Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  Yarri pulled out her last spare set of needles and one of the two precious skeins of lace-weight yarn—this one in a lovely washed indigo—and gave them to her without a word.

  They sat in silence for a few moments until Trieste asked Yarri what she was making.

  Yarri smiled, hesitantly, and completed weaving in the last ends, then held out a lace dust cap in lavender and turquoise, made from one of the few remaining skeins of the precious stash Bethen had given her on a day that seemed forever ago, before snow covered the ground and froze their hearts.

  “Here,” she said, hesitantly. “May I help you put it on?”

  Trieste regarded the cap with a hard swallow. They’d trimmed her hair close to her head, but it would still be at least a month before the scabbed patches of scalp grew over with her once-unruly dark hair.

  “Yes, thank you,” she muttered from a rusty throat.

  Yarri got up in silence, and as she settled the cap lightly on her friend’s still-tender head, Trieste said to the space in front of them, “Aldam said I can still have children.”

  Yarri bent and wrapped her arms around Trieste’s shoulders, touching her wet cheek to Trieste’s. “I’m so glad,” she whispered. “Oh, sister—I should never have let you stay.”

  “You wouldn’t have stopped me.” Trieste took Yarri’s hands and kissed them, then leaned against the arm by her head. “Alec came the night before… before… it began in earnest. And I wouldn’t go with him either.”

  “Why…?” Yarri stopped herself. She already knew. She’d taken Eljean’s gift, knowing full well what he might suffer, and wanting it anyway. “Would it help,” she said instead, “if you knew that I think you’re terrifyingly brave, and that I’m so glad he wasn’t alone?”

  “Yes,” Trieste wept quietly. “Yes, it would help. Oh, Yarri—he would have been so alone….”

  “But you never have to be again.” Yarri rocked her softly.

  “His father came,” Trieste said, hoping to get this out when she didn’t have to look either of them in the eye. “His father came with drugs, at the end, to ease the pain. It was bad still, but I take comfort in that—he had some drugs to ease the pain.”

  Yarri’s arms tightened convulsively until Trieste shook her off stoically, saying she needed to cast on if she were ever to make anything of the wool in her hands. Trieste made sure that Yarri told Torrant, when they were alone, and hoped she’d done both her stalwart brothers justice with that one lie.

  The women sat and knit and kept each other company and kept watch over Torrant’s recovery. After a week, they were almost out of yarn when one of the women from the ghetto showed up with a basket of perfectly spun, natural-colored wool. After finding some roots and an old stash of sunflower seeds, they were back at it again, with some rustically dyed red and blue yarn. They found they were both making very small sweaters, and neither of them mentioned who would wear them.

  About this time, Aerk, Keon, Marv, and Marv’s sister Kerree came to visit.

  Alec had been in and out, his visits with his wife gentle and courtship-like, their time together quiet, warm, and forgiving. To anyone’s knowledge, he never once blamed her for choosing to stay. In the meantime, he kept them briefed on the state of the city, but only barely, telling them that Torrant’s friends would have more details.

  When those friends arrived to sit at Torrant’s bedside, they all discovered that particular details were important indeed.

  “You’re the king?” Torrant asked incredulously, drawing enough strength to sit up and give a strained expression that passed for a smile.

  Aerk looked uncomfortable. “It’s Keon’s fault,” he said sourly. “One of his relatives started suggesting he should do it, since he was one of the original….” Aerk flushed. “And anyway, Kee threw me under the title like a ball under a runaway cart.”

  “Original what?” Torrant asked, looking better than he had all week.

  Aerk muttered something that sounded like “freffufm ferrfeerfs” and Keon elbowed his friend in the ribs, and Aerk looked up, red from the roots of his shaggy brown hair to his pale neck under his pointed chin. “Freedom. Fighters. They’re calling us the ‘Freedom Fighters’ back in Dueance, like we’re some sort of bloody-arsed heroes.”

  The three remaining regents all gave a collective shudder, horrified to their toes.

  Kerree laughed, sadly, but it was a laugh just the same. “Jino would have kicked kittens to avoid that,” she murmured, but Marv had no sense of humor about their fallen brother, none at all.

