Night of the Waning Moon

They did not speak in the carriage.

It was a long drive home. Garrick sat in the corner with his mask in his lap and his gloved hands closed over it, looking at the window, where London slid by in black and amber. Ixara sat in the other corner, with the cloak drawn up to her chin. The wheels rang on the stones. The lamps went past, one and one and one. And between them on the leather seat lay a space of perhaps a yard, which neither of them crossed, and which seemed to grow wider and hotter with every turning of the wheel, until she could feel it like a third passenger.

She had never kissed anyone before.

She had not told him. It had not seemed the moment. On Corvane the priestesses of the Gate did not marry, and did not, as a rule, take lovers; their bodies were the instruments of the Heart, and a girl who had been chosen at seven was taught that what happened between a woman and a man was a sacrament and not a pleasure. She had listened. She had believed it. She had not, until tonight, known that a sacrament could taste of lemon and cold air and the faint rough salt of a man's mouth, or that it could make her knees fail on a stone terrace under a rose arbor, so that she had to hold on to the front of his coat.

He had held her up. He had made a sound, low in his throat, as if he had been struck. And then, the instant the kiss ended, he had let her go and stepped back and put a hand over his eyes, and said in a voice she did not recognize, I'm sorry. God. I am so sorry.

Do not be, she had wanted to say.

But a footman had come out onto the terrace with a tray, and the moment had gone.

Now the carriage turned into Hartwell Square and drew up before the green door, and Tobias came out with a lantern. Garrick got down and gave her his hand. His glove was cool and dry and not quite steady. He led her up the steps and into the hall, where the single lamp burned, and the clock ticked, and the house, enormous and sleeping, folded round them in the dark.

"Odette is abed," said Tobias, in his soft funeral baritone. "Mrs. Hatch sat up with her until ten. She had a quiet night. She asked me to say that she hoped you enjoyed yourselves."

"Thank you, Tobias."

"Will there be anything further, my lord?"

"No." Garrick did not turn his head. "Go to bed."

The footman bowed and withdrew. The door at the end of the hall shut.

They stood alone at the foot of the stair.

…

He spoke first. He spoke to the floor.

"I owe you an apology."

"You owe me nothing."

"I took advantage. I am your guardian by the law, and your host, and you are under my roof, and you have no one else in this country." His voice was low and stiff and utterly miserable. "I should have had more care. It will not happen again."

"Garrick."

"I will see that you are given the east bedchamber, with a lock. I will have Mrs. Hatch—"

"Garrick." She waited until he looked up. In the lamplight his face was bare and white, and under the thin lines of fatigue she could see what it cost him: the jaw set, the mouth clenched, the grey eyes dark and wide and so full of longing that it was almost indecent to look at. "I want to say something. I would like you to hear all of it before you answer."

He said nothing. He inclined his head.

She took a breath.

She had thought, for four days, about what she would say. She had rehearsed it, in the dark, in three tongues. She had known that she could not tell him the whole of it. She could not say I came to your ship to steal back a stone, and to make a child with you, so that the child might be the key. She could not say, the moon is waning, and I have waited for the Gate, and I am here because the smoke told me you were the one. She could say none of it. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.

But there was a thing she could say that was true.

"I have never in my life been afraid of you," said Ixara. "You should know that. On the ship, in the hold, I was afraid of the Bishop, and of the sea, and of what I would find in the city. I was not afraid of you. I do not think I could have been, even if I had tried."

His throat moved.

"I came to this country for a reason that I cannot yet tell you. It is a good reason. It is a heavy one. I have not lied to you about it, but I have not told you everything, and I think you know that." She held his eyes. "I want you to know that what I feel tonight is not part of it. It is not a trick. It is not a spell. I have not touched the smoke since the sailroom, and I will not touch it on you, now or ever. I made that promise to myself, and I made it in the old tongue, and it is the strongest I know."

"Ixara—"

"I am asking you," she said, "because I want to. Because you are the first thing in this whole gray country that has ever made me feel I was not alone. If you say no, I will go upstairs and not speak of it again. I will curtsey to you in the morning and eat my toast. And I will know that you are a good man."

