Shadow Moon

by Chris Claremont

  SHADOW MOON

  A Bantam Spectra Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam hardcover edition published September 1995

  Bantam mass market edition / August 1996

  SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  ™ and © 1995 Lucasfilm Ltd.

  All rights reserved. Used under authorization.

  Map illustration by Jim Kemp & Anita Karl / Compass Projections

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-3613.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  ISBN 9780553095968

  Ebook ISBN 9781984800039

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Random House, Inc., New York, New York.

  v5.2

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Dedication

  About the Authors

  In the middle of the night, Willow Ufgood rode the back of a dragon.

  It was a dream, had to be. He’d gone to bed quite a bit later than usual after a hard day in the fields. Spring had come late this year, the weather changeable as a courtesan’s costume; when it finally broke, he and the other farmers of the vale had to hurry with their plows to turn the ground and ready it for planting. He was out the door every morning before sunrise and didn’t quit until the night grew too dark to see, sowing seeds of wheat and corn and barley and then checking the condition of the modest orchard of apple trees arrayed in a double row up from the river to form one border of his holding. At the same time Kiaya was busy with her kitchen garden close behind the house, with the herbs and vegetables that would not only grace their own table but bring welcome income at Saturday market.

  The whole family pitched in to help, but the children were still too young to handle stock, and as it was Kiaya’s special gift to charm the green, growing things of the earth, so it was Willow’s to speak to the animals that walked upon it. Occasionally, though, he considered that a mixed blessing—as with today, when his pig decided to behave like a pig and take it into its head that plowing was beneath its station. He couldn’t force the beast—it stood as tall as he and outweighed him by more than he cared to think about—which meant he had to resort to persuasion. The pig, of course, chose to hear nothing that was said to it until it was good and ready, preferring to bask in the sunlight and enjoy a day that felt more like midsummer than spring.

  Willow wanted to strangle the beast. He thought of glazed ham and pork roasts and chops and bacon—oh, how he loved bacon—but he knew the pig wouldn’t take that threat seriously. It was far more valuable to the farm in its present occupation and as breeding stock. In that moment, and only for the moment, the world seemed to shift ever so slightly, turning back on itself a whole year: same field, same situation (though the pig then wasn’t acting nearly so pigheaded), Willow tilling his soil as his father had done and his father before him and so on back as far as memory went in Nelwyn Vale, distracted suddenly by the cries of his children that they’d found a baby in the bulrushes. Such an ordinary day it had been, yet from that point his life was forever changed, and the fate of the world in the bargain. That day he’d rescued the Sacred Princess Elora Danan.

  He found himself walking to the river, crouching by the spot where he’d drawn her ashore. There was a peaceful stillness to water and air that allowed him the full use of his senses, as though every sight and sound and scent stood as an individual, in stark and absolute contrast to its background, rather than being mixed together in a cacophonous blend, as was normally the case. Honeysuckle was sweet, almost cloying, until it gave way to the more delicate fragrance of Kiaya’s rosebushes, winding their madcap, helter-skelter way up and over her arbor. He heard the whine of a mosquito, the deeper buzz of a fat-bottomed bee, the zizzing of a clutch of cicadas, building to a crescendo and fading away, the trill and squawk and whistle of a myriad of birds. He saw a widening circle of ripples, marring the perfect plane of the river as a fish quickly broke the surface to claim the life of an unwary bug. He beheld the pattern and order of life, in all its forms around him, and thought how a year ago that sight would have left him content.

  It still brought him joy, but contentment was a word with an edge that, while it had yet to draw blood, still pressed him deeply enough to make itself felt.

  The pig was up when he returned to the field, shifting impatiently from one foot to the other and glaring at him accusingly, as though it was Willow’s fault this task wasn’t being properly accomplished.

  After supper, when the children were safely tucked abed, he retired to his workshop off the back of the house proper, half-sunk into the ground, so that he had to descend a small stairway from the washroom. Originally, it was where he stored his tools and made whatever was needed in the way of furniture for the house; now, in addition, it was where he practiced his magic. The walls were slabstone, like the house, which gave the whole structure the sense that it was an extension of the natural landscape, rather than something that had been built. There was a hearth in the far corner, for warmth as well as to heat his various concoctions. He had a comfy chair to relax in, on those occasions when his castings left him too weary to manage the climb to the main floor, and a wooden stool by his workbench. Windows for light by day, candle sconces for night. The floor itself was bare, unlike the polished wood planking of the rest of the house, because regardless of season, he preferred working barefoot, drawing comfort and no little strength from the raw, rich earth beneath his toes.

