Queen of the Blazing Throne

by Claire Legrand

  “As is mine,” Artem replied.

  She smiled at him. “But not for long.”

  “No, Obritsa. Not for long.”

  Then she told Artem good night and dismissed him, making certain she did not entirely stifle her yawn. She was tired. The hour was late. She would soon prepare for bed.

  Or so he would think.

  Once alone, Obritsa exchanged her tasseled dressing gown for her patched brown traveling clothes and woolen cloak with the cunning pockets and grabbed the knife she kept under her pillow. In her sitting room, she stretched and moved through a short series of silent exercises until her heart was pounding and her legs limber.

  Then she stood in silence, re-­creating every object in the room in the quiet eye of her mind, until she felt a warm clarity settle over her, as it always did when she called upon the power in her blood. The blood of both angels and of humans, leaving her neither one nor the other, but instead a marque. Unjustly hated and feared by everyone.

  Except Sasha, who feared nothing, and Artem, whose loyalty left no room for it.

  Obritsa lifted her hands, moved through the slight anger that always accompanied her work, and pulled strands of light from the air as if plucking loose threads from a carpet.

  With the image of the festival grounds near the Astreka River held firmly in her mind, she turned over the glowing threads in her palms, cradling them as she had, in her previous life, fussed over Yeva’s hair. Their energy tugged at her chest, beckoning her.

  She opened her eyes, the edges of her mind gone golden and soft. When she had first begun her magical training under Sasha’s watchful gaze at the age of six, the sensation of her carefully hidden power stretching its limbs had made her weep for reasons she did not understand.

  Now, when she worked, her eyes were dry and her mind sharp.

  She drew in a measured breath, then shaped the eager threads into a circular doorway limned with trembling light. Through it, a wavering passage stretched to the upper banks of the Astreka. Ghostly, starlit shapes capped the water—­broad terraces and heated bathing pools, manicured garden paths and lantern-­lit mazes, colorful banners snapping cheerfully in the chill wind off the water.

  Obritsa resisted the urge to touch her back. She could still feel the phantom pierce of Sasha’s knives, but not even that night of unthinkable pain had managed to take her power from her. Nothing could.

  “And still I rise,” she whispered, before stepping onto the path of her own making.

  3

  On the first night, she saw nothing.

  Disguised and cloaked, her white hair pulled into a tight bun under her hood, she searched the festival grounds.

  She haunted the edges of the enormous spiral maze, where shrieking revelers rushed underneath stone arches and crawled into tunnels carved through tree roots. Lovers abandoned the maze to hide among the wandering paths softly lit with lanterns and draped in thick sheets of plum ivy. Obritsa hurried past the veiled shapes of entwined arms and legs, skirts rucked up to hips. She heard soft cries and grunts of passion, but nothing of violence.

  Snow began to fall, silvering the world. She had stumbled upon no slain bodies, seen no dead-­eyed children, heard no phantom carriages.

  Just before dawn, numb with cold, she found a lonely alcove on one of the broad festival terraces overlooking the Khasprey Falls. Crumbs and coins littered the ground. Beggars—­sharp-­eyed, wary of patrolling city guards—­darted from shadow to shadow, collecting the careless discards of the rich. They were elementals, unmarked by the collars of bound human servants, but their poverty indicated their lack of ability.

  Elemental in the blood, talent in the mud. An old-­fashioned taunt, aimed at elementals born with insignificant power, that Obritsa had always found disappointingly unimaginative.

  Amid the infinite spools of the empirium, among the countless paths between here and there, Obritsa hid in the terrace alcove and let her mind melt into the supple planes required for traveling. She found the threads that would lead her back to her rooms and followed them home.

  * * *

  Obritsa scoured the festival grounds for two more nights, which turned out to be her threshold of tolerance for shrieking adolescents, drunken debauchery, and half-­naked old men who spent their nights lounging in the steaming pools. They bellowed to one another about trade routes and spice tariffs, boasted about their elemental abilities, and showed off with grander and grander tricks until the pools were left in frothing ruin.

