The Contingency Plan
His Trial brothers hadabandoned him and his Grace. Lio had never felt so betrayed.
He was Cassia’s only protector now. He pulled himself to his feet, and the world spun around him. But she was his sense of direction. He had to get to his Grace.
He stepped to her across the length of the kingdom and plunged into a cloud of smoke. More of it billowed from the open door of the tower. Flames were licking out of the high windows.
Cassia!
I’m coming. Stay outside.
Once again, she expected him to stand here and watch her throw herself into danger. And she called it protecting him. Had she learned nothing the night he had helped break her out of that cell?
Lio plunged through the doorway, slamming his senses open in search of living auras. Magic writhed all around him. The tower’s spells were dying.
Following the cord of their Grace Union, he levitated across the hazy ground floor. His eyes burned as he flew up the stairs. The dining hall roiled with orange light and dark smoke. Hot, dry air scoured his skin.
“Cassia?” he called, coughing.
“Get out of here!” she bellowed over the roar of the flames.
He followed her voice toward the Mage King’s fire and made out her silhouette before the roaring flames. She threw a blanket over the hounds. They were alive.
Lio picked up the other side of the blanket. “The stairs are still clear. This way.”
Bright tears streaming from her eyes, and her anger snapped at him. “I told you to stay outside where it’s safe.”
“Stop asking me to break our vows!”
The fire overflowed the hearth. They levitated out of reach as the rug caught. The chairs were next. They passed over the table, where flames turned their research to ashes.
“No, no, no.” Lio fixed on the magic emanating from his scroll case and summoned it to him. He caught the hot metal with his cloak and wrapped it close against his chest.
They fled the tower and sank to the cold, damp ground of the bailey. Lio dropped everything he held to run his hands over Cassia’s head and shoulders and arms. “Are you all right?”
She nodded and turned to pull the blanket off the hounds. Knight was wheezing, but he sat up, licking her with anxious whines. Lio rested a hand on Dame’s side. Still unconscious, but she was breathing.
Magic swelled inside the tower, a terrible pressure on Lio’s senses. He threw himself over Cassia, covering as much of her and the dogs as he could. A boom split his ears, and the ground shook as heat blasted across his back.
The everything was silent. They lifted their heads and looked back at the ruin where the tower had stood.
Lio held Cassia tightly. She was shaking.
Then she scrambled out of his arms, fists at her sides, and faced the rubble. Black roses sprang up at her feet, then withered.
“I’m so sorry.” In the wake of the explosion, his words sounded too quiet to his ears. Too insufficient for what she had just lost.
All that magic. All that knowledge. Gone before they’d had a chance to understand it.
He dragged himself to his feet. “Miranda did this.”
Cassia wouldn’t look at him. “Lyros is gone, isn’t he?”
Lio hung his head. “I couldn’t change his mind.”
“And Mak?”
Lio looked away for a moment, then back at her. “He went to destroy the rest of the weapons.”
She wrapped her arms around herself. Eternal braziers and the Collector’s laughter haunted her thoughts. “All of this is my fault.”
He took a step closer. “Cassia, what happened to you in the temple?”
Shame and despair welled out of her. Such feelings had no place in his proud, beautiful Grace. He couldn’t bear this.
The next time he held Miranda’s mind in his hands, he would kill her.
“What did she do to you?” he demanded.
“It wasn’t Miranda.” Cassia’s voice was toneless. “It was me.”
“What?” His ears were still healing from the explosion, his mind still scoured by Miranda’s attack. He must have misunderstood.
Cassia finally turned to face him. “I tried to gain the temple’s recognition, as I did with the tower…but I failed.”
He closed his eyes for a moment. “Like the experiments we tried here that put the spell patterns under strain.”
“I pushed the temple too hard. I felt the break through the entire spell the Changing Queen and the Mage King left behind across their kingdom. I saw the lighthouse and stone circle in ruins. The tower burning. And I finally understood. Six Lustra sites are bound to the three doors.”
Cold spread through Lio. “Three times three. Nine nodes.”
“Ebah and Lucian’s monuments are keeping the doors sealed. The Lustra has been guiding us to them all along, trying to help me save the doors, but…”
“Miranda must have been the one following us,” Lio realized. “She was tracking your shared magic and letting us lead her to the right Lustra sites. This must have been Kallikrates’s contingency plan all this time.”
“And we’ve been playing along. Since he couldn’t open the doors with my magics, he’s breaking them down by destroying the nodes.”
“Leveling the monuments wouldn’t be enough to break spells that powerful,” Lio protested.
Cassia shook her head. “He has to destroy the magic.”
Understanding hit Lio like a blow to the gut. “That’s why he wants your artifacts. He must need a completed triune focus to tap into the spells and destabilize them.”
Lio had no doubt the Collector could wield them through his Overseers, because he still possessed the key to all of this.
Cassia’s first magic.
Her shoulders hunched. “He’ll hardly need to use the foci at this point. I just destroyed four of the nodes for him in one night. I saw the second door open.”
“No.” Lio took hold of her arms. “You cannot blame yourself for this. You were thrown headfirst into powerful magic none of us understand. And every step of the way, you’ve fought so hard to learn. To do the right thing.”
