Ruin of Stars

by Linsey Miller

  “It’s all right.” I rummaged around her traveling trunk for a pair of socks and tossed them to her. “I mean, it’s not, but so far as happenings go, I get it. I’m still bouncing back and forth on Our Queen.”

  Elise paused, one sock half-on, and then thought better of asking for an explanation. There was no innocence left in us and no innocent intentions left between us. How could I fault her for something as simple as lying?

  What I’d learned since then made her lies understandable.

  “Elise,” I said softly. “Erlend didn’t destroy Nacea. Not totally.”

  She turned her face to me. “What?”

  “They’re here. North Star’s using them.” I leaned in close to her, the weight of everything that had happened, hadn’t happen, would happen, closing in on me, and I closed my eyes. “We can use runes.”

  “Runes?” She tapped her pen against the ink pot, its bone handle clattering, and took a deep breath. “There are Naceans here, and they can use magic?” She pulled back, mouth open. “Is that where those children went? They were Nacean? They’re using you to make shadows?”

  So clever. So concerned.

  “Magic wasn’t banished.” I nodded, swallowed, and opened my eyes. If I slept now, would the world still be here when I woke? “Folks who never used magic and whose parents never used magic can still use it, and Weylin’s making them create new shadows.”

  She took off here spectacles and covered her eyes. “That’s worse. That’s so much worse than I imagined.”

  “The deal is if any of the Naceans in Lynd try to move against him, he’s got the rest of Nacea settled across Erlend in dozens of different homesteads and towns, and he’ll kill them all as punishment. I need to know where they are so we can send shadows, new ones, different from the ones we knew, to prevent rangers from killing the other Naceans,” I said. “There’s too much to explain now, but those kids you’re missing are probably in the laboratories. Erlend only wants the ones who can do magic or be turned into shadows.” I slid from the sill and crossed to her, leaning against her desk so we could stare across it at each other. “Gaspar del Weylin, Lena de Arian, and your father all knew this. They’ve been funneling kids up here to test for magic. Remember the ears? Magic isn’t gone, folks and families who used it just can’t anymore, but Nacean kids, kids who grew up away from it, unexposed to it, they can, and magic eats its medium. That’s what happened to the children and their ears.”

  She brought the three fingers of the Triad to her lips and muttered a prayer, chest heaving. “I had wondered how they picked, why only a few were missing. How many are dead do you think?”

  I took her free hand in mine and muttered, “Too many.”

  “It always is.” She started copying the ledgers again, marking places she thought might be kids from Nacea or Hinter kids she knew. “A decade later, and we’re still mired in memories of grief.”

  Mired.

  Good word for it. I always thought I was free, and then it sucked me back down.

  “Sometimes I dream of running—barefoot and gasping, skin full of thorns—and I wake up with burning legs like it was all real, like I never escaped the shadows and they’re still there, just out of sight. Still chasing me. And sometimes I don’t dream at all,” I said. “Grief’s like that. Sometimes I’m still running with its claws in my back and my future nothing but endless night. Other days, I forget I was ever running at all.”

  And these kids were going to be stuck in this mire too.

  Elise kept writing, hand steady and words perfectly inked. “I wake up hiding, crouched inside wardrobes and closets and chests. Just like back then. I never remember those dreams. Perhaps it’s best.”

  She pushed her glasses up and smeared ink along her nose, covering the dark freckles and trailing a few drops along her chin. I took her hands and wiped them clean with my sleeves, dragging the cloth along each finger until the wrinkles of her palms were clean. She shuddered.

  “It was Lena who told me it was all right to love girls. I had to be told it was. In Erlend, I didn’t grow up knowing that. I was young when I went to live in Willowknot, but I still remembered my father’s words, all the things he ever said about men and women,” Elise said softly.

  It wasn’t a slight from Elise. Winter would never have acknowledged the existence of people like me just like he would never acknowledge his own daughter properly.

  “What happened?”

