Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  She was openly weeping by the time she was done, and all they could do was watch in stunned bemusement as he whispered softness into her hair.

  Other Destined Moons

  STARREN CAREFULLY helped her mother sit up and offered her some water from a pitcher nearby. Bethen accepted and then took the cup herself.

  “It’s a bright and shiny spring day, darling,” Bethen murmured. “Why aren’t you out in it? At least take a walk, right? Bring some of the ocean inside with you when you come back?”

  “It’s cold, Mum,” Starren demurred, although she loved days like this, when the sun cut like a razor and the wind chilled the flesh and soothed the sting in the same bluster.

  “I didn’t raise you to lie to me, sweetling.” Bethen smiled, and although she was in pain, there was enough light in the expression to brighten the room. “Besides, I want to knit, and I don’t want you to see how slow I am. It’s embarrassing.”

  Starren looked unhappily at the knitting in her mother’s hands. It was for Cwyn, and although the thickheaded clod meant well, Starren wished her brother had consulted her before he’d given Mum his answer.

  But how would she know that Cwyn would ask for socks?

  “But darling” Bethen had drawled, blinking at her son in bemusement, “socks wear out!”

  “That’s right, Mum,” Cwyn had answered smugly, “so you’ll have to be around to make me more.”

  Starren had wanted to bang her head against the wall. Socks? Socks took a week, at most. But Cwyn had a little bit of canniness in him. He started asking for tricksy things, cables, color changes, textural twists…. Bethen was currently working on the ugliest, most elaborate pair of socks ever knit under the three moons. They had taken her a month, and Cwyn kept requesting more changes as she went. Bethen had just turned the heel on the first sock, and to Starren’s intense frustration, the pattern was far too elaborate for her to rip out—not only would Bethen have noticed, but Starren wasn’t sure the socks could be recreated.

  Judging from how long the sock had taken Bethen so far, Starren guessed her mother had three, maybe four more weeks to live.

  Starren heard a noise outside, and she sought the window immediately. She must have failed at keeping disappointment from writing itself along the round lines of her face because Bethen patted her knee from her chair.

  “It’s only Cwyn, coming by for lunch. Stanny’s not due back for another week, you know that?”

  And where the hell was Stanny anyway? Resentfully, Starren looped another stitch and then jumped up as though stung. It was lunchtime? It was lunchtime, and she’d forgotten to fix lunch! Oh Triane’s pincushion, how could she have forgotten! Bethen could hardly eat anything solid these days, and the things that upset her stomach had unforeseen, disastrous consequences that both humiliated Bethen and upset Lane. It was lunchtime, and she hadn’t put soup on yet? She needed to boil the stock and…. Oh hells, hells, and seven stars of dark, the chicken was still in the cold box, and it needed at least an hour to cook and damn damn and damn, what had she been thinking!

  Starren didn’t realize she was muttering to herself until her mother called her name and asked for her hand.

  “It’s okay, Littlest,” Bethen murmured, and Starren tried not to squeeze the brittle, fragile fingers in her grasp. “I’m fine—some soft bread, maybe some juice. You’ll have the soup ready for this evening.”

  “You need to eat, Mum,” Starren murmured stubbornly, and her mother smiled.

  “I will, darling,” she said, that light-shadow smile back on her face, “but later.”

  Starren nodded, wondering how it was that her mother still seemed to be keeping everything together when she, herself, was falling apart. “I’m sorry I forgot, Mum.”

  A little wave of the hand, then, a shooing off of any fault on her daughter’s part. “You’re young. You should forget to make lunch. You should be out at the shore—make your brother take you.”

  “Mum….”

  “No, I’m serious. Take that fat baby of a stallion out. He misses people, since Torrant and Yarri have left.” Bethen tried not to let her voice fall. She missed Torrant and Yarri, she was the one lost without Roes and Aldam by her side, and she talked almost as much about Aylan as Starren did. But no, thought Starry bitterly, it was the damned horse that needed comforting.

  Suddenly, Starren couldn’t stand their little house, the boarded floors, the comfortable and worn furniture, the hand-stitched floral curtains, any of it, anymore.