Her voice cracked on the last word. She had not meant it to.

The clock ticked. Down the passage, a draft stirred the curtains of the long window. Beyond the glass the old moon hung over the chimneys, so thin that it seemed almost to have been drawn there with a single stroke of a pen.

Garrick looked at her for a long time.

"I do not know what you are," he said at last. It was a strange, hoarse, wondering voice, the voice of a man speaking to himself. "I have measured you in every way I know. I have set traps. I have written it all down. And I do not know."

"No."

"I do not know what is true."

"This is true."

"I have a sister who is dying," said Garrick. "I have done things I cannot undo. I am not a good man, Ixara. You cannot know what I have done."

I do, she thought. I know all of it. I know exactly. And the knowledge lay in her chest like a stone.

"Tell me to go," she said.

"I cannot."

"Then tell me to stay."

He closed his eyes.

She watched his hands. The gloved fingers uncurled, one by one, and let the white mask fall. It hit the floor with a small dry clatter. He pulled off the right glove, and then the left, slowly, as if he were removing armor, and dropped them on top.

His bare hand came up and touched her face.

It was hardly a touch. His fingertips lay along her cheekbone like a man testing the temperature of a stream. He traced the line to her jaw. He brushed her mouth, where the plum color had been kissed away. His hand was shaking.

"Stay," he said.

…

She remembered afterward only in pieces, as one remembers a dream.

The stairs: she remembered the stairs. The fifteen steps to the landing, and the stern woman in the ruff, who seemed, as they passed, to turn her painted face aside. His hand in hers. The brush of his sleeve.

The corridor: the thirty-one paces that he walked each night alone, which they walked now together, in step, in the dark. She counted them without meaning to, and on the thirty-first he stopped, as he always stopped, at the door that was not Odette's. This one was his. He pushed it open with his shoulder. The latch clicked.

The room was cold, and smelled of cedar and ink and lamp oil. A fire had burned to a red bed in the grate. The curtains were half drawn, and through the gap lay a single bar of moonlight on the carpet, thin as a blade.

He turned her toward him.

"Last chance," said Garrick, very low.

"I know."

"If you want to leave—"

"Garrick." She took hold of his lapels. She was laughing, a little, in a breathless, shaking way, and her eyes stung. "I have waited my whole life for something that was mine. Do not make me wait any longer."

He kissed her.

It was not the kiss on the terrace, hurried and startled and bright. It was slow. It was deep, and careful, and it tasted of every word he had not said. His hands came up and framed her face, and moved down, and found the long row of tiny hooks at her back, and he stopped, and looked at her with such naked, boyish, appalled gratitude that something in her broke open.

"I have never seen a woman undone by a dressmaker," he murmured against her mouth.

"Then you will have to learn."

"I am a good student."

"I have noticed."

The silk whispered. The silver stars slid down her shoulders and pooled on the floor in a small, glittering sea. The firelight caught the planes of his face, the line of his throat, the white scar on his collarbone, which she touched, and which made him draw breath. He was lean and hard and warm, and he held her as if she were a thing that might blow away.

She had expected fear. She had expected the stiff terror of the temple, the cold sacrament of the Gate. She found, instead, an astonishing lightness. It was as if she had walked all her life with a stone on her back, and set it down at last in a quiet room and discovered that she could dance.

The moon's blade lay across the carpet. The bed was wide and cold and smelled of lavender. He lowered her into it like a man laying down a sleeping child, and then, for a long, long moment, he did not move at all, but only looked, with his dark head bent over her and his hands braced on either side, as though to memorize her.

"You are beautiful," said Garrick.

It was not a compliment. It was a statement of fact, offered in the same grave and puzzled tone in which he might have reported the position of a star.

"So are you."

"I am not."

"Be quiet," said Ixara, and drew him down.

…

What came afterward belonged to no one but them.

There was dark, and heat, and the low sound of breath, and his hands. There was her own voice, saying his name in a language she had not known she remembered. There was the quiet creak of the old bed, the warmth of the sheets, the slow gold flicker of the fire on the ceiling. There was a moment of pain, brief and bright and soon forgotten, and the shock in his face when he understood, and the tender fierce Why did you not tell me? and her answer, whispered into his shoulder: Because you would have stopped.

