Ruin of Stars

by Linsey Miller

  Let it not be Cam. Let him be far away from here.

  I laid one hand flat against a door. The cold slithered up me, picked at me. Droplets of water pooled on my sleeve. Rose up.

  Names lined the doors. Namrata, Mara, Thea, Cari, Prava, and more and more who had vanished under the wear of time. I tried to open the first one. Namrata was close to Namrantha, and Emerald had said the First Star of Nacea—there had been three, one for each of the Lady’s main stars, one to protect each of Nacea’s three regions, their families chosen by her centuries ago to be the leaders of Nacea forevermore—had possessed that name. It sounded like an Erlend or Igna thing to do.

  Change the name a bit to make it more palatable. Even if it belonged to one of our queens, our protectors. Even if it was the only holy name we had left.

  I shoved it open. The door rasped as it slid against the ground.

  The racking, shivering fear that gripped me tightened, and I wrapped my arms around myself.

  Cam could be in one of these rooms. The names were old, worn down, the nameplates used over and over and over. How many had died in this dark? I couldn’t let Cam die in one of these rooms.

  Rath had died to save him, and I wasn’t letting Rath down.

  Not again.

  I pushed open the door, fully, totally, something I couldn’t name pulling me toward the yawning black, and I heard it dripping across the dark. Skin scraped along stone, nails dragging, cracking in the dips.

  Drip.

  A breath soft as a breeze in summer rain coated my face in rotten, stagnant damp. “Hello.”

  Drip.

  I took a breath, tongue heavy with sour rot, and muttered into the dark, “I’m looking for Cam.”

  “Who’s Cam?” The sounds dragged across the still air, long and full of soft, slithering sounds. “Who’s Cam?”

  I shuddered. Fear, bitter and burning, filled my throat. A thousand images—Hia and Shea, faceless, red as dawn, as flames, as death, twitching in the grass—hit me hard, like my body hitting the surface of the Caracol. Splintered. Breathless.

  Breathe. I had to breathe. This wasn’t weakness.

  This was a rational reaction to a stimulus, but I had reason to panic.

  Drip.

  Blood seeping into dirt.

  This was real.

  Drip.

  “Cam?” Its words rattled in the air between us. A whisper. “Hello.”

  The shadow, more magic than flesh in the dim light, bandaged and bleeding, trailing moss and mold and the bitter taste of rot as it—she, Namrata—paced back and forth, stopped before me. There were gaps, great holes in her body where nothing oozed from the runed bandages holding her together. The last pieces of her green-marbled corpse vanished beneath a damp cloak.

  “You’re here for Cam,” the shadow said, the name a death rattle in her missing throat. “The new child?”

  A sickly, flighty feeling settled in my stomach. I wanted to run. Be sick. Sob. Give up and die because nothing could stand against the abyss that was this half-solid shadow hemmed in dust and dirty bandages. It slipped through the air before me like sound and touched my arm.

  And it was real.

  I threw my left hand up, the knife singing out of my sheath and tearing through the air where the shadow had been. It flinched back, like waves going out with the tide, and I darted out the door. It slammed shut behind me, my back against the stone, but I’d no memory of turning. I blinked, and I was running down the hall. Up the stairs.

  And a hand grasped the back of my collar, nails scraping down my neck.

  I screamed. It yanked me back, and I went tumbling down and down, back into the dark and nothing. I hit the hall floor ass first and crawled to my feet. Footsteps backed away.

  Shadows didn’t have footsteps.

  “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

  A girl, rune-drenched and wounded, black hair slick against her bruised neck, dark skin pricked with scratches and scabs, stood in a pitch-black doorway at the end of the hall. Blood and ink dripped down her fingers, pooling around her bare feet. The torch beside her flared.

  And the runes—Lady, the runes—writhed within her skin.

  The shadow maker.

  Her gaze lowered to the knife in my hands, and she raised her hand to the wall, a line of runes so thin they might’ve been a torn strand of hair burrowed from her skin and into the stones. A prickling, scuttling pain held my empty hand to the wall. Blood welled up in the crack between flesh and stone. Red seeped into the carvings.

