Astra crossed the room, kneeling beside him, only now aware of the cropped length of her nightgown. She reached for the slip of canvas lying on the floor as he gently swept the remaining pieces into a pile on the edge of the desk.
“Baby Astra?” He asked, gesturing to the canvas in her hand.
Astra held it up, an image of her mother’s face, though several decades younger, peering back at them from her throne. To her left stood a white-blonde princess in all her glory at five, maybe six years old.
On the floor sat her fiery counterpart, chubby legs jutting out from under a golden dress, a wild spray of red curls already unfurling from her head.
“Baby Astra,” she confirmed. Luxuros glanced around at the other paintings on the wall. Dozens of women with pale skin, ice in their veins, and snowy silver hair watched them.
There were but two smoldering flames amongst them, standing out in a sea of cool masks.
Astra, and her aunt, Leona.
Her aunt’s portrait sat behind the desk, painted shortly after she took the Lunar throne. Her burning hair coiled in a glorious crown, woven into a thick braid beneath a starry diadem. Her amber eyes glowed with an inviting warmth.
“What do you think changed in your family line with Leona? Thousands of years of silver queens, and then one generation everything changes. It doesn’t make sense,” the commander mused, strolling along the wall and taking in the portraits.
Astra shrugged, the hem of her nightgown crawling up her thighs with the movement, something she quickly remedied.
“We don’t talk much about her. But Lunaria’s High Priestess once told me Leona was born with cooler features, but they warmed over time. Some say it was a divine fire gifted to her by the god Mars as part of the arrangement for my mother’s hand.”
Luxuros snorted, his hand drifting to his bare chest. In the low light, she could just make out the stretched pink skin over his shoulder, tangled with golden ink.
“That whole ordeal can’t have been easy on your father,” he snorted.
“It was a disaster,” Astra said. “Even now, forty years later, there’s still a lingering tension. But it wasn’t like my mother did it on purpose. She was perfectly content to accept her duty and marry the Martian king. They got on well, from what I’ve heard. But one night she bumped into an Earthen soldier and everything changed.”
Luxuros took that in. His lips pulled into a slight smile as he found a portrait of Oestera, painted with the same love and care as the Earthen canyon in Astra’s study. She sat on the edge of the Lunarian garden fountain, her chin tilted just so that she looked rather like her daughter after she’d won an argument.
“Nayson must have been shocked, too.”
“Just imagine it,” Astra laughed. “You’re on your way to a foreign court as a security guard, and you stumble onto the throne. Selenia was enraged?—”
“Selenia?”
Astra scanned the wall before them.
“There,” she said, pointing to a large painting of a particularly sharp-featured woman with Oestera’s icy gaze, but something else, something chilling to the bone in the cut of her jaw.
“My mother’s mother. Ascended Lunar Goddess Selenia Aurellis, may she bless us all,” Astra muttered, reflexively. “She was horrified by the Tether. My poor father wasn’t even supposed to be there. Another guard had gotten injured the week prior, and he agreed to sub in before his leave at the last moment. Leona was trying to prevent war with Mars, Selenia was trying to prevent a riot with the council. You have to understand, most Tethers in our lineage have fallen between nobles, if at all. A princess and a soldier? It was unheard of.”
Luxuros nodded. “And then Leona died?—”
“Her death was a shock to my mother;s entire world. They’d eloped and set up a home in the Earthen Court to avoid Selenia’s wrath. Mother hadn’t been near the court in years. Selenia dragged her back kicking and screaming.”
Astra’s eyes fell to the commander’s fingers, twisting into a leather cord around his neck that held a moonstone pendant. She turned her gaze back toward Leona’s portrait.
“I would give anything for just five minutes with her. To understand what really happened in Solaris. To learn how to avoid the same Fate.”
“You will,” Luxuros said, as if it was that simple.
“And yet here I am,” Astra giggled, gesturing toward him. “Putting myself at the mercy of a Solarian after all. You know, we’re raised to believe that one touch from you is lethal.”
“You’ve touched me and no one went up in flames,” Luxuros mumbled. “Well, I suppose not no one.” He grinned, but the point stung. She lost her grip on the heat of him in her embarrassment, the smoke rising in her throat quickly. She tried to change the subject, to shift her focus.
“Earlier, you spoke another language to Daria. What was that?”
“Li elomhi eontu and eontu neu,” Luxuros said, the notes flowing like music off his tongue. “It’s a Jovian phrase their Nova Captain started using years ago to identify ourselves. It’s a question and answer. ‘For crown and court?’ ‘For court.’”
