He Stole My Life, So the Moon Gave Me Back novel · Chapter 1 of 27
Chapter 1: The Light That Throws Him Back
Noah, the youngest high priest, wakes imprisoned in a dark chamber watched by a stranger named Adrian; when Adrian reaches for him, Noah's sun-blood erupts and throws Adrian across the room, and Noah pockets a brass key that fell from Adrian's coat before Adrian warns him never to let the court see his power.
Noah woke on a stone bench with a cup of water already beside his hand and a stranger watching him from the wall.
He did not move. He lay still and let his eyes do the work.
A dark chamber. No window he could find. One door, iron-banded, bolted from the outside. Cold coming up through the floor into his back.
And a man sitting in a chair by the wall, close enough that Noah could feel the cold rolling off him before he could see his face.
So this was the part where he found out what they wanted.
He had gone to sleep in the church dormitory with the snow falling past his window and Brother Idris snoring two cells down. He had woken here, in white he had never worn, in a room that smelled of iron and old smoke.
Someone had carried him out of the church. Someone had dressed him. Someone had stood over him while he slept and decided what he would wear to whatever this was.
'You're awake,' the man said. He had a warm voice. That was the first thing Noah filed away. Warm, and easy, and entirely wrong for a locked room.
'I am.'
'There's water. You should drink it.'
The man leaned forward and set the cup a little closer to Noah's hand. His hair was dark and too long, falling past his collar. He had a face built for laughing, and he was not laughing now.
He was guilty about something. Noah could see it in the way he would not quite meet his eyes.
'You're safe here,' the man said.
Noah looked at him.
That was a lie, and it was a clumsy one, and the man knew it was clumsy, because his hand came up and touched the back of his own neck before he caught himself.
So he lies badly. Remember that.
'Where is here?' Noah asked.
'Somewhere you won't be found.'
'By whom?'
The man smiled a little. It did not reach his eyes. 'By everyone who wants what's in your blood.'
Noah kept his face still. He had learned that trick young, before he had learned anything else. When they came at you, you went quiet and polite, and you let them keep talking, and you counted.
Two guards outside the door. He could hear them shifting their weight on the stone. One bolt on the door, heavy, thrown from the outside. A second door behind the man, half open, showing a corridor that ran dark in both directions.
And the man himself, who had a ring of keys clipped inside his coat, one of them brass and older than the rest.
'You don't remember coming here,' the man said. It was not a question.
'I remember going to sleep in my own bed.'
'Then I'll tell you the truth of it. You were brought here. Not by me.' The man spread his hands in a small, open gesture. 'I'm only the one they left to watch you.'
Another lie, and a better one. Noah filed it next to the first.
'What is your name?' he asked.
'Adrian.'
'Adrian.' Noah said it back slowly, as though he were learning it. He was. He wanted to know how the man reacted to hearing his own name in a stranger's mouth.
Adrian's face did something small and complicated, and then smoothed over.
So the name matters. And he did not expect me to ask for it.
'You're not going to ask me to let you go?' Adrian said.
'I don't think you can.'
Adrian laughed, one short breath of it, and looked away. 'You're sharper than they told me.'
They. Noah tucked that word away too, and did not chase it.
Adrian stood. He was tall, and he moved like a man who had never once been afraid of a room, and he came toward the bench where Noah lay.
'Drink the water,' he said. 'Then we'll talk about what happens next.'
He reached down.
Noah did not decide to do it. That was the part he would think about later, over and over, in the dark. He did not decide anything. Adrian's hand came toward his face, meaning to help him sit, and something inside Noah's chest that had been coiled and waiting since the moment he woke threw itself open.
Gold light cracked down his arms.
It came up through his skin in thin bright seams, along his wrists and up his throat, and the room went hot all at once, the way an oven goes hot when the door is opened. The cold in the stone fled. The shadows on the wall jumped back.
Adrian made a sound Noah had never heard a man make.
He was thrown. He crossed the room without touching the floor, hit the far wall with his shoulder and his back, and came down hard on the stones. The chair he had been sitting in tipped over and slid.
Noah sat up on the bench and looked at his own hands.
They were glowing. Veins of it, gold and moving, running under the skin like water under ice. He could feel the heat coming off them, and it did not hurt. It felt like the only warm thing in this whole frozen place.
He had been told his whole life never to let it out. The elders had drilled it into him with sun-rites and fasting and the flat of a wooden rod across his knuckles. Suppress it. Hide it. The world will kill you for it.
And now it had come out on its own, because a stranger reached for him.
Adrian was getting up. Slowly. His coat was scorched at the shoulder, the leather blackened and curling, and he was staring at Noah with an expression that had nothing warm left in it.
Fear. That was fear on his face.
Good.
Noah's eyes went to the floor by the overturned chair. The brass key had slid out of Adrian's coat when he fell, and it lay on the stone, small and dull, three points of a crest stamped into its head.
Noah swung his legs off the bench and stood. He let his hands hang at his sides, still glowing, and he walked two steps toward the door, as though he meant to try it.
Adrian tensed. 'Don't.'
'I'm not going anywhere,' Noah said. 'You've made sure of that.'
He turned back toward the bench, and on the way his sock caught the key and dragged it, and when he bent to right the fallen chair he closed his hand around it and slid it into the waistband of the white trousers they had dressed him in.
Three points of a crest. Whatever that door is, it is not the only one it opens.
The glow was fading now, the gold seams dimming one by one, and the cold came creeping back into the room.
Adrian had his back to the wall and one hand pressed flat against it, and he was breathing hard, and he was looking at Noah the way a man looks at a fire he thought was out.
'You've done that before,' Adrian said.
'No.'
'Then what in the god's name was it?'
Noah did not answer. He sat back down on the bench, folded his glowing hands in his lap, and waited for them to go dark.
Adrian stayed against the wall a long moment. Then he pushed off it and crossed the room, wide of Noah this time, and stopped at the door with his hand on the bolt.
He did not open it. He turned.
'Listen to me,' he said, and his voice had lost all its warmth. 'Whatever that was, you must never let the court see it.'
Noah's hand closed around the key in his waistband.
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