A War of Swallowed Stars Read online

  The feel of the arrow between those fingers is uncomfortable and unfamiliar, but at least I can get a firm grip on the shaft. I slide the arrow into place and try to do as Tyre said, experimentally tugging the bowstring back and forth to see how much force my fingers can generate. Not as much as they need to but more than the prosthesis.

  Ilara overcomes her discomfort with the gods’ presence and steps up in front of me to examine the position of my hand. “She’ll need to build up her strength in those fingers,” she says to Tyre.

  “Yes.” He nods and pats me on the shoulder. “Practice, Esmae.”

  “Can you do it?” I ask him. “It would be easier if I could see how it should be done.”

  Tyre takes the bow and arrow from me. He nocks the arrow effortlessly, letting me see exactly how his two fingers hold it in place. He doesn’t even look at the target as he lets the arrow fly.

  It doesn’t just hit the target. It shatters the target.

  “For fuck’s sake,” I say.

  Tyre grins, his eyes twinkling at me.

  Kirrin, leaning against a tree, rolls his eyes affectionately. “Any excuse to show off,” he says. “He was the archer, you know. Of the six of us.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask, curious.

  “In the Third War,” he says. “Haven’t my brother or sister told you this story? I suppose it falls to me, then. As I’m sure you know, the first gods were Bara, Ash, and Ness. For centuries, they lived in harmony with the garuda, the great beasts, the raksha demons”—he gives Laika a nod, as if to acknowledge their shared histories—“and with all the other celestial creatures.”

  “Even Ness?” I ask skeptically.

  Tyre smiles wryly. “As long as nothing threatened his immortality, Ness was perfectly pleasant. Or so we’ve been told.”

  “Then Bara, as the creator, birthed the other gods,” Kirrin goes on. “A hundred and ninety-seven of them. This was all before the mortal world came to be, of course. But the problem with introducing a hundred and ninety-seven new, arrogant, powerful celestial beings into a harmonious world is you now have a hundred and ninety-seven new ways in which things can go wrong. And some of the newer gods didn’t want to live in harmony with everyone else.”

  “And so, the First and Second Wars,” says Tyre.

  “My ancestors were not meek bystanders who got swept along into the conflict,” Laika offers, with a rueful laugh. “Our stories tell us that they riled the gods up every bit as much as they were riled.”

  Kirrin nods. “The First and Second Wars were ugly, but both were quickly suppressed. Bara, Ash, and Ness ordered Bara’s children to stand down. They did. Bara then created the mortal world, and humanity with it, in the hope that it would give her children something to care for and protect.” Sitting down cross-legged on the grass and making himself comfortable, Kirrin plucks a blade of grass and nibbles it. In a different tone, he goes on: “Now, at some point after the Second War, Ness discovered the prophecy that said his child would kill him. At first, he thought nothing of it. He and Ash had no intention of ever having children. But when you mate with stars as often as Ness did,” Kirrin shrugs, “there are, inevitably, consequences.”

  “I’m sure you know what happened after that,” Tyre says. “We were born, and swallowed, one after another. Amba, who was saved from that fate by the love of a great beast, survived, grew, and saved us in turn. Ness died and we lived.”

  “Which brings us to the Third War,” Kirrin says with a dramatic flourish. “It had been an inevitability since the end of the Second War and, about a hundred years after Ness’s death, its time had come. It was horrific. I’ll spare you the stories I could tell about the violence, cruelty, and ugliness on all sides.”

  “Weren’t you part of it?” I ask, thinking of what Max told me about the wars he fought in as Valin.

  “Not yet,” says Kirrin. “I should mention that, as Ness’s children, and therefore the cause of his death, the six of us were rejected or ignored by the other gods. Ash and Bara were kind to us, and Ash in particular saw to our education and training, but the other gods saw us only as the manifestation of the end of Ness. Gods, you see, are not supposed to die. They didn’t trust us. So when the Third War started, we had no part in it.”

