Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  It was not so fine, however, when Keon and Aerk had told him they wouldn’t be meeting to fence on a rest day, and then the next. Then Marv and Jino had joined them, and two weeks before it had been Djali. Djali! The consort’s son had been chosen before Eljean? What was so trustworthy about Djali? Was it his complete social ineptitude? His struggling aspirations toward being a poet? His ability to stammer to a halt in five seconds a conversation that had been tripping along for an hour before he spoke?

  Eljean’s resentment screwed up his face as he thought about it, and he sent Ellyot a disgruntled look, only to realize that Ellyot was looking at him kindly, with complete understanding.

  “We didn’t mean to exclude you, Eljean,” he said gently. “We just had to make sure your attachment to Dimitri was over. It’s very important that he not know.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Eljean replied, yawning for show.

  Ellyot, with his characteristic humility, dropped to his haunches and was suddenly, disturbingly, eye-level. Eljean blinked several times and resisted the urge to back away on principle, like a cat from an overzealous, overfriendly dog.

  “I know it’s hard,” Ellyot said quietly, “having to disguise a thing like that, having to pretend that you don’t feel the way you do, having no one to confide your broken heart to when the person that you’re not supposed to care for at all turns out to be a wanking git. But those things can either make you mean or make you strong. We need your help; in fact, we’ve missed you with us. But we needed to see which it was going to be, right?”

  “It was a crush,” Eljean rasped from a suddenly raw throat. “It was over before it was real.” Oh gods, could he, of all people, pray to unforgiving gods? The oath he wanted to swear right now had nothing to do with Oueant’s honor or Dueant’s pride because Ellyot Moon was right there staring into his eyes, and the lines of his face were so clean, those brackets at his cheeks so deep, that cleft in his chin, and that sinful, wicked mouth….

  Eljean swallowed, closed his eyes, willed his breath not to quicken, and by the time his eyes were open, Ellyot had moved away and was leaning against the step railing, twinkling a smile at Eljean as though the dumb arse hadn’t just turned his world upside down by a close conversation.

  “Good!” Ellyot was saying, and his grin was infectious. He held out a hand for Eljean to grasp, and as Eljean propelled himself up he was hit square on with what looked to be an old, mended peasant’s shirt. “Here,” Ellyot told him, turning and moving toward, of all things, the regents’ apartments. “You’re going to need that. You could put an eye out with those things before the sun heats up!”

  By the time Eljean realized Ellyot was referring to the little pebbled nipples, hard on his chest, they were in the lobby of the building, and Ellyot was swapping pleasantries with the guard who took the night-to-morning shift, watching over the precious young rulers of the kingdom of Clough.

  In the past, Eljean had breezed right by the old relic; he was nothing but decorative, a remainder from a past when the regents had first forced the principal ruler of Clough to give the other landowners a voice, and the woman who had ruled at the time (some two hundred years ago) kept trying to have the dissenting landowners killed in their sleep.

  Ellyot seemed to think differently. While Eljean struggled out of his cloak and into his shirt, the old man and the young regent discussed everything from the old man’s grandchildren to the chickens his wife liked to raise and how to find the best minstrel group in the city. Suddenly the older man twinkled up at Ellyot, and his next words both floored Eljean and made Ellyot blush.

  “Oh, you go ahead and talk about that lute player like I haven’t heard about you, sneaking away at night to play at the the Amber Goose.”

  “Lies.” Ellyot shrugged, his grimace saying otherwise. “Lies, lies, and damned lies…. What I do at the Amber Goose cannot possibly be considered lute playing, not after having heard Triane’s Kiss playing there last….” He stopped abruptly and grimaced again, this time for another reason. Old Jems gave him a shrewd look from the wooden slatted chair he sat in.

  The concierge, who sat up higher at the raised desk, caught the exchange and said mildly, “Some madness was meant to pass, young Ellyot. Life is too short to worry if you’ve heard pretty music from the wrong people or not.”

  Something indefinable passed through Ellyot’s eyes then—a terrible mixture of emotions that Eljean certainly couldn’t define, although he thought perhaps one of them might be rage. But Ellyot’s expression stayed genial, and he put his palms together and bowed slightly.

