Beatriz
remembers the first time she and her sisters were allowed to enter their mother’s study. They were fourteen at the time and until then, the room had been strictly off-limits to them and, it seemed, everyone else in the castle, apart from Nigellus. had hatched a plot to sneak in once, a few years before, but in the end even she hadn’t dared to try.
As it was, when they’d finally been invited into that room, it had been something of a letdown. There were no state secrets spelled out on the walls, no treasure trove of crown jewels on display, no secret garden of rare orchids—nothing they’d spent years theorizing about. It was, actually, fairly plain, without the ornate décor that could be found in every other room of the palace. The desk at the center was plain oak, the bookshelves stocked with practical historical texts, the only ornament on the walls a single map of Vesteria, bordered by an assortment of constellations.
Now, standing in her mother’s office two years older, without her sisters at her side, struggles to keep her eyes on her mother rather than let them drift to the map behind her. It isn’t only the additions to the map that distract her—how Temarin is now shaded the same blue as Bessemia, the silver pin stuck in Friv’s capital of Eldevale, which she imagines must represent Daphne the same way the gold pin stuck here in Hapantoile represents herself. It isn’t that she’s wondering what color pin Sophronia was and what, exactly, her mother did with it. At least, those aren’t the only things about the map distracting her. She also keeps stealing glances at the constellations surrounding Vesteria.
Someone else might say they were coincidental, a choice of the mapmaker, but knows nothing her mother does is coincidental.
“, I assume you know I didn’t bring you here to stare at a map you surely have memorized,” Empress Margaraux says, and forces her gaze back to where she sits behind her great oak desk.
“I assume you brought me here to find out what I learned from poisoning Gisella yesterday,” she replies, injecting her voice with enough flipness to make her mother’s eyes narrow. It’s a small shift in her expression, but feels like she’s scored a point.
Her mother leans back in her chair, surveying . “The coughing truth serum was a clever touch,” she says.
shrugs. “Gisella is no stranger to poisons, she would have detected anything more straightforward, perhaps even trained herself to lie through it, just as Daphne, Sophronia, and I did.”
“The real question is how effective it was, consideringit narrowed the scope of truth in her answers,” her mother says.
“It was effective enough,” says, bristling. In the last day, she’s weighed just how much she should tell her mother—things the empress is bound to find out herself, from her spies in Cellaria, but not so much that her mother might believe that marrying to Nicolo is the best path toward her end goal. No matter what else happens, will keep Pasquale safe, from her mother and from anyone else who means him harm. “Nicolo isn’t well liked at court. His ascension was sudden. Admittedly, the court wasn’t terribly fond of Pasquale, either, but he was King Cesare’s only living legitimate child, so they tolerated him. But I’d imagine many feel that if the throne was contested and open to claims, they themselves might be better suited than Nicolo and Pasquale both.”
“Hmm,” her mother says, watching in silence just long enough that she begins to feel herself sweat. Did she say too much? Not enough? Just when is about to speak again, the empress continues. “My spies in Cellaria say the same, though that isn’t all they say about young King Nicolo.”
The way the empress says it, knows she is laying a trap, hoping to see show weakness, or any sign that she cares for Nicolo more than she should. Luckily, it’s a trap she can avoid easily. She simply looks at her mother and waits for her to elaborate, using the woman’s own trick against her—silence.
“They say,” the empress says after a moment, drawing the words out, “that he is pining.” When still doesn’t react, she continues. “Many say he pines for you.”
Once, when and her sisters were young, they snuck away from their lessons to climb up to the castle roof, taking turns walking along the edge, balancing carefully. All it would have taken was one misstep—or even a strong breeze—and they would have fallen to their deaths. They didn’t, which in hindsight strikes as nothing short of a miracle, but here and now she feels the way she did then, standing at a great height, balancing for her very life.
She forces a laugh, something she learned from courtesans—how to convincingly laugh at jokes that aren’t at all funny. “I suspect it’s less about pining and more about guilt.”
