Lightbringer (Empirium #3) - Claire Legrand Page 0,22

him lead her, and in the moments when her memories had threatened to resurface, her power flaring in protest, he had increased his hold on her and pulled her back into a numb, padded cage. He had coaxed her to sleep and rewarded her with fevered dreams.

Swallowing a sob, trembling with the effort of staying quiet, Rielle silently stood and crept away from him. The stone floor was squalid; her feet carved a ragged path through long centuries of dust and decay.

That he would keep so much from her, that he would deceive her so fully, that she had seen Tal not long ago, that he had been mere yards from her—and yet Corien had prevented them from speaking, had taken the choice from her, had not even allowed her to remember the moment, or any moment he did not want her to…

On her feet, she edged backward out of the room, not daring to blink, pushing hard against her fury and disappointment and the grief of her recovered memories until she felt dizzy. She saw it all unfurl unimpeded before her: her wedding, and the vision that revealed she had killed King Bastien; Audric shouting at her in the gardens; fleeing the city; following Corien’s voice into the forest outside Âme de la Terre until, at last, she had collapsed into his arms. And then…

And then, nothing. A gray ocean. Occasional flashes of color. A dreamscape of Corien’s making. A stolen carriage. Tearing her wedding gown from her body as she wept, then staggering through a black Celdarian wood in her shift and boots until Corien found her, forced her into a gown still warm from its previous wearer, kissed her until her crying ceased and she found herself drifting on a quiet gray sea once more.

And Tal—oh, he had called for her. In those trees, on that storming night near a firelit inn, he had fallen to the ground and reached for her. He had been following her, he must have been—searching for her, hoping to bring her home.

Rielle reached the door, her breath tight and thin, her eyes burning as she stared at Corien and willed him to remain still. It was unusual that he would be so distracted by his work that he wouldn’t notice her awakening.

But whatever the reason for it, she had to take the chance to run. I see a divine creature aching to be set free, he had told her, while tightening the chains that bound her to him.

Freedom. A grand joke. She had been a dog on a leash; she saw that now with a scorching immediacy that felt like she had swallowed lightning.

Her thoughts roaring with panic, she glanced at the unconscious lumps in the far corner of the room that were Artem and Obritsa, kept frozen in a deep sleep crafted, of course, by Corien. He was arranging all of this, and she could trust none of it, and now where was she? Nowhere. Far from home, in a ruined land that had once belonged to angels.

Once Rielle had stepped backward over the threshold and into the vast corridor outside—the ancient, crumbled ceiling open to the house’s upper floors and then to the star-salted sky above—she ran.

• • •

She did not make it far.

She raced through a series of courtyards tucked between the grand, pillared houses in the nearby neighborhood, each abandoned garden overgrown with scrubby trees and twisted dry brambles. Ducking underneath a crumbled stone arch flanked by two figures—one without a head, the other with misshapen lumps on its back that must once have been wings—Rielle looked back over her shoulder.

The moon was half-full, and the air was cold; her breath came in rapid puffs. Black ruins touched with silver loomed over her, scorched with ash that did not fade. Each was marked by a blow of an ancient elemental fist, scars neither time nor weather could scrub away. She could smell the magic even now, centuries later. Smoke on the wind. Mud ripe with rain. The tang of bloodstained metal.

She turned again—and ran straight into Corien.

He grabbed her arms, but before he could speak, before he could wrap her once again in his thoughts and numb her to his liking, she exploded.

Her fury summoned the empirium, and it joyfully obeyed.

Fettered for too long, her power surged up through her body and erupted from her palms. She whipped him with it. He flew across the garden, hit a pillar; his head cracked against the stone. He slid