Secrets of the Starcrossed

by Clara O'Connor

“Of course, Father,” Marcus returned easily, or at least so it would have looked to anyone who hadn’t spent as much time with him as I had. Although I wasn’t sure if my newfound skill at seeing beneath the surface of things wasn’t something I hadn’t acquired under Devyn’s tutelage.

  His father laughed, every inch the doting parent as he gestured for the group to continue. “Out here in the countryside, I suppose the temptation to embrace nature is irresistible, eh, son?” Out of sight of his companions, the once-over he gave Marcus contained the edge of a sneer.

  Marcus looked like he’d been slapped across the face. He bowed his head and his father passed on. I reached out to place a hand on his arm as he stood there while the group disappeared around the corner. As my hand touched him, he flinched away and continued stiffly and silently towards my house.

  “Marcus,” I called after him, not quite sure what had happened to leave him so changed.

  He paused as we reached the drive to the villa before veering off and taking one of the trailing paths that wound through the villas back in the direction of the river. I followed, unsure if I was wanted but driven by the guilty awareness that if it were Devyn, I would want to know what was wrong and how to help. I owed Marcus no less.

  Finally reaching the folly, he sat down, grimacing as he realised the river weed still remained attached to him. His expression was raw as he turned to find me hovering at the entrance, unsure of my welcome. Giving me a small smile, he ran his hands over his face before sweeping them decisively through his thick wavy hair.

  Sitting up, he pushed his shoulders back, before looking at me again. I sat down gently beside him, reaching out to touch him comfortingly. This time he didn’t shrug me away.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

  “I don’t understand. Sorry for what? What just happened?”

  “I suppose you should know. It’s only fair.”

  I suddenly had an idea about what was coming.

  “I’m not entirely civilised,” he began to explain. “I’m not sure if you’re aware of the history of my family.”

  I was. Of course I was. His family was studied in my history classes, but if he wasn’t already aware of his own coverage in our education system then this didn’t seem the time to fill him in. Besides which, I wasn’t sure where he was going with this.

  “In the last set of wars between us and the Britons, part of the Treaty was that they married one of their princesses to my great-great-grandfather. She was the favoured daughter of the king of Anglia, and it was felt that the Treaty would be more secure if there were one of them in the city with us. It was essential if the Empire wanted to remain unmolested in the southeast, and for the last couple of hundred years, we’ve been able to farm sizeable tracts of some of the best land on the island… not to mention have access up the river to the sea for trade purposes.”

  I nodded, smiling wryly. “I am vaguely familiar with the terms of the 1772 Treaty. I did recently graduate, you recall.”

  In reward, I got a fleeting smile before he braced himself once more, his usually unguarded face suddenly anything but.

  “I’m the last of Princess Margaret’s line.”

  I bit my lip, unsure of what he was expecting me to say as it wasn’t exactly a state secret.

  “Wow, that’s impressive,” I finally responded. “Actual royalty in our midst.”

  He frowned. “Cassandra, you’re missing the point.”

  “I am?” What deep dark secret would I have to keep now? I was starting to hate secrets.

  He shot me a pained look before finally spitting out the words as if they were coated in acid.

  “I’m one of them. I have Briton blood running through my veins.”

  I laughed in relief.

  “Hardly new news.” I waved a hand in the air to dispel the heavy atmosphere between us.

  “Well, my father is all too keenly aware of it. He’s not the greatest fan of my bloodline,” Marcus said.

  “That’s a bit rich. After all, your father sits on the high council in the seat he married into, the seat that belonged to your mother’s family, right? Which of course came down through the Courtenays, from Tobias Courtenay who married that Anglian Princess.” I was outraged on his behalf. What hypocrisy. Says the girl who just pretended she didn’t know every detail about his family.

  He laughed, taking a small step back towards the Marcus I knew.

