The Star Thief

by Lindsey Becker

  “I will, if I ever meet her,” Honorine said as she took his hand to help him up. “I don’t even know her name, you know.”

  “Oh, well, I do,” Lord Vidalia said absently as he shuffled around gathering teacups left around the room.

  Honorine’s heart nearly stopped.

  “Or, I used to know,” he added, stacking cups with the soft clink of delicate china. “The Mapmaker knows. And Astraea and Lux, I’m fairly certain. Oh, and the ship, of course.”

  “The ship?” Honorine asked.

  “Well, yes,” Lord Vidalia said. “It’s a living thing, isn’t it? The ship of the stars. Living things have knowledge, even if it’s locked up in a form we can’t quite understand.”

  Locked up.

  Honorine’s heart came to a full stop this time, before starting up just quickly enough to keep her from fainting dead to the floor. But she composed herself, brought Lord Vidalia a chair, and prepared his tea. When he finally settled back in with a book and some blank pages, Honorine scribbled a note on a scrap of parchment and slipped out onto the main deck of the ship.

  It was empty and quiet, apart from the chirp of crickets. Scorpio was somewhere among the trees.

  She had asked every one of the Mordant about her mother, and each of them had refused to tell her a thing. But she had never thought to ask the ship herself.

  But how did one ask a ship a question?

  If she wanted food, she went to the orchard. If she wanted a game, she went to the pines or the willows. What she wanted now was a secret. And secrets were kept in the cypress swamp.

  She worked her way along the edge of the ship, through the pines, past the redwood forest and oak grove, and around the edge of the palm oasis. With a quick look around and a check for any indicators on her watch, she slipped into the forbidden swamp.

  She reached the edge of the brackish water but found her courage flagging with each step into the wet sand and deepening water. Among the tall, straight trunks of cypress, she spotted the ironwood tree, on a tiny hill at the edge of the swamp.

  It stood out, its shape more bent and bushy, its black bark streaked with rust-colored moss, and no lanterns at all in its sparse, twisted branches, hanging low enough to reach.

  Honorine snuck up to the tree, just as she had when she’d asked it for her tools, the little scrap of parchment clutched too tightly in her hand. This time, instead of a request for an item, she had written on the little scrap, The name of my mother. She wedged the parchment securely in the trunk, under a lower branch, and then took a step back. It disappeared, as if melting into the wood, and a little rustle of wind shook the leaves high overhead. And then another noise, much closer and much more alarming, reached her ears. Footsteps, splashing through the silty water. Honorine pressed herself against the ironwood’s trunk and looked back into the swamp, even though she already knew who was coming.

  The Mapmaker.

  She couldn’t run. The water around would splash, giving her away at once. With few other options, she grabbed the lowest branch and swung up into the ironwood tree.

  Within moments, the Mapmaker passed directly under the tree, heading toward the palm oasis.

  Honorine stood up on the branch, trying to see where he’d gone. When she turned back around, she saw something hanging on the next branch over, quite near the trunk.

  A key.

  It was small and dark, and shaped like an old iron skeleton key, though it was made of pure black wood. She plucked it down, holding it for a minute while her heart pounded again, all the way up into her ears.

  But what was she supposed to do with a key? There were no locked doors on the Carina. She had never encountered anything, not even a chest or cupboard, that required a key to open it. Once again, she quickly realized, the thing she hadn’t yet found would be in a place she hadn’t looked before. The swamp.

  She checked briefly for the Mapmaker. Then she slipped from the tree and waded in deeper as quickly as she dared.

  To her relief, the swamp did not continue on very far past the ironwood tree. The water receded as fast as it had deepened and rose back up to a bank of dark sand and a second tier of deck. It was thick with vines and moss hanging over a solid wooden wall with a single small door right in the center.

  She paused in front of the door, expecting to be discovered by someone, anyone, lurking about in the dimly lit swamp. But no objection came as she fit the key into the lock under the silver doorknob.

