Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “I’ve got a lot of darkness there,” the little man wailed, and Torrant nodded, because it wasn’t something he could gainsay.

  “You’ll be right, yes, Mackel,” he murmured at last into the quiet of the store, exchanging anxious glances with Aldam and Graene. “The priest’s gods may consign you to the dark of the seven stars, but my Goddess always forgives.” He looked behind him, and then he and Aldam both moved quietly to leave.

  “That priest, he talks awful mean about us,” Mackel whispered to himself now, and Graene made shooing motions, so Aldam shouldered the bolts of cloth, and they left the dim little store, much of their joy dissipating like the steam of their breath into the snowy air.

  “I hate winter anywhere but Eiran,” Torrant said abruptly into the silence of the square. Everyone had seen Mackel go in, everyone had heard the ruckus, and Torrant and Aldam just strolled out of the mercantile as though nothing had happened. Torrant didn’t care. He missed smelling salt in the air instead of just snow and pines. He missed the feel of icy brine when he walked in the wind, the texture of the sweaters the people wore. Aunt Bethen had told him once that you could identify the merchants on the ships by clan, just looking at their sweaters, knitted thickly and cabled so the fabric clung within inches of the men’s chests. He had missed Eiran winters at Triannon, but he and Aldam had managed to make it home for all but the first Solstice. Even if they hadn’t been able to visit, the people at Triannon, the other students, the professors, had created a comfortable township of their own—it hadn’t been home, but it had been hospitable.

  “The pounding of the sea always frightened me,” Aldam told him, and Torrant wondered if he would ever stop being surprised by his supposedly “simple” brother.

  “It felt so much like my heartbeat,” Torrant mused. “Coming down that mountain, seeing that silver-gray world just waiting beyond the little town… breakers like mountains, spray like butterfly kisses…. I couldn’t imagine I had ever lived in a place that didn’t beat against the shore like my heart beat against my ribs. It was so natural I didn’t even notice—” He looked around him. They had left the township and come to their two horses, tied patiently under a tree where the town’s men wouldn’t know where to find them.

  Heartland was Torrant’s mount now. The horse had his father’s disposition, and such a pretty, fine, and sturdy-boned body that Lane hadn’t had the heart to geld him. He had been a good choice to send up to the mountains, and before Aylan’s care package had come, Heartland’s gleeful servicing had been traded for food when the bartering for healing had run thin. Sweetheart’s last foal was Aldam’s mount—another one of Courtland’s geldings. This one had thick legs and a barrel chest. He hadn’t been a good choice to breed, but he had the disposition of a happy, hay-eating tree. He and Aldam got along very well, and it made Torrant happy enough to know his brother wasn’t clinging to his horse for dear life that he could forgive Albiebu (Starren had named him—none of them could figure out what it meant) for moving with all of the velocity of a thoughtful glacier.

  The horses were happy to see them, especially because Aldam had purchased a handful of maple-sugar sweets from Graene, and they nosed the boys’ hands in puffs of steam.

  “I like it here,” Aldam murmured into Albiebu’s placid warmth before he swung himself up. Both of them were bundled in layers of sweaters, with their sheepskin jackets packed in their saddlebags for when the early evening fell like a sack of frozen sand over the hills. That was another odd thing about the hills—it was cold, damned cold, but unlike the mountains around Triannon or Hammer Pass, the chill was mostly bearable as long as they were inside by the full, joint-freezing cold. “If the people would only….” He sighed and shifted on Albiebu as the two of them started trotting through the crisp snow. “I can’t find the words,” he finished glumly. “I’m no good at words.”

  “You’re fine with words, brother,” Torrant reassured him. “It’s just that we’re getting so used to seeing people without joy that we’ve forgotten how to say it.”

  Aldam’s face lightened. “Yes—if the people could find their joy, then I would love this place.”

  “Mm….” Torrant shook his head and debated whether or not to pull his jacket from his saddlebags. “I don’t think so—even the snowcat loves the sea.”

  “That’s not very catlike of him,” Aldam observed, and Torrant chuckled.

