Ruin of Stars

by Linsey Miller

  “Briar?” the ranger muttered, gaze still stuck on the other dead ranger.

  “What?” I tapped his face. “Briar what?”

  “They got nicknames,” the boy said. He waited for me to turn and peeked out from behind Rath. “That one’s Vine.”

  “They can regrow us,” Vine said. His eyes were unfocused. His lips tinted blue. “They can always pick another.”

  Of course Erlend ruined even its rangers. Bain burned their real selves down and regrew them from the ashes, a forest fire of a person.

  “Wouldn’t that get confusing?” Rath asked. “All having the same name?”

  I glanced back at him. “I know you’ve met least three people with your name. You get confused?”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Vine, eyes here.” I flicked the ranger’s nose and held two fingers up to my face. “Why you stealing kids?”

  “I don’t know.” He coughed, blood bubbling between his teeth. “Orders.”

  Orders.

  North Star, Deadfall, Riparian, Caldera, and Winter had given orders, soldiers had obeyed, and my entire country had been slaughtered. Orders were the last defense of ethically corrupt.

  “Where you taking them?” I took his chin in my hand and lifted it, letting the blood drain back down his throat and buying him a few more words. “How do you know which kids?”

  Bain clacked his teeth together, like cracking a pumpkin seed. He’d given in too quietly. I pointed the knife at him. He stilled.

  Vine coughed again. “Lynd. They’re the ones don’t bleed less you cut them.”

  “What you mean?” I asked.

  “We got an example—”

  Bain spat. A white blur shot out of his mouth and lodged in the back of Vine’s throat. I shoved Bain aside, and Vine, gasping and hacking up blood, collapsed. My hands held his throat.

  No pulse.

  “Rath,” I said quickly. “Search him.”

  I held two knives to Bain’s neck while Rath went through his pockets. It was typical, really. Erlend stealing kids from other countries and using them for their own means. They stole land, titles, lives. What were a few children on top of that?

  “Sal.” Rath’s soft voice barely reached me over the crackling fire. “Why’s he got an ear?”

  Rath held an ear in his palm, a tiny one with wrinkled, brown skin and a piercing in the lobe. Runes, black and solid, lined the upper shell.

  Magic had no place in mortal skin even when it was allowed, but to carve runes into a child when magic didn’t even work, when nothing but blood would come of it, was a level few mages had ever lowered themselves to.

  I shuddered.

  “What’s this mean?” Rath shoved the ear under Bain’s nose. “Who’d you take this from?”

  “Can’t be Cam. Don’t worry.” I pulled it from him, a memory itching in the back of my head, and turned it over in my hands. “Looks familiar.”

  Bain turned fully to me, eyes widening.

  I traced the runes. Turned the ear sideways.

  “It’s not runes,” I said softly. It was a word. “Eat.”

  A Nacean word. Sliced into dead flesh. The bone-shivering word settled over me, too soft, too long in my mouth for the sharp pain it caused.

  “That one didn’t work, like most things in the Fallow.” Caden de Bain chuckled. “North Star will tear you apart just like he did all your others a decade ago.”

  I froze, then whispered, “Fallow. You keeping mentioning ‘fallow.’ And you called Weylin ‘North Star.’”

  No Erlend had ever called Gaspar del Weylin that. None would know it unless they’d a secret name too.

  Caden de Bain did not move, did not speak, did not do much of anything, and I flipped the knife to a forward grip. The blade stood upright between us.

  “Which one are you?” I asked him. “Deadfall or Riparian?”

  He laughed.

  I knew the answer. I knew him now better than I knew myself.

  Because of him, I knew him better than I knew Nacea. Riparian was too gentle a name, too much like the rivers it described.

  I’d not even had to go looking.

  He was practically Lady sent.

  Deadfall.

  I slammed the hilt of my knife into the back of his hand.

  “You’ll have to hit harder than that.” He laughed. “You’re much too scared to make a shadow of me.” He leaned in close.

  I turned the knife over. Pinned his hand to the floor.

