A War of Swallowed Stars Read online

  He probably just looks like a human man, I think, as I take a curious step closer. He is dressed like Ash, in a god’s battle gear. He is suspended in the air, as if on an invisible bed, his hands clasped on his chest and his eyes closed. Golden, leonine hair falls back from his forehead, and it’s the only thing about him that moves at all. In fact, he’s so still that I wonder if he’s dead, not asleep.

  He is what is causing the golden glow that I could see from the outer chamber. His entire body gives off that glow. It’s some kind of energy, but I have no idea what it is; my human brain can’t analyze its composition.

  “Titania?” Max’s voice echoes from the other chamber. “They’re done! Where did you go?”

  “I’m here!” I call back. “Come look!”

  “We are not supposed to enter that chamber,” I hear Amba protest.

  I wonder what that golden energy feels like. I reach out a hand to touch it, and a curious pulse hums over my unfamiliar human skin. Like a heartbeat.

  “Stop.”

  Ash’s voice is quiet but so icy that I freeze in place. He materializes beside me and, an instant later, without him so much as touching me, I find that I’m three steps away, the sleeper well out of reach.

  “Did you touch him?” Ash demands.

  “No!” I say at once. It’s not really a lie, is it? I touched the golden energy, not the sleeper.

  I hear Max and Amba come in behind me and then stop abruptly. When neither of them speaks, I turn around to see why and find them both staring at the sleeper. Amba is pale with an expression I have never seen on her face before.

  It’s terror.

  Max’s voice cracks. “Isn’t that . . .”

  “Yes,” says Ash.

  Amba trembles with fear and fury. “How is he here? Why is he here?”

  “Who is it?” I ask, alarmed. What kind of creature can put that expression on the face of a former war goddess?

  Max swallows. He still hasn’t taken his eyes off the sleeper. “That’s Ness,” he says, and it all makes sense.

  Ness.

  Their father.

  “But you killed Ness,” I say to Amba, mystified.

  Amba’s lips move slightly, as if in a silent prayer, before she says, “I did kill him. I cut him open to save the others.”

  Max puts a hand on her shoulder to steady her. His eyes flash with rage. “Why is he here? Is he alive?”

  Ash nods. “I saved him, after the battle,” he says. “It took the combined power of Bara and I to keep him alive. He has slept here ever since.”

  “Why?” Max growls. “You know what he did to us. You know it went against all our laws. Why would you save him?”

  Ash sighs. “Because before he lost himself, he was my brother. In the beginning, before the age of the gods, there were just three of us. It was a lonely existence. All Bara, Ness, and I had was each other. So when he fell in that battle, we brought him here and healed him. We have kept him alive, and peaceful, and asleep.”

  “He’s been asleep for hundreds of years?” I ask incredulously. “What do you plan to do with him?”

  “I do not plan to do anything with him,” says Ash quietly. “I know I cannot let him wake, because I know what he is capable of. I also know he cannot sleep for all of eternity, but I find I have not yet been able to let him go.”

  Amba turns sharply and walks out of the chamber. Max watches her go but turns back to Ash rather than follow her. “Swear it,” he says. “Swear you’ll never wake him.”

  “You have no right to ask that of me.”

  “You had to no right to do this in the first place!”

  Lightning flares up around Ash, and for an instant it seems to crackle inside his eyes, too, but then he closes his eyes and it dies down. “Very well. I swear it.”

  Max clenches his jaw. “And the rest? Will you stay out of it?”

  Stay out of what?

  “That is not in my hands,” Ash says grimly. “Tell Esmae Rey to return the starsword to me when Sorsha is gone. What happens after that will depend on her.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Esmae

  I wake with a knife in my left hand.

  A minute ago, I was dying in the snow and Leila Saka was about to finish the job. Now I’m alive, awake, armed, and Leila Saka is nowhere to be seen.

  I can’t see much else, either. I’m not in the snow anymore, but wherever this is, it’s dark.

  “Shhh,” a voice hisses in my ear, a hand over my mouth as a precaution. Both the voice and the hand are my brother Bear’s. “Hide it.”

