Lightbringer (Empirium #3) - Claire Legrand Page 0,210

her tongue felt fuzzy with power.

Odo’s companions stood guard at the entrance while Odo himself led Eliana and Remy first into the basement, and then into another room below that, dark and damp. Odo went to a table in the corner, found a scrap of paper and a pen.

“I cannot go with you,” he muttered, sketching out a map. “There are many still trapped in this city, and what you must do is beyond any help I can give you.”

He gave her the map, then glanced at Katell’s sword. So close to the castle, the blade hummed with a light Eliana could not contain.

“You say you seek your mother,” Odo said. “When you find her, what will you do?”

Eliana looked steadily at him, feigning a calm she did not feel. “I think you know the answer to that question, Odo Laroche.”

After Remy translated, a faint, sad smile touched Odo’s face, and Eliana wondered how he knew Rielle, what he thought of her, if they had been friends before everything went so horribly wrong.

“Yes,” he said quietly, “I know the answer.”

Then he unlocked a plain wooden door and a second one beyond it. He knelt at a hatch set in the stone floor. Somewhere above, a detonation. The house’s foundations shook, and dust rained down from the ceiling.

Odo stood. Katell’s sword lit his stern, sad face. “Hurry, Your Highness. The city has fallen. Soon, its people will too.”

Remy climbed down the hatch, and Eliana followed him. There was a metal ladder, then a slight drop to a flat earthen floor. Her castings illuminated a narrow dark passageway. She heard the locks click shut above them, looked once at Remy. He nodded, his face grim in the shadows, and they ran.

44

Audric

“There are mornings when I wake and think I’ll be able to reach out and feel her there beside me. I convince myself that I won’t have to fight her. That she will see me and want to come home. Then I turn to find my empty bed and remember the truth of what I must do. ‘I don’t know how to both love you and be the person who sends you to war,’ I once told her. If only I had known then what would come for us. If only we had had more time.”

—Journal of Audric Courverie, king of Celdaria, dated April 30, Year 1000 of the Second Age

Inside the castle, all was still. Soldiers and servants lay strewn across the floor of the entrance hall, stiff where they had fallen, their faces drained of color and their mouths frozen in screams.

Audric moved past them in silence, trying not to think of where his mother might be. When he had left her, she had been overseeing the citywide evacuation, ushering people south through the once-secret mountain tunnels.

But that was hours ago. Any one of the bodies lying dead at their feet could have been hers. Or perhaps she was somewhere in the city, her unseeing eyes turned up to the stars.

Audric did not look at any human shape he passed, too frightened of seeing an auburn fall of hair.

“What is this?” Kamayin whispered. She stood near one of the hall’s stone pillars. Rivulets of gold spilled down it, pulsing with light. They were everywhere, in the walls and across the ceiling. Floating down the stairs from the second-floor mezzanine, they drifted like delicate branches suspended in water.

Kamayin, eyes wide, reached for the nearest one. Her castings sparked brighter as she approached it.

Miren hurried over, caught her wrist. “It’s Rielle. She’s doing this. Don’t touch it, not any of them.”

She looked back over her shoulder, and Audric saw on her face the same longing he felt. His power ached inside him—he could scarcely breathe around it—and Illumenor hummed in his hand, as if it truly belonged not to him but to the light streaming golden through the palace.

Audric.

He did not answer Rielle’s voice and said nothing to the others. He stepped carefully up the grand staircase, avoiding the slender lines of gold that shifted and hissed, blind snakes seeking heat. Sloane followed behind him, then Kamayin, Miren, Evyline, Fara, Maylis. Seven frightened shadows creeping slowly through a castle seething with light.

As they ascended, the drifting veins of light grew brighter. Audric’s heart pounded; the fear was thick inside him. Every step forward sent doubt plummeting through his body.

What would they find at the top? In his mind’s eye, he saw Rielle as she had been on their wedding night. Before the