Bitter Moon Saga Read online

  “The snowcat saved my life when I was sick—you know that, right?” The worry on her piquant little face with its hard, red-apple cheeks was enough to erase all his irritation in one swoop.

  “That’s what we need to talk about,” he said gently.

  Torrant was finishing the dishes he and Stanny had been working on when the trouble had arrived at their door. Aldam was drying.

  “Aldam, could you give us a moment?” Lane asked casually as he came in and sat at the battered table where the family ate.

  “I would like to stay,” Aldam replied in his mild way, and Lane shook his head.

  “Torrant’s not in any trouble here, Aldam,” he said, holding back a laugh.

  “Of course not,” Aldam replied, “but I would still like to sit at the grown-ups’ table.”

  And now Lane did laugh. “You’re underestimated a lot, aren’t you, Aldam?”

  “I am simple,” Aldam said, and there was a wealth of sadness in his tone that wiped the smile off Lane’s face in an instant.

  “There is nothing simple about you, boyo,” he murmured gently. “And if Torrant is fine with your presence, you’re welcome to stay.”

  Torrant looked at Aldam, and a smile like slow water moved across his face. Lane noticed that one side of his lip curled higher when he did that, and that brackets grooved his cheeks. Between that and the dent in his chin, he wondered how long it would take the boy to discover that women were going to fall at his feet like leaves in autumn.

  “He’s my brother now,” was all Torrant said, and Lane gave in to the inevitable.

  “Well, then. So now let’s talk about the snowcat.” A silence like plopping snow thumped into the kitchen, and surprisingly enough, it was Aldam who broke it.

  “He protects us,” he told Lane simply. “The snowcat comes when Torrant is afraid he can’t protect us.”

  “I can’t protect you,” Torrant said with surprising passion. “I couldn’t protect my family, I couldn’t keep Yarri safe—I can’t even hunt!”

  Lane fought to keep his expression bland, but inside he hurt. “You kept your family alive over the pass,” he reminded him.

  “I couldn’t have done it without the snowcat,” Torrant said with certainty; then his voice dropped a little. “But I don’t like…. I mean, I do a little, because I’m strong, and I’m fast, and I can do things. But….” And now he lowered his eyes, and Lane held his breath. “But the world is so cold. It’s all black and white and… and red… and it’s cold.” He said that last on a whisper, and Lane brought his hand—not too rough and not smooth like a rich man’s—out to cover the boy’s shoulder. “If I can avoid the snowcat, I will,” he finished, meeting Lane’s gaze in the adult way Lane had learned to expect from the boy. Stanny, gods love him, wouldn’t carry himself like Torrant for a good ten years at least.

  “Fair enough,” Lane agreed. “Although I suggest you let him out to run when you can. You keep something like that animal in your heart too much, and he’ll roar his way out if you’re not careful. And boy, you have to know—a gift like this—there’s no way you cannot go to university, you understand that? They have Goddess gifted there. You’ll get training and people who understand you. You’ll get things there that we can’t give you here, and….” He hesitated. He didn’t want to make it a condition of the boy’s staying there, but it was imperative that the full weight of this gift didn’t rest on Torrant’s shoulders alone.

  “Right.” As usual, Torrant saved him from the hard decision by making it himself. “Good.”

  Lane could read the boy’s mind. Triannon would be in four years, after all—maybe in four years they would forget all about sending him away from a new home he had come to love.

  “You will always be welcome in our home, Torrant,” Lane told him firmly. “You and Aldam will bring your wives here, and your children, and we will gather every holiday and thank the gods and her highness that you both came into our lives. You’re our family, boyo.”

  Torrant’s face worked, as if he struggled with a heart too full and words too few. “You’re good people,” he said at last. “I couldn’t ask for better.” He swallowed again, and, with an oddly passive gesture for such a stout young man, laid his arms on the table and his head on his arms.

  “Can Aldam come to Triannon with me?” he asked, blinking heavily. “Will it cost too much?”

  Lane laughed wryly. “Boy, you do realize that you brought your college tuition over that pass with you, clopping over the hills on dinner-plate sized hooves, don’t you?”

