Eliana, her eyes blurred with tears from the wind, saw a rooftop nearby. She tried to roll as she landed, but she was out of practice and fell badly. The impact jarred her knees, and she cut her arm on a jagged slate tile. She slid down the roof, grabbed on to the cornice and clung there, legs swinging, until she realized the ground below wasn’t far and let go. On the road, she stumbled forward, gritting her teeth against the starbursts of pain that lit up her legs. As the Dread, she could have jumped onto that roof and felt nothing. The thought came and went swiftly, an echo of her former life.
She raced through Elysium with no sense of where to go next, desperate to call for the Prophet. Ostia’s light had darkened, washing the city in an angry purple-red, as if every tower had been dashed with blood. The Prophet had told her that her friends would soon arrive and then they could act, they could meet at last. But when? And who?
But she asked the Prophet nothing and kept her mind firmly shut. Corien would be looking for her. Using her mind to seek the Prophet would light her up like a beacon.
Instead, she imagined her river, the cool satin currents of it carrying her swiftly into the city’s congested heart. She climbed a low wall, raced up a slowly winding staircase to one of the city’s higher levels. Cruciata streamed past her, their tails lashing, their wild calls a ravenous chorus. Some—feline, quick and yowling—darted over rooftops and up walls with ease. Shrieking flocks of raptors glided fast overhead. They dove and pounced, feasting upon anything that moved—the prisoners of Vaera Bashta, ripped from their own kills, and the citizens of Elysium in their shredded finery.
None of them touched Eliana, but she didn’t think their gratitude would last forever. She needed to find a safe hiding place before their mood changed.
Remembering the rooftop courtyard from earlier that night, she turned sharply left, then right, then up two broad flights of stained stone steps. She could have wept with relief to see the familiar narrow staircase, the apartment building with its yawning cruciata gargoyles.
Over her shoulder, she glimpsed the cruciata still flooding down from the sky. They spread fast across the city in rivers of darkness. Soon they would find the bridges, the tent cities sprawling across the rocky fields beyond.
She turned away from the sight, hands in fists as she ran. She would kill them once they had served their purpose. When the Emperor was defeated and the Empire had fallen, she would destroy any beast that still lived and close both Ostia and the Gate.
She only had to survive until then.
On the rooftop, on the terrace bordered with curling white stone, she found the ivy-draped arbor she had hidden beneath only hours before, and froze. Under the arbor, two small boys huddled in the arms of an old man and a woman plump with child.
The elder boy had his hand clamped over the younger one’s mouth. All of them stared at Eliana until she held up her hands, shook her head, and smiled. They relaxed, smiled back. The woman even scooted aside to make room for her.
Then Corien found her.
He appeared suddenly, striding across the terrace. His coat was pristine—long and black, pressed and embroidered, buttoned at his shoulder with a set of gold wings.
One of the little boys cried out. Corien snarled under his breath, flung out his arm. The next moment, everyone hiding beneath the arbor crumpled to the ground, their eyes empty.
Eliana knew it was futile to run but tried it anyway. Corien kicked her legs, sent her crashing to the roof. Her castings, dull and dark, clattered against the stone.
He grabbed her hair, wrenched her hard to her feet. She cried out, scalp stinging and eyes watering, and tried to whirl and punch him. Her exhausted mind remembered too late the knives strapped to her waist.
Corien found them first and ripped her belt from her. Arabeth skidded across the stone and into the shadows. He tossed the other knives over the side of the roof. He said nothing, which terrified her. He loved to hear himself talk, loved how he could make people squirm with his words. But even his mind-speak had vanished. His face was a beautiful white mask of fury.
He dragged her toward the steps, one hand in her hair and the other clutching a handful of her gown. The simple, primal part of her mind that knew only that she was prey pounded on her skull, begging her to scream for help. But any scream would go unnoticed in the demented arena Elysium had become, and if she screamed with her mind, Corien could find the Prophet.
