Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

  Foxfire whispered, “No.” Wanting to die herself.

  Soral Brûl stepped back, clearly not about to cross Red Silk’s will. As he did so he gave Foxfire a wide-eyed gaze with eyebrows tweaked in what he obviously meant to be sympathy: You have all my support.

  As long as it doesn’t mean going against your grandmother.

  Foxfire took a deep breath, her knees trembling. “Please. Grandmother, please. I . . . I don’t want us to disregard a spell that doesn’t work, if maybe it is the right spell, and it’s only not working because I’m too tired to concentrate.” Between exhaustion, hunger, terror, tiga root, and the sickened horror of watching those seven lingering deaths, she almost couldn’t get the words out in anything resembling a sensible order.

  The guards yanked the manacle pin from the dead teyn’s shackle, fastened the old jenny in his place. She sat at once, hugging herself and rocking, nostrils snuffing fearfully, pale eyes wide. Foxfire felt as if she, too, were shackled in this terrible room.

  Please, PLEASE, let me go!

  Red Silk’s eyes narrowed, and she shook the girl again. “So if I let you go today at sundown, are you going to find yourself ‘too tired’ to go on at noon tomorrow? You think magic is something that will wait until you’re feeling happy and your hair’s combed? Brûl, was it part of your training to work spells when you were tired or had a bellyache?”

  “Yes, my lady, it was.” The young man gazed with great earnestness into her face, hands clasped before his breast, brown eyes wide. A lock of his light-brown hair trailed down over his forehead. “We were put through sword drill until we were too tired to go on, and then . . .”

  Yes, but that was after you knew which spells would work!

  Foxfire knew if she started to cry, her grandmother would keep her in this suffocating, lamplit box of a room, putting protective spells on teyn and then murdering them, until midnight—and would probably slap her, too.

  And, no, she didn’t want her father to die. She didn’t want her cousin Oryn to die, either, or her cousin Barún.

  Red Silk shoved her away with drunken strength that almost knocked her to the floor. “Lazy slut,” she said. “Get to bed, then. Garmoth.” The dark-featured guard had just reappeared with coffee. “Tell the cook to send food to my granddaughter’s room. Brûl, come with me. We need to talk about this mess here.” She gestured to the dead teyn, the old jenny chained to the post, the whole dim chamber’s reek of death. “Have this cleaned up.” She took the coffee cup from Garmoth’s tray as she swept through the door.

  Soral Brûl paused beside Foxfire as he started to follow her out, put his arm protectively around the girl’s shoulders—protective, she thought, as long as there wasn’t anything there that he’d actually have to protect her from. “You were most brave today, my lady. You have such extraordinary power—it’s rare that I’ve ever seen such strength to match such beauty.”

  Foxfire pulled away from him, trembling with disgust. “If you think I haven’t heard you flatter Grandmother with those same words, think again,” she said. “Do you think I’m more desperate than she is, or just more pleasant to kiss?”

  She pushed past him into the colonnade, where the desert twilight was just beginning to settle on the barren courtyard, tears running down her stony face as she walked to her room.

  “Sweetheart!” Opal caught her in her arms as she stumbled through the door. “Are you all right? I kept some of my food for you at lunch.”

  Foxfire shook her head, weeping now in earnest as she clung to the smaller, plumper girl who guided her to the bed. Opal sat her down, went at once for a basin of lavender water. “They’re sending something,” Foxfire managed to say when Opal returned with cold barley tea as well as the lavender water and a dish of rice and chicken. “No, don’t light the lamp. I want you to lie in bed here with the curtain down and the sheet over you. When the slave brings it in you just say, ‘Set it on the table . . .’”

  Opal’s eyes widened in apprehension. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll be back soon,” Foxfire promised, sitting up and clasping her friend by the shoulders. “I promise I’ll be back soon. Grandmother’s been taking tiga in brandy all day—after she’s done talking with Soral Brûl and Urnate Urla she’ll probably just fall asleep. I just . . . I can’t . . .” She shook her head again, her long black hair trailing loose from its pins, her hands trembling as she snatched up the little dish of her maid’s humble lunch. “I have to get out of the compound for a few minutes. I won’t go far. . . .”

