Lightbringer

by Claire Legrand

  Somewhere above them, silent and unseen in the thick night, Atheria kept watch, ready to dive down and extract Audric if necessary.

  “You’re doing wonderfully, Lu,” came Audric’s low voice. He touched her shoulder, for which she was grateful. Even through her cloak and gown, the warmth of his sun-soaked skin was a familiar balm, one that left her chest aching.

  It had been so long since he had touched her. She had to look at the thought sideways. Head-on, it would shatter her.

  Audric resumed his position at their boat’s prow. He was not a sailor, and yet he looked at ease standing there, his cloak fluttering behind him.

  Ludivine surveyed the soldiers rowing their boats, the elementals working to push the empty warships across the ocean. When they faltered with fatigue, they looked to Audric, this king who was not their own. Queen Fozeyah remained in Quelbani, overseeing the city’s defenses in case of swift retaliation from the Celdarian navy, or the arrival of another storm. Queen Bazati and one thousand Mazabatian soldiers were traveling the land route to Celdaria. In two more days, they would reach the capital.

  Princess Kamayin sat behind Ludivine, working as hard as the other waterworkers she commanded, and they were grateful for her. Their thoughts, when they drifted to Kamayin, were bright with love.

  But it was Audric, too, whom they loved. They found him in the dark, his curls windblown, his brown skin gleaming with moonlight from without and sunlight from within. Engraved in their minds was the moment when he had plunged into the hurricane’s eye and destroyed it from within, his sword ablaze in his bloody palms, the sky blooming gold.

  Since that day, his skin had held a new glow. Golden threads of light gilded his curls. He had always been beautiful to Ludivine—those warm brown eyes, that full mouth, his firm, square jaw.

  Now, he was something out of saintly lore. The Lightbringer, descendant of Saint Katell, reborn in the belly of a storm.

  Her hands trembled. The mental shield she had fashioned to cloak their boats did not waver. But the dark thoughts that had been brewing in her mind for months stirred and swelled, threatening to spill over.

  To keep them at bay, she thought through their plan again.

  The Sea of Silarra was a blunt spear of water between the southern coast of Celdaria and the northern coast of Mazabat. They had been traveling across it for a week. Ludivine could see the dark line of the Celdarian coast on the horizon.

  They had sent ahead a message: The usurper will fall. The sun will rise. And now fifteen warships sailed fast for Celdaria. Hundreds of Merovec Sauvillier’s soldiers had ridden south from the capital to mount a defense. Ludivine sensed them even now—scores of minds waiting at the shore, others gliding out to meet them on warships of their own.

  With the capital emptied of so many of its fighters, Merovec would be utterly unprepared for the arrival of Queen Bazati and the first wave of her army. Ludivine pushed her mind east, toward the road the queen’s army traveled, and was pleased to find them on course. They had left Mazabat days before Audric’s armada and would arrive in the capital in less than two days, long before the soldiers Merovec had sent to the shore could hurry back to the capital and defend it.

  All was as it should be. And yet this was no comfort; Ludivine’s thoughts remained a tangled knot of dread and shame.

  She licked her upper lip, tasting the salt of her sweat, and marveled. Years in this body, and she had still not grown used to its oddities—the icy drip of anxiety, the hot flush of desire, the sharp pinch of hunger. As an angel, centuries ago, she had of course felt such things. But as a human, each sensation was so much more immediate, the hunger more pressing, the desire more insatiable.

  She closed her eyes, fighting the pull of memory. Herself sprawled across Audric’s bed in Baingarde, Rielle tucked between them. Audric reading by candlelight, Ludivine absently toying with Rielle’s hair. Rielle snoring, her cheek pressed against Ludivine’s arm.

  Tears turned Ludivine’s throat tight and hot. She knew such a moment would never come again.

  What is it? Audric scanned the Celdarian shore. You’re troubled.

  It is nothing, Ludivine told him, and she was relieved when she felt the lie pass through him unnoticed.

  Rielle would have felt it at once.

