Dark Moon Daughter

by J. Edward Neill

  Flattery, Rellen thought. He only needs to sign Jacob’s terms, but instead he wants to woo us all.

  “And this fellow.” Orumna nodded lastly at Saul. “He is your man-at-arms, Lord Rellen? His name is Saul, yes? Of no particular household? You do not have the look of a Graehelm man, Ser Saul. Forgive my saying, but you are wider, darker, more like a Fury than a northling.”

  Even in the court of a king, to say that a man resembled a Furyon was among the worst of insults. But watch, Rellen knew what to expect. Saul will shrug it off as though it were nothing. Jacob should have made him the ambassador, not me.

  “I am of House Cour.” Saul did not disappoint. “I come from Elrain, far north of Graehelm. In younger days, I served King Lumaur, but I serve Gryphon now.”

  “He is no Fury,” Rellen reminded Orumna. “Nor near one in blood. In fact, he felled many of them, and was there when the Fury capital was thrown down.”

  “Oh.” Orumna swallowed another biscuit, seeming unimpressed. “Well then, Ser Saul, we are forever in your debt.”

  Between every word, Orumna waged war against his breakfast. He hurled biscuits into his mouth as though they were grapes and swallowed strips of bacon whole. More than once, he licked his fingers clean, savoring each digit as if it were a drumstick, greasy and sublime. Rellen tried to decide whether the King was ill of mind or simply rude. No wonder they want Graehelm’s help, he thought. They want our gold, our swords, and our manners.

  Sometime into the meal, Rellen retook the initiative. He cleared his plate away and swung his satchel onto the table, flooding the space before him with the documents his mother had given him. He had read many of the scrolls and most of the treaties, but a few were waxed shut with the blues and golds of House Nurė, and he had not dared crack any of Jacob’s seals.

  “Highness, all other things aside, perhaps now is the time to review these?” He presented the scroll of introduction to Orumna. “These are King Jacob’s terms. I am prepared to discuss them, if that is your leisure.”

  Orumna glared with displeasure upon the paper in Rellen’s hand. He leaned back in his chair, cupped his belly with his hands, and showed the whole room a grimace. “My leisure?” he snorted. “If there is such a time, it is not now, not yet. No, we will do this my way or not at all. You, Lord Gryphon, shall talk with me every day this week. Your companions shall enjoy every luxury of Aeth: the gardens, the harbor sands, the bazaars. But you, you will stay here with me. I must come to know you. If we are to be allies, your Jacob and me, you and I must tread these hours alone”

  And so end my hopes. Rellen sagged in his chair. If I could just get home, I could make everything right again. But this will take weeks, and the trip home months. Like as not, we will spend the winter snowed in at Kilnhome. Saul will tumble into his books, Ande will bed Garrett, and I will turn into a drunkard.

  “If that is your wish, Highness,” was all he offered.

  “My wish.” Orumna smiled. “Yes, it is.”

  Breakfast was at an end. Rellen’s three companions, if I can call them that anymore, departed after saying brief farewells to the King. Rellen stayed in his chair, his papers piled high before him. He looked to Garrett, who seemed either oblivious to his suspicions or steely enough to hide it. Garrett nodded at Rellen as if to say, ‘Do this well,’ and then marched away between Andelusia and Saul. Rellen also looked to Saul, tottering away like an old dog beside his masters, but Saul never looked back.

  As Andelusia made for the far door, Rellen chased her with his gaze. He wanted to leap out of his chair, sprint to her side, and pour a thousand apologies at her feet. I do not mean to be jealous, he wanted to say. You are not in love with Garrett, just cold to me for reasons that are all my fault. He watched the way she walked, floating across the floor with her chin held high and her skirts swirling at her ankles. She looked like a ghost fleeing Orumna’s hall, and he knew in his heart now was not the time.

  When they were gone, he sat alone with Orumna in the sunlit hall. The purpose of the meeting was clouded in his mind, the tension in his body strung like many dozen longbows. But I have to do this, he told himself. I told mother I would. Father, give me strength. I will do this right and return home a better man.

  “King Jacob would make allies of us.” He rose before the King, his gaze steady. “He sends me to do it. I hope I am worthy. I know I might not seem it.”

  The King rolled his shoulders, grunted bullishly, and folded his sausage-like fingers together. “Oh my dear boy, I know you are worthy, but there is more to it than that. Sit now. Sit and listen to an old man prattle. My visitors are rare, and I would whet your ears with a bit of wisdom if you allow.”

  Rellen did as he was asked. He sat stiffly in his chair, pretending he was meant for this moment. “The floor is yours, Highness.”

  Orumna stood and spread his arms wide, fanning out his robes like a spreading swath of violet clouds. He coughed, emptying his throat of a noisome bubble of phlegm, and then began his diatribe.

  Over the next hours, the great round King heaped his ramblings like cold gravy onto Rellen, ensnaring him the same as an unwilling student. He gave lessons on Thillria’s history, told anecdotes of Thillrian heroes and politicians, and ground a hundred grievances into Rellen’s ears, few of which had anything to do with Graehelm. All topics were game, trifling or grandiose, all save for the treaties at hand, which Orumna shunned as though they were a nuisance, something to be avoided until the last possible moment.

