Lunav

by Jenn Polish

  Blaze.

  My eyes inevitably are drawn to Evelyn herself. She’s asleep on a simple cot, a book resting near her head, which is wrapped in a silky purple scarf. The softly crackling light of her lanterns reveal the faded words on the golden binding. It’s a human Highlander to Underlander word and gesture guide.

  I smile before I realize with a jolt how repulsive I would be to Lerian right now. Not to mention how repulsive I’d be to Evelyn, sneaking into her dwelling when she’s sleeping, vulnerable, her nightgown riding up quite high on her exposed thighs. I avert my eyes, ignoring the heat pooling in my core.

  Though it’s a warm night, I pull at the Energies and spark the fireplace with my fingertips. I say her name firmly as the light grows, wanting to wake her as gently as I can.

  She gives a muffled scream when she opens her eyes and sees me. I toss my hands up and fly backward as she sits up quickly, the backs of my knees colliding with her desk chair painfully.

  Her eyes still wide but her face adjusting itself into a cautious glare, Evelyn flicks her wrists and my gut lurches as she pulls the Energies into a purple haze of smoke around her. When it fades, her nightgown is nearly folded on the edge of her cot, and she’s fully dressed in her usual Controller attire. She’s left the scarf on her hair, though, and touches its edges with ginger fingertips to make sure it’s still properly in place.

  Her swollen eyes rake up and down my body, demanding an explanation. I swallow. “I’m sorry, I just…” I stop and try to control my stuttering. “I’m sorry I woke you. And scared you.” I look away from her. “And violated your space.” I stop, not knowing what to say next, humiliated by how right Lerian was about my impulsiveness. Evelyn could punish all of us for my violation.

  But that’s just the point. I trust that she won’t, and Lerian doesn’t.

  I shake my head like I’m trying to get water out of my ears.

  “Has something else happened?” Evelyn demands, and her voice is full of gravel, like she hasn’t used it in days. If her last few sunups were anything like mine, she probably hasn’t.

  I shake my head in the human fashion. Her body relaxes, but only slightly. I take a deep breath and land softly, reminding myself that she’s the Controller and I need to show due respect. If I have any hope of maneuvering out of this situation without Lerian’s fears coming true.

  “I hear you haven’t been out, since…”

  The deep breath Evelyn takes pushes out her chest slightly and I lick my lips involuntarily. “I hear you haven’t been either.” My brow must furrow, because her voice becomes more clipped, more like the Controller. “It’s my duty to keep track of suspected dissidents.” My heart sinks.

  She chews on the bottom of her lip. “How’s your brother? Iema says you and he were nowhere to be found.” Her voice is different now; still loaded with gravel, but traced with something more like the sweetness and concern I overheard when she asked Aon how Blaze was, and earlier, when Aon and Blaze—Blaze—ran into her.

  When Blaze was still alive.

  I shrug and shuffle off my left foot. She notices and inclines her hand toward her desk chair behind me. I pull it out and sit gratefully, my elbows on my wide spread knees.

  “He’s…I don’t know how he is. P’Tal came to get him today, said he and Zeel and Aora wanted to swap stories with him about…” But quer name catches on my lips, and I stare at the space between us, a space that, the night we met, was full of snow, of Iema’s blood. I wonder if she’s thinking of that night too.

  “Did you come here to talk about Blaze?” She looks confused, but there’s a vaguely hopeful lilt to her voice.

  I wish Kashat hadn’t given me his Dream memory. But I came to tell her the truth, but I’m not sure why. So she doesn’t retaliate against Dreamers, maybe, because she’s watched too many young people die of the plague? So she doesn’t break another mirror? I don’t know.

  But I have to tell her. I don’t know why.

  “Evelyn…” I start but then correct myself. “Controller, do you know that faeries can sometimes remember Dreams they had before Slici—before Initiations?” It’s not entirely untrue. Kashat had to twist the Energies with medical experiments to help him remember, but some of us do remember naturally. The little lie boils my insides, but it feels necessary. Like somehow, I’m still being loyal to Lerian, even if she’d hate me for just being here.

