Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  YARRI DECIDED that her nemesis was that Goddess-damned wall.

  Let Torrant change the world, that was well and good; she would be happy when the wall between the Goddess ghettoes and the regents’ square was knocked down to rubble, because that was the second time she had scrabbled over the damn thing to land in the hands of someone who wished her harm.

  In this case, it was one of Rath’s guardsmen, and since Ellyot Moon had gone missing, his sister, Yarri, was also wanted for questioning.

  Well, wasn’t that a stinking kettle of rotten fish?

  For a minute, it looked as though the man had the same designs as the corpse on the other side of the wall with no teeth and no bollocks, but Yarri pointed out that as the sister of a candidate for regency, touching her put his life at risk. She was not so desirable after that, but she was a lot happier about being hauled by the arm to the Regents’ Hall.

  As it turned out, that was exactly where she’d been planning to go anyway.

  She heard most of Torrant’s speech as she was being dragged through to the side entrance, and what she heard made her even angrier with the people inside. He was so sad, this new Torrant who had barely survived the winter. How could these people look at him, with that pathetic burden in his arms, and not want to change the world that created that excruciating sadness?

  And then she was shoved into the room and met Torrant’s flickering, Goddess-blue eyes, and she knew, to the tingling in her back teeth and the aching behind her eyeballs, what stark terror for another felt like when you saw it in your beloved’s eyes

  The man with the iron gray mustache who sat on the dais barked an order, and suddenly she was dragged, kicking and struggling, up to where Rath himself wrapped his arm around her throat and added a dagger near her carotid for good measure. She stomped on his instep, bit his hand, and got a scratch on her jaw for her trouble; then she noticed the dirty tide of black and teal flooding in after her to surround the dais.

  Shouts echoed with surreal clarity around the room, and Marv, Jino, Aerk, and Keon—who had all been kneeling near Eljean’s body—stood fluidly and pulled out their swords, their backs to Rath and their bodies shielding Torrant as he sank to a crouch and snarled, catlike, at the enemy he’d tried so very hard not to kill.

  Aerk, hearing that snarl, knew that if anyone was going to speak in “human,” it was going to be him. “Regents, this is your chance to claim your hall. We’ve been fighting these wankers all winter, trying to keep our people safe. If you think that’s a worthy cause, a little help would be very much appreciated!”

  The secretary general panicked. He saw it—he saw the membership of the entire hall go for their swords, and he saw his chances for survival dying by the blood drop. He panicked the way any coward panics—he lashed out at his closest enemy without thought of honor or of self-defense and simply killed without mercy. In one quiet, unannounced blow, he skewered Jino through the back and in the heart, leaving him to fall at Marv’s feet without even a whimper of good-bye.

  Marv only spent a moment in shock—Jino was so irrevocably dead, the bright black eyes open and shocked, blood trickling from his mouth and gushing through the hole in his chest in quick pumps. There was no question. There was no time for mourning or tears. There was only his brother, senselessly dead at his feet.

  Marv’s howl of grief led the scream of retribution that followed, and the soldiers, who had all been facing the few regents on the dais, turned to find themselves outnumbered two to one, as the horde of angry senators descended to reclaim their birthrights and their manhood.

  Rath, seeing his people turning on him with righteous bloodlust, snarled back at Torrant and made to dig his dagger into Yarri’s throat. Torrant, more snowcat than human but using all his strength just to stand, let out an inhuman, terrifying yrwowllll! Crouching, on all fours like a cat, he leapt over Eljean’s body in a spring, landed on Yarri, and kicked her out of the way with back paws still tethered in boots. Rath shouted and went down on his back, and Torrant opened his mouth around his enemy’s throat, tasting blood as he shredded one jugular and then another, finally ripping out the monster’s trachea, with his blunt, human teeth.

  Rath didn’t have time to scream.

  As the last breath rattled from the protruding windpipe of the enemy—the monster, the mad, vainglorious, weak man—Torrant thrust his bloodied mouth and chin into the air and howled and howled again.

