Before the Broken Star (The Evermore Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  I dream of sailing and exploring like my father, but the isle is no place for people. Thousands of leagues away from Dagger Island here in Dorestand, we have heard the accounts of the settlers’ starvation and sickness and, odder, rumblings of men disappearing in the island’s dense forest. It is said the Ruined Kingdom, at the center of the isle, is protected by a curse. But the queen doesn’t believe in sorcery.

  “You’re assigned to the outpost?” Uncle Holden asks. “I’ve been told the survival rate is one in four.”

  “My orders are to oversee the female convicts on their voyage,” Callahan replies, shifting his weight from one leg to the other. “We embark day after tomorrow.”

  “And the governor?” I ask, ignoring my uncle’s silencing look.

  The lieutenant’s attention sharpens on me. “Markham’s ship departs at dawn.”

  Bloody bones. The governor has been stationed overseas on Dagger Island for years. Come morning, he will be out of my reach again.

  “Governor Markham paid for both chronometers in full.” Uncle Holden dusts his hands off on his breeches. “Will that be all, Lieutenant?”

  “Actually, no.” Callahan points behind him, his wavy hair brassy like the inner workings of a timepiece. “How much for that clock?”

  “Which one?” Uncle Holden follows him between the shelves.

  “This one here,” says the lieutenant, touching the daisy clock.

  That is my favorite timepiece, a twin to one my uncle gave my parents on their wedding day. The original burned to ash long ago. I generally keep the clock out of view from customers, but this morning when I dusted, I moved it to the front of the shelf and forgot to push it back.

  “It isn’t for sale,” I say.

  Both men swivel toward me. My uncle’s graying mustache twitches over stern lips. A lady customer enters from the street, saving me from explaining.

  Uncle Holden lifts the twin clock off the shelf and passes it to the lieutenant. “My apprentice is mistaken. She’ll ring you up.” He leaves Callahan in my care and greets the lady.

  The lieutenant carries the daisy clock over and sets it on the desk. “I’ve been looking for a keepsake to bring on my voyage. The flowers remind me of the daisies outside the front gate of my family’s estate.”

  I cannot begrudge him for wanting the clock as a reminder of home since I want it for similar reasons. My mother would read to us by our drawing-room hearth, with my sister, brothers, and I crowded around her skirt, and my father in his chair. The clock rested above us on the mantelpiece, a sentinel watching over us all, while mother told tales about fantastical creatures and worlds beyond our own.

  “You seem fond of this clock,” the lieutenant remarks, studying me.

  The lieutenant is too perceptive, too conversational. My ticker is still struggling to recover from Markham’s visit. It beats like a normal heart, though it looks and sounds like a clock. The inner workings—balance wheel, torsion spring, escapement, and gear train—are strained by emotional exertion more often than physical labor.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “It’s just a clock.”

  My ticker stutters, triggering my regulator.

  Ring!

  Callahan’s gaze drops to my waistline, where the small regulator for my ticker is hidden beneath my dress. “Do you have a bell in your pocket?”

  “What an absurd question.”

  My regulator is a nuisance. The tiny noise box connected to my heart detects spikes in my pulse and rings three bells inside of it when I should rest. The outbursts are not unlike a tolling cuckoo clock, minus the wooden figures popping out. The alarm sounds when I’m nervous, overworked, or poorly telling a lie.

  The lieutenant reads the price tag on the daisy clock and lays down his money. “Paid in full . . . Everley, isn’t it? Have we met?”

  “No.” If I were lying, my ticker would tell me.

  Callahan squints at me in doubt. I don’t know why he thinks we are acquainted. He’s a nobleman and I’m a shop clerk. Except at night when my uncle is fast asleep; then I become someone else. But the lieutenant would not know about my nocturnal escapades. Few do.

  My fingertips tingle, a consequence of my offbeat pulse. I fumble to package the daisy clock with paper as my heart ticktocks erratically. While working faster, I drop the spool of twine.

  “Let me help you,” Callahan says, retrieving it from the floor.

