Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

“Only you, me, and Yarri know any different, mate.”

  “Right,” Torrant said stiffly, putting an expression on his face that, to people who didn’t know him well, passed for a smile.

  To his relief—at the first—there was no cheering, no celebrating, just people there waving and smiling. Then, to his horror, something worse than cheering happened.

  As their party passed by, the whole of his town, the people who had adopted him and Yarri and Aldam and Aylan, bowed to them, silently, staying that way until the party reached the end of the street and took the turn that would lead them to the Moon home.

  The minute they disappeared from sight, the cheering and celebration erupted behind them, and Torrant threw himself off Heartland’s back and vomited in the corner behind the new brick tavern. Aylan was there, holding his head and keeping his trembling body upright, and in an awkward moment, so was Yarri, who sent an anxious, puzzled glance over Torrant’s back.

  “I don’t understand,” she murmured, running her fingers through his hair.

  Aldam stopped the wagon and dismounted, waving the two of them off as he made to lift Torrant’s painfully thin body up to the wagon.

  “Sod off, Aldam,” Torrant rasped ungraciously. “I’m fine.”

  “Then why…?” Aldam was puzzled but not hurt in the least.

  “Because,” Aylan said bitterly, coming to take Torrant’s arm, “it’s a lie. Don’t you understand? It feels like a lie. They… they bowed to us.” He and Torrant met eyes in perfect communion. “Because the people they should have bowed to are dead.”

  Torrant took an offered canteen of water from Aldam, rinsed out his mouth, and spat.

  “I guess we’re all they have, brother,” he said tonelessly, pulling himself painfully back up on Heartland’s back. “I wish there was some way we could give them something more.”

  “Been writing any music lately?” Aylan asked archly, because everybody knew about Prince Aerk’s (as they called him ironically) request.

  “When I feel like singing, I’ll let you know,” Torrant responded. It had been his response for the last week, but for the first time they heard a thoughtfulness in the answer, instead of the bitter irony they’d grown used to.

  It was something.

  Lane was in front of the familiar boarded two-story house to greet them, but in spite of all he knew about the last year, he still had to close his eyes against the thin, beaten version of the boy he’d raised to adulthood. Oh, Bethie—you should be here. He’s going to need both of us, and I’m not hardly whole.

  Nevertheless, a faded joy touched Torrant’s pale face as he swung down from Heartland on wobbly knees.

  He fell into Lane’s embrace as he had fallen into Aylan’s, but his burdens, the ones he had always laid on Lane’s shoulders if only for a moment, stayed his own.

  Lane and Aylan met saddened eyes over Torrant’s tense, trembling body.

  Oh, this was not going to be easy.

  THE NEXT night, Aylan woke up with terror in his groin and ice in his chest, hauling breath through his lungs like a strangling rabbit.

  He knew this feeling. It was how he and Torrant had awakened in Clough, when they were afraid the bells had rung and they’d missed them, or that they’d finally heard the pounding on the door for their heads that had never come.

  Downstairs he heard Torrant shout, and he scrambled down to the living room, only to meet Yarri there, huffing for breath after scrambling up the stairs.

  “False… alarm,” she puffed. “He just sat up in bed, sweating like a race runner, saying, ‘Aylan, the arse-wanking bells….’”

  Aylan sat down on the hardwood where he stood, his body shaking with laughter at a thing that was not funny in the least. “Gods…,” he gasped, panting for breath. “Sweet Dueant’s soft, squishy balls and Triane’s purple tits, that’s why I was awake in the first place.”

  Yarri looked at him, not laughing, not even a little bit.

  “Please come down and sleep with us,” she said somberly. “Please? He has me to calm him down—and I’m barely enough. Until the night terrors stop—at least for you—please stay with us. I can’t stand that you’re alone.” A tear escaped, and she wiped it away. “Damned pregnancy. I hate it when I can’t say a damned word without weeping like an infant. Anyway, please, Aylan? You can’t just spend a few nights under a mountain and erase a year of fearing for your life every time you close your eyes.”

  Aylan was shocked into silence. “That’s a generous offer, Yarri,” he said haltingly, “but for a couple newly married….”

