“Oh no, these serve me just fine.” She picked up a wrapped package from the counter. “Thank you, dear. And do be careful out there.”

  Once the customer left, Spar turned dreary, dark eyes on them. Xe was tall and well-muscled in the arms and chest, xir horns coiled tight against xir head. Long black hair had been tied into a high ponytail, and xir apron was stamped with a symbol of a hammer surrounded by stars like sparks. The white tattoos across xir face were the same as Mirelle’s, with stars above the arches of the eyebrows.

  “How can I help you?” xe asked. Marcellus lowered his hood, and Spar’s posture straightened. “Mar? What are you doing here?”

  Marcellus gestured at the apprentices. Spar frowned, but shooed them into the back room. It was only when they were gone and Marcellus had locked the front door that Lilia pushed back her own hood.

  Spar’s eyes grew round before xe fell into a kneeling bow. “Your Highness,” xe gasped to the floorboards. “I—I thought—”

  “That I had died with the rest of my family?”

  Xe winced. “I am relieved to see you well and whole.”

  “We don’t need you on the ground, Spar. We need you to make something for us. Something far more valuable than kitchen knives.”

  The blacksmith rose to xir feet. Xir expression was a blend of wariness and tentative excitement. “What were you thinking?”

  Lilia nodded to Taesia. Taesia’s pulse thundered and her stomach twisted, as if the lichen were suddenly disagreeing with her. She, too, pushed back her hood.

  Spar immediately reached for the tongs on xir anvil.

  “Vitaean,” xe spat. “You—you brought one of them here?”

  “She is not our enemy,” Lilia said, her voice strong and sure. It brought up memories of Taesia’s mother at council meetings. “She is here to help us defeat the one who murdered the Lunaris and razed our city. Phos.”

  There was silence save for the crackle of the furnace. No one moved a muscle as they watched Spar process the words.

  “Phos,” xir repeated. “Phos is in our city.”

  “You can believe me or not,” Lilia said. “You can help us or not. But know that if you aid our cause, your contribution will be reported back to your family. To your grandfather.”

  There was a bitterness in Taesia’s chest she couldn’t identify at first. It hit her all at once: jealousy.

  She was an heir who had grown up refusing to act like one, hoping Dante would take care of everything and she would be left to her own devices. But Lilia was an heir who had been abandoned by her family, practically exiled, and still found ways to present herself with surety.

  The sudden insight made her feel pathetically juvenile. Something unripe and unformed, hanging sadly off its branch.

  Spar looked to Marcellus, who nodded encouragement. Taesia could see thoughts churning behind the blacksmith’s eyes, weighing the threat of harboring supposed fugitives versus the esteem of xir family.

  “What exactly do you need?” xe asked at last.

  Taesia didn’t wait for Lilia’s prompt this time. She parted her cloak and drew out the wrapped sword, uncovering it inch by inch until Starfell sat naked and heavy in her hands.

  Spar hurried around the counter. “Is this real? Astralam bones—in a sword?”

  “It was forged by a Noctan refugee in Nexus,” Taesia said. “A young woman named Mirelle. I don’t know her family name, but she claimed to be from a long line of famous blacksmiths.”

  Xir eyes, locked onto the sword, began to shimmer. “Oh,” xe breathed as xe shakily touched one of the spinous processes along the edge. “I see it, now. It’s… it’s beautiful.”

  “And it needs a sheath,” Lilia said. “One powerful enough to dampen it from a Shade’s perception.”

  “Of course. The thing is, there’s so little of it left.”

  “So little of what left?” Taesia asked.

  “Nightstone. But my family has a store of it. I was saving my share in the event I got a wealthy Shade patron.” Xe scoffed. “Instead it’s all gardening and kitchen tools.”

  “I’m a Shade,” Taesia said. “It won’t be wasted.”

  Spar studied her, assessing if she truly was worthy of this Other-Realm material. She knew a little about nightstone; about how, like stardust, it could amplify a Shade’s natural abilities. And, in the right hands, it could grant the carrier visions—or even re-create the power of a dream walker.