  The howls made Yarri cringe, and she fought the urge to shudder, to curl up into a ball, to let the regents protect her and pick up the pieces. Instead, she picked herself up and looked out about the room dully. Even her unpracticed eye could tell that the fight was going to be over long before Alec arrived with his reinforcements. Half the guardsmen had dropped their swords and were crouching where they stood. They were staring at the ground, shivering, not wanting to be a part of the bloodbath that was ripping the other half of their number to shreds.

  Marv was standing over Jino’s body, laying waste to every uniform in sight, shrieking revenge. Keon and Aerk were standing back-to-back and fighting as they had been all winter, calling out marks as they fought. “To your left, Kee—I missed him.” “Got him, Aerk. Behind you!”

  Before the chaos erupted, Aldam, seeing poor Jino crumpled in a surprised, vacant heap, strode up to the secretary general and without ceremony touched him on the shoulder. Then he leapt out of the way as the man in charge of Clough’s army disintegrated into parts, one plopping, sliding, bleeding bit at a time.

  The nearest handful of soldiers to see this grisly phenomenon laid down their weapons and begged for mercy.

  Aldam, wearing a grim, angry look, stood with Marv over the body of the young man who had always smiled when he’d visited Moon Hold. Very deliberately, he played with a handful of sand from his pocket, looking about the room to see if he was needed.

  If it hadn’t been for Marv’s complete desolation, his shrieking, incoherent, inhuman vengeance for his friend, his playmate, his brother, Yarri could have watched the regents finish the battle. Unfortunately, what was waiting for her at the dais frightened her as this battle did not.

  But Marv’s desolation was too close to Torrant’s, and besides, she would wrong them all—her friends, herself, her babies, her beloved—with her cowardice now, wouldn’t she?

  She pulled herself up next to Rath’s corpse, listening to Torrant’s feral snarls over the body of his enemy, and reached out her hand, gentling the hackles of his human hair over his smooth neck.

  “Come back, beloved,” she murmured. “You promised you’d come back.”

  He turned his inhuman blue eyes toward her, the recognition in their depths screaming “mate” and “protected”—but not beloved. Not her name. Not the quiet space between their hearts that had always meant the two of them together.

  “Please, Torrant,” she begged, catching his far, stubbled cheek in her hand and pulling him toward her.

  With an animal grunt, Torrant shifted, still on hands and knees, and circled, coming to rest with his head in her lap.

  Her ravaged overskirt was stained with Rath’s blood, but if it meant Torrant would come back to her, she’d bathe in the stuff.

  “Torrant,” she murmured. “Torrant, come back to me. You can’t sing to me like this. You can’t sing to our young. Come on, beloved. Come home.” She shed tears, when she’d thought she’d grown too strong for them since the night before, when he’d died in her arms and been resurrected.

  “I want so badly to go home, Torrant Moon-Shadow. Please come home….” She clutched his head to her bosom and looked up to realize that the battle, short and fierce as it was, had ended.

  Marv sat in almost the same position she sat in, with Jino’s head in his lap, weeping like a lost child. Aerk, Keon, and Aldam were approaching her tentatively, and as she looked up at them, she realized the entire Regents’ Hall had heard her beg him, not as a sister, but as a lover.

  The silence was punctuated by guards pleading for mercy
and the incredulous panting of a governing body that had just discovered it did possess a spine and a voice after all.

  “He’s not my brother,” she said aloud, hearing her voice echo in the vast hall but feeling like it should be said. “My brothers were all killed at Moon Hold, when I was six.” She swallowed and felt, suddenly, Torrant’s forehead against her palm, burning with a killing fever. She stroked the white streak of hair back from his bloody brow. The entire hall was looking at her as though they had never seen her before, when, in fact, she had been to many of their homes since she’d arrived in Clough.

  “His name is Torrant Shadow. He saved my life that night. He took me to Eiran. He’s my lover, my mate.” A little half sob shook her, and she bent down and kissed his ear. He burrowed against her middle, eyes closed, a sense of desperate peace trying to steal over his struggling features. “My beloved.”

