Kingsbane

Swept clean, she followed them.

I am the light.

She lowered her hands to Remy’s torso, on either side of his wound, and then, suddenly, as if breaking through a glass wall to the fire beyond, the world shattered and flashed, incandescent.

The rain was a diamond cascade, the bullets overhead shooting stars across a field of gold. Harkan was a creature of light, as were Jessamyn and Patrik beyond him—though Eliana could see the wrongness of Patrik’s broken arm, the gaping black wound of Jessamyn’s bleeding thigh. A nothingness in the empirium, a lack, a cosmic hurt.

The longer she gazed at it all, the farther into the gold she sank. Her eyes unfocused, and her vision expanded. She saw the adatrox advancing across the paddock, raptors feeding throughout the camp. Gerren hiding under his fallen tree, hardly daring to breathe. She saw the narrow streets of Karlaine, the wide flat reach of northern Meridian and its eastern mountains, and the grand port city of Festival, situated on a peninsula curved like a horn.

She saw an ocean, brilliant and amber, and across it, a palace in a vast city. On its highest terrace stood a winged, black figure, shivering against the gold of the sky, misaligned and furious.

Simon’s voice murmured against her ear. “Come back to me, Eliana.”

She obeyed, for that angry black silhouette frightened her.

“I’m not letting go, El!” Harkan cried. “I’ve got him!”

Her vision shifted, the gold clearing enough for her to see the false, gray world in which her body existed.

Harkan had his arms locked around Remy’s, and Jessamyn and Patrik had crawled over from the wall, holding down Remy’s legs, and there were figures beyond their circle—at the wall, approaching slowly, weapons lowering. To the left and right, emerging from their hiding places with limps and bruises. A pair of crawlers paused, poised on the wall to attack, and now looking confused, unsettled. A viper and two raptors fled shrieking from the scene, and some deep part of Eliana—foreign to her, and yet the truest part of herself—told her that they fled because they knew now what she was, and what she was about to do.

Remy’s body was lifting up from the ground, held in place only by the monumental efforts of her friends, and her hands were buried inside him, joined with him—not by flesh, but by the power in her blood, and the power of the empirium that lived inside Remy, even though he was ignorant of it. A shell of light formed around the place where her hands met his body.

It frightened her. She flinched, crying out. The light dimmed and shrank.

“It’s all right,” Harkan shouted, eyes wide. “We’ve got him, keep going. We’re not letting go!”

And then Simon spoke softly against her cheek. “I’m not letting go,” he said, his hands locked around her wrists. His torso, strong and warm against her back, anchored her to the ground underneath them.

She breathed, trembling, in the nest of his arms, and the earth shook as she shook, and the air drew taut as she strained against her castings. If she did not control their fire, their eager burn, they would plunge both her and Remy into the earth.

“Think of him, alive and whole,” Simon murmured, faint but near. “Think of how much you love him. You’re doing wonderfully, Eliana.”

She obeyed, picturing Remy’s face in her mind. A smile tugged at her lips, and Simon’s earlier words shone at her through the fog of a dark age. “I am the light.”

“Yes,” he replied. “You are the light of the world, and you will guide us home.”

“With the dawn I rise,” she whispered, because Remy loved the saints, their prayers, their godsbeasts, and it felt right to honor that, to use those particular words to reach for the life left in him.

Simon’s arms tightened around her. She felt his muscles strain just as hers did, wondered how hard he was fighting to keep them both earthbound.

“With the day, you blaze,” he told her hoarsely, and then again, and again, passing the prayer back and forth between them, until he lost his voice. He hid his face against her neck, in her hair, and pressed the words into her skin with his mouth.

I am the light.

The earth bucked and then detonated, surging out from Remy’s body and her own blazing hands.

She blinked, gasping, her eyes dry and afire. The world around her was as it should have been—rain-soaked, gray and dark, acrid with smoke and gunpowder. A thin wave of light flew out from where she sat in the mud. A ripple in the ground echoed its passage, like the shifting of great plates beneath the earth. What cruciata remained fell from the sky, scrambled blind in the mud. Crawlers fled; their screams held human voices inside them.

Remy cried out and shot upright, gulping down great breaths of air.

Eliana fell back from him into Simon’s arms, and then she was pushing herself toward Remy and gathering him up against her, crying into his hair. For he was alive, he was alive, and her hands were her own, tingling in the warm net of her castings. She kissed his cheeks, his dear, dark head, and cradled him against her chest, and he did not flinch from her monstrous touch or duck to avoid her kisses. He clung to her, clutching her shirt.

“I love you,” he sobbed, his voice cracking. “I love you, El. I love you, I love you.”

Eliana could no longer hold herself up, but she could not bear to let him go. Her side stung, and she glanced down to see copper-bright shards scattered through the mud, and she heard Zahra’s voice, deep and familiar and full of tears, and she realized the pain in her side was because this thing she had done, this saving of Remy, had broken open the box and freed Zahra.

Woozy, she noticed Harkan wiping his face, heard his broken, relieved laughter. She leaned against him, letting him support them both, her and Remy. She felt Zahra against her, her cold-water hands cupping Eliana’s cheeks. She heard Patrik shouting orders, saw him and Jessamyn and grim-faced Gerren easily picking off the gathered, gaping adatrox—even though they had all dropped to their knees, their hands clasped in supplication. They implored, they begged, but to no avail.

How strange, Eliana thought as she watched them die, that an adatrox should beg. That was not something she had seen before.

And then, another foreign thing: Simon, still sitting where he had held her, staring at a twisting light in the air. Thin and golden, the light stretched from him to a spot some ten feet away and three feet above the ground, and then arched up, endless, until it disappeared into the trees. Simon reached for it with his other hand and, trembling, wound the light around his fingers, directing it to hug his right wrist.

For a moment, the light remained, allowing his touch. Even relishing it, Eliana thought.

Then, flickering, the light faded.

Simon’s body sagged. He braced his fists against the mud and bowed his head, breathing deeply.