Chapter Two

The Titan's Spear

In the cellar, Diana cried until she was exhausted and her head ached dully. Curled up on her pallet, she closed her eyes and willed herself to try to sleep, but she knew she wouldn't. Father didn't understand that she couldn't. The moon called her, it whispered even in her dreams, its light was like cool fingers in her hair, a caress to awaken her and draw her into the night. Even now she could feel it; she could see the silver glory of the moon in her mind, the stars scattered around it like jewels. They had told her all her life of the sun, but what of its pale sister? What could they learn of the heavens and the world through the moon?

Speak of the tides, she wanted to tell her teachers. Speak of the moon on the water. Of the pull of the moon on the women of the Rakkor, its claim on their bodies.

She was almost thirteen now, and a woman, and how could any woman say she didn't know the power of the moon?

But they would not listen, and she was afraid to ask.

It was only a few nights each month. It was like an illness, she thought; she would ask Father in the morning if it might not be so. Maybe she was moon-addled, maybe something had happened to her when she was young that made her sick this way.

"Perhaps," Father allowed when she asked him, stroking his curling beard. She could see him thinking, see the relief he tried to hide from her at the idea. "Can you bear it, my daughter?"

"Yes, Father," she said, and went to school with a lighter heart. She could. It was stupid, that she had to be locked away in the cellar every month, but there were worse things. She could be like poor Father with his walking stick, or like the girl down the street with the skew eye, or she could have pimples.

This, she could hide. There was no hiding it if you had pimples.

When she turned thirteen she was moved to the next class in school, and she was glad, because Lelia and Kallista had been there for months and she had waited forever to join them. She had no way of knowing her actual birthday, but Father had said she had been born into a new life when she came to him, and so they would call that her birthday. It made her a summerchild, which was considered lucky. She guessed she would be happy about that, even if it did mean she was one of the last to join the thirteen year-old class. The good thing was that she knew almost everyone there. It was harder for Kallista, who would move into the fourteen year-old class in a few months and would be the youngest and smallest person again, until Caiphas joined her.

Even better, her new teacher, Skala Euthalia, was the person Diana wanted to be like more than anyone else in the world.

Glad as she was to be with her friends, she was enthralled by the Skala, who was tall and golden and beautiful, her arms and legs hard with muscle, her voice strong and resonant. The Skala had once taken Karacas one fall out of three, it was said, and anyone who could best the paragon of the Rakkor even once was a formidable opponent. Diana was mortally certain her teacher was the smartest, most beautiful woman on Mount Targon.

Eventually she wore out even Father's patience, telling him so.

"I will not hear what Skala Euthalia says one more time," he said, putting down his cup with a thump. "Once per week you may choose the most impressive thing she said or did and tell me that, Diana. One thing. Once per week. Have I made myself clear?"

She sulked, but she got over it. The other girls in school admired the Skala just as much as she did, and it was Lelia who figured out how to copy their teacher's hair, pulling her golden locks into a complex knot of curls on the back of her head, tied with blue ribbon. Then she taught the others, sparking a run on ribbons in the shops.

Diana's pale hair never would curl, but she comforted herself that she would surely be as tall as the Skala, and no other girl could say as much. She was the tallest girl in their class, and had taken to the harsh physical training like a goat to the mountainside. Maybe one day she would fight Karacas, too. She had managed to knock Skala Euthalia over once in the ring, and no one else, not even the boys, had ever done so much.

Only to someone she trusted and admired as much as the Skala—the source of all wisdom in the world, aside from Father, as far as Diana was concerned—would she have dared to ask the question. It happened one autumn afternoon as they were observing the sun making its slow track west, marking time with slashes in the dirt, and then calculated the degrees of its elevation and its changed angle on the earth.

"Skala," Diana whispered when she was sure no one else was listening, "couldn't we do this with the moon, too? Mark its time, I mean?"

"Yes." The Skala looked down at her, a small frown puckering her brow. "But why would you want to do such a thing, Diana?"

Young as she was, she didn't hear the warning in her teacher's voice.

"It's another way we could follow the passage of the year," she said eagerly. "I tracked its phases once, and we could calculate its full cycle—"

"To twenty-nine days," Skala Euthalia finished for her. "And from that we could measure the year. But it is not a useful measure of time, Diana. It is a tiny paring of what the sun tells us, so why would we study a thing that speaks less, and lies in what it does say?"

The idea was straight out of the Solari Devotions, though Diana had never thought of it that way. And she didn't know why it was important to her that there should be another way; the Solari looked for one truth. There was one way to refine their bodies for war, just as there was one path to wisdom, and one way, leading from east to west, to follow the sun.

