Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “Mmm….” Grand looked at the sky and frowned. “When Triane rises—not too long now. We’ve got about fifteen minutes or so.”

  Fifteen minutes. Aylan blanched. “Oh gods….” He flung himself up on his horse, grabbing Heartland’s reins in the same motion.

  “Cwyn—you put him on the back of your horse and ride west as fast as you can.”

  “West? But we were going back to the—”

  “There’s no cover there. In an hour, if we ride hard, we should end up in the trees, and we’ll be able to put in for the rest of the night. When this goes down, they’re going to be looking for us… and it’s going down in a few heartbeats, so you two get gone, right?”

  Cwyn’s eyes opened and closed slowly, followed by his mouth, as the suddenness of the danger seeped in through his own self-involvement. “They’ll kill him too, won’t they?” he asked, feeling thick.

  “Gods, little man, what did you think we were doing out here?” Aylan asked harshly, “Now go!”

  Cwyn may have been self-absorbed, but he wasn’t stupid. He and Grand Wind were pounding through the trees on the back of one of Courtland’s fastest offspring before he realized that Aylan had returned to the little clearing, some part of their strategy clearly occurring to him that he’d almost forgotten.

  Oh gods…. Dueant’s headache, Oueant’s dysentery, Triane’s cramps… the fuse. They couldn’t light the fuse from the granite slab. The entire plan depended on Aylan staying in the clearing and lighting the fuse, but he couldn’t do that with Torrant on top of the kiln floor, playing with the damned powder.

  And there would be guards there, in… how long? Cwyn resumed his gallop and prayed.

  Aylan didn’t even spare a moment for him as he galloped away. Instead, he started searching for the little trail of gunpowder, then looked at the horizon, trying to determine where Triane would rise and when….

  Shite. Holy Triane mother of shite, there She was!

  Aylan swung off his horse and fumbled in his pocket for the flint, praying as he had never prayed before, and then he found the line of black powder as the fuse.

  He struck the flint experimentally, making sure it would spark, and then took a deep breath and bellowed, “Triane’s Son, clear!”

  Torrant was so shocked his voice cracked an octave as he shouted back “What!”

  “Enemies, dammit. Clear!”

  There was only a heartbeat of uncertainty, although Aylan must have aged a year in it.

  “Strike, dammit, strike!” And Aylan had to trust that Torrant was clear.

  The flint hit with a clear spark, and in a chilled breath, the fuse sputtered its lightning way along the ground toward the giant kiln of the Goddess’s children. Aylan mounted his poor, confused horse, grabbed Heartland’s reins one more time, and rode for all he was worth.

  The pounding of the bloody great horses practically jarred his teeth loose, and it was a good thing Heartland was as happy to run as he was to sit munching grass. But both the horses were used to quick getaways, and neither of them were carrying a double burden, so Aylan was not surprised to catch up with Cwyn after they cleared the stand of trees below the construction. Cwyn, perched on his stirrups and looking under his arm, suddenly sat down and turned his entire body, in spite of the awkwardness on the back of a fully galloping horse, and Aylan had to look behind him to see what shocked Cwyn so badly.

  The snowcat was gaining on them.

  In strides that seemed acres, not feet, the man-sized cat was heaving, bunching his muscles, digging in his haunches, bounding toward them, closing, closing….

  The concussion of the hellfire-orange explosion behind them sent the cat rolling, almost unseated Cwyn’s terrified passenger, and made Aylan look forward instead of backward. There was another, smaller explosion, then a series of them. The noise was deafening, and the shock of them sent cold fear from Aylan’s stomach to his spine, in spite of the heat at his back.

  When he looked back again, Torrant had nearly caught up and was crouching for a leap that would have felled the horse if he was hunting. He coiled, bunched, and sprang, his shape morphing fluidly into a man’s in midair, as he landed smoothly on Heartland and took the reins.

  Aylan looked at him and shook his head, shooting a relieved grin because they were all alive, and Cwyn looked back and shouted, “Nice, cousin, very nice!”

  Another concussion blew in the chaos behind them, and a flaming granite rock fell from the sky and knocked Aylan off his horse.

