Bitter Moon Saga Read online

  “The gift does that,” Lane told her, a pucker between his eyebrows. “When Owen wrote me about the boy, he told me that when Torrant was using his gift, he was fine, but afterward, he needed a couple of hours to sleep it off.”

  Bethen blinked. “That’s how he did it,” she said, suddenly sure.

  “What?”

  “That’s how he got them over the pass.” Bethen shook her head, the motion causing her whole body to wobble, her stomach almost overbalancing the rest of her. “I don’t know how he used it, what he did, but how else does a fourteen-year-old boy have a map no one else does and get two other children—”

  “Aldam’s nearly of age—”

  “They’re children, all of them, and that’s how Torrant got them over. Yarri didn’t die of fever because Aldam healed her, every night, until he couldn’t anymore. Whatever Torrant did, he kept them safe. Aldam was covered in mud when he got here—he said, and I quote, ‘We slid down the trail, and the horses followed on their own.’ Yarri and Torrant didn’t have any mud on them—in fact, Yarri was hardly wet. I don’t know what he did—my people are peasants, we don’t do money or gifts, you know that—but he used his to save their lives.”

  “He’d tell us!” Lane protested.

  “You’re not listening to the refugees,” Bethen corrected. “They’re all Goddess’s children, Lane—in one way or another. Rath’s made it illegal for them to make a living or to live as they please. I don’t know how much those children know….”

  “Owen didn’t let politics into his hold,” Lane said, bitterness creeping into his voice.

  “He may not have let them talk about it, but his entire hold was a political statement. You know that as well as I do. If Rath was persecuting Goddess’s children, then a hold that openly welcomed them was practically an enemy country. I’m not saying it was wrong!” Lane was looking to protest. “I’m just saying that the refugees are talking that some rogue Goddess’s children are responsible for the ‘Moon Massacre’—I think that’s a rumor Rath started, and those children know who killed their family, and it was the people in charge.”

  Lane swallowed, feeling suddenly nauseous. “I’d thought it was a rogue group of bandits, or of Twin fanatics…. I wouldn’t think it was…. Owen said it was getting dangerous…. I thought he meant the climate, not….” A wave of darkness passed over his vision and only his wife’s hand in his own kept him standing. “Oh, Bethie—do you think they were killed by their own king?”

  “I’d lay money on it,” she said grimly. “And I think it’s dangerous for Torrant to keep Ellyot’s name.”

  “But Yarri—”

  “Rath doesn’t care about girls,” Bethen cut him off. “People like him—to demonize the Goddess is to demonize women in general. He won’t believe she’s a threat, and rumors that she’s alive aren’t going to touch him. But Ellyot—Ellyot is a young man who’s capable of taking vengeance.” Her voice got thick and angry. “The longer Torrant keeps that name, the more danger he’s in.”

  Lane swore bitterly and at length and eventually realized that a small smile had quirked at his wife’s lips. “What?” he asked, still angry.

  “Just making sure Cwyn isn’t around to pick any of that up and broadcast it about the barracks,” she said blandly, and Lane smiled back at her, just a little, before his expression gentled.

  “Rath would have to worry about you, wouldn’t he, dearest?” Lane asked wryly, touching his fierce wife’s belly when he knew she would fillet anyone else who tried.

  “Rath wouldn’t live long enough to worry, and if I failed, Roes would finish him off,” Bethen affirmed and then, without warning, burst into tears. “Those poor children. Oh gods, how are they going to grow?”

  Lane comforted his wife with arms around her shoulder and tears in her hair. “With us. They’ll grow up with us.

  To Be Kept Later

  TORRANT MIGHT have held on to Ellyot’s name indefinitely, if it weren’t for one more brush with death.

  After his first awakening, he improved steadily if not quickly. He frequently told Aldam to stop hovering. He could heal fine on his own, and that was that. Aldam ignored him, and one fine morning after Samhain when the air outside was so cold it practically crackled as they breathed and Torrant’s fever threatened to come back, Aldam blatantly overruled his new brother. First he leaned over and kissed Torrant on the lips and then tumbled gracelessly back over his own heels to land on the ground.

