The Native Star by M K Hobson

“They were trying to rebury it and he got in the way.”
    “Horrible,” Stanton said.
    “Will it hurt me, do you think?” She struggled to keep fear out of her voice.
    Stanton shrugged with his customary dismissiveness. “Well, you’re not dead yet,” he said.
    Here , she thought, is where I treat this tactless lout to a snappy retort . But suddenly, she didn’t feel like doing much of anything snappy at all. Instead, she looked back over her shoulder toward the mouth of the mine. She thought of the man who would remain buried there forever. She clenched her fist around the stone, as tightly as she could.
    “I’m going home,” she said.

CHAPTER THREE
The Rule of Three
    By the time Emily got home and was able to get a look at herself in the mirror, her eyes had returned to normal. Her hand … now, that was a different story. Nothing would shift the glimmering blue stone from where it was embedded in her right palm. No amount of distracted fiddling, pressing, or pushing helped in the least. The gem remained firmly and stubbornly imposed.
    She and Stanton had parted at the bottom of Moody Ridge. Emily, turning up the path that led to Pap’s cabin, had been more than willing to forgo the niceties of a good night, but Stanton had stopped her.
    “Listen, the crate that came for me today is a shipment of periodicals and collected journals. I’ve been waiting for them all winter. I’ll look through them and see if I can find reference to such a singular occurrence.”
    Early morning sunlight, pale and peach-colored, peeked through the back windows as Emily went to kindle the stove. While the water was heating, she climbed to the attic loft and changed out of her mud-caked calico dress. She frowned at the stains. They’d never come out. Spoiling her best dress would have seemed an utter tragedy twenty-four hours ago, but now it seemed a pretty trifling thing.
    When the water boiled, she made a pot of fresh coffee (clumsily, for she wasn’t used to working with a hand half crippled) and set out some of the cornbread that Mrs. Lyman had left. Then, as she waited for Pap to wake up, she sat staring quietly at the stone, watching the shifting light of morning cast smoky blue shadows through it onto the white tablecloth. When Pap finally stirred, scattering cats, she said simply: “You’ll never guess what happened to me last night.”
    After pouring him a strong cup of coffee, Emily told Pap about her trip to the Old China Mine. She kept the story simple, leaving out the more distressing elements. No need to alarm Pap about trivialities when the main issue was sure to trouble him enough.
    When she came to the part about the stone, she laid her hand on the table, palm up, as if inviting him to read her fortune. He felt the stone in her hand with his rough thumbs, his sightless eyes straining to remember how to see.
    “Well, if that don’t beat all … It’s a stone, you say? A blue-colored stone?”
    “Yes.” Emily leaned forward. “You know something about it?”
    “Nope.” Pap shook his head. “But it feels powerful, whatever it is. It’s got something in it, I can’t quite feel what. It doesn’t really feel like magic or power, or anything, really. More like … I don’t know, like something that isn’t yet, but might be. Like light from a star.”
    Emily was slightly surprised. Pap was rarely given to such poetic abstraction. She shook her head with impatience.
    “Well, anyway, can you get it out?”
    Pap was silent for a long time, his thumbs stroking Emily’s palm.
    “I can’t see as there’s any way to medicine it out without cutting,” Pap said. The thought made Emily cringe. “And no way I can see that you wouldn’t lose all the use of that hand.”
    “That’s my writing hand,” she said. “I couldn’t do charms or anything without that hand.”
    “Your other hand would learn, in time,” Pap said distantly. “But, Em, I don’t know if we should make any decision too quick.