  “And we had no interest in playing a part in it, either,” Tyre adds, “until it got so bad that Ash summoned us to step in.”

  “Monsters were loose in the celestial realms, conjured by gods, rakshas, and creatures on all sides,” Kirrin explains. “The war had started to poison the sacred rivers, the golden bridges, the holy glades, and even the stars. All the elements were out of balance. Even the mortal world, far removed from the celestial realms as it was, suffered from earthquakes, droughts, and frost. The thing about war, Esmae,” he says, looking me straight in the eye, “is not that it burns down palaces or turns cities to rubble. The real damage is what it does to the soul of every living thing it touches, whether they choose to be a part of it or not. That is the poison that rips apart the fragile fabric of the universe.”

  I’m starting to get the impression that Kirrin isn’t telling me this story just to explain how Tyre happens to be such a skilled archer.

  I don’t take the bait. “So Ash summoned you to do what, exactly? End the war?”

  “That was his hope,” says Kirrin. “We were his secret weapon, a force he had trained so that, when the time came, we would be able to put an end to the Third War. We were each given one of the ancient, powerful Seven. I had the seastaff, Thea had the chakra, Suya the sunspear, Amba the starsword, and Valin the trishula. And Tyre had the moonbow.” Kirrin waves a hand dramatically at his brother. “And lo, the archer.”

  “Did it work?” I ask, looking from one to the other.

  “No,” says Tyre. “It was hell. We fought gods, demons, and monsters for sixty years, but it was no use. We couldn’t stop it. Suya didn’t even try, after a while. He fell deeper into it instead, unable to resist the power the sunspear gave him.”

  “He’s always been a selfish bastard,” Kirrin informs me. “He’s a lot like our father.”

  “He can probably hear you, wherever he is,” I point out.

  “Good.”

  “Wait a minute,” says Ilara. “There were only six of you. Who wielded the seventh weapon of the Seven?”

  “Ah, yes,” says Kirrin. “The seventh and most powerful of all. The astra. Only Ash can wield it.”

  “And when we failed to stop the Third War, he did,” says Tyre. “The astra can destroy the universe in a blink. That’s its sacred purpose, to end the world when the world is past saving, so that Bara can start a new one. That’s why Ash is called the destroyer.”

  “I feel like I know this part of the story,” says Ilara, her eyes widening.

  I nod. “The Lotus Festival,” I say. “That’s this story, isn’t it?”

  “That’s the one,” says Kirrin. “Ash told us it had gone too far. He was going to use the astra to reset the universe. Only he and Bara would survive. And they would start again. So Amba, Valin, and Tyre knocked some sense into the heads of the other gods, and Thea and I pleaded with the raksha demons to see reason, and a hundred of us went to the Temple of Ashma. And we formed the Lotus defensive formation around the astra and told Ash that if he wanted to use it, he had to get past us first.”

  “And that was when Ash and Bara told you they had no intention of using the astra,” I finish for him. “They just wanted to see what you would choose when it really mattered.”

  “No, they already knew what we would choose,” Kirrin says. “They wanted us to see what we would choose when it really mattered.”

  “And you chose peace.”

  His eyes are dark and somber. “Yes. We chose peace.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Esmae

  We have to lure Sorsha back to our corner of the universe. While it would be safer for everyone else if I were to try to kill her far, far away, it would also be impossible: to re
ach her with the starsword, I’ll have to be outside the safety of a ship. Our battleground can’t be an uninhabitable planet or the vast, open reaches of space. It’ll have to be somewhere I can breathe.

  So Titania leaves Kali and flies into the dark, to find Sorsha and bring her back, one way or another.

  Meanwhile, I train. I also keep thinking about the story Ash told Max, Titania, and Amba about my father. You must decide for yourself what you can live with. Ash said that to my father, but I don’t know what it means. What was weighing so heavily on his conscience? And why was Ash’s answer to it to give him a sword and tell him that his daughter—that I—would one day carry it into battle?

