Chapter Text
The first time the stars fell to earth, Sersi was perched on her roof, hugging her knees to her chest while her parents fought in the house below—something about why can you never and you are always so and nag, nag, nag, that’s all you. She squeezed her eyes shut, not so much sad as she was tired, because it was always like this, and there was nowhere to go to escape the giant bubble of pressure that filled the whole house after one of these arguments.
The flash of something hot and sparkling behind her eyelids made her look up.
It fell in a white flare, so bright it nearly hurt to behold, and crashed to the earth in a roil of smoke and dust only twenty metres from her yard.
Sersi hesitated for only a moment before she wiggled off the roof, not minding that she was dirtying the bum of her nightgown. She was only eight, but it was old enough to know that her parents wouldn’t notice the stain, nor would they notice she was gone. She landed back on her balcony, shimmied into a light jacket and her fuzzy bunny slippers, and climbed down to ground level, taking off running through the yard.
Though the moon was full, the night was still dark, and she reprimanded herself for not bringing her flashlight, the one she left in the drawer of her bedside table in case she wanted to read Junie B. Jones after lights-out. She prided herself on being very mature and very responsible, and this seemed like a horrible oversight.
Nonetheless, she stayed the course. Bramble tore at the terrycloth of her hoodie, but she fought through the thorns, picking her way through the mud and rocks before stumbling upon an open, unwooded glade in the middle of the woods.
Something was burning—not quite aflame but simmering, and the smell of scorched autumn leaves drifted through the air. She wasn’t old enough yet to be careful, just curious, so she approached.
The crash site looked like it had been dug from the earth by some cosmic ice cream scoop, perfectly round and perfectly even, improbable in best of times and impossible now, because in the middle of the hole sat a boy, around her age, looking discombobulated and rubbing at his eyes. He had hair as dark as the night, broken up by a streak of shocking white, and wore strange blue clothes threaded through with gold. And he was blinking up at her.
“I’m Sersi,” she informed him, for a lack of anything better to say. “Hi.”
Years later, he would swear this was the moment he fell in love, but what did eight-year-olds know about loving? In the moment, he only blushed up at her and mumbled, “Hello, Sersi.”
“What are you called?” she asked, offering him a hand. He shrank from it a little, but when she didn’t pull away, he reached out to grab it. She hauled him to his feet and helped him climb out.
“I don’t know,” the boy said. “I don’t remember.”
“Hmm.” Sersi had always been a practical girl—if a little precocious—and it struck her with firm logic that she couldn’t make a new friend if she had nothing to call him. She scanned through the stack of books daddy had helped her borrow from the library, and the stories she was told at bedtime. Apollon perhaps, for he was from the heavens—but that didn’t seem quite right. Aeneas, who left home for a distant land? No—she knew exactly what to call him.
“Ikaris,” she said. “How does that sound?”
The boy smiled shyly, looking down at their still-entwined fingers. “Ikaris. I like that.”
She led him to the treehouse daddy built last year when mummy was on his butt about never doing anything around the house—they were all pretending that it wasn’t true, and Sersi was pretending she didn’t notice—it was a shabby little thing, but secure enough that she didn’t have to worry about making Ikaris fall twice in one night. It must have hurt a lot.
They climbed up the tree together, she with practiced ease, and he with the clumsiness of a toddler just learning how to walk. Sersi bet he wasn’t used to Earth’s gravity yet. It was a word she’d learned in science last week, and she’d decided it sounded nice because it kind of sort of rhymed with her name. She flipped on the switch that controlled the tangled Christmas lights daddy had tried very hard to make pretty. It cast the space in a warm glow, and then they crawled inside the crooked door into a ground littered with stuffed animals, overfilled patchwork pillows, and chunky knit blankets.
She’d decorated with all the things that were too precious to leave inside the house, where the monsters who lived in her closet (but only when the closet doors were open and it was night) might get to it: a rubber bracelet her best friend Thena gave to her before she moved all the way to Australia, a collection of stones (some of them were pretty, others just had interesting shapes), and some books, near in tatters from how often they’d been thumbed through.
“You can stay here,” she told him. “Until you remember where you come from, I mean. My mummy and daddy won’t mind.”
Or at least, she thought they wouldn’t mind. She’d decided they weren’t going to mind, because most likely they wouldn’t notice, and she wanted to keep him so badly.
“Thank you,” he said quietly, edging in from the corner where he’d been shrivelling into himself. “I like it here a lot.”
