Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  A few moments passed, moments during which all Eljean could hear was his own breathing, although he was trying so hard to keep it still in his chest that he was bringing spots to his eyes. Eljean focused his vision on a wrapper of dried meat and contemplated snacking on it out of boredom when there was a rustling from outside. It was Aylan’s voice again, and this time the tenderness, no matter how exasperated, was unmistakable.

  “There. I’ve relegated the minor cases to Djali and Triana—they’re competent enough—and you have an hour’s reprieve. Stanny should be here in two or three hours, so maybe we can keep you from doing anything arse-stupid for a while. Now eat and nap. That’s an order.”

  “Funny,” Ellyot mocked gently, “you don’t look like Aunt Bethen.”

  Aylan made a pained sound. “Ah gods, if only Bethen were here. She would have kept you from doing that. Or Yarri….”

  Ellyot laughed. “Yarri thinks I can do anything,” he said softly. “I would have done it to keep her believing just that.”

  “Foolish arse!” There was a smacking sound, and Ellyot made protest, but Aylan overrode him. “Yarri knows exactly who you are and what your limitations are. You underestimate her. Now eat.”

  An exasperated groan. “I’m not hungry! Now leave me alone.”

  “The hell I will. If we have to sit here all day, I’ll see you eat that sandwich and put your head down. I know what the gift takes out of you, especially when you do something that drastic. If you’re not hungry, it’s because this Goddess-forsaken pisshole would upset anyone’s stomach….”

  “’Der, I’b eaading.” Swallow. “Will you stop lecturing me now?”

  “I don’t know why I should,” Aylan replied dryly. “I can’t believe you brought that vain little cock-pigeon here this morning.”

  “Eljea’m?” Another swallow. “What’s wrong with him?”

  A humorless sound. “He wants you. That’s what’s wrong with him.”

  A grin Eljean could almost hear. “Jealous?”

  And a shudder he could hear as well. “No, brother. Not to knock your tremendous appeal, but if we were doing that, here? I’d lose my mind. I worry enough about you as it is. If my skin never got a break from you, my mind would eat itself up with fear.”

  A hard swallow. “Eloquent, Aylan. I’m sorry, I really am…. You know, Stanny is coming….”

  A sudden fist slamming down on the table startled all of them. “If you tell me to go back home, I will be as close to hitting you as I ever hope to be in my life.”

  A sigh. “You’re right, the people need you….”

  “The people?”

  A humorless laugh. “Are you going to make me say it? Haven’t I told you in a thousand ways? You’re my lifeline here. She may be the reason I breathe and my heart pumps in and out, but here? You’re what gets me up in the morning. I couldn’t look my friends in the face and lie to them if I didn’t remember who I loved and what I was fighting for.”

  After a reconciling silence, Eljean risked a peek through the door handle again. He saw the two hands on the table, one covering the other with a tenderness beyond any Eljean had ever had from a lover. She may be the reason I breathe and my heart pumps in and out, and yet, If my skin never got a break from you, my mind would eat itself up in fear. Eljean was more confused than he ever had been, but there was no denying the tenderness in that touch of hands.

  “Eljean’s all right,” Ellyot said into that healing silence. “He’s just like all of them, you know. Young, callow….”

  “He’s our age.”

  “Well, yes, but no one has taught him—or any of them, for that matter—how to be men.” Ellyot gave a sigh. “Does it ever surprise you that all fathers are not Lane Moon?”

  Aylan laughed humorlessly. “Now you’re showing how spoiled you are. It surprises me every day that Lane Moon loves me like a son.”

  A frown, then, probably. Eljean could imagine the expression crossing Ellyot’s face—that lower lip would purse, just so. “It shouldn’t surprise you. You’re worthy of the love. I just mean that these boys, they’ve grown up just… void of anyone teaching them right and wrong. And they’re hungry for it. You’ve seen them listen—stories, poems, heroes. Eljean is no different.”

  “He looks sneaky,” Aylan grumbled.

