Bitter Moon Saga Read online

  “I beg your pardon?” Lane said, blinking hard.

  “Stanny said she was found behind the barracks with her head caved in.” Aldam’s voice was calmer now. He had an armful of old, clean linens and started laying them out on the bed, where Lane pulled them up under his wife’s hips even as he undressed her.

  “Lane,” Bethen protested, looking at the two young men with a mixture of mortification and helplessness.

  “I’ve delivered many babies. People babies and horse babies,” Aldam said calmly. “It’s the only time the people in Switchback Village weren’t afraid of me. I need to go boil things.”

  “There’s a pot of water on the stove for tea,” Bethen told him, using her “in-charge” voice, and then she looked at Torrant, rolled her eyes, and made a protesting noise in her throat.

  “I’ve helped my mother since Yarri was born,” Torrant added shortly, spreading out one of the linens and using it with Lane to drape over Bethen’s knees. “I helped with the five babies at….” His voice trailed off. With the exception of Yarri, all those children born at the Moon hold had been killed with the rest of their family. “I’ve delivered children before,” he repeated firmly, silencing the anguished wail that threatened to break free.

  “Lane….” Bethen was in the middle of another contraction, and if she’d noticed Torrant’s lapse into the past, it didn’t matter. Like any woman about to give birth in front of men, she was embarrassed and in pain, and her discomfort could only be conveyed mutely by her expressive brown eyes. The contraction worsened, and even though Bethen kept her breathing even, the breaths were short and painful, and her grip on Lane’s hand was pretty damned excruciating, judging by Lane’s bulging eyes and whimpers.

  Torrant waited until the contraction was over before he spoke again. “Auntie Bethen,” he said firmly, putting his hands on her knees and making sure she could see his eyes. “Auntie Bethen, I trusted you, right?” He nodded and waited for her miserable nod to follow his. “So you need to trust me now.”

  “Fine,” she threatened, gearing up for yet another contraction. “You go ahead and deliver this damned baby, but when I’m not in labor you’d better still let me be the mother.”

  “You couldn’t be anything else,” Torrant soothed, and in another moment Aldam brought in a pot of hot water with some harsh soap, and the two of them washed their hands stoically and got down to business.

  The rest of it happened quickly. Bethen’s waters wouldn’t burst on their own, so Torrant had Aldam boil one of Bethie’s tiny steel hooks, the kind she used for lace, and used it to burst the amniotic sac without touching the baby’s head.

  “Just don’t tell me which one it is!” Bethen panted as Torrant stepped back from the initial burst of fluids.

  “I promise,” he murmured and put his hand in position to catch at the next contraction. The promised contraction never came, though, and Bethen whimpered, in a hellish limbo of crowning without the labor to finish. “Auntie Beth, can you turn over to your side? Please? You’re squishing the blood supply that makes the whole thing work when you’re on your back,” he instructed, and Bethen just whimpered.

  “C’mon, woman, move it!” Lane snapped.

  Bethen snapped back, “You turn a hippopotamus on its back when it’s pushing out a lumber barge!” But she grabbed Lane’s hands and rolled, ponderously, to her side, and with the shift of her body weight, the next contraction slammed into her like a panicked horse into a guardrail.

  With a grunt and a tearing moan from its mama, the baby’s head was out, a bald little head with a fine and fair fuzz plastered against it. Torrant cleaned the tiny mouth and squashed-up nose, just as he’d seen his mother do. With the next contraction, he turned the head gently and allowed the shoulders to plop soundly into his waiting hands. The little mouth opened, the tiny face scrunched, the eyes crinkled into puffy creases, and a squall came out that almost deafened Torrant with its beauty, if not its volume.

  In spite of the blood and the whitish muck that coated the blotchy skin, Torrant clutched the little form to him, and in a flash, clutched all those other babies he’d helped his mother with to his breast also. In a moment much like Bethen’s contractions, he felt a weight of tears slamming against the back of his eyes, and a compulsion to huddle over the new life, to guard it, snarling and feral, almost overwhelmed him. This baby would be safe, this family would be safe, and no one, no one ever, would touch them with pain or fear while he lived and breathed.

