Furyborn (21 page)

A storm of blades, ten thousand strong, turned as one and raced toward the lonely spot in the dirt where Rielle and the child crouched.

Rielle stared, panic drumming its way up her throat. Time slowed and quickened, both at once. She could faintly hear
Corien shouting at her to do something, to defend herself, to
move
.

But thousands of swords? That was too many. Manipulating a few pieces of the maze was one thing. But this—they darkened the sky. They whistled and roared. They would cut her to pieces—and the child too.

The child grasped her wrist. “May the Queen’s light guide us home,” he whispered to her, the smile on his face not one
of resignation, but of belief.

The Sun Queen’s prayer. The Sun Queen’s light.

Her
light.

Her
power
.

Yes
, Corien whispered. Yes
, Rielle.

Rielle pulled the child close, then turned to the swords, closed her eyes, and flung up her arms.

No.

She refused this fate.

No.

She had trials to complete, friends waiting for her, the mystery of a foreign princess’s murder
to solve.

No.

She had words of love still to speak.

And a voice in her head.

And a hunger, a
craving
, to answer the awakening call of her blood.

No.

Not yet.

She waited in silence, her body trembling. Power stretched out from her fingers, from the sharp turns of her shoulders, from the ends of her hair.

Had it been enough?

She drew a few shallow breaths in the
ringing silence, then dared to open her eyes.

A blade hovered before her face. Two more, pointing at each of her eyes. Hundreds.
Thousands
, all held in place by her silent command. They filled the pit, quivering, denied their kill. The air hummed metallic.

Rielle let out an incredulous, tearful breath.

Then she let her arms fall.

The swords dropped flat to the ground, forming a
perfect circle around the spot of earth where Rielle knelt with the child. Their fall shook the ground. Their blades pointed away from her; she sat at the center of a scorched metal sun.

Slowly, the world returned to her. She blinked, wiped her eyes clean. A growing surge of voices made her look up.

The people of Celdaria were on their feet. They were screaming her name—a chant, a prayer.

Rielle! Rielle! Rielle!

She raised her face to the sky and showed them her smile.

Eliana

“Something is wrong with Lord Arkelion. He took me into his bed, ordered me to hurt him as he lay naked before me. I did so happily, but his wounds closed almost at once. He roared and writhed and wept. He is ill, perhaps mad. I believe all the Emperor’s men to be mad. Every single one.”

—Encoded message written by Princess Navana Amaruk of Astavar, delivered to the
Red Crown underground

Eliana scrambled upright, gasping, her clothes clinging to her sweat-drenched skin. She had been lying facedown on a mud-crusted blanket. Her hands slipped as she struggled to push herself to a sitting position.

“Remy.” She looked wildly about, saw only a black forest lit by a wedge of moon. “Remy!”

“Hush.” A gentle hand smoothed the hair back from her forehead.
“He’s safe, and so are you.”

Eliana recognized the voice. “Navi?”

The girl smiled down at her, her gaze worried but kind. “I’m here. You’re all right.”

Dark clouds shifted meanly across Eliana’s vision. She gripped Navi’s hand. “Tell me.”

“We’re three days’ ride from Rinthos. You’ve been drifting in and out for hours. A fever, Simon thinks. Him, Remy, you, and me—we’re all alive
and safe. Hob is with us as well.”

“Hob.” Memories of the Empire outpost came rushing back to her: Smoke drifting up from the ground. Running toward the waiting lines of adatrox, two whining bombardiers in her hands.

Only then did Eliana register the searing pain on her back. She winced, and Navi hissed in sympathy.

“Simon and I did the best we could,” Navi said, “but the blast caught
the entire back of your body. Please, lie down on your stomach.”

Eliana obeyed, her vision tilting. The wounds must indeed have been terrible. She’d never suffered from such severe pain hours after an injury.

“The compound,” she bit out. “Did they survive? Patrik and…?” She could not make herself say Linnet’s name.

Navi sat beside her. “I believe most of the refugees got away, yes.
Patrik stayed to help evacuate them to a new site. Hob has come with us to meet a contact in Rinthos who can help with supplies for the survivors. The smoke ruined much of their food. But, Eliana, you saved them. What adatrox you didn’t destroy, Simon picked off easily. What you did… I’ve never seen anything like that.”

Eliana lay very still, her cheek pressed to the blanket. Her vision was
beginning to settle in the darkness. Remy lay nearby, curled up at the base of a tree. Even as he slept, his brow creased with worry. Beside him sat Simon, arms crossed over his chest, eyes closed. In sleep, he looked almost peaceful. The silver ribbons of his scars shivered like ghosts in the shifting moonlight.

