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But even as she said it, she realized nothing was wrong. She felt the channeling crack open inside her and let out a cry. The wildness of the letting site raced through her veins and into his mouth.
His magic was not only flowing into the Lustra. The Lustra’s power was flowing into him, through her blood.
Behind Lio, Miranda strained against the vines, reaching toward a cleaver that had fallen from her worktable.
“She’s going to break free,” Cassia cried.
With a gasp, Lio sealed her vein and rose, his mouth stained with her blood. She took the spade from him and began cutting through the strap across her chest. “I can do this. Focus on Miranda.”
“I have to break her dream wards.”
“The Lustra will protect you while you cast.”
Miranda’s hand closed around the cleaver. She hacked at the vines, and they shriveled, falling dead around her, blighted with necromancy.
Every glass beaker shattered as Lio turned to face the Gift Collector.
Cassia’s cleansing blood pounded through Lio’s veins, driving away the lethargy of the poison. The magic of the letting site throbbed through him. He had never felt so powerful.
With another blast of levitation, Lio sent Miranda flying across the room. Her cleaver clattered out of reach. She hit the wall where she had imprisoned him, and the Lustra’s vines coiled around her, pinning her in place. Lio advanced on her.
Miranda lifted her chin. “Do your worst. I’m trained to withstand tortures that would make your Hesperine sensibilities writhe. You cannot hurt me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, Miranda. But I promise you, I will find a way to deal your Master pain as no one ever has in his epochs of existence.”
Lio gripped her temples and struck her mind with his full power.
The poison in her thoughts wafted away, and he barely felt the prick of her mental daggers. Layer upon layer of dreams wards crumpled under his thelemancy, empowered by the Lustra.
At last he saw fear in her eyes. She whimpered in his hold like a frightened child. The girl she had once been.
Cassia could have become this. But Miranda could also have become Cassia.
Lio cradled her head in his hands and gently unfolded the deepest reaches of her mind.
What he saw made him want to retreat. It was all laid out in her thoughts in neat, complex patterns, like a game board with each move planned and labeled. The Master’s design in this time.
“Do you see it?” she whispered. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
He beheld a vision of Tenebra in flames. War mages hurled fire at Hesperines errant, whose shadow wards shattered before the onslaught. The blood of his people soaked the soil before their bodies disappeared in flashes of light.
“It’s one of the requirements.” Miranda smiled. “The Orders and the Hesperines must fight a war on Tenebran soil.”
“That will never happen again,” Lio said. “The Last War is over.”
“But the next one has already begun. You started it for us.”
“We have always striven for peace!”
“Your negotiations ended in a siege, didn’t they? Why do you think Lucis waited until that precise moment to attack? We could have crushed your little council anytime we wished, but the Master wanted Solia to win.”
“No.” It couldn’t be. Everything they had worked for…it could not have been part of the Master’s plot all along. Could it?
“Solia is a gift to our game,” Miranda said. “We have tried to lure your kind to war for so long, to no avail. But now, at last, Tenebra has a queen the Hesperines will fight for.”
Hespera help them. Miranda was right.
Her logic carried him deeper into the plot, and he saw the second prerequisite. Thalia waited in a bedchamber in Solorum Palace, while Lucis entered and shut the door behind him. Lio shied away from the vision.
