Ruin of Stars

by Linsey Miller

  Riparian’s bookkeeping records.

  “Lena de Arian does all of Weylin’s bookkeeping,” I explained. “She has to have records of the settlements, Naceans, and mages in order to make sure Erlend can keep track of where you are. It’s all about worth with her, how much it costs to do all this versus the payout. She has to calculate it some way.”

  Moira’s jaw tensed, mouth stretching wide.

  I shrugged.“Money’s probably the only truth she and Weylin have.”

  “I will keep an eye on Dimas. The guards who check our progress can’t tell the shadows apart. It will be easy to say he succeeded.” She took me to a door cut directly into the dry dirt wall of a tunnel. We saw no other people, only footprints in the dust, and she laid a hand on my arm once we reached it. “We use this door to get around, but it is very hard to hide something in plain sight with magic. Don’t let them see you leave or enter.”

  I paused. “Why not escape with magic? Why make shadows at all?”

  “The runes.” She held out her arm to me, palm up, and let the runes beneath her skin settle into place. “Do you know why we call them living runes?”

  “No.”

  “Because they’re exactly that. Alive,” she said. “Bargaining with them, performing magic, takes sacrifice. If I lose control or attempt magic beyond my abilities, I will be devoured. And what’s the point of me even trying to escape if in all likelihood I will end up dead and Weylin will kill the village I grew up in for my transgression? If I don’t do what Weylin asks, he kills people. If I do what he asks, I kill people. He has forced me to walk a line, and I will walk it so that no one else has to make these decisions.”

  “How do you live like this?” I had asked Amethyst and Emerald the same question as Ruby’s pyre burned. And I knew the words Moira would say before she spoke.

  “Because I must,” she said. “Because if it were not me, it would be some other child, some other Nacean I was supposed to protect, learning magic and making shadows and choosing who would die, and I would make no one else suffer this weight.”

  “I’ll be your blade.” I grasped her hand, the clammy touch of her skin so like mine. “I’ll help you bear that weight.”

  “And I’ll help you bear yours.” She grasped my wrist and pulled me close. Her lips brushed my crown. The copper bite of ink and blood burned in my nose. “But Weylin is mine. We must show the world what he has done so that it is never done again.”

  “How do I find you after?” I asked.

  She drew a rune on my arm. No power, but it still made me itch. “Draw that on the other side of this wall. It’ll let you in. We’re kept under guard, but they can’t sense magic like we can.”

  I stared at the rune, stomach rolling, and thought of nothing but Namrata’s hands, the ink holding the nothing gaps between her flesh together.

  Moira sighed. “Never mind. I’ll let you in after dawn. This street will be dark still.”

  “I’ll see you then.”

  She touched me once before I left, her rough hands sliding down my arm and catching on my sleeve. “You have questions, but after this, I will answer all of them. And introduce you to the others here. There aren’t many of us, mostly children, but they’ll be as excited to meet you as you’ll be to meet them.”

  I stared at her hand on my arm, the way her fingers curled across the wrinkled cloth, the neatly clipped ends of her nails darkened by grit and blood, how her spiked ring picked at the wool. It felt warm and real, real as my own skin. The runes curling round her knuckles were sharp. Arching.

  “I’ll make a list,” I said. “I got lots.”

  She laughed as I left, the door cutting off the sound with a prickling snap.

  Magic.

  It was still night. It felt like it had been longer, a full day in the shuddering presence of Namrata. A biting chill had crept in, snow drifting down from the mountains, and I glanced around the empty dark. I was outside of the central grounds and the door was gone. The little alley opened onto one of the main streets of the eastern district.

  I needed Maud and Adella. My hands were shaking and my skin itching, the little hairs on my arms standing straight up still. Like before a lightning storm.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Ice crusted every tree and rock on the mountain pass. Rivers of thigh-deep snow carved out by the wind soaked through our clothes and boots till I couldn’t feel my toes. Flakes weighing nothing continued to fall—each soft, white insult easy to ignore, but with all of them pressing down on me. It was like drowning.

