The Star Thief

by Lindsey Becker

  When she opened her eyes, they were soaring over the rivers of silver mist, back in the Sea of Ether. Honorine glanced back to make sure Francis was still safely aboard. He was staring all around them, not speaking, not even blinking, as if he were afraid to miss a single second of the heartbreakingly beautiful view. He reached out his hand, trailing his fingers through the shimmering silver mist, and then let out a single laugh of amazement.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” Honorine said, and then “Hang on!” as Pegasus tucked his wings and descended, leaving a wake of silver star mist behind as they sailed back toward the world below.

  There were no branches or trees this time. Honorine’s view was completely clear in all directions. They were soaring over open water, headed north, with great bands of shore on either side of the wide, rolling ocean. She could barely breathe at the sight of it all.

  Behind her, Francis sputtered and tripped over his own words as he tried to express what he was seeing.

  “This isn’t possible,” he said finally, turning about on the back of the horse to take it all in. “I can see half the world in the same view!” Pegasus tossed his head and banked a bit to the left.

  “Are we there already?” Francis asked.

  “This is a very fast way to travel,” Honorine said, just before Pegasus began to dive even faster.

  The drop was even more terrifying than the ascent. Francis flew backward so quickly that he nearly pulled Honorine off, and the pair of them only managed to stay aboard when Pegasus gave a little buck to knock them back into place.

  The beautiful landscape spread out before them narrowed into an angry, surging sea. It was still dark where they flew, but the sky above became blotted by heavy clouds and flashed with distant lightning.

  Below, the water churned, sending up swells that would have toppled any ship smaller than the Gaslight. Then a faint sliver of pale shore appeared between the crests of huge waves.

  Pegasus soared up and over the tremendous waves. The tips of his wings brushed the rising water.

  “What’s that light?” Honorine asked as a streak of bold blue, like a comet or a shooting star, flashed through the clouds above and fell back toward the sea. Pegasus tossed his head and whinnied in alarm.

  “What light?” Francis replied. Indeed, the blue streak had vanished, leaving a handful of sparks quickly fading among the flickering lightning.

  “It was just there!” Honorine insisted with an uneasy feeling in her gut, and not just from the plummeting descent or the bumpy ride. The blue sparks looked uncomfortably familiar. Like the ones Corvus left in his wake as he flew.

  “I see something!” Francis shouted.

  “Where?” Honorine asked, scanning the clouds.

  “Out there,” Francis pointed over the waves. “That’s an island!”

  It was becoming easier to see. There was a violet light glowing under the black sea and around a bright white crescent of land. “We’re coming in a bit fast,” Francis said.

  Honorine agreed, but there was nothing she could do but hang on and close her eyes as the shore came toward them with frightening speed.

  Pegasus’s legs began to race beneath them, pantomiming a gallop as he sailed low and swift over the ground, until his hooves began to graze it and then slowly take the weight of his body. Within a few strides, they were galloping along the shore, right at the boundary of the sea and the land. With hooves firmly on the ground, Pegasus slowed to a trot and finally came to a halt with a snort and a whicker.

  Honorine untwined her fingers from his mane and tumbled to the ground.

  The beach was covered in something rough and sharp, like shards of broken pottery.

  “What is this?” she asked as she took a few shaky steps on the unstable land. Francis grabbed her sleeve and pointed at a round white skull lying between them.

  Bones. The beach was covered in bones.

  There was not a grain of sand or bit of shell to be seen. The entire beach was made of bones of every shape, skulls with long noses and strange flat teeth, femurs cracked in two with the splintered ends caked with dried marrow. They were every size as well, from great, rounded pelvic bones with odd-shaped openings big enough to stick a foot through, all the way down to little, pebble-sized vertebrae and the tiny fragments from inside fingertips. There were more than a few human skulls in the collection as well.

  “It’s just bones,” Francis said, trying to sound confident, though his voice cracked and quivered.

