Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  A swipe: Aylan dodged. A feint: Aylan saw the other one coming. A charge: Aylan hopped backward up onto a chair, a table, and grabbing the rafters above him, he swung his feet at the man’s head, getting in enough of a blow to stun the bastard but not bring him down. However, it did give Aylan enough time to draw his own knife as he landed, and that was almost as good. Aylan had learned fencing at Triannon but had been taught knife work by his tutors at home, and he had always been decent at it. He and big boy went at it hard, their blades meeting at the hilts, tables crashing in their wake and chairs collapsing to kindling as they leapt and kicked and thrust, and still, the guard was close enough that Aylan could smell the leeks the wanker had eaten for lunch on his hot breath.

  Goddess, I need to back up; this brute was too strong to parry long in close quarters, and he knew how to use his weight. Aylan managed a leap back, escaping (he hoped) a swipe at his stomach, when there was an enormous clatter at the doorway. Aylan ignored it—he knew enough about fighting by now to know that if it wasn’t an immediate threat to his person, then he would get to it in a minute—but the guard was not so canny. Aylan moved in to gut the guard just as the man turned his head.

  In an explosion of silver fur and a dinner-plate-sized paw, the man’s head all but burst from his shoulders. Aylan, as well as the tavernkeeper and his pretty daughter, watched in shock as the corpse sank to its knees, the head bobbing sideways, held on the shoulders only by the flesh on the other side of the snapped neck bone.

  The snowcat’s roar of pain and fury was almost anticlimactic after that.

  Aylan remembered to sheathe his knives before he sank to his knees on the floor. He looked anxiously at the snowcat, who, after disemboweling the unconscious man on the floor, was now whine-growling anxiously at him. The wide silver forehead was wrinkled, and the whiskers were pulled back from the thin, black lips as the creature advanced and snuffled carefully at Aylan. The tufted fur tickled his face as Torrant sniffed his neck and nudged at bones that might possibly be broken. For his part, Aylan wrapped his arms around the massive neck and buried his face in the soft fur behind the snowcat’s ears.

  “I was going to get him, you git-wank,” Aylan panted into that mess of black-striped fur. “You should have just gone to your room and healed….”

  He reached around to the cat’s chest and prodded. The snowcat let out an affronted yelp, holding up a massive, pink-padded paw with dagger-claws sheathed, as though to say “Take it easy, you arse!” Aylan saw traces of blood still on the fur-covered breastbone and swore so long and so loudly that the tavernkeeper’s daughter actually burst into a quiet giggle from behind the counter.

  The sound pulled Aylan back to his surroundings, and he looked around the room in chagrin. “Oh jeez….”

  The snowcat was doing the same, and he plopped to his haunches and whuffed in sympathy.

  “How are we going to hold clinic here?” Aylan wailed. “Should we just cancel?”

  Crushed tables, overturned chairs, broken glassware, and, oh yes, the two dead people seeping bloodstains onto the rough wooden flooring—the destruction was not particularly epic, but the first rest day was the day after tomorrow, and they would be hard-pressed to fix things up before then. One of the most abominable side effects of pretending there were two moons instead of three was that there were only two rest days in seven as opposed to three rest days in eight, and one of those was mandatory. If they didn’t have the tavern ready for clinic hours by then, the frightened people waiting in the front of the tavern to visit Torrant in the stockroom/surgery were never going to return.

  “We can’t!” Olek protested, standing up from behind the counter and ignoring the snowcat and the dead bodies altogether.

  “There’s so many of the girls who need the tea,” Triana added, not even bothering to blush in front of her father. “Oh please. Aylan, can’t you and—” Her eyes darted to the giant, feral creature sitting on her floor. “—um, the young regent find some way to still come?”

  The snowcat looked over at the tavernkeeper and his daughter, both of whom had met Ellyot Moon the previous rest days, and gave what sounded, even to human ears, like a long-suffering sigh.

  “Godsdammit!” he swore in the pain of the quick change, only to be damn near assaulted by Aylan, who pushed him back against the bar and ripped through the bloodstained, shredded remnants of his fine brown shirt.