Then Eliana heard footsteps in the woods and tensed.

“It’s only Hob,” Navi
whispered. “He’s on watch. Please, try to rest.”

“That’s unlikely. Where are my knives?” Then she remembered Lord Morbrae confiscating them and groaned. “They’re gone, aren’t they?”

“Actually, Simon retrieved them from the outpost. Now Remy has them. He won’t let any of us touch them.”

Eliana let out a tired, relieved laugh. “And now…we go to Rinthos.”

“Yes. There, we’ll be able
to find better medicine for your back than what Hob helped us scrape together.” She paused. “I’m sorry to say I think you’ll be scarred permanently from it. But you will live.”

Eliana closed her eyes. Exhausted tears slid down her cheeks.

“Oh, Eliana.” Navi cupped her face with one soft hand. “How can I help you? I feel useless.”

“You can’t help me. Just leave me be. Please.”

For a time, Navi was blessedly quiet. But even in the silence, broken only by the whisper of wind and Hob’s occasional steady tread, Eliana could not find her way back to sleep.

She opened her eyes, knowing that she must say
something
, or this dead, black feeling in her chest would rise up and engulf her. “Navi?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know, I…I can’t sleep.”

“Shall I tell you a story?”
There was a smile in Navi’s voice.

“You saw things in Lord Arkelion’s palace. Didn’t you?”

A new stillness fell over them. Navi’s voice was careful. “What kind of things?”

Impossible things.

Men with slit throats, somehow walking again.

Men with black eyes, speaking from across a vast ocean.

“Did you ever see…odd behavior from Lord Arkelion?” Eliana asked. “Or from visiting
generals?”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean by odd behavior.”

But the slightly stilted quality of Navi’s voice told Eliana that in fact she did know. “Lord Morbrae. I slit his throat, yet there he was, minutes later, walking once more. His neck was whole. No wound.”

“Here,” Navi offered. “Water.”

Eliana allowed Navi to help her take a few greedy sips from Simon’s canteen, then
lay back down with a moan.

“And before that,” she added. “I was in his lap. I was prepared to pleasure him in exchange for amnesty. I bent to kiss him, and then…”

Eliana’s voice had grown so quiet Navi had to bend low to hear.

“And then?” she prompted.

“I saw…a vision,” Eliana said. “His eyes locked with mine, and I was taken elsewhere. I was both at the outpost and also across
the ocean. I was in Celdaria, in a beautiful city, larger than any I’ve seen. In Elysium.”

Navi’s eyes were wide with astonishment. “The Emperor’s city?”

“He spoke to me.”

“Not the Emperor?”

Eliana nodded once. The pain firing up her legs, back, and skull was so violent it nearly made her sick over Navi’s boots.

“Those prisoners,” Eliana whispered, squeezing her eyes shut.
She was losing her grip on the conversation. Her questions scattered and faded. “At the outpost. They were kept in cages. The fire… They couldn’t get out. I heard them screaming.”

“Hush now.” Navi’s hand pressed hers gently. “Think of Crown’s Hollow. You saved many lives there.”

“I’m a murderer, Navi. Tell me I’m not.”

Navi did not reply.

“Ah,” Eliana murmured. “A telling silence.”

“All I will say,” said Navi, “is that you have done the best you could with what was given to you.”

“How disappointing. I’d hoped you wouldn’t lie to me.” Eliana stared bleakly out into the night. Her cheeks were on fire. She pressed them into the cool mud. “He recognized me, you know.”

Navi leaned closer. “What? Say that again.”

“He recognized me. The Emperor.”

Just before
Eliana’s eyes drifted shut, she saw Simon’s own eyes open to watch her.

“He saw my face, and he asked me where I was,” she mumbled.

“Eliana?” came Simon’s voice, near now, and gentler than she’d ever heard it. Almost asleep, she turned to face it, like turning her face up to the sun.

“Simon.” She smiled, fuzzy-headed. “There you are.”

“Eliana, say that again. What you told Navi.”

“I saw the Emperor. He reached for me. He asked where I was.”

“And did you tell him?” One of Simon’s hands cupped her cheek, the other, gingerly, the bandaged back of her head. “Eliana, listen to me, this is very important: Did you tell him?”

“No.” Her eyes fluttered shut. “I told him nothing.”

“Good.” Simon helped her settle with her head in his lap. His thumb caressed her forehead.
“That’s very good. You’re all right now. You’re all right. Sleep.”

