Ruin of Stars

by Linsey Miller

  She didn’t answer.

  Probably best.

  There were no words she could offer up to match this feeling, this hole that had replaced my heart, eating everything I’d laid down in it—old memories of my mother’s face, new knowledge of Nacean history, the true sound of my sister’s voice. It ached like hunger and stuck to my ribs, the pull so tight I wanted to curl up most times. It wasn’t fair.

  “It was easy to see when you started hating us,” Emerald said much, much later.

  I shrugged. “Maybe you all just aren’t that great.”

  “Sal.” She exhaled and shook her head. “Why’d you become Opal?”

  “Revenge, better life, the usual.” Rage and nothing and a flicker of want pulsed within me every moment of every day Erlend wasn’t held accountable, and I didn’t know what else to do. I wanted to hate them. I wanted to treasure them. I wanted to learn from them. I wanted to be better than them.

  I wanted to be free of the emotions thrust upon me by their actions, but I didn’t want to say it aloud.

  “Why’d you become Emerald?” A second question, but she’d not stop a conversation.

  She glanced at the sky. “Two questions?”

  “Fine.” I wrapped my coat around my shoulders and turned away. “But don’t think of a way out of it.”

  “I intend for no one to ever hold the position of Emerald but me. No one should know the weight of what killing means. I can handle it. Some couldn’t. I know how far I am willing to go to make sure the people of Igna and Our Queen can live safely. I know how far I can go and still return as myself. My answer to this will always be the same—I love the people that depend on me far too much to let them die or let them know what killing’s like.”

  We did not speak at all after that. We walked for another full day, me slightly behind her. Looking for anything suspicious, I wove through a caravan of people trying to cross into Igna and bartering lunch, and when it came time to cross the line of Erlend soldiers proper, Emerald and I slipped in with their group to keep our movements quiet. No one needed to know where Emerald and Opal had been.

  “One of the kids Erlend took north is from my old gang,” I said softly. “If Our Queen’s got nothing else for me to do, I could go get him and figure out what they’re doing.”

  “No.” She glanced at me from over the corpse of an Erlend soldier, who’d been too eagerly hunting draft dodgers to kill for us to arrest alive. “You will do what Igna needs done. There are rangers out now looking for those children.”

  I didn’t speak again until we were camped out near the caravan, a day’s walk from Willowknot.

  “Why do you shave your head every new moon?”

  Emerald laughed, the upturned corners of her eyes scrunching together. “That’s your last question?”

  “It makes you happy.” I nodded. “I want to know how to be happy.”

  “It’s not a happy story.” She took a deep breath and tilted her head back till the moonlight shimmered across her skin and caught in her eye. “When Marianna and I were at the Thrice-Blessed School, we taught a non-runed alchemy course with a physician named Gaila. Marianna made chalk that she could run through her curls to color. It made her students interested in alchemy and made them think about what they could do. She loved making sure they were happy, not just learning.”

  Sounded good.

  Her metallic nails traced runes on her arms. “It wasn’t just that though. Hair’s its own culture, isn’t it? Another thing she lost. She felt so apart from the Sun-Drenched Coast after—”

  “You’re skipping ahead.” I was grinning. I didn’t want to be, but it was hard to hate the memories of someone being nice.

  Emerald licked her lips and covered her eyes with one hand. “Our Queen Marianna da Ignasi died the night she banished magic. Her heart stopped, and the night sky went completely dark. She was ill for a very long time, and she started losing her hair. So we made a party of it, shaving our heads. It stuck. It’s tradition now.”

  I sniffed. “That’s nice of you.”

