He raised his head, and immediately shuffled over to the silver-wrapped bars. Chains scraped stone. He had a cuff around each ankle, bolted to a plate in the far corner. He came within a hair-distance of the bars and croaked, “Luna.”
One of his eyes was sewn shut with six crude stitches, and a trickle of blood had crusted at the corner, and the socket itself... realization jolted me that he had lost the eye. His jaw hung loose on one side, completely broken, and it slurred his words as he tried to speak. The gash across his belly had been restitched for the how many-th time? I couldn’t bear to inventory it all, and could barely speak. “Not here. I am no one’s Luna here.”
“Always. Anywhere,” he rasped.
The iron keys were still on the hook. I retrieved them and yanked the door open. I didn’t care who heard. I stepped into the cell and knelt down next to him. “What have you done, Hix?”
I had heard what he had done, of course. It was all over SableFur. The house had become like a drum, everything stretched tight and sounding much louder than it was. Even from my little dusty corner I had caught my goons whispering to each other, and seen small groups talking outside. Not in the casual laughing nice-to-see-you way, but in the close-leaning, serious, hushed way.
Lulu.
It seemed so long ago, it was hard to remember what she had even said. It was another lifetime ago.
I leaned as close as I dared. The proximity to silver burned my skin like the fizz off a soda. “Why? You had to know it won’t change anything, and they’d kill you.”
“I did to them what Lulu did to us. Doubt. Questions.” Hix shaped each word with careful pain.
“But your life for so little?” I pleaded with him. It wasn’t fair to make him speak, but I couldn’t stop myself. Oh, his jaw! I reached towards him through the bars. I cradled his face, trying to do something for him, but he flinched and I withdrew, helpless.
“It is more than zero.”
My eyes pooled tears. Stupid, literal wolf! He looked at the raw wounds on my neck with his good eye, and started to rasp, “Luna—”
“Did Gabel send you?”
“No. He knows I hunted Lulu. I told him I would not return.”
“Don’t speak that way,” I pleaded.
“Do not let them hold me prisoner, güzelim,” he whispered his one request.
I had no idea what the last word was, but I knew exactly what he wanted me to do. I whispered a plea, “The first responsibility of any prisoner is to escape.”
He shuffled a little closer. “You plan to attempt escape?”
Getting him out of the cage was easy. But he wasn’t going to get far with his injuries. One eye gouged out, shattered jaw, silver sickness, who knew what else. I couldn’t even look at the wound on his belly. My fingertips brushed the stiff beard sprouting on his jaw. No, escape for him would be hopeless. I could just walk out of SableFur anytime I wanted, but I couldn’t take Hix with me.
I gulped and answered instead, “No, I can’t leave. I have to clear my name. You could try.”
Was that why they had let me down here? If I let him out, Magnes would have an excuse to kill me. Maybe they thought I wouldn’t dare.
“No,” Hix said. “I will die for you, but I will not leave you.”
I shook my head, trying not to blubber, and whispered, “It might not matter. I have to work quickly, or we’ll both be down here.”
My vision shimmered like rain off a glass window, and the RedWater ghosts materialized. Hix did not see them as they slid through the bars and circled around him, sniffing out each injury and wound. Azure blue tendrils of light flicked off their coats, caressing Hix’s skin, illuminating each part they touched. What were they doing, and why show themselves now?
It wasn’t fair that he’d die for so little. He deserved a glorious warrior’s death and funeral. Not to die like... like this, poking a bee hive with a stick just to piss off the bees so someone else could run in and get the honey while he was stung to death.
Stupidly, I clung to the hope I could save all of us.
“Does he suspect?” Hix’s whisper pulled me back to him.
“Not yet, but he will.” The frantic urgency gripped my throat even thinking about it.
The RedWater wolves sat on opposite sides of Hix and stared at him. The blue glimmer on the tips of their ghostly pelts remained.
“Then I will not leave you to die alone,” he whispered.
