Remy climbed up one of the palace gutters and slipped inside a smashed window. Someone had thrown a head through the glass. The prisoners of Vaera Bashta were gathering at the palace doors, roaring to be heard, pounding on the walls, begging for entrance. Corien’s troops had scattered through the city to fight the cruciata, desperate to avoid the bright blue sprays of blood. Using vaecordia, the same massive mechanized cannons that Corien had sent to the Gate, a regiment of angels fired at Ostia and the cruciata scrambling out of it.
Ludivine, sitting quietly at the outermost edges of Remy’s mind, led him into a small chamber on the palace’s third floor. The nurses’ ward, where Corien’s physicians patched up mutilated human bodies until they were suitable for angelic use. Remy had stolen weapons from the Lyceum before the prisoners had invaded it—two little daggers and a sword strapped to his back. Jessamyn had trained him well in their short time together, and the four adatrox hovering listlessly at the doors were useless fighters. Angels no longer guided their movements. They moaned wordless cries of agony, swung their blunt fists, tried to ram Remy against the wall.
He darted between them, slashed their throats, then hurried inside the room.
There was Jessamyn, gritting her teeth as she pulled on her boots and jacket over her bandages. Ludivine felt them lay eyes on each other. Jessamyn: surprised relief. Remy: weary gladness. He hadn’t thought he would be lucky enough to find her.
The cruciata have invaded the city, he told Jessamyn.
I can see that. Her wry reply.
He approached her carefully. Ludivine sensed how prepared he was to kill her if she tried to stop him. She was wounded; he might manage it.
I need your help, he said. I don’t know the palace. You do. And you’re a better fighter than I am. We need to get Eliana out of here.
Jessamyn nodded. I’d thought of that. Who else can stop the beasts? The Emperor certainly can’t. She eyed his belt. I need a knife.
He tossed her one, and they ran. Ludivine watched them weave through the palace toward Corien’s favorite theater. Music began to play, accompanying their quick, light footsteps. Brass horns set high in the rafters crackled with sound. Lights flashed at each juncture of wire that connected them—galvanized power, sparking as it worked. Lamps flickered in their casings.
The music was choral, sweeping, triumphant. Ludivine recognized it as the symphony Corien had commissioned from a recent acquisition—a young composer from Mazabat, prodigiously talented, who had surrendered to save her wife.
Ludivine dared to brush her mind across the theater, the barest sweep of a touch. She saw Corien lounging in his favored curtained box, flush with wine. He had locked the doors; he was brooding. The city was falling down around him, and he was ignoring it. He had nearly killed Eliana, and realizing that had frightened him. So there he sat, furious and terrified, unwilling to face the reality of his failure.
Or so Ludivine supposed; she would not dare touch his mind. But after thousands of years, she knew him well enough to guess.
Below, the audience—bloodstained and wild-eyed, plucked from the city by Corien’s generals to enhance the evening’s entertainment—applauded frantically for the orchestra. Ludivine felt the frenzied buzz of their thoughts: maybe, if they cheered loudly enough, the Emperor would let them stay inside, locked away and safe.
And sitting in a chair near Corien was Eliana, unconscious and horribly pale, sweating out nightmares Corien had left wedged in the brittle glass of her mind.
Only when she looked at Eliana did Ludivine feel pain. Her face was the perfect combination of Rielle’s and Audric’s. His full mouth, her arched brows. Her sharp jaw, his lovely brown eyes.
If Ludivine allowed herself, she would be able to remember their warmth, their arms wrapped around her, the soft fragility of their skin. Her rage, his grief. Her passion, his strength. Soothing Rielle to sleep after yet another night of dream-horrors. Audric howling in Ludivine’s arms on the floor of his rooms in Mazabat.
How desperately and fatally she had loved them.
But Ludivine did not allow any of this. Her mind was silver and clean, sharp as death.
