Every Star in the Sky Page 9

  I so desperately want a family. Not a husband and kids, but flesh and blood people whose flesh and blood is as much mine as it is theirs. Maybe then the loneliness wouldn’t be so intolerable. I think of the other four daughters of Reya. I think I can remember their names-- Kira, Lynn, Regan, Charlotte. Maybe they’ve been looking for me, the same way I’ve been looking for them without even realizing it.

  The puzzle that Leon keeps talking about-- the way to defeat Calico Exodus, the plague, the crow people. I wonder what part my supposed sisters and I am to play. I can’t imagine being part of a puzzle, but I can imagine being the last piece that someone is trying to put in the last empty spot, only to discover that I don’t fit, and I’m from a different puzzle, a different world, entirely.

  I want to read, but I am tired, so I sleep instead.

  *

  “Wake up, sunshine. Let’s get to that cemetery.”

  Leon lights a lantern and sets it on the floor so the room isn’t pitch black. The brightness startles me. I gasp and cover my eyes.

  “My sisters never came.”

  He shrugs, “You can meet them today, probably, when you have to train with them.”

  “Training,” I mumble, feeling sick.

  “Oh, c’mon. It’s not that bad. Get the hell up. I made pancakes.”

  I grin and get to my feet, rushing to the mess hall. Leon points out the stack on a table, and I rush over and begin to shovel the buttery, chocolaty perfection into my mouth.

  “You know, you could try slowing it down a bit and enjoying ‘em a little,” a heavy voice growls from behind me. A man who must be at least six and a half feet tall is smiling at me as he pets Bear’s head.

  “Name’s Brom. I’m comin’ with y’all to that cemetery today. The boss is real excited about some daggers or somethin’. Doesn’t matter to me. He gives orders, I follow ‘em, and he lets me have booze for breakfast.” He takes a swig of a jug in his free hand, a dark, heavy-looking liquid pooled inside. “I like yer dog. Nice ‘n big, the way a dog was intended to be. Bet he could maul up a coyote pretty bad. Who’re you?”

  “I’m Jay,” I say with an awkward nod. “That’s Bear. He’s never mauled anything before, actually. I don’t think it’s in him to kill another animal.”

  Brom smiles and kneels down, looking into Bear’s eyes. “I like ‘im. Real nice dog. I understand ya, buddy. Hard bein’ big and scary lookin’ and not have the heart to do anything with it, huh?”

  Brom takes a plate from a different table and puts it on mine, handing a sausage patty to Bear. “Hope ya don’t mind if I set with ya a while. We haven’t had a new recruit in ages.”

  I shake my head and smile cautiously. “I don’t mind.”

  He grins, “Good thing. I had a dog die a year back now. Named him Goliath. St. Bernard looking, just like this one. He got real old and couldn’t walk anymore so I ended up havin’ to put him down. I miss that dog, I tell ya. I miss that goddamn dog every goddamn day. Where’d this fella come from, huh?” He feeds him a piece of bacon, and I can’t help but feel relaxed, even next to this giant of a man. He didn’t care who I was. He just wanted to talk and he liked dogs. Maybe the simple people are the best kind.

  “My parents found him back in my village. He was a stray. They looked everywhere for his owner but nobody said he was their dog, and I’d always wanted one. I guess it was fate. He’s been by my side ever since.”

  Brom grins at me. “I like you. You can tell how good a person is by how good they treat their dog. Ain’t never liked somebody who didn’t think that dogs was family too. But you think that. I know.”

  I watch the rough, brownish skin of his face wrinkle up when he smiles at me.

  “I’ve never met anyone so friendly,” I say.

  He chuckles, “Well, ya ain’t been meetin’ the right kind of people. Life ain’t nothin’ without bein’ nice to everybody. Gotta give everyone a chance. Don’t know who they are or what they’re goin’ through till you talk to ‘em. Judgin’ somebody afore you meet ‘em is just about the worst thing you can do. Never know what kinda stories you’ll miss out on.”

  I can’t help but shake my head in disbelief. This tree trunk of a man, even though he uses different words, sounds exactly like my frail, fifty-year-old mother.

