The Scarlet Star Trilogy

by Ben Galley

  ‘Do I detect a hint of jealousy?’ Merion enquired, knowing perfectly well he did.

  ‘Careful, boy. Ain’t discussin’ that with you. I’ll talk to her, see it done right,’ Lurker said, with an affirmative nod. Merion decided to leave him be on the matter, and promptly hopped down from the barrel.

  ‘Tonight, when we stop, once the circus is pitched and the sun goes down, I distract Yara and you talk to Lilain. That gives me the afternoon to talk to Rhin,’ Merion reeled off. A bigger plan has more room for holes, as Rhin always said, when he had prattled on about battles and tactics, of wars fought in the wilds of Cymru, where he was raised. ‘Seems a tight plan, if I don’t say so myself.’

  Lurker shrugged as he shoved himself off the barrel. ‘Hmph,’ he grunted. ‘We’ll see.’

  *

  ‘Are you out of your pea-sized mind?’ spluttered Merion.

  Rhin spat. ‘I could ask you the same question.’

  ‘You think I’m making this up? That I’m mad for suggesting it?’

  ‘I think you’re readin’ crimes into innocent things, is what!’ Lilain butted in. ‘Yara’s probably just trying to put your mind at ease, is all. She ain’t the stupid type. She probably had you figured in a day. All she’s doing is tryin’ to spare you the worry.’

  Merion held up his hands, grasping for silence. His voice was calm and low. ‘Aunt Lilain, you warned me about Castor Serped. I didn’t listen and look where it got us. I should have listened to you. But now it’s my turn to be right, and you should listen to me, before somebody gets hurt again. Yara is hiding something, and trust me, it is not in kindness.’

  His aunt crossed her arms once again. ‘Castor Serped was a ruthless lord and businessman who was nothin’ short of a despot. This is a circus, full of fellow letters and rushers, who, last time I checked, took us in and are helping us head east. I ain’t exactly goin’ to spit in their face because of a few suspicions.’

  Merion dropped his chin onto his chest, and made a strangled whine of frustration. It was about time Lurker weighed in, did his part. He had been sucking on that flask of his again, though Almighty knew where he kept finding the moonshine, or the circus for that matter. He seemed to have made a permanent home out of the stool in the corner of their tent.

  To his surprise, Lurker did indeed pipe up. ‘You’re just taken in, is all.’

  Lilain rounded on him. ‘And just what is that supposed to mean, John Hobble?’

  Lurker was drunk enough to glower right back. ‘You know what I mean: Sheen Dolmer.’

  She gave him the coldest look she could muster. ‘Oh, for Maker’s sake! This is a good place for us. Wake up or grow up, prospector.’

  That resoundingly skewered Lurker. He growled and pushed himself off his stool, storming towards the tent-flap and leaving them with a few muttered curses before he disappeared.

  ‘Please, Aunt Lilain, you have to trust me. And you damn well know how much I hate using that word,’ Merion said, truthfully.

  His aunt fixed him with the same cold stare before his resolve chipped it away. ‘Fine, but I want more proof.’

  ‘Oh.’ Merion wagged his finger as he turned to his small friend, lounging casually against the edge of the table. ‘You’ll get it. Isn’t that right, Rhin?’

  ‘Couldn’t just leave me to it, could you?’ Rhin muttered and shook his head at the ground. ‘Had to boil up with something dark and terrible.’

  Merion spoke between stiff lips. It was about time he spilled a little more of that bitterness he carried, the coldness of disappointment that stubbornly clung to his insides. Wetly fresh amongst vestigial leftovers from the hardship of Fell Falls. He had carried it always, buried deep where things could be silenced for a time. The circus had helped, but now that help had died miserably. Maybe this way he could boil it off, and kill it.

  ‘There are thieves and liars in this world, and they seem to gravitate towards me. Maybe it’s a curse, brought on by riches and the weight of responsibility my father left me. I don’t see how that’s my fault, and you can bet all your Fae steel that I won’t be outdone by it. So, Rhin, tell you what, you give me one chance: you read what’s on Ms Mizar’s desk and decide for yourself. It should be an easy trick for you to pull off.’ Merion wanted to go on, but all the breath had run from his lungs. He folded his arms, and waited.

  Rhin was having a silent conversation with the rug, or a staring competition. In any case he remained quiet. Just when Merion was about to open his mouth, the faerie kicked the dust.

