Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  And soothing word by soothing word, Yarri walked him home.

  FIRST SHE sat him in the kitchen, around the same bare-board table they’d been eating at for four years. She left him petting Anye, who, since Lane wasn’t there to shoo her off, was curled up on the table in the sunshine from the open kitchen window. Yarri went and quietly roused Lane, who, as soon as he saw Torrant’s shivering, dejected shoulders, ignored the cat and shooed her out of the room instead.

  “I’m just going to listen at the doorway!” she insisted, and Lane glared at her.

  “If you ever want that boy to be a man, you give him a man’s respect, do you hear me?” he growled, and Yarri gasped.

  “Fine!” She slipped away, out the front door and into the wild summer morning, presumably to roust Aldam and Stanny and make their lives miserable to pay back the world.

  “She’ll hold that grudge,” Torrant chattered, and Lane covered his shoulders with a throw before giving him a cup of bitter chocolate and sitting next to him in the strong morning light. He gave Anye an exasperated nudge, but she opened one gimlet eye, and he retreated. Torrant seemed to be comforted by her presence anyway.

  “Either that or she’ll find a way to listen,” Lane replied with equanimity. “That’s how family works.” A thick silence descended then, while Torrant shivered and drank and ate some of the soft bread Bethen had left on the table the night before. It seemed to help settle his stomach, and he ate some more. “What happened?” Lane asked, after the shivers had eased up and the thick silence had thinned a little.

  “We were—well, you know. She’s very pretty.” His voice faded away, and at first he seemed dreamy, and then—oh gods. That Goddess blue shine made his blood cold.

  Lane made a strangled sound and a little hum of grief. “Your eyes, boy,” he said softly. “I think I can guess. She’s still—I mean, there’s no blood.”

  “Goddess, no!” Torrant burst out, shivering some more. “But for a minute, I wanted to, which was weird, because the only people the snowcat ever wanted to… hurt… were the ones who wanted to hurt us. Other than that—” He looked beseechingly at Lane. “You’ve seen me hunt—you and Stanny and Aldam. I’ve never even thought of—” He swallowed hard. “—eating anybody.” Then he added bleakly, “Until now. I’ve never thought of it until last night. And then when I realized what I was thinking, you know, I….” He looked down in shame. “I couldn’t tell her ‘no.’ She just wouldn’t let me. I’d tried—I’d tried for months to tell her no, and this was going to be the one time I lost control. No promises, no children, just what she wanted and she’d maybe stop stalking me. She wouldn’t have listened this time.” He was looking fully into Lane’s eyes, as if begging him to understand.

  “So what did you do?” Lane asked with concern.

  “I made her think…. I can do it. I can change people’s thoughts and their memories—but it’s hard. It’s really hard. It hurts, it hurts my head and my stomach and my conscience. But I couldn’t tell her ‘no,’ and I couldn’t tell her about the snowcat, and I couldn’t actually”—he shuddered—“do it! I don’t know what the snowcat would have done, and I was wrong, I know I was wrong, but what if it’s worse than that? What if I can never—what if every time I try to—? What if the snowcat is a part of that forever? How will I tell? What am I going to do?” He didn’t wail and weep, but he did put his head in his hands and shiver until Lane’s arms around his shoulders finally seemed to seep some warmth into him.

  “Don’t worry about it, Torrant,” Lane whispered, stroking his hair like a child’s. “It’s not you—it was her—do you hear me?”

  “How could it be her?” he muttered from the comforting circle of his uncle’s arms.

  Lane sighed. “Torrant, you didn’t feel safe. What you were thinking about doing—there’s only two things in a man that will make him take his clothes off in front of someone else with the intention of doing what you were doing. One’s trust, and the other’s recklessness. The wilding’s all about being reckless, being foolish with your heart, your body, your dignity. Aldam was scared, Stanny was scared—I’m sure the young lady wasn’t feeling as bold as she seemed to be.”

