Star Mother (Star Mother #1)(45)

“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.

We flew, weightless, the Earth and the night sky blurring around us. Not as it had after Ristriel broke the law of time, but in a whimsical way, the way of gods. I was a falcon diving into the heavens, I was a falling star, I was a baby’s first breath. The sky opened to my eyes, the stars becoming large and real, their light warm and cool all at once, soft and blinding, dazzling and mesmerizing. Matter of all sizes and shapes flew around them in dark rings, and when I asked about it, Ristriel answered simply, “Their power attracts the unmade things of the universe.”

He flew with skill and ease, weaving through the halos of dust, speeding among the stars. As we soared past them, they became streaks of color. I could hear their interest, their laughter, their singing.

Time seemed to warp. I was everywhere and nowhere, flying through seconds and years. And then I saw her in the distance, silver and white, small and precious. I pointed, and our direction shifted, until I was surrounded on all sides by velvet nothing, yet with Ristriel’s arms around me, I did not fall.

Before me shone an effulgent being smaller than myself, a child enveloped in a massive halo of starlight. Her skin was starlight, and her hair and eyes shone like diamonds. She smiled at me, and my heart grew too large for my chest to hold.

“Mother.” She reached for me.

Tears fell from my eyes, one after another. Extending my arm, I clasped her hand in mine. She was warm and soft and everything a child should be, though she seemed more a girl of ten than a newborn.

“My dear Surril,” I whispered. Ristriel’s arms released me, but I floated into hers, my skin glowing as she did, our light combining into something even more beautiful.

“I saw your picture,” Surril sang. “I watch you every night.”

I wept into her hair and clung to her, giving her all the love I had within me. “I watch you, too, my dear girl. I love you.”

“I know.” She giggled and pulled her fingers through my hair. “I know, and I love you, too. All of us do.”