Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  He picked through the bookshelf that sat next to the small table and found one titled Goddess Stories of Eiran. The faceplate stated that it was hand transcribed at Triannon University by one “Torrant Moon-Shadow” from the stories told in Eiran at Beltane.

  He read a story, at first shocked by the blasphemy of the gods and the Goddess changing roles, changing relationships, in such a fluid, poetic manner. He continued to read, completely enthralled by the loveliness of the themes. Honor was worthwhile, compassion was strong, and joy was beloved. The first one was credited to Bethen Moon.

  He read the second story, in which Oueant is killed by a hurtling meteor, and Dueant puts on his brother’s clothes to take his place. A new Oueant spins out of the sky, and Dueant is so relieved that he and Triane can reach across the sky and touch hands that he takes Oueant’s hand too, and together they spin the earth for a few cycles. The three moons eventually part until the next time their orbits grow that close, and then they spin in tandem with whatever moon is closest. The poetry in the story was beautiful, and Eljean found himself completely starry-eyed by its finish. At the end, where credit was given to the storyteller, the name written was none other than Torrant’s.

  Eljean caught his breath. Quietly he tiptoed and peeked into the room where Triane’s Son lay sleeping next to Oueant’s child.

  Torrant was lying on his side, curled up in a little ball, his knees drawn to his chest, a bit of fabric from under his pillow tucked under his chin.

  Aylan was right behind him, his long-fingered hand buried in Torrant’s hair, his head above Torrant’s on the same pillow, even in sleep guarding Torrant’s back.

  Eljean’s face grew cold for a moment, and he contemplated going back to his own room. Then he heard Aylan’s voice in his head. My mind would eat itself up with worry if my body never got a break from you.

  And now he wanted to weep for an entirely new reason.

  In the end, he simply went back to the couch and lay down, reading two more stories before, finally, he closed his eyes in sleep.

  After a decent nap, a knock on the door woke him, and he let Aerk and Keon in first, followed by Marv and Jino moments later. Marv and Keon went for the leftovers of the morning breakfast—Marv was always hungry, and Keon was always too thin. Jino and Aerk reset the backgammon board, because they were both too busy with the competition to bother with the food, and Eljean pretended to read while he listened to them talk about their day, the week on the regents’ floor, and the terrible waste of spending one of the few remaining glorious summer days stuck inside for moments of “quiet contemplation.”

  “Whose idea was rest day curfew, anyway?” Keon complained, and then he rolled his eyes. “Of course. Why would I even have to ask? What is it about that man that he wants to suck the joy out of every lovely thing on the planet? Sex, reading, summer days—what does he have against them?”

  “I think they’re messy,” Aerk said on a roll of the dice. “You saw his rooms—nothing out of place. I think his whole problem with the Goddess and her joy is that he can’t make them fit into his neat little view of life, that’s all.”

  Eljean looked up from his book with contemplative eyes. It made sense. He allowed himself, for just a moment, to wonder what it must be like to have such an overwhelming ego, such a total surety of one’s own rightness, to kill and kill based on the way you thought the world should look.

  He couldn’t do it. In fact, the whole exercise made him queasy. He was just about to bend his eyes back to the next story—another one of Torrant’s, he’d checked—when Keon sauntered over with a borrowed book of his own and sat down next to Eljean.

  “That’s a good one,” he said with a measured glance from his bright black eyes, and Eljean looked at him sharply.

  “I like it,” he replied, trying for casual, and Keon, dark-eyed, sarcastic Keon, nodded his head.

  “You know what’s funny about that book?” he asked, keeping a casual tone, but pitching it so low that the other three, interested in the backgammon board, wouldn’t hear him.

  “I have no idea.” It wasn’t a lie—Eljean couldn’t even fathom where Keon would go with this.

  “When we first started the clinic—back before you started coming—Ellyot played a song on stage about a meteor that wiped out Oueant and how Dueant had to bring Triane to safety. The song was wonderful—it practically brought down the house. I asked him about it later, and he blushed. You know how he does that?”

