The Rise of the Fire Moon
By Aoife Fallon
Copyright 2012 Aoife Fallon
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***
For my dad, the best storyteller I know.
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Table of Contents:(select title again to return to top)
Prologue
1. Aftermath
2. The Renegade
3. Cinders
4. The Outsider
5. The First Tale
6. Alpha’s Captive
7. The First Hunt
8. Reflections
9. Sunrise
10. Assessment
11. River’s Ally
12. Placement
13. The Deer
14. The Second Hunt
15. Blacksky
16. Blood and Bargain
17. Retaliation
18. The Third Hunt
19. Yew
20. The Renegade’s Forest
21. Fire Moon
22. The Second Tale
23. Falling
24. The Last Hunt
25. Balance Upset
26. Dissent
27. Retracing
28. Storm Clouds
29. The Last Tale
30. Full Moon
31. Fire Scatters
32. River Daughter
33. Arwena
34. Healing
35. Ashes Mend
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue
The mother wolf knew little about plants, but what she did know was fatal.
On the second day of summer, she brought her pup with her when she ventured into the crackling forest for the fourth time since the trial. The trees all had baked beneath the sun; their heat-browned leaves were wrinkled as dry, hairless skin, and the trunks around her had bowed and contorted themselves into strange shapes as figures bent in prayer. A prayer for rain, perhaps.
She had prayers of a different sort, none of which had any hope of being answered. She no longer believed in The Spirits of her pack, but she did believe in the red berries. The red berries were certain, sudden, glittering and confident in ways The Spirits had not been. There was not a doubt in her mind that, if she prayed to the red berries, her prayers would be answered.
“Mother,” the little brown pup said, batting at an empty crayfish shell that met his path. “You are still sad, aren’t you?”
“I am very sad, Tir,” she said in reply. She did not look at her pup. Her green eyes were hollowed as the crayfish shell her son had kicked, but a manic glint had stolen into her expression. “There is no mother under the sun who would not be sad in my situation.”
The pup nodded, though his ears were flattened in a dissatisfied manner. Tir did not understand why his mother had woken him up so early and taken him out to the forest, but he felt it would be best to be quiet. She was in a strange mood.
The pair came to a halt. When the pup raised his head from the dusty ground, he saw a tree like none of the others around it. It was stunted and thick-trunked, twisted in odd positions like an armful of snakes escaping the cracks of the earth. Black-green needles grew in a protective mesh around its scabbed bark; they were dry and weak in the drought, but sharp enough that the fallen ones pricked his paws. Red berries glinted like beetles’ eyes from the tree’s depths—blood-stars in a withered sky, smooth and soft and beautiful in a terrible way.
“You have seen this tree,” the mother said as she padded up to it and nosed one of its branches. Tir flinched as the dry needles fluttered down and sank into his mother’s filthy brown fur. “Have you played beneath it?”
“No,” the pup said. “Father forbade us.”
The pup’s father was the alpha of the pack, a raven-furred wolf named Misari. He had indeed warned the pups to avoid the red-eyed tree, but the warning was useless. What pups would want to play under such a thing?
“Misari,” the she-wolf said in a rush of bitterness, her voice harsh. The needles tumbled from her matted fur. “Misari, fearless leader, maker of laws, father of my children, murderer of my last daughter—”
“Father didn’t kill her, mother,” Tir said in a soft voice, frightened by her savage tone. “You did.”
It was this, then, that brought a sudden wilt to the fierce-eyed old she-wolf. Her head dropped and her shoulders fell. Turning her head, she looked at her son, who met her gaze with frightened eyes as green as her own. The savagery was gone, and Tir was no longer afraid of his mother. He leaned for her; she drew him in as she had when he was so young his eyes had not yet opened—only then, she had drawn in two pups, Tir and another, a sister who would always be nameless. He remembered the day his mother had gone out into the forest with her and returned alone. Her paws had been wet, as though she had washed them of something that she would not wish him to see, and her green eyes had been hollowed by terrible sights. He was not too young to know what had happened. She told him.
“It was not a decision I would have made on my own,” she said, her voice breaking up in whispers and fragments of speech. She drew rattling breaths, the air shaking between her ribs and up her empty throat. “It was Misari who made me, little one—not I, never! You know the traditions. What must be done. This drought has drained us all; there is no room for runts.”
“Am I a runt?” he asked, fearful that this was the reason she had brought him out to the forest. But the mother shook her head.
“If you were, I would not have been allowed to keep you so long. No, Tir, I only want you to listen to me—can you see the red berries?”
The pup peered into the twisted tree. The red berries winked back at him from their shade. He averted his eyes as he would before another wolf, not to appear challenging, not to draw trouble. “I see them, mother.”
