The Star Thief

by Lindsey Becker

  “Me?” Honorine asked.

  Lord Vidalia nodded solemnly.

  “Nautilus Olyphant,” Honorine said, “is my father?”

  “And the Mapmaker’s enemy. And that puts you in a difficult place.”

  Time was a difficult thing to measure while traveling on the Carina across the Sea of Ether. The sky was always dark above the trees, and the world was always spinning from dawn through dusk below them, but there was no sunrise or sunset aboard the ship. There were also no chores or lessons. Honorine’s time was hers, to do with as she pleased. She slept when she felt tired in hammocks provided by the spiders. When she was hungry, there were always fruits and nuts to eat from the ever-bearing orchard on the fore of the ship. And in between, she explored the forest, studied the Mordant, and asked questions. Many, many questions.

  From the moment she was told that Nautilus was her father, the very next question was, of course, “Then who is my mother?”

  When she had first asked, Lord Vidalia had patted her hand and shaken his head.

  “I’m afraid I cannot tell you yet,” he said. Honorine had never been so infuriated by an answer in all her life. But the soft sadness in Lord Vidalia’s eyes told her that it pained him to give her such a cruel answer. “I made a vow to protect you, and part of that agreement was to keep her identity a secret until she chose to reveal herself.”

  “But she is a Mordant?” Honorine asked.

  “Well… yes,” Lord Vidalia replied.

  “Which means, I’m a Mordant,” Honorine said. Francis had been right! But Honorine still did not quite believe it. “So, I have a constellation? Am I a muse? I don’t feel like I could be. And I don’t make the omen stones glow. Or make sparks, for that matter. I bleed like any ordinary person when I’m hurt.…”

  Lord Vidalia nodded along until she took a breath.

  “You are half Mordant, to be sure,” he said. “But also still a child. Someday, you may have a constellation, but not yet. If you had a constellation already, made stones glow with light, and inspired brilliance in human people, Nautilus would have been able to find you quite easily. And we never could have kept you hidden from the Mapmaker.”

  “Someday I may?” Honorine repeated. “Does that mean… I might not be a Mordant like they are?”

  She pointed toward the ceiling. Somewhere on the other side were the rest of the Carina’s crew, the true Mordant.

  Lord Vidalia sighed.

  “All in due time,” he’d said, and filled her cup with more lavender-colored tea. “When this problem with Nautilus is resolved, you will know everything, I promise. For now, you have one parent back. That must be enough.”

  This was followed by Sirona arriving to remove Honorine’s bandages and proclaim her healed, and Lux inviting her on a tour of the ship to see the orchards and the giant redwoods, the curious baobabs with their stout trunks, and the maple trees always in autumn shades of red and gold, growing from gentle dunes of snow-white sand. Honorine asked about all of them, about the age of the trees, and where they’d come from, and how they could grow on the ship, with no earth to hold their roots.

  “They are like us,” Lux replied as he and Honorine made their way through an oasis of palm trees, some impossibly tall and slender, some short and positively primordial, gathered around clear, shallow pools of warm freshwater. “They look like trees, but they are much more than that. We plant them all around the world, in places that are distinctly important to us, and they can live for thousands of years.”

  “There are trees in the world that are thousands of years old?” Honorine asked as they ducked under a spray of hanging palm fronds.

  “Indeed there are. And this is as far as we should go, for now.”

  Beyond the palm oasis, at the farthest end of the Carina, was a dark, silent swamp crowded with cypress trees, their branches dripping with gray spanish moss, their trunks surrounded by rounded spires like crocodile teeth rising from shallow, tea-stained water. There were no lanterns in the swamp. Light seeped in from the palm oasis and was quickly smothered in the quiet dark.

  “What’s in there?” Honorine asked as she peered around the gently swaying tendrils of moss. Her feet sank into wet sand, leaving footprints filled with brackish water.

  “The Mapmaker’s quarters,” Lux replied. “That’s where he stays when he requires peace and solitude. I suggest you respect his wishes.”

