Secrets of the Starcrossed

by Clara O'Connor

  “When I was picking up the boat, a group of sentinels hailed me down,” he explained. “What reason could I give to refuse the job? It would have been suspicious, and the last thing I needed was them taking down the name of the boat and tracking the licence. Like I say, I had a fare.”

  It was my turn to humph. I couldn’t argue with that.

  “Now, please, face forward and no more talking.”

  I lifted my chin and did as requested. This first section of our trip was the most dangerous in a lot of ways. The Limehouse Reach was always busy, this section of the river having the most docks and warehouses. The tall ships swayed all along the shore as dockhands worked through the night unloading them, the warehouses of the hungry city emptying as quickly as they were filled with the imports on which the city survived. Londinium might be a leader in technology, a very wealthy city despite its location at the edge of the Empire, but it was also one of its most isolated. While the city had control of most of the southeast since the Treaty, this was hardly enough to feed the millions huddled behind the safety of the city walls.

  As we swept along the river, I watched the bustle with interest. In truth my father rarely permitted me to come this far east and certainly not without him. The rougher edges of the city towards the outer wall were not something to which he wanted me exposed. The old inner city was deemed sufficient exposure to a world I didn’t really need to become familiar with, while, obviously, the East End proper was pretty much out of bounds. I had friends whose fathers worked in the financial district or technology towers just to the north that I had visited, and I had made frequent visits to the forum at the heart of the old city even before I attended classes there.

  But most of my life was spent in the villas and open leafy levels of the western suburbs and bankside, our summer sojourns out in the country in Richmond as far from the outer walls as I had ever travelled. Not that anyone really considered Richmond all that far outside the walls. There were no arteries in or out of the city on that side. The lands out there were heavily patrolled and were strictly for citizens of Londinium only.

  My attention was snagged back to my current location by the deep creak of timbers in the nearest ship. Deep voices speaking a foreign tongue and a glimpse of brightly coloured robes suggested it was likely traders from mineral-rich central Africa. When I was a child I used to beg my father to take me on the river to see the traders from other parts of the Empire and beyond. They were not permitted ashore so sightings of the Cherokee or Shawnee with their long black hair, Aztecs and Incas from further south in the Americas, wealthy Africans, and white-robed Arabs could only be had on the river.

  The tangled web of rigging and sails on the great boats tethered ten-deep on the docks was thick tonight, leaving only a small narrow channel to enter and exit. I wistfully took in the tall ships as we passed. What places might they have come from? What adventures? How many had been attacked by Caribbean buccaneers in their fast sloops or Northmen in the colder waters of northern Europe? I sighed. As the cossetted daughter of Graham Shelton I was unlikely to ever find out. Adopted daughter, I corrected myself, a differentiation I had been acknowledging more of late.

  As we swung beneath the Isle of Dogs, Devyn hoisted the small sail of the taxi.

  I turned in surprise.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Power might go in the engine before we exit the Greenwich Reach. It happens sometimes. Best to be prepared. We can’t afford to be dead in the water,” he explained.

  I frowned. “But we aren’t even at the outer walls. Power should be steady here.”

  “Not always, princess. There’s an energy line running underneath this section of the river and occasionally the power fluctuates out here. They don’t even bother to set up the monitoring here because the cameras just get fried.”

  At that, the engine sputtered and died. Given the relative peace on the water, I felt I could afford to turn and watch as Devyn deftly raised the sail, his muscles flexing as he pulled a rope here, deftly let one out there.

  For the first time ever I could be certain we were out of range of any listening devices as well as cameras. I braced myself to ask the question that had been burning inside me for weeks.

  “Devyn, are you a spy?”

  He stilled.

  “No.”

  “But you’re not… your family, they’re not citizens, are they?”

  “No.”

  He was a Shadower then, here without papers, passing as a citizen. “You said before that you’re here alone, but I remember you from school. Exactly how long have you been here?”

  Devyn looked at me as if weighing his answer.

  “Ten years.”

  “You’ve been living here alone since you were twelve?” I gasped.

  “Not quite, I was sixteen when I arrived in Londinium.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand. That doesn’t add up.” My maths was average, but it wasn’t that bad. Ten years ago we had just been entering secondary school.

  “I’m a little older than I appear,” he explained wryly. “I am actually twenty-six years old.”

  “Why join a class four years younger than you?”

  “I needed to be in that class,” he replied ambiguously.

  “Why?”

  “For you.”

  I gritted my teeth. Getting anything more than I already knew from Devyn was an exercise in restraint that would test the most patient of souls.

  “Because you thought I might be this girl, the one with magic in her blood?” At this point, I had turned all the way round to face him so he could see how openly crazy he was making me.

  “There was a chance…” He paused, no doubt assessing how much would be just enough to shut me up. “I had to start somewhere. Why not with the little girl who had just been matched to the York prince?”

  “The York prince?” My brows crinkled. “Oh, you mean Marcus.”

  On my twelfth birthday I had been promised to Marcus Courtenay, scion of one of the pre-eminent Houses in the city. His line had sat on the high council for centuries.

