Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  Five sets of young eyes looked up at her expectantly, and that unholy little smile bloomed like a fully potent cabbage rose. “Of course,” she almost purred, “I would like to hear a few stories myself.”

  To a one, the young men put down their forks uneasily and met eyes in the knowledge that they’d been caught like fat, gullible trout.

  “Oh my!” Trieste said drolly. “It looks like we may have to postpone dessert.”

  “Now, Yarri,” Aerk placated, “that’s really Torrant’s story to tell.”

  “That isn’t entirely true,” Trieste said as Suse cleared the table. “Now is it, Eljean?”

  Eljean looked like a light-struck deer, and then a handsome strawberry flush washed his pale skin.

  Yarri iced her wicked smile with a bit of playfulness. “Oh dear—that would make you the disaster, then, wouldn’t it?”

  The pretty flush drained out of Eljean’s face. “I suppose it would,” he said through a dry throat, and Yarri relented.

  “Now, don’t feel bad, darling. I really don’t have to know details. In fact, I’d be willing to trade my story for only one of yours—and it doesn’t have to be the one where Eljean takes a lover. Suse, would you mind if I had dessert right now?” She added that last because food was suddenly looking much more appealing.

  “Whatever you say, Miss Yarri,” Suse indulged. Yarri beamed at him because she’d enjoyed his company and his stories of his wife and children on the journey from Wrinkle Creek to Dueance and because he’d been very kind about helping her find her way around the world as a regent’s daughter instead of a merchant’s niece.

  “So, uhm…,” Aerk said nervously, breaking the silence as the unacknowledged leader when Torrant was gone.

  “Mmm?” Yarri smiled sweetly.

  “What story did you have in mind for trade?”

  “It’s only a little one, gentlemen, a grooming matter, really….”

  “Uh-oh,” Keon said, catching on at once.

  “Please don’t…,” Aerk muttered, closing his eyes so he wouldn’t glare at Eljean, who appeared as though he wanted to take lessons in looking exactly like the tapestry cushions he was sitting on.

  “Don’t what?” asked Marv, desperately trying to leap where the others had gone. For once, nobody smacked him on the back of his head or stepped on his foot, and he was still in the dark when Jino shook his head like Aerk and closed his eyes.

  “Don’t make us tell her why Ellyot cut his hair,” Jino supplied, and Marv’s eyes widened. He looked up at the table to where his leader’s beloved was taking a dainty bite of a cream pie.

  “Oh gods,” he said in wonder. “You’re just like him!”

  Yarri grinned at him and licked off a little bit of whipped cream from her nose. “Except apparently, I have amazing breasts,” she agreed and focused on her pie while shock rolled from their faces like thunder.

  YARRI WAS asleep on his bed when Torrant and Aylan got back to the flat that morning, dressed in what was apparently the servant’s breeches and a black cloak. She had Torrant’s green-and-gold cloak wrapped in her arms.

  “Dueant’s bloody hangover!” Torrant swore. He shook his head at Aylan. “Looks like you’re on the divan, mate.”

  “Did she come by herself?” Aylan asked, concerned.

  Torrant didn’t even need to change form—he put his nose in the air and closed his hazel eyes, opening them again and shaking his head. “She must have done a number on all of them—she had escorts.”

  Aylan blew out a breath and pulled off his kerchief. “Brother, this isn’t good. She can’t do this all the time. It’s suicide.”

  Torrant knelt by her side and touched her cheek. It was sticky with dried tears. He tried a game smile at Aylan. “Here—let me shower first. I think this might be the only time.”

  “What makes you think that?” Aylan asked, settling down on the other side of the bed with a grunt.

  “She can only hear that story for the first time once.” With that, he stripped his bloody clothes into the hamper, and Aylan caught a new scar on his backside, a small one, that had just healed on his cloak that evening.

  “That’s not the only story she needs to hear,” he said just loud enough for Torrant to hear, and Torrant turned to him, his eyes sparking with something like fear.

  “Please—not that,” he begged. “Not now.”

