Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “Ellyot,” Aerk hissed in concern, and Torrant affected not to hear him.

  “Right—we need to have our story straight. For all of you, it’s not much of a story. You simply need to say that you brought Triana’s body to her family, and you heard the song. Based on… on Djali’s state of mind at the time, you can assume that… that our friend is dead.” His voice barely cracked. He was both proud and ashamed.

  “Ellyot,” Keon tried to interrupt, and Torrant continued over him.

  “If he asks for confirmation of the song, leave the question to me. I won’t leave you all hanging. You’ve got to trust me on this. I won’t just let him savage you on the floor—”

  “Ellyot!” Marv, Jino, Aerk, and Keon all shouted in tandem, causing Aylan, who had flopped on the divan with a desperately feigned disinterest as the door opened, to jump and turn on his knees, staring at them all with eyes hungry for something, anything, that would give Torrant hope.

  “I’m sorry?” Torrant’s jaw was clenched like a twisted spring, and his voice was one half gruff and the other half young.

  “This wasn’t your fault,” Aerk said gently, extending an embarrassed hand to pat Torrant on the shoulder.

  “Uhm, right, then.” Torrant made a business out of pulling his battered sword belt from the corner and fastening it over his green coat and huntsman, mindless of the sweltering early-autumn heat. He turned around, expecting the young men would have moved toward the door, but they were standing there, regarding him with a gentle resolve.

  “It’s not your fault,” Keon reinforced, and Torrant flushed, nodded, and made to move past them. Aylan was as surprised as Torrant when the group of young men didn’t give way.

  “It’s not your fault.” Marv and Jino spoke in tandem and stood, facing him, their bodies as implacable as their good natures.

  Torrant stood, arrested, for the first time in their knowledge looking hunted. They could see his heart beating in his throat as he hovered between action and misery, between acceptance and denial.

  “We need to hear you say it, before we leave,” Aerk said into the hush. He shook his long bangs out of his almond-shaped eyes, and his throat bobbed with a nervous swallow.

  “I….” Torrant stopped, closed his eyes, and tried again. “You trusted me. This… you weren’t supposed to get hurt.”

  “You told us the risks.”

  Eljean hadn’t knocked, and his quiet words were greeted with surprise and hostility. He saw the hostility and flushed, unable to meet anyone’s eyes but Torrant’s.

  “Ellyot,” he said deliberately, “you have never been anything less than honest with us. Even when you lie, you’re telling us all the truth you have.”

  Torrant’s cheeks went so pale that Aylan wondered for a moment if he wasn’t going to simply fade from existence as they watched.

  “Djali trusted—” he started, and Eljean cut him off.

  “Oh, now somebody listens to me? I’ve always been wrong. I’m a coward—Aylan’s always known that about me. Do you think I wouldn’t be afraid of my own grief?” Eljean tried a smile, but it quivered on his long face. He looked as though he’d dressed while sprinting through a hurricane, and his eyes were too weary for the smile to be anything other than an attempt. And then he really took a look at Torrant, and his hand moved up to cover his mouth. “Triane’s tears, your hair!”

  Torrant looked away. “Your cravat’s a disaster, Eljean,” he said to the back of the couch. “You need to fix it before we go.”

  Eljean shook his head and wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand. “You say it first—you say what Aerk told you. It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault.”

  “Djali—” Torrant began again.

  “Would never have known happiness, if he hadn’t known you,” Aerk supplied gently. “Please, Ellyot. You cannot bear the sins of the entire city on your back. It will break you, and we need you unbroken.”

  At last Torrant turned and met their eyes. “My brothers,” he said softly, “I came here to change things, and I forgot that change can be a terrible, destructive force. I will give credit—much credit—where it belongs. Djali’s father—” Torrant turned his head and spat on the rich carpet. It was a crude, violent gesture, but none of them recoiled from it. They all felt their bile rise at the mention of their enemy. “I can’t tell you it’s not my fault,” he continued, even as they swallowed and paled. “Not until I feel it in my heart.”

  There was an awful, fraught, and weighted silence, and he and the regents regarded each other tensely. The regents loved him, he realized with a tightening chest. That hadn’t been part of the plan.