My lips trembled and my fingers did too. “I’m so sorry. I can’t. I—”
I wasn’t brave enough to be alone. Even though I knew Magnes would torture him, and make him suffer, I didn’t have the courage or the bravery I needed. The will to do what I had done for the RedWater wasn’t there. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even think it. Hix had been my guardian, even willing to fight with Gabel. Even if he often chose the wrong moments and hills to die on.
Hix sank down onto the stones. “All I want is a good death, because I have not led a good life. I know what they will do to me. I am not afraid. It is for my Luna. I should have done more, sooner. But I was not brave enough when it counted. I will not fail again. If my life still serves you, then I will remain.”
“Stop talking.” I feared for his mangled jaw. Every word must have hurt him. The tears were hot and thick now. Soon I’d be blubbering like an idiot. I bit on my lips and fought the shaking in my throat. The RedWater ghosts watched, blue-tinted, and Hix’s one good eye was glassy-bright. My hands trembled with realization. “You found the secret for me, Hix. This was the second test.”
The secret. Lulu hadn’t been the secret, she had been the evidence of the secret: Magnes’ secret. I’d follow the trail of blood the rest of the way.
His lips couldn’t smile, but somehow his face did even through the swelling and blood.
“I could let you out. I could, I could do what you wanted, but—” It was too much. So many had died, I had ordered some to their death, I had killed, my soul ached, every part of me hurt, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t put Hix out of his misery. And maybe, if I did, Magnes would believe I was still the IronMoon Luna in some way, and maybe this was all just a trap.
Maybe that was an excuse I made to myself.
“Save your courage,” Hix said. “I have my own.”
My hands fell to my sides. Hix, exhausted, shuffled back to the center of the cell. They had at least given him a blanket. That was an improvement, or was it? The RedWater ghosts sniffed at him, he didn’t seem to notice, then they slid back through the bars to sit on either side of me.
Upstairs, my goons gave me looks I didn’t appreciate. I snarled at one, “You will be so lucky if your Luna even knows who you are when you die in her service! Would you do what Hix did for her, if she were me?”
He hesitated before he said, “I would.”
“Liar, coward!” I spat.
The RedWater wolves wove around their legs, their fur-tips now haloed in reddish-orange-yellow.
“You can say whatever you want about him,” I snarled, “but he isn’t a coward, and I’m not guilty. He’ll die a warrior, and I’ll vindicate myself. You, however, are going to be following me around and when I’m gone, because I will be gone, you will still be here doing whatever menial shit goons like you do. If you want to figure out how to be a wolf worth something, go look at the one you just spit on!”
My insides twisted and hurt, almost spinning as they twisted around themselves in a huge knot.
...Gianna...
“Get away from me!” I snapped my foot into Goon A’s knee. “Mongrel lapdogs! So worthless they didn’t even bother to tell me your names! I doubt the Moon cares either!”
I stormed away before I could do anything else stupid, the RedWater wolves trotting behind me.
Demented Easter Bunny
I huddled over the little piece of mirror.
Gabel’s mother’s mirror.
An Oracle who had used a mirror, and no one remembered. I pulled my finger along the sharp edges.
And Hix in the dungeon. Hix who had found the secret for me, in my name. The SableFur wouldn’t see it that way, so I’d have to make them see it that way. I couldn’t let Hix’s sacrifice go forgotten. I couldn’t let the SableFur go back to sleep and pretend it hadn’t happened.
The RedWater wolves sat across from me, sunlight playing golden games on the tips of their ghostly pelts.
I had never questioned the Moon before; I had just accepted that deities were beyond my understanding, but the longer this went on, the less it made sense. The ghosts of two wolves I had put down months earlier seemed the most normal thing in all of this. If the Moon had wanted to destroy Magnes, She could have done so.
Perhaps She had already tried.
I only knew that Kiery had seen Gabel choose a Shadowless female for a mate. She had known me from before, and hadn’t seen me, so it must have been Amber she’d seen. Gabel must have changed paths at the last minute and chosen me. That was why visions were unreliable. They only showed a likely future, not a certain one. A single choice could change everything.
