Starsong Read online

  “The first child may step forward.”

  Everything about this one screamed boy, from the leather shoes to the slouch of the back, so it was no surprise when he sidled up to the table and, without hesitation, picked up the black robe. Two attendants helped him remove the original and don the new one, and he flashed a gap-toothed grin at his parents before returning to his place in line.

  So it went for most of the others. A few hesitated, hand outstretched in the space between the two piles, but within a few seconds, all had chosen.

  Soon, the last child took the floor. Nothing about the shoes, the shape of the clothing beneath, or even the facial features gave him or her away, and after years of ceremonies, I was an expert. Finally challenged, I sat up in my seat and watched this one with interest. Their eyes were an intense green, extremely rare for the pale Dramanians. There was a focus in every movement of the limbs, a calculation not often found in children, though the limbs of this child were much smaller and daintier than their age would suggest.

  “Red or black, dear?” the master of ceremonies prompted. The hour was late, and our guests had not yet had dessert. After that there would be dancing, and I was sure Aduerto would insist on parading me around the room on his arm.

  “Neither.”

  The child whispered this word, and as the closest person to where they stood, I was the only one to hear. My mouth made a shocked O.

  “What did they say?” my father asked from beside me.

  I shook my head, hoping for the child’s sake that something else would come out this time.

  “I said neither.” The child faced the master of ceremonies. “I will not choose.”

  “Will not choose?” the master of ceremonies stuttered. “But this tradition has been part of our culture since Draman’s founding.”

  The child shrugged and moved back toward the line.

  “Sire, we cannot let this happen,” the master of ceremonies whispered to my father. “If one does not choose, then none will. The collapse of our society as we know it will be imminent.”

  “Collapse? Imminent?” my father repeated. “Quite right.” My father pointed to the child. “You must choose.”

  “No. I am not boy or girl. I am a Draman.” The child’s voice was not outwardly defiant, but I knew my father would not hear it that way.

  “You dare disobey your king?” he asked, appalled. Draman was not a place of defiance, never had been.

  “I’m sorry, Sire, but I cannot choose.”

  My father’s face grew red, the kind of coloring that meant he was about to send out an army or issue an edict or, occasionally, send a foe down to the dungeon.

  “Guards, seize that child,” he cried out. From the corners of the room, the royal guards in their black robes with silver belts moved to capture them.

  Aduerto was suddenly at my side. “Princess, turn away,” he said, putting his arm on my shoulder and forcing me to look at him instead. “Women should not see such things.”

  I resisted the urge to bite him, more afraid of the leftover chicken oil than the repercussions of harming a mayor’s son. Instead, I shrugged the arm off and inched away from him.

  “Stop!”

  Someone else moved toward the child, getting between them and the guards, but I did not need to see her face to know who had spoken. Sara Lee moved the child behind her back, then spoke directly to my father.

  “Sire, I am sorry to be defiant, but you cannot arrest this child.”

  “Oh, really—Sara Lee, isn’t it? Would you mind explaining why the serving maid is telling her king what he can and cannot do?”

  “Because you’re wrong, Sire. This practice is wrong. Sure, some of these children truly feel like a boy or a girl, but some don’t. Some just pick up a robe to please their king, and are therefore doomed to a life as someone they are not. One day, they may even love someone they cannot, all because of a stupid ceremony when they were too young to know any better.”

  I gripped the armrests of my royal chair so tightly that my fingers went white.

  “Are you admitting to a relationship with another girl?” my father demanded. “That’s a punishable offense.”

  “I’ve not acted on these feelings, my king,” Sara Lee said, “but why shouldn’t I? Beneath these ridiculous robes, there are no girls and boys. There are only Dramanians.”

  “Take them both down to the dungeon,” my father called to his guards. “We’ll see how they feel after a long night with the rats.”

  Only then did I notice the familiar twitch of Sara Lee’s limbs, the sudden whiteness of the eyes. We Dramanians rarely transformed into our other sides, since doing so was looked down on and we could rarely hold the dragon form for more than a few minutes, but I had seen a few of the villagers make the change.

  “Get back,” I called to the children, who dutifully fled to the wall. “She’s transforming.”

  Sara Lee’s body stretched, and next to her, the child’s body mimicked the motion. White wings sprouted from their torsos, and talons appeared on their claws. The flesh disappeared from their bodies, leaving only the bones. Or only the bone dragons, to be exact.

  I’m sorry, Sara Lee said, her voice only in my head. Please come with us, Nimue. I don’t want to leave you.

  I almost went. I stood, but the thought of my mother, dying in her royal bed, kept my body in its Dramanian form. Reluctantly, I shook my head no. I wished I could explain myself, but only dragons could use telepathy.

  I guess this is good-bye. She looked like she wanted to say more, but then she turned away and ran for the window. The little child followed, and as one, they crashed through the stained glass and took flight in the night air.

  “There’s nowhere for them to go,” Mayor Nemo said with a chuckle. “Draman is a small planet.”

