“Perhaps you should call her,” Ruhn said, “give the warning yourself. She’d appreciate your concern.”

“I’m otherwise engaged,” his father said calmly. It had always astonished Ruhn: how cold his father was, when those flames burned in his veins. “You may inform her yourself. And you will refrain from telling me how to manage my relationship with your mother.”

“You don’t have a relationship. You bred her like a mare and sent her out to pasture.”

Cinders sparked through the room. “You benefited quite well from that breeding, Starborn.”

Ruhn didn’t dare voice the words that tried to spring from his mouth. Even as my stupid fucking title brought you further influence in the empire and among your fellow kings, it still chafed, didn’t it? That your son, not you, retrieved the Starsword from the Cave of Princes in Avallen’s dark heart. That your son, not you, stood among the long-dead Starborn Princes asleep in their sarcophagi and was deemed worthy to pull the sword from its sheath. How many times did you try to draw the sword when you were young? How much research did you do in this very study to find ways to wield it without being chosen?

His father curled a finger toward him. “I have need of your gift.”

“Why?” His Starborn abilities were little more than a sparkle of starlight in his palm. His shadow talents were the more interesting gift. Even the temperature monitors on the high-tech cameras in this city couldn’t detect him when he shadow-walked.

His father held up the prism. “Direct a beam of your starlight through this.” Not waiting for an answer, his father again put an eye to the metal viewing contraption atop the prism.

It ordinarily took Ruhn a good amount of concentration to summon his starlight, and it usually left him with a headache for hours afterward, but … He was intrigued enough to try.

Setting his index finger onto the crystal of the prism, Ruhn closed his eyes and focused upon his breathing. Let the clicking metal of the orrery guide him down, down, down into the black pit within himself, past the churning well of his shadows, to the little hollow beneath them. There, curled upon itself like some hibernating creature, lay the single seed of iridescent light.

He gently cupped it with a mental palm, stirring it awake as he carefully brought it upward, as if he were carrying water in his hands. Up through himself, the power shimmering with anticipation, warm and lovely and just about the only part of himself he liked.

Ruhn opened his eyes to find the starlight dancing at his fingertip, refracting through the prism.

His father adjusted a few dials on the device, jotting down notes with his other hand.

The starlight seed became slippery, disintegrating into the air around them.

“Just another moment,” the king ordered.

Ruhn gritted his teeth, as if it’d somehow keep the starlight from dissolving.