"But it's still true that the moon cycles every twenty-nine days," she said, small. "It's knowledge. It does no harm to try to learn—"

"But that is the truth," the Skala said, pointing unerringly at the sun, describing its place in the sky without even needing to look for it. "It is the whole of the truth, not a fraction of it. You should already know this, child, I am disappointed in you. We do not deal in half-truths."

"Yes, Skala," Diana said, defeated, and tried not to feel Skala Euthalia's eyes on her as she went back to Lelia. It wasn't the whole of the truth, she wanted to say. Even her admiration for the Skala couldn't make her abandon her inner integrity, the voice inside her that demanded all shades of the truth, and would suffer nothing less.

Her pale eyes were troubled and she looked back more than once, wishing she could try again and say it better somehow. Perhaps Skala Euthalia hadn't understood what she meant. She hadn't had time to say what she'd found about the earth's angle and how it affected the moon, that she'd found a certain wavering…

"What did you say to the Skala?" Lelia asked her after they had been dismissed for the day.

"Just a question about the measurements. C'mon, I'll race you," Diana said, and ran as if she could leave all her questions behind her. Lelia followed with a shout, their sandaled feet digging into the stone of the road toward the market.

"Slow as a Demacian!" Lelia called after her, catching up swiftly. The shorter girl could run like a rabbit.

"Cheat like a Noxian!" Diana shouted back, dodging away as Lelia pounded up beside her. Lelia always threw an elbow when she was getting close. They sprinted through the market and up the road to the Temple Heights square, dodging the bakers and weavers, cobblers and armorers, shrieking with laughter as they rounded the stalls and burst onto the wide stairs leading to the acropolis. This time it was Diana that touched the well first, a step ahead of Lelia. The Temple Heights were mostly deserted this time of the day, but they would fill again at sunset for the evening benedictions.

The boys were already there on the stone benches curving around the well, and Helion scooted over to make room, grinning. Diana ignored him. He'd stolen her lunch yesterday and made her chase him to get it back, and she wasn't ready to forgive him yet.

"You had a head start," Lelia said, panting for breath, and sat down in the vacated space.

"A step at most."

"You beat me by a step at most," Lelia retorted.

"You're both equally slow," Helion declared, making them laugh. "Now, what are we going to do today?"

"Go to the orchard," suggested Borean, who generally wanted to do something involving food.

"Go down to the trader camp," suggested another boy, who liked to talk to the people making their way through the pass. It was late in the season, and it could be the last news they had before the heavy snows blocked the pass.

"Diana?" Lelia asked slyly, knowing what her friend would say. Diana grinned.

"The Titan's Spear," she said, ignoring the groans of the boys. "One of us has to get to the point."

The challenge hung in the air for a long moment, as though awaiting an invisible signal, and then Helion leaped to his feet with a whooping war cry and tore off toward the market. All the rest were on his heels in an instant, jeering and shouting insults at each other. They ran until their eyes watered in the wind and the Solari in the market got out of their way good-naturedly, shouting at the laggards to keep up with their friends. The Solari approved of high spirits in the young, it made for strong warriors when the time came.

A boy or girl that climbed the Titan's Spear would be a warrior to be reckoned with.

The Titan's Spear was on the north side of the Temple Heights, jutting from the side of Mount Targon as if the mountain itself had drawn an arm back for the cast. It was an odd formation of silvery-blue stone, tapering to a point at the end and weathered by the constant wind. Extending nearly a thousand feet from the mountainside, the drop below was dizzying, more often than not obscured by clouds. When it wasn't, like today, they could see clear to the valley floor, many thousands of feet below. Never did they feel that they were on the Roof of the World so much as when they were on the Spear.

There was no surviving such a fall. Most of the young Solari were of the opinion that they'd die of sheer terror long before they hit the rocks below.

But they still tried the climb.

Helion was the first to swarm up the side of the Spear with Diana on his heels, both climbing with the ease of long practice. The rest flung themselves behind them, finding the finger and footholds, laughing and shouting. They were as fierce and wild as wolf-cubs, their slender arms and legs strongly muscled, carrying them steadily up the rock face. Diana had figured out her handholds to about two-thirds of the way up the Spear and moved swiftly, passing Helion at the halfway mark with a triumphant flash of her pale eyes.

"Higher!" Helion shouted, good-natured as ever, and the rest shouted it back and burst into Taking the Tower, a war song about the suicidal charge of the Mage-Tower during the days of Boram Darkwill.

