The Sky Weaver

by Kristen Ciccarelli

  Scarp berries.

  Safire held her breath, trying to resist their poison.

  “First,” the empress said as Safire struggled to fight the soldiers off, “I’ll take Eris to the immortal scarps.”

  Safire couldn’t hold her breath forever. Soon enough, she felt her arms growing heavy and slack. Felt her legs giving out beneath her.

  “There, I will cut off her hands.”

  At those words, Safire struggled harder, even as that dull fog crept over her mind, lulling her, insisting that she close her eyes and sleep.

  “And then,” the empress said as the world began to fade, “I’ll watch the daughter of my enemy die a slow and agonizing death.”

  Forty-Two

  Eris watched as one of the soldiers took out a ring of keys, slid one into the lock, and turned it. The door swung open. The room beyond was much smaller and darker than the throne room, but just as high. It was also empty—or so Eris first thought.

  When they nudged her inside, she found herself at the edge of a marble platform, its surface damp and slick. Below her, water surged and Eris could just make out shadows moving beneath the dark surface. Things with spines and jagged teeth.

  She looked up.

  High above, a dozen cages swung from the ceiling like hideous ornaments, their chains secured to huge iron hooks in the walls. Eris watched as one of the soldiers unhooked one. A heartbeat later, a swift rattling sound filled the room as it plummeted downward, halting just before it hit the water. Bouncing on its chain, the cage swung in frantic circles.

  Using what looked like a long shepherd’s hook to grab it, a second soldier pulled it to the platform they stood on and swung the door open.

  That was when Eris realized she was meant to get in it.

  There was no point in fighting them. Her hands were bound in stardust steel, and she wasn’t a fighter. But she fought anyway, digging her heels in, and when that didn’t work, dropped to her knees. They threw her inside easily, and locked the cage behind her.

  Safire would have lasted longer, thought Eris miserably, staring out at them between the bars. Safire would have taken a few of them down before they overcame her.

  But Safire wasn’t here. Safire was long gone—or so she hoped.

  Most of all: she needed to stop thinking about Safire.

  The cage lifted off the floor as the soldiers heaved on the chain, pulling it up toward the ceiling. It swung back and forth as it rose, spinning and spinning, making her dizzy. Between the spinning and the increasing distance to the churning water below, Eris had to shut her eyes, feeling nauseous.

  It was only when the cage stopped rising that she opened them. Other cages—all of them empty—hung aloft around her. Beyond them, slender shafts of light sifted in through narrow windows high up on the walls.

  Looking out between her bars, Eris found the platform impossibly far below and the soldiers filing out—all except two, who now stood guard. As if they expected her to make an escape attempt.

  The door slammed.

  Sitting now, Eris slumped forward, letting her forehead rest against the bars of this cage, waiting for it to stop spinning. An eternity seemed to pass before it slowed. When it finally did, she opened her eyes . . .

  And found herself staring into a woman’s face.

  Eris shot upright.

  The other prisoner sat across from her, locked inside her own cage, bathed in a beam of silvery light. Into the silence, the woman said, “Dear child. Why have they brought you here?”

  “I . . .” Eris looked around them, but all of the other cages were empty. “Who are you?”

  She looked back to the prisoner, and her gaze caught on the woman’s hands. Or rather, the place her hands would have been, if she’d had any. The fact that she didn’t, that her slender arms stopped just above her wrists, told Eris what she needed to know.

  This woman was a traitor. An enemy of the Skyweaver.

  Eris looked from the stumps of her arms up to the woman’s face.

  And that was when her breath caught.

  The woman’s eyes were pale green, like a meadow in late summer, and set too far apart—one of them looking in the wrong direction. Her body was knobby in places, as if she’d been assembled differently than other people.

  Her presence wasn’t the startling thing, though. The startling thing was that Eris knew her.

  This was the woman from the tapestry at the foot of her bed. The one Day made her.

  “My name is Skye,” said the woman, studying Eris back. “What’s yours?”

