Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “I’ve got them,” she almost crowed, pushing up from her squat, and then she stuffed the socks in the boots and set them up on the bald, sandy spot of the scrub-covered hill next to them. Only winter tides came up that high, so the boots would be safe until they came back.

  “Thank you. You don’t need to wait on me.”

  “I know it.” She smiled, taking his hand. A breeze had kicked up, and it yanked some of her hair from its neat plait. The loose hair softened her face a little, even when tucked absently behind a small ear. “Auntie Beth serves Uncle Lane. Have you noticed that? He comes home, and she’s been busy all day, but she drops everything for just a moment to dish up some glop from the pot, and he sits down, and she brings it to him, and he says….”

  “You don’t have to do that….” Torrant smiled. It was an old tradition, and he wasn’t sure even Lane and Bethen were aware they’d kept it for years.

  “Yes,” Yarri said, running to his other side to kick at the waves as they crept in. “And I don’t think it’s a ‘the Goddess serves the gods’ kind of thing. I just think it’s what people do when they care for each other.”

  “Like the way your father swept the floor for your mother when he came in,” Torrant mused. “Whether he’d brought mud on his boots or not.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Yarri said softly. “But then, that’s part of the reason you’re going into Clough, isn’t it?”

  “We have a right to be angry,” he said simply, looking across the ocean to where Oueant and Dueant were heading toward their apex and Triane was just cresting the horizon. She was very red in the summer haze, and the beach glowed in the twilight with the light of the three moons.

  “Will you be less angry if you do this?” she asked.

  “I will be less angry when this evil is stopped,” he told her seriously, pausing at the fizzy surf and letting the tide touch his toes and then the bottoms of his feet. “And I’d be angry my whole life if I didn’t do anything to stop it, even if it’s something as small as bring wool to people who will use it for food money. Watch that wave, Yarri. Yarri!” She had her back to the ocean as she tried to think of something to say and did not see the enormous breaker heading their way. With a heave and a grunt, he took two steps forward, picked her up around the waist, and skittered backward up the beach until he felt loose, dry sand under his feet, with Yarri shrieking in protest the whole time. Then the breaker hit the shore in a mighty leviathan’s heave, and she gasped again as the water came up past the packed sand left from the last high tide to lap at their feet, even as they stood where they should have been safe.

  THEY STOOD, laughing and gasping with the surf foaming around their ankles until the wave finally subsided. Then Yarri realized Torrant had not yet let go of her, and his chest was wide and broad under her hands, and his clean-shaven chin was just level with her eyes. His hands were secure and warm around her waist, and his smell…. She leaned forward, just so much, to take in the scent of warm feline and cedar that had become his smell only in recent years. The smell of the cedar trees was the one thing she liked about his new home. She closed her eyes a little, leaned again, until her nose touched his jawline, and inhaled, and it wasn’t until she heard a strangled “Yarri!” from his throat that she realized the shape of his body was changing against her stomach.

  She fought the urge to jump back in alarm and instead stood steady, leaning back and looking soberly into his eyes. He swallowed, hard, his throat working and his breath coming quickly again after his mad dash up the beach. His glorious hazel eyes went dark in the moonlight. She smiled a little, the corners of her mouth curving up, and when he realized her intent he stopped, all of him, even his breath, even his heartbeat, she thought, and he swallowed again.

  And then he shook his head no and took a step back, grimacing at the keening sound she made as their bodies broke contact.

  “Two Beltanes,” he rasped, breathing as though he’d taken her in his arms and run the length of the beach.

  “But—”

  “Two Beltanes, and if you still want me then—”

  “You’ll kiss me?” she asked, hurt.

  “Then I’ll take you. I’ll ravish you. I’ll make love to you all through the wilding night, Yarrow Moon. But I’ll handfast you first.” His jaw was set, a muscle ticking in its side, and she knew he was more serious about this matter than he ever had been. A sudden smile bloomed across her face, playful and predatory at the same time.

