A Rising Moon Page 2

  “She sees the anamacha as well,” Ceiteag broke in. “Go on, girl—point to the Ceanndraoi’s anamacha or to mine. I know you see them, even if your friend is entirely blind to them.”

  Greum scowled as Orla pointed to Greum’s right side, where a ghostly figure stood, its head flickering as several visages came and vanished, the faces of dozens of the former draoi caught within it. “Draoi Ceiteag is correct; I can see the anamacha too, not just the taibhse,” Orla told Greum. “I know now that back in my old home of Pencraig, both my mother and I saw Leagsaidh Moonshadow’s anamacha, and we all know what my mother became when she bonded with the Moonshadow.”

  Greum’s scowl deepened at the mention, irritation knitting together bushy eyebrows. “And where is the Moonshadow’s anamacha now?” he scoffed. “Lost again, as it was for so long before it found your mam. I don’t see the Moonshadow’s anamacha or any other standing alongside you, girl. Do you think I need another menach or another servant to clean the temple? What use are you and your unsighted friend to me or to Onglse?”

  Sorcha, who had been Orla’s constant companion since they’d fled the Mundoan army encampment, took a sudden step back at the ceanndraoi’s evident rage, as if afraid the man might strike them or cast a spell. Since their arrival on Onglse, Sorcha had become increasingly reluctant to speak out and more reserved, despite being the older of the two. Orla forced herself to stand erect, lifting her chin and staring silently at Greum, her lips pressed together tightly.

  “Here’s what I will do,” Greum spat at last. “It’s two moons until the next solstice. You and your friend may stay until then. I’ll have Menach Moire see if you’ve any potential at all, and if you don’t, you’ll both be asked to leave.”

  Ceiteag touched the arm of his robe. “Ceanndraoi, perhaps I should—”

  “No,” Greum said loudly before Ceiteag could finish. “Not you, Ceiteag. Menach Moire will be in charge of the girl’s training.”

  And with that he stalked away with a swirl of his red cloak. With a final glance back toward Orla, Ceiteag followed him.

  * * *

  Orla had little contact with Ceanndraoi Greum after that first day, though his red-clad presence was often in the periphery of her vision and the sound of his brass-tipped staff on the temple’s tiled floors in her ears. Menach Moire undertook teaching Orla the duties and responsibilities of a menach. Sorcha, unable to see the taibhse at all, was taken on as a lowly temple servant—mostly, Orla suspected, because Orla had insisted that if Sorcha were sent away, Orla would go with her.

  That was what little power she had from being Voada’s daughter. No one wanted her, but no one wanted to cast her away either.

  Menach Moire was one of the staff members always hovering around Greum—nearly all of them women, Orla noted. She had a thin face and body that reminded Orla of a human-sized weasel, and her darker complexion along with the shape of her cheeks and nose made Orla wonder if she wasn’t part Mundoan. The woman treated Orla and especially Sorcha with a cold disdain that Orla suspected was simply a reflection of Greum’s attitude. Menach Moire was both menach and draoi, though the acolytes whispered that her anamacha was extremely weak and that she could barely control it. She was never referred to as “Draoi Moire,” and she refused to give any draoi training to Orla.

  “If an anamacha comes to you, then Ceanndraoi Greum may change his mind,” she told Orla when questioned. “Until then, young woman, be content with your lot in life. You should be grateful that you’re suffered to be here at Bàn Cill at all, after what your mother did to us.”

  She waved a gaunt, wrinkled hand that was meant to encompass all of the temple grounds and Onglse itself. She’d kept Orla at her side the entire day, something that Orla was certain made the woman as irritable as it made Orla. “Most of the draoi here would tell you that your mother couldn’t handle the Moonshadow’s power and that it eventually drove her mad. She wasted Elia’s gift. It’s my task to see that you don’t do the same. Now tell me again the three ways to direct a taibhse to the sun-path that will lead them on to Tirnanog.”

  With a barely suppressed sigh, Orla recited back to Moire the lesson she’d been given—one she knew from experience—stroking between her fingertips the silver oak leaf pendant that was her only legacy from her mother. She saw Moire’s gaze following her fingers’ movements, though the woman said nothing.