  Eljean nodded. He knew. The oddest times, the oddest memories, could make Ellyot Moon blush. It was one of those things that had always fascinated Eljean, and now that he knew Ellyot Moon was really Torrant Shadow, the fascination had only grown stronger.

  “He mumbled a little about how he’d written it when he was very young, and I let it be. But if you look in that book… here….” Keon took the book and thumbed through a couple more stories, stopping on a song and leaving the page open as he handed it back to Eljean. “You see that?”

  Eljean nodded, his face going cold and numb.

  “That says it’s written by ‘Torrant Moon-Shadow.’ But I’d swear on my life—hell, I’d swear on my book collection—that Ellyot wrote that song himself.” Keon was watching Eljean’s face carefully, and as neutral as Eljean tried to be, he must have given something away.

  “You know, don’t you?” Keon asked at last, and Eljean sat dumbly, looking at him with miserable eyes. “Don’t worry,” Keon said. “I don’t care. If it’s a choice between following the git who made a summer day illegal or following the man who made treating other people like shite feel like a crime, I’ll follow the second one, right? I don’t care what his name is.”

  “He loved Ellyot like a brother,” Eljean said at last, feeling dumb for having to say anything at all.

  Keon pinched the bridge of his nose. “It makes sense.”

  “Have you told….”

  “Aerk. Aerk has known for a month.”

  “But you went to that dinner. You could have been poisoned.”

  Keon nodded. “You could have been as well. Would you desert him now?”

  “No,” Eljean said through a dry throat. “No.”

  At that moment “Ellyot” came out of the bedroom, his hair wet-combed and running a tongue over his newly cleaned teeth.

  “I see the pastries weren’t wasted,” he said dryly and then went to his cupboard and started pulling out more bread, fruit, and cheese. The others dug in, and “Ellyot” took an apple, sat up on the counter by his cupboard, and took a bite before he started talking.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “I have two things I want to talk to you about. Eljean, if you could fill in Djali when he gets back from the funeral—”

  “The funeral’s over,” Aerk interrupted. “If Djali’s not back, it’s because he went to see Triana.”

  “Ellyot” winced. “Damn.” He took another bite of his apple and nodded at Aylan, who was stumbling out of the bedroom without the benefit of the grooming Ellyot had given himself. “You all need to watch out for him,” he said through his mouthful of apple. “If his father finds out where he’s spending his time….”

  Aerk nodded. “Eljean and I will start following him—right, Eljean?”

  Eljean’s eyes got wide at the thought of a job as important as keeping Djali safe. By now he loved the man like a brother. He thought better hands than his should be in charge of keeping his brother safe. “Sure,” he said weakly, hating that he was weak. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  “Ellyot” sighed. “Right, then.” He swallowed his apple, and Eljean wasn’t the only one who noticed that it went down hard.

  “Look,” he said after a moment. “You’ll all hear about this soon enough, and you need to hear now so you know how you want to take it. Old Jems—the night guard who was supposed to watch over us—he’s… he was killed last night.” Before the stunned silence could erupt into murmurs and questions, he added, “It was an accident. I was… disguised, and I was trying not to
hurt him, and he….” Closed eyes, a terrible swallow. The apple fell unnoticed from his nerveless fingers and rolled on the counter. “He fell on my sword.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Aerk said into the static of the announcement.

  “Don’t be sorry for me,” Ellyot replied, not meeting anybody’s eyes. “I’m not the one who left a family to starve or who died defending my people.” He swallowed again, and Eljean wondered how lean a face could grow on sorrow and anger. “I just wanted you to know, that’s all.”

  “And now we know,” Aerk said quietly, tucking his shaggy hair nervously behind his ears. As the unacknowledged leader of the group, it was his reaction that set the tone. “What—you think we’re going to Rath now? Make poor Jems the punch line to a bad Goddess joke? I’m thinking we honor him more by keeping to our purpose like he kept to his. Right?”

  Ellyot nodded, met Aerk’s eyes, and smiled faintly—enough to give them all heart. “Right, brother. Absolutely.” He nodded brusquely, breathed once, twice, and then continued as though they couldn’t all see the pulse throbbing in his throat or that his eyes were shiny around the brilliant hazel. “So that was the first thing.”