  On the table was the gift he’d been making for the Princess. It was a stuffed bear, a larger version of the ones he’d made for his own children when they were her age. Its fur was golden, to match her hair, short and thick like a tabby cat’s and plush enough for a girl to sink her face into. The arms and legs and head swiveled, so that if Elora hugged the bear it would feel as though the bear was hugging her back. As he’d known from the start, the face had been the main challenge. He sat in his plush, overstuffed armchair and stared, savoring the mug of cider Kiaya had poured for him, and the bear stared back. More than once over the weeks, Willow had been prepared to swear the bear’s expression changed. The eyes were polished crystal that he’d quarried himself; he’d meant them to be green, to match Elora’s, yet in place they appeared a rich hazel, like finely aged wood, the same as his own. The mouth would seem serious one glance, then take on a wryly humorous cast with another.

  The bear had actually been finished the better part of a fortnight, time enough for even a Nelwyn messen
ger to carry it to Elora’s home, the fabled Daikini fortress of Tir Asleen. Willow’s intent had been to present it himself, but nature had little interest in such human desires or the plans that went with them. The time he’d be away would cost him the better part of this year’s crops and that was a loss his family could ill afford. He’d sent apologies and regrets as soon as the weather’s perversities became clear; the bear should have gone with them.

  Yet here it was, sitting on his table.

  He sipped his cider, thinking how quickly it had grown cold, never considering that the cause of the chill might be the length of time he’d been sitting there, and turned his gaze to the hands that held the mug. A year ago they’d been farmer’s hands, and he a proper Nelwyn with improper dreams of becoming a sorcerer’s apprentice. Now he was a wizard, true, and felt the power crackle within him at every beat of his heart. It was part of the fabric of his being, it reached through him and from him to everything he touched.

  “Some power,” he muttered in asperity, “some wizard, who can’t even persuade a pig to pull a plow.”

  He rose to the table as he spoke, reaching out a finger to gently trace a line from the center of the bear’s forehead down between its eyes and over the tip of its nose of black thread to finally tap it oh so gently on its chest, right over its heart. The stuffed animal wasn’t alive, yet he felt from it a sense of…being. As though the act of physical creation had imbued it with a minute portion of Willow’s own spirit.

  “Watch over her, little bear,” he said. “Keep her safe always.”

  He took care not to wake Kiaya as he snugged his way gently beneath the sheets. There was a fresh scent of flowers and sunlight to the cotton, hardly a surprise, since he’d watched them billow in the afternoon breeze as she hung them out to dry. She stirred anyway, sleepily murmuring his name, and to make up for disturbing her, he gently scratched her back along the length of her shoulder blade. She immediately rolled to her stomach, flexing along the full length of her like a cat as an invitation to continue, and so he did, stroking the tips of his nails from the top to the bottom of her spine while she smiled and purred in delight. She drew him to her, one kiss leading to another, returning his caresses with her own, and passion quickly claimed them both.

  Afterward, he thought it would be a long time before sleep claimed him, he’d never felt so alert and wide-awake, but the moment he stretched himself flat, he found himself yawning, fatigue sweeping like a sunset across his back and shoulders.

  He beat his pillow into its proper shape and rolled over onto his side…

  …to behold the whole, wide world far, far below.

  He cried out.

  The dragon laughed.

  A louder shout burst from him, heart trip-timing in his chest more sharply than a quartermaster’s drum beating the call to arms.

  He was nestled in the hollow of a set of shoulders so broad they easily would have fit his entire farm, staring up a neck that all alone topped the tallest tree he’d ever seen. He didn’t want to think of how far the creature stretched in the other direction. Great wings reached out from where he stood, beating only occasionally as the dragon rode the evening thermals, letting wind and air do most of the work of keeping it aloft.

  The ground below was already cast in shades of velvet, dusk having mostly turned to full night, but the dragon soared high enough to catch the last rays of the sun as it dropped beyond World’s End, casting diamond sparkles off the surface of the Sunset Ocean.

  In spite of himself, Willow pushed to knees, then feet, taking hold of one of the double row of dorsal spines—most resembling maple leaves in shape—that ran the length of the dragon’s back, from skull to tail. At this juncture, they stood easily twice the height of a tall Daikini, which made them nearly four times his own, and he couldn’t help marveling at the scale. He knew houses in his village where a single segment would have served as a good-sized wall; the only reason his didn’t number among them was that he’d expanded it to a second story when the children grew old enough for rooms of their own. The dragon’s line of flight put this side of the dorsals in sunlight and even that faint and fading radiance, he saw, was enough to paint the outline of body and wings in continuous flashes of crystalline fire, as though the dragon was formed of the same golden, glowing substance as the sun itself.

  It was a beauty so wild, so elemental, it made him ache.