  It could help her connect with Brailee again.

  “I can’t prove it to you.” Taesia shifted her arm, showing off the dark shackle. “But I am a Lastrider, if that means anything to you. I carry Nyx’s power.”

  The blacksmith exhaled shakily. “I don’t have any diamond to cut those off,” xe said eventually. “But I believe you. I think. When do you need this sheath?”

  “Now,” Lilia answered.

  Spar grimaced. “Fine. I need my apprentices, though. Put your hoods back on. Also, I’ll need the sword.”

  Taesia’s hands tightened around it, nearly drawing blood. But a quiet, reassuring word from Lilia made Taesia offer Starfell to the blacksmith. Xe handled it with reverence, as if it were a newborn.

  “Forged by a Verlith and sheathed by another,” xe said quietly. “A star that’s traveled between two realms. If this isn’t enough to prove myself, I don’t know what is.”

  A lifetime passed before Spar returned, but in actuality it had only been two hours. They’d only seen xir once in that time, when xe had come to the back room to cut a swath of dark leather from a bolt of hide.

  “It’s from an artican,” Lilia had explained when Taesia asked about the leather’s strange look.

  “Fearsome things,” Marcellus had murmured from his place on a wooden bench. “Big and fanged. Absolutely covered with hair. Though some people think they’re cute.”

  Lilia had shifted on the bench beside him. “They are, when they’re not hungry.”

  “So it’s… a bear?” Taesia had asked.

  “What’s a bear?”

  “Like what you just described, only with less fang and more claw.”

  “Honestly, they’d be cuter that way,” Marcellus had said.

  Spar now held out the new sheath. “I’m going to have blisters on my hands for weeks,” xe complained. “But it’s done. You’ll stick to your word, Highness? You’ll tell my grandfather about this?”

  Lilia bowed her head. “Once it’s safe to. I swear it.”

  Spar didn’t seem particularly thrilled with the addendum, but xe still passed Starfell to Taesia. “Let me know if it needs any adjustments.”

  The weight of it was staggering and satisfying, a gentle pull on her muscles she’d have to build endurance for. The sheath was wide enough to hold the blade and its spines, covered in that black artican leather with silver fittings and studs, accented with a metal tip at its point. Spar had even gone so far as to etch a design down its length of swirling vines that ended in stars. A band sat snugly around the middle, smooth and glossy as liquid, not quite stone and not quite metal. It didn’t even gather her fingerprints where she touched it.

  “Nightstone,” Spar said. “Be careful with it. It’s almost as precious as the sword itself.”

  “It’s beautiful, Spar,” Marcellus said.

  Spar scratched behind one of xir horns. “An astralam sword needs a good sheath. And it needs to be something my grandfather would be proud of.”

  “He will be,” Lilia insisted. She dug into an inner pocket of her cloak, but Spar stopped her.

  “No need,” the blacksmith said.

  “But—”

  “Consider this my tribute to your family.” Spar touched the center of xir forehead, then xir chest above the heart. “Long may they be sheltered in the dark.”

  The princess’s face grew taut as her eyes brightened, furiously reining back whatever longed to claw out of her. Eventually she whispered, “Thank you.”

  Taesia’s fingers curled around the sword. For the first time she had the niggling sensation that this was not supposed to be hers, that she had no right to wield it. Her blood ran with Nyx’s shadows and starlight, but she was still a stranger. An outsider. A helpless observer of grief and destruction.

  A hand settled on her shoulder. She met Lilia’s somber lavender gaze.

  “We have what we need,” Lilia said. “Are you ready for the Sanctuary?”

  Taesia cataloged the added weight to her body, from the pull of the sword to the drag of her shackles to the expectations placed upon her shoulders. They were not enough to pin her to the floor—not yet.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  VI

  Sleep was heavy and honey-thick, a red dark blurred at the edges with gold. There was emptiness like a maw, poised to swallow whatever fell inside it. Below, the blue ash of earth where bones were buried; above, the trace of pyre smoke. Somewhere between the liquid of starlight and the open gash of sunshine.

