Bitter Moon Saga Read online

  “Tor… where?”

  “I’ve got to go back, Yar…. I’ve got to see….” He stopped at the stricken look on her face. Her next words would echo in his head until his own death and beyond, because they were spoken by a six-year-old, and they were so very certain, and so very calm.

  “Torrant, they’re dead now—I know that. It’s just you and me. Don’t leave me.”

  He breathed in and out, concentrating, because he was afraid he would forget how in that moment. His family. Her family. But he couldn’t believe it in the words of an exhausted child. He had to go see for himself.

  “I need to go see, Yarri—for both of us. What if we’re wrong?”

  She nodded, her eyes fluttering closed with exhaustion, and fell into a shivering, miserable sleep. He looked helplessly around for something to cover her with besides leaves. All he had was his own tunic. He used it without regret, and, dressed in an undershirt and breeches, forced his scraped, bruised limbs across the familiar, alien territory of his childhood home.

  The Death of the Childhood Moon

  THE DESOLATION of his homestead was worse than he had anticipated. The house had burned down—not to the ground, but in a patchy, uncertain way that left skeletons of familiar things thrusting up from the ashes and cinders. He saw the coatrack that Moon had whittled two winters ago, untouched. He saw Kes’s looking glass that Yarri had stared into for hours with a child’s vanity. He saw the charred boxes of winter clothes that had been hastily packed, and, from the half-burned pantry, he smelled the oddly comforting smells of burnt wheat and cooked ham. That last alone was enough to make him want to vomit.

  The barn was worse. The family had been killed—probably immediately after Torrant and Yarri had escaped, he surmised sickly. Their bodies lay in sticky red puddles, next to the bloodless bodies of the guards killed. The guards themselves had been killed by the illusion, and their eyes gaped open in a horrible parody of life. His family had not died so mercifully.

  Torrant had no words.

  He ran to his mother first, and after yanking her skirts down and fixing her shirt, he finally had the presence of mind to close her eyes gently and kiss her brow. Brave Myrla—she had worked so hard, been so content in the Moon household, so proud that her son had a good life. That final illusion had surprised him—he’d known she was gifted, but to produce an illusion that could kill was so far beyond what anyone had anticipated. The implications of his own gift would stagger him in the months to come, but for now, all he could think of was her sacrifice and how not to make it hollow.

  Moon was completely headless. Torrant steeled himself and brought the misshapen head back to the corpse. He arranged head and body as close as possible and covered the body up to the chin with a horse blanket. Kes had not died soon enough, and with sorrow he pulled skirts down chastely to the feet of a woman who never said a coarse word in her life, and, although she had been truly and lustily in love with her husband, had rarely even kissed his cheek in public. Tal and Qir had died quickly, with swords in their bellies, fighting in the face of hopelessness, falling within inches of each other, who had never been parted more than a few hours in life. And for all this, it was Ellyot who well and truly broke Torrant’s heart.

  Ellyot was a fierce fighter, and he had wounds on his face and on his hands, but the mortal wound was on his back. He’d been killed fighting his way to the door. Torrant had to look away. The only reason Ellyot would run from battle was to distract the guards. To save Yarri. To save him. He knelt for a moment, placing his hand on Ellyot’s back. The flesh was still warm but cooling rapidly in the dawn.

  And it was too much. His mother, Moon, Kes, Tal, and Qir—all his family. And Ellyot. His friend, confidante. His brother. He loved them all, but Ellyot was his mirror, the man he would have yearned to be. Reluctantly, he felt tears prickle at his eyes. He couldn’t do this, he thought. Yarri was waiting for him. He had plans to carry out, responsibilities. This entire family had sacrificed their lives so he could save their youngest child, and by all the gods, he would not fail them. Abruptly he straightened, and that sudden movement saved his life.

  The soldier had appeared dead, killed by Myrla’s last, desperate illusion, but death is a tricky thing. If he had been left for long, he would have died and never known he’d had a choice—his fellows were dead because of their own belief. But he’d heard a gasp, a sob, a rustle, and had known his heart had not been torn out, and in that knowledge, he had made it pump again. And awoke, seized with zeal, to kill an enemy who crouched among a slaughtered family on the bloodstained stone floor.

