Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  Keon grinned—he and Yarri had been taking turns chiding Torrant about working too hard, and it was fun to have another target.

  “Piss off, little sister,” Aylan said mildly. “If you’d had the night we had, you’d be off your feed too.”

  “Sweet Dueant’s arse-kicking toe!” Torrant swore, surprising everybody. “I could have gone all day without you bringing that up!” He ducked as Yarri threw an apple slice at him.

  Aylan said “What?” and then remembered himself with a grimace, just as Yarri ripped into Torrant once again about telling her what had happened the night before, since he’d managed to neatly dodge the topic.

  “Oh, little sister,” Aylan said somberly, quieting down the raucous laughter of the entire group, “you do not know what you are asking, sweetness. It’s not that we want to keep secrets. It’s just that….” He and Torrant met bleak gazes across the room.

  “Last night was bad,” Torrant said, picking up the thread as he always did. They would have told the regents—there was no reason to keep it silent now. “Duan is dead, along with a number of other guards, and tonight promises to be a study in retribution.”

  “How did he die?” asked Aerk quietly in the sudden, tense silence. Torrant and Aylan shrugged.

  “By my hand,” Torrant sighed, and Aylan burst out, “That’s not fair—that’s not fair to yourself or to him!”

  In spite of the seriousness of the situation, Eljean found himself laughing—if nothing else, their disagreements were entertaining. “Oh come—you must tell us what happened!”

  Torrant wrinkled his nose in Aylan’s direction. “It was really like we were being spared,” he said at last. “Like the Goddess has some amazingly dire choices coming down the road, and she let us off the hook with these two so the next wouldn’t be so hard.”

  With that, he outlined the events of the night before—although Aylan spoke up to clarify that Duan really had taken his own life, no matter how inadvertently—and as he spoke, he watched Yarri grow wide-eyed and somber at the details.

  “Why would Duan do that?” she asked when Torrant was done. “Why would he… profane his people that way?”

  The rest of the regents winced, but they were circled behind her on the floor, and she couldn’t see. Torrant said, “He had cause, Yar—but now that everyone’s up on events, I think we need to think about getting you home.”

  Conscious of being manipulated, Yarri stood, regarding Torrant evenly from bright brown eyes. “Excellent,” she said sweetly, “but while you’re out prowling the streets for mice tonight, beloved, don’t think I’m not going to be sniffing out some things on my own.”

  And with that, she made her purposeful, no-nonsense way to the bedroom to change.

  Torrant scrubbed his face with his hands, looking about at nobody in particular. “I’d give anything for her not to hear that particular story,” he said, mostly to himself.

  “Which part?” Marv asked curiously, looking sideways at Eljean, who flushed.

  “That part she knows,” Torrant replied dryly, “if not by name. But the whole of it….” He shook his head and sighed again. “There are some things I wish she never need know.”

  “Fat chance!” Aylan snorted, and Torrant gave him a dark look.

  “Are we really all going to dinner?” he asked. “I don’t want to impose on Trieste, you know.”

  “Oh, relax!” Aylan smiled, a thing that made all the regents decidedly uneasy. “It’s not like you eat anyway!”

  Torrant laughed, and his smile was brilliant and breathtaking. As he stood to change his shirt and get his cloak from the bathroom, the rest of the regents exchanged looks of hope instead of worry. Suddenly, to a one, they all adored Yarrow Moon with the fierceness of a snowcat’s love for its cub, and they looked forward to dinner far more than they had.

  YARRI DIDN’T realize it, but her arrival in Dueance was a social event of epic proportions.

  Ellyot Moon had arrived to much shock and little fanfare and then proceeded to spend all his time working. It had been a disappointment. He showed up to no dances, attended no theatre events, and had accepted only one dinner invitation.

  After the death of Djali Rath, society’s hope that he would be a new person of interest in Clough had died a swifter, even more brutal death.

  But Yarrow Moon and her elegant, interesting friend Trieste, Queen of Otham, were women. As such, they were not expected to know anything about politics, and they were certainly not expected to have anything important to do. They had one duty—to visit and to participate in the complicated, feline hierarchy that occupied the wives, sisters, and daughters of the regents.