  “It’s not funny,” Marv said. “I keep thinking I see him, you know? Out of the corner of my eye, I’ll see someone with a pale face or dark hair, and I’ll think it’s him, and then I’ll remember all over again.” He took an angry, fortifying breath and then looked up pleadingly into Torrant’s eyes.

  “Torrant, they’ll never know—none of them. They’ll never know the real awfulness, what Eljean—” His voice hitched. “—or Djali or Jino endured. Our brothers will get a footnote in a history book, but unless they’re in a song or something, no one will ever really know.”

  Suddenly, everyone in the room was looking at Torrant beseechingly, and Torrant looked blankly back at them. Then their need dawned on him, and he, as ever, bowed his head to it.

  “It will take some time,” he murmured. “I… I feel so emptied out… so hollow now. I’d need to be filled with poetry to do them justice. I don’t know when that’s going to happen.”

  They talked of other things after that, trying to entertain Torrant, trying hard, so hard, to see together the future they had all once dreamt of. But Torrant’s face grew more and more pale, and once, as Keon was explaining the idea for a city memorial park in the place of the Goddess ghetto, Torrant let out a brief, keening wail, staring into the distance at nothing at all.

  He came to himself and apologized, saying the park sounded like a lovely idea, but they could see plainly that although they all were grieving, Torrant was sick with the feeling, and all that would heal him was time.

  The royal party from Dueance left shortly afterward, but before they left, Aerk told them, “The Goddess folk are free to come back to the city now—but they may want to wait a while. This kind of prejudice, it dies hard. I’ll do my best—Alec’s been making suggestions—but… I don’t want anyone hurt anymore.” He closed his eyes and shuddered. They all did.

  “I’ll tell them—those here, those who made it to Eiran. I’ll make it known that they’re welcome back in Clough,” Torrant reassured, sitting up with the last of his strength, and they bowed and left.

  Torrant fell back against his pillows and was yanked, protesting, into more healing sleep, but not before he smiled to himself with a certain grim satisfaction. Aerk would make a fine king—he had compassion, strong morals, and that wonderful, self-deprecating way of asserting himself when the world really needed him. Torrant had seen it all in him, that first day, when all he’d needed on the floor was one more voice.

  A week later, late at night, Aylan arrived, crashing through the doors and demanding to know where Torrant was. Yarri and Trieste, who had been cleaning up dishes from the hold’s evening meal, pointed to the front room, where Torrant, still protesting, had been ordered to sit after dinner.

  He was playing restlessly with his lute, with motion but no music in his fingertips. As soon as he heard the commotion, he put the lute down, stood, crossed the room, and fell into Aylan’s embrace like the shore to the ocean. Neither of them spoke for a long, long time.

  The next day, Alec of Otham came to take Trieste home, and Aldam and Aylan packed up gear for everyone returning to Eiran.

  Torrant asked Trieste for a moment alone in the living room, but she smiled and refused.

  “Trieste!” he said, surprised. “I just wanted to….”

  “To heal the scars on my cheeks,” she said firmly, touching the half-healed, red, puffy tissue with a faint smile. He’d been looking at them speculatively since he’
d been able to walk. They were supposed to be in the shape of a w for “whore”—but the guard had bollixed it up, and what was healing on her cheeks looked more like a v. Alec and Torrant both said it was for “valiant”—Trieste found she rather liked that idea.

  “I’ve done it before,” he said, tentatively, holding out his hands as though to give her a gift.

  “I know.” She came in from the kitchen anyway, the Queen of Otham, wiping her hands on her apron and checking automatically to make sure her delicate, lace dust cap was still perched on her growing hair. “And maybe someday, I’ll let you do it again. But you’re not whole yet, and I won’t have you hurting yourself.”

  Torrant snorted. “I’m not made of glass. I won’t snap like a lute string. You are all entirely too sensitive to my poor recovering body—I’m fine!”

