Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “Horse shite!” Aylan laughed, shocked.

  “No—it’s true. I mean, he loves me, I could never argue it, but you—you were everything he’s ever wanted to be. You, Torrant, Aldam—you’re the children they chose. Even Yarri is kin—you three they took into their hearts without any blood to ask them. Tell me you’re honoring that, would you? Tell me the two of you are honoring how badly we need you home when my mother dies.”

  And now Aylan was wiping at his eyes. “Ah, Cwyn, you gods-cursed little terror—you are so like the both of them, and the best parts too, not the dregs at the bottom like you think. Of course we’re planning to come home. This is just his way of making sure it’s the both of us, not just him.”

  Cwyn nodded and then gave Grand, on the horse behind him, a scant warning before leaving to drop his reluctant passenger off at Moon Hold, before meeting them at Dueance.

  AYLAN AND Torrant waited until late morning to leave. In the meantime, they ate some more of the stores, including a rabbit Aylan caught while they were waiting. Eventually, Torrant changed form, and then changed into Aylan’s spare shirt. Aylan cleaned up their camp, and the two of them mounted their placid horses.

  Together they made their slow, easy way to Dueance, just a regent and his friend, enjoying the lack of curfew outside the city. Aylan’s face blanched about halfway there when he saw the blood seeping through the bandage at Torrant’s shoulder onto his second-worst shirt. Torrant said nothing, but the lines at his mouth were white with pain.

  They made it to the gate right when Cwyn, who had been riding full-out, made it, and they arrived at Trieste’s with an hour to spare before nightfall.

  Yarri was pacing the back entrance, waiting for them to arrive—she’d been there since the curfew ended. When they burst in, dusty, weary, sore, but infinitely glad to be somewhere warm and friendly, she practically leapt on Torrant, and he swept her up in his one good arm—using the other for balance—and kissed her soundly on the mouth until her breath caught, and she pulled away, embarrassed, in front of Cwyn and Aylan.

  “So that’s how to get her to stop nagging!” Cwyn teased. Yarri looked at him sharply, because there was an age in his merry brown eyes that hadn’t been there before, and she wondered sadly if their precocious terror had finally grown up a little.

  “But I don’t advise you try it,” she answered dryly, just as Trieste swished in, all fine woolen skirts and seriousness.

  “You three are back just in time—we saw the explosion from here, and the whole of the regents’ quarters has been a hornet’s nest of people being called in. The others have hidden out here, but you’re going to have to clean up and report within a half an hour or there’s no way we can keep up the façade!” Her lovely oval face was set in lines, and she stood, hands on hips, as authoritative on her own turf as Bethen was on hers.

  Torrant and Aylan both nodded and went trotting down to the servants’ quarters, where a big tub of warm water had been prepared. Almost none of the townhouses had showers, Trieste had reported with deep disgust, and many of them didn’t have hot water. It seemed unthinkable that a city of this size should have omitted that from its planning, and Aylan had made an acid comment about it being a hallmark of Rath’s pseudocivilization that he should think a hot shower was a luxury instead of a necessity.

  Cwyn stood in the little entryway from the stables for a moment, looking confused, and then decided something. “I’d better go brush their cloaks—it won’t do if the two of them are all clean, and their cloaks look like hell.”

  “Will they need any bandages?” Yarri asked anxiously. Torrant’s usual strength had not been all there as he’d held her.

  Cwyn nodded. “Yes. Yes—if you could bring me some….”

  “Cwyn!” Trieste burst out, almost laughing but mostly concerned. “What happened? You’re never this quiet—I should think you’d be bursting with news about your grand adventure!”

  The look Cwyn gave her was miserable and confused. “Let me get my own bath,” he said with a painful effort at lightness, “and get those two on their way. Maybe I’ll remember how to talk then.”

  But Trieste and Yarri exchanged troubled looks as he moved wearily and purposefully toward the servants’ washroom. They highly doubted that whatever was weighing down Cwyn’s usually irreverent heart could be washed away with mere water.