  And there was no escaping it.

  I should’ve worn the uniform Maud suggested. She was always right.

  “No one comes up here.” Adella, face turned into the wind, pointed toward one of the four towers looming over North Star’s home.

  “How do you know all this?” I asked through clenched teeth.

  I was not made for the cold.

  She shrugged. “Asked around, but not the folks Weylin likes, you know, the street performers and the like.”

  I held up my full arms. “What am I doing?”

  “You’re sliding down the embankment.” Adella took an ax and mimed slamming the point into the icy sheet beneath our feet. “There’s a ledge a little ways down, and from there you can jump from the mountain to the tower. You’re good enough at climbing.” She grinned. “It’ll be fun. You can’t climb up. You’d never make it over the lip in the wall at the third floor, and the guards do circle the path at the bottom. They just don’t look up here often. Too cold.”

  “Sounds like I’m going die in an avalanche.” I wrapped my scarf round my face. My mask was hidden, hooked over the back of my belt. “Or fall to my death.”

  It was too cold for the clothes I wanted, and I’d so many sleeves it was a miracle I could feel my arms.

  “Both better deaths than what Erlend has planned for us all,” she said. “The windows have got bars. It’ll be easy.”

  Lady save me.

  Sliding was slow going. The cliffside wasn’t straight and for all the blinding white around us, there wasn’t enough snow to bury the handholds and bumps of the rock wall. And a good ways down, there was a little ledge jutting out toward the tower wall. Adella shouted something down. The wind ate it.

  I could never tell Maud about this.

  An ankle-spraining fall beneath me, a little balcony beneath a well-shuttered window gathered show and pine needles, and I leapt onto it. My feet slipped on ice, sending me to my ass. I groaned.

  Only three stories to go till the next one.

  I tossed up the weighted end of the rope. Took me three tries to loop it around the window bars above me, and I used it to climb up. Then the next window and the next until my arms were burning and my lungs too hot to be right. I just had to get to the next balcony.

  I crawled onto it and laid down in the snow, arms buried, chest tight. The cold seeped in again.

  “Up.” I pushed myself up. I didn’t want to be anyone else but me, but being Amethyst would’ve done me a lot of good right now. “No staring at the ground.”

  I left the rope and ax on the balcony and slipped a thin piece of wire into the crack between the doors. The hook popped up. I was in.

  It was a furnished bedroom. The mattress was bare and the desk empty. There were another two rooms attached, an entryway and a bathing room. A set of two glass doors separated these quarters from another room, and I tried the handle, smiling as it gave way. The door in the other room opened. I dove under a couch.

  Two people entered: a servant, pale-brown uniform dull next to the brilliant-green clothes of their companion, who wore a fancy mix of cloth and jewelry. The servant bowed, and a silver cuff at his ear, hiding a series of half-healed scars, glittered. Another Nacean.

  “There’s a room connected to it,” the servant said. “Once your father arrives for tomorrow’s demonstration, we can make sure he’s comfortable there. A guard will escort you both to dinner and the city square.”

/>   The door to the room opened again. The fancy one jumped to attention and dropped into a bow, feet apart and back straight. The perfect height to acknowledge someone of higher rank than you. The servant dropped to his knees and pressed his forehead to the ground.

  “Is it to your liking?” The new man was older, voice the rumbling gravel of decades of talking.

  North Star.

  The servant remained on his knees while the other man straightened and nodded. “Yes, sir. Thank you for your concern. I’m happy to be close by so that I can be part of this.”

  I braced myself, digging into the rug until my nails cracked inside my gloves, and closed my eyes. So close.

  So close to the man who’d ruined thousands of lives to feed his hungry greed.

  And I couldn’t kill him. Not yet.

  “Of course.” North Star inclined his head and looked around, gaze glancing over the glass doors. “I am pleased you’re taking an interest in your family’s responsibilities at so young an age.”

