Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “And he’s here five times out of seven for dinner,” Bethen said dryly, and the whole family laughed.

  “Do you want me to stay home and cook?” her eldest asked innocently, and she reached from her armchair and ruffled his hair under his hat.

  “No, boyo, you’re about as independent as I can stand you right here and now.”

  “Hey!” Yarri exclaimed, looking at Torrant through narrowed eyes. “Your school mates are on this map too. They’re not family.”

  Torrant looked at the map in some surprise, a smile quirking at one end of his mouth as he did so. Sure enough, there were Aylan and Trieste—their names superimposed at opposite ends of the school. “That’s odd,” he murmured. “I hadn’t planned on that at all.”

  “What were you thinking?” Lane asked curiously.

  “Well… I was still sort of thinking like the snowcat, right? I guess I was thinking about the people I’d….” He flushed, because it was a little arrogant, but it was true nonetheless. “People I’d protect.”

  Lane nodded, clapped him on the back, and took his turn examining the map’s minute detail like everyone else, but Torrant could sense a “talk” coming. In fact, he was almost relieved.

  THE NEXT night was Samhain proper. Cwyn, Starren, and Yarri dressed in shrouds with terrible masks they had made out of cloth, flour, and water and went out into the night to face death, wearing façades and their own innocence. Roes took them from house to house, where the townspeople handed out apples and sweets to appease the restless spirits, and when they were done, the family bundled up and went to the town bonfire.

  It was too cold to walk far, as they did during the Beltane Fair, so the bonfire was held in front of the barracks, on the road itself. The next day, most of the able-bodied men in the town would gather to clean up the avenue, but for tonight, the town—including the refugees who had stayed and assimilated into the sweet, easygoing populace of Eiran—was assembled raucously, the children bundled against the cold, many of them still masked against the remembered dead.

  Yarri and Torrant had worked quietly that day, writing their letters to their dead. This year, unlike the previous years they had participated in this ritual in Eiran, Yarri didn’t let Torrant read her letter. She told him she’d let him see hers if he’d let her see his. Torrant had never let Yarri see his letter, and he wasn’t going to start now.

  Instead, they stood somberly, watching their letters burn with Lane’s and Bethen’s, in flames the color of Yarri’s hair in summer.

  Dear Ellyot, Torrant heard his own voice in the flames, reading his pain to his honored dead, tell my mother I love her. I am trying to earn her sacrifice for us—know that, all of you; I never forget that Yarri and I owe our lives to you. Tell my mother that I’m at the university. I’m going to be a healer and a midwife like my father. Tell Tal that I almost kissed a boy this autumn, and tell Qir that I did kiss a girl. I think I’ll keep kissing the girls, thank you, but I won’t close my mind to the boys. Tal swore by them, after all. Tell Kes that Bethen has taught Yarri to knit, and that might be as close to being a lady she’ll ever get. Tell Moon that I’m keeping Courtland’s legacy alive, and tell both of them that Yarri can paint like a Goddess gift, just with colors and a brush.

  And you, my brother, what can I tell you?

  I can tell you that when I’m angry, I look just like you do. I can tell you that you will be avenged.

  I love you all. Yarri will be happy—that is my promise.

  Torrant

  It lacked poetry, he knew. For someone who was considered a poet, he found that when he addressed his honored dead, everything in his body became jammed and static, as though if he weren’t careful, he would fall to his knees and howl until his throat was ripped out of his body, leaving only his hollow shell grieving for his family and the past.

  Only being with Yarri kept his grief from destroying him every year. He remembered that first morning, and how he had needed to live for her. He continued to live for her, and the grief became a burden he could bear.

  He stood, lost in the fire, in his communion with the dead, when he was surprised by a hand on his shoulder, and he looked up to see Lane. Lane’s eyes were red, and his smile was crooked as he gestured Torrant into the shadows. He looked over at Bethen, who nodded, so Torrant knew Yarri would be cared for, and together he and Lane moved from the brightness of the center to the shadows at the edge. They sat down in the same corner of the barracks where Lane had first pointed out Torrant’s blue eyes and swung their legs under the railing over the edge of the porch.

