Page 95 of The City of Stardust

Starlight.

Penelope staggers into her quarters, clutching her chest. Her hands still drip with blood, but the claws are fingertips once more. Her skin clings to her bones like paper, and her wings—her beautiful, fine wings—trail behind her in corporeal form, not as smoke, but leather and sinew. She sucks in a ragged breath.

Violet Everly did this.

Always an Everly, the cause of her ruin. Always an Everly, her downfall.

Penelope lunges towards the door. Claws, then hands, then claws again. She’s lost too much blood, and now she is losing her grip on herself. Her strength is fading, too quickly; it’s taken a millennia, but at last, she’s run out of time.

Activity bustles in the tower beneath. Hundreds of scholars going about their day, unaware of the chaos raging above them. Hundreds of dreamers, their lives bright sparks of energy. Like worker bees, purposeful in their mindless humming.

Their talent—their lifeblood—sings to her, and her stomach roars with complaint.

She swore she would never do this. Wasteful to undo all her efforts to restore her fractured legacy. But she can imagine how they would taste, in excruciating detail. Sunlight and earth, reveurite and stardust. All the delights of the world, ready for the taking. It’s not the sacrifice she would have chosen to commemorate such a momentous occasion, but she is used to ugly compromise.

There will be time later, to drink Violet’s corpse dry. To discipline her wayward assistant—for this is the last time Aleksander disappoints her. Time later to rebuild what she must destroy.

She is Astriade, divine wielder of the dual swords of mercy and justice. She is glory. She is devastation.

And she ishungry.

CHAPTER

Forty-Six

ENDLESS WHITE. Achill that shoots straight through Violet’s bones. She inhales and almost chokes on the frosty air.

They’ve landed on a cliffside, though with the snow it’s hard to tell where the edge finishes and the sky begins. Behind her, a half arc of an archway rises above them, surrounded by ruins of stone buildings. Somewhere in the distance, the mountains boom with shedding ice, low and eerie.

“I thought it would be better to come here, to avoid attention. And… the view.” Aleksander gives her a small smile, and for a second, she catches the flicker of the young man who once spoke of stardust and dreams. “Welcome to Fidelis, Violet Everly.”

Fidelis.

Violet looks out again at the snow-washed landscape. So many times she’s dreamed of coming here—literally dreamed, her head filling up with images of a fanciful city to match its fanciful street names. A place brimming with magic, scholars, secrets.

“You brought the sword,” Aleksander says, compounding the feeling that she’s dropped into a fairy tale.

Violet looks down at her clenched fists, and the heavy weight of the sword balanced between them. “I guess I did.”

Aleksander leads her down a perilous stairway, slick with ice. They emerge in an alleyway, pushing past the overgrown bushes that disguise the entrance. At first all she can see are the sheer walls of thebuildings on either side, shadows falling over them. Snow crunches underfoot, collecting in downy white on her shoulders. A bracing wind ripples through their clothes, and Violet gasps at the chill. She follows Aleksander, out of the alleyway to a large courtyard, into the frosty evening. And then she has to stop all over again.

Mountain peaks jut into the sky like shards of glass, glittering with snow. And below, the world falls away into winding terraces laced into the mountainside. In the valley, amber light suffuses the mist that settles at the bottom of the treeline. And the stars. Constellations in that half-familiar pattern she’d once seen scattered over her kitchen table.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” Aleksander says quietly.

She can’t stop staring at the other side of the valley, solemn and dark against an even darker sky. “I never imagined it would be so real.”

“Real as life,” he says.

“If I lived here, I’d never leave,” she says.

“Most people never do,” Aleksander says. “But if you never leave, you never get to find out what the rest of the world looks like. What other worlds look like. And then you never know how astonishing Fidelis is in the first place.”

Then his gaze rakes over the horizon and his smile vanishes.

“The light in the scholars’ tower,” he says. “It’s gone.”

He starts to walk up the mountainside towards it, past the rows of high-roofed houses, stacked closely against each other.

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