“A sword forged true in hammer and flame
Flies sure and swift
A heart forged in battle and strife
Cuts deeper than any blade”
—The Metal Rite
As first uttered by Saint Grimvald the Mighty, patron saint of Borsvall and metalmasters
The opening of the cage flung Rielle down a smooth chute and onto a tiny platform so small she almost tumbled over the edge.
The crowd above let out shouts of dismay.
She swayed, regaining her balance. A blast of heat shot up from below her. Looking down, she saw a churning mass of metal—pulleys hissing, swords flying and fans whirring, large steel plates crashing into one another, staircases folding in on themselves and transforming in the blink of an eye into long ramps slick with oil.
She could not leave this horrible creation without the three children. All her effort in these trials would be for nothing; the people would turn on her.
But it was more than that.
She glanced up through the black bars of the cage to the seething crowds above.
You want them to love you, Corien observed, sounding surprised.
Rielle threw her arms over her head and crossed her forearms, echoing the sigil of the Forge. Cheers erupted from the crowd in response.
Yes, she thought. I want them to love me.
Then she turned and ran—not for the opposite corner of the maze, where she thought she glimpsed a door that would lead her to escape. Instead she ran for the child nearest her, his brown face pressed to the bars of his cage.
She jumped over a narrow chasm beside the platform and then started down a set of stairs. Below her feet, each step flattened, vanishing as she ran. She was almost fast enough.
Almost.
Toward the bottom of the stairs, the steps disappeared entirely. She slid down the last stretch, falling forward fast to land, knees first, on a deck of metal grating that careened from side to side. The landing sent spikes of pain up her legs. She clutched the grating, gritting her teeth as her stomach roiled violently.
“Please!” cried the child, not too far off. “This way! Please, my lady!”
She closed her eyes, struggling for breath. She could almost hear Tal’s patient voice in her ear: The empirium is always there. Every moment, every breath, every inch of life you touch. It waits for you.
Corien remarked softly, Your teacher is not wrong.
But the empirium does not simply wait for you, Rielle, he continued. It hungers for you. No one else will ever understand it as you can. It longs for you the way a lover yearns for his mate.
Rielle snapped open her eyes. The world around her began to shimmer. Her fingers curled. I hunger for it as well.
Darling, I know it. Don’t resist. Reach out and take it.
She shuddered, heat flooding her limbs.
“Stop,” she whispered, reaching out for the churning gears with the edges of her mind.
The deck beneath her jerked, slowing. She slammed her palms against the grating, tasted its metal tang on her tongue, felt its vibrations up her arms. A gold-tinged wave of energy shot out from her hands, ricocheting through the maze.
“Stop.” It was a command.
The deck screeched roughly to a halt. With a choked scream, Rielle lost her grip, fell, then caught herself on the deck’s edge at the last second with grasping fingers.
“Here!” the child yelled, below and behind her to the right.
Rielle glanced back over her shoulder, feet dangling. The threads of concentration she’d managed snapped. Silver glinted at the corner of her eye—metalmaster magic?
She followed its trail to a winding set of stairs that flew apart into whirling metal plates. They spun right for her, cutting through the air like spinning knives. Desperation gave her strength; she swung her body once to get momentum, then flung herself through the air to the platform where the child’s cage stood.
The metal plates just missed her, slamming into the deck from which she’d hung only seconds before.
Shaking, eyes stinging from sweat and oil, Rielle fumbled with the lock to the child’s cage. The near-miss with the flying plates had thrown her; she could hardly see, hardly think.
The child screamed at her, sobbing, “Hurry! Please, hurry!”
“I’m trying!” she snapped and then saw the reason for his terror: His cage was shrinking.
In seconds, he would be crushed.
If she got out of here alive, she would tear the Archon’s flesh from his bones and relish his every dying scream.
She thrust her palm against the lock with a furious cry. Raw power sizzled up her arm and out of her body, knocking the child off his feet and shattering the lock. The metal scraps of it went flying.
She wrested open the door. “Come on!”
The child flung himself at her and wrapped his arms around her neck.
Overhead, the crowd burst into wild cheers. Beneath the din, Rielle heard a metallic creak and looked up. A small door in the cage’s roof was opening. Two metalmasters crouched there, holding their arms out for the boy.
Two more. Rielle shoved him out to safety, not waiting to hear the door shut. The nearest child was wailing for her clear at the other end of the maze.
Between them was a series of shifting corridors made of crashing metal blocks the size of Rielle’s body, spears that thrust out at random, stairs that twisted and transformed without pause, paths that twirled on their axes like roasting spits over a fire—too many moving parts to keep track of. Watching them, she felt utterly dwarfed; the thought of saying her prayers, steadying her breathing, felt ludicrous, inadequate.
