Lightbringer (Empirium #3) - Claire Legrand Page 0,177

to find you. The blade will have weakened him, though. That will buy us time.”

Eliana stared at Simon, hardly seeing him. It was too strange, standing in the near-dark beside him. As if the past months hadn’t happened and they were back where they had begun.

Come to me, little one. The Prophet sent her a feeling too muddled to decipher. Simon knows the way. I’ll explain everything once you’re here.

Simon shifted Remy on his shoulder and turned away from the steady gold burn of Eliana’s hands.

“Follow me,” he said, his voice flat, unreadable.

She wanted to seize him, burn his face with her castings until he writhed as she had, until he screamed her name as she had screamed his.

Only the Prophet’s gentle voice stayed her hands. I’m sorry it had to be this way. I took no enjoyment in it.

Eliana said nothing more to either of them. By the light of her castings, she followed Simon down the stairs. She couldn’t look away from the dark blond crown of his head, mussed and bloody from battle. She imagined grabbing it, then smashing his face against the stairs. Her head ached from Corien’s last attack, ready to split open, and she almost wished it would, for then she wouldn’t have to face what came next. She felt numb, as if she had entered another world, one in which she understood nothing. Her legs moved of their own volition, carrying her deeper into the endless darkness. Her throat ached with each frigid inhalation. The air had grown cold.

At last, the stairs ended. Beyond them spiraled a web of tunnels and chambers. Three people with the bustling efficiency of soldiers hurried by with weapons, packs of supplies, clean folded linens. Their eyes, when they found Eliana’s, were clear.

They stopped to watch her, and then four more hurried out of the shadows, breathless, their eyes shining. As she passed them, they sank to their knees and bowed their heads. They kissed their fingers and touched their closed eyes, murmuring prayers in her wake.

Beside the entrance to a chamber flickering with candlelight, Simon stopped. Still he wouldn’t look at her. He placed Remy on a bench outside the chamber, so tender and careful, even in his stark uniform emblazoned with wings, that Eliana nearly went for his throat with the knife Jessamyn had given her. Her imagination went crystalline with anger, showing her how the blade would sink into his chest and scrape bone. She thought of Jessamyn, how at the moment of her death, she had still believed Eliana intended to close Ostia and save the city, and felt the sharp rise of tears.

“You dare pretend kindness,” Eliana whispered.

A moment of silence. Then Simon turned to her, his eyes lowered. Her pulse drummed against her throat. Since that night on the shores of Festival, his face had been steel from brow to jaw. Now, every hard line had softened, haggard with weariness.

She wanted desperately to look away but could not. He seemed to shrink from her, as if she were too brilliant to be seen.

“It was the only way, Eliana,” he said, the first time he had uttered her name in months. His voice broke beneath the word, and his fingers flexed at his sides, as if he longed to reach for her. “That’s what she told me. It was the only way.” He drew a ragged breath, then at last lifted his gaze to meet her own.

She stepped back from him. That piercing blue, the full force of it like a strike to her chest. Once, it had held the heat of desire, the flint of anger.

Not once until now had she seen his eyes raw with grief.

A voice spoke from within the chamber. Gentle and familiar, though different than it had felt in her head. There was a clarity to it now, as if a veil had been lifted.

Eliana gratefully turned away from Simon, her knees liquid and her throat sour, and entered the chamber to her right.

In its heart, positioned between three flickering candles, a young woman sat in a polished chair. Pale and golden-haired, she wore a gown of rose and lilac that buttoned at her throat and mimicked the look of an armored breastplate. She held a sheathed sword in her lap, and her eyes were twin drops of ink. Colorless and ancient.

But Eliana was not afraid.

“You are the Prophet?” she whispered.

The woman smiled softly. “You may call me Ludivine. I knew your parents.”

She lifted the sword from her