But I’m too much of a coward to even move.
No wonder I couldn’t save that boy in the alley.
A cheerful knock at the door startles me.
“Cyra! Are you ready to go?” Astrid’s voice calls through the wood. “I brought extra supplies today – heard there was some trouble near the east market yesterday, so we might have more patients than usual.”
I stare at the door, paralyzed. How do I explain that everything has changed? That the woman who raised us – even though Astrid isn’t of our blood – is gone?
The knock comes again, more insistent. “Cyra? Are you all right?”
I force myself to stand, my legs unsteady. When I open the door, Astrid’s bright smile falters immediately.
“Stars above, you lookawful. What happened?” She pushes past me into the cottage, already dropping her satchel to examine me. Herhands, always smelling like medicinal herbs, reach for my face. She’s taller than me by half a head and older by a few years, her dark eyes missing no small detail as they scan me. “Are you sick? Did someone hurt you?”
“Astrid—” My voice cracks as I gesture helplessly around the disheveled room. “She’s gone...”
Astrid steps back and follows my gaze, taking in the overturned chair, the abandoned tea, the absence that fills every corner. The golden-brown skin on her face loses colour.
“Liora? What do you mean, gone?”
“Last night. I came home and—” I pick up the summons with shaking hands. “This was waiting for me.”
I hand her the note and watch as her eyes scan the words quickly.
After a moment, Astrid sets the summons down, her fingers trembling. “But … Cyra, this doesn’t make any sense. Are you sure Liora wasn’t just sent on an errand by His Grace? Maybe they just need an interim palace healer for a few days while she’s away…”
“Then why don’t they use one of their Royal medics or something,” I say, sinking into one of the cushioned chairs by the hearth. “Maybe they think I’m a Daughter of the Moon? I mean – Mother trained me in healing, and in some of the ceremonies, but I don’t have enough experience to be a royal adviser – I haven’t even done the ritual?—”
“But you have the power,” Astrid says, leaning on another chair. “What you do, it’s not normal medicine. It’s the kind of healing only the Daughters could do.” She pauses. “My mother used to say the Daughters were meant to keep rulers healthy in bodyandmind. That healing magic came with the responsibility to counsel, too.”
I nod in agreement. Mother prepared me to be a Daughter in almost every sense of the word, convinced I could keep the Sisterhood going. The one thing she didn’t prepare me for was the counselling, the advising – she barely told me anything about her work at the palace. And I was too wrapped up in my own problems to ask.
Astrid sighs. “Liora was so young when she took the rite and became a Daughter,” she continues quietly. “Not even twenty, and sentto the Star Court to help the Sun King at that. I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”
The words fall heavy between us, weighted with everything we don’t say aloud. Everything Astrid has always known about me, about the blood running through my veins.
We had all heard the stories, whispered rumours of what happened after the Sun King fell. Entire families executed for carrying a drop of royal Sun blood – even those who simply worked in his court were persecuted. Mother left before things escalated and rebuilt her life as a healer here on Mars, laying low at first and taking a new name. The Sun King’s reign left famine and ashes in its wake, and the system has spent two decades trying to scrub his name from history.
No one wants a reminder of all the horrible things he did.
I flash her a dangerous look, an unspoken understanding passing between us that we don’t broach the subject any further.
Astrid moves to her satchel and pulls out a small wooden box, mementos kept from her own mother before she passed away. Dried plants, a beautiful silver moon pendant, and some small glass vials. I watch as she thumbs through, looking for something.
“There’s more.” Astrid’s eyes grow serious as they meet mine from across the room. “Liora taught me some things in preparation for this. Emergency protocols, you might call them. Ways to hide magical signatures, to communicate without being detected, to protect ourselves if the worst happened.”
She moves to our hearth and kneels beside it, running her fingers along the red stones until she finds one that shifts. I watch as she pulls from it a small leather pouch.
“Emergency supplies,” she says, showing me the contents. “Coins, herbs that can mask magical auras. Liora made me promise to keep these hidden, to only use them if we were in danger.”
The realization of how much I didn’t know about my own life violently washes over me.
“W-What?How long have you been preparing for this?”
“Since we were children,” Astrid admits. “Liora – I don’t know how to explain it – somehow she knew this day would come.” Astrid hesitates, chewing her lip. “My mother admitted to me once thatDaughters of the Moon can see more than illness in a body. They can see patterns … threads of fate.”
She runs a hand through her braid, eyes going distant. “Do you remember last winter? When that merchant caravan went missing in a sandstorm? Liora told me not to take my usual route to the market that day. She said the winds would ‘turn hungry.’ I thought she meant I’d catch a cold or something. But the storm hitexactlywhere I would’ve been.” Her voice drops. “Liora always seemed one step ahead of danger. Maybe she left for a reason, Cyra.”
