“My students, please know this: I chose to give up my casting and bind myself inside my own maze. I did it for two simple reasons: I trust Rielle Dardenne, and I love her.”
—Letter written by Grand Magister Taliesin Belounnon to the acolytes of the Pyre
June 19, Year 998 of the Second Age
Once Rielle stepped inside the maze, the crowd’s cheering dimmed.
The doors slammed shut behind her.
She kept running down the path, dry grasses crunching beneath her feet.
The maze will burn quickly.
Already, she could smell smoke. But coming from where?
She climbed the nearest wall and had almost reached the top when a hard knot of fire shot down from the stands. It slammed against the wood, knocking her back to the ground. Head spinning, she watched flames spread along the wall.
No climbing, then.
She pushed herself to her feet and ran. The structure containing Tal was in the dead center of the maze. She reached a fork in the path—three routes. Left, right, continuing center. She thought quickly. If she’d been mapping the maze correctly, the path on the right would bring her to the maze’s outermost wall—and a dead end. Center would keep her running around the maze’s rim.
She turned left, heard a faint burst of cheers from the distant crowd above.
She smiled in relief. Left had been the right choice.
She raced down a corridor of walls capped in roaring flames. Wood snapped, showering embers across her path. Bile rose in her throat, along with a smoky black flavor that twisted her stomach. For weeks after her mother’s death, the taste of ash had lingered on her tongue.
Ahead: a door in the wall to her left, which should lead to the maze’s center.
She ducked through the door, turned right, raced down the path, then turned left—and skidded to a halt.
A stone wall blocked her path.
Outside the maze, the horn blasted once more.
Rielle looked up just as three knots of flame arced through the sky. Their impact crashed through the maze like fists against glass.
The crowd cried out in awe.
Tal.
Rielle turned and ran back the way she had come, the pressure of tears building behind her eyes. When she turned the corner, the path before her erupted into flames.
She screamed, raised an arm to shield her face, and stumbled back against the wall.
Rielle, where’s your mother?
Rielle, what did you do?
She bent over, hands on her knees, and made herself breathe until the memory of her father’s frantic voice faded.
Corien? She reached out with her mind, cautious. He had said not a word to her since she’d taken Audric into her bed, and she had not dared speak to him. But the angry flames devouring the path before her made her feel shrunken, brittle. Too much heat, and she would crack.
She squeezed her eyes shut. She had worked with Tal for years, had manipulated torches, candles, hearth fires. But these flames were different—wild and vindictive. She could hardly breathe, the heat stealing away her air.
Are you there? Corien, please, help me.
Another horn blast.
She looked up as three more arcs of fire shot across the sky.
“No!” she screamed. The crowd’s cries echoed her own.
She turned to face the fire blocking her way, fear punching a sob from her throat. She flung out her hands without thinking.
The fire parted, clearing a charred path for about twenty feet in front of her, and then collapsed. The fire re-formed.
Her hands shook. She wiped the sweat from her eyes. She couldn’t think, couldn’t find the empirium, not with these flames crowding her, not with Tal trapped somewhere behind her.
But she had to. Somehow, somehow…
She sank to her knees, watching bleary-eyed as the flames climbed. The twin biting scents of smoke and firebrand magic carved sour ruts down her throat.
Rielle, make it stop!
Rielle, she’s still inside!
She closed her eyes, crouched, ready to run. What had Tal always taught her? Prayer steadies the mind.
Fleet-seeming fire, she prayed, blaze not with fury or abandon.
She glared up through her lashes at the nearing flames. She let her eyes unfocus, breathing in and out with each familiar word.
The world shimmered gold.
Unless, she finished, I command you to.
She pushed off the ground and ran, shoving all her rage and grief ahead of her like a wave. The fire broke at her approach, flames peeling away up the walls to let her through. She heard them collapsing back down as she fled, felt the snap of flames against her heels. Turned a corner, and another, ducked under a doorway and came out in a circular clearing.
Seven identical doors surrounded her, including the one through which she’d entered. Despair swelled within her. Which way?
The sky was filling with smoke. As she knelt, closing her eyes, she heard more fire erupt behind her—to the left, then the right. Sparks scattered across the ground.
She dug her fingers into the dirt, imagined that every bead of sweat sliding down her body could seep into the earth, race off through the veins of rock in the ground like buzzing beacons.
She saw it in her mind’s eye: Gold knots zipping lightning-quick through the deep dense dark, seeking fire. Seeking Tal.
Warmth suffused her, but not from the fire.
From the empirium.
