Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  Torrant nodded as she stepped back, and his eyes suddenly sparkled with wry laughter. He swept a gallant bow, there on the main avenue to the Beltane Fair.

  “Miss Yarri, would you do the honor of accompanying me to the fair?” he asked formally, and Yarri nodded slowly, picking up on his mood, his cues, and his complete willingness to allow her room to grow before the throbbing burn between them took spark and conflagrated their two hearts into one.

  “It would be my pleasure.” She bowed back to him and stepped into his still-brotherly arm around her shoulders. “And if we get there before Cwyn starts sticking his head up the ladies’ blouses, we might even get to hear Aunt Bethen tell a story or two before she carts him off.”

  Torrant was surprised, again, into laughter. “Triane’s toes, is he doing that now? What a complete little terror!”

  “Gods!” Yarri snorted. “It’s funny. Starry follows him around like she’s completely worshipping his horrid little self, but we figured out that what she’s really doing is warning people off him and cueing in the adults when he goes completely ’round the bend. And because she’s warned him first, always very matter-of-fact without whining or bribing, or any of that ‘I’ll tell’ nonsense other kids do, he never holds it against her. He gets mad at the grown-ups, but never at her.”

  Torrant’s laughter rang through the now empty little town. They had taken their time getting ready that morning and were among the last to walk to the green. “Little maniac! He is going to be some serious trouble when gets to his teens. He’s got Ellyot written all over him.”

  “But Ellyot wasn’t a complete little pervert wastrel,” Yarri corrected, and Torrant shook his head.

  “No. It was never girls, or boys for that matter, but do you remember when Tal and Qir were giving him grief about his riding and he set the beehive where they’d run into it?”

  Yarri was quiet for a moment—so quiet Torrant stopped and turned his head to read her expression in the late morning light.

  “You do remember…? I mean, you were only three, but….”

  Yarri shook her head, slowly, an expression of such profound sorrow crossing her face that Torrant’s breath stopped in his chest for a moment as he wondered what would cause her such pain.

  “I don’t really,” she said at last, when their footsteps crunched quietly on the dirt road for a couple of patters. “They’re…. My memories of them, Torrant, they’re getting dim. I tried to remember, the other day, the shape of my mother’s eyes, to see if I got mine from her or from Owen, and I couldn’t. I had to look at those pictures we made, and then I could only remember what she looked like in that moment we drew the picture, and….”

  “Yarri, calm down.” Because her voice was becoming more distraught as she kept talking.

  “But I can’t, because they seem to live for you, you seem to look behind you or around your shoulder, and just… just see them, and I can’t anymore, I can’t, and I’m afraid. I’m afraid they’re all we have between us and if I don’t have them anymore—” She gasped, holding on so hard to the sobs threatening her that her breath was forced out hard, and hard again. “If I don’t have them anymore—” And now Torrant was well and truly alarmed because the morning, which started off on such a gay note of happy laughter and a rare moment between the two of them, looked as though it might devolve into the unthinkable. Yarri, who was as tough a person as Torrant had ever known, might actually cry before they got to the fair.

  “What, my dearling?” he asked a little desperately. “What will happen if you don’t—”

  “If I don’t have them anymore—” She gasped again. “—then we won’t have them between us”—gasp—“and then”—gasp—“I won’t have youuu!” Wail, wail, wail, and suddenly Torrant was holding Yarri next to his heart and comforting her like the child he didn’t think she’d ever been, until she was nothing but a spasm of hiccups and sweaty, messy hair around her face, and he was the kind older brother who would die before she hurt.

  “Yarri, my dear one,” he said, when she was down to some shaky breaths and rubbing futilely at her ruined, braided, glorious, autumn-colored hair to calm it down. Her breath wasn’t calming, and she was still hiccupping, so he shook her shoulders a little to make her look at him again. “Yarri, are you listening?”

