Fire in the Star

by Kamilla Benko

  The knife began to press down, and it was as though it cut through the shock that had frozen Claire.

  “NO!” Claire screamed, and with one last shove, she was through and onto the dais! “I AM CLAIRE MARTINSON!”

  She’d surprised Estelle. Everyone turned to look at her. Everyone but Thorn. In the two seconds everyone turned to Claire, he’d started sprinting across the dais toward Sophie.

  “Stop!” Estelle said, changing the direction of her knife to point it at Thorn. But he dodged it easily, knocking it out of the queen’s hand as he ran past both her and Sophie. And that’s when Claire realized his real target: the last unicorn.

  There was a flash of silver in Thorn’s hand: the scissors Scythe had given him—the ones that could cut through anything. And then they were plunging into the unicorn’s white mane. Snip!

  A horrified wail rose from the crowd as bits of grit, Spyden silk, and unicorn mane slithered to the floor to reveal a plain gray horse.

  Now Claire understood why the unicorn had seemed so still and tame. Now she understood why she’d found a Royalist cloak in the Spyden’s cottage. The queen, too, had needed the rare silk to craft an illusion strong enough to trick the people of Arden—and to use as bait to lure Sophie to her. Sophie, the true last unicorn of Arden.

  “Estelle lies!” Thorn shouted to all the guilds of Arden. “It’s an illusion—all of it!”

  “You,” Estelle snarled, and she raised her ram’s head cane high. “You vile, horrid little—” But she seemed too angry to finish her sentence as she sliced her arm through the air and the ram’s head came hurtling down.

  A sickening crack resounded through the throne room as the ram’s head connected with bone and flesh. As Estelle pulled her arm back, the ram’s horns glittered darkly red. Claire, however, had seen the horns up close and knew they were not inlaid with rubies. That was blood, reflecting in the torchlight.

  But it wasn’t Thorn’s blood.

  Thorn still stood, his face white as he looked down at the body of Francis Green crumpled at his feet, a dark stain sprouting from where the ram’s horn had pierced the old man’s heart.

  CHAPTER

  21

  The stain on Francis’s chest grew, sprawling and spreading across his tunic like a wild vine. As Claire watched, the bloody vine seemed to grip everyone on the hilltop, wrapping around their feet so that they could not move, wrapping around their tongues so they could not shout. She—and the Forgers, Tillers, Spinners, and Estelle—stood still, seemingly rooted to the ground, until a cry cut the dark.

  “Grandfather!”

  A dark shadow stumbled out from behind a pillar and sprinted up the grass-patch aisle to where Francis lay. A low, mournful sound rattled against Claire’s skin, as though Nett’s pain had become a living thing. The sound vibrated through Claire like the bass of an unadjusted speaker. It didn’t seem human.

  And then Claire realized: that sound—that wail—it wasn’t human. And it wasn’t coming from Nett but from beyond the garden wall.

  Estelle understood a second before anyone else. “Royalists, at the ready!”

  The foundation of the ruins shuddered a final time, and the crowd scattered to reveal an elderly woman gripping onto a lion chimera with her knees, as the Woven Root army sounded its golden trumpets and thundered into Hilltop Palace.

  Claire’s breath caught at the sight. When she’d left Woven Root, there had been only a handful of the beasts unfrozen. But it seemed that with Nett and Sena and the Steeles’ journals, the alchemist handlers had brought life back into at least fifty of the creatures. Copper teeth, copper fangs, copper wings, all streamed through the throne room as easily as sunlight and just as bright. Here and there, though, Claire saw green patches that had not yet been polished, and one chimera—a wolf with a squirrel’s tail—still had moss hanging from its snout. It had clearly been wakened only recently, and as Claire watched, she saw its bushy tail wag furiously in sheer delight.

  From somewhere far above Claire’s head, she heard an excited “Purr-ka!”

  The guilds, however, had not seen a chimera move in hundreds of years, and they had just seen the last unicorn unravel in front of them.

  They panicked.

  Tillers’ thorny vines suddenly raced up the columns while Forgers unsheathed their many types of weapons. Meanwhile, the hair on Claire’s neck rose as Spinners pulled at the static electricity in their heavy woolen vests. Metal clanged. Wood snapped. Whips cracked.

