Chapter One

The Crippled Scholar

"Diana?"

No answer.

"Diana!"

No answer. He hobbled to the foot of the stairs and called again, balancing his weight on his walking stick, and then began the slow and laborious process of climbing the stairs, grumbling under his breath. The girl usually went to any lengths to avoid making him climb steps, willingly fetching and carrying for him for hours at a time, but in this one thing…

He pushed open the door to her little bedroom, a cozy space with a line of pretty stones she had collected on the window sill, and an empty bed. Through the open windows the wind was bitterly cold, and the full moon was rising.

"Blast and blind the girl," he growled, and stumped back out the door and down the stairs.

If she wasn't where she was supposed to be—in bed, asleep—then there was only one other place she would be.

Domitian pulled a rough woolen cloak over his shoulders and limped out into the darkness, his powerful arms bared to the cold. He had been born Rakkor, and lesser folk said they must absorb the heat of the sun to survive in the freezing cold of the mountains. The Rakkor said that the lowlanders simply let themselves feel too much.

The path wound around a pillared portico that was much too grand for his little house, through a grove of hardy high-altitude cedars and pines and out to an east-facing overlook, an outcropping on the mountainside that plummeted many thousands of feet to the lower mountains where the rest of the Rakkor tribe lived. The Solari came from the Rakkor and were their class of scholar-priests, living at the summit of Mount Targon, which they called the Roof of the World. It was the highest mountain in Valoran, and the place where they were nearest to the sun.

Once, the great eagles had lived there, too. In the oldest legends, the most pious of the Solari had flown on the wings of the great eagles into the sun at the end of their lives, going joyfully to the fire.

It helped to think of fire. Domitian sometimes thought that the entire race of the Rakkor had just deluded themselves into thinking they weren't cold. Maybe if you told yourself a thing often enough, and everyone else said it too, over generations of effort you could make yourself not notice when it was cold enough to freeze the horns off a mountain goat.

He knew the path well enough that he could have found his way blindfolded, and it was good, because the great Two-Faced Stone overhung the path for nearly a quarter of the mile, blotting out even the dim light of the stars. Snow crunched underfoot. Up here there was almost always snow, but the winds were so fierce and variable that it never stayed in one place for long.

The path rose toward a plateau, and from there he could see the jutting edge of the cliff and the little shadow of the girl, sitting on the very edge, dressed only in her belted tunic and sandals. Her pale hair streamed in the wind.

"Diana!" He called again, exasperated, and she turned, her face brightening at the sight of him.

"Look, Domitian!" She cried, running toward him as if they had arranged to meet here. She tugged at the hem of his tunic, pulling him toward the cliff. The moon was almost on level with them, enormous and full and glowing silver, and it looked so near that he almost thought they could walk into it. The little girl's arms stretched out as if to embrace it. "Look how pretty!"

It took everything he had not to smile at her. He braced himself with his staff and looked down at her, his bearded face stern. "You are supposed to be in bed."

"I had to see," she said, turning her pale face to the light.

"It's the same as it was last month, and the month before." Gently, he nudged her with his staff, shepherding her back down the path the same way he had the tough little mountain sheep of his youth. "And how will it look when you fall asleep during the Salutation ceremony, again?"

She tilted her head back and wrinkled her small nose at him. "That's the same every day," she pointed out.

"Even so. We are Solari, child, the sun is our life. Inside, now." He shut the door behind him and pulled off his cloak, hanging it on its peg. "You mustn't do this again, Diana. Someone will think you moon-witted. I shall have to punish you."

She looked down at the floor, prodding the rough wooden floor with her big toe.

"I couldn't help it," she told the floor. "I woke up and saw the moon and it was calling me, Domitian."

"And it told you to get up and go outside and force your old teacher to come out in the cold dark to fetch you?" He asked dryly. "Go to bed, and don't get up again. Next time I really shall punish you."

As he'd said that last time, and the time before, she wasn't terribly worried by this, and less so when he permitted her to hug him, and even kiss his grizzled cheek before she went back to bed. He watched her go, a pale little shade in her white tunic, and he wondered again that she was somehow his. Long past the time when he'd given up hope of having a wife and children of his own, he had somehow acquired this little girl who was as good as a daughter of his own blood.

