Star Thief

by Robin Kristoff

  “It feels like…” she swallowed. “Never mind. Let’s get going.”

  Tylan smiled at her hopefully as they all shouldered their packs and began walking. “If you’re talking, does that mean you’ll sing if I ask?”

  Kris smiled faintly. “If you asked, little brother, I would dance.”

  The mages talked off and on through the day, comparing the farms to Rusamite farms, making small observations of the smaller industrial town they passed through in the late morning. In the afternoon, per Tylan’s request, they sang a few more Rusamite songs. It brought back memories of Nolan’s family’s winter nights. He knew quite well that he sounded like a mule when he sang, but, if his right hand had worked and there had been no accident, he might have been tempted to play his flute along with them. He was starting to get a feel for the Rusamite melodies. But then, that would also have involved looking at Kris, and her looking at him, and that didn’t seem likely that day.

  Angry as he knew she was, Kris didn’t give out even the smallest of sparks that day. Impressed and relieved, Nolan thought that the stone Sabine gave them must have been real. Kris wouldn’t meet his eyes and spoke over his head to Tylan whenever she could, but Nolan took this as a fair trade-off for an end to the sparking. One burned hand was bad enough.

  The scenery changed from countryside to city to countryside again. Nolan did a lot of thinking when he wasn’t listening to the mages’ songs or dwelling on the pain in his hand. Tylan had said that Kris was doing the best that she could, as though only Kris was struggling to control her magic. Nolan had also come within a heartbeat of reassuring the younger boy that he was not afraid of him. Instinctively, he felt that Tylan was safer. Tylan had never once given out the tiniest of sparks since Nolan met him. There was no need for him to have talisman like Kris’s. Whether that came from less training or a more even temperament, he decided that Tylan was probably about as threatening as a head of lettuce. When Tylan offered to help him cook that night, suggesting a cloth around the knife to let him hold it, Nolan readily and gratefully agreed.

  “You’re sure you’re all right?” Tylan asked Kris as they worked. “You look strange.”

  Kris swallowed hard and shook her head.

  “It’s the strangest feeling, wearing this thing,” she said slowly. “Like there’s a glass wall around the magic.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it?” Nolan said.

  She glared over the bowl of vegetables that Tylan handed her. “It’s…like having one of my legs go numb.” She frowned at her bowl and passed it back to her brother. “And I think it’s making me nauseous, the longer I wear it. You can have this, Ty.”

  Nolan forked up a mouthful of carrots and potatoes, balancing his own bowl precariously on his knees. “You don’t know that’s why you’re sick.”

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “Or you could just need to adjust.”

  “If you can’t eat, though—” Tylan interjected. “You can’t keep that up.”

  Kris swallowed again. “Maybe it’ll pass.”

  Neither she nor Nolan said another word when she rewrapped his hand, or the rest of the night. Nolan curled up around his burned hand and willed himself to ignore the spike of throbbing pain he felt now that he was lying still and quiet, with mosquitos buzzing around him. When she started retching a few hours before the morning, Nolan pretended to sleep through it, and let Tylan bring her water and care for her alone.

  By breakfast that morning, Kris’s face had picked up a green tinge, and both of the Rusamites looked exhausted. Nolan avoided looking at Kris’s face while she put Sabine’s cooling balm on his hand again. When the pain eased, it gave him an odd twist of guilt to see her looking sick. Not that there was any proof the stone was what was causing it. She could be sick from anything. And from her expression, Nolan guessed that if it weren’t for the necklace she’d be sparking again.

  They stopped twice that morning to let Kris throw up on the side of the road. Or at least, to retch over a piece of the road, with nothing left in her gut to show for it. The second time, she crawled back up off her knees, wiped her mouth on her sleeve, and reached behind her neck to untie the leather strap.

  “Enough of this,” she muttered. Her face looked murderous.

  Nolan took a step back. “Kris, if you take that off…”

  “I’m not an idiot.” The straps fell free. She held out the stone. “I’ll be careful.”

