Blood Mercy (Blood Grace Book 1)

by Vela Roth

  The speeches had never been so excruciating or so meaningless. Lio kept his face blank as a veil and his power steady as the moons themselves while one, two, then three free lords raised their objections and issued demands.

  Lord Tyran sat back down. To give the embassy the floor. Lio’s heart hammered against his ribs. He shifted in his chair, preparing to rise.

  Uncle Argyros’s signal rippled through the Blood Union. One last check, one last encouragement. The way Lio braced himself made his own Gift shake inside him.

  Lio stood.

  Nothing came.

  He eased into his remarks and began addressing Lord Tyran’s points one by one. The waiting became worse.

  The only mistake Dalos made was to watch Uncle Argyros. For Lio saw when a hint of satisfaction appeared in the mage’s eyes.

  Dalos swayed on his feet. Power erupted out of thin air where he stood. The mage’s real aura. As soon as it manifested, his spell eclipsed it.

  Was this what the sun looked like?

  The golden, blinding flash slammed into Lio’s light. But his people were already there, their magic bound up with his. They were on their feet, infusing all their protective power into the moonlight Lio had provided as material for their warding magic.

  He felt them all. Basir and Kumeta’s zeal. Javed’s strength and Arkadia’s valor. Argyros and Hippolyta’s breathtaking, ancient power, anchored in him, made ferocious by her. Aunt Lyta was the ward’s architect, Kadi its artist. They built it on the foundation of Uncle Argyros’s magic, and Javed, Basir and Kumeta lifted it high.

  Lio was blind as an unborn child under the onslaught of fire, but he felt powerful as a firstblood. He could no longer feel his body. He had become his power, pure magic in the night, flowing with the others but distinct from them. One with all, but standing on his own.

  How could they have doubted they were equal to the task?

  Pain burned into Lio and reduced that thought to a cinder.

  Was this what it felt like to gaze into the sun until it destroyed your eyes?

  The Heretic and the Bastard

  The scream Cassia had kept inside her for fourteen years tore out of her throat.

  Flame roared down from the Mage King’s throne. Every shred of light under the pavilion rose to meet the fire, and a translucent white barrier throbbed into being. The cascade of flame broke against the pale, ephemeral shield.

  The free lords screamed with Cassia, letting out battle cries and shouts of alarm. There was no escape. Dalos’s ward penned them like animals. Chairs crashed against one another, boots pounded in the grass, and the swish of steel echoed as swords leapt from their scabbards. But there was no enemy to fight. Heralds and retainers scrambled for refuge beneath the council table while the warriors staggered about with useless blades in hand and squinted into the clash of magics. Light was all that stood between them and the flame.

  Cassia watched the anguish on Lio’s face. Everything within her demanded she run to him. Part of her remembered she must do no more than look, but she could scarcely hear that voice. What held her in place was the certainty she must not distract him from his people’s spell.

  The Hesperines stood as still as always, their hands at their sides. Only their faces betrayed the magnitude of the power they channeled. They bared their fangs.

  Was there nothing Cassia could do?

  Even as she cursed that she must stand and watch, she felt it. Felt him.

  Lio was all around her. She sensed him as surely as she might feel his arms around her body. She looked down at herself. Moonlight clung to her, a soft and glowing film over her skin, her clothes, her hair. The same light that marked the boundaries of the Hesperines’ ward.

  Did the lords not see it? The moonlight was a veil upon their heads and a mantle around their shoulders. The light was everywhere, even clinging to Knight’s fur, which stood on end. But he bared his teeth at the throne, not the Hesperines.

  They were so powerful. She had known, but now she saw.

  Despite that impossible, horrific flame towering over them all, Cassia felt safe.

  Until a second wave of fire erupted behind the first.

  Tongues of blue shredded through orange as if cannibalizing the lesser fire. Sapphire flame licked at the Hesperines’ shield and began to gnaw.

  Cassia held onto her chair for support as she watched the wall of light creep toward the crowd.

