Bitter Moon Saga Read online

  “Will the horses know?” Aldam asked. Aldam had great faith in the abilities of animals to know things.

  “Not always.” Torrant had worked with horses all his life. Sometimes, the animals’ knowledge of their environment was as spooky as any Goddess-born gift. Sometimes they were a full-out ton of panicked sinew and bone, with the destructive capacity of a hurtling meteor. He knew Tal and Qir had been able to all but read a horse’s mind, and horses had responded by returning the favor. Torrant himself had been an able, but not spectacular, horseman: he had been a help to Moon, and that was his only claim. Torrant took a deep breath and considered his options, then pulled the rapidly whitening forelock at his forehead. His wizard’s lock ought to be good for something. Thinking furiously, he pulled out one of the white cloths Stella had gifted them with as a camp dishcloth and a charred stick out of the fire.

  He made a painstaking copy of the map using the charred stick and cloth, and then tried to fix an image in his head, something lasting, that would stay forever and not get rubbed off or wrinkled or burned or washed away. Then, very carefully, not using nearly as much power as he’d used on the Consort’s emissary or to hide himself and Yarri as a cat and a tree, Torrant thought about “map.” He thought thick paper, shiny and light brown, with heavily lined details and color keys. He’d seen maps in Moon’s study. All the hold’s children got their lessons there, not just Moon’s children. Orel and Breen and Lira, quiet Ben, and bright, quick Arin…. For a moment his heart stuttered in pain at the thought of his playmates, his peers, whom he and Yarri had not had time to mourn. He felt his gift ebb, so he stopped and concentrated on the maps. He’d been good at maps; not as good as at music and poetry and essays, but he liked maps. Maps were places he’d never traveled, people he’d never met, and that joy filled his heart a little, and his gift seeped out of his fingers, and in a breath and a shivering heartbeat, the rough cloth with its black char of lines had become smooth, shiny, thick, and colorful—a piece of parchment that would wear like leather.

  And it was not the same as the map on the floor.

  “Torrant….” Aldam looked in confusion from the map on the floor to the new, shiny one in Torrant’s hands.

  “Oh….” Torrant concentrated for a moment, shoving into the background the faint headache he had from using his gift. “Oh… oh no….” He paled and fell from a squat to his backside and didn’t even register the bruise until the next day.

  Compared to the map in Torrant’s hand, the map on the floor was a giant trap. According to Torrant’s map, every path scratched onto the floor would lead to a gaping pit, and every sound path on Torrant’s map led to disaster if one went by the map on the floor.

  “Which one…?” Torrant asked in consternation.

  “Yours is the right one,” Aldam said with certainty, and Torrant looked at him in surprise. Aldam often deferred to Torrant’s opinion. In fact, Torrant had gotten used to answering his questions. Is the horse well, Torrant? Should we stop here? Do we have enough water? Do you think Yarri slept well? Do we need to conserve food, Torrant? Can we eat a little more? Torrant had adjusted in the last few days to being the parent of his little impromptu family, and suddenly Aldam was having a say.

  “How do you know?”

  Aldam shrugged. “You used your gift—the Goddess’s gifts come from us, from our hearts. I am gifted, but if I hadn’t wanted to cure you when you were dying….”

  “Sick!”

  “I wouldn’t have been able to. You wanted a safe passage and a map. I know that is true. I don’t know what the person who scratched this map into the stone wanted, but his map must be the one that’s false.” Aldam regarded him tranquilly, with such conviction that Torrant had no choice but to believe him. “It’s a good thing you checked, Torrant. We would have been killed.” And then, as though unaware of how drastic that statement sounded, Aldam toodled off to finish packing the pony. Kiss had been relegated to pack animal since she’d reared and almost dumped Yarri off a cliff, and since Yarri didn’t adore her one whit less, she seemed fairly placid about her change in status.

  “He keeps saying that like it’s no big deal!” Torrant grumbled to himself and then looked at the map on the floor. He closed his eyes, put his hands on the map, then thought maps and truth. He felt his gift pass through his hands before he looked down at the stone.

