Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  Clean

  ONCE HE got over the rim of the bowl valley, it was easy to follow Torrant’s trail—even in the dark. All he had to do was follow the bodies.

  The first ten or so were the most viciously mauled—often their throats were ripped out, leaving larynxes like broken branches jutting from blackening flesh. After that, Aylan could read the weary pattern of an exhausted man finishing a job—a simple swipe to the jugular, a quick nip at an unguarded wrist. Some of the soldiers had crawled a few paces in their own blood and then simply lay and let the world go dark to their dying vision. And still the snowcat killed.

  As the final moon readied to set, Aylan realized the bodies had left the path back toward Clough and were veering to the west—toward the great river that eventually ran through Eiran. When there were no more bodies to mark the trail, he continued to the river, maybe knowing in the back of his mind what he would find there.

  The river was wide and low at this juncture; the snowcat would have known that. They all would have known; they had made the journey so often. In the moonlight it was a light-struck ribbon of diamond velvet, molten and sharp, and it was easy to miss the huddled man, crouched in the rushing shallows of the runoff of a still-snowy mountain and hugging his knees to his chest.

  “Dueant!” Aylan swore softly, but Torrant didn’t hear him over the river or the howling of his own demons. “Torrant!” Aylan called more loudly, but still pitching his voice low so as not to disturb the night. “Torrant, brother, you need to get out of there!”

  The face Torrant turned toward him was so pale and blue it shone like great Triane herself. “I’m n-not-t-t cl-cl-cl-clean,” he chattered. “I n-n-n-n-need to be c-l-l- cl-clean!”

  Goddess! Aylan nodded, and reasonably certain the only people within five miles of the two of them were sleeping with the stars this night, he set about building a bright fire and then stripped to his underclothes.

  Wading into the river was like jumping into a snow bank, and the rocks under his feet were like knives. Aylan was pretty sure he covered all Dueant’s body parts as he cursed his way to where Torrant sat and reached down into the river to haul his brother up by his armpits. Torrant almost drowned them both by refusing to go, but Aylan had only been riding for a day. Torrant had been on a hard road for three days before he had pulled every power the Goddess gave him and killed and killed and killed. Besides, Aylan thought as he forced Torrant’s half-dead limbs to move over the uneven riverbed, Torrant was shorter than he was by nearly a head, even if he was thicker in the chest and thighs.

  The night air, which had seemed only mildly chilly before he’d gone in, was suddenly frigid as they emerged, and Aylan lost no time stripping Torrant down to his bare skin and wrapping his own cloak around his shoulders. Then he hung up the sodden clothes. Torrant, for his part, was possessed of the dangerous stillness Aylan had come to associate with his brother trying to forgive himself for things he had done in his other form. Aylan remembered the string of fleeing bodies—many of them slashed from behind—and shuddered. I can’t remember, Torrant had said once. I don’t want to remember.

  Aylan prayed on this night, at least, Torrant wouldn’t be able to recall a damned blessed thing.

  When he was done hanging Torrant’s clothes on the low branches of the poplar trees growing near the river, Aylan danced around a little in the chill spring breeze, and then swore by Oueant’s enormous manhood and stripped off his underthings, threw them on the nearest branch, and wriggled in under his cloak next to Torrant’s chilled, naked body. For a moment, Torrant sat unresisting as the two of them began to grow a little warmer. Then suddenly he whimpered and started to struggle out of the cloak.

  “Don’t touch me, brother,” he rasped, standing pale and naked in the firelight. “I’m n-n not-t….” He stammered, because it was cold outside the cloak. “C-c c-c c-clean,” he finished, shivering wretchedly. “I’m-m not-t….”

  “Bollix!” Aylan shouted and stood to wrestle the cloak around them both. This protest must have been the last, because Torrant allowed himself to be quietly wrangled back to sitting by the fire, and Aylan was too busy yelling for him to get a word in edgewise. “Bollix, bollix, and shite!” Aylan continued, furious. “They were cowards, damned bloody-arsed cowards, and they got what they deserved!” Aylan found he was weeping as he shouted, and he couldn’t seem to help it. He wrapped his arms around Torrant’s bare shoulder and pulled his head into the hollow of his chest, dripping tears into the chestnut-colored hair as he rubbed it against his cheek. “You fought for us, that’s all. They came to hunt innocent children and teachers and—”

  “And earnest young men who could hold a sword—” Torrant’s voice fractured into grief. “Ah gods, Aylan. They were so young—so damned young, and they looked like you and like Aldam and Stanny, and they died…. They all died, and I killed so many men. And those young men, they’re still dead. Oh Goddess, Aylan, the things I’ve done….”

