Winter Moon by Mercedes Lackey & Tanith Lee & C E Murphy

Author:Mercedes Lackey & Tanith Lee & C E Murphy [Lackey, Mercedes & Lee, Tanith & Murphy, C E]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Fantasy, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9781426840678
Google: 3GvjV9DtJ68C
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 7059496
Publisher: LUNA
Published: 2005-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

4

Village

Shadows are called

By the ending of the day

Night unfolds her wings

With the white moon in her hair…

Clirando shuddered. The fragment of song had sounded inside her skull, words clear as the plinking of the lyra which accompanied them—so clear, for a moment she thought a voice had actually sung aloud, a hand actually plucked the chords. Araitha’s voice and Araitha’s hand. It had been a favourite song of hers to play after supper.

Zemetrios this time did not seem to notice Clirando’s lapse.

He said, “There are no lights in this village.”

Clirando said, “Nor any lights anywhere among the fields and orchards. Not one torch burning. Not a single dog to bark.”

The sun was just now down over the horizon, leaving a solitary rift of gold. Darkness was claiming the landscape. But not a lamp shone out anywhere, and over the stubble of the fields, where already the grain must have been scythed, not one figure walked. The orchards too had been stripped of fruit, which surely would not have been ripe.

“What’s happened here?” Zemetrios asked.

The walls of the village-town lay ahead of them, and in them two tall wooden gates stood wide. A street of tamped earth ran in from there, and buildings lined the way. But there also—no movement, and no illumination.

“We must go and see,” she said.

The thought of her girls was in her mind. They had vanished—and now this deserted village.

They hurried to the gates, and reached them as the final golden wash faded on the sky’s edge and darkness bloomed like a long sigh over the earth.

“Look! The gates are closing—”

Together, not thinking, caught by some primal instinct, they bolted between the slowly joining gates. Clirando cursed herself even as she did so—to pelt into this unknown enclosure that might contain anything—and heard Zemetrios curse louder.

But by then they were in.

The gates padded together at their backs.

And, in a fiery chorus, at once every lamp, torch and candle in the village was, or began to be, lit.

The village street, the houses and other buildings, blushed to sudden life. Faces appeared at windows and figures emerged on terraces. Others came strolling along the thoroughfare. Two men, that neither she nor Zemetrios, she thought, had previously seen, were securing the gates with bars.

“Just in time, travelers,” one of the men remarked to them.

Then down the street came striding a giant creature, tall as the roofs, her black hair swinging as she swung her impossibly long legs, a lighted brand in her grasp with which she brought alive the last torches leaning from house walls.

Zemetrios laughed. Clirando glared at him. Had he gone crazy?

“A stilt-walker, Clirando,” he said.

And looking back, Clirando saw the woman, who was dark skinned as a Lybirican, was perched on two long poles, each swathed in her abnormally long white skirt.

A child ran up then. She carried a basket of apples and dates, and offered it to them.

Zemetrios reached out at once.

Clirando said, “Be wary.”

“I’m hungry, Clirando.”

“Yes, but if you eat that you may also be dead.

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