The Forest of Stars E-Book

Heather Kassner

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

A dark, compelling fantasy from the author of The Bone Garden for readers of Neil Gaiman's Coraline. Left all alone after her mother passes away, twelve-year-old Louisa watches the sky for her father. Long ago, a powerful gust of wind stole him away on the wings of his untamed magic - the same magic that stirs within Louisa. As if she is made of hollow bones and too much air, her feet never quite touch the ground. But for all her sky gazing, Louisa finds her fortune on the ground when she spots a ticket to the Carnival Beneath the Stars. If her father fits in nowhere else, maybe she'll find him dazzling crowds alongside the other strange feats. Yet after she arrives, a tightrope act ends disastrously - and suspiciously. As fate tugs Louisa closer to the stars, she must decide if she's willing to slip into the injured performer's role, despite the darkness plucking at the carnival's magical threads.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Also by Heather Kassner and Available from Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1 The Night Thieved

2 Soot-Prints

3 The Invitation

4 Traveling with the Winds

5 The Carnival Beneath the Stars

6 Walking on Air

7 The Wingless Raven

8 A Terrible Darkness

9 Unmoored

10 The Misfortune Teller

11 Magic, Marvels & Mystiques

12 The Marionette & The Seamstress

13 Sharing the Silence

14 Strong the Ox

15 Waiting & Watching

16 A Different Kind of Gravity

17 Something so Lovely

18 Windswept

19 The Starlark

20 Mina the Mirror

21 The Moon Ride

22 Merciless the Spider

23 Grief-Hungry Love Bugs

24 Shifting Shadows

25 The Worst Sort of Trickery

26 Snare the Butterfly

27 The Opposite of Nothing

28 All Things Lost & Broken

29 A Clash of Magic

30 Elsewhere

31 Cobwebs & Lace

32 Skyborne

33 The Forest of Stars

34 Moonlight & Magic

Acknowledgments

About the Author

ALSO BY HEATHER KASSNER AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

The Bone Garden

THE FOREST OF STARS

Print edition ISBN: 9781789091809

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789091816

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark Street, London, SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition: May 2021

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

© Heather Kassner 2020, 2021. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For the stars who brighten my life. Cameron, Moonie, Bill, Pop. How I love you.

1

The Night Thieved

The midnight sky darkened, black as the love bugs eating away at her mother’s heart. If Louisa listened closely, she could hear them chewing. Tiny bites that crackled and clicked, as if their teeth were very sharp. And in the quiet of the night, when the only other sounds were the groans of the old building settling and the lonely call of a lune lark, Louisa could not block out the persistent nibbling.

She should have been curled with her blankets beside the fireplace, asleep like her mother, but the stone hearth had gone cold, and there was no more wood to burn. So she sat by her mother’s bedside, listening to the love bugs tick and tock like a clock winding down.

In her hand Louisa held a threaded needle. Careless of the mending in her lap, she stabbed the pad of her thumb through the length of fabric. She held back a yelp and sucked the pinprick wound. With only embers in the hearth, it was much too dark for sewing.

Shadows crowded the corners and settled under her mother’s eyes and in the hollows of her cheeks. They changed the shape of her face, sharpening every bone.

Louisa looked away. Her eyes fell on the pile of mending her mother took in from the neighbors, a task that afforded their food and their kindling and their rent, except that it sat there ever unfinished. Whenever Louisa offered to help, her mother gently refused her, insisting she was neither too tired nor too ill.

Though she would have liked to pretend otherwise, Louisa knew better. She tried very hard to sneak in late-night mendings, but tonight the gloom pressed in, and she struggled to focus on anything other than her mother’s shallow breaths and the shuffling in her chest.

Louisa scratched her elbow and rubbed her knee. Sometimes she couldn’t quite convince herself that the love bugs weren’t crawling over and beneath her skin, burrowing closer to her heart no matter how tightly she locked it against them.

She’d heard their gnawing and chewing all twelve years of her life, but tonight they ate faster, as if they raced for the very last bite. Soon there would be nothing left beating inside her mother’s chest. All of her heart devoured.

Darkness pressed in through the window. It spilled on the floor like tar, so thick it blotted out everything in its path.

