Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight Read Free Page B

Allanak is readying itself to come and gnaw the spoils your folk have prepared for it!”
    “ We gave you your victory, gave you what you needed. We didn’t know what the elementals would do!”
    I picked up a tray and went in to retrieve glasses, counting on a servant’s invisibility. Kul stood near the fireplace, his arms crossed, and gave Alkyone no smile. “You have a day to leave the city.”
    “ She’ll go with us, since you don’t seem to acknowledge your debt to the Tan Muark either,” one of the men said. Everyone else in the room scowled at him. Merchants dislike the Tan Muark, who have tricked every house in the Known World in their time—often more than once.
    Kul stared the Muark down. “My city is destroyed. Press me no further.” Alkyone stirred as though to speak, but Kul turned to cut her off with a gesture. “And tell your comrades in magic that they will get no favors from me either. I mean to put them entirely out of the city or see them dead. There is blood on all your hands, and you cannot wash them clean enough for me. And make no threats—this crown enables me to defeat any of you.”
    “ I have made no threats. Indeed, wasn’t I there to help you secure that crown, Kul?” she said. “I am tired and heartsick. Many of those I loved vanished in this as well. You give me a deadline, but I already have one. I gave my life to fuel the ceremony that opened the gate. I have but a day in this form before I am returned to the wind. Do not reproach me. I have given my life to this struggle and it has taken all that I am.”
    And with that, she walked away.
    At the door, she stopped, seeing me. “I recognize those earrings. Is all well with you?” She waved her two Muark companions on ahead.
    “ The inn is still standing—we lost the stable and some livestock,” I said. “And my little sister’s barrakhan pen, which is why we have no eggs.”
    The words were inconsequential. I drank in the sight of her in. Her eyes were no longer coal. They were the color of moonlight on the sands. They were sad, but they were so beautiful that they gave me hope.
    For years afterwards, I could take my breath away just thinking of her eyes. It took me through some hard times—the occupation by the Allanaki, the night when my two youngest were killed by the Borsail lord they’d sent up to oversee things. We didn’t know it then, that we’d be decades under their heel because of what the elementalists had done. But I never hated her, never thought that, even when they were taking my children.
    She had not stood back, she had gambled. None of us knew what had been won or lost at that point.
    As she paused in the doorway, one of the men said, “Come on, Alkyone.” But she shook her head.
    “ I believe I’ll walk in the desert by myself for a little while,” she said. The other held out his hand, and she sidestepped it with a wry twist to her shoulders that had them both laughing as though to keep from crying.
    “ This is goodbye, then,” the Muark said.
    “ I’ve walked by myself most of my life,” she said. “That’s how I intend to end it.” She smiled at me.
    I’ll always remember her eyes. All through my life, through the betrayals and petty rivalries, the moments that were large and small and everything in between, the thought of her eyes has gotten me through the hard times. She walked by herself, and gave me the strength to do it too, by remembering her eyes. Not as they were at first—that storybook blue, the color of the ancient days when it rained—and certainly not when they burned with that black, fierce light.
    But rather as they were that final night, when she walked out in the company of the gentle evening wind, a fearless woman who had given all she could in the fight and would never be seen again. Her remarkable eyes, silver as the moonlight, and twice as kind, and a thousand times as brave and alone.

    This story, written in the spring of 2008, is set in the world of the