  “That’s true, but I think my father could live with it better if I at least looked more Courtenay or Dolon and less Wilder.” He shrugged bitterly. “Apparently, if my face is anything to go by, my blood must be nearly completely Plantagenet.”

  “Ah.” I suddenly saw why our encounter today had been so poorly timed.

  A thought struck me.

  “Your father married your mother and looks every inch the natural born senator. You sort of forget that, in fact, that seat was your mother’s, the Courtenay seat. Shouldn’t it be yours now?”

  Marcus’s laugh came more easily this time, the golden-boy aura almost entirely back in place around him.

  “Yes. Which is possibly the only reason my father didn’t outright forbid me from becoming a doctor, rather a non-profession in his view.”

  “What do you mean, a non-profession?” I asked.

  He threw his chin up and in his father’s perfectly modulated tones continued, “Medicine… What is the point, Marcus? Proper citizens don’t need your services and the rest can’t afford it. What a waste of your time. But if you must, I suppose it’s a way to fill your days until I retire and you take my seat on the council.”

  My jaw dropped. “No way. He’s letting you work as a doctor, but only so he can continue to sit in the council seat that’s rightfully yours? That’s outrageous.”

  “Yep, and he was fairly happy about it, up until the outbreak. Now he’s less happy. I’m fairly certain it’s only out of fear that if I were to catch the illness and die, they might take the seat from him.”

  “Outrageous,” I repeated, shaking my head.

  “He’s not entirely wrong though,” Marcus added.

  “Wrong about what?”

  “Proper citizens have very little need for clinical medicine. Sure, for surgeries and so on, but diseases, viruses, and such are rare.” Marcus flicked me a glance. “My mother died when I was young. She was ill for a long time – they couldn’t help her – but a few years after she died, I was ill for a while too. I promised myself if I got better, when I grew up I was going to help people like me.”

  “People like you?”

  “With Briton blood.”

  “You think you were ill because of your ancestry?”

  “That’s what I thought when I was a child since my mother had been ill too. Recent research seems to confirm it.”

  There it was: my opening to ask more about the illness. I had told Devyn I wouldn’t though. It felt like a betrayal to ask Marcus more about that research now.

  “Their name and their blood.”

  “What?” I had been so caught up in my own internal debate that I’d missed what he said.

  “That’s my inheritance, and it will be our children’s.” He looked at me keenly to check I understood what he was telling me.

  “Their name?” I asked.

  “Yes, just as I was obliged to take my mother’s name rather than my father’s, I also must bear the Anglian name. My full name is Marcus Varian Edward Plantagenet Courtenay.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “Not only am I the last Courtenay, I am also the last Plantagenet,” he said, returning to the subject of his Wilder lineage. He huffed out a laugh. “Did you know that the line of that house hasn’t broken in almost one thousand years?”

  “Really?”

  “Mmm, they fled Normandy after the Empire crushed some rebellion there, came here and conquered Anglia… and apart from a spell in Mercia, they’ve held the kingdom ever since. All those Edwards, Margarets, and Richards for hundreds of years.”
>
  “Why were they in Mercia?” That was where Devyn’s lord lived.

  “Oh, we held Anglia for a century or so but the Plantagenets fled to their cousins in the north. They eventually came together under the rose banner – forming the Union of the Roses – and pushed back.”

  I frowned. “Mercia is ruled by the Plantagenets as well?”

  “It was at that time. But the last of the House of Lancaster, as that branch was known, was killed in battle. His widow married a soldier called Owain Tewdwr from House Glyndwr. Their son married the Lady of the Lake, who was a distant Plantagenet cousin, I seem to recall, and started a new dynasty.”

  “The Tewdwrs.” I had followed enough of that to identify possibly the most famous of all the Briton dynasties. Even I knew of House Tewdwr. “How do you know all this?”

  Briton genealogy wasn’t required knowledge, much to my recent frustration.

