Aster's eyes hold the same look I've seen in the mirror after too many late nights studying and a hard day of class. I want to ask him if he's alright, but I bite my tongue. His country is at war, his castle is surrounded by people who hate him, and his soldiers are dying, the lucky ones dragged to the infirmary. His world trembles before him, promising to fall unless he makes the right moves. Just because we survived today's battle doesn't mean he's alright.

He ushers me into his room, and I try to keep my expression from reflecting my thoughts. If my world threatened to topple around me, a sallow face would hardly be what I wanted around.

He sits in an armchair, and I plop down on his couch, the strange Morineause skirt fluffing out around me. I thought I would miss my pants—the only times I used to wear dresses in Erreliah was to parties—but the Morineause garb is oddly comfortable. "I have a present for you." I smile.

His head tilts, and he sits forward, arms on his knees. "Oh?" The word struggles to be light, but still his gaze is heavy with distraction.

From my pocket, I draw out my notebook, flipping through pages. "I believe some messages somehow found their way into my book, and I thought, where better to bring lost messages than the Prince of Morineaux?"

His smile doesn't quite reach his eyes. "You should be careful. You don't have to do that."

"I know," I say, serious now. "And I am." I pass the notes to him.

His finger traces over the letters. "I'm surprised you wrote this in my language."

"I didn't." I blush, feeling dumb for handing him something he can't read and reach to take it back.

He just holds up the book.

I lean forward, examining the page. The words are Errelian, but as I stare, the characters twist into the Morineause script. I blink, and they morph back. "The bracelet."

His eyes flick to it, and the little lights dance on my wrist. "A powerful artefact indeed. I've never heard of a spell that could..."

Before he can ask where I got it, I gesture back at the notebook. "Is any of that going to be helpful? Do you recognize the woman from my drawing?"

"Woman?"

I reach over and flip to her face. He purses his lips as he considers. "I recognize the insignia," he says carefully.

I chuckle. "That bad, is it?"

"Sorry. No, it's not that; it's just not... specific enough to describe a particular woman. This could be almost any Lady of the court."

I hide a smile in mock seriousness, but his overcast face and voice makes my attempts at levity feel forced. "Then your Ladies need to stop looking so much alike."

He musters a feeble smile and leans over the scraps of the woman's letter. His face sobers as he reads. "This doesn't sound good."

"There's hardly anything there." I wrote it hoping at the time it would be helpful to him, but now that it is, I worry.

"It sounds as if Lady Irrianet is reluctant to follow mine and my siblings' leadership." He leans back, but with that look in his eyes he normally gets before pacing and theorizing. He stares at the ceiling as he talks. "'Admirable,' 'guidance'. Either Reyan is admirable and she trusts his guidance, or—more likely, considering her desire for the message to burn—she wants someone to give him supposed guidance."

"Supposed?"

He glances at me as if he forgot I was listening to his deductions. "Ahm, yes. The sort of influence that leaves the influencer as the one in power. And Osennia being a 'good friend' to Sela is practically the same thing." He pauses, face drawn.

"What?" His worry unnerves me. I draw my feet onto the couch, settling in to listen.

He sighs and straightens. "Solus was second-in-command during my uncle's reign, and remains so now. The fact that I'm not yet coronated gives him more power. Irrianet has already shown that she doesn't want me to have much; she opposed my coronation happening any time soon. I figure she wants Solus to rule. Perhaps will cite my inexperience and the current crisis as justification." He shakes his head tiredly and flops back again. To the ceiling, he says, "She's discussing ways to usurp our power."

Leaning forward, I whisper, "Isn't that treason?"

His laugh is sardonic. "How could it be treason to provide friends and advisors to the leadership? And if everyone that matters approves of holding off on letting the Second Son rule his Corps, then who would accuse of treason?"

Clarity settles in my mind. "So she's not trying to remove you. She's trying to use you."

"Mm, yes. The far more dangerous of the two." His words are barbed, but I know its sting isn't directed at me. Instead, its pain makes me ache for the boy whose castle is falling apart on both sides of its wall.

I nod, trying to find some upside for him. "So are you going to warn your siblings?"