  “There are bandits in the hills,” whispered Opal. “Bandits and wilding teyn.” She sounded scared—maybe less of the dangers outside the wall than of her ladyship’s wrath if Foxfire was discovered missing.

  “I won’t go far.” Foxfire wiped clean the shallow dish from Opal’s lunch with the end of an old veil, used another veil as a makeshift sling to carry the dish and a bottle of water. Wrapping herself in the Gray Cloak’s shifting spells of misdirection, she bestowed a quick kiss of farewell and encouragement upon Opal, then stepped out into the colonnade again.

  The gates of the compound were marked with Red Silk’s Sigil of Ward, but there was a low place in the kitchen wall, near the compound where the teyn were kept. Standing in a corner of the kitchen court, Foxfire laid a little whisper of spell on the hearth that sent the cook and his assistant darting back into the rickety shed in a panic.

  Three strides took her to the wall. Something moved in the shadow of the water barrels and Foxfire swung around, her heart leaping in alarm.

  It was the old jenny teyn, Eleven Grasshoppers. White furred, and a little bent with the effects of a lifetime of carrying water and grinding corn, the jenny still moved surprisingly fast, darting on all fours as teyn did when in a hurry, reaching out one long arm to grasp Foxfire’s wrist.

  “Let go!” Foxfire whispered, pulling against the clutching fingers—useless, of course, given the power of teyn hands. Foxfire said, “No!” in her firmest voice. “Off.”

  Eleven Grasshoppers released her at once. Those were the first commands beaten into the tiniest teyn pips. She pulled back her lips and bared her teeth in conciliation, but the pale blue eyes regarded her anxiously from beneath the overhanging brow. When Foxfire moved toward the barrels that would give her a footing over the wall, the jenny caught her wrist again. She released her immediately when Foxfire turned. Then she said hesitantly, “No.” Her long pale arm, the dark flesh seeming to shimmer where the white hair had been shaved close, swept in the direction of the wall. “Off.”

  After one startled second, Foxfire relaxed into laughter. She stepped close to the old jenny and hugged her, and ruffled the cropped white hair of her head. “You’re as bad as Opal, you silly old girl,” she said affectionately. It flashed across her mind how nearly this stooped, white-furred creature had come to being poisoned that evening, and she wondered if this was her way of thanking her: trying to keep her out of what she perceived as danger.

  Foxfire took her hands, stroked her arms the way she’d seen the teyn do to one another, when one of them was frightened or hurt. “I’ll be all right,” she said, looking into the blue eyes. “All right— You understand? How’d you get out, anyway?” And she led her to the door of the teyn compound, slipped back the bolt, and steered her in again. As she moved to close the door, Eleven Grasshoppers caught her hand again—very lightly this time—and stroked her arm.

  Climbing over the wall after shooting the bolt, Foxfire wondered how she could go about making sure the old jenny wasn’t among those Red Silk would pick to poison—or feed to the crocodile—for the remainder of their stay in the Valley of the Hawk.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Although darkness was settling over the desert, Foxfire kept the Gray Cloak spell wrapped around her until she reached the broken jumble of immense pale rocks at the foot of the valley wall, about a hundred feet from the compound. Behind the rocks a wadi twisted back into the hills, and this she followed, keeping t
o the stony track in its center in the hopes of avoiding being trailed or, nearly as bad, being found out. All it would take would be for Red Silk to come out here and find her footprints, to know she’d slipped out over the wall.

  In recollection of her grandmother’s tales, she cut a piece of brush from the wadi wall, and dragged it over her tracks. Not, she reflected, that the old lady wouldn’t identify the tracks of a dragged branch on sight.

  But her errand really would take only a few minutes. Once out of sight of the old hunting lodge, Foxfire was more than ever oppressed by the deadly silence of the hills. She’d stayed up as long as she could last night, leaning against the thick stone wall of her room and listening through it to the sounds of the hills. She wasn’t really good at reaching out with her senses yet, but at least she’d been able to tell that there weren’t troops of bandits everywhere, as Opal feared. She had heard neither voices nor the clink of horses’ hooves, nor the groaning complaints of camels.

