Kingsbane

by Claire Legrand

  The Archon, beside her, eyes still closed, robes a sea of white around him, murmured, “Is there something wrong, Lady Rielle?”

  “No, nothing,” she replied. “I apologize for the disruption.”

  Corien’s laughter haunted her prayers like shadows.

  • • •

  The next evening, the Archon walked with her, arm in arm, through the softly lit courtyards surrounding the Holdfast, lush with greenery and the dim glow of whistblooms.

  She, Audric, and Ludivine had told him, of course, everything that had transpired in the Sunderlands, but that was too sensitive a topic to speak of in the public gardens. So they discussed nothing of consequence, meandering toward the temple at a pace that made Rielle want to scream.

  In the plain, earthen rooms of the Holdfast, surrounded by barefoot worshippers with their toes in the dirt, she prayed, a secret black hope in her heart.

  Corien answered with a wordless vision: A wintry landscape, sharp with mountains so monstrously tall that Rielle knew it could be nowhere in Celdaria. Herself, climbing a snowy passage toward a dark mountaintop château, barefoot and freezing, her toes black with frostbite.

  Horrified, she tried to shake loose the vision, but it would not release her.

  Here, Corien whispered. Here, Rielle.

  Tears in her eyes, she searched through the whirling snow and found him in a soft green clearing, sitting by a fire. She cried out, stumbling toward him. He opened his arms to her and wrapped her in the fur lining of his cloak.

  She pressed her face against his chest. His lips touched her hair. In his arms, she bloomed, warming. The pain in her toes faded, and so did her fear.

  Where are you? she asked, afraid to know the answer.

  Come find me, he replied, and then he was gone, along with the fire and the foreign winter.

  Rielle knelt in the dirt, her breath coming high and fast, a sheen of sweat coating her skin.

  The Archon regarded her with one raised eyebrow. “In all my years, Lady Rielle, I have never seen someone pray quite so violently.”

  She smiled at him, her jaw aching with tension. “Such is the strength of my devotion, Your Holiness.”

  • • •

  Corien did not speak to Rielle the third night, in the Firmament, nor on the fourth night, in the House of Light.

  Each moment of silence sent her tired thoughts spiraling. What were his intentions? Where was he hiding? He was playing a game with her. He had a plan, and she could not see it.

  In the House of Light—Audric’s temple, the temple of sunspinners and the Lightbringer, the temple of the Sun Queen—Rielle knelt on a gold-fringed cushion before a marble statue of Saint Katell and bore down on her prayers with a vengeance.

  Corien wouldn’t speak to her? He would tease her with horrifying visions, with the tender touch of his voice, and then abandon her? Fine. She would pray, then. She would pray as no one had prayed before.

  Except that praying had never come naturally to her. It required a quieting of the mind she found tedious and nearly impossible. Over the years she had forced herself to learn—at first out of fear of her father, then out of love for Tal, and then, at last, because she had to begrudgingly admit that praying did help focus her mind. Praying kept her power docile, her mind smooth as a river stone.

  Her mind was anything but smooth that night. Corien had dropped an anchor into her, hooked himself to her thoughts, and the ripples of that grew, and grew, until her prayers roared and wailed.

  Later, feeling wild, Rielle went to Audric. She led him upstairs, to the fourth floor, where a small sitting room overlooked the northern ballroom. She whispered her desires to him, elated when he gently pressed her back against the velvet curtains. She kissed him until her lips were sore. She tugged at his trousers.

  “Someone will hear, my love,” he murmured, his kisses trailing down her neck.

  She threaded her fingers through his curls, held him to her. If he didn’t hurry, she would fly apart. “Let them hear,” she gasped, and hoped Corien could hear most clearly of all. “Let them all hear how I love you.”

  • • •

  The next evening—sore, delirious with exhaustion, smiling to herself in a way that was not entirely appropriate for a temple—Rielle allowed the Archon to help her into the warm water of the Baths, and together, they prayed to Saint Nerida.

  Overhead, worshippers walked the three open mezzanines of the Baths, the slender stone columns lined with heavy sprays of purple blossoms. Fountains spilled softly into the praying pools; the quiet trill of birdsong floated down from the rafters.

