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  PRAISE FOR IGNITE THE SUN

  “How do you ignite the sun in a world teeming with darkness? Howard explores the answer in this lyrical fairy tale that feels at once familiar and fresh. Her innovative world is filled with fascinating characters that will stick in your heart long after you turn the final page. A vivid story, beautifully told.”

  JOANNA RUTH MEYER, AUTHOR OF ECHO NORTH, BENEATH THE HAUNTING SEA, AND BEYOND THE SHADOWED EARTH

  DEDICATION:

  To Jerry Howard, whose belief in my writing was

  unwavering, and without whose encouragement

  this book would not exist. Miss you always, Dad.

  BLINK

  Ignite the Sun

  Copyright © 2020 by Hanna Hutchinson

  Requests for information should be addressed to:

  Blink, 3900 Sparks Dr. SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

  Hardcover ISBN 978-0-310-76973-6

  Ebook ISBN 978-0-310-76975-0

  Epub Edition June 2020 9780310769750

  Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.Zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.®

  All internet addresses (websites, blogs, etc.) and telephone numbers in this book are offered as a resource. They are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement by the publisher, nor does the publisher vouch for the content of these sites and numbers for the life of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover direction: Cindy Davis

  Interior design: Denise Froehlich

  Printed in the United States of America

  * * *

  2021222324/ LSC /10987654321

  Contents

  Cover

  Map

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Part One Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Two Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part Three Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Part Four Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Part Five Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE

  “Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.”

  MADELEINE L’ENGLE, A RING OF ENDLESS LIGHT

  PROLOGUE

  Yarrow, tell me about the sun.”

  “Eh?” He looked up from his lap, the unwound strings of his fiddle sprawling like insect antennae into the air. “What for?”

  “I want to hear about the way things used to be,” I said. “Before the Darkness.”

  The old man returned to stringing the instrument, brows furrowed. I glanced across the small cabin, warm and smoke-scented from the fire in the hearth, to where Linden Hatch, Yarrow’s grandson and my best friend since I was six years old, sat mending socks. He waved me on with an enthusiastic nod.

  I stood up, forgetting the feathers I had been sorting into piles for arrow fletching, causing them to flutter down around me in a whirling cloud. I laughed and spun away from them, toward Yarrow.

  “Once upon a time, there was something called the sun,” I prompted, staggering to a halt in front of his rocking chair.

  Yarrow pressed his lips together, but his stone-colored eyes had gone warm and sparkling. He scratched his bald head and wrinkled his brow, making his bushy, gray eyebrows look so much like caterpillars I half expected them to crawl right off his face. “You start at Gildenbrook next week, Siria. Don’t you think you might do better to go home and get to bed?”

  My shoulders sagged. Gildenbrook: stiff lace gowns and tedious lessons for the next six years of my life.

  “I wish I could learn to be a gardener instead,” I said wistfully. “You and Linden could teach me.”

  Yarrow snorted. “What would your mother and father do with a gardener for a daughter? They want you to become a proper young lady, not a hired hand.”

  He didn’t point out the obvious: that my tramping around the dark grounds of our manor with him and Linden every day practically made me a hired hand already. I looked around the old cabin: at the scrubbed wooden table, the mismatched curtains I had helped sew, the floor-to-ceiling piles of firewood beside the hearth—more home to me than Nightingale Manor had ever been—and wilted slightly. Yarrow was right: my parents didn’t want a gardener for a daughter.

  But one more week couldn’t hurt.

  I leaned forward and put my hands over the wiry strings of Yarrow’s fiddle. “Tell me about the way things used to be,” I pleaded. “Tell me about how the sun would light up the whole world, and about the trees being green and leafy, and about grass, and blue sky, and sunlight, and birds, and magic—”

  His laughter rolled out in an infectious rumble, making his rocking chair lurch backward and sending me toppling sideways. “I think you already know it all, Weedy.”

  “Not the way you do!”

  Linden had abandoned his darning and was now dragging a fat sack of grain across the floor to the woven rug in front of the rocking chair. We plopped back against it and gazed expectantly up at Yarrow, who sighed. Linden grinned at me, messy brown hair everywhere, the dimple winking in his right cheek.

  Setting aside his half-strung fiddle, Yarrow reached for his pipe and began packing it. I sniffed to catch the spicy, loamy scent—the smell of stories—and waited with my feet tapping while he went to light a taper in the fireplace and ignite the tobacco.

  “Once upon a time,” he said, turning back to us as the bowl glowed orange and a trickle of smoke crept from the corner of his mouth, “there was something called the sun.”

