Page 27 of The City of Stardust

Gabriel falls silent.

Ambrose clears his throat. “Anyway, Marianne was secretly looking for a way to undo the curse. She dug deep in the scholars’ archives, and found… something. Written in a cypher, which was maybe why it had been overlooked in the first place. But when you were born, she had to flee Fidelis, taking the research with her. Penelope had no idea you existed, you see. It was a chance to keep you safe.”

Violet tries to imagine her mother slipping between worlds, a baby cradled in her arms. With a dull shock, she realises the implications of his words. She was born in Fidelis. Another city—anotherworld.

“It took her years to understand the documents she’d taken, but eventually she cracked the cypher. And it was big, Vi. Game-changing. A key to… another world. Not here, or Fidelis, but somewhere else. A place that could help us remove the curse. She wouldn’t tell us more than that,” he says.

“As if her own brothers couldn’t be trusted,” Gabriel says scornfully.

Violet stands there in silence, trying to comprehend everything she’s learnt. It all sounds like make-believe, and yet so many conversations are slotting into place.I’ve been so stupid.

“Nine years,” she says in disbelief, recalling Gabriel’s earlier outburst. “You waited nine years to tell me this.”

She turns to leave, but Ambrose follows suit. “You were a child when she left, Violet. What else was I supposed to do? It was all just another story to you. If you’d had any notion—no, it would have been too cruel. And,” he adds reluctantly, “we thought Marianne would be back by now.”

A terrible silence falls over them.

“So where is she?” she asks. “Is she in Fidelis?”

Ambrose and Gabriel look at each other.

“We really don’t know. That’s the truth,” Ambrose says. “We haven’t heard directly from her in years.”

“Penelope is still looking for her,” Gabriel adds. “And that means she doesn’t know where Marianne is, either.”

“So wherever she is, she’s still safe from Penelope,” Ambrose says.

A cold, sinking feeling hits the pit of Violet’s stomach. “If she’s gone, why are you still tiptoeing around this… this Penelope? What did you mean,more time? If Marianne isn’t coming back, I don’t understand why—”

“She still needs an Everly,” Gabriel says, and it’s with such a gentle tone that goosebumps prickle Violet’s arms. “There’s time left, but not much of it. That’s why we need to find Marianne. To break Penelope’s hold over us.”

Those Everly portraits on the walls. Young men and women, forever.

“No.” Violet’s hands are shaking. “That’s not true. That can’t be true.”

She thinks about the way Aleksander flipped the napkin between his hands, showing her the way to Fidelis. Two sides. Magical and mundane. Light and shadow.

Fairy tales… and the curses that come with them.

“Vi, listen to me,” Ambrose says urgently. “The scholars are dangerous. Why do you think we kept you at home for so long? We wouldn’t have brought you here unless we had no choice. You can’t tell anyone about this, understand? If you did—”

“I don’t owe you anything!” Her gaze sweeps across them both, disgusted. “You lied to me. About all of this.”

She’s spent half the evening trying to get back to her uncles, but now she can’t bear to spend even a second more with them. She pushes past them, back towards the party. Let them argue over the best way to keep her in the dark. Fuck them both.

“Violet!” Ambrose says.

Gabriel shakes his head. “Let her be.”

A curse is just a story, just a fairy tale to frighten children into good behaviour, to mistake coincidence for causality, to explain why a mother would leave her child without so much as a backwards glance.

So much she doesn’t know, and may never understand. And the box in her head that she can’t bear to even look at—the one that has her mother’s eyes, her warm laughter—rips open, spilling hurt like blood.

She stumbles back into the party, and into the sea of strangers. But after the dim hallways, the room is too bright, the guests’ laughter sharp and high-pitched. They eye her with bright hunger, and she hears a name on their lips.Marianne. Marianne Everly. Her daughter.

Everywhere she looks, there are people she doesn’t recognise. And yet they all know her name. A molten anger slides around her gut, and suddenly her skin feels too tight, pins and needles shooting through her fingers. Caspian Verne makes towards her, holding a glass of water as promised, but she can’t bear the thought of more “conversation.”

Spotting a break in the flow of people, Violet bolts for the wide back doors and through them, outside. Lanterns light up the patio, casting a honey glow across the flagstones, but the rest of the garden is swathed in velvety darkness, the moon soft and hazy against the clouds. From here she can see straight through the house’s enormous arched windows, framing the party like a painting come to life.Dropped-waist dresses and frothy tulle skirts—wolves with expensive taste, clearly.

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