  Rielle was comforted, her mind quieter than it had been in days.

  O seas and rivers! she prayed, drawing her hands through the smooth water. O rain and snow! Quench us our thirst, cleanse us our evil. Grow us the fruit of our fields. Drown us the cries of our enemies!

  She had barely finished reciting the words when Corien arrived.

  His words snapped like tinder. How are you feeling today, my dear? Tired? Aching?

  Rielle opened her eyes. Night had fallen. The temple was empty. Snow fell through the open ceiling, quiet and even, dusting the surface of the water.

  She shivered. Her thin prayer robes clung to her, crusted with ice.

  “Are you going to talk to me, truly?” she called out. “Or just play games and send me nightmares?”

  Behind her, a soft splash. She turned to see Corien approaching her through the water, in a dark robe of his own.

  “This is no game to me,” he said, his voice low and thin. He reached her more quickly than he should have been able to. Her head spun, and her foot caught on a slab of ice. She stumbled; he caught her wrist, held her against him.

  “Release me at once,” she commanded.

  He obeyed, his breath puffing in the frigid air. He bowed. “Forgive me. Sun Queen.”

  Suddenly she found herself blinking back tears. “I don’t understand you. You’re frightening me, and I hate you.”

  “You don’t,” he said at once. “Though you wish that you did.”

  “Why are you tormenting me? Because I burned you that day?”

  He laughed. “You could burn me a thousand times, and I would still want you for my own.”

  She shivered from the cold, from the frightening beauty of his voice. “Why do you want me? Because I can tear down the Gate for you? Because you can use my power to destroy my race?”

  Corien reached for her face, then paused. “May I touch you, Rielle?”

  She let out an impatient cry and captured his face in her hands. “There. I’ve touched you myself. Now, answer me!”

  His pale gaze seemed suddenly tired to her eyes, and ancient. He turned into her touch, pressed a kiss to her palm.

  “Come find me, darling child,” he whispered against her wrist, “and I’ll tell you everything you wish to know, and more.”

  Then he was gone. The water was warm again, the evening light a cheerful violet, the temple halls humming with prayers.

  “My lady,” said a nearby worshipper, wide-eyed, “are you all right? You’re crying.”

  “Sometimes my power moves me to tears,” Rielle replied, her voice thick, her hands trembling under the water. “For it is a gift from God, from the empirium, and it brings me indescribable joy.”

  • • •

  Her feet carried her automatically to Audric’s room that night, but when she found him, she could not bear to wake him.

  He slept peacefully, sprawled across the bed, his face soft and his curls in disarray. A book lay open on his stomach—The Great and Terrible Legacy of Our Blessed Saints. Three others sat on the bedside table. Papers and pens, small scraps of paper marking pages of import. He had been reading for her, taking notes for her.

  She went to him, eyes burning, throat aching, and kissed his brow
. He stirred softly, but slept on.

  She fled, her body taut and aching. She wished she did not love him so completely. If she didn’t, she would not have hesitated to wake him.

  • • •

  Instead she went to Ludivine, telling her baffled guards to wait outside. They had grown used to her nighttime wanderings, had become marvelously discreet, but she knew her mood was frantic, crazed. Evyline must have sensed it.

  “My lady,” she began quietly as Rielle knocked on Ludivine’s door. “If there’s something I can do to help you, please let me know of it.”

  Lu, I’m coming in.

  “Please, not now, dear Evyline,” Rielle said tightly and then hurried inside.

  Ludivine was sitting up in bed, her hair a golden cloud that fell to her waist. Her nightgown’s loose sleeves exposed the terrible blue map of her blightblade scar—blue, and growing. Slow but inexorable, it reached for her neck, climbed down the bend of her side.

  “What’s wrong?” She started to rise, her worry buffeting Rielle’s mind like ocean waves.

  “Stay there,” Rielle snapped. “Please. And don’t you know? Haven’t you looked?”

  “I’ve been granting you space during your evening prayers, as you requested.”

