Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “I’m sorry,” Torrant said again, feeling inadequate and too young.

  “Don’t be.” Stella’s voice grew sharp enough to cleave through the awkwardness and leave the moment behind. “You’ll leave tomorrow night. He won’t be missed until the morning after that, and we hid him on the far side of the refuse heap. If the boys are as lazy as usual, we won’t have a thing to worry about. And this way, you can take Aldam with you.”

  “With us?” Torrant tried to sit up, but Stella pushed him back down against the bed and put the tray over him, then stuffed his mouth full of soup, forcing him to eat and listen and not argue.

  “You’re gifted, boy,” she said, and tugged at the lock of hair on his forehead until it fell into his eyes. It was four shades lighter than it had been a week ago, four shades lighter than the rest of his peasant-brown hair. “You can already see it—and I can show you how to hide it, like I hide Aldam’s wizard lock. But hide it or not, people know. Aldam’s too simple to conceal his nature like you do. And it’s dangerous to be gifted here. I think you, of all people, would know that Clough is no safe place for any of Triane’s children.”

  Torrant looked away. Moon had housed Triane’s children as any other hold would house the children of the two gods. His reputation for housing children of the Goddess had been what brought Torrant’s mother begging at his door when Torrant was just a baby, fatherless and starving. And Torrant knew, without a doubt, it had been what brought the Consort’s fury hammering down on the Moons of Clough like an iron rain.

  “It will be dangerous,” Torrant said, his voice gravelly. Then, looking carefully to make sure Yarri was still asleep, he said, “If it wasn’t for Yarri, I’d hide here. I’d hide, and I’d wait and I’d….” His voice thickened, and Stella’s hand clenched on his shoulder.

  “You stay alive first, boy,” she said. “Now you owe me, and you seem an honorable sort. You stay alive, you keep your girl and my nephew alive, and you get them to safety, and you will live to do whatever it is you’re planning. And I know folks who would help. But you’re a boy now—a boy can do strong things. A man can do great things. You see the difference?”

  “No,” Torrant replied miserably after swallowing more soup. Yarri had said someone needed to be smacked. Triane’s tears, he wanted to smack someone—but not as much as he wanted to keep Yarri safe. “But you’re right—we’ll keep going to Eiran. Yarri’s got… we’ve got family.”

  “I’d wager Yarri’s family is your family now, boy,” Stella reassured, feeding him the last soup in the bowl. “Now you rest, you let your young one rest—and this time, keep her in the room, you hear? I’ll be back in for dinner. My sister—she’s been worried about Aldam staying in Clough for some time. That thing that happened to the Moon hold, that just clinched the matter. She and I, we’ll give you more than a change of clothes and some coins to travel with.”

  “Thank you.” Torrant was humbled by her kindness.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” she said, ruffling his hair in a way that reminded him of his mother. “Let’s wait until after we steal the horses.”

  They waited until the next night—after Torrant could walk down the hall without getting winded and before the horse trader’s absence was any more than remarked upon. The horse trader’s apprentice was a scrawny, abused boy who had taken what his master had doled out and let it make him mean. He wouldn’t cut anybody a break without his master’s approval. All in all it was easier to steal the horses and let the townsfolk blame the missing. It was too close to winter for anyone but the Goddess’s desperate to follow them over Hammer Pass.

  “And isn’t it wonderful that the only thing that’ll keep them from chasing us down with swords and pitchforks is the thing that’ll probably kill us in the end,” Torrant said sourly, after reviewing the maps Aldam’s mother had provided. Aldam was sitting quietly in the corner, playing string tricks with Yarri and stroking Anye the cat, who had made him her new best friend.

  “I can make fire,” he said mildly. “Even in deep snow. It will help.” He smiled at Torrant, hoping for approval.

  “Fire might just well save our lives,” Torrant returned with feeling. “If you’ve got a bottomless wallet of food, we’re set.”

  “I don’t have one of those.” Aldam sounded distressed, and Torrant smiled gently to calm him. He needed to be careful with what he said to Aldam; the young man took things very literally.