  “You’d be sneaky too, you randy git, if you’d had to hide every hard-on you’d ever sprung because it wasn’t for the right person. You’re lucky enough to like girls—don’t tell me you haven’t had a few women here. Arue watches you like a play and then tells the rest of us, you know. But not him—he’s like Tal. Every desire he’s ever had, he’s had to hide or sneak or pretend did not exist. When you can’t get laid, you’re an unlivable bastard. Just think about what he goes through.”

  “You hide your hair with every breath, don’t you?” Aylan asked softly, and Eljean would have been almost amused to hear a snarfling, gobbling bite taken from a neglected sandwich if he hadn’t wanted to hear the answer to that question. Aylan didn’t seem to be amused either. “You’re done chewing now. Answer my question, brother.”

  “It’s not important,” Ellyot muttered.

  “It is too. You said we’d give this a year. I can tell by how much night work we have that you’re doing well in the hall. I just don’t know how much more of this you can stand.”

  “I thought I was supposed to nap?” Ellyot’s voice became light, teasing, and suddenly Eljean knew exactly why Aylan was so angry all the time. Getting the man to take care of himself was like picking a bouquet of flowers from the Whoring Moon herself.

  “You alone are worth this entire shitehole of a town, Tor—Ellyot,” Aylan said quietly, with an intensity that vibrated the floorboards and shook the flour from the shelves. “If you think I’m going to watch you kill yourself here, when our family needs you….”

  “That’s Goddess thinking,” Ellyot (what was that other name Aylan was going to say?) replied wryly. “Even Lane would tell you that this situation needs the gods’ perspective.” Abruptly, even to Eljean’s limited vision, Ellyot pulled his hands in front of him and rested his head on them, muffling an enormous yawn in his arms. “Let’s not argue,” he said through the yawn. “Did you send that messenger to those boys?”

  “Yes. They’ll be here when Stanny arrives. I wish we could talk Arue into going.”

  “Gods.” Ellyot yawned again. “If only. But she won’t leave without her brother, and he won’t leave without Torrell….”

  “And Torrell won’t leave his people. I know, I know. Too damned much honor here.”

  “And not enough joy.” Ellyot mumbled the last bit, and as quickly as that he was asleep, snoring gently on the slab of the backroom table.

  Eljean would have thought that Aylan—gruff, competent Aylan, who had been a whirlwind of activity in the tavern that day—would have left then on some vital errand or important task that only he could accomplish. Instead, he sat quietly, eating (or so it sounded). Every now and then Eljean could see his hand going to Ellyot’s chestnut-colored hair and stroking gently.

  Eljean was just starting to fight the compulsion to stand up and scream I’m in here, you two gits—let me out! when there was another clatter from the front of the taproom. Aerk’s voice suddenly burst in through the curtain, calling with no small amount of panic for Ellyot, and the man who had abruptly fallen asleep on his own hands was bounding up like a rubber ball off a granite floor.

  “Wha…?”

  “Guards… one of them’s wounded….”

  “Well, bring them in!” Aylan said wolfishly. “We’ll cure all their ills!”

  “Not here, Aylan!” Ellyot hissed. “In fact, you need to stay back. The rest of us are regents. You go out there, and you’re their target again.” Then, to Aerk, “Tell him I’ll be right out.” A rustle and Aerk disappeared. “I’m serious—in fact, go out to the alleyway. If I have to bring them in here, I don’t want you anywhere near.”

  “Wonderful!” Aylan snarled
. “Exiled to the children’s table.”

  “Get out there, you wank!” The last word was punctuated by a slamming door, and Ellyot’s footsteps sounded past the pantry again, leaving Eljean alone and wondering what his next move would be.

  The Healer’s Song

  OH GODS, there were two guards in Torrant’s makeshift hospital, and one of them was bleeding out from his crotch. For some reason, when Torrant had wished the boy’s wounds on their perpetrator, he had assumed the man would collapse safely in the guards’ barracks, and the rest of the world could make of his slow and painful death what it would. Having him show up in Torrant’s surgery scant moments after he’d cured the bastard’s victim was not in that hastily erected plan.

