Chapter 13
STAR
The morning starts with pins and ends with thorns.
“Shoulders back, sweet pea,” Mama says, her drawl sugar-thick as two seamstresses attack the bodice like it owes them money. “Breathe. But not too much. The line on this corset is just divine when you don’t.”
“That’s not how lungs work,” I say through my teeth while one of the women—Elise, pins between lips like silver thorns—tugs the stays tighter. Silk hisses. My ribs argue. Lemon polish and steam from the iron mix in the air, bright and cloying, and I can almost taste my own patience caramelizing.
“You want the Feldspar matriarch to cry?” Mama goes on, only half joking. “Because I wouldn’t hate that, but it should be for the right reasons.”
“The right reason would be me setting her veil on fire,” I mutter.
“Tempt me,” CynJyn says from the chaise, swinging her legs, flipping through a florals catalogue like it’s a scandal sheet. She’s wearing a robe she stole from somewhere important, horns tipped gold for mischief, a grape between finger and thumb. “Chapter title: ‘Blazing Mother-in-Law.’”
Elise clucks. “Hold still, Lady Star.”
“I am still.” I fix on the far wall and pretend the mirror isn’t a person staring back. The girl in it looks like a painting someone’s overcleaned—edges too sharp, color leeched, eyes polished down to something that reflects anything but her own light.
The door blooms open and an entire garden enters.
“Oh! Blossom, breathe in this palette,” coos the head florist, a severe woman whose hands smell like peonies and power.
Assistants fan out behind her, juggling vases, swatches, sprayed samples of scent.
“We’ve narrowed it to three moods: ‘Moon in Milk,’ ‘Imperial Meadow,’ and ‘Legacy of Light.’”
CynJyn snorts. “What about ‘Please Don’t Sneeze’?”
“Moon,” Mama decides, tapping a swatch of pale petals. “Legacy sounds like a funeral.”
“Maybe appropriate,” I say.
“Hush,” she replies, light as a flick of a fan.
The florist arranges a small constellation of white blooms against my bodice, the scent clean and cold, a hymnal written in pollen. “You’ll be an apparition,” she says reverently. “A vision.”
“I’d rather be a person,” I say, and she blinks like I’ve broken the rules of the room.
By midmorning, I’ve been fitted, fluffed, assessed, and anointed with three different perfumes I do not want to live in.
Lunch is a parade of nobles I barely remember, each offering a compliment like a coin tossed into a fountain and expecting a wish to come true.
“Radiant,” one says. “So poised,” says another.
“A true Chamber,” says a third, and I smile my best museum smile while something in me pulls up a chair and refuses to applaud.
Daddy appears at my elbow with a plate I didn’t ask for and warmth I didn’t earn today. “Starling,” he murmurs, his eyes crinkled with relief, belly in rebellion under his formal vest. “You are… how do the kids say… a showstopper.”
“Only if I trip,” I say, mouth dry.
He sobers, thumb brushing a bruise the dress doesn’t quite bury. “We’ll make this gentle,” he says. “You hear me?”
“Gentle is for lambs,” Mama says, sliding in, her smile sharp enough to peel fruit. “We’re going to make this legendary.”
Legend tastes like sawdust. Kaspian arrives in the afternoon for the dance rehearsal with our very tolerant instructor. He’s pressed and perfect, tie obedient, hair combed into a position soldiers envy, and he will not meet my eyes for more than three seconds at a stretch.
“Lady Star,” he says, offering his hand, voice pitched for company. “Shall we?”
“Let’s,” I say.
We do not step on each other. We do not laugh.
His palm is cool where it rests at my waist. The musician counts time like a metronome with a grudge.
“Left,” he murmurs just before I go right, and I let him lead because that’s what’s scripted.
When we turn, his gaze slides somewhere over my shoulder.
The last time we were alone, he said he didn’t like faking.
Today he’s faking so hard the truth can’t get a word in.
“Are you all right?” I ask, quiet, when we cross at the end of a figure, breath ghosting my cheek.
“Define all right,” he says, with a shadow of a smile that doesn’t rise to his eyes.