  “And the second?” Marv prompted.

  Ellyot nodded again and looked at Aylan over the heads of his fellow regents, raising his eyebrows as though looking for his approval.

  “We need to start clearing the ghetto out. One or two families a month is great—for those families—”

  “Well, let us know when the wagon train starts toward Eiran!” Jino laughed in disbelief, and the others did as well.

  Ellyot’s mouth quirked in spite of himself, and he winked at Jino. “I will indeed, my friend. But I wasn’t thinking Eiran.” Unable to sit still, Ellyot started pacing.

  “My family lands have sat fallow for twelve years. There were always rumors of Ellyot Moon’s survival, so no one dared claim them. I’ve been very active here in the city. Everyone has seen me. If I’m gone for a rest day, no one will notice too much, and if we all take a turn— rotating out through the west gate, the small one, where there’s hardly a sentry—no one will notice either. I’m thinking that I take a day and camp out, spend the night. And I do two things. The first is see how much work needs to be done on the lands—”

  “And the second is take a look at whatever Rath is building north of the city!” Aerk interjected excitedly.

  Ellyot nodded in approval. “Exactly. I didn’t like the sound of that ‘relocation camp’ idea—I didn’t like it at all. Someone needs to go see it, come back, and report to the rest of us. We can’t just take Rath’s word for it. What he has planned is bad enough.” They all shuddered. “What horrors he can come up with—that needs to be seen to, my friends. That definitely needs to be seen to.”

  “Were you going to go alone?” Keon asked worriedly. “Because I hate to think of you out there as a target.”

  Ellyot waved a hand. “Not at all. I was going to leave most of you at the clinic. The summer babies have been delivered—” There was a profound sigh of relief. “—and none of the women are expecting anytime soon. The summer flu has mostly been taken care of, and between most of you, plus Djali, Torrell, and Triana, I think you can manage whatever comes along—at least for the rest day. We’ll be back right after the bell the next evening, so if there’s anything urgent, leave us a note here in my flat, and we’ll attend it.”

  “Who’s ‘you’?” Marv asked, and Eljean saw only casual friendship in Ellyot’s look over toward him.

  “Me, Eljean, and Aylan, I think.” Ellyot winked at him, and Eljean flushed with the honor. “Enough to keep safe but not too much to attract attention.”

  The others liked the plan—although they kept calling Eljean a lucky bastard, to be the first one to see Moon Hold in however long—and the conversation that evening veered toward securing the funds and the materials to set up exactly what Rath feared the most: a seething pit of Goddess insurrection. It was, they all agreed, no more than Rath deserved, and the conversation was lively and excited, right up until Aylan disappeared into the bedroom, and they all heard the doors open into the slightly cooler, late-summer night. Ellyot nodded charmingly and pulled the battered black leather cloak from his armoire, buckled on his sword, and excused himself into his bedroom as well, asking the rest of the young men to lock up as they left, or not to steal all the pillows if they decided to stay.

  The others settled in for a slightly longer night, and backgammon was resumed. Eljean picked up his book, and Keon—about to start his turn at backgammon—excused himself for a word.

  “It happened, didn’t it?” Keon asked, and for a moment Eljean didn’t know he was talking about.

  “What happened?” he asked, his face burning with a sudden sweat.

  Keon looked at him curiously. “His name—I bet that as soon as he started speaking, you stopped thinking of him as”—his voice dropped—“Torrant Shadow and started thinking of him as….”

  “Ellyot Moon,” Eljean continued, meeting Keon’s sardonic dark eyes in wonder.

  “Mmm-hmm.” Keon nodded sagely. “Makes me think it doesn’t matter so much what name he was born with. The person we follow has nothing to do with the man underneath, does it?”

  Keon excused himself to play then, and Eljean stared sightlessly at his book, hearing those words rattling around in his head like pebbles in a shoe. The person we follow has nothing to do with the man underneath. But what if the man underneath had been the touch on your flesh? The lover in your bed?

