This book is dedicated to everybody who has touched my life, given me encouragement, and believed in me in the course of my writing. The list is nearly as long as the damned book, so I’ll try to name the heavy hitters first.

Mate, Big T, Chicken, Cave Troll, and Ladybug—you are the heart of my Joy and I would not be able to live in Honor and Compassion without the example you set for me and the example I strive to set in order to be worthy. I love you all with all my heart.

Mommy and Auntie Monica—you guys really believe in me. Every time you tell me this, I am grateful beyond words, and with every word I write, I try not to let you down.

Daddy & Janis—you’ve read every one of my books, and you actually like them. Thank you—I hope I make you proud.

My e-buddies—some of you guys will get hit in the acknowledgments too— consider it more bang for your buck in the ‘tolerance of Amy’s neuroses’ department: Roxie, Littlewitch, Needletart, Eric, Shelley, Julie, Michelle, Lore, Jennie, Galad, Tinkingbell, and Archer—thank you. I’m the most annoyingly insecure person I know, and you guys are always there to say, “No, really—you DON’T suck!!!” And you say it consistently and you say it sincerely and someday I’ll believe it and in the meantime, I cannot thank you enough.

Acknowledgements

Oi! This one was long and hard and difficult and I MUST give some props to the people who helped me out with it:

Roxie, Eric, Bonnie, Ceri, and Michelle—these guys are my editors. They read and nitpicked and asked me questions and three of them told me under no uncertain terms that YARRI MUST NOT DIE. One of them told me that maybe she should—and then didn’t sneak into my house and smother me in my sleep when I completely ignored him in spite of all of his thoughtful work. Bonnie edited the manuscript TWICE. Both times it got better. All of you—you make me a better writer and you keep me grounded, and even if I don’t DO what you say, I’d be a fool to IGNORE what you say. The mistakes are all mine, and if I ignored your advice it was at my own peril. (After all, I’m the dumbass who walked off the cliff when you all were screaming, “Oh for Triane’s sake there’s a damned CLIFF over there!”, right?)

I’d also like to thank the amazon.com people—PNR forum and KTT folks—you all are my electronic coffee-klatch, and I have learned so much from all of you. Thanks for listening when I rant and giving my books a chance and basically having an open mind to someone who put her own ass on the line and prayed REALLY REALLY HARD that her work didn’t suck. Thanks for telling me that, mostly it doesn’t!

Prologue

Goddess Stories

The Healer sat in the waning twilit hours of the Beltane Faire and watched the couples dancing in front of the bonfire in preparation for the wilding. His wife, short, plump, and sturdy, came and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, touching her cheek to his.

“They’re all waiting,” she murmured, not wanting to look into his eyes. The pain was there, all of it, as fresh as it must have been thirty years before, when he’d first ridden off to the east and left her. It was just as bad now, just as bloody as it had been, when they’d ridden back to town nearly a year later.

Goddess, how Yarri hated Beltane.

Once upon a time, it had been her favorite holiday. When she and Torrant had come to Eiran it had been a symbol of rebirth and spring and beauty and family.

But that had been before he’d left her to save the world. That had been before his heart had been ripped out, and she and Aldam and Aylan had barely been able to put it back together again. That had been before she’d had to watch him, for nigh on thirty years, resurrect this pain for their town and their family, and make it fresh and red all over again.

“Beloved?” she murmured now, and he turned towards her, the softness on his face for her and her alone. Then he came to himself, remembering what he had to do, wiped his mouth with his hand and stood, his hazel eyes assuming that artificial brightness that she always associated with this moment, on this evening.

“You don’t have to do it again this year,” she said, taking his hand. He touched her cheek and smiled again, this one almost reaching his eyes.

“Of course I do,” he murmured. “It’s important. Besides—the little ones expect it.”

“The little ones just want a story and a song from their Pa-pa,” she snapped with bitterness that surprised them both. “This hurts you!”

“It should hurt me.” He ran a hand through his short hair, the salting of gray obscuring but not hiding the white crest at his temple. He’d wondered lately, watching himself age easily through the years, if he would have to dye his hair brown in order to show that mark of magic like the badge of honor it was. This morning he’d decided that just never having to hide it again would be enough.

“That pain bought something important,” he continued, when she looked away and refused to answer.

“Well then,” she turned away sharply, angry with him for doing this to himself. Hadn’t he given enough?

“Hey!” He caught up to her and took her hand. “You knew this would hurt us when we started.”

Yarri eyed him sourly. “It’s one thing when we were young,” she said at last, “but shouldn’t there be an age when you get to stop ripping your own entrails out for the greater good?”

He winced. “Appropriate, beloved,” he said with a grim smile, but she couldn’t even return that.

“This hurts you.” It was stated baldly, without flinching. Yarri was as she always had been—the years had not softened her, but they had given her a little grace. “It hurts me to see you hurt,” she added softly.

“I’m fine…”

She shook her head adamantly, her long, silvering braid rippling past her wide hips. Once it had grown back, neither of them had ever wanted to cut it again.

“Every year you say that, and every year there’s nightmares. We’ve done this for thirty years—you know that, right? For thirty years you tell this story, and every year the two of you spend a week sharing a bed back to back, swords in hands, whimpering if you actually do close your eyes.”

He looked away. Starren and Yarri had known, had known from the first night of their return, that Torrant and Aylan would never be able to shake some parts of that terrible time. For the most part, neither of them minded overmuch, but Torrant and Aylan were honorable men. Their wives didn’t give a flying bucket of pig-shite about the niceties of fidelity, as long as their beloveds could rise from the darkness and embrace them in the light, but that need for each other when they were frightened or reminded of the darkness never faded. Sometimes honor flinched, and honorable men had to live with that.

Yarri was not concerned with honor. She had learned long ago that she would take her beloved living, breathing and struggling with his conscience, to still and dead on any day.

“I could give a shite if you and Aylan bugger each other until your hearts pop,” she said now, and shifted in impatience when Torrant winced. “Look--I’ll always be here to pick up the pieces, because I truly don’t care—I never have. But I can’t watch your heart break…not one more time…not again… Ellyot’s youngest isn’t feeling well…”

“All that sugar,” he smiled and she rolled her eyes in agreement. For a moment they were a perfect burst of harmony, a shared expression of a lifetime of living to be the other’s heartbeat.

“And Bitsy’s baby is teething. I’ll take them to the house while you do this. I’ve heard it before.” Her mouth, which was usually shaped like a plump and pleasant little bow, was pinched together now, almost invisible in her irritation. Still, he thought he’d try one more time.

“The song changes every year,” he said lightly, and her look grew even darker.

“No it doesn’t!” she hissed. “It never changes. ‘Oueant’s Son’, ‘Dueant’s Son’, ‘ Triane’s Son’—none of it matters. What matters is that it was real, and that we lived, and that you and Aylan and Aldam and…” her voice faltered. Not even she could mention those other names, the names of their honored dead, on a breath of ire. “All of us,” she finished lamely, “All of us did this.”

Yarri sighed and eyed their five children unhappily. They were waiting gravely, their families or lovers or children or friends grouped around them. Their father was going to play. Yarri couldn’t, not even for the love she bore her husband, figure out how to tell him how much the aftermath of this story hurt him.

“What matters,” she finally said, “is that we shed blood, not a little of it your own, to make this world a better place, and that you shed more of it every year when you go out and tell this story, and I’m sick of it!”

He smiled, the grooves in his mouth deepening, his dimple popping, and his lip curling up on one side. It was an absolutely lethal smile, and it had taken him a while to learn its power, but many women still fantasized about the lead Healer of Eiran.

He had only ever cared about two of them.

“Thirty years, my heart’s peace, that we’ve been telling this story, and you still don’t understand why it’s important that I tell it?”

She looked away, feeling childish. She had never been poised, never been quiet and docile, and she assumed that was one of the qualities he loved her for—or in spite of. But she hated feeling petulant, spoiled, and unkind.

“You tell me then!” she snapped, unhappy with both of them. She should drop it. She should just drop it. She should be a good wife and listen to his story and let him spend his week sleeping in Aylan’s bed and accept that he loved her without question.

“It needs to be remembered,” Torrant murmured, holding her shoulders. “That’s what’s important. We need to make sure that no one ever needs to go out and live this story again.” His voice hardened, and his eyes flashed a glacial blue, frigid and sharp and at odds with the warmth that he practically radiated.

“Right,” she replied, her brown eyes wide. She rarely saw that color anymore—she may have lost her hard-won maturity in an effort to protect her husband, but she was not a fool. “The little ones will be fine. I’ll stay and listen.”

Very carefully, so as not to puncture her acquiescence, he leaned forward and touched her forehead with his own, holding cupped hand between their chests as though there was something precious, something lovely and sweet and fragile housed in the space between their heartbeats. Her mouth softened and her tanned, freckled, barely wrinkled face creased into a tender smile as she cupped her hands over his.

This. This lovely warmth between them—this had never changed, and it could not be killed.

His gorgeous, gods-beloved smile came back, and he swung it around to greet the family, all of them, gathered around the Moon’s traditional picnic table. He had to wade his way through grandchildren in order to perch on the top of the table, and shoo a couple of the smaller ones off his lap.

Aylan did his own wading and handed his oldest friend his lute, and Torrant took it gratefully. It was old as well—it had belonged to Lane before him—and the wood was mellow and sweet with age and oil, and years of melancholy songs dancing across its strings.

“Thank you, Aylan.” For the first time a hint of uncertainty crossed

Torrant’s face. “You’re staying, right?” There had been a few years after Starry had come of age when the two of them had tried to live without each other the week after Beltane, and Aylan had been unable to stay and listen. The absence had hurt them. It had left them shredded and infected, and one Solstice wilding, Starren and Yarri had conspired for the two of them to meet. Hadn’t they all fought for the right to wild and love and make love and make family as they saw fit and not the world at large?

“Of course I’m staying,” Aylan replied, with a killer smile of his own. Aylan’s smile had improved with time—the bitterness that possessed it in his youth was completely gone now. “If I’m not here, you don’t tell it right.”

“Ha!” the Healer guffawed, secure now that Aylan would be there to see him through this. “If you’re not here, no one whines when the son of Oueant gets his due!”

Aylan’s look of disgust was enough to pull the last of the tears from Torrant’s heart, and he smiled at his children for their approval. The oldest two, the twin boys, they of all the family needed this song, he thought achingly. So much of who they were was wrapped up in who had come before.

Lane hobbled up across the green, much of his weight on the pair of canes in his hands. He had been seated with the other elders, watching the sunset, but he too was faithful to the story as it was told at Beltane. The Healer’s eldest, Ellyot, ran up with a stool for his Great Uncle Lane, and Lane sank onto it gratefully.

“Have you started yet, boy-o?” he asked. His voice had aged, and his beard was long and full and white now, but his eyes still twinkled their merry blue, nearly as sharp in what they saw today as they had been in Torrant’s youth.

“Not yet, Uncle Lane. You know we can’t tell the story without you.” Torrant tuned a couple of strings then, and played a chord that proved his ear was still sound. Almost to himself he murmured, “I wish Aunt Bethen was here.”

“Oh she is, but she’s getting impatient. Now start!”

The rest of the family laughed, and Aylan’s youngest, a scant and scandalous six years old, piped up, “You’re going to tell the story of the Sons of the Three Moons, right Uncle Torrant?” The little boy’s hand was firmly entrenched in the hand of Ellyot’s youngest, as they had been since the little girl had been born. The sight of the two of them, so easily moon-destined, so beautifully meant, made Torrant’s heart constrict with pain and joy.

“Absolutely, Djali,” he murmured. “Are we all ready? Do we all remember how it starts?”

His five children started the first verse, their voices falling in and out of harmony, but still strong. And when they were done singing, he began the story itself, the words changing as details sharpened and faded with the passage of years, but always, always, starting with the same image.

“A ruthless ruler, mad and powerful, had been persecuting Triane’s children for many years. One day, Triane’s Son, and his best friend, the son of Oueant, the moon of Honor, rode into the cursed city, to stop him.

They bore between the two of them, a terrible secret…”

Part I--The Deceiving Moon

And You Are?

They would not have known who he was when he entered the gates of Dueance, trying hard not to gag at the stench of the crucified bodies hanging over the archway. They would not have known who he was as he made his way through the neatly bricked streets of the city’s main common area and into the square where the Consort’s palace, the Hall of Regents, and the regents apartments all faced each other, with the entrance to the square serving as the fourth wall.

After he presented his letters of introduction to the concierge at the regent’s dormitories, asking politely for a ground-floor room with a window and a water closet, odds were good that his name got out. It certainly received a satisfying reaction from the self-important little man who waxed lyrical about the library on the top floor of the apartment building, talking at length about how it was the finest collection of law books and financial tracts in the three lands.

“And poetry, now that you’ve burnt down Triannon,” he said with no dryness and a bitter lack of irony.

The concierge turned red, looked at the name on the letters of introduction, and promptly tried to choke on his tongue.

The young man across from him smiled with only the faintest lifting of his eyebrows. “Is something wrong?”

“I’m…” The small old man looked up at the strapping broad chest of the young man and swallowed at that level, expectant gaze. Years of training kicked in, years during which he observed the foibles of the young, the moneyed, and the feckless and not only didn’t raise an eyebrow, but didn’t let an indiscretion pass his lips in the company of anyone but his bored wife. “No problem at all,” he smiled blandly, and the young man indicated that the concierge should lead the way to his apartment with a raised eyebrow over shockingly clear hazel eyes.

“I thought not.” And they proceeded to a sumptuous apartment, full of heavy burgundy velvet draperies and a truly hedonistic sateen couch cover done in jewel-colored embroidery. The bedroom was as large as the sitting room and kitchenette put together, and the bed was big enough to house five, with a sin-dark mahogany four-posted frame and a matching wardrobe as big as the ferry to Otham. There was a small patio outside the bedroom, and a washroom annexed to the bedroom with a window overlooking the marble-walled shower and toilet. There was also a promise of maid service and discreet laundry service, as long as he put what needed to be washed and pressed in the offered hamper.

“There’s a canteen in the west wing corner,” the concierge offered with a smile, “so there should be no problem if you get caught without stocks during curfew. They offer all three meals if you like, but most of the young regents take their breakfast in the marketplace.”

The man looked at Torrant with a smile, hoping for some response for the amenities, but he got a rather dazed look in return. Had the concierge known it, his shocking new tenant was both humbled and disgusted by the excess.

He yearned for a simple house of battered board walls and a thick slab of a kitchen table instead, with the sound of family inside and the roar of the sea without. He would have settled for a country surgery, with newly built bedrooms and a tiny water-closet with a wooden seat on the commode and the smell of dust and cedars in the hot, dry summers. He would have wept for the loft in a horse stable, with a quilt on the straw and a picnic of bread and apples at the ready.

But wanting was easy and doing was hard. What the young man actually did was park his duffel next to the bed and waited for the concierge’s attention.

“Are the regents in session now?” he asked, hoping that all of his practicing with his best friend and partner in this mad enterprise made that question come out casually.

“Not at the moment, sir—they take a break in the midday and reconvene around dusk when the temperature drops in the city.”

The young man nodded. Good. Give this old man with the pulse beating in his throat a chance to spread the word, and then he could make the entrance he’d planned.

“How do you want to do this?”

He looked at Aylan, who was too grim for the late spring sunshine spilling gold from his hair. “Quickly, without blood,” he’d replied dryly, and Aylan had rolled his eyes.

“Your mouth to Triane’s ears. Now think—are you going to go, play the ingénue, allow the fat boys to lead you where you want to go? Or…”

“Definitely option two.” The thought of dissembling was too awful, too repugnant. There would be so much subterfuge already and he had never been good at it. “I can’t do this if I’m faking everything—it will be hard enough faking my name.”