She felt it rise from the ground, called by her desperation. Heat bloomed up her arms and legs, unfurled in her belly, raced up her spine, and burrowed into the base of her skull.
When she opened her eyes, the world blazed gold. One door—second to her right—shone brighter than the rest. From down that golden path came the faraway sound of a man calling her name.
She blinked. The gold faded, and the world was itself again.
She launched herself off the ground, ran through the door, followed the path to the right, then right again, then left. Climbing flames surrounded her on all sides. Above the roar of fire and the crashes of the collapsing maze, she heard the crowd cheering and pushed herself faster. Flames chased her over a caved-in wall. She dropped and rolled, leapt up, kept running.
Another fork. She took the left path. Not fifty yards later, she hit a wall of stone.
The horn blasted; the fire arced overhead.
Then, three crashes. Very near. The wall just beside Rielle rumbled and groaned.
She whirled to follow the sound, then raced back to the fork, took the right path instead. Ran for a full minute at top speed, her side cramping. Dodged a buckling wall, shielded her face from a cascade of sparks. She could hear it now—a larger, roaring fire, straight ahead past a pile of smoking rubble that had once been a wall.
She climbed through it, kicking aside planks of charred wood, then emerged into a circular yard pockmarked with blackened craters. From the craters snapped trails of fire, and in the center of the yard, surrounded by rubble and walls of flame, stood a familiar building.
It was a narrow, three-storied house, not as grand as one might expect for the commander of the royal army. Painted gray in honor of his metalmaster heritage and forest-green in honor of the family he served.
So he had said. But Rielle’s mother had told Rielle the truth—no-nonsense Armand Dardenne had ordered his house painted green because that was the color of his daughter’s eyes.
All clarity left Rielle in a flood of dread.
It was her parents’ house, re-created in the center of the maze. And it was on fire.
Rielle, what did you do?
She’s dead! Oh, God! Help us! Someone help us!
But then Armand Dardenne had come to his senses. He had stared at Rielle over the red, ruined wreck of his wife’s body, watched her frantic sobs with an expression of abject contempt until everything Rielle had known about her father had disappeared. His face had closed to her, never to be opened again. He had lowered Marise Dardenne’s body to the ground, picked up his shivering daughter, and hurried her through the tunnels below the castle to the Pyre and Tal’s bedroom.
Tal, sleep-rumpled and only nineteen years old, had opened his door, taken one look at Rielle’s face, and held out his arms to her.
Help us, her father had said, his voice carved hollow. Help her. Don’t let them take her from me.
“Rielle!”
Tal’s distant shout shook her. She took two halting steps forward, gazing up at the burning house.
“I can’t,” she whispered, a sharp, ill heat flaring throughout her body. “No, no, no.”
Then, with a groan, the front face of the house began to collapse.
A choked scream rang out—her own name, quickly silenced.
Rielle ran around the house, searching through the smoke for the back door. It was there, just as she remembered it. She kicked the blackened wood; it gave way easily. She raced over the threshold into a world of black smoke and leaping orange flames. How strange it was to see the rooms just as they should have been—but empty now. No furniture, no art on the walls. Only flames and a noxious smell that coated her every breath with darkness.
She hid her face. “Tal? Where are you?”
“Here!” His voice was faint. “In the parlor!”
She stumbled down the main hallway and to the door of her mother’s parlor. The wall was buckling; overhead, the rafters creaked and groaned.
She shoved her weight against the door. It didn’t budge. She slammed into it again and again, her throat tightening, her vision a luster of tears.
Outside, three monstrous crashes hit the ground. The house rattled, windows shattering. More fire from the acolytes?
She cried out in frustration, then heard a loud snap and scrambled out of the way right before the ceiling above her collapsed.
The door, wedged loose, fell out of its frame.
“Tal?” She crawled to the door, the floor blazing hot under her palms. Dragged a hand across her face to clear the grit from her eyes, looked inside the parlor past billowing waves of heat.
Tal.
He was there, wrists and ankles bound, trapped in the far corner by a shattered window. Glass sparkled across the floor. Rafters and chunks of plaster from the collapsed ceiling separated them, as did a roaring ribbon of fire.
“Tal!” She clung to the doorframe. “Answer me! Come on, get up! We have to leave!”
“I can’t move,” he called out to her. His voice was ravaged, wheezing. “The ceiling fell on my legs!”
She sagged to the floor.
“Douse the flames, Rielle!” He coughed violently. “Just as we practiced!”
As if it were that simple. Just a prayer, just a lesson.
The sound of the flames roaring between them was turning her stomach inside out. She couldn’t think past them to remember her prayers, much less find the empirium.
