Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  Eljean looked over to the curtained taproom. He’d heard muffled sobbing and moans coming from the room periodically for the past hour. Two girls who would need stitching—the thought of where they needed to be stitched made his stomach roil.

  “How could we not know, and we’ve been living here? And he just… shows up, and he knows exactly what we’ve done?”

  Keon shook his head and shrugged. He looked tired, and his dark, cynical eyes were bloodshot. They had been in session late the night before; how early had Eljean’s friends awakened to perpetrate this act of kindness?

  “Have you seen him, here?” Keon asked after a moment when he scowled at the flowered curtain. Eljean shot him an evil look, and Keon grimaced in apology and continued. “You know how most times he just sits back and watches us and smiles when he approves or looks thoughtful when he doesn’t?”

  “Mm.” Eljean nodded.

  “You won’t see him like that here.”

  Eljean raised his eyebrows, but Keon had moved on with purpose. The conversation stuck with him, though, especially about an hour later when he moved back toward the taproom to get another packet of blankets and food for a family that had just arrived. The curtain was pulled aside; the girls who had been treated had apparently been taken out through the back way, and he heard Ellyot’s voice from surprisingly nearby. Turning around, he saw Ellyot through a gap in the curtain, facing a tiny, barely-adolescent girl with dark-brown hair that looked as though it had been cropped with a belt knife, wearing a boy’s tattered breeches and a man’s overlarge shirt.

  “Arue,” Ellyot was saying softly, taking the girl’s hands in his, “you were so very brave in there, helping us. You must let me know if it ever hurts too much, helping the girls who have been injured or… violated the way you were.”

  The girl shook her head and looked down. “Feels better,” she said gruffly. “Would rather help than sit and watch them bleed.”

  From his position, Eljean had a clear view of Ellyot’s face, and the pure empathy that passed over it turned a knife somewhere in Eljean’s middle.

  “I know you would, precious,” Ellyot said, stroking her hand gently, “but I need you to watch them too. Make sure they take care of themselves.” His hand moved up to the girl’s forearm, which was covered with even slice scars that appeared to have been healed over for several months. “Make sure they don’t do any of this.”

  “Sorry.” The girl studied her feet, but she apparently trusted Ellyot to keep up his gentle touch on her arm. Eljean’s breath caught tightly to realize how deep that trust must have run.

  “Don’t be sorry, sweetheart,” he said softly. “It’s not your fault. Just be well.” Somewhere from the depths of his toes, Ellyot pulled up a grin, and his gentle hand went to the girl’s shorn hair. “And let your hair grow. Short hair cannot keep you safe, but your beautiful hair can bring you pride and joy.”

  The girl shrugged, but the corners of her mouth were turning up shyly, the compliment having clearly found its mark.

  “Now tell me,” Ellyot continued, “do you still guard Aylan while he sleeps?”

  Suddenly the girl’s eyes were no longer at the floor. “Oh yes. He makes me feel safe.”

  “Good girl. I sleep easier knowing that you’re there. And you’re right to feel safe around him—he’s the most honorable man I know.”

  A grin crossed the girl’s face that was so sudden and impish that Eljean’s heart ached for the child she should have been. “You know, he says the same thing about you, Triane’s Son.”

  There was a pained laugh, and then Ellyot’s voice took on a conspiratorial tone. “Well, you know that even Oueant’s son lies sometimes.”

  The girl burst into a peal of impish laughter at the irreverence, and Ellyot asked her to go fetch his next patient.

  Eljean was left standing in the corner with his heart beating in his throat, a thousand suspicions behind his bright eyes, and a terrible, terrible longing burning in his chest.

  The day continued, and before lunchtime even Eljean was exhausted. However, since none of the others seemed to be stopping and resting, he continued with his tasks until a young woman wearing a barmaid’s apron around her middle and a white streak in her fair hair came up to him with a tray of sandwiches and a jerk of her chin to indicate the counter full of pitchers of water.

  “You all need to eat,” she said softly. “Tor—Ell—Regent Moon told me to make sure you took a sandwich and a moment off your feet. He said you were looking knackered.”

