Phen

She’d been in the tower for three days. On each of those days, Midsummer’s Eve and the moons drew ever-closer. And on each of those days, her son’s threats came closer to fruition.

Once more, Phen found herself sprawled on the floor. Bandim loomed over, face twisted in a leer.

‘Bandim, please!’ Phen cried, her talons scrabbling on the stone. ‘Who has put these thoughts in your head? I am your mother! You should not have turned out like this.’

‘Perhaps I would not have if my mother had been with me!’ Bandim roared, stalking towards her. ‘Perhaps I would have been filled with the joys and wonders of life if you had been there to show me. But you weren’t!’

‘Bandim, please!’

Phen cowered, memories returning of the fateful day so long ago when the priestess had saved Mantos’s life. She never even knew her name. There wasn’t time to ask, and then…she had given her life for her first-hatched.

Backing her into a corner, she flinched as Bandim brought a hand up to strike her.

‘You made a deal that took you away from me!’ He delivered the slap. ‘And this is what you have received in return. You tried to circumvent the natural way and you have been punished for it. Now the path of fate is unfurling at my feet once more. One empress has thrown herself from the topmost window of this tower.’ He paused, his mouth twisting. ‘Why not another?’

Phen screeched. Bandim raised his hand again. Before he could arc it down to his mother’s face, there was a cough. Phen stared at the doorway. A guard of indeterminate age, middling rank, and unusual height stood in the arch, bearing a long pike. The first of his horns was cracked. He bowed as he spoke.

‘Your Grace,’ the guard said. ‘I am sorry to intrude, but I have news.’ His eyes flicked to the huddled figure on the ground, then back to Bandim. ‘News that’s best discussed in private.’

Phen cried out when Bandim kicked the sole of her bare foot.

‘There are no secrets in my family. Not anymore.’ He strode towards the guard. ‘What is it?’

The guard paled under his burnished helmet. He tried to speak but no words came forth. Growing impatient as the silence stretched on, Bandim snarled.

‘Your emperor has commanded you to speak!’

The guard swallowed and nodded.

‘Your Grace,’ he said. ‘It’s the priestess, Johrann Maa. She’s taken ill, and she’s asked for you. She said it was urgent, otherwise she would not have called for you.’

Phen watched as her son’s face fell, for a moment showing a chink of fear. Whoever this priestess was, she was someone he cared for. At least that meant he was capable of some form of love.

‘What?’

‘Yes, Your Grace.’

Bandim strode past the guard.

‘Make sure she doesn’t leave,’ he said. ‘If she does, I’ll gut you myself.’

The guard gulped and nodded.

‘Yes, Your Grace.’

With that, Bandim slammed the door. The sound of the key turning in the lock made Phen’s heart sink. She was trapped. There was no escape.

The weight of her son’s absence weighed so heavily on her that she couldn’t stand. Instead, she lay where Bandim had left her. She stared at the guard. He stared back.

Then the male cast aside his long pike. Phen winced as it clattered to the floor.

He hurried to her.

‘Your Grace,’ he said, taking her hand.

‘What’s going on?’ Phen asked as he pulled her upright. ‘Who are you?’

‘A friend,’ the guard said, his tallow eyes sparkling with a mix of youth and age and intelligence that made him impossible to place. ‘That’s all you need to know.’ He took the cloak from his shoulders and draped it around Phen’s bony form. ‘I need you to come with me.’

‘Why?’ Phen asked, drawing back from the stranger’s touch.

Even as she asked the question, a voice in her head responded: does it matter? If you stay here, you’ll die. Another voice added, What if this is a trap? What if Bandim is waiting outside, ready to pounce on you? Uncertainty coiled around Phen’s throat like black vines.

The guard crossed to the door and dug in his tunic pocket.

‘Your Grace,’ he said. ‘Bandim will bring destruction to this empire and the entire world. I intend to stop that from happening and I need your help to do it.’

He fished a set of keys from his pocket. As they rattled, Phen’s breath quickened. She didn’t understand what the guard was saying. Destruction to the empire and the world? What she did understand was that this was a chance to flee from her son—and the sharp possibility of this being a hideous trap.