Louisa set aside the mending and rose from her seat, levitating ever so slightly. She crossed to the window on nimble feet that never quite touched the ground. Maybe the shadows held her aloft. Maybe it was the air. She didn’t know the how or the why of it, only the feel of it. Like there were marshmallows under her soles.

Soot gathered in the corners of the window. She peered through the hazy glass at the spattering of factory lights still burning and the darkness that swallowed everything else. The night thieved even the stars and the moon. With a shiver, she swept closed the tattered curtains her mother always left parted.

A slow breath wheezed from her mother’s mouth. “Keep them open.”

Louisa’s fingers tightened on the fabric. She drew the curtain to the side once again and then turned back to her mother. “But it’s so dark outside.”

“Not any darker than when you close your eyes. And yours should already be laced shut by your lashes.” Her mother spoke softly as she angled herself against the headboard, not quite sitting upright, not quite lying down. The shadows tried to hide it, but a small smile bloomed on her face. “I’m disappointed I didn’t wake to your snoring.”

Louisa laughed, pleased by the teasing. Maybe her mother was feeling a bit better. “I don’t snore.”

“You’ll never know for sure, will you?”

“I suppose not.” Although she did not like to turn her back on the night, Louisa drifted to her mother’s bedside. “I’ll just have to believe you.”

“Now there’s my sweet girl.” Her mother pulled her arm out from under the blanket and reached up, trailing her fingers through the ends of Louisa’s long, black hair.

Louisa smoothed her nightgown and sat on the chair once again. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t padded or that the back was very hard and straight. Not one part of her body touched the wood; a thin layer of air cushioned her, just as it did when she walked across the room or slept before the fireplace.

“I’m sorry if I woke you,” Louisa said, though she was sure she’d been very quiet. After all, her feet made no sound, as they never touched the floorboards.

“Oh, no, it wasn’t you.” Her mother placed a hand to her chest, right over her frail heart. “They’re the ones keeping me awake. They’re so restless tonight.”

Something prickled at the base of Louisa’s spine, as if a love bug tiptoed across it. She squirmed on the chair. “I can hear them.”

Her mother attempted to smile again but could not hold up the corners of her mouth. “Not for much longer.”

Louisa froze in place, her lips setting into a grim line. She twisted her fingers in her lap. “Please don’t say that.”

“You’ll have to believe me in this too,” her mother whispered.

“I don’t want to,” Louisa said stubbornly. Her thumb throbbed where she’d poked it.

“Come closer.” Already, after only their brief exchange, her mother’s voice sounded strained from use.

Louisa knelt just above the floor beside the bed. She took her mother’s cold, white hand in both of her own. “Should I fetch Mrs. Morel to mix a healing tonic?” Louisa glanced at the ceiling, where, in the apartment above, their landlord slept.

Her mother shook her head. “There’s nothing more she can do for me, Louisa.”

“What can I do for you?” Louisa clasped her mother’s fingers. She would bring her extra blankets or warm water with squeezed lemons. Something to comfort her mother until morning.

A sheen of sweat beaded her mother’s forehead, and a shiver ran the length of her body. She smelled of autumn roses after their bloom, something faded and oversweet. “Just stay by my side.”

“I’m here,” Louisa said in a small voice. “Where else would I go?”

Her mother’s eyes flicked toward the window. “Sometimes I wonder.”

“That’s silly.” Louisa never left her mother for long, not if she could help it. She did not even attend school, taught at home by her mother instead. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“You won’t mean to, but one day the wind might carry you away. The sky is vast, and like the Spark Woods beyond Plum, something you might become lost in. I could not bear to lose you to the forest of stars.” Her mother drew her eyes from the night as if it pained her and settled them heavy and searching on Louisa. “You must promise me you’ll be careful.”

Louisa slouched under the weight of her mother’s words and those still unspoken. “You have no reason to worry about me.” But in truth, anytime her mother mentioned the forest of stars, Louisa quaked with fear—that the wind might blow her so high she’d float past the sooty fog and be lost forever in the stars no one in Plum could even see.

Her mother’s gaze once again returned to the window. In the silence that followed, the love bugs licked their mouths and chomped off chunks of her mother’s heart. They had never been so loud. The sound of their feasting rang in Louisa’s ears.

“Mother.” Louisa’s voice quavered.

