Chapter 3: The Prince of the Stars
"You don't have to come," Stolas says.
He has said it eleven times. You've been counting. He's said it while pacing the observatory, while changing his coat four times, while straightening his crown and then knocking it crooked again with his own fluttering hand. He has said it in a voice that gets smaller every time, as if each time he's bracing to hear you agree.
"I'm coming," you say, for the eleventh time. You're sitting on the edge of the chaise, in a dark blue dress he had made for you that afternoon by a tailor who arrived by portal and measured you with a ribbon that moved on its own. You've never worn anything that cost this much. You feel like you're wearing a small house. "Sit down. You're going to wear a groove in the floor."
He sits. Then he stands again.
"You don't know what he's like."
"I met him this morning. I was naked. I have a fairly good idea."
"He'll be cruel to you."
"He'll try." You get up and take both his hands. They're cold, which is how you know how frightened he is; his hands are always warm. "Stolas. I spent a decade getting picked apart by grant committees full of old men who thought women couldn't do maths. I died on a mountain trying to prove them wrong. Your father is a large, rude bird with a mean crown. I'll be fine."
He looks down at you, all four eyes, and some of the fear in them loosens.
"Did you just call the King of the Goetia a large rude bird?"
"To his face, if he asks."
He laughs. It's a little hysterical, but it's real. He bends down, a long way, and rests his forehead against yours.
"My starling," he murmurs.
You blink. "Your what?"
"Starling." He goes faintly pink beneath the white feathers of his cheeks. "Oh, I'm sorry. It slipped out. It's what I've been calling you in my head. Because of the star, you see, the little one off the Crown. And because starlings are such brave, loud, clever little birds. They fly in clouds of thousands, and they'll mob a hawk if it comes near the nest." He clears his throat. "You argued with me on the first night like you'd mob a hawk. I thought, there's a starling."
You don't have an answer for that. You just pull him down the last few inches and kiss him, and he makes a surprised, pleased sound against your mouth, and you nearly miss dinner entirely.
Paimon's dining hall could seat a hundred. Tonight it seats three: the King at the head of the table, his son at his right hand, and you at the far end, so far away you can barely see over the candelabras. A servant brings the soup. It's grey. Paimon doesn't touch his. He just watches you.
"So," he says, at last. "A sinner."
"Yes, sir."
"From the Pride Ring."
"I work in Pentagram City. Worked. At a print shop."
"A print shop." He says it like you've said a sewer. "And before that? In life?"
"Astrophysicist."
"Astro-" He pauses. "A stargazer. How appropriate. My son has always been fond of fortune-tellers." He turns to Stolas, and his voice drops, smooth and lethal. "Is that what she does, Stolas? Reads your fortune? Tells you that you're special? I'd have thought, after that imp made a fool of you in front of the whole Goetia, you might have learned something about letting lesser creatures..."
"I'm not a fortune-teller," you say.
Paimon's eyes snap back to you. The temperature in the room drops.
"Fortune-tellers tell you what you want to hear," you go on. Your voice is steady, which surprises you. "I tell Stolas what's true. Mostly that he's wrong. About astrology, about Saturn, about whether you can make a decent cup of tea with Lust Ring water. He's wrong about almost everything I'm interested in, and he never once gets angry about it. He just asks another question. Do you know how rare that is? I've worked with the smartest people on Earth, and almost none of them could do it."
"How charming," says Paimon. "I'm told my son also enjoys rubber ducks."
"I don't know anything about the ducks," you say. "But I know he's the kindest person I've met in Hell. And I know someone made him believe he's an embarrassment, because he says it about himself like it's the weather. I'm guessing it was you." You set down your spoon. "Sir."
The silence is total. Stolas is staring at you from across the table, his beak slightly open.
Paimon leans back in his chair. His eyes are very cold. "Do you know what I could do to you, sinner? I could send you back to the Pride Ring in pieces. I could have you erased from the records of Hell. No one would miss a dead stargazer from a print shop."
"Father," says Stolas.
He says it quietly. But something in the room changes. You feel it, a pressure, like the air before a storm. The candles flicker. The shadows on the walls lengthen and stretch and grow eyes.
Stolas rises. He keeps rising. He grows, the way you didn't know he could, until his crown brushes the ceiling of the dining hall and his shadow swallows the table and all four of his eyes burn red. His voice, when it comes, isn't plummy and soft anymore. It's deep and old and echoes off the stone.