  “Bollix.” She looked at him implacably. “If you think the thing that got me pregnant is going to happen anytime soon, you’re mad. I’m afraid to touch him—he coughed blood yesterday, did you know that? After throwing up? He coughed blood and then he hid it from me. From all of us. And he doesn’t sleep—not really. He’s been relaxed as a kitten in bed, from the day he woke up from fever….”

  “That’s not how he sleeps,” Aylan said, making to stand up. He took her offered hand gratefully and could almost hear her rolled eyes.

  “Do you think I don’t know that?” She snorted and then wobbled a little on her new gravity base. “And I have no idea how you sleep, but judging from the circles under your eyes, it’s not well either. Come sleep with us. He won’t survive without you, and I don’t think you’ll make it without him. And this family has lost enough as it is.”

  She was watery again and angry at it, but Aylan had to agree. Coming home to a Moon house without Bethen had felt wrong in such a vast way, like coming home to an Eiran without a sea.

  With a sigh, he wrapped his arms around his little sister and was reassured when she snuggled into him. They might make it after all, if Yarri was this strong. If the three of them could gather what strength they had to stand.

  “Don’t be afraid to touch him,” Aylan whispered. “He needs to be touched. He wasn’t touched enough before you got to us, and afterward, there wasn’t enough time for the two of you to touch at all. Touch him—rub his back as he falls asleep. Run your fingers through his hair. He likes that.”

  “And you, Aylan? What do you like?” she asked sadly, so happy to have someone to lean on that she felt like she could live with the answer.

  “Falling asleep next to him,” Aylan told her after a fraught, raw moment, and she realized that living with the answer was as easy as breathing.

  “Then come along, big brother. Let’s go get some sleep.”

  Remembering To Live

  TORRANT SAID nothing the next day, when he woke up sandwiched between Yarri and Aylan. But when Aylan slid under the covers with him the next night, he curled up and sank like a weighted lead ball into the mattress.

  The circles beneath Aylan’s eyes faded after that, and Lane would watch the three of them coming up the stairs from the basement room with kind eyes. There was not much else he could do for them, he thought fretfully. The weight of unhappiness palled over them like funeral ashes, covering the sun.

  Torrant made an effort for his cousins—anybody could see that. He teased Starren, who regarded him with sober humor and praised Cwyn’s newfound self-control. He congratulated Evya with a kiss on the cheek and shook Stanny’s hand. He said delighted words over Roes’s full belly and made the comment that she bore herself as fearlessly as her mother did when she was pregnant.

  Lane wondered if he was the only one who saw the stark fear behind the boy’s eyes whenever she walked into the room.

  Roes asked him, shyly, about a week after their return, if he wanted to feel the child inside her. Torrant always had such an affinity for babies, for the littlest, most helpless ones. Lane wasn’t the only one who was unsurprised when what little color he’d regained in his face washed out, and he’d had to excuse himself with shaking hands.

  Yarri met Lane’s eyes in utter misery, her own hand caressing her swollen abdomen, and Lane shook his head and went to go after him.

  Aldam beat him to it.

>   After patting Roes’s shoulder and assuring her that she’d done nothing wrong, Aldam caught up to Torrant, who was behind the house running in a ragged pattern toward the beach. He fell to his knees halfway there, pulling air into his lungs between curses, too short of breath to throw up.

  “I can’t do it,” Torrant panted as Aldam drew near. “I can’t. I can’t touch Yarri either…. It’s not right. It’s not right that I should touch them.” He stretched his hands out in front of him, seeing things Aldam could not. “I’ve got blood on my hands, brother. Can’t you see the blood on my hands?” He turned an anguished face toward his brother, and Aldam fell to his knees across from him and took those hands in his.

  “I see nothing on your hands that isn’t on my own, brother,” Aldam said with that maddening, implacable serenity. “Is this the reason you haven’t been to the orphanage?”

  “I’m….” Torrant shook his head. “I don’t deserve to touch them. You’re good, Aldam. You’ve only ever killed because you had to.”

