Page 81 of The City of Stardust

“Marianne didn’t fight for us,” Violet says suddenly. “She never even came back to warn us. Once she knew she couldn’t stop Penelope, she just… left.”

“Oh, Violet—”

“You stayed! Gabriel stayed!” Violet says in a rush. “Marianne Everly, tough as nails. Marianne Everly, stubborn as hell. Marianne Everly, smarter than the devil.Well, if she was so bloody tough and stubborn and smart, then why didn’t she come back?”

Hot tears burn at the corner of her eyes, and this makes her angrier than ever. She’s supposed to be done with the exhausting pain of it all. Done with the humiliation and anguish of being the daughter that wasn’t worth staying for. Marianne left over a decade ago, but she might as well be sitting with them right here, staring at the same fire, for all she’s blown a hole through Violet’s life. All the damage she continues to do.

“She was afraid,” Ambrose says.

Violet bites down on her lip so hard she draws blood. She presses her palms to her eyes, and takes in a deep, shuddering breath.

She can’t do this. She can’t.

There’s the sound of springs as Ambrose eases up from his chair. Then warm arms envelop her.

“I’m sorry Marianne left,” Ambrose says. “I’m sorry we didn’t tell you the truth. God, I’m sorry.”

Something in Violet breaks.

Later, after her tears have dried on Ambrose’s shirt, and the fire has been reduced to ashes, Ambrose disappears briefly to return with a cup of tea. He hands it to Violet, and she inhales deeply before drinking.

It’s a poor cure for heartache, but she’ll take it.

Two days later, Aleksander packs up his meagre belongings at the forge, Penelope in attendance. The forge bearers look on in a mixture of awe and fear.Thefamous Penelope, here, attheirforge.

“Where are you going?” one of them asks timidly. A child.

Penelope kneels down so she’s eye to eye with the apprentice. “He’s going back to where he belongs, little dreamer.” She turns to Aleksander. “Isn’t that right?”

He bows his head, unable to make eye contact. “Yes, Mistress.”

They walk up the hill in silence. Penelope parts crowds with ease; they give way as if to a god in their midst. But Aleksander can feel eyes boring into the back of his neck. The disgraced assistant, returning to the cathedral of knowledge. Even for him, it seems to defy sanctity.

Penelope stops outside of the scholars’ tower. “It’s been a long time coming, hasn’t it? It’s okay, you can say it.”

“Yes, Mistress,” he says, swallowing the sudden lump in his throat.

A year of exile, of hardship. He has paid for this with his own blood, a forfeit of pain. He has paid for it with Violet’s trust and Yury’s humanity, too. But he tucks the thought away as quickly as it emerges.

And doesn’t he at least deserve this? His future stretches out before him, an ocean of possibility once more. The scholars’ archway looms overhead.

Penelope smiles, and for the first time in his entire life, steps aside for him to enter first. “Welcome home.”

Aleksander is given a new room, higher in the tower than before. A scholar’s room, not a novice’s, even though he’s yet to take the test that separates them. Instead of stone walls and bare floors, the walls are wood panelled and the floor covered in luxurious carpet. His bed is soft, his pillows full and downy. There’s even an en-suite bathroom, with water shunted upstairs from the hot springs. His precious books are all there, lined up in a real bookcase.

It’s everything he ever wanted.

Well, not quite. With his short hair and muscly heft from the forge, Aleksander stands out wherever he goes, and even the scholars give him a wide berth. Their eyes stray to his bare forearm, free of the reveurite tattoo that would mark him as a scholar proper, and conversations fall silent when he walks past, as though even gossip is too sacred for his ears. He takes to wearing long sleeves and eating at oddhours in the cafeteria, where only the kitchen staff side-eye him and mutter as they prepare for the rest of the day.

Before, as Penelope’s assistant, he’d endured all kinds of rumours—that he was secretly her child, that she took a bribe to take him on, or even that his unidentified parents held some kind of sway over her—and he’d been able to ignore them because he was her assistant. Chosen. Even at the forge, he had been able to endure the suspicious glances and whispering. But this feels different, sharper somehow.

He combats his guilt by working it away, spending long hours in the archives. Unconsciously at first, and then with deliberate lack of acknowledgement as to why, he starts pulling anything he can find on the astrals. Most of the documents are fragmented or in a language so old he can barely read it, spidered alphabets meandering across pages pocked with toothy beetle marks. He lingers over words splintered from sentences, paragraphs that might have once belonged to an entire essay:longevity, grace, war, calamity.

More than once, he reaches a shelf and comes up empty, a finger-sized gap collecting dust. Books go missing occasionally, despite the card catalogue and army of sharp-eyed archivists: mis-shelved; abandoned on a desk; occasionally stolen by a covetous scholar to read in the comfort of their own room; and more rarely destroyed by those gripped with vengeance—or else too careless with hot drinks.

Even with all the potential mishaps, it’s still unusual for a document to vanish from the shelves entirely, especially more than one on the same subject. The archivists shrug at the first two disappearances, glower at him suspiciously for the third. After that, he stops telling them, but he notes the absences in the back of his mind.

Not once does he let himself think about what he’s searching for, beyond a deep unease. Yet he keeps digging, moving further through the archives, past the well-lit front shelves and into the many tunnels that snake into the mountainside. He reads until he collapses at his desk, succumbing to a dreamless sleep. In the middle of the night, he wakes with his face pressed against the book, alone.

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