Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “But it’s not like that in Eiran.”

  “But Eiran isn’t all the world!” he exclaimed harshly in the hushed, whispered voice he had used before. “This place, it’s getting better. The women are starting to believe in themselves, and the men, they’re starting to respect their women again. But it took terrible things for that to happen. Terrible threats, terrible—”

  “I heard you talking to Uncle Lane,” she confessed, taking his hands and stroking them gently. “You don’t have to hide the terrible things from me, really.”

  Torrant closed his eyes and shook his head. “You didn’t used to think so kindly of the snowcat.”

  “I was a child then. Now I mind a passel of children who have been beaten by men just like you describe. I’m not so naïve as you think I am.”

  “Then you know why I need to go to Clough.”

  A silence then. A heartbeat. A few, actually, because their blood was up as they argued in the silver hush of the night.

  “There are plenty of bastards for the snowcat to eat here, or at home. He’ll glut himself in Clough!” Yarri finally exploded, and Torrant surprised himself by laughing softly. It was so typical of her—of the Moons, actually—to not mind the blood of their enemies as long as it was shed protecting their own.

  “Your family, Yarri—you should have been the damned snowcat. The lot of you have more bloodlust than my whole bloodline put together.”

  Her body relaxed, as though the argument would end in this small moment of humor. “We just think very simply, that’s all. Lane calls it ‘Goddess thinking’—Auntie Beth and I just think it’s common sense.” Her hand appeared out of the dark and patted his cheek smugly, and then, when he smiled, she curved it around his face.

  When she spoke next, her voice was husky and shy. “So, Aylan spent the winter in this bed.” It wasn’t quite a question.

  “Our long johns remained on the whole time, I promise.” He grinned, thinking to reassure her. He didn’t.

  “That’s too bad,” she whispered, troubled. “In a year or two, I think it would really bother me if they were to come off. I wish you two would get it out of your systems before then.”

  Torrant swallowed. “Aylan was too hurt for anything but holding,” he said rawly. “It hurt me just to see him like that. He’s always been all confidence. To see it gone….”

  “Do you think it didn’t hurt him to be with you?” she asked, disbelieving. “Do you think he’s the only one who was wounded this winter?”

  “Yarri, you don’t need to worry about that.”

  “You mean I don’t need to worry about you?” she asked bitterly, and the blood rush in his ears began again. “So, it’s all well and good if you walk into the heart of the country that killed off our families, because I don’t need to worry about you, right?”

  “I’m not without ways to take care of myself,” he said with a small attempt at humor that earned him a sock in the arm. “Ouch!”

  “It’s one lousy snowcat to an entire army! People kill them all the time for fur, and you seem to want to donate a brand new rug to some fat regent in a country beyond redemption!” she snarled, the tears in her throat making her voice husky and loud.

  “Yarri—”

  “No! No ‘Yarri, I’ll be careful,’ no ‘Yarri, you worry too much’—none of that. It’s shite, and I won’t let you lie to either of us.”

  “What would you have me say?” he burst out before she could go on, suddenly wondering at the ridiculousness of their hushed voices when this was perhaps the most intense argument they had ever had.

  “I’d have you not go, you lackwit!” Now her voice rose, and he hushed her. She glared at him, and he glared back.

  “I can’t do that!” In a flash of passion, he could no longer have this conversation curled on his side, looking at her quiet in the dark. He scrambled to his knees, mussing the covers, and Yarri was right in front of him, their faces close, and their expressions fierce and mutinous.

  “Why not?” she demanded, and she was so close to him and his blood was so fierce that he was the one who broke the whisper taboo.

  “Because it will never leave us be!” he yelled. “Because this evil keeps spreading. It’s not just Clough, it’s not just the Desert Lands to the south—it’s Wrinkle Creek and the Old Man Hills and a shrine between Triannon and home. Look at you—you spend your days teaching orphans who were made orphans because of this evil, and you can’t tell me it doesn’t break your heart to think of mothers leaving their children at doorsteps because they are too afraid the child will get labeled Goddess’s bastards if they keep them. You may not remember Orel or Bren, but I know you remember growing up with those Goddess’s ‘bastards,’ and I know it makes your blood boil that everything your father ever loved is getting ground under bloody soil on horses which couldn’t kiss Courtland’s fat self-satisfied ass!”

