Queen of the Blazing Throne

by Claire Legrand

  “The angels found you,” Obritsa said, the pieces having assembled in her mind as she waited in the cold darkness for Leevi’s return. “The power of their minds led them to you and your beasts as you hid in the Villmark, and they brought you here to the Northern Reach.”

  Leevi nodded miserably. “They have been conducting terrible experiments, work I do not understand, transforming dragons into monsters. Melding different beasts together. And now, they’re beginning to bring children into their experiments. Elemental children stolen from their homes.”

  Obritsa’s stomach felt slippery and unsettled, like cold fish were squirming along its walls. “Why do they need elemental children?”

  “They want to create beasts specifically bred for war. Beasts like nothing the world has ever seen. And they are well on their way to accomplishing it.”

  “Elemental beasts?” Obritsa whispered.

  “No, though perhaps they will someday achieve that. No, these creatures are bludgeons, intelligent and huge and nimble. The angels force the children they’ve stolen to forge new castings, then embed those castings in the beasts. Elemental children, bound to monsters, their minds controlled by angels.” Leevi shook himself and turned to her. “Serafima, you must leave this place. I’ve already said too much. I’ll take you to the tunnel.”

  “How many of you are there? The Kammerat, I mean?”

  “Two dozen, here. How many have survived and remain in hiding back home, I do not know. When they came for us…it was a massacre. Those of us who are left no doubt scattered and remain deep in hiding.”

  “And how many dragons?”

  “Dozens, here. Hundreds, perhaps. More are born every day. The angels breed them ferociously.”

  Obritsa swallowed a knot of ill feeling. “And I assume they force you and your friends to oversee them?”

  “They know we won’t leave,” Levi whispered, his face lined with weariness. “Not without the dragons.”

  “And the dragons can’t leave, because without the drugs they’ve come to depend on, they’ll die.”

  “That’s our story.” Leevi’s smile was a thin, miserable sight. “The great failure of the legendary Kammerat. And the true end of the dragons.”

  Obritsa shook her head. “Talking like that is a waste of time. How many children are being kept in that building?”

  “Nearly two hundred, now.” He watched her closely. “You really are not like other children, Serafima. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that your offer to help me escape is a kind one, but one I cannot accept.” She rose to her feet, her head buzzing. It was quite possibly a mistake, what she was about to do, but she had already come this far—­defying Sasha’s orders, betraying Artem.

  Ludivine would simply have to wait a little longer for her report.

  “I’m also thinking that I can trust you with my true name,” she said. “It is Obritsa Nevemskaya. I am the chosen queen of Kirvaya, the Korozhka of the revolution, and I’m not leaving the Northern Reach until I’ve helped you burn it to the ground.”

  8

  Obritsa stepped through her ring of threads and into a small, dark room.

  With a flick of her wrist, she drew the threads closed behind her, the strands of light snapping apart and scattering until they had faded into the room’s shadows like tossed embers.

  In the silent darkness, she stood catching her breath, willing her pounding heart to calm. She pressed her ear against the door. Hearing nothing but quiet, she held her breath, turned the handle, and stepped out into a hallway of stone.

  It was exactly as Leevi had drawn on his map in the dirt—­a narrow passage carved out of the mountain. Small torches lit the way, affixed to the wall with iron brackets. The passage was immaculate, swept clean of dust and dirt. Solid walls and no windows, only scattered locked doors.

  If she were to meet an angel here, there would be nowhere to hide.

  She hurried down the passage, silently reciting her and Leevi’s plan to keep her mind focused:

  Follow this passage until it forked. Take the left branch, and then turn left, then right, then left again.

  Find the door bearing a single word in the angelic language of Lissar—­BELLUORUM. The drug that laced the veins of every captive dragon.

  Thread her way inside.

  Steal four canisters of belluorum, which should be enough to enable Valdís to carry Leevi to Borsvall and back.

