Page 47 of Born of Starlight
Asterie’s eyes scanned the rows of abandoned shops. The gray cobblestone was grimy and blackened. Smoke stacks from tattered row homes left soot an inch deep on the ground. It smelled of piss and other bodily excrement. Kullworth had become a slum.
There seemed to be one pub open, and people filed out of it and toward the town square. With steins in their hands, their faces were red from drink and thin from malnutrition.
It wasn’t how I remembered Kullworth—always a small town but once a lively one.What had happened?
“Is this how all the towns and cities look?”
Asterie’s words interrupted my thoughts. She’d neverseena town. Her face was not trained in its usual expression of indifference. She frowned, her brow furrowed and her eyes crinkled—disappointment.I hated that look.
“No,” Emmerick answered. “Kullworth didn’t fare well after the Order was enacted. The soil here wasn’t fertile enough for crops, and they had relied on growth charms. When those charms were banned, the wealthy moved on, leaving those remaining in row homes—or without shelter at all. Others who refused to stop the charms were pushed out to the Wastelands.”
“What of Belray?” I asked.
“Belray still prospers—they could afford shipments in winter months and have better growing conditions.”
Asterie walked stiffly beside me. I couldn’t imagine how seeing this world for the first time felt—being introduced to darkness before ever seeing the light. Selfishly, it was a relief to see her facing the realities of the Order that she so vehemently sought to uphold.
We walked into the town center, where a rowdy crowd began to gather. A platform had been set up in the square, and a man was yelling to anxious onlookers. Helos guards surrounded the onlookers as if ready to shut down the event. The air was thick with tension.
“What good has the Order brought to our Corridor?” the man yelled above the crowd. The scene made my stomach drop. The man looked like a commoner—a tattered tunic and holed shoes.
The man on the platform spat words down at the crowd. “Yes, there are no wars—‘peace’ they call it. But that’s all for show! When will they turn on us like our friends in the West faced? When will they cut us down too?”
Great.A righteous idiot about to get himself killed by well-armed soldiers. The crowd was growing more and more restless with every word.
A boy, no older than ten, brought the man a lit torch.
The preaching man raised the torch toward a figure rigged upright and hanging from a rope. It was a cloaked human-shaped form made of straw.
“We have dying crops with no magic to aid the soil. We have children dying of sickness and plague because the remedies to cure them require the art of potions that they keep locked in those fucking towers! And what do our Kings and Queens do? They continue to allow it!”
As the robe burned, I recognized the emblem patched onto it—an eye, a scale and a ring of thorns. I looked down at Asterie’s robe, and there it was, right on her shoulder sleeve.
The symbol of the Sisterhood? Fuck.
I reached out and ripped the patch off her robe as quickly as possible, thanking the Sources it only left a few frayed threads. Glad that the guard earlier, and no one in this crowd, had noticed it, I shoved it in my cloak pocket.
“Time to go,” Emmerick whispered.
For once, me and the Constable agreed. We needed to get Asterieoutof there. I tugged on her sleeve to try to pull her away from the growing crowd, but she was rooted to the cobblestone.
Asterie stared wide-eyed at what unfolded on the platform. The straw within the robe burst into flames. Embers and ash scattered over the crowd.
“They must burn! Down with the Order, down with those magical bitches!”
The cuff around my wrist tugged. Asterie trembled—whether it was shock, fear or anger, I didn’t know. Her eyes were pitch black, irises swirling and inky but with an iridescent shine—mesmerizing but eerie. It was the same effect that overtook her irises as when she’d heard whispers in the cave the night prior.
That couldn’t happen here. Grabbing her hand, I turned to put myself between her and the platform.
Her grip found mine and she squeezed back, but her attention never peeled from the burning robes on the platform behind me.
“Look at me, Asterie. Count with me. Ten...nine…eight…”
Her eyes shot to mine in recognition. An old friend had once helped me learn how to cool down when my anger had overcome my emotions. I suspected that my friend had taught her the same.
“Seven…six…”She mouthed the words with me. The whites of her eyes returned, and her irises glistened warm brown by the time we got to one.
The people around us were shouting their agreement. Their anger was palpable, like the smoke settling in the air. They began throwing whatever they could find at the guards—a bottle, a rock, a shoe.
