“I’ll visit again soon,” Cassandra said, rising from her chair.
“You are most welcome at any time, my dear.” Borea led her to the door.
As Cassandra turned to leave, the abbess grasped her hand. “Do not lose faith,” Borea whispered. “Sparks of rebellion can catch fire, even in the darkest hour.”
Cassandra desperately wanted to be the one to light the match.
CHAPTERFOUR
As it was, so shall it be.”
A rasping whisper uttered from dry, cracking lips.
Two wrinkled hands draping a glittering diamond necklace around a liver-spotted neck.
Dry leaves drifting along a pale stone avenue.
Nemosyna’s ghostly marble visage twisting, eyes narrowed, lips moving. Uncanny. Terrifying.
“So shall it BE!”
Cassandra ripped the glowing, golden vial from her wrist and replaced the cork. She settled the stoppered memory onto a low table, then flopped back against the plush, charcoal sofa in Tristan’s living room.
One-hundred and twenty-seven.
That’s how many times she’d watched Cora’s scrambled memory.
And despite the confidence she’d displayed before the Emperor and the Vicereine, she was no closer to interpreting it. Especially not with her mind running an endless loop of all the potential terrible outcomes of the Emperor’s new decree. He’d barely been in the colonies for a day and had already wreaked havoc.
She tried to focus on the scenes she’d just witnessed. The pale stone avenue seemed to signify an actual location, though it could be any number of towns or villages within the colonies.
For a split second, when Tristan had first viewed the memory last week, Cassandra swore recognition flared across his handsome features before becoming uncertainty. Another memory long forgotten, he’d confessed. This one pulled by time, not Letha. He’d told her to stop worrying, to stop watching the memory and await the Artisan’s interpretation.
But Cassandra had never been comfortable just sitting around and doingnothing.
She padded to the bay window and peered down the sloping, moonlit lawn.
Still no sign of Tristan.
Though smaller than she’d expected—especially considering his newly revealed heritage—Tristan’s bungalow was comfortably outfitted with the same magical energy and appliances that graced all Fae-owned dwellings within the colonies. And it was decorated with crumbs of his existence: a crumpled knit blanket on the couch; an abandoned coffee cup filled with a ladder of stains; an open cookbook folded over the arm of an over-stuffed chair.
During this first week of their experimental domesticity, Cassandra had been delighted to discover that Tristan devoured cookbooks in the same manner as others did fiction. He chuckled at some parts, raised his eyebrows at others, occasionally—and adorably—gasped at a plot twist. Cassandra, with her utter lack of cooking skills, couldn’t imagine what a culinary plot twist might be—the use of a lime instead of a lemon, perhaps?
She ambled over to the chair and picked up the book, running her fingers along the oil stains and crusty bits dotting the well-worn pages.
The only room in the house that didn’t bear the evidence of Tristan’s casual approach towards tidiness was his state-of-the-art kitchen: a stainless-steel and marble shrine that gleamed despite the frequency of its use.
Abandoning her futile vigil, she stalked up the stairs to her room to get ready for bed and change out of her muslin dress. She cringed that she’d worn such plain attire in front of the Imperial leader of Ethyrios—considered burning the dang garment. Instead, she flung it into her closet and pulled out her nightshirt.
Well, Tristan’s shirt.
He’d let her borrow it since she didn’t own any pajamas other than that slinky white nightgown. And she certainly wasn’t about to parade around inthatin front of him.
Not anymore, anyway.
Even if that wicked thing within her, the wanton beast she’d finally wrangled under control, prodded her to do just that.
“He’s the Emperor’s brother, you idiot,” she mumbled, slipping into the loose cotton shirt that fell to her knees and wafted enticing traces of Tristan’s spicy, oaky scent. “Why would he ever choose to be with a penniless, homeless mortal?”