  “It’s a good excuse to pretend we’re back in school and our problems are someone else’s.” She studied her hands, turning them over in the thin streaks of light hitting us, and shook her head. “There were twenty attempts on Marianna’s life within the first three months of founding Igna. More followed. Gaspar del Weylin sent person after person, not caring if they lived, not caring if they were good. He wanted her dead in any way possible. There were others too, who just wanted her dead—for banishing magic, for being a mage, for the war, for not surrendering the school. So then the whole of us, the court back then, decided it would be better if we went after the people hiring the contractors and the killers they hired before they came for us. We went after the mages too, who were trying to bring back magic and create new shadows. It was a mess, but Weylin was intent on destroying us. There were no words or calm discussions to be had. His entire ideology is built on our eradication. You cannot reason with that. We tried, failed, got killed, and decided no one else was dying. That is why I am Emerald. That is why Our Queen has a Left Hand. That is why you are Opal. You’re out to kill them so they don’t do what they did to Nacea ever again. Hold on to that.”

  In the dark quiet a few breaths later, without any of the bite her voice usually held, Emerald said, “We’re not perfect. We’re not good. If we went back, I doubt we’d make the same decisions, but that’s why we’re making sure people like you and Elise de Farone and all the others out there have what they need to make the world better than we ever could.”

  I glanced up at the Lady’s stars. Only one of the three was visible, a flicker of silver between the leaves.

  I pried up one of the scabs on my arm, finger sticking to the tacky blood. I’d killed Deadfall. I’d bled for him and the other rangers.

  Least I was in charge of who hurt me now.

  Sometimes I swore the Lady’s stars flickered in time to my prayers, blinking to black with each of my pleas.

  North Star. Let me find the other Naceans. Deadfall. Let me kill the people who took them from me. Riparian. Let me sleep through the night without my family’s faces peering out from the dark at me. Winter. Let me rest.

  It worked half the time, which meant it wasn’t working at all. Rath called it gambler’s luck.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We walked for one more day and wandered into Willowknot with masks blazing in the sun and skin clean as Emerald could make it. She’d insisted we put our masks on before getting to the capital and dust off the days’ worth of dirt before being seen by people—an image to keep up now, so much of politics was image—and she led through the crowds and paths and gates till we reached the common quarters of the Left Hand. The buildings and paths were quiet, a forest hushed before a storm. She squeezed my arm.

  “Sleep.” Her mask came away, and she nudged me to my room. “Amethyst is guarding Our Queen, and I will send her to speak to you when you wake.”

  I nodded. “All right.”

  For all the odd feelings between us, it was still best to do as she said, and some small part of me was still thrilled by her acknowledgment.

  I stumbled into my rooms. They were spotless, as if Maud would leave them as anything else. She’d laid out enough clean clothes for me to pick from as I wished—picking out what went together instead of leaving it up to me—and packed me two more bags in case I needed to leave again. I touched the bags, the clothes, and fell into bed. The ache in my chest was only half the rangers’ fault.

  I hurt now, but it was worth it. It made the love real, made my feelings real. No one—not even Rath—could call me heartless when such a small absence hurt so much.

  “Keep them safe,” I muttered to the ceiling, where I’d painted the Lady’s stars. “Elise, Maud, and Rath. Cam too. Not for me.”

  They’d so many things left they deserved to do. I wanted to see them through.

  I slept for a full day, waking only to remember Maud was gone and day
s away. Ruby’s old servant had been brought back to take her place until she returned, but having him in my space made me think of nothing but being watched. I didn’t give him a key to the rooms.

  Maud’s was on the table by the door.

  I’d not moved it.

  Emerald was stretched out on one of the couches in the common room, a plate of dried fruit balanced on her stomach and using a bundled-up quilt as a pillow. I poured myself some water and sat in a chair near her.

  “I had considered waking you up for a nice round of target practice.” Her eye was closed. She’d a piece of damp cloth draped over her forehead. “You’re welcome.”

  “You’re too kind.” I sipped my water. “Anything happen?”

  Attacks? Assassinations? Spies? Deaths? News?

  “Nothing.” She turned her head and opened her eye. “However, I think it’s important for you to think about why you’re Opal.”

  I huffed and flopped back in the chair, arms covering my face. “You making this a daily thing?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “How fulfilling has killing them been?”

  Not at all. Nothing like I thought. Not enough for what I was doing.

