Scavenge the Stars

by Tara Sim

“I’m the reason my family is in this mess,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t just enough to overindulge. I wanted more. So I got in with the Slum King, and I played for him. I dealt. I cheated. I lined his pockets with money.”

  He rubbed a hand over his mouth, feeling the bristles starting to come in at his jawline. “But I got in over my head, and I lost…everything. I drained all my coffers, and some of my father’s. I was so far gone that I hadn’t even been keeping track, and my father didn’t notice until it was too late. And then Soria got sick, and…”

  “You couldn’t pay for the medicine for ash fever,” the countess finished softly.

  He nodded, teeth clenched. “My sister is the reason I got out of that life. She literally dragged me from the gutter and slapped me awake. Without her, I…I don’t know where I would even be now. I’d do whatever it takes to care for her, even if it means condemning myself to something I don’t want.”

  The countess stopped under the shivering leaves of a ceiba tree. “Such as marrying yourself off to the Slum King’s daughter.”

  Cayo sighed. “I made a bad deal with the Slum King, and Romara was the price. But at least my family stays safe, and we get the medicine Soria needs.”

  Yamaa’s eyes were pinched. “You could have come to me for the medicine. We could have struck a fairer deal.”

  “This happened before we properly met. And besides, we haven’t known each other that long,” he said with a small smile, though a part of him warmed at the idea that she cared enough to suggest it.

  “Still,” she muttered. “Is there a way you can break off the engagement?”

  “Not without making the Slum King very, very angry.”

  They continued walking, entering the main city and wandering aimlessly down its streets. Although he had taken the lead at first, he noticed that the countess now seemed to be picking out their path, as if her feet were guiding her somewhere. There were few citizens out today, everyone no doubt preferring to keep inside and wait out whatever storm was on its way to Moray. He could smell it in the air, sharp and earthy.

  They walked in a direction that Cayo typically never went, but the countess was deep in thought and he didn’t want to disturb her, so he was content to follow. Her hair was half tied back with a butterfly pin, a couple of locks strategically curled and framing her face. He wanted to reach out and brush one behind her ear. To skim his fingertips against her smooth cheek.

  God and her stars, what was wrong with him? He was engaged to another woman, his sister was potentially dying, his father was a criminal…And yet all of that fell away when he was with her, this girl made out of salt water and steel.

  The countess looked up and blinked at their surroundings. Cayo recognized it as one of the poorer districts, a traditionally Rehanese neighborhood where the houses were guarded by statuettes of star saints. She shrank back suddenly, looking uncomfortable.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. He recalled all the times his father would tell him not to go near neighborhoods like these for fear of theft and getting roughed up. “Are you afraid?”

  She scowled. “Why should I be afraid?”

  “Well, you know, places like this…”

  “Just because the people who live here have less money doesn’t mean they’re dangerous,” she said. “They live their lives as best they can, just like you and me.”

  Cayo studied her, the flame of her eyes and the white-knuckled grip on her shawl. It was true that he was brimming with secrets, but he was certain she was, too.

  “You’re right,” he conceded. “I’m sorry to imply it. Sometimes the things you’re told as a child follow you through the years, whether they’re correct or not.”

  That seemed to calm her down, and she gave him a little nod. Wordlessly they agreed to pass by the neighborhood. The countess’s shoulders didn’t ease until they were several blocks away.

  Why was it that whenever he spoke to her, he felt as if different parts of himself broke open? He wondered if she felt the same, oddly pleased with the idea that he might have the ability to make her as off-kilter as she made him. But more than that, he was drawn to tell her things, to unleash those frantic whispers inside of him so that he didn’t have to carry them alone.

  Cayo drew in a deep breath. “Do you remember when you said something about knowing a person well, only to realize you never truly knew them at all?”

  She looked at him with those heavy, dark eyes and said nothing. As if she were plagued by her own restless whispers.

  “How do you cope with it?” he asked softly.

