Starbright: The Complete Series

by Hilary Thompson

  “Spring stacks have six stones on the bottom. And this is the year of the pine.”

  “So someone has been here recently?” I glance around, noticing suddenly how the fire resting in my open palms throws pointy shards of light through the trees. Shadows dance around us every time I move.

  “At least within the last couple of months. It’s closer to summer than winter, so whoever it was is gone. No need to be afraid of the dark,” she grins at me. I glare – it’s hard to ignore that she’s calling me a child again.

  She starts walking again and I follow, trying not to think about the last time we met people in the woods.

  “Were you following us? Before?” I ask.

  “Of course. I left to follow Stian immediately after he left on his mission to find you. He just wasn’t supposed to know I was following.”

  “And he didn’t know?”

  “Of course not. I’m better than he is at tracking.”

  “I think I saw your fire, then,” I say, remembering how I saw the tiny fire so many nights ago, a speck across the shore from Madna’s house.

  “Perhaps. There are others looking for you, too. Remember that, Tre.” She stops and faces me, one hand on her hip. “Our Tribe is not the nicest, but they are fairer than others. If we meet people before we get to Tartarus, you need to either hide who you are, or be prepared to fight. Both would be better.”

  “I fought before.” I shudder though, wiping my arm against my shirt as though it were still awash in the hot blood of the man I knifed.

  “Stian told me you were lucky with Thadd. I don’t want to ask for luck again.”

  “I can throw a knife. And now I have my fire. I’ll be fine. Wait - Thadd?” The name pokes at my brain.

  She shakes her head. “You’re naïve.”

  “Then teach me!” I say, and wince as my voice seems to echo in the dark.

  “Would you throw your fire and burn someone to death? Would you throw your knife into a man’s heart?”

  “If…if they tried to kill me.”

  “What if it was someone you knew? Stian and Thadd grew up together. Trained together. Then you three met him in the woods and you stuck your knife in his belly. Stian had to finish your mess.” As I struggle to make sense of her fury and mocking tone, she shoves her wrist in my face.

  I blink at the black lines and red hashes carved into her skin - forever marks of her own kills. “Would you kill a child? Would you kill a family member? If your own mother came at you with a knife, could you turn it on her and drive it into her heart?”

  “Stop it!” I cry, pushing her away as my knees crumple at her words. Surely she doesn’t know how Mother died. Surely she wouldn’t be so cruel.

  “There’s no limit to the evil in this world, Astrea. You’d better be prepared for it.”

  Zarea swings around and stalks back in the direction we came, the ground seeming to ripple and sway beneath me as she goes. “I’m going back. I’m hungry.” She doesn’t glance back to see if I follow, so I don’t. A low grumbling sounds, and I can’t exactly say if it’s thunder or something rumbling deep inside the earth.

  I huddle against my knees on the ground, trying to put the image of Mother, bleeding in my arms, back in its cupboard, locking it away bit by bit. The image of the laughing man whose stomach met my knife is somehow harder to lock away. Now I have a name. Did he have a family? Was Stian his friend?

  Then I remember, and the breath pushes from my lungs. Thadd was one of the names in Madna’s book. He took refuge in her house, as we did.

  And I killed him.

  And nobody told me he was Stian’s…what? Friend? He was no friend when we met him in the forest that day. What of the others? They hadn’t greeted Stian as a friend. They had greeted him as an enemy - perhaps even a traitor. Which is right?

  Zarea’s careful movements have faded and I am alone in the quiet dark. I’m not afraid, though. Between her threats and this new realization that I’ve been lied to again, something has broken in me tonight.

  After everything, I’m angry again.

  And I think I could very well turn a knife into Zarea’s heart, if the need arose.

  I rise after a few minutes and glance around to get my bearings. Not ready to go back to camp, I turn and walk in the opposite direction. Ahead of me lies a faint lightening in the trees, and I want to see what is causing it.

