Once Upon a Star

by Nora Roberts

  When he fell silent, looked back at the pendant, Allena slipped it under her sweater. And feeling the quiet heat of it against her heart, waited for him to continue.

  10

  “AFTER ME, MY parents tried for more children. Twice my mother miscarried, and the second, late in her term…damaged her. I was young, but I remember her having to stay in bed a long time and how pale she was even when she could get up. My father set a chair out for her, so she could be outside and watch the sea. She was never well after that, but I didn’t know.”

  “You were just a boy.” When she touched a hand to his, he looked down, smiled a little.

  “Soft heart, Allena.” He turned his hand over, squeezed hers once, then released. “She was ill the summer I was twelve. Three times that spring, my father took her on the ferry, and I stayed with my cousins. She was dying, and no one could find a way to save her. Part of me knew that, but I pushed it out of my mind. Every time she came home again, I was certain it was all right.”

  “Poor little boy,” Allena murmured.

  “He doesn’t deserve as much sympathy as you think. That summer, when I was twelve, she walked down to the sea with me. She should’ve been in bed, but she wouldn’t go. She told me of the stone dance and the star and my place in it. She showed me the pendant you’re wearing now, though I’d seen it countless times before. She closed my hand around it with her own, and I felt it breathe.

  “I was so angry. I wasn’t different from the other lads I knew, no different from my cousins and playmates. Why would she say so? She told me I was young to have it passed on to me, but she and my father had discussed it. He’d agreed to let her do it, in her time and her own way. She wanted to give me the pendant before she left us.”

  “You didn’t want it.”

  “No, by God, I didn’t. I wanted her. I wanted things to be as they were. When she was well and I was nothing more than a lad running over the hills. I wanted her singing in the kitchen again, the way she did before she was ill.”

  Everything inside her ached for him, but when she reached out, Conal waved her off. “I shouted at her, and I ran from her. She called after me, and tried to come after me, but I was strong and healthy and she wasn’t. Even when I heard her weeping, I didn’t look back. I went and hid in my uncle’s boat shed. It wasn’t till the next morning that my father found me.

  “He didn’t take a strap to me as I might have expected, or drag me home by the ear as I deserved. He just sat down beside me, pulled me against him, and told me my mother had died in the night.”

  His eyes were vivid as they met Allena’s. She wondered that the force of them didn’t burn away the tears that swam in her own. “I loved her. And my last words to her were the bitter jabs of an angry child.”

  “Do you think—oh, Conal, can you possibly believe those words are what she took with her?”

  “I left her alone.”

  “And you still blame a frightened and confused twelve-year-old boy for that? Shame on you for your lack of compassion.”

  Her words jolted him. He rose as she did. “Years later, when I was a man, I did the same with my father.”

  “That’s self-indulgent and untrue.” Briskly, she stacked plates, carried them to the sink. It wasn’t sympathy he needed, she realized. But plain, hard truth. “You told me yourself you didn’t know he was ill. He didn’t tell you.”

  She ran the water hot, poured detergent into it, stared hard at the rising foam. “You curse the idea you have—what did you call it—elfin blood—but you sure as hell appear to enjoy the notion of playing God.”

  If she’d thrown the skillet at his head he’d have been less shocked. “That’s easy for you to say, when you can walk away from all of this tomorrow.”

  “That’s right, I can.” She turned the faucet off and turned to him. “I can, finally, do whatever I want to do. I can thank you for that, for helping me see what I was letting happen, for showing me that I have something of value to give. And I want to give it, Conal. I want to make a home and a family and a life for someone who values me, who understands me and who loves me. I won’t take less ever again. But you will. You’re still hiding in the boat shed, only now you call it a studio.”

  Vile and hateful words rose up in his throat. But he was no longer a young boy, and he rejected them for the sharper blade of ice. “I’ve told you what you asked to know. I understand what you want, but you have no understanding of what I need.”

  He walked out, letting the door slap shut behind him.