  The bell ending curfew had barely rung when invitations and cards began pouring in. Trieste fielded the first onslaught, brought in by her rather confused steward, who was used to his queen issuing invitations instead of the other way around.

  “You’re the Queen of Otham!” the poor man protested, and Trieste grinned at him, her feet tucked under her bottom as she readied her quill at her portable writing desk.

  “Apparently, that makes me an oddity, but doesn’t really give me any rank,” she returned, her eyes dancing. She was grateful that the last five years of not taking herself seriously as Queen of Otham were finally paying off.

  The valet (who had left a wife and two children to come serve Trieste voluntarily, because she was his queen, and the whole family loved her) sniffed unhappily. The idea of anyone not valuing Trieste as all of Otham did was upsetting. The idea of her being insulted was infuriating.

  “Relax, Suse!” Trieste chided, resisting the urge to ruffle the mass of dark curly hair on the young man’s head. “It will be vicious and backbiting and all of the horrible things that we managed to weed out of Otham, except this time Yarri will be there to help. We have each other’s backs, as the men say, right?”

  Suse smiled radiantly—he had adored Yarri since she arrived at Wrinkle Creek on Trieste’s heels. It was hard not to love a woman who could help bridle a horse, load the wagon, cook dinner, and then allow herself (unwillingly!) to be dressed like a princess and taken to a ball. If Yarri and Trieste were together, nobody would dare insult the two of them.

  The trick would be getting Yarri to see it that optimistically.

  Hoping the crowd of young men around the medium-sized banquet table would help Yarri keep her temper, Trieste introduced the subject then.

  “We have to visit who? Why?” Yarri asked, all surprise, through a mouthful of potatoes.

  “Well, I guess we have to visit all of them,” Trieste said thoughtfully. “It’s not like you’re at home, where you have the orphanage to occupy your time. But it’s important that we keep up these appearances.”

  “And helpful too!” Torrant said. Yarri looked dourly at him, and he shrugged. “There were not nearly as many guards out last night as there could have been—because Minero’s wife and daughter complained. You remember—if Aunt Bethen wanted something from the council and didn’t want to put up with Anse, she’d ask Uncle Lane to bring it up. Of course, most of the time she’d do it herself, but she couldn’t, not here. Not since Rath’s made it illegal for women to be regents. But that doesn’t mean the women don’t have a way to have their opinion voiced. You two go and get more of the wives and the daughters on our side, and their husbands will be happier to vote with us on the floor.”

  Yarri brightened at the prospect of helping and took another bite of potatoes. When she was done swallowing, she said, “So, who are we going to visit first?”

  Trieste blinked and called up the name. “Aleta Moss and her daughter…. I forgot her name.”

  Aylan, who was plowing his way through his second plate of food, dropped his fork and looked uncomfortably at the food left on his plate. “Essa,” he said into the sudden silence. “Her name is Essa, and I’d really rather you didn’t make that call.”

  Torrant swore, and Aerk looked at him oddly. “Essa Moss—is that the same Essa who started the purge
about two years ago?”

  “That’s the one,” Torrant affirmed, casting a sideways glance at Aylan’s blotchy, pale/red countenance.

  “The purge?” Jino asked. “Isn’t that when the orgies stopped?”

  “Orgies?” Cwyn perked up from his side of the table. He’d greeted Torrant and Aylan with bone-crushing embraces but had been disturbingly quiet since. He kept looking at Torrant speculatively, and Torrant dreaded what the precocious young man would ask of him next.

  “Don’t look at me—” Keon grinned. “—the purge brought them to a halt right before I was about to be invited!”

  “Oh gods,” Aylan muttered, going completely pale, “I’d forgotten about that. Jarrid had just put you on his invitation list, hadn’t he?”

  “You were there?” Keon asked, and suddenly everyone at the table was looking expectantly at Aylan, who himself was looking as though he’d rather be drinking tea with Rath himself.