  “Augh!” Aylan screamed, and then he whirled, kicked over an already overturned table, and sank to his haunches, hands scooping through his hair. “You horrid wanking-git-bastard-arse-pricking-goat-rutting horse turd!”

  Torrant sank to the ground next to him and threw an arm around his shoulder. Aylan didn’t resist him, but he did roll his eyes in disgust.

  “I don’t think I can do this for a month or a year or whatever,” he breathed after a moment. “I don’t think I can take it, knowing your life depends on my ability to save my own skin.”

  “It’s truth, brother.” Torrant sighed and fell to his arse, leaning back against the bar. “Whether I bleed in flesh or I bleed in heart, it’s truth. Besides, as a test of keeping your arse out of the fire, it wasn’t bad.”

  “Oueant piss on you,” Aylan snapped heatedly, falling back from his crouch against Torrant’s arm. There was a restive movement above them, and Aylan could actually feel the inhale as Torrant pulled the mantle of authority on. He didn’t rise, but he did speak.

  “Don’t worry, Olek, Triana. Early rest day, I’ll bring some stout young men to assist in the cleanup, and we’ll have this place fixed up before the first patient arrives. That’s a promise.”

  “Are you insane?” Aylan gasped, pulling away and looking at his brother’s weary face. The shirt had gaped open now, revealing the raised and still-weeping scar that had mostly closed during that last change. It stretched from the far right collarbone down to below the brown nipple on the left, and Aylan wanted to kick something again, knowing how deep it must have been to still be bleeding after two changes.

  Torrant laughed, eyes still closed. “Don’t worry, brother. If Aerk and the others don’t have me burned as whore’s witch for bleeding all over the podium when no one saw me take a wound, I don’t think a little charity work will push them over the edge.”

  Aylan’s face went pale, and he fell back against the bar again. “Oh gods,” he muttered. “Gods, gods, gods, gods, gods…. Oueant’s big prick, Dueant’s soft balls, and Triane’s….”

  “Hush, brother.” Torrant laughed.

  “You were up on the podium?”

  Torrant’s smile was every bit as beautiful as it always had been, even with his eyes closed and lines etching themselves into his cheeks as Aylan watched. “I was indeed.” He chuckled. “I was, in fact, about ready to close a stunning argument on why we shouldn’t tax Lane’s wool as it enters the city. I had to claim a frightening case of the runs in order to get out of there…. As far as they know, I’m still on the privy.”

  In spite of himself, Aylan laughed too, and although there was hysteria in the sound, his chest felt easier when he was done. “Well, while you’re there, brother, do you have time for a pint?”

  Torrant opened his eyes and saw that Olek and Triana had moved around the bar. Triana was holding four mugs by the handles, and Olek had a tray of beef sandwiches; all in all, he hadn’t seen anything more welcome since Yarri had last greeted him in Eiran.

  “Oh yes, brother,” he replied reverently. Aylan had already risen, and he took the proffered hand. Blood loss made his knees a little weak, even as he stood. “In fact, if you’ve got a back door I can escape from to get back, I might even have time for two.”

  After they rolled the bodies in an old oilcloth, which they stowed behind the pub to throw in the river later, and then bleached the floor, he only had time for one pint and a couple of sandwiches. Then he partially changed to the snowcat as a disguise and slipped out into the late afternoon. Aylan watched him go with such an anxious look on his face that Triana
patted his shoulder in sympathy.

  “Your friend—Triane’s Son—he’ll be all right? He is Goddess blessed, after all.”

  Her pat on his shoulder was tentative and childlike, and her fair cheeks with their brown freckles were blushing just from being bold enough to comfort him. He spared a mental groan for the dalliance that was never meant to be. “He’s human, Triana, that’s all,” he said. Then, almost to himself, “And if you asked him, he’d probably say it’s more like Goddess cursed.”

  Without another word, the two of them went back inside to wait for dark so they could dispose of the bodies before the bells rang and the guards started their rounds for real.

  TORRANT’S RETURN trip was not uneventful.

