Brother of the Moon XIII.
Afterlife
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Lucian
The world is asleep under the snow, one moon after midwinter and at least another moon away from the thaw, when Lucian wakes before dawn and he knows. He sits up, rubbing his back and letting out a breath. It had started some time in the night, but the pains had come and gone before. They’re still coming now.
Eadwin stirs behind him, touches his arm. “What is it?”
Lucian tilts his head back, face toward the ceiling, trying to keep his breathing steady. “When the sun comes up,” he says, “you’ll want to get Sister Fiona.”
Eadwin starts up and Lucian holds out a hand. “Slow down. I don’t think we’ll need her before you have enough light to see by, and I don’t want you killing a horse or breaking your neck in the dark. Just—sit with me a while.”
Eadwin comes around to his side of the bed, sliding a hand across Lucian’s back. “I don’t know how you’re so calm.”
“No sense in getting worked up now before we’ve even started,” Lucian sighs.
“I’m fucking terrified,” Eadwin says.
Lucian laughs. “Language, Brother.” He only calls Eadwin ‘brother’ to tease him. He leans into Eadwin’s side, thinking of the day he woke up in that hospital and Eadwin had clearly been at his side all night. “I’ve changed my mind,” he says, “send someone else when there’s light, I don’t want you to leave me.”
Eadwin takes his hand and sits with him until the light outside goes from black to silvery gray. He does a decent job of concealing his worry, except that his grip tightens whenever Lucian reacts to a pain.
Lucian pulls up the moonstone that never leaves his neck anymore, running the smooth sides under his fingers. Eadwin kisses his wrist and goes to rouse the others. Lucian is hardly alone but that Fortune appears, pulling the blankets off the bed and making the room ready. “All of my children were born in this room,” she says, “and I never lost one that made it this far, so I’ll pray some of that luck rubs off on you.” She draws the curtains against any spirits that might look in, and walks a candle in a full circuit around the room, muttering a prayer and making the sign in each corner. Lucian hears the creak of the gate and the hooves in snow as someone leaves.
He thinks of the Queen of Heaven giving birth to the first people in the dark underground, in the caverns of what had once been her husband’s body. He paces restlessly, keeping close to the bed so he can grasp the posts when an ache becomes too much. Mother, he thinks, not knowing if he’s praying to the Heavenly or the earthly one, the one who died birthing him—please I have so much life left to live.
How long, how long has he spent bargaining with Heaven? With ghosts?
“Where’s Eadwin?” he asks. “I want him here.” Eadwin was with him when he tried to take his own life, was with him when Wulfric would have killed them both, Lucian needs him there now. This is the threshold of the world, between life and the road after, and if he is going to risk falling on the wrong side of that threshold he does not want to spend his last moments without Eadwin.
“Men don’t belong in the birthing room.” Fortune says it without thinking, only seems to realize her mistake as the last word leaves her lips.
“When you figure out how to do this without me, you let me know,” Lucian says. “I want him here. He put me in this condition, he can damn well be here for the result.” He has always been safest when Eadwin was there.
Fortune lets out a breath and goes to the door, shouting for Eadwin.
Eadwin is swift about coming back up the steps, and he stays with Lucian as Fortune makes things ready for the midwife. Lucian wraps his prayer beads around his hand, the rose medal clasped in his palm.
Sister Fiona arrives with two other nuns, and Hanne brings hot water and soap for washing. Veils are taken off to the small hair caps beneath, sleeves are pinned back and aprons pulled over habits. Hands are washed and purifications performed. Prayers are said, with only a little stumbling where the written prayer says Holy Mother watch over your daughter and Sister Fiona corrects herself to say watch over your son. Sanctified rosewater is drawn in circles over Lucian’s forehead, his belly.
Eadwin holds tightly to his hands, and Lucian thinks of that grip as his mooring, the thing holding him to hope and safety and life. He focuses as much of his attention as he can on the grip of their hands together, thinking that he cannot have come all this way to die here. I am going to live, he thinks, and so will my daughter.
She comes into the world with a scream, and Lucian sags back against Eadwin’s chest, trying to catch his breath. Eadwin wraps both arms around him, kissing his temple.