  Get out. Thread back to the stone outcropping where she had been hiding for the past two days, subsisting on whatever scraps Leevi could bring her, huddled quietly in a narrow crevice between two snow-­dusted boulders.

  From there, she could thread safely back to Artem. Find Ludivine. Deliver the information she had discovered.

  And Leevi and Valdís would bring help—­any dragons and Kammerat still living in Borsvall, or perhaps even the Borsvallic army. Leevi could make an appeal to the new king, Ilmaire Lysleva, tell the royal court in the white halls of Tarkstorm what evils were being done in these awful frozen mountains.

  But that part of the plan was not Obritsa’s concern. She was to steal the belluorum, deliver it to Leevi, and get safely home. Once she had delivered the information about the Northern Reach to Ludivine, Obritsa could send Kirvaya’s finest armies into these mountains and command the elemental soldiers who had sworn fealty to their queen to save the abducted children and bring the angels’ work to ruin. She would order them to crack open the earth beneath that terrible black fortress. She would direct them to flood the bay, filling every laboratory, every cell, with frigid icy water.

  She held these thoughts in her mind as she moved swiftly down the passage, their violence lighting the path of her focus. At every distant sound—­every clanging hammer and bellowed order, every wailing dragon’s cry—­she pressed herself flat against the wall, hardly daring to breathe. But the corridor remained empty. As Leevi had said, the laboratory compound was sparsely guarded in the late afternoon.

  She took the left branch of the fork, just as Leevi had instructed. Many times, he had told her, he’d walked these halls, brought inside by the angels to tend to an ailing dragon or help dissect a great scaled corpse. He had seen the belluorum room dozens of times but had never been able to get close enough to even attempt to sneak inside.

  And when Obritsa at last reached the end of her path and her target stood before her—­a narrow black door marked with a tidy metal plate—­she understood why Leevi had never managed a burglary.

  Two enormous angels flanked the door, each holding a broadsword. They wore sleek, dark armor, and their stolen human bodies were tall and muscled. Each of them looked capable of cleaving a man in two with a single sword stroke.

  Obritsa swallowed hard. The longer she waited there, the likelier it was that someone would discover her. She sent wordless thanks to Artem for all the hours he had spent practicing threading with her in the temple gardens until she could do so in utter silence. She shoved aside the resulting pang as she wondered how he was faring. How frightened he must have been, and how furious with her. How deeply, utterly betrayed.

  She crouched in the shadows, just past a bend in the wall that she hoped would shield her from sight long enough to complete the thread, and summoned her power more quickly than she ever had in her life.

  Leevi had caught occasional glimpses of the belluorum room while passing through the laboratories and had given her a cursory description. A narrow, tall space, perhaps ten feet deep. Walls lined with tidy black shelves, each one holding squat glass jars of belluorum. No lights inside—­no torches, no lanterns.

  While traveling north with Artem, Obritsa had grown familiar with the strangeness of threading to a place she had never seen before. But she was not used to threading both to an unfamiliar place and into a space so small.

  A shift, around the corner. A sharp hiss. And then, a t
errible silence.

  The angels had noticed the light of her thread.

  She heard their quick footsteps, felt the air tighten and grow heavy. A foreign tingling sensation tapped against her mind. Leevi had warned her about this. Angelic intrusion, something the Kammerat were somewhat resistant to—­due to their bond with the godsbeasts, Leevi theorized. They were still no match for the more powerful angels, but these foot soldiers who guarded doors and oversaw corpse disposal—­they were easier to evade.

  Still, they could do enough. They would attempt to slip inside Obritsa’s mind, seize control of her thoughts and her actions. They could drive her to bash her skull open against the wall, if they wanted to.

  Obritsa waited tensely for the brilliant loop of her gathered threads to solidify and connect. Then she jumped through, just as the angels turned the corner. A foreign presence butted against her thoughts; she stumbled, caught her foot on the thread, and fell through to the other side. She twisted around before she hit the floor and flicked her wrist to close the threads.