  He smiled into the broken silence. It was a small, pale imitation of the smile that had made Aylan’s heart race for nearly ten years and that he had longed to see the night before, but still it was there, real and beautiful, and Aylan’s breath caught because he’d been wondering if he would ever see that quirk of the lips again.

  “But… but that you want to stand up in there with me, that you’re willing to do this together—” He looked at Eljean, the tightness in his eyes easing up a little. “—that you’re here this morning—” The tiny smile flirted with his mouth again. “—it may give me heart to go on.” He swallowed. “Now someone fix Eljean’s tie, and let’s go. We’re going to need coffee and food before that bell rings, or we’ll never make it through the day.”

  The words seemed to give them heart, and they managed some quiet talk and even some grim banter as they paused at a cart in the square for coffee and pastries under the orange-tinted, blue-sky sunshine.

  “Look at that,” Keon muttered darkly, nodding to the place on the tan marble steps where Triana had fallen. It had been scrubbed clean in the night.

  The others regarded it soberly until Torrant spoke. “He won’t be able to cleanse the deed from his conscience quite so easily,” he said with conviction. The others nodded and quietly finished their breakfast.

  When Aerk saw that Torrant had left off the pastry portion of his breakfast and settled for coffee, he bought an extra and nodded Torrant over to a quiet place in the shade of the stone canopy overhead.

  “Eat,” he said quietly, and his voice held just enough authority to get Torrant to take the bread as it was shoved in his hand, but not quite enough to make him put it in his mouth.

  “I’m not—”

  “We know.”

  Torrant cast a puzzled look at the pastry. “Know what?”

  “Know who you are. Keon and I, we’ve known for months that you’re not Ellyot Moon. But we know you love his family like your own—probably more, because I think I love your family more than I love the git who sent me here and left me to flounder. But we know your real name; Eljean obviously does. I’m not sure about Marv and Jino, but they might have guessed, and either way, we’ll tell them as soon as this terrible day is over. Whatever you are hanging onto in the name of honor, whatever little piece of self-hatred you are grasping with broken fingers, Torrant Shadow, you let it go right now”—Aerk’s voice shook—“and you eat that damned pastry, because I could swear I saw the sun shining through your hands a moment ago, and we can’t afford to have you fade away before this is done.”

  Torrant looked at Aerk in amazement, taking a bite of the sweetened bread before his brain registered he was thinking about it. “Is it that easy to…?”

  “No.” Aerk shook his head. “We figured it out because Keon reads every damned thing and because I have a head for songs. We’ve known for a month, he and I. We didn’t say anything because we thought it wasn’t our place.” Aerk looked away, suddenly embarrassed by the uncharacteristic show of force. “It’s still not…. It’s just that….”

  Torrant laughed a little and shook his head, responding with a full mouth. “Thank you. Just… thank you.”

  And then the bell rang, and they guzzled what was left of their mugs before they gave them back to the wary vendor and ran for the tan marble of the Regents’ Hall.


  Torrant was shoving the last of his breakfast in his mouth as he went.

  AERK AND Keon had to hold him up under the armpits, ten hours later, as he lost whatever was left of that scant breakfast in the bathroom.

  “Dueant’s rotten fish,” Aylan muttered, stunned by his brother’s gray pallor and clammy shakes. Torrant had rushed in grimly, the regents at his back, and then practically swooned over the porcelain toilet in the bathroom. “What in the star’s dark happened in there?”

  Aerk shook his head, keeping a tight hold on Torrant’s shaking body and looking none too hale himself. “It was unrelenting,” he muttered, not allowing Torrant to have his own weight back. “They didn’t let us eat or drink—it was the six of us, in the center of the hall, answering the same questions phrased six dozen ways, from either the consort or one of his cronies. What did they think we were going to do? Suddenly confess to the murder of his son?”

  “Yes,” Torrant rasped, passing a shaking hand over his face. “He’s got another pet wizard on a leash, hoping we’ll do exactly that.”

  “Oueant’s fat white ass.” Aylan stood jerkily and grabbed Torrant’s old duffel from under his armoire and started stuffing it with clothes.

