Bitter Moon Saga Read online

  The next day he set off. He spent the morning finding roots and even recognizing the occasional herb, which he brought back and set quietly by Aldam. Aldam and Yarri were curled up against the rock hollow, with the glowing coals between themselves and the elements, and for a moment Torrant had a shiver of fear at how vulnerable they were, and then forced himself to turn away.

  He didn’t go so far this time, and he found the edge of a small clearing where he was pretty sure deer would come eventually. He hadn’t brought his bow and arrow, and he knew his clothes would change with him, so it was a matter of sitting down in the clearing, closing his eyes, gathering a great force of gift inside his heart, and thinking like a giant black-and-white predator. Because he knew it was coming, he had time to experience the change and think. The physical part wasn’t painful as much as it was squirmy—his muscles seemed to be walking over his body in little troops of undisciplined insect ranks, and his bones were wiggling under his sinews like fish. What was most alarming was not the physical; it was the mental.

  His body alone didn’t become the cat’s—his mind did as well. In a slow blur from seeing the world in color to seeing it in a haze of gray and red, he lost his compassion for anything not his. Instinctively, he knew that Aldam and Yarri were his, but that didn’t make his complete lack of empathy with any other creature in the snow-covered valley less frightening. His wide, padded paws hushed softly on the snow, and he curled his whiskers back from his nose and scented the air: rabbits… five, six, more… good. Deer… a little farther away, back behind him on the snow trail of sparse trees, dug into the volcanic rock… and there… something that smelled like….

  He whuffed air through his nose and licked it with the broad, pink, barbed tongue… eww. Mountain goats didn’t smell any better than the domesticated kind, and as the snowcat they were even louder to his sensitive nose. And then he smelled….

  His hackles went up. Oh, those were dangerous. Tasty, but dangerous. Boars had razored tusks and solid bodies. They were damned near impossible to penetrate, even with claws and teeth, and Torrant was alarmed to find that smell was coming from behind him, like the goat, from the way he’d just come.

  It’s not like he’ll go seeking them out, he tried to reassure himself, but it didn’t work. His hackles rose, and before he could consider his course of action, he was speeding back to camp in a graceful, full-out run.

  Boars don’t attack for no reason, he thought, and then, What if we stole his home? The hollow had been covered by brush—but it hadn’t smelled animal. You didn’t check it out as the snowcat. Oh Goddess, twin gods, all three together….

  The smell of boar was getting stronger and they were just over that hill, past that stand of brush and….

  The boar struck him from the side. Its tusks pierced his skin even as he was in full gallop and caught in his thick fur before ripping through his flesh. They caught under his ribs, and the boar tossed him against the pile of rocks that marked the entrance of the cave with brutal momentum.

  Torrant didn’t have time to be stunned. That monster was there in front of his family, and he would not let it get closer.

  He came to his feet with an echoing merreowlll that shook some of the pebbles loose from the precipice above, and quicker than a greased piglet, he charged the rampaging boar. He vaulted up over the tusks first, knowing he was bleeding and not wanting to see his entrails ripped out on the snow behind him. He landed on the boar’s haunch with his teeth extended, ripped down the flank, and then dove away before his enemy could turn around and charge. He was a snowcat—he used that. He danced, batted, leapt, vaulted, and ripped the vicious pig apart piece by piece, until finally, in a move that got his foreleg gored by its yellowing tusks, he ripped open the boar’s jugular and left the beast bleeding on the snow. Before the animal’s eyes had time to glaze over, Torrant turned toward the cave on a limp and staggered his way to his family.

  Aldam had heard the fight, and he was sitting up, his back against the stone wall, with Yarri clutched to his chest. She was shivering, still unconscious with fever, and Aldam held his belt knife clumsily in front of her, as a last resort. He didn’t look reassured at all to see the giant, bleeding snowcat Torrant had become.

  Torrant stopped on the far side of the camp fire and drew a methodic tongue over the wound in his wrist, again and again until it stopped bleeding so much, and Torrant learned that the taste of his own blood was much less pleasant than the taste of the boar’s. In the meantime, he came up with a plan.

