Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

  Gently he took her hand. “You ask me that?”

  She’d forgotten what she must look like, covered with soot, blood, dust. Father, she thought. Grandfather.

  And she had to push the thoughts away. Thoughts of her responsibilities now—her family would be up at the Citadel. She really ought to go to them.

  The thought of doing one single thing more made her weep with sheer exhaustion, and Jethan put his grimy hand against her cheek. “Come,” he said. “Let’s get you to bed.”

  The crowd in the Golden Square seemed to be ready to make a day of it, despite the heat. Vendors were setting up carts of sherbets and fruit, impromptu bands were forming, and a cheer went up as palace servants rolled three huge wooden hogsheads of wine to the fountain in the center of the square. More cheers went up: “To the king!” “To the king and his lady!” And, amazingly, words that hadn’t been heard in the Yellow City for centuries: “To the queen!”

  Shaldis hoped Mohrvine was choking.

  “He’ll want to see you sooner than the morning,” warned Hathmar, edging out of the mob with the other Sun Mages around him. “The Red Pavilion is ready for you as usual. Ladies . . .”

  The fragile old Archmage turned to Pomegranate, Moth, Pebble, and Cattail; all of them shook their heads. “Papa’s been so sweet about letting me stay in the palace all these days and nights,” said Pebble, “but the poor dear’s been living on my sister’s cooking. I really must go back and rescue him. It will be heaven,” she added with a sigh, “to sleep in my own bed.”

  “It’ll be heaven to sleep,” declared Moth. “And I don’t care in whose bed as long as nobody wakes me up. Just get somebody to fetch me a litter and take me home.”

  “I’ll give you a ride, honey,” promised Cattail. “Mine’s a double, and it’s on its way.”

  “I’ll be back in the morning,” said Pomegranate, stepping forward to give Shaldis a quick hug. “I had enough people for now, and enough palaces, too. It was Foxfire, wasn’t it?” she added. “That saved the king? You thank her for me. Thank her for us all. Let’s go, Pontifer.”

  As she walked away, Shaldis almost thought she caught a quick glimpse of a white pig, following the old lady away through the crowd.

  But when the others dispersed, Shaldis looked back up into Jethan’s face and saw his blue eyes grave. “It wasn’t Foxfire, was it?” he asked, and Shaldis shook her head.

  “No.”

  He seemed to read in her short reply that no alternative candidate was forthcoming. One eyebrow rose. “Whoever it is,” he said, “the king owes her his life.”

  Shaldis said softly, “Oh, yes. And that’s what I need to talk to him about.”

  The gate porter beneath the Marvelous Tower recognized Jethan and let him and Shaldis through. Shaldis doubted he or anyone would recognize her, in her filthy trousers and tunic, with her long hair hanging in grimy strings and her face and clothing all stained and splotched with soot and blood. The sun dazzled her eyes and she stumbled, and Jethan caught her up again in his powerful arms. She wanted to tell him not to—that she could perfectly well walk—but only leaned her head against his chest, glad that she didn’t have to.

  The Red Pavilion, in its jungles of jasmine, was cool even in the heat of noon, the door a haven of shadow and solitude as Jethan set her down. “Will you be all right?”

  She nodded, and he turned to go.

  “Jethan . . .”

  Blue eyes enigmatic in a face as sunburned and blistered as her own. Black hair escaping from the pushed-back snaggle of turban and veils. Waiting.

  “Thank you. Thank you so much.” She stepped out of the shadow to where he stood in the dappled green shade. “For going to fetch Foxfire—for coming after me in the desert. You always look like you’re thinking I’m such a hoyden and not what your family would approve of; and every time I turn around, you’re there like an oak tree to lean on. Not like Papa. Not like Grandfather . . .”

  I must be tired, she thought confusedly, to be saying all this. . . .

  He said, “Raeshaldis, don’t you understand?”

  She could only look up at him, shaking her head.

  He stepped forward, pulled her into his arms, and kissed her with a hungry and tender violence so utterly at odds with everything she’d known of him that her first instinct was to thrust him away.

