Kingsbane

by Claire Legrand

  Then she guided Atheria out the window and into the storm.

  • • •

  It was unlike any Rielle had ever seen, and she marveled at it.

  The black clouds, miles high. The ferocious lightning cutting through the rain and wind like spears of white fire. Waves crashed against the shore, washing away dunes and tearing trees from the ground. Even Atheria fought to keep them airborne. Rielle lay low against her neck, Tal doing the same against her spine. The storm cracked open the ground, collapsing the pretty, white buildings nearest the shore.

  “Well?” Tal shouted against her ear. The rain was cold, and so was the air, unseasonably so. They weren’t dressed for this weather. Tal’s fingers wrapped around her wrists like cold spiders. “Aren’t you going to stop it?”

  But Rielle knew she couldn’t. Not yet. She read the beat of Atheria’s wings and the beat of Atheria’s heart and the beat of her own blood. The hands of the empirium were upon her, pulling her away from the sea.

  “I can’t,” she shouted back through sheets of rain. “It’s a distraction. We can use it.”

  “The Obex?” he cried.

  She nodded. With the storm raging, the Obex would be afraid, maybe even frenzied. They would not see her coming.

  Rielle waited until her mind cleared and found the empirium’s cold gaze at once. She felt it hovering above her, all around her, in the deepest pit of her stomach. It stared at the city’s heart, where delicately sculpted white buildings swayed amid a profusion of rain-slicked, broad-leafed trees.

  She turned Atheria down into the storm, following the path of the terrible, ancient instinct with which she had been born.

  • • •

  It did not take long to find them.

  They were hiding in the Holdfast—the largest of the city temples, with great domed roofs that stood firm against the storm’s onslaught. Trees and mountains had been carved into every inch of the exterior walls, and in the lightning, wind, and rain, the carvings shimmered and shifted as if they were alive.

  Ludivine managed to send Rielle gasping surges of feeling. Through their connection, which seemed fragile and frayed as it never had before, Rielle felt a sensation like drowning.

  Lu, please rest, she sent back to her gently. Leave us to our task.

  I’m sorry, Ludivine replied, and her grief, her anger at her own incapacity, nearly overwhelmed Rielle. They chose to hide in the Holdfast because it is the largest of the temples, the one most likely to withstand the storm. They have the boy. Zuka. They are furious and afraid. They have barricaded themselves—

  But then Ludivine cried out in pain and fell silent.

  Rielle shuddered, and Tal shouted a question at her, but she could not find the voice to answer him. Instead she drove Atheria down toward the domed roofs, her vision a frantic, searing red, and with a quick thought and a stab of anger, she tore a great hole in the western wall of one of the topmost floors, through which Atheria dove.

  Inside, those who had taken shelter in the Holdfast ran away from the collapsed wall, screaming and shouting. A robed acolyte and two others lay bleeding, having been caught by the flying stone.

  Tal’s hands tightened around Rielle’s waist. “Tell me what’s happening. Tell me you know what you’re doing.”

  She hardly heard him. She scanned the soaring ceilings, the columns wrapped in stone vines, the gleaming wooden floors now covered in dust and rain. She listened to the vibrations of the air in this temple—the whispers and footfalls of everyone inside it, the bright pulsing innards of the empirium that turned in every leaf, every dark chamber.

  Tal touched the inside of her wrist. “You’re glowing,” he said, but his voice came to her dim and clouded, and—there.

  The Obex were below them, barricaded in classrooms on the fourth floor.

  Rielle thought to Atheria, Go, and Atheria obeyed, plunging over the nearby railing and down into a circular atrium framed in greenery. Once they had landed on the fourth level, on a dark stone floor painted with golden leaves, Rielle dismounted and stormed toward the nearby wooden doors. They marked the entrance to the temple school, and the empirium told her—pricking her flesh with tiny white-hot needles of information—that the doors had been barricaded shut with great wooden planks, and piles of desks and chairs.

