The Girl Who Drank the Moon (12 page)

What if we are wrong about the Witch? What if we are wrong about the sacrifice?
Antain wondered. The question itself was revolutionary. And astonishing.
What would happen if we tried?

Why had the thought never occurred to him before? Wouldn't it be better, he thought, to bring a child into a world that was good and fair and kind?

Had anyone ever tried to talk to the Witch? How did they
know
she could not be reasoned with? Anyone that old, after all, had to have a little bit of wisdom. It only made sense.

Love made him giddy. Love made him brave. Love made foggy questions clearer. And Antain needed answers.

He rushed past the ancient sycamore trees and hid himself in the bushes, waiting for the old men to leave.

It was there he found the paper falcon, hanging like an ornament in the yew bush. He grabbed it and held it close to his heart.

B
y the time Xan reached the clearing, she was already late. She could hear that baby fussing from half a league away.

“Auntie Xan is coming, dearest!” she called out. “Please don't fret!”

She couldn't believe it. After all these years, she had never been late.
Never.
The poor little thing. She closed her eyes tight and tried to send a flood of magic into her legs to give them a little more speed. Alas, it was more like a puddle than a flood, but it did help a bit. Using her cane to spring her forward, Xan sprinted through the green.

“Oh, thank goodness!” she breathed when she saw the baby—red-­faced and enraged, but alive and unharmed. “I was so worried about you, I—”

And then a man stepped between her and the child.

“STOP!” he cried. He had a heavily scarred face and a weapon in his hands.

The puddle of magic, compounded now with fear and surprise and worry for the child that was on the other side of this dangerous stranger, enlarged suddenly into a tidal wave. It thrummed through Xan's bones, lighting her muscles and tissues and skin. Even her hair sizzled with magic.

“OUT OF MY WAY,” Xan shouted, her voice rumbling through the rocks. She could feel her magic rush from the center of the earth, through her feet and out the top of her head on its way to the sky, back and forth and back and forth, like massive waves pushing and pulling at the shore. She reached out and grabbed the man with both hands. He cried out as a surge hit him square in the solar plexus, knocking his breath clear away. Xan flung him aside as easily as if he was a rag doll. She transformed herself into an astonishingly large hawk, descended on the child, gripped the swaddling clothes in her talons, and lifted the baby into the sky.

Xan couldn't stay that way—she just didn't have enough magic—but she and the child could stay airborne over at least the next two ridges. Then she would give food and comfort, assuming she didn't collapse first. The child opened its throat and wailed.

T
he madwoman in the Tower watched the Witch transform. She felt nothing as she watched the old nose harden into a beak. She felt nothing as she saw the feathers erupt from her pores, as her arms widened and her body shortened and the old woman screamed in power and pain.

The madwoman remembered the weight of an infant in her arms. The smell of the scalp. The joyful kick of a brand-­new pair of legs. The astonished waving of tiny hands.

She remembered bracing her back against the roof.

She remembered her feet on the rafters. She remembered wanting to fly.

“Birds,” she murmured as the Witch took flight. “Birds, birds, birds.”

There is no time in the Tower. There is only loss.

For now,
she thought.

She watched the young man—the one with the scars on his face. Pity about the scars. She hadn't meant to do it. But he was a kind boy—clever, curious, and good of heart. His kindness was his dearest currency. His scars, she knew, had kept the silly girls away. He deserved someone extraordinary to love him.

She watched him stare at the paper falcon. She watched him carefully unfold each tight crease and flatten the paper on a stone. The paper had no map. Instead it had words.

Don't forget,
it said on one side.

I mean it,
said the other.

And in her soul, the madwoman felt a thousand birds—birds of paper, birds of feathers, birds of hearts and minds and flesh—leap into the sky and soar over the dreaming trees.

19.

In Which There Is a Journey to the Town of Agony

For the people who loved Luna, time passed in a blur. Luna, however, worried that she might never be twelve. Each day felt like a heavy stone to be hoisted to the top of a very tall mountain.

In the meantime, each day increased her knowledge. Each day caused the world to simultaneously expand and contract; the more Luna
knew,
the more she became frustrated by what she did
not
yet know
.
She was a quick study and quick-­fingered and quick-­footed and sometimes quick-­tempered. She cared for the goats and cared for the chickens and cared for her grandmother and her dragon and her swamp monster. She knew how to coax milk and gather eggs and bake bread and fashion inventions and build contraptions and grow plants and press cheese and simmer a stew to nourish the mind and the soul. She knew how to keep the house tidy (though she didn't like that job much) and how to stitch birds onto the hem of a dress to make it delightful.

