Lightbringer (Empirium #3) - Claire Legrand Page 0,150

their own hands, unable to bear the agony of their failure. Whichever of these things happens, their joy will be short-lived.”

She felt Corien settle, watched the lines of tension melt from his shoulders. He pressed his thumb to her chapped bottom lip.

She smiled at him. “You see? They are nothing to us. Let them flee for their mountains like rabbits running scared. I would like to see them realize the futility of escape. I would like to watch that dawn on their faces. Wouldn’t you?”

Corien pressed his brow to hers and closed his eyes. His mind rose to meet hers gently, and when he next looked at her, he was calm.

Then a thought occurred to Rielle. “Did I kill him?” she asked, thinking of the angel she had smashed between her hands.

A pause. Corien’s fingers stroked her arm. “You did.”

“I hardly remember it,” she said, and yet the girl inside her, eyes glittering in her endless sea, could remember every speck of the angel, how it had felt to split him open with her power. Mere dust in her hands, easily swept away.

“I’m sorry,” she added, because she felt it was the thing to say.

“He meant very little to me. A child from a common family, neither strong nor clever.” Corien paused. “And anyway, you don’t mean it.”

He was right. The death of that angel had sent her to that place beneath the rushing stars, and she already longed to return to it.

But before she could do that, she would need to be stronger still, in both mind and body, so she could understand what she saw and be worthy of it.

More than that, she needed to look once more into the eyes of those who had feared her. She thought of them all, their names plucked easily from her distant memories: Audric, Ludivine, the Archon, Miren Ballastier, Queen Genoveve. Tal, dead at her hands.

She drew each of their faces to mind and felt a cold white rush of anger. They would be cursing her even now. They would still think of her as human, look at her as if she were one of them. They would perhaps still imagine themselves capable of gentling her.

Corien’s lips brushed her brow. She could sense how she baffled him, how carefully he moved around in her mind, as if stepping barefoot around broken glass.

“What is it you want, Rielle?”

“I want everyone to see the wonder of our great work and fall to their knees,” she said. “I want to walk the black sea and climb the lights to see what lies beyond them.”

She looked up, her vision painting Corien in shades of gold. He sucked in a breath, and gleefully she wondered what she looked like to him now that she had held a world in her palms. When they returned to the fortress, she would go to her mirror before she ate a single scrap of food.

“I want to look once more into the eyes of those who fear me and show them what I have become,” she said, her voice trembling as she thought of it. “I will show them they were right to fear me and that I will never again hide from the true reach of my power.”

Then Rielle looked past Corien to the dull gray sky and comforted herself by imagining it remade—vast and roaring and incandescent with stars.

30

Ludivine

“When the world was young, bright with fire and black with storms, the empirium touched the white sands of Patria’s northern shore, and drew up from the dust a creature of such beauty that for a moment all the beasts of the world held their breaths. Into this creature, the empirium breathed the gift of long life, and sent her soaring into the clouds on newborn wings of light and shadow that trailed to her ankles, and named her angel.”

—The Girl in the Moon and Other Tales, a collection of angelic folklore and mythology

In her boat, her cloak damp with seawater, Ludivine watched the Mazabatian warships out on the waves. Her stolen human eyes watered from the wind.

There were fifteen ships, their curved wooden hulls and empty decks polished to a gleam. A banner of cyan and emerald fluttered proudly from each mast, and the ships plunged across the sea at full sail—but they were unmanned, propelled forward by waterworkers and windsingers packed into the boats surrounding Ludivine’s.

Somewhere above them, silent and unseen in the thick night, Atheria kept watch, ready to dive down and extract Audric if necessary.

“You’re doing