5. A Goddess Falls from the Stars
A Goddess Falls from the Stars
ISABEL
I sabel picks through the boneyard, filling her woven satchel with shiny trinkets she finds and anything that looks like a valuable supply.
“I might as well take what I need as long as I’m here,” she mumbles to herself.
“Kaelen would say I should just get in and out quickly, but I just can’t help myself. ”
She approaches a body, wincing at the mangled sight, and grimaces as she kneels beside it.
She puts her hands on the man’s chest and looks up at the sky, saying a star-prayer over him so his soul may live with the stars.
When a star winks at her, for a moment burning brighter than the others, she smiles.
Searching the man’s pockets, she finds gold, coins, and other collectibles. She keeps the gold but doesn’t find anything else useful.
Isabel does the same to the other bodies she approaches, releasing their souls and checking their pockets. It wouldn’t feel right to take without giving something in return, and their trapped souls would scream into her dreams if she left them.
Her heart is heavy when she moves on to yet another person and still hasn’t found what she’s searching for among the rubble. Kaelen was right; she shouldn’t have come here. She hates to think this stuff will be wasted and forgotten, but the boneyard takes something from her every time she visits.
Isabel hears movement. It’s Kaelen maneuvering around the bodies and forgotten things, and she sees the disgust on his face as he joins her side. She smiles.
“Couldn’t stay away?” she asks.
The draek?n huffs. She knew he wouldn’t stay away for long. He’s afraid to leave her alone in case the night daemons arrive and he has to get to her quickly.
Kaelen taps his large paw against the ground in impatience. It’s growing late, and he’s worried. She sends comfort to him through their bond, hoping it will calm his anxiety.
“It’s fine,” she says. “It’s here. I know it is. I’ll find it.” She has to. The trip can’t have been a waste. Senor Abisai is counting on her.
The longer she searches, the more lightheaded Isabel grows from the heat and the smell of hot, dry air. She can tell Kaelen is about to call it and drag her out of here, if he must, when she sees it: the glowroot.
“Aha!” she shouts, leaping over junk as she heads for a root that looks like a contorted hand sticking up from the dry earth.
Isabel grabs a pouch of sweet water from her bag and drips it over the palm, which slowly closes into a fist when it comes into contact with the water.
Isabel watches in awe as the small, bulbous fist grows bigger and bigger until it looks swollen and ready to pop.
The plant glows like the warm flesh of a papaya and beats like a pulse.
Pulling three empty vials from the handsewn belt around her waist, she pricks the glowroot with a needle she carries pinned to her chest and fills the vials with the shimmering liquid that flows out.
As she stands and tucks the vials into her belt, the last light of the fading sunset disappears, and she watches speechless as the stars begin to fall. They drop slowly, floating down to the earth.
Kaelen growls to warn her that they have to leave, then grows big enough for her to ride him.
“All right, I’m going—”
KRAK!
KRAK! KRAK! BOOOM!
GRRRGRR!
Clashing thunder pierces the sky, and Isabel and Kaelen freeze. Isabel’s blood runs cold as she watches the sky crack open. Then a figure appears among the stars.
“What is that?” Isabel wonders aloud, breath trapped in her throat and her chest feeling heavy. A goddess? Then, as the figure gets closer, she says, “It’s a woman,” her voice breathy with surprise.
High up in the sky, a woman falls from the heavens. Her black hair is caught in the starlight that tumbles around her, her torn dress whipping like flower petals in a heavy wind.
But the woman doesn’t look like a woman. She looks ethereal, her dark skin lit up by the falling stars and glowing a deep blue-black in the night.
Isabel shakes herself from her trance when she realizes the severity of the situation. The woman is plummeting fast. From that height, she will die when she hits the ground.
Isabel pushes herself to action. She raises her arms to the sky and asks the stars to slow the woman’s descent. Her magic isn’t very powerful, but it’s enough. It’s always just enough.
As the woman falls in slow motion, Isabel races over to Kaelen and jumps on the takops’s back. “Hurry!” she shouts, and he takes off, fur whipping around her as he races high up into the sky, where the stars reach, hanging just above the dark, forbidding valley.
Steadying herself with a hand on Kaelen’s large head, Isabel reaches out to catch the woman in her arms, careful of the sword clutched in the stranger’s hand.
Kaelen slows, batting his wings to hover in the air as Isabel regains her breath and cradles the woman in her arms. She is lanky, her limbs loose and long.
