Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “I’ll just tell them it was related to my gift,” Torrant told him simply. “That usually scares people enough as it is.”

  Gregor nodded. “So it does,” he agreed sadly. “So it does indeed.”

  THE YEAR progressed much more smoothly after that.

  Aylan, who could usually be found chatting with a group of potential bedmates during mealtimes, began to eat with Torrant, Trieste, and Aldam. First it was once or twice in a week, then it was once in a day, and then the potential bedmates had to eat with them or not be considered candidates at all. Aylan’s conversation was light and fun, and once he’d stopped making scathing comments about nearly everybody, he was a welcome friend.

  Occasionally Trieste caught him eyeing Torrant with a speculation—and a longing deeper than anything she would have suspected Aylan capable of—but he never spoke of it. Not even when she started making excuses to be alone with Torrant in the evenings to study or to sing. Not even when he rounded a corner of the dorm hallway one night—alone—and found Trieste, leaning against the wall with Torrant’s arms braced on either side of her. Their bodies were not touching—not yet—and those warm, quirkily beautiful lips hadn’t yet touched hers—not yet—but everything about Torrant’s leaning posture and her breathless wonder as she gazed into his brown-hazel eyes shouted to the heavens that they would kiss, soon.

  After raising a sardonic eyebrow and giving a little bow—both of which effectively made them separate and blush at the time—Aylan had continued on his way and gone into his own dorm room, again, alone.

  The next day he caught Trieste as she was on her way to the one class Torrant had dropped but he still had with her. They often sat near each other these days, and both of them were pleasantly surprised at the other’s usefulness as a study partner.

  “You know he and Yarri are probably moon destined, don’t you?” He asked the question seriously, and since there was no hint of censure or of anger in his tone, Trieste answered teasingly, as though he were a friend and not the tormentor she had known for the years prior to Torrant’s arrival.

  “You know I’m engaged to marry Alec, the king of Otham, don’t you?” She kept her voice light and a little sardonic, and Aylan’s sympathetic head tilt and grave quiet brought tears to her eyes. She hurried through them. “Someone I choose, Aylan—is that too much to ask? I know….” She swallowed hard and looked away. “I am well aware that I don’t have the charm that a Yarri Moon might—in eight or so years—possess, but for today, before I get bargained away in the greatest political coup the five smaller kingdoms have seen in a hundred years, wouldn’t it be lovely if I got a lover of my own choice?”

  His full lips tilted in a brief smile, and he gave the tiniest nod, and she was suddenly more candid with Aylan than she had been with Torrant the night before, as she’d hurried out of his arms in a confusion of blushes and “see-you-tomorrow-lets-meet-in-the-quad.”

  “He’s kind, he’s beautiful, and he seems to want me, and just for this time here, in school, I choose him.” She dashed her hand across her eyes and blinked hard but didn’t fall victim to the regret already haunting her every touch of hands with the boy with the white streak in his brown hair.

  Aylan nodded. “I understand, sweetheart,” and the endearment sounded almost brotherly, “but just remember the kindness isn’t the only part of him.” Aylan shuddered a little.

  “I know it’s not.” Trieste nodded. “But because I’m not Yarri or Aldam—or you! I think that’s the only part he’ll let me see.” Torrant had been all that was gentle to her. Kind, complimentary, solicitous. She had seen passion—his breathing the night before had been very heated before Aylan had interrupted—but he hadn’t let her see that the passion might have its own way to go. And she was quite frankly relieved. “I think that’s the only part I’ll ever bear to see.”

  Aylan nodded in turn. “Well,” he said with some grim and self-deprecating humor, “I for one would be very interested in that other side of him—if he’s ever letting on that it’s out prowling.”

  Trieste laughed then, gaily and with a whole heart, suddenly liking that Aylan was a friend. “If he ever needs to let that part out, you can have it, you horrible flirt.” She seized his arm, and they walked into class together. “But for now, he’s all mine.”

