Ruin of Stars

by Linsey Miller

  A muscle beneath his eye twitched. “I shouldn’t feel glad for that. You are as you are.”

  I was as I was, and they’d be dead.

  As the guilty should be.

  “I’m sorry you have to do that.” He drew one lone line of red between us. “And I’m sorry for what I have to do.”

  The room exploded.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  A dull, distant echo thrummed in and out, the push and pull of tidewaters in my ears. I was staring at the night sky, the deep nothing and flicker of stars. Heat lapped at my feet and arms and face. A damp chill seeped down my stomach.

  I coughed, choked, and let my face fall to the side.

  “Be alive.” A hand touched my arm. “Please, please, please. I didn’t think it would be that big. I’m sorry.”

  Dimas.

  I wrenched open my eyes, the sticky sting of light and pain forcing them back together. Again.

  My vision was a blur. The smear that was Dimas stood and turned away. A spot of silver rested near my head, and I grabbed it, arm aching. Had to get up, I had to move. Dimas was Nacean. Dimas was a traitor.

  Dimas was escaping.

  I pushed myself up and grabbed the silver. Pain and pain and pain and then the steady heat of rage.

  He’d tried to kill Our Queen and nearly killed me? After all that? After Nacea?

  I fixed my grip on the silver—the pain giving way to the blood-singing joy of knowing what to do, the hairs on my arm rising, the shudder running through me stopping dead—and threw it at Dimas.

  It sailed through the edges of his blur.

  “Lady.” It died on my lips. The little spark of awareness I’d had faded, and I collapsed. My head hit the stones. I couldn’t move, not easily. My vision cleared, but the rumble in my ears remained. I stayed there, twitching and staring and coughing. The room was ruined. The wall Dimas had been pinned to was only a small series of bricks a bit shorter than me, and sunlight was streaming in. He’d escaped into the evergreen sea circling the palace grounds.

  And if he got stopped, how many more whatever-did-this did he have? It had to be alchemy. Explosives were easy enough to make so long as you’d the right things and steady hands.

  I willed my hands to move, and they shook. My head rolled back to stare into the daylight. I blinked.

  Scrawled across the stones still standing was a single line in burned-black blood.

  Lady, let me out.

  A crashed sounded behind me, a shout that might’ve been my title came, but I could only think, Had she?

  The turtle green of a physician’s cloak loomed in the corner of my sight. Hands grabbed my shoulders. I flinched.

  “Isidora.” I coughed, chest aching. “I want Isidora.”

  She was too important to deal with me, but I wasn’t dying, and I wanted familiar eyes and hands on me. She was clever and kind, and she’d always been nice to me even in the throes of grief. She’d understand me now.

  The pair of hands gently cupped my face but didn’t move me. “It’s me. It’s all right. Move your feet for me.”

  I did.

  “Good, good. Now look at me.” Her face came into focus, thin lips drawn and freckles outnumbered by flecks of dust and ash. She pushed her bulky sleeves up past her elbows. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “Dimas.” I coughed again, spit and snot dripping down the back of my throat. “Did something. He said they, Erlend, had his mother. Erlend’s got his family. He kept apologizing, and then I was on my back.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll tell Emerald. Just rest.” Her words dripped over me, hitting my ears in wavering, wobbling sounds. A panic I couldn’t place took hold of my heart. “Your hand is the worst bit. I won’t have to stitch it up, but it looks like a sawtoothed hilt?”

  I held up my hand to the light. “I threw Nicolas’s sword at Dimas.”

  I shouldn’t have looked at my hand.

  The wound was familiar, deep and dark, blood pooling in the holes where the hilt had been. I’d seen wounds like this before on corpses’ skin. In festering skin.

  Little heads like grains of rice poked through the gaps of what was left of my brother Hia’s skin. Holes no bigger than my littlest nail filled with blood that sloshed and spilled as blowflies probed the jagged edges. A creeping itch gnawed at my hand.

  I shuddered and closed my eyes.

  Hia, dead for a day and torn flesh moving, overflowing with other creeping, gnawing lives.

