Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  Oh joy! He was inside her, and her legs were wrapped around his waist, and she could see his face, enraptured and beautiful in the moonlight. In a moment there was another breathless kiss, and he moved. She groaned, and he moved some more, and then it became imperative that he move faster, so he fell back onto the soft grass of the hill at his back, keeping her with him. Her moan of excitement was so deep it resonated in the core of her, against his body, and he anchored her hips with his hands and thrust and thrust while she raked his chest with her nails and cried joyously into the night.

  THEY WERE not the first ones home by any stretch, and Torrant sighed when he saw Aylan on the davenport, holding a sleeping Starry on his lap while Cwyn slept, mouth parted in a little-boy snore, with his head on Aylan’s thigh.

  Trieste was still humming, vibrating with the excitement of their lovemaking, and Torrant was throbbing in tune with her. He knew after their hushed and flurried escape down the stairs there would be more of the starlight-slick pleasure, and he was as eager as she was to dive back into the world of beautiful moans and chilled, shivery skin.

  But she would wait, Torrant thought with a little sigh and a smile. He kissed her, tasted her tongue, himself on her tongue, her eagerness, and barely pulled back to stick a giggly nose into the soft haven of her neck and urge her down the stairs without him. She tripped hurriedly, and he turned to Aylan.

  With a grunt and a solid bracing of his legs under his back, he shoved his hands under Cwyn’s heavy, eight-year-old body and lifted the little boy off to his room in the rear of the house. When he came back, he offered his arms out for Starry and was only a little surprised when Aylan shook his head.

  “The night is still wilding, brother,” Torrant said gently, “and you can be out in it.”

  Aylan’s smile and the softening of his lavender eyes as he shook his head “no” made Torrant remember it had been a near thing, his choice of Trieste as his first lover.

  “No?” Torrant asked, extending his arms again. “You know, it’s not like I’m counting, but I don’t think you’ve been with… anyone since”—he frowned—“since that girl with the rash.” Aylan’s mouth and eyes were no longer soft, and Torrant had a sudden shrewd thought. “She didn’t have a rash, did she?” he asked, certain of the answer.

  “Not now, Torrant,” Aylan murmured, running a big, work-roughened hand down the back of Starry’s bright-red hair. “Just….” He looked fondly at the sleeping child in his arms. “She calls me her ‘music,’ and when I look at her”—he shook his head—“I hear that song, that one you wrote for that first night here. I didn’t tell you when you were practicing it back at school because you were trying to keep it a secret, but it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. And I look at her, and I hear it, only… only larger, and played by a chorus of Triane’s best stars… and….” He looked at Torrant helplessly and shrugged. “I can get bedmates anytime, brother,” he said at last, “but this”—his arms wrapped more securely around Starren—“this music I can only get here.”

  Torrant was touched, to the point that as he was walking away, he bent his head toward Aylan’s and put a tender hand on his blond-stubbled cheek. Aylan leaned into the unexpected caress and was surprised when Torrant placed a soft kiss at his opposite temple. “I hear you, brother,” he whispered, “I hear you.” He straightened, and both of them pretended to ignore Aylan’s little sound as Torrant walked back toward the stairs. Aylan wanted more, and in the moment, even with Trieste waiting for him downstairs, Torrant wanted to give it to him.

  When Torrant got to the stairs, he turned back toward that lovely male face, soft and wanting in the lamplight.

  “And, Aylan?” He waited until his friend met his eyes, and he knew he had his absolute attention. “I wouldn’t mention the ‘music’ thing to Lane for a couple of years, right?”

  Leaving him with a puzzled expression on his face, Torrant ran down the stairs to where Trieste’s warm, willing, waiting presence was even more desired than it had been when they arrived.

