Star Mother (Star Mother #1)(60)

“I found a weak spot. A soft note, and it allowed me to pass through. To enter time itself. And I strung its music around me. As much as I could get. But Sun and His soldiers realized what was happening and came for me, forcing me to flee. I stole enough for mortals to forget me, but not for gods to.”

He met my eyes, shadowy hair falling across his forehead. “Ceris.” He swallowed. “I took seven hundred years.”

The number made my heart jump.

“I knew it was yours after . . . after I used time to pull us from that field.” He hugged himself, shrinking. “The song was the same. Your song. It was your time I took. I didn’t know. I didn’t know you.”

I opened my mouth, closed it. Tried to wet my dry tongue and found it nearly impossible. My pulse hammered in my neck and wrists. “Seven hundred years,” I repeated.

He nodded.

I needed to sit, but there were no chairs, so I leaned against the shop wall. Its cool, smooth surface sucked heat from my skin.

And I thought of the long grasses, the rotting trees, the autumn leaves in the midst of spring. I thought of my spoiled meat and rusted coins, of long hair and long nails. I knew he had broken the law in the field, but I hadn’t realized the extent. Time was leaking from him, altering the things around us any time we stayed in one place too long. Perhaps even making a trail for Yar and Shu to follow.

Numbness spread through my fingers, my cheeks, my lips.

“Ceris . . .” He struggled to continue. “The soft note I entered . . . I was able to come into the music because that note was so weak. It was . . . dying.”

Dying.

I closed my eyes, and I was on that not-bed in the heavens again, my body blazing, my abdomen crunching, my star ripping from my womb.

“I took all of it.” He whispered now, bent over like he was in physical pain. “I took your time of death, Ceris. I took the years from your chord. I shifted your fate seven hundred years.”

My chest had become so heavy it was hard to breathe. I had lived not because of my own strength, but because of the meddling of a runaway godling. I had been barred from the paradise of star mothers, severed from all those I knew, because of him.

My voice was no stronger than a frog’s when I asked, “Can you not give it back?”

The moon rose higher, casting her light onto him, and he seemed to shrivel in response. “I have lost so much of it already, Ceris. Even if I could give it to you, I wouldn’t be able to send you back.”

Memories of Agradaise flooded me, untold beauty lined with despair.

Emptiness.

I could never go back. I was well and truly lost, separated from my loved ones, cast out of the paradise that was supposed to be mine.

Trickster.

I turned my back on him, one hand against the shop for support.

“Ceris—”

“Please go.” My voice was a whisper yet sharp as a knife.

He drifted after me. “I didn’t think—”

“Go!” I shouted, loud enough that the laughing men at the end of the road paused in their conversation. I did not turn. I did not look at him. I dragged one heavy foot in front of the other. “I would rather be alone.”

Such was the fate he had given me. I walked away, and Ristriel did not follow.





CHAPTER 18


I had been robbed of time. Or rather, time had been robbed through me.

That was it. I wasn’t resilient, I wasn’t special. It was a coincidence with unintended side effects. A star had died—the very star that powered Ristriel’s chains—and Ristriel escaped. Then I had given birth to Surril at the same instant Ristriel fled to time to shake his pursuers . . . and my dying body had allowed him to steal time for himself. He had literally cut my death out of the strings of fate. Out of the chords of time.

He had preserved my life in the process. One might think I would be grateful to be alive. And perhaps I would have been, had Agradaise not come to me.

I had my daughter to live for, of course. But how could I live for a being I could not even inhabit the same space as? Who was independent and well all on her own, without the care of a mother?

The universe had literally continued spinning without me. For seven hundred years. Was I even still a part of it?

My hand drifted to my ring, still lined black.

Did Saiyon know? But how could He not?

And how dare He not tell me if He did? He might not know I traveled with the godling who had stolen time, but I had told Him about the time discrepancy. Seven hundred years. He had paused. Considered. And said nothing.

Were mortals so unimportant that gods and godlings alike didn’t think twice about our welfare? About what we wanted?

I was glad for the night, for I would not have been able to bear the presence of people as my mind sorted through this revelation. I did not wander too far; I did not know the city, and there were certainly dangerous men within its walls, lurking about. I absently followed the music until I found the tavern, then looped around and climbed back to the peak of Nediah, to the cathedral. Ristriel was nowhere to be seen, not that I looked for him. But the woman from before was locking the doors. I approached her, trying to straighten my back and look friendly, but the weight of time itself seemed to press me down, as though I were just as old as all the years I had lost.

“Pardon me.” My voice had aged as well. “I’m so sorry. I’m a traveler, here to find family. And I haven’t yet. I . . . I need a place to stay.”