Lightbringer (Empirium #3) - Claire Legrand Page 0,69

at herself. “Why I’m like this. Why I am. Can’t you sense what I mean?”

But when she reached for Corien’s thoughts, she felt the startling truth: Only the barest hint of him remained inside her. The rest of his presence was gone, some distance away in the landscape of her mind. Genteel, it seemed, even chaste. Careful. Discreet.

She stared at him, caught between gratitude and offense. “Were you afraid? Is that why you’ve stayed out of my thoughts?” She lifted her chin. “You thought the empirium might work through me to hurt you. You were disgusted by me.”

“Never. I thought…” He paused, at a rare loss for words. “I thought you might want privacy. You were so hot in my arms that it frightened me. I thought me being there, wherever you had gone, would only interfere with whatever was happening. I wanted…” He spread his hands, laughing a little. “Rielle, you are beyond me. I hope someday you can take me with you to that place, and we can learn all the answers we seek together.”

He looked at the floor, his brow furrowed. His lashes were thick and dark; Rielle felt a sudden craving to kiss them. She sent him the thought, and his heated gaze snapped up to meet hers.

“I won’t pretend to understand all that’s happening to you,” he whispered. “But I will do everything I can to make myself worthy of you.”

For a long time, Rielle could not speak. Instead, she rose unsteadily to her feet and turned away from him, looking out over the world.

She stood at the top of a huge flight of stone stairs, past which sprawled a vast network of ice, rock, fire, and equipment. Soldiers ran drills. Other workers hauled crates and turned the spokes of gigantic metal wheels to open great doors set in the earth. They wore nondescript clothing and obeyed soldiers barking orders in what Rielle thought must be an angelic language. Behind her was a massive fortress of black stone. Inside its entrance hall, silent, masked guards stood at winding staircases.

“The Northern Reach,” Rielle whispered. Her breath became clouds.

Corien came to stand beside her. “Home.”

She looked up at him—his travel-worn collar, his stiff jaw, the proud gleam in his pale eyes as he surveyed this kingdom of ice he had built out of nothing.

A tenderness overcame her. She turned his chin, brought his lips down to hers. Unbidden, a memory of Audric flashed across her vision; she felt Corien flinch but did not apologize.

“I still love him,” she reminded him, thinking of her lingering grief so Corien would easily see it in her mind. “But I’m here with you. He’s afraid of me. You aren’t. He turned me away. You didn’t. That will have to be enough for now.”

Corien’s expression hardened. “You are a creature of maddening contradictions,” he muttered, raking a hand through his hair.

“And you love me for it,” she replied. A distant crash of dark waves echoed through her skull. She felt the cold lap of infinite gold against her toes. She touched her head, searching for cracks.

“I’ve had a suite of rooms made up for you,” he said tightly, stepping away from her. “I imagine you’ll want to rest.”

“No.” Audric remained in her mind, his memory warm and steady, even as the rest of her teemed. If she looked at it too closely, pain pricked her chest and eyes like thorns.

But Audric was far away; Audric thought her a monster.

Her mind shivered, exhausted by its own hesitations. She longed desperately for oblivion. She caught Corien’s hand, sending him a thought clear and hard as a diamond: Rest is not what I want.

The force of her suggestion surprised him; she felt his delight unfurl, softening all his frustrations.

Then Corien pressed his fingers into her palm, called for guards to shut the doors against the cold, and guided her upstairs.

• • •

Corien was making monsters.

One hung from the ceiling—though this was not one he had made. Rather, it was his model. His inspiration.

“We named them the cruciata,” he explained, guiding Rielle through a large room he had called a laboratory. Suspended from the stone ceiling by a series of fine copper wires and steel plates hung a preserved bestial corpse. The beast had six splayed legs, a hide of crimson scales, a long, reptilian snout. Empty eye sockets, long hooked tail, a spine ridged with tiny serrated spikes. Its jaws had been pried open, revealing several rows of teeth.

Corien pointed at the frozen slender legs.