BLESSED LUNA RISING

blessed Luna chapter 6

# Blessed Luna Rising

**By Melisa Warui**

## Chapter 6: Six Nights Remain

By morning, the whole palace knew that the Queen had burned a writ.

Luna heard it from three servants, two guards, and a cook before she had finished crossing the courtyard. Each version was more dramatic than the last. In one, the Queen had thrown the parchment in the Chancellor's face. In another, Kael had drawn a sword. Luna let the rumors wash past her and kept walking, her keys steady at her hip.

Six nights remained.

She found Kael where she had left him, in the lower archives, though she suspected he had not left it since dawn. He sat at the long oak table in his shirtsleeves, surrounded by open ledgers, one hand pushing through his dark hair. A tray of untouched bread sat at his elbow.

"You haven't eaten," she said.

He glanced up, and his whole face lit. It was a small, unguarded change, and it undid something in her chest.

"I was thinking."

"You were reading. It's not the same thing." She set down the small basket she carried: honeyed figs, cold chicken, a flask of pale wine. "The Queen has ordered that I keep you under my eye. Officially, so the Chancellor's men can't claim I'm negligent. Unofficially, she wants us working without interruption."

"An excellent order." His eyes dropped to the basket, then rose again, warm and amused. "Do I get to know what the Keeper's eye thinks of the work so far?"

"The Keeper's eye thinks you're exhausted." She pulled out the chair opposite and sat. "Eat first. Then show me what you've found."

---

He ate with the efficiency of a man used to short meals, and while he did, Luna looked at the pages spread between them. Kael had drawn a map of the palace foundations, marked in neat charcoal, with the cistern at its center. From it, a faint line ran north.

"The founding queen's journal mentions the moon three ways," he said, tearing a piece of bread. "As a light, as a tide, and as a *door*. The cistern was the light. The pool answered the tide, and the inscription said to return when the moon is full." He tapped the map. "But the third word, *door*, hasn't been answered. The cistern isn't a door. It's a threshold."

"A threshold to what?"

"Something below it. Or beside it." He frowned. "These foundation charts show a chamber west of the cistern, marked only with a crescent. No entrance. No corridor."

Luna leaned over the map and felt the warmth of his shoulder close to hers. She kept her eyes on the paper. "There's an old tale among the masons. That the foundation builders sealed one room to keep a promise."

"What promise?"

"That no one would enter it who wanted to." She traced the crescent with one finger. "They never explained."

"*One who keeps without being bound,*" Kael murmured. "It always comes back to wanting."

"Or not wanting."

He looked at her then, a long, quiet look. "I'm beginning to think the palace has a very odd sense of humor."

"It has no sense of humor at all." But she was smiling.

---

The afternoon passed in a haze of dust and lamplight. They worked side by side, trading scrolls, reading aloud, arguing amiably over translations of the old dialect. Luna had worked alone in the archives for nine years, and she had assumed she preferred it. She discovered, slowly and with some alarm, that she did not.

Kael was a good listener. He asked questions that sharpened her thinking rather than deflecting it. When she explained how the founding records were organized, he followed instantly, and when she made a joke, dry and quick, he laughed with his whole chest. Once, when she reached for a high shelf and her fingers could not quite grasp the spine of a book, he reached over her shoulder to take it down. For one suspended moment, his arm was around her, the whole warm length of him close behind, and neither of them moved.

"Which one?" he asked quietly.

"That one." Her voice was not quite steady. "The grey binding."

He drew it down and placed it in her hands. His fingers lingered a heartbeat on hers before he stepped back.

Luna opened the book with intense, unnecessary concentration.

It was a bound set of the founding queen's letters. She turned pages without seeing them until her breathing slowed, and a line near the middle snagged her attention.

"Kael. Listen."

He came around the table and read over her shoulder. She tilted the book so he could see.

"*I have hidden my gift where the stars can be heard but not seen. Let the one who comes seek the high place that looks inward.*"

"A high place that looks inward," Kael said. "An observatory?"