  “We know what you’re doing here!” the smaller, unwounded man was saying. He had fine blond hair and a narrow, almost pretty face. “If you don’t help my friend then we’ll make sure Rath knows too.”

  Torrant raised his eyebrows and knew his face was as hard as it ever got when he was human. “That’s unlikely, since then he’d have to tell the world what he’s doing to get such a wound—or do the sodomy laws pardon the guards automatically?”

  The pretty guard dropped his eyes. “That’s none of your business….”

  Torrant had a sudden, sick suspicion. “No, but this arse-ripper made it yours, didn’t he?” There was almost gentleness in his voice then. Perhaps the man deserved it.

  The blood washed under the man’s fair skin, and Torrant knew he’d been right. Dammit, why couldn’t this man be as monstrous as his sallow-faced, spittle-riven partner?

  “He’s a good man,” the blond guard protested, and it sounded as though he was trying to convince himself.

  “Good men don’t rape boys in brothels they helped to build,” Torrant spat. The wounded man gave a groan then and fell to his knees. The movement must have jostled his groin, because he let out a hoarse scream before his eyes rolled back in his head, and he collapsed to the floor.

  “They’re just Goddess whores!” the pretty guard screamed, and Torrant’s sympathy faded with immediacy. He looked around him, dazedly, at the children huddled around Aerk, sharing food as though they’d never seen it, and at the parents, spread on the pallets for the ill or the exhausted because food and hygiene had been stripped from them like rights and dignity. He looked at the young regents—his friends, in spite of all the lies he had told them—and thought of their shock, their disillusionment, when they’d seen what one human could do to another when the law said that it was right to do so. Someone was missing, he noticed, but mostly what he saw was that they had the right to make amends without being persecuted by the consort.

  “Well then,” Torrant said in a hard voice, looking the young guard in the eye, “you shouldn’t mind that none of these ‘Goddess whores’ will treat your friend. And since I’m serving them, I guess my touch is tainted as well.”

  The man’s eyes widened, and he began to shake his head, Torrant’s eyes bled blue because simply turning the men away was not going to be enough.

  “You think the Goddess and those who serve her are nothing. You have killed Compassion with Pride. What you do not have eyes to see in truth is the truth you will not find,” he intoned, and the younger guard’s eyes grew blank, and his lips moved as though he were talking to someone inside his own head. With a whimper and a heave he turned around, hauling his friend with him, and slow, foot-dragging, step by painful step the two of them walked through the swinging doors and into the overbright sunlight outside.

  Marv ran up to Torrant then, his tightly curled hair sticking on end from nervous hands ripping through it. “Dueant’s bright helmet, Ellyot! What did you say to him to make him go away?”

  “Words,” Torrant said dreamily. The world lost its hard, cold, snowcat focus and became the dim color of tarnished pewter. “Deadly words.” From the back room there was the racket of a table scraping the floor and wood colliding with wood, and two facts fitted together neatly in his fading brain. “Oh, that’s where Eljean went….”

  The next thing he heard was the thump of his own body hitting the wooden floor.

  “WHERE’VE YOU been?” Aerk asked Eljean as he and Marv hoisted Ellyot Moon between them, his limp arms over their shoulders.

  “I got locked in the storeroom,” Eljean replied shortly, although he knew Aerk’s quick mind would eventually ask questions about that. “Here, bring him back to the table.”

  Eljean blocked out a path, and together Marv and Aerk brought the unconscious Ellyot into his own surgery. They laid him out on the table, which was at a decidedly odd angle in the dead center of the surgery.

  “Where are you going?” Aerk asked as Eljean trotted to the door.

  “Aylan can help him,” Eljean replied, opening the back door. “He knows about the gift.” Dueant’s big-arsed mouth, did he really say that? Aylan was glaring at him from the open door as though Eljean’s throat were about to become a thing of the past, so yes, he really must have. No wonder they had kept him in the dark for weeks, Eljean thought miserably. It was obvious he couldn’t keep his heart in his chest or his thoughts behind his mouth to save his life.

  “Yes, you really said that,” Aylan barked, reading his mind—or the open expression on his face. “Now what in the seven darks happened?”