  “What are you doing?” Torrant asked blearily, looking at him in wonder. Then: “No. No!” He stood, and with strength they could have all sworn he didn’t possess, he grabbed the duffel from Aylan’s hands and started pulling his clothes out. “We’re not leaving!”

  “Did you not hear yourself?” Aylan demanded. “I’d say that’s the last bleeding straw, mate! A new pet wizard, trying to get a confession out of you?”

  “Well, he didn’t, did he?” Torrant returned, an unhealthy flush spreading over his cheeks. “Do you think I’d be this undone just by standing and answering questions? My gift is truth, remember? What do you think I’ve been doing for the last ten hours if it wasn’t making sure the truth was heard!”

  “Well, it’s been heard!” Aylan snatched the duffel back, unbalancing Torrant and sending him sprawling across the floor. He muttered an oath that probably turned the sky black, threw the duffel sideways, where it smacked a bemused Keon across the face, and went to his knees. “The truth has been heard, and it’s time for us to get out. You said it yourself. Yarri’s coming. It’s too dangerous for her here, and you need to leave!”

  “Yarri’s coming?” Marv echoed. “Why would Yarri come if he’s not really her broth…. Ouch! Dammit, Jino, are you trying to kill me…? Oh. Never mind.”

  Jino rubbed his elbow and glared at his friend, although the looks from the rest of the room were decidedly kinder.

  “If you were any more dense, you’d sink the earth below the star line,” Jino muttered, and Marv flushed.

  “I just like things clear,” Marv said with dignity, and the tension in the room loosened like an undone knot in wool.

  “We can’t go now,” Torrant said, still kneeling on the carpet, the shakes taking over his body again. “We’ve given too much, lost too much to give up now. Someone in the ghetto has been shanghaied or bribed into Rath’s court, but we can’t let it stop us!”

  Aylan sank to the carpet, remembering inanely that he had gone back to sleep not long after Torrant had left, and took his brother’s hands in his own. “Look at yourself. Yarri’s going to kill me if she sees you like this.”

  “Right back at you, brother.” Torrant smiled without humor. “We can’t leave,” he added somberly. “The secretary general left early. Rath wasn’t pleased to have Djali’s words about setting the guards on Triana spoken in front of the entire Regents’ Hall. There’s going to be night work to do.”

  A silence like the beginning of a baby’s hurt shriek thudded through the room as all the young men looked at their leader, his face gray-green from the stress of the day, and heard him talk about going out into the night to protect the ghettoes. And, just like a baby’s shriek, the chaos that followed was deafening.

  “Are you insane?”

  “You’re certifiable, do you know that?”

  “The only place you’re going is to bed!”

  “What are you going to do, puke on the sadistic killers?” This last was from Jino, and it was so incongruous that the rest of the group stopped talking to stare at him. Aerk broke the stunned silence with a short laugh.

  “I don’t think it will come to that,” he said dryly. “I think we all need to patrol the ghettoes and let Ellyot here get some sleep.”

  “When do we get to call him by his real name?” Marv complained, and Torrant and Aylan both snapped a sharp “Never!”

  “The less you know about me, the better,” Torrant said softly, meeting Aylan’s pained glance with his own. “What if you get caught by this new pet wizard? What if Rath knocks on your door and calls you in for an interview? If you never knew my real name, you’d never be accused of collusion. It was what I was trying to avoid in the first place.”

  “After today,” Keon replied thoughtfully, “I don’t think Rath can touch us. No, no—listen!” he insisted when Torrant and Aylan would have protested. “At least, not like that. We stood on the floor and accused him of kidnapping a girl from the ghettoes—and the entire hall saw the dead girl on the steps. We told him he’d driven his own son to suicide. And the entire city is singing Djali’s song. Between that song and Ellyot’s ballad from a couple of weeks ago, the whole world is beginning to understand that Rath is not the benevolent ruler he’s managed to lull us all into believing.” Keon stroked his chin and then scratched his head through his dark, wiry hair. His eyes were round and dark, and when they sharpened in speculation, they were scalpel-fine and dangerous.

