Ruin of Stars

by Linsey Miller

  I glanced back, vision blurred and speckled with black, and the bridge was well out of sight beyond the bend.

  I pressed my back to the stone and screamed into my shirt, muffling the sound. Washing it away. I looked for any sign of Rath, but the dark was thick. I wanted Rath. I wanted to carry him home one last time, but now I was stuck, cold and dying, in the lands of the woman who’d killed my family.

  I sat at the water’s edge, teeth chattering, and watched the current sweep Rath farther and farther from me, into the depths where I couldn’t follow.

  I woke to pain. I was alone. The numb tingling of sleeping limbs covered me. I opened my eyes slowly. Moonlight filtered through the trees. Not bright enough to help me see.

  I sat up. Nothing snapped. No broken bones.

  There was nothing left for Erlend to take from me—family, home, innocence, friends.

  They were thieves.

  And I was the shadow they’d made, ripped from my life and left to wander, trying to piece together the fragments of the life Erlend had left me. I buried my face in my hands, too cold and empty to cry. They’d stolen everything.

  I’d have been a farmer or weaver or anything else if they’d never gotten greedy for more land and started the civil war. I’d not have been Opal.

  Rath would’ve been a merchant by now, traveling between here and Mizuho and charming folks left and right. He’d be alive. He’d be warm.

  “Cam.” The voice wasn’t mine. It couldn’t be because there was no world where Rath died and I’d lost him in a river, so my voice couldn’t crack, and my throat couldn’t hurt. I’d touched him. I’d nearly had him. “Adella. Elise. Maud.”

  The memory seared.

  When did his body stop being his? To be him? How long till I wouldn’t recognize him in death? Wouldn’t remember the sound of his laugh or rhythm of his breathing in bed next to me? How long till thinking his name didn’t hurt?

  I was drowning, choking, the memories of Rath and me a deep well from which I couldn’t escape.

  I took the long way around, hoping Rath would be caught at the edge of the river. Alive. Dead. Just let me see him again.

  And a long time later, I found the clearing where the rangers and the two children had been. I restarted the fire, stripped, and stole the clothes off the dead ranger closest to my size. I curled up next to the fire.

  At noon, when I woke up, I built Rath a funeral pyre. It wasn’t big, probably not hot enough either, but it was all I could do. At least I could build him a fire even if he wasn’t in it.

  I picked up my pack, burned the rangers’ things I didn’t need, and sat before the fire.

  “I’ll throw you a party when this is over.” My nails scraped over the ring, picked at the fresh scabs along my knuckles, and I held my hand above the flames. Not close enough to burn. “I’ll find Cam. I’ll keep him safe, and I’ll take all your kids to see the Carnival of Cheats. They’ll like it, and we’ll be even. I hope your Triad’s happy to see you.”

  They would be. Who wouldn’t?

  I left. I did not cry.

  I had nothing left to lose.

  North Star. Riparian. Winter.

  The sun melted away the frost of a wicked Erlend winter but not the seeping chill in my creaking ribs as I started walking north.

  To Riparian.

  To Maud, who was not a traitor but definitely in danger.

  To Adella. Tests and Erlends could only end poorly.

  To Elise.

  And hopefully to Cam.

  With any luck, Riparian would think me truly dead, and I could move through Erlend like a ghost.

  The ghost of Nacea hunting its killers. Elise would call it poetic.

  But there were no pretty words or turns of phrases that could capture the raging want that Nacean memories awoke within me—I wanted to taste the words I didn’t know, sink into the splattering sound of warm blood on frozen earth, and memorize the wide, shocked looks on their faces as they realized what they’d created.

  I would be a death of their own making.

  I went to Hinter first.

  The journey to Hinter went faster than it should’ve. I slept in bushes and trees, beneath the cover of my cloak and pack in the woods off the road. There were soldiers and rangers and farmers chasing cows, and I skirted round the countryside, darting from main road to hunting trails to avoid them. The air bit deeper the farther I went and thickened into frost each morning. I drew my scarf over my face.

  “Hello again,” I muttered to Hinter from atop the hills just south of it.