• • •

Eliana dreamed of death, as she so often did.

She dreamed of everyone’s death but her own.

She reigned, a corona of light blazing around her head, over a world of scorched earth.

Rielle

“I believe us to be lost. How can we fight creatures whose lives stretch before them like infinite roads, who can sift through minds as easily as a child crafts castles on the shore? We have made a mistake, engaging the angels. All our power pales in comparison to that of their ageless minds.”

—Surviving journals of Saint Grimvald of Borsvall
September 25, Year 1547
of the First Age

Two nights after the metal trial, Rielle lay in bed, pretending to be asleep for the sake of Evyline, who stood placidly at the door to her rooms.

But her mind raced, and her blood thrummed hot with nerves.

Well?
She swallowed hard. She could not delay this moment any longer.
Are you there, Corien? It’s time for us to talk.

Of course I’m here, Rielle
, came his
voice at once.
I always am.

She frowned into her pillow.
I don’t find that particularly comforting.

You should. Unlike your other friends, I have no desire to see you killed.

So, we’re friends then, you and I?

His response came like a sigh across her skin:
I very much hope so.

She drew her blanket tighter around her body.
How can I be friends with someone I’ve never met? Someone
I’m not even sure is real?

A delicate sensation slid down her spine, like the brush of a gentle finger, then faded near the dip of her lower back.

Don’t I feel real?
came the response.

Rielle shivered.
Are you a spirit? A ghost?

No.

Then why is it that I can feel you and hear you, but I cannot see you?

It is my own special way of talking to you from afar, my dear.
There
was a shifting in Rielle’s mind, of both sound and sensation, as though Corien were settling himself comfortably beside her.
I can send you my thoughts, and you can send me yours. I can send you how I feel, and I can sense your feelings in return.
He paused. Then, with a tiny smile curling his voice, almost shyly:
I can send you the feeling
of how I would like to touch you. And you can do the
same back to me
if you wish.

A war was taking place inside Rielle’s body, between cold fear and the desire to say at once:
Touch me, then.

And if I don’t wish for you to touch me?
she managed to think.

Then I won’t. I have been too forward. Forgive me.

Just don’t do it again.
She paused, her cheeks flaming.
Unless I ask you to.

Of course.
He sounded quietly pleased.
So, you
wanted to talk to me. You have questions, I think.

Many.

That is understandable.
Another shift. She had the sense of him sitting on the edge of a divan, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

But his face was a blur.

First
, she began,
what do you look like?

I can show you if you’d like. You’re already partway there.

Rielle’s heart beat faster.
You
are
sitting on
a divan, then? I can see the faint shape of you.

Indeed. Concentrate on the lines of my body. Try to make them sharper, as if tracing me with a pen.

She obeyed. Slowly, the blurred figure came into focus—a slender, tall, pale man, with fine black hair in shining waves that curled softly at his ears. Fine cheekbones, as if chiseled from white marble. Large eyes of a bright, pale blue. Full
lips that stretched into a fond smile when her eyes met his.

“Hello, Rielle,” he said, and his voice was no longer simply in her mind. He was there; he was
speaking
to her.

She gasped, blinked, and her concentration broke. Corien disappeared. She was suddenly, terribly alone in her bed, in the dark quiet of her rooms. She struggled to catch her breath, her mouth dry.

Where did you
go?

I’m still here,
he replied.

I lost you, I
— She swallowed. Her skin felt cold and clammy, now that she no longer stood near him.

It’s difficult right now for us to communicate as completely as we could. In time, we’ll manage it. It requires practice, and
—here his voice darkened slightly—
you have so very many things demanding your attention right now.

The trials.

Yes, among
others.
There was a tense silence, and then he whispered,
Rielle, may I touch you?

She drew in a tight breath.

Nothing untoward. I swear it.

Rielle watched the star-spotted night sky beyond her windows.
First, tell me: What are you?

What am I?
He sounded playfully put out.
Dearest, you insult me. I am altogether a person, you know, with an identity and a name.

But you aren’t
human. Humans can’t talk like this, using only their minds. The night before the metal trial, you showed me a memory. One of my own memories, one I’d forgotten.

Yes, I did.

Corien…that’s extraordinary.

I suppose it is, to you.

Humans can’t do such things.

That is true.

She waited for him to say more, and when he didn’t, she realized he was waiting for her to say what she
already knew, what she’d known with increasing certainty for weeks now.

You’re an angel.

His response, when it came at last, was toneless:
I am.

Rielle climbed out of bed, tossing the linens aside. Only when standing did she realize that her nightgown clung to her body, damp with sweat.

