The Starless Crown （Moonfall #1）
James Rollins
FOR TERRY BROOKS,
whose creativity inspired me
and whose generosity of spirit is the only reason you are reading this book.
Life is full of holes.
Even in the best of times, the span of one’s years is never a perfect tapestry, laid out in a sprawl of days, months, and years, all woven in flawless detail, each color as bright as when its thread was plaited into the whole. Instead, over time, bits of this tapestry get worn away by age. Other sections stretch out of shape as one worries over them, returning again and again to pull and tug at certain threads. Worst of all, large pieces go threadbare, to the point of indecipherability. Still, memory proves to be a devious trickster—filling in gaps, darning rips, patching gaps—often with stories that are not true, only necessary. They are the yarn needed to create a whole that one can live with.
At this old age, I am not in the best of my times. My own tapestry is far more motheaten. I am nearing my hundredth year. So, if I don’t remember you, it does not mean I do not hold you dearly. If I don’t recall every detail of this long story, it does not make it any less true. Here in my attic croft where I write, I have my sketches and drawings that anchor my past, that do not let me forget, that remind me of the man I once was.
As I begin this story, I leave the last of my many journals propped open, near to its last page. Her image in ink stares back at me, judging me, daring me. I had used ashes to capture the sweep of her hair, a crush of azure shell mixed with oil for her bright eyes, my own blood for her lips. Her smile is sad, as if disappointed in me. Her gaze is hard and unforgiving. Her cheeks are blushed with barely restrained fury.
Long ago, I drew this image from memory—as it was the last time I ever saw her.
She who was prophesied to destroy the world.
And did.
BEFORE
SHE GIVES BIRTH in mud and mire.
She squats and strains under the fog-shrouded bower of a gnarled cottongum. Vines choke the massive tree, dragging its limbs to the mossy hillocks and draping leaves into the boggy waters of a slow-moving stream. To her side, a trunk as wide as a horse twists around and around, as if the tree were seeking to escape these drowned lands.
She sweats and pants, her legs wide under her. Overhead, her hands remain clamped to a vine. As she hangs there, thorns pierce her palms, but the pain is naught compared to the final contraction that rips her wider and pushes the babe from her womb. She stifles her scream, lest the hunters should hear her cries.
Still, a moan escapes her, wordless from her lack of a tongue. As a pleasure serf of Azantiia, she was never allowed the luxury of speech.
With one last push, she feels the release. The child spills from her and drops to the wet mud underfoot. She slips off the vine. Impaled thorns rip her palms open. She slumps to the mud with the babe between her thighs. The child is still tied to her by a twisted bloody cord.
She sobs with wracking heaves and picks up the skinning knife near the base of the cottongum. The hunting blade is not her own, neither is the blood that already stains it. The knife was thrust into her hands by her savior, by a man who broke a vow to help her escape the castle keep. After sailing across the Bay of Promise, under the glowering eye of a winter’s sun, pursued by the king’s legion, they had made landfall along the treacherous coast of M?r. Its shoreline was less land and more a blurring where the blue sea met the brackish waters lined by a drowned mangrove forest. Once the skiff could traverse no farther into the swamps, her rescuer had sent her off on foot, while he poled the skiff away, intending to lead her pursuers elsewhere.
Alone now, she slices his blade through the thick cord, freeing the babe from her body and from her past. She had thought herself emptied, but her belly convulses again. She gasps as blood and tissue flow out, washing over the babe. Fearing the child would drown with its first breath, she wipes the baby’s face clean. Its eyes remain closed to this harsh world. Her torn palms smear more blood. Still, she reveals little pursed lips—too blue, nearly black in the shadows.
Breathe now, little one …
She rubs and prays.
One prayer is answered when the child sucks in its first breath, stirring, only slightly, but enough. Her other prayer is ignored when she discovers her child is a girl.
No …
She picks up the knife again. She lowers the blade to the baby’s throat.
Better this …
Her hand trembles. She leans down and kisses a brow furrowing toward a first cry at this harsh world. She prays, both as apology and explanation. Be free from me. From my past. From my shame. From those who would take you.
Before she can act, the Mother Below punishes her for daring to forsake the gift granted to her womb. Her stomach clenches again. Hot blood pours out between her thighs. The pain is at first fiery—then turns to a dreadful cold. And still the flow continues, pouring her life into the mud.
She reads the truth in the spreading stain.
Having been raised among the pleasure serfs, she had assisted midwives with other girls who had found themselves with child, despite the teas of Bastard’s Herb. Over the passing two decades, she had witnessed births in all their myriad forms: some joyous, others fearful, most with resignation. All had involved tears. There had been blood, shite, torn flesh, babes born backward, others deformed by the teas, or bodies broken by their own mothers in attempts to end the child’s life before it was born. When she was very young, she had reviled the latter. She had not known then what it meant to be a child born under the whip, to be eventually broken under the heaving throes of a master.
She eventually learned the hard and necessary lessons.
She stares down at the knife at her daughter’s throat.
By now, blood pools heavily under the babe. The scent draws flies and suckers. As she stares down into eyes just now peeking open, the forest grows hushed, as if awed. Birdsong falls silent, leaving only the hum and whine of insects. A new noise intrudes. A heavy splash to her right.
She stirs her cooling flesh enough to turn her head. Even this small movement closes the darkness tighter around her. From the sluggish current of the swamp, a reptilian beast thrashes onto shore. Claws gouge the muck, dragging its massive length, led by a snout edged by sharp teeth. Though eyeless, it aims unerringly through the reeds and moss, drawn by her blood as surely as the biting flies.
No …
Her instinct to protect overwhelms the bitter lessons of her past. She lifts the blade from her daughter’s neck and threatens the approaching beast. But she knows she can inflict no more than a pinprick—if even that. The reptilian hunter is twice her length, ten times her weight. She senses its age, reads the centuries in the thick growth of emerald moss fringing its black scales.
Despite its age, it barrels faster toward her, blind to the knife and all its uselessness. It carries with it the reek of carrion and brackish waters. The moss across its back and flanks glows faintly in the forest shadows.
Still, she kneels over her child. She is too weak even to stand. Her arm quakes to hold up the dagger. Darkness continues to pinch her world smaller and smaller.
She girds herself for the heavy strike to come, as she did many nights in the perfumed beds of her masters. Her body was never her own.
Anger flares through her. Even this fire had been forbidden to her in the past. In this last moment, she takes hold of that flame and screams the last of her strength away. She closes her eyes and cries to the heavens, at the beast, at herself, at a child that would never get to live.