  He was afraid to change immediately. Aldam was not strong, and Yarri was sick, and the complete change had taxed him to the point of unconsciousness when the other two needed him with all his faculties intact. The partial change, however… that had left him feeling strong and well. The snowcat’s vision had still been his, and although he’d probably looked strange and grotesque with his brownish, human features covered by the white and black of the snowcat’s thick fur, he’d been able to hold Yarri on his lap and talk to Aldam, and that was all that mattered. They needed him well and strong, and if he had to live a half-life as a snowcat, well, then….

  All he had to do was think that thought, and suddenly he was sitting on his bottom in the melting snow, his clothes damp and bloody from the fight. The wound at his wrist and the one in his side were partially closed and no longer bleeding, but the pain of them left his vision black, and he gasped for breath because he had no breath to scream. He briefly contemplated vomiting before his vision cleared a little and he got a handle on the pain that would always plague him when changing while wounded.

  Aldam relaxed his arm and breathed a sigh of relief, shifting the insensible Yarri in his arms.

  “I’m sorry,” he said shakily. “I should have known….”

  “There was a boar,” Torrant growled, trying to make his voice more human and failing. “I need to go dress him.”

  “You were trying to hunt a boar?” Aldam asked, shocked.

  “I was trying to hunt a deer!” Torrant retorted grouchily. “But since the boar is what’s dead, I thought he’d be good for lunch.”

  They cooked and dried all parts of the boar into leathered toughness, the better to chew for long stretches, Aldam said gamely, but they both knew the most important part was the broth they made with the remnants and the tubers and herbs. When they were done and the unused portions had been taken far away from camp for the scavengers, Aldam healed Yarri one more time, and even Torrant, who would do anything to help Yarri, could see that he couldn’t do it again.

  When the healing was over, Aldam sat holding his pale face and aching head in his hands. “The problem,” he panted, his breath pluming in the evening twilight, “is that she’s not warm. She needs to get warm. Even when we’re off the snow, we’re so cold… so cold….” The temperature would drop even more tonight, making it hard to breathe when they emerged from the cave in the morning.

  Torrant nodded, still seeing everything with the icy clarity of the snowcat. “Give her to me,” he rumbled and folded a now cool but still weak Yarri into his embrace. “Have we packed everything?” he asked, making sure he had Aldam’s attention.

  “Everything but tomorrow’s broth and the sleep rolls,” Aldam said, nodding wearily and hugging his knees for comfort and warmth.

  Torrant shook his head once, decisively. “Don’t be alarmed when I do this. The horses have gotten used to my smell by now. It should be all right.” Yarri whimpered against him, burrowing deeper into his heat, and Torrant kissed the top of her head tenderly. She hadn’t complained; she had hardly cried. Her only demand, every night, had been for a song, and no matter how hard the day, how sore their feet or lungs from breathing the thin air and picking over what felt like a riverbed of snow day after day, he had sung his heart out for her, just for her bravery and her willingness to try. He had to try this for her. He had to succeed. Without thinking about what he was doing, he pulled his tunic out of his pants with one hand, tucking her in next to his chest, her
cold little hands flexing in the fine layer of his fur. He kissed the top of her head again and pressed his face against that hair of quiet flame. “Stay with me, Yar. We’ve gotten too far…. Stay with me.”

  “Torrant… I’m so cold….” Her voice was so raw it hurt him to hear.

  “I’ll keep you warm, baby,” he whispered. Please, Goddess… please… just let this work….

  And then he changed.

  And Yarri stayed with him, closely, under the fur.

  It was a bizarre and frightening sensation at first, and Torrant was terrified that she couldn’t breathe, but then he heard her voice, murmuring, “It’s dark in here… but so warm….” He relaxed a little and padded his way to Aldam, who was looking with wide eyes at the large snowcat with the burden under his fur. Carefully, so as not to lie on top of Yarri, he swung her to the side and stretched out next to Aldam. Aldam took the hint and covered himself with all the blankets on the bedroll and wrapped himself around Torrant, shivering against the fur until the warmth seeped into his bones.

