by Rachel Aaron
Benehime straightened to her full height. She loomed over him, white and terrible with that cold smile on her lips, and the air grew thick with the pressure of her will. It surrounded Eli like tar, pressing in until he could scarcely breathe.
You think you are anything without my love, arrogant boy? she whispered. You’re nothing without me. The only worth you have is what I give you.
Eli rolled his eyes. He’d heard that one before. “You’re wrong,” he said, grinning wide. “I’m worth two hundred and forty-eight thousand gold standards. Now that Den’s dead and Josef’s king, that’s more than anyone else in the world.”
Benehime closed her eyes. I should have known better than to expect sense from you, but to choose a bounty over my favor… Her voice trailed off, and then, without warning, her face softened.
I love you, Eliton, the Lady whispered, opening her eyes. Despite all you’ve said, all the insults, all the selfishness, I love you. Nothing can change that. But since you would choose a bounty over my favor, even in jest, it’s obvious you need to be reminded of the value of my love. All these years living in the light of my good graces have made you forget how easy you have it. I think it’s time for you to relearn the harsh realities of the world.
Before Eli could answer that, Benehime reached out and touched his chest. Her fingers burned through the cloth of his shirt, and Eli didn’t even have time to brace before the pain exploded through him. It flooded his mind, burned over every inch of his skin, ground into his bone, but then, as quickly as it had started, the pain was gone.
Benehime’s hand left his chest, leaving only the feeling of emptiness and the knowledge of what he’d lost. The mark of the Shepherdess, the sign of Benehime’s favor that had been inside him so long he couldn’t remember life without it, was gone. Suddenly, Eli felt painfully weak and small, like he’d deflated. It must have shown, for Benehime began to laugh as she straightened again.
Let’s see how you live up to your words, she said haughtily. But don’t worry, darling, I haven’t taken everything from you. After all, you still have your bounty.
Eli opened his mouth to say she was bloody right about that, but before he could make a sound, he realized he was falling. Above him, Benehime’s face shone down like the moon, her lips curved into a cruel smile.
I hope it’s everything you dreamed of.
Her voice rang in his ears as the white world vanished, slipping away through the cut in reality she’d opened under his back. Suddenly, he was surrounded in a whirl of color—blue sky and green trees and tall white spires topped with gold. That was all he caught before he crashed into something cold, hard, and uneven. Eli rolled on instinct, clutching his chest as the breath was knocked clean out of him. When his lungs were working again, he opened his eyes to see the tip of a sword hovering right in front of his nose.
Eli raised his hands on instinct. He was on his back in some kind of paved yard surrounded by soldiers in white surcoats, all of whom had their swords out. Overhead, a great citadel rose like a mountain, its seven, gold-tipped spires scraping the pale morning sky.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Eli muttered, lowering his hands to rub his aching eyes.
“Arms up!” the soldier barked.
Eli raised his hands again, smiling at the guards. It wasn’t his best smile, but it was all he could manage. Of course, of all the places Benehime could drop him, where else would she choose but the front gate of the Council of Thrones?
“That’s him, all right,” one of the guards said, nodding toward the wall of the guardhouse where Eli’s poster was pasted prominently. “Looks just like his picture.”
If the fact that the most wanted criminal in the Council had literally fallen from the sky bothered them, the guards hid it well. They hauled Eli to his feet without fanfare and marched him into the citadel through a side gate. Once inside, they said something to another guard who was wearing a long white coat, and then took Eli down a long set of narrow stairs as though following long-standing orders.
Despite all the jostling, Eli saw little of the journey. His mind was still reeling from how quickly his situation had changed. It was a strange realization to have while he was surrounded by guards marching down a seemingly never-ending stair into the dark underbelly of the Council of Thrones, but it was slowly dawning on Eli that he was free. The mark was gone. He’d done it. He didn’t know how long it would last, but for now, in this moment, he was free.
