Jaele breathes in and out. Her body is aching, but she is not faint as she was the last time. What change? What have I done?
Listen, they say, and open your eyes even when they pain. Speak as you listen—speak, because the change is not yet complete.
The change . . . I have told you everything—all that I saw. Even Lallan throwing pebbles. Even clothes in a river, raised up and weeping glass. What remains?
They speak, all eight. Tell us your freedom, and ours.
My freedom, she repeats; my change. She knows, then, with a surge of warmth and tears. It is almost too clear, too bright: light on water, a bird’s thread. She does not speak for a time. I know, she finally says. I know, now that I have run and swum and danced. Now that I have told you everything, from beach to Fane to these red barrows. You have listened and sung and asked, and they have lived. My mother and father and brother, my friends, my companions. They are here.
She pauses and breathes and finds that she is trembling. Then, slowly, she speaks their names—each one, every one, as the iben stretch in the darkness. The names a weaving, smooth and whole, vivid as sun or flame; words she feels in her mouth like joy. You are here, she says at last, and smiles as Llana wipes her tears away.
She feels trickles of dirt on her skin, hears it hissing as it falls. Points of light prickle the thick, deep earth. The iben’s horns and talons glint as they look upward. They are silent.
You are still waiting, she says. But all that remains is what will be, above. What I did not know until now. I will leave here: I will run in sunlight—
There is a rending crash, then another, another. The points of light crack wide as the earth tears apart. A searing glare—Jaele cries out as her dark sight is ripped away, but she does not hear herself, her voice is lost in the ringing, keening joy of theirs. Singing of sand and mountain cloud, running in dawn-bright grass—singing and calling, then, one or all: Our freedom from yours. We have waited so long, thinking only of darkness and past, endlessly following grief. Endlessly—until you, and your tale. Others sometimes came to us, but none told us what you have. Yours is a tale of before and now and someday all together and one. Like us, child Jaele. We will not forget.
The iben reach and cry, and Jaele speaks again, for somehow they are still listening, still need her words
I will run through the silver rain and corn to where Serani and Bienta dance I will pass beneath the gleaming portcullis of Luhr and look up at palace spires I will follow the tracks of Alilan wagons in red sand I will I will go home
There is no cavern. Shattered stone and spinning sweep of sky so blue, so unexpected, that it is almost white—the iben crouched then leaping. She sees them arched into the sun; sees their faces as they turn to her.
The hut is drifting ash and frame of blackened ends—but there is the bay, the Giant’s Club, the snails and layers of water, seagreen weaving. Ilario’s words breathing in my hands. My fingers curled around the writing stick: my words another circle closed or open, as shonyn now still always.
I can see the stars, shining through their skin.
COPYRIGHT
A Telling of Stars © 2003, 2015 by Caitlin Sweet
Cover artwork © 2015 by Melanie Luther
Cover design © 2015 by Vince Haig
All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Distributed worldwide by
HarperCollins Canada Ltd.
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Scarborough, ON M1B 5M8
Toll Free: 1-800-387-0117
e-mail: [email protected]
A Telling of Stars
First published by Penguin Canada
The Penguin Group
Penguin Books, a division of Pearson Canada
2003
eISBN: 978-1-77148-320-9
ChiZine Publications
a CZP eBook
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
Copyedited and proofread by Michael Matheson
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Caitlin Sweet’s first fantasy novel, A Telling of Stars, was published by Penguin Canada in 2003. Her second, The Silences of Home, was published in 2005. Between them, they were nominated for Aurora Awards, a Locus Best First Novel Award, long-listed for the Sunburst Award, and ranked in the top five of SFSite’s Best Novels of 2005. The Pattern Scars was published by ChiZine Publications in 2011, and was nominated for an Aurora, a Sunburst, and a CBC Bookie (which it ended up winning).
Caitlin’s first YA book, The Door in the Mountain, was a reimagining of the ancient Greek Minotaur myth. It came out in 2014; its sequel (as-yet unnamed) will be published in the fall of 2015, also by ChiZine, under its ChiTeen imprint.
When not working on her own books (which, sadly, is most of the time), Caitlin is a writer/research analyst with the Ontario Government, and a genre-writing workshop instructor at U of T’s School of Continuing Studies. She lives in Toronto with her family, which includes a husband, two teenagers, four cats, a rabbit, a hamster, and a bunch of fish.
Visit Caitlin at: www.caitlinsweet.com
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