Kingsbane

by Claire Legrand

  Remy, Remy. But she couldn’t think about him. Not now, not tonight.

  “‘A heart forged in battle and strife,’” she continued, “‘cuts deeper than any blade.’” Another lift, a push, a hot hiss of air into the flames. “‘A sword forged true with hammer and blade…’”

  The acolytes stationed around the room, including Ikari, began to recite the Metal Rite along with her. The only one to remain silent was Simon, standing near enough that Eliana could have reached back and caught his fingers in hers. She was grateful for his silence. It was the fulcrum upon which she balanced her work.

  “‘…Flies sure and swift.’” She followed the paths of the sweat coursing down her arms and back, using them to trace the lines of her muscles as she worked. “‘A heart forged in battle and strife…’”

  “‘Cuts deeper than any blade,’” came Ikari’s steady voice.

  Beside Eliana, Simon shifted. She recalled what he had told her as they walked to the Forge earlier that evening: Remember what you felt that day on the beach. Remember it, and channel it into every movement you make tonight.

  She had read as much in the books he had retrieved for her, as well as others she herself had worked with the royal librarians to find. She had to keep her mind clear and focused during the forging, direct her thoughts along every muscle and bone in her body, and dig deep within herself for the memory of how her power felt on the beach—a memory she had been working diligently to stifle.

  But she could stifle it no longer.

  With the Fall of the Blood Queen, the magic that had once illuminated humanity’s path to the empirium had vanished.

  And, somehow, Eliana had to find it again. Find it, and control it.

  “‘A heart forged in battle and strife…’” she muttered.

  “‘Flies sure and swift,’” Ikari and the acolytes echoed.

  Eliana had read that a true forging process, back in the First or Second Age, might have taken many days, many fires.

  But Eliana did not have that kind of time—and neither did Navi.

  “A heart forged in battle and strife,” she said, eyes stinging, “cuts deeper than any blade.”

  Ikari held up her hand, signaling Eliana to stop.

  Eliana moved toward the hearth, each breath a scorching gulp, her thoughts an urgent haze of heat and memory. With a pair of tongs, she picked up each metal scrap and deposited it in the crucible. First, with a dull clang, the bronze bell. Then the long length of thick copper chain and the brass pipe.

  Then, last of all, her necklace.

  It hung from the tongs, turning slowly, the chavaile’s wings glinting in the firelight.

  She shouldn’t think of them—she shouldn’t, she wouldn’t—and yet the memories rushed at her, eager and cruel: herself, in Rozen’s lap, running her fingers across the necklace’s engraving. Falling asleep against Ioseph’s side as he read to her from a battered copy of The Book of the Saints. Remy, proudly presenting her with a sketch of her necklace—except, in his version, it wasn’t the Lightbringer riding the chavaile. It was Eliana herself.

  She faltered, nearly dropping the tongs.

  “Simon,” she said hoarsely.

  He stepped closer, his overheated arm brushing against her own. “I’m here.”

  “Tell me I won’t be like her.”

  “No. Say it yourself.”

  Fury snapped through her at his words, pure and clarifying, but he was right and she knew it.

  “I am not like her,” she said, through her teeth. “I am like no one but myself.”

  Then she dropped the necklace into the crucible and returned to the bellows. She pushed past the ache in her muscles to feed the flames and prayed to the ruthless saints her brother worshipped.

  • • •

  With each pump of the bellows, she recited the Metal Rite.

  Then the Fire Rite, then the Sun Rite.

  She recited each of the seven rites, which she remembered because first Ioseph and later Remy had carved them into the walls of her heart.

  She prayed until her voice grew whisper-thin, her throat an aching column of fire, and as she prayed, she imagined pushing her words down her arms, through the bellows, into the flames. She imagined herself as a beast made of fire, licking up the sides of the crucible, heating it. She imagined her necklace melting, the lines of the Blood Queen’s scarred face morphing into ruin.

  I am not like her.

