A Legend of Starfire

by Marissa Burt

  “Hello? Is someone there?” Wren couldn’t see anyone, but with the door’s opening came strange sounds, a fluttering whisper, and then a loud bump and a muffled groan that sounded remarkably like Simon.

  “Simon?” Wren whispered. “Is that you?”

  “Hang on a minute,” Simon’s voice said, and then the shadows shifted, revealing a lantern hanging in midair, and the sound of a match striking against something.

  “What is going on?” Wren demanded as the cabin bloomed with lantern light. She could hardly believe what she was seeing. In front of her, Simon appeared, as though a cartoonist had sketched his outline in charcoals.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” Simon said with a grin. “I found an old cloaking rhyme in the library archives, but this is my first successful execution of it.” His voice turned lecture-y. “What you have to do is pinch your fingers like this—” He held out his hand but Wren swatted it aside. Though Simon looked almost see-through, he felt real enough.

  “A cloaking rhyme? Is this for real?”

  “I couldn’t miss out on seeing the gateway a second time. I thought stowing away made the most sense, since I didn’t want you to get in trouble for telling me the Council’s big secret.” Simon’s voice sounded uncertain. “Do you not want me here?”

  “No! Of course I want you here!” Wren cried. She realized the truth of the words as she said them. Having her best friend with her made the whole trip turn from an intimidating task into a fun adventure. “It’s great that you sneaked on board. I just can’t believe there’s a rhyme that can make you invisible.”

  “Well, not completely. Ordinary firelight reveals the illusion,” Simon said, dropping a blanket that shimmered under a coating of stardust onto the floor, uncovering a cage with two falcons roosting inside. “I thought you could use some company. Cleansing the gateway is a big deal, after all.”

  “Coeur!” Wren leaped across the cabin in one bound and stuck a friendly finger into her falcon’s cage. She had finally decided on her falcon’s name—it meant heart, which Wren had picked because of the courage her bird had shown. Coeur ruffled her feathers in response, and Wren moved closer, but she didn’t have time to say anything more, because just then she heard voices passing by her door.

  “Hide!” Wren hissed as Simon grabbed the birdcage, throwing the stardust-coated blanket over it. Wren blew out the lantern and tumbled onto her bunk, holding her breath in the darkness.

  Her door opened and closed a second time, but this incident was much less eventful. “Weather Changer, check!” William’s nasal voice called, and then the door shut with a slam. Even so, Wren stayed on her bed, silent and still, until the airship began to rumble and jolt as unseen apparatuses sprang to life. Then came the whir of an engine. The wall next to her bunk hummed with the workings of the airship, and Wren could feel the thrust of a propeller. The boat began to slowly rock back and forth, then gave one final jerk before gently spiraling up.

  “We’re in the air!” Wren said excitedly, easing over to the porthole. The brilliant hues of the aurora surrounded her, whisking the vessel up into the starry night sky. The last time she had traveled to the gateway hadn’t been so comfortable. The airship exhibited none of the strange gravitational effects she had experienced on Jack’s platform. “Isn’t it beautiful?” She looked down at Simon, who had lit the lantern and was hunched near the birds, already writing in his notebook.

  “Want to take a look?” she offered.

  “Hmmm,” Simon said after he joined her by the window. “It appears that there is a current flowing through the aurora. I wonder how the Fiddlers are piloting this craft.” He rummaged through his pack until he found a pencil sharpener. “Aurora current paired with stardust sails . . . very curious.” He expertly sharpened the pencil until the tip was a point and began working sums in his notebook. Wren couldn’t hear what he was saying, but there were murmurs of acceleration and speed and force.

  “Simon.” Wren grabbed his pencil out of his hand. “Just take a minute and look out the window. We are flying through outer space.” The same wonder she had felt the last time bloomed within her. “Unbelievable,” she breathed.

  “On the contrary,” Simon said. “It is believable since we are actually experiencing it.” He grabbed for his pencil, but Wren pulled it out of his reach.

