Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “I’m not going to be tiptoeing around her for three whole summers,” she finished. “Torrant and I may not be moon-destined, or even just husband and wife, but he’s mine for what little amount of time we have, and I’m not going to let her ruin it.”

  Roes grinned. “Good for you. But remember—that girl grew up the youngest daughter, with what amounted to four brothers. She fights dirty and she fights mean.” Roes nodded seriously, with a knowledge born of four years of jockeying for limited closet space in a small room. “I love her like a sister, but it would be good to see her taken down a peg or two, or she might run wild until she comes of age.”

  “I don’t mind the running wild,” Trieste mused, thinking how she envied the girl’s tattered breeches and oversized shirts. “But she’s not going to be running over me anymore if I can help it.”

  “May the Goddess be with you!” Roes said earnestly, and then they heard Yarri’s steps on the stairs, and both of them pretended to talk about other things.

  THE TRIP through the meadows alongside the river to the “magic mud” hole was, Trieste thought later, the best preparation for court life she was ever likely to have. They both smiled and made sunny conversation, but Trieste knew she was walking into a trap, and Yarri was pretty sure her rival wasn’t fooled. And yet they still tried.

  “So,” Trieste sallied, “do you swim often?”

  “Almost every night.” Yarri put her hands in the pockets of her faded red breeches and trod bare feet carefully around a gopher hole. “The boys swim in one hole, the girls downriver. If it’s the family, we wear Aunt Beth’s bathing costumes and all swim together. It’s a lot more fun than a bath.”

  “Where do you like to swim best?”

  “With the family—if you look over there, you can see the family hole.” Trieste looked out beyond the meadow and calculated the family swimming hole was only a little landside of what amounted to the house’s backyard.

  Trieste looked at the girl’s autumn-colored hair—it was pulled back into a plait, but even so, it glowed like golden amber. It was meticulously clean, and although Yarri’s clothes looked as though they had been slept in, her hair looked as though it had been brushed, extensively and daily. Ah, vanity, Trieste thought wistfully. Her own hair often escaped its plait because she just as often didn’t bother to brush it; it annoyed her, and she didn’t want to reward it for bad behavior. But she knew her body was willowy and graceful, and her skirts were fitted and her blouses too, and she almost always wore blue or purple, which, she admitted only privately, she knew made her gray eyes look the most stunning.

  “Your family has the most beautiful hair,” she said now into the silence, because Roes’s hair was more dark red, less gold, and Starry’s hair was the color of the inside of a ripe peach.

  Yarri looked at her sideways, unable, Trieste thought with an inward smile, to automatically rebuff the overture, because it complimented one of the things she most liked about herself, but also unable to take it gracefully because it came from a hated rival.

  “Thanks,” Yarri said gruffly and added, “I think it comes from our fathers, even though Auntie Beth has red hair. But my mum had dark hair, so I don’t know.”

  “Have you asked?” Trieste walked uncertain ground here. Hearing Torrant speak about their dead families brought down untold deluges of pain. Perhaps it was easier if you were just a child, instead of halfway to grown.

  Yarri gave her a pain-darkened glare that was not softer for all the eight years between them, and Trieste guessed maybe nothing made it easier at all. Then Yarri looked away, saying softly, “I should. I never thought about it.”

  Then they rounded a bend and came in sight of the vast fetid half acre of “magic mud,” and all the tentative warmth became as chill as the winter snows that fed into the river.

  “It stinks,” Trieste understated pleasantly, observing that there were shrubs both tall and short springing from the rich soil. A layer of moss grew over everything, making it look like more of the meadow to the uninitiated. Of course, all the vegetable matter made for lots of rot, and hence the indescribable stench. There were also lots of good places to hide, she surmised, planning for battle, but her sandal-shod feet were already squelching ankle deep into the sun-warmed muck, and she could feel, quite literally, what she was getting into. “Do you really think I’m going to smear this all over my silk dress?”

  “It’s why you brought it, isn’t it?” Yarri’s glee trembled in her voice

  Trieste laughed a little and upended the sack, letting the most sun and wear faded of the family’s towels and linens fall out. “No, actually I decided your Aunt Beth might do better on the dress than… oof.”