  Eljean whipped his head around to see if Ellyot was actually outside the taproom to be making these observations, but a very young woman who was very heavy with child had just lumbered through the curtain, and Ellyot was nowhere to be seen. Eljean returned his attention to the shy barmaid and smiled, but his mind was still chewing over the things he’d heard—including her stumbling over Ellyot’s name.

  “Why do you call him Triane’s Son?” he asked through a mouthful of sandwich, settling his bottom down on one of the stools up by the bar.

  The girl flushed, and she cast a furtive look toward the closed curtain.

  “No, you didn’t say it. I heard someone else use it. Why?” He swallowed gratefully; for all the want in the ghettoes, the food was amazingly good.

  “Triane is the Goddess. She looks after the gifted, the healers, the poets, the dispossessed…. Isn’t he all of them?” she asked at last, and Eljean almost choked on his sandwich. Did “gifted” mean what he thought it did?

  The girl caught his amazed look and realized she might have said something untoward. With an awkward curtsy, she was suddenly at Djali’s side, and Djali, with another amazing turn of grace, was smiling at her with such beauty that his round, dreamy face was abruptly handsome, square, and capable. His clumsy fingers were now deft as he took the tray from the girl. He placed it on the bar and then assisted her to a nearby stool, bending his head solicitously to her conversation and answering her with complete seriousness shining from his sweet, sloe eyes.

  Eljean wanted to bang his head against the bar to clear out the confusion of what he had believed he knew, and what was proving itself to be true with every moment of this odd day.

  “He wasn’t always this smooth with Triana,” Jino said next to him, also munching on a sandwich.

  “That’s Triana?” Then the not-quite adolescent girl must have been Arue.

  “Mmm.” Jino swallowed. “She’s the barkeeper’s daughter. They give the place over on the first rest day so we can come in. Aerk and Keon said you should have seen the place the first week they were here. Apparently the guards picked a fight with Aylan there, and they had to work fast to get it ship-shape before people came in.”

  Eljean looked at Aylan. The golden god had been everywhere this day, and all the people in the makeshift little clinic seemed to know him. The children especially had clung to him, and he had greeted them all by name. Aylan’s efforts had brought in most of the stores of supplies for those in need, and he seemed to be the driving force behind placing the children whose parents were too sick to care for them.

  “Where did the care packages come from?” Eljean asked, now that he’d found someone to talk to. He’d been talking to the ghetto denizens all day, and the conversations had been enlightening, but those people had treated him with deference and more than a little fear. It was good to talk to a peer again, someone who wasn’t half afraid he was going to pull out a dagger and knife them where they stood for the white streak in their hair or the person they called “beloved.”

  Jino shrugged, the gesture making him look young and fragile, in spite of his hard, wiry body. “We’ve been bringing supplies these last weeks, but I understand that before that, Ellyot’s uncle, the one he lived with in Eiran, has been smuggling stuff in here for years. Remember that lace bill?”

  Eljean nodded. Ellyot had arrived for the vote just as the last bell tolled, freshly dressed and looking as though he’d never run out of the hall, sick, bleeding,
and desperate. He’d proceeded to stand up and give an impassioned, fearless oratory that had resulted in one less tax on the people of the Goddess. After the vote he’d promptly disappeared and hadn’t shown up the next day. When Eljean had seen him after the rest days, he’d been pale and lean, as though he’d spent too many sleepless nights running for his life.

  “I remember,” he said dryly.

  “Well, he told Aerk that he and Aylan had been smuggling wool in for two or three years before Ellyot showed up to claim his place.”

  Eljean blinked and looked hard at Jino, who shrugged as if anticipating his next question. “Why the wait?” he asked anyway.

  “I asked him that,” said Aerk, coming up beside them after having heard the last part of the conversation.

  “What’d he say?” Eljean was feeling restless; he wanted to hear the end of this, but he was looking around the room and realizing how many more people had to be seen, cared for, given to, and he could tell by Jino’s gulping of the last of his food that he was not the only one overwhelmed by the need in this place.

  “He said that all he wanted was to be with his beloved and do a little good in the world. It wasn’t until Triannon burnt down that he realized he didn’t have a choice in the matter.” Aerk waited a beat, while Jino and Eljean digested that last bit of gossip, and then walked forward for his own food with a “Triana, my darling, what culinary masterpiece have you cooked up for us today?”