  Sacrifice

  Another contraction made Skyweaver cry out. Pushing away from the empress’s table, she rose to her feet, stumbling. Leandra turned to look and saw what Skyweaver had worked so hard to keep hidden: a belly swollen with child.

  Accusation darkened her eyes.

  Skyweaver fled, needing to escape her true enemy.

  Needing to set the Shadow God free.

  Her servant, Day, helped her climb the steps of her tower. But halfway to her weaving room, Skyweaver collapsed in the pains of labor. She could go no farther. So Day lifted her into his arms and carried her.

  Inside the weaving room, he set her down and barred the door, trapping them both inside.

  The baby came, wailing and beating its fists. As it did, Skyweaver gave it what was left of her immortality.

  In the world beyond, the wind rose. The rain pummeled the panes. The sea raged.

  The god of tides was coming.

  Day looked below to find Leandra approaching the tower with an army at her back.

  “I know a place you can hide her,” he said, taking the baby and swaddling it in a blanket. “But we must go now.”

  He held the child out to Skyweaver. But the god of souls only gazed at her newborn with sorrow in her eyes.

  She did not take her baby. Instead, she lifted her weaving knife and held it out to Day. “Keep Eris safe. Until I find you.”

  Far below, Leandra’s soldiers broke down the tower door. Their footsteps echoed up the stairs.

  Skyweaver went to her weaving bench and picked up the spindle there.

  “The key to your escape,” she whispered. Taking her servant out into the hall, she drew the spindle across the floor. In its wake, a silver line shimmered delicately on the floorboards. On one side stood the door to her weaving room. On the other . . . a world of mist and starlight.

  Day looked from the mist to the god he served.

  Skyweaver looked to her daughter, seeing a life she might have had. I could still have it, she thought. She would fight for that life—and for her daughter. She would defeat Leandra just as she defeated the Shadow God.

  The soldiers’ footsteps were close now. As their shouts got louder, the baby started to wail.

  Skyweaver kissed her daughter’s brow. She tucked the spindle into the blanket swaddling her, then turned to face the enemy on the stairs.

  “Come with us,” Day begged.

  Skyweaver shook her head. “I must end this,” she said as Leandra appeared before her, as cold and ruthless as the sea. “I will find you when it’s done. Now go!”

  With no other choice before him, Day obeyed. Clutching the child in one hand and Skyweaver’s knife in the other, he stepped across the shimmering line and into the mist.

  Leaving his god behind.

  Forty-Three

  Safire woke to a bitter taste in her mouth. She lay on her side, her wrists and ankles bound, her mouth gagged, and her body aching from the constant bumping of a cart’s wheels on rough terrain.

  It smelled like fish and brine here. And though the cloth sack over her head blocked out the world, Safire could hear the clop of horse hooves and the softer hush of waves lapping against a wharf.

  Axis Harbor, she thought.

  Suddenly, the cart jerked to a stop. Someone stood over her. Safire flinched, waiting for whatever was coming. But whoever it was simply untied the rope around her ankles. A heartbeat later, they dragged he
r from the cart by her armpits and set her on her feet.

  Safire would have tried to run, except she couldn’t see. The effect of the scarp berries hadn’t completely worn off yet, making her sluggish and dizzy. She tried to listen, taking in every sensory detail she could.

  She heard the clink of money and the murmur of voices as they shoved her up a slope of some kind. As soon as the ground leveled, her boots thumped against wooden planks, and she knew she was on a ship.

  The pressure around her throat let up as they untied the sack, then pulled it off her head. Several faces swam into view, none of which were familiar, and then, quite suddenly, she was being shoved down through a hatch and into a dark, dank hold where several people huddled against each other.

  Safire rose, shakily, to her feet. Her hands were bound behind her back. She looked up just as the hatch slammed shut, plummeting her into darkness once more.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  From the darkness, the deep-throated voice of a man answered, “In the belly of the Angelica.”

  That meant nothing to her. “The Angelica?”

  “A ship that trades in human cargo.”

  “Where is it headed?”

  “A far distance from here, lass.”

