Chapter 79. Two Moons Over a Frozen Lake, and One of Them Was Still Looking Down at Me

Chapter 79: 79. Two Moons Over a Frozen Lake, and One of Them Was Still Looking Down at Me

A single thread of white light drifted down from the great glowing sphere, thin as a hair, and touched the palm of my open hand. It was warm.

For one instant, it felt like fingers closing around mine. Then it faded, and the palm was empty.

Beside me, I felt Magnara’s hand settle on my shoulder.

She didn’t say anything. She just stood behind me, solid and enormous and silent, and held on.

A few feet away, Elsbeth had fallen to her knees. Velora stood with the back of her hand pressed to her mouth.

And from somewhere behind us, I heard Sylvara whisper a single word in a language that wasn’t any I knew, over and over, with tears running down her face.

And then the world went white.

There was no sound.

I want to be very clear about that... It was the loudest thing I’ve ever seen, and there was no sound at all.

A great, silent wave of light rolled out from the second moon, a flood of silver and white that swallowed the keep, the courtyard, the plain, and the hills beyond.

I felt it pass through me... It didn’t hurt... It felt like being turned inside out, gently, like a glove, and set down again somewhere new.

Magnara’s grip tightened on my shoulder until I thought she’d break the bone.

I saw things in that light. I can’t tell you how I know they were true.

I saw the Chosen, standing in their ranks, their gold crystals shattering one by one into glittering dust.

I saw dozens of women, the sleepers and the Hollowed and the ones with seeds in their skulls, stumble out of their trances, blinking and bewildered, as the shards fell from their throats.

I saw them reach for each other.

And I saw the others.

I saw Cassian, standing in the middle of the courtyard with his ruined face and the Throne Glass blazing in his hand.

I saw the army behind him, the beasts, the chain-mages, and the golden ranks.

I saw the Beast Warmother, a mountain of silver ice, raising her head to the sky and howling.

I saw Ylva beside her, her crystal still burning, a small, slim figure with silver hair, turning her face toward her sister.

She looked at Elsbeth... For half a second, I swear, her smile was gone.

"Sister...?" she said.

I couldn’t hear it. I only read her lips.

But I saw it, and I knew Elsbeth had seen it too.

Then the light took them.

SWOOOOSSSHHH!

They went like a candle going out. In one heartbeat, they were there, and in the next they were gone, the whole army, from the golden ranks to the monsters to the man with the white cane, swept away like leaves in a gale.

I heard Elsbeth scream her mother’s name and her sister’s in a voice that didn’t sound like anything human.

Before he vanished, Cassian turned his head.

He found me in the glare. I was kneeling there with my hand still held out, and he looked at me with his one remaining eye, and the kind, patient fatherly mask was gone.

His voice, when it came, was flat as a stone.

"Until next time... Guest."

Then the light swallowed him, too.

WOOSH!

I’ll tell you what I learned later, because I didn’t understand any of it at the time.

Sylvara explained it in the weeks that followed in her soft, careful voice.

The moon had a rule... It didn’t pick sides, and it didn’t care who was loyal to whom.

It only asked a single question of every living soul within its light: ’Where do you wish to be?’

The ones who wished to stay were allowed to stay.

The ones who had been bound against their will, the Hollowed and the sleepers and the victims of the seeds, had their chains shattered and were sent to stand with those who loved them.

But the ones who had gone too far, the beasts who’d been Broken and the Chosen who were still wrapped in gold, were sent where the crystals wanted them to go.

Home... To the places that had made them.

It wasn’t cruelty. It was only what the light did.

It sorted the world into those who chose and those who had already lost the ability to.

I didn’t know that... All I knew, in that moment, was that the keep was empty.

There was one more thing that I only found out later.

Deep in the cellar of the Moon Shrine, a lynxkin woman with tufted ears and two curved hooked swords lay tied up on a pallet, and she’d been dreaming for days.

When the silent light washed over her, she woke with a gasp, and a thin gold crack ran through the crystal on her throat.