  Triana giggled, and Jino broke the silence by going up for seconds. Eljean sat and nervelessly wiped his fingers on the hem of his borrowed shirt.

  His beloved. Ellyot didn’t speak of her (or him?). He had never spoken of a beloved. Eljean suddenly remembered a tattered cloak with loud gold lining. It had been wadded up on Ellyot’s bed when they’d passed through his room, as though someone had slept with it bunched up in his arms. Her. Ellyot Moon really did have a beloved, and it was a she.

  Eljean fought the urge to kick something and cry. Instead, he picked up his little board of questions and names and went to the newest family who had sat itself down at a newly available table. “Do a little good.” Well, since he was there, he might as well.

  Less than an hour later, he got locked in the storeroom behind the makeshift surgery, and although he really did kick something, he found he had something better to do than cry.

  He could listen.

  Getting locked in the storeroom was an accident. He was looking for a crate to hold yet another care packet while Djali was asking him for a rhyme for the word “auburn.” Djali was frequently doing this; long before Ellyot Moon, he had fancied himself something of a poet, and now that Ellyot Moon had entered their lives with his eloquent tongue and stylish turn of phrase (and that well-played lute, spied upon their first day of acquaintance), Rath’s son had been unstoppable in his quest for the perfect love poem. Even now, as he worked with his shocking competence, his brain was apparently busy, unable to leave his saddest passion to rest.

  So Eljean needed his crate, and Djali needed his rhyme, and together they watched until a patient came out and none came to take her place. Eljean slipped into the taproom and saw that Ellyot was sitting at what looked to be a makeshift surgery table, tilting his head back in weariness. Eljean didn’t want to interrupt that moment, the quiet contemplation, a scant second of regeneration. If he was emotionally exhausted from tending to the children of the sick, Eljean could not imagine what it must be like to stitch wounds, quiet coughs, and give hope, any hope, to people who had been too hungry for too long.

  He took a quick left into the darkened, oversized pantry that Olek and Triana called the storeroom and found the stack of crates in the back. That was when Aylan had shot past, shouting, carrying the body of what looked to be a twelve-year-old boy in his arms.

  He slammed the door shut as he went, and as Eljean turned, dreamlike, to move to the door, he heard the dragging of furniture and an unmistakable thump of something shoved against it. The door was mostly a rough plank, secured by leather straps acting as hinges on the wall. The handle was a round hole cut out of the plank, so Eljean gave a whuff and sank to his knees, looking through the hole for a severely limited view beyond. All he could manage at first was a view of the two men from the arse down (not a bad view, really, but not helpful in the least) and the edge of the table, which had been jammed against the door. There was a window on the opposite wall, with sun streaming down, and it seemed clear that Ellyot needed the light.

  The boy on the table had messy brown hair; that was all Eljean could see of him, because his head was only a few inches from the hole in the door.

  He heard Ellyot swearing clearly, and suddenly the things he could see were not nearly as important as what was being said.

  “Oueant’s bloody tears, Aylan, what happened?”

  Aylan’s next word was so foul that Eljean almost stumbled back. Young boys used that word when they wanted to irritate their parents. Adults didn’t use that word unless they were on the verge of breaking something.

  “The guards…. He was in a Goddess-boy brothel, so they thought that was excuse enough.”

  The boy cried out, and Eljean could see the hand on his brow. “Hush… hush….” There was the sound of ripping fabric, and from the angle of Aylan’s golden head, Eljean surmised the boy’s breeches were a thing of the past.

  “Oh gods….” The despair in that eloquent voice was enough to make Eljean whimper, but nobody heard him because the boy had started what sounded like his last round of screams from a raw throat, and Ellyot’s next words were strong enough to drown him out.

  “It’s okay, boy,” he said firmly. “No worries. I’m just going to do a little wishing, and all that pain is going to go right away.”

  “You can’t!” Aylan protested over the whimpers. There was another gentle, long-fingered hand in that tousled hair. Aylan was more than just a gruff horse’s arse, apparently.