“Oh?” the empress asks, raising a single eyebrow.
sighs, biting her lip. “I’ll confess, Mother, you were right before: we did have a…flirtation that crossed the line. From what I’d heard, extramarital affairs were quite common in Cellaria and I didn’t think much of it, but Nicolo was absolutely mad with guilt over it. He and Pasquale were close, as I’m sure you know.”
“Hmm,” the empress says, and isn’t sure whether that hmm indicates interest or disbelief. “Curious, though, that he would be so guilt-ridden over a few kisses with his cousin’s wife but not over stealing his throne?”
shrugs. “If you’re hoping I can explain the way the male mind works, Mama, I fear you’ll be disappointed,” she says. “Though it is my understanding that Gisella was the power behind the coup, Nicolo hardly more than a puppet for her to control.”
“If that is true,” the empress says, “it will be fascinating to see how the puppet behaves with his strings severed. And speaking of which, I read the letter you wrote, alerting King Nicolo to Lady Gisella’s situation. I assume it will irk him?”
smiles. “I believe so, yes,” she says.
“Well, it matters little,” her mother says, shrugging. “You’ll be leaving for Cellaria soon, just as we discussed.”
stiffens. “You can’t still mean to send Pasquale and me back to Cellaria—not now. Wouldn’t it be more prudent to see how he responds to our having Gisella? That gives us leverage.”
“I never thought to hear you advocating for being prudent, ,” her mother replies dryly.
clenches her jaw to keep from saying something she will regret. She takes a deep breath and steadies herself. “Sending Pasquale and me back into Cellaria without the entirety of Bessemia’s army behind us is a death sentence,” she says.
She knows that’s the point, knows her death at Cellaria’s hands is exactly what her mother needs to take the country for her own, but still she needs to say it. She needs to see her mother’s reaction. But, of course, her mother gives no reaction at all.
“Only if you fail,” she says instead, her voice cold. “Do you intend to fail, ?”
“Of course not, but—”
“Then don’t,” she says, as if it’s that easy.
opens her mouth to argue, more out of habit than an expectation that she’ll change her mother’s mind, but before she can, there’s a knock at the door.
“Come in, Nigellus,” her mother says without asking who it is. But then, who else would dare enter her mother’s study?
The door opens and Nigellus sweeps in, looking perplexed. When he sees , he stops short.
“It’s fine,” Empress Margaraux says, waving a hand. “ and I are done here. Keep an eye on that husband of yours, my dove. He might be more tenderhearted toward his cousin than you are.”
decides not to respond to that, in large part because she isn’t certain her mother is wrong about Pasquale. She turns toward the door and passes Nigellus, who gives her a brief nod, as friendly as he usually is, supposes. They haven’t spoken since he discovered that the star he took down from Sophronia’s constellation—the Lonely Heart—had reappeared. She’s supposed to meet him in his observatory for another lesson tonight and she is both looking forward to it and dreading it.
just makes it to the door when her mother speaks again. “Oh, , I almost forgot. There was a letter from Daphne.”
turns back toward her mother, who is holding out a folded piece of cream parchment. “Daphne wrote me?” she asks, eyeing the letter.
“Oh. No, actually,” her mother says, frowning. “The letter was written to me, but I thought you might be interested in its contents all the same.”
masks her disappointment and crosses back to her mother’s desk, taking hold of the letter, though her mother doesn’t release it.
“I must say, it’s a relief to have one daughter, at least, who isn’t a disappointment.”
The empress finally releases the letter and it takes all of ’s self-control not to crumple it in her hand.
A dozen bitter words rise to ’s lips and she knows she’s going to say something she’ll regret—knows too, somewhere deep down, that her mother wants her to speak in anger now, to show all of her cards. She opens her mouth, but before she can speak, Nigellus clears his throat.
