Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “Roes is going to university,” Aldam said unexpectedly into the wet, August heat.

  “So are we,” Torrant replied, wondering, as always, what unexpected paths the slow and powerful river of Aldam’s mind had wandered.

  “She’s too smart for me to marry when she’s eighteen.” The sadness in Aldam’s voice was unmistakable.

  “That’s in four years. First we have to survive school—then we can worry about Roes, right?”

  Aldam nodded. “Right. But it’s less frightening to worry about Roes than it is to worry about us.”

  “Lots of people go away to school,” Torrant told him soothingly. It was a conversation they’d had before—just not on the way to their future.

  “But are they people like us?” Aldam wondered aloud. It was the first time either one of them had mentioned what it would be like to be at Triannon with gifts like theirs, and for this, Torrant had no answer.

  THEY MADE camp at a moon shrine that night, after an hour of squinting into the severely westering sun. When the sun actually set, they were left blind for a few moments, and Aldam was rattled enough about being in a new situation without Lane or Bethen that he almost tearfully begged Torrant to change into the snowcat so one of them could see. Torrant talked him out of the idea by reminding him that the snowcat was a predator and would probably eat all their dried fish stores before they got to Triannon the following night, and by the time Aldam thought of a good argument for that, the spots had cleared from their eyes, and he calmed down.

  The moon shrine was well kept—every moon had an engraved and shaded stone alcove for offerings—food for Dueant’s compassion, metal for Oueant’s courage, flowers for Triane’s joy—as well as a tree-sheltered cove for sleeping and a set of food stores. Bethen had given them more food than they could eat in a week, and they left some of the dried fish and fruit at the altars and in the stores, for the next travelers.

  “I like this shrine,” Aldam said, when his worries about being sunblind had faded. “Not all of them keep the Goddess this well.”

  Torrant nodded, not saying the obvious. In some of them, the Goddess had been removed or ignored, or, as in one they had seen where the Old Man Hills came closest to Clough, defaced with graffiti wrought in feces. It seemed that Rath’s poison could not be contained to Clough alone.

  But this shrine was peaceful and safe, and camping out was pleasurable. It was freeing to stare at the deep sky and remember they were small pebbles on what was really a large and fertile moon. Lane had taken them camping many times in the wooded areas outside Eiran, and the family had often slept outside on the beach during the summer or early part of autumn, so there was nothing worrisome about looking up at the stars.

  The next day they left early—more from nerves than from any desire to hasten the journey—and made their way along the small but established path through the pine-scented woodland. They talked quietly about family, pointing out animals Cwyn and Starry would like, and told jokes that Roes and Yarri would either make or get.

  “Do you think Bethen will miss us?” Aldam said at one point, and Torrant was surprised.

  “Of course!” he said. Of the many doubts he had about leaving, that Lane and Bethen Moon would miss him as much as they would one of their own had never crossed his mind. “Why?”

  “I don’t think my mother missed me when I left,” Aldam said, and Torrant looked at him in shock. He and Yarri spoke frequently of the family they’d left behind, and although the pain of losing his twin-in-spirit in Ellyot would never be wholly gone, Torrant had not needed to be told how fortunate he was that Aldam and then Stanny had filled some of that void. But although he remembered the frantic, sad, and rough parting of Aldam’s mother and aunt from the inn at the bottom of Hammer Pass, Torrant could rarely remember Aldam talking about either of them. But he did remember her look—sad, desperate, and bereft—as she’d watched her son walk away.

  “I think she did,” Torrant said, uncertain. “I think she must have cared for you, to let you go. It was getting bad in Clough—bad for all of us with gifts, and anyone else who could be said to follow the Goddess. It must have hurt her to let you go.”

  “She was embarrassed of me a lot,” Aldam said thoughtfully. “It was hard on her, to hide me. My Aunt Stella protected you and Yarri. I don’t think my mother would have, if it had been her shift at the inn that night.”

