The Sheltered City

by John Tristan

  They lay together for a moment then, Caedian still clinging to Amon with one clawlike hand. Amon lifted it away and pressed a kiss to his palm. He rolled onto his back; Caedian rolled with him, falling limp against his chest.

  The dark pulse of Amon’s desire was ebbing now, leaving shivering uncertainty in its wake. He looked down at Caedian. The elf’s face was unreadable, his eyes wet, and his breath came in slow gasps—but he let himself lie against Amon as if he belonged there, as if Amon’s muscled chest and wide lap were made to his specifications.

  Amon took a breath to speak, to say something, but Caedian twisted against him and laid a single finger against his lips. That was enough to stop whatever words had been brewing there. He held Caedian in his arms, inhaling the smell of his hair, and said nothing.

  Chapter Sixteen

  While Caedian slept, lying curled up in Amon’s lap, Amon was awake and watching him.

  There were plenty of beds to be found in Caedian’s quarters; it seemed sheer perversity that they had not managed to make it to one. Instead Caedian’s fur coat was spread out beneath them, with Amon’s slipsilk kilt pulled and deformed until it formed a thin, makeshift blanket; it only covered Caedian’s legs, pulled up close to his chest, and one of his shoulders.

  His other leg was bare and pressing into Amon’s thigh. He didn’t mind. Amon thought he could stay there forever, watching Caedian as he slept the deepest sleep Amon had ever seen. With a cautious hand, he reached down and stroked the soft nape of Caedian’s neck. Caedian didn’t wake, but he made a sort of soft, half-pleased murmur in his sleep and pressed the back of his head into Amon’s palm.

  All Amon wanted was to stop thinking, to slip into the same sleep as the elf in his lap, but his mind wouldn’t let him. Half of him was compelled to keep himself awake, to stretch out this time for as long as it could last. Caedian was warm against his skin, his cheek up against Amon’s stomach. The curve of his head fit so well in the hollow of Amon’s hand, and everything was silent and perfect.

  The other half of him was somewhere else, somewhere far away, thinking of a too-tall, clumsy, ugly youngster kneeling at his foster father’s feet, trying not to meet his eyes.

  You’ll be getting urges, Zoran had told him. Everyone does when they get to be about your age. You will want to find someone to...to spend time with. But you have to be careful, Amon, so careful not to hurt anyone. You’re already stronger than you know, and you will only get stronger.

  Even then Amon had known what Zoran was talking about, despite the old dragonhunter’s awkward circumlocutions. No young man living in the Rim stayed naive long, not with the whores who crowded the taverns and street corners.

  If you’re built that way, he’d gone on, try to stick with the boys. It’s not fair on a girl...if she got with child she’d have to be rid of it, or give birth to a halfdead. Either one would be a danger to her. It wouldn’t be fair.

  It wasn’t fair, of course. Zoran was right. Giving birth to a halfdead child had almost killed his mother—had, in fact, weakened her enough that the corruption already eating her insides had gotten the upper hand. She died mere weeks later, leaving him robust and squalling in Zoran’s arms.

  He’d wondered for a long time if the old dragonhunter had been his father. When he finally gathered enough courage to ask him, Zoran had laughed and said he’d only been the nearest thing. His sire by blood had been a brief fling of Luziana Vraja’s, a young recruit starstruck by the hard-bitten veteran. He had died in a stupid accident while Amon was still an invisible fish in his mother’s womb; Amon didn’t even remember his name.

  No, it had been Zoran who had shaped him, Zoran and the silent ghost of his mother, and whatever they had meant to impress him with they had left him with the surety he would live and die alone.

  For near his entire life it had been no hardship. He had looked at boys and girls alike and come away with nothing save some vague appreciations—he had an eye for a few comely faces, but he did not have many of the urges that Zoran had spoken of so obliquely. Whatever ones he did have were gratified by his own hand and then quickly forgotten. He had never wanted, never craved the touch of another, until now.

