Excerpt: Under a Dead Moon

Prologue

I am sixteen years old and tomorrow I will be dragged tear-streaked and hoarse-voiced to Mierne to train as a mage like my father. But I don’t want to be like my father, who treated the arcana like a relic to observe through glass, not a living beast to control. My father, who could have conquered a Dead Moon night and silenced the writhing underclasses but instead wrote his tomes. I don’t want to be like my father because my father is dead.

A shadow has grown under my bedroom window, tucked into the rose bushes to keep from fluttering away. A remnant of the last Dead Moon. I stare into its heart now, and hear it whispering beneath the arcana; I listen to the darkness that underlines the handful of spells I know. Gritta calls me away from the garden and makes me come inside.

I watch her as she bundles my clothing, and treatises from my father’s library. Tears clean her cheeks and she says Oh, Fierine, I wish I could be your nanny forever. I wish she could, too. I want to savor the muggy summer days of Loureilles, when only the Western Sea’s delicate breeze can relieve us. I want to boss around the servants and buy new gowns for Mother’s parties and learn to bake with Gritta and steal tastes of wine with my best friend Lorna until we collapse, flushed and giggling, and gossip about simple things, not the encroaching demons or games of land.

But the end of these days ripens on the horizon bright as dawn—I see the life that’s been designed for me, like lifting away an engine’s casing to reveal its gears. Lorna, who cannot touch the arcana, has confessed her parents’ threats of arranged marriages. I’m no longer my Mother’s ornament to be glimpsed once at parties and never seen again; I command a seat at the banquet.

When she finishes packing she wraps one burly arm around my shoulders and tells me to leave the shadow behind. I didn’t think she could see.

Lorna and I climb from my balcony to the shallow gable, our hiding spot, and watch the winking stars. We trade sips of Krytosian rum and choke on cigars. She says she wishes she could touch the arcana; I shrug because it’s not a thing I do, it’s just a thing that happens, and then only when I’m mad. Someone insults my father’s memory—a gush of flame at my fingertips. Baron Heaume tries to lure me back to him, and I feel the arcana hardening my veins, protecting me. Lorna says I’ll learn, and become as strong as my father someday.

But in my heart I know its power is only a fragment of what’s ahead. I barely know why men watch me like they do, eyes chasing the curve of new hips, but ignore Lorna and her stick-straight lines. I can scarcely see Elanthine beyond our privileged enclave, hardly know the stink of the factories and the sweat of the fields. I’ve never surrendered to the power of the arcana—I fear it will shatter me and rebuild me; wash over me, more intoxicating than anything that can be sipped, heard, touched. I dread drowning in its undertow, breathing it in like water, until all I want is to touch it, and when I touch it, then all I want is more.

I should fear the dark fur of its underside most of all.

Lorna asks if that’s Baron Heaume down in the gardens. I can’t tell her—can’t tell anyone—so I ask her to go back inside while I make him leave.

I beat on his thick chest and tell him I hate him once Lorna’s gone, but he plucks me up like a dead bud and takes me deep into the hedge, insisting he just wants to say goodbye. I start to cry. There’s a rum-laced tilt to my protests and I ask him why he couldn’t have kept his filthy old hands to himself at Mother’s gala. He fusses with my hair and says I should thank him for making a woman of me.

I’ll never thank him. I love him, in the helpless, self-loathing fashion of any girl melting at her first touch, but I won’t thank him. I don’t care what riches he promises me, what schemes he outlines. I just want him to leave the Baroness, which he says he’ll never do. But I’m too tired and drunk, and it’s written in my drooping speech. He undresses me and takes what he wants. His touch feels as mismatched as Gritta’s embrace.

I say I hate him again as I gather my clothes to scamper back to Lorna, but I’m sure he smells the lie. As I pass the garden shadow, I wonder if I could kill him. Then no one wins.

At some point in the night, or maybe it’s the blush of dawn, Mother interrupts our chatter to say farewell. She sweeps in and out of my room on a single swish of black robes, arcing across the floor, not stopping even for breath.

In the morning I will be baptized in the deluge of arcana.