  Safire turned toward the voice. “What do you mean?”

  “He means,” said a woman’s voice from farther away, “you’ve been sold by the empress. It’s what she does with petty criminals. Selling them is more profitable than imprisoning them. Or killing them.”

  Safire was starting to lose feeling in her hands. The rope binding her wrists was too tight. She breathed in deep, trying to focus. Needing to take stock of the situation.

  These were the things she knew: Eris was in terrible danger. Dax and Roa were in the clutches of the empress. Asha would soon be forced to hand over the Skyweaver’s knife. And she herself was trapped on a ship bound for some godsforsaken place she’d never heard of, where her friends would never find her.

  A cranking sound thundered around them, and Safire knew from the limited time she’d spent on ships that they were hauling up the anchor. As soon as it was fully raised, they’d head out to sea.

  First things first, she thought.

  “There’s a knife in my boot,” she spoke into the darkness. “Could someone cut me free?”

  Forty-Four

  Skye. It was the name carved into her spindle.

  “How long have you been in here?” Eris gripped her bars as she stared at the woman in the cage across from her own. Her face and clothes were streaked with dirt and grime.

  “Oh, child.” Skye’s tiny frame heaved with a sorrowful sigh. “Years and years.” She tilted her head then, carefully pushing herself to the edge of her cage—so as not to set it spinning. “You look so familiar”—her gaze gently traced Eris—“almost as if—”

  “But why did they put you here?”

  “Because I defied her.” Skye’s jaw tightened. “She declared me an enemy of the Star Isles and accused me of colluding with the Shadow God. Of creating an abomination—one she would never stop hunting.” Her green eyes narrowed, as if remembering. “They took my hands to punish me.” She lifted the two stumps of her arms. “But they couldn’t take my child. My servant, Day, hid her away.”

  Eris’s heart constricted at that name.

  “Day?” she whispered. It was Day who made her stay in her room when visitors came to the scrin or sent her up to the scarps to cut plants for dyeing. As if he didn’t want her seen. Swallowing hard, she said, “Day was the name of the man who raised me.”

  Skye lowered her arms, staring fiercely now. “What did you say?”

  Eris swallowed. “I . . . was abandoned. Day found me on the steps of the scrin and convinced the weavers to take me in.” If the Lumina hadn’t taken the spindle Day gave her, she would have reached into her pocket and shown it to Skye.

  Skye leaned closer to the bars of her cage. Her green eyes flickering back and forth as she studied Eris. “The night Leandra turned against me, I gave Day three things to guard with his life.”

  Eris ached with a sudden, hungry need. “What did you give him?”

  “The knife I used to betray the man I love.”

  Eris thought of the knife she’d sold to buy passage aboard a ship.

  “A key disguised as a spindle.”

  Eris squeezed the bars, thinking of the spindle the soldiers took from her.

  “And”—Skye looked up, her gaze sharp as a needle—“my baby girl.”

  Eris swallowed.

  “Her name was Eris,” whispered Skye. In the stunned silence that followed these words, she said, “It’s also your name, isn’t it?”

  Eris stared, frozen, as the pieces locked into place.

  She’d been no more than a baby when Day found her on the steps of the scrin, swaddled in a woven blue blanket. Or so he’d told her, years later, when he gave her a knife for cutting scarp thistles and a spindle for spinning wool into thread.

  “I knew it the moment they brought you in here,” Skye whispered, her gaze turning tender as it moved over Eris. “I see him when I look at you.” She shook her head. “Day didn’t find you on the steps of the scrin. He brought you there—to hide you from my enemy. To keep you safe. He knew they were searching for you.”

  That was why Leandra killed Day.

  Eris remembered the night the scrin burned. How right before Leandra murdered him, Day looked to the stars and whispered a prayer to the god of souls.

  “You’re her.” Eris swallowed. “Skyweaver.”

  Skye’s silence confirmed it.

  My mother.

  Eris’s heart squeezed at the thought.

  She hadn’t been abandoned. She’d been hidden and protected.