  Obritsa’s mouth soured with disgust as she hurried away from their howling antics. What must the world have been like during the First Age, when the empirium was closer and stronger and elementals ran amok with even more powerful magic than the scraps and shreds they now possessed?

  Obritsa tried not to think about it. Everything she had read about the age of the empirium—­the brilliant chaos of the world’s ripe power, the first elitist murmurings that those in Kirvaya who could not touch magic should be scorned—­made her skin crawl.

  She decided to try the lower banks instead, where the common districts stretched in stinking, cramped rows around the southern bend of the city. She had to be careful here. Not because it was more dangerous, but because the danger was different. At the festival grounds, it was easy enough to blend into the shadows and go unnoticed; the wealthy cared for nothing but themselves.

  But in the common districts, everyone noticed everything. It was the only way to survive.

  The first night passed frustratingly without incident until a group of men came tumbling out of a drinking hall and knocked Obritsa off her feet. One of the men tried to help her up; his hands pawed at her. Stumbling, he grabbed her waist, her shoulder, mumbled obscenities in her ear.

  Obritsa thought quickly. Submit, fight, or run? If he looked under her hood and saw her face, she would not go unrecognized. Her visage adorned every temple wall now, every newly pressed coin.

  And if news of her nighttime wanderings reached the Council, she would be watched even more closely by shrewd magisterial eyes. Questions would arise: How had the queen managed to escape her secured rooms? How had no guard seen her coming or going?

  She shoved the man away, hard. “I was walking well enough before you came along, thank you,” she snapped at him.

  The man pushed back, so hard she nearly toppled, and then he himself fell, drunk and drooling, and roared unintelligibly after her as she ran.

  A half-­formed spark of fire shot at her heels, singeing her boots.

  Obritsa hurried on, her face hot with anger. She wished she had the time to turn back around, find threads that led to the high mountains, and send that horrible man hurtling to his death in a canyon.

  The image made her smile as she ran, and the next night, she arrived in the lower banks feeling ferocious, itching for a fight. Sasha had taught her how to hold a knife; Artem had spent years teaching her how to kill with one.

  Come find me, awful men of the world, she thought, slipping through the narrow common streets like an eel through dark waters. Come find me, and you’ll wish that you hadn’t.

  But the night left her alone, as did the beggars and thieves and tired dockworkers. Grim-­mouthed elemental mothers without enough talent to buy themselves comfortable lives helped their children search the sewers for scraps.

  Once again, Obritsa returned to her rooms having seen nothing that helped her understand the mystery of the missing children. She paced until dawn. When her maids arrived to help her dress for a morning at court, they glanced at the shadows under her eyes, her tired face, but wisely said nothing and instead dabbed her skin with a cooling cream.

  * * *

  Two nights later, scowling and exhausted, her feet blistered from the endless walking, Obritsa wandered the middle districts—­apartments of moderately successful elemental merchants; markets where indentured human servants of wealthy ele
mental families secretly shopped for bargains; seedier, more daring playhouses than one could find in the upper districts.

  She turned a corner onto a side street, glowering at the cobblestones, cursing her own curiosity, her infuriating stubbornness. Half wishing Artem would come find her and put a stop to this, since she was apparently incapable of discovering anything useful.

  A strange sound arrested her—­a choked, startled sort of sound, and nearby. She flattened her body against the wall of a pretty manor house with fiddle music drifting out a cracked-­open window. Found the knife at her belt, searched the dark street. Black windows. Tiled roofs. Three dimly flickering lanterns, lit by firebrands to burn without end. Something scraped against stone. A blade? The heel of a boot?

  There, a few paces ahead of her—­a shape, shifting through the shadows that collected at the door to a building Obritsa recognized. One of the holy schools, Saint Marzana’s Hope, where potential acolytes trained and tested before being accepted into the seven high temples.

  Another sound. Gasping, gurgling. A choked plea.

