Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  Beside him, Aylan grunted mostly in agreement, and Stanny had known him long enough to know that if he didn’t ask another question, that could be the last the man would say.

  “So,” he asked conversationally, knowing that in spite of their willingness to talk this night, the regents had somehow been maneuvered into sitting well behind them, “what should I tell Da about ‘night work’?”

  Aylan almost spit up his ale. “Goddess, Stanny!” he choked out when he could actually speak again. “Are you really going to ask me that here?”

  “Nobody’s listening.” Stanny smiled that broad smile, and Aylan narrowed his eyes. Just hearing those words made him want to check the room, and he was well aware that checking the room would be the thing that made everybody look at him. Judging from the wink Stanny gave him over his mug of ale, Stanny knew it too.

  “And you wouldn’t have asked the question if you didn’t know,” Aylan accused.

  “I want to hear you say it,” Stanny replied evenly, dropping his voice accordingly. “Tell me you’re assassins. Tell me that in addition to his standing up all day and risking his life wearing another name, you’re both risking your lives in the ghettoes, keeping the population safe. Tell me that you take whatever strength you’ve got left and pour it into this place on your rest day, and that he’s so exhausted, I can almost see into his skull through the shadows under his eyes. Tell me that.”

  Stanny dumped ale down his throat with a shaking hand, and Aylan did the same. He and Yarri’s easy-going cousin had always gotten along; they had worked together in the days as partners in Lane’s successful shipping business and downed pints of ale as brothers in the nights afterward. They had sat to family dinners together and given each other gentle grief about the sad (or not so sad) condition of the other’s love life, and Stanny had wryly chided Aylan about his helpless attachment to Stanny’s youngest sister. Until this moment, hearing Lane’s shaking anger in Stanny’s deeper, rougher voice, Aylan would not have used the word “love” to describe that relationship, but he supposed there was no other word for it.

  Torrant started to play then, and their conversation stilled. Aylan closed his eyes as he listened, and for the moment, with Stanny at his back, he pretended the two of them were back at Triannon, and that the future was bright, and doing what was right was easy.

  The sour note made him look up—Torrant never played wrong, not in public—and although the error was quickly covered, Aylan almost groaned looking at him. He was feverish with exhaustion, and their night was far from over.

  When he was done, Aylan half stood up, but Torrant nodded his head with a sweet grin at his audience and bowed. As Torrant took his seat next to Aylan to wait for the next band, Stanny cleared his throat and looked at Aylan, making it clear that now that the three of them were together, he expected an answer.

  Aylan looked at Torrant, the brother he loved more than life, and fought the temptation to put his head on the table and pour out all his misgivings to Lane Moon’s son, because of anyone, Stanny would understand. But there were two things for which Torrant would never forgive him. One was dying and the other was giving up.

  “You can’t tell Yarri,” is what Aylan said at last, looking miserably into Torrant’s eyes. Torrant, using that exquisitely sensitive intuition that he wore like skin, knew there was something important brewing between his cousin and Aylan, and with Aylan’s tortured plea, he knew what it was.

  “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t!” Stanny demanded.

  “Because she’ll come here,” Torrant replied calmly, accepting a cold pint of water from Triana with a smile. He looked to Stanny as though they weren’t discussing everything the three of them held dear. “Yarri will come, she’ll bring Roes and Aldam with her, and then there will be the five of us in mortal danger and not just the two. And Yarri isn’t a statesman. She’s not a politician. When she was six years old she hit a guardsman on the head with a rock, and she hasn’t changed her approach to those things that make her angry. You think it’s hard for us now, living two lives….”

  “Three lives,” Stanny said stubbornly. Torrant took a swallow of his water and sighed.

  “Fine. Three lives,” he conceded wryly. “If you think it’s hard for us, living three lives, just send Yar….” Suddenly his throat closed up around her name, and, Goddess help him, he had to fight the urge to crumple his face and sob the syllables against Aylan’s strong shoulder. He breathed evenly a few times, barely aware that Aylan had found his hand under the table and grasped it firmly, stroking the back of it with his thumb. “Just send her here,” he breathed at last, past the mountain of grief crushing his chest. “Send her here and watch the chaos explode!”

