Lightbringer

Did you? She leaned her heavy head against his shoulder.

Do you miss him? Answer me, he said lightly. Answer me now.

Rielle had trouble scraping together her thoughts, but this troubled her only briefly, for the fog was creeping fast through her mind, sweeping away all worries. I have known him all my life, she said at last.

And you love him still, and that fire cannot simply be snuffed out overnight. Corien stroked her hair, which fell wild and uncombed down her back. He sighed, sounding tired. I understand that. But you see now, don’t you? You see the truth of him.

For a long moment, she did not speak. It was so difficult to think.

“He hates me,” she whispered at last against the curve of Corien’s ear. “He does not understand me.”

Corien kissed the bridge of her nose. “He is too small to understand you. All of them are. They see a monster. I see a god in the shape of a girl.” His hand slid down her arm to rest on her hip. “They see a beast to be tamed. I see a divine creature aching to be set free.”

Rielle’s eyes drifted shut as he kissed her brow. Through her mind’s fog came images—secret visions of Corien’s ardor, and how he longed to demonstrate it, and how passionately he wished they were alone.

But she could not fall with him into the haven of their shared thoughts. Not yet. She had one question, and she fought the fog pulling her under long enough to ask it.

“Tell me this: Is he safe?” Rielle’s words tumbled out clumsily. “Is he well?”

A tiny ripple passed from Corien to her, along the sweet cord of their linked minds, as if a small pebble had been thrown into still water.

“He is safe.” Corien said nothing else aloud, but Rielle heard him clearly inside her mind.

Someday, he told her, and soon, I hope you will understand what must be done.

“I wish I didn’t love him,” she replied, her voice the thinnest of threads. A strange sleep she did not particularly want was pulling her under. “I wish to worry for him no longer. Someone who hates me as he does deserves no piece of my heart.”

I can help you with that. If you’ll allow it.

Her exhausted body screamed in protest as she pulled back from Corien to study his face. Her mind was a confusion of hurt and weariness. She burned to no longer be walking or riding in a rattling carriage. A carriage—how strange. Why a carriage? She tried to ask and found she could not speak. She wanted to rest. She wanted to kiss him.

A small cord tugged insistently at her from a distant corner of her mind—the darkest, smallest corner that existed behind a locked door to which she no longer had the key. Which was troubling. Wasn’t it? Shouldn’t she possess the keys to her own mind?

But when her gaze met Corien’s, her discomfiture disappeared, and there was a spray of clean gray sea foam against her face, and the fog of clouds drifting above it kissed her knees, her belly, the back of her neck. Her shoulders slumped. Her frown slipped. The empirium, forever simmering just beneath her skin, lapped steadily at her edges, and the thought occurred to her, in a quiet bloom of happiness, that she never again had to keep that powerful tide from rising. Not here. Not with Corien.

I can help you with that, he had told her. If you’ll allow it.

He would help her forget her old life. He would help her learn to unlove Audric.

I see a divine creature aching to be set free.

“I’ll allow it,” she said at last, and then slipped so swiftly into sleep that her last thought before the dimness took her was one of alarm, quickly forgotten.

2



   Eliana

“Tameryn, Tameryn, Tameryn. I say her name every night before sleep, in hopes that the word, like a prayer, will bring forth some goodness from the empirium, some kind force that will cushion the blow of my endless nightmares. Savrasara, Tameryn, wherever you are. Come back to me. We need you. I need you. You carry my heart, and without you I am lost. What have we done, Tam? My God, what have we done?”

—From the journals of Saint Nerida the Radiant, written during the Angelic Wars, stolen from the First Great Library of Quelbani

Onboard Admiral Ravikant’s prized warship, in a small holding cell in the vessel’s bowels, Eliana rubbed her wrists raw.

Once—only weeks before—those wrists had worn slender golden chains and flat, round castings she had fashioned herself at the Forge of Vintervok.

Now, they wore chains of a different sort. For the first few days aboard the ship, which she largely spent heaving up her guts onto the wooden floor of her cell, Eliana had ignored the new weight on her arms, the metal links rendering her helpless and inert. She had lain in her own sick, refusing to eat the food the admiral’s soldiers brought her, until at last she had been hauled upright and brought to a cargo hold, where they had stood her atop a grate and dumped bucket after bucket of icy-cold seawater over her until she stood clean and shivering, her teeth chattering. They had unbound the chains then—three silent adatrox, as two black-eyed angelic soldiers stood smugly at the door—and they had stripped her of her sodden clothes and dressed her in fresh ones. A large linen shirt, woolen trousers.

Then they refastened her chains, and when they turned her toward the door to escort her back to her cell, Admiral Ravikant stood at the threshold, hands clasped at his waist. An angel in possession of Ioseph Ferracora’s body.

Eliana’s heart dropped at the sight of her adoptive father’s face—the dark hair and sharp chin that were perfect duplicates of Remy’s. The short, muscled body she had once thought reassuringly solid and now saw as grotesque, a bullish facade.

The black eyes that held nothing inside them, emptier even than her windowless cell.

Admiral Ravikant watched her in silence, and she could only stare at him, her mouth dry and her heart beating fast.

When he spoke, it was in Ioseph Ferracora’s voice, all its warmth gone, and Eliana wanted to be sick once more, though she had no food left in her stomach.

“Dirty yourself like that again,” he said, “and I’ll come back with your brother and demonstrate how ingenious a dealer of pain I can be. Refuse to eat another meal, and I’ll truly grow angry.”

He left without another word, and though she hated herself for it, as the adatrox brought her back to her cell, Eliana searched the ship’s dim corridors for familiar ash-blond hair, a trim profile, a gleam of ice-blue eyes.

Your eyes are like fire.

She could not stop hearing the sound of her own voice in her memory—nor could she stop feeling the ghost of his hands upon her, the echo of his lips.

But the shadows shivering in the ship’s labyrinthine hold were only angels in stolen skins and dead-eyed adatrox marching mindlessly after their masters.