Lightbringer

by Claire Legrand

  Rielle ground the heels of her palms against her temples in tight circles. “Lu, go away.”

  “If you want to see her,” said a small voice from across the room, “I can send you to her. Not all the way there in one go, of course, but eventually. It would be a start. Maybe he wouldn’t attack me, if you were with me.”

  Rielle lifted her head, staring blearily.

  Bound in the opposite corner, the girl-queen Obritsa met Rielle’s gaze. It was the first time she had spoken since Corien had taken Artem belowdecks just after they’d claimed the ship as their own. Where the Kirvayan guard was kept and what games Corien was playing with his mind, Rielle did not know.

  “Isn’t that what you want?” Obritsa continued. “To see Lady Ludivine? To see them both? You didn’t have time to say a proper goodbye, after all.”

  Rielle closed her eyes. “I didn’t want to say goodbye.”

  “I saw you on the night of your wedding. You were devastated. There was agony on your face. You didn’t want to leave them, and yet you did. You felt you had no choice.”

  “I was glad to leave them,” Rielle snapped, pressing her fingers against her forehead. Miniature storms of power crackled between her knuckles. “I should have done it sooner.”

  “You forget that you visited my palace, Lady Rielle,” said Obritsa. “I saw all of you together. I saw you with Prince Audric. King Audric, now. The love between you was not a lie.”

  Rielle’s heart pounded in her ears. “Our love was not a lie then,” she said stiffly. “Now, it would be.”

  “If you say it, I suppose it’s true.”

  “I could disintegrate you with a snap of my fingers, and you know it. Considering that, it seems odd that you would insist on provoking me.”

  If Obritsa felt fear, Rielle could not see it. The shadows under Obritsa’s tired eyes made her face look sunken, yet her poise was impeccable. She was a spy, Rielle knew—a weapon planted on the Kirvayan throne by revolutionaries determined to overthrow the elemental ruling class. And now she was the prisoner of an angel.

  Rielle looked away. The girl was an asset, nothing more. She deserved neither admiration nor pity.

  “He’s busy, maybe even distracted, but he won’t be for long,” Obritsa said quietly. “If you want to see Ludivine and Audric again, you should act quickly, and you know it.”

  Rielle rose unsteadily, hating the new plumpness of her body. Thoughts of the child growing inside her crested bitterly, but she fought against them. She couldn’t think about the life inside her just yet, nor the danger it might pose. She couldn’t think about how furious she was with Corien for keeping the truth of her child from her, even after he had promised her no more lies. He had apologized; she had accepted. That should have been enough.

  Rielle paced. Corien was up on the deck, overseeing his new, gray-eyed crew. She knew that even as he worked his mind would be elsewhere, in a thousand different places across the world and in the Deep. It was possible that, right now, in this moment and perhaps for a few more, he would be distracted and not looking at the captain’s quarters, where Obritsa’s words lingered in Rielle’s ears, and a seed of doubt had begun sprouting slowly in her heart.

  But the girl was right; at any moment, he would return to them. In an instant, he could reach for her, and hear everything they said.

  “It’s taken us weeks to travel this far,” Rielle said quietly. “I wouldn’t be able to get to Celdaria and back before he realized we were gone.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Obritsa agreed.

  “He’d find us before we could get very far.”

  “Most likely.”

  “And punish us. You most of all.” She blew out a sharp breath. “What a stupid idea. You’re stupid for suggesting it.”

  “Undoubtedly.” A beat of silence. “But wouldn’t it be worth it to try?”

  Rielle breathed slowly through her nose, fighting for calm as nerves bubbled hot in her chest, rising higher and higher. Was it worth it to attempt leaving? She imagined being back in Celdaria, in the familiar halls of Baingarde. She could confront Audric, know for certain that he was alive and well. Demand an apology for what he’d said to her on their wedding night.

  Punish him, if she decided to. Reject him forever.

  She could plant her feet on Celdarian soil once more, ride Atheria up to Mount Cibelline’s highest slopes and gulp down the crisp mountain air until her lungs burned.

  But what would she find beyond that? What life could she find there after everything that had happened?

