Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  Ulvane had said something about a cat and a tree at the time, but that was more than ten years after the death of Torrian Shadow, and Ulvane’s usefulness out of the castle was questionable at best. Besides—a cat and a tree? Was the cat going to strike the tinder herself?

  Rath shook his head, resuming his perch at the wide double doors, searching the courtyard for any sign, any hint, of where his son had gone the week before and not returned from until nearly dinnertime the next day.

  Djali merely widened his round eyes when Rath had questioned him.

  “You’ve never bothered with me when I’m actually here, Consort. I don’t know why my whereabouts should bother you now.”

  Then the boy had had the nerve to simply walk away, leaving his father gaping after him like a dog dying of a stomach bleed.

  Rath had known, simply known, that Torrian Shadow’s curse had worked; the boy had found a leader to love and to trust, and it wasn’t the man who had spawned him. As much as Rath detested his son and resented his duties as a father, it rankled that his offspring shouldn’t be grateful for what he grew up having. What if the moons had seen fit to have him birthed in the ghettoes? Didn’t the cow-stupid pig-turd have the sense to know that his lineage was noble and his birth a fortunate act of the stars? If Rath had still allowed worship of Dueant as the god of Compassion, he would have insisted, then and there, that Djali fall upon his face and prostrate himself before the force in the universe that allowed him to have a full belly and clean clothes his entire life.

  What really bothered Rath was that he had the feeling the boy would have had too much honor to lie to the weak woman’s god in that way.

  What was he thinking? Rath shook his head, trying to get rid of the convolutions that his son’s unexpected behavior had put there. It would all be made better in the next week. Rath had made sure of it.

  There were few things that a well-prepared dinner party couldn’t cure, especially when your chef was gifted with a few long-acting herbs that most mothers wouldn’t let their children near in a pretty meadow.

  Oh yes, by the second rest day of next week, Rath’s problems with Ellyot Moon would be over.

  Invitation

  “HE’S GOING to try to poison you. You know that, right?” Aylan’s voice, thick with annoyance, almost wakened the new child in Torrant’s arms.

  “Shh.” Torrant glared at him. He was in the middle of singing the birthing rites, a practice he’d learned at Triannon that he’d loved so much, he regretted he hadn’t done it over Yarri’s and Starren’s wrinkled, downy little heads when he’d held them. Of course, he’d sung to them with love in his voice, and it amounted to the same thing, but to call it a rite of love, to make it a ritual of blessing… well, those words held a lot of power. Especially here, where love and blessings were both so rare.

  “Fine, fine, I’ll wait until you’re finished,” Aylan huffed, and then turned around to pester one of the other young men about why going to eat at the home of the consort king was madness in the first order.

  It wasn’t as though they weren’t aware of their danger. It was just, as Djali said despairingly, looking at his friends over coffee as they’d compared invitations the previous week, you didn’t refuse an offer from the king of Clough.

  Torrant tried to think of it as a positive thing. Rath was afraid of him—afraid of them when it came right down to it—and that meant that their work on the legislative floor was having an impact. But now they had to survive dinner.

  “Ellyot, make him stop!” Eljean complained, his narrow shoulders hunched and his green eyes haunted.

  Torrant laid the child in the spare cradle that Olek kept in the back room for births just like the one he’d helped with. The mother was swaddled and asleep in a pallet in the back room, and the family was frantically trying to find a place for the poor woman and her child to stay, since the floor of their flat had collapsed, which is what had precipitated the birth in the first place. In addition to the other hurts of childbearing, the woman had to contend with lacerations on her legs, her thigh, and a scrape down her back incurred as she’d gone through the floor. Delivering the baby safely and keeping the mother calm had taken all of Torrant’s skill; the thought of going to Rath’s this night, of all of them, was daunting.

  Aylan was following in Eljean’s wake, the expression on his face the same one Stanny had possessed when worrying his mother about working the family business, or, even earlier, trying to get on the town’s ball team, when he was neither fast nor agile, only large. It was the expression of a dog with a bone, and inwardly Torrant groaned. Of course Aylan had gone after Eljean. The group’s weakest member, the one most frightened of this dinner party with the most to lose, would be the easiest one to persuade to do something risky. Like leave town altogether.

