Set the Stars Alight

by Amanda Dykes

Lucy attributed his intelligence to all that time alone spent in books, with entire universes as his constant companions.

The breath went from Lucy’s lungs as she saw before her not the lost boy, but the young man, whose gaze no longer lingered on his oversized feet through thick glasses but lifted to the horizon, to the sky above, searching. And as he lifted his gaze to these new horizons, he was looking right over her. Past her.

No longer a child at fourteen, but feeling more lost and childlike than ever, she began to understand that it wasn’t just Mum she had lost. She pruned and deadheaded the lilac, watering it, repotting it, moving it from sunny spot to sunny spot as the light shifted. But it would not come back. And neither would Dad. He was there . . . but he was gone.

Gone was Dash, except for the books he left on her doorstep. He did not know how to enter their broken lives any more than they knew how to bring him back in. Not with Mum gone.

“It’s okay, Matchstick Girl,” he said. “Come on.” Just two words: Come on. No treatise on healing or hope, no magic cure . . . but somehow they infused her with hope all the same. As if this boy, who knew how to be alone and still live, was promising to show her how to be okay.

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.’

“So,” he said, “riddlers we shall become. Something to set our hands to. I shall give you two clues, and you shall find a story. And along the way, we will dig for light. Continue to tell the stories of this world’s wonders. I think we could all use a bit of that, don’t you? Some reminding of what the Maker of such a world can do?” He looked so fragilely hopeful then, all Lucy could do was nod, though she still did not understand. “Good,” he said, ruffling her hair. “I think it’s our duty to keep the stories, to pass them on. It is our duty—and our honor. In a world as dark as ours, we—that is, people—forget how to see the light. So we remind them by telling the truth, fighting the dark, paying attention . . . setting the stars alight. There are things shining brightly all along, if we will notice.” “You make it sound as if we’re in a battle, Dad.” He folded his fingers around her small hand. “So we are, my girl. So we are. But it is a battle that can be won by holding fast to hope . . . and light. We’ll keep telling the stories, finding the clues. Gather them up, Lucy and Dash. Taking note of the good, the true, the just, the miracles hidden at every turn is like . . . a deliberate act of defiance against the darkness. Build a . . . ” He paused, searching for a word and not finding it. “Your mother was always the one with the words. Gather the stories into a . . .” “Compendium?” Dash offered, pushing his glasses up as if unsure whether he should speak into this moment. “Y...

“I can’t, Dash. I have Dad’s shop. I have to find a place to move, and I just . . . I can’t just pick up and leave.” Hadn’t that been her life? Anchored, always. Steadfast. Minding the shop. Staying close to the nucleus of her world, where she belonged. The outer edges of that world called her, but such things weren’t for her.

She remembered how the stories made her feel. Full of longing, like she’d missed the times of yore and wonder and was born instead into a time of plastic and speed. Father’s magic was tucked, always, in the past. Her chest burned and she sniffled. It was ridiculous that she hadn’t cried at the funeral but was sniffling like a baby an hour later over lost fairy tales. Grief did that, apparently. Snuck out of hidden exits. Fear gripped her deeply. What if she never remembered? And worse, what if this wasn’t the only one of his stories she had lost in the muddle? She closed her eyes, a sickening darkness gripping her stomach at the realization: She could not remember the stories. A few of them, perhaps, but . . . there had been so many. They melded together, covered over in an iron blanket of grief that would not let her in. It was too much. To lose those, too. So she stood there. She and the river and a thousand stories and losses in between—and she wept. She wept for Father. For Mum. For the stories, the world they so longed to give her, and the way it was lost to reality. And for the boy who once sat beside her in that fragile place of hope . . . and who was long gone, too.

MY HOPE IS THAT BY RETURNING HIS STORY TO YOU NOW, IT MIGHT OFFER SOME SMALL LIGHT INTO YOUR WORLD. YOU WERE LIGHT IN MINE. SINCERELY, ALWAYS, DASHEL GREENE

Dash stopped in front of a stone wall flanked by two pillars, a white picket gate creaking open to his touch. Lucy’s breath caught as she stepped through to hydrangeas in full bloom leading to a Dutch door whose top was flung wide open. Its white paint was chipped and all the more lovely for it. The farmhouse rose up from the ground as if it had grown there, stone by stone, over the course of a thousand lifetimes. Wisps of smoke slipped from the chimney as a cool breeze blew off the distant Channel, and every step ushered her into an unseen veil of cinnamon and allspice. She ached so deeply, her feet slowed and finally stopped altogether. Dash turned. “You okay?” She blinked back the heat in her eyes, willing herself not to cry. “Silly,” she said, shaking her head. Dash tipped his head ever so slightly. She’d forgotten that about him, the way he would wait, the way he let silence invite talk. She shook her head as if to shoo away the ache growing inside. “It’s just . . . it’s a home,” she said, lifting one shoulder. Of course it was a home. She might as well declare the dirt brown and the buttercups yellow. Such a sparkling conversationalist. But she had not set foot inside a house that felt like a home in . . . well, not since her parents had gone. But Dash did not laugh. He did not smile, or continue on. He took a step closer to her and held out his hand. “Yeah,” he said. “And they’re waiting for you.”