  She tore her gaze away and stared at the Hesperines. Two globes of light pulsed in Lio’s hands, one liquid red, one blinding white. She could see his body trembling. Argyros stood at Hippolyta’s back, his arms wrapped around her, holding her up. Her head had fallen back, and she held her hands out as if begging the moons themselves to come down to her aid.

  Their shield retreated another measure.

  But the light that cloaked every human in the pavilion only drew closer. That power…it was Lio, wasn’t it? Part of him and all of his people who made the spell. Might Cassia find a way to reach them through that power, to help them?

  It was a wild notion. She barely knew how magic worked. But she had seen Lio smear his blood—their blood—on an ancient stone, and she had touched the roses their offering had brought to life.

  While the free lords fell helplessly into a fighting formation behind the ward, Cassia dropped to her knees between Knight and her chair. From her satchel, she drew her spade. She put her tool’s sharp edge to her palm and laid open her own flesh where Lio had healed her.

  The tremor threw her onto her hands and knees. A flash of white light blinded her, and tendrils of red coursed across her black vision. Her head filled with the smell of blood.

  Through the burn of light and her own tears, a pair of jewel-blue eyes met hers. She could see in Lio’s gaze that he was smiling.

  Darkness fell.

  His gaze broke from hers. Cassia heaved at the air and wrapped an arm around Knight by feel. She became aware of the blood trickling down her hand and the handle of her spade she still gripped in the other. Let the free lords think a wayward weapon had caught her palm in the confusion. Let them scoff at her for brandishing a gardening tool in the face of danger.

  As the dark shapes around her manifested, she realized the blood on her spade didn’t matter, for the free lords weren’t looking at her. They surveyed the scene upon the dais.

  Cassia stumbled to her feet and went closer, blinking at the backs of the crowd. Now that the mage ward around the pavilion was gone, gasps and outcries echoed across the greensward. Together she and Knight pushed their way through the onlookers. The lords moved away from her sharp shoulder and Knight’s snapping jaws until the two of them found a spot where they could see.

  Lucis had stepped down from his throne. He stood over a prone body in red-gold robes. Dalos lay spreadeagled at the foot of the Mage King’s chair, face down in the ivy that carpeted the dais.

  Caelum sat frozen in his seat, his skin pale and sweaty as if he were about to vomit or faint. Dalos’s apprentice was already on the ground. Only the uneven rise and fall of his back revealed he was alive.

  Lord Hadrian mounted the dais. He paused to murmur to Caelum and grip the boy’s shoulder. Then he knelt and reached for Dalos’s neck as if to search for a pulse. But Lord Hadrian jerked his hand back.

  Lucis lodged the toe of his bejeweled velvet shoe under Dalos and flipped the mage over.

  Fear drained from Cassia as bile rose in her throat. Dalos was dead.

  His body was untouched from the waist down. But where his heart had been…it could not be called a wound. Flame had hollowed him from his belly to his mouth and left a chasm of charred flesh and seeping fluid. As if he’d swallowed all the fire he’d conjured.

  Cassia turned away, swallowing hard, and got out of the press of bodies for some air. She could look at Lio for a few more moments.

  But he was no longer in sight. The free lords, dumbfounded, surrounded the empty seats at the table where the Hesperines had stood.

  Li
o was gone.

  “Cassia.”

  She froze at the sound of his voice. Her imagination? Another whisper of magic?

  She felt his hands frame her face. Not his moonlight, his real hands. She could see nothing, but he was there.

  “You never cease to amaze me.” Lio was definitely there. “I thought I wouldn’t get one more taste of you, but then you shed your blood into our spell.”

  She stood still, not daring to move or speak, and shut her eyes. She breathed in his scent, feeling his body inches away from her, his palms on her cheeks, skin to skin. She willed him to feel in the Blood Union how she treasured this moment.

  “Dalos didn’t ward you like he warded the king and the prince,” Lio said. “His spell might or might not have reached your chair.”