  “He’s funny that way,” he replied mildly. “Now let’s get a move on before full dark—I want to get the spare bed ready for Aylan. He should be here in a week!”

  “I hope all is well,” Aldam murmured, and Torrant had to agree with that. Together they made an uneasy way home.

  When they got there, Torrant had a surprise waiting in his bed.

  “Pansy?” He would have been embarrassed about the squeak in his voice, but the girl was a comely seventeen-year-old, with dark hair and dark eyes, and she was as naked as a Solstice maple tree.

  “Come to bed, Healer,” she purred, patting the yellow pillow under the bright yellow-and-green quilt Yarri (with some help from Bethen and Roes) had gifted him with upon his graduation from Triannon. He might have preferred green and brown, but the gold reminded him of Yarri, so he kept the quilt where it could be seen.

  Yarri’s quilt or no, he hesitated when confronted with that pale flesh pushing out in curves under the quilt, and the suggestion of bare hip and thigh that showed in the drape of the stitched fabric. And the faint bulge of tummy on what was normally a fulsome, but slender frame. He swallowed, ordered his fully functioning working parts down, and said rationally, “I’m not a cuckoo bird, Pansy. You’re not planting that baby in my house and expecting it to grow.”

  The girl’s enticing smile wilted, and she pulled the quilt up to her shoulders. When she spoke again, her voice didn’t purr, it trembled. “I’d be a good wife,” she murmured. “I’d keep house for you. I’d…. You could bed me, if you wanted, and if you don’t like…. If you and the other healer…. I wouldn’t tell.” She looked at him and shook her head sincerely, that marvelous chestnut hair falling in her limpid eyes to be brushed back with a nervous hand.

  Torrant pinched the bridge of his nose and laughed without humor. “Pansy, I like a pretty girl as well as the next cock-driven rooster, but I’m not going to bed you. Why don’t you and—” His brain floundered for a moment as he searched out the name of the boy she’d been bedding. “—Ernst get married? You’ve been seeing each other since you were… I don’t know… children yourselves.”

  All Pansy’s pride completely deserted her. She pulled her knees up to her chest and laid her cheek against them, letting the tears flow freely, darkening the pretty yellow and making Torrant’s heart hurt for her. It must have been hard, he thought painfully, coming to a stranger’s house to seduce a man she wasn’t sure liked women. She must have been desperate to try such a thing.

  “It’s not Ernst’s baby,” she moaned into her knees. “He doesn’t even know about it. He was so nice, wore the sheep’s gut and everything so I wouldn’t get pregnant, so he could have time to make us a house… and his heart’s as big as the world… and I didn’t want him hurt, and he threatened….”

  “Who threatened?” Torrant asked, confused. He had a chair in the corner by his desk, and he drew it up and straddled it, because it was the least intimate position he could think of, and hunkered down to get to the bottom of why this particular pretty girl would want to be in his bed. Aldam, who had heard the voices and seen the lamp Torrant lit, came into the room with big eyes. Torrant rolled his eyes and mouthed “tea,” and Aldam nodded, going off to fetch some with all speed. Torrant tried again, a little more firmly this time. Pansy’s sobs were gaining force.

  “Pansy, who threatened you?”

  “The baby’s… the baby’s… the baby’s….”

  “Father?”

  “Father!” Pansy wailed, and Torrant sighed. It was going to be a long night.

  Fifteen minutes later, Torrant had
moved from his position on the chair to sit by Pansy on the bed, throw one of Aldam’s old shirts over her (thank Oueant!), and rub her back while she drank tea. Although the back rubbing had originally been to comfort Pansy, Torrant found he was using the motion to soothe his own uncertain temper.

  “This priest threatened to have Ernst… whipped?” He still couldn’t believe that. A boy whipped for what he and his girl did in the privacy of their own rooms… a protective father, maybe, but this… this interloper?

  “Yes,” Pansy sniffed, taking another sip of the tea. “This is really good—where did you get the honey?” she asked, and Torrant grimaced and tried to focus her on the problem at hand.

  “How did you stop him?” Whipped? Would people let this man do that to one of their own?

