by Amy Lane
“Dueant had a little Goddess of his own—in fact, he had two, but Dueant had a heart as big as the sky. Our first little Goddess, who was meant to be the golden Goddess of the day, with a glow the color of all the leaves in autumn, had her own place in Dueant’s heart, because if Oueant was courage and strength, then Dueant was compassion and honor, and an open heart was Dueant’s way. At first the little Goddess loved Dueant fiercely, because she did everything fiercely, and they were happy.
“But she missed Oueant. He had been a good daddy-moon, and because he burned in the night sky, he had seemed brighter and stronger than Dueant. It wasn’t true, but that’s what happens with bright and dark, and the Goddess was little, after all, and couldn’t always see what was glow and what was sky, so it was to be forgiven.
“The Goddess became angry and bitter, because she couldn’t find words to tell Dueant that she loved him, but not in the same way as she’d loved her own daddy-moon, and the only words she could find were waspish and unkind. ‘That was a stupid thing to say! You’re not my real daddy-moon! Anyone could do that!’ Day and night, it seemed, and when Dueant smiled upon her and understood, that only made her pain the worse. The Goddess started to lose her glow—and even though Dueant would always love his brother’s daughter, his own heart grew heavy and dim, because you can only abuse a person or a moon so much before it has to draw dark shields about itself to keep from being hurt anymore. And now the world waits, breathlessly, to see if the Goddess will grow up and forgive herself for needing another daddy-moon, or if Dueant will have to grieve some of his love away to save his bruised heart, because when the Goddess lost her daddy-moon, Dueant lost his brother-moon, and now the Goddess is all he has left.”
Torrant finished speaking, and an awkward silence descended on the family. It was broken, finally, by Yarri, who was dumping handfuls of warm sand on her toes by the light of the fire.
“How does that story end?” she asked roughly.
“We don’t know,” Torrant answered, lowly. “We’re all poised at the river, looking at the sky, waiting to see what the moons do next.”
“I don’t want to forget my daddy.” Her chin quivered with obstinacy.
“I’ll make sure you never have to,” Lane said softly, and Yarri nodded, that chin quiver becoming more pronounced.
“Torrant’s more than a star,” she muttered, daring anyone to contradict her.
“He’s the sun in your sky, precious,” Bethen answered softly. “We all know that.”
Yarri nodded and dashed at her face with the back of her hand. She was so tough, Torrant thought with an aching heart—so tough. “I’m sorry,” she muttered roughly. “I’m sorry I’ve been so mean. I just… I heard Uncle Lane talking to Roes one morning and I almost… almost called him… almost called him….” Her voice broke completely, and Lane couldn’t stand to watch her sit there and be so tough all by herself anymore. In a moment he moved around to the fire and wrapped his arms around his little niece, and she sobbed into his shoulder, “I almost called you Da-aadddy….”
He rocked her and murmured, “I know, I know, little Yarrow, I know…,” until her sobs faded into the darkness, and she was left sniffling on her uncle’s shoulder.
Later, as they were walking through the darkness of the river’s edge toward home, careful not to go into any of the dark corners where couples might be found wilding, Lane carried her limp and sleeping form and Torrant carried Cwyn, while everybody else was burdened with picnic baskets and blankets. “Thank you,” Lane said.
“I just told a story.” Torrant was embarrassed.
“A story is more powerful than a king, sometimes,” Lane told him seriously. “A story makes our hearts move. Look what your story did to this one?” He jiggled Yarri just enough to make his point but not enough to wake her up. “You have a good voice for telling stories, Torrant, and a good hand for healing. Maybe those things will be your revenge, you ever think?”
Torrant flushed, because he hadn’t, but he had thought maybe Lane had forgotten his vow of vengeance. “If I see a way to kill Rath with a good story, I’ll do it,” he replied with dignity, and Lane nodded.
“Fair enough, boyo, fair enough.”