  Her mind unraveled and narrowed, both at once. A vision came to her, shimmering with heat: Herself, walking along a narrow ledge across a deep chasm. She had to breathe just so and step just so, or the ground beneath her would crumble, and she would fall.

  She would not think of Rozen or Ioseph.

  She would not think of Remy’s voice condemning her as monstrous.

  She instead remembered the beach—the world erupting at her fingertips, the sky tearing itself open at her command.

  She revisited that moment of abandon, when her hands steamed hot with Rozen’s blood. She remembered it and then pulled back from it, holding the memory in her palms like a crystalline creature. She hardly breathed for fear of shattering it. Treading lightly along the chasm yawning beneath her, she bore the treasure of Rozen’s death in her cupped hands, and then, opening her fingers, dropped it into the abyss.

  She was not sad to see it go. Instead she pushed against the walls of her mind and held the feeling of her body’s perfect blazing balance like a full cup in the valley between her shoulders.

  I am like no one but myself.

  Ikari’s voice came like a breath on the wind. “It is time, my lady. It is done.”

  • • •

  Eliana lived in a humming cloud of fire.

  She was afraid to move, so she kept her breathing shallow and thin. Light-headed, she used the tongs to lift the crucible. It was too heavy to move easily, even with her mind swimming in its strange overheated euphoria, and her arms trembled. But when Simon moved to help her, his hands cupping hers, his breath hot against the back of her neck, she shook her head.

  If he joined her on this thrumming ledge, it would crumble.

  Distantly she realized tears were streaming down her face, the flames pulling heat from her eyes.

  She poured the molten metal—a dirty gold color, smoking and glossy—into the mold the acolytes had fashioned for her, and lowered the crucible back into the hearth. Then she used the tongs once more to lift the mold away from the fire and set it on a stone ledge to cool.

  “My lady,” said Ikari gently, “might I suggest going to wash your face while the metal cools?”

  “No.” Eliana shook her head. “I’m not leaving until it’s done.”

  • • •

  She sat silently beside the mold, hugging her legs to her chest. Beyond her blurry field of vision, the hearth fire blazed, ecstatic and vicious.

  Without a word, Simon set a cup of water beside her.

  She ignored it. The balls of her bare feet balanced on the rocky ledge. A sly wind butted against the backs of her knees, trying to unbalance her.

  But she was not afraid.

  She sat beside the Forge’s hearth, its flames dancing against her skin, and pushed the air out of her lungs, down her arms, into the cooling metal—strengthening it, gilding it with her mother’s blazing blood.

  The world was suffused gold with light. The shimmering air undulated around her.

  Eliana breathed, and for a wild instant, her weariness so complete her mind felt stretched thin as fine paper, she thought she felt the world breathe with her.

  • • •

  Two hours later, the metal was cool enough to remove from the mold.

  Eliana rose, shoulders and legs and chest aching, eyes burning. Using the tongs, she removed the twin pendants from their molds and placed them on an anvil the acoly
tes had provided for her. Then she sat beside it and, with a charcoal pencil, drew shapes on the pendants’ rough surface.

  She was no artist; her lines were crude and uneven. But she refused to let anyone else touch the pendants. They carried the weight of her inside them. They were hers to use, and perhaps, someday, if she wished it, hers to destroy.

  Her exhaustion was so complete she hardly understood her own actions. But she continued working, hunched over the anvil. Once her drawings were complete, she retrieved a small hammer and chisel from the array of tools the acolytes had spread out for her and began chipping away at the metal, along her clumsy sketched lines. Each strike of the chisel jarred her bones.

  For hours she worked, refusing Simon’s silent offers of water. She accepted only the rag he offered to wipe her face, and when at last she had finished, one of the pendants boasted a crude etching of a sun.

  On the other, a jagged-bladed dagger—her Arabeth, her beloved. The mother killer.

  One of the acolytes brought her a honing stone. Bleary-eyed, dry-mouthed, heartsore, she used the stone and thick, soft rags to file down and polish the unadorned sides of the pendants and their rims until they gleamed.