  “Courtland?” Torrant seemed surprised. Courtland, Clover, and the little pony, Kiss, had been stabled nearby since they’d come dragging into town on that wild, fever-drenched night. They had visited a couple of times to do their share of the stable cleaning, and the horses had been getting winter-fat and happy. Clover had overcome the shyness of being older and grayer and accepted the young stallion’s attentions, and a sweet-tempered and ginormous colt was a likely event in the early summer.

  Lane’s face softened, and a trace of the grief of his lost family etched across his face.

  “Yes, Courtland,” he said, laughter and tears vibrating in his deep voice. “That horse was my brother’s crowning achievement. This family could live for ten years on his stud fees alone. He’ll make your tuition and Aldam’s and Yarri’s, if she wants it, and set the three of you up in whatever situation you care to have when you’re grown.”

  Torrant gave a murmuring sigh, and Lane realized he was falling asleep, right there on the kitchen table. “All I wanted was to see Yarri grow up,” he mumbled—his time as the snowcat and the remnants of his illness had tired him out. “When she smiles….” Torrant’s voice wobbled into darkness. “I hear bells….” And then his eyes closed, and just like that, he was snoring gently in the late-night kitchen.

  “I’m too simple to go to university,” Aldam said sadly, watching Torrant sleep with the protectiveness of a brother. “I’ll have to be left behind.”

  Lane patted Aldam’s shoulder and hefted himself to his feet. “You’re smarter than you give yourself credit for, Aldam. And if this one didn’t leave you behind on Hammer Pass, I’m betting he won’t leave you behind when he goes off to school.”

  Hope glowed from Aldam’s sky-blue eyes as got to his feet as well. “Do you really think so?” His voice held wonder.

  Lane nodded, a lump in his throat. “I’m sure of it, boyo. Now you take one shoulder, I’ll take the other, and let’s get him off to bed.”

  They hauled Torrant to his feet and guided him through the house. “Right, then,” Aldam said placidly, not even breathing hard with his brother’s weight on his shoulders. “But you can get his boots. His feet smell.”

  Lane looked sharply at his new son, saw the faint quirk of the lips, and let out a smothered whoop of laughter. “Aldam, my boy, you’ll take Triannon by storm.”

  Part III: Goddess Stories

  “Are we done yet, brother?”

  Aylan looked as disgusted as he felt with what they’d achieved that night. Ugh. Betrayal and retribution—it wasn’t what either of them had signed on for.

  Torrant gave the snowcat’s version of a shrug and thought wearily of Yarri and her unplanned visit into the middle of his worst nightmare of himself. All of the time, of that effort, trying to raise that girl to womanhood, trying to give her a life that would keep her safe, and she’d ended up here?

  How had she ended up here?

  What flawed parts of Torrant had he passed on to her that had dragged her from safety in Eiran back to Clough, where it all began?

  Winter, Beltane

  TORRANT SAT on the steep side of the sand dune, watching the waves roll in like a thunderous volume of cold-smelted lead. The sand was freezing. Although the snowdrifts had mostly been blown inland, the wind off the water was bitter, and the day before Solstice was not a time to stare dreamily at the ocean and wish you were somebody else.

  But even the cold couldn’
t force him to stop doing just that.

  Winter had set in for truly and good, and he had come to appreciate the benefits of living near town. Torrant could remember winters in the Moon hold, when even the great, stately house had seemed claustrophobic and overrun. But in Clough, the drifts would come up so high that even going out to feed the horses the carefully stored hay and grain was the job for a grown man and not a young one. Here, near the sea, the snow was not too deep—a foot at the most—and there were regular expeditions to the mercantile that was, coincidentally, housed by Lane’s successful shipping business. There were also visits to the nearby stables to visit Courtland, Clover, and Kiss, and frequent moments when Bethen simply got tired of the lot of them inside and bundled them up (Cwyn looked like a walking ball of wool) and shooed them into the yard to run themselves out.

  Today, though, everyone else was inside, working secretively on their Solstice gifts, and Torrant had suddenly found it absolutely necessary to be right here, freezing his arse off and staring at the sea.