Once Isabel has both herself and the woman secure on Kaelen’s back, she gets a good look at her, grabbing one of the palm-sized stars floating around them to look down into her face.
Her breath catches at the sight. She must be a goddess, for sure.
The woman’s dark skin glows in the blue starlight, and thick lashes brush her cheeks in a tender kiss. It’s only when Isabel looks down at the tattered fabric around her that she notices the woman is bleeding, an arrow sticking in her leg.
Running her fingers over the woman, Isabel hisses at the pain that lances through her. She has never felt pain this great. The woman has many injuries and needs help fast.
“She’s hurt!” Isabel shouts up to Kaelen. “Get us home quickly.”
She takes a cloth from her satchel and keeps her hand on the woman to stanch the bleeding at her side as Kaelen nods and speeds off toward their home.
Isabel can see the Vacciom swirling on the ground below where the starlight doesn’t touch. Starlight doesn’t fall in Marrowmere or the dark crevices of the Sand Isles.
Isabel’s pulse races as she holds the strange woman close. “Who are you,” she whispers. “Where did you come from?” It looks like she was in a fight. Someone tried to kill her. Why?
Kaelen touches down in front of their small cottage, which is camouflaged into the hill.
Framed with greenery and sunken into the ground.
Isabel slides the woman off the draek?n’s back and whisks her inside the hillhouse, pushing through the pain in her own leg, strained under the weight of the tall woman draped over her shoulder.
She sets her gently onto the long wooden table she uses to treat injured patients—primarily animals.
Isabel does another scan of the woman’s body and logs her injuries as Kaelen rushes into the room in his human form. She glances up at him. His soft, milky-red hair and windswept, rosy cheeks greet her, oversized blue ombre kaftan falling off his shoulders.
“What’s the damage?” he asks, looking over her shoulder. He sounds worried, his eyebrows furrowed as he peers at the woman.
Isabel has the irrational urge to hide the woman from his eyes. Instead, she sweeps back her curls and says, “Besides this snapped arrow in her leg, she has a twisted ankle, cuts and bruises all over, and a large gash in her side.”
“Where do you get injuries like that? Do you think she’s a fugitive?”
Isabel shakes her head. “I don’t know. But I don’t think she’ll be any trouble.” Pushing long, frizzy hair and loose braids from the woman’s soft face, Isabel’s breath catches. “Whatever this is, I don’t think it was her fault.”
“I think you’re being naive,” Kaelen says. “You’re too trusting.”
Isabel doesn’t respond. Kaelen says this all the time. It’s a conversation they’ve worn dead. She focuses on healing the woman.
“What an odd dress,” she murmurs, ripping her garment, and pulling back wire in the garment to get to the injuries.
She pours sanitizing water over her hands and then dips a cloth in it to dab over the unconscious woman’s injuries.
She calls out instructions as Kaelen runs around to grab the things she needs.
“Silk cotton!” she shouts. “No, the ones soaked in medicinal oil. More cloth! Kaelen, grab my draek?n tooth pinchers. Thank you.”
Isabel works with the worst of the injuries first. She stitches and dresses the gash on the woman’s side, binding it with medicinal cotton and a tight strip of cloth.
Kaelen gags, turning from the sight. He whines when Isabel pulls out the arrow as he holds the woman’s leg to keep her steady.
Isabel quickly stops the blood flow and covers it in salve, sticking over the top of it a steaming banana leaf straight from the pot of water that Kaelen boiled. Isabel’s glad the woman isn’t awake; otherwise, she would have needed to be numb first.
She wraps the woman’s ankle with cloth. Then, with her small pool of magic, Isabel can heal some of the more minor wounds—the scrapes on the woman’s face and arms, and as many bruises as possible.
Kaelen turns while Isabel carefully cuts the woman out of her dress, averting his eyes as she slips her into a kaftan. Because the woman has such long legs, the kaftan is shorter on her than on Isabel.
Kaelen moves closer as Isabel lays a blanket over the woman and slips a pillow under her head.
“I love watching you do that,” he says. “The blood and things are gross, but you are in another world when helping a patient. It’s a beautiful sight.”
“Kaelen, are you hitting on me?” she teases, the dimples popping in her cheeks.
Her best friend rolls his eyes. “You ruined it,” he groans. “Don’t be gross.”
Isabel laughs. She knows there is no way Kaelen would ever have feelings for her, and it’s mutual.
Turning back to the sleeping patient, Isabel lets her gaze wander over her. Her skin is a dazzling, icy-brown with cool, deep undertones that shine like diamonds, striking against jet-black hair.