The Girl Who Drank the Moon

They left knowing that there surely wasn’t a witch. There never had been a witch. There were only a dangerous forest and a single road and a thin grip on a life that the Elders had enjoyed for generations. The Witch—that is, the belief in her—made for a frightened people, a subdued people, a compliant people, who lived their lives in a saddened haze, the clouds of their grief numbing their senses and dampening their minds. It was terribly convenient for the Elders’ unencumbered rule.

“Luna,” she said. “Your name will be Luna. And I will be your grandmother. And we will be a family.”

And just by saying so, Xan knew it was true. The words hummed in the air between them, stronger than any magic.

Xan visited the Free Cities twice a year, once with Luna and once without. She did not explain to the child the purpose for her solo visit—nor did she tell her about the sad town on the other side of the forest, or of the babies left in that small clearing, presumably to die. She’d have to tell the girl eventually, of course. One day, Xan told herself. Not now. It was too sad. And Luna was too little to understand.

“I remember. All at once.” He shook his head. “Why had I forgotten?”

Xan pushed her wrinkled lips to one side. “Sorrow is dangerous. Or, at least, it was. I can’t remember why, now. I think we both became accustomed to not remembering things. We just let things get...foggy.”

The child was never magic, Xan started telling herself. And indeed, the more Xan told herself that it might be true, the more she was able to convince herself that it was true. And if Luna ever was magic, all that power was now neatly stoppered up and wouldn’t be a problem.

The madwoman in the Tower could not remember her own name.

She could remember no one’s name.

What was a name, anyway? You can’t hold it. You can’t smell it. You can’t rock it to sleep. You can’t whisper your love to it over and over and over again. There was once a name that she treasured above all others. But it had flown away, like a bird. And she could not coax it back.

Fyrian seemed younger and younger every day. Sometimes, it seemed to Luna that he was going backward in time while she stood still, but other times it seemed that the opposite was true: it was Fyrian who was standing still while Luna raced forward. She wondered why this was.

Dragons! Glerk would explain.

Dragons! Xan would agree. They both shrugged. Dragons, it was decided. What can one do?

Which never actually answered anything.

Luna didn’t have very many memories that were as tenacious as this one—her memory, typically, was a slippery thing, and difficult to pin down—and so she hung on to it. This image meant something. She was sure of it.

Her grandmother, now that she thought about it, never spoke of memories. Not ever.

And the things that they did not speak of began to outweigh the things that they did. Each secret, each unspoken thing was round and hard and heavy and cold, like a stone hung around the necks of both grandmother and girl.

Their backs bent under the weight of secrets.

How many feelings can one heart hold? She looked at her grandmother. At her mother. At the man protecting his family. Infinite, Luna thought. The way the universe is infinite. It is light and dark and endless motion; it is space and time, and space within space, and time within time. And she knew: there is no limit to what the heart can carry.

“I was taken from my mother,” Luna explained. “Like you, I was brought to a family who loved me and whom I love. I cannot stop loving that family, and I don’t want to. I can only allow my love to increase.” She smiled. “I love the grandmother who raised me. I love the mother I lost. My love is boundless. My heart is infinite. And my joy expands and expands. You’ll see.”