  Torrant didn’t feel the sword tip as it nicked his ear, but his adrenaline, high from despair, kicked in, and he felt himself tumbling into the same roll he’d executed on his brother, less than twelve hours before. Instinctively, his foot kicked out, felling the stunned guard, and the man’s sword went clattering across the ground, bouncing among the carnage like a child’s toy. Torrant seized it without a thought, his tumbler’s grace made jerky by anger and pain, and without mercy plunged it into the back of the guard, who was stumbling to his feet. The man quivered and jerked as his blood spattered warmly on the floor, and Torrant stared at him, dazed, wiping futilely at his own blood that drizzled down his face from the divot in his ear. The same place where Ellyot had his by birth. He didn’t think of that then. He didn’t think of anything as he stared at the corpse of the man he had killed.

  Torrant moved then—not quickly but purposefully. He posed the rest of his family in peace. Then, after grabbing the tinder that was stashed in a back cupboard, he set fire to the hay in the barn. The soldiers hadn’t burned the barn the night before—he assumed it was the better to show off the “artwork” he’d heard spoken about. Well, let them wonder, he thought dully as he watched the wood catch fire from outside. This was his family, and he would not leave them there to be food for carrion. If he had not the strength nor the time for a burial, he could at least honor their passing.

  At last, when he could linger no longer, he moved to the house. The Moon family had been packing, and it was no trouble to find Ellyot’s and Yarri’s packs among the luggage at the back of the house, relatively untouched by fire and pillage. He and Ellyot were of a size, and Ellyot’s luggage bore his initials and the family crest. That would be needed for identification. When he had pulled Ellyot’s and Yarri’s winter cloaks from the two trunks and shoved them into the packs with some rolled-up bedding, he pulled a spare scrip from the rubble and went to the pantry next. He found relatively unscathed meat and bread and knew that, for at least the next forty miles, there would be a windfall of apples to spare. When the food was stashed, he reluctantly and systematically began to search through Kes’s and Moon’s packs.

  It felt profane, in a way. His mother’s possessions he was free with. She had given him the only thing they owned of value—a small silver locket with a miniature of her and his father, painted with her trousseau when they were married—and that he carried with him. Yet for all the Moons’ generosity and warmth, it felt awkward to be pawing their possessions. But he had to, for Yarri’s sake, if not for his own. Moon himself had ample coinage, both great and small, in his pack, and of this Torrant took freely, stashing the coins individually in parts of his pack and in his and Yarri’s clothing as quickly as he could. From Kes’s pack he pulled her wedding necklace. She had worn it on special occasions, like Solstice and Beltane and Midsummer’s Night… and when Yarri begged her because she had been so very good all day long. He joined that to Moon’s necklace that he had pulled from the bloody floor, the thick links of silver no safety against a sword blade, and put it all in his pocket to be sorted out later. Then, with a hint of exhaustion, he hefted the food and the two packs over his shoulders and set out.

  He had only gone a little way when he realized he was not entirely alone. Whispering alongside him, making plaintive little sounds in the back of her throat, was Yarri’s skittish calico cat. He thought about leaving her, anticipating the
joys of traveling with a cat and Yarri’s heartbreak should they be separated again. But with his next step he heard the jingling in his pocket of those necklaces. His and Moon’s and Kes’s. He and that calico cat, he realized. They were all Yarri had left of a family that had been splitting at the seams just the day before.

  With a sigh, he stopped, pulled a bit of meat from his scrip, and held it out to Anye. She liked Torrant, and with a dainty movement pulled it from his hand and allowed him to scoop her up. Her purring in his arms, he realized years later, was all that kept him going as he stumbled across the Moon grounds to find Yarri, still sleeping in the bole of the tree. Exhausted, he stumbled next to her and covered them both with his cloak in the chill of the dawn. The tree was turned away from the road and a little way back. That will have to be enough, he thought as he pulled leaves on top of himself. Next to him, in the crook of his shoulder, he felt something small and furry. That—and the child in his arms—gave him enough warmth and comfort to sleep.

  Wizard’s Gifts and Goddess’s Get

  WHEN HE awoke, he was conscious of two things. The first was the throbbing of his injuries—his hands, the back of his knees, and his ear all pulsed with ache and ague. The second was that Yarri, with help from Anye the cat, was busy ferreting into his wallet, where they smelled food.

