Chapter 69: A Red Star Hits the Glass Like a Thrown Coal, a Merchant Sits Down in a Heat That Would Boil Iron

It hit the island like a thrown coal.

There was no warning. One moment the sky was a soft black dome stitched with falling silver, and the next, a streak of dull red tore across it, trailing smoke, and the whole world went orange. Adam had time to throw one arm across his face. Then the glass shuddered under his boots with a sound like a bell cracking, and a wall of heat slammed over the island, and every drifting dim light for a hundred yards flared white and winked out.

"Down!" Shen roared.

They went flat. The air howled over their heads. Somewhere behind Adam, a plank of the Seventh Wave split with a crack like a gunshot, and Brine bellowed an oath in a language that had no business being said in front of a boy of thirteen. Fire rolled across the glass in a slow spreading ring, melting it, and where it passed, the pale stuff ran in glowing rivulets like honey on a hot stone.

Then it stopped.

The silence was enormous.

Adam lifted his head.

A hundred paces away, in the middle of a ring of molten glass, there was a crater. It was twenty feet across, scorched black, still smoking, and in the center of it, on its hands and knees, a figure was getting slowly to its feet.

It was a boy.

He looked about fifteen. He was thin, and tall for his age, with a mop of hair the color of banked embers and a face like a clenched fist. He wore nothing. His body was not flesh. It was a dull, sullen, glowing red, shot through with veins of black, like a lump of coal that had been breathed on, and it gave off a dry, shimmering heat that set the air quivering in a wide circle around him. Smoke curled from his shoulders. His eyes were two small, hot, angry points of white.

He stood in the crater with his fists clenched at his sides, and he looked at the island, and the ship, and the little dim lights lying in drifts around his feet, and his mouth twisted.

"Great," said the boy.

It was a thought, like the others. But it came with the sound of a slammed door.

"Perfect. Wonderful. Another beach." He spat. A drop of molten red rolled across the glass and hissed. "Is there anybody here? Is there any person here at all? Because I would like to say, to whoever it is, that I do not want any."

Shen had risen to one knee.

"Stay back," he said, in a low, urgent voice. "All of you. He is a young one. They are the worst. They have not had time to be tired."

"What is he?" Adam whispered.

"A star. A small one. Perhaps three hundred years old." The tall man’s face was grim. "I have sat with two like him. They do not want to be sat with. They want to burn."

"Can they be hurt?"

"Not by us." Shen’s voice was very quiet. "But they can hurt a great deal. The last one took my left hand off at the wrist. It grew back." He lifted the arm, and Adam saw, beneath the cuff of the faded black robe, a faint pale line around the bone. "It took four years."

The red boy’s white eyes had found them.

"Oh," he said, in a voice like a hot wind on a dry field. "There are some. How lovely. I suppose you’ve come to tell me that it will be all right."

"No," said Adam.

He had risen.

He did not know quite why. Shen made a small, sharp, warning sound beside him. Captain Ning, a few paces away, had raised her harpoon, with an expression of grim, ferocious interest. But Adam only stood, with his hands open at his sides, in the heat that rolled off the crater like a furnace door, and met the boy’s furious white eyes.

"I am not going to tell you it will be all right," he said. "I do not know that it will."

The boy’s brows drew together.

"Then what do you want?"

"Nothing."

"Everyone wants something."

"I would like to sit down," said Adam. "If you do not mind. I have been standing a long time."

There was a pause.

"You are mad," said the boy.

"I have been told."

"You will burn."

"Probably."

"I will not stop you." The white eyes narrowed. "I will not help. I will not say a word. If you are stupid enough to sit in this, you may sit in it. And when you are a crisp, I will not be sorry."

"That seems fair," said Adam.

He walked across the glass.

It was perhaps the strangest walk of his life. The heat grew with every step. At fifty paces, it was the heat of a smith’s forge. At thirty, it was the heat of the Heavenfall Pool. At ten, it was something he had no word for, a dry, white, roaring weight that pressed on his eyes and his lungs and the skin of his face, and the white lines in his arms began to glow in answer, blazing like hot wire. His cloak smoked. His hair crisped at the ends. The glass beneath his boots had gone soft, and left a faint sticky print at every step.

He stopped at the lip of the crater.

He sat down.

It was a very small thing. He folded his legs, and put his hands on his knees, and arranged himself on the bubbling glass with the care of a man settling to a long meal. And then, for a long time, nothing happened at all.

The red boy stared at him.

"You are very stupid," he said at last.

"I have been told that too."

"Go away."

"No."

"I mean it."

