Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  It would, in fact, look better off.

  With determination, she stood and did just that, loosening the stays in the back with some difficulty—must all the dresses she and Trieste ordered require a lady’s maid to secure?—and then hauling the whole thing over her head in a loud mutter of taffeta and satin brocade.

  There—she took a breath. Much better. Her chemise was pretty fancy, with lace around the cap sleeves and over the bosom, and her knickers under the petticoats had little bits of green embroidery on them, which she couldn’t understand at all since these people professed to be so chaste she didn’t know who would actually see that bit of whatnot. But all in all, once she slipped off the petticoats and the white embroidered stockings and the pantaloons (and ‘loon’ was right—because the designer of that bit of clothing could not have had all his faculties about him!) she felt not only more comfortable but….

  Desirable.

  He wanted her. She knew he must. She had frissoned the scorch of his eyes up the backs of her arms this evening as he’d entered the room. His every touch seemed to pull her heart closer and closer to the surface of her chest, until it beat throughout her skin, in her throat, on the curved surface of her bones. He wanted her. He loved her.

  And she had been a fool, a fool and a weak-willed child to let him walk away from her this summer, when even a fool should have seen that he could not do this alone.

  With a huff of indignation at her foolishness, she pulled the remainder of the pins out of her hair and shook it down her back, sniffing with dissatisfaction as it came just beneath her shoulder blades instead of down past her hips. How she was supposed to make any decent sort of braid out of hair this short was beyond her, but Trieste said it would make a difference, and so she had gone along with it.

  She would not, would not tell him about how Trieste had found her, moments after the maid left, weeping mournfully over two-foot lengths of hair that had been discarded in the waste bin of her room when she was supposed to be getting ready.

  She would certainly not tell him that Trieste had heard about the last time Yarri had gotten her hair cut so severely—when she was six years old, and Torrant had been forced to hack it off with a belt knife to keep her safe on the road. Trieste felt bad then—awful, in fact—but there had been no changing it, and—Yarri sniffed—it was only hair.

  And she would refuse to comment on his hair until he told her why he’d butchered it in a far less friendly way than she’d trimmed hers.

  Good. She had her back up now, and sitting in the dark, half dressed, waiting for the other half of her heart was not quite so daunting as it had been. She listened and heard the shower taps turned and some movement as he dried himself off. Then she heard a muffled swearing and some rummaging-around sounds—she presumed he was searching the cupboard under the sink—and some more swearing.

  Abruptly the washroom door was opened by a young man obviously in a temper, and she wondered if he had even checked the couch to see if she was still on the divan as he pounded his way into the bedroom.

  He rounded the corner with a towel clutched around his hips in one hand and a brown bottle of adhesive and a short length of gauze clutched in the other hand.

  He saw her sitting there, on the edge of the bed in the dark, dressed in her small clothes, and he almost dropped the towel. Then he dropped the gauze and bottle when he was recovering the towel, and then almost lost the towel again as he was recovering the gauze and the bottle.

  “Breeches,” he said dumbly, clutching everything at his waist. The ends of the towel flapped woefully at his thighs. “Breeches. I was going to… but I needed… but you… home. Walk. Breeches.” He stared at her, his face more naked than his body—even without the towel—and breathed, “Oh Goddess,” which was the loveliest thing Yarri hoped to hear.

  Smiling with the smugness of a beautiful woman, Yarri stood and moved toward him. “Here,” she murmured, taking the gauze from him.

  He visibly flushed, even in the dark. “I need to….” His now free hand made a vague gesture, and then she noticed the dark, seeping wound on his side.

  “Torrant!” She half laughed in exasperation. “Why didn’t you change forms before…. Wait. There’s scar tissue around this. You did change!” she accused crossly. Then, in horrified wonder, her hands found the scars, gleaming a little in the borrowed lamplight from the other room.

  “Triane’s tears!” she swore. “Beloved—I could swear you were a better swordsman than this!”

