Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  Eljean took pity on her and whispered in her ear, “Torrant, my lady. Yes, I know them. But let’s get you to safety first, shall we?”

  “And a bath,” she begged.

  Eljean laughed, dazed a little at the wonder of this young woman clinging to his arm as though he were a hero from one of Torrant’s Goddess stories. “And a bath,” he affirmed.

  “And Aylan?” she asked hopefully, and Eljean had a sudden vision of what the sour, taciturn Aylan would become in the face of this sunshine sweetness.

  “Oh, absolutely!” he said, chortling a little. “We couldn’t possibly leave him out.”

  To her credit, Yarri waited until Starren was in the bath and they were working to get her hair clean before laying siege to her with questions.

  “Gods, Littlest!” Yarri massaged some more soap into her hair, as well as a concoction made with avocado, mayonnaise, and orange rind that would ease up the snarls. “What possessed you to go under that mountain by yourself? You must have been alone and cold and hungry.”

  “I just….” Starren shivered and looked forlornly into the cocoa Suse had brought her that was cooling rapidly on the wooden shelf beside the tub. “I wasn’t hungry,” she murmured. “There were food packets left every so many miles down the passageway, with the torches.” Her shivers worsened. “Every so often, the torches were burnt down….”

  Mindless of the water, Yarri reached around her cousin’s back and pulled Starren, wet, soapy hair and all, back to her chest. “Don’t you fret, Starry, my darling. You won’t have to go that way without light again.”

  “It’s not the darkness,” Starren whispered. “It’s the people. That’s why I left. Everybody was gone… and then… in the mountain… there was nobody….” A sob shook her body, and another, and then they were ruthlessly squashed, and the emotions that broke in Starren’s voice were squashed flat and toneless as well. “And Mama’s going to the stars’ dark, and nobody will be there to light the way….”

  Oh gods…. Yarri wanted to hit something, because she was going to cry, dammit, she was going to cry, and the way her body had been working, it wasn’t going to let her stop. “She won’t be alone, Littlest,” she choked into Starren’s ear. “Don’t forget, there’s my mama, and Torrant’s mama, and my daddy, and my brothers… and her mama and daddy. There will be plenty of people to light her way like torches when she makes that journey….”

  “But someone should see her off,” Starry protested, and the seething anger under that quiet voice almost took Yarri’s legs out from under her.

  Instead, she wiped her cheek on the shoulder of her dress. “You silly girl—where do you think Stanny is? You probably passed him—and Roes, you lackwit!—on the path. They left yesterday morning with the first batch of Goddess folk.”

  “Left?” repeated Starren faintly. “Then why are you here still?”

  “We need to get the rest of the folk out of the city,” Yarri told her carefully, not sure how much her cousin understood about the situation and not wanting to frighten her. “Rath isn’t…. He’s not acting rationally. He doesn’t know about Alec’s forces camped in the trees and the hills on all sides. After carving a hole through the mountain, tunneling under the walls to Aylan’s flat in the ghettoes was no big feat, right? So we’re moving the Goddess’s folk outside the city gates, and from there to Moon Hold, and from there, if they want to go….”

  “Through the mountain…,” Starren said dreamily. A little bit of common sense asserted itself for a moment. “But Eiran, I’ve heard the talk. Eiran can’t take an entire city.”

  “Eiran won’t have to—not for long. Once the folk are out of his reach, Alec’s going to demand a new leader.”

  Yarri busied herself then with rinsing Starren’s hair, wanting to get her young cousin out of the water and into some dry clothes as soon as possible. Seeing Eljean walk through the door with an exhausted, hysterical Starren on his arm made Yarri realize for the first time exactly what Torrant had felt when he’d seen her in Clough. Never had such a packet of welcome and unwelcome news been tied with the selfsame string.

  The guards hadn’t been confining their activities to the ghettoes since Stanny arrived, but they weren’t the only problem. The problem was, since the guards had been spending all their time monitoring a small quarter of the city, thieves, cutthroats, and worse had come to believe the city was theirs. When the criminal underclass realized that fewer and fewer people were living in the ghettoes, they set up shop there themselves and spent much of their time terrorizing the rest of the city.