  “All right, Wren,” he said. “It’s amazing. Glorious. Magical. Do I need to get a thesaurus? I’m overwhelmed. We are flying through outer space.” He grinned at her. “Now give me back my pencil so I can figure out how.”

  Wren had no recollection of how long the journey had taken with Jack, and on this second trip, time moved surreally. The minutes passed, but each one was wrapped up in the wonder of riding the aurora, of leaving the atmosphere and entering the blackness of space. Whatever protection the airship had against shifts in gravity didn’t seem to extend to the temperature, and soon Wren huddled on her bunk with the falcons, piling the blankets and her apprentice cloak around them against the icy chill. Wren reached to stretch the cramp out of her hand and immediately recoiled. The metal wall of her cabin was so cold it burned.

  “What was the gateway like?” Simon asked in a shivering voice. The invisibility rhyme was beginning to wear off, and even without the lantern lit, Wren could see the outline of Simon’s features, though they were a little grainy.

  “I didn’t get a close look,” Wren said. She chose as few words as possible. Talking made her feel even colder. “But the room it was in looked like a cavern. Maybe it was an asteroid, I don’t know. And the gateway itself was a web of stardust.”

  “The gateway must sustain an Earthlike atmosphere,” Simon said. The cold didn’t seem to affect him as much. He had pulled the collar of his cloak up past his ears so only the tip of his red nose poked out, but he kept up the same lecturing tone. “Or else humans couldn’t survive there. Even Magicians like Boggen need air to breathe.”

  Wren managed a noncommittal grunt. Simon seemed to think the whole endeavor was a curious scientific experiment, and Wren wished she could find some of his detachment. Instead, her sense of adventure was diminishing under the burden of the Ashes’ command to cleanse the gateway, and the weight of what had happened there with Jack. She wanted to make up for all the trouble she had caused. Without her help—unwitting though it was—Jack would have never made it to the gateway in the first place. He wouldn’t have lost his magic, and Wren wouldn’t be on the cusp of losing hers. Something inside shifted at that, and Wren felt guilt tighten around her chest. Was it her defensive spell that had backfired and caused Jack to lose his magic? Would the same thing happen to her? She pressed the guilt down and curled herself like a comma around the roosting falcons.

  Simon was still working equations in his notebook when Wren’s eyelids began to grow heavy with sleep. “Don’t forget to reapply the stardust,” Wren mumbled. “I can see you clearly now.”

  Simon looked up, startled, then set his notebook aside and began rummaging through the pack he had brought. “Good idea, Wren,” he said, setting to work immediately. Wren watched him for a while, the way he mixed a few drops from some bottle and a sprinkle of something that smelled like spices from another, before spinning it all together with stardust and singing the rhyme:

  I sing, I sing

  From morn till night.

  From cares I’m free

  And hid from sight.

  Wren yawned, feeling the exhaustion of the past hours catching up with her. “That’s amazing,” she said sleepily. Simon was smearing the smoldering stardust across his skin, and whatever the stardust touched vanished as though it had never been. She watched him as he disappeared from sight, and then a blanket floated up from the floor and through the air, as Simon placed it over his other belongings. Soon, the only thing that gave any evidence Simon was in the room was the methodical scratching of his pencil. But even that blended in with the hum of the airship, lulling Wren into a most welcome sleep.

  FIVE

  Littl
e Jenny Wren did dream

  Once upon a time.

  In came Robin true of heart,

  And taught her how to rhyme.

  Wren took a deep breath and looked around her. Jack had put words to what she had always recognized. The air in her dreams of Nod smelled different—smoky, almost, and very, very cold. She braced herself, waiting for the horror of the spider dream, but she wasn’t in the burned-out village. She was standing on a hill covered with a spongy plant. Off in the distance, beyond a thick forest, there appeared to be a city. Spindly buildings reached toward the gloomy sky, with balconies and bridges connecting them. She waited, wondering if the dream was going to show her something more, but she had barely taken a few tentative steps toward the forest’s edge when a crashing sound came from behind her.

  “My calculations were a little off this time, I see,” said the person who was clambering toward her. Wren took a step back, wishing for the cover of the forest. Light shone from the open doorway that the stranger had left ajar. Wren could see the outline of a low building that blended in with the rocky landscape.

