Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “Power?” Yarri asked, feeling her hands shaking. She took a chomp out of her knuckle and didn’t notice that it started to bleed again. “He used his gift on a guard? He and Aylan go out on a regular basis, fight battles? He goes home, changes, stands on the floor, and confronts Rath? And he’s running around the city as that cat, saving people, and using his gift…. Do you have any idea what it costs him to alter a memory like that?” She was shouting to the room in general, and everybody looked at her in dumb surprise.

  “Do you?” she demanded, fighting clear memories of her beloved, young and distraught, falling to his knees in the dusty road to be sick, and of his helpless weeping when it was over. He had done this, he had done these terrible things far away, and she hadn’t been there to comfort him. His and Aylan’s awful undertaking, their utter aloneness, assaulted her like a predator in a back alley.

  “This isn’t what he said he’d be doing.”

  She turned to Bethen and Lane for confirmation, and they nodded soothingly, because that last statement had been almost hysterical.

  “This isn’t what he said!” Her voice rose, and Bethen heaved herself painfully out of her chair and came to lay a calming hand on her shoulder, but Yarri stood and shook it off.

  “This isn’t what he said!” she cried, and on that note she turned on her heel, her braid whipping behind her, her skirts twirling so quickly around her ankles that she almost tripped as she stalked out of the kitchen and toward her room, purpose written in every line of her small body.

  “Where are you going?” Cwyn asked in surprise.

  “Where do you think I’m going?” Yarri snapped over her shoulder. “I’m going to pack!”

  Yarri’s room had been tiny when she’d shared it with Roes, but now, when it was hers alone, it was perfect: snug, airy, filled with billowy, pale-yellow curtains with blue accents. The bare boards of the floor had a bright rag rug to keep the draft off cold feet, and the armoire was full of fewer dresses than her Uncle Lane wanted to buy her and more than she thought she needed. The wood-framed bed she’d used to share with Roes was still there, but with only one person, it was vast and comfortable when it had once seemed cramped and tight.

  Yarri had been looking forward to sharing it with Torrant for a bit, before they built a practice in Eiran, near the orphanage.

  Critically, she looked at the armoire and started pulling out her best dresses. Trieste had bought Torrant and Aylan new clothes before they’d left for Clough, and she’d told Bethen in the letter following their departure that it wasn’t enough. Apparently, regents and royalty were expected to wear a scandalous number of outfits in a week, and she was pretty sure Torrant would spend much of Courtland’s proceeds on looking the part of a role he’d never wanted to play. And now she had to join him.

  Just as she decided to take all her best dresses, and to find a place to buy more when she got to the city, she heard footsteps coming into the room, and she turned to meet Bethen. She could remember, she thought wistfully, when Bethen’s footsteps were quick and light enough to belie her size, and her entire body rustled into a room, her energy seeming to push out from her as she moved. Not today.

  Today, Bethen moved like an old woman. She had always been tall and plump, but the flesh seemed to sag from her large frame, and the lines in her face—until recently, all laugh lines—seemed to press painfully into her cheeks and around her nose. Her hair, always a rusty-gray combination, had gone almost all yellow and silver.

  Yarri looked at the woman who had been her mother for twelve years. Bethen had taken her in, read her stories on her knee, taught her to knit and what she knew of cooking. It hadn’t been much about cooking, but since the main ingredient had been love, it had been all Yarri needed to know. Bethen had helped her embroider the red flowers on her dress after her first moon cycle and held her for long hours, weeping, every time Torrant had mounted his horse and ridden away from her, the one person who loved him best.

  All those years she had needed Bethen; and now, more than ever, Bethen needed her, and she was leaving.

  When her anger at Torrant hadn’t done it, seeing Bethen, looking older than her years and ill and lost, made her throat tight and her eyes shiny.

  “Oh, Auntie Beth….”

  Bethen shook her head and smiled, her eyes still bright as new wool, in spite of all the changes her illness had wrought. “Don’t say it, sweetling.”

  “But you’re not feeling well.”

