Blood Feast: A Fantasy Romance

The Barrow

Cassia blinked the tearsfrom her eyes. She lay entwined with Lio in a pool of blood inside the Ritual circle. Flowering vines wound around them, tying them to each other.

Petals of every color floated in their blood. This was real.

She reached inside herself and sank into familiar magic. The power she had once known flowed into her Gift and became Hesperine, and she knew it again.

With a thought, Cassia calmed the vines that clung to her. They fell away to cradle her Grace. She sat up and smoothed Lio’s bloody hair back from his face. His eyes moved rapidly under his closed lids. She put Final Word back in his hand, and his fingers closed around the staff.

She lifted her head. Mak and Lyros were on their feet, battling Miranda across the cracked, scorched Ritual ground. She blocked the Star of Orthros once more, but her arm shook. As she spun to evade Night’s Aim, her bare breastplate came into view. Cassia’s blood really was gone.

They could win this battle. And if they could do that, they might win the war.

Cassia picked up the empty chalice and levitated blood from the Ritual circle to fill it. She rose to her feet and stood over her Grace. She didn’t know what her power would do now, but she trusted it.

At her feet, Lio’s Union Stone glowed once more. Hold.

Miranda traversed out of Mak and Lyros’s reach, stumbling where she landed. Knight was on her in an instant and closed his jaws on her bloody sleeve. Her weakened arm broke a second time, and the weed hook fell from her hand.

“Loma hoor!” Before the command to retreat had left Cassia’s mouth, Knight leapt clear. Miranda’s fork of lightning struck the ground behind him as he raced toward Dame, the handle of the weed hook between his teeth. A smile came to Cassia’s face. “Oedann!”

Miranda tossed tongues of flame to keep Mak and Lyros at bay while she healed. She was rationing her fire spells, and it took longer for her bleeding to stop this time.

Cassia lost sight of Mak in the smoke. Only the brush of a veil spell reassured her he was all right. Lyros faced Miranda head-on.

His whole body tensed. Cassia’s heart lodged in her throat. Surely he wasn’t about to try what she thought.

Lyros charged straight for the Overseer. She held out her empty hand and blew a gout of fire toward him.

He dropped low and rolled, a blur. For a terrible instant, Cassia couldn’t see him. Had the fire hit him?

Then Lyros shot to his feet, untouched by Miranda’s fire spell, in a flawless Martyr’s Heart. He slid his spear up under her breastplate with Hesperine speed. Bracing the spearhead on her collarbone, he levered the leather armor off of her, snapping straps and her clavicle. Her breastplate fell away, leaving her in nothing but a necromancer’s robe. Red light emanated from the scabbard across her chest.

She hacked at Lyros with her mattock. But it halted midair, then was hurled away. Eyes wide, she made to dodge, but an invisible force stopped her, too. Her arms were pinned to her sides, as if held by an invisible vice.

Mak’s veils fell as he reached around her from behind and slipped Rosethorn out of the scabbard.

“Cassia, catch!” he called.

He tossed the blade, and it spun toward her. Her immortal reflexes took over. She caught the hilt midair.

The magic overflowing her chalice flowed into the dagger, honing to a focused current.

The Union Stones flashed. Now.

Cassia drove her power into all four of their weapons. Black roses sprouted from Rosethorn to twine around her hand. But from Final Word came moonflowers, while the Star of Orthros and Night’s Aim sent blackthorn crawling over Miranda.

Mak’s magic met Cassia’s through the adamas. His new enchantment rang though their artifacts, and a resounding echo moved through the temple.

Kallikrates’s voice disturbed the sacred air of Hagia Boreia. “Do you think this instant of victory matters? It is the blink of an eye, to be forgotten in my endless reign.”

Heated air hurled Mak and Lyros away from him again. The dome exploded around Cassia.

Black chunks of stone hung suspended, as if the Collector had stopped the flow of time. Then they hurtled into the Ritual circle, closing in on her and Lio.

The pieces of the dome struck Mak and Lyros’s wards and broke into smaller fragments. But they kept coming. Her Trial brothers shouted her name.