  Your shield is holding. His thoughts were steady, a firm hand guiding her through a dark maze. I hope you are proud of your work. It’s remarkable.

  Ludivine nearly laughed. What would have been remarkable is if I had been stronger. If I had managed to fight past Corien’s hold on Rielle and get her away from him. If I had persuaded her away from his side and back to ours before she opened the Gate.

  As they plunged across the sea, Ludivine remembered that day in Quelbani when the sky had dimmed and the world had grown still. She had reached for Rielle and seen dim echoes of what she had done—the Gate wrenched open, hundreds of thousands of angels freed. Ludivine felt the memory echo in Audric’s mind too, darkening his thoughts. She wished she could hold his hand.

  But touching him would only make things harder.

  Ludivine pressed her palms together and ran her thoughts once more over the shell of her shield. The more diligently she worked, the less room remained inside her for guilt. Guilt would fade and end. Someday, she would not feel it at all.

  Then came a whistling, crackling sound. A hot spear of elemental power shot through the air, and one of the Mazabatian warships burst into flame.

  On the horizon, dozens of lights flared bright. Tiny fires, raging and ready.

  Audric pointed, running his fingers along the shoreline.

  “They’re here,” he muttered. “And they have firebrands.”

  Ludivine felt how unsettled Audric was to see the ships his own father had commissioned sailing toward him through the night in the hands of the enemy. Their sails were ghosts, their new House Sauvillier banners gray and black in the moonlight.

  “Rowers, hard to starboard!” Audric’s voice rang out over the water.

  The rowers obeyed. The six boats veered right, a tight formation within Ludivine’s shield. Kamayin called out to her elementals in a northern Mazabatian dialect.

  “From sky to sky!” she cried. “From sea to sea! Steady do I stand! Never do I flee!”

  The windsingers took up the call, chanting the Wind Rite as they worked. And then the waterworkers began, repeating Kamayin’s second prayer:

  “O seas and rivers! O rain and snow!” Their voices formed a steady chain of sound atop the waves. “Drown us the cries of our enemies!”

  They kept the empty Mazabatian armada sailing north without pause, even as each vessel caught fire and burned. The warships met the Celdarian fleet with no arrows fired, no catapults launched.

  “Turn, you idiots,” Audric whispered, for the Celdarian ships were slow to veer away from the ships bearing down on them.

  Ludivine, her back to the flames, could nevertheless sense how confounded the captains were. Fifteen prized Mazabatian warships sailing at full speed to their destruction?

  She allowed herself a small smile as their six little boats circled wide around the chaos toward the Celdarian shore. Through Audric’s eyes, she saw the fiery Mazabatian ships encircle the bewildered Celdarian fleet, and once they were in place, Audric shouted a single command.

  At once, the elementals lowered their arms. Heads drooped onto shoulders. Some leaned out over the water and heaved.

  But there was still the shore to reach, and after a few moments’ rest, Kamayin called out encouragement, and their tired cloaked fleet resumed course for Celdaria.

  Ludivine stared ahead at the dark coastline. Her heart was a wild thing, its rhythm like the clop of a horse running scared.

  Audric knelt beside her. “Only a little while longer, Lu,” he said. His thoughts were tired; she could sense how the mind-speak had wearied him. “Then we
can rest, catch our breath. You have done so well.”

  She set her jaw against the warmth of his voice. How she had craved its return these long weeks. And now, how she fought to push it from her mind.

  Yes, they would reach the shore soon. They would rest.

  And then, she would run.

  • • •

  The waterworkers quietly sank the boats in a deep cove off the Celdarian coast some hundred miles from Luxitaine, where there was little but tiny farms and fields of sleepy goats. They made a crude camp in a scrubby woodland near an orchard of olive trees. The air was warm, but in me de la Terre, high in the mountains, it would be crisp with the spring snows.

  Ludivine waited until most of their party was asleep. Only two people remained awake: a pale, burly woman and a brown-skinned reed of a man, neither of them an elemental. Soldiers, cursing quietly to each other about their aching arms, their hands blistered from rowing. But Ludivine could sense the bloom of their pride, how glad they were to have seen Audric safely to shore.

