Below the Moon

by Alexis Marie Chute

  Duggie-Sky has a square of the Olearons’ vulai bread in one hand and a drying mud ball in the other. His face still presses against the glass as he raps on the door with his elbow. Luggie swings it open.

  “Hi!” says Duggie-Sky cheerfully. His dark brown skin glows with raindrops, and his boyish round cheeks are flushed from evading the young Olearon tasked with minding him until our company departs. Since the transformation gifted to him by Rolace the man-spider in his web, not only is Duggie-Sky as fast as a blink, but he’s also grown smarter. Perceptive.

  “You sad, Luggie?” Duggie-Sky asks. “Wanna play catch?” The boy moves with the agility of a basketball player. His eyes tell me he understands what’s going on around here—probably better than I do—though his voice hasn’t lost the childlike slur.

  Hi, I say in my head and wave at the boy who stands two feet shorter than me. Duggie-Sky beams and takes a bite of vulai bread. His tight black curls bounce as he chews. Luggie doesn’t turn, so I smile and raise my hands. Duggie-Sky tosses me the ball, a perfect sphere of mud just like the ones the conniving Bangol, Zeno, taught him to make.

  “Snack?” Duggie-Sky asks, holding the bread toward me first, then Luggie. I shake my head and toss the ball back with terrible aim. Without pausing mid-chew, Duggie-Sky zips to successfully catch the mud in his free hand. He laughs and vulai breadcrumbs fall from his lips.

  “Ugh, I cannot stomach more vulai.” Luggie grimaces.

  Duggie-Sky darts around Luggie and peeks at me for a second before disappearing behind the narrow glass wardrobe. The gift of teleportation, imbued with the magic life force of Naiu, is well used, and daily. Duggie-Sky even exercises it in pestering Grandpa Archie, who is always a good sport and even does much of the initiating on his own.

  I jump behind Luggie. As I peek around his stocky body, Duggie-Sky leans out of his hiding place, then vanishes again. Suddenly, I feel a tap, tap, tap on my back. I jump and turn at the same moment and thrust my hands forward to tickle the boy’s belly. He giggles, scrunching his neck, and tumbles down onto the grass floor of the chamber, pulling me down by the wrists. I can’t help but laugh. “Aweeak!” I sound horrible and am suddenly self-conscious. Luggie catches my gaze.

  “Be careful, child,” he says. “She is not well.”

  My weakness, the nausea and frailty from the tumor, are my business, and I would say as much if I could even whisper the words. The way Duggie-Sky looks at me now, less like a playmate than a fragile decoration on a mantel, to be appreciated from afar and certainly not touched … ugh, I hate that look. I remember that expression on the faces of my classmates at school. It’s true—physically I couldn’t keep up with them, but I was still me.

  Luggie turns away from Duggie-Sky and me, and the unbalanced feeling fills the modest space. To tip the energy toward peace, I sweep my hands outward, one to the left and one to the right, as if brushing away crumbs after a meal. The gesture is American Sign Language, meaning finished. Duggie-Sky gets the idea and leaps to his feet.

  “They’re almost ready out there,” he says happily, and on his way out adds, “Okay, bye!” Duggie-Sky disappears with a swoosh through the entryway.

  “Why does he bother with doors?” Luggie mumbles.

  Before the door clicks shut behind the gleeful child, I catch the edge of it and take a step out. It’s clear that I’m wasting my time here; I’m sure I can help with packing in the octagon paddock, if they’ll let me. My eyes find Luggie’s and I shrug, wave goodbye, and step out into the drizzling, windswept pathway.

  “Wait,” he says.

  I want to scream. Instead, I close my eyes at the whipping of the breeze. It animates my long blond hair, dancing it around my face like a puppet’s strings. The wind has been erratic: strong like a bull, wild like a snake. It’s one effect of the Star’s poisoning of the island, making the Bangols—their king Tuggeron, whom I call Tuggs—crazy-hungry to expand their territory. The Star is also to blame for creating the Millia sands, which leeched the blood from half the Constellations Cruise Line passengers—people I sat beside at the ship’s mammoth tables in the dining hall and swam with in the bean-shaped pool on the deck. I can’t help but shudder.

  The Star must be stopped.

