Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “Lavatory. Now,” Torrant commanded. When they reached the impeccably white-tiled room, Torrant shoved them both into it and pulled Eljean’s shuddering, sobbing body into an embrace, murmuring soothing things against his sweaty hair as though he were a child until he quieted. Djali waited, looking miserable and distraught, obviously trying very hard to keep a lid on his temper until he got an explanation.

  “It was sorcery, some sort of sorcery. I’m not sure where it came from, but it was aimed almost directly at Eljean and myself, just like the food.”

  “Why me?” Eljean demanded, his voice still thick and shuddery.

  “Because,” said a feeble voice behind them, “Rath thinks you’re a sodomite, and he wants to know if you’ve dragged his son into your evil ways.”

  “Uncle Ulvane?” Djali was clearly surprised. “You got out?”

  An old man with a bird’s nest of dingy, yellow-white hair and a track of saliva shining his chin dodged into the lavatory like a kid playing hide-and-seek.

  “My fault,” the old man muttered. “My fault, Willa’s son… all my fault….”

  “You’re gifted,” Torrant said with a shock of recognition. He couldn’t say it any better than that the spell and the old man simply smelled the same. “That was your geas that took Eljean down.”

  “My spell… my fault. Torrian Shadow was all my fault.” The old man’s rheumy eyes focused abruptly on Torrant even as Torrant tried to stop his blood from freezing in his chest and throat. “You’re the cat and the tree, and your father was all my fault, and your family was all my fault, and Willa’s son…. Willa’s son….”

  “Old man, what was the geas for?” Torrant asked, hoping his friends in the front weren’t going to suddenly start spilling all of the things they didn’t want known into that room full of malevolence. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, think of the things the man was saying now about his father, about the day he and Yarri had almost been caught fleeing from the slaughter of their family, or about how close these things were to the knowledge of the young men who had trusted him with their lives.

  “Secrets…. Rath wants the only secrets in this house but it was weak. So weak.” Again, that strange sharpening of the eyes. “Torrian Shadow made sure it wouldn’t work on Willa’s son. Birthing rites… he sang Goddess rites true and fine, and it’s a blessing he met you, and you loved him. But your friend here….” Those eyes turned inward now and lost their point. “Too many secrets, too many fears. He took wine from the table, and the geas found a way in.” A grave look now was aimed at Eljean. “You mustn’t take food from the hands of your enemies, boy.” Helpless tears began to bathe Ulvane’s face, and he scuttled in closer to Torrant, clasping his hands.

  “And it’s my fault. I was keeping secrets…. I had to keep Rath focused on his own people… my secrets….” A sudden urgency filled the old man’s voice. “Boy, my secrets could kill you all. And I can’t do that to Willa’s son. I can’t. I can’t do that to the son of Torrian Shadow and Owen Moon. All of that blood on my hands, and I can’t….” And now his voice broke completely, and he wept into Torrant’s hands. “I can’t escape it. My dreams are red, and my heart is twisted by the things I’ve done. Please, boy, you must kill me, please…. I don’t want to betray you…. I knew you from the moment Djali came home with you in his heart, and if you don’t kill me you will die, and you will fail and…. Oh Goddess, just let me die!” He couldn’t speak anymore, the sobbing was so complete; he just crouched on the floor, gibbering in panic, and Torrant crouched with him, meeting Djali’s eyes in hope of more information.

  “He….” Djali swallowed. “He tried to hang himself once, with his bed sheet, when I was about five,” he said at last. “The consort had the woman who was watching him hanged in his stead, for treason, while Ulvane and her family watched.”

  “Dueant’s much maligned arse!” Torrant swore, appalled by the story and by the choice he was being asked to make. He scrubbed his face with his hands.

  “Ellyot,” Eljean said, calmer now that he was more sure of his own senses, “who is Torrian Shadow?”

  “A midwife,” Torrant answered, his eyes dreaming into the remorseless white of the tiled walls. “I’m guessing the midwife who delivered Djali, here. And”—he closed his eyes and swallowed—“and probably one of Rath’s first victims.”

  “But Uncle Ulvane just said he….” Djali’s voice trailed off, and he looked straightly at the gibbering, sobbing man in Torrant’s arms. “Yes. Yes, my father could have done that. He could have told him… anything, I guess.”