  A handful of foul, stinking mud sailed out of the air and hit Trieste—whap—on the side of the head. Belatedly, Trieste heard the patter of swifter, lighter, barer feet as they tripped over the top of the mud that Trieste knew she would only sink into, and abruptly, the fight was on.

  It was guerrilla warfare, and it wasn’t pretty.

  “Oh, you vicious little cat!” Trieste dodged another mud clot, this one with sticks embedded in it, and decided to retreat first and get her bearings. She dodged behind the nearest shrub and scooped up her own handful of mud, waiting with a kettledrum heart to see which way Yarri would come. Trieste was taller, and she had a reach on her opponent. She figured any pass of mud she made would have to go farther than Yarri’s based on sheer momentum—but surprise wouldn’t hurt.

  “You didn’t trust me?” Yarri shrieked, making a suicide run in from Trieste’s right—clever girl. Trieste threw with that hand, and it was awkward. Her mud got clogged in the trees, but Yarri’s landed square in her chest. (Trieste would later bless their terrific height difference—the only mud which made it close to her face was the first sally.) As quick as she could, she bent down (ducking more when another scoop of mud hit the leaves above her head) and gathered giant heapfuls to lob at her antagonist. Yarri was already dodging away, but Trieste managed to tag her in the back—hard enough to make her stumble, and Trieste was surprised at the sound of triumph which crowed out of her throat.

  “No more than—oomph—that mouse”—throw—“should have”—squat for more mud—“trusted that”—stand—“mangy cat!”—throw again.

  “Anye is not mangy!” Yarri whirled, indignant, and caught a mud clot on her chest. To Trieste’s horror, she saw tears in the little girl’s eyes. It suddenly occurred to her that here she was, an adult for all intents, and she was engaging in a ferocious battle with an eleven-year-old. She almost raised her hands and called it a draw then, but Yarri dropped to a crouch and with a surprisingly powerful arm threw clot after clot of mud directly at her. After getting spattered and then seriously tagged in her weak attempts to dodge, Trieste finally made a run for it and took cover on the other side of the tree.

  “That doesn’t mean I want Anye’s dinner on my silk skirt!” Feeling pinned, Trieste tried a high lob over the tree. It fell short but had a considerable splatter, and Yarri’s feet made rapid splat-squelch noises as she ran for different cover.

  “Well maybe if you hadn’t brought your fancy silk skirt to my home, it wouldn’t have gotten mouse guts on it!” Her words still rang clear, and Trieste realized sourly that the little wretch was hardly winded. She herself was panting like a dog in summer.

  “I was invited!” Oh Goddess, where did she go? Trieste tried not to panic—it was mud, right? If she closed her eyes before she got hammered in the face with it, it would mostly just taste bad.

  “But not by me!” Three deadly accurate throws came below the tree itself and hit Trieste’s skirt with the sound of birds hitting a sail.

  “It’s not my fault he likes me right now!” Trieste wailed. She spotted more cover in front of her—and this shrub went all the way to the ground. Without looking to see where her nemesis was, she hitched up her skirts and started running.

  “It’s not my fault I’m too young!” Yarri screeched, and for th
e first time the sunshine halo of self-possession that surrounded the girl wavered, and Trieste finally heard the real hurt in her voice.

  “And it’s not my fault I’m betrothed to the old toady King of Otham!” Trieste grunted, struggling more in her sprint across the mud than Yarri had. Pull, stride, pull, stride—there was a terrible, thigh-and-calf burning rhythm to running in the squelch, and Trieste was starting to think she’d just about mastered it, when—

  Splat! She went face down into the mud, twisting her knee as she went, and suddenly rolling around on her back in the fetid swampy stink hole didn’t seem like such a bad idea after all.

  “Oww oww oww oww!” she wailed, holding her knee and not minding the painful tears smarting at her eyes. “What… go away!” Suddenly little hands gripped hers, and then Yarri was smacking at her hands.

  “Stop it, you silly moo…. I’m trying to see if it’s really hurt or just torqued.” A particularly stinging slap to her knuckles finally got Trieste’s attention, and she stopped rolling and struggling. With surprisingly gentle fingers, Yarri probed around her kneecap. Trieste whimpered a little, and then Yarri sat back on her haunches and sighed.