  “He keeps talking to me,” Rielle said, pacing. “He’s trying to tell me something, I can feel it, but I don’t know what it is. He kissed my hand tonight, and I wanted him to kiss me more than that. He’s been visiting me during my prayers. Maybe he knows you’re leaving me alone during that time. Maybe he doesn’t like that I pray and wants to distract me.”

  She stopped, fists clenching and unclenching. “I went to Audric, but he was asleep. I couldn’t bring myself to wake him. What would I tell him? That Corien was touching me? That my body is afire for him? ‘Make love to me, Audric, and try not to think about the fact that the hand touching you bears the stamp of Corien’s mouth.’”

  Ludivine said softly, “Rielle, please come here. You’re shaking.”

  Rielle obeyed at once. She crawled onto Ludivine’s bed and then onto her lap, her vision a frantic field of tears. She cupped Ludivine’s face in her hands, drinking in the sight of her grave, pale face.

  “When I was younger, I loved you for a time,” she whispered, her thumbs stroking Ludivine’s cheeks. “I loved you as more than a friend, more than a sister. The feeling came and went, as these things do, I suppose. And when it came, I thought of you often. I still think of you, sometimes.” She leaned against Ludivine, dragged her hands down her body. “Please, Lu, I feel like I’m going mad. My head is spinning. I can hardly breathe.”

  “Rielle, listen to me,” Ludivine said, her compassion blossoming gently in Rielle’s mind.

  But Rielle didn’t want to listen. She wanted someone to drive this wildness out of her; she wanted to erase Corien’s touch from her skin. She slammed the feeling of her own desperation back at Ludivine, uncaring and grasping, and then bent low to kiss her.

  For a moment, Ludivine allowed it. Her body softened, melting into the frantic hook of Rielle’s arms. Through the feeling of Ludivine’s worry came a soft pulse of curiosity, of delight.

  Then, just as quickly, she pulled away, her cheeks flushed. “Rielle, listen to me.”

  Rielle let out a sharp sob, reaching for her. “Please, don’t stop. I’ll go mad if you do.”

  “Rielle.” Ludivine’s voice was stern. She caught Rielle’s wrists and held them to her heart. “I love you, my darling, but this will not help you. It might, for a time, and then you would feel just as frightened, just as frayed. And,” she added gently, “you would have to tell Audric, and that conversation would be uncomfortable, I think.”

  “Audric wouldn’t mind,” Rielle argued. “In fact, he and I have spoken of asking you—”

  “I know,” Ludivine said with a small smile. “And we can discuss that, all of us, and it would delight me to love you both in that way. But this is not the moment for that, and you know it.”

  For a moment, Rielle remained perched stubbornly in Ludivine’s lap. Then exhaustion came for her. She moved away, hugging one of the pillows to her chest, and turned her back on Ludivine. Curled into a tight, tense bow, Ludivine’s fingers gently unwinding the knots in her hair, Rielle glared at the fire across the room until, at last, her body began to relax.

  “I think,” she mumbled, as sleep crept closer, “that we should begin in Kirvaya. We’ll retrieve Marzana’s casting.”

  “Oh?” Ludivine said, still stroking Rielle’s hair. “Why Kirvaya first?”

  Too tired for words, Rielle pushed images of Corien’s recent visions toward Ludivine’s mind—the high, foreign mountains. The snowy passage, the ice crusting the water of the Baths. The warm clearing, green and impossible in the heart of a blizzard, like the very same clearing in which, long ago, Saint Marzana had found her godsbeast—a great bird with feathers as brilliant as fire.

  17

  Eliana

  “My darling Nerida, it has been far too long since I have seen your face. Please, come to Astavar before the moon turns. I have a gift for you, and if you like it well enough, perhaps it will convince you to stay forever at my side. My nightmares of the Deep continue. Only when I’m with you do they spare me. Savrasara, Nerida. Come home to me.”

  —A letter from Saint Tameryn the Cunning to Saint Nerida the Radiant, archived in the First Great Library of Quelbani

  Eliana burst up through the water in Tameryn’s cavern. Her lungs were on fire, but that was nothing compared to the heat of her palms.