"No," she said, in a small, ragged voice.

It was her own.

And the crystal split and fell away.

She sat up, shaking. And then she stared at her hands.

She was the first woman I ever saw who had been truly set free by saying a single word, and she did it all by herself.

Corra didn’t go with the Chain, though... She was carried away by the light with all the rest of us, to wherever the moon thought she wanted to be.

...

I woke on ice.

It was dark... and it was cold.

For a few long seconds, I had no idea where I was.

I lay on my back and stared up at a vast black sky studded with stars, and the snow was falling softly on my face, and somewhere far above me, a pale, dim moon floated in the clouds.

I sat up, slowly, and looked around.

I was on a frozen lake.

It was enormous.

It stretched away in every direction, a flat, smooth sheet of black ice, dusted with snow, rimmed by distant dark pines.

I could see my own breath. And I could see the faint gleam of stars reflected in the ice beneath me, so that it felt like sitting on the surface of the sky.

I wasn’t alone.

All around me, scattered across the ice like the pieces of a broken puzzle, lay hundreds of people.

They were soldiers of Elarune, Hearth Guard in gray, Nightclaw riders in white and gold, refugees wrapped in blankets, and others I didn’t recognize.

Some of them were stirring.

Some of them were sitting up, rubbing their eyes, looking around with the dazed faces of sleepwalkers.

A few were weeping.

A few were laughing, in the high, cracked way that people laugh when they’ve been given back something they’d thought was lost.

I counted... I couldn’t help it.

Elsbeth was kneeling near the edge of the ice, thirty feet away, with her back to me. She wasn’t moving.

She was staring at the empty air where her mother and sister had been standing, and she hadn’t made a sound.

Her hair had come loose, and it hung over her shoulders in a tangle. Her hands lay open on her knees.

Velora was a little farther on, pushing herself to her feet.

She swayed. She caught herself on her sword, and I watched her stand there for a moment with her head bowed and her hands shaking.

Then she raised her head, and her voice, hoarse and steady, rang across the ice, calling the remnants of the Nightclaw to form up.

Sylvara lay a few feet from me in a heap of purple silk. She wasn’t moving either.

I crawled over, my knees scraping on the ice, and pressed two fingers to her neck. A pulse, slow and steady.

I let out a breath. "Hufftt... thank god..."

Then... A shadow fell across me.

"She is alive," said Magnara.

She stood over me, enormous against the starlit sky, her axe slung across her back. Both of her forearms were wrapped in rags that had once been a cloak, and the rags were soaked through.

She was swaying slightly. She picked Sylvara up as if she weighed nothing, cradled her against her chest, and looked down at me.

"I will remember what you did today," she said.

I opened my mouth, but then I closed it... I didn’t know what to answer.

"I have not decided what it means," Magnara said. "But... I will remember."

She turned and walked away across the ice, carrying Sylvara, and I knelt there alone, listening to the soft hush of the snow.

I stayed on my knees for a long time.

I don’t know how long. I’d forgotten that I still had my hand held out in front of me, palm up, open to the cold air. It had been there for so long that the fingers had gone stiff. Snowflakes were landing on it and melting, one by one.

Ding.

[Host: You may move now.]

I looked at the words. They floated in front of my eyes, calm and polite and impossibly cold.

I closed my fingers.

Slowly, one by one, I curled them in until they made a fist around nothing at all.

There was nothing there. And there had never been anything there.

I held it anyway, tight against my chest, and I looked up.

There were two moons in the sky.

One was old and pale and distant, a thin sliver of silver sailing through the clouds.

The other hung low over the horizon, huge and round and warm, glowing with a soft golden-white light that lit up the whole frozen lake.

It was close enough that I could see faint markings on its surface, like the pattern of a face... It was so beautiful that I couldn’t breathe.

I knew exactly who it was.

I stayed on my knees on the ice, and I looked up at her for a very long time, with the snow falling on my face, and I thought about everything that had happened.

I did not move, but...

She did.