Lightbringer

by Claire Legrand

  There you are, he thought, slipping into the wrecked grooves of her mind. My little runaway. I thought I’d lost you.

  Eliana gasped for air, her back arching violently. Her hands scrabbled for purchase on the blood-slicked ground. Every muscle in her body strained against her skin.

  Pinned and helpless, she gazed up through a film of tears at the thing that would kill her at last. This angel she had never seen, controlled by another gone mad from centuries of grief.

  Then, out from the angel’s throat plunged a strange blade—an iridescent copper, shadows shifting across it. Blightblade, Eliana thought, shaky and reeling. Fountains of blood spurted from the angel’s neck. The blade tore free, and the body twitched, then fell hard. Empty now, nothing more than a corpse.

  And over it stood Simon in imperial black, his scarred face streaked with blood and grime. His expression was furious. A dark cloak lined with crimson fell to his knees, and across his torso cut a red sash like a bloody smile.

  His bright-blue gaze found Eliana’s, locked on for one blazing instant. Something metallic crashed behind her. She turned, still unsteady on the ground, still woozy, but Simon was faster. He darted in front of her, blightblade in one hand, revolver in the other, and shot three angels as they leapt for her. All three copper bullets struck under their chins, where their helmets left them vulnerable.

  There is a door in the far wall, the Prophet instructed. Narrow and plain. White stone. Run to it now. Remy will follow. I must protect him. They are confused, but that will end soon.

  It was as if someone had turned the world inside out. Eliana blinked, searching the plaza, while above her Simon fired shot after shot. Out of bullets, he flung his gun aside and drew another from the belt at his waist. I must protect him, the Prophet had said. Because now, Simon was the one drawing their ire. Simon, the Emperor’s favorite.

  When Eliana found the Prophet’s door, a sick heat rushed down her body. A moment ago, the door had not been there—she was sure of it. Thick swaths of blood, both red and blue, slashed across its surface.

  Now, Eliana!

  Eliana pushed to her feet, searching for Remy. More cruciata were slinking over the walls. They tackled the angels, lashed them with their tails.

  In their midst, Jessamyn fought a single angelic soldier. She swung her sword at him; their blades crashed together and locked. The angel swore at her, the ripples of his fury ricocheting through the plaza. Eliana knew that look. He was trying to get at Jessamyn’s mind but couldn’t.

  Her skin prickled. A hidden door. A thwarted angel.

  The Prophet was everywhere.

  The angel fighting Jessamyn spat a curse in Lissar. Eliana had come to know the word well. Corien shouted it at his servants, often flung it like a knife into Eliana’s mind. The Prophet had translated it for her. It meant whore.

  Jessamyn bared her teeth at her attacker. Sweaty strands of red hair had come loose from her braid and clung to her neck. “My name,” she shouted, her voice cracking, “is Jessamyn.”

  The angel shoved her to the ground and raised his sword. Eliana looked away before it could fall.

  Simon was running toward the Prophet’s door, an unconscious Remy slung over his shoulder. He locked eyes with Eliana’s. “Go, now!”

  Eliana ran for it, but she saw at once that there was no latch. Her power rose like the heat of an explosion. She punched her fists toward the door, castings ablaze inside her clenched fingers.

  The door shattered. Shards of stone went flying. Beyond it, narrow stone stairs descended into darkness.

  Eliana ran toward them, choking on clouds of white dust. Once Simon passed over the threshold with Remy, she whirled back around and flung her palms at the door. Rock and dust reassembled in seconds, flying back into a solid wall of rock, sealed tight against the city beyond.

  In the darkness, Eliana heard only her own ragged breathing, her own pounding head. The tunnel had swallowed all sounds of battle.

  She found Remy slung over Simon’s shoulder, cradled his cheek in one hand, and held her other before his mouth. A faint puff of hot air, then another. He was breathing. Weak with relief, she stepped back, away from the heat of Simon’s body. They stood for a moment, the silence thick and scorching between them. Eliana’s castings threw a faint golden light across the scarred lines of Simon’s face and the iridescent blightblade still clutched in his hand, dripping blood.