  Chaos reigned.

  It was impossible to tell who was doing what, who was fighting whom, and why. Was that a Tiller of Greenwood or a Tiller Royalist? Were those Forgers looking to escape or were they stalking the Spinners? And still, the only Gemmers Claire spotted aside from herself were Jasper and Estelle. What had happened to Stonehaven?

  The horse reared, screaming its fright, before slamming down right where Sophie was—or had been. In the confusion, Sophie had disappeared. Her chains, however, lay on the dais.

  Sophie. Claire had to get to Sophie!

  Claire thrust her hand into her pocket and pulled out the budding pencil. But she didn’t know what to do with it. In the roaring, scattered, terrified crowd, no one knew who their enemy was and who was their friend.

  “Claire!” someone shouted. A woman’s voice.

  Claire whirled around and saw a massive lion chimera barreling toward her, Aunt Nadia’s gray head peering over its ears. The mayor of Woven Root gave a sharp tug on its copper mane, and the chimera immediately clanged to a stop.

  “Claire,” Nadia repeated. She leaned down and gripped Claire’s hand with her own. “You’re safe!” She gave Claire’s hand a quick squeeze, then let go. Auntly duties fulfilled, she asked, “Where’s the crown?”

  “The tines were up there—” Claire gestured at the dais. “On a broken pillar!”

  Nadia nodded sharply. “Get out of here!” she said, leaning forward against the chimera’s neck to dodge a spinning dagger. “Go to Greenwood. We’ve planted Camouflora around it. You’ll be safe there!” With that, the mayor dug her heels into the copper sides, and the lion chimera—which Claire had already thought was pretty fast—turned into a copper blur as Nadia charged toward the front.

  Grit and dust trickled down from the ceiling, and a few stone blocks clattered near her feet. Claire looked up. The ruins were old, and one wayward Exploding Mulberry could make the entire structure collapse. More gravel fell in front of her, and this time, Claire realized that when the pebbles hit the ground, they didn’t stop moving. They jumped and wiggled, like kernels in a frying pan. Frowning, she reached down to pick one up, but as her hand neared the earth, she yanked it back.

  Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.

  The ground—it was warm. And Claire felt a hum. But it didn’t originate from her. It came from the earth itself. Magic was swelling beneath her feet. And she could feel its thrum spread out and sink down, deep …

  and deeper …

  and deeper into the earth.

  “GET OUT OF HERE!” Claire screamed to nobody and everybody as she leaped to her feet. She swayed as the hum rattled her knees. “OUT OF THE RUINS!”

  But no one paid her any attention. They were too focused on their own battles. Claire began to run. As she sprinted past a group of huddled dancers hiding behind a fallen stone, she managed to scrape out, “It’s going to collapse! Out!” She didn’t wait for their response but kept running. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

  Her cry was picked up, and she could feel people—Forgers, Tillers, Spinners—begin to rush for the open entryway, the wooden doors long ago rotted away. They spilled out into the courtyard. And still, Claire could feel the hum beneath her feet.

  “KEEP RUNNING!” Claire shouted. Around her, she was aware of others fleeing into the night. Her feet pounded the cobblestones of the courtyard as she aimed for the crumbling garden wall. But no matter how fast she moved, she couldn’t seem to escape the thrum beneath her feet. The
earth shuddered—

  —Claire could picture what was happening: Estelle, inside, surrounded and protected by her Royalists, aided by the unicorn artifacts that would now be draped across her, raising the ram’s head cane high and slamming it down—

  —and the world cracked open.

  Screams and thumps filled the air as fissures and trenches suddenly laced the garden. Whole trees disappeared as the ground opened up beneath. Claire fell and grasped at the grass as the ground undulated, as though it were a trampoline and not solid at all. From the new cracks in the earth, shadows darker than the night rose up like a black fog and, with them, a cold as bitter as hate: wraiths.

  Their queen had called them, and they had obeyed.

  The wraiths rose up from the newly formed fissures, and Claire realized for the first time that the cracks in the earth’s surface weren’t natural but followed straight lines and sharp edges. The queen had collapsed the tunnels that must have crisscrossed beneath Hilltop Palace, just as they crisscrossed beneath Starscrape Citadel and the Drowning Fortress—all built by Gemmer architects.