  We’ll Say Farewell in Summer

  AT THE end of things, Trieste only spent three summers with the Moon household, but it was enough to fall in love with the sea, the land of Eiran, and, of course, the Moon family. She came to love Cwyn’s precociousness (but not enough to let him lift up her skirt during their second summer), and his way of making the world conform to his specifications: he had the neatest room in the Moon house. She came to adore Starry’s sweetness, the easy way she had of sitting back and watching what the world would do around her before she responded, and her sudden fierceness when her family was threatened. She enjoyed Stanny’s easy smile, and the way he was always at her elbow to help, even when she hadn’t thought she’d need any, and she often wondered how she had lived without Roes’s gruff, tart-tongued friendship. And, of course, Lane and Bethen filled a dark, empty place in her stomach she had never known she had.

  And now, at the beginning of her first summer without the Moon family, that dark, empty place threatened to engulf her.

  She and Aylan had made it through finals with a minimum of fuss and a little studying, and she was now an official commodity—a noble with an education and a pedigree, and her fate had been delayed long enough.

  She stood in her small dorm, reflecting on how bare the room was now that she had removed all traces of herself. Most of those traces had come from the Moon family—the throw Bethen had made her one Solstice, the cross-stitch Roes had given her the last summer, the small set of wooden figures Torrant had bought her for no reason at all during a family visit to Otham one summer because there had been ten of them. The genders had corresponded, and Torrant had named them Bethen, Lane, Aldam, Torrant, Trieste, Roes, Starry, Cwyn, Yarri, and even Aylan with the curly hair. All these things she loved had been given to her by her lover and his family. She thought, almost in panic, that they had become her family now as well, and she might never see any of them again. On that thought, even with the bright sunshine outside streaming through the window, she laid her head against the windowpane of the room she had lived in for most of the past eleven years and mourned. What if, she thought dismally, the little basement in the crowded Moon house would always be her home? How would she ever find joy again, if she was never to sleep there?

  There was a tentative knock at her door. She murmured a scant “come in” and was surprised when Torrant entered, smiling shyly. They had said their good-byes—in a spectacular fashion that would leave her breathless for years just thinking about—two nights earlier, after finals and before Trieste really had to pack, when they could still pretend they had ever really belonged to each other.

  “Hello, pretty Trieste,” he said with that still-devastating smile, and she rolled her eyes. Nearly four years they’d known each other, and he still couldn’t convince her she was beautiful. She’d remarked tartly only a few weeks before that it didn’t help that her acne scars hadn’t all faded. He’d brushed her cheeks with his thumb curiously, saying, “I haven’t noticed them since that first day we met,” and she’d wanted to cry, because he was telling the truth, and she still wouldn’t believe him.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, but not coldly. As she was standing in her bare room, waiting to see her parents’ coach pull up to take her away from everything she knew, Torrant and his unspeakably beautiful face and voice were probably the best comfort a girl could ask for.

  “I haven’t given you your wedding present.” He smiled the smile that made the grooves at his mouth pop out and the dimple in his cheek deepen.

  He had offered to save her from her fate—to elope with her to the sea and live for years in handfast until everybody had forgotten her, and she could go out and choose her own life. She had refused, not because the idea wasn’t tempting but because, even unspoken in the offer, was the fact that he still wouldn’t give Yarri up, not even to save her from her fate with Alec of Otham. At least, she’d thought to herself at the time, Alec was her fate—Torrant
obviously never had been.

  Now she smiled. “I can hardly wait…. Gold, silver, jewels?” Gifts had been arriving at the school for months—Trieste, with some help from the men, had shipped them off to Otham via coach the week before. The gifts weren’t from people she knew, so she hadn’t opened any of them, but then she hadn’t needed to open them to know the feel of what was inside.

  His smile became a little shyer and a little more wonderful, like the boy she had gazed at four summers earlier, as the sun set behind the mountain. “No, Pretty Trieste—truth.” And with that, he advanced on her. First, he put his hands on her cheeks, then he brushed her elegant cheekbones with his thumbs, and finally he pulled her close, fitting his lips to hers in their very last kiss.

  It shocked her and left her gasping for breath, even as she felt the tingle across her skin, across her cheekbones, altering, ever-so-slightly, the shape of her face.