  ‘I made a promise to a father once. I made a similar promise to you. I said I’d protect you, and if you think there’s danger, I’m there. I already failed you once, so I’d better not do it a second time,’ Rhin replied, baring his teeth without humour. ‘But if I look at her desk and I don’t see what you tell me is there, then I’ll not be taking another step down that path. This matter’s over.’

  ‘Fine,’ Merion snapped, striding forwards to extend a hand. Rhin slapped it with one of his, and the matter was sealed. It was refreshing to be able to speak so plainly to the faerie again. Merion had to smile despite himself, and the faerie’s hard eyes. Like old times. Rhin just huffed, but Merion knew he thought it too.

  ‘You two are going to be the ruin of me,’ Lilain hissed, before waving them out of her sight.

  *

  There were no fire-pits that night. No raucous dinner, just a few spoonfuls of soup and a couple of biscuits. There was no point with the next locomotive coming so early in the morning. The tents sat in a broken ring around the sleepy railroad station while the rest of Cirque Kadabra remained packed up on the still-warm rails, glimmering in the light of the fat, waxing moon, which was taking its lazy time across the star-freckled sky. Halfway between half and full, and that only meant one thing. The Bloodmoon was mere days away.

  Every night brought the Bloodmoon closer, and every night Merion thought of it, once his head had hit the pillow. The boy dug around in his veins and in his mind, attempting to uncover any magick lingering there, as though the Bloodmoon might already be working on him. There was never anything but a headache at the end of trying, and Merion found nothing else to do but wonder about it, the colour, the size, the feel … for hours at a time. Each day that brought it closer, the more it filled his thoughts.

  It had caught him by surprise at first. Sneaking up on him like a footpad. His mind would trundle off as the countryside turned to a blur in his preoccupied eyes. There it would be, the crimson moon, waiting to be hummed over, for a forehead to be scrunched. Each mental footpath led to it. Though his dreams were still an amorphous, muddy haze which he could never remember, the Bloodmoon was always lingering low on the horizon.

  ‘Will you hurry up?’ Rhin whispered, buzzing his wings.

  Merion was almost a dozen paces behind. There he was again, drifting off. He flicked a finger at his neck to jolt himself awake. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, jogging forward.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts.’

  Merion pulled a face. ‘Don’t even go there. Come on.’

  As usual, Yara’s tent was detached from the makeshift ring, set inwards and closer to the station. Like half the tents around her, a candle or a lantern burned within. Early nights don’t seem to sit well with circus folk, even if early mornings are called for.

  A score of paces from her glowing doorway, Merion took a breath and smoothed his shirt. ‘Go in the back. I’ll sit across from the desk, on that cushion of hers, so her back is turned. The rest is up to you.’

  ‘How generous!’ Rhin grinned sardonically.

  The boy ignored him, letting him slip into the shadows and melt away into the dust. ‘Show time,’ Merion breathed.

  His knuckles made a dull thudding sound against the tent fabric. ‘Ms Mizar? It’s Merion.’

  There was a shuffle of papers, and then a squeak of a stool. ‘Come,’ she said.

  After the darkness, Merion was somewhat blinded by the bright lantern li
ght. Yara turned it down with a smile, and he blinked away the spots.

  ‘What can I do for you, Master Harlequin?’ she asked. Something in her voice sounded tired, but cheerful enough.

  It took all he had not to look at the desk. In his periphery, he could see a quill in her right hand, but what it hovered over, he had no idea. He did not dare tempt himself.

  Merion pointed to the fat cushion wedged into an angle of the tent. ‘May I sit?’

  Yara cocked her head to one side as she swivelled to face him. ‘Of course, please.’

  The young Hark took his time over arranging his backside on the cushion. He hoped Yara would take it for a different kind of nervousness.

  ‘I wanted to ask,’ he began, once he was comfortable, ‘as long as I’m not disturbing …’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘In that case, I wanted to ask,’ and here Merion took a breath for full effect, ‘to be in the big tent on the night of the Bloodmoon. I want to be part of the show for King Lincoln.’

  It was a play, an act of course, just a bold subject to get her focussed. But that did not mean that Merion was not secretly curious, privately eager to find out more about what she had in store for him, what part she would have him play in Washingtown. Knowledge and power are the best of friends, after all.

