Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “Torrant….”

  “I’ve done that, remember?” Something was crashing up against his chest, and there didn’t seem to be any way for it to come out but this. “I’ve left my family dead in this godsforsaken place, I’ve taken Yarri and rebuilt my heart….” His voice cracked a little but he carried on. “A man only has so much heart in him to rebuild, Aylan. Mine’s spent. If only one of us is walking out of this pisshole, it’s going to be you.”

  Aylan swore against his neck and turned a resentful face up to catch the light from the three moons coming in from the patio. “What makes you think I’ll make it any better? You at least have Yarri to pull you back together…. What am I going to have to keep me alive if you’re gone? What am I going to have?”

  “Starry.” Torrant smoothed the hair back from Aylan’s hot face and kissed his brow. “You feel it, don’t you? It’s not attraction, not yet… but there’s a burning need inside you to see her grow, to know who she’ll be when she’s a woman. You miss the family, but I’d give every breath in my body that it was her voice in your head that got you to sleep this morning, her face you saw behind your eyes when you woke up.”

  Aylan closed his eyes, the look on his face one of great pain and excruciating pleasure. “How do you know that?”

  Torrant laughed, and it was real; the sound itself seemed to heal the rift between the two of them, almost as much as the contact between their bodies. “I’ve been haunted by Yarrow Moon since I held her little rat-slippery body on the night of her birth,” he said. “In case you were wondering, I delivered Starry as well, and I love her like a sister, but she’s never been my reason to breathe.”

  He shifted his weight a little and grimaced. “Brother, I could hold you all night, really, but I must smell like something dead….”

  Aylan allowed him to break away and grimaced. “Something dead might be an improvement. You didn’t bathe this morning?”

  Torrant stood and moved toward the privy room that was covered in tan marble. “Have you ever stood in an airless oven, getting grilled like steak, wearing velvet and hose underneath it?” Torrant shuddered, the weariness dropping from his eyes just a little, and he was all amused young man. “The only good part of that is that they were all suffering along with me.”

  “How was it?” Aylan asked seriously. If Torrant’s work in the Regents’ Hall didn’t go well, their work at night keeping the Goddess ghettoes safe from Rath’s guards was an exercise in futility.

  Torrant paused at the door. “We’ll know at the bell, then won’t we brother?” He thought for a moment. “I think, whether they vote me in tonight or not, I’ll at least get the 50 percent of the people who want to keep me around a bit—and if I get that, I also think we’re going to have a very busy night.”

  He took longer in the shower than he usually did. Of course, the boiler that he and Aldam had set up for their water closet in the surgery hadn’t been nearly as large as the one used in the big apartment building, but that wasn’t why he took so long. The truth was, as soon as the hot water sluiced down on him, his exhaustion flooded back, and it was all he could do to stumble out of the shower when he pulled in enough strength to turn off the water at all.

  Aylan was waiting there with a towel when he stumbled out.

  “How did you get here anyway?” Torrant asked fuzzily, too tired to even object to being coddled like a child.

  “The same way I got here last night, you dizzy wank. Your tailor gave me directions, and I slid in through the patio. His friend in the ghetto was more than happy to tell me you had an in at the castle.”

  “Coryal,” Torrant grunted as Aylan pulled a sleep shirt over his head. “Good man.”

  “Mmmm, takes one to know one,” Aylan muttered, “and you didn’t really answer my question.” He shouldered Torrant into bed, taking advantage of his friend’s exhaustion to get a straight answer to this next question.

  “I’m doing the best I can!” Torrant yawned as Aylan pulled the covers up to his chin. “I can’t even remember what it was anymore!”

  “What I meant is, how did it feel to pretend to be your brother? Don’t tell me it didn’t hurt, Torrant. I know better.” Aylan sprawled out in one of the chairs near the bed, tipping it until the chair’s back touched the wall.

  “Of course it hurt!” Torrant snapped around yawns. “The real irony is that if it really had been Ellyot up there, he already would have failed. Goddess, he hated this politics shite. He never even listened when Owen talked about it at the table.” A sudden shrewdness entered his eyes, and he sat up a little.