She’d be crushed. She lacked the control to slip through such a cruelly designed maze. If only she had more time to think. She squinted through the wild glinting chaos, her hands shaking.
Don’t risk it, came Corien’s voice—tense now and unamused. You are powerful, but you’re not immortal.
I could be, Rielle responded. And that shocked her, made her straighten and blink in surprise. She hadn’t meant to say such a thing; the very idea was preposterous. And yet the words had surged up through her body, automatic and instinctive.
Yes, Corien answered pensively. You could be, I think.
Rielle shook herself, silencing him. That was a conversation for later.
She wasn’t, after all, immortal today.
The platform beneath her shifted. She took a deep breath, dashed forward just as the platform jerked and gave way. She looked back, frantic.
Eyes front, Rielle!
Corien’s voice made Rielle whirl just in time. A gigantic metal pendulum swung her way. She flung out her arm. Gears shrieked; a thud sounded, as of a hammer hitting an anvil. The pendulum, now warped and dented, ground to a stop.
Rielle raced on, dodging spears that whistled fast toward her. The path ahead shifted, tossing her off her feet and down a narrow tunnel made of mesh. She landed in a heap, bit down hard on her tongue. Tasting blood, dizzy, she peered through the mesh of the tunnel. It was one of many—a rotating knot of tunnel-shaped cages, long and thin. She crawled, seeking an exit, as the knot of tunnels spun ever faster. They knotted and unknotted like a mass of wriggling snakes. A patch of mesh ahead of her peeled open, creating an exit. She scrambled for it, but wasn’t fast enough; the mesh sewed itself shut in the space of a blink. She screamed in rage, nearly slammed her hands against it, stopped herself.
Think, Rielle. If you shatter this trap, you’ll fall—and to where?
Eyes shut, struggling to force her mind clear, she found the path she needed. She saw the maze arrange itself, orderly, so that the writhing nest of tunnels trapping her would unfurl and grow still. She saw a path leading out of her tunnel and down to a set of sturdy stairs that would lead her to the second caged child.
The image unfurled in her mind’s eye like a map, golden-edged and glimmering, and when she opened her eyes once more, a sea of miniscule brilliant grains winked beneath the shifting veil of the physical world.
Then the world remade itself as she instructed.
Power shot out from her fingers to slither down the mesh of her cage. She felt its progress as a slithering heat under her skin, felt the rough metal beneath the reaching tendrils of her power as if her own hands were touching it. Her eyes drifted shut with pleasure. The knots in her body loosened, then vanished. A shuddering liquid heat cascaded down her limbs, pooled in her belly, shivered down her thighs.
The maze around her shifted, groaning as if in protest. The metalmasters above were fighting for control.
She smiled, sated. Nice try.
Just as Rielle had envisioned, the tunnel that trapped her unfolded, docile. Its opening came to rest on a wide platform leading to a set of stairs. She crawled out, stood for a moment to catch her breath. She felt shot full of energy, as if awakening from the best sleep of her life.
She turned her gaze up to the crowd, to the two mountain peaks above that, to the sun beyond.
She bowed low, with an indolent flourish of her hands.
The crowd exploded into cheers, so loud that even from the depth of the pit, Rielle’s ears rang from the noise.
Grinning, she bounded up the stairs to the second child’s cage. This one was a girl, pale and thin-limbed, her eyes large and dark in her hollow-cheeked face. Peeking out from under a mop of tangled brown hair, she sobbed uncontrollably.
Rielle touched her hand to the cage’s lock, felt the euphoric power from a few moments before seep into the metal like a drug.
With a quiet sizzle, the lock collapsed, melted, and dripped silver to the stairs.
Rielle gazed down at the girl, her eyes heavy-lidded.
“It’s all right,” she said, breathless. “I’m here to save you.”
The girl gaped up at her. “Are you the Sun Queen, my lady?”
Rielle held out a hand to her. “I will be soon.”
The girl jumped up from her hiding spot and barreled into Rielle’s open arms.
But then, with a great, heaving groan, the entire cage rocked beneath them. Rielle swayed, tightened her grip on the child.
A ripple of horrified shouts sounded from the crowd above.
“My lady,” whispered the child. She raised a shaking hand to point into the maze below them. “It’s falling down.”
She was right. Rielle stared, her terror climbing fast as the cage began to move—from the far, bottom corner and the near, top corner. Swiftly it collapsed, folding in on itself. The horrible grinding racket sounded like all the axes in the world clashing against one another.
And the third child still stood trapped far below.