  “I can do it.” I take the twine back and pain stabs my torso. I double over the desk. The gears of my ticker clunk and grind, the balance wheel swinging erratically.

  The lieutenant’s morning-sky eyes cloud with worry. “Are you all right?”

  I wave him off.

  Uncle Holden excuses himself from the lady customer and strides toward me. “Everley, go to the workbench and find my caliper.”

  He has fabricated an excuse to send me away.

  I hold down my hitching chest and start to go. Two steps from the desk, my heart clunks to a halt as the balance wheel quits turning.

  RIIIIIING . . .

  My regulator emits a continuous, high-pitched warning. I stumble forward, agony punching out to my limbs. Big hands catch me, and Uncle Holden lifts me into his arms, sturdy from hauling stacks of lumber. Darkness edges into my vision and dims his troubled face.

  “Sir?” Callahan asks. “How can I help?”

  “You can show yourself out.” Uncle Holden nods at the door where the lady customer has left, then carries me into his workshop and kicks the door shut.

  Chapter Two

  I cling to my uncle’s sawdust-covered apron. Deadness spreads out from my chest, my grip fading and my muscles slackening.

  Uncle Holden sweeps his cluttered worktable clean and lays me down. His shaky hands unbutton the top of my dress, revealing the scar above my shift. His most prized timepiece and invention has gone silent.

  “Hold on, Everley.” His tools ting as he searches for the right one.

  RIIIIIING!

  The regulator’s strident call strengthens. Gray eclipses my vision, and my breaths grow harder to draw, as though I am inhaling through a shrinking pipe.

  Uncle Holden bends over me with his calibrator, his old face creased with twice as many lines. He detaches my regulator and the alarm stops. An unmarked beat of time resonates between us—and then he starts to crank.

  I clamp my teeth down on a shriek as grinding gears rip through my chest. Each turn of my uncle’s calibrator wrenches me in half, like hooks prying apart my rib cage. Black stars dive at me. Unconsciousness lies only a crank away, but pain straps me to the table. I would sob, I would beg, but I have no strength to instruct my tongue, no breath to push past my lips.

  Uncle Holden winds the mechanism. Rewinding and recalibrating. Cranking, cranking, cranking . . . I wait for the rhythm of life. Tick of time. March of forever. I fear Father Time has come to take back the years I stole.

  Let me stay. Spare me to live another day.

  The nothingness opens its jaws—

  Tick . . .

  . . . tock.

  My clock heart reanimates and I gasp on life’s breath. Blood soars out from my chest, rushing to the far reaches of my extremities. Tiny stars fleck my vision, their brightness and glory swelling with the same steady crawl as the rising sun.

  But dawn is frigid. Cold burrows into my bones, as though my insides are crystallizing with hoarfrost. Uncle Holden appears in my widening vision.

  “Everley, can you hear me?”

  I nod, my teeth chattering.

  “I recalibrated the escapement and reset the torsion spring. I’ll fetch a quilt.”

  He goes, and air skims across my breastbone where the top of my dress hangs open. Having my ticker exposed is unbearable. Though I am more decent than most ladies of fashion in their fancy low-cut gowns, I try to cover myself. My arms are heavier than blocks of ice. They stay at my sides as drowsiness plays with my focus. The last time I felt this cold . . .

  I fight the pull to retu
rn there, but it is too strong.

  Tavis struck the man blocking the bedroom doorway and urged me to run. I raced to the drawing room. Mother lay crumpled on the carpet in her birthday gown. Her eyes, open and blank, gazed into oblivion. Blood was pooling around her.

  Gunshots blasted in the nearby bedchamber. One, two, three—Isleen, Carlin, Tavis. One boom for each of my siblings.

  A masked soldier held Father at gunpoint. He shouted for me to run. I was his good girl, so I did what he said.

  Markham was as quick as a snare; his iron arms locked around me. I thrashed to break free, kicking over the music stand. The sheet music Carlin had given Mother spilled to the floor. I bit Markham’s hand.