  “Your laugh …” Luggie begins. “It is jarring, a pained screech. I do not understand how the illness at your neck saddens you, how it makes you weak, but still your sounds are beautiful to me. Even in my anger, Ella Wellsley, I need to protect your laugh.”

  My hand is on the triangular glass handle. I’m unable to walk away, to leave Luggie alone with his sack and the despised blue tunic. I’m also stubbornly unwilling to return to his chamber. Again, I find my blue eyes locked with Luggie’s vibrant yellows. He is the first to look away. I can’t hold back the tears.

  I give in.

  Chapter 2

  Luggie

  Luggie softens as Ella brushes past him. He swallows hard to mask the breath-stealing effect she has on him. She sits on the carelessly strewn sheets of Luggie’s bed, smoothing them, then patting the spot beside her, beckoning him to join her. If only she could speak, he wishes, then laments: Even if she were to write the words of an apology, I cannot read her language.

  Ella’s gaze once made Luggie’s head-stones ache with affection, though now her eyes send an unnerving shiver down his spine. When he blinks, he still senses the place where Ella struck him. That one act, he realizes, was the unraveling of them, of their trust. Luggie was rendered unable to protect Nanjee’s body from being picked apart by the hungry black flyers with their curled talons and scavenging, pecking beaks—black flyers that have morphed since the arrival of the Star and now bear two heads and overgrown wingspans. Their great shadows arrive with a chill before them.

  Luggie and Ella had formed a plan to escape that didn’t involve flying Kameelo or the Olearons. He planned to sneak the keys to her cell from his father, and in the night they would paddle the makeshift raft Luggie constructed to the next arching stone bridge to save Nanjee. The three would head north by sea to the Bangols’ fortress at the head of Jarr-Wya. The other part of the plan, which Luggie had not articulated, a fantasy of impossibility, stretched many sunsets into the future.

  He had imagined hiding Ella within the stone fortress until he could convince his father—King Tuggeron—that she played no part in thwarting the ruler’s plan to capture and wield the power of the Star. Then a lifetime with Ella …

  Luggie sobers at the thought of Tuggeron, which pains him more than his healing wound. Everyone knows the king is mad and selfish, desiring immortality and, most of all, the Star. The Olearons believe Tuggeron must die. They have spoken of their desire plainly in Luggie’s presence.

  He agrees that his father must be stopped, but a sliver of love still lives in his heart for the Bangol who raised him—for the father who taught him to manipulate earth and stone, and to fly the awakin butterfly balloons. He feels love, even for the king who beats him.

  Luggie frets over the look of betrayal that will greet him on the faces of all Bangols when he arrives on Baluurwa the Doomful with a company of Olearons. They will surely see; the Bangols have eyes on the mountain at all times, as Tuggeron’s paranoia never sleeps. They keep watch for a lone Steffanus, a winged creature they might capture to use in the operation of a Tillastrion. The Bangols have never ventured to the derivative world—the human Earth—themselves, to Luggie’s knowledge, except for the twin heirs of the previous king whom Tuggeron successfully banished.

  Luggie strains to remember back many sunsets to his childhood, to recall whether his father ever touched him kindly. Was he good before the mysterious Star crashed into the sea beneath Jarr-Wya?

  He sighs deeply and his shoulders fall. No. Tuggeron never loved him. He loved Luggie’s sister, Nanjee. My father will be furious with me. Luggie clenches his teeth. If I return without Nanjee, without even her head-stones, that will be it. He will kill me and seek immortal dominion more fervently. Who was I fooling? Tuggero
n was never grooming me to rule—only to serve him without objection, without a mind of my own.

  Dejected, Luggie plunks himself down beside Ella. The bed, enchanted to gift the sleeper pleasant dreams, rests on a glass frame and is firm with little give. Ella shifts to face him. Her hands graze his cheeks. Tenderly, she turns his head to check on the stitches where his ear had been blown off by the Maiden of Olearon’s blast. The Maiden sacrificed herself to destroy the manifestation of the cruise director, Valarie, in her massive carakwa horde, though not to save the Bangols. Luggie’s kin had been consumed by the lizard-beetle horde hungry for blood and vengeance.

  Luggie pulls sharply away from Ella’s embrace. Her eyes fall, and her hands, too. She takes a deep breath. Her lips make silent shapes, mouthing his name. He shakes his head, as Ella had done moments before. “Ewwwwwaaaaa,” she says aloud as she tries to speak. The tears that had clung to her fair eyelashes, and glistened on the bright whites of her eyes, now surrender and plummet. He watches her sadness rise and fall in her chest.

