Lightbringer

by Claire Legrand

  “Merovec won’t know what to do when he comes for them,” she said quietly, and they both knew who he was. “Merovec thinks he can vanquish angels, but he doesn’t know them like you do. He’s hard, intransigent. And he doesn’t know Rielle.” She crouched beside him, her eyes bright with tears. “Audric. The day may come when she turns on Celdaria. You know this. And you know her. When that day comes, you may be the only one who can stop her.”

  “I won’t hurt her,” he said, his voice so raw and vicious that it startled him as much as it quite obviously startled her. “Don’t ask me to do that. Ask me anything but that. Say it again, and I’ll never forgive you. And damn you anyway, Sloane, for being so persistently heartless.”

  She stared at him for a moment, and then something in her deflated, as if she were seeing him clearly for the first time and finally realizing the depth of her disappointment. His shame was blistering; he revolted himself.

  Sloane did not visit him after that, not for days, and then something happened without explanation one morning when Audric woke from a few hours of restless sleep. It had been eighteen days since the Celdarian entourage’s arrival. Nearly one month since he had last seen Rielle.

  He rose from his bed with a sense of tranquility that disturbed him, like a sea ominously still before a gale. He stood silently in the center of his bedroom, barefoot and bare-chested, and recognized that he existed on a knife’s edge. On one side was the third war council meeting, which would begin downstairs in an hour. He could dress and wash himself, trim the beard that had grown a bit wild. He could attend the meeting and by doing so face the impossible, inevitable heartbreak on the horizon.

  On the other side was an ending. He could take his own life and let the rest of them sort everything out on their own.

  He considered the idea, examining it as a healer might inspect a wound that needed stitching. For several long minutes, he wavered. Atheria watched him keenly from the terrace, mid-breakfast, her kill maimed at her feet.

  Then, Audric took a long, slow breath and walked to the bathing room. He splashed water on his face and inspected his hair, rubbed his bristly cheeks.

  I love how easily you can grow a beard, Rielle had told him on many occasions, gazing dreamily up at him. She loved to nuzzle her smooth cheek against his rough one. My brilliant, beautiful, noble, scruffy bear-king, she had said on one particular occasion, drunk on wine and on him, and he had burst out laughing and then kissed her until they were both trembling and ready.

  In the mirror, his reflection smiled faintly.

  Forty-five minutes later, dressed in borrowed clothes that were looser on his frame than they had been a month ago, feeling like a fawn on new legs, Audric opened the door to Queen Bazati’s council chambers, found Evyline—square-jawed, gray-haired, her face open with sudden hope—and nodded at her. His grief and sorrow still lived inside him and always would, and he imagined there would yet be days when getting out of bed was an indescribable torment.

  But today, he was standing.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to Evyline and to all of them, staunchly ignoring Ludivine’s pale profile to his left. “I needed time. I’m ready now.”

  8

  Eliana

  “As an elemental, you must learn a certain control that other humans, who cannot touch the empirium, will never know. Your body—every muscle, every thought, every feeling—is inexorably connected to the deepest fabric of the world. Unchecked, your anger could lash out and shatter a window, send a kitchen blade flying. Your despair could crack the earth beneath your mother’s feet.”

  —The Path to the Empirium: A Meditation on Elemental Practice by Velia Arrosara, Grand Magister of the Firmament in Orline, capital of Ventera, Years 313–331 of the Second Age

  When Eliana awoke, she was in the white room from her dreams.

  Rafters of ivory and pearl gathered at nine points across the ceiling like clusters of bleached stems. The bed was enormous, draped in white. Pale gauzy curtains hung from each post. The floor was smooth white stone. Thick white rugs surrounded the bed and abutted the empty hearth. Beside the nearby window, two delicate armchairs faced each other, awaiting conversation.

  Bouquets of crimson flowers sat in vases at her bedside, near the windows, on the tiny dining table, their curling red petals providing the room’s only color.