  Marcus’s family had been an instrumental part of the Treaty: the Britons had married one of their princesses to Marcus’s great-great-whatever, making him a prince of the House of York.

  “How did you know?” Matches were not exactly public knowledge.

  “The Anglians take an interest.”

  Spies. Even if he was claiming not to be one, the Britons had spies in the city. I barely knew what happened in Rome, or even Dubris on the coast for that matter, but somehow the Britons knew about Marcus’s match.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” He gestured for me to duck as he tacked, and the boom swung to the other side of the boat.

  “Why did my match make you think I might be her?”

  Devyn contemplated me in the dark.

  “You don’t find it unusual that a little adopted nobody was matched to the Courtenay heir?”

  It had been a massive coup for my mother to discover that the girl she had adopted was matched to House Courtenay. At times I felt that from the day they had matched me to Marcus, Camilla had seen me less as a daughter to raise and more as a future first lady of the city to shape and polish.

  I felt as if he’d slapped me across the face. I’d spent my whole life trying to ensure I belonged, that I fit into the Shelton family, to my group of friends, to the city, to my match.

  “I am not a nobody. How dare you.”

  “Really?” he fired back. “Twenty years ago, your father was a moderately successful merchant, then he acquires a daughter and suddenly he has more council business than any other merchant in the city. You don’t find that a tiny bit odd?”

  “Coincidence,” I snapped.

  Devyn smiled his infuriating half smirk and raised his brow. Double whammy.

  “Sure,” he said patronisingly, “Then when you turn twelve, the youngest possible age at which a citizen can become matched, you are betro
thed to the single most eligible boy in the entire city.”

  “So?”

  “I found that interesting.” He lay back against the tiller.

  I felt like bashing him over the head.

  “Interesting enough that you gave up your own life to sit in the back of classrooms watching me live my life,” I threw at him.

  “I didn’t have anything better to do,” he drawled. “So many pieces fit. But it seemed less likely the more years that passed. I haven’t been able to find another lead as strong, otherwise I’d have been long gone.”

  He’d been here for years… since he was little more than a child himself.

  “Do you manage to get out to visit your family often?”

  His mouth twisted. I suddenly had a really bad feeling.

  “Devyn, where does your family live?”

  “Uh, northwest of here.” Both brows dipped as he gave his answer.

  “Northwest,” I repeated. That bad feeling solidified into a stone wall inside me. There was nothing to the northwest. No Shadowers lived in the borderlands that side of the city; it was a wasteland.

  Dark eyes awaited my realisation.

  “You’re not a Shadower… you’re a full-blood Briton,” I said in a strangled voice. “How?”

  “Not entirely, but my father was one. My mother was a citizen and they got married and one night they… Ow!” He acknowledged my direct hit to his shin.

  “How come your mother married a Briton?”

  “She was from another part of the Empire, the other side of the Mediterranean. She fled her country, ended up on a ship that was bound for Eireann, and, fortunately for me, it stopped to do some trading on our western coast.”

  “Don’t you miss her?”

  “I never really knew her. She died when I was very young.” He looked down and checked on the sleeping Marina. “She died of the Mallacht.”

  “The what?” The word sounded like it was in one of the Celtic languages.

  “The illness.”

  “But that was twenty years ago. The illness hasn’t been around that long.”

  “Not here, but in other parts of the Empire they call it the Maledictio.”

  The Curse.

  We spoke the common tongue like most parts of the western world, but as an elite I had learned old Latin.

  “But there’s nothing in the feeds about that.”

  Devyn looked at me, his face impassive. “You know what they want you to know.”

  My mind absorbed this. Was he right? Were the authorities hiding the truth? Had there been instances of it that far back? They controlled everything. His mother had fled for the same reasons Marina now ran; no wonder he had been so quick to help. Despite the danger, he had risked his life to come here. If the authorities caught him…

  “Devyn Agrestis.” My jaw dropped. His name, Agrestis, meant rural, wild. “Is this all a joke to you?”

  “I was sixteen when I chose it.” His lip tugged up at the corner.

  “And Devyn?”

  “My real name.”

  “Right.” My mind was reeling. “If you’re discovered… how could she be worth risking your life?”

  How had he lived for so long in the city, undetected, as a minor?

  He stayed silent.

  I stared at him in frustration until he finally shrugged.

  “It didn’t seem a big decision for me. If there was a chance I could find her, I had to try.”

  “You came here alone. You were only sixteen. How did your family allow it?” What must it have been like for him to leave everyone and everything he knew to live in a place where he was alone and in constant fear of being discovered.

  He shrugged. “Didn’t have much family to speak of. My father and I haven’t spoken in a very long time. What other family I have left was better off without me. I volunteered to do this.”

  “Volunteered…” I whispered the word. He was here illegally, a Briton on the wrong side of a boundary that had been created centuries ago. The two societies shared this island, living separately in clearly marked regions of it. Crossing the border was frowned on. Since the Treaty, fatally so. My heart was beating a wild tattoo in my chest. Why was he admitting this to me now?

