The Starless Sea

Then Allegra Cavallo sinks to her knees on an empty beach by a star-covered sea and sobs.

ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS is being dragged backward, away from the rift that has torn open the Heart of this Harbor and into the Keeper’s office where the floor has remained intact, his feet slipping on the broken tiles.

“Sit,” the Keeper says, forcing Zachary into the chair behind the desk. Zachary tries to stand again but the Keeper holds him down. “Breathe,” the Keeper advises but Zachary can’t remember how. “Breathe,” the Keeper repeats and Zachary takes one slow, gasping breath after another. He doesn’t understand how the Keeper is so calm. He doesn’t understand anything that’s happening right now but he keeps breathing and once his breath is steady the Keeper lets him go and he remains in the chair.

The Keeper takes a bottle from a bookshelf. He fills a glass with clear liquid and places it in front of Zachary.

“Drink this,” he says, leaving the bottle and walking away. He doesn’t add “it will make you feel better” and Zachary doesn’t believe, not right now in this chair, that he will ever feel better but he drinks it any

way and coughs.

It doesn’t make him feel better.

It makes everything sharper and clearer and worse.

Zachary puts the glass down next to the Keeper’s notebook and tries to focus on something, anything that isn’t the last awful moments replaying themselves over and over in his head. He looks at the open notebook and reads, one page and then another.

“These are love letters,” he says, to himself in surprise as much as to the Keeper who does not respond.

Zachary keeps reading. Some are poems and others are prose but every line is passionate and explicit and clearly written to or about Mirabel.

He glances up at the Keeper who stands in the doorway, looking out at a chasm into which the universe has fallen save for a single star that dangles defiantly from the ceiling.

The Keeper hits the doorframe so hard that it cracks and Zachary realizes the apparent calm is barely contained rage.

He watches as the Keeper sighs and places his hand against the frame. The crack repairs itself, slowly mending until only a line remains.

The stones in the Heart begin to rumble and shift. Broken rock moves over the void in the floor, rebuilding the surface piece by piece.

The Keeper returns to the desk and picks up the bottle.

“Mirabel was in the antechamber,” the Keeper says, answering the question Zachary had not dared ask as he pours a glass for himself. “I will not be able to retrieve her body or what is left of it until the wreckage is cleared. The repairs will take some time.”

Zachary tries to say something, anything, but he cannot and instead he puts his head down on the desk, trying to understand.

Why only the two of them are here in a room filled with loss and books. Why everything that was crumbling before is broken now and why only the floor seems to be repairable. Where the ginger cat has gone.

“Where’s Rhyme?” Zachary asks when he finds his voice again.

“Likely somewhere safe,” the Keeper says. “She must have heard this coming. I think she tried to warn me but I did not understand at the time.”

Zachary doesn’t ask the Keeper to refill his glass but he does it anyway.

Zachary reaches for the glass but his hand closes over an object next to it, a single die, an older one than the dice from the entrance exam but with the same symbols carved into its sides. He picks it up instead.

He rolls it onto the desk.

It lands, as he expects it to, on the single carved heart.

Knights who break hearts and hearts that break knights.

“What do hearts mean?” Zachary asks.

“Historically the dice have been rolled to see what kismet has to say about a new arrival to this place,” the Keeper says. “For a time the results were used to gauge potential for paths. Hearts were for poets, those who wore their hearts open and aflame. Long before that they were used by storytellers and rolled to nudge a story toward romance or tragedy or mystery. Their purpose has changed over time but there were bees before there were acolytes and swords before there were guardians and all of those symbols were here before they were ever carved upon dice.”

“There are more than three paths, then.”

“Each of us has our own path, Mister Rawlins. Symbols are for interpretation, not definition.”