Of Fire and Stars

by Audrey Coulthurst

  “Well, we’ll have to break in,” I said.

  “Subtlety has always been your strength.” Nils chuckled.

  I shrugged and started off toward the building, but Nils grabbed my arm. “What if there are people in there?”

  “We’ll tell them we’re looking for a place to get married and are charmed by the old-fashioned majesty of this fine building.”

  “You’re deranged.”

  “Let’s try the back,” I said.

  We stomped over the spindly weeds through what must have once been the temple garden and made our way along the side of the structure. The high windows were boarded up with planks streaked with bird chalk, abandoned nests wedged between them. Across the street the clang of a blacksmith’s hammer rang out, the only sound breaking the silence of the early afternoon.

  Around the back we found a second entrance, also boarded up. A white circle the size of my palm marked the topmost board near the top of the frame. I tugged the handle, not entirely certain that the whole thing wouldn’t fall apart when I yanked on it, but the door swung open on silent hinges. The boarded-up exterior was a ruse.

  The Recusants had left much of the interior intact—restored it even. While the apses looked as though they had never been painted with aspects of the gods, the floor had a brightly painted star, each point corresponding to one of the gods’ colors. But they were in the wrong order. I frowned, perplexed.

  “There’s nowhere to hide in here,” Nils said, surveying the heart of the Sanctuary.

  “Sure there is,” I said, and pointed to the cross-work of beams on the ceiling. The Sanctuary was designed in an old style, with notched beams made for climbing that would allow the clerics to open the high windows during summer. The windows, of course, were gone, but the beams remained.

  Nils looked a little sick. “You’re suggesting that we hang from the rafters like a couple of bats?”

  “If it gets the job done,” I said.

  “You first,” he said.

  “Fine by me,” I answered, and pointed to the closest beam. He boosted me up and I climbed into the deepest chapel—the one for the wind god—and concealed myself in the wide well of the window between the boards that had been haphazardly nailed to both the inside and outside of the frame.

  “Can you see me?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” Nils said.

  Dust motes danced through the light slanting in through the slats of the boards across the window. Nils looked like a mirage, like some artist’s idea of the perfect man.

  “The light suits you,” I said.

  Instead of responding, he stepped a few paces away, toward the front door. I was inching forward to crawl back out when an unfamiliar voice asked, “Can I help you?”

  I froze.

  “Hello,” Nils said, and cleared his throat.

  I slid backward as quietly as I could, tucking myself into my hiding space.

  “Are you new?” the voice asked. “The service doesn’t begin for another half a sunlength.”

  “Service?” Nils asked.

  “You must be lost.” The voice sounded disappointed, and female.

  “Well, I could be convinced to stay,” Nils said. I could almost hear the wink and smile accompanying the phrase. The owner of the voice must be pretty. Over Nils’s shoulder I could see only the barest hint of a head crowned with dark curls.

  “It’s risky,” she said. “Not everyone likes the kind of service we do here.”

  “Well, I’m nothing if not a man of service. Tell me more,” Nils said.

  The girl giggled and I rolled my eyes. How did he get away with it? But I knew. It was that chiseled jawline, those warm brown eyes, and the way he looked at people like they mattered regardless of their station. And even though by now he had to know that he always got what he wanted when it came to women, there was always still a hesitation, a question, in the way he stepped close—always asking for permission before he touched. She must have seen it too.

  “You can stand in back with me,” she said. “And if you decide not to stay, slip out the door. Not everyone wants to join the cause.”

  “Who could resist an invitation from a girl with your eyes?” Nils said. “Show me the way.”

  She laughed, and they walked off toward the front door of the temple, out of earshot. I breathed a sigh of relief. I was committed to my hiding place now, though. Eventually other people trickled in, settling on blankets on the floor until the Sanctuary filled with a low hum of conversation. To anyone who barged in, it would have looked like an oddly timed service for the Six. They could have passed it off as a prayer group, the very thing they supposedly stood against.

