Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “Your father used you to obey the Consort!” Aylan said, alarmed, swinging around to grab the boy by the shoulders. His eyes were unfocused, and his dark skin was gray and clammy. Aylan silenced an internal scream of panic, but the echo was still in his ears. Jerid was so fragile, and now the friends, the people he had used to prop up his weakness, to shore up his courage, had scattered to the four winds of the three moons, and Aylan did not like the look he had at all.

  “But I have nowhere to go, if I can’t go home,” Jerid replied, a fine edge of hysteria to his voice.

  “You can go to my home!” Aylan insisted. “Do you think I live in this Goddess-forsaken piss hole, Jerid? I know what a real home is, and a real family—come with me. I will show you two what it is like to be loved.”

  Brina smiled softly at her brother and took his hand. “Jerid, darling, do what Aylan says, and I’ll go with him to the capitol. I want to say good-bye to Marik, after all.”

  “Right,” Jerid nodded, giving them both a watery grin. “You go, and I’ll be ready to go. Don’t worry. When you get back it will all be taken care of.”

  Aylan believed him, Goddess help him. He couldn’t fathom a different ending.

  THE CAPITOL was crowded—Aleta knew a lot of people, and her shrill voice could command people out of bed on a rest day like nobody else, male or female, who was connected to the Regents.

  Aylan wore a hood, and so did Brina, and together they slunk behind the crowd. The capitol square was surrounded by three buildings and was approached on the fourth side by a red-paved road. The buildings were tall, decorative, and imposing, with columns and archways, and each had a wide flight of steps up to the foyer under the archways. They hid up in the foyer, peering from behind a column and trying not to look as though they didn’t want to be seen.

  Aleta was a bone-thin woman with the pretty, dusky skin and hair that was unnaturally gold. She curled her lip and rasped her voice unpleasantly when she spoke, and right now she was in full snarl. Aylan wondered darkly if anyone’s ears were bleeding.

  “—in the heart of our city… this defiance of the Twins laws, this perversion! These people have even approached my own daughter, and you let them sit in your midst like they’re not the Whore’s own bastards, fornicating to weaken the strength of our young people and the honor of our king. Oueant and Dueant are too strong to weep so we weaker, abused women have to! We weep for the corruption of sex and the violation of the family in the heart of our own city. Weep because the people who should be leading us are leading us to the dark behind the stars!”

  She went on, and Essa stood next to her, looking virtuous and upright, as though she had been chastened through a terrible ordeal and had made it through. Aylan glared at her, wanting to vomit. Would she be able to pull off this act so convincingly when the bodies of her dead friends lay at her feet? He saw a chilly smile cross her lips, right before she burst into tears, and knew coldly that she was looking forward to it.

  “Tell them, Essa!” Aleta was shaking her daughter’s arm, and Essa looked demurely up, as though she hadn’t been waiting—planning—for just this moment.

  “It was terrible! Bodies lunging against each other, and the blond one with the curls grabbed my arm and threatened me. He told me they’d denounce me in the square if I didn’t join them in their horrible, nasty orgy. There were men with their things in each other’s mouths and it was so nasty… and in the middle, with his thing everywhere it shouldn’t be, was Jerid of Troy and his nasty sister, Brina!”

  Aylan felt his gorge rise, and he took Brina’s arm. “We need to go,” he whispered, because the crowd had been surging to begin with, but at the mention of incest, they gasped, both titillated and excited by the idea of seeing a Regent and his sister destroyed and humiliated and surrounded by their bloodlust.

  “Isn’t that right, Olen?” Essa cried, and Aylan looked out to see a shocked and puzzled Olen being hauled onto the front steps of the capitol. Her eyes locked with Essa’s, and Essa looked arrogantly back. Olen wasn’t shocked and puzzled for long.

  “Of course it was!” She began to cry, tears coursing down her cheeks, sobs heaving her padded body. “All of those people lusting! It was so blasphemous and profane, and they wanted us to do it! To put their things in our mouths and to touch them, but they were revolting!” The crowd gave a roar, a thrust against the podium like a cresting wave, and then receded in the calm before another crash.

