Inherit the Stars

by Tessa Elwood

  “Yes,” says the Lady, drawing out the word. “Poor Daric. With him, apoplexy is a state of being. And I’m much afraid your brother will inherit the habit.” She smiles light and feathers and waves us away. “So, off with you. Enjoy the skies.”

  RIDING MEANS TOOTHY, FOUR-LEGGED PUFFBALLS with wings. Actual wings that flitter and fill the stable stalls around their barrel bodies and tree-trunk limbs.

  Giflons. I’ve seen pictures in some of the old feed articles at home while looking for medichips. I thought the writers were making them up.

  A smushed orange face snorts stale heat, and I freeze, hand halfway to its nose. The stable is almost as large as a public docking bay, each stall wide enough to land a small flightwing. Or a massive giflon.

  “Are you real?” I ask.

  Its huge nose brushes wet pebbles against my fingertips, before it leans down and licks my ear. I yelp and jump back.

  “Careful.” Reggie reappears from a stall farther down, carrying a wide gray saddle. “Too much attention and she’ll never leave you alone. Get the door, will you?”

  I scramble to unhook the latch and open the stall. “We’re not riding that, are we?”

  “Her,” Reggie corrects, throwing the saddle over its back. “And we’re not, you are.”

  “By myself? But we don’t have giflons in Fane.”

  “Don’t worry. Panna’s just a big kitten, and I’ll be right beside you the whole way.”

  I retreat a step. The giflon looms until I swear her head brushes the rafters, her slitted cat eyes hungry. “Maybe we could ride something else?”

  Reggie laughs, slips from the stall and walks so close I back into one of the support posts. He leans in until I can see the purple in his irises. “Don’t tell me that of all people, Fane’s Daughter is scared.”

  Yes. Terrified. But that’s not the right answer.

  Most all of the Electorate like Reggie. He goes snow-skidding with them.

  “No,” I say. “I’m not scared.”

  “Oh, come now. I’ve heard you lie better than that.” He brushes the hair off my ear with airy fingertips that frighten sparks down my neck.

  “I haven’t lied,” I say.

  “And what do you call stealing a blood bond?” Warm and teasing. “Universal truth?”

  “Love.” Sure, instant. True.

  Wren needed me.

  Reggie’s smile falters. “Now that does sound suspiciously honest. Eagle must be quite the lucky boy.”

  No, not really.

  Reggie returns to the stall, and suddenly it’s easier to breathe. I sidestep the post so if he comes marching back there’s more room to run.

  “Does Eagle come flying a lot?” I ask.

  Reggie grabs the reins and pushes the door wide open. “Forsake his precious wheels for a being with a heart and soul? Oh, constantly.”

  “Wheels?” I ask.

  “His skidcycle.”

  “Skidcycle?”

  Eagle? With his never-ending crisp suits and speed-walking nonconversation? A skidcycle?

  “You mean you haven’t seen it?” The giflon snuffles Reggie’s shoulder, but he ignores her, puts his full focus on me. “Lord, I’d have thought that’d be the first thing he’d—didn’t he write about it? In his letters?”

  My heart fists tight.

  Think, Asa, think it through.

  Eagle has a skidcycle?

  “Yeah.” I squeeze my eyes, shake my head. “My sister loves engines so much, and it was all she would talk about. I got good at tuning her out, so whenever Eagle gets technical I don’t even notice.” I shrug, find a smile. “Sometimes habits are hard to break.”

  “Yes.” For once, Reggie looks exactly like his brother. Unreadable. “They can be. Here, I’ll help you up.”

  GIFLONS LOVE SKIMMING TREES. AND BUILDINGS. AND anything spiked or deadly. Swooping in and then away at the last possible second.

  Like the main tower’s storytelling windows.

  I swallow a scream. Duck my head behind the giflon’s ear and bury my hands in her fur.

  “Easy there, Panna!” Reggie laughs from somewhere behind, but air whips and wings flap and my heart somersaults over my stomach while the giflon approaches another wall at full speed.

  “Don’t crash,” I beg into the coarse grind of her fur. “Please, don’t crash.”