Their daughter shrieks while she’s washed clean, and when she’s placed in Lucian’s arms. The thin wisps of hair on her head are redder than he would have expected—he had envisioned her with Eadwin’s dark hair. Her tiny fists are clenched tight, her face contorted in all the fury and dismay such a tiny thing can muster. Lucian laughs, and draws her up to kiss her head. “My little fighter,” he murmurs, “you should be angry, to find the world this cold.”
When Sister Fiona is satisfied that neither of them are in any immediate danger, she washes her hands and gathers up what she needs for the blessing. “What will you call her?”
Lucian looks up. “Luna.” He’s given it a great deal of thought, ever since he was put in the convent at Grenacre. When Margaret spent every day reading Eadwin’s prayer book, the one still inscribed with the name he took as a brother of the Moon: Eadwin Lunadora. He had kept that name close to his heart, when he had no guarantee that he would ever see Eadwin again. “Her name is Luna.”
Sister Fiona nods, and performs the blessing there at the bedside, sprinkling Luna with rosewater, praying for her good health and long life under the protection of the Queen of Heaven and Her angels.
“Sisters, have you eaten?” Fortune asks. “Hanne will have made something.”
They leave Lucian and Eadwin for a moment, while Lucian adjusts his nightshirt to bring Luna to his breast. Eadwin gets up and draws a blanket around them, pausing to stroke Lucian’s hair.
“I’m alright,” Lucian sighs. “We’re alright.”
“If I may be frank,” Eadwin says, “I would prefer to do this as few times as possible.”
Lucian laughs, smiles. “What, you don’t want to keep going until we get a son?”
“I don’t care about having a son, I care about you.” He strokes Lucian’s cheek, and drops a hand to caress Luna’s head. “She’ll look like you, I think.”
“Ah, all babies look the same,” Lucian murmurs. “Stay with me.”
“Always,” Eadwin murmurs, getting back into the bed and wrapping an arm around him. He traces circles on Lucian’s shoulder, murmurs, “Let him drink my life’s blood, let him eat my flesh.”
Lucian turns his face toward Eadwin’s. “Let it redden his lips, let him suck the marrow from my bones—”
“—and dress himself in my skin,” Eadwin murmurs, stroking Lucian’s cheek. “For I give my life to him, to keep as he wills, and in the belly of my lord—”
“I will be reborn,” Lucian finishes, and tips his face up for a kiss.
Abigayle brings a tray of food up, eager to see her new granddaughter. “Ah,” she murmurs, “she looks just like my girls did.”
Eadwin takes a drowsing Luna down to let the household see her while Lucian sleeps, Sister Fiona keeping an eye on him while he does. He dreams himself as Margaret, meeting their mother again as she was in the moon mass. They are sitting in the church, the candles all lit and filling the space with golden light. Her mother strokes her hair which is still cut short, and smiles. “You’ve done well for yourself, darling. Are you happy?”
Margaret nods. “Yes.”
“You have so many people to care for you here,” her mother says. “I’m glad you don’t feel so alone, anymore.”
He wakes when Eadwin comes back, settling into the bed with the baby against his chest. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It’s alright,” Lucian murmurs, moving to tuck up against his side. “I’m glad you’re here.”
Eadwin slides an arm around his shoulders, and Lucian falls asleep watching Luna breathe.
#.
Spring comes, and Lucian goes out to set snares for rabbits. The deer will be too skinny from the winter, and all of them are sick of venison. Luna rides in a sling on his back, quiet and astonished by everything in the forest. He sings to her as they walk back along the river, keeping an eye out for signs of bears beginning to stir.
Luna’s hair is coming in red-gold, but her eyes are dark like Eadwin’s. She’ll be a haunting beauty when she grows up. Lucian means to teach her to hunt.
He has found someone in the village to teach him how to make arrow shafts, and the smith is willing to trade arrowheads for meat. Even so, he’s careful not to fire at anything he doesn’t think he can get the arrow back from. The ducks will be back soon, Tom says, with a wink and a sort of nudge.