We are Rakkor at birth

We shine and we burn

Fear not the fall, kindle the fire!

We are sons of the earth

To the earth we return

Fear not the fall, higher, men, higher!

They sang it again, higher, men, higher, their feet moving in rhythm, lunging for the next hold high above their heads. It warmed their limbs and paced their breathing and Diana thought she might make it, this time. She sang the words with all her might into the cold, clear air, pushing to reach, catching hold, pulling herself up fluidly. It would be a good omen, if she reached the top today. It would undo what had happened with the Skala. Oh, and what would Father say, when she told him she had climbed the Spear!

They climbed. The song died away and the exhilaration faded to a faint glow, but they still breathed to its rhythm for a little longer, listening to it in their minds, pacing their breathing to it. And at the tip of the great Spear, pale and white and ghostly, the moon rose as they climbed. Not quite full, and it was an early rising in the late afternoon sky, but it was there, and strength flowed into Diana's arms as she fastened her eyes on it.

They climbed. One of the boys fell away, and one of the younger girls, conceding defeat and sliding down with trembling arms and legs. Lelia gave up a little past the halfway mark; her strength was all in her legs. But Helion, taller than Diana and with more stamina, began to overtake her. She set her teeth in her lower lip and climbed, climbed, eyes on the moon and the end of the Spear, even though her biceps were trembling and it felt as though someone was sinking stiletto knives into her muscles.

"Slow, there's a long way to go," Helion gasped beside her, breathing hard, open-mouthed. Still the tip of the Spear seemed no closer, as if by some magic they were climbing and climbing and not moving at all.

"I'm fine," she panted, willing herself onward. It was a sign. The Solari Elders had told them all about omens, and how you had to follow them with courage if you wanted to fulfill your destiny. They had climbed the Spear half a hundred times and never once had she seen the moon at its tip. It meant something, to see it there now; a reward, if she had strength, and the will to endure.

Onward, upward, and she and Helion were the only ones on the Spear now, more than two-thirds of the way and farther than she had ever climbed before. Both of them streamed with sweat, Helion's hair gleaming like beaten copper where the sunlight touched him. He paced her, their hands moving together, his the dark golden brown of the lowland Rakkor, hers pale and smooth, long-fingered.

She found herself whispering under her breath, her eyes fixed on the moon. Almost there, give me the strength, I can do this, let me reach you, and later she thought it was a prayer of a sort she'd never prayed before, without the structure of the Devotions or Benedictions, the words caught by the wind and carried away to whatever ears were listening.

Beside her Helion missed his next hold and paused to recover, his fingers twitching as he shook out one hand, then the other.

"Wait," he said as she passed him, even going so far as to slap at her ankle with the back of his hand. Her arms and legs were trembling visibly with the strain, and the holds were so far apart now that they had to jump to reach them, spaced for someone much taller than they were. "Diana, maybe we—"

"I can do it!" She shouted into the wind, gathering herself for the next jump. "We're going to make it this time, I—"

She heard Helion swear behind her as she tried to push, letting go with one hand and propelling herself upward for the next hold, but suddenly her legs just wouldn't. The muscles burned and her knees gave way as if they weren't there, all at once, like a marionette at a Harrowing show with its strings cut. Her left foot slipped from its hold and her stomach dropped as if it were preceding her in the fall, a preview for the rest of her. Then there was nothing in her hands but air, and the endless blue of the sky.

"Diana!"

Her belt yanked against her waist and Helion caught her with a gasping cry, his left arm straining with the effort of holding her. She almost tore them both off the wall, and she scrabbled for a hold, her lips parted in a silent, breathless scream.

"Are you moonstruck?" Helion gasped, his eyes round, his face ashen under its tan. "Oh, by the solstice, we almost came off. What were you looking at?"

"The tip of the Spear," she said, muffled, her face pressed into the silvery stone. "We're all right!" she yelled, knowing without looking that the others had begun to climb to help them; she could hear Lelia's voice in the shouting, ordering them both down this instant. Diana didn't trust herself to look at Helion or the others, and if she was telling herself the truth, she thought she might just be sick.

"We have to go back." Helion took a deep, shaking breath, and flexed his left hand. "I can't catch you again."

If she'd been paying attention to what she was doing, he wouldn't have had to. Her face burned with humiliation, but she forced herself to look at him and say it.

"Thank you."

"I'd never let you fall," he said, and his ears went red.