The guard gave a soft, ‘yes!’ as he found the right key. He slipped it in. The lock clicked as the key turned. The door swung wide, revealing freedom.

The guard ushered her out. The first thing Phen did was glance in all directions, looking for Bandim’s smug face. But she saw nothing but shadow.

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At the threshold of the stairs, she couldn’t help but stop. She stared at the window. The low moons were framed in it, nearly upon one another. This was the window an empress had thrown herself from, the same window Phen’s sole surviving son had threatened to throw her from, to a gruesome death on the cobbles below. Perhaps she was about to be thrown, the guard acting on Bandim’s orders. Perhaps her son was in the courtyard below, waiting to watch her smash.

The guard took her arm, pulling her forward. His face looked strange, like a wisdom or a secret loomed behind his eyes.

‘Your Grace, we must go to the temple,’ he said.

‘The temple?’ asked Phen. ‘Why?’

The guard took her hand a guided her down the spiraling stairs.

‘There are things that have happened over the course of the last thousand cycles you cannot understand. Folk have meddled with powers they have no knowledge of.’

Phen startled at that. Such as me.

The guard went on, his words echoing off the curving stone walls.

‘There are others who…’ His voice softened and for a moment, he looked vulnerable. ‘There are others who have not done as they should. The world has rotted from the inside out. And if Bandim comes to the throne, it will be destroyed in fire. I need to get to the temple of Light so I can bring Mantos back.’

‘But he is dead,’ Phen said, her eyes filling. ‘He cannot come back.’

The guard stopped and looked at her from a lower stair. There was something about his eyes that made her recoil. They were the eyes of the strange priestess from many cycles before, on the day she brought Mantos back from the dead. It was a look that spoke through centuries and said more than words ever could.

Phen swallowed. She had dealt in magic before, but it had made no difference. Mantos was dead. In the end, life turned full-circle.

‘Trust me,’ the guard said, starting their downward journey again. ‘Please, trust me and come with me. We need to flee. The story of illness won’t buy us much time.’

‘The story?’ Phen asked.

The guard nodded.

‘A lie,’ he said. ‘A convenience. Bandim will find out soon enough and if he catches us, we’ll both be dead.’

Phen’s heart thundered as they slipped through the courtyard, away from the Grieving Tower, miraculously unseen. She scurried along, swaddled in the cloak of the unknown guard. She hadn’t gathered the courage to ask who he was. Perhaps later. Perhaps when she was out of the long reach of her son’s stranglehold—so long as the guard didn’t kill her first.

Regardless of her fears, Phen followed in the wake of the guard, driven by desperation.

Shards of pain stabbed her as they turned a corner, away from the palace proper. They wound through the warren of servants’ quarters and guards’ barracks. Phen flinched at every shadow. How could Bandim do this to her? She loved him. She would have done the same for him, had it been he that tumbled from her arms.

They are my sons, both equal to each other.

That thought stopped her cold. The guard kept running but Phen couldn’t will her withered legs to move. There were her sons, she corrected herself. Now she had lost them both.

The guard turned and jerked to a stop. He sped back and took up Phen’s arm, gentle enough for a commoner, but not gentle enough for the mother empress. In spite of the situation, Phen wrenched herself free.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she snapped.

The guard’s eyes widened and he grabbed her again, this time with no fringe of delicacy. He pulled her close.

‘We don’t have time to stand on ceremony.’

In his sudden anger, his voice shifted. It sounded…lighter, more like a female’s. He took a deep breath to calm his ire and briefly closed his eyes.

Up close, Phen could see the fine details of the guard’s face. He had thin planes, wide lips... She recoiled sharply, filled with shock.

‘You are female!’

The answer that came was simple.

‘Yes.’

The female cast her guard’s helm aside, the pretence of masculinity now gone. The stranger was transformed. She spoke with a clear voice, tinged with an accent Phen had never heard before. But strangest of all, before Phen’s eyes, the female’s skin and armor changed, now blue and purple, something Phen had never seen before.