Aylan nodded, and then shook his head. “It will be harder that way, in the end.” He said it softly enough that the words were almost lost in the jangle of horse’s tack.

Of course, Aylan would know.

“Is there anything else,” hesitation, “sir?”

The young man’s gorgeously sculpted mouth quirked up, and even the devout old man with his forty years of solid marriage under his belt felt a flutter in his belly. “No,” he said quietly, his eyes darting around the room and wondering which new set of clothes he should wear for his grand debut to the hall of regents. The old man made to leave, and a sudden foreboding shivered through his chest and knotted itself down in his guts. A year, they’d told the family. A month, he’d thought to himself. But what if it was closer to a year? He looked at the duffel bag and his lute case and thought unhappily that he would probably need more to wear than what his ex-lover had shoved in his saddlebags as he and Aylan were departing from her home, forged letters of introduction snuggling in with his lute.

“Uhm…” he said tentatively, hating the eagerness with which the concierge (what had been that man’s name?) turned around. More gossip for the fodder, he supposed. “A…” word…what was the word? It was comforting that none of his brothers would have known either. “A clothier? Uhm…haberdasher? I didn’t bring enough clothes to stay for long.” Ugh. The idea of staying long in this city already made his stomach churn.

“Absolutely, sir,” the concierge said, a relieved smile gracing his wizenening features. The name may have been strange, but the behavior was what he was accustomed to. “I can send him in with your midday meal.”

“Thank you.” He was, in truth, grateful—as much for something to do while he waited as for anything else.

The clothier brought in his food—fruit, a sandwich, a flask of wine—and proceeded to cluck over him, gushing about all of the many ensembles he could create for the new regent, and the new regent felt badly about saying “No—just a few outfits for this season—I’ll let you know if I’ll be here for the fall.”

“Oh, but sir!” The clothier was a compact, fluttery man with an extraordinarily embellished waistcoat and a minutely trimmed goatee. “You must…don’t you see? Regents attend balls—it’s a social obligation. They need to dress for the senate, and dress for dinner— they need clothes for fencing practice…you can not function socially without more clothes than this.”

And the new regent closed his eyes. It wasn’t as though he couldn’t afford it, right? He had a sudden thought, then. “Right—I hear you.” He nodded. Good—he’d do it, sing the song and dance the jig if he had to. But if he were going to do it, he wanted something practical as well. In spite of what he’d said to the family, he was reasonably sure he and Aylan weren’t going to escape this venture without their alter-egos coming out to play. “May I make a request?” he asked, and then began to outline what he wanted, ignoring the clothier’s protests that such a garment would not be fashionable in the least.

“All the better,” had been his mild answer. “I’ll take two.”

The clothier swallowed. There was something chilling about the way the handsome young man had said it that made the designer feel as though he were swimming in water far deeper than he was comfortable with. “Well then,” the man ingratiated, “can I at least take this garment from you?” He picked up the simple, battered cloak of forest green with its shockingly yellow liner, and almost had the thing yanked from his hands.

“No!” The young man clutched the cloak to his chest and glared at the clothier as though he’d tried to steal a beloved pet for the stewpot. “No.” The young man swallowed, tightly, and his eyes gleamed suspiciously for a moment, and then he gave a distraught smile. “My sister made it,” he said at last, glaring at the clothier. He hoped that the hitch in his voice when he said ‘sister’ hadn’t caught the man’s attention.

The man took the hint and bowed at the waist. “Of course. Now if you’ll allow me, I’ll have a few items delivered before nightfall.” So he could wear them to the hall of regents. Of course.

He nodded, and bid the man good day.

When the door was closed, he sank solidly to the oversized bed, clutching his old cloak to his chest, feeling his first round of shudders sweep him from icy bowels to clammy palms. Sweet Dueant, brave Oueant, could he really do this?

He looked outside and saw the dark spring shadows had barely moved from the moment he’d ridden under those cursed gates, and the small bit of food that he’d eaten when the clothier had been there congealed. His face flushed under his shivers and he fought the urge to vomit. With deep, steadying breaths, and purposeful movements, he reached for the one thing at this point that could calm him down.

Cradling his lute in his lap, and being careful to preserve his voice so that he could sound strong and sure later, he carefully and deliberately wrote a song of longing. He inscribed the words in careful letters on the parchment, being careful to never use his beloved’s name. But it whispered through the air, through his new, uncomfortable clothes, and the sumptuous, ridiculous room. When he heard the clock at the square ring the half-hour, the name followed him, until he was afraid that he would stand before the regents, decked out in bravura and fraud, and it would scream from his skin, making the one giant lie of his name irrelevant after all.

Yarri.

He wore her name like a flag on his heart as he strode across the marble archway from the apartments to the hall. He could hear the whispers as he went, coating him with lies that he hoped would be stronger than his belief at the moment, and he bore his head high and his chest out as though his boots were weighted with truth.

The sea of young regents—some of them not much older than he’d been when he’d gone away to university—parted for him like two separate armoires of fanciful velveteen clothes and extravagant feathers, and he pretended not to notice the startled gasps, the stares, and the wide-eyed, childlike wonder at his presence. All of it was glamour—it would help when the time came.

The hall itself was vast. His first thought was that there were relatively few outer rooms around the great hall, and his second thought was that the building didn’t look this big from the outside.

His third thought, random and irrelevant, was that he could get heartily sick of teal-colored velvet and mahogany wood, both of which were plentiful around the inside of the hall. By the time his eyes sought out the small antechamber which was separated by a waist-high wooden partition from the semi-circle of chairs and desks that wrapped partially around the consort’s dais, he had the fanciful notion that he and Aldam should start making teal labels for the toxic medicines in their surgery. This particular shade would warn any inquisitive child, he thought with wide-eyed distaste.

And then he was in the ante-chamber, presenting his borrowed name sotto-voice to the record keeper with the scroll and quill pen, who was so shocked that he knocked over his inkwell and stared nakedly at the young man with the dark chestnut hair and the hazel eyes. He wasn’t even that tall, thought the registrar in shock, and the young man’s sardonic smile let him know that his disapproval had been acknowledged.

And then he was waiting for his turn to speak, fully aware of the wildfire sweeping the room, his borrowed name dancing in the flames. To calm his nerves, he paid attention to the man who was speaking, and that sardonic smile at his quirkily beautiful lips deepened. How perfect.

“I’m telling you they were ready for us,” the man was saying desperately. “There was a battalion of trained soldiers outside of the school, and one of the Goddess’ own beasts with the warriors on the front lawn!”

“And I’m telling you its impossible!” snarled the squat, scarred man to the left of the consort’s seat. “Eiran has no army, Cleant only cares about farming, and Otham has no interest in our business. Now tell me, since your superior officers seem to have all deserted, did you at least rid us of the sorcerer army being trained at Triannon?”

The soldier suddenly looked troubled…“They were children,” he said after a moment. “I think you must be mistaken, sir. They were children, and they got away.”

“They were sorcerers…” spat what looked to be the Secretary General, only to be interrupted smoothly by the thin, aesthetic-featured man with the salt-and pepper hair and full mustache sitting in the consort’s throne.

“I’m sure they looked like children,” he said softly, understandingly, with a condescending smile. “We all know that the Great Whore is deceptive. Now, resume your narrative, young man. How did they get away again?”

Oh, he couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity if he’d scripted it. Pushing through the swinging door at the ante-chamber, he walked swiftly towards the soldier at the podium, speaking with a carrying voice trained by years of singing by the fireside.

“Oh, that’s easy,” said the young man, smiling that hard smile and meeting the eyes of the Secretary General and the King Consort with a fierce and dreadful joy. They moved with underwater slowness, staring at him in shock, and that smile only deepened. “I can tell you how those children got away from an entire company of soldiers descending on a school of healers and poets. My cousin and I evacuated those children out the back entrance while twenty-five men in our local militia died to protect us. Those ‘warriors’ that this man speaks of were beardless boys, defending their home with the help of a couple of aging professors who had never drawn blood in combat in their lives.”

The collective gasp of one hundred and fifty regents, as well as assorted registrars, secretaries, and retinue sucked the air right out of the room, but now that he had spoken, now that his boiling fury was vented for the people who should be flayed with it until they bled, his own anxiety was forgotten.

“Who are you?” asked the Secretary General, when he had recovered his tongue.

Torrant Shadow replied, his eyes on the pale shock of the Consort King himself. “I’m the person that you two have been trying to kill for the last twelve years,” he lied with just the right amount of nonchalance. “I’m Ellyot Moon.”

His oldest son (by ten minutes at most), truly named ‘Ellyot Moon’ had always loved this part as a child, but as he aged into adulthood, it troubled him.

He stood now, his arm around his tiny wife, looking at his father with an undisguised compassion. For his entire life, his father had never pretended, not even to tell him pleasant lies as a child—the cat never ran away, it died. His ‘Da’ was never a hero, he was simply a Healer. There was no happiness guaranteed, it was always on loan, because Joy could never stay in one place for long.

The only exceptions to the truth, ever, had been his ‘uncles’ , Aylan and Aldam, and the fact that they were uncles had not been a lie so much as it had been a fact made true by force of will.

That truth, as well as the reason Aylan had kept the battered, ripped, and blood-crusted cloak in his closet, long since the thing had become too stiff for use--that truth had taken several Beltanes to figure out.

But beyond these subtleties, his father was everything he said he was, as average a man as he was average in height.

Except that he wasn’t. It was his very truth that made him extraordinary, and this extraordinary truth made his lie, the one terrible lie of taking ‘Ellyot Moon’s name, such an enormity of sin.

Part II—The Moon at Night

The Return of Triane’s Son

When the pandemonium died down, and Torrant was back in his room, crouched in a corner and trembling all over with aftershock, he would wonder how he pulled it off . He’d needed to produce his letters of introduction, of course, and then explain how it came to be that a boy whom everyone assumed was dead would turn up twelve years later, breathing vengeance on the country that birthed him. His own words kept echoing in his head, with the perpetual question, Did I do them right? Did I speak for our loved ones, Yarri? Did the world hear?

Rath had been exactly as he’d imagined.

Aloof, judgmental, the man had recovered from his initial shock and sat back to let the furor of ‘Ellyot’s’ return wash over him. Torrant had watched him while both of the men at the dais took stock of the regents’ reactions—who protested without question, who sat back and listened to what was said, and who (a surprising number) looked at Rath sideways, as though they had suspected him of foul play all along. Rath returned those looks blandly, and his very mildness seemed unsettling to a number of the regents. They were especially unnerving to the few older ones who had stayed throughout the ‘Purge’ as the people in the Regent’s Hall referred the wholesale attempts to rid the world of a people whose only crime was seeing the third moon.

As Torrant had continued to speak, and as the regents continued to listen, Rath’s expression seamlessly shifted from detachment to distaste, and as Torrant enumerated on the deaths of his family, an expression crossed the Consort’s face akin to that of someone who went walking through a kitchen late at night and accidentally stepped on a slug.

Why didn’t you stay to defend your family, sir?

Rath’s one question, the one that had haunted Torrant his entire life. The answer hadn’t changed.

Yar…my younger sister, sir. The family charged me with her protection—she is everything they loved best in the world.

Are you telling me that you fled from a fight to save a child? The State General, and Torrant’s disgust with the question was evident in his reply.

Are you telling me that honor requires your soldiers to kill them? His lips had twisted in bitter triumph as the general—and the rest of the assembly-- recoiled. I returned, he said into that silence, wondering if everyone could see the blood seeping from his chest at the admission. I returned to see if my family had survived. Then he had looked Rath full on in the eyes, knowing that while the rest of the world would need to read his papers, and examine the divot in his ear—Ellyot’s birthmark, Torrant’s first wound—and quiz him interminably on the workings of the Moon family, this one fact would seal Rath’s belief forever. Who did you think burned the barn, Consort? You painted it in the blood of my family to make sure everyone believed the Goddess had killed them—who do you think came down and burned it, to cleanse what you had desecrated, and honor our beloved dead?

That Rath had reacted was irrefutable. What his gasp and rounded eyes could mean were still up for debate.

And that was the thing that had Torrant most on edge—the endless debate. The council hadn’t adjourned until well after midnight, and in the end, there were only two things anybody was willing to admit. The first was that, yes, the young man claiming to be Ellyot Moon had the Moon family birthmark. The second was that, yes, his horse was descended from Courtland, the pride of Owen Moon’s breeding program and the animal that had disappeared from holding on a frosty autumn night shortly after the death of the trader who had taken him. Other than that, letters of introduction were taken by the registrar for careful consideration, and all of the regents were told to go home. The end.

Torrant had just bared his soul and lied about his very person, and the result? Go back to your over-lush apartment, and we’ll see you tomorrow, bright and early. So now here he was, bleeding the adrenaline from his body in terrible shudders, wishing beyond everything that Aylan was there to talk to.

There was a sound on his open porch, and the back door jiggled and Aylan was there in the flesh, so agitated that Torrant jumped up in greeting, eager just for something to do.

“Guardsmen…” Aylan gasped. “We’ve got a boy watching the barracks—half a company just loosed itself into the city…we’ve locked the children away in every closet, but…brother, I know it’s been a long day, but we’re going to need you tonight.”

Gratitude and sweet, sweet clarity surged through Torrant like a freak wave. Purpose—at last, he had purpose, and it was immediate and real, and nobody gave a damn if he was Ellyot Moon or Triane’s only son, because his teeth, claws, and sword would be irrefutable, concrete, and now.

Without speaking, he pulled his sword out of an armory cupboard that was mostly decoration. Then he picked up the extra-full, hooded, black leather cloak that had been waiting for him in his room when he’d returned from the Regent’s Hall and closed his eyes, concentrating hard with his gift. His white streak of hair glowed suddenly brilliant as he saturated the leather cloak with his magic instead of using it for his one element of disguise, but that didn’t bother him. When he was done, still without a word, he threw the cloak at Aylan, the heavy thump of leather masking the smaller thump of black cloth for his face.

Aylan grunted in surprise, but Torrant simply met his gaze. The eyes he turned to his dearest friend were glacially, icily blue.

“Put it on, brother,” Torrant snarled. “There’s hunting to do.”

Aylan smiled with forced brilliance and removed his own battered cloak. He loved Torrant’s fierceness—he always had—but seeing that proof of animal in his gentle brother’s human heart unnerved him. From the moment Aylan realized that those eyes didn’t desire him the way he desired Torrant, he’d known his friend’s heart was unreachable when that winter-sky blue looked down on the world. Unbidden, he thought of Yarri, and he amended the thought. Torrant’s heart was unreachable to anybody else when he was fierce like this, but for Yarri, Aylan was sure, he would become human again.

For now, he eased up on that hard grin and crinkled his dark-blue eyes. “I didn’t get you anything!” he protested half-heartedly, as he did the bronze clasp at his throat and felt the satisfying number of pockets. The cloak was heavy and solid, and would protect him well in a fight, and it had slits through the sides for his arms, so that the folds wouldn’t get in the way during battle.

“You got me out of this Goddess forsaken pisshole,” Torrant returned, with more cheer than he’d felt in hours.

“Good day, brother?” Aylan asked as Torrant led the way out of the back entrance. With a hand up and a heave they both easily cleared the wooden fence that surrounded the little porch and both of them instinctively shrank into the shadows of the alleyway behind the great granite building.

“Damned useless day,” Torrant growled, with feeling. Aylan could faintly see the glimmer of white fur at Torrant’s face and neck, and tufts appearing at his hands…“What are they gathering for, do you know?”

