Scavenge the Stars

by Tara Sim

BRAEGAN: There is nothing equal about vengeance—only the victor and the defeated.

  —THE MERCHANT’S WORTH, A PLAY FROM THE RAIN EMPIRE

  Cayo stared up at the sign of the Port’s Authority, clenching and unclenching his hands. The street was busy at his back, yet all he heard was a distant roaring in his ears, like a wave about to crash down on a dinghy.

  Just a few words from his mouth would become that wave, capsizing his father’s business, their family, and everything they had ever worked for.

  The weight of it slammed into him, made him stagger back. His throat was tight, his breathing thin. The space behind his eyes flared and pulsed through his temples with a steady, pounding pain.

  He hadn’t slept at all last night—not since Soria had given him that unbearable revelation. Not only had he been tormented by its implications, but his sister had had a bad night as well, tossing and turning with fever interspersed with terrible bouts of coughing. Cayo had stayed beside her, sweating and shaking as if he were also feverish, dabbing the blood from her pale lips and patting her forehead with a cool cloth.

  When she finally fell into a doze, Cayo had crept downstairs to the wine cellar. Walking from the humid warmth of Soria’s room to the cool cellar beneath the manor had been a shock to his system, pebbling the skin of his arms and raising the hairs on the back of his neck. The cellar had smelled of cold stone and aged wood, with a slight vinegary tang left from the recent barrel spill.

  Cayo had spotted the stain on the floor and followed it to where the chest must have been. But it was no longer there, leaving only a vague rectangular impression of where it once sat. Suddenly furious, Cayo had heaved the remaining cluster of barrels onto their sides and rolled them to the far wall until he spotted the corner of a small stained box.

  It had reeked of the wine that had ruined it. Pushing open the lid, Cayo had staggered back from its contents, his breath catching in his throat.

  Hundreds of black discs, all identical to the one in his pocket.

  Cayo wasn’t sure how he managed to pass the rest of the night without pounding down his father’s door. He’d put the chest in his bedroom closet before going back to Soria’s room, where the heat had lulled him into a trance-like state that wasn’t quite sleep, but neither had he been fully awake. When Narin had shaken his shoulder hours later, he said that Kamon was out on business for the day.

  Cayo had been relieved to avoid a confrontation with his father. After all, he had the evidence that Nawarak needed. It would be enough to claim his reward money.

  But it would cost him so much more than whatever he would be paid.

  Which was why he could only stand and stare at the office of the Port’s Authority, his head and his heart at war with each other. Nausea sat coiled in his gut, spiking painfully whenever he moved to take a step forward.

  What if he was wrong? What if his father was being set up? What if Cayo single-handedly destroyed whatever was left of the Mercado name, ruining the business his father had worked so hard to cultivate?

  Cayo pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, cursing. What could he do? What should he do? Condemn his family, or condemn the city?

  It felt as if he stood there for an hour, a boy turned to stone, betrayal and fear compressing his bones into faceted mineral. One more blow and he would shatter.

  His feet refused to move forward. His mouth had forgotten how to form words. In the end, he turned away from the Port’s Authority and wandered down the main thoroughfare of the Business Sector, his chest sore from the weight of indecision and his heart in his mouth. Disappointment threaded through him at his cowardice.

  But Soria didn’t deserve to have this unleashed on their family. His duty was to protect her, not use her as an exhibit in court. His father, though…

  I have another child to think about, a blood heir who can inherit our family’s Vault when I’m gone.

  Kamon’s meager excuse to let his daughter wither away to nothing. Just like their mother.

  What if he wanted her to die to protect his secret?

  Cayo shuddered and leaned against the nearest building, his arms crossed tight across his chest. He willed himself to turn back around to the Port’s Authority, but he was too heavy, too uncertain.

  He had gambled all his gold away, but he couldn’t gamble his father’s reputation or their livelihoods.

