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Old blood, long dried. Horror. Fury. Grief.
Lio closed the distance between them and saw what was in her arms. She had dyed the linen with her blood and emotion. The fabric was rank with flametongue oil. Solia’s fabled garments, which Cassia wore in the king’s hearth?
Lio reached for her, but halted his hands midair, helpless to stop the flow of blood already spilled. “What made you bleed like this? What happened to you in Tenebra that you have not told me?”
She unfolded the fabric to reveal what she carried. The glyph stone from their shrine. Its magic cried out to his senses. He fitted his hands to the bloody prints of hers.
A forest surrounded her, and a strange, eerie light he had never seen crept nearer and nearer. What was this ochre haze eating the sky, this fleshly pink specter rising? Was that…dawn?
She heaved for breath, pushing her leaden legs onward. Pain tore at her palms as she worked the glyph stone out of the crumbling arch. As a mage sent a cascade of threatening heat over her, she stared Anthros in the face.
Lio relived the morning of the Autumn Equinox in disconnected shards of sight, sound, and smell, until he could no longer bear the boom of war magic upon Hespera’s shrine, and he yanked his mind and his hands away.
“I’m so sorry,” Cassia said. “I tried so hard. But this is all I could save.”
Lio wrapped her in his arms and held her, running his hands over her. The glyph stone throbbed between their bodies. “You’re safe. You’re safe. Nothing else matters.”
“Now you know how I brought the Sanctuary ward with me.”
“If you hadn’t managed to awaken the ward— If the mages had come upon you a moment sooner— Why didn’t you tell me? I almost lost you!”
“I didn’t have the heart to break it to you. But I swore that day I would bring this to Orthros to be safe with you. It belongs here, just like me.”
She set the glyph stone down in the moonlight, at the head of a makeshift bed. She had spread out their wool blanket and silk pillows from the window seat and scattered them with rose petals. She had even hauled the pots of their roses all the way up from the library. The fledgling vines clung to their stakes, their blooms already turning toward the windows.
“I dishonored your gift.” She hung her head. “I tried to refuse the greatest gift anyone has ever offered me. Happiness was within our reach, and I told myself I must not grasp it. I thought I had changed so much since we met, but I haven’t. It’s more difficult than I imagined.”
“I know. It is so hard. But we can do it together.”
“My own survival was once the altar where I sacrificed life’s sweeter things, but if I put them to the scythe for Tenebra, it amounts to the same. I lived like that for so long, I don’t know how to let myself be happy.”
“You can learn here, with me. I do not want to follow Bloodborn’s Path. I want to chart my own, and I want to do that with you. Will you help me?”
“I have been trying, but some part of me is shaped to the iron rule that something so good cannot be, that this is not how the world works. The rhythm hammers on in my mind even when I think I have shut it out. Lady Cassia cannot. Lady Cassia must not. If Lady Cassia does, someone will die.”
“But you can, Cassia. You must. If you do not…”
“Iwill cease to live. I will go back to merely surviving. Since I told you I was leaving, I have been reliving all those nights I endured in Tenebra without you. I can’t bear that ever again. I have given my heart to you. I will never again try to live hollow-chested out of your reach. I cannot live without you.”
“I was dying without you.”
“I am so sorry I hurt you. Can you forgive me for nearly ruining everything?”
“Nothing is ruined, my rose. You have built our shrine anew.”
She brought him to stand with her over the glyph stone. “We will treasure Laurentius and Makaria’s history, but we will make our own. Our shrine will stand forever. We will not die for it. We will live in it.”
“I don’t want to be Hylonome, and I don’t want you to be Solia. Our stars are sacred to us, and they guide us. But we cannot let them blind us. I will not lose you again. Not for the throne of Tenebra, not for anything or anyone. I will not make that sacrifice. I will not stand by and watch you sacrifice yourself.”
“To devote my life to bringing down the king would be the same as letting him take it from me. I refuse to let that happen.” Her words carried through the Sanctuary ward, out the windows, and over the gardens of House Komnena. “I refuse. I refuse to be my sister or my mother or one of Tenebra’s tragic queens. I refuse to be the next woman who swallows her pain and lays herself down for the kingdom. Good things don’t last long in Tenebra. I refuse to be one of them. This is is my promise.”
From a pocket of her robes, she pulled out the green fair ribbon. She reached up and separated a strand of her hair from the rest, her fingers sure. He watched her weave a slender braid. When she reached the end, she secured it with the ribbon.
“I will never leave you, Lio. You will never go hungry another night. I love you, and I will love you for so long that I must become a Hesperine to make time for it all.”
He felt her decision in her aura and her words and the way she put her arms around him. She held on to him, and he knew she would never let him go. He started at her brow, feathering caresses and kisses over her face, her neck, everywhere he could reach.
“Lio, your hands are shaking. Have you been so hungry these past few nights?”
