Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “They said you could visit whenever you wanted, as long as you promised they could raise him as their own,” Ernst assured her for what must have been the thousandth time, and for the thousandth time, Pansy clung to her lover’s neck and cried.

  The incidences of bruising and broken bones all but disappeared, much to Torrant’s and Aldam’s relief. The winter before had brought nearly frostbitten women trekking through the woods to have their wrists bound after cutting off their circulation with their own efforts. In their stead were more calls to tend fevers, and more calls to tend to pregnancies just to make sure all was well, and more tending to children who had stayed too long out in the cold.

  Aylan busied himself during this time helping with the improvements. When Torrant and Aldam protested the house was big enough, Aylan said cheerfully that if Roes was as fertile as her mother, they would have children to fill it soon enough, and for a few months before she gave birth in the spring, Pansy didn’t need to sleep in the surgery anymore.

  Every night Aylan slept in Torrant’s bed and whimpered in his sleep.

  Every night Torrant held him and whispered there was nothing he could have done that would lose him the love of his family. After the last snow of winter, when the air smelled warmer even if the temperature didn’t feel that way, and the crocuses and pinks started poking their brave, stiff noses out of bare patches in the slush, in the dark of the night of what would have been the equinox, preparation for Beltane had they been home, Aylan whispered his terrible burden into his brother’s ear.

  Torrant held him harder and wept for him.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he whispered again and again to that strong body and that soft, curling yellow hair.

  “I was using them.”

  “You cared for them! It wasn’t your fault. The actions were theirs, and it wasn’t even evil—no!” he said, when Aylan would have protested. “The evil was with the judgment and the anger, and the people who would rather condemn than love. The evil was in thinking that loving children makes them weak. If your children had been stronger, if they had known any love but the kind that was in their bed….” Torrant trailed off and looked at Aylan’s face so close to his, the white of his eyes still glistening from his tears in the moonlight. Aylan was resting his head on Torrant’s shoulder—usually because of their heights it was the other way around. For three months they had been sharing a bed, and for three months they had pretended the warm body next to them was just that—a warm body.

  “I will always love you, my friend,” Torrant whispered in sudden understanding. “Whether you are a lover in my bed, or a friend when I need one, I will love you. My family loves you. As long as you need us, we will be here to love you. Family doesn’t leave.”

  A fresh flood of silent tears fell, there in the quiet of the almost spring, and Aylan’s full lips quirked in his first real smile since Torrant had seen him on Solstice in the snow. “You know, don’t you, that as soon as I’m ready to share a bed with anyone again, Yarri will probably be of age.”

  Torrant laughed a little, dryly and truly, and he kissed the top of Aylan’s head. “Well then, we were not to be.” He smiled wickedly, in the way that made all the women of the town stop talking and look at him wide-eyed. “But wanting is sometimes as much fun as having—we can just want and enjoy that.”

  Aylan buried his head against Torrant’s chest and curled closer, like a child. “Say what you like. I still think most of the joy is in the having.”

  “Well, we’ll never know, will we?” Torrant asked archly, and Aylan raised a tear-stained face and kissed his friend less than chastely on the lips. Torrant tasted salt, and then tongue, and then Aylan, and he let Aylan kiss deeper, push closer, for just a little more.

  When Aylan pulled back, they were both breathing harder, and curling up was not as comfortable as it had been. Aylan sighed with regret and then rolled over to his side. “Good night, brother,” he mumbled, and Torrant spooned him from behind and kissed his neck until Aylan’s breath caught.

  “Good night, brother,” he replied, and they fell into a deep and dreamless sleep—the first for either of them since Solstice.

  Part VI—The Fractious Moon

  Patience.

  Torrant had it.

  He hadn’t always been this patient—when he was younger, his dreams of coming back to Clough and the city of Dueance had been all about charging in, ripping Rath to shreds, and running away in safety.

  He and Aylan could probably still do that—but at the moment, it wouldn’t change anything. The rot, the vicious, pernicious rot that had taken hold of this city like the decay of a tooth wouldn’t let go.

