The Star Thief

by Lindsey Becker

“Take any shot you get!” Nautilus directed. “Bloom! Higher!”

  Salton called out an order, and a row of cannons exploded at once, sending a barrage of yellow stone cannonballs toward the sea serpent. They created a tremendous blast of smoke and steam as they hit the water, sending spray in all directions and creating a strange flash of red light under the rippling waves.

  The rising smoke created a brief screen from the approaching Carina. Bloom called out a second order, and the crew braced themselves as all power was momentarily diverted to gaining altitude.

  Flame exploded into the balloon chamber, and the airship bounced higher into the sky like a cork shooting up through water.

  “Ready a second volley, Salton! Now for speed, Bloom!” Nautilus ordered, gripping the wheel of the airship. Bloom gave a signal to the crew members working at the set of turbines that provided acceleration for the airship. The Nighthawk raced forward, rising up and out over the black water below.

  “Five hundred yards, Captain,” called Professor du Ciel from the bow as the Nighthawk raced onward and upward toward the Gaslight, waiting in the dark sea. A shot of light streaked by overhead, spitting out arcs of fire that flew like arrows and then dropped like rain. More cannons blasted stone and smoke into the air and the water around them. The Nighthawk rose just high enough to clear the upper railing of the Gaslight for a landing on the main deck.

  Honorine anticipated the touchdown. Her eyes darted from the cannons along the lower decks, much larger and more powerful that the ones on the airship, to the crystal dome, to the stairs twining up to spindly lookout platforms tangled overhead. She wanted to explore it all, every inch of this marvelous ship and how it was built. She nearly had one leg over the rail, ready to climb out, when she was startled by a hand closing on the back of her overalls and hauling her back onto the airship.

  “Just what do you think you are doing?” Nautilus asked.

  “I was just—”

  “About to fall overboard,” Nautilus said. “You have to be more care—”

  There would have been more lecturing, which Honorine was used to, but instead, Nautilus gave a strangled shout as he looked at something over her shoulder.

  She turned back around, expecting to see the sprawling deck of the Gaslight, but instead she saw only glittering black feathers, a coal-black eye, and curved black talons.

  “Get down!” Nautilus commanded. He drew a short copper pistol from his belt and leveled it at the crow.

  Honorine ducked and hid her head under her arms as the crow reached out, brushing her side with his talons. Nautilus fired his pistol, but the crow was agile for so large a creature. The shot sailed off into the dark like a shooting star and fell harmlessly into the ocean below.

  “Salton! The guns!” Nautilus cried.

  “We’re too close for cannons, Captain!”

  “I’m telling you to fire, gunner, so you obey my order and fire!”

  With a quick nod and a muttered “Aye,” Salton obliged. He aimed the cannon and fired a single, perfect shot.

  The crow was caught in midflight, straight through the heart, and burst into sparks along with the cannonball, which exploded into a million shards that flew in every direction. A great deal shot straight through the blue silk chamber of the Nighthawk’s balloon, creating tiny, raw punctures on one side and blowing an explosion of flaming gas out the far side. A blast of green fire and glittering sparks blinded the crew below and choked them with a cloud of rancorous smoke.

  The once magnificent airship quickly lost all buoyancy and plummeted like a comet toward the water below, leaving a trail of fire and blasting embers.

  “Honorine!” Francis shouted, diving toward her.

  “Francis!” Honorine shouted back. She felt his hand close around hers and tried to hold on, but she’d caught only the tips of his fingers before something else exploded, ripping the deck free from the remains of the balloon and tossing crew members, equipment, and bits of the ship in every direction.

  “Honorine!”

  She heard him call one last time as she fell. Looking up at the sky, at the last twisting knot of fire that had been the balloon, the tiny bright stars in the distance, and the great black cliff of the Gaslight, she filled her lungs with a tremendous breath, intending to shout out for Francis, but instead she plunged into the cold black water.

