Lightbringer

by Claire Legrand

  Ludivine sat up, wiping her mouth. As Eliana watched, her lip stopped bleeding. “Of course I didn’t.”

  “Because you feared I would fight you.”

  “I feared nothing. I knew you would react as you’re reacting now.”

  A sob burst out of Eliana as she imagined Navi’s face. “I love them.”

  “And they love you. Even those who have never met you. They love what they have been told about you. They believe in your ability to save them. And if they must die to allow you that chance, then they must die.” A smile touched Ludivine’s lips. “Navi draws irresistible pictures of you for anyone who will listen. Of course they love you. One night at Navi’s side, listening to her stories about you, and anyone would believe what she says. That you are a queen for the ages.”

  Eliana wrenched her arms free of Simon and Remy. Her feet were stones on the floor. “You got inside their heads just now, sent them away to fight. You could have done that with anyone, recruited dozens of people from Elysium. Two hundred, five hundred. Why them?”

  Ludivine let out a thin laugh. It did not move her face. Her mouth was pale, her eyes grotesquely dark in the bleached canvas of her skin.

  “I’m not sure you understand how angry he is,” she said, her voice smooth as a polished blade. “It requires so much of my strength to keep him out of this room. I have very little left to spare, only enough to encourage people already inclined to die for you to go and do just that. I could not have shepherded people from the city down to us. I could not have gotten inside their minds and made them into puppet soldiers. It would have left me too vulnerable. It would have left Simon too vulnerable, or you. And now, every part of me that still lives is fighting him.”

  Eliana pressed her fists to her thighs. A hundred people paled in significance against the entirety of humankind. She knew this.

  And yet she clung to her anger. “You gave them no choice,” she whispered.

  “They chose to sail to you,” Ludivine said. “They chose to follow Zahra through a city tearing itself to pieces when at any moment she could have died and they would have been discovered. One chink in Zahra’s mental armor, and a warship could have found them, blasted them to pieces on the high seas. I merely made a suggestion just now. A slight breeze at the backs of warriors already prepared to die and eager to fight.”

  Eliana was too numb with sadness to protest when Ludivine took her hands. She wished Zahra were before her instead of this black-eyed angel with a hollow space where her stolen heart should be. She formed the thought viciously, slammed it at Ludivine’s face.

  It remained unruffled, porcelain smooth.

  “Five of my acolytes died twenty minutes ago while drawing the cruciata into my home,” Ludivine said quietly. “I have spent long years with all of them. I grieve their death. But I did not flinch at sending them to it, nor did they flinch at going. When Navi, Ysabet, and their crew left the Vespers, they knew they would sail to their doom. They did so gladly. They did so for you. It was their choice to fight then, and to fight today. We should now honor that choice by doing what must be done.”

  Eliana held Ludivine’s black gaze, then turned away to face the empty door. Navi had stood there, and Patrik and Hob, only a moment before. Behind her, Simon and Ludivine were speaking. She ignored them, listening instead to the distant sounds of battle. Monstrous shrieks, wet guttural roars.

  Swords crashing.

  “I hear swords,” she said, the words foul on her tongue.

  “My acolytes, before they died, managed to tempt one hundred cruciata underground,” Ludivine replied. “And Corien has sent five hundred angels ahead of him. They will move slowly, avoiding the cruciata blood our friends have spilled. This will give us some time. But their sheer numbers will eventually overwhelm the beasts. They will be the sea that clears a path for him. Before an hour has passed, he will stand in this room. But by then, you will be long gone.”

  Eliana turned. Simon stood in the center of the room, his back to her. He pulled threads from the air, a weaver of light.

  Ludivine put her hand on Remy’s shoulder. “Remy and I have been practicing Old Celdarian. In case something should happen to Simon, Remy will know how to speak with whomever you encounter. The common tongue was different then, and Celdarians will be more likely to trust you if you speak their language. Luckily, Remy’s vocabulary was already quite robust. He learned much in his time with Jessamyn.” She smiled fondly, tucked some of Remy’s dark hair behind his ear. “If only we had longer to spend together, Remy Ferracora. Your mind is a fascinating one. It holds so many dreams, even after months of living in darkness.”