  But as we watched, Sara Lee and the child did not fly over our land. Instead, they angled their magical wings and beat upward, higher and higher into the sky and then, finally, into space. The reflection of our moons on their bones made them look like ghosts.

  “But…,” my father sputtered, “they’ll die up there.”

  “Only if they transform,” I said quietly.

  Eventually, even the bones disappeared from sight.

  Chapter THREE

  SKELLY

  I HAD always been different.

  The sixth and last child in my family, I should have at least had a few guaranteed playmates, but my siblings didn’t know quite what to do with me. On some days, I wanted to swordplay with the boys; on others, I wanted to sew doll clothes with the girls. Between those days, I took to wandering off into the town alone, and could often be found seated on a pub stool listening to the grown-ups talk politics while I sipped a ginger ale. “Introspective,” my mother called me when she came to pry me off the seat, and though I had no idea what that word meant at the time, I knew she didn’t approve.

  Plus, I was at least a foot shorter than I should have been by my age, and my green eyes unsettled everyone they rested on. I was like a stray cat that no one wanted, but everyone felt guilty enough to feed.

  As the royal seamstress’s helper and the wife of a royal guard, my mother cared a great deal about what was proper for a girl or boy to do. Because of her long hours at the sewing machine, she was round and slightly hunched. She decorated her face with too much powder, and on the hottest days, it ran off of her cheeks and down her neck. Unlike her, my father was tall and broad-shouldered, and when not in his uniform he wore little to distinguish himself. Often, I forgot about him entirely, since he rarely spent time with us except to sleep or tell us stories about protecting the princess I had only seen once in real life.

  My mother ran the house. Just like her hundreds of pins, she liked to put people in their proper place all facing the right direction. She liked discipline and order. When not working, she spent her time sprucing the house up so that she could pretend she was the royalty she served. She even made my sisters’ dresses modeled in the st
yles of the royal family with some stolen scraps, though, of course, the dresses could never leave the house.

  The day that she tried to put me in one of those dresses was the day I realized that not only was I different from my brothers and sisters, but from everyone on Draman.

  I had allowed my mother to dress me in frills and lace many times, but usually those were on days when I was already playing dress up with my sisters. On this particular day, I had been chasing my brother around the yard with a toad I had caught in the tall grass after dinner, and could not be bothered with the red velvet frock my mother kept insisting I put on so that she could fit it properly.

  “I don’t understand you,” she muttered as she forced the tight collar over my head. So close, she smelled like the boiled carrots she always served with dinner, and I angled my head away. “Why can’t you put on the dress today when you were so eager to do it yesterday?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, defeated by the tight button now secure around my neck. “I just don’t feel like a girl today.”

  “Oh, child.” My mother put her hands on my shoulders and faced me toward the mirror, where a small stranger in a hideous velvet dress stared back at me. “One day soon, you’ll have to pick a robe and stick with it.”

  “But what if I don’t want to?”

  She patted my hair lovingly, but her words sent a chill through my body. “This is the way things are done on Draman. Unless you have plans to leave this planet, you will choose a robe at your Naming Ceremony and make your father and me proud.”

  Satisfied with the fit of my new gown, my mother finally released me to put myself to bed while my sisters got their dresses fitted too. As soon as I heard her footsteps pad down the hall to my eldest sister’s room, I faced the mirror again.

  I hated that dress. I hated my mother for making me wear it. And I hated the stupid planet I lived on and its old-fashioned ways that made me do things like try on dresses and pick robes.

  I hated everything so much that I began to transition out of anger. The shoulder bones came first; stretching and angling upward, they ripped holes in the sleeves and then stretched through them to create large gaps. My chest expanded, forcing out the stitches of the constricting bodice. As an adult I would learn to wear a loose robe that I could transition with, but at that moment, all I wanted to do was tear my dress apart. And I did, bone by bone, until the gory red velvet mess lay abandoned on the floor.

  Not only had my bone dragon side saved me from that terrible dress, but it saved me from giving in to my mother’s control. In the mirror, in the bony face and wings, I finally recognized myself.

  I got grounded for a month when my mother saw what I had done to the scraps of royal material she had so generously gifted to me. Since most children could not transition into their bone dragon forms and most adults chose not to, she never suspected me; in her mind, I had stolen her scissors and cut the thing up while she wasn’t looking. No matter that the only scissors we owned had been in her sewing pack in my sister’s room—my mother believed what she wanted to.

  I didn’t care one bit about the grounding, though I pretended to cry and sulk. What’s being stuck in your room all day worth when you can fly around all of Draman at night?

  Chapter FOUR

  SARA LEE

  NO ONE ever asked how I came to live in the castle and take the role of a servant to Nimue when I was only a small child. The lack of questioning was not unusual—Nimue was the only one who acknowledged my presence, and as an introverted princess, she rarely spoke unless prompted by me—and in some ways, I was glad for the disinterest. My story was sad, and I did not want her to pity me for it.

