Kingsbane

“Lady Rielle is right,” Audric said. “If we abandon innocents to their deaths, all we will have done is make Corien’s task easier for him.” He glanced back at Rielle, his face framed in fur.

Rielle wished, in that moment, that she could send him a feeling of love, as she would have done to Ludivine.

Tell him I love him, she thought. Please, Lu, tell him how desperately I love him.

But Ludivine did not respond.

“She’s not answering me,” Rielle shouted, her chest a flurry of panic. She pushed her pony up a steep path, narrow between two rocky slabs. The beasts were up to their knees in snow, ears flat, heads bobbing with the effort of pulling themselves up the slope.

Then, at the path’s crest, a rush of smoke and orange light greeted them.

Rielle threw up an arm to shield her eyes.

“My God,” Evyline exclaimed, pulling her mount up beside Rielle.

The village of Polestal sat tucked into the crags of the mountain below them—tiny houses carved into the rock, little stone yards and paddocks piled with snow. Skinny black pines stood afire; screams rose through the wintry air. Dark, furred figures chased one another across a charred white canvas. Some flung knots of fire from brilliant castings—pendants, knives, arrows. Others fell, screaming. They clawed through the snow, frantic for escape. They were caught, pounced upon, beaten with flaming fists.

They burned.

Rielle’s breath came high and fast. The flames she had manipulated in front of the Kirvayan court were tame. These were different—wild and furious.

She felt a soft pressure on her arm and realized Audric was touching her.

“Are you all right?” he shouted. At his hip, Illumenor blazed.

She nodded and reached again for Ludivine. Lu, I don’t know what to do. I know I managed the fire trial, but this—

You know exactly what to do, Rielle.

Corien? She tensed in her saddle, her every sense sharpened. Why are you doing this?

His voice rang silver with delight. Because I can. Because you left me restless and unsatisfied, and one must find a way to take the edge off, mustn’t one? But also because I know you can save them, even those who have died. And save them you should, and you shall, unless you want the entire village to burn.

Rielle’s pony shifted uneasily beneath her. Save them? I can’t do that.

Of course you can. You transformed those flames into feathers. You command the empirium to weave nets and form shields. You wrangle waves and craft shadows.

Yes, she whispered, her body turning supple and warm as his words washed over her. She closed her eyes, remembering the tidal wave. Stopping the swords at the metal trial and flinging them to the ground, flat and harmless at her feet. Burning Corien in the cave of her father’s death.

Stopping the hearts of three men with the bludgeon of her rage.

So, then? Corien was before her, in her mind’s eye. She saw herself as she could be at his side—unfettered, blazing, and brilliant. A maker of worlds, a granter of life and a dealer of death.

“Rielle, stay with me!” Audric cried, his voice shaking her out of her reverie.

She did not allow herself to look at him. If she looked at him, she would return to him, to her guard, to the weight of the shield waiting for her back at the temple, to the weight of a role that she had had no choice but to claim.

Instead, she jumped down from her pony and plunged into the snow. With a sweep of her arm, she cleared a path for herself to the village. A storm of white flew into the air, momentarily clouding her vision and leaving behind a dark strip of soil and bare rock. She ran, following the path down the slope, ignoring the cries of Audric and Evyline behind her.

The first body she came to was that of a man, she thought, though his features were cooked, mottled. Patches of glistening red skin, strips of white bone, singed clothes and hair. He writhed in the snow, and though it should have quenched the flames that had burned him, the fire persisted. It flickered up and down his body, blackening his skin and the snow beneath him.

Rielle coughed, eyes watering from the smoke. She swept her arm through the air just over his body, dousing the flames, and allowed herself a tiny moment of triumph at the ease with which she’d managed it.

Once, she would not have been able to. Once, the sight of flames had left her stricken and helpless with fear.

You are stronger than any flame that burns, Corien murmured.

“Don’t be afraid,” Rielle said to the man, though she was uncertain if he could hear her. “I’m going to help you.”

Then she lowered her hands to his chest, her mouth souring at the gruesome texture of his ruined skin, and set to work.

She breathed in and out, letting her eyes unfocus. In the books she had read with Ludivine and Audric, various discussions of elemental theory had touched upon the possibility of healing, of repair and restoration, even—though much more rarely—the concept of total resurrection.

Such ideas were a natural extension of elemental power, several of the more radical empirium scholars had posited. To summon fire, to manipulate it, a firebrand must call upon their connection with the empirium and rearrange it, like shifting the blocks of a child’s creation to craft something new, taller, better. Similarly, a powerful enough elemental would, in theory, be able to delve beneath the surface of the empirium and manipulate not only the elements of the physical world, but also the elements of a physical body.

Instead of water, earth, and metal—blood, muscle, and bone.

I will need new prayers, Rielle thought, sifting through the golden layers of this man’s ruined body with her mind. The Bone Rite. The Blood Rite.

And the world will need new prayers to worship you, Corien replied. The Prayer of Rielle. The Glory of Rielle.

You flatter me.

Because I know it delights you. Now, focus.

It was more difficult than stopping a hundred swords in their tracks, more immense a task than corralling a tidal wave. There were so many more layers to be sorted through than there were in a flame or a wave. There were flesh and muscle, joints and ligaments, tendons and bone and blood, and beneath that—

Oh, Rielle whispered. There are so many things in a body.

Tell me, my darling girl, Corien replied. Tell me everything.

There are tiny pulses throughout his skull, and along a strange web that spans the length of him—his torso, his limbs. Everything. They flash like storms. Her mouth fell open, in wonder. They carry information. They carry sight and sound. Sensation.

What else?

There is a map, underneath all the rest of it. She scooped through the sea of golden light that was the man’s body, looking deeper. Infinitesimal beads. They are pure empirium. They build him, like the bricks of a house. No. Smaller than bricks. The miniscule grains of sand, too small for the eye, that make a brick what it is.