by Vela Roth
As every year, Cassia would not be there. The king thought her presence would be an act of remembrance. Of defiance. A reminder of what she knew.
But he was wrong. That dark hole meant nothing to her. That he forbade her to mourn there only freed her from pretense. Freed her to memorialize the truth of that night when the catapults had delivered their verdict and all she could do was try not to scream…
She was free to remember that her sister now dwelt in light, not the grave.
Cassia’s mind fled back to the memory of how Lio had reached for her after she had told him the truth. The brush of his sleeves. Then the sureness of his arms around her. Finally, the sensation of his hands. His fingertips on the nape of her neck. His palm sliding down her back.
How could her heart ease so, while her cheeks began to flush at the thought? It seemed she had some proper degree of maidenly modesty after all. That must be the reason his touch made her skin heat.
She had overcome all her modesty and caution to offer him her blood. And he had said no.
If she dwelt on that, it would have the power to hurt her again. She couldn’t afford any more pain. Not today. She had no comfort to waste. She could not bear for her anger to push him away.
His embrace was a solace he had given her only once, but once was all it took to make a good memory. She imagined herself back in that moment and hung on tight. For once, she gave her thoughts free rein. For once, she relived a moment she did not want to escape.
Perhaps if she allowed herself to think of him, she would get through the day.
So far she did not feel the tears threatening. She pushed away the hot tide of her emotions and put herself back in the cold night air and into his warm arms. His hands stroked her hair. Drifted down her back…down…
Lio’s gesture of comfort proved a potent antidote. It got her out of bed and into her clothes. Kept her under control through breakfast. Helped her stay silent and composed in front of Perita.
Was the memory of Lio holding her enough to last her through the entire day?
Oh yes.
She returned to the sheltering darkness of her room and thought of Lio.
Until Perita pushed open the door and let in the firelight. “Lady. There’s a messenger here.”
“What?” Cassia’s mind was so far away, she had not heard him arrive.
“You’ll have to come out to the hearth room. He’s here with a message from the king.”
The words invaded and dragged Cassia back to where and when she was. Her fragile hold shattered, and emotion filled her, too fierce to withstand, until she had to stand up and move. She wanted to turn right around and pace back into the depths of her bedchamber, but Knight let out a growl and marched into the next room.
She followed him. Ochre light fading at the window told her it was dusk. Knight stood on guard across the hearth rug from the messenger. Cassia could see the white of the man’s eyes. A young man who was not the enemy, but another of his pawns.
“Het,” Cassia said. “Dockk.”
Knight let out one last snarl, then came to her, circling her with the same unbearable agitation she felt. She looked at the messenger to indicate he should speak. She had no words for him.
The young man delivered the same message as always. Cassia tried not to hear it but could not escape the words. “…king…summons…”
He expected her to appear before him on this day. At sunset.
She should never have come to Solorum. This audience with the king would teach her what a mistake she had made. This would be her point of failure, when she must admit being near him on this day at this hour was too much for her. Not worth any gain.
Not even finally knowing the truth?
Not even meeting Lio?
The walk to the king’s solar was harder than anything she had ever done. Even speaking at the negotiation table had not been this difficult. Only one thing kept her feet moving: the memory of comfort that took her away from where she was going.
Some part of her remembered it was utterly foolish to rely on anyone for help, even just the memory of someone. But she could spare no thought for such concerns. Lio’s hold on her got her to the king’s door.
She commanded Knight to be silent. She would not have him growl at the king with her fury and earn a punishment for protecting her. He could not protect her in this room. But her own thoughts…yes, they could.
She just had to think about Lio’s face above her. Not the king’s. The carpet pressed into her knees as she knelt. No, she wouldn’t think about that feeling, only Lio holding her. Not the king’s voice. Lio’s voice and her own, speaking openly in the night.
I have told you. I shall defend you.
With such a capable protector as you, Cassia, I feel very safe indeed.
Flashes of awareness about her surroundings came to her. The king wasn’t wearing black. The chamberlain was leaving the room. Business as usual. Of course.
I promise I’ll keep you safe, Cassia. Tonight it is my turn to protect you.
She focused on those words until she was almost chanting them in her mind.
She realized she was not going to retch at the king’s feet. She was able to listen to his words enough to know if they required a response.
“Your humble work in the temple gardens reveals itself to be untoward, when it transforms into such a brazen display. I thought you knew better than to draw such attention to yourself. Do not mistake your attendance, which is merely symbolic, for a place at the table.”
He was talking about the Summit? Now? He had chosen this moment to chastise her for speaking out. He had waited till she was on the ground to land his next blow.
…you’re intelligent and determined and braver than any man who charges out onto a bloody battlefield with a sword. You shouldn’t be locked away in some neglected wing of the palace or even the walls of a temple garden.
