Dark Moon Daughter

by J. Edward Neill

  “Even if we knew where Grimwain fled, we’ve none to chase him.”

  “None?”

  “Everyone is afraid. An army, I might send, if I thought it would work. But none who know Grimwain will dare face him. Most won’t even utter his name, lest he hear them across the night.”

  “Then you are cowards.”

  “Perhaps so.”

  “A lord, they call you, the most powerful in Denawir,” she dared. “If you willed it, you could change their minds. You could delay this judgment. You could see the wisdom of sparing the warlock…and pursuing Grimwain. You can do these things. And I will beg you if you ask. Will you help me?”

  Tycus faced her. Gone was the tall, terrifying lord of men. His black and gold raiment might as well have been sewn of pauper’s threads, for all his lack of nobility. She recognized him then. From the Undergrave. From the prison pits. I remember. He was just like the others. I lowered the ladder for him. I saved his life.

  And even so, he will not help me.

  Like Daughter, Like Father

  In dawn’s wee hours, as the rest of Aeth dozed, Andelusia descended to her father’s cell. Winter pervaded the old castle. The walls near Aeth’s bottom glittered with frost, the winds from the sea skulking through the windows. Her white shawl streamed over her shoulder, her wooden slippers clapped against the naked stone stairs, and her eyes glittered silver-grey. She darted down the stairs, unseen and unheard, until she reached the bottom.

  When she came to the last door, its four sentinels stood aside.

  “Let her in,” she heard one murmur.

  “As if we had a choice,” another whispered as he opened the door.

  She glided into the shadows beyond the door. The guardsmen barred and bolted the gate behind her, stringing iron chains across it, still afraid of father. The frigid cellar air washed over her. Her black tresses caught a shivering breeze, her shawl fluttering above her shoulders. She minded the cold none. Since leaving the Undergrave, the Nightness had never waned.

  The only light, a pale predawn sliver, slid between the bars of a tiny, iron-barred window. She kicked her slippers off and padded to the room’s center. She saw the bed and the bundle of blankets, and she knew he was still alive.

  “Father.”

  “Daughter?”

  “Yes. Me.”

  He rose beneath his blankets. She heard his iron rings clink, and she saw him peer over his topmost cover. “You came back,” he coughed. “I thought two nights ago might’ve been your last visit.”

  “No. Though perhaps today might be.”

  He sloughed off his blankets and sat on his bed’s edge. He looked as pitiful as ever she had seen him. His patchwork robes hardly hid his knobby, protruding bones. His eyes, only half-open, hung like sad moons in their sockets. Pointless, this exile, she thought. Death is already upon him.

  Somehow, he managed a faint smile. “You have more questions?” He blew a cloud of cellar dust from his sleeve. “All you’ve asked me, all you’ve tried to carve out of my addled old mind, the Thillrians’ work, yes?”

  On most days, she would have stood at the door, keeping her distance with both body and heart. Today felt different. No longer pleased to see him suffer, she took three steps closer. “No questions, not today.” She trembled.

  “Then why did you come? Are you to be my executioner? I’d prefer it that way. No sword could ever end me as quickly as a drop of black fire.”

  “No.”

  “Then what? To read my last rites?”

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  “They held your trial last night.” She barely breathed as she said it. “They have no king, but they judged you all the same.”

  “I should’ve known,” he creaked. “They sent a boy to tell me my fate, only I wanted to disbelieve him. He mumbled through the bars only an hour ago. ‘Cornerstone,’ he told me. ‘You leave tomorrow,’ he said. The poor lad; I think they sent him because they’re still afraid of me.”

  Tranquil, he sat in the sliver of light. Two salted tears welled like raindrops in Andelusia’s eyes. “I have something to tell you.” She stilled herself. “Something not easy to say.”

  “Go on.”

  “I am supposed to hate you. You know that.” Her shoulders sank. “Every day they try to tell me what I should feel, that I should wish you dead because of what you did to me, to Rellen, and to the rest. Many nights I have lain awake wondering what was wrong with me. I asked myself how it was I could let you live. I thought many times to sneak down here and snuff you out while you were sleeping. I would be Thillria’s hero if I did it.”

  “But?”

  “But…I cannot hate you. I do not wish you were dead. It shames me to say it, but I love you, father.”

  Her emotion caught up with her. Her voice lodged in her throat, trapped in place like a pill too large to swallow. “I should have had some wine before I came.” She shivered. “It would have made this easier.”

  “You don’t have to continue.”

