A War of Swallowed Stars

by Sangu Mandanna

  I allow myself to blink, to get sweat out of my eyes, and when I open them, Alexi isn’t front of me anymore.

  Instead, there’s only a child, maybe four or five years old, his sword far too big for him, his gray eyes wide, innocent and eager to please.

  “Let me try again, Father,” he says, in a high, merry voice. “I can beat you this time!”

  Alex.

  My sword wavers mid-strike, my arm falling to my side. It’s the opening Alex needs to strike me down, but he doesn’t. I think that’s because he falters, too, jerking back in shock, as if he, too, has seen something that shouldn’t be there.

  When I blink again, the child is gone, and Alex is fully grown once more. Bloody instead of fresh, furious instead of enthusiastic. Childlike joy put right out, like a blanket thrown over the last embers of a fire.

  “Did you see—” I can’t help asking the question.

  His jaw tightens. “I saw you, but you were a child. You asked me to tell you a story, except you called me Amba.”

  “I assume this is Kirrin’s work?” I raise my eyebrows. “Maybe he thinks showing us visions of our childhoods will make us less likely to kill each other?”

  Alex opens his mouth to give what I can only assume will be a scathing reply, but then something flashes high above us and he jerks his head up. I look, too, and see that, somehow, the inner shield is back in place, shimmering gloriously across every horizon.

  Alex’s fleet is on the other side, cut off from him. All he has left are Leila Saka and the soldiers he landed with. We’re not outnumbered anymore.

  And in the distance, far, far away, I see the specks of more ships. Shloka, Elba, and Skylark. They can’t reach us with the shield in place, but they can reach Alexi’s stranded ships.

  My heart thumps. We can win.

  “This doesn’t change anything between us,” Alex says, his eyes flashing. “Nothing that happens up there will make any difference to this battle between you and me.”

  He comes at me harder than ever, but with hope pounding in every one of my heartbeats, I fight back. I may not be as good as he is anymore, but I fight harder and better because I have a family here, and I’m fighting not for a crown, but for them. I’m fighting so that they’ll live, so that I’ll get back to them when this is over, because they need me and I need them.

  Another swing of the sword, another blink, and the small child is back. Only this time I’m a child, too, and our swords are grotesque in our small hands.

  Again, I falter, and this time it costs me. Pain lances through my right shoulder, the blade of the sword slicing right into the muscle. I stagger back, blinking again, and the bloody, wild, real version of Alex is back, advancing on me and knocking my sword out of my hands.

  I trip over the root of a thorn tree, landing hard on my knees. Alex’s eyes burn, watching me, and he sheathes his sword. At first, I wonder if it’s because he thinks he’s won and this is over, but then I see him reach for the Golden Bow on his back.

  There’s a dull roar in my ears as his lips move, uttering the incantation that activates the celestial power of the Golden Bow, making it glow.

  Once activated, it can kill one enemy. There’s no stopping it.

  Except—

  Except with a bow of equal power. A bow that can also be activated, a bow that can destroy the Golden Bow if its wielder is fast enough.

  My shoulder throbs as I yank the Black Bow off my own back. If I unleash my bow before Alex unleashes his, mine will destroy his and he won’t be able to kill me outright. I open my mouth to speak the ancient, powerful incantation—

  —and nothing comes out.

  I don’t know what to say.

  I—

  How is this possible? I know the incantation. I was taught it, made to repeat it until it was carved into my brain. I know it.

  Why can’t I remember it?

  Oh.

  Reeling, the words of a curse come back to me.

  You stole knowledge you weren’t entitled to, so when you need it most, that knowledge will fail you.

  How could I have ever forgotten that Rickard’s curse was in the dark, waiting for its moment?

  I can’t activate my bow.

  I can’t stop his.

  It’s over.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Titania

  As I watch Alexi’s Golden Bow glow with the power that will surely kill Esmae, I let out a piercing, anguished cry. And something inside me just

  snaps.

  I turn away from the screens. I am done watching. I am done standing by helplessly. One way or another, I will be Titania again, powerful and unbeatable. I will put an end to the madness of this war.

  At last, says the voice inside my head, satisfied.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Esmae

  I let the Black Bow slip out of my grasp and I sit back, exhausted, on my heels. In a way, I’m glad that Rickard died before he could see his curse come to pass. He regretted it, in the end, and it would have broken his heart to watch me fall like this.

  Alex’s brows knit together, confusion and suspicion crossing his face. “Why aren’t you doing anything?”

  “Because I can’t.”

  “You don’t need your thumb to activate the Black Bow,” he says, like he can’t understand when I became such a fool. “You just need the incantation.”

  Leila Saka would not have bothered to say any of this. Nor would my mother, or Lord Selwyn. None of them would have cared one bit about whether I could defend myself before they unleashed the power of the Golden Bow on me.

  But Alex is not any of them. No matter how he may feel about me, the boy who was raised to value honor and chivalry above all else must hate the idea of using his powerful, celestial bow against an opponent who hasn’t even the slightest protection from it.

  “I can’t use the incantation,” I say, my teeth gritted as my cold, inglorious defeat stares me in the face. “I’ve forgotten it.”