“I beg your pardon, Your Majesty, but it is imperative we speak at once. I bring word from your friend in the north.”
Empress Margaraux’s eyes cut away from Daphne and land on Nigellus. “Go,” she says, and though she doesn’t look in her direction, knows the words are meant for her. She hurries from the room before she can lose more than her temper, though two questions nag at her—who is her mother’s friend in the north, and why did get the feeling Nigellus had just saved her from herself?
—
waits until she reaches her room before she sits down at her desk and smooths out the letter from Daphne. Though she feels a touch of guilt, reading words that weren’t meant for her, she reasons that her mother did give her the letter, though knows she had her own motivations for doing so. Still, seeing Daphne’s elegant and neat handwriting digs beneath her skin.
The letter, written in a hidden ink that only shows when the correct solution is applied to the paper, has already been revealed.
Dear Mama,
Queen Eugenia has arrived with a letter that I believe is from you, though if it is a forgery, please tell me so. Shortly after she arrived with her two younger sons, the boys were kidnapped, though Prince Bairre and King Bartholomew are doing everything they can to locate them. I will let you know if they succeed.
As to King Leopold, I’ve heard some whispers that have yet to prove true, though I will keep you apprised of that situation as it unfolds as well. I believe he is in Friv, though I’m sure you know how rumors of his whereabouts have spread over these last weeks. I know how important it is that he is found as soon as possible and don’t want to distract you with false leads.
Your dutiful daughter,
Daphne
When finishes the letter, she wishes she could reach through the paper and give her sister a shake. Though Daphne doesn’t say as much, would bet her favorite pair of shoes that the whispers of Leopold’s whereabouts she mentioned came from Violie—at least is relieved that Violie was smart enough to withhold Leopold himself, especially with Queen Eugenia loose in the castle.
And the young princes have been kidnapped—something is sure her mother is at least partly responsible for. Your friend in the north, Nigellus said, and now has several suspicions about who that might be—either Queen Eugenia, or whoever is responsible for kidnapping her sons.
Another thought occurs to her—what if her mother’s friend in the north is Violie? It’s possible—Violie worked for her mother before, she admitted as much, and after falling for Nicolo’s and Gisella’s lies, doesn’t have the same confidence in her ability to read others that she used to. But as she follows that line of thought, she realizes that if Violie were working for her mother, she would have simply delivered Leopold to her rather than traveling first to Cellaria and then to Friv.
No, the most likely candidate for her mother’s friend in the north is Eugenia.
—
arrives at Nigellus’s laboratory just shy of midnight, dressed once again in Pasquale’s clothes, with the hood of his cloak drawn up over her head to hide her red hair. When she opens the door and slips inside, Nigellus doesn’t look up from his workbench, a vial of stardust in one hand and a beaker full of some gray liquid in the other. closes the door behind her firmly, but still Nigellus doesn’t glance up, instead studying the gray liquid closely, turning the beaker this way and that.
“Who is my mother’s friend in the north?” she asks him.
At that, Nigellus spares her a glance, though he doesn’t answer, instead setting both the stardust vial and the mysterious beaker down. “You’re early,” he points out. “I didn’t think such an occurrence was possible.”
ignores him. “My mother’s friend, in the north,” she presses. “Who is it?”
He shrugs. “Your mother has many friends, some of whom reside north of here,” he says. “But you aren’t here to discuss your mother, you’re here for lessons.”
clenches her jaw. “Very well,” she says. “Then I have another question: Why is Sophie’s star back in the sky? You said yourself it was impossible.”
“Surely many things seem impossible until they’ve been done,” Nigellus says with a shrug. “As to the why of it, I don’t know enough to speculate, but I will find out.”
“I’m starting to believe you don’t know much of anything, Nigellus,” she says, more to rib him than because it’s the truth. As is often the case with Nigellus, though, he shows no reaction to the barb.
