Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “Not at the moment, sir. They take a break in the midday and reconvene around dusk, when the temperature drops in the city.”

  The young man nodded. Good. Give this old man with the pulse beating in his throat a chance to spread the word, and then he could make the entrance he’d planned.

  “How do you want to do this?”

  He looked at Aylan, who was too grim for the late spring sunshine spilling gold from his hair. “Quickly, without blood,” he’d replied dryly, and Aylan had rolled his eyes.

  “Your mouth to Triane’s ears. Now think—are you going to play the ingénue, allow the fat boys to lead you where you want to go? Or…?”

  “Definitely option two.” The thought of dissembling was too awful, too repugnant. There would be so much subterfuge already, and he had never been good at it. “I can’t do this if I’m faking everything—it will be hard enough faking my name.”

  Aylan nodded and then shook his head. “It will be harder that way, in the end.” He said it softly enough that the words were almost lost in the jangle of horse tack.

  Of course, Aylan would know.

  “Is there anything else—” A hesitation. “—sir?”

  Torrant’s mouth quirked up, and even the apparently stolid old man, who seemed married to his toes, flushed. “No,” Torrant said quietly, his eyes darting around the room and wondering which new set of clothes he should wear for his grand debut to the Hall of Regents. The old man made to leave, and a sudden foreboding shivered through Torrant’s chest and knotted itself down in his guts. A year, they’d told the family. A month, he’d thought to himself, but what if it was closer to a year? He looked at the duffel bag and his lute case and thought unhappily that he would probably need more to wear than what his ex-lover had shoved in his saddlebags as he and Aylan were departing from her home, forged letters of introduction smuggled in with his lute.

  “Um,” Torrant said tentatively, hating the eagerness with which the concierge (what had been the man’s name?) turned around. More fodder for gossip, he supposed. “A….” What was the word? It was comforting that none of his brothers would have known either. “A clothier? Um, haberdasher? I didn’t bring enough clothes to stay for long.” The idea of staying long in this city already made his stomach churn.

  “Absolutely, sir,” the concierge said, a relieved smile gracing his wizened features. The name may have been strange, but the behavior seemed to be what the old man was accustomed to. “I can send him in with your midday meal.”

  “Thank you.” He was, in truth, grateful, as much for something to do while he waited as for anything else.

  The clothier brought in his food—fruit, a sandwich, a flask of wine—and proceeded to cluck over him, gushing about all the many ensembles he could create for the new regent. The new regent felt badly about saying “No, just a few outfits for this season. I’ll let you know if I’ll be here for the fall.”

  “Oh, but, sir!” The clothier was a compact, fluttery man with an extraordinarily embellished waistcoat and a minutely trimmed goatee. “You must… don’t you see? Regents attend balls. It’s a social obligation. They need to dress for the senate and dress for dinner. They need clothes for fencing practice…. You cannot function socially without more clothes than this.”

  The new regent closed his eyes. It wasn’t as though he couldn’t afford it, right? He had a sudden thought, then. “Right. I hear you.” He nodded. Good—he’d do it, sing the song and dance the jig if he had to, but if he were going to, he wanted something practical as well. In spite of what he’d said to the family, he was reasonably sure he and Aylan weren’t going to escape this venture without their alter egos coming out to play. “May I make a request?” he asked and then began to outline what he wanted, ignoring the clothier’s protests that such a garment would not be fashionable in the least.

  “All the better” had been his mild answer. “I’ll take two.”

  The clothier swallowed. There must have been something chilling about the way the handsome young man had said that, because the designer seemed to realize he was swimming in water far deeper than he was comfortable with. “Well, then,” the man ingratiated, “can I at least take this garment from you?” He picked up the simple, battered cloak of forest green with its shocking yellow liner and almost had the thing yanked from his hands.

