Eliana looked away. She had told Zahra she would practice using her power. In order to help Navi, she had resolved to do it, to swallow her revulsion.
But the memory of Zahra’s vision still swirled thick as bile in her head, and Harkan’s presence made her feel young again, and small. A child calling to her friend across the gap between their houses.
She shook her head, panic brimming sick and hot beneath her skin. “I won’t be like her. I won’t. I won’t do this—”
“You don’t have to.” Harkan cupped her face in his hands. “You’ve done enough for this war. This isn’t your fight. You are Eliana Ferracora.”
She closed her eyes, unable to speak.
“You are my friend,” Harkan continued, his voice soft and urgent. “You are Remy’s sister. You are the daughter of Ioseph and Rozen Ferracora. You are the Dread of Orline.”
“But don’t you see? It’s already begun.” When she looked back up at him, her eyes were dry, but her body was a clenched tangle of worries. “The day my power awakens, I kill the woman who raised me, the woman who was more my mother than any ghost from the Old World could ever be. What does that tell you?”
From beyond Harkan came a soft cry.
Eliana’s heart crashed against her ribs.
She turned to see Remy standing in the middle of the room, having just entered with a teetering stack of books in his hands.
The look on his face left Eliana feeling as though all the air had been sucked out of the room. She gaped at him, utterly frozen. The world was tumbling down around her, and she had no idea how to stop it.
Harkan took the books from him cheerfully, as though nothing had happened. “Hello there, Remy. Did Simon send some more books? How considerate of him. Can you ask him if, next time, he would be so kind as to jump up his own ass instead?”
But Remy ignored him. He allowed Harkan to take the books and then stood there, looking so small and frail in the shadows that the sight of him made Eliana’s chest hurt.
“Is it true?” he asked, both his expression and his voice eerily calm, though his eyes were bright. “You killed her?”
Eliana forced herself to meet his gaze. “She wasn’t herself anymore, Remy. They had turned her into a monster. She was attacking Simon.”
“No.” He shook his head, backing slowly away from her. “No. You’re the monster.”
Then he turned and hurried out of the room.
• • •
Two days later, in the early evening, Eliana sat hunched over a table in the royal archives, staring dully at the book lying open in front of her.
She had tried to talk to Remy several times, and each had been a disaster. He had screamed at her, declared his hatred, wept so viciously that he’d made himself sick, and now he wouldn’t speak to her. He saw her coming and ran the other way. She searched the castle for him and ended up chasing shadows. He was a small, sly thing, her brother. He had grown up in the twisting, narrow streets of Orline, and if he didn’t want to be found, he wouldn’t be.
So, now, utterly heartsick, feeling ill down to her toes, Eliana had retreated to the archives, spending most hours of the day there and letting Remy have the space he obviously craved—and hoping that Harkan would somehow be able to reach her brother when she had not.
A soft movement from the shadows made her glance up to see Simon sliding into the chair across from her. She returned to the book and pretended to read for a few moments while he sat with his hands folded on the table.
When she could bear his silent presence no longer, she looked up once more. “Yes?”
“You sent for me,” he replied.
She flushed a little. “Oh, right. I’d forgotten.”
“If it’s so unimportant to you, perhaps my time can be better spent elsewhere.”
“You have something better to do than serve your queen?” she snapped.
Simon’s smile came slowly. He leaned back in his chair, considering her. “Royalty suits you.”
The sight of him looking so quietly delighted unnerved her, which made her want to push back from the table and kick her chair into the bookshelves, but she was afraid she might start crying again if she moved with too much violence.
Slowly, she began stacking her books. “How does it suit me?”
“You’re a snob,” Simon replied, “and you have a terrible temper, not to mention an unshakable belief in your own worth.”
An ugly laugh burst out of her. “My own worth.” She slammed the topmost book shut. “I look in the mirror, and do you know what I see? I see the daughter of a cruel woman who nearly destroyed the world. I see a girl who doesn’t understand one fucking thing about any of this nonsense.” She gestured impatiently at the books. “And I see Remy, staring up at me, calling me a monster because I killed his mother.”
She glared at the table for a long, fraught moment, and when she looked up, the sight of Simon watching her so quietly—his eyes piercing and unwaveringly focused—shook something loose inside her. He wasn’t trying to comfort her; he wasn’t showing her a scrap of sympathy, or moving to touch her, or hold her, as Harkan would have done. He knew very well what she was, she realized, and understood that she neither deserved comfort nor craved kindness.
She was suddenly, savagely, glad for his nearness.
It took her a moment to find her voice and remember why she had summoned him—to convince him of her loyalty so it would be easier to leave with Zahra for the Nest.
“I need your help,” she said at last. “That’s why I sent for you. I haven’t wanted to attempt using my power again because I’ve been afraid of what might happen.”
“Another storm,” he guessed.
“Or worse. But if I had some physical assurance that that wouldn’t happen—at least not as easily as it did on the beach—it might be easier for me to open my mind to this entire idea.” She took a deep breath and met his gaze. “I want to forge a casting for myself, and I need your help to do it.”
He nodded slowly. “I’m not well-versed in metalwork.”
