idiot girl. You could have had everything you wanted, and instead you wriggle on the ground like a caught worm, soaked in your own piss!”
Eliana sucked down air like a child newly born, but it wasn’t enough. Her lungs were burning, her mind a shrieking white storm. Her castings began to warm; her power had tolerated this indignity for long enough. It swelled fast inside her, a boiling sea rushing for the shore.
She couldn’t clench her fingers; instead, she slammed her palms against the floor, willing her castings dark. A vision came: herself smashing her head on the tile until it split. Corien’s delight slithered inside her. He would allow her that after she had given him what he wanted. She could bash her head open to her heart’s content.
Soon, her mind would slip altogether. Her power would burst out and awaken Simon’s marque blood, and that would be the end. It would all have been for nothing.
The breath she drew rattled in her chest, an inward wail. “Simon!”
Then Corien flew back from Eliana, and his mind tore free of her. Something had come between them; some cold door of stone had shut on the reaching crawl of his fingers. He stumbled into a toppled statue, crashed inelegantly to the floor.
“It’s her,” he breathed. “She’s here.” And then laughter shook him, bubbling up until it became a cackle, shrill and beastly. Where Simon was, Eliana didn’t know. She reached feebly across the floor, hot red-black pain surging up to drown her.
Corien’s wild howl hurt her bleeding ears. “Show your face to me, you snake! Where are you? What have you done?”
And then, another voice, quiet and thin, only for Eliana to hear: Stay with us, little one. Just a little longer. Help is coming. Help is close.
The Prophet. The last two words Eliana’s mind formed before a gentle hand, a familiar tenderness, guided her into blissful oblivion.
33
Ludivine
“When alone in your bed at night, the dark all around you, horrors without and within, you may wonder: Is this all there is? War and death? Fear and despair? But this is the wrong question to ask. Instead, ask yourself: What will I do when he comes for me? At the moment of my death, when I look back upon my life, what will I see? Will I be proud of what I have done? Or ashamed of what I have not? Think carefully. I know shame you cannot imagine. I know guilt that crawls through the blood like disease.”
—The Word of the Prophet
In her private chamber at the heart of a vast underground labyrinth, Ludivine sat in her favorite chair: deep cushions of lavender velvet, polished cherrywood that gleamed red in the light. Three squat candles flickered on polished stone pedestals—one to her right, one to her left, one before her against the curving stone wall.
One for Rielle. One for Audric.
One for Eliana.
Her rooms were never without them.
An ornate sword rested in her lap, vibrating quietly. On its golden hilt, a tessellation of carved suns. On the dark leather of its tasseled sheath, an elaborate tapestry of tridents and daggers, spears and arrows, hammers and shields. Rays of sunlight and godsbeasts in flight—a chavaile, an ice-dragon, a firebird.
Ludivine shifted, making herself comfortable. Her stone halls were quiet, but they would not be for long. Once, they had been a wing of Vaera Bashta, collapsed and abandoned. Now, after decades of painstaking work, they had been rebuilt and scrubbed clean of everything except for her seven acolytes, their weapons and supplies, her vast collection of books.
The corridor outside her chamber whispered like wind through rushes as her acolytes prepared for the arrival of their guests. She made sure to keep seven with her always. She liked the number, and disguising any more minds than that would require her to divert too much attention from her efforts around the world.
Their excitement was orderly but obvious. They had prepared endlessly for this day, and Ludivine had seen to it that their minds were disciplined, but they were still human, still flimsy and volatile and bursting with contradictions. Their little flittering fears and hopes darted through her mind like tiny gold fish in a dark sea.
She saw herself through their eyes as they passed the door to her chamber. Pale and quiet, a young, sweet-faced woman sitting tall in her chair. Long golden hair twisted into a braided knot at her nape, a woolen gown of lilac and rose buttoned at her throat. The shoulders were