Rielle, save her!
Rielle, please! Do it, now! Oh, God…
She fell to her hands and knees, stomach heaving.
Papa, I’m sorry! I can’t stop it! Mama! Mama, run!
“I can’t,” she gasped. “I can’t stop it.”
“You can do this, Rielle,” Tal was calling to her. “Listen to my voice! I trust you!”
From elsewhere in the house came a massive groan. The floor shook. Rielle looked back, down the smoke-filled hallway to see the second floor collapse. Her bedroom, her father’s study, her mother’s music room. New flames roared up the walls. A great gaping hole in the roof revealed a smoke-stained sky.
“Rielle, listen—” Tal’s voice disappeared into a fit of coughing.
“Tal?”
He didn’t respond.
“Tal!” She rose on shaking legs, searched through the inferno for a path through, and found one—small and shrinking.
She ran for it, diving through the flames and slamming to the floor on the other side. A few feet away, Tal lay under a ceiling beam, his face sallow and slick with sweat.
She crawled to him, head ringing from her wild leap. The fire’s heat pressed down on her back like a hand determined to bury her.
“Tal, I’m here. Tal?” She helped him sit, slapped his cheeks until his bloodshot eyes fluttered open.
He smiled up at her. “There you are.” His hand fumbled for hers. “I knew you’d find me.”
“We’re trapped, I can’t… I can’t carry you. Please get up.”
He gasped for air, shaking his head. “You can put the fire out.”
“Tal, I…” Her tears dropped onto his neck. Papa, I can’t make it stop! “If I try, I’ll just make it worse. You know I will.”
“What I know is that you were only a child. And that now…” He touched her cheek. “Now, you are a queen.”
His eyes began to flutter shut.
“Tal? No! Tal!” She looked helplessly at the encroaching flames, tried reaching for the empirium with a weak thrust of her hand. “Move! Leave us alone, please!”
Another rafter collapsed, not five feet from them. Rielle ducked her head over Tal’s body, breathless.
Then she heard Tal’s voice, faint at her ear: “Burn steady and burn true. Burn clean and burn bright.”
The Fire Rite. She closed her eyes.
“Burn steady and burn true,” she repeated, her voice cracking. “Burn clean…”
His hand tightened around hers. “…and burn bright. Again, Rielle.”
“Burn steady and burn true.”
“Think,” he whispered, “of the ones you love.”
“Burn clean and burn bright.”
The ones I love.
Ludivine. Tal.
Audric.
Fresh warmth touched her fingers, her toes.
From overhead came Atheria’s piercing cry—part horse, part hawk. A distracted part of Rielle’s mind recalled the discarded firebird cloak. Her vision flooded with a thousand shades of summer.
“Burn steady,” she whispered.
“And burn true,” Tal finished, his voice a mere thread.
“Burn clean.” She opened her eyes to a room of soft gold. Gold fire, gold ashes, golden shimmering Tal. “And burn bright.”
She blinked. She inhaled.
The gold shifted, gathering in twisting knots that hovered, waiting.
Rielle breathed out. Hot points of energy surged away from her fingertips, like needles stabbing their way out of her skin. The gold flooding the room careened away in spinning whorls of light.
All at once, the heat crowding her vanished.
She blinked, gulped down a breath as if surfacing from water.
The world returned to her, dull and ordinary.
Except for the thousands of feathers floating down from the rafters, gusting along the walls, coating the ruined floor. Everywhere that flames had been, now there danced among the diminishing curls of smoke long needlepoint feathers of tangerine and gold, violet and vermilion. Firebird colors.
“Rielle…” Tal swept his arm across the floor. Feathers flew up at his touch before drifting back down to rest lightly among the piles of simmering embers.
He looked up at her, wonder turning his face soft. “How did you do this?”
She retrieved a feather of a particularly brilliant red and watched with a thrill of delight as the fine downy barbs flickered at her touch.
“I don’t know,” she whispered, caught between exhaustion and the most perfect joy she had ever felt. “I think—”
But the words died on her lips. For at that moment, a familiar touch scraped down her spine.
Corien? She looked through the house, her grip tightening on Tal. Are you there?
Silence was his answer. But she was not fooled. She sensed his nearness like a familiar shape in the dark.
Distant horns blasted—staccato, frantic. Warnings. With the flames gone, Rielle could hear the crowd’s terrified screams.
Oh, God.
“What is it?” Tal searched her face. “Rielle, say something.”
And thus, Corien murmured, we begin.
Rielle touched her mouth, chasing the sensation of lips brushing against her own.
With a small smile, she whispered, “He’s here.”