  Watching them, Eliana felt ill. She snatched Remy away from Ludivine, then walked with him to the far side of the room.

  In the shadows, she steeled herself. Pressed her brow to his, held his cheeks. His eyes were her whole world. Bloodshot and blue, rimmed with dark lashes.

  “I would say you can’t go with me,” she said, “but somehow I don’t think you’ll accept that.”

  A tiny smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “If I stay here, I’ll definitely die. If I go with you, I might live.”

  She bit her tongue. It was not the moment to talk about time, what might or might not happen, what would or would not be changed.

  “There is that,” she said weakly.

  Remy put his hands over hers, gently pressed her fingers. “You can do this, El.”

  It felt wrong to hear the pet name in his new cracking voice. This boy before her, this wiry killer with watchful eyes. She pressed a fierce kiss to his forehead. If she didn’t look straight at him, she could pretend away the past few months and imagine her room in Orline. The lace curtains, her mother’s quilt, Remy’s voice lulling her to sleep as he read of saints and angels, godsbeasts and kings.

  From the corridor came horrible sounds, the crash and tear of teeth and swords like lightning splitting open the earth. A sharp cry burst free of the chaos. Eliana thought it sounded like Navi. Her neck went cold with sweat.

  Ludivine moved past them to the door. The light from Simon’s growing threads lit the walls strangely, a wan white-gold that carried with it a sharp, acrid scent like the silver charge of spitting storm clouds.

  “When you step through the threads, you will find yourself in the royal gardens behind Baingarde,” Ludivine said. Her hair was liquid gold in the growing light. “It was a peaceful evening. Audric, Rielle, and I were resting under a sorrow tree at the end of a long day. Long, but good. The trials were over. We had not yet left for the tour that would introduce her to the kingdom. Her father had recently died, and Audric’s too, and there was grief in us, and fear, but when it was only us three, there was also peace.”

  She glanced back over her shoulder. The threadlight gave her eyes a golden sheen. “Simon?”

  “Nearly there,” he said, his voice tightly coiled.

  Eliana went to him and stood at his side. She felt Remy join her, caught a glimpse of how soft with wonder his face had become as he watched Simon work. The expression made him more familiar.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Eliana asked.

  Simon tightly shook his head. “No.”

  “You’re doing wonderfully.”

  His mouth quirked. His temples gleamed with sweat. “How would you know?”

  The truth was, she didn’t. But it was beautiful, as it had been before, to watch his long, deft fingers draw light from the air. The serious furrow of his brow, the set lines of his jaw.

  She placed her hand on his arm. His body relaxed, and the swirling threads of light gathering at his fingertips solidified, brightening.

  Despite the fear turning coldly in her chest, Eliana smiled.

  “Thank you,” Simon whispered, his voice thin beneath the growing hum of his threads, and though he could not remove his hands from the air, she felt him shift toward her.
Their legs touched. Remy hooked his arm through hers, pressed his cheek to her shoulder. He muttered a sentence in Old Celdarian over and over. At the corner of Eliana’s eye, one of the candles flickered.

  Then, an explosion of sound from the hallway, a titanic cascading clatter of metal against stone. Past the door flew a slain cruciata, flung by something out of sight. The raptor’s sleek black-green feathers painted bright blue streaks across the floor.

  “He’s coming, and faster than I thought,” Ludivine announced. Her voice betrayed nothing, but Eliana felt the slightest of tremors in her mind.

  “You’ll send us through and then come right after us,” Eliana said firmly to Simon. “Close the thread behind you. Don’t look back.”

  Simon nodded. A slight shudder passed through his body. His threads—dozens of them, maybe hundreds—were gathering into a solid ring of spinning light. And as Eliana watched, darker threads joined the lighter ones, consuming them. They snapped like whips, lashing a spitting blackness through the air. The ring of light flickered, dimmed, then brightened. Dark threads twined with threads of light. Shapes manifested beyond the ring—tall green shadows like enormous soldiers marching in clean lines. Trees?

  Eliana’s skin prickled. The royal gardens behind Baingarde.

