Xan, for her part, did her best not to say, I told you so. She mostly succeeded.
In that first year, both Xan and Glerk watched the baby for any sign of magical eruption. Though they could both see the oceans of magic thrumming just under the child’s skin (and they could feel it, too, each time they carried that girl in their arms), it remained inside her—a surging, unbroken wave.
At night, moonlight and starlight bent toward the baby, flooding her cradle. Xan covered the windows with heavy curtains, but she would find them thrown open, and the child drinking moonlight in her sleep.
“The moon,” Xan told herself. “It is full of tricks.”
But a whisper of worry remained. The magic continued to silently surge.
In the second year, the magic inside Luna increased, nearly doubling in density and strength. Glerk could feel it. Xan could feel it, too. Still it did not erupt.
Magical babies are dangerous babies, Glerk tried to remind himself, day after day. When he wasn’t cradling Luna. Or singing to Luna. Or whispering poetry into her ear as she slept. After a while, even the thrum of magic under her skin began to seem ordinary. She was an energetic child. A curious child. A naughty child. And that was enough to deal with on its own.
The moonlight continued to bend toward the baby. Xan decided to stop worrying about it.
In the third year, the magic doubled again. Xan and Glerk hardly noticed. Instead they had their hands full with a child who explored and rummaged and scribbled on books and threw eggs at the goats and once tried to fly off a fence, only to end up with two skinned knees and a chipped tooth. She climbed trees and tried to catch birds and sometimes played tricks on Fyrian, making him cry.
“Poetry will help,” Glerk said. “The study of language ennobles the rowdiest beast.”
“Science will organize that brain of hers,” Xan said. “How can a child be naughty when she is studying the stars?”
“I shall teach her math,” Fyrian said. “She will not be able to play a trick on me if she is too busy counting to one million.”
And so, Luna’s education began.
“ ‘In every breeze exhales the promise of spring,’ ” Glerk whispered as Luna napped during the winter.
“ ‘Each sleeping tree
dreams green dreams;
the barren mountain
wakes in blossom.’ ”
Wave after wave of magic surged silently under her skin. They did not crash to the shore. Not yet.
6.
In Which Antain Gets Himself in Trouble
During Antain’s first five years as an Elder-in-Training, he did his best to convince himself that his job would one day get easier. He was wrong. It didn’t.
The Elders barked orders at him during Council meetings and community functions and after-hours discussions. They berated him when they ran into him on the street. Or when they sat in his mother’s dining room for yet another sumptuous (though uncomfortable) supper. They admonished him when he followed in their wake during surprise inspections.
Antain hung in the background, his eyebrows knit together into a perplexed knot.
It seemed that no matter what Antain did, the Elders erupted into purple-faced rage and sputtering incoherence.
“Antain!” the Elders barked. “Stand up straight!”
“Antain! What have you done with the proclamations?”
“Antain! Wipe that ridiculous look off your face!”
“Antain! How could you have forgotten the snacks?”
“Antain! What on earth have you spilled all over your robes?”
Antain, it seemed, could not do anything right.
His home life wasn’t any better.
“How can you possibly still be an Elder-in-Training?” his mother fumed night after night at supper. Sometimes, she’d let her spoon come crashing down to the table, making the servants jump. “My brother promised me that you would be an Elder by now. He promised.”
And she would seethe and grumble until Antain’s youngest brother, Wyn, began to cry. Antain was the oldest of six brothers—a small family, by Protectorate standards—and ever since his father died, his mother wanted nothing else but to make sure that each of her sons achieved the very best that the Protectorate had to offer.
Because didn’t she, after all, deserve the very best, when it came to sons?
“Uncle tells me that things take time, Mother,” Antain said quietly. He pulled his toddler brother onto his lap and began rocking until the child calmed. He pulled a wooden toy that he had carved himself from his pocket—a little crow with spiral eyes and a clever rattle inside its belly. The boy was delighted, and instantly shoved it into his mouth.
“Your uncle can boil his head,” she fumed. “We deserve that honor. I mean you deserve it, my dear son.”
Antain wasn’t so sure.
He excused himself from the table, mumbling something about having work to do for the Council, but really he only planned on sneaking into the kitchen to help the kitchen staff. And then into the gardens to help the gardeners in the last of the daylight hours. And then he went into the shed to carve wood. Antain loved woodworking—the stability of the material, the delicate beauty of the grain, the comforting smell of sawdust and oil. There were few things in his life that he loved more. He carved and worked deep into the night, trying his best not to think about his life. The next Day of Sacrifice was approaching, after all. And Antain would need yet another excuse to make himself scarce.
The next morning, Antain donned his freshly laundered robe and headed into the Council Hall well before dawn. Every day, his first task of the morning was to read through the citizen complaints and requests that had been scrawled with bits of chalk on the large slate wall, and deem which ones were worth attention and which should simply be washed down and erased.
(“But what if they all are important, Uncle?” Antain had asked the Grand Elder once.
“They can’t possibly be. In any case, by denying access, we give our people a gift. They learn to accept their lot in life. They learn that any action is inconsequential. Their days remain, as they should be, cloudy. There is no greater gift than that. Now. Where is my Zirin tea?”)
Next, Antain was to air out the room, then post the day’s agendas, then fluff the cushions for the Elders’ bony bottoms, then spray the entrance room with some kind of perfume concocted in the laboratories of the Sisters of the Star—designed, apparently, to make people feel wobbly-kneed and tongue-tied and frightened and grateful, all at once—and then he was to stand in the room as the servants arrived, giving each one an imperious expression as they entered the building, before hanging up his robes in the closet and going to school.
(“But what if I don’t know how to make an imperious expression, Uncle?” the boy asked again and again.
“Practice, Nephew. Continue to practice.”)
Antain walked slowly toward the schoolhouse, enjoying the temporary glimmers of sun overhead. It would be cloudy in an hour. It was always cloudy in the Protectorate. Fog clung to the city walls and cobbled streets like tenacious moss. Not many people were out and about that early in the morning. Pity, thought Antain. They are missing the sunlight. He lifted his face and felt that momentary rush of hope and promise.