A War of Swallowed Stars

by Sangu Mandanna

  I should refuse, but I know that Esmae went to ambush Sorsha, in part, because of me. To give me this. I couldn’t possibly repay that friendship and loyalty by refusing the very thing she risked her life for.

  Also, selfishly, I still want it. I long for it.

  “Yes,” I say, furious with both Suya and myself. “I want this. And if you have any decency at all, you’ll wait until after the war to give it to me.”

  “No one has ever accused me of decency,” says the sun god, and vanishes.

  The transformation is nothing like what I experienced on Ashma. There, it just happened, instantaneously, and I didn’t feel a thing.

  This is slow and, worse, I experience something I’ve never felt before: pain. If I could cry out, I would. It radiates up and down my wings and spine like fire, like I am ablaze. Parts of me twist, like they’re melting in the heat, my metal deforming and reshaping itself into skin, my new limbs carving themselves out of the wreckage of my old self.

  It’s agony, but I scarcely notice it, because I am changing on the inside, too. Caches and caches of data, a neat and perfectly ordered filing system of memories, knowledge, and connectivity, all compressed into something small and imperfect and messy. A human brain replaces my database, a heart replaces my engine, and the anguish of transforming from my almost infinite self into something so utterly finite is unimaginable.

  I want this. I remind myself of that. I want this more than anything. I want to be messy, and finite, and marvelously, miraculously human.

  But it would be a lie to pretend that it doesn’t hurt to lose what I was.

  When the pain stops at last, I’m curled up and shaking, shivering and damp with what can only be sweat. I can hear the beat of my own heart, feel my own skin. Exhaustion, joy, and sorrow all pulse through me, more acute than anything I have ever felt before. Every sensation is magnified, exaggerated. It’s beautiful and terrifying and too much.

  Someone wraps a blanket around me, holding me tight until the shivering stops. I peer up, through my damp brown hair, and see a pair of familiar gray eyes.

  “You’re okay,” Esmae says. “I’ve got you.”

  “I’m hungry,” I reply, and fall promptly asleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Esmae

  A cold, quiet dark has settled over me, but it’s not the same beast that’s kept me company for months. There’s not much anger in this darkness, not much rage—this beast is a quieter, sadder creature and it is in so many ways worse than the rage. Where the fury filled me with a manic energy that kept me moving, this darkness holds me still. It carves me hollow.

  Titania is human now, and she’s having a hard time getting used to it. It’s not just that this happened far sooner than any of us expected; it’s also the fact that human limitations are frustrating to her (“but why must I shower? I hate the water!”), she hates that she can’t fly anymore, and, most of all, she feels terrible that she got the thing she wanted because Sorsha is dead. But, in spite of all of that, I know how happy she is. The sight of her, a young girl scampering all over the palace and city with boundless enthusiasm and wide-eyed wonder, is the only good thing to come out of that day.

  I suppose I should be more concerned about losing my indestructible, unbeatable warship, because it is unquestionably a blow to our side in this war, but I can’t seem to muster up the energy for concern, or fear, or anything other than this endless, mournful quiet. The last great beast of the universe is gone, my brother is dead, and I am too hollow to be able to see much beyond that.

  Losing Sorsha has taken its toll on Amba, who spends more and more time up on the eastern tower, alone, staring at the stars. Meanwhile, the palace is in mourning for Bear. Even Elvar, in spite of all his conflicted feelings about his nephews, looks like he’s aged a decade overnight. And outside these walls, Kali seems caught between sorrow for our lost prince and relief that we have all been saved from certain destruction. Or so I’m told. I don’t watch any of the news broadcasts myself. For their sakes, I’m glad that our people get to celebrate the fact that the stars will now stay exactly where they are, the sun won’t budge, and life will go on. I am. I just find myself unable to celebrate with them.

  I sleep. It seems to me that no sooner have I woken up than I’m tired again. All I want to do is sleep.