  The figure was drawing closer, and Wren could see that it was a girl of about Wren’s own height. She wore a leather vest with a number of pockets and straps that looked handy for carrying tools. It was belted at the waist over fitted gray pants tucked into boots. Her long black hair was restrained by a pair of large tinted goggles that she pushed back to reveal her face, which Wren instantly recognized.

  “Robin!” Wren exclaimed, running to meet her. She hadn’t seen Robin in her dreams since before the gateway, when Robin had contacted Wren to warn her about Boggen’s imminent return to Earth.

  “Not here!” Robin yanked Wren’s hand and pulled her back through the doorway into the room beyond. It was a small space, shaped like an octagon, ringed by walls alternating with four glass-paned windows. Now that she was inside, Wren could see that she was in a strange combination of laboratory and storeroom. One bay was piled with an array of different-sized goggles, all the way down to a minuscule wire monocle no bigger than Wren’s thumb. Another had maps and charts tacked up with tools that looked like telescopes arranged below them.

  Robin was fidgeting with a candle, except in place of a lit wick it had a blue gas flame. She flipped through some parchments and made a notation using a quill dipped in ink. “That’s better,” she murmured. “The coordinate where Nebula 14765 crosses the Pearl Galaxy.” She smiled up at Wren. “Next time I will be more precise. Of course it helps that you’ve seen my astrolab. That should make it easier for me to bring you here.”

  “Have you been doing that? Bringing me to Nod in my dreams?” Wren rubbed her arms. “I’d just as soon not be brought to the pit of giant spiders.”

  Robin pointed Wren to a roughly carved stool and leaned herself up against an old worktable. “What spiders?”

  Wren should have felt reassured to see Robin. She was, after all, a friend. But watching Robin’s expression go from curious to wary as Wren recounted her dream did nothing to ease her prickle of fear at the memory of the spiders.

  “It could be one of Boggen’s wells,” Robin said, running her palms across her forearms as if she was fighting off a chill. “The glowing liquid you described sounds like starmilk, a byproduct of the refining process, flawed as it is.” She tapped her lip with a forefinger. “I wonder if there’s more information in his lab. Now that he’s ill, his defenses might be down, and it would be a good time—”

  “Wait, ill? Boggen’s not dead?”

  “I don’t wish any living thing dead, but I wouldn’t mourn Boggen’s passing.” Robin gave her a bitter smile. “For now, he’s only very sick. His henchmen found him collapsed outside the gateway. It seems he tried to force it open, and his spell backfired.”

  Wren stared at the instruments on the table next to her. Boggen is still alive. And it seemed that Robin didn’t know about Jack. Or her part at the gateway. “He wants untainted stardust, doesn’t he? That’s why he wanted to open the gateway?”

  Robin nodded. “I believe so, but who knows what he will do now?”

  Something Robin had said tickled her memory. Jack had used that same term. “You said something about refined stardust. Has Boggen found a way to cleanse it? Is that what’s in his wells?”

  “We know very little about his wells,” Robin said slowly. She got to her feet and reached for one of the charts on the wall. “Boggen keeps them a secret from everyone, even his most trusted advisors. We have a general idea of where they might be located, but it’s all simply guesses at this point.” Robin spread the chart out on the table. It was a hand-drawn map with names of places like the Murkish Wood and the Valley of Lights. Between a very darkly shaded area labeled Upas Poisonwood: Keep out at all costs! and something called Phosphoric Lake was a circular symbol marked Well I? There were three more scattered across the page. “However he tries to refine the stardust, it’s still tainted.” She tapped the roman numerals marking the potential locations of the wells. “We must stop the corruption from spreading else we risk another plague.” She waved away Wren’s questions. “Let’s just say that the early Magicians’ efforts to manipulate the stardust went very, very badly. It’s a lucky thing Boggen didn’t force the gateway open or he would have no doubt brought the same corruption to Earth.”

