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Endeláf (Last) Moon

“Scholars aren’t in agreement on the Monafyll Stone’s purpose, but they do agree that it’s more than just a lunar chart. You notice these marks?” Fairhrim pointed at divots on the outside edge of the Stone.

“A worm?” hazarded Osric. “A chicken?”

“A serpent and a swan,” said Fairhrim. “And these—herbs, a pestle, a potion, and, here at the bottom, a healing hand. Typical healing iconography—but it’s unusual to find it superimposed on a lunar calendar. The number seven is marked in several places. Scholars have suggested that this depicts some kind of healing path, or pilgrimage, or ritual, to be followed at the full moon.”

“So itisabout the Old Ways,” said Osric. “Have we got to dance about in henges?”

There was hauteur in the tilt of Fairhrim’s chin. “If it were that simple to achieve wonder cures, don’t you think everyone would be doing it?”

“What are those lines?” asked Osric, pointing at curling marks carved along the moons down the Stone’s centre.

“Possibly decorative elements. Possibly natural erosion. Possibly an unknown variant of a dead language. One philologist has proposed that it may be one of the fairy tongues.” Fairhrim looked as though the notion offended her. “Of course, that idea isn’t well received by academics. Ultimately, whatever this Stone represented—if it was, indeed, a heretofore undiscovered mode of healing—has been lost to time. We have no directions other than the list of moons and these healing motifs. Ten years ago, an enterprising young Haelan decided to explore the matter further—unfortunately.”

“Fortunately,” corrected Osric.

Fairhrim did not agree, as evinced by her pinched nostrils. She tapped at the Lovelace engine. The Monafyll Stone disappeared. What followed was a rapid-fire sequence of images: pages from books, lines of poetry, snippets of fairy stories, scrawls on birch bark, transcripts of long-ago conversations between long-dead people. Fairhrim flipped through these items with curt commentary; they were all tales of miraculous healings at the full moon.

“All unsubstantiated,” Fairhrim hastened to add. “A fine collection of apocrypha, really. But, nevertheless, a considerable number of accounts. Full-moon healings are a recurring motif throughout our history, from our children’s stories to our theologies. The Monafyll Stone’s discovery was regarded as nothing more than a contribution to this motif by most scholars. Rightfully so. The full moon’s alleged potencies have been the subject of enquiry over centuries now, and the results have always been failure. But I—overexcited, naive girl that I was—thought I could do better.”

Fairhrim, standing perfectly upright, with her hair compressed into the most severe of buns, and her starchy dress buttoned up to her throat, did not look like she had ever been an overexcited girl in her life.

“The Stone’s discovery and its explicit connection between the moons and healing spurred me on to investigate whether or not there was a grain of truth in the miracle tales,” she continued. “I wanted to analyse the apocrypha and seek out commonalities. Patterns. Recurrences too strange to be coincidence.”

“And? Did you find those things?” asked Osric.

A shallow sigh escaped Fairhrim. “I found problems. Acquiring all of these sources, and translating them where necessary, cost a fortune, of course.”

“I’m involved now. Cost is no longer a factor,” said Osric—generously, he thought.

Fairhrim did not agree. Judging by the clench of her jaw, she thoughtit, on the contrary, unseemly. “Do you simply buy or kill your way out of every difficulty life presents you?”

“I use the resources at my disposal,” said Osric. “You should, too.”

“Resources as blood drenched as yours cross certain ethical bounds.”

“Your ethical bounds keep you so confined, it’s a wonder you can move.”

“I don’t know howyoumove, given the weight of your sins.”

They glared at each other. Fairhrim was all edges: dark eyes piercing, lips pressed thin.

She said, “Shall we return to the topic at hand?”

Osric said, “Let’s.”

Fairhrim continued her explanation in a clipped voice. “I’m not one for qualitative analyses but I hadn’t any choice with this particular dataset, if I can be so bold as to call this hotchpotch that. I began to capture and code anything that seemed even marginally relevant—names, places, times, seasons, ailments, demographics—and created this monster.”

Now projected onto the wall was an enormous diagram segmented by tables within tables, and arrows and labels, and large red question marks scattered about. The healers purported to have brought about the full-moon cures were a varied lot: wisewomen, Druids, witches, alchemists, physickers, fairy folk, the gods themselves. The places were equally varied: barrows, wells, crossroads, hill forts, death roads, mountaintops, ponds, islands, doorways, spirit-ways. The diagram also captured moments—sunrise and sunset, high noon, midnight—season, weather, and, finally, which of the twelve full moons was in the sky, if the source indicated it at all. The diagram was populated to bursting with data on probabilities, scales assessing the validity of the sources, odds ratios, recurrences, confidence intervals, and replicability.

If this was only the beginning, it was massively impressive, though Osric would rather eat his puce gown than say so to Fairhrim.

She herself, however, did not seem to think so. She swept a disdainful hand towards the data. “The only meaningful thing I was able todraw from the mess was the importance of place, and the importance of time, for these alleged healings. And the most irritating part is that I needn’t have gone to all this trouble, because the importance of those things is reiterated time and time again in any children’s book, or folktale, or fairy story.”