Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  Humans often baffled Aldam. He could not understand why his Aunt Stella, who had no children, seemed to have loved him more than his mother. He could not understand why the horse trader had sought him out and hurt him when he was a child. He could not figure out why Aylan was so mean to Trieste and why he had hounded Torrant. He certainly was at a loss as to why Roes had pushed him into the wilding this last summer and had wept at him to come back to her before he’d even left. The spectrum of cruelty that had forced him and Torrant and Yarri from their homes loomed like a big, gray, cloudy question mark in his mind, and it left him sad and gloomy, just like the rain. Except he could play in the rain as a child, and Roes seemed to enjoy walking in the rain as she grew, and so Rath’s evil was much more sinister than even the worst thunderstorm. Sometimes Aldam woke up at night with the cold shakes, knowing there was that much blackness in the world.

  So Aldam was frequently perplexed by humans, but he was rarely perplexed by Torrant.

  Everything Torrant had ever done was straightforward to Aldam’s way of thinking.

  He had needed food, and he could not kill. Well, he must become something that would kill, so that Yarri and Aldam could have food.

  Yarri needed a family, and Torrant needed to be there for her. Well, then he must tell Yarri’s new family that he was a part of Yarri’s old family—it was only common sense.

  He needed revenge, but he did not yet have a route to Rath. Well, then he must learn more about the world so that he might find his way to where he belonged.

  He needed to learn about the world, but he must not leave his brother behind. And so, he begged, worked, cajoled, pleaded, and taught Aldam all he would need to know in order to succeed here at Triannon.

  Since Torrant could do that, then Torrant could do anything. But Aldam was beginning to grow unsure about how much coursework Torrant could do in one day. Since Aldam had to wake up every morning to read and stay up every night to study, it did not distress him that Torrant had his limitations. Time was time and humans were humans, after all. What distressed Aldam was that Torrant did not seem to know his limitations. He seemed to be trying to devour all his knowledge in one gulp, but one could not live on knowledge alone, and Torrant was growing lean and leaner trying to do it all.

  What will you do when you’re done getting all of your knowledge, Torrant? Aldam wanted to ask. What will happen when you know all of your politics and history and sword fighting, so you can go and kill Rath? How will you use all of your science and biology and healing so that you can live afterward? Shouldn’t you plan to live first, and learn about the world as you go? But even in his head, Aldam could not make those words fit into the place where they would come out of his mouth, and so he watched the chase game of Trieste and Aylan with annoyance, because it was one last thing Torrant didn’t need, and watched Torrant with concern, because soon he would be all knowledge and no flesh left with which to act upon it.

  A sudden flight of birds interrupted Aldam’s thoughts, and he watched a patch of shadows from inside the stand of trees resolve itself into white fur, dappled with black, and those eyes, colder than Hammer Pass and brighter blue than an early-spring sky.

  Torrant was licking spatters of blood from his muzzle with satisfied swipes of a sandpaper tongue, and even as a snowcat he had the swagger of someone who had defeated a vicious rabbit in whisker-to-paw combat. His eyes lighted on Aldam, and the kitty equivalent of a smile crossed his features as he trotted amicably over to where Aldam sat and settled himself leisurely, laying his massive head on Aldam’s thigh.

  Aldam started scratching him behind the ears without thinking about it, and neither of them noticed Aylan’s wide eyes and Trieste’s muffled squeal from the shadows of the building. The sun moved a notch, and then another, and the long tree shadows crept up the hill. Aldam didn’t mark the moment that the tufted fur of the snowcat became Torrant’s tangled brown hair, or that his brother’s hazel eyes closed and he lapsed into a shallow nap. On the far side of the building, classes let out and students came outside to sit at the tables and eat or study or talk. Their noise—not loud—must have wakened Torrant, because he moved restively and murmured, “Oueant and Dueant, Aldam, how long was I gone?”

  “Two hours at the most,” Aldam replied easily. Torrant sometimes lost time when he changed, but not this instance.

  “I need to keep hold of it better.”

  There was an ineffable despair in his voice, and Aldam couldn’t bear it.

