Page 1 of Cage of Starlight

CHAPTER ONE

T ory arknett is no stranger to the dead and dying, so when the bell on Thatcher’s repair shop tinkles to admit a group of blood-soaked miners, he greets them with no more than the usual amount of dread.

Captured in the streaked glass of the display case Tory’s dusting, the miners make a ghastly picture as they huddle on the wide circle of Thatcher’s beloved (and exceptionally ugly) floral rug—placed just inside the shop’s door for situations like today’s.

One man even stuffs his dripping hands into his pockets to spare the rug.

Thoughtful, but unnecessary: someday soon, when Thatcher’s not looking, Tory’s going to bury the appalling thing in the woods.

“Tory, a moment?” The tall man at the head of the group wrings his hands. “This one’s urgent.”

Like he couldn’t tell. “What is it this time?”

“Kelly got it bad in a cave-in. You got his wages for a week if you can save him.”

There’s always something like that. A week’s wages. An armful or three of obscenely large gourds. Some token payment so they can pretend they’re not gently coercing Tory to do this and he can pretend they don’t ever-so-politely have him by the throat.

Tory sets his dust rag down. “Where is he?”

“With Fedri.” His wife. “You gotta help him—they ain’t assigned a Healer here.”

Only because Hulven hasn’t requested one.

A government-licensed Healer’s fees for life-threatening injuries are the sorts of debts parents pass to their children.

The bastard Grand General needs all the Healers he can find for his war machine.

He won’t surrender any to a small town unless they can pay generously for the honor.

Tory looks to Thatcher, hoping the cheery old man will intervene on his behalf.

Thatcher only smiles. “It’s your choice. Do whatever you think is best.”

“I hate to say this”—he doesn’t, actually—“but I’ll be useless for days if I heal him.”

“That’s fine! There’s always Doc if we need anything.”

Easy for them to say.

Tory breathes in. Don’t make waves. Then out. Keep your head down. Don’t be difficult. The scriptures of survival his mother left him with have kept him alive this long, so he calms himself and speaks only when sharp words don’t crowd up his throat. “Lead the way, then.”

The miners surround him like a wall on the way to Kelly, head and shoulders above Tory even though he’ll turn twenty this winter.

Outside this wall of blood and bone, there’s the wall around Hulven, then another, and another—one for every city along the way.

Tory wouldn’t be surprised if this rotten country had a wall at every border: cages as far as the eye can see.

Years before he was born, before the first rumblings of war shook the ground, Westrice was a country without walls ruled by the Four Families, each with an equal seat.

The Rost family specialized in law, Eastrin in commerce, Chimre—the public face of the four families—in the art of saying nothing of substance very charismatically, and Vantaras in military might.

When the war started, Vantaras stepped in to take the reins.

First, he stuck his fingers in commerce.

No more trade with the enemy, he advised.

Westrice was years behind Arlune in harnessing stellite’s capacity to store and amplify energy.

Every shred of stone in Arlunian hands was a weapon.

Vantaras pulled the brightest minds from every corner of the country and set them to work.

If Westrice could not beat its enemy at magic, it would beat them at everything else.

And they have. The war, in fits and starts, has been going on for almost as long as Tory has been alive, and Westrice’s never-tiring inventors have masterminded weapons that spit bullets and durable, pourable building materials that harden like stone.

Then in the legal system: better if the caps on prison sentences were removed, Vantaras whispered.

War demands weaponry, he coaxed, when the Rost family resisted.

What a shame it would be for Rost’s own daughters to have to make rifles.

If criminals refused to serve their country when free, they would serve it indefinitely in captivity.

So, they built manufacturing facilities inside the prisons, and Vantaras didn’t care that some of the hands that assembled his guns were the hands of children.

After he’d stabilized the country and enlisted his own people to build and man impregnable walls around the most populous cities, Vantaras showed his face in front of the once-frightened citizens.

With a politician’s smile, he convinced them his walls made them safe, made them free .

Quick-minded Chimre knew himself beaten and surrendered his throne.

Vantaras, once a mere general, became the Grand General—the Vanguard, builder of walls and orchestrator of armies.