  It wasn’t a rough sketch anymore. It was a fused, antiqued, smoothed, and perfected version of the one in his hand. The right one. He started to shiver, sitting on the floor, thinking about what would have happened if they’d tried to follow the false map. How many caravans had come up to this pass in winter, how many of the Goddess’s refugees had fled up to these mountains, come to this cave for succor, and followed that false promise of safety to their deaths? And he, Yarri, and Aldam could have been next.

  “Gods….” He swore and put his face against his knees as the shivers took over his entire body. He would have caused Yarri’s death. The thought was unimaginable. It was bad enough that he hadn’t been able to save their family. Torrant, you have to go back and save them. And for the first time since that horrible night, his own failure penetrated his general grief, and the fear of repeating that failure had him paralyzed, rocking back and forth on the floor of the newly redecorated cave.

  Yarri’s hand on his shoulder pulled him out of it. “What’s wrong, Torrant?”

  “Nothing,” he lied roughly. “Bad moment, that’s all.”

  She patted his back comfortingly, the small hand feeling like the beating wings of a very fragile, very trusting bird. “You should sing. You sing to us every night, and it makes me feel better. Sing, and you’ll feel better.” He looked up over his shoulder, and saw that little heart-shaped face, with her shorn hair haloing wildly about it. Her eyes were wide and guileless, and he had no choice but to have faith in what she did. Himself.

  “Sing, huh?”

  “Yes. I like that song about the princess who fell asleep—the one you made mama sing you, again and again and again until you knew it perfect. And then you sang it better than mama.” She was so earnest.

  “No one sang better than your mama,” he told her, believing it.

  “You do. Let’s sing as we leave the cave. It will make the bad moment better.”

  He wasn’t sure where the smile came from; it must have been the place miracles are born. “Absolutely, poppet. Let’s sing. Sweet Beauty sleeps in her lover’s arms, made of briars, made of thorns, sweet Beauty sleeps in her lovers’ arms, and they shall all protect her….” His voice grew stronger, until it lifted him onto his feet and swung him and Yarri onto their courtly horse, and it rang into the cave where perfidy had been made truth and echoed out onto the treacherous road ahead.

  They reached the end of the switchbacks that afternoon and began making their way along the rocky crevasse between the Hammer and the Anvil, picking their way with care. There were trees up here, not thick, but sturdy stands of pines and stubborn scrub that clung to rocks. In the broad crevices of rocky hollows there were cold, brown patches of grass. Good, Torrant thought, trying to believe it. That meant deer.

  As they traveled, he’d been trying to do the math in his head, figuring out what day it was. He finally had to break down and ask Aldam. “Samhain is in three days.” Aldam told him, and Torrant nodded, feeling a little better.

  “I want to get as far as we can before first snow,” he said, leading Courtland around a pit. True, it was only one or two hands deep, but a horse going too fast could easily break a leg. Clover was so sure footed, she seemed to accommodate such things with a placid flick of her tail, but Courtland got peevish if the ground didn’t do what he expected it to.

  “That will be tomorrow,” Aldam said calmly, and Torrant and Yarri exchanged surprised looks.

  “You know that?” Yarri asked around Torrant’s arm. They were in the lead.

  “Can’t you taste it?” he asked in surprise. “It’s like a kitchen knife that’s been left in an iced-
over river. It’s in every breath we take.”

  Torrant closed his eyes and breathed deeply and then tried not to cough. The air was brutally cold, making him glad all over again that he’d pulled Yarri off of Kiss’s back and put her on the saddle in the shelter of his arms and the stallion’s big back. And there, on the edge of the wind….

  Torrant opened his eyes. “Yes,” he said and then frowned. “Except… Aldam… it tastes… deep and sharp….”

  Aldam nodded. “It will be a very big first snow, this early in the season.”

  Torrant remembered that song he’d pulled from the depths of his heart and tried to mark that place in his soul, so he could get there when he wanted to. He had a feeling he’d need to go there a lot in the following weeks.

  Yarri was downcast for a different reason. “Torrant, why can’t I taste the knife on the wind?” she asked in a small voice.