  “Oh Goddess, piss on the brat!” Aylan snapped and gave Brina’s arm a harder tug, willing the girl to see her friends’ perfidy and to get on with it.

  “But, Marik…,” Brina murmured unhappily, and then her lover stepped up to steps next to Aleta, and into her worst nightmares.

  “I had no idea these people profaned the gods!” Marik announced loudly to another roar, and Brina turned toward him slowly, as though swimming through blood. “I’m shamed that I ever thought of courting a Goddess’s whore! I came close to shaming my whole family, and I’ll be sure to be far more careful in the future!”

  Essa and Aleta beamed up at him, the crowd throbbed and surged and throbbed again, and Brina made a little mewl like a tortured rabbit and almost sank to her knees.

  Aylan swung her up into his arms and fled, unnoticed by the crowd that was already rising, rising, surging and screaming, shrieking and climaxing for blood.

  She was on her feet eventually as they tore through the streets, using the alleyways Aylan had learned while getting to know the city, and Brina had learned while sneaking away to see the man she thought would love her forever.

  They were running so fast they almost slammed into the servants fleeing from the house of Troy.

  Aylan seized the arm of one in confusion, finding himself face to face with the poor little thing who had delivered Aleta’s message just hours before. “What’s the matter?” he demanded, trying not to scare the girl. “Where are you all going?”

  “Master Jerid!” she gasped. Her blondish hair was a wet mess around her head from sweat, and her eyes were a brilliant red from crying. Her voice trembled, thick and uneven, and Aylan felt the sickness in his stomach spread to his other limbs. “He told us all to flee back to our families. He didn’t want any of us caught when they came for him but… but I didn’t want to leave him alone….”

  “Oh gods!” Brina swore and broke free of Aylan. “Jerid! Little brother!” She ran screaming into the house, and the servant girl nodded sadly, tears trembling in her reddened eyes again. Aylan let her go, tearing after Brina as though the hells of the seven dark were closing near his heels.

  He found her in the big white bathroom next to Jerid’s bedroom, the one with the well-used, gigantic tub. It wasn’t white any longer.

  Jerid floated by the edge in water the color of rubies, thick and cloudy with them, like scarlet mud. The gape of the wounds at his wrists against his black skin was as obscene as an eviscerated cat, and just as fatal.

  Aylan had no course of action for this. “Goddess!” He stood, stunned, at the door of the room, watching numbly as Brina sank to her knees in the bloody water slopping onto the floor, pulled her brother’s head out of the water, and cradled it against her. Jerid’s arms splayed loosely, and his body moved like a ship made of seaweed, but Brina murmured to his glassy eyes like a mother to a sweet-breathed child.

  “Baby brother,” she said. “Oh, baby brother. I’m sorry I let them hurt you. I’m so sorry. Don’t do this. You can’t do this. I’ve followed you everywhere, don’t you know that? I won’t let them hurt you again. You can’t leave me like this. You made my life sweet, little brother… no… no… don’t go… don’t go somewhere I can’t!” She shifted on the bloody white tile, and Aylan heard a metallic clink, but it didn’t register until he saw the glint of the razor in her hand.

  “Brina,” he said, shaken out of his stupor by panic. “Brina, we have to go.”

  But Brina didn’t know him. The only person she knew was cradled against her chest, as still and cool as
the lapping water against a porcelain tub.

  “He’s alone,” she said, mostly to herself. “He’s alone behind the dark of the stars, and he hates the dark. He’s always hated the dark. It made him cry. I’m the only one who came to him when he cried. Don’t worry, baby brother. I’m coming. Don’t cry. You won’t be alone for long.”

  “Brina!” Aylan shouted desperately, and started to move toward her, but it was like moving through a dream, it was like moving through blood, it was like moving through sorrow, and his reaching, flailing hand was still a foot away as she raised her blank, tear-reddened face to him and put the glittering blade against her pale throat.

  “I’m coming, little brother. You won’t need to cry anymore,” she whispered and yanked the blade backward, gouging a slice through her vein even as she toppled back against the floor, dragging Jerid’s body on top of her.