  1

  CHAPTER

  FOUR Y
EARS LATER

  The day had been dark, even for us. In early evening, the Darkness was denser than tar, and it made the sweeping drive before Gildenbrook School for Girls look like a black river that glistened in the light of many windows as it curved downhill to meet the road. I gazed at it from my tower dormitory. In just a few hours, its current would carry me away, perhaps forever, to the Royal City of Umbraz.

  Upon meeting my eyes in the reflection of the darkened window, I released a breath—fogging the chill glass. An impulse seized me quicker than thinking, and in a swift motion of my index finger I swirled a circle over the misty surface and sketched a half dozen lines branching out from it, just like Yarrow had once showed me. A sun.

  I stared at it for a moment, surprised and slightly ashamed. Nearly sixteen years old, and I was still drawing mythic totems to ward off the Darkness? I would deserve it if the queen didn’t choose me tomorrow.

  “A message for you, Miss Nightingale.”

  I jumped. Smearing my palm across the window, I whirled to find a slight, plain woman standing in my doorway. She wore the shapeless black tunic issued to all Gildenbrook’s servants, as well as the gleaming obsidian band the queen herself had fixed around the upper right arms of every nymph who surrendered to her after the rebellion. The band blocked magic, and without it, this nymph—a naiad, or water nymph, by the look of her lank hair, blue-tinged skin, and enormous aqua eyes—would be able to perform unspeakable horrors with her elemental powers.

  She held out an envelope. “It just arrived from Umbraz with the post.” Her voice was throaty, heavily accented, and carried the merest trace of mockery within its polite neutrality.

  I didn’t know her name, but I certainly recognized her. She had been at Gildenbrook almost exactly as long as me, and in the course of those years—for reasons best known to herself—had never once failed to treat me with subtle disdain.

  I scowled at her and took the parchment envelope. It was addressed to me in my mother’s swirling penmanship, and the wax seal was the sigil of our house: a songbird in flight. The paper was thick, so finely made it looked as if flecks of silver had been worked into the fibers. Which, I reminded myself, they probably had.

  Dear Siria,

  I’m sorry your father and I could not attend the banquet at Gildenbrook last week. We were simply too busy at court. We will look for you at the Choosing Ball, however, and trust you will conduct yourself in a manner befitting your family’s status and rank. Please do honor to your education and upbringing, and we will be proud to introduce you to Her Highness, the queen.

  Sincerely,

  Milla Nightingale

  I admired the looping letters that were so much prettier than my own hurried scrawl, and then my eyes fell upon the valediction. Sincerely.

  My heart contracted, and a sudden, fierce spike of determination shot through me. They would be proud to introduce me to the queen if I behaved well, my mother said. Proud. I held her letter tight, willing her to sense across the distance how desperately I wanted that approval. Perhaps if she knew, she might make it easier.

  The nymph servant had departed as soundlessly as she arrived, so I gently kicked the door shut and drifted back to the window, scooping another scrap of parchment off my bed as I did. This note was much shorter, much sloppier, and scribbled on the back of an old seed inventory list.

  Weedy—Come to the cabin after dinner? Y and I need to talk to you. Urgent. I’ll wait by the back step.

  —L

  Linden Hatch had given me the parchment just before breakfast, callused hand slipping in and out of mine as he brushed past me in the entryway. He had worked as a groundskeeper at Gildenbrook for nearly four years, leaving my parents’ employ to follow me shortly after I began school, and for a while I couldn’t imagine a better situation for him. But things had changed between us, and my childhood best friend was now someone I almost dreaded to see.

  Almost.

  I rubbed the skin where his hand had brushed mine this morning, wishing I couldn’t still feel his touch. Wishing the mere memory of his fingertips against my palm didn’t make heat flood my stomach like a swallow of hot tea.

  I leaned my forehead against the cold windowpane. “He’s a servant,” I mumbled. “That hardly qualifies as ‘befitting your family’s status and rank.’”

  The heat from my breath had once more spread fog across the glass, and beneath the smears my fingers had left a few moments ago, I could still make out the faint outline of my sun.

  Closing my eyes to rub them, I said, “The Light was dangerous and destructive. Thank Her Highness the queen, the Darkness protects us now.”

  Our school mantra. It was the first thing I learned when I came to Gildenbrook, and it was what I would remember if I wanted the queen to choose me for her court tomorrow. I could not risk leaving the school at all tonight, much less gamble a trip across the dark moor to visit Linden and Yarrow Ash in their cabin at Nightingale Manor.