  “No,” Trieste murmured, looking him in his Goddess-blue eyes, “you’re not. Your body is still weak—and no amount of disguising your shaking hands after a trip across the yard is going to convince us otherwise. But worse than that, your soul is still fragile. We’ve been here for two weeks, and I’ve smiled more than you have.”

  Torrant tried another smile, this one closer to the real thing. “You’re stronger than I am,” he said, believing it.

  “That’s not true!” Trieste shook him off, angry suddenly that he should think so little about himself. “What happened in that cell was awful, my brother—don’t get me wrong. I’ll be wearing those scars across my heart long after the ones on my skin have faded. But what happened to you this year was relentless. Day after day, everything that was soft and kind and tender in you—it was raped, as surely as I was. Give your heart some time to heal—spend your strength on your beloved and your young.”

  She smiled suddenly, a bright, fierce smile that would have scorched his heart with its intensity when they were young schoolmates, a million years before.

  “I earned these scars, Torrant Shadow. I’ll keep them for a while yet. They’ll hurt, but they’ll remind my people that Otham is just a heartbeat—Alec’s heartbeat, actually—from becoming Clough. It’s a lesson worth my humility, don’t you think?”

  Torrant was unhappy—he gave a truly tremendous scowl that hid more hurt than Trieste thought he’d have to spare for such a small matter. But he respected her wishes. Just as Alec had back in the prison cell, and just as Aylan had as they’d ridden out of Clough, Torrant abided by her decision.

  She crossed the room then and kissed his cheek. “Besides, Torrant—remember, I’ve seen your body without your shirt, and I know what you looked like, young and clean and perfect. My scars are small things, my brother. Heal them later.”

  It wasn’t until she was in the wagon next to Alec and they were riding for blessed home that her husband asked her the real reason she wouldn’t let Torrant heal her.

  “If you heard that conversation, then you know the reason,” she said chidingly—he must have been in the kitchen, listening in.

  “I heard.” He nodded and clucked to the horses. He was happy—they were returning home, his home, with his wife, and his country that needed him. He put the reins in one hand and wrapped his arm around her shoulder. Something in him warmed that no one would be responsible for the healing of her heart and mind but him.

  “If nothing else convinced me you two weren’t destined to be lovers,” he continued, “it’s that he didn’t hear the lie in your voice. You’re hiding something from him.”

  Trieste nodded and sighed, grateful for the one person she wouldn’t have to hide anything from, ever again. “I am,” she murmured, “and if he’d tried to heal me, he would have known it. And then I would have had to tell him the truth.”

  “Which is?” Alec prompted, gratified when she relaxed into his shoulder, in spite of the jouncing of the little wagon. He’d been so afraid to touch her when he’d first seen her at Moon Hold, looking frail and victimized and violated. But simple, warm, human touch seemed to be something she craved, and he would never tire of giving it to her.

  “Eljean never took those drugs. I told Torrant and Yarri that he did, but he threw the packet in the privy.”

  Alec was horrified. “Oh gods… why?”

  “Because otherwise, beloved, he was afraid he would have betrayed us all. Torrant hurts so much, aches so much for that death. It would betray Eljean’s sacrifice to make it worse—at least now. Wait until Torrant smiles again, a true smile. Wait until he plays the lute again. Wait until he sings. If he can do all that, be the joy his family needs, then he’ll be ready to heal me.”

  Alec made a suspicious sound and passed his shoulder over his cheek. “You are so damned lionhearted, beloved. I don’t know how we’d live through this if you weren’t so damned brave.”

  Trieste leaned on him some more. “I learned it all from Torrant and Aylan, and then you, Alec. I’m paying him back the best I can.”

  “And me?” he asked softly.

  “You?” she laughed a little, but a true laugh. “You, darling. I’ll pay you back for the rest of our lives, if you’ll let me.”

  He closed his eyes and kissed her head, longing for her hair again, but willing to wait.

  “Of course, beloved,” he murmured. Oh yes. Things were right again. Trieste, Queen of Otham, was coming home.

  Remembering to Breathe

  TORRANT COULD only wish his homecoming was as quiet as Trieste’s.