  She turned to the nearby wall, pressing her palms against it, her head pounding in time with the rocking of the ship. “I cannot.”

  Obritsa’s voice tightened with impatience. “You claim to want freedom, and yet you allow him his chains.” Then, in an urgent whisper: “Lady Rielle, if you’d seen what I’ve seen at his base in the north, the things he does in the mountain beneath his fortress—”

  Then, abruptly, Obritsa stopped speaking.

  Rielle whirled just in time to see the girl stiffen. Her eyes glazed over, and she slumped back against the wall.

  The door flew open, and Rielle hurried toward it, met Corien at the threshold with a kiss.

  “I want to get rid of them,” she said breathlessly, her mouth against his, “as soon as we have the casting and take it to…what do you call it? Your base?”

  “The Northern Reach,” he said, voice flat, not responding to her touch.

  “Yes. As soon as we get there, get home, can we rid ourselves of her?” She gestured at Obritsa. “We can find another marque. I don’t like this one. The sight of her repulses me. Such a scrawny little thing.”

  It was a pitiful lie. Obritsa was quite obviously beautiful, and Corien knew Rielle thought so.

  His fingers curled at her waist. His lips hovered over hers. “Your dress is getting tighter. We’ll have to find you a new one.”

  “Several new ones, please? Lacy ones, and velvet. Gowns that feel nice against my skin.” Rielle ran her hands down his torso, paused at his belt, then moved lower. He drew in a sharp breath. This was new, a place she had touched in the dreamscape of their minds but never in reality. Her body fluttering with nerves, she leaned closer and whispered against the skin above his collar, “Things that feel nice as you take them off of me.”

  He caught her wrist, kissed her racing pulse.

  “Stay at my side, Rielle,” he said, “and you’ll get everything you want.”

  A thrill of fear touched her skin. He knew she had been speaking to Obritsa; she had sensed that the moment he entered the room.

  She grinned up at him, pretending they didn’t both know she had been offered the chance to escape him and had come close to taking it.

  Pretending that she knew exactly what she wanted and that it was as simple as the kiss with which she now claimed him.

  • • •

  After a week on the sea, they reached the enormous island of Patria, a country of lush rain forests, high plains, and towering volcanic mountains.

  Once, it had teemed with angels.

  Now, it was a land beautiful in its desolation, echoes of luxury dusting every abandoned street. Broad plazas of cracked marble, spiraling towers capped with copper gone green and black, neighborhoods of slate-roofed manor houses and crumbled apartment buildings bordered with stately columned terraces, all laid out in impeccably designed grids. Wings of bronze and ivory capped peaked roofs, street markers, overgrown gardens.

  But in the centuries since the angels’ defeat, the land had devoured every construction. Bright green vines with ravenous-looking white flowers spilled out of courtyards. Twisting black trees climbed through shattered glass ceilings. In the heart of a sunlit neighborhood stood a cavernous library, its shelves bare and its floor strewn with rotting books.

  “The City of the Skies,” Cor
ien announced as they stepped across the library’s threshold. Overhead, the ceiling was a broken tapestry of colored glass. “The heart of the angelic empire. This is where the empirium raised the first angel from the dust and breathed the gift of long life into her lungs before sending her to live among the clouds.”

  Rielle turned away from him, her gorge rising. She knew that story quite well. Many times, Audric had read it to her from his favorite collection of angelic lore. Even now, she could hear his warm, rich voice shape the words, imbuing it with the rhythm of song.

  Corien turned sharply to glare at her.

  Their eyes met, a hundred warring words on her tongue.

  Then the Obex found them.

  It was an ambush indeed, just as Corien had hoped for, and a pathetic one. As soon as the first arrow flew—whizzing down from behind the spiked parapet of a crumbling watchtower adjacent to the library—Rielle’s exhaustion faded, and her instinct erupted.

  Afterward, she didn’t recall slaughtering them. Their faces, how they had staged their attack, where they hid, what they wore, how many there were, how many of them were humans and how many were marques employed by the Obex—Rielle knew none of this and didn’t care to know.

  She knew only that there were weapons flying at them and that it was time to kill.

