There it was again—that same exhausted tone, like a sad-eyed hound resigned to its next beating.
To keep from snapping at him, Eliana fiddled with the battered gold pendant under her cloak. She wore it on a chain around her neck every day and knew the scratched, worn lines of it by heart: The arch of the horse’s neck. The intricate details of its wings. The figure riding astride it, sword raised, face blackened from time: Audric the Lightbringer. One of the dead Old World kings her brother obsessed over for reasons Eliana couldn’t fathom. Her parents told her they had found the trinket on the street when Eliana was still a baby and given it to her to calm her crying one sleepless night. She had worn it for as long as she could remember, though not out of love for the Lightbringer. She cared nothing for dead kings.
No, she wore it because, some days, she felt like the familiar weight of the necklace at her throat was the only thing that kept her from flying apart.
“I’ll stay,” she told Harkan lightly. Too lightly? Probably. “I’ve got the time.”
He didn’t even scold her. The executioner lifted his sword. At the last moment, the child raised his hand in a salute—a fist at his heart and then held up in the air. The sign of allegiance to the rebellion, to Red Crown. His arm shook, but he stared at the sun with unblinking eyes.
He began reciting the Sun Queen’s prayer: “May the Queen’s light guide me—”
The sword fell.
Eliana’s tears surprised her. She blinked them away before they could fall. Harkan covered his mouth with one hand.
“God help us,” he whispered. “El, what are we doing?”
She grasped his hand, made him face her.
“Surviving,” she told him. “And that’s nothing to be ashamed of.” She swallowed—and swallowed again. Her jaw ached. Pretending boredom was hard work, but so was war. And if she fell to pieces, Harkan would crumble even faster.
The Lord of Orline raised one hand.
The citizens packed into the plaza below chanted the words that constantly circled through Eliana’s mind like carrion birds:
“Glory to the Empire. Glory to the Empire. Glory to the Empire.”
3
Rielle
“After the breaking of the Sunderlands, the Seven returned to the mainland, and still they could not rest. Their people had been at war for decades, and they craved a safe place to call home. So the saints began in Katell’s homeland and used their power to carve out of the alpine mountains a paradise. Sheltered by high peaks, verdant with forests and farmlands, this haven was named me de la Terre and became the capital of Celdaria. They built the queen’s city in the foothills of the highest mountain and surrounded it with a crystal lake that seemed carved out of the clearest sky.”
—A Concise History of the Second Age, Volume I: The Aftermath of the Angelic Wars by Daniel Riveret and Jeannette d’Archambeau of the First Guild of Scholars
The starting line was chaos.
Some riders competed in the name of the Church temples. Those from the Pyre, Tal’s temple, wore scarlet and gold. Black and deep blue for the House of Night, the temple of shadowcasters and Tal’s sister, Sloane. Umber and light green for the Holdfast, the earthshaker temple.
The great Celdarian houses had also sent representatives. Rielle passed riders in lilac and sage for House Riveret, russet and steel for House Sauvillier. Riders had even traveled from the distant kingdoms of Ventera and Astavar, which lay across the Great Ocean.
Many riders, like Rielle, had been hired by merchants eager for the winning purse—though none of them were as wealthy as her sponsor, Odo Laroche.
And none of the other riders had had the privilege of training with the king’s finest horsemasters since they were old enough to sit in a saddle.
Grinning, Rielle guided her mare beneath the maze of stilted spectator boxes. Her ears rang from the noise—gamblers shouting their bets, children racing through the crowd and shrieking with delight. Smoke from market vendors selling roasted pork sandwiches and blackened fowl skewers stung her eyes.
She finally reached the tent set aside for Odo’s riders. The gown she wore was a favorite—forest green to match her eyes, iridescent vines sewn at the hem, a swooping neckline that showed off her collarbones—but the midday sun made her itch to rip it off. Leaving her horse with the paid swords guarding the door, she slipped inside to change.
And froze.
Audric was already there, clad in only his riding trousers and boots. His fine emerald tunic and embroidered jacket hung neatly from the back of a chair. In his hands, he held a plain linen riding shirt.
He grinned at her. “Took you long enough,” he said and threw her a shirt of her own.
She caught it, barely. “The crowds are larger than I had anticipated,” she said, though her throat was suddenly dry, and it astonished her that she could manage a word.
It had been a long time since she had seen her kingdom’s prince so unclothed.
Growing up together, it would have meant nothing. She had spent hours playing with him and Ludivine in the gardens behind the castle. They had swum together in the lake surrounding the city, worshipped together at the Baths.
But that had been before.
Before Audric and Ludivine’s betrothal, an arrangement that bound the houses of Courverie and Sauvillier even closer together. Before Audric had transformed from her shy, gangly, awkward friend into Prince Audric the Lightbringer, the most powerful sunspinner in centuries.
Before Rielle had realized she loved Audric. And that he would never be hers.
She drank in the sight of him—the lean muscles of his arms, his broad chest, his narrow waist. He was not as dark as his father, not as pale as his mother, the queen. Dark-brown curls, damp from the heat, loosely framed his face. Dappled sunlight fell through the tent’s netting and painted his skin radiant.
When he looked up at her, she flushed at the warmth of his gaze. “Lu’s all right?” he asked.
“And enjoying the attention, I’m sure. And your mother?”
“I told her I’d take care of Lu, and that she should relax and enjoy the race.” He shook his head ruefully. “She thinks I’m a dutiful son—”
“And instead you’re sneaking off to risk life and limb.” Rielle threw him a sly smile. “Your lie was a kindness. She’d be frantic if she knew where you really were.”
Audric laughed. “Mother could use a fright now and then. Otherwise she gets bored, and when she gets bored, she starts to meddle, and when she meddles, she starts pestering me and Lu.”
About when we will be wed. The unsaid words lingered, and Rielle could no longer look at him.
She stepped behind the dressing screen Odo had provided, undid her gown, stepped out of it. Clothed in only her shift, she reached for the trousers Audric tossed over to her.
“If I didn’t know better,” she said, keeping her voice light, “I’d say you’re sounding rather rebellious. And here I thought you weren’t one for breaking rules.”
He laughed again. “You bring it out of me.”
This was, she began to realize, a terrible idea. She should have asked Odo for a separate tent. Undressing five feet away from Audric was the sort of delicious madness for which she could never have prepared herself.
God help her, she could hear the fabric of his riding tunic sliding against his torso. She could almost feel it, as if he were there beside her, drawing her gown up over her head, freeing her of the last remaining barrier between them.
As she tried to wriggle into her own black tunic, cursing herself and her unhelpfully vivid imagination, she got her arm stuck through the heavy embroidered collar.
“Rielle?” came Audric’s voice. “Hurry, they’ve started announcing the racers.”