Ruin of Stars

by Linsey Miller

  “Stay,” she said. She did not move, but I knew she looked at me. “Opal, keep him there. Pin him somewhere else if you must, but he does not leave.”

  “Not alive at least,” I said.

  “Keep him alive.” Nicolas coughed and rolled over, blood pooling beneath his shoulder. His old mage’s sword fell from its sheath. “He was kind enough to apologize. Perhaps he’ll be kind enough to tell us everything he knows.”

  Our Queen knelt before Nicolas and peeled back his torn shirt from the wound. “Clean strike at least. No lung damage. Come, before you bleed to death. Emerald?”

  “On it.” Emerald threw open the door and took the nearest guard by their collar. “You’re staying here, both of you, and no one except the Left Hand walks through that door once the three of us leave. Understand?”

  One guard bowed. The one she was holding nodded.

  “You all right to walk or—”

  “Walk. Help me up.” Nicolas held out his hand to Emerald. His eyes were squeezed shut and his chest heaving. “Dimas, I hired you. You were nine. You had no ties to Weylin. He orphaned you, for Triad’s sake. Why?”

  Nothing.

  I rounded on Dimas. “Least you justified my dislike of you.”

  He wheezed but said nothing.

  Emerald hauled Nicolas to his feet and hooked an arm around his waist. Our Queen followed them out. The door clicked shut.

  “Well, you failed, which, considering you attacked her with Emerald in the room, isn’t surprising.” I dragged a chair so that I could sit before him. “Bit of a disappointment, aren’t you?”

  “You know nothing about me. No one here does, only the Lady, and you have no idea—”

  “Which lady?” I asked. “The Erlend one who recruited you? Who you think is going to save you?”

  He stayed silent.

  “You dye your hair black,” I said. I’d not pegged him for the sneering Erlend type, but I could play that game, and I could play it well. “You paint your nails to keep from biting them, and you’d never touched a knife until today. Except in the kitchen. You’ve cooked. You held that stiletto like you were going to chop onions.” I glanced at his bleeding hand and his disgusted sneer. “And you’re not used to seeing your own blood. It’s unfair, really, being all right with spilling other’s but not all right with spilling yours. You have to give some to take it.”

  Erlend might’ve laughed at the Lady or called her old fashioned, but she was there, staring down on us.

  Judging us.

  “Every Erlend I’ve ever killed for prizing their power and their nation over the lives of Igna’s people was just like you—concerned with looking good, looking powerful…and dead days after I met them. I met Caden de Bain. Man was a monster, but at least he was willing to bleed to get what he wanted.”

  Dimas shuddered. “I am nothing like him or any of those others.”

  He was hunched and on his knees, right hand pinned to the wall. Blood dripped down his elbow and splattered against the floor. I laid my knife across my knee. He shuddered.

  “Well, Our Queen’s not dead and Nicolas’s isn’t either, so you’re at least as disappointing a person as they are.”

  He opened his mouth, crying too hard to speak, and stopped. A shiver ran through him. His gaze went through me, unseeing.

  “I failed,” he muttered. He laughed, then sobbed, then threw his head back against the wall. The sobs shook out of him, choking him till he was nearly sick. His pinned hand tore with a sickening squelch. “Lady, forgive me. I killed them. I killed them.”

  “What?”

  I’d never heard anyone but me use that phrase with such care, and my ears were singing from the way he said it, with an emphasis just like mine.

  He didn’t like spilling blood. Even now, still rambling and shaking with grief, he didn’t make the sign of the Triad.

  My knife clattered against the floor. “What did you say?”

  He sobbed into the crook of this red-soaked, dripping elbow, the other hand wrapped around his knees.

  “Dimas!” I picked up Nicolas’s mage sword. It was only a hilt with a sawtooth inlay on the grip—mages had no need for a blade when they’d plenty of blood and runes to spare—and chucked it at Dimas. It bounced off his shoulder. “What did you just say about the Lady?”

  I’d thought he meant “a lady,” not mine.