  It was over in moments.

  Glorious, fire-hot moments during which she could feel neither the edges of her own body nor the earth under her feet. Her power had been waiting for this moment, brewing under her skin as she slept and fretted; as she huddled, miserable and sick, on the stolen ship; as she hid from the tenacious scraps of Ludivine’s voice in fevered dreams of Corien’s making.

  It had been waiting for weeks, an animal pacing in its cage, and when it broke free of her, the explosion of power knocked Obritsa and Artem to the ground. Rielle remembered blackness rising up and taking her, replacing her eyes and lungs with gold.

  Later, she came to slowly. On her hands and knees, on a shattered marble floor, she panted. A red sun of blood circled her, its rays wet and shining. There were no bodies; flakes of bone drifted slowly through the air like snow. A hum filled Rielle’s ears, and she couldn’t determine if it came from somewhere far away or from deep inside her ribs.

  She fumbled through shards of shattered marble, clods of fresh earth. Her hand landed on a long, heavy piece of metal, and when she lifted Ghovan’s arrow free of the rubble, her vision cleared.

  She sat in a tableau of utter destruction.

  The library was gone, its ruins demolished. Piles of dust and stone were scattered across the uprooted foundations like snowdrifts. Curls of black smoke crowned each of Rielle’s fingers. She cradled the arrow in her arms and smiled, her skin buzzing. She felt the cords of Saint Ghovan’s arrow snap into place as it connected to Saint Marzana’s shield, Saint Grimvald’s hammer, Saint Tokazi’s staff. A web of power that fed her own and painted her skin in veins of bright color.

  She heard something heavy being dragged and looked up to see Corien kneeling a few paces in front of her. He’d found a body, still intact—one of the Obex, she assumed. She’d missed one.

  Corien caught her wrists before she could destroy it.

  “Wait,” he said, his voice coming through a churning sea of color. She blinked, and blinked again. Perhaps her vision wasn’t so clear after all. She could see the black and white of Corien’s familiar form, the faint sheen of red coating the ground, but beyond that, all was gold—gold behind her eyes, gold beneath her fingernails, gold at the corners of Corien’s mouth.

  She lunged forward and kissed him, greedy and full of fire. She bit his lips, climbed into his lap. She was ravenous. In her right hand, she clutched Saint Ghovan’s arrow.

  “Rielle, wait, listen to me.” Corien’s voice floated down from the clouds. Gently, he detached himself from her. “I need you to try something for me. Now, while you’re still hot and humming. My beautiful girl.” He pressed a kiss to her brow. His voice was urgent, thrumming with excitement. Or was she herself thrumming? The whole world was thrumming, and she had made it so.

  Smiling, she touched his face. She’d been drunk before on wine and ale, but that was nothing compared to being drunk on the ecstasy of her own power. She sensed, distantly, that it had never been this good before, never this eager or quick—and never this disorienting. How suddenly it had erupted; how violently it had come over her.

  She braced her palms against the ground. “What is it you want?” She laughed at the absurd shape of her hands in the dirt. “Anything. I can do anything.”

  “I know you can.” Corien pushed the Obex’s body closer to her. “I have friends here. Many of them. Can you see them?”

  He sent her a thought, and she sensed how tentative it was, how careful. He was being careful with her in a way he’d never been before.

  He was afraid.

  She would ask him about that later, but at the moment she was fascinated by the thoughts he was sending her. She became aware of a new presence—a dozen of them, dozens of them, all drifting nearby. Consciousnesses. Mighty ones.

  “Angels,” she breathed, looking around in wonder. “There are angels here.”

  The empirium granted her vision that her eyes would never possess. Faint shapes drifted through the air, dim and pale, shapeless and anguished. Their voices teemed, whispering. They did not have hands or arms, and yet she felt them reaching for her, imploring. They lacked cohesion. The empirium gold glinting inside them was pale, worn out.

  “Those who have escaped the Deep,” Corien was saying quietly, “but who are not strong enough to be soldiers, I have sent here, to the City of the Skies, to hide and to wait. For you, my vicious marvel.” He paused, a tense, expectant beat. “Will you try? Now, for me? Your power is so vital right now, I can barely…Rielle, I can hardly look at you. You’re brilliant. You’re shining.”

