Blackthorne

The Moon That Remembered Blood

DRACO / DRAKHAR

Thousands of years ago…

Ihad watched empires rise and fall across the long centuries, and not one of them had ever stilled my hunger as he did, with nothing more than the rise and fall of his breath.

The chamber was old stone, cold to its bones, yet warm in the small circle where we lay.

A brazier had burned down to embers in the hour before dawn, and they gave off the low red light that made a man feel half outside the world.

Beyond the walls I could hear the camp stirring, the shuffle of leather and iron, the murmur of men who had not slept and pretended they had.

The horses were restless, and somewhere a drummer worked his hands against the stretched skins while a priest made promises to a god who had never once heard him.

Inside, there was only Cassiel.

He lay on his side, one arm folded beneath his head, the other thrown across the furs as though he had reached for me in his sleep and forgotten why.

His mouth was parted, and a thread of breath fogged the cold air and vanished.

I had been awake for hours, for I did not need sleep the way mortals did, and on that morning I would not have taken it had the gods themselves come to offer it.

There was too little of him left to waste on closed eyes.

I watched him the way a man watches a flame he knows will gutter.

His hair had grown long through the campaign, dark and roughened at the ends from poor washing in cold rivers.

There was a scar at his temple I had not been quick enough to prevent.

Beneath the furs his shoulder bore the half-healed mark of a spear that had nearly taken him from me at the gates of a city whose name I could no longer remember.

I reached, careful as I had ever been with anything, and laid the back of my fingers against the bare skin of his arm. I bent my head and pressed my mouth to his shoulder, just above the scar, and I did not breathe.

“You're staring,” he said, without opening his eyes. His voice was rough with sleep. “Like an omen at the foot of the bed.”

“I am no omen.”

“You're a poor liar at this hour.” He turned then, and looked up at me. His eyes were that grey-green that had no name in any tongue I knew, and I had heard many. “What hour is it?”

“Before the horns.”

“Then there is time yet.”

“Time for what?”

“For you to stop watching me as though I were already gone.”

I did not answer. He reached up and laid his palm against my cheek, and I let him, because that was the rare and ruinous thing about Cassiel.

The world knelt to me; armies broke at the sound of my name; kings sent their daughters and their gold and their best wine, and sometimes their sons, and I took none of it, because none of it touched me.

“You have that look,” Cassiel said. “The one that begins wars.”

“The war is already begun.”

“Then save the look for the field.” His thumb moved once, slow, beneath my eye. “Not here. Not on me.”

I caught his wrist and turned my mouth into his palm.

“You stole the blanket,” I said.

“I did.”

“Again.”

“You are made of cold and old stories. You have no need of it.”

“And yet.”

“And yet,” he agreed, smiling now, small and crooked, the smile he gave only to me. “Come back under, then, my dark one, if you are so bereft.”

I came beneath, and he folded himself against my chest as though he had been doing so since the world was made, and perhaps he had. I did not know how souls were measured. I knew only that mine, whatever shape it was, had a hollow in it the exact size and weight of him.

For a while we did not speak. The embers shifted, and far off a horse cried out, and another answered. He drew lines on my chest with his fingertip, idle, the way he did when his thoughts ran ahead of him and he did not wish to chase them.

“After,” he said, at last.

“After.”

“A house. Not grand. Near water, perhaps. I have never lived where I might hear water at night.”

“You will have water.”

“And a garden. Small. I have no skill for gardens, but I should like to ruin one.”

“You will ruin many.”

“And you.” He tipped his head up. “Pretending not to hate the goats.”

“I do hate the goats.”

“I know.”

“They are foul creatures. They look at a man as though they have read his accounts.”

“And you will suffer them anyway. For me.”

“I will suffer worse, for you.”

The laugh he made moved through his chest into mine, and I closed my eyes against it. When I opened them again he was watching me with that grave look he wore sometimes, the one that did not belong on a face so young.

“Drakhar,” he said.

I did not like when he used my name in that voice.

“Speak.”

“Whatever waits beyond those gates.”

“Cassiel.”

“Hear me.” He did not raise his voice, for he never had to.