  Evelyn nods, her brow furrowed. Her fingers toy with the edges of her scarf again, and I get the urge to undo her hair for her. I look away.

  “My friend Kashat, you know him, he did the accounting performance…” She bristles, and I know she’s remembering the image he’d produced of Fiora.

  “He didn’t—”

  I swallow in affirmation. “Before he was Sliced”—I emphasize the before carefully—“he Dreamed you, at the time of her death, and he showed me just now, because he thought…”

  I hear his voice ringing in my head, saying that I’m in love with the woman in front of me, with the woman who could destroy us all with a single command.

  I squirm and don’t meet her eyes. “He thought you might be extra upset about Blaze. Because of Fio—because of her. So I wanted to…”

  She mutters something in Izlanian non, and I wait, eyes downcast.

  “How much did you see? In this…Dream memory?” She sounds panicked.

  I wrap my left wing around my arm and fiddle with its tensile tip. “You running to get her journal, but she didn’t have time to write in it…and then the mirror.”

  I look up enough to see her left hand smooth over her right in her lap, thumb swiping over the spot that took the most damage, the knuckle of the littlest finger.

  “Sadie.” Her voice is ragged, but not impatient. I raise my head and meet her eyes. She’s regarding me silently, and she stays that way for a long moment.

  She takes a slow, ragged breath, and absently continues to stroke her right hand. When she speaks, it’s softly, like she’s somewhere else.

  “Kashat had no right to share that with you. It wasn’t acceptable for him to tell you anything, let alone share the images with you. It’s private. I…” Her eyes flutter closed and it looks like she’s counting in her head. Guilt digs at my insides and crawls all over my skin. I shouldn’t have let him tell me. “I fail to understand why you people find Dreams so compelling. In Izla, Dreams are so…exposing.”

  I consider her, weighing her words in my hands like I weigh my axe before taking a swing. My voice is low and creaky when I open my mouth. “You’re right. It wasn’t his story to tell. And I’m sorry. I really am. Evelyn.” She meets my eyes and my chest threatens to cave in. “But vulnerability is only as painful as you make it. It can also be beautiful. Powerful, even.” I’m not sure why I’m whispering.

  There’s a long silence in which I hear nothing but the crackling of the fire and the rush of the River from outside.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” she tells me evenly. “But perhaps sometimes our vulnerabilities are what can be used most easily against us.”

  I furrow my brow. She stops breathing, then, and cocks her head to listen intently. She gestures that I should do the same. I hear nothing. Neither, apparently, does she. Seeming satisfied that no one is listening nearby, her eyes come back to lock with mine.

  “Fiora didn’t happen to catch the blood plague. Nobody happens to catch it anymore, not with the Initiations.” She holds up her hand to stop my protest. “You might not like them, Sadie, but they do effectively prevent the plague. Perhaps there are other ways, but that’s not what I’m talking about right now. What I was trying to explain to you, is that Fiora heard lots of things, being a stable girl. She heard of a plan to attack the dragons, before the massacre. She told me she was going to try to warn your people, but she…” Her voice cracks.

  “Got the plague instead? And you think we gave it to her?”

  A single tear tracks down her face as she shakes her head. I lean forward, putting my hand out to wip
e it away. She puts her fingers on the underside of my wrist, and her touch crackles like the flame behind me.

  “I was told she was exposed to a rebel who had not been Initiated, that they exposed her to the plague through their resistance to Initiations, and that’s how she got sick. I was told she was killed by your little rebellion.”

  Evelyn squeezes my hand slightly, and I withdraw it unwillingly.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  She lets out a rueful laugh and tilts her head to the side, staring at me through gleaming eyes, every bit composed. “You haven’t figured it out yet?” I blink.

  She laughs ruefully again, and then the shake of laughter becomes the shake of a sob. “It’s my fault, Sadie, don’t you see? It’s my…my…” And then her flesh racks with sobs, and I look around the dwelling like I’m looking for someone else to tell me how to comfort her. Or to do it for me.