  “I’ll be fine. No, no”—when Yarri might have protested—“I won’t make you stay. At least,” she amended, “I won’t make you stay more than a couple of days. Lane is getting the cart and a great deal of money together, and Cwyn will take you. You’ll stop by Wrinkle Creek and tell Roes and Aldam what is happening and maybe meet an old friend as well.”

  “Who?” Yarri asked, still trying to assimilate all this planning into the middle of her “jump on the first fast horse she could saddle” scenario.

  “I don’t know—not for sure. I need to write a letter and”—Bethen’s mouth turned up sardonically—“if I’m not mistaken, so do you, right?”

  Yarri put her hand to her mouth. She had almost forgotten the priest!

  “Oh no! What should I do?”

  Bethen shrugged. “Tell them the sea air has given you rheumatism, and you can’t travel.”

  “Really?” It sounded highly unlikely to Yarri, but Bethen shook her head, laughing a little.

  “The higher-ups in Clough—I don’t think they’ve ever been beyond their borders. If they have been, it was to look down their noses at those of us in the dirt. They’ll think it’s likely, even though we know that it’s mostly the fisherfolks and the sailors and the women who do tight, tight needlework who have the problem. And that way, when the handwriting changes to your Uncle Lane’s….”

  “They’ll have to accept that it’s true!” Yarri smiled, the most practical part of her absence dealt with. Then her face fell, and she reached for Bethen’s hand—the one not holding the full canvas sack. “But you….”

  Bethen nodded. “My darling, I want you back by spring. I mean, I can give no guarantees, right? But it would help, if you’re back before Beltane, at the very least.”

  No guarantees. Yarri dashed her eyes with her hands. She was planning to leave Bethen, and Bethen was planning to leave all of them—there could be no doubt about it. “I can’t leave you when, when you might not be here in the spring!”

  Bethen cupped her foster daughter’s cheek in her palm and stroked away another tear as it threatened. “Of course you can,” she said. “You must! Do you think I can stand it, that our boys are so far away from us, and nobody can go to their rescue? You need to go. You need to keep them safe and be the reason they come home if it gets too hot for them in Clough. You need to remind them what haven is all about.”

  Yarri threw her arms around Bethen, and Bethen squeezed her in a hug that, although from a more delicate body, had all the strength of will Yarri needed to feel. “Haven is all about you, Auntie Beth,” Yarri murmured against Bethen’s neck, and Bethen’s voice was suspiciously thick when she spoke again.

  “And now it will be all about you and Roes and Starry and even Evya. You will be haven and home. It’s all I’ve known to teach you, right?”

  Yarri couldn’t speak for a moment, and they clung together in the bright sunlight of Yarri’s window, until Bethen made a small sound, maybe of pain, and Yarri sprang back, horrified that she could have hurt her.

  Bethen shook her head, smiling through wet eyelashes and holding out the canvas bag. “It’s just that this is getting heavy, sweetling. Here—you need to pack this. It will keep you from getting too caught up in what the boys are doing and keep you grounded where we need you.”

  Yarri opened the bag. “Wool?” She gestured vaguely to her own project tote—in fact, one that had been made for Bethen by Trieste some years ago. “I’ve got three jumpers working for—”

  “Torrant and one for Aylan,
yes, I know—and you’ll have time to work on them too, darling. But I’m talking about a calendar of sorts…. Here.”

  She started pulling out brightly colored hanks of fine yarn that was often combined with sewing thread and used for socks, or sometimes used alone for slightly heavier lace shawls. “Here—that’s thirty-four hanks of sock yarn, with the thread for the heels and toes, and two hanks of lace—enough for a shawl apiece. You make, what? Two pairs of socks a week, if that’s what you’re doing?”

  Yarri nodded. She often knit while supervising the little ones or reading to them as they went down for their nap. Socks were good for such activity. There was not much attention used on a sock, and everybody needed them. “Yes?”

  “Well, then. That’s seventeen, eighteen weeks of knitting, all told, with some to share and some in case of accidents and such. Nineteen or twenty weeks if you use the odds and ends, you see?”

