Waning Moon

She did not sleep that night.

She lay on her back in the great canopied bed with her hands folded on her breast, as the priestesses were laid out for burial, and watched the shadows of the window-bars move across the ceiling. The house ticked and settled around her. Somewhere below, a door opened and closed. Once she heard footsteps in the corridor, slow, heavy, hesitating, and stopping outside her chamber for the space of twelve breaths.

Then they went away.

He felt it, she thought. He felt it, and it frightened him.

She touched the back of her own hand, where his had been. The skin still hummed. It was a small, bright, private ache, like a bruise she did not want to stop pressing. She had seen into him for half a heartbeat, through that thin bridge of skin: not his thoughts, which were a locked room, but something under them. A boy, perhaps ten years old, sitting on the end of a bed in a dark house, with his hands over his ears. And a weight, the shape of a grief, pressed down upon the boy like a stone.

He has been alone a very long time.

She turned her face to the pillow.

It does not matter, she told herself fiercely. You have a task. You have eight moons. You have a people who are dying in a silent forest, and a Heart in a glass box, and you are lying in a bed in a stranger's house feeling sorry for the man who put it there.

It did not help.

…

In the morning she asked Mrs. Hatch for a calendar.

The housekeeper looked at her over a basket of freshly pressed linen. "A calendar, miss?"

"With the moon." Ixara kept her voice careful. "I have an interest in astronomy. Miss Odette has been teaching me."

It was not entirely a lie. It was something else she had learned in London: how to tell the truth in such a way that it would carry a falsehood on its back.

Mrs. Hatch's face did not change. But after a long moment she set down the basket, went to a shelf in the housekeeper's pantry, and returned with a slim almanac bound in blue paper. Moore's Almanack, for the Year of Our Lord. She laid it in Ixara's hands without a word.

Ixara carried it upstairs and shut herself in her room.

It took her an hour to learn the English figures. She had begun with Odette's help, a week before, but the dates were laid out in a strange unlovely grid, and the lunar tables were printed in a tiny crabbed type. She traced the columns with her finger. She counted. She counted again. And then she sat very still, with her heart going hard against her ribs, and understood what she had half known since the moment she opened the book.

The moon is waning.

It had been full on the third. It would be dark on the eighteenth of July, three nights from now, as the English counted nights. And the thin moon, the old moon, the emptying moon, was the one that the priestesses called the Gate. For three nights in every cycle, the world turned its face away from the sky, and the unborn stood at the threshold, and a woman who knew the old way could call them in.

This week.

It had to be this week.

She had known it, in the abstract. She had cast the smoke in the hold, in the third month of the voyage, and the vision had come to her as clean and cold as a bell: a moon like a paring of fingernail, a closed door, a child with eyes of two colors, laughing in the dark. She had looked at it a long time. She had not told anyone, not Pike, who watched her with an anxious face, not Jory, who adored her, certainly not the man who had locked her in the sailroom. She had put it away like a coin she was ashamed to spend.

One night.

She said it aloud to the quiet room, to hear how it sounded.

"One night."

It sounded like a prayer, and like a lie.

…

She did not go to him that day. She did not go the next.

She went about the house with her eyes lowered and her hands folded, as Madame Verrier had taught her. She practiced her curtsey on the stairs. She read to Odette, and ate toast, and sat in the garden for the allotted half hour in a bonnet. She was a model of docility. She was a good, quiet, pale, inoffensive ward.

And she studied him.

It was the one thing she had left, in the cage: the long unhurried leisure to watch. She learned that he rose at six and read until eight. That he took his coffee black and sweetened with a single cube, and that he held the cup in both hands, as if he were cold. That he touched the signet ring on his left hand when he was thinking, a quick small turn with the thumb. That he never raised his voice to a servant, and that servants, as a consequence, would have walked into a fire for him. That he paced the long gallery on the second floor at night, up and down, up and down, in a regular stride of thirty-one paces, and that on the thirty-first he always paused, as though about to turn into a door that was not there.

That the door was Odette's.

That on the nights when the cough was bad, he would stand outside her room with his hand flat on the wood, and not go in. Because if he went in, she would see his face.

She learned that he did not sleep.

She learned all of this in four days, and with each new fact she felt something shift in her, a small, treacherous tilting, like a boat that has taken on one wave too many.

You are not here to know him, she told herself.

You are here to choose him.

That was the cruel part. The prophecy had said the child of the stranger, but the old women had been careful about what they meant. They did not mean any stranger. They did not mean an enemy or a rapist or a conqueror. They meant a man who comes in the dark and is welcomed. The Gate would open only if she opened it. The child would come only to a father she had chosen.

And she had chosen him.

