Traitors Grave
TRAITORS” GRAVE
Sometimes Lio wished mindmagic lent itself to elaborate rituals or complex spell ingredients. There was a certain comfort in making physical preparations for a casting. Those gestures made a mage feel in control. Of magic. Of outcomes.
But all Lio could use to control his affinity was pure Will. The only way to ready himself for his rematch with Miranda was to sit quietly in his saddle and prepare his mind. Moonflower and Freckles followed Mak and Lyros’s horses, leaving Lio plenty of time, or perhaps too much, with his own thoughts.
He kept thinking of that moment when he’d held Miranda’s mind under his power. She was different from a nameless war mage throwing fireballs at him. Perhaps she shouldn’t be—every life he had the power to destroy was still a human life.
But Miranda was someone Cassia used to love. She could have turned out like Cassia, if Hesperines had found her before Kallikrates did.
She had also taken Cassia’s magic, subjecting his Grace to the torture she had relived in her day terror. It had been Kallikrates’s doing, but he had used Miranda’s hands to perform the spell. She had offered those hands to him willingly and painted an Eye of Hypnos on her breastplate in Cassia’s blood.
Lio remembered how Miranda’s head had felt between his palms and the pleading look she had given him. The pitiful way she had begged him not to bring her Master’s wrath down upon her for her failure… Until Kallikrates himself had spoken through her.
You will have to duel me.
He had been ready to fight Lio, not for Miranda’s sake but to keep Lio from discovering the secrets in her mind.
Could Lio have won? Perhaps. He’d had the power of a rabid letting site flowing through him, a boon from the Lustra to Cassia’s mate in her hour of need. Tonight, he must rely only on his own power.
Cassia’s touch in their Union pulled him out of his thoughts. You’ve stopped meditating and started overthinking. Try not to make this harder for yourself, my love.
He gave in to her invitation to focus on her instead. Amid the dread of what they were about to face, the reality of it struck him anew. They had Grace Union now. She was immortal with him.
Immortality didn’t feel as certain on a night like this. But Grace Union did.
She reached over and took his hand.
Ahead of them, Mak murmured something to Lyros, then dropped back to ride on Lio’s other side.
“Did Lyros send you to make sure I’m not planning anything rash?” Lio asked.
“Yes.” Mak made a face at him. “Somehow it’s become my duty to tell you not to be impulsive. The world has gone mad.”
“That’s precisely why he’ll listen to you,” Cassia said. “Lyros and I can’t reason with him any longer. You can speak to him as one hothead to another.”
“I haven’t become a hothead,” Lio protested.
She eyed his staff. “Whatever you say.”
“There’s something you should know.” Mak’s smile was humorless. “Nike would have my fangs for breathing a word of it, but no telling how long it will be before we see her and she has an opportunity to make me regret it.”
“A secret of your sister’s?” Lio asked. “Something that could help us in the battle tonight?”
Cassia leaned forward in her saddle to look around Lio at Mak. “Does this have to do with her quest to find out if Methu is alive?”
Mak hesitated. “Yes and no.”
Lio raised his brows. “We always suspected she confided more in you than you were letting on.”
Mak gnawed on his lip. “I do try not to cross the veil. But I’m not even sure where the veil is these nights.”
“If it could keep us safe,” Cassia pointed out, “I don’t think she’d begrudge you telling us.”
“Right.” Mak sighed. “Lyros is correct that a Gift Collector has never changed sides. And no necromancer in history has every become a Hesperine.”
Lio felt Cassia’s heart twinge, and he frowned at Mak. “This is not reassuring us about the battle.”
Mak held up a finger. “But there is a necromancer who has allied with a Hesperine.”
Lio had to shut his jaw before speaking. “Nike has a necromancer ally? Your sister, who has sent so many of them back to Hypnos that he probably has a dedicated portal to the realm of the dead just for her victims?”
Mak gave a sad laugh. “Wish you’d had time to tell her that. It would have made her laugh.”
Mak’s homesickness washed over Lio. He tried not to wonder what his own sister was doing at this moment. It was hard not to imagine Zoe crying and frightened and confused about why he and Cassia would put her through this separation.
“What else did Nike tell you about her ally?” Cassia asked.
“Oh, she didn’t tell me. I found out in time-honored younger brother fashion—by snooping. You remember all those scrolls she filled after she came home?”
Cassia nodded. “It seemed she might be writing down her findings from her travels.”
“They’re letters,” Mak told them. “She’s been writing to the necromancer. And he writes back.”
Lio stared at his cousin. “Nike is pen friends with a mage of Hypnos?”
“How does she even get her messages to him?” Cassia asked in disbelief. “One does not simply send a courier into a necromancer’s lair.”
