A Crown of Hollow Stars: The Veiled Oath

The stone beneath Sera Vane's knees held the chill of deep wells and older graves. She could taste iron on the back of her tongue, though no blade had touched her, and the air carried the green rot of tallow candles that had burned too long without tending. Twelve flames ringed the chamber in a perfect circle, each one guttering in a draft she could not feel against her skin. The chamber itself had no windows, no doors she could see, and the ceiling pressed downward like the underside of a closed hand.

Caelum Vance stood at her right shoulder, close enough that she could smell the jasmine oil he wore, close enough to remind her that this was his doing. His voice had been warm in the antechamber, all theatrical concern and honeyed counsel. Now he said nothing, and that silence felt worse.

Queen Thessaly Ardrin descended the seven steps of the dais with the measured grace of a woman who had learned long ago that power moved slowly. Her mourning black caught the candlelight and drank it. The widow's veil she wore obscured the lower half of her face, but Sera could see her eyes, grey as the ash that coated the hearths of the lower city, and they did not blink.

"You understand," the Queen said, "why you have been brought here."

It was not a question. Sera had learned to read the Queen's speech the way stable hands read the weather in the shifting hides of a restless horse. Thessaly Ardrin asked nothing she did not already know the answer to.

"I understand that Lord Vance has spoken for me," Sera said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "I understand that the Crown requires a Cartographer for the Expedition to the Tower, and that no other candidate has been found willing."

The Queen's veil stirred with what might have been a breath of amusement or dismissal. "You understand very little. That is preferable. Understanding invites pride, and pride in this work is a kind of suicide."

Caelum shifted, and the scent of jasmine thickened between them. Sera resisted the urge to press her hand against her knee to still its tremor. Her mother's ring sat heavy in her pocket, the band of tarnished silver warming against her thigh, and she focused on that weight because the Queen's gaze was beginning to scrape at her composure.

"Archivist Yvenne," the Queen said.

From the shadowed edge of the circle, a figure stepped forward. Sera had not seen Yvenne enter, had not heard the door that must have opened for her, and that fact alone made her stomach clench. The Archivist was ancient in a way that had nothing to do with years; her face had the polished smoothness of river stones, and her hands moved as though they belonged to someone else. She carried a shallow bowl of blackened oak, and in the bowl sat a quill made of something that was not feather.

The quill was long and curved, the grey-white of sun-bleached bone, and its tip glistened with a substance that was not ink. Sera knew what it was. Every child raised in the lower corridors of the palace knew the smell of it, though they were forbidden to speak of it. The smell of it was the smell of the morning her mother had not woken.

"Blood-ink," Yvenne said, and her voice was the creak of an oak door. "Rendered from the veins of the unwilling, bound with the resin of the weeping thorn. Your blood will not be taken; another was taken for you, in accordance with the old compact. You will sign with what has been given."

The Queen's veil tilted a fraction. "Repeat after me, daughter of the stable. Word for word, or this chamber swallows you."

Sera swallowed. The taste of iron thickened.

"I, Sera of the House of Vane, born of no claim and offered no mercy, accept the post of Cartographer to the Crown of the Ardrin line."

The Queen spoke each word with the precision of a jeweller setting stones, and Sera echoed them, tasting their shape in her mouth. They felt like keys turning in locks she had not known existed.

"I bind my hand to the maps unfinished. I bind my eyes to the lands unseen. I bind my tongue to the secrets of the Survey, and I render my life forfeit should I abandon the work before its completion."

The second phrase was longer, and Yvenne moved closer as Sera spoke, the bowl held out so that the quill's tip hovered over the surface like a hovering wasp. The scent of the blood-ink reached Sera fully then, a smell that was both copper and cold soil and something almost sweet, the way rot was sweet, the way lilies were sweet just before they fell.

"I acknowledge," the Queen said, and her voice had not changed, "that desertion of the post, refusal of the Survey, or the unapproved disclosure of the contents of any map drawn in the service of the Crown, shall be deemed treason against the throne. The sentence for such treason is death, carried out without trial, by the hand of the Cartographer's successor."

Sera's mouth went dry. She had known. Caelum had explained it in the antechamber with that warm, solicitous tone, as though he were warning her about a storm that might keep her indoors. She had not believed he meant it. She had not believed any of it would be spoken in a chamber without doors, in a voice that belonged to a queen she had only ever seen from a distance, at the far end of corridors that smelled of beeswax and grief.