He placated the much-weakened three families, promising they’d be back in power as soon as things stabilized. Until then, he’d protect them. Never would they smell a whiff of blood or smoke from a battlefield.

Fools, every one of them. No wall has ever made anyone free.

Tory has spent every moment since he was eight trying to stay outside them, living on the fringes or in forgotten places like Hulven, where the crumbling wall is barely taller than he is and the only place Vantaras’ awful soldiers bother to patrol is the stellite mine.

In Hulven, brightly painted mudbrick houses flourish between the hardy grasses, and the residents hang glinting charms from the trees to call for wind to drive off the fuel stench from the mining machinery.

There’s no wind today.

Fuel fog coils over the ground toward them as they walk.

A crash reverberates through the trees, and Tory jerks back, nearly colliding with the miners behind him.

He’s closer to the mine than he’d like. There’s something indefinable about it, a terrible charge to the air that raises the hair on the back of his neck and makes him ache to flee.

The vines that choke the woods outside the wall have flooded over it here.

They snake along the ground and twine around trees, hanging strings of bell-shaped blossoms that tickle Tory’s shoulders as he passes.

He sees the mine in snatches between the trees, the way the setting sun casts eerie bars of light through its wrought-iron fence and silhouettes the patrolling soldiers in their crisp, double-breasted navy uniforms. Tory’s known those uniforms since he was big enough to know anything.

Soldiers like these guarded the camp he was born in.

If they see him—if they discover he’s healing without a license, that he escaped the camp without pardon—they could drag him back.

He picks up the pace, thankful for the first time in his life that he’s small, invisible at the center of this group.

But they don’t lead him away from the mines and toward the cramped mudbrick home Fedri shares with her husband. The men guide him, instead, closer to the wrought-iron gates.

A chill creeps outward from Tory’s stomach. “You said he was with Fedri.”

The tall miner at the lead looks steadily ahead, expression guilty. “She came out to be with him when we told her what happened.”

They planned this, then. Oh, he’s going to hurt them. He’ll let wild animals into their homes to gnaw their feet while they sleep.

“No. Let me out. I won’t do this.” It’s his only rule. No work near the mines.

“Tory—”

“Tory nothing! I won’t do it.”

They continue walking, slow but steady, with Tory trapped at the center.

He turns to the tower of a man behind him. What’s his name ? Eli. Eli with the six young daughters and a harried son left to corral the girls while their father is at work.

“Eli. Let me out.”

Someone to his left whispers, “Make a fuss and they’ll find us. You want that?”

“I want out !” His heart roars in his ears, a whoosh that drowns even the earth-deep clank of man’s hunger meeting steadfast stone in the mines. To his left, too close in his peripheral vision, one of Vantaras’ navy-clad soldiers paces in front of the fence, a thick rifle resting on his shoulder.

Tory’s hands ache with remembered pain. It would be nice if he could be angry, but the tar-slick churning in his belly and the way his blood retreats from his numb lips is fear, plain and simple. He thought he left it behind twelve years ago. “I told you—you know —”

Behind him is Eli of the many daughters.

To his right is Carn, who lives in a small home with his elderly mother and whips up an excellent mushroom stew.

When Tory healed old Mrs. Carn’s broken hip, he and Thatcher feasted on that stew all winter.

The stocky woman with her nose pointed at the ground works the mines while her partner watches their young twins. He knows them all.

He hates them.

One rule. He had one rule.

“We tried, Tory!” It’s the hand-wringing miner at the front, a transfer from one of the many dried-up towns down south.

“If we move him any farther, we’ll kill him.

You’ll understand when you see him. Please.

We got him out the employee entrance and a little ways into the woods.

The trees should keep anyone from seeing.

Please, he’ll die if you can’t help. Kelly’s a good man. ”

It stings because it’s true.

Tory wants to bite his tongue all the way off and spit it at them.

He wants to leap over Hulven’s walls and keep running until his feet fail him, because if he learned nothing else from cleaning up after clients in one of the pleasure houses as a boy, he learned this: people who knowingly violate your boundaries once will do it again.

Instead, he forces a tired smile and says, “All right.”