  Runes.

  Namrata’s door opened, tendrils of shadow unfurling from the gap, and I jammed my knife into the mortar near my fingers. It crumbled. The blade bit into my skin. The magic’s hold weakened.

  A strip of nothing so dark that staring at it hurt slipped between my hand and the wall. I stabbed it.

  “Stop!” The girl slammed her hand into the wall as the shadow reared back, my knife doing nothing.

  Blood splattered down the hall, dripping between us. The hairs on my arms rose, prickling and cold, like all the warmth was seeping out of me breath by breath. An ache rolled over me, oil on wet skin, and I stumbled to my knees. My ears rang. The shadow backed up.

  A whisper.

  A sigh.

  The drip of blood and ink.

  The girl crouched near me. “You were looking for Cam?”

  “I—” The words wouldn’t come. My hands shook, the knife clattering against the stones.

  Shadows were real.

  Real. Real. Real.

  “They wanted Cam.” The shadow Namrata flitted behind the girl, leaning over her and whispering in her ear. “Cam Nissa, son of Nissa Rin.”

  Namrata paused, though she didn’t stop moving. The nothing of her body continued to twist and peel away from the wall before settling into a smoky blur before me. Her half-bandaged limbs, cloth stained green and yellow, mottled like a pear. She raised one hand to what might’ve been her mouth.

  “You’re scared of me,” she—it, the shadow, Namrata?—said.

  What had Erlend done?

  Was this a soul and a mind bound to the earth without a body? Did that hurt? Was she always here? In this room, alone in the dark with no one for company but an eternity of pain?

  Was this a person?

  The girl glanced up at the shadow. She nodded.

  Namrata vanished back into her room. The girl held her hand out to me.

  “How about we go see Cam?” she said. “And we can take a break from panicking?”

  She led me to a door at the end of the hall, and a cold, crushing fear of pushing open the door and seeing a shadow with salted eyes and the height of a child froze me. She tugged me harder.

  “Just look. He’s fine.” The girl pushed open the door and a squeaky shriek came from beyond it. Light footfalls pattered away. “It’s me, Cam. And a friend, I think.”

  I blinked, bracing for shadow, but there was only a boy. Tall for his age and missing a front tooth, he peeked out from behind a short cot. He stood, upsetting the layer of dead moss dust coating his dark-brown skin. Black runes flickered along his eyelid.

  “I don’t know you,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Rath sent me.” I tried to smile. “He wanted me to make sure you were all right and take you back to Igna.”

  “Rath!” Cam grinned and tackled me in a hug, squeezing the air from between my ribs, and the touch made me shudder. “I knew he’d find me.”

  I patted his shoulder. “It’s a long story, but he did. Traveled half the country doing it too.”

  “You’re Sal, aren’t you?” Cam sucked a poppy seed from his teeth and let me go. “You look like Sal. He talked about you a lot.”

  Course he did.

  “Was it all bad?”

  Cam shrugged. “Ninety to ten.”

  Course it was. I laughed and rubbed the tears from my eyes. The girl cleared her throat.

  “Rath was your minder, yes?” she asked Cam, but she didn’
t wait for him to respond. “You know this person?”

  He opened his mouth and shrugged again. “If they’re Sal.”

  “I’m Sal.” I swallowed and touched Cam’s shoulder.

  He was alive. He was real.

  “Good.” The girl touched my elbow, a barely there brush, and nodded to the hallway. “He’s fine. He’s alive. We need to talk.”

  I nodded.

  She led me into the hall. It was like being a child again, afraid of the dark and getting led back to bed, but this time to the dark was alive and hungry, an abyss waiting to snatch my face.

  Except Namrata had spoken. Had acted mostly human.

  Was she just a soul?

  I shivered. Nearly vomited.

  The girl shut Cam’s door behind us and turned to me.

  “I am Moira Namrata, the Last Living Star of Nacea, and you are trespassing in my domain regardless of good intentions.” The runes on her arms poked through her skin, sharp and bloody, and twisted toward me. Snake-line. Deadly. “I will ask you only once more—are you really named Sal and why are you here? Do not say for Cam. I know you were in the other labs.”