  “Don’t, Ella,” Luggie says weakly. “You broke me. You betrayed me. Your touch was the only kindness in my life, other than Nanjee, but now …”

  Ella pulls a parchment book from her sack, which she wears with the handles slung over her shoulders like her school backpack, long lost in the fire on the eastern shore. She produces a paintbrush and vial of black ink. Luggie cannot help but compare the artist tools of the Olearons to those of the Bangols. The ornately constructed and decorated book he and Nanjee had given Ella was by far more precious than the simple, modestly stitched pages of the Olearons. Even the blue-bark brush and long silver vial of ink look primitive and minimally adorned. Just like the thin red bodies. Luggie grimaces.

  Luggie hates the sight of the art tools in Ella’s hands. He looks away while she draws. The paintbrush makes a gentle scraping sound against the paper, and, with it, his mind becomes entangled in thought once more. When he looks back, he sees Ella’s drawings. He studies the pages, which she has torn free and laid across the bed so their dampness will evaporate. A black drip slips off one page and stains the immaculate white bedding.

  Ella points at one drawing, then at another, and another. Luggie begins to recognize the invisible journey that connects each image. Ella has a plan! Luggie fills with understanding—and with hope.

  “Are we too late for this?” Luggie asks, resigning himself to sadness, hope being too dangerous. Look where hope left me not many sunsets past! The flicker of possibility dulls in him.

  “I loved you, Ella. Then you delivered me into the fire. I loved you … The word love is more beautiful in my language.”

  Luggie takes the book of paper and roughly tears free a new page. Ella slips the blue handle of the paintbrush into Luggie’s callused hand. He draws the letters. One at a time, slowly, thoughtfully. He blows the bubbles of ink dry, then turns the paper to show Ella. Her eyes trace the lines.

  She reaches, and Luggie thinks she means to take the paper—but her hands find his. He lets the drawn Love fall to rest on the bed between them. Ella scoots closer, rising to her knees, filling the distance between them. The paper crumples beneath her. Her pink lips brush against Luggie’s. Once more he feels Ella’s weakening effect over him. She pulls back a shallow breath’s distance and pauses. Her taste is sweet on his nearly black lips. He inhales her. She waits. For what feels like a thousand breaths, Luggie’s heart hammers away his dwindling resolve until he can no longer sit unflinching like a stone. Then he, too, leans forward.

  Their kiss is full and long. It is laced with the desperation of too much time spent waiting and the pain of the vast distance between their two worlds. Neither knows how to encapsulate their bizarre love, which only makes sense removed from race and land and magic and language and hate and the Star.

  Luggie touches Ella’s shoulders, her neck, and her ears. His pointed nails delicately part her hair, now messy and tangled, until he feels the crest of the scar at the back of her neck.

  “Oh,” he says without thinking, the word spoken inside Ella’s mouth. “I’m sorry.” Luggie winces. He shakes his head and is about to speak again, fretting that he may have hurt her.

  Ella smiles, broad and encompassing. Her teeth are dull edged like a spoon, the white of Jarr’s moon. She laughs—the cackle of illness, and all Luggie has ever known of her mirth. His worry turns to vapor and is gone.

  As if they both know what the other needs in that moment, they fold their arms around each other in a desperate embrace. The cherished touch of two lost ones, separated from their predictable courses, forced to endure each night in the abyss of unknown, and lacking the sun to guide them by day. They remain entangled until their breathing harmonizes, heart to beating heart. Luggie is sure Ella feels it: the racing in his chest.

  He briefly forgets that they sit in his enemy’s city, that Ella’s father has transitioned—in body and mind—to an Olearon within Rolace’s web, and that the Bangols were abandoned and deceived by the company led by Ella’s mother, Tessa, and grandfather, Archibald Wellsley. Luggie forgets that he and Ella have somewhere to be, that the new company is venturing out at any moment to begin a new quest to defeat the Star and find Ella’s cure, which is impossibly intertwined with the fate of all worlds.

