Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  Instead he played with Torrant’s hair, separating the white forelock from the even chestnut around it and pulling the strands between his fingers until they were like satin. He knew Torrant was waiting for his answer.

  “I told her what she already knew,” he said at last. “I told her who you were.”

  Torrant grunted, the sound making Aylan’s stomach vibrate. “Do me a favor, brother, would you?”

  “Mmmm?”

  “Don’t remind Yarri of whatever you told Trieste, yes?”

  Aylan looked down, his lips curving into a smile. He realized, in spite of all they’d done this day, he wasn’t ready for it to be over yet. “It’s not polite to talk of other lovers in bed,” he reproved mildly and then set about making sure that for this one night in thousands, Torrant was his and his alone.

  THEIR GOOD-BYES were short the next day, but Trieste’s face had taken on the drawn, disapproving look they recognized from school, before finals when Torrant had been not eating and not sleeping.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll look after him,” Aylan said kindly.

  But she only shook her head, rejecting his comfort with her worry. “Look after yourself,” she said quietly. “Keep in touch with the family. You’ll be able to when he won’t. Write me when you’re safe.”

  While they were talking, Torrant was shaking Alec’s hand. Trieste thought he’d been sincerely impressed by the man’s kindness, his humor, and especially by the fact that he seemed to adore his pretty wife. Then he embraced Trieste and kissed her platonically on the cheek.

  “Don’t worry, Tri,” he murmured and gave her the benefit of his full-on smile, quirking that upper lip and wrinkling the corners of his eyes. “I’m off to make the world a better place. Aren’t you glad I’m not doing it with a sword in my hand?”

  She waited until he had swung up on Heartland’s saddle to say, “I’m not sure you’re not” to herself, aware that Alec was looking at her sideways, waiting for the horses to disappear down the cobbled roads of the city so they could talk.

  “I know you’re worried, beloved,” Alec said quietly to her when the clip-clop had faded beyond earshot. “I just wish I knew what you were thinking.”

  “I’m thinking….” Trieste sighed, not sure if she could put it into words, especially because Torrant’s secret was the one thing she had never shared with her husband. “I’m thinking….” She crossed her arms and gnawed her lower lip, her eyes still gazing sightlessly to where the men she thought of as brothers had disappeared.

  “I’m thinking,” she finally said, snapping her gaze to Alec’s patient observation, “I need to go write their Auntie Bethen, that’s what I’m thinking.”

  Alec raised his eyebrows, as if it had never occurred to him women might have things to say to each other men might not understand. “You go do that,” he said dryly. “I’m going to go write some letters of my own.”

  He had spies in Dueance, she knew, and she smiled up at him, some of her worry falling away like shadows from sunshine. “I love you very much, my husband,” she said blandly, and his lips curved into a smile as he kissed her in the brightness of the courtyard.

  My Beloved Waits for Summer

  THE MAP Torrant had made for the Moon family during his first year at school had augmented itself through the years. It had started showing the trip from Triannon to Eiran. When Trieste had married Alec, Otham had appeared on the map in a pretty burst of sunshine-colored ink, and Yarri had marked the map every time she wrote to the woman who started out as her rival and ended up as her friend. When Torrant and Aldam had moved to Wrinkle Creek, ink-lined hills had appeared, rolling in the red earth and green trees of the Old Man Hills. When Aylan had started his missions to Dueance, moving through Clough, what had appeared to be black smudges in the center of a brown-tainted field appeared, and they would watch Aylan—and then both Aylan and Torrant—move through that dark place.

  When Triannon was torched, a bright flare of orange and black ink marked what had been a stately, if eclectic and beloved, building. Yarri had never been to Triannon, but Torrant had called it home.

  The day Aylan and Stanny had gone pounding across the bridge to the rest of the world, Yarri had spent an hour glued to the map, watching as Torrant and Aldam arrived in Triannon, as Aylan and Stanny slowed their pace, as Roes and Aldam wandered in a slow and hoofsore way toward home. Bethen had called her anxiously away for meals, but Evya, Stanny’s beloved—they were going to handfast this Beltane—took over for her at the orphanage. Stanny’s name had met Roes and Aldam’s name, and they were moving home.

