Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “Oh yes!”

  And there she was, the same way all babies had been since he’d held Yarri in his arms at her first breath. Red-faced, squalling, angry, and confused, little Bethen Moon made her entrance into the world, and Torrant was there to ease her way.

  Yarri made an able assistant, taking the grumpy little human to where linens and warm, sterile water lay waiting, bathing her and swaddling her into a tight, suspicious little package who settled daintily into her mother’s arms as soon as the afterbirth was delivered and the cleanup was complete.

  “She’s too little for Mum’s name!” Roes said, wiping at her tears. Aldam took her with a look of beatific enchantment on his face.

  “Well, she’ll grow,” he said, his contentment so typically Aldam that Torrant found himself catching Yarri’s teary eyes and sharing a smile. “We can call her Bitsy in the meantime—she is a little bit of a thing now, isn’t she?”

  Eventually, the new mother was resting, her beloved by her side. Aldam whispered kind things to her and promised her something to eat as soon as humanly possible.

  Torrant took the baby out to the sitting room to show the family, presenting her to Lane with a certain amount of pride.

  Lane held his granddaughter as he’d held his own daughter, oh so long ago, and kissed the top of her fiery red head. “She’s….” He stopped, closing his eyes tight. “Bitsy, right?”

  “That’s right, Uncle Lane,” Torrant nodded encouragingly. “Bitsy.”

  Lane nodded and looked his foster son in the eyes. “So what do you think of her, boyo?”

  Torrant grinned, and it was bright enough—real enough—to make the whole family stop its breath. “Sweetness,” he said softly, touching the tiny, absurdly long, wrinkled finger with his own. “She’s all that is sweetness.”

  Lane’s tears broke. “Of course she is, boy!” With that, he held her up to the family, and Torrant stepped aside as new aunts and uncles surrounded the baby and her grandda. He’d had his moment with her—and suddenly the idea that he would have moments with his own held none of the terror it once had.

  Later that night, when the family was settled and the new family was sleeping, with little Bitsy rocking in her mother’s own cradle, Torrant and Yarri took their belated walk.

  The stars were splinter sharp in the spring night, and Triane peeped out from under a fogbank on the seaward horizon.

  The ocean itself was nearing high tide. Torrant had taken off his boots, and Yarri dangled her sandals between her fingers. They walked with sort of an exhausted enjoyment of each other’s company.

  “You panicked for a moment,” Yarri murmured when they’d reached their accustomed stopping place. There was a driftwood log there that was the perfect size for sitting on and talking—or sitting silently, listening to the crash and the roar and the throb of the heartbeat that drove this place they both loved.

  “Yes,” Torrant replied, too enchanted by the night sky to want to talk about that moment anymore.

  “But you’re fine now?” she asked stubbornly, and his teeth glinted in the starlight as he smiled at her.

  “You are amazing,” he said out of the blue. “Look at you—you’re beautiful and stubborn, and you can do anything. You keep the orphanage running, and you can barely walk!”

  “Torrant!” she protested, because he was dodging the subject.

  “I’m just….” He smiled again, the kind of smile where his lip curled, and his eyes crinkled, and her heart stopped. “I’m just suddenly grateful, that’s all. Auntie Beth said one day, I’d wake up and I wouldn’t be tired anymore, and waking up would be worth it. I think today is that day, that’s all.”

  And for once, Yarri let it go. “When did she tell you that?” she asked, taking his hand off the log and stroking it. He’d looked at her, this week—really looked at her. Not as a brother looks at a sister, or a warrior looks at a brother-in-arms, but as a man looks at a woman he loves. Her heart had started to fill up too.

  “The night she died,” he said softly, reaching up to cup her chin. “The night Eljean died, and I died, and we all met at the riverside by the boat that would take us beyond the stars’ dark.”

  Yarri closed her eyes, the warmth of his hand on her face the only anchor to the here and now. “You all met there?” she asked, believing.

  “We did—and they told me to stay. And then you were begging me to stay. And so I did.”

