Lightbringer (Empirium #3) - Claire Legrand Page 0,111

into your head and tricked you. I understand.”

Rielle pushed him away and scrambled to her feet. Her eyes blurred with tears, and she hated that he would see them and think her in need of comfort. She pulled the tears into her palms, turned them to fire, and threw them to the ground, where they stuck and grew.

Tal watched the flames in wonder. The shield strapped to his back seemed pathetic beside them, a toy fit for a child.

“I was not tricked,” Rielle spat, clear-eyed. “I wanted to leave. I wanted him. He isn’t afraid of me. He adores what I can do, and he wants me to do more.”

He stared up at her from the rocks, stricken. “Of course he does! He wants to use you!”

“He wants us to work together, as one.”

“And what lies at the end of that work? Everything you love will be destroyed. Everything you know, gone.”

“If I decide to spare anyone, he will allow it.”

“Listen to yourself!”

“He loves me, Tal.”

“So do we.” He stood, his shield sparking as his anger rose. “We love you, Rielle, and will not ask of you any bloodshed.”

“What if I want bloodshed? Will you still love me then?”

He hesitated, and that was enough.

Rielle stepped back from him. “I see it on your face. What I am terrifies you. It revolts you.”

“No, love—”

“A shadowed life, hiding away in soft rooms, praying for calm, appearing only to water dying crops or cool a hot summer wind, is not a life I want. I would die in that life, no matter how much love you claim would surround me.”

There was something happening to Tal’s face, a shrinking. His muscles drew tight and thin, and his eyes shone with sadness.

“Rielle, that’s not what your life would be,” he said. “You would live under everyone’s protection. We would slowly reintroduce you to the people, bring petitioners to court to ask questions, voice their concerns.”

“And until it was safe for me to walk freely again, would I sit docile by Audric’s side, our child in my arms? A devoted wife and queen, silent with shame? Begging for pardon? Trying to persuade everyone who looked at me with disgust that it wasn’t an angel’s child in my arms? Would I have to present her to the magisters every month to prove no marks of black wings had formed on her back?”

“No—my God, no, that’s not what would happen. I swear to you, Rielle. It would take time, but—”

“Stop lying to me!”

Tal’s knees buckled. Rielle watched him fall, her body drawn tight with anger. She saw the places where he hurt—his skull, his chest, his stomach. Dark wounds from the grip of her power. His light was so pale, so ordinary. The empirium within him was a mere pallid sheen. She marveled that she had never noticed it before.

“You know there is nothing left for me there,” she whispered. “Perhaps there never was.”

“Your family is there,” Tal gasped, reaching for her. “Your friends, your teachers. Whatever Corien has made you believe, you are not a monster whose only power is destruction. You are loved, Rielle.”

“You lie!” She flung her arms at him, her palms rigid with anger. He tried to stand, and she shoved him back down. He pushed uselessly at the air and clawed at his throat. His eyes were bulging; his veins stood out like cracks.

“I would have died for you,” he gasped, twitching on the ground. A terrible black sound spilled from him, raw in its grief, and Rielle saw the flash of power in his eyes just before he let out a strained roar. He wrenched his arm behind him, fighting her grip so hard that he snapped bone, and then, his face white with pain, he seized his shield.

It blossomed, a wreath of flame. Rielle saw Garver huddling in the brush some yards away, the pale woman helping him sit. A small flame flickered in Garver’s hands—a crudely constructed torch. At his feet was a tattered bag of supplies.

Rielle faced the fire Tal threw at her, and for a single crystalline moment, her eyes were infinite and pitiless. Thousands of tiny bindings shivered before her, millions of spinning empirium stars, all waiting for her command. Inside her, a hundred doors swung open on their hinges.

It was easy to turn the fire back toward its shield. Tal let out a choked cry, swiftly silenced.

She ensured it was a fast burn.

Even monsters were not always without mercy.

• • •

Hours later, a whisper lifted Rielle