  “It’s a part of you. You need to admit that it’s there.”

  Aldam’s hand never stopped stroking—it was the same response he had to Starry or Cwyn when they were in tears. It was what he had done to Yarri when he’d first seen her, wrapped in a blanket and her own destroying fear.

  “Tell that to Aylan.” Self-recrimination. Aldam couldn’t bear it.

  “Aylan got what he deserved.” Aldam’s voice rarely got that hard. “And I think he learned something, so you don’t worry about Aylan.”

  “Protecting me, Aldam? You know I can eat people.” As an attempt at humor, it failed.

  “It’s your heart in the snowcat’s body, Torrant.” And it needed protecting, Aldam thought miserably, probably more than Aldam himself needed protection from the big, bad world. Torrant’s heart would need protection in that brutal body, the Goddess’s fickle gift.

  “My heart is fine,” Torrant lied. Torrant lied so seldom, Aldam wondered if the lie hurt as much to say as it hurt to hear.

  “You should talk to Gregor.” Their gifted seminar professor. Aldam’s voice was even as he changed the subject, but something behind it seemed to make Torrant shift restlessly. Aldam continued stroking his brother’s hair, and the movement stopped. “Have you told him about this gift?” The nature of the Goddess’s gifted was often secretive, although most of the young people confided in their seminar professor—if nothing else than for the sheer relief of sharing what so few people understood.

  “No.” Torrant’s voice fell flatly. In spite of his brief nap, he sounded exhausted, emotionally and physically. Aldam could detect no vitality in him, not even in his voice.

  “I’ve told him everything.” Aldam inserted a little bit of gloating into this statement, knowing that it would make Torrant smile.

  “Your gift is perfect. There is nothing to confess.” Torrant seemed very content to simply lie there and take his brother’s solace. Something about the stillness of the moment convinced Aldam that if he were to give advice to someone, even his perfect brother, this would be the time.

  “Your gifts are perfect too,” Aldam murmured, still stroking Torrant’s hair. “You are the meeting of truth and songs—even your poetry is truth, even when it is not. And because you are the meeting of truth and songs, when you need to defend yourself or your family, you become truly something out of a song. The snowcat isn’t bad, no more than one is in the wild. It is a fierce thing, a predator, but not bad. Even when you needed to feed us, you only took the old.” Aldam looked sideways at Torrant and tried for another smile. “And a young deer would have been so much tastier.”

  That worked. A laugh escaped Torrant’s chest, and then another. They were soft laughs, puffs of air really, but compared to that dangerous stillness they were a welcome relief. “Yarri never complained.”

  “Yarri thinks you set the moon and the stars just for her.”

  “Which moon?”

  “The moon of joy. The Lady herself, of course.” Aldam was surprised he would ask.

  “Then who hung the moon of honor? Oueant should get some credit, you think? And compassion? Let’s not forget Dueant.” And finally the flatness was gone, replaced by a dreaminess that sometimes came when Torrant was singing or telling stories. “Rath claims that he hung Oueant’s moon, but he cracks honor just by saying its name.” And now the dreaminess painted itself sad and angry, and Aldam’s stroking hand moved to Torrant’s shoulder and squeezed. “Will she still think I hung the moon if I kiss Trieste? Or Aylan? Wi
ll I still hang the moon if I lose my head one day and go wilding? Rath says that the moon drops its wrath on you if you kiss the wrong person or go a-wilding or… or help women give birth or… die before first moon’s blessing….” Torrant’s voice choked a little. “There are so many things to be angry at him for, Aldam. I don’t think I can keep peace in my heart with only my heart alone, until Yarri comes of age.”

  “Then choose one,” Aldam told him. “One can be a friend, and one can be a lover, and of course you’ll have me—that should be enough to keep your heart centered.”

  “You’re so wise, brother,” he mused, “so very wise….” As Torrant’s voice wandered off into a second, deeper sleep, Aldam realized his pant leg was wet. Torrant had soaked his breeches through with quiet tears.

  Aldam moved in a few moments, and as he laid Torrant’s head gently in the grass, Trieste and Aylan moved out of the shade and up the hill. Aldam glared at them and held a finger to his lips, but Trieste had gone for a blanket, they both had books with them, and neither of them seemed to be shouting.