"You will not touch her," he says. "You will not threaten her. You will not speak to her in that voice ever again. She is mine, and I am hers, and if you lay one claw on her, Father, I will remind you why the Goetia once feared the Prince of the Stars."
Paimon looks up at his son for a long time.
Then, slowly, the old King picks up his soup spoon.
"Sit down, Stolas," he says. "You're dripping on the tablecloth." He takes a sip. "Well. At least this one has a spine. Which is more than I can say for the last two."
They're back in the observatory before midnight, and Stolas is still shaking.
"I've never done that," he keeps saying. "I've never, ever done that. Not once. Not in four hundred years. I threatened my father. In his own hall. Over the soup."
"You were magnificent."
"I was terrified."
"You can be both." You push him gently back onto the chaise and climb into his lap, your expensive dress bunching up around your thighs. "Stolas. You stood up for me. Nobody's ever done that."
He goes very still under you. All four eyes on your face. He reaches up and touches your cheek with the backs of his long fingers, careful of the talons, the way he did on the first night when he wiped the ink away.
"I meant it," he says softly. "What I said to him. That you're mine and I'm yours. I know it's terribly fast. I know I'm a great deal, and my family is a horror, and I'm technically still getting divorced. But I've never been so sure of anything." He takes a breath. "I'm in love with you. I'm completely, ridiculously, hopelessly in love with you, my starling. I have been since you called Titan a rock."
Your throat closes. You put your hand over his on your cheek.
"I love you too," you say. "Even though you're wrong about everything."
"Especially because?"
"Especially because."
He kisses you, and it's different this time. Not careful. Not asking. Just certain, deep and slow and claiming, his hand cupping the back of your head, his other arm locked around your waist. You kiss him back the same way.
He gets the dress off you much faster than he managed the buttons last night. You get his coat off faster still. There's less patience this time and more need: his mouth on your throat, your hands buried in the soft feathers of his chest, his talons tracing the curve of your spine in that slow, deliberate way that makes you shudder and arch and press closer. He lays you down on the velvet and settles over you, all that height and plumage and heat, and this time he does cover you completely, his wings coming out on either side and curving down around you both like a tent of grey silk, shutting out everything but him.
"Is this all right?" he whispers. "Being under me? I can..."
"I want it," you say. "I want you. Please."
He slides inside you, slow and deep, and holds there with his forehead pressed to yours and all four eyes closed. Then he moves. Long, rolling strokes that make you gasp every time, his feathers whispering against your skin, the chaise creaking beneath you. You wrap your legs around his waist and dig your fingers into the down at his back and meet every thrust, and he murmurs against your mouth, my starling, my clever starling, my love, until the words are just sounds and the sounds are just breathing.
When you come, you come with your eyes open, looking up past his shoulder at the dome. And there, beside the new star off the Crown of Paimon, another flickers to life. Tiny, faint, brand new. Then another. Then a third, a little cluster of them blooming out of the dark.
He comes with your name on his tongue and his face in your hair, and when he finally looks up and sees them, he laughs, breathless and wondering, and the sound goes all the way through you both.
"Well," he says. "That's rather embarrassing."
"What do they mean?"
"They mean," says Stolas, softly, "that I'm happy."
You lie together afterwards beneath his wing, watching the new stars. You've already started naming them in your head. You'll chart them in the morning. You'll probably publish. There must be a journal somewhere in Hell.
"I'm going to need a bigger notebook," you murmur.
"I'll buy you a thousand."
"And a better telescope."
"I'll buy you the moon."
"Hell doesn't have a moon."
"Then I'll make one," he says, sleepily, smugly, into your hair. "Basic spell. Very vulgar."
You're almost asleep when you feel him go still against you. Not the soft stillness of drowsing. The other kind.
You open your eyes. You follow his gaze up to the dome.
The first star, your star, the one off the Crown, is moving. Not drifting the way the Goetia stars drift. Falling. Slowly, steadily, a single bright point sliding down through the lavender dark, trailing a thin line of silver behind it, growing larger and brighter as it comes.
It's coming toward the palace.
"Stolas," you whisper. "What happens when a star falls in the Goetia?"
His arms tighten around you. When he answers, all the sleep has gone out of his voice.
"I don't know, darling," he says. "It's never happened before."