Mak shook his head. “The fellow uses his familiar like a carrier pigeon. It’s a vulture. An undead vulture.”
“A literal bloodless vulture,” Lio said flatly.
“That was my first reaction, too.” Mak shuddered. “Uncanny thing.”
“And where is this apostate’s lair?” Cassia wondered.
“He’s not an apostate,” said Mak. “He’s a mage in the Order of Hypnos. In Corona.”
“What in all the Divine Domains?” Lio uttered. “That’s…unbelievable.”
“And brilliant.” Cassia’s admiration and regrets tangled in her aura. “Nike has a source among the enemy.”
“How does this help us tonight?” Lio asked. “We can’t march into Cordium and ask him for information. And we can’t ask Nike to politely write to him and request he send us Kallikrates’s secrets by carrier vulture.”
“That’s not the point.” Mak looked at Lio as if his head was full of rocks this time.
“Ah,” Lio said after a moment. “Your point is that there is one necromancer who’s had a change of heart. And if there’s one, who says there can’t be two?”
Cassia’s gratitude throbbed in the Blood Union. “Thank you, Mak. That gives me hope.”
Mak bowed from the saddle. “Think about that before you do anything hot-headed, will you, Lio?”
The forest outside CastraRoborra looked smaller to Cassia now than to her seven-year-old self. And yet it was richer with scents and sounds. The year’s fallen leaves, ripe with decay, now trapped beneath fresh frost. The lone lament of a bird. The clack of bare branches against each other in the wind.
“The woods feel deserted to me.” Her own voice sounded hushed to her in the winter night.
“I don’t sense any minds so far,” Lio confirmed.
She clucked her tongue softly and murmured a command to Knight to seek for enemies. Nose to the ground, he disappeared into a nearby cluster of evergreens.
Warding magic waned in the air, a spell returning to Mak and Lyros’s hands. Mak shook his head. “The wards we sent out didn’t activate any death magic. Yet.”
“There may still be traps nearer the fortress,” Lyros cautioned.
Cassia halted Freckles beneath a tree that seemed familiar, although she couldn’t place it in her memories. Then she realized it was not from her own recollections of that night, but the final moments of Solia’s handmaiden, which Nike’s mind magic had allowed Cassia to witness.
“Iris was captured right here,” Cassia said.
The other three paused around her, and they all shared a moment of silence for the brave woman who had sacrificed her life for her future queen.
“We’re getting close.” Cassia urged Freckles onward.
They rode between stunted saplings and once-proud oaks with scars burned into their bark. Not from the fires of battle. Cassia recognized the signs of salt damage. More than that, she felt the sickness in the soil. And yet that proved to her the Lustra was still alive here, somewhere deep, giving her a sense of the poisoned land.
Knight returned to them, falling into step beside Freckles. Cassia reached down to pat his shoulder. He hadn’t bayed a warning, so he must not have found anything. But he remained alert, which also put Cassia on guard.
The forest ended abruptly at a line of dead pines. She looked across the field of snow before them to the place where fortress walls had once towered over her. She didn’t need to say a word for Lio to pull Moonflower closer to her.
He reached over and clasped her hand. I almost lost you here before I ever knew you.
She squeezed his hand. You gained me here.
“This is where I first met a Hesperine,” Cassia said.
Mak let out a breath. “Nike saved your life right here?”
“The arrow hit the ground in this area.” Cassia gestured to the snow at Freckles’ hooves, then at the trees behind them. “She carried me into the shadows, where Alkaios and Nephalea were waiting.”
Lyros pointed across the field. “And that’s where the fortress stood?”
“Yes.”
Cassia remembered looking out across that seemingly impassable distance to the bodies Lord Bellator had catapulted over the walls. She had believed Iris’s broken form was Solia.
That horrific moment had defined her human life. Now, turning over that shard of her past in her mind, she discovered it was one her Gifting had smoothed so it was no longer too sharp to touch.
She breathed, her chest free of the crushing weight of that grief and bitterness and despair. She had survived this place. She had even healed from it.
Whatever danger lay in the ruins, her past was no threat to her. She bared her fangs at the snow-covered rubble ahead. Let Miranda do her worst.
We’ll face this place together, this time, Lio answered.
They drew their weapons and fell into the formation Lyros had taught them, with him at their back and Mak ahead, Knight and Cassia on either side of Lio.
I still protest this arrangement with every fiber of my being,Lio informed her. You should be in the center where you’re safest.
You know the rest of us overruled you about this several training sessions ago. Let my roses throttle your enemies so you can concentrate on breaking the dream wards protecting Miranda’s mind.
I will, but not happily.
I know, my champion.
His thelemantic veils descended over them while Mak and Lyros’s wards swept out ahead. Cassia adjusted her grip on her dagger as they rode forward across the field.