Aylan grunted—negative—and tied the kerchief around his face. His bright hair was tucked up into his dark, brimmed hat already. He had no idea why so much force had spilled onto the streets of Dueance this night, but he was prepared to do something about it. They had made forays into the city for the year before this, and none of them ended peacefully. Aylan recently discovered--in a very personal way--the cost his friend had paid for their moments of covert peacekeeping, and the thought of the flesh that Torrant was willing to give in order to ensure that Rath’s men spilled as little civilian blood as possible was horrifying.

The good news was that after their previous practice, tonight they moved as a team, sticking to the shadows, placing their booted feet soundlessly. They even had a rhythm—Torrant went first, because his snow-cat eyes were better in the dark, and his sense of smell--even in a partially changed form--could pick up the odor of sweat-stained chain mail at least fifty strides before Aylan could hear it clink.

And Torrant’s improved hearing wasn’t bad either.

Torrant stopped suddenly, shrinking back further into the shadows, and Aylan followed his body language without question, straining his ears to see what his friend could smell.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t good. Torrant held up his hands, showing ten fingers, and then closed his fists and opened one had again. Aylan’s eyes widened. Fifteen? He mouthed, and Torrant nodded. A hand went up to play with an elongating, tufting ear, and Aylan saw Torrant’s fingers move to the notch at the end. It was not a habit Torrant had when fully human, but when he was thinking like a predator, his fingers automatically moved to where he was first marked as one. Aylan had only noticed it when they’d gone hunting in the city.

Abruptly Torrant held up one finger—wait a minute—and just as abruptly ceased to be human. In a fluid, silent leap, the snow cat was up on the roof of the little gatehouse they were hiding behind, and only Aylan could hear his spit of dissatisfaction at the view. There was another leap, as Torrant moved to a windowsill, and then another as he moved up a level on the building. They had not moved far from the regent’s apartments, which in turn were nearly adjacent to the guard’s barracks. The guard barracks opened out straight into the Goddess ghetto, but this building was still a part of the Consort’s favored. In fact, it looked like a bureaucratic office of some sort—the human half of Torrant’s mind was saying Aha! This is where all the people actually work in the Regent’s Hall.

Whatever it was, it was blessedly vacant as the giant snow cat worked its way up to the top, and then prowled up there from corner to corner, licking anxious whiskers as he padded. The way down was just as fluid as the way up, and when he poured into a morphing form of skin and muscle next to Aylan, he was speaking almost before his vocal cords were fully human.

“There’s over a hundred of them, headed for the ghetto,” Torrant growled, “and fifteen of them coming our way.” Aylan sucked wind through his teeth, and Torrant went on. “Some of them have cans of paint and most of them have shackles and all of them are armed…”

“Cans of paint…” Aylan repeated blankly. Then: “Vandalism.”

“Make the Goddess folk look like criminals, make the people happy to keep them confined,” Torrant finished on a sub-growl. Roughly he rammed his head back against the side of the building, hard enough to see stars. “This is because of me!”

“Think much of yourself?” Aylan asked, but he felt a chill. It was too much of a coincidence, wasn’t it? Ellyot Moon makes his grand appearance at council this evening, and by the height of the three moons there are a hundred guardsmen hurrying to harass a sixteen-block square of city that most folks tried to ignore?

“We need to stop them,” Torrant stated the obvious, and then added the catch. “And we can’t kill them.”

Aylan made a definite sound of outrage that he squelched at his friend’s terrible blue-eyed glare. Even he could hear the sloppy movement of armed men in a hurry. “We can’t what?” he mouthed.

“They’re out there to prove that the Goddess folk are savages— they’re going to vandalize the quarter, they’re going to imprison some of their favorite dissenters, and they’re going to prove, once again that the people in the ghetto aren’t really people. We can’t let them do it, but if we leave a string of bodies this time…”

“We just prove them right,” Aylan sighed, still sotto voice. They were drawing close to their own little back-alley corner of the city. “So what do you recommend?”

Torrant grinned, his sharp incisors protruding over his thin cat’s lips. “Watch my lead,” he hissed, and then leapt out in front of the oncoming squad of surprised soldiers.

Aylan always loved watching Torrant in action—full snow cat, full human or anything in between, when the boy was fighting he moved with a tumbler’s grace, a gymnast’s fearlessness, and a dancer’s fluidity. Much of it was training, but the way he could (dodge, duck, feint to the right, clock the enemy in the head with the hilt of his heavy dagger) move in the field was, Aylan was often convinced, nothing shy of the Goddess’ violent poetry in his soul.

Tonight was no exception.

He watched as time slowed down and Torrant kicked out sideways, taking an opponent in the chest, and as the man stumbled back Torrant lashed down, catching the man’s thigh plate and forcing it down onto an unprotected knee. The man grabbed his dislocated knee and screamed, rolling into another man who went down hard over him. That was when Aylan stepped forward and brought his sword hilt down on the back of the man’s head.

And now that he was in it for real, the fight sped up.

He and Torrant were a whirling, fluid, determined dervish of knives, solid hits, dislocated shoulders and knees, and the occasional concussion. By the time they were done, fifteen men lay groaning at their feet, and, wonder of wonders, all of them would live.

To make sure the unconscious men wouldn’t come following, both of them gathered up as many manacles as they could find and set about randomly cuffing the men to each other. They threw the keys in the river on their way past as they headed for the heart of the ghetto, where the rest of the guards of the city were. The night was far from over.

They had the advantage of knowing where the enemy began his campaign, and where the destruction had to end. The guard’s barracks opened out almost right behind the regent’s apartments, and the guards needed to fan east, through the northeast portion of the city, wherein lay the so called “Goddess” folk. It was not a label that existed before Rath had come into his own power. Anyone gifted enough to have the telltale streak of white hair had first been ‘offered free quarters’ and then, herded into them, and then the appellation had grown. Midwives had come next, then healers in general, then any woman who had given birth to a child without a mate. Women whose children had died within a week after they were born were added, as were the men who chose not to abandon their mates.

Poets came next, and painters, and singers whose songs were too close to the truth. Old storytellers who still told stories of the Goddess were taken from their houses and put into the middle of Goddess square, and told not to return. Children whose voices were too eerily sweet to be real were told not to sing, or pushed into the quarters, and so on.

When it came time for the ‘sexual deviants’ to be thrown into the now crowded, squalid, tiny patch of cobbled-together-stucco walled hell of disease and disenfranchisement, the solution was simple. Rath had looked at the living conditions of the people who had been unlucky enough to not escape the city as he’d tightened the noose of their damned bad luck and personal choice around their throats and then had sentenced ‘those people’ to death automatically.

It was bad enough being aligned with the Whoring Moon by accident—choosing that path apparently made one simply evil.

So the guards percolated through the ghetto like fetid swamp gas, and Torrant and Aylan snuck up behind them, leaving gobbets of guardsman in a manacled daze like chunks of carrion from a vulture’s mouth. It was a good system, and Aylan was feeling particularly proud of the two of them as the dawn played coy with the Old Man Hills, when a sudden shout from above them rent the air.

At first they were afraid that the guards had gotten smart enough to keep a lookout from the rooftops, and then they heard the words “Fire! The school is on fire!”

“Goddess!” Torrant swore. The children in the Goddess’ ghetto weren’t allowed to attend school—but a small, unprepossessing wooden building had been used for the last two years, along with a stash of contraband books and materials (donated by Lane Moon, of course) to give the youngsters the basics of reading and writing and poetry and hope.

“Would they be in there at this hour?” Aylan gasped, as the two of them made ready to sprint the block east to where the school sat.

The sound of jeering and a terrible scream answered the question. At least one child was in there, and the guards who had set the fire weren’t letting her out.

Torrant’s howl of fury was no longer remotely human, and the fluid form of the snow cat sped into this new fray.

By the time Aylan arrived at the scene, sucking in as much air as his exhausted body would allow him, the fight was nearly over—and this time the three bodies crumpled on the ground in front of the tiny wooden shack would not arise again to lie about what they had been doing. Aylan watched, with his heart in his throat, as the snow cat played swipe-and-parry with what he thought must be the last two guardsmen.

The building had been covered in paint thinner—it was burning with gusto and fury. Although the flames had not yet caught completely, the scream of the child trapped inside (she had spent the night there, hidden by her parents when word of the massive ‘purge’ had gotten out) had grown hoarse and weak with coughing.

Aylan took a good look at Torrant and thought that his brother in arms could handle this lot on his own, and instead launched himself through the weakened wood door, hoping to break it through. As he was going he felt a weak stab—one of the guards Torrant was battling had turned and taken a good swipe at Aylan’s back end as he went through—and he thanked the Goddess for the thick cloak he’d been sweating under for the whole warm night. Outside he heard the shrill cry of the snow cat, cranked up beyond sound, as he assumed his friend went in for the kill. His own eyes were on the terrified child, crouched in the center of a room that was now entirely alight with terrible flames.

In a swirl of black leather he enveloped her, protecting her already blistering skin from the heat of the flames and the smoke, and in three steps bounded back out of the room, trusting that Torrant would have taken care of any dangers there. The child whimpered in his arms, and he could hardly bear to look at her as Torrant partially changed form beside him. Furry hands came out to take the girl from Aylan, and Aylan gave her willingly, listening as Torrant’s soothing growl told her that everything would be all right.

There was no crowd, here in the almost-gray of the morning. No one would have dared draw attention to their neighbors by facing the guards vandalizing the ghetto. There was nobody to hear Torrant’s broken voice as he crooned over the little girl who was raggedly and weakly coughing blood in his arms.

Aylan risked a look at her and swallowed his gorge. Her skin had blistered. It was, in fact, peeling off from her face and her hands, and from her scalp in clumps of charred hair. It had been hot in the room, but Aylan had only spent seconds—she had been there for minutes as the accelerant had taken flame, and it had been too long. Torrant’s murmuring growl continued, and Aylan realized that he had been mistaken. His brother was not telling her that she would be all right.

“My brothers will be there to greet you,” he was murmuring, “and they will teach you to dance, and you can swim in the family swimming hole, and get all of the soot and ash from your clothes, right?” There was no response as her screaming breaths shuddered painfully in her chest, and he didn’t wait for any. “My mothers will be there, and they will dress you in pretty dresses, with ribbons, and Ellyot, my brother, will teach you to dance when they are done. And when you have danced until your feet are sore and you have laughed until your sides hurt, my fathers will hold you on their laps and read stories to you until you fall asleep. And you will be warm and loved and happy, forever and ever under the light of the stars.”

The painful breaths stuttered to a halt even as he finished, and

Aylan could hardly bear to look at his brother, knowing what would be etched in his face, human or inhuman, as the child died in his arms and the tiny school of hope burned itself out between the brick buildings behind them. Into that silence, there was the thudding of bells, as the clock tower by the Regent’s Hall claimed the morning hour.

“Where are her parents?” Torrant rasped roughly, and Aylan took a good look at the charred body and made a rough guess.

“About two blocks over. Let me take her, brother.”

“I should…” Torrant heard the last chime of the bell and grimaced.

“You should go prepare for a long day,” Aylan replied with a grim attempt at humor, reaching out for the unbearable burden in his arms. Torrant rewarded him with an equally grim smile, but did not relinquish his hold.

“Good hunting tonight, brother,” he commended, looking dazedly at the dead guards at his feet over the head of the dead child. “I’m sorry I forgot myself here.” A sudden shudder racked him, and he clutched the tiny body closer to him, his muscles shivering like lute strings as he attempted to get himself under control. A shutter somewhere opened, and a low growl sounded in the back of his throat, an awakening sound.

“Here, brother,” Aylan repeated gently, “let me take her…I’ll see to her properly.”

And now the growl turned to a mewling sound, and Aylan swallowed, hard.

“You need to go fight for us all, Torrant,” he whispered, not wanting the name to chime like a clock-tower across the city. “You’ve been Triane’s Son, now go be Ellyot Moon, yes?”

“Yes,” Torrant murmured, finally giving his terrible precious burden over, not even daring to look at the cracked, blistered little face. “Absolutely. Dawn’s here.”

Aylan smelled the charred flesh and hair and the burnt fabric of the little cotton dress even as he felt the dead weight, feather dry and light in his arms. He fought the urge to fall to the ground, retching and weeping, and when he recovered he looked up to see that without another word, “Triane’s Son” was limping toward the nearest alley, blood from a wound along his back flank dripping down the back of his breeches.

Something about the placement of the wound bothered Aylan immensely.

It niggled at him, even as he slunk along the alleyways to the child’s house, although the thought left him for a moment in all of the chaos and agony that followed his knock upon that door. I’m so sorry. It caught so fast. We were too late…I’m so sorry we were too late. His words, weak and sad, were hardly heard as her mother and father—older folks, who’d had five children before her but loved her no less for all of that— wept soundlessly for their tiny one.

He wanted words to tell them about Torrant’s beautiful benediction, and how she had died seeing a family of strong brothers, kind mothers, and gentle fathers who would guide her in the light of the stars, but they had been Torrant’s words and not his, and his own words simply failed. When a neighbor knocked on the door and rushed in with familiarity and her own tears, Aylan simply kissed the still, cold and sooty forehead and bowed and left, slinking along his own shadows until he found the partially destroyed building that housed his own modest little room.

Torrell, the young widower who had first employed Torrant and Aylan’s assistance in dealing with the sadistic guards and vicious priests as they ravaged the trapped victims in the Goddess ghetto, had been happy to help Aylan furnish his room the day before. It had an ugly old green couch for sleeping on, a small chest to hold food, a chamber pot (and a hole in the floor near the rubble wall that led to the alley privy ditch outside for dumping it in) and a big, tough, ugly green gray carpet between the bare warped boards and Aylan’s feet. The flat was protected by the rubble wall and a pile of ruined wood on the side near the street and it shared the outside wall of the building next door to it on the side adjacent.

He entered it through a (thankfully) low window from the small alley on the other side. The alley was the only way to get into the tiny courtyard behind the derelict building itself. Torrell kept a garden back there—the white streak over his brow made his green thumb a sure thing.

Today, Aylan wanted his lumpy couch and the pile of old throws that Bethen had sent with him, and a dreamless sleep. He paused in that goal to slide out of that magnificent cloak—the one he was sure had saved his arse literally—and throw it over the back of the couch. His eyes widened when he saw the score across the back of the cloak. The score itself was closed, as though it had re-knit, like flesh. Around the edges were flakes of crusted blood.

Abruptly that niggling little doubt he’d had exploded into his vision and the picture of Torrant limping away, sporting the wound that had been rightfully incurred by Aylan himself, blinded him. His legs gave way and he fell into the couch, clutching his knees to his chest and holding back on the urge to howl.

That bastard. That goddess-forsaken-git-wanker-arse-buggering bastard. Aylan dragged a breath in through his chest, and it felt like dragging the inside of his bare skin over his own broken bones. Ah Goddess… how could Torrant do this to him.

He was making little angry moaning sounds and rocking himself for comfort when Torrell let himself in through the window without ceremony. With a shuddering breath Aylan was himself, and he willed Torrell to ignore him as he ran sweaty hands through his hair, trying not to shake.

Torrell gave him a nod, and looked away courteously, even as he made himself at home and squatted on Aylan’s food chest.

“Bad night, brother?” Torrell asked as though he knew the answer.

“It had its moments,” Aylan replied, swallowing hard.

“I brought you something.” Torrell held out a wooden bowl filled with diced tomatoes, olive oil, and fresh bread.

Aylan gave his best impression of a smile. “Thank you.”

“It’s going to come at a hard price. The Alms were grateful that you brought their little girl back—but you left so early. They wanted to know if she said anything…if she suffered.”

