She dreamed that she stood on the edge of a high, rocky crag, a great promontory that dropped away hundreds of feet to jagged rocks below. The landscape spread out and away beneath her, an impossible chaos of ridges and shattered stone, tree-choked valleys and plateaux. It was thick with spirits down there, invisible in their hollows, and they cooed and whispered to each other in the night.
The night. The three moons hung before her in a velvet sky, so close that they were overlapping. Aurus seemed near enough to touch, looming immense in the star-pocked darkness. She was not in the least perturbed by the impossibility of the three moons being in such close proximity without the howling maelstrom of a moonstorm lashing the land. With the easy logic of sleep, she knew that it was simply not the right time yet.
She sensed the dream lady watching her before she turned to look. The sloping table of rock she stood on jutted out from a thick wood, and in the shadows of the treeline she could see the blurred, unclear shape of the mysterious stranger. She was a smear of black and white, a child's charcoal drawing, stretched thin and tall with a cloak folded close around her like a bat's wings. Always too far away to see clearly, always evading Lucia's sight. This one had found her when the unseen monster could not; but Lucia was not afraid of the dream lady. There was no malice there, only an unsettling intensity. Often she was simply present on the sidelines of Lucia's dreams, watching silently from some distant point, a rooftop or a cavern, her gaze unwavering as she followed the Heir-Empress. Sometimes she spoke, and though Lucia did not like her voice, her words were very clear and she told Lucia things about the world outside. Lucia, desperately curious, would converse whenever she could with the dream lady; but often the newcomer would not reply, would simply watch her disconcertingly, always from far away. Lucia did not know what to make of it all, but she had the impression that the dream lady told Lucia exactly as much as she wanted the young Heir-Empress to know, and nothing more.
Still, as time went on, she learned who and what the dream lady was, and she began to think of her as a strange kind of friend.
Tonight she was not talking, it seemed. She hung in the shadows, a half-seen haze, and stared. Lucia ignored her. She had learned by now that it was pointless doing anything else. Distractedly, she sensed the unseen malevolence, hunting for her again. It was far away, and no threat to her here.
There was no sound but the sigh of the cool wind and the calling of the spirits in the cracked landscape below. Lucia wandered to the edge and looked down, her blonde hair tumbling over her shoulder. When she turned back, the dream lady was gone.
It gave her a fright. She was quite accustomed to the dream lady's visits, but her sudden disappearances were always a surprise. Before, she had only ever vanished when the dark presence that stalked her had become too strong, got too close. She had told Lucia she must stay away from the presence, must not let herself be detected. Lucia had accepted that, but when she asked what the presence was, the dream lady would not say.
Now, however, the air seemed to become light, taking on a coppery taste, and the fine hairs on Lucia's skin stood up. She felt as if she was being lifted, dragged upward towards the sky, though her feet remained firmly on the ground. The atmosphere had become charged, and the spirits hidden in the panorama beneath her had gone silent.
She felt a hand touch her on her shoulder, far bigger than any human hand, thin white fingers tipped with hooked nails. Her heart seemed to slow to a stop. She did not dare turn around. She could feel them, their presence making her consciousness crawl. Ageless, endless, mad things, the three sisters that stalked the earth when the three satellites shared space in the night sky. The Children of the Moons.
The touch was both dreadful and divine, filling her with terror and awe in equal measure. She squeezed her eyes shut, knowing that behind her there was no ground to stand on, that the spirits hung in the air over the precipice, massive and cold and fearful. She could not bear to look at them, could not face the depthless void of their eyes, where motivations boiled that were as alien to humanity as the gods were. And though some part of her knew this to be a dream, it brought her no comfort; for dreams were no refuge from beings such as these.
Words were spoken, but they came as an awful, thin, sawing noise, making Lucia shudder. She could not hope to comprehend them. She trembled, bowing her head, her lower lip shaking and her eyes screwed firmly closed.
Then they were before her instead of behind, the three of them looming, and though she could not see them she could feel their outlines through her eyelids. She felt something brush the side of her hair, and she shivered. A fingernail. It brushed her again, infusing her anew with panic and wonder, the strange current that passed into her from the contact. It took her a breathless moment to realise what the spirit was doing. It was stroking her, using only a single finger, as a person might to do a delicate animal, or a mother to a newborn baby. Gentling her. The voice came again, and once more it was horrible to the ear; but this time softer somehow, a tonal quality that transcended language and meaning.
Lucia did not know what they wanted. She did not even know if wanting was a concept that applied to them. But she said a tiny prayer to the moon sisters, and then opened her eyes, and looked upon their children.
The Imperial bedchamber was shadowy and quiet. Warm night breezes blew in through elegantly curved window arches, stirring the thin veils that hung before them. Against one wall, the enormous bed was a rolling landscape of opalescent sheets, gold and white and crimson. At each corner stood one of the Guardians of the
Four Winds, carved in precious metals and reaching up to hold aloft the canopy that roofed the whole of the grand structure.
Anais tu Erinima, Blood Empress of Saramyr, stood by a dresser of finest wood, leaning gently against the wall with a silver cup of amber wine in her hand. Her light hair was loose, falling about her deceptively innocent face and over the shoulders of the black silk nightdress she wore. The jet-coloured lack of the floor was cold against her bare soles – apart from its reflective properties, loch was a stone valued for its reluctance to take up heat, and hence keep a room cool.
She sipped her wine and waited, nursing her fury.
How she hated him. As if the Emperor Durun had not been enough of a trial before, this business with Lucia had made him a hundred times worse. He seemed to be going out of his way to anger and humiliate her. His drunkenness, always apt to get a little out of hand, was appalling now. He caroused at feasts, bawling and vomiting until even his hunting companions seemed uneasy. The hunts themselves were a mercy, because they got him out of the Keep for a few days at a time; but he used them as an excuse to stand up important guests and often reeled home in a worse state than he had left.
She seethed as she thought on it. At least she had the small revenge that his family, Blood Batik, had thrown their support behind her at the council. But this in itself was a double-edged sword. If Blood Batik had declared against her, she would at least have had the comfort of annulling her marriage to Durun; now she was forced to suffer him, for she could not do without the support of his family. Durun was too stubborn and bullheaded to toe the family line in this matter, and his frustration was evident. He and his father Barak Mos – a firebrand to equal his son – had bellowed at each other often in the past weeks, but each confrontation only sent Durun away with a renewed desire to embarrass himself. After that, the Barak had come as near as he ever came to apologising to Anais, asking her to forgive his son's transgressions and promising to make up for them in the future. Anais knew how much it had taken for him to overcome his not inconsiderable pride to do this, and she was touched; but it did not abate her anger one bit.