His face broke into an idiotic grin, and Eli practically floated as the guards pushed him along a suspended walkway through a huge, dark, cavernous room. He was so lost in his happiness, he didn’t even notice where he was going until the guards sat him down in a worn but surprisingly comfortable chair. And then, to his great astonishment, they left.
Shocked out of his happy daze by his sudden abandonment, Eli looked around, casing his surroundings with the attention to detail Giuseppe Monpress had drilled into him. He was alone in a small, windowless office with strange, curving metal walls held together by rivets. Desks covered in papers took up most of the space. The walls were covered in papers as well, drawings mostly, but one wall, the wall he was facing, was different.
There, pasted in neat rows from the ceiling to just above the desks, hung every bounty poster he’d ever had, starting when he was only worth five hundred and going all the way to the current sum of two hundred and forty-eight thousand. The sight of his own smiling face repeated over and over was so puzzling and unexpected that Eli didn’t realize there was someone else in the room with him until she spoke. But even though he hadn’t seen her, the scratchy, smoke-stained voice told Eli exactly who it was.
“Hello, Eliton.” Sara stepped out from behind him, her pipe dangling between her teeth. “Been a while.”
Eli took a deep breath. “Not long enough.”
His mother smiled, and Eli felt the joy of his freedom shrivel away to nothing.
CHAPTER
5
Miranda leaned back in the padded chair and ground her palms into her eyeballs. Powers, she was tired. Six hours of sleep was not enough for this nonsense. All she wanted to do was lie down and never get up, but she couldn’t rest now, not when there was still so much to be done.
From the moment she’d gotten back to the Tower after leaving Mellinor, Miranda had been trying to figure out what to do about a disappearing star. The problem was overwhelming, mostly because she knew so little about the stars or the Shepherdess who ruled over them.
The Shaper Mountain had told her stars watched over other spirits that were like them, sort of like a Great Spirit but on a much larger scale. She knew that most of them were ancient, though not as ancient as the Shaper Mountain, and that they had a great deal of free will and awareness compared to the smaller spirits. Other than these few basics, though, she knew nothing. She didn’t know where to find the stars, how many existed, or even how to recognize one if she saw it. With so little to go on, Miranda had had no choice but to start at the beginning and proceed methodically.
Before she could worry about what a star’s disappearance meant, though, she had to know if this was an isolated incident. Had something happened to the Deep Current alone, or was this a larger epidemic? And how would she know if it was? She needed more information. Specifically, she needed to know how many stars there were and where to find them. Once she knew that, she could figure out which ones had disappeared (assuming the Deep Current wasn’t an isolated incident), and then she could start looking for patterns.
Identifying and locating the stars had seemed like a simple and reasonable starting point. Surely, if stars were so important, they would be well-known. All Miranda had to do was ask her spirits. Her rings had been with her every step of the way; they understood the need. But while her spirits were perfectly willing to break the Shepherdess’s edict of silence (yet another mystery she intended to unravel), what they’d had to say hadn’t actually been very helpful. In hindsight, Miranda shouldn’t have been surprised.
Spirit politics were about as transparent as baked mud.
“I don’t see why you’re so upset about it,” Kirik crackled from his place in the lamp at her elbow. “It’s not like we need to know who our stars are. They’re supposed to watch over us.”
“Well, excuse me for expecting a large and intelligent spirit to know who was in charge,” Miranda grumbled, glaring at the flame. “You’d think you would at least know whom to complain to.”
“That’s what Great Spirits are for,” Kirik flickered. “I don’t even think I have a star, actually. Any fire that big would burn the continent to ash. I’m probably under the watch of one of the great volcanoes down south.”
Miranda’s glare grew belligerent, and the fire puffed up. “What? It’s not like it’s ever been an issue before now. And I’d know my star when I saw it. You can’t miss the mark, after all.”
“You missed it on Eli,” Miranda huffed.
“That was different,” Kirik said, his crackle defensive. “You humans keep your spirits closed up all the time.”
