Lightbringer

And Tal—oh, he had called for her. In those trees, on that storming night near a firelit inn, he had fallen to the ground and reached for her. He had been following her, he must have been—searching for her, hoping to bring her home.

Rielle reached the door, her breath tight and thin, her eyes burning as she stared at Corien and willed him to remain still. It was unusual that he would be so distracted by his work that he wouldn’t notice her awakening.

But whatever the reason for it, she had to take the chance to run. I see a divine creature aching to be set free, he had told her, while tightening the chains that bound her to him.

Freedom. A grand joke. She had been a dog on a leash; she saw that now with a scorching immediacy that felt like she had swallowed lightning.

Her thoughts roaring with panic, she glanced at the unconscious lumps in the far corner of the room that were Artem and Obritsa, kept frozen in a deep sleep crafted, of course, by Corien. He was arranging all of this, and she could trust none of it, and now where was she? Nowhere. Far from home, in a ruined land that had once belonged to angels.

Once Rielle had stepped backward over the threshold and into the vast corridor outside—the ancient, crumbled ceiling open to the house’s upper floors and then to the star-salted sky above—she ran.

• • •

She did not make it far.

She raced through a series of courtyards tucked between the grand, pillared houses in the nearby neighborhood, each abandoned garden overgrown with scrubby trees and twisted dry brambles. Ducking underneath a crumbled stone arch flanked by two figures—one without a head, the other with misshapen lumps on its back that must once have been wings—Rielle looked back over her shoulder.

The moon was half-full, and the air was cold; her breath came in rapid puffs. Black ruins touched with silver loomed over her, scorched with ash that did not fade. Each was marked by a blow of an ancient elemental fist, scars neither time nor weather could scrub away. She could smell the magic even now, centuries later. Smoke on the wind. Mud ripe with rain. The tang of bloodstained metal.

She turned again—and ran straight into Corien.

He grabbed her arms, but before he could speak, before he could wrap her once again in his thoughts and numb her to his liking, she exploded.

Her fury summoned the empirium, and it joyfully obeyed.

Fettered for too long, her power surged up through her body and erupted from her palms. She whipped him with it. He flew across the garden, hit a pillar; his head cracked against the stone. He slid to the ground but wasn’t down for long.

Shaking his head, he staggered to his feet.

She flung out her arms at him as if shoving closed a great door. Her power hurled him into the air, pinning him against a shattered lattice of corroded ironwork curving upward from the courtyard walls. Had it once been an aviary? The thought of winged angels keeping birds caged and clipped for their amusement was perverse. Rielle’s fury spiked higher.

She shoved her hands into the air. Corien’s body jerked against the iron.

“Rielle,” he gasped, “please, listen—”

“You should have trapped me again the moment you realized I’d gone,” she growled, stalking toward him. “Wrapped me up in that mind of yours that you so love. Kept me dead asleep like Obritsa and Artem. Perhaps you thought you didn’t need to. Perhaps you thought I’d see you again and forget to be angry.”

“It’s happened before,” he pointed out, and even dangling from the lattice, he was unsettlingly beautiful, his eyes bright, his petulant mouth practically begging her to kiss it. “You love my companionship. You can’t deny it, Rielle.”

She couldn’t, but his soothing voice was such an obvious attempt to placate her that if she’d had hackles, they would have risen to her ears. “I will deny whatever I wish.” She flexed her fingers, twisting cords of the empirium around his body. “I will use my power however I wish.”

Corien’s pale eyes flashed. She felt his mind reaching for hers and pelted him with a rapid-fire stream of pebbles she summoned from the ground. He howled with pain as they rapped against his face.

“Don’t try that again,” she commanded. “Don’t lie to me again or cloak my thoughts with yours, or I’ll kill you. I’ll burn you as I did all those months ago, and this time I won’t stop. You’ll crisp on the ground, and I’ll watch your ashes flake away.”

“You won’t,” he gasped, blood now dotting his face. “You love me.”

“I wish I didn’t,” she said bitterly.

“I fascinate you, darling.”

“As would your death.”

He laughed. How he could laugh while hanging helplessly from the noose of her power charmed her despite her refusal to be charmed.

“You deceived me,” she said quietly.

He did not respond for a long moment. “I did,” he agreed at last.

She held him in place ruthlessly, her power unyielding. But her chest ached. She despised her hot eyes, her tingling nose, and the fact that he would be able to feel the birth of every tear.

“You didn’t need to,” she said. “I was there. I was with you. I had come to you. I had…” She hesitated. Everything was too fresh; her recovered memories had scraped her raw. “I had left Audric, left my home, to come to you.”

“I know.”

“You knew you didn’t need to lie to me, and yet you did it anyway.”

“I did need to.”

Impatience lashed through her body; her power tightened its sizzling grip on him, making him cry out. She saw the slick black gleam of blood on his neck, his hands. If she pressed a bit harder, she would scorch away his skin.

“I don’t understand,” she told him, her voice choked. “You promised me freedom and have given me the opposite. I came to you because I had no one left. I could trust no one, but I trusted you.”

“I know.”

“You knew me, and you weren’t afraid.”

“I still do, and I’m still not.” His gaze held her gently, and she bristled at the tenderness there, even as she craved it.

“You love me,” she declared.

“More than I have ever loved anyone in my long life,” he answered at once.

Her heart skipped in its cage. “Then why?”

“Because I know you still love him,” he muttered. She watched in fascination as despair swept his face clean of guile. “I know you still love them, even as you hate them, and that this is all new for you. You’re tired, and yet your blood roars unceasingly with power that makes you tremble with both desire and terror. I know you’re afraid to be far from home. I know you miss the familiar. And I did not want that fear to take you from me.”