  Nolan reached halfway for it, then hesitated, not wanting to touch her.

  She scowled and threw it at him, blinking hard. One small spark flew off of her and hit the ground. Her face crumpled, and she ducked her head, sucking her breath in hard. Nolan backed away, clutching the stone. Kris stamped on the spark, resettled her backpack, and strode away up the road. Tylan looked worriedly between them and followed. Wondering how any of this had turned into his fault, Nolan put the stone in his pocket and trudged after them.

  By nightfall, Kris was wolfing down lentils, beans, and dried pork. Between bites, she and Tylan whispered together in low voices, setting Tylan snickering three times. Kris’s smiles didn’t touch her eyes, but she looked like she was working hard to put her brother at ease.

  After dinner, the mages looked at the star-jar again, just as they had every other night. Nolan noticed that they could look into it for minutes at a time now without hurting their eyes, and that worried him. The light had been painfully bright at first. The more Nolan looked at it now, the more sure he was that the stars were dimming. He didn’t mention this to the Rusamites, though.

  “You’re feeling better?” He asked eventually, after Tylan had curled up in his bedroll.

  Kris nodded. “Not that you care.”

  “I do care,” he snapped. “I didn’t want to make you sick, I just—”

  “Thought I might kill us all by accident.”

  Nolan hesitated. Kris broke her stare from the star-jar and looked at him fiercely.

  “Don’t you think I want to control it? I could have killed you—or Ty. Or one of those random people in the town. Do you think I want to walk around feeling like…” She took a deep, steadying breath and turned back to the star-jar.

  “I know you didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” Nolan said grudgingly.

  “But doing all of that by an accident just makes me more dangerous,” Kris said in a low voice.

  “Yes.”

  For another minute neither of them said anything. Finally Kris picked the star-jar up and handed it back to Nolan. He took it gingerly, mindful of keeping his fingers away from hers.

  “You still have that binding?” Kris asked. “The rock?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll wear it half days. For a little while.”

  Nolan felt his shoulders relax slightly. “Thank you.” Then, when he should have just taken the compromise, some part of him forced his mouth to blurt, “What about the other half a day?”

  “I’m going to learn how to control it,” Kris said firmly. “If I can relax about it half the time, maybe that’ll help.”

  Nolan grimly resigned himself to keeping an even more careful eye on Kris’s temper from now on. He would have liked that ‘glass wall’ between her and her magic for good. But they wouldn’t be able to keep moving north with her so sick every day.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  From the Book of Kings

  Julien was a farmer’s son in early Marayne, drafted into the army at the age of seventeen. He marched north with his unit and fought to claim gold mines for his people in the southernmost Lomorn mountains. For ten years, the armies fought up and down the same mountains, advancing, retreating, and advancing again. Deserters swore that the ground they fought on had turned red with ten years of blood.

  Julien never again returned to his home. His betrothed married a blacksmith. He forgot his family’s faces, and their voices. He forgot when crops were planted or reaped. He became a skilled fighter, trusted by his commander to complete his missions, and trusted by hi
s men to guard them as well as he could. At the end of ten years, Julien became a captain in his people’s army.

  That winter, a sudden blizzard struck the latest battleground. The snow fell so thickly that the soldiers could not see their friends or their enemies. Julien walked through the snow for hours, calling for his men until he grew hoarse, but no one answered.

  When the skies cleared at last, Julien was high in the mountains, so high the snow around him had become ice. He searched for any kind of shelter, and at last came upon a cave with a fire burning inside. Never knowing that he had found the Dawn Caves, he took the chance to let the fire melt the chill from his bones. Warm and safe for the first time in years, Julien fell asleep.

  While he slept, he dreamt of war. He saw the ground he’d fought over, the friends who’d died beside him, and the faces of the men he’d killed over ten long years. He dreamt of blood, and hunger, and cold. He dreamt of the families who’d lost their sons to the fighting, and the royal families wearing the gold from the mines that their soldiers fought over. At last he dreamt of an old man who asked him what he wanted. Julien answered, “To end the war. To bring peace.”

