Filed to story: When the Moon Hatched Book
He snaps the lid back on his weald. “You don’t like fire.”
“I don’t like males with cocks bigger than their brains.” I slay him with a stare I hope cuts the head off his observation. “Unfortunately, that eliminates half the population.”
Silence bleeds between us, a victim of my slashing ire.
Arms crossed, he watches me. Unblinking.
Unyielding.
I watch him with the same intensity, sharpening more barbs to sling should he decide to have another pick at the subject. One that is, in fact, none of his fucking business.
He clicks his tongue, then moves around the butcher block.
Perfectly still, I watch from my periphery as he lumbers to the door and retrieves his saddlebags, dumping them on the long, cushioned seater. He brings the smaller one to the bench and flips the satchel open. Rooting through it, he pulls out a scroll of leather he unrolls, bearing a tidy collection of tools. He lifts a small hammer from one section, a tapered nail from another, and jerks his chin at my hands.
Frowning, I ease them toward him, remembering too late that I have a scale tucked between my bound wrists.
My heart leaps so high up my throat I almost choke.
Shit.
I silently beg him not to notice while he settles my hands on a folded piece of cloth, sets the nail against the pin of my right cuff, then taps it.
My brow lifts as the pin slides out, allowing him to loosen the iron cuff and wriggle it free, though he shows no inclination toward the one on my left wrist.
“What about my other one?” I ask, nudging my still-bound hands at him.
He bats them away. “Oddly enough, I’m in no mood to have my lungs minced.”
“Well, what about my ropes?” I shove my hands at his chest again. “I had a perfect opportunity to shove you off the cliff earlier, but I didn’t.” Only because I got distracted by the tick story, but he doesn’t need to know those finer, rather embarrassing details. I’m not usually so bad at … slaughtering. “That should earn my hands some freedom, surely. Small sign of good will?” I say, winking at him.
“Foot,” he drudges out, and I scowl.
“What in the Creators do you think I am? Some sort of filthy animal who goes around putting her muddy feet on cute, oddly shaped butcher blocks?”
He frowns. “You think it’s oddly shaped?”
I shrug. “Lil bit.”
“Huh,” he says, scanning it, a deep line still etched between his thick brows.
“That only adds to the cuteness, in my humble opinion. Wish I had one just like it.”
Guess I could, except I can’t shape stone well to save myself. The flipside of blocking Bulder out so much I can only wield a few roughly-hewn words, and none of them very well.
That, and I don’t have a home anymore to put one in.
Ouch.
Kaan clears his throat and slaps his hand on the top. “Foot, Raeve. Before the soup burns.”
Bossy and a bad listener …
Definitely needs to die.
“I’m not putting my filthy foot on your mah’s butcher block, King Kaan Vaegor. End of story.”
His head cocks to the side. “And
I’m not kneeling before you for fear of being kicked in the head hard enough to knock me out cold so you can steal a blade from the drawer, slit my throat, and escape.”
Valid concern, honestly.
“Foot. Unless you want to keep your pretty anklets on?” he goads, and I kick the damn thing up on the stool beside me instead, tarnishing the surface with a smear of dirt.
He glares at me.
I flash him a smile.
“You’re very stubborn,” he says, moving around to crouch by the stool.
“So nice of you to say. I sharpen that weapon daily.”
“I can tell,” he mutters, tapping the cuff free of one chafed ankle, then the other. When he’s done, he tucks the tools in the pouch and rolls it up, stuffing it in his satchel, a waft of cold air blowing back at me from within the packed hollow.
Frowning, I catch a glimpse of something silver and shimmery inside. Something that stills my heart, my next words cut with a serrated blade. “What else is in there?”
“None of your business.”
“Your precious moonshard?”
He strikes me with a stare that chills me to the bone, then flips the satchel’s flap. Giving me his back, he strides toward the stove, lifts the lid on the pot, and stirs the soup.
I blow a wisp of dried hair from my face, gaze shifting from the satchel to Kaan, back again. Scratching at the skin beside my nail, I tap my foot against the ground, drawing a breath so big I’m certain it’ll shift this heaviness from my chest.
It doesn’t.
Moonshards come in all different hues, depending on which fallen beast they split from. Most are dug up by those who work in the mines—from long-ago moonfalls from long-forgotten times.
There’s only been three documented moonfalls since folk began scribing our history onto scrolls, and each occurred somewhat recently.
An adolescent Sabersythe barely three phases old that fell within the Boltanic Plains. A Moltenmaw large enough to destroy a chunk of the wall, littering the sky with a cloud of dust and sand that could be seen all the way from Gore. And a
Moonplume
… the first to fall in more than a million phases. Perhaps longer.
That beast was not small, and it did not fall lightly.
It did not plummet without aftershocks of carnage.
Silver as the aurora ribbons, that beast shone with the light of a thousand moons before gravity lost its grip on the thing. Before it fell, bursting into a litter of shards that blasted a crater within The Shade so large a city could dwell within its dimpled depth.
Or so I’m told.
I’ve seen shards of it before, in a place where I was remade more times than I could count—those glorious shards one of the only forms of luster that didn’t cause me some sort of pain.
I don’t know why Kaan’s collecting bits of the fallen Moonplume that ripped from the sky more than twenty phases ago, but my gut tells me that’s a secret best kept stuffed in his leather satchel.
For that reason alone, I let silence have its crown.
Standing over the other side of the butcher block, Kaan splits his focus between stirring the soup and crafting one of Rygun’s scales into a blade, chipping off bite-sized crescents with a round-mouthed tool.
It must be handy to have a ready supply of Sabersythe scales, given most dragonscale blades maintain their slitting edge forever. They’re also lighter than any metal and hardier when shaped correctly—the very reason I have so many despite their steep price tag in The Fade.
Had.
Fucking had.
Rekk probably has most of them now, the fuck. Can’t wait to stuff one so far down his throat he chokes on it.
Kaan inspects his makeshift blade from all angles, loose hair hanging around his face. His black tunic is rolled to the elbows exposing slash marks up and down his corded forearms, half the buttons popped, offering peeks of dense chest muscles that tense with each strong clamp of his tool. Another thumbnail-sized crescent of scale chips off and flicks into the large clay bowl he’s working over.
I avert my gaze toward the pot of bubbling soup, steam escaping from around the rim of the waggling lid …