Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “You came!” he said in wonder, and Lane laughed dryly.

  “I had no choice,” he said. There was more gray in his beard this year, Torrant realized with a shock. He really looked like a town elder now, instead of a middle-aged father of four. “The minute Yarri looked on that damned map of yours and saw that you weren’t coming, well, she started packing.”

  “You saw them first?” Torrant asked anxiously. Ah gods, Aylan….

  “I talked to him,” Lane said gently, a grim shadow falling over his pleasant face. “I—I fathered him, as much as I could.” Torrant could almost see the guilt sitting on Lane’s shoulders like a spike-encrusted boulder. Lane sighed and rubbed his face, weariness and age descending deeper into his flesh, and Torrant was forced to wonder how many nights he’d lain awake, worrying about the young man he’d taken into his family and then sent into danger.

  “Aylan wouldn’t have been happy doing anything else,” Torrant said gently, over Yarri’s red-gold head. She was still clinging to him, making it hard for him to give an excited Cwyn the attention he seemed to feel he desperately deserved. The boy had grown—in fact, he was a year or two away from growing into his feet and passing Torrant up by a head, and his once fair hair had turned dark as wood already. And Cwyn, at twelve, was as smart as his parents and twice as vocal about it.

  “Mama told Da that if he ever sent one of her children into Clough again, he was going to need a map to her bed!” he piped up, happy to contribute to the conversation.

  Lane turned purple. “Gods, boyo—has it occurred to you we wouldn’t want that conversation spread all over the lands of the three moons?”

  “If you didn’t want everybody to know, why did you yell at each other when you were having the conversation?” Cwyn asked, and Torrant disengaged himself from Yarri long enough to give the precocious boy a solid hug and distract him from an obviously sensitive subject.

  “Since you’re here, we need to find someplace for you all to sleep. Would you like to see what we’ve done with the place?” He took them on a tour of the house in its entirety—pointing out the work he and Aldam had done and making sure they knew that most of the badly varnished boards and the paneling with nicks in it were his fault. “Aldam does carpentry with such patience,” he said at one point, admiring the finely sanded boards in Aldam’s room with the woven rug (Roes’s work) on the floor. “It’s almost a shame he’s such a wonderful healer. He and Roes got home all right as well?”

  Lane chuckled, truly happy for the first time since Torrant had seen them all in his kitchen. “Aldam and Roes are so lost in each other—I don’t know how he’s going to make it the next two years while she finishes her schooling.”

  “It can’t be a picnic for Roes either!” Yarri snapped, yanking Torrant’s attention back to her, and Torrant looked at her and smiled gently.

  “Waiting is difficult for everyone, Yarrow root,” he reminded her. “Aldam does it with more grace than most.” He grinned wickedly and showed them the hand-carved commode. “In fact, he channels it all into carpentry.”

  Lane and Yarri laughed long at that, and Cwyn eyed them all disgustedly. “The house is really nice, cousin,” he said with an obviously sincere attempt at politeness. “Can I go out in the woods and explore now?”

  Torrant caught his breath and whistled slowly on the exhale. “I guess that would be fine, young man,” he said carefully. “But….” He looked at Lane, who grimaced and shrugged. Torrant had no idea how much of his and Aldam’s letters home Uncle Lane had shared with his younger children. “Don’t kiss anybody, Cwyn,” he said at last, running his hand through his trimmed hair and making it stand out all over his head like a hedgehog. “Especially not boys. Trying to kiss a boy out here in the hills will get you killed. Dead. Like the rabbit you probably ate for lunch. Do you hear me, sir?”

  Cwyn wrinkled his nose, trying to assimilate the warning. “Why on earth would somebody kill me for that?” he asked finally.

  Torrant shook his head and shrugged, at a complete loss for words. “I have no idea,” he said at last. “But believe me when I say it to be true, right?”

  With uncharacteristic solemnity, Cwyn nodded his head and agreed. “I hear you, Torrant, but you’ve got to know that you live in a wanking cesspool of a place, right?”