"Next time we'll get it." She started to climb down, as much to avoid looking into his blue eyes as to get off the stupid Spear. "We could have this time if we'd rested at the halfway mark, I bet."

"We could," he agreed, following her gamely. Halfway down the tower there was a bit of a lip, only five inches deep but still enough to provide a respite. They needed it; Diana was sure her toes were going to come off altogether, and her fingers were cramping terribly.

"Are you done yet?" Lelia shouted from the base of the tower. The others were stamping their feet and swinging their arms against the cold as the sun went down. "We'll miss the evening ceremony!"

"We'll be down when we're ready, Diana wants another look at the moon!" Helion shouted back, to make them laugh.

But there was too much truth in that for her to laugh with them, and her smile at him was tight and forced. After a space of silence, they began to climb down again, and she could feel his eyes on her all the way, wondering.

The Temple Heights were ablaze with sunset.

It was an overwhelming light, a terrible light, bouncing off the wide mirrors into the white paving stones and dazzling the water of the eternal fountains. There was a geometric perfection in the array of the mirrors, enormous and flashing above and around the crowded Solari, the wide rectangles eight feet wide and five feet tall, catching the light in preparation for its refraction. Diana and the others arrived just in time, slipping into the crowd to find their parents, glad that they were just late enough that there wasn't time to be lectured for it.

She found Domitian by the well, excused from the laborious mirror-positioning by his infirmity. He was tall and grave in the white tunic and golden cape of an Elder Solari, the rays of the embroidered sun spreading over his wide shoulders. Old and crippled though he was, he was still a powerful man. His armbands were tight to the swellings of his biceps and he stood with all his weight on his strong right leg, hiding the withered left with a careful twitch of his cape. That leg pained him at the end of the day, but he would never show it.

"You are very nearly late," he said under his breath, but his hand rested on her shoulder briefly and she knew he forgave her all the same. Somehow she felt she didn't deserve to be forgiven.

"I'm sorry, Father," she whispered back, and waited for the evening Benediction to begin.

It didn't matter whether it was raining or snowing, it didn't matter how ferocious the wind, every day at sunset the Solari came to the Temple Heights and gathered in the great square before the Temple of the Sun. It was their farewell to the sun for the night, their chance to thank it for the light and warmth of the day—however dark and cold the day might actually have been—and ask it to return after the coming night. Even on cloudy days they could still catch its light in the massive mirrors, a feat that seemed nothing less than magical.

Domitian had explained how it worked, that the Elders knew the precise angle of the sun every minute of every day, and that its light still reached them even in the depths of winter, when the blinding snowstorms howled around the mountain. Light—life—finds a way, he'd said, with a rare softness in his eyes, an outward sign of the depth of his faith. And it was true; she had seen it with her own eyes. Last year during the winter solstice, she had seen the light blaze from the thousand mirrors, thrown skyward into the whirling snow like a column of fire.

Diana had often wondered how it looked from the sun's point of view, to see the slow evolutions of the great mirrors from its bed in the west.

The psalta for the Evening Benediction was Helion's mother, a lean woman with hair the same bronze as her son's, pulled back with golden ribbons. The crowd quieted as she stepped forward and began to sing the Benediction. Her voice was low and rich and sometimes Diana was so intent on listening, she forgot to sing the response: though silent is the sleeping sun, the night will always end.

At the edge of the Heights, where the wide stairs led down to the market, the Elders of the First Degree stood in a line with a row of their mirrors, all covered with golden cloth bearing the sign of the Solari. On the temple steps the drummers began to beat the rhythm, and the gathered people to stamp their feet along with it.

"For the warmth of the day," said the Elders together, practice, no doubt, for when they were sent out among the Rakkor to be their priests. "For the harvest. For the blessings of light and life. For the light that shows us the way, straight and true."

Diana tried not to think what that meant for the moon, what other significance there might be of the sunset, the night. In her head she always reversed what they said. The sun lets us see clearly, the Elders said, and in the back of mind she would think, but in the dark there is only the dark, and the things the moon shows. Is that not a simpler truth? She struggled with it, rationalizing what they said, trying to apply it to the world around her. Even the simple existence of the night meant something to the Solari: the dark time was the struggle for the life of the world, and life was victorious every moment the sun rose.

It made sense. It did. They were right when they said there would be no life without the sun. And maybe they were right when they said the moon was false light, a mockery of the sun, a trick, a deceit. Maybe the night obscured, and the moonlight only obscured further. Maybe it was a trick of the darkness itself.

