Chapter 10
10
A S THE LAST bell of Eventoll echoed down from on high, Nyx crossed toward the cot in her cell. Cane in hand, she moved unsteadily across the room, partly from her residual weakness but more from the generous amount of rum in the sweetcake. Bone-tired and stuffed near to bursting, she had no doubt sleep would come quickly.
Her ears still rang with the laughter and songs of her dah and two brothers, celebrating her coming Ascension to the ninth tier. She smiled at the pride in the lot of them. The fears and trepidations from this morning’s furtive talk with the prioress and the physik had been chased away by the merriment of family, by her own hope for her future.
Best let it all fall behind me, she had decided. She would cast aside her frightful dreams and let them be forgotten. Whether portentous or not, matters of such import and intrigue were best left to those who knew what they were doing—or at least, those who had the power and influence to make a difference.
That’s certainly not me.
As she rounded the foot of the bed, the oil lamp’s flame flickered, dancing shadows over the stone walls. The movement dizzied her. Before she lost her balance, she dropped heavily to a seat atop her bed with a groan.
She breathed deeply to clear her head. Bog brine salted the warm summer breeze through the high open window. The steady hum of gnats and meskers competed with the croak of frogs and scissor-song of crickets. In the distance, the haunting lilt of a marsh loon stirred a sad longing.
She sighed and glanced up to the window. The Father Above still shone outside—but His face remained hidden from view. Though the sun never vanished, Eventoll was marked by a slight dimming of His brilliance and a thickening of shadows. Such a change had been more evident before, when her clouded eyes were more sensitive to the vagaries of light and shadow. The shift was barely perceptible now, which saddened her, as if she had lost a part of herself with her returned sight.
Sobered by this thought, she stood up and crossed to the window. She drew the shutters against the sunlight, darkening the room. But she could not bring herself to close them completely. She had lived in shadows for too long.
Standing there, she gazed out at the full moon sharing the Eventoll sky. She studied its countenance, shining with the bright face of the Son. She noted vague dark eyes, maybe a nose, definitely a mouth. Before this past day, she’d never had the sharpness of vision to observe such details before.
It does look like a face up there.
She smiled back at the Son, knowing over the coming days that the dark Daughter would chase that face away. Such had been their dance since the beginning of time.
“And when I see your face come around again, O silvery Son,” she whispered to the moon, “I’ll be in my ninthyear.”
She could hardly fathom it. In a fortnight, the wish that had been clamped tightly in her heart was about to come true. The joy inside her shone as brightly as the Son in the sky. Yet, she could also not discount the gloom there, like her own dark Daughter waiting to eclipse her bright joy.
She knew the source of that glumness, remembering the prioress’s inquiry. She searched the moon’s face for any sense of enmity or danger. But she discovered nothing, felt nothing.
She dredged up the word used by the prioress, testing it on her lips. “Moonfall.”
What did that even mean?
With no answer forthcoming, she shrugged and returned to her bed. She climbed onto her cot and nestled into her blankets and pillow. She lay on her back and stared up at the drape of drying herbs in the rafters overhead. The flickering flame of the oil lamp made them look as if they were jerking and clawing toward her.
She shivered.
It seemed sight brought about its own unique terrors.
With a huff, she snuffed out the oil lamp, rolled on her side, and clutched her blankets tighter. She closed her eyes, but she doubted sleep would come as quickly as she had earlier surmised.
She was wrong.
S HE FLEES UP the shadowy mountain slope, through the fringes of a leafless forest made of stone. Screams of man and beast chase her the last of the way. The clash of steel rings all around, punctuated by the thunder of war machines.
Panting and breathless, she skids to a stop at the summit. She takes in everything, recognizing she is older, taller, scarred, missing a finger on her left hand. But she has no time for such mysteries.
Ahead, a cluster of figures with tattooed faces and blood-soaked robes circle an altar where a huge shadow-creature thrashes and bucks, its wings nailed to the stone with iron.
“No…” she screams with a raw throat, fire stoking inside her skull.
Dark faces turn toward her, curved daggers flashing into view.
She swings her arms high and claps her palms together as words, foreign to her, burst from her lips, ending in a name. “Bashaliia!”
With that last word, her skull releases the fiery storm held inside. It blasts outward with enough force to shatter the altar stone. Iron stakes break from black granite, and the shadow-beast leaps high. Its blood blesses the dark gathering, sending them scattering.
One figure runs toward her, a blade held high, a curse on his lips.
Wasted and empty, she can only fall to her knees. She cannot even raise an arm in her defense. She simply lifts her face to the smoke-shrouded skies, to the full face of the moon. The sickle form of the winged creature passes over its surface and disappears into the smoke and darkness.
As she watches, time both slows and stretches. The moon grows ever larger. The war machines fall silent all around her. Screams and cries of agony malform into a chorus of terror. The ground quakes under her knees, ever more violent with each breath.
And still the moon fills more and more of the sky, its edges on fire now, darkening all the world around it.
She finds the strength to name this doom.
“Moonfall…”
Then a dagger plunges into her chest—piercing her heart with the truth.
I’ve failed… I’ve failed us all.
W ITH A GASP, Nyx sat upright in her bed.
Tears blurred her newfound vision. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She fought a hand free of her tangled blankets and wiped at her eyes. Her other hand rubbed the fiery pain between her breasts, expecting her fingers to come back bloody.
