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.
24
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.
25