  When Julien awoke the fire beside him had died. The cave was dark and empty, and beside him lay a pendant with a jewel that was warm to Julien’s touch. When he descended from the Dawn Caves wearing the pendant, he saw that the fighting had stopped. Men followed him from the battleground, and were soon joined by farmers, tradesmen, fishwives, and others who silently followed Julien, and the pendant, all the way to the capital city of Malenz. Across the countryside, fights halted, arguments were solved, and bitter feuds ended. When Julien reached the capital, he found the royal house empty and the staff waiting for him. On that day, Julien began a reign that marked one hundred years of peace.

  ~~~

  The terrain they traveled grew hillier over the next few days. They passed through one last industrial town and finally into Lelongue, a town so similar in size and rhythm to River’s End that Nolan felt a painful twist of homesickness. The shingled roofs were steeper here, and the ceilings looked lower, but the smells of wood smoke and brick were there, as well as a certain pace to everyone’s gait. For the first hour that they were in that town, Nolan narrated every difference and similarity he saw between Lelongue and River’s End. The mages nodded and led him to the food stalls, where Nolan haggled valiantly with their remaining coins.

  “We’ll have to work for the next round of goods,” Nolan told the others grimly. He hoped for a farmer wanting help with an early harvest. Or that they would come across a stable that was short of hands, assuming he could use both of his own by then. The swelling had gone down, and so far Kris had managed to keep infection at bay, but he still couldn’t grip or hold or carry anything in his right hand. He felt like he was growing lop-sided as his left side strengthened to compensate.

  In the same week, Kris began lighting their campfires magically with a quick gesture. Her first attempt resulted in a small explosion and a series of expletives that gave credit to Nolan’s weeks among sailors.

  “Are you trying to kill us all?!” Nolan demanded as the three of them frantically stamped out the flames licking through the dry summer grass. He fervently hoped the farmer who owned the fields beside them would wait to investigate until they were gone. He batted at the hair around his left ear, which smelled charred.

  “I’m trying to learn how to control it,” Kris snapped, emphasizing her words with foot-stamps over the flames. “So I won’t kill us all.”

  “Why don’t you learn how to make it go away then?!”

  The last of the embers died. The three of them glared at each other.

  “I’m trying to work on both.”

  “It’s harder to dampen a fire than to start one,” Tylan said defensively. “The magni always say so.”

  “And in the mean time we’ll have half of the nearest town trying to drive us out for witchcraft.”

  “If I can control it, I can hide it.”

  Nolan sighed and looked at his bandaged hand. What Kris was saying made a certain kind of sense—if she didn’t kill him while she trained herself, she’d be less likely to start any fires when she could control herself. But his neck prickled at the idea of letting her spark and snap around him every day. He’d thought her half days of “controlling” the magic would be much more about keeping it quiet than trying new spells. He brushed his hair back once more. It still smelled singed.

  “All right. Practice. Just keep it away from me, will you?” Nolan backed away to allow her room to light the fire a second time.

  Kris’s face flashed an odd expression—a good deal of anger mixed with something Nolan had never seen on her face before—but she turned away before he could decide what it was. He waited as she lit the fire again, and in another minute she’d created a strong but manageable blaze. Nolan ignored her sulkiness for the rest of the night.

  From then on Kris used every opportunity in the afternoons to make Nolan nervous. After triumphantly handing back Sabine’s stone at each mid-day meal, she lit small fires in her hand as she walked, and snuffed them out. If they were alone for a good stretch of road, she practiced casting the flames high in the air, in different sizes. Nolan followed behind her to stamp out the small flames that escaped to the ground. If anyone wanted to track them, he thought sourly, they could follow the singe-marks on the road. He preferred the balls of light that she also called to herself, although they were just as conspicuous. By the end of each day, Nolan was left cross from the tension, Kris was irritable from the cost of her magical efforts, and Tylan was exasperated with them both.

