Leena Likitalo: The Five Daughters of the Moon

His eyes narrow a fraction. His hand feels tense through the red leather of his glove. “I don’t recall such.”

“You also took me to a workhouse where sounds harsh and loud filled the night. The very air smelled of sticky tar and dry hemp. There, the poor worked in the smoke of the cheapest tallow candles. They squinted at the lengths of rope, fraying it to pick oakum. To me, they all looked the same. At first, I didn’t realize why. I wondered, was it the desperation writ all over their faces? The concentration of one desperate enough to give his life into the hands of others in exchange for something, anything to eat? But no, in the end I realized it was their faded gray uniforms, so worn that no two garments looked exactly the same, so valued that every single person in the room wore theirs with something that eerily resembled pride.”

“Please don’t.” Captain Janlav runs his free hand through his hair, scattering snowflakes. He lives in denial or then simply doesn’t remember, but he wonders. How could I possibly know these details? No one would tell such to a Daughter of the Moon. No one would write these ugly truths on paper, not even as their reflections about the scriptures. “I’m just a man, and I’m not sure of many things, but I’m sure that before I was tasked with the honor of escorting you and your sisters to safety, I had never seen you, only heard of you.” He winces as though struck by a sudden headache. “And even if I had, I would never have taken a girl like you to a workhouse.”

Can the gagargi’s spell be somehow undone? I glance up at the Moon. My father gazes back at me kindly. He helped Celestia to break the spell the gagargi had cast on her. Will he help me?

“You took me to a hospital,” I say, silently praying for my father to come to my aid. “We saw the halls crammed with beds. We walked through the long corridors. We heard the involuntary whimpers, the escaped sobs and sniffs. We greeted the men who had once been so proud, who had marched to war in their prime. They were that no more, but forgotten; out of sight, out of mind.”

“Stop it.” He tugs his hand—once, twice—as if yearning to be released. But I can’t let go of him now, can’t heed his plea. I can remember everything as if it had happened mere heartbeats earlier, not in another time and age.

“You led me down the aisle into a vast, white hall. There lay the ones who suffered the most. The fathers and sons, the uncles and cousins, every single one equal in their pain. Men that had faced cannons, who now missed a leg or an arm. Or more. Men with bandages wrapped around their heads, over their unseeing eyes and unhearing ears. Men with wounds that… stank of rot, their bandages dirty, unchanged. You took me to the very men who went to war because my mother so demanded, the very men she forgot once they were no longer of use to her.”

“No!” He yanks his hand back with such force that I lose him. I have gone too far, or perhaps then not far enough. And yet, I don’t dare to touch him again. What if he was even partially right? What if my father or even I do indeed possess a power to make people act as benefits us? If I were to take further advantage of that… I would be no better than the gagargi.

I wait patiently, dreading that he will never speak to me again. I don’t know how long we have been out already. I don’t know when the train will depart. Perhaps soon. But I can’t hurry him, not now, even though this may be the only opportunity we have for this conversation.

“You can’t know this.” His voice is hoarse, that of a frightened boy. “You can’t. How could you? You’ve lived a sheltered life of leisure, in the halls and hallways of the finest palaces. How could you have ever even wanted to know the truth?”

I tilt my chin up, a gesture Celestia resorts to when argued against. How infuriatingly can a man act? How can I still care for him this much? “Because you showed it to me.” He flinches, and I regret my harshness. It’s not his fault he doesn’t remember. I add out of remorse, “Silly.”

He reaches out for me, and I’m acutely aware of the silver pressing against my skin. I shift minutely, so that his fingers come to rest against my shoulder, not my neck. I meet his eyes with a questioning gaze. His eyes are the same as before, the brown of young pines. And yet, the gaze is different. But I think… Is there a flicker of recollection there?

His lips part, and I lean toward him. Because I miss him. I miss being with him.

“No,” he says, pulling his hand away. Again. “We must not. It would interfere with my duty.”

I feel like laughing and crying, both at the same time. My lips burn with the cold, not with his kiss. My voice trembles with what may be chagrin. “Your duty?”

“To see you safely to our destination.” It sounds as if he were repeating a mantra, something enforced in his mind by foul means. He crosses his hands behind his back and nods toward the carriage. He wants us to return. “If you must know, it isn’t exactly easy, to keep another human being contained for an extended period of time, even if it’s for their own safety and to ensure the future of the Crescent Empire.”

This lie… I want to laugh maniacally, I want to argue, but I bite my tongue. He sounds so serious, proud even. Perhaps it’s not a lie to him. Perhaps that’s why the other guards avoid us, so that they won’t have to remember why the doors are locked and curtains drawn, why one of them has to sit in the corridor ready to spring into action while the others play cards and smoke cigarettes.

“I never assumed it would be,” I reply at last. My father still gazes kindly at us. If he doesn’t feel anger, neither should I.

“It’s not only that,” he says, chin pressed against his chest, but not to keep himself warm. Something weighs heavy on his mind. It’s curious that I know him though he doesn’t know me.

It strikes me then. He’s a captain, the one in the lead. He has no one else to confide in than the very person he thinks he’s tasked to guard. “What is it, then?”

He glances over his shoulder, at the rails—no, onward—at the plains we have crossed, into the towns we have left behind. In his eyes lives regret, longing to change a decision made or perhaps an act done in haste. “When Alina fell ill, when we halted in that town…”

“Yes?” I prompt, dreading the answer, every slipping step that carries us closer to the carriage and silence. The witch, no matter that she helped us, frightens me. She saw things in our shadows, shapes she wouldn’t speak of, and the bargain she made with Celestia left my sister weak.

“You hate us already,” Captain Janlav says. “Don’t you?”

I don’t say a word. So that’s it, then. He has done something so despicable that he expects to be called a monster.

“You would hate us even more if you knew the lengths to which we have gone to protect you and your sisters.”

“Try me,” I reply more dryly than I had intended. The cold air has chafed my throat sore. I might catch my death because of this excursion, but I’m past caring about that.

“Perhaps I will.” He glances at the carriage, at the door he left unlocked, as if to measure how many words he has time to say before all talk must cease. “After you’d boarded the train, we argued about it long and hard. I didn’t want to do it, but what choice did we have? Even as blind as she was, what if she somehow recognized you? What if she’d tell someone? Not that she seemed the type. But what if those who wish to harm you caught her in their hands and interrogated her. People speak when they’re in pain. They’ll do anything to make the agony stop.”

I had practically betrayed my family to escape the darkness of my own mind. What he’s saying… As I shake my head, my blanket shifts. Cold gnaws at my throat, down my back, into my belly. “No…”