There had been a time when he'd hoped to be a warrior, fierce as the wind, ferocious as the cold. He had been strong as a boy, swifter than any other. He had killed Sammeas with one blow during the Rite, when he was sixteen. It had been a clean death, quick and merciful. But that same night a chunk of ice had given way under his feet, and he had fallen, and there were many who said it would have been kinder to let him die. He had agreed, at the time. A cripple was no use to anyone. But the Solari priests had said no, all things under the sun had a purpose, and his time to die had not yet come.

In his dreams, Domitian was always falling.

When he rose from his sickbed he could only walk with greatest difficulty, leaning heavily on a walking stick. His world in the Temple Heights was a small one, a daily round from his house to the Archives to the Temple. One of the acolytes did his marketing for him because even the little shops at the mouth of the pass were too far away. But inside the Archives the pages were as wide as the whole world, even wider, perhaps, because the pages moved through time as well as space, and told not just of the Shadow Isles but of their founding, and the strange rites that had been lost and forgotten centuries ago.

He couldn't walk, but he could learn, and he told himself he was too busy to be lonely. There was too much yet to discover, too many things to write and think. He went to bed every night with his eyes burning and in the cold and dark he thought of the sunrise, and sang the sleep-songs he had learned as a boy. He understood his prayers better now; he understood the devotion to the sun, his longing for its light and warmth. It wasn't a purely religious matter, to a scholar. It was a matter of scientific fact. Without the sun, there was no life. Let other, lesser peoples invent their gods. His was always there, undying, something he could see with his eyes, feel on his skin. Who else could say as much of their god?

Crippled as he was, no woman would ever have him. Not women of the Rakkor, who prized strength and fighting prowess among all other attributes; not even among the Solari, who said they had hung up their shields in favor of scrolls, but still had a habit of taking them down again to train every day. They were not soft, stoop-shouldered scholars in the Temple Heights.

Domitian sat down in his chair by the fire in the study to warm himself again before he went to bed, stirring the dying embers back to life. There beside him was Diana's little chair, a replica of his own, even with the same fleecy sheepskin over its hard wooden back. She was a tidy little creature; her workbasket was stowed neatly under the seat, her yarn and needles and thread wrapped up in their own corners. He could hardly remember a time when that basket hadn't been there.

It had been two years since he had found her asleep on his doorstep, curled up with her thumb corked securely in her mouth.

"Oh-h?" He'd said, giving the word an extra syllable and prodding her with his walking stick. "Wake up, girl. Wake up, I say."

When her eyes opened, he was struck by their paleness, so light a blue as to be almost silver. His own eyes were the vivid blue of the sky, and among the ruddy Rakkor this was acceptable, but hers were so light, he wondered if she could see at all. Her silver-gilt hair was strange, too, and for a second he thought she might be one of the pneumari, a specter of the dead escaped from the underworld.

"Where is your mother?" he'd asked, but she didn't know. She never knew.

Her mother was not in the Temple Heights, as it turned out. Nor was she among the families of the village below, or the next nearest, or even the one after that. In the end they decided, after Domitian brought her to the Elders, that she must be from one of the Solari villages lately destroyed by Noxus, in retaliation for the Rakkor warriors who fought with Demacia in the late war. It was possible. Even from the peak they had seen the smoke rising when the sky was otherwise clear, and heard the far distant cries, carried on the wind.

If it was true, she had come a long way.

While the search for her family dragged on, Domitian decided he could tolerate her for a few days and let her remain in his home. Those days became weeks, then months, and by then, blast it all, he'd gotten fond of the absurd little creature. It's okay, you'll be all better soon, she used to tell his socks when she darned them. I bet it hurts to be all ripped like this, but Domitian didn't do it to you on purpose.

Everything was alive to Diana, everything had a story. His house was never quiet anymore, and she bobbed along at his heels like a talkative shadow.

No one asked him where she would go if they didn't find her family; it was clear that she would stay just where she was. The Solari men accepted it as a sort of unavoidable accident, like being followed home by a puppy who was subsequently adopted by the household, but the women smiled to each other at the change in the old scholar, who—improbably knobbled socks and all—was happier than they'd ever seen him. Diana herself seemed unable to explain who her mother had been, or how she had come to the Temple Heights. The only words they ever got out of her were dark, and scary.

Very much open to interpretation.

