Beneath the Shadows of Starlight (The Starborn Chronicles #1)

Chapter 1

LYRA

The sage was damp again.

I rubbed one of the leaves between my fingers and frowned at the dark smear it left across my thumb.

Three days without rain should have left the edges dry enough to crumble.

Instead, moisture slicked the veins and gathered cold against my skin.

“Maia.” She made a sound from somewhere behind me. I turned. “Feel this.”

“I have my own sage.”

“Humor me.” Maia was crouched beside a patch of yarrow with her skirts tucked beneath her knees. She finished cutting the stem in her hand before reaching for mine, because apparently the yarrow deserved more patience than I did. She pinched the leaf between two fingers. “Well?”

“It’s wet.”

“I know it’s wet.”

“Then why did you ask me?”

“Because it hasn’t rained.”

Maia dropped the leaf into my basket and returned to her yarrow. I stared at the silver threaded through her dark hair.

“You’re doing that deliberately.”

“Gathering herbs?”

“Pretending you don’t know what I’m asking.”

“I know exactly what you’re asking.” Her knife slid through another stem. “I’m choosing not to encourage you.”

Which was an answer, technically. Maia was very good at those.

I sat back on my heels and reached for the twine hanging from my basket.

The sage bundles needed to be small enough to burn evenly in the healing wards tonight, which meant eight stems to a bundle according to Maia.

Nine, apparently, was an offense against several generations of healers.

I counted twice before tying the knot. The silence caught me before I finished.

I stopped. Usually the elder pines were unbearable at dawn.

Thrushes nested along the creek, and some ugly little brown bird outside our cottage had been waking me before sunrise for years.

Maia claimed it was a wren. I called it a menace.

There wasn’t a single call from the canopy. Not one. I looked toward the trees. “Do you hear that?”

Maia’s knife stopped. “How long have they been quiet?”

“Animals go quiet, Lyra.”

“All of them at the same time?”

Her eyes lifted to mine. I waited. “A fox passes through,” she said. “A hawk circles. Something disturbs a nest.”

“There aren’t any hawks.”

“You’ve checked?”

“I would have heard everything else screaming about one.” Maia looked toward the western trees.

The clearing was bright now, morning reaching between the pines and turning the moss around my knees almost gold.

West of us, where the land climbed toward the ridge, the trees grew closer together.

Their roots crowded through dark soil before disappearing beneath bracken.

One patch of shadow beneath them seemed deeper than the rest. I stared at it.

A branch shifted overhead. The darkness below moved a heartbeat later.

Every hair along my arms rose. “Maia.” She was already looking.

The shadow stilled. I stood slowly. For several seconds, neither of us moved.

“What did you see?” she asked.

“The shadow.”

“What about it?”

“It moved after the branch.” Maia’s gaze remained fixed on the trees.

Then she stood and picked up her basket. “We’ve gathered enough.”

I looked at what we had. “You said we needed twice this much sage.”

“We have more drying at home.”

“You told me yesterday we didn’t.”

“I was wrong.” Maia was almost never wrong about her stores. She started toward the path.

I didn’t follow. “Is this about the Veil?”

Her shoulders went still. “Lyra.”

“What?”

“Leave it.”

“You haven’t even heard the question.”

“I have heard every version of this question since you were old enough to realize west was a direction.”

“And you’ve never answered any of them.” She turned. Maia wasn’t particularly tall, but she had perfected a look that made height irrelevant.

“What do you want me to tell you?”

“The truth would be interesting.” Her eyes moved past me toward the ridge.

The Veil lay somewhere beyond it. Far enough that nobody from Edenlo could wander there by accident, close enough that every child in the village knew which direction not to go.

I had spent most of my childhood imagining an actual veil.

At six, I pictured a great curtain stretching from one end of the world to the other.

At ten, I decided the adults were lying and there was probably nothing there at all.

At fifteen, I asked Elder Rina what lay beyond it and got assigned three afternoons cleaning the meeting hall for being disrespectful.

I’d stopped asking her after that. Maia was harder to give up on.

“Ferin tells stories about people disappearing near the western roads,” I said.

“Nara says Shadowwraiths crossed before the old kingdoms drove them back. Every Turning we hang protection charms over our doors and burn enough sage to choke half the village, but whenever I ask what we’re protecting ourselves from, suddenly everyone finds an urgent excuse to leave. ”

“Ferin tells stories because children give him sugared almonds to tell them.”

