Page 12 of The Sundered Realms

Liris snapped her fingers at his eyes, sending him stumbling back off balance. As the guard from the cart stepped toward her, Liris turned and swiped her leg behind the ankle of the guard’s foot still on the ground, sending her toppling over.

Liris rolled away toward the door, used the momentum of sliding on the stone to bring her faster to her feet—

The door banged open, and Liris barely managed to change direction in time to keep from getting smacked in the face with it.

That was enough. The guards behind her were back on their feet, boxing her in from behind, and guards from outside blocked the doorway.

Bile rose in her throat. That quickly, it was all over for her again. Just one miscalculation.

“Enough,” Lord Vhannor said coldly, and Liris shivered.

Then she squared her shoulders and turned.

As long as she was alive, she could fight.

“Liris, let’s try this again.” Lord Vhannor strode toward her implacably, brandishing a piece of paper. “Right now I don’t care who you are, where you’re from, or why you’re here. All I care about is whether you can read this.”

He shoved the page in her face, and Liris blinked.

She kept her face blank, fully prepared to pretend regrettable ignorance, but she studied it nevertheless.

On the sheet was a diagram of layers of circles. Inside there were mathematical equations winding in an odd path she couldn’t quite place, similar to the command form of Thyrasel. Then there was a layer of archaic musical notation for the Sotruthian drum dance, punctuated with—

Her head tilted as she frowned at it.

“You can read it,“ Lord Vhannor breathed.

And not in the tone of someone who’d found the quarry he was hunting.

Like someone who’d found water in a desert just in time.

She had another decision to make, and fast.

She’d just learned that the risk she’d taken with Tenoti had landed her in deep shit.

On the other hand, if she didn’t take another risk, she could admit that Future Liris wasn’t going to have any options.

And void it, she did not have a good feeling about this diagram, and if it was Thyrasel, this soon after she’d left her notes with a demon servant, in a realm connected to Serenthuar by an unknown Gate—

“It’s nonsense,” Liris murmured, her head tilting further as she followed the scattered Thyrasel letters. “That doesn’t make any—“ She took a breath; looked up at his intent lavender eyes. “Do you have paper and ink?”

His reflexes were even faster than Jadrhun’s.

And the thing that Lord Vhannor of Embhullor, home of the most elite spellcasting university in the Sundered Realms, needed her to read was a spell.

Liris accepted the paper and pen and right there, surrounded by guards, began running calculations, clearing out the mathematical clutter.

“I’ve already isolated the symbols of the written language,” Lord Vhannor told her briskly.

“You can’t have put them in grammatical order. I think the equations are directions—“

“Yes, that part too. Look at this.”

This time Liris followed him to the desk.

The papers were all scratchwork laying out the pattern and content of the spell in Traditional Enchor characters, separated into sections.

Liris met Lord Vhannor’s gaze and held it.

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