Page 103 of The City of Stardust

Ever’s workshop is on the edge of a lake that funnels into canals snaking through the rest of the city, passing across the reveurite barrier. This, of course, they won’t cross, though Violet keeps a sharp lookout for a winged shadow against its pane. The shore of the lake is a graveyard of crumbling wood, but Aleksander finds a functioning boat easily enough, probably belonging to Ever. The paint is chipped and flaking away in the heat, but Violet can still make out the markings of what must have been a name, even if it’s no longer legible.

She clambers in first, the boat rocking underneath her weight, then Aleksander follows. The water is relatively shallow, and so clear Violet can see straight to the bottom, to the crushed shells littering the lakebed and the ghostlike remains of sunken boats.

The sun bears down on them and Aleksander rolls up his sleeves past his elbows to row. Underneath his sleek tattoos, his arms are dusted with silver scars, some no bigger than a fingernail. He catches her gaze, and she has the grace, at least, to not pretend she wasn’t staring.

“From the forge,” he explains. “Accidents happen.”

He says this casually, but Violet knows they are both thinking ofthe deep scars on his back, and how he hadn’t said anything at all, then, to explain them away.

The water carries them across the lake and underneath the long shadows of what must have once been an enclosed archway, into the city’s labyrinth of canals. There are still, incredibly, one or two panes of glass in the ceiling, casting prisms downwards. The remains of stone faces look out on them: bearded and solemn, or with smiles tucked behind high collars. Carved vines curl around empty brackets that would have once held lanterns.

Twenty minutes later, the boat shifts to a halt against a set of stairs, corroded iron rings at precise intervals in the wall. Violet steps out carefully.

Ruined buildings of marble and sandstone rise up in front of them. Houses still bear faint traces of elaborate murals, or friezes like lace dripping from gutted roofs. Dead stems wind around trellises, the leaves long since disintegrated. The ground beneath their feet is mostly obscured by centuries of dirt, but Violet scuffs it away with her foot and catches flashes of mosaic tiles underneath. Up close, the marble isn’t quite white, but a rainbow of colours, dazzling in the morning sun. Pale cream and peach, but also jade green and umber, veined with bright flecks of gold.

It’s beautiful, like a city from a painting. It’s also absolutely silent.

They spend the afternoon wandering around the city, along its narrow arterial waterways and through streets that must have once been busy with people, with life. Most of the buildings are fallen wrecks in one way or another, having succumbed to time and decay, and riotous green blooms from their empty shells. Large crane-like birds with azure feathers stalk across the roads, paying no attention to the human intruders. When the sun is highest, they stop and sit in the shade of an overgrown tree on the edge of the canal, bare feet in the water.

It is so easy, at times, to believe that the rest of the city is in hiding. Then Violet will glance up—at a flock of birds, a particularly beautiful window, a cloud sailing past—and see the pane of reveurite. And she remembers why she’s here, and who awaits on the other side.

She also finds herself hyperaware of Aleksander’s presence. Every time he pushes his hair out of his face; every quirk of eyebrow that means he’s caught something interesting; the way the light plays across his bare forearms, revealing again the silver scars hidden by his black tattoos. Every time his gaze darts to her, then flickers away. They quickly fall into a companionable silence, but Violet can’t stop thinking about all the ways she could fill it. There are questions she needs to ask. About Prague, about why he returned.

What he will do once they face Penelope.

But the warmth is lovely on her skin, and she gathers up her hair in a knot that rests against the nape of her neck. Along the water, she listens to the bright chirp of frogs, the hazy whine of insects. Aleksander smiles at her, free and unguarded. She can have this, she decides. A day where she can pretend she is still café Violet and Aleksander is still the man she once knew, strolling along the bank of a river.

As the sun sets, they climb higher into the city, up the long winding stairs that bracket it into tiers. Neither of them point out that this will leave them scrambling back down to Ever’s workshop perilously close to pitch darkness. Violet wants the magic of the day to last as long as possible, to keep holding on to the soap-bubble fragility of whatever this feeling is stretched between them.

The top tier of Elandriel might once have been settled with grand buildings, a garden, an amphitheatre—or something else. But the ruins have been flattened, leaving a pale disc of hard ground. Around the edge, though, sectioned by giant pillars, are the remains of archways, stark compared to the rest of the decorative city. Golden sparkles flit across her vision.

Doorways.

Aleksander stops moving, his breath held still in his chest. “I don’t believe it.”

But Violet does. She always has. And she’s already seen a doorway much like these ones, in Prague. Caspian’s words come back to her, about the possibilities beyond the scholars, and the price he refused to pay. His confidence had seemed like foolish naivety, then, even to her. How he would laugh now.

There are still shards of reveurite from the doors themselves, and the worn nubs of nails from broken hinges scattered across the ground. Every sliver has some kind of raised detail, but there are too many fragments to tell whether it was once part of a word, a design, or simply graffiti.

Aleksander walks around the archways, touching each pillar with reverential awe.

“You’d think there would be even one left standing,” he says, half to himself.

Violet knows the reason behind this, too. Or at least, she’s almost certain of it, now that she’s seen Ever and the fear in his golden-ringed eyes. But to voice it aloud will be to end this day of unrestrained joy. She closes her eyes, drinks in the feeling one more time.

“Ever did this,” she says, and Aleksander looks back at her. “To stop anyone else coming through.”

“The astrals,” he says, his smile already fading, and she nods.

All that waste and ruin, for the sake of one man.

The sun dips beneath the horizon, and the black night sky returns.

CHAPTER

Forty-Nine

OVER THE NEXTfew days, Aleksander keeps returning to the doors. He can’t help it; he feels compelled, as though someone is calling to him from just beyond their reach. While Violet argues with her ancestor in his workshop, Aleksander takes the boat out on to the lake and climbs the long staircases before the sun is truly burning in the sky. He can’t tell if the reveurite dome overhead amplifies the heat, but he’s always sweating by the time he reaches the top of the dais.

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