As it turns out, I do survive until moonrise, though frankly the hours between my encounter with Jahnari and the return of light sucked ass and I never want to do anything like that again.
Now that the moon has returned I feel a little better. I study the familiar blotches on its luminous surface. Is that really the same moon I've seen a thousands of times through my bedroom window? Or is just a clever copy? How can anything in this sanity-smothering land of darkness be the same as it is at home?
I stand up and pick the leaves off my jeans. I don’t love having a plan that hinges on consulting a hairy fiend or nightmare demon, but it’s a plan I didn’t have when the moon went down.
The Moth King lives in a palace. Palaces are nice. How bad could it be?
It’s not lost on me that my walking directions came from a forest hag, and therefore “follow the creek” is as likely to lead me to a cottage made from gumdrops and peppermint sticks as it is a palace guard tower, but purposeful beats blundering. I figure I have a better chance of getting answers from whatever lives in the palace than from an empty forest.
I walk for a long while, listening. I think I can hear water, but when I change direction, it seems I was mistaken. I circle back and try again. I give up on my ears and try scenting the air, but it just smells like earth and pine. I scold myself for thinking I might be able to smell water. I’m not a dog.
As I make my way deeper into the woods, my ears start picking up some unsettling things. Giggling, or possibly wind chimes, or some bizarre combination of the two. When I turn, I see nothing.
To my right and slightly behind me, the understory rattles, echo-like, in almost perfect time to my footsteps. I pause, the sound pauses. I step, there it is again.
I vault two steps backward and poke my sword into the brush but that does nothing except stir up leaves and sticks.
What the fuck. This place is giving my adrenal gland a solid workout.
I approach a gnarled tree that might be a yew though tree identification is not exactly one of my proudest skills. I’m about to bypass it when motion catches my eye.
I stop and squint at the tree. I see it again. A nose, poking out from behind the trunk. An animal’s nose.
I wait and the nose becomes a head.
It’s a fox.
“Hi there,” I say, relieved to be encountering a perfectly ordinary forest creature.
“Hi there,” says the fox, pulling itself onto its hind legs.
Okay, not a perfectly ordinary forest creature.
I unsheathe my sword. My heart overreacts with a flutter and a burst of speed. It’s just a fox. A talking, standing-up fox, but a fox. What could it possibly do to me?
“There’s no need for that,” it says, eying my sword, its lips pulled back to reveal sharp, white teeth. “You are not to be harmed.”
“I’m not?” For a second I forget I’m talking to a small, furry, somehow bipedal predator. “Who told you that? Why?”
“I believe the king is expecting you. Follow the creek to the guard tower.” It raises a paw and gestures to my left.
That sounds all kinds of ominous. I swallow the rising lump of doom in my throat and sheathe my sword. “Okay,” I say, awkwardly, because I’m pretty sure the “don’t say thank you” rule also applies to talking foxes.
The fox pulls its lips back again in what might be a smile, but it’s damned hard to tell. “Safe travels,” it says, then it ambles off, still on two legs.
Well, that was fucked.
Do I trust it? Fairy tale creatures aren’t exactly known for their goodwill and helpfulness. And I can’t think of any story where being expected by a monster king ends well for the mortal.
What’s the alternative? Keep poking empty bushes with my sword?
The king knows I’m here. He might also know if Leo is here.
Look at me, being optimistic.
When I finally find the creek I’m an uncomfortable combination of amped up and exhausted. I hear giggling again and turn in time to see something vaguely monkey-shaped with long pointed ears and a coiled tail scramble behind a bush.
When I finally reach my destination, the moon is halfway down the other side of the sky’s dome.
The guard tower is a tapered, conical structure with dim light bleeding from a single, top story window. It reminds me of Angel’s Point, the lighthouse my family used to visit every summer, except without the fog-busting beam of light and, you know, pretty much every other similarity. Most lighthouses are painted in friendly, welcoming white. This thing is black. Its stone walls are lustrous and striated. It’s also alarmingly off-kilter. Crumbled stone leaks grotesquely from one side of it like innards. Someone has half-assed a structural reinforcement from two uncut logs jammed into the fragile stone at 45-degree angles. It looks like something a child might build from loose rock and sticks for no other reason than to see how tall it can be made before gravity gets offended and pulls it to the ground.
I’m amazed to see movement in the window. I don’t think I would have the balls to go up there.