  She nodded. “Killing for revenge is all well and good until they’re dead and you’re left with nothing to do.”

  “Who are we killing?” Amethyst poked her head through her door, hair damp and the pale spaces of her face red from heat. “Because I’m looking forward to this day off.”

  “You can’t call it that if you’re awake longer than you’re asleep,” Emerald muttered. “You need better reasons than revenge to commit to this if you don’t want to lose your entire self to it.”

  “Well, Erlend’s got plenty of faults.” I rose and got myself one of the soft, brown rolls from the table. “I’m sure I can find one.”

  Or one hundred.

  “I imagine Eredan heritage will be an excellent starting point. It seems to be the root of all their issues.” Amethyst scoffed, setting down her cup with as much care as she handled spears. She controlled everything around her. “Or perhaps you can focus on their insistence that if it’s not affecting them, it isn’t that bad.”

  “Our discomfort and death is a small price for them to pay for their comfort.” Emerald took the plate from her. “We fought back and formed Igna because they valued their mindsets over lives and were happy to let us die. They’re not doing it again.”

  From her lips to the Lady’s ears.

  Amethyst spread her arms wide. “And now they’ve returned to crush us and retake their seats above us. They don’t know how to function without a scapegoat.”

  I was as I was, and the rest of the world had to deal with it. I wasn’t alive for them. I wasn’t their scapegoat.

  All this explained why south Igna—old Alona, the cities of the Sun-Drenched Coast—felt safest to me. Erlend’s ideas hadn’t seeped into the coast yet. Not everyone down there viewed it as a strict divide between two.

  “Speaking of scapegoats, we have a court meeting soon.” Emerald pointed at me. “We’ll be discussing the spy situation. We’ve been bleeding out information, and it’s most certainly a servant. Nicolas narrowed it down to the domestic spaces.”

  Good.

  “I’m off until dawn.” Amethyst pulled a plate a food toward herself. “And I intend to spend it sleeping. Let me know if we’ve whittled it down by then.”

  “Yes, yes.” Emerald pulled on her mask and tied the ribbons back. “Mask on, weapons ready.”

  A guard that Emerald forced to stand on her blind side escorted us to a small room I’d never been to before. Part of the palace’s safety was its maze of hallways and minimal exterior doors, and until we passed a window, I’d no idea which direction we were facing. The door was a thick, solid oak and had two guards standing on either side of it. It locked behind us.

  Our Queen nodded when we entered. Nicolas rose from his chair, his knee-length coat swishing about his knees. He was in cheap, layered clothes not tailored to fit him or accommodate his missing arm. He was normally so particular about clothes.

  “Who you been spying on?” I asked.

  He blinked, the runes running across his eyelid covered by cosmetics. “I was out for a drink, not spying.”

  “It doesn’t make you sound more interesting or less like a spy, only insufferable, dear,” Emerald said. “What’s happened?”

  “The spy isn’t a woman.” He tossed a ripped letter to her and shrugged off his coat. The two sheaths on his belt tapped against his boots. “A woman recruited and sent them here.”

  Emerald held up the note to one of the lamps. “Who wrote this?”

  “An Erlend spy who gave up his life of spying to live his life in Igna.” Nicolas sat back down and bowed his head to Emerald. “The one you killed was still active. This one wasn’t. He liked Igna, quite a bit to hear him tell it, and I tracked him down from some old census records. He agreed to talk and is staying in the Gray Rooms.”

  It was a pleasant name for the barely furnished, over-guarded blocks where we housed noncriminal prisoners who needed watching on palace grounds.

  Politically better sounding, Nicolas had told me.

  Which more and more meant disguising the truth.

  Emerald scowled so hard her mask moved. “Do you think this means they were the only ones left here, or the rest remained loyal and none of them tried to leave Willowknot?”

  Emerald had been sent to kill a spy running for Erlend after a decade of spying on us, and the idea of more of them still here, still spying, still reporting to Erlend, made me shudder. At least some had defected.