  He takes another swig from his whiskey jug and shows it to me. “Want some?”

  “No, thanks. I don’t drink.”

  “We don’t have age restrictions here. Anybody can drink if they wanna drink and don’t get too tipsy. Summa these guys are real angry drunks. Funny to watch ‘em change like that.”

  I shake my head, “I’ve heard bad things. I couldn’t.”

  The smell of alcohol only reminds me of the breath and clothes of the soldiers that took my dad away. Alcohol is anger and sadness and pain.

  “That’s alright,” he says. “It’s not fer everybody.” His voice is slow, thick blue waves washing a white shore. He is simple and strong and kind, and he reminds me of home and makes me feel at home at the same time.

  “Who else is coming with us today?”

  “Oh, I dunno. I don’t pay much attention. But Leon’ll prolly bring Wilson, Malcolm, Hayden…”

  Brom rattles off about ten names, and I don’t remember a single one of them. He’s passing a frisbee to a brick wall.

  Leon. And a girl.

  A really pretty girl.

  My stomach lurches up to my throat and I look away.

  “Oh, that’s there’s Regan. She’s one o’ th’ daughters of Reya-- that’s the moon spirit for this weird religion from the nameless villages-- they call it Sylvism, I think. Some play on the Latin word for forest, since that’s where all those villages are. She’s real pretty, ain’t she? All the Reya daughters are real pretty. Wish my DNA gave me somethin’ besides bein’ tall as a building.”

  Regan. My sister.

  “I found somebody for you to meet,” Leon says, giving me a pleasant nod. But he suddenly seems distant, worlds away. His silvery eyes are dim and blank, and a little sad.

  Regan holds out a hand and I stand up to meet it with my own. I try to ignore the fact that I’m using my ugly hand and she’s perfect.

  “Hi, I’m Regan. Nice to meet you.”

  She has ginger red hair and eyes the color of ancient jade, like her irises were imported from a museum. She’s curvy in all the right places, but still fit. And she’s the daughter of strength, if I remember right. I felt it in her fingers. Like she’s asserting herself over me, whether she intends to or not.

  “R-Rose. Nice to meet you too,” I mumble.

  Brom looks up at me and his mouth drops open a little bit. Suddenly, all eyes in the mess hall are on me. I have the urge to run far, far away and never come back.

  “Never thought we’d find you, I hafta say. We found Charlotte a year ago, and we’ve been looking for you ever since. Now that we have you… Maybe we stand a chance against that bastard Exodus. Welcome to the team.”

  Her voice is so relaxed and cool, it’s almost cold. I don’t know what I expected. I am her sister, technically. Maybe some sort of happiness, joy. Some sort of light in her eyes. But there’s nothing. She just looks bored and vaguely annoyed.

  “Um, thanks.”

  Leon speaks up, “Regan will be joining us at the cemetery today. I figured you two could get to know each other.”

  “Stupid idea that this one’s coming with if you ask me, Leon. What training does she have?”

  “Enough,” he retorts, voice rigid. Regan blinks a few times, crosses one leg over the other, and leans against the wall as she picks at something on one of her nails. His prominent authority is very clear. I fight back a snarky smile as she leans against the wall in defeat.

  “Well I hope your paints have fucking poison in them, art girl, or you’ll die your first ride out.”

  I clench my fists, “And I hope you’re not the pathetic, insecure bitch you’re making yourself out to be.”

  I don’t know where
the words come from, but they slip out, and I can’t take them back. I see Leon smirk a bit from the corner of my eye, when she pins me against a wall.

  “What’d you say, you little freak?” She asks, her eyes a forest fire.

  “All I said is that maybe you’re a little sad and pathetic to be picking on somebody a foot shorter than you that you don’t even know, and that maybe, just maybe, I’m a person and not a flimsy little girl,” I hiss quietly in her face as I thrust my fist into her stomach. She reels back in pain, releasing my wrists, and I take the opportunity to slip away from her.

  “That little bitch punched me!” Regan yells, a single hand clutching her stomach.

  “Maybe you asked for it,” Leon shrugs noncommittally.

  I sit back down to my pancakes and shovel them aggressively into my mouth.