When the search ended, Diana was already well settled in his house. Domitian gave up one of his studies to be her bedroom and had one of the village boys haul bundles of old furs out of the attic for airing to make her bed. She had her own cup and plate that she proudly washed after every meal. Domitian was puzzled as to how she kept turning up with new clothes until he caught one of the Solari women surreptitiously pulling a new cloak over the little girl's head while he was visiting her husband. It was a kindly conspiracy among the women of the Temple Heights, but he still sent the clothing back with a note thanking them for the loan of it. He was a crippled bachelor, but he had not sunk so low as to accept charity. There was an allowance for scholars and the East-facing Sun knew he hadn't had anything to spend it on all these years.

The very next day he send one of the serving girls to the shops with a pouch full of gold, and bought Diana clothes enough to outfit a chieftain's daughter. And that, giving her a tunic and sandals and a warm wool cloak trimmed in purple, and a beaded headband, and quite a few other ridiculous things he didn't remember asking for…that had made Diana his own.

"Look!" she squealed in delight, holding up one pretty thing after another. The beaded headband dangled lopsided over her silvery hair, and her cloak was askew, rumpled over one shoulder. "Domitian, I got new shoes and look! I laced 'em up, too!"

"Very good," he said, bending to inspect the knots that would take him an hour to undo later. He almost tumbled onto his backside when she flung herself at him, squeezed, and then ran off like a little whirlwind to tell the kitchen maid about all her new stuff. And he found he was smiling, broad and foolish as a lowlander, as he bent to pick her headband up off the floor.

She grew up strong, slender and beautiful as a moonbeam, and that was a great deal of the trouble.

Diana could run as fast as any of the other girls, and when she threw a spear it made his heart sing with pride, for no one threw a straighter spear than his daughter. When she was ten, she was chosen to sing the Salutation in the morning Sun Ceremony, her high, clear voice ringing over the mountain.

We salute the sun as she rises

As she comes at break of day

How sure and bright her glowing gaze

When morning comes, and dark night fades…

Skalos Joras, one of the Elders, told him he'd never heard it sung so well.

But she still crept out of the house on the nights when the moon was full, and he wasn't deaf to the whispers about her unusual coloring. Not everyone, no; only the mean-hearted, the pinch-mouthed, but still they whispered, and it would go hard on her if anyone knew about her strange affinity for the moon. It just wasn't done. At night the Solari locked their doors and barred their windows, and they warned their children about fools and madmen and moon-witted savages, drunk and stupid on the lies of the sun's lesser sibling.

He'd finally delivered on the long-threatened punishment. It hurt him terribly to do it, but he knew no other way. And, he told himself fiercely, she would not be spoilt by over-indulgence. He would not do that to her.

"Get inside," he told her in a terrible voice. She was almost eleven then. The cold wind ripped at their clothes and he shoved her toward the house, furious that she persisted in this, after so many warnings. "I have told you again and again not to do this, Diana, and I see that I must show you I am serious."

He was Rakkor. Perhaps among other people, it would have been done differently, but he could only do to her what had been done to him. So that night he took the light switch they used on their mule, Callas, and flogged her until she screamed, then sent her crying to her room.

She truly seemed sorry. She begged his pardon the next morning at breakfast with red eyes, and he hugged her once, hard, then shoved away and stumped away to the Archives. It was not the way of the Rakkor to embrace their children once they were older than seven or so, and maybe that was where he had gone wrong with Diana. Maybe he had held her too close in his heart. He didn't know; there was no one he dared to ask, not about this. But he thought she'd learned her lesson, and he was proud that she had the courage to beg his pardon.

The next month, they repeated the performance.

By the time she was twelve he was at his wit's end, and took to locking her in the cellar on nights when the moon was full, terrified to his bones that it had come to this. He had by then been initiated into the Fourth Degree of the Mysteries, and knew the sun from all its directions, the watery winter Southern Sun, the North, the West, the East-Facing Sun, most glorious. And buried in those mysteries had been whispers of lunar worship.

The Lunari.

No one seemed to know much about them. A dead cult, some said; a myth, said others, like the First Solari, pure fabrication. And he didn't dare ask more, even though he was rising swiftly among the Elders by them, deepening in wisdom and lore. From earliest childhood he remembered the Solari and the Rakkor calling a foolish person moonstruck, mood-addled, moon-witted. Chasing the moon meant a pointless or futile endeavor. Until Diana he had never wondered why they said these things.

He left her crying in the cellar and made his painful way up the stairs to his study, sitting down at his desk by the window and lighting a candle. Down in the village they were all sleeping, their windows dark, while the moon rose full and high over the mountain.