  “I….” Torrant floundered. “You’ve never talked about this before. Aldam, four years, and you’ve hardly mentioned your mother at all.”

  “You missed your family,” Aldam said mildly. “It felt unfair to burden you with a family that wasn’t as kind as yours.”

  Torrant swallowed. How like Aldam, to not think his comforting would be important. “I think your mother loved you,” he said, more certainly now. “I think that Rath and the whole… air of Clough, it made her afraid to show it. I think that might be one of the saddest things about Clough, all that hatred of people. It makes other people afraid to love.” He paused for a moment, trying to gauge the distance they’d gone since morning. They had visited Triannon once during the summer with Lane, to make sure there would be a place for them come the fall, and Torrant remembered the way fairly accurately. “What made you think about that now?” he asked after the silence grew unusually burdensome.

  “It’s easier to leave this time,” Aldam said, as though realizing it for the first time. “It’s easier to leave if you know that someone will miss you when you’re gone.”

  Torrant remembered that, as he did so many of Aldam’s simple truths, but he didn’t have time to comment, because at that moment the forest thinned abruptly, and the land dipped below them into a wide valley, and the University of Triannon lay sprawled at their feet.

  Part IV: The Learning Moon

  “Trieste looked good tonight,” Aylan said as they ghosted along the alleyways, bent on the second part of their unpleasant task. Torrant had to smile—albeit grimly.

  “Trieste always looks good.”

  “You think that about all of your lovers,” Aylan told him smugly, and Torrant tried to growl. Of all of the things, of all of the dangers they faced here, in this place, reminding him once again of where this unlikely chain of alliances and family had started was perhaps the most dangerous of all.

  “If I’d known Triannon was going to spawn all this, I never would have went,” he said darkly, and Aylan’s eyes narrowed.

  “You take that back,” he snapped, and of all things, that put Torrant’s heart to rest and his mind more able to focus on the task at hand.

  “Yes, yes, all things spawned at Triannon,” he said, because arguing with Aylan was fruitless.

  Especially when he was right.

  Triane’s Welcome

  AS TORRANT got older and had time to wonder about such things—and good cause to wonder about them—he often wondered about the architecture of Triannon. He could never figure out where the ugly human things that came with all dwellings actually went. Triannon had indoor water, but he could never figure out where the pipes went in or the wastewater came out. He knew there was refuse, but he didn’t know where the refuse pit was located. All he could see of the house of learning he would come to love was a gorgeous, wood and stucco building filling a green bowl valley in a kitty-corner sort of fashion, which ensured no window ever got blinded with direct sunlight, ever.

  The building was huge—the biggest Torrant and Aldam had ever seen—and built like a tall rectangle, with pointed turrets in every corner and a peaked roof that housed a lookout building with glass on all sides. They had learned over the summer that the building had four levels, the first two being school levels and the second two being dormitories, and anyone was welcome to go into the lookout and simply marvel at the height and the prettiness of the building as well as the redwood hills that surrounded it.

  The front—the west side of the building—had steps and two columns under a decorative stucco archway and an impressive wooden door, but Torra
nt and Aldam were coming from the east, so their view was a little different. There were stables on the far side of the school. The long-ago architect had some sense of drama and had put them on the downhill side, where they wouldn’t impede the view from the top of the rise—and that’s where Aldam and Torrant left their horses. They had been made to understand that everybody tended their own animals, and Torrant was secretly relieved, because the horses were a note of normalcy in all the strangeness. When they were done seeing to Clover, Hammer, and Cannonball, the students who were there tending their own horses directed them to the door on the southeast side of the building, where the dorm manager and registrar resided. After gathering their baggage—and remarking again at how many clothes and other essentials Bethen had managed to jam into their duffels when they hadn’t been paying attention—they walked across the quad and into that great, frightening building with a confidence neither of them felt.

  It looked smaller inside.

  The offices were plain areas—simple, brown tiles on the floor, low ceilings, and small spaces, made even smaller by the masses of parchment that were stacked everywhere in both the registrar’s office and the dorm master’s office, and great, bulky, dark-wooded furniture that matched nothing else anywhere in the school, including the walls of the room they were in.

