Lightbringer

Sloane touched his shoulder. He waited until his eyes were dry, then turned away from the sorrow tree. Kamayin was muttering instructions to her elementals, their castings faintly aglow. Evyline and the Sun Guard stood in a circle, all of them reciting the seven elemental rites.

Audric could hardly bear to look at them, these people who had decided they would fight at his side. They were so soft in the dim garden light, so breakable. If he had never loved Rielle, would they be standing there? Would a usurper sit on his throne? Would his father be dead and his mother a shell of her former self?

It would have been easier, he knew, if he had never loved her.

And yet, given the choice, he would do it again, even knowing what was to come. He would lose her a thousand times over if it meant he would first have the chance to love her.

They crossed the gardens to the catacombs, where another network of tunnels led into Baingarde itself. They connected to the mountain tunnels at several underground junctures; there had been no need to come to the surface. But Audric had wanted to see the gardens, even though he had known it would hurt him.

Near the catacombs, the seeing pools gleamed flat and black, like polished stones set into the ground. Memories of himself, Rielle, and Ludivine, young and uncaring, flitted across the pools like shadows.

Sloane kept near him as they hurried through the trees. Her short black hair shone blue in the pale moonlight. The polished obsidian orb of her scepter buzzed with ready power, and the shadows clung to her lovingly, like children to their parents’ legs.

“It’s strange, isn’t it?” she murmured. “Remembering the last time we were here? It was such a wild night, so long ago, and so rife with terror. I hardly remember what Baingarde looks like.”

“I remember it,” Audric said at once. “I see it in my dreams. I taste the cinnamon cakes I used to steal from the kitchens for Rielle. I can smell the old leather of my books. I can feel the cold hoof of Saint Katell’s stone mare in the Hall of the Saints. I used to sit on it and pray when I was a child, when I couldn’t sleep. I could tell you every stair that creaks in the servants’ wing. There is a tapestry on the second floor, near my father’s old study. It depicts Saint Nerida standing in the middle of a crashing sea, the waves splitting apart on either side of her. There is a golden thread on her trident that’s come loose. Right on the shaft, below the middle prong.”

They had reached the catacombs. Sloane watched him steadily, saying nothing. The others waited in the shadows, weapons at the ready, scanning the trees for enemies.

“I remember everything,” Audric whispered.

A call shattered the night’s quiet: three long blasts bellowing from the old watchtower at the city’s perimeter. Audric had only ever heard the sound when Miren and her acolytes from the Forge had visited the horns to make repairs and refresh the magic woven into their metal.

The sound of that horn meant that enemies had been sighted.

Another horn answered, this one higher and brassier. Kamayin, grinning, lifted her chin; her soldiers stood taller. It was the Queen’s Horn of the Mazabatian army, announcing their arrival. Queen Bazati would be with them, and General Rakallo. One thousand Mazabatian troops. More would come, once they had retaken the city. The real battle was yet to come.

Audric turned to face his own little army. The faintest sliver of light escaped the top of Illumenor’s sheath, lighting the faces gathered around him with an eerie glow.

“May the Queen’s light guide us,” he said without shame, for Rielle may have left them, but the prayers spoken in her name had lost none of their power.

And there was still another queen to be found, if the prophecy was true. She carries a girl, Ludivine had told him weeks ago, and whenever he thought of it, his heart ached with love. Was it his child’s light they now followed? Or was it simply the light that came of believing there was reason to keep going?

Audric caught Kamayin’s eye. She nodded once, her castings humming gold at her wrists. Then he found Evyline, towering above them all. The lines around her mouth looked deeper than Audric had ever seen them, the gray of her hair that much closer to white.

How the last few months had aged them all. How stretched thin with grief they had become.

“May the Queen’s light guide us,” Evyline answered, and the Sun Guard echoed her prayer.

There was nothing else to say. Audric hurried into the cool darkness of the catacombs, the air heavy with the weight of lives lived and lost, and led his fierce little army into the tunnels that would take him home at last.

• • •

Baingarde buzzed with chaos.

Servants gathered weapons and supplies, fled to their rooms, took up posts at the windows to watch the battle unfolding outside. Soldiers of House Sauvillier ran from storeroom to storeroom, then out into the castle yards.

Audric, Kamayin, Evyline, and Sloane each led a team of fighters up through the castle from its cavernous foundations. Audric had drawn diagrams of Baingarde, gone over the maps again and again until everyone from the boats that had crossed the Sea of Silarra knew the number of rooms, the stairwells to avoid, where guards would most likely be posted. Anyone they encountered, they were to incapacitate—no killing, if they could manage it—and to avoid detection, they were to use elemental magic only when necessary. The common soldiers sworn to serve Merovec Sauvillier, Audric had told them, were not to blame for the crimes of their lord.

Audric approached Baingarde’s soaring entrance hall, his team of six at his heels. They crouched in the shadows of the second-floor mezzanine. A polished wooden arcade ran the length of each corridor of the mezzanine, and heavy green drapes curtained private sitting rooms. Three enormous staircases joined the mezzanine to the hall below, where the polished marble floor gleamed.

Audric watched the massive front doors open, thick wood reinforced with stone. A stream of Sauvillier soldiers rushed out into the night, their commander barking orders. Even once they had closed the doors behind them, Audric could hear the sounds of battle in the city. He glanced out the windows that spanned the length of the front wall, saw the streets of his city sloping down to the wide, saint-made lake and the broad grassy Flats beyond.

The Flats were alight with magic—angry bursts of fire, soaring streaks of sunlight. The Mazabatian army was a great dark river pouring through the wide pass between Mount Taléa and Mount Sorenne. Scattered shapes spilled across the Flats to meet them.

Audric watched grimly. With so many of Merovec’s soldiers still making their way back from the coast, those left in the capital would be overwhelmed by the brutal efficiency of Queen Bazati’s one thousand troops. Miren’s reports had estimated that only a few hundred Sauvillier soldiers had remained at their posts in the capital, and those would be listless and agitated, undisciplined, as all Merovec’s soldiers had become.

They would not stand for long against the Mazabatians. It was a fantastic diversion to direct attention away from the castle and a startling demonstration for the citizens of Âme de la Terre of how inadequately Merovec had prepared the city for angelic invasion.