  She snorts, flexes her massive shoulders and banks hard. My bones rattle and—

  Don’t flatten into the tower like a puffcake.

  I peek one eye open. Both. Below us the ground rushes in a maze of paths and grass and windowed balconies with yanked open doors and people coming out.

  “Eagle!”

  He’s there, right there, motionless on the balcony by his dad, craned neck and sun-soaked hair. Not tall, but tiny. Forever away.

  Panna agrees. She dives toward him.

  The planet tilts.

  My foot slips and the stirrup disappears. No strap across my toes, no fur at my ankle. Wind rips fury until my whole leg dangles. Air. Nothing but. Opposite knee skidding over the saddle’s hump, until it’s just me and the wind.

  Slide slide sliding.

  The upper corridor roars. Explodes. A fiery fist buckling the supply warehouse walls, throwing me back onto floor that isn’t flat like it should be, but sloped and slide slide sliding. I bounce, skitter against tile as the floor gapes open to swallow me whole.

  Wind snatches my voice. My ears ring, and my head.

  Then the world levels. My leg slaps into fur and my stomach bottoms out. I clutch at reins and skin and—

  —scrabble along the slick upper ramp. Screaming, everyone’s screaming. Me, the soldiers, Wren. Who was somewhere below, with the rations crew. Closer to the blast. “Wren!” My feet hit the floor’s busted edge and slide off.

  Footsteps pound between wingbeats and screams. Dust and fur in my nose, under my nails.

  “The rail, m’lady!” Casser thunders through the smoke. “Goddamn it, Asa, grab the rail!” I stretch, hand scraping the splintered support just as my back follows my feet off the ledge.

  I bounce. Against the buckled corridor. Against a broad saddled back.

  The wind stops and the world stills and I clutch the furry rail.

  “Hold on, you hear me? Hold on.”

  “Asa.” A hand tugs my foot. “Let go.”

  But that’s wrong, I know that’s wrong, and I kick it away.

  “Asa—”

  “I’m holding I’m holding on where’s Wren?”

  The hand stops tugging. “Safe. So are you.”

  I curl forward, hunch my shoulders.

  “Asa.” Weighted as Casser’s boom. “Look up.”

  My head lifts automatically. There are no walls, no warehouse. Just blue and green. Sky and field. Bushes and—

  “Eagle?”

  He stands by my foot, fur all over his brown shirt, hand up and stretching. “Let go.”

  I do. Slowly, knuckle by knuckle, and reach down. He pulls my wrist until he can slide his hands under my arms, and lifts.

  I’m on my feet. Steady level feet on steady level grass.

  My ribs have gone hollow and glassy, and Eagle holds them together with all ten of his fingers.

  “Okay?” he asks.

  But there’s smoke in my nose and the colors are too bright.

  “Wren,” I say.

  Eagle bends so closely our foreheads almost touch. “She’s all right.”

  “No, she’s not. She’s not at all.”

  Movement, then Reggie appears at our side. “Asa, are you—”

  “Don’t,” says Eagle, and even the birds shut up. “Don’t try that again.”

  “How was I to know Panna would bolt?”

  But now Eagle ignores him for me. “Ready?”

  I nod. He steps back, offers his arm instead of his hand. I wind mine through his. We walk back toward the complex as Reggie watches, one hand on Panna’s mane.

  FAITHFUL

  BREAKFAST IS
A CACOPHONY OF COUSINS. THEIR voices bounce off the arched ceiling, weave through the skylight’s rays, rumble down the long wooden table with its army of chairs. Milky platters and crystal cups. Silverware etched with roots and leaves. Plates inlaid with gold filigree.

  Breakfasts are formal in Westlet. It shows in the silver ribbons in the Lady’s hair and the sea gray of Lord Westlet’s cuffs. The Lord sits at the head of the table, watching the commotion with heavy bored eyes that never stray too far from me on his left.

  Eagle is two chairs down and impossible to see without lying on my plate.

  I try not to speak.

  Mekenna Solis sits beside me. Long roped braids shift over her shoulder to brush mine as she converses with the Lord. She isn’t lithe or blonde. Her chin is too narrow, her eyes too big and demanding, her ears overlarge and almost tipped. Strong, regal, but not pretty. Her son Charles takes after her, no lanky limbs and cute freckles. He doesn’t look much like Orrin—the father who forgot his existence.