"The palace has one. The Astronomer's Tower." Luna's thoughts raced. "But it was boarded up after the last great fire. The lens was lost. Everyone assumes the tower is empty."

"But what if the *lens* is the clue? A high place that looks inward. A device that looks at the sky, but looks in."

"A mirror."

"A mirror." Kael's eyes were bright. "She wouldn't hide it in the sky. She'd hide it in what the sky *reflects*."

Their eyes met, and the thrill of it ran between them, quick and electric.

"Tonight," Luna said.

"Tonight."

---

But the palace had other plans.

As they climbed the archive stairs at dusk, Teodric met them on the landing with a face like weathered stone.

"Keeper. The Chancellor has posted guards at the Astronomer's Tower. Four men. He claims the tower is structurally unsound and a danger to festival guests."

Luna's jaw tightened. "On whose authority?"

"His own. But the order carries the Council seal, and the Queen has not yet countermanded it." Teodric lowered his voice. "He knows what you're looking for, Keeper. Or he suspects."

Kael swore softly under his breath. "He's one step ahead of us."

"Only one." Luna's mind was already moving, her whole body gone still with the calm that always came when a problem sharpened into shape. "He posted guards at the *front.* But the Astronomer's Tower has another entrance."

Teodric's eyebrows rose. "The old servant's passage? It was bricked up forty years ago."

"Bricked up from the outside." She looked at Kael, and something wicked and bright rose in her. "From the inside, a Keeper has other keys."

A slow grin spread across his face, and Luna felt it like sunlight. "Keeper Averin," he said, "are you suggesting we break into a guarded tower in the middle of a festival?"

"I'm suggesting that the palace belongs to me, and I'll walk through it as I choose."

"Gods," Kael said softly. "I'm in trouble."

Teodric coughed into his fist, his mustache twitching. "I will, ah, be on duty at the opposite gate. Entirely occupied. Should anyone require me."

"Thank you, Teodric."

"I thank no one for what I did not see." He bowed gravely and walked away, shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter.

---

They went at the ninth bell again, in black cloaks, through passages Luna knew by heart. The servant's way wound upward through the thickness of the western wall, a narrow stair barely wide enough for two. Kael followed close behind her. In the dark, she could feel the warmth of his breath at the back of her neck, and every step felt longer than the last.

At the top of the stair, a bricked-over door blocked their way. Luna ran her fingers along the mortar until she found a single loose block, pressed it, and heard a soft click. A section of the wall swung inward on silent hinges.

Moonlight spilled through.

The observatory was a round chamber open to the sky, its great dome cracked and stripped of glass, ribs of iron reaching toward the stars like the skeleton of a sleeping giant. Dust lay thick on the floor. In the center stood a single massive pedestal, and on it, wrapped in a shroud of decayed cloth, something large and circular.

Luna crossed the floor with her breath held. Kael came beside her. Together they drew back the shroud.

A mirror of polished black stone lay beneath, three feet across, its surface unmarred by two centuries of dust. In its depths, the stars wheeled slowly. Not reflected from above. Reflected from *within.*

"A looking-glass for the sky," Kael breathed.

Luna leaned closer. Letters were etched around the rim, faint and silver.

*Behold what lies beneath. Seek the one who sleeps.*

"It points down," she whispered. "Back to the cistern."

"Back to the chamber with no door."

Below them, in the courtyard, a harsh voice rang out. Boots struck stone. Someone shouted a command, and a brass horn sounded the alarm.

Kael caught Luna's hand. "They found the open passage."

"Then we run."

She turned, and in the black stone mirror, she saw both their faces side by side, flushed and fierce and impossibly alive. For one fleeting, dizzying instant, the mirror showed something else. A third figure stood behind them in the glass, tall, robed in grey, smiling.

Luna spun around. The chamber was empty.

But the mirror still held the shape of a man who was not there, and in the distance, the footsteps drew closer.

---

*End of Chapter 6*