"I acknowledge," Sera repeated, and the words fell from her like stones into dark water.

Yvenne offered the quill.

Sera reached for it. The bone was warmer than it had any right to be, and the instant her fingers closed around the shaft, a tremor ran up her arm and settled somewhere behind her eyes. The blood-ink clung to the tip in a single trembling bead, and the candlelight bent around it in a way that was not natural.

"Press it to the page," Yvenne said.

There was no page. Sera looked down, and the floor of the chamber had changed. Where there had been bare stone, there was now parchment the colour of old cream, spread across the flagstones as though it had grown there. On the parchment was a single line, drawn in faded ink, with a space at its end where a signature should rest.

Sera pressed the quill to the parchment.

Pain.

Not sharp, not burning, but a slow and spreading ache that radiated from the tip of the quill through her hand and into the hollow of her chest. She felt something leave her, something she could not name, pass through the blood-ink and into the parchment, and the parchment drank it. The signature that appeared beneath the quill was not her handwriting. She had never written in that script. The letters were angular and old, the ink the deep brown of dried blood, and they arranged themselves into her name as though they had always been waiting.

Sera Vane. Sera Vane. Sera Vane.

The name repeated itself across the parchment, smaller and smaller, spiraling inward to a point she could not see, and the ache in her chest became a weight, the weight of a duty she had not chosen, a marriage to a work she did not understand.

She lifted the quill.

The parchment was gone. The floor was stone again. The twelve candles burned as though they had never been interrupted, and Yvenne stood before her with the bowl empty, the quill returned to its resting place, and an expression on her face that Sera could not read.

"It is done," the Queen said. She had not moved from the third step of the dais. "Rise, Cartographer."

Sera rose. Her knees protested the cold, and she swayed a fraction before she caught herself. Caelum's hand brushed her elbow, steadying her without touching, and she hated him for the precision of it.

"There are terms you have not yet heard," Thessaly continued, and her veil shifted again as she turned toward the far wall. Sera followed her gaze and saw, for the first time, what hung there.

A map.

No, not a map. A scaffolding of maps, layered one over the other, some pinned to the stone with iron nails, some hanging from silver chains, some held against the wall by nothing she could see. They were old. They were torn. They were stained with marks she could not interpret, and across their surfaces moved shadows that had nothing to do with the candlelight.

"The maps were begun by your predecessor," the Queen said. "He did not finish them. You will."

The Queen's voice did not waver, but something behind it did, the way a bell's resonance can falter when the clapper strikes a flaw in the metal.

"Where is he," Sera said. The words were out before she could stop them, and the chamber went very still.

Caelum made a soft sound. Thessaly turned, and through the veil Sera thought she saw the glint of teeth, though not in a smile.

"Your predecessor," the Queen said, "stands now in the Whisper Wing, in a state the physicians cannot name. He is alive. He is not whole. He attempted to abandon his post on the eve of the Expedition, and the binding answered the question of his loyalty before any court could be convened."

The ache in Sera's chest deepened. The weight shifted, and she understood, with a clarity that tasted of iron, that the post she had accepted was not a duty. It was a leash. The maps were not a commission. They were a cage, and the cage had teeth, and the teeth were already in her.

"You will be housed in the Cartographer's Wing," the Queen continued. "You will be attended by Archivist Yvenne. You will take your meals in the Survey room. You will speak to no one of the contents of the maps until they are complete, and when they are complete, you will surrender them to the Crown in person, in this chamber, before these candles. Should you fail to appear, or should the maps be found incomplete, the binding will call you home."

Home. The word sat wrong in her mouth. Sera thought of the lower corridors, of the straw tick she had shared with two other servant girls, of the loft above the stables where she had hidden as a girl to escape the sounds of the court above. She thought of her mother's ring, warm in her pocket. She thought of her mother's face the last time she had seen it alive, drawn tight with a fear Sera had not understood.

The fear had a name now. Sera did not speak it.

"I have questions," Sera said.

The Queen's veil tilted. "You will have answers, when answers are permitted. Tonight is for binding. Questions are for the Survey."

"Then I have one question that is not of the Survey."

Thessaly's hands, gloved in black silk, folded one over the other at her waist. "Speak it."

