The Star Thief

by Lindsey Becker

  A second sound echoed through the house. This was lighter and faster, like the feet of a galloping animal racing down the hallway overhead, then down the stairs, then onto the polished marble floor of the foyer. Hard nails rattled on the smooth stone as the unknown creature raced straight toward the parlor.

  Honorine extinguished the lantern light and shrank down to the floor, crouching behind the stout front paws of the Barbary lion. Out in the foyer, she could see stones beginning to glow in the huge arched window over the front entryway. Across the hall, the dark sitting room was also peppered with tiny spots of faint yellow-green light. The footfalls on the marble floor slowed to a walk. The stones began to burn brilliant yellow. Then the footfalls stopped.

  The creature in the foyer howled. Or at least, a howl was the closest Honorine could come to describing the wild, ghostly call. It echoed down the cavernous hallways, rattled the windows, and cut through Honorine like a shot of ice-cold water.

  When the howl faded away, the house was silent. Honorine looked up to see the stones fading back from pure golden yellow to a deeper yellow-green. As fast as she dared and as silently as she could manage, Honorine hurried to the doorway and cautiously peered into the dark foyer. The marble floor was bare and shining, as always. But leading up the carpeted stairs was a trail of paw prints, singed into the silk fibers of the rug, still smoldering hot orange around the edges.

  Her eyes traveled up the grand staircase to the first landing and its huge leaded glass windows, also covered with a web of glowing stones. One window, though, was wide open.

  Honorine slipped out of the parlor and snuck silently up the steps, carefully stepping around the burning paw prints in the rug. Each one was enormous, larger than her hand with all her fingers stretched out to their very widest. They led directly to the open window and then stopped abruptly, as if the creature that made them had leaped out, taking a rather bold two-story plummet onto a solid stone patio below.

  Cool evening air blew in the open window, pushing something off the windowsill and onto the carpet at Honorine’s feet.

  It was a feather. A black feather, with an iridescent sheen of purple and green that swirled across the surface like oil spreading across dark water. Honorine plucked it from the ground, remembering the black feathers near Lord Vidalia’s writing desk. But as she tried to make sense of the paw prints, the howling, the open window, and now the feather, it began to dissolve into violet embers, like the edge of paper curling as it caught fire. There was no heat, just a brief, faint glow as the feather crumbled into fine ash.

  The stones in the window went dark. The smoldering paw prints extinguished across the rug. And Honorine was left with nothing but soot-stained fingertips.

  I told you to go right up to your room and change your filthy clothes.”

  Honorine’s bones jumped inside her skin. She looked up from her sooty hands to see Agnes standing at the top of the next flight of steps, wearing her fiercest scowl.

  “There was some… one in the house,” Honorine said with a squeak, pointing to the open window, and then down the stairs at the singed paw prints. Agnes bustled over to the landing, pulled the window shut, and drew the curtains tightly closed.

  “You didn’t see anything,” Agnes said, as if it were both a question and a statement. “And you will not speak about this to anyone.”

  “Did Lady Vidalia—”

  “Any. One,” Agnes repeated, and pointed up the branching staircase. “To your room now.”

  With her brow furrowed in silent protest, Honorine turned and marched up the stairs, the soot still on her hands and the book in her apron pocket.

  The rest of the staff lived on the lower floors of the east wing of the house, in rooms near the kitchens. Honorine stayed in a nook up in the attic on the west end of the building, in the oldest part of the house, where rough, ancient stones and enormous wooden timbers were still visible in the walls and ceiling of many of the rooms. There she had a quiet little space with a snug bed, a tiny fireplace, and a large dormer window that looked out over the gardens and the northern sky, all tucked up under the very oldest rafters, where the roofline was uneven and impossibly steep. Her window was, of course, adorned with yellow stones, hung in a string across the very top of the glass. They were, to Honorine’s disappointment, dark and exceptionally ordinary at the moment.

  She set her lantern down, untied her apron, and emptied her pockets onto the bed. Along with the small leather-bound book, today she had gathered a pocket watch, a music box, and a carved wooden kaleidoscope, all broken, to add to her collection of projects gathered on the stout wooden mantel over her fireplace. She often tinkered with them in the late hours of the night, sometimes fixing them, sometimes taking them apart and building something new. But tonight she took no interest in her malfunctioning treasures.

  Instead, she picked up the little leather-bound book, still dusted with drying soot.

  It was beautiful. The cover was tooled with the image of a crown made of stars, and mythical beasts shimmered on the inside pages. A great phoenix with silver and gold feathers and reptilian eyes stared out from the heart of a raging fire. On the next page soared a copper-colored stallion with tremendous black speckled wings that reached to each end of the paper.

  “‘Pegasus,’” Honorine read from the text penned in tiny script along the edge of the inked drawing. “‘The winged horse. Visible in the autumn sky. Do not be fooled by his beauty, for he is bloodthirsty and vicious.’” She looked up. “Vicious?” He certainly looked hot-blooded, but far more vicious was the centaur on the next page, and the dragon covered in claws and spines a page later. The creatures were made all the more frightening by the curious iridescent ink that gave an illusion of movement as light hit the page.