  “I was joking, Aldam,” he said softly. “As far as I know, only the Goddess’s women have the talent to make those.” And as far as he knew, that was a myth. Besides, he told himself bracingly, Aldam’s family had set them up with bedrolls, more blankets, a small cooking kit, and as much food as three horses could carry. It wasn’t anybody’s fault that it wouldn’t be enough to last them.

  “You can hunt, can’t you, boy?” Stella asked apprehensively, and Torrant grimaced and nodded, Ellyot’s last words to him ringing in his head like bells.

  “I can,” he hoped lowly. “Dried fruit and nuts would be good—a body gets weak on just meat.”

  “That we can do,” Stella agreed, and Torrant went back to the study of the maps.

  THAT NIGHT they stole horses and rode off to face the deadly winter of Hammer Pass.

  The stealing of the horses was actually fun. Compared to the horribleness of the horse trader’s death, ghosting along the moon-frosted fields was like a game. It was good that the quiet flurry to the stables was fun, because Aldam had said good-bye to his mother and his aunt before they left, and watching their worry and their love as he got ready to depart had depressed everybody. Yarri had started to cry soundlessly before Stella had roughly kissed her wet cheeks and told her to stay safe. Torrant felt his face go stony and hard. He had to narrow his eyes stoically in an effort not to dissolve from the longing of wanting the farewell from his own family that Aldam got from his.

  But Stella and her sister Sahra were not strangers to a young man’s pride, and they also knew when a young man was still a boy. Torrant too got a rough hug and kisses on the cheek and a stern admonition to stay safe and be good. He would never admit to anyone but Yarri, but he treasured the kisses against his cheek, and his skin tingled with longing for family again.

  He let the wind chap his cheeks and kill the tingling as they ran, because he was afraid of that longing. He was afraid that longing for family would weaken him until he was unable to find family for Yarri. She was the only family he could worry about.

  Which made the pleading look she gave him as she held out her hand and clucked to her fat and sturdy pony even harder to refuse.

  The horses recognized them as they neared the pen. Suddenly, Torrant and Yarri were surrounded by huge, warm bodies, the comforting smell of animals, soft whickers, and tickling whiskers in their hair and over their shoulders. They knew these horses; Torrant had helped to break some of them.

  “It will be a hard journey.” Torrant hated the hesitation in his voice. Shouldn’t he be stronger with her, if he was supposed to guide her to safety? The pony was too small for the journey—even a child knew that, especially one who had been raised around these horses.

  “But she missed me!” Yarri said, and the pony was proving her words by whuffling at Yarri’s neck and whickering ever so softly into her cupped hands.

  “But….” But she had just had her family ripped away, and, really, how much worse would one fat pony make their odds of crossing Hammer Pass in the dead of winter anyway? He thought of a thousand ways to end that sentence and then sighed instead. “Here, Aldam,” he said quietly, leading a broad, fat, mottled mare with the personality of a sunny day and the constitution of a granite slab. “This is Clover.”

  Aldam backed up nervously. “She’s so big.”

  Torrant nodded and took the other boy’s hand in his own, holding it to the horse’s heart. “Feel that?” he murmured, smiling as the mare nosed his pocket for the carrots he’d cadged from Sahra before they left.

  “It’s strong,” Ald
am said thoughtfully.

  “Strong and sweet as clover,” Torrant told him. “That’s why we named her—she’ll be your friend and your ride and your blanket, and all you have to do is be nice to her. That’s not a problem, is it, Aldam?” He slipped some carrots into Aldam’s soft hand and turned it, palm flat up, and nodded, reassured as the mare took the carrots and then nosed the hand for some soft pets on her sensitive nose. Aldam smiled at his new friend and proceeded to find the mare’s favorite sweet spot between the fine, brown eyes and up toward the ears. He scratched until her eyes closed in satisfaction. Good—one happy couple down, two more to decide on.

  A laugh sounded loudly from the inn, and Torrant closed his eyes. They didn’t have long.

