CHAPTER 25: STARLIGHT AGAIN

For the first time, Joe approached Starlight without wondering whether his future depended on a black stone.

That alone made the festival feel different.

Harvest had ended only recently. South of Green Hollow, the family's six strips and the neighboring fields had been cut down to short golden stubble, with bundles of straw stacked along the edges and loose stalks caught against the low earthen boundaries. For weeks the roads had been filled with creaking carts carrying grain toward household stores. Now the heaviest work was finished, leaving the valley in the brief, pleasant pause between harvest and Deepwinter.

The mornings had grown colder. Mist sometimes gathered above the river before sunrise, thin enough that the eastern bank appeared and disappeared as the wind moved it. The wooded hills surrounding the valley had begun changing as well. Summer green remained in patches, but the northern slopes were increasingly streaked with yellow, brown and deep red.

Inside the village, Starlight transformed the familiar packed-earth road.

Lanterns hung beneath thatched eaves and from poles near the square. Children had collected late flowers, colored leaves and berry-covered branches from the lower hills to decorate fences and doorways. The communal ovens had been hot since morning, and smoke drifted between the houses carrying the smells of bread, roasted vegetables, fish and the occasional richer scent of meat.

After weeks of harvest work, Green Hollow seemed determined to spend one day pretending there would never be another field requiring attention.

Joe walked toward the village center with his family.

Mary had been told not to run ahead.

She obeyed for perhaps twenty steps before gradually increasing the distance again, apparently believing that moving away slowly did not count.

"Mary."

Lily did not need to raise her voice.

Mary stopped, looked back and reluctantly returned.

Pam watched her fall into place beside Joe. "That stubbornness came from somewhere."

Lily glanced toward her mother-in-law. "Don't look at me."

Pam smiled without answering.

Mike wisely found something interesting on the opposite side of the road.

Joe walked beside Simon and simply enjoyed himself.

Last year, the festival was surrounded by uncertainty. He had watched every eligible child and wondered whether the black stone would respond when his turn came.

Now the result was already behind him.

He could look at the stalls instead.

Travelling merchants occupied several of the best spaces near the square. Green Hollow had no permanent market, so Starlight attracted anyone willing to make money from villagers temporarily holding harvest silver.

The merchants' wagons looked heavier than ordinary farm carts, with canvas stretched over curved wooden frames and iron reinforcement around the wheels. Horses had been tethered farther from the square where children could not easily annoy them.

One stall displayed Blackwood-made knives, axe heads and metal fittings.

Another carried cloth dyed in blues and reds rarely seen in ordinary village clothing.

Mary became fascinated by polished stones and carved wooden ornaments until Lily informed her that looking was free and touching was not.

Joe and Simon found something more interesting.

Medicine.

The smell reached Joe before he properly examined the stall.

Dried herbs mixed with sharper medicinal scents he now recognized from Merek's workrooms. Small wooden boxes sat behind the merchant's table; some sealed with wax. Several narrow ceramic bottles had been packed into straw-lined cases, while expensive powders were wrapped in paper finer than anything Merek wasted on ordinary medicine.

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Simon leaned toward the price board.

"That costs more than our grain sale."

The merchant heard him.

"That preparation isn't meant for boys beginning foundation training. It's for body tempering."

Simon straightened slightly, as though his dignity had been challenged.

Joe ignored that.

"Healing or nourishing?"

That earned him a more careful look.

"The black packets are recovery medicine. The red-sealed bottles are nourishing. Those came from far east."

Joe examined them without touching.

A year ago, the stall would have been little more than an expensive collection of mysterious herbs and bottles. Now he recognized two ingredients in the demonstration packets and suspected a third from its smell.

That knowledge only made the limits of his understanding clearer.

Rare medicine was not simply common medicine prepared more carefully. Some plants did not grow around Green Hollow at all. Other ingredients might come from animals, minerals or regions he had never seen.

Simon pointed toward the red bottles.

"How many doses?"

The merchant answered, and Simon immediately began calculating the cost per use.

Joe looked toward Mike.

His father had stopped nearby and was studying the same medicine.

For a moment Joe remembered the previous year's four-silverling purchase.

Mike's gaze moved toward Lily.

Lily was already watching him.

Nothing needed to be said.

Mike rubbed the side of his nose and continued toward another stall.

Joe almost laughed.

Simon looked after him. "We weren't asking him to buy it."

Lily passed behind them. "Good."

Joe did not mind.

One expensive package had helped him and Simon for several weeks, but it had also shown exactly why buying medicine occasionally could never solve the larger problem. Their family could not repeatedly spend nearly half a good harvest's silver on recovery paste.

Now Joe had another route.

Merek's shop could not give him rare medicine for free, but knowledge was beginning to become a resource of its own.

The family continued through the festival.

Mary disappeared less than half an hour later.

They found her behind a food stall arguing with another child over a decorative string of dried berries. Mary maintained that the berries belonged to nobody because they were hanging from a post rather than being held by a person.

The stall owner appeared unconvinced.

Lily arrived before Mary could develop the legal argument further.

The rest of the afternoon passed more peacefully. They ate roasted fish seasoned far more heavily than Lily would ever allow at home. Pam bought a small packet of honeyed sweets and distributed them according to a system nobody else understood, leaving Mary certain she had received too few and Simon certain Joe had received one too many.

Joseph spent much of the afternoon near one of the communal tables, content to watch villagers and travelers move past. Occasionally someone he knew stopped to speak with him. Several minutes after one man left, Joseph asked Mike who had just visited.

Pam answered without looking surprised.

Joe let the familiar noise settle around him.

Children shouted between lantern poles. Music came from one side of the square, where a man played a stringed instrument while two others beat small hand drums. Merchants called prices from the road, and cooking smoke drifted through the crowd whenever the wind changed.

Beyond the last houses, harvested fields stretched toward the wooded hills. The lowering sun turned the stubble pale gold before the eastern side of the valley slowly darkened.

At sunset, the Seven First Fires were lit around the village square.

The elder stood beside the largest brazier and gave the familiar recitation about the First People crossing the darkness, arriving beneath a new sky and raising the First Hearth. The villagers answered the traditional responses as orange firelights moved across their faces.

Joe listened without trying to solve the story.

The wording still interested him.

That did not make it evidence.

Once the formal ceremony ended, families with eligible children began moving toward the wooden examination building beside the square.

The black stone remained inside.

Joe remembered the room clearly: bare timber walls, Hall nearby and the charcoal-black stone resting on its waist-high platform.

From the festival square, none of it could be seen.

One parent was allowed to accompany a child into the examination area, while the actual test happened inside.

Joe's family had nobody testing this year, so they remained outside with the larger crowd.

Watching from there felt very different.

Children disappeared through the doorway and returned carrying the result on their faces.

One boy emerged staring at the ground while his father rested a hand on his shoulder.

A girl came out later grinning so widely that her waiting family began celebrating before anyone explained what had happened.

Joe remembered Mike after his own test.

Some results required no formal announcement.

He understood the stone slightly better now, if mostly through understanding what it did not tell them.

It did not rank qualified children.

It did not measure how quickly they would learn.

Nothing Joe had seen suggested it provided any meaningful quantity of spirituality either. As far as the test was concerned, spirituality behaved like a qualification.

Present or absent.

One or zero.

Whatever greater role it might play far beyond the foundation and body-tempering stages was irrelevant to the children entering that room tonight.

For their families, the only question was whether the martial road had opened.

Joe watched for a while, then followed his family back toward the food stalls.

This year Starlight had no judgment waiting for him.

It could simply be a festival.

Joe enjoyed it.