  Claire had wondered once before where wraiths dwelled during the daylight hours, and here was the answer: under the earth, away from the sun, the only thing that wraiths feared, aside from a unicorn’s horn.

  But Sophie had no horn, and the sun was hours away.

  The ground continued to tremble, and Claire knew she couldn’t stand up yet. And so she began to crawl as fast as she could through the garden, twigs and pebbles jabbing into her knees and palms. Her breath came in fast white puffs as the air grew colder and colder. Wraiths spilled into the garden.

  All around her, she was aware of others running, and she wished she could call out to them—to ask them if they were Sophie or Nett or Sena or Thorn or Lyric—but the cold had teeth, and it tore at her. Around her, shouts turned to sobs as the wraiths’ cold carved away any memory of warmth or love from the people who couldn’t outrun them.

  From somewhere nearby, Claire could hear the rusty screech of the chimera as their metal joints froze. She could tell that the riders—those who had managed to stay on—were fumbling for their cotton nets of spun sunlight that could keep the beasts at bay. A few bright bursts broke the night, followed by the inhuman shriek of a wraith hit by a Mulchbomb. But the humans had been surprised, and there were too many wraiths: more than Claire had seen in the Drowning Fortress. More than she had seen on the Sorrowful Plains. And they kept coming.

  Claire didn’t know when she’d stopped crawling, but she suddenly realized she was face-first in the leaves. She tried to roll over, to look up at the bare branches of fruit trees, but she couldn’t move. Her body was frozen, and soon, her mind would be, too. But … she was holding out longer than she had before. Now she was aware that though she was cold, the earth still felt warm beneath her, as though Estelle’s magic had given it a fever. If only Claire could help heal it. If only she could stitch the fissures back together, maybe she could stop the never-ending swell of shadows.

  But some things could not be fixed. Not even with magic.

  With that knowledge, Claire cut herself adrift into a tattered darkness.

  One without friends or hope.

  One without sisters.

  “THIS IS FOR MY GRANDFATHER!”

  A hot shout cut through the drowning black, pinching Claire, urging her to wake up. To fight. She knew that voice. Her first friend in Arden, Nettle Green. What, she wanted to ask, is he doing for Francis?

  And suddenly, the black beneath her eyelids was replaced with gold. Bright, shimmering gold. Claire opened her eyes and saw that the garden was on fire.

  With a yelp, she squeezed her eyes shut again, but the image was seared onto her brain: the fruit trees, the overlarge leaves, the rosebushes, the autumn leaves coating the ground, everything was a golden glow—a sun’s glow.

  It wasn’t fire. It was sunlight!

  Her ears were suddenly warm again, and she could hear the hiss of wraiths in retreat, a sound like ice evaporating in extreme heat. A little more cautiously, she cracked open her eyes, and peering through her lashes, she saw the roiling shadows hissing in pain and tumbling over one another to flee the daylight and dive back into the bowels of the earth.

  Sitting up, Claire brought her hand to her eyes, shielding herself from the brightness, even as she tried to look for its source. And there, in the center of all that golden glory, stood the black silhouette of Nettle Green, every inch of his five-foot frame fierce and determined as he pressed his palm against the trunk of a tree and asked if it would like to glow. If it would like to fight back against what had just disturbed its delicate root system and its home of thousands of years.

  Nett’s other hand was gripped by a girl whose long ponytail whipped in the wind like a victorious banner: Sophie. The garden’s light streamed out from around her like a halo, radiating over the entire hilltop, making everything that was previously unseen visible. And though Sophie still looked like Sophie, Claire felt that maybe she was already more unicorn than girl. Someone who was pure magic and made all magic stronger.

  Nett pulled back his hand, and slowly the sunlight trickled out of the plants, and the night’s blue darkness settled over them all again. But now the chimera and their riders had recovered, and the alchemists had their nets ready. With triumphant shouts, they galloped at the remaining dregs of the wraiths, sweeping them away from the people who were slowly staggering to their feet.

  Claire closed her eyes. She was so exhausted, she thought she might pass out right there.