“He has four teeth.”

“Three.”

“That makes your argument worse.” Maia didn’t smile. My own faded.

“There are dangerous things beyond this valley,” she said. “You know that.”

“What things?”

“Things that have no reason to concern you.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

The certainty in those two words irritated me more than another refusal would have. “How?” She held my gaze. For one strange second, I thought she might actually answer. Instead, she looked down at the bundle in my hand. “You tied this badly.”

I stared at her. “Seriously?”

“It’ll come apart when it dries.”

“We were talking about the Veil.”

“You were talking about the Veil.”

“Maia.”

She took the bundle from me, retied it in three quick movements, and put it back into my basket. “We’re going home.”

A crack sounded somewhere behind us. Maia froze.

So did I. Another came from deeper among the trees.

Closer this time. Her hand disappeared into the folds of her skirt.

The bone-handled knife. The sight of it killed whatever argument I had been about to make.

“Maia?” She stepped in front of me. Not beside me.

In front. I had seen her draw that knife a hundred times.

To cut roots. Open stubborn jars. Once to threaten Tomas after he tried climbing through our kitchen window at midnight because I had refused to answer the door.

I had never seen her hold it like this. The brush ahead of us exploded.

I stumbled backward. Maia’s knife flashed.

“Finally!” Irelia burst onto the path, caught her boot beneath a root, windmilled both arms, and somehow remained upright. For perhaps two seconds, nobody spoke. Then Maia lowered the knife.

Irelia bent over with her hands on her knees. “If either of you laughs, I’m leaving you out here.”

I laughed. The sound came out too loud in the silent forest. “You nearly died.”

“I did not nearly die.” She straightened, still catching her breath. Half her dark braid had escaped, mud covered one boot, and a leaf clung to her shoulder. “The root came out of nowhere.”

Maia plucked the leaf away as she passed her. “You took the lower trail.”

Irelia looked down at her wet boot and sighed. “You make it very difficult to lie to you.”

“That’s intentional.” I watched Maia put the knife away. Her fingers weren’t shaking. Mine were.

Irelia followed my gaze. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” Maia said. I looked at her.

Irelia looked between us. “Right.”

“Did Nara send you?” Maia asked.

“Technically she sent Tomas, but Tomas claimed Fenric needed him at the fire tower, which is a lie because I saw him eating over the cider barrel.”

“That sounds like Tomas.”

“She said if Lyra intends to hide in the woods all day, she can come back tonight and explain to Elder Rina why half the garlands aren’t finished.”

“I wasn’t hiding.”

Irelia glanced at my basket. “You voluntarily came into the woods before sunrise. That counts.” Maia started down the path. I fell into step beside Irelia. She waited until Maia had put several paces between us. “What happened?”

“The birds stopped singing.”

Irelia looked up. “And?”

“The sage is wet.” Her face remained carefully blank. “And I saw a shadow move when the thing casting it didn’t.”

That got her attention. “Where?” I nodded toward the trees behind us. She looked back. Nothing moved.

“I could’ve imagined it,” I said. Maia’s pace changed.

Barely. But I noticed. Irelia did too. Neither of us said anything else until the pines began thinning.

Edenlo appeared below us between the low hills, roofs crowded along the central road and thin trails of chimney smoke lifting into the morning.

Beyond the village, narrow fields followed the shape of the valley rather than any sensible plan.

The Caplin’s eastern fence still leaned where their old ram had broken through it last autumn.

Someone had propped the middle section up with a cart wheel.

This was home.

Crooked and loud and too small for anyone to keep a secret longer than an afternoon.

Fresh ribbons covered the old wooden arch at the edge of the village, hiding the split where lightning had struck one of the posts three summers ago. Elder Rina had insisted the entire thing needed replacing. Nobody had listened.

Children had already taken over the square.

Two boys chased each other between the festival tables with strips of yellow ribbon tied around their foreheads. Sela, the potter’s youngest, sat directly in the road drawing circles in the dust while her older sister tried unsuccessfully to convince her that carts existed.

From Nara’s ovens came the smell of bread and the sharper scent of something burned.

Irelia sniffed. “Third batch.”

A crash sounded from inside the bakery. “Tomas!” I smiled despite myself. By the time we reached the square, the forest felt farther away.

Not forgotten. Just farther.