“Good.” The she-wolf raised her head now, and nudged the branch again, as tenderly as she would nudge one of her own pups—as tenderly as she had comforted Tir, a moment ago. “And can you hear them?” she said, pressing her ear against the sharp wall of needles. Her voice had dropped to a thrill of a whisper, gaining in suppressed excitement. “I have heard them every day, my dear. I come to see them now; I have come several times. Can you hear them whisper?”
“I do not hear them, mother.”
“Then you are too young. You do not understand the promises these trees offer—they are promises that will be kept, among all doubt in prayers. I have sorrow to be rid of, and they can bring me that: the night, cool and dark and numbing as the rain. You can trust the red berries, Tir.”
Tir did not want to trust the red berries. He was frightened again; there was something in the mother’s eye that he did not like, and her speaking in hoarse, fervent whispers sent shivers down his spine. He wanted her to be quiet now. He wanted to go back to camp. “Mother, why did you bring me here?”
The answer was not given. While they were speaking, another wolf had come to watch—Kiala, a young she-wolf a few seasons older than Tir, had followed them from camp and now stepped from the dry undergrowth. Her reddish pelt had blended in with the burnt landscape and her scent had been hidden by the dark tree’s fragrance.
“Arwena,” she said. Her voice was small, but she knew why she had come, and her stance was determined. “Arwena, you are not supposed to be out of camp.”
The mother wolf did not turn around, but her face went slack. Her eyes
drained into the empty shells they had been before. “I am visiting her grave, Kiala,” she said in a low voice. “I can still hear her whimper.”
Kiala flinched and her grey eyes widened, but she did not go away. “Do not lie to me, Arwena,” she said. “I know you took her to the river. She is not here. But I will tell Misari that you have come—”
“Tell Misari, then, the demon, the law-maker, murderer of my last—”
“Arwena, oh, no, you know what this tree is. Please step away from it.”
Arwena silenced, but did not move.
“Your son…” Kiala faltered, discouraged by Arwena’s lack of response. She shot a glance at Tir. “Your pup is here. You don’t want him to see…you don’t want him to see you die, do you?”
“What makes you believe I have come here to die?”
“I know what the tree is. And so do you, or you would not have come here.”
There was a long silence, in which Arwena stared into the crossing branches of the dark tree. Kiala, the young wolf, shifted in the dust—she met Tir’s inquisitive eye and looked away. Tir had not missed the note in her voice when she had spoken to his mother—quiet, patient, an attempt by someone very young and innocent to be understanding. It was how the pack spoke to Arwena now. They felt sorry for her, but she had lost their respect—good she-wolves are never cursed with runts. Arwena must have done something wrong. Had she come to the red-eyed tree for answers? Had she come to be forgiven?
“I did not come to die,” Arwena said. And then, stronger, “I did not come to die.”
“Please,” Kiala said, raising her voice in an attempt to mask her unease with confidence and authority. “Please come back—”
“No, I am not finished.” Arwena straightened herself and then turned to face Tir—the manic light had left her eyes, and now she seemed strong, authoritative, the warm maternal force Tir had known before the death of his sister.
“See this tree, Tir, and memorize its appearance,” she said to him, and he met her eyes. “This is a yew tree—know it, so that you may stay away from it. All parts of it only wish to do you harm—the leaves, the bark, the roots. And do not speak to the red berries. Do not ever touch them. Should the black seed of a single berry touch your tongue, you will be killed. Do you understand?”
Tir nodded, his eyes widening. Behind him, he heard Kiala gasp, and he wondered if he was meant to be entrusted with such knowledge. He was glad he knew another way to not be killed.
“If you ever find yourself so desperately in need of answers, do not turn to the red berries. They will give you answers, but not the ones you want. Never find yourself desperate enough to turn to the yew berries, Tir.”
He only stared. Arwena’s gaze was firm, solid, green as the leaves that had once covered the trees. He wondered when he would see her eyes clear as this again—his mother’s eyes changed each day, going through their cycles; they withered, grew, and died, like the dead leaves that now lay on the ground.
“I will come with you back to camp, now,” Arwena said to Kiala. Her head was raised and her voice was calm, like a queen’s, like the alpha female she had once been. “Please lead the way for us.”
Tir was too young, then, to understand the gravity of what had happened. He knew his sister’s death had struck his mother—for such was the law, the rule of the pack. But he never understood entirely, not until many years later.
The drought persisted and the red-eyed tree thrived as the others faded, but Tir kept constant watch. His mother’s health would rise and fall—falling lower than it had on the occasion of the yew tree, preceded by times in which she seemed stronger, her own self. The forest dried to a husk, a wisp of vegetation, and the scent of distant fires hung sharper and sharper in the air each day. The smoke made promises where the rain did not; the red berries offered solutions where The Spirits could not. But in the lowest of her emotions, Tir guarded the yew tree; Arwena never went near it again. Perhaps she knew that he would be standing there, waiting.