  Torrant snorted, and there was a suspicious noise from behind the open window, but Lane ignored both. “Even the boldest young lady is leery of being rejected, Torrant. That’s why she had such a hard time hearing your ‘no.’ But the point is, you felt threatened, and then you felt on the verge of losing control. Those two things are what bring out the snowcat, and that’s what got you looking out through his eyes, do you hear me?”

  Torrant sniffled a little and nodded, the last of his shivers dying. Lane watched his stillness and wondered if the boy wasn’t on the verge of falling asleep with his head on the kitchen table again, as he had that winter night so long ago, but Torrant had one more question for him.

  “I’m not going to have to wait eight years, am I?” he asked, his voice muffled along with his obvious embarrassment.

  “The way women are falling into your lap?” It was Lane’s turn to snort. “I seriously doubt it.”

  “Are you sure? Because my right forearm is getting really strong.”

  Lane felt a laugh well up in his throat, and he had to press his hand against his mouth to keep it down from the rest of the family. “Go to sleep, son,” he choked, “and exercise that arm some more. You’ll have a chance to give it a rest someday.” Abruptly the laughter died down, with the exception of a suspicious-sounding echo outside the sunny window. “Has it occurred to you that it’s a good thing you’re leaving, Torrant? It’s going to be a long enough time for you, waiting, but with her right here it would damn near kill you.”

  The wave of grief that washed over the little kitchen was palpable. “I don’t want to think about it,” Torrant said, raising his tear-streaked face and looking beseechingly at Lane. “It’s going to hurt bad enough to go. Thinking about leaving just makes it worse.”

  Lane grimaced. “Go downstairs to bed, boy. Sleep until it’s too hot, go swimming, help Starren play with the kittens, chase Yarri by the swimming hole, and grow up later, right?”

  One last tear snaked past Torrant’s tan nose and puddled around his top lip. “Right,” he said roughly before heaving himself up and hauling himself down the stairs.

  When Lane heard him hit the landing at the bottom and fall into bed, he stuck his head out the kitchen window and looked down at a rebellious and unrepentant angel face that glared back up at him in turn. “And as for you, Yarrow Moon—if you can think of any way to not make the next eight years miserable for him, it will make your lives together much more peaceful ever after, do you hear me?”

  Yarri blinked her big brown eyes, and Lane was surprised to see them shine, fill up, and spill over. “His heart hurts, Uncle Lane. How come I make his heart hurt?”

  Lane sighed and wished to both gods and their Goddess that his wife had managed to catch this crisis instead of him. “He’s grown, Yarri. All he wants is a crush and some love as a grown man—is that so hard for you to understand?”

  “I’ll miss him like I missed my hair,” she said rawly. “Except worse, because sometimes I’d forget my hair was short, and I won’t ever forget he’s gone.”

  “You know he’s only living to come back when you’re grown, right?”

  She nodded somberly. “That better be a promise.”

  “It’s one of the few truths I know. Now go find Aldam and Stanny and tell them Bethen left breakfast on the table—and if you love that boy, you let the world think this wilding’s like any other, right?”

  Yarri laughed with all the evil a precocious ten-year-old could muster. “She sighed a lot in her sleep. I think Torrant gave her a very good dream.”

  And before Lane could object, complain, or laugh helplessly, she was gone, pattering barefoot down the packed town road, wearing Torrant’s old knee breeches and one of Bethen’s old shirts.

  Honeysuckle and Holly

  ONE MORNING at t
he end of the last month of summer, Torrant and Aldam hitched a stout packhorse named Cannonball to the cart Lane had bought specifically for their trips to and from the university. They strapped food to the saddlebags at the back of Clover’s four-year-old gelding (named, appropriately, Hammer Pass, since that’s where he had probably been conceived), saddled up Clover herself, and prepared to leave the Moon home in Eiran by the sea. Stanny had made noises about going with them, but he genuinely enjoyed the warehouse work, and Lane was secretly pleased that his son was following in his footsteps. He would often complain that he had built a business, not a legacy, but Stanny was as good at the business as his father, and so a legacy it became. On this day, Stanny was out with the rest of the family to tell them good-bye and to reassure them that Triannon in the heart of the Old Man Hills was only two days’ ride, and that the boys would always have a home in Eiran, and that they would be loved and missed.

