Page 1 of Stardust Child

Prologue

YEAR 794 OF THE DIVINE HOUSE OF AGNEPHUS

“Do you think it’s too late to run?”

“The lady’s carriage has departed the estate,” said Laud Ereguil, shutting the door on a messenger. “If you’re going to go, Divinity, you’re going to have to do it out the window.”

“I would make a capable mercenary,” said twenty year-old Bastin Agnephus, two years the Emperor of Argence, and soon to be married.

Imminently, in fact.

Thirty-one years before Remin Grimjaw lifted the first beams of his House in Tresingale, Emperor Bastin Agnephus was getting married.

He stood with a young Duke Ereguil in an upper room of the Temple of Imele Mer, a soaring structure of crystal and stone upon whose high tower rested the light of the stars. The Emperor was splendid enough to rival them in his wedding attire, a blue-black doublet the color of the night sky, studded with pure white diamonds. He had the thick brown hair and blue eyes of the House of Agnephus, and he was a well-made man, elegant and spare, his body trained in the use of sword and bow.

His was not the body of a weak man. He could not abide weakness.

“You think so?” The recently raised Duke of Ereguil laughed. “I hear they’re hiring in Rendeva.”

“I would never go to Rendeva. Backhill peasants.” Bastin leaned against the deep stone window ledge and looked out on the streets below, where flower petals were falling so thickly, he could barely see the crowd. Was that a carriage, at the end of the road?

“I don’t think you’d get along with the other mercenaries, Divinity.”

He would never have a chance to try. There was no escaping his destiny. Bastin Agnephus, Beloved of Stars. He had been born in their sight and would die in it.

Ordinarily, he would have been attended by a half-dozen of the highest-ranking lords in the land, but Bastin had kicked them all out an hour ago, leaving only Laud to stand this final vigil. Both men were young for their responsibilities, but theirs was a generation of orphans. So many of their fathers had been lost on the battlefields of the Andelin Valley, in yet another failed bid to take it back from Valleth. The former Duke of Ereguil had perished along with a full third of the peerage of the Court of War. It had been all they could do to hold Valleth back at the Brede.

But Bastin’s father had not died honorably on the battlefield. The previous Emperor had died in his bed of a wasting illness, weak to the very end. And before he died, he had bowed one last time to his nobles and betrothed his son to Esmene of Melun, the eldest daughter of that powerful House.

Bastin had been fighting to get out of the betrothal for two years. And Laud Ereguil had supported him all that time, the nearest thing he had to a real friend. It was hard to tell sometimes. Everyone always wanted something, and the divinity of the Emperor intimidated many of them. Maybe other Emperors had believed in their own celestial origin, but Bastin was all too aware of his mortal frailty.

“You are the blessing on the land, my son,” his father had told him, over and over again. “Our lives are the covenant between the stars and the Empire.”

That was the bargain, as Bastin had always understood it. He was born into wealth and splendor, raised and guarded as the most precious treasure in the Empire so that the blessing would endure. In all the world, the Empire of Argence was the only land without magic. There were no Stone Teeth left in the hills, none of the chaotic bursts of wild magic that twisted men into beasts and beasts into men or melded the two together. In Benkki Desa, a man might walk into the forest and find twenty years had passed when he walked out again. In Bhumi, he might carve a wooden totem for his door and wake up the next morning to find it had come to life and was gnawing on his toes. In the Empire, a statue was always a statue. A song was just a song.

But if the lives of the House of Agnephus were the binding covenant for this blessing, it was a very flimsy one. His father had been ill for several years before Duke Melun had won his way into his chambers, where he kept the Emperor closeted for three days, then emerged with a signed betrothal in his hand. The Emperor had died soon after. It had been humiliating, but Bastin had gone before the Court of Nobility to argue that his father was weak and sick, and it ill-served Argence to bind its Emperor against his will.

It had been the first great challenge of his reign, and he had lost.

“That’s her,” he said, clenching his teeth. That was definitely a carriage, moving slowly down the road toward the temple, giving the commonfolk a show. “She will never be an Agnephus.”

“It might be more productive to try to make her one,” Laud replied, pragmatic as always.

“There have been six Melun Empresses.” Bastin knew his history. “Their ashes rest in the Melun crypt at Ereseide.”

He did not doubt Esmene of Melun would follow suit. He had met her three times since their betrothal: once when the engagement was first announced, again at the summer Turning of the Stars, when he had been browbeaten into making an appearance with her, and the last time after he lost his bid to break the engagement and had been forced to go before the Five Courts to formally present his future Empress.

There had been no mistaking the triumph in her eyes.

He saw it again when he stood upon the temple dais and watched her approach, resplendent in a silver gown that suited her cold beauty. In her heeled slippers, she was of a height with her soon-to-be husband, and three years older, though she wore her silver-blonde hair loose in the style of a maiden. She was already wearing a delicate silver crown.

One thathe,her sovereign, had not placed on her head.

“Blessings upon this night,” said Duke Dardot Melun, bowing deeply to Bastin and then turning to kiss his daughter’s hand. Bastin had been so distracted, he had barely noticed the true author of his misfortune. He was not required to acknowledge the duke, so he didn’t; his eyes passed right over him, as if he did not exist.

“Greetings to the Divinity Bastin Agnephus, Beloved of Stars, Emperor of Argence, Dulcia, Capricia, and the Four Isles,” said Esmene, sinking into a deep and graceful curtsy.

“Lady Esmene of Melun,” Bastin acknowledged, with only the slightest nod. He was an experienced courtier and could assume a mask of serenity even when he was being shackled to a harpy. The House of Agnephus had suffered many humiliations like this over its long history. There were some that called it the House of Marionettes for the number of weak Emperors it had produced, figureheads protected only by their sacred blood. Divine puppets.

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