Ruin of Stars

by Linsey Miller

  Took all my effort not to bow back. I was Opal, not Sal, and bowed to no one but Our Queen unless I wanted to be polite.

  And I didn’t. Not with any of them. Not with the whole of her court ignoring Nacea’s slaughter to make sure Erlend didn’t resist being combined with Alona to form the new nation Igna under Our Queen.

  “What did Lord del Aer say?” Nicolas’s voice was low and rough. He’d grown ashen and more frantic since the night I’d been named Opal.

  The night Elise’s father had been revealed as Winter and restarted this whole damned war with Erlend. He and Five had killed Ruby, tried to kill Ruby’s sister, Isidora dal Abreu, abducted Elise, and nearly killed me. The next night, every Erlend noble except three had seceded from the ten-year-old nation of Igna.

  Before the war a decade ago, before Igna existed, there’d been three nations: Erlend to the north, with Nacea tucked into its southwestern side, and Alona to the south. After Erlend’s atrocities in the war and their hand in making the shadows, Our Queen had tried to start over by combining what was left of Erlend and Alona into Igna, and only the northernmost tip of Erlend had held out. Lord Gaspar del Weylin, the king who’d bow to no woman title-thief, still ruled those mountain reaches. His constant attacks on Igna were why the Left Hand was even needed.

  Course, I knew him as North Star, the one who’d come up with the plan to let Nacea get slaughtered in order to buy Erlend time to escape the shadows.

  “Lord del Aer said nothing useful.” I handed him the bag from my shoulder. “That’s all his papers.”

  I’d recognized names and maps but nothing more.

  Emerald glanced at me, the muscles of her neck tight with a scowl. “People will know what happened.”

  “No,” I said. “Made it look like he’d burned them. Made him look scared.”

  “We’ll see.” Emerald handed Nicolas the ear. “Runes?”

  “None I ever used.” He held it up to the sun, shadows peppering his gaunt face. “You?”

  She shook her head. “Ask Isidora when she’s up to it.”

  “How is she?” I’d not seen Isidora since leaving the infirmary. “Physicians cleared her to leave?”

  She’d taken up teaching me to read, laying out books on the unused bed next to me, and had been a good teacher when she wasn’t crying. I’d have holed myself away if I’d lost my twin twice in one lifetime too. The silence Ruby had left behind was thick and cloying.

  “She’s mending.” Nicolas tucked the ear into his chest pocket—odd man—and took the papers from my hands. The servant who usually accompanied him to carry around his notes wasn’t here. “She’s glad we have no time to audition a new Ruby.”

  She’d not gotten to burn her brother before, when he’d been Rodolfo da Abreu and the war criminal who’d killed the Erlend mages responsible for making the shadows. Least he got his funeral rites this time, even if only a select few knew we’d been saying farewell to Rodolfo and not just Ruby. Was it worse now with his pyre ash still clinging to our mourning clothes? Or did it feel more final?

  “You’re to meet with Our Queen after me,” Nicolas said softly. “I’m sure Isidora would love to see you alive and well after that.”

  He bowed again and left. Emerald grabbed my arm, fingers tight but not painful.

  “You’re being rude.” She pulled me away from the guard to her right and onto the shaded path to the inner workings of the palace.

  “You didn’t make me Opal because of my good manners.”

  Nicolas was all right, teaching me to fence and turning over all his Nacean goods to me, but he’d still been part of the Igna court that had let Winter and Caldera and Coachwhip—Horatio del Seve, the Erlend lord I’d killed during auditions—take no responsibility for their hand in Nacea’s slaughter. I understood the decision.

  Didn’t like it.

  Emerald leaned over me, her breath puffing out from beneath her mask. “You should be more polite to the people who thought you the best candidate for Opal. We’re not too arrogant to refuse the opinions of confidants.” She let me go. “Which was my main concern about you. Your personal vendettas cannot trump the well-being of Igna.”

  As of right now, the northern lands that had been Igna’s only months ago were under Erlend rule yet again, but people remembered the strict rules of Erlend society and were fleeing south. I didn’t blame them.