  He rolled, then came up, not bothering to swear at his own pain because he knew it wasn’t his for long.

  “Torrant!”

  Torrant slumped over his saddle and was fighting for breath, trying not to scream.

  “You all right?” Torrant gasped, as his horse danced in place, too frightened to stand still, especially not when Torrant was too weak to hold him.

  “I’m fine—you….” Aylan clutched his horse’s reins and watched helplessly as Torrant threatened to fall off the creaking leather saddle.

  “Get back on. Let’s go. We’ve got an hour before we hit the woods….” A ripping groan shook Torrant, and he sat up using what seemed to be will alone.

  Cwyn had turned around in confusion and was sputtering, “But… but it hit Aylan….”

  “Go!” Torrant commanded, and as always, Aylan was helpless to resist.

  The next hour was torturous. Aylan’s whole shoulder felt the pressure from the wound that wasn’t there, and when he put up his hand to his cloak, he felt two large holes, one in back and one in front, knitting up slowly as Torrant continually both slumped and sat up on his horse.

  They were within sight of the tree line when Torrant toppled off Heartland’s back without even a whimper. Aylan shooed Cwyn onward and jumped to Torrant’s side.

  “Change,” he commanded harshly, feeling the blood soaking through the shirt underneath Torrant’s unblemished cloak. “Change, and it will heal.”

  “Absolutely, brother,” Torrant responded dryly. “Where do you suggest I get the strength?”

  “Your bloody toes, if you have to—you’re not going to just lay here and….”

  “Don’t say it!” Torrant almost laughed, even though his head was pillowed on Aylan’s lap. “I’m not that bad off, really. It passed through—it just needs to stop bleeding, that’s all. Here….”

  He sat up then and unclasped his cloak so he could reach his shirt, before jerking it sharply and ripping it in half. Aylan helped him shrug off both sides, and at Torrant’s direction, he folded the clean side up and made a pad over the shoulder, tying it off with strips of the hem.

  “There….” Torrant grunted, sat up, and looked levelly at Aylan for some help to stand. Aylan didn’t take his offered hand—instead he got behind Torrant, bent over, and literally hauled him up from the waist. Torrant wobbled for a moment, reached out, grabbed the horse, and leaned across the saddle. Aylan swore and pushed his friend up until he was sitting on the animal properly. After remounting himself, together they broke into a painful canter. Aylan felt a dagger of anxiety in his stomach with every jounce of the horse, every bump in the road, and for an eternity, a chilly eternity of listening to Torrant’s teeth chattering and his breathing labor past the pain, they made their way toward the line of oak trees that marked the changing topography of Clough.

  It wasn’t until they were almost there that Aylan thought to ask about pursuers.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Torrant rasped. “They started closing in at your shout, but I’d been in their sights for a few moments. I didn’t know how to tell you to go, and then I heard you….”

  “Bloody wonderful for me,” Aylan muttered. “My timing’s finally on.”

  Torrant’s rusty chuckle was almost reassuring as they looked for signs of Cwyn and his reluctant passenger.

  Moons Maturing

  CWYN PACED in the limited span of three oak trees, huddled together for secret reasons of their own, and asked himself how everything had gone
so wrong so quickly.

  Grand Wind was not happy at all to be by his side.

  “I can’t go home?” he asked for the fifty-eleventh time, and Cwyn stopped his pacing and spared a moment for the young man whose life he had changed in one ill-advised tumble.

  “Look—I don’t know what you want me to say!” Cwyn threw up his hands, scanning the horizon and breathing a sigh of relief when he saw two horses at an easy canter heading in their direction. The rider on the biggest horse was slumping in the saddle but obviously still controlling the reins.

  “I want you to say that it didn’t happen!” Grand replied bitterly. “I want you to tell me that I can stay in the Dueance Guard and let my mum keep her home. I want you to tell me that I can still marry a nice girl and settle down and have children, and that I’m not a filthy sodomite for the rest of my life!”