  “Not too much, Yar,” he mumbled, trying hard for consciousness. “It’s got to last us until we hit the mountain village. That won’t be for a week.”

  Yarri paused in the act of stuffing a hunk of ham into her mouth and snatched her fingers back from the cat, who was beginning to lick them a little too aggressively in search of another morsel. “Whe’’we’oin’?” she asked, chewing.

  “To the Moons in Eiran,” he told her, sitting up painfully. “The same place we were going yesterday, only….” He stopped, starkly, and met her gaze head-on. She swallowed, hard. And swallowed again. Carefully, she brushed the crumbs off her hands and gave Anye one last piece of meat. Then she met his gaze.

  “Only,” he continued, “we’re going alone.” She nodded and then took his outstretched hand, heedless of the terrible scrapes and the dried blood. As soon as she had ensconced herself on his lap, and not a moment before, she dissolved into sobs in his arms. He cried with her. The grief he had clamped down as he knelt over Ellyot’s corpse welled up, and he wept for all of them, for his mother, for his adopted family, and most painfully, for the sobbing child next to his heart.

  Torrant had no recollection of when the tears stopped. All he knew was that suddenly it was very quiet, and it was no longer morning. With that realization, the terrible quiet was disturbed by the distant clatter of horses. Without thought, Torrant hauled Yarri back into the leaves and against the deep cleft of the tree. Anye didn’t need warning or coercion—she huddled by Yarri, shivering, as the two humans listened carefully. Hardly daring to move, hardly daring to breathe, Torrant snuck his head around the tree and glimpsed flashes of Rath’s teal-and-black livery flashing through the trees, heading north, toward what had only the night before been their home. Closing his eyes, breathing deeply, he thought of those colors and opened his gift. Torrant gasped, his eyes snapping open, his breath coming in pants.

  “It’s Rath!” he gasped as soon as the last horse had passed and its dust had faded into the road. “Oh, Triane, merciful Goddess of gifts—it’s Rath—and he saw the smoke and is wondering who is left, and he’s angry. Goddess and kin, he’s black with anger. Yarri, we’ve got to go—wait.” He grabbed her arm. “Wait! There’s a follow-up guard.” And something else. Another gifted presence… oh Goddess.... “Yarri, do me a favor, precious. Think like a tree.”

  “Tor….”

  “Brown wood, green leaves, sap, earth…. But not in words, Yar, pictures. Think like a tree. Or a root. Or a cat… hot mice, twitching tail… there’s a wizard…. Yar… just do it….” The pile of leaves in his lap shook its head, and he tried to resume his breathing and follow his own advice. They sat in silence for a moment, trying hard to breathe through the mouthfuls of leaves covering them, sweating from all the warmth of the afternoon, and thinking like a tree and a cat, respectively.

  The next clatter of horses coming up the drive was not nearly so loud, but the quiet was almost part of the awfulness that kept trying to push its way into Torrant’s chest. Tree. Tree. Toes in earth. Slow sap, yellow leaves, green leaves, brown leaves. Slow breaths through thick, hard skin. Many, many arms, one firm leg… tree. Brown. No words. Brown. Sky. He thought it, felt it, lived it for a heartbeat, and then another, and then a third. The horses got closer; he felt them through his toes, rooted in the earth, tickled with root hairs, visited by wriggling, happy worms. Tree. The horses galloped past. Reined to a stop… holy Goddess, tree.

  With a yowl, Anye hopped from Yarri’s hands and climbed up his side, then jumped to the trunk of the great oak they were sheltered by. From just up the road, Torrant could hear voices.

  “See there, wizard—there’s your cat and your trees….”

  “I said tree, moron, not trees. And I see them—I’m telling you, I heard them thinking. One was thinking cat, and the other tree.”

  “Well maybe, wizard—” The first voice was sounding a bit affronted. “—you heard them think cat and tree because they are a cat and a tree. There’s enough magic in Moon lands for that not to be an impossibility. And even if the cat was thinking cat and the tree was thinking tree, neither of them, apparently were thinking Moon, or enemy of the state, and so I suggest we go on. Rath doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  “Fine….” The wizard’s voice was a growl of impatience, but Tree heard the creak of leather, the jangle of harness, and the clatter of hooves. When that had died away, Tree became aware of the child sitting at his trunk, and that it was saying something.