“You came here for a lesson, , not an interrogation,” he says mildly. “Come, sit,” he adds, gesturing to the chair on the other side of his worktable, which begrudgingly takes. He moves away, turning his back to her as he searches the bookshelf against the wall, trailing his fingers over several spines before taking down a tall, slim volume. “You know why empyreas don’t use their magic to bring stars down, except in the direst of emergencies,” he says.
“Because stars are finite,” she answers automatically. “They are a resource to be preserved. Though in Cellaria, of course, it is because it is viewed as blasphemous. The stars are gods, and taking one from the sky is an act of deicide.”
“Do you view the stars as gods?” he asks, his tone shifting from lecturing to merely curious.
blinks, considering it. The stars control the way the world turns, she believes this, but does that make them gods? Does it make them sentient?
“I haven’t spent much time thinking about the stars at all,” she admits. “Apart from what they say in horoscopes, I suppose, or when it comes to wishing on stardust.”
“Which is to say that you don’t think about the stars unless it is in how they can serve you,” he infers, and though the words raise ’s hackles, there is no judgment in his tone. When she doesn’t respond, he continues. “There are different schools of thought in regard to what, exactly, the stars are, and those who believe pulling stars down is sacrilegious aren’t only in Cellaria. Many empyreas vow to never intentionally do so.”
“You did,” points out. “Not just with my sisters and me, but during the drought a few years ago.”
He nods, once. “It was a decision I weighed carefully, one many people disagreed with, many empyreas disagreed with. The royal empyreas in Friv and Temarin both refused to do it, though I suspect they were grateful that I did. They reaped the benefits, but the blood was only on my hands.”
“Is it a decision you regret?” asks.
Nigellus shrugs. “I don’t know if the stars are sentient or not,” he says. “I don’t know if they are gods or souls or anything else people believe. I do know that every day the drought continued, people died. People I knew were sentient, people I knew had souls. So no, I don’t regret the decision.”
agrees with Nigellus, though she won’t give him the satisfaction of saying as much. “What’s in the book?” she asks, nodding toward the volume he is still carrying.
Instead of answering, he opens it, finding the page he’s searching for and laying it out on the table between them. looks down, though it takes her a moment to make sense of what she’s looking at—a star map, but with more stars than she’s ever seen. Almost more stars than sky aredepicted.
“The first recorded star map,” Nigellus says. “The date of origin is unclear, but it’s believed to date back a thousand years or more.”
frowns and looks at the map again. She spies some familiar constellations—the Clouded Sun, the Hero’s Heart, the Broken Harp—but they are almost lost among a sea of stars she has never seen before.
“There are so many,” she says, her voice coming out mostly breath.
“There were,” Nigellus corrects. “Not only stars are gone but entire constellations. There are some references in ancient texts about constellations that no longer exist—the Bones of the Dead, for instance,” he says, drawing his finger to connect six stars in the upper corner of the page. “You’ll note that it’s much smaller than the Hero’s Heart,” he continues, pointing at that constellation, which contains at least two dozen more stars, a few that knows aren’t in the Hero’s Heart she’s seen in the sky itself.
studies the map in silence for a moment, struggling to reconcile the image before her with the sky she’s seen her entire life. She knew, logically, the cost of bringing a star down from the sky, but it never seemed a truly dire cost—what did it matter, after all, if the sky was missing a handful of stars, when there were so many? But looking at the map of what the sky once was frightens her now. Suddenly, it seems all too easy to imagine a world where there are no stars left in the sky at all. What will the world become then?
“You understand,” Nigellus says softly, withdrawing his hand from the book. “There is a cost to magic, and we aren’t the only ones who pay it.”
nods but can’t bring herself to speak. She clears her throat, tearing her eyes away from the star map to meet Nigellus’s gaze. “What of the stars I took? By accident in Cellaria, and then…on purpose. To escape the Sororia?”
