Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “Not a problem.” With a terrifying dispatch, the young man yanked his knife out of the priest’s back, kicked the man over so his wild eyes were staring upward, and positioned the knife carefully between the ribs on his chest. After searching irritably around, he found a rock within reaching distance, and with one sharp rap, pounded the knife through the man’s ribcage and into his heart.

  Abruptly the priest stopped gurgling and died.

  Yarri took another one of those shuddering, fortifying breaths and thought about running out to the road for the very useful but now no-longer-needed bag of tools.

  “Does it ever terrify you,” she asked her cousin as he pulled the knife out of the dead man and started cleaning it on the man’s tunic, “that you have nothing resembling a conscience?”

  Cwyn grinned at her, his brown eyes sparkling, repentance nowhere to be seen. “The gods are for this one here,” he said, rising and giving the body a casual kick, then moving his knife and his rock to Carl’s chest, “or maybe this steaming pile here.” Carl never gained consciousness to feel the blow that killed him. Cwyn growled as Carl Mildew’s body twitched beneath him.

  “No, cousin, you can keep your gods for the likes of these two dead men. You know I’m all about Her Highness’s joy.”

  TORRANT CAME awake abruptly. Aylan was shaking him rapidly, and there was a pounding on the door that had probably woke the entire complex. Without thinking about it, he sprang to his feet, the shout of Yarri on his lips, when he realized Aylan was doing everything but slapping his face in an effort to get him to focus.

  “Your hair,” he whispered. “Don’t forget your hair!”

  And as Torrant took a breath and put his small spell of disguise back in place, Aylan slipped silently out of the porch doors, leaving them open just enough to hear if his brother was in trouble.

  Torrant pulled on his breeches even as he was running to the door to answer it, wondering what in the name of Triane’s clarion was the problem.

  He could still smell Yarri on his skin.

  Good Night, Brother. I love you.

  THE MAN at the door was none other than the secretary general.

  Torrant ran his hands through his hair before he opened the door, feeling the reassuring tingle that told him his disguise was back in place, and when he found himself face to face with the man who had actually ordered the sacking of Triannon—not to mention the destruction of his home—he was only pretending to be stupid with sleep.

  The secretary general didn’t look as distinguished close up as he did when he was on the regents’ floor. His white hair was thinning in spots, giving way to patchy, age-spotted skin underneath, and the pouches under his eyes and the broken blood vessels in his face attested to a hard-lived life with more than his share of alcohol and debauchery.

  The man’s hangover breath could knock a fly off a manure cart from half the width of Eiran’s main street.

  “Good morning to you too,” Torrant snapped, pushing the edge of courtesy and knowing it.

  “It’s past noon,” the secretary general replied thinly. “I’m looking for Djali Rath.” His eyes were scanning behind Torrant’s shoulder as he spoke, taking in the mess from their midnight buffet through the open door to the bedroom and, hopefully, missing the slightly open patio door where Aylan was listening, crouched in the shadows behind the curtain.

  “I think he’s changing his surname,” Torrant said evenly. Djali had, in fact, told Torrant he would go by “Hearth,” his mother’s surname, from now on. “And he is obviously not here.”

  “Do you know where he is?” The disdain was thick enough to cut with a thin, flat board.

  “Do I look like his father? Oh wait—if I were his father, I’d be the last person you’d ask. No. I have no idea where Djali is. He is his own man.”

  The secretary general sneered under his white mustache. “Oh—was that him being his own man last night?”

  Torrant’s smile was real, softer than his harsh words, sweet and genuine. Oh, he had been proud the night before! That hadn’t gone away, even in this harsh light of day. “Oh yes,” he said in certainty. “That was my friend being his own man.”

  The secretary general’s jaw dropped, and he gaped at the young man who had been his enemy simply by being born. He had no reply, no comeback, to such unadulterated love. “If you see him, tell him his uncle is dead. The service will be in a week.”

  Torrant grimaced, both in remembrance of the worst thing that had happened the night before and in reaction to the news. “In this heat?” he asked, aghast.

