Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “That’s shite!” Torrant protested, looking at Aldam’s unhappy face. “How are healers supposed to ply their trade if people don’t believe in what they do?”

  “Oh, Rath’s got an answer to that one too,” Aylan said, and there was a bitter, dangerous undertone to his voice. “He’s schooling his own healers—healers who heal under the twins and don’t use ‘witchery’ or ‘damned weak compassion’ to heal, since those are Goddess’s evils.”

  Torrant gasped, blinking his eyes in order assimilate this new horror, and then he leaned forward on his elbows too, the movement putting him in close proximity with Aylan. The angry heat coming off his body made Torrant flush.

  “Aylan, brother,” he asked carefully, “where did you get this information?”

  “It’s common knowledge,” Aylan said flatly, looking away, and Torrant leaned closer, close enough to smell the small amount of beer on Aylan’s breath.

  “It isn’t,” Torrant said softly, insistently, and Aylan started to turn his head. He must have realized how close his face would be to Torrant’s if he did, so he stayed, head defiantly turned, his body so close to being graced by the touch it most craved. “Aylan, what are you doing when you travel?” Torrant continued persistently, and Aylan moved impatiently, facing Torrant with a cavalier smile he obviously didn’t feel.

  “I ended up in some interesting beds this trip out,” he said with mock gaiety. “Would you like names?”

  “I know where your heart lies, brother,” Torrant bit out, anger creeping into his tone, “so you can’t play that game with me. If you ended up in the bed which gave you that information you did it on purpose, and if you did it on purpose while working for Lane, the two of you are doing more than the family knows about, and that is my business.”

  A sigh went out of Aylan like a great cleansing wind, and he turned toward Torrant, leaning their foreheads together, and, Torrant suspected, leaning his battered heart on him, just a little, just for this moment as well.

  “It’s a front,” he murmured. “I’m establishing contacts so we know what Rath’s doing, what he’s saying. Eiran, Otham, and Triannon are becoming the last places in the lands of the Three Moons where the Goddess’s name can be mentioned, and Lane is afraid of invasion or aggression.

  Torrant nodded, closed his eyes, and swallowed, leaning into the contact of skin as well. Untold dangers, terrible visions, frightening possibilities opened up at his feet for his friend, and his bones grew cold thinking of what could befall Aylan, the wanker who had come to be a part of Torrant’s family too. “Brother, you need to take very good care of yourself, you understand?”

  “Brother,” Aylan sighed, “you need to do the same thing. This girl you are saving, her family—it’s noble, and it’s like you, but we can’t ship all the victims of this religious perversion to Eiran. It’s only so big. And if this husband is as scary as you say—”

  “He is!” Aldam broke in, and both the men at the table backed away from their intimacy for a moment to smile tiredly at Aldam’s usual truth.

  “Well then, since he is,” Aylan said in a slightly lighter voice, “you need to be very, very careful. These men, raised on the shite of ‘pride and honor’—they have no room in their hearts for mercy and no room in their brains for self-control or common decency or even the sheer dumb fact that we are all the same species, yes? He will kill you, brother, just like—”

  “Just like he’ll kill his wife eventually,” Torrant said evenly. “I can’t ship them all to Eiran—I know that. But I can help the ones who ask for it. That’s what being a healer of the Goddess is all about, right?”

  Aylan nodded and smiled grimly. “Right, then. So, tomorrow, or do I get a day’s visit first?”

  Torrant grinned, relieved. “A day’s visit, absolutely—I told Choa I’d be back to fix his knee in a week. He can’t move until then.” And then he’d had to explain what was wrong with Choa’s knee, and Aylan laughed hard enough to spray ale across the table, and the meeting had been merry after all.

  Torrant hadn’t counted on Choa’s old man being even more brutal than the son.

  He and Aylan managed to move the woman and her children—and their meager possessions—out of the shack that posed as their home and into Aylan’s cart easily enough. Torrant and Aldam had sacrificed a couple of blankets for Junie’s comfort, although Aldam had stayed back at the healer’s house in case anyone came to call. Aylan and Torrant had shaken hands and touched foreheads, and Aylan was just clucking to one of Courtland’s gigantic children—this one a sweet-tempered mare named Betty—when Junie said, “The horse—Healer—you must get the horse, or he’ll be able to follow us!”