  Torrant laughed, a true laugh but one that made his chest tighten and his eyes bright. “Truer words were never spoken, boyo—but it’s where we are now, and you need to play by those rules. Be back by sundown. I have zucchini bread and watermelon for supper.”

  “Wonderful!” With that, the boy was through the front door so fast it blurred as it slammed shut behind him.

  Torrant opened it anyway. It got warmer there in the hills than it did at the sea, and it was more pleasant in the house if he opened the front door, the door through the surgery, and the windows in all the bedrooms as well. He and Aldam had installed a cold box with a compartment that burrowed into the earth, where they placed the ice they had chopped from the creek that winter. There was a little cellar burrowed under Aldam’s room for that purpose, with a dark set of stairs that went underground. Aldam’s room and the surgery, which was right next to it, were both the better for it in the summertime, and Torrant told Lane he could sleep there.

  “You can stay in the surgery,” Torrant told Yarri, who was standing next to him, close enough to touch. He found he couldn’t get enough of the smell of her hair. There was something pleasant and floral (probably the soap she used on it—women were good at finding smells for things like that) but also something musky and animal and appealing about it. The smell of her hair soothed the aching place inside his chest like nothing had done since the bitter and dark solstice midnight of winter.

  “Whose bed is in there now?” Yarri asked curiously, and Torrant smiled.

  “Well, we started out building it for Aylan, but….” Torrant trailed off, unwilling to talk too much about Aylan’s troubles, but too entrenched in family not to. He swallowed, looked Lane in the eye, and finished, “Aylan had trouble sleeping this winter.” Lane nodded his head sadly.

  “Starry heard him, his first night home. She crawled in with him, and he quieted, and so I think that’s the way it will be all summer.”

  “Good.” Torrant nodded. “Good—because all I could do was hold him until he was done. I’m glad something can take that away.” He mustered up a smile. “Anyway, Aylan couldn’t sleep alone, and Pansy was staying here until she had her baby….”

  “Wait a minute—who was having whose baby?” Yarri asked anxiously, and then hung on his every word until he was done with the story.

  “I was going to visit Conrad and Rora tomorrow. We want to make sure he’s growing well, with the goat’s milk and the boiled grain and all. You can see him then.”

  “What did she name him?” she asked, entranced. Yarri was drawn to babies in any room, Torrant thought fondly, remembering his visit the year before. Bethen had written him often about Yarri’s happy place, teaching the orphans of Eiran, and how much they all adored her. Of course she would want to hear more about the little changeling child he had delivered from a cold home into a warm one.

  But Torrant blushed to answer the question just the same. “Conrad and Rora named him.” He looked determinedly at the cold box and wondering about wrapping some of that extra bandage material in the seams of it so the ice would melt a little more slowly.

  “But what did they name him?” Yarri insisted, and Torrant shrugged.

  “Well, they wanted to name him after me, since it was my idea, and I was there with Aldam the night Pansy brought him into the world, but I told them I’d rather they name him Tal, because, you probably don’t remember, but Tal had this way of wrinkling his nose when he was thinking hard, and this little boy came out and cried a little bit and then just gave us all that nose-wrinkled look like he was trying to decide if the whole trip was worth the results. So I told them it would be a real honor to me if they named him after my brother,
and they were good with that.”

  Yarri’s eyes had gone terribly bright. “It’s a good name,” she said thickly, “but you’re wrong. I do remember that look of his. I haven’t forgotten everything, Torrant, honestly I haven’t.”

  Torrant looked at her quizzically and recalled their conversation from two Beltanes ago. He took her hand in his and kissed it and then used his thumb to wipe away her tears. “I know you haven’t, Yar. I just don’t want to assume.” Yarri nodded, dashed her eyes with the back of her hand, and they continued to visit until it was time to fix dinner.

  That was when Lane sent her to find Cwyn. Yarri rolled her eyes at the obvious tactic—“As though that child has ever missed a meal!”—and then left so the men could talk about “grown-up, manly things.”

  “Do you think she’s still out there?” Torrant asked wryly.

  “She is, and Cwyn’ll be with her,” Lane affirmed, and Torrant gave an exasperated laugh.

