The Sheltered City

by John Tristan

  A strong, warm hand slid under his arm and supported his chest. Caedian, holding him upright. “Cae...”

  “Shut up,” he said in a whisper, and he smiled. “You’re hurt more than I am. Let me help.”

  Rado, the healer who’d stitched Amon’s wound before, came up and cast a quick, assessing look over the pair. “Can you take him to the warm pools?” he asked Caedian. “We need to get the dirt washed off of him before I can see the damage.”

  Amon was distantly aware it was true; he was covered in blood—some of it his own—and soot-blackened. His shirt hung off his chest in singed rags.

  “I will,” Caedian said. “I’ll take care of him.”

  “I’ll come down as soon as I can. I have to see if anyone up there needs me more.”

  “I understand.” Caedian lightly squeezed Amon’s chest. “Come on,” he said. “It’s not far. Come on.”

  “You came for me,” Amon said, and then he found he could no longer speak.

  The world grayed out; the next he was aware, he was half stumbling into the bathing pool, with Caedian guiding him in so he would not fall. He was still dressed, dirty clothes billowing in the blood-warm water. Eddies of soot and blood wound through it like storm clouds.

  Caedian was working at his clothes with a thin little knife, slicing them away from his skin, peeling him like a fruit. Amon looked down and recognized the knife they had taken from the City, the knife he had used to sharpen hollow reeds into needles. He’d thought it lost forever, down some dark crevice. “Where...?” His voice was weak. “Where did you find that?”

  Caedian gave him a sideways look. “Here in Esper, in one of the old halls.”

  “It must have—it must have fallen down here...”

  “Hush now.” Caedian parted the fabric of Amon’s trousers and lifted them away from his wounded thigh. The wound was smaller than Amon had thought, but deep; the claw had snagged a vein, perhaps an artery.

  Caedian’s hands moved beneath the water, the knife floating away forgotten; he knotted the remnants of Amon’s trousers into a makeshift tourniquet. Amon winced as he tied it, leg going numb.

  “Stupid,” Caedian said, and there was a little tremor to his voice. “Stupid to get you in warm water, it makes the blood flow. If he’d seen how hurt you really were he’d never have told me to do it.”

  He washed Amon’s other wounds with tender dexterity, leaving only the charred hand, which he forced Amon to keep out of the water. Somewhere along the way some of Amon’s rational self came back to him, and he became slowly aware of Caedian’s touch, his proximity, of his tears mingling with blood-dirty water.

  “Cae,” he croaked.

  He came closer, not quite touching. His wet clothes were clinging to his body, his own heat fiercer than the steaming water. “Amon—”

  “You saved me.”

  He laughed, badly feigning insouciance. “Just returning the favor.”

  Amon reached out with his wounded hand and pulled Caedian close, burned fingers fisted in wet white hair. Caedian wrapped his arms around him, his billowing clothes clinging to Amon’s skin as if Amon were the one wearing them.

  “I thought you would die,” Caedian said. Amon barely heard the words; they were whispered against his collarbone.

  “I thought—” Amon swallowed. “I thought you wanted nothing to do with me.”

  They clung together in the warm dark of the pools. Caedian smoothed Amon’s hair away from his face; it was getting longer, sticking wetly to his cheeks. They were both bruised and bleeding, both a collection of aches, but that did not matter as much as this necessary closeness; Caedian hooked his ankles around Amon’s calves and laid his head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

  Amon stroked his back, hand finding its way beneath the lip of his shirt so he could trace his fingers against bare skin. “Stay now, please,” he was saying, soft enough it was almost to himself. “Stay here, stay with me?”

  Caedian was shaking his head against Amon’s shoulder but saying nothing. Despite the wordless denial his hands were locked around Amon tighter than ever. Amon lifted Caedian’s head up with his uninjured hand and traced his thumb over his parted lips. Caedian closed his eyes and sighed, letting himself settle into Amon’s embrace. He kissed Amon’s thumb and the crease of his palm and rubbed his cheek against it.