"Why me."

The chamber waited. The candles waited. Yvenne, stone-faced, waited. Caelum, smooth and silent, waited.

The Queen descended one step.

"You were chosen," Thessaly said, and her voice had lost its glacial precision, slipping into something rougher, something that sounded almost like grief, "because the maps will not accept any other hand. We have tried. Three times we have tried, in the years since your predecessor took the post. The blood-ink rejected two candidates before the binding was complete. The third accepted the binding and was consumed by it within the hour. The maps have a taste, child. They have chosen you, and the Crown has bowed to their appetite."

The ache in Sera's chest flared. She thought of the parchment that had been and was not, of the script that was not hers, of the name repeating itself across a page that was not a page.

"And if I had refused?" Sera asked.

Caelum's hand brushed her elbow again, a warning she did not need.

"You would not have left the antechamber," Thessaly said. "You would not have left the palace. You would not have left the city. The binding finds its Cartographer whether the Cartographer consents or not. Lord Vance offered you the courtesy of choice, because the Crown prefers willing hands. Willing hands do better work."

The jasmine scent thickened, and Sera understood that Caelum had offered her nothing. The offer had been a performance for the Queen's benefit, a kindness enacted for an audience, a leash offered with a velvet hand so that the teeth would feel like a surprise.

Sera did not speak. She could not. The words had dried in her throat, and the iron taste had become the taste of her own blood, though her tongue found no wound.

"Take her to the Wing," the Queen said. "Begin her instruction at dawn. The Expedition does not wait for readiness, and the Tower at the World's Edge does not move closer for our grief."

Yvenne inclined her head, the motion small and ancient. Sera felt the Archivist's hand close around her elbow, the grip firm and impersonal, and the chamber began to shift around her, the candles sliding into a single point of light that receded as she was led toward a door that had not been there a moment before.

She looked back once.

The Queen had turned away, her veil falling straight as water, and Caelum stood where she had left him, watching Sera go. There was something on his face she could not read, something that flickered at the corner of his mouth, something she would have to learn to name if she was going to survive the months ahead. The chamber swallowed itself behind her, and the cold of the stone passage replaced the close air of the ritual, and Yvenne's grip did not loosen.

Somewhere above them, in a wing Sera had never entered, the maps were waiting. Somewhere in the Whisper Wing, a man she had never met stood in a state the physicians could not name. Somewhere ahead of her, the Tower at the World's Edge rose out of the dark, and the Expedition that would carry her toward it was already named, already provisioned, already bound for a coast she had never seen.

Sera walked, because walking was the only choice left to her, and the ache in her chest pulsed with every step, a reminder in the rhythm of her stride that the post she had sworn to was a post she could never leave.

Their footsteps echoed through a corridor she did not recognize, the stones beneath her worn to a polish that reflected the guttering sconces in long, liquid strokes. Sera had walked this palace since she was six years old, had mapped its kitchens and its servants' passages and the cold rooms where the linen smelled of lavender, but she had never walked this corridor, and the realization settled into her chest like a splinter of ice.

Yvenne released her elbow as they passed through a low archway. The older woman said nothing, did not look back, and her silks whispered against the floor as she turned a corner and was gone. Sera stood alone in a passage hung with moth-eaten tapestries, the woven hunts fading into threads the color of old bone.

"You are being ridiculous," she said, to no one, and to herself.

The passage led her on. She climbed a narrow stair, counted fourteen steps, and emerged onto a landing she half remembered from some fevered dream. The door at its end was black oak banded with iron, and she pressed her palm to it, feeling the grain bite into her skin.

Inside, her chambers were exactly as she had left them that morning. The narrow bed. The washstand with its chipped basin. The single window that gave onto the inner courtyard, where the fountain ran silver in the last of the afternoon light. The room smelled of lamp oil and the ghost of the dried thyme her mother had once hung above the door.

She set the veil-wreath on the table. She did not weep.

A knock, measured and unhurried, struck the oak.

"Sera." Caelum's voice came through the wood, warm as poured honey, as patient as a cat at a mousehole. "I know you are within. I watched you climb."

She did not answer. She stood with her hand still flat against the wood, feeling the iron bands cold against her knuckles, and let the silence answer for her.

A pause, then the latch lifted of its own accord. He had a key. Of course he had a key. He stepped through without waiting for her to grant him entry, and the door swung shut behind him with the soft, deliberate sound of a trap closing.

