Winter Moon: Moontide / The Heart of the Moon / Banshee Cries

Thank heavens. Anatha’s absence made this much easier—no need to conjure up excuses for going back to the nursery.

She opened her jewelry casket underneath the lamp and found the ring she was looking for. Slipping it onto her middle finger, she stole back down the hall to the nursery, carefully closing the door behind her this time.

She positioned herself at the window with her eyes mere inches from the center pane, and making a fist, rubbed a little scratch in the glass right where the beacon shone through the storm with the diamond in the ring.

There. When the storm broke, she could come back here in daylight and see if the scratch lined up with the beacon. If it did, she had been anxious over nothing.

If it didn’t—

If it didn’t, there was something very, very strange going on at Highclere Sea-Keep. And she would have to find out what it was—and more important, why it was happening.

When Anatha returned to Moira’s rooms, she found her mistress with her feet resting on a stone warmed on the hearth with a fur rug covering her lap, sitting beside the fire, knitting. Knitting was a very plebian pastime, and most ladies didn’t even bother to learn, but Moira found it soothing. It was one of the few tasks that could be done by the uncertain light of a flickering fire and guttering lamps during a storm. And it certainly did no harm to have extra soft, lamb’s-wool hose on hand in a sea-keep winter.

“A wild night, my lady,” was all Anatha said. “The Winter Witch has come early.”

“I thought as much—but I also wondered if my memory had been at fault,” Moira replied. “Well, what are the canny old sailors saying?”

“That—that it isn’t natural, my lady,” Anatha replied, looking over her shoulder first, as if she expected to see someone spying on them from a corner. “The witch has never flown before all the leaves are gone, not in anyone’s memory.”

Once again, Moira felt an odd little sense of warning. “The leaves will certainly not outlast this storm,” she replied, and yawned. “Are they saying this means a bad winter?”

Anatha looked over her shoulder, and this time, she leaned very close to Moira and whispered, “They’re saying, this storm was sent.”

Once again, that touch of warning, that sense as if a single ice-cold fingertip had been touched to the back of her neck. She thought about her father and Prince Massid exchanging cryptic comments and glances full of meaning about the winter storms.

But no one could control the weather. Even the greatest of magicians couldn’t control the weather—the one who could would have a great and terrible weapon at his disposal. Such a magician wouldn’t be content to serve a greater master. He himself would use that power to become a powerful ruler.

Not that Moira had any great acquaintance with magicians. They were few and far between, the genuine ones, anyway. The Countess had her wizard, Lady Amaranth, but she had never performed any magic more powerful than the spell that allowed the Grey Ladies to use pigeon-mail. And Lady Amaranth was supposed to be the most powerful wizard in the kingdom, except for those that served the King.

“How could such a storm be sent?” she replied, keeping her tone light and disbelieving. “And more to the point, why? This is a sea-keep—we are used to such storms. At most, it is an inconvenience. The men-at-arms won’t be able to hunt until it’s over, and we might run a bit short of fresh meat, but the High Table will not suffer. The beacons will have to be tended, and the poor fellows who have to do the tending will spend a miserable time of it. Soon or late, it doesn’t matter when the Winter Witch flies, she’ll have no effect on Highclere. And I hope you aren’t going to tell me that God has sent the storms early for our sins! I shall be quite cross with you.”

Anatha laughed at that. “No, my lady. You’re right, of course. It was all just kitchen talk.”

“Then I count on you to be sensible,” Moira replied, with a nod. “When that sort of talk begins again, make sure you are the one who keeps her head.” She yawned and set aside her work. “And I believe that I will be sensible and go to bed.”

Tucked up in bed, with the curtains closed tightly all around to prevent icy drafts from waking her, Moira did not feel in the least sleepy. She turned on her side to think.

If someone was a powerful magician, and could control the weather, at least in part—he’d use that power to make himself a king. Wouldn’t he?

But what if he already was a king? Or, say, a Khaleem, which was basically the same thing.

Massid had said that the Khaleemate had never lost a ship to storms. Maybe that wasn’t just good luck. Maybe the Khaleems of Jendara had power over the weather.

If that was their only power, it was a cursed useful one, especially for a nation that fielded an enormous navy, and unofficially fielded a second enormous force of pirates.