  Amon let himself sink deeper in the bath, taking Caedian lower with him. Water closed over their shoulders; it was cooling now, and gooseflesh prickled the hair on the back of Caedian’s neck. He scooted even closer, legs wrapping around Amon’s waist. There was a warm stir of response in his belly, but Amon was too worn and battered to do anything more than hold him close and trace soft kisses down the side of his neck.

  “Am I interrupting?” came a soft voice—it was an honest question, without a trace of irony. It was Rado, the healer.

  They came apart in the water, sending eddies splashing to the edge of the pool. Amon’s cheeks were flushed, his heart massive inside him. Perhaps they hadn’t been the wisest, doing this while wet and bleeding; the gray feeling at the edges of the world was coming back. Still, how could he have done otherwise? The feel of Caedian was in his hands and in his lap, a warm ghost of presence, and best of all Caedian himself was there, helping Amon climb out of the tepid bathing pool.

  Amon smiled up at the elf, half dazed. “Cae, is this real?”

  Something like pain passed over Caedian’s face, but then he too smiled and ran a quick caress through Amon’s damp hair. “Yes, it’s real.”

  “How much blood has he lost?”

  “I don’t know.” Caedian’s voice sounded faraway. “We shouldn’t have put him in the heat...”

  “He’ll be all right,” Rado said, a little gruff; Amon got the idea he was trying to comfort Caedian. “We dragonblooded are made of tough materials.”

  Amon lay back on the hard, warm stone of the pools and stared up at the ceiling. He was all head and heart now, the rest of his body a vague mess of pain somewhere far away from his center. Rado worked on his wounds with the same quick, careful skill he’d shown after Caedian’s rage—the worst was the moment when he rubbed some sort of salve on his burned hand, but even that was over in a moment.

  “That’s it,” Rado said, helping him up, supporting him with a hand on the small of his back. Amon was suddenly aware he was naked, but the healer didn’t seem to care. “I’ll see you again after you’ve had a night’s sleep. Sleep,” he repeated, the latter word directed, embarrassingly enough, at Caedian.

  Amon laughed. “Don’t worry, Rado, I’ll sleep.”

  Rado made a sort of huffing noise. “If you do, you might be well enough by morning to help out. We could use that.”

  “I know.” He stumbled against Caedian, who held him up; he didn’t seem to mind Amon’s nakedness.

  “All right.” He gathered up his things and snuffed the lamp he’d brought, plunging the warm pools back into comfortable darkness. “I’ll leave you alone now,” he said, and this time there was a needle-thin thread of irony in his tone.

  Amon looked down at Caedian with a small quirk of a smile, but unsurety was flooding back to him like cold air. Naked and stitched together and reeking of salve, he made a strange and clumsy sight. “Are you going to leave now?” he asked, trying to make it sound like a jest.

  “No,” Caedian said. “I’m not going to leave.” He put his hand on Amon’s belly—one of the few places on his body not singed, bruising black or scratched by drakeling claw. “If you’ll have me, I’d like to stay with you tonight.”

  “If I’ll have you,” Amon said, shaking his head, and he pulled Caedian into a long and gentle kiss. “Caedian, I want you with me for—”

  “There’s no such thing as forever, Amon,” he said, cutting him off, the harshness of his ton
e sitting at odds with his gentle touch. “Not for us.”

  “But we have tonight.”

  “Yes.” He nodded, hiding his face. “We have tonight.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  As Amon had promised the healer, they slept—but they slept in each other’s arms.

  Amon woke first, with the unfamiliar and entirely perfect weight of Caedian on his chest. He took a deep breath, inhaling their mingled scents, and stroked Caedian’s hair. The elf made a murmuring sound under his breath but did not wake. Is this real, Amon remembered asking him, down in the warm pools. Here, lying skin to skin, he knew it could not be anything else.

  After a while the weight began to ache though. He slid Caedian off him with gentle care, got up and stretched in a long, luxurious movement. Rado had been right. A long rest had knitted together most of the wounds that Amon had suffered, and what remained when he woke was the itch of healing flesh. The worst was his burned hand, which was stiff and cramped. He wanted to massage feeling back into the fingers, but when he touched them, the skin was tender and fragile-feeling.