Fortunately, not all her spirits were so willfully ignorant. Her stone spirit Durn, for example, had named his star right off. Too bad it was one of the few Miranda already knew: Durain, the Shaper Mountain.
But while the stars were universally powerful, they seemed to have wildly different policies on how to manage the spirits under their care. Some were very involved, like the Shaper Mountain, or another Durn had named, Gredit, the Lord of the Bears. Others seemed downright indifferent, like the Great Ghosthound. From what Gin had told her, the Great Ghosthound cared for nothing but the hunt, and would even kill other ghosthounds who got in his way. Gin seemed to take this as a matter of course.
“He’s a ghosthound,” he said at Miranda’s look of horror. “What else can you expect?”
“Nonsense,” she said. “You wouldn’t act that way.”
“I’m not like other ghosthounds,” Gin said, tucking his nose under his tail. “That’s why I’m with you.” And that was all he’d say about the matter.
So it had gone all morning. Miranda had grilled her spirits one by one, and while she’d learned things about them that she’d never thought to wonder over before, like how her mist spirit Allinu was actually a member of the Wind Courts and thus had no star at all, she got precious few of the answers she was actually after. Around lunch, she’d finally given up on her own spirits and gone for the one source of information she had left—the Spirit Court’s Restricted Archives. That’s where she was now, three fruitless hours later.
The Restrictive Archives dealt exclusively with the Court’s interactions with stars. Of course, they were never called stars, either by the spirits or the Spiritualists who’d written the records, but the truth was plain if you knew what to look for. She’d skimmed the archives the morning before Master Banage had ordered the Court to Osera; now she dug in deep, plucking out the details the dry reports did their best to dance around—names, places, and, most important, the star’s past relationships with the Court. It was slow work, but thanks to her stint working for the Council before she’d chased Eli up north to Izo’s, Miranda had gotten surprisingly good at picking the important bits out of bureaucratic writing.
Despite this advantage, however, she had precious little to show for her hours. Her list of stars, so optimistically penned on a piece of paper as long as her arm, had a grand total of ten names on it, four of which she’d known before she started her research: the Shaper Mountain, Eli, the Immortal Empress, and the Deep Current that Mellinor had replaced. From her own spirits she’d added Gredit, the Lord of the Bears, her moss spirit Allinora’s star, a huge cave lichen that supposedly lived in the Empress’s lands, and the Great Ghosthound, whose actual name Gin hadn’t mentioned, probably because he didn’t know it. And there was one more, a surprise confession from Skarest, her lightning bolt, who claimed none other than the Lord of Storms himself as his star.
“You’re telling me the Lord of Storms is actually a storm?” Miranda said, aghast. “How? I mean, he’s human. I’ve seen him.”
“So have I,” Skarest crackled from his ring. “That’s how I know he’s my star, not that he’s ever done anything for me,” the lightning bolt finished sulkily.
“How does a storm, and a star no less, run a human organization like the League?” Miranda wondered out loud, tapping her fingers on the table.
“I don’t know,” Skaraest said. “He’s different from the other stars, though.”
Miranda frowned. “How so?”
The lightning dimmed a moment, and then he spoke in a humming whisper that ran up Miranda’s arm, making her hair stand on end. “The Lady’s mark is different on him than on the Shaper Mountain. The Mountain’s mark is like a stamp pressed onto the surface of the older spirit. But the Lord of Storms bears the Lady’s mark on every part of his essence. Like it’s woven in.”
“What do you mean woven in?” Miranda whispered back.
“I can’t explain it any better,” the lightning crackled in frustration. “Even if you could see it, I don’t think you’d understand. I don’t understand it myself. One thing is certain, though. Whatever the Lord of Storms was before the Shepherdess touched him, he’s hers now. When the Lady made him, she gave him a purpose, and it wasn’t to take care of lightning. Does that makes sense?”
