Ruin of Stars

by Linsey Miller

  His sister and mother. Two more Naceans alive somewhere. Hopefully.

  Lady, let it be true.

  “I know, and I’m sorry.” I punched him in the jaw only hard enough to unsettle him, and he stumbled to his knees. “But this is ending.”

  I yanked him up, fastened his hands to the table meant for Adella, and had Maud hold his flattened hands down so he couldn’t rune his way out of this. He only sobbed.

  Maud closed her eyes.

  Would I have done this if it meant seeing my family again? Even just one of them?

  Maybe.

  Probably.

  I’d killed so many to avenge them. What would I have done to save them?

  Dwelling on it like this would get me nothing but grief and I’d enough of being sad already. I broke open the lock on Adella’s trunk and threw open the lid, sure Adella would be out for blood.

  Nothing.

  I peeked over it. A blur of limbs flew out of the trunk and caught me around the middle. Maud shrieked. I grabbed Adella’s bound hands and twisted her off me.

  “Hello to you too,” I said and sat up. “You all right?”

  Blinking rapidly and staring round, Adella held out her hands to me. “How would you be?”

  “Fair enough.” I stood and helped her up, avoiding the sight of her bandaged ear. The edges were frayed as if something had been gnawing at it. “How’s your ear?”

  She groaned. “I was going to ask you. Lady de Arian kept going on about how she hadn’t realized the cheaters were options too.”

  “She had me look at her books.” Maud sniffed and looked up, hands continuing to keep Dimas still and runeless. “Some of the supplies were, well, like she’d been sending people up here for a while.”

  “She has been.” Dimas laid his forehead against the table, and it was the first chance I’d had to look at him up close without wanting to punch him. His hair, so carefully brushed and shining when I’d been at auditions, was tangled up in a hasty bun. His skin was ashy, streaked the pale of cold winter months and relentless scratching. A stutter clung to his every word. “And I’ve been helping her for three months to find the kids. It’s something to do with us—with our lack of magic—and Weylin wanted us all. My sister can’t use runes, so she wasn’t of any use. But I am.”

  I licked my lips. Hope was crushing. Deadly. “How do you know your mother and sister are alive?”

  “Lady de Arian handed me an ear.” Dimas shuddered. “That’s the test. Magic changed something in people’s blood and bones, something deep and constant, and a lot of children can use it still because their parents did. But my sister can’t. They didn’t need her, so cutting her wasn’t a problem for them.”

  “You inherited it?” I asked. “Magic?”

  Was it in me? Was the same slithering force that had flowed through shadows’ veins as they tore apart my family living in me?

  “No, I inherited nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all—no runes, no magic—and that’s why they needed me. They knew my parents, so they knew there was a half chance I could still use magic, and that’s why they came after me. Weylin had them cut off my sister’s ear, the one that had revealed her inability to do what I could, and Lady de Arian placed it in my hand, scars and blood and all. They’d iced it to keep it fresh. So I would know my sister was alive when they cut it off.”

  That meant magic hadn’t been banished. Magic wasn’t gone. Marianna da Ignasi, Our Queen of the Eastern Spires and Lady of Lightning, hadn’t gotten rid of magic ten years ago.

  She’d only banished mages’ ability to use it.

  People who had used magic or had runes used on them ten years ago couldn’t use magic now. But people who’d never used magic, whose parents had never used magic, and who had never been touched by runes, could still use magic today.

  People like Naceans.

  “How do you know this?” I swallowed, skin aching. My parents hadn’t used magic.

  “She told me.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “My sister was sick as a child, and a physician placed a rune in her heart. There’s magic in her flesh, and she can’t use it now. Lady de Arian told me that if I didn’t help them find children who could be mages, my sister would meet an end worse than death.”

  The clawing itch within me stuck me to my spot. If I moved, I would split. Scratch. Tear.

  “Shadows,” I whispered.