  Most were like me—their very existence outside of Erlend’s fragile standards threatened the old Erlend way of life. As if my existence was a threat because I didn’t hold to Erlend’s narrow definitions of man or woman.

  And they always said “or.”

  Those folks fleeing had no place in North Star’s fight.

  “I won’t put Igna in danger,” I said. “No more than you.”

  Emerald clucked her tongue against her teeth. “Clean yourself up before you meet with Our Queen.”

  I hummed to keep from speaking and ducked into one of the squat corridors servants used to traverse the buildings. Maud had acquired clothes and soaps and a dozen other unnecessary things for me while I’d been laid up in the infirmary with one arm splinted and my chest bound in bandages. It had been overwhelming, the options she’d given me each morning, and she’d stopped asking. There were so many things happening it felt wrong to worry over whether I was wearing wool or cotton.

  She’d be in my quarters now, not quite used to the new white collar of her uniform that marked her as my servant, with more questions than anything, and I couldn’t handle it yet.

  I washed my face in a basin set aside for servants to clean their hands and shook the dust from my tunic.

  Wasn’t trying to impress Our Queen these days anyway.

  Chapter Three

  Our Queen of the Eastern Spires and Lady of Lightning Marianna da Ignasi, draped in an olive-green dress and silver scale armor, was more tense than impressed with me.

  “I told you to kill him.” Her fingers, opal ring casting white across the floor, clacked against the armrest. “I did not tell you to start rumors about Nacea.”

  I pulled up from my bow. Her gaze still prickled on my skin even with my mask between us. “You didn’t instruct me not to. They think they can get away with it again,” I said, “because you never called them out for it.”

  She nodded. The runes lining her eye flickered in the light as though they still lived, and the jagged shadow of her armored silhouette shifted. “Did you harm anyone else?”

  “No.” I shuddered and met her gaze. “I knocked out two guards with a tree branch. They’ll think it an accident of nature.”

  “Good.” The interlocking scales of her armor were runed and sharp, sawtoothed where one might grab her in a fight, and the padded leather at her shoulders exaggerated her strength. She looked all-powerful. “Do you know the others on your list yet?”

  North Star. Deadfall. Riparian. Caldera. Winter.

  Gaspar del Weylin. Deadfall. Riparian. Mattin del Aer. Nevierno del Farone.

  “No.” Deadfall and Riparian were mysteries. “I’m working on it.”

  “Come. You will escort me to our court meeting.” She rose, trembling, and reached out her hand. “Or shall I call Emerald?”

  Emerald was terrifying and overprotective of Our Queen, and I’d no desire to die at her hands.

  “Of course.” I let her grasp my arm. “How would you like to walk?”

  She was careful not to cut me with her armor. “Slowly.”

  Nicolas had explained why Our Queen toned down the effects of her illness. Erlend’s fault, of course. He had turned to me while teaching me history and said, “What do you see when you look at me?”

  “A hawk,” I’d said. “Or a stork, depending on how you’re standing.”

  Isidora had laughed from her seat across the table.

  “Erlend sees weakness.” He’d laughed too—and smiled. “Nothing matters to them so much as appearing what they think they are, fulfilling their image of power, and I do not anymore.” He
gestured to his missing arm. “Our Queen and I share very different yet similar liabilities in Erlend’s eyes. She must appear as their definition of strength in order to make them wary. We like them wary.”

  Our Queen stopped me at the door to the courtroom and straightened her claw-tipped gauntlet. She’d not held me with that hand. “This is good.”

  “Of course, Our Queen.” I bowed again—best I put on a show for the guards—and let her enter the room before me.

  It was not a large room. Wasn’t grand either. Three of the four walls were bare, and only one large map covered the other one. The low ceiling was lit by lanterns, and there were no handholds to boost you up to the two rafters. I’d tried it. They’d designed the room for safety.

  I entered. Emerald saw me first, shaking her head at my dust-covered clothes. Nicolas was at the table already, and the seat next to him for Isidora was empty. I paced around to the far wall near the only other door, the one servants used, and waited. The door creaked open, Dimas’s familiar face peeking through. The cosmetics beneath his eyes were smudged.