  There had been the soft stirring of animal sounds, sounds she couldn’t identify. But if worse came to worst, she thought, she could always frighten animals or wilding teyn away with fire—though to do so would run the risk of betraying her to Red Silk, after which being carried off by bandits would seem a tame fate.

  By the same token, she knew she had to retreat a considerable distance into the hills to keep her grandmother from being aware of magic being worked in her immediate vicinity. As she’d climbed over the wall—and sneaking her pale-blue linen dress into the laundry undetected would be another task for later in the night—she’d seen the crude little bundles of dried grass, ashes, and broken glass that hung from the line of spikes there, an old nomad defense against the Bad-Luck Shadow. A reminder, if she’d needed one, of her grandmother’s listening presence.

  So Foxfire worked her way up the wadi and over a barren shoulder of red rock and dust turning colorless in the fading light, then along another gulch for some distance before she knelt and filled the pottery dish with water. It didn’t make a good mirror and she was afraid to call more than a tiny seed of light over her shoulder for fear that, even far off, her grandmother would see. The moon was rising over the hills, just past full and golden as fire. As her mind traced over the power lines she’d drawn in the dust, the spells she’d sketched invisibly on the inside of the bowl, she thought, Please be there. Please answer me.

  Somewhere a coyote howled, the voices of the rest of the pack picking up the cry. Foxfire shivered, trying not to remember that there were tombs all through these hills, even here so far from the city. Trying not to remember the poor teyn, dying in convulsions at the stake.

  Please be there! Let me know what’s happening!

  Don’t let me be all alone with Grandmother!

  She was aware that the ghostly reflection she’d thought was her own white face was that of Raeshaldis, Habnit’s Daughter.

  “Are you all right?” was Shaldis’s first question, and Foxfire almost wept again, at the older girl’s care.

  “I’m fine,” she said, because you never betrayed your own, even by a word. Besides, to wail, My grandmother is holding me prisoner and I’m tired and scared! would be to brand oneself a ninny indeed. “How is Summerchild? What happened to her?”

  “She tried to scry the walls in a village where all the people died of . . . of something that everyone’s saying was a plague, but I don’t think it was. I don’t know what it was.” Behind Raeshaldis’s head, Foxfire could see the blazing starlight of the desert sky. She wondered if Shaldis was in one of the high places of the Citadel or out in the desert herself.

  “She was unconscious when I saw her just after noon,” Shaldis went on. “I tried to find her mind, to go into trance and look for her, right after it happened. I was nearly lost myself. Where are you?”

  “I can’t say.” Foxfire looked around her sharply, wondering if the noise she’d heard was a fox or something worse. “I’m—Grandmother and I are looking for a way to get my father through the tests of kingship, if His Majesty should . . . shouldn’t survive the jubilee.” She added desperately, “Please don’t be angry at me. Grandmother—”

  “God of Women, Foxfire, I’ve met your grandmother! She’s like my grandfather in veils. Is there anything I can do to help you?”

  “Nothing,” Foxfire whispered, nearly weeping again at the kindness in her voice. “Just be there. I may not even be able to do this again. She took away my mirrors, and I had to sneak out . . . sneak out of the house tonight.” She glanced over her shoulder again. It was a noise. But she dared not take her concentration from the water bowl, to listen into the darkness to be sure.

  She swallowed another qualm of panic. “Is there anything I can do, to help you?” she asked after a moment. “To help Summerchild?”

  “I don’t know yet. I know you can’t tell us whatever you and your grandmother find out, but if . . . if you hear anything against the king.”

  “She isn’t—Grandmother isn’t—planning anything against the king,” said Foxfire. “She’s just not going to help him. She wants him to die.”

  “Well, excuse me while I dust off after falling down in surprise,” said Shaldis drily, and Foxfire laughed. “Let us know what you can,” she went on. “If you can’t . . . I know you’re in a bad situation. You do what you have to, sweetheart, to take care of yourself. That’s the most important thing.”