  “That’s not true,” Aldam replied with a little snort of laughter. “The man who hit Roes deserved to die. His death made me very happy.”

  Torrant looked up in surprise. “Someone hit Roes?” he said stupidly, and Aldam surprised him with that sunshine grin of his.

  “You are not the only one who got his hands bloody, brother.”

  “I can’t help you deliver Roes’s baby. You know I can’t. I’m not… good enough. I can’t… can’t bear to think of my hands touching them….” Torrant buried his hands in the sand, clenching them tight enough to dig sand into the creases of his palms.

  “You speak as though children stay pure, brother.” Aldam laughed, sincerely, picking the sand up and letting it slip through his fingers. “I think, if nothing else, watching Cwyn and Starren grow should have proved the wrongness of that idea. Children are people. They are—” He struggled for the word, found it, and lit up the foggy beach sunshine with another potent grin. “—potential! They are potential. You were potential to be another victim of Moon Hold, but you weren’t. You became our brother and our son. You had potential to be a simple healer, hiding in the hills, breathing your beliefs in fearful secret. I would have, if I hadn’t followed my brother because he left me behind. But you didn’t. You went into the world and did dreadful things, brother. Because all of those dreadful things had the potential to make the world a better place. Yes, your hands are bloody. So are mine and Aylan’s. So are Cwyn’s. So are Trieste’s and Yarri’s, and no, I’m not going to tell you how. She hasn’t wanted to burden you with it.”

  Torrant couldn’t help it—he had to smile at his “simple” brother, and his wonderful, complex faith. “I will ask her,” he said quietly. “But I still don’t know if I can….”

  Aldam stood from the cold sand, grateful that Torrant hadn’t made it to the wet part of the beach when his legs gave out. He wiped his hands off on his pants and then took Torrant’s hands and hoisted him up with the ease of lifting a thin child while he frowned. “Of course you can. You left me, you wanker. You owe me. You owe me this. But she’s got a good month yet, so you have time to get used to the idea, and then you’ll have time to get used to the idea of delivering your own. Time, brother. We do have a little of it.”

  He frowned at Torrant again as they walked slowly back to the house, shivering from the spring wind off the ocean. “But first, you have to eat.”

  Later that night Torrant asked Yarri about the blood on her hands.

  Yarri shrugged it off. “It was nothing,” she said with a patently fake smile.

  Torrant frowned and leaned forward to take her hands, then stroked their backs with the pads of his thumbs. Yarri’s cheek’s warmed, and with a shock he realized it was the first touch they’d had that spoke openly of sex between them since that frantic kiss in the back alley of Dueance. He frowned again and leaned forward to brush his lips against hers in the tiniest, most ticklish way.

  He backed up again with his eyes closed. “Sweet,” he murmured. “I had forgotten how sweet….” He leaned forward to deepen the kiss and was surprised when she jerked away.

  “You’re not… well,” Yarri protested, and Torrant looked away, trying to hide his hurt.

  “I’m not….” He shrugged, because he’d always taken this part of himself for granted, dismissing it as irrelevant or superficial. “I’m not pretty anymore,” he apologized humbly and was shocked by her hand cracking across his face.

  “Ow….”

  “You wanker!”

  “Wwwwch!” His shock really left no other word for it.

  “You’re beautiful,” she snapped. “You are so golden, you horrible wank, that you shine with it!”

  “I ripped a man’s throat out with my teeth!” he snarled back, her anger surprising him into shouting his most heinous sin out into the quiet household. “I don’t know how you all can stand to look at me!”

  “You were defending me! You were defending me, and I don’t give a damn how that monster died!” She brought a hand to her mouth and gnawed on a bloody knuckle, and he was angry at that too.

  “It wasn’t even my sword!” Torrant shouted back viciously. “I live in fear—do you know that? I live in fear that my monster will come out, and he won’t know you. He’ll hurt you, or he’ll fail you the way he failed El… El… and….” Oh Goddess, he couldn’t say their names. “Why do you think I’ve been so anxious to hide in my own skin for the past weeks? How could you touch me knowing what’s inside of me?”