  “When I was a child, I was ill. I had a lot of spare time. And the last of the York kings had just died, so it was in the feeds.” He shrugged, glancing wryly down at himself. “Let’s go and get out of these wet clothes.”

  The subject of Briton blood hadn’t come up again but it played on my mind as we walked along the river a couple of weeks later and, on impulse, I led him up the track that went to the old Briton ruins.

  “It’s odd to think that this used to be territory held by the Britons only a few hundred years ago,” I commented, looking around what I supposed would have been a small courtyard or an entrance hall – it was impossible to tell on this side of the buildings. Some were better preserved, the beautiful stonework redder near the crenellations, the foundation stones dark to the point of being black, from age perhaps, or maybe even the fire that had destroyed it hundreds of years earlier.

  Marcus surveyed the ruins. He looked exhausted, I realised. He turned to me, the side of his mouth tilting up.

  “Indeed, we’d have been stuck inside the city walls.”

  The period during which this castle had been inhabited had been a low point in the ebb and flow of control of territory on the island. The Empire had been pushed back and limited to the walled cities: Londinium, Cantiacorum, Dubris, and a handful of other towns.

  “We would have been killed on sight this far out of the city.”

  “I might have. Your ancestors probably danced in these halls.” The lie came easily. For all that Devyn assured me I wasn’t city-born, I had grown up believing myself civilised and that hadn’t changed overnight because of some throwaway claim by a boy with a clear motive to lie to me… however much I was increasingly inclined to feel that it was the truth.

  “Touché.” Marcus acknowledged the hit. “I suppose they probably did.”

  I looked around, imagining that far-off time. On this very ground, the last great House of the Britons had lived and laughed and, by all accounts, generally made merry in between waging war with the Roman city on its doorstep. High King Arthur had been a clever leader despite suffering from poor health most of his life. The last of his line, the Tewdwrs, had united the tribes of Britannia and built their castle boldly on the very doorstep of the Empire’s capitol. Arthur had expanded his reach through his marriage, a dynasty ended by the fire that had taken the high king and his Basque queen.

  There had been rumours that his brother, Henry, and his niece had escaped the flames, but a dark war-torn era had ensued on the island, and the records were hazy regarding what had been going on outside the walls beyond the battles that had pushed the borders north again. That is, until the 1772 Treaty some two hundred or so years later had finally delivered respite from the constant warring.

  “Do you ever wonder what your life might have been like if your family hadn’t married into the city?” I asked, a thought that had recently been surfacing in my own mind. The expression I received clearly questioned my sanity before he even opened his mouth.

  “Why on earth would I? I’m, what, a fraction Anglian? Besides which, if my great-great-whatever-grandmother had married into her own society, I, Marcus, wouldn’t exist at all.” He spread his arms wide to take in our surroundings. “This world is not mine; the one that takes place out here in the country isn’t even one I particularly care for. I love the city, the towers reaching to the sky, the bustle of people toing and froing in the streets and along the river. The lights that keep our city bright, the technology that allows us to live lives that are fuller than they would be if we had to live in the primitive homes of the Britons.” He smiled gently. “I’m pretty much only out here in Richmond because of you. I have no plans to ever leave Londinium.”

  My stomach dropped. I knew he didn’t entirely love it out here – tech tended to be patchy this far from the city… something about the ley line that ran close to the surface. While I also loved Londinium, I felt restored after a summer out in the open air. I sighed inwardly. Would I have to give this up too once we were married? If we married.

  As if sensing my reaction, which I felt I had hidden from him reasonably well, he held out a hand.

  “But if my lady cares to dance while at court…” he offered, in the fashion of the stately Britons.

  I smiled shyly, accepting his hand.

  Evening was starting to fall, and there was the most spectacular red and pink light in the sky. There in the court of the Tewdwrs he swirled me around, our laughter at our foolish behaviour echoing back off the ruined walls.

  Until a wave of sorrow hit me like a wall.

