Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “I think that’s a hard bargain,” she said archly, and he moaned, took her hand, and placed it in his lap even as he knelt. She made a taut little sound of surprise.

  “I’d say you’re right,” he replied, and then her little hands busied themselves at the waist of his breeches, and he was done with words for a bit of time.

  He remembered kissing her. The summer before had been filled with the taste of her, the sweetness of her skin against his palms, the scent of her breath, the little sounds she made when his hands stroked her breasts or her thighs through her clothing.

  This was different—it was the difference between a star-painted ceiling and the summer sky at night, because every touch and breath and moan was filled with possibility, and for once in his life he wanted to indulge in that, to spread his arms wide and embrace the sky.

  Every flash of bare skin was a revelation.

  His palms could not find enough of her flesh. The neckline of the pretty white nightgown was untied and pushed off her shoulders, and then lower. She sat in a pool of moonlight, bared to the waist, looking at him in a combination of shyness and wryness that wrung his heart. He sat back and memorized every line of her skin, playing with her nipples, which had pebbled in the cold.

  “I wish I could see colors better in this light,” he murmured, kissing her collarbone and moving behind her. He kissed the back of her neck, then reached in front of her and traced delicate lines down the slopes of her breasts to the sensitive ends. “I want to know what color your skin is….” He tweaked a nipple and felt her squeal all the way down in his groin.

  “It’s lizard-belly blue,” she gasped, “and I’m freezing!” But he could hear the lie in her voice. She was more embarrassed than cold.

  “Here.” He took her fallen shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders and then reached for the brush. “If this is what I’m going to carry with me, I get to see your hair down.”

  “Are men always this picky?” she asked, but she was too breathless, too enchanted to be truly irritable. “I just want to know, so I can plan for the future.”

  He ruthlessly squashed the sound in his throat and began to shake that long, thick braid out and run his fingers through it. He loved her reactions, the lines of her body, the way her shoulders sloped and her head tipped back as she responded to the brush at her scalp the way a kitten would respond to a thorough stroking.

  “I heard that,” she murmured.

  “Mmm?” he asked innocently, and she opened one sensually hooded eye and peered at him as he loomed behind her.

  “I meant the future with you, genius,” she snapped—or tried to. She was too contented, far too relaxed to really sharpen her tongue.

  “That’s not fa-ir,” he sang softly, loving the way her hair felt like satin around his hands.

  “The love of my life is about to bunk me and leave me,” she said dryly, closing her eyes again. “Nothing is fair. My life won’t be in danger if I refuse a man.”

  He didn’t want to talk about this anymore. He kissed her neck again, under the fall of hair, and when she turned her head around to greet him, he kissed her and fondled her bare breasts until she gave a helpless moan and fell back onto the pallet of quilts. Her breath harshened, and her hips arched at him until he bunched the pretty gown at her waist and pushed downward, draping it on a nearby hay bale. When he was done, he turned to her bare, pillowy body and wide, trusting eyes waiting for him in the moonlight. He smiled a wicked smile as he positioned his head at the apex of her thighs.

  “You’re still mostly dressed,” she panted, and he grinned up at her, guessing the hair at the junction of her thighs was probably cinnamon in the sunlight.

  “Woman, I’ve done this before. Let me work,” he ordered softly, and then he parted her knees and worked very diligently indeed.

  Eventually, he was no longer dressed at all, and as he lay full length alongside her and felt the line of their bodies before their flesh was merged, he closed his eyes and tried to memorize every curve of her softness as it molded itself to the leanness of his hips and the broadness of his chest. He wanted this place in his mind to be just for her; he wanted the feel of his beloved as distinct and as magical as a snowflake, incomparable and unmistakable for the feel of any other lover. He opened his eyes and saw hers, gleaming in the moonlight as he fitted himself against her, murmuring, “Open for me, love…. I promise, it won’t hurt for long.” She ran her fingertips along his face and gazed into his eyes as though she were doing the same thing in her mind he was about to do in her body: forging a place just for this moment and him.

