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start until the weekend. He’d burn out if he didn’t get a grip on that mad hunger. I remembered the taste of it, like copper and sugar.
    I’d loved it once.
    “Don’t be a jackass,” I said mildly. “I’m trying to save your life. I don’t give a crap about the other stuff.”
    “See, I think you’re lying.” Colt paused on a wooden balance plank between two platforms and wiped his face with a towel he plucked off a branch. It was damp. He must have run the course once already. “I think you’re scared to share a little glory.” His face was red as he leaped down to the ground. “You want to stay the big man.” He shoved me. “But no one’s keeping me down.”
    I’d known it was a lost cause, but I still had to try. I clenched my jaw and resisted the urge to shove him back. Barely. We’d end up looking like kids in the sandbox when the rest of the Cabal arrived. “Back off, man.”
    He sneered and took a swing at my head. I reacted on instinct, dodging and swinging back. His nose cracked under my knuckles, and he swore, stumbling. He spat blood in the dirt before tackling me. We landed in a cloud of dust and cursing. His fist collided with my sternum and broke my breath, but then I wedged my elbow between us and jammed it under his ribs. He was bigger than me and built like a linebacker.
    But I was faster.
    It was hard to remember why we were fighting, even harder not to feel the intense buzz of adrenaline, that sweet burning moment in a fight where nothing else mattered. It was the same moment when Dad’s stories about heroes and champions always took root, like a particularly poisonous weed. You could salt the earth, but that weed would still grow. I knew exactly how Colt felt.
    I just didn’t want him to know what I felt.
    We were still hauling off punches and kidney jabs when Ada, Colt’s mother, interrupted us. “Boys.” She clicked her tongue. “That’s enough.”
    Colt’s father, Jed, was even bigger than Colt, and he reached down and hauled us apart, grinning. “Save it for the Trials.” He slapped Colt on the shoulder. Colt barely budged. It was a point of pride with him now that he could withstand his father’s friendly slaps. Bulls would have tipped over. “Now, come on. You’ll be late.”
    Colt used a towel to wipe the dirt and sweat off his skin, trading his worn T-shirt for the cream-colored hand-woven linen tunics Dad had had made for all of us. They had the Cabal crest embroidered on a sleeve. Ever tried getting mud and blood out of linen? I preferred to fight in jeans.
    We went back to the castle, picking our way silently through the garden, past the mermaid fountain and through a hidden door behind a bank of thorny rosebushes. We made a procession up the main stairs and Colt’s cocky snarls faded under the weight of the ritual before it even began. The others were already waiting for us. Inside the trophy room, the heavy wooden door hidden behind an ivory screen was open.
    This was the real trophy room, the one Dad wanted to show off to the world but couldn’t. The walls and ceiling were painted with protective symbols. The lights were discreetly hidden behind lantern glass, all aimed at the collection of animal heads nailed to the walls. They varied in size and species, but they were all fantastical, impossible.
    Dead.
    There was a stately griffin’s lionlike head, with the eagle wings nailed to the wall on either side. There was a hobgoblin whose moss-green eyes still followed you, even though it had died before I was even born. There were two Stymphalian marsh birds suspended from one of the beams, a bottle of basilisk blood, a whirled bone dagger purported to be made of unicorn horn, and the far too humanlike body of a mermaid floating in an aquarium filled with special embalming fluid, her hair like dusty turquoise. Her sister Nix was in the lake on the other side of the garden wall, singing songs no one could understand anymore. I’d brought her a flute once. I