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“All I sense is strength of Will,” Apollon said.
“Thank you,” Cassia said to his sketches.
His drawing of the kneeling girl was nowhere to be seen. Now he was working on a portrait of Zoe.
“Actually,” said Lio, “the Sanctuary ward seems to enhance my awareness of you.”
“That’s because you’re part of it,” she replied.
He looked at her with a knowing light in his eyes. “You are entirely magical, just not in the way that requires Teething Tonic.”
Cassia smiled, then shrugged. “I’ve always been glad I didn’t have magic. If it was weak enough for the Orders to ignore, it would be useless, and I’d be just as I am, anyway. If it was powerful…” She squeezed Lio’s hand. “…I would have been stashed in a temple, where I would never have met a Hesperine. All the magic I need comes from Orthros.”
Lio wrapped his arm around her. “A lot of use my thelemancy is, when I mustn’t raid Chrysanthos and Skleros’s minds to find out what they meant by this.”
“Ioustin?” Apollon asked.
The prince was silent, his expression grave.
Lio held Cassia closer. “Rudhira, is there something else?”
“I am loath to give you cause to fear what might not even be possible. However, I want us to be watchful and prepared for anything, now that we know essential displacement is not just theoretical, but magic that Gift Collectors actually practice.”
“I think you had best explain,” Apollon advised.
Rudhira nodded. “We still know very little about essential displacement, but Imperial theramancers like my mother Soteira have wisdom for countering necromancy that is beyond the comprehension of Tenebran mages. Based on her teachings, my experience in battle against Gift Collectors, and the information you brought us about Skleros, Cassia, I am concerned about a possible threat we have not yet considered.”
“Please tell me,” she replied. “Perhaps something I saw when I was spying on Skleros and Chrysanthos could help confirm your theory.”
“Or rule it out, I hope,” said the prince. “You are the only one of us who has actually witnessed an essential displacement. The secret working you saw Skleros perform transferred the bulk of Chrysanthos’s power into a vessel he can draw on through a channel. I wonder if other configurations of the process are possible.”
Cassia felt as if there were a fist in her chest. “I know there are other ‘configurations.’ It did not strike me at the time—it should have! Now I realize Skleros used that very word. He said, ‘This configuration of essential displacement requires three men.’”
Cassia had not seen such a look on Lio’s face since he had made the heart hunters who had threatened her fall at her feet.
Lio pointed at the goblet. “Rudhira, are you suggesting Skleros could use essential displacement to cause Cassia to need a tonic for growing magic?”
“We must remember it is only a theory,” the prince answered, “but it did cross my mind that the Gift Collector could transfer magic into Cassia in some way. He might attempt to make her a vessel.”
“By the Goddess,” Lio ground out, “no necromancer will treat Cassia as if she is some artifact to be used.”
“Of course he will not,” Apollon said. “We will send him back to Hypnos long before that.”
Cassia would never forget the person Skleros had used as Chrysanthos’s vessel. How the man had writhed, forced full of excruciating power against his will, his fate sealed and unknown to his family. She would make sure she never forgot, because there was no one else to remember.
She wished she could forget what the mage of dreams had planned to do to her.
She tried to ignore the cold sweat that broke out on her skin. She had known the danger she placed herself in, when she had chosen to be a woman who used her voice, who acted. She was adept at managing her fears. She was brave about facing them.
The king thought she was still his spare token, worth only what he could get from this or that man in exchange for her. He had bartered her all her life, first to suitors, now to Mages of Hypnos.
The day would come when she owned the market.
Cassia’s heart hammered in her chest, but the pulse in her glyph shard answered, strong and steady. “Can a Sanctuary ward stop an essential displacement?”
“Even with the Queens’ wisdom,” Rudhira replied, “I cannot answer that. The Gift Collectors’ rituals are still too unknown to us.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Lio said. “Skleros will never have the opportunity to try.”
