Lightbringer (Empirium #3) - Claire Legrand Page 0,171

Not a man, but a symbol. Not Audric, but the Lightbringer. It isn’t fair, but neither is the crown, and only if you wear it do we have any hope of surviving what’s to come. Of that I am certain.”

She sighed, and silence followed. They watched Atheria playing among the distant pines, trilling happily as she chased bright jays from their nests.

“Maybe if I had been a mother to her,” Genoveve said, “if I had welcomed her into our family with graciousness and warmth, we would not be where we are now.”

Audric took a moment to breathe. He hadn’t been lying—he did not want to talk about Rielle. But his mother was beside him, and she would not always be.

“It’s not as simple as that,” he told her flatly. “Maybe if the Archon hadn’t forced her to endure the trials. Maybe if Lord Dervin hadn’t caught us kissing in the gardens. Maybe if I hadn’t pushed her away on our wedding night.”

He blinked back his tears. “Or maybe none of that mattered, and regardless of what we did, we would have ended up right where we are. Maybe Aryava’s prophecy means exactly what it says: there is a queen of light and a queen of darkness. And maybe Rielle was always the latter, and nothing we said to her could have changed that.”

Genoveve made a soft sound, considering. “Have you wondered where the other queen is? If Rielle truly is the Blood Queen, then—”

“She is with child.” It was the first time Audric had said it aloud. The words ripped something from him; in their absence, a hollow place opened inside him.

“My child,” he added quietly. “Our child. Ludivine told me before she left.”

Genoveve put her fingers to her mouth. A little choked sound shook her shoulders. A dove made its mournful cry high in the sorrow tree’s blooms.

“Ludivine told me the child is a girl,” he went on. “So maybe she is our Sun Queen, our unborn salvation.”

Genoveve pressed his knuckles to her lips and closed her eyes. A long moment passed before she released him and wiped her face.

“I wish Ludivine were here to help you,” she whispered.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth about her,” Audric said, though he didn’t feel sorry. He only felt tired. He imagined his bed, how enormous and lonely it was, how small he felt inside it.

“I understand why you didn’t. You needed her—both of you did—and if I had known the truth, I would have had her exiled, or at least tried to. I would have tried many different ways to be rid of her and failed, and then I would have been regarded with even more pity and disgust than I already am.”

His mother spoke with no hint of self-loathing, no bitterness. Now Audric was the one to watch her carefully—the thin straight line of her nose, the painful sharpness of her jaw, how she held herself with such stillness. Was it because she was afraid of breaking? Or because she had been broken so many times that the idea no longer frightened her?

“Mother,” he began. “That’s not how it is.”

Genoveve smiled at him. “I don’t need comfort. I only want you to sit with me. I want you to come to me when the weight of this becomes too heavy for even your shoulders. I cannot take it from you, but God help me, I wish I could.”

She cradled his face in her hands, touched his cheeks, pushed the curls back from his eyes.

“My brave boy,” she whispered, and then brought his head down to kiss his brow.

They sat in silence, hand in hand, and waited for nightfall. Audric watched Atheria spin slow shadows through the trees.

I fear no darkness, he prayed. I fear no night.

I ask the shadows to aid my fight.

35

Eliana

“Sometimes it’s strange to think of them together and in love, even after all the stories I’ve read—the Lightbringer and the Blood Queen. One kind, one cruel. One good, one evil. I wonder what their daughter would have been like, if she’d ever been born. I wonder which parent she’d take after.”

—Journal of Remy Ferracora, dated May 24, Year 1014 of the Third Age

The nightmares were shapeless and vast, but Eliana let them sweep her along on their savage current. She held herself carefully within a fraying net. If she fought too hard against her bindings, if she tried to turn against the nightmares and swim through them to shore, the net would break, and she