They had wandered far enough from the family to take a mistaken step into the shadows, and only enough moonlight remained to outline lovers, wilding as they saw fit—all three of them, naked and tripling, Torrant barely choked a strangled noise in his throat before he and Lane managed to navigate their sleeping burdens back to the path the rest of the family had taken.
Lane laughed a little as they continued on.
“That’s one story I don’t know how I’d tell,” Torrant muttered, and Lane’s laugh turned into a full-throated guffaw.
“I’d enjoy hearing it if you did, boy,” he whooped. “But you’d better be careful how you tell that story around Bethie.”
And then Torrant laughed too, and they caught up with their family in the dark of the solstice moon.
Samhain, Winters, Four Years Sing Along
SAMHAIN CAME, and Yarri, Torrant, and Lane worked all day on letters to their honored dead, which would burn in the bonfire that night. Yarri and Torrant had never heard of the ceremony until then—it was not something practiced in Clough. Torrant had to help Yarri write hers, and when they were done, neither of them could speak. They sat in the deserted dining room, Yarri on Torrant’s lap, and listened to the sounds of their own muffled sobs for a long time after that. They watched the letters burn in Samhain fires, and Yarri asked Torrant what he had written. He was not able to tell her what he said for many, many years.
Later that day, Stanny played in the running ball game, in front of the entire town, as they cheered wildly, wearing clothes the color of the separate strands of Yarri’s hair. Winter solstice came with Stanny laid up and irritable, his leg in plaster from injury, but since his father had given him the honor of adding all the shipping manifests from the firm, Stanny could hardly complain. Two Beltanes after the refugees from Clough first arrived, Stanny allowed a sweet, sly-smiling brunette with dark, sloe eyes to lure him away from the family during the bonfire. That solstice, Stanny had his first wilding, and Evya became a quiet fixture at the back gate and the dinner table for the next several summers and winters, and a tumultuous, confusing storm in Stanny’s heart in the moments between.
Cwyn went from a dimpled maniac toddler to a dimpled precocious schoolchild, bearing a fantastic load of books on his narrow back. Four days out of the week he ventured hand in hand with Yarri, as every child from the town went to the little schoolhouse to learn their letters and numbers from the young women—married and unmarried—who had time and inclination to teach. His first week at school, he got caught behind the schoolhouse after bell, kissing a little girl. His third week, he got caught behind the schoolhouse after bell because a little boy was kissing him. Bethen and Lane exchanged rolled eyes, heaving sighs, and prepared for the maelstrom that his school years would be, and were still caught flat-footed when he was discovered naked before twilight of next summer’s solstice wilding, demonstrating to three other children what his naked parts did that the girls’ could not.
Roes spent all winter sewing dozens of rose-colored flowers over her solstice dress, only to discover that she had grown more inches around her bust than she had in height, and had to settle for a brand new dress with a scant week’s worth of embroidery on it. All that angst evaporated, however, when she danced her first dance with Aldam under the ribbon pole that Beltane. The next summer, it all came back as she insisted Aldam allow himself to be seduced into the wilding because she wanted him to know exactly where his heart was when she came of age. Aldam did as she instructed—but spent the next several years convinced that he was not clever enough to know women at all.
Starry went from happy baby to placid toddler to sweet-natured child in a transition as gentle as the purple velvet night to the gold-gray of dawn. She had red hair and blue eyes, and her perplexed, passionate mother
would often look at her in confusion, wondering where the storm was around all this calm. One day when she was four, Starry found a group of boys torturing a kitten from Anye’s sixth litter. When Aldam and Torrant were done icing noses, groins, eyes, and setting one wrist—Starry’s—Bethen took her youngest child in her arms and crooned at her until she slept, and then smiled admiringly at her sleeping, precious one for long after.
The Constable and Mayor read their resolution that Eiran would be neutral territory in that first spring before Beltane. Refugees continued coming over the hill and Hammer Pass for the next four years—more in the spring and the summer—until one day in fall, four years to the day after Torrant and Aldam had made their mad slide down the now graveled hill, a group of terrified families came bearing news. The switchback path that had so frightened Torrant had been destroyed completely. Rath had utilized sulfur and saltpeter and set off an explosion of ghastly proportions, and the flood of Goddess’s children was stopped—brutally.