  The last thing she saw before the dark water covered her completely was a flash of silver light, and then she was submerged, fighting against the cold, choppy water, struggling to keep her head above the surface. Despite her desperate efforts and much flailing about, one little maid—who had never been in deeper water than a bathtub—was swallowed by the sea like a tiny stone.

  She closed her eyes tight against the sting of the salt water and held her breath as the cold entombed her. As she continued struggling and sinking, something brushed her hand. Her eyes opened in surprise, but before she could feel relief, she saw what was lurking under the water.

  Beneath the paddling arms and kicking feet of the crew at the surface lurked the sea serpent, a huge snake gliding through the water, glowing with dim red light under its rough black scales. Its sides were lined with long, curving spines like strange fins.

  It curled under the wreckage, slipping between the sinking bits of ship and around the thrashing feet, all the while keeping its big, glowing green eyes locked on Honorine.

  She couldn’t swim away. Even if she knew how, she could never move as swiftly as the serpent through the briny deep. She braced herself for a strike, but instead the serpent lowered his head and slipped beneath her, catching her gently against the long spines rising from the top of its head. It then began to swim from the wreckage site, carrying Honorine far away from the sinking airship before lifting her toward the surface, where she broke through the water, riding on top of the sea serpent’s scaly black head.

  Back on the proper side of the water, she coughed and spat until she could breathe again and tried to wipe the wet hair from her face, but just as she reached up, the cold talons of the crow closed gently around her arms and lifted her into the air. Through the salt stinging her eyes and the hair flying in her face, Honorine saw a glimpse of the Gaslight and, beside it, a sudden explosion of red sparks at the surface of the water, followed by a trail of red flashing light that snaked down into the dark sea.

  Was that the sea serpent? she pondered as the crow sailed over a patch of floating fire that must have been the remains of the Nighthawk. Then, in a few beats of its wings, they were flying through trees into a thick forest, and the crow set her down amid a tangle of roots on a carpet of moss speckled with patches of white sand and curious red-capped toadstools.

  Honorine sat up, shivering in her wet clothes, her left arm beginning to feel not at all right. She thought she must have been brought all the way back to shore, until the ground dipped beneath her, and cold, salty seawater sprayed across her face.

  It was the patch of forest she had seen rising up into the sky. But now that she was seeing it from the other side, it wasn’t entirely a forest at all. It was a ship… made out of forest. A few scattered planks of true deck wood peeked out between the roots of tall, slender pine trees and knotty, curling junipers. Their branches were lined with thousands of tiny lanterns giving off gold and silver light that trickled through the thick leaves and speckled the root-covered deck like snow. Instead of sails, the tallest trees held out oversized leaves that caught the wind, and instead of railings, the perimeter of the main deck was surrounded by tangles of grapevine and blackberry brambles, all heavy with hanging fruit.

  “Are you all right?”

  Honorine looked up to see Lux standing over her, his coat ablaze with cold illumination, his eyes glowing intensely yellow. In the glittering forest, he looked much less like a mangy old wolf and much more like a constellation come to life.

  “Were you hurt in the fall?”

  She felt dizzy and confused, still coughing salt and seawater. She shook her head no and
tried to reach up to Lux, but when she lifted her left arm, a pain overtook her like she had never felt in all her life. She cried out, even before looking down to see the sleeve of her shirt gone and the skin of her shoulder blistered and torn.

  “You’ve been burned,” Lux said as he leaned down to examine her. “Try to be still.”

  The numbness from the cold of the ocean was wearing off, and Honorine began to feel the useless pain of a burn that lingers and swells long after the source of the heat has been removed. She twisted away as if something hot were still pressing against her skin.

  “Honorine, be still,” said a second voice. Astraea landed beside her, black wings cutting through the lantern light, creating a tiny breeze that was like knives on Honorine’s raw flesh. “Sirona will help you.”

  A woman appeared between Lux and Astraea. She was pale, with short dark hair that bounced up in loose curls around a fine circlet of silver set with gemstones. They appeared to Honorine as tiny, hovering lights. Sirona was dressed in leggings and a sleeveless tunic tied with a wide silver sash. Her arms, from her shoulders to her fingertips, were covered with tattoos of snakes, coiling and slithering over her skin.