“But you’re well-versed in the Old World. You can come with me to the Forge, help me speak to the acolytes. I want someone I trust by my side when I do this.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Would you rather not have Harkan by your side, then?”
“This is not Harkan’s world,” she said. “It’s yours. And I want to shelter him and Remy from as much of it as I can.”
Simon searched her face for a long time, his expression impassive.
She glared at him. “Have you quite finished staring at me?”
“I’m understandably suspicious of this change of heart,” he replied. “Two days ago, you were ignoring the books I gave you and barely acknowledging your power’s existence. Now you want to forge a casting so you can try using that power again.”
“Two days ago, my brother was speaking to me.”
“Give him time,” Simon said quietly.
“He won’t ever forgive me.”
“Perhaps not.”
“And yet part of me is glad he overheard me. Now he can live under no illusions of what I am.”
“He has long known what you are, and yet he never stopped loving you.”
“Until now.”
Simon inclined his head. “I suppose that’s possible.”
Eliana gripped the back of her chair, hard, and shot him a sardonic smile. “You know, I must thank you.”
“For what?”
“For your cruelty. One word from you, and I feel furious enough to forget the rest of my troubles.”
Simon smiled tightly, looking as though he were about to respond. Instead, he gestured at the books.
“As I’m sure you’ve read by now,” he said, “when an elemental forged their casting, they usually melted down an artifact of personal significance to add to the
mixture.”
Eliana nodded. “The stronger the personal attachment to one’s casting, the greater ease with which an elemental could use it to manipulate their magic. Luckily I have just the thing.” She removed her necklace and tossed it onto the table. The scratched surface of the Lightbringer caught the flickering lamplight and gave the horse’s wings the illusion of movement.
“You’re not her, Eliana.” Shadows cloaked the long lines of Simon’s body, shrouding all but his eyes in darkness. “You’re not your mother.”
“No, but I’m her daughter. Or so you say. What makes you think I’ll be any different from her?”
“Because I knew her. And I know you.”
Eliana scoffed. “You hardly know me.”
“I know enough,” came his low reply. “No one can decide what you become except you. Not me, and not your parents. You have a choice ahead of you, just as she did, and I have faith that you will make it wisely.”
He rose, straightening his jacket. “Shall we visit the Forge tonight, then? Or wait until tomorrow?”
His words left her feeling shaken more thoroughly than she had felt even in her Fidelia cell with Zahra’s proclamation ringing in her ears: You are the Sun Queen, and I’ve come to bring you home.
But she would not allow him the satisfaction of seeing her rattled. She kept her voice cool and retrieved the necklace from the table as if it were a mere trifle, easily discarded.
“No,” she replied. “We begin tonight.”
9
Rielle
“Together, in the war-ravaged plains of the land that would someday become the nation of Celdaria, the saints began carving a door out of this world and into the next. What they found, however, was not a new world, for not even they were powerful enough for so far a reach. What they found was the Deep—a void, eternal and narrow, a sea of hollow space just beyond the curtain of our world. And it was then that they began to understand what they must do, and how they would at last bring the angels to ruin.”
—The Last Days of the Saints, a study of the Gate and its construction, by Kristo Niskala, Borsvall historian
The archer who had shot Ludivine was named Jodoc, and as he led their party through the woodlands of Iastra, the largest island of the Sunderlands, Rielle glared at the back of his head, wondering if she could crack it open without even touching him.
Part of her very much wanted to try.
Ludivine walked beside her, making a valiant effort to keep up with the group’s pace, but new, thin lines of pain framed her mouth and eyes, as if she had aged in the terrible minute between the blightblade piercing her and Rielle shattering it.
Rielle glanced at Ludivine’s hastily mended dress. Tendrils of darkness—midnight-blue, indigo, the scaly brown-black of rotting flesh—snaked out from beneath her furred collar, following the delicate lines of Ludivine’s upper arm.
Rielle quickly looked away, her throat tightening. She returned her gaze to the back of Jodoc’s head and recited to herself that she mustn’t kill him, reminded herself dozens of times over that she mustn’t kill him, until her fists unclenched and she could breathe without feeling made of fire.
Over the past few hours, the bruise from the blightblade had spread down Ludivine’s left arm, encasing it in a dark lattice of uneven lines that shimmered in the light as if tiny jewels had been embedded in her skin. Rielle would have thought it beautiful, were it not for the memory of Ludivine’s muted screams as it bloomed. In the healer’s rooms, she had clung to Rielle, muffling her pained cries in Rielle’s cloak.
Thankfully, the bruise appeared to have stopped growing, the gown covered most of it, and Ludivine bore whatever discomfort remained without complaint. But Rielle was not fooled by her silence. Ludivine’s pain was a faint presence in the back of her mind, like the remnants of an unsettling dream she couldn’t shake loose.
And the farther they walked through the dense woodlands of Iastra, the greater became Rielle’s feeling of uneasiness.
