“You assume I have agreed to help you, or that I ever will,” she managed with dignity.

“No, my beauty. It’s only that with every breath you draw, I feel how deeply you crave more than this small, pale world will ever be able to give you.”

Rielle could say nothing to that. She had thought the same thing herself, and he knew it. Refusing his arm, she returned to lead the way back to the abandoned manor house, feeling cold in the still mountain air and unsettled, her mind heavy and muddy—and then she realized, just after Corien did, what their argument in the ruins had done.

A beat of silence, and then he grabbed an ancient, cracked vase from the floor and flung it against the nearest wall with a roar of fury.

The house was empty. Obritsa and Artem—and the three castings—were gone.

6

   Eliana

“They say Elysium’s towers pierce the clouds, that it’s as white as the highest snows. They say it glitters day and night with the stolen jewels of dead cities. They say there are thousands of desperate people on the bridges, screaming to be let inside, and more arrive every day. Cowards and traitors, all of them. Pathetic wretches. But if the doors opened up for me, I’d be right there with them. I’d kill my own brother to get inside the Emperor’s city, if I had to.”

—Collection of stories written by refugees in occupied Ventera, curated by Hob Cavaserra

The Emperor’s city was a gargantuan sprawl of spires and turrets on a high flatland, surrounded by a circular chasm spanned by a dozen slender white bridges.

It glittered like a careless spill of jewels, thousands upon thousands of them, every facet finely crafted, every tower winking in the chill sunlight. The air was thinner than Eliana was accustomed to. Since they’d made port at the coastal city of Luxitaine, their caravan of fine carriages had climbed and climbed until now, in the most mountainous region of Celdaria, they had at last reached Elysium. The mountains ended abruptly, and then there were rocky plains, and then a great chasm ringing the city. It had once been Âme de la Terre, the capital of Celdaria, a city Saint Katell had crafted after the war. Home of the Lightbringer. Home of the Blood Queen. And Eliana’s own home too, she supposed, even now with its altered name and an ancient angel on the throne.

Elysium. Thanks to Remy, Eliana was familiar with the angelic roots of the word. Paradise. A state of bliss or delight.

A giggle sprouted in her throat, and she let it rise. There was no point in hiding her growing fear. The Emperor would dismantle any mask she wore.

She sat on the velvet-cushioned bench in the fourth carriage of eight—the fourth and finest—and laughed, ruffling neither the angelic guards sitting on either side of her nor Simon, who sat silently on the bench opposite her. It was the kind of laughter that brought tears along with it. She didn’t even bother to wipe her face. She laughed and cried and looked out the window.

Once, she would have inspected the landscape, noted the number of watchtowers along the nearest stretch of the city wall, estimated the wall’s height and circumference, made quick, careful note of how many miserable people were clustered on either side of the bridge they were traversing. Hundreds of thousands of people lived in the mountains surrounding Elysium, and thousands more arrived every day, begging for entry and crowding the chasm bridges, eager to supplicate at the feet of angels.

But Eliana didn’t think it mattered now, counting the towers and counting the refugees and wondering about the chasm circling the city. What could she do with that information, surrounded by angels who could sense any escape plan the moment it began forming in her mind?

Nothing. She could do nothing with it. She had nothing, and she was nothing, and she had no one.

She flexed her naked hands; their bareness repulsed and terrified her. She couldn’t sense the empirium; her mind was an endless expanse of choking black wool. Remy sat in another carriage, and she had not been allowed to see him, even after an embarrassing display on the Luxitaine piers that began with begging, progressed to screaming, and ended in exhausted silence.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked. It was a stupid question, given the view out her window, but she could no longer bear the quiet.

Simon’s cool gaze flicked up from the thin leather-bound notebook he had been writing in intermittently since they had left Luxitaine three days prior. “Elysium.”

She thought she had grown used to the new awful flatness in his eyes. She was wrong. She dug her fingernails into her thigh. “Where in Elysium?”

Simon turned a page and resumed writing. “The Emperor’s palace.”

“Where in the palace?”

“The receiving hall.”

“Which receiving hall? I imagine there must be several, this being a palace.”

One of the guards, his broad chest emblazoned with the winged imperial crest, shifted with what Eliana hoped was irritation.

But Simon remained indifferent. The pages of his notebook were lined with meticulous script. “His favorite one.”

Eliana tried to sound cheerful, hoping it would unnerve someone other than herself. “And what will we do there?”

The carriage glided to a halt. Simon closed his notebook. He didn’t smile, not even cruelly. Eliana wished he would.

“Soon you’ll see for yourself,” he replied, then exited the carriage with the kind of easy, efficient grace she’d once admired and now despised.

The guards helped her out and into a broad stone yard where everything was white—the cobbled ground, the stone walls, the thin November sky overhead, the lack of sound. Wherever Remy was, they were keeping him out of her sight. At some point during her numbness, they had passed through one of the city gates, and now Eliana could no longer hear the wailing wretches crowding the bridges outside the city. She wondered how many of them had fallen into the chasm, charging desperately after the carriages in hopes of breaching Elysium’s walls.

As she thought of the chasm, a memory returned to her.

Remy had read it to her from one of his stolen books back home in Orline, in a life that seemed distant and absurd to her now: And on the final night of that old gilded age, the Blood Queen pulled the oceans from their beds, called down the sun’s fire, uprooted the mountains, and all that Celdaria once was, all that the world once was, collapsed under the weight of her rage.

With Remy’s dear voice echoing in her mind, Eliana realized that the chasm was where mountains had once stood. Mountains her mother had obliterated on the last night of her life.

Once again, Eliana flexed her bare hands and called for the power she had fought so ferociously to understand.

Nothing answered.

She nearly resumed laughing. Of course nothing answered, for she had become nothing, a wreck of her former self, and it was a relief to know it. A powerless Sun Queen would be of no use to anyone. But if they returned her castings to her, that would be the real danger. Her mother’s power in her blood, her castings around her hands once more, and the Emperor’s mind directing her exhausted one. His control supplanting hers. His will consuming her own. Encouraging her to try again. Insisting she try again, and again, until eventually some exhausted spark of power would alight, and it would all be over. He would have her—a Sun Queen puppet to play with as he liked.