Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “All of you,” Aylan rasped, scrubbing his face with a shaking hand. “Even the eyes, dammit. Even the eyes.”

  Torrant mewled a pitiful, beat kitten of a sound, closed his eyes, and tried again. He was so tired, he couldn’t even roar in agony when the last of the change completed the healing of his bones.

  He was aware that Aylan and Eljean were on their knees next to him, both colored the only warmth in the snowcat’s vision, the warmth of those he would protect. Both of them were stroking hands soothingly through his thick fur, regardless that it was soaked with sweat.

  Then Aylan bent over and whispered in his ear, spattering sweat which sparkled off of the delicate white tufts of fur there. “Good, brother. Well done. Now change back, and we’ll go hunting together.”

  Torrant passed out toward the end of the second change, so he had no recollection of being stripped down and washed, or of having a sleep shirt thrown over his head as he was toweled dry and put into his own bed. He certainly had no memory of the regents (some of them having returned from their own flats, where they pulled out their much neglected sword belts) slipping out of his patio doors with Aylan at the lead, or of Arue’s wraithlike form sliding into his room scantly an hour afterward to curl up in the chair by his bed and watch him as he slept.

  In Between Times

  THREE HOURS later, there was a pounding at the door, and Arue was shaking him awake. “Healer! Healer, it’s the consort!”

  “Triane’s purple tits,” Torrant slurred—it was one of Aylan’s favorites—and then he recalled himself. “Goddess!” He scrubbed at his face and stumbled out of bed.

  Before he cleared the doorway to the front room, Arue hissed, “Healer, your hair!” and Torrant knew with total certainty that if he hadn’t just slept, he never would have had the strength to do even that little bit of magic.

  As it was, he didn’t have to feign the exhaustion that had him slumping against the doorframe as he flung the door open into Rath’s startled face.

  “Did you forget to pin me to the rack, Consort?” he asked, fuzzily. “Otherwise, I could have sworn it was late, and I had the right to sleep.”

  Rath’s eyes were cold and compassionless—and his lip, under his mustache, was curled up with displeasure. “Where are your friends?”

  Torrant was suddenly wide-awake, but he kept his eyes drooping and blinking as he yawned. “I would assume they are grieving,” he replied, having the pleasure of watching the consort flinch. That had been one of his major scores against the administration during the day, and it had been nothing less than the truth.

  “You all look like hell,” the secretary general had sneered. “What have you been doing that makes the lot of you look like dissolute drunkards coming off of a bender?”

  “Grieving, sir,” Torrant had replied grimly, “but I notice that you and the consort look fresh and shiny this morning. I’ll have to assume that your grief has passed.”

  Rath had flinched then as he flinched now, and Torrant’s eyes were no longer sleepy as he regarded the leader of Clough.

  “I still don’t see any proof that I have anything to grieve,” Rath answered coolly, “and I have reports that there are regents wandering the streets of the ghettoes, singing that cursed ballad.”

  “Your son’s death song, Consort,” Torrant corrected gently. “Here, I’ll be right back.” He closed and locked the door, knowing Rath would be too stunned at the rudeness to protest, and went to the battered leather cloak hanging from the hook behind the door in the bedroom. He pulled out the sheaf of papers Duan had given him the night before. Something niggled at him now, about Duan’s anger and his reluctance to tell anyone what he’d suspected Djali might be doing, but he put it on the back shelf of his mind and opened the door to Rath again.

  “It’s in his hand,” Torrant murmured, opening the papers so Rath might see. He had no intention of letting the consort actually have Djali’s death song, in spite of the fact that every musician for a twenty-mile radius of Dueance had probably already transcribed the lyrics and Torrant’s makeshift melody as the song had been sung during the course of the day. “And in his tears and blood as well.” The teardrops on the ink were unmistakable—and so was the horrible, blackened crust used to transcribe the symbol of the three moons at the end.

