Star Mother (Star Mother #1)(38)

He glanced up at the bright orb in the sky. “He wants you.”

While his deep, endless black eyes were childlike, the question was nothing of the sort. We both knew what kind of want he meant.

“That doesn’t matter right now.” I stood and adjusted my bags, rolling my shoulders beneath their weight. “Right now, I want to go to Nediah, and I want you to take me.”

He stood as well, studying my face. “You are not like most mortal women, Ceris.”

“I’m told I’m not quite mortal.”

His lips quirked into half a smile, a handsome expression that punctured the heaviness of the moment. “You wouldn’t be like the others even if you didn’t have starlight in your hair. You are not afraid as you should be.” He glanced westward. “But sometimes it is safer to be afraid.”

I chewed on my lip. “Are you afraid, Ristriel?”

“I am. But I am also free, and freedom is worth the fear.” He turned back to me and held out his hand. “We can still make good time today. We’ll find your kin. I swear it.”

Reaching for his hand, I wished dearly that I could take it.

Instead, I let my fingers pass through his, getting the impression of distance and coolness. He gestured in the direction we should go, and as we started walking, I said, “Is there a meadow along our path anywhere?”

He paused a moment before saying, “I can take us through one, if you’d like.”

“Please.” His brief words on freedom had burrowed themselves into my blood. “I have the very strong desire to run.”





CHAPTER 12

We came across a field in the late afternoon, and I dropped my bags, hiked up my skirt, and ran through the new grasses and small violet flowers, pushing my legs as fast as they would go. I’d run from the bandits earlier, but this was different. This wasn’t desperate or terrifying, but liberating and peaceful. Running pulled me out of my gloom and threw me back seven hundred and ten years to my childhood, when I’d darted around the village and climbed trees without a care in the world. I could almost hear my mother screaming after me, telling me I was being immodest and unladylike, and what if Caen’s parents saw?

Even though the memory wasn’t necessarily a happy one, it made me miss her. It made me dwell on all the unanswered questions that danced inside me. Had my mother found some happiness in the end? Had both of my sisters married? How many nieces and nephews did I have? And Caen . . . had he remembered me the way I’d wanted him to?

I would have to wait until I died to find out. But when I died, because I had lived . . . would we even end up in the same afterlife?

I stopped midfield, catching my breath, letting the questions unravel like slipped stitches. “I simply have to believe the best will pass,” I chided myself. Try my hardest. Barter with the gods themselves, if I needed to. I couldn’t undo what had already come to pass. Sun had made that much clear.

“Are you all right?” Ristriel hovered nearby. He stood in full Sunlight, and I could see the forest line through his torso.

Straightening, I tucked loose strands of hair behind my ears. I smiled, stretched. “I’m trying to be.”

He glanced back toward my bags, barely noticeable above the grass at the other end of the field. “What are you believing the best of?”

I flushed. “Oh, you caught that?” Leave it to a godling to have impeccable hearing. “I was thinking about my family. The ones I left, when I became star mother. They’re all deceased now.”

He nodded solemnly. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.” Leaning back, I stretched my spine. “But it’s been a long time.” Longer for them than for me. “I’m hoping to find my sister’s descendants in Nediah. Stories get passed down in a family, so they’ll be able to tell me about the relatives I never got to meet.

They’ll be my stories, too, in a way, and I’ll become part of their tapestry, and everything will feel right again.” I laughed, though it wasn’t particularly funny. In truth, it hurt. “That’s the plan, at least.”

“Mortals have always been fond of stories,” he supplied.

“Of course.” Turning about, I hiked back toward my bags. “We don’t live long enough to remember who we are without them.”

Ristriel followed my path, lingering about two paces behind me.

“What are your stories, Ceris?”

My steps slowed. He didn’t mean the story, the one that drew attention from everyone else. The one that had made me “important.” He already knew that story. He’d discerned that story the moment we’d met.

It was strange, and somewhat alarming, how long it took me to reflect beyond that, to the person I was before that star died. Like it really had been several centuries. Like I was an old woman scraping up her past.

“I liked to play in the forest,” I finally said, turning around. I was on an incline, making me a hand’s breadth taller than he was. “I liked to pretend I was a wolf or a fairy, and bound around like a wild thing.

My mother hated it.”

A smile bloomed on his mouth.

“I liked jokes. Pranks. The setup was almost better than the reveal.” I chuckled to myself as memories surfaced. “I often dragged my sister in on it. It was never as fun by myself. I’d switch neighbors’