"I know." Adam did not look away. His eyes were streaming from the heat. "I am not going to go away. You may be as rude as you like. I shall sit here and be rude back, if I have to. But I am not leaving you alone."

"Why?"

"Because I do not think anyone has ever stayed."

The boy went very still.

Then he shouted.

It was a thing Adam would remember for a long time, afterward. It was not a scream. It was not a roar. It was the sound a child makes when he has been told a thing he did not want to hear, a high, cracked, furious shout, and with it, the whole crater went white.

"YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING!" the boy cried. "You don’t know a single thing! You come here, with your face, and your sitting, and your nice voice, and you think you can..."

The heat struck Adam like a hammer.

It was not a gust. It was a wall. It slammed into his chest and his face and his hands, and the skin of his arms blistered in an instant, white lines flaring red, the Nine-Turn bronze of his skin turning a dull glowing orange. He gasped. He did not move. A thin high sound came out of his throat, and he clamped his teeth on it, and bent his head, and let the fire come.

Something cool wrapped itself around his heart.

It was a thread. It was a thin, warm, golden thing, and it came up out of the dark place beneath his ribs and ran through his veins like a cold stream through a burning field. It was the dragon’s gift. It was far away, a thousand miles, in a cavern under a hill, but a thread of her was in him, and it knew what it was for.

Hold, said the little gray flame.

It was a very small voice. It was frightened, and fierce.

Hold. I am here. I have you.

It rose in him like a banked fire, and the heat of the red boy’s rage, which would have boiled iron, ran into it, and was drunk, a mouthful at a time, and turned to something that was almost warmth. The Chaos-Devouring Fire did not burn him. It ate the burning, a bite at a time, with the quiet, steady hunger of a thing that had learned, in a Hollow in the north, what it was for.

The white light faded.

Adam sat on the glass, with his arms blistered and his face scorched and his breath coming in short, hard gasps. He was still there.

The boy was staring at him with his mouth open.

"What," he said, in an altered voice, "are you?"

"A friend," said Adam, through his teeth. "Of a sort."

"I did not hurt you."

"You hurt me a great deal."

"You are still sitting."

"It would seem so."

The red boy backed up a step. Then another. He sat down hard on the lip of his own crater, with his knees drawn up, and put his arms around them. He looked very young.

"Nobody stays," he said, in a small, savage voice.

The night was very long.

They did not talk for a long time. The boy sat on one side of the crater, with his chin on his knees, glaring at the molten glass. Adam sat on the other, with his hands on his thighs and his scorched cloak steaming. Behind them, at a distance of a hundred paces, a ragged half-circle of onlookers had gathered, and no one dared come closer. Ning had taken up a position on a rock with her harpoon laid across her lap, and was watching the pair of them with the expression of a woman who is not at all sure how this is going to end and has decided to enjoy it.

It was Fin, of all people, who broke the silence.

He had crept up behind his Captain, and stood at her elbow, small and pale in the red light, with his thin hands clasped before him. He had not taken his eyes off the red boy for an hour.

"Captain," he whispered.

"Hm."

"Why is he so angry?"

Ning considered the question seriously.

"I do not know," she said at last. "I think it is because nobody ever asked."

The red boy’s head turned.

He had heard. The white eyes had found the ship’s boy, and for a long moment, they simply looked. Fin stood very still, with his chin up and his lip trembling, and did not step back.

"Do you want something?" said the red boy, in a flat, wary voice.

"No," said Fin.

"Everybody does."

"I just want to know if you are cold."

The boy stared.

"It is only that you are sitting by yourself," Fin said, in a rush. "And it is night. And the glass is hot, but... you do not have a coat."

There was a very long silence.

"I do not get cold," said the red boy. His voice cracked in the middle. "I am a star."

"Oh," said Fin. "Of course. Sorry."

He backed away, and the Captain reached out a hand and ruffled his hair.

Across the crater, the red boy was looking at his own knees.

"Do you know," he said, after a while, in a low, grudging voice, "how many people have wished on me?"

Adam did not move.

"No," he said.

"Ten thousand." The boy’s fists clenched on his knees. "Ten thousand, three hundred and forty. I counted. I have been hanging in the south for three hundred years, in the Southern Cross, where the sailors steer, and every night, they look up. And every night, they make a wish." He laughed, a short ugly sound. "I do not know why. I am not a wishing star. I am only a star. I cannot do anything. I cannot grant a thing. I just hang there."

"And they wish anyway."

