Lightbringer (Empirium #3) - Claire Legrand Page 0,230

all ached to touch her mind, to understand her strangeness, but I ordered the others to shield her and your friends, and while they dove to protect them, it was I alone who read her thoughts. My king…”

She knelt, overcome. Shadows pooled around her, as if she knelt in shallow dark water.

“I saw everything she had seen,” she whispered. “I saw the world in which she had lived. I saw the Undying Empire and all it had done. I saw the people she loved and those who had hurt her. I saw myself through her eyes. In that time yet to come, in which your daughter had lived and fought, I was her friend. I loved her, and she loved me.”

Slowly, Audric sank to sit beside her. The soft night winds kissed his hands. Overhead, Atheria dove for her supper, chirping gaily.

“I felt everything in that moment my mind touched hers,” Zahra said thickly. “I saw all that she had endured and what would happen to the world if she failed. I died for her in that future world. I died in her arms, and she wept over the place where I had been. My lord king, this is what I saw. This is why I fought for her, and for you, her father, and why I always will. I died for her, and I would again.”

Zahra reached for his hands. Her dark fingers passed through his like smoke. The cold, supple press of her nearness made him shiver. Tenderly, she touched his cheek. Presumptuous, and yet he sensed nothing would ever be typical between them, not for as long as he lived.

“May I tell you the rest?” she asked. “May I tell you the story of your daughter?”

Tears in his eyes, completely undone, Audric nodded, and then he listened through the night as Zahra spoke of a future that would never be.

• • •

It was as if she had heard him, his daughter.

The next day, Sloane came bursting into his study, her eyes shining. Her excitement summoned the room’s shadows. They rose trembling from their corners and stretched across the bright windows.

He knew it before Sloane drew breath to speak. A light broke open inside him, warming all the tired bones of his body. A single word rose, blooming through his thoughts:

Eliana. Eliana. Eliana.

For of course, that would be her name.

“I’ve sent for Garver,” Sloane said. She was sparkling at the door, her wide smile a welcome sight. The days had been hard, but this joy was easy and desperately needed. “Your mother is with her, and the nurses. The pain hasn’t come for her yet, but she insists it will happen very soon. She’s asking for you. She’s nervous, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her this happy.”

She waited for him to stand, but he couldn’t. His knees would surely give out if he tried.

Sloane was merciful. “Come upstairs,” she said gently, helping him rise from his chair. “It’s time.”

48

Rielle

“To the skies you were born, to the skies you return

Back to the high places, the far moon, the cold burn

But why did the great song call you so soon, child of the stars?

And why oh why did you listen?”

—Traditional angelic lament

It was dawn in the burnished glory of autumn, and Rielle could no longer hold her tongue. Today was the day. She would tell him as soon as he awoke.

Eliana, full and happy, had fallen asleep on her chest. It was five months since she had come into the world, eerily quiet, staring at everything with those huge brown eyes, and Rielle had still not grown used to how beautiful she was. Her smooth skin, a pale brown like the cheek of a fawn; her soft head, impossibly small; the silken dark hair swirling atop it. The warm weight of her, how perfectly she fit in Rielle’s arms. The gentle burbling noises she made while waving her tiny wrinkled feet, hands clenched as if ready to punch.

Rielle kissed Eliana’s head and laid her carefully in her cradle. As morning sunlight crept across the room, she watched her daughter sleep. Sometimes her mouth moved, suckling nothing. Sometimes her eyelids fluttered—a dream—and Rielle laughed, in awe of this little person sleeping below her, this person she had carried through month after awful, glorious month.

She hadn’t known what to expect when Garver had laid the child in her arms. Nearly twenty hours of excruciating labor, pain so unthinkable that it had drawn her deep into its heart, where everything felt