The Theft of Sunlight by Intisar Khanani (story reading .TXT) 📕

the silver needle glinting brighter than it should as it points straight toward me.

I raise my eyes to Niya’s. Seri isn’t just missing. She’s somewhere even magic can’t find her.

She’s been snatched.

Chapter

3

Mama sends me home with Bean and Niya. While they shut up the house, closing the shutters and bolting the doors, Baba and I take a dozen horses with us to town as mounts for the search parties. By dusk, Sheltershorn feels like a different place, the square deserted and the streets empty. Not a child can be seen anywhere, all of them kept indoors for fear that the snatchers might strike again while everyone is searching for Seri.

We search through the dark, hour after hour. But night edges into dawn, and the search parties have scoured every hidden vale and winding road, and there is still no sign of Seri. Mama and I return home to rest for a few precious hours as dawn burgeons into day. Baba will lie down at a friend’s house in town, that he might rejoin the search efforts that much quicker.

“Any news?” Niya asks as she and Bean join us to help untack the horses.

Mama shakes her head.

“We’re not giving up,” I tell my sister. “We just need a rest. Is there anything else you can do to help?”

Niya shakes her head. “I’ve tried a dozen different things. Nothing works.”

“It’s not your fault,” Mama says, her voice rough. “Even the Circle of Mages hasn’t figured out how to track the snatched.”

“Do you think they’ve tried?”

I glance at her, steadying myself against the wooden stall, exhaustion dragging at me. “They’re the highest group of mages in the realm. Why wouldn’t they?”

She drops her gaze to my feet. “They’d have to care.”

I grunt in agreement, and leave Bean to finish looking after my horse.

Mama and I rejoin the search again near mid-morning, having slept away the intervening hours, only to find it is over.

“It’s no use,” one of the organizers says, her eyes so darkly shadowed they look bruised. “Wherever Seri is, she isn’t here anymore. We’ve sent search parties down all the major roads. We’ll have to put our hope in them.”

I follow Mama to Ani’s house, unable to quite come to grips with this. When we arrive, I slide out of my saddle and lean against Muddle’s solid mass. She turns her head to regard me, one ear permanently crooked, and then leans down to take a taste of my skirt.

Mama calls to me. I free my skirt and trudge toward the door.

“They can’t give up.” Ani’s voice is like a slap in the face. I jerk to a stop as she storms out of the house. She glares at Mama and me, and then strides away.

“Ani!” her mother calls. “Anisela!” She casts a helpless glance at me. I’m already moving as she says, “Don’t let her go off alone, Rae.”

I catch up with Ani at the first crossroad. She stands there looking one way and then the other, as if lost. As if her sister might suddenly show up once more, a smile lighting her bright, chubby six-year-old face, the wind whipping her hair out of the twin braids she always wears, same as my sisters.

“This way?” I suggest, taking a single step in the direction that will lead us out of town. No need to parade her grief before everyone.

After a long moment, Ani dips her head and we fall into step together. She doesn’t say anything, though she adjusts her stride so that I can keep up. We pause when my own house finally comes into view, the red-brown adobe walls rising tall. The house is bounded by a low stone wall, and past it is visible our goat pen, and then the long, low bulk of the stable. Beyond that are the practice rings, with horse fences made of wood carted in from the distant mountains, and then the pastures where most of our herd grazes.

The house lies quiet, Bean and Niya closed up indoors, waiting for news.

“I didn’t believe it could happen to us,” Ani says abruptly. “To my own sister. Did you ever—well, you would never be snatched. But your sisters, do you worry about them?”

I tamp down on the hurt. She is angry and grieving and oblivious to how her words might sound to me, true as they might be. I was never at risk because snatchers take only the able-bodied. I answer quietly, “I worry a great deal.” Especially about Bean. Niya, with her magic, might be able to keep herself safe and win an escape, but Bean has no such advantage.

Ani nods.

It’s hard not to fear for every child in Sheltershorn, though the snatchers come so rarely. The last time it happened, three years ago, two children disappeared altogether, went out to play and never returned home. And as with Seri’s disappearance, no amount of searching, not even by the best of our trackers, returned a child to us.

“They found that boy who disappeared once, a few years ago.”

That was ten years ago, when Ani and I were only eight. I remember it well, for none of us were allowed out of our houses for nearly two weeks, until the threat of more children being snatched had waned. The boy escaped of his own accord and was rushed away to stay with relatives far out in the plains. His family followed after him within a week, leaving behind the life they had built here in order to keep their family together.

“He even escaped the Darkness,” Ani says. “He might be able to tell us something.”

The Darkness. A poison the snatchers plant in the blood of those who are snatched. If they manage to escape, it blossoms in their veins and eats away at their minds until they are left a husk of themselves. Our religious scholars have found a treatment, and while it’s effective in destroying the Darkness before it can take a child’s mind, it’s devastating in its