  Torrant and Aylan were bathed and dressed in minutes, but Yarri had heard what sounded suspiciously like a yelp and a growl of pain coming from the servants’ bath in the interim. She was about to march into the bathroom and see what was going on when Trieste grabbed her, practically by the ear, and took her to the front entryway to see them off.

  “But he’s hurt!” Yarri hissed, aware that the other regents were in the hallway, waiting for Ellyot Moon to show.

  “Yes—but Aylan’s taking care of him. They know how to do this; they’ve been doing it for years—yes, years. If he wanted you to baby him over this right now, believe me, you’d be doing it! Has it occurred to you that it’s harder to see you while he’s flying from one danger to the next than to not see you at all?”

  Yarri was still sputtering in outrage when the men came striding down the hall.

  “I’m just saying you should stay here!” Torrant was protesting as they neared. “Last night was brutal,” he agreed thoughtfully. “Just don’t grow too old too quick, right, Terror?”

  Cwyn popped a dimple with this. “Marv and Jino said they could take tonight, and we should trust them!”

  “Yeah, well, they won’t be able to patrol until the convocation’s over. I trust Marv and Jino just fine—it’s Rath I don’t trust!”

  “You can’t go alone!” Torrant’s voice rose with exasperation, and Cwyn stepped forward.

  “I’ll go,” he said quietly. “Don’t worry, cousin—I’ll watch his back.”

  Torrant looked at him closely, in spite of the increasingly loud heartbeat of the hour. “Right,” he said with a grin.

  “Thanks, Da,” Cwyn said dryly, but some of the terrible wisdom seemed to lift from his shoulders.

  “Flatterer!” Torrant shot back with equal dryness. He looked up and smiled at the regents then, and if they saw the white lines at his mouth or the tightness in his eyes at the smile, they either pretended not to notice, or they were so used to marks of pain on his face that they really didn’t. “Are we ready to go? Do we all have our story straight?”

  There were nodded assents, and Torrant turned to Yarri, a tired smile on his face, only to see her staring at his shoulder under his cloak with unhappy eyes.

  “I can see it now,” she said thoughtfully, and she thrust her hand inside the left shoulder of his cloak. He winced, and she brought back her hand, looking unhappily at the blood on her palm that had seeped through the bandage. “How will you hide that?”

  “I’ll wear my cloak inside—there’s no heat this time of night. It will be too cold to do anything else.” He caught her hand and kissed the shredded knuckle, and she gave him a faint smile in return.

  She glanced at Aylan, preparing to make a tart remark about how at least Torrant’s cloak didn’t look so bad when she saw the distortion on his left shoulder. Her eyes widened, and then flew to Torrant’s face, but he and Aylan were exchanging pained glances of their own. She turned slowly, and there was an unnatural silence in the anteroom as she scrutinized Aylan’s ugly, battered, scarred leather cloak. When she turned back to Torrant, even the regents could hear every puzzle piece fit in its slot with a stony little clink.

  Suddenly her hands were at Torrant’s shirt, tugging it upward, out of his breeches, and when he tried to step backward, she grabbed the collar without looking at him and jerked him in place. Any movement and the shirt would have ripped, and he didn’t think Trieste had another one that would fit.

  “Uhm, Yar?” He tried to keep some humor in his voice. He knew where this was going, but her anger was a catastrophic wave getting ready to demolish a beach.

  She igno
red him, and her hand traced the scar that slanted across his chest. She looked at Aylan, gesturing him imperiously closer until she could trace her hand across the supple, beaten leather.

  “Uhm, Yar?” Torrant repeated, still hoping to put off this argument until somewhere, anywhere, but in front of Trieste, in front of the regents, in front of Aylan. “Yarrow—you know that dream where you’re standing naked in front of a crowd of people and….”

  “Shut up!” she snapped, one hand mapping the scars across his torso, his stomach, the small of his back, the other exploring for the counterpart on Aylan’s cloak. They were not identical—Torrant had incurred wounds of his own, and in the horrible suffocating silence there was the occasional pause where she found a scar that did not have a match, and then her eyes would flash to his face.

  She didn’t map every scar, in the end.