  Lux was not alone. Sirona, Astraea, and even Lord Vidalia all advised her to keep her distance from the cypress swamp. Corvus, though he never spoke, cawed harshly at her when he happened upon her wandering a bit too close. Scorpio expressed no opinion on the matter, but he was also the only one ever to go into the swamp besides the Mapmaker himself, when he happened to be on the ship.

  The Mapmaker, Corvus, and Astraea were very often away, trying to keep track of Nautilus and determine where he was moving to. They returned regularly, but again, with no clocks and no sunrise and no sunset, there was no way to tell how long they were gone, and how long they stayed when they returned. The immeasurable time aggravated Honorine. When she found Lord Vidalia’s old pocket watch, which had long since stopped working, it was simple enough to fix, but with no other clocks around to set it, it was impossible to keep the thing properly wound.

  “You must let go of this attachment,” Lord Vidalia said after Honorine marched into the study, dropping the puttering, old pocket watch onto a table with a clunk and an irritated glare. “Time is going to be different for you than it has been before.”

  He rubbed his sore hands and sipped his therapeutic tea, and then rummaged about for a very old book, which he pried down from the bookshelves, causing the ancient leather binding to groan.

  “Here’s something you could devote your attention to,” he said as he brushed off a layer of dust and opalescent spider silk from the gilt-edged pages. He tapped a gnarled finger on the cover, which had the same tooled crown of stars as his little journal. “Much more comprehensive than my field journal. They’re all in there. And you will meet them one day.”

  While Lord Vidalia shuffled off to brew another cup of tea, Honorine curled up in a chair with the heavy, musty old book. She realized, when she held it in her hand, that her mother was among the Mordant listed in that book. But it was an impossibly dense volume, the pages filled with tiny handwritten script, often with passages in foreign tongues, and footnotes and annotations that interrupted proper reading. She found she could rarely get through more than a few pages in a single sitting, and there were far too many distractions aboard the Carina to allow enough time for quiet studying.

  There were the other Mordant, of course. Lux was constantly wandering about the ship, as if he was patrolling it, and always glad to have company. Sirona had endless macabre yet fascinating stories of the way mortal bodies could be injured or sickened and then healed. When, in the deepest hours of night, the Carina would sail lower, near the sea, Sirona would perform healings on injured seabirds, turtles, squids, and even once a young whale with a shark-bitten tail fluke.

  Astraea rarely spoke to her, but Honorine discovered that she was interested in games of any kind, as long as there were clear, uncomplicated rules. When she was aboard the ship, Astraea would always agree to a game of chess or cribbage or a quick round of knucklebones, just to pass the time. Though Honorine would attempt to ask her questions, Astraea made it clear that she preferred to play in silence. So Honorine wasn’t quite sure if Astraea was pleasantly surprised or annoyed to return from a long flight to find Honorine waiting in the oak grove with a satchel of game pieces.

  “What do you call this?” Astraea asked as Honorine scattered a little haystack of finely carved wooden instruments onto a table made from an oak stump.

  “Jackstraws,” Honorine replied. “Haven’t you ever played it?”

  Astraea shook her head as she picked up a piece from the table. It was a miniature spade, about four inches long, carved from pale white wood. The other pieces were fashioned into
tools as well, among them a rake, a hoe, a broom, a saw, an ax, and even a tiny ladder.

  “It’s very simple,” Honorine said, picking up a long, thin stick with a tiny hook at the end. “You pick them up one at a time, without moving the rest of the pile. If you succeed, you get a point. If you move the pile, you lose your turn.”

  Astraea loved the game.

  “Did we have this somewhere down in the depths?” Astraea said, indicating the cabins belowdecks. “Or did one of the trees make it for you?”

  “The willow made them for us,” Honorine said as she gently freed a miniature pickax from the pile. That had been another delightful surprise about the Carina. Just about anything one could want the trees could grow, as long as it could be made from wood. The chairs and desks and furniture down in Lord Vidalia’s study had all been grown like fruit from the buds of the pine and oak and walnut trees, and then plucked when ripe and ready for use. They could do the same with croquet mallets and bowling pins, playing cards and paper dolls, violins and the sheet music to play with them. All that was needed was a written request on a square of parchment, folded and slipped into an open knothole on a hollow branch.