  They had been making pictures.

  There was really nothing else the Clough children had to give for Solstice, and when Torrant suggested drawing pictures of the family, it had seemed like a beautiful idea. Yarri hadn’t thought so. They don’t look real, she had whispered tearfully. They’re wonderful, Yar, he’d insisted—and they had been. Yarri knew how to draw with her heart—he had always thought so, even when she had simply scribbled with colored wax. Please? And oh! He had never been able to resist her tears.

  The small amount of gift he had sent through her pictures (and Aldam’s as well) had made him tired enough to be melancholy. And then he looked at what he had wrought, and he felt a jagged glass lump of rage and grief rip through his chest, and without a word he had grabbed his sweater and a hat and left the house.

  The stables would have been a logical place, but every other child in Eiran seemed to have the same idea, including the two partially dressed young men he’d interrupted kissing in the loft. Torrant had excused himself uncomfortably and fled to the nearby dunes.

  Now he hugged his knees, shivered, and watched miserably as the waves beat incessantly at the shore. He liked it here, he thought with surprise. He loved the busy, crowded, happy, noisy Moon house here in Eiran. He loved the ocean, and the sand, and the inland river, and living near town, where other children visited every day and wrestled or practiced swordplay with stick branches or went riding after chores were done. Torrant, who had practiced with real swords, was everybody’s hero in this activity—and he enjoyed teaching the others and keeping his own skills up. He liked galloping Courtland over the sand on the beach, even when it was cold. He really liked that Yarri was happy.

  And today he sat and looked out at the iron-colored ocean in the knife-metal sky and wished he could leave. And hated that he even thought he should.

  Yarri appeared from the other side of the dune, wearing a sweater that used to be Roes’s and a hat with little animals on it just like Aldam’s, which Bethen had finished for her while they’d been sick in the barracks. She flopped in the space next to him without warning, and he looked at her in surprise. “It’s too cold out here for you.”

  “You were sicker than I was!” she snapped back, frowning.

  “You’re smaller,” he returned loftily, but he smiled as he said it. As awful as he felt, it was better not to be alone with the awfulness.

  “Aunt Bethen says you’ve been out too long, and you need to come in,” she asserted, obviously trying another tack when the first one failed.

  “In a minute,” he replied mildly, putting his arm around her and pulling her next to him because it was unthinkable that they should share the same space on this bitter, bitter day and not touch.

  “I miss them too,” she said then, and he had to make his face strong against the urge to crumple it up and wrap his arms around her and sob. He was at least a hundred years too old for that.

  “I should go back,” he rasped roughly. “I should go back and—”

  “No,” she interrupted.

  “And find Rath and—” His voice was starting to break.

  “No!” she insisted.

  “Smack him and smack him and smack him—”

  “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!”

  He was sobbing now, and she was shouting, and she insinuated herself into his lap and pounded her little fist on his shoulder and shouted in his face until he wrapped his arms around her, and they wept together, freezing on the winter sand.

  “You can’t go,” she hiccupped, when most of the storm had passed. “You’re what I have—”

  “You have a whole family!” he protested.

  “But it’s not whole without you in it!” she insisted, and her brown eyes were bright with tears and luminous with anger, even as she thumped his shoulder with her little balled fist.

  They were quiet for a moment, their breath puffing out between their bodies in foggy bursts, and then she spoke into his shudders.

  “You still have nightmares,” she accused against his chest. “We hear you.”

  “So do you.” Once a week, sometimes twice, she would creep into the downstairs bedroom in the hush of translucent night, and he would wake up with her plastered between himself and the rough wood wall. It hadn’t bothered him to have her there until now, when he realized he might have given away something of his own terrible, panicky, blood-fraught dreams.

  “Yes,” she whispered, looking down into the space between them and playing with a cable on the thick sweater—an old one of Stanny’s—he’d thrown on in absence of a cloak. Then she looked at him, smart—so smart, for a tiny girl with angels’ eyes. “But I’m not always shouting ‘I need to go back’ in my sleep.”

