Lightbringer

by Claire Legrand

  A few paces to his left, a light began to spin. A ring formed fast, sparking white, and out of it stepped four people. Two Audric didn’t recognize—a thin woman, fair of skin and hair, with angry blue eyes, and another woman, tall and plump and copper-skinned with graying black hair in a crown of braids around her head. The sight reminded him of Ludivine, how she had popularized that very hairstyle in the north. His throat tightened painfully.

  Two more people emerged from the ring of threads. A man with pale brown skin, dark brown hair and eyes—and a girl with white hair, her skin a similar light brown, her own eyes alight with power.

  Audric stepped back in shock. “Obritsa.” The man was her bodyguard, the silent, stoic Artem.

  The queen of Kirvaya nodded sharply, her face a grim mask of determination. “What do you need us to do?”

  Audric glanced at all of them. The pale woman’s fingers glowed, as if she too were ready to summon threads. Two marques, then. Clearly, they all had a story to tell, but there was no time to ask for it.

  A chorus of battle cries made them all look up. Another regiment of winged angels had reached the city, joining those that had already made it past the elemental chaos of the Flats. They flew over the wall and darted up the winding streets. Elementals chased after them—windsingers gliding atop the currents of their own power, earthshakers burrowing up through the ground. A formation of dragons raced over the wall in pursuit, black-robed Kammerat riding atop them.

  Audric turned away from the sight of his people fleeing in terror. These streets had been their home. Now, they burned with the fires of war.

  “Help them get out,” he said hoarsely. “Take them south, help them hide. As many as you can.”

  Obritsa did not hesitate. She exchanged a sharp look with the pale woman, the other marque. Immediately, they summoned threads, waited for Artem and the woman with northern braids to hurry through, and followed soon after. The rings of light snapped closed.

  Audric went to Atheria. He held her long face in his hands, pressed his brow against her velvet snout.

  “You can do more good out there than you can with me,” he told her quietly.

  For a moment, she was still. Her ageless black eyes watched him gravely. Then she snorted and stepped away from him. Her wings brushed like silk against his cheek. She launched herself into the air and flew fast for the battlefield. She gave a sharp cry, hawk-like and terrible, as she disappeared over the wall.

  Audric turned away, blinking hard, and faced the castle. No more words were said. None were needed. Miren and Sloane on his right, and Kamayin, Evyline, and the two Sun Guards on his left—Fara, he was pleased to see, and Maylis, two of Rielle’s favorites.

  Together, they raced through the city. Audric stifled his power, kept Illumenor dim. For now, he would let the others fight for him. Eyes focused on the streets ahead, he heard the crash of his friends’ magic, the whip of their swords.

  He was, perhaps, running to meet his doom.

  But he would not meet it alone.

  43

  Eliana

  “Feel the earth beneath your feet

  and the wind that moves the trees

  See the shadows shift across the fields,

  the tide that pulls the seas

  Hear the whip of metal forged in prayer

  The crack and spit of flame

  Watch the sun climb up the sky and burn—

  A fire no sword can tame!”

  —“The Glory of the Seven,” traditional Celdarian war hymn

  Bodies marked the path toward the city of me de la Terre. Armored bodies abandoned by their angels. Adatrox, disposable infantry, their armor crude and their faces frozen in expressions of horror. Steaming elementals, their magic slower to die than their bodies. Horses and archers, and the beasts that fought for the angels, creatures that looked like perverse imitations of the cruciata Eliana knew.

  Many more still lived. They fought on foot on the battlefield wet with mud and blood, crashed together in the air. And hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand, flooded the city in churning waves of hide and steel. The defensive wall had fallen, its thick stone bashed clean through.

  Eliana raced to join them, Remy at her side. They used the fallen as shelters, running from corpse to corpse. At each one, they knelt, watching for a break in the fight, then ran on, slipping on the slick, trampled ground. A dragon swooped by, chasing after a pack of beasts that scrambled toward the wall. The dragon’s mighty wings turned the air to thunder, knocking Eliana and Remy to the ground.

