Chapter 25 Dying Star
Dying Star
Later that night, Aurora woke to a shuffling sound beyond her balcony.
She tried to ignore it and fall back to sleep, but it continued, and her curiosity got the best of her.
The fire had died down to a few stray flames, and Aurora pulled on her robe and tucked her feet into her slippers before venturing outside.
She stood on the balcony and wrapped her arms around her waist, watching as her breath drifted off into the cold night.
A crescent moon hung in the sky, and distant stars peppered the darkness as if someone had stood at the top of the world and tossed a handful of diamonds up in the air, never to come back down.
The sound that had woken her continued, and Aurora walked to the railing and looked down.
It reminded her of her very first night at the castle, when she had asked the Starmaker to prove that there was magic in her blood.
That night seemed so long ago, as if she had lived many different lifetimes since then. Maybe, in a sense, she had.
Aurora scanned the gardens until she saw the Starmaker pushing a wheelbarrow toward his greenhouse, leaving a trail in the snow behind him.
She thought about calling out to him, but he was already far past her room, a comfortable enough distance that he could pretend he didn’t hear her even if he did.
Aurora laughed at the thought.
She turned back inside and shut the door softly behind her. She climbed into bed and closed her eyes, but she was wide awake and knew that sleep would not find her again.
I might love you.
Aurora still couldn’t believe she had said the words aloud, but the thought that continued to swirl in her mind hours later was how she wished the Starmaker had heard her, how she didn’t know if she would ever summon the courage to say such a thing again.
She didn’t even care how he would respond; she simply wanted him to know.
Aurora turned on her back and looked up at the ceiling, wondering what the Starmaker was doing in his greenhouse, what sorts of plants he was tending. She had never actually been there, though it was where the Starmaker spent many of his free hours.
After several more minutes of lying there, Aurora threw off the covers, wrapped herself in her robe once more, and shoved her feet into her boots. She went to her wardrobe for her cloak, then found herself moving quietly down the hall, descending the stairs, and heading out into the early morning.
It wasn’t necessarily her intention to follow the Starmaker, but that was precisely what she did, walking beside the trail he had left in the snow, many paw prints dotting the ground beside his footprints.
Tilly sat on a bench in the gardens, holding her looking glass out in front of her.
Aurora stopped and watched her for several moments, her heart aching as the angel tilted her head to the left, then the right, then back again.
Aurora continued walking, and the greenhouse came into view in the distance, a warm light glowing from within.
The outside was coated in frost that sparkled in the moonlight, and she slowed her steps, worrying that she was about to barge into the Starmaker’s sacred place.
Interrupting him had never bothered her before, but things were different now.
She didn’t know exactly what had changed, but Aurora found that she was trying not to annoy him, which was hardly realistic.
When she reached the door, she opened it without hesitation.
The Starmaker’s back was to her, and he didn’t look up or turn when she entered. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked, his tone dripping with sarcasm, and Aurora smiled to herself. Something had changed, but not everything.
“You disturbed me, so I felt it was only fair to return the favor.”
He sighed, stopped what he was doing, and made a show of slowly turning around. He cocked his head to the side and brushed the dirt off his hands. “If I did disturb you, it was unintentional. This,” he said, motioning to Aurora, “seems rather deliberate, does it not?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, walking farther into the greenhouse.
The door closed softly behind her, and she looked up, the glass hazy from the frost. The greenhouse smelled sweet and earthy, filled with every color and species of rose Aurora could imagine, and the sight of them moved her deeply.
She saw years of work in the tiny space, hours of tending seeds and pruning stems and ensuring that each plant received enough water, and it had paid off, for the blooms were vibrant, each one larger than her fist. There was hardly enough room for both Aurora and the Starmaker to stand, and she moved carefully, shuffling around the roses so as not to harm them.
“Nor I,” the Starmaker said, turning back to his work, and Aurora watched as his hair fell over his shoulders. She didn’t say anything, so overcome by the beauty of the roses and the quiet of the night and the small amount of space that separated them.
“Aurora, tell me what you’re doing here or leave me in peace,” the Starmaker said, but there was a pain in his voice that hadn’t been there before, as if he was mourning his flowers. The thought took her breath away, a swift, hard punch to her center, and a small gasp escaped her lips.
As if he was mourning his flowers.
Aurora tried to reach back into her memory, to find the specific moment she had learned that a Starmaker began to age once their successor was found, living out the rest of their life as a mortal.
But as hard as she tried, she couldn’t locate it, and her stomach dropped when she realized it must have been an assumption.
It was a plausible one, of course, but as she looked at the Starmaker now and thought of how eager he had been to give Tilly her gift, Aurora knew her assumption was incorrect. She just didn’t know how incorrect.
“You are doing it again,” the Starmaker said, not bothering to look at her.
“Doing what?” she asked, her voice coming out hoarse.
“Mourning things that have yet to happen.”
His back was still turned to her, but Aurora kept her eyes on him, watching his every movement as if something in the way he tended to his roses might give her the answers she sought.
“How long did you get with your mentor before he died?” She said the words so quietly, and yet they seemed to take up all the space in the greenhouse, hanging in the air like early morning fog.
The Starmaker’s hands went still in the soil. “Long enough,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means exactly what I said. I will not pretend to know what the Sun has in store for me.”
“You are not making things better for me by lying,” Aurora said, her voice rising. She didn’t want to fight, but she felt as if the whole world was shaking beneath her, and she needed something steady to hold on to.
“I am not lying.”
“You are being intentionally vague, which ought to be the same thing.”
“Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps I don’t enjoy discussing the end of my life?
” The Starmaker exhaled, long and slow. The faint moonlight reflected off his hair and skin, casting him in a soft blue glow that made him appear as if he consisted entirely of starlight.