  The skin of Rath’s face tightened inexorably back, revealing a hideous snarl and eyes that bulged when they shouldn’t have. “You made him do this! My son’s silly love of words, of poetry would have died, and he would have ruled after me. He wouldn’t have been perfect, but—”

  Against his will, Torrant found a grim laugh forced out of his chest. “His silly love of poetry? Consort, do you know what it is you hold in your hand there?” Torrant pulled it from Rath’s grasp before the bastard could crumple it in his fist.

  “The last delusions of a foolish boy!” Rath spat, and for the first time—the only time—something like grief crossed the man’s features. But it wasn’t grief for Djali—at least, not the Djali that Torrant and his friends had loved.

  “You’re so wrong.” Torrant shook his head and ran his hands through his shorn hair, feeling the small buzz of magic where his disguise hid the last of who he was. “You’re wrong about all of it. In a thousand years, your madness will be dust—it will be a cautionary tale, one that we tell children. No one will remember you—or me, for that matter. No one. But they’ll be singing this song. Your son’s song will outlive us both, and it will teach the world that love is stronger than madness.”

  For a moment, Rath looked shaken. Truly shaken. “My world will be perfect,” he insisted.

  “Consort, was there something you needed to tell me? I assume you mean to depose us again tomorrow, and you get to sit through the proceedings.” Torrant’s legs ached from standing so many hours—he imagined the other regents were pretty tired as well, and felt a pang that they were walking the ghettoes without him.

  “Make them stop!” Rath’s normally pale features flushed blotchily, and in the morning, Torrant would take that as a good sign. It was the first time he’d seen anything approaching color in the face of the enemy. Tonight, leaning weakly against the doorframe and thinking longingly of the bed he’d been exiled to, it was all he could do not to laugh.

  “Since they’re out there against my express wishes, I’d say that this movement for freedom in the ghettoes has grown beyond both of us,” he said, almost to himself. He looked his opponent in the eye again. “As it should be, since we’re talking an entire people here, and not just a few of my friends.”

  “Your boy puppies are interfering with my guards’ ability to protect the people!” Rath said icily, and Torrant grew grim.

  “My fellow regents are serving their people, and your guards will be able to rape children and steal from businesses another day,” he said evenly, and that unhealthy blotch in Rath’s face spread.

  “If the guards are sometimes carried away in their zeal….”

  “It’s because you told them to be,” Torrant threw back. He knew it was the truth—but he had not expected to score such a direct hit, because the flush disappeared, and Rath was left pale, clammy, and shaken.

  “Who told you?” he whispered. “How did you…? Are you in league with that vigilante? What do they call him? Triane’s Son?”

  So Rath had heard of him. Torrant suddenly felt much less like laughing. “Consort, two of my friends are dead, and you’re the cause. My other friends are in the ghettoes, protecting people from you, and I have been asked to remain behind—apparently to answer your questions. Either way, I am not with them. I can only assure you that I have never felt less like the son of joy in my entire life. Now if you’ll excuse me—” A wholly unfeigned yawn threatened to take over his jaw and throat. “—I will do what the young regents insisted and retire.”

  And with that, Torrant shut the door in the consort’s face and threw both bolts. He stumbled to his cupboard for his sword belt and an old towel, so as not to get oil on the beddi
ng, and flopped into bed with the sword next to him. Arue was still in the room, shivering in the corner chair.

  “Don’t worry, little one, he’s gone,” he whispered and was surprised when she scrambled from the chair into the bed with him, forcing him to move the sword a little so they could both fit. Shivering, she clung to him through the covers, and he remembered the times Yarri had snuck into his room after they’d arrived in Eiran, suffering from a dream of her parents. “Sh… sh… sh…,” he murmured into the girl’s growing hair, wondering that she’d trust a man at all after all she’d been through at the hands of the guards.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you, Triane’s Son. Thank you.”

  Ah… he thought muzzily, his body sucking him into sleep almost vengefully. Of course, because Triane’s Son wasn’t really a man, was he?

  The god fought the urge to weep and started to snore gently instead.