  “It’s fine. You need to cool it down, keep it raised for a day or two. You’ll be fine,” she murmured. With another sigh she rocked back onto her bottom, pulled her feet out of the muck, and scraped it down her ankles with her toes in a purely experimental action. Trieste sniffled a little, wrapped her mind around the pain and found it manageable, and pulled a little bit of self-possession out of her ear to make an attempt to sit up. A silence settled between the two opponents, and Trieste could hear birds singing in the background, before Yarri spoke abruptly into the quiet.

  “Are you really betrothed to the King of Otham? Torrant put it in his letters. I thought it was just to make me feel better.”

  “Why would he make up something that spectacular to make you feel better?” Trieste asked, rocking forward and feeling her knee for herself. Yarri’s assessment seemed sound but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt like hell.

  “Why would a future Queen of Otham be interested in my Torrant?” Yarri’s lower lip trembled, and suddenly Trieste’s diabolical little antagonist was a heartrendingly vulnerable little girl.

  “Any girl would be interested in your Torrant, Yarri,” Trieste said gently. “He’s handsome, he’s kind, he’s smart and fun to be with….”

  “He’s fierce,” Yarri muttered into her knees.

  “What?” For a disorienting moment, Trieste wondered if Torrant had told her about that awful day in the snow, but then, with a painful snap of clarity, she realized Yarri was probably talking about things Torrant hadn’t told her, and which she, Trieste, had elected not to know.

  “He likes to think it’s just Ellyot in him that makes him fierce,” Yarri said, scraping more mud off her ankle. “But he’d kill to protect me—any of us, really. He’s not tame like Anye.”

  “No,” Trieste murmured. “He’s not tame like Anye. But he doesn’t like me to know that…. I don’t like to know that,” she amended.

  “Do you want some help to the swimming hole?” Yarri asked brusquely, changing the subject so abruptly Trieste would wonder later why she wouldn’t want to talk about Torrant some more. He was, after all, the reason for this little jaunt to hell’s magic mud for washing clothes. But Yarri stood up and offered a hand that had been hastily wiped on the back tail of her shirt, and Trieste didn’t have it in her to refuse.

  “Yes please,” she said, extending a hand. She was impressed by the little girl’s wiry strength as Yarri supported much of her weight on the way to the wide, sandy bank where the river had almost no current at all.

  There was nobody there but the two of them, and as Trieste was stripping to her chemise with one hand while leaning on Yarri’s shoulder with another, she was dismayed to hear Aylan’s voice behind her.

  “Oueant’s fetid droppings, girls—you smell like the fart of a thousand dogs!”

  Oh gods. “Aylan!” she groaned, just as Yarri turned over her shoulder and shot back, “Or maybe the breath of one foul player!”

  Aylan laughed, and the sound had a note in it of relief, almost of tears, that made Trieste look up. She realized his day hadn’t been all peaches and ice cream either. His eye and lip were swollen, his fists were bloodied, and his clothes—one of the three sets of work clothes he’d brought with him—were considerably shredded. Of course, the state of his clothes didn’t bother her nearly as much as the fact that he was now taking them off.

  “Aylan!” she objected, and he rolled his one good eye at her.

  “Come off it, Spots—just to my skivvies. You’re not the only one who had a dustup today, and I couldn’t find the other damned swimming hole, and my eye is hurting like Dueant’s….”

  “Fine, fine, fine!” Trieste snapped. “Just don’t finish that sentence!”

  “I don’t give a piece of cat barf if either of you see me in my skivvies,” Yarri snapped. “Let’s just get in the damned water—my scalp is starting to itch!”

  A few moments and a minimum of embarrassment later, Trieste and Aylan were sitting chin deep in the almost chilly water, watching as Yarri swam like a sleek, plump otter where the swimming hole got deeper.

  “Should she be that far away?” Aylan wondered aloud. “There’s a little current out there—you can see it.”

  “With that child’s luck, she’d get carried out to sea, abducted by pirates, and made their damned bloody queen before anything bad happened to her,” Trieste said sourly, and Aylan turned a fully brilliant and wicked grin toward her.

  “Did you two dance?” he asked, all pleasant interest.

  “Do birds mate in the spring?” Trieste asked back, sardonically. “But I’ve got to say, I’m surprised you had a dustup. Back at school, you would have slept with whoever it was and things would have ended there.”