  “I—you know. Did what people do, except the priest….” She began to cry again. “He wouldn’t wear the sheepgut, and…. I thought it wouldn’t be a big deal, you know, because I’d done it before, and the priest said I was damned anyway, and my soul was going to the dark behind the stars and I might as well do it again. At least this way I wouldn’t suffer more for letting my man take my punishment….”

  The whole of the girl’s story suddenly smacked Torrant in the face, and he felt revolted and angry and terribly naïve. “That’s not fair,” he murmured, almost to himself, but Pansy’s body was shaking with the effort to finish, and she didn’t hear him.

  “But it wasn’t like it was with Ernst. It was awful and cold, and the priest smelled and his breath smelled, and he called me horrible names the whole time, and I hated it, and I hated him, and I couldn’t let Ernst touch me because I was just so afraid it wouldn’t be sweet anymore….” The tears were finally trickling to an end, and Pansy’s last words all but broke Torrant’s heart. “Ernst was always so sweet. And now he’ll never want to touch me again,” she said softly, bleakly. “And now I’m pregnant with another man’s child, and I’ll be thrown out of the town to become a whore in another, and Ernst will never touch me again.”

  Torrant sighed and closed his eyes tight, hoping this problem would be gone when he opened them. When he opened his eyes, Pansy was still there, pretty face swollen from weeping and red eyes staring hopelessly at her hands. Aldam was across the room, looking at him expectantly, just as he had when they were crossing Hammer Pass, and just as he had when they were in school and he understood something Aldam didn’t. But I don’t understand this at all, he wanted to tell Aldam. That’s not what came out of his mouth.

  “Pansy, you have to tell Ernst—you have to. You made this sacrifice for him, and it’s only fair he knows of it, and it’s only fair he knows the priest isn’t to be trusted.”

  “But how can he love another man’s baby…?” Her voice trailed off. “How can I love this baby?” she asked with so much candor Torrant was reminded of her older sister, and in thinking of his patients, he suddenly had an idea.

  “You may not have to, Pansy.”

  “I’m not going to… to reach up inside myself and—”

  “Goddess, no!” Torrant almost shouted, completely disgusted. Did women do that? There were ways of helping a girl’s body rid itself of a child, and he knew them and knew when they were good to use, but… the other…. He paled, grabbed hold of his stomach with all his mind, and stuck firmly to his original plan. “No. Pansy. I know a couple, nice people—they live right outside of Wrinkle Creek.”

  “They’d tell.”

  “They’ve wanted a baby so long, and with so much of their heart, Pansy. This baby—they wouldn’t care, these people. You, growing up with this baby, it would hurt you every time you saw his father in his face, but them, they wouldn’t know. They would just know it was a baby, and they would love it. And we’d call it a gift from Dueant or Triane, and no one would know. It’s winter, Pansy. You tell Ernst the truth, and we’ll tell the rest of the town you’re staying on to help us keep house. By the time this baby comes in the spring, you and Ernst, you’ll have some time to remember that neither one of you did this, and those people, they’d have time to prepare for your gift.” As solutions went, it sounded great, maybe even good enough to get the naked woman out of his bed, but as far as problems went….

  Aldam and Torrant locked eyes, and Torrant brought Pansy his oldest pair of summer breeches so she could have something to sleep in.

  Afterward, he and Aldam set about making the low cot they used in the surgery into a more inviting bed, and Aldam made little sucking noises through his teeth.

  “Aylan will be here in a week,” is what he said, shaking out the old sheets they had been saving for Aylan’s bed.

  “I know,” Torrant sighed. “Maybe Rora and Conrad will want to take the girl in themselves. Pansy would feel better, once she got to know them, once she knew they would love her baby as she can’t.”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t a wise solution,” Aldam smiled gently. “I just said there is some urgency.”

  Torrant made a sound in his throat between a groan and a growl. “Speaking of urgency,” he murmured. “How frightening is it that this priest has only been around since summer’s end, and he can already start causing this much trouble?”

  “He’s been spying on all the girls around the Creek,” Pansy said from the doorway, and both the men startled, because they thought she was still pulling herself together. “Nobody tells you two, because they’re afraid you’ll put a hex on him, and nobody tells him you’re here, because they’re afraid he’ll consign their souls to the seven darks if he finds they let you live.”