  A few moments after, Caedian stirred. Amon went and sat on the edge of the bed and laid a hand on Caedian’s chest. Caedian laid his own hand on top of it, and Amon let out a breath he had only been half-aware of holding.

  “We should get up,” Caedian said. “They’ll be waiting for us. To come and help.”

  “I think they can wait a little longer,” Amon said, and he bent down to kiss him.

  When he pulled back, Caedian gasped out a little breathy sigh; it was almost enough for Amon to lose the last of his control and press him into the stone of their bed then and there. He took long cooling breaths himself and stepped away from the bed. “We should—”

  “I know,” Caedian said, and he rolled out onto the floor in a graceful motion. A subtle expression of pain came over his face, and he touched his side. There was a huge purple-black bruise there, like a storm cloud in a gray sky. “Did I really kill a dragon?” he asked.

  “You did,” Amon said. “I saw you.”

  He licked his lips. “When you were—when I saw you fighting the small dragons, the drakelings... It was like finally seeing what that rage in you can do.” He paused a moment. “That rage in me, as well.”

  Amon tilted his head. “Did it feel like rage? When you were fighting?”

  “No. No, it was...different. I was scared and I was determined and I wanted to save you. I was...” He shrugged. “It was cobbled together. Seeing you fight, that was a revelation.”

  He grunted a laugh. “You actually won.”

  “The others would have gotten it, if I hadn’t been there. I just finished it off.”

  “And with the drakelings—”

  “Amon.” He touched his face. “Alone, they were impossible odds. Impossible. But you still fought, still survived.”

  “Because of you. It’s why I survived.” He hesitated. “It’s why I fight, as well.”

  Caedian shook his head. “You have all of Esper to fight for now. To fight with. They call you brother, don’t they?”

  “If they’re my siblings, they’re yours, as well. We share the same blood now.”

  “Yes.” He took Amon’s hands and wound their fingers together. Their skin was all gray, though it was of different shades, Caedian’s darker and smoother in tone. “The same blood.” He hitched a breath, and Amon saw he was trying to keep some violent emotion in control—tears, or riotous laughter, or perhaps both. “How do you deal with it, Amon? The poison in your blood?”

  “Maybe it isn’t poison,” he said slowly. “Maybe it’s like a sword. You can cut yourself on it, or use it to defend what you love.”

  “What you love,” Caedian echoed, and he rested his forehead against Amon’s chest.

  Amon closed his eyes; there was a tremor going all through him. “I can teach you how to control it,” he said, in a low voice. “The rage.”

  “I don’t want to control it,” Caedian said. “I want to direct it. The way you did, at the drakelings.”

  “I don’t know if I can teach that. Besides, you can’t always rely on enemies to be at hand when the rage comes over you.”

  “No,” he agreed. “But I know where my enemies are.”

  He was silent then, still leaning against Amon, breath warm on his bare chest. Amon let him remain until he could stand it no longer, then pulled away. “I’m going to go,” he said, in an unsteady voice. “Get dressed, I mean, and go. I have to...to see if I can help.”

  Caedian nodded. “I’ll come along.” He smiled thinly. “Unless your Esper friends would rather lock me in again.”

  “Why?” Amon asked, raising an eyebrow. “Do you feel like biting anyone?”

  The thin, humorless smile blossomed into a laugh. “I suppose we’ll have to see.”

  * * *

  Emil had been right, of course; there was still plenty of work to do by the time Amon and Caedian emerged.

  The dragon’s death spasms in the outer cavern had knocked one of the mirrors awry, and the light was dimmer than usual; two men were sent to climb into the stalactite-dripping heights of the cavern to set it aright. The dragon’s corpse could not be moved whole, so the process of butchery had begun where it had fallen; the dragonhunters had hacked it into pieces and carried the dismembered remnants away.

