The Emperor of Evening Stars by Laura Thalassa

Chapter 2 The Shadow King

254 years ago

“They’re coming.” My mother slams our cavern door closed as she storms into our house.

“Who?” I close the book I’ve been reading and slide my ankles off the edge of the table. I’m not supposed to kick my feet up on our table, and normally I’d get chewed out for it, but today, my mom doesn’t even notice.

“Your father’s men.”

I look at my mother with alarm as she grabs my arm, dragging me towards the back recesses of our home where our rooms are. Every room in our house has a door or an artificial wall to seal the caverns we dwell in from those that lie beyond. The entire heart of Arestys is a maze of them, spanning nearly the length of the island. Not even I know all of the caverns by heart, and I’ve lived my whole life inside them.

“Why are the king’s men coming?” I ask, my voice deepening in alarm.

Control your emotions, I tell myself, though it’s my mother’s voice I hear in my head. For fairies, power and emotion are all wrapped up together. Lose control of one, and you’ll lose control of the other.

And if the king’s men are coming, I can’t afford to lose control.

Since the day three years ago that my mom confessed my father was the Galleghar Nyx, tyrant King of Night, I sealed away all dreams of reuniting with him. Better to be a bastard than his son.

Galleghar Nyx is a powerful man. A cruel, powerful man. The kind of man you hope never notices you.

“Someone saw your wings,” she says.

I swallow. My distinctive, damning wings. Fairies don’t tend to have the talon-tipped wings of dragons and demons. In fact, there’s only one particular line of fairies that share this trait—the royal bloodline.

I had the misfortune of inheriting my father’s wings.

“They must’ve reported them,” she continues.

Fear coils low in my stomach. I did this. Over the last three years, I’ve kept my wings hidden, but sometimes even my practiced control slips.

“I’m sorry,” I say, running a hand through my white hair. The words sound hollow. You apologize for a mistake, but this is so much bigger than a simple mistake.

Too many fights that I went looking for and too many pretty women I spent too long gazing after. I baited myself over and over again with the exact things that triggered my wings. 

And there had been that village girl the other week … she’d seen them. She’d seen them and all but ran to tell the village elders. I was only able to stop her by striking a bargain—her silence for a bracelet made out of moonbeams and asteroid hearts.

I can’t wield magic, but I’ve gotten good at churning out deals.

So I whispered to the sweet moon stories about the sun until she shared a little of her light, and I let the cosmos taste my essence in return for the hearts, and it took four days, but I got the village girl her heavenly bracelet.

Apparently it was all for nothing. She must’ve told someone in those four days before I could fulfill my end of the bargain. After all, it’s not every day that you stumble upon the heir to the Night Kingdom.

“Don’t apologize for who you are,” my mother says now, refusing to allow me to take the fall for something that is surely my fault. She drags me to her room, shutting the door behind her.

“Your powers are still awakening?” she asks, changing the subject.

I nod. I was powerful before my wings sprouted, and even though I gained a huge portion of my magic that night, it’s been steadily burgeoning within me ever since.

The look my mother gives me is both proud and full of worry. “My son, you’re already powerful. Not yet powerful enough to escape your father’s clutches, but one day … one day you might become the very thing he fears.”

I don’t know what to do with her words. At any other time I might preen under the praise, but right now … they sit like spoiled meat in my stomach.

She releases my hand and moves over to her rickety bed. She pushes it aside, staring at the ground beneath it. I follow her gaze, looking at the uneven, rocky surface. Other than some dust motes, there’s nothing to be seen.

She holds her hand out and mutters a few words under her breath. My arms prickle as I feel her magic drift out from her. The ground shimmers, like a mirage, then disappears, revealing a huge pit in its place. And inside the pit …

“Mom …?”

I stare, transfixed, at the mountain of coins that fill it nearly to the brim. Some are copper, some are silver, but most are gold. Scattered between them are rough cut gemstones, the kind that pulse with heartbeats.

Lapis viventem. Alchemist stones.

“What—what is all this?” I ask.