Stay with us, little one. She didn’t dare touch Eliana. Corien would feel it. Instead, she said it to herself. Just a little longer.
She began her slow retreat from the palace. No movement too swift, no movement unplanned. Everyone was running where they should. There were Remy and Jessamyn, sneaking through the palace toward the theater. There were Navi, Ysabet, Zahra. Patrik and Hob, their soldiers. All of them fighting their way through the city.
There was another person Ludivine needed to find, perhaps the most essential piece of all. As always, when reaching for him, she sent her instructions with a silent apology—for everything she had done to him and everything he had lost.
But she would do it again if she had to, and he knew it. She would destroy his mind and remake it a thousand times if she had to.
It’s time, she told him.
Understood, he replied with a tiny shiver of joy, for even all the abuse she had dealt him had not destroyed his love for what his blood could do, for all the fearsome secrets it held.
She felt him draw his gun, heard him stalk through the corridors of the palace. Wailing adatrox intercepted him, bewildered and terrified. A human man in a ruined blue suit, bold and delirious with trauma, crawled through a smashed window and leapt onto his back. But his shots were clean, his blades precise and deadly. She knew that better than anyone, had made certain he was more weapon than man long before Corien had gotten the chance to do the same.
It was the only way, Ludivine told him, as she had told him many times before. He did not answer her; she did not expect him to. She left him to his work.
She sat in her chair, watching her three candles burn, but her mind was everywhere. She held her sword and waited.
34
Audric
“Dearest sister. You’ll not believe the story I have to tell you, so I’ll wait until we meet in person and you can see for yourself the extraordinary circumstances of my new life. Suffice it to say, there are dragons, and there’s a boy, and I love them all. We’re on our way home to you—though not directly—along with a marque and her guard, and several others whom we freed from a secret angelic prison in the far north. I must sound mad to you, but for the first time in my life I feel like myself. I’ll see you soon, and I know I’ll need to do much to earn back your trust, but know this: I’m ready for war at last. I’m ready to fight for our home. And I’ll not be leaving you again.”
—Encoded letter from Ilmaire Lysleva to his sister, Ingrid, dated March 30, Year 1000 of the Second Age
Audric was sitting in the gardens behind Baingarde when his mother found him.
“I thought I might find you under this tree,” she said, without insinuation or scorn and settled beside him in the soft, spring grass. The earth was black and damp, the trees heavy with that morning’s rain. Twilight painted the gloom a soft violet, and the pink blooms of the sorrow tree overhead were finally beginning to open.
Audric forced a small smile. “If anyone else caught me moping under the tree where I first kissed the Kingsbane, they might try to take my crown again.”
Ludivine, he tried once more, are you there?
He had been trying all afternoon, had wasted four hours under this tree as the sun faded from honey to lavender.
Wherever she was, she still refused to answer.
“All the Mazabatian soldiers have been assigned lodgings,” Genoveve began. The gray folds of her linen gown pooled atop the wet grass like fallen petals.
“You’ll ruin your dress,” Audric pointed out.
“I have many dresses,” Genoveve said mildly. “The commanders and as many of the infantry as we could accommodate are in the barracks. The rest of them are lodged throughout the city. So many people opened up the
ir homes. Odo has set up rather luxurious makeshift barracks in his rooftop gardens.”
“I would imagine the commanders in our barracks are jealous of whoever was lucky enough to get those beds.”
“Undoubtedly.”
Audric huffed a soft laugh. Talking about procedure should have helped clear his troubled mind, but his thoughts still felt clouded. He shifted them to the piles of notes stacked neatly on his desk.
“I’ve sent letters to Ingrid Lysleva and the Kirvayan regent,” he said. “Queen Fozeyah will come with more troops once they’re ready. Ten thousand by the first of May.”
Genoveve nodded, her hands white and still in her lap. Her cheeks were sunken, her every bone pronounced, but the braided twist of her auburn hair was immaculate, and her gray eyes were flint.