  From my place in the dark, separated from North Star by practically nothing, he couldn’t see me. Not through darkened glass and the seat of a couch. Not if his life depended on it.

  Those in the light couldn’t see out into the night. Elise would’ve called it a metaphor.

  It wasn’t. If it were, Weylin and I would’ve been facing off in the pitch black of the void, no moon or stars to guide our bloody battle. There was no light to guide our deadly ways.

  “When is Roger arriving?” North Star asked. A sliver of a mouth set above a strong, clean chin wrinkled downward in a bored frown, and the thinness of his nose made the broken crook all the more crooked. He didn’t so much as look at the servant still prostrate at his feet—even Our Queen acknowledged servants. There was no unnecessary gilt draped over him though. The dark green of his uniform and golden collar and cuffs brightened what little gold was left in his white hair. Round, brown eyes gazed from corner to corner of the room.

  A crag of straight-cut mountain stone crowned in ice.

  “Three days.” The young lord smiled. “He wanted to see the borders personally.”

  North Star didn’t answer, only nodded.

  Everything about him itched at me: the sharp, exaggerated angle of his coat’s shoulders, made to make him look wider and stronger than he was; the straight line of his spine as he stood unmoving while his people talked to him; the dismissive disinterest in the way he never quite angled his body to the lord speaking. North Star forced him to adjust to his stance.

  Erlend men, back in the day, had prided themselves on how immovable they were, how stoic, how like the mountains they lived among, so Elise’s history said. She’d a whole chapter on it. Erlend’s culture had invaded Alona’s like a weed and changed everything—food, language, gender. And I could see it in him.

  North Star might as well have carved himself from marble, made himself into the ideal Erlend of old.

  Eredan, wasn’t it? The people who’d so ruined their own nation that all the folks they’d conquered and forced to be Eredan had fled? The people who’d traveled west across the sea from Eredan to Berengard and been denied as refugees for their hand in the ruin? The people who’d been welcomed in Aren out of mercy and wormed their way into the heart of it until they overthrew Aren and revived Eredan as Erlend?

  Conquering. Ruining. Invading new lands to repeat the process until they’d an empire as vast as the one they’d made unlivable. A manifestation of the destiny.

  Erlend was just a new name for it—Eredan greed at the expense of others, a driving force to see the world kneeling at their feet and declaring them the best. The greatest this world had to offer.

  Weylin was selfish wants given mortal form.

  And he made sure that all his men aspired to be him.

  He made everyone and everything shift to accommodate him, made sure that everyone unlike him—male and noble blooded, pale beauty and able bodied—knew they could only pray to be like him. He was the ideal by virtue of his birth. A false upholding of blood as something that could be pure.

  But no one was ideal. My heroes were as mortal as him, and marble could crack.

  I would shatter him.

  Chapter Forty

  I waited for them to leave before sliding out from under the couch and into the visiting lord’s room. There wasn’t much in there to help, and I peeked into the little room off to the side for his servant. A stack of neatly folded uniforms that might be useful sat on a table.

  I cracked open the door to the hallway. There was nowhere to hide out there, no rafters or furniture, and the only freedom was a window facing inward to what must’ve been a courtyard. The servant who’d been on his knees before North Star was the only one left in the hallway, and he stared at me, eyes wide.

  I touched the shell of my ear where his cuff was, held out three fingers to his lips, and raised them to the sky, to the Lady’s stars.

  Your lips to the Lady’s ears.

  He grinned and did the same, turning his back to me and carrying on down the hall as if I weren’t there. I slipped through a window facing the opposite direction as quiet as I could.

  It was a garden closed for winter, the more delicate plants covered in cloths and the balconies stripped of their furniture and planters. I jumped to a little balcony beneath me and used the weighted rope to reach a large one backlit by a glowing window. Silhouettes drifted in and out of the light.

  I crouched in the dark against the wall. If they didn’t look hard and if I stayed far enough back, they’d not see me through the glass. The guards down below wouldn’t either, and I could stand the cold for a little while. The sweat I’d worked up climbing had cooled as I waited for North Star to leave.

