by Claire Luana
Their circle broke into a semicircle facing the queen, bowing respectfully. “Your Majesty,” Emi murmured.
“Daughters. It brings me joy to see you having such a wonderful time,” the queen said softly. Even among the rich and colorful dresses of the guests, the queen was set apart. Her silver hair was ornately gathered on her head, decorated with tiny silver chains that caught the moonlight. Her dress matched the silver of her hair and shimmered at the cuffs and neck with tiny glittering gems woven into the fabric. She looked like a goddess glowing in the night.
“It is a wonderful celebration,” Kai ventured, trying to keep the images of the koumidi entrails flowing into a silver bowl from her mind. “I have never seen anything like it.”
“I’m glad you like it. It is important to remember to celebrate. Though we live in hard times, we have much to be grateful for.”
The other women murmured their assent.
“Kai,” the queen said. “Please stop by the throne room tomorrow. I have news about the . . . inquiry we discussed.”
It took Kai a moment to remember that the queen had promised to look into her mother.
“I can speak now,” Kai said.
A shadow passed over the queen’s face. “I’m not sure this is the time to discuss that, daughter.”
“Please,” Kai said. “If you know something, please tell me.”
“Very well,” the queen said, gesturing for Kai to join her.
They paused a few steps past the group and Kai shifted from one foot to another.
“I did have our operatives inquire into your mother’s well-being. I am very sorry to report that your mother is dead.”
Suddenly, the night air felt very cold. The merrymaking around her seemed alien.
“Dead?” Kai asked, voice cracking.
“I’m sorry. Our operative is quite certain. Your mother tried to escape, but was caught. She fought . . . and was killed.”
Kai nodded numbly.
“I’m sorry to be the bearer of such sad news on a night that is supposed to be joyful. But be assured, you have a new family now.” The queen took Kai’s hands in her tiny ones and squeezed. Then she turned and disappeared back into the crowd.
Kai felt like she couldn’t breathe. She made her way towards the entrance to the courtyard.
“Kai!” She heard Emi call, but Kai waved her off. She needed to be alone. She walked through the courtyard, deaf to the world around her. How could her mother be dead? She was so strong, so capable. She could have lasted more than a few months. She wouldn’t have tried to escape if she didn’t have a solid plan.
As Kai left the courtyard, her mouth felt dry, her skin clammy. The cheerful lights decorating the skies above her suddenly felt harsh and intrusive.
“Kai,” Quitsu said, trailing behind her. “Slow down.”
“Just give me a few minutes alone,” she called back to him, her voice catching in her throat. She didn’t want to be around anyone, even Quitsu.
Kai fled, half stumbling, through the lonely space of the citadel, dark and devoid of life. Everyone was back in the main courtyard, enjoying the festival. She slowed in front of the hospital ward, cutting around the side of the building to stop by the herb garden.
She fell to her knees on a soft patch of dirt ground next to the little pond, tears flowing freely. Her borrowed dress would be ruined, but it didn’t matter.
Tiny pink flowers sprouted from a cluster of leaves draped down the rocks bordering the pond. Their beauty offended her. What right did they have to live such a lovely carefree existence, content only to bloom and die with no complications? She ripped them out of the ground in a fit of rage, throwing them into the cool night air.
She instantly regretted it. It wasn’t the flowers’ fault. She looked out at the scene in front of her, just a blurry, tear-streaked vision. It was still achingly beautiful. The stars shone brightly, the constellations standing out in stark relief against the dark sky.
She remembered laying out in the hayloft above the cattle barn back home when she was a child, both her mother and father on either side of her, pointing out their favorite constellations. Her father’s favorite was the rearing stallion, Esku, while her mother loved the constellation Koto, the trickster fox. She thought of Quitsu. That was probably her favorite now, too. She shouldn’t have left him.
A noise behind Kai drew her back to herself. She stood and turned to face whoever was interloping in her private sorrow.
