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“Of course,” said Mak. “We’ll patrol back to Rose House in a moment.”
Lyros glanced around the courtyard. “While Grace-Mother is inside the New Guest House breathing down Chrysanthos’s wards, Mak and I are to keep the rest of the guests in line. I doubt we’ll hear a peep out of them, though. The Dexion has broken them.”
So the Guardian of Orthros was also between Lio and his target. This would be a challenge indeed. “Thank you both. Reassure Cassia I won’t be long.”
Lio stepped away, yanking a heavy veil about himself as he went so they would lose track of his aura between where he departed and where he arrived. They would never guess he had gone not to the Queens’ Terrace, but to the common room right across the courtyard from them.
Now to put his power to the true test. Uncle Argyros’s teachings against Aunt Lyta. But Lio had something more. Queen Alea’s teachings.
A fitting night for him to put her lessons into practice. It had taken him years to master the illusions that had once formed part of her fortifications of Hagia Boreia, methods that lived on in the ward over Orthros even now. He could not craft the warding component of her spells, of course, but with his light magic, he could make veils the way the last surviving Sanctuary mage had taught him. Lio reached for his power and meditated upon her words.
They call us shadow mages because they fear the night.We call ourselves light mages because we do not.
He breathed in, and the shadows around him stirred. A shiver went over his skin. This was magic you could stake lives on. Lio must do that now.
Hespera is the goddess of darkness and light. Rejoice in both.
Lio exhaled, releasing the light in his veins. The moonlight in the room gleamed brighter, as if the sky had cleared of clouds. Lio watched his own body disappear into shadow before his eyes.
He passed through the room as a fleeting length of darkness that touched Cassia’s chair, then blended into the gloom that clung to one wall. He slipped around the perimeter of the room and into the dim hallways beyond. He crept nearer Chrysanthos’s sun-bright wards.
But as he neared, he sensed no trace of Aunt Lyta. A different aura, just as familiar, loomed outside the Dexion’s door.
It seemed Rudhira had relieved the Guardian of Orthros and taken up watch himself.
Why would he do that, when he was due to arrive at the Queens’ circle right now?
Lio fed his sense of warning to his spell, dissolving himself into finer shadows. He would have to put a Queen’s magic to the test against the First Prince.
Rudhira stood in a shaft of blood-red light that came down through one high stained glass window. Lio crept up behind his Ritual father, occupying the deep shadow just outside the light’s reach. Rudhira hadn’t even changed clothes. He stood before the Dexion’s door in chain main and Tenebran riding boots.
As Lio watched, his Ritual father reached out a hand as if to open the door.
“Rudhira,” Lio said.
He froze. He cocked his head, then turned slowly around, scanning the shadows. “It was bad enough that my little sister Konstantina always used this spell to win hide and seek when we were children. Imagine how I feel about my Ritual son casting it to sneak up on me. Care to stop lurking, Lio?”
Lio adjusted the shadows to make himself visible only to a Hesperine’s sight. “Rudhira, what are you doing here?”
“It is unlike you to ask me to explain myself.”
“It is unlike you to miss a circle with the Queens that concerns the fate of your Hesperines errant.”
“On the contrary. I am a very lax prince. I do nothing but miss crucial events in Orthros.”
His Ritual father’s words were edged in bitterness Lio had seldom heard, but often suspected was there.
“Rudhira, I’m not here to admonish you, so you certainly needn’t admonish yourself. Don’t mistake me for your sister or your conscience haunting you in the shadows.”
“Why are you here, Lio?”
They gazed at each other in silence for a moment.
“I am a very lax diplomat,” Lio said at last. “I am here to take an Apollonian course of action. I’m sure my uncle will grieve that I’m using the magic he taught me to do so. But you will appreciate this.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Chrysanthos may not know exactly where his order is keeping the prisoners, but he’s the sunbound Dexion of the Aithourian Circle. His mind is the foremost library of all their secrets, after the Synthikos’s own. Chrysanthos probably knows more about how the Order works than the Akron does. The captives’ precise location is not in his mind, but the information I need to figure out where they are is certainly somewhere in his thoughts.”