Cassia tilted her head. Something glimmered at her senses from inside each sliver of stone. Rock that could become soil. Blood that could become life. She touched the thousand fragments with her power, and shoots of green ate the stone, falling to her feet in a shower of leaves.

Kallikrates hurled more lightning through Miranda’s hands. Cassia twitched her dagger, envisioning the proud cedars in the city of Haima. Saplings sprang up, lining the path to the Ritual Circle, and soared into mighty trees that drew the lightning. With a twirl of her wrist, she poured life back into their blackened branches, and they greened again.

Miranda stalked forward, and as she came, she hefted Lyros’s fallen spear. Cassia held her power, letting her enemy come. Closer.

Miranda raised her arm to throw the spear. Blackthorn sprouted from the handle and turned on her, tearing into her flesh and shooting toward her eyes. With a yell, she dropped Night’s Aim to claw the spiny branches off herself.

Mak rolled to his feet from a pile of rubble, the Star of Orthros in his grasp and a triumphant smile on his face. On the other side of the battleground, Lyros laughed and lifted his hand. His spear levitated back to him.

Rosethorn’s Union Stone pulsed with a slow signal of concern from her Trial brothers. How was she holding up?

Cassia laughed. With this much magic, she could keep Kallikrates occupied until the next epoch. She shot power in the Union Stones, and they glowed like four red stars. No surrender.

Mak and Lyros let out a battle cry and closed in on Miranda again. The hounds took up the call and resumed their hunt.

The Black Roses wouldn’t stand down until Lio won his battle.

Cassia lifted her cup high and splashed blood onto the ground at her feet. Vines of black roses tangled around Miranda once more. She shot lightning along their branches, but Cassia poured the life within her into the roses, and they did not burn.

At her command, the vines yanked the Overseer off her feet and dragged her forward. Cassia halted Miranda at her feet.

Looking into the Collector’s eyes, Cassia yanked the pendant from around Miranda’s neck.

“You have broken our bargain,” he said.

“Save your breath. I don’t negotiate with Old Masters.”

With a dab of blood from within the chalice, she sealed her battered ambassador cords around her neck. Her medallion came to rest where it belonged.

The power in the cup and the dagger throbbed in her chest. All of the arcane felt perfectly in balance and ripe with endless potential. The whispers caressed her ears, and although she could not understand, she thought they spoke a blessing.

Her triune focus was complete.

The vines around Miranda tore suddenly. Her bloody hand emerged from her bonds, holding her relic blade. She lunged at Lio’s prone form.

Dame cleared the rubble in one powerful leap and barreled into the necromancer. They rolled, landing with Dame’s weight crushing Miranda. Spittle flew from the hound’s jaws as she went for Miranda’s face.

She scrabbled for the relic blade a hand’s breadth away. Cassia shot a vine out and pulled the dagger toward her. A scream grated out of Miranda.

Then a blast of magic hurled Dame off her, and the hound fell heavily near Lio. Cassia’s fresh fury and grief made her roses tighten around Miranda’s blade. But the dagger spun, cutting through the vine that bound it, and flew back to Miranda’s hand.

The necromancer got to her feet, the mauled half of her face obscured with blood, and Kallikrates gazed at Cassia over Lio’s body. “You remember how this game works. If he breaks the rules, I punish you. Now you have erred. I will punish him.”

Lio landed in acrouch at the foot of the third door. He was closer than ever now.

Miranda lay where she had fallen, crumpled on the ground between him and the portal. She erupted into hoarse coughs, and her hand came away from her mouth covered in blood. As Lio approached her, she struggled to rise.

“Drunk on your victory?” The taunt wavered between her voice and the Collector’s. “I’ll humble you.”

Lio planted the end of his staff on her clean breastplate and pushed her back down with little effort. Stealing Cassia’s power had been Miranda’s initiation as an Overseer. Had losing it also weakened her bond with Kallikrates?

“Is he worth this, Miranda?”