It was too quiet. Her heart seemed lodged in her throat. Despite all their spells, she felt exposed.
They reached the snow-capped, crumbling stones that marked where the outer wall had been. Not a living creature disturbed Traitors’ Grave. No magic raised the hairs on her arms. And yet there was a thick presence here, a stirring of some other power.
An instant before it overwhelmed her, Lio’s magic shot through the mind ward and bled into their Grace Union. The onslaught of impressions broke against his magic, and they tugged on her heart as if from a distance.
The certainty that all was lost. The anger that this was the end. Grief, blow after blow, until the loss and the blood wore her down like visions of her own impending end repeating before her eyes.
Even held at bay by Lio’s magic, the flood of emotion made her stomach sour. She swallowed hard. “Do all battlefields feel like this to Hesperines?”
He nodded. “Where blood soaks the soil, so do emotions. The residual energy of so many lives ending can be overwhelming to our senses, even years after the fact.”
“I wasn’t prepared for that.” She took another deep breath. “I should have been.”
“You’ll get stronger,” Mak reassured her. “I won’t say it ever gets easier, but you develop the ability to cope with it.”
She shook her head. “What if we’d been ambushed while I was losing my grip?”
“We weren’t,” said Lio, “and I’m better able to shield you from remnants of the past than from your own living experiences in battle.”
“Thank you,” she told him.
Lyros’s aura hummed with tension that brought to mind his spear when he was just about to strike. “I’m not sure the ambush we expected is going to happen. We may be able to ambush her. Let’s stay veiled and search the ruins.”
They picked their way through the maze of rubble. There wasn’t a wall or roof still standing, but the way the chunks of the fortress had landed, they had created plenty of hiding places where Miranda might lurk. Watching every twitch of Knight’s tail for signs of danger, Cassia began to jump at shadows.
Piles of stone, shattered by the mages’ enchanted siege weapons, now formed cairns for those who had died trapped under them. From between two stones, a hollow-eyed skull met Cassia’s gaze, and she recoiled. Lio reached over to touch Freckles’ neck, guiding them away from the sight.
These soldiers had betrayed Solia, murdered the few men loyal to her, and mutilated Iris. In Cassia’s human life, she would have spat on that skull. She didn’t want to feel compassion now. But she did, and she clung to that feeling nonetheless. Her path to Hespera had begun in this place, and she had not turned from the Goddess yet.
The bones of dogs, horses, and page boys left icy tears on her cheeks. She pushed herself onward with Lio and their Trial brothers until they reached the center of the ruins, where the keep had stood.
Lucis had not left this grave to chance. The body he’d put on display here had long since wasted away, but the skeleton remained impaled on a banner pole. The wind tugged at the moldering flag bearing King Lucis’s emblem. The broken shield strapped to the dead man’s chest left no doubt as to who he had been. That black horn on a field of gold was the emblem of the former Free Lord Bellator.
Cassia sucked a breath into her lungs. “Perhaps I was wrong about salt and bones. There’s no sign of Miranda here. I’m sorry if I’ve brought us through this for nothing.”
“There’s one thing we haven’t checked for,” Lio said. “Do you feel able to search for Lustra portals?”
She nodded, rubbing her eyes. “Yes. We’ve made it this far.”
“Are you sure?” Mak asked.
“We can step away to the trees if you need a moment,” Lyros offered.
“No, I can cast,” Cassia said. “We should be certain we didn’t overlook anything. Then we can leave this place behind with no unanswered questions.”
Lio dismounted swiftly and helped her down from her horse. This time, she didn’t protest. All the death had left her weak in the knees. He turned them away from Bellator and kept a steadying arm around her as she raised her dagger to her hand.
Her blood slid along the blade. She let one drop stain the snow at their feet.
Her first warning was the sickening sound of bones shattering. Then Mak and Lyros’s shouts. She and Lio spun to face Bellator’s corpse.
It wasn’t there. The skeleton had exploded, leaving a fissure in the snow and the air, a maw opening in the world. Wind blew from inside it and tore at their clothes, bathing them in the scent of belladonna.
She had seen such a thing only once before: in Orthros, when the Collector and his Overseer had opened a displacement gate.
She had an instant for the moves to make sense in her mind. A spell hidden in the bones. A trap waiting to be awakened with the one thing Hesperines would surely shed—blood.
Then a figure stepped through the portal, his spurred boots clanking in the snow. A blond man, tall and muscular, without a scar on his handsome face. She had never seen him before. But there was something familiar about his cruel smile.
When he spoke, there was no mistaking his voice. He sounded like he had spent centuries breathing down magic until it left him raw.
“I told you I wouldn’t let you escape,” Skleros said.