Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  Some of his snarl relaxed. He remembered this smell. This was a friend. Abruptly his vision changed, and the red heartbeats that were Jino and Marv resolved themselves from the hot burn of “enemy” to the gentler red of “ward.”

  Marv and Jino exchanged glances. This had to be good, right?

  “Good, brother,” Marv said, his usual easy, white grin in his dark face making lighter of the situation. “Good. Now, I know it’s going to hurt, but we can’t get you through the streets like this, so we need you to do us a favor. Can you? Can you just remember that you’re human? Can you change for us, Elly…. Torrant. Can you change for us, Torrant? Please? If you change for us, we’ll take you to Yarri, right? You want to see Yarri again. Now come on. Let’s see her as men, right?”

  The questioning sound that rumbled out of the snowcat’s throat gave them heart.

  The high-pitched, agonizing howl of pain that followed it broke their hearts.

  But it was a man—a wounded, desperate man—they hauled between them when they left the alleyway, and it was a man who put his legs under him and helped them run to elude the tidal wave of guards that seemed to be suddenly everywhere at once.

  BETWEEN TORRANT’S wound and Aylan’s cloak, there were two blood trails through the city that day. The trails intersected in more than one place, unbeknownst to either of them—which is why it took the guards so long to track them down.

  Marv and Jino took the back way into Trieste’s, through the stables, and Yarri, who anticipated their entrance, was there with bandages, water, and antiseptic.

  When she saw the extent of the wound, her hands shook too badly for her to treat it.

  “Trieste…,” she called weakly, sinking to her knees and taking Torrant’s head into her lap. “Trieste!”

  “It looks worse than it is,” Torrant muttered weakly, and Yarri laughed a little hysterically.

  “That’s a relief, beloved, because it looks like you’re dying!” She put her forehead to his and wondered at the smell of his skin. It was sick, weak, and unfamiliar, and she suddenly understood how Starry could need to be “elsewhere” after months of tending her dying mother. It was all Yarri could do not to let go of the rope of the here and the now and sink into the abyss of the otherwhere.

  “Oh holy Dueant….” There was no profanity at all in Aylan’s voice as he burst into the room and sank to his knees next to his brother, choking on his own pain.

  “Are you hurt, mate?” Torrant asked in concern, and Aylan took Torrant’s bloody hand in his.

  “You total and complete wanker—” Aylan breathed hard, drowning in nightmare. “—how could you do this to me?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Torrant reassured. “I just need….”

  “A healer,” Aerk said, crowding into the room with Keon, Starren, Trieste, and Eljean. Eljean gave a little moan and grabbed at the doorjamb for support; he found Trieste’s shaking hand instead.

  Everyone looked at Aerk in surprise. It was the first note of sanity since Aylan had exploded in the front and the nightmare of waiting had ensued. “He’s healed worse than that. We’ve seen him.” Aerk looked up at everybody, hoping it wasn’t wishful thinking on his part.

  “All the Goddess folk are gone,” Keon hissed, “and I wouldn’t put him in the hands of those quacks from Dueance for all the hope-tainted gold on the planet! The only healer in the city who could make this right is the one with the wound!”

  “Aldam is still at Moon Hold,” Aylan said blankly and then looked at Torrant and his wound. “Aldam could heal this—you know he could.”

  “He was always the better healer.” Torrant nodded, smiling faintly.

  “What about it, mate—can you make it? We have to leave right now….”

  “There are guards out there, everywhere,” Jino told them, some of his earlier panic returning.

  Aylan nodded. “They’re going to be looking for me. I killed two regents getting this wound….”

  “Who?” Aerk asked, wondering at the extent of the backlash, even in the panic over their friend and leader.

  “Merrick and Dimitri,” Aylan said absently. “Here, Trieste, get me a sheet—I’m going to wrap it around his middle. Yarri, go get your biggest needle. We’re going to sew it up tight, and we have to do it now, and fast. Starren, go help them. We’ve got maybe half an hour before they come pounding at the door.”

  “Oh thank the Goddess,” Marv murmured. “I was wondering who was going to get to kill Dimitri.”

