Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “Where’s Nica?” Roes asked even as Aldam was shoving her inelegantly up on Albiebu.

  “She’s still in there!”

  “We don’t have time for this!” one of the militiamen pleaded. “She’ll have to come on her own—now where’s your horse?”

  Torrant gasped, “Heartland!” because his faithful companion of six years was still in front, resting, while an invading army roared down upon him. With little ceremony he threw the girl in his arms to one of the militiamen and saw that every horse had two riders. “Go! I’ll go get Heartland—that horse can outrun anyone coming for us, now that he’s had a breath of rest and some grazing. Now go! Get to Eiran! Don’t stop and wait for me, not for anything!”

  And with a quick clasp of hands with his brother and a kiss on the back of Roes’s tanned wrist, he turned and ran straight into the heart of the battle.

  ALDAM STARED after him in a panic of indecision, and Roes ripped the reins from her beloved’s hands and jerked them sideways, making the ponderous animal actually dance.

  “The little ones need us, Aldam. He’ll be fine!” she barked authoritatively and wheeled toward the retreating line of students and away from the invading army. But even as Albiebu started an unlikely, staggering gallop, Aldam was looking forlornly behind his shoulder to where his brother had disappeared, and Roes was wiping her tears on her shoulder. In a moment they were up the hill, and Triannon was out of their sight.

  The Sacking of Triannon

  HE SHOULD have known, Torrant thought with a breathless groan as he rounded the corner. He should have remembered what it was like to be young and to want revenge on the world for the things that have wronged you.

  The group of young men he’d spotted when he’d burst into the great hall of the school were in front of the red brick pillars, wearing their fencing armor with their swords in their hands. Professor Gregor and the fencing master were with them, and even as Torrant spotted Heartland, who was starting to whicker as the battle shrieks grew louder, he could see Gregor had an old sword.

  Goddess! he swore to himself and ran up to the group of young men, who were arguing earnestly with their professors. When he got to the top step, he turned and tried not to let his vision darken as he realized at least a hundred men were pouring down the slope of the bowl valley, less than half a mile away.

  “They’ll kill you!” he shouted, trying to get the mob to see sense. He realized his years must have given him some authority, because suddenly the twenty or so people on the entry slab turned toward him with open eyes. “This is not the place to fight them. Don’t you see? They’ll slaughter you, and there will be no one to witness what they’ve done to this place.”

  “We’re not afraid to die!” shouted the youngling who looked like Aylan, and Torrant shook his head.

  “Of course you’re not! None of you are afraid to die. But your lives are not well spent here—”

  “Then where?” called another boy, this one with dark hair and a ruddy, sweet face.

  “In a place of our choosing, where we can win!” Torrant commanded and thought he had them. Gregor looked relieved that they’d seen sense and these young men needn’t die after all, when an arrow came from the slope ahead of them and pierced the sweet-faced young man in the throat and then the shoulder. The shaft formed a horrible red-dripping bridge between the two body parts, even as the young man gurgled blood and sank to the ground, drowning in his own gore as it poured down his throat.

  The boys with the swords turned as one to the twenty-man avaunt that was now only hundreds of yards away and screamed vengeance as they charged headlong to their deaths.

  Oh Goddess! Torrant wasn’t sure if he said it aloud or not, but Professor Gregor watched in shock as his students, his beloved children, ran straight to the reddened weapons even as he and the fencing master ran shrieking to stop the red tide of soldiers.

  Professor Gregor was one of his, Torrant thought coldly, and then his heart went icy and his vision went sharp, and he didn’t think at all.

  The snowcat leapt in front of the professor and felled the man coming at them with a raised saber even as the rest of the enemy began to lay casual waste to the young lives who had offered their soft bellies to the slaughter. And then another enemy died, and another, as Gregor turned his back and began to fight—surprisingly well—with the man who had snuck around and tried to attack him behind.