  AYLAN ARRIVED sometime before dawn and removed the sword before throwing an afghan over Arue, then stripping to a sleep shirt and climbing into bed next to him.

  “Don’t you have a flat of your own?” Torrant mumbled.

  “At the moment, it’s filled with sleeping regents. Bad dreams?” Torrant felt more than saw Aylan’s nod at Arue and the sword belt.

  “Bad company.” He tried to sit up but was pushed down with humiliating ease, so he gave a brief account of Rath’s visit to Aylan’s gold chest hair, which peeped out of his shirt. He finished with, “How is it the regents are sleeping in your flat, but you hauled your manky arse into mine?”

  Aylan chuckled and kissed his forehead. “Now, be nice. I know you can’t hold a grudge longer than you can hold your breath. The alley’s full of guards, and I’m better at sneaking than they are. They’ll meet you for coffee, same time, same place, and you can all debate on the scintillating moral fiber that kept you from skewering that piece of cat yak as he stood on your doorstep.”

  “No mystery.” Torrant yawned. “You were right, and I could barely stand. That doesn’t mean I have to love you for it, that’s all.”

  “But you still do, right?” There was something in Aylan’s tone that made their sleepy banter suddenly very important.

  “Aylan, brother,” he started, but he was tired, and tired of having his heart cracked like an egg and pushed about in a frying pan, so he started again.

  “Aylan, did I ever tell you the last thing I said to Ellyot?”

  Aylan’s arms tightened around his shoulders, and Torrant breathed his sweat and his worry—and his love.

  “He was teasing me because I couldn’t hunt. I told him to piss off. He was laughing as he walked away. When I woke up, he was distracting the guards so I could get Yarri out and he could die quick.”

  Aylan sucked in a harsh breath, his words shriveled up into gravel.

  “Aylan, I’m tired. I’d like to go to sleep now. Good night, brother. I love you.” Torrant burrowed into Aylan even tighter, and Arue shifted a little on the bed now that she had more room on top of the covers.

  “Night, brother,” Aylan responded, their comfort ritual suddenly pounding in his ears like bells. “Love you too. Dream of Yarri, right?”

  “Mmmm.” And Aylan felt the tingle against his chest as Torrant let that last little bit of himself go.

  THE WEEK wore on. Torrant, Aylan, and the regents took turns wandering the ghettoes at night—with the exception of Eljean, of course.

  Eljean had gone that first night, but at one point he’d needed to draw his sword against a couple of brigands, and the shaking in his hand had made them laugh before Aerk had rolled his eyes and pulled out his own sword. Since then, Eljean had been relegated to lookout and to getting useable information from Zhane.

  At the moment, it didn’t matter—since Torrant’s conversation with Rath, the streets of Dueance had been surprisingly quiet. Torrant wasn’t sure how long it would last, though, so patrol they did. There were always bullies from the town who would wander into the ghettoes to make trouble and garden-variety criminals who took advantage of the poor living conditions to make their own dens in the crumbling tenements. It kept them all busy enough.

  They continued with their plans to evacuate the ghettoes as a whole. Since the regents now knew enough to get them hanged should things go awry, Torrant briefed them on the plans and assigned every regent a rest-day week to start moving people. Zhane’s family was scheduled to go first, and after that, Olek and Torrell were preparing a list of likely candidates. Neither of them would consent to go, but Torrant thought he was close to convincing Arue and her brother Iain that they would be needed on the farm. Torrell was thrilled.

  “You know, they’re going to be naked there, if suddenly Rath gets this idea too.” Aylan was leaning against a powdering stucco wall, cleaning his nails with his dagger in the full light of the three moons. It had been quiet that night, and a sudden resurgence of heat made a mockery of the chill that had frosted the air the week before. They had ducked into the alley to pull the leather cloaks off their shoulders and catch a hopeful breeze.

  “I’d thought of that,” Torrant agreed, turning his nose to the wind in a supremely catlike gesture.