Just like I could choose to leave SableFur and return to IronMoon.
Lulu made the SableFur very uncomfortable. Lulu hadn’t been her real name, but that’s the name everyone had called her, and she had been a well-known and trusted Hunter for Magnes. Her being in MarchMoon for so long, posing as one of them, knowing something as personal as a vision, and having been the voice that had incriminated me... it shocked people.
Gabel was a monster. Nobody in SableFur disputed that. Magnes dealing with him was important. Nobody disagreed on that either.
But incriminating Gabel’s Luna using the Oracles and a spy?
Hix had made it more difficult for Magnes to simply throw me into a pit. There might be some questions as to why, but those questions wouldn’t be too loud. He’d find a way to smooth them over or push them aside.
It was going to be a race to the finish. No time to wait for my bowls. I needed to know my next move, and my choice in tools was a mirror or the tourmaline.
I set the old piece of mirror aside. There was a vague feeling about it, like it wasn’t quite real, or that it was dangerous. It had belonged to another Oracle, and we couldn’t swap tools between each other. In theory the tools could be purified again after a very long time, and having been buried for about thirty years might have been good enough, but the mirror was angry. It was still an Oracle’s tool, and I wasn’t the Oracle it had chosen.
That left the mirror off the back of my door. This mirror was rust-spotted, old and generally derelict, but didn’t send an ominous prickle up my senses like the other one.
I smoothed the surface with salt and wrestled it out of its wooden frame. Mirrors didn’t need to be purified like stones, their reflective surface meant they were difficult to contaminate. This one felt inert and well... dead. Dead could work. I brushed the salt away and selected my runes. Protection, of course. Mercy seemed reasonable. Not a rune often used. It could mean various things, literal mercy, or intervention, or supplication. I had no idea what I was even looking for, aside from my next clue.
I was afraid. I was so afraid. Hix in the dungeon, Gabel setting fire to the countryside, Magnes closing in on me. Using an old rusty mirror. The ghosts of two wolves I had put down staring at me from the corner of my tiny room. My fingers trembled as I fished through my runes, unsure which one to use. I settled on courage because the Moon knew I needed it right then.
Runes aligned along the top of the mirror, I knelt, and leaned over the reflective surface.
I clung to the edge of something. The mirror’s sharp edges. The Tides churned and bounced, threatening to topple me off balance into the waves. I clung to the mirror and tried to stay within the center of the motion, not let myself panic or cry out. I had to keep focused, and not capsize into the Tides, or get lost.
I could do this.
I had to.
I was at SableFur. Specifically, outside the main house, standing on the porch of one of the other houses, looking inside a window.
Inside, a little girl was tearing apart her room. I pressed my face to the glass and heard her sobbing.
The Tides hadn’t taken me far.
I turned and looked around, trying to figure out what I was supposed to see, because I didn’t sense it was the little girl, beyond she was a little girl looking for something. At the corner of the porch was a large tree. I went towards it and looked up into the evergreen branches, and spied what the girl was looking for: a sock doll.
A toy. She was looking for a toy that had been thrown up into the branches.
A toy?
A shout from across the way. Angry. Male. Then answered by a female.
Bewildered, I walked towards the argument. It was behind another house, a man and woman having a snarling, not-quite-shouting fight in their kitchen. I peered through the window.
“I told you he won’t pay us back!” she was shouting at him.
“He’ll pay us back,” he snapped. “He’s my brother, he’s good for it.”
“When are you going to stop? He’s not good for it and never has been!”
“He’ll be here with the money tomorrow,” the man insisted, red-faced and furious.
The scene made the hole in my soul ache, but at the same time I laughed. Gabel and I would have been lucky to argue over unpaid debts. The argument seemed to end, with the players pausing like a stilled movie. I pushed off the window and walked around to the back of the house. Tucked into the door jamb was an envelope with the rune for the brother in red ink. I opened it.