  The gall of these Obex. The stupidity and the arrogance, to think such obstructions could stop her. Fury cracked through her body like a whip. She hurled it at the doors, and they flew open, flung off their hinges. The barricades went spinning away—chairs shattered, wooden planks reduced to splinters.

  At the far end of the classroom huddled the Obex—thirteen in total, pale and dark, men and women, and all of them gaping at her, as if they were surprised that she could have found them, that she could have destroyed their pathetic excuse for a defense. One of them shoved forward a pale, wide-eyed boy—Zuka, the princess’s friend. An offering, perhaps, a plea for mercy.

  “Run fast,” she told the boy. “And don’t look back.”

  He obeyed, slipping on the polished floor, and once he’d gone, a glimmer caught Rielle’s eye. She turned and saw a slight, brown-skinned woman frantically weaving several threads into a circle of light—the pet of the Obex, their indentured marque, doubtless trying to provide them an escape.

  Rielle laughed. With a flick of her wrist, she broke the woman’s neck. She collapsed, soundless; her threads vanished.

  Behind her, Tal called her name, but Rielle had eyes only for those who had so foolishly thought they could best her. She stormed toward the Obex, knocking their knives and arrows from the air. She caught the light and wind and shadows hurled from their castings, knotted it all into pure blinding energy in her palms, and sent it careening back at them. Her power slit their throats, flung them back against the wall, dove inside their screaming mouths and burned them from the inside out.

  And when she had finished, finally arriving at the far side of the room, where they all steamed and bled and crisped on the floor, she found on the floor a long wooden staff, thickly carved with the sigils of all seven temples. She retrieved it and rose to her feet. She admired its craftsmanship, how easily she wielded it, how nicely it fit in her hands.

  And then, a flicker in the world around her—a familiar shift that sent her heart racing with anticipation.

  This time, when Corien appeared, he was on his knees before her. His dark cloak pooled on a gleaming black floor. Beyond him were windows, a landscape of mountains and ice.

  His pale eyes were bright as moons. “Darling child,” he whispered, “you are a vision in red.”

  And then Rielle looked down at herself and saw that again, as in Polestal, her hands, her boots, her skirts were drenched in fresh blood.

  The sight was startling enough to bring her back to herself. She blinked, stumbling back from Corien, but then he was no longer there, and she was staring instead at the classroom’s wreckage. The blood painting the walls. The steaming, charred marks where her fire had scorched the floor.

  Even without me urging you on, this is who you are. Corien’s voice came, distant and gentle. This is what you’re capable of, and I accept that.

  Then he was truly gone, and without the comforting weight of his mind in hers, Rielle felt unmoored.

  The room was silent, far from the chaos of the storm beyond its walls. She turned to find Tal, his face gone white. She put up her chin, staring him down, for there was something new in that quiet gaze of his—new, and fearful.

  “I have the casting,” she said to remind him that she had done what she was supposed to do, that there was nothing wrong with having killed these people. They had stolen a boy; they had threatened her life, and Kamayin’s too. They would have kept the staff from her and, by doing so, would have doomed the world.

  But with her fading rage came the wretched return of her humanity. Her mouth soured with t
he smell of blood, and her stomach turned hot with shame.

  She went to Atheria and leaned against her for a long moment, breathing in the storm-sharp scent of her wings.

  “All great work must begin somewhere,” she whispered, repeating Corien’s words, but the godsbeast remained still, and that stillness was no comfort. A moment longer, and the pull of the empirium had faded from Rielle’s limbs. She was small and dim again; she was human once more.

  “Why would it direct me to this place,” she asked, her voice low and rough, “and tell me to do these things that I’ve done, and then afterward leave me alone in shame and confusion?”

  Tal came to stand beside her. “The empirium?”