  “Hullo, tiny daughter,” he murmured, although the baby was quite large compared to the others he’d seen. He could swear it weighed nearly three pounds more than Yarri had, but then he’d been very young when he’d helped deliver Yarri.

  “Daughter?” Lane said hopefully. “Did you hear that, Bethie? A girl for Roes.”

  “You mean a wrestling bag for Cwyn.” She laughed, her voice still weak with panting.

  Aldam was reaching for the baby, and Torrant almost smacked his hands away before he came to himself and realized that Bethen would need tending, the afterbirth was coming, and the cord that still bound mother and child needed to be cut. Goddess, he wasn’t going to be able to watch his mother do these things! They were his tasks to do on this bizarre and stunning night.

  Aldam had boiled everything in preparation. The string to bind the cord and the scissors were still hot from the boiled water, and so were the needle and thread.

  “She doesn’t need stitching,” Aldam suggested carefully when the afterbirth had been delivered, and Torrant agreed.

  “If she has another one, it will probably walk out on its own,” Torrant said with a twist to his mouth. Aldam deftly cleaned and swaddled the infant, who had stopped squalling in an amazingly short time. He handed the baby to Lane, who had pulled a chair next to the bed and was calming a tearful Bethen, and showed her their newest child.

  “No more,” he said sharply, and Bethen sighed.

  “Like you have anything to say about it.” As Aldam and Torrant cleaned up the blood and the fluid and the feces, she closed her eyes, as if pretending they weren’t there.

  “I’m serious, Bethie—this isn’t good for you,” Lane said softly. “She’s beautiful, but… but I don’t want to trade your life for another one.”

  “I’m not drinking that vile tea,” Bethen humphed. “And we’re too old to be fooling around with that other way.” She was nodding off in the exhaustion of aftermath, and her voice was slurry. “Don’t try to control it, beloved. Just enjoy them when they come.” She yawned, and her eyes fluttered closed, and Torrant saw Aldam looking at her intently even as he scooped the last of the soiled linens into a basket.

  “I can stop it,” Aldam said, his voice apologetic. “Lane—if you want me… there’s a place in a woman’s body that… that delivers what will be the baby to the womb. I can… I can interrupt that place. My mother… there was a woman in our village who had too many babies with no fathers. My mother told me to stop her from conceiving, and I did….” His voice trailed off, and he sounded almost frightened. “She didn’t know. It felt very wrong—but if Bethen wants, if she knows, I can do it for you. But I can only do it now, when her body is ready for healing.”

  Lane nudged Bethen, waiting until her eyes fluttered open. “Bethie—did you hear that—Aldam can make it so there’s no more babies.”

  “So can the Goddess,” Bethen murmured.

  “Well, maybe that’s why she gave Aldam this gift,” Lane said tersely. “Please, Bethie. If the next one kills you, you’re going to have to trust me to raise the rest of them.”

  “Which would be a reason to live, don’t you think? Enough, Lane. Boys. Enough. Let me sleep. Let me wake up and hold my daughter. Have a little faith that the heavens have a plan.” And with that she slipped under, leaving Lane to rock their daughter in the thoughtful quiet.

  A Little Bit of Later

  THE MIDWIFE’S death had repercussions throughout the barracks. The refugees were terrified that they had run fro
m danger to disaster, and the town began muttering about whether or not the refugees were really the innocent victims they had claimed to be. The morning after little Starren’s birth (Starry, for short) a red-eyed Lane brought a bleary-eyed Torrant to the barracks under the strenuous objections of the mayor and constable.

  “What is that boy going to do? Point his finger at anyone who looks at him funny?” the mayor demanded, and Lane aimed a gaze that Torrant was starting to associate with Lane protecting his family. It was the same look he’d had when he’d begged Bethen to let Aldam help her, and the same look he’d had as he’d stood and threatened to move his warehouses across the bay. Owen Moon had possessed that look whenever Rath’s guardsman rode onto his property and asked if he was hiding anyone dangerous to the government of Clough.

  “He knows evil when he smells it, Anse,” Lane replied mildly. “When was the last time you bathed?”

  The mayor flushed and gestured the two of them grandly into the barracks, where they’d had this conversation, and Lane grunted in frustration when he was out of earshot.