“You’ll see the answer to that for yourself when he rules the world with me at his right hand and enjoys revenge on you as his eternal entertainment.”

“Is that what you want? To spend the ages at his beck and call? There was a time when you wanted freedom.”

“Power is the only real freedom.”

“You could have power without him. Your power. Do you remember what that felt like?”

She laughed at him. “Little girls with necromancy don’t have the luxury of power, Hesperine. My affinity was nothing but a prison sentence. Until it drew my master’s interest and he showed me what I could become.”

“I’m sorry no one else was there for you.” He meant the words, although he doubted she would believe him. “You deserved better than Kallikrates. A Hesperine wasn’t there to rescue you then, but I am here now. I’ve freed people from him before, and I will do it again for you.”

She spat blood at his feet. “I would rather die for the game than accept help from you, Deukalion. But I intend to survive to enjoy my reward from the Master. He has promised me the pleasure of killing you in front of him, slowly.”

“You think you’ve chosen your side. But what kind of choice did you have? You turned to him out of desperation. You deserve to know what having a choice truly feels like. I will fight for you to have one, even if you won’t fight for yourself.”

“You can never break my bond with him.” Her words were bold, but her fear ran down the walls of the passage and made pebbles skitter across the ground.

“It’s not a bond. It’s a chain. I will break it, no matter how this ends. Knowing that, will you tell me what lies behind the door? I don’t want to cause you any more pain for his secrets.”

“I’ll fight you…with everything I have left.”

She hurled her relic dagger at Lio. The attack scratched through his mind. He caught the hilt midair.

Your thirst for knowledge will be your undoing. The Collector’s voice in Miranda’s mind seemed to infiltrate Lio’s own. There is nothing more destructive than secrets. Why do you think they are my weapon of choice?

Lio felt sick. He was holding Miranda’s chain in the palm of his hand. But he knew what he had to do.

He drove the dagger into the door. Stone split stone. The door cracked open for the relic blade, and the final barrier in Miranda’s mind fell to Lio’s Will.

Lio stood in afield that had been green, but now the tender crops lay trampled, and the mud ran with blood. He stared at the hues of orange and red that drenched the sky as a glowing ball descended toward the horizon. It was sunset on a battlefield in Tenebra.

A lone warrior stood with his boot propped on a corpse, the gore drying on his armor. In the distance, other men in his colors patrolled the field, piling bodies to be burned. But this man held himself apart. Waiting.

He reached up and pulled off his helmet. His blond hair was plastered to his head with sweat. When Lio saw the burn scar on the man’s jaw, a shock of recognition hit him.

He was witnessing a moment from Lucis’s past.

Lio found himself walking forward. He had no control over his own body. Panic stirred in his mind. He looked down at himself.

A black robe. A long beard. A quicksilver pendant in the shape of an Eye of Hypnos. He was experiencing this memory through the eyes of an undertaker.

A shiver moved through Lio’s own consciousness. This was no remembrance of Miranda’s. It had happened before Lucis’s hair had turned white, when she and Cassia had not yet been born.

Lio opened his mouth and spoke. The Collector’s voice came from his own lips, and he wanted to retch.

“I see that the last free lord who would oppose you lies dead under your heel. There is still the formality of the Full Council, of course, but allow me to be the first to address you as King Lucis. Congratulations.”

Lucis pulled his sword out of the corpse and stepped forward. “My part is done. Are you here to uphold your end of the bargain?”

“I have already been generous.” There was a faint warning in Kallikrates’s tone. “The Orders would have discovered your magic long ago, had I not aided you in concealing your power all these years.”

“And I’ve carved my way through every fucking swine who wants a crown, just as you asked.”

“Don’t pretend you didn’t enjoy it.”

Lucis’s abrupt laughter mocked the dead men around them. “My reign has begun well enough. But I won’t have it end like that of every other man who has called himself king—in the royal crypt. Or worse, with my head on a spike in the court of my successor. I need the power you promised me to become the next Mage King. I’ve seized the palace for us; now tell me what magic lies in the barrow under it.”