  At last she sat up, her shoulders cracking, her back muscles screaming, and she thought she heard the Eliana sitting by the hearth fire let out a soft sob of exhaustion.

  The real Eliana, however, was standing on the edge of the cliff upon which she had balanced for an age.

  She peered down into the chasm that awaited her to find that it was no longer a chasm, but a river, near and roaring and golden. It didn’t look like blood, but she knew that it was, and she craved it as she had craved nothing else in her life. Not Harkan, not the tongue of the Orline woman Alys, nor the girl she had given her first kiss at the edge of seven. Not Simon, not finding Rozen. She dipped a toe into the river’s swirling gold eddies, and a charge ripped up her leg, pinning her where she stood.

  She looked up, dazed. The forging room was hot and quiet, the flames dying. Morning light shone through the room’s high windows, illuminating Saint Grimvald’s stern face. Shapes moved through the room, shadowed and gentle.

  “My lady, are you ready?” asked Ikari, very near.

  For answer, Eliana held up her hands.

  Using lengths of chain so slender and cool that they felt like ribbons of silk against Eliana’s skin, Ikari and two young acolytes settled the pendants in her palms. The chains hooked over her middle fingers, along the backs of her hands, around her wrists.

  When they had finished, Eliana’s pendants sat against her palms like twin drops of fire. The metal had cooled long ago, and yet the pendants jolted her, branding her, and she wondered how she had ever existed without these chains around her wrists. They were a part of her, and always had been, that much was obvious. She had carved slivers of bone from her ribs and fashioned them into these discs now cradled in her hands.

  A sharp energy swelled within her, drumming eagerly against the husk of her skin, and it felt both strange and familiar. Familiar, because she had lived a long time with the knowledge that she was ill-fitting in the world.

  Strange, because at last she understood why.

  She blinked, returning to herself with a sharp lurch, as if awakening from a wild dream. Her hunger, her thirst, her fatigue, the throbbing pain knitting her muscles to her bones—it all crashed down upon her at once, and she staggered forward with a cry.

  Simon caught her before she could fall, and she was too tired, too overcome, too angry to fight him. She hadn’t asked for this—being born to the Kingsbane; escaping death on the night of her birth, only to be flung into a doomed future by a frightened little boy.

  Bitter tears rose to her eyes as she considered the awful truth that beyond finding the antidote that would save Navi, she knew nothing of what the future held for her, nor how to face it.

  Feeling ill and fevered, her shift soaked through with sweat and stained with soot, she turned into Simon’s chest and allowed him to fold her into his arms. Though she fully intended to disappoint him in the end, she decided she would allow herself this one small moment of respite, for he smelled like smoke and sweat and hot metal. He smelled of death, and that comforted her, for death was one thing she still understood, even as the rest of her world had changed before her eyes.

  “Now what?” she mumbled against his shirt, her hands trapped between them. Her voice sounded worse than she felt, and she hoped that would make him pity her.

  Simon’s hand cupped the back of her head, and when his fingers grazed her neck, gently stroking in small circles, she shivered and nuzzled her cheek against his chest without quite realizing what she was doing.

  “Now,” he replied, his voice as weary as her own, “the real work begins.”

  11

  Rielle

  “My father’s illness is not abating. He speaks of things I do not understand, his words jumbled and angry. Sometimes he knows my face. Sometimes he shrinks from me, screaming in terror, as if I am some nightmarish monster come to claim him for death. I beg you to visit Styrdalleen and assess his condition for yourself. We are fast losing what hope we had left.”

  —A letter from Ilmaire Lysleva, prince of Borsvall, to the headmaster of the School of the Healing Arts in the Mazabatian city of Damezi

  Upon returning to Styrdalleen, their party was met at the lower yards of the castle Tarkstorm by a pale man in a plain gray tunic and coat, flanked by four wide-eyed attendants.

  “My lord prince,” the man said, breathlessly, “your father has asked to see you at once.”

  “Is he dying?” Ingrid’s words fell flat as stones.

