“No,” Tal said after a moment. “It won’t be a lie.”

He placed a gentle hand on her wrist, but that only made her feel worse, for her arms were covered in blood, and yet he touched her as if she were holy, a sacred thing to be worshipped.

And there was still the Gate’s storm to be dealt with.

Wearily, she said to him, “Hold tight to me,” and urged Atheria back out into the night.

• • •

Then, two days later, as Rielle and Ludivine lay quietly by the windows in Rielle’s rooms, watching earthshakers and windsingers clear the sunlit beach of debris, a letter from Audric arrived.

Rielle opened the note with joy in her heart, soothed by the sight of his familiar, meticulous penmanship.

Ludivine looked up at her from her pillow, frowning. Her lips were white and chapped. The blightblade scar had begun to creep across her jaw.

“Odd, that he didn’t simply send a message through me,” she observed.

“He tried to, but couldn’t reach you,” Rielle said, reading over his words, and then her stomach dropped, and she had to read one particular sentence several times before her mind would believe it.

“What is it?” Ludivine asked, struggling to sit.

Rielle looked up at her, the implications of what she was about to say settling like bricks upon her shoulders. “Queen Genoveve,” she whispered, “is dying.”

36

   Eliana

“And so I declare, in agreement with the other saints and with the authority of the governments we have established to bring order to our brave new world, that any surviving marques—that is, the offspring of humans and angels—are now considered enemies of the state, sentenced by nature of their treacherous blood to immediate and swift execution, and that anyone with knowledge of a marque’s whereabouts and identity must surrender this information at once, or else suffer the same fate as these dangerous creatures whose tainted magic we cannot trust and must therefore extinguish.”

—An international decree written by Queen Katell the Magnificent of Celdaria, dated February 17, Year 6 of the Second Age

“It’s like a web,” whispered Remy, leaning close. “That’s what Simon told me.”

He sat beside Eliana on a low stone bench in the gardens of Willow, beneath one of the trees for which the estate was named. There was a small stream nearby. The gardens were full of them, little trickling ribbons that kept the foliage lush and the flowers bright. Tall wetland grasses shivered in the afternoon breeze, and wild clumps of perfumed blooms bobbed happily along the dirt footpaths that wove through the trees.

They were alone except for Simon, who stood across a tidy clearing of clover and small white flowers, facing away from them. His shoulders were high and square, his fists clenched at his sides.

Even after two days of working with him, alternating between practicing small, focused tasks with her castings and watching him attempt to thread, Eliana could still hardly bear to look at him. His embarrassment and discomfort were palpable. His restless presence itched at her. She had asked him if he would prefer privacy, but he insisted it was important to have her near, as she had been when his power first resurfaced.

So here she was, sitting on her bench, trying desperately to resist the urge to either run from him or run to him and make him look at her. She would tell him not to be embarrassed, that she thought his threading was beautiful. She would take his face in her hands and hold him until his shoulders relaxed.

But instead she stayed solidly put.

“A web?” she asked.

Remy nodded. “I asked him a lot of questions last night, right before bed. Probably about fifty questions altogether. We had a long talk.”

“I’m sure he enjoyed that,” Eliana said, stifling a smile.

“Not at first, but he did eventually.” Remy drew his knees to his chest. “He loves talking about traveling. About who he used to be.”

There again was that terrible ache in her chest. Who he used to be. She doubted she would ever be able to shake the guilt of knowing that, were it not for her, he would not have been thrust into this strange, anchorless life. But then what? They would have both been in Old Celdaria when her mother fell, and most likely they would have been obliterated along with so many others.

Was this, then, the kinder future? A life of war and servitude to some faceless Prophet?

“Tell me what you mean,” Eliana said with some difficulty. “About it being a web.”

“He said that underneath the surface of the world,” Remy said, “the world we can see, there’s another world.”

“The realm of the empirium,” Eliana said, nodding.

“Yes, only marques can sense it in a way others can’t. Not even you can, El, because you don’t have angel blood. Marques can sense the billions and billions of threads connecting every person and place and moment. It’s all connected. Every person is connected to every moment. Every place is connected to every other place. And marques are the only ones who can navigate all of that.” Remy blew out a breath, bouncing a little where he sat. “Thinking about it makes me dizzy.”

Eliana remembered what Simon had said during their first hour in the gardens the day before. “To get where you want to go,” she added, “or when you want to go, you simply have to find the right thread and follow it.”

“Easy, right?” Remy snorted and rested his chin on his hand. “I’m glad I don’t have to do it.”

She smiled a little, glancing up at Simon. He hadn’t moved, except for his arms. Those he held out before him, loose and easy, like an artist, only instead of sculpting a figure from clay, he was pulling light out of nothing—a long, hair-thin light, bright enough to illuminate the entire gloomy clearing.

Eliana held her breath, watching him draw first one, then two, then three threads close to his chest. He cradled them there, as if spooning light into the cavity of his torso. But then the threads flickered. They brightened, dimmed, and vanished.

The clearing plunged back into gray.

Simon spat a curse, his body tensing once more. He dragged both hands through his hair and walked toward the clearing’s edge.

Steeling herself, Eliana rose and went to him. He turned at her approach, his face a furious storm of misery.

“I can’t hold any of them for longer than a few seconds,” he said.

“I know,” she replied. “I saw.”

“I haven’t even tried to find a thread in time. I’ve only tried little threads, ones that would take us back to the house if we followed them. But even those I can’t manage.” He looked away, his jaw working. “Once, this was easy. It felt like breathing. And now it’s like clawing my way through a swamp determined to drown me.”