Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  They stood there, in the shock of discovery, trying to piece together the things their minds kept refusing to see, when they heard a whimper from a cell nearby.

  “Oh gods—Trieste?”

  Trieste was no easier to look upon than Eljean. Torrant howled as she crouched in the back of the prison, naked, bleeding from her bottom, from between her legs, from carvings on her face and on her breasts. Her long, fine, dark hair had been hacked from her head and ripped out in clumps. She pulled at the pieces of it to try and hide her nakedness, even as she huddled, whimpering Torrant’s name.

  Yarri stutter-started her mind and began to rifle the pockets of the dead guards for keys, while Torrant turned his sword around and started beating the pommel end against the rusty lock, ranting and muttering as he did.

  It was a race to see who would get the lock first, and he won, although his hands were sliced and bleeding to do so. When he was done and the iron-barred door clanged open, he stood at the mouth of the cell for a moment, just looking at her and trying to calm himself enough to not terrify her more.

  “Here, Torrant….” Yarri removed her cloak. Torrant nodded numbly and took it from her, then crouched down near Trieste, holding it open.

  “Shhh…,” he muttered. “Pretty Girl, don’t worry. We’re here. We’ll take you home. We’ll keep you safe. They’re all dead now. The bastards are dead, and they can’t hurt you anymore.”

  Trieste held out her arms, and he wrapped her up like a baby. She whimpered against his throat as he lifted her to her feet. “He never told them. He called for Torrant Shadow, always Torrant, but not once for Ellyot Moon.”

  “I know,” he whispered. “I know.” And then he wrapped his arms around her and allowed her to weep against him with Yarri pressed behind her, smoothing her back and weeping too.

  But grief and weakness were luxuries they didn’t have time for, and Torrant had to peel away from them.

  “Yarri,” he muttered thickly. “Beloved, can you get Trieste back to the young lieutenant? The only reason Alec hasn’t killed Rath and taken over is because they’ve had his wife. We need her safe. Can you do this for me?”

  Yarri nodded, her arms wrapped so securely around the woman she’d grown to love like family that they moved together as one person. “Of course,” she murmured, thinking ahead to how she was going to get the both of them over that damned high wall. “What are you going to do?”

  Torrant removed his own cloak and wrapped Eljean’s splayed body in the soft, beaten leather—all of its parts and limbs—then closed the wide-opened green eyes with his hand. When he hefted his burden, he closed his eyes and kissed the cold forehead. “Oh, my brother, I promised you the pain would be worth it. I never meant this. Never.”

  He met his beloved’s eyes over his lover’s body. “Justice, beloved. This monster has devoured one too many brothers, and now it’s time to chop off its head.”

  And with that, they staggered out of that tiny, metallic, death-stench of a space and into the deadly city.

  AFTER THEY split up, Yarri stopped in the shadows long enough to pull off her sweater and underskirt and help Trieste to put them on underneath the cloak. She had to tug at the strings of the skirt and tie it to make it fit on Trieste’s frame, and she apologized again and again for the pain the wool must have caused Trieste’s injuries, but her friend would have none of it.

  “You came for me. I was so afraid he was dead, and you came for me,” she said in wonder, and Yarri smiled grimly and pulled the hood of the cloak over Trieste’s ravaged head.

  “Of course he came for you—and of course I came with him. You think this honor thing is just for men?”

  Trieste answered with a faint smile of her own. “Now, I didn’t say that,” she murmured weakly. Yarri turned and hurried her along the alleyway, keeping an eye out for something to help her scale that horrible wall. As she found it, Trieste said, “You didn’t happen to bring your knitting with you, did you?”

  Later, the two of them would wonder that the question didn’t seem odd at all.

  “It’s back with the horses. I just cast on a long stocking, if you’d like to work it….”

  A small amount of the anxiety that had ridden Trieste’s brutalized body faded—not much, just enough to blunt the barbed edge of the pain. “Oh yes. Thank you. Thank you so much. I want to knit that sock almost more than I want to bathe.”