  “And next Beltane?” she asked impishly, relieved when a grin broke through the grim self-control on his face.

  “Next Beltane, maybe then I’ll kiss you!” He flushed and laughed at the same time, and she smiled into his eyes. Someday, he was going to kiss her. It was all she’d ever wanted, and she could live with that promise.

  “You’ll have to catch me first!” she squealed, breaking the moment and running down the beach. Torrant caught her, tickling her as though she were a child again until she threatened to wet her panties if he kept it up. They calmed down and walked home, hand in hand, talking quietly.

  When they got back, he took her downstairs and gave her Grete’s gift. Yarri was speechless.

  “Why did she give this to you?” she asked, running the pretty embroidered eyelets through her hands. Yarri had done needlework—she knew the time that this had taken and the love that had gone into it.

  Torrant shrugged, the heat of his sudden flush filling his and Aldam’s old bedroom. Aldam and Roes were staying at Stanny’s flat tonight. Stanny and Evya were on a trip to Otham for business, or so they said. As Lane had become more and more entangled in the politics of the little town, Stanny had more and more assumed his father’s place in the business. Stanny did so well, the family hardly even blinked at the changeover, and the workers loved and respected Stanny as much as they had his father. But that didn’t mean Yarri’s open, wide-faced cousin hadn’t been as secretive in this last visit as he had ever been able to be in all the time they’d known him.

  “She made it for her granddaughter,” Torrant told her through his flush, “but the girl married a total bastard, and it didn’t get given—”

  “So why you?” Yarri held it up to her and twirled, making a very fetching moue of irritation when she realized that, true to their masculine makeup, the only mirror in Torrant and Aldam’s old room was a small shaving mirror in the water closet.

  “I was her healer when she died.” Torrant swallowed. “It’s an old practice, and I followed it, and she was… she was great company. I told her I had a moon-destined, and she wanted me to give it to you. She told me—” He swallowed again and waited for his body to boil into a puddle of embarrassment or unfulfilled want. “She told me…,” he tried once more.

  “What?” Yarri was obviously already looking at the empire waist, the full skirt, and the demure little sleeves and imagining herself in the gown.

  “If I gave my moon-destined a gift, she said you’d wait for me,” he blurted, and Yarri stopped preening, looked up at him through lowered lashes, and smiled as shyly as he’d ever seen her do anything.

  “Does that mean I have to tell the miller to stop trying to feel me up?” she teased breathlessly.

  Torrant scowled. He’d been looking for the boy during the last week, and though he’d seen the occasional skulking shadow from the corner of his eye, he hadn’t been able to catch the boy doing anything untoward. The whole thing reeked of cowardice—the type of cowardice he’d faced for two years at Wrinkle Creek. It was the dangerous type, the kind of sneaky, weaselly fear that had put Aylan in danger this winter and had ripped his heart out on Solstice night.

  “Be careful, Yar,” he warned, and she laughed up at him, still shy, but so delighted by the gift, by the implications, that she couldn’t be bothered with trifles.

  “Two Beltanes, Torrant—that’s a promise!” she said anxiously.

  Torrant caught his breath, unhappy at the thought of a promise for something so far away. A foreboding? Perhaps.
Perhaps it was just that his gift was truth, and he couldn’t promise to anything that might not be the truth.

  “You won’t promise me?” There was nothing but naked hurt on her face. He smiled and rubbed her arms, willing himself a way to bring back her earlier joy.

  “I promise it would take something fearsome and terrible to keep me away,” he said at last, and after a moment, the hurt slipped away, replaced by a troubled happiness.

  “The world’s in that sort of state, isn’t it?” she asked at last.

  He smiled and took her hands in his, tucked them next to his heart, and bent his head to kiss them as they nestled there. “Not here,” he said. “Here, in this space between us, the world is just right.”

  And if the trouble didn’t leave her heart, it did leave her smile, and she beamed up at him gloriously, thrilled with the promise and the wonder that might be the two of them together.