I draw my sword. The rational, lives-in-the-normal-world part of me says this is a terrible idea. The Leo-rescuing warrior part of me clamps a calloused hand over my rational self’s unhelpful mouth.
I approach the tower.
A hunched, smallish creature emerges from a low doorway. It’s covered in long, matted brown hair and gives off an aura of Bigfoot if Bigfoot wasn’t big. It has long arms that end in sinuous, claw-tipped fingers and huge, yellow eyes that seem to perpetually roll around in its head as if it is exasperated by the entire world. It grunts and ambles towards me, and I can see that its sense of personal hygiene is not super great. It has sticks, leaves, and other bits of debris wound up tightly in its long, dirty hair.
A hairy fiend, then. That’s at least slightly better than nightmare demon.
It grins at me with slightly pointed teeth that would be scary except they’re so rotten they'd probably fall harmlessly out of its mouth if it tried to bite someone.
I don’t know if exhaustion is working in my favor or if this particular monster seems diminutive in comparison to the other monsters I’ve seen because my heartbeat remains oddly stable.
The creature pauses just out of striking distance, so it seems to have at least some higher intellect.
“I’d like to see the king,” I say. Like is a strong word, but that’s what I say.
“King,” it confirms. It points its disgusting hand. “Sword.”
Not too much higher intellect, then. “No,” I tell it.
“Sword down,” it says. “Or no king.”
I put my sword back in its scabbard without taking my eyes off the schrat. It grunts as if satisfied and then points at the trail.
I guess I’m supposed to walk in front of it. Fantastic.
Another schrat joins the procession. This one hoots like an ape while the first walks in silence. Though they haven’t disarmed me, I can’t help but think I’m a prisoner and not a guest, despite what Jahnari implied when she said I should “ask the Moth King.”
The schrat behind me prods me with a long, willowy finger and grunts. It points to something luminous rising from the shadows.
It’s a building of some kind. I think. It’s moon gray but still the most colorful thing I’ve seen since arriving here, unless you count the slightly greenish tint of Jahnari’s leathery face. It seems to be a castle—or something like a castle—but without the colorful flags, white horses, and fairy princess joy. Its towers and turrets are shaped like gnarled, dead oak trees, and fog clings to it like its own little microclimate of despair.
I pause and swallow hard. So much for my palaces are nice fantasy.
The schrat prods me again.
The castle’s arched doorway is framed by thick vines with silvery, three- pointed leaves. It’s manned by two identical schrats wearing moss-covered armor. One of them keeps batting the hanging end of a vine out of its face with the back of its hand instead of taking the much more practical approach of moving two steps the the right.
My escorts stop and the less-hooty one points at my sword. “Down,” it says.
Every self-preservation instinct I possess tells me not to give up my sword. On the other hand, I doubt anyone is going to let me walk into a palace with a weapon on my hip.
I briefly imagine what might happen if I grab a schrat by its greasy hair-mat, press the tip of my sword to its throat, and demand an audience with the king.
I guess I’d rather not be smited or turned into a piece of furniture. I unbuckle my scabbard and hold it out.
“Down,” it says impatiently, waving at the ground.
I knit my brow. “Here? You want me to just leave it on the ground?”
It grunts.
I study the two guard schrats as if I might actually be able to read thoughts in their almost completely hair-covered faces. “How do I know it will still be here when I get back?”
“Drop,” it says again. Multiple-word answers are apparently not its thing.
Without taking my eyes from the guard schrats, I lean my sword upright against the castle wall and rearrange the vines so they kind of obscure it. The hooty schrat makes a sound that’s somewhere between an evil laugh and two chimpanzees fighting over a banana.
I follow my escorts through the gates.
The courtyard is full of moonlit creatures in various shades of gray, green, and brown, some hunched and bald, some covered in moss or grass or reeds. They stop to gawk as if I’m the one who has plant life growing out of my head. One holds a wooden stein mid-toast and another gives a temporary stay of execution to the small frog he’s dangling over his gaping piranha mouth. A few of them growl or hiss but most simply blink eyes that are huge or beady, all black, mottled like moons, or sparkling like stars.
I flip through my mental file box of fairy tales, but except for a small group of bearded men who are probably gnomes, I can’t put names on any of these creatures.
Faint music drifts through the courtyard, and my heart picks up an out-of-time beat. That’s faery music, and I’m about to be ensorcelled.