  It turned almost without effort. The door swung open, leading into a low, rounded room, the roof barely higher than Honorine’s head. It was impossible to see what the walls were made of, for it was nearly pitch black. The only light came from tiny incandescent points of clear crystal embedded in the domed roof. At first, it seemed like a random scattering of lights. But as her eyes adjusted, Honorine noticed a pattern, a slightly misshapen hook outlined in spots of light. It was the constellation of Scorpio. Nearby, she found Virgo (for Astraea), Lupus (for Lux), Corvus, Eridanus, Sagittarius, one she did not recognize at all, and finally, the long sprawling formation of Andromeda.

  All of these were constellations of Mordant who Nautilus hadn’t captured yet. Six were on the ship. One was probably the Mapmaker’s unnamed constellation. And the last one was Andromeda.

  It had to be her. Honorine’s mother.

  Honorine wanted to stay there, in that dim little room, staring at those tiny spots of light, but she didn’t dare linger much longer. She locked the door on her way out and tucked the key in her pocket.

  She had to go right back to Lord Vidalia’s study, to his old almanacs, and confirm that she was right about the constellation. If she wasn’t, she would have to come back and check again, and it would be too dangerous to keep sneaking in and out of the swamp.

  In her excitement, she was much less cautious on the way out. There was much more splashing as she rushed back toward the palm oasis, and she had nearly reached it when a voice stopped her, dead as stone, in midstride.

  “And what might you be doing so near to my quarters?”

  The Mapmaker.

  He took a step forward, extending his hand with the star-shaped mark embedded under the skin. It wasn’t exactly a tattoo, though that would be the closest description. This looked more like veins, Honorine realized as the Mapmaker approached.

  “I don’t fault you for being curious,” the Mapmaker said. “Everyone has their secrets, and their darkest wishes.”

  He seemed tired. His eyes were very dark and still. His steps slow and deliberate.

  “What did you find in there?”

  He nodded toward the swamp behind her. Honorine did not look back.

  “What is it that you want most in the world?”

  As soon as he asked, she knew, as if he had unlocked a door long closed off in her mind. She saw herself, and, to her surprise, Nautilus, and also a woman, though her exact features were hazy and undefined. Honorine was with them, together. It was a mother and father, a real family.

  The Mapmaker took her hand, the way he had the very first time she’d met him. His skin was uncomfortably warm and unusually dry. The blue mark began to glow once more.

  “What a perfectly reasonable wish,” the Mapmaker said. “A family for a girl who always believed she was an orphan.” He shook his head. “And now the difficult part. Let me show you what you must do to make your vision come true.”

  The Mapmaker and the trees and the world around her faded out, as if a curtain had just dropped in front of Honorine’s eyes. A moment later the curtain rose again, and an image appeared, like watching a dream playing out in front of her.

  She was on the deck of the Gaslight, dressed in a finely tailored blue jacket, just like the rest of the crew. She walked into a laboratory, under a beautifully monstrous machine made of glass globes on slender copper pipes, hanging inside that huge greenhouse dome on the deck of the ship. Honorine watched herself walk to the controls, turn the dials with precision, and pull the switch that brough
t the smoldering globes overhead to life. In the vision, the machine flared with a crash of electricity and wild sparks. When the blinding light settled, Honorine was holding a globe containing the tiny form of the Mapmaker under a shell of marbled amber.

  Then the image shifted, and she was standing on top of a mountain, her face lit by the glow of the amber globe in her hands. Inside, the Mapmaker pleaded silently with her, but she ignored him, looking down into a wide hole in the ground at her feet. Far, far below, a pool of monsters writhed in a lake of lava. Spines and horns and thorny claws reached up toward her from somewhere deep below the earth.

  Honorine held out the globe. She looked one last time at the Mapmaker. Then she dropped him, still in his golden prison, down into the waiting jaws of a slithering beast that swallowed him in one hungry snap.