  Torrant choked off a laugh, partly because her touch, her tender, gentle, arousing touch, was making a hash out of his desire to dress and walk her home like a gentleman, and partly because her acerbic words were the perfect balm for the wound of Eljean’s thick pity.

  With brusque movements, she took the gauze from his hands. “I assume there’s more of this?”

  He nodded and gestured to his armoire, where he kept a length of loosely woven linen for the occasion. He usually ripped off a few lengths at a time—this time, of all of them, he hadn’t had enough to dress the wound.

  “In there,” he said. He should, perhaps, make noise about how he could dress his own wounds, but he didn’t. She wanted to touch him. She wanted to talk to him. Of all the times he had come to this miserable little flat alone and bleeding, having someone there to make a fuss over him was too much of a luxury to bollix up with pride.

  “Are you going to tell me about it now?” she asked, coming back after giving the linen a few hearty rips. She had seen him dress enough hurts back at home to know what to do and had dealt with enough small crises with the children to have some practical knowledge. He had cleaned it already; all she had to do was make a pad of some of the linen and use the adhesive on his skin to make the pad stick. Her movements were efficient and sure, with none of the irritating fluttery touches Eljean had graced him with. Her every breath, her every irritated “humph,” helped to ease the memory of that night from his mind and etch her indelible presence on top of what was left.

  “I’d rather hear about your trip,” he prompted, letting her touch him, enjoying the heat from her body and the fall of her hair across his shoulder.

  “I thought you’d dreamed all about it.” Her irritable reply was muffled as she ducked under his arm to wind a length of gauze around his torso to help hold the pad in place.

  “I knew you were coming, but it was all you—I didn’t see much of Roes and Aldam, or Trieste.” He smiled in the dark over her head as she checked the bandage again. “Just you.”

  She reached across him and set the rest of the gauze and the adhesive bottle on the end table and then crouched in front of him, her eyes avidly searching for his in the dark.

  “Just me?” she asked, her voice gruff with invitation and longing. “I told you to take other lovers.”

  He closed his eyes, and his hands came down on her shoulders, kneading at the smoothness of her skin through the thin bands of the chemise. “I tried. One was a disaster, and the other was Aylan. It was as it has always been, Yarrow Moon. Just you.”

  She rose up a little, and he bent, but he didn’t claim her mouth right away. He nuzzled her temple, moved his lips by her ear, dragged rough, shaking hands through her hair. His movements were not sure; they were jerky and uneven, and she rubbed her cheek against his, seeking a closeness he seemed to be denying her.

  “Why won’t you kiss me?” she asked, her voice thready with hurt.

  “I can’t be gentle,” he trembled. “I want to be….”

  His whole body quivered as he touched her shoulders again, slithered his hands down her upper arms to her elbows, circled her waist over the damned small clothes, the heat from his palms burning through the thin layer and making her tremble too.

  “I have no gentleness,” he muttered against her temple. “I just want you.”

  Her hands came up to his chest, fingers splayed, and she kneaded his muscles, smoothed his skin, teased the little points of his nipples, and he gasped.

&nbs
p; “Ah… gods, Yarri.” He leaned his forehead against hers. “I can’t be gentle. You deserve tender, and all I have is need….”

  For a moment, his eyes were closed, and he fought the tremors that urged him to possess her roughly, to take her, to own her, and for just a moment, she was afraid. She was young, and he was her everything, and for a moment, she was afraid she would not be enough.

  She would not allow that. He needed her. She had to be enough simply because he needed her.

  “Then take me roughly,” she panted into the space between them. “There will be time for gentle later. Sweet Triane’s tears, beloved, I need you now.”

  He smiled, his eyes still closed, his breath coming in short bursts against her ear as his need threatened to break free. “Yarrow Moon, I will handfast you one day—you mark me, right?”

  “Shut up and kiss me,” she ordered, and he did.

  Their mouths met, and it was a tumultuous heaven. He kissed her again and again, never giving her time to retreat, never giving her time to breathe, and when she was tempted, even a little, to back off and ask for time to breathe, she fought it and kissed him back, kissed him harder, met his need and fed it.