  “No!” Torrant clutched the cloak to his chest and glared at the clothier as though the man had tried to steal a beloved pet for the stewpot. “No.” Torrant swallowed, tightly, and his eyes gleamed suspiciously for a moment before he gave a distraught smile. “My sister made it,” he said at last, glaring at the clothier. He hoped the hitch in his voice when he said “sister” hadn’t caught the man’s attention.

  The man took the hint and bowed. “Of course. Now, if you’ll allow me, I’ll have a few items delivered before nightfall.” So Torrant could wear them to the Hall of Regents. Of course.

  He nodded and bid the man good day.

  When the door was closed, he sank to the oversized bed, clutching his old cloak to his chest, feeling his first round of shudders sweep him, from icy bowels to clammy palms. Sweet Dueant, brave Oueant, could he really do this?

  He looked outside and saw the dark spring shadows had barely moved from the moment he’d ridden under those cursed gates, and the small bit of food he’d eaten when the clothier had been there congealed in his stomach. His face flushed under his shivers, and he fought the urge to vomit. With deep, steadying breaths and purposeful movements, he reached for the one thing at this point that could calm him down.

  Cradling his lute in his lap, and being careful to preserve his voice so he could sound strong and sure later, he deliberately wrote a song of longing. He inscribed the words in painfully neat letters on the parchment, being mindful never to use his beloved’s name. Still it whispered through the air, through his new, uncomfortable clothes and the sumptuous, ridiculous room. When he heard the clock at the square ring the half hour, the name followed him, until he was afraid he would stand before the regents, decked out in bravura and fraud, and it would scream from his skin, making the one giant lie of his name irrelevant.

  Yarri.

  He wore her name like a flag on his heart as he strode across the marble archway from the apartments to the hall. He could hear the whispers as he went, coating him with lies he hoped would be stronger than his belief at the moment, and he bore his head high and his chest out as though his boots were weighted with truth.

  The sea of young regents, some of them not much older than he’d been when he’d gone away to university, parted for him like two separate armoires of fanciful velveteen clothes and extravagant feathers, and he pretended not to notice the startled gasps, the stares, and the wide-eyed, childlike wonder at his presence. All of it was glamour; it would help when the time came.

  The hall itself was vast. His first thought was that there were relatively few outer rooms around the great hall, and his second thought was that the building didn’t look this big from the outside.

  His third thought, random and irrelevant, was that he could get heartily sick of teal-colored velvet and mahogany wood, both of which were plentiful around the inside of the hall. By the time his eyes sought out the small antechamber separated by a waist-high, wooden partition from the semicircle of chairs and desks that wrapped partially around the consort’s dais, he had the fanciful notion that he and Aldam should start making teal labels for the toxic medicines in their surgery. This particular shade would warn any inquisitive child, he thought with wide-eyed distaste.

  Then he was in the antechamber, presenting his borrowed name sotto voce to the record keeper with the scroll and quill pen, who was so shocked he knocked over his inkwell and stared nakedly at the young man with the dark chestnut hair and the hazel eyes. The young man’s sardonic smile let him know his disapproval had been acknowledged.

  And then he waited for his turn to speak, fully aware of the wildfire sweeping the room, his borrowed name dancing i
n the flames. To calm his nerves, he paid attention to the man who was speaking, and that sardonic smile at his quirkily beautiful lips deepened. How perfect.

  “I’m telling you they were ready for us,” the man was saying desperately. “There was a battalion of trained soldiers outside of the school, and one of the Goddess’s own beasts with the warriors on the front lawn!”

  “And I’m telling you it’s impossible!” snarled the squat, scarred man to the left of the consort’s seat. “Eiran has no army, Cleant only cares about farming, and Otham has no interest in our business. Now tell me, since your superior officers seem to have all deserted, did you at least rid us of the sorcerer army being trained at Triannon?”

  The soldier suddenly looked troubled. “They were children,” he said after a moment. “I think you must be mistaken, sir. They were children, and they got away.”

  “They were sorcerers,” spat what looked to be the secretary general, only to be interrupted smoothly by the thin, aesthetic-featured man with the salt-and-pepper hair and full mustache, sitting on the consort’s throne.