  The sickness had to be yanked out by the roots, and the roots were in the ruling body.

  And that was why Torrant, and that was why Aylan, and that was why patience.

  But Torrant had spent more years than he could count waiting. Waiting to grow up, waiting to learn enough, waiting for Yarri to come of age.

  After training like that, a few moments in an alleyway were nothing. He had, after all, spent a great deal of time in the Old Man Hills, learning that people changed.

  And hoping that he and Yarri would never change.

  Unexpected, that’s all

  THE OLD woman was dying, but she was awfully cheerful about it. Torrant had sat at her bedside for the better part of a week, caring for her needs as she rambled under, over, and through the reality of the now and into the reality of her sweet and hard-lived past that was just as solid. Torrant was charmed to listen to her, even as he was sorry to see her go.

  And he tried hard not to resent the fact that old Grete of Shady Wrinkle had chosen Beltane week to fade from the land under the three moons.

  The last summer, he and Aldam had sent for a replacement from Triannon so their corner of the Old Man Hills wouldn’t be without a healer. This summer, the only replacement Triannon had trained was female, and as much as matters had improved in Wrinkle Creek, a woman alone (and one who, by all accounts, was timid, unsure, and barely nineteen) was in danger, if not for her own person, then of destroying all their carefully wrought tolerances for all things female, including the Goddess and the mentioning of a woman’s monthlies in public.

  It had hurt, but Torrant in the end told Aldam and Aylan to go home without him. He would stay in Wrinkle Creek until Professor Austin could relieve him for a scant two weeks at the height of midsummer. The thought of not seeing Yarri was enough to make Torrant’s chest tight with resentment, but Aldam… Aldam was pining away without his Roes, and Torrant envied them their wilding and the long, sweet summer of family he had thought would be his salvation.

  He needed a talk with Uncle Lane and a hug from Auntie Beth in the worst of ways, and as much as he worried about Aylan baring his soul to Lane alone, he envied him the chance to do just that. And Yarri… her body had been maturing in the last years—he wondered, as he had wondered since his first wilding, what she would look like when she was old enough to choose her first lover. Her sharp, dry sense of humor hadn’t softened any since she was eleven, but her vocabulary and her timing only got better with age. His life didn’t feel real if he couldn’t reach out and touch Yarri at least during the summer, and he’d nearly wept as he watched Aylan and Aldam trot away.

  If Grete hadn’t been such whimsical, captivating company, Torrant would have been miserable with self-pity, and he told her so one bright morning when she was lucid and not in pain and not mistaking him for her long lost brother, Torrellion.

  “Oh shite!” The old woman laughed, her wrinkle creases deepening with her smile. Her skin was translucently thin with age, and her eyes were rheumy with illness, but the way her face moved with a grin of delight spoke of happy years spreading goodwill and hard work, and Torrant thought sadly of his and Yarri’s mothers, who would have smiled just like this. But it was hard to be sad around Grete, even for a moment, even when she was sick. “I just wander in and out—I don’t know why a handsome and hale young
man would stay with a wild-flying old dingbat like me when there are pretty girls and boys in the sunshine!”

  Torrant blushed and ducked his head, a corner of his lip curling up in a small smile. “The only one who would dance with me would be you, Grete, and you’ve told me you’re dying, so I’ll have to dance alone.”

  The old woman’s cackle was truly delighted. “Boy—I cannot imagine a world in which you would be allowed to dance alone. Now tell me truly, do you have someone? There were thick rumors about you and that angel of a man who stayed with you—is he special to you?”

  Torrant rolled his eyes. “He’s special to me, sweetheart, but not in that way. He’s a friend from school who’s family now… and too broken to love me even if it would have worked. No—I have a moon-destined, or so everybody calls her….”

  “Well, where is she, boy?” Grete looked eagerly around—everybody knew a moon-destined couple would pine if left too long from each other.

