Page 31 of A Legacy of Stars (The Lost God Legacies)

31

STELLA

S tella stared into the mouth of the cave, feeling a mixture of dread and excitement. Her mother had stood before seventy-seven magical caves like this and walked into every one to retrieve a memory. This magic was in her blood, and it called to her, a curling sensation in her stomach urging her forward.

Still, she was apprehensive because this was not the same as the Gauntlet. That magic had been created by the witches of Olney to preserve balance. This magic was part of a contest that Endros was using as revenge against those who had bested him.

Stella glanced at the darkening sky and drew in a bracing breath. Then, she stepped into the cave. She snapped fire to her fingers effortlessly, letting it rise into a large flare as she walked deeper into the velvet darkness.

The cave stretched on longer than expected, until finally she came upon a large, wild patch of greenery. She knelt before it, brought the memory stone into her right hand, and drew one of the blades from her vest in the same hand. She let her flame flicker out on her left palm and drew the knife across her skin in the darkness.

The cut stung, and she hissed as she placed the memory stone in her bloody palm and squeezed a fist around it, letting the blood dribble into the plants. By feel, she carefully tucked the blade back into her vest. The minutes ticked by; the longer she waited, the more afraid she was that she’d done something wrong. Her knees were going numb against the dirt floor.

Finally, something illuminated in front of her. The first flicker of soft light burned into the flare of a fireplace. Stella squinted into the sudden brightness.

She was no longer in the dank cave. Now she was in a fire-lit room that smelled of smoke and something metallic.

Blood.

She glanced around the room as her eyes adjusted. Stella recognized the woodwork around the fireplace because she’d once asked her father if he could replicate it in their home. It was the only time he’d ever denied one of her requests outright, so it stuck with her. It was in a dining room in Castle Savero, where she’d had lunches on their winter holidays.

She turned and came face to face with her father, looking so young and beaten nearly to death. His shirt was torn and blood-soaked. His hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat and his brow was furrowed in pain.

Something was very wrong—Stella wasn’t watching the memory through her mother’s eyes with just the sensory experience and emotions. Her mother’s thoughts raced through her head as well. Usually there was a slight detachment to shared memories, even with all their senses, but this was so visceral that Stella felt the raw fear in her mother’s body as if it was her own.

The embodied memory was disorienting because Stella was so much shorter, seeing the world from a whole new angle in her mother’s eyes.

Strong arms dragged Cecilia away from Rainer, who was bloody and half-conscious, and King Xander, who was being held in his chair by two guards.

She glanced over her shoulder at her captor.

Stella didn’t know his face, though something about it was vaguely familiar—the dark hair and olive skin reminded her of King Xander, but this man had a cruel glint in his eyes that made him look nothing like the king.

Adrenaline coursed through her blood, making her tremble as the memory took over.

Tears streamed down her face as she was forced to bend over a table.

No, no, no, this wasn’t right. This couldn’t be real. Stella would have known if this had happened. But the terror in her body was real—the memory was clearly her mother’s. Stella squeezed her eyes closed, but it was useless. The vision remained.

“Don’t cry, love.” Vincent ground his hardness against her. “I have a feeling you’ll enjoy it.”

“Fuck you.” She jerked her head back, connecting with his cheek, and he stumbled, cursing.

“Hold her still. You’re going to pay for that, Cecilia,” he said as the guards held her more firmly against the table. Their hands were like iron bands on her arms.

Vincent brought the butt of his blade down on her left hand. A bone snapped, and she yelped involuntarily.

“That’s right. Let me hear those sweet little screams. Let your men enjoy your agony.”

She bit her lip as he brought the butt of his blade down again, refusing to give him the satisfaction.

“Yes, please defy me. It will make it so much more satisfying when I break you,” he whispered before shattering another bone. “Scream,” he commanded. She kept her mouth shut. “Scream, or I’ll give you a reason to really scream.”

Fear sliced Cecilia in half. Rainer tugged hard on the other side of their connection, but everything in her was ice-cold fear. She’d hoped he would be unconscious, but there he was trying to fight his way back to her, if only through their bond.