  Her throat ached as she sent them to sleep. They would wake in a half hour or so, embarrassed to have dozed off. They would promise each other to never confess it.

  The camp was silent, the moon a thin smile. A goat bleated in its dark field.

  Ludivine’s knees shook as she left the soldiers behind. There was no need to creep; the power that had shielded them across the water shielded her still. They would hear none of her footsteps, not even feel the air her body moved.

  And yet she crept as if across a frozen lake. A sort of madness had taken her. Her thoughts screamed; she could not calm their wild spin.

  At a bent oak, she paused. Her nape itched with sweat. For a moment, she stared at the dark countryside, the farmhouse on the hill to her right.

  She could have gone then and been done with it.

  But she could not resist one last look at him.

  Audric slept beneath the oak, the Sun Guard in a tight circle around him and Sloane not far off, sleeping with her arms folded and a frown on her face.

  Ludivine knelt beside Audric, held his face in her hands. She could hardly bear to look at him, at how soft and dear he was in sleep. The elegant straight line of his nose, the furrow of his serious brow. Even in repose, he looked a king.

  She kissed him as he slept—his temples, his cheeks. Pressing her forehead to his, she breathed the air he exhaled, circled her thumbs against the turn of his jaw.

  “I love you, my friend,” she whispered. “I have never not loved you.” She remembered the words he had given Rielle, how tender his face had been as he spoke them. “My light and my life,” she whispered, then pressed her mouth to his cheek.

  Tears rolled down her face, her chest so tight she feared it would collapse in on itself. Rising, she did not look at him again. When she stumbled away from him, it felt like what she imagined death to be. In his sleep, he was innocent of her cowardice; when he woke, he would be battered with it.

  She put her hand to her chest, willing her heart to stop aching. But she knew it would never. She knew this, and still she left him, trusting that he would be able to sneak through me de la Terre and into Baingarde without her there to protect him. He had the Sun Guard, she told herself. He had forty elementals and twenty-four skilled soldiers and a princess of Mazabat.

  They do not need an angel, she told herself, and because they were asleep, because she had hidden herself so completely, she cried without fear as she fled. Her sobs gripped her chest like a glove of steel. She climbed a little ridge of rock, wiped her face with dirt-smeared hands.

  At the top, she sat on a flat boulder cracked down the middle. It wobbled as she wept. She hugged herself and sent to Audric every memory she had of their years together. Every lazy afternoon stretched out on the rug by the open windows in his rooms, every warm night nestled in his bed. His arms around her, her arms around Rielle. His dark head tucked over her fair one, and Rielle’s face smashed into her neck, or his, happily nuzzling them as she drifted off to sleep.

  When he woke, he would see the memories, and he would hate them. He would hate her for sending them, reminding him of what they had both lost, and he would hate her even more for leaving him. He would not understand it, and she would not leave him with an explanation, for the truth was too craven.

  For years, she had dreamt of a future with them. They would age and have children. Rielle’s power would grow, and she would use the empirium to solidify the hold Ludivine kept on this body she had grown to think of as her own. Rielle would help her truly join with it at last, become human at last, or at least near enough—stripped of her long life, diminished by Rielle’s godly craft to something crude and fragile. And Ludivine would finally be able to rest, no longer fighting to remain intact inside a body but instead simply existing. A being no one would fear or revile. She would love and watch over Rielle and Audric and their family for the rest of her days, and grow old, as they would, and die, as they would, and never be required to live without them.

  But instead, she had failed them both utterly. She had known it for months. Either one or both of them would die in the fight to come, perhaps at each other’s hands, and Ludivine could not bear to see it.

  She rose, shaky, and brushed the twigs from her skirt. Then she turned and saw a looming dark shape among the trees. Monstrously tall, horribly still. Even in the shadows, Atheria’s black eyes were unmissable. They fixed on Ludivine as if she were prey.

