Grace was called.

Dante's chest did something it hadn't done in years.

She walked to the crystal slowly. Calmer than Dante had expected. She had always been better at the present moment than he had — she didn't fight what was happening, she just *did* the next thing in front of her. She put her hand on the crystal.

It hesitated.

For a strange small moment, the colors swirling inside the crystal didn't pick. Greens and blues and a faint warm gold all moved through it at once, none of them claiming.

Then a soft warm wind moved through the hall.

Aneos was already smiling before the crystal even decided.

When it did decide — pale green, the color of new spring — Aneos clapped her hands together and almost flew across the marble to Grace.

"*Yes!*" she said. Her wings were buzzing again. "Yes, oh, *yes*, I knew it the second she walked over there, didn't you all see her shoulders, the wind *loves* shoulders that hold like that —"

She took Grace's hands. Her hands were small. Grace, dazed, let her.

"Welcome, child. You are very welcome. *Healing Breeze,* rank seven. Vocation: Mender. You will close wounds the wind has opened, and you will close wounds the wind never touched. A gift for both kinds of hurt."

She kissed Grace's forehead.

Grace's body settled. It was the only word for it. Her shoulders, which Dante had watched carry years of small things they shouldn't have had to, eased by some small amount. Her hair came loose entirely from its half-undone ponytail and lifted, briefly, in a wind that wasn't there. Her face — and Dante hated that he noticed this and could not stop noticing it — softened somewhere it hadn't been hard, and brightened somewhere it hadn't been dark.

The mark on Grace's hand was a small spiral.

She walked back toward the half-circle, and as she passed Dante she flicked her eyes at his and held them for a second, and the second contained an entire sentence: *did you see that, did you see what just happened to me*. Dante gave her the smallest possible nod, because anything bigger would have come apart in his face.

(I'm glad. Frog. I'm glad it was a kind one.)

(I'm glad it was you.)

---

Diana went next, and Diana, being Diana, walked to the crystal as if walking to a microphone.

The crystal went night blue.

Not navy. Not indigo. The deep blue that the sky goes ten minutes after the last light leaves it, when the stars are present but not yet bright. The color drained into the crystal from the bottom up, and where the blue spread, the marble around the crystal went briefly cold enough that Dante saw frost crawl outward in small fern-shaped patterns. Diana shivered. Did not flinch.

The air folded.

A woman stepped through, and she was *beautiful* in the way that the moon is beautiful, which is to say in a way that did not invite touching.

She was as tall as Solis was wide. Skin of porcelain so pale it was almost blue. A black veil covered her face entirely. The dress she wore was the night sky — actual night sky, with actual stars in it, slow-moving constellations that pulsed and faded as the cloth shifted. Where she breathed out, the air *froze*. Small clouds of vapor escaped the veil with each exhalation.

"Beloved," Solis said. His voice had gone careful.

The veiled head tilted toward him. Did not respond.

She walked to Diana instead.

Diana did not bow. Did not curtsey. Did not, as far as Dante could see, do any of the things she would have done to a teacher she wanted something from. She just stood, chin up, a sixteen-year-old girl in a soft gray robe in front of a goddess who had just chilled the air around her.

"You don't speak much," Diana said.

There was a long silence.

Then a sound came from behind the veil that, after a moment, Dante recognized as a laugh. A low, surprised laugh.

"And *you* speak too much. We will see how that serves you."

"I'm Diana."

"I am Selene. The Lady of the Night. Goddess of the Moon and Her Phases. Protector of the Men of the North. I have been listening to you, Diana, since you entered this hall. You make a great deal of noise when you are afraid."

Diana's face went very slightly red.

"I'm not afraid."

"You are. But you carry it well. That is its own kind of strength."

Selene laid one cool fingertip on the center of Diana's forehead. Diana's eyes drifted closed.

When the goddess withdrew her hand, Diana opened her eyes again, and the eyes were different. Still hers. But the brown of them was, somewhere very deep, *flecked* with something silver.

"*Lightless Crown,*" Selene said. "Rank seven. Vocation: Veilbinder. You will walk in a cold the moon herself does not warm, and in a light that does not reveal. Carry it as you carry everything — loudly."

She turned, then, and looked at Solis.

She did not say what Kidora had not said. She didn't have to.

She drifted to stand with the four other gods, and now there were five of them, watching in a row.

Diana walked back to the half-circle, very upright, looking quietly stunned at having survived the conversation.

