Obritsa kept her gaze fixed firmly on his face. A beautiful face, all elegant lines and delicate bones. Thick, dark lashes, a jaw pale and smooth as marble. She made note of his every feature. If she looked past him at Artem, helpless and drooling on the floor, she would lose herself.
She lifted her chin, drawing upon every ounce of hardness Sasha had beaten into her bones.
“By abducting me,” she said, “you have committed an act of war against the nation of Kirvaya. If you release us now and allow us to leave this place unharmed, I will take that into consideration when I tell my magisters what you have done.”
“Your magisters. Oh, child.” Corien cupped her cheek with one cold hand. She resisted the urge to recoil. “So much is happening in this world that you do not understand. Your ignorance is charming.”
He rose, dusting his hands off as if touching her had dirtied him. “I have something I need you to do for me. And you’ll do it, one way or another. If I have to force you, I can, and I will. But I’d rather not. Your power is unpredictable, and if I take control of your mind, it might affect the purity of your threads. And then where would we be? Smashed into the side of a mountain somewhere. Flung to the bottom of the sea, or forward in time.”
Obritsa’s mind, frightened and abused as it was, worked quickly. “I’m not taking you anywhere. I’ve seen what you’re doing here. You are a fiend who should be put on trial for your crimes. The atrocities you have committed in these mountains will not be tolerated.”
Corien considered her, his expression mild. “And here I thought you were supposed to hate elementals. What do you care if I steal and torture their children?”
To that, Obritsa had no response. For he was right—she was supposed to hate elementals, and she did.
But the deepest parts of her—primal, foundational, untainted by politics and war and the hateful elemental schemers of her court—understood without question that the things happening in this Northern Reach were abominable.
Corien seemed pleased by her silence. “I understand your contempt, but you’re utterly wrong in it and in everything you just said. You will take me to Celdaria, and you will take Bazrifel as well, and you will take your guard, Artem, because I don’t trust you not to try something stupid, and if Artem is there, maybe you’ll think twice before trying to outsmart me.”
Obritsa’s heart pounded, which made it difficult to maintain what she hoped was an expression of cold disinterest. “Bazrifel. Another angel?”
“Indeed.” Corien gestured at Artem’s prone form. “He’s inside your friend at the moment, and having a grand time of it.”
And then Artem began to scream once more. His body jerked as if seized by invisible hands, pulled in too many unnatural directions. The cords of muscle in his neck distended; his arms bent, twisting, as if someone were determined to detach them.
Obritsa watched in silence. She directed her mind down into its basement, where everything was dark and cool, where Sasha’s blades and fists and Artem’s screams could not hurt her.
But she had never faced this particular sort of cruelty before. Yes, she had seen torture and experienced it and dealt it. She had killed, and she had witnessed killings. But she had never seen Artem like this—out of his head with pain, pounding on the floor, scraping his nails across his face, his body jerking up into the air and then slamming back down like a rag doll in the fist of a fitful child.
Obritsa tried to speak and couldn’t. A madness was rising inside her, heat driving up her body into her eyes and cheeks and forehead. At last, her calm shattered. A soft cry burst out of her, quite beyond her control, and she hurried to Artem, knelt beside him, helped him rest his head in her lap, pushed the wet hair back from his eyes.
“Artem, can you hear me?” she whispered. “I’m here, Artem, my dear. It’s going to be all right.”
He opened his eyes, found her hands, held them tight against his chest. Beneath her fists, his heart pounded alarmingly fast, and his eyes were bloodshot, bleary. For a moment, flush with panic, Obritsa wondered if he could even see her or if the angel’s torment had robbed him of sight.
“Whatever he wants of you,” Artem rasped, “don’t do it, Obritsa. Not for me.”
Obritsa could sense Corien waiting patiently behind her, his still, pale gaze on her shoulders. She ignored him.
“You don’t give me orders, Artem,” Obritsa replied as sternly as she could manage. She would order him better, healthy, safe, and her loyal guard would have no choice but to obey.
