Starbright: The Complete Series

by Hilary Thompson

  TWENTY-NINE

  The Inner Libra: You are known for optimism, but you are not always happy. Instead, you smile through life’s struggles while hiding frustration and resentment. Sometimes you think saying no will result in horrible consequences, and so you often give away your power to make others happy. You long for love, and wish for a happy ending.

  From Understanding Your Horoscope

  Head Minister Charles, year 2073

  I wander through the house touching unfamiliar objects at random, looking for distraction. Earlier, Madna showed me a small scrapbook she has made – a collection of writings that puzzle me. It seems as though the prophecy that owns me was made even before the Sickness, and I don’t know what to think of that.

  Stian, Zarea, and Madna sit at the table, maps and papers surrounding them. Zarea’s head bends close to Stian’s as she traces a route on the map, and her clean hair slips in dark silky waves over her shoulder, brushing his arm. I don't see Lexan anywhere, but I know he isn't far.

  In another room I find a gathering of instruments, including an old guitar like Mother's. I twist the pegs to tune it the way Mother taught me when I was small. She always shared her talents with me, whether it was knives or music.

  I’m not a good or patient player, and I only know one song, but it was her favorite. I play and hum to myself, feeling a peaceful, bittersweet connection to her.

  “That's beautiful,” Lexan says softly from behind me. “Your mother's song?”

  I nod. “I miss her so much, Lexan.” I think briefly of the pills he has not returned to me then push the thought firmly away. I have to learn to be strong without them.

  He says nothing but sits next to me. I think about his father, dead not even two years. “Does it get easier to manage?”

  His eyes meet mine, a great deep sadness answering the question before he speaks. “Easier isn't the right word. You get…comfortable, I guess. You get used to the idea of missing them. But then sometimes, a word, a smell, certain sounds...and it just cuts right back to your heart.”

  We sit without speaking, my fingers slowly plucking the notes of the song. Suddenly, I rise and leave the instrument.

  “I'm going outside.” I'm not sure if I want company right now, and thankfully Lexan only follows me with his eyes.

  I cross the garden into the forest, following a path Stian pointed out to me yesterday. He said I could see the water, and that’s what I need to see now. I can’t touch it for calm, but perhaps it will soothe my thoughts as they rank against me.

  The path opens onto a flat cliff, high enough to jut beyond the larger hills. Behind me, the trees cover any mention of a house, and before me spreads the water, still as glass. Far below me on the beach I can see the edges moving gently, the moon pulling a small tide. The sun is nearly level with my eyes, nearing the distant horizon of trees. The sky is fiery, as though the heavens are burning, and the water mimics this. A small tree clings to the ledge, and I see its black outline with astonishing clarity against the blazes of the lowering sun.

  After some minutes where time seems to stand still, the colors fade, and the sky becomes the dull gray of ash. The water has changed allegiance, and now imitates the moon, its surface liquid silver. It looks thicker than water. The absence of the sun has chilled the air, and I shiver slightly.

  I’m not surprised when Lexan steps from the trees, a soft blanket cradled in his arms. Without speaking, he encases my shoulders in the warmth of the wool, the breadth of his own body stretching the blanket to my right. His arm brushes mine as he adjusts, and his fingers gently touch mine then move away, unsure.

  “Strange,” I break the silence, leaning my head on his arm. He waits. “My whole life, I've tried to worship the sun and stars and have been expected to live my life according to their location on a certain day. All of Asphodel lives like this. But none of us have ever even seen the sun.”

  “I know. A week ago, I was training to be a minister, yet how could I tell people to believe in something I'd never experienced? How could I worship something I'd never seen?”

  “We have to do this, Lexan. We have to fight her.”

  “I know,” he says again simply.

  “I wish I could just stay here, build a life like Madna has. I could be happy here.”

  I don’t say anything else for a few minutes. We simply sit, and the quiet around us is soothing and restorative.

  “I’m really sorry for all the ways I’ve hurt you. I’ve been so selfish,” I say.

  “I’m sorry, too, Trea. Sometimes I feel like we were never given a chance.”

  “Lexan, if I stay here, just for tonight, would you stay with me? We can forget about everything. Forget the whole world."

  He doesn’t answer, but his hand closes firmly over mine and I feel his lips brush my hair, so gently, with no message other than yes: he will stay with me.

  Lexan doesn’t expect things from me, but he hopes. And that gives me hope.

  Spring star and autumn star: once separated by the sun, now together under the goddess moon.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  They say it takes a village to raise a child, and this goes for paper children as well. My village is a global one, and I’m forever grateful for every person who has helped along this journey.

  Thanks go to David, for giving me what a working writer needs most - time to write. Thanks for putting the kids to bed many, many nights so I could stay up and write, and for enabling my coffee addiction. In my country, I will keep you, and I’ll always love you, whether it’s lots or bunches.

  To Mom and Dad, for bestowing the love of reading and writing, and for always asking “what happens next?” Don’t worry - I won’t leave Lexan and Trea stranded.

  To Margaret, aka seester, for giving me permission to love astrology too, and for being a superbly encouraging beta reader. Keep following your dream, and I’ll keep following mine.

