Chapter 34 Half-Moons
Half-Moons
The next time Sascia wakes, the infirmary is cloaked in darkness.
Nugau has moved to the floor by Sascia’s cot, leaning against its side with his arms resting on his bent knees.
Purple marks the Darkprints on his cheeks and deep shadows fold beneath his eyes.
Did he sleep at all? Sascia doubts it. He is watching his friends: the slow rise and fall of Orran’s chest, the arm Thalla has wrapped around their waist.
He must hear the change in Sascia’s breathing, because he looks up at her.
Sascia feels too present in her body: the fold of the mattress beneath her weight, the creases of the blanket over her legs, the pull of the stitches on her shoulder.
Under his gaze, every movement is a caress, every heartbeat a confession.
She turns onto her good side, tucking her hands beneath her cheek. For a while, they gaze at each other.
“I’m ready now,” Nugau says into the quiet.
Sascia knows exactly what he means. She warned him when the Queen raised the Labyrinth around them a second time. The Nugau from the future had told her she would almost die in it. And here Sascia lies, having narrowly escaped death. At long last, Nugau wants to hear the whole story.
“I met you three times,” Sascia begins. “The first time, I pulled you out of the Dark near Times Square. Humans had never made contact with aesin before. Your appearance caused havoc. You had an old scar right there.” She lifts her finger to the bandage at his neck.
“You said I had been judged for my actions in the Battle of Feathers and found guilty of treason. You were sent there to kill me. And that’s what you tried to do. ”
He watches her, still and voiceless.
“The second time is the one you remember,” Sascia goes on.
“I was with Danny and our friends at the Village Halloween Parade. Mooch appeared out of the Dark and flew straight to you. I thought you had come to kill me. But you had no recollection of the attack in Times Square. You were bright-eyed and full of wonder. You looked younger. Unscarred.”
“I was,” Nugau says. “After I came back from that year in your world, I could feel nothing but grief and shame. Every night I thought about my parent desperately looking for a way to bring me back, and cursed myself for choosing to stay in your world. I needed to see it again. To decide if it was worth it. Mooch appeared and guided me to that parade. Nan had spoken to me about Halloween. She had thought I’d love it. ”
He doesn’t go on, so Sascia picks the tale up again.
“The third time I met you, you stumbled out of the Dark in my closet. You were dying. Mooch was stuck in your throat, poisoning you.” Her eyes find the itka, perched on Orran’s wounded wing.
“I got Mooch out. While I was cleaning your wounds, I noticed your hand. When you attacked me in Times Square, only a month before that in my timeline, I fired a nova-gun on you. But the burn scar on your hand was old, almost completely healed. That’s when I realized. ”
“Ymneen,” Nugau whispers. He is staring at his unmarked hands.
“You told me you and the aesin were betrayed. That war would destroy both of our worlds. That I would try to help you, but I would fail. We would all fail. That we never found the reason the itka brought us together. That this was farewell.”
She doesn’t mention the kiss. The dread of the future presses tight around her.
She thought she had changed it, remade it, by winning her first Trial, but now with her near death, with that wound on Nugau’s neck…
The future is here, and it is unchanged.
To speak of kisses right now, of begging for them, feels like defeat.
Nugau lowers his head to the cot, his hair pillowing against her thigh.
When he looks at her, his face is a carving of sorrow.
“All this time,” he whispers, “you jumped into the Dark to save us and made the Heart Claim and tried to convince me to help you and fought and schemed and argued for peace—even though I tried to kill you?”
Heat gathers at her neck. “It sounds far more noble when you put it like that,” she teases. “Mostly, I was just a reckless screw-up desperate for a second chance.”
His lips quirk into a split-second smile.
Then he raises his hand to his neck. “Mooch did this. I don’t think it meant to cut me—it was just worried about you.
It loves you, just as much as you love it.
So why would it bring you here to get hurt, over a peace that you have no chance of achieving?
Why would it let you glimpse a future you can’t undo? ”
Mooch soars back to land on Sascia’s arm.
It does love her, Sascia can feel that in its every choice, but more than that, it trusts her.