“We weren’t the last family on the trail,” said one trembling father of six. “I saw… the whole switchback was full of people… and then… the trail practically disintegrated beneath my feet.” He had dissolved into tears, and the constable sought Lane out that very night to apologize. “I thought your younglings had exaggerated or misunderstood,” he said, swallowing a tankard of ale at a gulp. “But it’s bad in Clough—ugly in a way I’d not thought ugly could get.”
The refugees found homes. Many went across to the sea to Otham, and some merely went across the river to Cleant or beyond, into the Old Man Hills by Triannon. Eiran doubled in size—from two rows of houses lining both sides of the road to six rows of houses on the side farthest from the river. It didn’t affect the Moon family too much; their backyard still ended with the river itself, as it had during that first winter when the one man, two boys, and a big snowcat had dumped the guardsmen’s bodies into the foaming green tumult below.
When asked why they’d fled their homes, it took many of the families months among the easy-giving tolerances of Eiran before they would admit to having a midwife in the family or losing a child or a mother during childbirth. It took some of those fleeing their homeland years before they talked of bearing a Goddess gift, and even longer before they stopped dyeing their hair to hide the telltale white streak that Torrant wore like a badge. Those who walked the Goddess path with a lover of their own sex often never admitted to their reasons for exile. There was one couple—two men—who maintained staunchly that they were unlikely looking cousins until they died, old, happy, and obviously in love.
Life went on in the peaceful land of Eiran—life has a way of doing that. If the heavy, dark Clough of Rath loomed over the horizon, the friendlier side of Hammer Pass blocked its ugliness with green cedar pine and redwood trees and soft, red dirt.
Aldam and Torrant continued with their studies, and Torrant tutored Aldam until his writing was up to Triannon’s standards. Both of them worked as the unofficial town healers, and Aldam’s gift was much more appreciated than it had been in his tiny home village. He grew taller, sprouting nearly a hand’s worth of height in his first year in Eiran, after which he towered over nearly everybody, including Stanny. His shoulders grew broader, and although his face never lost its even-tempered sweetness, it lost some of its roundness. His body became leaner from working hard in the warehouse, and he became much more confident that his voice would be heard. Of course, he didn’t speak any more than he ever had—but when he spoke, like Lane, he knew people would listen.
Torrant and Yarri grew as well. Torrant would never be as tall as Aldam and Stanny, but his chest would be broad, and working in the warehouse and tumbling in the yard to play with the other children left him wiry and thick with muscle. His face grew leaner, and an uneven, darkish stubble haunted his jaw if he was not careful (unlike Aldam, who said he only shaved so his four chin hairs didn’t get caught on anything), and he began to attract more and more sly young women who wanted some time up close and personal to fall into his unusual and shy smile.
Yarri grew lean and brown from running wild in the summers and helping with child care and warehouse work when it was needed, and her chestnut-red-gold hair continued to streak and to wave, until it attracted the gaze of envious matrons when she brushed it out at the Beltane dances and wore it loose to her waist. She participated in her studies just enough to know that she’d rather mind children and paint than write and do math, and was stubborn and wily enough to get out of her lessons unless she was doing just that. Torrant often said, while he was reading a history book to the family and ignoring her yawns, that this focus made her world smaller than it had to be. Then she would present him with a colored illustration of the sea battle between Otham and Eiran, and he would change his mind entirely.
Unlike the shadow that had chased the two of them to Eiran and loomed terribly over the future, the thing that loomed on their horizon was neither ugly nor fearful. However, it was blocked by the eight years that spanned their births, and although it was not awkward or cumbersome yet, it was getting there.
It was certainly an uncomfortable presence the morning after Torrant’s first wilding, when Yarri woke him up next to a sleeping redheaded girl by throwing his pants in his face.
“So?” she asked bluntly as he struggled into his breeches, blushing down to the parts that were being quickly hidden by the rumpled fabric.