  “Excellent advice as always, gentlemen, and I thank you for the conversation as well. Now, if you don’t mind, Master Eljean and I have things to attend to, right, Eljean?”

  Eljean nodded, fastening his cloak around his shoulders over the shirt. It was loose in the shoulders and short at the waist, making him think it had been tailored expressly for the wide-chested Ellyot, and it was soft from repeated washings. Eljean tried very hard not to think of ways to keep that shirt.

  “Well, you make good and sure to sneak out the back, young sir!” Jems called after them as they turned to leave. Eljean stumbled and recovered just in time to hear Ellyot complete the thought of what was obviously a common exchange between the two of them.

  “What else is being young good for, if it isn’t to sneak about!” he called, and Eljean hurried to catch up.

  “What was that about?” he asked, trying not to frown at the old concierge and the even older guard, who apparently knew more about Ellyot Moon than he did.

  “Visiting,” Ellyot replied briefly, looking surprised. “They’re nice old men, and they know a surprising amount about the lot of us. It’s good to have them on our side.”

  “But….” Eljean grimaced. How could he say But they’re old without sounding like a shallow, self-centered arse? Apparently there wasn’t a way, because he was still sputtering for words when they blew through Ellyot’s room, coming out on the patio side, before Eljean could even ask Ellyot what they were doing or comment on the décor. There were lots of small, personal items, he noted in his hurry—small wooden figures, a battered child’s doll—things other people had given Ellyot that he seemed to like keeping, and Eljean wanted a moment to linger over them, but not today.

  Ellyot put two hands over his head at the edge of the wooden fence, gave a heave and an agile swing of his legs, and disappeared into the alleyway behind the apartments. Eljean, who was tall enough to see over the edge of the fence, gaped at his fellow regent over a length of wood.

  Ellyot grinned up at him expectantly. “You can make it, can’t you? I mean, I can help you, but it’s going to be a lot more difficult going over that—” He gestured at the stone wall that bordered the alley. “—and we’ve got a long day ahead of us.” The wall was a good three hands over Eljean’s head, and he could only stare at it, perplexed. Weren’t the guards’ barracks over there?

  But Ellyot was waiting, so Eljean gathered his wits—and his muscles—and heaved and grunted his way over the wooden fence, wondering what folly ever led him to believe his body was in good shape. When he landed on the ground beside Ellyot, he barely had enough wind to gasp, “Are we really going over that?” before Ellyot took off at a trot down the alleyway.

  They were indeed. When they reached the end of what Eljean took to be the guards’ barracks, Ellyot crouched and gave Eljean his linked hands as a vault. Eljean found himself awkwardly hoisting his body over the edge of the white-painted stone. About the time he was hanging from his fingers, wondering how long the drop was if he let go, Ellyot had vaulted to a crouch at the top of the wall. Eljean was so surprised he let go and landed on his arse. Ellyot sighted a spot about eight feet down on the ground from where he crouched, and before Eljean could even ask, Ellyot started running along the foot-width of the cinderblock wall. With a hop and a handspring off the edge, he tumbled twice in the air, landing on his hands in a small spot of spring
y grass, before he collapsed his elbows and rolled to his feet.

  The look of freedom, of unfettered joy on his face as he bounced up from the roll and did a handspring forward was enough to break Eljean’s heart. He didn’t have the wherewithal to even chide his friend for showing off as he himself struggled to his feet and brushed off his stained black trousers.

  “Damn!” he muttered, trying to be casual even though his heart was pounding with the exultation of just seeing something like that so close. “You make it look simple!”

  “I’ve practiced most of my life,” Ellyot said easily. “Yarri and….” He stalled then, and something so profoundly sad crossed his expression that Eljean almost whimpered. “Yarri and my brothers, we grew up doing that, off the pipes and hay bales and stable doors in the barn.” He flashed a broken grin then, as though pretending those brothers hadn’t been killed in that very barn. “We taught our cousins when we got to Eiran.”