  “Your mother’s death,” Ulvane said distinctly, his tear-stained hands pushing back his sweaty, dingy hair. “He told me that Torrian Shadow killed your mother, and I believed him. I was young and weak, and Goddess help me, I needed someone to blame. I didn’t realize until later, so much later… after so much blood….”

  The old man took a shuddery breath and spoke directly to Djali, his face assuming for a moment a younger, cleaner countenance, with brown eyes that may have once been the most handsome feature in an ordinary man’s face. “I’m mad, boyo. This moment, this is as clear as I’ve ever been. I need to die, and die quietly, or I will betray the last thing I hold dear, and there is no absolution for a traitor like me.” A tremor seized him, and the sobs threatened his body again, and Torrant couldn’t bear it anymore.

  “Don’t worry about it, old man,” he told the man gently, pushing his vision of truth into the man’s mind with just enough force to start a small bit of bleeding, just a little pool of blood, pushing against the fragile brain and the skull, that would grow bigger and bigger as the night wore on. “Don’t worry about it…. You’ve been absolved by the son of Owen Moon, by the son of Torrian Shadow, by your sister’s son, by your people. You’ve been forgiven, washed in the Goddess’s tears. Go sleep now, dream of Djali when he was a child, remember the times you saw his smile, and know that smile was for you.”

  “Bed…,” the old man mumbled. “I should go back to bed…. My keeper should be looking for me soon. She’s a good lass…. I don’t want her punished.” He looked up at Djali and smiled, the expression transforming his face once again to the hale, handsome, happy man he might have been. “And the boy, he’s everything Willa wanted him to be. Such a brave boy, fighting for the world. He’s got a smile like sunshine, Willa’s boy.”

  “Kiss your uncle’s cheek and wish him good night, Djali,” Torrant said roughly through hot tears he couldn’t fight. The weakness and nausea of using his gift this way were secondary things to the terrible sadness of what he’d just done.

  Djali looked at him, startled, comprehension and protest dying on his lips even as they dawned. “Good night, Uncle Ulvane,” he said thickly, shaking his head at Torrant. “Pleasant dreams.”

  “Good night, boys.” And with one last, sunny smile, the old man toddled off to his deathbed, leaving Torrant and Djali to slide completely down so they were side by side, sitting on the bathroom floor next to Eljean like children.

  “Will it hurt?” Djali asked after a fraught moment of shuddery breaths and harshly controlled tears.

  “He’ll dream of you as a child,” Torrant said, mastering himself. “And he’ll dream that Torrian—” Oh, he couldn’t finish that name, could he? “That Torrian Shadow will come to you and pick you up and play with you like the father you deserved. He’ll see Owen Moon laugh at you as you roll around on the ground with my brothers, and when he wakes, he will be behind the moons with them all, and it will be truth.” He counted ten breaths, then abruptly stood up and washed his face, knowing that the dinner party would be more than wondering where they were and not caring any more than he had to in order to get them all out of there alive.

  “And tonight,” he continued in a stronger voice, “you are going to go pack your things with Eljean and meet us at my flat. Eljean, is it good if he sleeps on your couch for a bit?”

  “If he can still stand me after tonight,” Eljean ventured, and they tried a g
rim smile for him.

  “Just don’t start telling me about your dead childhood pets, and I think we’ll be fine,” Djali ventured back, and then they both tried a small, hollow laugh. “But, Ellyot—what will we do about Triana? Is she in danger?”

  Oh holy Goddess. “Yes,” Torrant murmured, “and no. I think you’ll be watched, Djali. You’re going to break away from him, so he’ll want to know what you’re doing. We need to be aware that you’ll be watched, and you need to warn Triana that she might be in danger. You shouldn’t go out unless you’re with another one of us.” He shot a quick grin at Eljean. “Since your roommate is also seeing someone in the ghetto, that shouldn’t be a problem. You may want to cool it down for a while, or only see her on nights when we’ve all been at the clinic. You’re an honorable man—I trust you to do what you must to keep her safe. Just remember….”