  “Honorine?” said Sirona as she knelt down on the sandy deck. “It’s lovely to finally meet you. I understand you’ve had quite an eventful journey to be with us tonight.”

  Honorine nodded and then felt her head go wobbly with pain as Sirona lifted the ragged edge of her shirt from the damp open wound on her shoulder. She turned her head and squeezed her eyes shut, as if that would provide some escape from the pain.

  “Oh yes, this won’t do,” said Sirona. “Lux, take her other hand.”

  Honorine felt the brush of bristly wolf fur under the hand of her uninjured arm. She opened her eyes briefly to see Lux lying at her side, her arm draped over him.

  She heard the others talking and the tearing of fabric, and at the point where she felt she couldn’t take it any longer, there was a cool, immediate relief, starting between her shoulder blades and then spreading, as if someone were draping a cold cloth up and onto the back of her neck, over her shoulder, and down her injured arm all the way to her elbow. She slumped forward, feeling at once utterly relieved and overwhelmingly tired.

  “There, that’s all,” Sirona said. “Your wound will heal, and there will be no more pain. Though you do need to rest.”

  Honorine nodded, her eyes opening only enough to see hazy lights all around her. Sirona said something further as she pressed a hand gently to Honorine’s forehead. Then she felt she was being lifted up, but she couldn’t be certain if that happened before or after she had fallen into a deep, silent slumber.

  She awoke lying on her back, swaying gently from side to side, and looking up into a bough of reddish pine branches swarming with spiders. After a short screech of alarm and a brief struggle with an unexpected blanket, Honorine tumbled to the ground, landing with a thump directly on top of Lux, who had been lying quietly beside her as she slept.

  “Feeling better?” Lux said, ears pinned back, as he stood up and shook out his glistening white fur.

  “Spiders!” Honorine shouted in reply.

  Lux raised his wolfy brow and tipped his head to the side. “Yes, of course,” he said. “The ones that spun your hammock.”

  She looked over at a swinging, tangled net of silvery silk containing a few fat pillows and a thick blanket, all bundled and hanging from the trees like a strange mess of fishing tackle.

  “Oh,” Honorine said, managing to catch her breath, though her heart still hammered in her chest.

  “Did you sleep well?” Lux asked.

  Honorine looked around, taking in the trees and the lanterns and the dark sky above them. She started to remember all the events that had happened, and the order in which they had unfolded, that led to her sitting on a pile of white sand, under a fleet of spiders, surrounded by pine trees and toadstools.

  “How long did I sleep?” she asked.

  Lux scrunched his nose. “Time is a very hard thing to keep track of up here,” he said. “Do you feel rested?”

  “I think so,” Honorine said.

  “Then you slept the usual amount, I suppose. And your arm?”

  Honorine sat up sharply, remembering the burn, particularly the pain. When she looked down, she saw she was wrapped in a thin, shimmery gauze like a mummy, completely covered from her ribs all the way up to her neck and back down her left arm to the elbow. She stretched her shoulder, waved her arm, wiggled her fingertips.

  “It doesn’t hurt at all!” she said. “Though my head feels a bit… fuzzy.”

  “Well, that happens, I’m told, when Sirona works an especially intensive amount of healing on a person,” Lux said with a look of amusement. “And also, you fell out of an exploding dirigible from an impressive height.”

  Honorine nodded as she turned her arm about and ran her other hand over the soft bandages around her neck. She realized that something was missing when she reached up to the back of her head.

  “Oh yes, the hair,” Lux said. “A fair bit of it seems to have been… well, burned right off, I’m afraid.”

  Honorine patted her head. Her hair was now no longer than her chin in the front, and chopped roughly in the back. There was barely enough left to run her fingers through. Her hand came away a bit sooty.

  “Well,” she said with a shrug, “I’d rather lose my hair than an arm, I suppose.”

