Ruin of Stars

by Linsey Miller

  “No one’s got magic down south.” My voice echoed and rattled. “I never felt it. I never used it. I’ve never had it, and my parents never used runes.”

  But that wasn’t true. Dimas had said the same thing.

  Magic wasn’t gone. Shadows weren’t gone. Nacea wasn’t gone.

  “It’s not a thing you have,” Moira said. “It’s a part of the world, like air or gravity, and you can utilize it. Marianna somehow cut off the ability of people who’d used magic to sense it, manipulate it, whatever it is you want to call it. It’s still there, it can still affect them, but I can only assume she took away their ability to sense it. It’s why, once Gaspar del Weylin found out some of the people he had considered little more than refugees taking up his land and paying taxes could still use magic, he found the ones of us who could.”

  I laced my fingers together.

  Us.

  “The shadows came from the south, from Alona, or at least that is what the Erlend soldiers said. It’s what we saw. It seemed reasonable. A simple lie.” She wiggled her fingers, like running a coin across her knuckles but nothing was there. “Weylin started off slow, taking only one or two children away from their homes to Lynd under the guise of schooling and jobs. Helping us find new, better lives after Alona’s shadows destroyed our old ones. That’s what he told me when he brought me here five years ago.”

  How perfect that Erlend’s monstrosities had driven Nacea here and Weylin had finally done the honorable thing and granted the survivors land, homes, lives. The lives he’d taken from them. Of course he’d lied. Of course he’d laid the blame at Alona’s feet. Of course he’d made himself the hero.

  She glanced at me from the corner of her eyes. “My mother didn’t believe him when he said I was too busy to write so often. She visited. She found me, so he couldn’t let her leave. We’re not all in the same place, you see, so it’s easy to make sure we don’t know what’s happening, but now I have you to add on to the news the others he sent north have shared. It’s not like he let us settle in Erlend ten years ago with this in mind—he just let us settle. We built homes wherever we could and wanted, and we started paying taxes, paying tribute. We were just living. Like normal. We’d no reason to leave, no reason to not believe him. I didn’t, at least, until he brought me here.” She sighed. Slumped. “What’s happening outside of Erlend?”

  “What do you know?” I asked.

  I should’ve brought Elise’s notes.

  I winced. Elise.

  “Never mind.” I shook my head. It didn’t matter. “What don’t you know? I’ll fill in the gaps.”

  Moira knew of Igna but not greatly. It was, for all that mattered up here, still Alona. They’d known that half the Erlend nobles weren’t truly loyal to Igna. There were just a few extras that Nicolas and Our Queen hadn’t foreseen, and North Star had been plotting his little incursion for years. Winter and Five had moved too quickly and ruined North Star’s plans. She’d hummed at the rumors of Our Queen making shadows.

  And I’d nearly screamed.

  Nacea had lived, still lived, and he’s squirreled them away to use as scapegoats on some future day. Anyone farther south than Highwater, he’d told everyone in northern Erlend, was destroyed, the lands infected by whatever monstrous magic Our Queen had worked to destroy the shadows. He called them dead lands. Fallow.

  Gaspar del Weylin—North Star through and through—had told his small Erlend holdout territory that after the war, the land was rotten. Igna was not a real nation but a collection of groups stubbornly holding out and refusing Erlend’s aid.

  And once North Star’s Erlend and the old Erlend lands that had been integrated from Igna were united again, who’d care about the lie so long as they caught what they wanted?

  “We had to defend ourselves.” Moira scratched a shape onto the table and rubbed it away. “That was what he said. The old nation of Alona had risen from the ashes of the war and was trying to steal our land again. In the beginning, until five years ago, we’d no reason to leave. We were at war, and Erlend was fulfilling its contract of quartering us.”

  She talked of soldiers missing body parts—arms, legs, ears, noses, tongues. Shadow wounds. Runes carved into revealed bone but no magic buzzing in them.