  Torrant looked away and thought of the father he couldn’t remember, dying by the side of the road in a pool of blood as his mother told him. He thought of Qir and Tal, his brothers, who had lovers when they’d died, lovers who had also died that same night.

  “Just remember that innocence is no guarantee of safety, will you, my friend?” he begged at last, and Djali nodded.

  “We need to win this, don’t we?” he asked, and Torrant nodded.

  “We really do. Now you two go and pack. I’ll get the rest of us out of here. Slip out the back way if you must, but meet in my flat as soon as you can.”

  When Torrant got to the banquet table, the silence was as glaring and repellent as the white tile in the bathroom. The young regents, his regents, sat, arms folded, legs extended under the table, their main courses congealing on the table in front of them, while Rath’s cronies ate in a pointed silence across from them. Torrant felt a smile wash the last of the grief from his features and decided that this sort of pride—pride in friends of high character—might not be such a bad thing after all.

  “Gentlemen,” he said with a bow and a telling look at Aerk, Keon, Marv, and Jino, “if you will excuse us, Eljean is not feeling well, and we’re going to escort him back to his quarters.”

  Rath was so surprised that they weren’t going to observe the niceties that he almost dropped his fork. “But… but dinner isn’t over yet!” he protested, and Torrant’s smile turned sardonic in half of a beat of his broken heart.

  “Especially since none of us are comfortable eating, Consort.” He bowed, and the others rose, pushed their chairs in, and did the same. “We’ll see you on First Day, on the floor. You seem to have attached a caveat to the bill I proposed asking for hunger relief in the ghettoes. I plan to have something to say about that. Gentlemen, good night.”

  With that, they filed out of the banquet hall and toward the stairs down to the front foyer. Knowing they were being watched, the five young men maintained a stoic silence until they had marched somberly out of the palace and across the courtyard to the apartment complex. By the time they got there, the silence was so embedded in the night that they kept it until Torrant let them all into his flat.

  The Importance of Dreams

  AYLAN WAS waiting for them when they arrived, and by the looks of it, he’d bought out half the marketplace and set it up on Torrant’s dresser in his burgundy, dark-wooded bedroom. The stiff and somber silence that had settled on them during that long walk across the courtyard shattered into bounding, chattering pieces when they saw the food.

  “Where’s Djali and Eljean?” asked Aerk, after he’d swallowed half a meat pie in a gulp. Sweat had soaked through his shaggy, dark-blond hair, and all of them were flushed and starving.

  A knock on the door answered his question about Djali and Eljean, and the young men dodged in, carrying two large cases apiece filled with Djali’s things.

  Everyone quickly settled on Torrant’s bed, eating the simple food with groans of contentment.

  “What is that story about the country mouse and the city mouse?” Keon asked, sucking the last of a pastry off his teeth. “About a crust of bread eaten in peace as opposed to a banquet eaten in danger?”

  “Wishing you were a country mouse?” Aerk asked with a raised eyebrow and another bite of meat pie.

  “Wishing I could crawl up Rath’s leg and bite him soundly on the ego with my pointy diseased teeth!” Keon bit out, and it was a mark of how much strain they’d been under that the others hooted and whistled in agreement.

  “I’ve had nightmares about being naked in public that went better than that,” Marv stated, and for once Jino didn’t even try to cuff him on the arm or kick him in the shin.

  “You all did beautifully,” Torrant said, meaning it. “You should have seen them, Aylan—they did us proud, debating like professionals, showing solidarity when none was asked.”

  “Except me,” Eljean muttered. A sudden, recriminating silence descended as Torrant walked across the room to his friend and seized his shoulders as he hunched in the corner by the double doors and the armoire, standing on tiptoe so he could touch foreheads with his friend.

  “You were attacked by sorcery.”

  “Which I apparently let in with a sip of wine.”

  “You’re drinking water freely in my room, Eljean—it’s not in our nature to reject hospitality when it’s offered.” He sighed then, dropping his head, and wanted to laugh because the difference in their height was such that he almost rested it on Eljean’s chest. Sometimes being shorter than everyone else made his gestures more intimate than he’d planned. He shook his head and backed up, tilting his head to look in Eljean’s eyes.

  “It’s not in our nature to think that people will cover a deformed truth with a pretty lie and that the world will only see a pretty lie.”

