Star Thief

by Robin Kristoff

  Kris’s features finally relaxed slightly, and she didn’t move as Tylan poured water on a cloth and began dabbing gently at the nape of her neck, moving the shoulder straps and the collar of her shirt out of the way.

  “So why do you speak Rusamite then, if you’re not from Rusam?” she asked.

  Nolan stayed very still as he watched the siblings. He was getting a very bad feeling about these two. He’d never even heard of Rusam. Wherever they were from, it was very far away.

  She was also a witch, if she could sense the star-jar, but not one that seemed likely to help him.

  “To me, you sound like you’re speaking Surian.”

  “Nobody else here can understand us,” Tylan explained without looking up. “That’s what scared us so much when we saw you at the inn. Then I thought maybe you were from somewhere else too when I saw your bag, but you’re from here, aren’t you? But that lamp in your bag seems so strange here. Everybody else here uses oil or something. I can’t even tell what’s in that.”

  “What was in what?” Kris asked.

  “This jar full of light that he’s got in his bag.”

  “Let me see.”

  “I think you’ve seen enough,” Nolan snapped. “Look, you’ve crept up on me in my sleep, tied me up, put a knife to my throat, and rifled through my things. Don’t you think it’s time I got to ask a question or two?”

  Kris rolled her eyes and pulled her shirt collar back up over her neck. “We don’t need to waste time talking to you now. Tylan, let’s go.”

  “Wait. You’re hungry, right? I have food—we can cook some of it. Then we can sit and talk like normal people.”

  Kris wavered, a stolen glance at his cook-fire betraying her.

  “I’m harmless, right? You have your knife. I don’t have anything.”

  That won them. Tylan grabbed a piece of wood from Nolan’s little pile of firewood and threw it incompetently onto the fire, sending sparks up and threatening to smother the whole thing. Kris shrugged her uninjured shoulder and dropped to the ground. Nolan tucked the knife and the flute into his belt and set to work reviving the fire and starting enough porridge for four people.

  He didn’t ask them anything until after he’d put three servings worth of food into his bowl and handed it to the siblings. He picked slowly at what remained in the pot while he watched the strange pair. They tucked into their meal with single-minded attention, as though it were their first meal in days. Which it probably was, Nolan thought.

  After they’d eaten their first few bites Nolan gently started probing them with his own questions.

  “So you’re not from Marayne. You’re from…what did you call it—Rusam?”

  Kris glanced at him warily. Tylan nodded.

  “Why are you in Marayne now?”

  The siblings exchanged looks. “Not by choice,” Kris said finally. “It was…an accident. We’re leaving as soon as we can.”

  Nolan let them eat for a few more moments in silence before asking his next question. “How far is it to get back?”

  Kris frowned. “You ask a lot of questions.”

  “We don’t know,” Tylan answered solemnly. “We’ve been lost ever since we got here.”

  “But how did you get here? Did you walk or…”

  “We don’t really know, all right?” Kris answered reluctantly. “So just leave it.”

  “Kris,” Tylan whispered, “If he can understand us, he’s different from the others.”

  “Not a mage.”

  “But still, maybe he can help.”

  Kris sighed irritably and rolled her shoulders.

  Tylan looked back at Nolan. “We don’t know how we got here. One minute we were—”

  “In our housing block,” Kris said. “Like everyone else.”

  “The next…we were frozen…neither of us could move. It didn’t feel that long, but when we could move again…”

  “We were here, in a field we’d never seen. Surrounded by a bunch of dirt and farmers and backward people we can’t understand.”

  Nolan took one deep breath. Then another.

  “When did that happen?” he asked. He hoped that he didn’t already know the answer.

  Another shrug. Kris brushed loose strands of hair back behind her ear. Her bracelet glowed dully in the firelight before falling back under her sleeve. “Two, maybe three of your weeks. I haven’t kept track. And I don’t know how long we couldn’t move.”

