hard, but there was a pity in his eyes that unnerved her.
“Fighting with me until dawn would be a mistake,” he told her. His voice cracked, neither boy nor man. “You need rest, and if you go back to the palace without sleep, you may make another mistake and displease the Emperor.”
Jessamyn stared at him, speechless.
“I saw what happened in the yard yesterday,” Remy said, looking away. “I snuck into one of the attics and watched you fight Nevia. I saw it when he came for you. He was too distracted to realize I was there, I think. I saw the others fall. I saw him attack you.”
Remy’s mouth twisted; he was biting the inside of his lip, a nervous habit Jessamyn had broken him of their first week together. She should have struck him for it, but she was too shocked to move.
“And I heard what happened to Eliana,” he added, his eyes bright. “I heard it was your knife she almost used. Everyone’s talking about it.”
“Everyone,” Jessamyn said, quietly reeling.
“Here at the Lyceum. I notice things, when you’re not here. I sneak around and spy, as you’ve taught me.” Then he looked at her again with a ferocity that startled her. “I don’t think you should fight me tonight. I think you should rest. I think you’ll need to stay sharp.”
Jessamyn finally managed a soft laugh. “Such a devoted student you are. I’m touched by your concern. You, who hate me and would probably love to see me executed or exiled by the Council of Five. Thrown out into the tent cities for the refugees to devour.”
“It doesn’t matter whether I hate you,” Remy replied. “You need to stay alive and in the Emperor’s favor. And you being alive is good for me.”
The library’s shadows suddenly felt oppressive, as if they held the weight of many staring eyes. So he had overheard whispers. Her fellow trainees, no doubt, gossiping about her rumored failure. Jessamyn laughed, circling Remy so he would not see her face and how he had shaken her.
Then she whirled around and kicked him in the small of his back, sending him flying forward into the table.
“I need to stay sharp?” she snapped, swallowing the revolting fear curling at the back of her throat. “So do you, little virashta. And if you think you can weasel out of a fight tonight, you are gravely mistaken.”
Remy glared at her over his shoulder, wiped the blood from his lip.
Then he launched himself at her, and Jessamyn felt herself relax with her first savage blow to his head. They would fight until she decided it was time to rest.
They would fight until Remy remembered his place—and until she remembered hers.
22
Rielle
“There are scholars who believe the empirium to be a conscious force, kind and merciful, a gift from a benevolent God. Others believe it to be inherently indifferent to the life it has made. I posit that the empirium and God as some have conceived it are one and the same. It is neither unkind nor particularly benevolent. It simply is—an incomprehensible essence that I, for one, am glad I cannot knowingly touch.”
—The Unknowable Essence: An Examination of the Empirium by Humans Without Elemental Magic, a collection of essays compiled by Celdarian librarian Vaillana Morel for the First Guild of Scholars
Raindrops landed on Rielle’s cheeks, and she turned up her face to welcome them.
She spread her arms wide, because a terrible heat surrounded her, and in her blood raged an inferno. She was desperate for the cool splash of rain.
But the rain was hot, and when it hit her lips, there was a pungent thickness to it, a red tang. Something coiled tight in her chest, and when she opened her eyes, she saw that the drops wetting her face were not water but blood.
She was standing in a shallow pool of it on a cliff-side overlooking a rocky line of coves. Her memory slowly returning, she recalled that Obritsa had taken her to Meridian’s eastern shore in pursuit of the Meridian Obex and Saint Nerida’s trident. The wind from the ocean below gusted up into her blood-matted hair. Waves crashed and roared like beasts battling for meat, and the horizon flashed with lightning.
Many storms, Rielle learned, casting her power out across the flat plane of water and reading the words the empirium had etched upon it. A thousand storms rippled out from the Gate and carpeted skies across the world.
Rielle laughed, licking her lips, and braced her palms against