  “Wait a minute!” Marv demanded, bouncing on his toes. “What is this about sorcery?”

  “And what is all of Djali’s stuff doing in your entryway?” Jino asked, and the questions suddenly flew thick and fast until Aylan put two fingers in his mouth and whistled at them like Lane Moon would whistle for a horse. There was peace again, and Aylan, relieved just to see them all alive and bickering, leaned back against the wall (since the chair, the bed, and the chest at the foot of the bed were all taken) and gave them a palm out, open-eyed gesture indicating that they should proceed in an orderly fashion.

  “Perhaps we should let Ellyot speak,” he said reasonably, then held up a palm to forestall any protests. “And when he’s done, you all can add your observations, yes?”

  It went much more smoothly after that.

  By the time Torrant was done, doing most of his speaking while pacing back and forth across the room, Aylan had slid down the side of the wall and put his face in his hands. He finished speaking, and nobody said a word; the young men just sat there with fragments of their supper still clasped in their hands.

  “I’m sorry, Djali,” Torrant muttered, scrubbing his face with his hands again. “I’m—”

  “Don’t be,” Djali replied quietly.

  “I’m—”

  “Don’t be.”

  “But I have to be, don’t you see? You could think it was vengeance, working through me tonight, and you need to know it wasn’t.”

  “Vengeance for what?” Aerk asked sharply. Aylan hissed, because Torrant had left himself wide open for that question, and explaining why he would want vengeance for Torrian Shadow was out of the question.

  “Vengeance for tracking me and Yarri after our family was killed,” Torrant said, surprising Aylan into looking at him. “We were the cat and the tree that he heard. We were….” Torrant trailed off, lost abruptly in the place that Aylan knew the bad memories lived. “We were huddled against a tree, with the family cat clutched in her arms, and I knew a ‘wizard tracker’ was coming. I… I used my gift. I told Yarri to think like a cat—she’d followed Anye around enough that it shouldn’t be a stretch… and I… I grew roots and branches and had leaves for hair. And suddenly the wizard tracker was gone, and Yarri was pounding against the inside of my bark for me to let
her out.”

  “I know why you did it, Ellyot,” Djali was saying now, his voice gentle, and the compassion on his face making him a picture of true Dueant. “You did it because he asked you to. You did it to give him….” Djali, always in search of the elusive perfect word, shook his hands and his head trying to find one, and for once nobody interrupted to help him out. “Absolution!” he cried at last, the triumph in his voice bringing the first smiles to the room in over half an hour. “You let him die in peace, without betraying me, or his people or our cause anymore. You told him he was forgiven….” Djali’s voice was choking up now, and Eljean unexpectedly moved to the bed and threw his arm around the son of the consort in an attempt to console him. “It was the best death he could have asked for—the most merciful thing you could have done. Don’t be sorry, Ellyot. Eljean and I… we know that vengeance was the furthest thing from your mind.”

  “But it won’t be the last thing on Rath’s mind,” Aylan broke into the silence, “and you all know we might have to deal with that tonight.”

  “Not tonight,” Djali surprised them by saying. “The secretary general was getting pretty tipsy by the time we left. I don’t know if he’ll be able walk to the compound to issue an order. The consort never really issues those orders himself, so….” He looked directly at Aylan, “Triane’s Son and Oueant’s Son might have a rest tonight.”

  Aylan groaned. “Triane’s best dance, who’s been calling me Oueant’s Son?”

  Aerk laughed in spite of the gravity of the moment. “Triane’s Son—that’s what the buzz at the clinic said this morning.”

  “You manky wanker!” Aylan burst out at Torrant, and in spite of the exhaustion and the ache in his heart, Torrant laughed back at him.

  “If I have to be Triane’s Son, you might as well get a spiffy name too!”

  Aylan reached out to the throw pillow Jino offered and pitched it at his brother’s head; relieved laughter echoed through the room.

  The impromptu “party” broke up shortly after that, the young men moving quietly to their own rooms and Marv and Jino taking Djali’s cases to Eljean’s flat on their way. Torrant and Aylan had warned the two men not to visit their lovers in the ghettoes without a tail of their own and promised to tell “whomever might be interested” why the young men couldn’t visit as much as they wanted.