  “Sh….” But it was hard to comfort him when Aylan was sobbing too.

  “Dueant’s tears, my brother, I pollute you with my breath.” Torrant was still not too weary and heartsick to try to pull away.

  “You bless us all, Torrant.” Aylan wept, keeping his brother firmly tucked in his embrace, unmindful of his manhood or his pride. The vision of the vast, crackling ember that had been the beautiful school abused him again. Professor Nica had been nowhere to be seen, and thoughts of the gentle librarian burnt alive in the middle of her beloved books, and of Torrant’s kind mentor lying dead next to the students he’d tried to protect, laid siege to Aylan’s breath in a suffocating rain. As the surging rage choked him, he knew, deep in his stomach, in his groin, the fury that had sent the snowcat running for vengeance. He sobbed a final time and clutched Torrant closer. “You do what we wish to—you fight back.”

  “It’s awful,” Torrant whispered, sounding terribly young. “It’s awful, to know I’ve done this, to know that I’ve killed, and I can do it again….” His voice trailed off, and Aylan knew he must be beyond exhausted. “I don’t know how you can even bear to touch me.”

  “Shhh….” Aylan wrapped the cloak around them tighter and leaned back against the bedroll he’d found in Heartland’s saddlebags. “There’s nothing you can do that would make me afraid to touch you.”

  “Someday,” Torrant muttered bleakly, “there might be.”

  Aylan shushed some more into his hair, and in the crackling quiet of the fire by the river he was suddenly aware they were two naked people, wrapped in a cloak alone at night. And then he was aware of Torrant snoring abruptly on his shoulder. In spite of himself, of the tragedies of the day, he felt a wry smile twist at his mouth. “Oh, my friend,” he mourned into the silence. “Why is it we’re only alone and naked together when we’re coming out of the cold?”

  TORRANT JERKED awake like a frightened child when the sky was barely gray, and Aylan choked on a snore and fell back asleep. Torrant whimpered and snuggled back into Aylan’s arms, and then he, too, realized they were both pressing smooth bare skin against smooth bare skin. And Aylan’s body was definitely responding to his presence. He was suddenly tempted.

  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to run his hands down Aylan’s ribcage, feel the muscles of his stomach, touch the mysteries of his arousal? Wouldn’t it be lovely and beautiful to forget the horrors he had wrought the day before in the perfection of this gray predawn on what was going to be a lovely spring day?

  Oh Goddess. A groan broke his throat, and the temptation disappeared. Aylan choked on another snore, his warm body rippling under Torrant’s head and his breath rasping in Torrant’s ear. Abruptly, Aylan sat up, taking Torrant with him until Torrant’s head slid down, making embarrassing contact with his groin. His manhood was erect and large in its nest of golden hair. Torrant fought the cloak to scramble up to his knees so he could look Aylan in the face.

  “Shite!” Aylan swore blearily, rubbing at his eyes. “What’s wrong? You made a sound—what’s wrong
?” Blond stubble covered Aylan’s chin and cheeks, and his yellow curls had escaped their habitual queue to wrap around his face. His pouty, soft mouth was slack with sleep, and suddenly Torrant’s friend was so much dearer than his swelling heart could hold.

  “I love you, brother,” Torrant said, holding his hand to Aylan’s face. “I love you, and I love you forever—and tomorrow is Beltane.” He grimaced and swallowed tightly, still feeling the cloudiness in his head and his eyes from his indulgence in grief the night before. “Tomorrow I was going to handfast Yarri, in front of our family and the town who took us in, at the Beltane fair.”

  Aylan closed his eyes and trapped Torrant’s hand with his own. “Ah,” he said in acknowledgement. “So, what are you going to do instead?”

