The Star Shard

by Frederic S. Durbin

  And of course, Cymbril had to sing. Balancing on an oaken chest that served as her stage, she took request after request, her eyes stinging from the smoke, her stomach churning from the mingled odors of roast meat and spices, baked bread and wine, sweat and dog breath. This last was exuded by Bale, Master Rombol's lanky, enormous hound.

  Bale would sidle among the tables, his head as high as the revelers' shoulders. He favored those he fancied with his glistening black nose under their arms, demanding a pat by flipping his neck—a powerful flip that could send a diner's cup or knife flying. All obliged him, some with coarse affection, some glancing nervously toward Rombol. With a plotch, plotch, plotch of his paws, Bale would approach Cymbril and stand motionless, his jowly snout raised. His sleepy, droopy eyes regarding her, he would sigh, a long expulsion of rancid heat that made her turn away and gasp for air.

  When at last the feast was over, Cymbril bowed to those who clapped with greasy hands. She lifted her hem and carefully stepped down from the chest. Many merchants were already snoring, their heads on the tables in the flickering, oily light. As the clearers padded along the trestles, silent as ghosts, Cymbril moved to help them.

  "That will do, Cymbril," called Master Rombol. Slouched in his carved chair, he licked his fingers and wiped them on his black beard. He pointed at Cymbril with a chicken bone. "Go and rest your voice now. Tomorrow we roll into Highcircle, where the crowds await with their heavy purses!"

  Several of the groggy merchants grinned.

  "Be in your blue dress at first light." Rombol tossed the bone to Bale, who caught and crunched it in his jaws.

  Cymbril curtsied and hurried into the corridor, thinking, If you're worried about my voice, Master Rombol, why do you make me sing in the pipe smoke? At least during market journeys, she could spend the day in fresh air, and by evening she had no voice left for the dining hall.

  Shutting the door behind her, she leaned against it and inhaled the coolness. This hallway—called the Starpath, on the Rake's uppermost level—was a street tonight, its ceiling drawn back into the walls to let in the breeze and the light of the sky.

  Cymbril tipped back her head, gazing up between walls at the uncountable bright stars—thousands of them, even in this thin strip of sky—so high above the world of masters and money. One of the Rake's cats rubbed against her ankles, and she knelt to stroke its fur. "It's Highcircle tomorrow, Miwa," Cymbril told the cat. "You'll have plenty of new mice to chase." Miwa purred, looking exactly as if she understood. Her eyes glowed with the blue-green fire of the Fey world. Cats could always see the land of the Faeries, the Sidhe folk, side by side with the world of humankind. Cymbril fingered the stone in her skirt's pocket. She had a little of the Sidhe's fire, too.

  Following the Starpath, she reached a square courtyard no more than ten paces across. At its center, a stone basin green with moss always held rainwater. It was full and clear after spring showers, brackish and murky by the end of summer, when it had collected dust, seedpods, and leaves blown from trees on the orchard deck towering just aft. Three closed doors led into different passageways. Cymbril liked to dip her hands into the water when it was fresh and cold. She admired how the pool reflected clouds in the daytime, stars at night.

  But most of all, she enjoyed seeing the Monk's Door.

  Long before, an artist had painted a picture on the door opposite the Starpath. Cymbril brushed it with her fingertips now—even in the starlight, the faded colors were visible. It showed a friar or monk with a gentle face, praying in a garden beneath a tree. The depiction had nothing to do with the corridor behind it, which led to the fruit bins and pruners' sheds. Cymbril knew of no other door on the Rake that bore a picture. It was only here, for reasons unknown, that some forgotten painter had chosen to preserve the image of a praying monk. And over the figure's tonsured head, twining among the leaves of trees, there were faint letters that read:

  WISE IS THE ONE, AND TRULY FREE,

  WHO MAKES A FRIEND OF AN ENEMY.

  Cymbril smiled, because the words seemed so much at odds with what the Rake's merchants believed. She was certain Rombol had not ordered the painting done. Perhaps Rombol's father, the Rake's first master, had been a different sort of man than his son. She sat on the basin's mossy edge and petted Miwa, who purred and narrowed her eyes to glowing crescents.