  “I will.” Maybe creeping out into hills crawling with jackals and wildings didn’t sound like taking care of yourself, thought Foxfire, but the alternative—staying behind walls unable to speak to someone whose first question had been Are you all right?—would have been infinitely worse.

  “You haven’t heard anything about a Raven child in the city, have you?” asked Shaldis. “Or rumors about a Crafty nobody knows about?”

  Foxfire shook her head. Something was in the wadi behind her. She knew it, felt it.

  “Listen, I have to go,” she whispered. “I’ve been here too long. I’ll speak again when I can.”

  And let the image fade.

  Wilding teyn. Her mind reached out, picked out their musty, sweetish smell, the rustle of their breathing—God of Women, they were all around her! In the rocks, creeping stealthily behind the shouldering curves of the wadi. Foxfire hastily gathered the spells of the Gray Cloak around her, dumped the water back into the bottle. Her hands were shaking so badly that the liquid dribbled onto the sand.

  She heard them coming closer. The grit of bare horny feet on pebbles, too soft for the hearing of any but a woman of power. As softly as she knew how, her heart thumping hard, she got to her feet, stole off down the wadi. But she could hear them follow, stealthy as the jackals that followed after them for the scraps of their kills.

  Foxfire’s night-sighted eyes scanned the shape of the hills, seeking the way back to the compound. But she’d gotten somehow turned around, and now the whole of the barren landscape looked the same. Just stones and other stones, close-crowding hills, bare eroded slots where water had flowed centuries ago. The rising of the moon had changed the appearance of the shadows. She risked releasing her mind from the wildings long enough to listen more widely, to sniff for the smells of horses and camels, water and smoke that would bring her back to the Valley of the Hawk.

  And could detect nothing.

  Dear gods, she thought. Grandmother! Grandmother put spells of ward on the whole place! Not just against the Bad-Luck Shadow but against anyone traveling these hills!

  This way. It was this way.

  I think it was this way.

  Panic filled her and she struggled to keep to a silent walk. Didn’t a Gray Cloak work against teyn? She realized she’d never tried to cloak herself against their notice. Why should she? She’d have to ask Shaldis. . . .

  Something—some preternatural rustle to her keyed-up senses—made her turn in time to see the dark rushing shadows of two wilding teyn spring from the crevasse of a rock barely ten yards away. Foxfire gasped, bolted like a gazelle, stumbl
ing and skidding over the rough stones and broken ground. Her mind groped at fire spells but fear numbed her thoughts—the glint of tusks in the starlight, the flash of eyes within those rushing shadows. She could only flee, terrified, expecting any second to feel those huge hands grabbing her, those horrible tusks. She plunged down the rocks, fell, skinning her hands.

  Which way is the compound?

  What am I going to—

  Her foot caught in a hole and she fell hard, rolling down the rough gravel of a talus slope, choking on dust and fear. Pain slashed her, knees, palms, head.

  I have to get up, I’ll have to fight.

  Fire! How do I call fire?

  Sobbing, she sat up, threw back her long hair.

  They were gone.

  She saw the dust hanging in the moonlight where a moment ago they’d been. Smelled the dust.

  And felt the silence that watched her. Silence that lived.

  Trembling seized her, from her flight and from that silence. She saw something—some flicker of greenish light, far off among the rocks—out of the tail of her eye. But when she looked it was gone.

  It scared them off.

  Panic, pure and icy, seemed to seal her thoughts.

  Or something scared them, anyway. And whatever it is, it’s still here, it’s coming for me.

  She managed to get to her feet, but when she turned toward where she thought the compound had to be, she saw—she thought she saw—that greenish flicker there, too.

  And in her heart, in the marrow of her bones, she felt a sudden wave of weariness, of weird sweet sleepiness, as if everything were going to be all right. All she had to do was lie down and rest, and all would be well in the morning. Her grandmother would be kind again, and her father would love her without asking anything of her in return.