  The rip in her throat sprayed blood violently, pattering against Aylan’s dark-green woven cloak like bunny feet, spattering his face, tapping rapidly against the tile. He was left stunned as the blood was pushed from her body in a few beats of her heart. And in a moment, a breath, a shocked cry, a blackness in front of his eyes, he was standing alone in a room that was swimming in blood, the thundering of his heart the only beat of life in the vast, rich, still house.

  The Healing Teeth of Justice

  TORRANT WAS trying so hard not to think as he led the horse through the cold black and white of the Solstice night that he almost didn’t recognize Aylan huddled on his porch, snow drifting against his hood. For a moment, his heart gave a lift—he’d been waiting for Aylan this evening, when he’d been called out, and he’d been happy. Then he saw Aylan’s posture, the defeat, the pain that surrounded his shivering body like a shield, and Torrant’s heart thudded at his feet again.

  Aylan looked like Torrant felt.

  Oh Dueant, god of compassion, what had happened to them both?

  Torrant should have let Aldam take this one. He had been on call the night before and had been rousted out of bed to stitch up old Ulf’s thigh because his damned cow had kicked him and sliced him up good. So it really was Aldam’s night, but they weren’t quite finished with the bed for Aylan, and Aldam was the better carpenter. Pansy was hard at work fitting the sheets Bethen had sent for the straw-and feather-ticked mattress, because they had been a trifle small. All in all, they were so close to making Aylan comfortable in his own room—the final addition to the house—that when Tansy’s mother had come in, saying uncomfortably that Tansy was having “woman problems,” Torrant told Aldam to keep at it. Tansy was barely thirteen years old. She was probably just having her first course of monthlies, that was all.

  By the time Torrant had ridden the few miles back to the two-room shack that housed Tansy and her family, with her terrified mother hanging onto the back of Heartland with him, Tansy had almost bled to death.

  When Torrant saw the overwhelming, clotted rush of blood on the rank mattress beneath the frightened girl, he ordered her mother and all six of her younger siblings out of the room. Her father was a titanic man, known for threatening anyone who came near his wife or daughters. Unlike many of the men, he wasn’t violent toward women, but he was very protective of his women—and their immortal souls. When Torrant asked where Clel was this cold dark night, his wife (who was such a timid thing Torrant wasn’t sure if he’d ever known her name), had replied, “He’s at service, with the priest, damning the Whore’s demons for the darkness.”

  Torrant was glad the man was gone, but one look at Tansy made him wish someone had been there to protect her. Obviously brute strength and a loud voice hadn’t done it.

  “Tansy, I’m the healer—do you know me?”

  Tansy nodded, so lost for blood that her lips were gray, and Torrant wondered if she could really hear him or if she was answering to the last of her heartbeat.

  “Tansy? Tansy—something made these wounds here, between your legs. Do you know what happened?” But Torrant knew already. Just looking he knew, and Pansy’s terrified voice came back to him. I won’t stick something up there to get rid of it… I won’t.

  Tansy was a tiny, brown-haired, murky-eyed mouse of a girl. All the children were quiet, but Tansy, the oldest, was almost terrified of strangers. For Tansy to have needed that abomination to be done to her? Torrant washed his hands in the bucket he’d had the girl’s mother bring and shuddered. She wouldn’t have conceived a baby, not willingly. Oh, Tansy, you must have been so afraid.

  Torrant spread her knees gently and brought some of his new, clean bandages to see if he could reach inside her to pack the wound. But as soon as the blood touched his skin, his gift of truth broke his heart. He tried to staunch the bleeding anyway, to give her mother and father the time to say good-bye, and then he washed his hands again and moved up to stroke her hair. She had lain silently, a tiny child in a thin, faded dress in the middle of winter. When he’d touched the inside of her, silver tears had glinted down the side of her face, and a terrible ferocity reared in Torrant’s heart as he contemplated whoever had done this to her.

  “Sweetheart,” he murmured gently in her ear, “sweetheart, you have to tell me who did this to you.”

  “Me,” she answered, and he couldn’t let her die believing that.

  “No, darling,” he whispered. “You were alone, and afraid, and somebody gave you a baby you didn’t want that you feared to carry. Who gave you that baby? He’s who did this to you.”