  “It’s not something he likes to discuss,” Torrant said firmly, throwing himself in front of Aylan socially as he had been physically during the last months. At that particular moment the evening bell rang, signifying the guards’ change of shifts, and Torrant took that opportunity to duck out of the subject for the time being.

  “We have to go,” he said, standing. Time stopped for them all as he bent to kiss Yarri on the cheek and nuzzle her ear a little, and then he was stepping away from the table.

  “You’ve hardly touched your food!” Trieste exclaimed, ignoring his plea for them all to stay seated and standing to meet him. “How do you expect to go out and… and….”

  “Adventure?” Cwyn supplied excitedly from his end of the table.

  “It’s a little more difficult than adventure!” Torrant returned good-naturedly, striving to get out of the room before Yarri picked up on the food thing. “But you can come see for yourself next rest day—we need help in the clinic.”

  “What, I can’t do ‘night work’?” Cwyn demanded. At the same time, Trieste said, “Don’t think you can get out of it that easily!”

  “No and yes!” Torrant answered cheekily, and Aylan met him at the doorway. He was almost clear when Trieste and Yarri stood up and said, “We’ll walk you out!”

  “Not a word!” he muttered to Aylan, and Aylan laughed in spite of himself.

  “You two!” Trieste said imperiously as they neared the front door. “You, Torrant, are going to make your way here for dinner an hour after the session lets out. Aylan, you too—I don’t care where else your day may take you. I know you’ve been working in the ghettoes, and I might even help you on some days, but as of right now, you’ll spend two hours a day here, where we can see you eat, watch you relax, and check on your hurts from the night before. Is that understood?”

  “Oueant’s heartburn, Trieste!” Torrant protested. “We’ve managed to survive this long without you mothering over us. Why do we need a wet nurse now?”

  “I’m not a wet nurse,” Trieste shot back. “I’m the Queen of Oueant-bleeding Otham. That’s what I am, and Torrant, if you looked this bad after stumbling down Hammer Pass, I’m surprised they didn’t give you up for dead!”

  Aylan muffled a snort of laughter, which was a mistake, because it brought Trieste rounding in on him. “And you—you put on a good show and all, eating like a pig in slop, but I’m not buying it for a minute. You haven’t weighed this little since you were eleven years old—and you were a runty little rotter then, so that’s not saying much!”

  “Runty!” Aylan protested, trying to keep a straight face and failing.

  “Don’t you laugh at me, Aylan Moon,” Trieste snapped back seriously. “You two take risks every night—don’t think I don’t know that. We can’t make you stop doing it. Apparently it comes with your purpose here, and if Yarri can live with it, then I must. But if you’re not even going to bother to take care of yourselves, I will call my husband’s guard in here and have them box you up like big dumb animals and ship you home, cursing my name through the air holes!”

  “Oooh, good one!” Yarri praised. She was standing next to the Queen of Otham, listening with appreciation.

  “It was one of yours,” Trieste acknowledged modestly. “You used it on the road.”

  Torrant was holding his hands out in placation, and Aylan was hiding behind him. “We will try… try,” he emphasized, when both women looked as though they might argue, “to be here four nights a week.” He braced himself, feet apart, and took on a firm expression that looked, for all the world, like Lane Moon on the few occasions he’d ever been forced to put his foot down. “We can’t promise more than that, Trieste. Yarri,” he began warningly because she had opened her mouth as well, “you need to promise me something in return.”

  “What?” Yarri asked warily.

  Torrant flushed and moved nearer. “No more visits like last night’s unless you talk to me first,” he said firmly.

  “Torrant!”

  “I’m serious—they have virginity laws here. I would be put to death cleanly, if we were ever caught, but you….” He shuddered. A month ago, a regent’s niece had been stoned to death in front of a jeering crowd. Torrant would carry the picture of her broken body in his nightmares. “Please, beloved. Please. We will meet—I’m not daft enough to believe that either one of us won’t try for it. But please be careful. Please, let’s plan and not surprise. Rath knocked on my door not three weeks ago—the secretary general’s been there too. There are demons in every corner here. I don’t want one of them to bite you.”