Cassia opened her clenched teeth enough to say, “Yes, Your Majesty.”
“What were you thinking?”
Cassia swallowed. Why must he expect more from her than silence today, of all days?
Because he knew that made it harder for her.
“I was thinking…” That you’ve committed enough murders. “…only of the lives the mages might save.”
He did not raise his voice, just let his words do the beating for him. “You should have come directly to me with their request.”
You would have refused even more quickly. “Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Such a public defiance of my decision is not acceptable.”
But now they know you would let their children die, just like your own. “I understand, Your Majesty.”
He sat up in his chair and leaned forward, and Cassia nearly jumped out of her skin.
“You do not understand,” he corrected her. “If you understood, you would never have placed the Kyrian mages’ pleas, however pitiful, above my command. This is precisely the sort of behavior I warned you I would not tolerate from you, when I generously agreed to permit your presence at court.”
She felt him looming over her.
“Look at me.”
When her head remained bowed a moment longer, he repeated the command.
“Look at me.”
Cassia struggled to breathe and fought to compose her face. No, coming into this room today was not the hardest thing she’d done. Keeping the fury from showing in her eyes must surely be the greatest challenge she had ever faced.
She would never forgive him for what he had done. Every breath she took would keep her anger burning. Her anger was even more powerful than her fear.
Cassia lifted her head.
His blue eyes bored into her. “You will no longer visit the Temple of Kyria. The palace, the Temple of Anthros, and the greensward are the boundaries of the kingdom in which you now reside. The next time you make it necessary for me to call you before me, I shall redraw the borders at the walls of your own chambers and fortify them with guards at your door
.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“You will continue to attend the Summit. But you will never again rise from your chair. If you stray in the slightest, if you dare for even one moment to be anywhere other than where I have ordered you, I will put you in your place, just as I have done to every other woman who thought she could defy me.”
Cassia must make sure he saw no response in her eyes. No grief. No fear. No defiance. Nothing.
“You are nothing,” the king said.
She told me I am beautiful and good and that she loves me.
Then that is what you must say to yourself. That is what she wants for you.
“You are what I command you to be and nothing more. Do not forget again.”
Do not ever be ashamed. You have done a courageous deed tonight, and your sister is proud of you.
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“I am your king.”
He dared to say such a thing on her day of mourning for a world in which he would not have been her king, and she would have knelt instead before her queen.
But the day would yet come when he no longer was her king. All she had to do was survive him.
I do not want to imagine a history in which you did not survive that night to stand here with me.
“Yes, My King.”
“Get out of my sight.”
When she got to her feet and backed away, she did not flee. With Knight as her honor guard and memory as her talisman, she walked out of the room.
Flint and Steel
Solia’s dark rooms enfolded Cassia. She could not risk filling them with candlelight, not so close to the king’s wing. But if she got no clear look at them ever again, they could always look as they had when she and Soli had been here together.
Folk were keeping vigil long into the night, and the votive lights and open chamber doors had made it hard for Cassia and Knight to move through the halls unnoticed. But having withstood her encounter with the king, she would not let a palace full of well-meaning mourners prevent her.
She carried her unlit candle out into the garden, where the walls had no eyes and overgrowth shielded her. Knight stayed close by her as she knelt amid the broken tiles at the rim of the dry pool. The blue and gold pattern on the tiles looked blue and silver in the moonlight and was as beautiful as ever. Cassia found one tile that was still whole and set her candle on it. She bade Knight sit behind her, where his fur would be well out of danger, before she retrieved flint, steel and a scrap of tinder from her satchel.
A breeze slid down through the trees, snatching sparks as soon as she managed to produce them, casting them away into the damp undergrowth to fizzle out. By the time her hands slipped and her flint gouged her palm, she was crying. She kept on, ignoring her blood dripping onto the tiles.
When a tall shadow cast by moonlight fell across her hands, she did not startle. She breathed a sigh. A sense of relief stole over her.
Lio knelt down across from her. “May I join you? I do not wish to intrude.”
On any other night she would have kept her head down to hide her tears. But there was no shame in proper mourning. She lifted her face. “I’m glad you’ve come.”
More of a welcome than she had intended to give him. Not as much as he deserved. Judging by the look on his face, more than he had dared hope for.
Why did he want welcome from her and take it so to heart? Of what value was her favor, which he worked so hard to win?
She owed him more words, thanks for what he had done for her today. She tried to think of how to tell him. She had not shamed herself before the king, and she could not have won that battle without Lio’s help. His embrace had given her courage. He and her Hesperine rescuers and her sister had all been part of her…strength.
The only words that came to her were, “How did you find me here?”
His gaze fell to the red droplets on the tiles. “I followed the scent.”
Of course. Her blood. Which she had tried to give him, and he had not wanted.
