The passing years had given Peris more than enough time to consider whether he’d done the right thing by fleeing the planet Earth with Danis. At the time, he’d thought that they could somehow find a way to convince Junior Consul Steyr to free them, after which they could join the fight.
But Steyr made it clear that he had risked enough by helping them to leave the doomed planet, and they should now regard themselves as prisoners of war. On the orders of the Archmage, they had been exiled to a homestead on the moon of Beros; they were captives in a gilded cage, safe but impotent, two pampered political prisoners kept at the Sisterhood’s pleasure and guarded by Securitats, two aging soldiers robbed of duty or cause, overfed, understimulated, and left to live make-believe lives through holograms of places where they had once walked as free beings.
A quick death would have been better than this lingering one, thought Peris. Perhaps they should have remained on Earth and accepted their fate. Anything had to be better than this slow fading away. Then he thought of the Others, and decided that, no, there were fates worse than this one . . .
He gazed again at the smaller moon above, satellite to a satellite, one of so many moons he’d stared at over the years. He could never look at a moon now without remembering Earth’s tale of the man in the moon, inspired by the ancient blue shadows that fashioned a benevolent, craggy face, a watchful presence guiding the planet’s waters into tides and eddies, quietly but unstoppably influencing the world below.
The earth had a man in its moon, but Illyr had a woman in the greatest of its moons. Influence she had beyond measure, but as for her benevolence, well, who could tell?