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“No, Cassia. I cannot understand how this could be our future. I cannot last a year without you, must less ten. I. Cannot. Do this.”
“This is the only way. We must give up what is good for us to do what is good for everyone.”
“You told me you love me!”
“I will always love you.”
He pressed the rose into her hands. “How can you give this up? After the way you showed me how you feel last night, after the way I—”
“Please.” She pushed his hands away. “Don’t. This is hard enough. My resolve is almost gone. Do me the kindness of not trying to persuade me to stay.”
He dropped the rose at her feet. “If all I have done since you came has not been enough to persuade you, I have nothing more to say.”
“I am so sorry.”
“If this is the right thing to do—if this is what the Goddess requires of us—then I am no hero and no devout.”
He turned on his heel and quit the courtyard with a crack of power that made Cassia shiver and the glass quake.
VIGILOF
UNION
2 Nights Until Winter Solstice
EYE TO EYE
Lio halted in histracks in front of Prometheus and braced his hands on his knees.
As soon as he was still, his thoughts got the better of him again. For the first time, he noticed the trail his bare feet had left in the pristine white around the monument. His passage across the grounds at a breakneck run had gouged the snow.
Lio remembered when he had grown as tall as Prometheus. As he had often done since, he now cut in front of his childhood portrait and faced the first bloodborn. The view was very different when they stood eye to eye. It was a view no other Hesperine but Lio was tall enough to see.
Queen Alea’s words upon the night of his Summit proposal now came back to him.Why look into stone eyes for wisdom?
Prometheus’s eyes had shut on this world for the greater good. Could that decision be understood? Had he understood it, when he had made it? Or had he simply done it, because he must?
You need only seek it in your veins.
“I am angry,” Lio told Prometheus.
The last drops of insight his own veins had to offer.
“Why did we have to lose you?” he demanded. “If you had made it home, your monument would not be all I have of you. Goddess, why must this be all that’s left of us?”
Despair rose within Lio, as crippling as a Craving chill. He braced his hand on Prometheus’s shoulder for support.
“I don’t want this to be my future.”
Would Zoe one night stand before a statue of her brother, grieving for him as Nike had for Methu? How many years would it take Zoe to become tall enough to reach Lio’s stone shoulder? Years he would miss.
Would Mother ever recover from the loss of her son, whose survival she thought she had secured? What shape would her pain take, as Kassandra’s had taken on life as a hopeless prophecy?
Could Father bear one more loss without his rage consuming him? When the family that had healed him was broken, what would his grief break?
And for what?
To save lives. One more time, from one more strike by the Orders. Cassia’s palace would be the inquisitors’ prison of Lio’s legend. All the Tenebrans she saved from tyranny would be the prisoners whose freedom his sacrifice made possible.
