StarCrossed

by Elizabeth C. Bunce

  “Mouse! This is an unexpected plea sure. I’d nearly given up on you, after your last report. Well, don’t just stand there; let me see it.” He stepped back and ushered me inside.

  As usual, his rooms were much too hot. Daul’s beard had gone scruffy, and apparently I’d interrupted him in the act of shaving, for he held a sharply curved blade in one hand. Calmly I passed him my work of the last several days. He stopped, stared hard at me for a moment in which I was very good and did not fidget at all, and then took the book from me, almost reverently. He held it in his palms a moment, and the strangest thing happened — he closed his eyes and seemed to slump just a little.

  “Thank you,” he said, and I stared at him. Thank you? From Daul? He held the book before him, thumbs stroking the leather. “Eighteen years.” The words were a sigh.

  “All right, so what is it?”

  For a second there he almost looked like an ordinary person. “This book was written by my father. During the war. It’s the only thing that could lift his mind away from the battles for a few moments.”

  I bit down on my tongue before I could say something unkind about military commanders staying focused on wars they were losing. Daul leafed through my pages, fingering the letters, and for the briefest of moments I almost felt sorry. His father had never touched this book, never written those words. The memory that Daul was experiencing now was a forgery.

  “He left me a message in this book,” Daul said quietly — and there, it was back: the edge in his voice.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. And yes, before you hit me, of course I read it.” Unless he meant the star under the endpapers, but what did that say that the world didn’t know already?

  Daul actually smiled, a flash of genuine amusement that disappeared as soon as it was born. “It was a message to share,” he said. “Half went to Antoch —” He held up the journal. “And half to me. ‘In these pages, I have recorded the truth.’ ” He leafed through the text, reading swiftly, hungrily.

  “What truth?”

  “About Kalorjn.” He shut the journal with a snap.

  The truth about Kalorjn? He was the second person in recent days to say those words to me. “What does that mean?”

  Daul’s hard gaze came back up and met mine. “Before he died, my father was convinced he knew how we were betrayed. This will tell me what he knew.”

  “How? And why didn’t you just ask Antoch for it?”

  And like that, the moment of confidence was gone. Daul opened the drawer of his carved desk and withdrew a leather purse. “You have done very fine work today, my little thief,” he said. “And since I am a fair man, a man who keeps his side of a bargain . . .” He took out a gold coin, gleaming brightly in the morning light. I almost didn’t catch it when he tossed it to me — it was a sovereign, the highest coin of the realm, a coin so rich that no common person dealt with them. This was the money affairs of state were conducted in. I gaped at him. I wasn’t even sure what I would do with that kind of coin. I could probably buy a ship to Talanca.

  But that wasn’t all he’d promised me. “I want my letters back.”

  He leaned back, as if considering me. “I think not.”

  “Why not? You said —”

  “My, my. For a lying thief, you’re awfully prickly about people keeping their word, aren’t you?” He was slowly edging me back toward the door. “By the way, it looks like we can expect a break in the weather soon. Mail will be going through again; I’ll be sure to send your regards to your brother.”

  He shut the door in my face. I stood outside, fuming. I had half a mind to bang on his door, but had the good sense to get out of there before I did something stupid. We were shortchanged on jobs sometimes; it was a hazard of our trade, since there was hardly anybody to complain to. I’d just have to get them back some other way.

  I turned down the hall, forcing myself to walk calmly. The truth about Kalorjn? What did that mean? Cwalo had said there were questions that had never been answered — about the battle, about how the Sarists were betrayed. But Daul was at Kalorjn; surely he knew what had happened. And why would someone with his fingers in the Greenmens’ purse care about an old battle that the Sarists had lost?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  An excitable Meri caught me by the hand as I got out of bed the next morning. “Come with me today,” she pleaded. “They want to see you again.”

  I frowned, not really liking the sound of that, but reluctantly pulled myself into my heaviest kirtle and the wool damask coat they had given me. I suspected it had belonged to some Bryn Shaer child before me, but it was warm, which was all that mattered.