  “Then when?” Aylan asked gruffly. “When do we tell her why Triane turns to blood?”

  Torrant grimaced unhappily. He wouldn’t take back that magic even if he could. “After She sets, mate, after She sets.”

  “Bugger,” Aylan spat after Torrant had disappeared around the corner. Next to him, Yarri opened her sleepy eyes and frowned.

  “Torrant?”

  “Making himself sweet for you,” Aylan told her, smoothing her hair back from her face and giving the battered cloak a little pat. “Not that you deserve it, pulling this shite on us after he all but begged you not to!”

  “I’m sorry.” She sounded genuinely contrite. “I just couldn’t…. I know it was a month ago but… but I wasn’t here for him. I wasn’t here. His heart just gets ripped open like that and all he had was….”

  “Me,” Aylan supplied dryly, and Yarri “mmmd” and snuggled in a bit to his thigh.

  “You’re wonderful,” she acknowledged gently, “but you’re not me.”

  “Think much of yourself?” he asked wryly, but he kept brushing her hair back from her face. He was thinking about all the times he’d arrived at the Moon home after traveling around the lands of the three moons, and Yarri had been part of the family that had greeted him. He was thinking about the year after the debacle of the house of Troy. After a winter of bunking down with Torrant and Aldam, he hadn’t been sure he could live with the rest of the Moons again. Yarri had forced him to do the dishes and help her with the children and, on more than one occasion, play with Starren when he didn’t think he could face himself through her eyes.

  “Not as much as I think of you and my beloved,” she said, peering up at him. She’d called him a worthless player once, early on in their acquaintance. Now she couldn’t love a brother more. “What are you thinking?”

  A small smile lit the darkness of the square little room. “I’m thinking that he sleeps in a tight little ball. He’s like eight stones of iron shot, punching a hole in the bed. Unless he dreams of you.”

  She didn’t know what to say to that, so she was quiet for a moment, stroking the supple leather of his battered cloak. She squinted in the poor light, rubbing her fingers over a couple of raised rips that looked as though they’d been sewn back together from the inside. “This is really the ugliest cloak I’ve ever seen!” she said with a little laugh. “Torrant got a new, pretty one.” She indicated the old scrap of green-and-gold she had found under his pillow. “Why don’t you?”

  Aylan turned an inscrutable face toward hers, and his eyes, so often angry or frustrated or musing, were now sad, shadowed by a cross between guilt and anger that was too complex to read. “I would if I could,” he replied cryptically.

  They heard the water turn off in the washroom, which saved him from another uncomfortable question.

  “Come back in here after you shower,” she ordered, laughing only a little at the appalled expression on his face. “No—we won’t be doing that—not tonight. I just want you both here. I just want to comfort you, even if it’s too late. That’s all. Are you good with that?”

  He tried to laugh, but it didn’t come out right. Torrant was humming to himself as he dried off, and Yarri caught his eye, and they both smiled.

  “I put more linen in there in case he needs it,” she said, and Aylan looked at her again. What would it be—five, six years, before Starren was this old? Hadn’t he been this old when he had first seen the boy with the hazel eyes and the white stripe in his dark hair, looking young and vulnerable when he was, in fact, the strength and the wisdom of them all?

  Far be it from Aylan to turn down
the offer of comfort from an older, wiser soul than his.

  “If you two are naked when I open that door, I’m never speaking to you again,” he threatened, and Yarri laughed softly.

  “Now we both know that’s a total lie!” she accused, and at that moment Torrant rounded the corner with another towel draped around his hips. He started rooting through the armoire for a sleep shirt, and Aylan grunted.

  “Get another one for me—apparently I’m bunking down with you two tonight.”

  Torrant’s eyes met his beloved’s, an exquisitely gentle expression darkening them in the borrowed light from the washroom. “Of course, brother,” he affirmed and threw Aylan a shirt as he crossed to the bathroom.

  “It’ll be too bloody short on me!” Aylan groused, disappearing through the door.

  “Will not, you big wanker,” Torrant muttered, shrugging into his own, which was, in fact, past his knees. “I had a bunch specially made for him,” he explained to Yarri, keeping his voice down so she’d know that Aylan didn’t know this.