  “You’re wrong,” she said quietly. “I do understand.”

  She kept herself busy through the morning. If she did indeed go away the next day, she would leave something of herself behind. He wouldn’t be allowed to forget her.

  She hung the curtains she’d mended, pleased when the sunlight filtered through the lace into patterns on the floor. In the laundry room she found tools and brushes and everything she needed. With a kind of defiance she hauled it all outside. She was going to scrape and paint the damn shutters.

  The work calmed her, and that malleable heart she’d spoken of began to ache. Now and then she glanced over at the studio. He was in there, she knew. Where else would he be? Though part of her wanted to give up, to go to him, she did understand his needs.

  He needed time.

  “But it’s running out,” she murmured. Stepping back, she studied the results of her labors. The paint gleamed wet and blue, and behind the windows the lace fluttered in the breeze.

  Now that it was done and there was nothing else, her body seemed to cave in on itself with fatigue. Nearly stumbling with it, she went into the house. She would lie down for a little while, catch up on the sleep she’d lost the night before.

  Just an hour, she told herself and, stretching out on the bed, went under fast and deep.

  Conal stepped back from his own work. His hands were smeared with clay to the wrists, and his eyes half blind with concentration.

  Allena of the Faeries. She stood tall, slim, her head cocked slyly over one shoulder, her eyes long and her mouth bowed with secrets. She wasn’t beautiful, nor was she meant to be. But how could anyone look away?

  How could he?

  Her wings were spread as if she would fly off at any moment. Or fold them again and stay, if you asked her.

  He wouldn’t ask her. Not when she was bound by something that was beyond both of them.

  God, she’d infuriated him. He went to the sink, began to scrub his hands and arms. Snipping and sniping at him that way, telling him what he thought and felt. He had a mind of his own and he’d made it up. He’d done nothing but tell her the truth of that, of everything, from the beginning.

  He wanted peace and quiet and his work. And his pride, he thought, as his hands dripped water. The pride that refused to accept that his path was already cut. In the end, would he be left with only that?

  The emptiness stretched out before him, staggeringly deep. Were these, then, after all, his choices? All or nothing? Acceptance or loneliness?

  Hands unsteady, he picked up a towel, drying off as he turned and studied the clay figure. “You already know, don’t you? You knew from the first.”

  He tossed the towel aside, strode to the door. The light shifted, dimmed even as he yanked it open. Storm clouds crept in, already shadowing the sea.

  He turned for the cottage, and what he saw stopped him in his tracks. She’d painted the shutters, was all he could think. The curtains she’d hung danced gaily in the rising wind. She’d hung a basket beside the door and filled it with flowers.

  How was a man to resist such a woman?

  How could it be a trap when she’d left everything, even herself, unlocked and unguarded?

  All or nothing? Why should he live with nothing?

  He strode toward the cottage and three steps from the door found the way barred to him. “No.” Denial, and a lick of fear, roughened his voice as he shoved uselessly at the air. “Damn you! You’d keep me from her now?”<
br />
  He called out to her, but her name was whisked away by the rising wind, and the first drops of rain pelted down.

  “All right, then. So be it.” Panting, he stepped back. “We’ll see what comes at the end of the day.”

  So he went through the storm to the place that called to his blood.

  She woke with a start, the sound of her own name in her ears. And woke in the dark.

  “Conal?” Disoriented, she climbed out of bed, reached for the lamp. But no light beamed when she turned the switch. A storm, she thought blearily. It was storming. She needed to close the windows.

  She fumbled for the candle, then her hand jerked and knocked it off the little table.

  Dark? How could it be dark?

  Time. What time was it? Frantically she searched for the candle, found a match. Before she could light it, lightning flashed and she saw the dial of the little wind-up clock.

  Eleven o’clock.

  No! It was impossible. She’d slept away all but the last hour of the longest day.

  “Conal?” She rushed out of the room, out of the house, into the wind. Rain drenched her as she ran to his studio, fought to open the door.