  The conversations in the room died down to a hush as a man with a gray beard came to the front of the temple and stepped up onto the dais. He wore the simple clothes of a craftsman—perhaps a cobbler. He opened a leather satchel and unwrapped a silver bowl that he set on the table.

  “Anyone who wishes to be tested may come forward,” Graybeard said.

  Three young men stood and came hesitantly up to the dais. Each one held a hand over Graybeard’s silver bowl, and each time Graybeard shook his head. Then, as they took their seats, he put his own hand over the bowl, which lit up with a soft, silvery light.

  “May the Six protect us and our Affinities,” he said.

  That he asked the Six for protection startled me. I thought the Recusants believed only in the power of magic, not the Six, but that didn’t seem to be the case.

  Graybeard led them through something that almost took the form of a praise day service, the difference being that instead of merely acknowledging each of the Six Gods, he also acknowledged the Affinities tied to them. By the end of the service, I was truly puzzled. There hadn’t been any secret information, or plans to destroy the royal family, or even any mention of the alliance. At the end, everyone trickled out of the Sanctuary except for four people who clustered up near the dais until all the others had departed. I hoped Nils had found somewhere to lurk nearby.

  “Yashti is lost to us,” Graybeard said. “They’re questioning her today. No doubt her treason will be discovered and she’ll be punished. We’ll soon have to relocate.”

  Thank the Six I’d found them before that happened. I held my breath and shifted my weight, trying to ease the cramps from crouching for so long.

  “It was only a matter of time,” a thin woman with sharp, shrewlike features said. “They were always extremists, and she hasn’t been right since Alen died. It’s no surprise she’d run off on her own, delusional enough to think she could single-handedly assassinate a member of the royal family. Of course the spears got her.”

  I leaned closer to catch the softer voice of the next person who spoke.

  “She and Alen would both still be here if they hadn’t taken the shadow man’s money,” said a younger man with hunched shoulders. Though he was the youngest of their group, he had a weariness about him that suggested he’d lived through more than most his age.

  “Yashti made her choice, and we cannot save her now,” Graybeard said. “If we spend time hunting anyone, it should be the source of that other eruption of magic. All I’ve been able to determine is that the signature was like Alen’s—but he had already been dead for two days. There’s someone out there with a fire Affinity. Someone exceptionally strong.”

  It sounded as though they were talking about whoever was responsible for my father’s would-be assassin going up in flames. If they didn’t know who had done it, they couldn’t be the ones responsible—so who could?

  “If we find that person, they may kill us,” the shrew replied. “We don’t know whose side they’re on, and there aren’t enough of us to take on someone that powerful.”

  “We should work on the magic itself,” the young man said. “Just because we’ve been labeled Recusants doesn’t mean we should lose track of our original purpose. We don’t have time to hunt down rogue members of the Circle or waste time trying to find a mage who surely
would have already found us if he wanted to. If we work together, there’s still a chance we can create some kind of siphon to reduce the ambient magic here and make it safer to use and develop our powers. That burst we felt released quite a bit, but it’s building up again. If we could set up a loop that would keep going in perpetuity without necessitating our presence, we could—”

  “Is no use.” The last member of their group finally spoke, a small woman with dark gray-streaked hair whose features almost reminded me of Dennaleia’s. Her voice carried a thick accent, the consonants sharp. Zumordan. “Even after burst, is like playing with fire with hands soaked in kerosene. Magic here is so thick you can cut.”

  The Recusants were working with Zumordans—that much, at least, was true. But what did it mean? I kneaded worriedly at my foot to ease the pins and needles.

  “We shouldn’t try to do this without Alen,” said the shrew. “We should focus on continuing to use our smaller spells as we always have.”

  “I agree. We don’t have Alen anymore. We’re the only ones left,” Graybeard said.

