Star Mother (Star Mother #1)(44)

“Are you not among us now?”

Instead of reminding me I wasn’t quite mortal, he said, “It is different.”

Sighing, I set my work aside and scooted to the edge of the loft to better see him. “We need to talk about last night.”

“Your starlight weakens me.” He didn’t meet my eyes. “That is why we were seen. Why I left your side.”

My lips parted at the confession. That was not what I had meant, but the information was valuable. I remembered how his cloud of inky darkness had dissipated the instant my starlight surfaced. I remembered the fear of watching his shadow merge with so many others. Of being alone, and unable to help.

I rubbed my hands together to warm them. “You used time.”

I remembered what Sun had said to me. Time cannot be altered.

When Ristriel did not reply, I added, “It’s a universal law, isn’t it?”

“There are laws not of this universe that are broken every day, with much more far-reaching consequences.” Sharpness laced his tone. “Acts that create only suffering among your people and mine, and yet they go unpunished.” His volume squeezed down to a whisper. He looked up at me, hair black as soot swishing over his eyes. “Do you believe what I did was wrong?”

Did I know it to be wrong? Yes. Only he hadn’t asked what I knew, but what I felt. “No.”

He pressed his lips together, dark eyes shifting from me as though I had scolded him. As though something I couldn’t see weighed on him, and I watched as it slowly crushed him. He breathed slowly, deeply. The rays of Sunlight coming through the window turned ruddy.

“What can I do for you, Ceris?”

I hadn’t expected that. In truth, he had done so much for me already, but I couldn’t let the opportunity for an honest exchange wither. “You can answer my questions.”

The way his mouth drooped told me that was not the response he had wanted. Gathering my skirt in one hand, I came down the ladder. When I was on solid ground again, I asked, “Who are you?”

He didn’t meet my eyes. “My name is Ristriel.”

“Why are Yar and Shu hunting you?”

He took longer to respond this time. “Because the deity who gave you that ring ordered them to.”

I glanced at the ring on my middle finger. Reaching down, I twisted it, the amber line at its center turning black.

Ristriel visibly relaxed. I hadn’t realized how tense he’d been until his shoulders slumped and his expression unwound. In that moment, I switched places with him. Empathy overwhelmed my fears, and I imagined myself in his position. Alone, on the run, afraid, only to have a star mother constantly barrage me with questions I feared answering. Questions that could send me back to wherever I came from, and it was clearly an unpleasant place. Questions asked by a woman courted by my . . . nemesis? Enemy? As professed by the ring on her finger.

I wanted to touch him—to feel his presence so I might remind him, and myself, that we were not alone. But a sliver of Sunset still grazed him, and I could not.

“What’s wrong, Ristriel?”

Now he looked at me, as surprised as he’d been the first time I thanked him. He didn’t answer, only studied me. Had he been solid, had he been as any other man, the moment would have been intimate. We stood very close, alone in a barn away from prying gazes, eyes locked, searching each other’s depths.

It was intimate, but in a way new to me.

When he spoke, he answered my question with one of his own. “If you could have anything at this moment, Ceris, what would it be?”

The enormity of the question made me pause. Anything? Would I rip open all of Ristriel’s secrets? Fly back seven hundred years and pick up life as I knew it? Go even further back and turn Sun’s eye away from Endwever, or turn Caen’s heart toward me? Yet those things felt unreal to me, like pieces of a complex dream I was forgetting more of by the day. I did not have to search my heart long to know what I truly wanted more than anything else.

I moved toward the barn doors, stepping outside as the golden tip of the Sun dropped below the horizon. “If I could have anything, I would want to meet Surril.”

“Your star.” He had followed me.

I nodded, looking upward as the stars began to poke through, waiting for her face to shine. “I carried her, gave birth to her, but when I opened my eyes again, she was already among her sisters and brothers.” I turned, watching the sky. I found her twinkle easily and pointed. “There she is.”

“You want to see her?”

I pulled my gaze from the sky to Ristriel, who stood solidly before me, dressed in his inky clothes. “If I could have anything, that is what I’d ask for.”

Ristriel held out his now-solid hand to me, a soft smile on his lips. “Then let me take you.”

My heart surged enough that the faintest silver glow danced across my skin. “What? There? You can . . . do that?”

He nodded, hand still extended.

I stared at his outstretched fingers, my pulse a drum in my ears, my breaths quick. I had been waiting and waiting for this war to end, for Sun to break away from His responsibilities for long enough to safely traverse the universe to our child’s home. Could this godling really accomplish such a feat now?

Did I trust him? Did it matter?

My own fingers trembling, I slipped my hand into his. He grasped it firmly and pulled me to him, embracing me tightly like he had on the battlefield, when time had rippled around us, and I felt strangely safe, like he was a shield against this strange world I’d become lost to.