  The only person who might be able to tell me anything about it is Rickard, so I go to see him. I take the starsword with me.

  “I knew it wasn’t an ordinary weapon the moment I laid eyes on it,” says Rickard, resting a reverent hand on the blade. His grandson Sebastian, who happened to be there when I arrived, peers over his shoulder, awed. “I guessed it was celestial, but I had no idea it was the starsword. And you’re telling me Ash gave this to your father?”

  “Let him borrow it, more like,” I say. “He told Amba, Max, and Titania that he wants me to return it once Sorsha’s no longer a threat.”

  Rickard breaks into a smile that lifts the exhaustion and age right off his face. “All these years, and I can still be surprised,” he marvels. “Extraordinary.”

  I let him examine the sword for a few minutes while I chat with Sebastian, who wants to show me pictures from the most recent trip he went on with his parents. As we rummage around Rickard’s desk in search of Sebastian’s tablet, I accidentally hit the button that unlocks a secret drawer.

  “Oooooooh,” Sebastian crows.

  “Cover your eyes, Sebastian!” I shriek dramatically. “You can’t see what’s in here!”

  “You shouldn’t be seeing what’s in there, either,” Rickard points out, rolling his eyes at our theatrics.

  “So this is where you keep the codes to trigger the base ship’s emergency shutdown,” I say, somewhat disappointed by this anticlimactic reveal. The numerical sequence is important, of course, but hardly interesting. Elvar, Guinne, and Max each have a copy, too, so I’ve seen it before. I move the papers aside, nosing around the rest of the drawer. “Oh, wait, there’s something else. Oh, my innocent eyes! There’s also a very wicked love letter in here.”

  “Get out of there,” Rickard huffs. “Keep your nose out of my love letters.”

  Sebastian, who has kept his eyes obediently shut the whole time, starts gagging.

  I shut the drawer, continue to rummage around the desk, and come up empty. But the search has given me an idea. Once Sebastian leaves and I’m alone with Rickard, I take the opportunity to bring up the subject of my father. I pour us both cups of hot tea, lacing it with sugar.

  “Do you think my father had hidden drawers in his desk?”

  “Yes,” says Rickard, looking amused. “Unfortunately, they were all emptied when Elvar inherited the desk and there wasn’t much interest in them. I’m afraid the hidden compartments in the monarch’s desk have been something of an open secret for generations.”

  So that’s not where I’ll find any of my father’s secrets. Disappointed, I try a different approach and gesture to the starsword. “Do you remember the day he got the sword?”

  He considers, settling deeper into his armchair. “I remember that he had a different sword one day, and then this the next. He wouldn’t answer any questions about it. I assumed it was a private matter between the gods and him, so I did not press it.”

  “Did he seem . . .” I fumble for the right words, considering I know so little. “Did he seem troubled at the time? Or maybe he seemed different after he got the sword?”

  Rickard frowns, taking a sip of his tea. “Cassel was troubled for a long time, Esmae. He hated that he had been named Queen Vanya’s heir over his brother, but he loved the kingdom too much to refuse. Being king, when he suspected his mother’s death was his fault and he felt like he’d stolen the throne from Elvar, was difficult for him. The sunny, charming boy of his youth was replaced by a man with a very heavy conscience.” There’s a pause, and then Rickard says regretfully, “Of course, with hindsight, I now know that he must have also been very troubled about what had happened to you.”

  “It wasn’t something that just happened to me,” I remind him. “They did it to me. At best, my father let it happen. At worst, he helped my mother bundle me into that pod and ship me out into space.”

  “Yes,” says Rickard, sighing. “Yes, they did that to you.” His brow clears. “Come to think of it, Cassel did seem different after he got the sword. Not straight away, but some weeks later. He seemed at peace for the first time in almost ten years. I often wondered if he had sensed his death coming and had accepted it, but of course we now know he was alive until recently, so—”

  “Wait,” I stop, my tea halfway to my mouth. “He died just weeks after he got the sword?”