  Things that could not be grown from the trees were a bit harder to come by. But after scavenging in the darkest, dustiest corners down in the roots of the ship, Honorine had collected a surprising amount of materials: some glass, leather, iron, assorted ceramics, a few bits of jewelry, and even a jar half-full of omen stones, though the rest of the crew called them starglass.

  “The only one who ever called them omen stones was my dear Josefina,” Lord Vidalia explained as Honorine inspected the collection. There were all sizes from pebbles as small as her fingernail up to hunks the size of a croquet ball. All of them gave off a faint, consistent glow here aboard the Carina but grew intensely bright near any of the Mordant crew.

  Honorine kept her small hoard of materials in a far corner of Lord Vidalia’s study, where she went to tinker with ideas for new inventions and improvements to old ones when she needed a break from the rest of the ship and its inhabitants.

  The Mordant, she had noticed, had the ability to inspire moods. Spending a lot of time around Sirona made her very analytical. Being with the healer for too long would make Honorine start to pick apart every story she’d read down to the sentence and try to reason how all the parts worked together. Spending time around Scorpio, however, made her cautious. He could amplify fears. Too much time around him made her anxious.

  Astraea would make her feel melancholy or even angry and, at her worst moments, a bit hopeless.

  “Justice is a tricky thing,” she told Honorine one day before flying off with the Mapmaker for another scouting expedition. “When it seems near, it can be most powerful and uplifting. But when it is denied, it can eat away a person until they are nothing but bitterness and regret.”

  Honorine did feel a bit bitter for all the Mordant being trapped on Nautilus’s ship; for herself being separated from Francis; and for her mother, still unknown, her identity kept hidden. She grew a bit relieved when Astraea was away from the ship.

  Lux usually made her feel bold, strong, and curious. But too much time around him also made her anxious and frustrated. He often spent time at the edges of the ship, in places he could look down over the world. He wanted to go back there. Being stuck on the Carina for so long was turning him into a ball of nervous energy.

  It seemed they could all use a break from the endless sailing. While Honorine waited for the Carina to arrive at a destination—any destination—she kept herself busy turning the old bits of clockwork and worn instruments in the study into new gadgets and inventions.

  She made two important discoveries fairly quickly. First, the starglass, aside from glowing around any particular Mordant, had another, even more curious property. If aligned in a pattern that matched a constellation, the stones would glow brightest when the corresponding Mordant was nearby.

  Second, the ironwood tree, though it grew at the very edge of the forbidden cypress swamp, provided spectacular tools for working on smaller, more meticulous projects. After braving the darkest parts of the ship to retrieve them, she took apart the old pocket watch with ease and fashioned instead a kind of bracelet with a thick leather wristband. She reworked the round ebony watch face with tiny, polished chips of starglass arranged in the pattern of the five constellations representing the Mordant aboard the ship. Whenever a Mordant was near, the glowing chips gave her a bit of warning if she was just about to run into Scorpio in the dark woods or if Corvus was swooping in overhead.

  She was wandering through the pine trees, nibbling on a meringue-flavored lemon with a hint of graham cracker, testing her Mordant watch, when something buzzed by her, brushing back her hair with a flutter of wind.

  There were insects on the ship—moths and glowworms and beetles and, of course, spiders—but this was something else. Her watch didn’t react to it in any way. Honorine looked up to see a tiny flash moving swiftly through the trees, and she followed it to the redwood forest, where the very tallest of the redwoods stood at the precise center of the ship, acting as the mainmast. Somewhere near the crown was the crow’s nest—not just the lookout spot on a traditional ship, but an actual nest, where Corvus rested when he wasn’t ferrying the Mapmaker. Corvus actually made Honorine a bit nervous, but his nest seemed to be where the little light was headed, racing upward into the mist and the feathery needles of the tree.