  “I am the Unmaker,” she said simply, kindly. An explanation. “And I am the Kingsbane. But you shouldn’t be afraid of me.” This she announced to the air. She felt settled in her own skin, blissfully calm. “Who among you is bold enough to be the first angel reborn? Come forward. Come to me.”

  A mind approached her, curious and afraid, trying to mask its fear. A child, Rielle thought. A boy. A vision of truth came to her: As an angel, during the First Age, this child had been a creature of alabaster skin, hair that fell in auburn waves past his shoulders, amber eyes flecked with bright green. When the Deep took him, rent his body from him, he had been mere decades old, quite young for an angel.

  “Malikel,” Rielle whispered. “Don’t be afraid. Be reborn.”

  Her empirium-bright vision took her under. It showed her that the boy, Malikel, was at his core nothing more than stardust. Millions of spinning orbs, each more brilliant than the sun, each connected to all the others—and to the ground Rielle knelt upon, and to the darkening shape of the corpse at her feet. It was an abomination, that corpse. She hated the sight of it. Why would it lie gaping before her like this, so dead and dim, so lifeless, when it could easily be made whole again?

  She worked quickly. Her power was endless, brewing like a storm. She followed its reach up to Malikel, tugged on the threads of his mind. Some nearby threads, slippery and elusive, she could not touch, not yet—the threads connecting this place to that place, the threads connecting the moments ahead of her to the moments behind.

  Darkly, she thought of Obritsa. It wasn’t fair that the girl should enjoy privileges Rielle could not.

  “Someday I will travel anywhere and everywhere,” she murmured as she knit together the threads she could touch—the physicality of the corpse, the eagerness of Malikel’s mind—and dreamt of the threads she couldn’t. “Someday, I will travel to the ends of everything and then back to the beginnings. Someday, marques will fall to their knees in envy of me, for I will surpass them.”

  “Concentrate, Rielle
,” Corien said urgently, his voice near and far at once. “You’re dimming fast.”

  And he was right. Something was changing so rapidly that it made her falter. Malikel’s mind, all his ancient thoughts, were half knitted to this corpse, this body with its brightening light. A braided path brought them slowly together, a connection of the empirium itself—angel to corpse, vibrant mind to dead flesh. The beginning of a new life, crafted by her own will.

  But then Rielle’s fingers caught on an empirial knot—a snag in the fabric of energy she had woven—and she stumbled in her work. The energy that had come over her as she killed the Venteran Obex bled swiftly from her. It was as if she’d been holding up a palace with her own two hands, lifting it high in the air, and then her muscles gave out without warning and the entire structure came tumbling down. The knots unraveled; the threads of mind-to-flesh and flesh-to-mind slipped from her grip.

  She didn’t hear Malikel’s scream, for he had no mouth, no voice, but she felt his panic, his terror and pain. It wasn’t just that the stitches she had created were unraveling.

  Malikel himself was unraveling.

  She felt the essence of his mind unspool. Something at the core of his consciousness was rent open and flew apart, a detonation. The pieces of him went flying, his thoughts reduced to sheer terror, and then he was gone.

  Rielle sat back hard on her heels.

  The corpse steamed at her feet, now a puddle of blood, bone, and punctured organs. A constellation of sizzling gashes dotted what had once been its torso, and through the gashes blazed a golden light, rapidly fading.

  Rielle looked up at Corien through a veil of weariness, and as her exhaustion returned, she began to understand what had happened. The thoughts of the other angels brushed up against her, all of them terrified, all of them astonished and cowed.

  “I’m not ready yet,” Rielle said at last. “I thought I could do it; I felt how close I was. I’ve been close.” She cried tears she did not ask for, registered a sadness that felt too far from her to touch. Her mind was wrapped in sheets of thick cotton. She wanted to lie down in the dirt and sleep for months. Her nose and mouth filled with the scent and taste of blood. Her thoughts crested and dove, darting from desire to desire, and she didn’t know how to quiet them.