  There had been taibhse enough in the army encampments Orla had endured after Bakir had taken her forcibly from her parents to be his wife. The Mundoa permitted no worship of the Goddess Elia in their camps, but there were Cateni wives among the men who still clung to the old beliefs and who celebrated on the solstices cautiously, silently, and in private. When it became apparent that Orla could not only see the ghosts of the Cateni dead but could direct them toward the afterlife that was Tirnanog, Orla became their unspoken and untrained menach.

  Moire sniffed when Orla was done. “Adequate,” she said. “But only that. Go on and eat your supper, if Cook has anything left at this point. You have the night watch. And this time make certain the watchers don’t find you asleep.”

  Bowing with relief, Orla left Menach Moire and returned to the acolytes’ dormitory on the periphery of the temple grounds, where both she and Sorcha slept when they weren’t expected to be at the temple. Sorcha was there already on the straw-stuffed bedding next to Orla’s. She was holding a crudely carved wooden soldier painted in the colors of the Mundoan army and no longer than her little finger, staring at it cupped in her hands.

  “Difficult day?” Orla asked her, and the woman started at the sound of her voice, then tentatively smiled up at her, closing her fingers around the carving.

  “It’s that obvious?” Sorcha’s smile vanished like thin frost under a spring sun, and she looked up at Orla with eyes shimmering with moisture. When she blinked, twin tracks slid down the slopes of her cheeks. “This is all I have left of Erdem and Esra: a silly, stupid toy they used to play with, and one I hated seeing them with. They wanted to be just like their father and go into battle. Now I can’t bear to throw it away because it’s all I have left of them.” Her fingers tightened around the carving, her knuckles turning white with the pressure. “I miss my children, Orla. It hurts. I thought . . . I thought that because Azru promised to watch over them for me, I wouldn’t grieve about losing them. I thought the pain would go away in time, but it hasn’t. It still hurts just as much as it did the day I left them.”

  “Sorcha . . .” Orla felt her own tears emerge in sympathy. She sank down next to Sorcha and pulled the woman to her; as she did, Sorcha began to sob, clutching at Orla’s shoulders. Orla simply held her without speaking, feeling the woman’s deep sorrow as she stroked Sorcha’s hair and rocked the woman as she might a child. After several breaths, Sorcha sniffed loudly and lifted her head. She wiped at her eyes and nose with the back of her sleeve.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Sometimes . . . sometimes I just start thinking about it, and . . .” Her voice wavered and broke.

  “You don’t have to apologize. I understand.”

  Sorcha gave a short laugh freighted with self-deprecation. “I know you think that, but you don’t really understand. It’s not your fault—you never had a child, so . . .” Her voice trailed off, and one shoulder lifted in a shrug. “But I love you for the lie,” Sorcha added.

  “Then I’ll keep lying to you,” Orla told her. “And you can keep telling me how Onglse is where I’m supposed to be.”

  Sorcha placed a hand over Orla’s. “Menach Moire acting the bear again?”

  “The bear, the wolf, the ogre. All of them at once. She hates me, and so does Ceanndraoi Greum. They’ll be sending me away soon enough.” She grinned at Sorcha. “And when they do, maybe you and I will just go back across the Meadham, find Azru, and check up on your children.”

  Sorcha’s smile returned for a moment before fading. “If Elia wills it.”

/>   “Even if She doesn’t,” Orla answered. “I don’t care if She wills it or not.”

  “Hush,” Sorcha told her. “You shouldn’t be saying such things, especially here. Sometimes I think that Menach Moire can use the walls for ears.”

  They both laughed at that. Orla gave Sorcha another hug and stood up. “I have to be at the temple for night watch in three stripes of the candle. I’m going to try to get some sleep so Menach Moire doesn’t catch me dozing again. I didn’t hear the end of that for days. I still haven’t heard the end of it.”

  “Have you eaten?” Sorcha asked her, and Orla shook her head.

  “Then get to your bed and try to sleep,” Sorcha told her. “I’ll go to the kitchens and see what I can find and bring it back to you. Go on now.”

  Orla smiled, sighed, and did as Sorcha requested. She fell asleep quickly, and when the evening watch’s acolyte came to wake her, she found that Sorcha had left a tray of bread, cheese, and an apple on the floor between their beds.