  “Oh,” Eljean replied, feeling inadequate. It hit him, then, that there was an entire world to Ellyot Moon that Eljean would not have any experience with. The thought depressed him.

  “Hurry, Eljean, we’re late!” Ellyot urged, and Eljean was forced to actually run a little, as Ellyot’s purposeful trot took them pelting over the rough cobblestones of the Goddess ghetto.

  If anyone had asked Eljean fifteen minutes before, he would have said he had no idea how to get to the ghetto unless it involved going through the marketplace and on from there. His way would have taken an hour, at best. If he hadn’t had to watch his feet quite so avidly so he didn’t break an ankle on the terribly crooked stones, he would have allowed himself to just gaze at Ellyot with his jaw dangling in awe of where this intense, magnetic man had taken him on what had once promised to be a lonely sort of day.

  Ellyot practically skidded to a halt in front of a neat, rough-wood building with a sign hanging from the eaves that read The Amber Goose. The building looked familiar, and he caught his breath, his eyes darting to another tavern a few doors down the newly built boardwalk. It was just as neat from the outside, but somehow to his mind seedier and full of foul desires. That tavern he’d been in before, but he tried very hard to keep the information from the young regents he’d learned to think of as friends.

  A golden god was restlessly pacing in front of the tavern, and he gave Ellyot a long-suffering look as they rushed up.

  “This? You’re late for this?” The god with the curling yellow hair shot Eljean a disgusted look, and Ellyot thumped him on the shoulder good-naturedly.

  “Be polite, Aylan. It wasn’t fair. I pretty much kidnapped all his mates and didn’t tell him where they went. I thought since Stanny was showing up today, he could help us out.”

  Aylan gave Eljean another grudging once-over, and Eljean felt free to return the glare. Besides curling yellow hair that was scraped back into a haphazard queue, Aylan was barely an inch or so shorter than Eljean himself. He had bluer-than-blue eyes, a sculpted mouth, and cheekbones that could cut steak. He also had a possessive air around Ellyot that was surprisingly hard to read.

  Gamely he extended a hand. “I’m Eljean, from the house of—”

  “I don’t care.” Aylan folded his arms, and if anything, his glare intensified. Ellyot leaned over, grasped Aylan’s arm at the shoulder, and aimed a finger at the golden god’s midsection. Aylan gave a yelp and a smothered giggle before he caught Ellyot’s finger, and Ellyot danced backward, laughing as he dodged a wrestler’s grasp.

  Aylan gave up, holding his hands up and rolling his eyes. “Fine, fine, you bloody wank—he can stay if he can be useful. Your hordes are waiting, oh Regent Healer of Clough.” Abruptly the laughing concession on his face stalled, and the air around the three of them sobered. “It’s going to be a hard day, brother,” he said at last, gently. “I hope you’re ready.”

  Ellyot drew a deep breath and assumed a face that was almost frightening in its calm assumption of competence. “Right. You know I’m always ready, brother. You give Eljean a job, and we can start. Anybody critical?”

  Aylan’s mouth tightened, and he nodded. “The guards found a safe house for the girls last night…. The two worst cases are prepped and in the back room, but you’re going to need to stitch.”

  Ellyot cursed foully, lines of pain etching themselves into the corners of his eyes. “Triana and Arue are back there?” he asked softly.

  “Yes, and Torrell brought in that anesthetic/aloe concoction that works so well.” Aylan clapped a sustaining hand on Ellyot’s shoulder and Ellyot sighed grimly, pushing at the swinging double doors to move from the brightness outside to the cool tavern within.

  “Let’s get busy.”

  With that, they pushed into the cool darkness of the little tavern, and Eljean blinked furiously to make sense of what was inside.

  “Eljean!” Aerk called from where he sat, surrounded by children, with a book on his lap. “Good! Ellyot said he was going to bring you in today. We can use some help!”

  Eljean looked about him in quiet wonder. Although the building was most obviously a tavern on other days—there was a bar with stools and rough-wood tables with folding chairs, a rack of shelves with sweet glass bottles filled with sweeter poisons, and an ale tap—today, it was most definitely a surgery.

