Chapter 43: One Hell Of A Hot Streak

Nova walked back to her spot between the princesses.

Both of them grabbed her arms before her boots had finished settling into the mud like she was a flight risk and a life raft simultaneously, and Nova’s circulation was going to have opinions about this arrangement.

The woman who’d been standing behind Nova originally gave her a nod as she passed. Small. Steady. The nod of a woman who had watched every rejection tonight from three feet away and had been doing math on her own odds since the four hundreds.

Nova returned the nod and hoped with everything she had left that this woman got a flame. The rejections had hit her the hardest. Nova had watched it happen in real time, watched the flinch travel through her body every single time the fire went dark for someone else, watched the hope in her chest shrink by degrees until it was barely visible and she was holding onto it with both hands like a candle in wind.

Nova stared at the fire.

She knew visualizing it had accomplished nothing earlier. But she did it anyway. She pictured the flame burning for the woman behind her. Pictured it tall and bright. Any color. Pictured the look on that woman’s face when the fire said yes instead of no. She pictured it so hard her jaw clenched and her hands balled into fists inside the borrowed cloak.

The woman approached the pit. The priestess pricked her finger. One drop of blood fell into the flame.

WHOOOOM.

A towering column of emerald green roared into the sky, twenty feet tall, so bright the clearing lit up like midday. The heat rolled outward in a wave that dried the mud in a six-foot radius around the pit and the woman standing beside it looked like she had just been handed the keys to a life she’d stopped believing in three hours ago.

Her face. That face. Nova would remember that face for the rest of her life. The way it went from bracing for darkness to being swallowed by green light, the way her mouth opened and nothing came out because the sound she wanted to make was too big for her throat, the way her hands flew to her chest like she needed to hold her own heart in place because it was trying to leave her body through her ribs.

Nova clapped internally. Full standing ovation behind her own eyes. If she could have clapped externally she would have brought the house down but her arms were currently the property of two princesses and the eviction process was unclear.

The elders on the panel looked at one another. One of them shrugged. The shrug was eloquent. It communicated: I have been an elder for forty years and I have no explanation and I have decided that’s acceptable.

The next girl stepped up. The five hundreds had been a graveyard. Everything past the four hundred mark had been darkness and long walks home. The statistical probability of two flames in a row from this section of the draft was so close to zero that zero had sent a formal complaint about being associated with odds this low.

Everyone knew it. The women knew it. The elders knew it. The sacred flame had been saying no to this section all night like a bouncer with a grudge.

The priestess pricked her finger. Blood fell.

WHOOOOM.

Ruby. Twenty feet. Climbing and curling and burning with an intensity that the ruby flames earlier in the evening would have been embarrassed by. It was the first ruby they had in a few hundred.

The girl’s face broke into a smile so wide it reorganized her entire face. She looked like she couldn’t believe it. She turned, eyes scanning the crowd, and landed on Nova. The nod she gave was small and deliberate and carried the unmistakable weight of thank you.

Nova received the nod and felt something in her chest that had no business being there, given that she had done nothing, controlled nothing, and was currently pinned between two princesses like a glowing bookmark.

The elders gave Nova a look that said something else. Several of them. At the same time. The synchronized head-turn of a panel that had identified a suspect and was building a case with their eyebrows.

The next girl stepped up.

Ruby. Twenty feet tall.

The one after her.

Sapphire. Twenty feet tall. The only sapphire of the night besides the first one hours ago.

The crowd actually gasped. A sapphire from the five-hundreds was like finding a diamond in the ocean.

The one after that.

Emerald. Twenty-two feet. The fire was showing off now. It was performing with the energy of an understudy who had finally gotten the lead and was going to make damn sure the audience remembered.

One of the elders pinched the bridge of his nose, the same elder who had cussed earlier.

"Friendly reminder: interfering with the sacred Moonfire in any way is grounds for automatic Lottery assignment."

The elder dropped the Lottery threat like a nuclear option and every wolf in the clearing knew exactly who he was aiming it at, which was the glowing girl whose defense was I don’t control it and whose track record was calling bullshit on that defense in real time.

Every head in the clearing turned towards Nova.

She gave a single nod. There was no point in trying to explain that she couldn’t control it. But if she had a button that made the flame say yes, she would absolutely be pressing that button with Kai-Starborne commitment.

Maria squeezed her arm. Whether it was solidarity or a reminder to keep her face straight, the message was the same.

The next girl stepped up. Emerald. Tall. Bright. Grinning.

The one after her. Ruby. Taller. Brighter. Grinning harder.

The one after that. Emerald again. The fire was on a streak. It was rolling. It had found its rhythm and was refusing to miss.