  I barely have time to clumsily shove the knife up my sleeve before there’s a clatter of footsteps somewhere close. Bear pulls his hand away from my mouth and stands, moving a few paces away, just as a door slams open and mellow gold lamplight floods the room.

  I squeeze my eyes shut against the light, but it’s not just the light that hurts. Everything hurts, just like it did in the snow.

  “So.” My mother’s cold, furious voice makes my eyes fly open. “It’s true. You’ve had her here this whole time.”

  I turn my head as much as I can bear. I seem to be in a room so small it’s barely more than a broom cupboard, and it may in fact be a broom cupboard. I’m on a small, hard cot. Bear is beside the cot, his arms over his chest and a mixture of guilt and defiance on his face. My mother stands just inside the open doorway, her eyes flicking over me in furious disbelief. Alexi is beside her, his ears red, and just behind them is Leila Saka.

  “How could you both be so stupid?” My mother’s eyes dart from Alexi to Bear and back once more. “The whole of Kali has spent the last month and a half scouring every corner of the galaxy for her, and you’ve had her hidden in a closet in the palace of a king who was extraordinarily generous in taking us in after Arcadia burned. You know full well that after all the lies, and Sorsha, we’re on thin ice with King Ralf. He swore to Max that he doesn’t know where she is. He might just throw us out if he finds out we’ve been hiding her right under his nose!”

  A month and a half? Shock sends a bolt of heat right into my fingertips. I’ve been here for weeks?

  “I told you, Mother,” Alexi says, his ears still red, “she’s not a threat to us. We’ve had her in stasis the whole time.”

  I was in stasis for a month and a half. Bile rises in my throat, the bitter taste of rage. They’ve kept me in a closet for weeks, frozen in time like a princess in a bloody fairytale.

  “She doesn’t look like she’s in stasis right now!”

  Alex cuts a look at Bear, who flushes even redder. “It must have worn off,” Alex says quietly.

  It’s not hard to work out what must have happened. For whatever reason, either Bear or Alexi or both of them found General Saka with me in the woods and prevented her from killing me. Then my brothers put me in stasis and hid me here for weeks. Weeks. How they got Leila to keep it secret from our mother is beyond me, but maybe she finally cracked. Either way, our mother must have found out just minutes ago. As soon as he knew she knew, Bear must have rushed here and pulled me out of stasis. And slipped me the knife. To give me a chance.

  That’s why it feels like not much time has passed since the woods. My filthy, bloody clothes, my sore throat, my jagged scars, the blood in my hair, the broken bone in my leg—they were all frozen in time, too, and unfroze when I did.

  I don’t move. I don’t even know if I can get up, but either way, it’s better they think I can’t.

  “What I cannot understand,” my mother goes on, not even looking at me, “is why. Why is she here? Why is she alive?”

  “Well, we couldn’t let her die, could we?” Bear says, bewildered. “She’s our sister.”

  “She’ll be the death of us all,” our mother snaps. “You know what Kirrin said. She’ll destroy your brother. She burned our city to the ground! What more does she have to do before you see how dangerous she is?”

  “I know what she did,” Alex snaps back. Pain and anger simmer in his voice
.

  When I exposed the truth about Arcadia, and then took his city from him, I hurt him badly. I knew I would. I wanted to.

  “She can’t do anything to us anymore,” Alex goes on. “She’s our prisoner, and no one knows where she is. We used shielding technology on the closet to make sure even the gods can’t find her. We can put her back in stasis, and she can stay here until the war is over. And with Esmae out of the picture, you know we’ll win.”

  I wish I’d hurt him more.

  And yet, I’m alive. He could have killed me, but he didn’t.

  “It’s too risky,” our mother says. “She cannot be allowed to live.”

  Before Alex can speak, Bear cuts in. “What happened to her thumb?” he demands. “What happened to her throat?”

  Alex glances at my thumb, and then, as if he can’t help himself, his eyes meet mine. I see so much there. Pain. Fury. Pity.

  Hope.