  Nolan closed his eyes. For a moment he thought he was going to be sick then and there.

  “Hey, what’s wrong with you?” Tylan asked.

  “Nothing. It’s just—you don’t even think you’re from this world at all, do you?”

  Tylan stared at him for a second. “That’s what Kris’s been saying, because of how—”

  His sister looked at him sharply.

  “Of how everything’s so different,” he continued placidly. “The languages and everything I mean. But we just got here. And it’s not even that cold here or anything. Plus the light’s different—”

  “Tylan, you talk too much.”

  It was true, Nolan thought slowly, letting the thought circle his brain numbly. They were from another planet. He must have frozen them like Kris had said, and somehow they’d gotten out, but there was nowhere to go but here…this was all his fault.

  “Where’s your family?” he asked softly.

  Kris glowered. “How should we know that when we don’t even know how we got here?”

  So they’d either landed somewhere else on Nolan’s world…or they were still in the star-jar. Remorse stung the back of Nolan’s throat and the inside of his eyelids.

  Kris was staring at him clinically when he opened his eyes again.

  “Something’s not right with you. Why should you care?” she set the bowl down and stood up, brushing her hands on her trousers. “And there’s something not right here. That magic’s still here, it must be coming from somewhere. Ty, where’s….” she scanned the ground and her eyes settled on Nolan’s pack. Before he could react she’d opened it roughly and started tossing his clothes out at random.

  Nolan dug his fingernails into his palms and watched. It made no sense to stop her. They deserved the truth.

  Kris’s body stilled, and he knew she’d found the jar. She didn’t move for several long seconds. When she did, she drew the jar out very gently with both hands. The eyes she turned on Nolan were fiercer than anything he’d ever seen. Three small sparks of light flickered through her hair.

  “What the hell is this?”

  Nolan met her eyes as levelly as he could. “My night sky. The summer sky from here. Our moon and the stars—”

  “What?!”

  “I’m sorry! I guess…you’re right, your world is in there, it must be, but I never meant to—”

  Kris grabbed Tylan by his shirt collar and began backing away from Nolan so fast she was almost tripping over herself. “What kind of mage are you? How could you?!”

  Nolan stood up. “I didn’t! I made…a stupid wish, but I never meant any harm by it. And it was a witch—a sorceress—I swear! I didn’t do this!”

  Kris turned and started running, pushing her brother before her. She gripped the star-jar firmly under one arm.

  “No! Don’t leave!” Nolan lunged forwards after them, only to be thrown backwards by a gesture from Kris.

  Nolan’s first thought when he woke up was that his head hurt. His second thought was that he’d gone blind. He blinked for long moments, passing his fingers before his eyes, before he reassured himself that he could indeed see. There was just absolutely nothing to break the permeating darkness that hung all around him.

  His third thought sent him scrambling to his feet, which doubled the pain in his skull. He scanned his surroundings, his heart pulsing in his throat. His eyes found nothing, not even the trees that he knew must surely be there.

  He’d lost the star-jar. Lost the entire point in traveling to the Dawn Caves less than a week after s
tarting.

  A small part of him, the part that couldn’t really believe it was gone, delighted in the fact that such a burden had been lifted so suddenly from his shoulders. He could hardly fix it if he couldn’t keep track of it, after all, and wasn’t it right that those people from another world be able to hold the jar that held their home?

  The larger part of him, however, mourned how completely he’d failed his task. He’d—indirectly and unintentionally—rearranged the cosmos, frozen at least one population in time, torn at least one family apart, and was risking the deaths of who knew how many people…and now all of that was in the hands of people who probably still barely knew what they had.

  And Edeva had thought for some reason that he was “worthy”.

  Nolan settled back uneasily onto the ground, still watching anxiously around him.

  What would happen if they broke it?

  Could he go to the Dawn Caves without the star-jar? How could he even know it still existed when he got there? Nolan didn’t see how he could get the stars back to where they belonged if he had no idea where they were.

