Fire in the Star

by Kamilla Benko

  “It’s not my best knitting,” Thorn said apologetically as he handed one to Claire. “I’m calling it a Make-a-Face.” From far away, the hat had looked navy, but up close, she could see it was a hodgepodge of color: pinks blending into yellows, which quickly swirled into a shocking green. But threaded throughout all the colors, there was a shimmering iridescence, like sunlight on spider silk.

  Or, more accurately, Spyden silk.

  “Will they work?” Claire asked, sticking a pinkie through a dropped stitch.

  Thorn looked worried, but he nodded. “As long as we keep the anchor objects in our pockets, we should look just like the Malchains.”

  Nerves settled heavily on Claire’s chest. That was the plan—her plan.

  The Love Knot Tine was missing, which meant one of two things: either it had been smuggled out of Needle Pointe and was far away from Estelle … or Estelle already had it in her grasp.

  Thorn, unfortunately, hadn’t known.

  “Sorry,” Thorn had said after she’d explained everything last night, “even though I’m her heir, Her Majesty treats me like a little preamble. But just so you know, Queen Estelle already has the Stone Tine with her, I’ve seen her wearing it, and both the Spinners and Tillers have promised to present their tines on Starfell.”

  “The Tillers, too?!”

  Thorn nodded. “We got their message right before I left for Needle Pointe. The Forger Guild hasn’t decided yet, though!” he’d added hastily as dismay twisted Claire’s face. “If you tell the Forgers everything you just told me, I bet they would give the Hammer Tine to Nadia and help crown your aunt.”

  But Claire doubted the grandmasters would believe her. As Thorn had just pointed out, even in Arden with all its enchantment, grown-ups were still grown-ups. They would never take a kid like Claire seriously … but Anvil and Aquila Malchain, famed treasure hunters, were another matter.

  It was the Spyden silk that had given Claire the idea.

  If a Spyden could weave itself disguises from silk, maybe a Spinner like Thorn could, too. Thorn hadn’t been so sure (after all, he wasn’t part spider), but he thought that if they each held an object that belonged to the person they were trying to illusion themselves into, maybe it would work.

  Luckily for Claire, many of the contents in her pack—like the ReflecTent, her map, and a few clothes—once belonged to the Malchains. And the famous cousins didn’t need their belongings at the moment.

  When Claire and Sophie had escaped from Stonehaven, they had tracked Anvil and Aquila to a dusty cottage. But Queen Estelle had found them first. She’d frozen their blood into rubies and left the cousins to stand in the cottage forever. But after Nadia rescued Claire and Sophie from the Drowning Fortress, they’d finally trusted the mayor enough to tell her about the Malchains’ awful fate. Nadia had immediately sent Woven Root scouts to collect them, and now they were standing safely in their own tent, with a whole cohort of alchemists attempting to turn their blood back into liquid once more.

  Now, Claire reached into her pack and handed Anvil’s Kompass to Thorn before slipping Aquila’s compact mirror of polished silver into her trouser pocket. She looked at Thorn expectantly. “On the count of three?” she asked.

  “I’ll go first,” Thorn interjected. “I don’t think anything should go wrong, but in case I messed something up, better for a Spinner to handle it.” And before Claire could protest, Thorn slipped the hat over his head.

  Nothing happened. Five full minutes passed before Thorn finally pulled it off with a frustrated sigh. “I don’t get it,” he said. “It feels like the threads want to work, but it’s like they’re, I don’t know, too tired to stand up. As though …” He trailed off, blue eyes somber.

  “As though what?” Claire prompted.

  “As though the magic in Arden really is dying.”

  But magic wasn’t fragile in all parts of Arden. Claire had seen powerful magic before. Big magic. Wondrous magic. Woven trees that could hide an entire village. Sewn packs that could contain as much potential as a seed and be just as light. The shining flanks of copper chimera as they galloped, pranced, and snorted in the sun. In Woven Root, one could still find the powerful magic that most believed was lost to the past.

  “I have an idea,” Claire said, and hurried to the Rhona, which curved calmly through the orchard. Kneeling on the bank, she reached into the water. It was icy cold, numbing her fingers, but she scooped up a bit of river sand. Remembering how she’d once shaped it into a dolphin, she began to rub the sand into the hats Thorn had knitted, letting the wet grains bury themselves in the yarn.