  “Good,” said Yarri practically, spotting a large empty crate that would serve their purposes particularly well, “because I think the sock’s closer than the bath.”

  With the help of the crate, scaling the wall wasn’t as difficult as Yarri had dreaded. Unfortunately, she landed with a thump right next to one of the brigands who had survived the sacking of the city. He watched Yarri descend, looking up her overskirt and leering at how easy the whole thing would be without an underskirt in the way.

  He had Yarri’s arm twisted around her back and a knife to her throat before Trieste descended, and Yarri could only hope Trieste thought to look down before she finished scrabbling to the top of the wall.

  “Pretty girl, running around this city today. Most pretty girls are all locked up….”

  “Ugh,” Yarri protested irritably, too angry to be frightened, “your breath is fetid. A twig brush and some baking soda would do you some good!”

  Her arm was hauled up behind her a little more brutally, and then he shoved her on the ground, grabbed the back of her hair, and hauled her head back to look at him. The first thing she noticed was that he had no teeth to brush, and the second was that he had no soul to speak of behind his eyes to care.

  “Tha’s where a woman belongs—on her knees.”

  Yarri’s heart was beating in her throat—it had been since she’d felt this bastard’s hands on her body when she’d landed in the soft mud. But all she’d been able to think of were the people she’d had to protect—the two in her belly and the one currently crouched, shivering, on the top of the wall behind her attacker. When the man’s other hand went to the string on his loose trousers and they dropped to his ankles, she couldn’t help but roll her eyes in exasperation.

  “Don’t criminals ever have any original ideas?” she complained, her mind racing. His brutal hand at the back of her head tightened and thrust her forward, shoving her nose into his crotch, and she reassessed her idea of “fetid.” “Bathing would be a good start,” she ground out, and almost crowed when that hard, grimy hand shoved her head again, making her scrabble her hands in the mud for balance. Every scrabble in the mud brought her hands closer to her boot—and the knife she’d carried there ever since she’d had to fend off two attackers with a bag of hammers.

  “Not that there’s that much to bathe,” she tried again, and this time found her mouth mashed up against the man’s squashy, filthy privates. She fought the urge to vomit—although that might have improved the smell.

  “If you’re goin’ to open your mouth, bitch, use it for something!” came the impatient snarl, and with it, a drag at her head to pull her up, which made her need to move her knee up, and that brought her hand a little closer….

  And then Trieste could no longer watch Yarri suffer the same horrible indignity she’d been made to endure, and she leapt down from the wall with a scream just as Yarri pulled the knife from her boot and shoved it into the man’s testicles with as much force as she could muster.

  The man fell over, bellowing like an ox, and Trieste, wearing a pair of boots scavenged from one of the guards as they’d left, kicked him in the nonexistent teeth, then in the chest and in the stomach, then down where Yarri’s knife was still lodged and he was bleeding out.

  She gibbered obscenities with every kick.

  Yarri finally forced Trieste away from the body, which was tricky because she didn’t want to force Trieste physically, but her abused, violated friend was hysterical with rage, forcing Yarri’s hand. She was certain the man was dead, and she really wanted to get back to Torrant, but mostly, she was afraid f
or her friend, afraid this lapse into madness would never stop. She had to pull Trieste, shrieking and kicking, away from the corpse of the dead rapist, and then she pulled her knife from his vitals and wiped it on her skirt as she hauled Trieste, numb and wild-eyed, behind her. When his body was out of sight behind the rubble, Trieste broke, sobbing on her shoulder until Yarri’s thin undershirt ran wet with tears.

  ALDAM WAS like nothing the regents’ floor had ever seen before.

  Aerk spotted him the moment he walked in through the great double door, but Aerk was on the floor, and it took some frantic eye contact with Keon to get the message across.

  In his memory, the only other person to sprint that fast through the hall had been Torrant himself, the day Aylan got wounded at the pub.

  Keon met Aldam and escorted him to the small antechamber, and Aerk continued his petition to release Eljean and Trieste. They had taken turns for the last four days, and the rest of the regents had begun to get behind them—but it had been slow going without Ellyot Moon. Alec’s presence—he was currently pacing behind Aerk like a caged panther—and his deadline of nightfall before he used his peacekeeping troops to take over the city had proved helpful. The problem had been convincing everybody he had enough troops.