  “Forgotten it?”

  “Because of a curse.”

  Anger darkens his face. “You’re lying. You think you’ll be too late by the time you activate the Black Bow, so you think you can stop me from using the Golden Bow by pretending you’re helpless.”

  I’m not surprised he thinks that. I was not raised to value honor and chivalry, and he knows it. We both know full well that I am not above such trickery.

  “Think what you like,” I snap, outrageously bitter that, after everything, this is how I’m going to lose. On my knees in the dirt, with the thorns of the forest beneath me, hunted by a curse that has finally caught up to me.

  I was born in the shadow of one curse, and I will die in the shadow of another. It’s almost poetic.

  “I suppose you think I should spare you now,” he says furiously.

  “I think you’re going to do whatever you want,” I bite back. “Just like you have all your life.”

  “All my life?” He lets out a mirthless laugh. “You obviously know nothing about my life if you think I’ve had everything I ever wanted.”

  “You were the darling of the star system.”

  “And how much do you think that meant to me when my father was dead?”

  I have no answer to that.

  “You took everything from me,” he says, his voice cracking with the weight of his devastation. “Without the crown, I have nothing. I’m nothing. I’ve lost everything because of you!”

  I start to object, but then I stop. Is he wrong? Haven’t I taken from him all our lives? Oh, other people did the killing and exiling and lying, but wasn’t it all because of me? He lost his father. He lost his home. He lost his brother. And his mother, well, she drove him away herself, but I can see how he might trace that back to me, too.

  Our tragedy started a long time ago, and now, at long last, he’s going to end it.

  As I look up at him, I feel suddenly overwhelmed by pity. Because the truth is, I have been very lucky. All those years I kept
looking to the horizon, wanting more, I had more. I had the dearest, most loyal of friends, who made me laugh, who sat beside me in the royal schoolroom and scribbled notes to distract me, who loved me so wholly that he died so that I would not. I had a teacher, who made long journeys every week just to help me grow, who let me see his warmth and tenderness and flaws, who loved me until the moment he died. I had a war goddess, who I mistook for stern and uncaring, but who also loved me, and guarded me, and told me stories, and tried in vain to keep me away from the path that would lead to calamity.

  And even after I lost Rama, even after it seemed that I had been betrayed and abandoned by everything I believed in, I was still so very lucky. I had an uncle, who, for all his failings and mistakes, put his trust in me. I had a prickly, devoted friend, who, even bleeding and stumbling, did not want to leave me to fight this last battle alone. I had a ship, who tried to chart me the safest and brightest path across the skies. And I had love, dazzlingly real, dizzying love, with all the laughter, passion, joy, and heartbreak that comes with it.

  I had so very much. I have so very much.

  Can’t I let him have this?

  My throat is tight as, piece by piece, I dismantle my pride and my pain and, quietly, say the words that will end this.

  “The crown is yours.”

  He blinks, going very still, the Golden Bow still glowing in his hand. “What did you say?”

  “You can have it. The crown, the throne. Your home.”

  “Why?” He’s suspicious again. “You can’t expect me to believe you’d rather surrender than die.”

  “Dying in battle isn’t everything the stories tell us it is, Alex,” I reply. “I’d quite like to live.”

  “I could choose not to accept your surrender. I could still kill you.”

  “Yes, you could.”

  “This isn’t how this is supposed to go!” he says, as anguished as if I had wounded him, as if I’ve taken something else from him. “You’re supposed to fight me until the bitter end. Even if you can’t use the Black Bow, you’re supposed to find another way. You’re supposed to get right up and wrestle me to the ground if you have to. I know you, Esmae. You don’t give up.”

  It’s all true. I don’t give up. All I have done since the moment he met me is fight. It’s not at all like me to stop fighting now. Especially since we both know that with his fleet on the other side of the inner shield, and with Amba and Max and our ships still in play, he could still lose this war. And even if I fail at a last, desperate bid to overpower him and can’t save myself from the Golden Bow, and I don’t survive, we both know I would die with the knowledge that I fought to the end and that those I love will probably win after I am gone.

  But I shake my head. “Every minute this goes on, more of us die,” I tell him. “There’s a moment, in a game of Warlords, when the right thing to do is resign. I could fight you, and keep fighting you, but I don’t want to do that anymore, Alex. I want to live. I want everyone else to live. I want you to live.”

  The Golden Bow, still aglow, wavers in his hand. His eyes are wet. “Maybe,” he says, the words coming out so low I almost miss them, “Maybe I don’t want that.”

  My heart gives a sharp, painful thump as understanding settles over me.

  “Oh,” I say.

  And suddenly, that strange, skewed vision sweeps over me again, over us, turning him into a small, earnest boy and me into a small, lonely girl. My heart feels like it’s splintering all over again as I, the Esmae before the blood and the grief, reach for him, the Alexi before the loss and the dark. The Golden Bow, oversized in his child’s hands, tumbles to the ground, the glow dying to nothing, as I grip his hands in mine.

  “I don’t know who I am without them,” he says, his voice young and afraid. “I don’t want to be here if they aren’t.”