  One night, I wake up in the dim glow of the nightlight and find the other half of the bed empty. It takes me a moment to find Max, sitting on the floor with his back to the bed, his head bent over his arms as his shoulders shake with grief. He grew up with Bear. And after a lifetime of trying to keep him safe, Max must feel like he’s failed, and I don’t think he can bear that. I seem to have forgotten how to cry, but my heart feels bruised for him as I reach across and stroke his hair.

  Days pass. I feel even more hollow. There’s not much left of me.

  When I tell Max this, one evening when we’re alone in his rooms, he shakes his head. “You’re not going anywhere,” he says. “Terrible things have happened to you, and I think this may be the first time you’ve let yourself stop long enough to feel them. You didn’t stop after Rama, or after Shloka, or even after we got you back after Arcadia. It’s all coming at you at once, everything you’ve pushed away for months. You’re grieving and traumatized.”

  “I don’t know how to make my way through to the other side of it,” I tell him. “I can’t see anything but the dark. I feel like I’ve fallen down a cold, dark hole and I’ll never get out.”

  Max considers me for a moment, one hand absently scratching between a wolf’s ears. I think it’s Sorrow.

  Then he says, “Come with me.”

  I’m too tired to protest, so I follow him, only a little curious. We take an elevator across the palace and up into his tower, to the workshop where he makes and fixes things.

  The last time we were here, I woke up with temporary paralysis and he was captured by Kirrin’s Blue Knights, but I don’t have time to dwell on this. Max takes me to a worktable in the corner, where a miniature wooden chariot sits, parts of it painted bright, glossy red.

  “It’s for the toyshop,” he explains. “I haven’t had a chance to work on it in a while, but it’s almost done.”

  Somewhat bewildered, I watch as he unscrews the can of red paint and picks up a clean brush. Instead of dipping it into the paint, which is how I assume one paints, he holds it out to me.

  “Take the brush.”

  “What?”

  “Take the brush,” he repeats patiently. “Paint this panel.”

  “I don’t have very good fine motor skills with these,” I remind him, wiggling the four fingers and prosthetic thumb of my right hand.

  “If you can hold a knife, you can hold a brush. Use your left hand if you like.”

  “I don’t even know how to paint!”

  His mouth twitches. “I’m sure I can fix it if you mess up.”

  “I don’t see why—”

  “When I come in here and make something, it keeps me me,” he says. “Everything outside this tower is blood and war and grief, but in here, I can forget what’s outside for a little while.”

  I take the brush from him, using my left hand. “And you think painting this chariot will make me forget, too?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But either way, it’s something to do that has nothing to do with this war. And who knows?” Amusement lights up his dark eyes. “You might even have fun. Imagine that!”

  “I am perfectly capable of having fun,” I grumble, dunking the brush in the tin of paint.

  I sweep the brush across the wooden panel of the chariot. Bright, shiny red spreads across the wood. It’s streaky and clumsy and I get paint all over my hand, but I think even that’s an achievement for someone who has never so much as painted a fingernail before.

  And the truth is, it’s nice to see my skin red with paint instead of blood.

  Max moves over to the other side of the chariot and gets to work with a brush of his own. His strokes are smoot
her, neater, and cover more of the wood than mine do, so I copy the way he moves the brush, keeping the direction consistent instead of flailing back and forth like I had been. It’s surprisingly easy to adapt to the rhythm.

  I don’t forget. I didn’t expect to, but I wondered. I wondered if there was some magic here that would work on me, too. If there is, it doesn’t. My heart still feels hollow. My bones are still so tight around me that it’s just a little hard to breathe. The ghosts are still at my side, the beast that keeps me company is still on my shoulder.

  The gold of Rama’s eyes as he died. My mother with a bloody knife in her hand. The cold of the snow as I lay bleeding in the dark. The longing in Sorsha’s voice. Bear’s gray face. The fire eating up Arcadia, just like I am being eaten up.

  Ghosts, everywhere.

  “Esmae.” Max’s voice breaks in. “The chariot’s done.”