  Eliana glanced at it. “Is he in there?” she said tightly.

  “No.” He would not look at her. “I tried long ago. He’s too strong for blightblades. They can’t hold him.” Simon flicked the blade a little, as if scorning it. “It’s the other angel in here, the one whose body he momentarily took possession of to find you. The blade will have weakened him, though. That will buy us time.”

  Eliana stared at Simon, hardly seeing him. It was too strange, standing in the near-dark beside him. As if the past months hadn’t happened and they were back where they had begun.

  Come to me, little one. The Prophet sent her a feeling too muddled to decipher. Simon knows the way. I’ll explain everything once you’re here.

  Simon shifted Remy on his shoulder and turned away from the steady gold burn of Eliana’s hands.

  “Follow me,” he said, his voice flat, unreadable.

  She wanted to seize him, burn his face with her castings until he writhed as she had, until he screamed her name as she had screamed his.

  Only the Prophet’s gentle voice stayed her hands. I’m sorry it had to be this way. I took no enjoyment in it.

  Eliana said nothing more to either of them. By the light of her castings, she followed Simon down the stairs. She couldn’t look away from the dark blond crown of his head, mussed and bloody from battle. She imagined grabbing it, then smashing his face against the stairs. Her head ached from Corien’s last attack, ready to split open, and she almost wished it would, for then she wouldn’t have to face what came next. She felt numb, as if she had entered another world, one in which she understood nothing. Her legs moved of their own volition, carrying her deeper into the endless darkness. Her throat ached with each frigid inhalation. The air had grown cold.

  At last, the stairs ended. Beyond them spiraled a web of tunnels and chambers. Three people with the bustling efficiency of soldiers hurried by with weapons, packs of supplies, clean folded linens. Their eyes, when they found Eliana’s, were clear.

  They stopped to watch her, and then four more hurried out of the shadows, breathless, their eyes shining. As she passed them, they sank to their knees and bowed their heads. They kissed their fingers and touched their closed eyes, murmuring prayers in her wake.

  Beside the entrance to a chamber flickering with candlelight, Simon stopped. Still he wouldn’t look at her. He placed Remy on a bench outside the chamber, so tender and careful, even in his stark uniform emblazoned with wings, that Eliana nearly went for his throat with the knife Jessamyn had given her. Her imagination went crystalline with anger, showing her how the blade would sink into his chest and scrape bone. She thought of Jessamyn, how at the moment of her death, she had still believed Eliana intended to close Ostia and save the city, and felt the sharp rise of tears.

  “You dare pretend kindness,” Eliana whispered.

  A moment of silence. Then Simon turned to her, his eyes lowered. Her pulse drummed against her throat. Since that night on the shores of Festival, his face had been steel from brow to jaw. Now, every hard line had softened, haggard with weariness.

  She wanted desperately to look away but could not. He seemed to shrink from her, as if she were too brilliant to be seen.

  “It was the only way, Eliana,” he said, the first time he had uttered her name in months. His voice broke beneath the word, and his fingers flexed at his sides, as if he longed to reach for her. “That’s what she told me. It was the only way.” He drew a ragged breath, then at last lifted
his gaze to meet her own.

  She stepped back from him. That piercing blue, the full force of it like a strike to her chest. Once, it had held the heat of desire, the flint of anger.

  Not once until now had she seen his eyes raw with grief.

  A voice spoke from within the chamber. Gentle and familiar, though different than it had felt in her head. There was a clarity to it now, as if a veil had been lifted.

  Eliana gratefully turned away from Simon, her knees liquid and her throat sour, and entered the chamber to her right.

  In its heart, positioned between three flickering candles, a young woman sat in a polished chair. Pale and golden-haired, she wore a gown of rose and lilac that buttoned at her throat and mimicked the look of an armored breastplate. She held a sheathed sword in her lap, and her eyes were twin drops of ink. Colorless and ancient.

  But Eliana was not afraid.

  “You are the Prophet?” she whispered.