  That jarring note of the furniture that didn’t fit helped to put Torrant at ease, and he presented the papers that introduced himself and Aldam, as well as the headmaster’s signature that said both boys had been accepted, tested, and placed, and all the pesky details that went with going to any sort of higher education.

  The woman behind the desk wore an academic’s robes and had a shoulder-length tousle of blondish hair. It had possibly been dyed, because the good-natured lines on the woman’s face were not the marks of someone of age to have that hair, but the plain goodness in her face was enough to make the hair natural. She looked up at the boys and smiled such an infectious, welcoming smile that they both managed a shy return and a head bob. They were painfully trying not to look overwhelmed.

  “Our students from Clough—so good to see you. We were wondering if you’d arrive today,” she said warmly, and Torrant felt compelled to correct her.

  “I’m sorry. We’re from Eiran,” he said roughly, the thought of being known as a native of his own home somehow repugnant to him.

  “Well, I know that’s where you’ve lived, but…. Torrant, your history is fairly well known here. You were the first refugees from the situation in Clough, weren’t you?” She stood—a scant height, really, a good five inches shorter than Torrant, and at least nine inches shorter than Aldam, even though he tended to slouch.

  “Yes.” Torrant flushed. “Clough….” He swallowed, hard. No one at home had ever forced him to say this, and it hurt coming out. “Clough is not a source of pride for either of us.” He looked away then, unhappily, and the registrar blinked, as though realizing it was a painful subject, and one not at all relevant to the business at hand.

  “Right, then.” She summoned that brilliant smile again. “I’m Professor Nica, and I have your course schedules right here. Classes start in two days, which will give you a little while to get settled in the dorms and used to how things work around here, right?”

  “Right.” This time Torrant’s smile felt less forced, and the uneasiness of the mention of his homeland disappeared as quickly as it had come.

  “Well then. I’m going to give you Trieste as a guide, then. It’s too nice a day to keep her all scrunched up here over my papers anyway. Trieste?” Nica called and looked around a wooden partition, out from which peered a girl about Torrant’s age with long, fine black hair pulled back into a wild braid and big blue eyes in a pleasing, narrow face. As she came out from her little office and nodded awkwardly at the two of them before looking at her feet, Torrant got the impression of high cheekbones and an unfortunate affliction of acne—normal for their age, certainly—but he remembered how embarrassed he’d been when the spots had seemed to keep coming in spite of long bouts of scrubbing with a washcloth and soap-sand.

  She’s embarrassed, he thought in surprise. She’s as embarrassed to talk to us as we are to be here. The knowledge put him at ease. Ducking his head a little, he caught her eye and smiled as warmly as he could.

  Trieste gave a little squeak and stared at him, wide-eyed, her mouth slightly open, with an expression Torrant had only seen before on a possum who had wandered into their bonfire ring one Beltane. Torrant was surprised—usually his smile had the opposite effect on people, so he bit his lip and tried again.

  “We’re glad to meet you,” he told her. “We don’t know anyone here—we… we grew rather attached to our last home. It was hard to leave and come to strangers.”

  It was simply said—and sincerely as well. Trieste responded to the sincerity like a closed flower responded to the sun. Her quiet smile almost sent sunspots dancing in Torrant’s eyes.

  “We won’t be strangers for long,” she murmured with a shy little bob of her head. “In a month you’ll be sick of us.”

  Torrant swallowed dryly and felt a weirdness in his stomach that almost reminded him of bells. When he remembered the moment later in time, he heard the sound as a flute instead.

  “I doubt that,” he said emphatically, and Trieste’s bashful smile disappeared, leaving a look of stunned pleasure in its wake.

  Nica cleared her throat a little and passed two pieces of parchment with schedules and a dorm number to Aldam. “And I think that’s your cue to go investigate the campus.”

