Alpha's Ocean Born Luna

The Queen's chamber smelled of kelp salve and burned scales. Two healers wrapped her arm in wet green leaves while she sat very straight and refused to make a sound.

I stood at the foot of her coral bed with the iron link in my fist. Iola was packing a bag behind me, folding things and unfolding them again, muttering to herself. Nobody else had been allowed in.

"Sit," the Queen said.

"I'd rather stand."

"You would rather shout. Sit, and shout sitting down. It is more efficient."

I sat. I did not shout, which I think surprised both of us. "You said I'm going to the land. You said it like it's a chore. Like fetching water."

"It is more dangerous than fetching water."

"Then tell me why. Tell me everything, because I've been asking for twenty years and I've had the same three answers. You found me. I was an egg. My parents are gone."

"Those three answers were true."

"They were not enough."

"No." The healers finished their work and Oshara dismissed them with a flick of her fingers. When they were gone, she looked older than I had ever seen her. "Then here is a fourth. Your mother is not dead, as far as I know. She is a woman of the land, and she gave you part of her power before you were lost. The ice that lives in your ribs is hers. I do not know where she is. I have searched for twenty years."

My mouth had gone dry. "She's alive."

"Perhaps. I will not lie and tell you more than I know."

"And my father?"

"Is the reason I have kept you hidden." She raised her good hand before I could ask. "That is all I will say tonight. Names are dangerous. The woman who threw your egg into the sea, and the man who helped her, are still alive. If you knew too much, you would try to find them, and you would die."

"You think I can't take care of myself?"

"I think you are twenty and you have never been hit by anything harder than a practice current." Her tone was gentle, which made it worse. "Now listen, because I will say this once, and then you will have to carry it alone."

She counted on her fingers.

"You have six gifts. The first is your mother's ice. It is the strongest and it is the most dangerous. Each time you use it, it takes something from your mind. You have felt it. You will feel it again, and each time it will take a little more.

"The other five come from the Stars. Orin gives you the tide, and his price is your breath. Sable gives you silence, and she takes your hearing for an hour. Cinder gives you heat, and he steals your sleep. Teal gives you current, and she takes your balance. Pell gave you light, and she took your sight, though only for a day or so."

"Pell is gone."

"Yes. And that is why you must go after her. A circle of five cannot hold with four. In thirty nights, perhaps less, the others will begin to dim, and what they hold inside you will start to leak out." She glanced at my chest. "Six gifts in one body is a miracle. It is held together by something called royal blood, though I will not say whose. When the Stars fade, that blood will have nothing to hold."

I understood only half of it. I had grown up being told I was a strange, lucky girl. I had never been told I was a fragile one.

"On land, your tide gifts will weaken. The air does not carry them well. Your ice will not weaken at all." The Queen paused. "That is what worries me."

Iola came over with the pack. Inside were a wool coat the color of a storm, two pairs of dry socks, a small knife, and a leather purse of seed pearls. At the very bottom lay a shell about the size of my palm, round and silver, with a pearl set in its center.

"A finding shell," said the Queen. "It will point toward Pell. It will also tell you if the Stars grow weaker. Do not lose it, and do not let anyone else hold it."

"Why not?"

"Because it is the only thing I have ever made that lets me see where you are."

She said it softly. I decided not to think about it just then.

We left through the Tide Door at the bottom of the east cliff, a narrow crack in the rock guarded by two old women with spears. Iola cried the whole way and pretended she wasn't. At the threshold, she pressed her forehead to mine.

"Eat hot food," she said. "Don't trust anybody who offers you something free. And if you find your mother, tell her she owes me twenty years of worrying."

"I will."

"Maris." Her thin hands gripped my arms. "Whatever you forgot back in the hall, I am sorry."

"It was probably nothing."

"It was not nothing," Iola said, and then she let go.

Before I stepped into the dark tunnel, four small lights drifted after me. Orin, Teal, Cinder, and Sable had followed me from the Hall, tiny and quiet, and settled against my collar like fireflies on a coat. The Queen had said nothing about that. I looked back, but she had already turned away.

The tunnel climbed steeply. The water got colder, then thinner, then it simply stopped. I crawled out of the last of it on my hands and knees, coughing, my lungs burning with something I had never felt before.

Air.

It stung. It was dry and sharp and enormous. Above me, instead of coral and glass, stretched a gray sky that went on forever. I lay on a beach of black pebbles while a thin, cold light spread across the water, and I thought I might be sick.

"Maris," a small voice said, right by my ear. It was Orin, barely louder than the wind. "Before we go any farther."

"What?"

"Ask her what we eat."

I sat up. "What do you mean?"

But he had gone silent. I turned my head and saw that where my hand had touched the pebbles, a ring of white frost had spread across the beach. It crawled out, wider and wider, until it reached the foam. Snow began to fall from a clear gray sky.

Far down the shore, a wolf howled.

Then another answered, then a dozen more. The sound rolled across the hills like a wave. And somewhere deep inside me, in a place I had never known was there, something that had been asleep my entire life lifted its head and howled back.