Half today, the rest when I can.
The mirror shifted under my feet, and everything wobbled. I gasped and dropped to my knees. My fingers slid through the wood, finding the sharp edges of the mirror instead, as the vision dissolved into mist and darkness
I had sliced my fingers open grabbing the actual physical mirror.
The blood coursed down my hand and wrist.
Still woozy and disoriented from being sucked out of the vision so abruptly, and exhausted from wrestling the Tides, I stared at my hands, dumbfounded by the sheer amount of blood, and the lack of any pain to go with the deep gashes.
After a few moments of bleeding, my senses returned, and I went to my bathroom. The water hitting the open wounds made me yelp in pain, and once my body realized how deep the gashes were, the amount of pain caught up.
And the bleeding wasn’t stopping.
I wrapped each of my hands in a washcloth, which quickly soaked red.
Goon B was on duty that time of night. I held up my towel-wrapped hands. “I think I need stitches.”
“What the hell?” he asked, taking in the damage and the blood dripping onto the floor.
“I grabbed the sharp edge of a mirror,” I explained.
“Go sit down and try not to bleed on anything else,” he said gruffly.
Lacking a bathtub I went and sat in the shower stall, fingers clenched around the towels, and damn, had it all started to hurt. I tried to distract myself by figuring out how to pad the edges of the mirror so I wouldn’t slice myself open the next time I used it.
Now a headache had set in, and the exhaustion from the vision. I just wanted to sleep and wait for my brain to stop sloshing around.
Goon B returned with Kiery. Kiery couldn’t do stitches, so why had the Goon brought her? She unwrapped one hand, then quickly rewrapped it. “What did you do?”
“I was scrying with the mirror and must have grabbed it on the Tides.”
“With a mirror? Are you insane? Your bowls will be done in a month,” Kiery groused. She looked up at Goon B. “Call the doctor. We have to take her.”
Goon B was mildly annoyed at the late night jaunt a few miles down the road to a small brick building. The doctor wasn’t much happier having been dragged out of bed to sew up my fingers. My fingers, once they were washed down, were cut deep: a gash across the middle three fingers on each hand. The bleeding had slowed down to a p
ersistent ooze.
“What were you doing using a mirror?” Kiery demanded while the doctor numbed my fingers.
“Scrying.” I felt more than a little fuzzy.
“With a mirror?” Her voice cracked on her agitation.
“I had to. What do you care if I use a mirror and die in the attempt? I’m an Oracle. I know the risk I’m taking.”
She growled, “Did you see anything?”
“Yes.”
“What did you see?”
“A toy in a tree and a note in a door.” The numbing injection had also had some painkillers in it, and that turned my brain into soup. The doctor also checked the slow-healing necklace of ulcers.
The RedWater wolves materialized in the bright light and sniffed Kiery, the tips of their fur green/blue. One of the wolves put his paws up on the bench and sniffed the hand the doctor wasn’t currently stitching.
I half-expected Kiery to at least be partially aware of the wolves, but she clearly wasn’t.
Kiery didn’t ask any more questions, and I drifted into la-la land while my hands were stitched and bandaged. Somehow I ended up back in my bed, and the next thing I really remember was waking up in the yellow-dark of my little room in daylight, my hands hurting like they had been hit with a hammer, my head splitting, and a rotten taste in my mouth.
And the RedWater ghosts curled up at the foot of my bed.
I propped myself up on my elbows. I needed to go outside and see if that toy was in the tree.
The RedWater wolves looked at me, shimmering and translucent, and expectant.
I still had their fangs. The seat of courage, the warrior’s fight. But now them sleeping on my bed seemed so... personal.
I also got dragged back in time to Places Beyond The Tides, and groves suspended in a void to see Gabel, and my Bond blocked off and twisted, and trying to unravel the secrets of a Goddess. A couple of wolf-spectres... but perhaps I should stop just taking them at face value.
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