“She died coughing blood, Torrell. Of course she suffered,” Aylan answered shortly, shoving handfuls of breadcrumbs and tomatoes in his mouth for sustenance more than anything else.

Torrell sighed. “Is there anything else then you can tell me? Anything of comfort?”

And that quickly, duty to his body was no longer a reason to eat.

“He told her stories,” he murmured, wondering why he, too, couldn’t just cough blood and die. It would be a hell of a lot less painful.

“Triane’s Son?”

“Torrant—you knew him as Torrant before you saw him change…”

“But anyone who has ever seen your friend must know that he is not ordinary. Besides, given what you’ve told me about the new ‘Ellyot Moon’, I’m thinking that it would be safer not to say that name too loud here.” Torrell’s eyes were a rich, deep brown, and Aylan met them, not realizing how his anger spit out of his own gaze.

“And he needs me to remind him who he is. His name is Torrant, and he sang to that girl about his family, all of them, waiting to greet her when she played in the light of the stars.” Aughh—that had hurt every bit as much as he thought it would, but not nearly as much as the thought of Torrant taking his wounds for him.

Torrell grimaced and rubbed his eyes. “That is good—it’s good for the girl’s family, they will be comforted. But for your friend…it’s not such a good thing.”

Aylan heard Torrant’s rough, growling voice speaking of his honored dead and the anger flooded from him like an ebbing wave. “He wants to take away the pain, that’s all,” he murmured in complete understanding. He met Torrell’s eyes then, his own unspeakably sad. “He’s a healer—I think it’s just what he does.”

Torrell nodded and took the bowl from Aylan’s nerveless fingers. “Lay down and sleep—I’m going to fix a covering for that window that will hinge up when you need to enter. I’ll have Arue bring a pallet in so she can sleep in the corner—she’ll help keep you safe.

“Arue needs to be in her own home,” Aylan murmured dreamily. Aldam could send people into an instant sleep, he thought, and frowned at the bowl of tomatoes in Torrell’s hands, a sudden suspicion making him angry all over again.

“I didn’t need to drug your food, Aylan,” Torrell laughed, reading his mind. “You’ve been up for two full days—sleep was bound to come pounding down your door. You make Arue feel safe—you always have. She’d be honored to do guard duty for you. Besides—you brought her new books.”

With that last bit of information, Torrell disappeared through the window like a rabbit down a hole, leaving Aylan to simply flop over limply, asleep in his boots, breeches and all.

Yarri looked unhappily at Aylan, who could meet nobody’s eyes during this part of the song.

Yarri knew her husband’s body—she had known it when they’d been children, swimming together in the summer or bathing in the big family tub in Moon Hold, when it had been flawless and perfect. He’d had a few scars by the time she’d known his body as a woman knows a man—she’d been able to count them on one hand, and had spent one lovely, perfect summer night doing just that, with the realization that his body would be different when he returned to her, if he returned at all.

She had never again had the stomach to count the scars on his body, not after Aylan had worn that cloak.

She loved Aylan like a brother, and like her beloved she would lay down her life for Aylan’s in a second, because there are some bonds you can’t break, and some debts that can’t be repaid; none of the three of them had ever been able to fathom where that hideous cloak sat moldering on those scales.

In the end, they had all finally learned that there were some bonds that couldn’t be defined, changed, or broken, and the cloak hadn’t been the beginning of their bond by a long shot.

The miracle had been, of course, that it hadn’t been the end of it, either.

Part III—The Moon at Day Ellyot Moon

Right after he vaulted the wall to the little apartment patio, Torrant shoved a wad of his cloak in his mouth and changed form completely.

Godsdammit, but it always hurt worse when he did that!

He looked up at the clock tower that loomed over his apartment and grimaced. Three hours—sleep would be thin and dire, after a hard night, but it couldn’t be helped.

The shower was mandatory—he wasn’t sure who was going to change the thick cotton sheets on his bed, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t allowed to. He didn’t think dried blood or kerosene and soot would go unremarked upon. He didn’t know what to do with his clothes. He settled for wadding them up in the hamper, and hoping this staff was as discreet as the concierge said. He certainly couldn’t run downstairs and wash them himself.

When he fell into bed, praying for his internal clock to wake him up, he was clean, naked, and willfully closing off his mind to the horrors of the night before.

The knock on his door came scarcely an hour later.

“I’m coming, Aldam…” Torrant mumbled, and stumbled out of the bedroom and into the sitting room before his tired mind even registered that this wasn’t their surgery, and Aldam had been left, distraught and despondent, back in Clough.

When he got to the front room, the door burst open and a crowd of his fellow regents burst in, laughing cheerfully and talking as though they had known him and his burgundy/mahogany/sateen apartment for years.

“Dueant’s strong arm, Ellyot—take it easy there!” said the young man in the lead. He was not much taller than Torrant and angular, with almond shaped eyes, a narrow chin, and ears that peeked cheekily out from where his hair was tucked behind them. He smiled sunnily at Torrant and gestured at the knife in his sword hand and the sheet wrapped around his naked hips.

Torrant blinked hard at them, but four years of healing in the mountains helped him wake up quickly. As he widened his eyes trying to get rid of the bleariness, he managed a semi-intelligent question. “Who are all of you, and what are you doing here?”

“We’re your fellow prisoners of the Regent’s Hall, that’s who we are!” replied the first young man. He flashed that gods-gorgeous, naïve and sunny smile again and extended his hand. “I’m Aerk, for the house of Farell, and this here is…”

“Dark, from the house of Sarcasm,” broke in the dark haired, dark eyed young man at Aerk’s side. His hair was short but erratically cut over dark brows, his lips had a sardonic twist, and when Torrant’s eyebrows went up at the introduction, he angled his head, the twist re-forming itself into a sheepish smile. “Right—I’m Keon, the house of Olive.” Another handshake, and another young man stepped forward.

Dimitri from the house of Troy, Jino, from the house of Blue, Marv from the house of Win, Eljean from the house of Grace and Djali from the house of Rath all introduced themselves in short order. The name of the last young man—a shortish, plumpish young man a little younger than Torrant brought another expression of raised eyebrows— this time without the amusement.

“I don’t talk to my father at all, if that helps,” shrugged Djali diffidently with a miserable smile, and perhaps it was the early hour without any sleep, or the seeming sincerity of this impromptu welcome, but Torrant’s mouth quirked up gently and he winked at the boy— for boy is what he seemed—and he felt marginally better when Djali flushed and smiled shyly back.

“It does indeed,” grunted Torrant, bemusedly. He stepped back a bit and got a better handle on the sheet wrapped around his waist. “Uhm…not that I don’t appreciate the visit and all…” he raised his eyebrows meaningfully. He was telling the truth—he had planned to befriend the youngest members of the Regent’s Hall, the ones he still believed could wreak change. He had not, however, planned on them all barging in on him when he was sleeping, naked, and unaware.

“What are we doing here?” Aerk asked, grinning that infectious smile again.

“Right,” Torrant nodded towards his sheet. “I wasn’t exactly expecting you.”

“We came to tell you that the convocation has been moved up an hour,” said Eljean, stepping forward. He was very tall—taller even than Aylan, with black, curly hair down to his shoulders and eyes that were meadow-green. His mouth was red and soft, like a girl’s, and his face was a narrow oval, made masculine by pointed cheek-bones, a bold nose, and a pointed chin. He didn’t smile, but his eyes held a veiled appraisal. Torrant blinked at him, wide awake now but playing sleepy and disoriented to take stock of his new friends. He knew that look in a man’s eyes, he thought with faint shock. After eight years of fending off Aylan’s advances and one glorious night of giving in to them, he could recognize that veiled desire in the brilliant green eyes of the tall and plain-featured Eljean.

“Moved up an hour?” he asked, returning Eljean’s stare neutrally.

“We sent someone to tell you last night,” said Jino, looking very responsible under a perfect coif of curly hair. Torrant got the feeling that it was a demeanor he used to get out of a lot of work and into a lot of beds, even as Jino gave a practiced, winning shrug. “You weren’t here last night, so here we are now.”

Marv elbowed his way good naturedly in front of Jino to get in his bit. He had dusky skin, slightly crooked front teeth, and hair cut short in tight ringlets—together he and Jino often, unknowingly, vied for the ‘who’s the prettiest’ award in their circle of friends, and they had never pursued a girl who hadn’t fallen for them. (Marv was the first to admit that Jino did more of the pursuing—he had a special girl back at his family’s estate in the country.)

“So we thought we’d get here early,” Marv was saying winningly, “warn you, and take you to the marketplace for breakfast—the bakery there is the best, especially in the early morning…”

“And we were damned curious about you,” interjected Keon, dryly.

Torrant had to laugh at that, and he found his heart in his throat a little as he looked at their eager, friendly faces. A welcome to the city. Allies. Things he hadn’t dared to dream of, but that he seemed to have found anyway. He knew there was a price—there was always a price—and very likely one of these eager faces had the ear of Consort Rath, but there was sincerity here as well.

“Excellent,” he murmured, nodding at them with quiet eyes. “Let me go find clothes.”

“Uhm…” Djali murmured from his seemingly preferred place in the back of the pack.

“What is it?” Dimitri demanded shortly, rolling his eyes.

“There were clothes in the hallway…”

“That package?” Marv took the brown, paper-wrapped armload courteously from Djali and handed it to Torrant. “How do you know its clothes?”

“My father sends the same man to me,” Djali returned. “He’s not a bad guy, really—he…he talked to me.” He smiled again, almost as a reflex, and Torrant wondered painfully what his home life must have measured, to be doling out those terrible smiles.

“Well, whoever they are, they need to work harder,” Eljean said practically, breaking open the seal and sorting through Torrant’s new things with arrogant ease. “These aren’t enough to last you through summer.” Even Torrant could see that Eljean’s impeccably cut huntsman, breeches, and summer cloak were the first water of fashion—and all of them were green and blue, the better to set off Eljean’s eyes.

“I just ordered them yesterday.” Torrant took a proffered set of green breeches, brown tunic, and an elegantly embroidered huntsman in green and gold from Eljean’s hands while keeping a firm anchor on the sheet at his waist. Curiously he looked at the rest of the things in the package—now spread about his brocade couch.

“Here, Eljean—what’s that?” he asked, indicating a swath of green and gold fabric that looked familiar for all its newness. “It’s got a note on it.”

“Here,” said Dimitri, shooting an evil look at Eljean that Torrant couldn’t interpret. “Let me read it. Sir—since you cannot wear the old one in public or the other during the day, perhaps you will consider this one for public use. I will accept any payment you consider. And it’s signed “Coryal”.”

“Really?” Torrant’s voice softened and he looked at the cloak with new eyes. It had been a kind gesture, and he recalled the slight man with the fluttery movements and the black goatee. “That’s wonderful—I shall have to pay him for it this morning, if we pass by.” He looked up at his new friends, his face wreathed in a smile, and awkwardly scooped up his purchases (he was holding both the knife and the sheet in one hand by now) and moved towards the bedroom. “You can show me his shop, right?” he asked Djali expectantly, and the young man flushed again.

“Absolutely…it’s on the way to the bakery.”

Torrant’s smile deepened, his lip curled up and the dimple on one cheek popped. “Excellent—I’ll be out in a moment.”

The door closed behind him, and, he knew well, the conversation opened.

“Holy gods,” Aerk said into the sudden silence, “did you see his…” and then the rest of the men filled in the blank at the exact same moment.

“Knife?” from Keon, with a raised eyebrow. Keon was not an able fencer, but he read a lot and was fascinated by the art of violence.

“Income!” said Dimitri, impressed.

“Scars!” exclaimed Marv and Jino in jealous tandem. They fenced a lot and were proud of the breadth of their chests, but had yet to see real combat.

“Smile,” murmured Eljean, in a dreamy shock that the others chose to ignore.

“Lute!” exclaimed Djali, because the instrument was still out of its case in the corner of the room.

All of the young men looked at each other in surprise, and Aerk finished his original sentence in a voice that was positively arid. “I was going to say ‘knife’ just like Keon, but really, what you all said was good,” he grimaced. “With the exception of ‘smile’.” He rolled his eyes at Eljean.

Keon shrugged. “Well, I’m no Goddess boy, but even I had to admit it was pretty spectacular.”

“Who says I’m a Goddess boy?” Eljean asked defensively. They all knew the penalty for that particular deviation was death—in spite of what the heart might want.

“No one,” Aerk soothed, “and we were talking about Ellyot Moon. So—anyone want to guess about the scars and the knife?”

“I don’t know about the scars,” mused Keon—although there had been a few of them, straight, crescent shaped, wedged and torn, ranging across his chest, shoulders and back. “But I would think that, if his past is what he says it is…well, I’d want to sleep with a knife under my pillow too.”

“Especially in this town,” muttered ‘Ellyot’, emerging from his room with water combed hair and still lacing his huntsman.

“Ye gods, you were fast!” Keon exclaimed back—partly to cover his embarrassment at being caught gossiping like a girl, and partly because Ellyot really had scarcely left the room.

“Four years as a healer in the Old Man Hills,” Torrant replied with a yawn that was only partly feigned. “It makes a man learn to get ready to ride out in a moment.” He finished the lace and buckled his sword and scabbard about his waist with quick, efficient movements that spoke of easy use, then looked around the room at his new ‘friends’. “So, shall we go?”

“Oueant’s prick,” Dimitri sneered crudely, “Djali, you wouldn’t be so fat if you didn’t eat three times as much as the rest of us!”

Marv frowned. “Leave him alone, Dimitri—one of those pastries is for me.”

Djali shrunk into his own shoulders and looked longingly at the pastry Marv had just split in half for him with a wink. It was obvious that he had been planning to eat it—and he wasn’t really fat, Torrant thought critically. He was broad. Stocky. Square. The food had probably been fuel, not dessert.

But Dimitri’s bullying and Marv’s defense were par for the course among the regents. His most hapless targets were Djali and Eljean.

“Are you done staring at my arse, Eljean? It’s starting to sweat, and you know how I hate that—or you’d like to,” he sneered now that Djali apparently had a champion.

Eljean, who had actually been looking over the red-clay-shingled tops of the buildings surrounding the marketplace as though searching for an escape, flushed.

“If you’d like me to stare at your arse, just ask me,” he said simply, and it was obvious to Torrant from Dimitri’s disgusted sneer that he could take the facetious comment at face value if he chose to—and that all of the young men knew it. His heart went abruptly out to Eljean—what a horrible thing to have a crush, and to have it twisted in such a way that any reference to it was laced with razor-wire pain.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Dimitri just had to twist that razor in a little further, and Torrant scowled at him.

“If you want to see someone crucified,” he said pleasantly, “there are less painful ways—like buggering him in the middle of the square with a jeering crowd. But if you’re going to just sit here and peck him to death like a rabid duck, I’d just as soon go get my coffee elsewhere.”

“No!” Aerk protested, glaring at Dimitri. “He’s just being a pig and a bully—ignore him and talk to us.”

“I’m not that interesting,” Torrant dismissed and Keon snorted coffee out his nose.

“Brother, that book collection in your apartment alone would make you the most interesting thing to happen in this city for months.” Keon’s frayed black cuffs and un-tucked shirt were apparently the result of spending his wardrobe money on forbidden books, and Torrant had taken that as a hopeful sign. Anyone who loved books had an open mind—Keon was a definite ally, as was Aerk, who felt the same way about books, but more particularly about music and songs. The two of them, although clean and groomed for this day, had a look about them, as though looks were secondary to the constant, thoughtful activity of active minds.

“That library will get you censured and arrested, if you aren’t careful,” Dimitri said ominously, and Torrant turned to him with more than a little dislike.