‘I am no palace guard,’ the female said, ‘but I can save your sons. Or at least, I can try. To do it, I need you.’ The female pulled Phen forward. ‘We need to get to the temple of Nunako.’

The temple. Where Mantos was. Phen’s lips started to form a question, but the female raised one sharp-clawed talon.

‘Questions later,’ she said. ‘For now, we run.’

This was not the first time Phen had trusted in a stranger. The priestess from long ago, muttering her spells, talking about a thread for a thread and a life for a life. Now there was this female, who had already tricked her. How could she trust her? A phantom open-handed slap struck Phen, and Bandim’s face loomed. No. She had to trust her. The only other option was death.

They escaped the compound of the palace over a high wall. Her body weakened from decates of atrophy and already exhausted from their run, Phen despaired at the idea of scaling the sheer brick. She needn’t have worried. The unknown female had both rope and grapple and scaled the wall with Phen on her back as easily as taking an evening stroll. Who are you? Phen thought. Why are you doing this? She dared not voice her questions as they fled.

Sticking to back alleys, they hopped over stinking puddles of sewage and the bodies of paupers, lying in the filth. As they crept towards the great mound upon which the temple sat, Phen’s eyes brimmed. The shadows were her veil of mourning.

The grand spire of the temple was edged in the silver of the moons. Phen’s throat closed. Mantos’s body was lying within. Braslen’s, too. How can I go on?

The strange female went to Phen’s side. This time, the hand that tugged her along was gentle.

‘Do not despair,’ she said. ‘I can bring your son back.’ At Phen’s wide-eyed terror, she shook her head. ‘I am no Moon Rogue, but there is movement among the stars. Shadows are passing over us and we need the Light. Please, trust me.’

Ignoring the instinct to flee, Phen nodded. What would she return to? Death at her son’s hands, or death on the streets as a beggar? There was no choice to make. She let the female lead her, ducking past the heavy presence of guards.

The temple echoed in its emptiness, but the cavernous interior was filled with light. Candles burned bright on every surface, lined on shelves, swirling in patterns on the floor. It was bright as day inside. And rightly so, for the Light guided souls home.

In the center, directly under the vaulting spiral of the roof, two bodies lay on pyres, awaiting their rebirth in flame. The roof would open and their spirits would be released with the cleansing smoke.

Without thinking, Phen ran. Her tattered skirts billowed around her stick-thin legs, her strength returning at the sight of her family. Her clothes ripped as she clambered up the funeral pyre, exposed skin mauled by the kindling. When she reached the top, her limbs froze.

Her husband, now an old male she barely recognized, and her son, a mirror of his brother, both lying in state, preserved for viewing.

But dead. Cold.

Phen’s body trembled, threatening to topple her from the pyre. She fell to her knees, sticks groaning under her weight. Splinters bit her legs, but she didn’t care.

‘Braslen... Mantos...’

The names were little more than squeaks. The other female mounted the pyre beside her, face set like carved marble.

‘I will carry your son.’

She crossed to Mantos’s prone form.

‘And... My husband?’ Phen asked.

No change flickered over the female’s face.

‘I cannot bring him back,’ she said. ‘There was no sorcery in his death. The goddess has called him and he must obey.’

She stripped Mantos of his elaborate state dress and unwound the jewelry from his horns. Swiftly, she wrapped the body in a plain cloth.

‘There’s a ship waiting for us,’ she said. ‘It’s a little way outside the city, but I can carry Mantos.’

‘A ship?’ Phen asked. She couldn’t take her eyes from her son’s prone form. ‘A ship to where?'

‘To a friend,’ the female said. ‘I can bring your son back, and perhaps even your other son. I need your help to do it, but it will all be for nothing if we don’t leave now. We must go.’

Phen’s chest constricted with unasked questions. She clambered from the pyre and watched as the female hefted Mantos’s body over her shoulders. Then she leapt to the floor with the grace of silk.

They slipped out of the temple of Light, into the waiting darkness.