  He traced the gash until it spilled out crimson, bubbling and steaming over his hands. A blade caught on a neck, slicing open artery, lifeblood, godsblood, and his father’s eyes open as he left the world the way he’d entered it: without wings.

  Nikolas woke and was immediately enveloped with pain. He bit back a whimper and dug his fingers into something soft below him, his fingernails grown long enough to scratch at fabric. He wanted to rake them down his own face if only that would get rid of the throbbing, burning pressure in his skull.

  It was a sickening tension that started at his right eye and radiated outward, prying into every corner and cranny it could reach. He wondered if his father had given him a particularly nasty hit. Nausea gripped his stomach, and for a while he floated in feverish warmth, lamentably tethered to his body despite his best efforts to dissociate from it.

  Something cold touched his forehead and he jerked. His movements were sluggish and uncoordinated, but he did his best to knock away whoever was leaning over him.

  “Now, now,” came a breezy voice. “You’ve done quite enough harm to yourself already.”

  Nikolas was finally aware enough to take in the image before him: Rian standing over the bed, a cloth in one slender hand. His younger brother’s face was unusually gaunt, his expression one of cool observation.

  “Rian,” he croaked, lifting his hand again. His brother ignored it.

  “Again with this.” Rian tossed the cloth away. “I wonder if the heir of Ostium permanently muddled your head.”

  The phrase heir of Ostium finally cleared some of the haze. The feverish warmth drained away as he remembered, remembered, remembered.

  The young man before him was not his brother. It was his god, his protector, his destroyer.

  Something else was wrong, beyond Phos wearing Rian’s face. There was an unevenness to the world around him, a strange lack of depth that didn’t come from vertigo.

  Nikolas clumsily reached for his face, for the apex of the pain. He found bandages and followed them up to his eye. He gently pressed, and an explosion of throbbing heat made him choke on a scream.

  Remembered, remembered, remembered.

  He covered the empty socket with his hand, the bandages wet against his skin. There was a low sound he realized was coming from his own mouth, something primal and wrecked.

  “I told you,” Phos said softly, “that you only have yourself to blame for this. I gave you an order. It could have been his eye instead of yours.” A slow, heavy sigh. “I suppose the message still got through.”

  The price of disobedience, impiety. Of sparing Fin this empty, resounding agony.

  It was a while until he caught his breath, until the shock turned to tremors across his body. Eventually he asked, voice small, “Where is he?”

  Phos scoffed. “That’s what you care about right now? You should hate him for putting you in this position.”

  You put me in this position. Despite the pain and discomfort, there was a respite in this moment of clarity, the fog in his head burning off. He didn’t know how long it would last.

  “Your sacrifices were worthless, in the end,” Phos went on. “I know where the others will go. They will attempt to find the astralam crown hidden in the bowels of Nyx’s unsightly temple. Only a Lunari may wield it, though I’m guessing that won’t stop Nyx’s heir from trying.”

  Nikolas turned his head until he could make out Phos again. Rian—Rian’s body, the one he’d raced and grappled with, that leapt and tumbled and wielded weapons like a true soldier.

  Remembered, remembered, remembered.

  Their father running them through drills and maneuvers, his voice a sharp drumbeat on the wind.

  The heat of Rian’s side against his, his brother’s arm around his shoulders, soft words after a hard day.

  Blood on his hands and falling, falling, over the edge of a roof as the sky rent apart.

  His left eye watered and spilled over. The bandages over his right eye seeped with blood.

  He wanted to tell Rian, wanted to confess and be done with it, throw himself at someone’s mercy. What was the cost for ending a cruel man’s life? What was the punishment for the son overcoming the father?

  There were many pieces of him missing; perhaps he deserved this particular hollowness.

  “They will try to stop me,” Phos went on, “but it won’t be enough. One of the advantages of this body is that it is largely Vitaean. The shadows do not harm me as much as they could.”

  “What happened to it?” Nikolas whispered. “My eye.”

  Phos was quiet a long time. The empty socket throbbed.

