Moonrise

Coming of the Lord…'

The Boston-woman returned in the dark with a scabbarded sword in her hand, as well as the other at her belt. She put back her coat-tails, and sat cross-legged at their fire without asking. – Making, to Bajazet, a fourth oddity present. It felt… unsettling to be in this company, while the only true-blood humans paraded the night naked, with filed teeth, singing.

'Woods-hatchets are handy,' the Boston-woman said, '- and knives necessary, but they never become the friends swords do. Though they say great Warm-time Bowie was loved by such a belt-blade.' Smiling, she lifted the slim, sheathed scimitar from her lap, leaned through the fire's smoke, and handed it to the Made-girl, Nancy.

'- Tom MacAffee was a lazy man, and weak-wristed for being so bulky; this weapon is no heavier than mine. I think, with fox's muscle aiding, you'll find it very comfortable to swing.'

The Made-girl said, 'Thank you, Lady Patience-Lodge. Thank you dearly,' drew some inches of fine steel free of tooled red leather, then bent to kiss it.

So, it was some small portion of fox's blood that Nancy had. Now, Bajazet could see it in her clearly… The yellow slit-pupiled eyes, and russet hair soft as fur. The sharp-featured face and long jaw, its white eyeteeth still making his bitten forearm ache.

'Patience Riley,' the Boston-woman said. '- Only nearly Lodge… Unkind-Harry, the Sparrows' war chief, wanted that sword for his own, but I persuaded him; he's too tall for it, anyway. And you needn't thank me, Nancy. The blade is small payment for your seeing that our Judas goat, here,' she smiled at Bajazet, '- was kept safe to draw the treacherous Cooper on and on.'

A 'Judas goat,' the creature that led spotted cattle to the slaughterhouse. Bajazet felt his face heated by more than the fire's warmth.

'I've offended you.' The Boston-woman smiled at Bajazet through dying flames. She seemed to smile often, find many matters amusing. '- But only with the truth. Do you think it wise to be offended by the truth?'

'The truth, Lady,' Bajazet said, '- is usually offensive, or it would be called something else.'

'Ah…' She stared at him, and Bajazet could see in the fire's warm light how beautiful she must have been before the years and some grave care had touched her face, and whitened the length of her hair.

'No thank-you gift for me?' Richard's voice was low as a warship's drum. '- Or Errol?' He rose to his feet with an odd rocking motion, and stretched, yawning.

'As for you, Richard,' the woman said, '- your great double-ax needs no improvement. And Errol has no notion of gifts, and never will have, as his partial-father weasel had no notion of them. They are as lost on him as conversation.'

The boy had looked up at his name being mentioned, and Bajazet saw no sign of that animal's blood in his body, which might have been any wiry human boy's… The sign was in his eyes, empty of all but the fire's reflection.

'So this conversational creature is better?' The big Made-man hulked over to her.

'Moonrisers are the best of beast and man.' The Boston-woman rose to stand the size of a child beside him, and reached up to stroke his cheek. '- And what was meant to be, before Sunriser- humans imagined themselves better than they were.' She smiled at Bajazet. '… Now, come walk with me, Who- was-a-prince.'

Bajazet stayed sitting where he was, not interested in obeying this Boston smiler.

'… And if I asked, please?'

The court's lessons of courtesy were likely the cause of his rising, then, to follow her into the dark. As he went, he heard behind him, at the fire, the soft whisper of steel drawn from scabbard. Then the swift ruffle… ruffle, of a curved blade testing the air.

'Can you use that lean, straight sword of yours?' the Boston-woman's voice before him in the dark.

'Yes,' Bajazet said. 'And very well.'

'Then, Who-was-a-prince, you might teach Nancy what you can.' Bajazet could see, by starlight, by the faint glow of tribal fires down the valley stream, the woman's white hair leading through thicket. '- Not that her hatchet has been bad practice for learning the crisscross strokes of a slicing blade. But wards, parries, the use of the point…'

'I don't see what opportunity I'd have to teach her anything.'

They'd walked a fair distance along the valley's brushy slope – Bajazet able to follow more by sound than sight – when a small hand came from shadow to rest on his chest. 'Here, is private enough. We will be voices in the dark, you and I – as the tribesmen believe all we Persons to be children of the dark, and made under a rising moon.'

Then she was silent for a while. Bajazet heard nothing but the wind down the valley's hills, stirring the tangle of scrub around them. The tribesmen were no longer singing… He hadn't noticed when they'd stopped.

'What do you imagine, boy? Do you imagine returning to Island?'

'No,' Bajazet said – and realized he'd decided before knowing he'd decided.

'And why not? The Cooper is dead. His only son is dead.'

'Then some other river lord will likely be waiting to cut my throat.' Bajazet spoke into the night and night's breezes, where only a small, outline woman stood. '- And now I believe it's my turn for a question.'

'Then… ask.'

'You're a New Englander, yet I hear you've said to those others that Boston has helped – I think now, more than helped – to murder my brother, and our friends.' Bajazet touched his left-hand dagger's hilt, to be sure of drawing. 'The Coopers are gone, but Boston remains, and I intend to damage those people and their town, if I can. – Why should I not begin with you?'

'Why not?' She grunted, seemed amused. 'First, I wonder if you're good enough with those straight blades to take punishment to me – even once you're rested from the chase… Second, and only for acting as a mother should, I've been declared Beyond-town-limits… And third, I've just killed Boston's ambassador to Middle Kingdom, after seeing to the tribes' slaughter of the Township's chosen River King.' A distant night bird called in the sedge, two faint sighing notes. 'You will find it difficult, boy, to injure Cambridge more severely.'

'Still… you are what you are.' There was a green scent of bracken on the air, from stems broken, crushed by the savages' battle charge.

'Ah, I hear your cruel First-father speaking there; sad that we never met… Yes, I am what I am, and Boston made and bred – but the Faculty Selectmen, meeting on Cambridge Common, voted to take my son away. They hold him, though he's a baby, and certainly the One Expected.'

'The One Expected…'

'Yes. They bred better than they knew. My Maxwell swims dreaming down lines of blood, through recalled history of its little bits. He follows those into the pasts of people gone, and looks out through their eyes, though understanding little.'

'And this is true?'

'True, even though only a baby's dreams – a baby, it seems, who will always be a baby, though wiser and wiser. Wise enough already to frighten those fools who have labored – as other Talents have labored for hundreds of years – to bring him to us.'

'And they took him for that?'

'That, and his dreaming into the future, more and more – I suppose by some arithmetic of possibilities the little bits tell him – so he sometimes sees what will be seen, though imperfectly.' She stood silent before Bajazet a little while, starlight barely salting her white hair. 'They intend to cripple him for their comfort. And I intend to have my Maxwell back… and have their heads, besides.'

She'd stood so perfectly still, that Bajazet was startled when she suddenly turned. 'Errol! Back to camp!' There was, perhaps, a rustling through the scrub, though nothing to see by starlight.

'A turned back,' she said, '- after seeing so much killing here, is a temptation for his knives. Any helpless person. And a girl – or boy, for that matter – also a temptation, of another kind. Though young, he's very true to his part-sire, with rutting and murder being close to the same for him.'

'More of New England's doing.'