Vincent dropped to his knees, and she felt a blade slice into her left inner thigh. She screamed in surprise and pain.

She bucked wildly, and his hand slapped her ass hard again.

“Stop it, Cecilia.” Vincent’s angry whisper cut through her. “Stop moving! I’m not doing what you think. I’m marking your inner thigh with my initials so that every man who ever gets between these legs will know I was here. So that you’ll never forget. Now scream your fucking head off, or I really will fuck you.”

She couldn’t understand what was happening. Confusion clouded her mind until she felt another slice of the blade, and she screamed.

“More,” he threatened.

She screamed louder. She begged him to stop.

Stella was breathless. Terrified. Split between embodied memory and distant horror.

Rainer’s love surged through their bond, mixing with his fear and her pain.

You’re not alone , it seemed to say. That broke her. She sobbed because she didn’t want to be alone, but she didn’t want him to feel her fear and pain either.

It was so cruel. Vincent wanted Rainer and Xander to think he was hurting her, and he was, but not in the way any of them had expected. Her relief was short-lived when she realized that in not doing it now, he could keep the threat of it fresh for whatever lay ahead.

Time slowed, marked by the fiery slash of his blade on her thigh and the hysterical sobs that ripped out of her. She waited for the fear to leave her, but she couldn’t stop shaking.

By the time Vincent was done with his carving and yanked her shredded skirt back into place, Cecilia’s throat was ragged from screaming, but he hadn’t done what she was afraid he would.

She told herself that she’d been through worse, but it was cold comfort. She felt dazed and unable to concentrate. The first glimmer of her goddess power flickered to life in her chest, but she couldn’t focus her mind. The pain was too bright and her fear too biting. Her skin flashed hot, then cold.

Cecilia screamed.

Stella screamed, too, in embodied agony. In grief that was new to her but old to her mother. In terror that was so cold and left her breathless.

The light of the room faded into blackness, and Stella was vaguely aware of her body. Gasping sobs rattled through her as her senses returned. Her hip was numb against the cave floor, but she curled into a ball anyway and continued to sob.

Stella wanted to run. She wanted to escape the memory—rip it out like an invasive plant that had rooted down deep and was taking over. She wanted to bail out of the Games—to stop the horrible mess she’d set into motion.

She’d wanted her parents’ story so badly, but she’d not once considered there were such horrifying parts she didn’t know. The omission felt partly of betrayal, partly of love. It was no comfort to know her mother was whole and hale now.

Stella remembered moments when she was young—when Cecilia had crawled into Rainer’s lap, crying, and he sat heart-to-heart with her, trying to help her breathe. She’d watched her mother sitting alone on the swing in the backyard, her father watching from the window.

“I want Mama,” Stella had cried.

“Mama needs some time, Stell-bell. Let me tell you a story instead.”

She’d listened to his story and pretended to fall asleep, but she’d jump up as soon as he left the room and watch him go to her mother and whisper soothing words while Cecilia cried.

Stella remembered it so well because she’d spent so long trying to figure out which of her dolls would make her mother feel better that she’d fallen asleep in the process.

But she could not go to sleep now and wake up safe. She could not unknow what she now knew, and that was exactly what Endros had wanted. To punish her parents by making them relive this. To subject her to the same pain because there was no worse way to hurt a parent than to hurt their child.

Much as her mother made her crazy, Stella never doubted that she was deeply loved. She’d seen it in Cecilia’s teary eyes when she’d sent Stella off on this trip. Cecilia had known what she was sending her daughter into; she was already grieving it, but unable to speak a word of it.

Stella rolled onto her back and squeezed the warm memory stone in her blood-slicked palm. Her body was sore, as if she’d lived through that pain, the memory in her bones and muscles as much as her mind.

Endros wanted her to learn what it took to challenge powerful men. He wanted her to learn to be afraid.

Stella lay in the dirt, shattered between past and present, between her own memories that were sliding into context with the puzzle pieces she’d just received from her mother’s past.