  She tried to pry the gauze back to take a look at the skin underneath.

  “Leave your bandages for now,” Lux said. “Sirona will want to check them and see that you’ve healed properly. In fact, she’ll probably want to see you right away.”

  “But I can’t have healed already,” she protested, trying to reconcile how long she had slept. The last few moments before she fell asleep were a bit of a jumble, and before she could puzzle out what had happened, she noticed that her overalls and shirt were gone and she was sitting on the ground in only her bandages and bloomers.

  “Well, this isn’t proper at all,” she declared, waving a hand over her unacceptable lack of attire. “Could I get the rest of my clothes back?”

  Lux pinned back his ears and shook his head.

  “You won’t want those any longer,” he said. “We’ll get you something better to wear.”

  He growled up at the trees, and then stood back as the spiders descended and began to spin a very dense web, which, curiously, included a tunic, a pair of leggings, and a long sash, all in the palest peridot green and embellished with fine, sparkling silver. In barely a moment, they were finished and retreated back into the branches above.

  “Well?” asked Lux, staring expectantly at her. “Don’t you like them?”

  “They’re… lovely,” Honorine said. “I was just a bit surprised at how they were… woven.”

  “Spider silk makes the finest garments in the world,” Lux said frankly, as if this were a well-known fact among people who didn’t travel on flying forests and leave trails of sparks everywhere they stepped. “Though they are nearly impossible to come by, as only spiders themselves can work with their silk in such an elegant manner. And sadly, nearly every human weaver has forgotten how to work with spiders. So put them on, unless you’d prefer to go about in bandages and your underthings.”

  “No, of course not,” Honorine said, getting unsteadily to her feet to reach the clothes. The fine silk was impossibly light and stronger than any fabric she had felt before. It came down off the line the moment she touched it and felt like liquid between her fingers. She pulled the tunic over her head. The loose silk fell a little above her knees, and the sleeves were the perfect length, a bit baggy at the shoulders and fitted from her elbows to her wrists, as if they had been woven right on her body. She pulled off her old bloomers and then slipped on the leggings, which also fit as if she were putting on another layer of skin. The spider silk was the softest, most comfortable fabric she had ever felt—light, yet so warm that even in the cold air, she felt a
s snug as if she were wrapped in a thick fur stole.

  “Much better, isn’t it?” Lux asked.

  Honorine smiled as she tied the silk sash around her middle. “Yes. Very much.”

  A trill of cold wind cut through the pine boughs, rattling the lanterns and creating a soft whistling music through the trees. Honorine looked up to see the branches part, giving her a brief glimpse of dark sky. Her head began to clear, and she was overcome with the notion that something was missing.

  “It’s night again,” she noticed.

  “Well, it’s always night here,” Lux replied.

  “But we’re on a ship, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, the Carina. The ship of the stars. She has the largest constellation in all the night sky, Argo Navis, though she is now considered three separate constellations by modern astronomers. Vela, Puppis, and, of course, Carina, are all part of the same magnificent ship.”

  Honorine made her way across the sandy, root-tangled deck. She stepped up to the grapevine railing and leaned out cautiously, expecting to see ocean spooling away underneath the ship. There was nothing below them but stars and thin silvery mist.

  The Carina wasn’t sailing across the ocean, but soaring through the air.

  “We are currently sailing just between dawn and dusk on the Sea of Ether, a place only Mordant can travel,” Lux replied. “And, thankfully, a place where Nautilus cannot find us.”

  At the mention of Nautilus, the image of the Nighthawk ripping apart and plunging toward the sea suddenly flashed through Honorine’s memory.

  “Francis!” she said with a gasp. “Lux, where is he? Did you bring him here, too?”

  “No,” Lux said, shaking his head. “He did not come here. Only you, Honorine.”

  “Well, what happened to him?” Honorine asked, dread falling over her. “Where is he?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know.”

  Honorine thought of Francis still in the water, sinking into the depths, never to be found. The dread began to crush her heart against her chest with a pain more intense than her burned shoulder.