Hare Moon (2 page)

At the end of their third meeting, he laces his fingers through the links of the gate and she laces her fingers through his and they sit that way for an afternoon, feeling each other’s pulse fighting.

He brings her a gift at their next meeting: a worn book with pages as soft as feathers. She opens the gate to take it from him. She’s astonished at how small it is, how compact. The only books she’s ever seen are copies of the Scripture in her village, thick heavy tomes with paper like onionskin.

“It’s my sister’s favorite,” he tells her. “I thought you might like it too.”

She reads the little book three times before their next meeting, trying to understand what it means. It’s about a house and a woman and her husband, who, she discovers, may have drowned his first wife. It’s lush and dangerous and makes her body pound and pulse.

“Why would a man be so cruel to his wives?” she asks Patrick after the next full moon.

He looks at her with his head tilted. “It’s just a story,” he says. “It’s made up—fiction.”

She nods but she’s frowning because she still doesn’t understand what that means, and he pulls her into his arms to ease her worries.

In the winter she tells him about Brethlaw, the celebration of life and marriage at her village. He opens the gate and she walks through it and now
they tangle together under blankets, surrounded by snow that floats through the air and melts against their skin.

He traces his finger down her spine, weaving between her bones. “Would you leave your world for me?” he asks.

“I might,” she tells him. She wonders how the world ever fell apart with this much love in it.

Tabitha’s parents are unhappy with her. She’s not focusing, they tell her. They remind her that if she doesn’t find a husband soon she may be left with no option but to join the Sisterhood, like her friends Ruth and Ami. And while this might have been an effective threat in the past, she just bites back smiles because she knows there is no man or god for her other than Patrick.

Patrick’s not at their meeting spot. It’s the first time he hasn’t shown, and Tabitha wraps her arms around her body and paces little circles in the freezing rain. She walks through the gate and sprints down the path, wondering if he’s hurt or lost, but there’s no sign of him.

She goes home confused and empty. Where before she felt too big for her skin when she walked around her village, now she feels too small. Her body doesn’t work the way it should—she’s clumsy, tripping when she walks. Nothing is right anymore.

The next month she checks the moon, making sure she knows exactly when it’s at its fullest. She’s so anxious to go to Patrick two days later that she’s not as careful as she should be. One of the Guardians sees her placing
her hand on the gate to the path.

He takes her to the Cathedral and the Sisters whisper in a tight little knot while her parents stand to the side, white-faced and silent. No one will marry her now, they know. She’s a dreamer, and dreamers need to be broken to the will of the Sisterhood.

Her parents don’t object when the Sisters proclaim Tabitha one of them. She puts on the black tunic and combs her hair from her face into a tight bun. She stands with Ruth and Ami, and listens to the enumeration of her duties. She bows her head and recites the prayers, but that is not where her mind and heart are. They’re on the path, waiting.

Tabitha spends the next month planning her escape. Soon she can’t sleep anymore and she’s memorized every detail of her room. She’s tired of the stone walls, the stone floor, the tiny window looking over the graveyard, beyond which the dead roam the fences. She thinks she might understand a little now why they moan. She thinks she might understand the pain of such intense desire. It brings tears to her eyes that never seem to go away.

She starts to wander through the Cathedral in the darkness of the too-early morning hours. She counts the windows, she counts the benches and cushions and even the stones in the floor. Anything to stop thinking about pregnant moons and Patrick and the feel of him trailing a hot finger down her spine.

She’s tracing her own finger along a crooked crack in the Sanctuary wall, remembering the feel of his skin against hers, when the crack dips behind a
curtain and she follows it. There’s a door there, and she doesn’t hesitate before pushing it open to reveal a long hallway. She wanders down it to another door, this one thick and banded with metal.

It’s dark and she has no candle and it’s late, and Tabitha spends a long while staring at that door before she turns around and goes back to bed. The moans of the Unconsecrated whisper her into the deepest sleep she’s felt for ages.

The next night she doesn’t even change into her sleeping gown, but instead waits in her black tunic for the Cathedral to fall silent. She takes the candle and flint from beside her bed and goes straight to the curtain in the Sanctuary, her heart pounding so hard that her fingers shake from the force.

She sneaks down the hallway, her footsteps disturbing a thin layer of dust, and this time she doesn’t pause but goes immediately through the metal-banded door. It leads to a set of stairs, and she descends, the air growing dank and thick enough that the light from her candle barely penetrates it.