  She looked out at them. “And we would like to go home now. Can we go? Please?” Something in her broke, and she looked at Aldam beseechingly. “Please, Aldam? Can we go home now? I want so badly to hear the ocean. I think if he only heard the ocean, his eyes would be right again. Please?”

  Please? The sobs broke in her chest, and she wept hopelessly over her beloved. Aldam bent to touch Torrant’s head, and he grunted unhappily at the sickness that radiated from Torrant’s body once again. But Torrant stirred in her arms and turned his face up toward hers.

  He reached out to touch her, cheek to cheek, and his eyes fluttered open.

  They were hazel, pure hazel, a place between green and brown, with no blue in their depths at all.

  “Don’t cry, Yarrow Root,” he murmured. “Don’t cry. I promised you I’d come back. I promised.”

  She cradled him to her, weeping, and a terrible, respectful quiet settled over the blood-soaked hall.

  A TERRIBLE, respectful silence blanketed the listeners of “The Ballad of Triane’s Son” at this point.

  Torrant had been very careful when he wrote this passage. He spoke metaphorically: “Triane’s spirit filled her son, ripping the life from the terrible one.”

  But Torrant’s and Aylan’s children had grown up in the same house, listening from behind corners as he and Aylan discussed that final moment in hushed voices. Those conversations made it clear that Torrant’s humanity, his healing, and his poetry deserted him at the last, leaving him a ravening animal, bent on slaughter.

  But the worst part hadn’t been the blood on his mouth or the flesh in his teeth—the worst part was how bitterly Torrant regretted the time it had taken to forgive himself. Could he not see that every lash he gave himself, every self-recriminating remark, every bitter glance in the mirror, had weighed double on Yarri’s back too?

  Aylan said the same thing to him every year, when the bitterness welled from a wound made fresh.

  “You had to heal, brother. Those many wounds you took for us all—did you think you would get away without healing?”

  Torrant’s children, being Moon children, had passed that conversation on. It became a watchword, a family axiom, a homily.

  At the end, they stood every year, arrayed around their father, the entire clan of them living proof that Torrant and Yarri had survived and loved long and well, but that nothing, not even honest grief, comes without a price.

  Part XXIII—The Wreckage of the Blood Moon

  Moon Hold and Moon Home

  THE DEATH rites in Eiran were usually brief and practical. There was about enough soft earth between the ocean and the mountain to grow vegetables, but not enough to house the dead. Aylan waited until the spring wind off the ocean had blown the last of Bethen’s ashes out to sea before he saddled up Heartland and rode back to Clough.

  The few days after her death and before the funeral had been awful—a dim, hazy hole that had been filled with grief and mourning and a dreadful black misery that encompassed the entire family. All that made those days bearable were Bethen’s last words, spoken in a sudden delirium before her breath stopped for good.

  “He’ll live, Eljean, my boy. Shall we take that boat now?” Then, wistfully, “Good-bye, Lane.”

  Her last breath faded away as gently as a leaf down a peaceful river.

  Those words had been all that had given Lane the will to keep breathing in and out. He would have to father them all when Torrant came home.

  They kept Roes sane. Aldam wouldn’t return unless Torrant was ready to come home.

  They kept Stanny and Evya moving back into Stanny’s flat with purpose. There would be much more room needed in the Moon household when Torrant, Yarri, and Aldam came home.

  And those words kept Cwyn and Starren active, optimistic, and working hard with the others to prepare the same basement where Stanny and Evya had been staying and to fix the room Roes had kept with Yarri into something Aylan could live in. It all would be needed when Torrant and Yarri and Aldam came home.

  And now Aylan was going to go and fetch them home.

  Lane stopped him before he got on Heartland. “Aylan—son, you know he might not be the same.”

  Aylan looked away. He knew. None of them were the same. How could they be? But Torrant—he, as well as Bethen, had been the joy of this family. How much room would be in his heart for joy now?

  “I know we’ll still love him, no matter how much he’s changed,” Aylan answered honestly. He’d seen some of those changes before the wounding, before Eljean, before… whatever terrible thing had knotted Aylan’s stomach since the morning they had all awakened and known that Bethen was gone.