  Lion’s Gate

  AYLAN’S COLD sweat started as the countryside changed from cedar trees of the Hills to the rolling sheep country of the foothills into Clough. He had been making efforts to control his breathing as the gates became clear across the green plains of Eastern Clough, but as they neared the shepherd’s hut where the raw wool would be stored, Torrant finally stopped the cart, put his arm around his friend’s shoulders, and cupped a hand in front of his mouth, allowing him to breathe the calm, warm air inside until he calmed down.

  “You don’t have to do this.”

  “Yes I do.” Aylan’s reply was muffled by the long-fingered hand cupped around his mouth. There were lute calluses on the fingers, Aylan noticed, and on a thought he started humming that song, the one Torrant had written for Yarri and Trieste back when they were in school. It worked, because his chest stopped heaving, and he had a brief vision of Starren, as he’d last seen her, with her red hair in a wild halo behind her as she chased Cwyn with a wooden brush and a bottle of paste from the orphanage supplies. He’d spent an hour when the episode was over (and Cwyn was icing his eye!) untangling her hair with some lanolin and a clean comb Yarri had given him. Starren had sung this song to him then, and others, just to please him because he had kept her from doing real harm to her unrepentant brother. He remembered the peace, that absolute, undemanding moment of quiet in his life, and the last of his panic eased.

  “WILL YOU at least tell me what is it about those walls that has you so terrified?” Torrant asked when the panic was over. He worked hard to veil the thin edge of exasperation in his voice, and Aylan’s next words wiped it out completely.

  “The bodies spiked to the top of them.”

  Torrant turned horrified eyes to his friend, who shrugged. “Buggerers, faggots, Goddess boys—they’ve got a lot of names for cold-blooded murder sanctioned by the Consort.”

  Torrant nodded and swallowed, hoping to find the right thing to say. “What we do in bed doesn’t show on our faces, Aylan. If no one knows who you are, you aren’t going to just walk into town and have a big pink arrow plopped on your cloak, telling everybody that sometimes you have a bloke in your bed.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” Aylan shot back, fighting a smile. “It’s not like the arrow would paint itself on you!”

  Torrant squared his jaw because the wanker was deliberately missing the point. “We could always pop right into that shepherd’s hut and I could bend over and we could take care of it, couldn’t we, mate?”

  Now it was Aylan’s turn to give his friend an outraged stare. “You… you… you wanking git arse!”

  Torrant grinned. “It’s something to think about besides fear and guilt, isn’t it?”

  Aylan covered his own grin with a scowl and was still sputtering in outrage when they pulled outside the little hut, hopped out of the wagon, and then checked inside to begin loading. The bales were both heavier than they felt and lighter than they looked, and the two made short work of throwing them into the cart until they were piled one bale higher than their own heads. The two young men took a moment to lean against the cart and stare moodily across the plains to the gated city of Dueant before them.

  “Oy, Aylan—where’s all the sheep?”

  “Eh?” Aylan squinted at him, as if still not sure whether to forgive him or thank him for the image of a quick taste of heaven in the dank, greasy hut.

  “We have an obscene amount of sheep fur. Where are the animals that grow it?”

  “I think he moves them over that rise and into the valley for winter,” Aylan said thoughtfully. “He’s got pens. They get together, do that thing that sheep do, and make more midsummer dinners. Those crevices in the hills are deeper than they look when it’s all waving and green like this.”

  Torrant nodded, digesting, not thinking of much at all, because any thought deeper than “Where’s the sheep” was painful.

  “Oy, wanker,” Aylan said in kind. “Where’s your old digs? I thought you grew up not thirty leagues from this city.”

  Torrant nodded. “Mmm, other side of the city. After the first twenty leagues, the land starts getting wooded. One of the two rivers that joins in Dueance runs down from Hammer Pass and makes a little valley right before the Hammer Foothills start—that was Moon Hold.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Probably still is, if I’m thinking right—if rumors about Ellyot Moon and Yarri are still causing such a rush, it’s got to be because no one’s claimed the land. I’d bet Owen’s regent position is still open.”