The half-circle was getting smaller.

The line of the Awakened across the hall was getting longer.

There were three of them left who had not yet touched the crystal.

Dante. Leon. And Theo.

Theo went. Fire again, a smaller one. The air did not fold, and Solis named the Blessing himself, distractedly: *Cinder Hand, rank three.* Theo joined the line, looking down at his own hand as if he wasn't sure whether to be relieved or disappointed.

Two left.

Dante and Leon.

---

Solis turned on the throne.

He had not moved from it during any of the Awakenings except to stand briefly for Sophia. Now he leaned forward, and his attention — the full weight of it — turned in a single motion onto Leon.

You could feel it across the room.

Leon, to his credit, did not flinch. He had been standing at the edge of the half-circle the entire time, watching each Awakening with the same calm careful attention he watched everything with. The mask Dante had seen outside the school gate that morning — the calibrated half-smile, the appropriate reactions, the weight of an audience worn like a coat — was still on. It hadn't even cracked when Arthur had asked about going home.

"Step forward, child," Solis said.

His voice had changed.

It was warmer. Slower. It was the voice you used when you had been waiting for something for a very long time and you wanted to be sure you didn't startle it.

Leon stepped forward.

He walked to the crystal without looking at any of the gods standing in the row behind the throne. He didn't look at Solis. He looked at the crystal, and he reached out, and he placed his hand on it.

The crystal exploded with light.

Not flushed. *Exploded.* Gold, blinding, *vast* — the color of a noon sun in midsummer — the whole hall was washed in it for a long second, and Dante had to throw his arm over his face to keep his eyes from burning. Heat rolled off the crystal in waves. Real heat. The kind that pressed against skin.

When Dante lowered his arm, the crystal was still glowing.

And Leon was different.

He had been good-looking before. Now he was something the eye actively had to work to stop looking at. Taller. Broader. His hair, which had been brown, had brightened to a bronze that caught light from no source Dante could identify. His skin had the same faint warm glow Sophia had picked up. His eyes were golden. *Actually* golden — not the casual brown that gets called gold by enthusiastic poets, but a metallic, unfiltered gold that did not exist on Earth.

He was beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with him.

He was beautiful because someone had decided he should be.

Solis stood from the throne.

The other five gods went very, very still.

"Finally," Solis said.

He stepped down from the dais. Slowly. The marble took his weight and did not crack. He crossed the floor of the hall with deliberate steps, and at the end of those steps he did something none of the other gods had done. He knelt.

Solis, the First Among the Divine, knelt in front of a sixteen-year-old boy.

"I have been searching for you," he said quietly, "for a longer time than you can yet understand. The Blessing you carry is *The Sun*. Rank ten. Vocation: Paladin. The world below this hall has been waiting for you longer than it has known to wait. I am — *honored* — to be the one who calls you forward."

A long silence.

Leon, after a beat that was just long enough for Dante to see the calibration kick in, did the only thing the moment demanded.

He bowed. Perfect. Practiced. The bow of someone who had been bowing since he was seven.

"It will be done," Leon said. "I will not disappoint you."

Solis smiled.

But Dante — watching from twelve meters back, behind Conrad's shoulder, in the dimming aftermath of the gold light that was still lingering in the room — saw something move across Leon's face in the half-second between the bow and the words.

Not fear. Not surprise.

A small, calm *taking-of-stock*.

The look of someone who had just been handed a very large weapon and was trying to figure out, very privately, whose neck it would land on first.

Then the mask was back. Then Leon was the Hero, perfect and shining, and the golden mark of the sun was burning on the back of his hand.

Behind the throne, the five gods were looking at each other.

Selene's veil tilted toward Kidora. Kidora's depthless eyes tilted toward Aneos. Aneos's wings had stopped buzzing entirely.

(They didn't know. None of them knew until just now what he'd done. He's been pulling souls trying to find his own Hero. His. Not the Heptarchy's. *His.*)

(They're going to fight about this. Not now. But soon.)

(And Solis — Solis already knows it.)

Solis rose to his full height, beaming. He gestured Leon to the line of the Awakened, and Leon walked there slowly, and the kids who had been Awakened before him — even Conrad, who was scared of nothing — moved unconsciously aside to give him a wider berth than they had given each other.

Then Solis turned.

His eyes settled on Dante.

Neutral. Patient. The calm appraisal of a man considering the last item on a list.

"You. Last. Step forward."

Dante stepped forward.