  “But it’s a lot of them.…” Honorine replied. The loose bones shifted about and made horrible noises as they scraped together. Honorine shivered at the sound.

  Pegasus watched the sky a moment longer, then, with his head lowered and his wings raised, he ushered Honorine and Francis away from the water’s edge.

  “Did you see the crow?” Honorine whispered. Pegasus nodded, his eyes still scanning the sky as they made their way uphill, away from the shore.

  “Was it… just the crow?” Honorine asked as she stepped gingerly over the bones. “Or was it the Mapmaker, too?”

  “He’s here?” Francis said, looking quickly back over his shoulders, then up into the sky.

  Pegasus flattened his ears and flapped his wings, hurrying them all toward an ominous forest of scorched pine tree skeletons standing in a crust of snow.

  “Yes, let’s get out of plain sight,” Honorine agreed, though she knew there was no hiding from the Mapmaker. Francis hurried along after her, and together they followed Pegasus into the pines.

  Beyond the beach the ground rose uphill quite steeply. Above the tree line, the snow faded away, revealing a mountain of jagged black stone reaching up toward a single narrow peak. The entire island smelled of smoke, the air choked with a mist of salt and charcoal.

  “Something very bad happened here,” Francis said.

  “Isn’t there supposed to be a city?” Honorine said as she took her first step into the snow.

  “Perhaps this is all that’s left,” Francis said.

  Honorine shook her head. It had to be here, the city they were looking for, and within it, Andromeda. Ahead, she saw two pillars of white stone spattered with black ash. What had once been an arch lay in a pile of rock between them. Beyond the pillars was a paved road snaking up the mountain.

  “That’s the way to Possideo,” she declared. Pegasus nodded in agreement.

  Francis craned his neck back to look up at the steep grade of the mountainside.

  “Up there?” he asked. “How far?”

  “Well, we won’t know until we start walking,” Honorine said as she stepped over the crumbled arch and onto the flat paving stones of the old road.

  Francis walked beside her, and Pegasus followed a few steps behind as they headed off into the silent, dead forest. The climb was steep, and the road was in poor condition, missing many paving stones, which made the ground mushy in places and icy in others. Pegasus kept his head low, sniffing the ground and listening intently. As they moved farther uphill, the air became warmer, and the snow and ice melted away. Faint clouds of smoke began to gather among the dead trees.

  “Where is that smoke coming from?” Honorine wondered aloud. “Is the forest still on fire up here?”

  “I don’t see any flames,” said Francis as they came upon a thin line of smoke rising swiftly through a narrow split in the ground. “This is coming from underground.”

  The ground rumbled very faintly, as if thunder had cracked deep under the earth. Pegasus spooked, fluttering into the air briefly, like a pheasant flushed from the underbrush.

  “The Bellua,” Honorine whispered. The ancient and horrible beasts that even the Mapmaker feared. Pegasus settled back to the ground, folding both his wings and his ears down tightly, and nudging Honorine with his muzzle, encouraging her to move just a bit faster.

  “And what are they again?” Francis asked.

  “The only thing that can kill a Mordant,” Honorine said.

  “Ah yes,” Francis said, nodding to
ward the crack in the ground as they carefully picked their way around it. “So don’t go down there. Got it.”

  Farther up the mountain, the smoke grew thicker, rising in sheets toward the sky, like a waterfall in reverse.

  “Something moved over there,” Francis said, stopping suddenly. “Something white.”

  “It was probably just smoke,” Honorine replied, too busy trying to keep track of the road to look up. Higher uphill, they finally moved away from the sheets of smoke and onto a ragged slope of exposed stone, hard and jagged as broken glass.

  Here, the road came to an end. The flat paving stones disappeared under a field of pointed black stones.

  “Obsidian,” Francis observed, picking up a chip of sharp rock. “And this is all hardened lava over here. We’re standing on a volcano. Wait! There it is!”

