I wait patiently, dreading that he will never speak to me again. I don’t know how long we have been out already. I don’t know when the train will depart. Perhaps soon. But I can’t hurry him, not now, even though this may be the only opportunity we have for this conversation.
“You can’t know this.” His voice is hoarse, that of a frightened boy. “You can’t. How could you? You’ve lived a sheltered life of leisure, in the halls and hallways of the finest palaces. How could you have ever even wanted to know the truth?”
I tilt my chin up, a gesture Celestia resorts to when argued against. How infuriatingly can a man act? How can I still care for him this much? “Because you showed it to me.” He flinches, and I regret my harshness. It’s not his fault he doesn’t remember. I add out of remorse, “Silly.”
He reaches out for me, and I’m acutely aware of the silver pressing against my skin. I shift minutely, so that his fingers come to rest against my shoulder, not my neck. I meet his eyes with a questioning gaze. His eyes are the same as before, the brown of young pines. And yet, the gaze is different. But I think… Is there a flicker of recollection there?
His lips part, and I lean toward him. Because I miss him. I miss being with him.
“No,” he says, pulling his hand away. Again. “We must not. It would interfere with my duty.”
I feel like laughing and crying, both at the same time. My lips burn with the cold, not with his kiss. My voice trembles with what may be chagrin. “Your duty?”
“To see you safely to our destination.” It sounds as if he were repeating a mantra, something enforced in his mind by foul means. He crosses his hands behind his back and nods toward the carriage. He wants us to return. “If you must know, it isn’t exactly easy, to keep another human being contained for an extended period of time, even if it’s for their own safety and to ensure the future of the Crescent Empire.”
This lie… I want to laugh maniacally, I want to argue, but I bite my tongue. He sounds so serious, proud even. Perhaps it’s not a lie to him. Perhaps that’s why the other guards avoid us, so that they won’t have to remember why the doors are locked and curtains drawn, why one of them has to sit in the corridor ready to spring into action while the others play cards and smoke cigarettes.
“I never assumed it would be,” I reply at last. My father still gazes kindly at us. If he doesn’t feel anger, neither should I.
“It’s not only that,” he says, chin pressed against his chest, but not to keep himself warm. Something weighs heavy on his mind. It’s curious that I know him though he doesn’t know me.
It strikes me then. He’s a captain, the one in the lead. He has no one else to confide in than the very person he thinks he’s tasked to guard. “What is it, then?”
He glances over his shoulder, at the rails—no, onward—at the plains we have crossed, into the towns we have left behind. In his eyes lives regret, longing to change a decision made or perhaps an act done in haste. “When Alina fell ill, when we halted in that town…”
“Yes?” I prompt, dreading the answer, every slipping step that carries us closer to the carriage and silence. The witch, no matter that she helped us, frightens me. She saw things in our shadows, shapes she wouldn’t speak of, and the bargain she made with Celestia left my sister weak.
“You hate us already,” Captain Janlav says. “Don’t you?”
I don’t say a word. So that’s it, then. He has done something so despicable that he expects to be called a monster.
“You would hate us even more if you knew the lengths to which we have gone to protect you and your sisters.”
“Try me,” I reply more dryly than I had intended. The cold air has chafed my throat sore. I might catch my death because of this excursion, but I’m past caring about that.
“Perhaps I will.” He glances at the carriage, at the door he left unlocked, as if to measure how many words he has time to say before all talk must cease. “After you’d boarded the train, we argued about it long and hard. I didn’t want to do it, but what choice did we have? Even as blind as she was, what if she somehow recognized you? What if she’d tell someone? Not that she seemed the type. But what if those who wish to harm you caught her in their hands and interrogated her. People speak when they’re in pain. They’ll do anything to make the agony stop.”
I had practically betrayed my family to escape the darkness of my own mind. What he’s saying… As I shake my head, my blanket shifts. Cold gnaws at my throat, down my back, into my belly. “No…”
“I had to send Beardard back.”
He doesn’t need to tell me more. I can see the sad scene unfolding before my eyes. Beard wading through the snow banks, rifle swinging against his back. The small cottage at the end of the lane. The witch hearing the approaching sounds, the snow crunching under his boots. He wasn’t there to ask her to remain silent, but to unsling his rifle and make sure that she would take what she had seen and heard to her grave.
At that moment, I can’t imagine how I ever could have loved this ruthless man.
“The thing is,” Captain Janlav says when we are but ten steps away from the carriage, “when he came to the end of the lane, to the very spot where we’d smoked a pack of cigarettes mere hours earlier, he found nothing. Nothing at all.”
I glance at him from the corner of my eye. His serious gaze is riveted on the train. I can’t decipher if he’s lying to me in a futile attempt to soothe me. A part of me doesn’t even want to try.
“Our footprints led to an abandoned yard. But there was nothing there. No trace of the old woman. No trace of the wee cottage. Not even a shadow remained.”
He meets my gaze at last. His eyes gleam with… earnestness. Does he really believe he’s serving me, not the gagargi? Does he really speak the truth?
“Beardard returned, ashen-faced. We thought he’d been drinking. Or smoking dusk. I took two good men with me and retraced our earlier path. Only to find out that Beardard hadn’t been mistaken. Where I’d expected to find the witch, I found but a magpie staring accusingly at us.”
As he escorts me back to the train, I decide he isn’t lying, at least not consciously. But can I ever forgive this? The witch may have escaped, but that doesn’t change the fact that he ordered her silenced.
When we reach the steps leading to the platform, he offers me his hand, to help me climb the steep metal steps. But I’d rather scorch my hand again than accept his help, and that’s what I do. Once I’m up, I glance at him from over my shoulder. His expression is one of utter confusion, and I do feel as if I should be the one apologizing. “I…”
But we are saved from further awkwardness by a shrill hoot that pierces the night.
He stills. His posture tenses, and his gaze glazes over. When he looks up at me, he no longer sees me, but someone else. A Daughter of the Moon. Whatever I might have been tempted to say no longer matters.
“The guards are done with the snow.” He quickly climbs up after me. As if nothing had changed. And yet everything has. “Time to return inside.”
I brush past him, into the confinement that has become home for my sisters and me.
Chapter 10: Celestia
I know every town and city, their names and exact coordinates. I know every stretch of railroad, every junction and station. I have flown from north to south, over the mountains and tundras. I know the face of the Crescent Empire, for I am the empress-to-be.
The pearl bracelets weigh on my gown’s two pockets, through the wool, against my thighs. There are no clocks in the carriage. I measure the passing of time by the beat of my heart and the rhythm of the train clacking against the tracks. Today is the day I have been waiting for patiently for five weeks and two days.