“Only if you tell Rath about it, right?” He was watching Dimitri carefully, and he caught the panicked flush behind the cavalier shrug. Well, it was obvious he wouldn’t tell Rath now.

The boys were amusing enough company, Torrant decided after they had brought him to a booth in the marketplace that featured chocolate-laced coffee and sausage pastries. He sat in the morning sun of early summer and drank quite a lot of the coffee, trying to get rid of the fog in his head, and was content, for the most part to be a friendly observer to their conversation. It was obvious that the young men had grown up in this position of leaden responsibility without ever having learned first hand what it was they were actually doing.

The only stinking cabbage in the lot was Dimitri, but as much as he tried to share the stench of his disdain, the other young regents were doing their best to keep him in line. Marv’s defense of Djali and Aerk’s defense of Eljean were common moments. Dimitri would bully, and the other boys would defend.

Although they took turns parrying comments about Jino’s womanizing, Marv’s swordsmanship, Keon’s clothes, and Aerk’s shaggy hair, most of the barbs were aimed at Djali’s clumsy embarrassment and Eljean’s potential to be a Goddess boy. It seemed to be a common understanding that Djali and Eljean were the weakest of the group, the least able to defend themselves, and it was heartening to see that the four other men were prepared to take care of them if it was needed. It spoke of good hearts on their parts, even though it was worrisome on behalf of Djali, and especially of Eljean. If a person was constantly afraid of something, he was more likely to fold under pressure, more likely to betray at an inopportune moment. Eljean had that potential, Torrant could see it in his miserable, dreamy determination to simply huddle in and endure Dimitri’s endless taunting.

Torrant wondered if any of them realized that they were allowing one man to demoralize them, one nasty, demeaning comment at a time. They’d been doing a good job of fending off his cancerous personality so far, but Torrant was a healer—the best way to deal with a malignant growth was to excise it, permanently.

“Is the marketplace always this busy?” he asked idly now, mulling over what to do about Dimitri and his poisonous tongue. In spite of many gambits into politics, he was trying hard to stay neutral. It was hard—every time they swore by Dueant’s pride, he wanted to shout to the wind that pride wasn’t what the god stood for. Every time they whored the Goddess, he wanted to weep. It seemed as though every exchange, every veiled taunt Dimitri made to Eljean, every brandish of the unblemished swords at the waists of Marv and Jino, every thoughtful, funny exchange of Keon and Aerk as they felt their way blindly through ideas that Torrant himself had learned on his fathers’ knees, grated on him subtly, like pants worn wet to dry.

“Ugh… Dimitri grunted. “It’s Goddess day—the ghetto rats are out in filthy force. It’s a good thing we got here early or we might have been in the privy all day with the trots ourselves.”

“I’m sure the cholera epidemic occurred just to annoy you, Dimitri,” Torrant snapped, out of patience in one careless remark.

“Well if they weren’t filthy worshippers, it wouldn’t have happened!” Dimitri responded with blind arrogance, and just like that, Torrant became political.

“It’s their fault they were put into a ghetto and then denied basic sanitation?” he asked, his eyes suddenly sharp and awake.

“What do you mean, ‘denied’?” Aerk asked, at the same time Dimitri asked, “It’s they’re fault they were fit to herd in a corner!”

Torrant eyed Dimitri with such extreme contempt that the handsome, brown-haired youth backed away. “I’ll answer that when I’m not afraid of killing you for stupidity,” he grunted, not looking to see if Dimitri took him seriously or not.

He turned to Aerk. “The ghettoes were made especially for the Goddess’s chosen, you know that, right?” At Aerk’s and Keon’s somber nods he continued, “Well the government—you people—made them, and then herded the people in there that fit your criteria and then cut off all funding to them whatsoever. You tax their food, you tax their market time, you tax any means they have of making a living—and whose roads do you pave with that tax money?”

“The city’s roads?” Marv asked, confused.

“Which part of the city?” Torrant asked patiently, “Because it’s not their part. Every part of the city was paved, and every part of the city had sewage culverts installed, except the Goddess ghetto. That leaves two parts of the city for the shite to go, me boy-os, and one of them is dug into a raised concrete trench on higher ground than most of the rest of the city, so it’s right out, and besides—you won’t let them drink out of it anyway. No—remember? The only place the ghetto can drink is from the wells dug in the ghetto. The wells that were running with the whole of the city’s shite.”

“We caused the cholera epidemics?” Keon asked, his shocked hush carrying over the bustle of the marketplace.

“Oh come on, Keon…” Dimitri mocked, but Keon cut him off with a hand.

“Don’t you ever look out your windows, Dimitri? I do. I watched body carts going from house to house three years ago.” His voice grew a little dusty, like dry earth. “There were tiny bodies being thrown into them. I…I heard the bills being passed, the ones telling us which parts of the city were being paved and…it never occurred to me…”

“See?” Dimitri challenged, even as Keon and Aerk were looking at each other in shocked horror and Marv and Jino were watching the exchange thoughtfully, trying to decide if the outcome were worth the emotional investment. “It’s just part of his plan of vengeance on Rath—he saw a boogeyman when his old playmates turned on his family, and now he’s here to blame our king!”

Torrant laughed without any humor at all. The last two days simply fell out of the sky, past the comforting pillow of chocolate and coffee, landing on his shoulders and crushing him to the ground. With eyes that were unutterably weary, he turned to Dimitri and cut through all pretenses in a few sentences.

“I know I wasn’t told about the early session for a reason,” he said, his usually eloquent voice flat and still. “And although I’m grateful you chose to give me a warning, I’m pretty sure you all arrived at my doorstep just to see if I was worth the novelty. I hope I’ve met your expectations.” He tilted his head back, drained his hot chocolate and stood deliberately, aware that he had their attention as completely as the earth had the sun’s.

“Let’s clear something up right now—if I had been bred for vengeance, I would have found it.” Planting his hands squarely on the wooden trestle table he leaned into them, speaking quietly but with intensity. “I took my sister and my brother-of-the-heart over Hammer Pass in the dead of winter when I was fourteen years old. The only thing that’s kept me from sneaking into this city and slitting Rath’s throat while he slept has been the knowledge that nothing would change. You people would make a show of how awful it was that someone would do such a thing, and then you’d go back to perpetrating his policies. He has enough true believers around him now that this could happen, and my people and my sister’s people would be just as bollixed as they were when we were children and our family was slaughtered practically before our eyes.

They all just looked at him, seven fresh-faced young men, six innocent sets of eyes, listening in breathless anticipation of what he would reveal next. He’d better make it good.

“Vengeance is fleeting,” he told them, believing it. “Vengeance is four beats of the heart as the blood gushes to the floor. Vengeance is a body dropping in the woods. Vengeance won’t keep my family safe. It won’t keep my sister from being raped in an alleyway. It won’t keep the children of our future from being locked in their school, where it should be safe, and burned alive by the people you’ve been paying with your naivety. Vengeance is not what I came for.”

He let the silence throb, waiting for them to ask the question.

“What did you come for?” Djali asked tentatively, crossing his arms in front of his chest and bobbing his moon face convulsively away from the terrifying, intense person they had gathered in their midst. Always for Djali there was that painful hesitation, and in spite of the weighted cushion of silence around the young men, Torrant couldn’t help but wonder what it must have been like to have an opinion in the house of Rath.

“He’s going to tell you so you can go bleat to your Daddy?” Dimitri snapped, obviously trying to shake the heaviness of Ellyot Moon’s steely words.

“Djali’s not the one who would bleat to his father, and we all know it, don’t we Dimitri?” Torrant responded evenly.

Dimitri flinched, and a twitch of a cheek too thin to be a smile crossed his handsome features.

Torrant nodded as though he had spoken. “So since I know you’re going to go report this morning to whomever cares to listen, I’ll spell it out in careful letters, with no big words. I didn’t come for vengeance. What I came for is much more frightening and much more difficult to achieve. I came for change.”

The sounds of the vendors and the customers and the calling children faded completely into the background as the young men all regarded him, digesting his words like cold porridge. The silence was only more pronounced as the bell chimed the half-hour before the convocation.

Torrant swallowed, not as tired as he had been, and stepped back into a courteous little bow. “Now, if Djali can point me to his father’s tailor, I’d like to settle up for some serious kindness before I meet you all back at the Regent’s Hall.”

“It’s right over there—down that block and on the right,” Djali said in a dazed voice, fumbling his coffee as he did another head-bob away from Torrant’s eyes, and Torrant bowed again.

“Wait…Ellyot…” Aerk said uncertainly, and Torrant gave him a small smile. He had, after all, been listening. “Did they really lock the doors at Triannon and burn it down?”

“Oh yes,” Torrant assured him.

“What were you doing to stop them?” Keon asked seriously.

Torrant grimaced, the memory still too fresh to wash over with strength. “I was fighting with two old professors and a group of schoolboys who had never fought without a tipped sword.”

“Against a company of Clough soldiers?” Dimitri scoffed. “However did you escape?

Torrant’s face closed down into a mask so absolute, it could only be covering pain. “With my hands dripping in treason,” he said faintly. “Now, if you will excuse me?”

This time they let him go.

The tailor was surprised to see him, and even more surprised at the gratitude.

“I was just doing my job!” he exclaimed, taking twice the tip Djali had suggested from Torrant’s hands nonetheless.

“Your job has nothing to do with keeping me from looking foolish, and yet you did it anyway. Triane’s best frock, my friend, having the first cloak done last night alone was worth twice that tip!”

But to his dismay, Coryal’s face blanched white and the look of shock was enough to tie Torrant’s tongue up in his mouth with fierce knots. “Sir…young sir…don’t…don’t spill that name, here. Please, for my sake, not in my house…”

Torrant closed his eyes and mentally slapped himself upside the head. “My apologies,” he murmured, bowing with full sincerity. “I had no intention of causing offense…in my home, Triane’s name is always welcome. I didn’t mean to put you in danger.”

The tailor nodded, then closed his eyes and swallowed. “Your home? Eiran, right? That’s how the gossip runs.”

Torrant nodded and smiled, grateful that the hunched and hunted look had lifted.

“Do they really…love her children, there in Eiran?” he asked with a terrible wistfulness in his voice.

“Yes,” Torrant murmured, thinking of the Beltanes he’d attended, with the handfasts and the dancing and the township spreading its arms to all the citizens, and celebrating their humanity under the spring sun.

Suddenly the tailor’s voice dropped, and he rabbitted a glance out his window, his entire posture screaming I want this kept private!!! “I don’t know if you want to know this or not, young Moon, but I was in the Consort’s rooms this morning and he was furious—it seems he’d ordered some sort of purge in the ghetto last night and the results were three dead guards and an entire company locked up in their own manacles. He doesn’t have many to send out again tonight—too many injuries, but he’s pacing the carpet, trying to order the Secretary General to pull more troops from the outside of the city to take care of this menace.”

Torrant nodded, trying to keep his face neutral—this was good to know, even if all it told him was that he might get some sleep this night…“Does this menace have a name?” he asked, curious.

“No—and it’s making them both rabid. It seems there’re other crimes that have the same description—a terrible creature, half man, half beast, who can fight like the tides at eclipse or the winds in the blizzard season, and no one has a clue.”

Torrant nodded, and searched the tailor’s face for some signs of dissembling. “Why have you not left the city?” he asked gently. He wasn’t sure what the man’s affiliation of the Goddess was, whether he dyed his hair to cover a white streak or monitored his appetites so that no one knew his choice of bedmates, but he was obviously as afraid of being seen for who he really was as he was desperate to have some hope of liberation.

“My…my friend. He’s in the ghettoes—I can’t leave him…” The man grimaced, and there was the answer to the question Torrant hadn’t asked.

“Well, the next time you meet your friend, or hear Rath asking for a name, you give them one, right?”

“Yes, young Sir Moon?” Coryal asked, his voice neutral.

“You tell them Triane’s Son is here, and he’s not leaving until his brethren are safe.”

Hope, terrible and bright, sparkled from the man’s eyes. “Triane’s Son?”

“That’s what I’ve heard,” Torrant nodded. “Thank you again for the cloak.”

With a sniff and a stiffened spine, the tailor responded with pride. “I’ll have that next item up to your room before the session is out,” he said with a bow, and Torrant rewarded him with a smile as he left.

Aerk and his friends were the most senior of the ‘Junior’ Regents— but they were still Juniors. They didn’t get to sit on the Regent’s floor, but sat instead at the balcony and watched with some fascination as the Secretary General tried—unsuccessfully—to grill Ellyot Moon like a trout on the floor of the Regent’s Hall.

“Are you expecting us to believe that a serving woman risked her life to give you a chance to escape?” The contempt dripping from General Rishard’s face almost ate holes through the floor.

“She loved us.” Ellyot’s voice was fierce, but composed. “She would have done anything to help my sis…Yarri and me live.”

That was his one inconsistency, Aerk mulled. In an unheard-of nine-hour session that featured questions both stupid and painful, he had stumbled exactly three times. Each time had been over the words ‘my sister’. Aerk was starting to wonder if the poor girl hadn’t died in Triannon after all—something was definitely amiss, although looking at his fellows, he thought he might be the only one to notice it. Other than that, Ellyot didn’t seem to be capable of sweating

“She ‘loved’ you? She was a Goddess whoring serving wen…”

“She was a mother to us all!” Ellyot snarled. The flesh drew back from his handsome features and that sculpted upper lip curled up from his teeth in a way that was almost feral. “If you want to ask a pertinent question, ask me how it felt to come back to the house to see the two women who had mothered me since babyhood with their skirts over their waists and blood on their thighs because your men couldn’t keep their pricks in their pants, otherwise, you don’t SPEAK of her!!!”

The Secretary General—in fact all of the Regent’s Hall—was struck silent. If Ellyot Moon was going to show his temper, that was the line with which to cut loose. So much of their culture was built upon celibacy and restraint—to actually speak of rape, and a rape perpetrated by the people who were supposed to be protecting them—in public was sure to get the attention of even the most junior adjunct in the room.

“We…well.” The Secretary General stumbled on his words and wiped his suddenly sweating brow. He risked a ferret’s glance at the Consort, whose face had gone so totally blank with shock that he was effectively left on his own. “We don’t speak of such things here,” he said at last, thinly. “This is a place for gentlemen.”

“If you were truly gentlemen, you wouldn’t have sanctioned such a thing,” Ellyot returned, his eyes level and not flinching.

Aerk and Keon actually sucked their breath through their teeth in tandem. Marv and Jino leaned so far over the wrought iron railing that it was a wonder they didn’t topple over. Eljean and Djali whistled lowly and as the silence rang through the hall like a bell, they all met eyes.

“He really means it,” Djali mumbled. “He’s going to make us change.”

“Foolish,” Eljean muttered. “Foolish and blind.” He shook his head, a look crossing his face an awful lot like regret, but for what, nobody at the railing would say.

“I’m going to help him,” Aerk said, a note of surprise in his voice as though he’d expected to hear himself say something else.

“Me too,” Keon agreed. Neither of them had taken their eyes from the tableau below, so they both sucked in their wind again when they saw Rath prepare himself to speak.

“I’m sure you must be mistaken,” the Consort said smoothly, his mustache hardly twitching with his breath. “Nobody in this room would sanction such a distasteful act—it must have been the work of one of the Goddess worshippers that Moon housed. You were a boy. You were simply mistaken.”

Rath was giving him an out. Aerk had never seen that before— Ellyot was being given a chance to back out of an absolute. To emerge on Rath’s side.

“Rath’s afraid of him,” Jino acknowledged quietly, and Aerk and Keon nodded.