She gasped for breath as he pulled her down the stairs, his iron grip sending hot spikes of pain down her spine. But she would not allow her power to rise and defend her. She could feel its anger; it had not been long since she had used it. It would be so easy, it told her, to let it out.
WE RISE
The empirium roared at her, its blazing fists punching through her veins.
“No,” she whispered, begging it to quiet. “No, no, no.”
Corien paid no attention to her, his pace relentless. She had never prayed harder in her life. A single, simple word: No. No power, no fire, no light. She pushed her entire body into the word. Her castings stayed cold in her palms.
A cloud of black bloomed before her eyes, lifting only when Corien threw her to the ground.
She blinked, the wind knocked out of her. Rielle’s flat, brass eyes stared down at her. They were back in the palace, in the gallery of her mother. Eliana lay inert as Corien swung a sword through a spun-glass rendering of Rielle, slashed an oil painting with the blade’s tip. He seized the brass statue perched on its pedestal above Eliana and flung it into the shadows. The noise was deafening, all the more so for his silence.
Eliana panted, sweat burning her eyes. She couldn’t move much, but she could see he had cleared a space around where she lay, a circle of destruction.
At last, he spoke.
“This is it, Eliana,” he said, his voice vibrating with something she couldn’t name. Appetite, or fury, or maybe exhaustion. “This is the end of our game.”
She strained to look at him. If she saw his face, would she know what he felt? She could sense nothing of him in her mind. He was keeping himself away from her.
Then his wide grin appeared. He was not alone.
Simon stood rigid at his side, Corien’s hand tight around his wrist. Simon’s lip was swollen and bloody from Corien’s backhand hours earlier. For a fleeting moment, Simon’s eyes locked with hers. Blue of ice, blue of fire. The look shook her, unraveling what was left of her fraying calm.
“Simon?” she whispered.
“Yes, Simon’s here too,” said Corien. “I assume you remember what he can do? He’s going to do it for me, here, now. I’m going to tear your goddamned power out of your veins once and for all. I’m going to batter open your mind and dig until I can twist everything you are around my fingers.”
She stared at Corien, her mouth dry, her heart beating so fast it left her buzzing. There was a twitchiness to him that she had never seen before, his face pulsing at the temple, at the corner of his upper lip.
She dared to look hard at his black eyes and wondered how many minds they held inside them—and how close they were to slipping from his grasp.
“I’ll die,” she told him. “Then you’ll have nothing.”
He crouched to stroke her cheek. “What do I care, once Simon has sent me back to her? I’ll have your mother. I can be rid of you at last.”
Frantic, she tried to rise. “You don’t want to see her. You failed her once—you lost her once. You’ll do it again.”
Corien stood, looking down upon her coldly. A madness lit his eyes. “No, Eliana. I see now the mistakes I made. I won’t make them this time.”
Then he plunged inside her. An inferno flaying open every fold of her mind, scorching clean every corner she had worked so desperately to hide. Everything he had done in her months at the palace was nothing compared to this. The pain sucked her breath from her, left her writhing soundl
essly. She clawed at the slick floor, her gasps choked and hoarse. She tried to say a single word, to focus on a single image. Blue eyes, locked with her own. Instead of No, her prayer shifted.
Simon. Her mind screamed it, and every image of him her mind had ever stored away flew at her. She reached for them, tried to grab hold of one and press it close. Simon!
“Come, Simon!” Corien howled, jubilant. “How long can you stand to watch her like this? Hours? Days? Weeks? I am ageless. I am infinite. I can burn her until the world falls apart around us!”
“I will watch for however long it takes you to succeed, my lord,” came Simon’s flat voice.
“Such a loyal pup you are, such a beautiful crag of a man. But even you, ice-cold as you are, will tire of her screams. The human mind can only stand to witness so much pain.” He shoved Simon. “Put up your hands! Find me a thread, Simon! Do it!”
Simon obeyed, his arms rising stiffly.