She shook her head. “I should have known better. I reached for too much power in the temple. If only I’d been more careful…if only I’d accepted my limits and what I don’t know…”
“Ignorance never kept anyone safe. If we’d known more—”
She held up her hands. “I don’t want to know any more secrets. They’re better left buried, where Kallikrates can’t use them.”
“Those secrets are yours by right. That power should be yours.”
“That’s what every arrogant mage and conquering warlord in the history of the shadowlands has said to justify their games! I won’t become one of them, greedy for what I think I should have, leaving destruction in my wake to get it.”
The injustice of it made Lio’s magic pound inside him. “It broke my heart when he took your magic. But this, I can bear least of all—that you would stop trying to get it back because of him. If you give up, you’ll lose a piece of yourself even more important than your magic. Don’t let him take that from you.”
“It isn’t your choice to make.” She backed away.
“Cassia, what are you planning?”
“Rudhira was right. Arrest in Orthros is the safest place for me. As long as I’m there, Kallikrates can’t use me to destroy anything else.”
“You can’t really believe this world is better off without you fighting for it.”
Lio reached for her through their bond, drawing her deep into his mind and heart. She fought his pull, her regrets washing through him.
“Get somewhere safe before dawn,” she said. “Go as far as you can. I won’t let the Charge take you easily.”
For the second time, his Grace stepped away and left him behind.
Cassia slipped through thefabric of the world. In that instant, suspended between flesh and spirit in a current of her blood magic, she was out of the Lustra’s reach. There was only Hespera.
Goddess, I’m sorry.
She had failed in her duty to protect the innocent with her immortal power. But what hurt most of all was that she had failed her eternal vows to her Grace.
The letting site at Paradum pulled her and Knight back to earth. True to her aim, she had landed them in the middle of her garden. She ran her hands over him to make sure he was all right, and he licked her chin in reassurance. She had managed to step him without making him ill or losing him somewhere along the way.
The strength of the restored letting site welled out of the soil and filled her, its undeserving Silvicultrix. Her one triumph here had not been enough to save them. She had failed the Lustra itself.
Casting her senses through the castle, she found it deserted. There were no patrols in the surrounding hills, either, ally or enemy.
Lio wasn’t here. He hadn’t followed her.
She didn’t want him to chase her and fight her decision every step of the way. She didn’t want him to martyr himself at her side, either. But some part of her had never expected he would simply let her go.
What was he planning?
Her only comfort was the light creeping over the horizon. He wouldn’t have time to do anything reckless before the Dawn Slumber hit him.
But Lyros would. He might have already reached Rudhira. Cassia had lost the advantage of turning herself in first. So she would have to strike a more compelling bargain than what her Trial brother offered.
The one thing she had to bargain with was her.
The Lustra would never let the Charge take her. She was sure she could disappear into the wilds, and not even Kalos would be able to track her.
If they wanted her surrender, they would have to meet her terms about protections for Lio.
Keeping Knight close, Cassia slipped through Paradum to her old bedroom. The place where she had lost her magic and chosen the Gift. She sealed the broken wall with a tangle of roses to block out the oncoming day. No Hesperine or mortal would find her here until she was ready.
Except for one. Miranda always knew where she was.
Cassia curled up on the floor and succumbed to the Slumber, praying her roses were protection enough.
Lio was alone inthe silence.
Without his Trial brothers and his Grace, the Blood Union now felt empty, too. The specters rose behind his eyes, and he tried to push them away.
He had to think. Act. As long as he could avoid arrest, there was hope of breaking Cassia out again. But he would have to convince her to escape with him a second time.
He would find Miranda himself, and he would take Cassia’s foci from her. Once he put them back in Cassia’s hands, she would have to see how important her power was.
But right now, he had to find shelter for himself and Dame before dawn. Their Lustra refuges were gone, and so was Cassia’s pendant, the key to the portals.
His hand went to his own medallion. The only Lustra artifact Miranda had overlooked.
He made a libation on the three wooden leaves and picked his way through the wreckage of the tower. He’d known his chances were slim, but he still felt devastated when no light sparked to guide him to a portal. The Changing Queen’s spells truly had been destroyed here.
He wouldn’t be satisfied until he checked the other Lustra sites to see for himself if Cassia’s vision was true. Kneeling with a hand on Dame, he stepped them to the lighthouse.
They landed near the brazier, which was now cold and half-buried in stones so broken and worn that they looked like part of the bluff. He levitated down to the portal in the hillside only to find it already open. The underground ritual site was lost beneath a cave-in.
He took them to the ancient Lustra circle last. The standing stones had toppled and cracked. His day terrors had become reality. The magic here had been ravaged yet again by the conflicts of Tenebra.
But it was older than those wars. Older even than the spell Ebah and Lucian had built on it. Could hulaic magic still survive here? With a worried glance at the horizon, he bled on his pendant again.
Suddenly, he knew what to do. He didn’t know what sense guided him—a rustle under his feet, a scent on the air, his heart pounding a warning through his body that predators lay in wait for him. Driven by instinct, he lifted his familiar in his arms and walked into the broken circle.
The winter fields of Tenebra disappeared. Beyond the stones, he saw land drenched in the burning light of sunset with fire raging on the horizon. Impossible. And yet somehow real in the Lustra’s mysterious paradigm.
Lio found a narrow shelter where one stone had fallen across another. He worked himself and Dame into the patch of shade just as twilight gave way to dawn.