  Remy, his face splattered with mud, stared after the dragon. Eliana let him stare as she ripped helmets from two angelic bodies lying nearby. She shoved hers on, trying not to gag from the vile scents coating the helmet, the ground, herself.

  Eliana tugged on Remy’s arm, yanked him up, shoved the second helmet at him. They ran. At the wall, they didn’t hesitate. Hesitation would draw angelic eyes. They brandished their weapons—the sword Remy had retrieved from a fallen adatrox, and Katell’s sword, dimmed to look like any other weapon. Eliana gritted her teeth as they joined the angelic companies streaming through the shattered stone. Beside her, Remy mimicked their battle cries. Eliana didn’t dare. She bore down hard on every muscle in her body. The air was ripe with magic, the empirium wide awake and watching. Her bones ached with the effort of stifling her castings, ensuring Katell’s sword stayed dark.

  She ducked the swinging blade of a young, wide-eyed soldier—not an angel but a human, trying in vain to defend his city. He was clumsy; she pushed past him easily and tripped him with her sword.

  They were through the doors, clambering across a plaza that was perhaps, in times of peace, a sprawling marketplace. Now, it was chaos. Beasts scrambled up the walls of buildings; gray-eyed adatrox marched up the plaza’s wide stairs and poured into the narrower neighborhood streets. Angels with bright wings punched through high windows and dove inside.

  Eliana glanced up toward the mountain that loomed over the city. At its base was Baingarde, now marked by a pair of enormous golden wings half as large as the castle itself. Whenever Eliana looked at them, her blood surged dangerously, and she had to clench her fists tighter to keep her castings from bursting to life.

  There was no question of who had made those wings or how desperately Eliana’s power wanted her to reach them.

  Remy panted as they ran, his helmet painted with fresh blood. When they reached a swarming intersection on the city’s second level, he darted behind a large square pillar, pulled off the helmet, and tossed it toward a doorway of arched stone where a gate stood smashed open, its ruined ironwork half-melted and sizzling. The helmet rolled across the path of two girls running hand-in-hand. Even the shadows teemed with people desperate for escape. One of the girls jumped over the helmet and screamed. The other yanked on her arm, let out a harsh sob. They ran on.

  “I had to kill a child to get through the wall,” Remy said dully, watching them flee. His fists opened and shut. “Some idiot boy with no armor and a knife as big as his face. He wouldn’t get out of the way.”

  Eliana couldn’t find the words to comfort him. Her throat closed in anguish; the air was hot and rotten with death. She pressed herself flat against the pillar and looked past it at the carnage beyond.

  People of the city, arms laden with wailing children, tore screaming through the streets. They fled toward the castle, for it was the only place left to run. Angelic troops marched relentlessly up from the city’s lower neighborhoods. They unleashed arrows; they charged with swords raised high. Dozens of citizens fell, though no weapon had hit them. They dropped like shot birds from the sky, rolled down the stairs, knocked others off their feet.

  A company of elementals in robes of charcoal and orange, scarlet and gold, rushed out from a side road, planted themselves between the angels and the fleeing humans. Fire snapped from their gleaming shield
s. Abandoned weapons flew up from the ground and whipped through the air at the angelic troops, slicing open necks.

  Eliana searched for the best route to the castle. But every street and alleyway, every set of stairs and parapet seemed to crawl with more enemies by the second. A dark beastly shape jumped from rooftop to rooftop, then slithered down a wall and barreled into a crowd of people rushing toward a building for shelter.

  Eliana’s palms began to burn. She clenched her fingers tight and turned, pressed her back flat against the pillar, tried to catch her breath. A screaming crowd rushed by. An elbow jostled her. A man with a shrieking child thrown over his shoulder ran past. From somewhere in the chaos came an explosive crash of glass and wood. Screams rose and were quickly silenced.

  “You’ll have to fight them,” Remy said quietly at her side. “We’ll never make it otherwise. There are too many of them.”