  The reminder that they needed to hurry galvanized him, and he decided on a risk he wouldn’t normally have taken. Without time to think or to second-guess, he walked up to Moon’s four-year-old bay and offered him a carrot.

  The stallion was a behemoth—almost eighteen hands tall, with a chest as wide as an oaken barrel and a head and face so small they almost looked silly next to the stallion’s immensity. He was strong, smart, well broken, even tempered and protective of his people. He was also an incorrigible ladies’ man, and even as Torrant broke him off from the herd and slipped a stolen bridle over his head, he knew that taking the stallion into the wilderness with a sweet old breeder like Clover was just asking for distractions and a late-season foal the next year. Courtland the stallion whuffled and pranced, obviously happy to be with his family again.

  He was strong, Torrant thought resolutely. He was strong and he was stout, and he would protect them as they slept in the tent and tried to clutch warmth to their hearts like fingers clutching water.

  “Besides,” Torrant muttered to himself, touching foreheads with the stallion in greeting, “he’ll be able to carry us both after we eat Yarri’s pony to stay alive.”

  They rode with saddle blankets instead of saddles, Aldam hunching over Clover’s back like a collapsed sack of potatoes. Anye stuck her head out of Yarri’s satchel and gave a plaintive good-bye to the horses they had to leave behind. Yarri, secure in the saddle since her third year, turned around and looked forlornly at the herd of horses in the starshine. They stretched their heads over the fence and made depressed, little whinnies.

  “Torrant…,” she murmured in distress, but Torrant’s heart was pounding from the theft and from his risky choices as it was.

  “They’ll be fine,” he muttered shortly, his voice seeming to carry unfathomably loud under the night sky. The Goddess moon had come up over the dirt trail. Unlike the moons of the twin gods that seemed to hover over the earth in a remote, detached sort of way, the Goddess moon came close in its orbit, and her face this night was personal, a vast, orange, harvest face that blazed the trail up like daylight and threw Anvil Mountain into sharp relief.

  “Is that where we’re going?” Aldam asked as the lights of the inn and the only life he’d ever known disappeared behind them.

  “Yeah.” Long ago, the mountain had been a volcano with a plug of ash. Before the third moon had begun its wandering across the sky, the volcano had blown, leaving a mountain with a top that looked like an open mouth of broken teeth. Centuries passed, the Goddess moon began her wandering, and the jagged top of the mountain wore down. Although probably not a place to walk barefoot, in silhouette, the top of the mountain was flat, denting in a little on the sides like a smith’s anvil. The smaller mountain that had jutted up from its side during the same event was the Hammer. In order to make it to the other side of those mountains, they had to pick their way over that path, through a series of switchbacks that held to the smooth side of Anvil Mountain like a lover, and then through the treacherous crevasse formed by the jutting of the Hammer against the Anvil. Besides steep cliffs and sheer drops, there would be severe winds, deep snow over deadly pits, and extremely irritable wildlife.

  “It’s a good thing the Goddess is so close to the earth tonight,” Aldam said in a small voice. “I have a feeling we’re going to need the help.”

  Torrant looked at his new responsibility with his first full-out grin in nearly two weeks. The muscles were so rusty the expression hurt his face. “I think we’re going to be fine.” He was surprised as the words came out of his mouth. He was even more surprised to find that he meant them.

  Traveling Companions

  THAT BURST of optimism lasted until the first bend in the switchback trail, when the wind hit them, and Yarri almost fell off her pony.

  Torrant had thought he’d known fear in his life. He’d been there when uniformed men had informed his mother that his father was dead and it would be better for her and her son to leave their home in the dead of winter. Then they left the country as well. He’d watched the beginning of the slaughter of his family, knowing he could do nothing but save himself and their most beloved member. But he truly had never had his bowels turn to water and his heart thud in a puddle at his feet until Kiss reared up, and Yarri’s entire body was suspended, her knees clutching the damned fat pony, over a drop of two hundred feet, with flesh-chewing rocks at the bottom.