  Stanny’s own eyes were bright. “You’re right,” he said, looking determinedly around the tavern. Stanny didn’t like to be thought of as weak. “You’re right that she’d make it harder, but she’d also keep you safe and strong, keep you from….” Stanny shook his head then, finding words, and Torrant’s heart was too fraught to fill the silence.

  “Mama’s dropped almost as much weight as the two of you,” he said after a pause, and both the other men blinked in surprise at the change in the topic. “Aldam came by to see her, and suddenly he and Roes got posted to Wrinkle Creek again, and Ma won’t say why, and Da won’t talk about it. There’s a new priest in town, and he’s left handfasting alone, but he’s started in on what rights a woman owes a man. There’s some in the village that’re weak, and they’ll listen.”

  He looked at Torrant. “The miller’s boy is one of them, and he’s not believing Yarri’s spoken for, in spite of all the family that’s saying so.” Now his eyes found Aylan’s. “And Starry’s been sewing red flowers on the flounce of a skirt she’s hoping to wear for next year’s Beltane. She still can’t officially wear them, but she keeps talking that next year you’ll see her in the red flowers, and you’ll know it’s not such a long wait.”

  Aylan strangled an unexpected little cry of pain before it was born, and Torrant tightened the grip on their hands, yet still, Stanny wasn’t finished.

  “The priest came to my parent’s house, going on and on about how the red flowers are obscene, that men shouldn’t know about a woman’s monthlies, and women should hide themselves in shame,” Stanny continued, his voice gaining strength even as he broke them, “and all Starry says in return is that her music will drown out the sound of a mean wind. He looked at my sister like she was crazy and told her she was just a girl and wouldn’t know the truth for the lies in her loins”—an almost laugh there—“and Da took him by the scruff of the neck and threw him from the house, but he’s come knocking since….”

  “Oh Goddess,” Aylan gasped, his fingers going cold in Torrant’s grasp.

  “Stanny, enough!” Torrant cried, standing up with his fingers still entwined in Aylan’s.

  “And the cat died!” Stanny finished over him, standing as well. The hidden tears in their shouts weighted the small joy that had built up in the little tavern.

  Torrant abruptly sat down. “Anye?” His voice was absurdly small for a man who carried so much consequence.

  “Yes,” Stanny confirmed, sitting down too. “She lay down in Mum’s chair in the evening and didn’t rise up the next morning.” He looked away. “Yarri wrote you letters, but she left it out and didn’t want me to tell you.”

  “Anye the cat,” Torrant said, working hard to keep his voice clear. He looked at Aylan, holding his chin as firm as he could, trying hard to keep the little boy lost-ness from his expression. He failed. “We brought her over the mountain, you know,” he said conversationally, and Aylan gaped at him.

  “I’d known she was old,” Aylan said, surprised. As long as he’d known Torrant, he’d known Anye, but it hadn’t occurred to him the cat had made that fateful journey over Hammer Pass in the winter. He was about to ask Torrant what had possessed him to try to shoulder one more burden when he had been only a boy when Torrant spoke up again, resolutely p
utting Anye the poor, old fluff ball behind them.

  “It won’t stop, Stanny. This litany of horrors battering at the family’s peace, it’s not going to stop. If we leave here now, we could stop them in the short term, but they’ll just keep coming back. With the exception of time and bad fortune”—he grimaced at the obviously still-raw wound of Anye—“most of these problems need to be stopped here, and only here!” With a harsh exhalation, Torrant breathed away some of the pain that had built up behind his chest and looked around at the sudden interest in their table. He took a visible breath to relax his shoulders and tipped his head back as though looking at an open night sky. In a moment he was calm, and the face he turned to Stanny was reassuring and kind.

  “Tell your mum and da that we miss them,” he said at last, begging. “Tell Aldam that we need him here. Dueant’s child needs to be here to bless the place, because no one else is, but that I’d worry myself sick if he were actually to come. Tell my….” Oh gods, holy Goddess, could he even say her name? “Tell Yarri,” he said at last, “that I think of her every day. Bring her the songs, sing them for her, let her hear that I miss her.”