  “Not when they impugn the family honor,” Torrant said, surprising them both from behind.

  Trieste gave a little shriek, and Yarri turned, watching the conversation she couldn’t hear with sober eyes. Torrant gave her a little wave, and she waved back sadly, as though it were the last time he would ever smile at her, and continued to tread water, just watching.

  “So, can I put her out of her misery, or do I need to go read her the riot act?” he asked carefully, starting to strip to his own undergarments, and Trieste sighed. The little girl had been lovely when she’d twisted her knee—and really, did Trieste want to just run off and marry the toady King of Otham if she wasn’t leaving Torrant to someone who would fight for him?

  “We’re fine,” she said after a moment. “She really loves you, you know.”

  “Well, we love you too,” he murmured, bending to kiss her temple, and then he stood and looked at Aylan. “Uncle Lane says you don’t have to come back until tomorrow—he told the crew you’re getting a paid half-day anyway.”

  “Aw… dammit, Torrant….”

  “No.” And suddenly there was the grace of authority sitting on Torrant’s shoulders as Trieste hadn’t seen it before. “You protected his family—even if it was only words aimed at Aldam. He may wish you’d find another method, but he wouldn’t have let Alk or any of his cronies back in his warehouse at all if he’d known how cruel they were. Family’s important, Aylan—we’re glad you’re part of it.” And with that, Torrant turned and dove out to the deeper water to splash Yarri, play with her, tread water near her, and trade confidences, leaving his two school friends speechless and near tears.

  “Do you think he has any idea what he does to us?” Trieste whispered when she could trust herself.

  “If he did, I don’t think I’d let him do it,” Aylan graveled back. Trieste was surprised to feel his fingers under the water reach for hers and squeeze, but not too surprised to squeeze back.

  TRIESTE’S KNEE was better that night, but since the next night was Beltane and Torrant didn’t want to “put a strain on her dancing leg,” he carrie
d her back to the swimming hole in the bright, hot evening after supper.

  Trieste was still chilled from her long soak in the water, so she was content to sit in the bathing costume Bethen had given her (so she wouldn’t wilt in the heavy moments before and after sunset) and watch Bethen knit in the shade.

  The knitting fascinated Trieste—it seemed so simple, two sticks and some string, but when Bethen offered to show her how it worked, she put her hands behind her back like a guilty child and shook her head.

  “No. No. I’m not good at that,” she said with such absolute conviction that Yarri looked up from her own knitting in curiosity. Yarri had been exceptionally quiet after her swim with Torrant and almost frighteningly gracious as well.

  “And how would you know if you’re good at it or not if you’ve never tried it?” Bethen asked with a smile and a raised eyebrow.

  Trieste flushed enough to make the swimming hole look suddenly inviting again. “I had nannies,” she said uncertainly.

  “Like goats?” Yarri asked in honest surprise, and Trieste laughed, feeling better.

  “Like babysitters, who were supposed to teach me,” she explained. “I couldn’t go to Triannon until I was your age, so I had nannies to teach me how to dress and how to read.”

  “What about your parents?” Yarri asked, so surprised she put her knitting down. For the first time since their fight and the quiet that followed, Trieste felt older than her rival.

  “You’ve been very lucky, Yarrow Moon,” she said gently. “Not every lord’s daughter gets her first lessons in her father’s study on her mother’s knee.”

  Yarri made an indeterminate sound in her throat, and Bethen met Trieste’s eyes and smiled, nodding for her to go on.

  “Anyway, they kept trying to teach me things—embroidery, sewing, crocheting, tatting, spinning, weaving…. I….” She tried to laugh because, after all, she had been younger than Yarri the last time an impersonal pair of hands had tried to guide her stiff fingers along unfamiliar, unwanted pathways. “I wasn’t very good,” she finished, wrapping her arms around her knees at the last. Wistfully, she looked out to the swimming hole. Aylan was taking turns with Cwyn and Starren, submerging himself, putting their feet on his shoulders, and letting them dive off as he exploded out of the water. Aldam, Roes, Stanny, and Torrant were playing monkey-in-the-middle with a hollow, wooden ball. Lane was across the river, toweling off and talking only partly seriously to the man Torrant had told her was the mayor of Eiran—they were probably discussing the Beltane celebration the next day and whether or not there would be enough food.