Page 92 of Fire to the Stars

“Eau de vie! Eau de vie!” Tears stream down his face. “Eau de vie, s’il vous plaît!”

“Thisis the reason we only managed to apprehend one of them.” Marshal Bard shakes out his fingers. “Observe.”

At first, nothing happens. Then I hear the crackle.

The prisoner’s wounds start to ice over.

Ice.It crawls over the wounds like frost on a window, seals the bleeding, then stitches the flesh beneath. Once he’s healed, the ice melts and rolls off his skin with the ease of raindrops. The sickly color of his complexion remains, but he’s otherwise uninjured.

I step back, cold sweat on my neck. “What in the Gods’ names is this?”

“It explains how they overwhelmed the people of Ravinfort, including the local Gendarmerie, so thoroughly,” Marshal Bard says. “They couldn’t lose. My brigade might’ve been slaughtered had these people not prioritized their escape.”

The rosy-haired assassin Claire killed in my defense was—is—one of them. She must’ve healed and walked away.

Claire felt all that guilt fornothing.

“I hoped you might know something about this magic, given the similarities to dragon healing,” Marshal Bard adds.

“Dragons don’t heal like that. Not with ice.” The ache in my shoulder throbs to the beat of my spiked pulse. “But the War-TornGods control opposite halves of creation. Solar and lunar. Fire and ice. Each one’s domain of magic inherently counters the other’s. So it’s almost as if—”

I shoot Marshal Bard a look. His jaw clenches just like mine.

“We’re both thinking it,” he says roughly. “Say it.”

“Almost as ifNoctucursed them.”

He pinches the bridge of his nose as if to center himself. “You can’t imagine how validating it is to hear you say that aloud. I felt like a heathen justthinkingit.”

“Feel free to claim it was my theory first. My research already puts me in the heathen category.”

“I’ll owe you a favor for that,” he remarks. “But Noctu attacks with meteorites. Why bother cursing individual humans?”

Might as well go full heathen. “I don’t know. But the mere presence of ice magic in this realm suggests Diu’s defenses aren’t as strong as we were taught. These people might even be Noctu’s foot soldiers, working toward the apocalypse.”

Alarm crosses his expression. “How much damage do you think they’ve done to the realm without us knowing?”

“That’s not even the scariest question,” I answer. “If these people are such blatant criminals, then why isn’t Diu punishingthem?”

As a slayer, I fully believed my role was to purge the realm of the greed that turned people into dragons. Even after Micah, Gérard, and Claire challenged my understanding of who deserves the curse, I still maintained my responsibility to protect the people of Florent and mitigate the suffering. But if the point of Diu’s punishment is to correct our moral compass, then he’s missed the mark by a long shot.

As far as I can tell, morality has nothing to do with magic.

“Maybe Diu can’t curse them if Noctu got to them first,” Marshal Bard offers, but then he rubs his face, looking unconvinced. “I don’t know.The Tale of Starsis so vague about the limitations of their power.”

“It was written to convey a moral lesson, not a scientific one,” I reply. “The rules of creation magic were lost to the Dark Days, probably by the authors’ design. The only magic we can hope to understand is what manifests in front of us.”

“I have more questions than answers at this point.”

“I wish I could offer more information, but Noctu’s magic is beyond my expertise. If your prisoner doesn’t explain how it works, I don’t think wecanknow.”

“This confirms my thoughts on the ideological profile, though.” He gestures tiredly to the slumped prisoner. “They’re Noctu cultists.”

“Cultists?”That’s a strong word.

“When you submitted your initial evidence for this case, you described their attire as a ‘uniform.’ In the context of Noctu’s magic, that’s not just an accurate description. It’s atell,” he explains. “Blue cloaks, sickles, silver masks with crescent-shaped cutouts for the eyes and mouth…Even the silverwolves follow a certain theme.”

“It’s all lunar symbolism,” I realize.