The Native Star

by M. K. Hobson

  She lifted her ivory hand. “That hurt,” she said. She touched her chest, the place where her heart beat. “This doesn’t.”

  Stanton said nothing, but reached up to pluck a petal from where it had lodged in her hair. He let it drop. “You won’t even be out of your thirties,” he mused softly.

  “Why must you always make things so complicated?” She stomped a petulant foot. “You’re alive now. I’m alive now. Forget the rest! Didn’t Ososolyeh teach you anything?” She dropped to one knee and clasped his hand earnestly. She looked up at him, making her eyes big and cowlike. “Dreadnought Stanton, will you marry me?”

  “For heaven’s sake!” Stanton said, looking around. “Get up! You can’t do that. It’s not …”

  “Proper. I know. But I’m not expected to be proper, I’m a skycladdische, remember?” Emily said.

  “And I’m still half a sangrimancer,” Stanton said, softly. He crouched down to look into her face, resting his elbow on his knee. “Remember?”

  She looked into his eyes. They had changed color, she noticed. They used to be bright green, but the blackness had not left them entirely. Perhaps it never would. Perhaps they would always remain as dark as polished serpentine, veined with deep rills of ebony.

  “I know what you are,” she said. “And I know what you’re not.”

  He did not say anything for a long time, and Emily began to feel annoyed. She stood and brushed off her dress.

  “Of course, if you’d rather not marry me, I suppose we could come to some other arrangement,” she snapped. “I’m a woman of independent means now. I don’t have to marry anyone.”

  Stanton caught her arm, rose. He took both her hands, living and dead, and held them tightly. He looked down into her face. A sudden breath of warm wind rustled the trees, sending showers of blossoms swirling around them.

  “Miss Edwards, I would be proud and honored if you would marry me and be my wife.”

  Emily shrugged diffidently. “I’ll think about it.”

  He blinked at her, face falling; then he smiled. “You’re insufferable,” he said.

  “Yes, we’re well matched that way. Shall we keep walking? I want to see the castle you told me about. And Charlie, the enchanted swan who can recite Dante.”

  “The moon’s not full,” Stanton said. “Besides, I just made Charlie up. I’m sorry.”

  Emily heard the echo of Mirabilis’ words. All credomancers are liars.

  “But there is a castle,” Stanton hurried to add. “And a reservoir with Croton water. And irises and blue flags. Honestly.”

  “Then we’ll just have to do without Charlie.” Emily tucked herself in close to him. He was so warm, so wonderfully warm. They walked down the avenue of blossoming trees, and Emily was astonished when she saw that the shifting leaves, for one indefinable moment, spelled out a word.

  Yes.

  She blinked, lifting a hand to point, but in a breath of wind, the word was gone.

  New York trees really were different from California trees, she realized with sudden amusement.

  Stanton looked down at her. “Do you remember when we first came to the Miwok camp? When Komé kept rattling on at me? You thought it was about the stone, but she was really saying something entirely different.”

  “You said she congratulated you,” Emily said.

  “She did. On finding such a suitable wife. I told her I wasn’t married, that I did not intend to be married, and that I certainly wasn’t going to marry you.” He grinned. “That was when she hit me.”

  Emily laughed and looked up at the sky. It was the most beautiful shade of blue. They strolled thoughtfully for a while, the late afternoon sun slanting low and golden across their path.

  “She also predicted that our home would be filled with the happy thunder of robust boy-children,” Stanton remembered, offering it up as if it were an exceptionally tempting treat.

  Emily frowned. “As the one who will presumably be called upon to produce the robust boy-children in question, I must say that it sounds like an awful lot of work.”

  “There are elements of the process that can be somewhat enjoyable, I’m told.” Stanton stopped her in the middle of the path. He put his hands on her waist and drew her very close. His hot breath tickled the little hairs on her forehead.

  “Now see here,” he said, his voice so quiet it rumbled in his throat. “I am very much aware of the fact that you haven’t said yes yet.”

  “To which, the marriage or the boy-children?”

  “Well, I thought you might object to one without the other, but …”

  Emily silenced him with one finger pressed against his warm lips. White and pink petals drifted all around them.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Epilogue

  Benedictus Zeno closed his eyes and breathed in the air.

  He’d forgotten the particular smell of Russian spring: high and thin and green, rich with the fragrance of black earth and cold water and mushrooms. There was still snow in patches, but a warming wind from the Caspian Sea stirred the tops of the birches.

  He was sitting on the ivy-draped terrace of a dacha outside of Saint Petersburg, next to a man whose hair and beard were white-blond and whose eyes were intensely blue. The man was called Perun, but that was not his real name. Few in the Sini Mira used their real names. For decades, Zeno had called him only by the name he used within the Sini Mira, the name of the heavenly smith, the god of thunder.

  They sipped tea sweetened with raspberry jam from glasses set in silver holders. On a table beside them, a brightly enameled samovar steamed pleasantly.

  “Well,” Zeno grumbled in Russian. “That didn’t go very well, did it?”

  “Certainly didn’t,” Perun said. “Not at all.” He paused. “Such is life in the service of the Great Mother.”

  “Your most revered Ososolyeh,” Zeno said, “can be a fickle, whimsical, opaque bitch.”

  Perun frowned deeply. “Mind your manners in my house, credomancer,” he growled. “She is mother of us all, and her wisdom is great.”

  “The whole point of allowing sangrimancers into my Institute was to learn from them, to use the earth’s consciousness during the séance to gain insight into the Temple’s plans for Temamauhti. To learn how the power in the stone should be used for our defense. And here we are, power gone, Mirabilis dead, and my Institute fallen into the hands of Dreadnought Stanton. And you’re going to sit there and tell me to mind my manners?”

