A Sliver of Stardust (23 page)

Wren's last thoughts were of home. Of her parents and how they would never know what became of her. Of Simon and his friendship. Of the warmth and life of Earth. And then she felt it. The whisper of wind against her cheek out in the eternal silence of space. A sensation of heat. Of well-being and hope. Something tugged hard on her shoulders. And then came the smell, the scent of spices and warmth and winter. And the rushing of wings. And the harmony of voices, before everything was blotted out in a brilliant flash of blue light.

Ring around the rosies,

Pocket full of posies.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

W
hen Wren opened her eyes she saw nothing but darkness, as though a black hole had swallowed her up. Then, as her sight adjusted, she saw glimmers of stardust nearby. She stood, ignoring the quaking of her knees, and moved closer to the wall that was covered with a glowing pattern. It was the winged shape, the one that she saw in her dreams, and this time it was alive. Papery wings sparkling with every shade of color fluttered like a butterfly's. With each movement, the soft sound ushered in the low notes of an antiphonal song. The sound didn't only reach Wren's ears, it thrummed through her chest. She stretched one hand
toward the wall of winged creatures, and that was when she heard it.
Wren.
Woven into the music, someone was calling her name. More than calling. Commanding.

Wren moved slowly toward the voice. The luminescent wings all around her lit a path through the darkness, the rocky floor sloping to a gradual descent. Illogically, the air grew warmer the lower she went, and the heat awakened the pain of her struggle with Jack. Her hands burned where the stone cut into her flesh, her jaw ached from clenching it under Jack's spell, and her calves grew more sore with every step.

The winged creatures accompanied her as she drew near the music. The notes sounded first like woodwinds, but earthy, as though someone was playing the breeze in the tops of the firs. Next came a chorus of strings interwoven with the pattering of rainfall. Percussion blended with the rush of waves on the ocean shores. Flutes with birdsong. Violins with the sound of weeping.

Wren wanted it to stop, and she wanted it to go on forever. The compelling voice rose above the music, urging her onward.
Wren.
She felt it coursing through her, pounding with each beat of her heart.
Wren. Wren. Wren.
And then she was there. In front of her was
the towering version of the wings. Two gigantic bird shapes, older and larger than Wren's full-grown falcon, stood stationed on either side of a doorway that throbbed with light.

Their wings were slicked back against their sides, the
U
-shape clear because of their size, feathery tips brushing against each other near the back. They weren't lit with the dusky light of stardust like their miniature counterparts were. Instead, they were the color of ashes, a blend of shadows the likes of which Wren had never seen. Beyond them was what seemed to be a fire that burned with blue flame instead of red. Opal-like stones ringed the blaze with cool light. In the center, pale green and turquoise and shimmering silver leaped and swirled in a mesmerizing dance. Above this hung something familiar. A giant pendulum, slowly tracing a smooth route over and among the unearthly flames.

Wren didn't know how long she stood there before she noticed that the music had stopped. A silence heavy with expectation filled the space, broken finally by the creatures in front of her. With the sound of entire flocks of birds in flight, they unfurled their wings, their length lit with a thousand tiny lights that peered out through a swirl of cloudy ash.

Wren.
This time Wren knew the voice was coming from one of the creatures. The word reverberated inside her as the creatures' wings met in an arch that framed the pendulum. Wren peered closer into the swirling stardust and saw two figures fighting on a platform in the midst of a streaked aurora, Jack's unmistakable web spread over them.

“That's me,” Wren breathed, as the images solidified. She watched them topple over the edge, outside the safety of the net, and then saw the swoop of a shadow, the outline of the giant creatures now in front of her plucking Wren out of the downward spiral.

“You saved me?” she asked.

We are the Ashes
, the voice told her.
The Crooked Man appoints us to watch this gateway. We have been watching for a long time, yet you and the boy are the first to come.

“Watching for what?” Wren asked, but the Ashes didn't reply. “The boy. Is he okay?” Wren wondered what more she should say. Had they rescued Jack as well? If so, where was he?

He lives.
More of the silence.
But he is not well.

Wren squinted at the dust that was moving faster, blotting out the image of her and the Ashes and forming the recognizable shape of Jack, kneeling on the floor.
Dark, ominous clouds whirled around him. “Where is he?” Wren asked.

Beyond. We warned him, and we warn you as well. Do not open the gateway. If you try, you will surely die.