  Roes was at his side in an instant. “That was a damned fool thing to do,” she scolded, sounding years older than she really was, “and I hope you have a bruise on your arse.” As sharp as her voice was, her touch was sure and gentle as she hauled Aldam to his feet and helped him wobble back to his own bunk, letting the much taller Aldam lean on her sturdy shoulder for support.

  Torrant watched her with fondness. The Eiran Moon clan was just as warm and as comfortable as the Clough Moon clan had been, with the added color of Bethie Moon’s tart tongue and strong will. He had come to secretly treasure the sight of Bethen, knitting tirelessly with her feet up in the corner, watching after him, Yarri, and Aldam as they slept or talked or (blessings of blessings) read books to each other during their recovery.

  Stanny—a greatly sized, handsome boy with hazel-brown eyes a lot like Torrant’s and a face full of freckles just like his mother’s—would come in after his chores at their house and play games. He and Aldam were kindred souls and equally awful chess players. Stanny was constantly trying to be amusing, and hundreds of bad joke attempts later, Torrant and Aldam were starting to laugh at the slightly better ones, just to watch the slow, proud smile bloom across Stanny’s face when he felt successful. And, of course, Cwyn was the apple of the family’s eye. He was unmercifully spoiled, and, as Bethie called him, a two-footed terror, and Torrant never knew when the little man was going to defy the family protocol of gentleness toward the invalids and rocket off one bed and right onto Torrant. He’d taken a special liking to Torrant, actually. He never seemed to pounce on Aldam from a four-foot drop when he was sound asleep.

  Today, Bethie was standing by the door where the other refugee barracks sat (as of yet, no one had given him a satisfying explanation as to why he, Aldam, and Yarri were kept separately) and talking to an older woman about midwifery while kneading her lower back patiently. Torrant gathered that the only midwife for quite some distance had just passed away, and she seemed to be relieved that someone else with knowledge of how to deliver a baby would be there for her next one. The midwife was grateful to escape the persecution of the Goddess’s children and equally grateful for a chance to earn her keep. Cwyn was lying on his stomach waging war with a platoon of wooden soldiers, a red rubber ball, and a giant stuffed monkey. The monkey was winning. Stanny was by the fire, cooking a simple dinner of eggs and potatoes. Torrant had been letting Aldam win at backgammon when a sudden bout of sweaty dizziness swamped him, and he’d practically fallen backward into his bed. Roes had pulled his shirt off to prepare him for a sharp-odored poultice to make him sweat, when Aldam had taken over and forced Torrant backward in order to heal him.

  Torrant watched with exasperation as Aldam was teetered over to his bed. The damn fool practically fell over when Roes removed her arm. He would have been fine, he told himself bitterly—he didn’t want Aldam risking himself any more on his account.

  After Roes laid Aldam down, she put a cold compress on his head and hung a blanket over the top bunk so the light wouldn’t hurt his eyes, and then moved back to Torrant with brisk purpose. “If you let him help you when you need it, he wouldn’t keep trying to ‘sneak’ help to you when nobody’s looking,” she said sharply, and Torrant shook a bleary head.

  “He needs to get well,” he said grumpily, reaching for his shirt and frowning when he couldn’t find it. They kept taking his sleep things to wash, and in spite of their best efforts to make him a brother in their household, he was still self-conscious in front of the Moon family. “I told his mother an
d aunt I’d take care of him—he can’t be getting sick for me.”

  “Well, then, let go of whatever it is that’s making you stay sick!” Roes snapped, scrunching her freckles mutinously, and “Ellyot” stared back into his eleven-year-old cousin’s black-brown eyes.

  “What does that mean?” he asked, maintaining the lie in his frown.

  “It means your heart is as sick as your body, and it’s keeping us all here when we need to go home. Mama is getting close to due—can’t you tell by the way she’s all inside herself and snapping at everybody? She wants to be home. We all want to be home—Cwyn, Stanny, Daddy—but we can’t go until the three of you are better, and you’re the one whose sickness is looking out of your eyes!” Roes was four feet ten inches of irritated preadolescent, and Torrant suddenly found himself smiling with all his heart when he hadn’t known he still could.

