by Jane Kindred
“Cover your right eye and look again with your left.”
“There’s no need to taunt me, Nazkia. I have no left eye.” He blinked the perfectly intact grey orb at me. “Just put the mask back on.” He coughed and swallowed painfully. “It hurts.” He was as lost in his dark imaginary world as he’d ever been, but now there was no Aeval directing his delusion.
I replaced the mask and fastened the strap behind his head. “Get some rest while you can. We have much to do.”
I walked back to the manor through rows of ice-glazed evergreens that caught the winter light like diamonds dancing in the wind. There was indeed much to do. Kae would have to take an army of peaceful, refined Virtues and turn them into a brutally efficient machine capable of taking down the Armies of Heaven, and he would have to do it without the help of the thousands of exiled demons I’d hoped to have on our side. At least I had Margarita, who promised to train me in the Russian Systema and to teach me how to use a sword.
I also had a strain of Seraph’s blood within my veins. For many nights since Kae’s deliverance, I’d pondered what Vasily had said to the queen, that he’d tainted Kae’s blood and mine by touching it with his fire. But he was wrong. Something was different. Vasily had been able to heal me in the world of Man, and I had later healed him, but our shared radiance had never affected anyone else. My own element had never shown at all in Heaven—nor had any waterspirit’s—before the day I’d knelt in the snow and held my hand to my cousin’s wound. It hadn’t healed him alone, but the blue glow had manifested, and it had nothing to do with Vasily.
There was one thing different about me since we’d arrived in Gehenna. I had taken a drop of my daughter’s blood to restore my true appearance—and my daughter’s blood was dominated by an element no one had ever seen in Heaven before. It was only a drop, but it was there. With Lively’s help, I hoped to find a way to tap into its potential.
The syla had told me in the Midnight Court that I would spill the blood of a fallen angel within a circle of ice and fire. The circle could only have been the frozen Empyrean itself, surrounded by the Pyriphlegethon, and the fallen angel, I realized now, was Kae. No angel had ever fallen so low. It was the direct result of his spilled blood that had given me the ability to conjure the quintessence with my cousin; he wasn’t tainted at all. My own tainted blood reacting with the pure elemental water in his was what had done it. And with the quintessence, we had sapped the Seraphim of their strength. With that same power, I might stand against the flower of the fern.
I pulled up the collar of my wool coat against the chill and sat for a moment on the ice-glazed surface of a stone bench to think. The empty beauty of Aravoth as it stretched into the Empyrean reminded me of Arkhangel’sk. It was unlikely I would ever see our earthly home again. If I succeeded in my bid for the throne of Heaven, I wouldn’t have the luxury of traipsing off to Raqia to fall as I pleased.
Something Belphagor had said struck me then, something he’d told me the first time I’d stretched my wings in the world of Man: Terrestrial magic, he’d said. It’s why we fall. I hadn’t understood him then, but I understood it now. If I succeeded, I would never again know the power of elemental radiance as it existed in the terrestrial world, including the intense dance of aether on my skin when Vasily touched me. What existed of radiance in Heaven was a poor copy of its earthly counterpart. I would never again be touched by the Unseen World of the syla—I could only hope they were safe now from the Seraphim.
I wouldn’t see the little dacha with its white wooden gate or sit in my garden of roses and wildflowers. I felt like weeping as I realized I would never see the intoxicating light of the Belye Nochi, or watch the mysterious glow of the aurora borealis.
Heaven held its own beauties, as this stark afternoon with its unearthly varnish of ice attested, but its beauty was so often wrought of a kind of desolate perfection. I’d fallen in love with the unpredictable, imperfect beauty of the world of Man without even knowing it. Perhaps, as Belphagor had also said once, we only saw beauty when juxtaposed with decay. Perhaps it was the entropy of earthly matter, the fleeting quality of terrestrial time, which lent that world its poignancy. It all seemed as if it might be gone in an instant.
But the time I’d spent there had changed me forever, and I believed for the better. It had taught me what no celestial education could have given me: that Host and Fallen were one and the same. Without falling, I would never have known the love of Vasily or the beauty we could create together, which Ola so perfectly encapsulated. I had thought once it would have been better never to have known Ola than to have known the pain of losing her, but I wouldn’t trade a moment of my time with her to assuage that now.
And I would have her back. With the peasant magic of two worlds, I would find a way to extinguish the fire of the flower of the fern. Helga would be very sorry she’d taken my child.
I was Padshaya Koroleva. And the Fallen Queen was about to rise.
Epilogue
The boy had long since learned to make his way in the dark. He’d lived most of his three brief years in darkness. But lately, strange pictures had played in his head of places he’d never been and things he hadn’t done, though it seemed as if he saw his own hands doing them. But they were the hands of a much older boy. They couldn’t be his own. The more the pictures crowded into his head, the more agitated he became.
Though he didn’t have the words to express what frightened him, his mother, when she visited him, assured him he had nothing to fear. In the pictures in his head, she was a younger, kinder mother who had nursed him through sickness and attended to his every need with toys and sweets, and fancy, warm clothes. He’d tasted a chocolate drink once in his head that his mother had brought him, frothy with foam, and stirred with a sharply sweet candy stick. He knew his mother had given him no such treat, but there it was in his head, an undeniable, happy memory.
He dreamed also of horses, though he’d only ever seen them at the front of the wooden cart that brought him to his home where the snow was. But how he longed to have a horse of his own. He would race it across the stone bridge over the red river and down through the mountains to the green valleys below. Except he’d never seen the mountains and the green valleys. But he remembered them just the same.
Now they’d left the snow and the red river once more and gone to the sea, but the sea also was something he hadn’t seen. Arriving in the dark of night, he’d only smelled the sharp, savory air of it and heard the gentle rush of the warm waves upon the sand and their spray against the rocks—and yet he remembered its salty feel against his skin.
He waited in the dark room for suppertime, his stomach growling, dreaming of the trays of cakes and pies and puddings he’d never eaten but couldn’t get out of his head. The light from above announced his mother’s entrance, and he squinted as she descended the stairs with the bright glow behind her. She came with the two hard pieces of bread and two bowls of gruel she’d been bringing lately, but he knew better than to eat them both. Mother no longer stayed with him at suppertime, but she patted him kindly on the head, smoothing her locket against her breast, and left him to his job, which he was not to begin until she’d closed the heavy door above.
The boy put his finger in the second bowl of gruel, stealing an extra dollop of it, before setting the piece of bread in it and putting it in the wooden bucket. He dragged aside the thick plank on the ground and lowered the bucket on its rope through the hole to the bottom far below. Waiting until he felt the weight of the full bowl being replaced by the empty one from yesterday, he drew it back up. He put the plank back in place and sat down to eat his supper, glad she’d stopped crying. She had done it for days and days.
Azel thought she must be a very naughty child to behave so badly. He never cried at all.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks are in order—to my editor, Stacy Cantor Abrams, for indulging my naughty demons even when they raise her eyebrows a bit; to my agent, Sara Megibow, for her end
less enthusiasm and her appreciation of tattooed, pierced bad boys; to my publicist, Dani Barclay, for juggling a plethora of blog appearances and for making sure I didn’t run away to hide in the bathroom at my first signing; and to everyone in the Entangled Publishing family for just being awesome.
I’d also like to add a special thank-you to LK Gardner-Griffie for her tireless support and for always being there to listen to my rants on my bad days and celebrate my successes on my good ones; to my sisters, A and J, for believing in my writing all those years ago; and to Hillary Seidl for making a debut author feel like a superstar.