  “Why do we bother?” he wondered aloud, and Lane clapped his back and reached for the zucchini to mash. Torrant had left it in the steamer while he started the fire in the little oven, so it was soft and squishy. Torrant also gave him the shelled nuts to chop fine as he pulled out the soft white flour and the hefty jar of honey, and then started to measure out everything else into the bowl.

  “The lie gives us comfort,” Lane said soberly. “We like to pretend that if they don’t know about the pain, we can protect them from their own. Besides—” He stopped his chopping and made sure he had Torrant’s absolute attention. “—I think you and Yarri will have this conversation twice. You always have.”

  Torrant flushed. Lane was right. He had always confessed to Lane as a parent, but Yarri had always found out from his own lips the worst of his offenses in the world. “She does the same,” Torrant admitted, and Lane smiled, because it was true.

  “Good—so we know you’ll tell her—now what do you want to tell me?”

  Torrant closed his eyes, the memory of blood vomited on snow clouding his vision behind them, and proceeded to tell Lane about bodies left in the woods and the demise of an evil little man who called himself a priest.

  When he finished, he turned to Lane for his usual comfort and was surprised to see Lane had his own eyes closed, the story itself etching lines into his face Torrant had never seen before.

  “Dueant’s eyes, boy,” Lane muttered. “You and Aylan. In a thousand years I hadn’t dreamed you’d grow into a world with this much awfulness.” He shook himself fiercely and squinted at Torrant, frustration and anger clear in his grimace. “We need this to end,” he said at last. “I’m not sure how—I… my thinking is more Goddess thinking than gods thinking, and I’m not ashamed to say it. I’m afraid for my family—that’s you boys, and Aldam, and Roes. She thinks she’s going to come out here with Aldam when she’s done with her schooling. I think I’d rather tie her to her little girl’s bed than let her stay in this defenseless house when the tide of this rocky little ocean of people can turn so suddenly savage. Aldam would give his life for her—but he’s a target too, and besides—” Lane made a sudden deep cut into his handful of nuts and had to pull the knife out of the new gouge in the cutting board. “—he shouldn’t have to. You know what Aylan’s been doing. I’m sure he’s told you by now?”

  Torrant nodded, still working, knowing exactly where this was going and grateful for it, fiercely grateful that he was going to be called into the fray.

  “I can’t ask him to go back there again, not alone,” Lane continued, not meeting Torrant’s eyes. “I can’t, and he’ll volunteer when he’s ready but it won’t be soon enough. If it was just the information, I could let it stand, but Rath has the Goddess’s folks shoved in ghettos with seven different taxes every time they take a shite, and no way to earn a living and no way to move out of the city. Stanny thought of the idea of giving them wool. Yarn, the guardsmen tax, but wool, they haven’t legislated that yet. They spin the nicest wool in those ghettoes. They card it and spin it and make it into lace that the women in that Goddess-blighted city will pay a fortune for, and from what Aylan’s been telling me, it’s been saving families from starvation. He trades the things I give him for bales of wool at the foot of the hills, where they grow sheep like bushes, and then he drives right into Dueance and gives Rath’s hated stepchildren the way to make a living. That’s what I need you to do, boyo—I know you’re burning at the bit to do more.”

  “I can do what Aylan was—”

  “You can’t, and you won’t!” Lane turned to him fiercely. “Do you not understand, boy?” Lane asked, his usually open face suddenly hard. “You’re a set of blue eyes away from being Clough’s most fearsome corpse. Rath would give anything to have you and Yarri pushing up horse food—and believe me, just because he failed a few years ago doesn’t mean he isn’t looking for you now. It’s one of the reasons I was all for you and Aldam working here in this little backwater. He’s not going after Yarri snug and safe in Eiran, and he’s got no idea where Wrinkle Creek is. It’s a good situation—I want to keep it that way. If Stanny weren’t working on something just as important—”

  “What’s Stanny doing?” Torrant wanted to know, but Lane held up his hand, a pained smile crossing his face.

  “I… boyo, if I told you what that son of mine cooked up, and what I gave my permission to let him try, you’d have to tell your Aunt Bethen, and she’d smack me on the head with a cook pot and tie me to my chair in the study as a madman.”