  “My Goddess!” he swore, swinging his pajama-clad legs over the side of the bunk bed and holding back a chuckle. “You are just like Yarri. Unsquare your jaw, prickly little flower, and back off. All you had to do was ask, and I would have been happy to tell you all to take Yarri home with you and leave us. Aldam and I will be fine.”

  To his surprise, and her mother’s clear dismay from across the room, Roes swung her dainty little foot back and kicked him in the shin. Hard.

  “You two are coming with us, ‘Cousin Ellyot’!” she snapped, even as he howled with pain and wobbled to his feet. “If you think we just nursed the three of you for two weeks to desert you in a barracks, wondering where you’ll be turned out to next, you’re dumber than I thought.”

  “Roes!” he hollered, stumbling after her. “Get back here! Aldam and I will be fine on our own. You can put us with the other refugees. You’re right—your mother needs her rest….”

  But Roes wasn’t listening. Instead, she stalked around the beds, nimbly avoiding her little brother as she did so, and out the door, presumably to let her temper cool off. Torrant was right on her heels.

  As he ran, barefooted into the frosty prenoon, he skidded to a halt as soon as he opened the door. He hadn’t actually seen the town by day.

  Eiran was not a city. It was a midsized port town that depended on outlying farms and fishing cottages for its militia. Nevertheless, Torrant, who had only lived twenty miles or so north of the bustling capital of Dueance, had never seen a dwelling place bigger than the Moons’ hold. He stopped, there on the barracks porch, and caught his breath.

  The militia barracks fronted a wide dirt road—growing slush-muddy in the melting frost—with shops and businesses on either side that led down to the pier. The pier itself was larger than the town. There were three ships with more than two masts bobbing at the quay, and Torrant had never seen the like. He had just caught his breath sharply with the surprise and the wonder of it when a small hurricane brushed by his legs, followed by several shouts of dismay.

  “Gods!” Torrant swore and then started after Cwyn, who had taken the opportunity of the open door to escape his imprisonment and run after his sister, right into the horse-and-wagon-crowded avenue below.

  Hot on his heels, Torrant scooped him up and out of the way of an approaching cart and hauled the shrieking, protesting boy back up the barracks steps to hand him to his breathless mother.

  “’all!” he wailed, “’all!” even while Bethen clutched him to her full-to-bursting body, chastising him as she did so.

  “No—we’re not going to get your ball, Cwyn—don’t you ever go out there without someone with you again!” But Cwyn’s struggles were getting epic, and Bethen was barely able to hold up her own body and her impending baby at the same time, so Stanny took the toddler from her arms so she could lean weakly against a pole.

  Stanny’s mind may have worked slowly, but it also worked with great shrewdness and creativity, and he was by no means stupid. “Mama… his ball. He won’t stop without his ball,” he pointed out, grabbing Cwyn by the ear and making him settle down before giving him back to his mother.

  Torrant—ignoring Bethen’s distressed calls of “Boy, get back here with your bare feet in that frost!”—turned back to the street to get the red rubber ball that was being ponged from wagon wheel to horse’s hoof with alarming violence.

  Scrambling to stay out of the way of the traffic, Torrant managed to dive behind one carriage and whirl in front of another horse in order to snag the toy at a dead run. He looked up at the porch with a breathless grin of triumph, waving the ball at Cwyn so the little boy would stop struggling to bolt into the street.

  Bethen, Roes, Stanny, Yarri, and even little Cwyn were looking at him in horror, their mouths working to call out something, anything, but nobody seemed to be able to spit out what they were trying to say.

  Yarri broke the shock first, pointing to the runaway horse approaching him crosswise from the rest of the traffic and screaming “Torrant!” piercingly enough to make even the passersby look up to see what the fuss was about. Torrant looked up and saw the horse just in time to be caught in the midsection by Stanny, who, unable to voice his name in time, had given his body leave to knock Torrant out of the way.