  “Thank you, Professor.” Trieste turned a grateful look toward Nica, and then in a move of what seemed to be uncharacteristic boldness, she seized Torrant’s hand, cast a radiant smile over her shoulder at Aldam, and pulled them both out of the room.

  “Here is your dorm,” she said a few moments later. They had followed her bemusedly up a hall and up some stairs and up a few more stairs and then down a big right with a left at the end, until they were in almost the same corner as the registrar’s office—except four floors up. “The girls’ dorms are downstairs, the gifted wing is on the west side, the nongifted is on the….”

  “They split them up?” Torrant asked, after walking into the small, bare room and dropping his duffels and bedding on the cot closest to the window. Aldam didn’t particularly care about such things, but Torrant found he wanted the light nearby.

  “Girls and boys? Well, yes… I mean, it’s not like some don’t bunk each other brainless after they hit the age of consent, but it’s a propriety sort of thing.” She was talking too fast; she had been since she’d grabbed his hand and started their tornado rush of the school and its environs.

  Torrant laughed, and she flushed. He liked watching her flush—it seemed to travel in a wonderful true-rose wave from her throat to the bridge of her nose. “I mean gifted and nongifted—is it mandatory that they not speak or something?”

  Trieste blinked. “Oh. No—no—nothing like that. In fact, it wasn’t even a consideration until the uprising at Moon hold….”

  “What uprising?” Torrant asked sharply, exchanging a puzzled glance with Aldam.

  “You know… I mean… surely you would know.” She flushed again, and this time the look in her eyes was uncomfortable and unhappy.

  “There was no uprising,” Torrant said after a tense silence, and then he relented. How could he stay upset with this person—this stranger, in truth—for knowing what, apparently everyone had been told? “So, are you gifted?”

  Trieste rolled her eyes, clearly relieved at so blunt a question. “No, I’m just rich. Dad’s a consul in Otham, and he and Mum dropped me off here when I was little so I could get an education in how to be rich and powerful.”

  Torrant grimaced. “Did it work?”

  “Oh, I can spend money with the best of them.” She smiled at him with dancing eyes. “But I spend it all on books, so I’m still a disappointment.”

  “I highly doubt that.”

  She
flushed and grabbed their hands in a rush and tore through the school to show which classroom was which and where the privies were.

  “This is the dining hall,” she said, after they had taken several turns, sets of stairs up and down, and bends around the corridor. She had narrated a breathless travelogue for the last hour. This here is the natural science wing. Aldam, you’ll be here a lot and so will you, Torrant, but you’ll also be here. This is the humanities wing, and this is the government professor’s room…. Why do you have so many classes in there? Why do you have so many classes in general—it’s like you’re learning to be two different people. And here’s the boys’ shower, and the girls’ shower…. No, we don’t take them together; there’s sort of a rule about that. And here is the library….

  They had actually stayed in the library for a few moments, mostly so Torrant could look around in awe as he took in the vast number of books. Professor Nica ran the library as she ran the registrar, with a troop of able assistants culled from her favorite students, and before they left Trieste had to promise Torrant that he’d eventually spend so much time in the library that he’d be sick of it.

  And then the travelogue had started again: And here’s the secondary door to outside, and the great hall leads to the front entrance, with the steps and the arches and everything. You two came in through the back. Was that because you stopped at the stables? You’ll have to see the front entrance, because it’s what you think about when you imagine the college. Here, follow me. Now if we go back in through here, you’ll see….

  And so on, until they reached the dining room. The dining hall was like everything else inside the school—large, impressive, darkly paneled, and at odds with every other decorating scheme inside the castle proper. Torrant had been going to ask why nothing seemed to match—why one room with baroque carvings in the moldings would fade into another that was all angles and why one room that was begun in white oak would be finished with ebony and one panel of maple—but the dark-haired girl rushing them along the multicolored tiles of the corridors never paused long enough for him to ask. “We often study here if the weather’s inclement. When it’s nice, there are tables out on the northwest side of the building that we usually gather at.”