  For a brief, blinding moment, Torrant thought the professor would fight well enough to live, and then the first horseman came charging down. Later, he would realize the cavalry had stayed to the back because the company had not expected any resistance, but now his heart sank, and in a staggering bound he dug his claws into the animal’s flanks and pulled the surprised rider into the melee to be trampled by his own men.

  The snowcat had fought a battle like this once, on a long-ago snowy mountain, and he remembered. He remembered how to leap from horse to horse, ripping and pulling and destroying without being touched. The problem with swords was that they were unwieldy with anything inside their reach. Gregor fought gamely on with his opponent, his efforts flagging, his determination fading with the lives of his students as they died around him, and the giant snowcat destroyed every commanding officer in the company, surrounding them both with surprised milling horses.

  But it wasn’t until the acrid smell of varnished wood beneath the torch washed through the valley that Gregor looked up to see the flames roaring out of the doorway of his beloved school and caught a sword underneath his ribcage that ripped upward as he fell.

  Torrant saw the death of Triannon and its headmaster and let out a roar of anguish that ripped through the valley and even, had he known it, reached the ears of the fleeing students who had barely escaped being locked inside their beloved school and burned along with it.

  That terrible roar caused a panic among the remaining soldiers. They had lost two men for every one of the tough, passionate little militiamen who had met them at the bottleneck of the trail, and they hadn’t expected it. They had written the students off as easy kills, and even though many of them had no stomach for cold-blooded murder, the task of locking a group of children in a building and setting it on fire should not have been hard. But the building had been emptied, with no trace of the students, and enough soldiers had trampled the area looking for them to not see the tracks they’d left. To top it off, the older students had swords they knew how to use, and in the midst of this confusion there was suddenly a terrible fury of silver fur that annihilated their leadership, and the roar of anguish sounded a lot like triumph to those who were left.

  The snowcat leapt to his professor’s side and guarded the body as what was left of the company of men took to their heels and ran back the way they had come. Torrant sniffed Professor Gregor’s face, smelled the blood in his rattling breaths, and gave a disconsolate whimpering growl. Gregor opened his eyes and raised a hand, which he buried in the pretty silver-white fur at Torrant’s neck, not mindful of the blood spattered there.

  “It’s soft,” he rasped, spattering scarlet with his words. “I didn’t know it would be so soft.” A sudden crackle sounded, and then a roar as timbers gave in the great hallway, and part of the roof collapsed with the sound of red thunder. Gregor’s kind eyes lost a little more focus, and his lips curved in his last try at a smile. “You’ll have to build the new one, my boy,” he murmured. “Maybe this time, the walls will match….”

  And then the blood spatter of his tortured breaths just stopped.

  Torrant stood stiff-legged like a puzzled cub at the body of his professor for several deep, panting breaths. He had been riding for days and had just used an enormous amount of power and strength to kill the men littering the stretch of lawn in front of the flaming remains of his old school, and for several moments his body fought—hard—to return to a man’s form so he could grieve like a man.

  His anguish and his rage won, and with a roar drowning out even the roar of the inferno, Torrant left his puz
zled horse to fend for itself and tore off into the blood-soaked morning to rip vengeance from the fleeing soldiers.

  A Witness to the Goddess’s Vengeance

  AYLAN HADN’T told Yarri, but he had been worried from the moment they’d first seen the two little spots on Torrant’s most recent map move from Wrinkle Creek toward Triannon.

  “They’re making good time!” Yarri had said happily, and Aylan had to agree. They were making excellent time. In fact, they were making panicky, fleeing-for-your-life time. When the words “soldiers” had suddenly appeared on the map, and the two small figures of Torrant and Aldam had renamed themselves “empty saddles,” both of them had called Lane.

  “Those soldiers are moving toward Triannon,” Lane said, watching in fascinated horror with both of them. His eyes met Aylan’s in dawning realization, and Aylan said, “I’ll go!” He was halfway to the militia barracks before the screen door slammed behind him, and he and Stanny were charging down the path to Triannon on Courtland’s children an hour before the militia was ready to move out.