  Torrant and Aylan, and then Aerk, Keon, Marv, and Jino had been occupied in the evening hours, either keeping taverns and student study halls and musician’s haunts from being raided, or else keeping homes from being invaded, or the unwary or just plain unlucky from losing their goods or their bodies or their lives to the criminals who had no other law to keep them in check. Sometime between Solstice and the beginning of spring, all their swords had been blooded and their flesh bloodied, and Yarri and Trieste had become proficient at doctoring small wounds. Since Stanny’s arrival, the wounds had grown larger, and their number had doubled.

  Eljean had been the exception because as the least able with a sword, he’d been the natural choice to keep the steady, underground stream of ghetto dwellers running from their various knotholes in the ghettoes to Aylan’s decaying flat. From there they could only follow the tunnel to emerge, surrounded by Eiran’s militia—Torrant had sent word to have as many female soldiers or white-streaked gifted around the exit tunnel as possible—and escorted to Moon Hold. Either way, Eljean’s one job when they weren’t in the Regents’ Hall had been to keep that stream moving. It was where he’d been heading when he’d seen Starren.

  It was a risky enough job, Torrant had cautioned, and Yarri, knowing of their history together, hadn’t begrudged Eljean the worry one bit.

  Don’t stop and talk, don’t flirt with Zhane—you two need to get those folks off as soon as possible. Remember the blankets—they’re all over Aylan’s flat—and Yarri and Trieste have provided poppets for the little ones. But don’t be a hero, Eljean. You’re one of the folk we’re trying to save, right?

  Eljean had flushed then, mortified that Yarri should hear him referred to as a victim. As Torrant had moved on to confer with Marv and Jino, who had been patrolling the taverns that particular night, Yarri had come up to her beloved’s ex-lover to commiserate.

  “He doesn’t realize how that might embarrass you,” she’d murmured, although she too had been a little surprised by Torrant’s insensitivity.

  “No—he’s right.” Eljean’s flush had deepened. “I’m a coward—he’s seen me be one. I’ve told him again and again that I’m afraid of pain. He’s trying to spare me, that’s all.”

  Yarri looked at him sharply, understanding suddenly, and then she’d smiled at him. “Well, then he really must trust you, mustn’t he?” she’d asked, and the smile that lit Eljean’s plain, narrow features then had given her a glimpse, a tiny flicker, into the bright spot of a night filled with broken glass and desperation.

  And now, toweling Starren off and getting her cousin dressed and warm, that conversation came back to Yarri, and she shuddered. The city was so dangerous these days, so terrifyingly bottomless in its capacity to destroy innocence and experience alike.

  Yarri wanted a chance to thank Eljean again, for saving their youngest, their littlest precious one from all the hells Rath could dish out.

  But what she had just told Starren about her brother and sister finally seeped in, like warmth through four days of cold.

  “They already left?” Starren looked at Yarri, only a soft surprise touching her slack, dreamy expression. She had spent so much of her time inside during this last winter that her pale, peach-tinted skin lost most of the freckles that decorated it in the summer, and Yarri just wanted to stroke her cheek again and tell her everything would be fine.

  But then, if anybody knew things had the capacit
y to not be fine, it would be Starren after this winter, wouldn’t it?

  “Yes, sweetie, yes they are,” Yarri told her with a shake of her head, “and now we have to get you through those tunnels to join them. Aldam’s waiting for Torrant, and then Clough will be empty of anyone Rath feels entitled to hurt.”

  Until. That had been the unspoken word among them.

  Until a little girl held another little girl’s hand in innocence. Until a musician posted a song about joy. Until a child with a white streak was born into a family that had forgotten it was a possibility. In broken whispers in the small hours of the morning, Torrant had confided his most terrible “until” predictions, and Yarri had only been able to comfort him with the hope that Alec’s plan would work.

  “You have given enough,” she’d told him firmly, but she hadn’t believed it even as she’d said it. The kind of evil, of indifference, that permeated the streets of Clough…. She and Trieste had seen, as citizens, what the world was like inside the circumscription of the stone walls.

