Lightbringer

by Claire Legrand

  But rowing was the only thing keeping Navi sane. Rowing and recreating in her memory a map of the Vespers.

  They were on one of the Vespers’ northernmost islands, Hariaca. Once they crossed this awful, endless swamp, they would follow the Hezta River to the island’s southern coast. From there they would traverse the Amatis Shallows on foot to the island of Laranti.

  And there, at last, Navi would meet with the leader of Red Crown in the Vespers. A woman, Hob said, named Ysabet. She would be able to help Navi mobilize the Red Crown soldiers scattered throughout the Vespers—a massive nation comprising thousands of islands ranging in size from the enormous and city-choked to the minute and remote—and prepare them to travel across the Great Ocean to the Emperor’s city, Elysium. They would gather an army of rebels and strays, then sail to Eliana’s aid, ready to help her destroy the heart of the Empire.

  If, that is, Eliana was still alive by then. If she hadn’t already been tortured into madness or coerced into allying with the Emperor.

  Or, God forbid, willingly agreed to ally with the Emperor.

  It was at a small Red Crown safe house in Meridian that they had learned the devastating truth: the brutal onslaught of imperial forces at the city of Festival and the capture of Eliana by Admiral Ravikant, who commanded the Emperor’s navy.

  Navi closed her eyes. She had not yet managed to think of Eliana without tears rising.

  “Eliana will not help him,” Navi muttered in Astavari. “She is too strong for him. She will not break.”

  It was a familiar refrain, something she voiced aloud whenever she needed reassurance.

  “Of course, my lady,” answered Ruusa blandly, also in their native tongue.

  “Her mother may have joined the angels, but Eliana is not her mother.”

  “That is true, my lady.”

  “She is stronger than Queen Rielle.”

  At that, Ruusa blew out an impatient breath. “My lady, you did not know Queen Rielle, so you cannot know that Eliana is stronger than her!”

  Navi smiled wryly. “For days you’ve been listening to me recite my little prayers. I was wondering when you would stop saying, ‘Yes, my lady,’ and ‘Of course, you’re right, my lady,’ and yell at me instead.”

  Ruusa’s mouth was a thin line. She glared at the trees they glided between, each slick with slime and draped with thick vines. The four boats carrying the other members of their party were nearby, their pale lanterns shining faintly in the gloom. A warm, overripe stink rose from the stagnant water like that of flowers gone brown in their vase.

  “I did not yell, my lady,” Ruusa muttered. “I was very careful not to yell.”

  “That depends on one’s definition of yelling, I suppose.”

  Ruusa was quiet for a moment. “I am sorry, my lady. Please forgive me.”

  “There is nothing to forgive. I encourage impertinence in my guards, Ruusa. You know this.”

  “Of course, my lady.” Ruusa paused. “It’s only that I don’t want you to be disappointed.”

  “Disappointed by what?” Navi asked, already knowing the answer. Fear curdled in her heart. She refused to acknowledge it.

  “By whom.”

  “Ah.”

  “Lady Eliana has brought you nothing but trouble since you left Orline. Were it not for Lady Eliana, you would not have been captured by Fidelia in Sanctuary. You would not have had to endure torture, nor would you have been experimented upon and administered the crawler serum.”

  “Now, you can’t know that,” Navi said lightly. “I might have been captured anywhere by Fidelia. And if I had been without Eliana there to save me, I would be a crawler by now.”

  “And then,” Ruusa went on, unimpressed, “it was the Empire’s desire to find Lady Eliana that brought them to Vintervok. It was her they wanted. She is why they stormed our city, my lady, our home. I know I was not born in Astavar, but it had become my country, just as it has always been yours, my lady, and when it bleeds, so do I.”

  The pain in Ruusa’s voice was too raw for Navi to ignore. She caught the eye of the sandy-haired, sunburned boy sitting across from her, who was listening intently but pretending not to. He was one of their strays, fifteen years old, his family murdered during an Empire raid. He’d attacked their camp one night somewhere in the southern dust-woods of Meridian. Ruusa had wanted to kill him for it, but Navi had not allowed it, and now he was loyal to her, ready to fight the Empire. His name was Miro. Since Navi had saved his life that night in the dust-woods, he had never looked at her with anything but fervent reverence.

