Dark Moon Daughter

by J. Edward Neill

  “Only sleep,” he murmured after a short silence. “No harm in it. Lay beside me if you like. It will be cold at first, but warm enough after a while.”

  He rolled onto his side, offering her his bare back. He does not understand. She remained on her knees. He thinks I mean only to sleep. I might die without his touch, and he will dream right through it. Or perhaps he knows, and he is waiting. Yes, that might be it. He knew the moment I came to his door. He is only being coy.

  Her fear melted. She squirmed out of her gown and stripped her undergarments away. Naked, she lay down beside him and pressed herself into his back. Her breasts brushed against his shoulders, her toes tangled with his calves, and her cheek found rest upon the nape of his neck. His penetrating warmth thawed her frozen joints and awakened sensations long forgotten. Forever, she imagined. I could lie with him until a thousand years from now. A puddle of water I will be, come morning. Beside him. Beneath him.

  She sighed and shut her eyes. She throbbed with his warmth, wishing only that he would kiss her. When he rolled and faced her in the darkness, she knew it was coming.

  “Ande.” He whispered. “Your gown.”

  “I took it off.” She brushed his chin with her mouth. His face, freshly shorn, felt as smooth as marble beneath her lips.

  “You said sleep.” He held her arm, and the roughness of his touch made her body sing.

  “I know what I said. But you knew what I meant.”

  She felt him tense. She feared he might pull away, the same as beside the lake in the Dales. Instead he planted such a kiss upon her that her body went limp. He slid his hand to her hip. He kissed her again, soft at first, then staggeringly hard. For so long, she had thought him incapable of passion, but when he pulled away at last, she knew his was more powerful than any other.

  “You kissed me,” she said in a daze. “Where did that come from?”

  “Forgive me.” He loosed her arm. “That was foolish.”

  “No, not foolish,” she whispered. “Do it again.”

  And he did.

  She resisted him none. Wherever he touched her, she guided his hands and made him linger. He pushed her onto her back, held her shoulders down, and moved his mouth up and down her body. She knew he had always wanted this, and that I have always craved the same. If not for Rellen, it would have been Garrett, and all things would have been different.

  The heat between their bodies swelled. She gave in to it, powerless to pull any rational thought from the thousand hungers inside her. Atop her, he pushed the hair from her cheek, clasped her wrists, and held her down. She tried to kiss him, but he controlled her, and the sweet feeling of powerlessness drove her wild. Like iron, she dreamed him. Driving the Nightness out of me.

  In one instant, he hovered over her, a half-breath before sinking inside her.

  In the next, he released her.

  His face slackened. The light in his eyes dimmed. With passions left painfully unquenched, he sat up and dragged his fingers down his face. “No,” he shuddered. “This is not for us.”

  “Why?” She tried to pull him back down. “Why not? If not forever, then why not just this once? We are alone here. We want this. Give in. Come to me.”

  Her skin steamed and her neck flushed scarlet with desire, but he rose and left her lying on his bedroll as though she were invisible. As she lay, anguished, he stumbled to the opposite side of the cottage. He returned fully dressed, holding a lit candle in one hand, draping a sheet over her naked body with the other. She felt frostbitten, quaking beneath the flimsy cloth. Had he tapped her with his finger, she swore she would have shattered.

  “Garrett, please.” She curled into a ball. “The night is ours. All nights from now until the end. Do not shun me.”

  “I would love you, Ande.”

  “Then do it. Love me. I am right here.”

  “You cannot know.” He sat on the bed and looked everywhere but at her. “If you were mine, no power on this earth could tear me from you. I would marry you and make children and live happily until the end of time. It is not your beauty, but everything about your mind that enlivens me, that cools the part of me I show to no one. Whatever I see in other women I see triply in you. Even Ona, poor Ona, was but a pale reflection of you. You were always in my head, and even though you belonged to Rellen, I dreamed of you every night. In sleep, I built towers, temples, and monuments to you. You drove me mad, and I said nothing.”

  “Oh,” she uttered, breathless. “I did not know. What is the matter then?”

  “Listen to me.” Two flecks of white candlelight gleamed in the darkness of his eyes. “You are not for me. Even if you could love me as I love you, you are not for me.”

  “You presume to know my heart.” She sat up. “If you did, you would see how wrong you are.”

  “I am leaving,” he said.

  “Leaving?” Like dry leaves cast into a roaring fire, her heart burned to ashes. “What do you mean?”

  “Not long from now, I will go from Thillria, and unlike before I doubt I shall ever return.”

  “Why?” She glared. “Leaving, you say? Do not dare think you can go without me. If you will not touch me, at least be my friend. Take me and Saul to some faraway land, where there are no monsters, no magic, no other men. You know as well as I that we have nothing else. We are your family, and you would be wrong to abandon us.”

