difficulty, he curved his swollen lips in a smile. “I think we should both save our energy to deal with the King. He is not going to be very happy about losing his Fool and his Grey Lady—”
She brought up her chin at that, covering her wince—she thought—rather well. “He will not have a choice,” she said. “I am the Keep Lady, and you are sealed and bound to me by the Keep Lord and my own will. If he does not wish to begin a revolt of the sea-keeps, he had better keep his opinions on the matter to himself!”
“Well said, my lady!” crowed someone behind Kedric, and the Fool began to laugh, shaking his head.
“Oh, you are a terrible woman, Moira of Highclere,” he said, tears leaking out of his swelling eyes. “I fear for my sanity, if not my life!” But the arms that held her did not release her; in fact, he pulled her closer as some of the men behind him began to chuckle. “Come along with you.”
He pulled her to her feet, though his own balance was none too steady. “Do you think it is possible in this howling gale to manage a bath for your lady?” he called over the storm.
“Eh, trust a Fool to want a bath at a time like this!” someone shouted mockingly, and everyone laughed, as they parted for the two of them to pick their way across the lumber and down into the heart of the keep again.
The Heart Of The Moon
Tanith Lee
Dear Reader,
The heart of the moon is, of course, the heart of a cool, strong and self-controlled woman. In this case, Clirando. She wears a “mask” because she’s been hurt. And because she is tough, she challenges what hurt her, and drives it off.
But most of us know there are things that, discard or deny them as we may, leave their marks on us, like the scratches of a lion. Some fade, some scar. The
I wanted very much to find a way to free my character from her hurt. She deserved that. But like most of the ones I write about, she, or others in this tale, told me how her freedom would come about. She needed not only new light, but the means to confront the shadows. When Zemetrios entered the story and showed his worth, the core of the narrative began to flame—the fire-heart was being refueled.
In fact, I first saw the heroine’s name in a dream, written across a white moon above a dark isle. It’s a kind of play on words, too, I believe. Clir-an-do:
The moon’s face is cold, but her heart is full of fire—how else could she give such light?
The night that lightning struck the Temple of the Maiden—that was the night she found them. Clirando would never have suspected the warrior goddess Parna of such harsh melodrama. Though justice, of course, was partly her province. It seemed she had wanted Clirando to see and to know. Perhaps she had expected Clirando to behave differently after it had happened.
The narrow streets of Amnos were moon-and-torch lit, and people were shouting and running up toward the Sacred Mount, where stood the temples of the Father and Parna the Maiden. Smoke and a thin flame still sizzled from her roof, and the sea-washed air was full of the reek of scorching stone.
But by the time Clirando reached the lower terrace, men were already on the tiles, girls, too, from the various female warrior bands. Clirando saw two of her own command, Oani and Erma, busy there.
She shouted to them. “Are you safe?”
“Yes, safe, Cliro. But come up—”
One of the men, no less than the architect Pholis, swathed in his bed gown, called down, “Use the stairs! No more swarming on ropes here, the roof is damaged.”
So Clirando and several others ran up the final terrace and in from the side court.
There were guest rooms off the court. Priests and others used them, if they were on duty that night at the temple.
Almost everybody had come out. They stood around the tank of crystal water under the fig tree, talking, shaking their heads, some offering prayers.
Two people were late, however, leaving a room.
As Clirando walked into the court—yawning, she afterward recalled, for the levin-bolt had woken her from sleep like most of the town—she saw them. One was Araitha, her closest friend. The other dark-haired Thestus.
Clirando knew them both so well that for a long moment it did not startle her to see them there. She was pleased, very probably. Her best friend, as well as her lover, Thestus, both of whom would be excellent at assisting on the roof.
Even with his hand slipping from Araitha’s shoulder…even with the way Araitha suddenly drew aside from him, her eyes blank with far too many emotions to show.
And his rasp of guilty laugh.
“Ha—Cliro. Are you going up, too? That was a strike and no mistake. A wonder the temple withstood—”
Behind, the two of them, the curtain of the little room had been drawn back, to show a disheveled bed, narrow but still wide enough for the pair of slender and hard-muscled figures who had chosen to couch there together. A flagon of wine stood on the floor. In the grey-red moon-and-torch mixing of the light, it gleamed in a horrible way, blinking and winking at Clirando like the center of an evil eye:
Clirando walked past the water tank and met Thestus and Araitha at the door of the cell, and pushed them both back inside. They let her do this, not resisting.
Thestus was taller than she, but Araitha was her own height. Araitha with her beer-brown eyes and long, dark golden hair. Thestus had always honestly praised that hair. And other things. Araitha’s warrior skills, her musical gift with lyra and tabor. Clirando, Araitha’s sister-friend since they had been six years old in the training courts of the temple, was always happy when others praised Araitha.
As for Thestus, he had come to the Father Temple, a warrior, with his own band of twenty men, only two years before. He had singled Clirando out inside three days, as she had him. Since the Spring Festival they had been lovers. Parna never minded such liaisons. Her warriors were also allowed love, and to make children, if they wished.
Clirando shook her own long brown hair over her shoulders and looked at him. Then she looked at Araitha.
Neither of them spoke.
Thestus’s mouth locked shut as if a key had turned behind his lips.