For a moment, Nigellus doesn’t respond, and for the first time in her life, she notes a touch of emotion in his eyes. Pity. She wishes he would go back to the cold, vacant expression he usually wears. He turns to the bookshelf and brings forth another book—another star map, she realizes, when he opens the book to a page and lays it out atop the other book.
“Here,” he says, pointing at a star in the Queen’s Chalice, the star remembers selecting for her wish in the Sororia. At the time, she thought it a small thing, dimly lit and lost among a constellation full of others. Now, though, the sight of it twists her stomach. That star had been there since the dawn of time and now, because of the trouble got herself into, it isn’t.
Nigellus opens to another page featuring the Wanderer’s Wheel—to one star in particular on the wheel’s axle. didn’t focus on a particular star then, the first time she used her magic, but she thought she noticed one missing the next day. There it is, confirmed now, another star took. Killed, even. It doesn’t matter that it was by accident, she still did it.
Nigellus flips to another page, and finds that she’s holding her breath. She doesn’t recall what stars were out when she wished that Nicolo would kiss her, what constellation she used. This, if anything, is worse than the others because though she did wish by accident, it was such a frivolous wish, one that didn’t save her life, only broke her heart. I wish you would kiss me.
looks at the constellation depicted and can’t help but let out a small, sharp laugh. The Stinging Bee—which signals either surprise, pain, or both. In regard to Nicolo it was certainly both.
“Which star?” she asks, surprised that her voice comes out even.
Nigellus points to the star at the end of the bee’s stinger. She blinks.
“That isn’t a small star,” she says. “How did no one notice it missing?”
Nigellus shrugs. “Plenty of people did, I expect,” he says.“Most likely wrote it off for what it was—a new empyrea learning her power. You aren’t the first and you won’t be the last.”
Perhaps it should make feel better, but it doesn’t.
“Come back in two days and we’ll resume your studies,” Nigellus says, closing the book.
“Come back?” asks, blinking. “I only just arrived.”
“In the state your mind is in, you’re useless to me,” he says before hesitating. “I don’t know any young empyrea who isn’t shaken after comparing star maps.”
shakes her head. “I knew the cost of pulling a star from the sky,” she says. “I just didn’t realize how many had already been lost.”
“And how few, by comparison, remain,” Nigellus adds.
“But what am I supposed to do for two days?” she asks. “Every passing hour brings us closer to my mother attempting to ship me back to Cellaria, to whatever scheme she has planned for Daphne in Friv. I’m not content to sit idle and wallow in my feelings about dead stars.”
For a moment, Nigellus says nothing, his unsettling silver eyes resting on her. “I’m sure you’ll find something to keep you occupied. Between your mother, your husband, and Lady Gisella, I don’t doubt your hands will be quite full indeed.”
opens her mouth to argue but quickly closes it again. He’s right, but that’s exactly the problem. She doesn’t want to think about her mother’s plots or how Pasquale is relying on her or that needle of sympathy she feels for Gisella, or Daphne’s silence. For all of the stars’ complexities, understands where she stands with them more than anyone else.
“What of my debt?” she asks instead.
“Your debt?” he asks, frowning.
“You rescued me from the Sororia and brought me here,” she reminds him. “And then you paid, er…Ambrose’s gambling debts. I was under the impression those weren’t gifts given from your magnanimous heart.”
Nigellus hesitates, seemingly speechless for a moment. “I rescued you because it was clear the stars had plans for you, and in making you an empyrea you became my responsibility,” he says, his voice full of censure. “And officially, I brought you here because I convinced your mother that your dying as a disgraced princess rather than a throned queen of Cellaria didn’t suit her needs.”
“But once you helped me escape the Sororia, I could have gone to Friv,” points out, mostly to be contrary, but Nigellus laughs.
“Oh? And you think you would be safer under your sister’s roof than your mother’s?”
doesn’t respond, but her silence is all the answer Nigellus needs.
“Come back in two days, Princess,” he says, turning away from her and returning to his work.
And just like that, is dismissed.