“He cannot be allowed to go to Celdaria. He is after Lady Rielle. He will bring ruin down upon us all.”
“Rielle will stop him,” Obritsa said, though she was not at all convinced of this. Even the words on her tongue felt false, thin. “Audric will gather his armies against him.”
Artem tried and failed to rise. “Obritsa. Let him kill me. Resist him with everything you have.”
“I will not stand by while they kill you right in front of my eyes. Don’t ask me to do that. You cannot order me to do that. Artem.” And then Obritsa’s tears spilled over, and she was too frightened, too outside her own mind with terror, to care. “You’re the only family I have.”
For a moment, there was silence. Obritsa’s tears seized her voice. And Artem—Artem stared up at her, a horrible shadow falling over his face, as if he understood something she did not, as if he had resigned himself to some awful fate she refused to see.
A soft noise to her right. Obritsa turned to see Corien crouching beside them, elbows on his knees, his cloak spilling across the floor like a small black sea.
“You understand, then,” he said, his voice soft, almost gentle. Pitying, even. “I can see it in your mind. You’ve already decided you’ll do as I ask, even though part of you feels that is the worst thing you can do, that complying means you lose and I win. Which is true. And you’ve decided this illogical thing because of love.”
He smiled, and Obritsa’s skin crawled at the sight, because it was kind, a kindness she could not trust. And yet she could feel her mind bending to him, becoming pliable and supple under the touch of his angelic power.
“We really are not so different, Queen Obritsa,” he told her. “What I do is also for love. For the love of my people, who have lived for too long in pain. And for the great love of my very long life.”
He rose. The kindness fell from his face. “Will you do as I command?”
Artem protested, his voice strained, but Obritsa ignored him and instead forced herself to keep her gaze locked on Corien’s. She wasn’t sure she could have looked away even if she’d wanted to. Those pale blue eyes kept her snared, a fish on a line.
For a moment, she considered threading right then, right there. She could do it quickly. She’d cut open a passage back to that snowy hut where she had left Artem. She’d jump down from her chair, seize Artem by his sleeve, and drag him through the threads, and she would do it all before Corien could stop her. And maybe the shock of passing through the threads would dislodge Bazrifel from Artem’s mind, or maybe simply the shock of being bested by a little girl would do it. He’d leak out of Artem’s nose and mouth and ears, he’d slither away with his angelic wings tucked against his body like a shamed dog, and—
Corien’s laughter came into her mind like the first notes of a beloved song, one you could hardly resist singing along with.
Child, don’t you understand? You are mine. I’m in your head. I see everything you think, everything you feel, every poorly conceived escape plan you consider.
She swallowed against a tight, sick feeling in her throat. Her hands wanted to fly up to her skull and claw out that dreadful crooning voice.
Somehow, she managed to speak. “I am not strong enough to send us more than thirty miles at a time.”
Corien raised one elegant black eyebrow. “In fact, you’re stronger than you think. I’ve s
een it myself. You’ve allowed weaker, less talented people to dictate your limits for you. A tragedy with which I’m intimately familiar.”
Obritsa didn’t know if she could trust him, had never attempted to travel farther—but Artem was beginning to convulse once more, emitting terrible strangled sounds as if trying to keep his screams trapped inside his body, to spare her.
Her jaw clenched so tight she could barely breathe. She prayed to the God she hated that the empirium would see Leevi and Valdís safely to Borsvall and that someone, somewhere, would be able to mitigate the consequences of the terrible thing she was about to do. She fumbled through the words of the elemental rites. She tried to remember the marque prayers she had known as a child—she would take any comfort, any godly power the empirium could spare—but then her mind gave up, foggy and tired, and she slumped there on the cold floor.
She looked up at Corien through a bright veil of tears.
“Whenever you’re ready,” she whispered, “I will begin.”
About the Author
© Ellen B. Wright
Claire Legrand is the author of several novels for children and young adults, most notably The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls, Some Kind of Happiness, Winterspell, Sawkill Girls, and the Empirium Trilogy. Claire lives in central New Jersey. Visit claire-legrand.com.
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