  Knife in hand, Obritsa hurried toward the school’s iron gates, atop which the bronze figure of Saint Marzana, crowned in flames, arms raised to the sky. The gates stood open. Steeling herself, Obritsa slipped inside.

  And stopped.

  A child around her age—­twelve, maybe thirteen. A boy, she thought, squinting in the milky half light for a better look. He held a woman in a strange embrace; she seemed to be leaning against him, nearly overwhelming him with her height and bulk. She wore the gray robes that outfitted every teacher of the holy schools.

  Once again came the choked sound, bubbling up from the woman’s mouth—­wordless and wet, despairing.

  The boy stepped away from her, watched her fall to the ground. In his hand, he held a long, dripping knife.

  He turned, calm, to stare at Obritsa. She could not move, nor could she see his face. She thought of calling for help; she thought of running at him with her own knife, scaring him out of his stillness.

  Then, from the far end of the school’s courtyard came a clattering of hooves and the sound of turning wheels. A dark shape stopped at the far archway. A door opened into the silence, and though Obritsa heard no words summoning the child, she certainly felt a summons. A thin current shifted in the air. A bend, a strange quiet, as if the world suddenly held a new presence.

  The boy turned away from her. As he moved, his eyes caught the light of a small lantern. Obritsa recoiled from the sight of his cloudy gray eyes, remembering what the frightened witness had said: Like the eyes of the dead. The child didn’t even blink!

  She waited too long. By the time she shook off her revulsion and ran across the courtyard, the carriage had disappeared. She heard its wheels clattering, the snort of its horse. She looked up and down the road, but the night was too dark, and it seemed, impossibly, that the harder she squinted after the carriage, the thicker grew the shadows, as if someone were drawing them specifically to obscure her vision.

  Her heart pounded through her entire body. Were there shadowcasters nearby, covering the carriage’s tracks?

  She stepped back from the road, retreating into the courtyard. At the teacher’s side, she knelt, watching helplessly as the woman’s life bled out of her belly.

  Then a voice sounded from very near. “Your Majesty. How unexpected, to find you out here in the middle of the night.”

  Obritsa shot to her feet and whirled around. Her hand flew to her head, but it was too late; her hood had fallen, and she had not noticed.

  Grand Magister Yeravet of the House of Light emerged from a door in the wall, pale and solemn, his hands folded at his waist. He wore a coat and tunic, a vest and trousers, and a plain wool cloak similar to her own. Common clothes.

  Despite this strangeness, Obritsa sagged with relief and fell into the pattern of behavior she had cultivated since her coronation—­girlish and flattering, bubbling over with too many breathless words. A clever but spoiled child, delighted with all the glittering finery she now owned, the number of people who fell over themselves to appease her.

  “Oh, Grand Magister!” she said, hurrying to him, offering him an embarrassed smile. “I know this seems unusual, and I do apologize for startling you. You see, I longed to learn more about my city without the burden of guards or ceremony. I wanted to pray alongside my people, observe them in their homes, walk their streets and see what work remains to be done in order to make Genzhar even more splendid than it already is.”

  Magister Yeravet’s smile was kind. “How admirable, my queen. Truly, you are a wonder.”

  “But Grand Magister, this woman, she requires the attention of a healer.” Obritsa gestured at the woman, who now lay horribly still in a dark pool of her own blood. “I don’t know what happened. I heard a sound, and I followed it here. I saw a boy, Grand Magister. I believe he was the one who killed her, and then he fled in a carriage I could not follow.”

  The sight of the woman’s glassy eyes left Obritsa feeling shaken. She had killed before, and she had seen many deaths, but this was different. This death had a sickening, slippery feeling that sent her stomach rolling.

  She placed a hand over her heart, put on an earnest, trembling affect she hoped would melt the Grand Magister’s heart and perhaps persuade him to tell no one he had seen her.

  “Do you think,” she began, “that this could be another instance of the vanishing children?”

  But she could say no more, for suddenly, she was in the grip of strong arms. A wet, acrid cloth clamped over her nose and mouth. She recognized the odor at once—­widow’s tears, a rare and expensive poison. She struggled to break free, but widow’s tears acted quickly. Fog crept inside her nose, her mouth. Her eyes burned. She dropped into a rushing black river.

