He hadn’t left his rooms in weeks, not since the day he had realized the newest terrible truth of his life.
Rielle was with child. Audric’s child.
The moment Corien had realized it, sensing the change in her even from thousands of miles away, across the wide continent between them, he’d stormed out of his fortress—a tall, stark construction of black stone, towering over the military base he’d named the Northern Reach. He raged through the mines, the laboratories, the shipyards. He killed thirty-one human slaves that day, and ten of the abducted elemental children from Kirvaya, and then he disemboweled one of his lieutenants who had grown both lazy and messily brutal since Corien had assigned him the task of overseeing the children’s dormitories.
Last of all, Corien had killed two of the Kammerat, the dragon-talkers from Borsvall. Sad-eyed and malnourished, they tended the beasts in their pens and helped dissect their corpses in the laboratories. Killing two of their number was an action Corien immediately regretted, for the Kammerat were useful and necessary in his work with the dragons.
But he had been stupid with rage and hadn’t realized he had killed anyone until he crashed into his rooms, drenched in blood and hardly able to see for the tears in his eyes.
He’d slammed the door shut and proceeded to smash everything he could find—every painting, every burgled artifact. Plates and goblets, the mirrors in his bathing room, even the windows that overlooked the Reach.
And then he’d gulped down every bottle of wine in his rooms and collapsed in the chair by the shattered windows.
There he had stayed for weeks, conducting his affairs and commanding the industry of the Reach from the comfort of his chair and the numb shell of his grief.
Snow blew in through the broken windows. Piles of winter and shards of glass littered his once-pristine floors.
Occasionally, he dared turn his thoughts once more to Celdaria, but everything he saw brought him despair—Rielle, in Audric’s arms. Rielle, being fitted for her wedding gown. Rielle, examining her body in the mirror, looking for changes that had not yet appeared.
He could not bear looking at her for longer than seconds at a time. The pain of the distance between them was like nothing he had felt since suffering the loss of his body in the Deep.
Then, weeks later, sitting in his glass-dusted, snow-frosted rooms, his head in his hands, his stolen body white and cold and beautiful in his velvet dressing gown, he felt a change in the air of the Reach. A shift.
Even drunk as he was, as dumb with sorrow as he was, it required little effort to stretch the edges of his mind and scan the Reach for the cause of this change.
He saw it at once and straightened in his chair.
How interesting: the Kirvayan queen, Obritsa Nevemskaya, had somehow breached the security of his laboratories. She was stealing from them, in fact, taking a container of the belluorum his surgeons used to keep the dragons docile and dependent.
He watched her, curiosity cutting through the black mire of his thoughts, and when she pulled threads from the air, using them to flee the laboratories and escape into the nearby mountains before his soldiers could stop her, Corien rose from his seat for the first time in days. He walked across the glass and snow to stand at the shattered windows.
His heart that was not a true heart pounded faster in his chest. As much as he could feel delight in this body, and excitement, he felt them now.
The Kirvayan queen was a marque.
For a moment he allowed himself to admire the diligence of her secret-keeping, the thick walls of her mental fortitude. She had been through much, this girl, had endured years of abuse that had left her hardened—though he sensed that, underneath those layers of steel and iron beat a heart that loved selectively but fiercely.
He watched her give the belluorum to one of the Kammerat—a nineteen-year-old man named Leevi. The boy administered the drug to his dragon, a young calf hardly big enough to carry even his scrawny frame. Then boy and dragon lifted off the ground, heading west—for Borsvall, he assumed.
To ask the new king for help, perhaps?
Corien smirked, shrugging off his dressing gown and exchanging it for his shirt and trousers, his long, black coat.
He could just imagine it now. “Oh, King Ilmaire,” he said, simperingly, “can you please, oh please come help me rescue my dragon friends? They’re being held captive by an army of angels in the far north! They’re using the dragons in horrible experiments! You must help us, you simply must!”
Corien snorted. “Good luck with that, boy. Your king’s a coward, and you’re a goddamned fool.”
Then he threw on his cloak and swept out the doors.
• • •
He had the girl and her guard brought to one of the receiving halls in the fortress itself. She was a marque, after all. She possessed angelic blood, tainted though it was, and deserved better than a holding cell beneath the mountain.
It took her some time to awaken from the blow his men had dealt her, for which he’d made them pay, sinking into their minds until they writhed on the floor and begged for mercy.
“She is not to be beaten or mistreated,” he told them coldly, listening to them sob. They were lower angels, hardly powerful enough to maintain grips on their stolen bodies. The sight of them disgusted him. Once, they had been creatures glorious and mighty, before the long dark of the Deep reduced them to this.
Now, he sat in a chair opposite Obritsa, watching her eyes flutter open. She was a tiny thing—pale-brown skin, ice-white hair like the long-dead liar Marzana.
“At last, she awakens,” he murmured.
Obritsa stared at him, her body tensing. Her eyes traveled to her guard, lying inert on the floor, and then back up. “It’s you,” she whispered. “I heard you in my mind. You’re an angel.”
