Lightbringer

by Claire Legrand

  Rielle knew the lightness in his voice was false. After he helped her to her feet, she laced her fingers through his. His black cloak and trousers, once immaculate, had grown filthy from their relentless traveling. Looking up at his face, so fine and smooth in the wash of red light, she felt a surge of fondness—and of pity.

  She touched his cheek. Her dirty fingers smudged his pale skin. No words she could say would be of any comfort, and she was still uncertain if comfort was something she wished to give.

  But she could not stop herself from touching him.

  Her life had become a series of frantic episodes—dashing east, from one city to the next, either on foot or on horseback or in whatever carriage Corien stole from people on the road, none of whom could resist his coaxing voice, his tear-bright pale eyes, his promises of a wild rut in the trees, if only they would grant use of their horse and cart.

  He enjoyed toying with them, these hapless humans who were at first content to let him slip inside their minds while gazing upon his exquisite face—until they realized too late what was happening and began to scream in fear.

  At first, Rielle had looked away whenever this happened. The sight of them was awful—their faces convulsing and contorting—and then, when they dropped to the ground, the heavy, hard thud. All the color gone from their faces, their expressions those of absolute terror. She knew Corien was capable of violence, but these had seemed such unnecessary, cruel instances of it that she refused to watch.

  At first.

  Now, she found herself peeking more and more often. It wasn’t that she enjoyed their pain, exactly. It was that she enjoyed the display of his power, and he knew she enjoyed it, could feel her tired delight pressing up against his thoughts right before he killed them, and knowing he was delighted brought her some comfort. She was desperate for comfort. Her head would not stop hurting, and she hated her stolen dress.

  She hated, too, how strange her body felt some days, how inexplicable sickness came over her without warning until she was forced, mortified, to heave miserably while Corien held back her hair with a tenderness that nearly made up for the indignity of being sick in the dirt.

  So, she watched him kill, craving his delight and approval with vaguely troubling desperation. But every time a jolt of alarm rattled her, it disappeared as quickly as it had come.

  You’re like me, she had told him five days past. He had just stepped away from a gray-haired man, wizened but strong, and let him fall to the ground. The man had been a shepherd, a fact that made Corien laugh for reasons he hid from Rielle when she tried touching his mind.

  I’ve been telling you how alike we are for months, he replied, amused, as he stepped over the corpse to approach her. Why say this today?

  You don’t enjoy hurting them. That’s not what makes you do it. Her heart pounded at his nearness. Each hungry pulse buoyed her chest higher and higher until she felt ready to float off the ground. She was so tired—she was always tired in a muddy sort of way, as if she were perpetually slogging through a gummy swamp—and the exhaustion only lifted when he was near.

  You enjoy your power, she told him. You enjoy what you can do, and the feeling of rightness that fills you when you use your mind as it was made to be used.

  Corien considered her for a moment, and then, his breath hot against her mouth, said, You’re only partially correct, my darling. For I do love my power, yes, but in fact I very much do enjoy hurting them. All of them. Every single one.

  Then he had kissed her, long and hard, until her slight sick dismay at his words had vanished, until she had forgotten about the dead man at her feet and all the other bodies they had left in their wake.

  She wasn’t even entirely sure where they were traveling.

  When she had asked Corien, only once, he had answered by sending her his thoughts, but they were so jumbled and confusing that thinking about them hurt her eyes, as if she’d gazed directly at the sun. She was forced to look away from them, and soon she had forgotten all about her questions, only occasionally noticing them there on her mind’s horizon before they disappeared once more.

  We must continue on, Corien told her. That’s all that matters.

  He was right, of course. They had to keep traveling southeast. There was no need to know more than that.

  They rested only when Obritsa needed it, which was far too often for Rielle’s liking. Didn’t she understand? They had to keep moving. It was important, and Corien didn’t care for delays.

  But the horrible girl could only carry them a hundred miles at a time before collapsing from exhaustion, which forced them to stop far too often and rest for a night or two in some dreadful filthy inn, or in a shabby cottage after disposing of its occupants, or even out in the open, in the dirt, like beasts.

  And in this blur of interminable eastward movement, during which every day brought a new landscape, an unfamiliar dialect or style of clothing, each of which made Rielle feel more unsettled, more alarmingly far away from home, Corien was her only anchor. The only steadfast thing that knew her and loved her.

  So, on the dry, flat bank of the canyon river, she touched him. She touched him as often as she could, even when the nausea of traveling through Obritsa’s threads left her shaking and damp with sweat.

  “Do you want to stay here for a while?” she asked, ignoring Obritsa’s muted cries of pain as the girl caught her breath nearby. “We could explore the ruins. Maybe artifacts remain that we can salvage.”

  Corien’s gaze softened, which happened only when he looked upon her face. The relief of this constancy brought tears to Rielle’s eyes. He was a bright moon shining down upon the gray, fog-draped sea in which she now lived.

  He kissed her brow. “For a night. We’ll find an old house, an angelic house, one that used to be as grand and glorious as you, and sleep there until dawn.”

