Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “I believe you,” she whispered. “I absolutely believe you.”

  “I meant every word.” Alec smiled, and the steward arrived at the door, and Trieste, breathless and stunned, found herself on the arm of her new husband. Alec of Otham wasn’t toady in the least, she thought in shock. In fact, he thought she was beautiful. And she believed him.

  Part V—The Healing Moon

  Aylan and Torrant hugged the shadows of the Dueance Ghetto, meeting eyes when the next round of guards swept by.

  Aylan nodded his head toward them, and Torrant shook his back—negative. No. They would not kill at this moment.

  Of course, both of them would end up killing by the end of the night.

  Terrible. Terrible and sad.

  For a man who had spent four years learning how to heal, who had agonized over his first kills with bloody gobbets of soul, how had it come to this?

  Aylan’s jaw tightened, and he nodded to the next batch of guards.

  Well, it wasn’t easy for either of them. Good.

  If Torrant had to go see Yarri this night, welcome her into his arms, into this wretched life of living enough for two people, with blood on his hands, at least the killing wasn’t easy.

  At the very least it wasn’t easy.

  Healers of the Goddess

  TORRANT’S LUNGS were on fire, and his legs were threatening to cramp. Even the snowcat’s body was threatening to fail him and still he ran, because Choa of Wrinkle Creek was on horseback, and the only decent thing about Choa at all was that damned horse.

  I can beat him; I can beat him; I can beat him; I can beat him—the refrain echoed in Torrant’s mind as his padded feet skimmed the ground and, in spite of being winded, he still howled his fear and frustration into the chill autumn air. He heard behind him a startled whinny, and although his pace didn’t slacken, his desperation let off a little. Choa was behind him, and Torrant might get to Aldam before he did.

  Gods damn it, he should have expected this.

  A WEEK ago, Choa’s wife Junie had been six months pregnant when she had first walked the distance from her home to the little house the students from Triannon used when they did their stint in the Old Man Hills. As she staggered down the road to the house, Torrant was doing what he and Aldam were always doing in their spare time: carpentry.

  As it turned out, the reason for all the mismatched paneling in Triannon itself was a senior tradition—the graduating classes learned a basic trade in their last year by improving the school and donating the lumber. Torrant, Aylan, and Aldam had learned a lot by installing privies near the stables (their choice of project) and now that knowledge was being put to good use. Torrant and Aldam had been steadily fixing up their little cottage since the end of the previous summer, when they’d first moved in. Except for the winter months, when the snow was too deep to work on the outside, and their six-week break in the summer when another student came from Triannon so they could go visit their family, their energy had gone into that house. Now, a full year later, the place was almost unrecognizable as the two-room hut that had so disheartened them when they’d first ridden up to their new post.

  Junie’s eyes had widened as she took in the paned windows (supplied by Lane) and the still-open plumbing lines Aldam had run in, as well as the framework and outside walls for the new bedrooms he’d erected. Aldam was nearly as good a carpenter as a healer, and Junie’s eyebrows were nearly at her hairline as she took in the size of what would be the new healers’ house—for the folks of the Old Man Hills near the Wrinkle Creek village, it was a palatial edifice.

  Junie had walked slowly, almost fainting as Torrant had seen her and come out to give her a hand. She had the four-year-old boy by the hand and the two-year-old on her shoulders, and a body that was black and blue from Choa’s fists and feet. She had been afraid this last beating might mean the end of the baby that was bulging from her now, and the thought had terrified her.

  “Women who miscarry children are cursed by the Goddess,” she’d whispered after he’d carried her into the exam room. It was now a different room than the bedroom, thanks to his and Aldam’s efforts. He and Aldam were sharing the other bedroom—whoever was off duty got the good bed, and whoever was on duty that night for emergencies got the uncomfortable cot.

  “I don’t believe that,” he murmured, setting her down on the exam table.

  “And their unborn children go to the darkness behind the stars,” she continued, as though he hadn’t spoken, and Torrant’s breath had stopped in his chest with the sheer cruelty of that belief.