He knelt before her. “My name is Corien. And you are Obritsa Nevemskaya. Chosen queen of Kirvaya. The human revolutionaries in your country call you Korozhka. The Destroyer. It’s a delight to meet you, truly. Your mind is sharp and still growing. I appreciate a good mind, especially one with such potential. And you’re a marque.” He smiled. “That I find most delightful of all.”
She lifted her chin, examining his face. Her eyes were pale and bright. “By abducting me, you have committed an act of war against the nation of Kirvaya. If you release us now and allow us to leave this place unharmed, I will take that into consideration when I tell my magisters what you have done.”
“Your magisters. Oh, child.” Corien cupped her cheek. She did not flinch away from him, met his eyes without blinking. “So much is happening in this world that you do not understand. Your ignorance is charming.”
He rose, dusting his hands free of the grime she’d collected on her face. “I have something I need you to do for me. And you’ll do it, one way or another. If I have to force you, I can and I will. But I’d rather not. Your half-breed power is unpredictable, and if I take control of your mind, it might affect the purity of your threads. And then where would we be? Smashed into the side of a mountain somewhere. Flung to the bottom of the sea, or forward in time.”
The words left his lips before he could think of their significance.
Forward in time.
The image of the girl on the mountain returned to him—Rielle’s daughter, she had claimed. Her name was Eliana.
And the things he had glimpsed when he touched her mind…
But that was for later. There was to be an order to things, and Obritsa must come first.
The little queen’s mind worked quickly. He admired its deftness, how nimbly it moved.
“I’m not taking you anywhere,” she declared. “I’ve seen what you’re doing here. You are a fiend who should be put on trial for your crimes. The atrocities you have committed in these mountains will not be tolerated.”
He tilted his head, considering her. “And her
e I thought you were supposed to hate elementals. What do you care if I steal and torture their children?”
The girl had nothing to say to that. He savored the texture of her conflict—years of conditioned hatred for elementals warring against the sheer horror she’d felt after discovering his great work.
“I understand your contempt,” he told her, “but you’re utterly wrong in it and in everything you just said. You will take me to Celdaria, and you will take Bazrifel as well, and you will take your guard Artem, because I don’t trust you not to try something stupid, and if Artem is there, maybe you’ll think twice before trying to outsmart me.”
Obritsa managed an expression of cool disdain. “Bazrifel. Another angel?”
“Indeed.” Corien gestured at her guard, Artem, lying on the floor between them. “He’s inside your friend at the moment and having a grand time of it.”
Then he told Bazrifel, Begin.
Artem’s screams began immediately, his body convulsing where it lay, and Obritsa watched him, at first implacable, and then with increasing panic, until her calm broke at last, and she let out a soft, sharp cry. She hurried to the man and sank to her knees beside him. Corien watched them, the two of them huddled on the floor—Artem shuddering, his lips wet with drool; Obritsa holding his head in her lap, smoothing the wet hair back from his forehead.
“Artem, can you hear me?” she whispered to him. “I’m here, Artem, my dear. It’s going to be all right.”
Artem’s eyes opened. He gathered her hands in his, then pressed them to his chest.
“Whatever he wants of you,” Artem croaked, “don’t do it, Obritsa. Not for me.”
Unseen by both of them, Corien rolled his eyes.
“You don’t give me orders, Artem,” Obritsa replied.
“He cannot be allowed to go to Celdaria. He is after Lady Rielle. He will bring ruin down upon us all.”
“Rielle will stop him,” Obritsa said. Corien could so clearly see her uncertainty that he nearly laughed. “Audric will gather his armies against him.”
“Obritsa.” Artem struggled to rise. “Let him kill me. Resist him with everything you have.”
“I will not stand by while they kill you right in front of my eyes. Don’t ask me to do that. You cannot order me to do that. Artem.” The tears she had been fighting spilled over at last. “You’re the only family I have.”
Corien stood quietly for a moment, letting the feeling of Obritsa’s love for this man, and his for her, wash over him. A father and a daughter, if not in blood then in heart. Dear friends, singular in the world, who understood each other like no one else did. The loneliness of that—the hopeless fragility of it—struck a raw chord inside Corien’s own mind.
He crouched beside them.
“You understand, then,” he said quietly. “I can see it in your mind. You’ve already decided you’ll do as I ask, even though part of you feels that is the worst thing you can do, that complying means you lose and I win. Which is true. And you’ve decided this illogical thing because of love.” He smiled a little. “We really are not so different, Queen Obritsa. What I do is also for love. For the love of my people, who have lived for too long in pain. And for the great love of my very long life.”
Then he rose. “Will you do as I command?”
Artem kept whispering protests, but Obritsa avoided his gaze, and Corien’s too.
“I am not strong enough to send us more than thirty miles at a time,” she said quietly.
“In fact, you’re stronger than you think,” Corien replied, which was the truth. He could clearly see the raw force of her talent, stifled by those who had raised her—feeble-minded humans frightened by things they could neither understand nor possess. “I’ve seen it myself. You’ve allowed weaker, less talented people to dictate your limits for you. A tragedy with which I’m intimately familiar.”
Obritsa was quiet for a long time. He sensed her praying, which she wasn’t good at, because she hated God.
He sympathized.