  Of course, he knew nothing of her true identity. None of her strays did. They knew her only as Jatana, just as they knew Malik only as Rovan.

  That they were the last survivors of the Astavari royal family would remain a secret. She and her brother were Red Crown; they hated the Empire. That was all Miro and the others needed to know.

  Navi smiled at the boy. “Miro, would you mind rowing for a while?” she asked in the common tongue.

  He quickly took her place, and once Navi had settled across from Ruusa, she resumed speaking in Astavari. “My darling Ruusa, please know that I hear you. I know you have left your home, a place that had become a haven to you, and that everyone you love was there.”

  “Everyone I love but you,” Ruusa corrected promptly.

  With those words, Navi felt something within her give way, and her eyes stung with tears. As she pushed her people south, she had refused to think much on what they had left behind. But oh, how she wished she could crawl into Ruusa’s lap, as she had many times during her childhood, and ignore every impossible thing that lay ahead.

  Ruusa gave Navi a keen look. She knew Navi’s expressions well, particularly the one that preceded impetuous embraces. “Not now, Your Highness. Not in front of everyone.”

  Navi smiled and blinked her eyes dry. “Very well. Somehow I will restrain myself.”

  “Excellent, my lady.”

  “But I will tell you this: I know you grieve what you have lost. I grieve as well. I think we will grieve for the rest of our lives. With every step we take away from our home, grief braids itself more tightly into the fabric of our deepest selves. And just as I cannot pry my grief from me, discard it, and move on without it, I also cannot let go of my hope.”

  Navi placed her hands on Ruusa’s. The two other rowers in their boat slowed their oars to listen. One was Taya, one of Navi’s guards, and the other was Edran, another stray that had joined their humble ranks on the coast of the Narrow Sea. Like their other new recruits, he couldn’t understand Astavari, but he watched Navi with wide, adoring eyes.

  “I must believe that Eliana is the Sun Queen for whom we have prayed all our lives,” Navi said, willing Ruusa to see in her eyes only her conviction and none of her fear. “I must believe she has the strength to withstand every bit of cunning and cruelty the Emperor will use against her. Please understand that when I speak of her in this way, it is not to dismiss your anger or your sorrow, but rather to express my belief—for myself, and for everyone trusting us with their lives. My belief is my hope, and hope is the light that shines even on the darkest night.”

  Ruusa was silent, her gaze steely. Miro watched their exchange with breathless attention, his oar forgotten.

  At last, Ruusa’s expression softened so subtly that Navi knew the others would not notice.

  “I understand, my lady,” said Ruusa, “and I forgive you.”

  Navi squeezed her hands in thanks.

  Then, as she reached for Miro and his oar, the swamp shuddered.

  It was more than a simple tremor, which could have been explained away in this volatile part of the world. It rumbled on, unending, and when Navi tried to call out, she found that something had stolen her voice.

  She gripped the sides of the boat, struggling to breathe, her mind racing.

 
; Volcanoes and quakes were ordinary occurrences. New islands formed, and old islands split into pieces. The Vesperian people—thousands of sprawling families, hundreds of cultures, united by the love of their late queen, who had been murdered during the Empire’s invasion—depended on reports from the Saterketa, scholars who specialized in reading and predicting changes in the earth.

  Their guide, Bazko, had told them this on their first day in the bog, when spirits had still been high and Bazko himself had been bursting with conversation. He was loyal to Red Crown and would help them safely navigate the Kavalian Bog, famous for the sheer number of travelers who had met gruesome ends in its waters.

  Over the past six days, Navi—eager to trust, desperate for help—had nevertheless grown skeptical. The first time Bazko had told them that they would soon be leaving the bog for cleaner waters had been two days ago.

