As she thought about it, she realized she’d only known a single, narrow facet of her father. Now she had discovered he was just as complicated and complex as any other person.
So absorbed in her thoughts had she been, that when the sleigh hit a bump, she was surprised to discover her father was not taking the main road home, but rather a narrow lane bordered by forest.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Arrowdale Road,” her father said.
Karigan’s disorientation faded immediately. Arrowdale was a meandering old track that was the “long way” home. She used to go riding on it sometimes, but to her it had always seemed so forsaken, a little spooky. There were only a few, long abandoned homesteads along it, taken over by the march of the forest. History held that some battle of the Long War had taken place in the folds of the land, hence the name Arrowdale.
“Your mother and I used to ride out this way at night sometimes,” her father said unexpectedly. “The stars were always lovely, and no one bothered us out here.”
Karigan glanced up, and between the bordering tips of evergreens, the stars were bright. The Hunter was making his seasonal trek to the west, and the Sword of Sevelon was in the half-raised position, slowly rotating upward from its winter’s rest.
They entered a clearing and the full expanse of the heavens opened overhead. Her father halted Roy and Birdy to gaze at the stars and Karigan imagined her parents young and in love coming to this spot.
“Now that you know I am quite imperfect,” he said, “can you accept that I misspoke earlier? I can’t say I like magic, or the fact it puts you in harm’s way, but I would never view my daughter as cursed.”
“You never told me about mother’s bloodline,” Karigan said.
“Stories. Stories told by superstitious islanders.” He paused, then said, “Tell me, where did you find the muna’riel?”
“You knew of it then?”
She perceived, more than saw, him nodding.
“I found it in mother’s chest among her things.”
“How did it ... ? I had it locked in my sea chest, down in the study.” He shuddered beside her. “Magic. I guess it wanted to be found.”
It was, Karigan thought, a perceptive statement from one with an aversion to magic. “You didn’t give it to me as mother wanted.”
Silence followed her words, then he said, “I desired to protect you from the magic. Or, at least not encourage it. I even let your aunts believe your mother was speaking nonsense in the end.”
Karigan wished she could see his features better in the dark, but she imagined his expression downcast to match his voice.
“I see I was wrong,” he continued. “Magic found you anyway. Do you have the muna’riel with you? May I see it?”
Karigan dug beneath her coat and into her pocket to retrieve the moonstone. She held it aloft on her mittened hand, the shock of light making the horses snort and bob their heads. The brilliance of the stone chased shadows deep into the woods, and the snow in the clearing intensified the silver-white light almost to blinding.
Karigan’s father shielded his eyes until the light ebbed to a more gentle glow. The snow on the trees that ringed them glittered as if strewn with diamonds.
“I forgot how bright it was,” he murmured. “I can’t remember when your mother first showed it to me. After we were married, of course, but before you were even conceived, I think. She never explained how she had acquired it, but she said it was Eletian. When I pressed her about it, she’d only laugh and find ways to distract me.”
“She knew how you felt about magic,” Karigan said.
“Yes, I suppose she did. And I suppose I chose not to see it in her, even though the muna’riel would light only for her and not me.”
“I wish I could help you understand,” Karigan said, “that it’s not the magic itself that is evil or good, but the user who makes it so.”
But he did not reply. He sat there, his eyelids drooping and head nodding until his chin rested on his chest. He breathed deeply as though asleep.
“Father?” Karigan asked. She nudged him, but he did not stir. She jabbed him harder, and still no response. He seemed only to sleep, but ...
She glanced at the horses, and they stood with heads lowered as if also slumbering.
A light blossomed in the center of the clearing. A silvery, fluid flame that flickered and grew into a column the height of a person.
“Five hells,” she murmured.
The light of Karigan’s moonstone spread toward the flame, surrounding it as if to embrace it.
Finally, a voice said, you have come.
MOON DREAMS
Transfixed, Karigan stepped off the sleigh, her feet sinking deeply into the snow. A figure rippled within the column of flame.
“What are you?” she whispered.
The figure did not answer, but its radiance grew, spread outward, and though Karigan backed away, it overtook her until there was only the light. Everything else, her father, the sleigh and horses, and the surrounding forest, vanished into shadow. She could not say for sure she was still in the clearing, or even in Sacoridia for that matter, though the snow still glared with its reflected light.
I am weakening, said the figure in the flame; a woman’s voice, distant, strained. Under siege ... for so long ...
“Who ... who are you?”
Losing hold ...
“Of what?” Karigan demanded. What was this? What was going on?
The grove. The figure shimmered, cried out in pain, and Karigan discerned darkness staining the fringes of the light, black branches scratching against radiance.