  Honorine dashed up a tight spiral staircase in the center of the mast tree. She reached a narrow opening at the top that led into a shallow dish of moss and sticks resting between the trunk of the mast tree and the forks of a stout branch. The tiny, sharp light she had seen below was nowhere to be found. She considered climbing back down, but as she raised her hand to reach toward the trunk of the tree, she glimpsed her Mordant watch, secured to her wrist. According to her new invention, and assuming it was working correctly, Corvus was somewhere very near.…

  The rush of wind as he landed shook a spray of dew from the branches, pelting Honorine with cold droplets. Corvus ruffled his feathers and turned about on the nest, until his black eye reflected Honorine in the nook of the tree trunk. He took a step forward, his hooked claws sinking into the soft moss, and reached toward her.

  In the tip of his pointed beak he held a tiny speck made of cold brass and bits of copper, with crystalline wings and round stone eyes. It was one of Francis’s bees! The eyes were still glowing, the wings trembling. Corvus dropped it into Honorine’s hand, and she quickly closed the other one over it to keep the bee from flying away.

  “This is from Nautilus’s ship!” she said. “He must be nearby!”

  Corvus nodded.

  “We should bring this to the Mapmaker,” Honorine said, but this time Corvus shook his head in disagreement. He leaned down and stretched out one wing, as if inviting her to climb onto his back. “You want to go now? To look for the ship?”

  Corvus cawed at her, a sound that rattled in her chest and stung her ears, and shook his wing impatiently. She hesitated for a moment, wondering if this was some breach of etiquette, but the thought of flying with Corvus and getting off the ship was much too tempting. She tucked the bee deep into her tunic pocket and climbed aboard, settling onto the crow’s back, her legs tucked under his wings, a handful of feathers in each fist.

  “All right,” she said, and the next second they were off, so fast that all the breath was drained from Honorine’s lungs. She took a huge gulp of air and crouched as low as she could over his neck as they rocketed across the sky.

  Flying on the Nighthawk was exciting. Flying on the Carina was amazing. But flying on the back of Corvus, looking out over the whole of the world, with only the force of the wind to tell her how fast they were racing, Honorine had never felt such freedom or such joy in all her life.

  Corvus bolted across the sky. Each wingbeat might have propelled them a hundred miles—she couldn’t be sure from that height. It was difficult to see where
they were going, as the wind and the cold made Honorine’s eyes water, and she dared not let go of a handful of feathers to wipe them. The world became a swirl of silver and violet as they raced across the Ether in a streak of blue.

  Eventually, Corvus slowed a bit, and Honorine felt her stomach lift as they began to descend toward the earth below. After managing to rub the water from her eyes on the sleeve of her tunic, Honorine looked down to see the clouds and the ocean coming up to meet them. The entire world was somewhere below them, the whole spinning globe, with every city, river, church, dairy cow, wild tiger, butterfly, and living person upon it. She wondered if anyone could see her and the crow, and if to them, she was nothing more than a glittering star sailing across the black of the night sky.

  Corvus banked to the left, dipping below the clouds, and there, under his wing, Honorine saw a curious line of white mist hovering very low over the dark water.

  “The Gaslight!” she said, leaning farther over Corvus’s rising and falling wing, until she could make out the sparkling outline of the ship far, far below, at the head of the trail of steam clouds.

  They were headed for Francis. Corvus seemed willing to take her all the way there. All the way to the Gaslight.

  “No,” Honorine warned. “We can’t go that far. Don’t fly too near the ship. They’ll catch you!”

  She desperately wanted to see Francis again. Even though Astraea had insisted that all aboard the Nighthawk had been saved, Honorine still wanted to see him, alive, with her own eyes. And Nautilus. She remembered something of his appearance, enough that she would recognize him if she encountered him again. But she hadn’t looked closely enough before. She hadn’t committed his face to memory, the way she felt she should have for Nautilus to truly feel like her father. At least she knew what one parent looked like.

  Corvus swooped in a wide arc, as if asking one more time if she was certain she wanted to turn back.