There was a long time after that when neither of them thought of anything at all.

The thin moon crossed the window. The fire sank to embers. Somewhere in the house, a clock struck two, and then three, and the notes fell through the dark like stones into a well. And somewhere beneath them, very deep and very far, in a vault that neither of them could see, the Heart of the Great Forest began, slowly and joyfully, to sing.

…

She woke before dawn.

The room was gray. The fire was out. She lay on her side with her cheek on his bare chest and his arm heavy across her ribs, and for a moment she did not know where she was, or what had changed; only that the world had been rearranged in the night, as a room is rearranged after a storm, and everything in it was in a slightly new place.

Then she felt it.

It was not a pain. It was not a sound. It was a presence, warm and small and utterly new, as if a single candle had been lit in a room she had thought empty. It rose from somewhere low in her body and spread, and her whole skin tingled with it. She lay quite still, with her heart going, and the scent of ashbloom, faint and sweet, rose from nowhere out of the dark.

She had not lit the smoke. She had not touched her pouch. But the Gate was open, and in the thin gray light the air above the bed began to move.

A haze. A violet curl, very light. It drifted up from the sheets like breath on a cold morning, and it gathered, and it took shape.

A child.

Not a baby. Not yet. A small, bright, shifting thing of smoke and light, the size of a hand, with a round head and two flailing arms. It turned in the air above her. It looked down. And she saw its eyes, one grey as rain, one green as new leaves.

It laughed.

The sound was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard. It was high and clear and bubbling, the laugh of a creature that has just discovered the joke of being alive. It rang off the ceiling. It filled the room. And across the city, in the vault under the Hall, the stone answered it, a great, rolling, joyful thunder that she felt in her teeth.

Yes, thought Ixara, with tears running down her face. Yes. There you are. I know you.

I have found you.

It dissolved. The haze thinned and dispersed, and the air was empty again, and the gray light lay quiet on the quilt. She lay with her palm pressed flat to her belly, feeling the little fierce flame inside her burn and burn.

It is done.

Joy rose in her like a flood. For a moment she could not breathe. She had done it. After a lifetime of training, after twelve moons of fear, after the hold and the storm and the long gray road. The first step. The Gate had opened and the child had come, and the Heart would be saved.

And then she turned her head.

He was asleep.

His face, in the dawn, was the face of a man who had not slept in years. All the lines had smoothed away. His lashes lay dark on his cheek. His mouth was soft and a little open, and a lock of hair had fallen across his brow, and his arm lay across her as though even in sleep he did not mean to let her go. He looked, she thought, exactly as he must have looked at ten years old, before the grief.

He does not know, she thought. He does not know what I have done.

The joy went out of her like water through a sieve.

It was a small cold feeling at first. A pebble in the shoe. But it grew. It spread through her chest and down her arms. She had said she would not lie to him, and she had told him a thing that was true and left out another, and it had been enough to lay him down in this bed. She had told herself that the choice was his. That she had not touched the smoke. That every step had been taken with eyes open.

But he did not know what he was choosing.

She closed her eyes.

It was a sacrament, she thought. A sacrament is not a theft.

Is it not?

She did not know. She lay in the cold light with her hand over her womb and a stranger's arm across her body, and for the first time in her life she did not know.

Beside her, Garrick stirred.

His brow creased. His lips moved. A low sound came from his throat, hardly more than a breath, tender and desolate and entirely unguarded, and his hand tightened on her ribs as though to catch something falling.

"Odette," he whispered.

And then, more faintly, in a voice she had never heard from him, a child's voice, lost and begging:

"Odette... hold on."

Ixara lay motionless, with the tears sliding sideways into her hair.

She had come to the city to save her people. She had done it, or begun to. And she had done it in the arms of a man who was, at that very moment, dreaming of the girl whose life he had traded for her island's death.

Forgive me, she thought, to the sleeping man, to the small flame in her womb, to the stone beating in its box across the city.

She did not know which of them she was asking.