The Girl Who Drank the Moon(30)

The madwoman pressed her hand to her mouth, the touch of her fingers as light as paper. She tried to see his face, but he was in shadow. Not that it mattered. She knew his face as well as she knew her own. She could follow the curve of each scar with her fingers in the dark. She watched him pause, unfold the bird, and stare at the drawings she had done. She watched his eyes lift to the Tower, and then arc slowly across the sky and land on the forest. And then look at the map once again.

She pressed her hand to her chest and felt her sorrow—the merciless density of it, like a black hole in her heart, swallowing the light. Perhaps it had always been so. Her life in the Tower felt infinite. Sometimes she felt she had been imprisoned since the beginning of the world.

And in one profound, sudden flash, she felt it transform.

Hope, her heart said.

Hope, the sky said.

Hope, said the bird in the young man’s hand and the look in his eye.

Hope and light and motion, her soul whispered. Hope and formation and fusion. Hope and heat and accretion. The miracle of gravity. The miracle of transformation. Each precious thing is destroyed and each precious thing is saved. Hope, hope, hope.

Her sorrow was gone. Only hope remained. She felt it radiate outward, filling the Tower, the town, the whole world.

And, in that moment, she heard the Head Sister cry out in pain.





17.


In Which There Is a Crack in the Nut





Luna thought she was ordinary. She thought she was loved. She was half right.

She was a girl of five; and later, she was seven; and later she was, incredibly, eleven.

It was a fine thing indeed, Luna thought, being eleven. She loved the symmetry of it, and the lack of symmetry. Eleven was a number that was visually even, but functionally not—it looked one way and behaved in quite another. Just like most eleven-year-olds, or so she assumed. Her association with other children was always limited to her grandmother’s visits to the Free Cities, and only the visits on which Luna was permitted to come. Sometimes, her grandmother went without her. And every year, Luna found it more and more enraging.

She was eleven, after all. She was both even and odd. She was ready to be many things at once—child, grown-up, poet, engineer, botanist, dragon. The list went on. That she was barred from some journeys and not others was increasingly galling. And she said so. Often. And loudly.

When her grandmother was away, Luna spent most of her time in the workshop. It was filled with books about metals and rocks and water, books about flowers and mosses and edible plants, books about animal biology and animal behavior and animal husbandry, books about the theories and principles of mechanics. But Luna’s favorite books were the ones about astronomy—the moon, especially. She loved the moon so much, she wanted to wrap her arms around it and sing to it. She wanted to gather ever morsel of moonlight into a great bowl and drink it dry. She had a hungry mind, an itchy curiosity, and a knack for drawing, building, and fashioning.

Her fingers had a mind of their own. “Do you see, Glerk?” she said, showing off her mechanical cricket, made of polished wood and glass eyes and tiny metal legs attached to springs. It hopped; it skittered; it reached; it grabbed. It could even sing. Right now, Luna set it just so, and the cricket began to turn the pages of a book. Glerk wrinkled his great, damp nose.

“It turns pages,” she says. “Of a book. Has there ever been a cleverer cricket?”

“But it’s just turning the pages willy-nilly,” he said. “It isn’t as though it is reading the book. And even if it was, it wouldn’t be reading at the same time as you. How would it know when to approach the page and turn it?” He was just needling her, of course. In truth, he was very impressed. But as he had told her a thousand times, he couldn’t possibly be impressed at every impressive thing that she ever did. He might find that his heart had swelled beyond its capacity and sent him out of the world entirely.

Luna stamped her foot. “Of course it can’t read. It turns the page when I tell it to turn the page.” She folded her arms across her chest and gave her swamp monster what she hoped was a hard look.

“I think you are both right,” Fyrian said, trying to make peace. “I love foolish things. And clever things. I love all the things.”

“Hush, Fyrian,” both girl and swamp monster said as one.

“It takes longer to position your cricket to turn the page than it does to actually turn the page on your own. Why not simply turn the page?” Glerk worried that he had already taken the joke too far. He picked up Luna in his four arms and positioned her at the top of his top right shoulder. She rolled her eyes and climbed back down.

“Because then there wouldn’t be a cricket.” Luna’s chest felt prickly. Her whole body felt prickly. She had been prickly all day. “Where is Grandmama?” she asked.

“You know where she is,” Glerk said. “She will be back next week.”

“I dislike next week. I wish she was back today.”

“The Poet tells us that impatience belongs to small things—fleas, tadpoles, and fruit flies. You, my love, are ever so much more than a fruit fly.”

“I dislike the Poet as well. He can boil his head.”

These words cut Glerk to his core. He pressed his four hands to his heart and fell down heavily upon his great bottom, curling his tail around his body in a protective gesture. “What a thing to say.”