“Don’t thank me,” said Obritsa, her jaw small and sharp. “Instead, save us.”
Rielle turned away—from Obritsa, from the memory of the villager’s body collapsing at her touch—and stepped through the shimmering threads into a pine forest, where the air was quiet and still.
Audric was waiting there, and she went to him at once. As her guard arrived behind them, one by one stepping softly into the thick carpet of snow, Rielle pressed her ear to Audric’s chest, against the drum of his heart, and matched her breathing to his own.
30
Eliana
“She will remake that which has been unmade. She will deal death to those who have dealt death, and she will show no mercy to those who have been merciless. She is a creature of light and a creature of death, as are all of us. But in her heart these extremes are greater, more dangerous, more violent, because she is chained to the empirium, and those bonds scorch her. And so it was for the Blood Queen, and so I now say to you: look upon your Queens with reverence and awe, with fear and with patience, and with pity most of all.”
—The Word of the Prophet
Simon.
Eliana’s heart jumped into her throat as she searched through the trees.
A fifth shot sounded, and then a shadow passed over them—a raptor, not dead, but wounded and furious. It crashed onto the stone wall, flailed on its back until it righted itself, then grabbed Patrik’s rifle with its cracked black beak, and flung both gun and man over its shoulder into the trees.
Patrik’s body slammed into the trunk of a nearby pine and slid to the ground.
The raptor jumped off the wall and clambered falteringly toward where Patrik lay.
Eliana pushed herself over the wall, ignoring Harkan’s cry of protest, and threw herself onto the raptor’s slippery feathered back. It writhed beneath her in the mud, trying to buck her off, but she grabbed a fistful of its feathers, and the clammy reptilian hide underneath, and then thrust her knife into the tender bend under its jaw.
Blood gushed out over her hand, hot and bright blue. As the raptor fell, she jumped off it and then crawled through the mud toward Patrik.
“Patrik?” She wiped the mud from his cheeks. “Please, say something. Are you alive?”
His eyes fluttered open. He squinted up at her through the rain. “Oddly enough,” he croaked, “I think that I am.”
She laughed a little, prepared to help him rise.
But then she heard a cry, a familiar voice: “El, watch out!”
She looked up just as a viper, crouched on a low branch, leapt toward her with its black mouth wide open.
A sharp rap of gunfire. The creature fell with a shriek. Patrik, panting, rolled out of the way just in time.
Then two more shots. That same voice, now shouting in pain.
Eliana searched through the trees and found him at once: Remy, clutching his belly. Stumbling against a tree, only a few yards from her. Meeting her eyes through the rain and then, with a frightened, small cry, collapsing.
• • •
The world stilled.
The sounds of battle faded—gunfire from the adatrox advancing on them, Harkan’s shouts, and Patrik crawling toward her through the mud. Raptors shrieking, diving, devouring. Crawlers screeching half-made words. Killing and being killed.
Eliana’s legs took her to Remy. Her body was beyond instruction, operating purely on instinct and terror. The buzzing whine in her head was all she could hear. That, and Remy—his high, thin breaths, his keening whimpers. He pressed his hands to his belly. Blood painted them red, spattered his tunic.
Eliana sank to the ground at his side. She said his name, but she couldn’t hear her own voice. She touched his face, his torso, and her fingers came away hot with his blood.
Movement jarred her. She looked to her left, saw Harkan on his knees at her side.
“We have to get out of the crossfire!” he shouted, and then, when she didn’t move, he scooped Remy into his arms and ran limping for the wall.
Eliana followed, bullets chasing her heels. She scrambled over the slick wall, clumsy and shaking. Jessamyn, belt wrapped tightly around her thigh, helped her the rest of the way over. Patrik lay in the mud beside the wall, his face pale in the rain, arm cradled against his chest at an unnatural angle. He was saying something—they were all saying something—but Eliana understood none of it.
Then hands grabbed her arms, turning her.
Simon. Hair plastered to his forehead, stubbled sharp jaw. Blue eyes, blazing in a sea of scars.
