by Amy Lane
After that, his cover as a traveling salesman had become less and less substantial, although donations of wool continued, along with a good portion of food and dry goods hidden under the bales, since it was illegal to bring either into the ghettoes unless taxed by the king and his regents. Aylan had, with Lane’s funding, set up a small apartment in the city. He had dressed the part of a rich merchant when living there, and his court skills had come flooding back. Within a month, he was the quiet new man at the best parties, and the young regents were telling him, such a good listener, about their days. Aylan had carried the information back to the heart of Eiran, warning the people there what was to come. Lane had, in the light of Aylan’s full disclosure and his own political innocence, started funding a full-fledged spy in the heart of his enemy’s capitol.
When Aylan had told his friend, his only true father figure, all the implications of what they were doing, Lane had blanched and told Aylan to forget it, that it was over, and he would get his information through his own contacts. Aylan remembered that day, a week before Beltane, because the spring sky had been so blue, and Starren had been playing some sort of tag game with Cwyn and the children from the orphanage, while Yarri supervised. Minding children and painting them pictures were the two things Yarri did best, besides knitting.
The orphanage had been a relatively new thing in Eiran—a product of people like Junie, who had, after all, died in childbirth after the hard passage north and left her three children in the hands of kind strangers who would not let her son beat his sisters. Some of the mothers were like Pansy, who left their foundlings at the doorsteps of the older people in the village, hoping this child would not be punished for being conceived under what the priests had started to call “the whoring moon” or the “bastard’s moon.” The number of these children, lost by the lost, became too large for the population to absorb, even after it had tripled in size from the Clough immigrants six years prior, and the city of Eiran had banded together to create a place of warmth and kindness, where the men, women, and children of Eiran volunteered their time and their surplus so the orphans might never feel abandoned, might always feel at home.
Lane had donated his warehouse, the one that had housed the refugees, and Bethen donated time to mind the children while her own were being schooled, and yarn and knitting for their blankets. Yarri, displaced as the teacher of the local school by someone who had a full course from Triannon, spent her days teaching the littlest ones their letters and numbers, and she adored them, and they loved her. Together, she and these other orphans filled the walls of the converted warehouse with beautiful pictures, color, and joy.
Torrant had been so proud when Yarri had shown him her work this last summer that he had glowed with it. Aylan had given him grief that he had spent much of his six weeks of leave giving his service at the orphanage, but even he had seen how well the two of them worked together. Oh, he wanted Torrant—it was possible the ache for his friend would always be there, hiding in his loins and waiting to bite him with gentle twinges—but even Aylan had to admit the world was a better place when the two Moon-destined were together.
And this day before Beltane, the lost children of Eiran were playing a game of tag where they splashed in the shallows of the river, and Aylan convinced the man who had done his best to father him though he was grown to send him to and from a city of death and to mingle with the people who would be his killers.
Lane had aged before his eyes and looked sorrowfully out at the orphans, who, although cared for and never forgotten, were the victims of Rath’s vitriol as surely as Torrant and Yarri had been, but with less cause to remember.
“This has to stop,” he said quietly. “If a ship has a rotten board, you replace it, or the rot spreads. If a man has a wound in his flesh that will fester, you let the maggots eat the rot so the wound can heal cleanly. This man, his politics, his—” Lane spat in the mud at their feet. “—his unholy priests, they’re a rot. They need to be cut out… but….” He looked around. From this place on the river he could see all of Eiran, at most a large shipping village, at his feet. They still had the barracks, and their small standing militia was growing as the unease of a great wrongness filled the young of the world, but it was helpless against a country eight times its size.
“Eiran isn’t going to attack Clough any day soon,” Aylan said dryly, trying to make this moment easier for Lane.
Lane wouldn’t let him. “You are dear to my family, boy,” Lane said fiercely. “We love you like one of our own, you hear me, Aylan Moon?”
Aylan flinched. Lane had given him his name as a courtesy, he thought. For the first time, Aylan felt the burden of family and knew it might be the sweetest weight he’d ever borne. “I’ll come back, Lane,” he said with assurance. He had, after all, been raised to be a spy, hadn’t he? He’d bedded his first girl—his first boy, for that matter—under the watchful eye of a tutor, who’d told him where to touch and what to move, just so he would know how to please. Your pretty face is a pit, boy, the man had told him in preparation. People will throw secrets into it. You’ll do what your family needs.
It wasn’t until he’d met Torrant that he’d realized what want was, the kind you kept for yourself. It wasn’t until he’d met Torrant’s family that he realized what sacrifice was, when you did the things you most despised so the people you loved never knew what despicable was.
What he was doing with these young people in Clough was despicable.
Not because it was sex—after those distasteful moments of being “trained” as his family requested, Aylan had resolved to enjoy sex as it came—but because sex to the rebellious young in Clough was as loveless as his first, supervised encounters had been. This made it easy for Aylan to blend in to the nightlife and the decadence that was being young and twin-blessed in Clough, but it made it hard to justify using their information, even to help Lane and Eiran.