  We walked, thank the gods, though I convinced Meri to take a more circuitous route with better cover: around the side of the old castle, in the shadow of the bailey walls, until we reached the woods pressing in on the northeast side. A few snowflakes drifted down from an overcast sky, and Meri’s cheeks turned pink in the cold air. The last several days, much of my freedom had been bought because Meri and her parents were meeting privately with the suitors in the afternoons, which Meri recounted to me now, concluding with, “It’s all very strange.”

  “Well, what do you think of them all? Are they nice?” Do they appear to be making war against the Crown?

  “I do like Lord Cardom, and Lord Sposa has been very nice. But Celyn! What am I supposed to do about Stagne?”

  “Do your parents know about him — about his friends?”

  Meri looked shocked. “Of course not! Mother would be mortified, and Father would probably kill him. They wouldn’t understand.”

  We reached the trees and ducked under snowy branches, and there, standing in a clearing just inside, was the fair-haired Stagne in a thick blue coat, and the wizard in gray whose power had so blinded me. He was still bright with it, but it wasn’t so overwhelming now. Meri ran to them, but I hung back, the ominous warnings of Celystra masters echoing in my thoughts.

  Meri spread her mittened hands wide to include us all. “Master Reynart, this is the girl you’ve asked me about, Celyn Contrare.”

  Reynart. That was the man I’d thought of as “Graymantle,” and something about that name sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. He bowed to me, and I squinted and stepped backward.

  “And this is Stagne Crevin,” she continued. The fair-haired boy came to her side and took her arm.

  “Wait till you see what Master Reynart has devised for us today!” he said into her ear.

  “More fire?” she asked, hope in her voice, and he grinned.

  I followed Meri to their camp, saying little as Stagne and Reynart spoke with her. Our path brought us toward the mountain, to a ruined cemetery and a shrine to the gods, half reclaimed by the woods. A tendril of steam rose from an iron cooking pot set up in the doorway of a squat round crypt, tended by a plump woman with a crow perched on her shoulder. The stone globes that marked the graves were dusted with snow, and the shrine’s domed roof had fallen in, the icons inside missing or broken. A squirrel scampered about the snow-strewn rafters, kicking flakes onto the broken benches.

  “We practice here,” Stagne explained. “The power’s stronger near Sar.” He pointed to a white statue in the corner, the figure of a robed woman kneeling to kiss the earth, a blazing star like a halo behind her. Her face was a bashed-in scar of shattered rock, a vicious crack spreading down her neck and shoulder. The same blow had knocked some of the pointed tips from the star — but she was still very obviously Sar, goddess of magic.

  I stepped across the branch blocking the threshold and approached the statue. I put a hand on the cracked marble, stroked fingers over the folds of the robe, poked the gilded star. “There’s no magic here,” I said without thinking, and then flinched from my own words.

  Reynart looked at me quizzically. “No power here? What do you mean? Show me.” His voice was curious and gentle, still with that low, rock-on-rock timbre to it. He gave me an encouraging nod.

  “I — I’m
not sure what to do.”

  Reynart passed his hand over the statue’s head and body, and though I could see the air around his fingers waver and glow, none of it came up from the statue itself. I put my hand on her, and nothing happened. I shrugged.

  “How do you know this?” Reynart said. “Forgive me —” He reached out his hand to take mine, and at my touch, the magic radiating from him flared up. He gave a little jump, and then laughed — an odd sound, full of surprise and plea sure. “I have never seen your power before,” he said.

  “It’s not —” I stopped, because he clearly knew more about it than I did.

  Reynart took my shoulder, still smiling at the way the magic arced between us when we touched. “Come, Celyn. Let us show you how we shape this gift the Goddess has given us.”

  And I spent that morning watching Reynart teach Meri and Stagne how to make magic. I was stunned and in awe of all of it — the ease and confidence with which Reynart moved and spoke, sparks occa sionally flying from his hands as he demonstrated some point; the calm and accepting way Meri and her friend listened and worked; the impossible thing they were doing, here in broad daylight where anybody might see.

