I bow from the waist. The blade is lighter than I expected but nicks the thumb I skim along its surface. Wicked sharp. It also sparkles with a strange lustre, the same I glimpsed on Leilani’s skin when I found her by the fountain. The rumours are true, then: starstone was mixed with the ore when the Crescent Swords were forged.
‘You do me a great honour,’ I say, still not believing I’ve been raised to a Conclave member. If my mother could see me now…
‘No greater honour than you do me, in marrying Leilani,’ the King replies darkly. ‘Tonight, you become my son in name, as well as affection. I know you’re loyal, Astrophel, that I can trust you just as I trusted your father. And I need good men about me now. The starscribes speak of sky-signs, they suggest the Oralians mean to violate the Partition Treaties. And the Northern rebels are clamouring…’ There’s the faintest tremor in his voice as he threads a handsome sword-belt around my waist.
I sheathe the blade, settle it at my side. I like the weight. Its every clank an avowal to my belonging.
‘Sit,’ the King says, drawing out a chair. ‘We’ve important matters to discuss.’
I do as I’m bid. ‘I shan’t fail you.’
He extends a hand, shakes mine with a crushing grip. ‘I know you won’t.’ There’s almost a bite to his words, a silent threat. Unbidden, a chill skitters through me. But then he’s pouring two goblets of wine, chinking his to mine. ‘And that’s why I’m trusting you with the Throne.’
I look up. A slow smile eases over his face.
I take a small sip.
He sets down his goblet, steeples his fingers. ‘After the binding, I have such plans for you, Astrophel. A reward for agreeing to this match with all its associated’—he wrinkles his nose—‘complications.’
It’s ever this way with him. He never makes an outright attack on Leilani, but there’s often an undertone; droplets of spite, which mean nothing on their own but, over time, have poisoned me against her, reinforced the knowledge that she’s volatile, that the King’s relying on me and the success of our binding to prevent his daughter from bringing the Throne into disrepute.
‘It’s nothing I can’t manage, Radiance.’
‘Hyperion,’ he says, a gleam kindling in his eyes. ‘High time you call me by my first name. Am I not soon to be as a father to you?’
Father. A word so long desired, so long denied.
‘I hope you’ll find my schemes agreeable,’ Hyperion says, draining the last of his wine.
Father. I roll the word once more in my mind. A gesture worth more to me than all the Crescent Swords in the realm.
I’d agree to just about anything after that.
TAINTED ARTEFACT
LEILANI
IFUMBLEWITHthe Reliquary key, worm it inside the locking mechanism. It’s stiff, rusted from long disuse. A clunk. The door opens. Mildew lingers in the shadowed recesses of the octagonal chamber and I’m glad of my pomander as I creep inside. Even its acrid fug is preferable to this rank rot.
I cross to the large rose window where scrolling tendrils of starcrystal tracery, encasing thousands of shards of jewelled glass, are all whiskered with ice. Together they depict the sigils of The Nine – Estelia’s leading noble families. I force the smaller lancet casements on each side of it open, hoping to clear the air.
Try as I might, I can’t ignore the cabinet looming opposite the great window.
It’s why no one comes here anymore. Six tiny jars, six tiny hearts – my lost brothers and sisters. I press my fingernails into my palms until my mother’s phantom screams, the stench of her blood-soaked birthing sheets, fades away.
A quartz podium stands in the centre of the room. The reason I’m here. The replica Starlight Staff and Celestial Chain lie on a silvery cushion atop the pedestal, ready for tonight’s ceremonies. Even with diamonds in place of the starstones of the lost originals, Noelani’s relics are still things of beauty. I sketched them from memory countless times after Izarius first showed them to me. The idea of wielding the originals, of possessing the Sister-Stones, fragments of the fallen Wishing Star, horrified and thrilled me in equal measure. For it was these stones that allowed my ancestor to wield Shadow, to safely amplify her brandmagic, to perform the blood rite that purged the realms of shadow creatures.
Legend states the Sister-Stones were also capable of granting a single wish to their bearer, a consequence of the Elemagi’s bloodspell fusing with the desperate wishes of a broken heart which the Dawn Sister infused into her celestial patterns when she created Arcelia’s constellations. Nobody knows how Noelani spent her wish, only that the magic of the stones wasn’t powerful enough to revoke the Sickening. As a girl, when I dreamt of finding the lost relics, I imagined reuniting the Sister-Stones, using that wish to restore my mother back to health.
Surely, my father would forgive me after that. Love me as his daughter again…
My fingers inch towards the podium. Noelani’s artefacts are symbols of absolute power and I’ll finally get to hold them tonight… or the next best thing anyway. Ironic then, that I’ve never felt so powerless in all my life.
I snatch my hand back. The relics belong to a bygone age before the Sickening was unleashed, that brief interlude when carrying a brand was a virtue, not a curse.
But tonight, they’re not symbols of power, they’re instruments of oppression.
A curtain at the back of the Reliquary flutters in the icy draught now circling the room. Something stirs in my memory and curiosity coaxes me forwards. A portrait of the Elemagi once hung in the recess behind it. Given how rarely the Reliquary is used, there’s a chance it might have escaped my father’s purges.