  He’d been looking rough. Lady de Arian had taken a liking to him after her stay in one of the visitor houses, and now he was serving as her personal assistant. Maud was furious.

  “And he got mad at me for being in it for the money.” Maud appeared at my elbow, her nose crinkling as she scowled, and handed me a spotless coat. “At least dress like you care.”

  I shucked off my traveling coat and pulled on the new one. “You leaving me to work for Lady de Arian?”

  “Don’t have to.” Maud grinned and tucked my dirty coat under her arm. “My family’s from her holdings, and she’s been helping me figure out where we used to live. And look!”

  Maud spun, braid smacking my shoulder. A gold hair pin with small green gemstones spiraling out like flower petals held the strands of her hair too short for the braid. A hot, sticky weight filled my throat.

  I’d offered Maud gifts, but she rarely accepted, citing propriety and privilege and how I was already paying her. I’d practically had to force her to let me help pay off her siblings’ keeping costs and travel.

  “You couldn’t do opals?”

  Her smile twisted. “My life isn’t about you.”

  Lady de Arian entered and nodded to Maud, who bowed and grinned. I scowled.

  “My guards took my pack to my room,” I said quickly. “Can you take care of it?”

  “Yes.” Maud narrowed her eyes at me, nose crinkling, and sighed. “I’m glad you’re back.”

  The rest of the servants filed out, Dimas pulling up the rear, and he glanced at Maud once, gaze skipping over me. She huffed.

  “Thank you,” I whispered as she followed them out.

  “This will be quick,” Our Queen said. Her voice carried across the room, and the members of the guard sat. The guards and Left Hand stayed standing. “Only one thing has changed since yesterday, and that is the number of living Erlend nobles.”

  Lady de Arian stiffened. “Mattin is dead, then?”

  “Yes.” Our Queen set her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands.

  There were only three Erlend nobles left in Igna—Lord Nicolas del Contes, Lady Lena de Arian, and Honorable Lark del Erva. Each of them was vocal about their hate for Erlend’s policies and history, but they still winced whenever we spoke of Erlend’s fate and the fate of its nobles.

  “Not to be crass,” Honorable del Evra said, “but good. That man was a bloody battle in the making.”

  “True.” Lady de Arian nodded, the tightly bound bun of blond hair atop her head wobbling.

  She was older than Nicolas, maybe thirty-five or so, but they shared the same wrinkles at the corners of their eyes and deep worry line between their brows. Her hair hadn’t started turning silvery white like his though.

  “Nicolas will know more tonight, but we have groups moving into Mattin’s lands now. Lord del Weylin will send soldiers, of course, but they will get there after ours, barring any complications.”

  Nicolas nodded. “Hinter is directly to the north, and Lord del Farone sent most of his west to the border. Only Mattin’s troops are there now, and ours outnumber them.”

  “You’ll be updated tonight once we have word of what’s happened.” Our Queen leaned back. “Other than that, I have no pressing matters that we have not already discussed.”

  I rocked from heel to toe, and a guard against the wall did the same. These meetings were always tedious.

  Honorable Lark del Evra leaned forward. “What of the flayed corpses? The ones Gaspar del Weylin is using to claim we have shadows?”

  “Isidora identified one by his teeth.” Nicolas shook his head. “He’d had work done she recognized as by a local gnathic. He was a furrier traveling north for winter, and his flaying was done by hand.”

  I shuddered. Three’s red, open eyes still peeked from the dark corners of my dreams.

  “No way to track how it was done?” Lark asked.

  “None.” Nicolas shook his head. “It’s almost certainly a scout or soldier given the type of blade, though Isidora isn’t quite sure yet. She was going to wait to confirm it.”

  Our Queen winced. The guard pulled his sword from its sheath. I lunged, fear rising in me. Guards didn’t draw swords in here.

  Ever.

  Amethyst and Emerald turned to me. The guard took advantage of their looks and darted forward. I sprinted to the table and leapt over it, sliding across the pages laid across it. Lady de Arian fell back and out of her chair. Our Queen turned. The guard raised his knife.

  Amethyst got there first.

  She disarmed him with a single hit, the sickening crack of his arm echoing through the room, and he crumpled. I slid to a stop next to her.