  Meri knelt in rapt concentration before the statue of Sar, looking almost like she was praying, while Stagne crouched behind her, one hand pressed flat against her shoulder. Meri glowed steadily, looking hazy and indistinct, and I watched a wide band of power wrap itself up Stagne’s arm, lifting strands of Meri’s hair like static. He murmured words, low and unintelligible, and the magic seemed to roll across his body and up to his outstretched fingertips. A ball of magic hovered above his hand, then slowly turned from a thick haze to something invisible, licked by tongues of flame. He saw it, gave a yelp, and yanked his hand from Meri. The ball of fire vanished, sucked back to nothing in the cold. They both started laughing.

  “We’ve never gotten that far before,” Stagne said, sounding triumphant. “Let’s go again.” He touched Meri’s shoulder and turned back to the shrine.

  Reynart explained that fire made a good place to start learning the manipulation of magic, because it was easy to turn the energy of magic into the energy of fire.

  “Meri’s magic is different,” I said, watching them. I could not say how, exactly, except that it seemed . . . more solid, somehow. “Is it because she’s a girl?”

  Reynart looked pleased again. “No, it is because she is Reijk-sarta, a Channeler. The boy and I are Kel-sarta, you would say, I think, Casters? The Goddess requires two to work together to use her power: one to draw the magic up from the earth, and the other to shape it to its new form. Your Merista, she has much power, but she cannot make it leap and play and become flame or wind or weapon. The boy can bend the magic into a new form, but without the Channeler’s power to draw from, he can do nothing. We do not know why, but the Reijk-sarta are very rare. We have not seen one for many years, so you may imagine how special she is to us.

  “Stagne is a good boy,” Reynart added, looking at them both. “He was abandoned by his parents in Breijardarl, and friends brought him to us.”

  “Friends?”

  He drew me closer. “All across this island are those who take great risk to protect those with magic, and arrange safe passage for them across this land.”

  “Is that who you are? Is that why you’re here — for Meri?”

  “No. Ours is another purpose here. Finding Lady Merista was a happy accident.”

  I wanted to ask him more — what his plans for her were, what they were training her to do. Fire or wind or weapon. What did that mean? But Meri was on me, grabbing my arm and chattering excitedly.

  “I wish you could stay and meet the others,” she was saying. “You’ll have to come back again, can she? They’re wonderful — there’s Kespa, she’s their healer — I’m learning that — she has the dearest little baby. And Hosh, that’s Stagne’s dog —” and on and on. She waved to the woman with the cooking pot, who poured out a mea sure of soup for a little boy. Fireballs aside, these people hardly seemed the horrific threat the Inquisition would have everyone believe. Not if they’d been consigned to spending the winter camped out in the most remote part of Llyvraneth. What harm was that small boy with his soup? What harm was Meri? I flexed my fingers, but did not look down to see whether they were sparking.

  “That’s — that’s a lot of you.” I broke into Meri’s chatter. Far more than I had seen the night I stumbled on their campfire. “Where is everyone?”

  “They’ve been camping in the tunnels.” Meri pointed across the cemetery to the little crypt.

  “Tunnels?” I turned to look. “The Breijardarl tunnels? Can we see? I thought they were blocked off.”

  Reynart shook his head. “They’re clear, all the way through the mountain. Perhaps unstable in places, but we’ve developed . . . methods of shoring them up.”

  I blinked at him, wondering how Lady Lyll would like knowing she had excavation contractors specializing in magic holding up the foundations of her castle. I turned to Meri. “Did you help with that?”

  She nodded happily. I shook my head in amazement. Then something occurred to me. “You have somebody watching the other end, right? In Breijardarl?”

  Reynart nodded. “Of course. There are many more of us than you realize.”

  “How many?”

  “These are interesting questions for a lady-in-waiting,” he said.