  “Children who have too much magic in their veins to be mages now make the best shadows,” he whispered back, voice dragging itself from his throat. “The ones who can’t be mages, the ones whose parents used magic and inherited its stain, are the most successful. It doesn’t always work, you know. Sometimes they just die, body, soul, and all, and there are too few children untouched by magic left in Erlend.”

  The Carnival of Cheats, its real cheaters, didn’t use magic to perform, but they got injured and have used runes to fix that. The perfect shadows. Nacea didn’t deal in magic, didn’t steal from the Lady and force her into runes. The perfect mages.

  What had Erlend made us now?

  “You’ve been finding Nacean kids?” I wiped my face, eyes burning. The Nacean in my mouth felt wrong. Hollow. Words that should never have been said. “We’re all that’s left and you’re helping them find us? Use us? And you asked me about forgiveness?”

  “Some will be mages, some will be shadows.” The unfinished thought hung in the silence, raising the hair at the back of my neck, and he curled his fingers against the table. “But my family will be alive.”

  So many dead to save two.

  Where was the line?

  “There are more of us,” I said in Nacean, “and you’re killing them.”

  “Sal? What did you say?” Adella coughed and started to unwind the bandage.

  Maud glanced between Dimas and me. “Are you speaking Nacean?”

  “Yes.” I touched Maud’s arm and nudged her back. “We were.”

  “I could still feel magic when we moved here. I touched a physician’s runes, and they lived.” Dimas touched his bare wrist. “My mother paid someone to take me away, to take me south and away from Weylin’s lands. She said no matter how nice he was, how kind to let Nacean refugees resettle on his lands, he’d want the power he’d lost. He would want magic back one day, and that meant he’d want me. And I never saw her again.”

  “What did you do to Adella?” I asked in Alonian.

  He raised his head, red eyes swollen shut. “All of us without magic in our veins can be separated, trisected—the body and mind peeled away from our souls. We’re the only ones it works on.”

  I froze. The familiar cold fury of disbelief rippled over me. I turned to Adella and touched her chin. She flinched back.

  “What?” she asked. “Is it bad?”

  My fingers gripped her jaw, and I turned her head to the side so I could see her ear. She was warm. Dry. Not the clammy cold of death. I could feel her life, and I could feel the gnawing pinch of magic in her skin. The hole in her ear was like lacework, the runed part so delicately removed it might have always been nothing if not for the soft blur when she breathed. A trick of the light.

  A shadow too slow to keep up with her. Separate—but not entirely—from her body.

  “Will it spread?” I asked.

  Dimas said, “I don’t know. It’s never worked for me, but I haven’t tried very hard.”

  And a clearheaded, empty knowing came over me.

  “Why bring her here?”

  Adella and Maud backed away from him. Maud gripped Adella’s arm, keeping her steady while she groped at the holes in her ear.

  “Shadows can’t pass through the doors.”

  I grabbed the back of my neck, the breath of air—not real, not real, not real—warming my shoulders.

  The room was small. The low ceiling hung above us, more mold than stone, and the door leading out was ringed in runes so old the carvings were soft and pale like paint. Another door, as tall as the ceiling and as thin as Dimas, was an overgrown mes
s of moss and weeds opposite the entrance. I stepped toward it, the moss muffling my footsteps. Rune-scrawled iron dripping rust and dying ferns shuddered when I laid my hand against it. My dark handprint revealed the scratched-out edges of the door.

  Nails clawing for a way out.

  A sound so deep my teeth ached shuddered through the door. This was it. The birthplace of my nightmares. The home of my death.

  Where Sallot Leon of Nacea had become damned.

  “This was where they made the first shadows.” I traced the flowery runes twining around the lock. The first shadows came from Erlend, but when Erlend was ready to put their work to the test, they used Naceans. Fitting. “And you were going to leave Adella here till she rotted away and nothing but a frantic soul remained.”

  Dimas didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

  I shoved open the door, sweat beading across my skin with effort, the chill in the air raising gooseflesh on my arms. The door opened slowly, a great yawn of a rusted-shut creak, and the dead air inside flooded the room. I stared into the empty dark.