  Suddenly, Eljean caught a glimpse into why Aylan might hate him. He remembered Torrant’s closed eyes, his terrible sobs, his yielding but inactive body. Eljean wrapped his arms around his middle, all the pleasure of the promised weekend flown from his heart as he tried to keep from breaking.

  As he relived that memory and what he now knew it meant, he found himself agreeing wholeheartedly with Torrant’s blond watchdog of a brother.

  He kept his arms wrapped around himself so he might not fall to pieces in front of his friends.

  NOT EVEN years later had Yarri, even for a moment, resented Eljean’s place in her husband’s bed.

  When she heard the ballad now and remembered, she remembered the terrible fragility of the tall young man, the vulnerability Torrant had seen and instinctively tried to shelter. She remembered a heart grown strong and hale from a little bit of love, from the acceptance of his peers.

  And she remembered the terrible row they’d had when naming one of the twins after him.

  She had suggested “Tal” or “Qir,” but Torrant had told her with a laugh that he had suggested her older brothers often enough when he was delivering babies—both in Dueance and the Old Man Hills—that there would be plenty of namesakes for Tal and Qir for generations to come.

  “Ellyot,” though, had never been “named to rest” as a member of Torrant’s beloved dead—so their eldest twin’s name was sealed.

  Their one daughter carried the twin burden of their mother’s names—Myrla-Kes. Her father called her “Kessie.”

  Yarri had nearly died when Kessie had been born, and one of the few scars on his heart that wasn’t spawned in Clough was from coming home after a late call to find Yarri crumpled in a heap and a puddle of blood. She’d stopped breathing during the delivery, and it had taken Aldam and Torrant together to save her life. She had managed, by unsurprising persistence and some guile, to convince him to have more children after Kessie, but next time he said he wanted children named after something that couldn’t be taken away from him. So it came that their youngest two were sturdy boys with the family white streak and the faintest bit of spookiness a person would associate with children named River and Night Moon-Shadow.

  And still, of all the omens she could count in the names of her children, she had been the most uneasy about naming Ellyot’s twin “Eljean.”

  Perhaps that was the reason these passages about Eljean in particular had always troubled her, and perhaps the reason Eljean’s name
sake had always been so troubled himself. He was loved—oh, Torrant loved all his children growing up, no exceptions, no favorites (well, his one girl did get a particular dose of affection) and no conditions.

  But Eljean the younger had been… lost. From the moment Yarri had held him, angry, fretful, bereft at the loss of his snug home in her womb and his constant companion and bright mirror, Eljean had seemed to need something that no one in the family could give him.

  This sense of being lost had pursued him even to adulthood as he followed gamely in his Uncle Stanny’s shipping business and tried to pretend his heart was as dedicated there as his brother’s was.

  Torrant and Yarri had both told him to draw, to make beautiful illustrations as they knew he could, but no amount of unconditional love on either of their parts could convince him that being different from his twin didn’t somehow make him less.

  Once, when Eljean was being particularly fractious as a teenager, she wished out loud that they had named their second son “Aylan.”

  Torrant’s grim look had chastened her. Yarri knew well that Torrant would give his last heartbeat to ensure he wouldn’t have to live in a world without Aylan, just like he would for Yarri herself.

  “Besides—” He’d tried to laugh. “—what’s wrong with the name ‘Eljean’?”

  “Because names have history to the ear, even if they don’t have it in the heart,” Yarri had told him then unhappily. “In your ear, Aylan can do no wrong.”

  “Ah,” he’d replied, “but in my ear, Eljean deserved a chance for joy. Aylan has had his.”

  Unspoken in that conversation, unspoken even in the ballad, was the truth she knew simply from meeting the man and knowing the whole story, unfettered by song and poetry and time.

  Aylan may have had his chance for joy, but Eljean never had.

  Part XVI—The Cleansing Moon

  The Man and the Memories

  “WHY IS he coming again?” Aylan asked, pacing in the alley behind the Amber Goose as they waited for Eljean.