  Of course, Torrant could admit to himself that it was this knowledge, and the sadness of the farewell, that gave him and Aldam the courage to leave in the first place, which is what made Yarri’s absence so galling.

  A teary Bethen met Torrant’s eyes and sighed. “You know where she is,” she said softly, and Roes grimaced.

  “I’ll go haul her back by the hair if you like!” It was warming that their bond of sisterhood had progressed to the point where out-and-out violence was not only possible but occasional, but Torrant shook his head.

  “I’ll get her.” He sent Aldam a look to tell him he’d be back in a moment. Aldam nodded and looked shyly at Roes, who looked shyly back. Roes was barely fourteen—there had been no words spoken, and no agreements, and not even any secret kisses, but Roes’s single-minded concentration had not lessened to any degree around Aldam, and Aldam’s wide-eyed admiration of Roes had only grown. It was enough to make Bethen and Lane bang their fists against their heads—but not enough to make them glad to see Aldam go.

  Torrant trotted quickly past the family and the sweet, blushing silence of Aldam and Roes, down the side of the house and through the wide expanse behind the backyard, and toward the river. Back here, Lane fought a yearly war against blackberry bushes that he never really won, mostly because if he left enough of the old growth in the winter to spawn new growth in the spring, he would be up to his armpits in preserves for most of the following winter. Besides the blackberry bushes, with their spicy, basil scent, there was a hedge bordering the river’s shore that was made up of a stand of holly bushes and a stand of honeysuckle, so close together that they merged. At the place where the two bushes met was a space. Yarri had trained the honeysuckle to grow in a straggly tube, keeping the bright, dark, spiky leaves of the holly from prickling her as she huddled inside the honeysuckle tunnel.

  This was Yarri’s thinking place. She kept an old horse blanket on the ground there, and when the heat grew too oppressive in the summer or memories of her lost family beset her in the fall, she would hide in this little green tunnel of solitude and be alone. Nobody had ever intruded here—until now.

  Torrant was big enough that his shoulders pushed past the honeysuckle, and the holly scratched his arm on one side causing a rip in one of the new woven shirts Bethen had bought for him and Aldam—this one a rich green. He swore softly but kept on until he was sitting next to the huddled figure in the center of the tunnel, her piquant nose and bee-stung mouth silhouetted against the brightness of the other end of the tunnel.

  “I’m too big for this place,” he grumbled as he pulled his knees to his chest.

  “You weren’t invited,” she said shortly, and he wrapped a tender arm around her resisting shoulders.

  “Of course I was. Anywhere you are, that’s where I’m going to go.”

  “You say that now—you’ll make new friends in school,” she said confidently, and he could only laugh; he was not nearly so sure that his social life at the university would be as easy and as kind as the small town of Eiran had been.

  “Goddess, I hope so.” He rolled his eyes. “Otherwise, it’s going to be a grim four years.”

  “Well, go get it started then.” She continued to stare at the matted leaves that made up the sides of her little green cave.

  “I can’t,” he told her. “The person I love best in the world hasn’t said good-bye to me. If she doesn’t say good-bye, then I can’t go. And if I can’t go, she won’t get a chance to grow into a young woman while I’m gone, and then I can’t come back to her.” He fought ridiculously against crying like a boy. It was stupid to get all tight with tears and sadness. “Besides,” he added practically, breathing hard against an embarrassing sniffle, “I’m coming back for Samhain and winter Solstice, and you’re just being stupid.”

  “I’m just a stupid little kid. What else did you expect?” Yarri didn’t have as much self-control as he did, and her sniffles were not nearly as hidden. “And you’re going to go off and find a lover and forget all about me.”

  “You’re the person I love best in the world, you stupid little kid,” he shot back, getting annoyed with the whole damned mass of pain that a little thing like leaving had become. “And damn it, I want you to tell me good-bye so I know you’ll miss me and welcome me home.”

  Finally she turned a tear-stained face to him. “Of course I’ll miss you,” she said without any grace at all. “And I don’t care if you find a hundred lovers, or a thousand, you still have to come back to me, right?”