  He knows that if it ever came to it, he could beat me now.

  “Yes,” our mother says, calm and cold. “I cut her thumb off. I cut her throat. She’d be dead if Amba hadn’t stopped me before I could finish.”

  Bear makes a choked sound.

  “Don’t look so surprised,” she says. “I killed her once, didn’t I? Well, I killed Prince Rama, but it was supposed to be her. Neither of you made a fuss then.”

  Bear explodes. “Alex almost banished you from Arcadia!”

  “But he didn’t. Because I am your mother and I have spent your entire lives trying to keep you both safe from the enemies that hound your every step. You both knew then, as you know now, that there is no line I will not cross and no promise I won’t break if it means protecting you. I can live with your hate, Bear. I can live with that look on your face. But I cannot live with your death or your brother’s.”

  Unable to hold her gaze, Bear looks down, shuffling his feet. Satisfied that she’s made her point, my mother turns to Alex. “If you cannot do it, step aside and Leila will.”

  “She’s a prisoner of war, and our family,” he says stiffly. “There would be no honor in killing her.”

  “This is about survival, not honor,” our mother snaps. “And if you had accepted that a year ago, and abandoned this compulsive need you have to be liked, you would have Titania and Kali by now.”

  Alex’s jaw hardens. “The fact that Bear and I are liked has kept us alive.”

  “Consider what she could do if she’s allowed to live!”

  “She’s our prisoner,” he repeats. “She has no power, no army. She doesn’t even have her bow thumb. She can’t hurt us.”

  I stay quiet, the knife in my sleeve a cold, solid weight against my skin. I will play this game of Warlords to the very end.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Titania

  Sorsha’s getting closer. When she broke free of Kirrin’s control, the first thing she did was fly as far across space as she could get before her ravenous, endless appetite took over. There, millions of light-years away, in a galaxy without sentient life, she started devouring stars, holding out as long as possible before feeding on the next, and then the next one after that.

  But she’s grieving, hungry, and she’s going to run out of stars. With each one she devours, she gets just a little closer to home.

  I haven’t told anyone, but I’ve processed the numbers. I think we have weeks. Two or three months, at most, before it will be past the point where our galaxy can be saved.

  We’ve reached something of a stalemate, Sorsha and I. We cannot destroy each other, so we’ve stopped trying. Instead, we fly side by side across miles of stars, darkness, and bright, milky nebulas. A beast and a spaceship. Equals. I don’t think either of us has that in anyone else.

  You deserve better than this, I tell her. I send the words out as pulses, small disruptions in the ether.

  My future is death, she replies. It must be mine, or it will be everyone else’s.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Esmae

  They don’t put me back in stasis immediately. Bear stays in the closet with me while Alex, my mother, and General Saka continue to argue outside the closed door. His face turns redder and redder as the sound of their voices debating my right to live filters in. Then he lets out a huff and sits down on my cot, almost crushing my leg.

  I inch it out of the way, drag myself up the wall so that I’m at least sitting up a little, and try to ignore that even the smallest movement is agony.

  The sight of my giant of a brother, hunched awkwardly on the edge of a cot in a room the size of a shoebox, would be funny under any other circumstances. I watch him and wait.

  He stares at the floor, and his voice is gruff as he says, “We loved Arcadia.”

  “And?” I ask, my voice creaking like an old floorboard.

  Bear glances at me, both angry and guilty. “You didn’t have to take it from us.”

  “Oh, you think I went too far?” I laugh, a jagged sound that hurts all the way down to my toes. “Did you think I owed you more than that?”

  “I was nice to you,” he sputters, his temper flaring. “I warned you about the poison, I warned you about Max and the Empty Moon, I just gave you a knife—”

  “Are we making lists? Because I have one for you, baby brother. You lied to me about Arcadia. You lied to me about Rama. You warned me about the poison, but let our mother do what she wanted anyway. You warned me about Max and the Empty Moon, but let Alex and Kirrin keep him imprisoned there anyway. You gave me a knife, while keeping me prisoner.”