  When the refugees from Triannon arrived, Yarri was one of the first in line, greeting them with blankets and food, listening to their stories, trying to keep her breathing easy in her chest when it felt as though Courtland were sitting his large, graying haunches on her ribcage.

  It was fortunate that Lane, Bethen, Starren, and Cwyn arrived with the other town members to help guide the children to the orphanage or the inn, depending on their ages. When Roes, Stanny, and Aldam showed up looking weary and worried at the very end of the column, the Moon family had been out at the entrance to the bridge working relief for hours. When she realized they were alone, with neither Torrant nor Aylan to be seen, Yarri started dragging breath through her chest fast and hard enough to leave stars in her eyes. When she came to, Lane had her by the waist, and she was trying to wrest the reins of Aldam’s horse from him.

  Her voice was hoarse from screaming Torrant’s name.

  Aldam, his round face wrapped in sorrow, put his hands around her jaw, cradled the back of her head, and touched his forehead to hers. “It’s my fault,” he told her tearfully. “I went with Roes and left him.”

  Yarri whimpered, because even as distraught as she was, she could not find it in her to fault Aldam when he’d been protecting Roes. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said roughly and then her eyes grew heavy, and she realized what Aldam was truly doing. She didn’t worry about his feelings at all as she called him a name that made Cwyn look at her from across the bridge in appreciation.

  When she woke up, it was Beltane, and Torrant and Aylan were on the move.

  They were going toward Otham.

  “Why Otham?” she asked Bethen at least fifty times as she ran around the house with Starren and Cwyn, gathering their extra blankets and other comforts to put in Starren’s old toy wagon to haul to the students. (They always had some around the house for the orphanage. They spent all of their spare wool on them.) Bethen didn’t lose her patience once as she replied a distracted “Oh Goddess, darling, I have no idea” throughout the day.

  “Why Otham?” she asked Roes as the two of them wearily recorded children’s names and family names so the militia could send letters out, assuring frantic parents of their children’s safety.

  Roes only looked at her anxiously. Roes blamed herself for Torrant’s disappearance. She had no idea why he and Aylan would be heading for Otham. Her only reply was a whispered, “I’m sure he’ll tell us.”

  “Why Otham?” she asked Lane as, at the end of the day, they trudged home, exhausted from their efforts at picking up the pieces war left behind. Lane wrapped his arm around her and gave her the first good reply she’d had all day.

  “Because he knows the queen, my dear,” he said quietly. “I imagine he wants to ask her a favor.”

  Her question changed the next day, and the day after, to “What could he have to ask Trieste?”

  The children were eventually settled, and the entire town took a rest day. They had been preparing food for Beltane. This was brought out, and much was shared with the orphanage. The inn provided its own, and instead of one public gathering of joy, there were many private gatherings of relief.

  The next day the two little dots which were Torrant and Aylan approached Eiran—not at a leisurely pace, but not as though being chased by a company of soldiers either.

  This was the first year Yarri was too tired to climb the cypress tree overlooking t
he bridge. Instead, she sat on the large boulder marking the last post at the edge of the embankment and wrapped her oldest shawl around her shoulders, the first one Bethen had made her. It had once been a sunny yellow with a simple lace pattern in it, but time had worn it a golden brown and washed it soft. She petted it as she had petted a thin and aging Anye the cat all the previous day.

  She blocked the setting sun’s sideways light with her hand and looked across the bridge and waited. By the time she could see them, silhouetted against the blinding post-Solstice sun, she had heard their hoofbeats for what seemed like a year. Heartland had barely stopped galloping before Torrant slid from the saddle with an incredible disregard for grace. Then his feet were pounding across the boards, and when he touched her, the relief at feeling his hands on her skin, his breath at her neck, his broken voice telling her he was alive and well and he hadn’t meant to worry her, made her heart weak. It seemed not to be strong enough to yell at him for worrying her or to demand to know where he had gone when he’d made the detour to the river. For a moment, feeling his cool cheek next to her own and his hot hands holding her waist, she even forgot to ask him what he’d needed from Trieste.

