Page 163 of Blood Feast

“Yes. This is where we carried you out during the battle.” Lio took her hand. “Are you sure you can bear to enter this place again?”

She wasn’t afraid, she realized. Far from it. She had to go through that door. She wanted to stand victorious in this place where Kallikrates had once violated her magic.

“I need to do this.” She levitated over the debris and set foot in Castra Paradum again.

Knight whined, but followed her, the others close behind. Before she walked further inside, Mak put a hand on her arm. “Let me check for traps.”

She glanced at the bow he held. “Where did that come from?”

“The Mage King’s armory.” He nocked three bloodied arrows and shot the volley into the ground ahead of them. “All clear.”

They levitated over the bare ground, Mak checking for traps along the way. Cassia kept Knight heeled, fearing he would go ahead of her and into danger, but her poor hound showed no sign of wanting to leave her side.

She led them through the inner walls overgrown with thorn vines. Her thorns. Those were alive, sprouted from her need the night she and Lio had fought Miranda here.

They passed through the dead apple orchard, through Cassia’s youthful memories of Miranda when they had been friends, past the ghosts of her Gifting visions. At the edge of the garden, she paused, looking across to the doorway of Agata’s empty kitchen. The cook had looked after her and Miranda like a mother.

Cassia believed Miranda regretted causing Agata’s death. It was sickening that she had reanimated their friend as a bloodless, but perhaps preserving her in undeath had been Miranda’s twisted way of trying to atone.

Lio put his arm around her. “I’m so sorry about Agata.”

Cassia leaned into him. A gentle, aching magic emanated from the kitchen like a lament. She recognized royal Hesperine magic, the cool and powerful traces of Rudhira’s power. Sheknew he was always compassionate when sending the undead to their final rest.

“He freed her here,” Cassia murmured.

“Yes,” Lio said.

Cassia drew a shaky breath. “I hope she is happy in Mother Kyria’s embrace.”

“Which way should we go next?” Lyros asked gently.

Cassia pointed to the other side of the garden. What had once been the window of her sickroom was now a gaping hole where vines had destroyed the wall to free her and Lio. “That’s where we last saw Miranda.”

She set out across the garden. When she reached the patch where her pea plants had once grown, the feathery touch of the letting site became a tangled grip.

She gasped, going down on her knees. She heard Mak and Lyros’s voices, felt Lio’s alarm in her heart. Knight was baying like a wild thing. But all her senses roared with the power pouring up out of the ground, here where she had channeled Lustra magic for the first time.

The letting site was crying for her. It was a force of nature, without morals or emotion. But she had a heart, and the letting site’s pull dragged a chaos of emotions out of her. Grief and anger and joy and recognition.

All of that flowed down her arm, and she plunged her dagger into the ground, returning her first focus to the soil that had forged it.

It didn’t tap the letting site. It tapped her. The channel that always ran through her from the Lustra now reversed, the world spinning the other way on its axis. Magic poured out of her and back into the letting site.

She knelt there, caught in the force of it, as if her heart had burst open to feed the land. She saw blood running down theinside of her arms, watering the soil. She wept, not with pain. She had never felt more powerful.

She was healing the letting site.

Cassia. We have to go!

At Lio’s warning in her mind, she looked up from the ground. And met a familiar gray gaze.

Rudhira’s mouth moved, but she couldn’t hear him over the howl of her own magic. He held out his hands, as if trying to approach a wild creature.

The Blood-Red Prince had found them.

RITUAL GROUND

Lio’s protective instincts roared,and he stepped in front of Cassia. For once, he didn’t understand what she was doing with her magic. He only knew he would defend his Grace until her casting was complete. Even against someone they loved.

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