  “I’m sure they looked like children,” he said softly, understandingly, with a condescending smile. “We all know that the Great Whore is deceptive. Now, resume your narrative, young man. How did they get away again?”

  Oh, Torrant couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity if he’d scripted it. Pushing through the swinging door at the antechamber, he walked swiftly toward the soldier at the podium, and spoke with a carrying voice trained by years of singing by the fireside.

  “Oh, that’s easy,” Torrant said, smiling that hard smile and meeting the eyes of the secretary general and the king consort with a fierce and dreadful joy. They moved with underwater slowness, staring at him in shock, and the smile only deepened. “I can tell you how those children got away from an entire company of soldiers descending on a school of healers and poets. My cousin and I evacuated those children out the back entrance while twenty-five men in our local militia died to protect us. Those ‘warriors’ that this man speaks of were beardless boys, defending their home with the help of a couple of aging professors who had never drawn blood in combat in their lives.”

  The collective gasp of one hundred and fifty regents, as well as assorted registrars, secretaries, and retinue, sucked the air right out of the room, but now that he had spoken, now that his boiling fury was vented for the people who should be flayed with it until they bled, his own anxiety was forgotten.

  “Who are you?” asked the secretary general when he had recovered his tongue.

  His eyes on the pale shock of the king consort himself, Torrant Shadow replied, “I’m the person you two have been trying to kill for the last twelve years,” he lied with just the right amount of nonchalance. “I’m Ellyot Moon.”

  HIS OLDEST son (by ten minutes at most), truly named Ellyot Moon, had always loved this part as a child, but as he aged into adulthood, it troubled him.

  He stood now, his arm around his tiny wife, looking at his father with an undisguised compassion. For his entire life, his father had never pretended, not even to tell him pleasant lies as a child. The cat never ran away; it died. His da was never a hero; he was simply a healer. There was no happiness guaranteed; it was always on loan, because Joy could never stay in one place for long.

  The only exceptions to the truth, ever, had been his “uncles,” Aylan and Aldam, and the fact that they were uncles had not been a lie so much as it had been a fact made true by force of will.

  That truth—as well as the reason Aylan had kept the battered, ripped, and blood-crusted cloak in his closet, long after the thing had become too stiff for use—had taken several Beltanes to figure out.

  But beyond these subtleties, his father was everything he said he was: as average a man as he was average in height.

  Except that he wasn’t. It was his very truth that made him extraordinary, and this extraordinary truth made his lie, the one terrible lie of taking Ellyot Moon’s name, such an enormity of sin.

  Part XI—The Moon at Night

  The Return of Triane’s Son

  WHEN THE pandemonium died down and Torrant was back in his room, crouched in a corner and trembling all over with aftershock, he wondered how he’d pulled it off. He’d needed to produce his letters of introduction, of course, and then explain how it came to be that a boy everyone assumed was dead would turn up twelve years later, breathing vengeance on the country that birthed him. His own words kept echoing in his head, with the perpetual questions: Did I do them right? Did I speak for our loved ones, Yarri? Did the world hear?

  Rath had been exactly as he’d imagined.

  Aloof, judgmental, the man had recovered from his initial shock and sat back to let the furor of “Ellyot’s” return wash over him. Torrant had watched him while both men at the dais took stock of the regents’ reactions—who protested without question, who sat back and listened to what was said, and who (a surprising number) looked at Rath sideways, as though they had suspected him of foul play all along. Rath returned those looks blandly, and his very mildness seemed unsettling to a number of the regents. They were especially unnerving to the few older ones who had stayed throughout the Purge, as the people in the Regents’ Hall referred to the wholesale attempts to rid the world of a people whose only crime was seeing the third moon.

  As Torrant had continued to speak, and as the regents continued to listen, Rath’s expression seamlessly shifted from detachment to distaste, and when Torrant enumerated the deaths of his family, an expression crossed the consort’s face akin to that of someone who went walking through a kitchen late at night and accidentally stepped on a slug.

