Chapter 83. A Thousand Years of Silence Ended in One Confession

Chapter 83: 83. A Thousand Years of Silence Ended in One Confession

I stared at the dark garden.

"There is... one more line," she said. "At the very bottom..."

"The letters are smaller, and some have worn away, but thankfully... I have pieced it together."

"I... do not trust my reading." She swallowed. "It says here... She shall carry the one who offered her a hand."

I felt something hot and tight rise in my chest. I put my hand over my mouth.

"Carry...?" I whispered.

"I believe so."

"Like, in her arms...? Or like..."

"I... do not know well enough of that."

We sat quietly for a long time. The pillar glowed behind us, pale and steady, and above it, over the broken roof, two moons hung in the sky.

"What does it mean...?" I asked at last. "Does it mean she’s coming back?"

"It means that she will not return as you knew her." Sylvara spoke gently. "She cannot be woken, or taken, or called back..."

"She can only be waited for." She hesitated. "The Sovereigns are born with their memories whole."

"It is only their shape that changes... I do not know what shape she will take."

"I only know that she will... remember you."

I closed my eyes.

"When...?"

"The seventh night." She took a breath. "Seven nights from the night the moon was struck."

"That would be the thirteenth night of our count... We must be here before then."

"And no one may be near the pillar when she comes."

Thirteen... It was the eighth, now.

Five days, and a road to travel, and a moon to wait for.

I opened my eyes and looked up.

The second moon was bright and calm and even... silent.

"Okay," I said.

I wasn’t sure who I was talking to. "Okay... I’ll be here."

I didn’t see it coming.

I should have. I’d spent days looking at Sylvara and thinking about the way she looked at things.

The faint, strange sadness that clung to her. The way she’d gone silent, again and again, at precisely the wrong moments.

The way she’d said, ’I have waited three hundred years, and never explained what for.’

But I’d been so tired, and so scared, and so grateful for anyone who would stand beside me, that I’d never looked at what she was leaving out.

She stood up in the great hall at dawn, in front of all of us, without her hat. Her hair was loose and tangled.

She stood very straight, with her hands folded in front of her, and her face was composed. But her eyes were bright with tears she was holding back, and I saw her swallow twice before she spoke.

"I have a confession to make," she said.

Nobody moved.

Velora, who had been pouring a cup of tea, put it down.

"I have not been honest with you... I have been unfair, and I will not make excuses." She took a breath. "I will tell you... who I really am."

The story she told took almost an hour.

I’ll give it to you as plainly as I can.

There were once Ten Sovereign Beasts... like she said earlier.

They weren’t kings or queens, exactly, but they were something older.

The First Bargain, the pact between spirit and woman that gave beastkin their gifts, had left ten empty seats in the world, ten places where the great spirits could return.

In every age, when the world was threatened, those seats were filled... A sovereign would rise and stand against the dark, and when the danger passed... she would sleep again.

The last age had ended more than a thousand years ago.

"And in all that time," Sylvara said, "no Sovereign has risen... Not even one."

"Not during the Culling War, when the hunters came for the beastkin..."

"Not when the villages burned, and not when your clans were hunted like deer." Her voice cracked. "That is why you were so alone... There was no one left to stand between you and them."

She told us about the sea of the moon. It was the only one that had ever been split.

Two sisters had shared it, the legend said.

One had been called the Bright Moon, who ruled by day and by candlelight and stood among her people.

The other was called the Hidden Moon, who ruled the night and walked unseen.

"The Bright Moon founded the line of Lunhare," Sylvara said. "She was... my younger sister."

Nobody said a word.

"I am... the Hidden Moon."

"I am the Evernight Enchantress... and it is not a title, Leon... It is more like a seat." She looked at me directly. "Millie is... my sister’s descendant."

"Or you can say that she is my niece... many generations removed."

"I have known her blood since the first night she sang in that camp."

I felt Velora go rigid beside me.

"When my sister died," Sylvara went on, "I sealed my own power and went to sleep in a hidden wood... I meant to wait."

"The Bright Moon would rise again in time, and I would be there when she did."

"I woke on the Night of the Broken Moon, but... I was too late."

"I have spent twenty years searching for the one child who survived."

"What...? But you said it yourself that it was three hundred years," I said.

My voice sounded strange in my own ears.

"I said more than three hundred years." Her voice was very quiet. "I never said how much more..."

"How much more?"

"A little over a thousand."

The room was silent.

"I did not seek you out by chance," Sylvara said. "I was in Elarune because I had felt her blood..."

"When I walked into your house, I was not curious about a stray human, but... I was looking for her."

"And when I saw you beside her, I thought, There is something very strange here." She closed her eyes briefly. "Everything I told you was true... I just did not tell you all of it."

She told us the rest, in a rush, as if she wanted to get it over with. The other seats, Frost, Night, Horn, and Dawn, and the two Moons.

Four others whose names even she had never known.

She mentioned, with a lightness that was far too careful, that the pact between our group, the one Magnara called the Fivefold Covenant, was named for five of the ten.

"I do not believe that is a coincidence," she said.

I saw Elsbeth go still.

Velora’s head turned slowly.

Magnara, who had been sitting with her arms folded, put a hand to her chin and stared at the floor.

Nobody said anything.

But I wasn’t thinking about the Covenant... I wasn’t thinking about the seats either.

More like I was thinking about a small woman in a white robe who had stood in front of a girl with a pair of silver knives and a face of such calm that I’d thought it was courage.

I stood up.

"You knew," I said.

Sylvara didn’t flinch. "Yes."

"You knew who she was! From the first day...! And from the minute you walked into that room!"

"Yes..."

"You knew what she was going to be!"

"I knew what she might... be."

"And you didn’t tell me?!" My voice cracked. "You didn’t tell any of us all?!"

"No."

"Why...?"

"Because... I did not know it would cost Bonette," Sylvara said.

The words hung in the air.

I don’t know what my face looked like.

I know that my hands had curled into fists and that my nails were digging into the bandages.

I know that I took a step toward her, that Velora’s hand closed on my shoulder, and that Magnara stepped silently between us.

"You may hate me," Sylvara said.

She stood very still, and her eyes were swimming. "I would not blame you."

I stared at her for a long, terrible moment.

A hundred things I wanted to say piled up in my throat. And all of them were cruel.

"Tch...!" I scoffed and turned my back.

I walked out of the hall, across the broken courtyard, through the gap in the wall, and out into the frozen snow.

I walked until I stood on a ridge overlooking the valley, with the keep behind me and the wide white world in front.

The sky was clear... and I can still see the two moons hung over the hills.

I took a deep breath.

"CASSIAN...!"

It tore out of me like something ripping.

It echoed off the mountains and rolled out over the valley and came back a dozen times, thin and cracked and furious.

"CASSIAN! CAAAAAAASSIAN!"

I screamed until my throat bled.

I screamed his name, and Millie’s, and Bonette’s, and a few other words I’m not proud of.

And in the sky, the second moon flickered.

It was so brief that I almost didn’t see it... A tiny shiver, like a candle in a draft, a dimming and a brightening, as if it had heard.

Behind me, in the doorway of the hall, I heard Sylvara draw a sharp breath.

I stood there for a long time, my chest heaving, my throat feeling raw, and my breath smoking in the cold.

Slowly... I lowered my arms.