Lunav

by Jenn Polish

  “Yes,” she whispers as she closes the space between our mouths, her full lips moist and soft and powerful and gentle all at once. One of her hands finds my short hair and the other, my wing sprouts, as one of my hands cups her face, neck, and lower ear and the other sinks into the gloriously abundant flesh of her waist. She moans softly as she parts her lips for my tongue, and I decide that I will always be happy if I can coax that magnificent sound from her whenever she wants me to.

  I don’t know how long we stay there, floating in the starlight, firefly flickers surrounding us and the glow of growing dragon bulbs beneath us, kissing like we can prevent the sun from ever rising again. Kissing like it’s all we need to permanently unsettle the power of the palace government. Maybe it is.

  When we finally part, she pushes off away from me, but still holds my hands. Bewildered, I’m terrified I’ve done something she didn’t want, but she’s beaming.

  “Can I try on my own?” She gestures with her head to the air around us, and I laugh at the eagerness in her question. So when she is just herself—Evelyn, not the Controller—she is playful, curious, eager. I wonder again how she became Controller so young. I save the questions for later and let my smile widen.

  I draw another deep breath and blow out toward her. It won’t work permanently, and I’ll have to watch her closely, but I can’t imagine being anywhere else. So I squeeze her hands once for reassurance before letting go, but her face betrays no fear. She screams with laughter when she finds herself afloat, unsupported, in midair. I belly laugh for the first time in I don’t know how long when she makes a swimming motion with her arms and legs. She joins in too, but still manages to pout, asking, “Well, how do I move, then?” with her tossed-up arms. For the first time, I truly see her as my age-mate, as a fellow near.

  I spin rapidly with my wings, unable to resist showing off.

  “Just believe you can,” I tell her. She squints at me slightly, pouting some more. I want to take her bottom lip, jutting out now, back between my own, but she lets out a laugh, and then she soars.

  As graceful as though she’s been flying since birth, and as enthusiastic as though she’s heading for an old friend she hasn’t seen in too many harvests, she tears across the Plains, laughter tinkling out of her very pores the entire time. I catch a glimpse of Zaylam’s extended snout as she flies up to us, and watch happily as she challenges Evelyn to a race around the circumference of the Plains.

  Zay’s wing wind will help keep her in the air, so I settle down with Jorbam to watch them with glee. Evelyn refuses to take a head start, but she is, unsurprisingly, not a graceful loser. After demanding a third rematch, still refusing a head start, and promptly losing again, Evelyn rides on Zaylam’s tailfin, back to Jorbam and me.

  “Jorbam tozo,” I say as I take her hand, helping her settle onto Jor’s branches. “My other hatchling mate.”

  Evelyn looks at me inquiringly, and I nod. She reaches her fingers out to Jorbam’s bark, stroking her greeting. Jorbam rumbles her hellos, and Evelyn’s eyes widen like they did when we first rose in flight.

  “Thank you,” she murmurs to Jorbam, and I wonder what she’d said. And how Evelyn understood her rumbles.

  Zaylam perches smugly beneath us. Evelyn glares down at her. “I don’t even have wings, and you didn’t win by that much,” Evelyn huffs, but the twitching of her lips gives her away.

  “This one you keep, Sadie, Controller or no. A fighter,” Jorbam rumbles, tickling Evelyn with a spiney leaf as she does so.

  I glance at Evelyn. “Or maybe not, maybe she’s just too stubborn to accept advantages when they’re offered to her!” I tease. Evelyn pretends to scoff.

  “Yes, dear, you’ve discovered a pattern in my life. Fleeing a life of luxury in the Highlands to be Controller of this place, and forsaking even that to revolt against the palace with a motley crew of overly smug Grovian young ones.”

  We all laugh. I’ve never seen this part of Evelyn, and I love it. Love. I want to learn so much more. And to kiss her. Again and again and again.

  But after the laughter dies down, the truth of Evelyn’s comment sinks into us all, and we grow quiet. Not unpleasantly so. We just know we have to transition, somehow, from kissing and racing and laughing into making decisions that can mean life, death, or torture for so many. I’ve never felt so ready and so overwhelmed at the same time.

  Evelyn must be feeling similarly, because she takes my hand.