  “That’s disgusting to even think about!”

  “Flesh is flesh—our bodies are animal, and animals rot in the sun. Holy Dueant, Secretary—it’s not even full noon, and we can barely breathe for the heat, and these rooms are cooler than the rest of the city. How can you wait for a full mourning period in this heat?”

  “Proprieties must be maintained,” the man said implacably. “I’ll give the consort your condolences.”

  “Make them sincere,” Torrant replied with a little bow, and something in his face must have disturbed the secretary general. The shorter man shuddered and walked quickly down the apartment hallway, his teal-and-black livery blending into the carpet, making him look like a walking head with no body at all.

  As soon as he was out of sight, Torrant closed his door and locked it behind him in relief. He was pretty sure Aylan had whispered over his patio railing to go pull Djali out of Eljean’s room before the two of them got the same wake-up call he did.

  “They’re not there,” Aylan muttered, dodging back into the room after only a moment, sweat leaking down his face from his thatch of curly hair.

  “Gods!” Torrant exclaimed, sinking against the door and sliding to the carpeted floor. “You know where they went, right?”

  “Triane save us from passionate lovers,” Aylan muttered with some irony, and Torrant stuck his tongue out. Then the full import of the “passionate lover” sank into his consciousness, and he groaned.

  “Oh Goddess!” Without warning his shoulders began shaking, and he fought the full-fledged sobs that threatened his chest like crumpled fistfuls of metal scrap. He breathed harshly and evenly, his body shaking with the effort to not disgrace his manhood by mewling like a baby bird.

  “Whoa… whoa, whoa, whoa….” Aylan closed in, and all his scruples from the night before vanished. In the last three months, Torrant had never been this naked, never been as fragile as he seemed right now. Sitting next to him on the floor, Aylan gathered his brother into his arms and whispered into his ear to calm down.

  “What’s the matter, ay? We’ve had closer calls than that!” he said soothingly, and Torrant angrily mastered the shame of his body with his iron will.

  “I dreamed of her,” he whispered angrily, ever mindful of neighbors or returning guards. “I let my disguise spell down, and there she was….”

  “You can do that?” Aylan asked, frankly curious.

  “I guess so.” The question seemed to ground him, and he made to straighten himself, but Aylan held him firmly in his lap, stroking his hair.

  “No, no. You haven’t let yourself come this undone since….”

  “Two weeks ago when the cat died,” Torrant supplied with a sour grimace.

  “That doesn’t count.” Aylan cuffed him so gently it was almost a caress. His hand resumed its stroking in Torrant’s hair. “This… this is vulnerability. Strain. The difficulty of being two people at once. I haven’t seen this since….” He trailed off, because it was an unpleasant memory for both of them.

  “Since Triannon,” Torrant remembered bleakly, wiping his face off on Aylan’s breeches.

  “Yes. Triannon.” He stroked along Torrant’s jawline with a callused thumb. “And since this is about all you’ll let me do for you….”

  “Stupid wank,” Torrant muttered weakly. “This whole thing would have fallen apart without you.”

  “I’m going to hold you and kiss your boo-b
oos as long as possible. Now tell me what my favorite sister was up to.”

  When the contents of the dream spilled out, Aylan broke the wondering, melancholy silence with a low whistle.

  “Cleaned his knife on the man’s shirt? Really?”

  “As cool as you please,” Torrant affirmed, and this time Aylan let him sit up.

  “I’ve always liked that boy.”

  “That’s because he never jumped on you when you were sleeping,” Torrant said with a weak laugh and leaned his head on his knees.

  “She’s cooking for Bethen now.” Aylan matched the posture, and they regarded each other soberly, side by side against the door, clutching their sorrows and their hopes to their chests. “That’s got to be sort of a relief.” He was trying for humor—Bethen’s cooking was always done with love but rarely done with skill.

