Daughter of the Moon (The Moon People, Book Two) (68 page)

The sun girl fell to her knees, looking up at the clouds through tearful eyes.

"I wanted to understand you, spirits," she said. "I thought Adel could teach me, but now I know I never will. How can anyone understand you, you who shape our lives this way? Do you play with us? Is that how small we seem to you?" She curled the fingers of her left hand into the leaves, watching as the wind swept an eddy of red and yellow fragments around her before sending them fluttering off the edge of the precipice.

She shook her head, sucking in a chilly breath. "Are you even real?"

The wind gusted again, and below her the land continued to ripple as waves of mist swept over it. But no spirit answered her.

She felt for the pendant that now rested in its familiar place against her breast again. If the spirits were no longer able to offer her any solace, then she would hold on to the people she loved instead. She traced the faint impression Caspian had burned into the wood with her thumb, feeling the curve of the half-moon symbol. Something about it seemed different. Rougher. The edges of the pendant had become scuffed and uneven in the time Miral had held it. She looked down at the piece of wood, and saw that the side of it was stained dark brown with dry blood. Speckles covered the rest of the pendant, marring the sun and moon symbol that had once stood out so prominently against the surface. It must have been her own blood, for Miral's would surely have washed away in the river, but to her eyes it looked no different. She tried to scrape some of it away with her thumbnail, but the wood beneath still retained its sickly brown colour.

Netya stifled a hiccup, staring at the pendant through her tears. She could no longer feel the pure glow of Caspian's love when she looked at it. Instead, she would always be reminded of Miral. Even in death he still tormented her.

Lifting the leather tie from around her neck, she held the pendant out over the edge of the cliff, watching it drift gently in the wind. Her grip loosened, and with the next gust the strips of leather slipped through her fingers. The pendant made one soft clack as it hit the edge of the cliff beneath her, and then it was gone. Disappeared into the mist.

She heard paws crumpling the leaves behind her, and then a hand settled upon her shoulder.

"What happened when you were with Miral's pack?" Caspian said, sitting down beside her.

Netya continued to gaze out over the edge of the cliff, picking pieces from the edge of a leaf to give her hands something to do. "Nothing that matters," she said. "He did not try to hurt me, though maybe he would have after a while. He wanted me to renounce Adel. To prove that we were weak. To accept that women could not stand on their own without the strength of men."

"Yet you proved him wrong."

"Perhaps I did. Though I cannot see what strength there is in killing a person."

Caspian fell silent for a few moments, joining her in watching the mist make strange patterns across the land below them. "Tell me how it happened."

Netya shook her head. "I do not want to."

"You should. I can tell how troubled your heart is. Talk to me."

"I was cutting meat in his tent," Netya said, her voice dull as she recounted the events without emotion. "He was not worried that I would hurt him. Then the knife broke, and when I brought him his meal I drove a piece of the flint through his neck."

Caspian looked at her, touching a piece of her hair that was still ragged and burnt at the end. "I know you, Netya. I do not think doing what you did took no strength. It is one thing to kill a foe in battle, when the choice is simple, but you must have thought about it every day you were with that beast. It isn't in your heart to kill without reason."

"I did not think it was in my heart to kill at all."

"You are too wise to believe that. Women like you and Adel understand than one evil is sometimes the only way to prevent another."

Netya sniffed, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. "I used to wonder why she thought I was the same as her. I hated her when I first came to Khelt's pack. I could not imagine the two of us being any more different. But she
was
like me, wasn't she? When she was younger."

Caspian nodded, his expression sombre. "More than you know. Had she stayed that way, it might have been her I fell in love with."

"Will you still love me, if I stop being who I am?"

He put his arms around her, encircling her waist in a grip as firm as the words he spoke next. "You will not suffer alone like she did, not if you tell me what troubles you. It is more than what happened with Miral, isn't it?"

Netya clasped his hand, stifling a sob as the cold sensation of loss lingering inside her became warm and hurtful again. "The spirits are cruel," she whispered. "They told me... I put my faith in them, and they punished me for it!"

Caspian drew a heavy breath. He seemed to sense what was coming next.

"She is gone, our daughter," Netya shook her head bitterly. "She was the reason I did it. I thought, if only I could live, then perhaps she would too. I kept going because of her. I killed him for her. And then they took her from me!" She cried out in anger, almost slipping toward the edge of the cliff before Caspian pulled her back. "Why show me her face?" she sobbed. "Why so many visions, all this time—they made me care for her! I loved her! Just to take it all away, to make it hurt so much more. I thought I had a destiny." A hiccup interrupted her as she yanked at the burnt lock of her hair. "That is what my dark hair means, does it not? Or is that a lie also?"

She wept and whimpered, cursing the spirits and everything they had promised her. Much of what Netya said she knew she would regret later, but in that moment she needed to say it. She had to give voice to the pain inside her, loosing it to the wind as her cries echoed off the cliffs around them. Caspian let her go on without interruption, holding her close as she vented her bitterness until she was spent.

"I just do not know what it was all for," she choked out eventually, her forehead resting against Caspian's chest as she clung to him with her good arm around his neck. "There has to be meaning in everything. I was sure of it. The spirits were leading me somewhere, but now... I feel I am some wicked joke to them."

"Is it because you are a seer that you feel that way?"

Netya thought on it for a moment, then nodded. "I am supposed to understand these things."