  Life dripping from his wounds.

  “It’s not too deep. That’s good.” Isidora pulled a bag from her pocket and cleaned out the holes, wet cloth burning against my skin. In my skin. Beneath it. “I’ll have to stitch it up, and Nicolas certainly owes you something nice for this.”

  “How is he?” I choked on the last word, and she helped me sit up. Even turned away to let me spit a blob of snot pricked with red across the room. I took a deep breath. “He got stabbed.”

  She swallowed, lips pursing. “Yes, but he’ll be fine so long as we keep an eye on it. No lasting damage.”

  The burn in me went deep, seeping into the wrinkles of my palm and down into the bones where I swear the cloth slipped under my skin easy as a shadow and drank up the blood the hilt had left behind. I felt it moving.

  “Could you just bandage it up?” I asked. “I don’t like stitches.”

  Didn’t like feeling them. Looking at them.

  She eyed me. “All right. If it starts hurting or looking inflamed—”

  “It’s infected. I got it.” I pulled my hand away once she was done with the bandage. “Thank you. Really. It’s easier this way.”

  The room was blown to nothing. Only the door still stood. The two guards who’d been next to it were clearing rubble from the hallway. Isidora touched my shoulder. The astringent from her rag dripped onto my shoulder, and I shuddered.

  “Let me take you to your room,” she said. “I want to make sure there’s nothing there that will exacerbate your injury, and since Maud de Pavo left, I doubt you want anyone else looking you over in your quarters.”

  I nodded. “I’ll need help standing.”

  “Serra?” She turned to one of the guards. “Help Honorable Opal and I up, please?”

  The guard sprinted to us and held out her hands. She walked us to the door to the Left Hand private quarters too, and Isidora dismissed her with a nod.

  “I used to visit Ruby,” Isidora muttered as I hesitated at the door. “Let me check you once you’re settled, mask on, and then I’ll wear a blindfold. Amethyst and Emerald are with Our Queen.”

  I shook my head and opened the door.

  “You’re quite well for such a large explosion so close to you.” She set her bag of supplies on the dining table. “Sit somewhere comfortable, and I’ll clean the rest of those.”

  I raised my arms. Dozens of little splinters and scratches lined my arms and chest. I pulled one out, the pain peaking. Isidora sucked in a breath.

  “Let me.” She doused a cloth in astringent. “Here.”

  Drip.

  I sat still, ears ringing.

  “I’ve been meaning to speak with you.” Isidora’s voice drooped at the end but her stare stayed steady. She wiped the blood from my mask. “Are you sure you feel all right?” She pressed her fingers to the pulse point of my throat, other hand holding the rag over the wounds. “It’s a bit fast.”

  “Is it?” I felt apart. Blurry. Like I was half-in and half-out of myself, like that cloth or the hilt or a maggot. “I did get blown up.”

  I’d seen my muscles gleaming, red and bright, beneath my skin.

  “I’m not surprised.” She pulled my boots off and rolled up my trousers. “You’re a very strong person.”

  People at court had started using words for me that carried no gender when they weren’t sure, like “person.” It was nice. I wanted it all the time. I wanted it to feel nice now.

  I couldn’t feel anything.

  “This will be cold.” I
sidora poured a small bowl of water down my legs.

  The sound echoed. I shuddered.

  “Anything hurt?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  Drip.

  She swung the cloth around to soak it again, flinging the last droplets from it.

  Drip.

  “I feel panicky.” I scratched at my bandaged hand, the itching unbearable. The pool of water between us rippled. “Nothing really hurts more than anything else.”

  My world was a dull, constant ache.

  “You’re injured and were recently in a sudden trauma.” Isidora rung out the cloth over the hand-washing basin in the corner, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. Little indents appeared in her reddened flesh. I blinked, but the indents spread, leaving a bloody trail Isidora didn’t notice. I tried to shake loose the vision, but pain shot through my head.

  It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.

  Drip.

  Was it?

  “Stop.”

  Isidora froze. “What?”