  The woman smiled softly. “You may call me Ludivine. I knew your parents.”

  She lifted the sword from her lap. The weapon’s strength pulsed against Eliana’s skin. Her power rose in greeting, making her teeth ache and her castings flare with heat, and she knew, though she had never seen it before, exactly what sword this was. Her blood knew its flavor, knew each engraved line of its hilt.

  Ludivine held up the sword, the sheathed blade flat on her palms. Above it, her black eyes shone. A strange sight: Eliana had never before seen an angel look upon anything with love.

  “The last surviving casting of the seven saints,” said Ludivine. “It has belonged to your family since Saint Katell used it to strike the angels from the sky. It survived the death of your mother. And now, little one, it belongs to you.”

  36

  Rielle

  “We have done all we can do. The watchtowers stand tall in the mountains. Earthshakers and waterworkers have deepened the lake. The forges burn day and night, churning out weapons by the dozens. Hundreds of civilians have fled the city, making for Luxitaine. Everyone able to stand and fight has stayed behind to bolster the Celdarian and Mazabatian armies. The angels are approaching. Well, let them come. We’re as ready as we’ll ever be. For crown and country, we protect the true light. And may God, or the empirium, or whatever damn thing is out there urging these dark tides—may something, anything, help us.”

  —Journal of Odo Laroche, merchant and member of Red Crown, dated April 24, Year 1000 of the Second Age

  Rielle knew she was alive. She knew she was standing. Beyond that, she knew very little of her body.

  Her thoughts careened through the stars. Each one brought her back a new piece of information about the mountains on the western continent, the endless black space beyond the clouds, the other worlds residing within it. Her skin was afire, her blood bubbling hot. The empirium insisted on pouring a million pieces of the world into her mind. It was too much and too fast, but Rielle could not stop herself from drinking. Her ears ached, her temples boomed like drums, and still she consumed.

  Corien arrived at her side. His presence pulled her thoughts back to her human body, which rankled her. She stared at the horizon until her irritation subsided. She could see things now—close things—that she hadn’t been interested in before.

  There were the mountains surrounding me de la Terre. Twelve mountains, carpeted with pines, and the highest of them—fearsomely huge, snowcapped—towered over the castle at its feet.

  There were the armies she and Corien had made over the past weeks and months. Ten thousand gray-eyed adatrox, puppeted by angels. Countless angels remained bodiless, their only weaponry the cunning power of their minds. And five thousand more walked the countryside of Celdaria, exquisitely crafted by her own hands and tethered solidly to the human bodies that housed them. Some flew; others strode. Scintillant and giddy, ravenous for revenge at last, their angelic glory would be obvious to the people watching their approach—the soldiers trembling nervously in their watchtowers, the children looking wide-eyed over their parents’ shoulders as they fled the city for the sea.

  There was the soft light of dusk, amber and tangerine to the west, violet to the east. There were the farmlands rolling in neat lines toward the capital. Spring seedlings turning quietly in the soil.

  And there was the roundness of her belly and the little life growing inside it. Rielle regarded it askance, this tiny assemblage of lit-up fibers kicking hard against her palms. Maybe allowing it to live after all was unwise. Two queens will rise, Aryava had said. One of blood, and one of light.

  She scratched her stomach, her nails catching on the delicate threads of her gown. It was a dramatic garment. Unadorned blood-colored sheer silk from collar to hem. Long slits to her thighs left her legs free to move. The skirt began high on her waist, falling loose around her belly. She wore no shoes; she didn’t need them. The night air of spring was cool, but her blood was high summer. She curled her toes into the dirt. The soles of her feet were black from traveling.

  She had designed the gown herself the morning before they left the Northern Reach. The first five sketches had ended in a frenzy. Each time she recreated the lines of her protruding stomach, a wildness came over her. That girl on the mountain. Audric’s eyes in a frightened face. Skin lighter than Audric’s but darker than her own, a light brown like the sweep of pale sand. Dark brown hair in a thick, messy braid, uncertain power trembling at her fingertips, her hands adorned with thin gold chains. My name is Eliana.