What was it about this place that quickened her soul so? She felt, as she slipped into the cool haven, that she was cocooned inside a place that changed people, harbored hearts, grew stories.

Frederick read Juliette’s missives aloud in the dark hold, wondering betimes—with a hollow inside of him growing wider by turns—what it would have been like to have words written for him by such a hand. But he never let the thought linger, for her words were not for him. Instead he contented himself that the shapes of the letters—the jots and lines and crooked way she quirked her S’s—were for him. For she knew he would read them and Elias would not. But the meaning beneath the letters, the words with a heartbeat and a soul, was for Elias. Frederick drew strict boundaries around the stubborn thing that beat in his chest when it came to that. So it went, him on the outside looking on—just as it always had been. Only instead of watching from the windows of Edgecliffe as Juliette and Elias traversed the fields, his panes were her letters as they traversed life.

Good. This was good. Thank you, God. Juliette’s heart was secure with Elias, a man to love her as her father had. A grey twist of melancholy settled into Frederick’s breathing as he watched the simple wedding. He had thought once that he might marry, start a family. When he was sick with the fever as a boy, had even had a fleeting notion that the girl with freckles on her nose might fill that place in his life. But he had awoken to her hatred, and to the realization that she’d already given her heart to another. When he’d made a promise at a shepherd’s grave, he had promised himself one other thing: He would give that girl his estate one day. Whomever she was wed to. It was all he had to give, or rather would one day. And it would be hers. So he had closed his heart away back then to the hope of marriage. For who would want a solitary soul like him who stumbled over his words and, even more so, over his feet on a dance floor? Who would want a man who felt more at home on a rooftop, hidden among chimneys watching the heavens, than at a dinner table among ladies and gentlemen, telling tales of daring? With no estate to recommend him, the answer was simple—nobody. So he’d settled that truth in his soul, tied it up tight, and moved on. He had purpose. Justice to fight for. And that was enough.

Lucy took a step back. “What if I hurt her?” Sophie’s eyes shifted back to Lucy, considering her. Lucy might have been mistaken, but there seemed to be a flash of understanding—or recognition—in the woman’s face. Barnabas sidled up. “We none of us know quite what to do when something is broken. Might be we’ll make it worse. But if we do nothing, it’ll surely stay broken. Ain’t it worth takin’ a chance on that?”

“All stories—the very best ones, anyhow—may be full of fairy tales and nonsense and lore, but if they are to be lasting . . . they must have truth at their very core.”

Lucy thought of the noises that filled her world back home. Wake-up alarms and message alerts and broadcasts that ushered her forward and forward, always forward. These bells seemed to do the opposite. They called her to pause. Breathe. Consider a soul who loved well and was well loved. “I like that,” she said. “We could do with a great deal more remembering.” And she tucked those bells into her heart.

“Such freedom, to know our limits. And to know the God who has none.”

When he left, the magic of Candlewick Commons began to dissipate. And after Dad had died, it had just been a shell of a place. Nothing of the home it had once been. But here, standing before her, was all of the warmth and life of those lost years, in human form. Here . . . was home. Come knocking on her front door, when she’d thought it lost forever. “I’m glad you came back.”

“Don’t you forget it, Lucy my girl. The God of the stars . . . He is coming, and coming, and coming after you. Always. The heart of a father who will never forget his daughter.”

He reached farther into the darkness, closing his eyes to those stars, imagining he could rake his fingers through their shimmer, gather up their light. Oh, that he could wrap that light in a parcel of brown paper, tie it with string, and send it to the wee child growing within Juliette. He was desperate to tell him—or her—to look to the skies when things were dark. For there always would be light. Steady and sure.

Broken. Whole. Alive. The three twisted and twisted and summoned his mother’s song, which used to do battle for him, warding off the dark. Setting the stars alight.

This, then, was what his life would mean. The giving of it. And it was good.

wrinkled the watchmaker’s forehead. “Perhaps,” he said. “But one thing I do know. Made-up tales that stand through time . . . they are echoes.” “Echoes of what?” He thought for a moment. “Truth.”

The world is dark, so dark we sometimes forget the stars. But they are always there—we need only fight to see these places of brilliant light, these echoes of the truest story. Of a man who gave his life for another—and of a Man, centuries before him, who gave His life for the world. The One who is coming . . . and coming . . . and coming after you. Fighting for your heart. Every breath a gift. He sets the stars alight, my girl. And we open our eyes to this in benevolent defiance of the dark . . . by remembering. Take note. Live deeply. And be well, my daughter.

am a quiet soul. Sporadic even online, harboring hobbit-like tendencies toward tea and comfort and general aversion to adventure . . . but God allows even quiet souls to help fight for that light in this world.