Page 77 of Flame and Sparrow

“Then you must complete my task.”

She waved her hand once more over the stars. This time, they seemed to keep their relative positions, but they grew larger, as did the darkness around them, creating a map that I could not only see but also walk through.

“Find the crown in your future sky,” she said. “You have until the last of the stars in the beast’s mane falls away.”

The task delivered, she disappeared in a swirl of sparkling dust.

The silence following her disappearance was eerie; with the sky stretching endlessly around me, I felt like I was the only living thing in the universe. The sheer magnitude of my task nearly overwhelmed me before I could even start.

I gave my sister’s necklace a quick squeeze, forced several deep breaths, and then began to break my task into smaller tasks, starting with the easiest of the goddess’s riddles.

Until the last of the stars in the beast’s mane falls away.

That was simple enough to puzzle out, I thought; I set about searching for a constellation that resembled a beast of some sort, and I quickly found it: the clear shape of a lion-like head. Stars circled around it, two clear layers set apart from the sea of lights beyond them. As I stared, expectant, one of the points in the outermost part of this circling mane flickered and began to fade.

So here was my timekeeper, then.

I watched it for a moment, feeling pleased at how easily I’d managed to untangle this first bit of my trial.

The satisfaction didn’t last.

In the next blink, the light had disappeared. It happened soquickly—a precious fragment of my limited time already gone, just like that.

Wasting no more of that time, I started to search for the crown—though I still stayed close to the lion’s mane at first, watching out of the corner of my eye until I saw another of its stars start to blink away. Then I calculated in my head, trying to determine—as accurately as I could—how much time seemed to pass between fading stars.

No more than a minute, I guessed.

A quick count found that there were only twenty of them left to go.

Palms sweating, I went back to my search for the crown. I walked as fast as I could through the sky map, noting the shape and layout of different star clusters I passed so that I wouldn’t end up going in circles and wasting time. I combed methodically through row after row, and I managed to cover a great distance without getting too turned around, but it was fast becoming daunting.

How far did this sky stretch in each direction?

I looked back to the lion. It was hard to be certain from a distance, but it appeared as though three more of the mane’s stars had already disappeared.

I shook off the sense of impending doom and walked faster.

I could do this.

Iwoulddo this.

Movement above drew my attention toward it. A star was falling toward me, and I reached up instinctively to catch it as I had when I’d been falling myself. It burst on impact just like the last one had, again showering me with silver and gold dust.

The particles seemed larger, thicker. What had seemed so beautiful before felt sinister now, reminding me of the shining, breaking glass from my nightmare. The bigger flakes of it scraped over my skin, leaving it feeling itchy and raw. Worse was the way the dust seemed to cast a fog over my senses, making the sky spin and stretch into something even larger, even more daunting.

More stars fell from somewhere up above, trying to distract me from the task at hand.

I pulled the rolled-up sleeves of my nightshirt down to protect my skin and trudged onward through the waves of stars, darting about to avoid letting them break against me. It made it more difficult, but I still stuck to the pattern of movement I’d established, still trying to be as efficient as possible.

At least five minutes had passed, if not ten, when the largest burst of falling stars yet fell over me. I couldn’t avoid all of them.

I tried anyway, veering wildly to the right, tripping over my own feet in the process. Falling down as the stardust showered me was disorienting to say the least. I closed my eyes, but opened them almost immediately; it was too tempting to stay still in the dark.

Wiping the star’s residue from my skin and clothing, I got back to my feet and continued my desperate search.

Until, finally, I saw it.

I spotted the base of it first, a curve of evenly spaced stars that connected to a vertical line of more stars on either side. The whole thing was tilted sideways, but it was very obviously a crown—one with five tall, distinct points.

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