  No need to be afraid of the dark when I own the fire of the sun.

  My footsteps are much quieter now that I take care, and my palms have only a dot of fire ready. I’m moving on shades of shadow, making my way by occasional shafts of light from the goddess moon. I can’t exactly see in the dark, but it’s more than the smooth dark of a cave, too. My eyes make effective use of what light they find.

  The lightened area opens before me as I step between two heavily branched trees. A small clearing holds a building, half destroyed by fire and a century of neglect. There is no noise, so I continue toward the structure. An animal scurries away from the building.

  The doorway gapes, and I can see through the entire frame to the burned-away back, and then the woods again. I think it’s a house, although it’s nothing like Madna’s. The rooms are small and square, and together they make the larger square of the house.

  Nothing remains inside – the house has been stripped bare by a hundred years of travelers. A tree has broken through the rotted floor and sprouted into the night sky, its branches twining around the rafters of the ceiling to create a new shelter. A sense of loss remains here, but also a sense of peace.

  I wonder who lived here when the Cleansing began – who has lived here since.

  “I was worried about you,” a low voice startles me and I whip around, my knife drawn before I remember I have one.

  “Stian,” I say, breathing out my adrenaline. “You shouldn’t sneak up like that.”

  “You shouldn’t sneak away like that.” He reaches around and squeezes my shoulders to his chest. “There are all sorts of wild things in the woods. Not just the threat of scouts. Animals, too.”

  “Zarea left me. I didn’t feel like coming back yet.”

  Stian runs a hand through his hair and glances down at me. He sits down on the floor, leaning against the tree. He gestures for me to sit, and I kneel down with him. I decide not to ask him about Thadd just yet - I want to ask Lexan what he remembers.

  “Rea is…hard,” he says.

  “I know she doesn’t want us to be together. She wants you for herself.”

  “No, that’s done. She knows it’s done.”

  I keep silent, but I know that Zarea does not, in fact, know it’s done. She made that pretty clear in the truck earlier. And it makes me uneasy that Stian hesitates to admit it to me.

  He traces my arm in the moonlight, his fingers lacing down between my fingers, then gathering on my palm. I flatten my hand and call a small flame. He blinks up at me, then snatches his hand away as the fire grows just enough to burn him.

  I shift and face him. “I’m not as naïve as she thinks. But I’m not going to be bullied into giving up what innocence I have.” I glance up to the stars which twinkle through the holes in the roof. “Life will take that from me soon, I think.”

  He nods, still watching my fire. I close my fingers to smother the flame and lean toward him, leveling my lips with his.

  “Tre,” he whispers, pulling me in. His hand grips the back of my neck and I press against him, climbing into his lap. One hand drops to my hips and finds the hem of my shirt, then the smooth skin beneath.

  He still kisses like he has spent a lifetime looking for me.

  And after everything, I still want him to have his home. I just don’t know if I can be that for anyone right now.

  He pulls his lips from mine and cups my cheek, holding me back several inches to look into my eyes. His fingers trace the diamonds at my temple.

  “You’re worth waiting for, Tre,” he says.

  I’m still trying to decide how to respond
to that when his face grows serious and his hands grow still.

  “I know I’m starting to fall in love with you. But I’m afraid to get closer. I’m afraid you’ll change your mind and want Lexan. I’m afraid Zarea will drive you away. I’m afraid some slave trader or stray arrow will take you from me. And I can’t handle it, Tre.”

  I trace the hard lines of his collarbone beneath his shirt, watching my fingers instead of his eyes. “Everyone in the world has lost someone they care for. That doesn’t mean you stop caring.”

  He shakes his head. “It almost killed me to lose Zarea. I don’t want to start caring again and then lose you.”

  “And I can’t promise that you won’t. Everything is different now. I don’t think I’ll get my happy ending, Stian. There are battles coming, and nobody wins forever.”