  He released me, yowling like an animal. I scurried away. Father lunged at Markham, and they grappled with the hilt of his sword. The masked soldier fired. Father’s eyes stretched wide and he slumped to the floor beside Mother, drowning in her sea of scarlet.

  Markham pulled a burning log from the fire and tossed it onto Mother’s reading chair. A flash of sparks blinded me, and then flames snapped and snarled. The scorching bite of the fire spread to the daisy clock over the mantel and chewed up our home.

  Markham lifted his sword between us.

  Though I shut my eyes to retreat, the cold locks me in the past. Nothing can stall fate. Time advances at the same reliable beat, yet it can pass in intervals of horrifying slowness and dizzying fastness that will not pause for anyone. Eternity trapped in a second.

  The governor’s sword ripped through me. Skin, sinew—ribs. I hardly made a sound as he yanked out his blade, swift and clean.

  The world collapsed around me. All I felt, all I thought of, was the bitter winter of pain.

  I hang on an icy wire, suspended between the past and present. My sluggish body shivers, neither here nor there. Some days I long to fall, to drop into that gap in time and never return.

  Uncle Holden piles our only two quilts on top of me. “You were lucky.”

  He asserted the same when I woke days after Markham stabbed me. He said I was lucky he was able to revive me. He then explained that he set a rare timepiece in my chest, and the clockwork heart had brought me back from death’s door.

  Luck did not save me. Uncle Holden’s miraculous invention did, and he said it was Father Time’s will that I live. How this clock heart revived me does not plague me as much as the question why. Why did Father Time spare me and not my family?

  My clock heart is not without flaws. After its installation, Uncle Holden and I did not trust its limits. Every day I waited for time to stop, but like a dutiful clock, my ticker plodded on. Eventually we quit expecting it to malfunction and my uncle allowed me to apprentice him. Almost a year later, I asked him to stop tutoring me at home and let me attend school. Living day after day as a shut-in was wilting my spirit. I longed to play with other children and make friends, to twirl in the sunshine and run through the schoolyard. My appetite waned, and I lost interest in my studies. I was arguing with my uncle about whether I was well enough to attend school when my heart gave out. He recalibrated my ticker before the cold consumed me, but I shivered for days and sustained nerve damage to my hands. On freezing nights, my fingers still tingle. Uncle Holden shut himself in his workshop and reemerged with the regulator—a tiny wooden box that connects to my heart by copper filaments. The regulator rings the bells inside when the clock is overburdened. I have worn the device strapped around my waist ever since.

  Quiet stretches, broken by my fervent pulse. I loathe that tick even as I rely on it for my next breath.

  “I’m sorry, Everley.” Uncle Holden stoops, his concerns weighing heavy. “Markham wasn’t supposed to come to the store. I intended to deliver the chronometers to him.”

  His serving that monster at all galls me. Everyone believes my family perished in a house fire and that I died with them. Uncle Holden was riding to our estate on the northern seashore for my mother’s birthday when Markham set the blaze. He dragged me from the flames, installed this miraculous clockwork heart, and hid me. He told his neighbors he had adopted a street urchin as his apprentice, and we have been unsociable with everyone since.

  “My cartography lessons,” I say, my voice shuddering from the inner cold. “I can still go.”

  My uncle tucks the blanket around me. “I’ll ask your tutor to postpone, just for a month or so.”

  I clench down to quiet my chattering teeth. I waited a year for my uncle to concede that cartography lessons aren’t a waste of time. The queen won’t commission a female explorer, so I cannot sail for the realm like my father did, but I still want to learn. It was another year before my uncle found a tutor who would teach a girl, and another two months before we saved enough notes to pay for the lessons. Uncle Holden will use this recalibration as an excuse to keep me near, but he cannot hold me here forever. Roving is in my blood. As a child, I begged my father to take me with him on an expedition. I crawled into his lap and cried against his shoulder. He stroked my hair, and calling me by my nickname, Evie, he said that great wonders and adventures were coming and the stars would wait for me to grow into my fate.