  Had the shadow that killed my family waited here? Trapped? Hurt? Tearing itself to shreds and forgetting who it was till it was nothing at all?

  I held my hand out to Dimas. “Come here.”

  He didn’t move. I pulled out my knife.

  “I’ll save your mother and sister, but you’re not leaving this room. Not now.”

  Not for a long, dark while. Till he’d lived with what he’d done.

  “I’m going to find every Nacean you sent up here,” I said, “and all the ones Erlend kept trapped, and then I’m going to kill Gaspar del Weylin, Nevierno del Farone, and Lena de Arian. No more shadows. Not now. Not ever again.”

  I couldn’t avenge Nacea.

  I could protect the Nacea that still lived—stuck in Erlend, scattered through Igna—and the dying flicker of home that still lived in us.

  “You won’t let her hurt them?” Dimas asked, soft voice choked.

  “If they’re alive right now, I’ll do everything I can to keep them that way.”

  Dimas, eyes open and hands still, stepped into the dark without a fight. I shut the door behind him.

  And it sounded like a sigh.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “You’re going to leave him in there?” Maud moved behind me, hands fluttering but never quite touching.

  I turned around. “For a while. We need to get to work without him interfering.”

  Adella was in the corner, her hand over her runed ear. Her hair was flattened on one side, where she’d been shoved into the trunk, but the springy curls on the other side trembled. A whole-body shudder overtook her.

  For someone always in control of her body, it was betraying her now.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Adella?” She tilted her head down, cracked lips quirking up. “You knew me as Two?”

  “Shadows don’t know who they are. Were.” I shrugged and slumped. Could you stop making one? “So you’re not one.”

  Right now.

  “There’s a second laboratory.” Maud let her hand linger just above my arm, and in the warm, thick air of the room, I could feel it shaking there. “It was listed as ‘fallow’ in Lady de Arian’s books, but it was still being sent supplies.”

  Fallow.

  The Naceans still alive would be there. They had to be.

  “I’ll see if anyone’s there and figure out what to do about it.” I pulled the winter hat from the thin pack strapped to my back and tossed it to Adella. “Cover your ear.” I turned back to Maud. “Get Adella out of here if you can and go about your day like normal. Just make sure that if you need me, you can send me a sign.”

  “I can lay low.” Adella pulled on the hat, face twisted in pain. “Show me the way out, and I can hang around outside.”

  “You can stay hidden?” I asked.

  “Obviously.” She rolled her eyes. “Or did I imagine sneaking up on you multiple times during auditions and after?”

  “Fair point.” I took Maud’s hands in mine. “You stay alive. I’ll deal with Dimas.”

  “I’ll find you a way in.”

  “Maud, you don’t have to do that.”

  She squeezed my hands, face harder than I’d ever seen it. “I know why you’re here. This is war. There are no rules. Weylin’s out for blood, and you’re out for him. Let’s get him first.”

  “Deal.” She was real. She was alive. She’d not betrayed me, and I’d see her again. One friend in this mess of a world.

  And Adella was all right.

  Alone in the room, my skin crawled with magic and shadows and fear. If magic was real, so were they. I spun the ring Isidora had gifted me and thought of high places.

  And ignored the bit of me that thought of Elise in the moments before our fight. Lena de Arian—Riparian, one of the nobles responsible for Nacea—was her hero as Our Queen Marianna da Ignasi had been mine.

  But Elise, no matter what else, would never have condoned this laboratory or Riparian’s tests.

  Maybe we weren’t well suited, but Lady, it hurt. Thinking of Elise and what we’d said to each other hurt so much I didn’t want to consider her at all, but not thinking of her hurt just as much.

  I rapped on the door before trying to open it. No answer. Leveling my shoulder against it, I pushed, feet scraping through the moss and hands smearing the rust. It didn’t budge.

  I pushed harder, wanting to see Dimas, to talk to him, to know which parts of us were so similar and so different.

  We’d both crossed lines.

