Page 10

A FONDNESS FOR STARS

Ember

E mber stood absolutely still in the middle of the bed chamber.

With the door closed behind her, something like peace had draped itself over her shoulders, and it seemed a shame to move and destroy her first moment of solitude since that cell in the dregs of Ankerick.

Moonlight from the room’s one large window streamed in, silver just like the new cuff that encircled her wrist, but that wasn’t what held her to the spot.

The room…it was…too nice .

She first waited to see if she made a mistake, but the demon hadn’t shouted or come storming up the stairs to drag her into some other cramped, musty, locked space. Just the thought had made her heart race and breath come short, but both eased in the anticipatory quiet.

Maybe this is where I’m meant to be.

Well, where he meant to have me go.

Yet she remained fixed to the chamber’s center because it was still too nice .

Not necessarily extravagant , though, and with that, her shoulders relaxed.

The estates Ember had worked in were always bustling with staff and filled with frivolous, expensive, breakable things.

The demon’s home had high ceilings, a wide staircase and hall, and it was remarkably clean, but there were no gold-framed portraits of elaborately dressed nobles on the walls nor intricately carved finials that attracted all manner of dust lining the banister.

When she’d been escorted up the flat stones that carved a path to the cottage’s door, she was sure she was being taken to the wrong place, not that anyone had told her where she was going.

The cottage sat back from the road surrounded by a stone fence covered in deep blue moss.

There were others like it dotting the gently rolling earth, but so much space between.

She hadn’t been able to look out the window on the ride, but this part of the demon city was quiet and reminded her of Lady Adine’s country manor.

The briefest smile played on her lips before she remembered the elderly woman’s passing and the turmoil that had come after.

And anyway, the Achreos Barrens were too bizarre and dangerous to really be a comfort, the grass and trees all shrouded under darkness, their muted colors otherworldly, the wooded outcropping past the houses dense and foreboding.

Ember was indoors, though, a solid stone wall between her and the suspicious bluey-purple bushes that sprawled under the front window, and as much as she would have liked to just stand in one spot forever, she knew eventually she would have to move.

Pain prickled in her feet as she broke herself of her stillness, but with a small grimace, she managed not to limp as she walked to the bed.

It filled most of the room, the mattress raised so that she would have to hop to get in, but then everything in the demon’s home seemed just a few inches too big.

She smoothed her palm over the linens and quietly gasped at the softness, pressing her other hand alongside the first. Despite washing and folding so many expensive blankets, she couldn’t place the fibers this had been woven from, but it was exquisite.

Deep sapphire and shimmering under the moonlight, she could only guess one of those odd-colored plants produced such material, but softness?

From the Achreos Barrens? Well, no, they called it… Heck .

Ember snorted a laugh. At least the ridiculousness of its name could temporarily muzzle the fear.

She lifted her hands to her face, but pain didn’t sear through her palms, not like when she had run through the surrounding forest of this place. But dirt did stain the creases of her finger joints.

You are filthy.

Embarrassment and anger flooded her veins.

Fuck you too, demon.

But he was right, and Ember was used to being filthy anyway.

Scullery maids rose with the dawn to scrub floors and pluck fowl and scour stoves, and it was only when dusk came that they had a chance to clean themselves of the messes they made sure no one else had to endure.

But there was no dawn nor dusk here, she had learned, and so she might as well get to it.

She pulled off the oversized and nearly worn-through boots she’d been given at the infirmary, more fiery pain in her soles as she walked barefoot to the room’s other door.

A washroom lay beyond, the one the demon had said was hers alone, but it just couldn’t be .

The small sound that escaped her lips rang against the stone inside as she marveled at the basins—two of them, one for hands and one big enough for a body—and the indoor privy.

The manors had rooms like this, but they were only for the families and their guests—servants had shared washtubs if they were lucky and outhouses that just the thought of visiting on a winter’s night made the urge to use one disappear.

She hurried to the biggest basin, and when she touched the faucet, water immediately poured out with a flash of blue light.

She pulled back as if she’d been bitten, but there was no pain, only a symbol carved into the metal a bit like the one on her cuff.

Some of the manors she worked in had plumbing, others required water to be carried in from a well, and sorcery was rumored to power the wealthiest estates, but nothing she had experienced was as easy as this, and when steam rose from the basin, she could have cried.