  They were halfway there when they met the first of the bedraggled students, walking grimly forward, several girls and boys about Cwyn’s age with strained, angry faces. Stanny and Aylan dismounted, shared food, and asked what happened.

  “A man with a white streak came pounding in and said soldiers were coming—the professors all forced us out.” He reached into his cloak pocket bemusedly. “They gave us books of poetry as we left,” he said, as though still trying to decide why they had done that. Stanny and Aylan mounted up as soon as he’d mentioned the man with the white streak.

  “There are soldiers about an hour behind us,” Stanny said comfortingly. “They’re the good kind, but they’re going to be riding fast, so stay to the side of the road. Some of them should start taking you back to Eiran.”

  So Aylan and Stanny went on, forced to slow down because the road was littered with puzzled, frightened youngsters and the professors and staff trying to control them and make some sense out of their world.

  “You know they’re going to be last,” Aylan said, trying to comfort them both as the shadows lengthened into late afternoon “If they were helping to evacuate the school, she wouldn’t let them do that alone. You know Roes—she’s got to have a say in everything.”

  Stanny nodded, the furrows in his freckled brow never easing. “And Torrant wouldn’t want to leave until everybody’s gone—he does play the hero when he can.”

  “Right,” Aylan said, nodding, because it sounded good and it gave him something to do besides weep at the sight of another group of students who were not the people they loved. “And Aldam wouldn’t want to leave them behind.”

  “Right,” Stanny agreed, disappointment making his voice break. “They’ll be at the end. They have to be.”

  And so they were, just as the westering sun reaped the shadows from the trees. Aylan and Stanny saw the last of the militia with the smallest children on their horses and Roes and Aldam in their midst. But not Torrant. After Stanny practically dragged his fully grown little sister off her horse to hug her, and Aldam slid down to get thumped on the back by Aylan, they both asked the obvious question.

  “His horse was around the front of the school. He was just going to get it,” Aldam said confidently, but Aylan caught Roes’s nervous look sideways.

  “What?” he demanded.

  “We’re the last in line,” she said, looking apologetically at her beloved. “We shouldn’t be. All the young men my age, and the headmaster—they should be behind us, but I’ve been listening, and Professor Gregor would have started to round us up anyway. He would have made people wait and kept us in groups.”

  Aldam processed this for a moment, and Aylan fought for breath as he wondered if he could be on his horse and down the road before Aldam realized he’d left his brother behind.

  Aylan managed to hit Triannon right as the last of the sunlight faded and the third moon rose. The smoke trapped in the valley threatened to choke him, and the heat thrown off the hulking black ember that had been his home for twelve years made him sweat inside his cloak. Ashes fell like rain, turning his cloak and his face white in the moonlight. But even the smoke and ashes could not obscure the horror of what Triannon had become. When he was a student, he had seen his old university by moonlight, when the grounds and the school were silver lit and lovely. Tonight there was not enough moonlight in the world to beautify the smoking hulk of wood and mortar which had been Triannon, much less the corpses thick on the lawn.

  Aylan made a sound—grief, terror, anger, he wasn’t sure. Then he heard a soft whicker and looked up to see Heartland, approaching him quietly from the grove of trees to the left of what had been the west entrance of the school. For a moment, he thought clouds had blocked the moons. For another, he thought he’d been caught by an arrow in the chest. And then his diaphragm forced his lungs in and out and made oxygen fill his body, and when he breathed his vision cleared, and his heart started beating again.

  Heartland wouldn’t leave him, he thought, his first clear, rational idea from the moment he’d torn off into the dusty spring evening, looking for his brother of the heart. The thought steadied him, calmed him enough to wipe his suddenly clammy palms on his breeches and canter his horse to Heartland. For his part, Torrant’s horse was so damned happy to have a familiar hand and voice nearby that he lifted his head and took a few steps forward, giving Aylan access to the reins.