  Francis pointed over the landscape of black rock to a white flash that was gone before Honorine could get it in her view.

  “I saw a blur,” she said. “What was it?”

  “An animal,” Francis replied. “Some kind of white animal. Like that wolf.”

  Honorine froze.

  “A wolf?” she asked. “Or was it Lux?”

  Then she finally saw it, first as a flash of white in the other direction. She looked harder, and the blur focused into a white animal bounding over the black stone, head held low, a trail of faint white sparks following it like a comet.

  “Lux?” she called as the creature streaked away over the curve of the mountainside.

  “Was that him?” Francis asked.

  “Why would he run away?” Honorine asked as she started out in the direction of the vanishing white streak. Over a ridge of obsidian, they found a vast field of black scattered with stark white stones, but no white wolf.

  “What is all this?” Francis asked as they stopped to examine the pale stones. “It looks like marble.”

  “A headstone? Is this a cemetery?” Honorine scanned the vast field. Most of the lighter stones were great square hunks and slabs, but among them were a few round disks with notched edges or carvings of curling leaves. Francis squatted down to examine a round white shape jutting out of the ground.

  “Doesn’t look like a tombstone,” he said. “Wait, this is part of a column!” He patted one of the great, round disks.

  “That’s a roof!” Honorine exclaimed, pointing to a steep ramp of reddish tiles.

  “Well, I think we’ve found the city,” he said, tapping his foot on the ground. “Buried. Must have been an eruption. Lava came down and covered the whole place, or most of it, at least.”

  “The whole city was destroyed,” she said, trying not to let Francis see just how angry and disappointed she was. “What are we supposed to do?”

  “What we came here to do,” Francis said. “Find Andromeda.”

  He looked just as scared as Honorine felt, but neither of them dared mention the thought aloud—that there might not be anything to find here.

  “And there’s that creature again,” Francis said, pointing toward the very peak of the mountain.

  There it was, a white beast with four legs and a shimmering white coat. But it was not Lux. It was a dog. A tall, elegant white dog with long fur and a curling tail.

  “There’s another one,” she said as a second, identical hound stepped beside the first, glowing against the black landscape all around them. They looked like phantoms. Honorine took a step up the mountain.

  “Wait, are we going after them?” Francis asked. “We’re sure they’re friendly?”

  “I have no idea,” Honorine said. “But I have nothing better to do than investigate a little further.”

  Over a lump of treacherously sharp rock, they found a wide, charred marble staircase leading up to the peak of the mountain and the remains of what must have been a spectacular palace. Great, round sections of fluted marble columns lay scattered about. Among the wreckage lay uneven patches of a terrace inlaid with a spiraling mosaic of gold and silver and rich blue gemstones.

  In the very center of the wrecked terrace stood a massive, ancient tree, its trunk twisted and pocked with gaping black knots, its branches gnarled and covered with galls. All around the tree, steam rose up through cracks in the ground.

  “This is it,” Francis said. “This is all there is.”

  “Wait, I’ve seen a tree like that before,” Honorine said. “That’s an ironwood tree. There was one on the Carina.”

  “And what happened to the dogs?” Francis asked, only to be answered by a low, mournful howl.

  The dogs appeared over the broken marble steps, trotting to the base of the tree. They were tall and sleek and made of ivory-white light, with long Roman noses and curling tails that made them look as if they were in midflight even as they were standing still. Just behind them came a woman, walking up the hillside and under the boughs of the ironwood tree.

  She looked as if she had been made of the night itself, with huge eyes that glittered like stars. Her hair was a magnificent spray of icy white ringlets that rose all around her, the ends waving as if weightless and leaving tiny silver embers drifting down around her. She wore silk in the deepest violet set with tiny spots of light, fixed to her like gems.

  “Andromeda,” Honorine whispered.

  “That’s her?” Francis whispered back as Andromeda approached them.

