BooksBarbecue
Back The Night and Its Moon Save as PDF
Chapters (64)
  1. Front Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  6. Pronunciation Guide
  7. Prologue
  8. Part One
  9. One
  10. Two
  11. Three
  12. Four
  13. Five
  14. Six
  15. Seven
  16. Eight
  17. Nine
  18. Ten
  19. Eleven
  20. Twelve
  21. Thirteen
  22. Part Two
  23. Fourteen
  24. Fifteen
  25. Sixteen
  26. Seventeen
  27. Eighteen
  28. Nineteen
  29. Twenty
  30. Twenty-One
  31. Twenty-Two
  32. Twenty-Three
  33. Part Three
  34. Twenty-Four
  35. Twenty-Five
  36. Twenty-Six
  37. Twenty-Seven
  38. Twenty-Eight
  39. Twenty-Nine
  40. Thirty
  41. Thirty-One
  42. Thirty-Two
  43. Thirty-Three
  44. Thirty-Four
  45. Thirty-Five
  46. Part Four
  47. Thirty-Six
  48. Thirty-Seven
  49. Thirty-Eight
  50. Thirty-Nine
  51. Forty
  52. Forty-One
  53. Forty-Two
  54. Forty-Three
  55. Forty-Four
  56. Forty-Five
  57. Forty-Six
  58. Forty-Seven
  59. Epilogue
  60. Excerpt from The Sun and Its Shade
  61. The Night and Its Moon Playlist
  62. Acknowledgments
  63. About the Author
  64. Back Cover

As she held Amaris’s face in her hands, guilt gnawed in her gut. What she now felt was an intimate love that she couldn’t bring herself to understand. Maybe she didn’t need to understand it. It didn’t make it any less real.

“What just happened—”

“It will never happen again. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.” Her voice broke with the pain of helplessness, of regret, of anger. When Amaris had needed her most, she had failed her. Nox vowed, “I promise with my life: you won’t go with her.”

* * *

The rumors were inescapable. They’d barely sat down to push their steamed yams and boiled chicken around their plates when a boy no more than ten asked Amaris what she was worth. She’d stared despondently into the mush of her orange vegetable. Nox glared at him until he went away, apologizing under his breath.

Whether it was the matrons or the other orphans generating the rumors, who was to tell. Farleigh was aflutter with their fixation on Amaris’s fetching price. Some whispered twenty crowns had been put down as deposit, while others claimed they’d heard it was a song to the tune of fifty. One matron cursed quietly to another that one hundred crowns were locked in the office as she dished out slimy, stewed okra onto the children’s plates.

The girls shrank into silence, allowing the talking and scraping of forks and knives to become a white noise around them. No one else seemed bothered by the inedible meal, too excited by the day’s events to scowl at the slop on their plates. There would be no murmuring from the ghostly silent girls. The food tasted like ash on Nox’s lips, settling into her stomach with the coal-heavy weight of certainty that everything she knew was drawing to an end.

Seven

“Are you awake?”

“I’m looking at you, aren’t I?” Nox whispered back, voice nearly inaudible. She’d always struggled with insomnia, but after the day’s events, she knew she’d have no chance of falling asleep. She’d watched the door for an hour as the tossing and turning of her peers had faded into the steady, rhythmic noises of their slumber. She’d spotted Amaris the moment the door eased open, and she watched her silhouette as her friend tiptoed toward her bed. The matrons had moved Nox into the older girls’ dormitory two years prior, which had been miserable for them both. Night was the only time the two were truly separated.

“Can we talk?”

Nox emerged from beneath her covers before Amaris had finished her question.