The Forgetting Moon

by Brian Lee Durfee

  She hung her head, wondering why he was talking to her—wondering what he was talking about. But the tone of his voice was less raw and commanding than it had been yesterday. There was a warmth to his manner that Ava found even more disturbing.

  “Perhaps you too will become one of my elite soldiers,” he said.

  Ava looked up at that.

  “Indeed, it is possible,” he continued. “I can have the Bloodwood teach you sword fighting. Spades can train you with the crossbow—”

  “It’s her who causes it all.” The words spilled from her mouth of their own accord. She cursed herself inwardly for engaging this white devil in conversation. There was a sinking, hollow feeling in her gut now. A boiling rage.

  The White Prince was staring at her, his face contemplative. “Spades.” He nodded. “Yes. You’re right. The others are none too fond of her. She tends to behave poorly when I am not around. She causes deep divisions wherever she goes.” He smiled at her, a widening of his perfect, unblemished lips, revealing teeth brilliantly white and pure. “Smart you are. I can see we will get along as friends. I am unashamedly pleased you have finally spoken. Your voice is like the sound of a harp strung with silken—”

  She slapped him. She didn’t just slap him, but clawed his face with her nails, catching his lower lip in her fingers, screaming as she did so. It happened so fast. It was a flurry. A quick burst of anger. Just one short, sharp slap and scream.

  As he slowly turned his face back to hers, there was genuine surprise and hurt in his eyes. She glared at him, defiant, half-stunned at what she had done. He would surely kill her now. Blood trickled from a split in his lip.

  With extreme delicacy, the White Prince lifted his hand to his reddened cheek, feeling it, working his jaw up and down as if her slap had truly caused him injury. As he moved his jaw, one thin, pale finger caught a bit of the blood from his split lip. He jerked his hand away from his face as if his own fingers had just stung him. His eyes widened at the smear of red on his hand. The transformation that came over his face was unexpected.

  “My blood,” he whispered, then whirled, and ran out of the room.

  And just like that, Ava was left alone—and utterly confused. She sank down on the bench at the end of Aeros’ bed, heart thumping. She thought of fleeing. But she was certain her head would be on a stake in front of the prisoner tent if she did. Still, her instinct to escape was strong. She began formulating a plan but realized that the Bloodwood was more than likely still outside. Gault was outside the tent too. Perhaps she could tell the bald knight with the kind blue eyes what had happened and he would . . . No, he would do nothing for me. She was trapped here. And death was closing in.

  Staying rooted to the bench, she scanned the room for a weapon, eyes coming to rest on the bed behind her. The mattress was thick, with four intricately carved posts rising from floor to ceiling. A white silken canopy was stretched over the entire affair. It was grand. A family of ten could stretch out on it comfortably.

  There were sounds coming from the room next to her—water sloshing in a stone basin. That the White Prince had shown such an aversion to his own blood was disconcerting on many levels. She smiled inwardly, knowing she had at least caused him some discomfort. If she were to die, at least she had drawn blood from the enemy.

  When Aeros returned, he came bearing a goblet of wine. “I only meant to bring you into my tent and allow you a little respite from your recent travails,” he said, holding forth the goblet. “I insist you drink this.”

  Ava decided that nothing he could do or say would scare her. Her eyes traveled from the goblet to his face. The split on his lip was scarcely noticeable, just a trifle swollen was all. There was an odd, yet familiar, look in Aeros’ dark eyes now. And she was startled to realize that she had seen this very same look before. It was this longing, wanton look in men that sickened her. But in that look was revealed many other things as well. The White Prince wished her no harm. He wasn’t going to kill her. At least not yet.

  Tentatively, she reached out and took the goblet of wine from him. The wine’s flavor was glorious to her dry tongue. She drank it down slowly, savoring each drop. Her eyes remained on Aeros, standing above her, pale and silent. Then his milky-white visage grew ever so blurry, and she felt the cup drop from her limp hand.

  Ava knew she’d been wrong. He had just poisoned her.

  “You don’t snore.” Aeros was sitting on the bed next to her. “It’s as if by merely watching your face I can see your dreams. As if I can hear the longings of your heart just from its soft beating. I could watch you lie there for days.”