  Women thick with child waited on the chairs, and some thoughtful soul had given them crates on which to prop their feet. Mothers sat on stools and cradled children with runny noses and flushed cheeks; other children played at Aerk’s feet while looking anxiously at their parents resting on makeshift pallets against the back wall. There were others too: men with bandaged limbs from a job gone wrong, young girls who would meet no one’s eyes, young men cradling strained shoulders or bruised knuckles. The tavern was reasonably large for such a place, but on this day, it was full to bursting with people looking for succor.

  Keon was moving from pallet to pallet, offering folded parchment cups of water with more compassion than grace, and refreshing the cool compresses on the foreheads of some of the sick. Jino was moving among the pregnant women, using his famed charm with ladies to ask them how they were feeling and keeping track of their answers on small sheets of parchment fixed on a board in front of him. Marv and Djali were talking to the mothers of the sick children. Marv was flashing that winsome, crooked-toothed grin of his while feeling tender foreheads and keeping notes as Jino was, and Djali…. Helpless, hapless Djali, who couldn’t say two words in a group without stumbling over both of them, was smiling gently at the children. He would reach under his cloak for each one and pull out a sweet—something medicinal, if Eljean had to guess—and a toy. There were tiny sewn poppets for the girls and little wooden horses for the boys, and by the way the children smiled or spoke to him, it was clear that they knew Djali well. He was their favorite uncle, cousin, and big brother rolled all into one.

  Eljean recovered from his complete surprise. This is what his fellows had been doing on the rest days without him? Caring for the sick? Minding their children? Why would they worry about…?

  A sudden, sick sensation dropped his stomach to the floor.

  This was illegal. He had voted on the issue himself—people in the Goddess ghetto were not allowed to congregate for any reason that involved their gifts or “foul practices of medicine.” There were no hospitals or midwives in the Goddess ghetto because, according to the headmaster of Dueance University, “The medical practices of the Goddess followers come into direct conflict of the beliefs of the sacred followers of the gods.” At the time, he hadn’t cared; the bill had been proposed by the consort, and all of the younger regents had simply followed his lead. The only thing Eljean’s father demanded, actually, was that he not displease any of the elders in the hall. And this—this—facility is what he had voted against.

  He himself had been a tool to make it illegal for a people to care for themselves.

  Apparently Ellyot Moon had taken it upon himself to care for them.

  “Eljean?” Aerk prompted. Eljean s
wallowed and met Aerk’s eyes. The same sort of self-recrimination was in Aerk’s gaze that he knew was in his own.

  “Absolutely,” Eljean muttered dazedly, “whatever I can do.”

  Aerk set him to work questioning the children with the sick parents. “When was the last time you ate? Was it tasty or too old? Are you cold at night? Why—are you needing blankets or firewood?” The ghettoes were a swamp; sometimes a fire was needed just to drive off the infection-bearing mosquitoes that plagued this section of town, in spite of the summer heat. For each child or set of siblings, a package was produced with clothes or food or blankets—whatever was needed that the ailing parent couldn’t provide. Some of the children, Eljean was told, would not be going home with their mother or father. Many of the adults were sick with hunger or exhaustion and would be cared for in other homes while the children went to the safe houses that hid them from the guards.

  “Safe house?” Eljean had questioned when he’d first been told where the dark-eyed little boy on his knee was going. “Why do they need to be kept safe?” Aylan had mentioned something about a safe house being discovered by the guards, as well—and stitches.

  Keon looked away, obviously disturbed, and the boy on Eljean’s knee burrowed his head against Eljean’s arm. “What do you think, Eljean?” Keon asked roughly. “They can’t defend themselves; the priests have spent years telling the population that any sort of sexual deviation is their fault. What do you think local brigands or even the guards do if they find unprotected children?”

  The child made a little keening sound, and Eljean, who would have said he didn’t care for children, wrapped his arm around the boy’s shoulders in protection.

  “Did we do this?” he asked in quiet horror.

  “No.” Keon shook his head. “I asked Ellyot, the first time I was here. Ellyot said….” Keon looked away. “He said this wasn’t our fault, but now that we knew it was truth, we had an obligation to change it.”