  “It won’t be long before they come for us too,” the youngest man said. “We need to try to set up something that will help mitigate the danger even if they do.”

  “Building a siphon is futile,” Graybeard said. “And those without any sensitivity to magic won’t notice the difference either way. To do that we need people stronger than us. People with more knowledge.”

  “But with those in Zumorda . . .” The youngest man’s voice grew even softer.

  I pressed my ear to a crack between the boards to try to make out his words. It immediately gave way and crashed to the temple floor. Panic raced through me. All four of the mages turned to me at the same time, shock registering on their faces. Then anger.

  “Stop her!” Graybeard shouted.

  I kicked the boards on the outside of the window and they gave way with a crack, tumbling to the ground. It was a long drop.

  I jumped anyway.

  My ankles smarted with the impact even as I tried to roll to catch my fall—right through a patch of weeds and rocky ground that left me stained with smears of golden dandelion and bruised from the sharp pebbles. I leaped to my feet and stopped only long enough for a whip-poor-will call, a signal that Nils and I had sometimes used in the past. Then I ran.

  The four Recusants came boiling out of the temple behind me. I wished I could have somehow communicated to them that I didn’t necessarily have a problem with what they were doing. I didn’t care if they had access to the High Adytum or not, or fiddled with magic or not. I only wanted to know that my family would be safe, but first, I had to make sure I was.

  A whistle pierced the air and I veered toward it, intercepting Nils at the next cross street. We raced through alleys until my lungs burned and my feet smarted from pounding against the stones. We reentered the castle, breathless.

  “They probably followed us, you know,” Nils said. “I don’t know how far back we lost them. It might not have been far enough.”

  I nodded. “Without doubt.”

  We took a side entrance up to my rooms.

  “Where’d you get off to, anyway?” I asked, still trying to catch my breath.

  “Jilli was quite accommodating of my need to stay close to the Sanctuary after the service ended.”

  “Of course she was.”

  He grinned but said no more.

  I filled him in on what I’d learned in the temple before it all went wrong.

  “So they’re working with Zumordans and using magic . . . but they still believe in the Six?” he asked.

  A chime sounded in the hall, and Nils cursed.

  “My shift is in less than a sunlength,” he said. “I have to go.”

  I nodded. “We’ll come up with another plan to get out soon. There’s so much more we need to look into.”

  We hugged, and as he left, a page arrived at my door.

  “Message from Princess Dennaleia, Your Highness.” The page bowed. “She invites you to stop by her chambers after the evening meal. Would you like to send a response?”

  Now that I knew the archer had been acting alone rather than with the Recusants, and had been paid by a third party, I had a side to the story she probably wouldn’t have heard. Though our lessons would start up again the next afternoon, it couldn’t hurt to see her before then.

  “Yes, please. Tell her I’ll be there. Thanks,” I said.

  The page ducked out.

  But in addition to wanting to compare notes on the Recusants, I found myself glad she hadn’t forgotten me in the three days since I’d seen her last.

  SEVENTEEN

  Dennaleia

  WHEN I RECEIVED AMARANTHINE’S REPLY AFTER dinner, several things struck me at once: my furniture was arranged all wrong, my hair was styled much too formally, and I had no idea how I was going to entertain her. Anxiety overcame me at the thought of her in my rooms. This was my first chance to make a more personal connection with her, and she was my only hope to stop the Directorate before my secret could be discovered. Moreover, I wanted to impress her—to show her that there was more to me than my clumsy attempts to improve at riding.

  I sat down at my vanity and began pulling pins from my hair. Calling Auna to do a casual twist seemed silly, and I didn’t want her to see how agitated I was over a visit from Amaranthine. With each pin deposited on the table, looping curls fell around my face, sticking out in all directions. I groaned in dismay. It still smelled lovely from the perfumes Auna had used in it that afternoon, but the visual impact was rather like angry mountain squirrels had been nesting in it for weeks. Gritting my teeth, I fought it back up, a few messy curls escaping. It would have to do.