  “All things considered”—Aylan’s tear-shot eyes met Marv’s gaze squarely—“I’d have preferred he lived.”

  Yarri and Trieste both ran out of the room, and Aylan looked up at the young regents. “There is going to be terrible backlash. You all need to leave, and leave now. Herd the rest of the Goddess folk into the tunnels, and just go. Don’t pack, don’t wait for us, just go….”

  “They’ll find us!” Aerk reasoned bleakly. “They’ll catch us in the tunnels—Aylan, you must know that! It’s not a secret where we spend our time. If the lot of us disappear, leaving this much blood with two dead regents in our wake, they’ll find us. It was one thing when we were simply not going to show up for the hall one day, but not now.”

  “We can stall!” Keon burst out. “No, it’s true! We can stall—the guards burst in and find all of us and a mess of blood, and we lie the moons to shame. While they’re sorting through the detritus, you’ll have time to get away.”

  “Wait a minute,” Eljean muttered, the darkness clearing from his eyes. He was stumbling back a few sentences in the conversation. “Wait, they’ll catch you in the tunnels….” He looked at Torrant’s pale face and the mess of blood and fascia welling up under his intact shirt and felt a curious, wrenching sense of dislocation. It wasn’t possible that Torrant should die, that a wound not even his should kill him. It wasn’t possible that this man should die before him.

  Aylan was looking at him without his usual exasperation. “Not if we leave in about five minutes. We’ll be on horseback—I’ll hold him….” Aylan’s voice broke, and he held Torrant’s head to his chest. “You bastard, you git-wanking-son-of-a-sheep-turd… I can’t even stay and die for you.” He sobbed once, hard. “Isn’t it my right to die for you?”

  Eljean watched Torrant’s bloodied hand come up to rest in the bright gold hair as though from far away and heard his words of comfort to his true friend from a terrible distance. As far as Torrant was concerned, Eljean had always been so far away.

  The women hustled in, well aware of having been manipulated, and Yarri and Aylan set about pulling Torrant’s cloak off so they could lay him on the sheet. Trieste turned to Eljean then with a pair of scissors and had him hold the sheet taut so she could cut it in three places and then rip the lengths across. When she was done, she handed him the scissors and the excess lengths of sheet and turned to Aylan and Yarri.

  Eljean looked at the scissors curiously, thinking of Torrant and Zhane lost in the tunnels under the city, being assaulted by guards, when Torrant’s only hope was clearly an unimpeded journey to the gentle brother Eljean had met only twice, but whom he loved anyway.

  “Here,” he said abruptly to Starren and dumped the extra sheets in her arms. As he pulled his shirt free of his breeches, he was dimly aware it was the same soft green shirt Torrant had thrown at him one bright midsummer day. He’d been wearing it a lot these days, for luck. With a hard-lumped swallow, he used the scissors to cut a slash in the beloved shirt and then shoved it out of the way.

  He pinched a flap of white skin at his midriff, thinking that his skin was looser on his flesh than it used to be, and he’d never been fat. He tilted his head at Torrant’s flapping shirt, adjusted the slant of the pinch of skin, and then looked at the scissors in his hand through surprisingly clear vision. They wouldn’t cut as scissors, he realized; they would be better used as a blade. He locked them open with his good sword hand, caught the tip of the blade under the pinch of skin, closed his eyes, dug in, and pulled up.
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  Starren’s muffled shriek made everybody look up from the hasty seam Yarri was sewing, and everybody watched, trancelike, as more blood spattered to the once-pristine floor. The scissors thumped in the middle of the puddle, fumbled by Eljean’s shaking hand.

  “Eljean… you hate pain…,” Torrant mumbled, and Eljean had to grin through the stars’ dark dancing in front of his eyes.

  “And the pain of losing you would be the worst of all,” he said faintly. Then, while he had everybody’s attention, he said, “You’ll all leave. I’ll stay. It will take them a while to figure out they’ve got the wrong person—the belly wound will confuse them. You’ll have your time to get away.”

  “Eljean,” Aerk said in horror, “Rath won’t just question you and let you go. He’s been torturing people. You know that….”

