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Little known beyond the confines of her subordinates’ injured minds is that a sizable fraction of Carta’s fleet is made to Iznario Fareed’s specific, lurid tastes. Or, at least they were when her men were something like half their current age. Many of them were Lord Fareed’s boys to begin with: a heartbreaking menagerie of spun gold and wary eyes hoping desperately to become imperceptible to the lord’s hungry, roving maw.
Now, they look straight to Carta: the moon they orbit round and round, their frequencies all revolving in pristine harmonics around her command. Well, all except Michaels. He is always off by a fucking eighth of a beat and it drives Carta to distraction.
She knows that many a Seven Star family head finds her career choices objectionable, and her fleet’s phenotypic uniformity baffling at best, off-putting at worst. They would have forgiven the apparent eccentricity from a man, but for her to command a fleet at all is only further evidence of the Issue line’s decline. She, a lady and of pureblooded Issue stock, should be making herself busy knitting by the weak light streaming from a window on a cloudy day, or withering away while keeping scholarly inventory of the family archival vault, or—and these are the heights a woman with her shortcomings should have been dreaming and scheming to ascend—plumping up the shadow out of an idiotic man, whispering into his ear to do this or do that, shit now or shit later, step here or step there.
But Carta has never been one to sit still; the stuffy, dusty vaults are full of tomes whose letters swim and tangle when she puts any effort into making sense of them; and most damningly for her: she doesn’t.
Fucking.
Whisper.
If she’s going to tell a man where and when to step, she’ll bellow it at the top of her lungs and Michaels better fucking learn to fall in phase with everyone else.
But she digresses.
Lord Fareed has never been anything but unfailingly distant with her, which, she learned at a tender age, is a blessing of the highest degree, a gift never to be questioned or spurned.
For all the humiliating ways she falls short in front of a page, Carta’s ear has always been exceptional. And Lord Fareed never considered that his charge might catch a swiftly hushed but unmistakable mewling wail that didn’t sound like Gaelio from a fair distance within the manor. Nor did it ever occur to him that the charge might think to investigate. And he never considered what a glaring security breach the tall, leafy tree just outside his window might pose.
The first time she learned what kind of house she was fostering in, Carta had nearly plummeted from her perch in shock, only narrowly recovering her composure to steal quietly down the trunk on shaking, uncharacteristically clumsy hands and feet. And she knew how lucky she’d been, because the only person to have met her eye when she’d stared slack-jawed and wide-eyed into the dimly lit room was a boy whose tousled hair shone pale gold like starlight, and not the raging ravaging beast behind him, which, in the morning looked indistinguishable from the very same and very dignified Iznario Fareed.
Of the boy with the starlit hair Carta found no trace, though she searched the manor and the grounds for days. He’d vanished.
With his disappearance, she tried to convince herself it had only been a bad dream. But the boy, in catching her eye, had mouthed something desperately at her and neither her waking nor her dreaming mind had been able to let it go.
It was too wrong, the asymmetry too frightening: the boy too little, the beast too large.
From then on, any time she saw Lord Fareed’s glossy black car pulling up the drive, Carta’s blood ran cold and she invented reasons to scamper, though Gaelio always chased after her, insisting they’d get in trouble if they were summoned and nowhere to be found.
Until the day a boy with the sun in his hair and flint in his eyes stepped out of the car, and Carta’s sense of self-preservation evaporated like mist in midmorning.
It wasn’t the boy with the starlit hair, the one whose mouth had shaped that silent plea for help that wouldn’t leave her alone. Nor was it any of the boys she’d caught glimpses of since, from the same leafy perch: boys whose eyes for the most part sat hollow in their sockets, as though their spirits had vacated their bodies in the effort to endure.
She’d felt sorry for them. This boy’s eyes told her, however, that he needed no one’s pity, so she obliged and withheld hers. In time, she learned that his eyes had been right: he was bright and he was strong, and he was nobody’s meal, though the beast might think so. Much smarter than her, he was easily capable of sitting for hours at study, while she could spend no longer than ten minutes at the task, every one of which was agonizing, sweating toil to parse mere sentences whose letters indecently insisted on shifting out of place to confound her. And he was also fast; she was a strong climber herself, but he outstripped her time and again.
Really, she never had a chance: there was no way for her to avoid admiring him.
But admiration is all it is, she reminds herself. Nothing more, but very certainly nothing less.
And she knows he deserves it. Because not once in all the years they lived under the same roof did he complain or let anything on of the pain that she knew he routinely endured at the jaws of the hungry maw.
And she could never—will never—ever—confess to him that she knew then, knows now. She only spied the first night. Every other night, she would simply mark his presence in the room, and then quickly scale back down the tree and steal back into her own quarters, her stomach churning with a shame she didn’t entirely understand then and quickly avoids dwelling on now. There was nothing, after all, that she could do for him then; nothing that he would ever accept from her now.
And really, McGillis is a devil of his own making at this point: betrothing himself to a child no older than he was when he’d been the beast’s victim. Another asymmetry she refuses to ponder for very long.
Instead, she considers her men. What she couldn’t do for them at the time, she has made up for in her painstaking ascent to greatness. When the leadership relented at her persistent demand for a fleet of her own, she set about finding all the boys she could. No mean feat, this—they’d all grown and been summarily dismissed from the compound where she learned Lord Fareed kept his collection. But she was an Issue, and if that meant anything at all, it meant she would marshal every resource at her disposal to locate their whereabouts. In short order, she’d recruited at least the ones who’d remained planetside, made her offer, and invested in their training.
Commander, they call her. Commander. And they, her bright golden satellites, look on her with pride.
With them at her side and at her back, she’ll restore rightful glory to the Issue name. Not from the shadowy sidelines, as the other Stars would have her do. She’ll be front and center. And she’ll have righted a wrong, in the bargain.
So bring it on, Tekkadan—cacophonous upstarts. Carta Issue will make sure the music of the spheres plays sweetly on.
…If Michaels could just for once in his sorry stretch of life keep the fucking, godsdamned beat.