  “I didn’t want to do any of that, but I promised—”

  “You could have walked away if you didn’t want to do it. You could refuse to have any part in this and walk away right now.”

  Bear opens and closes his mouth, shocked. “They’re my family.”

  “So am I!”

  He flinches. “I know that.”

  “But you never choose me, do you?” I croak. “Our mother murdered a boy, and you covered for her. She and Leila Saka have both almost killed me, and you’ve stuck by them. You and Alex could have come back to Kali and shared the crown with Elvar months ago, and none of that would have happened, but Alex wanted it to be all or nothing, and you agreed. Whenever it comes down to it, Bear, you choose them. You choose them every time.”

  “They’re my family,” he says again, his eyes shining with tears.

  “I know,” I say quietly. “I get that. I just don’t get how, after all that, you’re surprised that when I held a lit match over your city, I didn’t choose you.”

  His shoulders hunch even more, curling around himself like he thinks they can block out what I’m saying.

  Pain rattles inside my skull, a sharp, persistent pulse that makes it very hard to focus on anything else, but I try anyway. I map the different points of pain across my body, starting with my head and charting it all the way down to my leg: a ropey scar across my throat, a hand with no thumb, a dislocated shoulder, a sticky head wound, a leg that won’t take any weight. And not that I care much, but I suspect my hair is a wild, bloody, knotted mess.

  Unexpectedly, I laugh, startling Bear. Did I really compare myself to the princess in a fairytale? I’m more like the wicked witch.

  Only in this fairytale, the witch is going to win.

  I know what I’ve done. It’s taken me a long time to come to terms with the uglier parts of me, but I’m not afraid of them anymore. Why should I be? They’ll win this war for me.

  And I will win. I’m my family’s prisoner, a hair’s breadth from my own mother finding a way to kill me, but I’m not done. I exposed my brothers’ lies, cut down several hundred of their army, destroyed their city. Do they really think that evens out what they’ve done? The duel my brother promised he wouldn’t ask for, the lies they told under the yellow trees, Rama’s murder, the ambush in Shloka, Max and the Empty Moon, Sorsha, Amba’s fall, my mother’s knife at my throat? What is the loss of a city and a reputation when you measure it against a lie, a thumb, a goddess, a best
friend?

  “I’m sorry.” Bear says it very quietly, and the ugly shadows retreat. “It’s true, I made my choice. I don’t get to kick up a fuss because you made yours.”

  Somewhere, there must be a world where another Esmae and another Bear are on the same side. Where they run barefoot across the courtyards of their home, laughing. They know nothing of war, or grief, or rage.

  I want to reach across the universe to that other Esmae, in that other world, and tell her to hold on tight to him. Because he’s her brother, and he’s precious, and hers is the only world where she gets to keep him.

  “I’m sorry about your tree,” I hear myself say.

  He blinks. “My tree?”

  “Your beautiful, impossible mango tree.” It bore fruit year-round, even in the snow of Arcadia. “Amba told me a nice girl gave it to you.”

  “Oh.” For the first time, a little of the sunshine creeps back into Bear’s face, and he smiles. He reaches into the pocket of his jacket and pulls out a small tablet. “Here,” he goes on, swiping across the screen and then turning it around to face me. “This is a video I took of the ruins in Arcadia yesterday. Look.”

  At first all I see is smoke and ash of the almost-city. Then, in the gray, I see something bright. Golden and green.

  A tree.

  “It survived,” I whisper.

  “It survived,” he echoes.

  For some reason, my eyes fill with tears. It shouldn’t matter, but the tree in the middle of the ruins, still bright, still standing, feels like it matters very much.

  It feels like hope.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Titania

  It’s been two days since we returned from Ashma, and there is a storm on the way. It is a very human sensation, this nebulous awareness that something is about to break.

  Amba, Max, and Sybilla are in Amba’s suite of rooms. As usual, I’m hovering outside the window, connected to them by their earpieces. Sybilla stalks up and down the room, while Amba speaks to her from an armchair by the fireplace. Max stands close by, his hands in his pockets, staring into the fire with his back to the room.