  I would kill for him if he asked me to, Amon thought, still rhythmically stroking the back of Caedian’s neck. I would claw my way to the top of the Tree with my bare hands for him.

  I would stay with him forever, if he asked me to.

  When had this happened, he wondered? The craving, the need, had been there long before this mourning night—had been there, in fact, since Caedian had slept at his side, since he had first touched his mouth to Amon’s.

  Amon did not know whether Caedian had intended that kiss to fool his mother’s servants or to mean something more, but it did not matter. Feigned or not, it had stirred up a big dark swirl of long-dormant desire, like the silt at the bottom of a deep, still pond.

  Caedian stirred in his lap then, turning on his back so his head lay in the hollow of Amon’s crossed legs. His eyes were open. “Have they turned the sky again?”

  Amon shook his head; through Caedian’s narrow windows the canopy showed a seamless black.

  Caedian pulled himself upright, gathering the slipsilk fabric around him. He was facing away from Amon, looking toward the wooden wall. “You shouldn’t have let me sleep.” He shook his hair away from his face and smiled.

  “You needed it.”

  “Maybe so.” The smile fell away, leaving him grim as a carved icon. “But now there is work to be done. I don’t know what they did to my brother, but I mean to find out.”

  Amon got up on unsteady feet, bracing himself against the wall. He was still wearing his shirt half-open over his chest, but he was naked from the waist down—something about that combination made a hot blush rise on his cheeks. “Can I have that kilt back, please?”

  “Sorry—of course.” Caedian unwrapped the slipsilk kilt from his shoulders and tried to pull it back into its previous shape; it seemed he had stretched it too far though, and it wouldn’t come back to its old form. He tossed it to Amon nonetheless. “Here, just wrap it around yourself for now. I’ll find you something better to wear. And something for me, come to think of it.”

  Caedian wandered off, leaving Amon standing useless and sheepish with the distended slipsilk wrapped like a loose towel around his waist. He sighed, watching Caedian walk away: the bounce of his feet, the twist of his waist as he moved. The way his hair caught the light of the glowfruit.

  Stop this. The words were a whip lashed against his heart. What had passed between them had been a distraction, he told himself, a momentary lapse on the elf’s part. A misguided reach for comfort, nothing more. Whatever he might feel, they were too different, too far apart, for it to be anything else.

  Yet it had been Caedian who’d reached out for him, who’d told him to call him by his name, who had undressed him and lain naked before him. Caedian who let himself sleep, all trusting, cradled in a halfdead’s lap...

  “I will have your own clothes washed today.” Caedian’s voice came from somewhere in the depths of his quarters, jolting Amon out of his thoughts. “You will be more comfortable then, I think. Slipsilk is fine for some things, but—”

  The rest of the words were lost between doors and hallways, an echoing mutter. Amon tied the slipsilk into a makeshift knot around his waist and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt; it almost looked like a normal outfit now, save for the fact he was barefoot—he had taken off his shoes to let Caedian doze in his lap.

  “Caedian?” he called out. The elf’s voice had completely vanished in the distance now; Amon’s own voice echoed oddly in Caedian’s empty quarters.

  Caedian returned from an unexpected corner, as if he had made an entire circle behind Amon. “For now, there’s this,” he said, holding out a slipsilk robe. “The Tree is warm enough that you won’t m
ind, I think.” His smile seemed nervous, as if he feared Amon would rebuff the gift.

  Amon took the robe from him. “I don’t feel the cold much, in any case.”

  Caedian cocked his head. “Is that another gift of the halfdeath?”

  Amon managed to show his own smile at that. “It’s full of gifts.” He looked down at the robe in his hands. “So what are we to do now?”

  “I suppose we had best look in Seoras’s quarters.”

  “Look in—” Amon looked up, blinking. “You mean you haven’t? Your brother has been missing how long, and you’ve not looked in his room?”

  “I’ve approached, of course!” Caedian drew himself up in a haughty posture, the elvish lord showing through again. “I’ve stood in his entry hall and called his name. I would have known if he were hiding in there. But we do not go into another’s heart-home, their sanctuary, without leave.”

