40. Lucy
Lucy
Feed the thing under your floor before you feed yourself. Hunger downstairs climbs.
Every morning I lost him a little more.
Not the memories anymore. Those I’d learned to cage in my mind. It was the way his voice lived in my head all night, steady and close, and then went silent the instant I crossed back through the wards. One breath he was there. The next, gone, like a door closing on a lit room.
Riot?
I reached for him every dawn, knowing better and trying anyway. I pictured him curled on the southern cliff, deep golden eyes fixed on the fog, waiting out the daylight until I could return to him.
Nothing. The wards consumed the words. They always did.
I let my hand fall from the cold stone of the Keep wall and made myself stop looking. He couldn’t hear me. I couldn’t reach him. And standing here aching about it wouldn’t make the sun set any faster.
Snow fell slowly and directionless, catching in Tavian’s dark brown hair and melting before he noticed.
“Hold it higher,” Emrys said.
“I am holding it higher,” Tavian answered.
“Higher than that.”
Tavian turned to look at him, several minutes into holding a moon lantern above his head and clearly reconsidering his friendships. “If I go any higher I’ll need you to lift me up.”
The lantern drifted exactly two inches before sinking back toward his outstretched hands.
The rune Emrys had pressed into its base flickered once, optimistically, then gave up entirely.
I pulled my coat tighter and watched from the Keep’s front steps, my breath misting in the cold.
Every muscle ached with exhaustion but each memory of Riot’s scales against mine made it worth it.
Woodsmoke and honeyed cider from Papillia’s kitchen drifted out from a cracked window nearby.
It should have felt like peace. But the mountains sat at my back the whole time, and I couldn’t stop feeling them there, the way you feel someone watching.
Everything I needed was up there, past the fog.
So was everything that had been done to me.
“Try the other rune,” Tavian said.
Emrys practically snarled. “I already tried the other rune.”
“Try it again.”
“Tavian.”
“Emrys.”
“I could just shift,” I offered.
“So could I,” Emrys said. “But that’s not the spirit of it. If it isn’t annoying to hang them, it isn’t festive.”
I stared at him. “That is the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“And yet.” He gestured broadly at the lantern, still sinking toward Tavian’s increasingly tired arms.
I looked at the crate. Counted the lanterns. Looked at the Keep’s facade, the windows, the height they were attempting to reach with two scorched runes and optimism.
“You have twenty-six lanterns,” I said.
“We’re aware,” Tavian huffed.
“The runes you have will only sustain flight at that height if they’re doubled up.
One rune per lantern isn’t enough power to hold it there through wind.
” I picked one up and turned it over. “So you either sit out here and fight about this for the next three hours, or you double the runes and hang thirteen, then put the other thirteen in the windowsills where they don’t need to float at all.
The light carries just as well through glass and you’d actually be finished before dark. ”
Silence.
“I know it’s a novel concept. Try and keep up,” I smirked.
“Who let us be in charge?” Emrys asked.
Tavian shook his head. “Embarrassing.”
“It really is.” The apprentice lowered his arms with visible relief. “Right then. Windowsills.”
I fell into step beside Tavian as the three of us wound down through the city streets an hour later.
The snowfall had softened to something lighter, settling into the carved doorframes of every building we passed.
The Keep looked considerably better than it had two hours ago.
From this distance, the lanterns made the massive home feel far more magical.
I nearly walked into the pine bough before I saw it.
Two children had a branch stretched between them across the full width of the street, locked in an argument about which end was the front.
I stepped around them just as something landed near my boot.
A red stone from the dark ribbon strung between the awnings overhead, its knot finally giving up against the cold.
Picking it up, I held it out to the nearest shopkeeper, who took it without looking up from the black-stemmed flowers she was arranging, their petals a deep violet that held the gray light and refused to let it go.
“Thank you,” she managed, though clearly her concentration was on her holiday decoration.
Outside the clockmaker’s shop, an old man stood on his toes nailing a wreath of antlers and dried berries to his door, lips moving faintly as he worked.
“That’s pretty,” I told Tavian.