  “You can cry, Torrant. You know that, right?” Lane asked quietly when the roar of the fire and the Samhain crowd had faded in their ears.

  “If I cry, I’ll never stop.” It was a statement, a truth, and Lane didn’t contradict it. “I….” Torrant swallowed. “I have this lump of rage in my chest, Uncle Lane, and it grows denser and full of sharper knives with every year, and I’m afraid if I cut it loose it will just leave me empty and bleeding….” His voice choked up in his chest as he said it, and he wondered what had spawned this lump in his throat like a giant razor mushroom.

  “Yarri said you looked like Ellyot,” Lane said, reading his mind. “She said that, and suddenly you realized that you’ve lived four years without him and four years without your mother and four years without the family you loved, and that in the meantime you had effectively grown up and left home, and that they were not the home you left.”

  Torrant breathed sharply, through his nose, and the thing in his chest grew some great big metal blades that thrust out so far he touched the front of his shirt and was surprised to find his hand pale and dry.

  “My mother would have been proud,” was all he could manage to say.

  “And Ellyot?” Lane’s voice, his third father, the one he remembered best, lapped at Torrant’s own fears like an eroding tide.

  “Ellyot would have been furious at me for leaving.” Torrant looked intently at the sky above the sea. Oueant was up on the horizon, blazing an almost summer orange, reflected in the dark water. Triane had reached her pinnacle before falling off in her whimsical path, and there were a thousand shards of her yellow face rolling in the distance. Dueant was not up yet, and the god of compassion was not there to ease the gouging pain of loss that had begun to shred his chest like a wolverine shreds flesh.

  “And he is not here. For the love of joy, Torrant, weep for them!”

  “Oh Goddess!” Torrant leaned his head against the rail of the barracks and wept silent as a man for the family that had died when he’d been a boy. The tears pattered down his shirt like blood.

  When his sobs had died down and Lane’s easing hand had diplomatically moved from between his shoulder blades, Lane started to talk about other things, which let Torrant go back to the bonfire and Yarri’s expectant face and be easy.

  “So—you turned this Aylan down but kissed Trieste?” he asked, and Torrant shook his head, feeling the worn wood of the railing digging into his forehead.

  “Trieste kissed me!” he said, then, honestly, “I didn’t mind much.”

  Lane laughed a little. “And Aylan?”

  “Wanted to.” Torrant sat up straight and blew out a breath, knowing he could be honest with Lane. “He’s a good-looking boy—sexy as the three moons, but Goddess! What a wanker!”

  Lane laughed a lot and said musingly, “It’s good, then, that you left. You can see the world, see what other lovers would be like….”

  “They won’t sound the same,” Torrant interrupted, surprised at himself.

  “Sound… like voice?” Lane looked at him oddly, and Torrant flushed.

  “Like bells,” he replied shortly and then tried to make himself clearer. “Yarri, she came into my arms like a blind, wriggly puppy, and she sounded like… bells. Little chinging bells, big clanging bells, those xylophone things that you hear… bells. She sounds like bells.”

  “And Trieste?”

  Torrant sighed and shrug
ged. Maybe the Goddess’s gifted could be forgiven for their small madness. “Like a wooden flute—it’s pretty and all, and I’ll enjoy hearing it for a while, but—”

  “It’s not bells,” Lane finished for him.

  “No. Not bells.”

  Lane sighed and stood and stretched and offered his hand to Torrant, who realized his tears had dried, and his eyes had cleared. He was probably fit for a tankard of cider and a song after all, so he took it. “Bells.”

  “It’s true!” Torrant laughed as he stood.

  “No, no—I believe you. In fact, if you must know, Bethen says I smell like chamomile and lavender. It’s the reason she chased me through two Beltanes and a solstice wilding I’d rather forget. She says that scent was the only thing that would make the sun come out or the breeze blow warm, and that the birds wouldn’t sing if it wasn’t there, surrounding her. She absolutely knew the world would not sit well and easy if she didn’t have chamomile and lavender filling her home.”

  “A smell, really?”