  His hands were everywhere, hard and demanding, and part of her was shocked. Their one night together had been all sweetness, tender revelation, gentle passion. This moment was taking, hunger, voraciousness, and his touch was exhilaration and terror in the same place, so she met him back. She refused to cringe at every new smooth or rough closed tear in his flesh; she refused to weep for the scars on his body. She only touched him, fed her own need, eased her own longing, told him with her hands on his chest, his shoulders, his back, that she wanted him in any shape, with any wounds, unhealed scars and all.

  He reached under her chemise and was raising it over her head when he heard the loud “rrrrrrip” of shredded fabric, and his touches abruptly stopped. He pulled back from her, gasping, eyes screwed shut as he attempted some self-control.

  “I’m sorry,” he panted, trying a shaky kiss on her sweating forehead. “I’m so sorry… I should walk you home….”

  “Why?” she asked, kissing the corner of his mouth, her own breath making her chest heave. “So you can go do this badly with someone you’ll kick yourself for later?”

  “Yar—ri!” He pulled back again, gasping a pained laugh, but she was having none of it.

  “I’m here.” She pressed her bare chest against his, almost groaning at how right it felt to be skin to skin. “I’m here, and you can’t make me go away. Love me. Love me any way you can. I won’t run. I won’t cry. I won’t be afraid. Everything I’ve ever wanted is right here, in my arms. I won’t give it up, not for Rath, not for Aylan—and not because you’re afraid of being too rough or too hard or too damaged. Now go blow out the lamp, beloved, and come to bed.”

  He held her face in his hands then and kissed her softly, and when the kiss grew, he didn’t fight it, but he didn’t let it master him either. She was here. She was in his arms. She was kissing him back.

  Her breasts against his chest were wonderful, but not enough. He wanted to feel them, and he did, pushing her back with his hands and his kiss until she was on the bed beneath him, moaning and breathless. It was sweet, but heaven was waiting, and when she parted her thighs for him and he slid inside her waiting flesh, he had to bury his head against her shoulder and shudder at the perfection of her, at the haven for his heart that would always be Yarrow Moon.

  He began to move, and the breathless rush they’d felt on the dance floor returned, but better, worse, exquisitely, painfully, star-shatteringly wonderful, and unlike on the dance floor, their rhythm never rocked less than pitch perfect.

  For this moment of bell-chordant moonlight, it was only them, only the two of them, dancing the most perfect dance of all.

  AFTERWARD, HE couldn’t stop touching her. They were lying on their sides, close enough that they could feel the other’s breath on their faces. His outside hand felt restless. He smoothed back her hair, ran a finger over her shoulder, the rich outside curve of her breast. They never had turned off the lamp, and he devoured her with his eyes in the borrowed light, taking in her every curve, delighting in tiny freckles on her nose and the pudgy little pinch in the crease of her arm.

  She smiled at him before losing to the sudden modesty that assailed her as she hid her face in her pillow.

  “What?” he asked, and she tried not to giggle.

  “I’m not beautiful,” she said at last, peeking out at him from under her hair, and the horrified denial in his eyes warmed her to her toes.

  “You’re perfect.” He propped himself on his elbow and ran his palm from her shoulder to her elbow, the wonder on his face as open as a child’s.

  “You’ve been around too many men in the last few months,” she protested, and he rolled over to his back, laughing.

  “I’ve been around only men for the last few months—but that’s not why you’re lovely.” He laughed, rolled back to his elbow, and poked playfully at the plump of her breast again. “I woke Aylan one night, you know. I’d been dreaming about you, and I was mad because you were dragging Trieste here too… and all I could tell him was that your breasts were amazing.”

  “Oh Goddess!” She hid her face again. “He must have thought you were daft!”

  His laughter faded, and he looked away. She matched his pose on the pillow and touched his chest to bring him back to her.

  “What is it?”

  He shook his head. “We were so desperate, for family… for hope. He probably would have thought your breasts were amazing too—and I wouldn’t have held it against him.”

