Once upon a time, a falling star lost its way. The star was aiming for the sea, with its glittering welcome, as dark and soft as the star’s beloved sky, but a mischievous wind blew the star off course. Tumbling and twirling through the cold nighttime air, the surprised star watched the sky and earth flip places, and wondered where its final resting place would be. Would it end up entangled in the interlocked branches of the forest? The forest wooshed past. Well, perhaps in the center of a trembling lily, or on the curve of a dew drop? But the meadow, too, flew swiftly by and was gone. The spinning star lit up countless miles of somber clouds with its clear, cold light, flashed over endless waves of rolling hills, but by the time the horizon began to blush awake, the star had still not found a place to land.
Thus, it very well may have been sheer desperation. Whatever the reason, all that matters is, in the end, the star fell into the open mouth of a sleeping babe.
The baby’s parents did not know that their daughter swallowed a star. In fact, no one knew about the star, not even the baby herself, for years, until she became a little girl of two. One sunny afternoon, she had wandered away from her father, and was crouching by a stream, dropping pebbles one by one from her fat fists into the clear water. She liked to hear the plop of the pebbles as they touched the surface, and watch the tiny bubbles stream after the sinking stone.
Lured to slumber by the meat pie sitting heavy in his gut, the child’s father was fast asleep in the soft grass under a willow, so there was no one to pull the child back from the edge when she got too close to the water.
No one to catch her when she leaned too far, lost her balance, and fell in. No one to hear her tiny scream, swallowed by the stream.
But there was a face, watching the child from above the surface of the water. The child saw the face as she sank. Muted, spruce green eyes; white hair outshining the refracted sun; a colorless face rippling with the motion of the water. Terror forgotten, the child squealed, releasing a flood of bubbles, and reached her arms up to the face.
In the next moment, the child’s father was spluttering awake as his daughter landed with a sodden thunk atop his chest. “Why, you’re all wet!” he marveled, eyes wide as he untangled his daughter’s dripping fingers from his beard and set her at his side. “Now wait,” he laughed, holding onto the child’s wrist to stop her from running back to the water. “Where do you think you’re off to? Did you go for a swim while Poppa was sleeping? Come now,” he yawned, hoisting the child onto his back and gathering up their lunch, “Mum will be wondering where we are.” And he sang to his daughter, and tossed her high, and chased all the mossy green from her head.
However, if the lighthearted father had looked behind him as he strode back home through the forest, his song might have stopped. He might have seen what his daughter had. A white face, and a body to match, hovering just over the surface of the water, gleaming with curiosity.
***
The incident at the stream went largely unremembered by the girl who swallowed the star. It remained only in flashes of luminosity and a strange wet feeling of suffocation that sometimes jerked the girl out of sleep. But whenever she opened her eyes to the warm crackle of the hearth and the light snores of her parents, whatever wet and shining death that had swam beneath her eyelids flew back into the ether, ungrasped.
Remembered or not, when the girl was old enough and strong enough to help her parents with the fieldwork and the housework, just about of age to have her own house, a similar encounter happened again.
It was morning. The girl was in the yard. Her mother had gone into town to sell their latest harvest; her father was, again, snoring, somewhere inside the house. But it was a different sleep — a troubled, sweaty sleep of wheezing breath and scorched brow, a sleep that had lasted too long already, a sleep that was sending sparkling tears down the girl's ruddy cheeks as she worked silently in the garden.
She had paused to wipe her eyes with the back of a dirtied hand when she heard something rustling in the grass behind her.
"Oh no you don't," she declared, jumping to her feet and grabbing up her shovel, "I won't have you eating off my Poppa's herbs anymore!" Brandishing the shovel like a sword, the girl lunged forward.
The grass bent away from the girl in a snaking shape as her prey sought its escape. The girl followed, followed to the stone fence at the end of the yard, but when she swung her shovel, sure she had trapped the nasty vermin that had been terrorizing their garden, the blade only clanged loudly against the stone. Vibrations rang up the girl's arms so hard she had to blink a few times before she could see properly again.
When she came back to herself, someone was sitting on the wall in front of her, peering blankly into her face.
The girl screamed and leapt back before throwing up her dirt-streaked apron to cover her face. So startled was she that words struggled to escape her burning throat—burning, for the pale long-legged stranger wore not a strip of clothing, not from the top of their white head to the tips of their white toes.
Finally, the girl found her voice, and her anger. The shovel became a sword again and she waved it threateningly at the stranger. "What are you doing in my garden, scaring me like that!" she roared, before adding, "and put on some clothes!" Her eyes glittered with rage, and terror, and something else entirely.
The stranger glimpsed this something else, and their blank face suddenly flooded with life. The stranger waved an elegant hand, and the girl forgot why she was shouting, for this handsome stranger wore clothes as smooth and darkly satin as any prince or princess, and surely she was accosting someone of noble birth!