  The guards patrolling the low walls surrounding the city proper and the fortress at its heart moved slowly among the frantic bustle of the city. I edged closer after each round’s schedule became clear. In the hollowed-out stump of an old, wide pine, I half slept till evening.

  North Star. Riparian. Winter.

  Their reign of fear was over.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I climbed over the wall this time. Let them see me, let them catch me. It was dark by the time I’d enough strength to scale the wall, and it wasn’t the guards I had to worry about. The wall was slick with cold, my fingers trembling and scrambling for holds against the smooth expanse. I had to make my own, nearly fell twice before reaching the top, and the close calls ripped two fingernails clean off. It should’ve hurt, but I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel anything. Not my wounded hands or scraped up knees or the biting cold.

  I’d survived one fall. What did another matter?

  Shadows bounced between the hanging lamps dotting the top of the wall. I edged my way between two and sneaked into the main building through the servants’ doors. They’d cheaper locks.

  Elise wasn’t in her room. The bed was made and her nightclothes left across her chair. Only her desk had a touch of her, the papers scattered and stacked in unsteady towers. Charcoal pens used down to the nub and bottles of ink dotted the area. One brush pen with teeth marks in the tip balanced on the edge of an open drawer. Writing covered every part of the papers.

  She was planning something.

  I waited on the edge of her chair, too dusty for the bed and too tired for the floor. I’d not get back up if I sat down there.

  The door rattled. I darted behind her wardrobe, praying she was alone.

  “Wake me up as soon as they get here.” Elise paused in the doorway of her room, face turned back to whoever was in the hallway. “Don’t bother me until then.”

  By the look of her trembling hands and slumped shoulders, Elise would be awake until they knocked again.

  Elise turned, shutting the door, and leaned back against it with her head tilted up and eyes shut. Time and frustration had taken their toll on her. Her brown skin had paled, darkening the deep shadows beneath her eyes. The whites of her eyes were a pale, pale red, and cracks split her lips, the reddish tint more cold than cosmetic. She glanced up, glasses slipping down her nose, and froze. Her wide eyes settled on me.

  “It’s Sal,” I said. “Don’t scream.”

  “Sal!” The grin stretched to the hollow of each cheek—the outline of her jaw was sharper, more defined, and her smile lacked its usual luster—but it was real. The tension in her shoulders softened. “What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to see you.” Everything was different. I wasn’t the last Nacean, I wasn’t alone in my fear, and I’d only three more names on my list. I felt crowded, from the constant ringing of Isidora’s words in my head to my thoughts of Elise and Maud and Dimas and Rath and Adella and the dozen others I’d learned to care about. I had to hold on to their names, their faces. I needed to know something was the same. “And we need to talk about Erlend.”

  She’d a better mind for politics than me.

  “My least favorite phrase.” She locked the door, chin down and eyes narrowed.

  I bowed. “My favorite since it means I’m talking to you more often than not.”

  “It take you long to think of that line?” she asked, pulling the silk
scarf from her head. The new copper cuffs she’d added to the braids rattled as she looked me over, and the line between her brows gave her away. “How are you? You look…”

  “That bad?” My voice cracked. I didn’t want to linger on it, but I needed comfort. Rath was dead. There was nothing good left in the world. Nothing except Elise.

  And she knew something was wrong. Or knew the look on my face well enough to know death and grief were clinging to me. Her arms closed around my shoulders and held me tight, folding me in the warm scent of her skin and clothes—dry ink and lemon soap—and I let her hold me up.

  “What’s happened?” she asked, lips moving against my ear, and the closeness of it, the intimacy, nearly made me sob.

  “Too much.” A whine whistled from my lips.

  Sniffling, I pulled away. She let me go and arched her neck from where it had been bent to let me cry into her shoulder. She stared at me, gaze sliding down to my stolen ranger uniform.

  “What’s wrong? Really?”

  “My friend died.” I had to get to Riparian and North Star before they moved. I had to find Cam. If nothing else, Cam. “I just wanted to see you again before moving on.”

  “I’m so sorry.” She took me in her arms, not stiffening when I didn’t return the hug. I tucked my face into her shoulder, and she ran her fingers through my matted hair. “I’m glad you’re here. I won’t be here much longer. Weylin wants us in Lynd.”