"They wish anyway." The white eyes burned. "They look up, and they say, ’Please let my boat come home.’ ’Please let my wife be well.’ ’Please let me get the money.’ And they do not know I can hear. And I cannot do anything." His voice cracked. "I have been hearing them for three hundred years. And every night I think, I will do it tomorrow. I will think of something. I will find a way." He swallowed. "And I do not. And they go on wishing. And one night, I could not carry it anymore. And I let go."

The sea hummed on every side.

"You want to know why I fell," the boy said.

"I do not need to know."

"It was the wishes." He was crying. It was a strange thing to see. Where the tears fell, they hissed and turned to steam, and left small dark spots on the glass. "It was the wishes. They were too heavy. I was too small."

Adam sat very still.

He had been thinking, for the last hour, of something Lei Hong had said. Not for help. Only to know that someone is there. He thought of a woman on a dock with a bottle of rice wine. He thought of a blind man waiting for a friend. He thought of a thousand sailors, in the dark, with their faces turned up to a small red light in the south.

"Would you tell me one?" he said.

The boy’s head came up.

"What?"

"One of them. If you remember." Adam’s voice was very gentle. "I will not do anything. I cannot. I do not have the power to grant a wish, and I would not lie to you and say I did. But I should like to hear one."

"Why?"

"Because I think nobody has," said Adam. "Not once. I think they said them to the sky, and the sky was too far away to answer. And I think it would be a good thing if one person, just one, were to say, ’I heard that.’"

There was a very long pause.

The red boy looked at him with his hot white eyes. His thin hands had come loose from his knees. They hung in the air, trembling, as though he did not know what to do with them.

"There was a woman," he said, slowly.

"Yes."

"On a ship. A long time ago. She was old. She had a lantern, and she held it up, and she said, ’Please. Let my son come back from the war.’" The boy’s voice shook. "He did not."

"I am sorry."

"She came every night. For a year." He swallowed. "Then she stopped."

"I heard that," said Adam.

The boy flinched.

It was a small movement, as though someone had touched a sore place. But he did not turn away. He sat very still, with his eyes fixed on Adam’s face, and his mouth working. Then he said, in a low, fast, shaking voice:

"There was a boy. A little one. He wanted a puppy."

"I heard that."

"There was a man who wanted to be forgiven."

"I heard that."

"There was a girl who wished she were somebody else."

"I heard that."

They went on for hours.

It was a long, strange, tender litany, in the red glow of the crater, with the night turning slowly over their heads and the sea singing. The boy told him wishes. Some were small. Some were enormous. A sailor wished for a fair wind. A mother wished for a living child. A thief wished not to be caught, and then, in the same breath, not to have stolen. A hundred nameless people wished, in the dark, for the thing that every living creature has ever wished for, and could not name, and was too ashamed to say aloud.

Not to be alone.

And to each, Adam said, quietly, and meant it, "I heard that."

It was a very small thing.

It was the smallest thing he had ever done. It did not grant one wish. It did not change a single fate. But as the night wore on, the heat that rolled off the red boy, which had scorched the skin from his arms, began very slowly to soften. The black veins in his body dimmed. The coals of his eyes burned less white, and more gold. And somewhere toward the end of the fourth hour, in the very middle of a long and halting account of a fisherman’s daughter who had wished to be able to read, he stopped.

He was looking at his hands.

They were still red. But they had changed. There was a soft glow in them, like the glow of a lamp seen through a curtain, and the veins of black had faded to a faint dusky gray.

"It is lighter," he said, in a small, wondering voice.

"What is?"

"The wishes." He turned his hand over. "They are... I thought I would never be able to put them down. But I have told you. And now they are just... things I know. They are not on me." He looked up. "Did you do that?"

"No." Adam smiled. It hurt his face. "You did. I only listened."

The boy was quiet for a long time.

"I am tired," he said.

"I know."

"I think it is nearly time."

"I think so too."

"Will you hold my hand?" He held it out. It was thin, and red, and very warm. "I know it will burn. I am sorry. I will try to be careful."

Adam looked at it.

Then he reached out his own, scorched, blistered, blackened hand, and took it.

It did not burn.

It was warm. It was only warm, like the hand of a child who has been running, and it closed around his fingers with a surprising strength. The boy let out a long breath. His shoulders, which had been hunched around his ears for three hundred years, came slowly down.

"May I ask you a thing?" he said.

"Anything."

"What would you wish for?" The white-gold eyes were curious, and very young. "If you were looking at me. From the ground. On a night like this."

Adam thought about it.

