Daughter of the Moon (The Moon People, Book Two)

by Claudia King

  The hours stretched by in another slow burn of discomfort. Painful and tense, but nothing Netya had not endured before. She tried to keep her right arm still and tucked in close against her chest, but the momentum of Caspian's body bouncing beneath her still sent shocks of pain jarring through her bones. If nothing else, her throbbing wrist helped to distract her from the cramps in her belly that came and went as the night wore on. At some point she had bled again, leaving Caspian's fur and the space between her legs sticky with unwelcome warmth. More than anything, she longed to know why. Why now, after all her visions? At first she had been afraid of having a child. Back then she might even have been glad to lose it. But then she had accepted, embraced, and even come to love the unborn daughter she saw in her dreams. The only answer she could conceive of was that it was her penance for taking Miral's life. If that answer was true, then she no longer believed the spirits who guided her fate were worthy of reverence.

  As she held on to Caspian's fur she forced herself to revisit the moment she had plunged the shard of flint into Miral's neck. It had been no act of anger. She had known what she was doing, and she allowed it to happen. She had wanted it, even, perhaps ever since the moment Miral had killed her friends.

  Why could I not do it before? she thought to herself. Was I just a coward, like he said? Would I have been grateful to see someone else kill him, so long as I did not have to do it myself?

  For an instant, when she had felt the flint sinking into his flesh, it had seemed right. Not good, but... justified. She had taken a piece of evil away from the world, and she had avenged those she thought to be dead. Was it wrong to feel, even in so small a way, that taking a life was somehow satisfying?

  No, it was a terrible thing. It always was, and it always would be.

  Netya gripped Caspian's fur tighter, struggling to reject the person she had become in that dark moment. It was not her. It could not be. Some dark spirit had struck a pact with her soul, taken control of her body, and then stolen her daughter's life in payment for what it had done. The spirits were cruel. It was within their power to do such things. She repeated the thought over and over, and for a time it helped to quiet the turmoil inside her, but as dawn's first grey light began to seep between the trees the explanation started to ring hollow. She had changed. So much about her was different from what it had been just a few short years prior. Perhaps some dark spirit had influenced her, but it had been Netya who struck the killing blow.

  It was all just so hard to accept. She needed Adel's guidance and Caspian's support now more than ever. Then, perhaps, she could come to terms with what she had done, and what she had lost.

  Once the sky had lightened a little Caspian found a safe place in which to ford the river, crossing over to the northern bank and following a small tributary away from the main watercourse. They were headed farther northeast, away from Miral's territory, but also away from their own. It would take a long time to circle around and come back through the valleys they had traversed half a year ago on their way to their new den, but perhaps it was safer that way. The farther they went to avoid the path Miral had taken to reach the valley, the better.

  A light mist hung in the air following the previous night's rain, doing little to alleviate the chill that had crept into Netya's bones. Yet despite the damp, Caspian managed to sniff out a dry nook for them beneath the boughs of a fallen tree, and a few moments of foraging turned up a handful of plump edible grubs to take the edge off their hunger.

  Even though he was clearly exhausted, Caspian did not rest until he had found stones from the river to knap into improvised tools, and while he was working Netya sought out a few pieces of dry wood from which they might kindle a fire. It took many attempts, but eventually Caspian found a stick firm but soft enough to whittle and drive against another flat branch until a coal of wood shavings began to smoulder in the groove formed by his repeated rubbing. With a little help from Netya's kindling they managed to coax a small flame to life, feeding it until they had a fire burning in the dry space beneath their fallen tree.

  They spoke little, too weary, shaken, and drained to do much but remove their wet clothing and curl up together next to the fire. Caspian lent her the fur of his wolf as a soft blanket, but the thought of taking her own animal form unsettled Netya. She was afraid of what her wolf would say to her when she greeted it. The memory of cold, suffocating water was still fresh in her mind, and she had no desire to make her feral side revisit that trauma.

  They slept for most of the day, occasionally jolting awake at the crack of a twig or a rustle of foliage nearby, but their trepidation proved unwarranted. They had heard not a single howl in the distance since leaving Miral's territory, and by now they were surely too far distant for even the most skilled of hunters to catch up with them.

  The sun was starting to dip by the time they crawled out from the space beneath the fallen tree, hunger, thirst, and the necessities of their wounds forcing them to move. Caspian was eager to go hunting, but Netya made him stay put while she bound her throbbing arm between several straight sticks and checked him over for any serious wounds. His side was badly bruised, and after a little gentle exploration with her fingers she suspected that two of his ribs had been cracked, but they had not broken. Much like the bone in her arm, the injury would heal on its own so long as he was careful and kept pressure off it.

  After another long embrace and a kiss on the lips, her male slipped away into the forest to hunt, while she placed a few pieces of damp wood they had dried overnight on the coals of the fire and set out to look for more. It was good to be out in the wilds by themselves. The necessities of survival appealed to the animal part of her, drawing her mind back to a primal place where only the present moment mattered. As long as she was doing something, she could try to forget everything that had happened. The only thing she feared was finishing her task, and sitting alone with her thoughts while she awaited Caspian's return.