  Yarri nodded soberly, and Torrant gave a sigh of relief. Anything, anything, but to see her cry. “Yarri, we are family—you are afraid right now because, what if? Right? What if you fall in love with some wanker who’s not good enough for you and not me, will you still have me? What if I had married Trieste instead of sending her off to her toady husband in Otham, and you like Trieste, so you were probably hoping for a happy ending for her that didn’t involve me and couldn’t think of one, right? So what if that? What if that moon-destined nonsense is really just horse patties and dirty straw, and we will never be lovers, and then what? We’ll just be without each other because you’re not old enough now and I’ll be too old then, right?”

  She took a deep, shuddering breath and let it out, meeting his eyes with miserable brown eyes of her own.

  “Well, dearest, it’s not going to happen. If you marry some wank and I fall for Goddess-gives-a-flying-fish, it doesn’t matter. We will be you and I, Yarri and Torrant, for all of our lives, you understand?” She shrugged a little, and he shook her shoulders a little, laughing in his desperation to make her believe him. “Do. You. Understand?” he asked with a little shake on each word, and the corners of her mouth turned up.

  “Yes. Idiot. I. Understand,” she replied with a self-conscious sniff. “I’m not dim, or Aylan, who’s so in awe of family he practically wets himself when he comes over to dinner.”

  Torrant sighed and wrapped his arm more securely around her shoulders, glad one crisis at least had passed. “You need to give Aylan the benefit of the doubt,” he said after a few steps. “He knows you’re loyal to family, and he knows family is in your heart—really, that’s the only lesson you need.”

  “Yes?” Yarri asked seriously, listening to him as though his opinion were the only one that mattered.

  “Yes!” he replied firmly, because for that very moment, while his opinion did matter, he wanted her to believe that, if she believed nothing else. Together, they continued their way to the fair.

  When lunch was over and after his turns manning the swings, he did, indeed, get to listen to Bethen’s stories, which she told with her arms wrapped firmly around her most precocious child in a display of motherly affection that fooled no one. She simply wasn’t going to allow him out of her grasp long enough to get into any trouble. When she was done, Lane took over by taking Cwyn and Starry to the carnival games with the tiny trebuchets and buckets of water filled with wooden ducks. At Starry’s insistence (and no one’s surprise—she rarely let Aylan out of her sight during the summer), she made Aylan accompany them, which he did gratefully. Torrant knew Aylan had much to talk about with Lane and that some details would remain secret, even at summer’s end.

  Yarri and Roes were surrounded by a group of girls Torrant barely recognized, all of them chattering over Yarri’s reluctantly worn red flowers. Stanny and Aldam were off to help hoist the ribbon pole, although Aldam and Roes had been in the throes of intense conversation since the three young men returned the night before. Roes was of age for her first wilding—and she wanted Aldam there. Aldam was gallantly trying to insist she participate in the wilding with someone who hadn’t been gazing at her with stars in his eyes for the last six years, and Roes was maintaining stubbornly that she would wild with Aldam or no one at all.

  Bethen was stoically staying out of the dispute—in spite of Roes’s constant begging to her mother to make Aldam see reason—and everybody had the good sense not mention the affair in front of Lane, who was not eager to think of his daughter involved in any sort of wilding. So it was now, as the sunlight slid drunkenly sideways and twilight began a lazy stretch toward the other horizon, that Bethen, who had not seen her foster son the
night before because she’d been out nursing a sick friend, took her moment to edge up to her Torrant and “have a chat.”

  “I like your hair.” She smiled, the lines gathering at her eyes a little more firmly than they had seven years ago, when she’d first taken them under her wing. Her hair was grayer now as well, but her eyes still sparkled fiercely. She brushed the artfully ragged edges of his hair with her fingers as it framed his face, and he grinned back, a little abashed.

  “Yarri complained,” he murmured, and Bethen snorted an “of course” kind of sound. “She doesn’t like change.”

  “No—there’s only one change she’s really interested in,” Bethen agreed, “and it’s one you can’t rush.” She grimaced. “Just ask Roes and Aldam, who have been both rushing for that change and fighting it off with swords and sharp words.” She paused for a moment, and Torrant nodded, trying hard to keep the impatience out of his own expression. He was reassured by her warm smile, which said his frustration was normal. “But it’s fine to be a little impatient, darling—Yarri’s adulthood will mean the rest of your life can start. One way or the other, it’s all you’re waiting for.”