  As if inspired by his thoughts, his feet had led him to the Widow Vaults, a massive structure across the street supported with columns and curved eaves. The marble shone in the daylight, the stairs leading to the entrance inscribed with words from an old language of the Rain Empire:

  Blood to blood, name to name, bone to bone.

  An admittedly macabre way of stating that only those descended from the owners of these Vaults could open them, after the owner’s demise. Cayo had often wondered what was in the Mercado Vault—jewels, gold, bolts of silk? Surely his father would have swept it clean by now, bankrupt as they were.

  Kamon wanted at least one child alive to inherit a Vault full of dust and cobwebs.

  Or perhaps it was full of counterfeit coins, ready to be spread throughout Moray.

  Cayo laughed dully, mirthlessly, and leaned his head back against the wall. Everything was unraveling like a poorly stitched hem. He was tripping and stumbling in the dark.

  A shout and a short scream made him pop his head back up. A young boy had fallen into the road, an old, lanky man looming over him. The man was well-dressed in a Rehanese-style suit and gold-trimmed glasses, a walking stick in his hand. Judging by the way he held it, he’d just used it on the downed boy.

  “Were your filthy fingers in my pockets?” the man roared. The boy remained curled up, protecting his head. “Answer me, dog!”

  The man kicked him in the stomach. The boy coughed and wheezed, his face contorted in pain. The man lifted his walking stick again, intent on smashing in the boy’s skull with the heavy crystal handle.

  Cayo lunged forward, getting between the walking stick and the boy. The handle caught him on the shoulder, making him stumble as a bright flare of pain shot across his collarbone.

  “What is this?” the man demanded.

  “Sir, please don’t harm this child. Whatever wrong he’s done—”

  “He was trying to pilfer from me!” the man shouted. They were drawing stares now, people stopping in the street to watch the spectacle. Cayo’s face heated, but he remained where he was, arms spread to prevent the man from getting to the boy again. “I’m a hardworking businessman! He has no right to my money!”

  “I’m sure he’s just hungry and frightened,” Cayo said in a softer voice so that it wouldn’t carry. “People in his situation tend to do desperate things for some coin.”

  “If he’s so desperate for coin, all he has to do is go to the Vice Sector and learn some tricks.”

  Cayo grimaced at the implication. “Kindly walk away before I make this situation worse for you.”

  “You can’t speak that way to me! How dare—”

  A woman ran down the steps of the Widow Vaults wearing a horrified expression. “Father, please, don’t make a scene! Let’s go.”

  The man kept yelling and swinging his walking stick about, but the woman determinedly pulled him down the street, her face hardened with embarrassment.

  Cayo rubbed his shoulder with a wince, knowing it would bruise. He turned around, fully expecting the boy to have dashed off, but received a surprise when he saw the boy sitting in the street, staring up at him in awe. He was small and mousy, a birthmark as irregular as an island on his jaw.

  “Are you all right?” Cayo asked, extending a hand to help him up. “How badly did he hurt you?”

  But the boy remained silent. After a moment, he finally jumped to his feet and took off running, nearly tripping over himself in his haste to get away.

  Cayo sighed. The counterfeit money—his father’s counterfeit money—had the potential to break the city, but perhaps it was already too broken to fix.
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  In the end, he just couldn’t do it.

  He’d turned his back on the Business Sector and returned home, his relief spoiled by regret.

  Coward, his mind spat at him.

  But he kept telling himself he had to know for certain, despite the insistent clawing in his skull that whispered he already knew.

  Cayo waited in his father’s office until he returned home, but Kamon went straight to his bedroom, claiming he was too exhausted to even sit for dinner.

  “Father, I have to speak with you,” Cayo said, his voice tight and on the verge of breaking.

  “Not now, Cayo. I have an early meeting tomorrow, and I need to get rid of this headache.”

  “It’s important. I found—”

  “Cayo.” Kamon turned to him, a hand on the knob of his bedroom door. He wore the frown that Cayo remembered most from his childhood, the lines between his brows warning Cayo that he was trying his father’s patience. But there was also genuine weariness, as if Kamon was finally beginning to bend to the pressures he had exposed them to. “Have you fallen back on your vices?”