  Netya's wandering took her farther northwest, her feet carrying her through the falling red and yellow leaves of the forest until she came to the edge of a sheer cliff. The ground fell away before her, revealing a view so spectacular it should have taken her breath away. Beyond the precipice, evergreen trees stretched toward the horizon, the endless landscape accented with outcrops and lakes and waterfalls all shrouded in a sea of rolling mist. Somewhere far below she heard the throaty, warbling calls of herons. From so high up it seemed like she was looking out over the entire world, a space so vast it went beyond anything she had imagined as a young girl. Her world, once a small forest and the plains beyond, was now immeasurable. She had travelled so far, and still the horizons were endless. No one would ever witness it all. How could they? Even if they travelled for all of their life, there would still be new places to see.

  The sun girl fell to her knees, looking up at the clouds through tearful eyes.

  "I wanted to understand you, spirits," she said. "I thought Adel could teach me, but now I know I never will. How can anyone understand you, you who shape our lives this way? Do you play with us? Is that how small we seem to you?" She curled the fingers of her left hand into the leaves, watching as the wind swept an eddy of red and yellow fragments around her before sending them fluttering off the edge of the precipice.

  She shook her head, sucking in a chilly breath. "Are you even real?"

  The wind gusted again, and below her the land continued to ripple as waves of mist swept over it. But no spirit answered her.

  She felt for the pendant that now rested in its familiar place against her breast again. If the spirits were no longer able to offer her any solace, then she would hold on to the people she loved instead. She traced the faint impression Caspian had burned into the wood with her thumb, feeling the curve of the half-moon symbol. Something about it seemed different. Rougher. The edges of the pendant had become scuffed and uneven in the time Miral had held it. She looked down at the piece of wood, and saw that the side of it was stained dark brown with dry blood
. Speckles covered the rest of the pendant, marring the sun and moon symbol that had once stood out so prominently against the surface. It must have been her own blood, for Miral's would surely have washed away in the river, but to her eyes it looked no different. She tried to scrape some of it away with her thumbnail, but the wood beneath still retained its sickly brown colour.

  Netya stifled a hiccup, staring at the pendant through her tears. She could no longer feel the pure glow of Caspian's love when she looked at it. Instead, she would always be reminded of Miral. Even in death he still tormented her.

  Lifting the leather tie from around her neck, she held the pendant out over the edge of the cliff, watching it drift gently in the wind. Her grip loosened, and with the next gust the strips of leather slipped through her fingers. The pendant made one soft clack as it hit the edge of the cliff beneath her, and then it was gone. Disappeared into the mist.

  She heard paws crumpling the leaves behind her, and then a hand settled upon her shoulder.

  "What happened when you were with Miral's pack?" Caspian said, sitting down beside her.

  Netya continued to gaze out over the edge of the cliff, picking pieces from the edge of a leaf to give her hands something to do. "Nothing that matters," she said. "He did not try to hurt me, though maybe he would have after a while. He wanted me to renounce Adel. To prove that we were weak. To accept that women could not stand on their own without the strength of men."

  "Yet you proved him wrong."

  "Perhaps I did. Though I cannot see what strength there is in killing a person."

  Caspian fell silent for a few moments, joining her in watching the mist make strange patterns across the land below them. "Tell me how it happened."

  Netya shook her head. "I do not want to."

  "You should. I can tell how troubled your heart is. Talk to me."

  "I was cutting meat in his tent," Netya said, her voice dull as she recounted the events without emotion. "He was not worried that I would hurt him. Then the knife broke, and when I brought him his meal I drove a piece of the flint through his neck."

  Caspian looked at her, touching a piece of her hair that was still ragged and burnt at the end. "I know you, Netya. I do not think doing what you did took no strength. It is one thing to kill a foe in battle, when the choice is simple, but you must have thought about it every day you were with that beast. It isn't in your heart to kill without reason."

  "I did not think it was in my heart to kill at all."

  "You are too wise to believe that. Women like you and Adel understand than one evil is sometimes the only way to prevent another."

  Netya sniffed, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. "I used to wonder why she thought I was the same as her. I hated her when I first came to Khelt's pack. I could not imagine the two of us being any more different. But she was like me, wasn't she? When she was younger."

  Caspian nodded, his expression sombre. "More than you know. Had she stayed that way, it might have been her I fell in love with."

  "Will you still love me, if I stop being who I am?"

  He put his arms around her, encircling her waist in a grip as firm as the words he spoke next. "You will not suffer alone like she did, not if you tell me what troubles you. It is more than what happened with Miral, isn't it?"

  Netya clasped his hand, stifling a sob as the cold sensation of loss lingering inside her became warm and hurtful again. "The spirits are cruel," she whispered. "They told me... I put my faith in them, and they punished me for it!"

  Caspian drew a heavy breath. He seemed to sense what was coming next.