  I lean forward awkwardly, having no clue what to do with my hands, with my body.

  “Evelyn…” I’m about to say that the plague is its own creature, that its creation, its existence, is no one’s fault, and certainly not hers.

  But I bite down my words, because Lerian’s are still strong in my head. Because the plague hadn’t existed until the palace started contaminating our waters, our air, eating flesh and spreading their development everywhere. The plague is the fault of the government she works for, the soldiers in that stone dwelling she ran through the day Fiora died.

  And yet the plague struck the workers in the Izlanian mines even earlier than it struck here, and what do I know about Evelyn’s family? She could have people in those mines; she might be a non, but nons aren’t all born with equal footing. Fiora’s death in the stable is testament to that.

  “Evelyn.” I almost touch her arm, so close to me. My hands tremble in the space between us. “You didn’t create the plague.”

  She sniffles loudly, shaking her head, but somehow, the effect is still graceful.

  She smiles sadly as she looks up at me.

  “No, Sadie, you misunderstand me. Not abstract guilt. You can’t ask me how I know this, not yet, but I am absolutely certain now that Fiora was infected, intentionally, by the king’s orders, in attempt to win my obedience. And I am absolutely certain that the same thing happened to Blaze.” She takes a deep breath and I almost fall off the chair. “I am absolutely certain that one of my Hands infected Blaze with the plague, on sanction of the king, to exact revenge for protecting the Underland.”

  I sit bolt upright. “Aora kept saying that Blaze was playing, alone, that your second Hand found quer…” Evelyn nods numbly as I babble on. “He likes trying to hurt the young ones. He was trying to get Blaze and Aon to hunt creatures with his bow, before, he had a fight with Iema. He said he was having fun with them…”

  I pause for a long time, during which I’m reasonably certain I can’t breathe.

  I know she’s right. Lerian’s distrust be damned, I know her. I believe her.

  “Blaze was murdered.” Saying it out loud feels heavy, dull, makes my tongue feel so much thicker than it is, so much clumsier. Evelyn blinks as she nods, and tears spill out of both eyes.

  Rage sweeps through me.

  “Why would they target a young one? Que was just barely Sliced, still learning how to gallop!”

  More voice cracks at a higher octave than it ever registers, and both our hands move to caress the spaces on our own bodies where Blaze and Aon’s antics left bruises.

  I try to choke down a sob. I’m unsuccessful.

  I don’t know how long I sit there, wailing wordlessly with hot tears streaming down my face, but I know Evelyn’s cot rustles as she moves to kneel in front of me, putting her forehead in my lap and drawing soothing circles on the outsides of my thighs with her fingertips.

  I don’t know how long it is until I realize that I’ve grasped her left forearm with my hand, that the fingers of my other hand trace what feels like a scar on the back of her neck, normally hidden by her hair.

  I don’t know how long it is until I register that she is singing softly in a language I don’t recognize. I stop crying abruptly and so does her song. Evelyn looks up, surprised and maybe a bit embarrassed. She smiles and backs away from me gingerly, sitting herself back on her cot. My body keens from the loss of warmth.

  The loss of her.

  “You were singing,” I say, and my voice is thick with tears and snot. I wipe my nose with the back of my hand.

  She looks away, and now I’m sure she’s embarrassed. “It’s an Izlanian prayer. For the tears to take your pain out of your body with you, for your grief to be returned to you in its true form.”

  I wait. She looks back up at me and my breath hitches as her wet, wide eyes sink into mine.

  “Grief has a true form?” I croak.

  “Love,” she breathes.

  I blink and she sighs. Clearing her throat a little, she doesn’t sing again, but her voice is rhythmic—a poem. She’s translating the lyrics for me slowly, deliberately, pausing for long moments when she needs to think of the right word. In the end, the prayer she recites goes like this,

  Upon the backs of the dragons

  And into the depths of Qathram

  May your chest keep you rising

  Dear one,

  For if you sink,

  You will swim forever

  Breathe forever, but only of the

  Water that is your pain

  Only of the water that is your

  Grief.