  “Yes. It spoke to me. I heard it. It told me…” But then she fell silent, for in the new awful quiet of this room, she began to doubt herself. Had she heard the empirium? Or had it been her own murderous instinct driving her on? Or had it been Corien all along, directing her to do this thing, to kill these people, to take the staff, because he was, as he had confessed, impatient? Had he disguised his thoughts as those of the empirium?

  She touched her temple, which had begun to ache. Lu, are you there?

  Ludivine sent her a wordless, faint feeling—so gentle, so understanding, that Rielle’s eyes filled with tears.

  She turned away from Tal and climbed aboard Atheria.

  “We’ll tell them that the Obex threatened me and you,” she said hollowly, once Tal had climbed up behind her. “We’ll tell them that they threatened Zuka and Kamayin. It was self-defense. It won’t be a lie.”

  “No,” Tal said after a moment. “It won’t be a lie.”

  He placed a gentle hand on her wrist, but that only made her feel worse, for her arms were covered in blood, and yet he touched her as if she were holy, a sacred thing to be worshipped.

  And there was still the Gate’s storm to be dealt with.

  Wearily, she said to him, “Hold tight to me,” and urged Atheria back out into the night.

  • • •

  Then, two days later, as Rielle and Ludivine lay quietly by the windows in Rielle’s rooms, watching earthshakers and windsingers clear the sunlit beach of debris, a letter from Audric arrived.

  Rielle opened the note with joy in her heart, soothed by the sight of his familiar, meticulous penmanship.

  Ludivine looked up at her from her pillow, frowning. Her lips were white and chapped. The blightblade scar had begun to creep across her jaw.

  “Odd, that he didn’t simply send a message through me,” she observed.

  “He tried to, but couldn’t reach you,” Rielle said, reading over his words, and then her stomach dropped, and she had to read one particular sentence several times before her mind would believe it.

  “What is it?” Ludivine asked, struggling to sit.

  Rielle looked up at her, the implications of what she was about to say settling like bricks upon her shoulders. “Queen Genoveve,” she whispered, “is dying.”

  36

  Eliana

  “And so I declare, in agreement with the other saints and with the authority of the governments we have established to bring order to our brave new world, that any surviving marques—that is, the offspring of humans and angels—are now considered enemies of the state, sentenced by nature of their treacherous blood to immediate and swift execution, and that anyone with knowledge of a marque’s whereabouts and identity must surrender this information at once, or else suffer the same fate as these dangerous creatures whose tainted magic we cannot trust and must therefore extinguish.”

  —An international decree written by Queen Katell the Magnificent of Celdaria, dated February 17, Year 6 of the Second Age

  “It’s like a web,” whispered Remy, leaning close. “That’s what Simon told me.”

  He sat beside Eliana on a low stone bench in the gardens of Willow, beneath one of the trees for which the estate was named. There was a small stream nearby. The gardens were full of them, little trickling ribbons that kept the foliage lush and the flowers bright. Tall wetland grasses shivered in the afternoon breeze, and wild clumps of perfumed blooms bobbed happily along the dirt footpaths that wove through the trees.

  They were alone except for Simon, who stood across a tidy clearing of clover and small white flowers, facing away from them. His shoulders were high and square, his fists clenched at his sides.

  Even after two days of working with him, alternating between practicing small, focused tasks with her castings and watching him attempt to thread, Eliana could still hardly bear to look at him. His embarrassment and discomfort were palpable. His restless presence itched at her. She had asked him if he would prefer privacy, but he insisted it was important to have her near, as she had been when his power first resurfaced.

  So here she was, sitting on her bench, trying desperately to resist the urge to either run from him or run to him and make him look at her. She would tell him not to be embarrassed, that she thought his threading was beautiful. She would take his face in her hands and hold him until his shoulders relaxed.

  But instead she stayed solidly put.

  “A web?” she asked.

  Remy nodded. “I asked him a lot of questions last night, right before bed. Probably about fifty questions altogether. We had a long talk.”

  “I’m sure he enjoyed that,” Eliana said, stifling a smile.