  “What are you doing?” Thorn asked, crouching down next to her.

  “Where I come from, artists use strips of linen coated with plaster to make molds of people’s faces for masks or whatever,” Claire explained, tugging his hat away from him. She scooped grit onto it. “And plaster is basically just fancy sand. When it hardens, it helps the cloth keep its shape, making a perfect copy.”

  Claire brought her wet hands to her lips and blew warm breath on them. Her fingers were cold, but she was pretty sure she could feel a slight hum in her bones.

  “Here,” she said, handing the soggy hat back to him. He flinched away.

  She frowned. “What’s wrong?”

  Thorn’s mouth turned up slightly at the edges, and his forehead wrinkled in embarrassment, but Claire could see a tiny bit of fear in his eyes.

  “If it works, I mean—that’s jumble magic!”

  “So?” Claire asked, confused. “Royalists use jumble magic, like the Diamond Tree Vault.”

  “True,” Thorn admitted. “But that’s because Queen Estelle ordered it, and she’s, you know, a legendary ancient queen …” His voice faded away.

  Claire pulled her hair into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. There was no time to deal with Thorn’s prejudice now, but Claire knew that if Aunt Nadia ever did become the ruling queen of Arden, the guilds would have a lot of adjusting to do. “Ready?” she asked. When Thorn nodded, she began to count. “One, two, three!”

  They pulled the hats on. This time, she didn’t have to wonder if the magic was working.

  Something cool and slimy seemed to drip down her face, as if she’d cracked a raw egg against her head. The feeling spread as the fabric clung to her, tucking itself over her mouth and under her nose … and then over her nose. For a moment she felt like she couldn’t breathe! But then the Make-a-Face seemed to know what it had done, and there was a soft tickle as the fabric inched away from her nostrils. Claire inhaled deeply.

  The fabric began to dry, and as it did, the mask grew heavy, making it hard to wiggle her eyebrows or wrinkle her nose. And then the squelching stopped. The fabric lay still.

  Tentatively, she raised a hand to her cheek. Smooth, warm skin met her fingertips but … Claire frowned as she felt the planes of her face. Her nose felt shorter, and her cheeks felt as round as apples.

  “Claire?” a deep voice rumbled, and she turned to see Anvil. Or, actually, a not-quite Anvil.

  It was Anvil’s eyes, dark as coal, that looked at her, but the expression of amazement—something about the way the eyebrows twisted—seemed very much like Thorn. Claire whooped. “You look like—” She stopped, her hands flying to her throat.

  “Are you all right?” Thorn asked, hurrying over to her.

  “Yes,” Claire whispered, but she heard again what had so startled her: Aquila’s voice, dry as fire but just as warm, coming from her lips. She cleared her throat and spoke louder. “Even my voice is different!” She plunged her hand into her trousers and pulled out the little silver mirror. With a click, she flipped it open.

  Bright-blue eyes above pink-apple cheeks stared back at her, while steel-gray hair wisped over her forehead. Wonder filled Claire. She looked exactly like Aquila—down to the little scar on her cheek that hinted that this sweet-looking grandmother might be able to swing an ax as easily as she could bake a pie. Though there was still something a little soft around
the chin to be properly Aquila, and when she smiled, something seemed off. While the hats had made them look like the Malchains, in reality they were only as much the Malchains as a photograph of them would have been.

  Gray hair and rosy pink cheeks weren’t what made Aquila Aquila.

  Claire was relieved. She was still her, even if she looked like the famous Forger. She guessed it was because even though clothes could make you feel and look different, they didn’t actually change who you were. The Make-a-Face was more of an illusion, really, than an actual transformation.

  She clicked the mirror closed and put it back in her pocket before turning to face Thorn, who was using his new height to pick one of the few apples left on a tree.

  “You’re going to need to stand a little straighter,” she told him. “And keep your arms stiff; you’re swinging them too much.”

  “They’re just so long,” Thorn said, grinning at their success.

  Claire bit her lip. “And Anvil doesn’t really smile, unless he’s about to use his double-headed ax.”