  “How long was I asleep?” she asked groggily, unsure of where she was.

  “It was Royal Bedlam I put in your wine. A sleeping draught. It lasts but a while. Wyn Darrè nobles are notorious for slipping it into the court girls’ drinks and then having their way with them once they pass out. Of course, I’ve killed most of the Wyn Darrè nobles. So you needn’t worry about them. But it will loosen one’s tongue. You will now answer my questions freely.”

  The White Prince moved closer, lying down. He leaned his head on one elbow and brushed back a lock of her hair that had become stuck to her lips whilst sleeping. “You took my breath away the first time I laid eyes on you,” he said, brushing the hair from her eyes. “Had I known what a beautiful creature you truly were, I would’ve raced into Gul Kana. I would conquer all humankind without a slip of remorse just to gaze upon your face but once. You are like a precious gem, a delicate flower.”

  How could he have such a sweet, honeyed tongue yet look on her with such harsh, black, metallic pupils? His nearness was unsettling. She inched away from him.

  “I know you fear me,” he said. “That thought pains me. But soon I will make the world look very different for you, and for your lover, Jenko. He is your lover, no?”

  Despite the Royal Bedlam drug, whatever its properties might or might not be, at the mention of Jenko, Ava did not feel like talking. This was surely a nightmare.

  The White Prince continued, “I’m sure Jenko possesses an animalistic desire to rut with you all the time.”

  Ava drew farther away, hoping she might just fall out of the bed altogether. But it was so vast she found herself still stuck in the middle.

  “Jenko, though full of pride, seems possessed of no great wit,” Aeros went on. “Now that Spades has set her wiles on him, I wager he will have little interest in you. What I mean by that is—I can see you lack experience, if you take my meaning.”

  He sat up on the bed, looking down on her. “Everyone here, soldier or slave, lives or dies upon my sufferance. If we’re to be friends, you’ll soon have to renounce your church and your vicar and sing praises to a new Laijon. You shall be born again under heavenly sessions and enter the covenant of Raijael.”

  Ava’s blood froze. Renounce the grand vicar and the church? The very notion of abandoning her beliefs had never crossed her mind. Belief in Laijon’s promises was all that had sustained her since her parents had died.

  Then she remembered Bishop Tolbret’s fate at the hands of Hammerfiss. The impossibility of his death staggered her. They shot an arrow clean through his holy priesthood robe! With that thought, her faith wavered. She tried to cling to it, reel it back in. All her life she had dreamed of a wedding in the chapel. All her life she had dreamed of a happy life with a man of the community such as Jenko and children of her own. She felt the darkest fears of her heart rise up—and foremost of those fears was that she would now never know love.

  “Just lying there in that simple woolen dress, you look like a goddess,” Aeros said. “Do you not see what a treasure you are? You make every other woman in the Five Isles look unutterably plain. Gault is simply smitten with you. He grows gawky and flummoxed at your very nearness. I see the way he looks upon you. And Spades is treacherously jealous. This is why she’s set her sights on your boyfriend. You seem to have upended my entire contingency of Knights Archaic with naught but your beauty.�
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  Ava barely heard what he said as tears welled in her eyes. Through the fog of her dreams and half-rememberings, she recalled her former life just days before: working in the Grayken Spear, cooking salmon over the hearth, tending to her siblings, carving a turtle for Nail, longing for love and marriage with Jenko Bruk. But most importantly she recalled her faith in Laijon—only moments before it had sustained her. She closed her eyes and prayed for its return. They shot an arrow through Tolbret’s priesthood robe!

  “They all think I am a god,” Aeros said, his tone soft, but far from comforting. “My father, Aevrett Raijael, has raised me as such. But I must confess—and you, of all people, must allow me this one weakness—that I suspect, some days, that I am no god. But they all believe that I am, that I have powers beyond those of a mere mortal. And I fight at their side in every battle to prove my worth. I never lose. And they look to my victories as proof of our cause. Still, ofttimes I fear I am naught but a fraud, that my father’s trust in my divine future is misplaced. It’s hard when everyone’s expectations are so high. I am purposefully willful, headstrong, and ofttimes cruel. Could I be a god? Sometimes I believe there is greatness in me. Somewhere. You will come to see that. My greatness. Come to worship it as the others do. Our heavenly sessions shall be divine.”

