Set the Stars Alight by Amanda Dykes

Author:Amanda Dykes [Dykes, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Fiction;FIC042030;FIC042100;FIC027050
ISBN: 9781493425129
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2020-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

twenty-four

On the way back to what was fast becoming her spring-cellar haven, Lucy met Dash leaving the farmyard, his head once again in the stars. She filled him in on all she had learned during her visit with Violette—and that she had offered to take her to Oxford . . . but the girl wasn’t ready. Dash had plans for the next day, and Lucy hoped to visit a neighboring village for more research, so they agreed they would meet up tomorrow evening before the star party.

Lucy’s sleep came in fitful bursts. Dreams of bandits traversing the moor with eerie bundles interspersed themselves with her spring cellar’s stream song. When morning came, it was an out-of-place sound of scraping that woke her.

Sitting up, she saw someone had slid a crisp white piece of paper beneath her door. Sunlight spilled from the little circle window, beckoning her into the light of day, and whatever awaited her on the paper.

Unfolding it, her breath caught when Dash’s signature stick-straight permanent marker writing met her.

COMPENDIUM OF WONDER

She smiled, running her thumb over the words. She knew, even before reading on, what this was. A continuation of his gift given in that cloud document—an addition to the collection of stories.

Stories he now knew she had lost. He was gifting one of them back to her. Wiping away quick tears, she read on:

As told in questionably accurate detail by Dashel Greene, who might have not cared a whit for grammar and the like when this was told to him, and therefore might tell it kinda badly now, too.

“The tide keeps the time almost as faithfully as a clock, Dash and Lucy.” The watchmaker had a way of always linking their names together, as if they were one of the inseparable pairs of the universe, like tea and cream, or clouds and sky, or Castor and Pollux in the sky. He tinkered with his pocket watch again—he had that magnifying monocle thing over one eye and grinned when he winked up at them, looking like an absent-minded professor. Or a mad scientist.

Dash took the bait. “Almost?”

“Picture it,” he said. “A coastline studded with treacherous rocks, so tall and fierce no ship would venture near, not even in calm seas. Too many had been destroyed by those very rocks. And yet the sea is a living thing that rises and falls, reaches and pulls—” His screwdriver slipped. Lucy handed him a handkerchief, and he wiped it all clean, as he was in the habit of doing whenever he needed a fresh start.

“Thank you,” he said, handing it back.

Lucy tucked it into her dress pocket. She scrunched her nose up at Dash when she saw he was looking at her as if she herself were the relic from the past, not just the hankie in her hand. “Our family is old-souled and odd,” she’d told him once, “so you’d better get used to it.” He, in fact, liked that about them. They were a constant, in a crazy world.

The watchmaker continued.

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