The Girl Who Drank the Moon(50)

And so he put a stop to it.

He called himself the girl’s guardian and bound their destinies together. This, too, had consequences.

Zosimos warned the other scholars about the scheming of their colleague, the Sorrow Eater. Every day, her power increased. Every day, her influence widened. The warnings of old Zosimos fell on deaf ears. The old man wrote her name with a shiver of fear.

(Luna, standing in that room reading the story, surrounded by those papers, shivered, too.)

And the girl grew. And her powers increased. And she was impulsive and sometimes self-centered, as children often are. And she didn’t notice when the wizard who loved her—her beloved Zosimos—began slowly withering away. Aging. Weakening. No one noticed. Until it was too late.

“We only hope,” the papers whispered in Luna’s ear, “that when she meets the Sorrow Eater again, our girl is older, stronger, and more sure of herself. We only hope that, after our sacrifice, she will know what to do.”

“But who?” Luna asked them. “Who was the girl? Can I warn her?”

“Oh,” the papers said as they quivered in the air. “We thought we told you already. Her name is Xan.”





28.


In Which Several People Go into the Woods





Xan sat by the fireplace, twisting her apron this way and that until it was all in knots.

There was something in the air. She could feel it. And something underground—a buzzing, rumbling, irritated something. She could feel that, too.

Her back hurt. Her hands hurt. Her knees and her hips and her elbows and her ankles and each bone in her swollen feet hurt and hurt and hurt. As each click, each pulse, each second pulled them closer to that point on the gears of Luna’s life when every hand pointed toward thirteen, Xan could feel herself thinning, shrinking, fading. She was as light and as fragile as paper.

Paper, she thought. My life is made of paper. Paper birds. Paper maps. Paper books. Paper journals. Paper words and paper thoughts. Everything fades and shreds and crinkles away to nothing. She could remember Zosimos—dear Zosimos! How close did he seem to her now!—leaning over his stacks of paper with six candles burning brightly around the perimeter of his desk, scratching his knowledge into the rough, clean space.

My life was written on paper and preserved on paper—all those bloody scholars scratching their notes and their thoughts and their observations. If I had died, they would have inscribed my demise on paper and never shed a tear. And here is Luna, the same as I was. And here am I holding on to the one word that could explain everything, and the girl cannot read it or even hear it.

It wasn’t fair. What the men and women in the castle had done to Xan was not fair. What Xan had done to Luna was not fair. What the citizens of the Protectorate had done to their own babies was not fair. None of it was fair.

Xan stood and looked out the window. Luna had not returned. Perhaps that was for the best. She would leave a note. Some things were easier said on paper, anyway.

Xan had never left so early to retrieve the Protectorate baby. But she couldn’t risk being late. Not after last time. And she couldn’t risk being seen, either. Transformations were difficult, and she had to contend with the possibility that she might not have the strength to undo this one. More consequences.

Xan fastened her traveling cloak and slid her feet into a pair of sturdy boots and packed her satchel full of bottles of milk and soft, dry cloths, and a bit of food for herself. She whispered a spell to keep the milk from spoiling and tried to ignore the degree to which the spell drained her energies and spirits.

“Which bird?” she murmured to herself. “Which bird, which bird?” She considered transforming herself into a raven and taking on a bit of its cunning or an eagle and taking on a bit of its fight. An albatross, with its effortless flight, also seemed like a good idea, except a lack of water might impede her ability to take off and land. In the end, she chose the swallow—small, yes, and delicate, but a good flier and a keen eye. She would have to take breaks, and a swallow was small and brown and nearly invisible to predators.

Xan closed her eyes and pressed her feet to the ground and felt the magic flow through her fragile bones. She felt herself become light and small and keen. Bright eyes, agile toes, a sharp, sharp mouth. She shook her wings, felt so deep within herself the need to fly she thought she might die of it, and with a high, sad cry of loneliness and missing Luna, she fluttered into the air and slid over the fringe of trees.

She was as light as paper.



Antain waited for their child to be born before he began his journey. The Day of Sacrifice was weeks away, but there would be no more births in the ensuing time. There were about two dozen pregnant women in the Protectorate, but all of them had only just begun to show their bellies. Their labors were months away, not weeks.

The birth, thankfully, was an easy one. Or Ethyne claimed it was easy. But every time she cried out, Antain felt himself die inside. Birth was loud and messy and frightening, and it felt to Antain as if it took a lifetime or more, though in truth they were only at it for the better part of the morning. The baby came squalling into the world at lunchtime. “A proper gentleman, this one,” the midwife said. “Makes his appearance at the most reasonable of hours.”

They named him Luken and they marveled at his tiny toes and his delicate hands and the way his eyes fixed upon their faces. They kissed his small, searching, howling mouth.