  She saw it then, his darkness so wrongly thought cured. It smoldered in his eyes the same as her Nightness. With his stoicism rotted away, she saw everything. His heart is filled with vengeance.

  “I will find Grimwain.” The room seemed to shake when he spoke. “It is he that did this to you, to Ona, to Rellen. I know his game. If it is the Ur he desires, it is the Ur he will pursue. But he will not have them. I will chase him to the ends of the earth. I will bury him, planting both his cursed swords like saplings between his ribs.”

  Darkness claimed the room. His candle went out, not by her Nightness, but by Garrett’s. Clutching her sheet around her body, she stood and backed into the corner.

  “You dare not go,” she warned. “Before they sent father away, they gave me his journal. He wrote of Grim. He said our enemy is not a man, but an emissary of the Ur. You cannot hope to overcome him. You should stay with me and Saul.”

  “I cannot.”

  “Then you have deceived me.” A lone tear leaked to her chin. “You, my only friend, as full of hate as the rest of this damnable world. You never should have invited me inside. You could have had me, but you prefer death. I can tell without asking you will never change your mind. You are drunk with it, and nothing I say will make it better.”

  Crestfallen, she slunk to her clothes. Her hair fell across her face as she dressed. Her eyes roiled with shadows as she glared at Garrett’s back. “I am not angry with you,” she lied. “I will come to see you off, if you allow it. If you should grow wiser and reconsider your plan, you know where to find me.”

  She left him standing in his cottage, his door open to the night. She walked beneath the stars, weeping in silence. Alone, she wandered toward Aeth, a ghost a girl’s skin. She felt nothing anymore. All for the best, she imagined.

  Somewhere, Grimwain is laughing.

  Forget and Forgive

  For two nights Andelusia hid in her tower, and for two days she wandered Denawir. She pattered about the city streets and meandered along the beaches below Aeth. She browsed markets, peered in the windows of busy taverns, and walked the length of the harbor’s wharves. Until dusk, she moved about the city in a pale green cloak and dun sandals, anonymous, alone, invisible. Without Rellen she had been miserable. Without Garrett she knew desolation.

  During her jaunts through Denawir, Saul caught up with her more times than she likes. He knew her methods, and no matter her disguise he seemed able to track her down. Every time he found her, he offered alternatives to her wandering. Accompany me to the spring bazaar, he asks. Read books with him in the Inkhouse. Take a sail across the harbor together.
Clever to find me, but less so to believe he can distract me.

  “What if Garrett is at your door? What if he needs you?” Saul argued. “If you love Denawir so little, why not wait in your tower?”

  “He would not,” she replied. “He knows better.”

  “You say it as if you know.”

  “I say it because it is true.”

  Whenever not in the city, she hid at night in her tower chamber. She locked her shutters, pushed a table in front of the door, and lingered on her bed, dreaming while awake. She kept the Pages Black hidden in a closet, buried in blankets, and yet it called to her. She had honed her mind well enough to keep the Ur whispers out, but her imagination gave the Pages a voice of its own.

  None save Lord Tycus troubled her during her repose. He sent messages, flowers, and invitations to dinner, but she cared nothing for it, no matter his sweetness. During the winter, Tycus had been appointed Lord Tempore, keeper of Aeth until a new King climbed the throne, but titles and wealth and power-to-be captured none of her interest. She desired only to be alone with her daydreams, and so left Tycus to pine unrequited, her door locked against him and everyone else.

  The day of Garrett’s leaving arrived on a suitably ominous, overcast day. At midmorning a gust of wind blasted her shutters open, rattling louder than two colliding ships at sea. The sunlight crawled into her room, muted and grey, barely brighter than dusk. Rising from half-sleep, she looped her languid feet over the side of her bed and slipped into her sandals. She rifled through a chest and dropped a russet, sand-stained tunic over her head. She dreamed of dressing for the road and appearing before Garrett fully provisioned and ready to ride. But no. He will never have me. His sword is his only companion.

  She slunk from her room and padded down the stairs. Striding through the lower corridors and into the King’s hall, she was not surprised to see that Aeth’s usual breakfast attendees had already finished their meals and departed for the day. Saul sat alone at the farthest end of a long table, while Tycus’s servants maneuvered around him, plucking up goblets and dishes on their way back to the kitchen.

  “Morning.” She sat beside him.

  “So it is.” Saul appeared as somber as she. He had none of his books, and the bags beneath his eyes reached almost to his beard. He grumped just as she did, nodding before returning to his bowl of cold oats and berries. “Bloody cold out there today,” he groused. “A second winter.”