"I suppose. I'm sure they already know that the other government officials aren't exactly pleased about being led by people a decade, or a few decades, their junior. It's good, though, that I have a name to warn Sela of. We'll just have to hope that Reyan pays attention to me." He clears his throat, shifting to open the notebook once more. "Do you mind giving me a moment?" He gestures with the book. "I'd like to go through these more thoroughly. Copy them perhaps..." His voice falls off, gaze drifting down, and I smile, endeared despite his seriousness at how easily certain things absorb his attention.

"Of course." I rise, and he glances up.

"But you'll stay, won't you? I'd like to be able to ask questions if I come upon any."

I nod, but my eyes trail to the bookshelf that captured my attention the first time I came here. "Is it alright if I...?"

"Sure, sure." Distraction fills his voice.

Leaving him to study the notes, I move over to the shelf. Warm excitement fills me as my fingers trail the spines. Pulling a heavy tome out, I flip through the pages, marveling. Each of these letters were penned by hand, each page stitched lovingly in. My eyes skim words, but l can't make much sense of it, and I have the feeling I'm a novice trying to read her master's textbook.

Closing the tome carefully, I set it back on its shelf. This time, I tip a thinner book out and gingerly turn to its title page. In large, swirling script, it reads, A Lexis for the Star Prince, and underneath, in smaller hand, "Carefully translated from Wyrd Speak. Verit." The charm refuses to translate some of the words, but I turn the page anyway. The same swirling letters title it, "The Wyrd of the Silver Tree." A storybook, then, or poetry considering the strange format of the lines. Pleased, I return to the couch and curl up to read.

From the beginning of days

     there were men and magic made

Magic rest in the Stellries' hands

     but the Foolish One offered it to man

A darkness brewed, a darkness deep

     so our First Mother bound it in a tree

Yet the Shadesnare seeks to destroy its hold

     to let the captive darkness's wrath unfold

The Chosen we need,

     the Chosen to seed

The beginning of the Shadesnare's end

     lest when loosing what is imprisoned,

The end he spell

     for Avadel.

I recognize some of the words from my study in the library: Stellries, the magical beings who fell from the sky, and the Shadesnare, the human given magic only to turn it against the giver. Is the Foolish One, then, Jacqueline? She was the one to give magic to the Shadesnare, but given the way the Morineause revere the woman, calling her foolish seems like sacrilege. More likely she's the First Mother. After all, she was their first queen and the woman legend says imprisoned the Shadesnare.

So this is a retelling of that story, or perhaps an older, simpler version of it. But even though the ending is usual fairytale stock—a monster to fear, a dark consequence unless some good thing happens—it settles an eerie chill over me. Intrigued and faintly distrubed, or intrigued perhaps because I am disturbed, I turn the page.

The next story, "The Wyrd of the Shadesnare's End," is even more tangled and confusing than the last. I run my fingers over cryptic words again promising doom to the land unless some desperate condition can be met.

Of caverns and casters, of whispers and daggers...

A strange kinship rises within me to the heroes called for in these pages, perhaps because of words achingly familiar.

A prince, a witch, a scientist...

I imagine a girl like me hundreds of years ago, fleeing our underground homeland, leaving her world of science behind for fairy tales and magic. I want to reach through the pages and comfort her, to let her know she isn't alone in her exile, that though the world might have rested on her shoulders generations ago, it goes on still. She didn't cause the doom of her people, no matter what dark promises were written on this page.

Of whispers, one cast out

     of daggers, one bears scars

Of shadows, one born

     of snow, one lost...

Reading the fates that met these heroes washes a wave of regret over me. Exiled, beaten, born into darkness, and killed in the cold... I shiver, remembering the High Valley snow drifts men die among. All of it sounds like more than anyone should have to bear.

Hoping the next story is lighter, I turn the page, finding "The Wyrd of the Chosen Eight." Simultaneously anticipating and dreading more information about the story's heroes, I hold the book open with one hand, the other playing at my necklace.

As soon as I start reading, though, two words catch my eyes, and I freeze. Just an oddity, an impossibility, a coincidence. I read the poem, read it again, and finding no more sense in it, turn to Aster. "What is this book?" My hand and voice both shake a little, and I strive to calm them.

"Which book?"

Marking the page with my finger, I show him the cover.

He squints at it. "That looks like something my nursemaid read to me. When I was a child."

"These are hardly nursery rhymes."

He sets my notebook aside. "I barely even remember them." Standing, he comes to look at the book.

