Sighing, she lifted her left hand, calling forth the aether, the shine of it reflecting in his wet eyes. She extended her arm and pressed a fingertip to his forehead, letting the aether sink into his being, magic twining around his mind and soul.
“Close your eyes, and I will take your dreams.”
Her words were honey-sweet, carrying with them a fog that shrouded his young mind. Like called to like, and she could feel the coiled burn of starfire in his soul. The aether lived in him, a thing all magicians, no matter their calling, learned to master. The connection to that otherworldly place filled with magic was more a knowing, a sensing, than parlor tricks in some spice lounge in Daijal.
She dragged her metaphysical touch through the shape of him, thinking about how easy it would be to remake him on her own, but that was not what she was here for. The soul wasn’t something one mucked around with arbitrarily, and so the application of her magic was precise because it needed to be. You could change a person if you weren’t careful. Destroy them, even, or end up owning them how Daijal owned debt slaves through banks.
Slavery was such a distasteful habit. That entire, deeply entrenched mess grown out of debt bondage was the reason Callisto and Farren were skulking through the river under cover of darkness, burying children.
Callisto used the aether to coax the prince’s tired mind into sleep, fogging his memories. She pulled him into her arms, the boy deadweight, and stared down at his face. She gently rubbed a smudge of soot off the underside of his small chin.
“Something tells me the prince will remember where he came from even if I try to make him forget,” she murmured.
“He’s young enough. He will succumb,” Farren replied quietly.
“He is Rourke. They don’t know how.”
She slid a hand over the boy’s chest, the skin of her palm catching on the soft fabric of his nightclothes. She could feel his heart beating with a steady rhythm that would be soothing in any place but this.
The voice of the Eclipse Star came to her, soft in the quiet but weighted like the anchors that held Tovanian ship-cities in place against storms. “It was either him or his sister. You had to choose.”
“It wasn’t a choice. Eimarille was already gone.”
Farren shifted the steering levers with careful hands, the change in the engine vibrating through the decking. “Don’t blame yourself for this mess.”
“I don’t. I never do. Believe that.” Callisto held the prince tighter, bending her head to whisper into his ear with voice and aether alike. “Alasandair Rourke is dead. Let Soren rise in his place.”
The Dawn Star built a wall around the prince’s soul, one that would crumble over time but keep the starfire that burned there hidden until he could learn to live as someone else. Starfire was the mark of royalty in nearly every country on Maricol, and the Rourke bloodline had to be stricken from the genealogies if they were to survive.
In the morning, the broadsheets in all six countries would say Prince Alasandair Rourke died in the fire that razed nearly half of Amari.
He didn’t.
He died in the river.
Three
PORTIA
Baroness Portia Dhemlan and her husband, Baron Emmitt Dhemlan, were the first of their bloodline to be written into the nobility genealogies. They’d been merchants and inventors before being granted their title and were still of that mindset, to the consternation of what passed for high society in the eastern provinces of Ashion.
It was their newness that spared them dying at the hands of the Blades, which ravaged the cadet branches of the royal family on the night of the Inferno.
Some days, Portia wished her husband hadn’t accepted the title. Neither cared for politics. They much preferred making clarion crystals sing. But successful patents on water filtration inventions had ennobled them, and like any mother, Portia only wanted the best for her newborn daughter.
“At least you will live, my darling,” Portia murmured as she stared at the sleeping infant in the crib. The nursery was lit only by the candle in her hand, the clock on the wall ticking toward the midnight hour.
At barely two days old, her daughter’s naming ceremony in the star temple had been postponed once Portia had read the broadsheet that morning. Cosian was a small city nestled in the dry Eastern Basin, far from the politicking of Ashion’s royal court in Amari. But bloodlines crisscrossed the continent the same way railroads did, and everything was connected. Some families who once called Cosian home now danced amongst the stars, their bodies wrapped in funeral shrouds at the crematorium.
The coup upon Ashion orchestrated by Daijal was not the first one attempted between either country, but it was the only successful one since the civil war. The attempts at reunification between the two countries over the decades always ended in bloodshed, but never so devastating as this. The shock hadn’t quite settled into the populace, but the horror of what had happened screamed forth from broadsheet headlines like sightings of revenants on cleansed land.
“Is she yet nameless?”
The unexpected voice of a stranger had Portia whirling around with a gasping cry, the candle shaking in her hand. She stared wide-eyed at the woman standing in her daughter’s nursery, trying to find her voice for a scream and discovering it missing. She clutched her throat with frantic fingers, capable of breathing but not speaking.
“None of that, if you please. Let us not wake your household,” the woman said.
“Too late. Let my wife go, magician,” Emmitt said harshly.