  Without warning, someone raps on the door to Luggie’s chamber as loudly as the lightning beyond its reflective walls. The door clicks open. There, standing erect and unflinching in the rain, is the 30th Lord of Olearon. His scowl is menacing, though subtle enough that one might miss it on his polished face. Pinned to one shoulder, the Lord wears the distinctive patch once worn by his deceased Maiden. The patch is animal hide, dyed red and stitched with gold amidst a pattern of rainbow bands. The ten-foot-tall doorway is shy of the ruler’s towering height, so the Lord rounds his angular shoulders to enter, then tips his chin in solemn greeting.

  Luggie stands to face the Lord. Behind him Ella ruffles papers as she collects the drawings and shoves them hastily inside her sack, slinging it over her back in one swift motion. Understanding settles over Luggie: Ella does not want the Lord to see her plan. He relishes the thought. Maybe she is on my side of this war after all.

  Luggie does his best to block the Lord’s view—pulling his shoulders back and resting his thick hands on his hips—though the Olearon is a towering presence, seeing everything. The youthful Bangol forces down a nervous gulp. When the Lord finally opens his mouth after studying the scene, all he says to Ella is, “It is time. The company awaits, and you two are the last to assemble. Go now, human.”

  Beneath the Lord’s squinting black eyes, Ella retreats through the narrow doorway. She looks back, but the Lord seals the door. Once she is gone, leaving behind the floral smell of her hair and the bitter odor of ink on the sheets, Luggie is alone with the looming being, who radiates heat.

  Suddenly, the Lord’s shoulders tremble violently. Luggie startles at the motion, so alien for the composed, even-tempered Lord. A shiver of what Luggie can only guess is disgust creeps over the Olearon like a robe. The Lord’s posture grows even more plank-rigid. His ruddy lips pull back in a snarl.

  “Tell me, Bangol,” begins the Olearon. “Why should I trust you to join the company on this journey? You stone-heads are devious scavengers and oath-breakers. I would rather roast you here and report to the others that I was provoked, that you rose from the earth to swallow me whole. My actions would be seen as self-defense.”

  Luggie’s courage—bolstered by Ella’s plan—burns hungrily in his chest. “Now who is the devious one?” Luggie says with scorn. “You may be the Lord of Olearon, but you are not my king.”

  The Lord pauses, considering. He grits his ash-white teeth. “It would give me pleasure to turn your flesh to dust, but for now, I have a higher purpose in keeping you alive.”

  Luggie puffs out his chest. “I am going to Baluurwa to protect Ella, then get myself back to where I belong—”

  “Or so you think,” the Lord says with a twisted c
huckle. “While you may not believe this—because of the falsehoods your foolish forefathers hammered into your thick rock skull—the Olearons desire peace. We use war to achieve this when there are no other options, and I regret that this is one such occasion.”

  The Lord continues as he studies Luggie, circling him. “I do perceive that you are not as foolhardy and selfish as your father, or as the many who follow Tuggeron without a mind of their own. The Maiden in me has shown me these things—both the cruelty of Tuggeron and your bravery, Luggie. You are capable of restraint, which I have witnessed since you arrived in my city. And you are prone to love, though of this strangeness I need say no more. What this tells me is that you should be king—King of the Bangols.”

  Luggie waits. The Lord’s words strike him mute, silent like Ella, at the ludicrous proposition. Some—like Winzun and Zeno, the sons of the last Bangol king—would fight each other till their grey skin returned to earth and insect grub for the title the Lord so curiously dangles before Luggie. Yet Luggie refuses to be blinded by power like his father. Bangol skepticism rises in his throat, a resolute distrust of the Lord that solidifies into an even deeper loathing. It must be a joke, Luggie finally concludes. But before he can reply, the Lord continues.

  “If the Bangols were to live peacefully amongst all on Jarr-Wya, if they were to submit to wisdom”—the word wisdom clearly meaning Olearon rule—“I foresee the flourishing of your race, within reason. Things would change, of course. No wild pursuits of a foreign star. No thievery of the Olearon harvest or of the crop from the Fairy Vineyard. No warmongering.”

  “Obedience.”

  “Yes. Obedience.” The Lord bends. He touches the damp bedsheet where the ink drip is slowly drying. “I will need one to lead this new way of life for the Bangols—one I may counsel and guide. Will you be that one, Luggie?” The Lord burns a perfect circle into the white sheet so no remnant of ink remains. A wisp of smoke rises in a thin, tangled line.