  “You’re not gifted, sweet,” he told her gently. “Only the Goddess’s chosen… and not all of those.”

  “Who does the Goddess choose?” asked Yarri, and Torrant suddenly wondered that a child who had been raised in the heart of a land that persecuted his own people would not know these things. It was a tribute, he thought with a lump in his throat, to the goodness of the Moons. It was perhaps the first time he suspected that his adopted family had given sanctuary to the Goddess’s children on purpose as a cause, a bone-deep belief that they all lived under the same sun, no matter which moon they favored.

  “I don’t know… people with last names that are grounded, like yours—names like things and places that you can touch or see—they belong to the twin gods, Oueant and Dueant. You know that. But people with names like mine—Shadow, Nightbane, Starshine, Lightstalker—those are Goddess’s names. Those people are often chosen with a gift.”

  “That should be a good thing,” Yarri said softly. “Why isn’t it a good thing?”

  Torrant shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know why people like the Consort would decide it’s a bad thing, just like I don’t know why any of the other people—the ones who get banished to the Goddess moon—have done anything wrong.”

  “Who was banished?” So many things Yarri didn’t know.

  “Orel’s mother….”

  “Bren?”

  “Yes—she conceived Orel on a Goddess night, and the father was killed before they could decide whether or not to marry. She was banished to the Goddess moon. And Ginny and Arel—they… they chose each other, that was all. They were both women, and they chose each other… and that got them banished to the Goddess moon.” He remembered the adults of his childhood world, the kind souls who had loved him and all the children in the Moon holding, and wondered what their crimes had been. He remembered their old weaver, a grizzled, bent man who would work wondrous things with a loom and soft yarn. His wife had died in childbirth, and he’d been told the gods didn’t take women bearing children—or the children themselves—and so Jeb had chosen the Goddess with his heart, because he thought maybe that way he could see his beloved Becca when he died, since she would be with the Goddess. He thought of Kith, a quiet, somber youth who had shown up one morning with a face streaked with tears and who wouldn’t tell anyone, even Moon, of his transgression, but just asked to be given a place to stay and work. His father had been a midwife, and gifted to boot, and he’d heard that even the nongifted midwives were being canopied under the Goddess moon.

  “I like all the people under the Goddess moon,” Yarri said simply. “I like them a lot more than the… the….”

  “Monsters,” Torrant supplied flatly.

  “The monsters who killed our family.” Yarri’s voice shook with tears, and Torrant wanted to join her, but instead, he found that place at the bottom of his toes and pulled up another song.

  Aldam was right: it snowed the next day, and the next and the next and the next. Every moment under the sun became a daymare of swimming standing up through curtains of drifting water, squinting through white flutters, and hoping the landmarks they saw were really the ones on the map. Breathing became difficult, because they never knew when they were going to snort snow up their noses, and their lungs got chilly with so much cold all the time, so they covered their mouths with scarves and tried not to talk so they didn’t have to taste wet wool.

  At night, as the twin blue moons grew farther and more distant and the Goddess’s Harvest Moon waxed close and large and yellow, they huddled inside an oilcloth tent, over Aldam’s promised fire. The horses were tethered to nearby trees, generating warmth as they stood. They cooked porridge for the first couple of nights, and then Torrant realized the horses were going to need most of their oats for grain, since the grass had been unreachable for days and the trees were all but bare. Torrant looked at the last of the porridge in the pot with a sinking heart.

  “I’m going to have to hunt tomorrow.”

  “You don’t hunt,” Yarri yawned. They were sleeping on the horse blankets and mats of fur to cover the snow—the bedding was surprisingly warm but still never, ever, warm enough. “Ellyot hunts. You watch him and try not to get sick.” Her eyes closed. “I like that you don’t hunt,” she murmured, and Torrant sighed and shook his head.

  “You told Stella you could hunt,” Aldam said with gentle reproof in his voice.

  “I told her I knew how,” Torrant defended himself. And it was true. He could shoot an arrow as straight as Ellyot had, and he could use a knife in leather as well as any of the boys… but killing a living animal? He looked at the porridge pot again and reminded himself of how long the journey would be if they were starving by the end of it.