I almost laugh. I almost say the thing we’ve both been choking on, that we would be great friends in another life where I didn’t belong to him like an estate belongs to a baron. I almost say it and then the instructor claps briskly and my mouth forgets courage.
After rehearsal, the day splits into meetings: seating arrangements with men who love charts more than people, a tasting for confections I will not taste, a five-minute scolding from the minister about the solemnity of vows which makes me want to steal his hat and throw it in the fish pond.
The staff buzzes. Sneed glides—always where I’m not expecting him, always with a slate, always with that clean emptiness of expression that makes you want to confess even if you’ve never sinned.
Every hour I look for him. I search the edges of rooms, corners of corridors, the shadow line under the chess tree where he lives in my head like a saint carved of war. I hunt for gold eyes at the back of a mirror, for the tilt of shoulders I could spot in a hurricane. He isn’t there.
I don’t mean to ask Sneed. The question jumps out of me in the south hall when he surprises me by existing at the exact place my breath misfires. “Where is he?” I demand. The words sound like I’ve never learned please.
“Which he?” Sneed says, crisp innocent.
“Don’t,” I warn, stepping into his air. “I know about the transfer. Is he… gone?”
Sneed’s gaze flicks—the smallest movement toward the high windows as if horizon is a person strolling by. “Personnel matters are private,” he says, which is a lie with a well-tailored suit. “I am sure Commander Rayek will… find the appropriate place to be useful.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It is the only one I am prepared to give,” he replies, and there it is—a glimmer in his eyes, bright as a pinprick: satisfaction, relief, maybe both.
Approval. I want to smack it out of him.
I want to hug him because he thinks he’s protecting me.
I do neither. He inclines his head the width of a virtue and slides on, leaving the lemon scent of the polished banister to pretend it’s conversation.
That night, I slip. Not out of duty—duty has tall fences and a hired staff—but out of the high windows, into the house’s other bloodstream, the one I mapped as a teenager with mud on my boots and a pocketful of stolen apples.
The observatory at the top of the east tower is empty but for dust motes and the telescope that does not care about weddings.
It smells like old paper and cold glass.
We used to sit cross-legged on the floor here, Rayek and I, and argue about constellations while CynJyn fell asleep on the rug and pretended she wasn’t listening.
I press my palm to the telescope barrel and feel nothing but metal.
The armory is cleaner than it has any right to be at midnight.
The racks gleam. The inventory reader blips once in mild panic that someone has entered outside of normal hours and then recognizes me and decides not to be a hero.
I stand in the spot on the wall where my shoulders remember cold stone and my mouth remembers heat and I tell the room: “Don’t you dare.
” It doesn’t listen. Rooms are loyal to history, not threats.
The cliffs are honest the way air is honest after a lie.
Salt licks my teeth. The dark is giant and mine.
I stand on the outcrop where he likes to watch the river pretend it’s not headed for the sea and I say his name into the wind.
Akura answers with waves folding themselves politely against rock. The stars stare like jurors.
CynJyn tries to crack me like a safe with laughter, with plans, with the dangerous joy that has saved me more times than any protocol.
She sneaks into my room with a bottle the color of bad decisions and a grin so wicked it should count as a weapon.
“Okay,” she announces, toeing off her boots.
“Hear me out. We crash your wedding with a streaker squad. Minimal nudity, maximum horror. I’ve already got Boo Boo and Chuckles on board. Smurfette is negotiating paint.”
“No,” I say into my pillows, and even I can hear how dead my voice is.
“We could just streak the rehearsal dinner,” she tries. “A tasting? A tasteful streaking. Very art-house.”
“Cyn.”
“Okay, then I perform a very long, very moving interpretive dance during the vows. The theme is ‘lineage but make it horny.’”
I have to laugh at that; I do, a weak little hiccup of sound that makes her eyes go wet with triumph. She climbs onto the bed beside me and pokes my cheek. “There she is.”
“She’s not here,” I say, staring at the canopy. “She’s… somewhere else. I don’t know where. I feel like I’m wearing someone else’s life and the seams don’t match my bones.”
CynJyn sobers, rolls onto her back, the gold on her horn catching the lamplight. “Then tear it,” she says. “If it doesn’t fit, tear it. Who cares if the seamstresses cry. We can buy them tissues.”