  “Aylan, stop badgering him. We’ve discussed this already, and we don’t have a choice.” Aylan’s answering expression was both mutinous and terrified. Aylan had grown up in courts with people like Rath as a child, and he was convinced that none of them had the wherewithal to face Rath in his natural habitat. Torrant sighed and ran his fingers through his brown hair, feeling the slight tingle of the spell that kept his white streak from showing. Maybe Aylan had a point.

  “Look, brother,” he said at last, keeping his humor intact, “if I show you something,” he looked up, aware that the other regents who had been ill-at-ease all day were looking to him over the heads of their patients for some hope as it was and were listening to this conversation with desperate ears, “if I show you all something, will you take a breath and have some faith?”

  “It had better be spectacular,” Aylan said shortly, and Torrant grinned at him, his best lip-curling, heart-stopping smile, the one that made even Aylan put his hand over his belly to still a reluctant flutter.

  “It’ll knock your stockings off. Now I need you to gather a few things for me. We’ll all meet in the back room when you’re done.”

  Ten minutes later, all of the regents were gathered in the back, crouching over Torrant’s shoulder while Aylan stood, arms crossed, raising dubious eyebrows at three bowls. One was filled with a basic herb salad from Torrell’s window garden. The other two were filled with all of the toxic plants that Torrell used to distill his best, most potent medicines.

  “Are we ready? Marv, give us your belt knife, will you?” Marv always carried one because he liked the look of the handle and sheathe at his belt. It was his favorite possession—oiled and sharpened to a gleam—but he handed it over without question.

  “Right, then.” Torrant adjusted his crouch, closed his eyes, and hoped that what he was about to do wasn’t really a surprise to any of them. He opened his eyes and touched the belt knife to the contents of one of the bowls. “The food looks excellent, Consort,” he said with a smile and a grim wink at Aylan. “I hope that it is, in truth, as good as it looks on the plate.”

  “Nothing’s happening,” Jino said in disappointment. His usually well-coifed hair was a mess of distracted ringlets, and his pretty face was uncharacteristically grim.

  “That’s the control bowl, lackwit,” Keon said tensely. “Can we see what it does with the bowl full of poison, please, Ellyot?” Keon would usually have tried for humor, but none of them had felt like laughing in this past week.

  “Absolutely.” When he repeated the words this time, Torrant felt a distinct tingle through the belt knife, and sure enough, the toxic ingredients in the bowl began to shrivel and writhe, looking less like salad and more like compost as they watched.

  “But won’t the consort be suspicious of your gift if your food starts wriggling around on your plate as we watch?” Aerk asked, fascinated and appalled at once.

  “He’s already suspicious,” Torrant pointed out, “and if we all pretend we’ve seen nothing, he’ll have no choice but to apologize and send for another plate of food. The fact is, he’ll know that we know, and with any luck that alone should be enough to keep him from killing us in front of the rest
of his dinner guests, right, Djali?”

  Djali swallowed and nodded. “Right—he’s nothing if not conscious of his appearance. He might sentence us all to death on a rest day for trumped-up charges, but he wouldn’t want anyone to think it was personal.”

  “But what if you’re not the only one he’s trying to kill?” Eljean asked, and Torrant could tell by the grimace on his face that he despised himself for the question.

  “That’s what the other bowl is for. Now here—it doesn’t have to be skin on skin, but we all have to be touching each other….”

  “Now there’s a comfortable thought in this city,” Aylan remarked dryly, and Torrant shot him a disgusted look.

  “We’re all friends here.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Jino said, eyes twinkling in spite of the grim situation, “Marv’s been trying to get his hand on my arse for years.”

  “You wish, you git!” Marv cuffed his friend on the arm playfully. “Just remember, if you make a play for me, I’ll throw one of my sisters at you instead.”

  “How many do you have?” Torrant asked. He’d heard them mentioned before but hadn’t been able to get a bead on how many.