Lucian marks where the wild hazel grows, and cuts the heads of green ferns still tightly coiled to bring back with the mushrooms and early greens. “We’ll make this your second home,” he says to Luna. “Nobody will be able to make a prisoner of you if you know how to survive the woods.”
It’s been not quite a year since he left Grenacre for good, and even he sometimes forgets what he used to be. Not Margaret, but a lady. Someone who wore silk and was waited on. It feels like a fanciful story. The only thing he misses is having someone else to clean the stables.
Some great old tree came down in the winter, clearing a sunny stretch in the thick canopy. Lucian marks its location to bring Will and Tom back so they can cut it for firewood, and sits with his back against the trunk while he nurses Luna. He knows Eadwin will worry the longer they’re out, but he can’t quite bring himself to hurry back. Not yet. Out here in the forest is the only place he gets true quiet anymore, his only conversation partners the birds and the frogs.
He looks down at Luna, thinks of the vision he had of swallowing the golden eye. “What do you think?” he asks. “In a few years, should I eat the other?” His blood had hardly come back but that it stopped again, and he’s going to see Sister Fiona to have that taken care of. It’s too soon to have another.
Luna sleeps on his back as Lucian makes his way back into the village. Eadwin has his eyes on a plot nearer the forest, further from the river, where he says they could build a new house. A bigger house, with a proper barn for the horses, perhaps a cow or two, and a garden where they can grow flowers, not just vegetables. Lucian says he will just be glad to have a proper bed.
The sisters at the church are installing bee hives to fund their work. Luna’s name and the date of her birth is written down in the books there, and in the front of Eadwin’s prayer book. It’s written as Brewster, though people have taken to calling Lucian—and Luna by extension—Hunter.
Eadwin has also written down the day of their marriage, otherwise only recorded in Grenacre abbey under Lucian’s old name. They say Lady Margaret died of a broken heart.
Joan and Sky are planting the garden under Abigayle’s watchful eye. Peas and beans and carrots and beets and lettuce and cabbage. “Oh, bless you,” she says, when Lucian shows her the contents of his basket. “We’ll get these mushrooms to drying.”
“You’d think if Uncle Eadwin spent so long in the Moons, we’d be growing our own mushrooms,” Joan says, shaking seeds into her palm out of a jar.
“Once he has an inch of space, we probably will,” Lucian says. “He means to sell them.” Eadwin has taken to keeping his books like he keeps his prayers. Others in the village have begun to pay him a fee to make and keep books for them, hoping to see the same improvements as their own household. He can’t build a cathedral—but maybe a house.
#.
They build a house up against a hill. There’s a special outbuilding for the brewing, a bath with a great cauldron for heating water, and a barn for the horses. They find a stud to breed the mare to, and she drops a beautiful lively colt. They buy a pregnant milk cow who gives a heifer. Everyone grows a little fatter on butter and cream.
There’s an enormous garden, with strawberry rows and flowers along the edges. Young fruit trees stretch toward the sun. There is a particular lot where Eadwin cultivates mushrooms, and when it rains the ground explodes in a riot of shapes and colors. They buy a small barge to take their own goods down the river to the market.
It is in that new house that their son is born, three years after Luna. Lucian names him Eadwin, which the elder Eadwin protests, but Lucian won’t be moved. They call him Little Ed. He will be the last child, and his hair will grow in dark over grey eyes.
Luna is wild and keen, and she grows like a weed. Every spring she goes out to check the snares with Lucian, and every autumn they go to the wild hazel trees to look for nuts. She knows the names of the trees before she knows her letters—and in learning her letters she tries Eadwin’s patience at every turn.
When Lucian asks, the sisters at the church write to their orders, looking for fragments of information, recipes and magics that have been collected by the church. They look over everything together, and Lucian decides what he is willing to try.
The potion he’s meant to drink is so vile they switch almost immediately to a salve. It makes him smell rather noticeably like pine resin and horse sweat, but only for a few hours in the morning which he can usually spend out of doors. He thinks for a while that it must not be doing anything at all—until in the middle of a sentence his voice cracks in such a heinous way that in spite of his valiant efforts Eadwin cannot keep a straight face.