  “Why didn’t you stay to defend your family, sir?”

  Rath’s one question was the one that had haunted Torrant his entire life. The answer hadn’t changed.

  “Yar—my younger sister, sir. The family charged me with her protection. She is everything they loved best in the world.”

  “Are you telling me that you fled from a fight to save a child?” asked the state general, and Torrant’s disgust with the question was evident in his reply.

  “Are you telling me that honor required your soldiers to kill them?” His lips had twisted in bitter triumph as the general, and the rest of the assembly, recoiled. “I returned,” he said into that silence, wondering if everyone could see the blood seeping from his chest at the admission. “I returned to see if my family had survived.” Then he had looked Rath straight in the eyes, knowing that while the rest of the world would need to read his papers, examine the divot in his ear—Ellyot’s birthmark, Torrant’s first wound—and quiz him interminably on the workings of the Moon family, this one fact would seal Rath’s belief forever.

  “Who did you think burned the barn, Consort? You painted it in the blood of my family to make sure everyone believed the Goddess had killed them. Who do you think came down and burned it, to cleanse what you had desecrated and honor our beloved dead?”

  That Rath had reacted was irrefutable. What his gasp and rounded eyes could mean were still up for debate.

  That was what had Torrant most on edge—the endless debate. The council hadn’t adjourned until well after midnight, and in the end, there were only two things anybody was willing to admit. The first was that, yes, the young man claiming to be Ellyot Moon had the Moon family birthmark. The second was that, yes, his horse was descended from Courtland, the pride of Owen Moon’s breeding program, and the same animal that had disappeared from its holding on a frosty autumn night shortly after the death of the trader who had taken him. Other than that, letters of introduction were taken by the registrar for careful consideration, and all the regents were told to go home.

  The end.

  Torrant had just bared his soul and lied about his very person, and the result? Go back to your overlush apartment, and we’ll see you tomorrow, bright and early. So there he was, bleeding the adrenaline from his body in terrible shudders, wishing beyond everything that Aylan was there to t
alk to.

  There was a sound on his open porch. The back door jiggled, and Aylan was there in the flesh, so agitated that Torrant jumped up in greeting, eager just for something to do.

  “Guardsmen,” Aylan gasped. “We’ve got a boy watching the barracks. Half a company just loosed itself into the city. We’ve locked the children away in every closet, but… brother, I know it’s been a long day, but we’re going to need you tonight.”

  Gratitude and sweet, sweet clarity surged through Torrant like a rogue wave. Purpose—at last, he had purpose; it was immediate and real, and nobody gave a damn if he was Ellyot Moon or Triane’s only son, because his teeth, claws, and sword would be irrefutable, concrete, and now.

  Without speaking, he pulled his sword out of an armory cupboard that was mostly there for decoration. Then he picked up the extra-full, hooded, black leather cloak that had been delivered to his room when he’d returned from the Regents’ Hall and closed his eyes, concentrating hard with his gift. His white streak of hair glowed suddenly brilliant as he saturated the leather cloak with his magic instead of using it for his one element of disguise, but that didn’t bother him. When he was done, still without a word, he threw the cloak at Aylan, which hit him in the face with a heavy thump.

  AYLAN GRUNTED in surprise, but Torrant simply met his gaze. The eyes he turned to his dearest friend were glacially, icily blue.

  “Put it on, brother,” Torrant snarled. “There’s hunting to do.”

  Aylan smiled with forced brilliance and removed his own battered cloak. He loved Torrant’s fierceness, he always had, but seeing that proof of animal in his gentle brother’s human heart unnerved him. From the moment Aylan realized those eyes didn’t desire him the way he desired Torrant, he’d known his friend’s heart was unreachable when that winter-sky blue looked down on the world. Unbidden, he thought of Yarri, and he amended the thought. Torrant’s heart was unreachable to anybody else when he was fierce like this, but for Yarri, Aylan was sure, he would become human again.