  “We didn’t realize what he was doing at first,” she said. “He’d been trying to bring magic back for years, reawaken his connection to it, but it didn’t work. They just died. And then he noticed that our physicians were still using magic. We never considered it as such—scouring rot from wounds and ensuring those in need of lifelong interventions received it. He noticed. He offered my mother, a physician, many things if she would help him bring back magic or re-create shadows, but she refused. All of our physicians refused. Why would we torture a person so that the very core of their being broke? After that, he split us up. Divided us. There have been no more than twenty of us living in any given place since. We’re not allowed to talk or teach anyone how to use magic. Not all Naceans can, but he is cautious. He stopped us from communicating so that we could not escape or, even if we did, find the other Naceans scattered about Erlend.”

  “He has hurt so many people.” She dragged her nails down her arm, bouncing over the inky scabs. Her face might’ve been round once, but it was all softness turned sharp, hollowed cheeks and sunken eyes rimmed in red staring through me, never at me. “He has, by the sound of it, used Dimas Gaila to test children for magic, forcing him to rune their ears. He sends me children with bloodied, eaten ears and takes offense when I heal them. The other Nacean mages and I have done so much to avoid using the children he sends us. I have taught them to be mages at his behest and used my own blood as ink to make sure they spill none of their own. I have stripped my mother’s soul even barer so that it may pass as someone else’s shadow so that we need not make new ones. Every time he has threatened us with death, to kill or be killed, we have found a way around it, but now he wants a shadow army. He measures worth by blood, but how can he know till he’s spilled it all at Our Lady’s feet?”

  Moira turned back to me, black eyes bright, and held out her hand again. The runes were still. The ink was dull.

  “Gaspar del Weylin’s death belongs to me,” she said, “to Nacea as a whole. He forced his violence upon us, and I will make it his downfall.”

  I stilled, and a gentle, aching hum so deep I couldn’t hear it, only feel it, rattled across my skin. In my bones.

  “What have you got planned?”

  “Survival, to which he is a detriment.” She laughed, hollow and high, and offered her hand to me again. “A wounded limb steeped in infection will kill if not cut off, and I refuse to let our people be the rot-choked corpses Gaspar del Weylin wants us to be. We are going to free ourselves of the epidemic that is Erlend egocentrism.” She offered me her hand. “What do you do when your flesh is rotten, when the skin is so dead even your blood turns against you?”

  I took her hand. “Cut it out.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “And if you would have me as your surgeon, I would have you as my knife.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Moira called killing Gaspar del Weylin self-defense.

  I liked that.

  Vengeance made righteous. He’d been terrible and he’d never stop, and now he’d get what he was owed.

  “We don’t know where we all are.” She helped me from the table, the good bit of height she had on me making it easier, and unpinned a sprawling map from beneath the table. “And those of us he kept here he’s got under guard. There’s only about a dozen of us allowed in Lynd, and I know he keeps our numbers small in other settlements to prevent communication. The moment we try to step out of line, his guards will take us out, and he’ll send messages to the others. We can only kill him if we can overpower his guards and messengers.” She leaned in close to me. “I know how to do it, but I cannot do it.”

  She led me out the lab and down the hall. Watching her, the careful glide of her bare feet over the stones, the
gold and silver necklace falling out of her shirt, the spill of loose hair down her back, the unanswered question I so often muttered to the Lady—Our Lady—welled up in me.

  “Moira,” I said softly. “How understanding is the Lady? About blood and killing?”

  She looked back at me. “Why?”

  “I’m Opal.” I’d no mask and few weapons, but surely a Nacean Star would know, could look at me and see how out of step with Nacea I was. “I’ve killed a lot of people.”

  She stopped. “Do you feel guilty?”

  “Sometimes.” I swallowed and tensed. “But mostly,” I said, stuttering, “they deserved it.”

  “Why?” She took a step to me. Calm. Careful. But the glint in her eyes and tightness of her shoulders gave her away.