  Worship him? Ava wished for his death. Right here. Right now. She would kill him. She had bloodied him once. Though when she looked at his lip, there was no scar where she had raked him—no trace of injury whatsoever. Who was he? That the White Prince had healed himself so rapidly was disheartening, and confusing. How can it be?

  “What type of man are you?” Her voice was but a whisper.

  “I am the type of man who would concern himself about the secret desires of a simple slave girl. I know what is in your heart. For that same desire lives in me, too.”

  “You know nothing of me.” Pure darkness filled her. She wanted him dead. This man before her had done such awful things.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Seventeen,” she answered, unthinking, her mind in turmoil.

  “I’m twenty-eight,” he said. “Not that much older than you.” The flat black pupils of his eyes now possessed a hungry look.

  She recoiled from him. The darkness was creeping in. Some claimed that Laijon talked to them—the bishops swore to it. They said the grand vicar spoke to the spirit of Laijon face-to-face in the temple in Amadon. But it was said that others, the ones full of sin, heard the wraiths whispering in their head. Ava could hear them now. They were sounding deep booming drums to the beat of her heart. She clenched her eyes shut and uttered a prayer to dispel them. She prayed and prayed until the wraiths were little more than a silent breath and a whisper sounding in her head. But even that was not enough, for she knew that these shades could slink and sneak—like cats—evil they were.

  The White Prince was now kneeling on the bed over her. Like a hawk perched in a tree branch, he loomed above—dark eyes a glare, piercing like a raptor. He pulled a thin-bladed knife from his belt. “Your beauty has overwhelmed me,” he said, running the cool steel blade along the length of her arm and up her shoulder. “As a prince, one grows used to stripping the finery off the noble women. Not much excitement in that after a while. What I desire most is to rip the simple, coarse, filthy raiment off the peasantry, particularly the fetching young peasantry.”

  With one hand, he held the knife. With the other, he began to untie the dark leather belt from around his breeches.

  Ava could see the wraiths now, their shape watery, their substance naught but shadow, their movements soundless—their goal to lure her into a realm of eternal darkness and despair and death.

  * * *

  O that King of Slaves, that great One and Only! O that day of his fall! O that we could go back to that day when Mia placed the five stones of Final Atonement into the flesh of his wound. O that we could accompany his body as it was born into the tomb. For when we ventured into that veiled place days later, that great Cross Archaic we found empty. For Laijon had been translated into heaven, the weapons and stones with him.

  —THE WAY AND TRUTH OF LAIJON

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  NAIL

  7TH DAY OF THE MOURNING MOON, 999TH YEAR OF LAIJON

  AUTUMN RANGE, GUL KANA

  As Nail heaved one weary foot in front of the next, the taunting sun did nothing to lessen the cold. As they’d hiked, the clouds had parted and daylight began to filter through the pine and aspen, revealing a wispy ground mist. They’d spent the entire previous day trudging through low-hanging clouds and snowstorms making scant headway, eventually losing the trail altogether. Now he felt like they were completely lost.

  Nail’s mind bounced from one thing to the other, wrestling with problems and emotions he could not fully understand. A lifetime of Shawcroft’s bullying. Shawcroft saving him in the end. Confusion. Death. War. The most traumatic thing his mind was trying to deal with was Gisela. Her death had shaken them all, most especially Stefan. “I should have held her tighter,” he kept saying. “She slipped away as I slept. I should have kept watch. Had I only held her tighter, she’d still be with us.”

  “There was nothing you could do,” Dokie tried to reassure Stefan.

  But Nail knew that Gisela’s death had been his fault. He had fallen asleep and had failed do wake Stefan for the second watch. He had not told the others that he’d found the blue stone in Gisela’s fingers. The stone rode comfortably in his satchel now. Nail was beginning to hate it. And the cumbersome ax—it, too, got a free ride, strapped to his back like the weight of the world. He felt that the ax and the stone were somehow aware of him, knew him, stalked his mind even.