  2

  The Imperial Arrival

  COMMANDER ALTAN SAVAS had met Emperor Pashtuk once before in Mundoci, the capital city of Rumeli, when Pashtuk had given him command of the imperial army on the conquered island of Albann. The emperor had been a beardless young man of fifteen then. He had ascended to the throne of the Mundoan Empire as a boy of eleven, though he wore a false beard of woven human hair whenever he appeared in public, as custom demanded of young kings (and even of the rare queens who had sat on the same throne).

  Now a man of thirty-four, Pashtuk had no need of a false beard. His own—oiled, perfumed, dyed midnight black with kohl, wrapped in golden threads, and immaculately groomed—fell halfway down his chest atop a bright green tunic. His face and uncovered arms were the color of weathered bronze. Over his tunic was draped a long open cloak called an entari, this one of a rich blue that shimmered in the afternoon sunlight. The emperor’s head was wrapped in a sarik, a bulbous turban the same iridescent blue with the golden seal of the emperor set on its front. Pashtuk had the body of a former warrior who had, for the last several years, largely given up exercise and significant exertion. His hips were padded, and a paunch was beginning to show underneath his tunic and wide trousers. Still, he looked regal standing on the boarding plank of the warship that had brought him to Savur, banners bearing the imperial sigil of a stooping hawk fluttering in the breeze off the great harbor of Iska Bay.

  Savur had once again become the capital of Albann Deas after Voada’s razing of Trusa the previous year. Trusa, up the River Iska from Savur, was being rebuilt, but Great-Voice Utka, sent by Pashtuk to replace the murdered Great-Voice Vadim III, had decided to remain in Savur from which, admittedly, it would be easier to escape should another uprising of the native Cateni people occur.

  Altan thought Utka’s choice cowardly, but he also knew enough to keep that opinion entirely to himself.

  Great-Voice Utka stood alongside Altan, dressed similarly to Emperor Pashtuk in Mundoan finery—that was unlike Great-Voice Vadim, who before his death had largely adopted the more comfortable and relaxed Cateni clothing, albeit adorned with jewelry and gold brocade. Great-Voice Utka’s chariot, a gilded, too-wide, cushioned, and linen-canopied affair that Altan found ostentatious and generally useless as an actual vehicle, was placed alongside Altan’s own war chariot. Altan’s driver, Tolga, was seated in the harness of the war chariot just in front of Altan, looking uncomfortable in the fine entari that Altan had ordered him to wear over his polished armor. Tolga’s hand steadied the nervous horses as a quarter of long brass horns blared a fanfare at the emperor’s appearance. Double-headed drums called davul thrashed out a loud cadence that matched the emperor’s slow, deliberate procession down the ramp toward the quay where the Great-Voice and Altan awaited him.

  “This is a worse noise than battle,” Tolga said quietly over his shoulder to Altan, rolling his eyes. Altan shook his head slightly in admonishment, maintaining a serious, half-smiling expression as the emperor came closer. Tolga turned again to pat the horses’ rumps as the horns blared a new tribute and the drummers continued to flail at their instruments.

  Altan, the Great-Voice, Tolga, and the driver of Utka’s chariot all stepped down as the emperor reached the end of the ramp and prepared to step onto the quay—it wasn’t proper for them to be standing higher than the emperor. They dropped to one knee as Pashtuk stepped onto dry land, as did the other minor dignitaries of the Great-Voice’s court.

  Pashtuk stood in front of them, his expression serious. He nodded curtly to Altan, then more courteously and carefully to Great-Voice Utka. “Utka, my loyal friend,” he said, “it’s good to see you again and to finally be here in Albann.” Pashtuk held out a many-ringed hand toward the Great-Voice, helping him to his feet; he offered no hand to Altan. Utka accompanied Pashtuk to his chariot, the emperor ascending first to cheers from the crowd on the quay. Only after both Pashtuk and Utka were seated in their chariot did Altan rise, grimacing at the cracking of his knee as he did so. He went to his own chariot, stepping into its familiar confines. The Great-Voice gestured for him to precede them on the way to the Great-Voice’s keep. “Let’s go, Tolga,” Altan said, and the driver gathered the reins to turn the horses.

  They moved up the wide Avenue of the Emperor between a double row of cheering inhabitants of the city, crowded behind two lines of Mundoan soldiers in full dress armor, clashing spears to shields as Altan passed and holding the salute until the Emperor and Great-Voice also went by. Many of the buildings they passed were adorned with banners of the imperial hawk.

