Page 8 of Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely (A Curse of Fallen Stars #1)

Lorel

It is dark.

I am cold.

I’m grounded in a void that I think must be the place we go when we’re sleeping. Still tethered to the world. Not dead then.

Not yet.

The dark moves, shifting like smoke against my skin. Soft. Gentle. I repress a shiver and open my eyes to a place absent of light. It presses in, overwhelming me.

The curse that rests in the cavity of my chest stirs. A candle gone out. A cat stretching lazily. I thought I was cold before, but the temperature drops again. Colder. Darker. Something brushes my jaw. Holds it tenderly.

A cold blooms in the back of my skull, running down my spine like ice.

You need to wake up now.

The thought is not mine. It isn’t even really a thought— more of a feeling. A stranger's presence in my mind, like nothing I’ve ever encountered.

I don’t want to wake up. I want to stay here in this darkness forever. It’s cool, and my skin is burning. It feels safe. It cradles me. I close my eyes and relax into it.

The new unknown presence reaches in, cutting through the void. It pushes aside the darkness, grasping at my face, my hair, my eyes. The curse inside me pushes against my chest and throat, trying to tear itself free. Like it has done once before.

The illusion of peace is torn apart as the strange forces tear at my flesh and rend through my bones. I try to scream. I remember that I can’t.

The cold voice speaks in my mind again.

I am not done with you yet.

I do not wake easily. I drag myself from the depths of sleep, clawing my way back to the world of living.

The room I wake in is not my own. The bed beneath me is less comfortable than my own and smells faintly of pine.

The walls are carved from a different stone, painted with delicate forest motifs and healing herbs.

The light is blessedly dim, so I am not blinded when I open my eyes.

I still struggle to make sense of what I’m seeing.

I can see her clearly, leaning over me. The Librarian.

Sila. She isn’t looking at my face, she’s staring at my exposed chest where my shift has been pulled down.

Her fingers rest against my skin, cool against the fever still burning within me.

They rest softly against the dark bruise-like mark.

It’s almost the span of a hand now. It has grown.

Her eyes flick to my face, and light catches the edges of a long, cruel blade. The top hovers above my chest. My breath catches, my heart kicking up again.

I blink, and there is no blade. Only Sila, with her fingers pressing gently into my skin. Her dark hair is a curtain flowing over one shoulder, her eyes are a little bright in the low light. My addled mind must have imagined it.

“Oh little mouse, what have you done?” she whispers. My skin still feels too hot, too sticky. I don’t understand her question. I don’t understand how she can see the curse mark when no one else has been able to.

Sila spreads her hand across my chest. She takes a deep breath, and then she’s tugging my shift back into place. How have I come to be lying in the infirmary again?

Blissful ignorance doesn’t last long. Trefor’s face, wide-eyed and staring in death, comes back to me. Blood. Paint. Poison. Someone had poisoned us. Oh mercy, Elris and Sybri. I try to push myself up and find myself being pushed back down.

“Your friends are safe,” Sila says. She looks quickly regretful as she corrects herself. “Illuminator Elris and Scribe Sybri are recovering. Scribe Trefor was not so lucky. There is nothing you can do for them now. You need to rest. I can feel the heat from your skin. Your fever still rages.”

I feel too hot.

“I know, little mouse. You are not well. Rest, I will watch over you,” Sila says softly.

Why?

I fumble the sign, but she seems to understand.

“Because I must,” Sila says, helping me to sit. Her arms come around me, pulling my body up to sitting. Her skin is so cool. It eases the way my flesh burns.

She helps me to drink some water and when the glass is empty, I roll towards her body without thinking.

My cheek rests against her shoulder and I sigh without a sound.

It feels so good. I must be truly out of my mind, but I can’t bring myself to pull away.

I’m falling back under again, the lovely shadows beckoning me to rest. Sila’s fingers comb through my hair.

“Lorel?” she murmurs. My eyelids are so heavy that I could not possibly open them. Sila lowers me gently down against the pillows. I sigh again, loud in the darkness, as the cold press of her body leaves me.

I drift on the edge of that darkness, waiting for it to take me under as it wraps around me. Presses cool against my skin. Pulls me closer as I go under, and do not need to think any longer.

At some point, the fever dreams break, crashing against the shore of my consciousness one last time before fading away.

I fall into a proper sleep then, dreamless and restful.

When I wake next, it is a gentler thing.

I am not in my own room, the stone above different from the stone my room is carved from, the sheets smelling faintly of pine.