  I stepped back. “They led the shadows through Nacea. Or they were rangers. Or they killed someone else.”

  “If the child of someone you killed took revenge on you, would you damn the child?”

  I shook my head. “Probably not.”

  “Weylin and his rangers think they’re better than us due to their Erlenian heritage, and they have never had to face the consequences of their actions. They’ve been reprimanded but never punished,” she said. “You have become the consequences of their actions. We will show them how wrong they are.”

  I blinked at her.

  She smiled. “I’ve had plenty of time to consider morality while watching my mother wither away slice by slice. You are, like me, as Erlend forced you to be. They’d no right to leave us like this, but they did. And so we can set it right.”

  I nodded. “Good.”

  “Now,” she whispered, coming close. “What did you really want to ask of me?”

  “Am I Nacean?”

  I was. I was to me, and that’s what mattered.

  But I wanted her to say it in Nacean, to look at me, knowing all the things I’d done, and say it. I’d been acting for Nacea, but suddenly here it was, Last Living Star and all, and what if she hated that?

  “You’re Nacean.” She let a breath out through her nose, a half laugh. “If you want to be, you are. There’s not a test you have to pass.”

  I swallowed. “I remember some things. I remember the rules about magic and blood and prayers.”

  “Our Lady is understanding.” Moira held out her arms, runes gathered in the crooks of her elbows like frightened creatures. “And more importantly, you are as you are. A debt of blood must be repaid in flesh—in service, in thought. It doesn’t have to be literal. Do you think you’re a bad person?”

  I shrugged.

  “Bad is relative.” She took my hand. “Do you want to help me make the world a safer place for the people Erlend would murder and use and break?”

  I nodded.

  “Do you want the people who have killed for their own gain and comfort held accountable?”

  Again, I nodded.

  “And even though you feel in the right, do you feel guilty? Do you feel the need for redemption?”

  “I do feel guilty.” But did I crave redemption? Did I deserve it?

  “I’ll help you get it if you want.” Moira let go of me. “But I don’t think you need redemption. The world that made us does.”

  Let them try me after. Let a court of people just as hurt as I had been look at my soul and crimes and judge me as I was. Let the better world I wanted to make decide if I deserved to live in it.

  At least, no matter what, the world would be better.

  At least, of the two of us, it would be redeemed.

  And I would have my revenge.

  “You’ve only met one other Nacean since its destruction?” She waited till I nodded and stepped forward, pressing her forehead to mine. “Who you are is up to you, but for as long as I am Nacea’s Last Star, you are as Nacean as me. Understand?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s not a fact of closeness or place. It’s a being, and I will never deny you that. No one can but you.” She touched my arm. “I’m going to show you how we’re going to get rid of Gaspar del Weylin. I think you will be the key to ending his reign.”

  We stopped before a door, footsteps muffled by the thick mat of moss creeping out from under it. The door was rune-scrawled iron and dripping, trails of rusty water catching in the carvings. Ferns curled out from under the door like fingers, twists of green against the dark, stained metal, and a wilting, white flower grew from the lock. A sound so deep my teeth ached shuddered through the door. I shivered.

  Moira brushed brown leaves from the handle. “We found the idea of using flesh distasteful and gardening is quite calming.”

  She carved a rune and rapped twice. It echoed, long and loud. Longer than it should’ve.

  “Please understand that while we had options, they were not good. There was no good path for us to take. If we did not do as Gaspar del Weylin asked with mercy, he would have done it with cruelty. He brought us people, and we let them decide. Many we smuggled out. It is easy to fake a corpse once you know death so well. At least, if we agreed to his terms, we could make sure as many lived as possible, us included. If we agreed to his terms, we could make sure to undermine him at every turn.” Moira pushed the door open a crack. “We could destroy him. The expendable peoples he used to further his empire could break it down from the inside. So we waited.”

  The door creaked as Moira shoved it open and waved me in. “We are done waiting.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  She pulled out a diagram of the human body. I couldn’t look at it.