  With each step, the endless hard ground underfoot sent pain through Nail’s legs. He and the others crossed an ice-encrusted stream and encountered another ghost town of sorts—a place unfamiliar to Nail, a dozen small cottages hacked out of the forest, relics of a long-dead mining operation, the small string of stone huts reclaimed by twisting vines and underbrush. Stefan searched each broken-down building for food Nail knew would probably not be found.

  A few miles later, they encountered two other travelers—a leather-clad trapper with a grizzled, dirty look to him, along with his young son, wrapped in a heavy cloak. The trapper guided a sway-backed pony laden with muskrat pelts toward them. These were the first people they had seen since the Sør Sevier knights in the mines. But when the two drew close, they all realized with a shock that the trapper was an oghul and the son a big-nosed, bearded dwarf. Dokie let out a tiny gasp. The oghul was wearing a red quilted cap and a fur cape with a hood over his leathers, his coarse face barely visible under the collection of rough vestments. The dwarf’s bearded face was just barely visible under the hood of his heavy vestment. Dwarves stayed mostly to themselves in the Iron Hills in Wyn Darrè. Nail had seen plenty of oghuls years ago with Shawcroft in the far north near Deadwood Gate. It was rumored there were many oghul communities in the bigger cities like Amadon. And now and then an oghul trading ship would land in Gallows Haven. But to spot an oghul and a dwarf this far south into the Autumn Range was rare indeed.

  Nothing was said between the two trappers and Nail’s group as they passed one another. Beer Mug barked at them. But the squint-eyed oghul just scrutinized their ripped and ragged clothing and dented armor with a gray stone face. The sight of Zane slumped over the neck of Lilly, his armor blackened with blood, did not seem to faze either fellow. But the oghul’s leathery-lidded eyes did widen when he spied the gleaming ax strapped to Nail’s back. He began to hustle his pace away from them when Liz Hen begged him for a bite to eat. The dwarf scurried along behind him.

  “Crookbacked horse turds!” Liz Hen shouted at them before the two trappers entered a patch of pine trees and disappeared. “May the wraiths take ’em both to the underworld,” she moaned. “Witless dribbling oghul arse couldn’t even spare us a scrap. Not even one scrap.”

  So they con
tinued on, miserable, cold, and hungry.

  Thick snow was falling now. They still hadn’t reached the abbey. And Nail was still lost.

  As the afternoon wore on, Nail began to suspect they were being hunted. Beer Mug sensed it too. The dog trotted alongside Lilly, hackles raised at half-mast, ears pricked up, staring off into the trees. Nail thought that even he himself heard things moving around out there. But unlike Beer Mug, Nail knew that the wind and snow distorted sounds, made them more sharp and ominous. As of yet, there had been no sign of the Sør Sevier knights. But Nail knew the men had not given up the chase.

  Soon, the big gray dog was barking up a racket. Lilly snorted and shuffled, causing Zane to cry out as he tried to stay atop her. Nail’s eyes scanned the trees. Thick flakes of snow piled up around them. Everything was awash in white.

  He saw the slinking shape as it emerged silent as a tan-colored ghost from the blinding whiteness—a saber-toothed mountain lion. It came stalking toward them over the top of a pile of snow-covered deadfall, pacing back and forth, its head hung low. The devilish rumble emanating from deep within its throat sent shivers rippling through him.

  Beer Mug growled. The lion roared back in answer. Like the stark rasp of a dull saw blade, the beast’s roar emerged so rough and ferocious that Nail’s heart froze at the sound. But it did not frighten him into complete immobility. He still had wits enough to unsling the ax from his back. It was a struggle, and though the weapon was heavy, it still felt strangely at home in his hands, as if it wanted him to wield it. Nail noticed that Stefan had nocked an arrow to his bow and was taking aim. The lion was loping back and forth now, looking ever more eager to get at them. It’s sure to devour us! The ax quickly grew heavy in his arms. The lion roared again; the enormity of the sound took his breath.