She’s dead! Oh, God! Help us! Someone help us!
But then Armand Dardenne had come to his senses. He had stared at Rielle over the red, ruined wreck of his wife’s body, watched her frantic sobs with an expression of abject contempt until everything Rielle had known about her father had disappeared. His face had closed to her, never to be opened again. He had lowered Marise Dardenne’s body to the ground, picked up his shivering daughter, and hurried her through the tunnels below the castle to the Pyre and Tal’s bedroom.
Tal, sleep-rumpled and only nineteen years old, had opened his door, taken one look at Rielle’s face, and held out his arms to her.
Help us, her father had said, his voice carved hollow. Help her. Don’t let them take her from me.
“Rielle!”
Tal’s distant shout shook her. She took two halting steps forward, gazing up at the burning house.
“I can’t,” she whispered, a sharp, ill heat flaring throughout her body. “No, no, no.”
Then, with a groan, the front face of the house began to collapse.
A choked scream rang out—her own name, quickly silenced.
Rielle ran around the house, searching through the smoke for the back door. It was there, just as she remembered it. She kicked the blackened wood; it gave way easily. She raced over the threshold into a world of black smoke and leaping orange flames. How strange it was to see the rooms just as they should have been—but empty now. No furniture, no art on the walls. Only flames and a noxious smell that coated her every breath with darkness.
She hid her face. “Tal? Where are you?”
“Here!” His voice was faint. “In the parlor!”
She stumbled down the main hallway and to the door of her mother’s parlor. The wall was buckling; overhead, the rafters creaked and groaned.
She shoved her weight against the door. It didn’t budge. She slammed into it again and again, her throat tightening, her vision a luster of tears.
Outside, three monstrous crashes hit the ground. The house rattled, windows shattering. More fire from the acolytes?
She cried out in frustration, then heard a loud snap and scrambled out of the way right before the ceiling above her collapsed.
The door, wedged loose, fell out of its frame.
“Tal?” She crawled to the door, the floor blazing hot under her palms. Dragged a hand across her face to clear the grit from her eyes, looked inside the parlor past billowing waves of heat.
Tal.
He was there, wrists and ankles bound, trapped in the far corner by a shattered window. Glass sparkled across the floor. Rafters and chunks of plaster from the collapsed ceiling separated them, as did a roaring ribbon of fire.
“Tal!” She clung to the doorframe. “Answer me! Come on, get up! We have to leave!”
“I can’t move,” he called out to her. His voice was ravaged, wheezing. “The ceiling fell on my legs!”
She sagged to the floor.
“Douse the flames, Rielle!” He coughed violently. “Just as we practiced!”
As if it were that simple. Just a prayer, just a lesson.
The sound of the flames roaring between them was turning her stomach inside out. She couldn’t think past them to remember her prayers, much less find the empirium.
Rielle, save her!
Rielle, please! Do it, now! Oh, God…
She fell to her hands and knees, stomach heaving.
Papa, I’m sorry! I can’t stop it! Mama! Mama, run!
“I can’t,” she gasped. “I can’t stop it.”
“You can do this, Rielle,” Tal was calling to her. “Listen to my voice! I trust you!”
From elsewhere in the house came a massive groan. The floor shook. Rielle looked back, down the smoke-filled hallway to see the second floor collapse. Her bedroom, her father’s study, her mother’s music room. New flames roared up the walls. A great gaping hole in the roof revealed a smoke-stained sky.
“Rielle, listen—” Tal’s voice disappeared into a fit of coughing.
“Tal?”
He didn’t respond.
“Tal!” She rose on shaking legs, searched through the inferno for a path through, and found one—small and shrinking.
She ran for it, diving through the flames and slamming to the floor on the other side. A few feet away, Tal lay under a ceiling beam, his face sallow and slick with sweat.
She crawled to him, head ringing from her wild leap. The fire’s heat pressed down on her back like a hand determined to bury her.
“Tal, I’m here. Tal?” She helped him sit, slapped his cheeks until his bloodshot eyes fluttered open.
He smiled up at her. “There you are.” His hand fumbled for hers. “I knew you’d find me.”
“We’re trapped, I can’t… I can’t carry you. Please get up.”
He gasped for air, shaking his head. “You can put the fire out.”
“Tal, I…” Her tears dropped onto his neck. Papa, I can’t make it stop! “If I try, I’ll just make it worse. You know I will.”
“What I know is that you were only a child. And that now…” He touched her cheek. “Now, you are a queen.”
His eyes began to flutter shut.
“Tal? No! Tal!” She looked helplessly at the encroaching flames, tried reaching for the empirium with a weak thrust of her hand. “Move! Leave us alone, please!”
Another rafter collapsed, not five feet from them. Rielle ducked her head over Tal’s body, breathless.
Then she heard Tal’s voice, faint at her ear: “Burn steady and burn true. Burn clean and burn bright.”
The Fire Rite. She closed her eyes.
“Burn steady and burn true,” she repeated, her voice cracking. “Burn clean…”
His hand tightened around hers. “…and burn bright. Again, Rielle.”
“Burn steady and burn true.”
“Think,” he whispered, “of the ones you love.”
“Burn clean and burn bright.”
The ones I love.
Ludivine. Tal.
Audric.
Fresh warmth touched her fingers, her toes.
From overhead came Atheria’s piercing cry—part horse, part hawk. A distracted part of Rielle’s mind recalled the discarded firebird cloak. Her vision flooded with a thousand shades of summer.
“Burn steady,” she whispered.
“And burn true,” Tal finished, his voice a mere thread.
“Burn clean.” She opened her eyes to a room of soft gold. Gold fire, gold ashes, golden shimmering Tal. “And burn bright.”
She blinked. She inhaled.
The gold shifted, gathering in twisting knots that hovered, waiting.
Rielle breathed out. Hot points of energy surged away from her fingertips, like needles stabbing their way out of her skin. The gold flooding the room careened away in spinning whorls of light.
All at once, the heat crowding her vanished.
She blinked, gulped down a breath as if surfacing from water.
The world returned to her, dull and ordinary.
Except for the thousands of feathers floating down from the rafters, gusting along the walls, coating the ruined floor. Everywhere that flames had been, now there danced among the diminishing curls of smoke long needlepoint feathers of tangerine and gold, violet and vermilion. Firebird colors.
“Rielle…” Tal swept his arm across the floor. Feathers flew up at his touch before drifting back down to rest lightly among the piles of simmering embers.
He looked up at her, wonder turning his face soft. “How did you do this?”
She retrieved a feather of a particularly brilliant red and watched with a thrill of delight as the fine downy barbs flickered at her touch.
“I don’t know,” she whispered, caught between exhaustion and the most perfect joy she had ever felt. “I think—”
But the words died on her lips. For at that moment, a familiar touch scraped down her spine.
Corien? She looked through the house, her grip tightening on Tal. Are you there?
Silence was his answer. But she was not fooled. She sensed his nearness like a familiar shape in the dark.
Distant horns blasted—staccato, frantic. Warnings. With the flames gone, Rielle could hear the crowd’s terrified screams.
Oh, God.
“What is it?” Tal searched her face. “Rielle, say something.”
And thus, Corien murmured, we begin.
Rielle touched her mouth, chasing the sensation of lips brushing against her own.
With a small smile, she whispered, “He’s here.”
46