  “What’s going on?” I looked up and Elise stepped back, turning her face from me. “Or not?”

  “How long can you stay?” she asked.

  I kissed her, gently, quickly, savoring the press of her nose and scratch of her lips. She was alive and so was I, and the world couldn’t change that. I wouldn’t let it.

  I had to live, at least for a little bit longer, and I wanted to do part of that living with her.

  “Not long.” I pulled back. “Why does Weylin want you?”

  “To keep an eye on me, I’m sure.” Her lips twisted as she said it, and her hands pushed me toward to the bed. “In what I am sure is a terrible shock to my father, Weylin does not believe I am fully dedicated to the Erlend cause, and my father, for all his faults, is loath to renounce me.”

  I bounced as I sat, and she collapsed next to me. Her thigh, warm and soft, pressed against mine, and I pulled her legs across my lap.

  “Why’s Weylin still suspicious of you? You’ve been nothing but loyal to your father, to Erlend, since you’ve been back,” I asked. “I mean, you made it seem like that at least.”

  For someone as kind as Elise, the lying had to be eating away at her.

  She gestured to the whole of herself. “My mother was Alonian by birth and Erlend by marriage before the war, and I am ‘a benefit despite my unfortunate inheritance’ but still unfortunate.”

  The worst sort of insult—the kind folks bundled up in nice words and intentions but built on the backs of rudeness, power, and misconception.

  It was always the high north Erlends, the ones who made names for themselves and managed to keep them, the ones with their blond hair pulled back in tight, slick knots while they cleaned their nails on silk shirts and covered pale eyes with spectacles of colored glass. The ones who’d all sorts of ideas about what it meant to be properly male or female, able or not, of value or valueless. Never anything else.

  North Star’s ideal sort.

  “I’m a better liar than you’d think, and he thinks I’m still hiding things.” Her fingers brushed my back, gliding from shoulder blade to hip and back again. “It’s because I worked so closely with the Left Hand and refuse to divulge any secrets.”

  I slid a hand into the open mouth of her boot and laid my hands against her warm, sock-covered calf. “I thought you were just working with them for auditions?”

  She nodded. “My father thinks that too, but Lord Ruby asked me to screen the uninvited.”

  I stilled. “Screen the uninvited?”

  “Yes.” Her voice changed, the soft tone slowing. She moved her hand away from my back. “Sal—”

  “No, stop.”

  I’d never considered the coincidence. How she was so certain it was me.

  I gently pushed her legs out of my lap.

  It didn’t have to be me—any of the uninvited might’ve fit her statement if they were as hesitant as I’d been.

  “You were spying on me.” I rose from the bed, the awful patter of my heart getting quicker and quicker, stuttering my breaths. “You had a poster. You weren’t upset at being robbed. Your guards didn’t give chase. You knew me at tutoring. You asked me questions. You pursued me.”

  We’d been playing each other.

  “Well, yes, but no, I wasn’t still working for Ruby in tutoring.” She shifted, bed creaking. “It was the invitations. They needed to attract specific people, so they had me and several others travel around with decoy purses, and you happened upon me—”

  “And you decided I was good enough?” I asked. “That I was worthy?”

  Why was it that Erlends always decided my worth in the end?

  “Why does that matter?” She threw her hands up and slid off the bed. “You fit their qualifications. I didn’t demand you audition. I just supplied the information.”

  I spun back to her. “Because I’m Opal! Because my whole life depended on how nice you thought me. Was it because we flirted? You liked the sound of my voice so much you thought I’d make a fun auditioner to have around? I didn’t get to auditions—you got me there!”

  The muscles of her neck tensed. Her nostrils flared. “I gave those flyers to everyone the Left Hand instructed me to: people of skill and some sense of good moral judgment. You met their requirements. And it’s not like the whole thing isn’t rigged! Half of them were purposefully lured there to be watched or killed. Be glad I thought you should be Opal.”

  “And none of that seemed important enough to tell me?” I asked. “Or were you just thinking you’d found a rogue who fit your wants and all was working out, so might as well see it through?”

