It’s the difference between someone who wants to lead, and someone who simply wants to rule.
“Actions make a monarch,” Rapunzel tells him as Verette keeps singing, “not a throne. If you haven’t learned that, you’re not ready to be king.”
Enver glowers at her, wordless with outrage, clinging to the starlight and the throne simply so no one else can have them.
And over the song and the rumble of roots and clamor of fighting, she hears something else: a maelstrom descending on beak and wing.
A flapping noise precedes the soft patter of a shower of—bread?Rolls, breadsticks, tiny bits of toast, they all rain on Enver from above.
Of all the possible challengers to the Asteran throne, the last thing anyone probably anticipated was a flock of relentless seagulls.
They swoop down on Enver, who can’t even lift his arms to bat them away. Verette’s voice falters, but Enver’s grip on the starlight evaporates. Suddenly it’s all rushing to Rapunzel in a sweeping tide, and all she can do is lead it—not to her bones, not to the spring, but to the man dying in a strange palace in a strange land, here only because someone invited a princess in over her head.
A princess’s powers may still be new to her, but if there’s one thing Rapunzel will always know how to do, it’s heal someone.
Drop by drop, spark by spark, she guides the starlight from weary roots and wilting leaves and splinters of a warping trunk. She sends it into Cressien, closing the wounds in a way Enver never could, until his heart beats steady, his breath comes easy, and the pain is only a memory.
When the starlight has done its work, she turns and findsthe roots no longer burning with silver, or opal gleam, or mellow gold. They’re dulling to plain gray stone.
And Enver is fading with them.
Verette stands in front of the throne, tears running down her cheeks. “Papa, we just wanted to help. Why didn’t you let go?”
A distant, defeated smile only barely flexes his lips. He breathes, “Make me proud.”
And then—
The starlight is gone, and only the stone is left.
Verette sways on the spot. Rapunzel steps closer and braces her elbow, trying to think of anything to say that is big enough for something like this.
Footsteps crunch over the broken stone. Hughes comes to Verette’s other side, looking almost as lost as she does. He wraps an arm around her shoulders. Then he gathers himself.
“Your mother is with the stars,” he says raggedly. “And as one of the few who knew her, I swear—Gaelle has always,alwaysbeen proud.”
Twenty-Four
Eugene
A week later, Eugene notes with no small degree of dismay that the seagulls have yet to fully move on.
Fortunately, they largely congregate around the remains of the audience hall, and most of the flock he brought down on Enver has left. But even now, on their last day in Astera, the shrilling of the gulls still follows him and Rapunzel out into a familiar sunlit courtyard.
Like most of the palace, the sunmill is laced in the stone roots of what once was the starcloud tree. The sails creak and tilt occasionally with the breeze, but the waterworks are motionless; Ruvon is working with Councilor Laroux to salvage as much of the apparatus as they can. The logistics of theGreat Starlight Fountain, however, have also changed with the landscape.
The fountain’s basin outlasted Enver by only a few minutes. When it collapsed, it took a large swath of the courtyard with it, leaving a yawning sinkhole where the spring’s cavern once was. The rim has been roped off, with only a few ladders dangling down into the pit, but that won’t last for long.
There have been many hard choices this week, decisions of what to salvage in the palace and what to let go. Eugene and Rapunzel have helped everywhere they can, whether by picking the locks on the queen’s chambers or helping shelter citizens whose homes were swallowed by roots. Verette, however, has been simply and unmovably clear about one key decision: The Starlight Spring was torn open, and it’s staying that way.
Eugene and Rapunzel find her at a table set up near the lip of the sinkhole, huddled over sheets of parchment with Ruvon and Councilor Laroux. “…and if we add a support column below this shelf, that should stabilize—oh, you’re here!”
“We’ll keep working, Your Majesty,” Councilor Laroux says.
Verette tenses briefly, as she has every time someone’s called her “majesty” in the last week, but just says, “Thank you.”
“Still weird?” Eugene asks as she walks over.
“Still weird,” Verette confirms. She’s not dressed like the queens in storybooks, but in a laborer’s breeches and shirt, the only sign of rank a plain silver circlet over her long braid.
