By the Moon, page 23
The children were still playing outside, waiting for her. At her appearance the boy waved her towards the centre of the village. They began to run in that direction and Feyla followed them, the unfamiliar red skirt flapping in her wake.
18
Bread and Honey
Feyla had to duck to enter the atrium, and she gazed upwards in surprise as she straightened. The main square of the village was covered in layers of thatch, crisscrossed this way and that, rising to a small triangle in the centre, far above them. Between each layer was a large opening to the bright blue sky, Feyla assumed to let out the heat, while also shading the ground from the relentless sun. It was much cooler here beneath the roof.
Coarse wooden tables stood on the hard ground, each topped with a glass vase holding a bright flower. At the centre, a table piled high with food was crowded with people – they all turned at her arrival and the sound of the children’s squawks. A woman in orange skirts beckoned her forward and Feyla began to move towards her, lured by the promise of food. She felt awkward in her thin clothes.
As she got closer Feyla realised that the woman was the harsh villager who had denied her entry. Her face was birdlike, with severe brows and a hooked nose, and beady black eyes that looked right through her. She spoke.
‘Welcome. I am Magran. You have never been in the wheat fields, traveller girl?’
‘This is the first foray beyond my village fences, Magran.’ Feyla nodded deferentially as she spoke the name, unsure if she was being rude or overfamiliar.
Magran seemed heartened by hearing her own name on Feyla’s lips, and her face broke into the first smile Feyla had seen on her. It made her look older, the lines around her mouth and eyes cracking into deep ravines, gouged there by the sun over her lifetime. A daily flaying of age against the brevity of youth.
‘You will taste then, for the first time, bread as it is made here. The best in the realm.’ She drew a hand across the table and Feyla saw that it was piled high with loaves of bread, all of different shapes, consistency and colour. She began to move forward, her mouth watering, and a man placed a plate in her hand. Thick white slices, smeared with yellow butter. She frowned. Never before had she seen bread the colour of clouds. The bread they made in Seylon was dark and seeded, dense as the bark she scraped from the trees and just as chewy.
Magran steered her to a seat at the nearest table, while others began to sit and eat around her. She was reminded forcibly of her first meal in the Hold, and she pondered for the tradition of sitting together to eat, enforced over years and years of human progression.
There was silence as they ate and a rush of gratitude flowed through her towards these villagers. For bathing, feeding and healing her, patiently waiting until she was ready to tell of her travels, of the things she had faced and endured. The bread was as light as air in her mouth, the butter creamy and thick. She began to speed up, eating faster and faster, reaching for more. Another plate arrived beside her, this time smeared with honey. She ate that one too.
‘By the Moon, child, has it been many moons since you ate?’ Magran asked lightly. Several people chuckled, and Feyla sensed their deep approval for her ravenous appetite. They exchanged self-satisfied nods around the table and she was brought yet another plate, this time bearing a pile of berries that tasted of sunshine and sweet apples. When she finished she sat back, relaxed and content for the first time in several moons. The Pit was like a distant memory. Had she pulled an arrow out of her own leg just hours before? Impossible.
The villagers had long since finished eating, and the atmosphere in the atrium was relaxed. Women chatted easily and a young man played with several of the children, making berries disappear from between his fingers and reappear behind his ear, or theirs. Feyla watched him idly.
Finally Magran spoke.
‘So, Feyla of Seylon. Tell us of your journey. What is it that you seek, and what have you passed to reach it?’
The atmosphere shifted palpably. Talk stopped at once, and the adults who had been leaning against one another sat up straight, gazing at Feyla with a new intensity.
Feyla looked around at them all, suddenly intimidated by the collective attention.
‘It is a long and meandering story,’ she began, trailing off.
‘Our favourite kind,’ Magran assured her, and several people smiled, settling back again. ‘Tell us, child, for we have nowhere to be. You have visited on a Hallowed day. Usually you would find these faces working relentlessly in the sun,’ she gestured around at the men and women surrounding them, who smiled graciously at their mention. ‘Today we do not work. We break bread together, partake in mead and dancing when the sun drops from the sky. And we swap stories. So you, who holds the freshest story here, who claims she has escaped the Pit, who arrived here covered in blood that trails all the way to the forest, why, you are already the highlight of our day. Speak, child. We would love nothing more than to listen.’ She sat back and looked at Feyla, expectant and waiting.
Feyla blushed. She decided upon the truth.
‘In order to explain my plight, I have to go right back to the start.’
It took several hours to describe the journey. As Feyla described Seylon, the icy cold that gripped them from the south in the winter, several of the surrounding villagers shivered and pulled their skirts and vests tighter around them, though the day was warm. She spoke of the jaggedtooths, and how they hunted ever closer in the dark woods. Of Oaken’s vision, how he had told her she was Seylon’s only chance, that they needed help from the Lap of Anguard, and as a youth with power she had been chosen to journey. Several eyes flashed with interest at the mention of her power, though no one interrupted her, and for that she was grateful.