  “I’ll never tell you what we did with those kids,” Deadfall said, “but want to know what I did to you?”

  Rath sniffed. “So you know where they are?”

  “Your country had three queens or whatever you called them, and I used to watch them.” His head tilted, his gaze slipping from my face to the knife and back to me. “Namrantha, up north, was my favorite, but I got sent down south. That one started forcing soldiers off the land, making trouble, talking to Alona, and Gaspar asked me to take care of it. So I snuck in a mage and we did. We created the first shadow in Nacea. She didn’t scream. Most of them did, but she never uttered a word.”

  The Stars of Nacea, one of each of the Lady’s stars, were the last living descendants of her. They were perfect. They were sacred.

  They were dead.

  “She didn’t talk till the end. Sounded like wind or breathing. We didn’t leave her tongue, but she talked. Always wondered how they did that. Pulled her teeth out too.” He shook his head, blood dripping down the wall behind him. “Wouldn’t have known though, if you’d seen her gnaw her sister’s face off.” Drip. “Soon she was busy with the other soon-to-be corpses we gave her.”

  I was back in Nacea. The fire at my back dimmed. My vision tightened to one pinprick of light. The shadows at the corners twisted and spread. Blood, like salt in the air, burned in my nose, and the creak of the firewood became the skittering of beetle legs on bone. A shadow peeled itself from between the rangers. Their blood seeped into its nothing mouth.

  “We didn’t bring shadows to Nacea.” Deadfall leaned in close. Grinned. “We made them there.”

  I jammed the knife into his throat.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Deadfall died laughing.

  His blood soaked my hands. It dripped in the quiet rushing of my mind, slowing with each of my breaths. My heartbeat, too fast and flighty, fluttered in my head, and the howling nothing in my ears grew. I turned over my red, warm hands.

  Coachwhip. Caldera. Deadfall.

  My right ear ached. Rath’s voice, far, far away.

  Dead. Dead. Dead.

  Like my parents. Like my siblings. Like Nacea.

  But I didn’t feel better.

  The ache again. Rath’s voice echoed in my head. The words didn’t make sense. I twisted to him.

  He punched me.

  I blinked, facedown on the floor, and lifted my head. It was like wading, like the air was water and my ears were full of it. It muffled Rath and held me down. He sneered over me.

  It was like watching someone else. Like being someone else. No, I was me, but I wasn’t the Sal here now. This was happening to someone else.

  I touched my stinging cheek, my wounded side, and came away with nothing but the throbbing sting of new pain.

  Rath screamed and snatched my arm.

  “He was goading you.” Rath’s fingers dug into my arm as his voice wobbled and slowed. The rushing in my ears dulled. “He wanted you to kill him so he’d not have to tell us.”

  “Good,” the Sal who couldn’t be me said. “He deserved it.”

  Rath threw his pack at me. “Does Cam?”

  I couldn’t get my mouth to move.

  “You ass!” Rath stumbled back, raking his hands across his face. “He knew where Cam was. We had him. He could’ve taken us to him.”

  “He’d have never told us anything unless it hurt us.” Deadfall—Caden de Bain—was made of hurts. He’d have fed us lies till we were sick. It was all he was and all he had.r />
  Rath leaned over me, salted eyes narrow. “You don’t know that.”

  “I do.” Bain hadn’t flinched as I killed his rangers, and he’d not moved when I stabbed his hand. There was nothing we could’ve said, no goodness we could’ve appealed to, to get the truth from him. He’d sooner have died than give anyone but him satisfaction. “He’d have led us round in circles till Cam was dead or led us to a grave or a different boy or a soldier camp. He’d have done anything to hurt us and nothing to help no matter what.”

  Wouldn’t he have?

  We made them there.

  I shuddered and swallowed back the sick creeping up my throat. “I was sent here to kill him, and he was—”

  “Damn your orders.” Rath crouched and took my face in his hands. “Lords, Sal, you going to pull rank and jobs on me? Over family? Over helping kids? They come first. What’s the point in protecting Igna if we’ve got no future to live in it?”