  Maybe, in a few years, Dad will forget that I exist, too.

  Mom did.

  Wren wouldn’t.

  Mekenna catches me looking. Inclines her head. “So nice to finally meet our future Lady in person. She’s quite the exotic butterfly.”

  “More like a screech beetle.” Charles grins at me from her other side, gelled hair bobbing. Mekenna raps the back of his hand with her knuckle, and he subsides with a mumbled, “Sorry.”

  “A screecher, Charles?” Across the table, Elona Westlet jangles her silver bracelets. And she is a Westlet, with all their static power. She is Daric’s oldest, Eagle’s second cousin, and sits across from me on the Lord’s right. “She’s almost as mute as Eagle.”

  “Likely most of the appeal.” Reggie sits between Elona and the Lady, the only male without a suit, brown silk shirt unbuttoned at the top.

  “Yes, now.” Charles stabs enough eggs for three people. “You should have seen her yesterday. There’s a holorecord.”

  The Lurker recorded that?

  I cut my melon into smaller and smaller pieces. If I can get them into slivers, maybe I can swallow one without my stomach throwing it back.

  “No, a holorecord?” Mekenna raises a glass to Lady Westlet, either an acknowledgment or a challenge. “Do tell.”

  “Yes! Do!” Elona hems the Lady in. “You must have a true artist on staff. Considering how the feeds follow their every move, it’s amazing how little of Eagle we actually see. They always seem to catch his bearable side.”

  I scrape my fork on my plate. Loud even in the clatter.

  “Oh, you wouldn’t know, of course,” Elona says to me, “but Eagle was once the prettiest boy in the family.”

  “I heard that,” says Reggie.

  Elona rubs his shoulder. “I said was. Pay attention.”

  “Is.” I lay down my fork with care. “Is.”

  She laughs. Rich, bouncing notes.

  I stare until they die.

  Lord Westlet shifts in my peripheral.

  “Asa, dear,” says the Lady, “your eggs are getting cold.”

  “No, you’re right,” says Elona, smile hovering. “Why else would they marry him off in a blind irreversible ceremony to a locked down House who wouldn’t know better? Can’t have the House bloodline dying out due to all that prettiness.”

  My chair shreds the floor. I’m on my feet and towering, voice Dad-soft. “We know better. We know exactly what better means and what it looks like. How much it’s worth. Eagle is everything better and I know especially, because I have seen worse.”

  And right now worse is the tall girl with shattered grace and blood lips.

  They better not move. I will eviscerate them if she even thinks about moving them.

  “Asa,” says Lord Westlet, in the exact same tone he had used to ask for the salt. “Wait for me in the library.”

  He tips his head, his eyebrows gentle arcs that don’t mask the knives in his stare.

  I open my mouth, but he carefully and deliberately slices the corner off his toast with a click click. He stabs the brown square and lifts it to the light. Examines the edge with a lazy twist. “I’m sorry, did that sound like a request?”

  Mekenna eyes me like I’m a very exotic butterfly indeed, but Eagle doesn’t eye me at all. On my feet I can see him—his head down, hands flat on the table. Preparing for the bomb that will ignite any second and hit him first.

  Except there are no bombs here. Only sunshine, his family, and me.

  I walk out.

  I WAIT IN COLOR. MY DRESS TINTED BLUE AND GREEN from the windows. Sit across from Lord Westlet’s chair. Eagle isn’t here.

  Behind me, the door opens. I am very still and straight. I haven’t cried once.

  And my cheeks can prove it.

  A heavy feminine sigh. “What are we going to do with you?”

  Lady Westlet weaves between the chairs. She drops into her husband’s seat. “Of all the people not to humiliate. Elona lives for retribution. Charles would have been a better target, even with his mother there. Mekenna at least would be straightforward in her revenge.”

  “She said he was only half bearable.” Shaky. Crinkled at the edges. Like me.

