Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  Aylan tried not to laugh and confessed he’d never thought of it before.

  “You should, mate,” Torrant told him soberly. “Knowing who’s looking watch on those gates can save you or slay you.”

  Aylan swallowed and then looked at Torrant with a new realization in his eyes. “What made you think of that?” he asked. Like Torrant, he was looking anywhere but up. They were both glad of a reason not to look at the bodies, the flesh drooping from their bones, their faces obliterated by predators, standing gruesome sentinel over the city Aylan had started to think of as “The Capital of Don’ts” instead of “Dueance.”

  “The men who were sent to raze Moon hold and slaughter the family. They didn’t want to be there. It was a crap detail for them. Something they’d earned because they’d spoken up for the wrong kind of people in front of the wrong kind of friends. Those are the people who might catch you a break. Not often. I wasn’t going to risk Yarri on it—not when I could barely hold a sword—but those are the people you can make think ‘Is it worth my life? Is it worth my conscience?’ Those people know what the truth is. They just haven’t had anyone speak it back to them in so long they can hardly recognize it.” Torrant was quiet for a moment. “Some people just need the truth spoken back, that’s all.”

  Aylan felt his face grow cold and then his heart and then his stomach. “You have a knack for thinking like this,” he said as they passed under the worn yellow archway that had faded to a dingy tan over the years.

  Torrant turned icy-blue eyes toward his oldest friend and smiled a razor smile. “It comes and goes,” he admitted. Aylan’s heart stopped in his chest, and a burly, sleepy-eyed guard with greasy hair and a teal-and-black livery stretched too tautly over a middle-aged gut stepped up and gave the standard list of questions.

  Aylan barely breathed as Torrant answered questions easily about bringing wool to the rich matrons of Dueance, and yes, sir, they knew the penalty for going to the Goddess ghetto, and no, sir, they had no intention of straying off of the nice, even redbrick path laid throughout the shining (beige) golden city of holy Dueant. Thank you, sir. It was good to know that the path to the ghetto was paved with uneven stones that would break the wheels and axles of the little wagon. Yes, it was a shame the people couldn’t take care of themselves. Were they free to go? Strength in battle to you too, officer!

  And then they were clear, and Aylan wondered if his lips were blue from holding his breath.

  “Torrant,” he wheezed, and his friend turned those same aloof, alien eyes to him. Aylan swallowed and reached out to touch his hand to make sure the flesh was still human. In an instant, he remembered where they were, and that a touch on his friend’s wrist could get him swung from his palms until his bones cracked and the crows stripped the flesh from his cheekbones and gobbled his eyeballs, and he pulled his hand back to his lap so abruptly the horses skittered.

  “What?” Torrant asked neutrally.

  “Your eyes,” Aylan choked out, not wanting to be frightened by the sudden change, but not able to help himself.

  Torrant nodded calmly. “I thought they’d gone funny. It happens when I get too nervous—you’ve seen it.”

  “Aren’t you nervous that someone will figure out what you’re doing?” Channeling his magic, illicit, death-bringing gift?

  “Not when I see through these eyes.”

  And with that, Torrant guided the horses as surely as though he’d been the one who had ridden the city streets for a year. Aylan had drawn him a detailed map, and it wasn’t difficult to figure out. Rath had legislated a boycott of the usual masons and bricklayers against the Goddess’s children in the city, so anyone who had been herded to the ghettoes at the beginning of Rath’s rise to power was forced to live in the mud. Without bricks and small concrete trenches to funnel the water to the river, the mud became a sewage swamp, complete with the stench of the chamber pots being dumped into the streets. Consequently, with no paved roads, there were no trenches for indoor plumbing, and with no indoor plumbing, no water closets, and so all the disease and filth and sickness this entailed.

  Since Lane had started smuggling wool to the Goddess ghettoes, the people had been able to afford their own materials (and, of course, a few of Aylan’s wool bales had been a sight heavier than they should have been), so roads had gradually been laid in the last two years. They were uneven and unprofessionally done, and in many places they had already started to crack, but sewage trenches had been dug, and pipes had been laid, and after nearly three years of quiet Moon intervention, the twelve-by-twelve square block area marking the dispossessed trapped inside Dueance gates was no longer roped off for a cholera outbreak once a year. And Rath could no longer claim the disease that had ravaged the area was a sign of vindictive and angry gods, striking down the Whore’s bastards.