  Rielle had blacked out each scribbled drawing until the girl vanished from her mind and ink stained her fingers. The nib of her pen scored harsh grooves into Corien’s polished desk. Once she had managed to complete a design, she watched the tailors work frantically through the night to finish the gown, gratified to see the sweat painting their brows.

  Would her own daughter be the queen to rise up against her? Her palms tingled against her belly.

  Corien put his cool hand over hers, scattering her thoughts.

  “Look at them,” he whispered, sweeping his arm through the air to encompass the staggering ocean of their troops. There were the orderly lines of angelic soldiers. The generals wore black velvet cloaks hemmed in gold. There were the beasts Corien and his physicians had engineered under the northern mountains—crawlers, cruciata imitations, deformed and bulging. Their flapping, fleshy wings, armor embedded in their feathered, scaly hides. Controlled by angelic minds, the blank-eyed elemental children sat astride the beasts, their wrists and necks bound with castings.

  Rielle examined the beasts’ inner workings, blazing gold and complex. There was the muscled might of the Borsvallic ice-dragons; there were the scars left behind by the knives of Corien’s mad underground surgeons. The power of the elemental children encircled the crawlers and their forged armor like nets, ready to tug and whip, summon and blast.

  “You’ve done remarkably well,” Rielle said serenely. “But I can see where improvements could be made.”

  Corien lifted her hand to his lips. “In due time, my love. Worlds, remember? We have entire worlds to make our own after this.”

  “To unmake and remake as we see fit,” she whispered. An insatiable appetite stirred in the marrow of her bones.

  “Rielle the Kingsbane.” Corien turned her face to his. “Rielle the Unmaker.”

  “I held a world in my hands,” she whispered, closing her eyes as his mouth brushed against her jaw. Her thoughts sang as they returned to that endless glittering sea, the girl in the white gown pulling her into the stars. “I want to do it again. Tell me we will. Tell me it won’t be long.”

  “Soon, you will have everything you desire,” he said, his breath hot on her mouth, “and so will I. You will pluck worlds from the stars and set them spinning to please you. You will find God and demand something better than what we have been given.”

  Then he bent to kiss her. The soft warmth of his lips, his tongue
opening her mouth. Rielle’s blood leapt savagely at his touch. She tightened her arms around his neck, heat pouring down her thighs. Their army parted around them and thundered past. Their generals shouted out a call in Azradil; the infantry responded in kind, a chorus of war cries in the most lilting, most achingly lovely of the angelic tongues.

  Rielle sent Corien a blazing image. There was a copse of oaks on a nearby hill. He would lie in the grass beneath her, hold her hips as she moved. She would have him there in the shadows, and when she rose to face me de la Terre, it would be with the memory of his passionate cries ringing in her ears.

  He choked out her name against her throat, stumbled after her through the marching troops and into the trees, and when they had finished, he lay trembling in the dirt. With shining eyes, he watched her rise.

  She hardly noticed him, lightly kicking him away when he reached for her. Already, she was forgetting how it had felt to have his hands upon her. She stood beneath the trees that had sheltered their lovemaking, her skin ablaze with heat. Her vision pulsed with drumbeats of gold. These days, she knew few other colors. Gold gilded her nightmares, swam sparkling on her tongue. Through an amber sheen, she watched the flood of their army rush swiftly toward the city she had once thought to be her home.

  Little fires bloomed in the night—a path of flames snaking through the mountains. A thin wail of horns sounded, quickly drowned out by the chanting army.

  Rielle smiled, eyes closed, and tilted her face to the sky. As if it would help them to have a warning. As if watchtowers and horns could be anything but an embarrassment.

  Corien joined her, silent and dark at her elbow. She could smell him on her skin.

  “Are you ready?” he murmured.

  She opened her eyes, and he drew in an astonished sharp breath. She could understand that. The empirium was a vast golden mirror before her, and in it she could see her reflection. Her dark hair, wild to her waist; her silken gown hugging her body; her feet bare and black. Each vein painted with a golden pen, two blazing coins of light for eyes.