LIO KNEW HE HAD passed the final test. He had proved himself trustworthy.
If he had not, Cassia would never make a confession that cost her this much. In the face of suffering
so powerful, there was no such thing as controlling the Blood Union. Her nausea rose in his own
belly, and her panic heated and chilled his skin by turns. Every muscle in his body strained with hers
against the urge to flee or strike out blindly against any target at hand.
Her own words made her sick with horror. This went beyond their Oath of openness. But she had
spoken, and even now she stood just out of reach, trying to go on. Lio listened to her take a breath to
speak, then to the silence in which her words would not come. Still, she gasped another breath for a
new attempt.
From the first night she had approached him, she had said things to him she told no one else. With
him, she broke the silence that was often all that stood between her and her own mortality. Perhaps he
was finally about to understand why.
He must not push her. He tried instead to encourage her, to offer her a path into what she was trying
so desperately to say. “You have met a Hesperine before?”
It worked. Her breath hitched, her voice came out ragged, but she spoke. “Three of them. A flock
of swans come to carry away the slain.”
“Goddess bless. Cassia. I am so sorry.” Lio struggled to respect the distance between them and not
go to her side. “Now I understand. When you talk of the Mercy, you are speaking of someone you
lost.”
She cast a quick glance over her shoulder, not quite meeting his eyes. “Not a remarkable story, of
course. Humans died, your folk came to clean up my folk’s mess.” She shrugged, once more trying to
wield the sharp edge of indifference. But she barely had hold of her weapon, and she brandished it in
shaking hands.
Lio took just one step closer. She tensed, but did not move away from him. So he dared try to
comfort her. “My people have eternal memories. We never forget the fallen. I don’t know what
happened, but I can say with certainty that the Hesperines who were there still remember the face and
name of each person to whom they gave the Mercy.”
Her hands rested at her sides, but they curled into fists in the folds of her skirt. He smelled salty
moisture in the air.
She was crying.
Knight appeared at the edge of the clearing and strode to her side. Lio had never seen the hound
disobey a stay order. But now Cassia’s beast pressed himself against her skirts, nudging her fist until
she uncurled it and buried her fingers in his fur.
Watching Cassia’s shoulders quiver, Lio had never felt so frustrated and powerless. He prayed she
would understand his words for what they were. Not a demand to know more of her secret pain, but
an offer of sympathy. “Would you tell me your loved one’s name, so that I may remember as well?”
He listened to her soft, quick breaths. Not sobs to anyone’s ears but his. “It is still a mystery to me,
your concern for the dead. The ones beyond your reach. But I learned long ago you are their kindest
keepers.”
“To honor them is a sacred trust.”
“Nothing is sacred here.” Her heart thundered as she confessed her private heresy to him. “For that
reason, I am glad your people persuaded me to leave her in their hands. Much better that she be borne
away in a Hesperine’s arms than subjected to the mockery of a funeral rite in that pile of stone my
father calls a temple. The only god who dwells there is his own ambition.”
“You’re speaking of your sister.”
“Solia. My kind, gentle sister, who belonged on the throne. She was the answer to all our prayers.
The light that awaited at the end of the king’s cruelty. I was living evidence of his betrayal of her
mother, and yet Solia cared for me as if I were her own child. She never laid others’ transgressions at
my door. I loved her.”
Everything in Lio demanded that he reach out and offer Cassia the solace of touch. It was the right
thing to do, to give her a simple, physical assurance that another shared her pain. He could not. The
bounds of his role as a diplomat, the standards of modesty her people imposed on her, and Cassia’s
own pride stood in his way. In all his struggle to understand human strictures, he had never hated them
as he did in this moment.
As always, all Lio was permitted to offer Cassia were words. He gave her the best ones he had,
speaking them in Vulgus, so they would mean something to her. “I carry your grief in my veins.”
She swiveled to face him. The tears quivering in her eyes made those windows on her soul seem
enormous. “The Hesperines I met that night said those very words to me.”
“Those are our sacred ritual words, an invocation of empathy.” Indeed, words were the best gift he
had to offer. Not just his words, but the opportunity for her to speak her own. “Would you like to tell
me about her?”
“You know our history.”
He knew the date in the scrolls. But now he understood it. “The day after tomorrow is the
anniversary of the Siege of Sovereigns. It will mark fourteen years since Solia fell at the hands of free
lords who rebelled against royal authority. The king gave in to every ransom demand, but the traitors
were not satisfied. In their lust for power, they resolved to remove Lucis from the throne and destroy
his line, beginning with their captive, the seventeen-year-old princess. The king avenged her and
brought her remains back to Solorum...but they were damaged, and her body was kept covered during
the funerary rites in the Sun Temple. So says history. Would you like to tell me the truth, Cassia?”
The Blood Moon’s light glinted in the fullness of her gaze. “Yes.”
What would the night of the siege look like, feel like, taste like if Lio could use his thelemancy to
relive the memory with her and truly share in her past? He could not know. He could only experience
the flashes her mind and heart cast into the Blood Union. He must rely on her words to understand
what she had endured.
Cassia began to walk. This seemed her only concession to how desperately she wished to run
away from the past into which she was about to lead Lio. He stayed by her side and prowled with her
around the boundaries of her cage.
Once the trees were thick around them, she began. “In those days, Solia was the king’s only
legitimate child, his rightful heir. For that reason, he needed her. I thought she was the only person in
the world who was safe from him.”