“So what?” He knew what she wanted, but he didn’t want to answer, and not for the reasons she thought.
“So, is it everything everybody acts like it is?” Yarri demanded impatiently, and Torrant fought a pained smile. She looked so innocent, her curling hair escaping from its thick braid, her face longer and bonier than it had been four years before, but no less piquant, no less sweet, than the child he had wrapped in a magic flap of skin next to his heart. She was not even (to her chagrin) that much taller. In fact, she showed every indication of being as short as—if more buxom than—her willowy mother, and although Torrant was charmed by the idea, Yarri was furious with the body it looked like the Goddess was going to saddle her with. Nobody mentioned the fact that Cwyn, although three years younger, was less than half a head shorter than she was.
“Is it?” she persisted, her eyes wide, and he had to turn his head so she wouldn’t see his face as he answered—because that hadn’t changed between them in the last four years, and he prayed it never would.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said miserably, and he heard rather than saw the disbelief on her features, right down to the pursing of the bee-stung mouth.
“That’s unlikely!” she said shortly, not really in contradiction, but in surprise.
“Shhh.” He looked at the girl in panic. They were in the floor-level hay closet in the stables, where he and Sheyla had begun talking over a vain and well-exercised Courtland. She had been one of the predatory girls who had spooked him and Aldam so badly their first Beltane, and he’d discovered she was even more single-minded alone. She had wanted him, in a blatant, mature way that honestly surprised him. He couldn’t see with her eyes—Bethen told him often enough that he was handsome, that even his hair, with its wicked streak of silver bright against the dark, lustrous brown, was appealing, but he didn’t believe a breadth of muscle or divots in his cheeks was enough to warrant all that pursuing. Torrant was single-minded about some things himself, and not getting a girl with child or even not getting a girl who would be around when Yarri was of age were both high on his list.
He agreed to the wilding reluctantly, on the condition that she let Aldam give her an herb that would keep her from conceiving.
But she wasn’t stirring now, a thing that frightened him almost as much as if she’d wakened and looked at him, and he checked her closely, shaking her just a little, until her mouth curved up at the edges and she murmured his name. When he heard that, he shrugged hurriedly into his shirt and grabbed Yarri’s hand to tug her out of the building, completely ignoring an affronted Courtland.
&
nbsp; “Torrant, you’re acting weird,” Yarri stated as they shivered their way home in the summer dawn. “I mean, even weirder than I thought you would be this morning. And you look like hell—did you drink wine last night?”
“No,” he protested, although his head was pounding hard enough to make his breath come in short pants. The road under his feet dipped suddenly, and his footstep went jerky. Without warning, he fell to his knees and lost his dinner from the night before. When he was done, he passed a trembling sleeve over his mouth and took a deep, shuddery breath and tried to calm himself. He found he was shivering uncontrollably and that pulling himself together was much harder than he’d imagined. It wasn’t until he felt Yarri’s arms around his shoulders that he could even make his breathing calm.
“What happened?” she whispered, and he closed his eyes against tears.
“The snowcat….” Behind his eyes he could see the bonfire and Sheyla’s bare, moving body, feel her hands boldly grabbing, rubbing, even exploring and entering and pinching, and just as he’d wondered how often Sheyla had been a-wilding, the world had gone black and white and red, and he’d seen a pulse throbbing in her throat, and….
“I need to talk to Lane!” he gasped, feeling stupid, feeling weak. Sex didn’t make him a man. Lane had repeated it often enough as he and Aldam and Stanny had faced the choice of the wilding, and the whole town believed it. He had seen the belief etched honestly in the faces of the elders, of the mothers and fathers and the young people who had both refrained and participated in the wilding. But there was the implication, the age of consent, the age of dancing at Beltane, the age when the wilding was possible…. He didn’t want to think about it.
“Right. C’mon, Torrant! Stand up!” Yarri’s voice was easy and sweet when she didn’t have to be, soothing because he needed it. “Stand up, and we’ll go find Uncle Lane—he’ll know what to do. Of course he will. He can handle anything, you know that.”