  The last sliver of Sallot Leon within me, the one of farmland winds and my father’s voice, forced me to my knees. I bowed, face pressed to the floor. I knew that title better than I knew my name.

  The three stars of Nacea had been our leaders, three royal families who could trace their way back to when the Lady still walked the earth and humans were only just beginning. The Stars of Nacea had been blessed by the Lady herself. Three stars to rule three regions of Nacea.

  But this was the Last Living Star of Nacea. She was Lady chosen and alive.

  And I was dying.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Nacea lived.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I collapsed. The air within me tightened, chilled. Nacea lived and I was dead, drowned in the sudden crushing possibilities of it.

  The girl—this couldn’t be real and she couldn’t be Moira Namrata—walked to me, bare feet dragging along the floor. I opened my mouth to talk, to beg, and swallowed a mouthful of air too sharp to just be air. The cuts across my skin burned.

  “You’re Nacean,” she said softly, crouching before me. “How did you get down here?” She folded her hands behind herself, and the aching bite to the air went with them. “Why are you down here?”

  “Broke in. I was looking for missing kids, other Naceans that Erlend’s been stealing, and I found—” I spun my ring. Trees. Towers. Rafters. Roofs. They never looked up. “How are you here? How are you alive?”

  She held out one hand to me. The runes on her arms, more scar than ink, sunk back beneath her skin and settled flat.

  “They’re runes,” I muttered. “How’ve you got proper runes? We don’t get runes.”

  Except we did. Dimas did. He said others did, the ones untouched by magic.

  “We’ll do this.” She pulled back her hand, fingers curling. “We’ll trade. My name is Moira. What is yours?”

  She created shadows. She called Namrata mother.

  Moira Namrata.

  Naceans always took their mother’s name.

  Had she stripped her mother, the last Star of Nacea, bare? Had she bound her soul to this hungry earth, always searching for what she was?

  But she wasn’t searching. She wasn’t hunting. She wasn’t unsure of who she was.

  Namrata knew herself. Knew Moira. Knew Cam.

  Was she even a shadow?

  Moira wasn’t Dimas, wasn’t going past the bounds of humanity because I knew shadows better than I knew myself. Namrata was not a shadow.

  “Your name,” Moira said. “What is it?”

  Her voice was soft, her Nacean smooth, and the sound of it all made my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth. The Nacean I’d longed to speak for years clung to my teeth and refused to break free. A stone of words and fear.

  What if I said it wrong? To a Star?

  “Sal.” I licked my lips—would they taste different? Nacean words from Nacean mouths—and stared up at her. “Sallot Leon.”

  She smiled. “Sallot. Good. I was here to visit my mother. You said you were here looking for the missing children? Most of them are well. We’re not fond of the fact they’re bringing us children, though we have found many lost Naceans that way.”

  “I’m Opal,” I said quickly. “Our Queen’s, the queen of Igna’s, Opal, and I’ve been hunting the Erlends that ran the shadows through Nacea, and North Star—Weylin—is one of them, and you’re dead. You’re all dead.”

  “Oh, no.” Her jaw tensed. “We were too useful to be dead.”

  My stomach rolled. Worth.

  “You came from Alona? Through Nacea?” Moira brushed back her hair, strands as dark as the ink curled around the holes in her ears. Her fingers shook. “What do you mean ‘we’re all dead’?”

  “Nacea,” I whispered. “The shadows.”

  She fell back against the wall, eyes closed, hands up in prayer. “There are ten thousand of us in Erlend. I thought more would have—we sent people south.”

  Ten thousand? Ten thousand! That was an eternity of people, of faces, of souls, I didn’t know and desperately wanted to.

  “They’re here?” The words stuck in my throat. “There are other Naceans here?”

  “No.” Moira slumped. “Weylin had different towns and cities quarter us when we first got here, and when he realized we could use magic several years ago, he separated us ever more. Until then, it had been normal. We were just Naceans in Erlend, waiting for his forces to clear Alonian soldiers out of Nacea—we thought the war was still going on, you see—and all of his updates about Alona sounded normal. But it was all lies. There are only a few of us here, and we don’t know the locations of any of the towns housing Nacean families. It’s been made very clear that if any of us step out of line, he’ll kill an entire settlement.”

