Alpha's Ocean Born Luna

The first Star went dark while I was holding my breath.

I was twenty feet down in the Hall of Lights, both hands out, trying to keep a ribbon of current from slipping through my fingers. It was my hatch day, the only birthday I have. The elders sat along the coral benches to watch me do what I did every year. I held the tide for as long as I could without letting the cold in.

Iola had been sitting through these trials since I was a child. She brought a basket of sweet kelp and handed it round as though this were a theater, which, to her, it was.

"Longer, Maris," Queen Oshara called. Her voice carried through the water like a bell. "The tide does not tire. Do not tire before it does."

"The tide doesn't have to remember anything afterward," I said.

Somebody laughed. It was Iola, my old nurse, who had pressed a hand over her mouth and was failing to hide it.

In the middle of the hall, five Stars hung in a slow circle. Each was about the size of an apple and brighter than any lamp. Orin was blue, and he hummed whenever I borrowed his tide. Sable was black, the kind of black that looked like a hole in the water, and she never hummed at all. Cinder glowed red like a coal. Teal was green and fidgety. And Pell was white, my favorite, the one who flickered whenever I laughed.

That day she flickered once, twice, and then she stopped.

She didn't fade. She went out the way a candle does when someone pinches the wick. One moment there was white light on all our faces, and the next there was only blue and green and red, and a silence so complete that I heard my own pulse.

"Pell?" I said.

Orin stopped humming.

I had time to think, absurdly, that Iola's basket of sweet kelp was still drifting where she'd dropped it.

Then something struck the dome above us. It was a dull, heavy sound, like a bell being cracked from the outside. The sea glass overhead shuddered, and a long black line split across it. Through the crack came a net.

It wasn't made of rope. It was chain, thick and black, and the moment it touched the water I tasted blood in my mouth. Iron. Every child of the deep learns to fear that taste. The Tidefolk guards shot upward with their spears, and where the chain brushed their skin, their scales smoked and curled.

"Back!" Iola screamed. "Everyone back!"

The net dropped over the circle of Stars like a hand closing around a handful of fireflies. It caught Pell's dead little body and dragged her up through the broken glass. She was gone before I understood what I was watching.

Nobody moved. Even the guards stopped, spears half raised. A stunned hush hung over the hall, and I realized I was the only person in it who was still moving at all.

I did the thing I had been forbidden to do anywhere except the practice pool. I called the ice.

It came up from my ribs, where it always lives, a cold so sharp that it felt like swallowing a knife. It ran down my arms and out through my fingers. The water around me turned white. Frost raced along the chain, link after link, and the iron went brittle and began to crack.

The chain snapped, and the net fell away from the other Stars. Orin and Cinder and Teal and Sable tumbled free, tiny and frightened.

But Pell was still rising, caught in the part of the net that had already gone through the roof, pulled by something enormous that I couldn't see. I watched her last white spark vanish into the dark above.

Then the price came due.

It feels like a hand reaching inside my head and lifting something off a shelf. There's no pain, which is the cruel part. I turned to find Iola swimming toward me, her gray hair loose, her face wet with sea water or tears, and I did not know who she was.

She was a stranger. A thin old woman with kind eyes was reaching for me, and I flinched. For three heartbeats I had no name for her at all.

"Maris," she said. "Maris, it's me."

Then it passed. Iola's face slid back into place and I knew her again, and I held on to her as if I had been drowning. But something else had gone. I could feel the empty space where it had been, a small cold hollow, and I could not tell what it was. That's the worst thing about the ice. You never know what you've lost until someone mentions it.

"The Queen," a guard shouted. "The Queen is hurt!"

I turned. Queen Oshara floated at the center of the hall with one arm raised, the skin of her forearm burned black from wrist to elbow. She had thrown herself between the net and the elders. She was ancient and tall and silver, with a crown of living coral, and I had never once seen her afraid. She was afraid now.

I reached her first. She held out her good hand, and in it lay a single broken link of the chain.

"Look at it," she said.

It was cold and heavy. Stamped into the metal was a small mark, worn but clear. A crescent moon, resting on a crown.

"I don't know it," I said.

"No. You wouldn't." The Queen closed my fingers over the link. Behind her, the elders had begun to murmur and weep. "But I do. I have not seen that mark in twenty years. It belongs to the land. It belongs to Lativeran."

"What do they want with Pell?"

"I do not know. Not yet." She looked at the four Stars huddled against my shoulder, their lights shrinking. "But the circle is broken. Without Pell, the others will begin to fade, and when they fade, so does everything they protect. So do you."

"Then we go after her. The guards can..."

"Not the guards. You." The Queen's silver eyes held mine. "Tonight you go up, Maris. To the land."

I laughed. It came out thin and wrong. "I've never even seen the land."

"I know." She pressed my hand once, hard. "And child, hear me. Wherever you walk, whoever asks, you must never tell anyone your mother's name."

"I don't know my mother's name."

"No," said Queen Oshara quietly. "That was the point."