Chapter 1
Nyx had been awake for exactly four minutes, and in that time he had managed to grab a fistful of Rhysand's hair, sneeze on his collar, and wail loud enough that the neighbors across the Sidra probably thought the High Lord was murdering someone.
"I know," Rhys told him, bouncing gently on the roof of the river house. "I know, it's very unfair. Everyone has been talking about tonight for a month and no one consulted you."
Nyx wailed in agreement. His small wings, still more suggestion than structure, flapped twice against the blanket and then gave up.
Below them, Velaris was going dark one window at a time. That was the custom for Starfall: lanterns doused, shop fronts shuttered, every faerie in the city climbing to a roof or a hill or a bridge to wait. Along the river, the Rainbow had gone quiet first, the painters and musicians crowding the terraces with their faces turned up. Rhys could feel the city's anticipation the way he could feel weather coming, a pressure at the back of his skull. A few hundred thousand people holding their breath.
He felt the bond tug, warm and amused, before he heard the door.
"He was fine when I put him down," Feyre said, stepping onto the roof with two mugs and a blanket tucked under her arm. "Completely asleep. Snoring, even."
"He heard you leave. He has his mother's instincts. Knows when the interesting thing is happening elsewhere."
"His mother's instincts," she repeated, setting the mugs on the low wall. "His mother is half asleep on her feet and would very much like to sit down."
She didn't sit down. She came and put her chin on his shoulder and looked at their son, who had gone abruptly silent at the sight of her and was now staring with enormous blue-violet eyes, his face blotchy and offended.
"Hello, monster," she said softly.
Nyx hiccupped.
"That's it?" Rhys said. "Half an hour of my best singing and he stops for you in two words?"
"Your singing is the problem, I think."
He kissed the side of her head because it was there, and because she smelled of turpentine and the honeyed tea in the mugs, and because twenty years from now he wanted to remember that she had said something rude to him on the roof on Nyx's first Starfall. He tucked it away carefully, the way he tucked away every small thing now. He had learned the habit Under the Mountain, where small things were the only things they couldn't take from you, and he had never quite unlearned it.
Feyre felt the thought. Of course she did. She pulled back enough to look at him.
"Where did you go just now?"
"Nowhere important."
"Rhys."
He sighed. Nyx had found the clasp on his jacket and was trying to eat it. "I was thinking about the last Starfall I spent before I met you. Properly met you. The one before Amarantha."
She waited. She'd always been good at that, from the very beginning: letting a silence sit until the thing beneath it climbed out on its own.
"I was on this roof," he said. "Well. The townhouse roof. Mor was down in the street with half the court, and Cassian and Az were off arguing about who could fly closer to the falling stars without getting singed. Amren was on the bridge pretending to hate all of it." His voice did not change, and that was its own kind of effort. "I stood up here by myself for most of it, because I'd been High Lord long enough by then to think that's what High Lords did. Stood apart. Watched over it."
"And then you spent half a century under a mountain."
"And then I spent forty-nine years under a mountain thinking about that night. Every single detail. The color of the stars. What the air smelled like. I'd go over it in that horrible room of hers, again and again, like counting coins." He shifted Nyx higher on his shoulder. "And do you know what I kept coming back to? Not the stars. That I'd stood up here alone, when everyone I loved was twenty feet below me. I could've gone down. I didn't."
Feyre's hand found the small of his back, under his wings, where the muscles were always tight.
"You're not alone now," she said.
"No." He looked down at Nyx, who had abandoned the clasp and was now regarding the sky with the deep suspicion of someone who had been promised something. "No, I'm very much not alone. I'm actually quite crowded."
The first star fell.
It came out of the north, a long thread of silver that crossed the whole sky in a heartbeat and burst somewhere over the sea. A sound rose up from the city: not a cheer, exactly, but a collective breath let out, thousands of people saying *oh* at once. Nyx jerked in Rhys's arms, startled, and turned his whole head to follow the light.
Then another star came, and another, and then they were falling the way they did every year and had done since before the Wall, since before the war with the humans, since before there were Night Court records to count them: a slow river at first, then a torrent, every color a jewel could be and some colors that had no names in any language Rhys knew. They spilled over the Sidra and lit the water from underneath. They streaked low over the Rainbow so that the painted houses flared pink and gold and blue. Some of them came close enough that you could hear them, a faint hiss like a thrown coal.
Nyx was silent. Completely silent, his mouth open, one hand stretched toward the sky with the fingers spread.
Feyre had gone still beside him. When Rhys glanced over, he saw she was not looking at the stars. She was looking at their son's face, and her lips were moving very slightly, and he realized she was memorizing it. Every line. The exact way the light moved over his cheek. She would paint this, he knew. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not for a year. But one day he would walk into her studio and it would be on the easel: a small fierce face turned up to a sky on fire.
*You're going to make me cry,* she said down the bond.
*I haven't said anything.*
*You're thinking very loudly.*
*I'm thinking,* he said, *that for most of my life I believed I'd be grateful just to survive. And now I'm standing on a roof in the middle of my city, which is still standing, with the woman I love, who is still alive, holding our son, who is apparently trying to catch a star with his bare hand. I'm thinking I'm the luckiest male who has ever drawn breath and I didn't do a single thing to deserve it.*
Feyre made a small sound and pressed her face into his arm.
"Unfair," she said aloud, muffled. "Completely unfair."
"You asked."
"I asked where you went. I didn't ask you to say *that*."
One of the stars came lower than the rest. It was a pale blue thing, small, wobbling slightly the way the young ones did, and it drifted over the river toward them as if it had heard someone calling. Rhys watched it come. He had seen it happen before, once or twice in all his years: a star that wandered close enough to touch before it faded. Mor claimed it was luck. Amren claimed it was nonsense. Rhys had never had an opinion.
Nyx stretched further. His fingers opened and closed on nothing.
The star hung over the roof for a long moment, near enough that its light turned Nyx's dark hair silver, near enough that Rhys could feel a faint warmth on his face. It did not touch the baby. It didn't need to. Nyx let out a sound that was not a cry but a delighted, outraged shriek, the first real laugh Rhys had heard from him, and kicked so hard against Rhys's chest that he nearly lost his footing.
Then the star winked out, softly, like a lamp turned down.
Feyre was laughing, and crying, and trying to do neither. "Did he just—"
"He did."
"His first laugh, and it's at a *star*. Not at me. Not at you. Not at Cassian, who has been making faces at him for weeks."
"Cassian will be devastated."
"Don't tell him."
"I'm absolutely going to tell him," Rhys said. "I'm going to tell him first thing tomorrow, before breakfast, and I'm going to describe it in excruciating detail."
Nyx, overwhelmed by his own achievement, had started to wilt. His eyelids drooped. His outstretched hand curled closed and came down to rest against Rhys's collarbone, and he sighed through his nose, an enormous and dramatic sigh for such a small person, and went limp.
The stars kept falling. They would fall for another hour yet, maybe more, until the sky was tired and the city went to bed. Rhys sat down on the low wall with his son asleep on his chest and Feyre settled beside him, her head on his shoulder, the forgotten mugs of tea going cold between them.
Down in the streets, he could hear Mor's laugh rising over the crowd somewhere near the river, and someone with a fiddle, and the slap of the current against the stone embankment. Twenty feet below. Close enough to reach.
"Next year," he said, "we go down."
Feyre didn't lift her head. "All of us?"
"All of us. Into the streets. With everyone."
"You'll hate it. People will want to talk to you. They'll want to hold the baby."
"Let them," Rhys said, and pulled the blanket up over Nyx's shoulders, and watched the sky come down in pieces over everything he had once been sure he would lose.