Above, the creak of a door. Rielle shoved the girl toward it without thinking. “Climb!”
The child clung to her. “You’ll die! Come with me, please!”
Rielle caught the child’s face in one hand. “Do you really think that I, the Sun Queen, will let such a puny cage be the end of me?”
With a tremulous smile, the girl shook her head.
Rielle returned her smile and pushed her up a long, skinny ladder to the waiting metalmasters. Once they had the child in hand, the floor beneath Rielle gave way.
The fall choked away her scream. She dropped fifty feet and slammed onto one of several rotating poles. They spun out from a center mechanism like spokes of a carriage wheel. She clung to the pole that had broken her fall. She could hardly breathe; her stomach felt bruised from the impact.
But suddenly, even through her exhaustion, Rielle had an idea.
She closed her eyes. I can do this.
Corien answered firmly: You can.
She let go of the pole, dropping onto a metal plate that had been whizzing through the air only seconds before. At the slam of Rielle’s boots, the plate stopped, frozen in midair.
She threw up her hands, felt the simmering hot energy flowing between her and those spinning poles, and made them fly.
They spun out in all directions, so fast any one of them could have cut a man clean in half. Rielle twisted her wrists sharply in the air. The poles slammed to a stop, wedging themselves into the four corners of the cage.
The cage shuddered, its collapse halted. Every piece of metal trembled in place, creaking awfully.
That wouldn’t hold for long.
Rielle raced through the air, summoning metal plates from the walls as she ran. They flew to her from the floor, the staircases, the labyrinthine paths crisscrossing the cube. She flung each plate before her, stepped lightly on it, pushed off, and moved on.
Corien let out an admiring laugh. Marvelous, Rielle. Stunning.
Pride bloomed in Rielle’s chest. With each step on her floating metal path, she felt power gather at her feet. When she landed next to the third child’s cage, it blew apart at her touch, leaving the child standing, shivering, in its ruins.
“Come here.” Rielle shook her hand impatiently. Every inch of her skin tingled. Distantly, she felt the screaming ache of her muscles. “It’s almost over.”
“How did you do that?” the child asked, gaping. “You were flying.”
A series of colossal, metallic crashes exploded around them. Rielle looked up to see the poles wedged in their corners giving way.
But the cage did not continue its collapse.
Instead, it lifted itself into the air, the metal groaning. Rielle grabbed the child, watched the cage’s shifting base for an opening, then jumped through it to the ground. She and the child fell hard; the child screamed, clutching his foot. Above them hovered the cage, slowly spinning.
Then it rearranged itself, the metal maze breaking apart, re-forming, sharpening…
A storm of blades, ten thousand strong, turned as one and raced toward the lonely spot in the dirt where Rielle and the child crouched.
Rielle stared, panic drumming its way up her throat. Time slowed and quickened, both at once. She could faintly hear Corien shouting at her to do something, to defend herself, to move.
But thousands of swords? That was too many. Manipulating a few pieces of the maze was one thing. But this—they darkened the sky. They whistled and roared. They would cut her to pieces—and the child too.
The child grasped her wrist. “May the Queen’s light guide us home,” he whispered to her, the smile on his face not one of resignation, but of belief.
The Sun Queen’s prayer. The Sun Queen’s light.
Her light.
Her power.
Yes, Corien whispered. Yes, Rielle.
Rielle pulled the child close, then turned to the swords, closed her eyes, and flung up her arms.
No.
She refused this fate.
No.
She had trials to complete, friends waiting for her, the mystery of a foreign princess’s murder to solve.
No.
She had words of love still to speak.
And a voice in her head.
And a hunger, a craving, to answer the awakening call of her blood.
No.
Not yet.
She waited in silence, her body trembling. Power stretched out from her fingers, from the sharp turns of her shoulders, from the ends of her hair.
Had it been enough?
She drew a few shallow breaths in the ringing silence, then dared to open her eyes.
A blade hovered before her face. Two more, pointing at each of her eyes. Hundreds. Thousands, all held in place by her silent command. They filled the pit, quivering, denied their kill. The air hummed metallic.
Rielle let out an incredulous, tearful breath.
Then she let her arms fall.
The swords dropped flat to the ground, forming a perfect circle around the spot of earth where Rielle knelt with the child. Their fall shook the ground. Their blades pointed away from her; she sat at the center of a scorched metal sun.
Slowly, the world returned to her. She blinked, wiped her eyes clean. A growing surge of voices made her look up.
The people of Celdaria were on their feet. They were screaming her name—a chant, a prayer.
Rielle! Rielle! Rielle!
She raised her face to the sky and showed them her smile.