  “Right, Mum,” she murmured, literally running for the kitchen to throw the chicken in the pot with some water from the sink. There was a terrible clatter, and she remembered a handful of garlic cloves and some salt, then she ran back into the living room, pausing as she went from the bright, west-facing kitchen into the darker sitting room. Her mother was hunched in her stuffed chair, eyes half closed in an effort to stay awake in the middle of the day, her fragile, hearty hands working painfully on her most impossible child’s most impossible request.

  Starren’s heart squeezed so tight in her chest, she wondered that the whole city of Eiran couldn’t hear it beating over the friendly roar of the ocean. Her breath wheezed to a whimper behind her tongue, and she had to clench her arms around her middle to keep in the awfulness of seeing her mother bent over her last token of love, alone.

  “They should be here,” she whispered over a throat that felt like a carrot through a cheese grater. “It shouldn’t be a choice between me and no one. You should have an entire family here. It’s not right. They should be here, Mama. They should be here!”

  Bethen’s vast, kind patience was behind the look she gave her youngest. “They will be,” she murmured, and something indefinable, something that had kept Starren quiet and patient and undemanding at her mother’s side, snapped, shattered, and disintegrated into gritty gray powder. An angry whimper broke from behind Starry’s pursed lips, and with quick strides she moved to her mother, pressed the active, fragile hands between her own, and kissed her hard on the cheek.

  “I love you, Mum. I’ve got to go.”

  AND WITH that, she whirled out of the house, barely remembering to grab Stanny’s thickest sweater and her own cloak from the mudroom as she ran out the door. She practically ploughed into Cwyn as she dashed across the porch.

  “Whoa—hold on a minute, lackwit!” He laughed—something he had done a little more often, if a little more wisely, since his return in the winter. “What’s the hurry?”

  “Mum’s dying,” Starry said roughly. “Isn’t that hurry enough?”

  “Today?” Cwyn asked with a smile, only partly kidding, and Starren shook herself a little, trying to articulate the storm pounding in her chest with the force of a freak wave.

  “Soon. Where’s Stanny? He said he was going to go get Roes, but how on earth can he wade through the damned snows fast enough to bring her back?”

  Cwyn looked at her bemusedly. “Don’t you know?”

  “Know what?” Starry looked back at him blankly, and Cwyn shook his head.

  “I forget—you’re the good girl who never listens in corners or does anything she isn’t told to do!”

  “Right—I rely on you to get into trouble for me, Terror. Now what in the name of the stars’ dark are you talking about?” Starry’s voice was sharp and grim and bitter—all the darkness she carefully monitored so her mother and father wouldn’t worry about her burned in her tone like flaring pitch. Cwyn looked at her carefully, surprised and a little relieved. He was so dark and bitter himself, he’d been wondering if he would have to hate his little sister for her damned serenity.

  Cwyn told her, and when he was done talking about punching a hole in the mountain that had dominated the little seaside town for their entire lives, she slapped him hard across the cheeks.

  Cwyn was so stunned he just stood there, touching what would be a faint bruise across his face the next morning.

  “He’s there?” Starren all but screeched. “He’s there?”
She turned and glared at the Hammer and the Anvil, knowing the shadow of that landmark was the last chill that left their hearts in the morning. “Four days? He’s four days away? I’ve been sitting here, dying in pieces, and the one person who could save my heart from screaming has been four days away for a month!”

  “Starren….” Cwyn grabbed her upper arms and shook her a little. “Starren—even if he was here, it would still hurt!”

  “What?”

  She’d been staring at the mountain, trying to fit her mind around the old family pattern. It had taken Torrant, Aldam, and Yarri nearly a month to get to Eiran—the family legend was very clear on that. They had been sick and damned near starving, and Torrant had carried Yarri part of the way under his snowcat’s skin. Everyone knew it—it had been a Goddess story at Samhain from her first year. It had taken a month.

