had been stronger. If I had managed to fight past Corien’s hold on Rielle and get her away from him. If I had persuaded her away from his side and back to ours before she opened the Gate.
As they plunged across the sea, Ludivine remembered that day in Quelbani when the sky had dimmed and the world had grown still. She had reached for Rielle and seen dim echoes of what she had done—the Gate wrenched open, hundreds of thousands of angels freed. Ludivine felt the memory echo in Audric’s mind too, darkening his thoughts. She wished she could hold his hand.
But touching him would only make things harder.
Ludivine pressed her palms together and ran her thoughts once more over the shell of her shield. The more diligently she worked, the less room remained inside her for guilt. Guilt would fade and end. Someday, she would not feel it at all.
Then came a whistling, crackling sound. A hot spear of elemental power shot through the air, and one of the Mazabatian warships burst into flame.
On the horizon, dozens of lights flared bright. Tiny fires, raging and ready.
Audric pointed, running his fingers along the shoreline.
“They’re here,” he muttered. “And they have firebrands.”
Ludivine felt how unsettled Audric was to see the ships his own father had commissioned sailing toward him through the night in the hands of the enemy. Their sails were ghosts, their new House Sauvillier banners gray and black in the moonlight.
“Rowers, hard to starboard!” Audric’s voice rang out over the water.
The rowers obeyed. The six boats veered right, a tight formation within Ludivine’s shield. Kamayin called out to her elementals in a northern Mazabatian dialect.
“From sky to sky!” she cried. “From sea to sea! Steady do I stand! Never do I flee!”
The windsingers took up the call, chanting the Wind Rite as they worked. And then the waterworkers began, repeating Kamayin’s second prayer:
“O seas and rivers! O rain and snow!” Their voices formed a steady chain of sound atop the waves. “Drown us the cries of our enemies!”
They kept the empty Mazabatian armada sailing north without pause, even as each vessel caught fire and burned. The warships met the Celdarian fleet with no arrows fired, no catapults launched.
“Turn, you idiots,” Audric whispered, for the Celdarian ships were slow to veer away from the ships bearing down on them.
Ludivine, her back to the flames, could nevertheless sense how confounded the captains were. Fifteen prized Mazabatian warships sailing at full speed to their destruction?
She allowed herself a small smile as their six little boats circled wide around the chaos toward the Celdarian shore. Through Audric’s eyes, she saw the fiery Mazabatian ships encircle the bewildered Celdarian fleet, and once they were in place, Audric shouted a single command.
At once, the elementals lowered their arms. Heads drooped onto shoulders. Some leaned out over the water and heaved.
But there was still the shore to reach, and after a few moments’ rest, Kamayin called out encouragement, and their tired cloaked fleet resumed course for Celdaria.
Ludivine stared ahead at the dark coastline. Her heart was a wild thing, its rhythm like the clop of a horse running scared.
Audric knelt beside her. “Only a little while longer, Lu,” he said. His thoughts were tired; she could sense how the mind-speak had wearied him. “Then we can rest, catch our breath. You have done so well.”
She set her jaw against the warmth of his voice. How she had craved its return these long weeks. And now, how she fought to push it from her mind.
Yes, they would reach the shore soon. They would rest.
And then, she would run.
• • •
The waterworkers quietly sank the boats in a deep cove off the Celdarian coast some hundred miles from Luxitaine, where there was little but tiny farms and fields of sleepy goats. They made a crude camp in a scrubby woodland near an orchard of olive trees. The air was warm, but in Âme de la Terre, high in the mountains, it would be crisp with the spring snows.
Ludivine waited until most of their party was asleep. Only two people remained awake: a pale, burly woman and a brown-skinned reed of a man, neither of them an elemental. Soldiers, cursing quietly to each other about their aching arms, their hands blistered from rowing. But Ludivine could sense the bloom of their pride, how glad they were to have seen Audric safely to shore.
Her throat ached as she sent them to sleep. They would wake in a half hour or