  Rellen tried to listen to it all. He tried not to be the boy who had fled the lords in his father’s hall, but rather the lord entrusted with the care of Gryphon and the reputation of Graehelm. And though he tried, by the time dusk came and the shadows pooled atop the King’s table, he suspected he had failed. He sat in his seat, his eyes heavy-lidded, his lips wet with too much Shiver Red, and his thoughts wandering to Andelusia. He felt like a puppet, strung along for Orumna’s amusement, buried under the King’s weight. And where is Jix during all of this? He asked himself many times. He came for Ande, but Orumna mentions nothing of it. Nor do mother or Jacob’s letters. Lies, all lies. What does Thillria really want from us? And when will this beast of a man stop talking?

  Temptation

  It was morning yet, and after making her getaway from Aeth’s stark, unfamiliar halls, Andelusia wandered into the castle’s courtyard. The sun heated her, driving away the chill in her bones. The cloudless sky was as blue as a Graehelm banner, while the breezes off the ocean were just quick enough to tousle her hair. With Garrett and Saul gone exploring into Denawir, she was alone in the castle grounds, and glad for it.

  Walking by herself among Aeth’s bountiful gardens was a strange sensation, and not at all unpleasant. Where is everyone? She wondered. No guards, no children, nothing. She expected to be upset at Rellen, pestered by Orumna’s sentries, or plagued by black whispers in the back of her mind, but the castle walls isolated her from everything. I could live here, she thought. I wonder if the winters are as dreadful as Jix says.

  Daydreaming, she walked the castle grounds with no particular aim in mind. Near the western towers, farthest from the sea, she came to a maze of trellises. The vines trailed like jade serpents up the stakes and onto Aeth’s walls, prying with green fingers into every nook and over every windowsill. In the spacious eastern lawns, she meandered around islands of flowers, where thousands of scarlet, emerald, and sapphire blossoms erupted from the black loam, seeking the sun’s smile. It was the trees she loved the most. She encountered them here and there, old oaks nearly as tall as Aeth’s parapets. She curled around dozens of them, grazed their bronze-barked sides with her fingertips, dancing with each one as though it were her partner at a ball. It felt almost like Grandwood, only tidier.

  From end to end, she walked Aeth’s courtyard until she meandered between two towers and arrived at a dead-end. A lawn spread out before her sandaled toes, its dark greens the same shade as her eyes. Windowless curtain walls loomed high above her on
all sides, framing the small sea of grass the same as a valley between a range of grey mountains.

  In the middle of it all, she saw an abbey.

  It was surely the oldest structure in Aeth’s courtyard, perhaps the most venerable dwelling she had ever laid eyes on. The little round chapel’s outer walls were fashioned of carefully-carved stones, the seams between each rock so perfectly cut no mortar had been used. Its glass dome was long-shattered, the shafts of sunlight carving their ways like swords into the gloomy insides. Its door, a slab of rotting oak creaking in the breeze, laid halfway open, inviting her inside.

  Odd. She stood some ten paces away, stunned that such a place could exist. This looks like a holy house, like in Saul’s old books. But there are no gods, not even in Thillria. Who built it? How did the stones not get stolen for some other use?

  She could not resist. Creeping closer, she tugged the abbey’s door open and slipped into the gloom, making no more noise than a mouse.

  Inside, a haze of dust greeted her. The drifting particles glimmered in the sunlight like motes of silver, or like stars in the void, she imagined. Even through the murk, she saw much of the abbey’s central chamber. She glimpsed a dozen wooden pews, some tumbled into kindling, others still whole and standing. Shelves rounded the outer walls, empty recesses suggesting dwellings for many hundreds of books. In the abbey’s heart, ruined by causes unknown, a cracked marble dais lay blanketed in dust, cobwebs, and stray leaves. Three spears of sunlight caught the dais just so, frosting the marble such that it looked like a pool of tranquil water. Like Mirror, she reckoned. Though Rellen will not come to meet me here, nor Garrett.

  She wandered about the central chamber, touching everything, puffing away clouds of dust and drawing shapes on every surface her fingers could find. She found one shelf still half-full with books. She plucked a tome from its resting place, and its pages crumbled in her hands like stale cake, the musty odor wrinkling her nose. A shame, she thought. Saul would have thought these a treasure.

  Feeling at home in the gloom, she probed the abbey’s every cranny. She was surprised to find no symbols depicting one god or another, though in her heart she knew she might not know one even if she saw it. Saul said mariners built Thillria, she remembered. Denawir is the oldest city, Aeth the oldest castle. Could the founders have come here to pray when the gods still lived?

  As the sun climbed higher and the air inside the abbey warmed, she wandered near the stained-glass windows on the outer wall. Most were broken, but those that were not seemed to depict Thillria’s first inhabitants. She saw images of stoneworkers, carpenters, warriors, and sailors, their labors captured in panes of lavender, gold, and crimson. The most striking of them all was of a fire-haired maiden standing before a rising sun, which she gazed at with a smile, thinking that the girl looked much like herself. Though she looks happier than I do.