  But today… today… if a person were whole and healthy, on a horse, not dodging pits or slogging through snow or going miles out of one’s way to avoid lakes and boulders…. Cwyn told her it would take three days to go under the mountain, and then one more to get through the slush to Dueance, the capital of Clough, the rotten core of all their sorrows.

  “Starry—do you think Aylan can take away what you’re feeling here? Because I thought all it would take was joining the fight, and I was wrong!”

  “They need to be here,” Starren murmured, her eyes still on the mountain as though it were now the source of all her pain. “They need to be here….” She didn’t realize her eyes were leaking tears.

  “They’re coming,” Cwyn told her, troubled by her distraction, by her intense regard of the mountain Stanny had spent four years punching a hole through so they might have a chance to bring their family under it now.

  Starren was the only Moon child with blue eyes, and when she turned them toward her brother they were wide, joyful, and gloriously mad.

  “I’ll help,” she said and tore off in the direction of the stables. Cwyn had just finished taking off his boots, and by the time he’d laced them up again and taken off after her, she had managed to saddle Courtland.

  He arrived just in time to open the stable door for her as she blew by him on the back of Torrant’s old stallion, running full-out, slamming him against the outside wall of the stables, and staring dazedly at the spots dancing in front of his eyes.

  By the time he could wobble to his own horse and saddle it, Lane had come racing to the stables, asking Cwyn what Starry thought she was doing, galloping through town as though the hells of the stars’ dark were on her heels.

  Cwyn told his father what he knew, and when he was done, Lane Moon met his youngest son’s eyes with a terrible realization.

  “You’ll never catch her,” he said miserably. “Courtland was running like it was his last chance to race—that old bastard can outrun everybody but Heartland. You know that.”

  “She’ll come to her senses, won’t she, Da?” Cwyn asked anxiously. He had a sudden vision of his sweet, pale little sister buried under the dark mountain for days, of the suffocation and the absolute, utter aloneness of the black. It would be like the hells of the stars’ dark, he thought with a terrible shiver. It would be every bad thing promised them by the false priests of Clough. “She’s got to come back….” He thought of her bright, sunshine hair and of her gloriously mad blue eyes. Oh Goddess. Bethen was all alone here. He couldn’t go get her youngest, her darling for her. What if they didn’t get back in time…. “Sweet Triane, Da, we can’t. We just can’t….”

  Lane shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. Eiran had sent most of their militia with Alec of Otham—there was no one free to chase her down. And Bethen… Bethen was so sick… so very close to bidding good-bye to her children and hello to the family Torrant still missed. Lane couldn’t send her one remaining child after their wayward, half-mad flying Star.

  “She’s heading for Stanny and Roes and Torrant—she’s heading for safety,” he said at last, “and maybe all this is for nothing, right? Hey—maybe she’ll be back in time to cook dinner.”

  But by the time they got back to the house, the chicken was done and falling off the bone. Evya got home in time to add some noodles, and they ate dinner in the sitting room, in silence. Only Bethen seemed serene, as she had been for her family all along.

  “She’ll be home in time or she won’t,” she murmured. “Evya, this is wonderful soup, darling—thank you so much for taking over.”

  “But, Bethie….” Lane was as upset as Cwyn had ever seen him. “Bethen, your children… they should be here.”

  “So Starren kept saying,” Bethen murmured. “But she is here—even this mad dash to go fetch Stanny and Roes—it’s all about her heart being here. And so is theirs. And so is Aldam’s and Aylan’s and Torrant’s and Yarri’s. You all act like this one month, this one week, is all that counts in a lifetime. But it’s not. Starren sat here for a winter and stared at that mountain that kept her from all of the people who gave her strength, and she never complained, not once. She sat here and watched… watched….”

  Bethen couldn’t find a word that encompassed the dreadful wasting of her body, the illness that had withered the spirit of the home she’d worked so hard to fill with life. “She’s watched me dying—and all she wants is her people to help her get through it.”

  “But, Bethie… she’s our baby.” Lane’s voice cracked. “She’s our baby, and she’s all alone out there.”