She wanted to stand. To run from the horrible place where her life had just split between fantasy and reality. The perfect story, the history that had formed Stella, that had been so foundational in her life, was only half of a history. Her whole world was ruptured.

There were the stories her parents told and the ones that lived silently inside them.

Most were shared freely. Her father’s voice echoing through the hallway, joyful, teasing. “Let me tell you about the time your mother ? —”

But the story written in a mess of fine white scars on his back was the one he never told. She still remembered the shadow that drew over his face when she asked about them once when they were swimming in the sea. The memory sprang to mind with ease now.

“Papa, what happened to your back?”

He’d frowned, his eyes going hard. “That’s a grown-up story, Stell-bell. I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

He’d been out of sorts the rest of the morning until they walked back to the house and he’d disappeared into the backyard with her mother. Stella had watched them through the window—her father, her hero, his broad shoulders sagging as he curled into her mother. Cecilia holding him with the same tenderness with which she held her children when they had a scraped knee.

Stella wanted to ask so many times, but the moment never seemed right, and the question always froze on her tongue. She was more afraid of the stories they didn’t share freely than the expectation to live up to the ones they did.

Now she felt breathless, like just seeing that memory had broken something in her.

A new undeniable revelation rose in her mind after seeing the conviction in her father’s words, after seeing him fight to get to her mother, after seeing her mother’s love in trying to keep him from feeling her pain.

Suddenly, it was so clear. Stella had thrown herself into the Gauntlet Games, said she would walk across the fire to be with Arden. But that was not how Arden felt for her.

He didn’t fight for her even in the small ways. He’d taken the first detour on the course to their happily ever after, and she wanted to blame him. She wanted to say he was a selfish, vapid prince who only cared about himself.

But she knew the truth. Deep down, Arden did not love her the way she wanted to be loved—he might not even be capable of that kind of love. She’d let herself be blinded by his charm because she liked how it felt to be in his orbit, even if she was only occasionally at the center of it. And she had always known that. But surrendering that fantasy would have meant facing a reality in which she had no prospects and no idea if she’d ever meet someone who made her feel that way.

Stella had settled for less because she was afraid of having nothing. Wasn’t something better than nothing?

Now that she’d seen the real thing, it ripped open the aching wound at the center of her. Stella wasn’t special. She was just another silly girl living in a fairy tale in her head. There was no one coming to save her.

She sat on the dusty cave floor so long that her legs began to go numb, the cold creeping into her bones. Finally, she pushed to her feet and snapped fire to her fingertips. She had to scale back down the ridge before it was fully dark.

Footsteps pounded from somewhere behind her. Stella spun, drawing her short swords. She did not feel prepared for a fight, but her fire magic had been simmering beneath the surface the whole time she was in the memory and now she was made of rage and grief.

A small fire illuminated the cave, drawing closer by the second. The source of it rounded the corner and Stella was ready to pounce until she realized it was Teddy. All the fight leeched out of her as she sheathed her blades.

He looked haunted, his eyes wide but relieved, and his tunic torn.

“I saw the night Vincent invaded. I saw—” Teddy’s voice cracked, and he swallowed hard. “I saw the hardest choice my father ever had to make and felt the way he loathed himself for making it.”

They stood there suspended, uncertain of how to move forward in a world where they knew too many of their parents’ secrets. How were they supposed to hold this history they had no right to—these private hurts that their parents had tried to shield them from?

Stella couldn’t count how many times she’d told her mother how lucky she was to have found Rainer and how Cecilia would never understand what it was like to struggle to find someone to love.

“I didn’t know that happened. I—” Stella sucked in a breath. The grief was still alive. “I felt what my mom felt. I was there. I felt every broken bone. I felt the dagger cutting into her thigh—saw the sadistic way that the monster smiled at his handiwork when it was over. I felt?—”

Her voice broke, and a sob ripped up her throat. She’d felt their bond—the way her father had tried to force his way through, the way her mother had tried to prevent him from feeling something so awful. Something she had done a magnificent job of sheltering Stella from.