  He dismounted from Courtland and plucked Yarri up from Kiss’s back without a word. Then he settled her on Courtland’s back before mounting up behind her—and his hands never stopped shaking. For her part, Yarri hadn’t stopped trembling since Kiss’s hooves had grounded, and she burrowed in his arms, shivering, and stayed there sedately for the next few hours.

  Eventually they found a hollow at the bend of one of the switchbacks, a stocked cave, in fact, complete with firewood and food for humans and horses, and Torrant was so grateful to not have to dig into the bulk of their stores that he almost cried. The reciprocal kindness of the merchants who stocked the shelter seemed like a sign from the Goddess that not all the elements were out to get them. He left a small packet of dried fruit with the food stores in gratitude the next morning, but not before he gave Aldam and Yarri a bite with their breakfast.

  “But what about you, Torrant?” Yarri asked plaintively.

  “I’m not a big fan of dried apples,” he lied gamely, and she looked at him with worried eyes until he brusquely set her to pack her bedroll and wash her face with what was left of the warmed water on the fire.

  She had gone back to the privy dug into the back of the cave, and Torrant was dousing the fire when Aldam spoke.

  “She cried in her sleep last night.” His eyes were grave.

  “I know,” Torrant said shortly, squeezing the water pot into the saddle bag.

  “She called out for her mama.” Aldam was upset. He didn’t whine or argue like other people; he just got more insistent, and Torrant always listened with all courtesy.

  “I know.” Torrant’s voice dropped. “I know. I was there. I comforted her.”

  “I know,” Aldam repeated, the distress still in his voice. “And you are all she has.”

  Torrant shook his head, confused. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know….”

  “And I cannot make this journey alone. My mother knew that. It’s why she sent me with you.” Aldam had a little wrinkle between his brows, breaking up the serene lines of his boyish face. For the first time Torrant wondered how old the boy was—fourteen, like him? A little older? Eighteen? With a face that smooth and unlined by most worries, it would be hard to place an age.

  “I won’t leave you, Aldam,” Torrant said, trying for reassurance. Aldam kept looking behind them, toward the privy hole with its screen of rocks, as though this were a conversation they must keep from Yarri.

  “You are all we have, and you have no one to comfort you, Torrant. Don’t deny yourself sweetness—any sweetness—as it comes to you. When your spirit breaks because it’s grown brittle for lack of sweetness, we will have no one.”

  Torrant blinked his eyes, so surprised he sat down suddenly on the hard rock of the cave floor. It was his first lesson that very often the simplest view of the world was the wisest. Without warning
, his eyes began to blur with the kindness of this new responsibility, and while he was sitting there, staring at his knees and trying to pick himself up off the cave floor and be capable again, Aldam thrust half his portion of dried apples into his hands. Torrant blindly clutched them so they wouldn’t fall into the dust. Abruptly, this new responsibility became as dear as the brothers he missed.

  “Thank you,” he said roughly, then put an apple in his mouth and smiled at the tart-sweetness of it.

  “I’m happy you like it,” Aldam replied sincerely, and then wandered away to talk quietly to Clover. He had fallen very much in love with the horse the night before, as they were hugging the unforgiving side of the mountain and hoping for shelter.

  “I thought you didn’t like apples,” Yarri murmured, coming out from behind the privy and finding the damp cloth for her hands.

  “I change’ my min’,” Torrant said with a full mouth, and that was the end of the matter.

  THE SWITCHBACK trail continued for three days, and at the end of each day, often stumbling with exhaustion from maintaining a pace set by adults used to traveling in the mountains, they found caves in which to seek shelter. In the last cave, they saw a rough map, scratched into the stone, showing the switchback trail and the pass over the mountain itself. There were several circles with the word “pit” inside them. These chilled Torrant almost as much as the wind that had been plastering them to the granite sides of the mountain for three days.

  “You can’t always see those under the snow,” he said numbly after Yarri was asleep. He was wondering if he could memorize the map, or if they’d be walking blindly, hoping not to fall into those bone-chewing fissures outlined in the dusty shale of the cave.