The barrow. Was that what the doors had been guarding all along? A burial site?

“I will raise you above the so-called Mage King.” Lio could taste the malice in the Collector’s words. “But the only way to do that, my friend, is to destroy him.”

Lucis barked another laugh. “Will you have me deface his statues and replace them with my own?”

“Oh, yes. I will take great pleasure in watching you erase his legacy. But better still, you will help me kill him.”

Lucis’s hand tightened on the hilt of his sword. “What necromancy is this?”

“Not necromancy. A spell by the witch he took to wife. Through her power, he has made a bid for immortality. He lies sleeping in the barrow she sealed around him. I have waited sixteen hundred years to remind him he is mortal.”

Lio’s own heart pounded somewhere in his distant body. His carefully thought-out theories had all been nonsense. A mythical tale was the truth.

The Mage King was still alive.

Lucis’s face flushed, and heat wafted off him. “I’ve given half my life to our bargain, and all this time, you’ve been chasing an old wives’ tale?”

“Calm yourself. The songs of the slumbering king are all true, I assure you. Haven’t you seen enough impossible things in my company to take me at my word?”

Lucis’s hard blue eyes glinted with wariness, but the heat faded to warmth. “Explain.”

“You know I am ancient. It should not surprise you to learn that I was alive during the reign of King Lucian and the witch Ebah, who became Queen Hedera when they wed. In all my centuries of existence, I have seldom come to hate a pair of mortals so much.”

Lucis scoffed. “What did he do, then? Steal her out of your bed?”

Kallikrates made a noise of disgust. “I would never go to such lengths for mere lust. I have greater concerns than the base desires of mortals. But these two thwarted my plans at every turn. Even in death, she deprived me of my revenge by leaving him alive, out of my reach, for their heirs to call upon for aid against me.”

Lucis eyed him. “Well, well. Someone in history got the better of you. I’ll keep that in mind.”

Lio took a step toward Lucis. The warlord didn’t draw back.

“His reign will end in a glorified royal crypt,” Kallikrates said coolly. “Keep that in mind, as well.”

“I’ve given my blood to claiming the throne of Tenebra, only to be told my predecessor from sixteen centuries ago isn’t dead. If I must put the Mage King himself properly in his grave to get what should be mine, so be it. But I do hope there is more in it for me than another battle, or I may grow tired of our bargain.”

“I suggest you adhere to our agreement to the letter, if you wish to get inside that barrow at all.”

“Give me one reason I shouldn’t leave him down there to rot, where he has been all along.”

“Immortality.”

Now Kallikrates had Lucis’s attention.

“Your reign will not end at all,” the Collector promised. “I will bestow his fire magic and his everlasting life upon you. Tenebra will be yours forever. And why stop your conquest here?”

“This witch’s spell will work on me?”

“Yes. I have spent all this time becoming an expert on her magic.”

“If you’re willing to let me walk away with such a prize, there must be an even greater one for you.”

“Of course.”

Lucis waited.

“I assure you,” Kallikrates said, “it would be of no interest to a pragmatic man such as yourself. But for me, a collector of arcane secrets, it is the endgame.”

“You’ll have no help from me unless I know the whole truth,” Lucis said.

“Immortality isn’t reason enough?”

“I must know what I’m fighting my way into.”

“Ah, Lucis. Never one to hack blindly toward your goals, like the man at your feet. Fair enough. The witch queen left her husband behind not only as a champion for their descendants, but as the eternal protector of her legacy. He is guarding the source of her power.” Lio felt the Collector’s face twist in a smile. “You cannot imagine how long I have been chasing what she tried to keep from me.”

Lio’s mind reeled. Whatever he had imagined, it had not been this. He was certain of only one thing.

The power source Lucian was guarding belonged to Cassia.

Lucis crossed his arms. “So be it,” he said at last, as if he had the choice to agree or disagree. But he was more tangled in the Collector’s web than any of them. A covetous light in his eyes, he asked, “How do we open the barrow?”

“First, you must sire the witch’s heir.”