"That is a trial many seers face. I think anyone who possesses true wisdom has struggled with it at least once. A person cannot understand the full breadth of life without experiencing it for themselves. You remember how Adel fought to keep Khelt from making war on the people of your village? And when Miral's warriors came, she faced them not with tooth and claw, but with smoke and phantoms. I think she did those things because she has been where you are now. She saw what needless bloodshed did to her father's pack. Though she does not speak of it, I believe she lost more than most people would be able to bear during those days."

"Then she is a stronger woman than I," Netya said.

"No." Caspian squeezed her tight, tilting her chin up so that she met his eyes. "I think she must have felt exactly as you do. Strength of the spirit is not ignoring despair, it is enduring it."

Netya wrinkled the space between her eyebrows as she looked at him. "Are you saying the spirits sought to teach me something by doing this?"

He smiled. "I do not think the spirits hold all the answers to our lives. Sometimes we must find our own meaning in the things that happen to us."

Netya's tears had started to run dry, and as she rubbed the soreness from her eyes she found the clarity to think again. What meaning could she possibly find in how she felt right now? Was the lesson that she should not trust her visions ever again? To prepare herself for cruel trickery whenever the spirits whispered to her?

She shook her head free of the bitter thoughts. No, had Adel not told her there was little truth in premonitions but what a seer made of them? She had never believed the girl in her vision could possibly be her own daughter until Adel seeded the idea in her head. Learning that she was with child had made it easy to believe. She had soon embraced it without question, forgetting everything she had learned about the fickle nature of visions.

If the girl in the dream was not her daughter, then perhaps it had been Netya herself all along. Similar, but different somehow, in a way she had not understood at the time. A woman changed by the struggles she had faced. More like Adel than some timid sun girl.

It had been easy to believe that the face in her vision had belonged to someone else, for how could a person like her ever rise to fulfil such a great destiny? Yet as she searched her feelings, she already felt herself a hair closer to becoming such a person. It was not who she was yet, but she could glimpse it now, like the phantom of the mountains on the horizon.

As she grappled with her inner thoughts the sun sank below the horizon, turning the misty landscape to gold, and then silver as the clouds parted and the moon revealed her face once again. Netya cowered away at first, afraid of meeting the gaze of the moon spirit she had put so much of her faith in. If she chose to believe that the girl in the dream was her, and not her daughter, would she end up having her faith punished again? Perhaps it was a fool's dream, and the spirits were as horrible and cruel as she had suspected. But what good was there in living in such a world, where all around her she saw nothing but darkness and fear? She wanted her heartache to go away. She wanted to believe that somewhere, some day, she could feel the pure glow of Syr's light blessing her once more. Perhaps Caspian was right, and the spirits held no more power than a person's own will did. If that was true, then by her will she would choose to believe in something good again. She would hope, as she had hoped before, and find her own meaning in what the spirits told her.

Though her body hurt and her heart ached, she turned her face upward to meet the moon. The silvery light bathing her and Caspian was almost blue, and the shimmering mist below them could have been a thousand faces gazing their way. No white wolf walked at her side, but as the wind gusted she heard the calls of the herons sounding again, and a flutter of wings beat the air as one of the birds alighted on the rocks below her. She stared into the moon, and a glimmer of hope slipped back into her soul as she felt Syr looking back.

—48—

One Farewell

For two days they rested, allowing time for the lightest of their wounds to heal as they hunted and gathered food for the journey home. Netya was grateful for the quiet time she could spend alone foraging while Caspian tracked down prey nearby, no longer so tormented by the troubles that had driven her to despair. The pain of losing her daughter still weighed heavily upon her, and she woke from her sleep often with nightmares of blood and water and violet fire, but the darkness no longer felt like it was crushing her. She had her feet back upon firm ground. The stretch between where she was now and the happiness she had once felt still seemed vast, sometimes even insurmountable, but each day the gap narrowed ever so slightly. She was walking a path, to where she did not know, yet each step she took along it felt better than the last. Once they left their small shelter behind and began to head southeast, she felt that she was embarking on a journey home in more ways than one.

"How was it that you found me, when I was in the river?" Netya asked one evening as they slowed their pace to pick wild berries along the way. They were skirting the area of shrubland Miral had crossed on the journey back to his den, keeping to a series of eastern thickets that would soon lead them down into the valleys.

"Perhaps by the providence of the spirits." Caspian smiled. "I felt that something was watching over me, though perhaps it was just the determination of my wolf." The smile became a frown. "I was a fool when I chased after you. I led Adel and the others straight to Miral, and it may have ended in all of their deaths. But all I could think of was you. I couldn't bear to let you slip away from me."

A tender feeling plucked at Netya's heart, and she reached out to touch his hand.

"After Miral left me for dead I was fortunate," he continued. "I had time to heal. I couldn't hunt, but I found food, water, and one of the alpha's scouts along the way. The same one that went after Adel, I think."

"Did you follow him back?"

Caspian nodded. "Some of the way. He thought I was a spirit risen from the dead, and I warned him never to speak a word of me. The poor man was terrified. He said his clan made their den at the head of the river, but I followed his trail as far as I could to be sure. It was hard, with my wound." He rubbed his throat, tracing the scar with his fingers. The slight huskiness that had been in his voice since their reunion still showed no sign of fading. Perhaps it would be with him forever. "I can't remember how many days it took. I fell behind without the legs of my wolf, then as soon as I could change shape again I had to stop and hunt properly. But I kept following the river day after day, until I started catching the scent of other wolves. That was the difficult part."

"Were there many of them? I do not think Miral sent many of his warriors out to scout while I was there."

Caspian shook his head. "Not many. Mostly large hunting parties, and I made sure to stay away from those. I found the camp soon after, but there was no way for me to get close. Those paths up to the plateau had warriors watching them day and night."