  “Not at first, but he did eventually.” Remy drew his knees to his chest. “He loves talking about traveling. About who he used to be.”

  There again was that terrible ache in her chest. Who he used to be. She doubted she would ever be able to shake the guilt of knowing that, were it not for her, he would not have been thrust into this strange, anchorless life. But then what? They would have both been in Old Celdaria when her mother fell, and most likely they would have been obliterated along with so many others.

  Was this, then, the kinder future? A life of war and servitude to some faceless Prophet?

  “Tell me what you mean,” Eliana said with some difficulty. “About it being a web.”

  “He said that underneath the surface of the world,” Remy said, “the world we can see, there’s another world.”

  “The realm of the empirium,” Eliana said, nodding.

  “Yes, only marques can sense it in a way others can’t. Not even you can, El, because you don’t have angel blood. Marques can sense the billions and billions of threads connecting every person and place and moment. It’s all connected. Every person is connected to every moment. Every place is connected to every other place. And marques are the only ones who can navigate all of that.” Remy blew out a breath, bouncing a little where he sat. “Thinking about it makes me dizzy.”

  Eliana remembered what Simon had said during their first hour in the gardens the day before. “To get where you want to go,” she added, “or when you want to go, you simply have to find the right thread and follow it.”

  “Easy, right?” Remy snorted and rested his chin on his hand. “I’m glad I don’t have to do it.”

  She smiled a little, glancing up at Simon. He hadn’t moved, except for his arms. Those he held out before him, loose and easy, like an artist, only instead of sculpting a figure from clay, he was pulling light out of nothing—a long, hair-thin light, bright enough to illuminate the entire gloomy clearing.

  Eliana held her breath, watching him draw first one, then two, then three threads close to his chest. He cradled them there, as if spooning light into the cavity of his torso. But then the threads flickered. They brightened, dimmed, and vanished.

  The clearing plunged back into gray.

  Simon spat a curse, his body tensing once more. He dragged both hands through his hair and walked toward the clearing’s edge.

  Steeling herself, Eliana rose and went to him. He turned at her approach, his face a furious storm of misery.

  �
��I can’t hold any of them for longer than a few seconds,” he said.

  “I know,” she replied. “I saw.”

  “I haven’t even tried to find a thread in time. I’ve only tried little threads, ones that would take us back to the house if we followed them. But even those I can’t manage.” He looked away, his jaw working. “Once, this was easy. It felt like breathing. And now it’s like clawing my way through a swamp determined to drown me.”

  For a moment, she watched his face in profile—his straight nose, the pucker of his ruined skin, the ferocious bright-blue of his eyes in the gray light.

  “Well,” she said, “you have been working at it for two whole days now, after eighteen years of your power lying dormant. I can’t imagine why it hasn’t all come crashing back to you at once. Eighteen years is hardly anything, after all.”

  A tiny smile played at the corner of his mouth. “You’re mocking me.”

  She grinned up at him. “I am.” And then she touched his cheek and made him look at her. “I think it’s beautiful when you thread. Every time it happens, I lose my breath.”

  “They’re spotty,” he said, his voice softer now. “The threads are fragile. They hardly hold.”

  “To you, maybe. To me, they’re miraculous.”

  “They’re useless if they can’t carry you where you need to go.”

  “All great work must start somewhere,” she said, and then shivered a little, for she hadn’t intended to say those words. They’d surfaced as if someone had reached inside her and tugged them out. She touched her throat, frowning.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Simon said, “but unfortunately we don’t have time to sit here for ages while I recover my abilities.”

  Remy marched over, his boots squishing in the mud. “You know what you should do,” he announced, stating it half like a question.

  “Ah, yes,” Simon said, “I’d forgotten you were the threading expert here.”

  Remy crossed his arms. “I’m serious.”

  “I know.” Then he ruffled Remy’s hair with a little smile, and Eliana’s heart jumped into her throat. She had to step back from them, put distance between herself and Simon’s body.