  Eljean shrugged, the ripple making the gaping skin at his belly sting. “What’s he going to find out that he won’t know when you’re gone anyway?”

  “I’ll stay,” Aerk said, just as Keon, Marv, and Jino all said, “We’ll stay.”

  “We’ll stay,” Aerk said strongly, looking at Torrant in reassurance. “We won’t let him stay in Clough alone….”

  Torrant pulled strength from their harsh breaths, apparently, because he struggled against the hands holding him down while Yarri stitched the ugliest seam of her life in Trieste’s best brocade sheet. “You won’t stay at all!” he rasped. “You all will leave, and Rath will have Triane’s Son. And everybody I love will be safe in Eiran!”

  Eljean scrubbed his face with his hands and gave an actual laugh. He had always wondered how Torrant and Aylan laughed in the face of pain, terrible odds, and constant fear, and now he knew. Once the pain was there, you had no choice but to laugh, or the pain would be wasted.

  “Stop it,” he chided. He bent to a crouch and took the liberty of stroking Torrant’s cheek with his knuckle. “It’s not even your country, you buggering git. Go. Leave with your beloved. Be healed. Let me believe that you are out there in the world. Trust that you taught us all your best lessons. They’ll get me out.” That last part was a lie. He knew it was a lie. But that they’d risk their lives to try seemed to be worth the pain of all the last year.

  “Eljean,” Aylan said in a thick voice that hardly seemed his own, “you can’t do this. What am I supposed to tell Zhane?”

  Eljean looked nakedly at Aylan and saw suddenly through the hard-faced façade of the other man. Ten months, and he never knew. Aylan loved them all, as much as Torrant did. His anger, his saturnine sneering—it was all there to shield a tender, sweetly beating heart, and to help him protect the man who tried so valiantly to protect them all. Eljean had to look away, and his eyes fell sightlessly on Yarri’s busy, shaking, purposeful hands as she finished off the seam and tied it in an awkward knot.

  “Tell him,” Eljean lied, “that I won’t sacrifice a brother to make my lover happy.”

  “Eljean…,” Torrant protested, but it was clear from the way his eyes were fluttering back that he wouldn’t be conscious for long.

  “You can argue with me when you can stand!” Eljean snapped, and then stood, grimacing with the pain. Given what Torrant was going through, it seemed disrespectful to still feel such a small wound, but there it was.

  “Eljean,” Aylan said, “I can’t tell him….”

  “You can, and you will.” Eljean wiped his face on his shoulder, and Yarri stood, wiping her bloodstained hands on her skirt. Looking over her shoulder at Aylan and Torrant, she shook her head, still tearless after her hysterics at Aylan’s arrival.

  “I’ll take his gift,” she said thickly. “If you two can’t be gracious about it, I can. I’m not proud.”

  Eljean bowed at her, in spite of the pain. “With all respect, my lady,” he said humbly, because he had come to love the brisk, vital little woman, “I await my captain’s command.”

  Yarri looked at Torrant, and he, true to all the bravery in his heart, met her gaze unflinchingly.

  “We’ll help no one,” she said with as much strength as she could, “if you die of this now.”

  A sound of anguish came from Torrant’s throat, and he fixed his eyes on Eljean with as much irritation as he could spare. “Damn you, Eljean—it was just this sort of decision that I wanted to avoid!”

  “The Goddess isn’t always merciful,” Eljean said sagely, grinning slightly to show what a fraud he was. Oh heavens, he loved those eyes, he thought hazily. They were clear and wise and seemed to see everything. They were warm and human and beautiful, like the man himself. He’d do about anything to have those eyes look at him the way they were looking at him now.

  Torrant would wonder later, because it felt as though a voice not his own moved him to speak. But the words were his, and he could never, ever take them back. “We’ll come for you, brother,” he rasped. “This will heal, and we’ll come for you. Don’t ever think we’ll leave you alone….”

  Yarri let out a quickly suppressed sob and held out her arms. Then she stood on tiptoes because Eljean had lost none of his outrageous height and she would not grow again, and kissed Eljean’s wet cheek.

  “Thank you, brother,” she whispered. “You can take his word on that—we’ll come for you.”