  To his embarrassment, he found he couldn’t look at her. Instead, he moved her off his lap and stood, and she stood too and waited, as patiently as any adult, to hear his answer.

  “I couldn’t help,” he said at last, simply. “I was going to go back and help, but….”

  “But you saved me instead of getting killed yourself. Do you think they’d blame you?” she asked gently, putting a small, cold hand on his own, even as they stood, and suddenly he couldn’t stand her compassion anymore.

  “I blame me!” he shouted, and it felt so good to shout something into the wind that he did it again, raising his face from her tiny center of warmth and compassion to scream at the world. “I should have stayed. I should have stayed, and I should have fought, and I should have… ouch!”

  She’d kicked him in the shin, and as he backed against the dune and fell flat on his backside in the wet sand, it was her turn to scream. “You’re stupid, you’re so stupid, because you wish you could be dead with them instead of alive with me!”

  “That’s not true!” He turned back, so truly shocked that he stopped rubbing his shin. “That’s not true….”

  “Then why wish you had stayed?” she demanded, looming over him, if a tiny girl could be said to loom over an almost man-sized boy.

  “So they could be alive with us!” He glared at her, angry. “I want them to be alive with us. I want to watch Tal and Qir wrestle with Stanny and let Ellyot show Aldam how to ride…. I want….” His breath hitched in his chest, and he let it out with a shudder and finished the thought. “I want my mama to get to know Bethen. Wouldn’t our mamas like Bethen, Yarri?” He turned a face to her that was nearly as young as her own, and she started to cry again, softly, wiping her cheeks with the backs of her hands. He realized that her fingertips were turning a little bluish and for the first time thought about moving off the beach.

  “Torrant?” she asked seriously, the tears still streaming quietly.

  “What?” His hands were cold and wet now too.

  “How come I’m little, and I know that if you’d gone back you’d be dead, but you’re big and you don’t know that?”

  He sighed and reached out to take her hands in his, then rubbed them and blew on them to warm them up. “I’m not that
big,” he said after a moment. Neither in age nor in height, he thought wryly to himself. He was going to be of middle height and not much more, with a broad, sturdy chest and powerful legs—the family could already see it in his growing.

  “How come you don’t know?” she insisted in a little voice, and he pulled his hand inside the cuff of his sweater and tried to wipe her face dry with the outside of the folded ribbing.

  “I know it in my head,” he said after a moment, opening his arms to see if she’d come in for a hug. She did, and he moved one hand in between them and made a fist. “It’s here, in my chest, that I don’t know that it’s true for fact,” he said at last, and she cupped her hands over his.

  “But you need to,” she whispered. “Here, between us, it needs to all be right.”

  He nodded and kissed her little cheek. “Right, Yar. I’ll believe it here,” he tapped his chest with his fist, “so it’s right between us. I hear you.”

  “Good.” She sniffed, and he looked over her head and found his eyes widening.

  “Uhm, Yar….” He started to get up, but she wanted to cling for more hug, and he overbalanced again and fell flat on his back.

  “Yar!” he hollered, but it was too late, because she was still sprawled on his chest as the freak wave, a leftover of high tide, rode up the beach and hammered both of them in icy brine. They were too breathlessly cold to even shriek with the pain of it.

  He stood, dripping and shuddering uncontrollably, then grabbed her hand and pulled her after him.

  “C-c-c-c,” she tried. “C-c-c-an—w-w-w-w-w-w-e-e-e—go-go-g-go—h-h-h-o-me n-n-n-o-o-o-w-w-w-w—” She chattered grimly, and he didn’t bother to try to answer her as he began the freezing trudge home.

  Bethen was outraged, of course, that they would come home sopping wet and shivering, but it was Solstice night, and when they proved able to shower and warm themselves by the fire, she relented from her tirade and gave them some warming stew to make the last of the shivers go away. Roes snuck in after her with a shaker of spices to make up for the fact that the stew was underseasoned and a wink so that none of them would say anything to her mother. Bethen’s cooking was well-meant and always filling, but even Yarri secretly admitted to Torrant that she missed his mother’s cooking.