  “What about Lady Liléan? She came in without notice.”

  “Yes,” he said, a twitch of disdain at the corner of his mouth. “And even she stood in my entry hall and waited. To invade another’s heart-home without leave is...” He shrugged his shoulders, a liquid movement. “It is disgusting. That is all I can say.”

  Amon thought of how easily they had strolled into the House of Dust, mother and son both. How easily they had plucked him out of his own home. Elves. He shook his head and remembered the priest’s words: Our hearts do not beat the same rhythm.

  Caedian sighed. “But I suppose we’ll have to.” He looked up at Amon, his mouth set. “I have to know what happened to him.”

  Amon held his clear, uptilted eyes for a long moment. Not the same, perhaps, but not so different. He grieved for his brother, and he looked for comfort, just as a human would. He could feel pain just as keenly, of that Amon was sure—and he had known a sweet moment of pleasure in Amon’s arms. Did that mean he could feel warmer things as well, even for a man such as him?

  When he spoke, his voice was unexpectedly gruff. “Will you let me help, then?”

  “Let you?” Caedian’s lips curled into a half smile, amusement showing through grief and unease. “You said yourself I only had to command you.”

  Amon sketched a military bow, not sure how much of the gesture was mockery. “I did, my lord.”

  The half smile did not vanish from Caedian’s face, but something glittered in his eyes that Amon could not read. “Then let me command you now.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  To reach Seoras’s quarters—his heart-home, as Caedian called it—required a strange, circuitous journey. They slid into the moving room and made the long fall downward to the stout bottom of the tree, where its roots vanished unseen into dark earth. Then Caedian led him to another door, a not-inconsiderable walk from his own: a door of dark wood and bright metal in curving designs, with something like a diamond sparkling in the doorknob.

  Amon wore the slipsilk robe, incongruous as a lady’s dress with his broad frame and heavy boots. He was sure he looked worse than out of place—that he looked ridiculous—but none of the white-clad servitors they passed on their walk to Seoras’s door showed even a glimmer of amusement. Their eyes were downcast, their faces blank and smooth as hammered steel.

  Amon could not help his discomfort: he might have spent his life wishing to blend in, to not be seen, but it was different when the eyes averted from him seemed simply trained not to acknowledge anything if they were not told to.

  In the room gliding up to Seoras’s heart-home, Amon considered the possibility that he was dreaming, or dying, or both. That he was still wedged in the tunnel beneath the dragonhunters’ temple, the breath slowly squeezing out of him. That all of this—the carriage, the gleam of the living lights, the egg-coffin of pale wood, the feel of Caedian’s skin, of him sleeping warm and alive in his lap—were just the last flickering thoughts of a man on the edge of the final dark.

  He took the skin between his thumb and forefinger and pinched it hard, grunting softly at the pain. Caedian glanced over, only half seeing, then looked back at his brother’s closed door, with its soft garland of lightvines. The room took them up at a slow and gliding pace...but then, Amon thought, in a life measured in centuries, what did an hour matter?

  A half-pleasant chill raised the hairs on the back of his neck. In a life measured in centuries, perhaps the few decades of life left to him might amount to nothing more than a distraction. Perhaps Caedian would want him for that long, at least.

  He pinched himself again, trying to snuff out a different sort of dream, but hope did not yield that easily. Fool, he thought, but he could not keep from smiling.

  At last the moving room came to a stop, so softly that Amon barely noticed the change between motion and stillness. Caedian’s shoulders were tensed, the hair on the back of his neck raised in fear-flesh. He put his hand, palm flat, on the door and laughed—the quiet, nervy laughter of a man denying ghosts.

  Amon cleared his throat. “Caedian.”

  He did not look back, but turned the knob and pushed against the door.

  They came into a green hollow, the light of the vines faint and nocturnal. Glowfruits had failed to grow there, in stunted blossom. The floor was carpeted with fallen petals. It smelled of Verdancy forests and soft decay.