  Finding one’s way to the Goddess ghettoes was as easy as turning right at the first street by the gates and following the new, amateurishly paved roads to the ghetto square, where the well had recently been rebuilt as a small, crude fountain, since most of the houses now had water.

  “Down that street,” Aylan muttered, trying hard not to look around to see if anybody recognized him. Doing that would make sure he stuck in people’s memory. Torrant was as calm as a summer sea, and his very lack of tension was making Aylan break into a cold sweat.

  “And to the left, and then down the back alley. I told you, brother, I could do this myself—in my sleep.”

  “Silly me, I didn’t listen.” Holy Dueant, was it his sweat he smelled? Torrant thumped his back reassuringly, and Aylan felt his shirt stick to his skin. Yes, yes it was. He had seen those eyes before, Aylan reminded himself. He had never minded the snowcat in the past: he had always admired its fierceness, and of course that damned sexy beauty. But the thought of what the guards would do to Torrant, in either form, if they knew what those blue eyes meant was enough to make Aylan’s teeth chatter.

  “Calm down, brother,” Torrant murmured under his breath. “If I worry too much about you, my eyes will go back, and then you’ll have to worry about me falling asleep as we do business, so take a deep breath, and we’ll be fine.”

  Torrant’s chilly calm seemed to work, because Aylan felt his heart rate slow, and the ocean sound of pounding blood receded in his ears. Just in time, too, because there they were, turning the corner to a small, shaded alley between two older brick buildings. This alley hadn’t been paved, but it appeared to be raked regularly, and toward the middle there was even a tiny, thriving garden. Aylan knew the owner of this particular stone home had a white lock of hair and grew so many herbs for healing and eating that the building overflowed with red clay pots and sprouting green plants. It was a useful gift when stranded in an unfriendly city, and the people who lived nearby had missed out on much of the disease besetting the rest of the Goddess’s ghettoes. This was why, Aylan had always supposed, the owner and his family possessed the strength to lead the underground movement, accepting help and distributing the small amounts of good fortune that came their way.

  As they pulled up to the back of the house behind the alley, a door opened, and two children, a boy and a girl only a little younger than Starry and Cwyn, popped out. They were crawling over Aylan like kittens on a yarn basket before Torrant could ask them who they were.

  “Did you bring us something… sweets? Did you bring us sweets, Aylan?”

  Aylan grinned, for a moment forgetting he was sitting next to a lethal wish of the three moons, and reached into a pocket in his cloak, which was, thank heavens, not sweat stained. He pulled out a packet of the sweets he’d had Aldam make before they’d left Wrinkle Creek. “Here, Arue, and Aldam made them, so they’re the best you’ve ever tasted!”

  The little girl took them, and the two children, both with brownish hair, skin, and eyes, popped a sweet in their mouths. The young men got to watch those charming dark eyes grow to the size of Courtland’s hooves. Torrant smiled—not his usual, stomach-dropping grin, but Aylan thought if he
had to see true warmth on his friend’s face while those eyes were staring out at him, he might actually throw up.

  “Didn’t Auntie Beth give us something else?” Torrant asked, and Aylan rummaged through his pack under the seat.

  A pained expression crossed the older boy’s face. “Not cookies….” He trailed off as though afraid he was being rude.

  “No, not cookies,” Torrant reassured with a wink at Aylan that Aylan returned.

  “Winter is coming, younglings,” Aylan said with a more relaxed smile, “and Torrant’s Auntie Bethen can knit much better than she can cook!” And with that he produced matching hats and mittens—connected by a long cord that would run under a full coat or cloak, holding the three pieces together. The boy’s set was a solid, gorgeous purple with gold moons and stars around the brim, and the girl’s was a delicate, flowery pink.