In a rush of sound, the world exploded and returned to her. There was a new noise amid all the rest—ragged, gasping.
“Eliana,” Simon was saying, his voice clipped and firm. “Listen to me. You have to save him.”
She drew in a breath to reply—she couldn’t save him, she was no healer; she was nothing; she was a monster; she couldn’t heal, she could only destroy—but instead a cry burst from her lips, and she understood that the ragged sound was herself, that she was sobbing.
A high keening drew her eye to the ground. Remy lay there, his head in Harkan’s lap, his face gone white. He whimpered, trembling. Harkan had reached around to press Remy’s hands into his own wound. Their clasped fingers were a dark mess of blood.
Harkan looked up, despair writ plain on his face. His eyes locked with Eliana’s, and he shook his head.
“Don’t look at them,” Simon ordered. “Look at me.”
She complied, if only because she couldn’t bear for another second the sight of Remy’s wide, glazed eyes, losing all their light.
“Eliana.” Simon held her face steady. “Listen to me. Breathe, and listen.”
“He’s dying,” she sobbed. “Oh, God…”
“Yes, but he doesn’t have to. You can save him.”
She ripped herself away from him. “You’re mad.”
“I’m not. Your mother could do it. She could heal scars. She could create whole flesh out of battered wounds. She resurrected angels. And her blood runs in your veins—her blood, and your father’s.”
She shook her head, crawled for Remy. She gasped out his name.
But Simon yanked her back upright. “Listen, Eliana. You are not only your mother’s daughter. You are your father’s child too, and he was a good man, a brave man. He led armies and held his head high when everyone else had fallen to their knees. He was his kingdom’s hope. He was the world’s hope. He rode into a war he knew would be his end, and he fought with a sword as bright as the sun. I see him in you every time I look at your face. Eliana.”
Simon smoothed her wet hair back from her cheeks. “Do you hear me? He was the Lightbringer, and you are the light.”
She looked up at him, the rain carving soft lines down his worn face.
She held up her hands for him to see. Her bandages, wet and shredded, were nearly gone. The raw lines of her burns echoed the web of her castings.
“I don’t understand them,” she told him, tears choking her. “They frighten me.”
“I know.”
“I’m not her. I’m not.”
“No, you’re not,” Simon agreed. “You’re not her, and you’re not him either. You’re both of them, and you will surpass them.”
Remy cried out, his face collapsing in pain.
“El,” said Harkan, his voice breaking, “if you can do something, please do it.”
Simon caught her hands, wrapping them in his own. Her castings dug into her palms. “You don’t have to understand them. You only have to trust them. Now.” He released her, shoving her at Remy. “Save him, or watch him die.”
Bullets arced over their heads.
Simon shouted over his shoulder, “Can either of you hit even one of your goddamned targets? Take them out!”
But his voice was distant to Eliana now. Slowly, she crawled away
from him to kneel beside Remy. He shivered in the rain, all his color a dark puddle on his torso.
“Remy?” She touched his cold face, his thin shoulders. She was crying again and could not stop. “I’m here.”
“El,” he croaked, gasping. Tears leaked from his eyes. He tried to say something else—his mouth opened and closed—but no sound emerged. With one last heave of breath, his gaze found hers. He smiled a little, his face settling into something peaceful and terrible.
“Not a monster,” he said, and then his eyes fluttered shut.
The world wailed in her ears, clearing every last thought from her mind. Her castings leapt to life in a surge of grief. Her blood rose up to meet them, and she welcomed its ascent.
I am the light.
In Astavar, she had starved herself, deprived herself of sleep, driven her body mercilessly through exercise after exercise, until at last her mind had cleared enough for her to exist in whatever strange, fevered world had birthed her mother. A golden world that existed beyond the seen, and which she had truly accessed three times now—Rozen’s death. Forging her castings. Setting loose that fire in the Nest from which she and Harkan had barely escaped.
Maybe four times? The explosions at Caebris.