Just a dream, she assured herself.
She swallowed to free her tongue in her fear-dried mouth.
“Just a dream,” she repeated, this time aloud to further reinforce her conviction.
She glanced to the window, to the moon still shining there, hanging as it had before, no larger, no smaller. She forced her breathing to calm. She lifted her left hand, opening and closing a fist.
All five fingers.
She lowered her arm, lifting her face in relief.
“I’m being daft, that’s all,” she argued with herself. “Dah was always heavy-handed with the rum in his sweetcake. And all that talk…”
Moonfall…
She was sure her rum-fueled imagination had churned up all of her misgivings and doubts into a nightmare. That’s all it was.
With her face still raised, she watched the drying branches and sprigs of herbs wave down at her from the rafters. The dream was no more real than the shift of shadows from a flickering flame.
She stiffened in her bed.
Her gaze flicked to the bedside stand, to the dark oil lamp. She remembered snuffing out its flame. And the window shutters were wider than how she’d left them. She craned her neck and searched the nest of shadows above the rafters.
Something’s up there.
With this thought, her world upended. Suddenly she was seeing herself staring up, seated atop the bed. She let out a cry, watched herself cry out. Then the world righted itself, and she was back in her bed, gaping up at the rafters.
A row of dried addleberry branches shivered, drawing her gaze.
From the rafters, a pair of red eyes glowed back at her.
A scream built in her chest, but before it let loose, a keening reached her from above. It was soundless but felt all over. Her skin prickled in response. It reverberated off the stone wall, filling the breadth of the ward. It knifed past her ears and echoed inside her skull, setting fire to the surfaces of her brain.
She palmed her ears, but it made no difference.
The fires stoked into a blaze, bringing with it strange sensations. Her nose filled with a gingery musk, redolent with oil and sweat. Her tongue tasted a milky cream, rich and sweet. Shadowy images fluttered as her head lolled back, as if buffeted by the keening winds from above.
The world dimmed around her, while another grew sharper.
—her tiny fingers scrabble through fur.
—pursed lips find a dark nipple, where a single drop of milk hangs.
—she suckles and kicks chubby legs to push herself greedily forward.
—soft leather scoops her tighter, keeping her warm and safe.
Nyx shook her head, trying to dispel these thoughts, to deny what she began to suspect. But she could not escape it.
Other glimpses cascaded through her. Sometimes it was her looking outward; other times, it was as if she was viewed from afar.
—she crawls through rushes.
—she struggles to suckle her own toe.
—smoking brimstan stings her nose.
—a hot tongue cleans her all over.
—she is clutched and swept high, winds brushing her limbs.
As the images flashed faster and faster, her vision of them grew strangely cloudier.
—the milk she suckles still tastes rich and sweet. It fills her belly, makes her stronger, deepens her slumbers, but it also slowly darkens her world.
—the warm tongue wipes at her eyes, not as gently, more fervently with concern.
—the high-pitched squeaks and whistles that have always filled her world and skull, which etched her very being, now sound mournful, grieving. As if the entire world wept around her.
—then aloft again, carried through shadows.
—her tiny ears hear the lowing of a great beast below, along with the bony rattle of reeds as the creature moves through the swamp.
—she is gently lowered to a spot near the beast. Her new bed is damp and perfumed by blooms all around.
—by this time, she can barely see.
—a shadow looms over her. Huge eyes gaze down. A whiskered cheek presses to her own. A tongue tastes her one last time. Nostrils huff and sniff, drawing her into memory.
—then with a final buffeting of huge wings, she is abandoned.
—she bawls her grief, her loss, echoing the keening that still bathes her from above, but which grows fainter and fainter.
—she watches a shadow crest the moon and vanish.
Finally, the world returned fully to her. She was back on her cot. Tiny eyes still glowed from above, but the terror of them had dimmed to a dull glow. She wanted to deny what she had been shown—lost memories inflamed back to life by the keening—but she could not. She knew them to be true. Still, it was too much to take in, upending all she understood about herself.
Before she could even attempt such an impossible task, the piercing cries from the rafters sharpened. Once again, she was staring down at herself from above. She knew she was peering through the eyes of the creature hiding up there. Then another image overlapped this one, shimmering like a reflection on a still pond.
She was a naked babe again, snuggled to a nipple, nestled in the fur and wing of a massive shape that protected her. She stared across to the other nipple, where a dark shape, naked and downy, suckled. Its thin wings were held awkwardly to the side. Small claws dug for purchase in the furry pelt—while tiny red eyes stared back at her. This other had always been there beside her, sheltered and protected under the same wings.
The shimmering view finally faded. The room went quiet again.
She gulped several breaths, dizzy with knowledge. Her gaze narrowed on the rafters, to the pair of red eyes. She now knew what hid in the rafters.
As if acknowledging this, a dark shape—barely larger than a winter goose—cartwheeled into view. Its wings snapped wide, then with a single beat, it dove sideways out the narrow window. Her gaze followed after the young Myr bat as it turned on a wingtip and vanished away.
She held her breath, testing how she felt about this trespass.
Such creatures were the scourge of these harsh lands, predators like no other. But no fear iced through her. Instead, her earlier terror had hardened to a cold certainty.
She knew who had come to visit her this Eventoll.
She continued to stare at the window, picturing that other nipple, the small shape—only now velvety furred and grown larger.
My lost brother.