  She might have died. There was no way to know.

  “But you’re safe now.” Lio’s soft words reassured her. “Dalos’s own spell rebounded on him. He’ll never threaten you again.”

  She had lived. She had begged for a scrap of rope, and she had received Lio, who had severed the noose and carried her from the gallows.

  No one had saved Cassia in such a long time. Deliverance was the most astonishing feeling. The only thing as good was knowing she had saved him, too.

  Lio’s breath was warm on her mouth. “The heretic and the bastard won.”

  His kiss was so light, so gentle. She would weep later when she remembered it. But not now, not when he was touching her. His hands caressed her, not gentle at all, but ardent.

  Then he let her go.

  She opened her eyes to see a crowd of mortals in the dark Tenebran night lit by smoking torches and the distant, but brighter light of the moons.

  For All of Time

  The moment Lio landed at the Sanctuary, six pairs of hands reached out to steady him.

  “Those were the most frantic moments I’ve endured this century,” Aunt Lyta snapped. “What would we have told your parents if you survived a battle with an Aithourian war mage, only for us to misplace you between one step and another?”

  “You never lag behind when we travel.” Kadi supported Lio’s back with her arm.

  Javed held Lio’s shoulder. “He’s also never used that much power at once before.”

  Let them ask their questions. He would endure any interrogation in exchange for that last stolen moment with Cassia.

  Lio’s elders hovered around him under the shelter of Rota Overlook. The bluff rose dark and sheer over their heads, cutting off the moonlight. But the light within his veins was still cold and forceful and sweet. His ears brought him a chaos of sounds, his nose inundated him with scent. He struggled to regain his self-control.

  The Union invited Lio to share in their relief, to celebrate the realization that they had lived. The giddy power in his blood beckoned him toward euphoria. But his heart was too heavy to answer.

  He had left all his rejoicing behind at Solorum. He felt no triumph. He would call nothing victory that he did not celebrate at Cassia’s side.

  “What a gift the Goddess delivered to us in our hour of need,” Aunt Lyta declared. “I can’t believe one of the mortals got a cut in the scuffle and provided fresh blood for our spell when we needed it most.”

  “The scent was female,” Javed remarked. “There was only one woman in attendance tonight. The blood must have been Lady Cassia’s.”

  Lio’s whole body tensed. It hurt to hear her name.

  “I wonder what the king’s daughter would think if she knew she helped the heretics,” Kadi mused. “She never seemed too happy to be at the Summit with us.”

  “Whatever her own thoughts on the matter,” Uncle Argyros remarked, “it’s a good thing for her neither she nor anyone else knows she aided us, however unwittingly.”

  Basir held Kumeta in the shelter of his arm. “Our success should never have hinged on an accident.”

  She leaned into him for support, or perhaps to support him. “Everything about Dalos and his working was unprecedented. I fail to see how we could not sense an aura as powerful as his and why it suddenly became perceptible to us only an instant before he cast his spell. And the spell itself…”

  Basir tightened his arm around her. “We knew he had stored a great deal of power in the throne and the monument’s own magic would feed his spell, but that second blast of fire was beyond belief. From what reserves could he have drawn that?”

  “I have never felt a single mage layer a spell in that way.” Aunt Lyta’s mouth tightened. “If I hadn’t known Dalos fought alone, I might have imagined ranks of mages behind that wall of fire.”

  “We need to report what we witnessed tonight to our scholars in Orthros,” Kumeta said. “There are strange developments in the Aithourian Circle, and it will only become more dangerous for us not to understand them.”

  The Goddess did deliver gifts in the hour of need, sometimes through the words of another. What Basir and Kumeta said reminded Lio that Dalos was no longer a threat. They had not failed to counter the Aithourian’s spell. They would take some of his arcane secrets home to strengthen their people, while the infamous mage’s mission to Tenebra had ended with his life. The embassy had averted war.

  For tonight. Just as Lio had said to Cassia, war would yet come. And what then?