  The countess bit her lower lip and stared at the cobblestone road as they entered a district near one of the city’s public parks. The sky churned overhead, the air thick and damp.

  “It depends,” she answered at last. “What did this person do?”

  He thought of the chest hidden in his closet. The specks of blood on Soria’s pillow. The jar containing Sébastien’s eyes. “Something bad. Something that can hurt people—that has hurt people. People I care about.”

  She stopped and faced him. He turned to her.

  “Then you have to stop them,” she said, the certainty in her voice robbing him of breath. “Even if you love them.”

  His throat worked as he tried to swallow. “Even…Even if it means they’ll be taken away?”

  “Even if it means they’d die.”

  The breeze sent a chill down the collar of his coat, and he shivered. She took a step toward him, so earnest and confident that it was the only thing preventing him from simply crumpling to the ground.

  She was right—he knew she was right. His father had done so much harm already, and if Cayo allowed him to continue dispersing the counterfeit coins, even more people would be harmed.

  He had to turn his father in.

  He began to feel feverish again in the wake of that impossible decision, but there was also relief hiding beneath it, the chance to do the right thing. To try to make up for the harm that Cayo himself had caused.

  The countess lifted a hand as if to touch his sleeve, then dropped it again. She parted her lips to speak, but the sky chose that moment to rumble and burst open, unleashing a sheet of rain over the city.

  Yamaa yelped in surprise, and it startled Cayo out of his reverie. He held his hand out to her.

  “Come on,” he yelled over the deluge. “I know a place we can wait this out!”

  She hesitated, her fingers hovering over his. When she finally took his hand, it was like the sun and moon colliding, a brilliant and thrilling crash.

  Cayo pulled her forward, and together they raced through the rain like stars shooting across the sky.

  The magician smiled, and Neralia felt as if she were back among the stars. Together they danced through the ocean’s depths, leaving trails of radiant light in their wake so as to make the sky jealous.

  —“NERALIA OF THE CLOUDS,” AN ORAL STORY ORIGINATING FROM THE LEDE ISLANDS

  The touch of water to Amaya’s skin woke her from the dread at seeing her old neighborhood again.

  When Cayo had asked if she was afraid, she had almost wanted to say yes, but not for the reason that he thought. She had been afraid of the ghosts that still lurked there, the shadow of her old home against the street, a garden overgrown with weeds. She had been afraid that if they stayed there a moment longer, she would erode like rock washed with seawater, turning into a ghost herself.

  But as Cayo gripped her hand and led her toward the park, the two of them racing through the rain, her fear dissolved. She spent so much time living in the past that she had forgotten what living in the present was like—until now. Now, with soft, thick raindrops soaking her hair and her dress, her legs keeping stride with Cayo’s, a surprised laugh spilled over her lips as if she could hardly contain it.

  Cayo pulled her toward a stone bridge. Amaya vaguely remembered it from when she and her mother would walk the paths on sunny days, when the humidity wasn’t strong enough to choke. The bridge had been built
over a man-made creek that ran a serpentine track through the park, but the creek was running low after the summer months, only a thin trickle that would swell with the rainfall.

  They ducked under the arch of the wide bridge, panting and soaking wet. They looked at each other and burst out laughing.

  “You look like a drowned dog,” Amaya said as she pulled her hair over her shoulder and squeezed out the excess water.

  “Oh yeah?” Cayo shook his head like the dog she’d compared him to, water flying from his hair and hitting her in the face. “You look like a shipwreck survivor.”

  “What?”

  “You know, like in the books.” Cayo gestured to her sodden dress, the mud from the creek bed staining the hem. “There’s a harrowing shipwreck, and it’s always the woman who escapes and gets washed up on some deserted island. And of course, there she meets a man who helps her survive on the island, they eventually fall in love, et cetera….”

  Amaya grimaced at the memory of waking up on the atoll above the Landless comm. But she wasn’t some romantic heroine—she had more important things to do.