  She retrieved Katell’s sheathed sword and hooked it to her weapons belt, then drew the sword out for inspection. It was more elegant than she had guessed it would be, the golden hilt carved to resemble rays of sunlight, the blade polished to a high shine. Though it looked enormous, it felt light and nimble in her hands. She stood, marveling at how easily it moved through the air. Her castings sang against the hilt, their brilliant light kissing the metal.

  Horrifying screams ricocheted through the halls outside. Someone whose voice she did not know begged for mercy.

  A dark pressure rippled against her mind and brought with it a faint whisper:

  Eliana.

  Heart pounding, she returned Katell’s sword to its sheath. Pangs seized her, terrible longings for her room at home, for dear brave Zahra, for the warm embrace of Navi’s arms. Watching the threads, she held the knot in her throat so it could rise no further. She rolled her shoulders, shifted from foot to foot, shook out her hands and fingers. Her castings threw light across the ceiling.

  Beside her, Simon’s arms trembled in the air as if holding up an unthinkable weight. She reached for him, then thought better of it. If only she could wrap him in her arms, bury her face once more in the hot space between his shoulders.

  Instead, she faced the spinning ring of light, its sparks spitting across the room, and prepared herself to run. Her muscles tensed, Katell’s sword an unfamiliar slight weight against her leg. Beside her, Remy held a dagger in his right hand. At his hip gleamed another. His face, turned haggard by his time in Elysium, could have been carved from stone, perched atop one of the temples in Orline as a tribute to the fierce saints of old.

  The moment Corien arrived, Eliana felt it like the fall of night across her skin. The air pulsed, suddenly so thick and close that Eliana gasped for breath. A roar of fury punched the walls. Metal hit metal. Did Corien also have a sword? What did it look like, two angels locked in combat of both blade and mind?

  She kept her eyes on the threads, felt Remy start to turn, and grabbed him, swung him back around.

  “Don’t look at him,” she muttered. “Look at Simon. Look at the light.”

  She could feel Corien’s fingers scrabbling at the edges of her thoughts, digging for her. Her calm splintered like wood.

  Eliana. His whispers tumbled like falling rocks. A rush of furious sound. Eliana.

  “Go.”

  Simon’s hoarse voice rang out like a shot. Eliana eyed the spinning threads as if they surrounded a chasm, cold and bottomless. A wave of fear swept across her skin, sharp as needles.

  She resisted the urge to touch Simon and instead moved as close to him as she dared.

  “Now?” she whispered.

  Tears stood bright in his eyes. His mouth twisted. “Now. Go, Eliana.”

  From behind them came a sharp cry. Some blazing instinct compelled Eliana to turn. Corien’s white shirt, half-torn from him, shone wet with red and blue blood. Veins of black drew a dark map across the winter of his skin. He drew wheezing breaths, and each step was unsteady, but whatever the cruciata blood had done to him, whatever lingering pain the blightblade had left in him, he was fighting it. A lesser angel, so drenched, might have died at once.

  But Corien bared his teeth and raised his sword high. Ludivine stumbled. One of her hands flew to her temple. With a scream of fury, Corien swung at her. The blade sliced clean through Ludivine’s neck. Blood spurted like red rain. Her head dropped to the floor and rolled. Her body crumpled, and her sword clattered to the ground.

  A whine of panic erupted in Eliana’s skull. She spun back to the threads and launched herself at them. She grabbed Remy’s hand, pulled him with her through the ring of light.

  A gunshot cracked the air.

  Behind her, Simon cried out.

  Eliana turned back to reach for him, but something yanked him away, out of her reach. She saw a flash of his face, bright with pain, and then he was gone. His threads shifted sharply, veered, then righted themselves, as if a cloud had passed over them and then the sun had returned. The darker threads, those hissing tendrils of time, split and reformed. They grabbed Eliana and Remy, flung them forward. Her mind screamed with fear. Something gripped her throat, stole her voice.

  Then she set foot on solid ground. The threads snapped closed behind her, singeing her heels.

  She took a breath, desperate for a cool, quiet world of green. The royal gardens behind the castle Baingarde. It was a peaceful evening.

