Lightbringer

He paused a few paces from the door and glanced back over his shoulder. “The Emperor’s plans will proceed quickly, regardless of your ignorance.” Then, to the guards, he said, “You have your orders.”

He was gone soon after, and as Eliana was escorted out of her cell and through an endless, softly rocking maze of carpeted hallways, she began to doubt that he had ever been there at all.

• • •

After that, she was never alone.

They brought her to a spacious apartment on one of the upper decks. A plush carpet of midnight blue stretched beneath a pale violet ceiling, the painted wood embellished with depictions of unfamiliar constellations. A chandelier hung from the rafters, links of crystal shivering as the boat rocked and hummed, and the bed was massive, a monstrosity of periwinkle and indigo satin that seemed to leer as a trio of angelic attendants undid Eliana’s chains and tugged off her clothes.

Two guards watched the doors, and four more were stationed at the windows, past which stretched a glimmering blackness—the ceaseless waves, a touch of moonlight. The sight of the world beyond the ship shattered something fragile and tender in Eliana’s throat, and as the attendants cleaned and bandaged her wrists, she swallowed hard against tears.

In the adjacent bathing room, they scrubbed her from head to toe with steaming water that poured from a gleaming brass faucet. Their movements were brisk but not violent, and Eliana wondered what exactly the Emperor’s orders had been. If she did her utmost to goad them into hurting her, would they indulge her?

If she tried to kill herself, put an end to all of this before the Emperor could, would he slip inside her and hold her hostage inside her own mind, preventing her from doing anything except lying on that giant blue bed in silence until the ship made port in Celdaria?

She laughed a little at the image, and once she started, she could not stop. As the attendants worked soap through her shoulder-length cap of curls, hysterical laughter spilled out of her. Eliana watched herself in the mirror as they combed through her dark-brown hair, its waves and loose curls, its knotted snarls. The sight reminded her numbly of Dani Keshavarzian, who had cut her tangle-prone hair to her jawline, back in Willow. Thinking of Dani, of the Admiral’s Jubilee, of everyone dead on that beach in Festival, she expected tears, but none came.

The attendants smoothed creams into her skin, its pale-brown color and warm olive tones painted wan and shadowed by the dim candlelight. They softened and plumped her as they might a hunk of meat. Then they dressed her in a shapeless nightgown of violet silk and retreated, leaving her alone with her six guards.

One of them pointed at the bed. “Sleep.”

She obeyed, because if she stood for one more moment on her shaking legs, she would collapse, and she could not bear the indignity of angelic soldiers dragging her unconscious to her bed.

She climbed atop it, wobbly as a newborn foal. The perfumed scent of the soaps the attendants had used made her gag. She sank into her pillows, turned away from those twelve staring black eyes, and for the first time since waking aboard the admiral’s ship, she wept.

• • •

For days, she lay in quiet agony among the piles of blue silk that had become her entire world.

And in her dreams, he visited her.

First he was Remy, being dragged away down that endless red corridor of which she’d first dreamed in Astavar. She chased after him, running for miles along the blood-sodden carpet, but whoever or whatever was pulling him was too fast for her, too strong, and the end of the corridor was quickly unraveling, the pieces of it exploding outward like shards of shattered red glass.

Then he was Ioseph, the father who had raised her, lying on a clean white table in a clean white room, being cut open by angels in clean white robes. Each of them wore one of the masks she had seen at the Jubilee in Festival: a metallic black raven, a smiling brass fox, an ivory peacock studded with turquoise jewels. Ioseph screamed as the angels’ knives pierced him, and then a funnel of black came spinning down from above, forcing itself into his mouth, his nose, his gaping chest.

Next he was Simon, coming to her in the little room at Willow with the slanted ceiling and the tiny hot stove, the bed tucked into the corner. His muscles trembled as he moved inside her, and his arms around her were warm and strong. They steadied her and they pinned her and they exhilarated her. He placed his palm against her forehead, and the warmth of that gentle touch soothed her. She followed the quiet trail of his touch down, down, down into a hot black tunnel buried deep in her mind. Her own heartbeat drummed faster and faster in her ears, so loud it shook her chest, and suddenly she wanted to leave Simon, she wanted to run from him and never look back. But she couldn’t free herself from his arms. She was trapped there in the little bed, in the spiraling tunnel, with the boom of her heartbeat drowning her, choking her, and his mouth was upon her, his fingers pressing between her lips, against the tender curve of her neck, and she craved the pressure of his touch even as she despised it.

“Your eyes,” he whispered into her hair, “are like fire.”

A terrible scorching heat bloomed inside her. It started in her belly and grew and rose until she was pressing the heels of her palms to her cheeks, burning her fingers on the twin firepits where her eyes used to be, and Simon’s laughter was everywhere, a roughshod accompaniment to her racing heart.

Harkan’s voice rose through the crackling inferno: El, if you can do something, do it now!

She saw herself kneeling in the mud outside the city of Karlaine, pressing her glowing hands into the terrible wound on Remy’s stomach—

A sucking swoop of sound, then silence. Darkness.

“Ah.” A little sigh. Smooth words stretched around a smile. “There you are.”

She turned in her bed at Willow, in that little room with the slanted ceiling, rain tapping its cold fingers against the windows. Sitting in the corner, in a chair draped with Simon’s clothes, was a man in black, white fingers steepled at his lips.

His smile widened when her eyes alighted upon him, and the sight of him sitting there, content in his amusement, was such a flawless portrait, so startlingly beautiful, that Eliana found herself weeping anew.

“Welcome home, Your Highness,” he said to her, and then rose, the shadows of the room converging on him, shaping the clean black lines of his cloak, his coat, his hair—

• • •

Eliana awoke as the ship shuddered, then stilled.

The endless rocking was no more, and outside the windows of her blue room there was sunlight, a broad pink sky, a pair of gliding white gulls.

She sat up, her shaking limbs slick with sweat. Bedsheets ruined, eyes burning, cheeks raw and wet.

When the door opened, Admiral Ravikant strode into the room. Eliana’s three attendants flanked him, opulent fabrics draped over their arms.