“I am not asking you to save me. You would burn the field and salt the earth and call it mercy, and I will not have that be the shape of your love.” He drew breath.

“I ask only this. Keep me in your heart. That I was real. That you were loved, and that you loved, and the rest is dust, and may be dust.”

“You will not die today.”

“Then it costs you nothing to promise.”

“I keep you,” I said, against his temple. “Whatever comes. I keep you.”

“As love.”

“As love.”

“Say it once more.”

“As love, Cassiel. Not as ruin.”

He nodded, small, against my throat, and I felt the wet of his lashes there for the briefest moment and pretended, for his sake, that I had not.

There was a basin in the corner with water grown cold in the night, and we stood at it together, not speaking.

He dipped a cloth and washed the dried blood from a cut along my shoulder I had not bothered to attend to.

I took the cloth from him and washed his hands in turn.

His knuckles were split on the right, and I pressed my mouth to them.

I dressed him, and he let me, and before I reached for the cloak I drew from the inner fold of my own cuirass for the gift that I had for him.

It was a bloodstone. I had commissioned the setting from a craftsman in the city we took in autumn, a loop and bezel in a metal with no common name, and at the center of it I had set a small chamber, and sealed within that a single drop of my own blood.

I held it out across my palm, and Cassiel looked at it and was quiet a moment.

“Your blood,” he said. Not a question.

“It will not keep you from harm.” I held his eyes. “But I will know where you are. The blood is mine, and it answers to me, and wherever it goes, I can follow the thread of it.”

He reached out and took the cord from my palm and held it back toward me.

“Put it on me, then.”

I lifted the cord over his head and fitted the clasp at the back of his neck, under the line of his hair, and he held still for me, as he always held still.

When it was set, he pressed his fingers once over the pendant where it lay against his chest, feeling the shape of it through the linen of his shirt, and then he laid his palm flat over my chest and held it there as though, once more, he had found a beat where there was none.

“So,” he said. “I carry you in, and you know where to come.”

“Yes.”

He took his hand away and let me finish with the cloak.

He worked the buckles of my cuirass while I stood with my arms a little raised and watched his face, and when the armor was on he stepped close and set right the clasp at my throat that I always left too loose, his fingers lingering there as he smoothed the cloak at my shoulder.

“There. Now you're ready.”

“I have been ready since the first hour I knew you.”

The field met us with all its old mouths open.

The witches had warned that the moon would not yield its hour to the sun, and so it did not. We fought beneath two lights, the dying moon and the rising sun, and every man on that field threw two shadows.

I stepped into the line, and the line opened for me the way water opens around a stone. I had been a weapon long before I was a lover, and Cassiel had known it and loved me anyway.

I broke their first rank before they finished their cry, not around them but through them, into the gaps their own movement made and unmade, until the men who had come to kill me began to understand they had been lied to about what I was.

Beneath the iron and the screaming I felt the bloodstone, Cassiel's pulse carried to me through the drop of my own blood sealed at his sternum, steady and present and asking nothing of my attention. I used it as a navigator uses a star, never looking at it directly, trusting it to hold its place.

They had prepared for me, and I understood it the way a ship understands a reef, which is to say too late to turn.

The arrows came first, and they were wrong, singing as they flew with a thin note like a wire drawn across glass, and where they struck they did not pass clean.

Witch-bone, old temple work. One took me in the thigh and another in the ribs, and the breaking of them left a burn in me that was not heat but negation.

My shadow-working thinned, and when I moved I was already slower than I had been.

Then came the chains, sigiled iron whose marks were old enough that I felt their intent as a pressure behind my skull from twenty feet off.

They were dragged out by men who knew they would not live to see them used and had come anyway, because someone had narrowed their choices down to this.

One length got around my arm before I tore it free, and the cold of it was a lamp turned low, my strength tapering to a fraction of itself. The cost went into me and stayed.

I straightened and reached for the bloodstone, and what I found was wrong. The warmth was still there, but it had tilted off true, like a flame leaned over by a draft. It had not gone out, and yet the steady mortal certainty in it had become a question.