  “How very wise,” she laughed and sat up in bed, opening her arms so he’d come into them. “I love that you had sleep shirts made for him, but none for yourself.”

  He grinned a little, his eyes sparking in dark. “Until last month, it was pretty hot, Yar. I mostly slept in my small clothes—or naked!”

  “Pervert.” She smiled at him, but the reason she was there darkened her expression as Torrant sat next to her in a rustle of bedclothes and crisp linen, shivering a little.

  “We’re going to need to start our own fire in here soon,” he observed, giving a nod to the small hearth in the sitting room. “It really is getting cold.”

  “We heard the song,” she said abruptly. “It made it into Wrinkle Creek as we were coming down, as well as the one about you and me, crossing Hammer Pass.”

  “That’s good,” Torrant replied, no tone at all in his voice. “Djali would have liked that.” With a tiny puff of air, the empty disguise of a humorless laugh, he said, “He always wanted to be famous for his poetry, you know.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.” Her hands came to ruffle through his short hair, and she could tell by the strain in his body that he was trying not to shake her off.

  “Of course it wasn’t. Here, let me get another blanket.” He made to get off the bed, but her hand on his arm stopped him. It was a determined, fearless gesture, and he wondered, almost bitterly, if she was ever as frightened by his emotions as he seemed to be.

  “We don’t need another blanket,” she told him throatily. “We just need each other.”

  “I don’t want to live this again.” His voice sounded odd—reedy, constricted. Don’t make me touch you with blood on my hands. There was some blood he couldn’t wash off.

  “Then just live the part where you know I forgive you.” She sat up in bed and wrapped her arms around his stiff shoulders. “I’m not Eljean, beloved. I won’t turn on you because I don’t like what you’ve done. I’m not a child—I’m not afraid of the snowcat, and I know now that he’s not Ellyot Moon. He’s all you.”

  Torrant scrubbed at his face, resisting her warmth. “The bell rings in less than four hours,” he protested.

  “Then you’d better talk about it now because I’m not giving up, and you need your beauty sleep.”

  There was a silence when there shouldn’t have been. There were a thousand flip, lighthearted things he could have said, and he said none of them. They sat in the silence, listening to their own hearts beat, and heard Aylan in the shower, singing the song Torrant had written for Trieste and Yarri, their first year in school. He’d once confessed to Torrant that the tune and the words haunted him with Starren’s image.

  “He has a decent voice,” Torrant said softly, off topic as it seemed. “None of the regents know—they’re all afraid of him.”

  “He’s bloody awful to them,” Yarri snorted, and Torrant had to agree.

  “It was to protect me, you understand. He remembered—he remembered that thing with Jarrid and Brina. It’s never really left him alone, you know. He still blames himself—maybe forever. And the thing with Djali….” Unconsciously, Torrant fingered the divot in his ear, the scar where Ellyot had a birthmark. “The thing with Djali was so much like Troy, and not once has Aylan said ‘I told you so.’ Not once has he pulled out the ‘I warned you about this, you stupid git, why didn’t you listen!’”

  “Why do you think that is?” Yarri asked, wiping her cheeks on the back of his sleep shirt.

  “I think it’s because as awful as he tried to be, he started to love them too. I think Djali’s death hurt him as much as it hurt me.”

  “Well,” said Aylan, coming out of the washroom unexpectedly, having thrown the sleep shirt on over a wet body, “how could you not love Djali?”

  “It was impossible,” Torrant agreed with a strangled laugh. “He was such a mess. Do you remember his first day in the clinic?”

  “He dropped everything we gave him,” Aylan affirmed, “and most of it on Triana’s toes.”

  “He always wanted me to rhyme these impossible words—if the word was purple, orange, or silver, he’d put it at the end of a line, no question,” Torrant continued, his voice a terrible clog of affection and grief. “And he kept trying to compare love to things like stuffed dolls or well-made workbenches. He was the most hopeless poet.”

