Page 87 of The City of Stardust

As soon as the sun dips underneath the horizon, the first pinpricks of light appear across the clouds, brighter and wilder than any star. Reveurite, borne from the sky in fist-sized meteors. They barrel down like shining rain, leaving incandescent trails that look like the stars’ fingers outstretched:here is our gift, O you who were once our fledgling dreams.

There is plenty of swearing at singed fingers as the forge bearers, dressed in thick leathers and protective helmets, scale the nets to retrieve these blazing offerings from the stars. But there is also laughter and singing, cheers for the biggest chunk of reveurite, or applause for a forge bearer’s inaugural catch.

Aleksander enjoys none of it.

He sits alone on a bench, watching a forge bearer throw themself nimbly across a gap between nets. Even though this is an annual event, and no one’s a stranger to heights, the spectators still suck in abreath as another forge bearer dangles from the cliff with only one hand, gathering her body to swing over. The forge master stands below, shouting instructions and encouragement by turns.

Last year, it had been Aleksander scaling the nets, his fingers numb with cold, his heart pounding in glorious terror. Now, he has no place here, other than as a spectator.

Because he will be a scholar.

He stole a child.

But he will be a scholar.

You stole a child, Aleksander.

Ordinarily, he would have to wait another year for Illios’ Blessing to return again, and be made scholar amongst the other anointed. But Penelope had insisted upon tonight. A reward for exemplary service not just for scholars, but all of Fidelis. And who would disagree with Penelope, when she put it like that?

“For you, my assistant, all things we will make possible,” she’d said.

Only a few weeks ago, he would have given everything to hear that.

Aleksander looks down at his hands. His tattoo is scheduled for midnight—a slightly unusual time to receive the scholar rites, but given how important the harvest is, he’s lucky to be receiving it at all tonight.

Just half an hour left. And then he’ll be a scholar, with everything that it means.

He has always thought of himself as rooted in the scholars. Always. At first it was unquestioning loyalty; the scholars took him in when no one else did, gave him a purpose. Then it was the joy of wrapping his head around a complex problem, of peeling apart centuries-old texts to decode the secrets within, even if it was something as mundane as a recipe for vegetable stew. Not all scholars love the archives the way he does, and fewer still have the patience or tenacity to spends hours mulling over the same few texts, piecing together fragments to elucidate the greater truth of what they have inherited in this fractured mountainside home. What they might have brought with them from Elandriel.

He is very, very good at digging through the archives for that truth. And, it turns out, the truth is a name. Only a name.

Astriade. That’s what he’d heard Violet say as the church doors swung closed in Prague. It sounded impossible—of course it did. But then Violet’s entire journey has carried a mythic wonder to it, as if she was making her own legend. And there was so much conviction in her voice.

So he started to pick over the archives. And what a truth he has uncovered.

This is why Penelope warned him not to ask questions. Why he’s been so good as her blade. Because now that he holds knowledge in his hands, he hates the answers it’s brought. He hates that he has to make a choice.

How easy it would be to stay Penelope’s blade and let his new knowledge fall away into the void of memory. No one would ever know but him.

He buries his hands in his pockets against the cold and accidentally brushes the fuzzy corner of an old stamp card. He pulls it out and stares at it, even though it’s almost too dark to see. Ten stamps: a promise unfulfilled.

At a quarter to midnight, the forge bearers finish and bow to thundering applause, breathless and grinning. Fireworks burst in the sky, as one day rolls into another. Aleksander is nowhere to be found.

It’s almost midnight. Almost time.

Penelope walks out to the ruins on the mountainside, irrespective of the cold. She hasn’t felt cold for a millennia—or warmth, for that matter. Only the keen absence of her brethren’s singing, of her own power thrumming through her veins. Of white-hot light and icy abyss, ofhome.

It’s said that for a god, one hundred years is the blink of an eye. That mortals shed their lives like moths, living and dying between breaths.

It is a lie.

Penelope has felt every second of exile, every ache of her loss. She has paid her penance.

Now it’s time to return.

If this doesn’t work, it’ll be Violet’s last midnight. She decides to spend it on the roof of the house, even though the temperature has dropped dramatically. Better to freeze up here than watch her uncles exchange increasingly desperate glances, as if there’s still time to convince her to leave.

Clouds scull overhead, shadowing the moon. She picks out Orion, with his bright belt, then Pleiades, the Eye of Taurus. It’s entirely possible that they wander the earth in another world, no longer a dance of chemicals, but under more mortal guises. Free to live, love—destroy.

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