  BUT TORRANT was not all hers immediately. Samhain came, and a week’s worth of holiday with it, and Torrant and Aldam saddled up and prepared to make what was a two-day trip with a cart into a one-day trip at a canter. They were both itchy and excited to go home to Eiran and the Moons. Aylan had remarked privately to Trieste that if he ever met this family he would feel like some sort of pervert-stalker; he knew more about the bathing habits of the Moon women than he knew about his own mother. Trieste had scolded him, but in her heart she had agreed—both young men knew clearly where their hearts lay, and it was difficult to compete with a dream.

  But that didn’t stop her from tackling Torrant in a hearty hug as he was standing by the horse in the thin, gold light of the late, autumn morning, or holding his face in both long-fingered, delicate hands before she pushed her lips to his.

  Torrant seemed startled at first. A little laugh escaped to be muffled by her seeking mouth, and then, feeling what it was she wanted, he opened his mouth and his arms and began to enjoy the feeling of her against his body. She was thin but wiry and stronger than she looked, and he loved the power of the will beneath the delicacy of her fine bones and muscles. He returned the kiss with interest, becoming the aggressor, until she backed away, breathless, embarrassed, and so pleased with herself that her affection radiated from the sweet oval of her face.

  “You’ll remember me then?” she asked, trying to still the tympani of her heart.

  “I’ll bore Yarri with stories of you,” he told her, his voice kind. “I’ll make sure every Moon knows your name.”

  He could not have chosen anything better to say in farewell, and after a handshake from Aylan, he and Aldam were soon cantering up over the bowl of the valley to home.

  Letters to the Dead

  “WAS THAT so awful?” Aldam asked as they rode. The days were much shorter: they would have to ride hard to make it, but they had both been terribly homesick in the past weeks, which is why they had agreed to make the trip. There was no guarantee the snows would let up enough to go during winter solstice, and Torrant had hardly been able to mention Yarri’s name to Trieste without feeling his throat grow tight.

  “You were there,” Torrant replied with amusement. “Did it look like I hated it?”

  “You’ve been fretting,” Aldam reminded him.

  “Well unlike you, I have no wilding and no experience,” Torrant said grumpily. “The girl looks at me like I’m the rising moons and setting sun. I’d hate to only be a man after all.”

  “You could have chosen Aylan,” Aldam told him guilelessly. “He would have been happy to teach you what you didn’t know.”

  “If only he hadn’t been such a wanker!” It was a new word, taught to them by Aylan, and it made Aldam laugh.

  “He’s not a wanker anymore,” he said judiciously.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.” Torrant laughed. “He’s on his good behavior, but I’m sure he could still be a wanker if it suited him.” He patted Hammer’s flanks and felt the horse quiver with the excitement of being out of the staid little valley of Triannon. The horses were worked regularly, both by Torrant and Aldam and by obliging younger boys who envied them, but the animals were obviously bored with their regular routine. “How’s Clover doing?” he asked, and Aldam seemed to know exactly what he was asking.

  “She wants to go home,” Aldam replied, and without another word, the young men spurred their horses just a bit faster to try to make time.

  Yarri was waiting for them, perched in the same tree from which she’d said her farewells. It was bald now, and the girl perched in it was wrapped warmly and chattering her teeth in the ocean’s icy damp. It was nearing night, and both girl
and tree were dim, cold silhouettes against the darkness of the eastern sea, but Torrant saw her surely enough and called out as they were crossing the bridge.

  “Yo! Yarri—get out of that damned tree, and we’ll give you a ride home.”

  She didn’t reply but she did disappear as she scrambled down, and as Torrant and Aldam turned onto the road after the bridge, she was in that same mad scramble up the hill to greet them.

  Torrant slid down off Hammer, partly because she was moving so fast and so frantically he didn’t trust her not to just run into the horse, although she supposedly knew better, and partly because he wanted to see her so badly that longing was like a sledgehammer against his throat, stopping off the air.

  She never slowed, and it was a good thing he braced himself because he had just enough strength to catch her and pick her up in a flurried and fierce hug before she began to smatter his ears with questions like hard rain.

