by Ken Scholes
“I will,” he said.
“Then I will find you in Espira if I can.”
And somehow he knew in that moment, without doubt, that he would never hear her voice again.
But before he could reply she was gone. He waited all day hoping to hear her again but knowing he would not. He took the silver crescent with him into his private dining room and kept it near his tub as he bathed at the end of the day. He cradled it beside him on his pillow.
That night, the weeping came upon him again but it was different this time because the loss was his own and he understood it. Gone was Ameera’s final spell upon his family, replaced now by Amal’s first and the force of his bereavement wracked his body in great sobs.
Twice, the black-coats inquired of his well-being and consulted quietly with cloaked couriers. Then, sometime in the early morning hours, they came for him and carried the last Weeping Czar out of his palace and loaded him into a carriage bound for his new home.
* * *
A sense of time returned to Frederico but he had no way to know how many days he’d lost. How long had he been in this new place?
His new rooms were loftier than his former, overlooking the forests beyond the city. The bars across his balcony cast the sunlight in straight lines across the carpeted floor and though the rooms were much smaller, they were also more comfortable.
He’d fallen quickly into a routine. He read over his morning chai—mostly novels and plays, but sometimes he read poetry as well. He met with his physicians after breakfast and then exercised outdoors under the supervision of disinterested guards. In the afternoons, he practiced his harp.
When Pyrus came to him, his face white and his hands shaking, Frederico had just sat down and raised his fingers to the strings. He looked up. “Minister Pyrus,” he said, inclining his head. “Or is it Chancellor now?”
The old man said nothing. He stretched out his hand towards Frederico and in it, wrapped in black velvet, was the silver crescent.
Frederico stood. The sight of it stopped his breath and he saw the look of stunned surprise on his own face, reflected back in its mirrored surface. He reached out and took it, held it to his ear. “Hello?”
“Two daughters have you taken from me out of my own house,” a voice like silk said, “and I will have blood for them each.” Raj Y’Zir continued, quietly and with confidence. “When I fall upon you it will shake the foundations of the world. My physicians will cut you for my pleasure.”
Frederico looked up and saw the wideness of Pyrus’s eyes. “I’ve not taken your daughter, Lord Y’Zir. She’s left you of her own free will.”
“You’ve taken her, whether you know it or not. She’s swum the Bargaining Pool but she was too young to know that her body could not make the journey. Her spirit is yours for now.”
Frederico closed his eyes. These were tears he’d already wept but he felt them again at the back of his eyelids.
“You will not hear my voice again until it is in the sky above you,” Raj Y’Zir said. “Until then, know that a wrathful father builds his army and his bridge.”
After that, silence.
Frederico smiled grimly and looked to Pyrus, returning the crescent to him. “I believe this changes your position considerably.”
The old general said nothing as Frederico sat back down and let his fingers find their way over the harp strings. The canticle was upbeat but in a minor key, haunting and yet triumphant.
It is a love song, Frederico realized.
* * *
The war production was in full swing when Frederico took to his new estate near Belle-Sur-La-Mer. He left the affairs of state in the hands of his capable Chancellor Tannen and left the gun-fields and navies in the hands of his new Minister of War. Pyrus had taken to the role with gratitude appropriate for a spared life and a treason forgiven.
He found the same routines he’d discovered during his brief stay in the Ministry; they comforted him. And he added new ones. He took to walking the markets by day and the beaches by night, his bare feet shuffling over sand still warm from the sun and bathed blue-green in the light of the moon.
Sometimes, late at night, he even sat on the pier with his harp and played. His servants thought him mad but he was the Lord Czar and could do as he pleased. One night, as the lamps guttered low and his fingers ached from the strings, Frederico stood up and stretched.
He walked to the end of the dock and looked up into the night sky. It had been just past a year now, he realized, and he knew now that the Year of the Falling Moon was not literal after all. He’d wondered. But the anniversary of Jazrel’s passing had come and gone more than two months ago and there’d been no shaking ground or raining fire, no booming voice crying out vengeance.
Hanging there, full and bright, the moon waited.
And in that moment, deep in the waters at the end of the pier, something moved.
At first, Frederico thought it was a reflection, blue and green light upon the warm night sea. But then it moved again and he started. He looked over his shoulder to the crimson guard that waited by the front doors of his estate, to the servants stationed near their bell. Crouching, he leaned forward and looked into the water.
It was slender and beautiful and it coiled around the pillar of the dock before sliding off and out—a line of blue-green light moving deeper and away, as if part of the moon had fallen and now sank.
Amal. He couldn’t tell if he said it aloud or silently. But a sudden fancy took him. Soft and low, he whistled the tune he’d been playing just minutes ago and watched the light flicker as it turned about and drifted slowly back to him.
What had her father said? Her body could not make the journey.
And he realized then that the Year of the Falling Moon was not about conquest and war, vendetta and violence. They’d only had part of Carnelyin’s gospel. The angry, broken potshards of loss. Those would still come but they were not the message of promise.
No, Frederico realized, this gospel was really about love. A love so strong that it would swim, relentless, at any price. And so piercing that it could be heard in the deepest of dark places.
“You found me,” he said quietly.
And with that Frederico stood, returned to his harp, and gave himself to song.
Copyright © 2009 Kenneth G. Scholes
Books by Ken Scholes
THE PSALMS OF ISAAK
Lamentation (Tor, 2009)
Canticle (Tor, 2009)
Antiphon (forthcoming) (Tor)
STORY COLLECTION
Long Walks, Last Flights, & Other Strange Journeys (Fairwood, 2008)