  Torrant pulled away and looked closely at her, smiling wider, and offered her a small mirror, made by a friend in Eiran and inlaid with a crashing wave in mother-of-pearl. He wrapped her fingers around the handle, indicating that she should keep it, and kissed her temple. “Pretty Trieste,” he murmured. “It’s always been the truth—now you can see what I see. Take care, Pretty Girl.”

  And with that, he was gone, leaving her staring at her reflection in surprise, touching her cheeks lightly with her fingertips, exploring a face, which was pale and pure and unscarred, even by the tiniest freckle or mole. Touching the tears on her perfect cheeks, Trieste reveled in this one last gift.

  AYLAN AND Aldam were waiting for Torrant in the hallway to see if he’d need help back to his dorms. He was a little wobbly, in truth—it had been a subtly great use of his gift—and when Aylan and Aldam threw arms around his shoulders and waist in a show of brotherly support, he was grateful.

  “So what am I going to call her?” Aylan wanted to know. “Now that I can’t call her ‘Spots’?”

  Torrant looked sideways at his friend, not tempted to scold him as he would have once, because he knew something of the depth of Aylan’s heart now, and it wasn’t to be measured by the sharpness of his tongue. Aylan would be working for Lane again this summer—would, in fact, be spending part of his time journeying to Otham and the Old Man Hills to find new and different things to ship to Eiran, and not just for the summer either. After Aylan’s first summer with the Moons, he had continued to receive letters from home. He never shared the content of the letters with Torrant, but during his second summer, he had an embarrassed, half-angry conversation with Torrant, and then a much humbler conversation with Lane. When he returned to school in autumn, he’d spoken to Professor Gregor, who thenceforth returned all letters addressed to “Aylan Stealth.” Nobody by that name attended Triannon anymore, and the people sending the letters would not have, in a thousand years, thought to send letters to “Aylan Moon.”

  “I think,” Aldam said, breaking pragmatically into Torrant’s musings on his friend, “that we shall have to call her Queen Trieste of Otham. Otherwise we might not be allowed to speak.”

  Aylan looked sourly at Aldam, who had grown in height and breadth these last four years, but only very little in world-weariness. That last was something Aylan had needed to fight off continually when he was not with Torrant and his family. “And I think if it came down to it, she’d rather prefer ‘Spots,’” he said with a grimace, and Torrant nodded, trying but failing to take some of his own weight. He had forgotten how much changing something took out of him, even if the change was only to expose the true beauty inside.

  “I think you’re right,” he said quietly. “But I don’t think we’re going to see her often enough to worry about it. Now let’s get back and finish packing—remember Beltane’s the day after tomorrow, so we have to make it by tomorrow evening.” It had been Torrant’s idea to wait—he was pretty sure Yarri would forgive him one less day before Beltane. She had become fond of Trieste in the last four years.

  “The way you’re walking, that means we pack and you sleep,” Aylan grunted. “I can’t believe they think you’re such a god of industry at the warehouse.”

  “And I can’t believe you’d whine about it when you’re the one who started calling me that in the first place!” Torrant retorted as they entered the dorm, and he managed to sit on his bed with some dignity. Or what had been his bed for four years. He and Aldam weren’t returning to the university proper. They were being sent, as Gregor had promised, to Wrinkle Creek in the Old Man Hills to intern as healers—or, rather, to work independently as healers while the only man who claimed to heal in the Old Man Hills tended his goats and sheep. The university tried to keep the outlying areas supplied with students, because the population of the hills tended to shy away from education and anything that smacked of civilization. Or too many people. Or sometimes, basic hygiene.

  Since Torrant and Aldam were attending for an extra year, they were ideal for the job—and would be as long as they chose to stay in the hills—but it didn’t mean the idea of being on their own, tending to a whole new strange area with its own customs and ideas, was not a little frightening.