“He should be,” Aerk observed. “After nine hours, Moon’s barely broken a temper, and has seriously not broken a sweat.”

“I was old enough to know that the workers on our land were slaughtered before my family,” Ellyot was responding with ferocious dignity. “Who do you think we went to for protection?”

They all saw it, and it startled them enough to not comment on it for a moment, while the drama went on before them. While they were holding their breath in shock, Dimitri wandered in from…from wherever he had been, because none of them wanted to dwell on the idea that Ellyot had known where he would go before they did--and asked, “What’s happening?”

“He flinched,” breathed Marv.

“Moon?” Expectation. Mockery.

“No—Rath.”

The sound that came from Dimitri’s throat could only be described as wounded, and the look Eljean shot him was disappointment in the highest order.

“He was telling the truth,” Eljean murmured, unnecessarily. “He said the Goddess folk had been slaughtered before his family—Rath didn’t think he’d know that.”

“He’s real,” Aerk murmured, “and it’s time to stop this.”

In the memory of the Junior Regents, not one of them had ever actually spoken when an issue was being debated. They were young, and there by their parent’s sufferance, and not a one of them wanted to draw attention to himself by having Rath speak ill of him to his father. Aerk’s heart was thundering in his ears as he leaned over the railing and spoke to the general assembly, as was the custom when an issue had been debated enough and was ready for a vote.

“May I ask, Consort, are there any other doubts in house about the identity of Ellyot Moon?”

Rath actually looked startled as he jerked his eyes from a deadlock with Ellyot, and he had to shake his head before he could orient himself enough to answer. “I beg your pardon?”

Aerk swallowed and sallied again. “Consort,” a quick look around the room, “fellow regents —Ellyot Moon has not asked us to take action on any of the things he has said here. All he’s asked for is a voice—a voice that is rightfully his by succession. I’m asking if there are any more doubts as to who he really is. If there are not, then I do believe we have other work to do.”

The silence was so sharp Aerk thought the tortured breathing of his shocked companions might bleed on it.

“Of course we doubt…” the Secretary General spoke wildly into the silence.

“I don’t,” said Keon, meeting Aerk’s eyes in a grim attempt at self-assurance.

“Me neither,” said Marv and Jino at exactly the same time. They only needed three calls for a vote—everyone knew that. Accepting a Regent into the hall needed a quorum, though—a two-thirds majority. If the vote was over fifty percent and not quite two-thirds, the new member would be voted on repeatedly until he was either accepted or rejected. Aerk knew that if he and the others spoke up, the half of the Regents consigned to the balcony at least, would vote in Ellyot’s favor. Even if he wasn’t voted in by a quorum, he would be allowed to stay in the Hall and speak on issues until he was either voted in and allowed to vote himself, or voted out, in which case his cause would be for naught. He said he wanted change instead of vengeance—the first step to that was having a voice in the Hall.

“I do believe,” came Eljean’s voice with a mocking insouciance, “that we have a call for a vote.”

“We have a call?” The Secretary General looked downright shocked. “What good would a call do now?”

“Well for one thing, it would keep me from getting dissected like a bug by a schoolboy,” Ellyot drawled with a deceptively lazy look up at the balcony. To Aerk’s relief, there was a hearty scatter of laughter—a surprising amount from the lower tier.

Aerk took heart—both from the look, which masked a profound gratitude, and from the laughter, which said that odds were good Ellyot would be around long enough to give voice to the things that were pressing on his chest.

“It doesn’t matter what good it will do you, if you’ll beg my pardon Sir Secretary General,” Aerk called cheerfully, “the vote’s been called for!”

Almost resentfully Aerk looked at Ellyot’s cool stance again, and wondered when the sweat had started dripping from under his own arms. Well, he guessed, some people were heroes by birth, and some just had to sweat it out.

“Then I suppose the Hall is open for debate before the vote,” Secretary General said uncertainly, trying hard to duck the glare of the Consort. But glare or no glare, it couldn’t mask the fact that the two had been maneuvered into a position they neither liked nor could get out of.

“Of course,” said Rath delicately from his throne with the portable desk at its front, “I would think it should be much more comfortable for our young Sir Moon if he were not present for this?”

Aerk and Keon met eyes and grimaced, and the others turned towards them. “It’s common practice,” Aerk agreed softly. “But it means that I can’t be the only one arguing. Are we in?”

“Don’t look at me,” Dimitri said with a bitter pout. “I just went to the privy.”

“Wherever you went, Dimitri, it’s certain that you stink,” Marv snapped, and the rest of them turned away from him. Dimitri looked surprised at first, and then he gave a noisy sigh and turned towards them anyway, obviously not to be left out of whatever it was they were doing—whatever his reasons.

“I’m in,” said Jino. Aerk had known that if Marv was in then Jino would be too. Jino was the thoughtful soldier, and although Marv tended to act first and think later, he relied on Jino for insight.

“Yes,” Djali said quietly, with a furtive look at his father who did not seem to have even noticed that he was up in the balcony with the dissenters.

Eljean glanced at Dimitri—for the last few months, he had always glanced at Dimitri for an opinion, and Dimitri sneered at him, trying to look bored. Eljean looked away then, and down onto the floor, where Ellyot Moon was accepting a glass of water from a servant and gracing the man with the sweetest smile he was sure he had ever seen. The servant walked away, and Ellyot’s face relaxed again leaving him unutterably weary, and a little lost.

“Eljean?” Aerk asked gently. He’d seen that look on Eljean’s face for months—since Dimitri had come to town and been inducted into the Hall of Regents, actually—but he had never seen it turned with such thoughtfulness on any other soul.

“Yes,” Eljean murmured faintly. He turned towards his friends with a little more action in his shoulders. “Yes. Absolutely. You lead the way, Aerk, and we’ll argue ‘til we’re hoarse.”

“Uggh….” Aerk shuddered. He loved to debate with his fellows, but he really hated speaking in public. “He’d better be for real,” he said in disgust. “If he’s not for real, I might not be able to sneak in his room and cut his throat as he slept, but I surely could run him down in the road with a Oueant-gelded nag, that’s for certain.” Aerk sighed. The rest of the assembly had broken into murmuring conferences just like their own at Rath’s ‘suggestion’ that Ellyot leave the room, and now he was aware that they were waiting for some sort of acknowledgment that they would proceed.

“Mister Secretary General, Honored Consort,” he called down to the floor, garnering an instant silence that made his hands pop out in cold sweat and his stomach churn, “I think you’re absolutely correct. Perhaps we should break for dinner, and when we come back, I’m sure Sir Ellyot will want to get some rest after this most exhausting day, don’t you think?”

Ellyot looked up and graced Aerk with a smile much like the one he had turned on the servant, only about a million times more grateful. “That would be more than hospitable, Sir,” he said with a deep flourish and a bow. He turned towards the Consort, and the smile disappeared—his face remained crinkled up at the same dimensions, but nobody, not even the Secretary General, could call the expression a smile. “Will that meet your needs, gentlemen?” he asked with enough courtesy to flood a plain.

“Uhm…” The Secretary looked behind him to the Consort’s infinitesimal nod. “Yes. Certainly.” He raised his head and addressed the assembly. “We shall see you all after dinner hour. Tomorrow’s session will be postponed if need be, but we shall have the vote by the end of the night.”

And with that the assembly broke up, leaving Aerk and Keon to sit back on their cushions and try to figure out if their shirts were wringing wet from the heat inside the building or the cold anxiety that had sprung up at their own daring.

“Ye gods!” Aerk swore absently. “What is it about that smile?”

“I’m still not a Goddess boy,” Keon agreed, running a hand through his short dark hair and making it spike out all over, “but that smile makes me wish I were.”

“Perverts,” sneered Dimitri, and they ignored him.

“You know,” Aerk mused, testing his knees to stand, “if all that charisma really does come from the Goddess, I can see why we might need to lock up our virgins when Her children are near…”

Keon burst out laughing. “Shut up and let’s get out of this roasting pan. I need a cold drink, and food, and a chance to ask myself what in the name of Dueant’s enormous manly pride we’ve done here.”

Eljean seconded, and together, on shaky legs and hopeful fears, they moved out.

The Goddess’ Sons

Torrant came abruptly awake, his knife in his hand, slashing downward and crying, “Dammit, was that the bell?’

“Easy there, brother,” Aylan said gently from the doorway. “The last bell to ring was the one that broke up the convocation for dinner— about a half an hour ago.” After rooming together for a winter, he knew very well that when Torrant was truly asleep, his body was huddled into a tight, self-protective little ball. When Aylan had entered the room, his brother had been sprawled on the top of the bed wearing his breeches and one boot, with his shirt dangling from his hand. The bells in the city had been off for the day, and it appeared as though Torrant had only just managed to drag himself in.

“Augh…” Torrant gasped, using his free hand to scrub his face. He looked horrible—his eyes were red and his hair, usually kept back in a neat dark queue, was pulled out in clumps that stuck out all over his head, the band holding the queue dangling at his neck. It was still strange to see it look to be all brown—until this moment, Aylan hadn’t been aware of what a drain it probably was to maintain the tiny bit of illusion that hid the white sorcerer’s streak full time. He needed a shave as well. Aylan noted that it was a good thing his friend didn’t go in for beards, because his stubble pattern was uneven and patchy around his cheeks and chin.

When it became clear that the knife had been tucked safely back under the pillow, Aylan stepped forward with a meat pie in one hand and an apple in another and was disheartened when Torrant collapsed back on the pillows, shaking his head.

“No thanks, brother,” he murmured hoarsely. “I’m not hungry right yet. I need to listen for the bell—when the senate breaks up again, there’s no telling what the damage will be in the ghettoes.”

“Why—what are they deciding?” Aylan sat on the edge of the bed and put the food on the chest at the end, determined to see it gone before he left.

Torrant grimaced in disgust. “They’re trying to decide if I’m really Ellyot Moon, of course.” He tried to force himself off the bed, and his body screamed that he hadn’t slept in nearly forty hours so he fell back against the pillows with an oath.

“Oh Goddess,” Aylan paled. “They were questioning you this whole time? I mean…Torrant, they didn’t break for lunch. The whole town was like a shaken beehive, they were so unnerved…the whole time?”

Torrant grunted. He’d needed to channel a little bit of his gift in the end, in order to maintain his composure and stay upright. After a brief word of acknowledgment to Aerk, he had walked purposefully for his apartment. His relief when he’d come through the door had been so strong that he dropped the power, and had barely enough strength to stumble to the bed. Fitfully he raised his wrist and started pulling at the tightened cuff of his shirt. His eyes bleared shut and his hand fell on his chest, and then he was aware that Aylan was working the cuff off his hand.

“Need to wake up at the bell,” he rasped again. “I’ve got people arguing for me…they should be thanked.”

“You’ve got friends already?” Aylan worked the shirt free and tucked Torrant’s hands up on his chest with an unhidden tenderness. “Why am I not surprised?”

“They were curious, at first,” Torrant mumbled, keeping his eyes closed. He opened them again when Aylan went to work on his other boot. “Aylan, you’re not here to wait on me…”

The boot came free with a pop that landed Aylan on his arse, and with a surprising heave it went sailing towards Torrant’s head. It was a good thing temper set his aim off , because Torrant was too weary to duck. “Apparently I’m not here as anything but decoration, then, am I!” He stood up and glared at Torrant, who could only sit back and look puzzled.

“What in the name of Dueant’s sainted arse are you talking about?”

Oh Goddess, Aylan wanted to kick something. It wasn’t fair. He had a right to be raging and furious, but Torrant could barely keep his eyes open. “Go back to sleep, brother,” he commanded. “We’ll talk when you wake up.”

“We’ll talk now!” Torrant collected all of his will and swung his legs over the bed, and as angry as he was, Aylan pressed his advantage.

“We’ll talk when you’re awake enough to eat!”

“My stomach’s off …” Torrant complained.

“Your stomach’s always off when the pressure is on. If I bring you back to Yarri with your ribs popping from your skin, she’ll never speak to me again.”

“If you bring me back to Yarri alive, period, she’ll do everything but have your babies and you know it,” Torrant grunted with half a laugh. “Now give me my dinner and tell me what crawled up your arse, bit twice and died.”

“Stand up,” Aylan commanded sharply.

“Aren’ I ea’in’?” Torrant asked, confused. “Hey…” he objected, sputtering crumbs all over his bare chest even as he stood. “Have you lost your mind?”

Aylan had grabbed his breeches as he stood and pulled down, taking the hose he was wearing underneath with them. His hand, shaking and delicate, traced the swollen pinkness of the new scar that curved from lower buttock to thigh. It was, had Torrant known it, the exact same shape as the ‘healed’ portion of Aylan’s new and terrible gift. The sound Aylan made was somewhere between a cry and a snarl, and his hand flattened against the tender flesh as he squeezed his eyes shut, not wanting to see the proof anymore.

Torrant forced a bite of shepherd’s pie down his throat that felt like it was the size of the entire shepherd—or at least a hefty sheep. “Aylan…” he murmured tentatively, not objecting to the touch even though now that he and Yarri had been together the time for such intimacy should have passed.

“Don’t say anything,” Aylan whispered, leaning his head on his brother’s hip. “Don’t say anything until I’m sure I’m not going to clock you in the jaw or throw you on the bed, or maybe some combination of them both.” A heartbeat, a breath against Torrant’s bare thigh. Aylan cleared his throat, and stroked the newly injured skin.

“How could you do this to me you wanker?” he asked roughly at last.

Torrant’s hand came down, the one that wasn’t holding his forced meal, and stroked through Aylan’s surprisingly soft curly blonde hair. It was the only answer he had.

“You’ll take it back,” Aylan murmured, holding the up a fold of the cloak even as it sat heavy on his shoulders. “You’ll take the cloak back and…”

“It’s already been blooded,” Torrant told him, not stopping the stroking. “It’s yours—the gift, I mean. I told it that I would feel in truth the wounds on your body that I would feel in sympathy. You wore it—the charm is already set. If you take it off , it just makes it easier for me to…”

“ To bleed,” Aylan finished bitterly, wondering how long it would take for the leather to take his sweat and start chafing his very soul. “It makes it easier for you to bleed. For me.” Torrant felt harsh, seething breaths against his skin as Aylan’s head shuddered under his hand.

“Aylan, brother,” he said softly after a moment, “what exactly do you think is going to happen if I survive and go back to Eiran without you?”

Aylan’s body stiffened, and he pulled back, his face as naked as Torrant’s body, his hand still cupped protectively over the recent wound.

Torrant reached down and pulled up his pants with one hand, relieved when Aylan recovered himself enough to help him out a little, and then plopped bonelessly on the top of the bed. He stuffed the last of the meat pie in his mouth and wrapped his arms around his best friend, his brother. With his last swallow, he murmured, “I’m serious. Do you think I’d go home, be really sad for a while, and then…just go on? Yarri and I would live happily ever after, you’d get your honored dead letter once a year…and…and that’s the end? Do you think there would be enough pieces of me left to put back together and just do that?”

“Torrant…”

“I’ve done that, remember?” Something was crashing up against his chest, and there didn’t seem to be any way for it to come out but this. “I’ve left my family dead in this godsforsaken place, I’ve taken Yarri and rebuilt my heart…” his voice crunched a little, and he carried on. “A man only has so much heart in him to rebuild, Aylan. Mine’s spent. If only one of us is walking out of this pisshole, it’s going to be you.”