  “Yes, so we believed at the time.”

  I stand up, suddenly too restless to stay in my chair. “Rickard, are you sure you don’t remember anything else about him during that time?”

  “Why this sudden interest in your father, Esmae?” Rickard narrows his eyes at me, too shrewdly. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  He watches me for a moment or two, and then says, “As a boy, Cassel kept journals. Perhaps he continued to do so as an adult. You may find what you’re looking for there.”

  “Thank you! Do you know where they are?”

  “The private family archives,” says Rickard, smiling a little as I bounce on the balls of my feet. “Elvar had all Cassel’s possessions stored safely there, along with anything your mother and brothers left behind when they were exiled.”

  I kiss him on the cheek and dart out of the room. I don’t know why this matters so much to me. There are far more important things to do right now, but I can’t seem to let this go. Maybe now that I know there is no future for my mother, brothers, and me, the only thing I have left of the family I was born to is my past with my father.

  Outside Rickard’s suite, I almost trip over Radha.

  “I was going to speak to him,” she says uncertainly. “But I can come back another time . . .”

  “I’m sure he’d appreciate a visit right now,” I tell her, patting her on the arm as I run past her.

  “Where are you going?” she calls after me, bewildered.

  The private family archives are just off the palace library, in a wing paneled with warm wood and decorated with exquisite paintings of constellations by Mina Rey, one of my ancestors. One of the senior librarians obviously has access to this wing, presumably to periodically check the temperature and make sure everything is accounted for, because they’ve also created a very useful filing system on the tablet mounted beside the door.

  A few clicks later, I know where to go. I take the spiral staircase up to the second floor of the wing, where I find the old, solid oak shelf holding the last tangible pieces of my father.

  The journals are there, dozens of them, and I check the dates in each one. One day, I’d like to read them all, but for now, I need to find the most recent ones, the ones he wrote right before he was presumed dead.

  But they’re not here. There are no journals covering the last six years of his life. The very last entry, halfway through the very last journal, is just a few words long.

  The twins will be born any day now.

  My father never wrote another word after that.

  Frustrated and confused (why did he stop writing that day? Did jettisoning his daughter into space traumatize him so deeply that he was never able to put his thoughts down on paper again?), I sit back against the opposite bookshelf and stare at my father’s possessions, willing an answer to materialize out of thin air.

  He was taken from Kali and hidden away in a woodcutter’s cottage on a mostl
y deserted planet just weeks after Ash gave him the starsword. Just weeks after Ash told him that only he could decide what he could live with.

  Rickard said he seemed more at peace than he had in years.

  What did you decide you couldn’t live with, Father?

  Maybe he was going to abdicate and let Elvar rule the kingdom. But who would have faked his death to stop him from doing that? Lord Selwyn would have been delighted! The only people who would lose something—my brothers—were too young to care. Not even my mother, I suspect, would have minded. As crown princes, my brothers were targets. There were kidnapping attempts, assassination attempts. To spare them that, my mother would probably have supported my father’s decision to abdicate. So there’s no one I can think of, not one soul, who had a reason to prevent King Cassel from handing the crown to his brother.

  So what else troubled my father? There was Queen Vanya’s death, of course, but there was nothing he could have done to put that right. There’d have been no reason for him to suddenly feel at peace.

  Which just leaves—

  Your daughter will carry this into battle one day.

  —me.

  My hands are unsteady as I turn, facing the bookshelf I was leaning against. If my father’s possessions couldn’t tell me anything, maybe someone else’s can.

  The small gold plaque on the side of the shelf is printed with the name KYRA REY.

  And on that shelf, inside a wooden box of private letters, I find the answer I was looking for.

  It’s a simple note, folded over and crammed between dozens of other letters and notes and envelopes, untouched and forgotten for years. Like many of the other notes in the box, it’s from my father, probably left on a bedside table or desk for my mother to find when she woke or returned. Unlike the other notes, which are a mixture of the mundane and the nauseatingly sweet, this one makes me reel.