  “Leave him.” Our Queen stood with her back to the wall and Emerald between her and the would-be assassin. “We need him alive.”

  “Marc de Graff,” Lady de Arian said quickly, white skin pale from shock. She grasped at the chain around her neck and spun the too-long key dangling from it. I’d never seen her nervous before. “He was one of Mattin’s guards until four months ago.”

  Erlend had planted killers in our midst long ago, then.

  “In that case,” Amethyst said, pulling her arm back to strike, “we don’t need him alive.”

  Lady de Arian grabbed Amethyst’s arm. “We do. He has peers. Let them see what happens to traitors.”

  I looked down at him, the white expanse of my mask reflected in his green eyes, and his gaze slid to Lady de Arian and Amethyst. He opened his mouth.

  “Knock him out,” Lady de Arian said. “Arrest him. We need to find his friends.”

  I hadn’t believed Lady de Arian when she’d told me she had been Elise’s childhood mentor, but they shared the same measured shrewdness.

  I slammed my heel into the assassin’s temple and knocked him out. It was a dirty hit, maybe fatal, but the physicians could probably sort him out.

  I was getting real tired of Erlend surprises.

  We needed to find the other would-be assassins before they found us.

  Chapter Four

  “Why bother with the Alonian-born ones?” I asked Emerald.

  I’d learned patience during my fall. When Elise’s father, Winter, had tried to kill me by pushing me out of a window, I’d not flailed about or reached out for the bare stone walls and wooden windowsills flying by me. I’d waited for the thorny rose trellises and thin wooden outcroppings. Emerald said they’d slowed my fall enough to keep me from dying when I finally hit the Caracol.

  I shrugged when she looked at me. “It’ll just make our search longer.” Course, I’d not had much patience to begin with.

  “Because it sets a terrible precedent, breaks trust, and means we’re leaving half our suspects unchecked.” She beckoned me into a room with only the Left Hand, the remaining Erlend-born nobles, and our assassin. “Igna is not a perfect nation. It is not only Erlends who want Our Queen dead.”

  But only Erlen
ds had ever sent assassins and started a war.

  “Lena.” Our Queen sat on the lone chair in the room and yanked the gauntlet from her forearm. “How do you know the name of one of Mattin’s old guards?”

  Lady de Arian spread her hands out, palms up. “I know the name of every single one of my citizens working in Willowknot. I made it my business to know. It’s why I was so surprised to find Dimas de Gaila and Maud de Pavo right under my nose. Start with my citizens. We will have all of their backgrounds on hand and it will be easier to rule them out quickly,” she said, clipping each sound just so. “Should you interrogate Maud or should I?”

  I scowled. “No one’s touching Maud.”

  “Hush.” Emerald’s face turned to me, and I knew she was glaring by the tightness of her jaw. “The most likely candidates for grooming—who are they?”

  Lady de Arian shook her head. “The best for making an assassin?”

  “The easiest to train and mold to your will.” Emerald gestured to me. “We recruit young adults. Who would Gaspar del Weylin have recruited?”

  “Someone young. A boy, of course, as if Gaspar could conceive of a girl undertaking murder.”

  Honorable Lark del Evra and I laughed at the same time, and Lady de Arian ducked her head.

  Lark, a stout noble with a penchant for bird-watching and from the lands east of Nicolas’s, was practically Lady-sent and glorious. They were forty-two, married, and entirely done with Erlend’s strict thoughts on gender. We were alike, not the same, but they were more than happy to spend all night talking to me about life when I asked.

  I’d asked twice. They’d invited me to dinner and let me ask questions till I ran out.

  “He would not even consider your possibilities.” She laid a hand to her chest, fingers shaking.

  Lark shrugged, pearl necklace clacking against their chest. “Yes, he hated me even before I rejected my original name and title. I was never enough for Erlend.”

  I’d heard the same from the folks up north and near the old border between Alona and Erlend. I was too emotional to be a man, too stoic to be a woman, as if my feelings determined either. Erlends and those who’d lived close enough to pick up their ways had been telling me for years I’d been doing “man” and “girl” wrong. Always girl too. Lark had said the same.