The Sky in Exile

Chapter 1: The Farrier's Son

The horse was going to kill him.

Jonah Tallow saw it in the way the grey mare's left eye rolled white, in the twitch of the muscles along her flank, in the slight shift of weight to her hindquarters that meant she was loading up to kick. He had been shoeing horses since he was eleven years old, and at seventeen he could read the language of their bodies the way his sister Bess read books—fluently, instinctively, and with a certainty that left no room for doubt.

He dropped the hoof he was holding and threw himself sideways.

The kick came a half-second later. The mare's iron-shod hoof cut the air where his head had been, close enough that he felt the wind of it pull at his hair. She struck the anvil instead, and the ring of metal on metal sang through the smithy like a chapel bell.

"Easy," Jonah said, his voice low and steady despite the hammering in his chest. "Easy, girl. You're all right."

He didn't use his gift. He hadn't needed to.

That was the rule. The only rule that mattered. Never use it unless dying was the alternative, and even then, think twice.

The smithy belonged to his father, Gareth Tallow, who had shoed every horse in Dyer's Rest for twenty-three years and whose hands were so scarred from hoof-picks and hot iron that they looked like the surface of an old cutting board. Gareth was not in the smithy today. He was in bed with the winter cough that had been slowly drowning him since autumn, and Jonah was doing the work of two men with the body of one boy.

Dyer's Rest sat on the border between the king's peace and the king's war, which in practice meant it got the worst of both. The town was a sprawl of timber-frame houses, frozen mud streets, and smoke from a dozen forges that never quite cleared the valley. War roads ran through it like old scars—supply routes from the capital to the northern front, rutted deep by nine years of wagon wheels and marching boots.

Nine years since the Blind Hour.

Jonah had been eight when it happened. He remembered it the way you remember a nightmare that refuses to fade with morning: incompletely, but with a vividness that made the fragments worse than the whole.

He remembered his mother pulling him and Bess out of bed, wrapping them in blankets, carrying them to the doorstep. He remembered looking up and seeing nothing. Not clouds. Not darkness in the way of an overcast night. Nothing. The sky had been emptied. The moon hung alone in a void so absolute it looked like a coin floating in ink.

One hour.

Then the stars came back, and his mother went inside and wept, and his father stood in the yard with his scarred hands hanging at his sides and said nothing at all.

Three hundred people across Harthen woke with dead starlight in their souls.

Jonah was one of them.

He didn't know it until he was twelve. He'd been wrestling with Doss Greyhill behind the tannery—a stupid fight over a stupid insult about his father's cough—and Doss had gotten him on his back and raised a fist full of gravel to grind into his face. Jonah had thrown up his hands, and the world stopped.

Not slowed.

Stopped.

Doss's fist hung in the air, knuckles white, gravel suspended between his fingers like tiny frozen planets. A fly hung motionless near Jonah's ear. A drop of sweat clung to Doss's jaw, refusing to fall.

One breath.

That was all it lasted. One inhalation's worth of silence, and then the world lurched forward again and Doss's fist came down and Jonah rolled clear just in time.

He never told anyone. Not his father. Not Bess. Not the priests who came through Dyer's Rest every spring to inspect the unmarked and remind the townsfolk that the Registry was their shield, their shepherd, their salvation.

The Registry.

King Osric Bale's answer to the impossible. Register every Starmarked. Train them. Use them. Watch them. And if they hid—hang them.

Jonah had watched two hangings in Dyer's Rest. The first was a woman named Petra Colls who could make flowers grow from stone. The second was a boy his own age whose gift no one ever learned, because he died before anyone thought to ask.

So Jonah kept his secret. He shoed horses. He hauled water. He tended his father and argued with his sister and lived a life so ordinary that it should have been beneath the notice of kings and spymasters and the war that ground on and on in the north like a millstone with nothing left to grind.

He calmed the grey mare with soft words and steady hands, finished the shoeing, and led her back to her owner—a supply sergeant named Collis who paid in half-crowns and never looked Jonah in the eye.

The sun was already low when Jonah walked home. Dyer's Rest in winter was a study in grey: grey sky, grey mud, grey smoke, grey faces. The only colour came from the Registry banners that hung from the town hall—deep blue cloth stitched with the silver lantern of the Lantern Corps, King Osric's army of tame Starmarked.

Bess was waiting for him at the door.

She was fifteen, sharp-faced and sharp-tongued, with their mother's dark hair and their father's stubborn jaw. She had a book open on her knee—one of the old almanacs she collected from travelling merchants, full of star charts and celestial tables that had been outdated since the Blind Hour.