  “She helped me tell my father I liked girls. She said it was natural, that Erlend girls bonded in a way boys and girls never could, that our relationships were forged in fire.” Elise laughed, barely, tears dripping into the ink on her chin, but she never stopped writing. Her penmanship became a frantic scrawl. “I should’ve caught on then that she meant Erlend women were better than other women. That she held the same ideas as my father but twisted to serve her. She was friends with my mother. I just wanted some part of my family to not be terrible.”

  “Lady knows we’ve not got the words for it all solidified yet, but we need them. Erlend keeps shoving us into roles—always one or the other.” I leaned against her desk, head in my hands. “Everyone always defines me. I want to own myself. I should own myself. What gives anyone the right to tell me how I feel or who I am? Why’s it only infallible when it’s me? Why does every priest and judge rule that violating a person’s self is sacrosanct and monstrous when it’s everyone but me? I know myself. I get to say who I am, and you get to say who you are. That’s the world we have to help make—one where everyone is safe.”

  I was Sal, fluid and sure, and that was my Lady-given right—to exist as myself. To let others exist as their selves.

  “I’m sorry about how things went when we talked in Hinter. I should’ve stayed to talk with you, instead of leaving the way I did.” I took her hand in mine and bowed, kissing her hand. Knuckles. Fingertips.

  She hooked one finger beneath my chin and pulled me forward. “Take your filthy boots and coat off before you get in my clean bed.”

  I felt the blush in my cheeks and breathed before asking, “Can I stay in here with you?”

  “What?” Elise blinked at me, mind taking a moment to catch up with her moving mouth. She scooted her chair to the left and gestured to her empty right. “Sure. Pull up a chair.”

  I grabbed one of the wooden chairs before her desk and set it beside her, stretching out my legs under her desk and leaning on my left arm. Elise crossed her legs, hooking her left foot under mine. I sighed, the rough wool of her sock against my calf scratchy and comforting. Her breathing settled, and I twisted my chair so I could drape my legs across her lap. Elise laid her left hand against my thigh.

  “Go to sleep,” she whispered, thumb moving in circles. “I’ll wake you so you have plenty of time to escape.”

  I closed my eyes and leaned back.

  I didn’t dream of running.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Elise woke me up with a hand on my calf and the singsong call of my name on her tired lips. I thanked her, too much probably, but she’d dark circles beneath each eye and ink on her nose again, and the ache beneath my skin to take her face in my hands and let her rest safe with me was too great for anything else. She blushed, cheeks ruddy beneath her freckles and ink. I bowed over her hand.

  “Thank you, my lady.”

  “You’re welcome.” She caught my hand. “Question—was that your servant with Lena last night?”

  I nodded. “Riparian—Lena—took a liking to her back in Willowknot, and I’ve been getting information from her since.”

  “Will you thank her for me?” Elise smiled. “She had perfect timing. I was about to break.”

  “I’ll tell her. Or you can,” I said. “She’s nice. Like you.”

  Then I told Elise to be wary, and she laughed softly as I left. The day moved on, the world with it.

  I returned the ledgers and the key, and jumped at every shadow creeping across the walls in the pale morning light. Adella waited at th
e very bottom of the tower. She unknotted the rope when my cold hands failed.

  “I’ve been pacing the guards every round, hoping you’d show up.” She worked in silhouette, the white expanse of Lynd blinding in the sun only just peeking over the horizon. “Just wind it up and let’s go.”

  She led me around the city, dropping all the suspicious bits and picking up a mostly fresh rabbit carcass from a hollow tree off the guards’ path, and we reentered the city with my Opal masks still hidden against my back. The knives, at least, hunters carried. I made it back to the street for Moira just as dawn began.

  Adella stayed with me, and the two of us spent most of the new light avoiding the extra guards patrolling the streets above Moira’s laboratories. No wonder, even with magic and even if the threat of North Star killing a whole town of Naceans wasn’t hanging over her head, Moira wouldn’t escape.

  “You brought a friend.” Moira flinched under Adella’s gaze even though she was doing her best not to stare at the living runes. “Why?”