  “Besides,” he said firmly, “it will be easier to hunt now, full and well, than it will be when our stomachs are gnawing away at our good sense and health. And Yarri needs me. I can do anything.”

  “Of course you can,” Aldam said in surprise, and that was the end of the matter.

  Footprints in the Snow

  TORRANT LAY on his belly, looking at the fattened deer foraging fitfully in what was left of a stand of tall grass. There were three—a young doe and her fawn, half grown and still spotted and awkward—and an older doe, her muzzle gone almost white. The older doe was holding back on weary legs, letting the fawn eat first, and Torrant felt a burst of compassion for the aging thing. He’d given Yarri his porridge that morning, and his stomach was making so many gurgling noises he was surprised the deer didn’t bolt from the half-formed meadow.

  We need the food, he told himself firmly. They had given the horses oats that morning, and some of the dried carrots. Soon there would be nothing to eat for any of them if he didn’t bring home some meat for the people so the horses could have the grain. In another few days, the ground would be frozen solid, and although Aldam was taking Yarri hunting for tubers and other roots, Torrant knew it wouldn’t last.

  But… he raised the bow and sighted down the string, telling himself that his hands weren’t shaking, they weren’t, they weren’t, they weren’t…. It was no use. His hands were shaking so badly at the thought of taking a life that his left hand dropped the arrow point, leaving the butt of the arrow hanging from the string and his right hand drooping like a ribbon from a girl’s bonnet.

  Oh come on, Torrant, he whispered to himself. It’s not like you haven’t killed before. But he hadn’t seen the soul of those men, he realized while looking at the grandmother deer, sacrificing her own comfort for the child.

  We need the food.

  Ellyot could have done it. Ellyot had that same thing in him that Yarri had—the thing that had made her cast that rock on the head of an evil lackey without thinking twice. The thing that made them think only of the now and not of the then. But Torrant had a thing in him that made him see the deer’s soul, and the thought of killing the limpid, peaceful being inside that delicate, old body hurt.

  We need the food.

  He sighed in frustration. What he needed, he thought on a growl, was to be a predator. Three days ago, just as they’d left
the switchback, they had come upon an enormous snowcat. It must have weighed at least twice what he did, with thick, snow-colored fur sticking up all over its body and shadowy gray stripes in a random, dappled pattern along its back. The fluffy tufts on the sides of its face were dripping in blood, and it had been snarling over the corpse of another fat deer as it ripped the thing to shreds. The sight had been appalling, and Yarri had squealed over it and bemoaned the fate of the deer until even Aldam had snapped, saying, “The deer was born to be food, Yarri—I’m sure she’ll cycle back under the moons as something better.”

  The moment stuck in Torrant’s mind. That cat hadn’t cared about the deer’s “humanity,” only for its potential as dinner. It hadn’t felt bad for the soul of the poor old thing standing under the trees (it didn’t even occur to Torrant to kill the mother and the child); the snowcat had only cared that he was fed, and maybe that his family ate too.

  He wanted to be a snowcat.

  He thought about it—the selfishness, the ego, the absolute surety that hurting another creature was the only way to do what needed to be done. He could do that.

  He thought about the snowcat. Feral, fierce, loving the taste of blood. Feral, fierce, enjoying the hunt. Feral… snarling, warm, thank the Goddess, in that thick coat of dappled white, eager to run, eager to chase, eager to eat, to crunch elongated teeth into the deer’s carotid, to lap at the hot blood as it filled its mouth… to rip and to tear and to eat, to gorge on fat, raw meat….

  Torrant made a sound low in his throat, and the deer looked up, noses quivering, tails twitching in alarm. Torrant looked down at his hands holding the bow and arrow, only to find his bow and arrow in the snow and giant, tufted, white paws the size of dinner plates where his hands should be.

  He growled again from the snowcat’s throat, and he was no longer cold.

  The deer looked at him, and his vision became icy and crystalline—and the deer’s limpid eyes were speaking silent words.