  “I’m uncertain what my function is on this visit,” she offers up to no one in particular. “Are you going to interrogate me? Evaluate whether Sadie has behaved ridiculously by deciding to trust me? Or will that come later, when her growns join us?” My thumb strokes the back of her hand, where she punched the mirror.

  Zaylam looks up from her perch under us, then sings softly, relishing her chance to practice human Highlander. “You think the only way for learning us about you is with interrogation?”

  Jorbam leaks some sap near my neck. “Taste it,” I encourage Evelyn. She does. The sight of her licking her fingers is exquisite.

  But then her eyes fill with tears. I swipe my own finger through Jorbam’s sap and lick my finger roughly. It tastes like labor, like the Plains becoming an isolated hideaway instead of a hub of Grovian life. Like the smoke that’s rising from the factories near the Highlands, into our water and our veins. Like the Slicings, like the withering of so many potential dragon bulbs because of the loss of Dreaming, without which most of us can’t form hatchling bonds with the Lunavad trees who reach out to us. Like how hard Jorbam and some others had to work to make sure no one sounded the alarm about Evelyn’s presence here tonight.

  “I’m sorry,” the Controller whispers, shaking her head side to side, her eyes down. “Not that it matters, of course. But I am sorry.” Her eyes fly around the Plains before returning to us, and the dragons that are hovering at the level of Jorbam’s canopy to get a glimpse of her scatter. “I’m willing to work with you in whatever ways I can.”

  There’s a silence, and I break it with a shaking voice. I have to.

  “Why did you become Controller, Evelyn? Why help us now? Why not before you all arrested Rada? Or the Sampians? Why betray your people, now?”

  She swallows and holds my eyes with hers. The dragon sons around us go soft, like the entire Plains needs to know.

  “I thought you all ranged somewhere between reckless and murderous after Fi died, I…” She takes a shuddering sigh. “I’m not betraying my people. My people aren’t the king’s. I’m not a traitor, I’m just…I’m trying to live my life as I see it, as it needs to be lived. They murdered Fi, they murdered Blaze. I’m just trying to do what needs to be done.”

  The humans execute

  The human

  Dissidents,

  Zay sings softly. Evelyn straightens.

  “Like Fiora. I know. I should have fulfilled her work earlier instead of letting myself be deluded by their lies. I should have been stronger.”

  “They might kill you, Evelyn.”

  She meets my eyes.

  “I’ll be in good company, then.”

  I put my hand on hers, rub my thumb gently over the knuckles she broke when she put her fist through that mirror. Her eyes mist over, and I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that trusting her isn’t betraying my people, either; it’s fighting for them.

  For us all.

  “What do you have in mind?” I ask her, and she visibly relaxes now that we’ve moved from feelings to planning.

  Evelyn shakes her shoulders back and forth. “I can’t tell you how to fight violence I’m responsible for inflicting. But my Hands don’t expect my presence right now; I’ve locked myself away since…” There’s a silence in which we all think of Blaze.

  “I can use this time to tell you what I know about the king’s plans, and do whatever you think it is I should to throw them off course.”

  And dragonkind will ever know

  Whether the human

  Is tr
apping the rest—

  “You won’t, especially if you don’t care to listen when I explain myself,” Evelyn deadpans, trying to look directly into Harlenikal’s eyes as she hovers nearby. Zaylam stretches her long neck into Evelyn’s line of sight, blocking her view to Harlenikal. They lock eyes, and I cock an eyebrow. Zay’s only ever made eye contact with me, and sometimes Os and Lerian. After a few long moments, Zaylam must see what she wants to, because she wrenches her crystal orbs away from Evelyn’s to grin at me, her elongated snout grazing my nose. Harlenikal snorts angrily and swoops away.

  “I like the joiner you have, Sade,” she sings in Highlander.

  “Oh, no, she’s not—we’re not—” I can’t speak.

  “Aren’t we?” Evelyn asks me with big eyes and a slight pout. I know her mind is on my lips, and I almost fall out of Jorbam’s humming branches.

  I sputter. My stomach has fallen out of my body and crashed onto the ground beneath us. The corners of Evelyn’s mouth twitch.