She was a bright child, an accomplished child, a child who loved and was loved.

And yet.

There was something missing. A gap in her knowledge. A gap in her life. Luna could
feel
it. She hoped that turning twelve would solve this—build a bridge across the gap. It didn't.

Instead, once she finally did turn twelve, Luna noticed that several changes had begun to occur—not all of them pleasant. She was, for the first time, taller than her grandmother. She was more distractible. Impatient. Peevish. She snapped at her grandmother. She snapped at her swamp monster. She even snapped at her dragon, who was as close to her heart as a twin brother. She apologized to all of them, of course, but the
fact of it happening
was itself an irritation. Why was everyone vexing her so? Luna wondered.

And another thing. While Luna had always believed that she had read every single book in the workshop, she began to realize that there were several more that she had never read at all. She knew what they looked like. She knew where they sat on the shelf. But try as she might, she could not picture their titles, nor remember a single clue as to their contents.

And what's more, she found that she could not even read the words on the spines of certain volumes. She should have been able to read them. The words were not foreign and the letters hooked into one another in ways that ought to have made perfect sense.

And yet.

Every time she tried to look at the spines, her eyes would slide from one side to the other, as though they were not made of leather and ink, but of glass slicked with oil. It did not happen when she looked at the spine
The Lives of a Star
and it did not happen when she looked at the beloved copy of
Mechanica.
But other books, they were as slippery as marbles in butter. And what's more, whenever she reached for one of them, she would find herself unaccountably lost in a memory or a dream. She would find herself going cross-­eyed and fuzzy-­headed, whispering poetry or making up a story. Sometimes she would regain her senses minutes or hours or half a day later, shaking her head to un-­addle her brains, and wondering what on earth she had been doing, or for how long.

She didn't tell anyone about these spells. Not her grandmother. Not Glerk. Certainly not Fyrian. She didn't want to worry any of them. These changes were too embarrassing. Too
strange
. And so she kept it secret. Even still, they sometimes gave her strange looks. Or odd answers to her questions, as if they already knew something was wrong with her. And that
wrongness
clung to her, like a headache that she couldn't shake.

Another thing that happened after Luna turned twelve: she began to draw. All the time. She drew both mindlessly and mindfully. She drew faces, places, and minute details of plants and animals—a stamen here, a paw there, the rotted-­out tooth of an aged goat. She drew star maps and maps of the Free Cities and maps of places that existed only in her imagination. She drew a tower with unsettling stonework and intersecting corridors and stairways crowding its insides, looming over a town drenched in fog. She drew a woman with long, black hair. And a man in robes.

It was all her grandmother could do to keep her in paper and quills. Fyrian and Glerk took to making her pencils from charcoal and stiff reeds. She could never get enough.

L
ater that year, Luna and her grandmother walked to the Free Cities again. Her grandmother was always in high demand. She checked in on the pregnant women and gave advice to the midwives and healers and apothecaries. And while Luna loved visiting the towns on the other side of the forest, this time the journey also vexed her.

Her grandmother—as stable as a boulder all of Luna's life—was starting to weaken. Luna's increasing worry for her grandmother's health pricked at her skin, like a dress made of thorns.

Xan had been limping the whole way. And it was getting worse. “Grandmama,” Luna said, watching her grandmother wince with each step. “Why are you still walking? You should be sitting. I think you should sit down right now. Oh, look. A log. For sitting on.”

“Oh, tosh,” her grandmother said, leaning heavily on her staff and wincing again. “The more I sit, the longer the journey will take us.”

“The more you walk, the more pain you'll be in,” Luna countered.

Every morning, it seemed, Xan had a new ache or a new pain. A cloudiness in the eye or a droop to a shoulder. Luna was beside herself.

“Do you want me to sit on your feet, Grandmama?” she asked Xan. “Do you want me to tell you a story or sing you a song?”

“What has gotten into you, child?” Luna's grandmother sighed.

“Maybe you should eat something. Or drink something. Maybe you should have some tea. Would you like me to make you tea? Perhaps you should sit down. For tea.”

“I'm perfectly fine. I have made this trip more times than I can count, and I have never had any trouble. You are making a fuss over nothing.” But Luna knew something was changing in her grandmother. There was a tremor in her voice and a tremble in her hands. And she was so thin! Luna's grandmother used to be bulbous and squat—all soft hugs and squishy cuddles. Now she was fragile and delicate and light—dry grasses wrapped in crumbling paper that might fall apart in a gust of wind.

W
hen they arrived in the town called Agony, Luna ran ahead to the widow woman's house, just at the border.