  “People are starting to ask questions,” he continued reasoning. “Now, the time might have been when he could have, say, poisoned a couple of us, and people would have called it an accident. He might even have called us on the floor for treason, and they would have believed it. But he sweated us today. He sweat us hard, and none of us broke. Not even you, and I guess you were keeping us from the worst of it.”

  “But not needing to worry about being poisoned in public is one thing!” Torrant protested, struggling to his feet. He used the back of the couch to push himself up and stood in front of them, weaving but resolute. “Going out to face down the guards—”

  “Publicly, ‘Ellyot’!” Aerk stressed his name. “What you and Aylan have been doing—it’s invaluable, and so many would have died without it. But if we go out and put a public face on the protection of the ghettoes—”

  Torrant nodded, a little panicked. “I agree—you’re right. But not without backup. You boys haven’t touched a sword in months!”

  “It’s not our swords we’ll be flashing, Ellyot,” Jino said gamely, and still Torrant wouldn’t back down.

  “Fine. Come with us. But you’re not going without me.”

  There was a chorus of negatives, and then Aylan held up his hand. “Right, brother,” he said, swallowing. His purple-blue gaze locked with Torrant’s clear hazel eyes. He would ask the others later how long those eyes had waxed Goddess-blue during their public depositions and would be appalled at the answer, but right now, they were simply Torrant’s eyes, fatigued, grief ridden, but still human and still beautiful.

  “Right—we’ll do whatever you say, but you need to prove to us that you’re whole and able.”

  Torrant’s upper lip curled back warily. “Fine,” he said, wondering what Aylan had in mind. He stood to his toes, pulled out his sword, and took an offensive stance. “Name a figure, any figure—I’m good.”

  “No, no… nothing that elaborate.” Aylan’s own pouty mouth was compressed grimly. “Just one simple thing.”

  “I’m waiting.” Torrant relaxed his stance a little, and they all pretended they didn’t see the sweat popping out on his ashen forehead with that little bit of exertion.

  “Right, then.” Aylan licked his upper lip. Torrant was the only man on earth who would forgive him for this, and the only man on earth whose forgi
veness Aylan needed. “Change.”

  Torrant blinked. “Clothes?”

  “No, you wank—change forms!” Aylan wondered if he was really that fatigued or if he was being deliberately obtuse. “This morning you couldn’t change forms to reknit your broken bones—I saw it. You’ve said all along that the cat is your advantage. You’re one hell of a swordsman, mate, I won’t deny it, but if you’re too wiped to use your form, then it’s just as well you stay here and hoard your strength. Tonight is one night in many. Today on the floor was only a prelude to the sweet little hell I imagine Rath has been planning for you since you arrived on the scene. You change into the cat, and we’re good to go. If you can’t… well then, you sit back and let us take care of it for one night. Are you hearing me?”

  Torrant glared at him with inescapable venom. “You are Oueant’s piss in a paper cup.”

  Aylan smiled. “That’s the deal.”

  “Fine.”

  He had never made the change with so many curious eyes on him before, and the uncomfortable sensation of his muscles crawling across his skin like determined snakes seemed amplified times a million this night. And then all those snakes constricted angrily around the broken bones of his upper arm, and he collapsed to his still-human haunches, barely aware that Aylan, unmindful of his two-inch feline teeth, had wadded up a throw pillow and shoved it in his mouth to help quiet the whimpers he was ashamed to admit were escaping. Oh Goddess… it was slow… so slow…. Usually the pain was a ripping, a tearing, an explosion of agony, but this… this was breaking a bone and setting it, second by excruciating second. He locked swimming eyes with Aylan’s, drawing strength from the terrible compassion in his friend’s face, and kept going, whimpering some more as he felt the broken ends of the healing fracture grind together when they knit up completely.

  His vision swam, the usual iciness he experienced held at bay by the horrible pain, and he could tell from the way Aylan looked away that although he had flopped to his side in the snowcat’s form, his eyes, his all-too human eyes, had yet to change. He lay panting, licking as far up on his foreleg as he could to somehow ease the terror of nerve endings destructing and resurrecting underneath his skin. Mindless of the other regents, who were simply regarding him with fascination and sorrow, he looked back at Aylan, mutiny and misery in every line of his furry, powerful form.