  So long will you breathe your grief

  You will forget what made you

  Mourn

  What made you cling to

  Creatures whose journeys you

  Cannot follow.

  Dip, swim. Breathe the soured molasses breath of

  Grief

  But never forget,

  Dear one,

  That grief too,

  Is Grown.

  Grown of loss, grown of

  Rage

  Grown of futility, yes,

  But conjure her face in your mind,

  Dear one,

  For you would have called

  None of these pains to you

  If you weren’t keening

  From the loss of

  Love.

  May you bathe in ice

  Of Qathram

  And be warmed by the remembrance that

  Grief,

  Dear one,

  Stripped down,

  Is none but,

  Precisely,

  Love.

  Ripened with the agony of knowledge

  That bodies fade

  But love does not.

  Her eyes avoid mine with each “dear one,” but when she recites what grief is stripped down to, she finally lifts her gaze to mine, and holds it until she finishes.

  Only the fire crackling behind us dares make a sound.

  “An Izlanian prayer,” I whisper finally.

  She nods.

  “You’ve really been practicing your Grovian faeric.” She smiles sadly. “We only grieve those we love, Sadie. Without love—”

  “Life would be all laughs, all the time.”

  Zaylam would snort; Jorbam would rumble; Lerian would thwack me upside the head and ask if my ugliness has finally affected my brain.

  But Evelyn? Her eyes fly wide open, her mouth following with a soft gasp. For a moment, her lips twitch both up and down. And then she lets out a shaky laugh, like she’s afraid that the spirits of Qathram might hear her or something.

  “That’s not exactly what I was going to say—”

  “Thank you.”

  “What?”

  “For reciting the prayer. Maybe one day you could actually sing the whole thing, instead of just reciting it. Your voice is nice.”

  This time, her laugh is easy, but watery.

  “Hopefully you don’t ever need the Prayer for the Left Behind again.”

  The crackling of the fire makes us both jump. />
  “Controller—Evelyn—I know I’ve got no right to ask, but…who was she?”

  She stares at me for so long I don’t think she’s going to answer. “You already know that her name was Fiora. I was compelled to come to the Highlands Proper from Izla when I was very young. She worked in the stables where I lived in the Highlands. I’m sure you gathered that much. She was…we grew up together. She was my…we grew up together.”

  “And you can’t tell me how you know for sure? About Fiora and Blaze?”

  She shakes her head firmly, apologetically. Fearfully.

  “I don’t even know why I told you that. What are we doing, Sadie? What are you even doing here? You’re my enemy, I—”

  “Do you really believe that? You just told me that the king—”

  “I know what the king’s done!”

  Her voice rings throughout her dwelling as she jumps to her feet, and even the fire silences in its wake.

  Just like that, the glimpses I was getting of the girl behind the Controller mask is gone.

  But just as quickly, her face releases with troubled regret and she sits back down heavily. “I don’t think you’re my enemy. Do you see me as yours?”

  Lerian’s voice is screaming in my ears and her fists have a tight hold on my insides.

  “I mean, you locked my family up. You sent Rada away, and…” I’m about to say Leece and Mara, but I choose my words more carefully than that. “Those Sampians.”

  Evelyn sighs and lowers her eyes.

  “Are they dead too?” I ask.

  “No.” I’m surprised by how ragged her voice sounds. “You don’t know what I had to do for them, Sadie, but, no, they’re not dead.”

  I nod, and a season’s worth of knots start unwinding in my stomach.

  “Why are you here?” she asks me again.

  I heave a sigh. “I have no idea. Most faeries here think I’m their enemy. Lunara, maybe I’m proving that by being here, I don’t know. I just I remember watching Idrisim die. Jax’s joiner, he died. Was killed. And you, with Fiora… Jax almost died after Id was killed. I don’t want you to be in that kind of pain.”