Page 10 of The Breaker of Stars

I expected a crude joke. Something about slipping his hands beneath them so easily as he had for the first time last night, which I would have agreed with, but it wasn’t what he said.

“They suit you,” he said with a shrug. “You’d look devastating in Mystique leathers, but something about the skirts embodies your spirit. They feel free, like you.”

After nearly a month in Damenal, I was learning how insightful Cypherion was. In the hours we’d spent training and touring the city, he’d shared a number of musings that made me think in turn. Things about life and our purpose, questions about the Fates and how Starsearcher magic worked.

Nearly every time, his words were something slightly different than what I expected. It made me hungry for whatever he would say next. To be near him was to think, to grow, to see the world in a series of questions and steps and causes—and I was becoming dangerously entangled in how those truths made me feel about this Mystique Warrior.

Especially after how he’d kissed me last night. His hands in my hair, body pinning mine against the wall in my bedchamber, somehow sweet and dominating all at once.

This time, though, what he’d said was not entirely correct. Nor did it make me think as I hoped. Instead, a chill wormed along my spine.

“I’m not free.” My voice was small. “Not in the slightest.”

“What do you mean?” His brows pulled together as he took a step closer, protective and confused all at once, and I almost told him. Almost let slip how being here in Damenal—being here and not in Valyn, being here breathing fresh mountain air without eyes burrowing into my back and beckoning my sessions—was the freest I’d ever felt, and still chains remained around my wrists.

Not literally—that hadn’t happened since I was young.

But I could feel them.

And I couldn’t tell him.

“Are any of us truly free?” I joked, but it didn’t work. Cypherion kept searching my gaze.

So, I found what I was able to share and told him of that wretched day. “I was born in a small town near Lumin Lake. Just along the southern shores, not too far from the mountains.” I could see the cottage as I spoke, hear the echoes of the family’s voices I barely remembered. “When I was four, I was taken from my family by the City Council. I was raised at Lumin Temple until Titus found me—a prisoner, in a sense.”

I couldn’t find it in me to speak of the rest of it right now. Of what happened during those years. The brand on my shoulder flamed.

Cypherion’s hand gently nudged my chin. I hadn’t realized I’d dropped my gaze. Or that I was nearly crying.

“I was ripped from my home”—I took a huge breath—“and indebted to the temple.”

And while Titus had rescued me, being here in Damenal was the first time I’d felt free. I didn’t understand what that meant.

Cypherion’s arms folded around me as I slowly unraveled more pieces of the story.

“Why, though?” he asked when we both grew quiet, my head resting on his chest as he stood between my legs, his hand gently stroking my back.

“Magic.” I shrugged. The words were on the tip of my tongue. To explain it all to him. Instead, I said, “People fear power they don’t understand. Instead of learning it, they seek to control it.”

I didn’t offer up any more. I couldn’t, and he understood.

Still, as we watched the stars and whispered promises to them from our broken childhood selves, all I could imagine was a temple overlooking a lake, and the secrets lurking beneath the stone.

Cypherion barely looked at me the entire ride to Lumin. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied repairing the pieces of myself this city had shattered nearly two decades ago, I may have minded.

My resolve to crack his icy exterior slipped a bit more with each step, but I clung to it tighter than the reins of the dappled gray warrior horse beneath me, Marage.

The cloak Cypherion had given me was soft against my skin, a reminder of the gentle side of him I wanted to win back. It slid over Marage’s hide as she ambled along the path, and each time the deep blues caught the light peeking through the high branches, Cypherion’s eyes flashed through my mind, the precise shade of his intent stare I’d often been on the receiving end of.

We were traveling through the jungle rather than the mountains. Damenal and the surrounding peaks ignited a sense of freedom in me, but the trees stretching to the heavens were branches of my soul sprouted in the soil.

Each frond carving our path and vine tangled overhead nourished those pieces of myself. They rooted me to the magic of the earth, calling out to my own wary gifts, and that was the familiarity I needed if I was going to survive this.

The jungle cats, the primates, even the snakes and buzzing insects…The monotony of them all soothed a bit of the lost thread my sessions had torn up within me. I burrowed into that comfort, trying to chase off the worry of what waited.

“How long did you live there again?” Cypherion finally asked. The deep tone of his voice nearly shocked me from the saddle, and I clenched my legs tighter against my mare to stay seated. He didn’t specify where, and the consideration in that choice was so cautious, attentive to the details I’d given him months ago that made it clear it was difficult to speak of this city.

“Only about four years,” I answered without thinking. And immediately after saying it, memories of those days came pouring back. Every anguished one, every star-blessed one. All through the eyes of a child who didn’t know any better, now through the eyes of an adult who was still trying to figure them out.

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