  “Five!” Marv muttered in disgust. “Jessee, Megee, Lysee, Kylee, and Keree. They’re all at the town estate now. If we’re not careful, you may have to dance with them at the Autumn Ball.”

  “Well, won’t that be ‘Marv-ee.’” Keon smirked, and Marv socked him the same way he’d socked Jino.

  “Get bent, all of you! Can we hurry this up?”

  Torrant and Aylan were actually chuckling at Marv’s antics, but Torrant nodded. “Yes. Now we need to make this real, so it just needs to be a touch of knee to knee, or foot to ankle, and unless we’re planning on starting a new fashion trend, it should be through clothes. Right—everybody touching?” Eljean’s hand trembled a bit on Torrant’s knee, but he ignored it. “Here, Aylan, you take the knife and touch the bowl.”

  Aylan did as he was asked, and Torrant repeated his phrase. All of the young men gave a shudder, and Aylan gave a strangled yelp and tried not to drop the belt knife. In a moment, that feeling of muted lightning passed, and they were all huddled around the bowl of poisonous greens, watching as they writhed and wriggled until they looked like rotten food instead of a tasty, deadly salad. As a collective, all of the men let out a deep and shuddery breath.

  “Fair enough?” Torrant asked, and they all nodded in agreement. “Good. Now we have to make sure we’re all touching our food with our fork when I say the words.”

  “My father always says a prayer to the twins before we eat. Everyone pretty much digs in after prayer,” Djali informed him, and Torrant nodded, smiling in approval.

  “Excellent. Thanks for the head’s up, Djali. With your help, we might be able to get through this dinner healthy and happy.”

  “And hungry!” Aerk said dryly, and Torrant laughed again.

  “Amen. We may have to ask Aylan here if he’ll smuggle some edible food to my room for afterwards.”

  Aylan nodded, relieved, just a little, that he wasn’t sending his brother into the lion’s den unarmed. For all his pretty words, it was very hard for Torrant not to say exactly what he thought.

  “You couldn’t keep me away,” Aylan affirmed. “I’m dying to hear all about it!”

  “Hey, Ellyot,” Marv asked as Torrant stood from his crouch around the three bowls, “if you’re gifted, where’s your streak of hair—ouch! Jino! Would you stop kicking me in the shins, brother? You’ve been doing it for weeks, and I don’t know when you got that clumsy!”

  Jino hid his face in his hands. “I’m sorry, brother,” came his muffled words to Torrant. “Apparently he thinks that ‘tact’ is something you stick in a wall to hold things up.”

  Torrant sucked wind through his teeth at Marv’s bald words about his gift. He snapped his jaw shut in a moment, though, because he had counted on them knowing about it before he had showed them his way to get around the possible pitfalls of Rath’s little dinner party.

  “No worries,” he told Jino with a little sigh. “You all want to see my white streak?” he asked, actually feeling relieved. It was hard enough, week after week, as he came to love these young men like friends and brothers, to keep his name from them. The least he could do, he figured, was give them this little bit of truth and wonder.

  “Well, yes!” Aerk said, with that same forthrightness that Torrant had admired from the first, and the others seconded him.

  Torrant winked at them all and released the tiny bit of magic that kept his hair all brown. It was Eljean who broke the silence. “It’s gorgeous,” he said in wonder.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Aerk said dryly, “but it’s definitely more a part of you than the plain brown, isn’t it?”

  Aylan couldn’t contain himself; being the closest to Torrant he reached out and separated the white lock from the rest of the chestnut brown hair. “I miss it,” he confessed, and Torrant caught his hand and squeezed.

  “It hurts to hide things,” he said at last, looking at them with troubled eyes. Then, lightly, as though he didn’t mean every word, he added, “And now we’d better go out and tend to our patients, or I’m liable to reveal all my secrets, and we wouldn’t want that, now would we?”

  He took a breath, and his hair turned back to brown, actually shocking them all a little with the wrongness of the color. He avoided their eyes as he turned to go and missed the sorrowful, speculative look that passed between the young regents, Eljean included. Aylan watched them, and it was very clear that they were all wondering exactly what else it was that “Ellyot Moon” was hiding.