“We can't open it,” Wren said simply. “We lost the key when we fell.”

The boy will not listen. He means to force it open, and he will do so regardless of the cost. The boy is in great peril. He always has been. Look.

The dark clouds cleared from around Jack's form. He looked like Jack, but younger, and he sat alone at the edge of a crowded cafeteria. Ordinary boys and girls moved around him, a few pointing and laughing, but most ignoring him altogether. And then the dust swirled, the scene shifting to show Jack sitting in a doctor's office.

“And what exactly is it that you claim to see?” the doctor was saying.

“Dust filled with lights of every color,” Jack said, his eyes wide with wonder. “It's beautiful. Like magic.” The stardust spun in the air between Jack's fingers, but it was obvious the doctor saw none of it.

The doctor frowned, making a note in Jack's chart. He reached into a sterile cupboard behind him for a
bottle of pills, and the swirls of stardust faded as the doctor explained the medicine to Jack.

The next image was of Jack in a small white room all alone. He sat in a corner sobbing, but no one came to him. Wren's throat felt raw. What was she watching? Things that had happened to Jack? Or things that were about to?
Swirl.

The next picture answered it for her. The Ashes showed her a scene from the dream world. The room with the black-and-white window. Boggen's room. And there was Jack, sitting across the table from Boggen, leaning in.

“You'll find the stone with my last message in the crypt,” Boggen was saying. “I hid it there before we left for Nod. Show it to Mary, give it to her, sell it to her, I don't care—but do whatever it takes to gain entrance to the Crooked House.” He patted Jack's head in a fatherly way. “They will lie to you. The Alchemists will tell you all sorts of horrible things about me. Don't believe them.”

“How could I?” Jack looked up at Boggen with a glassy-eyed worshipful gaze. “You saved me. You found me in my dreams and saved me, and I got away from that awful place.” He shivered. “I will find the
key for you. And the rhyme.”

Boggen's voice turned syrupy. “You have brilliant potential, Jack, and I doubt the Alchemists will see it. Why else do you think I'm going to all this trouble?” He patted Jack's head again. “It's for you, Jack. So that you can come be with us Magicians. You are special. You belong with us.”

Jack was nodding vigorously, the sadness around his eyes replaced with determination. “I will find it,” he said. “I'll do anything.”
Swirl.

It was Jack as Wren knew him now, dancing around the falcon mews at Pippen Hill. He held the gateway key in both hands, hugging it to his chest. “I found it! I found it! Boggen's going to make me a prince!” He skipped in a circle, his cloak streaming behind him, as he cast a stardust spell over the falcons.

Wren leaned closer, as though she could leap into the scene in front of her. So that was why Jack had done what he'd done. To escape whatever horrible thing had happened to him when he first tried to tell ordinary people about stardust. To go to Nod. To belong with the other Magicians. The scene began to grow dim, as though the light was fading, and then the swirling clouds of darkness and stardust returned, obscuring Wren's view. Soon, all sight of Jack was gone, leaving
only the swinging pendulum and beyond that a slab of a door that looked like it had been fashioned from a giant opal. Swirls of color covered the surface, and from its depth came an icy clarity that reminded Wren of the aurora.

Now you see
,
the Ashes told her.
The boy will do anything for Boggen. He means to force the gateway open, and he will die if he does. You must go to him. You are the one who will save him. Use the rhyme.

“What rhyme? Go to him how?” Wren took a step back looking up at the silent creatures. “And do what?”

The Ashes didn't answer. Instead, the melancholy music began again, this time joined with the Ashes' singing:
Ring around the rosies; pocket full of posies
;
ashes, ashes, we all fall down
. The third time through, the translucent door in front of her shuddered as a single crack thundered right through the center, dividing the mineral mass into two halves that fell backward into pieces. Wren felt the feather touch of wings against her skin, whispery ministrations that coated her with stardust. When her entire body was covered, they swept Wren past the jagged remainders of the door and into the space beyond.

As soon as Wren stepped through, the haunting song of the Ashes disappeared. She whirled around, and the
pendulum and blue fire behind her were gone. In front of her was a cavern, and Wren could see Jack kneeling before a circular opening in the floor about two paces across. Beyond it was a doorway covered with thick reams of stardust, woven so tightly together it looked like a giant glimmering spiderweb.
The gateway.

