Lightbringer

by Claire Legrand

  “You could, I think.” A flake of ash stuck to Obritsa’s eyelashes. She paid it no mind, her face blank as washed stone. “Obviously you can destroy bodies. I think you could destroy him too, if you wanted. Unmake his truest self from the inside out. A mind, a body—they’re the same, aren’t they? At their deepest level, they are of the empirium, just as everything is.”

  “Could I kill him?” Rielle tried out the words, but the thought slipped through her mind like a sharp-toothed eel, vicious and elusive. It wriggled its coils inside her, and its eyes were as pale as Corien’s in his moonlit bedroom, its plump flesh the sleek obsidian of his hair. She had destroyed that angel Malikel in Patria, though it had been clumsy, unintentional. Could she do the same to Corien, who was so much stronger? Would he even allow her the chance?

  Rage flared swiftly inside her. She stalked toward Obritsa and knocked her flat. The girl’s head hit a soft spot amidst the rocks, a flat patch of black mud. Rielle saw the angry red-black flare of the pain in her skull and the stars blinking fast across her eyes.

  “You will not speak of that, or of him, ever again,” Rielle hissed. Only a short hour ago, she had been tired down to her bones. Now, blood all around and her veins sizzling with the violence of destruction, she was reborn.

  Obritsa stared up at her, breathless. “I should have stopped you from killing the Obex. You are not yourself. Your eyes are changing so quickly. Gold devouring green.”

  “Stop me?” Rielle smiled wide. “You could never.”

  And then she felt a change in the air, this air that obeyed her and was in her and of her, this air that would gather into a bludgeon and crush Obritsa into the earth if Rielle so desired. It shifted and folded, allowing room for three more bodies on this black cliff thrusting out into the sea, and when Rielle looked up, she saw two rings of light snapping closed. Her nostrils stung with the familiar smoky scent of threads, but these did not belong to Obritsa.

  They belonged to two marques—a man Rielle knew, and a woman she didn’t. The man was tall and blue-eyed, scruffy of face and hair. The woman was tall and lean and pale. The man lowered his glowing hands, his body stiff with tension—and his face, Rielle thought, softening with pity, even as he was so obviously afraid.

  “Garver?” Rielle whispered. The sight of him was incongruous and deeply unsettling. She imagined ridding the world of him with one swipe of her arm through the air. She did not want to think of home, of Audric with that jealous question twisting his face, and yet there was Garver, reminding her of it all simply by existing.

  Another man stepped past Garver, and this was worse, this was a blow that left Rielle unsteady on her feet and shaking with anger that he would have come after her, that he could have found her here. He was shaggier than he had ever been, and thinner, his tangled blond hair gathered in a messy knot.

  Tal. Her heart constricted around the word.

  He was hurrying toward her, his face alight with joyous relief, and all at once, Rielle realized what he would see—her, spattered with blood, her hands pinning Obritsa to the dirt. A ruin of ash and death encircling them.

  The last time he had seen her had been on her wedding night. She had been a gilded creature, trussed up in lace and velvet, stupid and happy, and she had still been slender then, her belly and face not so plump as they were now.

  “Rielle! Oh, sweet saints, thank God you’re all right,” he said, the words bursting from him. When he reached for her, a bolt of terror cracked through her like lightning.

  “Get away from me,” she snarled, not releasing her hold on Obritsa. The girl would run; the strange little alliance between them had doubtless been shattered the moment Rielle attacked her. Without her, if Rielle couldn’t snatch Garver or his friend before they threaded themselves to safety, she would be stranded here on this awful, storm-bitten coast, and it would take Corien months to retrieve her.

  Tal startled to a stop, the joy falling from his face. His gaze flitted across the cliff-side, the blood-sprayed rocks.

  Their eyes met. “Rielle, it’s all right,” he said, as if placating a child. “I understand what happened here.”

  She laughed. As if, with his simple mind and unexceptional talents, he could understand anything of what she felt or what she was.