Oddly, Lucian’s gradual transformation seems to make their neighbors less confused about him. Luna thinks the appearance of hair on his cheeks and its thickening on his arms means he’s turning into a fox or (because she likes them) a squirrel. She is deeply disappointed to be told otherwise.
Alone in their bed at night, Eadwin still claims Lucian will be the death of him, though he’s perfectly able to keep up. Their bigger house has thicker walls.
He watches his face change in the mirror, watches Luna and Little Ed grow and thinks how strange it is when news comes to them as if from another world. Lady Wulfwyn of Eagletop has become notorious for turning down marriage proposals, which her lord uncle refuses to do anything about. (They hear of this because Lord Andrew’s son is the latest in a string of failed suitors.) Lord Aethelric, it is said, keeps a lover openly—but he also won’t marry. Eadwin mutters that it will make it difficult to find Everard and Mildred good matches when they’re older.
Eadwin still wakes before sunrise every morning to pray at the icons on the wall. They’ve collected them gradually—the Queen of Heaven, the Moon, St. Luce. Around their windows they’ve had roses painted, and falcons and black stags. The rose bushes in their garden climb higher every year. Lucian prays his beads in the quite moments of the afternoon while his children sleep. He reads the poetry Eadwin wrote for him while they were separated.
Eadwin still writes when he can’t sleep, which is usually when the moon is full and bright outside their window and he has no mass to tend to. Lucian will wake and find him still at his desk. If it is a good day, his pen will be scratching at the paper like soldiers marching to battle. If it is a bad one, Eadwin will be staring out the window at the garden and the forest beyond, and Lucian will bully him back into the bed to sleep. “It’s not me that will be the death of you if you don’t rest.” But the children— “But nothing. They are overrun with relatives.” Especially when Bree and Joan make good matches for themselves and take to their husband’s homes. There will always be somewhere in this village for Luna and Ed.
He watches Eadwin sleep sometimes, turned onto his side and breathing softly under the blankets, and thinks of Margaret’s father summoning her in Grenacre, the first time she saw Eadwin standing there as impatient as a crow watching the butcher and trying to hide it, spinning tales for her father to persuade him to part with her. The way his gaze had flitted to Margaret’s measuring her expression, adjusting accordingly. As though they had already understood each other.
Chance and accident that they met at all. Lucian wonders what Lady Catherine thought of it when news of the scandal reached her. He wonders where in Grenacre those black antlers were hung. He imagines them high over the mantle in the dining hall, a reaching black shadow over Harry’s head. The hide still hangs in their bedroom, Luna lives in hope of seeing a black deer.
Autumn comes, and Lucian goes out hunting.
#.
Eadwin
He is up late working on the books while Lucian cuts new fletching for his arrows. He bought a parcel of falcon feathers when last they went to market, and he is gradually replacing damaged fletching with it.
Setting aside his tools, Lucian asks, “Do you ever miss her?”
“Who?” Eadwin asks, ascertaining the later hour by the position of the moon in the sky and the low height of his candle. Perhaps he should put away his pen. It has been a long day and Luna resists her lessons every time the sun comes out, a behavior which Lucian is in the habit of indulging.
“Margaret.”
“Is she gone?” Eadwin asks. “I thought we spoke just last week.”
“You know what I mean,” Lucian says. His voice has a low warmth it didn’t used to have, though sometimes the way he was trained to speak as a lady slips through.
Eadwin turns to look at him, at the trimmed beard that has come in so nicely, the changed shape of him. The beard makes him look older, which Eadwin thinks is why he let it grow. “No,” he says, “everything I love about her is still there in you. All I ever wanted was for you to be happy.” He holds out a hand, drawing Lucian to his side. “Have I done something that made you think otherwise?”
“No, it’s only—sometimes I feel so distant from her, and I wore her name until the day we were married.” Lucian slides an arm around Eadwin’s shoulders.
“Before we reached Eagletop, I thought that you would have been happier if you were born a man.”
Lucian pauses, looks at him. “You never said a word.”
“That’s not the sort of thing you say to a lady,” Eadwin says. “Particularly not when every time someone else says it to her she looks absolutely miserable.”
“Not even after she says the Queen of Heaven showed her what she ought to be?”