  Eliana squeezed her eyes shut. “I can’t. She’ll find me. He’ll find me.”

  “And they’ll come for you, and you’ll fight them here instead of there.”

  “Or they’ll kill me where I stand without ever having to leave the castle.”

  Something tugged at her breast, a familiar urgent pull. Her castings sparked and popped like a growing fire.

  A voice of thousands, of millions, neither kind nor cruel, spoke in her mind. A single cold instruction, spoken not with words but with feeling, with a particular flavor of power veering left in her veins.

  there

  Eliana’s eyes flew to the smoldering iron gate. She pushed off the pillar and shoved her way through the running crowd. Remy hissed her name, grabbed for her sleeve. She pulled free, crawled over the wrecked gate, and entered a small courtyard. One of many, she could see, of various sizes and designs. Immaculate stone arcades connected them, and narrow passages capped with vine-draped arbors created a maze of walking paths. Pale statues lined the walls, hidden in private alcoves piled with flowers. Others stood proudly on the elaborate cornices, robed and stern. Eyes turned to the sky, shields in hand.

  “These must be temples,” Remy whispered, joining her with his sword raised. “There’s Saint Marzana. And again, over there. You can tell by the shield she holds.”

  But Eliana hardly heard him. She was staring at the far end of the courtyard, where a man and boy knelt beside a woman twisting in pain. The man was pale with graying hair, his skin lined but his movements deft as he cut an arrow from the woman’s shoulder. She screamed past the cloth stuffed into her mouth, turned her face into the boy’s arm. She crushed his hand, her knuckles white with pain, but the boy did not flinch. Ash and dirt streaked his sweaty face, but his eyes were keen, a watchful bright blue.

  Eliana, watching him, could hear little but her own pounding heart. The screams and crashes of battle faded. Remy murmured a question, then spotted the boy and drew a sharp breath.

  The sound unstitched her. Her eyes filled with tears as she watched the boy pass a jar to the man beside him, then bandages with which to dress the wound. Everything about his face was familiar—the stubborn jut of his jaw, the set of his serious brow. His hair, ashen in the dim light, shaggy and mussed, in need of a trim.

  His name was in her throat. She clutched the front of her coat, and then Remy’s hand, because if she didn’t hold on to him, she would rush across the courtyard, all reason abandoned, for the chance to look even once into Simon’s eyes, innocent and not yet full of hurt.

  A few moments later, the man patted the woman’s shoulder. Simon’s father, Eliana assumed, her head spinning wildly. Garver Randell. She watched Simon help the woman to her feet. His father fastened a cloth wrap around her torso, gingerly placed a fussing baby inside it. The woman nodded weakly, then pressed a kiss to Simon’s head and limped away through one of the narrow courtyard passages.

  Simon’s father hurried through another passage at once, and Simon followed close behind, their bag of supplies strapped to his back.

  Once, before he disappeared into the shadows, Simon paused and looked back over his shoulder. Such a frown on his face, such a fearsome little glare. There were echoes of the man she loved, the man she had left to die at the hands of his tormentor. Thinking of it, the air left her lungs; she gripped Remy’s hand hard and tried to push from her mind the image of Simon, alone at Corien’s mercy.

  Then the young Simon was gone, hurrying after his father, and the courtyard was empty—except for one shape, long and dark and lithe, like the one she had seen only moments ago slithering down a building.

  And now it was here, darting into the passage Simon and his father had taken.

  Eliana launched into a fevered run across the cobbled stonework and into the shadows, and when she emerged into another larger courtyard, she saw the beast crouched to jump—scaled and bulbous, yet feline in its grace. Dragon-shaped, but a mutilated, vicious version. Charred castings had fused with its body, but it seemed not to care. It stared at the people gathered nearby. Simon was there, and his father, and several others, huddled around a man lying prone on the ground. They didn’t see the beast, nor the three others approaching through the courtyard’s garden. Tails lashing the air, long snouts glistening with blood.

