His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 193

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Chapter 193

Abby

They put a sack over my head before the truck had reached the end of the river road.

I didn’t see it coming. I was sitting in the back, on a bench against the side, with my cuffed hands in my lap and the silver burning into my wrists, trying to see out through the canvas flap at the back. Trying to see anything. A sign. A bridge. The shape of a hill. And then one of the men who didn smell of anything leaned across and pulled something rough and dark down over my head, and the world went black, and smelled of old flour and dust.

I made a sound. I didn’t mean to.

“It’s only for the road,” Cressida said, from somewhere in front of me. Her voice was perfectly calm. “You don’t need to see the road.”

I didn’t say anything. I sat there in the dark with my breath hot and close inside the sack, and

listened.

***

That was how it went. For days.

I lost count of them. I know that sounds impossible, but it’s true. There was no light inside the sack, and no time. The truck moved at night. I could tell that much from the cold, and the quiet, and the way the engine sounded on empty roads. In the day we stopped. Somewhere close and dark that smelled of earth and mice, a cellar or a barn or the inside of a hill, and they took me down out of the truck and sat me against a wall and left me there, with a man I couldn’t smell somewhere nearby, breathing.

Once, the first day, we stopped somewhere with voices. A long way off. A dog barking, and a man calling to it, and a gate. And before I could open my mouth, a hand came round the back of my head through the sack and a cloth went into my mouth, hard, and was knotted behind. It tasted of dust and something bitter. I sat there with it in my mouth until the voices had gone, and then for a long while after, until someone took it out again without a word.

I didn’t try to shout again. There was nobody to hear me.

I listened instead. I listened to everything. It was all I had. The tires on gravel, and then on tarmac, and then on gravel again. The sound of water, once, very close, rushing under a bridge. Then for a long time nothing but the engine climbing, in a low gear, round bend after bend. The cold got worse. The air coming in round the edges of the canvas got thinner and sharper, and smelled of pine, and snow, and stone.

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Every evening, before the truck moved off again, and every morning when it stopped. She did it herself. Nobody else touched it. I would hear her come, and smell nothing, and then her hands would beat my throat, untying the cord, and the sack would come up over my face, and there would be light. Not much. A lamp. A candle. The gray daylight coming in through the door of a barn. After the dark of the sack it was so bright it hurt, and I would sit there blinking, with my eyes running, and he would be crouched in front of me with a cup of water in one hand and something in the othe Bread. Cheese. A piece of cold meat. Once, an apple, which she cut into pieces with a little knife and led to me one at a time, because my hands were chained.

“Slowly,” she said, the first time, holding the cup to my mouth. “Slowly, little moon. You make yourself sick.”

I drank. I hated myself for it. I drank all of it.

She wiped my mouth with her thumb when I had finished. The burned hand. Gently. The way you wipe a child’s mouth.

I jerked my head away.

She smiled, and sat back on her heels, and looked at me.

“So this is how you make deals,” I said. My voice came out cracked from not using it. “Is it? Promise something. Get what you want. Put a sack on it.”

“I kept my promise.”

“You said I’d come of my own will.”

“And you did.” She tilted her head. “You walked down those stairs on your own feet. You walked across that garden. You got into the truck. Nobody carried you.” She held up the next piece of bread. “The chains are for the road. That’s all. The road is long, and you are very strong, and I don’t trust

you yet.”

“Then why bother?” I said. “Why come into my room and sit in the chair and talk to me? Why make \me an offer at all? You could have walked that girl in and had your men carry me out asleep, the same as the guards. You could have put a sack on me in my bed.” I stared at her. “Why make me say yes?”

Cressida looked at me for a while. Something moved at the corner of her mouth.

“Because it matters,” she said. “That you said yes.” She held the bread up to my lips. “Eat.”

I didn’t. I turned my head away.

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On the fourth night, the moon was full.

I knew it before anyone told me. Before they took me down out of the truck into the cold. felt it come up. Even through the sack, even through the silver, I felt it rise, somewhere behind the clouds, huge and white.

And Diana went mad.

She had been lying flat inside me since Greyhollow, under the silver, heavy and half asleep. Now she came up off the bottom of me all at once, howling. Not out loud. Inside. A sound with no sound in it, all the way through me, from the soles of my feet to the backs of my eyes. She wanted the moon. She could feel it, right there, full and pouring down, a hand’s breadth away on the other side of the silver, and she couldn’t reach it. She threw herself at the silver, again and again, and every time, it burned her, and she fell back, and came up again.