  “And you? That girl, her family….”

  Aylan grimaced, the chair tilting forward and hitting the ground with a thump. “Her family grieved.” He leaned forward and pushed Torrant back down on the bed, depressed when his friend didn’t have even enough in him to resist. “And that’s all you need to worry about.” He had a sudden thought. “You’re not feeling bad about the guards, are you?” Torrant’s guilt had always weighted on him like bad ballast when he’d killed before, but now he merely grunted.

  “Not enough in me to worry about filthy shite-for-brains cowards. I feel worse for the rats that fled from that shed than I do about them.”

  His disgust gave him strength for one last sally. “The bell!” He struggled against Aylan’s hand. “We need to go out when we hear the bell…. Rath won’t be pleased at all….”

  “Hush, brother.” Aylan gave one final push, and Torrant was finally too tightly curled up around his hand to move. “I’ll stay here and watch your back. I’ll wake you with the bell.”

  “’Night,” Torrant muttered at last. “Love you, brother.”

  “Love you too. Sleep.”

  So he did.

  THE BELL erupted less than five hours later. Aylan woke him up with a package that had arrived at his door and a letter sitting on top. The package was the second half of the ordered wardrobe, including a black leather cloak. Aylan noted sourly that while his had been fancy, with embossed knot work around the yoke and sides, Torrant’s was plain and serviceable. The letter was from Aerk.

  “Sleep well, Ellyot. You’re not a regent yet, but you came damned close. Fifty-nine percent voted aye. We don’t meet until evening tomorrow. We’ll come knocking ’round lunch. Aerk.”

  Aylan gave the letter to Torrant as he emerged wearing plain black breeches and a plain black shirt, and saw the fierce, thin-lipped smile that only surfaced when Torrant was thinking like the snowcat. “It’s a beginning.” He looked up, and Aylan saw that he’d summoned the Goddess to supplement the strength that was still not up to full. His eyes were winter-day blue, as cold and as merciless as moonlight over snow.

  “At least your rest days are coming up,” he said tentatively, nodding at the eyes.

  Torrant shook his head. “Nope. On rest days we start phase two.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding! Torrant….”

  Nothing could touch those eyes, not even the grim smile that touched that fabulous, earthy mouth. “I don’t know about you, brother, but I want to get out of here as soon as possible. Those young men stood up for me today. I’m thinking we owe them a little bit of truth for their chivalry.”

  “Torrant….”

  “Aylan, my love, I think while we’re in this room, you need to call me Ellyot. You never know who is listening.” Aylan closed his eyes and shuddered, knowing Torrant was right, but hating, hating, watching the world pull his brother in so many directions, watching him already becoming thin, translucent, and even so early beginning to fade.

  “Ellyot,” he amended, “are you sure we need to go tonight? You’re….”

  “I’m the reason the guards are coming, brother.”

  It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t true. But it was the way he would see it—it was the way Torrant had always seen things, and Aylan reckoned they wouldn’t be there, about to escape out a patio door and into a blood-red summer night, if his friend, his brother, his lover, hadn’t always been p
repared to shoulder burdens that weren’t his own. Nevertheless, he had to clench his jaw and suppress a shiver, knowing what Triane’s Son would say next.

  “Shall we go hunting, brother?” Torrant asked wickedly as his face sprouted hair and whiskers in disguise. Aylan thought of the little girl’s weight in his arms, her body covered in weeping blisters, crackling skin, and torment, and nodded. The same sort of snarl formed at his lips even as he tied his black kerchief over his face. He settled the weight of the black leather cloak more firmly on his shoulders and was relieved to see Torrant do the same.

  “Let’s see what we kill, brother,” Aylan growled, wishing he too could sprout death at the end of his paws. He settled for a hard grip on the pommel of his sword, and he felt for the twin knives he’d harnessed to his hips. “Let us just see what we can kill.”

  The two of them slipped out the door and swung their legs over the patio fence. The moons began their nightly course in earnest.