  He also didn’t see how he could go home without doing anything more. Hadn’t he always read of heroes stopping at nothing to right the world? He couldn’t imagine Julien, or even Gavin, leaving the star-jar and heading south now. Though they, of course, wouldn’t have lost it in the first place. Or made the wish at all. They hadn’t been such incredible fools.

  These thoughts made for unpleasant company, but eventually Nolan felt around for his bedroll and climbed back in. He lay awake for long hours, miserably trying to imagine how to phrase a wish to locate the summer stars.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Kris was staring down at him when Nolan woke up.

  He jerked away. “Stop doing that!”

  “I thought you wanted us to come back.”

  “Yes, but…don’t sneak up on me like that when I’m sleeping.” Nolan sat up cautiously and eased away from her.

  Kris waved her hand noncommittally. “You are a mundane, aren’t you?”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “You’re not a mage. You can’t do magic. Because I think you would have used some by now if you could.”

  Nolan shook his head. “No. I’m no witch, or mage. Only my mother has the talent for witchery in my family.”

  “So you didn’t put Rusam or any other place in that jar.”

  “No. I told you that. It was a witch, Edeva.” Nolan glanced behind her, and was reassured to see the star-jar glimmering and whole in Tylan’s hands.

  Kris studied his face for long moments, her lips tight. Her pale purple eyes searched his face with an aggressive intensity.

  Nolan frowned back at her, unnerved and irritated all at once.

  Finally she sighed, unhappily rolling first one shoulder, then the other.

  Nolan reached for his boots. “So you believe me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well…good.”

  “So how were you going to fix this?”

  “Can we eat while we talk about it?” Tylan suggested.

  So they ate more of Nolan’s store of oats and dried fruit, and he explained. When he was through, both of their faces were, if possible, paler.

  “They’ll turn to dust?” Tylan asked softly. “Is that what you said? Everyone?”

  Nolan set his empty pot aside. His hands felt larger and clumsier than usual. “That’s what they told me.” He watched Tylan’s face for a moment, then added hastily. “But they’re fine for now. Everyone is. And that’s why I’m headed north to the Dawn Caves. To save them.”

  “We’re coming with you,” Kris said.

  Nolan jerked his head back. “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’m supposed to do this alone.”

  “You’re supposed to find help yourself, is what those men said,” Tylan said.

  “And here we are. You’re probably the only person who can break the spell. I understand that. But that’s our world you’re carrying around.”

  “You almost killed me last night.”

  “No I didn’t,” Kris snapped. “And I wouldn’t go that route if I were you. You could have killed us all with your stupid wish.”

  “But I didn’t mean to do that!” Nolan protested, his temper flaring. “You pulled a knife on me in my sleep, then knocked me out cold by magic. I’ll take my chances alone.”

  “Well we’re not just going to wander around these back-country sheep fields until you do something ‘good’ or climb up some mountain hundreds of miles away with half the universe on your back. That’s our world you’ve got locked up in that jar. We’re not leaving it.”

  “Besides, you’re the only person who can understand us,” Tylan pointed out. “Probably because you have the jar, or the spell turns on you, or something. So where else are we supposed to go?”

  Nolan opened his mouth to fire back a retort, but the words died in his throat. He shut his mouth. Where could they go? With no one who could understand them in a country hunting out witches, they wouldn’t make it far.

  That’s what probably brought them back as much as anything, Nolan realized. The siblings were hungry, and ill-equipped, and scared. And that was his fault.

  “All right,” Nolan said finally. “You can come with me. At least for awhile.”

  “We don’t owe you anything,” Kris said deliberately. “You got us all into this. Don’t go acting like you’re doing us a favor.”

  Nolan busied himself with breaking the camp without answering. The Rusamites began to rinse their dishes with water from his water bottle.

  “I’m sorry,” Nolan said finally as he rolled his bedroll. “For starting all of this. I am sorry.”

