“What happened, Suraya? Why did you attack him? Did he say something to you?”
“I didn’t attack him,” I blurt out, and hesitate. He’s going to think I’m foolish or irrational, but then I shake my head—after all, he’s also seen me vaporize people with light from my bare hands. “He didn’t say anything. It was me. I thought... he was someone else. I mean, Isawsomeone else, sitting opposite us.”
He frowns. “Who?”
“One minute, it was an empty seat,” I say, searching for the right words, “and the next it was an old crone going on about the stars and my destiny. I must have imagined it or... or hallucinated, because the next thing I know, I was in the man’s face and his fingers were clamped around my throat.”
“It was a vision?”
I swallow hard and nod. “She called me the Starkeeper, too.”
Roshan stares, and the stark look on his face makes me quake inside, almost as if, until that very moment, he hadn’t truly believed the validity of the prophecy himself. His gaze falls to my outstretched hands, and I snatch them back to fold my arms across my chest, tucking the damnable things out of sight in my armpits.
“So it is you...” he begins.
“Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong,” I interject harshly, shaking my head. “I’m not that. Ican’tbe that.”
Without replying, he reaches out, his fingers sketching a trail down my forearm to my wrist. The pads of his fingers are warm to the touch and make a shiver chase up my skin. Gently, he unfolds each of my arms. He doesn’t touch my palm but cradles the back of my left hand in his and lifts it between us. His eyes travel the crisscrossing lines there. “How else do you explain these and what you can do? That wasmagic,Suraya. You were born with akasha in your blood.”
We stare at each other in fraught silence.
He waits for me to say something, but my heart has climbed into my throat, throttling any ability to speak. “I’ve only ever heard the wordStarkeeperin the story my mother told me, just like yours did,” he says after a few moments. “He was the first in the Order of the Magi.”
I exhale hard. “I’m not a fucking magi, Roshan. The Order of the Magi isextinct. Killed off by your ancestor. Akasha doesn’t exist anymore, at least not inside human bodies in Oryndhr!”
“Then how do you explain what you can do? Or those markings?” He eyes me, a pointed gaze falling to my forearms where the silvery inscriptions had glowed. All that remains now is faint script like pale vines.
“Droonish brain fever?”
My weak joke falls flat. I falter for a second, recalling what Javed had said about an illusion and my mother’s protective runes. Had she somehow suppressed the...thing... inside of me? But how? Mama had also been... no one. The memory of Amma’s furtive words about her sister’s protections comes back to haunt me. Maybe she had akasha, too, and whatever she’d done to safeguard me, the cost had been steep. And now, I’m exposed.
“You said this was all planned,” I say, remembering how I’d tried to figure out the rhyme or reason behind the selection. “How did Javed decide who to invite?”
“The invitations went out to women with very specific birth charts.”
I blink. Birth charts are the astrological guides created when children are born. My mother had shown me mine. At birth, the position of the stars, the moon, and the sun foretell a person’s future. Thousands of years ago, seers and wise men used them to translate the divine intentions of the gods. Like chiromancy, they predicted facets of life, marriage, work, dharma, and karma.
However, no two people could have the exact same chart.
I exhale a weak breath. “What do the birth charts have to do with it? Every woman invited would have a different one.”
“The sidereal zodiac would have shown the constellations at a precise moment in time when the Starkeeper’s soul ignited. The chosen had to be of a certain age, born on the night of a blood moon twenty-five years ago.” He lets out a slow exhale. “They’re marked by the magic of the four Royal Stars. Like your runes.”
I feel cold, my breath stuttering. Birth records wouldn’t have been hard to get, especially for someone like the prince. “In Kaldari, Javed said the queen knew someone powerful had cast an illusion on me. He said my mother’s name.”
“Nasrin,” Roshan says softly. “She would have been a magi, too.”
I slump back onto the seat and shake my head over and over, even though I’d pondered the same a minute ago. It’s too much. “No. She was normal and wary of jadu crystals. Magicless like everyone else in the realm.”
“It’s a matrilineal trait, Suraya.”
Wasthatwhy my parents had left Kaldari? My head is swimming. If my mother had been a magi, wouldn’t she have been able to heal herself when she was sick? Wouldn’t I haveknown? I desperately wish my father and Amma were here, so I could ask them the questions racing through my brain and demand they tell me the truth.
An icy shiver snatches me in its grasp. Javed also invokedFero’sname when he’d spoken of the magic. The ancient god of death. Irecall Cyrill’s ranting words in the inn. His warnings about the crown prince seem so long ago. Had he been right all along? Is Javed secretly an arcanist, worshipping old gods?
“What happened to the original Starkeeper?” I ask finally.
Roshan lifts one shoulder in a shrug. “Some say the Royal Stars reclaimed him. Others say that he still lives, watching over the fate of the realm, waiting for when he”—he glances at me—“or she is needed again. Other stories claim that he married a mortal and lived out his days in peace.” His eyes hold mine. “I’ve heard it told that descendants from that union received his gifts, but they were never forced to awaken.” Roshan grasps both my palms without hesitation. His fingers interlace with mine, and I catch my breath at the significance—the innate trust—of the action. Even if I haven’t admitted to trusting him, he’s showing thathetrustsme. “Until now. Until you, Suraya.”