  But then a bolt of fire zipped over her head. Breathless, she ducked, pulling Remy down with her. They hit the ground hard. Mud sucked at their feet and hands. The twin black smells of blood and smoke sent her head reeling. Something barreled past them, some great beast with a mottled furred head and a long serpentine tail. With each of its thundering steps, the earth quaked. Something glinted around its ankles as Eliana watched them streak by. Flat strips of metal embedded in swollen skin, each piece glowing with a familiar light.

  Horror swept through her. This creature was not quite a cruciata, at least not like any she had seen, but it was close enough, and it wore castings. On its back sat a gray-eyed child with wrists that snapped fire. Eliana’s blood turned cold. An elemental child, controlled as the adatrox were.

  She pushed herself up. Remy scrambled to his feet beside her. The world was an uproar of sunlight and fire, darkness that moved and howled. Something was burning nearby. They ran, choking on smoke, and found a rocky ridge to hide behind. They wedged themselves into a crevice slick with mud and blood. Beside them lay a man in armor, his glassy eyes open wide and one of his legs torn away.

  Eliana hid the light of her castings against her chest and stared over the rock at the chaos beyond.

  It was a battlefield, so vast it could have been the entire world. Soldiers in armor swung their swords, flung their spears. A horse with no rider raced by, its reins trailing. Eliana flinched as a shadow-hawk flew shrieking past them. It dove at an armored soldier, talons first, and expanded. A cocoon of darkness wrapped quickly around him, smothered him, and slammed him to the ground.

  Night had fallen, and yet bursts and beams of light illuminated the fight in erratic flashes. Eliana saw a pale woman with short black hair swing a black staff topped with a glowing blue orb. The orb drew shadows from the ground, and soon a pack of dark wolves bounded away from her and into the battle, their jaws open wide. A man struck the ground with a glowing shield, cracking the earth open. Five soldiers stumbled clumsily into it, and Eliana saw one of their eyes as they fell—gray and cloudy, expressionless.

  Her blood chilled. Adatrox.

  “Look.” Remy,
crouching beside her, pointed to her left, where the silhouette of an enormous mountain loomed in the distance. A thousand tiny lights spilled across its foothills. Fires marked an enormous stone wall. It was a city built on the hills that rose up toward the mountain, and at its apex stood a faint gray castle with towers reaching for the sky.

  “Baingarde,” Remy whispered. In his voice, she heard the same reverent awe that had kept him reading about the Old World night after night, year after year.

  Something exploded nearby. Fire bloomed and grew. A soldier flew—flew—away from the inferno, carried swiftly away on spears of white light tipped in shadow.

  For a moment, Eliana could only stare. She had spent a dark lifetime in the palace of an angel, but never before had she seen one with wings.

  Remy tugged on her arm, drawing her down. They flattened themselves behind the rock. Eliana’s castings trembled against her palms. Breathless, face pressed into the dirt, she tasted magic on her tongue. It choked the wind, sparked cold and metallic in her mouth, as if she’d kissed a bolt of lightning. Her vision was sharp as glass. Her blood roared, jubilant. Words floated to her mind on currents of gold.

  Rielle was alive. The empirium had not yet been broken. Eliana dug her fingers into the mud, resisting the upward pull of the magic-ripe air. Was it possible to fly without wings?

  “This isn’t the night Ludivine spoke of,” she said.

  “No,” Remy agreed. In the shifting, bursting light, his eyes were glittering jewels. “This is spring, the last year of the Second Age. It’s the Battle of me de la Terre. The battle that ended the world.”

  42

  Audric

  “We will ride for you as fast as we can, but Audric—it is many miles between Styrdalleen and me de la Terre, and my people have been ravaged by a hard winter of blizzards, constant quakes and avalanches, and continued attacks in our villages. Thousands are dead. The capital is overflowing with civilians who have lost their homes, their children, their parents. And we are running out of food. My brother has written to me that he comes with aid, but he has yet to arrive, and I worry he never will. You are the best hope we have to survive this, Audric. Stand fast against the enemy, and keep an eye on the northeast horizon.”