#and subpar starfall content is better than no starfall content

[fictionadventurer]

The Dust That Falls From Passing Stars: Part 1/3

Snow clouds covered the midnight sky, but it seemed the stars were all down here tonight. Stars poured light from street lamps onto snow-covered cobblestones.The glowing heavenly stones glimmered from the coats and necklaces of the wealthy theatre patrons who bundled into plush carriages.  A star even glowed at Lorenz’s throat—a bright green star in a cloak pin that would grant him entry to the House Diriks ball. Once, such a pin would have been an impossible dream, but in his year of fame, wearing it had become almost routine.

In a crowd as grand as this, there was no chance of finding a cab in the after-show rush. Better to walk the eight blocks than stand like a beggar in the snow.

A voice from the street called, “Fortuin!”

Snow crunched beneath Lorenz’s boots as he stopped in white glow of a star lamp. He lifted his top hat and saw a hatless man in a blue silk suit leaning out of a carriage caught in the crush of traffic.

Lorenz acknowledged him with a wide-armed wave. “Evening, Coeman.”

The star jeweler’s son’s eyes had an alcohol glaze. “Look at you!” he crowed. “All dressed up for a party!”

Lorenz and Coeman were both shopkeeper’s sons, but that was like saying a hovel and a palace were both houses. Lorenz came from a long line of grocers, while wealth fell from the heavens onto Coeman’s family lands. Coeman was ever amused by those who worked for their living.

Coeman cried, “Did the lady unchain you from the piano?”

Lorenz gave a thin smile. “Even genius needs refreshment.”

Coeman laughed. “Only you’d call a walk in a snowstorm refreshing.”

The light dusting of flakes could scarcely be called a shower, much less a storm, though it probably seemed like one compared to the plush comfort of a starfall family’s carriage.

Lorenz shrugged, then smiled, pretending indifference. “I’ll get there faster than you.”

He strode away, leaving Coeman and his carriage stuck in the crush of traffic.

From the street, voices shouted, horses wickered, wheels clattered upon cobblestones, and Lorenz wove among the hoop skirts and overcoats of his fellow sidewalk pedestrians. As Lorenz turned a corner, his cloak billowed, and a hand caught upon the hem and held him fast.

He stopped, then looked down into the dirt-covered face of a ragged young girl, a small, shapeless form somewhere between eight and eighteen, who sat in the gutter holding a small jar of glittering dirt.

She lifted it toward Lorenz’s hand. “Stardust, sir? Two pennies a pinch.”

Even if he had a cigarette to light or needed his hands warmed, the girl’s stardust wouldn’t have done anything—it was ten times more dirt than dust. Incompetent even for a dustgirl.

He yanked his cloak out of her hand, but pity soon overcame his annoyance, and he dropped a silver krenin in the girl’s lap.

Her eyes shone as if he’d tossed her the star at his throat. “God bless you, sir.”

Lorenz tipped his hat and strode away. A bit of blessing and a lot of hard work had brought him to his current heights. He loved that success gave him the means to become one of those towering figures of generosity that so lifted up the downtrodden.

That lofty feeling carried him all the way to the entrance of House Diriks. The house’s towering gray façade dominated the street, a castle within the city limits, built to with all the embellishments of current architectural fashion. Crystalline windows gushed starlight into the cold and dark of the city, illuminating the arriving guests. The carriages were like wheeled palaces, and the people coming out of them wore silks and velvets and furs that glistened in the glow of the stars they wore on their necks and ears and hands.

In that colored crowd, there was one spot of brown. A ragged girl, older than the one Lorenz had seen near the theater, held a small clay jar that faintly glimmered with stardust. Yet she didn’t offer the ladies stardust to adorn their faces and necks, didn’t approach the gentlemen with an offer to light a cigar. Instead, she scurried away, her eyes on some distant destination.

Very strange. What dustgirl would waste such an opportunity? These people would carry her week’s salary as pocket change, and would likely throw a good portion of it at her feet just to keep her from coming too near. She hadn’t been chased away, and she hadn’t so much as looked at the crowd. Leaving could only mean she had better plans in mind, and Lorenz, his curiosity piqued, decided to discover them.

He trailed her along the house’s western wing, sticking to the shadows between the glowing windows. Wide balconies extended from all the rooms on the upper floor, all filled with laughing, chattering party-goers who glowed in the light of the stars they wore. Aestus stars glimmered like flames to warm their lightly gloved hands. A hundred colors of decorative stars adorned necklaces, tiaras, earrings, cuff links, and were even sewn directly into ball gowns and suit coats. A thousand captured constellations that made it look as though their wearers had fallen from the heavens.  

