“Zahra?” Eliana whispered.
Even Zahra’s small nod was magnificent. “As I was during the Angelic Wars. Before the Gate. Before the long curse of the Deep and the loss of my body.” Then she pointed. “Look, Eliana.”
Eliana squinted across the fire-ribboned plain, and images rushed at her like the horrors of a nightmare:
A woman stood on a distant flat plinth. She raised her arms and carved a blinding door from the sky.
A castle flashed white, then fell, and from the abyss around it rushed a wave of ruin. There was a cry of pain and fear, a chorus of thousands—millions—and then silence.
The screams of a woman in a bloodied bed.
A baby, held tightly in the arms of a boy. Eliana peered over the boy’s shoulder, and she knew as she stared at the infant that the face looking back up at her was her own. Then she turned to see the boy, and—
A vastness of black, filled with screams too alien to belong to either human or animal. There was a light on the horizon and a figure standing beside it. Eliana cried out, crushed by the lonely weight of this place, and ran toward the light—
She was back on the firelit plain, watching a woman kneel beside a dismembered, blood-soaked corpse. The woman’s back was to Eliana. She wore a suit of black armor and a crimson cloak. The woman moved pale hands over the corpse, knitting across skull and collarbone, down chest and across severed hips. The air around the corpse shimmered, shifting, and then the woman sat back, calm, and the corpse jerked, gasped, and staggered to his feet. He was no longer a corpse. His skin was whole and new, his limbs intact. He took a few unsteady steps before falling to his knees. He looked down at his body and then threw out his arms and shouted to the skies—with joy, with relief, with fury.
The woman rose, smooth and silent, to her feet.
“You’re working faster now,” said the man beside her, whom Eliana had not noticed before. “Well done.” He drew the woman into an embrace, and Eliana stood frozen in horror as their faces came into view.
The woman was dark-haired and unspeakably beautiful, with a face so pale and faultless it could have been carved from porcelain—save for the shadows stretching dark beneath her green eyes and the small, hungry smile curling her mouth.
Eliana brought shaking fingers to her own lips.
My mouth, she thought and then touched the brittle ends of her own tangled dark hair. My hair.
And the man standing beside this woman—blue-eyed instead of black but with the same lovely pale face and untroubled poise that graced the painted portraits in Lord Arkelion’s palace. Black hair, mud-caked cloak, a bloodstained sword at his belt. He guided the woman’s mouth to his, and she clung to him as if their kiss was the only reason she remained standing.
The Emperor.
Eliana frantically backed away, tripped over another corpse, fell to the ground hard.
The world shifted, darkened.
She blinked.
She had returned to her cell, and Zahra hovered quietly in front of her—a mere distortion of the air once more, ephemeral and wingless.
“Please breathe, Eliana,” Zahra urged gently. “I know it is a great deal to understand.”
Eliana gasped for breath, tears streaming down her face. Her skull felt too heavy for her body. Her skin still felt flushed from the battlefield’s flames.
“That was him,” she croaked. “That was the Emperor. But…”
“That was the Emperor before he called himself the Emperor. When his name was simply Corien. He was the first of us to escape. And I am sorry that he was.”
Remy was right. The thought kept circling through Eliana’s mind. They’re angels. The Emperor, his generals, Lord Arkelion, Lord Morbrae. Remy was right.
“And the woman,” she whispered. “I know her face.”
“I would imagine so.” Zahra touched Eliana’s hands, and Eliana felt nothing. “For it is your own, is it not?”
“Partly. More beautiful. More…”
“More unkind.” Zahra offered a small smile. “You have a kind face, Eliana, though you try to make it not so.”
Eliana crossed her arms and shut her eyes. “That’s why he recognized me. The Emperor. Corien.”
Zahra was silent.
“What were they doing?” Eliana asked. “That body.”
“What he failed to accomplish with your mother before her Fall ruined all their work,” Zahra said, “and what he hopes to finish with you. Resurrection. Our return—and our revenge.”
“Our. The angels?”
“Yes, Eliana.”
When Eliana opened her eyes once more, her body felt caught on a high, hot wind—floating, untethered.
“I hope you are lying to me,” she said at last. “Please tell me you’re a hallucination. I won’t be angry, I swear it.”
Zahra bowed her head. “I wish I could.”
“I am the daughter of the Blood Queen.” Her voice came out hollow, heavy. “Daughter of the Kingsbane.”
“You are.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“That is understandable. It does not, however, change the truth.”
Eliana stared at the floor through a furious fog of tears. “How did I get here, then? If I was born back then, to her, and now I’m here… How?”
“That, I’m afraid, is not my story to tell.”
Eliana laughed wearily. “Of course.”
“Eliana, I’m not being coy—”
Eliana waved Zahra silent. She waited until her tears had dried, until she felt she could stand, until she could almost believe the story she told herself—that this was indeed a hallucination, some horrible dream brought on by whatever Fidelia had used to knock her unconscious.
Zahra said quietly at the door, “It’s time to leave.”
Eliana rose to her feet, wiped her face on her sleeve, and said to Zahra, “Then get me out of here. I have things to do.”
39
Rielle
“I worry about Tal. I’ve always worried about him for reasons I couldn’t name, and now I understand why: because he has lived a lie for years, for the sake of this girl, and now is suffering for it. I would never say this to him, but I write it here or else it will burst from my tongue: I hate her for doing this to him. Yes, she was only a child when it all began. But after that, as she grew and learned? What then? What stayed her tongue? Fear? Or malice?”