  “Right!” he said, kissing her sweaty little forehead. “But today, you have to come out and say good-bye to me and find comfort in our family, is that a deal?”

  She sucked in a breath and a sob at the same time. “It’s going to be dumb because all we’re going to do is cry and be depressed and….”

  “And you’ll do it together, and it’s the reason we crossed that mountain in the dead of winter, right? So you would have a family to be sad with, as well as happy. C’mon, little Yarrow flower—come tell me good-bye.”

  “Good-bye….” She launched herself into his arms and sobbed and sobbed, until eventually she couldn’t cry anymore, and her sweaty face stuck to his once-new shirt, and droplets of sweat dripped down his back between his shoulder blades, and it became too stifling inside the green cave to stay. He crawled out of the holly-honeysuckle cave and helped her out, and then, surprising him, she leapt into his arms and wrapped her legs around his waist, burrowing her face against his neck much as she had done when she was six. She was heavier now, but he had spent a lot of time working in the warehouse and working out with his friends, and he could carry her. By the time he got back to the family, her sniffles had at last died down, and she was a limp, warm, sweet weight against his shoulder, murmuring things to him that he already knew, so he wouldn’t forget.

  “And don’t forget that I still collect dolls,” she was saying as he neared Lane. “I don’t play with them anymore, even if I apologize to them for not playing with them and talk to them so they don’t feel bad, but I still like to get them for my birthday. Don’t forget that, right?”

  “I won’t forget,” he said through a clogged throat. “Now you need to go see Uncle Lane, right?”

  She went to Lane without resistance, although he rolled his eyes a little with her weight, and Torrant was free to issue hugs all around. Cwyn’s eyes were narrowed, and he hugged Torrant almost angrily, but Starry was as open and easy as Starry had always been. Today’s obvious emotion was sadness; she wore her long face comfortably and sniffled a little into Torrant’s shoulder before giving him a sloppy three-and-a-half-year-old kiss on his cheek and telling him “Bye-bye, Towant… come back soon and play.” Stanny gave him a manly thump on the arm, and Roes turned from her awkwardly static moment with Aldam to hug him fiercely. “You take care of him, ‘Cousin Ellyot’!” she ordered against his chest—since that one argument in the barracks, she had called him that when she’d been exasperated with him, and sometimes with Aldam, or when she was overcome with affection for her new family and didn’t want the moment
to get too maudlin. She rubbed her eyes against his chest and sniffed. “And you’d best be home for Samhain—I have plans for the Samhain fair, and the two of you are important to them.” Torrant nodded and swallowed against the tightness that plagued him and then looked up to see where Aldam was in his good-byes.

  By the time they were done, it was far past dawn, and the summer heat was already drenching the horses and the wagon. Lane started urging them on, and even Bethen, past red eyes and sniffles and urges for them to drink lots of water on the way, told them they should move on. Yarri freed herself from Lane for one last, quick hug with Aldam and a fierce, longer one with Torrant, and then she hurtled through the backyard toward the river.

  Torrant watched her go with pained eyes, and Bethen handed him up a packet of cookies and patted his thigh as he perched on Hammer’s back. Aldam, in spite of becoming more comfortable with horses in the past years, was even more comfortable driving the cart. “We’ll take care of her, Torrant,” Bethen said roughly. “But you remember, you’re not done growing yet, and you’re still ours, right?”

  “Absolutely,” Torrant agreed and bent down to kiss Bethen on the forehead one last time. “See you all at Samhain.”

  With that, they were up the road, down the path leading to the bridge that spanned the river, and up and over the bridge itself. As they crossed, Torrant heard a shout from a seemingly impossible place, and he looked in the direction of the Moon home—his home—and saw Yarri, perched in a tree almost level with the road, waving like mad. “See you at Samhain!” Torrant called.

  “For the rest of your life!” she called back insistently, and he laughed and continued to wave to her until the bridge curved down and she was out of sight. He and Aldam continued in silence for a moment, until even the bridge was invisible behind the tapping hooves of Clover, who was really too good a horse to be hitched to a cart anyway.