Lightbringer (Empirium #3) - Claire Legrand Page 0,153

so, embarrassed to have dozed off. They would promise each other to never confess it.

The camp was silent, the moon a thin smile. A goat bleated in its dark field.

Ludivine’s knees shook as she left the soldiers behind. There was no need to creep; the power that had shielded them across the water shielded her still. They would hear none of her footsteps, not even feel the air her body moved.

And yet she crept as if across a frozen lake. A sort of madness had taken her. Her thoughts screamed; she could not calm their wild spin.

At a bent oak, she paused. Her nape itched with sweat. For a moment, she stared at the dark countryside, the farmhouse on the hill to her right.

She could have gone then and been done with it.

But she could not resist one last look at him.

Audric slept beneath the oak, the Sun Guard in a tight circle around him and Sloane not far off, sleeping with her arms folded and a frown on her face.

Ludivine knelt beside Audric, held his face in her hands. She could hardly bear to look at him, at how soft and dear he was in sleep. The elegant straight line of his nose, the furrow of his serious brow. Even in repose, he looked a king.

She kissed him as he slept—his temples, his cheeks. Pressing her forehead to his, she breathed the air he exhaled, circled her thumbs against the turn of his jaw.

“I love you, my friend,” she whispered. “I have never not loved you.” She remembered the words he had given Rielle, how tender his face had been as he spoke them. “My light and my life,” she whispered, then pressed her mouth to his cheek.

Tears rolled down her face, her chest so tight she feared it would collapse in on itself. Rising, she did not look at him again. When she stumbled away from him, it felt like what she imagined death to be. In his sleep, he was innocent of her cowardice; when he woke, he would be battered with it.

She put her hand to her chest, willing her heart to stop aching. But she knew it would never. She knew this, and still she left him, trusting that he would be able to sneak through Âme de la Terre and into Baingarde without her there to protect him. He had the Sun Guard, she told herself. He had forty elementals and twenty-four skilled soldiers and a princess of Mazabat.

They do not need an angel, she told herself, and because they were asleep, because she had hidden herself so completely, she cried without fear as she fled. Her sobs gripped her chest like a glove of steel. She climbed a little ridge of rock, wiped her face with dirt-smeared hands.

At the top, she sat on a flat boulder cracked down the middle. It wobbled as she wept. She hugged herself and sent to Audric every memory she had of their years together. Every lazy afternoon stretched out on the rug by the open windows in his rooms, every warm night nestled in his bed. His arms around her, her arms around Rielle. His dark head tucked over her fair one, and Rielle’s face smashed into her neck, or his, happily nuzzling them as she drifted off to sleep.

When he woke, he would see the memories, and he would hate them. He would hate her for sending them, reminding him of what they had both lost, and he would hate her even more for leaving him. He would not understand it, and she would not leave him with an explanation, for the truth was too craven.

For years, she had dreamt of a future with them. They would age and have children. Rielle’s power would grow, and she would use the empirium to solidify the hold Ludivine kept on this body she had grown to think of as her own. Rielle would help her truly join with it at last, become human at last, or at least near enough—stripped of her long life, diminished by Rielle’s godly craft to something crude and fragile. And Ludivine would finally be able to rest, no longer fighting to remain intact inside a body but instead simply existing. A being no one would fear or revile. She would love and watch over Rielle and Audric and their family for the rest of her days, and grow old, as they would, and die, as they would, and never be required to live