  But she didn’t.

  When she woke in the cool shadows of the Red Pavilion the sky outside was just growing dark. Someone was trying to reach her on the scrying stone.

  Foxfire.

  Foxfire with her hair washed and her face clean and prettily painted, but not so prettily as to cover savage claw rakes on one cheekbone and a bruise on her chin. “What happened?” the girl asked at once. “Father was here, just furious. The king is all right? Shaldis, I’ve lost the power! I’ve lost the power to make the spells work, the spells against crocodiles and serpents, though my other magic seems all right. The guard barely got away from the crocodiles and the other one’s in the infirmary now with snakebite. And Father’s blaming Grandmother! They had a shouting match you could have heard clear back in the Valley of the Hawk.”

  Shaldis rolled up onto her elbows among the cushions of the bed. She could already see behind the younger girl that she was in some more luxurious chamber, probably down at Mohrvine’s lakeside compound at Golden Sky.

  “What happened? Did you— Did one of the others—?”

  “The king got through the tests all right,” said Shaldis. She tried to unclaw some of the tangles of her hair and gave it up, and ran a hand over her aching head. “I can’t tell you yet—it may be something that’s kept secret for some time, but I think your father will tell you.”

  If, she reflected, Oryn chose to pass the secret along to Mohrvine. She couldn’t imagine, with Red Silk investigating, that it could be kept long. “Are you all right?”

  Foxfire nodded. “Thank you, thank you for sending Jethan. That’s why Grandmother beat me, for keeping her and the guards from killing him when he tried to get me away. And I didn’t dare do more, because of Opal. Grandmother said she’d kill Opal, but we’re both here all right, because Father was so angry at Grandmother for hitting me, they aren’t even speaking. Thank you so much for trying to help.”

  “Do you still want to be helped?”

  Foxfire closed her eyes, as if turning in her mind the love she bore her father and her position as the second princess of the realm. The security of knowing that she had her father’s heart, now that the crisis was past. Then a tear crept down her cheek, and she whispered, “Everything’s fine now, but there will be a next time. I don’t know what it will be about, but I know Papa. There’ll be something. Yes. I want to get out of here.”

  “Then we’ll work on that.” Shaldis sat up, drew the sheet around her. “In the meantime, what happened to the old jenny who was carrying your things when you ran away? Did she escape?”

  Foxfire nodded. “The minute Soral Brûl and his riders showed up. We ran in different directions. I hope she’ll be all right. Grasshoppers is a household teyn; she’s never been in the wild. I’ve tried looking for her in my mirror already and I can’t see her. Is that because she’s with you? Or because I don’t know her real name? Do teyn have real names among themselves? That they call each other, I mean?”

  “I think they do,” said Shaldis. “I’ll find her and make sure she’s all right.”

  She folded her hands around the crystal, and let the image die. Some of the men wanted to kill the Little People, Puahale had said, when they realized they too had magic.

  Would they here?

  Faced with creatures who were everywhere, who were not human, whose thoughts could be neither predicted nor manipulated? Some men, certainly, would try to get control of them, as they did women.

  Was that why they’d kept silent about their power all these years?

  For a very long time she sat, gazing out at the last daylight fading above the gold-stained waters of the lake
.

  The light was gone from the sky and she was sitting in the dark when Jethan scratched softly at the archway that led to the stairs. “Are you awake?” he asked. “The king wants to see you.” He was clean and smelled of soap, and was dressed in the crimson tunic, the golden armor of the palace guard. Under one arm he carried his plumed helmet; over the other, the clean white robe of a citadel novice, which he crossed the room to lay on the low table beside the bed. He looked as collected and businesslike as ever.

  Only, when he passed her, and she put out her hand to touch his arm, he bent and very gently brushed her lips with his.

  She thought then, It wasn’t a dream.

  And a long shiver went through her, as she saw the new road that opened before her feet. Change she had not expected, something else—within herself, this time—that could be neither predicted nor manipulated. Her feelings terrified her, made her want to flee. To go back to a time when, no matter how harsh her life had been, her heart had been undisturbed.

