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He clasped her wrist. “Name your stakes.”
“I want a statue of Iris fit for a queen’s capital.”
Father’s face softened. “I would craft that for you without a fight. But I know it will mean more to you as a prize well won. I will make Iris a memorial as fine as any Hesperine martyr’s.”
Together, Sunburn and the Lion of Orthros faced their opponents. She looked small next to him, but her aura, too, was larger than life. She and Lio’s father had never seemed more like family than at this moment.
Aunt Lyta bit her hand and cupped her blood in her palm, raising it high. Then she let it fall. Red stained the sand, and the match was on.
Even Lio’s immortal gaze struggled to follow the melee. The Stewards were blurs of white fangs and black robes. The Ashes flowed in and out of the chaos, fluid and yet in perfect rhythm. The mortals might be slow, but they fought like veterans who had many years of practice sparring with Karege.
Lio had seen both the Stand and the Ashes in battle and even fought at their sides. But he had never seen them like this.
In the midst of it all, Lio’s father and Solia were two streaks of gold.
Cassia gripped Lio’s hand, turning her head to and fro as she tried to track the match. He kept up a commentary as best he could, but as soon as he pointed toward a duel, the fighters had already repositioned.
A powerful body wrestled Tilili to the ground. Kadi, using her weight against Kella. But Kella flattened herself against her mount, and the lithe pair rolled as one, slithering out of Kadi’s grasp. Mist snapped into Kella’s grasp and became water, then hardened into frost. A volley of razor-sharp icicles flew at Kadi. She stood her ground, raising a wall of shadow that shattered Kella’s arcane blades.
Mak and Karege were locked in a brutal wrestling match, laughing all the while. Beside them, Lyros danced across the sand, using agility to evade Hoyefe’s fists and Tuura’s staff. He retreated toward Alkaios to fight back-to-back with his fellow Steward.
When Alkaios grabbed Lyros in a headlock, Lio gasped. Light magic sparkled, and Lio saw that it was no Steward holding his Trial brother, but Hoyefe. The figures Lio had thought to be Hoyefe and Tuura resolved into Alkaios and Nephalea. Both halted in their tracks and shook their heads, as if realizing Lyros was not the enemy. The real Tuura, suddenly visible, closed in from behind them. Her staff swept through the air, and with it, a current of magic that knocked both Stewards off their feet.
At the heart of the battle, Lio’s father and Solia faced each other on either side of the whorl of shadow wards who was Nike. He sank back on his heels, his knees bent, and raised his arms. His muscles flexed as if he lifted a great weight.
Magic surged beneath Lio’s feet, pounding through their shared blood, and his heart roared. This was nothing like Father in his workshop, and yet so like him. The spell was an artist’s attack, a warrior’s creation.
The floor shuddered. Massive chunks of stone tore up through the ground to hover in the air around his father.
Then magefire roared to life in Hippolyta’s Arena.
THE ONLY LUSTRA MAGE
Flame rolled out of Solia’s hands. The hands of his Grace-sister. A primal shudder went through Lio before he could stop it.
Cassia wrapped her cool hands around his, no judgment in her touch, only reassurance. He tasted no acrid Anthrian magic in the back of his mouth. The arena filled with pure heat and light.
Solia’s flame never touched a Hesperine. The fire poured from her hands and collided midair with the rocks at his father’s command. Molten stone spiraled down around Nike, pressing in on her wards.
All Lio could see of her were her fangs in a pulsing orb of shadow. Then the darkness exploded outward. Stone shattered.
Solia’s fire flared to life once more; his father clapped, raising his broken rocks back to life. They began the cycle again, weaving a new cage around Nike to test her wards.
“Why can’t she step out of it?” Cassia cried.
Lio raised his voice over the noise. “Something about their spell—magefire and blood magic, combined. I’ve never seen the like.”
The entire battle orbited around the clash of darkness and light at its center. At last Nike’s shadows flared out again. But this time, the cage blazed orange, and fluid stone flexed away from her wards. As her blast of power faded, Solia and his father’s combined magic wrapped tighter around Nike.
Lio’s father lowered his hands. Solia kept moving, her gestures of command their own beautiful, deadly fighting moves, pouring heat into the stone his father had given her.
With Nike and Solia locked in magical combat, Lio’s father plunged into the melee at Karege’s side. The two elder warriors fought their way through the young Stewards, leaving defeated immortals in their wake.
Through the waves of heat rippling in the air around Solia, Aunt Lyta’s black handkerchief drifted down to land at the feet of the Victor of Souls.
As if fighting a mighty current, Solia wrenched her arms to her and crossed them over her chest. The heat curled back in on her. The stone cage cooled, fading from white-hot to the deep red of Haima’s bedrock. Lio sensed his father’s magic sinking back into the ground, going deep to its rest. And the cage was simply stone again.
Aunt Lyta’s voice rang across the arena. “This match goes to First Blade Kella and her Ashes; to Solia, Victor of Souls; and to the Lion of Orthros.”