  “Right, boy,” Aylan muttered, just to hear something but the utter silence of death and the occasional shifting of debris in what had once been the closest thing he’d had to a home. “Shall we go find him?”

  Aylan had seen what the snowcat could do, up close and personal, and he recognized the semicircle of bodies littered a pace away from the crumpled figure in the professor’s robes as Torrant’s handiwork. He crouched by Gregor’s body and made a soft sound of grief, then reached up and touched the cold flesh to close the eyes that had once been filled with kindness. “Sweet Dueant, greet him,” he murmured and looked wretchedly around the moonlit clearing, spotting the bodies of the young students, the fencing master, and those they had killed. It was easy to guess what had happened, but as to where to look now? There was no body on the grim field that could be Torrant’s—either feline or human. There was no way to track him in the moonlight either.

  Aylan’s frantic thoughts were interrupted by a rustling in the woods. He pulled his sword, sat himself firmly on the horse, and called out with more confidence than he felt. “You there, in the bushes, come out!”

  A man emerged, dressed in the teal and black of Rath’s regiment, but obviously unarmed. “Is… is it gone yet?” he asked hesitantly, and Aylan looked at his livery and felt disinclined to put his weapon away.

  “Is what gone?” he asked shortly, although he had a pretty good idea.

  “The She-bitch’s demon?” The man’s wail was soft, but Aylan still held his sword out. “It was an ill-omened day, and then that white thing from the star’s dark came and destroyed my captains. They were such good men—”

  “Yes,” spat Aylan disgustedly. “They were so good that they were going to burn a school full of children.”

  “It was orders,” the soldier said, shocked. “How could they disobey orders?”

  “How could they obey them?” Aylan keened at him. “You come to a school and kill boys with toy swords on the front lawn and plan to lock children inside and burn it to the ground, and you don’t expect retribution? You commit atrocities, and you don’t expect vengeance?” A thought passed through him of murdering this man in the quiet dark. Simply run his sword through his innards, and leave him there to die, screaming, for the sins of his people. With a great deal of delicacy, Aylan placed his sword in his scabbard.

  “They were the She-bitch’s whelps!” the man protested. “And we were met by a militia—don’t tell me those men didn’t know what sins they were committing!”

  Aylan shook his head. “They were chi
ldren, you fool,” he said softly. “And that militia was full of boys I grew up with, who signed on to deliver the mail and see the lands. They were here because you people threatened Yarri Moon, did you know that?”

  The man shook his head. “She’s been dead for years—she was killed by the She-bitch’s—”

  “By Rath’s men,” Aylan interrupted, hoping if he hurled enough truth into the void, something in this man’s mind would raise up. “Her family was killed by Rath’s men, and I know this is true because she escaped and told me.” On another day, Aylan would have relished the shocked gasp. “So before you start cursing the name of Joy again, you need to think about what you were willing to do to profane her name, you miserable, brainless ass. And then go back to your shit hole of a city and be a witness to what the Goddess’s people will do to defend their helpless ones. But first, tell me which way that demon went. He’s a friend of mine, and he might need some help.”

  The soldier hesitated, drawn up short, apparently, by the realization that a perfectly ordinary man would not agree that what had been done this terrible day was holy and worthy and good. Wretchedly, he pointed toward the south entrance of the bowl valley. “The men, they ran away when they realized the school was empty and the captains were dead. After losing so many to the militia, it just seemed… it seemed like bad luck.”

  “It was bad luck,” Aylan snarled. “Bad luck that your cook didn’t poison you on the way here.” His fingers still itched to pull his sword and become the murderer Torrant had saved him from becoming, but Torrant was out there, as the snowcat or the man, and eventually he would realize what his vengeance had done. It was the one time in their lives Aylan knew, knew beyond doubt, that Torrant needed him and no one else.