Lumina Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

By dusk Lumina returned to the square with her hood pulled low and her staff strapped tight. The stranger had moved. He stood now beside a small pastel hut at the market's edge, pink-walled and crystal-trimmed, the kind traders rented by the hour. A glass display box sat on its front step. Inside, propped on velvet, lay the blue-black shard. Fairies drifted toward it in twos and threes. From a hook above the door hung a jeweled bell, swinging without wind. Lumina felt its hidden tone before she heard it, a thin pull behind her teeth. That was how he drew them in. Crystal fairies heard the bell. No one else did. She needed to get close enough to read the shard's fracture against her own. She circled the hut at a slow walk, counting paces. At twelve paces her braids stiffened. At eight, the cracked crystal in her forehead began to ache, a dull throb that matched the shard's pulse beat for beat. She stopped. Around the hut's path, someone had scattered a ring of silver and purple dust that shimmered like a small aurora on the stones. It marked where the shard's pull turned sharp. She watched another fairy step across the dust and wince. Her own crystal would do worse than wince. It would flare, and the stranger would see the light through her hood. She could not cross the ring. So she changed the plan. Lumina knelt outside the dust line and unstrapped her staff. She pressed her thumb to its uncracked stone and aimed the tip at the display box, low, between the boots of passing traders. A thin line of light reached from the staff to the glass and held. She read the shard from a distance the way she read her own forehead in a mirror. Three fracture lines. One matched the scar above her left brow. One matched the long crack down the center. The third pointed somewhere she had never mapped before, north and deeper north. Her hands shook on the staff. She lowered it before the light could brighten. Then the bell's tone changed. It sharpened, searching. The stranger stepped out of the hut and looked across the square, slow, hood turning. Lumina pulled the staff in and walked away without rising fully, bent like an old woman with a cane. She did not look back until she reached the lane. He had not followed. She had what the night owed her: proof the shard was hers, and a new direction in its third line. She had not touched it. She had not been seen. But the bell had felt her listening, and by morning he would know a crystal fairy had come close and run.