And now—now, a fifth.
The tiny metal box that held Zahra trapped lit up in her pocket, straining against its seams.
“Move your hands,” Eliana told Harkan, her voice coming out hollow and strange, but he had already begun to do so, for her own hands were ablaze—twin webs of light, blooming. They tugged her toward Remy’s body like birds that knew the right way home.
Swept clean, she followed them.
I am the light.
She lowered her hands to Remy’s torso, on either side of his wound, and then, suddenly, as if breaking through a glass wall to the fire beyond, the world shattered and flashed, incandescent.
The rain was a diamond cascade, the bullets overhead shooting stars across a field of gold. Harkan was a creature of light, as were Jessamyn and Patrik beyond him—though Eliana could see the wrongness of Patrik’s broken arm, the gaping black wound of Jessamyn’s bleeding thigh. A nothingness in the empirium, a lack, a cosmic hurt.
The longer she gazed at it all, the farther into the gold she sank. Her eyes unfocused, and her vision expanded. She saw the adatrox advancing across the paddock, raptors feeding throughout the camp. Gerren hiding under his fallen tree, hardly daring to breathe. She saw the narrow streets of Karlaine, the wide flat reach of northern Meridian and its eastern mountains, and the grand port city of Festival, situated on a peninsula curved like a horn.
She saw an ocean, brilliant and amber, and across it, a palace in a vast city. On its highest terrace stood a winged, black figure, shivering against the gold of the sky, misaligned and furious.
Simon’s voice murmured against her ear. “Come back to me, Eliana.”
She obeyed, for that angry black silhouette frightened her.
“I’m not letting go, El!” Harkan cried. “I’ve got him!”
Her vision shifted, the gold clearing enough for her to see the false, gray world in which her body existed.
Harkan had his arms locked around Remy’s, and Jessamyn and Patrik had crawled over from the wall, holding down Remy’s legs, and there were figures beyond their circle—at the wall, approaching slowly, weapons lowering. To the left and right, emerging from their hiding places with limps and bruises. A pair of crawlers paused, poised on the wall to attack, and now looking confused, unsettled. A viper and two raptors fled shrieking from the scene, and some deep part of Eliana—foreign to her, and yet the truest part of herself—told her that they fled because they knew now what she was, and what she was about to do.
Remy’s body was lifting up from the ground, held in place only by the monumental efforts of her friends, and her hands were buried inside him, joined with him—not by flesh, but by the power in her blood, and the power of the empirium that lived inside Remy, even though he was ignorant of it. A shell of light formed around the place where her hands met his body.
It frightened her. She flinched, crying out. The light dimmed and shrank.
“It’s all right,” Harkan shouted, eyes wide. “We’ve got him, keep going. We’re not letting go!”
And then Simon spoke softly against her cheek. “I’m not letting go,” he said, his hands locked around her wrists. His torso, strong and warm against her back, anchored her to the ground underneath them.
She breathed, trembling, in the nest of his arms, and the earth shook as she shook, and the air drew taut as she strained against her castings. If she did not control their fire, their eager burn, they would plunge both her and Remy into the earth.
“Think of him, alive and whole,” Simon murmured, faint but near. “Think of how much you love him. You’re doing wonderfully, Eliana.”
She obeyed, picturing Remy’s face in her mind. A smile tugged at her lips, and Simon’s earlier words shone at her through the fog of a dark age. “I am the light.”
“Yes,” he replied. “You are the light of the world, and you will guide us home.”
“With the dawn I rise,” she whispered, because Remy loved the saints, their prayers, their godsbeasts, and it felt right to honor that, to use those particular words to reach for the life left in him.
Simon’s arms tightened around her. She felt his muscles strain just as hers did, wondered how hard he was fighting to keep them both earthbound.
“With the day, you blaze,” he told her hoarsely, and then again, and again, passing the prayer back and forth between them, until he lost his voice. He hid his face against her neck, in her hair, and pressed the words into her skin with his mouth.
I am the light.