  “Your class just started, Aldam,” Trieste whispered. “You go down and get to class. We’ll stay here with him.”

  “No.” Aldam took the blanket from her and covered Torrant, then sat so the sun was at his back, and his shadow fell across his brother’s face.

  “But you’ll miss class!” Aylan’s protest stalled at the look of serene rebellion on Aldam’s face.

  “You can wait with me,” Aldam replied with dignity, “but he needs his brother here.”

  And that was that. Aylan took off his hated scholar’s robe and laid it down so he and Trieste could sit and watch over Torrant, and sit they did. They sat until Torrant woke up around dinnertime, talking of nothing and everything—Trieste’s home in Otham, Aldam’s home with the Moons, what college was like compared to the younger education Trieste and Aylan had experienced. Aldam talked a lot about Yarri, and the rarely spoken but universally acknowledged belief that she and Torrant had been destined by the moons. Aldam barely spoke Roes’s name—that wish was too painful to contemplate, in case it didn’t come true.

  When Torrant awakened, ravenous and disoriented, he awakened to friends.

  One Year More

  TORRANT DROPPED one of his humanities classes and one of his healer classes, and he and Aldam resigned themselves—gratefully on Aldam’s part—to an extra year of schooling, spent mostly as apprentices healing in one of the communities located in the Old Man Hills.

  “What is your urgency?” Gregor, their gifted professor, asked a crestfallen Torrant gently. “I never would have allowed you to take this course load in the first place if I’d realized the extent of your gifts.”

  They’d had to tell him. When the four first-years had come down from the hillside, Aldam and Aylan had needed to bear most of Torrant’s weight, he was so weak from making the Goddess’s change on low reserves. There had simply been too many questions not to answer any of them. After feeding Torrant and making sure he could walk on his own, Aylan and Trieste practically shoved him into their professor’s office, with Aldam on his heels. Shamelessly, they threw themselves into the study too, taking unobtrusive places on the floor so they would not be asked to leave.

  Professor Gregor was one of their younger-looking professors. He was clean-shaven with a deep widow’s peak and a strong, narrow face that the younger students especially seemed to find handsome. His brown eyes were exceptionally kind, and Torrant had once told Aldam that if Dueant didn’t look like Lane Moon, he probably looked like Prof. Gregor. On that evening, as Torrant sprawled—exhausted, embarrassed, and still a bit dizzy—on the leather couch in the professor’s book-cluttered study, those eyes were more compassionate than usual. But he still wasn’t Lane Moon, and Torrant couldn’t answer him.

  So Aldam did instead. “He wants to kill Consort Rath.”

  Those kind brown eyes widened, and the two shadows at the end of the couch gasped. “Really? Any reason why?”

  “I don’t want to tell this story again.” It was the most coherent thing Torrant had said—in fact, Aldam had done most of the talking about the snowcat.

  “You just admitted to a conspiracy against the consort of Clough. I sort of think you have to.”

  “He didn’t really tell this story in the first place,” Trieste grumbled to Aylan, but she was shushed immediately.

  Gregor sat down on the opposite end of the couch from Torrant and handed him a mug of something. Torrant sipped at first, for politeness, but then, realizing it was broth and he was still hungry, he drank deeply until it was gone.

  “I’m not Ellyot Moon.” He stated it baldly, as though expecting argument.

  “I’m aware of that. In fact, most of the staff here is.” Gregor took the mug from him and set it down on the battered table in front of the couch. There was hardly room for it in the stack of books. Aldam heard something, stood up, and came back from behind the club chair he’d been sitting in with an enormous and obliging orange cat that he sat on his lap and fondled until the monster purred loud enough to knock papers off of Gregor’s desk. Torrant looked steadily at Aldam’s soothing hands until he felt ready to answer again.

  “Ellyot… he was perfect,” Torrant said roughly. The only person he ever talked to about Ellyot was Yarri. This was harder than it should have been. Ellyot had lived, and he had laughed, and he had been Torrant’s twin in every way but blood. “He could ride a horse like he and the horse were the same wind, and if you put a sword in his hand you’d almost lose the fight just to watch him dance.”

