“Will you help her?” he asked. His chest began to seize, his lungs fighting for air that would not come.

“I will find a way,” Zahra promised. “Until the world ends, I will fight for her.”

“We both will,” said a voice—a man, leaning over him. Copper-haired and blood-streaked. His voice torn, heavy with pain.

“Patrik?” Harkan tried to form the word, but it came out garbled. Frustrated, he tried again. His voice failed him.

He felt a warm hand on his cold face. “This fight isn’t over yet.” A slow breath, puffing against his face. A tiny, furious sob. “God. Harkan. I’m so sorry. We tried. We tried so hard. I’m sorry. You did so well, my friend. You’re all right. It’s all right.”

A burst of fear, sudden and wild. Zahra?

I’m here. Me, and Patrik. He’s alive. Some of us are alive. We’re here. We will go on.

Does she still love me? Harkan could no longer speak. His thoughts were a whisper, fading. But he needed to know. He needed, he needed.

Oh, Harkan, Zahra replied, soft and sad. She never stopped.

54

   Rielle

“This has all happened before, and it will all happen again. In the eyes of the empirium, a war is but a sigh; an age is but a blink. We must not let ourselves be confined by a narrow human understanding of events. We must accept that we cannot understand the world’s workings and allow the will of free human decision to evolve unfettered.”

—Children of God: A History of the Empirium

They were calling for her death.

She heard them as she ran—the people of the city into which she had been born, the only home she had ever known. She heard their cries rising like flocks of black birds taking frenzied to the sky.

Kingsbane!

Kingsbane!

Kingsbane!

Their screams for justice, their shouts for her death—they carried her swiftly out of the gardens, through the stable yards and the armories, into the temple districts.

The city bells began to chime, and she laughed a little, wiping the tears from her face. Audric had sounded the alarm. He would perhaps send the city guard after her. Would they shoot to kill? She hoped they would. She would melt their swords and fuse their feet together with the molten metal. She would cut their hands from their arms and let them bleed out beside their useless arrows.

Ludivine was screaming at her, distant and distorted, as if Rielle were hearing her through oceans thick with black water. She gathered up every scrap of energy she could find and shoved it at her, pushing her away. She couldn’t see Ludivine, couldn’t talk to her, couldn’t think of her. For if she thought of Ludivine, she would think of Audric, and if she thought of Audric, she would crumble. The pieces of her would collapse, a toppled, ill-fated construction.

Rielle, please, don’t leave me! Ludivine’s last words, which Rielle pushed away with her tired mind. She was pressing hard against a door, desperate to keep Ludivine far from her, but her body was trembling, she was exhausted and could hardly see—but then Corien was beside her. His eyes were dry and clear, his arms steady. Together they closed the door to the part of her mind where Ludivine lived. He put his hand to the latch and turned the key.

Almost there, he murmured, his voice a light on the cold horizon. Almost free.

• • •

The city guard did try to stop her.

They tried, and they failed.

Her father’s soldiers, dozens of them. They followed their commanders’ shouted orders and ran at her, eyes wide. They knew they would die, that something was terribly wrong. She was the Kingsbane, after all. The Blood Queen. She would cut them down, sure as breathing. She had done it to their late king. They had seen the vision, just as everyone else had.

Rielle swept her arm at them, like clearing a table of debris.

They fell all at once, dissolving, and by the time they hit the ground, they were mere glittering swirls of ash.

She ran through the dissolving echoes of their bodies, choking on ruin.

No one tried to stop her after that.

She stumbled out of the city, running into the mountains. The entire valley was clogged with people, but her path remained clear, untroubled. Corien was helping her, she realized, so suddenly, sharply grateful that she felt faint. Her mind spun around a single, indisputable fact: He was the only one left to help her. The only person living who could look at her and see a girl, and not a monster.

She thought of Garver and Simon, sitting in their little shop, their dinner growing cold as Corien’s vision played out across their table. Sweet Simon, watching his Sun Queen crumble before his eyes.

It was just as well for him to see the truth. She had hidden it from him, from all of them, for far too long.

She looked up at the sky only once, called for Atheria only once. But the godsbeast did not come. The sky remained empty, a spill of moonless black.

Furious, she plunged into the trees. So, she was truly alone. The realization settled around her like a suit of armor, slowing her feet. But she pushed past the extra weight, muscles burning.

She was alone. She was alone.

She repeated it to herself, twenty times over. Fifty. One hundred. She would keep repeating it until it no longer hurt her.

She was alone.

But not for long.

• • •

She found him standing in a deep wood.

There was a girl sitting in the grass at his feet—light-brown skin and hair like white silk. Queen Obritsa of Kirvaya, eyes wide and haunted, shadows dark across her tear-streaked face.

An unmoving figure in ragged travel clothes lay beside her, their head resting in her arms. An adult—pale brown skin, a soft cap of shaggy brown hair.

Rielle remembered him too. The queen’s bodyguard. Artem, was his name.

But then Corien was opening his arms to her, his face awash with pity, and she crashed into his embrace. She pressed her face to his chest, breathed hard and short against him.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. His hands trembled as he stroked her hair, her shoulders, the ruined tatters of her trailing sleeves. “Look at you. My poor, darling girl. I’m sorry you’re hurting.”

She opened her eyes and looked past him at the capital. Baingarde shimmered, fire-colored, against the inky backdrop of the mountains. She refused to blink. Her tears turned the city into a blurry, glimmering inferno.

“Don’t feel sorry for me,” she whispered at last. “And don’t apologize. It’s good that they know. I’m glad they know. And besides,” she added, curling her fingers into the stiff black wool of his coat, “I won’t be hurting for long.”