  “Thank you for that,” she said, and his thumb brushed a teardrop from her cheek.

  “You’re welcome,” he said softly. “But it wasn’t my pleasure, I’m afraid. Not until this exact moment.”

  Her eyes flew open, and suddenly he was so close to her. She remembered everything about him so acutely—his smell, the way his whiskers patched his cheeks this long past morning, the way his hazel eyes gleamed darkly in the moonlight. Oh Goddess, it was all there, and in this moment, it was all for her.

  Their lips met with a delicate voracity, and then a true brutal starvation, and they kissed each other hungrily, their bodies throbbing with want in the silent midnight.

  His hands came up to her breasts, and she gasped for a moment. “I’m not the same,” she said, trying to remember the last time in Clough they had done this. He laughed a little, putting her hands under his shirt. She could feel it there, the smooth, raised expanse of scar tissue that ran from below his belly button to above his second rib. Its edges were uneven, and it was almost half the expanse of her hand. She still touched him voraciously, hungry for the feel of him.

  “Neither am I,” he murmured softly, and she smiled at him, a little bit of seduction in her smile.

  “So, uhm, do you want to go back home? I think Aylan’s sleeping on the couch tonight….”

  He kissed her in response, and for a moment it looked as though they wouldn’t make it back to the bedsitter after all. And then a sound, a sense, caught his attention, and he pulled away.

  “Yarri,” he muttered to get her attention, and she saw the freak wave coming at them, just in time to stop his attempt to get them up the shore.

  “We’ll live,” she said firmly, and he looked at her in surprise. Their hands were clasped tight when the wave hit them, dousing them both nearly to their chins, but they held on to each other firmly, and the water receded before it had a chance to suck them under. They stood there, shrieking, laughing, breathless for a moment, and then he turned to kiss her again, only to find her looking gravely at him, shivering in the dark. Her hand was cupped at his chest and held that precious, indefinable thing that existed between them with such awe and care he could swear it glowed in the space of her palm.

  He held his own hand over hers, and then they kissed, reverently, sweetly, lovingly, keeping the promise of those cupped hands after all.

  IT HAD seemed like such a promise, that they would weather any storm, any wave, together and love side by side until the end of a long life.

  They had taken it as such, and it was truth.

  Oh, there were moments when they doubted, the two of them. The morning of their daughter’s birth had almost been the morning of Yarri’s death, and Torrant had very nearly cursed all the gods and his own breaking heart.

  But Yarri had strength. She had her husband and her twin boys, and she too made the choice to walk away from a peaceful river for the grit under her feet on the riverbank, and she too stayed like her husband to discover the joys the world could give them.

  And Goddess, there were so many joys.

  There was the moment he played what would become the full scale “Ballad of the Three Sons” at Beltane—and his family had wept with him, for Eljean and Djali and Jino, for Triana and Trieste, for all the victims of the mindless hatred the Moon family had battled at such cost.

  There was the moment of their belated handfast, Yarri’s burgeoning belly under the spring sunlight a testament to the fact that their hearts had been married long before.

  The moment that Aylan moved his stuff back into his room, o
nly to venture down to the bedsitter during the worst of his nightmares or when Torrant gasped out his name in a sweat, had been a personal triumph for the three of them.

  There was the moment Torrant and Aylan had escorted Starren to a newly rebuilt Triannon, a buckboard full of rescued books testament to what they all believed in, and a moment two years later when Aylan and Starren had finally handfasted, because they could not wait until her course at Triannon was done to consummate that waiting love. Torrant and Yarri had cheered and wept to see their true, honorable friend, their beloved brother, happy, peaceful, and seated firmly in the joy of his soul.

  The moments of watching the children grow had been magic. They marveled at small things together, from twin boys making vowels at each other across a sunlit moon, to all the children running around in a pack at Beltanes, Solstices, Samhains, and summer. They celebrated the discovery by the barely mobile toddlers of a beleaguered and irritated cat—a thousand small moments such as these made that one moment, dripping in salt brine, the heart of all that followed.