  “Was he a healer?” Trieste asked bravely, risking a glare and getting none.

  “No.” Torrant shook his head, so lost in memories he hardly registered Trieste’s presence. “He was a fighter. He was a hunter—a true hunter. He could hit any target he wanted, and he had no remorse. It didn’t matter if the deer were old or young; it was his adversary. Ellyot’s world was all black and white. His family was good; anything else was fair game.” Torrant laughed, a light bitterness, like basil. “He never would have survived in Triannon.”

  “You would have come anyway,” Aldam said, touching noses with the cat.

  “I would have come anyway,” Torrant agreed.

  “Ellyot was killed…,” Prof. Gregor prompted delicately.

  “With the rest of our family, Yarri’s and mine,” Torrant continued, nodding. This needed to be said. “He…. You see, my mother called up an illusion, one that killed. Yarri and I were napping in the back of the barn when the soldiers came in, and this big mama wolf appeared and we… I….” His throat clogged. Bethen knew this part. Lane too, and Aldam. But it had not been told more than twice.

  “You have to understand. Yarri was everything to us, and I was the one who had her safe, right?” He nodded, and everybody else nodded with him. “So I had to keep her safe. And Ellyot, he’s looking at me and nodding and I… we slid out of this trapdoor in the back, and Ellyot ran toward the front to distract them, and someone knifed him in the back, and it wasn’t fair. He was the strong one and the brave one and he shouldn’t have had to….” Torrant gulped air, thought hard about Ellyot, and felt his vision go sharp and clear. He was only vaguely aware of his Professor’s caught breath and intent gaze.

  “It was unjust,” Torrant continued, in a voice as calm and cold as a frozen sea. “What happened to the Moon family was unjust. Rath’s soldiers came in and slaughtered them. I went back, after Yarri was hidden and safe, and….” His vision flickered, but he got it under control again. “The women had been raped and murdered and the boys had been stabbed in the heart, and Moon, who was maybe the most courageous man I’ve ever known, was beheaded while kneeling in the straw. I picked up his wedding necklace for Yarri from between the space of his head and his neck. I was there. I saw Rath’s soldiers; I heard the thoughts of the commander who was waiting for a wizard to come help track us, and the voices of the men who were repeating his orders. It was Rath. He ordered our families killed,
and now he’s blaming my people. And no one’s doing anything to stop him.”

  “I believe you,” muttered a shocky Professor Gregor. “Torrant, your eyes are blue again. Maybe we should change the subject for a moment.”

  Torrant nodded and focused his rapidly blurring eyes on the empty cup in his hands. Professor Gregor changed the subject by rewriting Torrant’s and Aldam’s schedule, and this time, when Torrant made a little sound of protest, the Professor took the mug from him and made sure his now hazel eyes met the Professor’s own kind brown gaze.

  “You will get through, Torrant. You will graduate, and this way, you and Aldam can spend some time in the Old Man Hills healing. You can build a clientele; you can get to know the people who share the border with Clough. All of the political learning in the world will not help you understand politics like watching it work on the people who live through it. And maybe, you’ll decide that the people need a doctor instead of a savior. That’s my hope, anyway, but”—when Torrant would have protested again—“either way, you will be equipped with knowledge, with experience, and with, as your Uncle Lane told you to have, a way to live when you are done.”

  “Besides,” Gregor added, when it looked as though Torrant’s depressed silence signified agreement, “it’s going to take four more years for Aldam to convince Professor Austin that he can pass biology without dissecting anything.”

  “They’re not broken!” Aldam said emphatically from his curl on the chair with the cat.

  “Absolutely, Aldam,” Gregor agreed with some humor. “And I’m sure you’ll turn Austin around to your way of thinking. But for now—” He stood, and everybody else took their cue and stood with him. “—for now, you all need to go to bed. You four have classes to make up tomorrow, and Torrant, you may need to explain yourself to your other professors. I’ll back up anything you say—even a lie, although I won’t like it—but you will need to think of something to tell them.”