  ‘My, my, Master Harlequin,’ Yara mused. ‘The Empire is not backwards in coming forward, is it?’

  ‘I was taught to get to the point.’

  ‘By a wise mother, or a stern father?’

  ‘What an odd question,’ deflected Merion.

  Yara waved her hand apologetically. ‘From an old saying, in my hometown.’

  ‘Ah yes. Shat, was it?’

  ‘Siyat,’ Yara corrected, bending her vowels in that Rosiyan way. ‘Well, Master Harlequin, that is a big question indeed.’

  Merion waited whilst the circus master took a few moments to rub her chin and hum over it. ‘How would you like to be my grand finale?’

  The question was asked so simply and quickly that Merion almost missed it, already poised to parry with a counter offer. Just for show, of course, but there was that old boyishness again, creeping in, daring him to be excited, despite the danger. A moment was spent just blinking, more genuinely shocked than he would have liked. He was glad for it though; a shiver of something at the edge of Yara’s desk tickled his eye. Merion looked around, trying to find some words. His heart thumped.

  ‘The finale? Are you certain?’

  Yara nodded. ‘As I said, Merion, you are our only leech. Lincoln deserves the best we can offer.’

  An authentic question now, all charades put aside momentarily. ‘Do you think I’m ready?’ Merion asked. Out of the corner of his vision, something leapt onto the desk, a quiver in the lantern light.

  A smile curved, prideful in a way. ‘The Bloodmoon will see to that, Master Harlequin,’ she answered, staring up at the coloured fabric that hung, criss-crossed from the ceiling of her tent. ‘Did you know they used to call it the Hunter’s Moon?’

  Merion shook his head.

  ‘It is a very old story. The oldest, some say. No doubt your aunt has told it to you?’

  A sheaf of paper on the desk lifted and fell, as if a breeze had disturbed it. ‘How about you tell it, and I shall interrupt if she already has?’ Merion strained to keep his eyes on the circus master. More paper moved.

  Yara leant back in her chair and twirled the feather of the quill around her lips as she spoke. ‘The very first of us called it so, aeons ago, before we built cities or tamed the horse. Before the first of the kings and queens arrived from the ice, before the First Empire, the Greeks, the Nile Kingdoms. When man and woman were young, and the old gods still walked among us.

  ‘Every year, the blood-red moon would rise, and the people would go out to hunt under its light. They would hunt all through the night until it sank into the dust for another year. They believed it a different moon from our usual, a darker sister, painted red. Once a year, she would win the fight over her silver sister and rise, and we would honour her by spilling blood in her name. The old gods had but one rule, to spill the blood of the hunted on the ground, every drop, to let it soak back into the earth, so that the Hunter’s Moon might be drenched with it throughout the year. Otherwise she may not rise, you see.’

  ‘I see.’ Merion scratched his head and smiled as she paused. The paper had lain still for quite some time now. There were no shimmers on the desk. He quivered behind his polite smile. What are you doing? shouted a voice in his head.

  ‘Two brothers broke the rules, for rules are only made to be broken. You may know their names. The Church teaches of them. One was Cain, the other Abel.’

  Something by the flat bed in the far corner flickered, and Merion almost forgot to answer. He nodded, entwining his fingers so she would not see them itching. ‘They tell a different story, I take it?’

  Yara had heard something. She stayed silent, head tilted, eyes glazed as all focus was directed to her ears. Merion coughed for good measure.

  ‘Hmph,’ she grunted. ‘Rats. This whole town is infested with them, I am told,’ she said. Her eyes lingered on him, too long for comfort, before she continued. ‘Cain farmed the land while Abel kept sheep. When the Hunter’s Moon rose in their twentieth years, their father took Abel on the hunt, but not Cain. Man was not meant to hunt the grass and the leaves, he said. Cain was angered, consumed by jealousy. That night, before the moon sank and the sun began to rise, they returned with a feast. Father sang the praises of Abel as he walked along the road, leaving Cain by the roadside, spurned. Just as the moon was setting, consumed by anger and jealousy, Cain lured Abel out into his fields under the pretence that one of his sheep had become snared. “Over there,” Cain told his brother Abel, and as Abel turned to look where he had pointed …’

  Slap!