  Where more privileged children might have been polite in their thanks, these children were not privileged. Most of the wool coming their way was carded, spun, crocheted, and knitted for the very rich, and come winter, their small fingers were used to being stiff and achy from the cold. And the colors… bright colors cost a bright amount of money, and the taste and skill Bethen put into the children’s garments was enough to make the two children who had to eke out their living in the backstreets of a forced ghetto enclosure moue their little mouths in joy.

  “Tell Auntie Beth thank you,” the little boy said gravely. “Tell her we’ll meet her someday, and then we can make her cookies to say thank-you!”

  “Absolutely, Ian,” Aylan replied, and then he grinned at them so they could celebrate their gifts in peace. “Now go get your father—we have something for him.”

  TORRELL, IAN’S father, had the same brownish coloring, with the exception of the damning streak of white on his brow. Once the Goddess’s children had been rounded up and enclosed in this tiny space, not even allowed to leave the city of their birth for a better life, Torrell had cut the brown part of his hair to within an inch of his head and braided the silver streak that condemned him and his children to imprisonment. “If my children are going to be punished for my gift,” he’d said, “then we will make this gift important.” He had been providing his people with fresh vegetables and herbs for the last five years, since the ghetto laws had been passed.

  The hardest part of unloading the wool bales was maneuvering the bales through the tiny doors and the even tinier home that Torrell’s family had built with the stones from older buildings that had fallen apart in this area of the city. Torrell was a fair craftsman—the pavement in front of his home was the smoothest in the ghetto.

  When they were done, the wool bales had been distributed in every room in the house and covered with cloths like small tables, where they would stay. After Aylan and Torrant left, the wool would be given to the most skilled women in the ghetto to earn money for the community as a whole.

  After the unloading, as dark set and the moons rose in the sky, Torrell asked Aylan and Torrant to a customary cup of tea.

  “It’s good to see you, Aylan,” he said with a smile as they sat at the small table in the front room/dining room/kitchen facing the door that opened onto the street. There were no windows opening into the room, but the shadows under the door were long and twilight-colored as they sipped their tea, and evening was obviously setting in. “We haven’t heard from you in….” Torrell frowned, trying to place a date. “Right before last Solstice, was it? Stanny came with the last three bales.”

  “I didn’t know Stanny had been here!” Torrant looked reprovingly at Aylan, and Aylan shrugged. Stanny had been part of the family conspiracy to keep Torrant out of Clough. Nobody had felt it necessary to tell him. Torrant’s eyes blazed even brighter blue at the thought of his open-countenanced, cheerful cousin in the sort of danger they were in now.

  “He did fine,” Torrell said with a small smile. “But he didn’t tell us why Aylan had stopped coming.”

  “My cover in the city was blown,” Aylan said baldly, and he shrugged. The only news that filtered into the ghetto was the kind telling them another law limiting their humanity had been passed.

  Torrell looked at him carefully, as though putting something together. “No,” he said, obviously making the connection. “Not your cover identity—your contacts in the city were exposed… but not for spying.” Suddenly the brown man smiled grimly. “You needn’t look so surprised. A regent’s two children commit suicide and ten others flee the country, and you think we’re not going to hear about it? Besides, it spawned another round of priests coming to screech in the ghetto square about how we were evil and our influence made good young people fornicate.” Torrell raised his eyebrows a couple of times, a small bit of humor from a man who had lost his wife, his freedom, and his youth in a terribly short span of years. “Because, you know, young people have never fornicated before the moons rose in the sky!”

  Torrant laughed then, a lower, grimmer version of his usually somber laugh, and Torrell looked at him closely for the first time since they sat down to share fellowship. “There is something Goddess about you…,” he said softly, and Torrant’s blue stare was all challenge.

  “More than you know,” he said, his lip curling. “I’m Torrant Shadow—I’m not sure if Aylan talked about me—”

  Torrell’s eyes grew as large as his children’s when presented with sweets. “You’re Torrant? Your father was Torian Shadow?”

  “You knew him?” Torrant asked curiously. He had no memories of his father—he’d been very content with the two surrogates Dueant had thrown his way.