  Like trying to pry more secrets out of the boy beside her. She had gotten too wrapped up in their conversation to think properly, to ask the right questions when he was so obviously baring his soul to her. Someone he knew and cared about had done something wrong. Was it his father? Had Cayo discovered something that could help her own plans in bringing Kamon Mercado down?

  But the pain in Cayo’s eyes had been so stark that it had stripped away her motives. She understood that pain; she felt an echo of it in her bones. It was the pain of asking yourself, How could someone I love do something so horrible?

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean it as an insult,” Cayo said, noting her dark expression. “It’s actually a good look on you. Just that, you know, you can pull it off. Like you and water belong together.”

  He was beginning to ramble, so she gave him a wry smile. “Thanks?”

  He raked fingers through his hair, pulling it back. Looking around, he hummed in surprise. “Looks like others have been here recently.”

  Amaya followed his gaze to the underside of the bridge. It was covered in drawings and words and symbols she didn’t recognize, some done with paint, some done with the reddish clay runoff from the creek. A few of them looked old, but the ones done with clay were more recent, almost as bright as blood against the dark stone.

  “People like to come here and leave their mark,” Cayo explained, putting his hand against a drawing of a sea serpent that was actually quite good. “It’s like a rite of passage. I remember daring one of my friends to do it, but he got caught. They usually have a patrol that comes around to check that no one is vandalizing anything new.”

  “I know,” Amaya said without thinking. “I remember.”

  She had once seen two teenagers chased out of the park by an irate member of the city guard, one of them carrying a bucket of white paint. When she had asked her mother what they were doing, her mother had explained that some people were graced with the gift of art, and sometimes that made them want to share it with the whole world. If you have a special talent, she would say, it would be selfish of you to keep it for yourself.

  “You remember?” Cayo echoed, frowning.

  Amaya realized her mistake and stiffened. “They…do something similar, where I’m from. That’s all I meant.”

  “Oh.” He still looked a bit confused. “Where exactly are you from? I think no one really knows the answer to that, yet.”

  “Does it matter?” she asked, already rebuilding her protective walls.

  “I think it does, yes.” He dropped his hand and studied her as intently as he had studied the graffiti surrounding them. “Where you’re from…I think it helps inform who you are as a person, in some ways. A home is something you can’t easily forget. It stays with you no matter where you go or who you become.”

  Amaya stared at him, again sensing the ghosts that called her back to the street where her mother and father had carved out a simple yet happy life. For a time, anyway.

  She had carried that seed of remembrance during her years on the Brackish. She carried it still, that pocket of memory that reminded her of all she’d lost, of everything she would never have again.

  She looked away from Cayo, drifting to the far end of the bridge. Placing her fingers against a word she couldn’t read, she traced the lines and curves as if to discern its meaning through touch alone.

  “I come from a place where happiness was more important than money,” she said, her voice nearly overtaken by the hiss of rain outside their shelter. “Where spiders are revered and myths were eaten up like candy.”

  She heard him come closer, stopping just far enough to give her space. “What sort of myths?”

  Amaya took a deep breath and delved into memories of her father, his low, amused voice and the way he used his broad hands to add inflections to his stories. Turning, she bent and scooped up a handful of clay from the edge of the trickling creek.

  “Trickster was born from a seed of the oldest acorn tree and the blood of the cleverest snake, and the heart of a star was his womb.” She took some of the cold, wet clay with her fingers and drew a star on a bare patch of stone, with Trickster’s symbol in the center: a diamond with a forked line in the middle. “When he emerged bright and hungry from the star, he descended to the earth and disguised himself as human. He wanted to learn about people by becoming one, to better understand what they wanted and how they deceived one another.”

  Cayo listened raptly to the Kharian myth her father had often told her—her favorite one, the one she would always request before bed. She drew as she spoke, outlining Trickster’s life and his most notable deeds.