  Tansy looked at him with miserable eyes. “He said… if I told…. There’s worse than the star’s dark….”

  Torrant knew his eyes had shifted to blue, so he kept them closed when he spoke his next words. “He lied, darling. There’s a bright light, like the moons in summer, and you go beyond that, and there’s music. Have you heard music?”

  “There’s songs at service,” the girl said. “Pretty.”

  “Well, this puts them to shame,” Torrant spun from the sadness of his own heart. “And there’s dancing and laughing. My mothers are there, and the rest of my family. My brothers and my two fathers, and they will take your hands. Ellyot, my brother, will carry you on his shoulders like the little girl you are and spin you around until you laugh. There’s nothing dark about where you’re going, sweet Tansy. You believe me now?”

  “Is Ellyot nice?” she asked, her voice thin and wandering. “Will Father like him?”

  “Ellyot’s the best,” Torrant told her. “But I’m going to get your mother now, right? You tell her not to worry. Don’t you worry about any dark stars. I’ll tell her the gods took you now, because they couldn’t live without you, right?”

  “I’d like dancing,” Tansy continued. “I bet my gran will be there. She liked dancing too.”

  Torrant looked up, aware his eyes had gone to ice blue, and the smell of blood was stirring him to a frenzy. He made deadly sure to not let that rage out here. Tansy’s mother came to the bed and read Torrant’s face, then bent to kiss her daughter’s cheek, as Tansy murmured about music and dance into the closing night.

  The susurrus of longing paused for a moment. Tansy’s mother looked to the bloodsoaked bandages between her daughter’s thighs and then looked away, and Torrant had a sudden, sick epiphany.

  “You knew,” he said in shock. “You—you told her to do it!”

  The mousy woman turned her head. “Her father—he’d put her out into the snow if he knew!”

  “It wasn’t her fault!” Torrant protested, not wanting the last words the little girl heard to be angry ones.

  “It’s always our fault, Healer,” the woman said, and Torrant swore viciously, then grabbed the thin arms in his, knowing his strength was escaping, knowing he’d leave bruises.

  “You take that back,” he growled in her face. “You bend to your daughter and you take that back. You tell her she’s a good girl, and you don’t let her die thinking she did this.”

  “But, Healer!”

  “Do as I say!” he growled.

  “But,
Healer,” the woman protested once again, “she’s gone. My baby’s already dead.”

  Torrant let his head fall back: his roar of rage rattled the clapboards of the cabin. He turned to Tansy and bent to kiss her brow. “Tell Ellyot I said hello,” he told her quietly, and then, slowly, as though swimming through blood, he turned back to the faceless, nameless mouse of a woman who had allowed the lie that murdered her daughter. “I’ll be back for my horse.”

  And then, without coat, without hat, he was pelting through the frozen dark under a moonless Solstice sky. He was the snowcat, thundering through the underbrush, jumping frozen streams, the world as icy and crystalline to his cat’s vision as it had been murky and frightening to the human.

  And the snowcat knew exactly where they were going. They had been there before, but they had been running away that time.

  The men of Wrinkle Creek had fixed up Choa’s house—but even as Torrant changed form to open the door and charge in, he knew the walls would be no match for the strength of his rage.

  He’d never seen the priest, and the thin, crooked man with the nose like a notched axe blade was a surprise. He had expected ugly, but he had expected monster ugly. This man was just little and bent, and all his monster was on the inside with only his little man’s ugliness for show.

  “Who in the seven darks are you?” the little man asked. For a frail-looking man, he had a resonant voice, like a bass clarinet, and Torrant thought it was no wonder he could sing the simple folk of Wrinkle Creek into jumping through the ice of hell.

  “I’m the man who’s been cleaning up your messes for the last month,” Torrant growled. “Pansy the miller’s daughter, Cora of Sprout Pond, Solly, Graene’s sister—you remember these girls?”

  The priest looked blank, and Torrant knew his hands were no longer the hands of a man, but in the lamplight the change wouldn’t be seen.

  “The babies you left in their bellies make sure they’ll remember you!” he spat, and the sneer on the other man’s face didn’t surprise him.