  The day before, when she and Trieste had been at market, a child had dropped her doll in the street. After her mother—a proper citizen of Clough—had jerked the girl’s arm hard enough to make her squeal in pain and then spanked her to stop her from crying, the poor thing had escaped to run in front of a moving cart to grab the doll herself.

  Yarri had blocked the little girl’s hurtle, and Trieste waited until the cart passed to pick up the doll and dust it off, but the mother, after yanking the poor thing from Yarri’s arms and swatting the doll out of Trieste’s hands, had sneered at both of them to mind their own business and hauled the screeching little girl away.

  There was a bitterness, a selfishness, left in the people of Dueance. It was as though they had turned their backs on compassion for their fellows in the ghettoes for so long that they had forgotten how to feel it for themselves.

  Yarri had a terrible, gnawing feeling in her bloated, craving belly about what it would take to feed that hunger for compassion, and there wasn’t enough love in the world to fix the people of Dueance.

  It was going to take life’s blood, heart’s blood. Death’s blood.

  That was why she had to get Torrant out of this blighted, angry place. His entire reason for coming to Clough was rooted in the idea that he was the only man for the job. She needed him in Eiran before it dawned on him that he could save this awful, rotted little world with the last spark of his beautiful life.

  “Why haven’t you left already?” Starren asked, in that same odd, toneless voice, and Yarri grimaced.

  “He can’t leave his brothers, Starren. I can’t ask him to. The young men who are helping him—you met one….”

  “Eljean—he’s very brave.”

  Yarri smiled faintly. “They all are,” she murmured, “and Torrant won’t leave them. They’ve thrown in with him; he needs to see them to safety.” Her voice dropped, because she had seen the toll this had taken—on all of them—but mostly on her beloved.

  “They already lost one. In fact, they lost the only man who could have resolved this without Alec’s coup. So we’re getting the people out of the Goddess ghettoes and then sneaking the young regents out, and then we’ll be in that tunnel as well. But not you. You need to be home—for all the reasons you came to get us, you need to be home. We’ll have….”

  Yarri’s heart stuttered in her chest. There was only one person who could take Starren back, and he was the one person who had kept Torrant alive for much of this last year. She swallowed, hard, and tried not to let Starry hear the tears and worry in her voice. “Aylan,” she said before the pause became too telling. “We’ll have Aylan take you home.”

  Starren seemed to melt, pleasantly, from stiff, frightened child to relieved, relaxed, young woman, and for the first time, that odd dreaminess didn’t seem out of place. “Mum would be happy to see Aylan again,” she murmured. “She made baby blankets for us.”

  “Right,” Yarri said dryly. “It’s your mum who’ll be happy to see Aylan.” And with that, she finished dressing her young cousin and fussing over her now clean and wavy sunset-colored hair.

  Torrant was the first who arrived at Trieste’s, the young regents behind him. “Eljean!” He called unhappily, “Eljean—did you get that last family moved to the—oh.”

  Eljean was standing by the table, along with Trieste. The two of them were watching Starren eat and trying to cull details from the girl while she gulped warm stew.

  Even an hour after her bath, Yarri could have told them it was harder than they would have ever imagined. Starren’s pervasive dreaminess had assumed stubborn proportions. Not one of them had gotten a solid answer about what had made her ride under the mountain, all on her lonesome—but then, none of them were Torrant, either.

  Torrant took one look at Starry and made the impossible connections that nobody else seemed able to make. It was what he had always done for the family—it was the way in which he was most like Bethen.

  “Hullo, Littlest,” he murmured, coming to crouch in front of her. “It all got to be too much, did it?”

  Starren’s chin quivered, and she nodded.

  Torrant took her hands in his, stroking them with endless compassion. “It’s a hard task, what you were set to. There’s no shame in falling for a bit—you know that, right?”

  A silver tear tracked down her cheek. “But Roes and Stanny already left,” she murmured, and Yarri exchanged a surprised and long-suffering look with Trieste. Oh sure—they could provide the food and the hot bath, but it took Torrant to bring her to herself.