  But at the sound of the Overseer's horn, pulleys and chains began to move deep under the decks. Gears gnashed, axles creaked, and the Rake clawed the ground. The Thunder Rake rolled at night—daylight was for buying and selling. At the lurch of motion, Cymbril brightened. This was the hour she'd been waiting for all day. Far below, in the Pushpull Chamber, the benches were full again. After giving Miwa a final neck rub, she ran to the nearest crank basket and descended.

  Cymbril pushed through a curtain of stringy brown vines. Dark and drippy, the room within was warm with many bodies, but it had none of the stuffiness of the dining hall. The Urrmsh occupied this long, narrow chamber, and of all the Thunder Rake's inhabitants, only the Urrmsh were content.

  Even sitting on the rowing benches, they were taller than Cymbril, and as big around as boulders. Dark green and warty, they rocked back and forth, pushing and pulling on the "oars"—wooden levers that turned the gears that worked the Rake's tremendous claws, gouging the ground, drawing the vessel forward. The mouths and round eyes of the Urrmsh were like those of frogs. They had no ears, only nostril slits for noses, and short, thick legs. Most amazing were their muscular arms, so long they could reach to the floor, with hands that could crush a rock to powder. Humans, who generally had trouble trilling the r in "Urrmsh," also called them the Armfolk or the Strongarms.

  The Urrmsh smiled wide smiles as Cymbril passed between them, some pausing in their song to call her name or tap a fingertip on her head. She beamed and waved back, but she didn't try saying their names. Whenever she thought she'd learned them, the Armfolk changed places, rowing on different sides so that one arm wouldn't grow stronger than the other, and so that each rower could visit with a new bench-mate. The Urrmsh were nearly always singing, sometimes one by one, sometimes all together. The words were in their own language, which sounded something like the gurgle of rain through gutters, something like the purring of giant cats. "We sing our songs," they had explained to Cymbril. "We tell our tales, and we push and we pull. It is a good life."

  One Strongarm she could always find was Urrt, because of his especially lumpy head, his lopsided smile, and his great size. He was several hundred years old—not at all old by Urrmsh standards. (None of the Armfolk kept a very careful count of their ages, though many of them remembered the world from when it was quite different.) Tonight Urrt was rowing on the right, at the very front. Cymbril threaded her way up the center aisle, stepping over the puddles that leaked from the canal above. The Strongarms liked to be wet. They glistened in the light from two rows of lanterns on strings.

  There were just over three hundred of the Armfolk in the Pushpull Chamber, half on each side, two on each bench. The room itself lay in the center of the traveling city, deep in its cellars. Cymbril marveled that even this many rowers could move the Rake. It was a matter of levers, Urrt had told her—with a lever long enough, you could topple a mountain.

  Cymbril settled in the dry front corner against a bulkhead, Urrt towering like a cliff above her. Pulling up her knees, she wedged her toes against the edge of his foot, its toenails cracked and yellow with age. He said nothing, but his gentle eyes watched her each time he rocked forward, his fingers locked on the limb-thick oar. When the song rolled toward Urrt, he sang, his deep voice resonating in the boards. Cymbril hummed on the same pitch.

  She had always heard the tones of the world and had always answered them from within herself, matching the sound. As a very small girl, she'd stood in the middle of a deck and sung with the Rake. Her voice echoed the shriek of the axles, the roar of crowds, the stir of wind in leaves ... and added something of her own, a nameless emotion that was both joy and lon
eliness, a cry that would not be stilled. When Rombol had determined that nothing ailed her, that she was singing like no child he'd ever heard, he found her a teacher of music and voice. Rombol knew a commodity when he heard one.

  Now, sitting at Urrt's feet, Cymbril untied the silver twine from her hair, pulling free the jeweled pin. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders. Sliding the twine into her pocket, she withdrew the stone and laid her two treasures onto the table made by her skirt between her knees.

  A stone from her father, a hairpin from her mother ... but Cymbril had no faces to go with the words. Her mother and father had both died of the plague that swept the village where Cymbril had been born. After that, there had been an old woman who cared for her—or fed her, at least. Cymbril mostly remembered her red scarf and hairy chin. Then there was the Thunder Rake, and a woman of bony angles who'd taught Cymbril to sing. Selene—that was the woman's name. On the day Master Rombol sold Selene in Banburnish Crossing, Cymbril had learned that even people had prices. She'd understood then that Rombol wasn't her uncle or a charitable merchant who'd given her a home. He had bought her with shiny coins, just as people bought sacks of flour.