  Torrant went down hard on the icy ground—Stanny was taller than he was and outweighed him by a fair amount—and the last thing he remembered as his head smacked sharply off an iced-over rut in the road and then settled painfully back down was that Yarri had said his name.

  HE WOKE up in the basement of the Moon home, which, had he known it, he had seen from the barracks porch that morning, since it only sat two streets behind the main avenue. He tried to look around him, but all he got through his aching head was a vague impression of roughly finished walls with tapestries over them and two newer-looking beds side by side, covered in a motley assortment of quilts and afghans. He was in one of them, and Aldam was in the other, snoring gently.

  Lane Moon sat next to him, reading casually, or so it seemed until Torrant’s eyes focused on him, and then his face creased into a relieved smile.

  “Where am I?” Torrant asked groggily, squinting through the pain behind his temples, and Lane abruptly sobered.

  “You’re in what is from now on your room, in my house, which is going to be your home. Do you understand that, Torrant?”

  Torrant blinked and took a few moments to digest what that meant. He couldn’t. “No,” he said. “I don’t understand at all.”

  Lane nodded, stroking the trimmed goatee that framed his face. “Stanny’s going to be telling the story of how he saved your life until the sea turns to fire—you know that, right?”

  Torrant smiled, slightly, wondering when his head would stop pounding. “He should. It was pretty impressive.”

  “He wouldn’t have had to do it, ‘Ellyot,’ if you had just told us your real name in the first place.” Torrant wanted to smile in earnest, because Lane sounded exasperated and irritable—just like Moon used to. Just like a father would. Abruptly, his smile faded.

  “Yarri wasn’t living here yet,” Torrant said after a fraught moment. “She needed to be… here. She needed to be safe before I left.”

  Lane’s eyebrows rose, and he nodded. “Uhm… where did you think you were going?” he asked, as if trying to keep his face and voice straight.

  Torrant tightened his face, trying to be stoic. “I don’t have any family here,” he said. “I… unless I go back and slaughter Rath as he sleeps, I’ve got nowhere to go.”

  Lane gasped a sudden breath through his teeth, and his expression was both shocked and compassionate. “Is that something you were thinking about?” he asked seriously.

  Torrant turned his face to the wall next to his bed. It was roughhewn but thoroughly stained, and, he noted, the tapestry that hung there was not old. In fact, it was new, and featured Courtland and Kiss and Clover as the centerpieces. It had been made for him. “Somebody needs to,” he said roughly.

  Lane’s voice from behind him was suddenly gruff. “I’ll give you that, boyo. Somebody does need to do it—but not you. Not today.”<
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  “What then?” Torrant whispered, mostly to himself. “What do I do now?”

  “My brother had me enroll you in Triannon,” Lane said boldly, and Torrant moved his head around so quickly that he groaned at the dizziness the movement caused. “Why does that surprise you?”

  “It costs a lot of money,” Torrant murmured. “And Ellyot wasn’t going.”

  Lane laughed a little sadly. “Ellyot wasn’t going because he would have grieved himself heartbroken if he had to leave his father’s horses. Moon wrote me. He felt the university was the best place for you to make your future. You’re surprised at that?”

  Torrant closed his eyes painfully. “It was something Moon would do,” he said softly. “But I wasn’t family.”

  “You were to Moon,” Lane said, equally soft. “And you saved my brother’s only surviving child. You’re family to me now as well.”

  Torrant closed his eyes tighter, wondering if he was weary from the conversation or the concussion or just from living through the bleeding in his heart. “Thank you,” he said. “I would… I would like to see Yarri grow up.”

  Lane laughed again, this time not sadly. “Of this I hadn’t a doubt in the world.”

  “But what about Aldam?” Torrant murmured, having this one last thing to see to before he rested for the first time since the last night he’d spent in the Moon hold, free, happy, and innocent.

  “Your brother in spirit?” Lane Moon asked with gentle humor. “He’s a part of the family already. If you’re going to worry about Aldam, worry about Roes’s sharp tongue filleting him alive.”