It was on these nights that he kept vigil for his daughter, and he opened one of the books he'd smuggled out of the Archives, an obscure and ruinously old tome that mentioned the Lunari in its later chapters. He was accustomed to talking to Diana about the things he read in the Archives at the end of each day, cultivating her quick mind as carefully as her teachers at school cultivated her body. But he never told her about this.

Over the years he had learned much of the Lunari. He had accumulated scrolls and books enough to fill a shelf of his personal library, if he had dared to leave them out. He took notes, he speculated, he returned again and again to correct his earlier speculations, piecing together a puzzle that might have gone back two thousand years. The Cult of the Moon, wiped out utterly centuries before. It was not the Solari that had built the temple on the Roof of the World and tamed the eagles. The ancient Solari admitted as much themselves; he even found a lost chronicle from Arivan, one of the greatest historians, speaking of the silver eagles of the Lunari.

The Moon Cult had worshiped the other face of the Sun, cold and lovely and sterile. And they had been destroyed utterly, destroyed and forgotten so that the only thing most of his people remembered was the distaste for the moon's deceits, and tales of fools and madmen. What he didn't yet know was why they had been destroyed.

Maybe he was always meant to be a scholar, he thought, pulling his stacks of notebooks closer. He loved the smell of paper, the scratching sound of his quill as he wrote. He even liked making ink, tedious as the process was; grinding the ink stick onto its stone, mixing the colors together. He had more notebooks than he knew what to do with, but he could never resist when the tinkerman came to the door. It was his one indulgence.

He wrote the things that he knew were true in the red book, a thick notebook bound in red leather and bound in golden thread. In the front he wrote his sun-songs, his devotions, he wrote of its angles and arcs and the movement of the heavens. He wrote sometimes of Diana there, and maybe that was blasphemous. Struck the target today, he'd written one day when Diana was learning archery, and another, chosen to demonstrate the six unbreakable clutches. That had been a good day. Diana had come home from school bubbling over with it, that she'd put the biggest boy in her class on the ground and kept him there with every single clutch. He hadn't gotten away from her once.

In the back of the book, he wrote the things he knew were true of the Lunari.

The irony of this configuration did not escape him.

The things he knew were true of the Cult of the Moon filled only a few pages, more of a list than a coherent narrative. But he opened his book to the correct page and wrote down the next thing that he knew was true, confirmed by six contemporary sources:

Vase depiction, warrior with sigil of the moon. Lunari Champion as described by Caraeton, Malleas, poss. Aristos, volume six. Kaiphas, Tiberian, Meridia the Younger, volumes two and three. Champion died defending the Citadel of the Moon Cult 1086, citadel destroyed by fire. Relics disposed of in lunar well.

He didn't know what the significance of the well was, or what the relics might be. But this year was calculated as 2234 by solar calendar reckoning among civilized scholars, so the Lunari Champion had perished over twelve hundred years ago.

It disturbed him. It shook the foundations of his faith, to discover that so much he had been told wasn't true, or was only partly true; so much had been forgotten. He set down his quill and went back to reading. In the back of his mind, he could hear the Salutation song to the sun, and it warmed him, even though he was sitting by an open window. History was complex, he knew that. Only children expected a simple narrative, the innocent and the guilty, absolute truth and lies. Why had the Solari destroyed the Lunari? What had driven them to war?

And he couldn't understand the devotion of the Lunari to the moon, any more than he could understand its strange hold on Diana. It wasn't a mere difference of opinion. The sun was life. It was everything. It burned away falsehoods, it was the hammer and the anvil. It shaped, it refined, it renewed. He had felt sometimes that the waves of its heat in the summer matched the beating of his own heart. And the priests of the sun married, had children, contributed to the life of the world.

The Cult of the Moon, with its sexless priests, was a death cult. Cold and joyless, wavering and faithless as the moon itself.

He paused to listen, but Diana's sobbing had ended. He hoped she was asleep. He'd had a pallet made for her in a dark corner of the cellar and told the kitchen maids that it was for visiting pilgrims and scholars. A poor lie, as no one had visited his home for at least ten years, but he couldn't think of anything better.

He read, and wrote, and watched the moon pass above his window, watched it as he would have watched a foe on the field of battle. He was old now, more than fifty, and there were only a few golden threads left in his beard. But he was Domitian, Elder of the Fourth Degree of the Solari, born of the Rakkor, and somehow he would protect his own. Even from herself.