  “The water.” I flinched. “You’re dripping everywhere.”

  “Yes,” she said, jaw tensing. The veins beneath her skin darkened. Rose. Poked out of her skin, heads black above the muddy red. “Opal? What’s wrong?”

  I took a deep breath but it didn’t help. The panic stayed. My heart sped up. My lungs were too small, too tight, and the moment stretched out forever, the terrifying space between the sounds filling my head. Nothing but death. Nothing but shadows. Nothing at all getting closer and closer, blood and flesh dripping from it. I blinked.

  Nothing was happening to Isidora’s veins.

  Drip.

  I leapt to my feet. I had to run. I had to do something. My heart was loud between my ears, in the back of my eyes, and my breaths were too shallow, too short. This was wrong.

  What was wrong?

  Drip.

  I ripped the cloth from her hands. They were red, dripping, skin speckled with holes, bone-white mouths boring through the flesh. She flinched, stumbling back. A dull, low gnawing filled my ears. Like gnashing mouths. Like pumping blood.

  Isidora’s mouth moved, but I didn’t hear anything. Nothing.

  Drip.

  The dark water between us writhed and twitched. Shadows dripped across her feet.

  I ran.

  I tripped over my chair and kept going, slamming into the side of the table. High ground. Safety. I grabbed the edge of the table and hoisted myself on top of it. My face was numb, my skin too tight, and my hands moved without me, clawing at the edge of the wardrobe. I crawled onto the top of it, behind the elaborate whorls of wood, and curled up with my back to the wall. My hands shook. The drip remained.

  The panic stretched on forever.

  I breathed in and out, dust clouds bursting from the top of the wardrobe with each breath. My eyes burned like I’d been crying. I’d dealt with grief before. I’d shaken myself awake from plenty of monstrous dreams, but I was awake.

  “Opal?”

  I winced.

  “Panic attack?” And Isidora, whose late-night screams of pain and grief I knew as well as I knew my own, reached a hand to the top of the wardrobe, fingers barely skimming the edge. “I thought this might happen.”

  “What?”

  She sighed. “It happens to many of us, panicking with no obvious reason, but there are small things, reminders, that set it off. It was the sound, wasn’t it?”

  I sunk into my spot. “It happens to others?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “It’s why Rodolfo—Ruby—slept with a lamp.”

  Her voice hitched, and I reached over the edge to touch her fingers.

  “I’m Opal.” The world cleared slowly, like a clean streak through rain on glass windows. “I shouldn’t be scared of anything, especially when nothing bad is happening.”

  “Says who?” Isidora laughed, harsher than I’d ever heard her. “You’re Opal. You can feel however you like and anyone who disagrees can take their opinions elsewhere.”

  She waited for me to climb down and settle on one of the couches, my back to a wall and a thick pillow in my lap. She sat next to me, legs crossed and sweater bulging. She rested a hand against her stomach. “I typically do not push it, but I think you might need it—the sound and your hand are what pushed it over? You’ve seen wounds like that before?”

  I swallowed. “Is it still a wound if they’re already dead?”

  “I know what the dead look like.” She rested her chin on her palm, fingers curled around her face. Dark brown scars covered the backs of her hands like lacework gloves, and she tapped her cheek. “It didn’t occur to me why you were flinching, but it was your hand, wasn’t it? There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “It’s just holes.” I shivered, the memory of it scratching up my spine. “How can I be scared of that?”

  “Because you saw them first during the most terrifying time of your life,” Isidora said. “So now they are a part of that terror.

  “We’d no time to preserve the dead during the war and eventually no magic to preserve the living.” She shifted, drawing a line from her wrist to her elbow. “A shadow flayed Nicolas’s arm, and Our Queen banished magic. I could do nothing for him. Rot set in.”

  She closed her mouth, swallowed, and shook her head. I knew what she was feeling. I did it all the time too.

  “Nicolas and I don’t each much meat now,” she said, voice hushed. “A fear wrought of war.”

  I swallowed, skin itching and hot. “You said Ruby slept with a lantern.”