  Kris’s eyes flashed. “Sorry isn’t going to do any good now, is it?”

  The first few days with the Rusamites dragged by in long, hot days punctuated by painfully tense exchanges. All the water Nolan could pour into the water bottle never lasted until the next stream. Thirst made all of them cross, particularly Kris, who was aggressive and defensive by turns.

  The three of them went quickly through Nolan’s supply of food, and then through his coins as he bought new supplies from a small village. Despite this, mealtimes became a time of truce respected by all. Nobody wanted to argue with a full bowl of food in front of them. Their priorities changed.

  They only had one sleeping roll between the three of them. After awkwardly looking at the other two the first night, Nolan reluctantly decided to take turns.

  “I don’t need it,” Kris said immediately. “Tylan can have my turn.”

  Tylan shook his head, his face solemn. “Kris, that’s not fair. You need it too.”

  Kris shook her head. “I got us into this.” Her eyes flicked to Nolan. “Not all the way, but enough. And you’re still growing.”

  “I’m not a baby.”

  “I never said—”

  Nolan cleared his throat. “We’ll all need as many solid nights’ sleep as we can get. We’ll each get a turn until we can get more sleeping rolls.”

  Kris glared at him hotly. “I don’t even want it. Tylan—”

  “Can have the first turn, tonight.”

  Now it was Tylan’s turn to glare. “We should draw straws or something. That would be the fair way.”

  “It’s my sleeping roll in the first place. I can say how we’ll use it.” Nolan heard the resentful tone in his voice and ignored it, too irritated with them both to care.

  “I’ll never use it at all until you do, Ty.”

  Tylan looked at the sleeping roll, conflict clear on his face. Finally he glanced at his sister. “You promise you’ll use it?”

  She hesitated. “I promise.”

  Tylan’s face cleared. “All right then.” He looked at Nolan uncertainly. “Thank you.”

  Kris’s cheek twitched. “He’s the one who got us into this, Ty. Don’t thank him for anything—he owes us.”

  Nolan gritted his teeth, sunk to the ground, and wrapp
ed himself in his coat without saying another word. Between the rocky ground, the sticky-hot air, the mosquitoes and the speed of his own thoughts, sleep did not come easily. He lay blinking at the dark forest for nearly an hour, reeling from the progression of the day and mulling bitterly over Kris’s attitude towards him. What made these thoughts all the worse was the deep-seated notion she was right.

  The next day it rained. Nolan kept his boots, Kris took his hat, and Tylan got the coat. Nolan wore the winter coat his mother had sent with him instead, which soaked through within the hour and then surrounded him in the smell of wet sheep. They all went to sleep wet, muddy, and grouchy.

  The mages could not touch metal, Kris explained. Any contact burned them as Nolan’s flute had when it burned her skin. They could carefully stir the contents of Nolan’s cook-pot, but they couldn’t wash it. The three tried taking turns making campfires, cooking (carefully, on the mages’ part), washing their few dishes, gathering wood, and digging latrines. After the first disastrous round of this, Nolan resumed cooking, and left the others, grumbling, to dig the latrine and gather wood before their meal.

  “I’ve never met a girl who couldn’t cook,” Nolan commented bitterly that night. His stomach was half-empty, but he had no mind to eat what he was now chiseling out of the bottom of the pot.

  Kris glared. “I’ve never met a boy who could.”

  “Well it’s good for you I can. What on earth have you been eating since you got here?”

  “Not much,” Tylan said softly.

  “I’ve never had to cook. The servants cook, or my grandmother—old people who are weaker, with less power.”

  “You might have mentioned that before,” Nolan said.

  “I did.”

  “I thought you were joking! You don’t look like you’re some gentry-daughter—anybody, any girl, who doesn’t have an army of servants can do at least a little.”

  “Well not us,” Kris snapped, scrubbing their wooden spoons aggressively. “We usually ate in the Hall with the other mages from our housing block. The servants and the elders did the cooking.”