  “I know they’re different and all, but I was in Nacea when the first shadows tore through.” I covered up the stripped face on the diagram. “My mind doesn’t always recognize that difference, especially if they get close or something, so if your plan involves shadows, I can’t be a part of it.”

  “They’re not really shadows though.” She covered the diagram and frowned. “Weylin asked us for shadows, but we didn’t know how to do that, and most importantly, we didn’t want to. Making them was a process of trial and error. My mother volunteered to be the first so no one else would suffer the pain, and I did not torture her until she died and her body could no longer contain a soul. A shadow of violence is not the same as one of kindness. I broke her down, but it was not what Weylin would have done. These are not the shadows you feared.”

  But they were shadows still.

  “How many are there?”

  How many dead still walked this earth, killed with kindness and kept here by magic? It was unbelievable.

  “Nine. A good, lucky number,” Moira said. “And enough to protect the other towns where Weylin has hidden the rest of the surviving Naceans, I think. They’ll be able to enter the towns and kill the guards and messengers before anyone gets the signal to kill Naceans.”

  I’d no idea what numbers were lucky or not in Nacea. I’d so little knowledge.

  I ran a shaking hand across my face. “She’s a shadow.”

  “She was my mother first.” Moira’s eyes narrowed. She spoke through gritted teeth. “All those shadows, they were souls, real people. Erlend made them as it made you.”

  I’d speared men and slit their throats, even made a few suffer, but I’d never stripped the face from a toddler’s corpse and stitched it to their father’s.

  “You ever see them?” I asked. “What they did to Nacea?”

  She slowly shook her head, and for a moment, the runes around her arms sharpened and cleared, jagged, black lines curled around her arms like thorns. “I don’t remember.”

  No wonder she wasn’t scared.

  I laughed. Empty. Gasping. “When you strip us away, how much of the self remains? A soul? A mind full of a life that had come to pass? A soul without a person to fill it up is just a shadow. Like a body without a mind? I heard those stories growing up—tales of the War of Twelve Gods has got nothing on the shadows. And you’re just unleashing them on the world!”

  “I am in complete control of her. I hold dominion over her soul.
” Moira led me down an empty hallway, all doors and no people. “Could you know everything about someone you love? Could you control them? Could you have pulled their memories from their head and carved magic so deep into their body it burned them from the inside out till they were nothing but a soul?”

  As if that mattered. My last two encounters with shadows—or whatever they were—had left me so shaky I didn’t think I’d ever be able to shake again.

  Instead of answering, I asked, “Could you break a man’s neck to get what you wanted?” I shuddered—Roland, if I’d been faster, could’ve been dead. “Even if he didn’t deserve it?”

  She didn’t move, didn’t speak.

  I rubbed the back of my neck. Eyes. I could feel eyes on me. An itching, creeping prickle of eyes or hands or spider webs.

  We were as we were.

  And our bloodied, runed souls were going to destroy Erlend.

  “I will do whatever you need me to, but I will not work with the shadows.” I asked, “How do I help you kill North Star?”

  I’d told her about their names, but she still scowled.

  “Weylin is putting on a show tomorrow night for his officers and noble guests.” She traced a rune on the table but placed no power in it. “I have been planning on taking over that show and demonstrating to Erlend what Weylin has truly done, but before I can do, I need the locations of the Nacean settlements. He separated us out. If we move against him, he kills a settlement, and we can’t stop it because we don’t know where the others are. They could be anywhere in Erlend, and they have no idea what’s going on. No one outside of us has idea any of this is happening.”

  “I know how to find out.” A vicious joy spread through me. Maud had said Riparian was in charge of accounts, and she was meticulous enough to list those settlements. They’d have some sort of location marker on them. “Can you keep Dimas here? Tell him to pretend his job went smoothly if anyone comes for him? I only need into North Star’s estate, and I can get the locations.”