“You’d also just told me you were with child, so my mind was preoccupied with other things.” He shifts in his chair, pulls Lucian into his lap. “In any case, you were right.”
“About what, specifically?”
“That I should have just stolen you for myself from the beginning.”
Lucian smiles and kisses his temple. “Come to bed, thief.”
The sandalwood perfume is long ago run out, but Eadwin’s come to know the scent of him beneath that. Lucian is covered now in fine red hair, folding in among the pale scar-like strips on his belly that came after the children. Every fold and scar and bruise—Eadwin thinks he knows Lucian’s body better than his own, down to the scent and taste of him.
And it is still his preference to touch Lucian until he begs—or curses Eadwin, depending on his mood.
#.
Lucian
It’s spring, six years after he left Grenacre when Lucian first hears the song. They’re in town after going to market, staying the night in a tavern before going home in the morning. He has left the children with Fortune and Abigayle.
A man is sat by the fire, plucking at his harp and singing for pennies tossed into a hat. He has a good voice, but Lucian isn’t really listening until he hears that name. Lady Margaret.
It starts with quite the scene; a beautiful young woman locked away in a tower (Grenacre never had any towers) by her father who would share her beauty with no man for fear of how his only daughter would be ruined. Lucian gets up from the table to move closer and listen. In the song, Lady Margaret spends her days wishing wistfully for a rescuer. A young and handsome monk comes to ask for her father to part with her to marry his lord. The song paints him as a talented deceiver, who never has any intention of delivering the lady to her betrothed. (Wulfric and Eagletop go entirely unnamed.) Then the song has it that the monk seduces and despoils Lady Margaret, wins her heart and persuades her to kill her betrothed. Her father dies of a broken heart over the scandal (Lucian can’t help it, he snorts) and her brother cloisters her in a convent. The treacherous monk abandons her, and Lady Margaret throws herself from the church spire, leaving her bastard daughter a church orphan to be raised by nuns. He would be impressed that they guessed it was a daughter, but he suspects it only sounds more tragic to have a motherless bastard girl who will never be claimed and who will be redeemed by growing up a nun.
“Did you write it yourself?” Lucian asks, when the song is finished.
“I did,” the man says.
“Your poetry’s not bad, but the story is all wrong.” Lucian flips him a coin. “Grenacre Hall doesn’t have any towers.”
The man looks at him, puzzled, but Lucian just smiles and goes back to the table with the others. Eadwin had been out, tending to the horses. “What’s that look?” he asks.
Lucian leans in to lower his voice. “Did you know you’re a dangerous seducer and known deceiver?”
“Am I, now?” He raises his brows. “Is that how we met?”
“According to the song.” Lucian takes a drink. “I think you should write a version, just for us.”
“I was never much for music.”
“A poem, then.”
In the morning when they untether their barge to turn back upriver, which will take them nearly all day, silver ribbons of mist are rising up off the dark trees. Lazy black eels disappear into the murk when the barge is disturbed, some as thick as Lucian’s arm. The Penbreak is quiet today, calm and smooth to disguise the cold and strong currents beneath. Even in the height of summer it’s cold enough to freeze a person who fell in. (The fish taste just as muddy as Lucian suspected they would.)
Lucian hums the tune of the song under his breath, wondering how many of the songs he knows are about someone, and how much any of them are true. The black stag hunt would make a good song, if anyone who cared knew the story. He can imagine Lord Aethelric commissioning one, though he can’t imagine how fantastical it would be.
The barge falls into a lull when they have nothing to talk about, and Lucian watches the trees. Mostly its birds they’ll see along the shore, the occasional bear.
They come around a bend, and a doe lifts her head from the far bank to watch them. There are two small fawns at her side, teetering about on their little legs. One is red, its spots bright and white. The other is black as charcoal.
Lucian watches them in silence, not wanting to spook the doe. He hears the others fall still as they notice. “Well,” Tom whispers, “would you look at that.”
The doe makes a sound to draw her fawns’ attention, and they fade into the trees like shadows.
Lucian glances back at Eadwin, and smiles.
End.