  As she inspected it all, Eliana smiled. What a lovely room the Emperor had given her. How thoughtfully decorated it was, and how thoughtful to have left her so many attendants, should she require help with something.

  There were ten, all women, silent and glassy-eyed as they stood against the pale walls. Their hair was cropped short and white robes covered them from neck to toes.

  “Good morning,” Eliana called out cheerfully. She stretched and yawned, then swung her legs out of bed and into the cool air. Someone had bathed her, dressed her in a thin white nightgown. Such a generous host, the Emperor. She wondered distractedly if all angels were so kind.

  She discovered that beyond the bedroom, there was a sitting room, a receiving room, a bathing room, and a dressing room, all in shades of white—cream and eggshell and vanilla, cloud and snow and sand. The drapes had all been pulled wide open; sunlight drenched the rooms. The red flowers emitted a sharp, sweet perfume so powerful it made her tongue tingle.

  She buried her face in their petals and breathed deep.

  Then she went to the bathing room to look for a mirror. If she were to see Corien today, she ought to make herself presentable. But she could not find a mirror, or a comb, or jewelry, or pins for her hair.

  “Strange,” she said aloud, then shrugged and forgot she had ever thought such a thing.

  Double doors marked the exit to her rooms—two huge pieces of white stone engraved with perfectly symmetrical diamond patterns.

  She tried the doors, and they opened without a sound.

  The corridor outside was broad and pale. Windows lined each side, their lace curtains fluttering in the breeze. Beyond the windows bloomed a profusion of flowers and greenery. Birdsong trilled from a cloudless blue sky.

  Merrily, she continued on her way, wandering down empty white corridors. The sun was warm on her bare toes. She caught glimmering dust motes with her fingers.

  At last, she came to a single door standing ajar in a wall of gleaming pale wood.

  Her heart lifted at the sight, though she could not have said why, and when she pushed open the door, she let out a cry, for there was Simon, sitting at a desk with his feet up on a windowsill. He turned to her and smiled broadly. He stood and came toward her with three long strides, and she met him in a pool of sunlight at the room’s heart. When she threw her arms around his neck, he lifted her off her feet and buried his face in her hair.

  “There you are,” he said, and she squirmed happily in his arms, pulled back to gaze upon his face.

  And froze.

  It was wrong. It was all wrong.

  That face, so smooth and smiling, was not Simon’s. She remembered now—there ought to have been scars. He was scarred all over; he had been burned and cut. But this man holding her was healed and happy. No shadows turned in the bright blue of his eyes. His smile was open and easy.

  “No,” she whispered, and pushed back from him.

  He released her, brow furrowed. “What is it, love?”

  She whirled around to face the door and screamed, “No!”

  She woke in her white room, drenched in sweat. The sunlight was gone. It was the deep of night.

  Across the room, sitting in a chair by the window, was Corien, washed silver with moonlight.

  “That wasn’t real,” she said, staring at him, her heart racing high in her throat. Even now that she understood her dream had been a lie of his creation, she wished she had never woken from it, and she hated herself for that.

  She could still feel Simon’s arms around her,
and the feeling of lightness in her heart as she had wandered those halls bright with sunshine.

  Tears came to her eyes. Her chest ached with longing. The pinch of hunger returned to her stomach; she had not eaten since she had first woken in this room, since she had beaten her fists raw on the locked doors.

  “That wasn’t real,” she whispered again.

  Corien shrugged eloquently and rose to his feet. “It could be,” he said, and left her alone with her staring guards.

  • • •

  When Eliana awoke, she was standing on a white shore.

  Gentle, warm waves lapped at her feet. The sand was soft, and behind her, on the dunes, clusters of thin pale grass rustled quietly in the wind. She tasted salt on her lips. The air was clear and light. She put her arms out to feel it and rose up onto her toes. Maybe she would fly. She was happy enough for it.

  “El!”

  She turned and smiled.