  Zaylam finally takes pity on me. “Come,” she sings to Evelyn in Highlander, flying out so that her broad back is underneath Evelyn’s seated body. “Let me show you the more of the Plains. No for the racing this time. Maybe by we will be done time, the joiner you have will remember how to speak, yes?”

  I stammer some more, trying to protest. It’s no use. Evelyn is laughing, squeezing my hand before she lets go, then slipping her long fingers into the short, thin magenta fur lining the front of Zaylam’s long neck. And off they go.

  Jorbam curls her branches tighter around my body. “What just happened?” I want to know.

  My friend just rumbles softly and holds me closer. I sigh into her soft leaves, as the unlikely pair of my hatchling dragon and the human Controller soar above us.

  AS THE NIGHT grows deeper, Zaylam roars softly across the Plains to me. I dislodge myself from Jorbam’s embrace and fly toward Zaylam, dodging the disapproving glances of some dragons and the curious glances of others. I meet Zay and a windswept, shaking Evelyn at the northernmost point of the Plains. This spot is the only one that is completely covered in grass, continuing from a field on the other side of the Barrier, and it is here that Zaylam sets Evelyn down.

  “Thank you,” she bows deeply as she slips off of Zaylam’s back and stumbles slightly to my side.

  “My pleasure, my dear,” Zaylam sings warmly, and I wonder what they’d discussed together. “We’ll be watching,” she adds teasingly to me before flying off with another singsong roar.

  Evelyn laughs softly as Zaylam flies off. She’s shaking pretty hard. —Flight is cold at night. I slip my cloak off and put it tentatively around her shoulders. “You don’t need to do that,” she tells me, but wraps it tighter around herself nonetheless.

  “I know. But flying can be—”

  “Freezing!” she laughs. She looks out at the Plains and shakes her head. She looks to me uncertainly, and I bend to ask permission from the grasses beneath us to sit down. Not receiving it, I gesture Evelyn toward a different part of the patch, asking them. Receiving an affirmative response this time, I fold my legs in midair and nervously land on my backside next to her. She collapses elegantly next to me, running her hand gently over the grass, offering her thanks. “It’s magnificent, isn’t it? And you see the world like that at every moment.” Her fingers are working to separate her windswept curls, but her eyes are still fixed on the Plains.

  I don’t know what to say, so I stay quiet. She doesn’t seem to mind. She even puts her head on my shoulder after a few more moments of untangling her hair, the two of us just staring out at the Plains. “It’s so beautiful,” she whispers eventually.

  “You think it’s beautiful now? Imagine, Evelyn, this whole place with huge cocoon-like bulbs hanging down from the branches, two or three a tree. Dragon bulbs. There are a few now, one even on Aon’s hatchling tree, right there—” I point Banion out to her—“but not nearly as many as there used to be, because…” I trail off. She knows. “And they light up, what’s the word…” My tongue sticks out of the side of my mouth as I concentrate. Evelyn looks distracted, staring at my lips. I remember the word and swallow heavily before I forget it. “Iridescence, right? Yeah. They glow, like iridescence. See? Just to the right of where Zay’s flying. That blue glow. They all have a slightly separate color, all unique. Used to be that you could see newly hatched dragons’ paws and tails through the branches of almost every tree, because they were so bright and sometimes you’d see a little face… And then there was us, flying all around and tending to the bulbs, nuzzling with the little ones, learning…”

  Her eyes are full of tears and her face contorts for a moment, like she’s going to sob. But then she shifts her body to be flush against mine. I stiffen, surprised. Then I relax, content, and let a subtle pressure from her hand on my arm bring me down to lie next to her, the songs of my friends and the embrace of the grass beneath us pulling me into relaxation.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I WAKE, WITH the moon directly overhead and my arm draped across Evelyn’s waist. I blink into the moonlight, spotted with dragon shadows. She is already awake, her eyes on mine. Her fingers are stroking slow patterns across my wingtips. She smiles when she sees me stirring. I’ve never seen anything like it. Moonlight reflected in her eyes.

  “Hi,” she whispers, pebbles in her voice.

  I grin. My hand reaches up to stroke her cheek. I stop before touching her to ask, and she brings her own hand to complete our connection. Her skin is warm. She licks her lips and I lean forward.