He looked different in the small room. His finery, which had seemed so fitting in the ritual chamber, here appeared merely excessive, the velvet too rich, the lace too fine, the rings too many. His smile did not waver. It seldom did.

"You left before I could congratulate you," he said. "The throne has chosen well, whatever else one might say of it."

"Has it." She did not move from beside the door. "You sound surprised."

"I am never surprised, darling. Only occasionally disappointed." He moved further into the room, trailing one gloved finger along the edge of her washstand, leaving a faint track in the dust. "Your quarters are humble."

"My quarters are mine."

"Yours," he agreed, and the word bent in his mouth. "For the moment."

The afternoon light through the window was thickening toward dusk, and the fountain's voice rose in the courtyard below, a sound she had fallen asleep to for ten thousand nights. Caelum stood with his back to that light, and his face was in shadow, and she could not read what was there.

"Why did you follow me?" she asked.

"Because the Queen required a witness, and because I wished to speak with you." He tilted his head. "Do not flatter yourself into believing the second reason outweighs the first."

"And what did you wish to speak of?"

"Your new brother." He said it lightly, as one might speak of a change in the weather. "Kael. You seemed taken with him."

"I seemed nothing."

"You blushed. It was charming, in a rustic sort of way. Like watching a milkmaid curtsey to a bishop." His smile sharpened. "I have known Kael Ardrin since we were both too young to know better, and I tell you freely, Sera, the man is a danger to you."

"He is a danger to no one."

"He is a danger to everyone who comes within arm's reach of his considerable regard." Caelum's voice did not change, and yet the air in the room seemed to cool. "His kindness, his protectiveness, that rough soldier's tenderness he wears like a cloak, these are not gifts, Sera. They are instruments. He has been sharpened on them since boyhood, and he does not know how to lay them down."

"You speak as one who knows him well."

"I speak as one who has survived him."

She did not believe him. She did not disbelieve him. She held the thought in her mouth and tasted it, and found it sour.

"He told me," she said carefully, "that you were the one who forged the letters that sent him into exile."

Something moved behind Caelum's eyes. A flinch, perhaps. A calculation. It was gone before she could name it.

"Kael," he said softly, "has always been a victim of his own narrative. He prefers the role of the wronged hero. It suits his shoulders."

"And yours?"

"Mine?" He laughed, a small, clipped sound. "I prefer the role of the man who keeps a kingdom breathing while its princes play at martyrdom."

The fountain in the courtyard threw its voice against the stone. The light in the window shifted from amber to a deep, bruised rose.

"He is not what you think he is," Caelum said, and for the first time his voice lost its silken sheath. Beneath it was something harder, something that might have been fear, if she had been the sort of person to name such a thing in him. "None of them are. Least of all her."

"The Queen is his mother."

"The Queen is the throne." He turned his back to her, examining the dried thyme above her door as though it were a specimen in a collection. "And the throne devours its children. You would do well to remember that, in the months ahead."

"You speak to me as a friend."

"I speak to you as a concerned observer of your continued existence."

"And which of those," she said, "is the mask?"

He did not answer. He smoothed the lace at his cuff, and she watched his hands, the way they moved with such precision, such controlled grace, and thought of all the hands she had ever known, her mother's rough palms, Yvenne's ink-stained fingers, Kael's scarred knuckles. Caelum's hands had never known labor. They had only ever held pens, and cups, and the throats of men who had displeased him.

"I have offended you," he said, reading her silence as easily as one reads weather. "Forgive me. I forget that you are unused to candor."

"I am unused to be condescended to. They are different things."

"Yes." He smiled, and this time the smile was smaller, more private. "Yes, they are."

He moved toward the door. At the threshold he paused, one gloved hand on the iron band, and turned his head so that she saw his profile against the darkening window.

"Kael's kindness," he said, "has always been a tool of state. Do not mistake it for anything gentler."

The words hung in the air between them, and she felt them land, felt the bruise of them beneath her ribs, and refused to give him the satisfaction of a flinch.

"Your distrust," she said, and was surprised by the steadiness of her own voice, "seems to be a tool of something else."

"Something else?"

"Whatever it is that makes you need everyone in this palace to be as frightened as you are."