  I opened my eyes again, and they fell on the dark shape of a carriage far below that had not been on the drive a few moments ago. I squinted down at it, trying to make out the crest on the side, but it was too dark. A messenger for the headmistress, I supposed.

  Putting the carriage, my mother, and Linden firmly from my mind, I crossed to my bed, stuffed both notes beneath my pillow, and picked up my lantern. A good step toward success tomorrow would be arriving on time for dinner tonight.

  2

  CHAPTER

  Though I was the only pupil without the queen’s favored dark hair, and definitely the only one who spent her childhood trailing after a gardener, I had come a long way in my four years at Gildenbrook. Ridicule and scorn taught me the value of mimicry, and I had finally learned how to walk through a room without drawing stares. The rising popularity of black lace hair cauls helped too, as it allowed me to pile my deep red hair into a netted snood that disguised its odd color, tricking my peers into forgetting my most obvious oddity.

  When I joined the queue of rustling skirts and carpet-muffled footsteps leading into the cavernous dining room, though, I realized my usual camouflage habits might be unnecessary. Dinner was typically a restrained affair of idle gossip and practiced elegance; but of course eating on the eve of a Choosing Ball was not typical.

  Chattering voices echoed off the buttressed stone columns, and everywhere heads bent together, laughter rang out, and girls gestured animatedly from their seats. The teachers had patently given up trying to maintain order. I joined some fellow fourth-years at a long ebony table—set as usual with silver candlesticks, green glass goblets, and pearl-handled silver cutlery—and found my theory was correct: no one even looked up when I sat.

  “I would be the perfect choice,” a petite girl named Rinna teased the others. Like the rest of us, she was dressed in a tight-bodice, black lace gown, complete with whalebone corset, heeled leather boots, and black pearls. It was an uncomfortable uniform, but Gildenbrook followed the queen in all things, and the queen valued aesthetics far beyond practicality.

  “I love dancing,” Rinna went on, raising a fawn-colored hand to tick off fingers as she listed. “I adore our queen’s taste. And who could possibly enjoy the society of all those young men at court more than me?”

  A few girls laughed, but most rolled their eyes and began to argue with her. We had been training for the Choosing Ball our whole time at Gildenbrook, and tomorrow would decide who would move to the Royal City, Umbraz, to adorn the queen’s courts—and who would return to the ranks of lesser nobles vying for her favor.

  The thought made my fingers tremble around my fork. Though moving to Umbraz would mean leaving Linden and Yarrow forever, gaining the queen’s favor would secure the approval of the two people who had always found reasons to withhold it from me: my mother and father.

  Someone giggled, and I followed a half dozen turning heads to see a tall figure with tousled, nut-brown hair striding along a far wall, heading for the concealed door to the kitchen. My stomach lurched
. Linden Hatch—all lean lines, two-day stubble, and shocking green eyes against dusty-brown skin—threw a quick glance in our direction before pushing aside the tapestry over the door. His homespun shirt and deerskin trousers, which I had watched him sew, were dirt-smeared and sweaty, but somehow that worked decidedly in his favor. It was getting more and more difficult to picture the gangling, scrappy boy I had grown up with whenever I looked at him.

  “He’s a servant, Tira,” I heard another girl say in a lofty voice. “Surely you don’t fancy a servant.”

  I looked up in time to see Tira shrug, tossing her perfect sheet of silky black hair. She never wore a netted caul, and I didn’t blame her. “So? He’s brutally handsome.”

  No one seemed able to contradict her on this point, and in another minute they were all snorting and laughing into their hands, craning to look at the tapestry behind which Linden had disappeared. Its woven depiction of Queen Iyzabel’s conquest of the former king and queen of Terra-Volat had stopped rippling, and Linden did not reappear.

  Foolish disappointment stirred in my stomach, and again my mind went to Linden’s note. If I didn’t go to their cabin, I might never see him or Yarrow again. Yet if I made even one mistake tonight, I could lose my chance at the Choosing Ball.

  The half-eaten meat pie on my plate suddenly blurred as tears swam into my eyes. Dolt, I thought, blinking them away before anyone noticed. Get a grip, Siria. You’re a Nightingale, and it’s blighting well time you acted like one. Gardener’s urchins do not get chosen for the queen’s court.

  “I saw Nightingale talking to him last week,” said Rinna, jolting me back to the present. Her voice had a sly, cruel edge to it, and dread seeped into my stomach. “Maybe she’ll arrange a rendezvous for you, Tira.”

  “H-he worked at our manor when I was young,” I stammered, wishing I could melt into my chair and disappear. “Last week, he had news of my parents. That’s all.”