  The trip wasn’t so bad, actually. Aylan and Yarri hated being underground. Torrant spent much of his time holding their hands in the back of the wagon or singing quietly when they were on horseback, to make the dreadful chest-weighting pressure of the darkness choke them just a little less.

  He liked that part. He felt needed—and what was better yet, he felt like he could rise to the challenge. After Eljean and Trieste, he’d been wondering if he would ever be of use to anybody again.

  And the dark wasn’t so bad.

  The dark was peaceful, heavy in a reassuring way, like a winter cloak. It soothed him, made him believe he could curl up in it, sleep in it, allow the light to pass him by and become just a quiet, beating heart in the core of the mountain.

  But even that might be too loud, he mused the second night, in the back of the wagon, pushed there by his damnable physical weakness and the overwhelming urge to sleep. As he crouched there, his heart thundering in his ears and his breath coming too short from his time on horseback, he thought maybe the blackness would be complete and perfect if only those sounds stopped too.

  He tried to disappear, tried to make his breath so quiet it wasn’t there, but they passed one of the passageway torches, and he was startled by Aylan’s darkened figure on Heartland’s back next to the wagon, when he’d been out front earlier.

  “Don’t try it,” Aylan said softly, seriously. His face was still gaunt—neither of them had put on much of the weight they’d lost.

  Torrant gasped in a breath, unaware that he’d been completely trapping the air in his chest. “Don’t try what?” he choked.

  “We won’t let you disappear,” Aylan said implacably. With an agile movement, he swung off the horse and into the cart, securing the reins on the corner post.

  In the back of the cart, he leaned up against the backboard and took Torrant’s head in his lap. “Here, brother—I’ll watch your back, and you sleep.”

  Yarri, at Aldam’s urging, did the same thing—but not so agilely—before the light from the torch faded behind them. Zhane, the only one of the Goddess folk to leave Clough for good, sat on the buckboard with Aldam, talking quietly about anything at all.

  “Good night, brother,” Aylan said quietly into the encroaching dark. “Love you.”

  “Good night, beloved,” murmured Yarri from Torrant’s other side. “Love you.”

  “Good night,” Torrant replied, letting that soothing darkness take him, shallow breathing to see the sunlight another day. “I love you both too.”

  The next day, as a lightening of the air told them they were clos
e to the Eiran side of the pass, Torrant insisted on riding Heartland out of the tunnel. “He’s got a gait like butter!” he protested grumpily. “The only way I’ll fall off of him is if a plummeting star knocks me off my seat.”

  Aylan eyed him with supreme dislike from the back of the gray he’d actually ridden out of Eiran a little less than a year before. “That is so not funny,” he grumbled, and Yarri seconded that sentiment from her place in the back of the wagon.

  Torrant stopped short, and in the dim light, they could both see shock and surprise washing his features. His eyes crinkled, and a real smile actually flirted at the corners of his mouth. “Goddess!” He laughed. “I’d forgotten that really happened!”

  He was still laughing when the sun strike shot through their eyeballs at the end of the tunnel. Their eyes had barely recovered from the searing light of a true spring day when word of their arrival made it through Eiran. By the time they had taken the side road past the barracks to the main road, it was lined on either side by the citizens of Eiran: the people Torrant and Yarri had grown up with, whom Torrant had worked with at Lane’s warehouses, whom Yarri had bought sugar from, or Aylan had drunk a pint with.

  The entire orphanage was there, a hand-painted banner with Yarri’s name held in front of the children, Aln at their head, waving at Yarri with a certain relief.

  The people who had been evacuated from the Goddess ghettoes were in the front rows.

  Without warning, Torrant found that his hands were shaking, his forehead was sweating, and black spots were swimming in front of his eyes.

  “Aylan…,” he muttered, shamed and shameless in the sudden surge of fear and failure, “Aylan, I don’t think I can do this.”

  Aylan cantered up by his side and smiled at the new leader of the militia, the man who had taken over after a family friend had been killed at Triannon.

  “You’re Triane’s Son, brother,” Aylan said quietly. “You can do anything.”

  “Aylan….”