  “What?” Cayo shook his head. “No, it’s not that.”

  “Then whatever it is can wait,” his father said before disappearing into his room.

  So Cayo stayed in bed for hours, feverish and sore. His whole body ached, as if to physically repel the truth. As if that was all it took to reverse the fact that his father was a criminal.

  Somehow, he managed to sleep throughout the night. When he was fully aware of being conscious again, a watery gray light softened the edges of his widow curtains. His stomach was hollow, his shoulder and neck were stiff, and his mouth tasted like rot.

  Still, he hauled himself out of bed, not bothering to glance at himself in the mirror like he usually did before he shuffled down the hall to check on Soria.

  But his sister wasn’t in her rooms. Instead, he found Narin changing her bedsheets.

  “The lady decided she wanted to go downstairs to eat,” the footman said with a tone of pride.

  Relief loosened Cayo’s limbs. The medicine Romara had given him was already taking effect. “My father?”

  “Meetings all morning.”

  Cayo sighed and scrubbed a hand through his hair, wincing when the motion pulled on his bruised shoulder. How was he supposed to talk to his father about the counterfeit when he refused to sit still long enough?

  What would happen if I just turned him in? he thought as he went downstairs, taking in the manor that his father had worked so hard to obtain. What if I can end this now?

  The prospect was an arrow aimed between his eyes, sharp and unavoidable.

  As he neared the dining room, he heard two voices in conversation. Cayo frowned. Who else was around other than Narin?

  Pushing open the door, he took two steps into the dining room and froze.

  Soria looked up with a grin, dressed only in her nightgown and robe. The young woman beside her turned and met his incredulous gaze, the thinnest razor-sharp smile on her face.

  Countess Yamaa.

  “Good morning, Lord Mercado,” she said. She swept her eyes over him, from his mussed hair to his wrinkled sleeping shirt to his baggy trousers and bare feet. Cayo flushed hot all over, desiring nothing more than to run back to his room and put on his best suit with a healthy spray of Ladyswoon.

  But he made himself stand still, carefully clearing his throat. “Countess. What…Ah, to what do we owe the pleasure of such an early visit?”

  “Early?” She quirked an eyebrow at the nearest window. “It’s past noon.”

  Cayo swallowed a curse. The overcast sky had deceived him.

  “The countess was telling me her ideas for her next party,” Soria jumped in, barely able to contain herself. “Sit down and eat, Cayo.”

  He looked between them, shoulders tense. Although the countess knew his sister was ill, he hadn’t told her about the ash fever. Yet there was no disguising the gray mark on Soria’s neck. The countess said nothing about it—in fact, she didn’t seem troubled by it at all—so he could only hope she would keep it to herself.

  He moved awkwardly to a chair opposite theirs, his body jerky and uncoordinated under Yamaa’s intense stare. Unable to resist the urge, he tried to flatten down his hair, wondering just how wild it looked to her.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked Soria.

  “Good,” she said. There was some color in her cheeks to contrast with the gray spread along the side of her neck, her eyes brighter and her breathing more even. Cayo couldn’t shake the memory of blood touching her lips, her ragged gasps for air. “I wanted to take a walk in the garden, but Narin said it’s too cold.”

  “And I agree with him. Maybe tomorrow, if it’s warmer.”

  If we still have a garden then.

  She huffed but didn’t argue further as she nibbled at her egg bun. Cayo smiled despite the tightness of his chest, happy just to have his sister up and talking.

  The countess watched the exchange with fascination. He suddenly wondered if she had any siblings. He burned to ask her questions, to put away his worry and his indecision and merely focus on a girl he wanted to know more about.

  A foot kicked him softly under the table. Soria pointedly looked at the teapot between them, then at the countess’s nearly empty cup. Since they no longer had servers for this sort of thing, Cayo stood to pour the countess fresh tea, accidentally spilling some when he pulled the spout away. Cursing, he wiped it up as Soria sighed and shook her head. The countess tamped down a smile.