  His touch prickled across my skin. Too much.

  I pulled away.

  “Sal?” he asked. “You really that heartless? You really going to leave Cam?”

  Rath didn’t believe in leaving kids behind. They deserved coddling and chances and all the things Rath and I hadn’t had.

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  Rath was too kind. He was full of softness and truth and all the pretty things in the world. He handfed sick starlings at our window no matter how long they kept us awake with their cawing. He bought the extra-fancy, double-the-price tonics and syrups for the young members of Grell’s gang when they were sick just because the cheap ones tasted like feet. He was the opposite of suffering and death.

  The opposite of Deadfall.

  “If I’d left him alive,” I said slowly, “he’d have led us to some other death. He’d never have told us. Never.”

  And now he was dead, but so was everyone else still. I didn’t feel better no matter what I was telling Rath. I felt nothing. Felt everything. My body was too small, too tight. An uncomfortable reminder of still being here.

  “Think I’ve had more meetings with grief and death than you.” I sniffed, nose burning. “I get it. I’m sorry I killed him before you were satisfied.”

  Rath scowled. “And now Cam can join your useless, dead family, all thanks to you.”

  A quick, sharp pain shot through me. In all our years together, he’d never spoken of my family. He’d never pushed me to explain beyond what I was comfortable saying. He’d never asked me for proof. He’d never doubted my pain.

  We could get Cam back. I only had to think. Move. “Help me up. We can find him.”

  If they were taking kids from the south and shipping them up north to Lynd, Cam still had a few days before he got here.

  Unless the ears were part of something more harmful than dead runes and severed ears.

  “Help yourself.” Rath spun away from me and made a choking, disgusted sound in the back of his throat, then knelt before the boy. “You want me to take you home?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Come on.” Rath pulled him into a hug. They boy was hardly seven and small enough for Rath to carry. “Let’s get you back to your family and then I can find mine.”

  I sat back against the wall, chest aching.

  Rath’s family didn’t include me anymore.

  “We could do it, you know,” I said. “Find him. I can—”

  “Don’t worry about it. Just do your job, Opal.” Rath stopped in the doorway to the barn. “I don’t know which ‘we’ you’re talking about.”

  “Us,” I said quickly. The empty space where he had been widened and pressed in. I scratched my arms. “Always us.”

  It had always been us, against everyone and everything.

  “There’s no ‘us.’” Rath didn’t look at me. “Not anymore. I can’t tell if I’m talking to Sal or Opal half the time, and that’s too much Opal for me. You go do your job. I’ll find Cam. If you want to help, hunt me down. I’ll be in Mossvale.”

  I stumbled to my feet, but Rath walked away.

  He was right.

  I was Opal. I wasn’t Sal, not anymore, but Sal and Opal understood Deadfall better than he ever could. Viciousness for the sake of viciousness escaped Rath. I’d been molded by it.

  I sunk back to the floor.

  I didn’t sleep. An uneasy heat stuck to my skin, itching each time I breathed. The blood washed off easy, and the fire died. In the dark of the barn with nothing but corpses for company, the shadows returned, and I curled up in the corner with my eyes on the door and my back to a wall. They slithered in the edges of my sight, always just out of reach, vanishing when I turned to look. It was only the shadow of a bird outside. Only the shadow of my hands.

  I waited and watched. A shadow slipped through the cracks in the walls, oozing over the floor and swallowing up Deadfall in a puddle of dark. Not black.

  Black was a color.

  Shadows had no substance.

  Not real.

  It peered at me, the blurred edges of its face too black against the night.

  Not real.

  It touched my bleeding side. “Is this you?”

  My blood dripped from the nothing where its fingers should’ve been.

  I couldn’t speak. I was on my back and couldn’t move. The shadow slunk away in the silence, blood splattering across the floor. A low rumble rose in the distance. I jerked up.

  Awake. Up. Awake.

  Had I been asleep?

  My eyes weren’t stuck together, and I couldn’t remember closing or opening them. I struggled to stand and pulled myself to my feet. Deadfall and the rangers were still there, no shadows, only flies freckling their pale skin. Rath and the boy were truly gone. It was light out. They’d be a good ways away now.

