last quarter

The Princess was quite drunk when she found me--I didn't even know she was in the city. Last I'd heard her attempts to besiege the city had failed and her armies were in full retreat, and her generals . . . she shouldn't have been here. At first I wasn't even sure it was her, but she has a way of filling the room with her presence even when she's lost control of, well, everything.

I helped sneak her onto the roof of the theatre, and she passed me a bottle of wine and stared at the moon. "I used to like the half moon," she said. "It felt uncertain, like it could be waxing or waning. So much potential."

I took a long drink of her wine--even disguised in a city where she would be killed on sight, she drank far better wine than we mere performers were permitted to touch--and said nothing, but she seemed to accept that as a response. Or perhaps she was merely soliloquizing; I certainly was no stranger to that.

"Then I learned how to tell." She scowled at me, at the world. "There's no potential, just ignorance."

Then she turned and looked at me, suddenly urgent. "You have to leave the city tonight." I opened my mouth to respond but she put her finger against my lips. "No arguing. No questions. Promise. Pack up and leave tonight."

Did I even have a choice? "I promise," I said, because standing up to Nevena when she brought her entire presence to bear on you was impossible--or maybe I really did sense the urgency there. Maybe I didn't need to ask questions to understand that she would drown the city that night.

So I did. I fled the city, and I was only able to convince some of the others to join me, and we left by the light of that waning moon she hated so much. Word of the calamity wouldn't reach us for a few days, but still every night I'd look at the moon and think of her and wonder what terrible thing she was contemplating.