  “Oh, but I do.” She knelt before his bed and one of his skinny hands into her own. “The dignified thing to do would be to let them take you away without giving another thought to it. A bloodthirsty carnival, it will be, as they gather to send you away. But what do I care for dignity? Who am I now but a pale reflection of the person I wanted to be? All I have are my feelings, and it would be cruel of me to say that none of them are for you. I know these things, father; you are not as evil as they declare. You never desired the Ur to rule the world. You did everything because of Grim, because of the voices. You lost two daughters, one to death, the other to shadow. You could have sent a thousand hunters to find me, but you stayed your hand, knowing in your heart I could defeat just one. You did not kill Orumna; Grim did. You did not slay any of the people whose faces you used as masks; Grim did. You were a trickster, a liar, but never a killer. You saw the markings on the Ur spire and you felt the same as I did. You were afraid. All of this is true, is it not? I beg you to confirm it. Do not make a fool of my heart.”

  The old man sat in silence for a time. His face had been pale before, but now it went whiter than alabaster. “You are right…” He stared at his shriveled hands. “…and wrong.”

  “Wrong? How?”

  “I never wanted to hurt you, of course. But you give me too much credit. I am a proud man. I am selfish, vain, and worst of all a coward. My dreams did not belong solely to the Pages Black. They were my dreams also, my fantasies. We are of the old blood, daughter. We need no books, no Grimwains to stir the darkness inside us. Though I’m happy for it now, I was angry when you did not share my vision. I sent you into the Nightmare Forest, not because I believed you would survive, but because I was too afraid. So you see, I have no innocence. Were these irons stripped from my skin, I do not know what I would do.”

  She shuddered, but did not let go of his hand. She searched his eyes as though seeking a stray light in a dark, windowless abyss. “Then why? Why if you are so evil did you not loose the Ur when you had the chance?”

  The old man’s gaze fell to the floor, and his fingers slid from her gentle grasp. “A mistake...the only reason.”

  “I do not understand.”

  He smiled a sad, sad smile. “They don’t exist where I thought. They sleep not down beneath the earth, but in the sky, in the prison mankind made for them many eons ago. All those years I believed their tomb lay at the bottom of the world, but no. It is elsewhere, in the moon, the black moon. Look for it at night and you might see it. But perhaps it is better not to look, better not to find.”

  “So you would have went through with it? Had the tower been their tomb, you would have freed them?”

  “Maybe.” He shut his eyes so. “I do not know.”

  She knew what she should have felt. Disgust, anger, horror. But still she did not hate him. She could not. She would not. Strange as it seemed, her heart was unchanged.

  “The Cornerstone,” she said. “They will tak
e you there by ship. They were plotting to have you hanged, quartered, or worse, but Saul suggested exile instead. I hate him for it. I will never speak with him again.”

  “I knew he was the one to be afraid of,” her father chuckled. “Beware a man who reads many books. Far more dangerous than a swordsman. Though I think, my daughter, you shouldn’t hate him.”

  A frozen tear beaded beneath her eye. She blinked, and it shattered on the floor. “You will not last a week in this place,” she told him. “You will freeze or starve. To think of you out there alone should not bother me, but it does. I do not want you to go. I dream of rescuing you, of sneaking down this very night and taking you where no other could find us. This is the reason I came to see you today. I do not believe you deserve this death.”

  The old man lifted his gaze to hers. She expected to see despair, but instead she saw a knowing smile crease the wrinkled corners of his mouth. “Daughter, you do not know Cornerstone,” he said. “You may wish to forgive your friend. He likely knows the truth, which is far more than your Thillrian friends could comprehend.”

  “Truth? What truth?”

  “You understand there are many strange things in the world, so you will certainly understand what I am about to tell you. You see, fair daughter, no one dies in Cornerstone, at least not of natural causes. There is pain, yes, plenty of that. There is the cold, the hunger, and such loneliness that most men cannot bear, but there is no death. Cornerstone, last isle of its kind, is a cursed place, held by magicks as ancient as the Ur. I will not die there. I will remain alive until my mind slips and I wander willingly into the nether, which touches this world through the dark stair in Cornerstone’s heart.”

  “You jest,” she said.

  “No. I will suffer as I deserve, but I will live.”

  “The Thillrians do not know?”

  “How could they? Save for you and I, no sorcerer has walked their lands in many thousand years. They don’t believe in magic. Even with all that has happened this last year, they will find reasons other than the supernatural to explain it.”

  “And now I will be the last. You will be gone, and I will remain.”

  “Don’t be sad.” He took her hand and squeezed her fingers. “I shall remember you. I shall walk the desolate plains, and I shall dwell upon the one thing in life that made me happy. It was you, Andelusia. It always was. I’ve had many children, but only two daughters, and only one as luminous as you. Promise me you will make no move to free me. Leave me on Cornerstone. Leave me forever. Promise me, and do not weep a moment more.”