Corien’s fingers, wedged deep in Eliana’s thoughts, twisted savagely. A scream did burst from her then. She was hidden in her thicket in that lush courtyard garden. In the Blue Room on the admiral’s ship. At the glittering masked ball in Festival, in her warm candlelit room at Willow. She was in Orline, black and lithe, leaping from rooftop to rooftop with Harkan at her side. She was in her bedroom, listening to Remy read her a story about the saints.
She was in Ioseph Ferracora’s arms, watching the sun rise, looking shyly up at the crumbling statue of the Lightbringer, noble and tireless on his winged horse.
Her scream found a word. “Simon!” Her fingers were rigid; her bones would soon pop from her skin. “Simon, please!”
“Simon, please! Simon, please!” Corien burst into wild laughter. “Can you feel the threads, Simon? Can you sense them coming? She won’t last long. I can feel her every shield cracking. Poor little Eliana.” He leaned close, shouted in her ear. “Poor little Eliana! So brave, so noble, so needlessly fucking stupid! You could have been happy, you idiot girl. You could have had everything you wanted, and instead you wriggle on the ground like a caught worm, soaked in your own piss!”
Eliana sucked down air like a child newly born, but it wasn’t enough. Her lungs were burning, her mind a shrieking white storm. Her castings began to warm; her power had tolerated this indignity for long enough. It swelled fast inside her, a boiling sea rushing for the shore.
She couldn’t clench her fingers; instead, she slammed her palms against the floor, willing her castings dark. A vision came: herself smashing her head on the tile until it split. Corien’s delight slithered inside her. He would allow her that after she had given him what he wanted. She could bash her head open to her heart’s content.
Soon, her mind would slip altogether. Her power would burst out and awaken Simon’s marque blood, and that would be the end. It would all have been for nothing.
The breath she drew rattled in her chest, an inward wail. “Simon!”
Then Corien flew back from Eliana, and his mind tore free of her. Something had come between them; some cold door of stone had shut on the reaching crawl of his fingers. He stumbled into a toppled statue, crashed inelegantly to the floor.
“It’s her,” he breathed. “She’s here.” And then laughter shook him, bubbling up until it became a cackle, shrill and beastly. Where Simon was, Eliana didn’t know. She reached feebly across the floor, hot red-black pain surging up to drown her.
Corien’s wild howl hurt her bleeding ears. “Show your face to me, you snake! Where are you? What have you done?”
And then, another voice, quiet and thin, only for Eliana to hear: Stay with us, little one. Just a little longer. Help is coming. Help is close.
The Prophet. The last two words Eliana’s mind formed before a gentle hand, a familiar tenderness, guided her into blissful oblivion.
33
Ludivine
“When alone in your bed at night, the dark all around you, horrors without and within, you may wonder: Is this all there is? War and death? Fear and despair? But this is the wrong question to ask. Instead, ask yourself: What will I do when he comes for me? At the moment of my death, when I look back upon my life, what will I see? Will I be proud of what I have done? Or ashamed of what I have not? Think carefully. I know shame you cannot imagine. I know guilt that crawls through the blood like disease.”
—The Word of the Prophet
In her private chamber at the heart of a vast underground labyrinth, Ludivine sat in her favorite chair: deep cushions of lavender velvet, polished cherrywood that gleamed red in the light. Three squat candles flickered on polished stone pedestals—one to her right, one to her left, one before her against the curving stone wall.
One for Rielle. One for Audric.
One for Eliana.
Her rooms were never without them.
An ornate sword rested in her lap, vibrating quietly. On its golden hilt, a tessellation of carved suns. On the dark leather of its tasseled sheath, an elaborate tapestry of tridents and daggers, spears and arrows, hammers and shields. Rays of sunlight and godsbeasts in flight—a chavaile, an ice-dragon, a firebird.
Ludivine shifted, making herself comfortable. Her stone halls were quiet, but they would not be for long. Once, they had been a wing of Vaera Bashta, collapsed and abandoned. Now, after decades of painstaking work, they had been rebuilt and scrubbed clean of everything except for her seven acolytes, their weapons and supplies, her vast collection of books.
