Page 80 of The City of Stardust

Nothow could you? How dare you?

Violet closes her eyes. Pictures it in her head again. Of all the people she didn’t want to let down.

She tells him everything.

“I shouldn’t have trusted Aleksander. It’s all my fault.” She wipes away an angry tear, then another. “I’m so sorry, Ambrose.”

Ambrose stares into the fire thoughtfully, the flames casting shadows on his face.

“I wasn’t much older than you are now when your mother left you with me,” he says eventually. “I remember being panicked. I couldn’t look after a child!” He smiles to himself. “But Marianne begged. Sheknew she couldn’t take you with her, but she couldn’t stay. She wanted to fight for you—to fight for all of us, really. So I agreed.”

Violet recalls the first few weeks without her mother. How hollow her days felt, time stretching out like bubble gum. And there was Ambrose, awkwardly asking her whether she played with dolls, what food she liked, if she wanted to be friends. She hadn’t deigned him with a reply.

But then he asked her the magic question, and her eyes had lit up like stars.

Would you like to hear a story?

Ambrose steeples his fingers. “Over the years, don’t you think I’ve made mistakes? When Gabriel warned me about Penelope, we considering running, you know. We might not have run very far, but we could have tried. Gone to a different country, under different names.”

“Penelope would still have found us,” she says.

“Ah, but would she?” he asks. “We might also have got away. You and I could be living on a tropical island right now, lounging on a beach somewhere. Coconuts for days.”

Despite herself, she snorts. “Ease up there, Robinson Crusoe.”

“Well, maybe not. Certainly at the time, it seemed impossible. And we were still counting on Marianne.” His smile fades. “Perhaps I should have let Gabriel take you away, so by the time Penelope came, you would have been long gone.”

Violet blanches at the thought. “She would have killed you.”

“Butyouwould be safe. I think about that a lot, you know. What I was willing to give up. What I wasn’t.” He sighs. “I should have just told you the truth. I thought I was doing the right thing at the time.”

Violet tries to imagine Gabriel driving away into the sunset with her tucked into the passenger seat, glowering at the neon orange car. Or a childhood where a curse wasn’t just another story, but a vast and terrible thing to hang over her head for the rest of her life.

“Adelia Verne offered to take you with her once, to place you amongst the scholars in her family. I don’t suppose you know that,” he says.

“She did?”

A different life. Magic, scholars, reveurite—Fidelis. Once, Violet would have said yes within a heartbeat, desperate to see the world denied to her for so long. And part of her still feels the ghost of that particular longing.

“It’s not as unusual as you might think. Marianne went.” Ambrose drums his fingers against the armrest. “Again, a choice to be had. Would you have been happier in Fidelis, your birthplace, Marianne’s home?” he muses. “Or would you have suffered under the scholars’ rule, the way your friend did?”

A sudden surge of anger washes over her. “Aleksander doesn’t deserve your pity.”

Ambrose looks at her curiously. “Don’t you feel sorry for him?”

Aleksander lied to her in Vienna, and then again in Prague. So many lies snowballing into his betrayal. And sheknewit, too; that this new, slick Aleksander was not all he seemed, that he’d grown fangs in the year since she’d last seen him. He’d tried to dazzle her like a cheap magician, directing her to the pretty bauble of his attention even as cards of true intent spilled out of his pocket. And she’d let him. She’d just wanted to believe so badly in the man who had smiled at her over coffee, who had given her such a tantalising glimpse of what the world could be, if only she sought it out.

And if he’d looked at her in anguish? If for a second his veneer had cracked?

“You should have sent me away,” she says, regret sweeping over her. “You should have sent me away and been free. This can’t be what you wanted.”

Ambrose clasps her hands in his and smiles, his eyes crinkling. “It’s maybe not the life I would have chosen for myself. But it’s been a privilege to watch you grow up.”

For a long time, she and Ambrose watch the fire, burning to embers in the grate. In the hazy light, the crackles remind her of Erriel’s staff, or the gleam of her amber eyes.

Violet had been so close to the door. If she hadn’t waited that extra second, if she’d just taken Erriel’s hand and made her bargain,then she could be with Marianne right now. Or, she could be continuing to chase a ghost. A woman who doesn’t want to be found.

She wished to leave.

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