Starside novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Fiftieth
Sorrel steps through the Gate as the last challenger and is tied to the guard who betrayed her village. He says her name.
The Gate opened at midnight, and forty-nine people were already waiting in front of it.
I was the last one to walk up to the registrar's table.
All of Carrow had come out to the salt plain to watch.
Ten thousand people stood in the cold holding lanterns, and not one of them cheered.
Every fifty years the Gate opens for three days, and most of the fifty who cross never come back.
The registrar was a thin old man with ink on both thumbs.
He had been kind all night.
He had given bread to the children in the front rows and told the woman ahead of me that her husband's name would be sung.
"Name?" he asked me, and smiled.
"Sorrel Aldane. From Emberfold."
His pen stopped on the page.
"Emberfold," he said softly. "I'm sorry, dear. Nobody has said that name in five years."
"I'm saying it now."
He pushed a pair of iron tongs across the table.
Held in the tongs was the Gate token, a flat disc the size of my palm, still glowing orange from the fire.
"It's heated so nobody can forge one," he said. "Take it by the tongs, love. It will strip the skin off your hand."
I took the token out of the tongs with my bare fingers.
It lay on my palm, glowing, and it felt warm and nothing more.
The registrar stared at my hand.
"I've never been burned," I said. "Not once. Not at my father's forge, not on a stove, never."
"Well," he said. "That's a gift."
He wrote my name in the book, and beside it the number fifty.
"There's nothing to worry about," he added. "The Wardens are matched to challengers by lot. Nobody gets someone they know."
He said it very smoothly, to someone who had not asked.
I closed my fist around the token and looked up at the Gate.
It was two black pillars of stone with nothing between them.
Where the plain should have been, there was a night full of too many stars.
In front of the pillars stood the Wardens of Starside, fifty of them, in long silver coats.
None of them moved.
The one in the middle held a list in both hands and read from it in a flat, carrying voice.
He read forty-nine names, and then he stopped.
"Sorrel Aldane."
I knew the voice before I looked at his face.
I had known the handwriting for five years.
The night Emberfold burned, the goddess's fire came down on it in a single hour.
In the morning, the church door was the only thing left standing, and a list was nailed to it.
Every household in the village, in neat black ink.
At the bottom, signed: Dain Marrowby, tithe-counter.
My mother's name was on it. My father's. My brother Wick's.
Sixty-four people were dead, and the man who had counted them for the goddess had been gone before the first one was cold.
I had lain beside him in a hayloft that whole summer.
I walked toward him across the stones.
He was thinner than I remembered, and the pale scar through his left eyebrow was the same.
He did not look away.
Behind me, ten thousand lanterns shook in the wind, and the registrar called out that the Gate would stay open until dawn.
I could have turned around.
I had spent five years wanting this, and I was not going to waste it on turning around.
So I put my chin up and stepped between the pillars.
The stars closed over my head, and the cold of the plain was gone.
Dain stepped in beside me.
He took my left wrist in his gloved hand and wound a silver cord around it, then around his own.
The cord tightened and hummed, and then it was warm.
"It's the rule," he said. "You can't be more than twenty paces from your Warden."
His thumb lay over my pulse and it was racing, and I hated that he could feel it.
"The registrar said it was by lot," I said.
"It is," said Dain. "Most of the time."
He lifted his eyes and looked at me, and his voice dropped so only I could hear.
"Hello, Sorrel."
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