Teddy took a step toward her, and she flinched. If he was too gentle now, she would fall apart completely. She’d never get up off the cave floor.

Maybe it was the bond, but Teddy seemed to understand. He didn’t touch her like he thought she was fragile. He touched her like he knew she was strong.

He cupped Stella’s face firmly in his hands. “You did what you had to do and now you know you are stronger than that nightmare.”

“How did they survive this?” Stella said between sobs.

Teddy rubbed her back. “I don’t know. But they did, and you did too.”

She drew back and met his gaze. “What did you see? ”

Something like grief passed over his eyes. “I saw the choice my father had to make. I saw the night the kingdom fell to my uncle. He was so haunted. I heard your mother screaming.” A muscle ticked in Teddy’s jaw. “I think he’s doing this to punish them. I think Endros is finding a way to punish everyone who was involved in his downfall. Your mother is an obvious one, but the best way to get revenge on any mother is to go after their child.”

Stella felt sick just thinking about her foolishness. Her mother, pregnant for the first time in twenty-three years, trying to keep calm and collected while watching Stella fight for her life in a tournament. She’d been so reckless and selfish, throwing herself into this fight. So angry at Arden for not loving her more. So shaken by losing her status as the only biological child. It was idiotic to be jealous of a baby who hadn’t even been born yet. A baby she already loved. She hadn’t stopped to consider that Endros could be the gamemaker, because it had never happened before.

Teddy ran a hand through his hair. “I keep thinking about how he even seemed to be trying to humiliate Cato with this part of the challenge. Making him the map-keeper. The way he had the ancient witches who created the Gauntlet involved in this, creating this bastardization of the original Gauntlet designed just to hurt the competitors. Not to mention the magical cost to them.”

“Because of the memory stones?” Stella asked.

Teddy nodded. “Think about it. It takes a tremendous amount of magic to make memory stones. My father said it permanently robs the creator of some of their magic. Those witches had to make a stone for each of us. I’d say it’s an appropriate punishment to rob the women who sabotaged Endros’s plans by also robbing them of some of their power.”

Teddy’s theory made sense. Stella had been stunned to see a pile of memory stones. They were so rare and precious that she’d only seen one in her entire life—the one Cecilia had made for Rainer.

“And now with these memories, it feels clear he’s trying to haul all our parents’ most painful moments back to life. They had to relive them to put the memories into the stones. ”

“And then we had to suffer along with them,” Stella finished. It was diabolical. “It’s like this whole tournament is reminding everyone how terrifying he is.”

“That’s what I’m worried about. Even if he’s not working with the Sons of Endros, he’s still benefiting from their work, and from having a platform,” Teddy said.

Stella shuddered thinking about it. Centuries ago, the gods had lived among people, in mortal bodies, but greed and infighting and fearful humans forced most of them from the realm. The ensuing war that their parents had eventually brought to an end was a ripple effect of the end of the rule of gods in Olney and Argaria.

When the gods died, they ascended to the Otherworld and, while they could still visit and influence the mortal realm, their power was much more limited and they couldn’t stay corporeal for extended periods of time.

Endros’s power in the realm came from belief in him. His sudden presence as the gamemaker of the Gauntlet Games was a reminder to fear him, and the way he’d conducted the interrogation the other day, staying in corporeal form the entire time, was a flex of his strength. As far as Stella knew, no god had ever been born a second time into the realm of the living. But if Endros wanted to test if it was possible, he’d chosen a strategic time to do it.

“I know this is probably the last place you want to be, but I think we should rest here for the night,” Teddy said. “We’re only a few miles from the Muddled Mind and if we wake at first light, we’ll be home by nightfall tomorrow.” He studied her for a moment. “Is there something else bothering you?”

Stella couldn’t meet his eyes, but she shook her head. She was still trying to come to terms with the fact that her romance with Arden had been a fantasy she’d conjured out of loneliness. She wasn’t ready to admit to Teddy that he’d been right all along.