  Near Things

  TORRANT TOOK a deep breath and smiled deceptively at the secretary general and consort as they sat up on the dais. He must, above all things, not lose his temper today. He was pretty sure this vote, this first, crucial vote was going to swing his way, but it wouldn’t happen if he transformed into the snowcat, leapt over the dais, and ripped out the secretary general’s throat with his long, razored teeth.

  “The point, sir,” he said smoothly, “is not that I would miss the lace if you taxed it above reason, but that the grandmother trying to feed her family with her spindle and her needles would miss the food.”

  “Why can’t the men in the house feed the family?” the secretary asked, looking amused by the vagaries of those lazy Goddess bastards, sitting on their arses while the women slaved. “It’s not as though lace is a necessary commodity in this city.”

  “Well, sir,” Torrant gritted, “perhaps the men in the house could find jobs, but you’ve passed laws that won’t allow the men in the Goddess quarters to earn money anywhere else in the city. Since they’re not allowed to leave the city, either, it seems unfair to say a woman can’t earn food money with a skill she can ply while she minds her family. To tax this one small product—one that brings joy to most of us here”—he waved his own cuff, which had been decorated with a small trim of knitted Goddess lace, and gestured to the secretary’s own collar, which had the same—“and feeds the families of a quarter of the city, seems incredibly petty. You keep claiming that these sanctions against the Goddess’s children are for the good of the people themselves. I would wonder, sir, what good they will gain when you starve them into extinction. Ahh—”

  He didn’t make that last sound out loud, oh please, let him have kept that to himself. Aylan. It didn’t matter; he looked around, and his gasp at the sudden, tearing pain at the skin of his chest had been masked by the reaction to his strong words.

  Excellent, he thought, breathing through his pain, Aylan. If keeling over from blood loss wasn’t going to lose him the vote, his own uncertain temper would. Aylan. Another pain, this one slighter, across his forearm, and as he felt the warmth and the wetness welling against his shirt and his coat, he knew with certainty that in a moment, his pretty lace cuff was going to be dripping with blood.

  Aylan, oh Goddess, Aylan….

  He needed to get off the floor.

  Arranging his face into a pretty smile, he bowed slightly to the dais, not acknowledging in the least that his body screamed in protest and his wound gaped. “My apologies, Secretary, Consort…. I’m afraid I am not feeling well and my temper is short. If you would allow me to resume my speech later this afternoon, while you move on to other matters?”

  Up in the balcony, Aerk looked at the others in surprise.

  “What is he doing?” Marv whispered loudly, on his toes. “He had them…. Why is he backing out now?”

  They had all taken their turn on the floor, with Ellyot Moon going last. He was, they all agreed, an excellent speaker. His specialty was in taking the barbed remarks aimed at him from the old guard and twisting them to reveal a truth others hadn’t seen. It was damned near poetic.

  “I don’t know….” Eljean leaned so far over the rail that Keon grabbed the back of his fancy blue coat and tunic and held on, in case he went over. “He’s not looking good. I think he’s really that ill….”

  They all turned their attention to where the secretary was taking the reprieve gratefully, making pleasant noises about reconvening for the evening bell as if he could make up the ground he had lost over the last week and a half in just a few hours. Ellyot’s smile had not faded, but his face had gone suddenly pale, and he tucked his right hand underneath his left arm as though it pained him. A clammy sweat popped out over his forehead.

  Aerk swallowed. There was no doubt that whatever had happened on the floor was quick and dire. “Let’s go down. When he gets out of there, he might need help back.”

  They made it down to the podium antechamber just as Ellyot came through the little thigh-high gate. He smiled unhappily at them as they neared.

  “I’m sorry I had to back off,” he apologized. “Just give me a few hours to rest. I’ll feel better….”

  “Was it something you ate, brother?” Keon asked lightly, hoping to give a reason to such a sudden illness.

  “Or something trying to eat me,” Ellyot responded with a little bow.

  “Shall we accompany you?” Aerk offered, only to be cut off with an almost rude shaking of the head.