The schrats lead me through a gilded doorway between two fluted, gray columns adorned with empty candelabras shaped like witch’s fingers. We enter a great, long room with huge, arched windows and a rustic banquet table the length of a semi-truck.
A throne carved out of a massive piece of black stone sits at one end of the room, and I realize the music is not for me, it’s for him.
He is sitting on a throne looking petulantly bored, or as bored as one might look when one is a vaguely man-shaped thing covered in a colony of featureless, flickering phantoms. In the silvery moonlight, I can see details I didn’t notice when he was menacing me in the forest. He seems to have a body, but it’s hard to know where darkness ends and flesh begins, if it’s flesh at all and not just some other manifestation of shadow masquerading as life.
He’s staring down at a tiny creature with a grassy green body playing an instrument that appears to have been fashioned out of half a watermelon. His eyes are black, black, black, and horrible. His crown flickers. It’s shaped like dead trees with branches that spiral into the sky, pitching and bending as if the wind forever howls just above the Moth King’s head.
Gray, semi-transparent moth-like shadows cling to his arms and shoulders, furiously beating their wings as if engaged in the eternally fruitless task of trying to lift him into the air. Other shadowy things that are long and bullet-shaped loop endlessly around him like phantom fish. They remind me—ridiculously—of the mackerel that swim in an infinite circle in the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Schooling Fish exhibit.
The schrat prods me and I stumble forward. The Moth King’s terrible eyes discard the wretched, watermelon-playing sprite and fall on me.
“Kneel! Kneel!” mutters a small, grayish creature with huge eyes and pointy features. Everything in the room seems to have sprung from a storybook or a nightmare, and I’m so disoriented by it all that I can’t comprehend the action behind the word kneel. One knee or both? Do I fall to the ground, or is there some way to retain my dignity? Do I look at the ground, or do I look into the ghastly face of the man-thing lounging on the throne in front of me?
I’m still contemplating this when one of the two schrats that brought me here puts its hairy, filth-covered hand on the small of my back and shoves, and now I guess the answer is fall to both of my knees.
The Moth King is watching me so I stare at the floor.
My heart is flopping around as if a toad is dying inside it. All around me, I can hear shuffling, growling, hissing, and other sounds from the humanesque things watching me like rottweilers straining against their leashes.
“What?” the Moth King says as if he was not, in fact, expecting me. The timbre of his voice just pulls more springs out of my already malfunctioning brain. It’s not booming or echoey or raspy or even especially loud. If there are any sinister undertones, they’re suggestive of man interrupted while reading, not shadowy fiend with the power to destroy you.
I blink at the ground. “I’m looking for my brother.”
“I can’t hear you.” His voice is still very human-sounding, but now it has silky notes.
I’m determined not to meet those awful eyes but they’re black holes, and black holes suck things into them, and that’s exactly what happens when I look up. It’s like a little bit of my soul spagettifies and spirals away into outer space.
“My brother,” I manage.
He puts his shadowy hand on his shadowy chin. Hysterical laughter wells up inside me. When we were kids, Leo and I used to pretend to be monsters. Here’s a monster pretending to be a person.
I bite my lip and drag my gaze away from him to the tree that stands behind the throne, which is of course not a tree but some sort of walking, smiling thing with bark where his skin should be.
To my left, something titters.
“Humans don’t usually come here willingly,” the king says.
“So?” I croak out. The gray man with the pointy face hisses and I realize I’ve just been rude to a king.
The Moth King seems to be smiling but I actually have no idea. “You’ve brought a sword. From the human world.”
Now I’m back to wondering if I’m going to get my sword back.
I can’t figure out where he’s going with this. Maybe he’s trying to antagonize me so he will have a reason to chop off my head. Maybe he doesn’t need a reason to chop off my head and is just toying with me because it’s fun. I glance at one of the schrats and it gives me a rotten, pointy-toothed grin that has absolutely no humor in it.
The Moth King is still looking at me. “What is your name?”
“Sunday Hale.”
He’s silent for a beat, then he says, “Like the day of the week?”
This is how literally everyone responds when I say my name. Apparently, it is also how terrifying moth monsters respond when I say my name. Somehow I manage to feel irritated even as my adrenal gland screams at me to get the out of this place right now.
“I’m supposed to tell you that Jahnari doesn’t have him.”