“It will if I think on it a moment,” Miranda said, working this new information through her head. “The Lord of Storms is the demon hunter, master of the League. If the Shepherdess made him for a purpose, it must have been that. Of course”—her voice turned bitter—“he certainly doesn’t seem to give much effort to demon hunting, judging by what we saw at Izo’s and how he’s let Nico run around loose. If he’s not doing his bit as your star, either, I don’t know what he does with his time.”
“I don’t want to know,” Skarest said with a shiver. “He’s very dangerous, mistress. Wherever this investigation leads, please don’t cross him. I won’t be able to act if you do.”
“I have no plans to,” Miranda assured him.
But that had been three hours ago, when she’d known eight stars off the top of her head without so much as opening a report. Since then, she’d managed only two more: Ell, the mother river far to the south, and Frejesll, the great coral reef off the pirate islands. The slow pace made her want to kick things. She’d promised Mellinor she’d find out what was going on with his disappearing star. If she was going to keep that oath, she needed to get everything rolling before she lost her powers as Rector and access to the Court’s aid. At this rate, she’d still be looking up names when the Conclave convened tomorrow.
Miranda glanced again at her pathetically short list. Of the ten names she had, three—the Empress, the Deep Current, and Eli—were certainly gone. Three out of an unknown number wasn’t much to go on, but her spirits had all insisted that they didn’t feel that their stars were gone.
Of course, none of them had ever been without their stars, but Durn had been adamant that they would know if something had happened. That meant the Shaper Mountain, Kirik’s unknown star, the Lord of Storms, Allinora’s lichen, and Gin’s ghosthound were all still around, at least for now. Discounting the stars she knew were gone, that left two on her small list still unaccounted for: the mother river and the coral reef.
The river had been easy enough to check. Miranda had simply sent Spiritualist Brennagan to ask Rellenor. The Spiritualist had returned an hour later with an extremely long report. It seemed that the river, despite being sorely put upon by Mellinor’s salty presence and the constant strain of the boats and the narrow channeling of the docks and dire concerns about the amount of trash in her waters, was otherwise fine. Certainly not a spirit who’d lost its star. That left the coral reef far down south.
Going down to check it herself was out of the question, and this far from the coast there was no one in the Court with a coral spirit for a servant. In the end, she’d sent her wind, Eril. According to the archives, the reef was over five
hundred miles from end to end, spanning the entire southwestern corner of the continent. If something had happened to it, her wind would be able to tell even from the air. She’d sent him as soon as she’d realized the reef was her last lead, but even Eril couldn’t fly down to the end of the continent and back in an hour. So, sick of records and with no way to check on a new star even if she did find another, Miranda decided it was time for a break.
One of the perks of being Rector was that she never had to fetch anything for herself. Miranda closed the record she’d been reading and called the apprentice who’d been assigned to her for today. The girl entered meekly, all wide eyes as usual. Miranda smiled her best “I don’t bite” smile and asked for something to drink.
The girl bowed and left, returning not five minutes later with an enormous tray loaded with sweet breads, cookies, biscuits, and a carafe of steaming hot tea. For a moment, Miranda wanted to ask the girl just how much she thought a Rector ate, but one look at the girl’s pale face decided her against needless antagonism. Thanking the girl profusely, Miranda poured herself a cup and tucked in.
Thirty minutes later she was feeling pleasantly stuffed and decidedly more optimistic. She was sipping her third cup of tea and working up the willpower to dive back into the archives when the window on the wall began to rattle. Miranda sprang from her chair, tea forgotten. Running to the other side of the room, she flung the window open. Eril blew in as soon as the glass was out of his way, scattering her papers in the process.
“That was fast,” Miranda said, bending down to snatch her list off the floor.
“Of course,” Eril said smugly. “It’s me, remember?”
Miranda smiled, and then grew serious. “What did you find? How is the reef?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Eril sighed, spinning into her hands. “It wouldn’t talk to me. I told you it wouldn’t. Even if I could get through the water, why should a reef talk to a wind?”