"Collis paid?" she asked without looking up.

"Half what he owes."

"Half is generous for Collis." She turned a page. "Father's sleeping. The cough's worse."

Jonah sat on the step beside her and pulled off his gloves. His hands were red and raw from the cold, and there was a new burn on his left palm from a stray spark. He pressed it against the frozen wood of the step and hissed.

"I've been reading about the Veil constellation," Bess said. "Or where it used to be. Three of its seven stars haven't been visible since the Blind Hour. The almanac from six years ago still charts them, but the one from four years ago doesn't."

"Stars go dim," Jonah said. "That's what Father Callum says."

"Father Callum says a lot of things. Most of them are designed to keep people from asking questions." She closed the almanac and looked at him. "Jonah. There are riders on the south road."

He went still.

"How many?"

"Four. Registry colours. They stopped at the Widow Harren's place an hour ago. Asked about unmarked households."

Jonah's stomach dropped.

Registry hunters didn't come to Dyer's Rest often. The town was too small, too poor, too far from anywhere that mattered. But when they came, they came with purpose.

"They're not here for me," Jonah said carefully.

"No," Bess said. Her voice was flat. "They're here for me."

He stared at her.

"Someone filed an accusation. Widow Harren told me before she told them—she's not fond of the Registry, whatever she says on census day. Bess Tallow, suspected Starmarked, unreported, unregistered, in violation of the King's Edict."

"You're not marked."

"Since when has that mattered?"

She was right. That was the poison at the heart of the Registry. Accusation was enough. Proof came after, in the testing chambers of the capital, where Starmarked examiners peeled back the layers of your mind to see if anything burned underneath. If you were marked, you were conscripted. If you were unmarked, you were released—eventually, if you survived the testing.

And if someone had a grudge, or a debt, or a jealousy, all it took was a whispered name and a Registry seal.

"Who accused you?" Jonah asked.

"Does it matter?"

"It matters to me."

Bess shook her head. "It could be anyone. Doss Greyhill's mother never forgave me for breaking his nose. The Collis family thinks Father overcharged them for that plough horse. Or it could be someone who's never spoken to me, someone who needed to give the hunters a name so they'd leave their own family alone."

Jonah stood. "We'll talk to them. Explain—"

"Explain what? That I'm not marked? They don't care, Jonah. They fill quotas. Every hunter who comes back with a name gets paid. Every name that goes on the Registry is a body for the Lantern Corps or a prisoner for the testing chambers. We are not people to them. We are entries in a ledger."

She was shaking. Not with fear—Bess was not a girl who shook with fear—but with rage, the kind that burned cold and steady and refused to look away from the thing that caused it.

"Pack a bag," Jonah said.

"And go where?"

"Anywhere. The western valleys. Aunt Lissa's farm—"

"Aunt Lissa is dead, Jonah. She died two winters ago. You wrote the letter yourself."

He had. He'd forgotten. The world was full of dead aunts and empty houses and roads that led nowhere safe.

"Lowmere," Bess said quietly.

Jonah looked at her.

Lowmere was a name spoken in whispers. An outlaw haven in the marshlands south of the Greythorn Forest, where hidden Starmarked, deserters from the Lantern Corps, and people who had slipped through the cracks of the Registry were said to gather. No one Jonah knew had ever been there. No one he knew had ever come back from trying.

"That's a story," he said.

"Everything's a story until you walk into it."

The sound of hooves reached them from the south road. Four riders, moving at a trot, their lanterns swinging in the dusk.

"Go inside," Jonah said. "Stay with Father. I'll talk to them."

"Jonah—"

"I'll talk to them."

He walked to the front gate and stood in the mud and waited.

The hunters arrived in formation: two in front, two behind, wearing the blue-and-silver of the Lantern Corps but carrying the iron badges of the Registry's enforcement arm. Their leader was a tall man with a shaved head and a scar that ran from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. He dismounted without greeting.

"Gareth Tallow?" he said.

"His son. Gareth's ill."

"We're here for Bess Tallow. Accusation of concealed marking, filed under the King's Edict, section twelve. She'll come with us for testing."

"My sister isn't marked."

"That's what the testing determines."

"She's fifteen years old."

"The Edict doesn't mention age." The hunter's eyes were flat and professional. He wasn't cruel, Jonah realized. He was something worse. He was efficient. "Bring her out, or we come in."

