The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,31
a bit …” His eyes widen. “It’s getting really warm.”
“Hush.” I scoop up a handful of water and close my eyes, waiting until the tangle of energies in my mind calms a little and I can cast the water over the wound.
It bursts into golden healing fire.
The boy shouts in alarm and pain and reels backward, flapping his arm uselessly for a few seconds before dropping to his knees and thrusting it into the salty lake water at our feet.
I would grab him to hold him still if I could, but I have to resort to crying, “Calm yourself—it is only a bit of healing fire!”
The salt water does little to arrest the spell, for it is not a natural flame but a magical one. The fire is quick, however, and by the time he sits up again, it’s done its work. White-faced, the boy looks down at his arm in disbelief, and then back at me.
“S-some sort of chemical reaction,” he mumbles, testing the wound’s edge with his fingertips. The magic has sealed it well. The spellfire in the air has begun to fade, and the water disturbed by the boy’s flailing has dissipated much of what lay on its surface. “You could have warned me you were going to cauterize the thing.”
His reaction could not have been feigned. The alarm coursing through me at his unknown motives has faded, and in its place is curiosity, insistent and sharp. “Who are you that you have never seen a healing spell?”
The boy looks up at me, and then away. “I … I told you. I crashed here.” And then, for just a moment, his eyes lift toward the dark, shadowy hole in the sky that is the cloudlands by night.
The strangeness of his speech, his clothes and hair, his reaction to magic, the fact that he doesn’t know who I am—and most of all, the fact that the structure I saw fall from the heavens contained a place for a human form …
“You are saying … that you fell from the cloudlands?” I whisper, wondering, still skeptical—but when he looks at me, I see the truth in his face.
“I need to get back there,” he blurts, urgency quickening his odd voice. “Can you help me?”
But my ears are roaring with the impossibility of it, my pulse rapid. Light-headed, I can only whisper, “You come from the other side of the sky?”
The boy straightens, eyes me a moment, and then nods. “I need your help to get home. My glider is wrecked, I’m thirsty and hungry … Will you help me?”
The cloudlands are where the gods fled a millennium ago—the only things that have ever come to us from the sky are a few artifacts here and there, relics and spells of great power. Even I have not seen them all, for many have been locked for generations within vaults of stone.
Certainly never a human boy.
I believed I was meant to come here to find the Star, some object fallen from the heavens that would help me prepare for the coming of the Lightbringer—the one to end all prophecy, the one to wipe the world clean so that it can begin afresh. I expected a spellstone or a scroll, an enchanted sword, a spellfire lantern in whose light the Song of the Destroyer would summon the bright god to us at last.
A brand against the darkness …
My mind conjures the memory of seeing him trying to beat back the mist-bent creatures with a burning bit of wreckage, the flames bright against the night.
Like a brand.
Maybe … maybe … could the Star be a human boy? Some descendant of the gods themselves, unaware now of his divinity?
How he came to fall from the sky, I don’t know. How he could be the one to help me find my destiny, I can’t imagine.
Of one thing, however, I am suddenly, utterly, viscerally certain: this boy is what I was meant to find here.
“I know of no magic that can raise a man into the sky,” I say weakly, scanning the boy’s face, trying to find some sign—any sign—that I am looking at something connected to divine destiny. “Come with me to the temple. Our archives hold many secrets and many ancient scrolls. Perhaps they hold the knowledge you seek. Legend even says that the temple was once the home of the Sentinels, who guarded the passage to the sky.”
“Thank you.” His face is solemn, but there’s relief in his eyes, and now he even