  “Oh, yes. Always. And sometimes, all of us, each and every one of us, wakes up from a dream or a nap or even just blinks, and we’re back there—shadows slipping through hands like wind through window cracks and Erlend swords bearing down upon us.” Her fingers hovered over my arm. “You’re not alone. You’re not odd. Your mind is just trying to protect you from what it grew up thinking was a threat.”

  “It was safe in the trees or roofs or rafters,” I whispered. “They never looked up.”

  “May I touch you?”

  I nodded.

  She pulled me in close, her forehead to mine, and said, “When I am very stressed, when my mind is pulled in many directions, I can’t even stand the sound of spoons scraping copper mugs or knives dragging against plates.”

  “They were wet.” The words spilled from me. People were wet. “The smell came first and then the dripping as they stood still, waiting to find a new face.”

  Drip.

  They were nothing but the rustling of pine needles and blowflies on those days.

  Drip.

  Waiting. Stitching. Circling the base of my tree.

  “Opal?” Isidora’s low voice rumbled in my head. Her fingers clasped my arms. “You’re safe.”

  I pressed myself into the tree. No. No. No.

  “You’re remembering what happened,” she said softly. “It’s not real. It’s a memory.”

  A shadow, long and lean and bare, no skin claimed and no stolen face, rose from the dark cracks between the fallen leaves. White heads poked through its nothing flesh.

  “There are no shadows now. You’re safe. You’re here. No magic, no shadows. That was then. This is now.”

  I closed my eyes. “I see them.”

  “They can’t touch you now. It’s perfectly safe.” Her breath warmed my shoulder. “Do you understand?”

  “I hear them first,” I said, “and then they’re here.”

  “Does it smell?”

  “No.”

  Not real. They always smelled.

  Always.

  I opened my eyes. Isidora’s face, so close to mine, was pale and drawn, her freckles a rusty shade of red and the lines around her mouth deep. I rubbed my face.

  “Can I touch you?” she asked again.

  I nodded. “I don’t like being scared of nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing. You’re just a bit too good at survival right now.” She checked my pulse, my eyes. “You need to talk to
a physician. Properly. They can help you pinpoint how to make sure you’re safe when this happens. I would say you need them now, but…”

  But the world was falling apart as fast as me.

  Her fingers closed around my hand. I stared, head tilted, breathing fast.

  How could she touch me? How could her runes stand to be next to my bloodied skin?

  The Lady had gifted her those. Had seen her fit to wield such power and know how to use it.

  And I was spilling blood. All the blood that she’d help save.

  I thought the Lady might forgive me, understand me, but maybe my existence was punishment enough for her. Her way of seeing me repent.

  “The ways you’ve been coping with it aren’t healthy no matter how much you believe they work.” She very gently touched my hand, prying it from my thigh.

  “I killed them. How would you cope with that?”

  “I’ve had many, many people die when their lives were in my hands because my understanding of medicine wasn’t enough. Was that my fault?”

  “You’re good. You’re nice. You don’t hurt anyone.” I flipped my hand over and touched one of her turtles. “You weren’t even allowed to.”

  “Good is relative. I hurt all the loved ones of the people I failed to save,” she said. “And not all of the ways I coped were good for me or the people around me. Try to stop—you won’t always succeed. You just need to try, or else you’ll go too far. You don’t deserve pain. You can control other things. The world is not out of your hands, and you don’t have to deal with everything alone.”

  How Nacean was I when my entire life went against the only Nacean trait I remembered? If I spilled my blood and the blood of others?

  Could I trust Dimas’s comments on being Nacean when he left me like that?

  “You can always take off the mask.”

  “I can’t bring folks back to life.”

  I couldn’t undo what I’d done, and I could never repay enough in my blood to make up for it. Lives weren’t exchangeable. Even if they did deserve to die.

  She rose to her feet, as graceful as Ruby—they moved the same, slow and calculated till they made up their minds—and helped me up. A warm piece of metal slid from her palm into mine. I let go and looked at it.