  “Auugh!” Cwyn looked a little desperately to where Torrant and Aylan were slowly cantering toward them. Torrant didn’t look so good in his seat on the saddle, and he still couldn’t figure out how Aylan had been knocked off his horse but Torrant was the one who’d been wounded. “There’s no law that says you can’t marry a nice girl and squirt out babies like watermelon seeds, Grand. All that happened tonight was you got to see what the other side of the fence was all about, you see?”

  “But what about Mum? Why can’t I see my mum?”

  “Because life’s not fair!” Cwyn retorted, running his hands through his wild brown hair. “Because Mums don’t always understand what their boys are all about, and the really spiffing ones, the ones that know everything and love you anyway, well, they don’t always get to stay, now do they? Sometimes they get sick, and they tell you that it’s the ways of the gods or some shite like that, and the solid truth is that the gods don’t give a shite, and life isn’t fair!” Cwyn lowered his voice and rubbed a shaking hand over his face as he peered into the darkness, relieved that they were getting closer and that Torrant hadn’t fallen off the horse and died.

  He had a sudden, random memory of Torrant and Aylan, one summer, playing tag with him and Starren, Stanny, and Yarri, and how his mum and dad had snuck into the water behind him, grabbed his foot, and dunked him when he’d been least expecting it. They had all laughed a lot, even Roes and Aldam, who had been sitting at the river’s edge and dangling their feet in the shallows—because he’d been the champion dunker of the family. He could still see them, laughing boys, tight as any brothers, with their heads tilted back and their teeth straight and white, and as beautiful as anything he’d ever seen, including his first woman, including his first man. They had been handsome, strong, and beautiful, and now they looked lean, dangerous, and frightening. And still, still, Aylan hadn’t yelled at him for fooling around in the woods on this terrible, chill night where even the moonlight cut like diamonds.

  He became aware that in the silence of their little glen, his new lover was crying softly, and he sighed. His mum would have understood about the sex, he thought rightly, but she would never forgive him for making the poor kid cry.

  “I’m sorry,” he apologized miserably. “I really am. I had a choice between bonking you on the back of the head or kissing you senseless. And I was still planning on knocking you on the back of the head, except….”

  “Except I kissed back” came the clogged reply.

  “That you did, boyo.” Cwyn almost laughed. “And you’re going to have to live with it. But don’t worry about your mum getting put out of her house, right? We’ll stow you somewhere safe—somewhere you can make a difference, but where no one will care who you shagged on a wild Samhain, right? But we’ll get word to your mum, and money’s not a problem; we’ve got a bit. And maybe, maybe when all this is over, you can go back to Dueance and find that girl, right?”

  “Right,” Grand said listlessly. He was crouched on the frosting ground, and he wiped his hands on his sweaty breeches.

  Cwyn came next to him and squeezed his shoulder. “Now come on—wouldn’t you rather know that the part of you is in there? You know, the part that just went down on your knees for me and never looked back? Wouldn’t you rather know that it gave you joy?”

  “No,” Grand whispered, his eyes glazed with tears and depression. “I’d rather not know anything of the sort. I was happy with my future as I saw it. What right did you have to come and rip that away?”

  Cwyn sighed and heard the clopping of the horses. “None at all, I guess,” he answered before stepping out of the clearing and getting Aylan’s attention.

  Aylan slid off his horse and took Heartland’s reins from Torrant, then gave both sets of reins to Cwyn as the horses came to a stop inside the clearing. “There’s a brush in my saddle,” he ordered. “Give them some water and groom them. Have your friend help you—I’ll get out the bedroll and get Triane’s Son situated.”

  “Is he going to be all right?” Cwyn asked, worry cracking his voice. Damn it, hadn’t it changed fully a few years back? No matter.

  Aylan leaned his pale, clammy forehead against Torrant’s thigh as he rested in the saddle. “I’ll be fine, Cwyn,” Torrant reassured faintly. “Really. I need a little sleep, some food and water, and then I’ll change into the snowcat, and the wound will close up. I should have changed back there, only….”

  “We were running, and you had the horses to deal with, and you thought you’d be a bloody hero,” Aylan snapped without heat, moving so his cheek rested on Torrant’s thigh. Torrant’s hand, long-fingered, kind, poetic, and healing, rested in Aylan’s bright hair for a moment.