  He approached her, hands raised. “You don’t have to be ashamed. You’re destroying the saints’ castings, aren’t you? You’ve chosen not to open the Gate.” There was a small smile on his lips. “I knew you wouldn’t help him. I knew you would come to your senses. You were angry and afraid. I understand that.”

  “Come to my senses?” She glared up at him through her lashes. The world pulsed in shades of amber and bronze. “You know nothing of my mind, and you never could.”

  “But I want to, Rielle.” He slowly knelt, so their eyes were level. “I want to know what you see. I want to understand everything that hurts you.”

  Between them, Obritsa struggled in Rielle’s grip, her breathing fast and thin.

  “You can’t.” A great frustration reared up in Rielle. Tal’s ignorance disgusted her. “My might is beyond the reach of any man who lives.”

  “Maybe, if you come home with me—”

  “Home?” A tiny laugh escaped her. She drew in a shuddering breath, which pulled tears from her eyes. Her voice was a mere quaver. “I have no home.”

  “Yes, you do.” Tal’s voice held an immense gentleness, and she couldn’t bear it, that he would dare to be gentle when she felt so brittle, so sticky with blood.

  “Get away from me, Tal. You’ve said you love me. Show me that, and obey my wishes.”

  “Your home is in me de la Terre,” he said, undeterred, “with me, and Audric, and Ludivine. Queen Genoveve, Sloane, Miren.” Tal glanced over his shoulder, where Garver stood grimly. “Your friend Garver Randell and his little boy.”

  Rielle felt the moment Corien took hold of Obritsa’s mind. The girl’s body slackened under her hands, and with relief Rielle scrambled away from her, left her sprawled. Garver started toward Obritsa immediately, but Rielle flung out her arm and shoved him back into the tangled brush, far from the cliff’s edge. The pale woman, his companion, ran after him with a sharp cry.

  Tal tensed. “Rielle, please. Come home with me. You don’t have to run anymore.”

  “And what shall I do, when I go home with you?” She crouched in the dirt, her smile turning vicious. “Shall I parade through the streets, greeting my many admirers? Shall I compose a song to accompany the curses they will throw at me? Tell me, Tal, what rhymes with Kingsbane?”

  “Rielle. It won’t be like that.”

  “You’re lying to me.” She shook her head, harsh laughter rising, and touched her aching temple. “Everyone’s always lying to me. Audric said he didn’t care, that it didn’t matter, but it does. He can’t hide that from me.”

  “If you come home, if you tell everyone what happened, they’ll understand. They will accept you.”

  “They hate me,” she whispered, “and they always will, and you know it.”

  Tal opened his arms to her, and his face was so soft, so open with love, that Rielle, tired as she was, her head pulsing with pain and her mouth sour with death, let him come. He held her against his chest, his hand gingerly cupping her head. He pressed his mouth against her hair, heedless of the blood.

  And for a moment, Rielle closed her eyes and allowed it.

  But then Tal began to speak.

  “You were confused,” he said softly. “He slipped into your head and tricked you. I understand.”

  Rielle pushed him away and scrambled to her feet. Her eyes blurred with tears, and she hated that he would see them and think her in need of comfort. She pulled the tears into her palms, turned them to fire, and threw them to the ground, where they stuck and grew.

  Tal watched the flames in wonder. The shield strapped to his back seemed pathetic be
side them, a toy fit for a child.

  “I was not tricked,” Rielle spat, clear-eyed. “I wanted to leave. I wanted him. He isn’t afraid of me. He adores what I can do, and he wants me to do more.”

  He stared up at her from the rocks, stricken. “Of course he does! He wants to use you!”

  “He wants us to work together, as one.”

  “And what lies at the end of that work? Everything you love will be destroyed. Everything you know, gone.”

  “If I decide to spare anyone, he will allow it.”

  “Listen to yourself!”

  “He loves me, Tal.”

  “So do we.” He stood, his shield sparking as his anger rose. “We love you, Rielle, and will not ask of you any bloodshed.”

  “What if I want bloodshed? Will you still love me then?”

  He hesitated, and that was enough.

  Rielle stepped back from him. “I see it on your face. What I am terrifies you. It revolts you.”