  I groaned and stretched.

  The squish of carriage wheels in wet grass came from outside. New, louder sounds rattled through the barn and in my head. It wasn’t as bad now, the water and the wading and the roar.

  I picked up Deadfall’s sword and pulled out my knife.

  Time to be Opal again.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The barn was all right cover, and I sat in wait behind the uneven slats. A plain carriage, the cheap kind with no extras or guards, rolled into view, and the driver pulled back at sight of the barn. She shouted something to the occupants.

  Five guards, armored but not adorned in any colors that would betray their loyalties, darted out of the carriage and started searching the area. Two headed for the barn.

  I sighed, raised my weapons, and pulled on the dark midnight mask.

  I wouldn’t look like Opal, but I’d look like a member of Our Queen’s Left Hand, and maybe that would be threatening enough.

  “Barn’s occupied.” I stepped out of it, shoulders rolled back. The blood on my clothes would have to stay. Maybe, like the scars, it’d make me look dashing instead of like a mess. “So you should move along.”

  The guards all stilled, arms pulled back to throw a spear or fire a bolt, and I tapped my mask with my knife.

  “There’s four dead rangers in there,” I said, putting all the loathing and bite Emerald would into the words. “What’s four normal soldiers going to be to me?”

  “Opal?” a voice called from the carriage.

  I nodded. “And you are?”

  Lena de Arian stepped from the carriage. She was wearing a dress of silver so pale it looked white, and the simple design couldn’t hide the expensive wool or stitching. The key necklace dangled freely from her neck. No blue, no green. Traveling without loyalties.

  “Excellent.” She swept a few strands of light hair from her face and grinned. “It’s good to see you.”

  Her guards stood down.

  “What are you doing here?” I lowered my knife and sword and stepped forward, the unsettling prickle of being watched fading. “You’re across the border.”

  She sniffed, face pulling up into the sneer Elise must’ve learned from her. “Hardly. My lands
are a day’s ride east of here, and it was safer to cross here than try to get through Mattin’s chaotic mess. My lands are between the old Alona and Erlend border, and I’ve no intention of letting Erlend move in simply because I’ve been at court.”

  “Well, the rangers here won’t bother you anymore.” I nodded to the barn. “You need an escort?”

  “No,” she said, gesturing back to the carriage. “I think we’re prepared.”

  And then, from the dark within the carriage, a familiar, calloused hand reached out and grasped the door for support. Maud stepped out.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d prefer to offer my brief resignation from my duties in person.” Maud bowed to Lena and then to me. “Opal.”

  I inclined my head. “Maud.”

  “I’m sorry for doing this while you were gone, but Lena has offered me a very good opportunity to see where I was born and perhaps reclaim my mother’s home, and I couldn’t pass it up.” Maud flipped her braid over her shoulder, the emerald hairpin glittering behind her ear. She wasn’t in gray, and it didn’t look right. Her leggings were the thick, deep bronze of age-old weapons, and her flowing blouse and sweater were a dark, nearly black green. She looked sharp. Flowy. Nothing like the Maud I knew who wore and cared for her uniform like it was the best thing in the world. “I’m going with her to Aren while I still can. My siblings have family there. They might not have taken them in, but war changes people. I want to see what they have to say now. I can’t deny them that.”

  I swallowed. A yawning, bitter pit opened in the back of my throat and swallowed all my words. Maud too then.

  No Rath. No Elise. No Maud.

  The best parts of my world were scattering.

  “All right.” If that was what Maud wanted, I’d no business stopping her. “You need me to do anything?”

  “No.” She shook her head and crinkled her nose. Not the good kind. “No, thank you. Lena has more than taken care of everything.”

  Something about Maud—her tone, her posture, her still-wrinkled nose—was off, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  “You all right, though?” I leaned in close and whispered loud enough for Lena to hear, “You mad at me?”

  If something odd was going on, let Maud be able to tell me.