Then onwards to the journey, and as she told it Feyla realised just how far she had come. The hike across the desert that took days, the people of the Hold, across the treacherous Hawked Mountains, into the arena to fight. She told of the passage down through the ice, and then of the Malachite pixies, so tiny and yet so powerful.
At some point she was given a goblet of red wine, tasting of blackcurrants and raspberries. On she told, describing her visit to the Borderland Travellers, the fire water she had drunk. Several sniffed in disapproval, and as she watched their lips curl she realised that the disdain for the transient people of the Borderlands was not exclusive to Guthnick and his people. As she told of her approach to the Pit of the Honourless, the way she had walked towards a work party on one of the boardwalks, in full view with no weapon braced, she watched the mouths of the villagers drop open. Not in awe, but in pitying confusion at the absolute stupidity of this action.
She realised for the first time how foolish she had been. To walk into that land, expecting food and welcome. A sinking shame dropped through her, landing and settling in the pit of her belly, heavy as the bread she had eaten.
She described how she had been taken and awoke in the bowels of the earth, locked and trapped in that cell. The woman closest to her held a hand against her wine-stained mouth, her eyes open in a silent scream of terror. She described her escape, a night spent injured in the woods, her limping walk to the nearest edge of the forest, and the closest village.
‘And so, here I am,’ she finished, somewhat lamely.
There was silence in the vast tent for a few moments. A few of the villagers lifted their goblets and drank deeply.
‘You have been through much, child,’ said the woman beside her, laying a warm hand on her knee. Feyla started at the touch. It was unfamiliar to feel a hand on her skin.
Before she could speak Magran made some sort of complicated whistle, and there was a shuffle of movement near the doors. Then music, incredibly sweet and high, like a trail of sweet mead through the air, started to play. It was too loud to speak as the musicians played, their eyes closed, hands on fiddles and mouths on flutes. The woman next to her rose along with the others, and soon the atrium was alight with the blazing swirl of bright skirts as they swung and twisted beneath the shady cover. The men danced too, leather-clad feet beating out a complicated rhythm on the dirt floor, their yellow vests shining like their faces. Feyla could sense a shedding of their hard days, as though the hours and hours of toil beneath the baking sun was falling from their shoulders, being washed away like sweat from skin beneath sluicing hot water. She watched them dance, her mouth in a grim line.
Her throat rasped and she took a deep draw on her wine. It had been a long time since she spoke for so long. Since she had been with Florine, perhaps the only person in the realm that she was comfortable to be open with. As she thought of Florine, Raven’s face leapt into her mind, unbidden. She thought of his dark eyes, his uneven smile, that lock of shiny black hair across his forehead. She was filled with an unspeakable yearning to be home, to be wanted, to be safe.
But there was no safety to be had in Seylon. Not now that she had failed.
She remembered how she wept on the forest floor, lost. Black emotion swirled in her periphery, threatening to overtake her.
Suddenly she wanted nothing more than to be alone. She stood, crumbs falling from her lap onto the dirt floor. Those around her laughed and pulled her towards them, thinking she was joining the dancing. She tried to tell them she was leaving but the music was too loud to hear. They pulled her towards them, swinging her arms back and forth. She wrenched herself free and left, ducking as she passed beneath the outer folds of the atrium.
Outside the air was cool and the sky was growing dusky, the sun setting in the far west, lighting the heavens pink and gold. The space above her seemed limitless after the cover of the tent and she stared up for a moment, imagining the world twisting on its axis so that she fell into the sky’s deep embrace, spinning into the deep violet nothingness. She shivered with momentary vertigo.
A few people dotted the calm lanes, talking quietly. The music wound through the village; out here it sounded eerie, the high winding note of the flute like a battle song. She chose a pathway at random and walked quickly, her injured leg smarting. She passed a tethered goat and a string of tattered purple banners that fluttered to the cobbled ground.
As she rounded the corner she saw it, silhouetted by the still bright sky behind, the deep blue shot through with gold streaks. Anguard.
The fortress city was huge, looming above her. She had not realised that she was so close. She could make out the parapets, the flick and snap of flags in the breeze. It crouched there like an enormous sentinel, watching the fields from which it took sustenance. Her eyes raked the rock and she made out a zig-zag pathway to the fortress door, impossibly steep. It would take a day just to climb to the gates. She stared at the gates, just a shadow of wood from this distance, willing to know whether they would receive her, whether they would let her pass beyond those gilded walls to see the city beyond.
Anguard. Finally in sight.
And though she had lost everything, even the word filled her with a kind of impossible hope, a wondrous glamour. There were so many stories of the realm’s jewel city, she had grown up with the name burned into her mind since she was a baby. Tales of curses and mysterious magic, of talented mages, fearless warriors, and the Lap: those few who gave counsel to all of the surrounding towns, swapping wisdom for food. Exchanging the intangible and ethereal for that which could be eaten. In Feyla’s memory, the stories were told casting Anguard as the benevolent ruler and those around as grateful, docile recipients. She had always understood it to be a fair exchange, thought that if she could make the journey west and simply explain to them what was needed, they would snap to attention and send help.
