Lightbringer

Tears came to her eyes. Her chest ached with longing. The pinch of hunger returned to her stomach; she had not eaten since she had first woken in this room, since she had beaten her fists raw on the locked doors.

“That wasn’t real,” she whispered again.

Corien shrugged eloquently and rose to his feet. “It could be,” he said, and left her alone with her staring guards.

• • •

When Eliana awoke, she was standing on a white shore.

Gentle, warm waves lapped at her feet. The sand was soft, and behind her, on the dunes, clusters of thin pale grass rustled quietly in the wind. She tasted salt on her lips. The air was clear and light. She put her arms out to feel it and rose up onto her toes. Maybe she would fly. She was happy enough for it.

“El!”

She turned and smiled.

Remy was coming up a trail through the dunes, his arm linked with that of a kind-eyed boy with light brown skin and dark hair he kept long and knotted at his nape. Remy kissed his cheek, then ran to Eliana with a basket in his hands. She watched him fondly. At seventeen, he was the gangliest boy she had ever seen, and taller than she remembered. Had he grown even since leaving for the market that morning? The sea wind ruffled his dark hair. His eyes were bluer than the sky.

He grinned down at her and held out his basket. “I remembered.”

She pulled back the basket’s covering and saw a bushel of strawberries, each bright and red as blood. When she bit into the first one, the taste burst open in her mouth.

She sighed, closing her eyes. “I could die from happiness.”

Warm hands slid around her waist, gently pulling her back against a broad chest.

“Please don’t,” Simon murmured. “Stay with me.”

She turned to him with a smile.

“They’re perfect,” she said, and when he bit into the fruit she held up for him, his teeth grazed her fingers, and she shivered with delight, but then she caught a strange scent on the air. A sharp sweetness that did not belong.

“What is that?” she asked, before recognizing it—a floral perfume, cloying and familiar.

She cried out, bolted from Simon’s arms, ignored Remy calling her name, and ran.

She awoke not in bed but on Corien’s arm. They were walking together along a breezeway of his palace, overlooking the city of Elysium. White spires pierced the sky. A gown of black velvet cinched with a gold sash kissed her legs with every step.

She thought of the sea, the soft shore, Remy’s bright smile.

Corien pointed with his walking stick at a nearby tower capped with bronze tiles and winged figures carved from white stone. The polished scarlet jewel at the top of his cane glinted like an evil eye.

“That is the Tower of the Singing Skies,” he said lightly. “In Patria, in the City of the Skies, when an angel died, the temple choirs took to the air and sang laments for three days without ceasing. If only you could have heard it, Eliana. If only you could have seen us at the height of our glory.”

He wanted her to weep, to wail and beg, but Eliana refused, even once she had returned to her room. She wasn’t truly alone there, after all.

She would never be alone again.

• • •

When Eliana awoke, she was in a house that resembled her home in Orline.

A tall, narrow house, all its windows thrown open to the morning. Polished tile floors, thick rugs in the sitting room, the bedrooms, her father’s study.

She found Ioseph Ferracora in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, humming a tune. Eliana grinned as she watched him. It had been so long since she had seen him like this, relaxed and cooking breakfast. For years, he had been at war, but now he was home, and she couldn’t stop looking at him. He was fair-skinned with ruddy cheeks, shaggy dark hair like Remy’s, and he had a stubborn square jaw and square shoulders. A stranger wouldn’t expect him to possess any sort of grace or gentleness. But Eliana knew better.

He could whittle the finest little figurines—woodland creatures with legs thin as twigs, robed saints crowned with stars. When she woke from nightmares of the war that had nearly claimed him, he held her as tenderly as if she were a newborn.

Ioseph set down his knife, and Eliana came up behind him and hugged him, wrapped her arms around his big barrel chest and pressed her face to his back. When he laughed, she felt it in her ribs.

“What’s that for?” he asked, pulling her around to face him.

She gazed upon his rugged features, his beard-roughened cheeks. Her own felt likely to split open from her smile.

“It’s for nothing,” she answered. “It’s for everything. I’ve missed you, Papa.”

“I know, my sweet girl,” he told her, and kissed her cheek. “But that’s all past now. We’re together. We’re a family, and we’re safe.”

A merry shriek flew at them from the next room, which sent her father’s mouth quirking. He retrieved his knife and gestured with it toward the door.

“You’d best get a handle on that man of yours,” Ioseph warned, laughter in his voice. “He and Remy will wake the neighbors.”

Eliana turned to see Remy race into the kitchen and Simon tumble in just after him. Simon caught him, scooped him up into his arms, and Remy howled with laughter, pounded his fists against Simon’s shoulders.

“He cheated, El!” Remy shouted. “He cheated at king’s cards, and I called him on it!”

“Ah, but I would never lie to you,” Simon proclaimed solemnly, and then, over Remy’s head, he gave Eliana a sly wink that left her wobbly at her father’s side.

But something was wrong, she thought, watching them tease and laugh. Ioseph approached them with mock sternness, hands on his hips, and proclaimed something Eliana could not understand, for she was suddenly distracted. She stared at the back of her father’s head, watched Simon set Remy on his feet and ruffle his hair, and that was it, she realized—that was the wrongness of it.

Remy was too small. He was a tiny child again, not the gangly boy she knew. And Simon’s face was smooth and full of light, the shadows gone from under his eyes, and Ioseph…

“Father?” she asked quietly.

He didn’t respond, his back to her, but something was wrong, or at least she thought it was, and she needed to look at Ioseph Ferracora straight on. She needed to see her father’s warm, dark gaze, the amiable lines around his eyes, and feel reassured that this strangeness turning inside her was simply a fancy, the echo of a dream.

She touched his shoulder, but before he could turn, she saw his reflection in the mirror hanging across the room.