  “Well, then, we’ll have to make sure Aylan gets you home with them. We’ll put you on Heartland….”

  “But he’s your horse… and I already have Courtland.”

  Torrant shook his head, mostly in surprise and exasperation. “Of course you do!” He exchanged rolled eyes with Yarri. “Because you just decided to take a ride one day, and you ended up here, right?”

  A slow, sunrise smile glowed across the girl’s face, and she was suddenly nodding animatedly. “Exactly!” she exclaimed. “You know things, cousin. How do you know these things about me?”

  Torrant dropped his head and answered her with an odd, strangled voice. “I’ve known you since your first breath, Littlest. I was even there when you met your moon-destined.”

  He took a deep breath and met her eyes then, his tangled heartstrings apparently back in order. “And I’ve sat sickbed with someone, and it wasn’t even someone I loved at the beginning. The heart grief that can put you through—I’m betting it made you just a little bit mad, didn’t it, Starry, my girl.”

  Starren nodded somberly. “You won’t tell Aylan, will you?” she whispered. “He might think I’m… softheaded, or weak or something. I… suddenly, I just had to go get him, and you and Stanny and Roes. And the next thing I knew, it was darkness, forever and ever.”

  At that moment the front door slammed open. “Oueant’s wilted wand, Eljean, can’t you even finish one lousy gods-bedighted task….” Aylan stopped short, and Eljean watched curiously as an intense, painful parade marched its way across the handsome features. The conductor of that parade was playing his heart songs and had the rhythm of a painful, self-recriminating sort of love.

  “You’ll tell him yourself, Littlest,” Torrant told Starren gently as she began beaming toward the door like a nova sun. “Aylan will forgive you anything—we all will, you know that, right?”

  Starren blinked and patted Torrant’s cheek. “Thank you, cousin,” she murmured, and then Torrant got out of her way. Not even three moons of gravity could have stopped the girl from launching herself at Aylan and weeping disconsolately in his arms.

  Later, when she had calmed down and fallen asleep on his shoulder, even as he sat down to shovel stew in his mouth with her, a larger than comfortable burden on his lap, he looked at Torrant in anguish. Torrant shook his head, and his deadly, quirky upper lip curled up, but sideways, in a sad parody of his weakest smile.
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br />   “Don’t even argue with me, mate,” he murmured. “Give her a good night’s sleep, give you a chance to clear out some of our dearer gear, and you two are the first out of the tunnel tomorrow morning.”

  “But….” Oh, there were so many things behind that one word. They had seen ten months of hard fighting and harder loss, and now Aylan was leaving without him?

  “I’ll be on your tail, brother,” Torrant reassured him. “As soon as the bell rings, the others and I, we’ll be herding the last few diehards out the door.” Olek, Torell, Arue, Iain, and Zhane numbered chief among those who needed to evacuate. They wouldn’t leave without Triane’s Son (or Eljean, in Zhane’s case), and Torrant had been too grateful for their help with the other refugees to insist. “We’ll be half a day behind you, at the most.”

  “Then why can’t we wait?” Aylan asked, still troubled. He was afraid… wordlessly, namelessly afraid that if he left his brother inside the city, Torrant would never make it out.

  Torrant moved to stand over Aylan, and he stroked Starren’s pretty hair. Eljean watched his hand with a lump in his throat. Yarri was on Torrant’s other side, and their hands were laced together so tightly their knuckles were white, and when Torrant bent over and dropped a kiss in Aylan’s hair, wrapping a free arm around him and the half-grown child in his arms, Eljean had to look away. Aerk and Keon chose that moment to walk in from the hall, and the tableau was so startling they were silenced immediately, looking at the four of them in wonder.

  “It’s time, brother,” Torrant murmured, his lips touching Aylan’s ear. “It’s time to leave me, and put her first.”

  And oh Goddess! Eljean wanted to clutch his chest. He wanted to drop to his knees and howl in sympathy with Aylan… with Aylan, of all people, because the expression on his face was torn and ripped and bleeding, and nobody in the room could do a thing to staunch that wound.