"They're stories. Dark, cryptic—" I break off. "I'm sure you'd understand them better than I do, but—" I draw in a breath, trying to calm my unreasonably shaken nerves. "It has my name in it, Aster."

"What?" A weak smile tips his lips as though it's ridiculous or impossible, and his levity lightens me in turn.

I offer back a strained smile, like someone printed my name in the paper's obituary as a strange, macabre joke. "Yeah. Look." I flip the page back open.

His half-smile gains a little strength. "I don't see your name at all."

"You're just not looking right." Something feels wrong about this double-sided joking, about him being normal and me pretending to be, especially when it was the opposite just minutes ago. "Here. 'The Wyrd of the Chosen Eight.'" I clear my throat and read it to him in my most dramatic voice, like a gaudy street performer looking for a few coins. "And they shall be named from: the living river, the house of silver, and the count of one; the guilty verdict call, the path walker's fall, and the father not to become; the star of darkness, the heart unwanted—" My gaze shoots up like I'm trying to spook him with the chilling end to a tale, but inside, I'm the one shaken. "And if not, we're undone."

"Marvelous performance, maedimoielle." He pauses. "But I still didn't hear your name."

"It's only because you're so uneducated as not to speak the High Valley language." I click my tongue at him, and wonder why I'm putting up such a facade. "Eleaviara is derived from the words 'to be living.' And 'riveirre' is a thin, underground stream of water." My smile is thinner now, and I wonder how much he sees through my disguise. "I am the living river." In fact, when I was really little, that was my father's nickname for me, perhaps why it so startles me to see it now. This isn't just some logical jump based on a tongue no one here speaks; this is my name.

He looks back down to the book, seeming to mirror my unsettled sentiment for the first time. After a moment, with a laugh that sounds more uncomfortable than true, he says, "It must simply be a coincidence. Besides, no one in Avadel speaks your language."

"But it talks about their names, Aster. This isn't just a random phrase in a random story. 'And they shall be called from.' It's giving us people's names, and mine is in there." I'm more scared than I should be, and it frustrates me that I'm letting my irrationality through now.

He takes the book and thumbs through the pages, eventually closing it to look at the cover. A strange expression crosses his face, and he runs his finger over the last two words of the title. "Jeanna used to call me this."

"Star Prince?"

He nods. "She said—" He blinks, gaze far away. "She said that my parents naming me Aster was a sign." He twists his lips, shaking his head, and his eyes come back to the present. "I don't remember of what, though. She was full of silly proverbs."

His dismissal breaks the dark enchantment the words in the book cast over us, and I manage a smile. "We have a saying, in Erreliah."

He cocks his head at me, waiting.

"Fit the curve to the data, not the data to the curve."

His eyes narrow, and I resist the urge to bite my lip. He must be hopelessly confused, would have to be even if Idyne's charm translated everything for me correctly. "It simply means that people looking for a specific pattern will find one. You have to stick with the facts, make reality out of that. Don't try to force what you want reality to be around hand-chosen facts. You'll only give yourself lies."

He nods slowly. "I suppose that makes sense. Not so much with the phrasing you used, but I suppose it makes sense." His small smile teases me, and I can't help but smile back.

He goes back to the notes. He asks me a couple questions but hands me back my notebook soon enough. A dark thought still niggles in the back of my mind despite our joking, and as he quietly wishes me a good evening, I ask, "Do you mind if I take the book? Back with me to the infirmary?"

He hesitates. "I know you are careful with such things," he says, then adds gently, "but I would hate for something to happen to it."

I nod, understanding but inexplicably disappointed.

"I could make you a copy, though. Of some of the pages, if you'd like."

"A copy?"

"Like I did with your notes earlier. I suppose you were reading and didn't notice. Here." He moves over to where he was sitting and grabs some blank papers out of a stack on the coffee table. "Which ones do you want?"

I ask him for the first three, and he casts a spell for each poem, one hand on the book's page, another on the blank parchment. Words shimmer and appear on the new page, exactly like they were written in the old. I peer closer, amazed. Perhaps all the books here weren't hand-written after all.

With my copied pages in hand, I head into the castle halls. Dark words still swirl through my mind, though, and I have a feeling I'll be singing 'nursery rhymes' to myself into the long, quiet hours of the night.