The earth bucked and then detonated, surging out from Remy’s body and her own blazing hands.
She blinked, gasping, her eyes dry and afire. The world around her was as it should have been—rain-soaked, gray and dark, acrid with smoke and gunpowder. A thin wave of light flew out from where she sat in the mud. A ripple in the ground echoed its passage, like the shifting of great plates beneath the earth. What cruciata remained fell from the sky, scrambled blind in the mud. Crawlers fled; their screams held human voices inside them.
Remy cried out and shot upright, gulping down great breaths of air.
Eliana fell back from him into Simon’s arms, and then she was pushing herself toward Remy and gathering him up against her, crying into his hair. For he was alive, he was alive, and her hands were her own, tingling in the warm net of her castings. She kissed his cheeks, his dear, dark head, and cradled him against her chest, and he did not flinch from her monstrous touch or duck to avoid her kisses. He clung to her, clutching her shirt.
“I love you,” he sobbed, his voice cracking. “I love you, El. I love you, I love you.”
Eliana could no longer hold herself up, but she could not bear to let him go. Her side stung, and she glanced down to see copper-bright shards scattered through the mud, and she heard Zahra’s voice, deep and familiar and full of tears, and she realized the pain in her side was because this thing she had done, this saving of Remy, had broken open the box and freed Zahra.
Woozy, she noticed Harkan wiping his face, heard his broken, relieved laughter. She leaned against him, letting him support them both, her and Remy. She felt Zahra against her, her cold-water hands cupping Eliana’s cheeks. She heard Patrik shouting orders, saw him and Jessamyn and grim-faced Gerren easily picking off the gathered, gaping adatrox—even though they had all dropped to their knees, their hands clasped in supplication. They implored, they begged, but to no avail.
How strange, Eliana thought as she watched them die, that an adatrox should beg. That was not something she had seen before.
And then, another foreign thing: Simon, still sitting where he had held her, staring at a twisting light in the air. Thi
n and golden, the light stretched from him to a spot some ten feet away and three feet above the ground, and then arched up, endless, until it disappeared into the trees. Simon reached for it with his other hand and, trembling, wound the light around his fingers, directing it to hug his right wrist.
For a moment, the light remained, allowing his touch. Even relishing it, Eliana thought.
Then, flickering, the light faded.
Simon’s body sagged. He braced his fists against the mud and bowed his head, breathing deeply.
Zahra let out a low, sad sound. The air near Simon shifted, and Eliana saw the wraith’s long black arm touch his bowed head.
Patrik blew out a curse. “What in God’s name was that?”
No one spoke for a long moment as the storm rumbled merrily on, oblivious. Then Simon turned, and the look on his face made Eliana ache for him, even as tired as she was, even with Remy newly reborn in her arms. He gazed at her like a man undone, his expression so soft and bewildered, so obviously belonging to the frightened little boy she had seen in Zahra’s vision, that it embarrassed her to look at him.
She knew at once what the light had been, though she couldn’t begin to understand what that meant, or how it was possible.
“It was a thread,” she said softly, answering for him. “A way of traveling through time.”
31
Rielle
“As Ingrid investigates the origin of these fell beasts, I must prepare for the arrival of a special guest: Lord Merovec Sauvillier. He wishes to pay his respects, in the wake of my father’s death. It’s been years since a Sauvillier set foot in Tarkstorm. Well, besides Ludivine, of course. But does she count as a true Sauvillier? Forgive me, but I think not. I, of course, won’t say anything of her true nature to Merovec, as we agreed. Can you imagine his reaction? He might very well faint. His head might actually pop off. I shall imagine this scenario to soothe my nerves. The fearsome Shield of the North, fainting on my couch. Now there’s an image. I hope your travels in Kirvaya are passing without incident, and that you and Rielle are dazzling them all. When you have a moment to write, tell me about the capital. I’ve long wanted to see the Blazing Throne for myself. Does the new queen truly sit in a cloud of fire?”
Kingsbane Page 34