  Yarri tried to do the math in her head and failed—math had never been her strong suit, even simple figures. Unless it dealt with sticks and string, she was hopeless.

  Bethen shook her head. “I should have dragged you to those classes by your tiny, shell-like ears!” She laughed genuinely. “If you leave by the end of this week, you’ll have from Samhain until just after the snows melt, sweetling. That’s your window. If you run out of yarn before you’re on your way back, you’ll know to start. I know you, Yarrow Moon, daughter of my heart. If you have no wool in your fingers, you’ll harry whoever will listen until you gather some. Even your beloved. Even the joy of our joy.”

  Yarri looked again at the spectacular spectrum of hues and tints, from magenta to gold, from forest green to sunshine yellow, from pale blue to rose, and everything in between—even a few lovely, misplaced neutrals—waiting, just waiting for the venture to begin. These looked familiar, she realized. She had seen these hanks—some of them for years—always, always asking when they could be made up.

  Later, later my dear. I want time to savor those. They’re too beautiful to hurry through. Especially the lace.

  “Oh, Auntie Bethen,” she mumbled, sinking down in the midst of all that treasure, saved for a day that Bethen would never have. “Oh, Auntie Beth, you’re never going to…. You won’t have time to….”

  She slid past the bed to the floor, in the puddle left by her breaking heart, and Bethen sank down next to her. She wept quietly in her beloved Aunt Bethen’s arms, knowing keen, sharp, ripping, aching grief one more time. Because they knew, they both knew, that in spite of Bethen’s best efforts, guarantees were thin, and eighteen weeks might be too long.

  And Yarri would still leave.

  FAR AWAY in Clough, Torrant whimpered and turned in Aylan’s arms, his lips finding and kissing his brother’s bare chest in an attempt to pull all the comfort slick skin could offer.

  “Shhh…,” Aylan whispered, feeling in his bones the morning bell that would wake the regents had one or two precious hours before it rang.

  Torrant’s eyes opened, the grief and exhaustion of the night before slurring his vision with torpor. “Yarri’s coming,” he mumbled, wanting to say more, wanting to spill all his mind’s visit home into the breath between them, but unable to fight the weariness that deadened his limbs while his heart screamed in protest. His poor body simply could not manage to wake for all of it.

  “Really?” Aylan asked, in the same state. “Thank Triane.” And then they both fell asleep, clenched tight in the only comfort they had.

  Half-Healed Wounds

  TORRANT CRINGED as he made up his cravat in the mirror and tried to even out his breathing so Aylan, perched like a carrion vulture on a chair outside the bathroom, wouldn’t spot the sign of pain.

  The bones that had snapped through his flesh the night before had not completely healed, and the pounding he’d given them afterward had apparently spawned more small fractures and wounds that were waiting for a change of form to completely reknit.

  Torrant was tired enough that dressing for the floor was a challenge. He wasn’t going to be able to change again, at least until after the session, and so he would have to live with the pain.

  “I saw that,” Aylan said mildly. He didn’t tell Torrant, but during their lovemaking the night before, he had felt the anomalies of the injuries under his friend’s skin. His touches had been especially tender, but Torrant had been too broken to feel the extra care.

  Torrant ignored him. “We have to make her go back,” he said, looking past his own image in the mirror. He knew what he would see—the sunken eyes, the grief-lined face, and especially, the recently butchered hair. All the times people had called him beautiful, he had never cared; but now, all he could think of was what she would see. It would hurt him to death, if Yarri didn’t think he was beautiful anymore.

  “We can’t,” Aylan replied, keeping his voice even with an effort.

  “We must!” Torrant gave up on the tie and turned to Aylan desperately. “You can ride out and meet them. You can get word to Roes and Aldam, telling them not to come! Don’t you see the terrible danger she’ll be in here?”

  Aylan scrubbed his face with trembling hands and shook his head. “Don’t you see, brother? The only thing that’s keeping me from trussing you like a dead pheasant in your sleep and hauling you home by main force is the fact that Yarri’s coming to keep you alive.”