  “He grew trees when there was famine, stealing them from the forests of Khari’s enemies. He instated the first empress of Khari, and was even said to stay with her in the Ruby Palace for many years as her lover.” She drew the spiraling dome-shaped towers of the palace. “But when the other gods began to look upon him with disdain, he knew he was in trouble.”

  “But he was doing good deeds,” Cayo interrupted, the first time he had done so. “Why would they object?”

  “Because the gods like order and balance, and Trickster was a being of chaos,” Amaya explained. “He opposed all their orders and never listened when Protector warned him not to overstep his bounds. Then, one day, Trickster offended Protector greatly when he pretended to be him, ordering the other gods to perform his whims. When Protector found out about the impersonation, he challenged Trickster to combat.”

  Amaya drew a knife, its shape a familiar comfort. She checked to make sure the tattoo at her wrist was covered by her sleeve, but some part of her didn’t mind if Cayo saw. In fact, she wanted him to see it, to share a bit of who she truly was.

  Taking an uneven breath, she drew a tree. “Protector spilled Trickster’s blood, and an orchard grew where he fell, bearing enough fruit and nuts to feed five villages.”

  “So he died?” Cayo asked.

  “Gods can’t really die, but he disappeared for a while to lick his wounds. The orchard is still there, though. There are people who visit to pray to him, and some claim they can hear him laughing through the trees and raining acorns down on the heads of unsuspecting visitors.”

  She turned to find Cayo smiling at her drawings. The softness of that smile was like a kick to the chest, and when his eyes met hers, she stood rooted to the spot. They were no longer full of pain; they were gleaming with discovery, with contentment.

  For a moment, she felt as if she, like Trickster, were encased within a star. Bright and hungry and eager to right the wrongs of the world.

  As she watched, Cayo also scooped up a handful of clay and began drawing on the stone. He told her about his favorite book, a story about a boy who joins a pirate ship and sails on adventures all around the world. He drew sea monsters and swords and chests of treasure.

  “What’s that supposed to be?” she asked, poin
ting at an oblong shape he had made.

  “It’s a mermaid,” he mumbled.

  “Oh.” She tilted her head, as if seeing it at another angle would throw it into sharper clarity. “I think I see it now.”

  “Don’t you dare make fun.”

  “No, no, I think it’s quite good. Is the mermaid supposed to be part manatee?”

  Cayo threw the rest of his clay at her. She jumped back, but the clay hit her dress, a splatter of red and brown.

  Cayo’s eyes widened. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  She immediately retaliated, throwing a handful of clay at his coat. It hit his shoulder and splattered on the side of his face.

  “All right,” he growled, gathering more clay. “Now it’s war.”

  They threw and dodged and yelled, hurling insults at each other as they launched clay from their hands and ran from the other’s counterattacks. When Amaya proved to be too good at dodging, Cayo changed his strategy and came straight at her, his hands full.

  She shrieked in a way she hadn’t done since she was a child, being chased by her father in the backyard as he pretended to be a monster. She ran from one side of the bridge to the next, but Cayo eventually cornered her and grabbed her arms, the clay squishing between them.

  “Nooo,” she groaned around a laugh as he smeared it all up and down her sleeves. Liesl was going to have a conniption, but in that moment, Amaya didn’t care. She scraped some clay off her sleeve and rubbed it against Cayo’s cheek.

  “Agh!” He reached for her face to retaliate, then hesitated. The sudden stillness between them made her highly aware of their heavy breathing, the way her chest moved so close to his.

  Swallowing, Cayo reached up and touched her cheek. Slowly he began to draw, and even without a mirror she could tell what it was: Trickster’s symbol, the diamond with the forked line. She stared at him the whole time, invested in the concentration on his face, the solemn line of his mouth. Although her body was cold from the rain and mud, the skin under his fingers flared with heat, purling through her limbs and diving down into her chest as if she had taken a sip of warmed wine.