  Their light split and scattered. The dimly lit world of the laboratory hallways disappeared, submerging her in darkness.

  She had only a few seconds. The angels knew what marques were. They had hunted them all those years ago in the First Age, just as the humans had. They would recognize threads, and would no doubt soon guess where these had taken her.

  Breathing hard, Obritsa felt her way around the dark room. Her fingers met cool, smooth glass. She grabbed four jars, surprised at their heaviness, and stuffed them into the ragged, ice-­stiff pockets of her coat. She began drawing new threads out of the air, her hands flicking through the air like birds’ wings as she wove them into a hoop of light.

  Just as the door’s latch turned, Obritsa jumped through her threads and into the snow waiting on the other side. She spun on her heel, snapped the threads closed, and ran, not looking back, until she found the safety of her hiding spot, tucked between those two blessedly solid boulders. She stood there, hand clamped over her mouth, back pressed against the cold stone, until her breathing slowed and her heart calmed.

  A few minutes passed, and then the clack of nails against stone and a low trill drew her attention up to the boulders above her.

  There perched Valdís, tail twitching curiously, her furry white head tilting left, then right as she regarded Obritsa huddled in the shadows.

  “Valdís!” hissed Leevi, hurrying forward through the snow. “Get down from there!”

  Valdís chirped sharply like a scolded child, but obeyed at once.

  “Well?” Leevi asked, breathless, his cheeks pink with cold. “Did you get it?”

  “Barely.” Obritsa withdrew the jars from her coat and handed each of them to Leevi.

  “Your hands are shaking,” he observed.

  “They’re nearly frozen,” she snapped.

  He watched her closely. “Did the angels touch your mind?”

  “They tried to. No, they did.” She grimaced. “I don’t know what they saw. I moved quickly, but they’ll come after me soon, I’m sure.”

  “And you’ll be far away from here by then, and so will we.” Leevi tucked the jars into his coat and then faced her, his dark eyes shining. “This is far too abrupt a parting. I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Yes, you do. Fly fast, and tell the world what’s happening here. I’ll return to Genzhar and do the same.”

  Leevi nodded once, hesitated, then knelt before her, taking her hands in his. “Someday, I will repay you for what you’ve done here today. You have brought hope into a place from which hope has long been banished.”

  “If you stop talking and get out of here safely, that will be payment enough.” Obritsa shoved him gently away. His earnest expression was embarrassing her.

  He rose to his feet, murmuring something to Valdís in a language that sounded reminiscent of a Borsvallic dialect, but cruder and harsher. Valdís chirped once and then clomped cheerfully through the snow to press her head against Obritsa’s torso, her long nose spanning from Obritsa’s neck to her navel. Even that gentle touch was nearly enough to knock Obritsa off her feet, but she grabbed on to the dragon’s scaly head and felt such a sudden rush of affection for the godsbeast that for a moment she simply stood there, steadying herself against that lithe, fur-­crested body. The relief of not having to hold herself up, of leaning on something bigger and stronger than she was, reminded her, absurdly, of Artem.

  She stepped away, blinking hard. “Go now, please, before they find you.”

  Without another word, Leevi climbed onto Valdís, settling himself between her folded black wings. He leaned forward against the white fur of her neck, and it seemed to Obritsa in that moment that they were not two beings, but one. Valdís snapped open her wings and, with a great booming heave, pushed herself up into the sky.

  Obritsa watched them fly away, holding her breath at the strange beauty of their passage. Valdís kept low in the mountains, weaving between cliffs and snowy shelves of rock, in order to mask her flight from any angelic eyes below. Obritsa stared after them long after they had disappeared into the darkness. This far north, night fell early. Stars salted the black canvas above; strands of light colored emerald green and brilliant violet twisted above the distant sea.