  Torrant looked at her as she assumed an unhappy quiet, wondering how she seemed to glow in the dimness of the pale light. “I’m so weak, beloved,” he said at last, his voice sober. “If I were a better man, I’d have sent Aylan out and made him send you away. If I were a better man, this night—that terrifying dance, making love to you—it wouldn’t have happened. But I’m not a better man. I’m only me. I’ve missed you. I’ve needed you. And you seem to love me for the flawed piece of work that I am. I can’t give you up. I can’t send you away. I need to stay here—there is so much to do. Stay with me. I promised a year. If I haven’t done what needs doing in a year, I’ll come home with you, and we’ll try this in another way.”

  Sudden tears started in Yarri’s eyes. “Bethen may not have that long,” she confessed, and tears answered in his own.

  “I dreamed that too,” he replied gruffly, “and it kills me. But I can’t leave things as they are, and we’re trapped here in this city—in a week, maybe two, the snows will fall, and all we can do is hope we get home soon enough to say good-bye.”

  “You’ve done a lot of dreaming while you’ve been here,” she sniffled, and he rubbed her cheek with his knuckle.

  “Only when Aylan had my back,” he told her. And then he told her about when his dreams were true and when they weren’t, and her own fingers found his shorn hair fretfully.

  “Why did you cut it?” Her fingers found the white lock at his brow—he had released his disguise without thinking when they’d been together.

  He didn’t know what his expression must have been as he captured her hand and kissed it, but suddenly the tears that had broken in her eyes overflowed. He kissed her knuckles and then wrapped his naked limbs around her bare, soft body, breathing softly against her cheek and looking somberly at her from shadowed, hazel eyes.

  “Kiss me,” he commanded into the shell of her ear. “Kiss me. I can hurt you with truths soon enough.” Their cheeks rubbed together like silk as she moved her lips to his, and all talking stopped for the moment.

  This time there was tenderness. This time his touch was more than gentle. This time their bodies moved slowly and her climax was breathed softly in his ear instead of screamed into her bitten hand. This time she touched his scarred chest and felt his heart beat underneath, the heart of the healer, the poet, the boy who had loved her all her l
ife, and knew that the man who moved inside her loved with that same heart.

  This time was captured sweetness in the sacred sanctuary of their cupped hands.

  Sister Moon

  LATER THAT day, Ellyot Moon and his young friends would make a very public show of escorting the youngest Moon home a couple of hours after curfew had ended—long enough to allow that Miss Moon had probably been escorted to her brother’s flat immediately after the end of curfew, and had since completed her visit.

  Which was, as Torrant said when he and the regents were discussing the matter, exceptionally lame, and yet the best they could do. “I’m such a fool for not getting you back before the dawn bell,” he’d fretted quietly to Yarri in the bedroom as the young regents gathered in his sitting room.

  “I kept you busy,” she said with a grin and a blush, and he kissed her soundly and gratefully before he went in to talk to his friends and followers. She joined him soon after—the kiss had mussed her, and she wanted to appear nonmussed—and they greeted her cheerfully. None of them were surprised to see her there, and she wore such a natural smile (along with Torrant’s breeches and shirt) that whatever discomfort they might have felt dissolved like the darkness at the end of curfew.

  Of course, explaining her presence had been the source of debate over the next several hours until curfew ended.

  About ten minutes later, Aylan slunk over the patio fence with a package of “day clothes” for Yarri.

  “And we’re all invited to Trieste’s for dinner,” he said grandly, taking an apple from the table and glaring Eljean out of one of the two chairs at the table so he could prop it back on two legs against the wall.

  “I thought we just ate dinner,” Torrant replied blankly, looking at the fruit, cheese, and bread the others had brought from the canteen when they’d come knocking.

  “Which could explain why the two of you are too thin to thread through a needle!” Yarri said through a mouthful of bread and cheese. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor as Torrant took his customary place on the counter, and she did it so casually that the other regents, schooled in etiquette and rules of court, didn’t bother to blink.