  “This is good,” Aldam said dreamily, “but you can’t do this forever, Torrant.”

  Torrant grumbled in his throat. He knew that—he was painfully aware that every moment he put off changing back to his regular form was a moment of exhaustion that would tax him to the limit when he finally did. They would rest tonight, he knew that, but the next few days would be a sprint across the rocky ground with Yarri under his skin and Aldam changing horse. Their one hope was to reach sanctuary before their strength gave out and they were stuck, shivering in the snow, another story of lost travelers and bones for predators.

  They would start at first light.

  The morning Torrant went hunting, he and Aldam had sat with the map they had of Eiran and the new map that had served them well since Torrant had created it in the switchback cave. Together they calculated that they had a week, at the least, before they reached the city gates of Eiran.

  “Five days to get to the edge of the pass,” Torrant had said, tracing the line and figuring the distance based on what they’d already traveled. “And two days to get down the hill to the city gates.”

  At a flat-out run, with Yarri nestled against Torrant’s chest inside a closed pocket of fur, Torrant and Aldam made it in three days total.

  Aldam learned to sleep in the saddle, holding himself up as Clover or Courtland heaved their way through the rapidly packing snow. Torrant kept pace on the top of the snow, whuffling for predators to keep himself awake. Twice he confronted another snowcat, but they were content and happy with the winter-fat deer and they didn’t bother him. Other than that, he was bigger than anything he could have met besides a bear, and the bears were all asleep. Wolves didn’t eat people; they were creatures of the twin gods and everybody knew that to be true, so it was one worry off of Torrant’s back.

  It was probably the only one. The trees grew thicker as they neared north. The earth got softer and therefore less difficult and more treacherous. Because his vision was so different as a snowcat than as a human, several times Torrant had to shift forms in order to compare the landmarks around him to the map he had made in the switchback cave. Each time he shifted, Yarri grew weaker. He forced broth and water into her with every change. Even when she shook her head no, he fed her, because she seemed to become less substantial and more transparent with every passing minute. She burned with fever—was scorching and restless with it—but he couldn’t expect Aldam to heal her and to keep up the pace they had set at the same time, especially because he had developed a barking cough and a flushed face of his own. Besides, a cold snap had settled in, and if the air had been frigid and lung paralyzing before, it was like being burned alive by ice now. Torrant was afraid that even if they set half the trees on the mountainside to blaze, stopping to camp would mean they would never wake up again, and so their painful sprint toward safety continued.

  On the evening of the third day, they hit the descent trail, and the air became almost immediately warmer. Aldam, who had been lying almost insensible across Clover’s back, revived enough to shudder and sigh, but Yarri, tucked inside Torrant’s pocket of fur, didn’t even murmur. The trail itself was part of the older mountain—the Anvil before the eruption—and the dirt was softer, more worn and even, so that as the snow melted, the hooves of the horses became muddy but more comfortable. Torrant could almost believe they’d survived Hammer Pass in the beginning of a brutal winter.

  As they wound their way down the sloping trail, sighting the town far below them at the mouth of an inland river as it flowed out to sea, it began to rain.

  Gods, Torrant swore, and on a burst of fear (because the rain was hard and sodden and beginning to penetrate even his thick fur) he began to gallop down the hillside, Yarri jouncing painfully inside his skin. He’d made it about a half a league before the mud gave way under his padded feet, and he began a four-footed skid down the mountainside that he couldn’t control, the ruff at his chest holding a bouncing Yarri. Terrified that she would hit a rock, he rolled over to his back to keep her on top and howled his snowcat rage. Desperately he attempted to steer the skid near the side of the mountain and not over the side of the trail, losing chunks and tufts of fur and not a little bit of skin from his back as he went.