They were just so helpless, he thought unhappily, watching as the girls found a sheet, any sheet, to hide themselves from the morning light streaming through the windowpane. The boys were more arrogant—or tried to be—but he noticed no manhood standing erect as they strutted to the bathroom. They had awakened nude, their skin surrounded by the beautiful—it seemed as though something should have stood to attention.
But it wouldn’t, because their bodies might have been fully engaged the night before, and their lusts were certainly all present and accounted for, but their hearts were absent.
These young people—the regents of their country, many of them—had been left here by their fathers, in the hopes the young and naïve might survive the political rampages of a madman.
So Rath was off his rocker—excellent! Let us all retreat into the country and leave our children to rule. They’ll do what they’re told, they’ll do what he tells them, and when somebody (not us—no, that’s too risky) finally moves this rabid boar from the throne, we’ll come back and claim our places and rebuild our country.
The children were young—many of them were younger than Aylan—but they weren’t stupid. They knew they were pawns. But very few people had the strength to dismiss their entire family because they were being played.
Every day the young men went to council and agreed with what their leader said. Every night they wrote home and told their fathers they were doing the family proud. Every week they received no reply, lest one of those letters praising the regents for a good job would come back and prove that the old men who should have known better were fully aware their sons were consigning innocent people to ghettos, to the gallows, to be crucified on the outer walls of the city, all in the name of approval that would never come. Aylan knew it would never come. He wondered when the young men he was bedding would figure it out.
And the rules they had to live by—no celebrations, no birthdays, no Beltanes, no Solstices, no sex. No laughing, no kindness, no children (they made a man weak), no music, no dancing, no singing, no sex. Women had it worse: they couldn’t speak, they couldn�
��t walk by themselves, they couldn’t look their husbands in the eye in public. And of course, unless in the sanctity of the marriage bed, no sex. And certainly no pleasure in the sex they weren’t supposed to be having.
There were many diversions in the city. There were plays praising Rath, plays praising the twins, plays showing the Goddess for a whore. There were balls, there were dinners, there were teas. And after all the parties and the plays and the religious meetings where the young women would nod chastely at the visiting priests and the young men would look stern and forbidding and chastened, they would retire demurely and properly to their own apartments for a few moments of meditation and prayer.
And then they would slip down hallways, down hidden passageways, along back alleyways, to find their way to orgies of the exalted young, where taking their clothes off and begging for human contact was the only place they could be human, and young, and, for lack of a better word, loved.
Even though everyone in the beds of the rich were too needy, too lost, and too starved for kindness to love at all.
Aylan had tumbled in with them like a baby bunny with his littermates, and they had accepted him as their own. Aylan had come to care for them, those in his little circle, and Jerid and his sister Brina were the ones he cared for the most.
Jerid was young—barely as old as Torrant had been when he’d first come to Triannon—with dark, curly hair, the darkest of skins, limpid black eyes, and a pale heart so overwhelmed by life in the city it almost made the rest of the boy look pink. His participation in the orgies of the younger regents was the equivalent of a little boy building a fort of blankets to hide under because he was afraid. Jerid’s blankets were the willing bodies of the other young people, but it was the same thing. Every time Jerid came from a regent’s meeting where some new abomination had been passed (they were threatening to tax the sewers in the Goddess ghettoes now, to make it illegal to piss down a drainpipe without giving up a copper coin or two), he would run home and throw up blood. Then he would drink some milk, invite his friends over, and try desperately to forget what it was he had just participated in, and Aylan couldn’t blame him. He felt the same way after he’d bedded all these young people to learn their secrets.
Brina—Jerid’s older, discarded half sister—was as fair as her brother was dark, but her heart was not quite as pale. Since she was a girl—and her mother had died in childbirth—she was persona non grata at home. She had followed her brother to town because he’d needed her, as simple as that. Aylan had the impression the two of them had grown up together under the tutelage of nannies and the disapproval of the family. He felt for the both of them—but he envied them each other. Until he’d been shipped off to Triannon, Aylan hadn’t known other children existed.
Brina didn’t participate in the mass of insecure flesh Jerid invited to his home. She had a lover from a good family, and even Aylan could tell she was desperately afraid he would refuse to marry her because she had “given herself” before they were married. The desperation made her easy, malleable—vulnerable to every bullying tactic the young man tried, and Aylan despised Marik almost as much as he despised the young man’s father (one of the older consuls still in the city), who publicly bullied his son as much as Marik bullied Brina.
They were defenseless, Aylan thought, looking at them now. They were pawns, they were children, they were lost—and he had not liked the look Essa had given over her shoulder, as she left the same tangle of bodies he had.
“Where’s Essa going?” he asked abruptly into the yawns and stretches of the morning.
“I didn’t know she’d left,” Jerid said, confused. “Did she get a message? That mother of hers keeps her on a pretty tight leash.”
Aylan knew it—and unlike the other young of the city, who had little experience with any family, much less the wrong side of it, he feared her for the fact. “We need to find out if she did and from whom,” he said sharply, earning a surprised look from everyone in the gold-carpeted room. “I don’t like the way she looked back at us when she was leaving.”