Aylan swore against his neck, and turned a resentful face up to catch the light from the three moons coming in from the patio. “What makes you think I’ll make it any better? You at least have Yarri to pull you back together…what am I going to have to keep me alive if you’re gone? What am I going to have…”

“Starry.” Torrant smoothed the hair back from Aylan’s hot face and kissed his brow. “You feel it, don’t you—it’s not attraction, not yet… but there’s a burning need inside you to see her grow…to know who she’ll be when she’s a woman. You miss the family, but I’d give every breath in my body that it was her voice in your head that got you to sleep this morning, her face you saw behind your eyes when you woke up.”

Aylan closed his eyes, the look on his face that of great pain, excruciating pleasure. “How do you know that?”

Torrant laughed, and it was real, and the sound itself seemed to heal the rift between the two of them, almost as much as the contact between their bodies. “I’ve been haunted by Yarrow Moon since I held her little rat-slippery body on the night of her birth,” he murmured. “In case you were wondering, I delivered Starry as well, and I love her like a sister but she’s never been my reason to breathe.”

He shifted his weight a little, and grimaced. “Brother, I could hold you all night, really, but I must smell like something dead…”

Aylan allowed him to break away and grimaced. “Something dead might be an improvement. You didn’t bathe this morning?”

Torrant stood and moved towards the privy room, covered in tan marble. “Have you ever stood in an airless oven, getting grilled like steak, wearing velvet and hose underneath it?” Torrant shuddered, the weariness dropping from his eyes just a little, and he was all amused young man. “The only good part of that is that they were all suffering along with me.”

“How was it?” Aylan asked seriously…If Torrant’s work in the Regent’s Hall didn’t go well, their work at night keeping the Goddess ghettoes safe from Raths’ guards was an exercise in futility.

Torrant paused at the door. “We’ll know at the bell, then won’t we brother?” He thought for a moment. “I think, whether they vote me in tonight or not, I’ll at least get the fifty percent of the people who want to keep me around a bit—and if I get that, I also think we’re going to have a very busy night.”

He took longer in the shower than he usually did—of course the boiler that he and Aldam had set up for their water closet in the surgery hadn’t been nearly as large as the one used in the big apartment building, but that wasn’t why he took so long. The truth was, as soon as the hot water sluiced down on him, his exhaustion flooded back, and it was all he could do to stumble out of the shower when he pulled in enough strength to turn off the water at all.

Aylan was waiting there with a towel when he stumbled out.

“How did you get here anyway?” Torrant asked fuzzily, too tired to even object to being coddled like a child.

“The same way I got here last night, you dizzy wank. Your tailor gave me directions and I slid in through the patio. His friend in the ghetto was more than happy to tell me you had an in at the castle.”

“Coryal…” Torrant grunted as Aylan pulled a sleep-shirt over his head. “Good man.”

“Mmmm…takes one to know one,” Aylan muttered, “and you didn’t really answer my question.” He shouldered Torrant into bed, knowing that he was taking advantage of his friend’s exhaustion to get a straight answer from this next question.

“I’m doing the best I can!” Torrant yawned as Aylan pulled the covers up to his chin. “I can’t even remember what it was anymore!”

“What I meant is, how did it feel to pretend to be your brother— don’t tell me it didn’t hurt, Torrant. I know better.” Aylan sprawled out in one of the chairs near the bed, tipping it back until the chair back touched the well.

“Of course it hurt!” Torrant snapped around yawns. “The real irony is that if it really had been Ellyot up there, he already would have failed. Goddess, he hated this politics shite…he never even listened when Owen talked about it at the table…” A sudden shrewdness entered his eyes, and he sat up a little.

“And you? That girl…her family…”

Aylan grimaced, the chair tilting forward and hitting ground with a thump. “Her family grieved.” He leaned forward and pushed Torrant back down on the bed, depressed when his friend didn’t have enough in him to even resist. “And that’s all you need to worry about.” A sudden thought. “You’re not feeling bad about the guards, are you?” Torrant’s guilt had always weighted on him like bad ballast when he’d killed before, but now he merely grunted.

“Not enough in me to worry about filthy shite-for-brains cowards. I feel worse for the rats that fled from that shed than I do about them…”

His disgust gave him strength for one last sally. “The bell!” he murmured, struggling against Aylan’s hand. “We need to go out when we hear the bell…Rath won’t be pleased at all…”

“Hush, brother.” Aylan gave one final push, and Torrant was finally too tightly curled up around his hand to move. “I’ll stay here and watch your back. I’ll wake you with the bell.”

“’night,” Torrant muttered at last. “Love you brother.”

“Love you too. Sleep.”

So he did.

The bell erupted less than five hours later. Aylan woke him up with a package that had arrived at his door and a letter sitting on top. The package was the second half of the ordered wardrobe, including a black leather cloak. Aylan noted sourly that while his had been fancy, with embossed knot work around the yoke and sides, Torrant’s was plain and serviceable. The letter was from Aerk.

“Sleep well, Ellyot—you’re not a regent yet, but you came damned close. Fifty-nine percent voted aye. We don’t meet until evening tomorrow—we’ll come knocking ‘round lunch. Aerk.”

Aylan gave the letter to Torrant as he emerged wearing plain black breeches and a plain black shirt, and saw the fierce, thin-lipped smile that only surfaced when Torrant was thinking like the snow cat. “It’s a beginning,” he murmured. He looked up, and Aylan saw that he’d summoned the Goddess to supplement the strength that was still not up to full. His eyes were winter-day blue, as cold and as merciless as moonlight over snow.

“At least your rest days are coming up,” he said tentatively, nodding at the eyes.

Torrant shook his head. “Nope—on rest days we start phase two.”

“You’ve got to be kidding! Torrant…”

Nothing could touch those eyes, not even the grim smile that touched that fabulous, earthy mouth. “I don’t know about you, brother, but I want to get out of here as soon as possible. Those young men stood up for me today—I’m thinking we owe them a little bit of truth for their chivalry.”

“Torrant…”

“Aylan, my love—I think while we’re in this room, you need to call me Ellyot. You never know who is listening.” Aylan closed his eyes and shuddered, knowing he was right, but hating, hating watching the world pulling his brother in so many directions, hating watching him already becoming thin, translucent, and almost already beginning to fade.

“Ellyot,” he amended, “are you sure we need to go, tonight… you’re…”

“I’m the reason the guards are coming, brother.”

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t true. But it was the way he would see it—it was the way Torrant had always seen things, and Aylan reckoned they wouldn’t be there, about to escape out a patio door and into a blood-red summer night, if his friend, his brother, his lover, hadn’t always been prepared to shoulder burdens that weren’t his. Nevertheless, he had to clench his jaw and suppress a shiver, knowing what Triane’s Son would say next.

“Shall we go hunting, brother?” Torrant asked wickedly as his face sprouted hair and whiskers in disguise. Aylan thought of the little girl’s weight in his arms, her body covered in weeping blisters, crackling skin, and torment, and nodded. The same sort of snarl formed at his lips even as he tied his black kerchief over his face. He settled the weight of the black leather cloak more firmly on his shoulders, and was relieved to see Torrant do the same.

“Let’s see what we kill, brother,” he growled, wishing he too could sprout death at the end of his paws. He settled for a hard grip on the pommel of his sword and he felt for the twin knives he’d harnessed to his hips. “Let us just see what we can kill.”

The two of them slipped out the door and swung their legs over the patio fence. The moons began their nightly course in earnest.

Near Things

Torrant took a deep breath and smiled deceptively at the Secretary General and Consort as they sat up on the dais. He must, above all things, absolutely must not lose his temper today—he was pretty sure this vote, this first, crucial vote, was going to swing his way, but it wouldn’t happen if he transformed into the snow cat, leapt over the dais and ripped out the Secretary General’s throat with his long, razored teeth.

“The point, sir,” he said smoothly, “is not that I would miss the lace if you taxed it above reason, but that the grandmother trying to feed her family with her spindle and her needles would miss the food.”

“Why can’t the men in the house feed the family?” the Secretary asked, looking amused by the vagaries of those lazy Goddess bastards, sitting on their arses while the women slaved. “It’s not as though lace is a necessary commodity in this city.”

“Well, sir,” Torrant gritted, “perhaps the men in the house could find jobs, but you’ve passed laws that won’t allow the men in the Goddess quarters to earn money anywhere else in the city. Since they’re not allowed to leave the city, either, it seems unfair to say a woman can’t earn food money with a skill she can ply while she minds her family. To tax this one small product—one that brings joy to most of us here,” he waved his own cuff which had been decorated with a small trim of knitted Goddess lace and gestured to the Secretary’s own collar which had the same, “and feeds the families of a quarter of the city seems incredibly petty. You keep claiming that these sanctions against the Goddess’ children are for the good of the people themselves…I would wonder, sir, what good they will gain when you starve them into extinction. Ahh…”

He didn’t make that last sound out loud, oh, please let him have kept that to himself. Aylan. It didn’t matter—he looked around, and his gasp at the sudden, tearing pain at the skin of his chest had been masked by the reaction to his strong words.

Excellent, he thought, breathing through his pain, Aylan, if keeling over from blood loss wasn’t going to lose him the vote, his own uncertain temper would. Aylan. Another pain, this one slighter, across his forearm, and as he felt the warmth and the wetness welling against his shirt and his coat, and he knew with certainty that in a moment, his pretty lace cuff was going to be dripping with blood. Aylan, oh Goddess, Aylan…

He needed to get off the floor.

Arranging his face into a pretty smile, he bowed slightly to the dais, not acknowledging in the least that his body screamed in protest and his wound gaped. “My apologies, Secretary, Consort… I’m afraid I am not feeling well and my temper is short. If you would allow me to resume my speech later this afternoon, while you move on to other matters?”

Up in the balcony, Aerk looked at the others in surprise.

“What is he doing?” Marv whispered loudly, on his toes. “He had them…why is he backing out now?”

They had all taken their turn on the floor, Ellyot Moon going last. He was, they all agreed, an excellent speaker—his specialty was in taking the barbed remarks aimed at him from the old guard and twisting them to reveal a truth others hadn’t seen. It was damned near poetic.

“I don’t know…” Eljean leaned so far over the rail that Keon grabbed the back of his fancy blue coat and tunic and held, in case he went over. “He’s not looking good…I think he’s really that ill…”

They all turned their attention to where the Secretary was taking the reprieve gratefully, making pleasant noises about reconvening for the evening bell as if he could make up the ground he had lost over the last week and a half in just a few hours. Ellyot’s smile had not faded, but his face had gone suddenly pale, and he tucked his right hand underneath his left arm as though it pained him. A clammy sweat popped out over his face.

Aerk swallowed—there was no doubt that whatever had happened on the floor was quick and dire. “Let’s go down—when he gets out of there, he might need help back.”

They made it down to the podium antechamber just as Ellyot came through the little thigh-high gate. He smiled unhappily at them as they neared.

“I’m sorry I had to back off ,” he murmured. “Just give me a few hours to rest—I’ll feel better…”

“Was it something you ate, brother?” Keon asked lightly, hoping to give a reason to such a sudden illness.

“Or something trying to eat me,” Ellyot responded with a little bow.

“Shall we accompany you?” Aerk offered, only to be cut off with an almost rude shaking of the head.

“No, no…” Ellyot’s eyes darted around the room in the first sign of true panic any of them had ever seen. He swallowed, hard, regained his composure, and answered Aerk’s extended hand in farewell with a slightly less enthusiastic clasp of his own. “I’ll be back shortly…but I really need to leave now!”

And with that, he slipped easily between the massing regents getting ready for an early lunch, leaving Aerk staring at his hand in shock.

“Oueant’s left nut,” he muttered, and the others all gathered around, profaning Honor and Pride in sick amazement.

“Dueant’s shaft—that’s blood…” Eljean himself turned pale, and his eyes went searching over the crowd for the handsome, dynamic bright light that had attracted them all like moths. “Gods…I hope he’s going to be all right…”

But the dark head had disappeared through the crowd, and the murmuring mass of bodies was not giving them any answers.

As soon as Torrant cleared the granite steps of the Regent’s Hall he broke into his fastest run. When he cleared the side of the Regent’s apartments, he dodged into the back alley, opened his chest wound more when he vaulted to the top the man-high stone wall that separated the Regent’s square from the Goddess ghetto, and executed a dive roll to the ground. As he landed on his hands he began his change to the snow cat, and when he came up on his feet, he was on all fours.

His howl of fear echoed through the entire city as he went tearing through the ghetto, mouth open, panting tongue dropping, sniffing for the one person who was keeping him sane:

Aylan.

Aylan ducked a jab from the long curved dagger that had gotten him across the chest on the first thrust, and tried to think about the fight at hand and not about his brother, dropping from blood loss in the middle of the regent’s convocation.

All he had wanted was a pint of ale. Just one lousy, godsforsaken pint of ale, consumed in the afternoon after an exhausting week— maybe some companionship from the tavern-keeper’s pretty daughter, Triana, but really—was it too much to ask?

Then two enormous men—sweaty, greasy, out of place here in this neat little tavern on the inside of the ghetto environs—sat themselves plop down in The Amber Goose and eyed him with purpose. He caught sight of a teal-stoned crest on one of their pommels and thought guards, and then they both looked up at him with nasty smiles, and the thought changed to Triane’s barked shin, just one lousy pint and then they were both in front of him, stenching up his air with their fouled skin.

“You…pretty Goddess boy—I seen you here last rest day, didn’t I?”

Aylan smiled, his charm kicking in with his panic. “It’s a distinct possibility—why, did you ask for a dance and I left you off my card?”

A beefy hand with grime in the knuckles came crashing on his little table. “You’re with that other faggot, the regent’s butt-boy, healing vermin that needs to be dead.”

Again, that knee-jerk smile. “So—you’re a fan of our clinic, are you—excellent,” he babbled, “I’ll give you a free pass…we’ll do anything you like, baths, grooming, teach you how to walk upright…”

That first swing of a barn-sized fist at his tender head didn’t surprise him, and he ducked easily, but the knife was definitely a shock, and that’s why he ducked into it. But after that first it’s going to hurt moment, the realization of why it didn’t hurt was what stunned him enough to dodge the next blow of the knife with his wrist.

And then he was just plain furious.

He grabbed the first man’s wrist and whirled, hearing the bones crack under his arm as his momentum and body weight snapped the wrist. The knife fell out of his hand, and with a quick dodge that he wouldn’t have known to make without spending weeks watching that he didn’t get injured so that Torrant didn’t get injured, he sidestepped the other dagger of the beefy guard’s stocky friend. The guard with the broken wrist screamed and fell to his knees, and Aylan kicked him in the jaw for good measure, before turning his full attention on the other gigantic wanker with the knife.

This fight wasn’t going to be so easy.

He saw with sinking heart that, unlike his friend, who had relied on force and surprise, this one actually knew how to hold a knife—in fact, he knew how to hold two, with one blade facing out and the other facing down. And, sweet Dueant, the blade facing out was in the man’s left hand.

A swipe: Aylan dodged. A feint: Aylan saw the other one coming. A charge: Aylan hopped backwards up onto a chair, a table, and, grabbing the rafters above him he swung his feet at the man’s head, getting in enough of a blow to stun the bastard but not bring him down. However, it did give Aylan enough time to draw his own knife as he landed, and that was almost as good—Aylan had learned fencing at Triannon, but had been taught knife work by his tutors at home, and he had always been decent at it. He and big boy went at it hard, their blades meeting at the hilts, tables crashing in their wake and chairs collapsing to kindling as they leapt and kicked and thrust, and still, the guard was close enough that Aylan could smell the leeks the wanker had eaten for lunch on his hot breath.

Goddess, he needed to back up, he thought with a gasp, this brute was too strong to parry long in close quarters, and he knew how to use his weight. Aylan managed a leap back, escaping (he hoped!) a swipe at his stomach, when there was an enormous clatter at doorway. Aylan ignored it—he knew enough about fighting by now to know that if it wasn’t an immediate threat to his person, then he would get to it in a minute—but the guard was not so canny. Aylan moved in to gut the guard just as the man turned his head.