  Aylan studied him with narrowed eyes. His brother was making more of those, these days. There were times when they were hunting that he could swear Torrant was twitching whiskers he didn’t have. There were times at rest that he caught Torrant panting, with his mouth open and his tongue tasting air between his teeth, and a few moments when he saw Torrant’s spine rippling as though there would be a tail twitch at the end of it.

  Since that terrible change the night after Djali died, it had taken very little to make his eyes spark that deadly Goddess blue.

  Aylan had all but abandoned his own flat, slipping into Torrant’s patio every night, mostly so he could let his guard down while Aylan had his back and dream of his one reason to be human. Torrant reported on Yarri’s progress every morning, from gathering supplies and leaving snippets of future letters for Lane to copy, to Cwyn’s sudden, terrible bout of sobbing on his mother’s skirts the night before they left.

  “Just like when he was small,” Aylan said to that. “He’d be the worst child—rotten to the core, destroying toys, kicking his sister, hitting the cat, and then he’d suddenly be the joy of our joy, and even Starry would love him.”

  Torrant had looked worried. “Starry hates being left behind. You can tell she wants to come to you. It’s pushing at her skin. But she’s all that Bethen has left.”

  That had been the morning after Torrant’s terrible change as well, and Aylan’s knuckles still hurt from where he’d tried to put his fist through the outside wall of the apartment building. So did Torrant’s, which didn’t make Aylan feel any better.

  This night, with no guards to bonk on the heads, they were gnawing on this other bone, but it wasn’t getting any smaller with the chewing.

  “What we need to do,” Torrant said, his face closed against the light from the moons, like a cat in the sun, “is recruit one of the guards. Ouch!” The dagger had slipped, and Aylan had split a cuticle.

  “Are you insane?”

  “No mor’n ’oo!” Torrant said around his third finger, which he’d popped into his mouth to take away the sting. He popped the finger out and showed the back of it to Aylan, then continued with his thought. “Most of them don’t want to be here, have you noticed that? I swear, more of them are dropping before we bash them than after, and for the last two nights I’ve passed several huddled in the shadows, weeping. I’m thinking the secretary general put every sympathetic guard on ghetto detail the moment Rath put me together with Triane’s Son. It’s the crap detail—no one wants it. If they’re caught being sympathetic, they get their pay docked or their family is affected. So putting them here makes them either scared or mean. I think we find the ones that are scared and offer them a way out.”

  Aylan shuddered. “Are you really going to put these people into the hands of someone whom Rath can’t trust?”


  Torrant grinned, that disconcerting flash of blue in his eyes taking Aylan by surprise. “Now, brother, I didn’t say there wouldn’t be a failsafe, now did I?”

  Aylan remembered their first visit to Clough together, when that glimpse of Goddess blue had sweated him cold for two days. Abruptly, that sweat was back, freezing his breath in his chest and soaking his linen shirt more than the heat.

  “What are you planning, brother?”

  “I only have what the Goddess gives me, brother…. Shhh… someone’s coming.”

  It turned out to be townsmen, emboldened by the lack of guards, come to the ghettoes to raid the child brothels they had heard so much about. Torrant leapt out from behind the wall, growing the snowcat’s head as he poured in front of the hell-raisers like a liquid shadow. That fur-tufted head, sitting on the man’s shoulders, was a fearsome enough sight, but when Torrant threw back his ears and roared, the sound bounced off the crumbling mortar of the ghettoes like one of Cwyn’s old rubber balls, and he was even more frightening. The townsmen shrieked simultaneously, turned back toward the marketplace, and ran as though the star’s dark were about to swallow them whole.

  Torrant’s face and eyes were his own by the time he ducked back into the alleyway to find Aylan silently laughing so hard he could barely stand. Laughs had been so few and so far between that Torrant found himself joining in, setting off another round by mentioning that the biggest of the men had pissed himself and left a trail all the way back to the market.

  The laughter faded, and the two of them met eyes under the three moons. An entirely different heat flared between them than what had permeated the summer air just moments before.