  She stared down at them, the little chips of light falling over her shoulders and drifting to the ground as slowly as dandelion down.

  “You shouldn’t have come here.”

  Andromeda cast off so much vibrant white and purple light, it was difficult to look directly at her. But faced with a second long-lost parent who didn’t seem at all pleased to see her, Honorine found looking at the dark ground preferable. It helped hide the warm tears welling up in her eyes.

  “We didn’t know where else to go,” Francis said as Honorine lifted her head with a sniff. “Nautilus is trying to find you, and the Mapmaker is trying to kill him.”

  “All this time, and they still haven’t worked it out?” Andromeda said with a shake of her head. Then she smiled very slightly. “I remember you, Francis. You look just like your mother. And, of course…” Andromeda reached out her hand and placed a finger under Honorine’s chin, raising her face until she was looking the girl in the eyes.

  The color in Andromeda’s eyes shifted, growing bolder and then softer, just the way the Mapmaker’s did. But Andromeda’s eyes were gray, just like Honorine’s.

  “You are still too young to be here,” she said. “I had dear allies who had promised to look after you. Perhaps they are allies no longer?”

  “No,” Honorine said. “I mean, yes, they did look after me, as much as they could. But now we have to return the favor. They need us.”

  A growl rumbled up from somewhere deep beneath the mountain. Honorine froze, her eyes wide.

  “Is that…” she whispered as she looked past Andromeda toward the smoking vents surrounding the ironwood tree. “The Bellua?”

  Andromeda shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “They are farther down below. The mountain shakes and shudders. That’s its nature.”

  The mountain rumbled again, but this time the ground lurched up, shaking loose large boulders of obsidian. The sound of stones rolling down the rocky slopes echoed up from below. Pegasus leaped into the air, but this time, he didn’t settle back down. He flew higher, circling the mountain.

  “Are you sure that’s nothing to be worried about?” Francis asked.

  “Oh, it very well could be,” Andromeda mused. “It’s just not the Bellua.”

  “What else could it be?” Honorine asked as a single streak of blue sailed by high over the mountaintop. A very familiar blue.

  “Corvus!” Francis whispered.

  “It’s the Mapmaker! He’s here!” Honorine shouted. The entire mountain heaved as if it were resting on a carpet that had just been tugged away, knocking Honorine and Francis to the ground.

  Andromeda took eac
h one by the hand and lifted them to their feet in one swooping motion, moving them down the marble steps, away from the peak of the mountain.

  They had just reached the last splintered marble step when the ground heaved again, even more violently, shaking great sheets of mountainside free and sending them crashing down toward the ocean. This time, the shaking didn’t stop. Andromeda kept them moving out onto the field of black stone and broken marble as the peak of the mountain above them split in two, one side shearing clean off and sliding past them. Andromeda pulled Honorine and Francis closer and shielded them from the scattering shards until the trembling stopped and the mountain went quiet again.

  “Honorine?” Francis said through a cloud of dust and smoke.

  “Francis? Are you all right?” she replied. She felt his hand reaching out and took it, holding tightly as they waved away the chalky clouds around them.

  “You know,” Francis said. “Ever since we landed on that beach, I’ve been thinking, ‘At least things can’t get much worse.’ And then they do.”

  “Then don’t look up there,” Honorine said as she inched her way onto a fallen boulder to see what had become of the mountaintop.

  All that remained was the old ironwood tree resting on the precipice of a newly formed cliff of iridescent black stone and a narrow, rocky ledge. Facing out of the cliff, and tangled into the exposed roots of the ironwood tree, stood a gate made of iron bars and polished black bones of every kind of creature imaginable, and some unimaginable as well. Every bar and bone of the gates stood silhouetted by an unsettling violet light.

  “No, I don’t like that, either,” Francis agreed. “And yet, I feel certain it is about to get worse. Again.”

  And then, of course, a shadow moved through the violet light. Honorine and Francis both took a sideways step toward each other.