Fellow Travelers by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller

Author:Sharon Lee & Steve Miller [Lee, Sharon & Miller, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: liad, sharon lee, korval, steve miller, liaden, pinbeam
Publisher: Pinbeam Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

MOONPHASE

THE WOOD BENCH was cool beneath her bare buttocks, the stone cold under her bare toes. No heat came from the empty fireplace, nor light from the empty oil lamps and candelabra. Despite the season the barred windows high in the walls were open.

She needn't see the walls, canted inward as they rose, to understand the meaning of the word prisoner, though it was a word unsaid by the Sisters and the Mother herself.

"You will be assigned more appropriate duties after you recant, Mendoza," they'd told her, already stripping away the dignity of the name that had come to her unbidden the first time she'd bled.

Mendoza, they called her now. More properly, Priscilla Delacroix y Mendoza. And what of Moonhawk?

She sighed, felt her dry skin shiver, and went to Lessons of Intent to remove her concentration from the discomfort and center it on the reality.

The reality she found was motion and what it meant. The breeze was motion--

Within the light breeze that chilled her bare breasts were odors of the evening: dinner smells from the dining hall for the Maidens-in-Training, the hint of expensive herbs burned by wealthy supplicants down on Mother's Row, the occasional acrid touch of metal and smoke from the foundry on the edge of the bay downriver.

It all meant that the wind was from the west, and the night would be colder than last, and that in the morning they would take her to the Mother's Chamber to say a confession she would not make.

"You will recant," had said the Mother; "You will admit that you never heard Moonhawk calling, that you have always stolen your power from others, and that you were wrong to do so. You will be assigned to more appropriate duties, and given a Name-in-Keeping."

In the meantime they had left her here to meditate, for three days and nights, having left her only the earrings given her by a dead grandmother; Witches knowing better than to trifle with a gift of handwrought silver.

What they had taken! They'd taken amulets of power, bracelets of strength, stones that concentrated will. Then they'd subjected her to spells of unmaking, to other thefts...

Priscilla sat stiller now, thinking of the watchers. She'd know from the first moment that they watched, known that they'd taken Moonhawk's bracelets with trepidation, known they taken Moonhawk's Amulet only when the Mother and her Three Sisters had stood watching, only when the full Circle had cast spells of restraint and quiet. They'd stripped her then of everything but the earrings. Even her privacy was gone: the only light in the cell suite was the small constant green of an imported glow-ever beside the ancient waterless slot latrine.

To think that they'd feared her so much! If only she had the bracelets, even now--

She shivered. Even now she needed food. She needed drink. She needed Moonhawk as never before and Moonhawk had been forced away from her by the Council.

A tear came, and quickly she regretted it. No water here, no food. They wanted a weak and beaten, near-nameless Maiden, not Moonhawk-in-training.

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