If Ludivine allowed herself, she would be able to remember their warmth, their arms wrapped around her, the soft fragility of their skin. Her rage, his grief. Her passion, his strength. Soothing Rielle to sleep after yet another night of dream-horrors. Audric howling in Ludivine’s arms on the floor of his rooms in Mazabat.

How desperately and fatally she had loved them.

But Ludivine did not allow any of this. Her mind was silver and clean, sharp as death.

Stay with us, little one. She didn’t dare touch Eliana. Corien would feel it. Instead, she said it to herself. Just a little longer.

She began her slow retreat from the palace. No movement too swift, no movement unplanned. Everyone was running where they should. There were Remy and Jessamyn, sneaking through the palace toward the theater. There were Navi, Ysabet, Zahra. Patrik and Hob, their soldiers. All of them fighting their way through the city.

There was another person Ludivine needed to find, perhaps the most essential piece of all. As always, when reaching for him, she sent her instructions with a silent apology—for everything she had done to him and everything he had lost.

But she would do it again if she had to, and he knew it. She would destroy his mind and remake it a thousand times if she had to.

It’s time, she told him.

Understood, he replied with a tiny shiver of joy, for even all the abuse she had dealt him had not destroyed his love for what his blood could do, for all the fearsome secrets it held.

She felt him draw his gun, heard him stalk through the corridors of the palace. Wailing adatrox intercepted him, bewildered and terrified. A human man in a ruined blue suit, bold and delirious with trauma, crawled through a smashed window and leapt onto his back. But his shots were clean, his blades precise and deadly. She knew that better than anyone, had made certain he was more weapon than man long before Corien had gotten the chance to do the same.

It was the only way, Ludivine told him, as she had told him many times before. He did not answer her; she did not expect him to. She left him to his work.

She sat in her chair, watching her three candles burn, but her mind was everywhere. She held her sword and waited.

34

   Audric

“Dearest sister. You’ll not believe the story I have to tell you, so I’ll wait until we meet in person and you can see for yourself the extraordinary circumstances of my new life. Suffice it to say, there are dragons, and there’s a boy, and I love them all. We’re on our way home to you—though not directly—along with a marque and her guard, and several others whom we freed from a secret angelic prison in the far north. I must sound mad to you, but for the first time in my life I feel like myself. I’ll see you soon, and I know I’ll need to do much to earn back your trust, but know this: I’m ready for war at last. I’m ready to fight for our home. And I’ll not be leaving you again.”

—Encoded letter from Ilmaire Lysleva to his sister, Ingrid, dated March 30, Year 1000 of the Second Age

Audric was sitting in the gardens behind Baingarde when his mother found him.

“I thought I might find you under this tree,” she said, without insinuation or scorn and settled beside him in the soft, spring grass. The earth was black and damp, the trees heavy with that morning’s rain. Twilight painted the gloom a soft violet, and the pink blooms of the sorrow tree overhead were finally beginning to open.

Audric forced a small smile. “If anyone else caught me moping under the tree where I first kissed the Kingsbane, they might try to take my crown again.”

Ludivine, he tried once more, are you there?

He had been trying all afternoon, had wasted four hours under this tree as the sun faded from honey to lavender.

Wherever she was, she still refused to answer.

“All the Mazabatian soldiers have been assigned lodgings,” Genoveve began. The gray folds of her linen gown pooled atop the wet grass like fallen petals.

“You’ll ruin your dress,” Audric pointed out.

“I have many dresses,” Genoveve said mildly. “The commanders and as many of the infantry as we could accommodate are in the barracks. The rest of them are lodged throughout the city. So many people opened up their homes. Odo has set up rather luxurious makeshift barracks in his rooftop gardens.”

“I would imagine the commanders in our barracks are jealous of whoever was lucky enough to get those beds.”

“Undoubtedly.”

Audric huffed a soft laugh. Talking about procedure should have helped clear his troubled mind, but his thoughts still felt clouded. He shifted them to the piles of notes stacked neatly on his desk.

“I’ve sent letters to Ingrid Lysleva and the Kirvayan regent,” he said. “Queen Fozeyah will come with more troops once they’re ready. Ten thousand by the first of May.”

Genoveve nodded, her hands white and still in her lap. Her cheeks were sunken, her every bone pronounced, but the braided twist of her auburn hair was immaculate, and her gray eyes were flint.

“In the Archon’s absence,” she said, “Grand Magister Guillory has assumed leadership of the Church. The other magisters agreed. It was unanimous.”

Audric thought of Tal’s empty chair in the Magisterial Council chamber, how Miren—straight-backed, square-shouldered—refused to look at it.

“A sunspinner in command of the Church,” Audric said, smiling faintly.

“And a sunspinner on Katell’s throne.”

Genoveve was looking at him now. He kept his eyes fixed on the black seeing pools, sitting quietly in the sea of grass some twenty feet away.

“And the watchtowers?” he asked.

“Construction has begun on the eight that will surround the city.”

“And the builders I assigned to the remaining sixteen?”

“They and their supplies are en route to the northern roads. By month’s end, we’ll have a line of towers from here to the northeastern border, each of them magicked by earthshakers and metalmasters.”

Audric nodded. “And I have riders set to depart in the morning for the seats of all the major houses. Gourmeny and Montcastel. The Valdorais holdings in the Far Fallows.”

After a pause, Genoveve cleared her throat. “And what will you do with the soldiers from House Sauvillier? Our prisons are overflowing.”

“I’ll meet with them individually, then reinstate them if I can. We can’t spare a single sword.”

“And if there are some who don’t wish to fight for you?”

“I don’t wish to fight for me.”

Genoveve reached for his hand. “Audric…”