Lightbringer (Empirium #3) - Claire Legrand Page 0,8

of pain I can be. Refuse to eat another meal, and I’ll truly grow angry.”

He left without another word, and though she hated herself for it, as the adatrox brought her back to her cell, Eliana searched the ship’s dim corridors for familiar ash-blond hair, a trim profile, a gleam of ice-blue eyes.

Your eyes are like fire.

She could not stop hearing the sound of her own voice in her memory—nor could she stop feeling the ghost of his hands upon her, the echo of his lips.

But the shadows shivering in the ship’s labyrinthine hold were only angels in stolen skins and dead-eyed adatrox marching mindlessly after their masters.

Simon was nowhere to be found.

• • •

Eliana twisted her wrists against their bindings, though not to free herself, for she had determined that to be a futile task. Even if she escaped her chains, even if she somehow made it past the guards standing sentry outside her door, what then? What would she do? Dive into the middle of the sea and swim to safety, dragging Remy along behind her through the waves?

Once, not so long ago, she could have concentrated on the twin metal cages of her castings and used their solidity, the smooth anchors of the discs in her palms, to draw fire from the gas lamps lining the hallways and urge them into great bursts, scorching anyone who tried to stand against her.

But now, she could not find even a scrap of will to attempt summoning her power. Without her castings, she was a shell, scraped free of its meat and tossed into the waves. Reaching for the empirium would result only in bitter disappointment. She sensed it as surely as she smelled the tang of her own blood in the air, leaking from the wounds on her wrists.

There was an absence in her now—a great impassable void between the power lying in wait within her and the capacity of her mind to do anything more than stare blankly at the wall as Admiral Ravikant’s ship bore her ever onward across the Great Ocean, toward the eastern continent.

Toward Celdaria.

Toward the Emperor.

The chafing of her wrists’ tender flesh against the unyielding metal chains provided her with a perverse comfort there in the endless dark. A constant burning pain that reminded her where she was, that she was a prisoner, that her castings had been wrested from her. That one of her fathers was dead, his body long ago turned to ashes by his own lover’s will; that her other father was also dead, his corpse overtaken by an angel for ill use.

That one of her mothers was dead, too, by her own hand.

And the other…

The moments when she thought of Rielle were the moments in which Eliana strained against her chains with a fevered sort of hunger.

She could have killed her.

When Simon had sent her back to the Old World, to the foothills of those unfamiliar Celdarian mountains, she had encountered her mother—had locked eyes with Rielle, had breathed the same air—and she had lost focus, allowing fear to overtake her. At that most crucial moment, she had fumbled, missing the opportunity that would have solved everything and prevented all of this—this, being a prisoner aboard this immaculate ship, the scent of which sat foul and heavy upon her tongue; this, the sound of Remy’s horrified despair as he had cried out, weeping, at the sight of Ioseph’s altered, black-eyed face.

This—the moment she had turned upon the pier on the shores of Festival and seen with her own eyes the terrible sight of Simon shooting their allies one by one, barking out angelic commands that the imperial soldiers had rushed to obey.

Eliana could have stopped it all from happening. She could have, but instead she had entertained the foolish thought of peace, of conversation and understanding between her and the greatest evil the world had ever known: Rielle Courverie, born Rielle Dardenne. The Blood Queen, the Kingsbane, the Lady of Death.

Eliana could have killed her, but she had tried to talk to her instead. Talk to her. As if a creature so vile would ever have the presence of mind or the desire to talk about ending the disastrous war of her own making, still raging a thousand years past her horizon.

And who had engineered that meeting? Who had sat with her and Remy and helped Eliana craft just the right sentences to say in Old Celdarian?

Simon. She forced herself to say his name, first in her mind and then