  “This is Adella.” I handed Moira the bag with the copies of the ledgers in it. “We’re going to need her.”

  Moira’s nostril’s flared and she narrowed her eyes at Adella’s ear. “Fine. She stays in my room. I need to make sure her soul is still firmly rooted to her bones.”

  “So we’re clear,” Adella whispered to me as we walked, “I would not have come with you if I’d known this was part of the deal.”

  I opened my mouth to agree and shook my head. I would have come. I would have.

  I’d killed so many people. What was the point if I let Erlend kill even more?

  We shuffled back down the tunnel, stopping once as a single guard went past, and Moira let me collapse on the thin mat in the corner of her laboratory. The rustle of the pages lulled me to sleep, but Moira’s high-pitched hums of interest snapped me back out of it. She sounded nothing like Elise.

  “Only coordinates,” she muttered, “but I don’t need names. I can work with this.”

  Adella, perched on a stool and wide eyes following Moira’s fingers as they moved down each page, leaned her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her knuckles. Her thumb skimmed her lips. “You’re been here this whole time? Learning magic and double-crossing Weylin?”

  I covered my face with an arm. Fair certain watching a Nacean Star getting flirted with was against the rules. Of something. Surely.

  I peeked.

  “In short, yes.” Moira glanced up, eyebrows coming together in an uneven line. “Who are you again?”

  “Adella, Carnival of Cheats acrobat and knife thrower.” She stuck out her free hand. “If you can use magic, why’d he not have you all fight for him or try to take us out?”

  “He tried that when I was a child. It backfired. Only thing left of the people he sent out was the burned-on rune they were working with. Magic is fickle. None of us had ever trained in it and the runes we use are Nacean. The Erlend rules don’t apply.” Moira chuckled but took Adella’s hand. “I’ve never met anyone from a carnival.”

  “I worked at the Carnival of Cheats. The carnival.” Adella’s eye twitched. “The best one.”

  Too snippy. I needed them getting along. “Bet Weylin’s scared.” I stretched, arms and legs too sore for such an early morning, and sniffed. “The more you learn from making shadows, the more power you have over him. The shadows he controlled he could outrun and blame on Our Queen. But now the only thing keeping him safe is your fear for the rest of Nacea.”

  Moira said. “He wants our shadows in the next five days, and I’ve no intention of handing them over.”

  My tired mind cleared. “Did you talk to Dimas?”

  She waved toward a cot in the corner. “Yes, but when we were done, he opted for a tonic to help him sleep. I think it was for the best.”

  Probably was.

  “His family—”

  “His mother is one of my shadows.” Moira paused, glancing up from the ledger. “What’s the word in Alonian?”

  Dimas’s mother? I shuddered, the memory of Namrata cold in my chest. “What word you want?”

  The words came out as a raspy whisper.

  She turned to Adella. “Do you speak Nacean?”

  “No,” Adella said. “Why?”

  “Wasn’t sure.” Moira went back to the ledger. “I didn’t want to be rude and swap if you didn’t.” She made a note. “Volunteer. Gaila was the second to volunteer,” she muttered in Nacean. “He won’t wake for some time, but I can’t imagine he’ll be over the knowledge till he sees his sister.”

  “Dimas’s mother volunteered to be a shadow,” I said to Adella in Alonian. It was easier, and now that they’d gotten me thinking about words, a whole host of ones I normally knew in Erlenian were stuck in the back of my throat and out of reach. We were all too tired to be plotting like this.

  I was nodding off a bit later when the door creaked open and Maud poked her head in. She sighed when she saw me.

  “You weren’t in the other building, and I’m supposed to be checking on Dimas.” She looked around, wondering if I’d let him out, and froze when she saw Moira.

  I leapt to my feet and stumbled. “Maud de Pavo, this is Moira Namrata, the Last Star of Nacea.”

  Her mouth opened, closed, and she settled on nodding. “Should I bow?”

  “Yes,” I said as Moira snorted and muttered, “No.”

  “You and Dimas both bowed to me.” Moira shook her head and stared at me. “Why?”