  “It’s going to hurt forever,” she murmured, and she wasn’t talking about the little gate of flesh already partially opened for him. They both knew this.

  “I’ll come back to you,” he said, feeling his eyes burn for the same reason she was crying again. He thrust a little, and she made a little grunting sound and then arched her hips and took him all the way inside Triane’s gate, and they both groaned, relieved and aggravated by his perfect berth in the cradle of her body.

  “You won’t be the same,” she told him, wiggling enough to make him bury his face against her neck and sound his own frustrated grunt.

  “Sweet Goddess, Yarri Moon, you’re killing me!” he panted, and then he held her face in his hands, wiped her tears with his thumbs, and kissed her softly, passionately, until he was thrusting his hips without thinking about it, and she was moving her own to meet him. She moaned again, and he stilled his movements, slowing down, because, dammit, he did not want this to be over, not now, not when it had just begun.

  “I’ll come back,” he insisted, keeping his movements slow and long. He loved the way her fingers clutched the muscles in his arms, and her knees wrapped around his narrow hips. “I’ll come back.” He groaned because she was not letting him be slow about this, and his wits and his good intentions were about to fly out the window and dance on Triane’s moonbeam. “I’ll come back, I swear, I promise….” The rest was lost because she ran her palms across his chest, and her clever fingers found his own nipples, and then he was moving, lunging, thrusting, and she was crying out beneath him and begging him, pleading with him, until she finally gave a full-blooded shriek of completion, and he collapsed in his own moment, shuddering into her, burying his face against the scented warm hollow of her shoulder.

  He stayed there for quite some time, both of them catching their breath, and when he thought he could, he pushed himself up again and knelt before her, still inside her as he kissed the sad smile at the corners of her mouth.

  “I’ll come back, Yarrow Moon. I promise I will,” he said, his heart full.

  “Of course you will,” she accepted, reaching up to push the white lock of hair from his eyes. “Of course you’ll come back, Torrant Shadow. But you won’t be the same.”

  He had nothing to say to that, so he kissed her.

  OUEANT ROSE. Their bodies continued to move in the dance of “I love you, good-bye,” and the night spun on until the knife-metal gray of dawn sliced through the shutters and flayed their closed eyes open.

  “You didn’t get any sleep,” she said from her place nestled against his shoulder.

  “I’ll sleep on horseback,” he said with a smile, and he heard her smirk next to him. “We have to stop at the shrine anyway. It’s been destroyed again. I think some of the students tried to fix it, but Aylan and I have a knack of keeping it up.” They’d been doing it for years.

  “It was the stinking priests.” Yarri yawned. “They keep sending them here, and we keep laughing them out of town. This last one kept trying to tell us that handfastings weren’t real unless a priest of the twin gods blessed them.” She gave a soft giggle. “It was a tough sell. I don’t think he enjoyed being tied to last year’s Beltane ribbon pole and stuck out in the fairgrounds for a day or two.”

  Torrant laughed, but his heart was troubled. Priests again, he thought, but this time he was abandoning his lover and his family to them. “There w
ill be more, now that Triannon is gone,” he warned softly.

  “They killed our sons and brothers torching it,” Yarri replied, the sleep softness pushed out of her voice by the edge of vengeance. She sat up, clutched the quilt to her breasts, pushed back at her heavy hair, and flung the hay that had attached itself during the night. “Don’t worry about us, Torrant. You’ll have enough on your mind.”

  “You’re why I’m doing this, Yarri,” he said back so she’d never doubt it. “All of you. Don’t tell me not to worry. If I wasn’t worried, I wouldn’t be going.” There was a tenseness between them, an argument brewing made of the pain of leaving and the loss of each other so quickly after the lovely, deadly dawn. They glared for a moment, and, as usual, it was Torrant who smiled first. “And I’ll still worry about you if we quarrel, so how about we just skip that part, right?”

  Yarri’s plump little mouth thinned at the sides and turned up. “I’m going to be a wreck when you leave. Consider it skipped.”