“Chiya?” Kai asked. The woman was standing just a few yards from her, still wearing her samanera uniform. She must not have gone to the festival. “What do you want?”
Chiya’s eyes glittered dangerously in the moonlight.
“When a drowning man is trying to stay afloat, he can’t afford to be pulled down by the weight of his possessions. Even his clothing. He has to lose the dead weight.”
Kai wiped her face and stood. “I don’t expect you to care, but this isn’t a good time. Please just leave me alone.”
“It’s never been a good time for you, has it Kai? You’re nothing but a waste of time. You’re a moonburner who can’t burn. You are dead weight. Pulling us down.”
Kai’s anger flared. “What did I ever do to you to make you hate me so much? What do you want from me?” she shouted.
“I want you gone!” Chiya lunged forward and pushed her. Kai stumbled backwards, heels striking the rough rocks bordering the pond. Kai’s legs went out from under her, and she fell backwards into the water. As Kai came up for air, Chiya vaulted over the stone rim and grasped Kai’s neck with one big hand, pushing her under the shallow, brackish water.
Kai kicked and fought, trying to find purchase on her assailant in the dim water. She scratched and clawed and flailed at the hands holding her down, but Chiya’s grip was like iron. Kai’s lungs burned.
The Gleaming, she thought. It would kick in soon, to save her. Her thoughts were growing fuzzy and dim. Nothing. Where was the goddess? Kai thought of the dark figure in the temple, and with a sinking feeling, realized that no help was coming.
Kai’s struggles grew weaker. The soft bottom of the pond pressed beneath her back. She could feel the slimy stems of lily pads brushing against her face and neck. It would be easy to stop struggling, to stop fighting, to stop trying. She was alone. Her mother was gone.
But a part of her wouldn’t be quiet, wouldn’t let her give in to despair. She wasn’t alone. She had Master Vita. Maaya and Emi. She had people who cared for her. And then there was Quitsu, who would die if she died. Who had saved her in the desert. She felt herself growing angry. She had fought off a manga cat. She wasn’t just going to let Chiya drown her in a pond.
She opened herself to the moonlight as Pura had taught her, and the light flooded her, filling her with its heat. She pushed at her blockage, trying to force the light through the seams that she knew were there, that she had explored and touched with probing mental fingers again and again. There had to be a weakness. She willed the moonlight to leave her somehow, to fight for her and burn Chiya.
Still, nothing happened. She took in more and more, feeling the water around her growing hot. She could feel the hands holding her down loosening as her skin heated.
She filled herself with more moonlight, straining and pushing at the blockage with all her mental might. She saw a seam appear, a tiny crack down the smooth mortar of the brick walls of her mind. She redoubled her efforts, sending the light into the crack, expanding it, weakening it. The crack grew wider, until, with a final push, the bricks of the wall exploded away from her, tumbling down into nothingness. The power poured from her in an explosion of white light and heat that blew Chiya back from her. Kai dragged herself from the pond, stumbling over the side onto the ground. Her head pounded and her vision was blurry. She tried to fight her nausea as the world spun around her, but it was too much. She succumbed to blackness.
A memory floated to the surface of the blackness, like oil rising to the top of still, dark water. Kai had
been eleven, almost twelve. She sat at the little square table in her home in Ushai, the remnants of a meal of stew beef and root vegetables on her plate. A fire in the hearth and candles on the table, a sliver of moonlight shining through the nearby window.
She argued with them. She had been angry about something . . . what? There was someone in town . . . a tinker, a performer . . . Oh yes, a troupe of performers. Her parents had forbidden her from going into town, like they always forbade her from doing anything that brought her too close to the watchful gazes of their neighbors.
She fought, she yelled, she cried, trying every tactic she had in her pre-teen arsenal. But they stood firm. When she realized she had lost, she stood and shouted at them. The candles on the table had flared to an unnatural height, twice the length of the tallow sticks. She had fallen back in fear, partly at what had happened, but mostly at the looks on her parents’ faces. First panic, quickly painted over with a look that could only be described as resignation.