  The long, helter-skelter skate across mud and gravel and rain came at last to a rest at the foot of the mountain. Torrant was picking himself up from a weepy daze and planning to shift forms to check on Yarri when he heard her, inside his skin, singing. Whee, whee, swinging from a tree, which of my friends is gonna push me! Even as he stumbled a little to four feet and shook his head, sending droplets of mud into the pounding rain, he gave a feline grin of relief. She was fine—thank the Goddess, she was fine. She’d even had fun.

  He had just a second to get his bearings before he heard a frantic shout of “Look ouuuuuuuuuuuuuutttttttt!” And then he had less than a heartbeat to bound off the trail as Aldam, perched on one of the horse blankets they’d used as a bedroll, came sailing down the trail after him, skidding to a dizzy halt in almost the same place Torrant had.

  Torrant was so surprised he sat down on his haunches; his wide, cat-blue eyes and stunned expression asking every outraged question his grumbling animal voice could not.

  Exhausted, sick, and dizzy from the free-for-all down the mountain, Aldam giggled weakly at Torrant as he too stumbled to his feet. He answered Torrant’s exasperated look with his usual serenity.

  “Well, I’m not going to live much longer than Yarri if we don’t find shelter,” he said reasonably, before breaking into the cough that had plagued him for the last two days. Anye, who had been inside his shirt the whole time, and who had, from the looks of things, scratched him up pretty badly during their mad skid in the mud, mreowled grumpily from under his chin, and Aldam petted her in reassurance, while coughing fiercely. Eventually, he recovered and made a concerted effort to haul his shivering, feverish body upright. “Besides. I don’t like being left alone.”

  Torrant gave a very human snort and looked pointedly up the mountain to where, he hoped, the horses were still walking slowly down the slope, like the sane creatures he and Aldam apparently weren’t.

  “They’ll find their way,” Aldam told him. “Now look—the town’s another mile—two at the most. Let’s get there before the gatekeeper retires, and we just may live.” They started walking again, Torrant padding wearily and Aldam stumbling alongside him. Before their rhythm settled to the plodding, stumbling momentum they finally adopted, Torrant could clearly remember Aldam saying, “What is that pounding fuzzy sound?” But Torrant had no answer.

  Torrant had thought carrying the horse trader’s body was the longest walk he’d ever have to make. But the horse trader had been dead already, and the only other person at risk had been himself. Tonight, Yarri was shivering and coughing inside him, and Aldam was leaning more and more of his body weight on Torrant’s broad, thickly furred shoulders, and the rain, the cursed, blighted, sleeting rain, would not ease up
enough to see the lantern lights from the wooden wall of what he’d come to think longingly as “sanctuary.”

  It was getting farther with every step, Torrant thought in despair, sure Yarri’s last breath was weaker than the one before it. That was when he realized that his cat’s vision, his depth perception, was thrown off by the rain and the light in the darkness. The light was not growing farther away, as he feared, it was just getting more defined. Step by bleary, fear-wrought step, the light became more and more a singular object: a glass-covered lantern in a plain cut window of a log barracks, instead of just a vague and hopeful yellow light.

  When they were near enough to see what it was, Torrant paused behind a tree—a thick-boled redwood, one of many that covered this misty, soft, and kind side of the Anvil—and changed from a hulking, confident predator into a boy, holding the child he loved more than his own life.

  With every shift he’d made over the last three grueling days, Torrant had gotten better and better at drawing that line between his feral self and his human self—and now, in an effort not to collapse from complete exhaustion, and, he was sure, lurking illness just waiting for his human form, he held on to the true difference between his two states of being: the eyes.

  Torrant Shadow, who looked so much like Ellyot Moon that they could be brothers, possessed dark hazel eyes.

  The snowcat, the Goddess’s chosen form for Torrant, had eyes of snow-melt blue.

  TO JERIN, the guard who answered Torrant’s frantic knock against the town’s gate, the boy’s eyes appeared to glow silver in the night like a cat’s, for just a moment. However, when he opened the gate to let in the two mud-covered young men—the taller one leaning heavily on the shorter, stockier, younger one—and their small, sick, fragile burden, the shadows covered those eyes, and the guard forgot about the moment.