  He leaned over and kissed her, and in spite of their sleepless night they might very well have waited until the sun was fully up before emerging from the stables, but the horses below them whickered and snorted, reminding the lovers that very often the horses were fed early.

  “It will be hard enough as it is.” Yarri sniffed with a clogged voice. “I’d hate to sacrifice my dignity too.”

  “Absolutely,” Torrant whispered, kissing her temple and breathing in that combination of soap and yarrow and her, wondering if he filled his lungs with her, could he still smell her above the stench of the bodies and the sewage in the Goddess ghetto in Clough.

  Silently, they dressed, folded up the quilts, and climbed down out of the loft. They fed Courtland and an aging Kiss their apple cores and leftover bread crusts on the way out of the barn.

  THE FAMILY was preparing for breakfast when they arrived. It seemed nobody had been able to sleep well. When Lane finally kicked Bethen out of bed because she was making him crazy, Roes’s feet hit the floor next, and within minutes Aldam and Roes were cooking while Bethen packed blankets, trinkets, and stationery from home to go with the two young men she loved like sons.

  “Bethie!” Lane huffed in exasperation as he saw her stuff Yarri’s first doll in the pack.

  “Don’t start,” she told him shortly, her voice thick. “I still blame you for this, you know.”

  “I know,” he murmured, wrapping his arms around her thick waist, and putting his cheek next to hers. “You know that thirty years ago, I would have been riding with them.”

  “Lane Moon,” she said with some asperity. “I know full well the only thing keeping you here is the fact that Eiran would fall apart without you.” And that was nothing but the truth.

  “Ah, Goddess thinking,” he murmured wryly.

  “Well anything else just wouldn’t be sensible.” She sniffed and firmly tucked the doll in the bottom of the bag.

  ALDAM WAS making corn pancakes.

  “Smells great!” Torrant said with forced brightness as the batter spattered in the bacon grease on the griddle.

  Aldam looked at him with reproving eyes.

  “They’d kill you for the streak in your hair.” Torrant sighed, accepting Aldam was not going to easily forgive this desertion.

  “And you?” Aldam looked pointedly at Torrant’s white streak, and Torrant grimaced.

  Then he closed his eyes and thought of Ellyot Moon. All of Ellyot Moon. He’d been the best dancer of all of them, and the best hunter, and with the exception of Yarri, the whole family had listened to Ellyot first and foremost when he spoke. Torrant remembered those blue-gray eyes, urging him to save their youngest, most vulnerable member, and the easy way of commanding he possessed that had, in the end, sent the two of them scrambling through the hay door.

  He thought of Ellyot, face down in bloody straw with a knife in his back, when by every god and the Goddess he should have had the honor of dying bravely, with blood on his own sword.

  And then he thought, “I am Ellyot Moon today.”

  And his white streak disappeared.

  Torrant had practiced during the trip from Otham, and he’d perfected keeping ahold of himself when he made this transformation. His eyes were not Ellyot’s blue-hazel eyes, or the glacial winter-sky color of the snowcat—both of which took more power and gave him a headache almost immediately. They were his own hazel color. Still, Aldam almost sobbed.

  “How will you remember?” he asked, in tears. “It will be like school, where there is not enough of you to stretch until your task is done!”

  Torrant’s mouth quirked up, and he let out what felt like his first full breath in a while, and his hair darkened to the ends again. “I’ll remember because I have twelve years of all of you to keep me ‘me,’ right?”

  Aldam shook his head in sorrow. “This will hurt your heart, Torrant. I can feel it. How will you recover?”

  Torrant swallowed. Aldam would know. Aldam knew what hurt. It was part of his gift. “Sometimes we have to hurt, my brother,” he said at last. “Someone must. And it can’t be the Goddess’s people anymore, so it’s just going to have to be me.”

  Behind him, where Roes was cutting fruit into a big wooden bowl, he heard a suspicious sniff. And another.

  “Roes?”