  “You have time,” I tell him. “You have your whole life to figure out who you are. You may think you have nothing left, but that isn’t true. You have a cousin who has been fighting to keep you safe for years. You have an uncle who has hurt you, but who wishes he hadn’t. And you have me, whether you want that or not.” Tears track down my face, but I don’t let him go. “We can start again.”

  Gray eyes lift to meet mine. “We’ve hurt each other.”

  Yes, we have. And I don’t know if it’s possible to find a path forward without more hurt or hate, but we’ll never know if we don’t try.

  “We have to stay,” I say, thinking of Amba, who stayed for me, yes, but also because she couldn’t leave without righting her mistakes. “It may be easier to go, but we have to stay to remake everything we’ve broken.”

  He doesn’t say anything. Doubt and fear are written all over those heartbreakingly young eyes.

  “Alex,” I say. “Please. Let’s end this here. Let’s not swallow any more stars.”

  I close my eyes, because Alex has always done what our mother has told him to, what Kirrin has told him to. He’s afraid to choose on his own, but I can’t choose for him. I’ve done my choosing. This last part, this is up to him. And if he chooses to reject this, to reject me, and wrench his hands out of mine, and pick up his bow once more, I don’t want to watch.

  But when there’s only quiet, I open my eyes.

  He’s eighteen years old again, the Golden Bow is still dark on the ground, and my brother hasn’t let my hands go.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Titania

  The problem is this kingdom, the voice in my head says, kind and understanding. You do see that, don’t you? All the hurt around you is because of this realm. If there was no Kali, there would be no war.

  A pause, in which I bite my lip, unsure.

  Then the voice adds, gently, Perhaps you could even save Esmae if you act fast enough.

  Hope clutches me, pushing the doubts away. Alexi is about to use the Golden Bow on her. If there’s a way to save her, if there’s a way to end this war before anyone else dies, I have to act.

  I have been the arrow for too long. It’s time to be the archer.

  You know what must be done, the voice says. Use the boy.

  I take my earpiece out and deactivate it. Keeping secrets has never led me anywhere good before, but I can’t let anyone hear me.

  They won’t understand, the voice agrees. They love this kingdom too much. It holds them hostage.

  “Sebastian,” I say, and he tears his eyes away from the screens for the first time since the battle started, looking surprised. “I know how to end this. And you and I are going to be the ones to do it.”

  “Really?” His young, tearstained face lights up. He longs to be a hero, for his grandfather. “How?”

  “Esmae told me that she accidentally unlocked Rickard’s secret drawer one time. And you were with her. Do you think you could unlock it again?”

  “Yes,” he says doubtfully. “I don’t see why we need to open it now, though. All we found inside was a love letter.”

  “And the code to trigger Kali’s emergency shutdown,” I remind him.

  Sebastian’s eyes widen. “How will that make anything better?”

  “Because it’s time for Kali to end,” I say. “It’s destroying us all, Sebastian. You know that. All this death and bloodshed is because of this kingdom.”

  “My grandfather loved Kali!”

  “And look what it did to him,” I point out. Esmae’s time is running out. “A lifetime of service and devotion, and it got him killed. Now Alexi is about to kill Esmae. This kingdom is going to get her killed, too.”

  “But what will happen when the base ship shuts down?” Sebastian asks anxiously. “Won’t people get hurt?”

  “Of course not,” I say, echoing the words I can hear inside my head. “As soon as the base ship begins to shut down, the kingdom will evacuate. Everyone will go to Wychstar, or Winter, or anywhere else they please. And we’ll start new, better lives free of the shadow of this cold, warmongering realm.”

  “Shouldn’t we ask someone—”

/>   I want to shake him. There’s no time for this!

  “No one will help us,” I cut him off, my tone much sharper than I intended it to be. “Because no one sees how poisonous Kali is. We’re the only ones who know better.”

  Tell him Rickard told you he dreamed of a new beginning before he died, says the voice in my head.

  I don’t remember Rickard ever saying such a thing to me or to anyone else, but I suppose it could have happened when I was still a ship and it’s one of the pieces of data I’ve lost since I became human. After all, I can’t be lying to myself, can I?

  Invoking Rickard’s dreams is the right thing to do. Sebastian takes me back to Rickard’s suite without any more protests. Keeping his eyes averted from his cold, still grandfather lying on the floor under a blanket draped over him out of respect, he opens the secret drawer and hands me the code.

  “Now go back to the war room and check on the others,” I say, giving him a huge, beaming smile. “You’ve done so well. I’ll do the rest.”

  Quick, says the voice in my head. You may still be able to save Esmae.

  I run to the closest elevator, jabbing the button that will take me all the way to the base ship below. The elevator gives a gentle jolt as it starts to move.

  As I wait impatiently, I notice something out of the corner of my eye. Someone else, standing in the elevator with me. I jerk my head around, my heart jumping in a way that’s both unfamiliar and alarming, but the other person is only my reflection. The back wall of the elevator has a mirror on it.

  But as I look at my reflection, it skews and warps, and suddenly there’s a man staring back at me. A tall, handsome man with leonine blond hair and cold eyes.

  I’ve seen him before. But where?

  You’re seeing things, the voice in my head says, not as kind as before.