  No wonder people wanted to kill that which they did not understand. Shaldis had a quick scrub with water that silent-footed servants brought to the red-tiled bath chamber, changed into the white robe, and braided up her hair. Jethan walked with her to the Peacock Pavilion—the king’s official favorite residence—where all the lamps were kindled, blazing like a giant lamp itself in the twilight. As they approached it, Jethan’s stride checked. He looked around sharply and in the same instant Shaldis smelled it, too: the musky pong of teyn and, almost worn away by sand and the passage of days, the wry echo of indigo.

  For a moment she saw them, crouched in a great tangle of sand-choked jasmine that the wind had torn down from its arbor—three jenny teyn. Two were domestics, one of them white with age and the other big with child. To her astonishment she recognized Five Cakes from her grandfather’s household, the faded rags of her tunic still stained with indigo dye. The third was a wilding, small and black and very young. The younger two were watching the Peacock Pavilion and the paths leading to it, but the blue eyes of the old one—it had to be Eleven Grasshoppers—met Shaldis’s.

  Those are my sisters, thought Shaldis. Members of the circle like myself. But before she could speak, the three watchers faded away into the shadows of the tangled vines.

  Shaldis had half expected to see the other Raven sisters at the king’s pavilion, and the Sun Mages as well. But the only ones in its latticed lower chamber were the king, Summerchild, and Soth the librarian. Shaldis paused a yard from the threshold, glanced up at Jethan, aware that he had no place in the conference but torn by the unaccustomed sensation of not wanting to send him away.

  He didn’t smile, but his hand was warm, for an instant, on her back, and he said, “I’ll be near.”

  The king got to his feet as she came through the door. He’d clearly spent part of the afternoon in the baths and looked much more himself. To Shaldis’s utter shock, he knelt before her and took her hands to kiss.

  She drew them back, as confused by this as she had been by her sudden fear of hurting Jethan’s feelings. “Wrong hands, Your Majesty,” she said.

  The king looked up at her: hair newly curled, earrings and necklaces that matched his rings, like a giant blossom of color and perfume, with the eyes of a man who’s waded into a pool of crocodiles without the hope that any magic was there to protect him.

  The eyes of a man who’s put himself completely in the hands of the gods.

  “Oh, please don’t tell me that, my dear child,” he said, rising rather stiffly and bending to kiss her hand anyway. “In spite of everything you’d told me, when I came up out of the pool and saw you I dared to hope that somehow you’d put together some kind of spell. It was the only thing that got me through the serpents and the maze. Don’t tell me the gods really care that much who’s king?”

  “They care,” said Shaldis softly. “But they send messengers dressed in clothing we don’t expect. You’re not going to like this, Your Majesty—you’re not going to like what it’s going to mean for the realm. You were saved by the teyn.”

  King Oryn looked at her blankly, for a moment literally not understanding. “But the teyn don’t . . .” he began. And then, his eyes changing, “Are you sure?”

  Shaldis nodded.

  He drew in his breath, let it out, and said, “Oh, dear.”

  And in his silence Shaldis saw every slave compound and field gang that kept the mines, the farms, the economy of the realm running. Saw the digging gangs of the aqueduct and the sweepers of every courtyard in the city. “Dear gods,” sighed the king at last, “and I thought we’d had trouble with women coming to power.”

  From the divan where she lay, Summerchild said, “Tell us about it, darling. How did you learn this? And when did this power come to them? When it came to us? To the women? Is it only the jennies or the males as well?”

  “I think only the jennies, and I don’t know how many of them. I should have suspected last spring, when the mad wizard Aktis was killing Raven sisters to raise power. He killed a jenny teyn, you remember. But—”

  Summerchild’s head turned. At the same instant Shaldis smelled the unmistakable animal scent of teyn and, turning herself, saw framed in the archway the three jennies she’d glimpsed in the garden: Eleven Grasshoppers, Five Cakes, and the little black wilding. They waited, silently, between the darkness and the lamplight, their slit-pupiled blue eyes reflecting the glow like beasts’.