Sersi beamed. She liked her treehouse too, and she was proudest of the pictures she drew on the blackboard wall. She showed them to him as he hummed in appreciation. It was horses, mostly (she wanted to take horseback riding lessons and own a pinto pony because Misty of Chincoteague was a pinto), but she’d been tracking the constellation Draco through the sky at night too, and mummy was taking her to art lessons and they were teaching her how to shade a sphere.
“Do you know what star you’re from?” Sersi asked Ikaris as she showed him last night’s coordinates of Eltanin. “Maybe we can look it up at the library and then...and then we’ll figure out a way to contact them so you can go home.”
“I…I don’t know,” Ikaris admitted. “I called it Olympia.”
“There’s an asteroid called Olympia,” Sersi supplied helpfully. She’d remembered its name because she saw it in a book once, and thought it was funny that the name was so similar to Olympus. But Ikaris told her he was from much farther away, and anyway, a planet was bigger than an asteroid.
“You’re magic, aren’t you?” she asked. She was very ready to believe, and there was no other way to explain how he crashed into her backyard from a galaxy far away.
Ikaris shook his head. “Not any more than you are, I don’t think.”
But he did turn out to be magic. She found this out when she climbed down from the treehouse to get him something to eat. The downstairs lights had all been turned off, which meant that mummy and daddy had finished fighting and had gone to bed—or more likely, mummy had gone to bed and daddy was sleeping in the guest room. The tree wasn’t very tall and the climb wasn’t very arduous, but her feet were getting bigger while the planks beneath them stayed the same, so when she slipped and fell, it wasn’t very surprising. They were only ten or so feet from the ground, not high enough up to hurt her seriously, so she braced herself for impact.
But the impact never came. Instead, hands wrapped around her upper arm and hefted her upwards until she was soaring, dozens of feet from the ground. She gasped—her little suburb looked so sprawling from so high up, bounded by a creeping wood and sparkling with warm yellow lights. She looked up to see Ikaris, his face turned upwards to greet the stars, a marvel strange and wondrous. Then he set her back down, carefully, and waited for her to regain her footing before letting go again.
“Are you Superman?” she asked.
But he shook his head, shy again. “I’m Ikaris,” he said, “just Ikaris.”
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
Sersi’s parents divorced the next summer. She was staying with mummy, who said it would be a relief to take care of one child instead of two, never knowing that Sersi was hiding a third in their treehouse. Daddy moved into an apartment in town, but he still came to see her twice a week and brought her gifts to make up for not visiting more.
It was better this way, she thought, because at least she wouldn’t have to listen to them arguing all the time, and the proceedings distracted them enough that they never noticed how much time Sersi spent in the backyard.
After the first night, Sersi had thought about telling them about Ikaris, but she didn’t think they would let him stay. Ikaris didn’t have any other family on Earth, and they had to find him a way back to Olympia, not give him to strangers who would clip his wings and keep him tethered to the ground.
The two of them spent the summer poring over astronomy books, which weren’t very helpful. They just told stories about how a mean lady was hung upside down among the stars or a hunter who was killed by a scorpion. And when she asked for the bigger ones with fewer pictures, the librarian lady petted her on the head and allowed her to check out thick volumes that she only realized after the fact that she could not understand.
“It’s okay,” Ikaris said one day when she’d thrown a book across the floor in frustration. They didn’t teach them anything about aphelions at school, just that the sun was mostly made of hydrogen. “Maybe I’m not meant to go home yet. Maybe I’m meant to stay here with you.”
Sersi looked up, her vision blurry from angry tears. “Well maybe you’re not meant to go home ever,” she said, suddenly feeling hopeful. “Maybe the sky made you come here so we can be best friends for ever.”
Ikaris smiled ruefully, but he didn’t disagree.
She took that as a yes.
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
It was easier to keep Ikaris hidden than she thought. Sometimes, she talked about him at school, to her friends, but they all thought she was making things up because things weren’t good at home. That was what she’d heard Gil’s mom tell him one day when she was over at his house to play Legos.
“You have to be very considerate to Sersi,” Mrs. Gil’s Mom had said. “Things aren’t good at home.”
When he came back with a tray of ddeok to share and gave her the chewiest, sweetest ones, Sersi didn’t complain, because she didn’t want him to know she’d heard anything at all. Everyone expected her to be sad, so she let them think she was sad.
And after a while, Sersi just stopped bringing up the boy who lived in her treehouse.