“I have every reason to worry.” Her mother touched her tongue to her cracked lips, as if she did not want to release the words she’d readied. But then they fell fast and rough, pushed out from the place deep inside that had always tended them. “I think of it every day. That you might be more like William than I imagined.”

“My father?” Her mother hardly spoke of him. Louisa knew it pained her too much, that the very thought of his name fractured her already-broken heart. Louisa leaned closer so her mother could whisper the rest.

“Yes, your father.” Her throat moved with the effort of swallowing. “Just before you were born, he lost his grasp on the world.”

Louisa’s thoughts spun all around, too fast for her to catch.

“He floated out this very window, up and into the air.” Her mother clutched Louisa’s hand, holding her in place. “I reached for his coattails, but they slipped right through my fingers. He lifted higher and higher, touching the clouds and moving with them as the wind blew north.”

“What happened to him?” Louisa asked. Although she knew something must have happened to her father long, long ago (after all, she had never once met him), she hadn’t known this secret. And she hadn’t realized she took after him, that he too was made of hollow bones and too much air.

Her mother’s voice crackled like broken glass. “I never saw him again.”

But that Louisa had already guessed. All this time, her mother had waited for him to return, watching the window as if he might fall from the sky and back into their lives. He was the only one who could have chased away the love bugs. Louisa had tried and tried, but all the love she poured into her mother leaked through the fissures in her heart, never quite enough to fill it or seal it or make it whole.

“I’m afraid for you.” Her mother’s fingers trembled. “So promise me. Promise me you’ll always be careful.”

Louisa didn’t like the urgency in her mother’s voice, and she didn’t want to make the promise. Not because she wouldn’t be careful, but because it felt like a last promise.

And last words.

Louisa bowed her head. There was not enough time for all the things she wanted to say, only this final moment to put her mother at ease. She opened her mouth but found herself too choked up to utter even the smallest sound. A silent sob rattled through her.

“Shh.” The gentle shushing and the pressure of her mother’s hand soothed the raw edges inside Louisa.

She swallowed. “I promise.”

“Oh, my sweet girl. How I love you.” All the rest of what might have been said trailed off. Her mother’s eyelids fluttered and then shut.

Silence descended upon the room. A horrible, clutching stillness. It swelled and swelled, like a held breath, but her mother did not exhale.

“Mother?” Louisa said, gripping her limp hand, afraid to let go.

The quiet stretched on, a stillness more terrible than the gnawing of the love bugs, which had ceased all at once, in time with the final beat of her mother’s lonely heart.

“Mother!” Louisa cried. “Please don’t leave me.”

But her mother was already gone.

Louisa could not stand the quiet, how it engulfed her. Her throat clogged with tears as she released her mother’s hand. She clutched her own to her chest, eyes bleary as she looked at her mother’s still form. Louisa’s heart beat fast, but she would not let it break. The love bugs could squirm through the smallest sliver of space or the tiniest crack.

She would not let them eat her heart.

2

Soot-Prints

Every day since her mother’s last breath, the wind wailed. It churned the clouds overhead and the smog coughed up from the factory’s smokestacks. Black flecks blew all around, and a layer of soot stained the ground like the darkest, dirtiest snow.

With her skirt fluttering around her knees, Louisa looked down the street. Not a single footprint marked the blanket of ash.

And she would make none of her own.

When they’d gone out, her mother had always placed her boots down so carefully, perfect soot-prints left in the grime. They’d made a game of it, her mother an arm’s span ahead, face turned back with a smile, and Louisa hopping step to step after her—no one in Plum the wiser that Louisa’s feet never touched the ground.

But her mother was no longer here to guide the way. Not through the sooty streets. Not in any part of Louisa’s life.

Taking these steps without her mother felt impossible, but Louisa turned up the worn collar of her black coat and stalked forward. The wind ran beside her, stirring up ash and twisting and tangling her hair so it whipped around her head like strands of black lightning.

Had she really been there, her mother would have braided it for her. Louisa could have done it herself, of course, but even the small act of plaiting one strand over another brought a thick ache to her throat. She would have given anything to feel her mother’s fingers in her hair, how gently she worked out a snarl.