  But if Skyweaver was here, locked in a cage, who was spinning souls into stars?

  Who would save the Star Isles from the empress?

  “Day’s dead,” she whispered. “Leandra killed him.”

  “I know,” Skye whispered back, her eyes shining with the grief of it. “Eris, listen to me.” Her voice gleamed like a polished blade. “You were Day’s greatest hope. I failed to stop Leandra. But you—you are a daughter of stars and shadows. You will not fail. Day knew this, as I know it.”

  Eris lifted her head. Even if she weren’t locked inside a cage, how could she possibly stop Leandra?

  Skye leaned forward, looking toward the door far below them. Lowering her voice, she said, “A long time ago, before you were born, I stole something of your father’s and hid it in plain sight. It must be returned to him.”

  Eris frowned, thinking of the ghost in the labyrinth. Of what he told her when she asked what he wanted.

  Climb the Skyweaver’s tower. Take back my soul. Then bring it here, to me.

  “You took Crow’s soul,” she realized aloud.

  “He wasn’t Crow then,” said Skye, glancing down into her lap. “He was . . . something else.”

  But that means . . .

  “He’s the Shadow God,” Eris realized at the same time Skye said, “He’s your father.”

  They were one and the same.

  Suddenly, the world was spinning too fast, and it wasn’t from the rotating cages.

  I know him, she realized, thinking of the man with raven-black hair and gray eyes. I’ve known him all this time.

  But if her parents were gods, what did that make her?

  “Leandra knows what will happen if the Shadow God gets free of his prison. She’ll do everything in her power to stop it from happening. It’s why she’s been hunting you all your life.”

  “The knife,” said Eris, thinking of the weapon the Namsara was carrying. “You hid his soul in your knife.”

  The Skyweaver nodded. “Do you have it?”

  Eris shook her head. “And they took the spindle. So even if I had the knife, I wouldn’t be able to bring it across.” She looked away. “I can’t free him.”

  The Skyweaver shook her head. “The spindle
isn’t important. It’s a key your father made me, when I was mortal. One that led to the place he built for me. I gave the spindle to Day because it was the only way for him—for a mortal—to cross and escape with you. But you are the daughter of the Shadow God. And the Shadow God walks where he wills. Day needed the spindle and the doors, just like I needed them. But you don’t. You can walk where you wish—just like your father.”

  “Even with these?” asked Eris, raising the stardust steel manacles.

  The Skyweaver’s mouth turned down at the sight of them. “No. Not with those. You’ll have to find a way to get them off.”

  A loud noise echoed up through the room, making both Eris and Skye lean toward their bars, looking down. The empress stood below, looking up. Her gray eyes fixed on Eris, completely ignoring the Skyweaver.

  Eris’s cage shook suddenly, then swung as one of the Lumina soldiers unhooked the chain fastening her cage to the wall. As they started to lower her, Eris gripped the bars, glancing back to the Skyweaver.

  “There’s something else,” said Skye, her gaze fixed on Eris. “Your father turned me into a god to save me; and in saving me, he destroyed the girl I once was. But you . . . you gave her back to me—my memories, my mortality.”

  Eris frowned, not understanding.

  “I’m human,” she said, speaking quickly now. “I can’t spin souls into stars. Only a god can do that.”

  And then, just as she disappeared from view, Eris heard her whisper: “You could do that.”

  Me?

  But Eris wasn’t a god.

  Was she?

  Forty-Five

  Safire had difficulty determining how long they’d been out at sea. There was no light in the hold except for the occasional flash of lightning that managed to squeeze through the cracks in the deck above.

  She’d cut the other captives out of their rope bonds long ago and they now crawled through the darkness, looking for any object that might prove useful against those above deck. In their search, they’d found barrels of water, bottles of spirits, sacks of potatoes, and a variety of salt fish and pickled goods. The closest approximation of a weapon was a broken broom, which Safire gave to a girl several years younger than her. Some of the men were currently smashing bottles and handing them out—their broken halves would be able to slice a man as easily as any knife.