  Torrell’s answer was interrupted by a terrible thumping at the door, and, as though this were a drill they had rehearsed many times, he looked at the children, and they darted for the back bedrooms, then squirreled away into places in the closet where most men wouldn’t know to look. Torrant and Aylan stood, as though to leave out the back door, but Torrell shook his head. “They’ve seen your cart. Just sit and be silent and you”—he pointed to Torrant—“keep those Goddess-blue eyes to yourself, you hear me?”

  Torrant nodded, and he and Aylan stayed put. The guards burst through the door so quickly the slightly built Torrell was thrown back against the wall. He slid down to the floor, stunned and seemingly trying to orient himself to the sudden violence.

  “Where are they?” the first guard, a tall, burly, muscle-bound giant of a man demanded, and to Torrant and Aylan’s surprise he looked right past the two strangers at the table and started peering into one of the tiny bedrooms. Then he threw open one of the closet doors with such a crash that, for a moment, the men were afraid the children had been discovered.

  “We’re sitting right here,” Torrant said mildly, hoping to draw attention to himself and Aylan rather than the children.

  “Yeah, but you’re full grown, aren’t ya?” the smaller guard grunted. “We can’t get money for you from the high folks, so just stay put and you’ll keep your right to breathe.”

  Torrant stood up to reply, to object, to stop them, when he heard a screaming from the other room. The little girl….

  “Goddess,” he breathed, and Torrell struggled to his feet, calling out. “Arue!”

  “Brother,” Aylan said quietly under the commotion, making contact with Torrant’s blue eyes. “Neither of us are armed.”

  “Brother,” Torrant replied with a terrifying smile, watching with hooded, fierce eyes as the bigger guard dragged the girl in by her hair into the claustrophobic, darkened room, “I’m always armed.”

  Torrell had stood and was lunging across the guards to pull his screaming child from their cruel, hard fingers when the smaller guard, the one not holding the hysterical little girl, caught him across the face with the hilt of his sword, throwing him to the ground in a spitting seizure of blood and desperate cries. Abruptly, Torrant was two hundred pounds of muscles, sharp teeth, and claws as long as knives, and the little guard screamed and went down in a silent, gurgling heap with a torn throat.

  Th
e bigger guard dropped the still-shrieking girl and dashed out the door, screaming bloody murder as he did so. The snowcat made an almost canine whine in the direction of the dead body, the tension in his muscles and his darting eyes conveying he wanted badly to go after his prey, but he didn’t want to leave Aylan holding the corpse.

  “Go!” Aylan urged. “Stop him before he brings the whole king’s guard down here. I’ll hide this one until you get back.”

  Torrant gave an exultant growl and disappeared out the door in a bound, his body moving so fast Aylan wasn’t sure the speed wasn’t as magic as the cat body.

  TORRELL GROANED from the floor, and Aylan suppressed his own sigh. It wasn’t fair. The person who had spent much of his life planning to be a healer was gamboling down the street, anticipating murder, while the person who had spent his entire life trying not to be a spy and becoming one anyway was stuck in this tiny room, trying to sew the torn edges of this nice family’s life back together.

  But of course, Aylan thought, as he ran to dampen a clean cloth for Arue to hold to her father’s damaged face and then to gather her brother to help him hide a body in an old horse blanket so they could stash it in the cart, all their choices boiled down to the same question for both of them. What would Lane Moon do?

  TORRANT SUPPRESSED a triumphant “Mrowl!” as he spotted his quarry, charging down the street like a runaway carthorse. Damned man! He was making so much commotion Torrant was afraid to just run him to ground. Too many people watching, too many people more afraid of wild animals than they were of corrupt humans who could kill them with a thought and a lie. As he ran, he spotted a pile of wooden crates against a wall and a roof without an overhang, and that gave him an idea.

  With a fluid leap he was on top of the crates, and another leap, and another (that one wasn’t so graceful—he could hear the crates toppling in the alley behind him. Damn… was that glass? Had he just wrecked some poor ghetto dweller’s hard-earned product? He’d have to pay for that later). After a third he was trotting across the rooftops, up to the peak and down to the leap between the buildings, still so swift compared to the clumsy guard that eventually he was tracking parallel and waiting for the right building, with the right alleyway…. No, not yet.