  “Stop.” Bethen’s voice did break now. “Dammit, Lane. Stop it. She’ll be fine. She has to be. This entire family has run off into the wild blue at one time or another and had the strength to pull through. Just because she’s our youngest and our—” Break, shatter, crack, sob. “—darling—” Deep breath. “—doesn’t mean she doesn’t have the strength to make it home. If nothing else, Aylan will bring her home.” Helpless tears ran down Bethen’s parchment cheeks, and she only waved off her husband’s gentle fingers as he tried to wipe them away.

  “Right, beloved,” Lane said reassuringly, although his own voice was nowhere near reassured. “Aylan will bring her home.”

  Evya sat quietly and thought of Stanny, and thought that if she had to wait for her beloved and his family, she was glad she wasn’t alone.

  Moons Collide

  STARREN’S MADNESS receded the second day after she left home, and she would rarely speak about her time under the mountain alone, even as she grew older and forgave herself for making the trip at all. But she would wake, cold and sweaty, from dreams the blackened color of burnt wood for the rest of her life. Her trip slogging through the spring slush in Clough had been like a trip through wonderland—though she was cold and hungry and saddle sore, any place with sunlight had the grace of joy.

  For all the bravery that pulled her by the heart through the tunnels under Hammer Pass, for all the forlorn courage that made her follow the river from up in the hills down to Dueance in the valley, she very likely would have been beaten or worse and left for dead within an hour of entering the city. The only thing that saved her was that Eljean had ditched the morning session at the Regents’ Hall. Instead, he was hurrying along the main marketplace toward the ghettoes, doing his part to complete the final, covert evacuation of the Goddess’s people to the old Moon Hold.

  It was her hair, he told Torrant over lunch, as they were watching a clean, shivering Starren devour her fourth bowl of steaming soup while wrapped in blankets at Trieste’s table. He had been hearing stories about the Moon family for coming on a year, and along with her sky blue eyes, Starren’s amazing hair had been the one detail that had been repeated with every family story in which she’d featured even a little.

  All that amazing hair…. Aylan would often use that line to close her story—either that or those beautiful blue eyes….

  Eljean glimpsed the hair, glinting under layers of grime in the sun, just as the band of brigands was closing in behind her, ready to seize her and haul her into the deserted ruins that the ghettoes were becoming.


  Later, he would wonder at the impulse to save her. He hadn’t even been sure it was Starren—didn’t, in fact, remember to ask her until it was over—but he had seen her, innocent, lost, clutching the reins of a fat, graying stallion and sobbing in the middle of the indifferent crowd that was the marketplace at Dueance. It had not occurred to him that he was a coward. The other young regents had been out, making the streets safe since Solstice—but not Eljean, not until this moment. In this moment it didn’t occur to him that he didn’t like pain. All that passed through his mind was that he was the only person who could possibly do this deed.

  The rest had been easy.

  He drew his sword, shouted, waved it around, and watched—mildly surprised and with his blood and adrenaline thundering in his ears—as the three grimy young men took to their heels, ignoring the horse they nearly spooked as they ran.

  Starren, turning as the young men took off and seeing what danger she had been in, launched herself at Eljean in a sobbing flurry of thank-yous, Courtland’s reins still clutched tightly in her hand. That unbidden protective instinct, the one that made Eljean comfort a frightened child during his first day at the clinic, had him gentling her and soothing her, calming her down. He detached her from his shoulders and took her hands, then stooped a little—only a little—she was much taller than Yarri and nearly taller than Torrant—to look into her pretty blue eyes. And that was when her name clicked onto his tongue.

  “Starren? Starren Moon?” It was fantastic—beyond imagining. But then, so were Stanny and Alec of Otham and a standing army until less than a week before.

  The smile that broke across her face reminded him of Stanny’s and Yarri’s in its shape, but of Torrant’s in its radiant completeness, its sweet, incorruptible belief.

  “You know them,” she said with absolute surety. “You know my….” A sudden doubt crossed her eyes, and she searched for the right names. Like Stanny, he thought fondly, she had never learned to lie. “My cousins! You know Yarri and…. El…. El….”