  And now the swamp was quaking, no end to it in sight, and there was a high-pitched whine ringing in Navi’s ears that she couldn’t shake. Higher and higher it climbed. One glance at Ruusa told her she wasn’t the only one to hear it.

  Bazko sat dumbfounded in the prow of their lead boat, clutching his seat and looking about wildly. He pressed his left ear to his left shoulder and raised his right fist in the air: a command to stop.

  The rowers of the other four boats in their party pulled up their oars. Navi searched through the yellow-gray shadows for Malik, her brother, who sat tensely in the boat to her left. The eerie swamp light painted his golden-brown skin with shadows. Then she looked to the right; in that boat sat Hob, broad-shouldered, his skin a dark, rich brown. Navi often turned to these men for comfort. One she had loved all her life; the other she had come to love over the past few months.

  But now, they looked as frightened as she did, and a cold terror gripped her heart as she wondered if they would die here, if the swamp would open up and swallow them.

  The shudder continued, and Navi counted through it. The putrid water rippled, rocking their boats. Insects and snakes dropped from their branches into the water. Long-legged birds flew off in droves.

  Then, silence. Absolute and sudden. Navi’s ears rang, but the awful whining noise was gone.

  “What was that?” Miro whispered after a moment. He started to stand, clutching his oar like a weapon. “What’s happening?”

  Ruusa pulled him back into his seat. “Hush, boy.”

  Navi waited for their guide to call out a signal, some sign that he knew what that quake had been, but Bazko said nothing. He slowly lowered his fist, looking around at the others like a child desperate for guidance, and it occurred to Navi how small they were, how insignificant in the grand, unknowable scheme of the world.

  How many strays had they recruited? Wiping away the sweat dripping down her brow, she counted quickly to make sure they were all still safely in their boats. Thirty-one. She, Malik, Hob, Ruusa, her three other living guards, and thirty-one people who were either so desperate to escape their loneliness or so obsessively hungry for revenge against the Empire that they had agreed to brave the Vesperian wilderness with a young woman who spoke of legends as if they were real, who could promise nothing except the hope of a distant fight. A journey to the Emperor’s city. An assault on the place he called home.

  The rescue of a princess who would save them all, if only they could reach her in time.

  Navi swallowed against the sour taste in her mouth. What was she thinking? How could she and this tiny army she had made possibly mount any sort of offensive against inexhaustible imperial troops?

  She was wrong to hope, foolish to even try. Her home was lost. Her world was lost. And scrabbling for survival like this, clinging to wild imaginings of victory, was not only an undignified way to pass what would doubtless be her final days but also a great unkindness to those who followed her. These rootless people, so desperate for even the smallest glimmer of salvation.

  She closed her eyes, her palms clammy with dread. What had she done? Where was she leading them, and what lies had she tricked herself into believing?

  “All is well,” Bazko called out. His laughter was unconvincing. “Quite the quake, wasn’t it? Not to worry. They don’t call the Vespers the Ever-Shifting Lands for nothing.”

  Ruusa touched Navi’s elbow. “Jatana, here, drink some water. Hold on to me.”

  But when Navi opened her eyes to accept Ruusa’s canteen, something distracted her—a strange, jagged, flickering darkness, as if a seam had been ripped open in the air. No, not flickering. Shifting. Like a light seen through calm waters, only it was hovering atop the water perhaps forty yards away. Threaded with shades of gold, violet, and the plum-blue of a bruise, it hovered, waiting.

  And something about it—the faint sheen of gold, the particular quality of its rippling movement, its very existence, like something from an Old World tale—reminded Navi, for reasons she could not articulate, of her lost friend.

  Eliana.

  A chill kissed her neck. She stood slowly, ignoring Ruusa. Splinters of darkness branched off the shape in the air like cracks in glass. She watched them grow, holding her breath, listening to the others cry out in wonder.

  Then, the splinters stopped. A hundred spider legs of darkness hung suspended in the air and grew no more.

  A feeling tugged at Navi’s breastbone, urging her toward something, or perhaps away. She did not understand what it meant, but the longer she stared at this hovering shape, the sicker she felt.