  Torrant found himself laughing at the image, in spite of his curiosity, and even Lane’s face lost some of its grimness.

  “Don’t say it, boy,” Lane threatened, a smile working to crease itself across his features, making him young again.

  “I wasn’t going to.” Torrant smirked.

  “Don’t say it.” The laugh was almost at the surface now.

  “I hadn’t even thought it.” But they were both too far gone to a thought that needed completing. Lane started nodding, and the seriousness of the moment was shattered, and Torrant finished what both of them were thinking. “But it would be the kindest thing she’s done with a cook pot—”

  “Since she used it to catch the drips from our first roof,” Lane finished, and the laughter took hold of the both of them. Lane would give Torrant specifics later—dates, people to talk to, directions, and a guide who knew the city—but when Yarri and Cwyn walked back into the house, it was to see the both of them laughing heartily as the smell of zucchini bread began to rise in the already heated afternoon.

  That night, after quiet talk on the porch and Torrant’s lute in the dark of the tree shadows and stars, Torrant lay in bed and quietly counted the heartbeats of the family who had come to him. He was lying in a shirt and underclothes, and his embarrassment when Yarri crept into his room, her own shirt-clothed body lit from moonlight streaming in his open window, was acute.

  He made a strangled sound in his throat and pulled his covers over his bare legs in spite of the lingering heat of the day, and Yarri laughed throatily as she crawled next to him and put her own legs under the thin sheet he had on in the summer. With a sigh, she curled on her side to face him.

  “Relax, oh mighty moon-destined,” she said dryly. “I’m not here to work my womanly wiles on you.” They both smirked at the phrasing—and the idea. “I’m just here to talk.”

  Torrant rolled over on his side, peering at his sun and moon and stars. The moonlight glowed round about her jaw and the bright darkness of her deep-brown eyes. She had kept that soberness in her expression from when she was a child, but she had also kept the ability to laugh, and it showed in the way her full lips tilted at the corners and the wicked quirk finished off her smile. Soon, a little part of him thought, very soon and she wouldn’t have to work anything at all. Her womanhood alone would beguile him beyond redemption. “Mmm….” He spoke into the quiet, knowing she’d also been looking at him, remembering his face, remembering who he was. He hoped she remembered good things. “What
are we talking about?” But he already knew.

  “Aylan isn’t…. It will take him a long time to recover,” she said softly. “I didn’t even hear it all, but I can see that something terrible has scarred his heart, and yours. Do you have to take over for him? Do you have to go to Clough?”

  He breathed out, a little puff of air he wished would blow away her words. “I wish you’d come to talk about pesky village boys,” he said after a moment, “ones who’ve tried to kiss you that I ought to come out and beat up for you.”

  Yarri snorted humorously. “I can fend for myself,” she protested, then, reluctantly, “and the miller’s boy will too walk right one day.”

  Torrant was almost veered off course by his own red herring. “What did he try?” he asked, finding he was more than a little upset by the idea.

  “He tried a hand on my arse, and I tried a knee where no knee belongs—don’t worry about it, Torrant.”

  “But—”

  “Torrant Shadow, would you have stopped loving me if I’d given in and let him throw my skirts over my head and pound me like a dirt packer?” she asked sharply.

  He replied just as sharply, “No!” and then shushed himself back to the quiet of the night. “No!” he repeated in a furious whisper. “But I don’t like the thought of a man trying something with you when you say no….”

  Yarri took a breath and shook her head. He knew she was still a little young to realize there was more going on in his head than jealousy. “I can take care of myself, Torrant. Please, don’t let this distract us. Do you really need to go to Clough?”

  Torrant sighed and looked away from the avidness of her eyes. “Yes,” he told her after a moment. “I really have to go.” A thousand reasons passed through his mind, but he settled on the most immediate one. “Yarri—you haven’t seen the way the men act here. It’s why you’re so certain you can take care of the miller’s boy, whatever his name is. But here, Yar, they’re horrible. The priests have come by and taken the Goddess out of their hearts, and with her, any idea that a woman is a person, just like they are. I… there has to be a way to stop it, Yarri.”