  Torrant looked out at the river. He couldn’t remember when his animal had stalked away, leaving the man huddled in the water, but he’d been soaking in the frigid ice floe for at least an hour, and the blood was as much a part of his soul now as it had been then. His sins could never be washed away. He was a weapon—the Goddess had made him so. It was time he aimed himself at the target he most wanted to bleed.

  “Well, you’re going home,” Torrant said firmly.

  “Like hell,” Aylan replied in the same tone of voice, but Torrant ignored him.

  “And while you go home, I’m going to visit an old friend,” he continued quietly, “and ask her to forge papers for a dead man.”

  Aylan squinted, scowled, sat suddenly cross-legged, and wrapped the cloak snugly around himself, offering Torrant half so he could sit in it too. Torrant declined and hotfooted it across the sharp river rocks to his damp clothes, which were hanging from the trees. Shivering violently, he started pulling them on, made uneasy by Aylan’s scowling silence.

  “What are we going to do after that?” Aylan asked stonily.

  “You’re going home first—” Torrant insisted.

  “I said like hell. Now tell me the rest of the plan.”

  “When I get home,” Torrant said stubbornly, “I’m going to ask my beloved to….” Suddenly the dispute with Aylan was forgotten, and he was left shivering some more when the sodden hem of his shirt thwacked against his thighs.

  “To what?” Aylan asked, his voice gentling.

  “To let me use her dead brother’s name,” Torrant answered, and the face he turned toward Aylan was as naked and cold as his bare feet on the stones of the shore.

  “I’m coming with you, so don’t be an arse and argue with me.” Aylan sighed, standing and stretching under the cloak. “Now, take off that damned shirt and come get the things from your saddlebag. If we’re going to make the ferry to Otham in the next two days, we’d better leave soon and have breakfast first.”

  “That’s a wonderful idea,” Torrant snapped back miserably, doing as Aylan said because the shirt was freezing and clammy. He moved toward Aylan and his bags, suddenly awkward in his nakedness when he hadn’t been before. “You wouldn’t happen to have a fishing pole, would you? Because Aldam and I ran out of food our last night.”

  Aylan stood to give him room and wrapped the cloak securely around his own shoulders, even while eyeing Torrant’s blue-pale shivering body mournfully. At Torrant’s words, he smiled. It was a tired, heartsick smile, but the expression did as much to lighten the painful morning as the sudden golden shivering of river under the cheerful onslaught of the sun. Doing the same hotfoot dance across the river stones as Torrant, he hopped to where his horse stood placidly and started rooting through his saddlebags.

  “Actually, brother, I have several sandwiches still stuffed in my saddlebags—Bethen wouldn’t let us leave without them.”

  Torrant let out a laugh that was awfully close to a sob. “Did Bethen make the bread?”

  “It’s Yarri’s,” Aylan said, pulling the food from the saddlebags.

  “Well then, surely we should survive the trip to Otham,” Torrant said, his voice wobbly but standing. “And would you believe I forgot to pack underwear?” he asked as he rooted through his saddlebags. Actually, Aldam had packed for him, but he wouldn’t throw that stone for the world. “I’ll be chafing like mad by the time I get there.”

  “Well,” Aylan added through a full mouth, “that’s such a romantic picture, I think it’s a good idea we were never meant to be.”

  Torrant took a sandwich from his friend’s extended hand and met Aylan’s eyes for the first time in some moments. “I don’t,” he said soberly, and there didn’t seem to be anything to say after that.

  TORRANT WAS quiet and broody that day. The next day, Beltane, he was almost saturnine with suppressed grief. But the day after, they stood on the deck of the ferry to Otham and leaned against the rails, the horses comfortably and blindly tucked into the hold of the ship.

  Torrant held his face to the wind and let the sun soak into his hair and smiled. His underthings had dried out the day before, so he was no longer chafing, but that wasn’t the reason for the sudden lightening of the heart, Aylan was sure.

  “There’s a weight that comes off,” Torrant said out of the blue. They were his first unsolicited words in two days, and Aylan almost choked on the butter pastry he’d bought from the ferry cook.

  “MMmlllmmm?”