  He turned to me, the red lines crowded the whites of his eyes too bright in the dim light. Not dark like the smear of him dripping down the wall. “No.”

  “Fine.” I rose from the chair and sat down on the floor across from him. If I reached out, my fingers would have brushed his boots. But I didn’t. My hands were shaking. A cold, heavy sweat coated my skin. Let me be wrong. “What was your mother’s name?”

  His hand twitched, long fingers clenching together. More blood dripped.

  “I already didn’t like you, and I’m not inclined to like you since you upset Maud,” I said. “You’re not really helping your case.”

  His brows drew together. “Is she all right?”

  “Don’t worry about her. She wouldn’t want you to think about her at all in any way.” I leaned forward. “Is your real name Dimas Gaila?”

  Let Gaila not be his mother’s name. Let him not have changed his name. Let him deny. Let me be wrong. Let me not meet someone from Nacea in this damned, bloody place.

  He shook his head. “I can’t. I’m not supposed to.” He swallowed and shook his head. “It was the last thing she said to me—do not tell them your real name.”

  A tight, shuddering breath sat hot and heavy in my lungs.

  Dimas Gaila.

  His mother’s name.

  A Nacean name.

  “Dimas Gaila?” I reached out and touched his foot, my fingers brushing the solid, real heel of his shoes. I closed my eyes, sure I’d pass straight through despite how mortal weapons pinned him now, and sighed. “Are you lying?”

  He shook his head, gaze stuck on the tips of my fingers on his shoes. His fingers, ink stained and bloody, trembled against his mouth as if trying to catch the words before they left. “They had my mother’s silver cuffs and knew my sister’s name. I thought they were dead. They should be dead. Everyone is.”

  He was Nacean.

  He was Nacean sure as I was.

  “We’re not,” I said in Nacean. “We’re not dead no matter if Nacea remains or not.”

  He froze. Shuddered.

  “I want to hear about your mother and sister and who has them, but I’m more interested in hearing about Nacea now.” I gripped his hand in mine. Too tight to be pleasant. “And if you tell me, maybe you won’t die for trying to kill Our Queen.”

  A lie. I could not kill him—I could not bring myself to think of it now. Hard as it was to comprehend, I couldn’t stand him, but I needed him. I needed Nacea.

  But Our Queen might kill him.

  “You’re Nacean.” His voice was soft, the Nacean from his mouth rounder and slower than I remembered. It went up at the ends. He laughed, and it dragged up more tears. “You sound like my second mother. She was from Salt Lick, on the southwestern coast. She’s dead.”

  Accents. Cities. Memories.

  I couldn’t smile. The world was clear and sharp, like staring through the cold, still air of a winter day. My throat burned. My chest ached. Each breath came faster and faster and shorter and shorter.

  “You’re really Nacean.” He laughed again, louder this time, and unfolded his legs. “Do you… Have you ever met anyone else?”

  I shook my head. Heat burned in my stomach.

  “Because I haven’t,” he said. “And I stopped looking until they said my first mother and sister lived, and then home was alive again, and I had to—”

  My memories of Nacea tasted like bile and blood, the wet, dripping touch of spit pooling in the back of my throat.

  “I had to do it,” he whispered. “She’d understand, wouldn’t she? Erlend found my mother and my sister and said they’d
die if I didn’t help kill Our Queen.”

  Nacean prayers. Nacean words. The same rushing, writhing sound of nothing filled my ears. I pressed my palms into my eyes.

  “Dimas Gaila.”

  “But you’re Our Honorable Opal.” Dimas, wide eyed and desperate, reached for me. “How? How do you do it?”

  “Sallot.” I looked up. “My name is Sallot.”

  I could not give him my mother’s name. He didn’t deserve it.

  I wanted to, but the drip of his blood down the stones and the memory of Nicolas’s red-stained skin clung to me.

  “Sallot,” he said, drawing out the end in the soft sound of my name said properly.

  I laughed. “No one ever gets that right on the first try.”

  I wanted to touch him and know he was there, but the rest of me recoiled at the idea, winced as the image of him, knife in hand, stuck in my mind.

