Page 65 of The City of Stardust

As the minutes tick past, she starts to worry that he won’t show up at all. Then he appears, jogging down the road with a glittering object in his hands.

“Sorry, sorry,” he says breathlessly. “I had to pick this up first. Otherwise you won’t look the part.”

He hands her a gold mask, trimmed with lace and sequins. She places it over her eyes, the ribbons trailing down her collar.

“Here, let me help.”

Aleksander’s hands reach around to pull the ribbons behind her head. Gently, he ties the mask securely, his fingers brushing the tips of her ears. His breath is warm on the nape of her neck.

His own mask is made of steel-blue silk stretched taut against a wire frame that curls upwards into spiky silver horns. And no ill-fitting suit for him this time; his jacket sits snugly across his chest and his cuffs are the correct length, with silver cufflinks to match his mask.

“How do I look?” she asks, tugging nervously on her own cuffs again.

It will have to be enough. It has to work.

Aleksander tilts his head to the side. “You look beautiful,” he says quietly. “As always.”

And Violet would blush with pleasure were it not for the hint of resentment in his voice. She takes a step back, towards the light.

“And they won’t see your lack of tattoos,” he adds, then holds out his arm. “Shall we?”

Violet hesitates before taking his arm. But she can’t let herself be distracted by anything else, no matter how tempting it is to try and unpack their fight. Tonight, she’ll find Marianne, find the key, find out how to stop Penelope.

Tonight, it finally,finallyends.

With the same uncanny precision he’d shown in Vienna, Aleksander leads her around a series of winding streets. He barely glances at the signs, instead pulling her down alleyways no tourist would ever think to walk through.

“I thought you said you hadn’t been to Prague before,” she says.

He shrugs. “I’m good with cities.”

She pauses to look at him again, brow furrowed. There’s an unhappy tension stretched between his shoulder blades, as though his whole body is braced for something unpleasant. Then he stops on the street.

“Do you really think you’ll find what you’re looking for?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says, no hesitation.

Everything has led her to this moment: her uncles’ notes, Tamriel’s vision, her mother’s own footsteps. Even Caspian and his suggestion of other worlds.

Do you really believe the curse isn’t real? That the divine never touches you? That the wheeling cosmos is but an abstract of chemicals? Do you not hear the stars sing, little dreamer?

Once upon a time in that café, she’d believed, even if she hadn’t yet understood what that belief meant. What it meant to embrace the monstrous and the divine.

She believes she’ll find her mother. So she will.

“I admire that about you, Violet,” Aleksander says unexpectedly. “You know what you want, what it costs to go after it.” He looks down at his hands. “What you’ll do once you have it.”

An errant streetlamp paints his shoulders gold, and Violet recalls the asteros card of the woman with the sword through her chest, her head bowed as Aleksander’s is bowed now. He wears the elegant, sombre face of a Renaissance angel, and she wonders, not for the first time, what happened in the last year to make him like this. Distant and unknowable as a star.

“I will find her,” she says again.

He looks at her. “I believe you.”

They keep walking.

“You do look nice, by the way,” he says, after a pause.

She glances at him. “So do you.”

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