“I'm trying,” Jack was saying to someone. “But there's nothing I can put in the lock. I told you I lost the key.”

“Don't be a fool, boy,” a voice said from beyond the stardust web, and Wren's blood went cold, sending icy chills of fear all over her body.
Boggen.

“All along I thought you were the special one, Jack, that you were
different
. How you disappoint me. What a waste.” Boggen's words dripped with scorn and disgust, and Wren saw Jack crouch lower, his shoulders crumpling with shame. “I should never have dreamt of you in the first place, never have thrown away my time teaching you.”

“I can do better; just don't send me back.” Jack sounded panicked, all hints of his usual easy humor gone. “Not to the hospital. Not there.” Jack was babbling now, something about being stuffed with medicine and water dripping and night terrors. “They
thought I was crazy. Said I was hallucinating. That none of it was real.” A note of desperation entered his words. “You can't send me back now. Now that I know.” He gave a little cry of pain and then stood, pacing in front of the cobwebbed opening. “I can find something to open it. A stone or stardust or something.” He kept saying the same thing over and over, as though he were reciting a poem. Or a prayer. “You promised. You promised to give me a home. To teach me. You said the others would understand in the end.” His voice cracked with a sob. “You said you'd be like a grandfather to me. You promised.”

“Shut up!” Boggen's figure, a dark silhouette on the other side of the stardust web, pressed in. “And open the gateway.” His words took on a wheedling note. “Be a good lad and open the gateway. If you can do that, perhaps you can still come and live with me on Nod.”

“Don't do it, Jack. You'll die if you try,” Wren said, moving into the room. “Don't open the gateway.”

Jack's head darted up, fast as a snake's. He leapt to his feet, all trace of his sobbing gone, replaced by a smug smile on his face. He looked older and harder somehow. Less like the sobbing boy or the Jack Wren knew
and more like the dark Fiddler he was becoming.

“Boggen's using you,” Wren said in a low voice.

The shadow outside the door shifted. So much for Boggen not knowing she was there.

“The other Weather Changer,” Boggen said in that same bewitching voice. “Both of you the most brilliant apprentices in centuries.”

Wren couldn't see any stardust, couldn't see how Boggen could be working his magic, but he must be, because something in her wanted more than anything to believe him. The idea of being the most brilliant apprentice in centuries sounded good. Her lips formed a half smile in response before she remembered who she was. And where she was and why.

“Don't listen to him, Jack,” Wren said, trying to lock her gaze on Jack's. “He's a liar. He's been lying to you all along. About the message. About the Magicians. About everything.”

“What, are you jealous, Wren? Jealous that you might not be the only special Weather Changer Fiddler after all?” Jack sneered. “Who cares what you think? Besides”— Jack sprinkled some stardust over the hole in front of him—“you're too late.”

“Don't!” Wren shouted as she realized what he was doing. A cloud of stardust blossomed up from the
gateway lock, but it wasn't the usual harmony of colors. This was an array of unsettling hues: an eerie green, blinding red, and a ghastly brown color that sparked with black bolts of jagged energy. “I had a little treasure tree.” Jack began to sing the rhyme that would open the gateway.

“Jack, you've got to stop!” She ran toward him. “Jack! No!” Wren was halfway across the room when the ball of tainted stardust exploded into streams of piercing black daggers. One shot toward the gateway opening, the other swarmed toward Jack, and one pelted straight toward Wren.

She hardly had time to think. She rubbed some of the stardust the Ashes had coated her with and swirled it up in the air, scrambling for the words to the rhyme Simon had used to ward off the birds. She saw the stardust forming the same barrier, felt the warmth of the magic, and the smoking black missiles evaporated into her shield. Beyond, Jack had not been so lucky. The cloud of tainted stardust filled the air around him, covering him in a suffocating blanket that pressed his form down against the hard floor and seeped over to the gateway.

From behind her shield, Wren could hear Boggen's cry of pain, could see his shadow on the other side of
the gateway crumpling under the tainted stardust, the weapon of his own creation. Boggen fell to his knees, one hand stretched high in the cobwebbed door, as if to reach for help, and then his cry was cut off. For a moment, Wren thought the tainted stardust might yet pierce through, breaking open the gateway at last, despite all she had been through to stop it. But instead, it crept through the cracks, taking its sickly colors with it, seeping its poison onto the other side, and leaving the room empty except for Jack's lifeless form across the way.