I lay on the floor of wherever they had put me with the sack over my head and my cuffed wrists against my chest, and curled up round her, and shook.

And somewhere out there, a hundred miles away, or two hundred, or ten, Kade was lying on his back on the mats in the training hall, under the same moon. I knew he was. I knew Imogen would be kneeling over him with her chalk and her red wool. I knew the thing in his chest would be coming up to meet that moon the way Diana was trying to.

I reached for him. With everything I had.

Nothing. I could feel the bond going out of me, all that long way, and I couldn’t feel him at the end of it.

I didn’t know if he was alive.

I lay on the floor all that night, and didn’t know. And somewhere in the middle of it, very close, in the dark beside my head, I heard Cressida laugh. Softly. To herself.

***

She took the sack off in the morning, the way she always did, and I knew from her face before she said anything.

She looked tired. That was the first thing. Gray round the mouth, and drawn. And underneath it, pleased.

“Is he alive?” I said.

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“Drink first.”

Is he alive?”

Cressida looked at me over the cup. Then she lowered it.

“He’s alive,” she said. “Your witch held it. Just.” Her mouth moved. “She’s better than I thought. She always was, a little. It never did her any good.” She held the cup up again. “He’s alive, little moon. For now. I gave him a little push, to remind him, and she pushed back. That’s all. Now drink.”

I drank. My hands were shaking so badly the water ran down my chin.

She wiped it away with her burned thumb, and I didn’t pull back. I didn’t have anything left to pull

back with.

***

It was later that day, sitting against the wall of a barn somewhere in the cold with the sack back over my head and Diana lying broken and silent at the bottom of me, that I understood.

It came slowly.

She wanted me alive. She had said so, sitting in the chair in my room. Not dead. Not hurt. She fed me with her own hands. She held the cup. She wiped my mouth. She took the sack off herself, every time, and looked at my face, and then, every time, she looked at my eyes. And at my hair. At the four silver strands at my temple. Checking.

She didn’t want me. Not me. She wanted what was in me. The light. And she wanted it whole. Every drop of it, I thought, and I didn’t know where the words came from.

And last night, under the full moon, with the silver on my wrists, I hadn’t been able to draw in one drop of it. Not one. The moon had come up and poured down over the whole valley, and Diana had thrown herself at the silver all night to reach it, and the light in me hadn’t risen at all.

It had gone down.

I could feel it. Sitting there in the dark. A little lower than it had been at Greyhollow, where it had

hummed under my skin every night as the moon grew. Lower, and quieter, and thinner.

The silver wasn’t only keeping me in.

It was keeping the moon out.

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“You need it,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows.

“Whatever you want from me.” My voice was steadier than it had been in days. “Whatever is. Whatever you’re taking me up this mountain for. You need it full.” I held her eyes. “And it isnt.”

Cressida didn’t say anything. She crouched there in front of me with the cup in her hand, ver still.

“I felt it,” I said. “Last night. The moon came up, and Diana couldn’t reach it. Not through this I lifted my cuffed wrists, a little, between us. “She tried all night. And this morning there’s less in me than there was at Greyhollow. Not more. Less.” I swallowed. “You’ve been looking at my eyes every time you take that sack off. You’ve been looking at my hair. You know it too.”

She was silent.

“You can keep me chained all the way to wherever you’re going,” I said. “You can keep that sack on my head till we get there. And when we do, there’ll be nothing left in me for you to have. You’ll have dragged me up a mountain for an empty jar.”

The lamp hissed. Somewhere outside, the wind was moving in the trees.

“So what do you want?” Cressida said at last. Quite softly.

“The moon,” I said. “For Diana. An hour a night. In my own skin, in my wolf, under the open sky.” I didn’t look away. “You can do whatever you like. Put a circle round me. Put a chain on my leg. Put six of your men round me with knives. I don’t care. But if you want this to work, whatever it is, she needs

the moon. And so do I.”

I took a breath.

“If you want me whole,” I said, “we’ll have to cooperate. Both of us. Otherwise you’ll get nothing.”

Cressida looked at me.

I couldn’t read her face. I had never been able to. It was calm, and interested, and a little amused, the way it always was. But behind it, very far back, I thought I saw something move. Something quick, and hungry, and careful.

She wanted the light full too. I could see it. She had been watching it drain out of me for three days and doing sums behind her eyes. I wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t know.

I was only telling her that I knew it too.

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