  I sniffed and wiped my nose instead. “I feel like I’m going to be sick.”

  “Me too.” He dragged himself closer, till I could see the peppering of scars along his jaw. “What happened? I always thought the south was lost. We only barely made it to Lyncester.”

  I leaned forward and swallowed. My throat burned. “You ran to Weylin?”

  “We ran to safety,” he said quickly. “Erlend cities were supposed to quarter Nacean citizens in times of strife. The shadows were coming from the south, so we ran north. But we didn’t make it.”

  I grabbed his foot. A single point of contact.

  He was shaking.

  “But you ran north with folk?” My breath stuck in my throat. I choked. “Did they live? Are there more?”

  He shook his head, and it was like falling into the Caracol all over again.

  “I remember snow,” he said softly, hand fluttering around his face like a hatchling. He was careful and controlled, like Maud had said, and he ignored the bleeding hole in his hand. “The sky was gray and the ground was white—blinding and brutally cold, yet I still got a sunburn. All I wanted to do was stop walking, but we never stopped. There were shadows on the horizon, and we didn’t have time for pyres. We ran into soldiers the last night I remember. And then my mother paid a man to take me away. I was bleeding. I don’t…”

  He stopped, swallowing.

  “You don’t remember?” I asked.

  There were days when I was running, when my feet were blistered and my lungs full of rot, that I didn’t remember. I remembered panic and fear and corpses soft with heat beneath me, but the spaces between running and sleeping were nothing. I liked running at night.

  I couldn’t see what I was running on then.

  “It’s not like normal bad stuff,” he said quickly. “It’s not like that at all. It’s fuzzy. Like poppy tincture—you remember before and after but the in-between is gone and the edges blurry. My parents were a fisher and a midwife, and we always had a steady supply of scrapes and tinctures. I know that feeling. I was drugged.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged, fingers tapping against the floor and smearing blood across the stones. “My mother told me to never say I was Nacean. She never said why. She kissed me. I don’t know what happened to my second mother. She would’ve said goodbye. She only wouldn’t if—”

  A shiver so violent it rattled his teeth ripped through him, and I grasped his arm. Speaking things made them real. Brought back the fear.

  “I thought they were all dead, to bandits or shadows or soldiers, but then I got a letter.” He glanced at me, dark gaze fixed on mine. “I tried to take it to Amethyst, but a guard I didn’t know was outside my door. They know things only my mother could know. They told me about her and my sister, and they told me how they’d kill both. And then there were always guards I didn’t know following me. I don’t think they ever left after the war. They’ve been here the whole time, waiting.” He took a breath. Shuddered. Closed his eyes. “I tried to get Fernando de Lex—Five—out of auditions, and that night the guards were in my room when I woke up”

  “What did they do?” I asked, too shocked and sad and furious to ask anything else. Four Naceans alive, and two had been used to extort the third.

  But all the anger in me was dying. I’d have done the same as Dimas. I might’ve done worse than Dimas.

  There was nothing I wouldn’t do to see my family again.

  “My mother was a midwife. She had one rune on her arm to help with healing. They carved out that patch of skin, rune and scars and all, and laid it on my bed.” He shuddered and gagged. “I did what they wanted after that.”

  He closed his eyes, breaths unsteady. “I can still remember the way out of the corn mazes I used to make with my sister and how my mothers took their tea and how it felt when I knew they were dead. All of them. Forever. I was adrift. And suddenly I was saying my sister’s name for the first time in years and holding a piece of my mother’s flesh, and I knew it was real. They were alive. I couldn’t let them die. I couldn’t let Erlend hurt them. I would’ve died before betraying Our Queen, but I can’t let my family die. Not again.”

  I licked my lips, mouth dry and words failing. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.” He looked up at me, tears dripping down his face, pooling in the crook of his chin, splattering against the floor. A steady drip. “I didn’t want to do this. You’re Nacean. We could’ve been talking.”

  I leaned back, the deep need of me tugging at my heart. “Do you think we count?”

