We Who Will Die by Stacia Stark

Here is a summary with spoilers for We Who Will Die by Stacia Stark

Avrelle Dacien has been living in the poverty-stricken city of Thorn for years. Her past has haunted her; she once competed in the Sands arena and won, but felt like she lost everything, including her best friend Kassia, who died, and another friend who disappeared. Her mother’s death soon followed, and she became sigilmarked soon after. It left Avrelle in charge of the family, which includes her younger brother Gerith and her sick older brother Evren, who is in constant need of a very expensive medication. Avrelle makes do with what she has and has come to terms with her life, haunted though it may be.

One day she goes to purchase her brother’s medication, and the vials are all purchased. A vampire reveals himself, saying he watched her fight in the Sands years ago and now needs her help, and in return, he will give her the medication and heal her brother fully. Avrelle declines and leaves. When Avrelle gets back to her home that evening, Evren is doing worse and Avrelle starts to panic, but the vampire is there with the vials and breaks them in front of her. Avrelle has no choice; she has to take the bargain.

The vampire introduces himself as Bran. The full bargain is that Avrelle needs to compete in the Sundering, a brutal gladiator-type fight put on by the emperor Vallius Covus. Avrelle is expected to win and then, after, find a way to kill Vallius Covus. Bran forces Avrelle into a blood bargain and then takes Evren and Gerith out of their home as ransom to make sure Avrelle follows through with her promise, but does give her a mirror that she can use to communicate with her brothers.

Avrelle begins her training and meets some of the other initiates. They are all very deadly, and she realizes she is very behind. She does make a tentative relationship with Maeva. She is also able to keep her almost foster father Leon, Kassia’s father, who is there as support as well. It has been six years since she last competed, plus she has a terrible ankle from her last competition that has never healed right. Bran forces her to come to extra training sessions every night just to prepare her for the first fight. One evening, Avrelle decides to go out and explore the tunnels, figuring one day they will come useful in killing the emperor. While down there, she meets another vampire, the emperor’s son Rorrik, who happens to be a brutally mean killer that Avrelle decides she is going to stay away from. She also finds that he is hiding a wyvern down below. She quickly exits the tunnels and decides to stay away from Rorrik as much as she can.

In preparation for the first trial, there is a fight where sponsors are watching. The fights take place in the same arena where she lost her friend Kassia, so she does have a panic attack, but somehow Avrelle manages to win her fight and hopefully gains some sponsors.

Bran continues her training in the evenings, but there are some evenings that he can’t be there, so he sends a vampire nicknamed the Primus, a soldier, to train her. Avrelle feels like she should know him, and then one night during training it clicks for her; it is her teenage friend/lover Tiernon. She is furious, because she lost him years ago, right before she went into the Sands arenas, and she never got an explanation. He, meanwhile, is furious that she is even in these trials. Avrelle decides that if he is not willing to give her answers, she doesn’t care to talk to him and leaves.

It’s the first fight, and Avrelle gets matched with Maximus, whose tactic during the fight is to bring up Kassia’s death, a dirty move. Despite that, Avrelle is able to get a hit in that takes him down, but she refuses to kill; she still wants to leave the trials with somewhat clean hands. But she still has to look to the emperor for his final decision. He allows Maximus to live, and both contestants are taken to healers. Tiernon comes in to see Avrelle while the healer is there, and he overhears the healer talk about how her ankle bone is bone on bone and, despite the pain it will cause to fix it, encourages her to fix it. Though soon after, Tiernon makes her upset again, and Avrelle is back to being upset with him.

Soon after, Avrelle runs into Rorrik, who has been keeping an eye on her since the tunnels and now believes her to be a spy and starts to threaten her. Luckily, his threat is interrupted when she is summoned by the emperor for an extra bloodthirsty fight. This time, Avrelle is forced to kill a centaur, a being who is basically extinct thanks to the emperor’s games. She is able to give it a quick, clean death, though she didn’t want to kill at all.

The second trial quickly comes, this time with a new creature: the griffins. Avrelle finds it odd that she can communicate mind to mind with the griffins. While communicating with them, she once again offers them a clean death, which the arena and the emperor are not happy about; they want a fight and blood. Avrelle still gets pretty bloodied up during the process, but still comes out alive in the end. Tiernon comes rushing for her, takes her to a healer, and even offers her his blood for a quicker healing process. She accepts and even puts her walls down for him for a bit, and it feels like old times. Though the next morning, she goes back to building her walls up.

After leaving Tiernon, Avrelle runs into Rorrik and is surprised to find that she can communicate with him mind to mind; Rorrik is also surprised that she could talk into his mind as well. Not wanting to talk to Rorrik about it, she runs to Tiernon and tells him. Tiernon wants to know more about six years ago and the arena. She talks about how she and Kassia made it to the final trial, but she watched as Kassia died, and she won. She held Kassia, and they had to force her away from her body. Avrelle got all the winnings, and her mom took it all, but then her uncle stole it all; her mother committed suicide soon after. Avrelle felt all alone, but also felt totally in charge of the family and felt like she needed to step up and take care of her family. Tiernon then asks where her brothers are, and Avrelle can’t say, and that is when Tiernon finds out that she has entered a blood bargain and can’t say a single thing about it. He makes guesses, and by her not confirming things, he is able to confirm a lot of things. He then grabs some money and decides to get her out of the city and to her brothers, and he will take care of the rest. Avrelle takes him up on the offer. Though as soon as she leaves the city limits, Avrelle falls to the ground in immense pain and blacks out. When she wakes, Tiernon is upset that the blood-bargain vampire has thought of everything and that she will now have to compete in the third trial.