  “She has really sweaty meat hands,” I whisper to myself, pondering. Brom hears me and tries really hard not to laugh, but he ends up choking on his scrambled eggs and wiping tears of laughter from his face. I can’t help but feel a little encouraged as Brom pounds the table with his fist.

  First family member met, first enemy made. An incredibly productive start to my first day as a Nightingale.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Leon ends up taking fewer people than Brom had predicted. Just Regan, Brom, and I. The stables is about a 10-minute walk through the woods away, and a few men are working inside, feeding and watering 1,500-pound animals that snort and paw their hooves in the morning air.

  I love the smell. The mustiness of hay, the freshness of a light sheen of sweat. Barns have always smelled like paradise to me. Horses just have always had a particular smell about them that I can’t get enough of.

  Unlike the horses from the palace, the horses here are in a large palette of colors. There’s twelve stalls, six on either side of the aisle, and I can see black, brown, bay, palomino, gray, paint, appaloosa, roan, and sorrel.

  Dante is in the last stall, and he nickers to Leon as he approaches the bars of the stall. An easy smile grows on Leon’s lips as he pulls some carrots from his pocket, feeding Dante and whispering good mornings to the black stallion. Dante seems as pleased to see Leon as Leon is to see him.

  “Don’t stare at him like that. It’s weird,” Regan hisses in my ear.

  “Look how much they love each other,” I say back, unfazed, my mind seeming to forget that my sister was cruel and brutish.

  She rolls her eyes and walks away.

  “Hey, Jay, have you ridden before?” Leon asks without looking away from his horse.

  “Yessir.”

  “Good. You can saddle up?”

  “No problem.”

  He nods, “Your horse is the buckskin with the white stripe and four socks. His name’s Lucky. Try to find a fifteen-inch saddle and use a snaffle on him.”

  “How do I know how big the saddles are?”

  “They have little paper tags on them if nobody’s claimed it yet. You’ll figure it out in the tack room.”

  “U-um… What’s a snaffle?”

  Leon shakes his head as he gives Dante the last carrot before walking into a separated room in the middle left of the stable. He makes a vague hand gesture, which I assume to mean ‘follow me.’ That’s about all he says to me anyway. Thanks context clues.

  I follow him into a small, dimly lit room. Everything seems to be dimly lit around here. Luckily, the morning sun is beginning to bloom on the horizon, its rays kissing the window panes of the stable.

  He closes the door behind him. “Ignore her. She’s just jealous.” He begins rifling through the paper tags on the saddles, looking for a fifteen.

  “Jealous of what? She looks like every guy’s fantasy.”

  “Not every guy,” he mumbles, still digging through the saddles. “She doesn’t want anyone stealing her thunder. Everyone is a threat to her. She wants to be the best at everything, and when she isn’t, she turns into the psycho bitch from hell.”

  “What am I better at than her?”

  He shrugs, “You’re interesting. You’re soft and gentle, funny, smart.”

  He finds the saddle and he must turn around too quickly, because one second he’s a few yards away, and the next, his face is right next to mine.

  I can’t help but stare at his full, soft lips. My entire body feels like a raging tornado of fire and hormones, and I can’t move. I study his nose and his eyes and the way his hair falls just right, like leaves in autumn. My breath breaks apart and my tongue shatters and I can’t speak and my brain shatters and I can’t think and who the hell knows how to breathe anymore anyway--

  His breath on my cheek is shaky and hot, until it’s not there anymore.

  “Snaffles look like this,” he says, holding the metal end of the bridle in one hand, explaining something about the shaft of the bit and d-rings and o-rings.

  All I can think about is how badly I want to hold his hand, and how he smells like forests and bonfires and purple night skies and beating hearts against lace ribcages.

  He takes the saddle and bridle and leaves the room.

  I walk out in the stables feeling dizzy as I take the nylon halter from Lucky’s stall door. He snorts softly when he sees me and nods his head a few times in eagerness.

  I buckle the halter over Lucky’s head, feeling the velvet of his nose with my good hand. I don’t want to show him how ugly I am. Maybe he wouldn’t like me then.