  “Torrant! Torrant, stop!” she begged, panicked. “Torrant, come back!”

  Shaking his head at a final image of birds dropping shite in his hair, Torrant looked at her oddly.

  “Yarri, I’m still here….” At the sound of her name, Yarri stifled a yelp and collapsed against him.

  “Torrant, you were a tree. He was looking for us, and I thought we were dead, and I felt for your hand, and you were a tree, and I was inside you. Torrant, how did you do that?”

  Sap, wood, earth, sky, leaves…. Torrant shook off the feeling of his flesh congealing into a tree and looked at Yarri, puzzled, exhausted as only the gift could make him, and stood hurriedly. “I don’t know, but we’ve got to go now! If we left, do you think Anye would catch up?” At that moment Anye leapt onto his back, clawing for purchase, and they scrambled for their packs and hurried away.

  For the next couple of days they stuck to the orchards, eating windfall apples and raiding the occasional gardens for the last of the summer squash. When their tummies grumbled enough, Torrant consented to chewing on the hardened bread in their scrip, but only enough to keep them from crouching behind a tree for most of their hurried, running days. They stopped and bathed on the first night, and not even trying to be strong for Yarri could have kept Torrant from howling at the first touch of cold water on his wounds. He had stashed some soap in their packs, and had to submit to Yarri’s ministrations as she rubbed it into the backs of his knees and the soft, traumatized skin of his thighs and gams. His hands hurt so badly he had to wrap them in his shredded undershirt, and still, every night as he looked for freshwater and a place to camp, he dreaded the process of ripping the bandages off the seeping wound. By the third day, fever pulsed behind his eyes in constant counterpoint to his footsteps.

  And still they moved north and west—toward the tallest of the mountains, the one with the flattened top and the jagged mountain sticking out from its side like an axe in a tree. Toward Hammer Pass.

  For a nameless, gifted peasant, Torrant was an educated young man. He knew that to the east were the Old Man Hills—gentle mountains with a series of lakes between them, where peasants raised sheep and spun fine cloth. It was possible to g
et to Otham, Eiran’s neighbor, separated by a deep channel of sea, by going across the Old Man Hills, but in order to get there they would have to go near or through Dueance—Clough’s main city. Since Rath lived in Dueance, Torrant was rightfully more afraid of the city and who might be looking for them there than he was of the elements, but that didn’t mean it was an easy choice.

  To the south were the Kitten Mountains—fir trees and sharp, granite claws. To the northwest was the Anvil, sheer cliffs rising to a plateau pitted with sinkholes and vast glacial surfaces that had swallowed parties of travelers whole. It was the only one of the two with a road, a narrow, winding path that came halfway up the mountain and then clung to the side like skin to your hand. The path twined between the Anvil and the Hammer—the mountain that had risen from inside the Anvil in some seismic upheaval of long ago—only sometimes accessible, when the ice didn’t form an impenetrable wall, a oneness of iron and copper ore. People called it Hammer Pass.

  If they were going to Eiran, they had to go through Hammer Pass, and they had to hurry. Winter wasn’t here yet, but every morning the chill was sharper, and the stream they followed up through the orchards seemed to tingle more when they splashed it on their faces. Winter wasn’t here yet, but it was rushing down through the mountains, thinking hard about snow, and blasting at them with every playful autumn breeze. Winter was coming.

  He played, jollied, begged, cajoled, threatened, and carried Yarri, all but running in the evenings, when his strength was lowest and his sense of urgency was at its peak. Winter was coming, and they were moving too slowly. Winter was coming, and they were unprepared.

  The urgency itself was a blessing. They seldom spoke on the road of their family and of all they would miss. But Yarri wept, often without seeming to know it, every night as they made a nest of bedrolls and cloaks and camped. As often as not, Torrant wept with her. They would curl up together, Anye nesting between them, and Yarri would start off saying, “I miss….” And it was Moon, or Kes, or Qir or Tal or Ellyot or Myrla. Torrant would respond with “I miss the way he….” Or “Remember how she….” It became a ritual—their bedtime indulgence in grief. But only at night, when the sky was bigger and the unknown deeper, when Torrant didn’t have to look at Yarri’s face and plumb the gouge in her soul that measured what they’d lost. Only at night, when they were so exhausted they could weep for moments before sleep claimed them.