The third trial is quick and somewhat easy for Avrelle, and with that, she and a handful of others have won the Sundering. She is now a novice; she now just needs to figure out how to kill the emperor to get back to her brothers.

Rorrik comes to visit her that night and tells her that he knows of her mission and that he knows of a way to kill the emperor. Desperate to get to her brothers, she follows Rorrik through the tunnels and learns that Rorrik wants the emperor gone so he can be emperor. Rorrik takes her to a sleeping emperor, then leaves her to her mission. Avrelle brutally kills the emperor, then disappears. Though the next morning she finds out that the emperor is alive and well, but one of his trusted advisors, and the one who sponsored her during the trials, is dead. Avrelle is sick; Rorrik tricked her into killing someone for himself. When she confronts him about it, he is smug and says that he expected her to be stronger. Her mission is now even harder, because the emperor has tightened security around himself now that his advisor was killed in the middle of the night.

She needs a new plan. She goes to Leon hoping for some advice, and he tells her she won’t get close to the emperor based on merit, but she can get in by tricking her way in. She finds her opening when she finds Tiernon, Rorrik, and other higher-ups playing cards. Instead of betting money, she insists on betting favors. After hustling them, she manages to beat them all and insists that Rorrik give her a high-security position. Tiernon is furious that she is putting herself in this position, especially because he doesn’t know about this part of the blood bargain.

When she and Tiernon have a conversation later, she finds out that Tiernon is actually the emperor’s son as well, meaning that he and Rorrik are brothers. Avrelle can’t believe she didn’t realize this earlier. Avrelle finally insists that Tiernon tell her why he left. He tells her that his father found out about her, and he was taken and tortured for so long that he ended up harming his vocal cords. When he got out, he didn’t know if Avrelle was alive or dead, and he didn’t have time to look because he was sent to the front lines to fight. He had to pay someone to go back to the city to find out if she was alive. The two end up rekindling their spark and sleeping together.

Avrelle still wants to find out why she can talk to people mind to mind, especially because Tiernon doesn’t know why either, so she visits the library, where she finds out that she may have gotten the power from the griffin that she gave a clean death. While there, both Rorrik and Tiernon show up and start fighting over her training and also both reveal that they know she is marked and that she is there to kill their father. They both give her plans, but she isn’t willing to trust either of them yet, so she continues to work with Leon.

There is a party, and she figures that this is her opportunity to get close to the emperor and stab him, though when she gets a little too close, the knife she is holding goes right into her thigh and her blood starts running in a room full of vampires. She quickly has to leave along with Tiernon, who takes her to a healer. Bran quickly arrives as well; he is pissed that the emperor is still alive and that her assassination attempt has failed twice now. Feeling down, she goes to Tiernon and seeks a distraction.

Even though the Sundering has just ended, the emperor’s bloodlust still hasn’t been fulfilled. He wants another fight and orders it. Maeva is brought in, and Avrelle almost can’t watch it because it feels like Kassia’s death all over again. Luckily, Maeva comes out of it just barely alive, and Avrelle stays at her side, making their tentative friendship even stronger. The thing that finally makes her leave Maeva’s side is when she gets news that Leon has been attacked and is fighting for his life. She has no idea who would do that to him, but she wants to find out.

She starts investigating and ends up fighting several other bodies in the castle, but overall is just preoccupied by Leon, not wanting to lose another family member. Avrelle decides to go out into the forest and talk to the centaurs and ask if they can see anything about Leon or the murders happening; they say not to trust Albion. Avrelle runs right back into town only to find out that Leon’s visitor is Albion. Avrelle starts to fight him after he confesses everything, and she slits his throat. She hears a voice as she does so; she believes it to be the voice of a god, because she has now heard it a couple of times. She believes it is the voice of Mortuus.

The emperor has called for another battle, and Avrelle has decided it might be a chance to kill him during the fight. But the arena turns into a full-scale attack as rebel vampires with crossbows arrive, and it turns into a bloodbath. Avrelle decides to still try and go for the emperor but gets intercepted by Bran, who tells her it is too late; she failed at her assignment. He has taken matters into his own hands so that the rightful son can become emperor: himself. Bran reveals that he has been watching Avrelle for a number of years and is even the reason that Tiernon got sent to the dungeons for torture six years ago. She was never supposed to live very long, and even now, she was not supposed to live after killing the king. But thanks to the blood bond, Avrelle can’t kill Bran. More rebels come in and start attacking Avrelle, and she starts fighting them. Rorrik comes in and helps her as well, and the two of them kill a few and, in the process, also get a book in a language that Avrelle can, for some reason, read.

Rorrik starts to tell Avrelle she has no choice but to stay put and be trained by him now that she has a god in her head and a new power that she can’t control. She just wants to go find and protect her brothers. But when Tiernon finally arrives, the two brothers, once at odds, realize that they both might temporarily be on the same page and that Avrelle is the piece that will work for both of their plans. They all temporarily make an alliance: she will stay put, and the two brothers will teach and train her.