  Lane nodded, his reddened eyes growing shiny all over again. These days, it didn’t take much. “Oh Goddess… I miss them all. Our family needs its joys back—no matter how joyless they are for a time. Go bring them home, son.”

  Aylan nodded and made to mount, and Lane stopped him again with a hand on his arm. Aylan turned, surprised, and Lane opened his arms. Aylan stepped in, warmed, protected, loved—heartened beyond measure. “You are our son. You know that, right?” Lane whispered. “Whether they come back the same, or whether he’s so damaged he can never come back, you will always have a home here. Always.”

  Aylan caught his breath and nodded against his true father’s shoulder. “And that, sir, is why I can never leave him.”

  “Love you, son.”

  “Love you, sir. I’ll be back.”

  And with that, he swung up on Heartland’s back and rode away without looking behind him.

  ALDAM WOULDN’T let Torrant get out of bed for a week.

  Every now and then, he would try to sneak out to the porch on liquid knees after going to the privy, but Aldam had developed an uncanny sense of hearing. The entire hold could hear his voice booming through the house, saying that if Torrant didn’t get back in bed, Aldam was packing up and leaving without him.

  Torrant and Yarri would meet bemused eyes, and he would get obediently back in bed. And promptly fall asleep.

  Because his body was not nearly as forgiving as Aldam.

  They had brought him back to Moon Hold, feverish and gibbering, and for another two days, they watched as his body struggled to recapture the healing the snowcat made for him the night he’d nearly died.

  Nobody suggested he turn snowcat again.

  After Yarri’s speech to the hall, Aldam had taken matters into his own capable hands. He had scooped his brother up in his arms and looked sadly at Eljean’s brutalized body, at Jino’s still, bleeding form, and then at the regents he had come to know in the fall.

  “Would you like to follow me with your fallen ones?” he asked nobly, and Aerk, Keon, and Marv, their chests still pumping from the battle, had nodded.

  Aerk and Keon carried Eljean, but Marv wouldn’t let anyone touch Jino’s body but himself.

  Keon—always the strategist—remembered Aylan’s cart, and the trip through the tunnel was shorter than it could have been. They even picked up Trieste at Alec’s camp—now swarming like an anthill with activity, but Trieste didn’t care. She was so happy to
be with Yarri and Aldam, whom she knew and who made her feel safe, that Alec told her to stay at Moon Hold while he was finalizing the new government in Dueance.

  Although it was slushy and still frozen, there was plenty of earth at Moon Hold, enough to hold a cemetery for the fallen and markers for memorials. Together with Trieste, Yarri, and Aldam, the regents buried their brothers in graves they dug with their own hands, while Torrant was delirious with fever and self-loathing. After that, the sadder, older young men kissed Yarri and Trieste on the cheeks and shook Aldam’s hand before returning to their ravaged city to help Alec put it to rights.

  The other folks at the hold, unwilling to take the now-open pass to Eiran, began to make the hold ready for spring. Led by Grand Wind, who planned to bring his mother from the city when it was safe, they found the fallow land that had once been the family’s garden and gleaned some seeds to plant. They trimmed back the blackberry bushes so there would be more berries and fewer thorns come late summer. They cleared out fallen trees to make firewood for the next winter.

  They made Moon Hold a sanctuary for the Goddess Moon again.

  One day, or so it felt like to Yarri and Aldam, Yarri’s stomach popped out all of a sudden, and she looked pregnant instead of—her words—“whopping fat.”

  She would sit next to Torrant as he struggled in his uneasy dreams and put his unresisting hand on her belly. That touch, in the beginning, was all that would calm him down.

  When his fever finally passed and he was a restless convalescent, it only seemed to make him sad.

  His second day of recovery, when the fever had just broken, Aldam went into Trieste’s room and closed the door. There were some sounds of pain, of discomfort, and then Aldam’s deep, reassuring voice and Trieste’s painful laughter.

  She came out of her room for the first time since the funeral and sat next to Yarri as she was knitting.