  Thorn’s black brows furrowed in a very un-Anvil-like show of confusion. “You better tell me everything you remember if this is going to work,” he said.

  They quickly pulled on the spare Forger tunics Claire had tucked into her Hollow Pack, and spent the next half hour practicing moving around like the Malchains. How Anvil came off as forbidding but really most of the time he was just thinking. How Aquila often teased Anvil, and how Anvil pretended to hate it, but Claire could secretly tell he enjoyed when Aquila, only a few inches taller than Claire, told him exactly what she thought.

  “We should go soon,” Thorn urged, and Claire knew he was right.

  They deconstructed the ReflecTent and scraped apple mush from the bottom of their shoes before placing everything in the Hollow Pack except for the spyglass. They had done the math, and it would take about eight steps north and west to get to Fyrton in Claire’s boots. At each new spot, Thorn would use the spyglass to make sure that their next step wouldn’t send them to the bottom of a lake or into the side of a mountain.

  “Ready?” Thorn asked. “Wait! Claire, your pencil!”

  Oops. She reached into Aquila’s white hair and slipped the leafy pencil into her pack. Her heart thumped. Already she’d made such a silly mistake. How could she pull off being Aquila? How would she be able to convince anyone to give her the Forgers’ Hammer Tine if she couldn’t remember such a simple thing? Maybe this was a bad idea. But there was no time to reconsider as Thorn had already grabbed for her hand and was counting down.

  “Three … two … one …”

  They stepped together.

  Though Claire knew what to expect, her stomach still leaped as the world rushed at them. The journey was smoother, though, with Thorn wearing one of the boots. She didn’t wobble so much. In about as much time as it took to sneeze twice, they were in a glade of a forest. Thorn held the spyglass up to his eye, adjusted the lens, then nodded in the next direction.

  They stepped again.

  They passed a field, two more harvested apple orchards, and another forest glade before the terrain started to look familiar. Claire’s breath caught as they landed on the edge of a rusty red plain, a ring of small rocks looming in its center. Last time she’d been here, it had been night, but even in the early-morning sun, the Sorrowful Plains felt like a shadowed place. They stepped quickly away, taking an extra step east to avoid the Petrified Forest.

  “Two more.” Thorn huffed as they stood in a long-ago-abandoned Gemmer village at the edge of a lake, which Claire could tell had once been a quarry. His face looked pale, his legs shaking slightly as he took a deep breath.

  “Do you want to take a quick break?” Claire asked. After all, she was just along for the ride, while he was responsible for making sure they didn’t squash into a random farm wall.

  He shook his head. “Only two more steps,” he said, grim determination settling into the lines of Anvil’s face. He twisted the spyglass and nodded west. “This way.”

  They stepped.

  Everything was the same as it always was: a sudden jerk from behind the navel, a sense of sliding, but then, instead of feeling solid ground rise up to meet her sole, Claire felt her booted foot keep going, sinking through the earth with a loud squelch.

  Dampness started to seep in through her trousers, and Claire sputtered as she tasted mud and something—there could be no other word for it—greenish.

  Glancing down, she saw she was standing waist-deep in an earthy confection of water, leaves, and mud. They had arrived at Foggy Bottom swamp. Actually, only Thorn had arrived at Foggy Bottom, as his feet were both placed firmly on a large boulder that stuck out of the muck, while Claire had arrived in Foggy Bottom, her booted sole missing the boulder by inches.

  “I’m so sorry,” Thorn said, his worry making Anvil’s movements surprisingly jittery. “There must have been a smudge on the spyglass that knocked me off course!”

  “It’s all right,” Claire said, trying not to think what kind of swampy creatures could be lurking about. “Just get me out!” Anvil’s strong arms reached for her, and a moment later, Thorn had pulled her out of the swamp and onto the rock next to him. Claire’s toes stretched to soak in the heat of the sun on the boulder. It felt nice … until she realized she shouldn’t be able to feel the boulder through the Seven League Boot.

  Looking over her shoulder, she saw one last flash of red cowboy boot before Foggy Bottom swamp closed over it, swallowing it whole.

  “Ah,” Thorn said, one hand covering his mouth. “That’s not … great.” A muddy bubble from the swamp popped, as though in agreement.