  “You’re very wise, Auntie Beth,” he teased, just to lighten the moment, and he loved the way her smile split her wide, round face with delight. His Auntie Beth was as beautiful as any girl he’d ever seen when she smiled like that.

  “You’re very good at kissing up,” she retorted, and then, more soberly, “We’ll miss Trieste in the summers.”

  Torrant’s expression was not sad, exactly, but it was a little nostalgic. “Trieste, I’m sure, will miss coming here during the summers,” he said diplomatically.

  “But you will not miss her as much as you think you should,” Bethen said wisely and smiled when his grimace proved her right.

  “I loved Trieste,” he said honestly, but still looking for another word besides “love” because what he felt toward Trieste was a sort of quiet, muted thing compared to what he felt for his family and for Yarri. “But… sometimes I think the one thing we had in common was that we were both going to end up with someone else.”

  Bethen laughed then, a giggle like a gossiping girl. “You should speak at councils, boyo—that was the most horrid thing said in the most diplomatic way. I can’t believe she’ll be your only lover in the next four years.”

  Torrant’s mouth quirked up, and he took Bethen’s arm to lead her toward the games, where they could watch Cwyn try to bite a rubber ball in a rain barrel. “I don’t think that’s something I can plan,” he said at last, and he caught Bethen’s sideways look through hair, which had caught fire in the westering sun.

  “I had thought,” she said delicately, “you and Aylan might keep each other company this summer.” And Torrant really did flush.

  “He doesn’t take lovers in the summer,” he blurted in frustration and watched her several blinks and sharp intake of breath, as she put together all she’d known of Aylan in the last three years to find the same conclusion.

  “Whyever not?” she asked in wonder, and Torrant almost kicked himself, because he’d managed to keep this secret from Lane for three years. “What? Why won’t he take lovers here?” Bethen asked, and Torrant finally turned to meet her nakedly curious gaze.

  “Music,” he said at last, simply. “He hears music with Starren—he just can’t bring himself to leave that music, that’s all.”

  Bethen’s eyes grew enormous, dark brown and young. “No,” she breathed, and Torrant nodded. “No?” And again, another nod. “Noooooo….”

  “I’m afraid so,” he finished, and Bethen’s laugh/sob was tragicomic.

  “How long have you known?” she demanded, and Torrant shrugged.

  “Practically from that first night Aylan visited—remember what Starry said?”

  Bethen closed her eyes for a moment and grimaced. “She said ‘my music, I knew my music would come.’”

  “Yes.” There was nothing more to say.

  But Bethen was perceptive in these matters, and she cocked her head quizzically. “You still hearing bells, sweetheart?”

  Torrant grunted and shrugged good-naturedly. Of course Lane had told her. “Jingling bells, chiming bells, xylophone music, big thundering cathedral bells—Yarri has always been bells.”

  Bethen grimaced—she was fully sympathetic, knowing Torrant suffered the same agonies she had, when she had been oh-so-much younger. “Bastards have no idea what they do to us, do they? Poor Trieste, she never had a chance.”

  Torrant laughed out loud and bent down to plant a kiss on Bethen’s cheek. That’s when they saw Cwyn off in the distance, high up on the town’s best climbing tree and defying his father’s exasperated orders to come down. “Yes, Auntie Beth—you, me, Aldam, Aylan—we’re doomed from the start, but that’s fine. I think we like it. And don’t worry about Trieste. I’m pretty sure she’ll land on her feet.”

  Bethen looked at him wryly and nodded, and then both of them broke into a jog, hollering at Cwyn to come down as they went.

  Later that evening, Torrant found himself, Cwyn, Starren, and Yarri in the family room playing dice games with Aylan. When they’d turned for home, they’d last seen Stanny and Evya, the little girl with the flyaway dark hair who could not seem to leave Stanny be, even though he wasn’t the richest or smartest or most handsome young man in the village, dancing comfortably near the wilding bonfire. Roes and Aldam had apparently reached… détente. They had been dancing by the bonfire, looking in each other’s eyes as though dancing would not be the only thing they planned, but their wilding was by no means a certainty. After seeing their older children had seemed to resolve their romances with neither trauma nor heartbreak, Lane and Bethen had, with sly smiles and blushes, asked Aylan and Torrant to take the younger ones home before disappearing completely. Aylan had remarked in Torrant’s hearing only that it gave him hope, watching the two of them disappear like frolicking children.