  She swam and crawled for shore, coughing, and collapsed onto the flat expanse of black pebbles. Her heart pounded between her shaking fingers.

  Harkan tried to help her up, out of the water, but recoiled with a hiss. “Your hands are burning. El, God, your castings…”

  Woozy, Eliana looked down. Her castings had burned their shapes into the flesh of her steaming hands.

  “Do you have the antidote?” she asked, her words fat and faint.

  He patted the bag at his hip, his smile tired. “We did it. You did it, El. And Zahra?”

  She pulled the tiny copper-rimmed box from her coat pocket, handling it gingerly, as if it would break with too much pressure. For all she knew, it might—and then what? Would Zahra be free? Or would breaking the strange box somehow hurt her?

  Eliana sat back heavily on the shore, digging at the box’s smooth copper edges with shaking fingers. But there was no catch she could see, no lid to pry open. The box was insubstantial in her fingers, a container constructed of metal light as leaves. She pressed the heel of her boot into it, hesitated, then slammed it against the rocks underfoot.

  “Goddammit,” she gasped, her efforts sending blazing jolts of pain from her wounded hands up her arms and into the joints of her shoulders. “What is this thing?”

  “El.” Harkan knelt before her, stilling her hands. “Remember, we did this for Navi. She’ll live now.”

  “And Zahra?” Eliana blinked back tears. “What will happen to her?”

  “You’ll free her. We’ll engineer a way to open it.” He hesitated. “Maybe Simon will know what it is. He’ll have insight.”

  “What if we can’t open it?” She couldn’t look at him, could only glare wearily at the ground. “What if, when I try with my castings, I hurt someone? Or Zahra? You saw what happened back there. You saw what I did. How many people did I just burn, back in the Nest? How many weren’t able to escape, simply because I can’t control this power I didn’t ask for?”

  He didn’t reply; his silence held volumes.

  Then a new voice joined them from the shadows.

  “And if the wraiths of Annerkilak follow you here and kill everyone in this castle as vengeance, it will be your fault.”

  Eliana looked over Harkan’s shoulder to see Simon approaching, a few Astavari soldiers behind him.<
br />
  She bit her tongue and met his furious blue gaze in silence.

  “Hello, Simon,” Harkan said, fumbling for his words. “We were just—”

  “I know exactly what you were doing. Are you injured?”

  “Slightly. I’m also hungry.” She held up her hands for him to see, biting her lip hard to keep from crying out. “Also, these little shits have burned me.”

  “She needs to see healers,” Harkan said. “Or do you intend to hold us down here as punishment?”

  Simon ignored him. “Where’s the wraith?”

  “Zahra.” Setting her jaw so hard it hurt her teeth, Eliana held up the box for him to see. “Call her by her name.”

  His gaze fell to the box in her hands. He frowned. “Is this some sort of joke? What is that?”

  And with that, Eliana’s heart sank, too swift and hard for her to pretend otherwise. “I was hoping you’d know.”

  A beat. Then his gaze narrowed. “Are you telling me she’s inside that?” When no answer came, Simon exhaled sharply. “So now, whatever comes next, we have no wraith to help us. Spectacular news. I hope you’re quite proud of yourselves.”

  “That we managed to steal the antidote that will help Navi heal?” Harkan said. “Yes, actually, I am quite proud of us for that.”

  Simon gave him a withering look.

  Eliana wished Harkan had said nothing, hating how righteous he sounded, how unabashed. Only now, shivering and burned on the shores of Tameryn’s lake, did she begin to see the true rashness of what they had done. Her fire could just as easily have consumed the two of them, as well—leaving Remy both orphaned and sisterless. All of that, and what if the antidotes they’d stolen didn’t work? What if they could never break Zahra free of her tiny gleaming prison?

  Eliana looked away, unable to bear the sight of Simon’s glare.

  “We’ll fill this passage, collapse it,” he said, addressing the guards who had accompanied him. “And we’ll need twenty guards stationed here, day and night. If anything comes out of the water, kill it. If the thing attacking you looks human and pleads with you for mercy, kill it anyway. Look for the eyes. They’ll be black. They can’t hide their eyes.”