  “Did you get my letters because Uncle Lane said he was sending them by militia every day, but you only sent once a week and Hammer looks fat. Haven’t you been exercising him? You look skinny—how can you be so skinny if Hammer doesn’t get any time out, and aren’t you letting Aldam sleep? Roes cried for a week after Aldam left but you’re not supposed to tell him that. You didn’t hear, did you, Aldam? How are your classes? Auntie Bethen said it was a smart thing for your professor to make you take fewer classes and she told us she had worried about you and worried but that it was fine because you had people to look after you and….” She pattered to a halt to take a breath, and Lane, who was coming up the road as they walked slowly toward home, interrupted.

  “Yarri, if you don’t stop and take a breath you’ll make yourself sick, girl. Now give the boy a break and give Aldam a hello.”

  “Hello, Aldam!” Her smile was so enthusiastic that Aldam could take no offense.

  “Hello, Yarri,” Aldam answered equably as he embraced Lane. “I won’t tell Roes, I promise.”

  Lane grimaced cheerfully and embraced Torrant around Yarri. “Good to see you,” he said warmly. “We were hoping you’d make it tonight.”

  They talked easily as they walked down toward the second block of houses by the sea, and Torrant kept squeezing his arm around Yarri’s shoulder to remind himself that she was there.

  “Did you miss me?” she asked under Lane’s narrative about Starren’s effortless mastery of her letters and Cwyn’s newest offense at the school. (Climbed a tree so he could look in and watch his teacher dressing. The boy’s eight, what does he think he’ll do with whatever it is that he sees? Aldam had no idea.)

  “Like I’d miss my next breath,” he responded.

  “As much as you’ll miss that girl you keep writing about?” she asked sharply, and he grinned down at her, because he’d known it was coming.

  “More,” he told her decisively before his grin turned evil. “But not by much.”

  She squealed and socked him in the arm, and he thrust Hammer’s reins into Lane’s hands. Then he chased her breathlessly home, leaving Lane and Aldam to follow along behind with the horses.

  Later that night, as they talked and laughed (mostly laughed) over dinner, the subject of Trieste came up again, this time in concert with Aylan.

  “They were relentless!” Aldam said with considerable emphasis. “Torrant had to chan—oh….” Torrant was glaring at him with a pained expression.

  “Aldam—”

  “You know I’m not good at—”

  “I thought we weren’t going to talk about—”

  “—subterfuge.”

  “—this—I didn’t want Ya—everybody to—”

  “You would have told Lane or Bethen—”

  “—know!”

  “—eventually!” Aldam stopped, and both of them were scowling, and the family was staring at them in bemusement.

  “I’ve never seen Torrant turn into the snowcat,” Starren said mildly into the silence. “Would you let me see the snowcat while you’re here, Torrant?” She turned to him expectantly and smiled so sweetly that Torrant had no choice but to smile back.

  “Of course, Littlest—tonight before we go to bed, I’ll change for you.”

  Starry said a bright, smiling, “Thank you, Torrant!” and Bethen and Lane began to delicately inquire about Torrant’s initial slide into the snowcat. Torrant left out the part about Aylan’s attempts at seduction and Trieste’s habit of touching his arm or his shoulder or his hair, just to torment him and the way both of them listened to him sing after dinner with a look in their eyes as though he were something they had missed their whole lives but not known until he’d walked through the door. But he did include the part he’d already written about, when Prof. Gregor extended their stay at Triannon for a year.

  “He said most of it would be as healers in the Old Man Hills,” Torrant added, taking the last of the buttered bacon beans—the food at Triannon may have been more savory, but Bethen’s cooking tasted like home.

  “That’s good!” Bethen said emphatically. “The Old Man Hills—well, a lot of that Goddess-hating trash from Clough spills over there. They need some healers who won’t—”

  “Bethen?” Lane inquired delicately.

  “Won’t pack a woman’s womb with ashes or circumcise the baby girls?” Roes interjected with an arch of her brows. “We all hear the same reports, Da’. We know what doctors do to women when they desecrate the Goddess.”

