Page 9 of The City of Stardust

See? Seduction.

Ambrose tells her it’ll fade as she gets older. But that peculiar time when magic fades and cynicism sets in never happens, so there’s always a part of her waiting forsomething.

Two weeks after her seventeenth birthday, she’s curled up in a threadbare library armchair, idly toying with her bracelets, when she hears a pummel of footsteps. To her shock, Gabriel strides past the doorway—which is impossible, because as far as she’s aware, he’s supposed to be in some far-flung country, oceans away from the Everly house. She hasn’t seen him in almost a year, and the last time for only an afternoon, at that. It never occurred to her that he might be dropping into the house to see Ambrose, avoiding her entirely.

Quietly, she unfurls from the chair and steals after him.

She almost loses track of him twice as he makes his way through the labyrinthine corridors. He’s wearing a three-piece suit, his jacket slung over his shoulder. Then he pauses in the hallway, and she has to cover her mouth to stifle a gasp. He would look like he’s on his way to a dinner, were it not for the black eye and split lip. Blood stains his crisp white collar in a vivid red spatter.

Violet knows then that she was never supposed to see this.

She quickens her pace. Gabriel might tell her where he’s going if she can catch him on his way out. Might tell her why he’s covered in blood, or why he’s here at all.

Her footsteps are barely a whisper on the floorboards. But a whisper is still noise, and Gabriel is the one who taught her that trick. Sowhen he vanishes between one room and the next, she’s disappointed but not surprised he’s managed to elude her.

She’s about to head back when a gleam of light catches her eye. At the end of the long, dark hallway, a door stands slightly ajar. A chilly blue glow spills from it, casting shadows across the floorboards. It’s supposed to lead to an unused guest room, and on every other day, it does.

But not tonight.

In the sliver between the door and the frame, a city sprawls below, as though Violet’s suddenly standing on the edge of a vast cliff. Snow falls in heady fat flakes, clustering at the edge of the doorway. Rooftops sparkle white, illuminated by honey-coloured lamplight. Stars, brighter and more numerous than any she’s ever seen, in constellations Violet has no name for. And the sonorous song of the mountainside rolls across the clifftops, a hum accompanied by the pop and judder of shifting ice.

It can’t be real. Yet ice rimes the floorboards, creeping into the house. A breeze sends snowflakes skittering towards her, with a cold that snatches the air from her lungs.

Violet, the wind murmurs.

She takes one step, then another—

The door slams shut, as if someone’s tugged it closed from the other side.

Violet freezes, precious seconds ticking past. Then she reaches for the doorknob and yanks it open. The dark, dusty guest room stares at her. When she steps back, the snow has already melted, soaking into the floorboards.

She thinks of the boy and his marble, wandering galaxies dancing in the air, a woman who wore her smile like a weapon. Her mother, and the mystery wrapped in every syllable of her name.

A voice whispersadventure.

Aleksander, too, receives a gift of sorts on each of his birthdays.

For his thirteenth birthday, it’s punishment for showing the Everly girl the trick with the reveurite marble. Twenty lashes with a birch whip.Reveurite is the metal of the gods, Penelope says softly, as he’s led away to a cold, dark room. Not to be toyed with, andneverto be manipulated in front of the ignorant. Really, the punishment should be more severe. But he isn’t just anyone’s assistant, and so Penelope is merciful. This is what she says, and he believes her, even as the first lash descends and he bites down hard on his lip to stop himself from crying out.

On his fifteenth birthday, Penelope takes him to Paris. She drops him in the city with no money, no way of contacting her and no map—just the name of a café. Seven hours later, he arrives, exhausted, hungry and wet from the constant drizzle. Penelope glances at her watch.

“You must do better, Aleksander,” she says.

Over the following days, there are new cities and new destinations, until the cityscape feels like a second skin. He memorises street maps, tracks the flow of pedestrians into city centres, learns to pickpocket phones and ask for directions in over a dozen languages. On his twentieth drop-off, he finds Penelope within an hour, and she smiles approvingly, a gift all on its own.

He is almost seventeen when he falls into a heady romance with another boy. There is awkward fumbling and later, hasty undressing in the depths of the archives when they should be studying. For a month Aleksander is unfocused, distracted by the shape of the boy’s mouth, the feeling of another’s hands on his skin.

It’s during one of these secret trysts that Penelope herself comes to fetch Aleksander, five minutes late to a forgotten meeting. There is punishment, of course, for his missed attendance. But Aleksander discovers that he’s not absent of learning, for here is the new lesson: shame.

Two weeks later, the boy is caught stealing a scholar’s key toelsewhere. A crime beyond crimes, sacrilege, treason. The keys are the only door to the outside, the only way Fidelis can bring in vital resources that they simply cannot recreate in the city. Aleksander listens with the dead weight of horror, imagining—as the other scholars must surely also be doing—Fidelis without its precious link, its crucial imports.

A city in ruins, which is no city at all.

The boy protests his innocence, but the charge is clear. Aleksander bows his head quietly as the boy is escorted from the scholars’ tower, expelled forever. The next time they pass each other on the street—Aleksander in his scholar’s robe, the boy in agriculturalist overalls—they walk past, with no acknowledgement of the other, were it not for the studious way they avoid each other’s eyes.

Aleksander throws himself back into his studies. There are no more distractions. Which is a good thing, he tells himself, given how much there is to learn.

He studies the history of Fidelis until he can recite it by rote. He memorises long-dead languages, piecing together fragments from fragile manuscripts. In a dim classroom amongst a dozen other assistants, he moulds reveurite with his hands into self-perpetuating cogs and pulleys for the engineers, or fine strands to weave through airship rope, giving it preternatural strength. Then there is mathematics, chemistry, astronomy. On his own, with Penelope as his uncompromising tutor, he learns the languages and cultures ofelsewhere, building on the foundations of his excursions with her. Other days, he spends hours with her identifying fellow dreamers on wetelsewherestreets, trying to ascertain the telltale golden glow of talent that surrounds every scholar of Fidelis.

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