  Caedian lifted his head to the overgrown ceiling. In the soft light his eyes looked colorless as clear glass. “This is his entry hall.”

  It was smaller and lower-ceilinged than Caedian’s, all dark and green where his was airy—so different, in fact, that Amon found it hard to believe both quarters shared the same Tree, no matter how massive it was. Was it a difference of rank or of personality that determined this, or just random chance? He did not ask.

  A door, half-hidden by a curtain of dying vines, led deeper into Seoras’s quarters—into his heart-home. Caedian hesitated there, his hand half reaching toward the vines.

  Amon stepped forward and pulled them aside, showing the dim interior beyond. Caedian looked up at him, quick, then glanced away and took his first step into his brother’s home. Amon followed one step behind, a shadow at his heels.

  Where Caedian’s heart-home was a series of bright, airy rooms arranged in no particular pattern, Seoras’s had a kind of close, severe organization. The floors were a dark hardwood, the walls the same, smooth and bare of ornament. Both woods sprang from the trunk of the great Tree, of course, but that was no feat at all for the elvish Gardeners and their human apprentices, who could make fruit give light and grow a canopy of leaves that sheltered an entire city from the dragon-haunted wastes.

  There were no ornaments, no trifles, no sign of much inhabitation at all, save for a massive bed in one room and a round, polished table in another, under the fading light of a tangled chandelier of vines. Two chairs were placed at opposite ends from one another around that table, and Caedian stepped to lean on one, his knee propped up in a kind of half-sitting posture. He swept one hand across the emptiness of the table, then made a sudden fist and pounded against it, hard enough that a thin crack appeared in the solid wood.

  Blood rushed for a moment in Amon’s ears, a call to fight or flee, and he forced himself to breathe in a familiar, calming rhythm. “What’s wrong?”

  “Someone has been here.” His voice was thick. “Someone has...has taken things.”

  His nails raked hard against the wood, and his shoulders were trembling. Amon had never seen him like this before, the rage radiating off every surface of him. It was strangely familiar—a skewed mirror.

  “How do you know?”

  “How do I know?” He spat out the words, not bothering to look at Amon. “His books, his growing pots, his sword...they’re all gone! His heart has been emptied out, as if he’s been dead from Dragonfall to Dragonfall!”

  “And he couldn’t have moved them? Given them away?”

 
“Seoras is my twin. Was my twin. Don’t you think I’ve been in his heart-home a thousand times? Don’t you think I know what he cherished? Are you that—that—?” He finished the thought with a strangled yelp of frustration, balling his fists against his sides.

  “Tell me why,” he heard himself saying, his voice low and calm. Zoran’s voice, a ghost carrying across the years to find itself in his throat. Tell me why you’re angry, Amon. Tell me and it’ll fade. “Why would they do this?”

  “I don’t know!” He lashed out, a hard swipe of his arm, and the table tilted on its side. Something there, below the table, caught Amon’s eye for a moment, but then Caedian kicked at it and snapped the wood in half. “Damn you, damn you, I don’t know!”

  Amon stepped forward and grabbed him, pinning his arms against his side. Caedian struggled for a moment and a flash that was not quite anger sizzled at the edge of Amon’s vision—but then the elf went still. He was breathing heavily, like a man in pain, like the loser at the end of a fight. After a moment the heavy breathing faded to a thin, whispery sound. “Amon,” he said, in a flat voice, “let me go.”

  He did, at once, and he took an instinctive step backward, falling into a defensive posture. “Kicking the last of your brother’s things apart isn’t going to help you. Or him.”

  For a moment he was sure the rage would come over Caedian again—that he would have to hurt him to stop him. Then the elf subsided, his face twisted in a kind of childish shame. “This...is not right.”

  “No,” Amon agreed. None of it was; that much he could tell.

  Leaving Caedian to catch his breath and his temper, he turned away and kneeled beside the half-broken table to tip it upright again. In midmotion his fingers paused, feeling crude incisions in the wood. Something had been carved on the underside of the table.