  Then, without turning, he addressed the girl and her guard.

  “Onward, Your Majesty.” He loved mocking Obritsa, which tickled Rielle. “You and your noble companion may lead the way.”

  He pointed down a broad footpath that followed the river, waited for Artem to trudge ahead and Obritsa to limp after him, her small body trembling with exhaustion. Artem loomed over her, tall and sturdy, with light-brown skin and shaggy brown hair, his eyes bleary and troubled. Tied around his torso with six leather straps, resting against his back and shoulders, was an enormous canvas pack. Every time Rielle looked at it, her head spun and her throat tightened until she was forced to look away, then promptly forgot it existed. This happened again now, and when she swayed, Corien’s hands at her waist steadied her.

  Then he lifted her palm to his mouth and drew her other arm through his. So joined, they walked on.

  • • •

  It wasn’t until later that night, curled up on a filthy pile of furs and blankets they had found—most likely, Corien had said with contempt, left behind by one of the roving bands of treasure-hunters that roamed Vindica’s ruined cities, seeking angelic loot—that Rielle remembered seeing Tal.

  The memory returned as she slept, slamming into her with the force of a physical blow. Her eyes snapped open, and she barely managed to stifle a sharp cry.

  Several things occurred to her simultaneously:

  Corien was sitting a few paces from her, gazing out the open window of the manor house they were occupying for the night. The ceilings were high and the corridors wide, designed to accommodate the flaring wings of angels who stood at least eight feet tall. The proportions made Rielle dizzy. His eyes were open but glazed. When she slept, he often used his mind to “work,” he had told her, refusing to offer more information. He was doing that now, his chin propped in his hand as if he were lazily inspecting the horizon for clouds.

  So occupied, he hadn’t yet realized she was awake—nor that she had remembered the memory he had hidden from her. Tal, lying in the mud, reaching for her, ca
lling for her. I’m here, Rielle! And with that single heartbreaking memory came all the others, right on its heels. The fog in which she had lived vanished, and she saw everything clearly at last, as if she had been violently thrust from darkness into stark light.

  She had to leave. Now.

  Rising shakily to her feet, Rielle’s eyes flooded with furious tears. She now understood with devastating clarity how she had been living for the past fortnight. It seemed obvious now, and she raged to think of how stupid she must have seemed, how pliable and senseless.

  With his power, Corien had muddled her mind, then dragged her across the world through Obritsa’s threads. Oblivious, Rielle had let him lead her, and in the moments when her memories had threatened to resurface, her power flaring in protest, he had increased his hold on her and pulled her back into a numb, padded cage. He had coaxed her to sleep and rewarded her with fevered dreams.

  Swallowing a sob, trembling with the effort of staying quiet, Rielle silently stood and crept away from him. The stone floor was squalid; her feet carved a ragged path through long centuries of dust and decay.

  That he would keep so much from her, that he would deceive her so fully, that she had seen Tal not long ago, that he had been mere yards from her—and yet Corien had prevented them from speaking, had taken the choice from her, had not even allowed her to remember the moment, or any moment he did not want her to…

  On her feet, she edged backward out of the room, not daring to blink, pushing hard against her fury and disappointment and the grief of her recovered memories until she felt dizzy. She saw it all unfurl unimpeded before her: her wedding, and the vision that revealed she had killed King Bastien; Audric shouting at her in the gardens; fleeing the city; following Corien’s voice into the forest outside me de la Terre until, at last, she had collapsed into his arms. And then…

  And then, nothing. A gray ocean. Occasional flashes of color. A dreamscape of Corien’s making. A stolen carriage. Tearing her wedding gown from her body as she wept, then staggering through a black Celdarian wood in her shift and boots until Corien found her, forced her into a gown still warm from its previous wearer, kissed her until her crying ceased and she found herself drifting on a quiet gray sea once more.

  And Tal—oh, he had called for her. In those trees, on that storming night near a firelit inn, he had fallen to the ground and reached for her. He had been following her, he must have been—searching for her, hoping to bring her home.

  Rielle reached the door, her breath tight and thin, her eyes burning as she stared at Corien and willed him to remain still. It was unusual that he would be so distracted by his work that he wouldn’t notice her awakening.

  But whatever the reason for it, she had to take the chance to run. I see a divine creature aching to be set free, he had told her, while tightening the chains that bound her to him.

  Freedom. A grand joke. She had been a dog on a leash; she saw that now with a scorching immediacy that felt like she had swallowed lightning.

  Her thoughts roaring with panic, she glanced at the unconscious lumps in the far corner of the room that were Artem and Obritsa, kept frozen in a deep sleep crafted, of course, by Corien. He was arranging all of this, and she could trust none of it, and now where was she? Nowhere. Far from home, in a ruined land that had once belonged to angels.

  Once Rielle had stepped backward over the threshold and into the vast corridor outside—the ancient, crumbled ceiling open to the house’s upper floors and then to the star-salted sky above—she ran.

  • • •

  She did not make it far.

