Kingsbane

But then Ludivine cried out in pain and fell silent.

Rielle shuddered, and Tal shouted a question at her, but she could not find the voice to answer him. Instead she drove Atheria down toward the domed roofs, her vision a frantic, searing red, and with a quick thought and a stab of anger, she tore a great hole in the western wall of one of the topmost floors, through which Atheria dove.

Inside, those who had taken shelter in the Holdfast ran away from the collapsed wall, screaming and shouting. A robed acolyte and two others lay bleeding, having been caught by the flying stone.

Tal’s hands tightened around Rielle’s waist. “Tell me what’s happening. Tell me you know what you’re doing.”

She hardly heard him. She scanned the soaring ceilings, the columns wrapped in stone vines, the gleaming wooden floors now covered in dust and rain. She listened to the vibrations of the air in this temple—the whispers and footfalls of everyone inside it, the bright pulsing innards of the empirium that turned in every leaf, every dark chamber.

Tal touched the inside of her wrist. “You’re glowing,” he said, but his voice came to her dim and clouded, and—there.

The Obex were below them, barricaded in classrooms on the fourth floor.

Rielle thought to Atheria, Go, and Atheria obeyed, plunging over the nearby railing and down into a circular atrium framed in greenery. Once they had landed on the fourth level, on a dark stone floor painted with golden leaves, Rielle dismounted and stormed toward the nearby wooden doors. They marked the entrance to the temple school, and the empirium told her—pricking her flesh with tiny white-hot needles of information—that the doors had been barricaded shut with great wooden planks, and piles of desks and chairs.

The gall of these Obex. The stupidity and the arrogance, to think such obstructions could stop her. Fury cracked through her body like a whip. She hurled it at the doors, and they flew open, flung off their hinges. The barricades went spinning away—chairs shattered, wooden planks reduced to splinters.

At the far end of the classroom huddled the Obex—thirteen in total, pale and dark, men and women, and all of them gaping at her, as if they were surprised that she could have found them, that she could have destroyed their pathetic excuse for a defense. One of them shoved forward a pale, wide-eyed boy—Zuka, the princess’s friend. An offering, perhaps, a plea for mercy.

“Run fast,” she told the boy. “And don’t look back.”

He obeyed, slipping on the polished floor, and once he’d gone, a glimmer caught Rielle’s eye. She turned and saw a slight, brown-skinned woman frantically weaving several threads into a circle of light—the pet of the Obex, their indentured marque, doubtless trying to provide them an escape.

Rielle laughed. With a flick of her wrist, she broke the woman’s neck. She collapsed, soundless; her threads vanished.

Behind her, Tal called her name, but Rielle had eyes only for those who had so foolishly thought they could best her. She stormed toward the Obex, knocking their knives and arrows from the air. She caught the light and wind and shadows hurled from their castings, knotted it all into pure blinding energy in her palms, and sent it careening back at them. Her power slit their throats, flung them back against the wall, dove inside their screaming mouths and burned them from the inside out.

And when she had finished, finally arriving at the far side of the room, where they all steamed and bled and crisped on the floor, she found on the floor a long wooden staff, thickly carved with the sigils of all seven temples. She retrieved it and rose to her feet. She admired its craftsmanship, how easily she wielded it, how nicely it fit in her hands.

And then, a flicker in the world around her—a familiar shift that sent her heart racing with anticipation.

This time, when Corien appeared, he was on his knees before her. His dark cloak pooled on a gleaming black floor. Beyond him were windows, a landscape of mountains and ice.

His pale eyes were bright as moons. “Darling child,” he whispered, “you are a vision in red.”

And then Rielle looked down at herself and saw that again, as in Polestal, her hands, her boots, her skirts were drenched in fresh blood.

The sight was startling enough to bring her back to herself. She blinked, stumbling back from Corien, but then he was no longer there, and she was staring instead at the classroom’s wreckage. The blood painting the walls. The steaming, charred marks where her fire had scorched the floor.

Even without me urging you on, this is who you are. Corien’s voice came, distant and gentle. This is what you’re capable of, and I accept that.

Then he was truly gone, and without the comforting weight of his mind in hers, Rielle felt unmoored.

The room was silent, far from the chaos of the storm beyond its walls. She turned to find Tal, his face gone white. She put up her chin, staring him down, for there was something new in that quiet gaze of his—new, and fearful.

“I have the casting,” she said to remind him that she had done what she was supposed to do, that there was nothing wrong with having killed these people. They had stolen a boy; they had threatened her life, and Kamayin’s too. They would have kept the staff from her and, by doing so, would have doomed the world.

But with her fading rage came the wretched return of her humanity. Her mouth soured with the smell of blood, and her stomach turned hot with shame.

She went to Atheria and leaned against her for a long moment, breathing in the storm-sharp scent of her wings.

“All great work must begin somewhere,” she whispered, repeating Corien’s words, but the godsbeast remained still, and that stillness was no comfort. A moment longer, and the pull of the empirium had faded from Rielle’s limbs. She was small and dim again; she was human once more.

“Why would it direct me to this place,” she asked, her voice low and rough, “and tell me to do these things that I’ve done, and then afterward leave me alone in shame and confusion?”

Tal came to stand beside her. “The empirium?”

“Yes. It spoke to me. I heard it. It told me…” But then she fell silent, for in the new awful quiet of this room, she began to doubt herself. Had she heard the empirium? Or had it been her own murderous instinct driving her on? Or had it been Corien all along, directing her to do this thing, to kill these people, to take the staff, because he was, as he had confessed, impatient? Had he disguised his thoughts as those of the empirium?

She touched her temple, which had begun to ache. Lu, are you there?

Ludivine sent her a wordless, faint feeling—so gentle, so understanding, that Rielle’s eyes filled with tears.

She turned away from Tal and climbed aboard Atheria.

“We’ll tell them that the Obex threatened me and you,” she said hollowly, once Tal had climbed up behind her. “We’ll tell them that they threatened Zuka and Kamayin. It was self-defense. It won’t be a lie.”