  “He’s a good man,” he murmured resignedly to Torrant. “But his mind is small—he can only think about Eiran and those he protects and not about the world at large. That’s the Goddess thinking, and there’s not a thing wrong with it, but there’s two gods in the sky too, and they’re higher up and can see the whole plan. If you don’t think with all of them, you’re not really thinking.”

  “But….” Torrant grimaced. “What am I supposed to be doing here, Uncle Lane?”

  Lane smiled reassuringly and patted Torrant’s shoulder. “Have I told you, boy, how proud I am that you call Bethie and me Aunt and Uncle?” he asked out of nowhere, and Torrant flushed.

  “It’s what Yarri calls you,” he mumbled.

  “But of course.” Lane sobered. “Back to your question—you told me you could ‘smell’ Rath’s guardsman. You knew he was lying, and you knew something was wrong as he left. It was a good instinct. I think it saved your lives.”

  “Not everybody’s,” Torrant said bitterly, and this time the hand on his shoulder squeezed gently.

  “Three’s a good start for a boy,” Lane said dryly. “And that’s not counting the people you saved with your map. No. I’ll trust those instincts to hunt out the murderers, thank you very much.”

  “Why do you think it’s somebody from the camp?” Torrant asked, and he watched Lane’s eyes narrow.

  “For one thing, the rest of the townspeople are scared spitless. They see these people coming down the hill, and they wonder what they could have done to be driven out of their homes. Rath’s madness makes no more sense to them than it does to the people fleeing their own country—they wouldn’t come here, even to do evil, and that’s the plain truth. But the other thing is….” Lane stopped walking and drew to a shaded, chilly corner of the barracks, then turned Torrant to face him so they could look eye to eye. “Boy—this thing I’m going to say, it can’t go beyond me and you, you understand? Not your Aunt Beth, not Aldam”—he tightened his grip on Torrant’s shoulder—“not even Yarri, you understand me?”

  Torrant nodded gravely, and Lane continued.

  “The thing is, the one person from the town who had talked to that woman, and talked to her at length, was your Aunt Beth, and the one reason that would make her a target is….”

  “Us,” Torrant said from a harsh throat. “She was killed because Bethen needed her, and because Bethen was associated with Yarri and I. It’s like, whoever didn’t want to try to strike at the family directly, but they could do it through someone they were near.”

  “Exactly,” Lane agreed. “But there’s more. When you arrived here—somewhat spectacularly, I might add—you gave out your name as ‘Ellyot Moon,’ and Jerin, the guardsman, would have told a good many people that Ellyot and Yarri Moon survived. I don’t know what Donis and Anse have said since, but I don’t think they’ve done anything public to correct the impression that you’re Ellyot.”

  “Rath wouldn’t care much about Yarri.” Torrant felt numb, hardly unable to grate out the words. “She’s a girl. He’d be after me.” His stomach churned, and he fought the urge to cry. “I’m sorry.” He swallowed hard, tried to speak, swallowed again. “I’m sorry, Uncle Lane. I didn’t mean to—”

  “Of course you didn’t, boy,” Lane said gently. “Make no mistake about it—none of this is your doing. But we’ve been left this mess, and it’s up to us to either survive it or fix it, right?”

  Torrant nodded. “Right.”

  “Good, lad. Now—we’ll just go sniff around a bit, and with any luck, we’ll figure out who the bad guys are.”

  “What will we do then?” Torrant watched as Lane’s face became hard and angry with the thought.

  “We’ll do what we need to, boyo. But I hope all we’ll need to do is tell Donis to do his job.”

  The barracks had become clogged and crowded since the three of them had arrived, nearly a month before. As far as Torrant could tell, there was no rhyme or reason to the people fleeing Clough. They were old, young, men, women, and a surprising, heartrending number of children.

  “I don’t understand,” Torrant muttered to his uncle. “If we don’t choose our altar until we’re of age, how can there be so many children here?”

  Lane looked at him oddly. “What do you mean, ‘choose your altar’?”

  “You know—choose who you worship… the gods or the Goddess. Strength, compassion, or joy?” How could a grown-up not know that?