  He slunk through the back alleys on quick feet but didn’t tax himself by running flat out, which turned out to be a good thing. If he’d been running flat out, he would have tripped arse over can when he came upon the young couple locked together in the tiny vacant corner of four converging buildings. As it was, he had just enough time to vault over them, kick off the wall of the nearest building, and tuck into a roll that brought him nearly flush with the point of the opposing wall.

  “Triane’s bleeding gate, you two arse-wanking jackholes!”

  He turned toward them and saw them cowering, pulling up breeches, holding each other tightly, as though the embrace of their thin arms over slender chests would hide them from the fuzzy terror that had descended from what looked like the heavens above. His heart eventually stopped galloping in his chest like Heartland after a mare, and Torrant felt his snowcat’s features relax, even though his vision stayed cold and focused as it always did when he was channeling this particular power. He gusted a sigh and scrubbed his face with a fur-tufted hand. When he spoke next, his voice was calmer, and he did what he could to soften the growl.

  “What in the name of merciful Dueant do you two think you are doing?” he asked at last. “It’s broad daylight. And even if it wasn’t, there is an important vote tonight, and the guards are going to be flooding the streets. Do you think this alleyway makes you invisible?”

  He looked at them both, one fair, one dark, both of them tentatively pulling on their clothing now that it looked like he wasn’t going to eat them or haul them to the front gate to add to the rotting carnage on the walls.

  “The guards!” the fair one spat with an unsurprising bitterness. “The guards… they use us. They find us and use us and find us again.”

  He glared up at Torrant with burning eyes, and Torrant grimaced. He and Aylan were only two men. They could only do so much, and some griefs…. He looked at the hard, pointed features of the blond boy and felt his chest relax and tighten with an inward sigh. Well, some griefs had been happening for long before he and Aylan had arrived in the city.

  “We just thought….”

  The dark-haired boy looked at his lover tentatively, and then he met Torrant’s eyes with eyes the kind of liquid, sloe-brown that had probably been pulling both boys and girls toward him since he’d first blinked into the world. “We just thought that we… we would want to do this thing with someone we cared about, that’s all.”

  “Mmm….” Torrant nodded but kept his gaze locked with the furious blue eyes of the leader of the two. “That’s admirable,” he agreed gently, “and I can understand it, probably more than the two of you can imagine. But if you really cared about each other, you would find a way to do this and live.”

  “As opposed to dying of pox in a year or five?” Oh Goddess, all that rage. And Torrant knew a part of his own heart was just that furious. It always had been.

  “Look,” he said at last, thinking hard. “You know the tavern the Amber Goose? You know how there’s a healer there on the first rest day?” The two boys nodded, uncertain, and Torrant continued. “Well, you come in and check with him. There’s a shipment of wool due in a couple of weeks, right?” They nodded again, and he could see the realization in their eyes that they knew how the wool was smuggled in. Their look at him now had a degree more trust. “Well, the healer or his friend will know when it’s coming. I want you two on the way out with it.”

  “What?” gasped the blond, all anger and hostility forgotten.

  “Be prepared. Have a knapsack ready, a place we can reach you. We can get you out. Just… just plan to live that long, right?” His voice had taken on a certain pleading, and he wasn’t sure how he had gotten there, begging these two lost lovers to take care of themselves. To live.

  “Why?” asked the dark one. “Why us? Why help us?”

  Torrant closed his eyes. “Because I can. Sometimes I can do so little, but this I can do. Now I have to go, but you mark what I told you, right?”

  “Why should we believe you?” asked the blond one, his voice shaking in a terrible conflict between hope and fury.

  Torrant actually laughed. “Oh please! Look at me! I’m the guards’ bloody wet dream, aren’t I? I have less reason to risk getting caught than you do! Now go—the bells are going to ring in half an hour, and when they ring to let us out, you’d better be somewhere no guard can even guess, because they’re going to be in a lather all night, you hear?”

  Now both of them were nodding. “We hear,” they agreed “We hear.” Then, the blond one called out, just as he was turning away, “What shall we call you?”