It was a harder question than any the sky had asked. He sat on the molten glass with a star’s hand in his and let his mind move slowly over everything he had. A cellar in the Slum Ring. A noodle stall on the Street of Lanterns. A small gray man with a bronze staff. A woman in green robes, with ink on her cuffs, who had said write. A boy with a slate. A tall man in a faded black robe, and a very small woman, laughing.

"That the people I love," he said, slowly, "would be well."

The boy was silent.

"That is a wish," he said.

"Yes."

"You have a lot of people."

"A few more than I expected."

The red boy smiled.

It was a crooked, wondering, entirely unguarded smile, and it transformed his face from a clenched fist into something young and bright and a little foolish. He squeezed Adam’s hand.

"I cannot grant it," he said.

"I know."

"But I will keep it." His voice was very soft. "I will keep it with the others. I think it is a good one to have."

The glow was fading.

It went as the other had, slowly, from the edges, a tide going out. The dull red of his skin cooled to rose, and rose to gray, and the white-gold of his eyes dimmed to a tender amber. He did not look afraid. He looked, in the last hour of the night, with the first faint paleness of dawn on the edge of the sea, like a boy falling asleep on a long ride home.

"Thank you," he said, drowsily.

"I am here."

"I know. It is the nicest thing anyone has ever said."

His eyes closed.

The light left him.

It did not rise as it had from Lantern, a silver thread. It burst, gently, a single soft golden bloom that unfolded from his chest like a flower and filled the whole crater with warmth. It was a warm light. It was a hearth light. It went into Adam through his hand, up his arm, across his chest, and when it reached the dark place beneath his ribs, it did not settle. It roared.

It was fire. It was real fire, a clean clear wild gold flame, and it went through his body like the sun through a window. His skin cracked, and the cracks filled with light. His bones rang. The white lines in his arms blazed, and the bronze of his hands turned for one instant the color of a new coin, and he threw his head back and cried out. It was not a scream. It was a long, ragged, joyful shout, like a man coming up out of deep water into the air.

And with it came the wishes.

They did not come as a vision. They came as a weight. Ten thousand three hundred and forty small bright voices, whispering in the back of his skull, each one distinct and clear and entirely alive. Please let my boat come home. Please let me be forgiven. Please let me read. They did not crush him. They sat in his chest like a handful of warm stones, and he could feel every one of them, and he did not mind at all.

[Nine-Turn Immortal Body: 4th Turn. Starlight Tempering: 2 / 9.]

[Notice: The Host carries 10,340 wishes. They cannot be granted. They can be heard.]

[Notice: The Chaos-Devouring Fire has consumed 1 star-flame. It has not been harmed.]

He lay on the cooling glass for a long time.

The sun was coming up. It rose out of the sea in a long, soft, pearly light, and turned the whole island pink and gold. A faint, warm breeze came off the water. The molten glass around him had hardened, and in the center of the crater, where a boy had sat, a single small flower of red-gold crystal had grown up out of the stone, its petals trembling faintly in the wind.

A rough, scarred hand took his arm and pulled him upright.

"You are an idiot," said Captain Ning.

Her voice was shaking. Her face, in the dawn, was streaked with tears, and she was grinning like a lunatic.

"I am told," said Adam, "that it is a family trait."

"You are burned."

"I know."

"You will have scars."

"I have a great many already."

She looked at him for a long moment, and then, with a gruff sound, she flung both arms around him and held on. Her sealskin coat smelled of salt and tar and woodsmoke. She was shorter than his shoulder, and she was holding him up.

"That," she said, into his chest, "was the bravest damn thing I ever saw."

"It was only sitting."

"It was only sitting," she agreed, and laughed, and let go.

Shen was standing a little way off, with his hands in his sleeves. He had not said anything. He looked at the flower of crystal in the middle of the crater, and then at Adam, and then at the red-gold sun coming up on the sea.

"Seven," he said.

"Seven to go."

"I did not think," said Shen, softly, "that anyone could do that. Not the way you did." He drew a breath. "I took four years to learn to sit with an angry one. You did it in a night."

"I had help."

"From a flame."

"From a friend," said Adam. "Two."

He looked down at his hands. They were scarred, white and pink and shining, the skin of them like a map of rivers. But they were steady. And in the warm dark behind his ribs, the little gray flame had curled up around ten thousand wishes like a cat around a nest of kittens, and was purring.

Fin crept forward.

He had been standing at the edge of the crowd the whole night, in the cold, and his face was very white. He looked at the crystal flower. He looked at Adam. He looked at the rising sun.

"Did he get warm?" he asked.

"I think so," said Adam.

"Good." The boy sniffed, and wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I did not like him to be cold."

Over the rim of the world, in the pale blue morning, a very small silver light began to fall.