Page 69 of The Breaker of Stars

“Home?” Vale scoffed. Her grip grew solid in mine. “You left me, Titus! I wrote to you every week—sometimes every day—after Daminius, when I was no better than a prisoner of the Mystiques, begging for you to get me out of there. And how many letters did you write back?”

Titus was silent, searching for an explanation he either didn’t have or was reluctant to give.

“That’s what I thought,” Vale spat. “I knew the letters returned weren’t from you. Did you think I wouldn’t recognize the handwriting as someone else’s? After being your apprentice for years?”

“Darling—”

“I do not want your excuses,” she said, voice lethal. “I won my way out of that cage with honor. I became a true ally to the Mystiques, and in turn, they are helping me decipher what’s wrong with my magic.”

Pride burned through me at how she spoke. That was my Stargirl, as fierce and strong as the constellations that lined the heavens for eternity and burning just as bright.

“How could you abandon her like that?” I added. Titus glared at me. “If Vale is as important to you as you say?—”

“I would never truly leave her,” he interrupted my accusations. I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but my attention piqued at the knowing tone of his words.

“Vale,” he said, addressing his apprentice again, a new desperation seeping through her name. “You should have come back sooner. I have resources to help you.”

“I put it in the letters,” Vale admitted. “I asked for help.” Her voice broke over that last word, a crack in her armor.

“And speaking of her readings,” I added, “why were you two not affected by the incense in the archives as she was?” Both Harlen and Titus seemed unbothered while Vale was overtaken by…something else.

Titus answered, “Typically, a Starsearcher can postpone a reading at a given time. What happened to Vale is likely a result of her Fate ties being so powerful. And so stifled.”

Did that also mean that strange voice that had overtaken her was because she’d been succumbing to so much power? That thing that claimed it was there when Endasi was created?

Titus addressed Vale. “I’m guessing once you succumbed, they were a flood. I didn’t know what was plaguing you,” Titus admitted. He was somewhere between wrenching sadness and the edge of force. He was ready to push her into accepting his excuses, and that grated on my restraint.

“Why wouldn’t the stars have guided you to help her?” I accused.

“The—”

“Fucking Angels,” Harlen gasped. All heads whipped toward him. I’d nearly forgotten he was here, but now the Starsearcher was gaping at his chancellor. “Your sessions don’t work, do they? You can’t read a damn thing.”

Silence crashed over the room, so deep you could hear a coin drop on the marble floor.

“You never…” Vale began, voice trailing off. Her lips moved, but nothing came out.

“What wild accusations are you brewing now, Harlen?” Titus spewed. His glare locked on the Starsearcher.

Harlen didn’t fidget, his eyes didn’t waver. He pushed up from his chair and planted his hands on the table, tilting his head so his fresh bruise caught the light like a beacon. “Something with your magic doesn’t work.”

My mind spun, hand tightening on Vale’s under the table.

Titus’s brows flicked up. “And why do you think that?”

“Because you’ve never shown evidence of any kind of session you conduct,” Vale blurted, staring at her captor with a deeper betrayal in her eyes. “Ever since I moved here, you used my sessions. My readings were the ones you reported to council members.”

She spun to face me. “At the Rapture last year. That reading about Ophelia was mine. The one that promised darkness and destruction across Gallantia.”

She’d confessed as much after the Battle of Damenal. I braced for the wave of deceit that reminder would drudge up, but it never came.

Instead, I met Vale’s eyes and confirmed what she’d shared with us all those months ago. “It’s true,” I said. “At the archives, you said you operate on what the Fates say. Not what your readings show you.”

The choice of his words had stood out at the time, and I’d been about to ask him what he meant before he had Harlen drug me covertly.

“All these years,” Vale said, “have you ever had something to share of your own or has it all been mine?”

“And since I signed that contract, he’s used mine,” Harlen added. The disgust was thick in his voice.

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