  A loud faeric clearing of the throat startles us both up and away from each other.

  “So,” Mom begins lazily, eyebrow raised in tandem with Mama’s. “This is what you meant when you said you had something important to show us tonight.” Her eyes swivel to Evelyn. “I see you’ve gotten involved with one of your lowly faeric subjects.”

  “I wouldn’t phrase it that way,” Evelyn counters softly but evenly, disentangling our limbs and rising to her feet with infinitely more poise than I could ever aspire to. She’s different here, somehow. Her voice is smaller. Like she’s not trying to be the Controller. Like maybe she’s just Evelyn.

  “How would you phrase it then?” Mom asks coolly, and I stand too, looking down at Osley, who’s peeking out from under Aon’s feet, who’s in turn peeking out from behind Mom’s back. Os’s ears twitch.

  Evelyn doesn’t respond.

  “Won’t your soldiers be wondering where you are?” Mom continues.

  “I’ve been grieving, and my Hands know this. Iema is taking care of everything in my absence, and my other Hands are none the wiser.”

  “We’ve all been grieving,” Mom tells her, her hand shifting back to touch Aon protectively. “Why would you bring her here, Sadie?”

  “She saved the Underland, Mom. She helped Blaze.” Mom’s eyes soften, and she looks away.

  I meet Mama’s eyes. “Please.” She sighs and puts her hand on Mom’s back underneath her wing sprouts.

  Mom ignores her and takes a flutter toward Evelyn.

  “I don’t want know sort of sadistic fantasy you’re playing out, toying with my daughter like this, but it needs to end.”

  “Faye—”

  “You locked up my joiner, you’ve arrested both of our young ones—”

  “Not a young one anymore, Mom—”

  “Shush, Sadie.”

  “Ow! What do you do, sharpen your elbows before slamming into my ribs? This some Sampian thing you haven’t told me about yet?”

  “Sadie.”

  This time, my name comes from three different mouths: one angry, one at once irritated and amused, and one softer, pleading, rich with humility.

  I lower my head, but can’t erase my smirk.

  “Is there a single reason I should trust you? And don’t say because the Lunavad trees granted you entry. Sadie’s the last faerie with hatchling mates thanks to you and your government, they’re overly fond of her—”

  “The
king is planning an attack on the Plains. He thinks he’s found a way to penetrate the barrier, and I’m going to help you stop them. Just like I protected the Underland from my people, just like I stopped the crackdown on your uprising, just like I tried to help Blaze—”

  Her voice, usually so steady and cold,, wavers now, cracking like it’ll shatter into tiny irreparable pieces if she keeps talking. I reach for her hand and she takes it.

  When Evelyn speaks again, it’s so softly we all lean in slightly.

  “Blaze didn’t deserve to die. And que wouldn’t have if it weren’t for my government.” She raises her eyes to meet Mom’s, which is more than I can manage. “No apology can ever make up for what I’ve done.”

  “Evelyn—”

  “But I won’t let anything happen to your daughter. Or your son. Any of you. Not if I can help it.”

  I glance up at Mama, who’s staring at Mom, whose eyes are locked in some sort of battle with Evelyn. I almost back away from the energy passing between them. Mama and Aon exchange a glance while Osley and I gulp.

  “We’ve got a lot to do tonight, then. Let’s talk somewhere more private, shall we?” Mom offers finally.

  Evelyn nods once, deeply, almost a bow. Mom flies off and we follow, me holding Evelyn’s hand and Aon with a disgruntled but willing Osley in his arms. Zaylam meets us above Jorbam’s canopy, where Evelyn sits on her neck and we form an enclosed circle in the sky around her.

  I take Aon’s hand. He keeps glancing furtively at Evelyn, like he doesn’t know what to make of her presence. I know he has two things on his mind: her secret kindnesses to him and Blaze, and the cage she put him in.

  “Well?” Mama says. “You said they were planning another attack.”

  Evelyn nods. “King Xavier is planning to raid the Plains.” She holds up her hands before we can interrupt her. “I’m not sure when, but the rumors Iema has been able to gather suggest some time next week. He believes he’s found a way to penetrate the shield—you all call it the barrier, yes?—around this place.”