It trusted her to follow it to an active Maw.
It trusted her to protect it from the were-creature in her first Trial.
And it trusted her not to land the killing blow when she faced the Darkmanticore.
Each time Mooch came to her, it brought her to where she needed to be, but also to when she needed to be.
“Mooch,” she whispers, “did you create the ymneen? Do you choose when we end up each time we travel through your doors?”
Atop the knuckle of her index finger, Mooch taps one solitary time: right. In the Labyrinth, the instruction meant turn right, but here, in this context, it can only mean…yes.
“Why?” Nugau rasps at the moth. “Why knot our timelines together? How are we supposed to save each other, when you keep forcing us to meet as enemies?”
Scolded, the moth dives for its burrow behind Sascia’s ear, leaving Nugau’s question unanswered.
Yet some part of Sascia, the part that Nugau calls Ariadne, that never stops trying to understand, knows that Mooch wouldn’t have answered even if it could.
This is a question she and Nugau are supposed to answer themselves, because it is imperative that they, too, understand why the past has been knotted into the future.
“Our choices are still our own,” Sascia says: to Mooch, to Nugau, but also to herself. “I do not regret saving you the third time I met you. I do not regret making the Thistha Ren. And I do not regret saving Orran. But Ktren—”
“You were scared. We are all of us scared, and so we make choices out of fear when faced with a threat. Harin ye o’ skish, o’ skish thi haro.
” His head shifts, his cheek flat against her thigh.
Dark eyes bore into her. “But you’re right: our choices are still our own. It is time to finally make mine.”
Sascia’s heart begins to thunder. “You will make the Royal Claim?”
“I have to. The aesin won’t all support me, but some will, those who you won over.
It will not be a permanent solution, but it will stop whatever punishment the Queen has prepared for you.
Without the aesin’s full support, she will lose her increased powers, and without her power, the army is weak.
She will have to retreat to Itkalin. We can stop the violence that way, by separating aesin and humans forever, each in their own world. ”
But what of us? she wants to ask. What of the future where you beg me to kiss you? Pressure builds at the base of her throat, squeezing like a noose, but she refuses to let it out. Because Sascia does understand Nugau’s choice, even if it breaks her heart.
So she swallows that sob and says, smugly, teasingly, “See? I knew you weren’t a coward.”
A bark of a laugh spears through him.
Across from them, Thalla opens a heavy-lidded eye to glare at them.
The prince’s ears flatten to his head in apology. When Thalla rolls back over, he relaxes against Sascia’s thigh. Again, Sascia notices the deep shadows beneath his eyes, the bloodshot tinge of his pupils.
“You can be brave tomorrow,” she says. “Tonight, you will sleep.”
His mouth quirks up, but he doesn’t object.
He straightens his legs and crosses them at the ankles, then folds his hands on his lap.
A second passes, then another, before his eyes flutter closed.
Sascia watches him. The rise and fall of his chest. The dusting of lashes on his cheeks. The swoop of his unruly bangs.
Mindlessly, impulsively, she reaches out and runs her fingers through his hair.
His head snaps up fast—his mouth closes around her hand.
Long, sharp incisors press into the soft pad at the base of her thumb.
The touch is prickly but not painful. Instead, a current runs up her arm, kindling every nerve in her body into a roaring inferno.
Want throbs inside her. It is making her think all kinds of dirty, filthy things. Harder and deeper and more.
She remembers his soft murmur as they danced: I would like our first kiss to be as it should, and far, far more. What, she wonders, is that far, far more?
He must know. He must see the reaction his teeth cause in her, because suddenly his lips, still around her palm, are curving into a smile. Slow as torment, he digs his fangs out of her skin. He closes his mouth. He leans back against the cot. He shuts his eyes.
Sascia’s hand hovers in midair. Half-moons are drawn on her skin. She stares and stares at them. Was this a challenge? She thinks it might have been. She thinks she might have met it. She thinks she might have enjoyed it. Her breaths come out short and hard; she is grinning like a giddy fool.
She reaches out anew and runs her fingers through his hair, again and again and again, until he slips into an easy, fretless sleep.