Page 240 of Blood Feast

Lio could still taste those words on his tongue. The command that had ruled his Grace’s mortal life. His belly heaved, and he emptied it, as if he could purge the Collector’s evil from his mind.

“And you think you have the stomach to challenge me,” Kallikrates mused.

Lio wiped his mouth and dragged himself to his feet to face the Collector. They were in the main hall of Paradum. At the head of the chamber, in Miranda’s father’s chair, sat Kallikrates.

Or at least a manifestation of him that he wanted Lio to see. He wore the black robe and pendant of the undertaker. Confident, elegant, he lounged there with his hooded face lost in shadow.

Miranda lay at his feet, insensate and bleeding. She had given him her love, her loyalty, her very Will. And this was all she was to him. Not a person. Merely another tool to be used until it broke.

Lio tested the fabric of the room. This was Kallikrates’ final foothold in her mind, but he held on here with an iron grasp. Lio would not be able to free her without a fight.

He would have to fight even harder to free himself.

“You are too deep in the game now, Deukalion. You will never be free.” Kallikrates stroked the crow that was eating out of his hand.

The bird had no heartbeat. Miranda’s familiar? Or something more? Lio had seen it flying free in the ripe orchard. Coming to life in her hands when she had discovered her power.

He looked down at the dagger in his hand. If this was Miranda’s chain, could the bird be her Will?

“Be careful,” the Collector said. “You will hurt yourself on that blade.”

“Your taunts no longer frighten me. You cannot make me doubt myself. You have suffered nothing but losses tonight, and I am not finished.”

“I have known many like you who were consumed by the craving for knowledge. Few can look into the sun without burning their eyes. We all know how weak Hesperines are to the sun.”

“Enough riddles. There is no genius in your plots. You have shaped and destroyed so many lives, and for what? Revenge. You are no better than any other petty man ruled by his rage.”

Kallikrates chuckled. “You should know better. I will indulge in some revenge, yes, but that is not enough to satisfy me. I want the same thing you do. The power of the Silvicultrix.”

Lio stalked forward. “You want her power for yourself. I want it for her.”

“I would have made her more powerful than you ever can. Miranda has such sincere faith in my game. She is a knight who imagines herself a queen. But Cassia…I would have built her a throne. She believed in nothing. A superbly selfish being. Shewould have become my perfect, ruthless diamond if you had not ruined her with your weak-minded Hesperine principles.”

“Those principles gave her the Will to refuse you. Ask yourself whose mind is weak.”

“There is one pair in all of history I hate more than Lucian and Ebah. You and Cassia have that distinction.”

“Lucian and Ebah were the complication in the previous round of the game, weren’t they? They stood against you during the Last War, when you destroyed civilization to begin another cycle of suffering for the shadowlands.”

Kallikrates laughed softly. “How innocent you are, to think the Last War was the destruction of civilization.”

He kept using words as weapons to make Lio feel small. But Lio had now glimpsed one of Kallikrates’s own memories, and that was the key for drawing the truth out of his lies.

Lio fortified his mental defenses and did the very thing he had been so angry at Cassia for doing. He kept Kallikrates talking. “How can this be? We’re living in the same round as the last epoch?”

Kallikrates fed the crow another bit of apple. “At the true end of a round, we only preserve sufficient survivors to repopulate the board. We burn their scrolls and destroy all evidence of what they built. We take away their memories of their own families and the names of their gods.”

“That was what you tried to do during the Last War,” Lio realized, “but you failed. It was supposed to be the end, but the shadowlands survived. Lucian and Ebah helped save them.”

“There is no saving the shadowlands. They belong to us, and so too will the Empire one day.”

Lio took another step forward, going closer and closer to the shadow itself. “Ebah preserved her power in that barrow, where it will survive for future generations. You can’t end this round unless you get inside to destroy the evidence.”

“One more brittle door. Then the legacy of Cassia’s ancestors will survive only in my mind. With that power, I will win the next round, too. This is already set in motion, and by the time you understand my strategy, there will be nowhere left on the board for you to move.”

Lio laughed at Kallikrates. “This is why you hate us so much. Cassia’s legacy will survive as long as she does, and I have made her immortal.”

“Hesperines die a little more slowly than humans, but you still die.”

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