How, when her hands were busy, she might let something slip about Louisa’s father. Little bits that Louisa collected and held close—that his hair shone as black as a starless midnight sky, the same shade as Louisa’s own, that he was a night owl and sketched by the light of the moon, that he had once worked for the theater as a stagehand—but never once had she mentioned how he floated on air.

It seemed something Louisa should have known much sooner. It was a terribly lonesome feeling to have, every story of her father filled with holes so she could not see the whole of him. Not even the few spare photographs her mother had taken could trap his image, as if he was about to drift out of the frame.

Louisa took what tales she could from those faded black-and-white pictures. In one, her father ran fast with a long-tailed kite, his face no more than a smudge. It was taken the day her parents had met. In another, he stood just above the ground with his back to the lens, plucking an apple from a tree. And her favorite: the one with her parents together, their figures so small she couldn’t see either of their faces clearly—and Louisa a small bean in her mother’s rounded belly. They posed before a wide-striped tent, the sky above them dark but for the stars. Their fingers linked, as if her mother hoped to keep her father grounded. Louisa had always wondered where the photographs were taken, none more than this last one that she was a part of too.

As she walked along, Louisa glanced up, casting sad eyes at the clouds. She wanted her mother beside her. She wanted to know her father. The first was impossible.

The second was only nearly impossible.

Tears brimmed her eyes, but she couldn’t cry in case the love bugs were watching.

Not now. Not ever.

Louisa let the wind numb her. She straightened her back, taking deliberate steps as she neared the crowded streets of Plum Square, which were surrounded by black-shuttered buildings so tall and narrow hardly any sun reached between them. Here, someone would have to look very closely to notice how her feet hovered above the ground, but she heard the whisper of her mother, reminding her to be careful.

Sidestepping a group of boys her age, Louisa clutched her bag. They rushed for one of the stands along the square, knocking elbows as they went and shoving schoolbooks from one another’s hands, vying to be the first in line for a sticky bun (which was sure to come with a sprinkling of ash as well) or some other sugary treat.

She continued on, past the stalls with sweet rolls and scones and candied apples that smelled so much like happiness her lips twitched.

Louisa scanned the crowd, searching for the one vendor who was so inconsistent in her attendance at the market that it would be a wonder if Louisa could find her. All around the square she went, until at last Louisa spied the young woman at the edge of the alley, perched on a stool, two wooden buckets of flowers at her feet.

Although the flowers sagged in the bucket, all the best picked over earlier in the day, their heavy heads and velvet petals were as beautiful as the woman who sold them. They shone brighter than anything else in Plum Square.

The woman smiled as Louisa approached, an expression that seemed more appraising than warm. “Pretty flowers for a pretty girl? For a heart-sworn friend? For your most loved and cherished mother?”

The words chimed like bells and came as fast as the wind, blowing into Louisa all at once.

“What do you favor? The sweetest, rubiest-red roses? The hardiest chrysanthemums? Carnations to match your snow-white cheeks or asters to match your eyes?”

Louisa shook her head, finding her voice at last. “My eyes aren’t purple.”

“Come closer, then.” The woman adjusted her thick skirts, layered teal, plum, and gold, which were so long they fell past her toes and swept the ground. Dirt dusted the hem. “Let me better see.”

Louisa crossed the distance between them. Her fingers curled around the strap of her bag.

The flower seller touched the wilted rose struck through her hair and plucked off a creped red petal the same shade as her lips. Rubbing it between index finger and thumb, she leaned forward. Louisa squirmed under her sharp inspection. “It seems I was mistaken. Your eyes are a troublesome swirl of black and blue. But I haven’t any flowers with me to match sorrow.”

Louisa looked at her toes. She had not masked her feelings as well as she’d thought. “The daisies, please.”

She and her mother had picked wildflowers each summer (before the love bugs had consumed so much of her mother’s heart), arranging them in a glass jar once used for jam. Her mother had never said so, but Louisa had always imagined her father (faceless though he was) with a fat bunch of daisies in his hands, offering them up to her mother because he knew she loved them best.

Louisa slipped her hand into the pocket of her coat and tightened her fingers around one of the coins tucked deep inside, hoping it would be enough, for she could not spare more.

The woman reached down and plucked the flowers from the bucket. The stems dripped water, but Louisa accepted them without complaint and handed over the coin while nodding goodbye. She’d gone no more than a few steps when the woman called after her.