  “No, no….” Ellyot’s eyes darted around the room in the first sign of true panic any of them had ever seen. He swallowed, hard, regained his composure, and answered Aerk’s extended hand in farewell with a slightly less enthusiastic clasp of his own. “I’ll be back shortly, but I really need to leave now!”

  And with that, he slipped easily between the massing regents getting ready for an early lunch, leaving Aerk staring at his hand in shock.

  “Oueant’s left nut,” he muttered, and the others all gathered around, profaning Honor and Pride in sick amazement.

  “Dueant’s shaft, that’s blood….” Eljean himself turned pale, and his eyes went searching over the crowd for the handsome, dynamic bright light that had attracted them all like moths. “Gods, I hope he’s going to be all right….”

  But the dark head had disappeared through the crowd, and the murmuring mass of bodies was not giving them any answers.

  AS SOON as Torrant cleared the granite steps of the Regents’ Hall, he broke into his fastest run. When he cleared the side of the regents’ apartments, he dodged into the back alley, opening his chest wound more when he vaulted to the top of the stone wall that separated the regents’ square from the Goddess ghetto, and executed a dive roll to the ground. As he landed on his hands he began his change to the snowcat, and when he came up on his feet, he was on all fours.

  His howl of fear echoed through the entire city as he went tearing through the ghetto, mouth open, panting tongue dropping, sniffing for the one person who was keeping him sane:

  Aylan.

  AYLAN DUCKED a jab from the long, curved dagger that had gotten him across the chest on the first thrust. He tried to think about the fight at hand and not about his brother possibly dropping from blood loss in the middle of the regents’ convocation.

  All he had wanted was a pint of ale. Just one lousy, godsforsaken pint of ale, consumed in the afternoon after an exhausting week, maybe some companionship from the tavernkeeper’s pretty daughter, Triana, but really, was it too much to ask?

  Then two enormous men—sweaty, greasy, out of place in this neat little tavern on the inside of the ghetto environs—sat themselves plop down in the Amber Goose and eyed him with purpose. He caught sight of a teal-stoned crest on one of their pommels and thought Guards, and then they both looked up at him with nasty smiles, and the thought changed to Triane’s barked shin, just one lousy pint, and then they were both in front of him, stenching up his air with their fouled skin.

  “You, pretty Goddess b
oy. I seen you here last rest day, didn’t I?”

  Aylan smiled, his charm kicking in with his panic. “It’s a distinct possibility. Why, did you ask for a dance and I left you off my card?”

  A beefy hand with grime in the knuckles came crashing down on his little table. “You’re with that other faggot, the regent’s butt-boy, healing vermin that needs to be dead.”

  Again, that knee-jerk smile. “So you’re a fan of our clinic, are you? Excellent,” he babbled. “I’ll give you a free pass. We’ll do anything you like: baths, grooming, teach you how to walk upright….”

  That first swing of a barn-sized fist at his tender head didn’t surprise him, and he ducked easily, but the knife was definitely a shock, and that’s why he ducked into it. But after that first It’s going to hurt moment, the realization of why it didn’t hurt was what stunned him enough to dodge the next blow of the knife with his wrist.

  And then he was just plain furious.

  He grabbed the first man’s wrist and whirled, hearing the bones crack under his arm as his momentum and body weight snapped the wrist. The knife fell out of the man’s hand, and with a quick dodge he wouldn’t have known to make without spending weeks watching that he didn’t get injured so that Torrant didn’t get injured, he sidestepped the other dagger of the beefy guard’s stocky friend. The guard with the broken wrist screamed and fell to his knees, and Aylan kicked him in the jaw for good measure before turning his full attention on the other gigantic wanker with the knife.

  This fight wasn’t going to be so easy.

  He saw with a sinking heart that, unlike his friend, who had relied on force and surprise, this one actually knew how to hold a knife. In fact, he knew how to hold two, with one blade facing out and the other facing down. And, sweet Dueant, the blade facing out was in the man’s left hand.