  “Since you won’t bunk me, maybe someone else will want to when I’m not young and pretty anymore,” he’d said dryly, and Torrant had socked him solidly in the arm.

  “You’ll always be pretty, you wank,” he’d snapped, hoping Cwyn couldn’t hear him and repeat the word. “And you don’t bunk anyone during the summertime anyway, so I don’t know why you’re whining!”

  Aylan stopped walking so abruptly that Starry, who had him by the hand, outpaced him and yanked on his arm before she realized he’d stopped. At her look back, impatient and wry in all her seven-year-old glory, he kept walking again, but his look to Torrant was sideways and thoughtful.

  “And if I did?” he asked quietly after they’d entered the house and sent Yarri with the younger children for games.

  Torrant looked up from where he was lighting the lamp and noticed for the first time in a while how Aylan’s razor cheekbones cast shadows against his cheeks, how his full lower lip pouted, and how even in the lamplight of the summer, his eyes were so blue they were purple. “If you did what?” he replied, knowing the answer but wanting to hear Aylan say it.

  “If I did bunk people in the summer…. There’s no Trieste. I’ve left no one pining for me—if I did take summer lovers, here in your family’s home….”

  “What?” Torrant asked, trying for all innocence but knowing his heart was thundering in his stomach and below.

  “Would you say yes?” Aylan took a step closer to him—close enough that Torrant could smell the sweat of both of them, and the dust. Instead of being unpleasant, it was animal and compelling, and he wanted it.

  “Tonight, while the world is a-wilding around us?” Torrant all but whispered, suddenly wanting his friend so much his skin swelled with it.

  Aylan took a step closer just as Torrant stood. Torrant had to look up into his eyes, and they were beautiful, and his friend was magnetic, and Torrant was iron. “Yes, Torrant, while the world is a-wilding around us,” Aylan whispered roughly, his voice begging Torrant not to toy with him. “Would you say yes, if I asked you to my b
ed?”

  The moment thudded between them, and Torrant knew both their bodies were bursting and aching with the thing they wanted but had denied themselves for four years. He took in his breath to answer, and at that moment, when he would have leaned forward to touch his own sensitive lips to Aylan’s finely sculpted, exquisite mouth, Starry ran in and jerked Aylan’s hand, oblivious to the currents around her.

  “Come on, Aylan!” she pleaded, and as always, Aylan was helpless to deny her anything.

  “Yes, Littlest,” he murmured easily. “Just let me grab the berries from the cold box, and we can snack as we play.”

  When Aylan looked up again, stricken and exasperated, Torrant had moved toward the doorway and was looking back at his friend with good-natured longing and complete understanding in his eyes. “Yes, Aylan,” he said softly into the cocoon of silence that still seemed to throb around the two of them. “If you took lovers in the summertime, this summer, I would be happy to fall into your bed.” He smiled then, the crooked smile with the crinkled lip, and the smile tortured Aylan as much as his next words. “It’s too bad that you don’t take lovers in the summer.”

  Aylan’s sigh was mighty and frustrated and relieved, because Torrant had taken the choice from his shoulders when he wasn’t sure what he would have chosen, and together they went into the front room to play rounds of innocent games with children (in spite of Yarri’s red flowers) and to retire, each to his own bed.

  The next morning Aylan was driven out of his bed on the davenport (where he ended up sleeping, more often than not, simply because Starry complained bitterly if he tried to move to his allotted room in Stanny’s flat) by what he was prepared to admit was sheer frustration. He could not count the number of times he had awakened, swung his feet over the edge of the couch, fully prepared to venture to the downstairs bedroom and show Torrant what the two of them had been missing all this time, but had, after a solid moment’s hesitation, put his head back on his pillow and fallen into a fitful sleep.