The winter winds blew scraps of stardust from their finery. It whirled in the wind, blew over the balcony, and scattered on the sidewalk below. This shower—not the spectacle above—drew the dustgirl’s eyes, and she knelt on the snow-slicked stone beneath it, scraping with cold-chapped hands on the ground as she raced to gather as much stardust as possible into her battered clay jar.

Lorenz found himself entranced by the tableau—the bright and laughing elite above and the earthy desperation below. There was cruelty here, but also beauty, something that pierced deep into the true nature of things in a way that he rarely considered. He could make a lyric out of this—not one of his light, theatrical pieces, but a real and honest piece of poetry. The complacent rich who wore the heavens at their hearts without a thought, and a girl who thought herself fortunate to gather up the crumbs. A downtrodden soul who scratched in the dirt, yet came up covered in the dust of the stars.

When the ground had been cleared of its heavenly bounty, the girl turned her attention to the still-falling flakes. Could she capture it all, Lorenz wondered. How would she separate the stardust from the falling snow?

As if in answer, she unwound her ragged cloak from her shoulders and spread it like a net between her arms. Half the flakes faded within moments of landing on the fabric. Lorenz’s heart flared in admiration as he caught the trick of it. Her body-warmed cloak melted the snowflakes, leaving her with a haul of pure stardust cleaner than anything that could be gathered by any other dustgirl in the city.

He felt a strange connection to this girl, who took such pride in doing such a humble job so well. He’d never looked at a dustgirl with anything other than pity, or perhaps relief that his family had never fallen so low. But here was courage, enterprise, intelligence, and Lorenz found it more inspiring than anything he’d seen from tonight’s crowd of starfall elites.

As the girl bobbed and weaved beneath the stardust shower, a deep-voiced shout shattered the peace.

“You! Girl!” A thick-limbed guard in the blue and silver of the House Diriks staff raced toward her, boots clattering. “Get gone, you filthy scavenger!”

The tableau shattered. The girl crushed her cloak to her chest and tried to run, face white with panic. As she pivoted, her foot slipped on a patch of ice and she landed on the ground in a tangle of limbs.  

“Get gone!” the guard shouted again. “We don’t need rat-thieves crawling ‘round!”

The girl scrambled into a sitting position, but still failed to find her feet. The guard removed a thick cudgel from beneath his cloak and drew his arm back for a blow.

Before Lorenz could think, he stepped out of the shadows, grabbed the girl’s shoulders, and pulled her out of the path of the descending club. She slid easily on the ice, and the guard stumbled as his cudgel met empty air. As the guard flailed to keep his balance, his weapon caught Lorenz on the shoulder.

Lorenz barely felt it through his anger. He unbent himself and demanded, “What do you think you’re doing?”

The guard found his feet, but his tongue faltered, stunned as he stared at this unexpected gentleman. “My…apologies, sir. I didn’t see…”

“Is this how you treat innocent women? Beatings and blows?”

The guard snapped, “She’s a thieving scavenger, sir.”

At his feet, the shivering girl looked at the ground, ashamed in a way she hadn’t been while gathering the stardust, as if the guard’s words had the power to turn her into the very thing he claimed she was.

It reminded Lorenz of some of the things that had been said about him in his early days in high society. It softened his heart and hardened his resolve. He’d do what he could to make the guard look at this girl with the respect she deserved. With all the indignation he felt, he shouted, “A thief, sir? She is my guest!”

Lorenz squared his shoulders, straightened some folds in his cloak, and loosed the cloakpin at his throat to show it to the guard. The silver setting bore the crossed swords and crescent moon of the House Diriks crest, and the center of it held a polished fragment of a glowing green star. “I am Lorenz Karel Fortuin, and my patron is Lady Diriks herself.”

The guard gazed at the pin, his face growing white. “That’s real.”

“It is.”

“And this girl is your guest?”

Thankfully, the night’s shadows hid details. Lorenz draped his now-unfastened cloak over the girl before the guard could get a better look at her clothes.

Lorenz murmured to the girl in soothing tones. “I told you to dress warmer, Anya.” Anya was a good name—vague enough to apply to peasant or princess.

As the shock passed, the guard grew more truculent. “Why was she gathering stardust?”