  He looked at Aylan, who nodded and wiped his mouth with his hand. “Tell Starry that her music has finally stopped fighting his fate, and that he plans to dance with her this Beltane when she can wear her flowers. Tell them about the clinic, if you must.”

  He looked around to the regents, who, although the crowd had gone back to their conversation, still sat looking at him for a sign of his weakening, looking to him for guidance and help and inspiration, the only model they had ever seen for how to walk like men and lead with wisdom.

  “But please, don’t tell them about the rest,” he begged. “Don’t tell them how you saw me today, tired and foolish from the damned gift. Don’t tell them that Aylan looks haggard from worry, or that we have to beg each other to eat and rest. For sweet Triane’s sake, cousin, don’t tell them about ‘night work.’ What we’re doing here, we’re doing for them. If we were to leave now, the good we’ve done could never be gotten back. The goal we’re working for—it will never be gained, because people will see that the one person to ever stand for human rights in this unholy place has given up and that humans don’t really matter at all.”

  Stanny nodded and sipped his beer, and some of the tension left the air with his sigh. “You’ve always been good with words, cousin,” he said roughly, “but I’ve never been good at hidings and lyings.” He finished off his pint and sighed. “I’ll try. I’ll try not to panic them, to worry them, to send Yarri scrambling for the first good horse to take her here on a fast wind.” Stanny shook his head. “I’ll try, cousin, but my face is open, and it always has been, and I promise nothing.”

  Torrant’s and Aylan’s hands parted then, with a sweet little caress from the pad of Torrant’s thumb to the inside of Aylan’s wrist, and Torrant nodded his gratitude. “Fair enough,” he said at last. He grinned, strained and tired but ever optimistic. “And it’s good, Stanny—by the time your route takes you home, for all we know our task here will be done!”

  Stanny looked around the room, at the gaunt people in raggedy clothes gathered together and desperate for hope. He grunted, because as much as he loved the two of them and believed in them, even Stanny knew it would take longer than six weeks to fix this sort of pain.

  They stowed Stanny’s cart in the alley behind the tavern and Stanny himself in Aylan’s apartment.

  “Now stay put,” Torrant warned. “You’re good in here, and the two boys will be along in a moment to keep you company.” He shivered, trying his best not to frighten his cousin, but at the same time not wanting to understate the situation either.

  “It’s bad out in the ghettoes at night,” he said at last, meeting eyes with Aylan, who nodded. “The guards are always looking for safe houses so they can take the children and put them to work in the brothels or the regents’ homes, or to just use them for sport and cruelty. Two years ago you could sleep in your cart outside and no one would have noticed, but as the people in the ghettoes get hungrier and more desperate, the consort gives the guards more leave to hurt them. The brigands and the thieves know this; they take advantage of it every chance they get.”

  “I don’t understand.” Stanny was puzzled and appalled.

  “I don’t either,” Aylan muttered at the same moment Torrant said softly, “I’ve figured it out.”

  Both of them looked at him, and he shrugged. “The consort is trying to force a revolution,” Torrant said at last. “He’s trying to force a rebellion. You haven’t heard him in the hall. He’s very cold and very condescending, and he keeps telling the regents that the Goddess folk are like naughty children, and if they’re not kept exactly just so, they’ll turn savage. At the same time, he has the secretary general give leave to his troops to ravage the ghetto. He’s waiting for the people to break and prove him right.”

  “And then what?” Stanny wanted to know. Torrant could hardly look at him, the answer was so appalling.

  “And then he puts down the revolution. Completely.” Torrant turned his bleak eyes away from the both of them. It was something he had held close to his chest in the past days, but given Stanny’s desire to bring them home, he felt he had no choice.

  Aylan made a retching sound in his throat, and his chest heaved as though he were trying not to vomit. “Genocide?” he whispered, his eyes lost. “What if they don’t break?” he asked at last, a sort of desperate hope in the voice of a man who grew up with few illusions.