She and her mother had set out the next day, provisioned for days with their two swiftest horses under them. Kai opened her mouth to ask her mother questions a hundred times, but the look on Hanae’s face silenced her. After two days and a night they reached a wood that she had never seen before. It felt twisted and old and sinister, the trees wearing black bark and suffocating mossy coats. The ground grew soft under their horses’ feet and the horses shied from every sound and creak they heard.
“Please, Mother, tell me where we are going,” she heard herself beg in her high, youthful voice.
Hanae reigned in her horse and finally turned to face her daughter. “We are going to see someone who can help us. The candles . . . your moonburning is dawning. Your use of it will be unpredictable, even dangerous. Dangerous for all of us. We are going to see someone who can help us control it.”
Kai remembered feeling very small, dwarfed by the dark forest canopy. Small in understanding; trapped in a body that was intent on betraying them.
They continued to pick their way through the darkness for what felt like hours. Eventually they came upon a clearing, a place where the dense canopy yielded its dominion and allowed a patch of moonlight to break through. A dark, squat house sat in the middle of the clearing, smoke curling from its tiny chimney.
A shiver traveled through Kai, within both her twelve-year-old self and her remembering self. A woman met them at the door, not the hideous crone that Kai somehow had been expecting, but a tall, well-built older woman with silver hair pulled back in a loose bun at the nape of her neck. Though she gave off the appearance of age and wisdom, her olive skin was flawless and her gray eyes were sharp. She wore a basic gray wool dress, with a white apron tied around her waist. She ushered them inside.
The woman sat Kai by the fireplace with a piping hot pastry on a plate. Hanae and the woman moved to the other side of the small cabin, the way adults did when they didn’t want children to overhear. Young Kai turned her head slightly to maximize her eavesdropping, but then forgot all as she caught sight of the huge silver cat sitting on the chair across from her.
As her younger self gazed in rapt attention at the cat, who Kai now recognized as a seishen, Kai focused on the conversation between Hanae and the woman.
The conversation flickered. Her subconscious had only heard some of it.
“You sure? The procedure can have . . . permanent side effects. She could be stunted.”
“I can’t give her over to the citadel yet. She’s too impressionable. That place . . . it will ruin her.”
“This might ruin her.”
“But she will be with me. Me and her father. Who love her.”
The woman held her hands up. “I can’t do anything about her hair changing colors. That is beyond me.”
Hanae shook her head. “I will handle that. She will remember nothing of this?”
“Not until the blockage is removed. The memory may come back with the power.”
“All right.” Hanae sighed deeply.
“I do not know if what you do is brave or foolish,” the woman said, a hint of sympathy in her eyes.
“Only time will tell.”
Hanae and the woman ushered Kai onto the little low bed in the corner of the room. She lay down and closed her eyes, as instructed.
The woman busied herself, opening the windows to let the moonlight in and placing several moonstones around Kai’s body, including one on her chest. She could feel that heaviness, that weight.
Kai marveled at her utter trust in her mother and the woman. But what child suspects their parent of ill intent? She wanted to shout at herself to push the stone from her chest, to flee from the cabin and never turn back.
The woman knelt at the head of the bed and went to work, weaving a spell that would cut Kai off from the moon for the next seven years. Kai’s young self screamed and thrashed wildly, held down by the iron grip of her mother. She remembered the suffocating feeling, the wall being built, brick by brick. It felt like it would kill her, bury her, cut her off from all air and light and life. The memory filled with blackness.
General Ipan stretched in his chair, massaging a knot in one shoulder with a rough hand. He still wore his armor, burnished gold in the lamplight, with a sunburst on the breastplate.
“I’m getting old, Kuma,” he said to his seishen, a great golden bear resting by the tent’s little stone brazier.
“You’ve been saying that for the last twenty years,” Kuma remarked.
“Well, it’s been true for the last twenty years,” he said. “And more besides.”
