Page 88 of Scars Beneath a Serpent’s Scales

“That’s good, because I don’t quite know if I can.” She took the opposite chair, kicking off her shoes and pulling a sheet of parchment from the bag she’d dropped out here earlier. Before she’d made herself go look at the room. The scene had been cleaned to perfection—Myrella’s doing—but the taint of that bloody message would linger forever. Both in the walls of this dormitory and the walls of her heart.

Something had changed within her that night. And though she was still healing from it, she wasn’t sure she hated it, this hard shell and the determination it wrought. Her magic pulsed, a freshly beating heart.

Not yet, she told it as it begged to unravel.

Crossing her legs, Emmeline flattened the parchment in her lap and removed a piece of charcoal from her bag.

“What’s that?” Roremar asked.

Emmeline flicked a glance at him. His eyes were ignited by the stars like they warmed a sliver of his darkness. Then she watched the sky. Was she going to share this personal piece of herself with him?

Yes. She nearly jolted at the realization, but she supposed she was.

“When I was little,” she began as she swept the charcoal over the parchment, “and I was worried about something, my mom would take me outside at night, and we’d map the stars. Constellations, planets, whatever we saw. She taught me the stories of all those known and we created our own. She told me to recite my feelings to the stars.”

“Why?” Roremar asked softly, leaning an elbow on the arm of his chair and peering closer at her.

Emmeline continued drawing the constellations as she saw them tonight, losing herself in the methodic work. “She said if I gave the stars my concerns, they’d hold them for me. She said give them my fears but also give them the good feelings, everything that felt too big. The ones I didn’t know how to handle when I was so young. The hopes and dreams that felt impossible. Tell the stars your heart’s deepest desires and let them forge the fortune, tell them your worries and let them burn them away.”

Absently, she paused to compare her rudimentary star map to the vast expanse above. It wasn’t as fine as those done on Byron, but it was better than many. Fingers streaked with charcoal, she twirled her opal ring around her finger, but for once, when Roremar’s eyes burned into the motion, she didn’t feel too seen.

“That’s a nice thought. That they’re there to take what you can’t hold.” Emmeline didn’t think he was going to continue, but Roremar added, “Sometimes, I don’t trust the stars.” It was almost a sacrilegious thought to state aloud, but Emmeline didn’t say that, only carrying on drawing. A part of her wanted to hear what Roremar had to say, understand how his mind worked. She was beginning to think it was a fascinating place. “The Fates are made of the stars, right? We’re all stardust when it comes down to it. And yet they cause shit like these murders?”

Pulling her eyes from the parchment, Emmeline tilted her head at Roremar. “The Fates don’t write paths of fortune. They only communicate them to us.”

“Do we know that for sure?” Roremar challenged softly. His voice was so innocent, vulnerable.

“I guess not,” Emmeline admitted, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

Roremar’s lips twisted to the side as he studied the sky, lacing his fingers before him. “Sometimes, I don’t know how to trust them.”

“There are good and bad sides to us all,” Emmeline responded with another swipe of charcoal across parchment. “Most Warriors, Angels, even the Fates can’t be boiled down to simply good and evil. I like to think we can still hand over our fears when it counts, that safety still exists in their company, no matter what their hearts say.”

Sometimes that was all someone needed. To be seen and supported, to not be put in a box.

“Is that what you’re telling the stars of now?” Roremar asked, nodding to her artwork. “Something you’re afraid of?”

She gazed down at the constellation of Anphrosia, the Fate of Cruelty and Adoration, that she’d drawn. Her stars shone brighter than any others tonight, the single Seductress point at the top the brightest of all.

“Amongst other things,” she said, voice a hum along the breeze. The candle she’d set on the stone pillar beside the railing winked out, and Emmeline sighed, tilting her chin up to soak in the starlight.

For a moment, they were silent. What was Roremar thinking? Did he resent that he was here with her? Did he have someone he wished he was watching the stars with? Someone he went home to at the end of the day?

She’d been spending all this time with him, had maybe even begun to consider him a friend, and she knew very little of him beyond what she’d observed. She was wary of pushing too close, of asking for more. Those close to me wind up dead.

Would he survive the endless ruin in her wake?

But from her life on the outside, she’d learned you could gather the most important facets of someone by watching.

So she stayed quiet, and she paid attention.

She counted how long he studied her. How long he cast his gaze out over the jungle. Not down toward the city, as she’d expected, and not out toward the ocean, but chasing something else. She noted the rings on his fingers and the ink on his skin and the precise swoop of the dark waves at the nape of his neck, committing his details to memory.

After a while, she stopped watching. And she simply existed beside him.

From the way Roremar’s gaze strayed to the stars, she thought maybe he was telling them his worries, as well. Maybe—in this moment, based on his contemplative, elusive expression—they weren’t as different as she’d assumed. Perhaps they were both scarred, hiding their wounds deep beneath the skin where no one would find them. It was possibly a part of his armor, or a reason for it at the very least.

Perhaps he was just as concerned about what they were heading into as she was.