  Merion nearly jumped out of his seat as Yara clapped her hands, so fast they were a blur. She chuckled. ‘Cain took a rock and broke his brother’s skull with it. Abel fell to the dust, staining it with his own blood. And Cain, seeing the Bloodmoon burning red on the horizon, was driven by an urge he knew not. He bent to touch his brother’s shattered skull and put the blood to his mouth.’ Yara paused to add mime to her yarn, bending down to the bright rug and then raising a finger to her lips. ‘When he tasted Abel’s blood, he felt the power in it, the power the old gods had forbidden them for so long. He knew then what it meant. And so it was that the rule was broken, and the Hunter’s Moon became the Bloodmoon.’

  Merion nodded. ‘And what happened to Cain?’

  Yara shrugged. ‘Chased to the edge of the earth by his vengeful father,’ she replied. ‘Or so the story goes.’

  ‘So Cain was the first lamprey,’ Merion mused. No wonder they’re such a murderous lot, he thought to himself.

  ‘In a way, yes,’ Yara replied. She got to her feet, and Merion rose with her, eager to keep her eyes on him. ‘The first bloodrusher. The Bloodmoon has held sway over us ever since. Just as her silver sister holds power over the seas and tides, so the red moon holds power over our magick. And that is why, Master Harlequin, you shall be ready. I have utmost faith.’ Yara flashed that trademark smile of hers, and Merion could not help but notice the lie behind it now, like a hyena’s laugh, merry on the outside, but rotten within. She placed a hand on him, where his neck met his shoulder and smiled wider. ‘You will bring the house down,’ she whispered.

  They both heard it. It was impossible not to. A scrape of something against wood. Merion felt his face flush as Yara’s smile faded. He prayed she could not feel the thudding of his nervous heart, prayed that if she did, she would take it for excitement and nothing else. Merion tried on a boyish grin and kept his eyes fixed on hers.

  She would have made lightning jealous, the speed Yara moved. Without breaking her gaze or taking her hand away, she whirled her body around and whipped a dagger in the direction of the noise. A blade, previous hidden away in her sleeve, spun across the tent and buri
ed itself in the wooden table next to her bed.

  Merion’s eyes moved in terrible increments, inching cautiously to where the dagger had struck. He fully expected to see a faerie impaled on it, staring down at its hilt in disbelief and anger, his purple eyes full of blame for the boy. The young Hark felt his teeth chattering and clamped them down, hard, as his gaze found the dagger.

  But there was no faerie. Nothing but a skinny brown rat, wriggling in silent death throes, a silver blade thrust through its ribcage.

  Merion felt the sigh of relief trying to escape from the back of his throat, but he held it back, and shrugged. ‘Good shot,’ he whispered.

  ‘Damn rats,’ Yara hissed, breaking away from the boy and moving to stamp on the rodent. There was a crunch and a muffled squeak, and Merion found himself aching to leave. ‘They sneak and they creep, poking their noses into places that do not concern them. I despise them. Do you not, Master Harlequin?’

  ‘Without a doubt, Ms Mizar,’ Merion swiftly replied, watching Yara pull her dagger free. She flicked the blood from it and slid it back into the sleeve of her shirt.

  ‘So it is agreed then,’ she announced, extending a hand. ‘You shall be our finale.’

  Merion shook it, trying not to wince at her incredibly tight grip. ‘Agreed,’ he replied, and when he was freed from her vice-like fingers, he bowed and made to leave, head spinning. ‘Goodnight, Ms Mizar.’

  ‘And a good night to you, Merion,’ she replied, moving back to her desk and her powder-blue pages. She smiled again as he hovered by the tent-flap. ‘Sleep well, and mind the rats do not bite. We would not want you to catch anything before your big night, would we?’

  Merion shook his head. ‘No, Ms Mizar, we wouldn’t want anything spoiling that,’ he replied, and ducked out into the cold night.

  The young Hark walked swiftly and in a straight line, caring not for anything besides putting Yara’s tent far behind him. His mind rambled around the thud of his footsteps. Gradually, his heart found a calmer beat, and Merion allowed himself to slow. He took a moment to lean against the edge of a railroad platform and listen to the scuttling of rats under the decking. How simple life must have been for them, he thought, discounting of course the occasional dagger rudely bursting through your ribcage. Eat, sleep, scuttle, repeat. No plots, no guises, no games to play. Tough and brief, no doubt, but that was the price of many kinds of simple life on this strange earth. Merion sniffed and looked up at the waxing moon.