Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Emmeline
The isle was entirely still, a time when Emmeline usually felt her most lonely.
With the typical bustle of the streets winding from the hills down to the shores, she could pretend some of the energy was hers to claim.
That there were people among the crowds who belonged to her and to whom she belonged in turn.
But tonight, despite the death and threats, a sense of calm had settled across the rolling jungle and colorful buildings.
The peace was undeserved. The entire city should have been echoing with loss, at least to Emmeline. The depths of the alleys should have been screaming with it, the crashing tide pounding out the beating hearts of those who had taken their last breaths.
Normally she loved the serenity of her isle, but not now. Not with Liana gone, and who knew how many others missing. She placed a hand to her throat, where the memory of bruises still echoed.
Tonight, the quiet was another reminder of all she was working to preserve and achieve. Of everyone she’d lost in such brutal ways, and who she still needed to find. Longing twisted around her heart, its embrace familiar.
Despite the way the stillness ate at her spirit, as she stood on the balcony beyond her dormitory and breathed in the floral-tinged air of her makeshift garden, Emmeline prayed to the Fates Lyra would stay this way until they got back from Alvan.
Until they could figure out who was at fault for these killings.
A soft knock echoed through the front door, and Emmeline tossed a low, “Come in,” over her shoulder.
Heavy boots thudded onto the small tile balcony, sandalwood wrapped on the night breeze.
Though she’d expected Myrella, she shouldn’t have been surprised.
Somehow, she’d sensed he was nearby, as if she’d come to rely on his proximity since the attack.
Roremar’s appearance warred with the loneliness she’d been prepared to bask in.
“You’re here?” she asked Roremar without looking at him. The wind danced around her, lifting the hair draping her shoulders, and she breathed with it, her heart splintering.
“If you insist on being here, then yes, I am,” Roremar stated, no rumble of aggravation in his tone.
Emmeline glanced over her shoulder. Moonlight bathed his features in a pale glow, the drooping greenery framing the doorway casting shadows across his leathers and weapons.
The scar above his lips twitched as he inhaled, but his expression showed no sign of annoyance or disruption.
“I went to Des’s but you weren’t there. You’re never at the Academy this late anymore. ”
“I am tonight,” she said.
Still, no flicker of emotion.
No. There was something there. It resembled concern, and it poured a warm sensation through Emmeline’s limbs. It was a far cry from his analytical stoicism, amused recklessness, or the icy contempt he’d originally shown her—a disarmingly safe version of care.
She wasn’t sure she liked it. It was too close to being behind a fogged glass that was slowly clearing. An image forming that she had no control over.
Swallowing the lump in her throat, she looked back over a starlit Lyra. “I know we won’t be gone long, but I wanted to come back here once before we left.”
“You don’t need to explain,” Roremar said, claiming one of the metal chairs as if he was prepared to stay for hours.
“That’s good, because I don’t quite know if I can.
” She took the opposite chair, kicking off her shoes and pulling a sheet of parchment from the bag she’d dropped out here earlier.
Before she’d made herself go look at the room.
The scene had been cleaned to perfection—Myrella’s doing—but the taint of that bloody message would linger forever.
Both in the walls of this dormitory and the walls of her heart.
Something had changed within her that night. And though she was still healing from it, she wasn’t sure she hated it, this hard shell and the determination it wrought. Her magic pulsed, a freshly beating heart.
Not yet, she told it as it begged to unravel.
Crossing her legs, Emmeline flattened the parchment in her lap and removed a piece of charcoal from her bag.
“What’s that?” Roremar asked.
Emmeline flicked a glance at him. His eyes were ignited by the stars like they warmed a sliver of his darkness. Then she watched the sky. Was she going to share this personal piece of herself with him?
Yes. She nearly jolted at the realization, but she supposed she was.
“When I was little,” she began as she swept the charcoal over the parchment, “and I was worried about something, my mom would take me outside at night, and we’d map the stars.
Constellations, planets, whatever we saw.
She taught me the stories of all those known and we created our own.