“In the Archon’s absence,” she said, “Grand Magister Guillory has assumed leadership of the Church. The other magisters agreed. It was unanimous.”
Audric thought of Tal’s empty chair in the Magisterial Council chamber, how Miren—straight-backed, square-shouldered—refused to look at it.
“A sunspinner in command of the Church,” Audric said, smiling faintly.
“And a sunspinner on Katell’s throne.”
Genoveve was looking at him now. He kept his eyes fixed on the black seeing pools, sitting quietly in the sea of grass some twenty feet away.
“And the watchtowers?” he asked.
“Construction has begun on the eight that will surround the city.”
“And the builders I assigned to the remaining sixteen?”
“They and their supplies are en route to the northern roads. By month’s end, we’ll have a line of towers from here to the northeastern border, each of them magicked by earthshakers and metalmasters.”
Audric nodded. “And I have riders set to depart in the morning for the seats of all the major houses. Gourmeny and Montcastel. The Valdorais holdings in the Far Fallows.”
After a pause, Genoveve cleared her throat. “And what will you do with the soldiers from House Sauvillier? Our prisons are overflowing.”
“I’ll meet with them individually, then reinstate them if I can. We can’t spare a single sword.”
“And if there are some who don’t wish to fight for you?”
“I don’t wish to fight for me.”
Genoveve reached for his hand. “Audric…”
“They can go if they wish. I won’t have a mutinous army fighting at my back. But they’ll be safer here than they will be elsewhere, and I’ll remind them of that. Every elemental from here to Borsvall will be gathering in me de la Terre. If they leave, they will have to face the angels on their own. I think the majority of them will stay and fight and keep their dislike to themselves.”
“They don’t dislike you, Audric,” said Genoveve delicately. “They dislike her.”
“In fact, they do dislike me, and some of them even hate me, and perhaps wish Merovec had cut me in half, because I was foolish enough to love her. And I would rather not talk about Rielle, Mother.”
A long moment of silence. “Sloane told me about the weeks following your arrival in Mazabat. She told me about the weight you’ve been carrying. The change in you.”
Something flared in Audric’s chest, a hot spark of anger. He was grateful for it. When he was angry, he couldn’t think about everything else.
“I’m still the same person I always was,” he said tightly. “I can still lead fighters. I can still discipline traitorous soldiers.” Illumenor, sliding quick through Merovec’s body. The memory liked him, showed itself to him a dozen times a day. “I can still kill.”
“I see the sadness in your eyes, Audric.”
At last he glared at her. “And I see the sadness in yours. What good can come of this conversation?”
Genoveve watched him steadily. “For years, you urged your father to study the prophecy. You begged him to read the books you brought him, to educate himself on the writings of the great elemental scholars. And he never did. Do you know why?”
It was a turn in the conversation that Audric had not expected. He blinked. “No.”
“Because he was frightened.” Genoveve gazed at the seeing pools, the catacombs a distant gray ghost beyond them. “Katell’s line had been without true sunspinners for generations. And then you were born and started playing with sunlight while still in your cradle, even before the forging of your casting. Your father knew what that meant, and so did I. Whenever he looked at you, he saw the portent of a war he had long ago convinced himself would never come in his lifetime. The world was at peace. The Gate stood strong. And then you were born. The Lightbringer. More powerful than he ever was, and braver too. You were always willing to consider the worst and face it head-on. The fact of your power, the idea of a war—these things never frightened you, nor did Aryava’s words of doom.”
Audric shook his head. She had lost him with that one. “I’m always frightened.”
“And yet the people who fight for you don’t know it. In their eyes, you are Katell born again. And now you draw to you the crowns of Mazabat and Borsvall. Our allies, descendants of the saints, just as you are. Borsvall nearly became our enemy, but you forged a new friendship with them.” She paused. “Was it an angel who assassinated poor Princess Runa two years ago?”