  No less wondrous was the world through which they flew. Normally, heights terrified him; his wife was far better on ladders than he. Here, though, he felt no fear, and decided that was probably because it was so far a fall, his mind simply refused to comprehend. Or better yet, since this was a dream—has to be a dream, he told himself—there was nothing in it that could truly do him harm, so why not simply stop fretting and enjoy both flight and view?

  “Why not, indeed?” the dragon said companionably.

  “You can talk!”

  “But you can’t fly, so I figure I’m ahead of the game.”

  It was a pleasant voice, with a baritone’s hearty resonance, the kind he’d expect to hear at the Ram’s Horn Inn, telling stories before the blazing hearthfire. The dragon had turned his head all the way around for a look at him, with the same disconcertingly boneless ease of a swan.

  “You knew what I was thinking!” Willow protested.

  “Think more quietly, then. I’ll wager there isn’t a creature within mindsight of your dwelling, Nelwyn, doesn’t know your every secret.”

  Willow flushed furiously, as scarlet as the sunset sky.

  “No one ever told me.”

  “Did you ever ask?”

  “Why should I have? It never occurred to me that my thoughts could be heard by any but me.”

  “Sorcerers…” The dragon sighed, with a bemused dismay that was altogether genuine. “The power to shape worlds and not the slightest sense in some of ’em how to use it.”

  “I’ve been learning!” Another protest.

  “Parlor tricks. As you are more sensitive to the world, little magus, so is the world more sensitive to you. You took up the sword fate offered; you must measure yourself against all those who do the same.”

  Willow was about to ask what that meant when he caught sight of a layer of clouds ahead and gasped with the realization of the dragon’s headlong speed through the air as, an eyeblink later, he found himself passing through the heart of them. There was an instant’s darkness and chill, as though he’d suddenly been immersed in fog, and then they were once more in free and open air.

  “I thought there’d be more to it,” he mused aloud in wonderment.

  “Clouds, you mean? Nope,” and the great head shook back and forth. “What you see is both less and more than what you get.

  “I’m Dineer,” the dragon said. “Calan Dineer.”

  “Willow Ufgood,” was the Nelwyn’s reply as the dragon offered a wry grin with his surprisingly mobile mouth that revealed fangs far longer than Willow was tall.

  “Savior of Elora Danan, Slayer of the Demon Witch Queen Bavmorda. You’ve quite a reputation.”

  “This is lunacy,” was all Willow could find to say to that.

  “Or a most spectacular dream.” The dragon chuckled.

  “The sun hasn’t set.” There was amazement in the small man’s tone.

  “Oh?”

  “We’ve been flying all this while and the sun’s no lower in the west than when we started. Have you somehow magicked time to a stop?”

  “Neat trick, but also one that shouldn’t be indulged in often. Time is like a great river; the more you try to manipulate it, the greater the consequences. And they’re not always the ones you expect.”

  “Oh,” Willow replied, as though he understood, when in fact he hadn’t a clue what the dragon was talking about.

  “We fly at the pace the world turns, which means our position relative to the sun remains constant. If I go slower, it will
drop below the horizon; faster, it will appear to rise.”

  “And when you come to the end of the world, what then?”

  “The world has no end, Nelwyn.”

  “You lie!”

  “Look about you, what do you see?”

  “Water.” He clutched the nearest spine and looked about for a gap he might squeeze through to place himself safely between the line of double dorsals, and thereby block out the view. “What have you done with the land, monster?”

  “Look to the edge of what you can see, Willow. How do things appear? Or are you too afraid to try?”

  He took a brave stance—no giant lizard was going to shame him, the dragon’s chuckle on hearing this wayward thought only making Willow all the more determined—and ruthlessly quelled the trembling in his voice when he replied.

  “The horizon, it’s”—he thought a moment—“curved.”

  “What’s a curve that goes right the way around?”

  “A circle.”

  “And an object made up of nothing but circles?”

  “A ball.”

  “In large, by any other name, a world.”

  Try as he might, Willow couldn’t comprehend the difference right away, and the effort stole the strength from his legs, dropping him to his seat with his back against the dorsal spine, slack-jawed with astonishment and no little awe.

  “You need not take my word for it.” Dineer chuckled. “Mathematics will provide you proof.”

  “That’s Tall Folk knowledge,” Willow told him. “We Nelwyns have our own way, with little use for Daikini numbers.”

  “It’s there, regardless.”

  “Where does it go, Dineer, this water?”

  “To another land, only there this is called the Sunrise Sea. And beyond that land, another ocean. And so on, until at last we come back to where we started.”

  “Are there people?”

  “Domains there, as here, all the Realms of the Veil Folk. Plus what you would call Daikini, in their mad variety. Kingdoms galore, the greatest being Angwyn, which is as far from your home, young magus, as it’s possible to go.”