  “Uhm-hm. Bethen’s too tired at the end of the day. I think they’d rather eat burnt stew.” Torrant could picture Yarri’s memory of the town council, where they’d told her not to kill the priest if she could help it. “She looks old, Aylan,” he said after a moment. “Bethen… I didn’t think she would ever look old, not even when she was a great-grandmother, singing her way to the night.”

  “And Lane?”

  “Sad. He didn’t look that sad when he found out about Yarri’s family.”

  Aylan leaned his head against the door and looked up, his eyes growing red with his own misery. “Shite.”

  “Yeah.” Torrant shuddered one last time, hoping he was done with this nonsense.

  “Torrant, my love?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yarri’s right. You need to take a lover.”

  “What?” Torrant tried to launch himself to his feet, but Aylan grabbed his hand and kept him on his arse so they could stay close.

  “Your heart grows any more brittle and it will burst into a powder. It can’t be me—not here. We’d kill each other.”

  “So you keep saying.” Torrant managed to inject enough dryness into his tone that Aylan had to smile.

  “Stop that, you git. You know you were splendid in bed. I just mean….”

  “I know what you mean, and I can’t do it. Not here. Not in this city, not with what could happen to the young lady or the young man. There are too many bad repercussions to take a lover. You should know that.”

  Aylan shook his head, and his blond, curly hair fell into his eyes. Torrant reached over and pushed it back for him, and Aylan seized his hand. They went back to leaning their cheeks on their knees.

  “Do you know what I do when we’re not out bashing guards on the head?” Aylan asked at last.

  “Taking food to the poor, placing orphans with families, smuggling as many children as possible outside the city.” Torrant looked at Aylan with total admiration, and Aylan fought the urge to smack him, because it was frightening to be admired so completely by someone you would die for.

  “Sometimes,” he conceded, “but that’s only a few days a week. Mostly I just… live. I chat up girls, I drink pints in the pub, I walk along the marketplace, keeping an eye out for friendly merchants who might let the young people in the quarter work for their keep.” He let out an almost bitter laugh. “I spend Lane’s money.”

  “It’s your money.”

  “That’s not the point. The point is you never get a break. You never have a moment to be just yourself. Sex is easy. It’s animal. It relieves frustrations; it makes you feel good. And for that moment, you know, that moment, you are who you are. Your partner doesn’t have to know that who you are isn’t who they think they went to bed with. Your heart will know, and that’s the point.”

  Aylan shook his head, making himself angry because the alternative made him weak.

  “You’re growing fragile, brother. Brittle and fragile, and if something doesn’t give, you will shatter into a million tiny pieces, and all Rath will have to do is sweep you up. Yarri, bless her woman’s heart, knew that. She knows you. You’re not difficult on the eyes—it wouldn’t be a hardship on the person who fell into bed with you for a moment in the night. And it would do you a world of good.”

  Torrant took a deep breath, shuddering as he let it out. “I can still smell her,” he said softly. “I can smell the soft spot in the hollow of her neck, under her hair….” His voice murmured out, almost despondently, to disappear under his tangled hair in the hollow of his knees and his chest.

  Aylan waited to see if he’d finish the sentence, then clapped his hand on his brother’s back. It wasn’t until Torrant started that he realized how close Triane’s Son had been to sleep. “I’m not saying now, Torrant.” He laughed a little as he said it. He always forgot how quickly Torrant fell asleep when exhaustion finally took him.

  “Eljean looks at me like I’m a god,” Torrant muttered into the blue dark, sounding completely lucid. “I don’t want someone in my bed who doesn’t know me for human.”

  Aylan waited a few moments to see if that would be it, the end, finito. A gentle snore came from beneath Torrant’s tangled mess of all-brown hair, and Aylan stood, stretched, and then bent and hoisted his friend into his arms.

  He weighed even less than he had two weeks before when Stanny visited.

  Aylan’s initial plan had been to put his friend in bed and then sit and read. They took this rest day very seriously, the two of them, but as he pulled the covers around Torrant’s chin, his friend moaned and cried out, and Aylan sighed.

  He’d gone to bed fully clothed the night before, but now he stripped off his breeches and huntsman and crawled into bed next to Torrant, his brother, his hero, his friend.