  “Uh-huh, and Kes told her once that with Owen, it was that she could taste chocolate when he was near.” Lane watched him carefully, as if to see if he would comprehend.

  “A gift!” Torrant exclaimed.

  “A small one,” Lane acknowledged. “I’d be curious to know what Aldam senses when he sees Roes.”

  Torrant thought for a moment and looked to the bonfire where Aldam and Roes were standing near enough to be family, but far enough to be scrupulously observing proprieties, and he sighed. “I think with Aldam, Roes is probably her own sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound,” he said simply, and Lane agreed.

  “I think Aldam would have known that without the Moon gift, as well.”

  “Aldam knows a lot of things without knowing how he knows,” Torrant agreed, and then he was tired of talking and close enough to the crowd at the bonfire to not want to be heard. Casting a grateful smile at Lane over his shoulder, he ran to Yarri and asked her if they’d burned the leaf monster yet to scare away the worst of the winter snows, and she took his hand and led him to where the other children her age were preparing him, and the rest of the night passed with all the joy Torrant needed to leave at the end of the week.

  It was only later that night, as he lay quietly awake in bed, that he realized the lump in his chest had grown smaller, and a little less deadly, but that, as sure as the snowcat wore Ellyot’s eyes, it was still there.

  Acknowledgments

  This one, in particular, is for Elizabeth and Nessa, who gave my old story new life, and who believed in me.

  A Map Through a Cold Winter’s Night

  SPENDING THE Samhain break at home in Eiran had been lovely. Painful and cathartic, but lovely. Torrant and Aldam remembered all over again why finding the Moon home after their exile from Clough had been the proof of Joy’s mercy. Returning to school at the end of the week was difficult, but not nearly as difficult as the first departure, and since their rush back to Triannon was so flurried in order to avoid the snow, Torrant and Aldam didn’t have time to dwell on the leaving.

  Torrant kept safe the stiff card Yarri had stuffed in his pocket as he and Aldam had mounted their horses that cold winter morning. It was a picture of him, singing in the family room. The focus was on his eyes—hazel, a strange mix of brown, green, and gray, and shiny in the firelight.

  “Remember that’s how I see you.” Yarri’s face had been serious and sober as she’d wrapped her arms around his neck. “Remember that I’m never sorry that you’re not Ellyot.”

  He’d smiled gently. “Yarri—I’m never sorry that I got to grow up with you.”

  But she hadn’t been fooled. “Say it.”

  “I’m not fourteen anymore—”

  “Say it.” She pursed her lips and narrowed her brow, and he was reminded, yet again, that she only looked like an angel.

  “Yarri, it’s—”

  “Say it!” she barked, and Torrant had flushed as the rest of the family looked their way with raised eyebrows.

  Goddess, he loved them all.

  “Fine!” he snapped, mortified but knowing at the same time that he had lost. “I’m not sorry that I lived and Ellyot didn’t. Are you happy now?”

  “I’ll be happy when you believe it.” She’d burst into tears then, and he’d held her and comforted her, stroking her curling autumn-colored hair and whispering into her ears all the things she’d forced him to say, just to make her stop crying, just until he could believe it.

  “You won’t forget?” she whispered. “It’s a long time until spring.” Odds were good they wouldn’t be coming back for the winter Solstice. Because of his heavier course load, he would still be finishing up finals, and the snows would make the trip difficult with the wagon. Lane promised them that for next year, he would make skids for the wagon so they could use it as a sled.

  Roes and Aldam embraced quickly, bodies barely touching, and then the rest of the family was caught up in hugs as well. When Roes came to hug Torrant, she stepped on his foot to get his attention.

  “He’ll follow you to the nadir and back, right?” She was not smiling in the least; she crunched her tanned, freckled face together at the brows in anxiety. “You need to lead him back to me.”

  Torrant grinned. “Roes, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he could no more wander away from you than the moons could leave their orbits.” But to his dismay, this only made her cry.

