“I wrote a story once about what would have happened if she hadn’t died. If she’d lived forever with the angels, and the world still had magic in it. Do you think the angels would have made her one of them? That’s what I wrote, in my story. She led them to the sky, and they searched for God in the stars.”
“I think,” said Navi slowly, “that if the Blood Queen had lived, she would have become something more powerful than even the angels, with all their millennia of knowledge, could have comprehended.”
Eliana pushed herself off the tree, no longer able to stand there and listen to Remy’s voice grow more and more excited, as if this Princess Navana were some dear friend of his, as if he didn’t care that Eliana waited in the shadows, ready to slit any strange throats that might happen by.
And would he rather I stand idly and watch him get torn to pieces the next time we’re attacked?
She knew what he would say: Yes.
The fool.
Because at least then I wouldn’t be killing. Is that right, dearest brother?
“Do you like writing stories?” Remy asked.
“I like telling stories others have written,” Navi answered. “Stories about Astavar most of all.”
Remy hesitated. Then, shyly, “Will you tell me one?”
Eliana dared to look back at them. Remy had wedged himself against Navi’s side in the bracken, their backs against a felled watchtower tree, his head tucked under hers. The girl was stroking his shaggy hair, slow and soft, and when she caught Eliana staring, the expression she wore was one of such compassion that Eliana fantasized, for an immensely satisfying moment, about stalking over and striking her square in the jaw.
She turned away, toward Simon—
But he was gone.
She froze. Fear carved her chest into ribbons.
“I certainly will share a story with you, and I’m honored that a wordsmith like you would ask,” Navi replied. “You know, of course, that the patron saint of Astavar is—”
“Tameryn the Cunning,” Remy said, his voice lighting up. “She was a shadowcaster. I read that she slept under the stars with her black leopard for a pillow.”
“And did you also read,” Navi said, “that shadows grew out of her scalp instead of hair? Her favorite comb was coated in crushed black pearls and carved from the bones of a wolf who died saving her life when she was a girl.”
“I don’t know that story,” Remy whispered, awestruck.
Eliana crept away from them, their murmured voices following her into the morning air like an unfamiliar lullaby. Daggers out, she circled the tree under which Simon had been standing. Gone.
She supposed he could be relieving himself somewhere, but the unease inching up her torso said otherwise.
Ducking underneath a drooping oak branch, using Whistler’s blade to part a curtain of hanging moss, Eliana knew she was moving too far away from camp, that she shouldn’t leave Navi, Remy, and the horses untended, but without Simon, they were all lost. They’d get turned around in these swamp-riddled forests faster than—
A shift in the air, slight but undeniable.
Someone was near.
Eliana crouched in the shadow of a gemma tree, searching the forest.
Then something cold pricked the side of her neck.
“Give me a reason to kill you,” came a woman’s voice, vicious and made of gravel, “and I’ll do it.”
Eliana pressed her neck harder against the woman’s knife, felt the blade’s tip sink into her flesh. The pain thrilled her. I am here, it said, and I do not run from death.
I seek it out.
She laughed. “You’d die trying, I’m afraid.”
The woman made a scornful noise. “Unlikely,” she spat out, and then brought the hilt of her knife down hard against Eliana’s head.
15
Rielle
“I no longer have a name. I relinquish my casting to its destruction and forsake the magic with which I was born. I dedicate my mind and body to the guidance of the Church and the study of the empirium. I no longer have a name. I am only the Archon.”
—Traditional induction vow of the Archon, leader of the Church of Celdaria
The voice followed Rielle back into the waking world, companionable and silent.
Strange, that a voice could be silent. If it wasn’t speaking, yet Rielle could sense it beside her, then it wasn’t merely a voice.
It belonged to someone—a body, a person—and whoever it was, they were close.
Who are you? She hoped the voice could hear—and that it couldn’t. Had she gone mad?