  They never took it for granted. Not one moment. Not one laugh. Not one touch of their children’s hands in their own or one stolen kiss in the peace of the night. If anyone knew that Joy was a fleeting houseguest, it was Torrant and Yarrow Moon.

  In fact, all the Moon family lived by that truth: Joy is never still. She knows where She is welcome. Any home that follows Honor and Compassion lets Her in—but it’s not Her nature to stay put. Much of life is like that: the hard choices, the terrible hurts, the moments of “I wish I had….” But as long as the hearts making the choices keep their courses as true as the twin moons, Joy will find Her way home.

  And sweetness follows.

  Epilogue

  TORRANT HAD sung his ballad for nigh on thirty years now, and he always knew those moments when the gods sang with him.

  There was a fraught, thundering pause, wherein the collective breath of Eiran was drawn, and then there was the enormous, deafening applause. He bowed gracefully, every time—even that first time, when the wounds of all of them had still been raw and bleeding.

  Tonight, like most nights, he and Aylan met eyes over the crowd. They would not be spending the Beltane wilding with their wives. With a few years of hard exception after Aylan’s handfasting, they hadn’t spent Beltane in bed with their moon-destined women since that first year, the year Aylan had gotten Torrant roaring drunk for the first time in his life.

  The nightmares would be especially vivid for the next few weeks. Those weeks, those terrible moments, were the reason the Moon home might have expanded to hold their two families, but Torrant and Aylan never parted. Starren and Yarri counted the men’s closeness, their moments at wilding, as a small price to pay for whole, healthy hearts.

  Their family watched as the men’s eyes connected, as their wives snuck arms around their waists for quiet, reassuring embraces. Yarri wiped her face on Torrant’s shoulder, as she did every year, because every year she was angry with him for hurting, but it was Yarri who usually wept.

  “Are we done with this?” she asked unhappily, and Torrant looked at her, shaking his head because she knew better.

  “We’re never done with this,” he murmured, and then he accepted Roes’s hug and Starren’s and Evya’s, and a then a handshake from Stanny’s one child, a sober, big-shouldered boy whom everybody trusted with the children, no exceptions. Torrant had worked his way through most of the family and was moving to Lane to kiss his uncle on the cheek, when his beloved’s insistent tug on his hand let him know she wasn’t done with this matter either.

  “Sweetheart,” he murmured, and then Kessie, the one child who had picked up the lute after him, came up for her hug. He embraced her with both arms, kissing her on top of her red-gold hair and smiling into her sober brown eyes. Ah Goddess, she was so much the spitting image of her mother, a fact Torrant had celebrated every day since her birth.

  “Da,” said his dreamy-eyed, star-gifted daughter, “what have you done to make Mum so mad?”

  Torrant found himself smiling, because all the gods seemed to be winking at him at once on this matter. “She won’t let me finish, Kessie—I’ve been trying to tell her that I’ll start teaching you the ballad, if you like, and we can sing together next year.”

  Kessie—who had loved his pet name for her since she could barely walk—held one hand to her mouth and one hand to her rather swollen stomach delightedly. Her husband—Aerk’s only child, Jino—had been called to Clough on business, but he would be back within the week, which was good, because she was getting too large to get around easily. “Do you think I could do that, Da? I’ll have a handful.”

  “Every mother does. Don’t worry, Kessie—you won’t have to learn the whole thing right away, but….” He caught the joy in Yarri’s approving eyes and thought of the gray in his hair, the way his silver streak no longer showed so brightly against the dark and the silver frosting on Yarri’s hip-length plait.

  “It’s time to let us have our own glory, right, Da?” said Eljean from his other side, and his son accepted the hug with wry affection. Ellyot, with Torran—his perfectly tiny wife—and their two children were suddenly there too, and then River and Night, Torrant’s sturdy, cheerful youngest sons.

  “Oh, my children,” he murmured, looking at the happy, busy, beautiful, suffering, celebrating lot of them, all of them with the white streak at their temples, all of them gifts from the gods. “You are your own glory. But this story is ours, and it isn’t to be forgotten. I know you’ll all pitch in with the baby and help your sister learn it, right?”