  “You’re one of the Lady’s stars. You’re important.” I didn’t look at her. I couldn’t. “It’s what you do for important people.”

  She let out a deep breath through her nose. “You don’t have to bow to me. Stars are meant to protect, to be a light of hope. You don’t owe us anything.” She laughed, shoulders slumping, and wiped her nose. “You certainly don’t owe me anything.”

  Maud nodded to Moira. “It’s a pleasure to meet you then.”

  “And you,” Moira said. “Dimas mentioned you, and I assumed the mistake he kept talking about was Adella.”

  “I could do without that nickname.” Adella scowled.

  “How is he?” Maud sat at the table with us, gaze sweeping over the cot in the back, and Moira shook her head.

  “He’s too stressed, using too much magic without enough practice.” Moira sighed. “I hate bearing bad news, but at least only half of it was bad.”

  “Will we need him tonight?” I asked.

  North Star’s show of power had to be his last night on this earth alive.

  “I will. I can’t hold all of the souls on this earth at once, and it will be a start to repaying his debt.” Moira traced one of the nine leaves—each one for a different tree, each one veined with white—inked onto her wrist. “I can only hold five at once. He will have to bind the other four.”

  “You mean control them?” I shuddered. No part of me trusted that.

  “No, I mean bind.” She frowned. “They’re not here all the time. Not like the shadows Erlend made. I call their souls back from death when I need to, and their souls resettle into what’s left of their bodies. It’s easier on them. Unlike the old ones, they aren’t stuck between two worlds. They’re only traveling.” She closed the ledger and laced her fingers together. “What I really need is the estate guards out of the way. The ones not at the square.”

  “Poison them,” I said. It was the easiest way to take out many at once. “Knock them out for the night or something. Most of them eat and drink the same things unless Erlend does it differently.”

  “You say it so simply.” Moira blinked at me, owlish eyes bright in the dark. “As if I need only acquire the poison and a way to administer it, not also the will to do it.”

  “You live beneath a greenhouse and brought the shadows back to life.” I jerked my head to Dimas. “He blew up a wall without so much as breathing.”

  Dimas, still sleeping, said nothing. Moira picked at her scabbed-over arms.

  “I will not ki
ll them simply for being on guard. People change. Monsters don’t. They’re people doing their best in the world they occupy. Gaspar del Weylin has made me do terrible things, but he will not force my hand on this.” She fixed me with a stare so strong it rattled in my teeth like skimming a metal spoon. My bones shivered. “No one else dies if we can help it. Nacea will not free itself of Weylin’s reign to only to reinstate its nationalistic violence.”

  “I didn’t say kill them. I thought maybe you could magic them to sleep for the night.”

  She shook her head. “People respond differently to different kinds of magic. Even if I had that much control, I still wouldn’t know how much to impart or to who regardless. I could kill all of them or one of them.”

  “Use tartar then.” Rath and I had taken it a few times ourselves for a good distraction, and most folks were kindhearted enough to help us to a drink or light lunch after we vomited. “The one physicians use to make folks vomit. And lots of people get sick if they see someone else get sick, and if they’ve got more than a handful of guards losing supper, they’ll be distracted.”

  “I could find out where they keep their canteens.” Maud shrugged. “They all carry the same type, and I bet they fill them at the start of every shift. That’s what ours did.”

  If only we’d thought of this days ago and had swapped all their canteens out for antimony cups.

  “Servants will be distracted too,” I said, “dealing with so much sick.”

  Maud nodded. “Disgusting but true.”

  “That’s the other thing.” Moira leaned toward me, gaze darting to Adella. “I don’t want the servants or soldiers there—I don’t know which ones can be trusted yet and don’t want to fight them if they would turn over easily—but I want the people of Lynd there. A good number of them. I want to show them the monster who abused their trust. I want him to confess. I want them to support his execution.”

  Oh.

  I liked that.

  Let them see the truth of him.

  Adella smiled a crooked little half smile more hunger than happiness. “Are you asking me to put on a show so that Erlend can watch their king die?”