  At last, Obritsa let out a long exhale and allowed her body to relax.

  But then, behind her, came a footfall in the snow. A small shift of movement.

  She whirled, her hand flying into her pocket for her knife, but then she recognized the figure coming toward her through the shadows and took a faltering step forward.

  “Artem?” she whispered.

  He crashed through the snow and fell to his knees before she could draw breath to say anything more. He crushed her to his chest, saying her name again and again.

  A lightness overcame her, a sparkling relief so profound she felt as if she might float out of her own body.

  “Artem,” she whispered again, carefully, as if speaking too loudly could shatter him. “Please don’t cry.”

  “Why did you do it?” Artem’s voice broke. “You left me, Obritsa, with no message and no hint of where you’d gone.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” She pulled back from him, held his arms firmly. “And if you’re angry with me, I understand. But I had to come back here, and I knew you wouldn’t allow it.”

  “No, I wouldn’t have, because this is not our war to fight. I was a fool to allow you to leave Genzhar.”

  “This wasn’t our war to fight,” she corrected them, “but it is now.”

  Artem shook his head and glared at the frozen ground, his shoulders high and square. “Nothing has changed in these past few days, other than the fact that I will be watching you much more closely from now on.”

  “Everything has changed. There is much to tell you.”

  But then, without warning, a gray fog fell over Obritsa’s eyes, and cold hands clasped hard around her wrists.

  There is indeed much to tell, little queen, came a voice, smooth and amused, slipping into a foreign cold space between her ears. It was of her mind, and it was not. It was an invasion; it was a thing that did not belong. And it was speaking to her.

  Angel, she thought at once, her muddied mind struggling to form even a simple thought. You’re an angel.

  I am, the voice replied. And I’m eager to meet you.

  She heard Artem cry out in pain, the sound jolting her enough that her vision sharpened once more; she saw the stars, the mountains, Artem being dragged through the snow. Then, the presence in her mind dove sharply down, flooding her, and she fell forward into blackness.

  9

  Even before she fully awoke, Obritsa heard Artem’s screams.

  At first, her half-­conscious mind convinced itself that the screams belonged to a nightmare. But then they grew louder, and her ears began to hurt, and her jaw
too, as if she had fallen on it and scraped off some skin, and she came to understand that she was sitting in a hard wooden chair. Not tied to it, but unable to move even so, for when she opened her eyes, she saw Artem on the ground a few feet away. He was writhing. The screams were his, and they were awful. They peeled open, ragged and bursting, like the world unmaking itself.

  She could see no wounds on him, no broken bones. And that kept her still for a moment, shock and confusion bolting her to the chair. Why was he screaming? He looked able to run. Why didn’t he run?

  Then the shadows around him began to move.

  They were in a vast room with soaring vaulted ceilings and a floor of gleaming black stone. Windows sat high in the walls, their panes murky with engravings, or maybe frost, or maybe filth. Starlight leaked through them, illuminating thick black columns, cut square and sharp-­edged.

  “At last, she awakens,” said a familiar voice, and Obritsa watched as the shifting shadows coalesced into a man—­tall and slender, wearing a long black coat that met the floor. Pale and onyx-­haired, eyes bright and unblinking, hands clasped patiently behind his back.

  He regarded her with a small smile on his face, as if he were a parent waiting for his child to unravel a simple puzzle. He blinked, and Artem’s screams diminished; his convulsing body relaxed and stilled.

  “It’s you,” Obritsa whispered, finally able to speak now that Artem had fallen quiet. Her numbness loosened its grip; she felt tear tracks on her cheeks and realized she had been crying. “I heard you in my mind. You’re an angel.”

  He inclined his head. He knelt before her, arms resting loosely on his knees, and even his smallest movements were fluid, musical. He was a poem in the shape of a man.

  “My name is Corien,” he said. “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.” His smile was dazzling—­full lips, straight teeth. “That, I find most delightful of all.”