MOON DREAMS
Transfixed, Karigan stepped off the sleigh, her feet
sinking deeply into the snow. A figure rippled within the column of
flame.
“What are you?” she
whispered.
The figure did not
answer, but its radiance grew, spread outward, and though Karigan
backed away, it overtook her until there was only the light.
Everything else, her father, the sleigh and horses, and the
surrounding forest, vanished into shadow. She could not say for
sure she was still in the clearing, or even in Sacoridia for that
matter, though the snow still glared with its reflected
light.
I am weakening, said the figure in the flame; a
woman’s voice, distant, strained. Under siege
... for so long ...
“Who ... who are
you?”
Losing hold ...
“Of what?” Karigan
demanded. What was this? What was going on?
The grove. The figure shimmered, cried out in pain,
and Karigan discerned darkness staining the fringes of the light,
black branches scratching against radiance.
You must come. The voice held a desperate tenor.
You cross thresholds.
Cross thresholds ... The words kindled some memory
buried deep in Karigan’s mind and came to her like the shreds of a
dream: the spirit of a Green Rider, a quiver of arrows strapped to
his back, the royal tombs. When we
fade, he said, we are standing on a
threshold. Something about passing through the layers of the
world.
She grasped at the
shreds of the memory, but it dissipated until she could not recall
even the ghost and was left with only an impression of something
missing. Karigan rubbed her temple. Her head felt strange, full of
cobwebs. “Where is it I must come?”
The figure extended
her hand of quicksilver from the flame, and a globe, much like a
snowglobe, hovered above her palm. Karigan stepped closer to see it
better, squinting against the intensity of the figure’s radiance.
The globe was a blotch of blackness in the light and as she neared
it, she discerned in it the scene of a dark forest of decay and
murk.
Karigan recoiled.
“Blackveil?”
You must help the Sleepers, the figure said, her
voice increasing in urgency. If awakened by
the enemy, they shall be a deadly weapon. She cried again in
pain and the light wavered. I am losing
hold!
“Sleepers? What ...
?”
The dark on the
edges of light began to close around them like a claw. Keep the muna’riel close, daughter of Kariny. It is your
key.
The figure and her
flame sputtered like a dying candle.
“Wait!” Karigan
cried. “The key to what?”
You will recall our encounter only when you are given the
feather of the winter owl.
The figure dimmed
and waned, writhed as though in the throes of some
agony.
“Please!” Karigan
cried. “You must tell me more!”
I ... I cannot hold on, I— The figure screamed and
her flame extinguished.
The world was cast
into a midnight void and Karigan staggered back, her muna’riel
dimming as if in sympathy. The globe that contained the scene of
Blackveil hovered in the air for a moment before rupturing and, for
a single instant, transported Karigan to the forest, its rotten
tree limbs arcing over her, clawing for her, the mud of the forest
floor sucking at her feet, the wild screech of some creature
seeking blood piercing the thick, wet air. Then the vision was gone
and the shattered pieces of the globe cascaded into the snow like
crystals of ice.
There was a sigh
upon the wind and an anguished whisper that came to Karigan from
far, far away: Argenthyne.
Then
silence.
Karigan stood there
in the deep snow of the clearing, the muna’riel glowing on the palm
of her hand. Before she had a chance to grasp the apparition and
her words about Sleepers, thresholds, keys, and Blackveil, or even
the reference to her mother, the filament of memory was drawn from
her so it was as if none of it had ever happened.
“We are nearly home.”
Karigan started at
her father’s voice. The sleigh was in motion, the brasses and
silver of the harnesses jingling. The drays stepped at a good pace,
knowing they were headed for the barn.
“What happened?”
Karigan asked, looking about herself, but discerning little in the
dark.
“All my talk put you
to sleep, I guess.”
Karigan tried to
remember back, but it was all so foggy. They’d stopped in a
clearing. “We were talking about the moonstone.” She patted her
pocket and felt the bulge of it there.
“Yes, and I was
trying to apologize.”
They rounded a bend
and ahead were the lights of the G’ladheon manor house. Her father
halted the drays once more and turned to her.
“No matter what,” he
said, “you are my daughter and I love you. I am trying to be at
peace with the magic. Just know I am proud of you, and of the
accolades you’ve received. I’m glad the king recognizes your
worth—he is a good man, and our land is fortunate to have one such
as he as our sovereign.”
He paused, perhaps
gathering his thoughts, and rubbed his chin. “I just hope you can
one day forgive me for the secrets I have kept, but also understand
why I cannot apologize for the choices I’ve made in my
life.”
Karigan felt
depleted of anger. It was clear he had never stopped loving her
mother, and if he did not exactly like magic, he was at least
trying to accept that it was a part of her life. She did not like
the secrets, but acknowledged all those she kept
herself.
She could not pick
and choose the parts of her father she liked and disliked. His
dealings with the brothel and piracy were part of the same package
as the successful merchant and loving husband and father. All of it
made him who he was.
That’s what love was
about, right? Accepting the bad along with the good and without
condition?
“You and your mother
were always the most important things in my life,” he said. “I lost
her, and I do not want to lose you.”
“I know,” Karigan
said.
They hugged, and
being in her father’s arms once again made her life as a Green
Rider, and all the battles and dangers she’d endured, seem very far
off. She was once again a daughter, finding safety and comfort in
her father’s embrace.