  Then the king crossed the room to them and knelt, as he had knelt to Raeshaldis, and kissed Eleven Grasshoppers’s hands.

  The little jenny looked down at him solemnly, put her knotted hands around his face, and brushed his forehead with her nose and lips.

  The wilding jenny made a clicking sound with her lips. From the scented garden bed a snake crawled, a little brown fruit asp, one of the deadliest. The king got hastily to his feet and stepped back, and Shaldis could have sworn Eleven Grasshoppers almost smiled. But the old teyn only made a small movement with her finger, and the asp coiled itself into a neat circle and hid its head.

  Then Eleven Grasshoppers met the king’s eyes again, as if saying, You see?

  He replied, “Yes. I see. And I thank you, more than words can ever say. And I apologize, for my people, from the bottom of my heart.”

  There was silence, in which Shaldis heard the scrunch of boot leather on gravel and then Jethan’s voice. “You can’t—”

  “Oh, get away from me, boy. I have every right to learn who saved my nephew’s skin and what he plans to do with the power it’s brought him.”

  Steel hissed as Jethan drew his sword. The king’s eyes went to those of Eleven Grasshoppers. The old teyn nodded, obviously without the slightest qualm about meeting her master, and as Oryn called out, “Let him pass, Jethan,” she plucked a lamp from the nearest niche and blew out its flame. So much for the old tale that teyn are afraid of fire, thought Shaldis. As Mohrvine stepped through the door, Eleven Grasshoppers set the lamp on the floor close to the asp. She looked at the king, then looked at the lamp.

  Flame rekindled on the wick.

  Summerchild said, “You will have to free them. All of them.”

  The king said, “I know.”

  Transfixed, Mohrvine whispered, “Dear gods.”

  The teyn regarded him in silence. Shaldis found herself wondering what kind of information they passed among themselves—and by what means—about the lords who for over a thousand years had enslaved them in the Valley of the Lakes. They had quite clearly known who to save and when.

  The king made no reply.

  Mohrvine’s voice was hoarse. “You dare not!”

  The king held out his hand in silence. Eleven Grasshoppers picked up the asp and placed it in his palm. The little snake, whose bite killed in minutes, wrapped its brown tail around the plump bejeweled wrist and laid its head, tongue flicking contentedly, on the king’s hand.

  “I dare not not dare,” replied Oryn softly. He moved to hand the snake to his uncle—Mohrvine ba
cked quickly away.

  “I came to ask you, Nephew—now that you are favored by the gods—what you plan to do about the increasing escapes of the teyn. And I must say I was ready for almost anything—except this.” And he gestured at the teyn in shocked disgust. “And I can promise you that magic or not—and they do seem to have power of a sort—if you attempt to free them, if you so much as touch the property of myself or any of your landchiefs, no matter what opinions about you the gods expressed this morning, the carnage that swept through the Bazaar District last night will be nothing to the rioting that will break out.”

  Mohrvine turned in a great swirl of white cloak, as if to make an exit, but the king’s voice stopped him. “That is why I need your help, Uncle. Your help, your example, and your wisdom.”

  Mohrvine looked back at him, no expression in his turquoise eyes.

  “I have seen and fought the teyn in the desert, Uncle, and they fought like a trained army. We have no idea how they communicate or what they know. And if, after today, you think we can keep the teyn enslaved in spite of the debt that I personally owe them—and in spite of what they now must all know about their own power—all I have to say is that the attempt had better work the first time and keep on working infallibly. For if we now attempt to keep them as they have been, we will not have a second chance to win their trust or their aid.”

  Still Mohrvine said nothing, but faced his nephew—faced the beautiful Summerchild and the watching teyn enigmatic as animals—in the angry silence of a man who has no reply.

  “We thought last spring that the world had changed,” the king went on. “We did not know how right we were. The power that protected us is gone. Threats that it had kept at bay for so long we’ve forgotten their existence are now free to rove the earth, of which the lake monsters, bless their simple hearts, and the Eater of Dreams may have been only the first. We cannot now afford to think that anything is constituted the way it once was.”