  Torrant moaned again and turned against his chest, and Aylan wrapped his arms around him and sighed.

  He didn’t wish Torrant any more dreams of his beloved on this soggy, heat-saturated afternoon.

  ELJEAN AND Djali had been up at first light.

  They hadn’t said much as they’d gone down to sleep, Eljean in his unmade bed and Djali on the surprisingly comfortable, if very blue, couch. But they’d lain there in the dark, the weight of their worries pressing down on them, and it had been Djali who had broken the silence first.

  “My uncle is probably dead by now.” His voice seemed to echo in the breathless black. It was still hot. Eljean had left his patio doors open to let some breeze in and left the door to his sitting room open so Djali would get whatever the stagnant night had to offer.

  “Were you close?” It seemed like an appropriate thing to say.

  “My father wouldn’t let him near me. But I caught him, when I was little, hanging around the nursery, giggling like a child, holding his finger to his lips to be our secret.” The hollowness in Djali’s voice filled, became thick and choked. “He must have been dying to talk to me. All he wanted tonight was my safety.”

  “Well then, that’s a good thing, then, isn’t it?” Eljean asked. His only answer was a sort of sniffling silence, and Eljean felt compelled to say something, anything, to make that last statement seem less asinine. A little barrier in his heart broke. He could trust Djali, he thought, almost desperately. They all knew. All of his friends knew. And it had been Dimitri’s perfidy that had resulted in exile, not Eljean’s choice of lovers.

  “My father caught me kissing a boy when I was, like, twelve or thirteen,” he said suddenly into the silence, and he could hear Djali’s surprise as he choked on a sniffle.

  “We were close before that, you know. He took me and my older brother out riding and hunting and sword fighting and all of the things a man was supposed to do. And then he caught me in the stables…. And this boy, dark hair, dark eyes… he’d wanted to kiss me. It seemed so simple. So perfect. It was the sweetest thing I’d ever tasted.”

  “What did your father do?”

  Eljean swallowed. Well, at least it wasn’t Djali’s misery, now was it?

  “Well, the boy he cast out of the lands. I heard later that Kith got a position on Moon lands…. I….” Oh. Oh. He’d never put a voice to this thought, t
his fear. “I would imagine, if he did, then he was killed with Ellyot’s family.”

  “Eljean… I’m sorry….”

  “Shut up!” Eljean barked ungraciously, staring at the black pit where his ceiling should have been. “I’m telling you this for a reason, right? I’m sparing you some gods-be-damned misery here, so just listen.”

  “What about your father?”

  “My father… well. He decided my brother was better suited for all those things we used to do. And as Rath got more and more powerful and the older regents started bailing in droves, well, instead of sending my brother, because he had the right of succession, my father sent me. Said that maybe those rotting bodies over Dueance would make a man out of me.”

  “Gods….”

  “So my point is, that whether you knew it or not, Djali, you had for most of your life someone who loved you regardless. He spied on you, he probably snuck out from your father’s care just to see you, and he didn’t give a rat’s ass who you kissed or what your politics were or whether you were obedient. He just loved you. And with all that Ellyot and Aylan talk about Triane and Dueant and joy and love…. I just can’t imagine a love like that goes away, right? I mean….” He would not let tears break. He wouldn’t. His father was wrong about him—he was a man, dammit, he was!

  “I mean,” he continued as strongly as he could, “that sort of thing has to go up behind the moons and wait for us, doesn’t it? I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t.”

  He waited then, in the stagnant dark that pressed on his chest, for a sign from Djali, some signal that he hadn’t poured his heart out to have it chewed and ripped and mocked.

  “Eljean?”

  “Hmm?”

  “That was the bravest thing anyone’s ever done for me. Thank you.”

  Eljean laughed, a half snort, half sob, but all bitter. “I’m such a coward, Djali—you have no idea….”

  “No. That story—that was really brave. Thank you. You’re a good friend.”

  Eljean felt suddenly cooler, and the darkness was not quite so thick.