The great drums began to beat. Skala Euthalia was standing near the row of drummers, her face ruddy gold from the sunlight, and Diana looked away, blending her voice with the chorus of the Solari, the children first, then the women, then the men, and all together as the Devotion rose to its height. The Elders ripped the cloths away from the mirrors and sent the reflected sun into the sky, shot with clouds like drifting flames, a torrent of the sky's own heart's blood.

It was the reflection of the sunset sent from the enormous rectangular mirrors into each other, into the curving mirrors used to diffuse its glow, into the rows of tall, narrow mirrors like individual rays of the sun, and it lit all of the Solari. It was like bathing in liquid sunlight, and Diana closed her eyes with the rest of the Solari to feel the consecration. It was a lesser consecration than the great baptism of light at the summer solstice, but she felt her breath catch and her heart beating deep and slow in her chest, matching the rhythm of the great drums. She could almost feel it, what Father said he felt: the beating heart of the world. The breathing of the sun.

"Father," she whispered, reaching for his hand. "I have to talk to you, after the benediction."

"Of course," he said.

There was a bench in the cedar grove where they liked to sit and talk, a little way down the path behind their house. Father said sometimes that he needed to clear his head, and there was no better place than among the sweet-smelling cedars, sheltered a little from the wind.

When she was little, he used to tell her that trees could speak, but they liked to keep their secrets. It took a wind as fierce as the winds of Mount Targon to shake the truth out of them, because the problem with trees was that they were dreadful liars.

It had made her laugh, but she wondered if she wasn't like those trees now. It took a fall from the Spear to shake the truth out of her.

She told him everything. About how she couldn't sleep on the nights of the full moon, about her conversation with the Skala, about how she had tried to climb to the moon on the Titan's Spear and if it weren't for Helion, she would be dead. It had been a lie, she said, her voice tight with betrayal. She thought it was an omen, the moon at the tip of the Spear, but she had nearly died because of it. She could have killed Helion because of it, because she was so stupid, chasing the moon.

She told him about how she answered back to the priests in her head. About how she had marked the phases of the moon and thought she understood them. She talked until the sky was nearly dark, her voice fading gradually, her head bowed, and the last she confided to the roots of the cedars.

"Oh, Diana," Domitian said heavily when she was done, and pulled her close.

"I'm so sorry, Father."

He sat silent for a long time, but she knew he was thinking and waited quietly. That he might be just as uncertain as she was never occurred to her, and he certainly never showed it. But uncertain he was, and dismayed. This was worse, much worse than he had imagined.

"You are young for this," he said slowly, as if he were picking out his thoughts as he spoke them. "And faith is a hard thing. But for you…you must learn it, my child. I have tried to teach you, that there is one right path, straight and sure. There are reasons we worship the sun, reasons that we shun and fear the moon. You say it deceived you, and it did. It tried to call you to your death. Didn't it?"

"Yes, Father," she said, winking hard.

"It is not an easy path," he said, almost to himself. "And I think…I have reason to believe that some people will be more…susceptible. Blood strains that have survived the centuries."

"A family sickness?" She asked, her eyes narrowed. "Like the bleeding sickness?"

Sometimes he forgot how quick she was.

"Yes, exactly like that. But for you, your faith must be your shield, not medicine. We will go to the Temple tomorrow and see what can be done." He nodded to himself, stroking his beard. "Yes. You will be an acolyte, to better study the faith of the Solari. And our science, our arithmetic, the whole of the puzzle to see how it fits together. You are like me in this, I think. You can't follow what you don't understand. Perhaps I have left this too long."

"It's not your fault, Father," she said, low. "I've been lying to you. Not out loud, but…"

"You have been," he agreed. "It's the worst kind of lie, to lie in your heart. You understand that now, don't you?"

She nodded miserably.

"I will have to punish you for that. It is justice," he added. "For your deception."

"Yes, Father," she said again, and squared her shoulders. Oddly, it made her feel better, to know she would be punished. It balanced the scales.

"You must tell me the truth from now on, not what you think I want to hear. Tell me these thoughts," he said somberly, tilting her chin up with a finger so he could see her strange, pale eyes. "The truth is the right path. The hardest path. You have been floundering in the dark, my daughter, and I should have seen it. I should have seen it sooner."

He didn't embrace her. She was too old for that now, it wasn't done. But she could see it in his eyes, a love for her so deep, so radiant it was blinding. Domitian stood and balanced carefully on his staff, and as he had so long ago, used it to shepherd her onto the path, back home.

"You will come to it as I did," he told her. "You will understand the world, first. The rest will follow."