They could no longer hear the waves lapping against the island’s broad beach, nor the seabirds’ cries. The woodlands grew close and tangled, the trees’ trunks large enough to serve as towers of a woodland fortress. Their branches sprawled like ancient black serpents across mossy hollows, their bark lined with silver lichens. Some bore clumps of white flowers that glowed faintly as if they had each swallowed a piece of a star. Torn petals hung suspended in the air alongside dark oak leaves, grains of sand, flakes of crushed seashells, and tiny white shards that Rielle thought might be bits of animal bone. The air was thick, heavy with a slow, spinning weight.
With each step, she felt as though she were moving farther away from her body and into a new realm. Her vision shifted, and she could see more clearly the gossamer net connecting everything around them—a delicate golden sea, forever undulating, forever seeking new shores, on which the rest of the seen world floated.
She smiled, drawing her fingers through waves of light no one else was powerful enough to glimpse.
Ingrid at last broke the silence. “What’s happened to this place? Why is everything floating?”
Ilmaire and Audric answered simultaneously—Audric’s voice hushed with awe, and Ilmaire’s nearly giddy: “It’s the Gate.”
Ingrid cut an irritated glare Audric’s way.
“The nearer the Gate,” confirmed Jodoc, “the higher the concentration of the empirium. And in such a place, the world is not what it is elsewhere.” He held aside a branch so the others could continue unimpeded.
But Rielle didn’t follow. Jodoc, she sensed, was taking them the wrong way.
Well, not the wrong way, but certainly the long way—to confuse them, she assumed, and to make it more difficult for them to retrace their steps. She moved away from them, drifting farther into the trees, and as she walked, she observed how the entire endless woodland was lined with dozens of winding paths. The Obex had doubtless created these paths, treading upon them over and over for centuries, until they had become dirt tracks worn smooth. It was a maze; unwanted visitors would easily get turned around in the trees and never find their way out.
Rielle supposed that she herself was an unwanted visitor. But the call of the Gate pulled her like a distant light through a dark tunnel. She would not lose herself in these trees, no matter how earnestly they tried to confuse her.
Humming quietly to herself, her eyes unfocused, the world dreamy and slow-moving around her, she turned down a particular path that was a little more shadowed than the others, lined with floating browned petals. She pushed them aside, the movement lazy and supple, as if she were drawing her hand through water. She blinked and saw only her hand moving through the air, lightly bumping the petals out of her path. She blinked once more, and the world of the empirium appeared to her—every leaf, every petal, every faint breath of wind, every pore of her skin, painted with stipples of gold.
With her boots on, she could not feel the earth under her feet, so she removed them, discarding them in a nest of roots. Large iridescent beetles emerged from the shadows, skittering away from her presence.
The still, damp air grew charged and sour, as if from a nearing storm. The fine hairs along Rielle’s arms stood up. Each inhale felt like trying to breathe with a hand clamped over her mouth and nose.
Then, finally, her feet hit something cold and hard.
She blinked, clearing her vision of the empirium, and saw an enormous flat plinth of stone, square and gray, immaculately clean, surrounded on three sides by the woods. On the far side of the plinth rose sheer black cliffs that disappeared into a thick veil of low gray clouds. A slender set of stairs had been cut into the stone.
Rielle began to climb them, and at the top, she emerged onto a rocky black plain, slick and gleaming. Flakes of ash floated in the air, slowly turning. A gray and endless fog surrounded her, and what the landscape looked like beyond that, she could not de
termine. She heard the distant crash of waves but could see no trees, no sky, no water.
She saw only a broad stretch of craggy black rock, as if something terrible had permanently scorched the ground.
And there, in the center of the burnt plain, stood the Gate—an angular structure of unadorned gray stone framing a dim, shifting blue light.
Trapezoidal, the Gate stood on yet another flat plinth of stone, this one circular. The two pillars that formed the Gate’s sides, and the singular piece of stone connecting them at the top, were enormous, each slab as thick as twenty men standing with arms outstretched, finger to finger. The height of it made Rielle’s head spin. It must have stood some five hundred feet in the air, and another five hundred feet across—and even that, Rielle thought, was an underestimation.
She approached it, her breathing slow and thin, as if approaching a wild animal she wished to tame and claim for her own. From her reading, she knew the structure itself was merely for show, to demonstrate the clear boundaries of where the Gate ended and began. The Gate itself was in the air—an opening into the Deep, carved out of the empirium by the saints before they banished the angels inside and sealed the opening shut.
But that seal, Rielle saw at once, was breaking.
She saw it as clearly as if someone were holding before her a piece of glass cracked by the impact of a stone. Shifting her thoughts outside her body to the eerie world around her, she unfocused her eyes and imagined her blood and bone extending beyond her fingers and toes, beyond the reach of her tongue, and into the ground—along the rocks beneath her, skimming the flakes of ash floating in the air. She tilted her head, inhaled, exhaled, and the picture of the breaking Gate sharpened before her eyes.
The empirium was a white-hot sun at the Gate’s center, a solid wall of light—except for thin, dark cracks, fine as the threads of a spider’s web, that drifted through the empirium’s light like the alien shapes that floated across Rielle’s vision after rubbing her eyes too hard. One moment, they existed, long and delicate; the next moment, they had faded, only to reappear seconds later in a different location.
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