  “Don’t you understand, cousin? The Goddess moon doesn’t wander because she’s faithless. She wanders because she follows her brothers. You’re his brother, and he’ll wander away from me if you don’t send him back.” She dashed her hand across her eyes, and Torrant grimaced and hugged her close.

  “Right, little rose, right. I’ll send him back when we’re done with our wandering, I promise. You just remember that he might want you to wander a little on your own.”

  Roes sniffled against his shoulder in response, and then it was Stanny’s turn, and Cwyn’s and Starry’s and then Bethen’s, who sniffled too. “It won’t be Solstice without you two.”

  “We’ll be back for Beltane,” Torrant reassured her and then nodded at Lane, who had already given his permission. “And we’ll bring friends, right?”

  “Aylan can stay with me!” Stanny said excitedly—meeting someone from out of town had sounded very exotic to Stanny.

  “And Trieste can stay with me,” Roes said sententiously. Bethen elbowed her and shook her head in warning. There were more hugs and kisses all around and then….

  They were off, and Torrant was touching the card inside his cloak pocket as though it were his last link to everything he loved.

  THE NIGHT Torrant and Aldam got back, Trieste greeted Torrant with such a fervent kiss that he found himself closing his eyes in odd moments just to savor her taste.

  They continued kissing, learning the joys of bodies pressed close in corners, of the brief touch of lips in greeting and farewell, of cold hands on warm tummies and the squealing and laughter that ensued. He loved the way her eyes closed before he put his lips to hers, and the feel of her breath on his face just before that happened. He enjoyed the dark feeling of her fine hair as it spilled around his fingers, and the terrible sensitivity of his body, hard and full and aching under his clothes, as she pressed on top of him. One touch, he often thought in a delicious ecstasy of agony, one touch of her soft cool hand against his bare skin and his body would explode in a scorch of fireworks behind his eyes and in his pants and possibly even out his toes.

  The anticipation was as wonderful as the smug knowledge that someday soon, it would happen, it would happen between them and he would feel her skin on his without interruption or excuse and the thing, the glorious warmth between them, would wash over his body like a velvet wave.

  Aylan watched them with amusement, indulgence, and a certain amount of patient jealousy.

  “Why don’t you just do it and get it over with!” he demanded one day in exasperation. Torrant and Trieste h
ad met as Torrant was sprinting toward their fencing class—after a brief kiss and rolled eyes to indicate that it wasn’t enough, Torrant caught up with Aylan, and they walked shoulder to shoulder to the changing rooms.

  “Maybe, Aylan,” Torrant said smugly, “it’s not just something you ‘do to get over with.’ Maybe it’s something special.”

  Aylan grunted with disgust, and Torrant urged them faster. The fencing practice room could only be accessed from outside the building, and the snows had come. They were gentle and forgiving snows in the Triannon valley—not even comparable to Eiran’s sea-cold, and certainly nothing to Clough and Hammer pass—but the young men were outside with nothing but scholars’ robes and scarves to protect them from the cold.

  “Besides,” Torrant continued when they were inside undressing, “it has to be her decision. She’s still at risk for getting her head lopped off in a public ceremony if she’s wrong about Alec of Otham.”

  “I doubt it—Alec’s a nice enough sort, if you like benevolent rulers bent on changing backwards countries.” Aylan donned his fencing tights in record time and leaned back against the wall to enjoy watching Torrant struggle into his. Most noblemen were not as broad shouldered as Torrant, and their chests weren’t thick with the muscle gotten by wrestling and hauling crates in warehouses. Torrant may have lost a great deal of weight, as well as his self-consciousness around Aylan, but Torrant got the feeling that Aylan’s perusal of his body was still a treat.

  Torrant noticed his regard and flushed, more so when his body began the stirrings of a response, something made obvious by the tight fencing clothes. “Knock it off—I thought we were over that shite.”

  “I’ll never be over that shite,” Aylan returned seriously. “If you don’t want me to look, then go dress somewhere else, but don’t expect me to just turn the whole works off because you’re about to get a woman. My offer still stands, and probably always will. Just because I’m not stalking you anymore, Triane’s son, doesn’t mean I’d mind if you wandered into my room one night and dropped your drawers.”