General Ipan was still strong and able, and his men respected him. But he’d be lying to himself if he did not admit that his armor felt heavier at the end of a long day and his axe arm tired faster than it once had. He ran his hand through his thinning golden hair and sighed.
“A man of my age should be bouncing grandchildren on his knee, not riding around the desert on a lion-horse in full armor.”
Kuma just blinked. After years of companionship, the bear had no doubt learned that Ipan’s comments didn’t always warrant a response.
A silver light flashed from the bowl of water standing on the washbasin.
“My, is it that time already?” General Ipan picked the basin up and brought it to his desk, setting it before him. He pulled light from the sunstone set in the pommel of his dagger and traced symbols across the surface of the water. A silver-haired figure appeared before him, wavy and faint. No one knew that this bowl was more than just a regular bowl. Well, no one except the woman who possessed the bowl’s twin.
“Good evening. Or should I say good morning to you. Struck fear into the heart of any young moonburners today?”
“No. But the day is young. And you? Fallen off any golden eagles lately?”
General Ipan blustered. “One time that happened, one time. It was ages ago, and I had hit the sun whiskey a little too hard the night before. Yet I’ll never hear the end of it!” He threw his hands up in mock surrender.
The voice on the other end chuckled. “You know I’ll keep teasing you about it until you do something even more embarrassing.”
“It’s only a matter of time,” Kuma chimed in, his deep baritone ringing across the tent.
The woman laughed even harder.
“Not you, too,” the general said. “Ganging up is completely unsportsmanlike. I cry foul.”
The blurry vision seemed to wipe a tear from her eye.
“Okay, okay. I yield. I don’t have much time tonight. What news?”
“Trouble brewing, my old friend,” General Ipan said. “You know I can’t tell you much, but just be on your guard. We continue to escalate here.”
The woman sighed. “Yes, here as well. All our years of effort, and for what? The war continues.”
“We are but weapons in the hands of our monarchs. We do not choose where to cut.”
“I know, I know. I do have something . . . bigger . . . to share. The queen is planning a major offensive. She and General Gei
sa seem to think it will mean complete victory.”
“That is troubling to hear.”
“You and I both know Queen Airi ruling both Kita and Miina would be a disaster. I am tempted to share the full breadth of this intelligence with you, so long as you can provide me with some . . . assurances that Miina will be allowed to be free once the queen is dealt with.”
“I will see. The prince is tired of this war; I think I could gain some traction there. But we face the same problem as always. If Miina is to remain sovereign, who will take the queen’s place? There would be civil war.”
“I might . . . have a lead in that regard.”
“Really?” The general leaned forward.
“It is too soon to be certain. Find out if you think a deal can be struck, and I will find what I can.”
“Agreed.”
When Kai woke, she felt a heavy pressure on her chest where the moonstone had sat and burned at her years ago. She struggled to take a breath. Her throat felt sore and raw from swallowing water. She opened her eyes and blinked, laboring to move her head.
She pawed at her chest as if to rid herself of the remembered moonstone.
“Hey!” an indignant voice said.
“Quitsu,” she croaked. “Get off of me.”
He perked up, placing his two front paws on her collarbones. He licked her face once and then stepped to the side of the bed, sitting there and looking at her with his pointed fox face. “I’m glad you’re awake.”
“How long have I been out?” “Almost a week,” he replied.
“A week!” She cried. She tried to sit up and collapsed back on her pillows, head swimming. Her stomach rumbled.
“You burned a lot of moonlight. It lit up the entire sky. At first they thought it was a show for the Longest Night Festival, but they figured out pretty quickly that no one had planned it. The nurses weren’t sure if you had burned yourself out, or if you would ever wake up. It’s been infuriating.”
“Burned myself out?” Kai felt a sense of dread rising in her. She opened her mind to the waves of moonlight as Pura had taught her, drawing in a trickle. She concentrated on sending it into one of the orbs above her bed. It flared brightly, and returned to normal.