  In the end, she’d had enough. She planted her hand squarely in the middle of Aylan’s chest and pushed, and he took it for the dismissal it was. Her furious, devastated brown eyes found Torrant’s, and he had to look away.

  Her hand left his chest and came up in a stinging slap across his cheek that brought his gaze right back down to hers.

  “How. Could. You?” she ground between her teeth and then whirled away and fled the room before he could answer.

  Torrant brought his hand up to his cheek and closed his eyes tightly. After another painful moment, he looked up and met the incredulous eyes of the regents, all of whom were glancing from Aylan’s cloak to his exposed chest with both wonder and horror.

  Torrant cocked his jaw and shook his head, warning them away from the subject. “We still have to go,” he said with dignity, tucking his shirt back in. His look at a furious Trieste dared her to add her piece, and she backed down, although her face was flushed with anger. “Remind her that I love her,” he begged.

  “You should be so lucky!” Trieste snapped, and then she whirled in her turn, following after Yarri.

  “I could talk to her,” Aylan said as Torrant followed the others out the door.

  Torrant’s grimace was hard acres from a smile, but it was all he had. “I think that would be a very painful idea right now,” he said wryly. From the emerging bruise on his cheek, it was clear that he wasn’t talking simple emotional pain either. Aylan nodded with sad lavender eyes, and then Torrant whirled and was out the door to lead the regents waiting for him in the frosty twilight.

  MYRLA-KLES, TORRANT’S middle child and only girl, was the spitting image of her mother—with the addition of a brilliant streak of silver in the autumn gold of her hair. She adored the Beltane song and listened to it every year with enough intensity to note the changes that happened from year to year, as her father added more moments to the chaotic time in verse. She was Torrant’s only musical child. She’d been privately practicing the versions she’d heard on her own lute since she’d been gifted with it at her fourteenth Solstice—although her practice had grown scanter as her belly had grown larger with her first pregnancy.

  Today she heard something new that caught her attention, and she whispered, “I didn’t know they’d ever quarreled” to her cousin, Bitsy.

  Bitsy shrugged and balanced her fussy baby on her shoulder and looked to her mother and father, who made the trip from Wrinkle Creek every year especially to hear this story.

  “They quarrel every year at Beltane—I would imagine the reasons are the same.”

  Kessie (as her father called her) wrinkled her nose at her sharp-tongued cousin. It was untrue in the first place, and an oversimplification in the second. She had known, even when very small, that the feelings the Beltane song engendered in her mother were complex and painful. Every year she watched in amazement as her father kissed those wounds all over again and healed her mother’s heart, but she wouldn’t go into that now, not while she was listening to her beloved ballad.

  Bitsy saw her cousin’s disgusted look and rolled her eyes. It was bad enough they were surrounded by epic love stories and moon-destined lovers. Did they have to idealize a perfectly fine relationship by denying a logical quarrel?

  With a sigh, she left her (very) pregnant cousin (and her very best friend, in all actuality) and made a move to shift through the mess of cousins and siblings and the babies of cousins and siblings. Bitsy got closer to her mother, noting that Roes Moon’s usually pragmatic expression was dreamy and unfocused, her brown eyes looking backward through time. It was the sort of look that Mum always had when she was thinking about her father, even when he was right behind her, rubbing her shoulders.

  “What were you doing during all this, Mum?” she asked quietly. She knew her parents had been involved, but she had never really understood how. But then, she was as practical as her mum, and sitting through the healer’s yearly story had never been her strong suit.

  “Shhhh…,” her father cautioned, his mild blue eyes on Torrant’s face with his familiar expression of comfortable worship. “Our part’s coming.”

  Bitsy tried to meet her mum’s expression—the way Roes Moon smiled at Aldam’s devotion was usually a balm to Bitsy’s cranky spirit, but she wasn’t smiling this time. With a shrug, Bitsy turned toward the healer who’d birthed her and her babies, the man who had sung lullabies to her from the time she was very small.

  She forgot sometimes, she realized, that this gentle, ordinary man was a hero. She was pretty sure he wanted it that way.