He laughed again, but this time the sound was different, stripped of its performance, and it chilled her in ways she could not have named.

"Fear," he said, "is the only honest emotion left in this court, Sera. You would do well to cultivate it."

He let himself out. The latch clicked behind him with the soft finality of a coffin lid, and she stood alone in the small room, and the dusk poured through the window like water, and the fountain below went on with its patient, indifferent music.

The gown's hem whispered against the stone as she turned from the window. Caelum's words clung to her like the smell of someone else's perfume, and she wanted to be free of them, wanted to wash the taste of his meaning from her mouth. Instead she crossed to the small table beneath the mirror and poured water from the pitcher into the basin. The splash was bright against the quiet, and she cupped the cold in her hands and pressed it to her face, let it run down her wrists, let it shock her back into the shape of someone who had not just been told to cultivate fear.

She drank. The water tasted of iron and old wells, of the deep places beneath the palace where the aqueducts ran, and it grounded her in a way that Kael's steadying hand could not. When she lifted her head again her reflection stared back at her, smudged and water-bright, and she thought for a wild moment that it was not her own face but her mother's looking out from behind her eyes.

The thought passed. It always passed. She set the basin aside and unpinned her hair, and the dark mass of it tumbled over her shoulders, and the small room felt smaller for the intimacy of it.

She did not remember lying down.

What she remembered afterward, in the thin grey place between one breath and the next, was the sound of a door closing. Not the latch of Caelum's departure but something older, something that lived in the memory of her bones rather than in the architecture of the palace. A door of great weight, set into a frame of stone so old the stone had forgotten it was ever anything else.

The corridor stretched before her in both directions, pale as milk, lit by no source she could find. The walls were hung with doors. Bone-white doors, tall and narrow, each one carved with a sigil she did not recognize, each one set with a handle of dark metal that gleamed like a closed eye. The floor beneath her bare feet was smooth and cold, and her footsteps made no sound, and the silence had weight, the silence of a cathedral at the hour of the dead.

She walked.

She did not know why she walked. Some compulsion deeper than curiosity, deeper than will, drew her forward through the pale corridor as the doors ticked past like the numbers of a clock she could not read. The air tasted of chalk and something faintly sweet, like flowers left too long in a sealed room. Somewhere far ahead, or perhaps far behind, water dripped with the patience of years.

And then she heard her name.

"Sera."

The voice was a half-remembered thing, a tune she had once known by heart and could now only hum the shape of. It came from behind one of the bone-white doors, or perhaps from inside the walls, or perhaps from the corridor itself, the way heat came from sun-warmed stone. She stopped. Her breath stopped. The silence rushed in to fill the space where her name had been, and she stood very still, and she listened with her whole body.

"Sera."

Again. Closer now, or perhaps only more distinct. A man's voice, low and unhurried, with the cadence of someone who had once read aloud to her from books with cracked spines. She pressed her palm flat against the nearest door and felt the grain of the wood beneath her skin, and the wood was warm, warmer than the corridor, warmer than it had any right to be.

"Father?" she whispered, and the word felt strange in her mouth, a relic from a language she had half forgotten.

The door did not open. But she heard, from somewhere beyond it, the soft sound of footsteps drawing near, and she thought she could almost feel the displacement of air as a hand lifted on the other side, almost touching the wood from within.

"Sera. My Sera. You should not have come."

The voice cracked on the last word, or perhaps it only seemed to crack, the way ice seems to crack when the spring is still far off. She pressed her forehead to the door, and the wood smelled of pine resin and something darker, something that recalled the sickroom at the back of the stable where the old horses went to die. She wanted to weep. She wanted to hammer her fists against the wood until her knuckles split. She wanted to call out again, to demand that he open, to demand that he explain the years of his absence and the silence that had grown over his name like moss over a grave.

She did none of these things. She stood with her forehead pressed to the door and her hands flat against the wood, and the footsteps on the other side paused, and she knew with a certainty that lived below thought that he was standing there also, his hand raised, his palm perhaps an inch from hers, and that whatever lay between them was something neither of them could open.

"I cannot," she said, or tried to say, but the words would not come, and the corridor was already fading, the bone-white doors sliding back into a greyness that thickened and rose, and she felt herself falling, or being lifted, or simply ceasing to be where she had been.

She woke with a sound in her throat that might have been his name.