  “What?” asked Starry, and the look Lane shot his wife and daughter would have had any of his workers quailing in their boots.

  “They’re mean to them, sweetie,” Bethen answered calmly, giving her husband an answering look of her own. “It’s what happens when you forsake joy. It just makes you mean.”

  Starry nodded, satisfied, and Lane rolled his eyes at his wife and shook his head. Tactfully, Torrant changed the subject to how Prof. Gregor had been helping him to control his gift.

  Later that night, he gave demonstrations. First he morphed smoothly into the snowcat and gave Starry’s delighted face a lick. Then Cwyn jumped on his back and asked for a ride, and he showed his next trick: changing into a furry human with a cat’s face. That one made Bethen and Lane gasp.

  “That is really disturbing,” Stanny burst out on a shocked laugh. “Torrant, I wouldn’t know you like that in broad daylight, much less in the dark.”

  Torrant smiled, pleased with himself, and his broad cat’s tongue came out and licked the whiskers that still stuck out proudly from his muzzle.

  “I’d know him,” Yarri said flatly. “Because in that form he’s wearing my brother’s eyes.”

  A shocked silence fell over the family, but Torrant and Yarri, eyes locked, didn’t notice. “Ellyot’s not the only person in the five lands who had blue eyes,” Torrant said gently. “All snowcats have them.”

  Yarri swallowed hard and shook her head stubbornly. “You’re not Ellyot.”

  Abruptly Torrant was completely himself, hazel eyes and all. “No, sweets, I’m not, and I’m not trying to be him when I do this. It’s just….” He shrugged, suddenly realizing that the family was listening and embarrassed about it. “It’s kind of wonderful, that’s all. You used to think so too.”

  Yarri launched herself at Torrant and locked him in a fierce hug. “You are wonderful,” she whispered, violent tears scalding her face. “And you are a healer. That thing you become can kill.”

  “It kept you alive,” Torrant whispered into her hair. “It saved your life twice. And I can’t hate the part of myself that kept you alive.”

  “Yeah, but you only found that part by wishing you were Ellyot!”

  Torrant sighed and tickled her cheek with his nose. “Your brother was a good person. Wanting to be more like him isn’t a crime.” Yarri’s hug didn’t seem to be easing up, so he tried another tack. “Do you want to see what else I can do? Uncle Lane, do you have a piece of paper? Heavy parchment would be perfect.”

  In a moment, he was on his knees with all the children—includi
ng Stanny and Aldam—surrounding him. “Here,” he said, taking a piece of charcoal and sketching a rough building. “This is Triannon, over here, in the valley’s bowl, and this”—he sketched a meandering path—“this is the road there. This direction is the road to the Old Man Hills, and this direction is Eiran. Here’s the shrine at the halfway point, and here’s the bridge, and here’s the barracks and the main street, and the rows of houses on this side and here”—he added a special X to his rough scribbling; an artist he was not—“this is our house. Now watch.”

  He closed his eyes and focused his power, just as he’d practiced, and felt the parchment under his fingers become thicker and smoother while the edges became rougher, like one of the glossy illustrations from a very expensive book, and he heard the gasps of wonder around him. Then he opened his eyes and saw what he had wrought and almost burst with pride.

  “That’s our town!” Roes stated. “It’s as pretty as those paintings they sell by the shore in the summer. And it’s got labels—there’s the mercantile, the inns, and Daddy’s warehouse and our house and… these names here… those are us! It tells where all of us are!”

  Torrant grinned broadly. He’d saved much of his energy from the day for this special trick. “At any given time,” he told them smugly. “When Aldam and I leave, you can watch us move up the path and know we’re safe.” He looked at Yarri and nodded. “All year, you’ll know where I am.” He took another look at the map and saw something that surprised him. “Hey—the warehouse is labeled ‘Stanny’s flat.’ Stanny, did you move?”

  “I couldn’t very well live with Ma and Da my whole life,” Stanny replied, his broad, freckled smile embarrassed and pleased. “I moved about a week after you left.”