Rielle
“We have done all we can do. The watchtowers stand tall in the mountains. Earthshakers and waterworkers have deepened the lake. The forges burn day and night, churning out weapons by the dozens. Hundreds of civilians have fled the city, making for Luxitaine. Everyone able to stand and fight has stayed behind to bolster the Celdarian and Mazabatian armies. The angels are approaching. Well, let them come. We’re as ready as we’ll ever be. For crown and country, we protect the true light. And may God, or the empirium, or whatever damn thing is out there urging these dark tides—may something, anything, help us.”
—Journal of Odo Laroche, merchant and member of Red Crown, dated April 24, Year 1000 of the Second Age
Rielle knew she was alive. She knew she was standing. Beyond that, she knew very little of her body.
Her thoughts careened through the stars. Each one brought her back a new piece of information about the mountains on the western continent, the endless black space beyond the clouds, the other worlds residing within it. Her skin was afire, her blood bubbling hot. The empirium insisted on pouring a million pieces of the world into her mind. It was too much and too fast, but Rielle could not stop herself from drinking. Her ears ached, her temples boomed like drums, and still she consumed.
Corien arrived at her side. His presence pulled her thoughts back to her human body, which rankled her. She stared at the horizon until her irritation subsided. She could see things now—close things—that she hadn’t been interested in before.
There were the mountains surrounding Âme de la Terre. Twelve mountains, carpeted with pines, and the highest of them—fearsomely huge, snowcapped—towered over the castle at its feet.
There were the armies she and Corien had made over the past weeks and months. Ten thousand gray-eyed adatrox, puppeted by angels. Countless angels remained bodiless, their only weaponry the cunning power of their minds. And five thousand more walked the countryside of Celdaria, exquisitely crafted by her own hands and tethered solidly to the human bodies that housed them. Some flew; others strode. Scintillant and giddy, ravenous for revenge at last, their angelic glory would be obvious to the people watching their approach—the soldiers trembling nervously in their watchtowers, the children looking wide-eyed over their parents’ shoulders as they fled the city for the sea.
There was the soft light of dusk, amber and tangerine to the west, violet to the east. There were the farmlands rolling in neat lines toward the capital. Spring seedlings turning quietly in the soil.
And there was the roundness of her belly and the little life growing inside it. Rielle regarded it askance, this tiny assemblage of lit-up fibers kicking hard against her palms. Maybe allowing it to live after all was unwise. Two queens will rise, Aryava had said. One of blood, and one of light.
She scratched her stomach, her nails catching on the delicate threads of her gown. It was a dramatic garment. Unadorned blood-colored sheer silk from collar to hem. Long slits to her thighs left her legs free to move. The skirt began high on her waist, falling loose around her belly. She wore no shoes; she didn’t need them. The night air of spring was cool, but her blood was high summer. She curled her toes into the dirt. The soles of her feet were black from traveling.
She had designed the gown herself the morning before they left the Northern Reach. The first five sketches had ended in a frenzy. Each time she recreated the lines of her protruding stomach, a wildness came over her. That girl on the mountain. Audric’s eyes in a frightened face. Skin lighter than Audric’s but darker than her own, a light brown like the sweep of pale sand. Dark brown hair in a thick, messy braid, uncertain power trembling at her fingertips, her hands adorned with thin gold chains. My name is Eliana.
Rielle had blacked out each scribbled drawing until the girl vanished from her mind and ink stained her fingers. The nib of her pen scored harsh grooves into Corien’s polished desk. Once she had managed to complete a design, she watched the tailors work frantically through the night to finish the gown, gratified to see the sweat painting their brows.
Would her own daughter be the queen to rise up against her? Her palms tingled against her belly.
Corien put his cool hand over hers, scattering her thoughts.
