Prologue: The Night the Heart Was Lost

On the northern peak of Corvane, the moon turned the color of a wound.

It rose out of the sea slowly, as if it were reluctant, a swollen disc of dark copper that stained the water below it and lit the ashbloom canopies from beneath. The Ahtelan called it the Blood Moon. It came once in a generation, and on that night, by the oldest law the tribe possessed, the High Priestess of Corvane climbed alone to the stone dais where the Aurelith slept and asked the island what it dreamed.

Ixara climbed barefoot.

The path was cut into living rock, and every step of it had been worn smooth by priestesses before her: her mother, her mother's mother, a hundred women whose names were carried only in song. She wore the purple-feathered cloak of her office, and it hung heavy on her shoulders with the damp of the night. In her hands she carried a bronze censer, and in the censer the coals glowed, waiting.

At the summit the trees fell away, and the Heart was there.

It rested in its niche of black stone at the center of the dais, the size of a child's fist, and it breathed. That was the only word the tribe had ever found for it. Every few heartbeats the deep blue light inside it swelled and softened, swelled and softened, and the whole mountain seemed to swell and soften with it. Roots hummed beneath the soil. The night birds, perched in the highest branches, tilted their heads to the same slow rhythm. Far below, in the village, a hundred sleeping people turned over in their beds and sighed.

The pulse of the world, her mother had called it. As long as it beats, we are children, and nothing can hurt us.

Ixara knelt before it and set the censer on the stone.

She took the dried ashbloom leaves from her pouch, dark purple, brittle as old paper, and let them fall onto the coals one by one. Smoke rose, thin at first and then thick, sweet as overripe fruit and sharp as iron. She bowed her head over it. She breathed.

The pain came first, as it always did. A white wire drawn through the lungs, through the throat, up behind the eyes. She held on to it. She had been taught to hold on, to let the pain become a doorway, and when she had held long enough the doorway opened, and the world fell away from her like a cloak slipping off a shoulder.

Darkness. Wind without air. Voices without mouths.

Show me, she begged them. Show me what is coming.

The voices tangled and slid apart. Shapes formed and failed. She saw rain, gentle rain falling on a green island. She saw a feast, and children running, and herself old, with white in her braids. They were pleasant visions, warm and slow and unreal, the kind the smoke gave when the island was content and the future was a long still river.

Too kind, a small cold voice noted in the back of her mind. Too easy. The smoke is lying to you.

She pushed harder. She drew a second breath of the smoke, deeper than was wise, and her heart stuttered.

The pleasant pictures tore.

For one moment she saw a ship. It was black from keel to masthead, and it lay at anchor in the strait with no lantern lit and no flag flying, a hole in the shape of a ship cut out of the night. A man stood on its deck in a long coat. She could not see his face. She could see only that he was tall, and that he was very still, and that he was looking at the mountain.

Then the picture was gone, and a different one swept over her: a child, small and bright, laughing in the middle of a field of fire.

A child, she thought, bewildered. Whose child? Whose fire?

She tried to follow it. She reached for it with all the strength she had.

And the smoke went gray.

Gray and flat and silent, the gray of a sky that has forgotten how to rain. She flailed in it. She called out to the voices and heard nothing back. Her body had grown very distant, a heavy thing lying on cold stone somewhere far below her, and the rim of her awareness was darkening like the edge of a burned page.

I am drowning, she realized. I went too deep.

And somewhere, at the very bottom of the gray, there was a sound.

Footsteps.

She felt them before she heard them, a faint tremor through the stone beneath her cheek. Slow. Careful. Not the footsteps of anyone she knew. They crossed the dais, and they stopped beside her.

Something blocked the red light of the moon.

She could not move. She could not open her eyes. She was lying on the sacred stone with the censer smoking beside her and her cloak spread under her like a fallen bird, and a stranger was standing over her, and every instinct she owned was screaming at her to wake.

Oma. Daro. Someone.

Nothing in her would answer.

The stranger knelt.

She smelled him before anything else. Cedar and cold iron, the scent of a place she had never been: a dry, clean, expensive smell, utterly wrong in the wet green dark of the island. Leather creaked. Cloth whispered. And then a gloved hand came to rest against her cheek, very lightly, as if he were checking that she was still warm.

It stayed there for the space of a breath.

"Forgive me," a voice said.

It was a man's voice, low and rough and terribly tired. It said the words in a language she did not know, but the shape of them was plain, the way the shape of a wound is plain, and she would remember the shape of them afterward for a very long time.

Then the hand withdrew. The footsteps moved away, to the center of the dais, to the niche of black stone.

The pulse of the Aurelith stuttered.

She felt it through every bone she owned: a great, wounded, bewildered lurch, the sound of a heart being lifted out of a chest. The blue light flared once, wildly, and then dimmed behind a cloth. The roots stopped humming. Somewhere in the forest a bird cried out, a single high note of terror, and was answered by another, and another, until the whole mountain was screaming.

And then the singing stopped.

It was a sound Ixara had never heard before in her life, because it had never happened before in her life: the sound of Corvane falling silent. Every voice in the island, the wind in the leaves, the water in the streams, the long soft murmur of the sea against the rocks, went quiet at once, like a congregation that has seen the altar broken.

The smoke released her.

She woke on her hands and knees on the stone, retching, her lungs on fire. The censer lay on its side. The moon was high and red and indifferent. The niche in the center of the dais was empty, and a dull gleam of gold lay beside it: a small, heavy chest, set down very neatly, as a guest might leave a gift.

She crawled to the niche and put her hand into the hollow where the Heart had lain. The stone was still warm.

Around her, the first leaves began to fall.

They came down from the great trees in slow, whispering showers, brown at the edges, then brown all through, and where they struck the ground they cracked like old bones. Below her, in the village, someone began to wail. Then someone else. The sound spread outward and downward, house by house, like a stain.

"Ixara!"

Oma Teyra's voice, from the head of the path. Daro's, behind it, ragged with running. Torches swung into the clearing, and in their light she saw the elders' faces change as they understood.

She did not turn. She was staring out past the cliff, over the black water of the strait, where something very small and very dark was sliding away from the shore with its sails unlit.

She tried to say I saw a ship. She tried to say I saw a man.

What came out of her mouth was a cough of blood-flecked smoke, and then, hoarse and thin, the thing the smoke had left her with, the only thing it had left her with.

"A child," Ixara whispered. "I saw a child in the fire."

Oma Teyra knelt beside her and took her face between withered hands. In the torchlight her clouded eyes were wet.

"The island has twelve moons," the old woman said softly. "No more. Remember that, daughter. Whatever else you forget."

Behind them, the great trees went on shedding their leaves into the dark.

And on the dais, in the place where the Aurelith had slept for ten thousand years, the cold began.