Page 115 of The City of Stardust

How much it hurts.

Above her, the sky bursts into flame. Thousands upon thousands of stars. How has she never noticed them before?

They are singing to her, luminous and perfect. A cosmic song heralding homewards. Their tune is simply her name, a gospel of repetition in the oldest tongue she knows.

Astriade.

Just before her bones shatter into stardust, she hears a chorus of voices.

O star-daughter, we have missed you.

CHAPTER

Fifty-Six

THAT EVENING, THEYbury the bodies side by side behind Ever’s workshop. Aleksander’s face is expressionless as he digs into the sandy earth. Violet’s hands are raw by the time the ground is covered. She spent all day looking for wildflowers, and she lays a ragged bouquet across their graves. There is a moment where Violet thinks a hand will shoot up, just as she places the second bouquet, and Penelope will claw up from the earth, bloody with fury. Then it passes, and the two bouquets sit side by side.

Finally, Violet takes the sword, scoured clean. Ever’s silver chain dangles from the hilt. After a moment’s hesitation, she pulls off her mother’s bracelet, and slides it on to the hilt, too. Let it rest, she thinks. And if her mother ever comes out this way, if Marianne decides she wants to finish what she started, well—she will know that Violet was here, and faced what she could not.

Violet raises the sword, and the blade shines in the remaining light. With every ounce of strength she can muster, she buries it in the ground between them.

Violet and Aleksander stay there, watching the sunset burnish the graves gold.

She glances at him; she has no idea what to say. There is a strange sadness in the loss of Ever Everly, the man who had been something else, if not exactly more. And maybe one day she will bring herself to feel sorry for Penelope. But mostly all she feels is a huge relief.

It was all over so quickly. There was just enough time for Violet to gasp, for Aleksander to stagger backwards. The act was so quick, Violet wasn’t even sure it happened at all, until she saw the blood leave Penelope’s face. The dome overhead shattered, raining reveurite in harmless shards. A strong breeze rushed in to tug on their clothes.

After a week underneath shades of purple, the world looks so rich with colour.

But for Aleksander…

He doesn’t cry, doesn’t rage. And maybe there’ll be relief for him, too, with time. Violet’s not so sure, though. There is too much history between him and Penelope. Freedom, at such a vast price.

“Did Ever tell you what really happened?” Aleksander asks quietly. “Which version of the story was true?”

Violet suspects he’s really asking about Penelope. Whether there was ever a possibility that she might have once been the person he thought he knew.

She shakes her head. “If he remembered the truth, I don’t think he would have told me.”

And maybe that’s a sign in itself as to which version she should put stock in. Or maybe he deliberately tried to forget because the anguish was too great, the heartbreak too severe. She likes to think, despite everything, that the romance was real. That it wasn’t Ever and his cowardice that doomed so many of his descendants. After all, it’s the version that makes for the best story.

What does she believe? The fairy tale of the hero, or the monster?

In the end, she decides to leave the question by the grave. It is a small price to pay, in the face of everything else.

The next morning, they make the trek to the doorway home, through the parts of the city Aleksander had carried Violet through. It won’t take so much blood this time; the door is still saturated in power, and if it’s well maintained, it might not ever need more than a drop again.

On this side, the doorway is almost entirely hidden by leafy ferns and overgrown camellia bushes, bursting with bright pink. They stopat the edge of the door. But neither of them reach for it. Elandriel is a world out of time, a place where life can be put on pause forever. It’s easy to imagine that the other worlds have stopped with them.

Once they step through, time will come charging back. And there are decisions to make.

Aleksander rubs the back of his neck, pink with sunburn.

“You can go anywhere you want,” he says. “What will you do?”

He does not sayyou could stay with me in Fidelis. Though it must have crossed his mind, as it has hers. For a long time, she’d thought that if she went to Fidelis, she would find her mother. She imagines being inducted into the scholars, taking her place as one of the chosen few to live across both worlds. Playing that dangerous game.

There’s still a part of her that revels in the challenge, that could let herself be consumed by the scholars. Though there are other things she could be consumed by.

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