  “Nothing personal,” he barked into the uneasy silence, and they all—Torrant included—stopped to look at him.

  “Hwah?” Everybody looked at him in confusion.

  “Don’t make the conversation too personal. I know you….” He scowled around the room, “I know all of you by now. You’re going to want to argue—and they’re going to want to lecture you, and that’s well and good. That’s what we’re here for, and if he doesn’t kill you first you might as well make the best of the opportunity. But nothing personal. Don’t,” he commanded, looking hard at Eljean, “talk about the crucifixions.”

  “Like I’m that brave,” Eljean muttered, and Aylan just kept lecturing inexorably over him.

  “Don’t”—he pinned Djali with a glare—“mention Goddess-born rights.”

  “But that’s what we’re here for!” Djali protested, and still, Aylan kept on going.

  “And don’t”—and now it was directed at Aerk and Keon—“get pulled too far into a discussion over the book-burnings.”

  “But how are we going to stop them?” Aerk demanded, and Aylan grudgingly responded.

  “The same place you’ve been trying to stop it all along—the legislation floor.” Aylan sighed and ran a hand through his curly hair, dislodging his queue. Without even thinking about it, Torrant fetched the band from across the room and ran it back, handing it to his friend with a grin.

  “Don’t try to butter me up,” he huffed, taking the band but working hard to keep his serious face on. “Don’t even try. You know your pain centers—pretty much anyone you’re related to, and Triannon. Just steer away from them. These people like to think they can keep what’s personal separated from what they regard as ‘business.’ To these people, talking about personal, political hot topics at the dinner table is as distasteful as talking about your relationship with your favorite tight fist in the dead of night when you’re on the legislation floor. Don’t do it. If you want to avoid violence like you’ve been trying to since we got here, keep it one step removed from your heart, do you hear me?”

  Torrant bowed, deeply and seriously. “I hear you, brother,” he said gravely, “and if you promise you’ll have food waiting in my rooms when we’re done, I may even follow your orders.”

  The Sour Taste of Truth

  ULVANE KNEW what Ellyot Moon was hiding, and it wasn’t
a long-held unrequited love on the part of the secretary general.

  No, Ulvane had made that part up, because whenever Rath thought about Owen Moon’s son, the urge to blurt out the real identity of the man’s father nearly overwhelmed him.

  And Ulvane had done so much harm to his people, to his sister’s people, already. As Rath had brooded over Ellyot Moon, Ulvane had felt the urge, the byproduct of being on Yahnston Rath’s leash for too long. It was a terrible, twisted duty of a broken man and a broken mind to bring satisfaction to his master, his tormenter, the man who had betrayed him in the worst of ways. For once, just once in twenty-two years of servitude, Ulvane fought it.

  He won. Rath hadn’t believed him, had, in fact, sent him away, where he could giggle and whisper, “Torrian Shadow, Torrian Shadow, who is the son of Torrian Shadow” into his pillow for the rest of the night. The whole time he wished that he could smother himself in it and give Torrian Shadow’s son a chance to make things right.

  Rath had given orders to hide him during the dinner party, but the moment Torrian Shadow’s son passed the threshold, Ulvane knew. He felt the tingle of his gift telling him that one of the Goddess’s chosen was in his presence, showing him in an instant what his gifts were and how best to appeal to his heart.

  It would be easy for Ulvane to evade his captors; the women assigned to him were usually kind, because otherwise he threatened to expose himself and his unattractive madness to the other visitors at the palace. The kindness meant the woman could be easily eluded. It was a simple matter of some sneaking about and then some courage in his stomach, and reckoning and absolution were in Ulvane’s grasp.

  THE MOONS in Eiran lived in a small house made with hand-cut, sanded boards and ate at a big butcher-block table that had been scrawled on by little ones learning their letters, knocked about by growing boys roughhousing where they shouldn’t be, and slept on by more than one generation of cats. The floors were sanded wood, swept clean once a day, oiled once a year, and covered on most surfaces with felted rugs or woven of rags from previous generations of clothing.