  “Peace, Benedictus. The power has been returned to the earth where it belongs. The terramantic extraction plant in Charleston has been destroyed. Do not make the best the enemy of the good.”

  But Zeno was not mollified. In fact, his next words were even louder. “But Ososolyeh must have felt the compulsion working on Miss Edwards! Komé must have known … why didn’t she warn us?”

  Perun shrugged, spread his hands.

  “You cannot expect the Mother to think as we humans do,” he said. “Though I grant it would be more convenient.”

  “The way things turned out, it might have been better if we’d let Caul have the stone,” Zeno muttered bitterly. “At least he was fighting the right enemy.”

  “Do you really believe a narrow-minded bigot like Caul could have defeated the Black Glass Goddess?” Perun lifted an eyebrow. “His masters were happy to let him stockpile power, but they would never have let him use it. Putting the stone in his hands would have been as good as handing it to Itztlacoliuhqui herself.” He reached for an engraved silver case, snapped it open. He withdrew a brown cigarette, lit it, then exhaled smoke with great pleasure. “I think Captain Caul was lucky to have died with his illusions intact.”

  “I wish I’d been allowed to keep a few more of mine,” Zeno said, waving a hand to dispell the acrid stink. “Stanton! Master of my Institute! The thought turns my stomach. And on top of that, he’s in love.” Zeno spoke the word with mincing distaste. “As if a Sophos doesn’t have enough to worry about without being in lo
ve.”

  “They’re going to be married, then?” Perun asked. Zeno snorted disapproving assent.

  “After Charleston, I had Stanton utterly resolved to give her up—for her own good, of course.” Zeno shook his head. “But all she had to do was show her face at the wrong place at the wrong time, and …” Zeno threw up a hand. “Love!”

  Perun smiled. “We can’t all be priests, Benedictus.”

  Zeno slapped a hand on the table with remembered indignation. “Do you know what he said to me when I reminded him that there were still larger goals to be considered?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “He said, ‘the board has changed, and our strategy must change as well.’ And in the most insolent manner!” Zeno frowned at his own boots. “Without a doubt the board has changed—it has changed for the worse. We have been pushed a dozen moves closer to checkmate, and the one man who has even the remotest hope of forestalling it is picking out china and deciding what to put on the wedding invitations.”

  “Claiming Mirabilis’ power with blood magic …” Perun sighed, shook his head, watched the smoke rising between his fingers. “Well, I suppose there wasn’t anything else to be done. But really, you brought it on yourself. Letting Mirabilis go through with that ridiculous symposium in the first place. If you’d just handed the stone over to us …”

  “Caul would have reduced the Institute to rubble,” Zeno growled.

  “Every man has something he wishes to protect,” Perun mused, lifting the cigarette to his lips. “But to save the world, he may be asked to sacrifice that which he holds most dear.”

  The men contemplated this in silence for a long time. Perun smoked his cigarette down to a scant nub, flicked it onto the flagstones, and watched it burn itself out.

  “We will look for the poison that Komé spoke of,” he said finally. “The poison hidden by the god of oaths. She could only have meant Volos’ Anodyne. If we can find it and implement it quickly, perhaps no one will be required to sacrifice anything.”

  Volos’ Anodyne, the unripened fruit of the Sini Mira’s profoundest scientific mind. It was always thought lost, uncompleted … but if Komé spoke the truth, it existed—somewhere. This was hope, great and brilliant, and all too fragile.

  “The High Priest was at the symposium,” Zeno said. “Yet another instance in which I find myself questioning your Great Mother’s boundless wisdom. I don’t suppose she might have told us about the poison without Heusler being there? Now we have to raze the Temple to find it. You know they will stop at nothing to destroy it.”

  “The Temple does not know Volos’ true identity. They won’t even know where to begin to look.”

  “And we do?”

  “Surely Miss Edwards—”

  Zeno shook his head curtly, breaking off the words. “The less she knows, the less trouble she can cause us,” he said. “That woman has a positive knack for getting into trouble with sangrimancers. And if they manage to discover that Lyakhov was—”

  “Please,” Perun interjected, lifting a hand. “Call him by his nom de guerre. Call him Volos, after the god of oaths. It honors his memory better.”

  “It may well be the only honor his memory receives,” Zeno snapped. “Miss Edwards says her mother left nothing behind when she died in Lost Pine; a few minor female ornaments. Certainly no notes or papers. She assured me of this—she said that her ‘Pap’ told her everything he knew.”

  “And she is telling the truth?”

  “Do you think she could lie to me?” Zeno asked. Perun drew in smoke, closed his eyes, exhaled peacefully.

  “We will find it,” he said. “The Great Mother will not let us fail. Ex fide fortis, yes?”

  Zeno took a deep breath—of good clean Russian air, instead of smoke, and released a sigh. “Yes,” he said. “Ex fide fortis.” Then he stood, shrugging on his coat and clapping on his hat. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go teach a lovestruck sangrimancer how to run my Institute.” He opened his mouth as if to say something more, but then pressed his lips together and shook his head. He lifted a hand in mute farewell as he vanished into the twilight.

  Perun sat alone on the terrace for a long time after he was gone, smoking and thinking. He watched the sun go down, listened to the sounds of darkness closing in. Finally, when the last cigarette in his case was gone, he barked a laugh that resounded off the inkstroke trees. He lifted a glass of now-cold tea in a salute to the rising moon.

  “To the only thing that can civilize a skycladdische, redeem a sangrimancer, and leave a poor old credomancer at a loss for words!” He poured the liquid on the ground for luck, then rose to fetch more cigarettes.

  The Native Star is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A Spectra Mass Market Original

  Copyright © 2010 by M. K. Hobson

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spectra, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52169-9

  www.ballantinebooks.com

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