  I flushed, remembering that I had told Daul about them. “If the Greenmen — the Inquisitor’s men come through here, all of you will be the first to be targeted. Don’t you care?”

  Meri squeezed my arm. “You mean all of us, Celyn.”

  No, no, I most certainly did not mean that — but Reynart put a hand on me and said, “We have ways of protecting ourselves, of remaining hidden.”

  I watched the power swirling around his hand, bright as a flare where my skin touched his, and wondered. “Let’s go back through the tunnels,” I said to Meri. “You have a dress fitting, and your mother will be expecting us.” And I had artillery to look for. Now more than ever.

  I waited at the crypt door while Meri bade Stagne farewell, rising up on tiptoe to kiss him briefly on the lips. She led me confidently around the tombs, to a stairwell hidden beneath a plinth in the floor. She was changing, our timid little Meri. And for no accountable reason, that made me feel strange.

  Meri lit the way with the glow from her own hands, and I wondered if this was part of the way she purged herself of excess power picked up while she was “Channeling.” Pox, live until my tenth age and I would never get used to this.

  “The tunnels do pass beneath the fields and into the woods, but mostly they go underneath the castle itself,” Meri was saying. “And I guess some parts aren’t really tunnels at all, more like extra storage rooms, wine cellars and such.”

  And weird little hidden bedrooms, I thought.

  These tunnels were built to the same Bryn Shaer standards every where on the property, with arched brick ceilings and a hammered-earth floor that had turned nearly to rock over the years. I wanted to scurry like a rat down every dark turning of the entire network. Here and there we passed a bit of broken brick, or a spot of ceiling that seemed to sag — and I could see the patchwork the Sarists and Meri had done, bands of magic wound like straps around the weak parts.

  “How long will it stay like that?” I asked, and Meri shrugged.

  “Forever, I think. We used a permanent charm.”

  “You’re learning so much,” I said.

  She shook her head, ducking as we crossed beneath a wide stone beam. “Oh, no. I can’t imagine ever knowing as much as Reynart or even some of the others. They’ve been studying it all their lives, and I —” She trailed off, the glow of her hands fading just slightly. “Here, we’re at the garden wall — that’s the buttress we just passed under. The kitchens are just ahead.”

  Meri passed by another room, the bulky shapes within briefly illuminated by the swoop of light from her hands.

&
nbsp; “Wait, Meri.” I had another mission in these tunnels. “Can you shine your light here?”

  Meri turned back and joined me, and we stepped into the little alcove. Inside the room were two long, canvas-covered humps. They were low to the ground and the wrong shape to be cannons, but there might be muskets wrapped up in there.

  “Oh,” Meri said. She added in a low, respectful whisper, “Those are the bodies of the avalanche victims.”

  “What?” I stepped closer, drawn by morbid curiosity. “I want to see.”

  Meri frowned, but stayed by the door and looked out into the hallway as I crept closer and pulled away the canvas covers. The bodies were pale and cold — it was freezing in here; apparently an appropriate place to store someone until you could bury him when the earth thawed out again. I knelt there with them, looking at their still forms, imagining what it must have been like to die like that, under a ton of snow.

  “Who were they?” I was shivering, even wrapped in my heavy mountain coat. They did not seem to be related; one was heavy and muscular and fair, the other older, slighter, grizzled.

  Meri shook her head. “No one knows. They don’t belong to Bryn Shaer, so they must have been coming up from Breijardarl. Someone there will probably claim them in the spring.”

  Over their bodies I made the signs for Marau, meant to bring the crows to find them and carry their souls to the gods, although someone had done so already — their arms were laid out properly, one crossed over the chest, one pointing toward the feet. Their hands were bare, and the big one wore an onyx signet ring on the little finger of his left hand. Inscribed into the stone was an arrow. Frowning, I looked at the other man. He wore the same ring.

  “Meri, come and look at this.” She approached and reluctantly shone her light on the bodies, where I pointed at the hands crossed over each man’s chest. “Lord Daul has a ring just like that,” I said, and she leaned in closer.