  I huddle into the blanket and battle another wave of shivers. A better moment waits for me on the horizon. Then another and another, until someday the moment will be mine.

  Chapter Three

  I spend the afternoon warming myself by the kitchen hearth. A spring rainstorm knocks at our door, cold winds rattling the hinges.

  After I regain sensation in my fingers, I pick up my carving knife. My latest figurine is nearly finished. Uncle Holden prepares dinner while I complete the fluke of the whale and set it in the windowsill with the other figurines—a pixie, a sea hag, and a sleeping giant. These were tests of my skill, characters my uncle picked from common stories that would require all my tools. I still have much to learn about carving before he teaches me to build gearwork.

  My uncle side-eyes my completed pieces. I wait for the master carver to remark on their simplicity, but he says nothing.

  The potato-and-carrot soup finishes boiling. He utters a prayer to Mother Madrona, and we dine in silence. I sip down the hot soup one spoonful at a time. The liquid warmth unfurls from my center and flushes my face.

  Uncle Holden clears his dish and brews tea, adding splashes of whisky. He hums an old sea chantey my father used to sing. I know the words by heart.

  Sea, land, stars. Great Creator, your home is ours.

  Animals, plants, trees. Madrona, we rest upon our knees.

  Gathered beneath thy leaves. Brothers and sisters three.

  My uncle sets a steaming cup of whisky tea before me. I draw my shawl closer and dust wood shavings off my skirt. In evenings past, he regaled me with stories of warrior giants sleeping in the northern hills and brave gnomes stealing precious treasure from a sorceress. Tales that enthralled me as a lass no longer do. Though I once wished they were true, sorcery and creatures from the Otherworlds only exist in storybooks.

  My uncle sighs, the song of a weary man, and plods upstairs to his loft. I sip my tea, deepening the warmth in my belly until the creak of his thin mattress sneaks down the stairs. Then I tiptoe to the back door, open it a crack, and call into the alleyway.

  “Tom?”

  A mew answers, then a blur of fur shoots past my legs. I set my bowl on the floor before my friend. Tom, a black cat with a white spot on his chest, licks it clean as I wash the dinner dishes and mend my uncle’s breeches. When I was a child, a cook prepared our meals, servers cleaned our dishes, and a maid mended our clothes. I was too young to appreciate those luxuries.

  Tom rubs against me, purring. The alley cat is one of the few neighbors I socialize with. My uncle and I keep everyone else at a distance to discourage questions, a precaution that is as necessary as it is lonely. I pet the stray’s back and he purrs louder. He often sleeps in my room, curled at the bottom of my bed.

  “Not tonight,” I say.

  I scoop him up, set the cat outside, and take the lant
ern to my bedroom. A narrow path runs between a bed against the wall and a wardrobe. Covering the wall over my bed is a patchwork map of Dorestand. I drew it over a year’s time by scouting and navigating the city myself, then charting the network of streets by memory. My memory wasn’t always consistent, but my sense of direction was. Even as a child, I could find my way, and I rarely got lost. My father had the same gift.

  My all-black clothes hang in my open wardrobe. I exchange my work dress for a man’s tunic, breeches, and waistcoat. I try not to glimpse my reflection in the mirror by the door, but my scar—a slash below my collarbone—is impossible to overlook. I have another on my back where the sword exited.

  And there, on my left side, buried between two ribs, beats my clock heart.

  The pocket watch has a round glass face and a ticking brass meter, the remainder of the device hidden in the cavity of my chest. Uncle Holden insists Father Time instructed him to build it. I don’t doubt my uncle was inspired or that Father Time must exist, because time does. Even so, I don’t understand how this clock has assumed the function of my heart. All I understand is that my uncle’s invention, in conjunction with Father Time’s grace, sustains me.

  I tuck my regulator in the nook of my spine and button up my waistcoat. My long hair is easy to pull back, twist in a knot, and cover with a tricorn hat. I rub my hands together until the tingling in my fingers abates and then tug on my mother’s red wool gloves. My uncle purchased them for her last birthday, the day she died. They have fit me since I was fourteen.