  “His song was lovely,” Yarri commented and was not prepared for violent wracking spasms that convulsed Torrant’s chest, nor for the way Aylan launched himself into Torrant’s arms, sandwiching him between the two people he loved best, forcing him to grieve and accept comfort.

  “Oh gods, yes,” Torrant choked into Aylan’s hair. “His last song was all anyone could hope for!” He bent his neck then, accepting Yarri’s kisses, tears, and forgiveness.

  The Least Political Moon

  “THIS IS not going to go well,” Yarri predicted grimly as she and Trieste stood on the grand marble steps awaiting entrance into the Moss townhouse. She hugged her rich gold wool shawl around her shoulders in the brisk, yellow wind that whipped over the city walls. Samhain was in less than a week, and there would already be snow and frost in Eiran. Hammer Pass would be four feet deep, but here in the city, it was still late fall.

  “Look,” Trieste said patiently for the fiftieth time, “it’s going to be fine. As long as we’re subtle about it, it will be perfect. We go in, we let her know we don’t approve of her or her politics, and then we sip some tea, smile thinly over cookies, and leave. Word will spread, we’ll stop getting invitations from her cronies, and all of the people sympathetic to Goddess people will keep sending them. And we’ll have lots of good things to tell… your brother and his friends.”

  In spite of the near miss with “Ellyot’s” name, Trieste looked thin, elegant, and unflappable in fashionable dark lavender, her gray eyes as calm as a summer ocean. Yarri eyed her sourly and resisted the urge to fuss with her hair again. The maid had whined about it being too heavy to stay properly, but Yarri would be damned if she’d cut it again. There were enough hurts in Torrant’s life, and she would spare him this small one if she could.

  The night before had shaken her—more than she wanted to admit. They had huddled together like children in a war, Yarri on one side of Torrant and Aylan on the other, until the exhausted men had fallen asleep. She’d had plenty of sleep in the last six months. She still had enough reserves to lie wide-eyed in the dark and wonder if her beloved could survive the task he’d set for himself.

  She was pretty sure he could—she had wonderful faith in Torrant. He had saved her life more than once. He’d saved Aldam at least three times that she knew of. He’d even saved Roes a couple of times, and Roes was frighteningly self-sufficient. But the cost to him—it was terrifying.

  Lane Moon had said more than once that the difference between the gods’ thinking and the Goddess’s thinking was that the gods looked at the bigger picture, while the Goddess looked only on the faces in her glow. Torr
ant was looking at the fate of all of the Goddess’s children in Dueance. Yarri was only looking at the fate of one man.

  That thought had haunted her, even as she’d fallen asleep by his side. It haunted her as Aylan—with the help of Trieste’s valet—helped to spirit her out of the regents’ dorm a few hours after Torrant had kissed them both good-bye and left for the hall in the morning. It haunted her even as she’d napped and when Trieste had awakened her with her tea.

  Since the week before Beltane, she’d been adding a special herb to her tea to prevent conception—no babies, she’d thought happily, until Torrant had built them a home and was well established as the town healer. She’d added the herb for the entire summer, just on the hope that something would happen quickly and he would come galloping back on his damned fat stallion. She’d continued to add the herb to her tea as she’d journeyed through the Old Man Hills and into the foothills of Clough, knowing that when she arrived at Dueance, come dark skies or high seas, she would be spending nights wrapped in her beloved’s arms.

  That morning, she had sat at her little breakfast table and stared at the ground brown powder capsule sitting next to her tea as she always had it, and then she met Trieste’s eyes. Without saying a word, she’d taken the capsule to the waste bin by her desk and thrown it in and then resumed her seat, meeting Trieste’s wide eyes with a steely calm of her own.

  “Bethen gave me one calendar. Now I’m making another,” she’d said with more serenity than she felt. “He will make me pregnant—of that I have no doubt. If he doesn’t finish his job before I start to show, he’ll have to take us home.”

  Trieste had looked as though she’d wanted to argue—but she hadn’t. She had simply nodded thoughtfully and offered Yarri bread and fruit, then talked of other things.