  Ludivine froze. Under the godsbeast’s gaze, the shield of her mind felt pitiful and childish. She had never felt more keenly like the coward she was.

  “My love was not enough to save them,” she whispered, clutching her stomach. “If I stay and watch them die, it will kill me.”

  The chavaile stared. Her tail flicked savagely.

  Ludivine turned away, fled fast through the orchard and across the fields beyond, climbed over a crude wooden fence, and then, at the banks of a small stream, looked back.

  Atheria had not followed her. Audric would wake to see the chavaile at his side. Maybe he would see in her great dark eyes the truth she had heard.

  Ludivine squared her shoulders and faced the northern horizon. There were hills, and mountains beyond. Patchy woodlands, rivers rushing to the sea. She knew not where she would go, what she would do. She knew only the drum of her heart, her footsteps stamping out Coward, the hot racing fear that told her to run.

  If she ran, she could hide.

  And if she hid, when the world ended, she could live content inside the cocoon of her memories and pretend she heard nothing.

  31

  Audric

  “For weeks, the magisters and I have been suggesting to Merovec that he implement the reinforcements and defensive measures you outlined in your last letter, but he refuses. He insists the true danger is inside me de la Terre’s walls. He continues his interrogations of elementals and refuses to look past our borders toward the true danger. I suspect it’s because the idea of what’s coming terrifies him. He is incapable of facing it. Many elementals have gone missing. Rumors of bodies stacking up inside Baingarde race through the streets like wildfire. My heart grieves to send you this news, but I can also tell you this: Red Crown is ready. Everything is in place for your return. A series of instructions sent via several different messengers will shortly be en route to you. Patience and courage, my king. Soon, you will be home. For crown and country, we protect the true light.”

  —Encoded letter from Miren Ballastier to the exiled king Audric Courverie, dated February 21, Year 999 of the Second Age

  At every turn in the narrow, dark tunnels beneath Mount Cibelline, a part of Audric held its breath, hoping the next stretch of darkness would reveal Ludivine.

  She would be breathless with excitement. News had come from the north. She hadn’t run away; she had simply gone into hiding to safely make contact with Rielle. And now, Riel
le was coming home, speeding south on some other glorious godsbeast who had come down from the clouds to save her—which would of course make Atheria jealous, Ludivine would point out. He would laugh and embrace her, and then she would shield them all—Audric, Sloane, Evyline and the Sun Guard, Kamayin and her soldiers—as they snuck into Baingarde under cover of night. And by the time Rielle arrived home, the castle would once again be his.

  But the tunnels remained dark, the only sounds those of his breathing, the footsteps of his friends and allies, and the other part of Audric, the less hopeful part, knew the truth:

  Ludivine was not coming back.

  They climbed a narrow set of stone stairs set into the deep earth. Evyline insisted on leading the way; she and Sloane and the Sun Guard had taken this route months earlier and knew it well. Audric marveled at the passage of time. Though only a little over four months had passed since his doomed wedding, the long weeks since had felt like an entire age, and that he had been married to Rielle on the same night as Merovec’s coup—the same night he had fled his home—felt bizarre, even impossible.

  As he climbed, the acid bite of shame flooded his mouth. Sloane and Evyline, the Mazabatian queens, and Princess Kamayin had all told him many times that it was not cowardice that had driven him away, but he still found it difficult to believe them.

  This was a moment in which Ludivine would have reached out to him. It was not cowardice, she would have told him in that low, steady voice of hers. It was wisdom. You could not know what allies remained to you. The vision Corien sent had already thrust the night into chaos. You are the heir to the throne. If you had stayed that night and died, then the reign of Saint Katell and her descendants would truly have been lost.

  But Audric’s mind remained his own, empty but for his whirling thoughts. With each footstep, even as he climbed through the mountain, he felt himself sinking back into the heavy, dark place from which he had only just begun to emerge in recent weeks. He longed to sleep, to tuck himself into a cold corner of these tunnels his ancestors had built and close his eyes forever.