Quintessence by Jess Redman

Author:Jess Redman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

CHAPTER 49

In the musty, dusty, amber-blue light-filled Fifth Point, a new clock was now ticking and tocking. A wagon had been painted a cheerful cherry red. The floors had been swept and mopped until they shone. The ShopKeeper had neglected his home for too long, and he wanted to put things to rights. Before the end.

He sat now, exhausted from his work, on a cushionless armchair, the springs poking through here and there. Distractedly, he stitched a new arm onto a rag doll who had been through a great deal, while he mulled over what he had seen in the library that day.

“It is hard,” he confided to the doll, “to grow your Light, you know.”

After the third Elemental had run from the stacks, the other two had gone to the Fifth Point. He had seen them from the library window, knocking and knocking and knocking. Of course, he had not been there to answer.

That was the way it had to be though. He could consult his papers, find the Elementals, put a hundred pieces into motion and then coax them along with the help of disguises and impressions and well-timed wisdom. But the four had to find the Elements together. It was the surest way to refine the Elements inside them.

To the rag doll, arm half on and half off, he sang, “But me oh my, what a struggle it always is!” These quests, they involved so many risks, so many failures, so many heartaches and questions and challenges. And these Elementals, they were so young, like Starlings themselves.

Yet each one of them held such glorious possibility, and he could see how connected they were becoming. He could see how they were beginning to plumb their own depths, brightening day by day—if the final one would ever show up!

The ShopKeeper set the rag doll, limbs secured, back with her friends. Then he sifted through a pile of old scrap cloth until he found a tattered blue jumpsuit. Sinking back into the battered armchair, he began to sew again.

At least he was sure now that he had the right four. Even as the third Elemental had flickered and fled that day, he had known that she was not a mistake. She was the right one. He remembered what she had told him, here in his shop, about her home. He understood, oh yes, he understood.

The ShopKeeper knew about longing for home, like the third Elemental, Alma Lucas. Like the Starling.

After all, he himself was a fallen Star.

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