The girl was right. Rielle looked blearily around to see her meadow’s grass withering, the blooms turning black. Her focus was too scattered, her fear and anger running rampant.
She pushed herself to her feet, turned away from Corien’s soft pleas, and passed through Obritsa’s threads to whatever lay beyond.
• • •
On a clear night in the White Wastes, Rielle and Obritsa sat with their backs against a squat low cliff, looking out over a magnificent vista of snowy fields. The world was white and flat as far as Rielle could see. Above them, a sky of stars and twisting lights—green and violet, turquoise and amber. The legendary Astavari sky.
Obritsa—exhausted, her power depleted—rested her head against Rielle’s shoulder. Rielle stroked the girl’s arm through her furs.
Corien was quiet, only the barest shade of color on her mind’s horizon. Rielle knew she should be worried about what that could mean, but she was too tired for worry. They had been pushing themselves ruthlessly across the White Wastes for days, and this was the first time they had seen the stars.
“We’re almost there,” she murmured to Obritsa, who was growing heavy with sleep.
A thin vein of power tickled the edges of Rielle’s awareness. The crooks of her arms tingled; she rubbed her boots together, restless. The casting was close, and it was calling to her. In her mind’s eye, she saw Saint Tameryn in battle, riding her black leopard and flanked by a pack of shadow-wolves she had summoned with her casting—an elegant dagger with an ebony hilt.
Rielle closed her eyes. “We’re so close,” she whispered. “I can feel it.”
• • •
When Rielle stepped through the final ring of light that would bring her to Saint Tameryn’s casting, she was tense and ready, her power humming eagerly at her fingertips.
She stood in an immense cavern at the edge of a vast, clear lake. Bounteous greenery covered the cavern walls—tangles of creeping vines trimmed with glossy jade leaves, clusters of tiny white flowers that hung like clouds. The lake’s shore was a broad expanse of black stone glinting with flecks of amethyst. A gentle breeze ruffled the water, and though there was no window to the outside world, sunlight gently suffused everything Rielle could see.
Obritsa came up quietly beside her, lowering her furred hood. Chunks of snow fell to the ground. “Saint Tameryn’s cavern,” she whispered.
Rielle closed her eyes, breathing in the gentle air. Here, the casting’s call was insistent and clear. Its power showed her a vision: Saint Tameryn in a sleepy-eyed embrace with Saint Nerida. One with golden-brown skin and a head of glossy dark waves, the other ebony-haired with pale skin kissed golden by the sun. Entwined in a white bed beneath a canopy of leaves, they glowed with happiness.
An echo of their love bloomed in Rielle’s heart, the memory carried on the current of the casting’s power, and it was so overwhelming, so vivid in its purity, that Rielle felt choked by it. Dashing the tears from her eyes, she resolved to leave this place the first moment she could, for it brought memories of Audric too close.
She swept her gaze across the cavern and found a circular belvedere made of stone, sitting on a plinth out on the water. A low wall connected it to the shore.
Standing amid the belvedere’s columns were three men in gray robes, each with a familiar sigil embroidered on his chest—a high, square tower, and above it an eye. One of the men was already frantically pulling threads from the air, which made Obritsa draw in a sharp breath.
The Astavari Obex, and one of the marques who served them.
Rielle stormed toward them at once, Obritsa hurrying behind.
“Relinquish it,” Rielle called out, “or I will destroy you.”
One of the Obex clutched Tameryn’s dagger behind his back. “Lady Rielle, please, you must listen to reason—”
“I warned you,” Rielle said. There was no time to argue with them, nor to spare them. Still some fifty yards from them, she sent fists of power flying, grasped their hearts in her blazing hand, and stopped them, as she had done to her father, to King Bastien, to Lord Dervin. But she was better at it now—swifter, more efficient. Their deaths were painless; she made sure of it. Tameryn’s dagger clattered to the ground. The marque’s threads unraveled and disappeared.
Rielle crossed the wall to retrieve the dagger, then rejoined Obritsa on the shore. The girl looked utterly unsurprised by what Rielle had done. Instead, a faint smile brightened her tired face.
“We did it,” Obritsa said breathlessly. “I did it.”
“You did well,” Rielle agreed, and then held up the dagger, tilting its blade to catch the light. She tried not to think about how elated Audric would be to stand in Saint Tameryn’s beloved retreat, but her mind was a vicious traitor.
“Take us to the surface,” Rielle instructed. “Somewhere remote. That waterfall we passed in the mountains. Take us there.”
Obritsa frowned. “You won’t destroy it here?”
Rielle tightened her grip on the dagger. She waited until her eyes were dry and her mind free of the imagined Audric, standing awestruck on the shore.
Then she said quietly, “No. Not here.”
• • •
They rested under a cluster of pines in the mountains some distance north of Astavar’s capital, Vintervok. Not far from them, a slender waterfall tumbled down a black rise of stone. A thin mist pervaded the air, softening every leaf and limb.
Obritsa slept soundly on the bed of her furs, snug between Rielle and a boulder velvet with moss. Shadows stretched deep and dark beneath Obritsa’s eyes, and her cheeks were hollower now than they had been in the Northern Reach. But then, so were Rielle’s. She had seen her reflection in the nearby river and had hardly recognized the person staring back at her.
She left Obritsa sleeping and wandered through the trees until she found a tiny clearing encircled by pines. There, she stripped down to her tights and thin tunic. Alone, free of the thick layers of clothing and with no companions but the trees, she felt less brittle and found it easier to breathe. She sat on a soft bed of moss, leaned her head back against the trunk of a pine, and gazed at the sea of needles swaying above them. Her palms still tingled from destroying the dagger, and she had a passionate desire to sleep for a solid month. But they could not rest for long. The prolonged quiet meant Corien was planning something—or that he knew something she did not.
Rielle rested one of her hands on her belly. Sometimes the new shape of it revolted her, and she would come close to summoning her power and ridding herself of the creature inside her once and for all. She had neither the time nor the energy for the changes it had wrought upon her body, the new exhaustion of moving herself through the world. And it belonged not only to her but to Audric, and with that particular chain around her, she could never truly be free of him.