  Without warning, she dropped the knife, turned, and hugged him fiercely. “You saved my life. I never thanked you for that. You and Aldam riding like the world was crashing at your heels, and you did it for me,” she whispered, and he kissed the top of his cousin’s head.

  “Time well spent,” he said lightly, and she shook her head.

  “You need to come back.” She looked up at him, her eyes red and her face blotchy—none of Yarri’s family cried prettily. “You need to come back and be safe, because nothing here will be right if you don’t come back. Not Yarri, not this family, and not my beloved. Just come back.”

  “Right, little cousin,” he said calmly. “Believe it or not, I’ve already made that promise.”

  “Make it again,” she wailed, the sound muffled against his chest.

  “I promise to come back.”

  Roes sniffed again and made to brusquely turn away. “And you’d better bring Aylan back with you too,” she ordered and then finished cutting the fruit as Torrant took his cue to leave.

  For all of that, breakfast was almost cheerful. Starren sat firmly on Aylan’s lap, in spite of her nearly thirteen years, Torrant and Yarri held hands under the table quietly, and no one was scolded for being out of place. Other than that, they spoke of everyday things and laughed and needled each other good-naturedly. Cwyn tried to outrage everybody, Starry tried to make peace, and Roes ordered them both to settle down. All in all, it could have been any summer morning before the family moved into the rhythms of usefulness and activity that made them happy.

  Torrant and Aylan washed up afterward, while Lane and Stanny brushed and fetched the horses then loaded them with significantly heavier saddlebags than the ones they’d been wearing when the boys arrived.

  It was like any other parting—that was the most surprising thing of all. There were hugs all around. Bethen teared up, more so than usual, but they ignored that because they had to. Lane shook their hands soberly and gave them some final parting advice.

  “Come home if you have to,” he said firmly. “Don’t worry about letting us down, or our people down. We can change things from here if we have to, or emigrate to other lands, or….”

  “Or we could stand up and change things where they’re bad,” Torrant finished softly, and Lane looked away.

  “Just come home,” he said and hugged Torrant fiercely, and then Aylan.

  Yarri stepped forward and kissed Torrant good-bye, the grown-up Yarri of his dreams, the woman he’d waited his entire life for. He could have glutted himself on the saltwater of her tears, and on a few of his own. His hands came up to frame her face, and he kissed the tears from her cheeks before he pulled her head against his chest.

 
; “You promised,” she muffled, and he almost laughed at how many people had been asking him to promise the one thing he could not guarantee.

  “I promised,” he agreed. “Now smile for me, Yarrow root, because I need to remember your smile before I go, right?”

  “Right.” And she did. It was like sunshine. Like mead. Like love.

  Aylan swung himself up on Gracey Gray, another one of Courtland’s brood named by Starren, and a better ride than the poor thing he’d dragged halfway to Cleant and then all the way to Otham and back. Bethen captured Starry as she’d tried to follow Aylan up on the horse and was holding her daughter against her shoulder as silent sobs shook the girl’s body. Cwyn grabbed his sister behind the waist and leaned his cheek on her lovely sunrise-colored hair, making shushing noises to soothe her. Aldam and Roes stood clutching each other’s hands until their knuckles turned white.

  “A year.” Torrant shrugged, and releasing Yarri hurt worse than changing form with a wound, a thousand times worse, but he smiled for his family and gave a little bow before swinging up on Heartland’s back. “A year—it shouldn’t take longer. We’ll send word when we can.” He looked at Aylan, and his friend’s face was no better off for tears and pain than his own.

  “We love you all,” he said, and then he and Aylan urged on the horses and took off at their fastest canter, disappearing around the corner toward the bridge almost before the family realized they were gone.

  This time, Yarri didn’t go running to climb the tree by the bridge, because seeing him again would have hurt her even more.

  Stanny took a shuddering breath and sniffed stoically. “We have things to do,” he said, nodding meaningfully at his father.

  “We do indeed,” Lane agreed.

  And still the family stayed out in front of their home, with their back to the sea, and watched the empty road ahead of them.