She could not wait any longer. She moved past Simon, stepped into the net of his threads, and let them take her.

43

   Rielle

“Merovec has returned home from your capital and has invited me to supper tomorrow evening. From Belbrion, I’ve heard of Queen Genoveve’s resurrection. I’ve heard of your tumultuous streets, the crowds swarming to cheer Merovec’s name, and that there is no love lost between him and Lady Rielle. So I will tell Merovec what I’ve learned and read, in hopes that I may gently nudge him toward a friendship that remains elusive—one with you and Lady Rielle, between House Sauvillier and House Courverie. The two greatest houses in Celdaria must be united in friendship and must face the coming war as allies. For I know, as well as you do, that war is indeed coming. The angels’ eyes are everywhere, and they are hungry.”

—A letter written by King Ilmaire Lysleva to Prince Audric Courverie, dated October 1, Year 999 of the Second Age

Ten days before Audric’s coronation, Rielle awoke at dawn from the feeling of being watched.

Slowly, she sat upright in bed. Beside her, Audric slept peacefully, his arm heavy over her hips. The room was dark; the Sun Guard stood outside, having given them privacy for the night.

Rielle breathed into the dark silence for a few moments, waiting for the feeling to diminish, but it remained—the great invisible eye, watching her just as it had in Mazabat.

The empirium, cold and endless, waiting for her to understand.

She climbed out of bed, following the tug of energy at her breastbone, as if hot fingers were reaching gently for her heart. Quietly she stepped outside onto the terrace, where Atheria waited, ears pricked toward the towering black slopes of Mount Cibelline that dwarfed the castle. In the east, the sun was climbing, but the mountain remained still and dark.

“You hear it too,” Rielle whispered. Her fingers sparked when she touched Atheria’s soft gray coat, and the godsbeast knelt, shivering, so Rielle could mount her.

Palms flat against Atheria’s neck, she whispered, “We’ve got to follow it.”

Atheria’s ears swiveled back, listening.

“I know. I don’t want to either.”

But the itch in her chest was insistent, and golden images she could not understand shimmered thinly at the edges of her vision. The empirium was a stubborn song she longed to shake from her mind.

She directed Atheria up, away from the castle and into the great pine forests that carpeted Cibelline, and with every booming beat of Atheria’s enormous wings, the urgent fist in Rielle’s heart gripped tighter, until she could hardly breathe. Her blood raced and roared beneath the hot planes of her skin. She scanned the dark net of trees below, trying to shake the gold from her vision. She summoned up shreds of energy from her pinched gut and shoved them out of her hands as if that could dislodge the empirium from her eyes.

“Leave me alone,” she whispered. “I just want to sleep. That’s all I want, to sleep for a while. Leave us alone.”

When Atheria landed at last, in a thin copse of trees at the edge of a broad, grassy cliff, Rielle slid gingerly off her back and sank, gasping, to her hands and knees. She looked up once, searching the forest. She saw nothing extraordinary—only pines shivering in the high mountain winds. Rocks scattered across ridges of earth, rustling blades of grass. She heard the distant, lonely call of a hawk. Gold slipped across her eyes, as if the empirium were replacing the false frame of her body with something splendid and new.

Atheria lowered herself to the ground, covering Rielle with her wings. She stared up at the canopy of feathers, watching in exhausted wonder as each soft barb lit up like a sky of stars, compressed into a single brilliant moment.

Then a wave of light swept over her, pulling her under.

• • •

She had experienced such a thing many times before—dreams from Corien that left her restless and sharp-edged, visions from Ludivine that soothed her mind when nothing else could.

This was different.

This, she sensed, was a message sent from the empirium itself.

She was limbless, bodiless. She was her truest self in this realm—a creature of boundless light. She was stardust, luminous and ancient; she was the infinitesimal ash of long-dead worlds.

She floated in a sea of gold, buoyed by churning eddies of light. She hardly dared breathe for fear of splintering them, and anyway, breathing was an act relegated to the world of humans.

There was an endless plain before her, but instead of stretching from horizon to horizon, it stood upright, like a vast mirror. Though she did not understand what she saw reflected on its rippling gold surface, she knew that what she saw was her own self.

She reached out, though she had no arm, and touched the gold-sea glass, though she had no fingers.

The image of her alien self shattered, replaced with something new. A million colors, a million sounds, cycling faster and faster until they were a frightening, terrible blur—pewter and periwinkle, screams of agony and waltzes performed on sweeping strings, mustard skies and jade fields, the red of an opened wound, the high shriek of a child at play, the dazzling blue of lightning arcing through a storm. A bruised sky, mottled and veined, a dark river of screams pouring from its mouth. A green world, peeling away from itself like thin curls of apple skin until only darkness remained. An oppressive darkness, a physical void that sucked the air from her lungs.

Seven faces looked down upon this collapsing world. They were painted in fire and water, in earth and metal and shadow, in snapping wind and in the scorching light of the sun.

Her human eyes would not have understood what she was seeing.

But her true eyes—the eyes the empirium had given her, the ones she carried deep within herself—knew it at once. Ancient lies curdled, putrid, against the roof of her mouth.

And the moment she grasped the truth, the empirium released her.

• • •

When Rielle returned to the mountain, she lay breathless in the grass beneath a cloudless blue sky, and Atheria was nowhere to be found.

She sat up, her skin humming. She felt her mind rearranging itself in the wake of this vision, as if the very pieces of her skull were being remade.

She held her head in her hands and thought to Ludivine, too shocked for anger, You knew. You had to have known. Why did you never tell me?

Ludivine did not respond.

Instead, Corien did. He walked out of the trees and extended his hand to her.

“You do not belong in the dirt,” he told her, and she accepted his help only because the ground was cold, and she did not trust her body to stand on its own.

“You’re not really here,” she said.

“No, of course not. I’m far away, as requested.” He gave her a sardonic bow.