  Other pages held detailed drawings of engine components and bizarre machines, which she found fascinating, if impossible to decipher. There were also hasty journal entries listing what must have been important dates and events on some kind of expedition.

  April the Eighteenth, 1879—Hit edge of hurricane in Azores. May the Fourth, 1879—Second engine test a complete success. One entry was signed B. Vidalia.

  “Lord Vidalia wrote this!” Honorine whispered. A little spark of electricity pricked her fingertips as she flipped through the pages. This wasn’t just an almanac of his work; it was his actual journal, written in his own hand as he had traveled.

  A few other brief journal entries were scrawled among the illustrations. In August, there was bad weather. In early September, a baby was born to Lord Vidalia’s fellow explorer, Nautilus Olyphant, and his wife, Anne. Then, several pages seemed to have been torn out, leaving little ragged edges tucked among the binding.

  Several times, she encountered the word Mordant printed among the drawings. The very last page was filled with an image of a slender man posed very elegantly and artificially, holding out a glowing golden pear as if he were offering it to the reader. He had wild hair and vibrant blue eyes, and there was a great deal of text written beside him, but much of it was blotted out with spilled red ink. Or perhaps, she realized with a slither of disgust, blood. Between the smears and splashes, she managed to read a few lines of text.

  … myth of the Stolen Fire… known most commonly as the Mapmaker… Viciously guards his identity. Known to kill… I have concluded that it is far too dangerous to continue pursuing this particular Mordant, and accordingly, I have destroyed all of my research on the topic.—B. Vidalia, January the Ninth, 1880.

  “‘Eighteen… eighty’?” Honorine read aloud. She repeated the date to herself a few times before she hit on why it stood out. Lord Vidalia had vanished in early 1879, just after the portrait of the Vidalia family was painted and hung in the east parlor. He had not returned to the house again, yet somehow this book had found its way back into his study, and then wound up in the fireplace.

  Honorine closed the book and held it tightly in her hand, as if the creatures within might sneak out from between the pages. She
wondered what to do with it. This was a book about dangerous things, and someone had tried to destroy it.

  She kept turning this puzzle over in her skull as she changed out of her soiled gray dress and into a pair of patched overalls that Agnes found appalling. But it was well after dinnertime now, when the rest of the house prepared for bed, and Honorine began her favorite part of the day—a few quiet hours of tinkering with her little gadgets and contraptions. If Honorine was quick, Agnes would never see her taking her sooty clothes down to the wash.

  Before she could reach the door, she was distracted by the sound of something tapping on her window. She looked up excitedly, expecting for a moment to see the stones glowing again, but instead she saw something small and shimmery hovering outside the glass near the windowsill.

  It looked like a large bee, made of copper and brass, with little stone eyes and crystalline wings. When she opened the window, it flew straight in and landed on the bib of her overalls.

  She had seen a bee like this several weeks ago on the carpet in the east parlor. She had nearly swept it away, thinking it was just a dead insect. Then she noticed the strange coloring and heard a soft ticking, like clockwork gears moving somewhere inside it, and realized that it was a tiny machine. It appeared to be broken, and she took it back to her room, intending to examine it more closely after completing her daily chores. But that first bee had vanished from her mantel by the time she’d returned.

  Perhaps this was the same one, and it had somehow fallen through a gap in the floorboards or flown unsteadily out through the chimney. This time, it wasn’t getting away. She wrapped the bee in a handkerchief and tucked it in her pocket along with Lord Vidalia’s book. She was running out of time to get to the laundry, and Agnes would still expect her to be in presentable clothes the next morning.

  The clock at the end of the hall began to chime ten as Honorine picked her way down the servants’ stairs to the lowest level of the house. The kitchens were busy with the end-of-day tasks, some servants still cleaning up from dinner, some scrubbing the cooking areas, others preparing for the next morning, setting out bread dough to rise and bringing in wood to stoke the ovens before the first light of dawn. Honorine gingerly carried her bundle of dirty clothes toward the washing machines in a separate alcove off the main kitchens.

  “Good evening,” she said to one of the cooks, and was met with a glare.

  “And good-bye, then,” she muttered under her breath as she made her way into the laundry. There she was confronted at once by Jane, a scullery maid who had never been particularly fond of Honorine, for reasons that seemed very obvious to Jane and were a complete mystery to Honorine.

  “What are you doing down here?” Jane snapped. Her eyes narrowed when she saw the dirty clothes. “I’m almost done for the day, and you’ve gone and ruined your fancy little outfit?”

  Honorine felt a flicker of anger in her cheeks. “It was either get my apron a little dirty or let the house burn down. I can wash them myself if it’s too much trouble.”

  “Ha!” Jane said. “And have you ruin your uniform? Who would get blamed for that?”

  Honorine leaned around the angry maid to look at the washing machines. They resembled half barrels on legs, with a gear and crank on one side to stir the water in the tub, and a second crank that ran the set of rollers used to wring out the wet clothes after they were washed. Beside Jane’s tub was a second tub, where another laundry maid, Mattie, laboriously turned the crank to keep the hot water agitating, huffing and sweating and turning a brilliant, patchy red as she worked.