But the way the people of the Borderlands, the Hold, and even here in Opalline scoffed at any mention of the Lap, it sounded as though she would be lucky to get an audience with the rulers of Anguard, let alone receive help to return across the mountains. Even less so now, with nothing to trade. The thought of climbing to the fortress and being turned away at the gates filled her with a spark of fear and fury that made her teeth grind.
She would not be denied entry. Not after all this. Not by those who sat on gilded thrones growing fatter by the day, fed by the decent people of the land who worked incessantly.
And then, just as suddenly, the fury left her like a gust of wind dying out. What choice did she have, having lost everything?
‘Village girl.’
The rasping voice came from a nearby doorway and Feyla turned to look, taking an involuntary step back as she saw what was emerging from the shadows.
‘Come close. I have something to tell you.’
* * *
The man was hunched and missing his right arm. As he limped into the fading light she saw that his right eye was also gone. The whole right side of his body looked as though it had been melted away.
Revulsion prickled through her body, itching at her fingertips. She swallowed, trying to hide her unease, but the man simply chuckled.
‘It’s alright, I know I look a beast of the night. The younger children scream sometimes, if I creep up on them.’
He beckoned her forward with his left hand – it too was missing fingers, so that he only had his thumb and index finger. The others were stubs of various lengths.
She stayed where she was.
‘What happened to you?’ she breathed. Never had she seen such grievous injuries in someone still alive.
‘The Pit of the Honourless. I heard your story.’ He jerked his head towards the atrium, now a hub of music and dancing, warm light that spilled out onto the dark ground. ‘You too have had the pleasure. Though I was not so lucky as you. I fell from the boardwalk into the acid. Burning, like I have never known. It ate my right side like butter, my flesh melting into the depths. But I was saved, pulled from the acid by a comrade. He died, years later. Choked on a heel of a loaf. Funny, how life works like that.’ He cocked his head and stared into the distance with his good eye, smiling good-naturedly.
‘How… how did you survive?’ She couldn’t keep the incredulity from her voice. Florine had always told her that she wore her emotions like a banner.
‘A mage of Anguard. My comrade, he brought me to the outskirts of the forest and ran for help while I thrashed amongst the trees, and by a miracle, returned with a mage. If that blessed one had not been travelling to the north to the Carnelian pixies, I would have surely died within minutes. The acid was so potent that even my friend had scars from where my skin had touched his body as he carried me through the forest. They always worked in his favour, those scars.’ He chuckled, remembering. ‘It was a good story, heroic, to save a comrade from certain death and live to tell the tale. He was always telling a different maid that story. Ripped his shirt tactically. My scars never used to help me much. Although I’m still here, so who won?’ He threw his head back to the sky and let out a bark of laughter. He fell silent, his eye searching her face.
‘You do not speak much, do you, village girl? Even when you told us of your quest I could hear the secrets behind the words.’ He continued to stare at her through one narrowed eye. Feyla simply gazed back. He smiled. ‘I guess we all have secrets.’
Darkness was falling around them. The doorway behind the man was hidden in shadow, but she could see it hung ajar to a dim room.
‘I have no secrets, only things I prefer not to mention to first acquaintances,’ Feyla told him, her words measured. ‘Why were you in the Pit? It sounds as though the people of the lowlands know better than to venture there. Unlike me.’
She failed to keep the regret from her voice and a brief knot of his brow showed that he heard it, and understood.
‘Oh yes, we know. We only go if we are sent there. I stole from another village. A loaf of bread, just one, hardly enough to feed my mother and my small brother. He used to cry when his stomach ached with hunger and I couldn’t stand it. I ran through the wheat fields and sneaked into the Pashan village, an hour or so from here.’ He pointed with a gnarled hand towards the north, away from Anguard. ‘No one saw me take it, I thought I was home free. I couldn’t wait to see the look on my mother’s face.’ His eyes lit with remembered pride.
‘They caught you?’
‘In Pashan? No. One of our elders saw me returning from the fields with fresh bread. He knew immediately that it was stolen. We had a bad harvest that year, and they prefer us to starve than to ask those near villages for help. There is pride here. Reputation is everything. So there was no food for moons, only maggoty leftovers from the storage hold, and no medicine from the forests either. I could see each of my tiny brother’s ribs, growing more distinct with each day.’ He shook his head as though irked by the memory.
Feyla did not understand. ‘How did you end up in the Pit? Your own elders sent you to that place? As a child?’
‘I was the same age you are now, not quite a child, as I am sure you agree. I had gambled Opalline’s reputation as a harvest village. I had stolen from our neighbours. The elders would have killed me then and there I think, but they do not like the way that… looks,’ he said delicately.
‘So I was taken to the Pit. They did not keep me long, back in those days it was a two-way system, not like the black offal hole that it is now. I worked there for a sun circle and met criminals from throughout the realm, some as wicked as night-black bone, but many just like myself, who had simply acted out of desperation and been caught. I left with one such man, my friend who saved me from the acid as we left. The guards don’t like to see people leaving, so they make it… difficult. For sport. He returned to Opalline alongside me, for his own people of the mountain had cast him out.’