  She returned to her cottage at midday. Her feet were tired and her eyes bleary from the sun, and so she thought to rest and ponder the mysteries of the abbey in the comfort of her quaint little house. The ten stone and thatch dwellings sat in a row along the outer courtyard wall. She passed Garrett and Saul’s on the way to hers, but they will still be at the harbor. She lingered for a few breaths outside of Rellen’s, but he is still angry with me, and with Orumna besides.

  She slipped inside her cottage’s round door, kicked off her sandals, and set foot upon the soft carpet of the house’s only room. Three days and it already feels like home. On the end of her bed, she discovered water, bread, and berries. A treat from Reya, she knew. The maidservant who was so nice to us when we arrived in the rain.

  The day was young, and yet the warmth inside her cottage made her sleepy. For once, her mind lay on matters besides Rellen, Garrett, and dark voices. The abbey, she daydreamed. In her mind, she was still walking through motes of silver dust. The gardens. The castle and the sea. Thillria is fairer than Jix said, and not so full of horrors. She nibbled at her meal, splashed her face clean in a silver basin, and sank onto her bed. The linens were clean and cool. In moments she was drowsing.

  Sleep stole her away, deep and dreamless. The sunlight moved about her room, creeping through the shutters and shining across her little bed for hours and hours, but she had no sense of it, no worries for the world beyond her door. When at last she picked her head up from her pillow, her hair was a mess and her cheeks red as roses. The day is all gone, she knew. Was I so tired? Where are the voices? No? None tonight? Good.

  Crickets chirped at her window. A lonely bird cooed atop her chimney. She sat up, and for just one instant she imagined she was back in Gryphon, in Rellen’s round tower room. She soon came to her senses, and though she wished otherwise, she knew she was yet in Thillria, segregated from her friends by more than just her cottage wall.

  Late that night, as Denawir drowsed and Aeth rested, she lay awake on her bed. Where is Jix? She gazed blankly into the darkness. He made it all seem so dire, and now he is gone. Ah, but I wish Rellen would knock on my door. He hurts inside. I see it. I promised to make it all better, but the shadows inside me ruined everything.

  Though she waited, no one came to her door. No supper, no Rellen, not even Garrett. The moonlight gleamed through the slats of her shutters, but otherwise her room was black. She knew her mood, the time of night when her imagination caught fire. She feared for what would come if she lingered too long, alone and restless on her bed. I have to go. If I stay here, the voices will find me.

  She rose. After a few sips of warm water, she opened her door and tread outside. Over the courtyard, the moon was high, its pale light brushing the lawn such that the grass seemed a carpet made of silver swords. The flowers danced in the night’s breeze, little stalks of shining glass tickling her legs as she walked by. All was colorless. All was cool. The stars made a canvas for her to lose herself in, and the shadows were deep enough that she felt hidden from every soul in the world.

  She knew where she wanted to go. The abbey. The perfect hideaway. If it had a roof and a bed, I could sleep there instead of my cottage. Barefoot, quiet as a swallow streaking through the darkness, she crossed the grass carpet and found the path between the towers the moonlight marking the path to the abbey’s door. Her heart throbbed beneath her nightshirt. Her toes collected dew. That she was so excited confounded her. Nothing more than a pretty pile of rocks, she thought. And yet…

  She slipped soundlessly through the door. Inside, the moonlight shined through the broken roof just as the sunlight had, carving slivers out of the night. The light was enough for her to find her way to a glassless window and peer up at the midnight sky. The stars were all she could see, infinite as drops of water in the ocean. She swore she heard the sea crashing against the cliffs beyond the curtain walls, and she smiled at the thought of silver-tipped waves riding beneath the night. I wish I could fly. She stared and sighed. I would soar right out of this window. Rellen would look up from his cottage and swear he saw a star burning in the sky. Garrett would be sparring in the shadows like he always does. He would see me, Saul too, and I would dance for them.

  Leaning on the sill, she felt her eyelids fall shut and her imagination take hold. She felt the same as she had in the grove of the Dales, where she had become one with the night. She held her breath, her dreams taking hold of her heart. Once more, the shadows lengthened and all sounds faded away. Her eyes remained shut, but she played at the darkness with her fingertips, as if the night were a canvas and she its painter. Her body was asleep, but her mind as awake as ever in her life.

  Even as she plunged into shadow, she heard the door creak open behind her. Unwillingly, she snapped her eyes open, and all the sweet sensations of darkness fled from her heart.

  “Mistress? Are you inside?”

  I know that voice. Jix. I knew he would find me here. But how?

  “In here,” she called to him.

  In wandered Jix, wearing the same red robes as he had during the entire journey to Thillria. He looked so meek, his bones thi
n and brittle beneath his shabby raiment, yet his smile was as broad as ever. He always looks happy to see me.

  “At last, I found you.” He breathed a sigh of relief. “I hoped you would come here. I saw you storm out of the castle this morning and I thought you might need a few hours alone. Else I would have come to you earlier.”

  “You heard about Rellen and me?” She winced, remembering the morning’s spectacle. “The King must think us children.”