  Eliana did not think once of her sword or the knives at her hip and in her coat. She snapped her wrists to awaken her castings and threw herself at the beast she had followed. She tackled it, rolled, then slammed her palms against its hide and sent it flying through the courtyard. It hit a wall with a startled yelp, then fell and did not rise again.

  The small group of people cried out and scattered.

  Eliana turned away from them, Simon’s presence a hook in her heart. The three other beasts converged on her, mouths open wide, their broad malformed paws pounding the ground. A child rode one, pressed flat against the back of its beast. Gray-eyed and silent, the child sent spinning discs of light flying at her like arrows.

  Eliana dodged them, then flung back at the child raw waves of power, furious and blazing. In mere seconds, her attackers were ashes. Shards of the blown-apart castings skittered across the ground like sparks, then went dark.

  Eliana stood, breathing hard. She saw Remy watching from the shadows, ready to come to her aid. He shook his head at her, his mouth thin. Eliana flexed her hands, wrangled her wild thoughts, commanded her castings to dim.

  But was it too late? The people in the courtyard had seen her. Had Corien? Had Rielle?

  She held still, feeling for a change in the air, but none came. A moment passed, then two.

  She dared to glance back. Simon was gone, as was his father, and Eliana bit back a wild cry. An ache seized her, so hard it felt like a punch to the chest.

  A man stepped forward, tall and shadowed. He gestured the others away, sent them scurrying off through a narrow passage between buildings of pale stone. Saints stood at every corner, watching with blank white eyes.

  Soon, the man stood with only two others—soldiers, hands on their swords and shoulders square with tension. The man approached Eliana slowly. One of the soldiers hissed, “Odo!”

  The man waved them back, and as he came out of the shadows, Eliana saw his face. He had brown skin, smooth and taut, oiled black hair in neat waves, a neat black beard. He stopped a few paces away, narrowed his dark eyes, and said, “Who are you?”

  Eliana did not answer, unwilling to trust him yet. Was it Simon the empirium had been leading her to, or this man? Odo, the soldier had said. A name, perhaps, or an Old Celdarian word she did not know?

  She lifted her chin. She needed him to see that she was unafraid.

  “I need to enter Baingarde,” she said firmly. “Can you help me?”

  Remy hurried over and translated, and the man’s eyebrow quirked. Eliana could not understand his reply.

  “What a strange answer to my question,” Remy translated. The man looked at Eliana’s hands, at Katell’s sword hanging from her belt.r />
  Before Eliana could work out a response, Remy stepped forward. He spoke in Old Celdarian, his voice hard and clear. She did not know every word, but she understood enough.

  “She is Eliana,” Remy announced, “daughter of the Kingsbane and the Lightbringer, heir to the throne of Saint Katell. It is Katell’s sword she carries, and it is Katell’s blood in her veins. She hails from a future when the world is ruled by the angels of the Undying Empire. She seeks her mother and means to end this war.”

  As he spoke, Eliana stared hard at this man. She took Katell’s sword from its sheath and allowed it to shine. A slow chill passed through her, and her power lifted high against her skin, whispering along the sword’s blade, Know me.

  Then Remy said a string of familiar words—the same sentence he had recited repeatedly under his breath in Ludivine’s chamber just before they had passed through Simon’s threads.

  The man before them blinked. Behind him, his two companions straightened, glanced at each other in startled confusion.

  “What did you say?” Eliana whispered.

  “‘For crown and country, we protect the true light’,” Remy said quietly. “The words of their Red Crown. This is where it began.” He raised his voice. “How do we get inside the castle? Do you know? Can you help us?”

  A beat of silence. The man stepped forward and spoke. Remy quickly translated. “My name is Odo Laroche, and I am a friend of the king.”

  The man’s gaze moved to Eliana, sharp and seeking. “You look like them. Your eyes. Your mouth.”

  Then he glanced at her castings. “Your mother, though, needs no castings. You do?”

  “Someday, perhaps, I won’t need them,” said Eliana. “But I will always want them.”

  Odo seemed pleased by this answer. His voice softened the slightest bit.