But why would that be attractive to her father? It was true that bad storms could bring a few more ships to grief on the Teeth of Highclere, and that in turn would certainly increase the coffers of the Lord of Highclere Sea-Keep. But the gain would be offset by some loss; the worse the storms were, the less hunting there would be, the less fishing, and the more likely that one of those unfortunate accidents would befall whoever was supposed to be working outside. She vividly recalled a particularly wretched winter when frequent, though not violent, storms had kept everyone pent up within the walls right up until late spring. The number of fights had been appalling. Feuds had begun that were probably still being played out to this day. Ferson had lost a dozen men to accidents and to fights; it had been hard to replace them, and the keep had been shorthanded for nearly a year.

So what possible use could Ferson make of such a power that would outweigh the disadvantages?

She couldn’t think of anything. So whatever had brought the Prince of Jendara here, it probably wasn’t that.

She fell asleep still trying to figure out what had.

After four days of wind and storm, the morning of the fifth day broke over calm seas and a cloudless—if icy—sky.

Immediately, the scavengers went out to comb the shores for whatever the sea had cast up. Heaps of extremely useful kelp was always thrown upon the rocks, of course, but there were other things. Amber, jet, sea coal. And sometimes the sea in her fickle nature elected to toss back things that had gone to the bottom in previous wrecks. By the time Moira went down to breakfast, the keep was practically empty. Everyone who could be spared was out combing the shore, and everyone who could hunt was up in the forest doing so. The cook would make only one hot meal today, as most of his helpers would be elsewhere.

It seemed as good a time as any to send the Countess another message. But what? Moira still had no idea why Massid was here. No marriage had yet been proposed. And yet—

Frustrated, she essentially repeated her previous warning with the addition of the rumor about the storm being “sent,” adding only that Massid was spending all his time in her father’s company. She released the dove with a sense of futility, and carried a basket of eggs down to the cook as her excuse for being up there in the first place.

With nothing much to do, she went into the Great Hall before returning to her rooms, and stood at the window, brooding down at the ocean.

“Pining for a beloved, my lady?” Kedric’s dry voice came from behind her.

“If you know anything at all about the women schooled by the Countess, you know we don’t pine for anything,” she replied, without turning. “And as for a beloved, you would know that we also are aware that our lives are not our own to give.”

“Ah yes, you are well schooled in obedience—” The bitterness in his voice made her turn and regard him with a lifted brow.

“Perhaps, Kedric, you are insufficiently acquainted with the meaning of the phrase noblesse oblige,” she replied, keeping her tone cool, and just on the polite side of sarcastic. “It means that those who are born into a position of power inherit obligations and responsibilities far in excess of the benefits of privilege. It means that we are obligated to protect those who give us their loyalty and service. Sometimes that protection comes at the cost of a life. Sometimes the cost is only freedom. But we owe them that. This is what noblesse oblige means.”

She could not read Kedric’s face, so she continued. “Men,” she said with some bitterness of her own, “think that being willing to lay down their lives is difficult. They have no conception of what it means to be willing to lay down your life as a woman does—not for a moment of sacrifice, but for years, decades of sacrifice. To surrender it in that way so that the people you have sworn to protect are protected.”

“And so, you lie down and let yourself—” Kedric began.

She interrupted him, a cold fury in her voice that she could not entirely repress. “Is that what you think? That this is mere, passive obedience, weak and weak willed? I thought you wiser than your motley, Kedric. It is hard, hard, to subdue the will, to force aside I want for I must. But you mistake me. Even in the most loveless and calculated of marriages, there are children to love and be loved by. I refer to the hardest sacrifice of all, for a woman to steel her will to live alone and unwedded, not because she wishes to, but because, for the sake of her people, she must—to look down the long years ahead and see nothing at the end of them but an empty bed and a lonely singleness.”

He made a little strangling sound, and she sniffed, interpreting his odd expression, she thought, correctly. “What? You thought the Countess remained single because she wished to? Or because she does not care for men? Oh, she mourns the Count her husband, and she truly loved him, but she stays a single widow because it is her cousin the King’s will, so that she can be the stalking horse, be dangled, like a prize at a fair, for all to see but ultimately never be won by any. And she takes no lovers, for she is the King’s cousin, and like Caesar’s wife, she must be above reproach. She knows that, has always known it, and she makes sure her Gr—her ladies know that there is more than one way in which the King may ask for their obedience, and what the cost may be.”

“I—see,” he managed. “That had not occurred to me.”

“And to protect my people, if I thought it would protect them, yes, I would give myself over to be locked away in a seraglio in Jendara,” she added, turning back to the window. “But I do not think it would protect them. I think the opposite, and I think the King would agree.”