  “I’ll consider it,” she said softly. “It would, perhaps, be easier to keep me from acting rashly if I were to see you more nights than not.”

  Torrant’s upper lip began a slow curl, and the grooves in his cheeks deepened, revealing dimples. “You and Trieste have been giving lessons,” he said with delight, “but now we really have to go.”

  “Wait,” Trieste ordered. “Aylan, will you be staying here tonight, at least?”

  Aylan grimaced. “Not tonight, Spots. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the place to flop and all, but the regents’ flat is closer to the ghettoes. If Yarri’s not going to be bunking with Torrant, I’d rather sleep there, if you don’t mind.”

  Trieste blew out a breath. He was right, and she knew it, but she was having a terrible time living with the idea that she couldn’t keep the two of them safe now that she was in the same city with them. Dammit—they were her family!

  “Well, then,” she said at last, leaning forward and giving her one-time enemy a kiss on the cheek, “you two take care of each other, right?”

  “It’s what we do best,” Torrant replied with a bow, and then he whirled and was gone, Aylan at his heels.

  “Mmm….” Trieste was not entirely pleased with how that had gone. She had gotten very used to giving orders in the past five years and was not pleased to see that those two were still not wonderful at taking them.

  “They are very obstinate, aren’t they?” Yarri said thoughtfully.

  “And you’re not nearly as violent about it as I would have thought.” Trieste regarded her one-time rival with narrowed eyes, and Yarri’s smile made her want to back up a step.

  “Oh, but, my Queen, we have guests for dinner—there’s so much more conversation to be had this night, isn’t there?”

  And instead of wanting to back up, Trieste found herself smiling in kind.

  The Goddess Orbit

  TORRANT AND Aylan were trotting through the alleyways of the richer quarter of town—the place where the regents’ families resided during the winter. After making the observation that there was less piss on the walls and more food in the trash in the regents’ alleys than there was in the ghettoes, Aylan said, “Well, that went better than I expected,” before pausing to put his customary kerchief over his face to disguise his features and his bright, curly hair.

  Torrant laughed quietly and shook his tufted ears out of his hood. “If you think that’s over, you haven’t been watching the sam
e girls grow.”

  Aylan flicked a startled eye through his black mask. “What can they do about it?”

  A tiny scream echoed from across the river, followed by frantic shouts and the jeering of masculine voices. Torrant broke into a trot and muttered, “Brother, the mind trembles,” before hauling into a full-out run.

  BEFORE ELLYOT Moon had arrived in Dueance, Keon had been considered the best storyteller of the group, and as Trieste and Yarri walked back into the dining room, he had become the hub of the wheel again, although he looked decidedly less comfortable now than he had before the advent of Ellyot Moon.

  “Beyond that they’re dead. I really don’t know anything,” he was protesting. “I watched Aleta and Essa whip the crowd into a killing frenzy from my old room. The girl’s lover got up, denounced Brina and her entire family, and they screamed until our eardrums bled. The entire benighted riot stormed the Troy home, looking for the ‘den of iniquity,’ but from what I heard, all they found was an empty room and two bodies. After that, the purge was on—anyone they named was hunted down. Not that they found more than one or two of them. Most of the others had been tipped off. But they weren’t my crowd, really. Although, according to Aylan, they could have been!” Keon shook his head in disbelief—either for his narrow miss or his narrow hit, they couldn’t tell. “And I have no idea how Aylan would even know!”

  “I would,” Yarri said soberly as she sat down at her plate, not necessarily thinking about how much this information would mean to the people who had been following Aylan and Torrant for months. Her food was extremely unappetizing, she realized, and she had a sudden insight as to why Torrant was so thin.

  She looked up from the congealed pork chop, saw that all eyes were on her, and an evil little smile graced her face. “Do you all want to know?” she asked innocently. “You would need to be sensitive around Aylan, of course—this almost killed him. But you’ve all put a great deal on the line for the two of them—maybe it’s important for you to know why they’re so dedicated.”