“My lady?” inquired Evyline from the door. “Is everything all right?”

“Of course.” Rielle
could hardly hear herself over the thrum of fear in her veins. “I only need a glass of water.”

Somehow, she made it into her bathing room and shut the door behind her. She stumbled to the washbasin, splashed water on her face, then poured herself a glass and let it sit untouched.

She leaned heavily against her vanity’s marble countertop, struggling to steady herself. She felt light-headed,
detached from her limbs.

Rielle, please sit down.
Corien’s voice was gentle.
You’ll fall and hit your head.

I wish to stand
, she snapped.

Very well. Is there anything I can do to help?

You’re lying to me
, she managed at last.

You know I’m not.

All the angels are gone. They’re in the Deep. The saints banished them there, locked them beyond the Gate.

No gate stands forever
, Corien interrupted.

Rielle stalked across the room to stand before the enormous gilded mirror that stood propped up against the far wall. She looked rumpled and terrified, her green eyes bright and wide, her dark hair falling loose from her braid, her nightgown dwarfing her in the grand, tiled room.

Just think what sort of rooms they’ll give you once they’ve made you their beloved Sun
Queen
, Corien remarked, his voice edged.
A staggering thought, isn’t it?

Stop talking to me.

You don’t mean that.

Rielle began to pace.
I think I know my own mind.

And I know your mind too. Such a spectacular thing it is.

Get out.
She stopped midstride, fists clenched at her sides.
Right this moment. Get out of my head, and leave me be.

They will use you, Rielle
, he said
at last, urgently now.
They will lift you higher and higher, dress you in jewels and crowns, and when they realize who you really are, what lives inside you, they will spurn you, and you will be left alone—

“Get out!” she screamed, and when he obeyed, she felt his departure like a thread being tugged out of an infinite canvas until finally snapping free.

The sensation left her feeling
unmade. She sat down hard on the edge of her bathing tub.

Evyline barged into the room, sword raised. “My lady! Are you hurt?”

“No.” Rielle wiped her eyes with a shaking hand. “Evyline, I think I’ve had a terrible nightmare. I don’t feel quite myself.”

Evyline sheathed her sword and hurried forward. “Here, my lady. I’ll help you back to bed and send for some tea. And a cinnamon cake,
perhaps?”

Rielle leaned heavily into Evyline’s broad body. “Perhaps three cakes would do the trick.”

“Three cakes are, generally speaking, much more effective than one, my lady.”

Rielle’s smile was faint and brought prickling tears to her eyes. “Bless you, Evyline. I’ve taught you well.”

Evyline helped Rielle settle back into bed. “I’ll return shortly, my lady. I’ll send in Dashiell
to watch over you.”

Rielle nodded and wrapped herself back into her blankets.

The angels are all gone
, Rielle told herself, shivering in her bed and staring at the ceiling. If she thought it enough times, perhaps she could make it a real truth, just as she had remade the world of the metal cage into one she could control.

She squeezed her eyes shut and tried not to think about the
sweet, lonely ache that lingered against her skin where Corien’s touch had once been.

The angels are all gone.

The angels are all gone.

• • •

But the prayer did not help.

Rielle couldn’t sleep the rest of the night, which left her unfocused and sloppy the next day as her father drove her ruthlessly through her conditioning exercises. And even when she settled into bed the night
after, her muscles aching, sleep eluded her.

Corien, apparently, had taken her request quite seriously. She could neither hear nor sense him. Her mind felt hollow as a cave.

Part of her was glad.

But the part of her that lay restlessly in her too-large bed, unsettled and on edge, yearned for company.

And when she thought of his final words to her—
They will spurn you, and you will
be left alone
—the hollow of her mind expanded into her heart until all she could feel was a desperate, endless sadness.

“I don’t want to be alone,” she whispered against her pillow.

She held her breath, waiting. Would Corien answer her? Send her some sort of reassurance?

Five breaths. Ten.

He said nothing.

She flung aside her linens, yanked the heavy plum-and-gold dressing
gown from her bedside chair, and marched toward the door to her rooms.

Evyline snapped to attention. “Are we going somewhere, my lady?”

“Indeed we are, Evyline. I need some fresh air.”

She considered going straight to Tal and confessing everything to him: Corien, the angels, the frustration blazing hot paths through her body.

But instead Rielle slipped into the darkened castle—seeking
solace, craving company.

And recklessly, secretly hoping at each turn of Baingarde’s moon-painted corridors, that she would see Corien standing there, with an apology on his lips and a sly kiss for her own.