  To my babies, for tolerating a quietly insistent third child in the family. And yes, you’ll always be my babies.

  To Cecily, beta reader and editor extraordinaire. This would never have happened without you, and I owe you more than a few volumes of the OED.

  To Kayla and Corrina, the best target-audience betas a girl could want. May you never lose your love of great stories.

  To the OCHS LitWits, for keeping me in funnies, yummies, and a variety of reads. Your encouragement means so much.

  To the Western Kentucky University Writing Project, for not laughing when I said I was writing a novel, and for pushing me to go public and get real.

  To my students - past, present, and future - for often humoring and sometimes sharing my geeky love for all things written. All I really want is for you to find a dream and go for it. And stop writing “alot.”

  To my cover designer, Najla Qambar, for an exquisitely fierce rendition. Let’s work together again soon!

  And of course, to my readers, who are my inspiration day after day. You make my words into worlds!

  A Starbright Novella

  STIAN’S MISTAKE

  HILARY THOMPSON

  OFTOMES PUBLISHING

  FOR THOSE WHO ENCOURAGED ME

  TO GET TO KNOW STIAN JUST A LITTLE BIT BETTER,

  EVEN THOUGH TREA HAD ALREADY MADE UP HER MIND

  ONE

  I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.

  Genesis 28: 15

  The Holy Bible, saved from before the Cleansing

  “How many red hashes this time?” Thadd asks me, his eyes narrowed in a challenge of expectation. The number needs to be close to his own recent tally, but not more, or I risk a fight.

  “Three,” I counter, sitting on the ground next to him. I fill my lungs with the familiar scents of Hebron’s summer camp - home at last.

  He grunts, but lifts his chin in a show of approval. Show is all Thadd ever cares about. He readies his tattoo mater
ials, and I clench my jaw against the pain that I hope I never get used to.

  Pain earned by spilling other people’s blood.

  He carefully pushes the needle into my skin, inserting the red dye in tiny, careful jabs. As the hashes take shape, they cross the slim black line I finished during the long nights of my mission, without his official touch. For once, he doesn’t remark on my disregard for Tribal customs.

  Instead, “Have you seen Zarea yet?” His voice is too casual.

  “No.”

  “You need to check Caine, my brother.”

  I snap my head up and Thadd’s eyes flash above a humorless smirk. “Why?”

  “I heard that our honorable Leader is lining it up for her to marry Caine - him being her second cousin and all. Thought you should know.” He snorts a little. Both of us know Abraham is far from honorable when it comes to his daughter.

  “Thanks.” I know this information will cost me. Maybe not today, but Thadd doesn’t give anything for free.

  “Family means a lot around here,” he adds, as though I could somehow forget that I’m still an outsider here in Hebron. Always on the fringe. We stay silent until he finishes. I wipe away the dots of blood with a clean rag and smear the healing salve on my new tattoos.

  Marks of all the things I’ve done for my adopted Tribe, but still not enough. Seeing as family has always meant a lot around here, I’m not sure anything would be enough.

  After leaving Thadd, I enter the tent I used to share with three other misfit boys - all of whom are gone now. Married and moved out. Dead, last summer on a mission. On a trek through the desert to Tartarus.

  The silence might be soothing to some, but I’ve been alone for too many weeks. Thankfully, there’s work to be done. I grab my sack of dirty clothes and a cake of soap and head for the river.

  The water is warm and dark in the deepening sunset. A pair of younger girls is finishing their family’s washing, and they give me a wide berth, giggling when I wade into the water to do the work women do. But everyone in this Tribe knows I’m both man and woman - the plight of an orphaned, unmarried warrior.

  I scrub the stains on my shirts a little harder, pausing when the water splashes soap into my eye. I’m rubbing at it angrily when I hear a different sort of splash behind me.

  “No need to cry about it. Just dirty laundry.”

  Her voice instantly soothes that bristling feeling that was building across my shoulders. I turn and grin at Zarea, the weight of my little world feeling so much lighter now that she’s back in it.

  The younger girls have scattered, but still I glance around before pulling her close to me, my fingers slippery wet on her smooth, dry skin. I rest my mouth on her collarbone, inhaling deeply. Always…wild roses and earth, like someone has pulled up the whole plant, roots and all.

  She lets my lips find hers for a brief moment, then pushes me back a respectable distance. This isn’t the place, and discovery would be disastrous.

  Her body doesn’t want to leave mine yet though, so instead she runs her blunt fingernails down my forearm, stuttering over the new hash marks.

  Then she pauses her hand just long enough for me to focus on her own tanned skin. Deliberate.

  “What is that?” I bite out, grasping at her wrist. My heart stops as I see it more clearly, then it starts to beat twice as fast.

  She doesn’t pull away, but she keeps her eyes cast toward the dark water. She won’t answer, so I have to ask again.

  “Did Thadd mark you like this?” Red is all I can see at the thought of that asshole getting his hands anywhere near her. Not to mention the significance of the single red line crossing her slim black rings.

  “You know he did,” Zarea answers, wrenching her hand away from mine. “Thadd makes the death tattoos for all of us, doesn’t he? My missions aren’t so different from yours.”