She’s in a basement and it smells like dirt, tastes like the wet rot of fall. Rows of wooden racks march through the large room, some cradling old grimy bottles but most just barely withstanding entropy. There are no other doors and no windows, no escape from the heady mustiness.

Along one wall hangs a curtain but Tabitha already knows this trick. She pulls it aside and finds another door, but this one is locked. She tries every way she knows, but she can’t open the door. Eventually she gives up and goes back to bed, but this time she cannot sleep.

Soon, to Tabitha, the locked door behind the curtain in the basement
becomes like the gate blocking the path. She knows she must go through it. And as with the gate, she makes her plan carefully.

She offers to take on the chores assigned to Ruth and Ami, cleaning rooms and scrubbing walls and floors, using them as an excuse to rifle through drawers and cabinets. She finds dozens of keys and she tries them all but none work.

The next time the moon is full she thinks about abandoning Patrick in the Forest. It’s been months since she’s seen him, and she’s angry and hurt and broken. Sometimes she’ll pull his book out from under a loose stone in the wall of her room and she’ll flip through the pages, wondering if all men are so cruel; if love is like a spring bud that blossoms and bursts in a bright hot color and then wilts and dies, never to return.

Two days later, she spends the afternoon torn. She finds herself sneaking away and walking toward the gate and then turning back. She doesn’t know what’s right. She doesn’t want to give up the hope of Patrick but she’s not sure she’s ready to deal with the pain of him either.

It frustrates her that he occupies so much of her mind. Even when she tries to think of other things during the day, he invades her dreams at night and she wakes up sweaty and alone. The second night after the full moon is no exception. She crawls from her bed and carries her candle to the gate and walks the path through the Forest to their meeting spot.

The light from the tiny flame of the candle barely reaches past the fences bordering the path, and it throws cruel shadows across the Unconsecrated who follow her. Their eyes seem more hollow than during the day, their cheeks
sharper, their teeth and tongues black maws.

Moans surround her, peel away her flesh until she feels bare and raw. The Unconsecrated bang against the fence, claw for her so hard their fingers snap and bones protrude, gleaming and sharp. She can’t rush because the candle will go out and so she’s forced to walk slowly, unable to outrun the death on either side of her.

The gate is as it always is: impassive and sturdy. As she expected, the path on the other side is empty. She stands in the darkness and tries to decide what to do next. Go back? Go forward? Curl up on the path and let time take its toll?

Her shoulders fall, her fingers go limp and the candle drops. Just before the flame sputters out against the damp earth, she catches sight of something lying on the ground on the other side of the gate. In the middle of the path is a small basket covered by a scrap of material.

The moon is fat but waning, and she doesn’t bother relighting the candle before opening the gate and crossing through it. She pulls back the fabric to find a spray of wilted flowers, their petals black in the darkness. Nestled amid the limp leaves rests a piece of paper, and it takes her three strikes of the flint until her candle’s bright enough to read the words.

“My Tabby,” she whispers aloud to the dead around her. “My family has grown sick and my father is on the verge of death. I couldn’t bear to leave my mother and sister so soon. Forgive my absences. Please forgive me. I have missed you and I promise that nothing will keep me from you after the hare moon. I hope that you remain mine, as I remain yours. Always, my love, Patrick.”

She presses the words to her lips, hoping for a taste of his skin on the
paper. She holds her hand against her chest, wanting to rip out her heart and leave it in this basket among the wilted flowers for him. Because she now understands that it belongs to him and always will.

Tabitha keeps the note on her person at all times, tucked into the binding for her breasts, next to her heart. She doesn’t care that the sweat of the day blurs his words; she needs them against her. She needs to remember the feel of him.

She continues her search for the key in a feverish daze. She finds herself staring off into space in the middle of mundane tasks, and she’s late for services more than once. As punishment she’s tasked with spending nights alone praying in the Sanctuary for the Midnight Office and Matins.

Her eyes begin to look a bit hollow, the bones in her cheeks a little sharper and her jaw more defined. There are confusing moments when she thinks she almost feels the comforting heat of God in her deepest prayers, and she stumbles to her bed muddled and hazy.

She’s so lost in her thoughts one afternoon that she doesn’t realize at first what it means when she comes across a large key while dusting the shelves and stacking papers on the desk in the oldest Sister’s chambers.