I have a vague sense that I have woken here already, but it is hazy and edged in shadow. I think someone had held me.

I push myself up from the bed, any noise from the exercise stolen away by my silencing curse. Fuck, I hate that.

There is a familiar weariness in my limbs. I’d been a sickly child and the feeling in my body is no different from the many times I had woken from a fever in the past. The door to my room opens and my breath catches silently in my throat. My heart skips.

It is only Lune. She smiles at me, tired and raw around the edges, with dark shadows under her eyes that would rival a Librarian’s. I don’t know who I expected it to be.

“You’re awake,” she says. “Thank the King. This whole week has been a mess.” Lune drags a nearby stool to my bedside.

I shuffle back against the headboard, unable to hold myself up for much longer.

Lune leans in and pushes my hair back. Her fingers are warm against my skin.

“Your temperature is better. Elris and Sybri have been awake for a few days now, but you were the only one to take with a fever.” She cups my face with her hand, and I feel a slight tingle across my skin as Lune uses her magic.

Her eyes refocus on my face, and she smiles. “All clear.” The tension in her shoulders doesn’t entirely leave her, but she relaxes a little. “At least I won’t lose any more of you. I don’t think the Librarians would be very pleased with me if I did.”

Trefor . My throat burns at the memory. I close my eyes and rest my head against the headboard. Lune squeezes my shoulder. I’m too tired to cry. I wasn’t friends with Trefor, really, but we were all together day after day and he’d been a talented mark maker. What a foolish accident.

“I’ve only seen one Librarian this past week, and he was incensed. I fear for your paint master,” Lune says. She pours me a glass of water. I frown at her as she passes it to me. It’s cool against my skin, like the hands of the Librarian had been against my chest. As they held me.

Sila. The Librarian had been here when I had woken earlier.

“There’s pen and paper if you have questions,” Lune says. She knows I have questions.

Has Librarian Sila been here?

“Not since she brought you in,” says Lune. “She seems to always be there when trouble strikes you, doesn’t she?”

I chew on my lip. She does. She had found me after I had read the book.

She had known, even, that I had read the book.

Until the other day, I had never seen her before, but she seemed to know an awful lot about me.

I groan silently. I thought if I could just be my dull self she would grow bored with me, but I’ve had her attention for far longer than I realised. Fuck .

I’m doomed.

How is Paint Master Striger involved?

“The poison. It was in your paints. I guess the question is whether it was an accident or intentional,” says Lune.

My stomach turns at the thought. The Paint Master was an agreeable man, as far as people were allowed to be agreeable in the Library.

I couldn’t imagine him intentionally poisoning us, but nor could I imagine him being so careless.

This was beyond the games and torments of the Librarians, if what Lune said was true.

Librarians did not need excuses or traps if they wished to cause harm to a scribe.

There is a knock at the door, and another healer’s head pokes through the gap.

“Lune?” she whispers. “There’s another one.”

Lune’s face falls. “Can you find someone to bring Lorel something to eat? I’ll be out in a moment.”

Once the door closes, Lune puts her head in her hands. Her fingers press into her skin. I lift my pencil, but I don’t need to ask the question.

“Night cough,” she says through her fingers. “It started with the researchers, and now it has spread to the scribes and the papiers within the Library. It’s come up overnight in each of the other quarters too, and the afflicted are starting to fill up the infirmaries. It’s moving so fast.”

It has been years since an outbreak of night cough, but the memories of my parents as the cough tore through their bodies never left me.

It was believed that dark spirits, wretched enemies of the Dawn King, stole in to infect the afflicted while they slept.

True or not, it is no wonder I am in a separate room.

Lune takes a deep breath and lets it all out.

That must be nice. “Get some rest. I’ll be back when I can,” she says, standing.

She puffs up the pillows to make it easier for me to sit up.

She ignores any of my protests. It’s easy enough to do when she can’t hear them.

And then when she is gone, the chamber is silent.

There isn’t much to it. Just the bed, the wooden stool and the little table with the carafe and glass.

I wish I could be in my own room, in my own bed, but even that wouldn’t stop all the swirling thoughts. It’s like someone has opened one of the cliff side windows and sent papers flying about the room. Only each piece of paper is a thought, and it’s impossible to connect them as they wheel about.

The poisoning should have felt accidental. Entirely plausible that it could be a mistake. Only with how many times I had been in the infirmary these past weeks, it was getting harder to believe it was an accident.