  Part XX—Moons in Winter

  Aldam

  ALDAM WAS more than surprised to see Cwyn twice in the same week.

  His wife’s brother came haring through the scant inches of frosty snow barely a day after his unexpected appearance to drop off the bemused and bitter young guard.

  Grand had known Fredy from the barracks, and although he was reluctant to tell anyone why he’d suddenly decided to join the Goddess folks at Moon Hold, he was more than happy to take orders. Fredy, busy setting traps and building a small, hidden stand that a person could huddle in warmly to watch the road, was happy for the help. He met young Grand’s eyes, nodded his head, and shook his hand, and just like that, they had another member of the military on board.

  It was none too soon.

  The Goddess folk had been working steadily at making the old workers’ quarters snug, windproof, and livable for winter. Aldam, seeing that they had things well in hand—with lots of practice at using old building supplies and making them work a second and fourth and sixth time around—had taken advantage of the old foundation of the barn and made use of the still very sound plumbing around it to begin an entirely new building.

  Aldam enjoyed carpentry but was not so good with people; he tended to do his best work when he was uncomfortable or worried or upset.

  The snug, sprawling clinic/cottage where the barn used to be was beautiful and coming along at a surprising clip. In fact, two rooms were habitable after only two weeks, and Aldam and Roes stayed in one, using the other one as a kitchen and surgery until Aldam got the actual surgery completed.

  Aldam had been worried about Torrant for a very long time.

  And now that Cwyn was dashing in, frantic, gulping air, apologetic about abusing his poor horse to the point where the exhausted thing was on the verge of collapse, it appeared Aldam would have more to be worried about.

  Roes took over with her usual lack of nonsense. First she gave Cwyn water; then she ordered one of the older boys to take the horse down to the river, where they kept a constant fire to warm water for washing, and to give it some tepid water and a brisk rubdown. Then she sat across from her little brother and stroked his hand like she had done when he was a child, capturing his wild eyes with her own calm brown ones, and waited until she had his attention.

  “Right, then, Terror,” she said gently. “Now start from the top.”

  THE EVENING session had not gone in Ellyot Moon’s favor at all.

  Torrant argued passionately, but Rath, fueled by just enough information to make him dangerous, had insisted there was a pocket of
Goddess terrorists outside the city gates. One of the guards had survived the explosion long enough to tell investigators that a group of men had been riding west, and Rath had made the logical—albeit erroneous—jump to Moon Hold.

  Trieste’s household had been awakened only a few hours before dawn, and Aylan burst inside, calling for Cwyn to run the message. Cwyn had stumbled, still pulling on clothes, to the stables, and Aylan yanked the bag of provisions from Yarri’s hands as she’d been packing it. He slammed the connecting door to the stables in her face even as she sputtered in surprise.

  Torrant was there with Cwyn’s already-saddled gelding, penning desperate messages to Professor Austin with shaking hands. His face was pale, and his cloak was thrown back at the neck, revealing a very bloody shoulder. Cwyn had a sudden intuition as to why Aylan had been so abrupt to Yarri moments before.

  Then Torrant spilled out the total of the danger, and Cwyn had other things to think about.

  “THERE’RE SOLDIERS coming this way, just to check and see,” Cwyn sputtered at Roes’s table, suddenly aware of how fragile his sturdy sibling really was.

  “How many?” Fredy asked. He had come in to see what the dramatic entrance had been about.

  “Only about thirty….”

  “Only!” Roes exclaimed, forgetting she was supposed to be calming things down.

  “Well,” Fredy said, thinking fast, “we only need to kill twenty or so….”

  “What?” All the Moons looked at him in surprise, and he grinned at them. His sons had taken to Roes right away, and when he’d been busy setting traps, Aldam had taken time out to read to them and give them tasks that made them feel welcome. Fredy was more than grateful to earn his keep.

  “What Goddess gifts do we have? Have you been keeping track? Does anyone have a gift that would send a few men back to Dueance, telling everybody that the company fell into the river or deserted or circled around and went to Eiran? We kill everybody else, but we give the survivors a story that will make Rath look like a fool.”