  My father, a farmer, died before I was even born. From the way my mother spoke of him, I knew she had never loved him. She was forced to marry him because her family had lost its farm to an accidental fire and, without a marriage, would have died of starvation before the end of winter. My mother loved another, an iron worker, who she saw in secret until her death. The iron worker married after my mother did, but his wife did not die like my father; in fact, she soon found out about the affair and raised such a ruckus that the iron worker feared for my mother’s life. One summer’s night, his wife, filled with jealousy and rage, snuck over to our farm and transitioned, then used her dragon powers to set our crops aflame.

  Imagine watching the fruits of your toils go up in flames once, and then, after you’ve picked yourself up and started again, watching them burn a second time. Could you sift through the ashes for a few undamaged seeds? Or would you stay in your rocking chair frozen by your hopelessness as the flames ran toward your house like a pack of wild dogs?

  I tried to save her. I woke to the noisy destruction and ran to her, pulled her arm and tried to spill her from her seat from behind the chair, but to no avail. My mother’s spirit had left her body, and I could not tempt it back with my cries. I would not have left her at all, would have burned by her feet, if not for the iron worker, who burst in to rescue us in his dragon form.

  Delicately, he took my shirt in his teeth and pulled me away from my mother. Your mother loves you, the iron worker said. She just doesn’t remember. Now go to the castle and knock four times on the back door. When a fat man with one eye asks for your business, say that I sent you and ask him for a job as a maid. After this speech he turned back to the house and barreled through the flaming wall.

  Even though he was in dragon form and therefore immune to dragon fire, the iron worker never emerged from the house. They found both sets of human bones lying next to each other on our living room floor, together in death the way they could never be in life. The iron worker’s wife was charged with murder and given a lifetime prison sentence, and I… well, I did as I was told.

  AS MAID to the Princess of Draman, my boring, tiresome daily tasks took on a certain kind of weight. Yes, I washed sheets and pressed dresses and polished her silver hairbrush, but these things were for the good of my people, the good of the entire planet. Even as a young girl, I understood the meaning of duty.

  Over the years we grew closer and closer. Princess Nimue had no friends, and unlike me, she could not sit and gossip with the maids who stole scraps from the kitchen. I knew the castle inside and out, knew which livery boy was courting which cook, but Nimue was a stranger in her own home. When prompted, she could not tell me where to find the spare rags, or how to get to the kitchen from the throne room. Everyone respected her, but no one liked her much; or, more accurately, no one knew her enough to like her. To the servants, she was a very expensive china doll, and belonged on her shelf with the other heirlooms.

  She needed me.

  And I needed her too. Though I had lots of friends, they were much more interested in squealing about their latest crush than the workings of my mind. Nimue was quiet, but she was also observant; during those silences, she was getting to know me. Eventually, she could tell my mood by the face I made when I walked into her bedroom, and could almost always discern the cause without me saying a word. I felt the same connection with the princess, as well as a second skill: I could always sense her moving between rooms or down a flight of stairs, no matter where she was in the castle. After years of this sixth sense, Nimue was no longer surprised when I found her taking a spoon to Cook’s pies in the pantry in the middle of the night or hiding in the garden with one of the scribes’ newly printed books.

  Though we never discussed it, Nimue also understood how difficult the Naming Ceremony had been for me, and how having the ability to choose had not made the decision any easier.

  So how can I explain what came over me in the throne room? What swayed me to leave behind my best friend, the person I loved most in the world, for a journey into space with a stranger?

  The child’s face. The blank look of despair as they shuffled in behind the others, so like the look of my mother the day she died, and then the change when they stated to their king that they would not choose. The child still had hope, had the will to escape the burning
house, and I could not run away this time. I was going to pull this child from the flames, or I was going to die trying.

  Chapter FIVE

  NIMUE

  MY MOTHER died the next day. I was there in the room when she exhaled as if singing the last note in a song and never started again. The only person I wanted to see or talk to about it had thrown herself out of the throne room window and flown off into space, so I spent most of my time hiding from sympathetic mourners who held me too close and talked to me in voices normally reserved for children.

  My father, who had pretended my mother was already dead the entire time she was sick, was devastated by her actual death. He retreated to his royal chambers and never came out, not even for the funeral. Servants told me that when they had tried to force the door, my father had cracked it open only wide enough to throw his empty wine bottles at their feet. Eventually, after he cursed their entire bloodlines through the door and threatened to remove them all from their positions and leave their children penniless and maybe even fatherless, they stopped visiting him entirely except for the daily meal and fresh wine bottle delivery.

  Alone, I sat on the throne as pallbearers carried my mother in and the royal priest conducted the service in Old Dramanian, a language no one else but the royal clergy studied anymore. The words dipped and rose like a dragon’s flight, even more so because the old man grew winded and ended the notes abruptly, like a landing or, though I tried not to think of it, a transformation in space.

  She looked flawless in the casket. Without the yellow sickliness tainting her skin, she had gone pale and perfect in her whiteness, like a china doll. Her hair had been brushed and braided, and her closed eyes had been painted with the fire symbols of our lands. Someone had dressed her in her finest red gown, the train of fabric overflowing almost to the floor.