  “Why would I invite someone I liked to a competition where the majority of people died?” She drew her hands together in front of her, palms pressed flat and fingers splayed, and she took a deep breath. “I didn’t see the issue. I wasn’t lying.”

  “Not sharing the whole truth’s a different kind of lie.” I tapped one of the books on her desk. “The sort you Erlend historians love to tell.”

  “Sallot.” Elise dropped her hands, fingers curled into fists. “I know you are upset, but this is unfair. My giving you that purse and my affection for you are two different creatures.”

  A chill crept up my arms. I wrapped them around myself.

  “I know, but everyone lies to me. All the time, and I hate it.” Elise. Our Queen. Maud. Emerald. Amethyst. Nicolas. All of them had known Erlend had been responsible for Nacea’s slaughter. Lena de Arian and Dimas had betrayed me. “Everyone’s got their reasons too, but all it means is I’m not in control of my life.”

  She’d taken away the choice. My auditioning wasn’t my own now, it was hers and Ruby’s and Our Queen’s. It was orchestrated. Opal was a tool, but they’d maneuvered me into being Opal with handmade circumstances.

  “Forget it.” I held out my hands and shook my head. “We can deal with it later. I need to know what you’ve found out about the rangers and those ears. Anything?”

  She stared at me for a moment before letting the subject change.

  “I would think it a hoax if I’d not seen an ear.” She shuddered. “They’re from the missing children, but there’s always Igna signifiers nearby. It’s so clearly planted that I don’t know what to do. Why we’d cut off ears just for that?”

  “It’s probably extra.” They were using the ears for something else, they had to be, and they had to have been doing it for a while if Dimas was involved. But what for? Magic was dead unless they were trying to bring it back, and if they were, how long had they been trying? Let it be new, let there not be
a decade of missing kids we hadn’t found.

  “You’ve gotten no word from anyone?” I asked.

  “I did speak with Lena about some things a while ago.” Elise sighed, shoulders slumping. “I am concerned about the others in Hinter who don’t follow Erlend tradition, the ones like me who are attracted to men and women. It’s not smiled upon, and I don’t want them to be stuck in a place that denies them like I was before I went to Igna. It’s Erlend that’s wrong, but I say that, they’ll kill me and then there will be no one here.”

  I winced. Good intentions, bad execution.

  Always so focused on man and woman, man or woman.

  “I’m not a man or a woman,” I said slowly. “My gender doesn’t change from day to day. I am fluid. You do not get to define me by your attractions. I understand what you meant and I can’t define you, but if you’re attracted to me, I’m uncomfortable with that.”

  She raised a hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry. That’s not what I—”

  “I know,” I said quickly. “Still hurts. Never mind that for now. Tell me more about Lena.”

  “Lena?” Her voice went up. “What do you want with Lena?”

  How did I tell her Lena was wicked and two of her loved ones were on my list?

  “She betrayed us.” My chest ached with each word, the sounds stone heavy in my mouth. “She was one of the nobles working with your father. She helped destroy Nacea. She’s working for Gaspar del Weylin. She always has been.”

  “No!” Elise laughed, the crackling, snotty sound of disbelief. “That can’t be true.”

  I stilled, a little ember of rage flaring in my chest. “She’s the Riparian on my list of Erlend nobles, and she’s a monster.”

  “Lena de Arian has done more for the people of Erlend and Igna alike than most nobles accomplish in their entire life.” Elise’s face paled. “You’re wrong.”

  “Really?” I raked my hands over my face, too angry, too tired, too everything, to deal with this. “You just admitted to lying to me, but I’m the one in the wrong now?”

  “I apologize and accept my role in that, but this has nothing to do with auditions.” Elise held one hand up as though to wave me away. “She’s the reason I can inherit my father’s title. I’m a historian because of her. She taught me to read and to write. She helped me find the words to explain myself. To know who I was when everything I learned as a child in Erlend told me I was wrong for being attracted to more than just men. She held my hand at my mother’s funeral, and when I went to live with Isidora and Nicolas, she visited whenever she could. She was like a mother to me, and I know her as if she were mine. She’s not your Riparian.”