sweep of pale sand. Dark brown hair in a thick, messy braid, uncertain power trembling at her fingertips, her hands adorned with thin gold chains. My name is Eliana.
Rielle had blacked out each scribbled drawing until the girl vanished from her mind and ink stained her fingers. The nib of her pen scored harsh grooves into Corien’s polished desk. Once she had managed to complete a design, she watched the tailors work frantically through the night to finish the gown, gratified to see the sweat painting their brows.
Would her own daughter be the queen to rise up against her? Her palms tingled against her belly.
Corien put his cool hand over hers, scattering her thoughts.
“Look at them,” he whispered, sweeping his arm through the air to encompass the staggering ocean of their troops. There were the orderly lines of angelic soldiers. The generals wore black velvet cloaks hemmed in gold. There were the beasts Corien and his physicians had engineered under the northern mountains—crawlers, cruciata imitations, deformed and bulging. Their flapping, fleshy wings, armor embedded in their feathered, scaly hides. Controlled by angelic minds, the blank-eyed elemental children sat astride the beasts, their wrists and necks bound with castings.
Rielle examined the beasts’ inner workings, blazing gold and complex. There was the muscled might of the Borsvallic ice-dragons; there were the scars left behind by the knives of Corien’s mad underground surgeons. The power of the elemental children encircled the crawlers and their forged armor like nets, ready to tug and whip, summon and blast.
“You’ve done remarkably well,” Rielle said serenely. “But I can see where improvements could be made.”
Corien lifted her hand to his lips. “In due time, my love. Worlds, remember? We have entire worlds to make our own after this.”
“To unmake and remake as we see fit,” she whispered. An insatiable appetite stirred in the marrow of her bones.
“Rielle the Kingsbane.” Corien turned her face to his. “Rielle the Unmaker.”
“I held a world in my hands,” she whispered, closing her eyes as his mouth brushed against her jaw. Her thoughts sang as they returned to that endless glittering sea, the girl in the white gown pulling her into the stars. “I want to do it again. Tell me we will. Tell me it won’t be long.”
“Soon, you will have everything you desire,” he said, his breath hot on her mouth, “and so will I. You will pluck worlds from the stars and set them spinning to please you. You will find God and demand something better than what we have been given.”
Then he bent to kiss her. The soft warmth of his lips, his tongue opening her mouth. Rielle’s blood leapt savagely at his touch. She tightened her arms around his neck, heat pouring down her thighs. Their army parted around them and thundered past. Their generals shouted out a call in Azradil; the infantry responded in kind, a chorus of war cries in the most lilting, most achingly lovely of the angelic tongues.
Rielle sent Corien a blazing image. There was a copse of oaks on a nearby hill. He would lie in the grass beneath her, hold her hips as she moved. She would have him there in the shadows, and when she rose to face Âme de la Terre, it would be with the memory of his passionate cries ringing in her ears.
He choked out her name against her throat, stumbled after her through the marching troops and into the trees, and when they had finished, he lay trembling in the dirt. With shining eyes, he watched her rise.
She hardly noticed him, lightly kicking him away when he reached for her. Already, she was forgetting how it had felt to have his hands upon her. She stood beneath the trees that had sheltered their lovemaking, her skin ablaze with heat. Her vision pulsed with drumbeats of gold. These days, she knew few other colors. Gold gilded her nightmares, swam sparkling on her tongue. Through an amber sheen, she watched the flood of their army rush swiftly toward the city she had once thought to be her home.
Little fires bloomed in the night—a path of flames snaking through the mountains. A thin wail of horns sounded, quickly drowned out by the chanting army.
Rielle smiled, eyes closed, and tilted her face to the sky. As if it would help them to have a warning. As if watchtowers and horns could be anything but an embarrassment.
Corien joined her, silent and dark at her elbow. She could smell him on her