“Good boy,” she says, then picks up the diary entry.
October 29th
The architecture of Starlake is not too dissimilar to Cygnus itself. Starlake is no cathedral, but it is sharp and grand and secret. It bends and twists in odd places, sits impossibly level upon uneven terrain. It looks as if it was not made by entirely mortal means. There is magic in its bones, eyes in its walls. I don’t know whose magic, whose eyes, but while we were there, I felt it everywhere, in every room.
In the sitting room, Cassius was draped like a blanket over the chaise, and Marcherie curled like a cat at my side. Alistair was in the kitchen mixing some strange brew with herbs he stole from Cygnus’s greenhouse. It smelled, to put it kindly, like shit. He balanced four cups across his palms and served us all. The smell was far worse up close, like shit AND death. Deathshit.
- What poison is this? Cassius asked.
- It’s tea made from mushrooms.
- It doesn’t smell like mushrooms.
- You don’t have to like it. You only have to drink it.
Alistair gulped it down with grace and poise, wiped the corners of his mouth with his pointer finger, and smiled. He made it look easy.
It! Was! Not!
- I have a good feeling about this, Marcherie said.
- Do not confuse hope with intuition, Cassius said.
- Open your heart, Cassius. Let a little hope in. It will be good for you, she told him.
And oh, after, after we all drank it down, it was glorious.
All of us, we shed our clothes and skin and the entirety of our mortal selves. We entered into the sublime, naked and wanting. We became one another. We leapt from the estate and the moon descended upon us. I kissed Marcherie and tasted the ocean. Alistair licked the dirt and grew flowers in the pit of his stomach. Marcherie’s voice halved and doubled and tripled, tangled in harmonies with herself.
Cassius was different from us all. On his knees, he begged the stars to break his curse.
- Can you hear me? he cried. Can you undo what you have done to me?
A star floated down toward him, catching on the wind like a feather, and just before falling into his grasp, it erupted. Like a dandelion, little white wishes exploded into the air.
He never got to touch the star. The look on his face then… I wondered if he had hoped too hard, if he had taken a lethal dose of it. Something in him died that night, and when we awoke in the morning, all bloody and bruised, we awoke alone.
No god.
No answers.
It did not work.
It was all for nothing.
Claudia checks her gold timepiece. Three hours to go until she gets to see the Astrologia wing for the first time. Perched on her balcony in the dwindling light, she sips Earl Grey tea and rereads the diary entries she’s found. She rewards herself at the end of each page with big bites of a stale cinnamon scone; she doesn’t feel like walking all the way back to the Treaty for a new one. The courtyard below is lovely, bottomed by a lick of red leaves. She wishes she had the artistic ability to paint it. Perhaps she should be like Odette and keep a diary, if only to remember it all.
She retrieves an empty journal and returns outside just as Cassius steps out onto the balcony below hers. Until now, she hadn’t realized her room was on top of his. She’ll start being a whole lot louder—stomping on the floor, dropping stacks of books, maybe even rearranging furniture. She can’t wait to disturb him. With his balcony positioned a bit to the left, Claudia only has to lean over her railing to look directly at him standing in the center.
The distance between her and her rival is only about ten or twelve feet. She can clearly see the vibrant blue of his eyes when he looks up at her. Claudia gives a polite wave. Cassius nods his chin almost imperceptibly. His robes are undone and he’s not wearing a shirt underneath. She can see teases of his sculpted torso.
They’re the only ones here, and their eye contact persists while a breeze carries fiery leaves through the air.
“Nice weather,” Claudia calls down to him.
“Not particularly.”
“I was just making conversation.”
