Page 206 of Blood Feast

“Yes…” She sighed the word in two voices, her own and the Collector’s.

Miranda didn’t need saving from Skleros. Cassia had to save the Black Roses from her.

Cassia twined her rose vines up her arms, letting their thorns draw her blood. As her libation permeated the letting site, she flowed into the temple’s spells, and them into her. Everlasting embers tasted hot and bright in her mouth, and her blood ranthrough the earth with water. She opened herself, a conduit for life and fire.

One current of magic surged through her body and out of her dagger, shattering the floor with a forest of black roses. But two more currents of the spell ran wild like a flood seeking a riverbed. There was nowhere inside her for them to go.

The unbound magic flowed into the only path there was: the spell patterns of the temple itself. The ground shook, and with a rumble, the walls began to fall.

She raced along the tearing threads of Ebah and Lucian’s spells. Beyond the temple and across the miles of their kingdom. To the ruin of a lighthouse. To the center of a broken circle of stones. Round and round a burning tower.

At last, Cassia saw it. The pattern the Black Roses had been seeking in every ruin.

Six monuments. And at their center, three doors.

Nine nodes in all. But a Silvictultrix with only one power.

As the ancient magic in the temple unraveled, Cassia watched the second door open to reveal the third and final portal.

THREE TIMES THREE

Pain pressed into Cassia’swrist. Her eyes focused on her physical surroundings again. A petite boot ground her arm against the floor.

Miranda stood over her. The pendant dangling from her gore-stained hand at the end of Cassia’s torn ambassador cords.

The flame ward was gone, but Cassia was trapped in the rending web of the temple’s magic. Spells tore her in every direction. She couldn’t fight back, even as Miranda knelt and pried open her hand.

She lay helpless as Miranda tore her dagger from her grasp. Rosethorn. Her first and last focus. Stolen, just like her magic, while she lay helpless to stop it.

Mak and Lyros’s shouts echoed. Miranda strode away from her through a haze of fire. Toward Lio. His fangs were out, his face twisted with fury. He slammed the end of Final Word against the flame ward that bound him.

The ring of fire shrank, coiling tighter around him. Miranda stalked closer. There was nowhere for him to run.

Agony drilled into Cassia’s mind again, and she knew her Grace’s pain was greater. He collapsed, his head snapping back, the tendons in his neck straining as he writhed on the ground.

She screamed with rage, even as she tried to whisper comfort in his tortured mind.Lio, I’m here. I’ll make it stop. I won’t let her do this to you.

The look of suffering on his face would haunt her day terrors. He gripped his head, fisting his hand in his hair. He held on to her braid as a groan escaped his gritted teeth.

Miranda pulled back Rosethorn and took aim at Lio’s heart.

“No!” Mak yelled over the boom of another wall breaking.

Some force inside Cassia pulled her free of the crumbling temple’s spells. Natural laws bent to her Will, and the world parted for her. She stepped to her Grace.

Cassia threw her body over Lio’s and hurled black roses between them and the oncoming dagger. Rosethorn stabbed into her vines. She felt that wound all the way to the depths of the letting site.

The roses shot toward Miranda’s throat, and she leapt backward. A rafter crashed to the floor behind her, halting her retreat. Her gaze darted from the roses to the collapsing roof.

She was cornered, and yet she smiled with certainty. “You may have spared him for one more night, but he’ll never see eternity. He’s my kill.”

A traversal spell snapped in the hot, wavering air. She was gone.

The flame wards collapsed, only to leave them surrounded by magefire. The temple was destroying itself.

Lyros struggled toward her through the smoke. “Move!”

She followed his gaze upward. The roof above her and Lio caved in. Stones and burning timbers hurtling down toward them.

---