She told me to recite my feelings to the stars. ”
“Why?” Roremar asked softly, leaning an elbow on the arm of his chair and peering closer at her.
Emmeline continued drawing the constellations as she saw them tonight, losing herself in the methodic work.
“She said if I gave the stars my concerns, they’d hold them for me.
She said give them my fears but also give them the good feelings, everything that felt too big.
The ones I didn’t know how to handle when I was so young.
The hopes and dreams that felt impossible.
Tell the stars your heart’s deepest desires and let them forge the fortune, tell them your worries and let them burn them away. ”
Absently, she paused to compare her rudimentary star map to the vast expanse above.
It wasn’t as fine as those done on Byron, but it was better than many.
Fingers streaked with charcoal, she twirled her opal ring around her finger, but for once, when Roremar’s eyes burned into the motion, she didn’t feel too seen.
“That’s a nice thought. That they’re there to take what you can’t hold.
” Emmeline didn’t think he was going to continue, but Roremar added, “Sometimes, I don’t trust the stars.
” It was almost a sacrilegious thought to state aloud, but Emmeline didn’t say that, only carrying on drawing.
A part of her wanted to hear what Roremar had to say, understand how his mind worked.
She was beginning to think it was a fascinating place.
“The Fates are made of the stars, right? We’re all stardust when it comes down to it.
And yet they cause shit like these murders? ”
Pulling her eyes from the parchment, Emmeline tilted her head at Roremar. “The Fates don’t write paths of fortune. They only communicate them to us.”
“Do we know that for sure?” Roremar challenged softly. His voice was so innocent, vulnerable.
“I guess not,” Emmeline admitted, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
Roremar’s lips twisted to the side as he studied the sky, lacing his fingers before him. “Sometimes, I don’t know how to trust them.”
“There are good and bad sides to us all,” Emmeline responded with another swipe of charcoal across parchment.
“Most Warriors, Angels, even the Fates can’t be boiled down to simply good and evil.
I like to think we can still hand over our fears when it counts, that safety still exists in their company, no matter what their hearts say. ”
Sometimes that was all someone needed. To be seen and supported, to not be put in a box.
“Is that what you’re telling the stars of now?” Roremar asked, nodding to her artwork. “Something you’re afraid of?”
She gazed down at the constellation of Anphrosia, the Fate of Cruelty and Adoration, that she’d drawn. Her stars shone brighter than any others tonight, the single Seductress point at the top the brightest of all.
“Amongst other things,” she said, voice a hum along the breeze. The candle she’d set on the stone pillar beside the railing winked out, and Emmeline sighed, tilting her chin up to soak in the starlight.
For a moment, they were silent. What was Roremar thinking? Did he resent that he was here with her? Did he have someone he wished he was watching the stars with? Someone he went home to at the end of the day?
She’d been spending all this time with him, had maybe even begun to consider him a friend, and she knew very little of him beyond what she’d observed. She was wary of pushing too close, of asking for more. Those close to me wind up dead.
Would he survive the endless ruin in her wake?
But from her life on the outside, she’d learned you could gather the most important facets of someone by watching.
So she stayed quiet, and she paid attention.
She counted how long he studied her. How long he cast his gaze out over the jungle.
Not down toward the city, as she’d expected, and not out toward the ocean, but chasing something else.
She noted the rings on his fingers and the ink on his skin and the precise swoop of the dark waves at the nape of his neck, committing his details to memory.
After a while, she stopped watching. And she simply existed beside him.
From the way Roremar’s gaze strayed to the stars, she thought maybe he was telling them his worries, as well.
Maybe—in this moment, based on his contemplative, elusive expression—they weren’t as different as she’d assumed.
Perhaps they were both scarred, hiding their wounds deep beneath the skin where no one would find them.
It was possibly a part of his armor, or a reason for it at the very least.
Perhaps he was just as concerned about what they were heading into as she was.
And perhaps…perhaps, there was a kinship between her and the reckless warrior with the steel cut eyes. The armor only needed to be shed.