  “Everything except the hero part,” Torrant smiled weakly, “but I am going to need to get off this damned horse….”

  Cwyn and Aylan set to work, and in short order Torrant was lying bare-chested on his bedroll, and Aylan was searching through the saddlebags, swearing. “Dammit, Cwyn, I thought I told you to pack extra blankets!”

  “I did—I gave them to Grand….”

  Without bothering to reply, Aylan stalked over to their reluctant companion and ripped the blankets off his shoulders. He ignored his startled protest and brought them to where Torrant was lying, trying to sip from the canteen and nibble on some dried meat.

  Torrant smiled, although he didn’t open his eyes. “That wasn’t nice,” he reprimanded, “and give me a few moments, and it will be unnecessary. I’ll spend my night as the snowcat, and you get a fur coat as a cover.”

  “I can’t believe that damn rock—it came out of nowhere!”

  “Relax, brother,” Torrant counseled. “It would have killed you. I promise I’ll live.”

  Aylan sat with a tortured grunt. “I hate this.”

  “Well, it’s gotten us this far—don’t knock it until we’re done and out of town.”

  He looked so pale against the shadows, eyes closed in the moonlight, chest moving deliberately up and down. Aylan took his hand and started to talk about the regents’ floor, just to take his mind off of the terrible wound in his shoulder, the one that started flooding blood the moment the flaming bit of shrapnel had passed through Aylan’s body.

  “We’re close, you think?” he asked, stroking Torrant’s hand.

  “We’re getting there. We got our Samhain bonfire while they were having their damned hero’s parade. If we can fight the backlash from this, we might get Solstice. More and more of the regents are conceding the obvious. Fewer of them are getting hung up on stupid questions like ‘Do you have proof?’ when it’s something a dead bat could see. It’s slow, but change is coming….”

  Torrant’s voice was drifting off, and Aylan thought the time had come. Reluctantly, he reached over and tilted the water to give Torrant a hearty, sputtering swig.

  “Are you ready, brother?” he asked quietly.

  “As I’ll ever be….” And with that, the change started rippling up Torrant’s body at a fraction of its usual speed.

  As his shoulder started to knit, slowly, ever so slowly, his roars bounced off the oak-dotted foothills, scaring crows from meadows of gra
in nearby.

  CWYN TOOK the first watch, while Aylan huddled next to the snowcat just to monitor Torrant’s labored breathing and the amount of blood the wound continued to ooze. They gave the extra blankets to Grand and huddled on the other two bedrolls, then traded off midway through the night. By then, the shaking in Cwyn’s hands from hearing a creature in so much pain had eased up a little, and he could scratch the great cat behind the ears like he had as a boy.

  Cwyn had to stifle a laugh when the snowcat gave him a lazy tongue bath as he was settling down to sleep, but he didn’t tell Torrant to stop it. The action was comforting, like his mother’s brief, hard kisses on the cheek when he’d done something heinous and she was letting him know that she might be mad, but she still loved him.

  Aylan awakened him as the sky lightened, and Cwyn hauled a protesting Grand behind him, feeding the boy dried fruit and a chunk of his bread as they went.

  “Say hullo to Roes and Aldam for us,” Aylan said wistfully. Knowing how close they were and not having time to visit ached like a wound that wouldn’t close. “Tell Aldam not to worry too much—he’ll only build something, and I don’t know how much of that lumber is sound.”

  Cwyn nodded and went to clap Aylan’s shoulder from the top of the horse when he saw the new, ugly addition to Aylan’s battered cloak. His eyes met Aylan’s with dawning horror, and Aylan grimaced and turned away.

  “It wasn’t my idea,” Aylan said roughly, and Cwyn found he was dashing at his burning eyes.

  “Does Yarri know?” Oh damn, his nose was starting to run in the gods-cursed cold.

  Aylan shook his head. “So many other things to tell her,” he said bitterly. “Always something more important to talk about than himself, right?”

  “Da loves you more than me. You know that, right?” Cwyn asked, not sure what was in his voice or riding his mind to say such a thing.