A couple days later,
Karigan stood at the cairn of stones that covered her mother’s
grave. Her father had seen Kariny buried in the old way, the way of
the islands, with her head oriented toward the dawn. Karigan’s
aunts said he’d erected the cairn himself in his grief, day after
day bearing rocks and thrusting them onto the pile. Some were
enormous and she wondered how he had managed it. According to her
aunts, he would accept no assistance, and by the look in their eyes
when they recounted the story, she could tell how difficult it had
been for them to witness his pain.
Karigan remembered
little of it. Only that her mother wasn’t there, and people dressed
in somber colors had spoken in hushed tones around her, and that
all the windows and mirrors had been draped, leaving the house in a
perpetual state of darkness.
The cairn was coated
in ice. In the intervening day since the storm, the sun had shone
bright and warm enough to melt snow, which refroze during the
night, forming a glaze of ice that cascaded over the rocks like a
waterfall trapped in time.
Beside the cairn was
a monolith of granite, as if heaved up from the earth itself. Her
mother’s name was carved on it, along with the inscription:
Of the island born, to the star-lit heavens
embraced. The sign of the crescent moon topped the
inscription, and the face of the rock was carved with a looping
design that reminded Karigan of fishermen’s knots. It represented
continuity, no beginning, no end.
Karigan held the
moonstone in her hand, its light muted by sunshine, but its inner
glow still brilliant. She’d searched the house top to bottom to see
if she could find further clues of her mother interacting with
Eletians, but she found nothing. She guessed everyone had secrets,
even her mother, who took hers to the grave.
She thought to leave
the moonstone on the cairn as a sort of offering, but something
inside her fought the notion. Her mother had meant for her to have
it, after all, and she did not want to go against Kariny’s wishes.
She returned it to her pocket.
Finally she kissed
her fingertips, touched them to one of the icy boulders of the
cairn, and departed along the wooded path that led back to the
house.
She arrived just as
the stablemaster led a groomed and tacked Condor out onto the
drive. The gelding bobbed his head upon seeing her, eager to be
off.
“He’s a fine
fellow,” the stablemaster said as she approached. “I’ll miss him.”
Condor gave him a nudge, almost knocking him over. Karigan
smiled.
Her father,
resplendent in a long beaver fur coat, and her aunts emerged from
the house to bid her farewell. She hugged them one by
one.
“Are you sure you
have to leave already?” Aunt Stace asked.
“I think I’ve drawn
out my stay as long as I can,” Karigan replied. “I must return to
duty.”
“Well, don’t forget
us here,” Aunt Brini said.
“I won’t. Of course
I won’t.”
Aunt Gretta dabbed
her eyes with a handkerchief. “You must write us every
day.”
“Er, I’ll try.”
Karigan grimaced. She was not known as the most diligent of letter
writers.
“Oh, stop sniveling,
Gretta,” said Aunt Tory. She took Karigan’s hand. “Now, dear, there
is a fine young man down Bellmere way, of good stock, whom we
think—”
“No!” Karigan pulled
away from her aunt. “No match-making!” She remembered all too
vividly the fiasco of her father’s last attempt.
“If you turn down
every male we dangle in front of you, you’ll end up like us—alone
and without husbands.”
“I never thought it
so bad,” Aunt Brini said.
“I should think
not,” Karigan’s father grumbled. “With me to support you, you want
for nothing.”
This pronouncement
was followed by sisterly remonstration. Aunt Gretta flicked her
handkerchief at her brother.
“See what I must
endure?” he asked Karigan. “They are forever uniting against me.”
This incurred yet more sounds of disdain. He grinned and handed
Karigan a purse.
“What’s this?” she
asked, knowing precisely what it was by its weight.
“A little currency
to help you get by.”
“But—”
“Yes, I know. You
earn pay for your work, and room and board, but such a pittance
does not help you purchase the occasional trinket.”
“But—”
“And, you never
know, but your aunts might find the right young man for you and
you’ll need something special to wear. With your new title, I
imagine there will be dozens of suitors tripping over themselves
for your favor.”
Her aunts nodded
eagerly at this and Karigan scowled, but she knew it was of little
use to try and return the purse. She’d use some of the currency to
bring her friends treats from Master Gruntler’s Sugary, but most
she’d leave at Garden House. Yes, she liked that idea very
much.
“And here is my
message for Captain Mapstone,” he said, drawing the letter from
beneath his coat.
Karigan slipped it
into her message satchel and embraced him one last
time.
“Take care of
yourself,” he said. “Stay out of trouble.”
“You, too,” she
replied in earnest. She was both sad and relieved to be leaving her
father and aunts. She would miss them, but not all the complicated
expectations and emotions that came with family.
She mounted Condor,
and as they set off, she overheard Aunt Stace say, “Now Stevic,
what is this business about a brothel?”
There was silence,
then a quick exchange of words.
Uh oh, Karigan thought. Her father was in for it
now.
Before she lost
sight of the house at the bend in the drive, she turned to wave one
last time, but no one saw her. Her aunts were clustered around her
father, apparently deep in heated discussion, arms gesticulating
wildly.
Karigan could not
help but smile.
She rode on, unaware
of a winter owl, in its snowy plumage, perched high up in a tree,
watching her as she passed below.