  Between it and the drakelings there was an embarrassment of riches when it came to meat. Too much, in fact; the meat would spoil before Esper could eat it all. The skin was prized for clothes and lining armor though, and they had never had bones so large and of such quality; Taman was already talking of making dragonbone armor.

  The drakelings had been dragged out of the tunnel and into the square, and Adara had set up an assembly line of hacking, filleting and cutting the meat into pieces that could be smoked and preserved.

  Water was hauled up bucket by bucket from the warm pools and mixed with sand and pebbles, then raked along the tunnels to wash away the blood. Amon was on that duty, pushing along a kind of long-handled metal broom. It occurred to him his own blood was among the clotted, meat-and-copper-smelling mess he was sweeping away; the thought made his gorge rise, and he had to close his eyes a moment.

  Behind him Adara’s twins watched and giggled nervously; they were links in the chain bringing up fresh water and replacing the rags Amon used to mop the wet remnants from the ground.

  People passed Amon in the tunnel in ragged lines, carrying pieces of thick scaly skin and denuded dragonbone the color of steel. In death the dragonskin had lost some of its darkly iridescent luster, dimming to velvety gray. Everyone was nervous, Amon noticed, not just the children—every creak and rumble made eyes dart toward the unseen sky; watches had been doubled and hunts called off.

  Only Caedian seemed untouched by the electric air of nervousness, his face smooth and unreadable. He was moving among the Esperites, helping where he could, carrying a massive thigh bone or bringing up metal pails full of steaming water. No one commented on his sudden presence among them, his quiet assistance; everyone seemed to appreciate the extra pair of hands, and if there was unease it was at least well hidden.

  Amon watched him out of the corner of his eye when he passed by, searching for flickers of blankness or rage, not knowing which one would frighten him more. There seemed no sign of either though. Every now and then Caedian would even catch his eye and smile, and for a moment Amon would let himself believe that all was well, despite the ruin and dragonblood.

  Where he had gained, though—Caedian coming to him, after everything, and sleeping in his arms—Esper had lost. Semon’s absence haunted the stone halls; now and then someone would stop in their work and lean against the walls a moment to bite back tears. They had grown up here with him, with his constant presence, and now he was gone. The work would not wait, so they ha
d not even been given time to mourn. That would have to come afterward, Emil had told them, when they gathered in the village square when the sun rose. First they had to make sure the rest of Esper could go on living.

  Karenna seemed worst struck by his death. Amon did not think she had slept; she’d kept the watch until morning, when she was forcibly replaced, and after that she had joined in the grim, methodical work of hacking the dragon to pieces. Amon glimpsed her now and then, when sweeping bloody water out of the tunnel’s mouth into the outer cavern. Her face was a mask, her hair a singed and greasy mess. Had they been lovers, or family? Amon didn’t know. He only knew he had met them as a pair and had rarely seen them far apart.

  At last the largest share of the work was done, long hours after the final remnants of sunlight had faded. The outer cavern was empty again, the blood washed away by the steady rush of the waterfall which carved a cold runnel in the dark rock. The drakelings had been taken to pieces, the broken swords and armor gathered and brought to the forge to be fixed. Children were sleeping wherever they’d sat down to rest, along with no few of the elders.

  Amon lurched up into the village square from the warm pools, where he had stopped to swiftly wash off the sweat and dirt in a tangle with the other Esperites. Caedian came up behind him—he’d bathed just afterward—and laid a hand on Amon’s shoulder. “You should rest,” he said. “You look the way I feel.”

  Amon smiled a little, then sobered. “There’s one more thing to be done tonight.”

  Caedian frowned. “You’ve already done—”

  He shook his head. “Semon’s memorial.”

  The frown dropped off his face. “I don’t know if I should be there.”

  “You don’t have to be. But I feel like I do.”

  “Of course.” He turned away. “They are your family.”

  Amon remembered Seoras’s feigned memorial, remembered the burned corpse in the morbid hollow of the crypt-fruit—and the sight of a wooden face weeping in the darkness between the roots of the Tree. How raw was that wound still, for Caedian? How long had it taken Amon to stop crying for Zoran in the darkest hollows of the night?