  I ordered in some tea, mostly so I’d have something in my hands to fuss with in the event of awkward silences, and set to work tugging furniture into an arrangement more appropriate for entertaining. It felt wrong to ask anyone to do it for me, since it wouldn’t be an important visit in the eyes of anyone else. A casual dress completed my preparations. Looking in the mirror, I worried that I looked more peasant than princess, but as I contemplated another change in wardrobe, a knock sounded from my receiving room.

  “Princess Amaranthine, Your Highness.” The liegeman outside my door announced her as she strode in. While it had been many sunlengths since she might have been on horseback, she still wore breeches, though they were far too clean to have spent any time in the barn today.

  “Good evening, Your Highness,” she said with a tinge of her usual sarcasm.

  “Good evening, Princess Amaranthine,” I replied in an equally mocking tone.

  “Ugh! I wish you would stop calling me that,” she said.

  “Well then, don’t call me Your Highness or Princess,” I retorted. “I’ve heard nothing else from anyone all day long and I’m sick to death of it.”

  “Fair enough,” she replied, this time with a genuine smile. Her gray eyes burned right through me. Without the focus of my riding lesson, there was no structure for our interaction. I didn’t know what to say. I pressed a finger into my palm to quiet the tingling there.

  “Would you like some tea?” I poured a cup before waiting for an answer, eager to give my hands something to do.

  “Thank you.” She took the cup I poured. “It’s nice that the nights are starting to get cooler. We’re almost to the time when you start to value a cup of tea. Or better yet, hot chocolate.”

  “Autumn was always one of my favorite seasons at home, too. It’s different there, though. The changes were more dramatic. Flowers in spring, the best food in the summer. Leaves changing color in the fall, and snow in the winter.” I shifted nervously. Why was I babbling on about the weather when there were so many more important things at hand?

  “Snow?” Amaranthine asked. She strode over to a chair and sat down, crossing her legs at the knee. Her teacup sat cradled in her hands, tiny ripples catching the light as she blew on the hot liquid.

  “Oh yes. More snow tha
n you can imagine if you haven’t been to the mountains,” I said, remembering the great banks of white built up against the castle walls in winter. It wouldn’t be long before the first snow came to my home, the storm riding in with that strange metallic smell it always had. This was the first year I wouldn’t be there to run outside to let the flakes melt on my tongue for good luck.

  “So what did you do all those years trapped inside for the winter?”

  I thought back to my time at home, searching my memories for something meaningful to tell her. “I spent most of my days in lessons of some sort. Far too many manners and meals were involved. And a lot of books, though I didn’t mind those.” Amaranthine didn’t need to know about all the cold winter nights I had spent figuring out what I could do with fire.

  “Not to be offensive, but I think I would’ve found all that quite dull.”

  “Sometimes it was. But my marriage decree was signed when I was six, so my whole life went into preparing to become queen of Mynaria. Except the overlooked detail of learning to ride a horse.”

  “Maybe it was fate’s way of bringing us together.” Her mouth turned up on one side.

  “I doubt that,” I said. “You certainly weren’t part of my parents’ plan for me to be the perfect princess.” But she should have been. No one else in Mynaria had seen what I was capable of and given me the opportunity to help the crown.

  “Well, fate and your parents might have completely different ideas about what your life is going to be like. So keep that in mind, too.”

  “Fate and my parents both seem to have things pretty well plotted out for me,” I said. “It’s not as though I can run off and change my mind about what I want to do.” And honestly, it had never occurred to me. The certainty of a plan had always brought me comfort. But now, having traveled across two kingdoms to get to Mynaria, the world seemed a much larger place, and I wondered sometimes what another life would be like.

  “Maybe it’s best that you don’t know what else is out there that you might have done in another life.” She spoke without sarcasm. “You’d end up with a lot of regrets. Or wishing for things to be different.”