  “How could you touch me knowing that I left them there to die?” Yarri screamed, and Torrant took a step back, confused.

  “Is that the blood on your hands?” he asked, feeling as though he were in a strange room in a strange city, under a single moon.

  “The blood on my hands is some dirty, filthy bastard of a git who had nothing better to do in a burning city than try to rape anything in skirts.” She spat harshly on the floor. “I stabbed him in the balls, and Trieste kicked him in the head, and my virtue—” She laughed a little hysterically. “—my virtue remained unscathed. Let him rot. I’d do it again. I’d do it twice. I’d stalk the streets and hunt down every arsehole with violence in his bollocks for fun, and it wouldn’t change the fact that I was the one who left Eljean in that stinking city to die! I was the one who left my sister with no choice but to stay with him. I was the one who left you feeling helpless and hollow, and I’d do it again, just so you could live, but you know, and I know, that you’re never going to love me enough to forgive me.”

  And before Torrant could stop her, she scrambled up the stairs and across the porch. Torrant heard the door slam behind her as he whimpered up the damned stairs and watched helplessly as she stalked out into the dark, walking heavily at five months along but still leaving him in her dust.

  “Oh shite,” he muttered despondently, “I’ll never be able to catch her.”

  Aylan surprised him from the kitchen by saying “She needs some space, mate. She’s been carrying that burden hard.”

  Torrant looked at him unhappily, not sure if he was relieved or irritated that Aylan had heard. “Were we that loud?” he asked and followed Aylan in. There was some stew on the stove that Starren had made while Yarri had been at the orphanage. He hadn’t been hungry at dinner—he’d made some excuse, but the truth was, he’d been feeling useless and worn. Everybody—including Aylan—seemed to have somewhere to go, something useful to do during the day, but him.

  “Yes,” Aylan said with humor, dishing out the stew with purpose, “but everybody else is out. There’s a town meeting about how to celebrate Beltane this year. With so many folks from the ghettoes, they want it to be something special.”

  “Why didn’t I know?” Torrant muttered to himself, taking the stew and sitting down at the butcher block of a table. It was probably delicious, but he couldn’t talk himself into being any more excited about it now than he had been at dinner.

  “Because we haven’t told you,” Aylan s
aid softly.

  “I know it.” Torrant took a glum bite, and Aylan looked so cheered he took another. “The lot of you could walk on eggs without shattering a single shell. I’m not that fragile, you know.”

  “We can still see the sunlight through your hands, brother,” Aylan said, his face all concern, and Torrant tried to shake him off, but Aylan wouldn’t let him. “Is that it? What you said to Yarri? Are you eating yourself alive for Eljean? For Trieste? For becoming a monster to kill one? Let me know, mate—tell me. Because you’re not putting on weight. You only sleep when I’m there—and that’s fine and good for me, but it’s no way to be with your wife, brother. You ran away from a pregnant woman today, and I’m sure you poured your soul out to Aldam, but you need to do it for me again, because we didn’t have each other’s backs for a sodding year just to have you wither and waste in your own home—”

  “It… it’s worse here,” Torrant mumbled, interrupting Aylan before he could pour any more of his worry into the air.

  Aylan stopped short, swallowed, and nodded. “That it is.”

  “In Clough, all those horrible things were what we did in Clough. It was war; it was… whatever it was. But here, it’s like all that death, it followed us here, and I’m so angry at myself for….”

  “Poisoning,” Aylan supplied.

  Torrant agreed with him, shouting a “Yes” into the air that shot his chair backward and sent him reeling against the counter, his hands scrubbing at his face.

  “Poisoning. How can they—Lane, Roes, Cwyn, all of them—how can they let me sleep here, where Bethen slept, knowing the things I’ve done? How can Yarri let me touch her, let me touch our babies, knowing that I couldn’t protect Eljean. I couldn’t protect Trieste. I couldn’t save them. It was one thing when I was a boy, and I was caught unawares, but this was different. We’d worked to keep people safe. And I still failed. I swore I wouldn’t leave another brother to die—and I did. Yarri may have told him yes, but I was the one he looked to for an order, and….”