There’s far more money here than a scribe makes. Whatever my mother has been doing, it’s not just scribbling out the histories of Arestys.

My mother stares at the treasure. “It’s yours,” she says, her gaze moving to me.

Her words are like a blow to the chest. She’s been saving all this money … for me?

I’m shaking my head. Fairies don’t give gifts like this, not without catches. Not even to their brood.

It feels like cursed magic.

“I won’t take it.”

“You will, my son,” she says, “along with the rest of your inheritance.”

I furrow my brows as I look at her. There’s more?

She looks steadily at me. “My secrets.”

My heart is pounding, and whatever she’s about to say, I don’t want to hear it because secrets are meant for one soul to keep.

I pinch my eyes shut and shake my head over and over again. I refuse to think of what it means that she’s breaking one of her deepest rules. That she’s giving me her inheritance. That’s an ominous word to use.

“Desmond,” she says, touching my shoulder and shaking me slightly, “where is the man I raised? I need you to be strong for me right now.”

My eyes open at her words, and I’m silently begging her to not go down this path, but she ignores my look.

“The King of Day owes me a favor. Take this money, buy yourself asylum.”

Asylum? In the Kingdom of Day? Forced to never see the night?

“If he won’t accept your money, tell him you’re the daughter of Larissa Flynn and Galleghar Nyx. Show him your wings if you need to. He will not refuse you then.”

“Only if you come with me,” I say. Because that seems to be the catch—acquire safety, but abandon my mother. And that I will not do.

She cups my cheek. “I can’t, my son. I bought my fate long ago.”

I squint at her, not understanding.

“Listen carefully,” she says, “because I only have time to tell you this once. I didn’t love your father—I never did,” she says.

As soon as the words leave her mouth, I still. So many times I imagined asking her about this—how she came into my father’s clutches. I couldn’t fathom how my clever, principled mother could care for the Shadow King, a man who collected wives and killed his children.

“My name once was Eurielle D’Asteria. Originally, I was one of the king’s spies,” she admits.

My mother? A spy? And one who went by a different name?

Secrets are meant for one soul to keep. It’s an apt slogan for a spy.

“I didn’t answer directly to him,” she continues, “so for many decades we never came face-to-face. Not until I foiled an assassination attempt on the king did he ever lay eyes on me.”

My mother saved the king’s life. That revelation leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. There are urchins more worthy of saving than the creature that rules our land.

“Galleghar invited me to his palace to personally medal me for the deed.” Her eyes grow distant. She shakes her head. “I should have known better than to go, but go I did. That day I entered that meeting a spy, but by the end of it, I’d been stripped of my title and duties and I was deposited into his harem.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Why?” I ask, bewildered. From everything I’ve read, fairies don’t just choose mates over the course of a day. Some circle each other for centuries before settling down.

My mother lifts a shoulder. “He never really told me.”

So he ripped her life from her and forced her to be his. The thought makes my skin crawl.

I’m a product of that union.

“I was with him for many years, many long, lonesome years. Until, one day, things changed.

“Galleghar doesn’t let his concubines have much freedom, but on one rare occasion I was outside the palace walls, enjoying a traveling faire, when a diviner told me a piece of my future.

My mother pauses. “She said, ‘In your hour of desperation, you’ll know what to do, and the world will thank you for it.’

“I forgot the diviner’s words until the day I found out I was pregnant. It was only then that they came back to me. And she was right, I did know what to do. I sold off centuries of my life for the means to escape, and eventually, I fled the king’s palace right under his nose. I came here, and here I’ve stayed ever since.”

My mother sold off centuries of her life?

She clasps the side of my face. “So you see, my son, my fate was decided long before today.”

My heart is squeezing and squeezing. I imagine this is how a star feels as it dies, like everything it loves and everything it is, is pressing inwards and crushing the life out of it.

I shake my head in her hands. My eyes are starting to sting, but I’m still too shocked to fully process all that my mother has said.

She pulls my face in close. “Hide your wings, control your temper, and learn everything you can about the world, starting with your enemies,” she breathes. “Trust no one, and above all, don’t share your secrets.”