“Well, maybe you should have agreed to nail her,” Brina said archly, as she came calmly into the room with a tea tray and some breakfast. The nudity didn’t bother her, and she liked the company. She often ate with her brother and his friends in the morning, whether or not she had been with her lover that night. Marik had been busy the night before, so as far as Aylan knew, she had spent the evening in her room with a forbidden book. Her favorite, she had told him, was a collection of Goddess stories from Eiran—it was on the Rath’s burning list, but she couldn’t bring herself to sacrifice it. Aylan had to agree, once he’d read it, and had thought longingly of Bethen.
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t,” Aylan replied now to her question, annoyed. “I just said I didn’t feel like it last night.” Aylan had been more observer than participant lately—the sad result of a guilty conscience. He had crawled in at the end to comfort—he wasn’t sure how many of them knew they wept in their dreams.
“Well, she doesn’t take kindly to that kind of thing,” Brina said with the practicality of long knowledge. “You’d better be sure you don’t get on the wrong side of that one. She can make your life miserable.”
“Did she tell someone you had a rash?” one of the young men asked playfully, making Aylan wince.
“Worse,” Brina said with a shudder, and Jerid looked at her in sympathy and shuddered too.
“She told everybody we were bedding each other,” Jerid filled in when Brina didn’t look like she could go on.
“Ew.” This from Olen, a plump, shrill, blonde girl—another one of Aylan’s least favorites in this little group. “Did you?”
“Of course not!” Brina snapped. “But coming from Essa, with her horrible mother to back her up, our father had to threaten them with land fees to get them to shut up.”
There was a sudden knock on the door, and a little serving girl appeared, curtseying nervously. Brina was busy serving breakfast, and Aylan was the only one who didn’t dodge behind a piece of furniture, so he was the one to wrap a casual sheet around his waist and bow politely to the girl while he took the message from her hand and indicated she should stay for a moment in case there needed to be a reply.
“Go ahead and read it,” Brina mumbled through a mouthful of toast, and Aylan opened the missive and swore.
It was from Essa’s mother, Aleta, and it was bad.
“Did Essa get a message this morning?” Aylan asked the girl, trying to keep the urgency from his voice.
She shook her head no, but then added, “Her girl came, though, the one who waits on her at home. She’d been running the whole way—said Essa’s mother was looking for her, and Essa could only be in the bath for a few more moments. She had to get back.”
Oh no. Aylan looked up at his helpless little bunnies, all in the process of covering themselves with the most expensive skins, and said dreamily, “You people need to go home and get a story straight. Essa’s been caught.”
Brina hummed in her throat, and some of the boys said, “How do you know?”
“This is from her mother—if she sent it here, looking for Essa, and Essa just got home….” He trailed off meaningfully.
“Essa wouldn’t rat us out!” Olen burbled. “She’s one of us—she wouldn’t!”
“She would if it got the heat off her,” Jerid said flatly, and Brina nodded, her jaw tightening.
“She spread the rumor about us because she got caught outside after curfew—she said it was our fault, because she was covering for us as we were….” Brina shuddered.
Aylan looked at Jerid and said, “You let this person into your bed?”
Jerid looked away. “She’s… unpleasant… if you don’t include her. Her father owns much of the lands adjoining ours. We need her to be… pleasant.”
Aylan fought the churning in his stomach, suddenly grateful for the sheet around his waist because he felt both naked and unclean after that one sad little statement. He looked
around him at the other seven promiscuous children and saw they had all lost color and were sitting where they had once stood, as they digested with sudden clarity what their little rebellion might cost them. The girls would, at best, be shipped off to one of the horrible “seminaries” where the priests were trained, where they would be forced to wait, hand and foot, day and night on the needs of the men who would be the twins’ “exalted ones.” At worst they would be stoned to death in the courtyard outside the capitol.
The young men would be crucified, their bodies left to rot on the outside of the city gates, as a reminder to all of what happened to those who frolicked under the whoring moon.
“Get out,” he said authoritatively. “We never saw you, and you don’t know where we’ve been. Don’t go home. Go straight to your family estates, all of you. I don’t care where your horses are and I don’t care where your carriages are—walk if you have to. Go to your places in the country, and stay there, or escape the country before your parents get the letter. You know best, but you need to leave right now.”
In a rush they were all dressed, even Olen, who was pushed out the door toward her fat, sturdy pony, protesting, “But this is silly. Essa wouldn’t hurt us!” Aylan couldn’t tell by the direction her pony went whether she believed it or not.
Jerid was left in his bathrobe, looking at his sister in distress. “Father won’t let us return,” he said softly, and Brina nodded.
“I’ll take you out,” Aylan said confidently. “I want to stop at the capitol, to hear what they’re saying, and I’ll be back with my cart. Pack only the essentials. I’m nobody here; I’m a plaything. No one will be looking for me. Half the people in the room hardly knew my name. Essa kept calling me ‘Aland’ all night long. You get ready and—”
“Where will we go?” Jerid asked, his voice dreamy and sad. “I’m supposed to be regent. Father trusted me to obey the Consort.”