  She raced through a series of courtyards tucked between the grand, pillared houses in the nearby neighborhood, each abandoned garden overgrown with scrubby trees and twisted dry brambles. Ducking underneath a crumbled stone arch flanked by two figures—one without a head, the other with misshapen lumps on its back that must once have been wings—Rielle looked back over her shoulder.

  The moon was half-full, and the air was cold; her breath came in rapid puffs. Black ruins touched with silver loomed over her, scorched with ash that did not fade. Each was marked by a blow of an ancient elemental fist, scars neither time nor weather could scrub away. She could smell the magic even now, centuries later. Smoke on the wind. Mud ripe with rain. The tang of bloodstained metal.

  She turned again—and ran straight into Corien.

  He grabbed her arms, but before he could speak, before he could wrap her once again in his thoughts and numb her to his liking, she exploded.

  Her fury summoned the empirium, and it joyfully obeyed.

  Fettered for too long, her power surged up through her body and erupted from her palms. She whipped him with it. He flew across the garden, hit a pillar; his head cracked against the stone. He slid to the ground but wasn’t down for long.

  Shaking his head, he staggered to his feet.

  She flung out her arms at him as if shoving closed a great door. Her power hurled him into the air, pinning him against a shattered lattice of corroded ironwork curving upward from the courtyard walls. Had it once been an aviary? The thought of winged angels keeping birds caged and clipped for their amusement was perverse. Rielle’s fury spiked higher.

  She shoved her hands into the air. Corien’s body jerked against the iron.

  “Rielle,” he gasped, “please, listen—”

  “You should have trapped me again the moment you realized I’d gone,” she growled, stalking toward him. “Wrapped me up in that mind of yours that you so love. Kept me dead asleep like Obritsa and Artem. Perhaps you thought you didn’t need to. Perhaps you thought I’d see you again and forget to be angry.”

  “It’s happened before,” he pointed out, and even dangling from the lattice, he was unsettlingly beautiful, his eyes bright, his petulant mouth practically begging her to kiss it. “You love my companionship. You can’t deny it, Rielle.”

  She couldn’t, but his soothing voice was such an obvious attempt to placate her that if she’d had hackles, they would have risen to her ears. “I will deny whatever I wish.” She flexed her fingers, twisting cords of the empirium around his body. “I will use my power however I wish.”

  Corien’s pale eyes flashed. She felt his mind reaching for hers and pelted him with a rapid-fire stream of pebbles she summoned from the ground. He howled with pain as they rapped against his face.

  “Don’t try that again,” she commanded. “Don’t lie to me again or cloak my thoughts with yours, or I’ll kill you. I’ll burn you as I did all those months ago, and this time I won’t stop. You’ll crisp on the ground, and I’ll watch your ashes flake away.”

  “You won’t,” he gasped, blood now dotting his face. “You love me.”

  “I wish I didn’t,” she said bitterly.

  “I fascinate you, darling.”

  “As would your death.”

  He laughed. How he could laugh while hanging helplessly from the noose of her power charmed her despite her refusal to be charmed.

  “You deceived me,” she said quietly.

  He did not respond for a long moment. “I did,” he agreed at last.

  She held him in place ruthlessly, her power unyielding. But her chest ached. She despised her hot eyes, her tingling nose, and the fact that he would be able to feel the birth of every tear.

  “You didn’t need to,” she said. “I was there. I was with you. I had come to you. I had…” She hesitated. Everything was too fresh; her recovered memories had scraped her raw. “I had left Audric, left my home, to come to you.”

  “I know.”

  “You knew you didn’t need to lie to me, and yet you did it anyway.”

  “I did need to.”

  Impatience lashed through her body; her power tightened its sizzling grip on him, making him cry out. She saw the slick black gleam of blood on his neck, his hands. If she pressed a bit harder, she would scorch a
way his skin.

  “I don’t understand,” she told him, her voice choked. “You promised me freedom and have given me the opposite. I came to you because I had no one left. I could trust no one, but I trusted you.”

  “I know.”

  “You knew me, and you weren’t afraid.”

  “I still do, and I’m still not.” His gaze held her gently, and she bristled at the tenderness there, even as she craved it.

  “You love me,” she declared.

  “More than I have ever loved anyone in my long life,” he answered at once.

  Her heart skipped in its cage. “Then why?”

  “Because I know you still love him,” he muttered. She watched in fascination as despair swept his face clean of guile. “I know you still love them, even as you hate them, and that this is all new for you. You’re tired, and yet your blood roars unceasingly with power that makes you tremble with both desire and terror. I know you’re afraid to be far from home. I know you miss the familiar. And I did not want that fear to take you from me.”

  “It would not have been fear that took me from you, if I had decided to leave. It would have been my own self, my own will. And you denied me that choice.”

  “I could not allow it.”

  “You could not allow it?”

  He huffed out an impatient breath. “Rielle, this is a critical time. You’ve come so far with your abilities, and I’m more proud of you for it than I can express, but now things are changing. It is time to move forward, and I cannot risk losing you.”

  She scoffed, her vision blurring as tears rose. “You cannot risk losing me, or losing my power?”