  “But that’s the problem,” Wren said in a small voice. “It seems the gateway itself has become tainted. The Ashes told me that soon it will spread to Earth if we don’t cleanse it.”

  Robin’s face grew worried at Wren’s words. “The Ashes?” she said in a cautious voice. “You mean, the Ashes that belong to the Crooked Man?”

  Wren nodded. “Yes. They seem to know a lot about the gateway. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Robin swallowed hard. “The Crooked Man is no friend of anyone on Nod. Legend says he’s cursed this planet and one day he will destroy it with his starfire.” She shivered and then tried to laugh it off. “Of course legends can mean many things, but all of them say his Ashes are not to be trusted.”

  Thoughts swirled in Wren’s mind. What was Robin suggesting? That the Ashes meant to harm Nod? Wren had thought they meant to save it! And what did it mean that the Crooked Man would destroy Nod? She knew so little of him, only what vague references she had heard in the Crooked House. Now she wished she had asked more questions. Robin moved to an instrument that was like a compass with metal scales on either side, the sight of which snapped Wren’s thoughts into focus.

  “Hey! We have one of those in the Crooked House.” She thought of what Cole had said to Astrid before their departure and things clicked into place. “Is that what you use to meet me in the dream?”

  “Yes,” Robin said, adjusting a gear on the side of the strange candle. The blue flame flared. “No one here really practices Dreamopathy anymore, but I’m trying to figure it out. Experimenting. But you’re a tricky one. I can’t quite find you in the dream sometimes. I almost think I need to be asleep myself.”

  “You’re not dreaming?” Wren asked, staring at Robin and realizing that while the dream smelled like Nod, it didn’t exactly look like the other dreams. In this one she could see shades of color: the blue of the gas flame, the warm orange of the light, the copper glint as it shimmered off the metallic walls.

  “No,” Robin said, looking at Wren curiously. “I’m on Nod. You’re the one who’s asleep.” The pan next to her sizzled. “We don’t have much time, though, before the dream will take you back. What I came to tell you is that there’s someone helping Boggen on Earth. Someone who intends to open the gateway.”

  “I know,” Wren said in a quiet voice. “But he failed.” She thought of Jack, ill and magicless, and her heart squeezed with guilt and pity. She thought of how little Robin knew of what had really happened. How could she explain any of it to her Magician friend? She imagined the conversation. No, Robin, it only looks like Jack was helping Boggen. He was really deceived the whole time. And me? Well, yeah, I sort of helped him find
the gateway and ruin it and everything, but I promise! I’m on your side! Wren shook her head. “You don’t need to worry about him anymore.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Robin said. “Boggen may be keeping to his sickbed, but the rest of his minions aren’t. Something is going on at the gateway. My informants tell me that Boggen’s henchmen have a new device that will force the gateway open any day now.”

  “No!” Wren shook her head. “The gateway’s magic is tainted. The Ashes said that the corruption will only spread. If the gateway opens—”

  Robin grabbed Wren’s shoulder, glancing anxiously at the blue flame, which was slowly disappearing. “We have to find a way to keep it closed.” Robin shook Wren as if she could shake her all the way awake. “You’ve got to stop it on the Earth side, Wren! Before it’s too late for both Nod and Earth.” The room was growing dim, shadows swirling about, and Wren knew the dream would soon end. “I’ll see if I can pilfer some more stardust and try to meet you here again, but you have to try. Find a way—”

  Robin cut off with a strangled cry. Her eyes grew wide as she stared past Wren. Wren was fading from the dream. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, could only watch as thick cuffs appeared on Robin’s wrists, and a rope bound her arms to her sides.

  “You!” Robin spit to whoever was lurking in the shadows. “You’ve been spying on us? Why?” A dawning realization crossed Robin’s face. “Oh, no! What have you—”

  A voice came from somewhere Wren couldn’t see. “I do what I must,” it boomed, sending the shadows shaking. Wren tried to reach out, tried to help Robin, but the whole scene was shrinking as though Wren was seeing it from a great distance. It was too late. Whatever magic held her in the dream was nearly gone. The colors blurred together, blotting out Robin from view, and then everything went dark.