“The more you walk, the more pain you’ll be in,” Luna countered.
Every morning, it seemed, Xan had a new ache or a new pain. A cloudiness in the eye or a droop to a shoulder. Luna was beside herself.
“Do you want me to sit on your feet, Grandmama?” she asked Xan. “Do you want me to tell you a story or sing you a song?”
“What has gotten into you, child?” Luna’s grandmother sighed.
“Maybe you should eat something. Or drink something. Maybe you should have some tea. Would you like me to make you tea? Perhaps you should sit down. For tea.”
“I’m perfectly fine. I have made this trip more times than I can count, and I have never had any trouble. You are making a fuss over nothing.” But Luna knew something was changing in her grandmother. There was a tremor in her voice and a tremble in her hands. And she was so thin! Luna’s grandmother used to be bulbous and squat—all soft hugs and squishy cuddles. Now she was fragile and delicate and light—dry grasses wrapped in crumbling paper that might fall apart in a gust of wind.
When they arrived in the town called Agony, Luna ran ahead to the widow woman’s house, just at the border.
“My grandmother’s not well,” Luna told the widow woman. “Don’t tell her I said so.”
And the widow woman sent her almost-grown-up son (a Star Child, like so many others), who ran to the healer, who ran to the apothecary, who ran to the mayor, who alerted the League of Ladies, who alerted the Gentlemen’s Association and the Clockmakers Alliance and the Quilters and the Tinkers and the town school. By the time Xan hobbled into the widow woman’s garden, half the town was already there, setting up tables and tents, with legions upon legions of busybodies preparing themselves to fuss over the old woman.
“Foolishness,” Xan sniffed, though she lowered herself gratefully into the chair that a young woman placed right next to the herb garden for her.
“We thought it best,” the widow woman said.
“I thought it best,” corrected Luna, and what seemed like a thousand hands caressed her cheeks and the top of her head and her shoulders. “Such a good girl,” the townspeople murmured. “We knew she would be the best of best girls, and the best of best children, and one day the best of best women. We do so love being right.”
This attention wasn’t unusual. Whenever Luna visited the Free Cities, she found herself warmly received and fawned over. She didn’t know why the townspeople loved her so, or why they seemed to hang on her every word, but she enjoyed their admiration.
They remarked at her fine eyes, dark and glittering as the night sky, her black hair shot with gold, the birthmark on her forehead in the shape of a crescent moon. They remarked on her intelligent fingers and her strong arms and her fast legs. They praised her for her precise way of speaking and her clever gestures when she danced and her lovely singing voice.
“She sounds like magic,” the town matrons sighed, and then Xan shot them a poisonous look, at which they started mumbling about the weather.
That word made Luna frown. In that moment, she knew she must have heard it before—she must have. But a moment later, the word flew out of her mind, like a hummingbird. And then it was gone. Just a blank space was left where the word had been, like a fleeting thought at the edge of a dream.
Luna sat among a collection of Star Children—all different ages—one infant, some toddlers, and moving upward to the oldest, who was an impressively old man.
(“Why are they called Star Children?” Luna had asked possibly thousands of times.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you are talking about,” Xan answered vaguely.
And then she changed the subject. And then Luna forgot. Every time.
Only lately, she could remember herself forgetting.)
The Star Children were discussing their earliest memories. It was a thing they did often—seeing which one could get as close as possible to the moment when Old Xan brought them to their families and marked them as beloved. Since no one could actually remember such a thing—they had been far too young—they went as deep into their memories as they could to find the earliest image among them.
“I can remember a tooth—how it became wiggly and fell out. Everything before that is a bit of a blur, I’m afraid,” said the older Star Child gentleman.
“I can remember a song that my mother used to sing. But she still sings it, so perhaps it isn’t a memory after all,” said a girl.
“I remember a goat. A goat with a crinkly mane,” said a boy.
“Are you sure that wasn’t just Old Xan?” a girl asked him, giggling. She was one of the younger Star Children.
“Oh,” the boy said. “Perhaps you are right.”
Luna wrinkled her brow. There were images lurking in the back of her mind. Were they memories or dreams? Or memories of dreams of memories? Or perhaps she had made them up. How was she supposed to know?
She cleared her throat.
“There was an old man,” she said, “with dark robes that made a swishing sound like the wind, and he had a wobbly neck and a nose like a vulture, and he didn’t like me very much.”
The Star Children cocked their heads.
“Really?” one of the boys said. “Are you sure?” They stared at her intently, curling their lips between their teeth and biting down.
Xan waved her left hand dismissively while her cheeks began to flush from pink to scarlet.
“Don’t listen to her.” Xan rolled her eyes. “She has no idea what she’s talking about. There was no such man. We see lots of silly things when we dream.”
Luna closed her eyes.
“And there was a woman who lived on the ceiling whose hair waved like the branches of the sycamore trees in a storm.”
“Impossible,” her grandmother scoffed. “You don’t know anyone that I didn’t meet first. I was there for your whole life.” She gazed at Luna with a narrowed eye.
“And a boy who smelled like sawdust. Why would he smell like sawdust?”
“Lots of people smell like sawdust,” her grandmother said. “Woodcutters, carpenters, the lady who carves spoons. I could go on and on.”
This was true, of course, and Luna had to shake her head. The memory was old, and faraway, but at the same time, clear. Luna didn’t have very many memories that were as tenacious as this one—her memory, typically, was a slippery thing, and difficult to pin down—and so she hung on to it. This image meant something. She was sure of it.
Her grandmother, now that she thought about it, never spoke of memories. Not ever.
The next day, after sleeping in the guest room of the widow woman, Xan walked through the town, checking on the pregnant women, advising them on their work level and food choices, listening to their bellies.
Luna tagged along. “So you may learn something useful,” her grandmother said. Her words stung, no mistake.
“I’m useful,” Luna said, tripping on the cobblestones as they hurried to the first patient’s house on the other edge of town.
The woman’s pregnancy was so far along, she looked as though she might burst at any second. She greeted both grandmother and grandchild with a serene exhaustion. “I’d get up,” she said, “but I fear I may fall over.” Luna kissed the lady on the cheek, as was customary, and quickly touched the mound of belly, feeling the child leap inside. Suddenly she had a lump in her throat.
“Why don’t I make some tea?” she said briskly, turning her face away.
I had a mother once, Luna thought. I must have. She frowned. And surely, she must have asked about it, too, but she couldn’t seem to remember doing so.
Luna made a list of what she knew in her head.
Sorrow is dangerous.
Memories are slippery.
My grandmother does not always tell the truth.
And neither do I.
These thoughts swirled in Luna’s mind as she swirled the tea leaves in the boiling water.