  He glances down at his hand resting on my leg. A heartbeat passes, then two. “I don’t want to talk about this. Let’s go back, eat dinner, curl up by the fire.” His eyes beg me a little, and I relent.

  I’ve already spent my whole life avoiding the reality of my birth.

  What’s one more night?

  We walk back to the camp, hand in hand. Lexan and Zarea are huddled together under a blanket, whispering. They ignore us as we crawl under the canopy draped between the truck and a tree branch. I chew a few mouthfuls of roasted meat, watching the stars as they shift in and out of view between the branches above.

  “Lex has an idea for how to get into Tartarus,” Zarea says after a few minutes. “He thinks we should disguise ourselves as musicians. Gypsies. Tre plays the guitar, right? Surely we can find a few instruments and costumes before we reach the city.”

  Stian nods. “That might work. We need to be in disguise anyways, to hide their diamonds. And the summer festivals should be starting soon, so there will be lots of performers traveling to the city.”

  I nod too, although I have no way to judge their ideas. “Should we stay undercover for a while and spy to find out how much help Lord Hadeon might give us? For all we know, he might decide to fight with Keirna.”

  Stian shakes his head. “Hadeon doesn’t join with people easily. He’s powerful enough that he doesn’t need the help.”

  “Will the Tribes fight against Keirna?” Lexan asks. “They have the most to lose if she starts to spread Asphodel’s rule above ground. She would attack them the second she got strong enough.”

  “It’s hard to say,” Stian answers. “Some might. Others wouldn’t. They’ve been free too long to be allegiant to any outside leader, and many don’t care about the freedom of others. Besides, a lot of us are nomads. We can disappear into the hills until the threat goes away.”

  There are too many unknowns.

  All I’m sure of is that I must return to Asphodel and take the city back from Keirna. But I still don’t want to rule it. I only want revenge for Mother.

  I told myself I’d try being Justice. I never signed up for Leader.

  “Tre found an old safe house,” Stian says after a few minutes. Zarea raises an eyebrow at him, then looks back at the fire.

  “All of the houses still standing around here are stripped clean of anything useful,” he continues, turning back to me. “But if you go east, far beyond Asphodel, there are still pristine villages, with empty houses of furniture and clothing that turns to dust if you touch it. Beds full of bones from people who died in their sleep, or worse.”

  “And what about west?” Lexan asks.

  Zarea answers, her face grim. “The closer you get to Tartarus, the more everything is destroyed. A dead ring surrounds the city now – miles of wasteland and desert. In the early years after the Cleansing, Tartarus burned every village, bombed every building they could find, until everyone either joined them or stayed away.”

  Lexan shifts and stands, stretching his arms behind his back. “I could use a walk too. Want to find that house?” he asks Zarea. She smiles almost shyly and follows him beyond the light of the fire.

  Stian shifts to his back and props his hands under his head, grinning. “Finally. I want you to myself again before I have to sleep.”

  I smile back, but a ball of nerves begins to spin in my stomach. The moonlight glints in his eyes as he stares up at me.

  “I’m sorry I got so serious earlier,” he says. “I was acting like we were going to get married and have babies. I know we can’t build anything to last in this world.”

  I nod, but suddenly I’m transported back to my jealousy of Isa and Dalen, and how easy everything was for them. They will be partnered, and have children, and live happily in Asphodel as though a war were not approaching. As though life were a storybook.

  I never thought I wanted that, but now I’m angry that I can’t have it.

  “What are you thinking about?” Stian asks me. He scoots his body around and lays his head in my lap. My fingers trace the scars at his temple, messy ridges left from the false implants Keirna gave him. Was that really only a few weeks ago?

  “Tre?” he asks again.

  “Sorry. My mind is just wandering. I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  “Let’s stop thinking. We need a break. There’s too much tension around here.”

  My stomach twists again at his words, and then he pushes up and flips over me in one smooth movement. His chest presses against me, lowering us both to the blanket spread before the fire.