  Oh Goddess… oh Goddess… she didn’t ever want to let him go again. And she didn’t know why, but she was reasonably sure he was about to break her heart.

  “Did Roes and Aldam make it back?” he was asking, looking down into her eyes. The sun caught the hazel color, making them clear for a moment, so that it was impossible to tell if they were dark or light. Yarri made an unconscious sound as she realized they had become lighter in the last year—or maybe it was just the last week.

  “Yes,” she said, troubled. “They said you should have been right behind them. You just disappeared.”

  And she saw it, the bleakness that passed his eyes, the way his jaw tightened, the way his eyebrows lowered. He opened his mouth to explain, but he didn’t need to—not really. She would hear the details later—the hunted soldiers, bleeding out from expertly inflicted wounds even as they ran, the trail of bodies leading to the river where Torrant had tried to cleanse himself of his sins. She would even hear about Torrant’s and Aylan’s night at Trieste’s—not that it mattered to her, not really. Now, as the sun set orange over the ocean and her beloved’s face was silhouetted in pain across from her, all she needed to know was that for a brief time, he had been too angry to be human.

  “You were the snowcat,” she guessed, touching the side of his face.

  “I was vengeance,” he stated simply, and she nodded, leaning her own cheek into his palm.

  “Are you going to tell me, then?” Her voice was stronger than she would have given herself credit for.

  “What’s to tell?” He tried for a casualness neither of them felt, and she was too weary to let him get away with it.

  “Why every touch—” And now her voice trembled, quivered, broke. “Why every touch,” she repeated, squeezing her eyes shut, “and every word and every look on your face feels like good-bye.”

  He groaned, softly, a peculiarly masculine sound, and crushed her to his chest. He stroked her hair, not commenting on the soft tears soaking his unusually fine brown shirt. She would learn why it was, later, that they both looked like Lord’s sons instead of a healer and a merchant, which was all either one of them ever wanted to be. Right now, she knew the hardest thing she had ever done was to pull away and listen to his answer.

  “I need to ask you and your family a favor,” he said bitterly. “And it isn’t your hand in marriage.”

  She closed her eyes, and the damned hot tears kept trickling from the corners of her eyes. “Was it going to be?” she asked, feeling silly and weak.

  “Oh, Yarri,” Torrant said thickly, wiping her tears back with his thumbs. “It was all I ever wanted from my life, ever.”

  Aylan quietly took the horses to the stables behind them, and Yarri clung to her Torrant like the child she’d never been, weeping quietly and angrily as the sky turned purple, and the three moons rose above the sea.

  THE FAMILY was waiting for them when they finally walked through the door. Aylan had already been greeted and fussed over by Bethen and Starren. When Lane looked at him meaningfully, Aylan put him off. “When we’re both here,” he said, and Lane nodded, accepting. And then Lane embraced Aylan like a son, and Cwyn smacked him on the back with surprising strength and told him he and Stanny had been total wankers for riding off without him. Roes hurled herself in his arms and thudded him on the chest, telling him Aldam hadn’t eaten in almost four days, he’d been so worried about the two of them.

  Aylan looked up to where Aldam, a pale and drawn version of himself, stood miserable by the fireplace, removed from the family greeting in what seemed to be shame.

  “Aldam, brother!” Aylan called, making him look up. “Aldam, there was nothing you could do.”

  “I left him,” Aldam said quietly, and Aylan moved to where Torrant’s round-faced, fragile brother stood and clasped his forearm in greeting and absolution.

  “You saved your beloved,” Aylan said softly. “Really, Aldam, even if you had abandoned him, he would have forgiven you for it. But he ran around front to get his horse and got caught up in something else. He never would have forgiven himself if you and Roes had gotten hurt because of it.”