  Remy was coming up a trail through the dunes, his arm linked with that of a kind-eyed boy with light brown skin and dark hair he kept long and knotted at his nape. Remy kissed his cheek, then ran to Eliana with a basket in his hands. She watched him fondly. At seventeen, he was the gangliest boy she had ever seen, and taller than she remembered. Had he grown even since leaving for the market that morning? The sea wind ruffled his dark hair. His eyes were bluer than the sky.

  He grinned down at her and held out his basket. “I remembered.”

  She pulled back the basket’s covering and saw a bushel of strawberries, each bright and red as blood. When she bit into the first one, the taste burst open in her mouth.

  She sighed, closing her eyes. “I could die from happiness.”

  Warm hands slid around her waist, gently pulling her back against a broad chest.

  “Please don’t,” Simon murmured. “Stay with me.”

  She turned to him with a smile.

  “They’re perfect,” she said, and when he bit into the fruit she held up for him, his teeth grazed her fingers, and she shivered with delight, but then she caught a strange scent on the air. A sharp sweetness that did not belong.

  “What is that?” she asked, before recognizing it—a floral perfume, cloying and familiar.

  She cried out, bolted from Simon’s arms, ignored Remy calling her name, and ran.

  She awoke not in bed but on Corien’s arm. They were walking together along a breezeway of his palace, overlooking the city of Elysium. White spires pierced the sky. A gown of black velvet cinched with a gold sash kissed her legs with every step.

  She thought of the sea, the soft shore, Remy’s bright smile.

  Corien pointed with his walking stick at a nearby tower capped with bronze tiles and winged figures carved from white stone. The polished scarlet jewel at the top of his cane glinted like an evil eye.

  “That is the Tower of the Singing Skies,” he said lightly. “In Patria, in the City of the Skies, when an angel died, the temple choirs took to the air and sang laments for three days without ceasing. If only you could have heard it, Eliana. If only you could have seen us at the height of our glory.”

  He wanted her to weep, to wail and beg, but Eliana refused, even once she had returned to her room. She wasn’t truly alone there, after all.

  She would never be alone again.

  • • •

  When Eliana awoke, she was in a house that resembled her home in Orline.

  A tall, narrow house, all its windows thrown open to the morning. Polished tile floors, thick rugs in the sitting room, the bedrooms, her father’s study.

  She found Ioseph Ferracora in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, humming a tune. Eliana grinned as she watched him. It had been so long since she had seen him like this, relaxed and cooking breakfast. For years, he had been at war, but now he was home, and she couldn’t stop looking at him. He was fair-skinned with ruddy cheeks, shaggy dark hair like Remy’s, and he had a stubborn square jaw and square shoulders. A stranger wouldn’t expect him to possess any sort of grace or gentleness. But Eliana knew better.

  He could whittle the finest little figurines—woodland creatures with legs thin as twigs, robed saints crowned with stars. When she woke from nightmares of the war that had nearly claimed him, he held her as tenderly as if she were a newborn.

  Ioseph set down his knife, and Eliana came up behind him and hugged him, wrapped her arms around his big barrel chest and pressed her face to his back. When he laughed, she felt it in her ribs.

  “What’s that for?” he asked, pulling her around to face him.

  She gazed upon his rugged features, his beard-roughened cheeks. Her own felt likely to split open from her smile.

  “It’s for nothing,” she answered. “It’s for everything. I’ve missed you, Papa.”

  “I know, my sweet girl,” he told her, and kissed her cheek. “But that’s all past now. We’re together. We’re a family, and we’re safe.”

  A merry shriek flew at them from the next room, which sent her father’s mouth quirking. He retrieved his knife and gestured with it toward the door.

  “You’d best get a handle on that man of yours,” Ioseph warned, laughter in his voice. “He and Remy will wake the neighbors.”

  Eliana turned to see Remy race into the kitchen and Simon tumble in just after him. Simon caught him, scooped him up into his arms, and Remy howled with laughter, pounded his fists against Simon’s shoulders.