  They would all go back to Orthros, borne on the Gift. Before the night was through, Lio would be at home in the beloved halls of House Komnena. But not safe. None of them were truly safe anymore.

  Although he had helped spare them tonight, he could not truly protect his people. That was beyond his power. All he could do was fight for them.

  That was more than he could do for Cassia. She would fight alone.

  All he could do for her was be a steward of her secrets. Her grief. Her memories. Their memories together…Goddess. That was one thing no one could ever take from him. Her blood ran in his body and pumped through his heart. He would carry her inside him for all of time.

  Goddess, I don’t want to think about all of time.

  That great expanse ahead of him seemed vast and dark. Eternity no longer felt like the safe darkness he had known, but a strange void with no beacons in the sky.

  The Truth

  The king took the course of action he always did, when matters spiraled out of hand. He tightened his fist.

  He barked one order after another from the dais. Messengers set off in all directions. Retainers carried Dalos’s body and the unconscious apprentice away toward the Sun Temple. Caelum’s bodyguards escorted the prince back to the palace. Everyone else obeyed Lucis’s command to remain under the pavilion, except those who strayed to its edge to vomit. It was not just the heralds who spilled their dinners, but hardened soldiers as well. Even Tenebra’s fighting men seldom witnessed mutilation of the magical kind.

  Cassia stood where she was and waited to see what the king’s first move against her would be.

  The problem with an iron fist, she observed, was that it could not hold words. By their very nature, words slipped through even the strongest grasp.

  The words traveled in furious murmurs and stifled exclamations.

  War mage. War mage. War mage.

  “…bastard was a war mage from Cordium…”

  “…so keen to smite the heretics he cared nothing for our lives!”

  “Nay, he must have sensed the monsters brewing some spell. What else would prompt such an attack?”

  “What prompts the foxhound to hunt fox?”

  Cassia listened and watched. The king was watching as well. But everyone’s lips kept moving.

  “…Namenti betrayed us…or were they betrayed?”

  At last came the hushed whisper she had awaited. She could not pinpoint who spoke the words, only that they first took to the air here on the edge of the pavilion, farthest from the throne.

  “Did the king know?”

  Did the king know? Did the king know?

  Quelling looks grounded the whisper. But it fluttered inside Cassia’s thoughts
still, and she knew it would in others’ as well.

  A fist could hold no one’s thoughts.

  Could Lio still feel their Union? Wherever he was in this moment, could he feel through their pain what she felt now? Together they had not just won the battle. They had begun a war.

  Hers to fight alone, now.

  One of the king’s guards appeared before Cassia. A footfall behind her told her another soldier stood at her back.

  She turned a serene expression on each one in turn, her hand resting on Knight’s head. Her hound stood at attention and angled his body so he could watch both threats.

  Whatever came, they were ready.

  “Lady Cassia,” the guard before her said, “we will escort you to your chambers.”

  With her chin high, her back straight, she sailed out of the pavilion. The guards hastened to fall into step with her.

  Her remote little rooms were waiting for her, and within them, Perita. “My lady!” She left off pacing before the fire and raced to Cassia’s side to fuss with her tousled hair, muddy hem and everything in between. She spared one scowl for the two guards who posted themselves inside the door. “Leave me to my work. You’ve got no orders to keep watch over my lady’s bath.”

  One of them gave a snort, but they removed themselves to stand guard outside the door instead.

  Perita shut it firmly behind them, then guided Cassia to the fireside and pulled off the rumpled gown. “Oh, my lady. All afternoon, the king’s messengers demanding if you’d returned, and me putting them off…”

  “Thank you, Perita. You are a wonder.”

  Perita fixed her gaze on the chair she was pulling up for Cassia. “Thank you, my lady.”

  “I’m sorry you had to suffer their harassment.”

  “That was hardly the worst of it, for when we saw—” Perita’s voice trembled. “What was it, my lady? Like the Sun Temple fires laid siege to the pavilion. I didn’t know if you—” She broke off.