“Of course!”
Eimarille hugged him tight, squeezing her eyes against the sudden hint of wetness that dampened her lashes. But her voice was steady and calm when she said her goodbyes. “I will always love you. I promised you the world, and I will give it to you.”
He was too young, even at five years of age, to understand the lengths she had gone and would go to secure his future. She’d bided her time as a hostage ward in Daijal growing up, bowed to the pressure to marry a man she’d never loved in exchange for a chance to eradicate the Iverson bloodline and take their throne. Lisandro would carry onherbloodline, ever a Rourke, and she’d pave his road as best she could. Which meant leaving him behind in the safety of that suite of rooms and returning to the fight above, where Kote met her, grim-faced and determined, in the hall.
“What is it?” Eimarille asked.
“Amari is burning.”
Eimarille froze, some long-since-buried fear coming alive once more to grip at her. For a moment, she could smell smoke, could feel the ash that choked the air coating her skin. But it was all just a memory of that long-ago, frantic night when Innes had orchestrated her escape from the old palace and taken her west under the watchful, covetous eye of Daijal’s ambassador at the time.
Innes, who had been silent in the face of her prayers the past few days.
“Show me.”
Kote led her down the hallway and then another, taking her to a room that overlooked the forecourt of the palace. The tall windows let in weak afternoon sunlight, the balcony doors locked tight. Eimarille undid the lock and stepped outside, ignoring Kote’s protest. The air was on the chillier side, the breeze carrying with it the scent of gunpowder. Airships dotted the sky above the city, plumes of smoke rising in their wake throughout the city from bomb drops.
Eimarille breathed in the smell of smoke, the glow of fire eating through buildings in the city’s civic center, creeping ever closer. “Tell theKlovodto meet us at the starfire throne.”
“I’ll ready your escort,” Kote said.
It was time she faced the North Star’s decree. Eimarille had carried the Rourke bloodline since the day she was born, her name written in the royal genealogies. Aaralyn might favor another’s road, but Eimarille’s was still just as valid. She was Rourke, and she would put out that ever-burning starfire to take the throne.
It was what Innes had promised her, after all.
It was everything that was owed to her.
Thirteen
INNES
The starfire throne burned with his wife’s love, an inferno of determination that had seen them, once, leave a distant hell behind to escape into the stars. Aaralyn had yearned for freedom the same way he had. Innes had thought to instill that yearning in their children, thought of all the ones to carry his belief of progress forward into a new Age, it would be Eimarille.
“You’re grieving.”
Innes didn’t look away from the starfire throne, staring into its burning depths as the sounds of war echoed in his ears and in his memories, distant and half-forgotten as they were. “I wanted more than this for them. For us. You won’t let us have it.”
“Why can’t you see that we are home?”
The ache in Aaralyn’s voice finally had him turning around, facing her as he so rarely had since he’d claimed Daijal for himself. She wore well-worn trousers and a fitted short-sleeve blouse, a corset belt tight around her waist. The glittering lines of the constellation tattoo on her right arm burned like his own, a mark of this world that would never leave them.
Just as he knew he could never leave her, despite everything.
“Let Eimarille have the throne. Let her and our children have the world. Let the future be the stars once more. Let us befree,” he said.
Aaralyn stepped close, resting her hands on his shoulders, and he couldn’t push her away. She stared up at him, beautiful and forever young, eternal in this world and in the aether. He searched her eyes and found no recrimination for all that he’d done, all that he’d wanted, only a forgiveness that made him want to scream.
“Our children have always had this world. And you have always had me. Leave this road behind, husband. Come walk with me once more.” She raised a hand to cup his face, her touch as warm as the starfire at his back. “I have missed you. So have the others. Have you not missed us?”
He’d kept his distance, interacting with his fellow star gods only rarely over the last few centuries. Perhaps the isolation had driven him mad, but he would never know. The one constant—in his dreams and in his waking wanderings—had always been his guiding star.
Had always been his wife, even when she was not beside him.
“I won’t stop trying to reach the stars,” he said, pressing her hand to his face.
“If it happens, let it happen in some other Age, but it cannot happen this way. There is no peace in war, no salvation in conquering. Youknowthat.”
Innes closed his eyes, turning his face into her touch. “Have I become that which we fled from?”