“That’s a neat trick you have there. It almost looks as if you are floating. Are you a street performer? An illusionist? A levitationist?”

Louisa stiffened, too aware of the odd shadow that fell beneath her feet. She turned her head ever so slowly. “I am none of those things. I’m just a girl.” (Oh, how she wished that were true.)

Her heart pounded in her chest so loudly that she worried the love bugs could hear its call. She forced herself to meet the woman’s eyes, pretending she had nothing to hide and nothing to fear. The vendor made no comment, and her silence was even worse than the questions—full of knowing. Louisa shrank back, looking away and scurrying off before her secret let itself loose.

But the vendor’s too-observant gaze followed her.

3

The Invitation

The sky darkened another degree, sooty air and nightfall overlapping. Prodded by the wind, Louisa quickened her pace away from Plum Square and the curious flower vendor. She’d come so close to being found out, and her heart would not calm. She clutched the daisies. No one followed, but she didn’t stop until she reached her destination.

A spike-tipped fence surrounded it. Although she knew she’d spent too much time in the square and had come too late, she rattled the iron gate.

It was locked, just as it always was come sundown.

Louisa had no key. Not to the gate, not even to her old apartment on the other side of town. Mrs. Morel, the only one who might have taken her in, had put her to the streets the morning after her mother’s passing, plucking the key right from Louisa’s trembling fist.

She shook the gate again. She could not be shut out here too.

“Please open,” she whimpered, but there was no one around to hear her.

The wind gusted harder. It swirled and howled and lifted her as easily as it would a feather.

Another wave of panic pulsed through her.

Her arm shot out, searching for her mother’s hand before she remembered it wasn’t there. She grasped for something, anything, to keep her grounded. Her fingertips trailed along the cold metal bars of the fence and then grabbed hold. She curled her fingers, tugging herself closer.

She stared between the bars at the cemetery beyond.

A darker shade of dusk settled in the bone garden, as if the night were deeper and the hour later on the other side of the fence. It swept a shadowed cloak around the shoulders of the tombstones.

Louisa did not trust the wind, which bullied her higher and tore the fence from her grip. It carried her up. It could carry her away, just as it had her father, all the way to the forest of stars—and the dark patches of space between them. Her throat tightened, as if she’d already floated out of the atmosphere and had no more air to breathe. The fence passed beneath her toes, the crooked gravestones too. She would not even be able to say goodbye to her mother before she was swept away.

Then, quite unexpectedly, the wind weakened.

It did not immediately set her down but brought her to a lonely, disused corner of the graveyard with hardly enough space to lay a person to rest, so crowded was it with willows and roots pushed up from the earth.

With trembling hands, she grabbed for the drooping branches and drifted forward, drifted lower, her black boots just above the grass once again. The air stilled. But she knew at any moment it could return for her.

Looking down, Louisa let out a shaky breath. She stared at the fresh-turned earth and the plain stone marking it.

Simone LaRoche.

Mrs. Morel had offered this kindness at least, paying to lay her mother to rest when Louisa had scrounged up no more than a handful of coppers from the tin atop the cupboard. “Keep them,” Mrs. Morel had said, though she’d eyed them as if they were owed to her.

Louisa touched the stone, thankful it would always remember her mother. She sent love, love, love from her heart to the heavens and then scattered the daisies on the grave. “For you, Mother.”

Still she did not cry. The love bugs—some of which had crawled into her bag along with her change of clothes, a well-loved book, and her mother’s traveling sewing kit—craved softer hearts than hers, ones not guarded so fiercely. They scattered.

Louisa was very much alone.

* * *

Quiet, lonely days passed.

Each night, Louisa slept in the cemetery, resting just above her mother’s grave, and each morning, grief shook her awake.

Louisa brushed leaves from her hair as she rose and stretched, leaning into a patch of sunlight like a stray graveyard cat. It warmed her face and sank into her bones. She tried not to think about winter, when snow would blanket the ground and ice would crystalize the treetops, so cold she’d freeze like an icicle sometime in the night.

As much as she missed her mother, she was not ready to be buried beside her. But the sweet memories of her mother were further from her mind than her mother’s last words, spilled out like a secret, how her father had floated out the window, never to return.

“Where is he?” Louisa whispered.