Page 17 of Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely (A Curse of Fallen Stars #1)

Lorel

The remainder of the day is a drag. I place the death locket on the table and set about tidying up the mess I’ve made.

It hardly makes a difference. Sila’s room still looks like the burrow of a nesting dormouse.

In the end, I tidy up more than my share of the mess, likely destroying a complex system of organisation in the process.

The realisation that I’m not afraid of retribution is a sudden and shocking one.

I try to remind myself that she is dangerous, but it’s hard to do so standing here tucking all her things away.

I begin to understand why it is such a mess.

There’s simply not enough space for everything that exists in here.

I make up a plate for midday, even though it is long past time, and find myself wishing that Sila would just appear from the shadows so that I could get some answers out of her.

Two days ago I thought she had been locked up in the Library too long.

Two days later, I think I am the one who has taken leave of her senses.

I had thought what she’d told me was impossible, but it is me who is sitting here with a curse, unable to speak, after having faced multiple attempts to kill me.

If it wasn’t happening to me, I would have thought that was impossible, too.

I think I have been desperate to hold on to some semblance of normalcy, but it doesn’t exist anymore. Not for me.

The air stirs behind me and this time when her fingers thread through my hair and tug my head back gently, it doesn’t take me entirely unaware.

“Miss me, little mouse?” she says, looking down at me. She’s rather lovely from this angle. I shove that thought aside.

I’ve been waiting for you .

Her fingers comb through my hair with a slight tug, letting my hair drop away as she comes around to sit at the table with me. “What have you found today?”

Questions .

I nudge the box across the table, and Sila’s eyes widen in something like delight. “Oh, I haven’t seen this in an age.”

I can well believe it, given the state I had found it in. Her expression is soft as she takes the death locket and clicks it open.

“I have once again underestimated your tenacity.” She clicks it shut again and tucks it away. The gentle heartache in her eyes, the tightness in the corner of her mouth, goes with it.

I chew on my lip, a little nervous. I want this to go better than the last time she had revealed one of her secrets to me.

This is a death locket. For someone who was sacrificed. It’s you, isn’t it?

Sila holds my gaze, deathly still. I notice her shoulders do not rise and fall. She does not eat. She does not sleep. Her skin is as cold as ice. We were both more complicated than we looked, it seemed.

“It is,” she says slowly. Cautiously.

Then… how? How is it possible?

The silence stretches out between us.

Please. I want to know.

Sila blinks slowly. “How lovely it would be to hear you say that aloud,” she murmurs.

Her fingers run idly along the edge of the box.

“Your people have stories of dark spirits. Ghastly things that haunt the halls of the Citadel and bring sickness and famine in their wake. You also have tales of a ghoulish woman cast down by the Dawn King. I think these days you tell it that she wished to cover the world in darkness, but she was slain by the Dawn King and cast into her own shadows. When I was a girl, there was more to it. The woman was the Dawn King’s queen then, and he cast her out into her own Court, a pale imitation of the Suntide Court— reflecting the sun’s brilliance as the moon does.

It was necessary to keep the balance. Words I am sure you have heard before. ”

I had. Almost once a year, as the warmer months drew on and sickness took hold, or when the earth withheld her bounty. Blood will always correct the balance. That is what they say.

Sila is silent for a long moment.

“I went to the altar willingly. I had lost much that was dear to me, and I did not wish to lose anymore. At the time, I thought it was an honour. Now it was so long ago that I’m not sure what to make of it.

I drank the poison, and the Dawn King bled me over the altar.

” Sila tips her head back and in the low light, I can see the faintest line, usually hidden, running from ear to ear across her throat.

She tips her head back down, and her lovely face is unreadable.

“It was not so bad. Until I awoke in the Evenfall Court.”

The Queen’s court?

Sila smiles, a teacher pleased at her students' progress. “Exactly so,” she says, her brows creasing together as she continues. “I cannot recall the queen’s words exactly, only that I believe when the stories spoke of casting her out, they meant she was the first to be sacrificed on the altar. Through whatever bargain she and I struck, I was reborn as I am. As one of her wraith-like shadows. What remains of my first body still rests in the catacombs, in truth. She remade me anew.”

Then… how did you come to be in the Suntide Court?

“Did you not guess yet?”

You were sent to kill me… but I am not the first?

“Yes,” breathes Sila. “I am her eyes and ears in the Suntide Court, because my queen still has a grudge to settle with the man who murdered her. I have been here for centuries now. I have watched other wraiths fade, heard the stories change, seen Librarians born and been there when they died, but I persist and so she uses me to fulfil her wishes, to play her game.”

The light in Sila’s eyes is bright, fervent. It would be easy to believe her delusional, but I would be ignoring the evidence of my eyes. A bargain that shouldn’t have taken, struck. A true fae that lives on by the grace of a dead queen. A locket to mark the death of a woman who was once beloved.

But you let me live.

Because this is still the part that does not make sense to me.

Her expression softens again. “Of course I did. How could I not? It’s been a long, long time since I have cared whether someone lived or died. I do not wish to see you dead, Lorel.” She pauses, head tipping to one side, features suddenly impossibly sharp. “ Shit. ”

Sila’s hand snaps out and grabs my wrist, pulling me up harshly from the chair.

My knee catches and I curse silently as she drags me to her bedroom and shoves me through the door.

“Don’t move. Stay quiet— well, don’t knock nothing over.