Her prayers quickly unraveled, and when she looked up at him again, her gaze was hard and full of tears.
“Whenever you’re ready,” she whispered, “I will begin.”
49
Rielle
“I wish it to be known that I protest this union with everything I am. I wish it to be known that I will do everything within my power to fracture it. For what remains of her life—and I pray that this will be brief and pass swiftly—Lady Rielle will regret the day she restored me to this world. She will regret every smile and kiss she used to seduce my son beyond reason. She will regret every word she has uttered and every step she has taken, and only then, when she lies inconsolable with sorrow at my feet, either dead or dying—only then will I rest.”
—Journal of Genoveve Courverie, October 27, Year 999 of the Second Age
For days, Rielle watched dully from her rooms as visitors streamed into the city from all over the world, preparing for a wedding she desperately wished not to attend.
Unfortunately, the wedding was her own.
And if she refused Audric now, after agreeing to marry him, it would break his heart. It would humiliate House Courverie and perhaps lead to even more resentment and uncertainty than already existed throughout the realm. And the truth was, she did want to marry him. She wanted to declare to the world—to herself, and to Corien most of all—that she was Audric’s, and he was hers. Nothing had the power to separate them; she wanted that known.
More than anything, she wanted to convince herself that, yes, she could serve for the rest of her life as not only Sun Queen to Celdaria, but as queen to Audric. She had the strength to do it. She would be able to curb her doubts and swallow her protests and stay the course of this life she had been thrust into.
And that seemed to her an odd reason to go through with marrying someone, no matter how much love was involved.
But here she was, on the morning of her wedding, standing on a small platform in her sitting room as her maids and Ludivine’s tailors fitted her one last time into what would, she was convinced, go down in history as the most gorgeous gown to have ever been created.
She stared at her reflection in the mirror, drawing comfort from the sight of herself in this elaborate, glittering cloud of a dress. The bodice was dark-gold brocade, shimmering with delicate swirled lines of beadwork. The tiny sleeves perched on the edge of her shoulders, leaving her arms bare. Diaphanous layers of gold, white, and plum chiffon trailed down her arms and far past her fingers to the floor, each piece scattered through with a tapestry of embroidery—white starbursts, plum-colored roses, vines and leaves in Courverie green. Much of the dress was backless, with draped lengths of delicate chains crossing her bare skin—a cool, shifting net of gold. The skirts were a voluminous explosion of silk and lace and chiffon, in the colors of both the Sun Queen and House Courverie.
Ludivine watched her, bright-eyed, in a simple gown of rose velvet cinched at the waist with a slender belt fashioned of golden birds.
“Is it trite and expected,” she asked, “to tell you how beautiful you are?”
Rielle attempted a smile. “Perhaps, but not unappreciated.”
Even to her own ears, her reply seemed strained. It had been nearly a month since Corien had conjured that awful vision of the girl on the mountain—the girl who called herself Eliana and claimed to be her daughter.
It had been nearly three weeks since Rielle had discovered she was with child.
And during those three weeks, she had barely spoken to Ludivine. Since her vision from the empirium, Rielle had not been able to shake the truth of the angels’ banishment from her mind, and she didn’t care to speak to Ludivine about it—not about the fact of the banishment itself, and not that Ludivine had kept the reality of it from Rielle, and Audric, for years. Occasionally, Ludivine would dare to broach the subject, gently reaching out to
Rielle’s mind with a tendril of thought that felt something like an apology.
But Rielle wasn’t ready to talk about the saints’ great deception and face the terrifying doubts she now possessed—about Ludivine’s true loyalty, and what thoughts of revenge might reside deep in her heart. Ludivine had lied about what she truly was. She had chosen not to tell Rielle the truth about the Deep. Whenever Rielle looked at her friend, there now twisted a niggle of doubt in her heart that she couldn’t ignore.
And then, of course, there was the wedding to distract her.
It had been a whirlwind of preparations for the wedding itself, the days of feasting afterward, the official church documents the Archon drew up with the help of his secretaries that would bind Rielle and Audric together as king and queen. Fittings with the tailors and meetings for hours every day with the Magisterial Council and the Archon, with the cooks and the decorators. Even with Queen Genoveve.
But Rielle’s hopes that Genoveve’s opinion toward her would have warmed over the last several weeks since resurrecting her were quickly dashed. Whenever they met, the queen simply stared at her across their tea table, refusing to speak. The old shadows had returned to the delicate skin under her eyes. Her nightmares kept her from more than a few hours of sleep a week. They also, she claimed, robbed her of all appetite.
Rielle didn’t doubt that the woman was suffering. She had heard proof of that from Corien. But even with Ludivine helping to soothe her troubled mind, the queen refused to treat Rielle with anything but disdain.
She would not have been surprised if the queen were depriving herself of sleep and food simply out of spite.
And as the castle whirled itself silly with the mundanities of logistics, the city grew and grew.
Word of the wedding spread quickly, and the city soon clogged with visitors. Tent cities sprang up in the Flats, under the bridges, along the shores of the lake. Celebrations raged day and night—as did protests decrying the wedding as the end of peace and the beginning of war.
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