POLARIS

Thirteen-year-old Ardacian Polaris has never left the Montana wilderness where his mother has raised him alone. He orders his books by height within topic, taps the railing three times on every step, and has named five thousand trees. At seven, after failing to put down a dying deer, he made himself a rule: he will never take a life.

A seven-foot-tall stranger named Jobei arrives, and Ardacian’s mother gives him a leather-wrapped orb she has hidden beneath the floorboards. She tells him his father is alive. Then she tells him she is not human. Her name is Neglacia, she is Cirlean, and the bedtime stories she told about the planet Polaris were true.

That night a darkness comes for them. Neglacia holds it off long enough for Jobei to hide her son, and dies where Ardacian can see her. Jobei carries him across space to Polaris. On the way, Ardacian hears his mother one last time: anywhere you feel the warmth of light, know I am with you.

He wakes in his own cabin, and knows within minutes that it is false, because the fireplace has 244 bricks instead of 243 and the old pine outside is missing the knot shaped like an eye. The cabin is a construct inside his own crystal, built by a mind that could not bear to arrive anywhere else. He chooses to leave it, and steps out into his true Cirlean body: seven feet tall, amber light moving beneath the skin.

Attacked in the jungle, he is saved by Dia, a ruby-eyed warrior of the tribal village of Owala, and taken to her mother Vizi to heal. A wounded Kriche, a great light-shedding bird, is dying of venom, and the medicine to save it grows only in the deep jungle. Ardacian goes with Dia to find it. When a predator corners them, he cannot make himself throw the blade, and Jobei has to save them both. Dia is furious at being defended. Jobei is contemptuous of her people. Back at the village, Ardacian discovers he can heal by matching another creature’s frequency rather than forcing his light into it. The Kriche lives, names itself Aru, and bonds to him.

Jobei shows him a map. Ardacian’s father, Bollian, has been imprisoned for thirteen years in a Saegeon fortress at the planet’s frozen southern pole. They set out, Ardacian, Jobei, Dia, and the warriors Motah and Renai, across a desert that speaks in sevens, which Ardacian learns to read.

At the mountain village of Noakai, the elder Wynro betrays them. The Saegeons have been taking her people’s children for sixty years, and have promised to stop in exchange for the Cirlean boy. In the fight, Motah dies shielding Ardacian.

At the southern pole, Ardacian reads the falling curtains of diamond rain and the rotation of the guards well enough to get the party inside. They find Bollian alive, thin and dim and unbroken, having survived thirteen years by counting the drip of water in his cell. His son’s compulsive counting is not an affliction. It is the family’s inheritance, and it is what kept his father alive.

Pursued across the ice, Ardacian sees a blade come down over Dia. He breaks his rule. He pushes everything he has, kills a young Saegeon, and the wave is far too large to control. Jobei steps into it, bends it away from the others, and is destroyed. The planet’s ancient hum falls silent. The medallion that carried Ardacian’s mother goes cold, and stays cold.

They carry Jobei home. The Cirlean council performs the crossing, and his body rises into the sky to become a new sun. The council reveals what the brown dwarfs overhead truly are: seven generations of Ardacian’s own ancestors, once suns, now nearly dark, because the Saegeons have built towers that drain them one slow century at a time. Bollian tells his son the rest. The Cirlean who taught the Saegeons to do it, who murdered Neglacia, is Bollian’s older brother, Palux. He has been alive for two thousand years, and he will not be stopped by the brother who loves him.

Dia finds Ardacian afterward and tells him the shame belongs to the size of the wave, not to the reaching. It is the crack that lets him understand the cold medallion. His mother has not left him. She has stepped back so he can sit alone with what he has done.

A new sense wakes in him, the planet’s listening, now living inside his own chest. He reaches out with it across the world, and something reaches back. On the far side of Polaris, Palux feels the boy find him, and smiles.