“Look at them,” he whispered, sweeping his arm through the air to encompass the staggering ocean of their troops. There were the orderly lines of angelic soldiers. The generals wore black velvet cloaks hemmed in gold. There were the beasts Corien and his physicians had engineered under the northern mountains—crawlers, cruciata imitations, deformed and bulging. Their flapping, fleshy wings, armor embedded in their feathered, scaly hides. Controlled by angelic minds, the blank-eyed elemental children sat astride the beasts, their wrists and necks bound with castings.
Rielle examined the beasts’ inner workings, blazing gold and complex. There was the muscled might of the Borsvallic ice-dragons; there were the scars left behind by the knives of Corien’s mad underground surgeons. The power of the elemental children encircled the crawlers and their forged armor like nets, ready to tug and whip, summon and blast.
“You’ve done remarkably well,” Rielle said serenely. “But I can see where improvements could be made.”
Corien lifted her hand to his lips. “In due time, my love. Worlds, remember? We have entire worlds to make our own after this.”
“To unmake and remake as we see fit,” she whispered. An insatiable appetite stirred in the marrow of her bones.
“Rielle the Kingsbane.” Corien turned her face to his. “Rielle the Unmaker.”
“I held a world in my hands,” she whispered, closing her eyes as his mouth brushed against her jaw. Her thoughts sang as they returned to that endless glittering sea, the girl in the white gown pulling her into the stars. “I want to do it again. Tell me we will. Tell me it won’t be long.”
“Soon, you will have everything you desire,” he said, his breath hot on her mouth, “and so will I. You will pluck worlds from the stars and set them spinning to please you. You will find God and demand something better than what we have been given.”
Then he bent to kiss her. The soft warmth of his lips, his tongue opening her mouth. Rielle’s blood leapt savagely at his touch. She tightened her arms around his neck, heat pouring down her thighs. Their army parted around them and thundered past. Their generals shouted out a call in Azradil; the infantry responded in kind, a chorus of war cries in the most lilting, most achingly lovely of the angelic tongues.
Rielle sent Corien a blazing image. There was a copse of oaks on a nearby hill. He would lie in the grass beneath her, hold her hips as she moved. She would have him there in the shadows, and when she rose to face Âme de la Terre, it would be with the memory of his passionate cries ringing in her ears.
He choked out her name against her throat, stumbled after her through the marching troops and into the trees, and when they had finished, he lay trembling in the dirt. With shining eyes, he watched her rise.
She hardly noticed him, lightly kicking him away when he reached for her. Already, she was forgetting how it had felt to have his hands upon her. She stood beneath the trees that had sheltered their lovemaking, her skin ablaze with heat. Her vision pulsed with drumbeats of gold. These days, she knew few other colors. Gold gilded her nightmares, swam sparkling on her tongue. Through an amber sheen, she watched the flood of their army rush swiftly toward the city she had once thought to be her home.
Little fires bloomed in the night—a path of flames snaking through the mountains. A thin wail of horns sounded, quickly drowned out by the chanting army.
Rielle smiled, eyes closed, and tilted her face to the sky. As if it would help them to have a warning. As if watchtowers and horns could be anything but an embarrassment.
Corien joined her, silent and dark at her elbow. She could smell him on her skin.
“Are you ready?” he murmured.
She opened her eyes, and he drew in an astonished sharp breath. She could understand that. The empirium was a vast golden mirror before her, and in it she could see her reflection. Her dark hair, wild to her waist; her silken gown hugging her body; her feet bare and black. Each vein painted with a golden pen, two blazing coins of light for eyes.
“I am infinite,” she replied, taking up the words he was so fond of saying. She tried not to think about that too closely. That he could consider himself infinite in any way made him seem silly.
She stepped away from him to join her army as it marched relentlessly forward. She could see past them, past the mountains, past the Celdarian and Mazabatian armies assembled and waiting. She could see past all of it to a castle dark and tense, its halls rustling with urgent whispers, and a courtyard near the armories, where a king mounted a winged godsbeast and prepared to ride into battle.