Star Mother (Star Mother #1)(63)

She bore no family resemblance to me, not that I’d expected she would. Her pale eyes studied my face. “Can I help you?”

Behind her, a child scurried to the door to get a better look.

“I . . .” My throat closed, and I gently cleared it. “This is going to sound very strange, but my name is Ceris Wenden. I’ve come here from a village called Endwever. My family . . . married into your family a long time ago—”

The woman gasped, a hand rushing to her mouth. I’d forgotten what I was going to say next; she’d startled the words from my mouth.

Her hand slowly lowered. “I know exactly who you are.”

For a moment, my heart didn’t beat.

She opened the door a little wider, and the child, a blonde girl of about eight, poked her head under the woman’s arm. “Ceris Wenden,” the mother said. “You have . . . You have a statue in the Endwever Cathedral.”

Hope lifted my shoulders. “Yes.”

“Your nose . . .” When I touched it self-consciously, she let out a nervous laugh. “I’d heard rumors, but I thought they were just that.”

Knitting my fingers together, I prompted, “You know me?”

She nodded. “The story of our family’s star mother has been passed down for generations. I . . .” Her eyes watered. “I-I married into it, but . . .”

She pulled her daughter in front of her, settling a hand on either of her shoulders. “My name is Quelline. And this, this is Ceris.”

The child smiled and waved.

My jaw slackened. “Ceris?”

“It’s a family name. The first girl in every generation is named after the star mother. And you . . . you look just like the drawings.”

She stepped back, revealing a set dining table and a fire blazing in a cozy hearth, and waved me forward. “Come in, come in! Please . . . I heard a star mother had returned. I never thought it would be you . . .

That was six hundred years ago!”

Seven hundred, but I didn’t correct her. I was too enthralled by her smile, by the warmth of the room, by the adoring eyes of the child who shared my name.

“Come in!” Quelline took my elbow. “And tell me everything.

Everything. ” She hurried inside and called up the stairs. “Ruthgar!

Come down, come down! Our star mother is here!”





CHAPTER 19

I had been wrong. I had not run through every possible scenario in my mind. When the women who volunteered to sacrifice themselves for new stars were told their names would be honored and remembered for eternity, it was true. In my case, literally true.

After the introductions—Quelline and Ruthgar, who had one daughter, Ceris, and lived with Ruthgar’s mother, Yanla, and his father, Argon, who came home an hour after I first knocked on the door—Quelline opened a polished wooden box kept on a high shelf in the front room and set it on the dining table. From it, she unrolled two tapestries stitched in a delicate hand, both comprised of lines and writing in varying colors—one full, the other nearly so. They were old and weathered and hemmed multiple times to combat wear; I recognized it as a record of my family line. My genealogy, preserved.

And there were so, so many more of them than just the Parroses, for names had changed over and over again in marriage.

In truth, it was lucky the name Parros had brought me here at all. As though I had wished upon a star, and it had come true.

“Here.” Quelline pointed at, but did not touch, the delicate blue thread listing my name. In the light of a dozen candles, it looked green. A white star was stitched above it. My parents’ names were not there, but my sisters’ names appeared next to mine. The tree descended from Idlysi, not Pasha, and branched off again and again, some of the branches ending abruptly, others shifting off the tapestry, making me wonder if there was another cloth containing their family, or if they’d simply been forgotten to favor other families.

There were so many names, but one recurred throughout every generation: Ceris. Ruthgar even had a sister in a nearby village whose middle name was Ceris. Idlysi’s first daughter was Ceris, and her daughter was Ceris, and another of Idlysi’s granddaughters was Anna Ceris. There were boys named Cerist to make it masculine, and middle names strewn in throughout the tree, occasionally abbreviated to C. where space grew thin.

I read every single one of them until the end. Tapping my nail delicately near the bottom, I asked, “And these people are all still alive?”

“I think so.” Ruthgar rubbed his chin. “My cousins”—he pointed out three names—“are in Nediah. They . . . They would be incredulous to know of you.”

“I might not believe it,” Argon grunted, “if the rumor of a star mother returning hadn’t already come by. Only a week ago.”

Quelline shook her head. “But her face, Papa.” She returned to the book and pulled out an old sketchbook, its pages yellowed, and sheepishly set it before me. “They’re not the originals. We don’t have those, but they’re very good copies. Our ancestor Erick Trent made them, but I don’t know which one.” She pointed out the name in two different places on the genealogy, one naming Idlysi’s great-great-grandson, the other naming a man too far removed for me to guess an accurate relation. Carefully she opened the book, and sketches of my statue from the cathedral looked back at me. Every angle had been sketched: below and to the right, to the left, even just pictures of my feet. Quelline turned another page and blushed at the faded watercolor there. It depicted my face accurately, but I had golden-ginger hair and deep-brown eyes. My eyes were gray, my hair a simple mousy brown, streaked silver like an old woman’s.