  “So, ah.” Cayo wasn’t particularly hungry, but he took a rice noodle pancake and began tearing it into pieces on his plate. “What’s this about another party?”

  “It sounds amazing,” Soria said with a dreamy sigh. “It’ll be on a ship and catered by Kastille’s. They make the best cakes. And the theme of it is—”

  “Gambling,” the countess finished with another thin smile.

  Cayo stopped tearing at his pancake. There was a stiffness in the countess that he hadn’t seen before, a wholly different persona than the girl he had raced in the inlet. She looked at him with weight behind her dark eyes, as if she also bore a knowledge too heavy to hold on her own.

  “Soria,” he said softly, “you should go back to bed.”

  “But I feel fine.”

  “If you want a walk in the garden later, I want you to be rested for it.”

  Soria rolled her eyes and got up from the table, giving the countess a small curtsy before heading toward the stairs.

  Once they were alone and out of earshot, Cayo faced the countess again.

  “I know your secret,” she said without preamble.

  Cayo’s heart tripped. The theme of her next party was no coincidence; she must have figured out, somehow, that he was embroiled with the Slum King, that he had drained his family’s coffers, that—

  “Who would have guessed that the young Lord Mercado was engaged to the Slum King’s daughter?”

  The words were a punch to the solar plexus, leaving Cayo winded. He stared at Yamaa with an open mouth. When she did nothing but stare back, he desperately reached for his voice.

  “How…How do you know that?” he croaked.

  “All information can be bought, for the right price.” She winced, as if hating the words even as she spoke them. As if she were quoting someone she disliked. “I happened to be curious about you, and one thing led to another.”

  Although the engagement with Romara was far and away the least of his troubles, the fact that Yamaa now knew—even before his father knew!—filled him with a strange sense of shame. He realized then, in that moment, that he cared far more about what she thought of him than he had initially guessed.

  “So.” She laced her fingers together on the tabletop. “How exactly did that relationship start?”

  “It’s not a relationship,” he growled. “It isn’t like that.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s a marriage of convenience? Because somehow I don�
�t find the idea of marrying a criminal very convenient.”

  He sighed and rubbed his face. There were too many voices crowding inside him, whispering his fears and doubts in continuous loops, all pressed and cramped together so that he felt as short of breath as Soria.

  Eventually he dropped his hands, also dropping all his masks, so that when he looked at the countess, he was merely Cayo and noth-ing more.

  “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

  He didn’t dress in his best suit, but he did put some care into his outfit of soft breeches and a light blue shirt, over which he pulled on his long coat. Yamaa was a bit understated today as well, wrapped in a simple dress of dove gray with embroidered leaves around the hem. She wrapped a shawl about her shoulders and nodded for him to lead the way.

  Cayo didn’t have a destination in mind; they didn’t need one. He just needed to get away from the manor, from the possibility of his father coming home early and interacting with the countess. For some reason, he wanted to keep them as far from each other as possible.

  “You’ve probably heard the rumors about me,” Cayo said as they walked down the long, winding road leading to the manor. “You must have, considering you called me a drunken playboy.”

  Was that a hint of a blush he saw, or were her cheeks merely warming from the exercise? “I may have heard a rumor or two, yes. Including that you liked to frequent the tables. I didn’t know for certain if that was true until recently.”

  “Well, it used to be true. That used to be my life: gambling dens and countless drinks and getting good-luck kisses from strangers. I suppose that was my way of creating freedom—overindulgence, addiction, not bothering to think about the consequences of what I was doing.” He looked up at the pearlescent sky, hands in his pockets. A sea breeze was coming in off the bay, cool and sweet. Beside him, Yamaa hugged her shawl tighter around her. “It made everything seem simpler. And all I wanted was for things to be simple.”

  He had spent so long thinking about these words that speaking them out loud now was akin to peeling off the dead skin of a sunburn, revealing the tender, healing skin beneath.