  Torrant looked at him with sympathy and smiled. “Did you get any of that for me?” he asked, and Aylan held out the extra one in surprise. Torrant hadn’t eaten much either.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been so quiet,” he said at last. “It’s just—” His face clouded again. “I had such plans of riding up to my beloved and… and being her hero, just for the day. It hurt, when that day was here and I was not in it, ye ken?” Torrant liked the old expression and thought he’d use it more often.

  “I ‘ken,’” Aylan agreed. “Do you think Yarri will forgive you?”

  There was more grief, when for a moment there had only been a handsome young man in the sun. “No,” he said. “She will forgive me even less when she finds out what I have planned.”

  “What do you have planned?” asked Aylan shortly. Torrant hadn’t elaborated, and his mood had been so snarly Aylan had dreaded asking.

  “I shouldn’t tell you,” he said. “You’ll think it means you can come.”

  “I am coming,” Aylan argued back. He was pretty sure he’d won, but he wasn’t taking chances.

  “It’s dangerous, brother,” Torrant said, his clear hazel eyes boring into Aylan’s. “I do love you. Don’t doubt it. I don’t want you anywhere near where I’m going. You are one of the people who needs to stay alive in this world for me to stay sane.”

  “And you’re not as smart as you think you are,” Aylan retorted. “Because if you think I’m letting you go to Clough without me, you’d better think twice and spit in the wind. You are my family, more than those dumb-ass shite beggars in the Jeweled lands who were trying to breed a pretty puppet, and your family is my family, and we all depend on you living, and it’s my job to make sure that keeps happening. So tell me what you’re going to do as Ellyot Moon….”

  “Sh!” Torrant squashed, exasperated.

  “And I’ll stop terrifying you with my ignorance,” Aylan finished up shortly, and Torrant had to laugh.

  “Gods,” he said at last, turning his face to the brine. The sea was a merry deep blue today, and it really was hard to keep hold of fear when the fathomless deep seemed to smile. “Oueant’s happy lance, Aylan—you’ll have to live in the ghettoes. You know that, right? Somewhere they won’t see you.”

  “Well, yes,” Aylan said doubtfully. “Yes, I’d have to. But where will you be living?”

  Torrant grinned without any humor at all. “Oh, I’ll be living under Rath’s very roof. I plan to be a regent of Clough.”

  Aylan choked on his last bite of butter pastry and had to be thumped on the back several times before settling down to listen. When he was done listening, he swore long and loudly and more creatively than Torrant ever could.

  Part IX—The Leaving Moon

  Tor
rant padded toward the regent’s quarters, sliding through the shadows like a shadow himself.

  That vision of him and his loved ones in the future, with good living beneath their belts—ah, until this moment it had seemed like such a fantasy. And Yarri was here, in Dueance, in Clough, where every danger they’d ever fled lay in wait to kill them all, so it shouldn’t seem so much clearer, all of a sudden.

  But clear it was. If they could only survive, he thought hungrily. If they could only survive, skip this terrible year in Clough like it never existed, he could pretend all they had in their future was a quiet life, the healer’s life he’d planned.

  He thought of her touch on his skin, and it was almost truth.

  But first, they had to survive.

  An Old Friend

  TORRANT HAD forgotten how pretty the capital city of Otham was. The walls and cobblestones were built with a light-brown stone that bleached a cheerful yellow in the sea-thinned sun, and the white awnings keeping the sun off the windows and walls opened the light to the city, even in the shadows, and made it easy to feel the breezes that swept in over the walls and through the streets. The people dressed lightly—white tunics, white blouses, with bright yellow or green vests and sky-blue skirts or breeches. Torrant remembered trips the family used to make, before the Beltane fair grew larger and the Otham vendors came to Eiran, for scented oils and cleanly sanded toys and bolts of sumptuous cloth. Even though Bethen and the girls had been made to hide their faces under veils and walk behind the men, the friendliness of the people had been enough to forgive them this one painful custom.

  On this day, walking through the streets after seeing where such customs could lead a people, Torrant wasn’t sure if he’d be so forgiving.

  But then he noticed, now that Alec of Otham had been ruling for more than five years, many of the women seemed to be walking bareheaded and equal with their husbands, and he had a sudden hope for the next step in his plan.