“Cassia, I…” He ran both his hands through his hair. “When you didn’t come out to the grounds, and I smelled your blood, I… All I could sense was your distress. So many atrocities can befall a woman in this place.”
She had witnessed many displays of fear, and she’d spent her life grappling with her own. She hadn’t seen such fear for her on another’s face.
There was no call for him to look at her so. He was someone from another world. He did not have to risk her secrets and confront her pain. Why did it matter to him if she was safe?
He would not accept anything from her. Why would he give her so much in return for nothing?
For the same reason three of his people had rescued her on this night all those years ago.
Kindness.
The tears simply would not stop, even now, when she willed them to. Cassia held out her injured palm. “It’s all right. See? It’s nothing.”
Lio held out his hands. “May I?”
The shiver that moved through her had nothing to do with her weeping. He was asking her to place her blood in his hands. Surely he did not intend to collect on her offer after all. Not now.
If he did, did that disturb her?
Slowly she extended her palm closer to Lio. Behind her, Knight made no move, only watched in silence.
Lio gathered her injured hand in both of his. The smoothness of his skin made her all the more aware of the calluses on her own from wielding a spade. His long fingers dwarfed hers, but were so gentle.
As he gazed down at the cut on her hand, she looked up into his face and caught her breath. The blue of his eyes had receded to the barest rim around the fathomless black of his pupils. She was not looking at a benevolent Hesperine stranger. This was Lio. She knew there was no spell in his touch or his gaze, but she could not look away.
Vigil
The fragrance of her blood promised him he held everything he had ever desired in his hands.
Lio might never forgive this accursed country that his first whiff of what lay in Cassia’s veins had been mingled with grief and fear. He had known instantly whose blood he scented on the wind. In a single moment he had felt as if he had just made a profound discovery, and he was about to lose her.
The feeling hadn’t retreated, even now, although he knew a wayward flint had been the only threat to her. This time.
He held the gift of Cassia’s hand in his, which she had not refused to bestow. The pace of her pulse told him this one touch was enough to stir her response to him, which she fought so hard to stifle within herself. He could taste the scent of her blood, a divine tease of what it would be like to drink her. It would take nothing more than to lift her hand to his mouth, and the blessed scent would become flavor, and Cassia would no longer be sitting across from him, but flowing in his veins.
He could heal that cut with his mouth. Then open another. Somewhere that would bring her even closer and give her even greater pleasure.
And she would call it payment instead.
The heat in Lio’s veins turned from yearning into frustration. How could Cassia deny this meant more?
Perhaps she did not deny it—she simply didn’t feel it as he did.
What she did feel tonight was fourteen years’ worth of grief, and he was sitting before her overwhelmed with temptation, thinking only of desire.
Shame cooled his blood. He reached into a pocket of his robe and pulled out one of his remaining handkerchiefs. He spat onto it. How romantic. She had no idea how much he wished to employ the alternative instead.
Cassia sat still and patient as he cleaned the blood from her hand. He waited for her to realize.
“It’s gone!” She flexed her hand. The motion of her fingers in his tantalized him. And she was only touching his hand. “Thank you.”
It was my pleasure, he almost said. “You’re welcome.”
“Do others try to take it from you? Steal your spittle or your blood or your hair?”
Trust Cassia’s mind
to go to the direst consequences. “It doesn’t work that way. Just like only living blood straight from the vein can nourish us, our bodily substances only have healing properties when they come straight from the source. Removed from a living Hesperine, their power fades.”
She withdrew her hand, but not quickly, and only to hold it in her lap and study where the cut had been. “It’s like a bit of your immortality…”
The musing drew Lio to lean closer to her. He wondered what words she had left unsaid. A bit of his immortality…given to her. On her. In her. Erasing a mark, but leaving one too.
As he brought his body physically closer, the Union brought him near her grief again, and he wondered if she was only thinking of what tonight meant and how different his immortal life was from her human existence. Her blood drying on the tile still scented the wind, a promise to him, a warning to her.
“Cassia, may I be of assistance?”
She looked up at him, her hollow gaze filling with emotion. “You already made Solia a memorial light without compare.”
“Would it be acceptable for me to help you light your candle?”
“It would be a grave thing, if I didn’t manage to light a vigil candle for my own sister. But lighting it together with a fellow mourner…that’s an honored tradition as well.”
Lio dared take her hand again.
She wrapped her fingers around his. “I didn’t think Hesperines could start fires with magic.”
“Actually that’s not really my area. I was thinking I might place myself between you and the wind.”
The corners of her mouth relaxed. “That would be a great help.”
He had almost made her smile, on this night. He must count his blessings and be patient.
He arranged himself on her other side, whence the wind came. “This must be the garden where you and Solia planted flowers together.”
“Yes. Her rooms are through that door.” Cassia gestured, then put her flint, steel and tinder into position again. “We were always together here.”