  “He cheated, El!” Remy shouted. “He cheated at king’s cards, and I called him on it!”

  “Ah, but I would never lie to you,” Simon proclaimed solemnly, and then, over Remy’s head, he gave Eliana a sly wink that left her wobbly at her father’s side.

  But something was wrong, she thought, watching them tease and laugh. Ioseph approached them with mock sternness, hands on his hips, and proclaimed something Eliana could not understand, for she was suddenly distracted. She stared at the back of her father’s head, watched Simon set Remy on his feet and ruffle his hair, and that was it, she realized—that was the wrongness of it.

  Remy was too small. He was a tiny child again, not the gangly boy she knew. And Simon’s face was smooth and full of light, the shadows gone from under his eyes, and Ioseph…

  “Father?” she asked quietly.

  He didn’t respond, his back to her, but something was wrong, or at least she thought it was, and she needed to look at Ioseph Ferracora straight on. She needed to see her father’s warm, dark gaze, the amiable lines around his eyes, and feel reassured that this strangeness turning inside her was simply a fancy, the echo of a dream.

  She touched his shoulder, but before he could turn, she saw his reflection in the mirror hanging across the room.

  Mouth frozen in a smile, eyes black as twin hollows.

  “You should have let yourself dream,” said Ioseph, but the voice was not his, and came from over her shoulder.

  She whirled, but when she opened her eyes, it was to find herself twisted on the floor of her room. Her nightgown clung to her, soaked through with sweat.

  Corien stood above her, clearly amused.

  “You insist upon turning every sweet thing I give you into a horror,” he told her, and then pulled her to her feet and held her as she wept. She curled her fingers into his black coat, wishing she had the strength to claw at him. But the dream he had sent her had left her trembling. Her arms were liquid, useless.

  “It could be like that,” Corien whispered against her damp hair. He rocked with her as if soon they would dance. “Life could be happy again, Eliana, if you let me make it so for you.”

  She knew he was right, and she shut her eyes with an ache in her chest, remembering the warmth of her father’s smile. Her quiet home in Orline. Rozen Ferracora’s garden, the kitchen table strewn with Rozen’s tinkerings. Remy safe in his bed, reading aloud from one of his books, and Harkan asleep just across the way.


  • • •

  When Eliana awoke, Simon was standing over her, an urgent light in his eyes. A sword glinted at his hip; strapped to his chest were two revolvers.

  “We don’t have much time,” he said, helping her sit. “Listen carefully, for any moment he will discover I’m gone, and all will be ruined.”

  She stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s a ruse, Eliana. It’s all been a lie.” He found her hands and kissed them. “I’m sorry for it, but it was the only way to protect you. I could not risk your life.” His voice broke as he spoke against her fingers. “It’s been torment to deceive you. Every moment I see you suffer is agony.”

  Relief flooded her body, her skin tingling. She felt light-headed, weightless.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, but left her bed to follow him. He had gathered supplies. He was holding out a cloak to her. At the door, Remy kept watch. His hair was shaggy, unkempt, and fell to his shoulders. Bruises marred his skin as if he had borne the fall of a hundred fists, but his eyes gleamed triumphant in the moonlight.

  “We have one chance to escape, and it’s tonight,” Simon said, ushering her toward the door. “Follow me.”

  But she refused, planting her feet at the threshold. Something was wrong. There was a sharp metallic patter in her mind, and she could not dislodge its rhythm. It was familiar. She had heard it before.

  “El, we have to leave!” Remy whispered from the door.

  “Gunshots.” She looked at Simon, the memory rising fast. “You shot them all in Festival. You gave orders to the angels.”

  He hissed out an impatient breath. “It was all a lie, Eliana. Aren’t you listening?” He grabbed her wrist. His grip was awful, merciless. “Walk. Now.”

  But she knew the truth: She could trust nothing she saw. Her entire world had become lies of Corien’s making.

  She awoke quietly in the dim light of her room, her face wet with tears, and found Corien sitting on the edge of her bed.