  “No, love—”

  “A shadowed life, hiding away in soft rooms, praying for calm, appearing only to water dying crops or cool a hot summer wind, is not a life I want. I would die in that life, no matter how much love you claim would surround me.”

  There was something happening to Tal’s face, a shrinking. His muscles drew tight and thin, and his eyes shone with sadness.

  “Rielle, that’s not what your life would be,” he said. “You would live under everyone’s protection. We would slowly reintroduce you to the people, bring petitioners to court to ask questions, voice their concerns.”

  “And until it was safe for me to walk freely again, would I sit docile by Audric’s side, our child in my arms? A devoted wife and queen, silent with shame? Begging for pardon? Trying to persuade everyone who looked at me with disgust that it wasn’t an angel’s child in my arms? Would I have to present her to the magisters every month to prove no marks of black wings had formed on her back?”

  “No—my God, no, that’s not what would happen. I swear to you, Rielle. It would take time, but—”

  “Stop lying to me!”

  Tal’s knees buckled. Rielle watched him fall, her body drawn tight with anger. She saw the places where he hurt—his skull, his chest, his stomach. Dark wounds from the grip of her power. His light was so pale, so ordinary. The empirium within him was a mere pallid sheen. She marveled that she had never noticed it before.

  “You know there is nothing left for me there,” she whispered. “Perhaps there never was.”

  “Your family is there,” Tal gasped, reaching for her. “Your friends, your teachers. Whatever Corien has made you believe, you are not a monster whose only power is destruction. You are loved, Rielle.”

  “You lie!” She flung her arms at him, her palms rigid with anger. He tried to stand, and she shoved him back down. He pushed uselessly at the air and clawed at his throat. His eyes were bulging; his veins stood out like cracks.

  “I would have died for you,” he gasped, twitching on the ground. A terrible black sound spilled from him, raw in its grief, and Rielle saw the flash of power in his eyes just before he let out a strained roar. He wrenched his arm behind him, fighting her grip so hard that he snapped bone, and then, his face white with pain, he seized his shield.

  It blossomed, a wreath of flame. Rielle saw Garver huddling in the brush some yards away, the pale woman helping him sit. A small flame flickered in Garver’s hands—a crudely constructed torch. At his feet was a tattered bag of supplies.

  Rielle faced the fire Tal threw at her, and for a single crystalline moment, her eyes were infinite and pitiless. Thousands of tiny bindings shivered before her, millions of spinning empirium stars, all waiting for her command. Inside her, a hundred doors swung open on their hinges.

  It was easy to turn the fire back toward its shield. Tal let out a choked cry, swiftly silenced.

  She ensured it was a fast burn.

  Even monsters were not always without mercy.

  • • •

  Hours later, a whisper lifted Rielle to her feet.

  She licked her lips and tasted ashes, then saw Corien standing on the cliff’s edge. She felt him sifting carefully through her mind. A stag edging into a meadow after a storm. He was afraid she would run again.

  She laughed, a faint burst of air. “I have nowhere to run to now,” she whispered. She touched her wet cloak, and her fingers came away black with ruin.

  And you don’t have to, Corien said, the vision of himself offering an embrace. She pressed her cheek against his chest, seeking the idea of warmth he sent gently through her mind, but even that brought her little comfort. She was numb to it. Her fingers tingled with fire. She stared blankly at the fading gold spot on the ground where Tal had once been.

  Such a lonesome feeling it was, to understand the full truth of her own grotesque impossibility—and a perverse relief to understand, at last, with Tal’s ashes striping her furs, that she could never go home.

  Corien held her, murmuring things she did not hear, but then another voice spoke to her, a cold clarion call, and she turned her face to the northeast, listening.

  Corien’s vision-self watched uncertainly as she pushed past him to the cliff’s very edge. What do you hear?

  She thought of how to explain it to him—how the voice belonged to the boundless thing stirring inside her, and how much more clearly she could understand it now that her eyes had been opened by the burn of Tal’s fire. For years, this thing inside her had been awakening, and now, at last, it stretched its limbs, opened its wide, dark mouth.