  The panel I painted looks nice. More than nice. It’s beautiful. The paint is so smooth and glossy that I can see my reflection in it. The Esmae in the paint has a shocking, ugly white scar across her throat and her eyes are too wide and hollow, but she smiles at me.

  I didn’t forget, but I feel something I haven’t felt in a long time. Pride. I did this. I made something, and it’s not dark, angry, and ugly.

  I didn’t know anything I did could still be beautiful.

  A sound splinters the silence of the tower. It takes me a moment to make sense of it. It’s a sob. Tears flood down my face and I can’t speak, can’t move, can’t breathe.

  Max pulls me to him, getting paint in my hair, but I don’t care. I clutch fistfuls of his shirt and cry into his chest. Whatever flimsy, fragile glue was still holding my fractured pieces together is gone, and I fall apart. Pieces of me smashing all over the floor.

  “I’ve broken everything.” It’s a distraught cry, pulled from a deep, secret place where I’m not yet hollow.

  Max pulls back just enough to look into my face. “Broken things can be fixed. And when they can’t be fixed, they can be remade.”

  Remade. The word echoes, resonating in that deep, secret place in my heart. Remade. Is that even possible for me? Can I collect the shattered pieces of myself and be remade? Can I remake what I’ve broken?

  “How do I start?” I whisper.

  “Take the starsword back to Ash,” he says. “After that, we’ll figure it out together.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Titania

  Esmae goes to Ashma without me. I shouldn’t feel jealous that she’s flying a ship that’s not me, but I do. I have, it must be said, always had a talent for petulance, and I find it even easier to achieve as a human. Sulking, I wander aimlessly around the palace until I find myself on the arched stone bridge that connects the north and east wings. Below the bridge is an artificial stream, carved into the stone of the ground and lined with pebbles and shrubs.

  For some reason, I’m on edge. It’s not just because Esmae went to Ashma without me. There’s something else, but I’m not sure what it is. I feel like I’m forgetting something, something important. And no matter how hard I try, I can’t quite get hold of it.

  Of course, I’ve forgotten a lot of things. My brain can’t hold all the data that my processors used to. I always backed my data up, naturally, so I didn’t lose very much of it permanently when Suya transformed me so abruptly, but sifting through data on a sluggishly slow external database is nothing like the streamlined, intuitive process I took for granted as a machine.

  I find myself a perch on the bridge’s stone ledge and dangle my feet out over the stream below. I scowl at my reflection in the water. I look so young.

  Worse, I feel young. As a ship, I was no older than I am now, but I had the benefit of speedy processors, constant access to an infinite stream of data in the ether, and a glimpse into thousands of two gods’ memories. Without that, and with the added chaos of human emotion thrown into the mix, I am unsure, quick to overreact, and did I mention unsure?

  Unsure. Me.

  And that, of course, is the heart of the problem. Right now, Titania the ship would be flying Esmae to Ashma, but that is beyond what I am now. I wasn’t even allowed to go with her. Esmae was quite firm about it: “You’re not indestructible anymore,” she said before she left. “In this body, you’re untrained and vulnerable.”

  “And I suppose,” I said bitterly, “my brain isn’t much use either, without the data and access it used to have.”

  “I told you before, you don’t ever have to feel like you’ve got to be useful,” she said, but I noticed she didn’t deny that my brain is not what it was. “This about your safety. I can’t put you at risk.”

  What I didn’t say was that I want to be useful. I need purpose. I have spent my entire existence as a fearsome, powerful entity. I can’t just adjust in the blink of an eye to the life of a child who must be sheltered.

  It’s not that I don’t love being human. I do. But I know the others must feel like they lost something precious when they lost their ship. I certainly do.

  On top of that, the gamut of human emotion has been difficult to adjust to. No one ever told me there would be mood swings. Ever since Suya transformed me, I feel like I am two different people, both fighting to be in control of me: one is unsure and frustrated by what I have lost, but is still excited about the good things I have gained, while the other is bitter, dissatisfied, and unreasonably resentful of everyone around me.