"My apologies," she said hastily, as the glittering jewels on the stranger's collar cast colored light into her dazzled eyes. "But . . . Please, why are you in my garden?"
The stranger's eyes tracked down the girl's sweaty neck to rest somewhere over her chest. The girl flushed under the cool, mossy gaze. "I'm not afraid to use this, you know, noble blood or not," she warned, somewhat more shakily than before, tipping the shovel towards the stranger.
The stranger raised their gaze. Their thin pale lips lifted in the smallest of smirks, but the skin around their wide-set eyes did not move at all. "You have something that is mine," they said.
"I am sure that I don't."
The stranger's sigh sounded like the bells on the wheels of the merchant wagons that sometimes came through the countryside this time of year. Before the girl could move, the stranger leaned forward, carelessly, and pressed a long finger against the center of the girl's breast.
The touch sent flowers of ice blooming under the girl's skin, snow swirling in her lungs, white fire sparking behind her eyes.
The stranger removed their finger, and a rushing emptiness rushed to fill the girl's chest — a feeling she had lived with all her life but never noticed until now. Until now, suddenly feeling that she could not bear the emptiness a single second more.
"W-what was that?" she gasped.
"My star," said the stranger, crossing their arms with the haughty sense of one whose suspicions have been confirmed. "I need it back. It is stuck in your chest."
The girl pressed a hand against her fluttering breast and suddenly remembered the dream she had dreamt and forgotten every night since she’d first learned to walk. She knew the stranger's face, the cold light shifting beneath their white-gold skin and in their hair, the sage green eyes, emotionless, yet full of a calling she struggled to resist.
"How can that be?" asked the girl, though part of her already believed it to be true. "I’ve never heard of such a thing."
The stranger winced. "It is, ah, my fault. I am a starherd, you see, but this one—" they pointed to the girl's chest, frowning, "—escaped me. I was preoccupied with . . . other things. I was not there to guide it, protect it. It got lost."
"I'm not sure I understand."
The starherd squinted at her—the most expression their face had shown so far—and all of a sudden, laughed, a bright and cold sound like the sun on a frozen lake. "You did not think they fell all on their own, did you?"
The girl frowned. All this talk of falling stars and lost ways and the mistakes of shepherds—starherds—was sending her head a-spin. Before the starherd's interruption, she had been gathering herbs for her father's daily tea, and she could hear an ominous crunching sound from behind her that was probably the vermin returned to eat away her hard work. And now there was this new but ancient emptiness, ricocheting back and forth against the walls of her chest, and a yearning echo haunting its path.
"Can you do that again? Make me—come alive."
The starherd held the girl's gaze. "That is my star, not you."
"Then I want to keep the star."
The starherd's jaw tightened in impatience. "You cannot keep it, it is not yours. I need to guide it on its way."
"Why not?" The girl felt lightheaded and foolish, but for some reason she couldn't back down. The star became entangled with the chewing sounds behind her and the faint, remembered sound of her father's wheezing, weak snores, and then tears were running down her face again. "It's mine, it's all I have, you can't take it from me, I won't let you!"
Clouds wavered over the morning sun. Heat and shadow mingled, coolness and warmth wrestled in the yard and over the girl's furrowed brow.
The starherd sighed. "Well, I cannot take it from you anyway." Their eyes cast slowly about the yard, before landing on the small window looking out from the house's westward wall. "Hm. Your father."
"What about him?" growled the girl, gripping the shovel tighter.
"Give me the star, and he lives to see your first child. As it is, he will not make it three nights."
The shovel hit the ground with a dull thud. "What?!" spluttered the girl, eyes welling with fresh tears, "but the doctor said—"
"Those weeds you have been making him drink? The only thing they are good for is putting one to sleep."
The girl sank to the ground, bones of her legs turned weak as grass.
The starherd leapt back onto the stone wall, light as a tuft of dandelion drifting on the wind. "Three nights," they said. "You have three nights to find three blue stones. Each night, lay one out to drink the starlight. In the morning, after the sky starts to lighten, but before you glimpse the sun, place the stone at the bottom of your father's cup of water. Make him drink it all. By the third morning, he will be as healthy as he ever was."
"And the star?" asked the girl, rising to her feet.
But where the starherd had been standing there was only a gentle shimmer, a residual coolness, and the faintest scent of spring water and pine needles on the wind.
***
The girl had no time to ponder the starherd's intentions. She left the garden gate open, abandoned the useless herbs to the critters, and raced into the trees that waited farther to the west. She had walked as far as she ever did, to the place where the pines turned to willows and the sloping ground grew damp, when she realized she had no idea how to find what she was looking for.
"And what does it mean, there's a star in my chest?" grumbled the girl, stopping to lean against a willow's mossy trunk, "and what did I mean, wanting to keep it?"
The ground looked soft and inviting, carpeted in silvery fallen willows. The girl's eyes felt suddenly heavy. She sank down, using a mossy root for a pillow. As her eyes fell shut, she thought she heard the tinkling bells of the starherd's laughter, but it was only the spring, giggling just beyond a bend in the earth.
