Mrs. Percy flips me a discreet thumbs-up from the sideline. At the urging of a shrill whistle, the target springs to life and begins to move along its tracks.
Shirley steps to the line for her final throws, and her hand shakes when she reaches for her Stars. The first hits the target along the outer rim, but the second leaves her hand violently, flying past the target to land in the grass like a heavy jewel. She picks up her final Star with the air of someone who has already conceded her loss, and she throws it without conviction. Her final score isn’t enough to meet even Margeaux’s second round.
Which just leaves me to catch her.
“Final round for Aila Quinn, from Sterling,” the announcer says, and gestures me forward to the line.
I am still in this, I tell myself. There’s still the smallest possibility I could win.
But the tingling feeling I sometimes get, the one that tells me my next throw is going to be good, is missing. I try to summon it as I watch the target move along its path. There’s a cool breeze on my face. Someone in the crowd coughs. The Stars feel heavy in my hand.
I try to call to mind my mother’s face.
But suddenly I can’t.
I frantically search for memories of her, any of them, but all I can picture is little more than a blurred shadow. She has just slipped away, like sand trickling between my fingers. Like everything in this cursed place, I think fiercely.
I turn without really looking and hurl the remaining three Stars from my hand at the same time.
They soar through the air and rock the target almost simultaneously.
The crowd gasps, and I turn to look.
The first has landed on an inner ring, just to the right of the bull’s-eye. But the second and third have sunk in almost to their hilts, centimeters away from dead center. Two bull’s-eyes.
My breath catches in my lungs. Their force is making the candle swing lazily, back and forth, as if it’s trying to decide whether to fall.
After an endless moment the candle finally slows and returns to resting. Its fuse, holding one hundred points within it, remains unlit.
Sterling’s crowd jumps to its feet anyway, chanting my name in unison when my points are posted and I vault into first place.
I step back, and a tiny sprout of hope shoots up. I try to push it back down, but there is no stopping it.
Margeaux suddenly seems much less sure of herself. She moves to her line, mouthing something under her breath. The banners flutter as the crowd quiets. She steals another glance in George’s direction and steels herself. Then her arm cracks like a shot as she sends her Stars rocketing through the air.
The first one hits the outer edge of the target, narrowly avoiding a complete miss. The second falls nearer to the bull’s-eye, but still in the outer ring. I watch her score tick up on the board, calculating the difference. Her final throw has to be a good one, or else I’ve won it. I fix her with my steel eyes, willing her to let me have this. Suddenly wanting it as much as I’ve ever wanted anything before.
Margeaux winds up and hurls her final Star. It arcs through the air in a straight shot, as if the target is drawing it there by force, and every eye in the stadium watches it hit the candle. It slices through the wax, hard and clean.
This time, the candle does not hesitate.
Its lit wick topples forward and catches the fuel in the grass, and the word Corrander blazes and pops in the ground just beyond my feet.
Margeaux’s fans shriek and raise hundreds of tiny flags in the air, a field of violets and marigolds. The red and silver flags wither as everyone from Sterling sits back down.
I blink numbly at the candle. The tiny sprout of my hope is ripped out, all the way down to its roots. I can’t believe that after all this time, in only a handful of seconds, I’ve lost.
I force myself to go to Margeaux and extend my right hand.
“Congratulations,” I say. Before she can respond, the Corrander fans surround her, lifting her above their heads, and I seize the opportunity to slip onto the sidelines.
“Aila!” Mrs. Percy pulls me behind a corner of the stands where we can’t be seen. “You did well,” she says. “It was a very good showing for your first time, and you’ve made us all proud.”
She hands me the final Star. The one that had just missed the mark—?that caused the candle to sway but not fall.
“Thank you,” I say, taking it, and then George barrels over and throws an arm around my shoulders.
“Ya did good, kid,” he says. “And so Beas and I would like to cordially invite you to a bonfire at Chez Mackelroy tonight. I can’t guarantee any fancy food, drinks, or entertainment. But”—?he lowers his voice—?“you did only win silver.”
I punch him in the arm. “You don’t have to do this, I’m really fine,” I say.
“Do you need the speech? Because, you know, sterling for Sterling is actually really much better than gold for Sterling—” George says.
“All right,” I snort. “I’ll come.”
“Six o’clock,” he says, and as soon as he’s gone, a hand pulls me deeper into the shadows of the stands. I whirl around, and in the instant I realize it’s Will, he’s kissing me. All my disappointment instantly evaporates, and for one stolen moment I am filled with pure light.
I’m still feeling dazed when he rolls up his sleeve and shows me his arm, where he’s written “Next year.” Then he grins and ducks back out into the sunshine.
I smile and close my eyes, and I can suddenly see Mother again, exactly how she would have appeared if she had really been here, her laughter reaching its too-high octaves, shouting my name, not caring for a moment what anyone else thought.
Don’t let them crush you, her voice whispers in my ear, and the iron grip of Sterling’s approval suddenly loosens.
I tuck the losing Star into my pocket and head back onto the field, thinking that perhaps I’ve won a victory today, after all.
Chapter Fifty
The closer the train draws to Sterling, the harder I begin to sweat.
I shift in my seat, pulling my collar from where it suffocates my neck. “Are you all right?” an elderly woman asks, leaning toward me.
“Fine,” I snap, and she mutters something and returns to her newspaper. I pull my hat down a notch to cover my face.
The train glides right by that horrid lake, the very one that falls just beyond the border of Sterling. I catch sight of the water, gray and sheening, and feel a literal pain in my side. As if Juliet’s ghost has come back to stick a small knifepoint right between my ribs.
Everything, everything changed on the fateful day Juliet saw herself in that lake.
We were seventeen, and it had been years since we’d been close, whispering stories to each other in our shared room. Since the nights I had fallen asleep to the sound of her breathing.
Word swept through Sterling in a frenzy that Juliet Cummings had seen her reflection—?but by the time the news reached me, the crowd at the lake had already begun to dissipate. Two men were shoving each other in a fight that had just started brewing. Juliet was nowhere to be found. There was something heavy in the air. I realized soon enough what it was.