Even the Darkest Stars (Even the Darkest Stars #1)
Heather Fawcett
DEDICATION
For all those who wander
PART I
AZMIRI
ONE
I STRETCHED MY hands over the dragon eggs, focusing all my concentration on their indigo shells, and murmured the incantation. The air rippled and shimmered.
I can do this. The thought was born of desperation rather than confidence. My fingers were frozen, my stomach growled, and my legs ached from hours sitting cross-legged. Behind me, the sheer slopes of Mount Azmiri, draped with cobweb clouds, rose to greet the gray sky. Beyond the narrow ledge I crouched on, the mountainside fell away as if hewn by an ax. The forest far below was hidden under waves of mist, with only a few treetops floating above the surface like skeletal ships. The wind stirred my hair and slid its long fingers down the collar of my chuba. I shivered. The faint light gathering over the eggs flickered and died.
Chirri smacked me on the back of my head, causing me to drop my talisman, a string of ravensbone beads. “Foolish girl! Don’t break your concentration. You’ll never get it right that way.”
“I’ll never get it right any way,” I muttered.
She smacked me again. Perhaps she thought I would do better if my brains were rearranged. “This is the simplest resurrection spell I can teach you at your level. Do. It. Again.”
I made a noise halfway between a sigh and a growl. The incense burning beside the clutch of lifeless eggs tickled my nose, and I pressed my lips together. If I sneezed, Chirri would make us go inside, into her cramped, airless hut, with its smell of burned herbs and its shelves lined with poorly cleaned animal skulls. Sending a silent prayer to the spirits, I looped the talisman around my hands, shook the beads over the eggs, and began the incantation again.
After several moments, Chirri let out an exasperated cry. “Are you speaking the words correctly?”
“Yes, Chirri,” I said, straining to keep the anger from my voice. “I’m speaking the words correctly. I’m focusing my mind. I’m doing everything right, and I’m still a completely useless apprentice.”
“You are wasting time with this obstinacy, Kamzin.”
“We’ve been here since dawn,” I snapped, losing my temper at last. “Trust me, the last thing I want to do is waste time.”
The old woman smiled, the folds of her many wrinkles deepening, and I cursed my foolishness. Chirri was never angry, not truly—she merely used it as a ploy to make others reveal their weaknesses.
“You will stay here,” she said slowly, “until every egg has hatched. Or until the glaciers rise up and cover the village, or the witches return to the mountains in search of human souls.”
Chortling at my expression, Chirri untucked her legs and drew herself to her feet, arranging her many shawls with exaggerated care. Then she retreated toward her hut, which perched higher up the mountainside on an even more precarious ledge. From there, she would watch me until I did as I was told.
Or froze to death.
I glared at the eggs, as if my incompetence was their fault. With a growl, I stretched my aching limbs, then settled in to try again. A bead of sweat trickled down my neck.
“Hshhh,” came a low voice behind me. “Is she gone?”
I whirled. “Tem!”
To my astonishment, my best friend’s head poked up over the side of the ledge. He must have climbed sideways from the terraces, finding footholds and handholds in the weathered granite of the mountainside.
“Er—Kamzin?” he said. “Could you give me a hand? My fingers are numb.”
Bracing my foot against a rock, I hauled him onto the ledge. He collapsed on the ground, panting.
“How long were you down there?”
“Only since your fiftieth try,” he said. I tried to punch him, but he rolled away, laughing. His handsome face was flushed with cold, and his hair, which usually hung low over his forehead, obscuring half his features, stuck out every which way. I couldn’t help laughing too. I had never been happier to see him in my life.
“You look like a rooster,” I said.
He blushed, running his hands through his hair so it would curtain his face again.
“You’d better hurry,” I said, glancing over my shoulder. The clouds were advancing up the slope, sweeping over us in lacy bands. Chirri had vanished, as had her hut. “This weather won’t hold.”
He gazed at me uncomprehendingly. “What are you talking about?”
“You know what—you have to help me with these eggs.”
“I can’t.” His face went white. “Chirri will know.”
“She won’t. She won’t even know you were here.”
He glanced from me to the eggs, then back at me again. “But she’ll never believe—”
I grabbed his shoulder. “It doesn’t matter if she believes it or not. It just has to happen, so I can get out of here. Please, Tem. I’m going crazy.”
He glanced from me to the eggs. I could see him weighing his fear of Chirri against his desire to help me. “All right,” he said finally. “But Chirri can’t know I can do this. Or my father.”
I nodded. Tem’s father worked for my own father, as his head herdsman. He was a dour, sharp-tempered man who was gentler with a misbehaving yak than he was with his son. Tem was supposed to follow in his footsteps, and his father wouldn’t be pleased to learn that his true talent lay in shamanism, not husbandry.
Tem took the talisman, winding the beads around his fingers, and began to chant. He seemed to change, in that moment—something in his bearing and demeanor shifted slightly, and he became almost a stranger.
I shivered. I had watched Tem work spells before—he often helped me practice, in secret—but I had never entirely grown used to it. He murmured the incantation in the shamanic language confidently, absently, with none of his usual self-consciousness, and I could feel the power gather like a storm. The ravensbone made a shivery sound that seemed to vibrate the air.
The eggs glowed. The glow turned to flickering, like sunlight through branches. Cracks appeared in the shells, and then, suddenly, they burst apart.
The baby dragons were the size of sparrows, with long, snakelike bodies supported by six squat legs. They began chittering almost immediately, shaking their damp wings in the breeze. The little lights they carried in their bellies flickered on and off. These were thin and colorless when the dragons were young; as they aged, they would gradually darken and take on color—commonly, an iridescent blue or green.
“Stand back,” Tem said. He murmured again to the largest dragon, which let out a questioning chirp. As one, the dragons spread their wings and took flight. They swirled around us in a tumult of wind and feathery scales, making me shriek and laugh. Then they zoomed away like a glittering arrow, their lights bouncing through the clouds.
“Where are they going?” I said.
“I sent them to Chirri.”