It was even easier to keep him from mummy, who was out working all day and was so tired when she got home that she had barely enough energy to put together dinner before dragging herself upstairs to watch TV in an empty bedroom. Sersi would clean the kitchen quickly and then grab her backpack to do homework in the treehouse.
Ikaris was the only person she ever told the whole truth to: that she was worried she was a bad daughter, that she wasn’t sad about the divorce the way everyone expected her to be, that she was happy she wouldn’t have to listen to the fighting anymore and what kind of person did that make her?
Sometimes she wouldn’t do homework at all, she would just cry, but they were selfish tears, greedy tears, self-pitying tears, because she was worried there was something wrong with her for not crying more. He would let her though, and afterwards he would pat her eyes dry.
Sometimes, when she fell asleep against a mountain of soft, downy pillows, he would scoop her up in his arms and fly her into the window of her bedroom to tuck her into bed like her own reverse Peter Pan.
Sometimes, Ikaris would tell her stories—the ones he could remember anyway—about a planet called Olympia and the people who lived there, and a mom he called Ajak, how everyone there could fly and their eyes were molten. When she drew these Olympians in her art class, her teacher said she had a good imagination, and Sersi didn’t bother insisting it was real.
“Do you miss her?” Sersi asked one night. She was in her favorite polka dot nightgown, and Ikaris was in her rainbow unicorn shirt and striped pajama bottoms. It was after lights out, but mummy was asleep down the hall, so she’d turned on a nightlight, bathing the room in a gentle wash of gold.
“Who?” Ikaris asked. He took a Cheeto from the bag she offered him. He didn’t eat much—he didn’t seem to need to—but he never refused anything she offered him either.
“Your mummy,” Sersi said. “Living in a place where everyone is like you, and you don’t have to live in a treehouse.”
“It’s not so bad,” he smiled. “I have you.” They were sitting side by side on her bed, leaning against the wall where she’d hung all her favorite pictures, and he bumped her shoulder. “Sometimes, during the day, I can fly through the woods and look for interesting things.”
“What’ve you found?” she asked.
And he told her—there were toads in the wood, and nightingales. He’d found some kind of berry, too, and it had stained his hand magenta. He showed her his palms with solemn embarrassment, and it was all Sersi could do to stifle her laughter.
“Do you want to go somewhere really nice?” Sersi asked, once she’d finally got ahold of herself again. “I can show you, but you have to promise not to tell anybody.”
“Who would I tell?” asked Ikaris, genuinely curious.
“Just promise!” she insisted. “It’s about the prince…the prince...the princible.”
“Alright then, that’s easy enough. I promise.”
Sersi smiled, wide and bright. “Okay,” she told him. “But you’d better be ready to have your mind blown.”
Ikaris pulled a face. “Why would you need to blow on me?”
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
On a grey and blustery November afternoon, when Sersi had dropped her backpack off at home and called to her babysitter that she was going out to play with neighborhood friends, she and Ikaris picked their way across the woods. Wet dirt stuck in clumps to the bottom of her shoes, and as Ikaris had long since outgrown the ones she’d loaned him, he floated along beside her, feet barely skimming the ground.
The forest smelled of petrichor and moist soil and night was already beginning to hang at the edges of the horizon. It was the kind of autumn evening that clung to the last embers of warmth before a long, slow winter, but couldn’t quite stave off reminders of its own mortality. Sersi led the way past a fallen tree—a mossy shelter for all kinds of delightfully crawly things—past the brown remnants of a bramble bush, around a bend in the well-trodden path, over a fence and across an overrun field of barley. And then the vista opened up before them.
It took Sersi’s breath away every time.
They stood upon the drop of a sheer cliff. The rolling countryside, dotted with rows of tiny amber lights from the cobbled town below, flaring to life as day seeped reluctantly into dusk. Languid hills, lush in summer with verdant grass, barren now, and yellowed, rose and fell like the billow of a wave on the open sea. The sun sat just above the horizon line, a drop of sour lemon candy.
Sersi dug one out from her pocket and offered it to Ikaris, but he was looking into the distance, eyes a sparkle of light. She popped it into her own mouth instead, and squinched her face at the tart, acid bite of it. They’d been daddy’s favorite, and she found them in odd little pockets of the house sometimes.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked him. “This is the best part.”
Lowering herself to the ground and scooting closer to the edge of the cliff on her backside, Sersi readied herself to watch the sunset. But Ikaris remained where he was, captivated.
“I will miss this when I’m gone,” he said.