  “But why does it have to be you?” she shouted back, and Torrant opened his mouth to answer when Lane’s booming baritone cut through what had been a silent little house.

  “Yarri, you leave him alone about this until tomorrow. I swear by Oueant if you don’t shut up and let a man get some sleep, I’m taking you home tomorrow!”

  “But—” she tried to call across the three rooms.

  “And if you shut up now, I’m prepared to pretend you haven’t snuck into a grown man’s room in your nightshirt two years before you come of age, do you understand?”

  “Yes, Uncle Lane!” she called back, and the only sound in the house for a moment was the sound of Cwyn choking on a snore from what used to be Pansy’s room. Yarri and Torrant subsided and sat back on their heels in the deep feather mattress, the moonlight softening the disgruntled glares they were trying to cast each other. Torrant gave in first, as he often did, and with a snort of self-deprecating laughter he threw himself back on the bed and held out his arms.

  “Truce, Yarrow root?” he asked softly. “Two weeks is an awfully short time.”

  “You’re coming to visit after that?” she asked, her voice only a little tremulous.

  “Professor Austin promised me two weeks,” he confirmed, “and one for travel.” She nodded and threw herself into his arms, where he cradled her against his chest and took heady breaths of the oddly familiar mystery scent that rose from her hair.

  “Yarrow, rose, and chamomile,” she said softly against him.

  “Hm?” he asked, trying to still the trembling in his muscles as he fought the urge to crush her to him so nothing, never, not even he, could ever hurt her in any way.

  “My hair—the yarrow grows near the sea—it’s strong stuff. I can’t use much, but it smells like Eiran.”

  That’s why it was familiar—he and Aldam harvested the yarrow as a blood clotter to stop wounds. “It smells like home,” he murmured.

  “I don’t want to live anywhere else,” she confessed softly, and he chuckled, because if they really weren’t moon-destined, then they ought to be.

  “Me neither.”

  “Please don’t go,” she tried one last time.

  “Please don’t ask,” he said at last, and for the moment, one moment when crickets and a lone owl could be heard in chorus outside the window and the gods of honor and compassion were shining their way in, she nodded and let the matter be.

  Changing Times

  THE NEXT day, though, Yarri took it up again, and this time she didn’t stop, not for the next two weeks under the sun-soaked cedar trees, and not during the two weeks afterward in the letters she left for him, which seemed to mock him at every read, and not for a week after that, at the gray and briny sea. It was to the point where he could read her expression when she opened her mouth, and in the moment between when she thought about what she was going to say and then said what she wanted to say, he could do an about-face and beat a hasty retreat to the warehouse or the stables. Often, he went to the orphanage where he took over for Aldam or Roes in doing examinations and administering rose hips and other preven
tatives to the childhood diseases that often ran rampant in such places. He and Aylan did a lot of fishing off the abandoned pier by the stables in that first week of his visit, until the day she finally called a truce.

  He was sneaking into the kitchen to grab bread and some cheese from the breadbox when he saw her and that glint in her eye.

  “No!” he said, just for form, before turning around with his lunch in his arms and heading purposefully for the door. His hand had just closed the wrought iron knob behind him and he had one leg off the porch when he heard the thump of the laundry basket behind the door. He made it to the road in front of the house when she cleared the door herself, crying out, “If I promise to drop the subject, do you promise to take Aylan or Stanny with you when you go!”

