Lightbringer (Empirium #3) - Claire Legrand Page 0,93

soundly on the bed of her furs, snug between Rielle and a boulder velvet with moss. Shadows stretched deep and dark beneath Obritsa’s eyes, and her cheeks were hollower now than they had been in the Northern Reach. But then, so were Rielle’s. She had seen her reflection in the nearby river and had hardly recognized the person staring back at her.

She left Obritsa sleeping and wandered through the trees until she found a tiny clearing encircled by pines. There, she stripped down to her tights and thin tunic. Alone, free of the thick layers of clothing and with no companions but the trees, she felt less brittle and found it easier to breathe. She sat on a soft bed of moss, leaned her head back against the trunk of a pine, and gazed at the sea of needles swaying above them. Her palms still tingled from destroying the dagger, and she had a passionate desire to sleep for a solid month. But they could not rest for long. The prolonged quiet meant Corien was planning something—or that he knew something she did not.

Rielle rested one of her hands on her belly. Sometimes the new shape of it revolted her, and she would come close to summoning her power and ridding herself of the creature inside her once and for all. She had neither the time nor the energy for the changes it had wrought upon her body, the new exhaustion of moving herself through the world. And it belonged not only to her but to Audric, and with that particular chain around her, she could never truly be free of him.

Other times, she felt such a tenderness for the child she carried that it left her faint. Absently, she traced her fingers across her skin, wondering how it was faring after such wild days of travel. She wondered too if she should see a healer—and that made her think of Garver Randell, his little shop that smelled of herbs and resin, and Simon, looking up at his Sun Queen with shining eyes.

What they must think of her, sitting at their dinner table back in Âme de la Terre, wondering how they had been so thoroughly deceived.

How they must have come to despise her.

Head in her hands, Rielle blinked to clear her burning eyes, and suddenly, though she had not commanded it to, her vision flickered, and when it settled, the forest around her had been redrawn in shades of shifting gold.

An exhausted sort of dread washed over her body, even as her mind came alive with desire.

this power is yours

“No,” she moaned, covering her ears. “Not now.”

I wake

The empirium’s presence was cold and infinite, its whisper ageless, its might unthinkable. It rose to her surface like a behemoth of the sea coming up for air. Rielle shut her eyes against it, willing her vision to be small and pale once more.

this power is yours

take it

take me

I RISE

“I can’t,” Rielle whispered, tears rimming her lashes. “It’s too much.”

Her hands crackled with heat, and she flattened them against the dirt, hoping the press of the earth would satisfy their hunger.

Then there was a shift in the air, a thickening of the world’s quiet that muffled all other sounds. The rush of the waterfall softened to a dull rumble; the wood’s chatter hushed.

Rielle looked up and saw a faint vision: an airy room lined with fluttering curtains. Windows framing a white city. A terrace piled high with flowers.

And standing before her was Ludivine, faint but smiling. Golden-haired and pale in a gown of soft rose. Beside her stood a man in a green tunic, his dark curls mussed, his brown skin warm with sunlight.

Rielle’s breath caught. “Audric?”

19

Navi

“May your ship sail true

and your fires burn bright.

May your heart think of me

while the stars shine their light.”

—Traditional Vesperian traveler’s prayer

Malik had been gone for five days, two more than it should have taken him to travel to the island of Laranti and return with Ysabet, the Red Crown leader Hob had arranged for them to meet. A woman, Hob’s contacts in the underground had said, whose influence in the Vespers was unmatched.

But Malik had not yet returned. Navi couldn’t sleep for worrying about him.

Instead, she sat up late in her shabby canvas tent, staring at the damp, curling sheets of paper on the table she and Hob had fashioned out of an old tree stump. Beyond the tent flap, clouds of angry flies swarmed, kept at bay by the foul-smelling oil their guide, Bazko,