Lorenz asked, “What girl could resist a glittering starshower? It’s not illegal—fair falling stardust is public property.”

The guard didn’t seem quite convinced, so Lorenz turned his attention to the girl. He examined her face, crusted with sweat and snowflakes, cheeks chapped red from the cold. Her mouth was hanging open in surprise, and her brown eyes were wide with shock and hope. “Has he hurt you?” Lorenz asked.

“No,” she said.

“I’m glad of it,” he said gently. Then he turned back to the guard and snapped, “You ought to be glad of it, too. Harming a guest of House Diriks? Your lady would not be pleased.”

The guard’s pale, slack face suggested that he understood all too well what he’d escaped.

Lorenz helped the girl to her feet. She was taller than he’d realized, but impossibly thin. Swathed in his cloak, she looked breakable as glass.

“Stand tall,” he whispered, and when she stood more like a frightened lady than a battered street urchin, he escorted her past the baffled guard.

The guard watched them go with narrowed eyes, and Lorenz cast one cautious glance back toward the balcony. Most of the crowd stood heedless of the scene below, but a few sharp eyes followed Lorenz and his guest. Fortunately, he had plenty of experience in crafting scenes for balcony crowds.

Lorenz led the girl toward the house’s main doors and urged her toward the white silver-veined marble of the main staircase. “Let’s get you inside.”

She gave him a sharp, shrewd glance, more like her old self with the guard out of reach. “What are you doing, sir?”

Her words held a hundred other questions. Who are you? Why are you helping me? What are your intentions? He couldn’t hope to answer them with the eyes of House Diriks upon them.

“I’m helping you,” he whispered. He gestured in the guard’s direction with his eyes. “Until he’s out of the way.”

She took a step away from his side, and for a moment, Lorenz thought she’d bolt with his best cloak. But she merely examined him, top to toe, and seemed to come to some internal decision. “Thank you, sir,” she said, and started up the stairs.

The great blue doors opened before her, granting them entrance into the warmth and light of the House Diriks foyer. Lorenz bustled his guest past the outstretched hands of the attendants and toward a fireplace set between the curving staircases. She stared wide-eyed at everything they passed.

Lorenz smiled at her. “What do you think?”

“So bright,” the girl breathed.

Hardly fine poetry, but not an uncommon reaction upon entering the Dirik’s family’s city home. The Diriks House starfall was the prime landing place for solara stars—the largest and brightest that fell to Earth, with the purest, whitest light. Their decorations emphasized it on this dark midwinter night, with the crowning glory of a silver-limbed chandelier, holding half a thousand stars. Their light glinted off the silver veins in the marble flooring and the gilding in the deep blue wallpaper, sparkled on the bits of snow that swirled through the doors and brightened the eyes of the dustgirl guest who stared in wonder at it all.

He brought her to a wooden chair near the fireplace, hidden behind a marble pillar holding a bust of a House Diriks founder.

Here in the light, he could finally get a good look at her. She was thin and slight, but she was older than he’d realized—twenty at least, with softness to her face but a shrewdness in her eyes that hinted at experiences that had aged her further. Her hair was that indeterminate color between yellow and brown, wrapped in a ragged crown around her head. Her nose was dripping from the cold—he offered her a handkerchief before she wiped it on his cloak—and her eyes were as bright and green as the star in his House Diriks cloak pin.

“Are you well?” Lorenz asked her. “You took a nasty tumble.”

“He didn’t hurt me,” she said, speaking for the first time in more than a whisper. Her accent flattened and elongated her vowels—as stereotypical a specimen of the city’s lower classes as he’d ever heard. Lorenz had worked long and hard to train similar—though never so strong—tics out of his own voice.

“Did you keep the dust?” he asked.

Her dark eyes flashed. “It’s mine by right. I didn’t steal it. It fell fair, right to the ground.”

He dampened a smile. “I don’t plan to take it from you. The law’s on your side, so long as you didn’t knock anyone down to shake it loose.”

“I didn’t,” she insisted.

“There you go.” He couldn’t keep a lilt of amusement from his tone.

The girl caught it and scowled. “Why did you bring me here?”

“I told you. To get you away from the guard.”

“What’s that matter to a gentleman like you?”

He understood her suspicions. Many among the upper classes had little patience with their inferiors. “I guess I’m not as much of a gentleman as I appear.”

She went white, and seemed to try to fuse herself to the back of her chair.

“No!” Lorenz gasped, realizing the double meaning too late. He felt ill at the thought. “That was not an innuendo. I have no ungentlemanly intent toward you.”