Jonah's mind raced. He could refuse. They would push past him. He could fight. They would beat him, arrest him, possibly kill him. He could use his gift—

No.

One breath of frozen time would not stop four armed men. It would only reveal what he was.

But Bess was already at the door.

She had her coat on. Her almanac was tucked under her arm. Her face was composed in the way that meant she had already calculated every outcome and chosen the one that cost the least.

"I'll go," she said.

"Bess—"

"Take care of Father."

The hunter with the scar nodded and gestured to one of his men, who produced a pair of iron cuffs. Not the ornamental kind the Lantern Corps wore in parades. The real kind, with edges that bit.

Bess held out her wrists.

Jonah's vision narrowed.

He saw the cuffs close around her wrists. He saw the hunter's hand on her shoulder, steering her toward his horse. He saw Bess's face, calm and furious and fifteen years old, and he saw the future unspooling in front of him: the testing chambers, the examiners, the cold rooms where they stripped you bare and searched your soul for fire.

She wasn't marked. They would find nothing. But the testing took weeks, sometimes months, and people came back from it changed—quieter, thinner, with something missing behind their eyes.

If they came back at all.

"Wait," Jonah said.

The hunter turned.

"She's not the one you want."

The words came out before he could stop them. Bess's eyes went wide.

"Jonah, don't—"

"I'm the one who's marked."

Silence.

The hunter studied him. "You're confessing to concealment?"

"I'm telling you the truth. My sister is unmarked. I'm the Starmarked in this family. Take me instead."

The hunter's expression didn't change. "We'll take you both."

He drew his sword.

Not to fight. To threaten. The blade came up and pressed against Bess's throat—casually, almost lazily, the way a man might rest his hand on a fence post.

"Show me," the hunter said. "If you're marked, show me. If you're lying to buy time, the girl bleeds."

Bess stood very still. A thin line of red appeared where the blade touched her skin.

Jonah looked at his sister.

She shook her head. Don't.

The hunter pressed harder.

Jonah stopped time.

The world held its breath.

Snow that had been falling in lazy spirals froze in the air, each flake a tiny crystal constellation suspended against the grey sky. The hunter's mouth hung half-open, his lips shaped around a word he would never finish. His sword was a line of frozen steel against Bess's throat, the blood on its edge as still as paint.

The other three hunters were statues. Their horses were statues. A crow overhead was a black smear pinned to the clouds.

Jonah moved.

In the frozen world, he was the only living thing. He crossed the yard in three steps, reached the hunter, and carefully—so carefully—pulled Bess away from the blade. Her body was rigid, locked in the amber of stopped time, but she moved when he moved her, sliding free of the hunter's grip like a puppet lifted from its strings.

He set her down two yards away, behind the water trough.

Then he went back to the hunter and took his sword.

The blade was heavier than he expected. He nearly dropped it. He was a farrier's son, not a soldier. But he held it, and he stood in the centre of the frozen yard, and he waited.

One breath.

The world lurched back into motion.

The hunter stumbled forward, his hand closing on air where Bess had been. He blinked. He looked at his empty hand. He looked at Jonah, standing six feet away, holding his sword.

The other hunters drew their weapons.

"Starmarked," the scarred hunter said. Not with surprise. With satisfaction. "Both of you. Seize them."

"Run," Jonah said.

Bess ran.

She was faster than him—she'd always been faster, lighter on her feet, quicker to react. She vaulted the back fence of their yard and disappeared into the alley behind the tannery before the hunters had finished turning their horses.

Jonah threw the sword into the mud and ran after her.

Behind him, the hunters shouted. Hooves churned the frozen ground. A lantern shattered against the wall of the smithy, spraying blue-white light across the snow.

Jonah ran through alleys he'd known since childhood, cutting between houses, ducking under clotheslines, scrambling over the stone wall behind the chapel. Bess was ahead of him, a dark shape moving through the grey dusk.

They met at the old mill bridge, both gasping, both terrified.

"You idiot," Bess said. "You absolute idiot."

"You're welcome."

"They saw you. They know what you are. You can never come back here."

"Neither can you."

She stared at him. Then she grabbed his hand and pulled him across the bridge.

"Lowmere," she said.

"Lowmere," he agreed.

Behind them, the hunters' lanterns bobbed through the streets of Dyer's Rest like blue stars searching for something to burn.

Jonah and Bess Tallow ran south into the dark, leaving behind a sick father, a cold smithy, and a life that had been ordinary enough to hide in.

The sky above them was missing seven stars that had been there the night before.

Neither of them looked up to count.