“I don’t know how,” I whisper.
She laces her fingers with mine, warm and solid. “You’ll remember.”
The days speed up. Dressmakers, florists, nobles, charts.
A cousin I last saw when I was ten appears with a mustache and a story about goats.
A woman from the IHC stands in my dressing room doorway and praises our family’s commitment to unity and I nod in the right places while imagining her tripping over her dignity.
Kaspian is kind and distant, warmth on a dimmer switch; when we do find ourselves alone for a breath—between double doors, in the hush before the hall—he looks at my shoulder or my ear, but never my eyes.
“Big day,” he says.
“Mm,” I agree.
“I hope you… feel seen,” he adds, and I don’t know whether to laugh or set the curtains on fire.
Every night, after the house believes I have stopped being a person, I reactivate the old comm band I hid in the false bottom of my jewelry box.
It’s military grade, battered, a thing Rayek taught me to love and then took away because I kept using it to order pizza from the flight deck.
I press the casing until the hairline seam pops.
The little screen wakes with a tired hum.
The signal range isn’t great—but it’s honest, and that’s more than most things in this house manage.
I stare at the input field until the blinking cursor feels like judgment. I type the first thing that’s true.
I still love you. I always will.
No codes. No names. No coordinates. I send it on a civilian band that bounces off the belt and will probably die of loneliness before it hits anything he’s listening to. My thumb shakes anyway when I press send. The band chimes once, meek and brave. I expect nothing. I leave it on the sill, dark.
The next morning, the band is where I left it, dumb and faithful.
The next night, I send nothing and tuck it back into the box.
On the third day, I forget to breathe during a fitting and the seamstress pats my elbow like I’m a horse about to spook.
On the fourth, Kaspian walks me through the garden with a politeness that feels like a pillow pressed gently over my face.
On the fifth, Mama tells me a story about her grandmother’s veil and says the word legacy so many times it stops meaning anything and starts sounding like a brand of soap.
Three nights before the wedding, I wake in the dark with the feeling that someone has said my name without sound.
The house is quiet. Even the polite ghost in the pipes is asleep. My room smells like linen and a faint whisper of the rosewater they kept pushing at me and I kept declining. The moon is a thin coin caught in the crosshatch of the window lattice. The citrus trees out in the court breathe sugar.
I roll over, tug the sheet, and freeze.
There’s something on my windowsill that shouldn’t be.
I sit up, heartbeat stumbling, eyes trying to make sense of shapes.
It’s small. It drinks the moon. A shard of night, curved and matte, the size of my palm.
My feet hit the floor before I know I’m moving.
The stone is cold under my toes. The window is still latched.
The curtains are where I left them. The air is just air.
I pick it up and nearly drop it. It’s heavier than it looks. Smooth in the way a river makes things smooth after years of insisting. The edges are hard. When I turn it, the tiny cross-hatching of growth rings catches the light—silver tracing black like frost. Vakutan armor plating. A scale. His.
No witness but me and the moon and the lemon ghosts still clinging to the wood.
I press it against my palm and my whole chest goes electric.
The room tilts. The last week rewrites itself in a breath.
Not gone. Not gone-gone. Somewhere. Close enough to lay this down without waking the house.
Close enough to know I’d find it. Close enough to listen to my breath from wherever he is and match it the way the medic taught him.
“Rayek,” I whisper, and the glass doesn’t fog because the night is dry and my mouth has run out of water. “Ah, saints.”
The scale warms in my hand the way metal does when it’s been touched recently, when heat lingers instead of leaving. I press it to my sternum, right over the place my heart refuses to behave, and something in me that’s been holding itself upright out of spite finally leans.
No note. No promise. No explanation.
Enough.
The lemon smell is suddenly bearable. The dark looks less like a stage and more like a place.
I slide back into bed with the scale under my palm, between skin and sheet, my own stupid treasure.
My eyes don’t close fast. When they do, I dream of a shadow by the chess tree, of gold eyes where the cypress meet the sky, of a hand on the stone of my windowsill and a breath paused, listening for mine.
Maybe I’m not alone in this house that keeps trying to make me a statue.