  Over the mountain, a collection of stars flickered and failed, growing eternally cold and black, disappearing into the velvet darkness. And the Mapmaker was never seen, never written of, never spoken of for all the rest of time.

  The vision faded. Honorine was back on the Carina, her arm tingling and lifeless. She looked up at the Mapmaker, still standing before her, but with his hand at his side. “That is the path that will bring you what you desire.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Honorine said.

  “Not to be with your mother? Your father?” he asked. “You would sacrifice your own family for me? You would live out the rest of your life as an orphan, at least in practice, to spare me?”

  Now she was terribly conflicted and confused.

  “You saw Nautilus’s machine,” the Mapmaker said. Honorine nodded. “I saw it, too, when it was just an idea. A little kernel of inspiration in his mind.”

  “You knew he would try to capture the Mordant?” Honorine asked.

  “I knew he could, if he wanted to,” the Mapmaker said. “He had the ability. It was just a matter of whether he would use it. I’m not surprised that he did.”

  “And you think I’m the same?” Honorine asked. “You think I would do that to you, just to get what I wanted?”

  “I’ve seen men and women do far worse things, for far less reward,” the Mapmaker said. “And you see now why it is such a risk for me to trust you. I’ve known this from the moment we first shook hands.”

  Honorine did not know what to say. There was no way to convince him that she wouldn’t betray him, especially if he was right. What if the only way to get her mother back was to help Nautilus? To capture the Mapmaker? Could she give up the chance to have her mother and father back just to let the Mapmaker go free? She wanted to believe that she would. At least, she wouldn’t throw him into a pit of monsters.

  “I don’t believe I would do something like that,” she said finally.

  “Remember that, when the time comes,” the Mapmaker replied. “And remember this—an ironwood key will unlock any door. But you might not like what you find on the other side. Some doors are locked for a reason.”

  Honorine barely left the study for the rest of the trip, working at a hurried pace as the Carina flew across the sky in a race against Nautilus, sailing on the sea below.

  They were nearly halfway across the Atlantic Ocean when she figured out the last bit of the bees’ function, and called the Mapmaker down to the study to demonstrate.

  “It’s fairly simply, really. Each bee is assigned a location with this mechanism here.”

  She pointed to the first of three bees arranged on a little scrap of velvet. The back half of its abdomen lifted up to show a simple system of three tiny tumblers, with numbers and letters that could be arranged in different patterns.

  “The next step is the trigger, here.” Honorine pointed to the second bee. The top of the head was lifted up, revealing a little switch connected to the bee’s starglass eyes. “If these come in close-enough contact with a Mordant, it triggers this switch on the inside, and the eyes light up.”

  “So how does this tell Nautilus where we are?” the Mapmaker questioned.

  “That’s the best part,” Honorine said, moving on to the last bee. “The bees will fly over any location in a pattern, for a set amount of time, and then return back to the hive. So you pick a code for the location, you send the bee out there, and if it comes back with the switch triggered, there’s a Mordant in that location.”

  The Mapmaker nodded.

  “I assigned each of these bees to a part of the Carina. One for the orchard, one for the pine forest, and one for the oak grove. Look, these two bees lit up.”

  She picked up the two bees with lighted starglass eyes.

  “That means there was a Mordant in the orchard and one in the oak grove when the bees were there,” Honorine said. “And—if this worked—no one in the pine forest. Shall we check?”

  She led the Mapmaker to the orchard, where Lux was waiting under a pear tree, and then to the oaks, where they found Eridanus standing stoically under the mossy boughs.

  “Okay, I admit I asked them to wait here for the bees to find,” Honorine said.

  “But it worked just as you predicted,” said the Mapmaker.

  “There’s only one thing I haven’t figured out,” Honorine continued. “Somehow, Nautilus knows which Mordant the bees have found. I can’t get them to be that specific. They light up for any of you. But I still have an idea about how we might use these. We could trigger some bees in the wrong place and send them back to Nautilus, to distract him while we go after the archer.”