  “Why can’t you worship them all?” Lane asked carefully. “Just because you favor one or the other, that doesn’t mean they all can’t get some respect.”

  “It was a law,” Torrant insisted; then his voice became a little less stubborn. “But not one Moon made us follow.”

  Lane laughed sourly. “My brother was a smart man.” He neatly dodged a pair of siblings playing chase in the crowded confines of bunk beds. “But why didn’t you call him ‘Owen’?”

  Torrant looked at his new family member with puzzled eyes. “He was Moon,” he said simply, picturing the broad man with the thick mustache and blazing blue eyes. The memory of his surrogate father hadn’t dimmed any over the last weeks. Instead, it had become brighter somehow, and almost larger than life, with a sunshiny, golden halo around the edges. “He was….” He could hear that thick strong voice, booming tolerance through their gleaming dark-paneled schoolroom, thundering across the dinner table that gods’ people or Goddess’s people, they were all still people. Moon was the center. The belief. The father and the safety. “He was just Moon,” he said at last, simply, and Lane nodded.

  “Right, then. Moon he was.”

  Their conversation had to stop then, because the people grew, if anything, more populous and less washed, and more than once Torrant almost lost Lane in the dodge to avoid feet, toddlers, and grimy edges of thick, winter skirts.

  Torrant was distinctly uncomfortable as they moved. He had spent his entire life in Moon’s enclosure. Being caught in this press of people was almost more terrifying than seeing the streets of Eiran for the first time. He was unaware of the little animal sounds coming from his throat or the sweat breaking out on his forehead, however, until a meaty hand clamped on his shoulder, and he whirled around with a snarl that echoed from the snowcat’s throat.

  “Whoa, little man!” The voice was patronizing and smug, and Torrant looked up (not that far—he had grown at least an inch in the past month) into the face of a monster.

  He screamed, loudly, because his vision blurred with the gift, and he didn’t realize that the heavy-featured man with the scruff of beard and mustache and greasy dirt spots on his face was not the grotesque, twisted mass of evil intentions and foul deeds, swathed in Rath’s livery of teal and black, that his gifted vision revealed to him with that one unguarded touch.

  The man shrank back, his eyes glowing in Torrant’s vision, and then he took a deep breath and grabbed Torrant’s shoulder with hard, cruel fingers.<
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  “I’ll show you to be afraid of a little touch, boy!” he hissed, his breath foul. “You think that horseman had designs on your little sister? I’ll bend you over and shred you.”

  Torrant was stuck, helpless, gasping while the man’s foulness dripped over his skin like pig shit. With the contact between them, he could see the man’s intentions, and they made his insides run cold. He could see the man’s past deeds, and those visions made him want to vomit. Even worse, he could see the little teal-and-black insignia pin on the inside of the man’s rough sweater that identified him as a leader of Rath’s army. Torrant’s breath trammeled up in his chest and a little animal moan leaked from his throat and still, Lane was nowhere in sight, and this monster kept talking.

  “And when I’m done with you, I’ll take your retard buddy and your pretty little sister and bend them over and….”

  The threat to Yarri and Aldam snapped Torrant out of his inaction. He yowled—the sound echoing out of the snowcat’s throat—and suddenly his vision, which had been distorted by his gift for truth, grew icy, crystalline, and clear. This man was a threat to his family. This man had to die.

  He met the man’s lewd scowl with a subzero blue gaze of his own and was gratified when he watched his enemy recoil. He followed the action with a lunge and a strike, sinking his teeth into a grimy hand and growling fiercely when he tasted blood. Rath’s captain screamed in pain and surprise, and with that sound, Lane was at Torrant’s side, pulling him away and putting himself between Torrant and his attacker.

  “What have you done to him?” Lane snarled. “Get the hell back!”

  Suddenly, the knot of people around them opened up into a circle, with the participants in the little drama confined to the center.

  “He bit me!” The howl echoed off an unsympathetic wall of bodies. “Alls I did was touch the little punk’s shoulder, and he bit me!”

  Torrant yowled again, and Lane looked at him in sudden panic. “Boy, your eyes!” he hissed, shaking him at the shoulder. “Fix your eyes.”