  The door creaked open, coughing rotten air into my face, and I fell back. A panicked prickling raced down my arms. Gooseflesh pimpled across my skin. I pushed the door open and let the light stream in. Dimas sat huddled in the corner.

  His hands clutched his face. A constant shudder wracked him, and his muttering dulled the rumble of the room. Like whispering.

  “Dimas?” I stepped into the small cell, skin crawling. I touched the wall and came away wet, and the urge to trace the lines along my arm nearly took over my hand. I froze. “Dimas, what did you do?”

  He didn’t answer.

  A breath warmed the back of my neck.

  And I was six again, legs wrapped around a tree branch while I dangled upside down and begged my sister to stand. I was six and the summer was thick with heat and death, and I could taste the whispers of the shadows in the back of my throat. I was six and running for my fifth day straight, and I could still feel them at my back.

  This wasn’t real. I wasn’t six.

  I walked to Dimas. The scurrying of my feet across the stones sounded like whispered words. He wasn’t bloody. He had skin and flesh and hair left on his bones, and the only thing wrong with him was what he’d done. My feet hit his.

  “Dimas.” I kicked his leg. “We’re leaving.”

  He didn’t move. “I can hear them. In my head.”

  I leaned over and touched his arm. Live, warm skin against my own and not the brush of leftover pieces dried by the sun. The sour stench of death—it was only stagnant air and my mind playing tricks—spilled over me.

  “We’re leaving.” I grabbed his upper arm and hauled him up. “It’s only guilt, and I’m glad we’ve that in common.”

  “It sounds like my mother,” he whispered. “Why does it sound like my mother?”

  I shivered, knees locking, teeth clamping together. All the words I had meant to say piled up in my throat. I grabbed him with my other hand too and yanked him to his feet, pulling him close to me and dragging him backward out the door. The uneasy itch to run grew stronger.

  “I know who I am,” he whispered. “I know who I am.”

  I slammed the door shut, falling on my ass and staring up at the top of the door. A nameplate, name long gone, hung half-broken from the jamb. Dimas raked his hands over his face.

  “I made—” He tried to spit it out and gagged.

  I finished for him. “A mistake?”

 
He sunk to the floor, sobbing, and buried his face in his hands. I stumbled away, but the sound followed me.

  A whisper in the dark.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  I raced out of the building to the older laboratory building Maud had told me about. It was a greenhouse, no tomatoes or garlic growing within. Great orange flowers drooping on their vines and purple-spotted petals crowned in thorns filled the glass walls. Poisonous plants.

  Alchemical plants.

  I’d left Dimas locked in that other room. He could get out, I knew, with magic, but the way he looked at his inky hands was so watery and sad, I didn’t think he’d be using runes anytime soon.

  A cat, the only living thing daring to touch the greenhouse, scratched at one of the windows of the attached wooden shed and batted a field mouse back and forth along the sill. I glanced round.

  There were no other buildings nearby, and that struck me as odd. It would’ve made sense to build more here, would’ve saved space. There should’ve been something.

  I circled the outside a few steps behind the patrolling guards—nothing inside so far as I could see except two guards and a door to nowhere. I unlocked the shutters and windows farthest from them. Support beams crisscrossed the ceiling, all function and no show. The cat would be a good distraction.

  I crawled into the rafters. It wasn’t a big place, but they’d not look up with a yowling monster nipping at their heels. The cat, still scratching, meowed up at me through the wooden slats and glass. I reached down from the rafters and slammed the shutters, cracking the glass and letting the cat inside. The guards came running, and I crawled across the beams to their door. A terrible yowl split the air.

  “Triad take me.” One of the guards let out a loud, rumbling groan and clucked his tongue. “Come here, cat. I didn’t mean that.”

  It must’ve gotten underfoot.

  Least he apologized.

  I picked the lock on the door—easy even with only a knife and a broken hat pin—and darted inside.

  More stairs. More runes. More doors drenched in runes worn down by age.

  “What’re you hiding?” I whispered.