  “Are you sure that will work?” said the Mapmaker. “Wouldn’t he know they’ve been tampered with?”

  “Maybe,” Honorine said. “But maybe we’ll hit a correct code just by chance, maybe we won’t. But at least we’ll confuse them. At best, they might think every bee is malfunctioning, or that there is another Mordant out there they’ve overlooked. That machine of his takes time to operate. After they caught Leo, they couldn’t go after Corvus right away. So maybe we can trick them into hunting a Mordant they can’t catch. At the worst, if they’re distracted trying to sort out the accurate bees from the inaccurate ones, maybe that gets us a little extra time.”

  The Mapmaker nodded again, then scratched his chin, and finally broke out into a wide grin.

  “Well, let’s give it a try,” he said. “Honorine, prepare your bees.”

  It took her the rest of the journey to get the bees ready to fly. Only the first one she’d disassembled and accidentally set on fire couldn’t be salvaged. By the time the Mapmaker gave her fair warning that they would be making landfall, she had eleven fully functioning bees, and only one left that was giving her problems.

  The mechanism that opened the rear part of the bee seemed to be jammed. She had left it for last, thinking that there were already enough, if she couldn’t get it to work. But now she decided that any extra help they could get was worth the trouble. She tried it one more time.

  The bee finally opened. And inside she found not a set of tumblers like in the other bees, but a tightly curled bit of paper. She rolled it open to reveal a note. A note written to her.

  Honorine,

  If you find this, look for me in the dunes.

  —Francis

  Lord Vidalia did not join them on the deck for the first flight of the bees. His health was growing grave enough that he couldn’t navigate the stairs. He slept more often and seemed confused for long stretches when he woke. Sirona was the only one who could help him now, and Honorine felt the added weight of his worsening condition as they approached the eastern African shore in search of Sagittarius. She couldn’t let anything happen to Lord Vidalia before he had a chance to see Francis again.

  The Carina was already below the Sea of Ether, back in the proper earthly atmosphere, when Honorine emerged on the deck.

  Eridanus and Astraea were standing under a clump of birch trees near the rail as Honorine approached with Lux and the basket of bees. The landscape ahead of them was very different from the last places they had visited. Stretched across the entire length of the ho
rizon was the ocean breaking on a land of frozen red waves of sandstone that rolled away for miles, before rising into sand dunes as tall as mountains.

  “Where are we now?” Honorine asked.

  “The oldest desert in the world,” Lux replied.

  “How do you find anyone in there?” Honorine asked, looking up and down the endless, empty coast. There were no houses, no roads, no towns, just a repeating landscape of rock and sand. She was thinking not of the archer, hidden somewhere in the dunes, but of Francis, out there possibly all on his own.

  “First, you set your bees loose,” Lux said, pointing his nose toward the basket. “Nautilus is here already, and we need to distract him.”

  “What?” Honorine said with a gasp.

  “I spotted his ship off the coast as we came back down from the Ether,” Eridanus said. “I sent a small thunderstorm to slow him, but he will most likely make landfall today.”

  “Which means we need to be back in the sky before the sun rises,” Astraea added. “Are you ready?”

  Honorine nodded. The full moon was setting swiftly beneath the black ocean, which meant that sunrise was soon to follow. There was not much time. She took the lid off her basket of bees, humming with the vibrations of their little wings, and leaned it onto the railing. One by one, they rose and disappeared into the night, green eyes glowing with sabotaged news.

  With the bees set in Nautilus’s path, the Carina banked and began to sail south, riding along the frothy white coastline where the blue-black sea met the deep red shore.

  “I haven’t seen daylight in… I don’t even know. But it feels like a very long time,” Honorine said to Lux as they sat on a little rise of tufted grass in the orchard, where they had a clear view off to the east. She watched the horizon, hoping for just a glimpse of sunlight before their task was complete.

  “It’s all very bright,” he said with a bit of a growl. “I never really understood the appeal of daytime.”

  “Yes, but you’re just an old grouch about some things,” Honorine said.