  “Yes, well, you try attending school with someone who took two whole courses of study while you barely mastered one. I swear, if we didn’t have three moons already, another one would raise itself in the sky to honor your hot-burning, driving ambition to be something that doesn’t even have a name yet.” While Aylan was complaining about Torrant’s hard work, he himself was finishing with the packing, handling Torrant’s clothes with the ease born of familiarity. Torrant smiled a little at what a domestic picture his friend made, folding his breeches and his shirts as easily as Trieste had in the years earlier, if not as neatly.

  “He has a name,” Aldam said quietly, doing his own share of packing—it was amazing how many small things could accrete in the corners of a small room in four years’ time.

  “Right—‘Torrant,’ I think we’ve covered that!” Torrant laughed, giving his shaky legs a go and deciding to sit for a bit more.

  “No—your destiny name,” Aldam continued serenely, and Torrant and Aylan met eyes as they wondered what he had in mind.

  “And it would be…?” Aylan finally prompted when Aldam seemed content to let the matter lie.

  “You said it yourself. I can’t believe you don’t remember. You called him ‘Triane’s Son.’” Aldam was mildly surprised.

  “You weren’t even there, were you?” Aylan tried to remember the moment.

  “No, but Torrant told me later. I thought it was perfect.”

  “And I thought it was a crock!” Torrant laughed and, deciding this had gone far enough, he stood to add some weight to his words.

  “That’s because you haven’t figured out what Triane’s Son was meant to do yet,” Aldam continued with the same irritating serenity. “It will come.”

  Torrant sighed and nudged Aylan out of the way so he could refold his knitted throws. “What will come is tomorrow, if we don’t get a move on—and I don’t want to let Yarri down.” And for the moment, the matter was dropped.

  YARRI’S DRESS had red flowers on it for Beltane. Unlike Roes, she did not wear hers with pride.

  “I’m still short,” she sniffed dourly when Torrant congratulated her on her newly emerging womanhood. “And my boobs are too big and they get in the way, and bleeding like a dying chicken doesn’t make me a woman.”

  Torrant, who had his arm looped around her shoulders as they were walking toward the Beltane Fair, had to stop and gasp for breath, he was trying so hard not to laugh. “Well, it doesn’t make you dinner!” He choked at last, and Yarri shook her head in disgust.

  “Are you coming home this year?” she asked sharply, and he shook his head in bemusement, because she knew as well as he did that he had another year—probably more—practicing healing in the Old Man Hills.

  “No—”

  “Are you coming home next year?” she demanded, her eyes narrow and her chin as mutinous as he’d e
ver seen it.

  “Yarri,” he said gently, surprised they had to talk about this, “You know I’m not coming home until… until….”

  “Until I’m old enough to marry.” Her narrowed brown eyes were sparking with temper and with tears, and he never could lie to her, not even when she was six and he was sure their family was dead.

  “Yes, Yarrow Moon,” he murmured, stepping forward and taking her two hands in his. “I’m not coming home for good until you and I are old enough to see… to see if the fact that my heart beats for you, and you alone, through time and other lovers means we are destined to be. Until we can see that your heart will beat for me in the same rhythm, the rhythm which sets the sun in the sky and the moons on course, and teaches the birds to flirt shamelessly in the shade of the green-budding trees.”

  Yarri looked at him tensely to see if he was mocking her, making fun of her because of her youth, and then she saw his mouth, although turned up, was tense at the sides, and that his eyes, a hazel clear as a tree silhouetted by the day, were bright with the pain of waiting. And suddenly, a syncopated thunder started in her ears, and her blood rushed under her skin, flushing her until even the tip of her nose tingled with her shortened breaths and waterfall heart. Her mouth formed a little “oh” as she remembered everything she knew about what a man and a woman did with their bodies when they were grown, and she was suddenly aware that these things were the things she was waiting to do with the man who had been her friend and her brother since she shivered her first wail in the world. Torrant was a grown man, with a grown man’s body, and smooth skin over a grown man’s muscles. Oh… oh gods, the thought was terrifying, and she took a step back because she was too young to want these things, and her body was afraid before she could even remember she was angry because she was too young to want this tingling, this throbbing thing that sat between the two of them.