  She handed me the note. It had been torn down the middle, making most of the words impossible to read.

  “I think it is safest if we assume the others remained loyal to Erlend and are still out to assassinate Our Queen or one of us.” Nicolas rested his elbow on his knee and leaned his chin on it. His tall torso still barely fit in the chair. “It is certainly a domestic servant and someone now of age. The one I found is desperate to prove his loyalty but unable to name any others but two—both dead.”

  Our Queen laughed so softly I almost missed it. “Weylin has been exaggerating the greatness of his Erlend pieces and the weaknesses of Igna for so long, but it seems many have finally seen the truth.”

  He couldn’t operate without all his lies and propaganda. But not everyone bought into it.

  “Opal.” Emerald turned to me. “If you were sent to kill Our Queen, how would you do it?”

  I laughed.

  Our Queen didn’t.

  “Knowing what I do about this place?” I asked, and Emerald nodded. “Lock the doors to a court meeting in one of these weird, escape-proof rooms and set the place on fire.”

  Emerald snorted. “We do need to change those up.”

  “We can tomorrow, and we’ll have an idea of who we’re looking for by then. The records from longer than five years ago, around when we gained most of the domestic servant staff, are incomplete and not standardized.” Nicolas glanced at the door. “Lena and I tried to go through them, but it was staggering how ill equipped our accounting was back then. We vetted several servants—each Left Hand servant; Dimas, since he’s been keeping the records for the visiting and military boarding since; and a few others. They’re sending up the list of names within my guidelines any moment. Our other pressing matter is the missing children.”

  I shifted and moved behind one of the chairs. Itching unease crept down my back and arms, and I gripped the chair back. Cam could be dead.

  I was certainly dead to Rath, regardless of the outcome.

  “Some of the writing in the letter you found was Nacean, wasn’t it?” Emerald asked.

  There was no remnant of Nacea that would work with Erlend. Not willingly. Not that we wouldn’t know about.

  “Location names, yes, but there are still several towns around the old borders bearing Nacean names.” Nicolas’s eyes flicked to me. He stiffened. “I doubt the spy is N
acean and especially doubt they would willingly work for Lord del Weylin if they were.”

  Her hands were too busy with the other soon-to-be corpses we gave her.

  “Deadfall made the shadows in Nacea,” I said, but it barely escaped my mask. “The first shadow in Nacea was the First Star. He told me that.”

  Our Queen ground her teeth together, locking her fingers together. “I am glad you had a chance to meet another on your list.”

  I’d a mind to respond rudely, but someone knocked on the door. Emerald opened it, short sword out. It was Dimas.

  “Apologies for my lateness.” He bowed spectacularly deep for all of us, and his braid of black hair tumbled over his shoulder. The cuff on his ear sparkled in the lights. “I have the records you requested, though I recommend reading the transcriptions first, as the originals are quite worn.”

  “Thank you, Dimas.” Nicolas waved him to the empty chair.

  “I’m sorry.” Dimas set the box down on the chair. “Really.”

  He ripped a stiletto knife from the papery depths, ink splattering across the floor, and brought it down toward Our Queen’s heart.

  Chapter Twenty

  Nicolas pushed her out of the way. She went flying into the wall, and I went flying for Dimas. He spun, blade slicing through the air, and I ducked. Nicolas, off balance, caught the knife in his chest. Dimas ripped it out. A blur of green dove past my head as I tackled him.

  Dimas shrieked, hitting the ground back first. I rose to my knees and punched him. Blood splattered across my hands and the stones, and Dimas slapped my shoulder. I toppled over.

  An earringing pain shot through my head, and I slashed at Dimas’s arms. Nothing.

  Lady, how’d he hit me so hard?

  Dimas, weaponless and listing, used the far wall to stand. A jagged streak of red dripped down the back of his hand. He turned to run, but an arrow pinned his hand to the wall. He screamed, nearly tearing it free in his panic. I crawled to my feet, stumbling, and turned. Emerald lowered her bow.