“That is my guess,” Audric said grimly. “Hoping to spark the fires of war between Celdaria and Borsvall.”
“And yet you did not allow that to happen. You dared friendship, and now Borsvall may come to fight alongside us. You build watchtowers and order our metalmasters to forge thousands of new swords. You walk the streets of your city and talk to your people not as if you are a king and they your subjects, but rather as if you are a Celdarian and they are too. They are frightened, but you are not. That is what they see.
“And, Audric,” Genoveve added quietly, her fingers gently pressing his, “I worry that if you don’t talk about her—at least to me, or Sloane, or Miren, or Princess Kamayin—then everything you’re feeling will rise up and crack you open. Our people can’t see that. If they’re to face their deaths at the ends of angelic swords, they must never look at you and see how deeply you’ve been hurt. They must look at you and see an icon. Not a man, but a symbol. Not Audric, but the Lightbringer. It isn’t fair, but neither is the crown, and only if you wear it do we have any hope of surviving what’s to come. Of that I am certain.”
She sighed, and silence followed. They watched Atheria playing among the distant pines, trilling happily as she chased bright jays from their nests.
“Maybe if I had been a mother to her,” Genoveve said, “if I had welcomed her into our family with graciousness and warmth, we would not be where we are now.”
Audric took a moment to breathe. He hadn’t been lying—he did not want to talk about Rielle. But his mother was beside him, and she would not always be.
“It’s not as simple as that,” he told her flatly. “Maybe if the Archon hadn’t forced her to endure the trials. Maybe if Lord Dervin hadn’t caught us kissing in the gardens. Maybe if I hadn’t pushed her away on our wedding night.”
He blinked back his tears. “Or maybe none of that mattered, and regardless of what we did, we would have ended up right where we are. Maybe Aryava’s prophecy means exactly what it says: there is a queen of light and a queen of darkness. And maybe Rielle was always the latter, and nothing we said to her could have changed that.”
Genoveve made a soft sound, considering. “Have you wondered where the other queen is? If Rielle truly is the Blood Queen, then—”
“She is with child.” It was the first time Audric had said it aloud. The words ripped something from him; in their absence, a hollow place opened inside him.
“My child,” he added quietly. “Our child. Ludivine told me before she left.”
Genoveve put her fingers to her mouth. A litt
le choked sound shook her shoulders. A dove made its mournful cry high in the sorrow tree’s blooms.
“Ludivine told me the child is a girl,” he went on. “So maybe she is our Sun Queen, our unborn salvation.”
Genoveve pressed his knuckles to her lips and closed her eyes. A long moment passed before she released him and wiped her face.
“I wish Ludivine were here to help you,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth about her,” Audric said, though he didn’t feel sorry. He only felt tired. He imagined his bed, how enormous and lonely it was, how small he felt inside it.
“I understand why you didn’t. You needed her—both of you did—and if I had known the truth, I would have had her exiled, or at least tried to. I would have tried many different ways to be rid of her and failed, and then I would have been regarded with even more pity and disgust than I already am.”
His mother spoke with no hint of self-loathing, no bitterness. Now Audric was the one to watch her carefully—the thin straight line of her nose, the painful sharpness of her jaw, how she held herself with such stillness. Was it because she was afraid of breaking? Or because she had been broken so many times that the idea no longer frightened her?
“Mother,” he began. “That’s not how it is.”
Genoveve smiled at him. “I don’t need comfort. I only want you to sit with me. I want you to come to me when the weight of this becomes too heavy for even your shoulders. I cannot take it from you, but God help me, I wish I could.”
She cradled his face in her hands, touched his cheeks, pushed the curls back from his eyes.
“My brave boy,” she whispered, and then brought his head down to kiss his brow.
They sat in silence, hand in hand, and waited for nightfall. Audric watched Atheria spin slow shadows through the trees.
I fear no darkness, he prayed. I fear no night.
I ask the shadows to aid my fight.
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