  “I have to. He’s going to bleed out otherwise, and cauterizing the wound to make it stop bleeding would kill him!” Then, before Eljean wondered what it was he couldn’t do, Ellyot said clearly, in a voice that seemed to glow, “The man who did this to you deserves more, in truth, than you have suffered, but what you have suffered will be, in truth, what he receives.”

  The boy’s screams ceased immediately and there the sound of something heavy hitting the ground, followed by a round of swearing from Aylan that made Eljean’s eyes widen.

  “Stop it, Aylan,” Ellyot said with weak humor, “you’re scaring the boy. Could you do me a favor and find him a new pair of trews? I’ll clean him up.”

  “You can barely stand!” Aylan spat.

  Ellyot, who seemed to know exactly how to settle the irascible Aylan, lifted a hand and said, “Then help me up, brother, and I’ll sit down and work.”

  “Gods!” Aylan grunted, and there was the sound of a stool being dragged across the floor. Then, with less heat, “Could you save both, do you think?”

  “Mmm. No. The one that was ruptured has simply disappeared, and the skin has healed over it.” His next words were apologetic. “Excuse me, young sir. I’m going to touch you in a very personal way, like a lover. Only I’m not a lover. I hardly know you. I’m just trying to make you better, right?”

  Another whimper, this one merely frightened, and after a few “mmm-hmms” Ellyot spoke again. “Right. You’re going to be mostly whole, young man. Even your backside seems to have healed well. You’ll only have one stone, but you’re a brave boy. I think you can be braver with one stone than most men with two, don’t you agree? With twice the practice and a little luck, you’ll probably be able to sire a few more brave boys, if that’s your leaning. What do you say?” Ellyot’s voice was terribly weary, but it was infused with warmth and, amazingly enough, hope. Still, as Eljean put together what Ellyot was saying with what had been done to the boy, he felt a wash of anger that almost cleansed him of hope altogether.

  “Here’s some spare trews,” Aylan said, coming up fro
m wherever he’d gone. His voice now sounded right near Ellyot’s, and with an exquisite shafting of jealousy, Eljean imagined him standing right behind Ellyot with a hand on his shoulder. “No, here, let me put them on. You’ll need to rest a moment before you see anyone else.”

  “I can help with trousers, Aylan.” Ellyot’s dry voice had the sound of rolled eyes and exasperation in it. “I’ll let you take him to one of the resting pallets.” Then, to the boy: “Can you stay in a safe house for a while? No more being a Goddess boy, right?”

  “I hate it,” the boy whispered. “I hate it. But my family’s hungry….”

  “I know,” Ellyot said quietly, and Eljean could see another long-fingered, fine-boned hand stroking the boy’s brow. “Maybe while you’re in the safe house we’ll find a way to feed your family that doesn’t involve you in that place.”

  “Please….”

  “Absolutely,” Ellyot promised that terrified, stricken voice. “Whatever we can do.”

  A Goddess boy? At his age? Eljean felt sick. Memories suffused him, terrible, sick-making memories of coins left on an end table, awkward mornings, and eyes that could not be met. Yes, he’d known Goddess boys, but he’d known them fully grown, fully consensual… not children, castrated and raped in a fit of temper. Still, his own memories made him want to throw up on the floor of the storeroom. For the first time since the door had swung shut, there was not enough air in the room, and he felt well and truly trapped.

  “Here, I’ve got you,” Aylan said now, and there was a shifting as the boy was taken from the table. Eljean could see Ellyot’s hands wiping the table down with cloths and what smelled to be wood-grain alcohol. Then another towel, and another, and when the towels stopped showing red, then pink, and then a faint brown, the table was clean to Ellyot’s satisfaction.

  The towels were picked up and thrown somewhere for laundering, and Ellyot was back on the stool in front of the table. He’d sat down heavily, and Eljean was surprised enough to see his head come down, table level, almost even with Eljean’s own eyes. Instinctively he flinched away, leaning backward against the door like a child playing hide and seek. It was stupid—he had entered the storeroom for valid reasons, but he’d been there when Ellyot Moon had done…. Had done what? The implications of what he knew were huge and baffling, and Eljean didn’t want to suddenly burst out into the quiet of the now-clean surgery without thinking them through.