  His lips find mine briefly, then leave again, foraging along my neck, then my collarbone. My head starts to swirl a little as I try not to think of Lexan and Zarea returning to see us like this.

  Then I try not to think of Lexan at all. And soon he’s all I can think about as Stian tries to lose himself in me.

  I watch his head as he kisses my shoulder, then moves back to my lips slowly, leaving pinpricks of heat along the way. His eyes lock on mine and he smiles.

  “I’ll never tire of doing this,” he says.

  I lean up to meet his lips, trying not to think of Zarea’s claim that he would indeed tire of waiting for me to be ready for him.

  This should be romantic, and instead all I can do is push away my thoughts.

  Stian seems to notice and stops. “Are you tired?” he asks.

  “No. I slept for hours in the truck. I just can’t stop worrying about things, I guess.”

  “I must be losing my touch. One of these days, I’ll make you forget everything, Tre. I promise.”

  I smile and nod at him, hopeful that someone could do just that. He lies down next to me and pulls the blanket over us.

  “I need some sleep. Can you stay on watch until they get back?”

  “Of course.” I run my fingers through his hair as his eyes close, and he sighs into my shoulder. Soon he sleeps and I’m alone again with my thoughts.

  I’m more confused than ever about my choice to follow Stian into the outside world. It started as such an innocent idea: choosing a boy to love instead of taking the stars’ dictate. Finding my own path instead of obeying the prophecy.

  Then Father’s requests that I leave and find my strength, prepare to fight, return and save Asphodel. Now all I can think is that if I truly am the Maiden of Justice, then I am also truly supposed to be with Lexan. But it’s too late for that now.

  I never liked Lexan before, and I shouldn’t start now. Even if he’s all I can think about. Perhaps Garna and Isa were right: I really do want what I don’t have. And it doesn’t escape my notice that even though Stian is a Sagittarius, and therefore matched to me, we don’t seem to be as well-matched as Lexan and I are.

  I’m about to go crazy with these circular thoughts when Lexan and Zarea finally return to camp. Zarea’s face is flushed and her eyes shining as she glances across the fire at me.

  Lexan looks at me for a long minute, as though he wishes to ask me a question. I wait, but nothing comes: not from his lips and not from his eyes. Finally he lies down and pulls the blanket over his shoulders.

  I turn away and watch the darkness instead. Reaching under my pack
to bunch it into a better pillow, I close my fingers on a small sheet of paper. Pulling it out, I hold it to the firelight.

  A page torn from Firene’s journal. A few sentences. Not translated.

  I curse under my breath. What can I possibly do with this? I try to focus on the code breaker Lexan gave: you and me. My brain resists as a sudden wave of mental fatigue washes over me, and I tuck the paper into my pants pocket, fingering the edges as I turn my back to the fire and the three people around it, letting the darkness and the starry sky lull me to a place of watchful nothing.

  SIX

  “H ORY OF H PRG R  M R H RY OP  YMOM O M, Y WY OF  RRRG RM. H PRG R   VOR FGR.  K O HP H POP.  H M R   PROOR FGR.  K OY O HP H PRG R. WH H PROPHY  FF,  H M OF  RRV, H W  H VOR. H C OF  W  HR PROOR,  H M VR V HR ,  H PROPHY

  H O.”

  Page torn from Secret Journal of First Leader Firene

  Our days and nights begin to weave themselves into a sort of pattern – days of hot sun through the truck’s windows and cold nights beside the fire. We take turns sleeping and hunting the nocturnal animals, although Stian refuses anyone else a turn at the wheel of the rattling, temperamental vehicle.

  The truck is both a blessing and a risk. We travel much faster than anyone tracking us on foot could, but we are forced to stay in open, grassy fields or along the exposed, broken remains of the ancient roads. The forest which covered our progress away from Asphodel is now far too dense to manage.