  It was as close as she’d come to admitting defeat in five weeks, and Torrant closed his eyes and sighed before turning toward her. “I promise to ask,” he said after a fraught moment under a gray sky threatening rain. She looked at him, troubled, and he relaxed his expression a little, trying not to seem like a stubborn grown-up to a bright and fractious child. “I won’t ask Aylan to do anything he can’t, Yar. The man’s my friend—my brother of the heart. There’s too many torn, bleeding places inside of him to just rip off the bandage because you love me.” Aylan, in fact, had been offering—nagging was more like it—but even Bethen had told Torrant, in the quiet of his first morning there, that his friend was far from ready. Giving in to the both of them felt wrong, but at this point he couldn’t see any way out of it.

  “And you and I both know Stanny has other obligations,” he continued. Whatever Stanny was doing, it seemed to take a lot of his time, and it also seemed to involve dirt. Stanny was, in addition to other savvy mercantile pursuits, making a fortune selling every type of soil from gravel to potting soil by the cubit. Torrant had asked where it came from, at one point that week, but Stanny had simply smiled a cat-cream smile and mumbled something about holes and old maps. As it was, he’d been gone half the week of Torrant’s visit, and Torrant missed his sweet-natured cousin. He certainly didn’t think Stanny had time to take up Aylan’s post in Clough.

  “I’ll ask if it’s possible,” he told Yarri now, “but I won’t insist if it’s not.” And you’re going to have to be happy with that. He didn’t say it, but he knew she could hear it in his voice.

  “Fine.” She nodded, conceding at last. “Right. So if I accept that, will you go walking on the beach with me tonight?” A lone tear escaped and tracked its way down her cheek. “You only have a week left, and I’d hate to waste it.”

  Now that she had conceded, he felt his own eyes grow bright. “Damned stubborn child,” he growled, opening his arms. “You know Aunt Bethen was about to gag you during dinnertime, don’t you?”

  Yarri nodded from the comfort of his body. “She told me the only reason she didn’t is that it would mean I’d stop cooking.”

  Torrant laughed softly. “So that’s why it’s been so good!” he praised—but it was honest praise. He’d been thinking all week that Bethen’s cooking had gotten better with age. Apparently it was Yarri’s age that had done the trick.

  “It’s still cooked with love!” Yarri said hopefully, and his clear hazel eyes smiled into her deep brown ones, even as she raised a playful hand to tug at his silver lock of hair.

  “I never doubted it,” he said, and Yarri kissed him on the cheek and ran back to the porch with her wet load of laundry on its way to the drying line in back.

  He watched her go, feeling the lines in his face and neck relax, and when he looked up, Aylan had just walked up the road and was standing at his side.

  “She gave in, didn’t she?” he asked needlessly.

  “Yes,” Torrant replied. “Thank the Goddess!”

  “I’m not thanking that lying bitch yet!” Aylan replied, fierce enough even without the blasphemy to have Torrant turn to him in surprise.

  “That girl was my last hope,” Aylan responded, the fear on his face so naked that Torrant wanted to embrace him too.

  “Aylan, my brother,” Torrant told him softly, throwing a companionable arm over his shoulders—always a reach for Torrant. “If I promise to take you with me, do you promise to let me have a godsdamned vacation?”

  Aylan brightened then. “Oh, bless her! That must have been Yarri’s doing!”

  Torrant grunted and kicked a pebble in his way. “I still think it’s dangerous—”

  “Not if I’m traveling in the Goddess’s merchant circles. The Regents will never recognize me!”

  “Oh, enough!” Torrant laughed, but it felt forced. “Remember? Godsdamned vacation?”

  “How ’bout a Goddess’s blessed one?” Aylan asked suggestively, and Torrant rolled his eyes.

  “You wish, boyo,” he replied dryly. “The two of us are just going to have to suffer in silence this year.”

  “Every year, brother,” Aylan said mournfully, and together they walked to the dock.

  AFTER DINNER the family went out onto the back porch and sat to watch the mist rising out of the glassy dark of the ocean, feel the breeze on their faces, and talk quietly. Torrant closed his eyes for a moment and pinpointed the scent of the white-and-pink yarrow flowers growing on the sandy hillsides by the beach.