  Torrant met those lost eyes with his own purpose, the purpose that drove him past sleep, past endurance, and past reason. “If they don’t break, then they die anyway—you’ve seen it. Either way, it’s coming, my brother,” he said softly, “and we’re the only force in the world here to stop it.”

  “Have the others figured it out?” Aylan asked, with a painful conflict of hopes. The first hope was that the young regents hadn’t, and therefore hadn’t betrayed his growing attachment to young men who were so much like himself. The second hope was that they had figured out Rath’s endgame and that they were on board to help.

  Torrant shook his head. “Aerk and Keon—they’re close. They’re smart. Now that they’ve started helping at the clinic, the basic injustices are starting to grate on them. Marv and Jino… they see what’s close to them, and now that they’re closer to the problem, they’ll see what the problem really is.”

  He laughed wryly. “And Eljean has his own small world to be involved in.”

  “Yes, and it all revolves around you,” Aylan replied dryly, the dreadful weight of Torrant’s revelation easing for a moment. Stanny looked at him, surprised.

  “You’re the handsome one. Why isn’t he in love with you?”

  Torrant’s bark of laughter surprised them all, but he couldn’t stop it. He laughed until he could barely stand, while Aylan shot him looks of complete disgust. When he could catch his breath, Torrant wiped his eyes, still chuckling, and said, “That’s what he gets for being a total wank, cousin. Nobody notices he’s the prettiest!” With another chuckle, Torrant sobered and gave Stanny a quick, hard hug. “Stay here, wait for the boys, be safe. We’ll be back in the morning to see you off.”

  Together, he and Aylan slid out the window and into the alleyway below. It was dark, and their night work waited.

  Night Work

  ELJEAN TRIED very hard not to wake Zhane. He dressed silently in the summer-scented cool dark, but a wide-palmed hand with chapped fingers wrapped around Eljean’s wrist as he sat on the narrow bed to put on his boots. It was the only flat surface in the tiny room—a creaking metal frame in what was barely a corner of a crumbling wooden building, shored up in patches with bricks and bad mortar. When Eljean had seen it, he had been haunted by memories of bills being passed to limit construction in the ghettoes “for the safety of the children in the environs,” but this morning it was not guilt over his performance as regent that was bothering him.

  He trie
d very hard to be a man as he peered into Zhane’s brown eyes through the dark; the sadness there told him that he’d both succeeded and failed.

  “Still afraid of sin, Eljean?” Zhane’s voice was rough in the mornings, but his words were even rougher.

  “I’m working on it,” he replied. He didn’t like leading, felt awkward being dominant, but he disliked pain or even the fear of pain more. Zhane had been patient with him, with his clumsy lovemaking, and the embarrassment that had followed.

  Zhane grasped Eljean’s chin with his thin fingers, and the intimacy the touch assumed made the blood flow under his skin. The air was suddenly charged with warmth and the memories of sex.

  “Do you wish you’d had the wine?” Ah, the gentleness of that question!

  Suddenly being a man was no longer so difficult. Eljean grasped the hand at his face and laced his own elegant hand with the work-roughened fingers that had roamed his skin the night before. Zhane had been thin enough to count his ribs, his skin dark enough to show the scars of living in the ghettoes for most of his life, but still, in bed, he had been magnanimous, giving generously of a full and wealthy soul.

  “No.” Eljean shook his head and, wonder of wonders, managed a small, true smile. “If I’d had the wine, I would have ruined things with talking.”

  Zhane smiled his appreciation, nodding. “But I’m no Triane’s Son, am I?” he asked mockingly, and Eljean flushed even deeper. “If I’d been Triane’s Son, you might have forgotten about sin.”

  “It’s not your fault.” Eljean cleared his throat, stroking Zhane’s cheekbone with his thumb. Oh, his first real lover, the first man in his bed who had been neither paid nor too drunk to protest what they’d done the morning after, and he knew too, too much about Eljean’s heart for comfort. “I’ve heard talk of sin since I was a baby. The only sin you’ve ever seen is what my people have done to yours. If I blush for sin, it’s because I believe in it, not because you made me do it.”