Page 4 of Cage of Starlight
She carries him up and tucks him under the covers, and Thatcher flutters around him, tapping a sweating pitcher. “Drink a little before you sleep, all right?”
Hasra waves him away. “Don’t worry, Alvorn. I’ve got it from here.”
Thatcher takes this as his cue to leave, but not before his fidgeting hands tuck the blanket tighter around Tory. For all that he earns his living mending broken things, he’s helpless with the human body, for which the best fix is often just wait .
When the door creaks closed, Hasra lifts the pitcher, deadpan. “Little sips. No whining.”
He takes three. They don’t sit easy, but she’s right. Dehydration is kindling on this fire.
“You gonna be all right?”
He’ll sleep for a day, at least. That’ll leave two days before he has to go. Arlune, a country with no walls and no tattooed children in prisons, with sea-salt air flooding over fields fragrant with impossible harvests and stellite lanterns swinging from the eaves of dusky sand-glass buildings.
Arlune, with unfamiliar faces and an unfamiliar language. One more place to run to in a list as long as a lifetime.
Tory’s mouth sours. Running and running and running. Do people like him ever get to fight ?
The thought settles in his chest and blooms there. Exhaustion drags him down, but he makes himself speak: “What if I don’t want to go?”
“No take-backs. Three days, Tory.”
“What about the rebels?”
Hasra sighs, but she’s the one who shared the story with him in the first place.
They live in the woods off the fruit of the land, she told him when he was fifteen and angry and in need of a dream.
They freed a whole unit of captured Seeds, once.
They turned over a truck of supplies and picked it clean before Vantaras’ goons even noticed.
People will say they don’t exist, but sometimes Belmin gets a call for help, and when he gets there, someone has already helped them.
They’re ridiculous stories. A child’s stories. For all he knows, Hasra made them up.
But if they’re out there, maybe he doesn’t have to run anymore. Maybe even someone like Tory can be allowed to fight for something.
“Sorry, they’ve been kinda quiet lately,” is all she says, and Tory’s stomach sinks. Cool fingers drift over his temple before vanishing. His door creaks as it opens. “Get some sleep.”
The next day passes in a haze—heat and darkness and a gentle arm behind his neck and Thatcher saying, one more sip .
Thatcher makes beauty even of brutality.
When he was a young man near the border, he gathered the shrapnel that washed up on shore.
He used it to make the shop’s bell. It’s his fault, probably, that Tory started to believe Hulven was a place he could be happy.
The following morning, wobbling on his feet, Tory sets to convincing Thatcher to let him do the shopping. “Gotta earn my keep somehow.”
Earn his keep. That’s all this ever was. All he can allow it to be.
Something throbs in Tory’s chest. One more day.
He’ll give Thatcher’s shop the deepest deep clean it’s ever seen.
He’ll scale that thorny evergreen by the ridge and pick a whole basket of the berries Thatcher uses for his mother’s heirloom tea.
Maybe steal the Madam’s earrings for Hasra.
She’d get a laugh out of that. It won’t be enough to pay them back for what they’ve given him, but it might be a start.
Thatcher flaps a tired hand. “You take too long and I’ll come looking, you hear?”
Tory blinks the sting from his eyes and laughs. “You worry too much!”
*
Tory, it turns out, doesn’t worry nearly enough.
Hulven’s small market lines the central road leading to the mine.
The rutted road is a mess in any rain, deadly slick with mud and worsened by the wide-wheeled, matte-black armored carriages that come through to pick up stellite.
For now, the sun beams down to melt the morning’s frost, and a brisk wind clears the air of fuel fog.
Marketgoers scurry from stall to stall, loosening shawls and pulling hats from their heads to let the light brush them.
Everyone pretends the budding storm to the west will pass them by.
Fedri, whose booth boasts trays stacked with buttered herb twists, waves Tory over when she sees him and rolls two fragrant loaves and a large twist in paper, shoving them under his arm before he can protest the generosity. She tuts over how he staggers and slurs.
You need rest after what you did for my Kelly. Go home, she says, like home isn’t a word with sharp edges.
It’s fine. Tomorrow, he’ll be gone.
Tory receives two pity gourds from the farmer whose bad elbow he soothed last winter and a painted rock from a six-year-old who was stoic when he set and sealed her broken wrist in spring.
His legs are reedy and disobedient when he’s done, and the vendors laugh at how he staggers. He’s frozen to his core, shirt damp with cold sweat. The grumpier he looks, the more free things they give him, and the harder it all is to carry.
Thatcher will be delighted.
Tory’s legs fail him, as things do, at the worst possible moment. He goes to his knees in the middle of the street (a gentler fall than he expected) and wheezes with Thatcher’s groceries scattered around him.
He registers the quiet, first—the hushed gasps and murmurs. The sudden emptiness of the crowded road, marketgoers receding like the tide.
Then the noise. Wails rattle his eardrums, backed by a cacophony he can’t translate. Clacks and cracks and rattles. The clop of—hooves.
When he sees the matte-black carriage barreling toward him, it’s already too late.
Sharp nails scrabble against his arms, and the wailing makes sense.
Of course his fate couldn’t be so simple as his own imminent death.
He fell on someone. Tory blinks to clear grainy blackness from his eyes and locates her: mud-streaked, tiny, and furious.
Baby tooth missing in the front. He hooks his hands under her arms, but she won’t move.
She probably doesn’t know the soldiers won’t risk their precious cargo by stopping.
Probably her knees hurt, and she wants her mother.
The carriage hurtles on. Maddened beasts whinny, spittle flying, eyes white as the whips crack down again.
“Go on!” He pushes her.
Not far enough. There’s no time. It’ll take them both out, he has to move—
Right before it hits them, the carriage stops.
Instant, impossible stillness, like all its speed and momentum were snatched away by some great hand.
There’s no squeal of ungreased wheels on rickety axles or cries of “Halt, halt!” from the man who whips the beasts.
The stop is sudden—so sudden and so quiet it seems absurd the thing was ever moving.
If not for the wild-eyed horses stamping and frothing a half-length away, flanks rippling with shivers, he might believe the carriage had been sitting there all along.
It should tremble and moan with arrested motion. There should be deep ruts in the earth from the sharp deceleration. The horse should have whinnied its distress, at the very least. But the carriage just sits there, when moments ago it was on a deadly collision course . It doesn’t make sense.
There must be a trick to it, one of Vantaras’ newfangled mechanisms, some impossible thing that can stop a rampaging carriage in its tracks. Tory searches the crowd for a culprit but instead finds every eye fixed on him, every person waiting in breathless silence.
The soldier with the reins gasps and stares down—down at him—with dawning realization.
Pain shivers up through Tory’s marrow, followed by a bolt of sick horror: Tory recognizes this pain. It’s exactly like when he performs a healing.
The carriage, the horse, their impossible, immediate stop—somehow, Tory caused it.
The townspeople will hide a Healer. They benefit from a Healer. They won’t hide this, whatever it is.
He forces strength into his limbs. While the onlookers catch their breath, he ducks between the blacksmith’s and the butcher’s and sprints past colorful vendors’ tents toward home.
There’s no time. He has to run again, find another place to hide.
He’ll settle in and smile and make nice, like his mother told him before he escaped the labor camps at the cost of her life.
Her wisdom lasted him ten years. Funny that something so ridiculous, so unforeseeable, should ruin it all.
Tory runs, breath sawing from tired lungs, and wishes he could turn back time.