  “Glorious,” Torrant snapped. “I would just as soon live in the darks behind the damned moons than hear this pig lecture me on why I shouldn’t rape children or beat their mothers.”

  “Ernst is afraid he’s not a man,” Pansy murmured, looking at Torrant with awe in her eyes. “Because he says he can’t imagine hitting me.”

  Torrant’s growl was almost too close to the real thing, and he hastily blinked to make sure his eyes hadn’t turned. “If this… priest… thinks what he did to you is being a man, I hope someone bites his manhood off so he knows the difference!”

  Aldam and Pansy both looked at him in shocked silence and then burst into giggles more appropriate to the schoolroom than for the situation. Torrant watched them laughing and reluctantly joined them. “Well, I’m sure the women of the town wouldn’t mind,” he said after a moment, and Pansy sobered immediately.

  “I’m not the only one, you know.”

  Torrant made that sound again—he had guessed, and he could only shudder at what would come his way. He sighed. “Well, now he lives in Choa’s old place, we can keep a better eye on him, the old pervert.”

  “He’s not much older than you two,” Pansy said with a sad smile. “I wanted to trust him. You two are so nice to us.” Her voice threatened to break again, and Torrant knew she was already exhausted from weeping.

  “You won’t think that when I make you get our brother’s bed ready in the morning,” he said crisply. “You’ll think we’re slave drivers and hate us both.”

  Pansy smiled a little, and for a moment she looked like a pretty young girl, just old enough to be wilding at Beltane. Torrant kept the smile on his face, and inside wondered coldly what Aylan was facing that was so much worse than this.

  Aylan Stealth

  AYLAN WOKE up in a tangle of smooth limbs and bare torsos, male and female, before wiggling his way out and disturbing as few people as possible. Another horrible night in service of the greater good, he thought with a wry grin, and tried to put a finger on what had awakened him with such urgency. It wasn’t that he didn’t need to wake up—he had to leave early if he was to winter with Torrant and Aldam, but there was something… something not right….

  Then he heard a sound echoing, and his sleepy, cat-footed walk gained purpose and surety as he made his way to the thickly paned window overlooking the snow-dusted courtyard.

  Essa was hurrying away, her pretty, dusky skin flushed from the cold, a
nd her close-cropped tiny ringlets frizzing just a bit in the damp. She paused in the middle of her rush and looked furtively over her shoulder at the sleeping city house of the two children of Troy, one of the two hundred regent homes of Clough. Her eyes widened guiltily when she caught sight of Aylan, and then an unpleasant, sly expression crossed her face, and he was suddenly uncomfortably reminded of Lyssia, the girl who never did develop a rash, but who had left Triannon posthaste.

  Aylan turned to the tangle of bedmates on the giant, lush, velvet bed behind him. A few of them were moving gently, stroking or kissing the bare skin they came in contact with, but most of them were hardly moving after their play of the night before. Aylan felt a sudden, terrible pang of protectiveness and worry for his bedfellows—the pawns in his terrible game.

  All Lane had asked of him was to get information—any information—about Rath’s movements, about Clough’s politics, about the danger to the outlying lands and city states so that Eiran might not be caught unaware. It had started out small at first: a tat of information here, a tittle there, as Aylan marketed Lane’s goods to the smaller mercantiles in the Old Man Hills. But as the past year progressed, and Aylan’s tidings had been more and more disturbing, Aylan had ventured closer and closer to Clough. Finally, with a shipment of wool for the Goddess’s ghettoes (as they were called in the city), Aylan ventured into the heart of enemy territory and found it foul and black, coated in the filth of a people segregated, crowded like rats into a tiny, landbound ship, dying in their own filth and their own starvation, unable even to leave the heart of their city because their want marked them as the people Rath despised.

  When Aylan first saw the ghetto, after “selling” wool for the women to turn into the finely crocheted doilies that were the only goods the people of Clough would buy from the ghetto, he had gotten back in his wagon and wept, ignoring the stares of the guards after he’d ridden his wagon away. He had thought he’d known so much about human evil.