  Torrant had sworn under his breath as he’d waved good-bye, and when the cart rounded the last corner of the road, he’d gone hurrying to the stable, which was three times as large as the house, for the monster horse Choa would spoil while he was beating his wife senseless.

  So he was thankfully behind the stable when Choa came roaring up to the front of the house, bashing in his own front door howling for his wife. He was limping, badly, because his father had put his kneecap back in with a ham-heavy hand, shredding cartilage Torrant would have spared. Even with the hitch in his stride, Torrant knew if the man got his hands on him, unless he was the snowcat, he would be torn apart.

  He crouched against the side of the barn and sidled to the far side, where Choa couldn’t see him from either the front or back of the house, and as he heard Choa bellowing out the back door, he went dashing for the woods that separated most of the properties from each other in the Old Man Hills. He had almost reached the first tree when he heard a shout of triumph behind him and heard the clatter of horse’s hooves on the rock-strewn path from the stable.

  “Witch faggot!” Choa bawled, and Torrant turned toward him, muscles taut for a fight. “Where is my family, you shite-infested bowel!”

  “Where you’ll never find them, Choa,” Torrant replied evenly, his mind ripping through options as that horse would rip up the ground between them.

  “Enjoy your little joke, witch boy, because you’ve got just that much time to live!” Choa was struggling with the reins, and Torrant figured he must have saddled the animal so quickly he wasn’t as steady as usual. Good—if he could turn to run in the next few seconds, the man’s inevitable fall would give him a few more moments to run through the woods as the snowcat.

  As though reading his mind, Choa snarled, “And when I’m done with you, I’ll turn to your little girlfriend with the white hair. Hearing him scream like a pig is going to be a pleasure!”

  Torrant’s bones froze and his blood and his heart. There was a torturer’s gleam in those murky, brown eyes, and Torrant knew, without a doubt, that Aldam’s first assessment of Choa as “a horse trader” was absolutely correct. And Aldam must have stunk like “victim” to him.

  With his next heartbeat, his vision was clear, cold, and deadly, and with his next breath, Choa smelled like game.

  “If you think you can beat me home, Choa, be my guest,” he said quietly, and before Choa could laugh or even fix his horse’s bridle, the snowcat was running full tilt toward Aldam and their little home in the hollow with the river behind it.

  He heard Choa fall off his horse as he wheeled into the chase, but he knew it wouldn’t last long, so he added a burst of power to the snowcat’s fearsome speed from sheer, stinking desperation.

  He was in luck, because although his route was through thick underbrush and unpredictable woodland, it was the snowcat’s turf, and his terrifying reflexes kept him safe when a man on horseback would have been unseated and seriously injured in the flight. However, Choa was riding that monstrous horse on flat land, and it would be a near thing.

  I can make it; I can make it; I can make it….

  HE HEARD the hoof clatter behind him at the same time he smelled home.

  He yrowlled, and again and again, sparing breath he didn’t have in a warning to Aldam, then burst into the road wi
th enough time to wheel and face Choa, who was bearing down on him like a juggernaut. He howled with all the breath in his body, spooking the horse, and coiled his body to spring.

  He saw the axe in Choa’s hand as he sailed over the horse’s head and had enough time to twist his body to avoid the brunt of the blow, even as he was raking his claws over Choa’s throat and knocking him to the ground.

  The axe hit him in the back flank. As he turned to finish his opponent off, he knew he needed to change form soon or he would bleed out from the wound. He howled again, this time in pain, as he approached Choa, who was trying unsuccessfully to climb to his feet. He still had the axe in his hand, and he swung it blindly at Torrant in an effort to keep the snowcat at bay. Torrant was ready for it this time, and he danced away with the snowcat’s grace.

  Choa swore and advanced, raising his arm for a mighty swing, which would surely finish Torrant, when there was a sudden shout of anger from behind him. Choa turned to see Aldam running at him with Torrant’s sword held clumsily in both hands. Torrant took the moment to jump, landing on Choa’s chest with all four feet and ripping his throat out before he hit the ground.