  “Who in Triane’s name told you that?” he asked harshly, his temper made short by the bruising and the fear and the terrible injustice of a brute like Choa beating on a tiny, fragile woman who was obviously so terrified of the “darkness behind the stars” that she’d go see a Goddess-cursed healer (as she’d called him) to make sure she and her baby didn’t die.

  “The priest out of Clough” had been her guileless reply, and now he had to breathe like a woman in labor to keep from snarling at her. He had heard this tripe before—from the moment they’d stepped into the tiny backwater province of Wrinkle Creek, located in the Old Man Hills. The men used it as an excuse to beat their wives, the itinerant priests used it as an excuse to keep the men in line. He and Aldam had been fighting this ignorance for a year now, and it still made him angry every time he heard it. The only thing that kept his temper in check was the knowledge that the priests wandered by, at most, twice a year. There was a lot of forgetting in a six-month span, and when the healers were there to help you in the meantime, well, the priests’ words might have been spreading like the chickenpox, but chickenpox weren’t gold.

  “There is nothing shameful about bearing children,” he said, as evenly as he could, and was surprised when a small, chapped hand with two crooked fingers from an earlier beating rested on his arm.

  “I understand, Healer,” she murmured. “Women are weak and evil—if our bodies can’t do what’s necessary, then we have no useful purpose to the gods of pride and honor.”

  Torrant felt the earth tilt under his feet as he gazed at her and tried to put her world in sync with his. The village’s itinerant priest had been by a couple of weeks ago, and obviously he had a new poison to sell.

  “Compassion,” he said blankly, and she just looked at him, not understanding.

  “Compassion,” he repeated as flatly as he could, but he knew his voice was rising and distraught, and when she still stared at him, her face swollen and discolored from a beating too many people had told her she deserved, he had to fight the urge to fall to his knees.

  “Compassion!” he roared quietly, so as not to frighten her. “The other god is the god of compassion, not pride. Oueant is honor, Dueant is compassion, and Triane is joy—”

  “We’re not allowed to mention her name!” Junie hissed, horrified and fascinated at once.

  “Just because we can’t mention Her doesn’t mean she’s not still in the sky!” Torrant cried. “Junie—being born without bollocks doesn’t mean you deserve to be beaten. The gods are honor and compassion, and neither of those things tell us to beat a tiny woman with child until she can barely walk, and anyone who tells you that you are weak and evil because you are a woman is evil and twisted and sick and terrible. And all of the lies they have been feeding you are for shite!”

  Torrant had taken a breath, trying to get ahold of his emotions. Nothing in his life had prepared him for this tiny woman and her belief that she was worthless because she had been told she had no god.

  With a sigh, he applied some wet cloths and plaster to her wrist, which was almost certainly broken, and looked outside to where the four-year-old was backhanding his two-year-old sister with practiced ease.

  “Look at them, Junie,” he said quietly when he heard her little sound of dismay at the boy’s behavior. “There are places in this world where you wouldn’t have to be afraid of your husband, where you could teach your son that walking like a man d
oesn’t mean beating his sister like a coward, and where your daughter doesn’t have to be afraid. Wouldn’t you rather be somewhere that being born a woman isn’t a sin?”

  “Women are weak,” she said faintly, and he whirled toward her, knowing he was on the verge of turning snowcat out of sheer frustration.

  “My mother was one of the bravest people I know!” he ground out, surprising even himself, because the memory huddled in the back corner of his mind like a frightened kitten. “She sacrificed herself to save my life and the life of my moon-destined, and she killed men with only her thought and her desperation so that we might live. The only thing in the way of your safety is your own blighted fear!”

  He closed his eyes, mostly to feel for the pain of that resurrected memory, and he found it ached like an old wound, but it didn’t incapacitate him with its sharpness. He opened his eyes again and murmured gently, “I’m going to feel the baby now, Junie, and make sure she’s moving, right?”

  “Do you think…?” Junie’s voice trembled as he gently probed the hard-swollen belly under the homespun skirt.