  A servant set a bowl of the same lumpy cereal before her. Only modestly hungry, she swirled her spoon within, drawing shapes in the oats before taking her first bite. “My doing,” she explained. “Another friend gone, another week of stormy skies. So long as I stay, Thillria will look like this.”

  “I do not doubt it,” said Saul. “When Garrett leaves, you’ll not do anything foolish, will you?”

  “No. I promised Rellen.”

  “So you’ll come with me to Gryphon? A week or two more of research, and I’ll be ready for home.”

  His question, more than any other, is not one I am ready to answer. The idea of home, of a place to call her own, had perished with Rellen. “We will talk tonight.” She shrugged. “After Garrett is gone.”

  It hurt to say Garrett’s name. Whatever ill-feeling she clung to collapsed against her longing to have him stay. After saying it, she mouthed it many times more, and she sank a little deeper in her chair.

  The rest of the morning fled. Saul tried to cheer her by reminding her of happier times, but she and Garrett had done the same just three nights ago, and Saul’s attempt rang not quite so comforting. After she finished her oats and swirled the bowl clean with her finger, she sat waiting. Let Garrett burst into the hall and announce he is a fool, she hoped. And I will have him back. I swear it.

  “I love him, you know,” she blurted after a long silence. “Not the same as Rellen, but no less. I would have died a hundred times if not for him, in Furyon and the Undergrave. When he came back to Gryphon, I wanted to throw myself at his feet I missed him so much. I mean not to sully Rellen’s memory, but Garrett is different, harder, more a man than any other I have met. If he goes and I never see him again, I will think less of myself for not being woman enough to keep him here.”

  “You should tell him that,” said Saul.

  “He knows.” She cupped her chin in her palms. “Even if not, what does it matter? Rellen and I made an amiable fit because he never knew all my many flaws. But Garrett, he sees everything. He knows me. I feel uglier sometimes when he gives me that look. You know the one.”

  Saul shrugged, clearly unconvinced. “Tell him. What do you have to lose?”

  “No,” she huffed. “He is not for me, and I am not for him. He said it. It must be true.”

  Midday crept over Aeth. The hall remained empty save for Saul, her, and a few maidservants. The sparse grey sunlight wandered through the narrow windows, the sea breeze buffeting the glass panes. She felt in no hurry for Garrett to come. In her mind, the longer he delayed the more likely it was he lay in his cottage agonizing over his decision. In the long, slow silence, her mind cleared, her heart beat steadier, and she came to accept all that was to happen.

  If she remained patient, Saul did not. Drumming his fingers upon the table, he seemed unable to stand the wait.

  “Something the matter?” she asked.

  “We should find him. At his cottage.”

  “Would he leave without a goodbye?” she worried. “He was supposed to come here, no?”

  “If anyone would leave, it’d be him.”

  He bounded out of his chair. Anxious, she trailed him across the hall, through Aeth’s lantern-lit corridors and past the sentinels with their blue tabards and silver spears. Saul threw the doors open, and she emerged into the great green courtyard. Outside, the wind ripped at Tycus’s pennants and tormented the grass. She supposed most Thillrians hated the dour, grey day. But not I.

  Saul’s haste filled her with fear. She feared Garrett might already be gone. She almost hoped for it, but her heart rebelled. He would not leave without a goodbye, she knew.

  And look. There in the grass. My black tower. My shadow knight. There he is.

  Dressed like a brigand in loose raiment and tall leather boots, Garrett stood outside his cottage door. His burly stallion stamped the earth into wet clods. His new sword lay across his back, and a pair of long, narrow daggers hung at his waist, for all the good they will do him against Grimwain. As she and Saul marched closer, Garrett knelt to tie his bootlaces. When he rose again he looked as stoic as the grey, grey sky.

  “You were going to leave without saying a word.” Saul barreled in and hugged him.

  “No.” Garrett extracted himself from Saul’s embrace. “Preparing myself. Food, steel, and Graewyn, my newest friend.”

  “Graewyn.” Saul inspected the stallion. Impressed, he tugged the charger’s billet and stroked its mane. She remained a shadow behind them, disliking their show of camaraderie.

  “Why not let me come with you?” she heard Saul try. “I can get a new battle staff made. My pockets are stuffed with enough coin for food and a horse of my own. And what about a guide? You might need one. I’ve been elbow deep in maps all winter long. If Grim has gone beyond Thillria, I can get us there.”

  Having answered the same question dozens of times already, Garrett shook his head. “You have other work to do, friend. Take word of happened here to Gryphon, and be gentle in doing so. Deliver Ande wherever she wants to go, and keep her safe. These are important things. Someone must do them.”

  Yes, thought Andelusia. You.

  “Fair enough.” Saul’s amiable mood annoyed her. “Have it your way. At least you have a fine horse. Graewyn, you say? A lordly name for a lordly steed.”