  He stood on all fours, licking the dead man’s shirt to get the taste of blood out of his mouth, before he realized his back quarter had collapsed under him. As Aldam approached, cautiously, sword still in hands, he summoned his courage, because changing while wounded hurt, and then he twisted slowly into a man again.

  “Godssssdammit!” he swore, standing and checking the back of his thigh as he did. The wound had been too deep to close entirely, but he was no longer hemorrhaging like a Solstice pig either, so he thought he might live.

  “Goddess!” Aldam swore, dropping the sword on the prone body with trembling hands. “What went wrong?”

  “I think the old man fixed his knee,” Torrant replied disgustedly, squatting to feel the cartilage before the body cooled. “He got back right after they were out of sight, and before I had a chance to get the damned horse out of there.” Torrant looked at Aldam and shivered. The thought of Aldam alone with Choa, trying to defend himself with the dropped sword…. Goddess.

  “He threatened me?” Aldam said, reading his brother’s look very well.

  “You said it, brother,” Torrant said flatly. “He had ‘horse trader’ written all over him.” He stood, trying hard not to groan. “Now, how about I haul his carcass to the middle of the woods, and you get rid of the blood in the dust?”

  “You’re hurt,” Aldam said with some reproach. “I’ll get rid of the body. You get rid of the blood.”

  Torrant was going to argue, because he was the murderer, and he didn’t want Aldam to have any more contact with this pile of pig shite than necessary, but Aldam stopped him midprotest. “You cleaned up last time,” he said gently but firmly. “Let me have my part in getting rid of the scary, bad men.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Please, brother?” Aldam asked, and Torrant felt sudden tears starting at his eyes. He would give Aldam the world, if he had it, and his thigh was starting to ache fiercely, and the blood was starting to soak through his pants.

  “Fine, brother,” he panted, realizing he was still winded. “Have it your way…. Just make sure he’s closer to his home than to ours.”

  Aldam looked at the corpse and shuddered. “Like I’d want that in our backyard! Now hurry, and put some bandages on your wound. I’ll tend it when I get home. What are we going to do with the horse?”

  Torrant shrugged. The skittish beast had taken off as soon as Choa had been knocked off. “Nothing. People will assume a wild animal got him. If they find the body, it’ll be confirmed—the wandering horse will just be proof.”

  Life in the Old Man Hills

  AND SO it was. For the next few weeks, the disappearance of Choa and Junie of Wrinkle Creek was the talk of every hardy soul who ventured to the door of the two young healers from Triannon, and the theories were as varied as the people:

  The middle-aged couple who lived up the river several clicks and who came by every few weeks for help aligning Conrad’s neck simply supposed Junie left him to save the children, and Choa couldn’t stand to be humiliated by a woman. The couple had moved from Otham some years ago, because property was not plentiful there, but they were not fond of the abuse the Goddess took in the Old Man Hills.

  Grete, the tiny, tough, extremely elderly woman who came in regularly for what she called a “physic,” and who could still remember the days when the Old Man Hills had its own Beltane Fair and Samhain Fire, had salaciously supposed Junie had finally killed the bastard and left the Hills for fear of reprisal.

  The women who snuck in without their husbands’ permission for help with pregnancies, their own beatings, or to have their children seen for the usual ailments all believed Choa had killed Junie and had left the Hills to find another woman stupid enough to bed him.

  The roughnecks who came to get their fingers and wrists set after fights supposed Choa had gotten killed by some cuckolded husband, and that theory rankled both Torrant and Aldam the most.

  “Why would another man’s woman want to touch him unless she was forced?” Aldam asked guilelessly while Torrant was setting a plaster on a little man built like a tree root. While Aldam was the more proficient healer, Torrant was usually tactful around the uneducated, superstitious people of the Hills. The only reason Aldam was in the kitchen/surgery room was to get water from the pump to mix with caulking so he could finish installing pipes for a privy. They were both getting tired of running to the outhouse behind the trees in the morning.

  “Shoot, boy,” the man spat, “you know them girls is all whores…. They don’t care who’s sticking it to ’em, as long as they get some.”

