Lightbringer

But touching him would only make things harder.

Ludivine pressed her palms together and ran her thoughts once more over the shell of her shield. The more diligently she worked, the less room remained inside her for guilt. Guilt would fade and end. Someday, she would not feel it at all.

Then came a whistling, crackling sound. A hot spear of elemental power shot through the air, and one of the Mazabatian warships burst into flame.

On the horizon, dozens of lights flared bright. Tiny fires, raging and ready.

Audric pointed, running his fingers along the shoreline.

“They’re here,” he muttered. “And they have firebrands.”

Ludivine felt how unsettled Audric was to see the ships his own father had commissioned sailing toward him through the night in the hands of the enemy. Their sails were ghosts, their new House Sauvillier banners gray and black in the moonlight.

“Rowers, hard to starboard!” Audric’s voice rang out over the water.

The rowers obeyed. The six boats veered right, a tight formation within Ludivine’s shield. Kamayin called out to her elementals in a northern Mazabatian dialect.

“From sky to sky!” she cried. “From sea to sea! Steady do I stand! Never do I flee!”

The windsingers took up the call, chanting the Wind Rite as they worked. And then the waterworkers began, repeating Kamayin’s second prayer:

“O seas and rivers! O rain and snow!” Their voices formed a steady chain of sound atop the waves. “Drown us the cries of our enemies!”

They kept the empty Mazabatian armada sailing north without pause, even as each vessel caught fire and burned. The warships met the Celdarian fleet with no arrows fired, no catapults launched.

“Turn, you idiots,” Audric whispered, for the Celdarian ships were slow to veer away from the ships bearing down on them.

Ludivine, her back to the flames, could nevertheless sense how confounded the captains were. Fifteen prized Mazabatian warships sailing at full speed to their destruction?

She allowed herself a small smile as their six little boats circled wide around the chaos toward the Celdarian shore. Through Audric’s eyes, she saw the fiery Mazabatian ships encircle the bewildered Celdarian fleet, and once they were in place, Audric shouted a single command.

At once, the elementals lowered their arms. Heads drooped onto shoulders. Some leaned out over the water and heaved.

But there was still the shore to reach, and after a few moments’ rest, Kamayin called out encouragement, and their tired cloaked fleet resumed course for Celdaria.

Ludivine stared ahead at the dark coastline. Her heart was a wild thing, its rhythm like the clop of a horse running scared.

Audric knelt beside her. “Only a little while longer, Lu,” he said. His thoughts were tired; she could sense how the mind-speak had wearied him. “Then we can rest, catch our breath. You have done so well.”

She set her jaw against the warmth of his voice. How she had craved its return these long weeks. And now, how she fought to push it from her mind.

Yes, they would reach the shore soon. They would rest.

And then, she would run.

• • •

The waterworkers quietly sank the boats in a deep cove off the Celdarian coast some hundred miles from Luxitaine, where there was little but tiny farms and fields of sleepy goats. They made a crude camp in a scrubby woodland near an orchard of olive trees. The air was warm, but in Âme de la Terre, high in the mountains, it would be crisp with the spring snows.

Ludivine waited until most of their party was asleep. Only two people remained awake: a pale, burly woman and a brown-skinned reed of a man, neither of them an elemental. Soldiers, cursing quietly to each other about their aching arms, their hands blistered from rowing. But Ludivine could sense the bloom of their pride, how glad they were to have seen Audric safely to shore.

Her throat ached as she sent them to sleep. They would wake in a half hour or so, embarrassed to have dozed off. They would promise each other to never confess it.

The camp was silent, the moon a thin smile. A goat bleated in its dark field.

Ludivine’s knees shook as she left the soldiers behind. There was no need to creep; the power that had shielded them across the water shielded her still. They would hear none of her footsteps, not even feel the air her body moved.

And yet she crept as if across a frozen lake. A sort of madness had taken her. Her thoughts screamed; she could not calm their wild spin.

At a bent oak, she paused. Her nape itched with sweat. For a moment, she stared at the dark countryside, the farmhouse on the hill to her right.

She could have gone then and been done with it.

But she could not resist one last look at him.

Audric slept beneath the oak, the Sun Guard in a tight circle around him and Sloane not far off, sleeping with her arms folded and a frown on her face.

Ludivine knelt beside Audric, held his face in her hands. She could hardly bear to look at him, at how soft and dear he was in sleep. The elegant straight line of his nose, the furrow of his serious brow. Even in repose, he looked a king.

She kissed him as he slept—his temples, his cheeks. Pressing her forehead to his, she breathed the air he exhaled, circled her thumbs against the turn of his jaw.

“I love you, my friend,” she whispered. “I have never not loved you.” She remembered the words he had given Rielle, how tender his face had been as he spoke them. “My light and my life,” she whispered, then pressed her mouth to his cheek.

Tears rolled down her face, her chest so tight she feared it would collapse in on itself. Rising, she did not look at him again. When she stumbled away from him, it felt like what she imagined death to be. In his sleep, he was innocent of her cowardice; when he woke, he would be battered with it.

She put her hand to her chest, willing her heart to stop aching. But she knew it would never. She knew this, and still she left him, trusting that he would be able to sneak through Âme de la Terre and into Baingarde without her there to protect him. He had the Sun Guard, she told herself. He had forty elementals and twenty-four skilled soldiers and a princess of Mazabat.

They do not need an angel, she told herself, and because they were asleep, because she had hidden herself so completely, she cried without fear as she fled. Her sobs gripped her chest like a glove of steel. She climbed a little ridge of rock, wiped her face with dirt-smeared hands.

At the top, she sat on a flat boulder cracked down the middle. It wobbled as she wept. She hugged herself and sent to Audric every memory she had of their years together. Every lazy afternoon stretched out on the rug by the open windows in his rooms, every warm night nestled in his bed. His arms around her, her arms around Rielle. His dark head tucked over her fair one, and Rielle’s face smashed into her neck, or his, happily nuzzling them as she drifted off to sleep.