  But she had to look at it. She had to move closer. Something had happened, something to do with the empirium, and this was proof of it. The quake, and now this. Navi had to know what it was. Was Eliana hurt? Had she been killed, and now the world was breaking?

  “There.” She pointed. “Do you see that?”

  “I see it!” Miro scrambled to crouch beside her, rocking the boat and making Ruusa curse. “Is it a fire?”

  Navi retrieved Miro’s oar. “We must go to it, quickly.”

  Ruusa did not move. “Whatever that is, we should stay far away from it.”

  Navi’s patience had vanished, replaced by a frantic need to see this thing, to touch it. A wild thought came to her that Eliana could be on the other side of it.

  “You will pick up your oar,” she said to Ruusa, her voice calm but sharp-edged, “and help me get to that thing before it disappears, or you will condemn yourself to being forever a disappointment in my eyes.”

  It was a harsh thing to say, and Navi hated saying it, but soon they were moving, Ruusa rowing in abashed silence. Malik called after her, and Hob too, and Navi heard their splashing oars, but she did not look back at them, because as Ruusa and Taya and Edran and Miro brought her closer to this floating splintered eye, something changed.

  Inside the eye, in the midst of those swirling dark colors, shapes grew, like dropped ink spreading in water.

  Navi couldn’t look away. This impossible thing had fastened hooks to her heart. If she tried to break away, her chest would open like a crack in the earth. What was it?

  “You’re not going fast enough,” she muttered, and then, seeing that the water had grown shallow, she leapt over the side of the boat and plunged into the swamp.

  Soon after, Ruusa’s oar hit the ground. Navi heard the bottom of their boat wedge into the mud, heard Miro exclaim in fear, but she could not stop moving forward.

  “Navi!” came Hob’s voice. “Stop!”

  “Something’s inside it!” she called back to him.

  A creature in the water brushed past her leg. She hardly noticed it, climbed up a slight rise in the sucking mud. Past the bruise’s smudged rim spun slow shapes, like whorls of smoke.

  Navi yanked her foot free of the muck, found solid ground. From the side, the bruise was hair thin, nearly disappearing as she gazed at it.

  But moving around it, she saw that, from a different angle, it was wider, like a suspended dark m
irror. Thin, bright-blue sparks crackled around its edges, like small fingers of lightning. If she could only touch this strange blemish in the air, push aside some of its tangled shadows, she would be able to see what lay inside it. She would be able to understand.

  Her feet were moving too fast. She tried to slow down, move away, but the very air was tugging her forward. She stumbled over her own feet, reached out to brace herself, but she did not fall. Her arms went rigid, fingers pulled toward the dark unblinking eye. In a flash of terror, she understood that this thing, whatever it was, had a will.

  It wanted her to come close.

  It wanted her to touch it.

  Her fingers brushed the air around it, and a horrible pressure bore down on them, then on her hand and wrist, her arm, her elbow.

  She glanced down in horror, a scream lodged in her throat, and then, the darkness mere inches from her face, a crack like lightning flashed before her eyes.

  A thousand images became clear to her in that single shocking instant, as if countless lifetimes had been forced into her mind all at once. Strips of skin unfurling from bone like long black tongues. Hands reaching for help that would not come. A million howling voices, a cacophony of fury.

  A glittering city that had no end. Beasts with wings like scythes.

  A maw immense enough to swallow the world, black and fathomless.

  Navi flew back, stumbling. Something had broken her gaze. Hands seized her arms and legs, tugged her back into the swamp. She fell, inhaled murky water, came bursting back up with a gasp.

  She hit something solid, and there was Malik, knee-deep in the muck, Hob and Ruusa just behind him. The men helped her and Ruusa climb into their boat and then shoved it away hard, away from the rise of land and the black seam crowning the air above it.

  Then Malik and Hob scrambled back into their own boat, which had pulled up just beside hers, both of them dripping and breathing hard. Miro took off his shabby coat and draped it tenderly around Navi’s shoulders.