  “Charming,” Torrant muttered under his breath. He set the man’s plaster slightly crooked—maybe that would keep old Mackel from breaking his wrist on his wife’s jaw again.

  “What I don’t understand,” Torrant said to Aldam after the surgery had cleared out, “is, if these men despise women so much, why do they bother to touch them at all?”

  Aldam wrinkled his forehead for a moment—a sign he was taking the question seriously. “I think it’s like skirts,” he said at last, and Torrant was so surprised by the analogy that he spilled the coffee he’d been drinking all over himself. Coffee had been one of the things the two boys learned at Triannon that they had taken with them to their internship in the hills. It didn’t taste as good as the chocolate the Moons served, but it did keep them awake after those late calls, and the beans tended to grow at the riverside. They were constantly drying batches in a frame they had copied from the one at the school.

  “Skirts?” he sputtered.

  “Oh yes.” Aldam nodded his head. “Did you ever notice that Roes has more skirts than you can ever remember her having?”

  Torrant smiled benevolently. Of course—all things for Aldam came back to Roes. After their first wilding, the two of them had been inseparable, to the point where Bethen had asked Torrant to make sure Roes was taking the herbs that prevented conception. Of course, she had been. She’d started Triannon the year before, with the goal of becoming a healer like her beloved, and she was taking no chances. In fact, their only argument all summer had been over Aldam’s suggestion that Roes see other people while she was at school, so she would (in his words) know there were smarter men in the world than Aldam. Torrant had iced Aldam’s cheek after that, and after some pleading on Aldam’s part and some huffing on Roes’s, the matter had never been mentioned again.

  “I can’t say I have,” Torrant said now, bringing his attention back to the destruction of the Goddess in the Old Man Hills and skirts.

  “Well, she doesn’t exactly like wearing them; she thinks they hinder her ability to move,” Aldam said matter-of-factly, and Torrant smiled again—this time in memory. The two of them missed the family fiercely, and Torrant could feel that intense, practical energy radiating from his little cousin just from Aldam’s words. />
  “I am aware,” he replied softly.

  “Well, she despises the fact that women are expected to wear them, and she thinks they were designed to make women look foolish, and she hates everything they represent.”

  “So?” Torrant was unsure where Aldam was going with this.

  “But she sure does like the way they look on her,” he finished, and Torrant caught his breath.

  “Of course,” he breathed. “They’re like property, these women. They make the men look good.”

  “Yes,” Aldam agreed, wiping up the spilled coffee and pouring Torrant another mugful. “They make the men look good, and the men break their bodies and their spirits until nothing about them looks good, nothing at all.”

  Torrant regarded his coffee morosely, wishing for some honey and cream to go in it, but nobody had paid them in that currency for over three weeks. “That could be one the gravest insults to the act of sex I’ve ever heard of,” he murmured. “But… but I think you and I are naïve in such things, Aldam.” He looked at his brother and nodded seriously, and Aldam nodded back.

  “Yes—you’re right. I’m sure there’s something worse.”

  For a month or two, though, as late fall crisped and whitened to early winter, it looked as though the atmosphere of the Wrinkle Creek section of the Old Man Hills might improve.

  Choa’s frosty, well-gnawed remains were discovered about three weeks after his disappearance. He was recognizable only by the parts of his great black beard that hadn’t been used to insulate a hibernating family of woodchucks. The fact that Choa was found dead, and Junie was nowhere to be found, seemed to give heart to the battered, frightened women of Wrinkle Creek. Suddenly speculation turned from the idea that her husband had killed her to the idea that she, of all of them, had the courage to leave. The fact that she took out her tormenter seemed only to make her flight more heroic.

  Within the week, Torrant’s and Aldam’s practice doubled in clients. Women who had formerly not dared their husbands’ wrath were sneaking away to have the children in their bellies checked on, and the children at their skirts were having their limbs wrapped, their deep cuts tended, and their illnesses nursed. Women were suddenly coming to them by the droves to have their own beating injuries eased of pain, and when either of the two young healers of the Goddess spoke softly and passionately about how they did not deserve such beatings, the women were listening.