The corridor outside her chamber whispered like wind through rushes as her acolytes prepared for the arrival of their guests. She made sure to keep seven with her always. She liked the number, and disguising any more minds than that would require her to divert too much attention from her efforts around the world.
Their excitement was orderly but obvious. They had prepared endlessly for this day, and Ludivine had seen to it that their minds were disciplined, but they were still human, still flimsy and volatile and bursting with contradictions. Their little flittering fears and hopes darted through her mind like tiny gold fish in a dark sea.
She saw herself through their eyes as they passed the door to her chamber. Pale and quiet, a young, sweet-faced woman sitting tall in her chair. Long golden hair twisted into a braided knot at her nape, a woolen gown of lilac and rose buttoned at her throat. The shoulders were square, the bodice a cunningly concealed breastplate. Even she had to watch her abdomen. Wounds there required more time to heal.
Her acolytes wondered, as they glanced at her, what she was seeing. They looked at her black eyes, half-lidded as she worked, and shuddered. Even though they loved her, the sight of her sometimes unsettled them. After all, her eyes were black like his. Her mind was ageless and unknowable like his. Even if she did tell them what she saw as she sat motionless in her chair, they wouldn’t be able to understand it—how she could see so much at once, how her mind could be so immense and yet remain hidden right under his nose.
What did she see?
A city once grand and white, obnoxious in its swaggering beauty, now overrun with monsters.
A bruised eye hovering above the city. Crimson and pulsing violet, like a fresh wound, and edged with crackling blue light. Out of it poured a black river of wings and scales, claws and fur. Clever sinuous heads with gnashing teeth. Sharp beaks snapping for prey.
Once, Ludivine would have grown angry to see the destruction Corien had wrought. The hysterical fear of his citizens, how hopelessly trapped they were. The people of Elysium had traded their families and their freedom to escape the savagery of war.
And now look at them.
But Ludivine was past anger now, had been past it for hundreds of years. She no longer knew grief or loneliness. She felt no regret, no shame, no lingering ache of lost love. All feeling had fused inside her, plating her insides with steel.
The only thing left was the end. It had burned in her chest for centuries, an immo
vable blue flame that grew as she did, brightening as the pieces of her plan fell into the places she had made for them.
She stretched her mind a little further.
There was Navi and the Red Crown captain Ysabet. Hob and Patrik. Navi’s brother, Malik, and ninety-two others. Zahra was leading them toward the city through the rocky fields, cloaking them from sight. Ludivine watched Zahra closely. The wraith had used much of her strength to hide the Queenslight as it navigated the Sea of Silarra, evading dozens of imperial warships.
She would die soon. Ludivine could see that clearly. Only thin threads of strength kept the wraith’s mind in one piece.
Hurry, Zahra, Ludivine commanded. The link between them remained steady, guiding the wraith through the city’s pandemonium. Centuries ago, she would not have been able to achieve such a thing—to find Zahra, one wraith in a sea of minds, and guide her halfway across the world.
It was astonishing what a millennium of heartbreak could do. Centuries of working alone in the dark to make her mind what it now was.
She smiled a little. What was Corien so fond of saying? I am infinite.
Now, he was no longer the only angel who could make such grandiose claims. Now, she was strong enough to match him.
Maybe strong enough to beat him, for she had been smarter than he had. More careful, more sparing with whom and what she chose to control.
She stretched her mind a little further.
There was Remy, wiry and silent as he followed her path through the city. He had an open mind, clever and pliable, and he accepted her guidance as his own instinct. She saw the scars Elysium had left in his mind—the horrors of Vaera Bashta, the torment of Corien, his parents’ deaths, Jessamyn’s brutal tutelage—and was pleased. He would be more helpful to Eliana this way.
And in the end, if they succeeded, his scars wouldn’t matter.
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