  “No, Commander. But…” The man glanced at Rielle, uncertain. “Perhaps it would be best if we spoke in private, en route to His Majesty’s rooms.”

  “Our friends deserve to know the true health of their ally,” Ilmaire said, his voice heavy with a new weariness. “Take us to him, Arvo.”

  The man looked helplessly at Rielle, then Audric, then tightened the line of his mouth and turned sharply on his heel.

  They followed him up the terraced yards of Tarkstorm, their pace swift with some barely contained panic Rielle did not understand.

  “Ilmaire,” Audric said quietly, “if you must attend to a family affair, we’ll happily wait in our rooms.”

  “It’s as I said,” Ilmaire replied, his worried gaze trained on the ground before his feet. “You deserve to understand the true desperation of our plight here in Borsvall.”

  What does that mean? Rielle asked Ludivine, all thoughts of the Gate and Ludivine’s scarred arm and Atheria’s whereabouts flown from her mind. The air buzzed with a fear she could not name, as if gray clouds had fallen over their group, though the sky was bright blue, the sunlight crisp and cold.

  He’s lying, Ludivine answered, her voice thoughtful but unafraid. He wants our help, our insight, but he doesn’t want to say that aloud. He knows I’m reading his thoughts. He is confused and afraid, but he has a theory. He…

  She paused, and then her presence in Rielle’s mind sharpened, as if newly awake.

  Be on your guard, she instructed, with an icy edge to her thoughts that sent fear skipping down Rielle’s arms. I can’t pinpoint it. Something is preventing me from doing so. But I know this: we are not alone.

  • • •

  The king’s apartments were quiet and dark, drapes pulled shut against the afternoon sunlight.

  The king’s healer, Arvo, insisted that the light hurt His Majesty’s eyes, that the sight of the mountainous vista outside his rooms distressed him, for it reminded him of all that he could no longer enjoy—his city, his people, his morning rides with Runa.

  Ilmaire, apparently, did not care.

  Rielle watched as he strode across the room and opened the drapes. Sunlight poured in, bright and pale, tinged with snow.

  F
rom his bed, the king cried out softly. Ingrid, watching from the bedroom’s threshold, flinched at the sound. She seemed smaller in these rooms, shrunken by the stale, sick-smelling air, as if the presence of her ailing father had reduced her to the girl she had once been.

  Why are we here for this? Rielle asked, tense at Audric’s side. She fought the childish urge to hide behind him. Something about this room—its shadows, the smell of it, the sight of the king’s body beneath his blankets—crawled inside her like disease.

  He wants us to see something, Ludivine said. Be ready to run if I tell you to. Take Audric and run. Fight, if you must.

  “Hello, Father,” Ilmaire said, a forced brightness in his voice. “How are you feeling today?”

  Rielle’s father had described Hallvard Lysleva as a mighty man, tall and proud. But now the king of Borsvall lay shriveled beneath a pile of blankets—muscles atrophied, skin hanging off his bones. He squinted against the sunlight, gesturing feebly to shield his eyes.

  “Too bright,” he croaked, his chapped mouth twisting. “No more!”

  Ilmaire wedged open one of the terrace windows. A thin slice of frigid air punched its way inside.

  “Sorry, Father,” he said cheerfully. “You need fresh air, and you need sunlight. It isn’t healthy to lie here in the dark day and night.”

  “How dare you.” Hallvard glared at Ilmaire as he approached. “I am the king. You are no one.”

  Ilmaire sat in a chair beside the bed. “Now, Father,” he said mildly, “you know that’s not right. I am the prince. I am your heir.”

  “You? Danzdyrka?” Hallvard laughed, long and wheezing, letting loose a trail of discolored spittle.

  “Danzdyrka?” Rielle whispered.

  “A title given to junior dancers at the royal theater,” Audric muttered in reply.

  But, in this case, Ludivine said, not a title of honor. A title of scorn. He has long been scorned by his father. His heart aches from it.

  “Runa,” the king continued, his voice a thin rasp. “Runa is my heir.”

  Near the door, Ingrid turned away, fingers clenched at her sides.