  Eljean ignored the pain, and she was already steeped in her lover’s blood. He wrapped his arms around her and hugged, feeling Torrant’s love by proxy, which had always been the only way he would get it. “I know you will. Keep him safe.”

  “All right, then,” Aerk said briskly. “Everybody out to the stables. Aylan, you get up on Heartland first, and we’ll get Torrant on the horse in front of you. Yarri, Starren—Courtland’s still saddled, and he’s had a bit of a rest. He’ll carry you easy. Lady Trieste, can we saddle up your little mare for you? What will Suse be riding?”

  Trieste was halfway out the door from the hall to the stables when she looked behind her. Eljean was standing, hand clutching the doorframe, looking as lost as Starren had when she’d been dragged inside only that morning, and Trieste’s heart stuttered.

  These young men had eaten at her table. She had dressed their wounds, heard their stories, and held their hands when the world Torrant and Aylan had begun to take for granted became too much for them. She and Eljean had exchanged many wry looks, mocking their own hearts in the matter of one Torrant Shadow, and she had made countless silent promises to him that someday the ache would ease.

  Someday hadn’t come soon enough for him, and she couldn’t even say she was sorry.

  “Saddle the mare for Suse,” she murmured. “Aylan!”

  Aylan turned in the saddle as he was getting ready to haul Torrant up from Marv and Jino’s straining arms.

  “Aylan, tell my husband that Rath has me. Tell him to be unmerciful.”

  “Trieste!” Aylan protested, but she shook her head savagely.

  “You get him to safety, dammit. Tell Alec the same thing you’re telling Zhane—tell him I won’t leave a brother to make a lover happy—but with me, you’d better make sure he knows it’s the Goddess-damned truth!”

  There was a sudden clamor from the front door—luckily for all of them, it was Aylan’s blood trail the guards had found first.

  Torrant was shoved into Aylan’s arms, and Aylan swore, bitterly and long, even as Aerk and the others were leading Heartland to the stable door. “Dammit, Spots….”

  And then Aerk snapped Heartland in the flank with Courtland’s rein, and the horse took off. Aerk handed the rein to Yarri, who was looking over her shoulder and calling to Trieste as well.

  Aerk swore and smacked Courtland, who needed no such encouragement to follow his son out into the back alley toward freedom. Aerk and the other regents looked toward Trieste and Eljean, who had come to the doorway to say farewell.

  “Be strong, brother,” Aerk said, refusing to succumb to the contagion of tears. “We’ll fight for you, I swear it!”

  “Be safe!” Eljean called, and after they disappeared through the stable door, and w
hen Trieste wouldn’t budge—nor Suse either—he took her elbow.

  “Shall we answer the door, my lady?” he asked in a passably steady voice.

  “Absolutely, sir,” she told him and gestured grandly for Suse to proceed them down the hallway. “I would hate to keep the king consort’s men waiting.”

  Meetings and Partings

  STARREN WAS not the only one who would wake from nightmares of utter darkness for the rest of her life. But when Aylan awoke, in a cold sweat, screaming, it was always Torrant’s name he called.

  The refugees hadn’t needed Eljean or Aylan to prompt them to go after all. When the bells started ringing and the guards began to stream from the barracks, the last three dozen of the Goddess folk in Dueance ran for Aylan’s flat and slid in through the window into the bleak corner that was his living room. The space that opened under the floor—which had at one time been used as his privy—was now dug out and shored up. From there it sloped down until it could take six people abreast and, yes, two men on horseback.

  The only way to get the horse into the flat was to rip out the sidewall, but Stanny had readied for that contingency before he left. As the horses cantered carefully across the broken, half-set cobblestones, Torrell and his son, along with the rest of the men, took rocks from the rubble at the back of the room and hit the frame of the house where the walls met with several sharp raps.

  Aylan and Yarri reined in the horses around their burdens just as the outside wall collapsed. When the dust cleared, they trotted straight into the flat. The people of the ghettoes took one look at Torrant on the saddle in front of Aylan and parted silently. As they were cantering past the waiting people, Zhane stepped forward, his face pinched and devastated.

  “Eljean…. Where’s Eljean?” he asked, frightened of the answer.