  But Aldam was too lost in his own self-recrimination to do more than cast him a bitter look, and so Aylan told him a bitter truth in return.

  “Aldam,” he said at last, softly, aware the family was watching him carefully, and he was not the one who should explain what he and Torrant were going to do, “Torrant is going to have to leave this place, and this family, and you and Yarri behind him. You need to get over your decision, and do it now, so he doesn’t have your unhappiness hanging over his head.”

  Aldam’s pinched expression grew slack with shock. “But… why…?”

  “After dinner,” Aylan said resignedly. They had all heard, he realized. He could tell by the sudden, unnatural, and terrible silence that had fallen over the people he loved best in the world. “We’ll tell you after dinner.”

  Yarri and Torrant walked in shortly after that, and Torrant was greeted with the same amount of fussing that had greeted Aylan. As they sat down to dinner around the big, battered table in the kitchen, Lane took Bethen’s hand next to him and Roes’s hand on the other side. Both the women looked at the head of their table, and at Lane’s nod Bethen took Cwyn’s hand and Roes, Aldam’s, and so on around the table, until the family was quietly joined in a circle.

  “I just wanted to….” Lane closed his eyes fiercely and then powered through the obvious tightness in his throat and the hot tears that threatened. “This family needs to thank Dueant, because somebody decided to help keep us together,” he said after a moment, “and Oueant, because every member of this house has served his and her fellow humans well, this last hard, hard week. And we need to give thanks to Joy. It may not seem like it, because the world feels bleak today, and we all know the troubles aren’t over. But this family is my joy. It is my reason for showing mercy and behaving honorably, and I thank all the powers that be you are all here tonight by my side.”

  “Thank Triane,” said Bethen next to him, wiping her cheeks with the hand that still held her husband’s tight in its grasp.

  “Thank Triane,” said the Moon family quietly. Aylan squeezed Starren’s hand on the one side and Torrant’s on the other, and Torrant squeezed his friend’s hand on the one side and his beloved’s on his other. The men’s hands were shaking and sweaty with the discussion to come.

  Neither of them could later say what they had eaten. Roes and Bethen had cooked—it could not have been nearly as good as what they had eaten at Otham castle. But it had been made by Bethen and Roes, and it filled them in places they had forgotten about in the last painful week. They felt their hearts grow stronger just from being there to share food with family.

  AT LAST, the dinner plates were cleaned. Stanny and his pretty, brown-haired
Evya did the dishes, and then Stanny asked Evya if she could wait for him at his flat. The family had gathered in the front room, but Torrant, who had been wrapping some of the leftovers to put in his and Aylan’s saddlebags for the next day, heard part of the conversation.

  “There are some secrets my cousins have that it’s better you don’t know,” he told her quietly as she hovered near the back door looking hurt. She and Stanny had been on-again off-again almost since Stanny’s first wilding, and she had stayed by his side for over two years, so the hurt was understandable. “Evya—with the world the way it is now, do you really want to be the one keeping secrets for this family?” Stanny asked at last. “I know you think of leaving me. You wonder what else is out there in the world, and you can’t understand why you’d stay with me, a big, clumsy merchant’s son in a small town. These secrets are for people who think this family is something to strive for.”

  Evya swallowed, and Torrant thought she seemed to be stung a little by his words, but eventually she nodded and gave Stanny a reluctant kiss on the cheek. “I don’t think of leaving you anymore, Stanny,” she said at last. “You can keep your secrets—but please don’t worry about that anymore. I waited for you when you left. I don’t ever want to worry like that again.”

  A slow smile bloomed across Stanny’s face, and Torrant quietly exited to the front room to wait for him, glad that Stanny, at least, had found some peace in his love life.

  In spite of the chilly, late spring evening, the family had been too weary to start a fire, so sitting on the raised brick hearth was a comfortable place for Torrant and Aylan to be. Stanny wandered in, looking pleased and distracted for a moment, but as he took his place in one of the stuffed chairs, his attention sharpened. Torrant and Aylan met eyes, and the entire family took a breath, waiting.