  “Claire!” She felt a tug on her shoulder, and looking up, she saw that Sophie was pulling at her. Nett and Sena were already streaking ahead. “We need to retreat. The wraiths might not be able to withstand sunlight, but the Royalists can.”

  Claire nodded, understanding what her sister was saying. She let Sophie yank her to her feet. And that’s when she saw it.

  She almost fell back down again. “Sophie,” she croaked out. “The well.”

  The old stone well was no more. Smashed like a dropped cake, its stones lay on the ground like discarded crumbs.

  “I know,” Sophie said, and Claire could hear tears in her words. “Later. We’ll deal with it later.” Her voice hitched. “We need to get to Greenwood.”

  Gripping hands, the Martinson sisters ran down the hill—alongside a torrent of terrified Tillers, Spinners, and Forgers—toward the lanterns that waved above a brand-new hedge. Panting, they surged through the leafy embrace and stepped into an Arden that would never be the same.

  CHAPTER

  22

  Later, Claire would never quite remember how she came to be in the chaos of Greenwood’s Hearing Hall. All she knew was that one moment, she was running through the newly planted Camouflora, and in the next, she was standing beside Sophie while people rushed about, shouting instructions and carrying in the wounded from the hilltop.

  The Hearing Hall was a testament to Tiller talent, a building that had been grown instead of built. Tree trunks formed the walls of the space, and their branches arched upward and inward to form a leafy roof. Though most of the leaves in Arden had fallen, the branches of the Hearing Hall still retained their autumn splendor. It had been decorated for Starfell with garlands of paper stars draped from the ceiling, and the benches had been scooted to the sides to make room for round tables heaped with Tiller delicacies: powdered cookies in the shape of snowdrop flowers, sweet breads filled with jam, flaky spinach pies, and pitchers of sparkling chrysanthemum juice.

  But no one was touching them.

  Anxious children wearing festive star wreaths were herded out of the hall, while grown-ups turned benches into makeshift beds. Spinners frantically pulled out quilts for those shivering with wraith-burn, and Forgers hammered heat into coins before pressing them into hands blue with cold. Voices called for help, and footsteps pounded as healers from all guilds rushed to attend as many as they could, no matter the guild.

  “What should we do?�
� Claire asked, stepping out of the way of a Tiller sprinting through with jars of an inky purple liquid. “And what happened to the tines?”

  But Sophie didn’t seem to have heard her. Her sister was standing on her toes, looking frantic. “Do you see Thorn anywhere?”

  Claire’s stomach dropped. She knew she’d seen Sena and Nett running in front of them, even if she didn’t know where they were now, but Thorn … she hadn’t seen him at all.

  “If he’s alive,” Sophie said, spinning around, neck craned, “I’m going to murder him!”

  “What, why?” Claire asked. Her index finger tapped nervously against the pencil she’d pulled out of her pocket. “He helped us, Sophie! You can’t still be mad at him!”

  “Oh yes I can,” Sophie said. She looked left and right. “I’m beyond mad! I’m— THORN!”

  Claire jumped and shifted slightly to see the gangly figure of Thorn Barley just entering the Hearing Hall. One arm was clutched to his chest, holding something tight, while his other hung strangely at his side, limp. Dirt streaked his face and his blond hair was matted with leaves. But as he turned in the direction of Sophie’s voice, Claire thought that he had never looked more heroic.

  And then Claire saw what Thorn was cradling in his unbroken arm: two tall points, one with an oak leaf stamped on it, while the other held a gemstone.

  Two tines.

  One half of the Crown of Arden.

  Before Claire could fully register what she was seeing, she felt a draft against her arm, and she was suddenly aware of Sophie taking off, streaking across the hall. Thorn stood frozen, seemingly stunned, as Sophie charged him.

  “HOW DARE YOU, THORN BARLEY!” Sophie was shouting. “OF ALL THE RECKLESS, ASH-BRAINED, GRAVEL-HEADED THINGS TO DO!”

  Oh, no.

  “Sophie, don’t!” Claire called and broke into a run herself, chasing after her sister. Thorn was definitely going to need help managing Sophie in this temperament. Sophie wasn’t slowing down, even as she got nearer to Thorn. Was she going to run him over?