  Aerk looked from Eljean to Aylan for a moment and then nodded, as though filing away the blurted secret for later. “Two guards came in. One was bleeding out from between his legs. They….” He shared an uncomfortable look with Marv, who took over.

  “They talked. It… it sounded like Ellyot guessed something bad about them.”

  “No kidding!” Keon snorted, coming in behind the curtain with Jino and Triana as well, who was clinging to Djali’s hand.

  “Aylan,” Triana said carefully, looking sideways at the large number of tall, broad-shouldered young men squashed in the same small room, “if you recall that boy you brought in?”

  Aylan nodded and then grimaced. “Yes, I understand. What did… he… do then?” The hesitation was slight—a fledgling’s down-feather of a breath, and if Eljean hadn’t known to listen for it, he would have dismissed it altogether.

  “He started speaking poetry!” said Djali in an excited little burst. Djali had trouble writing poetry in a quiet room with a pen and ink, so the idea that someone could simply “speak” as a poet had obviously impressed him. Djali’s face fell then. “But I can’t remember the exact words.”

  Aylan nodded with a sigh. “Can anybody remember if he used the word ‘truth’ when he spoke?”

  “Twice.” This from Jino, who was rubbing his chest in distraction.

  “Damn.” Aylan ran his hand through his bright hair, yanking it from its queue and then pulling it back and refastening the band deftly. “Okay, all of you—he’s going to be fine. He just needs rest more than ever, that’s all. Can we function without him today? Are there any cases he absolutely must see? He can come back in tomorrow. I’ll take him to their homes if I have to, but right now, he needs to curl up in a dark corner and sleep until Stanny gets here, right? No disturbances, no ‘Ellyot, I just need.’ Just sleep.”

  “The storeroom is dark and cool,” Triana said softly, and Eljean nodded in enthusiastic affirmation.

  “I’ll put down some blankets,” he said quietly.

  “Good.” Aylan reached down, and to Aerk and Marv’s mortification, lifted their friend by his lonesome, grimacing at how little he really weighed. “Triane’s generous bosom, people, don’t any of you make sure he eats between bells?”

  “They assumed I was grown, brother,” Ellyot said weakly from his arms, and Aylan grunted as he waited for Triana and Eljean to prop up a bed out of flour sacks and old blankets on the floor of the storeroom.

  “They’re dumb-arsed sots, all of them; any idiot can look at you and see you need cozening,” Aylan muttered against Ellyot’s temple. The regents exchanged looks and took that opportunity to duck out and resume their duties in the f
ront. “Eljean, wait a bit,” Aylan told him when he would have left. Eljean stopped at the doorway like a guilty child, his heart pounding rhythms through his belly. He heard Aylan in the storeroom and couldn’t resist peeking his head in to watch the unflappable, gruff, golden god settle his friend down with more tenderness than Eljean had seen one human show another in his life.

  “It’s almost too cool in here, for all the heat outside,” Aylan was saying. “I’ll cover you with one of these blankets and let you sleep.”

  “Right, Mama,” Ellyot said dreamily. At first Eljean thought he was simply joking with his friend, as he had earlier when he’d mentioned his Aunt Beth, but Ellyot’s next words sent a chill clean through to his bowels.

  “If I sleep too long, the soldiers will come, and Yarri will die too…. Don’t let me sleep too long….”

  Aylan’s pained whuff of air told Eljean he wasn’t the only one who was chilled. “You’ve already wakened, my friend. That battle’s been fought. Now go to sleep so you can fight this one, right?”

  “Night, Aylan. Love you.”

  “Night, brother. Love you too.”

  Aylan’s shoulders were sloped as he closed the door behind him. He stood still for so long with closed eyes that Eljean was debating turning to leave. Aylan’s voice stopped him.

  “How did you know Ellyot was gifted?” he asked quietly.

  Well, his dumb mouth had crafted this box of shite; it was time he waded in it to see what would grow. “You locked me in the store room by accident,” he said baldly. “I heard all sorts of things I don’t understand.”