The Girl Who Drank the Moon(35)

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.



Later 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.



When 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.