“Half and half,” he agrees.
They come to a stop outside the door to the rooms she shares with Pasquale, but neither of them makes a move to leave. On the opposite wall, the large windows have been left open so the moon and stars cast the hall in an ethereal glow.
She wants him to kiss her—she wishes for it so badly that she thinks she might sacrifice just about anything for the feel of his lips against hers.
“I wish you would kiss me.”
She doesn’t realize she’s spoken the words out loud until she sees the surprise play over his face. But then he takes a step closer to her and reaches his hand up to her cheek, the tips of his fingers so light against her skin that she barely feels them.
“I hoped you would say that,” he says, the words more breath than voice.
“We shouldn’t,” she tells him, though even as she says it, she’s tilting her face toward his.
“We shouldn’t,” he agrees. “But I hoped and you wished and here we are.”
The kiss is inevitable. As soon as his lips brush over hers, she realizes there was never any avoiding it. They’ve been careening toward this moment since he kissed her hand at her wedding. Trying to pretend otherwise was a fool’s game, and now that it’s happening, now that his arms are around her waist and her hands are in his hair and the kiss has no end in sight, she can’t remember why she tried to resist it.
The courtesan Sabine’s words whisper through her mind. If you can become what they want you to be, they’ll burn the world down in your name.
But in this moment, Nicolo just seems to want her. She doesn’t have to become anyone, just to be herself. And that feels like a whole different kind of power. One she would drown in if she could.
When they break apart, though, and her eyes meet his, a realization shudders through her. He wants her, yes, but she wants him as well. Just as much. And her mother and the courtesans never told her how to navigate that.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have…” Nico trails off, and Beatriz gets the feeling he wants to kiss her again. This time, though, his sense wins out and he turns away from her, hurrying back down the hall and leaving her alone.
She turns to go into her rooms, but when her hand is on the doorknob, she catches sight of something glittering on the stone floor beneath her feet. She crouches down, reaching out to touch it, and the pads of her fingers come away glittering as well. Her stomach plummets.
What was it she said? I wish you would kiss me. Simple-enough words, a common-enough phrase. No real power in it.
But in the light of the stars, she wished and it came true, and now there is stardust on the floor where she stood and a sharp pain already beginning in the space between her eyes, like a postdrinking headache, but so much worse. Like the morning Pasquale shook her awake to tell her that the king wanted to speak with her because stardust had been found on her windowsill. On a night just like this one, when she couldn’t sleep.
Beatriz goes toward one of the narrow windows that line the hallway, peering out at the night sky. There is the Dancing Bear, making its way across the sky. There is the Thorned Rose. And there are the Lovers’ Hands, clasped directly overhead, but something about them is not quite right. It takes her a moment to find it, but when she does, the world shifts beneath her feet: a star is missing from the thumb of one of the hands.
She stumbles back from the window, a dozen excuses rising to her mind. Someone else could have pulled the star down, couldn’t they have? And whoever left the stardust on her windowsill before might have left it outside her bedroom door now, another ploy to frame her. The headache coming on could just be a headache, caused by too much wine. There are a dozen excuses, but she knows she is lying to herself.
She made a wish and brought a star down from the sky. And it isn’t the first time. She thinks back to before, when she wished on a star in the Wanderer’s Wheel. Then, she wished to go home, and that didn’t come true. But wishes work in mysterious ways, don’t they? And it was soon after that wish that she met Lord Savelle, the key to her returning home.
Lord Savelle. He asked about her sleepless nights, seemed particularly interested in them because his daughter had suffered the same affliction. What was it he said? I believe in the deepest part of my soul that she was as innocent as you are. She’d taken that to mean that he’d thought them both innocent, but maybe he’d meant the opposite. That he knew his daughter was an empyrea and that Beatriz is as well.
And is she? It seems impossible, utterly unfathomable, but here she stands with the proof of it on her fingers and in the sky. One person in ten thousand has the potential to bring down the stars, only a fraction of them ever manage to control it, and yet here she is, somehow. Two things become very clear to Beatriz. First, she needs to get out of Cellaria as quickly as she can, before her power is discovered, and second, Lord Savelle’s knowledge makes him a threat.
She scoops the rest of the stardust off the floor and brings it into her apartments, trying to ignore her blossoming headache. Wishing for Nicolo to kiss her was a small wish—certainly no bigger than her wish to go home—so she suspects the effect on her will be the same. Already, she can feel a headache blossoming. She needs to act now. A low fire is burning in the bedroom, and she casts a glance at Pasquale, who is fast asleep, before throwing the stardust into the fire and watching it burn. Then she retrieves the vial her mother sent her from its place in her cosmetics kit, along with a few pots of pigments and creams. She sits down at her vanity and gets to work.
* * *
—
Beatriz never thought of herself as a coward, but as she sneaks into Lord Savelle’s rooms just after sunrise, while he is out in the sea garden, she realizes she just might be one. She knows she can’t plant the stardust on him in person—if she tries, she will lose her nerve like she did last time. Which led her to cake her face in enough creams and powders that she looks like a woman at least three times her age. In her plainest gray dress, she manages to pass for a maid, if no one looks too closely.
In her disguise—with a hunched-over walk to match, because Beatriz does nothing by halves—she gains entrance to Lord Savelle’s rooms with ease. There are fewer guards than outside the royal wing, she notices, and with servants beginning to tend to their chores, she blends in easily enough.
Perhaps it is cowardly, she thinks as she places the vial of stardust in one of Lord Savelle’s boots, but she would rather be a living coward than a dead hero.
She leaves his rooms as quickly as she came in and wanders the halls outside until she comes across a guard. She lets herself bump into him, as if by accident.
“Watch where you’re going,” he snaps at her.
“Oh!” she says, pretending to be flustered. “I’m so sorry, sir, I find myself distracted.”
The guard doesn’t take the bait, as Beatriz thinks he might have if she still looked like herself—he’s perfectly happy to ignore a woman past middle age.