He sits back in his throne as if I’m making him weary. “Who doesn’t Jahnari have?” he says, as if he’s heard nothing I’ve said so far and is irritated that I expected him to be paying attention.
“My brother. I’m looking for my brother. Leo Hale.” I fix my eyes on his chin. I’m now fairly certain he has a face, but I have to piece it together one feature at a time since looking at it directly would mean making eye contact, and I would really like to not have to do that again.
He takes an audible breath. I can’t figure out why this strikes me as strange until I realize that breathing requires biology of some kind. Lungs. A ribcage. A need for oxygen. I try to reconcile this with the monster sitting in front of me.
“To receive a favor from a king, you must give a favor to a king,” he drawls.
I blink at him in disbelief. I’m a mortal woman, he’s a supernatural creature. He definitely does not need any favors from me.
I’ve read a lot of fairy tales and I’m pretty sure this is a trick. He’s planning to send me to my death so I’ll stop annoying him. He’s going to make a cleverly crafted promise with an unseen loophole in exchange for my humiliation or near-death. Wait, don’t fairy tale kings usually kill their unsuccessful champions? I seem to remember one about dancing princesses that had an awful lot of death and dismemberment in it.
Doesn’t hurt to ask, says a voice in my head. It might be the voice of my middle school history teacher or maybe my mom because it’s definitely not the voice of the person standing in front of a horror movie monster who has just asked her to do him a favor.
“Okay,” I say, hardly believing the words coming out of my own mouth. “What favor?”
He leans forward greedily. “Travel to the Twilight Lands and destroy the Dazbog.”
“I … ” I stammer. I wonder if I will be murdered if I ask him what a Dazbog is and if the Twilight Lands are full of friendly, sparkling vampires.
He spares me from asking the question by adding another caveat. “And you must swear fealty to me.”
“Fealty?”
“Yes,” he replies, folding his arms. “Fealty. Do you know what that means?”
“Of course I do,” I mutter. “I’ve seen Game of Thrones.”
“Good,” says the king. “Swear fealty and if you complete your mission, I will tell you what I know of your brother.”
His voice is now the only sound in the room. I’ve become a spectacle. I look around at all the brown, gray, and green faces staring hungrily at me, as if they’re hoping I’ll refuse so they can watch the Moth King strike me down, or smother me in shadow, or manifest a flock of shadow birds to pick me apart with their shadow beaks and shadow talons.
My mouth is bone dry. The words “fealty,” “mission,” and “brother” ring in my ears, but I’m not even sure what order I heard them in.
The gray man kicks my leg. “Say ‘Your Majesty, I,’ and then your name,” he growls.
I look pleadingly at the gray man as if he alone might be able to save me, which is stupid because he’s hovering over me like I’m something delicious he’s saving for a special occasion. “We’re doing this now?” I ask.
“Yes,” the Moth King replies. “Now.”
My brain scrambles for a foothold. This isn’t just a faery bargain. It’s faery extortion. “No,” I say, but it comes out sounding like the peep of a baby bird. “I can … offer …”
The king goes still. I mean, as still as is possible for someone covered with cavorting phantoms. “Did you just say no?”
The next sound I make is a choked whimper. I’m fucked. If I refuse, he’ll kill me, and when he’s done killing me, he sure as fuck isn’t going to take my dead body to see Leo.
I can fudge this. I clear my throat. “Your Majesty, I, Sunday Hale…”
The gray man moves closer to me and puts his lips next to my ear like there’s some possibility I will misunderstand him. “Do hereby swear fealty to the Moth King as my sovereign lord.” I flinch as his spittle hits my face.
“Do hereby swear fealty to my sovereign lord,” I say through gritted teeth.
“The Moth King,” the gray man snarls.
The Moth King drums his fingers on his throne and waits while I choke out a corrected statement of fealty.
“I will obey your commands in all matters and serve you faithfully on pain of death,” the gray man continues.
I say that, too, but I leave off the “pain of death” part.
Now everyone in the room has gone utterly still and I feel like a rabbit in that moment just before the hounds tear it into little pieces. “I swore it,” I plead. “Don’t make me say pain of death.”
The gray man kicks me again. I look up and accidentally meet the Moth King’s black, well-of-lost-souls eyes.
He leans forward again. “Pain … of … death …” he says, annunciating every word.
I look at the ground. “On pain of death.”