  Gone. He was gone. Struggling against despair, she felt along the wall for the shelves, and on the shelves for the flashlight she’d seen there.

  The thin beam made her sigh with relief, then her breath caught again at what stood in the line of that light.

  Her own face, her own body, made fanciful with wings. Did he see her that way? Clever and confident and lovely?

  “I feel that way. For the first time in my life, I feel that way.”

  Slowly, she shut the light off, set it aside. She knew where he’d gone, and understood, somehow, that she was meant to find her own way there, as he had, in the dark.

  The world went wild as she walked, as wild as the day she had come to this place. The ground shook, and the sky split, and the sea roared like a dragon.

  Instead of fear, all she felt was the thrill of being part of it. This day wouldn’t pass into night without her. Closing her hand over the star between her breasts, she followed the route that was clear as a map in her head.

  Steep and rough was the path that cut through rock, and slippery with wet. But she never hesitated, never faltered. The stones loomed above, giants dancing in the tempest. In its heart, the midsummer fire burned, bright and gold, despite the driving rain.

  And facing it, the shadow that was a man.

  Her heart, as she’d been told, knew.

  “Conal.”

  He turned to her. His eyes were fierce as if whatever wild was in the night pranced in him as well. “Allena.”

  “No, I’ve something to say.” She walked forward, unhurried though the air trembled. “There’s always a choice, Conal, always another direction. Do you think I’d want you without your heart? Do you think I’d hold you with this?”

  In a violent move she pulled the pendant from around her neck and threw it.

  “No!” He grabbed for it, but the star only brushed his fingertips before it landed inside the circle. “Can you cast it off so easily? And me with it?”

  “If I have to. I can go, make a life without you, and part of me will always grieve. Or I can stay, make a home with you, bear your children, and love you for everything you are. Those are my choices. You have yours.”

  She held out her arms. “There’s nothing but me here to hold you. There never was.”

  Emotions tumbled through him, end over end. “Twice I’ve let the people I loved go without telling them. Even when I came here tonight I thought I might do so again.”

  He pushed dripping hair away from his face. “I’m a moody man, Allena.”

  “So you told me once before. I never would have known it otherwise.”

  His breath came out in a half laugh. “You’d slap at me at such a time?” He took a step toward her. “You painted the shutters.”

  “So what?”

  “I’ll make you pots in dark blue, to fill with your flowers.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I love you.”

  She opened her mouth, closed it again, took a careful breath. “Because I painted the shutters?”

  “Yes. Because you would think to. Because you mended my mother’s curtains. Because you pick berries. Because you swim naked in the sea. Because you look at me and see who I am. Whatever brought you here, brought us here, doesn’t matter. What I feel for you is all there is. Please, God, don’t leave me.”

  “Conal.” The storm, inside her and around her, quieted. “You only have to ask.”

  “They say there’s magic here, but it’s you who brought it. Would you take me, Allena?” He reached for her hand, clasped it. “And give yourself to me. Make that home and that life and those children with me. I pledge to you I’ll love you, and I’ll treasure you, ever hour of every day.” He lifted her hand, pressed his lips to it. “I’d lost something, and you brought it back to me. You’ve brought me my heart.”

  So, she thought, he’d found the key after all. “I’ll take you, Conal, and give myself to you.” Her eyes were dry and clear and steady. “And everything we make, we’ll make together. I promise to love you now and ever after.”

  As she wrapped her arms around him, the mists cleared. In the dark sea of the sky a star began to pulse. The fire shimmered down to a pool of gold flame, tipped red as ruby. The air went sharp and cool so the stones stood out like a carving in glass.

  And they sang in whispers.

  “Do you hear it?” Allena murmured.

  “Yes. There.” He turned her, held her close to his side as the shimmering beam from the midsummer star shot through the stones and like an arrow pinned its light to its mate on the ground.

  The pendant burst blue, a clean fire, star-shaped and brilliant. While star joined star, the circle was the world, full of light and sound and power.