  “I think that babies are hardier than we think,” he said softly and was rewarded for his optimism by a solid knee to the palm of his hand. He smiled and gave her stomach a more-than-gentle pat. “She’s just fine.”

  “Oh!” There was relief and some happiness on that worn, once-pretty face, and then in another “Oh….” And there was fear and disappointment.

  “What?” He had gone to wash his hands, because one of the first things they learned at Triannon was that if they were clean, their patients would stay healthier, and he turned in alarm to see teardrops trembling at the corners of Junie’s mouth.

  “A little girl—are you sure?” she asked unhappily.

  “My gift is truth, Junie,” he told her delicately, because the people in these parts regarded his and Aldam’s silver streaks of hair with the same fear and horror he and Aldam would have regarded someone wearing Clough’s teal and black. “Part of it is knowing if it’s a girl or a boy.” It was a gift he’d had since he’d been small, if he’d known about it—but the gender of the infant had never been as crucial to the people around him as it seemed to be here in the Old Man Hills.

  “A girl,” she whispered. “It’s so hard, being a girl.” And he could almost read her thoughts: a girl to be beaten by her brother, and then by her father, and then by her husband. A girl who would see her own daughters beaten, and who would, as Junie probably would, die young, more than likely at the hands of the man who had fathered her children.

  “A girl to cherish,” he said softly, wanting to change that awful litany. “A girl to teach to sew, a girl to teach to dance, a girl to give you grandchildren.”

  “Not here,” Junie’s voice broke. “Not here, not in Wrinkle Creek, not in the Old Man Hills, not anywhere near where those priests seem to spill from, telling the menfolk that we’re nothing!”

  Torrant breathed a sigh, suddenly seeing hope where he’d just moments ago seen two corpses, walking because they didn’t know they were dead. “Then move.”

  “Where? To Eiran, where they rape the virgins at Beltane?”

  Torrant couldn’t help it—he laughed. “They do what?”

  Junie looked at him cautiously. “They don’t?”

  “Not at any of the Beltanes I went to!” he replied, shaking his head. “Junie, honestly, I don’t know who told you that, but the Beltane feast at Eiran has many better attractions than that!”

  Junie’s mouth turned reluctantly up at the corners. “I guess that was a little foolish to believe.”

  “Yes,” he said gently. “Just as foolish as believing you deserve to be treated like this.”

  She breathed in, hard, then said, “Did your mother really save your life?”

  “It was the last thing she ever did,” he said quietly. “And one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen.”

  She opened her mouth, but Choa turned up with that magnificent blond horse attached to a cart, his brutal voice hard enough to break timber.

  “Junie, Junie! Where in the six darks and the Whore’s tits did you get to?” His screaming for Junie was interrupted by a child’s squeal as he hauled the two-year-old up and threw her in the cart without ceremony—or regard for small and tender limbs—and Torrant could see the boy scrambling up the cart quickly so he wouldn’t get the same treatment.

  “I’ll come visit next week,” he said, knowing Aylan should be stopping by then on a return trip from wherever he went to sell for Lane, and he’d have an empty cart. Aylan was always on his way to or from somewhere. They had summered together this year, and Torrant had seen new lines and worries on his friend’s face, and the question of where Aylan spent his time seemed more and more burning as their first year in the Old Man Hills died and their second took its place. “I’ll have a friend with me—he’ll be on his way to Eiran.”

  Junie had regarded him soberly, and Choa’s voice got closer as he threw open the thankfully sturdy front door and screamed for his woman, again using epithets which Lane, in his most dire moment of frustration, had not dreamed of. A tiny nod, that’s all she gave, and Torrant spent a week praying he hadn’t misread it. He turned toward Choa with a genial smile.

  “Junie was just making sure the baby was still good after her—” His eyes moved to that terribly bruised face (he couldn’t help it) and then back to Choa’s coarse, bearded features. “—after her little fall,” he finished evenly.

  “She don’t need no help from no faggot witch,” Choa spat—and then literally spat, right on the kitchen floor Torrant had been sanding when Junie had walked up. Torrant made a face and looked back at Choa.