  Cymbril held the hairpin between her fingers. The tiny jewel at its top absorbed and magnified whatever light was present—just now, the flickering pink of the Pushpull lanterns. In harmonious contrast, the smooth, flat, palm-size stone from her father always glowed with the blue-green fire of marsh lights, of cats' eyes, of the moon on a midnight sea. "Urrt," Cymbril said suddenly, trilling the r with practiced ease, "tell me again."

  Urrt chuckled, the sound of rocks tumbling. "Never fear, little nightingale. You've heard it so often, you'll never forget." The thick oar lever passed back and forth over her head.

  "Please tell me again. I like hearing it from you."

  "Well, well," said Urrt, his voice hushed so as not to disturb the Strongarms' song—but the song echoed everywhere and could no more be disturbed than the earth's bones or oceans' tides. The song was not loud in the way that a crowd's roar was loud; it was more like the washing of waves on a sea coast, and quite conducive to sleep. "It is in the songs of the Urrmsh," Urrt said. "The stone is from your father and is the color of his eyes. The pin is from your mother and once adorned her hair. She was the most beautiful woman in the Misty Vales, and the sweetest singer, too. You, Cymbril, have her face and her voice." He glanced sideways at her with a full-moon eye. "Someday, little thrush, you must learn to sing in Urrmsh."

  Cymbril smiled. The Urrmsh traveled everywhere. There were many others besides those on the Rake. In woods and swamps, on grassy hills, they gathered to exchange their songs. The music wove together news and wisdom in ways that made the important things hard to forget. Cymbril carefully let the treasures slip back and forth in the lap of her skirt—a bright circle, a pink spark. If she squinted, they looked like a firefly and the moon.

  She was just beginning to feel drowsy when a long, braying tone resounded through the chamber, shattering the song. Wiltwain's horn again.

  "Hooooo!" called the Strongarms together, and leaned back on their oars. Behind the walls, winches shuddered. Out in the night, the Rake's wheels ground to a halt. The steel claws plunged into the ground and rested.

  Wiltwain the Overseer, Rombol's second in command, had blown the signal on his seashell trumpet. He appeared from the stairway, thrusting his sharp nose and chin through the moss curtain. "Just for a short bit, lads," he said, his glittering eyes sweeping the ranks of rowers. "We've got company coming aboard."

  Company after sundown, and with the Rake only just having gotten under way. What could this mean? Cymbril stowed the treasures in her pocket, and when Wiltwain had gone, she sprang to her feet.

  "See what it is, songbird," Urrt said. "But don't get stepped on."

  Cymbril laid a hand on his enormous knuckle, smiled at him and his bench-mate, and dashed from the chamber. She sprinted up one quick turn of the spiral stairs to the high-arching avenue called Wagonhall, where the rolling tents and shops stood ready to stream down into Highcircle at daybreak. As she ran between the double row of waiting carts, her slippers pattering, she heard the measured rattle of the ramp's chains. It was most unusual for Rombol to lower the ramp after dark. The lands outside towns were haunted by robbers, wolves, and worse things—things that the old cooks whispered of in the scullery on winter nights, especially when they wanted to keep the younger girls from giggling around the banked hearth fires.

  Hurrying forward with a shivery lightness in her chest, Cymbril wondered who—or what—might come up the ramp out of the night.

  Chapter 3

  Out of the Night and the Wild

  Lantern light flared in the lofty hold ahead. There came a murmur of voices, the thump of the jointed ramp unfolding and striking the ground, and the neighing of horses. Rombol called a greeting to someone. On the first balcony, Cymbril worked her way forward among the silent carts, their wheels braced with wedges. Three more levels soared above, but Rombol and his party—a few merchants and a squad of armored guards—stood on the chamber's floor one story below, where the ramp slanted down into the dark outside the Rake. Cymbril eased into the driver's seat of the front wagon, its yoke set against the balcony rail.