“My grandmother's not well,” Luna told the widow woman. “Don't tell her I said so.”

And the widow woman sent her almost-­grown-­up son (a Star Child, like so many others), who ran to the healer, who ran to the apothecary, who ran to the mayor, who alerted the League of Ladies, who alerted the Gentlemen's Association and the Clockmakers Alliance and the Quilters and the Tinkers and the town school. By the time Xan hobbled into the widow woman's garden, half the town was already there, setting up tables and tents, with legions upon legions of busybodies preparing themselves to fuss over the old woman.

“Foolishness,” Xan sniffed, though she lowered herself gratefully into the chair that a young woman placed right next to the herb garden for her.

“We thought it best,” the widow woman said.

“
I
thought it best,” corrected Luna, and what seemed like a thousand hands caressed her cheeks and the top of her head and her shoulders. “Such a good girl,” the townspeople murmured. “We knew she would be the best of best girls, and the best of best children, and one day the best of best women. We do so love being right.”

This attention wasn't unusual. Whenever Luna visited the Free Cities, she found herself warmly received and fawned over. She didn't know why the townspeople loved her so, or why they seemed to hang on her every word, but she enjoyed their admiration.

They remarked at her fine eyes, dark and glittering as the night sky, her black hair shot with gold, the birthmark on her forehead in the shape of a crescent moon. They remarked on her intelligent fingers and her strong arms and her fast legs. They praised her for her precise way of speaking and her clever gestures when she danced and her lovely singing voice.

“She sounds like magic,” the town matrons sighed, and then Xan shot them a poisonous look, at which they started mumbling about the weather.

That word made Luna frown. In that moment, she knew she must have heard it before—she
must
have. But a moment later, the word flew out of her mind, like a hummingbird. And then it was gone. Just a blank space was left where the word had been, like a fleeting thought at the edge of a dream.

Luna sat among a collection of Star Children—all different ages—one infant, some toddlers, and moving upward to the oldest, who was an impressively old man.

(“Why are they called Star Children?” Luna had asked possibly thousands of times.

“I'm sure I don't know what you are talking about,” Xan answered vaguely.

And then she changed the subject. And then Luna forgot. Every time.

Only lately, she could remember herself forgetting.)

The Star Children were discussing their earliest memories. It was a thing they did often—seeing which one could get as close as possible to the moment when Old Xan brought them to their families and marked them as beloved. Since no one could actually remember such a thing—they had been far too young—they went as deep into their memories as they could to find the earliest image among them.

“I can remember a tooth—how it became wiggly and fell out. Everything before that is a bit of a blur, I'm afraid,” said the older Star Child gentleman.

“I can remember a song that my mother used to sing. But she still sings it, so perhaps it isn't a memory after all,” said a girl.

“I remember a goat. A goat with a crinkly mane,” said a boy.

“Are you sure that wasn't just Old Xan?” a girl asked him, giggling. She was one of the younger Star Children.

“Oh,” the boy said. “Perhaps you are right.”

Luna wrinkled her brow. There were images lurking in the back of her mind. Were they memories or dreams? Or memories of dreams of memories? Or perhaps she had made them up. How was she supposed to know?

She cleared her throat.

“There was an old man,” she said, “with dark robes that made a swishing sound like the wind, and he had a wobbly neck and a nose like a vulture, and he didn't like me very much.”

The Star Children cocked their heads.

“Really?” one of the boys said. “Are you sure?” They stared at her intently, curling their lips between their teeth and biting down.

Xan waved her left hand dismissively while her cheeks began to flush from pink to scarlet.

“Don't listen to her.” Xan rolled her eyes. “She has no idea what she's talking about. There was no such man. We see lots of silly things when we dream.”

Luna closed her eyes.

“And there was a woman who lived on the ceiling whose hair waved like the branches of the sycamore trees in a storm.”

“Impossible,” her grandmother scoffed. “You don't know anyone that I didn't meet first. I was there for your whole life.” She gazed at Luna with a narrowed eye.

“And a boy who smelled like sawdust. Why would he smell like sawdust?”

“Lots of people smell like sawdust,” her grandmother said. “Woodcutters, carpenters, the lady who carves spoons. I could go on and on.”

This was true, of course, and Luna had to shake her head. The memory was old, and faraway, but at the same time,
clear
. Luna didn't have very many memories that were as tenacious as this one—her memory, typically, was a slippery thing, and difficult to pin down—and so she hung on to it. This image
meant
something. She was
sure
of it.

Her grandmother, now that she thought about it, never spoke of memories. Not ever.