“He’s been hanging the same wreath every year since before I was born,” Emrys said. “He’d nail it up in summer if Maren didn’t hide his hammer.”
Wait.
I paused, turning toward Emrys, completely unable to hide my surprise. “How old is Maren?”
“It’s not polite to ask,” the dragon said. “Older than I am, that’s for sure.”
I whipped around to Tavian. “How long do the scorched here live?”
He lifted a shoulder. “Few hundred years if they’re lucky.” He leaned in close. “Is that different than where you’re from?”
“Yes. At home, they’re just like the rest of us. Eighty to a hundred if we don’t die from something else first.”
“How old are you?” Emrys said, drawing back in surprise.
“I’ll be twenty-eight in December.”
Emrys threw an arm over my shoulder. “Aw. Tav, our girl is just a hatchling.”
I rolled my eyes and shoved him away, making a mental note that I’d need to add longer lifespans to my journal when we made it back to the keep. I’d made such little progress on my escape, it felt like nothing was moving forward. Maybe if I lived a thousand years, I’d figure it out by then…
“Where are we going?” I asked, trying to distract myself from turning right around to get my book or drown in self-pity.
“Threshold Vigil,” Emrys said.
“Which is?”
“Every year, a few days before Noctiria, the whole city comes together to mark the wall.” Tavian nodded toward the northern end of the street. “Thirteen lanterns placed along the line. Chalk symbols on the stones. It’s meant to welcome those that come down from the mountains on the night itself.”
“The Moonborn,” Emrys said. “They descend on Noctiria. Walk through the city. Celebrate with us. And when it’s over they walk back up into the mountain and that’s that.”
All of this holiday preparation for that? I tried not to laugh, considering they certainly had limited resources here as it was. Celebrations at home were far more exciting. But this was something at least.
“Has anyone ever followed them?” I asked, trying to seem interested.
“Three times in recorded history,” Emrys said. “Nobody who tried came back.”
That caught my attention. Three had tried to cross what the Moonborn crossed, and the mountain had kept all three.
I thought about the fog I went through every night, the way it bit at me then let me pass, and dread settled into me.
Whatever that boundary did to the people who tried it, it didn’t do to me.
I came back every time. I’d been telling myself that was the collar’s cruelty.
Now I wondered if it was something worse, that I continuously survived a crossing meant to kill, and I had no idea why.
“The hope is always thirteen,” Tavian added.
“If thirteen descend, the city prospers. Ancient stories say the river will run, mountains warm, crops survive that have no business surviving in the farmlands. Food won’t be so scarce.
Noctiria is about ushering in prosperity.
Last year there were nine and Emrys lost a very ill-advised bet to Baylor. ”
“I maintain that ten was a reasonable prediction,” Emrys said.
“You maintain a lot of things that aren’t true, we rarely see more than seven.”
“I had to deliver his stock from the farmlands every single morning for a month. Do you know how far the farmlands are?”
“You can fly there in ten minutes,” Tavian said.
“In the cold. Every morning. For a month.”
“And wouldn’t we all be better for it if those farmlands still had that level of production?”
“A month!” Emrys said, throwing his hands up.
I smiled despite myself and said nothing about the fog or the mountains or the particular thought turning quietly in the back of my mind. They loved this. Both of them. It would have been unkind to say aloud what I was thinking.
That the mountains above Luneth Hollow didn’t stop at the fog line.
That I knew exactly what lived beyond them.
We kept walking as I turned over the idea that someone from my world was coming down to theirs for a single night…
The plaza opened before us at the northern edge of the city, where the last of the buildings gave way to open ground and the mountain fog began its slow descent.
People had already spread out beyond the final row of structures, setting lanterns at careful intervals along the stone.
Children pressed their palms flat against the shimmer where the fog met the earth and shrieked when it pushed back.
I watched as a scorched man near the boundary reached up and adjusted the stones at his throat and my entire body went still.
Another Ossira.
This is what I was hoping for. What I was waiting for without telling the others.
Every face in this plaza knew something I didn’t, or wore something I didn’t understand, or had lived three hundred years in a city that had never once heard of the ocean.
One of them was a thread I could pull. I just had to find which.