  “I do. I promise,” she whispered.

  “Good. Good.” He touched her black tresses. “Now you must go. You’ve work to do. You might feel the part of outcast, but you must return to the light. You’ll find no comfort dwelling in darkness. You are as beautiful and intelligent a creature as any in the world. Go from here, live your life, forgive you friend Saul, and do not be ashamed of anything I have taught you.”

  The very next morn, the Thillrians exiled him.

  Just as she predicted, a great gathering of Denawir folk lined the widest street outside Aeth, waiting and watching for their enemy to be taken away. Under a cloud-covered sky they brought him out, his ankles and wrists locked in iron rings, his neck held in an iron collar, as though somehow he might escape his other bonds. Guarded by some fifty men-at-arms, they wheeled him down the street in an uncovered wagon. When the people saw him sitting pale and peaceful, they marveled:

  “Is he really the one?”

  “But he is so old, so small, so sickly.”

  “Why so many irons? Irons are for wizards, of which none are left.”

  Atop a white pony, disguised in a green cloak among the masses, she trailed the procession. Simple folk, she thought of the Thillrians. Better that they never know the truth.

  They took him out of Denawir, Well beyond the city boundaries, they removed him from his wagon and placed him inside a carriage. Six swordsmen sat in the carriage with him, while forty horsemen rose in a great ring around him, armed to the teeth with black iron spears, daggers, and long, cruel swords. She rode no farther than the last of Denawir’s frozen gardens. The crowd, having seen hardly the great nemesis they hoped for, disbursed and fled back to their homes.

  And father goes on. She watched his carriage roll into the fallow fields. To Shivershore. To Cornerstone. To his deserved doom.

  Until he and his escort were but a speck on the dead prairie south of the city, she watched. She daydreamt a last foolish attempt to rescue him, but before her heart got the better of her she led her horse back toward Aeth. No one saw her as she rode, or so she hoped. A slow stream of tears drained down her cheeks. A storm roiled in her eyes. She gazed skyward, and she wondered if what he had told her was true.

  What happens now?

  Nevermore

  The Thillrian winter, for many months colder and darker than any in recent memory, collapsed and died at the threshold of spring. The first signs were the clear ringing of Denawir’s harbor bells and the breaking of the grey cloud cover over the sea. In no other place was springtime’s arrival as magnificent as in the Aeth gardens. The lawns flourished with green seedlings, the vines on the castle walls budded with baby creepers, and every patch of soil not tramped upon by servants or guards began to blossom with the first flowers of the youngling year.

  For Andelusia, the season remained the same.

  Residing in a tower lent to her by Lord Tycus, she batted barely an eyelash at winter’s death. No matter the greening lawns, the weeds sneaking up the walls, and the baskets of flowers lining every sill in Denawir, she lurked in her lofty room, alone and glad for it. She kept her doors locked, her lamps unlit, and her hearth empty. On the rare occasion when she gazed from the window above her bed, she looked only to the sand, the rocks, or the sea, never to the clear blue sky. The brightness of it all injured her. I prefer the cold season, she told herself more than once. Were spring to die and clouds return, I do not think I would mind.

  Tycus had given her the tower to stay in for as long as she liked, but in truth she remained only because she had no other place to go. Without Rellen, she dared not return to Gryphon, and without a family she had no one to run to, no waiting arms to embrace her and shelter her from her darkness.

  “She’s a ghost,” she heard the servants whisper in the hallways.

  “No, a witch,” murmured others, thinking she could not hear.

  During the long, lonesome days, she kept little connection with the outside world. Saul tried to make amends, but she remained as distant as the far and wandering moon, sharing no more than a few suppers a week while allowing no conversation to pass beyond the mundane. She might have liked to spend time with Garrett, for at least he would understand me, but in the dead of winter he had packed his things and left without warning for the Thillrian countryside.

  And so came one night, the warmest of the new year thus far. Dressed in a waifish silken robe and skirt, she dined alone in the King’s hall. She haunted her chair, her moonlike skin pure and unblemished, her sable locks inking the pale flesh between her shoulders. After the poor steward lad delivered her food and wine, he tottered away from her in a stupor, his heart seemingly broken by her beauty, or the doom hanging over my head.

  Her table glowed beneath the light of a dozen fluttering candles, but the room’s corners were dark, draped in heavy shadows. Picking at her food, absent of mind, she hardly noticed when the steward, a bright-eyed lad no older than twenty, returned to her table. Poor creature, she thought. Stuck with serving gloomy me.