  I latch him into the cross ties and run a curry through his shedding coat, releasing pounds of buttermilk fuzz back into the wild. He rests placidly in the ties, his left hind leg cocked comfortably as I finish with a stiff brush and pick his feet free of debris. Putting on the saddle and bridle was second nature, and Lucky seemed eager to be helpful, standing perfectly still as I cinch the saddle around his waist and gladly taking the bit into his soft pink mouth.

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a horse happier to just be alive than Lucky.

  By the time I lead Lucky out of the stables, the others are waiting. Leon is on Dante, Brom is on a big bay Clydesdale, and Regan is on a light gray Thoroughbred. I am the shortest person, and Lucky is the shortest horse.

  “Everybody follow my pace. Brom, you’re behind me, then Jay, and Regan, you watch the back.”

  I mount Lucky just as Dante takes off at full speed to the exit of the forest, and when Brom goes, Lucky gallops after like a giddy toddler. I smile at his desire to run, his joy, the way he occasionally stumbles a little but it never fazes him. I let the warm morning sunshine stain my skin, and the steady breeze whip my hair.

  We are surrounded by long emerald grass, daffodils, daisies, and dandelions; cumulus clouds like huge puffy sky hills. The steady beat of hooves and rustling grass is a song, and the breeze is a song, and the feeling in my heart is a song. Maybe there is music in everything.

  I wonder, for a moment, if this is what freedom feels like.

  I wonder if freedom feels the same way that love does.

  And in this moment, there is an all-encompassing love and peace, deep and steady like and endless river, running deep within my soul like rainbow veins in opal stones.

  It’s strange to look at a valley of dead bodies on such a beautiful day. The songs stop all at once, and suddenly the sun seems just a bit too bright to be pleasant.

  Lucky doesn’t seem to mind as I dismount and tie him in an escape knot to the gate encircling the cemetery. Every stone is the same, about two and a half feet tall, the same pale slate gray, the same crooked font engravings of names. The only difference is the names themselves.

  It is an endless valley of death. The rows of headstones meet the horizon and even then refuse to stop.

  “What, is the little princess scared?” Regan growls maliciously.

  “No, but I would think that death would make anyone a little uneasy,” I respond, passing her by as Leo leads the way through the maze of gray stone.

  It feels like we’ve been walking in silence forever when we find the grave.

&nbs
p; EVAN OLSON was jaggedly carved into the stone.

  That’s when I notice that Leon had pulled a trowel from his belt and was digging into the center of the grave mound.

  “What are you doing?” I cry, mortified.

  “I’m not happy about it either, Jay. But this is what the bastard wanted, I guess. The blades are in here. Regan, Brom, dig with me.”

  They ask no questions, setting their fingers into the thick earth and pulling patches of it away from the ground. The soil is so dark it’s nearly black.

  Once Leon has broken the main ground with the trowel and softened the soil, he heaves mounds of soil away from the grave and throws it behind him. I kneel at his side and begin doing the same thing.

  He turns, as if he’s going to ask me why I’m helping, but there are suddenly tears in my eyes and he says nothing. We move the soil together for about 30 minutes until our fingers begin to scratch the surface of the coffin.

  “Regan. Brom. You know what to do.”

  They go on different sides of the grave, standing perpendicular to the headstone, and they dig beneath and in one swift push of their legs, Evan’s coffin is out in the open ground.

  Leon tries to open it, his fingers fumbling for some sort of latch, when he groans and slams his fist on the face of the coffin.

  “Locked,” he says, face red and damp with sweat.

  I kneel next to him and examine the lock, round and oddly shaped, tapering petals and a vein to infinity.

  I pull the dagger from my belt and gently push it into the lock and turn it until I hear a click.

  Leon can only stare at me, his mouth slightly agape, as I push the cover away.

  Inside are four blades of opal and gold, just like mine, a sealed letter with my name on it, and a journal.

  There is no body, no skeleton, no remains of anything resonant of death.

  Leon takes the four blades and puts them into a satchel, sealing it tight. “Take the journal and the letter. Those are yours.”

  “You don’t want to read the journal?”

  “My best friend… That bastard lied to me. He wasn’t dead. He’s never been dead. I want nothing to do with him,” Leon says in a ragged breath.