” Her brows knit together for a moment. “Did you tidy— ? Oh, never mind.” She pulls the doors shut fast, leaving me sprawled on the floor, still trying to catch up.

Then I hear what Sila must have heard. The metallic ringing of metal on metal that I would associate with the Barracks, not the Library.

There is a sharp, heavy knock at the door.

Two solid thumps that seem intended to let anyone on the other side know that the caller is being polite.

Heavy enough to prove that if they wanted to, the door wouldn’t stand between them for very long.

I pull myself up to lean against the bedroom door, where an ancient keyhole gives me a clear view of the centre of the room.

Sila must be sitting at her desk. She makes no sound to acknowledge her visitor.

Two more thuds threaten the integrity of Sila’s door and Sila clicks her tongue, impatient.

“I’m sure you know how to use a door, Vika, so use it,” she says, sounding tired already. There’s a rough laugh from the other side of the door before it opens. The woman who steps through gives all the appearance of someone in a very cheerful mood. It only makes her more terrifying.

I thought Sila was tall. I thought Sila was strong.

This woman— Vika— makes Sila look like one of the Dawn King’s most delicate courtiers.

Her dark curly hair is cropped short, her eyebrows as dark and thick as Sila’s.

The planes of her face are as sharp and hard as she looks.

The smile on her face is genuine, but incapable, I think, of being anything but cruel.

Everything about her screams violence and every sensible bone in my body is screaming for me to get as far away from her as possible.

She turns her back to my hiding spot, and the emblem of the Dawnbound is splashed across it.

She’s not wearing a weapon, and I suspect it’s because she is the weapon.

“Is this all the welcome I get?” says Vika, kicking the door shut. “I return from a gruelling year at the Dawn King’s watch tower and you can’t even look up from your books for me?” Vika stands in the only vacant space in the middle of the rug. “Fuck’s sake Sila, this is a mess.”

“No one asked you,” says Sila. I can’t see her from the keyhole.

Vika sighs dramatically and does a turn about the room.

I duck down, out of sight of the keyhole and try not to move.

I do not want to be seen by her. Sila does not want me to be seen by her.

“Have you returned all this way just to interrupt me?”

“Of course I did,” says Vika, cheerfully. “Given the complete lack of a challenge in this insipid cesspit. By the queen Sila, do you know how many of these idiots I’ve watched kill themselves out there?”

Queen. Did that mean Vika was another wraith? She certainly appeared to be. It was a wonder that no one had noticed.

“So what is it, then? You have come to ask me to spar because you are bored? Because if so, you have wasted your time,” says Sila, sterner than the oldest Librarian.

Well, second oldest Librarian, maybe. How Vika is just standing there with Sila speaking to her like that, I’ll never know.

If she spoke to me like that, I would shrivel up and beg for death on the spot.

Her words are punctuated by the telltale sound of a blotter being used rather aggressively.

“Don’t be dull, Sila. You’ve got to give me something, otherwise I’ll be the one to start killing them,” Vika says. There’s a sound of restless movement, chain mail moving against itself.

“I’ll not be goaded or flattered into it, Vika. Not by the likes of you,” replies Sila.

“Fine. Then I will have to settle for a conversation with my oldest friend,” says Vika. An armchair creaks as Vika settles in.

Sila laughs, cold and indifferent. “When have you ever ended a conversation with something other than your fists?”

“Oh, well, I think I had one last week… hmm, maybe not.”

“Why are you really here, Vika?”

My heart thumps in my chest, and there is a burning in my thighs and calves as they begin to cramp. There’s not a chance on this dark earth that I’m going to move.

“Can I really not pay a friend a visit?” Vika almost sounds hurt. Almost.

“No,” says Sila. “You put us both at risk.”

Vika’s laugh is an unexpected and wholehearted bark of a thing.

“Oh, that’s very good,” she says. “The only thing dangerous in this place is the incredible stupidity of its population. Each of them more idiotic than the last. The captain they’ve placed me with, Sila.

When I tell you how much I have to restrain myself from crushing her pretty little face. ” Vika makes a noise of disgust.

“We all have trials to bear,” says Sila, drier than a neglected inkwell.

“Oh, and what of you, Sila? I hear your mark has disappeared.”

“Have you now?” Sila says icily.

“I’m surprised. How hard is it really to murder a sad little scribe? Don’t you Librarians do that daily, anyway?”

“You are testing my patience, Vika,” returns Sila.

“Look, I don’t care if you want to play with your food, Sila. Just make sure you finish the task. I don’t want to have to do it for you.” More movement.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” says Sila. I hold my breath, every muscle tense.

“I’m sure you do,” replies Vika.

“Don’t make threats you can’t keep, Vika.”

“I would never threaten a friend, Sila.” Restless footsteps come closer to the bedroom door and it is a good thing I can’t scream because when Vika next speaks, she sounds like she’s right next to me.

The curse in my chest stirs, and this time, it is alert.

Watchful. All raised hair and twitching tail. “I’m hurt you’d even think that.”

“Get out, Vika.”

“Fine,” says Vika, her footsteps moving away from the door again. “I was getting bored, anyway.”

Just imagining the look Sila must be sending her has me quailing and hoping that the ground will swallow me whole.

My heart continues to pound long after the door shuts behind her.

I jam my eyes shut, willing myself to calm down.

Not one, but two of them. So far . If I had any doubts left before, I have none now.