  Torrant gaped at him, then clenched his jaw. “That’s not fair!” he protested. “What we’re doing here is important—you know that. It’s more important than you. It’s more important than me—”

  “And what you don’t understand is, if there is no you, there is no ‘great undertaking.’ These people will not be saved if you’re not here, and if it takes Yarri’s presence to keep you alive and make this happen, then I say let her come!”

  “But she had to leave B—” Torrant swallowed and turned away, and Aylan came to him and turned his shoulders around, his nimble fingers shaking as they worked deftly at the cravat. Torrant met Aylan’s eyes and saw his own misery reflected there. “How could she leave Bethen?”

  “Because she left her with Lane and Starry and Evya and Stanny,” Aylan choked back. Helplessly, his hands went to Torrant’s wet-combed hair. It had been so pretty in the sun as they’d played in the water, loose around his face, the white streak practically glittering in all that dark. “Don’t you see? Bethen taught us all about joy—she’s the reason we know why it needs to be saved. She knows that. That’s why she helped Yarri pack.”

  A weak trickle slid by Torrant’s nose, and he wiped it away with irritation. After the night before, he was so tired of tears. “If Starry were coming here, you’d go stop her,” he said at last, feeling small and petty for even bringing it up.

  Aylan forgave him even as the words were uttered. “If I left to go stop her, you would continue the fight.” He swept Torrant’s suit at his shoulders and turned him around again to straighten it at the back. Considering what Ellyot Moon was walking into this session, looking his best was mandatory.

  “I can survive without Yarri,” Torrant said stoically. It was hard to keep dignity in his voice when it was breaking, and the only thing keeping him from dropping to the floor and howling was the knowledge that the rest of his friends were going to be at his door in a moment, waiting to go out for coffee before confronting Rath like a snowcat in his cave.

  Aylan shook his head, screwing up his face as though he wanted to kick something. “I’ve done this before, you know. I know what you’re feeling. But you’re not running home with your tail between your legs to let your heart heal in the hands of the family. No, you’re staying here, hoping that what’s left of your soul will keep you breathing until it gets done. You won’t last without her, brother. I wish I was enough.” He took a deep breath and then another, and still his voice was not going to stay strong, and he still had to finish. “Triane’s bloody red heart, I wish we were all the other needed. But you need her.”

  Torrant’s hands came up to hold Aylan’s, which had
never stopped their fussy, restless grooming. “You’re doing fine,” he reassured with a weak twitch of the lips, and Aylan waved him off.

  “I’m not saying I’m planning on leaving—I don’t know if even Yarri can do it alone. But I need help, mate. I can’t live like this anymore. You’re breaking my heart, and you won’t let me care for you. I need her to make you care for yourself.”

  Torrant looked at him, their faces naked and pale and haggard, and tried hard not to notice the shaking in his own hands, the tremble to Aylan’s jaw, the terrible fragility of both of them, just a hair’s breadth away from the helpless chasm of being too weak to step forward.

  “Please, brother,” Aylan begged, sensing his wavering. “Please don’t send her away. She’s your only chance to get out of here, and just like you couldn’t survive my death, I’m not going to live through yours. Please, Torrant… just, please, that’s all. Please.”

  “You wank.” Torrant took several deep breaths and got himself under control, and he leaned forward to kiss Aylan’s temple, nuzzling his friend’s pretty yellow hair. “You wank—she’d better not get hurt.”

  “Of course she’ll get hurt,” Aylan replied soberly, refusing to be embarrassed. He’d beg and weep like that on the square in front of the entire benighted city, if that’s what it took. “It’s inevitable that Yarri will get hurt,” he repeated, an infinite sadness in his voice. “But she’ll survive. You won’t take one more hit and keep going, not without her.”

  There was a knock on the door, which was fortunate because Torrant was a breath away from apologizing for his weakness, and then Aylan might have needed to break something then.

  The young regents were all dressed like Torrant—their darkest, most formal suits, their ties impeccably done. As one entity, they took a deep breath of shock when they saw Torrant’s hair. In spite of Aylan’s best efforts, there were bare spots, next to the scalp, that had been too badly mauled by the belt knife to fix.