  Devyn’s eyes snapped from my face to somewhere behind me.

  “Face forward.”

  A guard boat had begun to glide by us, its sails bigger than ours, catching the wind and surging perilously close to our much smaller vessel.

  A light shone along the length of our boat.

  I raised an arm to shield my eyes even as I gave them my haughtiest expression. I was in a boat with a Briton and a sick child fleeing the authorities. Despite the chilly night air, I was perspiring madly. Evidently satisfied, the larger boat skimmed ahead of us in the direction of a barge coming upriver on the other side.

  I let my muscles unclench, my heart pounding.

  Devyn’s hand captured and squeezed mine briefly. “Good girl, nearly there.”

  I slowly relaxed, the adrenalin leaving my body somewhat shaky.

  “That, princess, is why it was necessary to have you along. Being out here on my own with a young girl would have been suspicious. Ferrying a snooty elite princess downriver, not worth the hassle of stopping.” He smiled smugly.

  I frowned. Now that I was finally getting answers out of him, I was not going to be distracted, not by cruising sentinels and not by faint praise.

  “You volunteered to come here to check me out?” I prompted him to return to his story. “If you were caught… it’s an instant death sentence. Why would they let you come? It doesn’t make any sense. It would be a major political disaster if you were caught here.”

  I turned to look at him but all I could make out was his silhouette in the dark.

  “When I said I volunteered, I didn’t say that anybody else deemed it a good idea,” he replied.

  “Then what changed their minds? Was it really so important to find out more about who was matched to Marcus?” I shook my head. “It makes no sense. The Britons have never cared before who Marcus’s line married… or have they?”

  “In Anglia, they have become more interested as the Plantagenet line has thinned out. Technically, your future husband is the heir to the York crown. But I’m not from there so I don’t care so much about that.” He adjusted the blanket around Marina, tucking her in against the cold on the open water. “I told you I was looking for someone.”

  This conversation was beyond frustrating – like all conversations with Devyn – forcing me to circle back again and again as his answers hid as much as they revealed. I had been educated in a system built on straight lines and this conversation was making me dizzy as I chased after the answers to the questions that had been burning inside me. But if I had to keep circling back endlessly, I would; I had to know. Who could possibly be so important to a sixteen-year-old that he would give up his world and risk his life to find her?

  “And you thought it might be me? Because I was matched to Marcus? So they sent you to check it out?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean, not exactly?”

  “There is no reason to believe…” He hesitated. “That is, everyone believes she died years ago. I thought… there was a solid chance that you might be her. You’re the same age and the colouring is right. Nobody else would even consider it because they’re sure she’s dead. I’ve never felt it to be true.” Another significant pause. “And over the last few years, I have even more reason to believe she’s alive.”

  “Why?”

  No answer. Whatever strange impulse had loosened his usually circumspect tongue seemed to be wearing off.

  No, he couldn’t stop now. I couldn’t bear it. I turned around to face him again. We were past the tall ships, and here in the less populated part of the river, in the dark, we would see any boat approaching long before they were close enough to see that the passenger and driver were unusually deep in conversation.

  “But you don�
��t think I’m her anymore?” I tried another avenue. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be this girl Devyn had risked all to find, but I was pretty sure relief wasn’t going to be my next emotion if he confirmed that I was nothing more to him than a girl he had reported back on as being nothing special.

  Devyn checked the sail, tightening the ropes before answering me.

  “I know you’re at least a Shadower, possibly a latent. But no more than that. I thought maybe the pills were some kind of blocker but it’s been weeks since you stopped taking them. She was from a powerful bloodline and I have reason to believe her magic would have manifested by now. I need to accept that she’s not here. I should have left years ago. She’s still out there. I just have to keep looking.”

  He stared grimly across the dark water. I couldn’t help myself. I reached out and laid a hand on his cheek until he looked back at me.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.” He ran a hand through his hair, slightly long for a citizen but still short, a habit I realised now he had probably learned as a child when his hair must have been long in the style of the Britons. “It was the foolish dream of a child. I wanted to restore my family’s honour, to save the girl. As it is, if I make it out of the city I’ll be lucky if my lord doesn’t take my head for what I’ve done.”

  I stopped to consider the life he’d left behind. I really wanted to know who it was he’d been looking for but I was loath to push my luck – he’d already revealed more in the last ten minutes than I would have believed possible. I realised the discovery that he was Briton should have horrified me more but instead I was intrigued, curious. As we sailed along I toned it down, keeping my questions simple, asking about daily life and the land of his birth. When it came to the vast spaces, trees, and natural life, he couldn’t resist describing the lush hills and valleys of his childhood.

  Mountain ranges and endless skies and eagles, things I could only imagine.

  Freedom, and the beauty of endless landscape rather than confining concrete. Visiting the parkland out at Richmond Hill always made me feel less weighed down. The city was still visible but the open space, the green, the wandering deer all combined to draw dark energy out of me. What must the places Devyn described be like? The deep forests of Anglia, the high mountains of Cymru, the distant beauty of the Lakelands of Mercia?