  There was a chorus of “Oh yes!” and “Absolutely!” and enough chatter about it to keep them happily engaged for the quiet hour after the song shook the town, as it did every year.

  However, eventually the night wound down. In a brief moment of quiet giddiness, Yarri pulled her middle-aged husband behind a tree and kissed him soundly. He grinned at her, the gleaming of his teeth and the brightness of his hazel eyes undimmed by the thirty years of joy they’d shared, and she smiled shyly back.

  “What was that for?” he asked, kissing her forehead reverently. Every year she dreaded the Beltane song. Every year she was grateful for it when he finished.

  “Nothing,” Yarri told him, feeling very young in the trapped quiet of the tree shadow. Between their bodies she held her cupped hands, a promise between them for more than forty years.

  This moment was no different than all the years before.

  Torrant held his hands over hers, and together, they breathed the sacredness of their love in the holy dark. It was an older love, wiser and tried, but it was still as vibrant a glow in the shelter of their palms as it had ever been.

  She stood on tiptoe and kissed him again, gently. “Go easy on Aylan tonight,” she warned with a smile. “You two are not as young as you used to be.”

  “Impossible!” he told her sincerely. “You are as beautiful as you ever have been—I’ll be damned if we’ve aged a year.”

  Yarri laughed, because she knew the silver in her hair glinted in the silver of the moons, and because she knew her hips had only spread as she’d born their children. She was no longer the laughing girl on the green she had been when he’d ridden a tired horse in to share their last carefree Beltane and to fall in love with the love of his life. She was no longer the girl who looked forward to Beltane with the complete, unfettered joy with which she’d awaited her first kiss.

  But it didn’t matter. In his eyes she would always be golden, always dance lithely, always be his.

  They smiled into each other’s eyes then, until a child’s piping voice called to grandmamma, and they both went out to shepherd their families to their various beds for the night.

  Later, Yarri helped her beautiful daughter waddle her way home, and Torrant and Aylan found they were walking to the Moon home in the dark of the Beltane night, side by side in the companionable crunching of their boots on the gravel road.

  “So, you’re ret
iring the ballad?” Aylan asked hopefully after a moment, and Torrant frowned wryly in the light of the three moons.

  “I’m training Kessie this year, but no. You know as well as I do why it needs to be remembered.”

  Aylan nodded and looped a comforting arm around Torrant’s shoulders. “You’d think, after all these years, it would feel like someone else living that time, but it never does,” he said thoughtfully, with a great deal of pain. “I don’t know what to think of that.”

  “I think,” Torrant said, leaning against Aylan as he so often did, “that there was sweetness in the midst of the madness, and I should be very unhappy to lose that memory with age.”

  Aylan nodded and then bent and dropped a kiss in Torrant’s hair. “Amen to that, brother, amen to that.”

  Together they walked down the main street of the town they’d loved for the thirty years since their return. The ocean glittered in the distance beyond them, the three moons dancing in her wake, and Triane’s Son and Oueant’s Son made their way quietly home.

  In Memoriam: A Few Words from the Author

  ONCE UPON a time I taught high school, and my students knew I wrote—a few of them even read my books. One of these students, Marvin Wingate, was sitting in my fourth period class with his best friend, Jino, and their friend, Carrie, and I was suddenly besieged: “Ms. Lane, can I be in your book? Please, Ms. Lane? We want to be in your book.”

  “Okay, guys, but remember, I do have bisexual and gay characters—you’ll have to be cool with that.” In my neck of the woods, this is an important qualification—students can get very upset when the sexuality issue is mentioned, and they needed to understand that this book was about all kinds of tolerance.

  “But we’re going to be straight, right, Ms. Lane?”

  I laughed. “Of course.” In fact, having based Aerk and Keon on two students I’d had the year before, their roles as young regents were already humming along in my brain. For that matter, so was the dance scene, where a number of girls who had already read Vulnerable are featured—again, by their request.