It took a minute for Sersi to understand what he meant.
“No,” she told him, almost reflexively. “You won’t miss this because you won’t be gone.”
“I have to go back someday,” he said, timidly.
“No you don’t.” Her voice was bold, commanding, and when she spoke he wanted to follow. “If you leave, you’ll forget me, and I don’t want you to do that.”
“But how could I ever forget you?” He said this with a smile, as though that made it any better.
“I don’t care, you’re staying.”
There was a long silence after. Sersi tried not to pout, knew it was childish to and that she was too old to throw tantrums anymore, but she couldn’t help herself. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms tightly around them, biting down hard on her lips to stop them from trembling. Thena had left her. Daddy was gone. And now Ikaris was talking about leaving too.
Was she that hard to want to stay for?
There was a soft thump next to her, and then a bony shoulder bumped into her own. When she said nothing, Ikaris put his head against her arm. “I don’t want to leave. You’re my best friend in the whole world. I just think—I just worry—that I don’t really belong here. And I can’t stay in your treehouse forever.”
“Can too,” was the sulky reply.
But after a while, she did take her head out of her arms. “You promise you won’t leave?”
“I promise.”
“Swear it.”
“I swear.”
Sersi held out an expectant pinky, and Ikaris looked at it as though she’d grown a second set of appendages. She laughed through her stuffy nose and threaded her pinky through his, folding the rest of his fingers into a fist. “There. No take-backs, or else.”
“Okay,” Ikaris agreed. “No take-backs.”
The sun slipped further into the hills, nestling deeper into shadow. This time of year, Sersi knew, the sun was nearly at its furthest from Earth, and felt it too, the light cold and wan. She leaned her head against Ikaris’s shoulder.
“I used to come up here with mummy and daddy before they started fighting so much. We would make a picnic, with toast and strawberry jam and salami and cheese. I don’t remember too much from then, but I do remember thinking that it must be so nice to be a bird and see the world from this high up. You can never really tell how beautiful it is until you can see everything all at once.”
“Do you want to go higher?” Ikaris asked, his voice a little muffled by the hair in his face.
Sersi drew back to look at him. “How?”
He put out his palms. “Do you trust me?”
Of course she did. She put her hands in his. They were warm and kind of sweaty. He guided her arms to his neck and then bent a little to lift her, one hand under her knees and one behind her back. “Ready?”
She nodded.
Then Ikaris stepped off the cliff.
It was like the first breathless plummet of a roller coaster—the bottom dropped out of her stomach and the air left her lungs. They were falling, falling, impossibly fast, tumbling through the air. Sersi squeezed her eyes shut and bit down hard on her lip, too frightened to make a squeak. But then they slowed, the pressure on her ears abated, and for one miraculous second, she was truly weightless. They were airborne.
She squinted her eyes against the sting of the wind, and through her lashes she could make out the winding streets of the village below whipping past them. For an ungenerous moment, she envied Ikaris, to be able to go where he wanted when he wanted to. If she could fly, she would fly far away from this place where sometimes, it felt like no one knew her.
And then he eased to a stop. They hung there like the stars in the heavens, looking down at that expansive world below. It was dark now, truly night, and her babysitter would be frantic, but Sersi could have stayed forever.
Below them, the people moved like ants across the pavement. She couldn’t hear the laughter so high up, but she could imagine it lingering in cafes and bubbling out of restaurants, where twenty-seven-year-olds wearing Burberry tweeds (they were always twenty-seven on tv, and they were always wearing Burberry) sat opposite thirty-two-year-old bankers (it was always a banker) and ordering petty fours, or doves, and carabet.
“Is this what you see all the time?” she breathed. The height was making her dizzy, but in a good way.
“Only at night,” Ikaris said. “You said I would scare people if they saw me during the day.”
“I said it would be funny if you scared people during the day.”
“I don’t think that would be very funny,” he said seriously. He was always serious.
“You know,” Sersi said, tapping her chin, “if you wanted you, I bet you could fly all the way to France and see the Eiffel Tower. It’s way better than being stuck in my treehouse reading all day, even if I do have good taste in books.”
“Yes,” he agreed patiently, “but what would be the point if I couldn’t do it with you? And anyway, I’d get lost. I always get lost.”
Sersi smiled, pleased despite herself, a warm bubble of happiness rising in her chest. Despite the late autumn chill, she felt glowy and warm. Here was someone who didn’t want to leave, and pinky promised he wouldn’t.
Here was someone who knew her after all.