  “That she did.” The Lady leans forward, arms resting on her knees. “We are not Fane, Asa. Arron does not hold absolute power, not like your father. Your lockdown?” She shakes her head. “Well, I still don’t know how he managed that particular feat even in Fane, but here it would be an impossibility. We are a collective. Our family, or rather my husband’s, has only held House status since Arron’s aunt Seraphina died and his father turned Heir. And Elona is the grandchild of that aunt. If Seraphina had lived, Elona would have Eagle’s place. And there are many, a great many, who would have preferred that scenario. She knows it, her father knows it, and so do we.”

  Elona? As Heir?

  The Lady shrugs a smile. “We walk a very fine line. Fane was never universally liked, and his lockdown not only severed trade but families. Most of the Electorate would rather see us dead then allied with Fane.”

  “Then why? Why us?”

  She searches my face. “Do I have your silence? Your word as your father’s daughter?”

  A request, not a command.

  “Yes.”

  “We need your fuel. We have perhaps two years of uleum left. Maybe three. Most of our reserves were destroyed during the meteor strike.” Her bitterness creeps into resignation. “Eagle’s, in fact.”

  Eagle’s scars. The disaster relief mission. I almost looked it up, several times. Wanted to. But I only have Eagle’s digislate for research. On mine it wouldn’t matter, but on his it somehow does.

  “You mean when he got his medal?”

  “Yes, he was in training for the Guard during the strike. The planet will recover, but the pre-mined reserves are gone and even our populated planets are not as uleum-rich as yours. The Electorate is unaware, and it is absolutely imperative they remain so. Your father said you could not survive an invasion? We would not survive a revolt.”

  “You think they’d revolt?”

  “Without a doubt. Not as a whole perhaps, but enough. Seraphina was much loved, and for good reason. And while I would say Arron retains more of Seraphina’s goodness than her own offspring, not many would agree. Which is why we wanted the Heir. Having full proxy powers in your House, where Lordship means complete authority, would have soothed a great deal of feathers.”

  I can’t meet her eyes. The armchair is small and I am smaller still.

  I broke their family. I’m going to break their House.

  “No, do not misconstrue me.” She lifts my chin. “The majority of the Electorate wouldn’t have approved of this bond even if we had your sister. And despite Arron’s current feelings on the subject, I’m beginning to believe we may not have been entirely shortchanged in this arrangement, and should perhaps hold to our end of the bargain, if you learn to hold your tongue and pick your battles.”

  Her brown eyes sp
ark, intent and depth, and I swallow hard.

  “I’m sorry, my Lady, but I pick this one.”

  She sighs. “Let me rephrase. You will fight your battles with temperance and tact, in a way befitting the future Lady of this House. Which does not include standing over your second cousin and calling her repulsive scum.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You thought it and trust me, we all knew.” She straightens, shoulders back. “The Lord and I will not live forever and when you take our places, I promise you will face worse than this. Best to practice and prepare. This behavior cannot be repeated, is that clear?”

  Light dances across the carpet, broken into colors that don’t fit.

  “Your word, Asa,” says the Lady.

  “You have it.”

  I BURY THE LIVING ROOM IN ORANGE-SPECKLED yellow. Marken, the gardener, didn’t have any leftover nonspeckled paints. His shed was full of everything mismatched and unwanted. Apparently the best quality colors come from a small moon two planets over, owned by somebody’s uncle’s cousin’s third husband, who had a tiff with somebody else’s second niece, which the uncle’s cousin found out about because prior to the tiff there had been an affair, and what with my Lord’s new fuel rations on nonessential shipments, nobody in this system has had decent paint for six months.

  Yellow smacks the wall and spatters into a dripping, dead sun. I smear it everywhere.

  The elevator pings. Booted footfalls, then silence.

  Paint rains over me and my feet and the drip sheet–covered floor. “If you hate it, Marken said he could probably track something else down next week, but it can’t be white because everything’s white and it’s not even your color—it’s mine.”

  Except Fane white hints at rainbows, while this white says nothing much.

  Neither does Eagle. Of course he doesn’t.

  I slather on another coat, which colorbot paint wouldn’t need, but this isn’t Fane and there are no colorbots. Not that Dad ever let me paint anything at home.

  On Urnath, Wren let me paint whatever I wanted. Except her biotech models, those were off-limits.