  The openmouthed, praise-shouting faces they passed were nearly all Mundoan. The Great-Voice had made it clear to Altan that any Cateni who came within a stone’s throw of the emperor must be thoroughly vetted and cleared.

  It wouldn’t do for the emperor to notice that there were still seeping, bloody cracks in the facade of his rule over Albann.

  * * *

  Later that afternoon Altan received a summons to come to the emperor’s rooms, delivered by a haughty page with a thick Rumeli accent. He followed the page through the palace to the east wing of the Great-Voice’s estate, where the page paused before closed double doors and gave a quick knock. Another attendant opened the doors, first bowing to Altan, then gesturing for him to follow. They passed through the room beyond and another set of doors where a crowd of milling highborns appeared to be waiting for an audience. Their eyes tracked Altan as he was escorted past them to yet another door where an attendant with the sigil of the emperor on his entari waited. That person knocked twice on the door with the head of his staff of office; when a muffled “Come!” was heard from the other side a few breaths later, he opened the door and motioned Altan through.

  “Commander Savas,” Pashtuk said. The emperor was seated on a dais flanked by twin imperial banners, the embroidered hawks glaring down as Altan approached. The high-backed chair on which Pashtuk sat was cushioned and draped with sumptuous, gold-brocaded cloth dyed the expensive and rare Tyrian purple. Large open windows permitted sunlight to dance across the tiles, the curtains pulled back. A simple, plain wooden chair was set on the floor below the dais in front of the emperor; to either side, clerks at desks stacked with rolls of parchment books were writing or reading, seemingly paying no attention to Altan. Pots of burning incense on either side of the dais filled the air with an overly sweet fragrance. Soldiers of the Emperor’s Guard in full dress armor were stationed in the corners of the room and on either side of the dais.

  “Sit,” Pashtuk told Altan, gesturing to the empty chair. Altan took the chair, trying to gauge the emperor’s mood from his face. There was no warmth there, only a cold, stern regard. Altan remained silent, waiting. The sound of the nearest clerk’s quill on paper seemed loud in the room. Just as Altan thought he’d better speak, even if just some empty platitude, Pashtuk finally stirred.

  “Commander Savas, you disobeyed the express orders
of former Great-Voice Vadim, who was my Voice here in Albann. He told you to send only a few cohorts of the army back to Albann Deas to confront the rebels of Ceanndraoi Voada, under the direction of one of your sub-commanders. You were to remain on Onglse and press the attack on Bàn Cill, yet you instead abandoned your invasion of Onglse and brought the entire army south.” Aside from the distinct emphasis on “my Voice,” the words were delivered in a clipped, emotionless manner, a simple recitation of irrefutable facts.

  Altan tried to reply in kind. Be careful here. You don’t know what he intends or how he truly feels. Your life could very well be at stake. “I deny none of that, my Emperor,” he answered. “Great-Voice Vadim underestimated the ability of the Cateni to organize and fight, and worse, he had no idea of the power Ceanndraoi Voada wielded. I had directly experienced that power as well as the military abilities of Ceannàrd Maol Iosa during our initial attacks on Onglse. When I learned that both of them had departed Onglse to invade Albann Deas, I felt that for the safety of our people, the full army was needed to put down the rebellion or we risked losing everything.”

  Pashtuk’s nose wrinkled as he sniffed. “So you disobeyed direct orders from Great-Voice Vadim, who was your superior and who spoke with my authority here in Albann.” Under the emperor’s sarik, his dark eyes glittered.

  If he wants me dead, I’m dead. If he wants me removed, I’ll be removed. So be it. “Yes,” Altan said simply. “And I was right in doing so. To be blunt, you wouldn’t be sitting here now if I hadn’t, my Emperor.”

  Altan wondered if he’d gone too far. Pashtuk’s fingers prowled the long, oiled strands of his beard, his mouth tightened, and his eyes narrowed. “Do you always speak so impudently?” Pashtuk asked.

  “I’m a poor diplomat, my Emperor, just a simple soldier and a loyal one. I feel I owe it to those above me to speak the truth as I see it, unvarnished and plain, so they can make the best decisions. I don’t intend to give offense.”