  Peeking over the footrest, she could see Rombol's group, but they weren't likely to see her ... unless her hair glimmered. Its gold did that in the glow of fires. After quickly gathering her hair, she jammed it down her collar and pulled the hood close around her face. Cymbril had learned to hide her head in order to avoid attention. People tended to stare at her startling blue eyes, her olive-golden skin, and, most of all, her shining hair—she simply didn't look like anyone else aboard the Rake.

  Cloaked riders rumbled up into the hold, night mist swirling around the horses' hooves. Spurs glinted on muddy boots. Some riders had long bows across their backs. Sheathed swords were tucked beneath their knees, and their eyes shone watchfully in the shadows of their cowls. Cymbril counted seven strangers. They stayed in their saddles but guided their horses to the sides, making way for the eighth newcomer, a woman on a pale chestnut steed. She flung back her hood and shook her flowing hair.

  Cymbril drew in her breath. The woman was not particularly tall, but she carried herself in a way that made her seem somehow larger than the rough men around her. A faint scar ran down her left cheek to the jaw. Her wide-set eyes fixed on Rombol. She did not smile.

  It was more than her appearance, though, that held Cymbril transfixed. The silvery scar, the hard line of her mouth, her eyes—she seemed familiar in a haunting, inexplicable way. Surely Cymbril would have remembered meeting such a person. The strange thought that leaped into her mind was: Maybe I dreamed her.

  "Brigit!" Rombol spread his arms as if greeting a close friend, but he kept his distance. "Welcome! The riders of the Lady honor us with their presence."

  The woman—Brigit—gave a slow, imperious nod. "My Lady of the Wild has received your tribute and grants you favor for another year. You may come and go through her lands."

  Rombol puffed out his chest and grinned in a way that showed no warmth. "That is good," he said.

  Cymbril could hardly believe what she was hearing. She'd seen Rombol fawn before nobles, but never defer to a mud-booted woman who would not even get off her horse to speak to him. Cymbril sat completely still, trying to catch every word.

  "But my visit now," Brigit continued, "does not concern my Lady Wildhair. It is an errand of my own. I bring news of your great good fortune."

  Wildhair. Eyes wide, Cymbril nodded to herself. She'd heard of Wildhair, the fierce Huntress—Queen of the Witching Wild.

  Rombol chuckled, hands on his barrel-like waist. "You hear news of me that I have not. What good fortune is mine?"

  "The fortune of the purchase you are about to make." Brigit signaled one of her riders, who prodded his black horse forward. Cymbril had thought the rider was a fat man, but when he shrugged open his cloak, she saw that he'd been concealing a small, sl
ender person on the saddle before him.

  Cymbril stared. It was a boy unlike any she'd ever seen. He had a long, beautiful face, a tiny mouth, and shoulder-length hair precisely the color of the moon. He wore a gray tunic that rippled like the swirling patterns of a stream.

  Rombol had begun to laugh at Brigit's words, but the sound snagged in his throat. For a full count of five, he gawked at the boy.

  At last Brigit showed the hint of a smile. "Yes. It's a Fey child. A Sidhe. They're not at all easy to catch. But he'll be worth the price."

  Rombol blinked. Like a man waking from a daydream, he glanced at his fellow merchants. "Worth it? How?"

  Brigit's horse snorted, almost as if expressing scorn at Rombol's ignorance.

  "They can see in the dark, for one thing," Brigit said. "With these eyes on your prow, you'll be able to run the Rake from Fencet to Ardle, straight through the Groag Swamp. A single night, open for business in the dawn. I believe you tried it once before and broke two wheels."

  One of her riders snickered.

  A gray-haired merchant spoke up—old Crenlaw, who seemed not to care if he offended the riders. "Do you take us for fools, Brigit? It's impossible to keep one of the Elder folk as a prisoner for very long. The birds of the air are all spies for the Sidhe. This boy's people will come to get him. We've no mind to make enemies of elfin enchanters."

  Brigit's eyes shone in the torch fire like those of a fox. Again something flashed in Cymbril's memory, beyond her reach—a dark mirror deep in her mind that reflected the light of those eyes, then was dark once more.

  "Master Rombol's not worried about that," Brigit said. "The old spells of protection guarding this Rake are still strong, though the hand that cast them is gone. Your rolling city is safe from Fey magic." Craftily, she added, "Only numbers and skill at arms could overwhelm you."