  Then the longest day passed, slipping into the shortest night. The light rippled, softened, faded. The stones sighed to silence.

  Conal drew her farther into the circle. The fire rose up again, and shot sparks into her eyes, stroked warmth over his skin. He bent to pick up the pendant, and slipping the chain around her neck, sealed the promise.

  “This belongs to you, and so do I.”

  “It belongs to me.” She pressed their joined hands against it. “Until it belongs to another. I’ll always be yours.”

  She kissed him there, inside the echo of magic, then stepped back. “Come home,” she said.

  Some say that the faeries came out of their raft to celebrate and danced round the midsummer fire while the star showered the last of its light. But those who had magic in their hearts and had pledged it left the circle, walked from the cliffs and along the quiet beach to the cottage with dark blue shutters that waited by the sea.

  CATCH A FALLING STAR

  Jill Gregory

  To Marianne, Nora, and Ruth—

  and friendship that shines brighter than any star

  And to Larry and Rachel—

  with all my love

  1

  “COME TO THE window, my lady, I beg you. Perhaps you will see a falling star and can make a wish, and all of this will vanish like a bad dream.”

  Else, the youngest of Princess Lianna’s ladies-in-waiting, spoke through tears. She turned from the castle window and gazed imploringly at the slender, sable-haired princess, who sat with legs curled beneath her on the gilded bed before the fire. The princess’s chamber was filled with women, all weeping, with reddened cheeks and eyes and faces damp with tears. Only Lianna herself, lovely and regal in her sapphire silk gown trimmed in gold thread, remained dry-eyed and composed, her heart-shaped face as calm as a new day.

  “A falling star? A wish?” Despite the churning of her stomach, Lianna gave her head a shake, sending her dark locks flying about her pale face. She even smiled grimly at Else as she sprang catlike off the bed, her gown billowing about her. “If I only had the chance, I
would wish Ambrose the Barbarian a bloody death and an eternity in hellfire!”

  She paced to the window, peering out at the silent black sky aglitter with a thousand stars. Not one fell from its destined place. There would be no help there. “Wishes and stars and magic will not avail me now,” she said softly, half to herself. “Nothing will.”

  A half-remembered spell of her grandmother’s floated through her mind, tinkling like a fairy song. Comes the night of a falling star…

  The rest danced away into the recesses of her memory, a chant from long-ago days of childhood. But she was no longer a child, Lianna reminded herself, her fingers tightening upon her skirt. She was a woman, full-grown, pledged to wed.

  Old spells and rhymes could not save her from that.

  She turned from the window, her shoulders straight and determined. “Falling star or no, I am going to marry the Barbarian come morn, and that is that.”

  Her old nurse, Meeg, sunk in a chair in the corner, let out a wail, the sound echoing through the firelit chamber where velvet bed hangings and rich tapestries and fragrant rushes softened the chill coming off the old stone walls of the castle. Lianna’s mouth trembled as she turned to gaze at the old woman. Meeg had been lady-in-waiting to her grandmother, a great lady renowned for her goodness and her magic, whom Lianna only dimly remembered, with fondness and awe. But Meeg had told her stories about her grandmother and helped her to see that she, Lianna, had inherited the knack for magic that blessed the women of her family, skipping every other generation, then returning afresh. It was Meeg who had raised her like a mother since she was twelve years old when her own mother had died giving birth to a stillborn son. Meeg, who had crooned to her when she had nightmares, encouraged her interest in the healing arts and simple spells, taught her to listen to the whispers of her own heart and follow the sigh of the wind. Now, weak as a baby bird and nearly blind, the old woman refused all of the fine gifts Lianna sought to give her, would not even wear the ermine robe Lianna had ordered made for her—save on state occasions—and still made up her own bed, swept her floor, spent hours at embroidery all done by touch and instinct—refusing to rest and lie about as Lianna kept insisting she had earned the right to do.