Page 17 of The City of Stardust

Aleksander pulls a napkin towards him and holds it up. “Think of it like this. You see this side? This is here, now. And the other,” he says, flipping it over, “is Fidelis.”

That word again. A thrill ripples through her.

Aleksander takes his butter knife and stabs it through the napkin. “Thisis the scholars. But not everyone can be the knife. Not everyone can cross the border.”

That evening, Violet makes dinner alongside Ambrose, the house in its usual companionable silence.

“Ambrose,” she says.

He doesn’t look up, half focused on chopping vegetables. “Mmm?”

“Have you ever heard of a place called Fidelis?”

The knife stops. Ambrose looks at her sharply, all easy humour gone.

“Where did you hear that word?”

Violet shrugs, keeping her eyes on the sudsy water in front of her. “I don’t remember. Maybe Gabriel.”

Gabriel hasn’t been home in almost a year, so he’s not here to call her out on the lie.

“Do you know where it is?” she asks. “I thought you might have—”

Ambrose cuts her off with a strained smile. “No, I’ve never heard of it.”

Violet thinks about the back of the wardrobe, imagines it unfurling into a set of stairs, then a doorway, easing open the way she’d dreamed about as a child. A sliver of a snowy city down a long, dark hallway.

Marianne Everly, vanishing into a thunderstorm.

From then on, every week, she asks Aleksander a question about Fidelis.

What’s the most beautiful road in the city?

What does a scholar learn?

What does a day feel like?

He answers, as best as he can. He tells her how to bind a book, to chart the night sky, to take apart a language that’s not her own. It’s as though someone has pulled away a brick in the dam of her curiosity, and now it’s all spilling out, unstoppable.

One day he brings a bead of reveurite with him, and working stealthily, he creates another, smaller bird in front of her to match theone she now keeps on her windowsill, plucking wings, a beak, an inquisitive eye out of the metal. He hands it over and she marvels at the tiny golden sparkles that glitter at the edge of her vision.

“Could I do this?” she asks.

To her surprise, he glances away from her. “Well… it’s unlikely. For lots of reasons. To be honest, I’m not really supposed to be showing you.” Gently, he catches her wrist and tilts it towards the light. “But look, your bracelets are made from reveurite.”

Marianne’s bracelets. Violet stares at them, her delight vanishing in an instant. She shouldn’t be surprised by the depths of her uncles’ secrets, not now; yet every time she thinks she’s come to a resignation, if not acceptance—

“Surely your mother told you?” Aleksander says, frowning. “Where did you say she’s gone again?”

“I—I didn’t know,” she says, her gaze still on the bracelets.

Aleksander looks at her intently. “Where she went, you mean?”

“I don’t…” Violet’s brain catches up to the rest of the conversation. “No. She didn’t say. To me, at least.”

It’s hard to articulate why, exactly, she’s so keen not to discuss Marianne with Aleksander. She’s held him so carefully at bay from her home, her uncles, and any mentions of her mother, even though with every question answered, it’s clearer than ever how intertwined Marianne and the scholars are. For the first time, she has an inkling of how Aleksander might have ended up in the Everly house, all those years ago. And yet her mother feels like an uncrossable line.

“Is this what the scholars do all day?” she asks instead, teasing. “Crossing worlds to have coffee?”

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