The room was dark. The fountain played its patient music below the window. The gown she had not changed out of twisted around her legs like a net, and her hair had come loose from its pins and lay against her neck in damp ropes. She lay still for a long moment, breathing, counting the beats of her heart against the pillow, and the ceiling above her was a country she did not recognize.

Then she sat up, and the room tilted, and steadied.

She crossed to the window. The palace courtyard lay below in the blue dusk, and the fountain threw its arc of water into the air where it caught the last light and broke it into a thousand small fragmentary. From somewhere in the lower corridors she heard the distant clatter of the kitchen preparing for the evening meal, and the smell of roasted meat rose faintly through the stone, and she was hungry in a way that surprised her, hungry in the way of the living rather than the dreaming.

She had not dreamed of her father in years. The last time had been the night before Kael had come to her with the plan that was not a plan, only the first of many slow motions toward the shape their lives had since taken. She had woken from that dream with a grief so sharp she had thought she would choke on it, and Kael had sat with her through the small hours while she shook, and he had not spoken, and his silence had been the kindest thing he had ever given her.

She did not know what to make of this new dream. She did not know what to make of anything.

A knock at the door. Soft, deliberate, the rhythm of someone who was accustomed to announcing himself to rooms that might contain listening ears.

"Sera." Kael's voice, roughened by something she could not yet identify. "Are you awake?"

She smoothed her gown with hands that did not quite obey her, crossed the small room, and opened the door. He stood in the corridor with a candle in one hand, and the candlelight turned the planes of his face into a country of sharp shadow and sudden warmth, and she saw at once that something had changed.

"What is it?"

He did not answer at once. He looked past her into the room as though checking that it contained only what it should, only the basin and the pitcher and the narrow bed, only the gown she had discarded on the chair, only the girl he had known for years standing in the doorway with her hair undone and her eyes still smudged with the residue of a dream she would not name.

"Caelum," he said at last. "Has he been here?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"An hour ago, perhaps. Why?"

Kael set his jaw. The candle flame shivered, and the shadows on the wall behind him leaned and recovered, leaned and recovered, like men taking a step and then thinking better of it.

"He has spoken with the queen," he said. "I have just come from the lower corridor. I overheard more than I should have."

"And?"

He looked at her then, and the look was stripped of its usual wry distance, and she saw in it something she had not seen in him in years, something she had almost forgotten he possessed.

"And the wedding is to be moved forward. Three days from now, in the great hall, before the full court."

The words landed in the room like stones dropped into still water, and the ripples moved outward through the silence between them, and she felt the cold of them spread through her chest.

"Three days," she said.

"Three days."

"And the queen has agreed to this?"

"The queen has agreed to nothing. The queen has been told. There is a difference, in this palace."

She leaned against the doorframe. The wood was cool against her shoulder blade, and she let it take some of her weight, and the gown rustled against the stone, and the fountain played on below the window as though the world had not just shifted beneath her feet.

"Why?" she asked, though she already knew, or thought she knew, and the knowing sat in her stomach like a stone swallowed whole.

"Because Caelum is afraid of something," Kael said. "And afraid men move faster than careful men. He wants the marriage done, the seal set, before whatever he fears has time to find him."

"And what does he fear?"

Kael did not answer. He lifted the candle, and the light climbed the wall and found the small portrait above the washstand, her mother's face in its frame of tarnished gilt, and the eyes in the portrait seemed to follow them both with an attention that had nothing to do with paint.

"I do not know," he said quietly. "But I intend to find out."

He held out his hand. She looked at it, at the calluses and the scars, at the knuckles that had broken and healed and broken again, and she thought of the hand on the other side of the bone-white door, the hand that had almost touched hers, the hand that had belonged to a man who had once read her stories in a voice she could almost remember.

She took it.

His fingers closed around hers, and the warmth of him was a small, fierce thing against the cold that was spreading through her, and she let him draw her forward into the corridor, and the door swung shut behind them with a sound like a held breath finally released.

The corridor stretched before them, pale and long, hung with its small lamps that burned without flickering, and their footsteps rang against the stone in a rhythm that sounded, to her ears, like the beginning of a story she had not yet learned to read.

She did not look back. She did not look at the door. She let Kael lead her forward into whatever came next, and the night received them, and the palace went on, and somewhere far above the rooftops a single star came out and watched them go.