  Yarri was inside, getting a cloak for their walk, and Bethen came up beside him and put a plump, work-rough hand on his shoulder. “I was actually rooting for Yarri to win,” she said quietly, and Torrant grimaced. “I mean, I wanted to stay out of it and all, especially after the row Lane and I had when Aylan came home with his shredded heart in his hands. I’ve spent the better part of a month stitching that heart back into something that can pump blood. You know I’m right, don’t you?”

  “If you think it didn’t hurt me too—” he started, exasperated, but the hand on his shoulder tightened, and he subsided.

  “And then you come, and your heart’s been shredded too, and you and Yarri are at odds, and the world is a stormy, unpleasant place to be when that happens. You tell me how I want this to come out in the end.”

  Using his shoulder as leverage, Bethen lowered herself down next to him and sat, her head on her knees, watching high tide invade the mist-brightened beach. “Lane and I grew up in Clough, you know,” she said thoughtfully, and Torrant looked at her in surprise.

  “Oh yes—we never told you?”

  He shook his head. He was sure there were things about his parents he never knew either—only now he never would.

  “Owen was set to inherit. He was the older by an hour, and their father passed away when they were about your age, and Lane was restless. He had nothing to do, nothing to aspire to, and he liked horses and all, but he didn’t love them in his bones like Owen did. He would wander the ocean of grass that is Clough at its finest and wonder if there wasn’t another place in the world that would stir his blood.”

  “And then he found you?” Torrant asked, and Bethen shook her head.

  “No. And then he followed a wagon train up Hammer Pass and came down the other side. I had moved with my parents when I was very small—but I still watched the trains coming down the mountain. I was curious at who was coming from my homeland and why they’d been restless enough to move. And then he came down, on the back of a horse he surely did know how to ride, and right then, I thought ‘this man is what wildings are all about.’” She laughed. “It just took me two years to convince him of that.”

  “What happened to your parents?” he asked, thinking of Grete.

  “Ah, they went down in a boat when Stanny was a baby,” Bethen said softly. Torrant had known, somehow, that they hadn’t been alive. Bethen, with her love of family, would surely have been in touch. “I do know loss,” she confessed. “But I don’t know what it feels like to be Aylan right now. And I don’t know what it feels like to be you, or even Yarri. But I know that this thing, this rot from my homeland, it’s threatening the people I love, and it has to be stopped.” She turned her head slightly on her knees and wiped h
er cheeks on her skirt. “And I’m old enough to know that if you want to do a big job, you have to get your hands dirty.”

  She sighed, a weighty enough sound to make Torrant put his arms around her shoulders, and she looked at him sideways, eyes growing bright in the starlight. “I just wish it was my hands and not my children’s hands, boyo,” she admitted. “If I was that girl again, watching my moon-destined come down that mountain, I think we could have gone right back across Hammer Pass and done what needs doing. But I’m not, and people look to me here, and the orphanage needs me, and my own children need me, but sending you and Aylan into harm’s way was never, ever a thing I thought I’d see as the lesser of two evils—”

  “Shh….” Lane was sitting next to her now, his own arm thrown over her shoulders. He looked at Torrant, and Torrant felt a hand descending on his shoulder. He looked up to Yarri and remembered his promise of a walk on the beach. Slowly he stood, while Lane rocked his beloved, and then took Yarri’s hand and walked away.

  “Take off your boots,” she ordered after a few steps, and then she crouched, her skirt brushing the sand as she did so, to help him with the laces on the soft leather calf-high boots. It struck him that she didn’t wear skirts. Even when she went to “play with the little-uns” at the orphanage, she wore well-tended breeches.

  “Is the skirt for me?” he asked in mild surprise.

  She gave a grunt and pulled at his shoe, and he used her shoulder to balance as he pulled his foot out. “Not if you’re going to make a huge steaming mound of something out of it,” she huffed and went to work on the other one.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he returned mildly, pulling his foot from the other boot with a little more ease. “Here, let me get the socks….” But she was still fiddling, even though he was getting uncomfortable with the thought of her at his feet. It was too much like the men of the Old Man Hills, that idea that a woman should crouch down there and serve.