  I can’t think of any reason for such resentment. No one else chose this fate for me. Still, just yesterday, I found myself irrationally, furiously angry with Amba at dinner, in spite of the fact that I can’t remember her saying anything that could have made me angry, and a few days ago, I felt something alarmingly like contempt when Max and I played cards. Contempt. For Max, who I adore. It’s inexplicable.

  Maybe this is what it means to be human. Maybe my feelings are all confused and jumbled up because I’m still learning how to be human.

  “Hello!”

  I look around and find a young boy standing on the bridge just behind me. He’s Rickard’s grandson, I think. He looks almost exactly like Rickard did when he was this boy’s age. I know that because I’ve seen some of Kirrin and Amba’s memories from back then.

  “Sebastian,” I say, pleased to find I haven’t forgotten that.

  He beams. “I can’t believe you know my name! This is amazing!”

  “Why?” I ask, bemused.

  “Because you’re you.” He says this in a tone of awe, which is rather gratifying after several days of feeling like everything that was awe-inspiring about me is gone. He hops up on the ledge beside me and says, frankly, “Is it weird? Being like us?”

  “Yes, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it,” I tell him. “I don’t regret it, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I bet it’s hard getting used to the way everyone treats you now,” he says, a little too astutely. “Like you’re just a child.”

  “How did you know that?” I ask, surprised.

  “It’s sort of the same for me,” he says, sighing. “We’re at war, and I want to help, but no one will let me. Max says I’m too young to be in the Hundred and One. Esmae promised me she’d teach me some of my grandfather’s tricks, but she never has the time. And my grandfather, well, he won’t even talk to me about the war because he wants to protect me.” He sticks his jaw out. “But I don’t need to be protected anymore. I can help!”

  “That’s how I feel! I’m human now, but that doesn’t mean I can’t help!”

  “I imagine this feels even worse for you than it does for me,” he says, “because you know what it’s like to be treated like you’re important and valuable.”

  This boy wants very badly to be included, the quiet, resentful part of me muses. That could be useful.

  As soon as I hear the little voice in my head, I’m appalled at myself for thinking such a thing. I hate all these unexpected, ugly feelings I keep having. If this is my brain’s way of learning how to b
e human, I wish it would hurry up and figure it out so that I can stop feeling like this!

  “They care about us,” I say, in an attempt to convince myself as much as him. “They’re not excluding us because they think we can’t help. They just want to keep us safe.”

  “I get that. I just wish there was something we could do, you know? Some way they’d let us help.”

  “Ah, to be young and enthusiastic,” says a voice behind us.

  Sebastian and I both jump, almost toppling off the ledge and into the stream twenty feet below.

  “You could have killed us both,” I complain, somewhat alarmed by my own mortality.

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” Kirrin says, rolling his eyes at me, while Sebastian lets out a squeak at finding himself face to face with a god. “Get off that ledge. I need to speak to you.”

  I should be annoyed that he’s ordering me about like this, but I’m actually rather grateful that there’s one person, at least, who is treating me exactly the way they always have.

  “Goodbye,” I say to Sebastian. “Wait, no, that’s not right. I’ll see you later? Yes, that’s better, isn’t it?”

  He grins. “Much better.”

  I follow Kirrin across the bridge, into the north wing, and up a set of spiral stone steps to a balcony. After years of being able to simply have conversations in my control room, completely sure that no one could listen in, it’s rather strange to have to actually look for privacy now.

  “So,” I say. “How are you?”

  I’m human now, so the connection between Kirrin and me has been severed, but right before I was transformed, after Bear died, I could feel Kirrin’s grief, pulsing across the tether between us. I know he loved Bear, and that he regrets what happened to Sorsha, so it’s not a leap to guess he’s probably not the happiest he’s ever been.

  “I’m fine,” he lies, waving it off like it’s unimportant. His dark eyes search mine. “I came to check on you.”