She had chosen him in the hold, with the smoke curling in her lungs and his lantern in her face, in the single bright instant when she had looked at his grey eyes and seen a man who would break the world apart to keep one thin girl alive.

It is a fair trade, she had thought, in her fever. A life for a life.

She had not known then that he would be funny.

…

On the second night she went to his study.

She did not go in. She stood in the passage outside, in her night-robe, with her hair loose, and put her ear against the door. She heard him moving. She heard the dry whisper of paper, the scratch of a pen. She heard a muttered word, very low: Odette. And then another, which she did not recognize: Corvane.

Her heart gave a hard knock.

He is writing about the island.

She waited until the sounds subsided. Then, with the delicacy of a thief, she pushed open the door a finger's width and looked.

He was asleep at the desk.

His head lay on his folded arms, and the candle had burned down to a stub, and in the guttering light, with the stern lines of his face smoothed out and his hair fallen across his brow, he looked younger. He looked like a boy. A page of notes lay under his cheek. His hand, ungloved, lay half open on the blotter.

She stood there a long time.

It would have been so easy. A pinch of ashbloom in the brazier, a breath, a whisper, and he would have dreamed of her. He would have woken with her name on his lips. She could have laid it all out for him in a soft purple haze: the island, the Heart, the thin moon, the child. She could have made him want it. She had the power. It was the oldest art of her order, and the one her mother had taught her first.

She put her hand to the pouch at her waist.

No.

It came so sharply that she almost said it aloud. She took her hand away. She wiped it, absurdly, on her robe, as if it had been dirtied.

Not him. Not like that.

It was a promise, and she made it standing in the dark with her heart pounding, in the old tongue, under her breath. I will not use the smoke on this man. I will not lay a single leaf upon his will. If he comes to me, he comes with his eyes open. If he does not come, then I will find another way.

It cost her something to say it. She knew, as she said it, that she was throwing away the easy road. The smoke would have been quick, and clean, and sure. Without it, she was only a woman in a nightgown, with a plain face and a foreign voice and a hundred reasons for him to refuse.

But a child born of a stolen will is a child born of theft, she thought. And the Heart has been stolen enough.

She shut the door as softly as she had opened it.

…

On the third day, she borrowed his books.

It was Odette who arranged it, by accident or by design. The girl sent her to the library for a copy of Halley's tables and told her, with a bright artless glance, to "take whatever you like, Garrick won't mind, he never reads the ones in the gallery." So Ixara climbed the little rolling ladder, in her stockinged feet, and ran her fingers along the spines. Natural philosophy. Geometry. Navigation. A shelf of travels. A shelf of poetry, much worn. An entire row on the diseases of the lungs.

She took down the poetry.

She read it that night by a single candle, curled in the window seat with a rug over her knees, her lips moving over the unfamiliar words. Most of it she did not understand. It was written in a language of knots and mirrors, all thee and thou and alas, and she had to puzzle each line out like a riddle. But some of it was plain. Some of it went through her like a knife.

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

She read it three times.

She did not know that she was crying until a drop fell on the page and spread the ink.

You are a fool, she said to herself. A fool, and a priestess, and a liar.

She wiped her face. She closed the book. She went to the window and drew back the curtain, and there, in the upper corner of the glass, thin and pale and cold above the chimney pots, hung the old moon.

It was a bare curve of silver. A thread. A paring.

Three nights, said the smoke in her blood. Three nights, and then the Gate.

She put her forehead to the pane.

She thought of the ball. Odette had told her, between bouts of coughing and a great deal of laughter: the great ball at the Hall was not until autumn, but there was a smaller one, a masquerade, in aid of the Foundling Hospital, at the Meridian rooms in three days' time. Garrick was to go. The Duke had sent a note. The whole town would be there, masked, in costumes, and Odette was desolate that she could not attend.

A mask.

She turned the thought over. It had a bright, hard, terrible shine.

She could go. In a mask, in a gown, among the crowd, under the roof where the Heart lay beating. She could stand in the same room with Garrick, in the dark, in the noise, where no one would look twice. She could be anyone. She could be no one. If she missed the Gate, there would be another moon, a month on, with a month less to spare. It was not the only chance. It was only the best chance, and the one the smoke had shown.

Just one night, she thought.

Just one.

She drew the curtain. She went to her bed and lay down in the dark and shut her eyes, and tried to sleep.

But the Heart pulsed in the vault across the city, slow and patient and enormous, and all through the house the glasses sang. And in the long, thin silence between the beats she heard, quite clearly, as if spoken beside her ear, the voice of her own mother, a dead woman's voice, dry and tender and implacable:

It is never one night, little bird.

It is never only one.

She turned on her side, and pressed her fist to her mouth, and lay awake until dawn.