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“She tried her gardening spade on me last time.”
The Collector spread his arms with a flourish, then lowered them. The sideboards flew apart and shuddered down to their positions along the edges of the hall. The Collector flicked a hand again, as if dusting something off the air. Knight flopped onto his side and skidded across the floor, between two chairs, and landed at Cassia’s feet.
Should she awaken the shard now, or would that waste her advantage? While she debated with herself, Knight lay there struggling to get up, and she could give him not one comforting touch.
The Collector paused at a sideboard to refill his goblet. “The treaty is brilliant, though, Cassia. You have lured the free lords into a rebellion that will give the king a reason to crush them. The Hesperines will of course come to their rescue. You have succeeded where Dalos and Chrysanthos both failed. You have given Orthros a compelling reason to go to war in Tenebra.”
It couldn’t be true. All their plots behind the king’s back…all their hard-won successes…it couldn’t all be for nothing. They had been trying to heal the world, not twist it into the shape the Collector envisioned.
Sweat broke out all over Cassia’s body. Had the Collector been inhermind?
Skleros tilted his head back, and his nostrils flared. “Ahh, the smell of fear.”
“Sweeter than the most ancient vintage.” The Collector toasted him.
No, the mage of dreams couldn’t possibly have tampered with her. Lio would have driven him out of her thoughts, just as he had driven him out of the heart hunters. Annassa Soteira, when she had rescued Cassia from the sickroom of her mind, would have saved her from the mage of dreams, too.
Cassia tucked the treaty safely in her gardening satchel and tightened it on her shoulder. “We are not your tokens. You cannot arrange our hearts to your satisfaction. These men and women believe in something. The teachings of their gods, the good of their people, the honor of battle—Solia’s memory. In the face of our conviction, the king is just one small man. We will crush him.”
With a sigh, the Collector took two wine bottles from a rack. He tossed one to Skleros, who caught it deftly. Twin pops sounded, and the corks flew from the bottles. The Collector tipped his bottle and spilled more of the Notian red on the pale floor.
He walked around the outside of the chairs, marking a semicircle on the floor in wine, Skleros following suit on the opposite side. Their lines met at a point behind Chrysanthos, and Skleros stood still again, as if waiting for orders. The two lines of wine surrounded the embassy, as if enclosing them in a great eye.
They were going to set a fire, Cassia guessed. Was that all? Ha. Her Sanctuary ward had withstood much worse.
The Collector paused in front of her again. How strange Eudias’s face looked when the proud, malicious Collector wore it. The Collector snapped Eudias’s fingers, and little darts of lightning skittered along his hands.
Cassia’s hands were halfway to her pendant, when a bolt of lightning arced toward one of the sideboards. She squeezed her eyes shut, and when she opened them, the only casualty was the silk tablecloth she had disturbed. What had been a rumpled pile of fabric was now a pile of ash.
The Collector went to the sideboard and thrust his hands in the ashes, caressing them. Then with speed and agility, he retraced the semicircle of wine in ash. When he reached Skleros, he straightened and clasped his Overseer’s hand, smearing ash on the other man’s fingers. Skleros completed the other half of the oval.
“Not up to your usual standards of subtlety,” Cassia said. “The display positively screams necromancy. What next? Little eyelashes like a glyph of Hypnos?”
Without flinching, Skleros snapped off one of his own fingers with his bare hand. Cassia fell silent. When he began to pry the finger bone out of his detached digit, she looked away.
There came a soft grinding noise like a mortar and pestle. Was Skleros turning his own bone to meal in one of the drinking cups?
The Collector’s throaty laughter taunted her. “You always did have a weak stomach, Cassia.”
This wasn’t the king’s solar. This wasn’t that tent fourteen and a half years ago.
This might be the worst enemy she had ever faced. More powerful and more insidious even than the king.
“My strength is in my heart,” she said, “which Hespera gave me.”
The necromancers circled her at the edges of her vision. Flesh and bone emboldened the line of wine and ash. As the smears of pink and beige neared one another, Cassia lifted her hands.
“I am strong in magic and the will to survive. You have no choice but to relinquish me. You cannot hold those of Hespera’s blood.” She grasped her pendant firmly in one hand and, aiming for the unseen scar of all her past blood rituals, drove the glyph shard into her palm.
Her heart jolted. Light and strength burst from her and flashed outward.
The spell marks met. A great, silent scream of magic tore at her flesh and grated in her bones. The lines on the floor cracked and split. They did not form an eye. It was a mouth, and it began to open. It was a void, waiting to consume them. Bit by bit, the floor of Rose House chipped away and disappeared into it.
A shining veil passed over the faces and bodies of the embassy. Cassia’s Sanctuary ward halted and hung poised between the backs of the chairs and the necromancers’ spell. The tear in the world slammed into her weaving of light and halted.
“What?” Skleros snarled. “Master—!”
Cassia met the Collector’s gaze through the shining light of her ward.