  Torrant sighed. “She’s not of age yet, Grete, my girl. She’s barely sixteen, and I refuse to go pounding down her door when she’s still practically a child. I’ve seen what happens here….” He trailed off and flushed uncomfortably, but Grete patted his hand with sympathy.

  “When the women marry young and grow old fast? Is that what you were going to say?” Torrant nodded again, and she reached up and patted his cheek. “You’re a good man, Healer—you and young Aldam, two of the best men to come near these parts in quite a bit. You’ve taught our men how to walk like men again in this world, and even if not one person thanks you for it, you need to know we’re grateful. Now, go to my drawer over there—yes, that one, now to the bottom. That’s right, boyo. Ah, good breeding. You see it when a man doesn’t want to go through a lady’s things, but don’t worry. This is a gift. See at the bottom, that bit of white muslin? It’s wrapped….”

  And sure enough, Torrant pulled out a paper-wrapped nightgown. It had been preserved carefully, and was only a few shades off the white it had been the day it was stitched up and embellished carefully, with the tiniest of yellow, red, and pink rosebuds, from the ruffle at the skirt to the ruffle at the throat. “It’s very pretty,” he said, meaning it. It was something Roes or Bethen or even Yarri, now that she was almost grown, would embroider for themselves.

  “Oh yes.” The woman sighed. “That’s it. It was supposed to be for Graene, my granddaughter—you know her?” Torrant nodded—the little wife at the mercantile, who was less black and blue, but no less frightened for all of the changing the men were doing in Wrinkle Creek. “But they had stopped the handfast pole and the Beltane fires by the time she married, and I didn’t want to grace that profanity the priest said over them with a gift as fine as this. Then Ulin, that rotter, said she couldn’t speak to me anymore because I was an infidel… and, well, she’s spoken to me since, but the present doesn’t seem like hers anymore, ye ken?” It was an old expression that meant “you know,” but Torrant could have understood it if she’d spoken another language altogether.

  “I do understand,” he told her. “It was a gift without a home.”

  “You are a poet, boy—you’ll have to sing to me again when I’m done with this.” She rested for a moment and then closed Torrant’s hands around the paper, making it crackle in the stillness of the tiny, sunlit cottage.

  “You take that gown home to your moon-destined, boy. You give it to her now, and make her want to wait for you. Give her a reason to believe you’re not an empty promise, and she’ll wait beyond time, beyond reason, and beyond the stars’ damned dark. Will you do this for me, boy? Will you give an old woman’s gift to a young man’s beloved? It would make me feel right sprightly, to know that gown won’t rot in the bottom of my daughter’s chest of drawers.”

  And, oh, she was so serious, and this meant so much to her. Torrant felt the last of his resentment evaporate like the last mud puddle of the rainy season, which had turned to clay the week before. He put the gift gently down at the foot of her bed and took old Grete’s wrinkled, blue-veined hands in his healer’s fine, strong ones and kissed them.

  “It’s a fair gift,” he said with a suddenly thick throat, “and I know she’ll cherish it as I do.”

  Grete pulled her hand away and tousled his hair like a ten-year-old’s. “Ah, boy—you’ll make me live yet with those pretty ways of yours. Now play me a song… something sweet. I don’t know how much longer I have, and my daughter’s coming by soon to nag at me to sleep, and I only have so much music to listen to before all I can hear is the singing of the stars.”

  He had been bringing his lute and practicing the songs he’d written over the winter for Yarri, and now she was looking very tired, and more like she was actually dying than as though she was just laid up in bed for a spell.

  “I bet they sing sweeter than me, old woman.” Torrant grinned gently, tuning his lute as he spoke.

  “I doubt it, pretty boy. Now sing.”

  The next day, Torrant walked into the little mercantile, looked Ulin levelly in the eye, and told him that Graene was going to see her grandmother before she died. Ulin, a blond pasteboard imitation of a man, tried to protest, but nobody wanted to go up against Torrant anymore. Besides having a high rate of success in a fight, he and Aldam were now the designated “men of the Goddess.” Nobody wanted to end up with his most vulnerable bits torn to shreds and his heart next to his head.