  I buried my face in my hands.

  He couldn’t.

  He would. He would do it easily, but I wasn’t losing Nacea after finding it. I wasn’t letting Weylin destroy Nacea for a second time.

  “Don’t panic. He’s been forcing us to work for him under threat of death, but his time has run out.” Moira gently touched my arm, eyes wide and glazed with tears, and smiled. “Did you really meet no other Naceans?”

  “I met another, Dimas. They told him his mother and sister were here, and that they’d kill them if he didn’t help test kids for magic.” I touched the shell of my ear. “He’s got holes, and he said his mother snuck him out. Dimas Gaila. He’s in the other laboratory. Or he was. Erlend said they’d kill family still here if he didn’t help them make shadows.”

  “Gaila?” She tilted her head back. “There’s a young woman whose mother was Gaila, but there are no others. And he is still in that lab.”

  I froze. “How do you know he’s still there?”

  “Because the shadow in that room is bound to me, and it says he is still there.”

  Shadow.

  It had been real. It had been right there. Next to me. Behind me.

  I was sick for real, and Moira pulled back my hair.

  “You’re scared of my mother, Namrata,” she whispered. “Why?”

  My last memory of hearing her name bubbled up in me and I cleared my throat. “Last I talked to anyone, they said the First Star was named Namrantha.”

  She laughed. “That’s the Erlenian version of my mother’s name. Namrata is a family name, one of my grandmothers decades ago came from the lands Eredan conquered far to the east and over the sea. It’s one of our ways to remember that, and I will make them say it right.”

  “Oh.”

  “Come.” She moved her arm within my grasp and didn’t question my barely there touch or shuddering hand. “My lab. It’s safer, and I have things.” She glanced at me. “From home, from Nacea. We can talk there. I’d like to know more about Dimas and Igna, and I imagine you would like to know more about Nacea.”

 
; Chapter Thirty-Six

  Clothes stitched into tapestries covered the gray stone walls. Deep, dark greens and blues, ribbons running through cotton like kelp through water, tightened the space, but I felt free, like floating in open sea. Like drowning.

  There were books and cuffs and a pair of yellow socks peeking out from papers and scratchily inked diagrams on the table that took up half the room. There were no shelves, no chairs.

  Moira sat on the clean edge of the table and cleared a spot for me. “Here.”

  “Thank you.” Was I supposed to bow to the stars? Use titles? Look at them?

  “I’m going to tell you everything I know,” she said, “and then I need to know what’s happened with the rest of the world.”

  I set my hand on the table. The diagram beneath it was of a human skeleton, skin peeled back and muscles bare, small runes burned into the underside of the skin.

  Magic.

  She was still a Nacean Star, but she was using magic. Drawing blood. Losing bits of herself and the Lady with every drop.

  Was I still Nacean, then?

  “You know magic?” I shook my head and pushed the diagram away. “I knew it was real, but how is it real? How can you use it? I don’t know a lot, but I know we never used magic.”

  Moira folded her hands in her lap. “It has become a necessity. The alternatives were far more dangerous.”

  “How?” I asked. “Our Queen Marianna da Ignasi banished it.”

  But she hadn’t. Everything leading up to this was proof of that. None of it explained living runes in Nacean skin.

  “No, she didn’t.” Moira held out her hand, palm down, and traced the faded lines of an old, white rune. “I’m certain she did something akin to banishment, but to reject it completely would change the fabric of our world. She changed us, not it.” Moira laughed and waved to the ceiling. “Well, she changed them, not us. She changed the mind, body, and soul of everyone who had ever used magic or been runed, and they passed on that change to their children. It will fade in time, most likely, but for now, there are a very few people capable of using magic and having it used against them, and a large amount of that few are Nacean.”

  My skin itched, the restless urge to scratch and claw until there was nothing left. I spun my ring. The soft hissing sound of metal on metal joined the thrumming in my ears.