She pushed herself upright, her body lighting up with pain, and croaked, “Do not harm that girl more than you already have. Obritsa had no choice but to obey me. If you hurt her again, I’ll kill you.”

“You assume I’ve done anything to her at all,” he said, unblinking.

She laughed, which made her raw throat burn. “You are an unconvincing innocent.”

Only then did Rielle notice the three nurses bustling about her, changing the bandages that wrapped around most of her body. Three humans—two women and a man. Had they chosen to serve the angels in exchange for the lives of their loved ones? Their nervous eyes flitted up to her face and then back to their work. Her skin stung where they had slathered it with salves; she was encased in long white strips of cloth.

And still Corien watched her, pale and still, but Rielle did not flinch from him. She had opened the Gate with her bare hands. She was radiant with pride; she was a force unmatched. And she knew, when he looked at her, that he sensed it too: a change between them. A ripple of new tension, the bend of a current changing its course.

The power she had demonstrated was beyond what either of them had expected.

Rielle shoved the nurses away. The sudden, sharp movement left her burns screaming. “Leave us. I can tend myself.”

Then she stumbled to her feet and tore the bandages from her skin one by one. At first, the pain was searing, as if she were tearing off strips of her blistered, blackened flesh. But she set her jaw and pushed through the agony to imagine herself whole and smooth, as she had once been. She sent the thoughts up and down her body. Waves of quick power, sculpting.

By the time she removed the last of her bandages, her skin had healed, and all her pain had vanished.

Unabashed before Corien and the gaping nurses, who had frozen at the door to watch her undo all their work, Rielle went to the enormous mirror that leaned against the wall in the room’s far corner. Fascinated, she examined her nakedness.

There was a golden sheen to her skin, and the ends of her hair and fingers sparked like a struck anvil. Her irises were twin circling storms of gold, only thin bands of green remaining. Her lips were pale, bitten, and chapped. Shadows stretched long and deep beneath her eyes, and there was a new hollowness to her face, as if something essential in her had been scooped away. She found she did not miss it, even as her head pounded and her bones ached with exhaustion.

Because there was a clarity to her mind that she had never before experienced, a singularity of purpose. She still knew that she had been born in Celdaria, that she had married a man named Audric and killed a teacher named Tal, but when she turned her thoughts that way, trying to recall the details of their faces, what they had felt for her, what she had felt for them, she could remember very little. Only vague swaths of color and sensation. Every memory that had once tormented her had faded into the shadows of her mind.

In their place seethed golden whispers, fervent and full of appetite, crowding out everything but the now. This frozen fortress, the angel watching her from his bed. Her fingers, still buzzing from the Gate. She would feel that violent ageless charge for the rest of her days, she knew. The cold pain in her teeth, the restless hum of the palms that had gripped the fabric of the Gate and pushed it open wide. These would forever be her companions.

Rielle smiled faintly, touched her face in wonder, then turned to the side and inspected the roundness of her swollen belly. The sight evoked a new fondness in her. She cupped her hands around it, felt the warm pulse of her growing child. This child who had survived the Gate. That she ever could have considered ending her life was inconceivable. No one else in the world would ever know what it felt like to be touched by the Gate’s power. That the child belonged in part to Audric was a fact that now left her indifferent.

The child was hers more than it was anything else, and bound her to no one, not even to Audric.

When Rielle turned back to Corien, she found him staring at her, rapt. She shot a silent glance at the nurses, and they scurried out of the room.

Rielle walked toward her wardrobe. She felt the gleam of her every step. “How many angels did I free?”

“Five hundred thousand,” Corien answered quietly.

She slipped on her black velvet dressing gown with the gold sash, the intricate embroidery of wings, flowers, thorns. “So few? You said there were millions in the Deep.”

“There are. The Gate has force to it still, even though you battered it soundly. The weaker of my kindred are finding it difficult to escape its pull.”

“Perhaps I can eradicate this force,” Rielle mused. “Create a safe passage through which the others can travel.”

Corien rose and drew her slowly toward the bed. “You can—of that I’m certain. You can do anything, my star, my fire.” He found the hollow of her throat and kissed it. “But first we must do something else.”

Faintly annoyed, Rielle considered denying him. Half her mind felt far away, imagining the Gate and how best to alter its fabric to allow the other angels passage. But Corien’s hands were warm and were doing delicious things to her skin. She smiled, sliding her fingers down his torso. This too was a pleasure she craved.

They would speak of the Gate later.

“Is this what you mean?” she murmured.

“It’s been too long, Rielle, since I’ve been able to touch you.”

She shivered at the rough quality of his voice, how close it was to unraveling. She pulled away from him and bid him kneel before her. He grasped her hips, pushed aside the folds of her dressing gown, and buried his face in her thighs with a moan.

“And then I shall begin our great work,” Rielle said, weaving her fingers into the glossy black of his hair.

“And then we shall begin our great work,” he agreed. Then he put his mouth on her, and Rielle knew nothing but the supple new strength stretching happily inside her, the luminous glow of her skin, the power beneath it rising to meet Corien’s lips.

• • •

There was a vast underground honeycomb of chambers and halls beneath Corien’s fortress. Weapons lockers, stores of grain and wine, the narrow dark rooms in which the servants slept. Dozens of passages led outward to the laboratories, the barracks that housed the adatrox, the pens where the ice-dragons of Borsvall were caged, dissected, poisoned.

At the heart of this grand labyrinth of stone, a ring had been carved into the floor—a great swirling circle of wings. Acres of pillars fanned out from the circle, each tall and thick as a battering ram.

Rielle stood inside the feathered circle. Corien had told her he had engraved it himself when the fortress was first built. No one had stood within it until now. Until her.

It was an altar meant for resurrection.

At Rielle’s feet lay a beautiful young man from a rural province of western Kirvaya. He had been stripped naked and trembled on the cold floor. His skin was pale and smooth, his limbs long and healthy. The torchlight flickering around the circle painted him gold. Chosen for his beauty and strength, plucked from his bed by an eager angelic mind, even laid out on the floor like a slab of meat he was exquisite. His name was Tamarkin.