  Each night, Kris lit the campfire by magic. Sometimes she entertained herself and her brother by forming bird-shapes and tree-shapes with the flames. The first night that she formed three sparrows at once, she turned a defiantly triumphant look on Nolan. He very nearly smiled back. The next night her campfire consumed all of its fuel in less than ten seconds, leaving them to scurry about for more fodder.

  As Nolan waited for the stony faced Kris to clean and wrap his hand that night, Tylan washed their dishes with the help of light from the star-jar between them, as he always did. Nolan watched him rather than look at Kris. Tylan diligently scrubbed as best he could with a rag and some water from their water bottles. When he’d finished with the bowls and spoons, he rocked back on his heels and waited for Nolan. They’d formed a system that let Nolan scrub their pot one handed by bracing it with his knees and scrubbing with his left hand, his right hand held ridiculously over his head to avoid any splashing water. Tylan helped by pouring water into the pot at need. Nolan had actually gotten slightly more adept at this maneuver through painful practice, but occasionally the pot would still slip, and land in the dirt, and the whole thing would start over again. Or Nolan would catch it with his right hand (painfully) and then need to have it rewrapped.

  But that night when the pot slipped, Tylan caught it.

  For a split second, all three of them stared. Tylan looked just as surprised as any of them to see the metal pot suddenly grasped between his hands. Then Nolan came to his senses and snatched it back.

  “Ty! Are you all right?” Kris rushed to him, taking his hands in hers and turning them over. Nolan put the pot aside, feeling guilty and excluded. As he watched the mages silently stare at Tylan’s hands, the air around them shifted subtly, turning the mood very grave. A prickle of warning shivered over Nolan’s scalp.

  “Tylan?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” Tylan said in a flat voice. “No mark at all.”

  “You’re lucky,” Kris said shakily. “If you’d held on any longer…”

  “No. I’m not lucky, Kris.” Tylan bent down and picked up the pot, gingerly at first, then cradling it in one arm and running his free hand around the rim. “It doesn’t hurt me.”

  “I thought you said metal burns you both.”

  “Metal burns Rusamite mages,” Tylan said.

  “Ty…” Kris started to say
weakly.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” Tylan continued to run his fingers around the rim of the pot, testing his fingertips, his knuckles, and the pad of his palm. “Everybody’s been whispering it for years.”

  “Lots of mages can’t use their powers until they’re eleven, Ty…”

  “And now I’m eleven.”

  For several seconds, there was no sound except the chirp of crickets and Kris’s careful breathing. Then Tylan snatched up a water bottle and began scrubbing at the pot with strong, steady strokes. Nolan exchanged a worried look with Kris. Her hands were clenched in tight fists at her side, and all color had drained from her lips. A small part of his mind registered with relief that there was no sign of any stray magic about her, even without the blue stone’s help. But mostly Nolan just felt confused by the whole scene. He cleared his throat.

  “I’m not a mage either, Tylan. I know you’re…disappointed, but there’s other things to be. You’re born a witch or you’re not. There’s no shame in it.”

  “Not when you’re mage-born. You don’t know my grandmother… to her, to the Flynn mages…it’s everything. To all of them. When we fix everything, when we go back…”

  “Grandmother will get over it, Ty,” Kris said gently, slowly kneeling to put her hand on her brother’s shoulder. “The Flynn family reputation wouldn’t change. Nolan’s right. There’s plenty of other things you can do.”

  Tylan shrugged her hand off and put the pot aside with the other cleaned dishes. “You did know, didn’t you? Before we left home that day, you knew. That’s why you took me with you.”

  “Yes,” Kris whispered, her voice shuddering. “But Ty, I meant it when I said I didn’t want to enter as a full mage. And I meant it when I said I wanted us to stay together.”

  “So you tried to hide me? Without even telling me?” Tylan finally turned to look at her, his eyes blazing. “Did Grandmother tell you to? I knew they were…” he shook his head and gulped. “I’m going to sleep.”