  “You know, I—well, it would be possible to fix a motor to that,” Honorine said, pointing to the crank handle. “To turn the agitator, so you don’t have to do it all by hand.” She could see not only how it would work, but also exactly how to build it. One little motor with a belt turning the crank and the paddle, another keeping the wringer moving.

  “Oh,” Jane said. “So the machine would wash all the clothes for me?”

  “Yes!” Honorine said. “It should be much less work that way.”

  “And then what would I do all day, if a machine could do my work for me? You mean to put me out of a job?”

  “Oh, no, not at all!” Honorine said. “You misunderstood.”

  “I heard you perfectly!” Jane said. She was no longer annoyed. She was angry. “We’re already running on a skeleton crew down here. And there’s nowhere to go if we lose our positions. You’ll have us all out in the streets or the workhouses!”

  Honorine fumed and felt the blush in her cheeks blazing to a full rage, but she choked it down.

  “Fine,” she said. “It was a terrible idea. Forget I ever spoke.”

  She spun on her black booted heel, walking as calmly and confidently as she could until she was out of the room. Then she ran up the steps, through the servants’ dining room, and into the empty hall, getting her anger out through a good foot-stomping on the solid wooden floors.

  She marched all the way back up to her room, her mind filled with Jane’s scowling face and Agnes dismissing her as if she deserved no explanation about the stones or the paw prints or the noises.

  Something suspicious was going on, but Honorine was angry, and only one thing ever really helped to clear her mind when she was upset. So she closed the door to her room and got to work on a prototype washing machine motor. Once the idea ignited in her mind, it grew like a fire, filling up all the space for practical things or responsibilities. Even if Jane didn’t want it, now she had to try to build that motor.

  She dismantled a few other half-finished projects to construct her new invention, letting the worries and grievances fade away as she focused on choosing suitable parts and fitting them together, until she had a roughly assembled motor in her hands. By the time she had finished, it was so late that night had slipped into very early morning. With everyone else asleep, Honorine put her brand-new motor into a pillowcase and carried it and her lantern down to the kitchens.

  The soft sulfur-yellow light of her lantern shone on the wet stone floor and the scrubbed pots hanging from the ceiling near the stoves. Thick shadows swung across the brick walls, the sacks of grain, the bins of salt and sugar and cornstarch lined up in the open pantry. Honorine threaded her way past all of it to the alcove in the corner and pulled her washing machine motor from the pillowcase.

  It was attached in no time, and with a few twists of the gears, the belt began to turn and the motor began to run. Honorine climbed up onto the sorting table, pulling her knees to her chest, and watched with delight as the agitator spun in the water, turning the soap into delicate, glistening foam. Jane couldn’t possibly be mad after she had a chance to use this splendid new machine.

  Honorine rested her chin on her knees, enjoying her quiet moment of victory. Her eyes wandered over the rest of the dark kitchen, searching for the next project. She looked at the ovens and wondered if she couldn’t build some type of a more effective thermometer or a machine to knead the bread. For surely, once the rest of the staff saw that she could make everyone’s work easier, they would not all look at her with such suspicion whenever she entered the kitchens.

  It was times like this that she missed Francis.

  He would have been excited to see the washing machine, turning on its own power, and her lantern, flickering away on the table. Francis had been her closest companion when they were the only children in the house, and they had spent a good part of each day together, eating their meals or spending afternoons in the garden, and later taking lessons together from Francis’s governesses. As they grew, they had both developed a fascination with inventing and building machines. But then, last year, Francis had been sent away to school for the first time. Lady Vidalia had decided it was time for him to begin meeting and socializing with other children of his same station.

  After the first semester, he had come home for holiday break with tales of classes and dormitories and dozens of other boys studying mathematics, history, biology, science. Honorine
longed to visit such a place. But though Lady Vidalia might have been willing to pay a governess a little extra to give some lessons to the young maid, she wasn’t going to pay to send Honorine to a proper school.

  So Francis went back to school, and Honorine went back to work, spending her time that used to be for lessons with Francis building clockwork games they could play together when he returned for the summer holiday. She had made one with ducks that moved on a glass pond with magnets, and another with little windup elephants that flipped marbles through the air with springs in their trunks.

  But when the school year ended, instead of Francis, a letter arrived, excitedly describing his intention to stay over the summer and continue his studies. And at the end of the summer, another letter came stating that he was looking forward to a new year of classes.

  Honorine often wondered what he was doing at school while she was dusting bookshelves or watering potted ferns, or sitting in the kitchen in the dark hours of the morning, observing her prototype washing machine motor, which was making a surprising amount of bubbles. Too many to be contained in the tub, she realized, and climbed down from the table to switch it off before they spilled out onto the floor. But before she could reach the machine, she was distracted by a faint flashing light at the far end of the kitchen. Not another lantern, and not a shaft of moonlight, but a spattering of green among the jars of extracts and pots of herbs gathered along the windowsills.

  The omen stones. Again.

  Honorine spun around. In every window, the omen stones glowed, flickering and waning like the cold twinkle of tiny stars.