  And Riparian was here.

  Her dress was pale, a burnished gold decorated with reddish-orange sun rays, and the jewelry dangling from her ears and glittering at her neck was all for show. Dark green ribbons trimmed in gold—Erlend colors—were woven through the braids bundled against the back of her neck in a neatly tied bun, and she laughed along with the young lord seated next to her. Her smile was too wide, but he tilted his head back, neck bared, and chuckled. She glanced at North Star, lined eyes dark.

  He arched one brow, just barely, and she laid a hand on the arm of the young woman next to her.

  Maud.

  She was dressed in a dark-brown dress the same color as pine bark, and a notebook lay open before her. No food or drink was set for her. She was only there to take notes. To serve.

  The dinner paused. A door opened, and a servant announced something I couldn’t make out. All the diners rose to their feet. I leaned left so I could see as far right as possible.

  Elise glided into the room, chin up and shoulders back, and stared straight at North Star till she reached his chair and bowed. He bowed back. Barely.

  I looked away, chest tight, and squeezed my eyes shut. She’d be all right. She wasn’t joining up with them.

  Or she was. Just like Our Queen had let the fall of Nacea go unpunished to save the new nation of Igna, Elise could’ve been saving Hinter. She liked Riparian enough for it.

  Would she do that?

  I nudged open the balcony doors a hairbreadth.

  “—glory in the name of Erlend.” North Star raised his glass to the dozen or so nobles seated at the table. “Let us commit to making our country great once again, to make sure we are never robbed of our place in the world, to ensure our destiny for generations to come. Let’s us not allow a queen of no significant blood deny us of our birthrights.”

  Elise and the rest raised their glasses, mouths moving in agreement.

  I sat in the shadows and watched, too twitchy to listen to more.

  If Erlend had ever been great, North Star and his nobles had ruined it.

  The dinner lasted awhile, long past the time it should’ve, and the same young lord North Star had spoken to earlier turned his attention—with the urging of Riparian—to Elise.

  She was d
ressed nice but nothing like how she used to look. It was all boring elegance and standard clothes, no cosmetics lining her eyes like sea waves or gold fishnets in her hair. A pale-green veil hid her braids, and she’d no jewelry at all.

  Not even the locket with her mother’s portrait.

  She looked like only a part of herself, and she kept twisting her hands in her lap.

  They all rose after dinner, mixing and talking over bite-size fruit tarts and pale wine, and Riparian and Elise spoke in whispered, grin-filled conversations anytime Elise freed herself of the young lord’s attentions. Riparian stroked Elise’s arm, a proud parent or particularly affectionate kennel mistress.

  But when Elise turned her back on Riparian and no one could see her face, her smile dropped. Twisted.

  Elise sneered.

  And I lived.

  So this was hope. She finally broke away from Riparian with a brief hug and walked as fast as she could to the balcony doors. I dove into the dark corner just to the side of them, and she pushed open the door, dress fluttering in the wind. A shuddering gasp filled the outside silence. I sunk down into the dark.

  I missed her. I was furious.

  She’d some bad ideas that needed fixing, starting with Lena, but that seemed underway. She’d come outside for a breather and was about to get an earful.

  I took a deep breath, hands shaking, and whispered, “Elise.”

  She froze. Staring straight ahead into the dark, cold night, she whispered back, “How?”

  “You know, spying, doing my job.” I shifted a bit, gave her a chance to know where I was, and cleared my throat. “You and Riparian looked cozy.”

  She opened her mouth, hand fisted at her side, and a voice cut her off.

  “Elise, darling, it’s much colder here than Hinter.” Riparian—of course—slipped onto the balcony behind Elise and draped a heavy cloak around her shoulders. She straightened out Elise’s ruffled veil with hands gentler than I wanted to admit. “You’ll catch your death out here.”

  Elise shivered but smiled. “Thank you. I only want to take it in. This feels like Erlend in a way Hinter never did. I want to feel it. I’ll come back in once I get too cold.”