  It seemed that signed and sealed documents from the council of elders in Eiran, the matriarch of Cleanth, and the king of Otham himself weren’t enough of a presence in Rath’s mind.

  The rest of the floor, however, had been paying attention to the city disintegrating around their ears, and they were inclined to disagree with Rath and agree with Alec. For one thing, Alec didn’t look insane.

  “I’m sorry,” said Consort Rath, breaking into Aerk’s half-minded dialog with more interest than he’d shown in four days. “Who is that young man, and what is he doing here?”

  Aldam looked up at Rath, and the sunny smile he’d used to greet Keon disappeared. In its place was a decidedly righteous indignation.

  “You sent the soldiers to Moon Hold!” Aldam declared. “One of them laid his hands on my wife! How dare you.”

  There were shocked titters from the floor and then absolute, enchanted silence. Even Rath was sputtering to that particular affront, and Aldam waved his hands irritably at the secretary in the anteroom who was trying to get his attention and simply walked over the barrier.

  “Hullo, Alec,” he said, his typically sunny smile taking over his face. He and Roes had visited Alec and Trieste over the summer—Aldam was one of the few Moon faces Alec would recognize by sight and not Yarri’s pictures. Aldam’s smile turned sober. “They’re going to get Trieste—he knows where she is.”

  Alec’s jaw dropped, and a terrible hope washed his face as snow pale as his wife’s. “He knows she’s alive?”

  Aldam nodded and glared at Rath some more. “She was when Eljean died,” he said with a terrible glower, and Rath’s face flushed green behind his white hair. The secretary general, who had been standing farther and farther away from Rath as the proceedings went on, looked at Rath’s face with a nasty little-boy wrinkle to his nose, as though he’d been vindicated of a petty dispute, and the rest of the regents began to murmur unhappily.

  This was not the distraction of some novelty ingénue. This was terrifying.

  “What,” said Rath slowly, trying to gather his composure with his words, “is your name, young man?”

  Aldam’s face became hard, earth hard, oak hard, hammer hard. “My name is Aldam Moon,” he said proudly. “I’m Yarri Moon’s foster brother.”

  As the rest of the regents erupted into chaos, he found a hard smile coming to his moon-featured face. Torrant had been right. He hadn’t even needed to betray any secrets. The truth had been plenty.

  The questions came next, from Rath and the few regents he still claimed as his own, and Aldam answered them all with his implacable calm.

  Yes, he’d gone over the Hammer with his foster brother and Yarri when they’d been children. Yes, they had all lived with the Moon family for years. And yes, he’d been one of the people to help evacuate Triannon when Rath had sent soldiers to destroy his beloved school.

  “You went to university?” sneered Rath, and Aldam’s smile toward the king consort held more than a little bit of evil in it.

  “Yes, sir,” he replied, the unsettling smile firmly in place. “That’s where I learned to dissect frogs.”

  Aldam found he liked answering the regents’ questions honestly after that—and years later, Aerk and Keon would claim they’d learned their best tactics on the floor from that one session with Torrant’s foster brother—but it was not to last.

  The moment Torrant came crashing through the great double doors with his grotesque, fragile burden, all questions came to a halt.

  An unnatural hush fell among the tiers, and Torrant ignored the antechamber and simply strode down the center of the room, walked up to the dais where the king consort sat, and set the body of his brother-in-arms down at the feet of the man who killed him.

  Eljean was nearly unrecognizable to the other regents—but not to his friends. His friends knew the shape of his neck, the few locks of hair that remained, the outline of his cheekbones behind the terrible bruises and cuts on the skin of his face. As Torrant’s cloak fell back from Eljean’s face, Aerk, Keon, Marv, Jino, and Alec all advanced and kneeled, holding hands to mouths in an effort to keep their emotions in check. Torrant looked to Alec first. “Trieste will live, my lord—with some help from you. Yarri should be getting her back to your men as we speak.”