  Graene swallowed painfully. When Torrant offered his arm to her, she took it and allowed him to escort her up the street and down the short walking distance through the woods to her grandmother’s cottage.

  Grete and Graene wept soundlessly at the reunion, and Torrant left them to busy himself in the kitchen and make dough for a zucchini bread that Grete’s oldest daughter, Graene’s mother, would be able to pop in the wood stove that night. It was Grete’s favorite, and she hadn’t been eating well. A part of him laughed dryly—she was dying. She proclaimed it to everyone who visited. There was no secret zucchini bread that would make her live longer. Torrant silenced this little bit of mockery. Grete might not live longer because of his zucchini bread, but she would live happier, and that was all that mattered.

  When he was done, Graene called him in. Grete had asked if he could sing her to sleep again, and he sang an old song—Yarri’s favorite as a child—about a princess and a beast and about not giving up. When Grete’s breaths rattled fragilely in her tiny, wasted body and her eyes closed, the last of the song died away, and he stood, put the lute in the case, and offered his arm to take Graene home.

  “I’ll stay,” she murmured, stroking the sparse white hair from her grandmother’s brow. Her own hair was thick and honey-wheat blonde. Grete had said often enough that Graene was the best bit of immortality she’d have under the moons. “I missed her. It hurt, not being able to visit.”

  “She missed you,” Torrant told her, not sure if it would make her feel better or worse.

  Graene looked at him sadly. “Our little world missed a lot of things under the men’s moons, didn’t it?”

  “I….” Torrant swallowed. He hated this—he hated answering questions for the Goddess like some damned priest. “Women are beautiful,” he said at last. “You are strong and lovely, and your bodies do amazing things, and you bring joy. It’s not good to forget that. It’s never good to forget that.”

  Graene dashed her eyes with the back of her hand. “Gran said I could have her cottage when she was gone, and Ulin and his nasty little store could go to the dark behind the stars, since he likes talking about it so much. What do you think?”

  Torrant smiled a little, looking fondly at the old woman. “I think a mercantile that didn’t cheat us for flour would make a lot more money than one that did.”

  Graene smiled back. “She said you made marvelous zucchini bread—is there any? I haven’t eaten today. I’d love to share some with you.”

  “You’ll have to let it cook first,” he replied, setting his lute down next to the paper-wrapped package. When he saw
it, he looked at her guiltily. It was supposed to have been….

  “The cottage is more than I deserve,” Graene said gently. “She gave you that because you being here, as her healer, means something to her. You let her give you that. I’ll—” And now her voice threatened to break for the first time. “—I’ll just stay here with her, and live in her home, and pretend I ever had her spleen.” She sniffled a little and turned toward the kitchen. “Now let me put that bread in so you can get back to the house before dark.”

  He let her go, not bothering to protest that there was nobody there at the moment who’d miss him.

  Four days later the old woman died, and he held up Graene at the funeral. The mountain people buried their dead and didn’t burn them, although the little cemetery was not a hospitable place to dig at all. Ignoring Ulin’s glare from across the township—a funeral was an event, after all—he spoke his first Rite for the Dead. As he spoke, he allowed his voice to thicken and his tears to fall, because Grete had lived her life bravely. He would face his grief bravely for the little old woman who had made days by her bedside feel like sunshine.

  When he was done, he was surprised to look up and find the men looking at him soberly and the women smiling through their tears. He had been terrified he wouldn’t do old Grete justice, and his relief had him smiling back at them with his whole heart. He nodded his head and turned away from the grave site, allowing the family to grieve as was only right, and did not see that the whole town was looking at him in awe and with more than a little love.

  Lane, Cwyn, and Yarri were waiting for him at the house when he got back.

  He was stunned at first, embracing Yarri nervelessly in the bright-lit kitchen, wondering if he had dreamed her up on the dreary way home in the stifling heat. Lane came to his side and clapped him on the back, and he clung to Yarri as tightly as he clung to his dignity and tried not to sob like a baby.