surprise—maybe Miren, maybe Evyline—and Rielle turned to see that every angel and beast on the terrace had disappeared. A faint glow lingered in the air where they had once stood. Ripples in the empirium, echoes of life suddenly and utterly erased.
Rielle knew what this meant, looked dully at her new reality as if reading scripted instructions. Corien had boasted countless times: I am infinite. At any given moment, his mind had been connected with thousands of others—adatrox, elemental children astride their monsters. Angelic captains, eager soldiers. Angels in Avitas; angels in the Deep. And then Ludivine, fighting him, had tangled her mind with his, their power locking together like warring blades, and now they were gone, they were gone—Rielle had killed them both at once, efficient, like an arrow through two hearts—and so every mind they had been inside at the moment of their deaths had also been destroyed. Not just dead—smashed into nothing, reduced to ashes so small they could not be seen or touched or tasted. Thousands of them, obliterated at the moment Corien was, leaving the angelic armies in ruins.
The thing rising inside Rielle erupted. An animal howl tore free of her throat. She was beyond weeping. This was a feeling for which there were no words. Her grief left her shaking, and her hands were claws on the stone, nails ragged against it. The air was sour with the things she had done.
Arms lifted her. Audric helped her sit against him, gently caught her hands, and held them against his throat. She felt the beat of his heart against her fingers, the soft vulnerable curves of his neck.
“I’m here,” he said, his wet cheek touching hers. “I’m here, I’ve got you, I’m here.” Tears shook in his voice, for he had loved Ludivine too. He had been there in the gardens, at the dinner table, in the warm bed at dawn.
Rielle clung to him, keening against his collar, and then a terrible thought occurred to her. She looked frantically past Audric at the terrace beyond. The bodiless angels who had fought for Eliana drifted above in eerie whispered conference. Alive, but uncertain. What would come next? What now?
But Rielle didn’t care about them, nor did she care about Miren, stumbling to her feet, or Sloane, turned away with her hand over her mouth, or Evyline, limping toward them.
“My queen?” Evyline managed, unsteadily, to kneel. Hope erased years from her face. “Are you with us? Is it you?”
Rielle did not answer her. She was looking past Evyline at Kamayin, who was sinking slowly to the ground. Eyes wide, she stared at two faint shapes moving toward each other—a boy and a girl, flickering like shadows thrown from candles.
A word lodged in Rielle’s throat. Eliana?
She reached for her, wondering where she would go, or if she would go nowhere. If the woman named Eliana would cease to be, now that she had done this thing she had traveled so far to do.
Rielle held her trembling breath.
Blew it out.
They were gone.
47
Audric
“On this day, Audric Courverie, the king of Celdaria, proclaims, in agreement with the Church, an alliance with the nation of wraiths, who are absolved of all responsibility for the actions of their kindred and with whom the people of Celdaria hope to forge a friendship of peace and communion.”
—A royal decree issued by Audric Courverie, king of Celdaria, dated May 21, Year 1000 of the Second Age
At dawn, Audric quietly opened his eyes, and before he was fully awake, he turned to find Rielle beside him.
She slept in a thin nightgown of white linen, curled on her side to allow her belly room. Turned away from him, her face was hidden. A fear gripped him, as it always did in these terrifying moments upon waking, that something had come for her in the night, some vengeful angel who had gotten past the wraiths’ defenses.
He held his breath until he saw her chest rise and fall. Relief surged through him, and he blinked until his vision cleared. For a moment, he traced the tangled lines of the dark hair spilling across her pillow. Then he moved toward her slowly, wrapped his arms around her. If she turned toward him, he would see the tired lines framing her mouth and carved into her brow.
He found her hands, clenched in hard fists at her chest. She was feverishly hot, but Garver Randell had pronounced her to be perfectly healthy. Audric wrapped his hands gently around hers as if cupping water he