  Alec’s face turned red, and he nodded curtly. He turned furiously to the waffling regents who had refused to believe the truth as it had pleaded for their understanding.

  “One hour,” he spat. “You simpering, piss-drinking cowards have one hour to give me this piece of shite’s head, or I will take your city from your miserable grasp and make it my own.”

  Alec of Otham stalked from the hall, roaring like an enraged bear, leaving shock and amazement in his wake.

  “I do believe he means that,” Aerk mused, his voice still choked with the tears none of them were willing to shed in the hall.

  “He does mean it,” Torrant replied evenly, “and when he sees what this….” He looked at Rath, all his formidable hatred coming to boil. “You had my friends raped. You had them tortured. You had this one killed. The least you could do is look at him. Look at him!”

  Rath’s eyes were everywhere but on Eljean’s ravaged body.

  “Who is that?” asked Minero of Trexel, and Torrant, still kneeling on the dais, stroked the ragged clumps of hair back from the purpled brow.

  “This?” Oh, Torrant hurt. His heart, his body, even his mind and his poetry were battered, bloody, and bruised from the cold, brutal winter. But still, he recognized when his poetry was needed, and he tried not to let anybody down.

  “This man? This man is nobody.” Torrant straightened, then looked from Eljean to the entire assembly.

  “This man is your brother. He’s your son. He’s a fellow regent or the man who sews your clothes. He’s the child you played with as a boy and the boy who courted your sister. He’s the man who draws your tap at the tavern or the brother of your best friend. He’s your father, your grandson, your lover. He was my friend, my lover, my brother-in-arms, and my fellow regent, and it wouldn’t matter if he was the man who cleaned my privy. Your ruler had no right to condemn him to die like this. And you all should be ashamed of allowing him to take that right from your whole and healthy hands. Eljean of Grace deserved better than this. He deserved better than you.”

  The entire assembly cringed, and the truth that Eljean had been his lover didn’t seem to matter to anybody, anybody at all.

  “But you’re all he has now,” Torrant continued, his voice ringing, “and you need to decide. Alec of Otham can solve your problems for you, you know. You’ve all but abdicated your free will as it is. But I warn you—when Alec sees what a mess your indifference has made of his wife, he might not be so sanguine abo
ut allowing you to live. As for me? I wash my hands of all of you. My brothers are welcome to accompany me, and if you don’t remember what your gods have made of you, I’m sure they will. Because a country is nothing if the men who rule it are ignorant, corrupt, and contemptible. My brothers are better than you, but it’s not too late to better yourselves.”

  Torrant turned his terrible glare to Rath, whose slightly parted mouth was making gibbering movements of words that would never be spoken. Torrant felt his gorge rise, and he spat at Rath’s feet. “And if someone wants to behead this piece of shite for Alec,” he finished, “I might even think about respecting you, but not now. You people who allowed this to happen are no better than he is.”

  Rath’s incredulous, profane laughter didn’t even make a dent in the shamed silence that left their breathing to echo in the carpeted hall.

  “You can’t overthrow me!” Rath protested, and he looked at the secretary general for help. Rishard was glaring intently at a small entrance at the side of the hall.

  Neither of them flinched when Minero of Trexel roared, “And Oueant and Dueant say we can!”

  But the roar of assent from the entire hall did make Rath jump, his wondering gaze snapping open like that of an opium dreamer from a long high, and still Rishard’s gaze stayed rooted to the door. His expression was shrewd and calculating—a man doing the math of his odds to live.

  Torrant, ignoring the howl of the regents looking for Rath’s blood, followed the chill wind of the secretary’s gaze to where one of his guards was waiting with an unexpected prisoner at the end of his dagger.

  “Sweet Triane help us….” Every corpuscle from his balls to his brain congealed with ice blue fear, and from across the room Yarri, blinking, looked at him with a miserable, apologetic gaze.

  Rishard Camp, the secretary general of Clough, called for his soldiers to defend him and bring the girl. Chaos, true battle-blooded chaos, exploded in that hall of empty words.