***
The cool, silken touch of water woke the girl from slumber. She wiggled her toes, shivering. She didn't remember falling asleep so close to the water, but it tugged gently, now, at the hem of her petticoats, slipped its fingers around her toes, as if the spring had leapt forward to meet her.
The girl sat up, blinking. She had been looking for stones, blue stones, for her father. The light on the water was turning amber— how long had she slept? Panicking at the late hour, she clambered to her feet.
A colorful sparkle in the water made her pause. Squinting, she lifted her skirts and felt her way carefully along the stone peppered bank. Sand, moss, soggy wood squished between her bare toes.
There. Shivering at the bottom of the spring, trapping a piece of grass underneath it so the grassblade bent, twisted and leapt in the pull of the rushing water. A small, oval stone snugly tucked in a dip of sand, gleaming blue.
The girl bent down, plunged her hand into the cold water, sending dirt and debris pluming in an underwater cloud. The stone met her fingers with resolute, smooth coolness, and she fished it confidently from the murk. In the sunset, golden water streaming from the girl's open fingers, the periwinkle stone took on the reddish hues of violet.
The girl pocketed the stone and raced the sinking sun home.
***
She touched the cabin's western wall before the stars emerged. Under the sky, slowly darkening to a lavender as blue as the spring-washed stone, the girl set her stone atop a corner of the garden fence. She waited, on tiptoes, till the first diamond star twinkled its greeting to the last lingering cloud. Then she ran inside, fed her father his supper with renewed hope, and gave her mother an extra squeeze as she kissed her goodnight.
The next morning, the girl found a dewdrop and a single strand of spiderweb clinging to the stone’s slick, but otherwise unbothered surface. She wiped the damp off on her apron, went inside, and set it at the bottom of her father’s cup. She brought the water to her father’s side, lifted his chin, and watched him drink it all.
When her father swallowed the last drop, he opened his eyes. “Daughter,” he said, his voice already sounding stronger than it had for weeks, “thank you.” And then he smiled, and his daughter wept at the sight.
She found the second stone later that day, under an old overturned wagon wheel. If the calls of the distant birds migrating south sounded at all like tinkling bells, the girl took no notice, merely pocketed the stone and set it out on its perch on the garden fence at the end of the day. It swam in darkness and soaked up starlight all through the night, and the girl slept sweetly. The second morning, after his cup of water, the girl’s father pushed himself to sit upright and asked for his flute. When he played, the notes sang strong; the girl could not hear a hint of weakness in her father’s lungs.
She found the third stone almost too late, just as the sun had dipped to light the tips of the distant trees. The third stone dropped quietly into the girl’s hands as she was reaching up to pluck a pine cone from a low branch at the edge of the woods. The girl searched the branches overhead for her benefactor, but saw nothing except the smallest tremble of a thin branch against a backdrop of peached clouds, in which the dark, pointed silhouette of a bird was whirling into the distance. On her way inside, the girl laid the stone on its perch with a satisfied sense of finality.
And the third morning, moments after he placed his emptied cup back in his daughter’s hand, the girl’s father stretched, yawned, and got out of bed.
***
The years passed, sweet and swift. They grew the girl into a woman, and turned memories of pale faces and blue stones into half-remembered dreams. She built her own house, planted her own crops, and started her own family. And one chill, starry evening, the woman lay sweating in her bed, groaning with the pain of labor. Her father, bent now with age, sat at her bedside, and she held his wrinkled hand in her grip. “Not long now,” she said through gritted teeth, and it was true—soon, her mother placed her newborn daughter in her arms.
But instead of focusing on her baby’s face, the woman’s eyes caught somewhere outside the bedroom window. Faint images were rising, flashing through her mind’s eye, of bubbles, and eyes like rivergrass, and skin as pale and sparkling as a star. What were they called, that lord, that being? What had they promised her? What had she sworn?
“A beautiful child, daughter,” smiled the woman’s father, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.
Only then did the woman look into her daughter’s face. As she studied the tiny nose, the red cheeks, the wrenched shut eyes, the curled fists, she felt it—a flame in her chest, blown to smoke. And for a moment, the lamplight dimmed, and the night sky outside brightened, blazing coldly through the window. For a moment, emptiness raged in the woman’s chest, and she knew the starherd had claimed what had always been their own. For a moment, the wind through the window sounded silver as bells.
But then her daughter made a sound, a quiet cry, soft as a morning dove. It rose in the woman’s chest, filling the space around her heart with something calmer, softer, sweeter than the star’s sparking light. The woman stroked her daughter’s cheek, and smiled with a joy that was all her own—tinged with worry for her father, and all the other worries of a new mother—but her own entirely.
“She is,” said the woman, smiling softly.
And far above, the starherd laughed, as the stars welcomed back the one they had lost.