  “He’s always so hungry, your brother,” Phos murmured. “My mind has absorbed his, but I can feel it. A grip in my belly for something to complete me. Comfort me. Nourish me.”

  Phos laid his hand gently over the bandages. Nikolas lay utterly still.

  “The piece of Orsus I consumed filled me the way nothing else ever had before. I’ve found myself yearning for it now and then, knowing nothing else will satiate the craving.”

  A tingling warmth traveled from his palm and into Nikolas, the feeling of stepping into sunshine after hours shivering in the dark.

  “I feel it now—he wants the hunger to end. It is an incessant madness. A plea.”

  Phos stared down at Nikolas with irises the same pale ice as his, and just as cold.

  “Let it not be said I am not merciful,” his god whispered.

  VII

  Loath as Risha was to leave the calming presence of the soul tree, they needed to move on.

  The landscape changed again, from verdant jungle to high cliffs and stone runs streaked with veins of gold. Flowers grew from the cliffs in dark, spidery shapes, giving off the fragrance of rainfall, sweet and cold.

  Every so often Risha paused to strain her ears for the sound of rattling bones. But so far they hadn’t come across another Sentinel, which she took to mean they were either very lucky or running out of time until their next encounter.

  Jas was quiet at her side. He’d been reserved since the incident with the imitori, and Risha worried it was because of what she’d done. Or maybe he was simply remembering his mother, carefully tending to the wound of his grief.

  In the shadows of the cliffs, she longingly recalled early summer nights at the villa, sitting outside with her family in the pink gloaming while lanterns were lit and food was laid out. The way her wine glass was always full, and the tea that came with dessert had just the right amount of milk. How it felt to lie in her bed afterward, warm and relaxed and safe.

  She imagined Jas there as well. Someone who was welcome and at home with her, who knew how to charm her mother and how to graciously lose at cards to Saya. Who would discuss politics with her father in a way that wouldn’t ruffle his feathers but at the same time provide a unique point of view.

  When this is over, she wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come. There was nothing she could promise him, and he wouldn’t believe it anyway.

  “You’re a cheery duo,” Val drawled from his place on her back. “Know any songs or stories to pass the time? Getting a little tired of the bleak, introspective silence.”

  “Forgive us for being introspective,” Jas said.

  “Can you tell us more about Leshya or her weapon?” Risha asked.

  Jas perked up at this. “Is it true that Samhara can only be wielded by using tandshri?”

  “What, that little dance of hers? That’s what she said, but don’t ask me how it works.”

  Risha recalled the tandshri lessons she’d been given as a child. Rath had instructed her on how to breathe, how to hold her arms and legs, how to flick her wrists just so. There was a movement they had practiced often where she had to spin with her fingers held in mudras. She’d kept falling out of position.

  “A strong performance is only possible if the person giving it is strong to begin with,” her father had told her, nudging her foot until it settled in the right placement. “That means treating your body with respect and listening to what it has to say. Do you know what this movement is called?” She’d shaken her head. “It is Sada—an invitation to dance. A request to meet strength with strength, judged not with muscle but integrity and power.”

  Val yawned loudly and excessively. “All I know is it was strong enough to chop off Tenamar’s arm.” He giggled. “Idiot.”

  “Tenamar?” Jas repeated. “Is that the name of one of the kings?”

  “Yup, and Leshya went and stole his arm. Fused the bones into the weapon’s handles. He was so mad,” Val whispered in delight. “Leshya wasn’t a boastful sort, so I did the heckling for her. Nearly got beheaded early for my trouble.”

  “Bet she appreciated that.” Jas sounded lighter than he had before. “Hopefully the kings don’t come running to reclaim their bones once we get Samhara. Didn’t you say you came from one of the cities? Which king ruled it?”

  “I don’t remember. The whole decapitation misadventure shaved off quite a bit of my memory. Oh! I do remember a song, though. It’s coming back to me. There was this gnarled old fellow who was always sent to the rack, and afterward he’d have to be carted back with his limbs in a pile for someone to reattach ’em. Was a good sport about it, though. Every time he trundled past he’d sing,

 

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