  "She is gone, our daughter," Netya shook her head bitterly. "She was the reason I did it. I thought, if only I could live, then perhaps she would too. I kept going because of her. I killed him for her. And then they took her from me!" She cried out in anger, almost slipping toward the edge of the cliff before Caspian pulled her back. "Why show me her face?" she sobbed. "Why so many visions, all this time—they made me care for her! I loved her! Just to take it all away, to make it hurt so much more. I thought I had a destiny." A hiccup interrupted her as she yanked at the burnt lock of her hair. "That is what my dark hair means, does it not? Or is that a lie also?"

  She wept and whimpered, cursing the spirits and everything they had promised her. Much of what Netya said she knew she would regret later, but in that moment she needed to say it. She had to give voice to the pain inside her, loosing it to the wind as her cries echoed off the cliffs around them. Caspian let her go on without interruption, holding her close as she vented her bitterness until she was spent.

  "I just do not know what it was all for," she choked out eventually, her forehead resting against Caspian's chest as she clung to him with her good arm around his neck. "There has to be meaning in everything. I was sure of it. The spirits were leading me somewhere, but now... I feel I am some wicked joke to them."

  "Is it because you are a seer that you feel that way?"

  Netya thought on it for a moment, then nodded. "I am supposed to understand these things."

  "That is a trial many seers face. I think anyone who possesses true wisdom has struggled with it at least once. A person cannot understand the full breadth of life without experiencing it for themselves. You remember how Adel fought to keep Khelt from making war on the people of your village? And when Miral's warriors came, she faced them not with tooth and claw, but with smoke and phantoms. I think she did those things because she has been where you are now. She saw what needless bloodshed did to her father's pack. Though she does not speak of it, I believe she lost more than most people would be able to bear during those days."

  "Then she is a stronger woman than I," Netya said.

  "No." Caspian squeezed her tight, tilting her chin up so that she met his eyes. "I think she must have felt exactly as you do. Strength of the spirit is not ignoring despair, it is enduring it."

  Netya wrinkled the space between her eyebrows as she looked at him. "Are you saying the spirits sought to teach me something by doing this?"

  He smiled. "I do not think the spirits hold all the answers to our lives. Sometimes we must find our own meaning in the things that happen to us."

  Netya's tears had started to run dry, and as she rubbed the soreness from her eyes she found the clarity to think again. What meaning could she possibly find in how she felt right now? Was the lesson that she should not trust her visions ever again? To prepare herself for cruel trickery whenever the spirits whispered to her?

  She shook her head free of the bitter thoughts. No, had Adel not told her there was little truth in premonitions but what a seer made of them? She had never believed the girl in her vision could possibly be her own daughter until Adel seeded the idea in her head. Learning that she was with child had made it easy to believe. She had soon embraced it without question, forgetting everything she had learned about the fickle nature of visions.

  If the girl in the dream was not her daughter, then perhaps it had been Netya herself all along. Similar, but different somehow, in a way she had not understood at the time. A woman changed by the struggles she had faced. More like Adel than some timid sun girl.

  It had been easy to believe that the face in her vision had belonged to someone else, for how could a person like her ever rise to fulfil such a great destiny? Yet as she searched her feelings, she already felt herself a hair closer to becoming such a person. It was not who she was yet, but she could glimpse it now, like the phantom of the mountains on the horizon.

  As she grappled with her inner thoughts the sun sank below the horizon, turning the misty landscape to gold, and then silver as the clouds parted and the moon revealed her face once again. Netya cowered away at first, afraid of meeting the gaze of the moon spirit she had put so much of her faith in. If she chose to believe that the girl in the dream was her, and not her daughter, would she end up having her faith punished again? Perhaps it was a fool's dream, and the spirits were as horrible and cruel as she had suspected. But what good was there
in living in such a world, where all around her she saw nothing but darkness and fear? She wanted her heartache to go away. She wanted to believe that somewhere, some day, she could feel the pure glow of Syr's light blessing her once more. Perhaps Caspian was right, and the spirits held no more power than a person's own will did. If that was true, then by her will she would choose to believe in something good again. She would hope, as she had hoped before, and find her own meaning in what the spirits told her.

  Though her body hurt and her heart ached, she turned her face upward to meet the moon. The silvery light bathing her and Caspian was almost blue, and the shimmering mist below them could have been a thousand faces gazing their way. No white wolf walked at her side, but as the wind gusted she heard the calls of the herons sounding again, and a flutter of wings beat the air as one of the birds alighted on the rocks below her. She stared into the moon, and a glimmer of hope slipped back into her soul as she felt Syr looking back.

  —48—

  One Farewell

  For two days they rested, allowing time for the lightest of their wounds to heal as they hunted and gathered food for the journey home. Netya was grateful for the quiet time she could spend alone foraging while Caspian tracked down prey nearby, no longer so tormented by the troubles that had driven her to despair. The pain of losing her daughter still weighed heavily upon her, and she woke from her sleep often with nightmares of blood and water and violet fire, but the darkness no longer felt like it was crushing her. She had her feet back upon firm ground. The stretch between where she was now and the happiness she had once felt still seemed vast, sometimes even insurmountable, but each day the gap narrowed ever so slightly. She was walking a path, to where she did not know, yet each step she took along it felt better than the last. Once they left their small shelter behind and began to head southeast, she felt that she was embarking on a journey home in more ways than one.