The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,29

those—things. How did you do that?”

“I used a beacon spell,” I reply absently as I scan him by the light of the stars. The Lovers have not yet risen, but despite the moonless night I can make out a few details. He doesn’t move, watching me with glittering dark eyes. The blood painting the side of his face gives his profile a rather warlike appearance, accenting the sharpness of his cheekbones and his aquiline nose. His lips are pressed together tightly in pain, no doubt from the wound beneath the bloody bit of rag tied about his arm.

“You still bleed,” I say finally. “The boar of the forest-sea are drawn to the smell of blood, and mist-bent boar even more so. That bandage will do little to hide the scent.”

I can’t help but continue to stare, as if I might intuit his duplicity or his purpose by looking at him. He meets my gaze, and while he looks nervous, he does not appear malevolent. His shock is wearing off, and now I can see that look in his eyes all the more clearly. He seems—glad to see me. An enemy agent wouldn’t, if confronted by the divinity herself at the site of the prophesied Last Star.

Perhaps he doesn’t know who I am.

Slowly, his eyes not leaving my face except to flick occasionally to the tip of my spearstaff, he shifts his weight. “I don’t have any intention of hurting you—can you maybe put that weapon thing away? Or at least stop pointing it at me?”

My own eyes flick to the tip of my spearstaff, which clinks with the dangling udjet charms of a magic user. I can feel my brow furrowing, mystery adding to mystery—who can this boy be, who doesn’t recognize the staff of a magician?

“Are you armed?” I ask finally, scanning his body. His strange clothes are of one piece, formfitting. Not much room to hide anything, much less a weapon larger than a small knife.

He blinks at me. “Why would I be armed?”

I blink back at him. Why wouldn’t you be armed? But I don’t say it aloud. I have to find whatever object or artifact fell with this thing—a glider, he called it—but I can’t conduct a search of him or the structure while holding the spear between us.

“Wait there, and do not move.” My order seems to strike him oddly, but he does as I ask. I climb carefully up onto the crumpled structure again, testing the creak and bend of the thing. The boy makes a few noises of protest, but eventually I’m close enough that I can lean down and examine the interior of the “glider.”

There is only a small space inside it, and nothing I could retrieve and carry back to the temple. Along the front is an array of scorched levers and soot-covered glass panels, labeled with the alphabet used in our most ancient texts, unreadable by anyone but a scholar. The words they spell are nonsense to me—ALT. and COMP. and RADIO—but the sight makes uneasiness prickle at me.

Suddenly, I understand why: the space inside the fallen object is the exact size and shape to hold a person. I’m looking at a seat.

The boy is waiting where I last saw him, his eyes following my progress. He meets my gaze when I straighten and look back at him. Perhaps even in the dark, he sees some question in my half-hidden face, because he shifts his weight and speaks.

“How … how are you here? Did you fall from Alciel too? Or from one of the lost sky-cities, maybe? Are there others down here with you? Do you have a camp somewhere, or some sort of shelter, or …” He trails off, watching me, eyes widening in wonder. “Were you born here?”

By here, he doesn’t mean the Mirror of Divinity. My heart is pounding with the weight of the thing I can’t quite wrap my mind around. Instead, I focus on something smaller, but no less incredible: he doesn’t know who I am.

I’m not wearing ceremonial red or the golden circlet that identifies me to my people when I’m home—a tactical decision, to avoid drawing attention as we travel—but my face is known throughout the lands in paintings and statues. He looks at me without recognition.

If he is an enemy, revealing myself as Nimhara, Forty-Second Vessel of the Divine, would be folly. I could end him here with a flick of my spear, but I won’t hurt an innocent, and there’s still