BLESSED LUNA RISING

blessed Luna chapter 8

# Blessed Luna Rising

**By Melisa Warui**

## Chapter 8: The Voice on the Balcony

The east balcony hung over the palace gardens like a held breath.

Luna arrived at the stroke of midnight. The festival had thinned to a distant murmur, and the moon, fat and golden, laid long shadows across the marble. Jasmine drifted up from the terraces below. Nothing moved.

She stood with her hand on her dagger and waited.

"You came alone," said a voice behind her. "Good. He would have been proud."

Luna turned.

A woman stepped from the shadow of a pillar, small and bent, wrapped in a pale shawl. Her hair was white and thin, her face a map of deep lines, and her eyes were clouded to the color of milk. She carried a staff of black wood, and she moved without hesitation, as though she could see everything.

"Sister Ilvane," Luna said, astonished. "You keep the moon shrine in the north garden. I thought you never left it."

"I leave it when I must." The old woman's smile was gentle. "I was married to Halric for thirty-one years, child. Few people knew. He preferred it that way."

Luna's breath caught. Halric. Her mentor. The old Keeper.

"He never told me."

"He told no one. A Keeper's wife is a Keeper's weakness, and Halric did not wish the court to find mine." She came closer, her staff tapping softly. "But he spoke of you often. He said you would be the first to wake the moon in nine hundred years."

"He gave me a key."

"He did." Ilvane reached out one thin hand, and Luna, after a moment, guided it to the chain at her throat. The old woman's fingers closed around the small, dull key and traced its worn edges. "It is only half. He carried the other for forty years and gave it back to the earth before he died. You must find it."

"Half?" Luna frowned. "The cistern door opened with this one."

"The cistern is only the antechamber. The chamber beyond requires the whole." Ilvane released her. "And it requires something more."

---

They sat together on a stone bench, the old woman's shawl drawn tight, her face turned toward the moon as if she could feel it.

"Halric did not die of old age," she said quietly.

Luna went very still. "The physicians said his heart failed."

"His heart was strong as a ship's keel. In the last year, he sickened slowly. Tremors. Pale skin. The healers said it was age." Ilvane's voice did not waver. "I made his tea myself, every morning, from my own garden. But in the evenings, someone brought a tonic from the palace dispensary, sent in the Chancellor's name."

"Voren."

"I cannot prove it. I have no names, no bottles. I was blind and old and grieving, and no one listened." She turned her clouded eyes toward Luna. "But I know what I know. And I know that the night before he died, Halric said, 'Voren will come for the key. Tell Luna to guard it with her life.'"

The words fell into the night like stones into still water. Luna felt cold spread through her, then something harder and clearer behind it. Anger, but disciplined, the kind she had spent nine years learning to use.

"Why tell me now?"

"Because the moon is growing, and the Chancellor is no longer waiting." Ilvane gripped her staff. "He has already found one of the three keys. The Queen's seal, which he stole from her private chambers last winter. The second is yours. The third lies in the earth, and I believe you will find it."

"Three keys," Luna whispered.

"The Queen's authority. The Keeper's trust. And the buried heart, which opens only to a free hand." The old woman leaned forward, and her voice dropped. "But there is a danger, child, that the founding queen herself feared. A false heart can wake the door. If someone who *appears* free but is secretly bound, by greed, by a master, by a hidden debt, passes the final test, the blessing will not bless. It will devour."

"The grey figure in the mirror," Luna breathed. "A false keeper."

"You saw it?"

"I did."

"Then the moon has already warned you." Ilvane's expression grew grave. "Someone near you will be asked to open that door. Someone you trust. Be sure that they are truly free."

Luna's mind went, helplessly, to a dark-haired man with a scar through his eyebrow, standing in a linen closet, saying *I'd like to see it.*

Ilvane's head tilted, as if she could read the thought. "Ah. So that is how it stands."

Heat flooded Luna's face. "It isn't—I mean—we only—"

"Child." The old woman laughed, a soft, dry sound. "I was married to a Keeper for thirty-one years. I know what the keys do to people. They make them lonely, and then they make them wonderful. Do not be ashamed of wanting. Only be wise."

"I don't know whether I can be both."

"No one does until they try." Ilvane patted her hand with surprising strength. "I will tell you only this. He is a good man, I think. But goodness is not the same as honesty. Ask him about the ship."

Luna's heart skipped. "The ship?"

"The one he sailed on, before he reached Valtheris. He has not told you everything about it." Ilvane rose slowly, leaning on her staff. "I will not say more. It is not mine to tell. But ask him, and watch his face."

---

Luna walked back through the palace in a dream of cold air and shifting shadows.

Halric murdered. Three keys, one stolen. A moon whose door could devour a false heart. A man who had kissed her in the dark and promised her honesty, and who, according to a blind old woman, still held a secret about a ship.

She stopped at the foot of the Scholar's Wing stair, her hand on the cool stone rail.

It was nearly one in the morning. The wing was silent. A single lamp glowed behind the shutters of the guest chamber, and she knew, with a sinking certainty, that he was still awake.

She climbed the steps slowly. Her hand lifted to knock, and stopped.

She had told him *no more secrets.* She had meant it. But she had not yet told him what she had learned tonight. For the first time since the Moon Gate, Luna was the one holding something back. She understood now what it cost.

*Trust the one who gave you the key,* the note had said. Not Kael. Halric. Ilvane. The dead and the blind, speaking from the margins of her life.

Behind the door, she heard a faint sound: the scratch of a pen, a low murmur, the clink of something metal set on wood. Kael was working. Or doing something else.

Her hand trembled.

She took a long breath. She lowered her fist.

Then she turned, quietly, and walked away from his door. She did not go to her own tower. She went instead to the lower archives, unlocked the black oak door, and descended the two hundred and twelve steps alone, because there was one document she had not looked at in weeks.

The old Keeper's personal ledger.

If Halric had left her a trail, it would be there. And if the Chancellor had left one too, written in poison and silver coin, she meant to find it.

She lit the lamps. She pulled the ledger from its shelf.

And when she opened the cover, a small folded paper slid out and fell to the floor. In Halric's cramped, familiar handwriting, it read:

*Luna: the third key is buried where the first light lands on the last stone. Do not tell the scholar. Not because he is false, but because he is not yet free.*

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*End of Chapter 8*