  * * *

  She woke to find Artem standing over her, his arms crossed over his chest.

  Groggy, cotton-­mouthed, Obritsa pushed herself upright. “What is it? Why are you glaring at me?” She gagged a little, smacking her lips. “My mouth tastes awful. Why does my mouth taste awful?”

  “Here.” Artem presented a tray heaped with food—­a buttery pastry stuffed with ham, a mug of black coffee, roasted potatoes slick with grease. “Eat and drink all of it, and drink this too.” He produced a pitcher of water and a small goblet.

  “And then,” Artem added, his eyes gone narrow and flinty, “you will explain to me why you thought it wise to go drinking in the lower districts, in the middle of the night, for seven nights in a row. You, all of twelve years old. You, the queen.” Artem’s face softened as he examined her. “When Grand Magister Yeravet brought you to me, limp in his arms, I feared the worst, Obritsa.”

  Her anger did much to clear her swirling head. “Twelve years old I may be, but yes, I am also the queen of Kirvaya, and more importantly, I am the Korozhka, child of the revolution. You would do well to remember that, Artem, or else I shall have to find another soldier to guard me.”

  Then she could no longer look at him and tore furiously into her breakfast. Only when Artem had left did she allow her tears to rise—­tears not of anger, but of strange, unshakable fear. She could remember nothing about drinking in the city, nothing about sneaking out in the middle of the night. Grand Magister Yeravet had found her, but where, and how?

  Her dreams had been terrible—­she knew that much—­and they were all she could remember, as if they spanned the course of her entire life. They crowded at the distant horizons of her mind. When she tried to find them, stare them into submission, they evaded her:

  A sour current, red as blood, chasing her to a dead end.

  A smiling mouth, pressing its flat white teeth against her cheek.

  Two unblinking gray eyes that lurked at the edge of her vision—­watching her eat, dispassionate, like a tireless ghost.

  4

  The morning of the Celdarian
entourage’s arrival bloomed so bright with sunlight that even in the December chill, Obritsa was damp with sweat.

  Of course, it didn’t help that she was wearing a completely ridiculous gown, a spectacular garment of gold, white, and scarlet brocade that was so heavy with beadwork that she might as well have been swaddled in furs.

  But if she was going to look this Sun Queen, this Lady Rielle Dardenne, in the eye—­this woman she somehow needed to capture and present to Sasha—­she was going to look resplendent while doing it.

  She beamed, bounced on her toes, gushed to the temple acolytes nearest her about how exciting it all was. What an honor to see the Sun Queen herself, to dine with the prince of Celdaria!

  Inwardly, she was still as a windless lake. She watched the Celdarian party approach the iron gates of Zheminask, all of them coated in white petals that had been tossed from windows as they proceeded up the city streets toward the palace. There was Lady Ludivine Sauvillier, a tall, slender, pale young woman with golden hair worn in a crown of braids. It was a style common in northern Celdaria, Obritsa had learned during her past three weeks of study, popularized by Lady Ludivine herself. She wore travel clothes, nothing remarkable—­a long brown cloak, tall boots, a modest gray gown—­and yet, atop her travel-­dusted horse, Lady Ludivine looked as poised as a queen who had sat for decades upon her throne.

  Ahead of her in the procession, riding a great bay stallion with a gold-­trimmed bridle, was Prince Audric Courverie. Obritsa watched him closely. The Lightbringer, they called him, the most powerful sunspinner in decades, but when Obritsa examined him, she saw nothing fearsome. Warm brown skin; soft dark curls dusted with white petals; a kind face; a broad smile. He waved at the cheering crowds. He wore a cloak and tunic in the colors of House Courverie—­plum, emerald, and gold. At his waist hung his sheathed sword, Illumenor. With it, Obritsa had learned, Celdaria’s prince could draw down the light of the sun and use the brilliant hot blade to cut a person cleanly in half.