  She remembered the black-gold sea that had taken her after she killed the Obex in Patria. And now it returned, lapping against her, and she was not afraid of it. It lived in her veins, and she welcomed its endless will. How it pulled at her, nibbled at her. Both feeding her and hungering for her.

  Turning, she faced Corien. At his feet was Obritsa, lying flat and still. The brush beyond her was empty. Garver and his companion had fled, Rielle supposed, or perhaps she had killed them too. Imagining it, she felt nothing.

  Rielle, tell me what you’re thinking, Corien insisted, worry coloring his voice.

  “I must go to the Gate.” Her mouth moved, and she was there inside her own body, and she was everywhere, spilling across the world on the backs of storms. She was herself, and she was the hungry black sea inside her, and she was the ocean bashing against the rocks below. She laughed. The Gate. Of course. “It is the only thing left to me,” she whispered. “I have made my choice. Now there is only this. Me, and my power, and the things I command it to do.”

  And me, Corien added quietly.

  Rielle ignored him. She looked out over the waves and saw nothing but infinite layers of gold. A sea of stars, shaping the world. They blinded her, but she could not tear away her gaze.

  “It calls me,” she said, “and I must answer.”

  Corien nodded and disappeared. The next instant, Obritsa sat up, her eyes glazed, Rielle’s fingerprints stamping her throat. Though Rielle could see the girl struggling to resist Corien’s commands, she nevertheless raised her hands, summoned threads, wove them into a circle. Rielle walked through them to a wet black island in the middle of the ocean. The wind knocked her to her knees.

  Don’t be afraid, Corien said, his voice a rope of love, guiding her. She clung to it. I’m here with you. I’ve been coming for you for weeks now. I’ll meet you there, my beauty.

  Rielle hardly heard him. Obritsa followed her through the threads to the black island and then began again. Her haggard face was frozen in concentration, her eyes Corien-fuzzed.

  Another ring of light. Rielle passed through it, and then Corien sent a map of the Great Ocean into her mind, a long chain of meticulously drawn islands that took a scattershot path across the waves.

  I don’t need that, she told him, for her own map was more accurate.
As they traveled, the empirium rippled black-gold against her ribs, and she laughed, and she wept with fear and longing, for she had never felt it so pronounced, so eager. Not even when her shadow-dragon had licked the Archon’s face. Not even hours before, when she had killed the Obex in Meridian. Tal’s face appeared in her mind, anguished and full of love, but the empirium rose up and swallowed it.

  Another island in the Northern Sea. At her right, Celdaria’s coast stretched like a distant dark ribbon. Seeing it, she felt nothing.

  The next ring of light brought her to Iastra, the largest island of the Sunderlands, and the huge square plinth of stone upon which stood the Gate.

  Obritsa fell to her knees, her face pinched with pain. Corien had released her. She huddled on the ground and heaved.

  Rielle stepped over her and walked unhurriedly to the Gate. Arrows flew at her; shouts rose up from the perimeter. The Obex, standing guard, had suspected she was coming. There was the call of a horn and running footsteps across stone.

  She raised her arm, silencing them all. It did not amuse her that they would try to stop her. It was simply pitiful. Their bodies dropped behind her, all forty at once.

  The Gate towered, a monument of shifting light bordered by stone. Rielle floated toward it, her feet barely touching the ground. The empirium pushed her on, and her own glittering muscles carried her, and it astonished her that months ago she had stood in this very spot. She had looked up at the Gate, the dozens of cracks floating across the surface of its strange light, black and violet and white-blue like flames. That girl had thought herself strong enough to mend this thing the saints had made.

  What a fool she had been in so many ways. Thinking of it, Rielle blazed with an anger cold and pure as starfire.

  The empirium filled her ears, roaring for her.

  I am yours

  That she had thought she needed a few humans’ flimsy castings—or anything but her bare hands—to make or unmake what she desired seemed ludicrous now. She laughed, giddy with astonishment.

  you are mine

  Rielle stepped onto the ancient dais and plunged her hands into the Gate.