  Was I Nacean if I barely remembered the sound of my name on my siblings’ fumbling lips or the taste of my father’s favorite spiced, soft-boiled eggs? Erlend had taken Nacea, my family, my words, my sense of safety, the comforting rise and fall of my mother’s songs on the evening wind as she taught my sister the name of each of our barn cats. Was there anything left of me they hadn’t ruined?

  I wanted to talk about all those things. Make them real again. But the words never came.

  What if my accent was off or my words all wrong? Dimas was older than me, had been old enough to remember what Nacea was like, to remember what being Nacean meant. What if I was all wrong?

  “I think we do. A Nacean is always a Nacean. It knows no bounds or rules. It’s feeling and soul.” He wiped his face and smeared red across one cheek. “My mother used to say that—Nacea is home and home is a feeling.”

  He paused, his hand leaving jagged lines of spiderwebbed blood across the floor. “I used to think I wasn’t, not when I was keeping it a secret, when I changed my name, when I pretended I was Erlend, but it didn’t last. All the little pieces bubbled up—the words I didn’t know the translations for, the food I didn’t like, the pointing and bowing and hierarchy. We never bowed to the stars. They were just the folks who counted votes and broke ties. Everything was different. I felt different. And then I didn’t want to lose it. I was as I was, and all I could remember was my mother’s face as she told me to never tell. I thought it would get better, that I’d not feel sad so often the further from my old life I got—cleaning and mathematics and making sure everything and everyone has a place; it’s as different from fishing and physician work as I could get—but it didn’t work.”

  It gave him a place but didn’t take away the little thread of grief that knotted up everything.

  “Sometimes I feel empty,” I said slowly. “Like being hungry but it’s in my bones, aching and burning all the way up to my head. I cried, once, when I saw a kid who looked like my sister laughing. I couldn’t remember how my sister sounded.”

  There were a dozen words and feelings and pieces of me I wanted to know and hold, to gather up in my arms and cradle so tight against my chest that they melted into me and took hold like ice on frosted mornings. But each time I tried to pull myself together, the dregs of my Nacean memories slipped through my fingers like water.

  Split. Spilled. Broken.

  I wasn’t those things, but I felt them. It wasn’t fair.

  “What was her name?” he asked.

  “Shea.”r />
  He smiled. “Were you the oldest?”

  “Yes.”

  I had been and would always be older than my sister, Shea, and my brother, Hia,even if Erlend killed me tomorrow.

  “You were old enough to pick your name.” He sniffed. “You were five, at least. You don’t remember your childhood name?”

  Sallot had always been my name. I thought it had been. But my memories were a blur, a smear of senses and details I couldn’t connect, the taste of honey and smoke as my mother lit a candle and heated a needle to red hot. I’d written “Sallot” in blood and burned it.

  A prayer for protection.

  “There,” my mother whispered. “She knows you now, and you’ll always be in her sight. And if you decide you want a change, you know how to tell her.”

  “Do you burn it?” I asked. “The new name you pick?”

  “So the Lady knows the new one.” He held his hands out, palms flat and up, and a little burn scar had regrown over the whorls of his thumbprint. “I grabbed the candle flame by accident when doing mine.”

  I laughed, and my tongue still tasted vile, but I felt light. Empty. A better kind of nothing than I’d ever felt before. Like picking off a scab you didn’t need.

  “It’s a wound.” Dimas smiled. “One of those that never really heals.”

  I knew this smile. The tight stretch. The sharp pain at the back of my jaw. The ache behind my eyes. That pitiful, little grin we offered up to others who shared our secret pains even as happiness crept in.

  Sallot. Dimas.

  Two sides of a bloody, stolen coin.

  “I’m killing them,” I said, quietly, slowly, drawing the edge from my voice like venom from a bite. “The lords who let their soldiers leave Nacea. The ones who didn’t warn us the shadows were loose. I’m going to kill them all for leaving us to die. They’d do it again if they could, and I can’t let them do that. Not to anyone else.”

  So long as they lived, the Erlends entrenched in North Star’s ideals would be a threat to lives everywhere.

  Killing them was a mercy. A handful of deaths to save thousands.