Looking at him was like watching a dying star, painful and beautiful and impossible to turn away from.
“But you said you were ready.” Aurora’s voice was small, and she hated how despondent she sounded.
The Starmaker did not reply and instead went back to his flowers.
But Aurora didn’t need a response to know his time was coming, and she tried to calm the dread building inside her, the overwhelming sadness.
She took a deep breath and told herself that she needed to learn more before panicking, and if the Starmaker would not be honest with her about his fate, then she would find the information elsewhere.
But for now, in these earliest hours of the morning, she would not fight with him.
Aurora walked slowly to where he stood and gently placed both hands on his back. His muscles tensed beneath her touch, his spine straightening, a low breath escaping his lungs. “If you will not talk to me, then perhaps you will show me.”
The Starmaker turned his head, his eyes finding hers over his shoulder. “What is it you’re asking for?”
“I want to learn,” she said softly. She moved her hands away from his back, trailing her fingers over his shoulder and down his arm, meeting his hands in the dirt. “I do not think I can bear to lose your flowers, too. Show me how to care for them in your absence.”
The Starmaker’s expression was entirely unreadable. Half of his face was in shadow, and his slanted cheekbones and the sharp edge of his jaw were somehow more pronounced in the darkness. “They can be rather finicky,” he said.
“A trait they picked up from you, no doubt.”
The Starmaker turned away so Aurora could not see his face. “I am meticulous. It is not the same thing,” he said, the words barely audible, as if he had spoken them for himself alone.
“I want to learn,” she said again.
The Starmaker paused, a delicate silence stretching out between them. Then, “I want to teach you.”
He kept his back to her, and Aurora reached out and touched his chin, slowly turning his face toward her. “Why will you not look at me?”
When the Starmaker finally met her eyes, Aurora wished she had let him be. He looked so pained. So tortured. “Because every time I do, it makes me want to live so badly I can hardly breathe.”
Aurora was overwhelmed by the words, by the bitterness that clung to them, by the way he said them with such restraint it was as if a single syllable might make the entire mountain crumble. “Then close your eyes.”
“Aurora—”
“Close your eyes,” she said again, and this time, he did.
Aurora’s mind refused to quiet, and she could easily name at least ten reasons why this was a spectacularly bad idea, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.
Not then. Not with the light of the moon on his face and the sound of his confession lingering in the space between them.
When Aurora kissed him, it was like feeling the warmth of the Sun for the very first time, and all she wanted was more of it. But the Starmaker remained stiff, unmoving, and Aurora pulled back, afraid that she had pushed him too far.
Then all at once, he came to life.
“Get back here,” he said, taking her face in both hands, pulling her into him as if she were the air and he hadn’t taken a breath in years.
She gasped when his tongue stroked hers, and he wove his hands through her hair and gently tugged, tipping her chin up and revealing her neck.
He kissed the corner of her mouth, her jaw, her collarbone, burying his face in her skin, inhaling her as if she were life itself instead of the end of it.
Aurora awakened with want, and she felt as if she would never be whole again, as if she would never know peace until every part of her had been touched by him and every part of him had been touched by her.
It couldn’t be healthy, and Aurora remembered when he had told her he was sorry that she had only ever experienced love that was good for her.
She knew now what he meant. It wasn’t necessarily that it was bad. The problem was that she needed him, insatiable and endless, and the more she got, the more she wanted. She would never feel satisfied again.
The Starmaker found Aurora’s mouth once more, his kiss warm and lips soft and tongue teasing, and she sighed into him when his hand moved up her rib cage and over the swell of her breast.
Then he stopped, took a sudden step back. Aurora couldn’t keep up, her head still stuck in their kiss, in the way he had touched her.
“We can’t,” he said, his breathing heavy, gripping the edge of the table behind him as if he needed to physically hold himself back. “It isn’t fair to you.”
“I am more than capable of determining what is fair,” Aurora said, closing the space between them once more, bringing her mouth to his ear. “I want this,” she whispered, and his whole body shuddered when her lips brushed his skin.
“I want this, too,” the Starmaker said, as if he was in pain, his voice strained and low.
“I want this, too,” he said again, taking hold of her waist and pulling her closer, and then he kissed her with an urgency that matched her own.
Aurora’s body pulsed with desire, a longing she had never known before, and she arched into the Starmaker, wanting to get closer.
She untucked his shirt and ran her hands over his stomach, his muscles tightening beneath her touch, his skin hot as fire.
The Starmaker groaned and guided her toward the table, pressing into her, and she could feel how much he wanted her, how desperate he was to make her his own.
Aurora was amazed by the need aching in her belly, the warmth blooming beneath her nightgown, and instead of fearing her hunger, she felt emboldened by it.
Aurora wrapped her arms around his neck and curved into him, and the Starmaker’s breathing quickened when her hips rolled against his. He reached for the tie on her cloak as Aurora tipped her head back, and he kissed along her neck, greedy at first, and then slower,
slower,
slower,
until finally, he stopped altogether.
He rested his head on her shoulder and took several deep breaths, and Aurora felt a hint of sweat on his neck when she pulled her hands away.
“I’m sorry,” he said, raising his head to look at her. “You caught me in a moment of weakness.”
Aurora wanted to tell him that she was weak for him all the time, but she knew by the way he tensed his jaw and narrowed his eyes that he had finally found the resolve he’d been looking for.
“I want you to feel good about your choices,” she said softly, stepping away from him.
“Good is not the word I’d use,” the Starmaker said with lingering frustration. “Conflicted is more accurate, but I appreciate the sentiment.” He sighed, long and heavy. “If you are still interested, I would like to show you how to tend to the roses.”
Aurora’s chest ached, and she blinked against the sting in her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “I would like that very much.”