Humans were meant to shun sorcery, but this…this wasn’t sorcery , was it? The demons called it magic , and…and…and evil be damned—free-flowing hot water could be nothing but a blessing!

“Thank Mareet,” she whispered, stripping off the cloak and too-big tunic, and then a bit louder, “Oh, Mareet be praised ,” as she submerged.

She slipped completely underwater, the ocean goddess’s cradle melting her limbs and seeping through the grime to caress her skin.

Eyes closed, there was no sound, no light, only a floating fluffiness that her body never felt.

No, not never—there was that brief moment in the infirmary when the healing demon’s magic played with her senses, and also maybe long, long ago, before…

A burning in her lungs eventually forced her to rise and take a deep, stinging breath.

The air chilled her shoulders as she pushed drenched strands out of her eyes and scrabbled against the smooth bottom of the tub.

She was clearly too short for the demon-sized basin, but what in the hells did that matter? She was in her own bathtub .

No, not her own—it was the demon’s bathtub. The demon who was keeping her in his home as a prisoner and had suggested she do exactly this.

Ember curled herself inward and sank as low as she could. Taking quiet breaths through her nose, barely disturbing the water, her eyes pinged to the door through the swirling steam. She hadn’t even thought to lock it—if she even could lock it—and she listened.

Nothing.

No creeping footsteps, no creaking hinges, no clearing throat.

Ember moved more deliberately then, grabbing a bottle from the closest shelf of something that smelled like yarrow and cleanliness.

She scrubbed her body like it was a floor, a stove, a plucked chicken, raking fingers painfully over her skin and through her hair.

She hadn’t bathed since before the cart, the cell, the blood, and even then she was only given a bucket of frigid river water and a demand to make herself presentable for the triumvirate—the triumvirate who refused to listen and locked her away, immediately forgetting about her so that she could be sold off to slavers.

She scoured her skin, but it wasn’t working.

Gods, why wasn’t it working? Dirt floated to the surface, but she could still feel the heat of blood gushing onto her limbs, could still feel the cold splatter of mud up her legs when she ran, could still feel the rough sting of strange hands grasping, dragging, touching .

It wasn’t until she turned herself nearly as red as the demon downstairs that she finally felt the pain of what she was doing to herself and stopped.

The water stilled, an oily layer floating between the soapy froth, and she gritted her teeth at a distorted reflection of herself.

Life would be much easier without a body, but then what would she have to offer?

All she had ever been was hands that could chop and arms that could scrub and legs that could carry.

Usefulness was necessary, good even, but it meant being used.

Ember gripped the edge of the basin with both hands and drew in a long breath of heady yarrow-scented steam.

How much time had passed, she wasn’t sure, but the round window on the washroom’s far wall no longer had the brightness of the moon in it.

That meant…night? The healer, Balran, had told her about the strangeness of Heck and how they had no sun, but a moon instead to mark the day, and when night fell there were only stars.

She stood, the water and heat falling away, her already bruised skin stinging from the overzealous scrub.

With careful steps, she climbed out of the tub and dripped on the stone floor, warm under her aching feet.

Her prints dried behind her, utterly wondrous, but then she might as well contain her surprise since magic seemed to flourish in this strange, new place.

The window was just over her head, so she pushed up onto her toes and gripped its sill.

The sky wasn’t as black as she expected but more like charcoal that had been tinted with crushed violets.

Tiny lights stippled the dark expanse in a thick band, sparse at the edges but brilliant in its center, arms spiraling off in dizzying clusters.

The stars had been visible at Lady Adine’s, but Ember had never seen them like this, glittering like the sun on a rippling lake.

In Ankerick there were too many lamps and hazy clouds, the sky more like a marshy pond with the occasional firefly that too quickly zipped away.

Perhaps these stars were as different as Heck’s daytime moon, magical and mysterious but too complex to be explained to a broken human with more fury in her mind than space to understand.

This sky was yet another divergence from the life Ember had always known, and that should have been just as terrifying as everything else she had suffered, and yet the corners of her mouth tipped up instead of down.

She wasn’t going back, and though the thought was a tiny one, something began to unravel in her chest.