  That got Aylan’s attention. “Yarri’s a regent?”

  Torrant shook his head and rolled his eyes. “She doesn’t have the right equipment. You really didn’t pay attention in your political science classes, did you?”

  Aylan flushed. “I was too busy watching you, you wank!”

  Torrant arched an eyebrow, only that, with the quirk of his off-center lip, and Aylan sighed and gave an honest answer.

  “I was busy planning how I was never going to do anything political again. I was raised to be a political animal.” He looked away, spending his next few sentences talking to the vast grassland foothills to his right. “The first woman I ever had was a courtesan, and my—I guess he was my school master—looked in and gave me instructions.” Aylan’s voice took on a mocking mimicry of their driest professor. “A little to the right, sir. To the left. Touch her there…. No, not there… lower. Good. Keep doing that. Now, take that one part, yes, it’s bigger now, and put it where it looks logical—”

  “Nasty!” Torrant muttered, torn between disgust and his urge to laugh at Aylan’s flawless comic delivery.

  “Well, it was just as fun with my first boy. And right about then, I decided I was done with politics. If I had to use my body that way….” Aylan shivered, and then he turned and met Torrant’s perceptive gaze.

  “You think you’ve become your worst nightmare, don’t you?” he asked quietly, and Aylan looked away again. “If that were true, brother, your stomach wouldn’t be tearing itself inside out at what happened this winter. You cared for those people. You did something that comes naturally to you, but you cared for the people you were with. You were trying to get them out.”

  Aylan’s eyes went to the walls surrounding the enormous city, and he did nothing to disguise his fear, his mourning, or his unhappiness at where they were going. “It doesn’t look like it’s the center of everything, does it?” he asked needlessly. “How is it that those children didn’t realize everything they needed to be happy was right outside those walls.”

  Torrant took his friend’s hand in his and raised it to his lips, seeing by Aylan’s closed eyes that the small caress was a balm to his open wounds. “You just keep remembering that,” he said. “You remember the seashore, and Starry’s wild hair, and Aunt Bethen’s horrible cooking, and you remember home. And then what we’re about to do will seem worth it.”

  Aylan laughed a little. “Thank Dueant that Yarri’s cooking now.”

  Torrant rolled his eyes. “I don’t have to. Aldam’s cooking is spot-on.” He sighed. Aldam had not been happy at being
left in Wrinkle Creek for two weeks while Torrant ventured into the danger that was Clough, but Torrant had been adamant. His absolute terror for his simple, gentle brother was eclipsed only by his certainty that Aldam had no subterfuge. It would take more than hair dye to hide the fact that he was very special indeed. Torrant’s own hair had taken to the dye as though he were meant to look like Ellyot Moon.

  “Good—I plan to crash for a week at your place when we’re done here,” Aylan was saying. When he saw Torrant’s mind had wandered elsewhere, he sobered and took the hand that was still pressed warmly around his palm to his own lips and kissed it in turn before letting go and hopping in the cart. “If I want to see who makes it worth it, brother, I just have to look next to me. This is for your honored dead, right?”

  “Absolutely!” Torrant hopped up next to his friend and faced resolutely forward. No one knew who they were, he thought firmly, trying to take his own advice. No one knew how much they hated the Consort. No one knew a wagonful of wool was treason. No one knew the person closest to Torrant’s heart was the person who could prove that Rath had destroyed his own people for his own insane ends. No one knew. It was not as comforting as it might have been, but feeling tinier than sheep on the vast sweep of foothill plain did the job.

  Together they sat in the gray wooden wagon as the offspring of Owen Moon’s dream pulled them inexorably toward his destroyer. The gates grew larger, a more opaque force of beige implacability, with every turn of the wheel.

  THE BODIES were not so high up that the stench didn’t reach them down at the gates as they passed. Two of the Consort’s guardsmen stood at the top of the gates, looking both bored and a little green around the gills, and Torrant muttered to Aylan that he wondered what rule you had to violate in order to get that sentry post.