  A sideways laugh. “Triane’s Son!” he called back, feeling foolish, and then he really did have to run flat out to bathe and meet his friends before the convocation.

  TRIANE’S SON.

  The words were breathed reverently by the chorus of children and grandchildren as part of the ballad’s ritual, but Torrant himself—well, over the years he had found ways to say the words as little as possible.

  Of course, he rubbed Aylan’s nose in the fact that he stood for Oueant’s Son in the ballad as often as possible.

  His friend had thought little enough of himself, for enough years, that convincing him that he was honorable and worthy and good had become one of his favorite hobbies.

  Torrant grinned over the crowd at Aylan, who gave him a disgusted look, and then winked gently at Aldam, who stood listening, his arms about his Roes with the same reverence he’d shown when they’d been children having first stumbled down a mountain.

  He referred to Dueant’s Son with no irony at all, just to watch Aldam quietly blush, and to watch Roes beam at her beloved with pride.

  But that part of the story didn’t come until much later, which was too bad, Torrant had always thought regretfully. If anyone was needed in Clough at that time, it was truly the son of Compassion.

  Part XIII—In the Dark of Honor’s Moon

  Eljean

  ELJEAN WAS bored.

  He sat on the stone steps outside the regents’ apartments in the chill of the morning, closed his soft green eyes, and tilted his face up toward the late summer sun. The sun was warm enough to make his hair sweaty on his shoulders, so he shook back the thick black curls, repositioned his hat, and still kept his face basking in the warmth of the light.

  He was dressed, as had become fashionable this summer, in a light cloak about his shoulders, a wide-brimmed hat with a flourish, a pair of black breeches tucked into his boots, and nothing else. He fenced regularly at the local club, and his chest might have been narrow, but it was wiry with muscle, and his long stomach was tight and trim. He was justifiably proud of his body, but mostly he just followed this fashion for the same reasons that had led him to keep company with the witty and subversive Aerk and Keon: it irritated the consort even if he hadn’t put a voice to it yet, and the rebellion would send his father into a fit of hysterical hyperventilation if he ever cared to know about it.

  Either reason would have been more than enough to put Eljean out on the steps in the morning, working on his tan, but a third, unspoken, terrifying, and attractive reason was now walking down the stairs toward him. His heart started beating fiercely in his throat, and he worked hard to even out his breathing as he closed his eyes and
kept his face toward the sun.

  “Merciful Dueant, Eljean! Dimitri’s nowhere around; go put on a shirt!”

  Eljean opened one eye irritably. Here he had been, throwing himself at Ellyot Moon as blatantly as he possibly could without ending up crucified over the eastern gate, and Ellyot still thought he was harboring a crush on Dimitri?

  “Dimitri is a sniveling arse-licker who would sell his mother for the consort’s hand on his prick,” Eljean said succinctly and knew that he flushed from the appreciation in Ellyot’s laughter. “What are you doing here?” He kept the irritation on as a cloak to hide his inward preening. “I thought you were off in secret, with all of the sots who used to be my friends.”

  This was, of course, the reason why Eljean was bored. The first rest day used to be their day to fence and then to loiter along the marketplace, making dry observations about the world at large and mocking the poor people who caught their notice. Eljean was not necessarily proud of how they spent this day, but since he was spending it with a social group that didn’t examine too closely how he liked to spend his time after dark, and with whom, he had just been grateful for the company.

  That had changed in the last month or so, and the beautiful man next to him with the hazel eyes and deadly curl to his upper lip was the reason why.

  The deterioration of the social group had started with Dimitri, but this had been their fault. As a whole, they had simply stopped talking to him, stopped acknowledging his snide remarks, stopped letting him intimidate Djali or bait Eljean completely. Eventually he had gotten the picture. One day he showed up for breakfast at what used to be their favorite stall for muffins and the lot of them had been at another stall. They didn’t even wave to him, and he never tried to join them again.

  But that had been fine; in fact, once Dimitri had disappeared from their midst, Eljean realized how pleasant it was to not always have to duck when his erstwhile crush fired a sally off from his vicious tongue.