  “Nice horse,” he said, taking the man aback.

  “Thanks,” he replied, wrapping thick fingers around Junie’s slender arm.

  “You take good care of it?” Torrant asked, almost casually.

  “’Course I do. You don’t neglect something that valuable,” he replied, and Torrant followed them outside, talking determinedly to Choa’s back.

  “Or beat it,” he added, and Choa dropped Junie so abruptly she almost fell, and he turned toward Torrant with narrowed eyes.

  “No, sir,” he growled. “It wouldn’t make no sense to beat an animal that valuable.”

  “You’re right,” Torrant agreed amicably. “Beating a horse like that makes about as much sense as beating a good woman, don’t you think?”

  Junie caught her breath softly, and Choa leveled a quick haymaker at Torrant’s head in retaliation. Torrant had never stopped fencing, and he still ran as the snowcat every week or so. His reflexes were frighteningly quick as he ducked that massive fist and then shot out a quick foot to the man’s knee, sending him rolling on the ground and screaming in pain.

  “Whatya do to me?” he howled, clutching his knee to his chest. “You godsdamned, cursed witch!”

  Torrant approached the man with level movements and pulled Choa’s hands away from the kneecap so he could probe it himself with firm fingers. He whistled lowly as though he hadn’t done the damage himself. “Oooh, that looks nasty,” he said matter-of-factly. “That’s been dislocated but good. I’ll tell you what, Choa—when Aldam gets back from his rounds, how ’bout I take you out to your dad’s farm, and you can recover from that. In about a week, I’ll come out and put it back, what do you say?”

  “You fix me now!” Choa shrieked, and Torrant put some gentle pressure on the kneecap itself, not flinching when Choa screamed spittle loudly enough to spook the already skittish horse.

  “Mmmm… no…. I don’t think so.” He gave a friendly smile and motioned Junie to get into the cart. “I’ll wait for a week and give your wife a chance to get over her ‘little fall’ before she has a chance to fall again, what do you think?” He ignored the profanities issuing from Choa’s mouth and nodded judiciously. “That’s what I think too.”

  Later, after Aldam had run inside (Choa had “horse trader” written all over him, he’d told Torrant
once, and Torrant could see the relation) and Torrant had loaded the screaming Choa into their cart and clucked Hammer toward Choa’s father’s farm, Choa had hollered that he would tell everybody what Torrant was doing. Torrant looked at him sideways.

  “And tell them that you got beat by a faggot witch from Triannon?” he asked innocently. “You must have bigger, better balls than I ever suspected, Choa, my man—I underestimated you.” The brute subsided and allowed himself to be meekly dropped off at his parents’ house, and as Torrant listened to his father—a graying copy of Choa himself—abuse Choa with his foul mouth about not having the sense the gods gave goat turds, he’d felt his one and only pang of pity for Choa. And then he breathed a sigh of relief for Junie and her children and their reprieve from viciousness, while he arranged with Aylan to take them away to a place where if a man beat his wife once, his neighbors wouldn’t speak with him or do business with him, ever.

  Aylan arrived a day early, and Torrant and Aldam welcomed him as they always did: with a glass of ale, a good bed, and the stories of what they had been doing since they’d seen each other last. They were good visits, but Aylan was always very cagey about what it was exactly he did for Lane. They knew he carried goods and wares throughout the lands of the Three Moons (which, since his family came from the Jeweled Lands, always seemed very funny to Torrant), but Aylan always seemed to know things—things he shouldn’t know if all he did was sell yarn, pottery, woodworking tools, and such.

  For example, when Torrant told him about Junie and her dire situation at home, Aylan’s relaxed sprawl at their kitchen table had tensed, tightened, and he’d suddenly shifted so his wide shoulders hunched over the table itself while he wrapped his arm around his beer.

  “That’s the priests,” he said tightly. “There’s a whole mess of them, straight from Clough, and all of them schooled that the Goddess is a whore, and the twins are pride and honor—”