  I wanted to be in Devyn’s arms. He wouldn’t twirl me in a mocking parody of a courtly dance. I somehow knew that here on this ground he would hold me close, respectful of the dead who once lived in these halls. Fierce and proud, taken down before their time by sentinels who had crept in at night and lit up the sky in red and orange flames that would have been seen from the walls of Londinium itself.

  I felt my bottom lip tremble… whether from the echoes of that night held within the ruined walls that left me unsteady on my feet or the lack of Devyn to support me as I crumpled to the ground, I couldn’t be sure.

  Marcus attempted to catch me as I fell, but I was at arm’s length when my legs went from under me.

  “Cassandra.” He knelt beside me, his hands moving across my forehead and taking my pulse, automatically doing medical checks.

  My eyes fluttered open, struggling to focus on his face.

  “Hey.” I felt terrible.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  I was not fine.

  For a moment I had been there in the night, seen the flames licking out of the windows and up the walls of the building opposite, heard the sound of people screaming and running in their nightclothes from figures I recognised as sentinels on account of their night-black tunics and dark red cloaks. They were somewhat more martial than the version worn today, what with the breastplates, but recognisable forebears of the ones who had taken Devyn from class all those months ago.

  The sights and sounds I had seen in that moment replayed in my mind. Most vivid were the sounds of horses, their screams almost human, their hooves battling against stall doors as the smoke and sparks invaded their space.

  “This was a stable,” I murmured.

  There, in the last stall, a door burst open and two horses galloped out into the chaos.

  The first bore a large man with a dark red beard atop a horse who mowed down a sentinel who stood in his path before being cut down by another. The second horse reared but the two riders held their seat, an adolescent boy fighting to stay in control, hesitating, before taking advantage of the distraction provided by the fallen man and riding for the gate.

  Behind the rider was a small child.

  She turned and looked directly at me, glittering green eyes in the most terribly angry face. A child with bright red hair. She had escaped.

  Tears sprang into my eyes. But was it relief at the fate of a child who had lived and died hundreds of years ago or concern that I was finally losing my mind?

>   “What? How do you know?” Marcus asked. His hand softly stroked my hair back from my face.

  I shook off the last vestiges of my latest and weirdest episode. How on earth could I explain my latest sign of lunacy?

  “Know what?” I looked back at him as if I didn’t follow his question.

  “You said this was a stable,” he offered softly.

  “I did? I can’t imagine why. Maybe because I felt like I’d been kicked by a horse.”

  Marcus chuckled softly.

  “There aren’t any horses here now. Are you feeling better? Can I help you up?”

  “That would be good.”

  He started to stand, reaching beneath me to help support me as I went to sit up.

  “Oh,” he exclaimed, pulling at the object that had given him pause, unearthing a rusted horseshoe.

  “Will you look at that.” His voice remained casual even as he looked at me, studying me intensely like I was a specimen in his lab. “Seems you might be right.”

  I swallowed hard. Had what I saw really happened? Had it been replayed for me across the reaches of time through some kind of Wilder sorcery sewn within the stone?

  “Told you I got kicked by a horse. If its ghost can pack that much of a punch, imagine what it must have been like in real life.” My nonsense brought precisely the response I hoped for as he laughed and dropped a kiss on my forehead… the first time he had kissed me since graduation night.

  I instantly froze. I liked Marcus, truly I did, but whenever he touched me in more than a friendly way, I felt like I was betraying Devyn.

  Devyn who had pushed me away… to Marcus.

  I needed to get over it, or I was going to have a rather awful marriage. A marriage to which it seemed I had become reconciled over the summer. It wasn’t like my real match was an option anyway.

  I smiled up at him, and in the hopes of covering my initial reaction I reached up and kissed him lightly on the lips. But I jumped back as the sound of falling stone interrupted the still warmth of the evening.

  “Let’s get you home, shall we?” Marcus’s arm around my shoulder urged me in the direction we had come. “Are you all right to walk?”