  “But…your first…”

  “Yes. My first kill.” Her voice is low and fierce, like an animal backed into the corner of a cave. Scared and desperate to survive the blackness surrounding it. “Nothing new to you,” she fairly spits at me.

  I know her fear without her voicing it - it’s plain in her dark eyes. Familiar, in a corner of my heart that I no longer acknowledge. Can’t acknowledge, if I’m to keep the blackness from taking over. Stepping carefully toward her again, I reach to brush a silky wave of dark hair from her face. “I don’t think any less of you. You’re still the same person to me.”

  She narrows her eyes but doesn’t flinch from my touch. “Of course I’m a different person. Don’t patronize me.”

  “Do you want to tell-“

  “No.” She turns her back on me and wades back to the bank, her loose pants molding to her legs and backside with the weight of the water. My attention shifts, which I know was her goal.

  Safe on the shore, the feral animal is replaced suddenly by a predatory one. She looks over her shoulder and smiles slowly at me, her brown eyes glinting in the waxing moonlight. My knees go liquid.

  “Are we going to your tent or not?” she asks.

  I don’t bother to answer - just throw my wet clothes over my shoulder and splash out after her, grinning at her hurried strides.

  We don’t even make it to the tent, opting instead for our special place. A secluded bend in the river, where a weeping willow brushes the water in a wide curtain, is bed to our bodies tonight.

  The blanket I pull over us is freshly washed, and I smile to myself as I think about her planning this moment.

  The weight of her body on mine keeps my soul where it needs to be - home. After nearly seven weeks wandering alone, I am exactly where I need to be.

  Our fingers twine together and I listen to her breathing gradually quiet as she falls asleep. The moonlight dips between the summer’s wealth of slim green leaves.

  The stars are too many to count, and I wish our people were just as numerous. The year is 2184, and it’s been more than a hundred years since the Second Civil War. Our ancestors were tossed aside in the Cleansing that followed; those who survived the disease were scattered and hunted until they were barely a thousand strong. We are the remnants.

  Even though our numbers have grown as the generations passed, the four Tribes make up the last of the free people who used to be united as one country. Everyone else is trapped in one of the three cities formed by the sisters who released the virus and began this mess. Asphodel is buried - a cave city nobody has seen sign of in decades. Tartarus is ruled by the Destroyer. And Elysium waits at the edge of the world - solitary and secluded and in no hurry to help anyone else.

  As a bank of clouds passes over the moon, I wonder again if we’ll ever find the star child from the old prophecy. The one who should come to deliver us from whatever evil has spread in the world.

  The one who should have already been here - evil is everywhere.

  Rea shifts beside me and I see her eyes open again, watching the night sky. “It was a slave trader,” she says, her voice almost as hushed as the air around our willow bed. I make myself wait, knowing better than to ask.

  She sighs and pushes up to look at me, her hand resting on my bare chest. The moonlight is behind her, so I can’t see her eyes, just the glance of light off of her cheekbones and nose. “He found me setting a trap for him. I had the upper hand, but he was big - too big. I couldn’t bring him in for trial. So I had to kill him. I…”

  She sighs again and rolls her back to me.

  “Where was your warrior? Who were you protecting?” As a protector, she isn’t supposed to be on her own during these missions - and I want to know why she was.

  But there’s no answer. The seconds slip by as the water runs past us.

  “You can tell me,” I urge finally, pushing down the dread that’s rolling in my stomach.

  “I had to let him get close. Pretend.” Her voice is muffled, and I notice she still doesn’t answer my question.

  “How close?” I ask, my voice cracking a little with the effort to sound casual. Wha
t was she forced to pretend, exactly? Rage simmers in the cage around my heart.

  “Too close. I slit his throat like the animal he was.”

  In one smooth motion she rolls back onto my chest, forcing a hard kiss on me. She wants to lose herself in me, erase his touch. I want to help her.

  I want her only memories to be of me. Forever.

  Holding her body tight against mine, I’m struggling to release my anger and forget the need to know more, when she moves again. She lifts her head, and her hair falls around her face in a dark curtain, shielding her again from the moonlight.

  “Stian?” she asks the night. I hope it tells her yes.

  “I see you,” Zarea whispers, her fingers light on my cheek. I close my eyes to revel in her touch. “I have always seen you.”

  As she brushes the too-long hair from my forehead, I feel the boil of anger and injustice begin to quiet. Whatever we have both suffered, we have each other again now. My heartbeat slows down and fatigue finally weighs heavy on my brain.

  “Sleep,” she whispers, her breath warm on my skin. I relax into her, kept safe between her soft body and the warm earth. Somehow I manage to just let it all go and rest.

  Hours later, the sun is what wakes me. The wind is blowing the willow branches around so the light flashes on and off my closed eyelids. I scrub my palm across my face and tense up to a sitting position.

  Zarea is gone, just like I knew she would be.

  She’s too good for me, and I know it. But God help me, I need her. There’s nobody else who can hold me tight enough to keep this mess together.

  TWO

  The scepter of the wicked will not remain over the land allotted to the righteous, for then the righteous might use their hands to do evil.