The terror in the girl’s eyes changed to something livelier and more glittering. Almost as though she was laughing at him. “Don’t fret, sir. I believe you.”

Gruff with embarrassment, he said, “I only meant that I wasn’t born to this world.” Wasn’t much above a dustgirl myself when I started out.”

That amusement changed to interest. “That so, sir?”

He puffed up a little. “Rose through my own merit.”

“And you got a starfall lady’s crest. Is she sweet on you?”

Lorenz tried and failed to imagine Lady Diriks feeling tender emotions toward anyone, and felt ill at the thought of her pursuing someone so far her junior. “Lady Diriks is my patroness. I’m composer and lyricist at one of her theaters. I write showtunes, operettas.”

“They’ll pay you money for anything, these starfall swells.”

Pride wounded, Lorenz squared his shoulders. “They’re excellent songs. I’ll bet even you’ve hummed a tune or two by Lorenz Fortuin.”  

Her dark eyes stared into the distance before brightening with recognition. “That song about the lady!”

Lorenz wanted to point out this didn’t much narrow down the canon of music, but then she softly sang the first bars of a tune that was clearly “Nightingale’s Lament.” A surprisingly smooth alto.

“One of my better ones,” Lorenz said.

She smiled. “It’s pretty. I sing it to the little ones sometimes.”

“You have children?” he asked in surprise. She was old enough for it, he supposed, but not by much.

“Sisters,” she explained. “Three of ‘em. Oma watches them when I’m working.”

Supporting three young girls—and possibly, a grandmother—on pinches of stardust. It was poverty he couldn’t imagine.

He couldn’t think of anything to say in response. “I suppose,” he said, brushing the toe of one foot on the marble floor, “that you’ll need to be getting back to them.”

“Eventually,” she said, settling into her chair with a sigh. “But it’s cold out there and this fire’s so warm.” She closed her eyes, languid and content.

Her few minutes in the warmth had transformed her. The hard-edged desperation of the street had softened, and her pale, cold-chapped face had taken on a warmer glow. By now, the guard would be long gone, the balcony crowd distracted by their own amusements, but he couldn’t imagine forcing her back into those freezing streets so soon.

The girl looked at the fire, the star-filled chandelier, the skirts and furs and star necklace of a passing duchess.  “I’ll have one hell of a story to tell them at dawn.” They won’t believe the things I’ve seen.”

The words sparked a wild idea, more brilliant than the stars around them. Following the impulse, he asked,  “Would you like to see more?”

She looked at him warily. “How do you mean?”

“I really am allowed to bring a guest to these events.”

Her expression became hard and skeptical. “You want me to stay?”

“Why not?” Lorenz asked. His mind supplied a dozen answers, but his showman’s side and his romantic side teamed up against his more practical inner voice. Even a dustgirl had a right to see a glorious spectacle once in her life, and what could compare to a midwinter House Diriks ball?

The girl tugged Lorenz’s cloak around her snow-stained clothes. “For one thing, I ain’t dressed for it.”

Caught up in the excitement, his imagination spun glorious possibilities and leaped over obstacles. “House Diriks provides fully-staffed powder rooms for these parties. The maids can clean you up. Your dress will be a charmingly rustic costume.”

She looked up those stairs with longing. “Do you think so?”

A significant part of Lorenz didn’t, but it was tackled and sat upon by his more optimistic side.

“Just picture it,” Lorenz said. “The finest music, the most illustrious people. Food from the finest chefs on the continent. There are people in the city’s oldest families who can’t enter a House Diriks ball, but you could be an invited guest.”

He was drunk on the drama of it. It was madness, but such glorious madness. A melodrama fit for his finest operettas. The downtrodden dustgirl, pulled from the gutter to experience one night of luxurious enchantment. He would be her generous benefactor, her benevolent guide to this elegant world.

Her eyes sparkled in the starlight. His enthusiasm was infecting her. “You really mean it, sir?”

“I do.”

She grinned. “I’ll stay.”

He clapped his hands together in satisfaction. “Excellent! You won’t regret it.” He put his hand behind her back and began to lead her away from the seat behind the pillar. “I’ll be Lorenz to you, if you’re to be my guest. You’ll need to be Anya for the night. Those on the balcony may have overheard us.”

“That suits me,” Anya said.

He led her away from the fireplace and toward a yellow-papered door in a small alcove. “Very well, Anya. Let’s get you ready for the ball.”