  Claire took a deep breath. “There’s still one boot left. Maybe if I …?” She gestured to his back. Thorn bent down, and Claire scrambled up. She was out of practice piggyback riding, but what other choice did they have?

  Claire shook her arm to let the rest of the swamp muck wick away from her clothes, a useful side effect of wearing Spinner-made fabric. “I’m ready,” she said.

  Thorn stepped alone.

  This time, the world didn’t just rush at them; it sprinted. The colorful streaks smeared together, becoming the same gray as a pencil smudge. How could Thorn see? Was he even in control? Claire screamed, but the Boot yanked them away before she could hear the sound of it.

  They were going too fast! They were going to splatter; she was sure of it! And then no one would know how to stop Queen Estelle! Sophie would never be Sophie again. And the worst part, Claire would never get to say—

  Thump! Claire’s grip on Thorn’s shoulders broke as they crashed into a field.

  She rolled, everything spinning until she finally came to a stop in front of a set of long, sharp claws. Copper claws.

  Chimera claws.

  Gasping, Claire looked up into the snarling face of a chimera, with a wolf’s teeth and a cheetah’s whiplike tail, all the green of an old penny. A frozen chimera. And as Claire gazed around, she saw they were in an entire field of such chimera, rusted still for nearly three hundred years. Which meant …

  She stood cautiously and peered over the long yellow grass that reached her shoulders. Yes, there it was, in the shadow of Mount Rouge: the gold fence that spiked around Fyrton.

  “Thorn,” Claire breathed, “You did it! We’re here!”

  The only response was a groan, and Claire glanced over her shoulder. Thorn—or rather, Anvil—didn’t look so great. His breathing was shallow and somehow, Claire thought she caught a glimpse of the shocking green yarn in the undertone of his cheeks. But before worry could engulf her the same way the swamp had claimed one of the Seven League Boots, she heard a jangle in the grass.

  Either the chimera had suddenly come alive or …

  “The crash came from this way!” an unfamiliar voice shouted.

  “Forgers,” Thorn rasped out. “They’re coming!”

  Claire had just enough time to tug the Seven League Boot from Thorn’s foot and shove it deep into the mout
h of the frozen chimera before the tall grass flattened to reveal a group of shield-wearing Forgers.

  There were four of them in total, each one tall and blinding as the sun glinted off their breastplates and metal helmets and the swords on their hips. And the knives in their armguards. And the axes strapped across their backs.

  This wasn’t just a group of inspectors. This was a squadron of warriors. And by the time Claire had taken all this in, there was already a knife at her throat.

  CHAPTER

  15

  “Don’t move,” a boy’s voice ordered from behind a visor. “As unauthorized trespassers, you are both now prisoners of the Fyrton Watch.” Claire did as she was told, but her eyes strained, seeking out Thorn. From her periphery, she could just make out a sword under his chin, too. A blade to the throat, she was learning, was basically the equivalent of a Forger handshake. It was how she’d first met Sena, too. Thinking of Sena’s stubborn bravery and Aquila’s sharp wit, Claire took a deep breath. It was time to be a Forger.

  “Good morning to you, too,” she drawled in Aquila’s voice. “Manners have certainly changed since I was young.” She tilted her head toward Thorn. “Even my baby cousin Anvil has more courtesy. Which is saying something.”

  “I—” Claire’s Forger stopped short, and there was a great squeak as he lifted his visor to reveal a teenage boy with a crooked nose and round eyes.

  “Rusted nails,” he swore, clearly stunned, and Claire used his surprise to take a step back and away from his blade. “You’re Aquila Malchain!” the warrior said. “You’ve returned!”

  Claire nodded. “So it would appear.”

  “And you!” Thorn’s Forger said, lowering her blade. “You’re Anvil Malchain?”

  Thorn jerked his head and stayed silent, exactly as the real Anvil would have done. He always chose his words as carefully as he selected his knives.

  “Twenty-Third Legion, why have you stopped moving?” the fifth and final Forger demanded as she appeared from the yellowed grass. Like the others, she, too, was encased in armor and wore her weapons as easily as jewelry. Judging by the feathered black plume rising out of her helmet like smoke, Claire guessed she was the legion’s leader.