In an explosion of silver fur and a dinner-plate sized paw, the man’s head all but burst from his shoulders, and Aylan—as well as the tavern keeper and his pretty daughter—watched in shock as the corpse sank to its knees, the head bobbing sideways, held on the shoulders only by the flesh on the other side of the snapped neck bone.

The snow cat’s roar of pain and fury was almost anti-climactic after that.

Aylan remembered to sheathe his knives before he sank to his knees on the floor, and he looked anxiously at the snow cat who, after disemboweling the unconscious man on the floor, was now whine-growling anxiously at him. The wide silver forehead was wrinkled, and the whiskers were pulled back from the thin black lips as the creature advanced and snuffled carefully at Aylan. The tufted fur tickled his face as Torrant sniffed his neck and nudged at bones that might possibly be broken, and for his part, Aylan wrapped his arms around the massive neck and buried his face in the soft fur behind the snow cat’s ears.

“I was going to get him, you git-wank,” Aylan panted into that mess of black-striped fur. “You should have just gone to your room and healed…”

He reached around to the chest and prodded, and the snow cat let out an affronted yelp, holding up a massive, pink-padded paw with dagger-claws sheathed, as though to say “take it easy, you arse!” Aylan saw traces of blood still on the fur-covered breast bone and swore so long and so loudly that the tavern keeper’s daughter actually burst into a quiet giggle from behind the counter.

The sound pulled Aylan back to his surroundings, and he looked around the room in chagrin. “Oh gees…”

The snow cat was doing the same, and he plopped to his haunches and “whuffed” in sympathy.

“How are we going to hold clinic here?” Aylan wailed, “Should we just cancel?”

Crushed tables, overturned chairs, broken glassware, and, oh yes, the two dead people seeping blood stains onto the rough wooden flooring—the destruction was not particularly epic, but the first rest day was the day after tomorrow, and they would be hard pressed to fix things up before then. One of the most abominable side-effects of pretending there were two moons instead of three was that there were only two rest days in seven as opposed to three rest days in eight, and one of those was mandatory. If they didn’t have the tavern ready for clinic hours by then, the frightened people waiting in the front of the tavern to visit Torrant in the stockroom/surgery were never going to return.

“We can’t!” Olek protested, standing up from behind the counter and ignoring the snow cat and the bodies altogether.

“There’s so many of the girls who need the tea…” Triana added, not even bothering to blush in front of her father. “Oh, please—Aylan, can’t you and…” her eyes darted to the giant, feral creature sitting on her floor, “uhm, the young regent find some way to still come?”

The snow cat looked over at the tavern keeper and his daughter, both of whom had met Ellyot Moon the previous rest-days, and gave what sounded, even to human ears, like a long-suffering sigh.

“Gods-dammit!” he swore in the pain of the quick-change, only to be damn near assaulted by Aylan, who pushed him back against the bar and ripped through the blood-stained, shredded remnants of his fine brown shirt.

“Auuuggghhhh!!!” Aylan screamed, then he whirled kicked over an already overturned table and sank to his haunches, hands scooping through his hair. “You horrid wanking-git-bastard-arse-pricking-goat-rutting horse turd!!!”

Torrant sank to the ground next to him and threw an arm around his shoulder. Aylan didn’t resist him but he did roll his eyes in disgust.

“I don’t think I can do this for a month or a year or whatever,” he breathed after a moment. “I don’t think I can take it, knowing your life depends on my ability to save my own skin.”

“It’s truth, brother,” Torrant sighed, and fell to his arse, leaning back against the bar. “Whether I bleed in flesh or I bleed in heart, its truth. Besides—as a test run of the Aylan-emergency-response system, it wasn’t bad.”

“Oueant piss on you,” Aylan snapped heatedly, falling back from his crouch against Torrant’s arm. There was a restive movement above them, and Aylan could actually feel the inhale as Torrant pulled the mantle of authority on. He didn’t rise, but he did speak.

“Don’t worry, Olek, Triana—early rest day, I’ll bring some stout young men to assist in the clean-up, and we’ll have this place fixed up before the first patient arrives. That’s a promise.”

“Are you insane?” Aylan gasped, pulling away and looking at his brother’s weary face. The shirt gaped open now, revealing the raised and still weeping scar that had mostly closed during that last change. It stretched from far right collarbone down below the brown nipple on the left, and Aylan wanted to kick something again, knowing how deep it must have been to still be bleeding after two changes.

Torrant laughed, eyes still closed. “Don’t worry, brother. If Aerk and the others don’t have me burned as whore’s witch for bleeding all over the podium when no one saw me take a wound, I don’t think a little charity work will push them over the edge.”

Aylan’s face went pale, and he fell back against the bar again. “Oh gods,” he muttered. “Gods gods gods gods gods…Oueant’s big prick, Dueant’s soft balls, and Triane’s…”

“Hush, brother,” Torrant laughed.

“You were up on the podium?”

Torrant’s smile was every bit as beautiful as it always had been, even with his eyes closed and lines etching themselves into his cheeks as Aylan watched. “I was indeed, brother,” he chuckled. “I was, in fact, about ready to close a stunning argument on why we shouldn’t tax Lane’s wool as it enters the city. I had to claim a frightening case of the runs in order to get out of there…as far as they know, I’m still on the privy.”

In spite of himself, Aylan laughed too, and although there was hysteria in the sound, his chest felt easier when he was done. “Well, while you’re there, brother, do you have time for a pint?”

Torrant opened his eyes and saw that Olek and Triana had moved around the bar. Triana was holding four mugs by the handles and Olek had a tray of beef sandwiches, and all in all, he hadn’t seen anything more welcome since Yarri had last greeted him in Eiran.

“Oh yes, brother,” he replied reverently. Aylan had already risen, and he took the proffered hand. Blood loss made his knees a little week, even as he stood. “In fact, if you’ve got a back door I can escape from to get back, I might even have time for two.”

After they rolled the bodies in an old oilcloth, which they stowed behind the pub to throw in the river later, and then bleached the floor, he only had time for one pint and a couple of sandwiches. Then he partially changed to the snow cat as a disguise and slipped out into the late afternoon. Aylan watched him go with such an anxious look on his face that Triana pat his shoulder in sympathy.

“Your friend—Triane’s son—he’ll be alright? He is Goddess blessed, after all.”

Her pat on his shoulder was tentative and childlike and her fair cheeks with their brown freckles were blushing just from being bold enough to comfort him. He spared a mental groan for the dalliance that was never meant to be. “He’s human, Triana, that’s all,” he murmured. And then, almost to himself, “And if you asked him, he’d probably say it’s more like Goddess cursed.”

Without another word, the two of them went back inside to wait for dark, so they could dispose of the bodies before the bells rang and the guards started their rounds for real.

Torrant’s return trip was not uneventful.

He slunk through the back alleys on quick feet, but didn’t tax himself by running flat out, which turned out to be a good thing. If he’d been running flat out, he would have tripped arse over can when he came upon the young couple locked together in the tiny vacant corner of four converging buildings. As it was, he had just enough time to vault over them, kick off the wall of the nearest building, and tuck into a roll that brought him nearly flush with the point of the opposing wall.

“Triane’s bleeding gate, you two arse-wanking-jackholes!” He turned towards them and saw them cowering, pulling up breeches, holding each other tightly, as though the embrace of their thin arms over slender chests would hide them from the fuzzy terror that had descended from what looked like the heavens above. His heart eventually stopped galloping in his chest like Heartland after a mare, and he felt his snow cat’s features relax, even though his vision stayed cold and focused as it always did when he was channeling this particular power. He gusted a sigh and scrubbed his face with a fur-tufted hand. When he spoke next, his voice was calmer, and he did what he could to soften the growl.

“What in the name of merciful Dueant do you two think you are doing?” he asked at last. “It’s broad daylight—and even if it wasn’t, there is an important vote tonight, and the guards are going to be flooding the streets. Do you think this alleyway makes you invisible?”

He looked at them both, one fair, one dark, both of them tentatively pulling on their clothing, now that it looked like he wasn’t going to eat them or haul them to the front gate to add to the rotting carnage on the walls.

“The guards!” the fair one spat with an unsurprising bitterness. “The guards…they use us. The find us and use us and find us again…”

He glared up at Torrant with burning eyes, and Torrant grimaced. He and Aylan were only two men. They could only do so much, and some griefs…he looked at the hard, pointed features of the blonde boy and felt his chest relax and tighten with an inward sigh. Well, some griefs had been happening for long before he and Aylan had arrived in the city.

“We just thought…”

The dark haired boy looked at his lover tentatively, and he met Torrant’s eyes with eyes the kind of liquid, sloe brown that had probably been pulling both boys and girls towards him since he’d first blinked into the world. “We just thought that we…we would want to do this thing with someone we cared about, that’s all.”

“Mmm…” Torrant nodded, but kept his gaze locked with the furious blue eyes of the leader of the two. “That’s admirable,” he agreed gently, “and I can understand it—probably more than the two of you can imagine. But if you really cared about each other, you would find a way to do this and live.”

“As opposed to dying of pox in a year or five?” Oh, Goddess—all that rage. And Torrant knew…a part of his heart was just that furious. It always had been.

“Look,” he said at last, thinking hard. “You know the tavern, The Amber Goose—you know how there’s a healer there on the first rest day?” The two boys nodded, uncertain, and Torrant continued. “Well, you come in and check with him—there’s a shipment of wool due in a couple of weeks, right?” They nodded again, and he could see the realization in their eyes that they knew the wool was smuggled in. Their look at him now had a degree more trust. “Well the healer or his friend will know when it’s coming. I want you two on the way out with it.”

“Wha…” gasped the blonde, all anger and hostility forgotten.

“Be prepared. Have a knapsack ready, a place we can reach you. We can get you out…just…just plan to live that long, right?” His voice had taken on a certain pleading, and he wasn’t sure how he had gotten here, begging these two lost lovers to take care of themselves. To live.

“Why?” asked the dark one, “Why us? Why help us?”

Torrant closed his eyes. “Because I can. Sometimes I can do so little. But this I can do. Now I have to go, but you mark what I told you, right?”

“Why should we believe you?” asked the blonde one, his voice shaking in a terrible conflict between hope and fury.

Torrant actually laughed. “Oh, please! Look at me! I’m the guard’s bloody wet dream, aren’t I? I have less reason to risk getting caught than you do! Now go—the bells are going to ring in half an hour, and when they ring to let us out, you’d better be somewhere no guard can even guess, because they’re going to be in a lather all night, you hear?”

Now both of them were nodding. “We hear,” they murmured. “We hear.” Then, the blonde one called out, just as he was turning away, “What shall we call you?”

A sideways laugh. “Triane’s Son!” he called back, feeling foolish, and then he really did have to run flat out to bathe and meet his friends before the convocation.

Triane’s Son.

The words were breathed reverently by the chorus of children and grandchildren as part of the ballad’s ritual, but Torrant himself—well, over the years he had found ways to say the words as little as possible.

Of course, he rubbed Aylan’s nose in the fact that he stood for Oueant’s Son in the ballad as often as possible.

His friend had thought little enough of himself, for enough years, that convincing him that he was honorable and worthy and good had become one of his favorite hobbies.

Torrant grinned over the crowd at Aylan, who gave him a disgusted look, and then winked gently at Aldam, who stood listening, his arms about his Roes with the same reverence he’d shown when they’d been children, having first stumbled down a mountain.

He referred to Dueant’s Son with no irony at all, just to watch Aldam quietly blush, and to watch Roes beam at her beloved with pride.

But that part of the story didn’t come until much later, and it was too bad, Torrant had always thought regretfully. If anyone was needed in Clough at that time, it was truly the son of Compassion.

Part IV—In the Dark of Honor’s Moon

Eljean

Eljean was bored.

He sat on the stone steps outside the regent’s apartment in the chill of the morning, closed his soft green eyes and tilted his face up towards the late summer sun. The sun was warm enough to make his hair sweaty on his shoulders, so he shook back the thick black curls, repositioned his hat, and still, kept his face basking in the warmth of the light.

He was dressed as had become fashionable this summer, in a light cloak about his shoulders and a wide brimmed hat with a flourish and a pair of black breeches, tucked into his boots…and nothing else. He fenced regularly at the local club, and his chest might have been narrow, but it was wiry with muscle, and his long stomach was tight and trim. He was justifiably proud of his body, but mostly he just followed this fashion for the same reasons that had led him to keep company with the witty and subversive Aerk and Keon: it irritated the Consort even if he hadn’t put a voice to it yet, and the rebellion would send his father into a fit of hysterical hyperventilation if he ever cared to know about it.

Either reason would have been more than enough to put Eljean out on the steps in the morning, working on his tan, but a third, unspoken, terrifying and attractive reason was now walking down the stairs towards him. His heart started beating fiercely in his throat, and he worked hard to even out his breathing as he closed his eyes and kept his face towards the sun.

“Merciful Dueant, Eljean! Dimitri’s nowhere around, go put on a shirt!”

Eljean opened one eye irritably. Here he had been, throwing himself at Ellyot Moon as blatantly as he possibly could without ending up crucified over the eastern gate, and Ellyot still thought he was harboring a crush on Dimitri?

“Dimitri is a sniveling arse-licker who would sell his mother for the Consort’s hand on his prick,” Eljean said succinctly, and knew that he flushed from the appreciation in Ellyot’s laughter. “What are you doing here?” He kept the irritation on as cloak to hide his inward preening. “I thought you were off in secret, with all of the sots who used to be my friends.”

And this was, of course, the reason why Eljean was bored. The first rest day used to be their day to fence, and then to loiter along the marketplace, making dry observations about the world at large and mocking the poor people who caught their notice. Eljean was not necessarily proud of how they spent this day, but since he was spending it with a social group that didn’t examine too closely how he liked to spend his time after dark—and with whom—he had just been grateful for the company.

That had changed in the last month or so, and the beautiful man next to him with the hazel eyes and deadly curl to his upper lip was the reason why.

The deterioration of the social group had started with Dimitri—but this had been their fault. As a whole, they had simply stopped talking to him, stopped acknowledging his snide remarks, stopped letting him intimidate Djali and bait Eljean completely. Eventually he had gotten the picture. One day he showed up for breakfast at what used to be their favorite stall for muffins, and the lot of them had been at another stall. They didn’t even wave to him, and he never tried to join them again.

But that had been fine—in fact, once Dimitri had disappeared from their midst, Eljean realized how pleasant it was to not always have to duck when his erstwhile crush fired a sally off from his vicious tongue.

It was not so fine, however, when Keon and Aerk had told him that they wouldn’t be meeting to fence on a rest day, and then the next, and then Marv and Jino had joined them and two weeks before it had been Djali. Djali! The Consort’s son had been chosen before Eljean? What was so trustworthy about Djali? Was it his complete social ineptitude? His struggling aspirations towards being a poet? His ability to stammer to a halt in five seconds a conversation that had been tripping along for an hour before he spoke?

Eljean’s resentment screwed up his face as he thought about it, and he sent Ellyot a disgruntled look, only to realize that Ellyot was looking at him kindly, with complete understanding.

“We didn’t mean to exclude you, Eljean,” he said gently. “We just had to make sure your attachment to Dimitri was over. It’s very important that he not know.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Eljean replied, yawning for show.

Ellyot, with his characteristic humility, dropped to his haunches and was suddenly, disturbingly, eye-level. Eljean blinked several times, and resisted the urge to back away on principle, like a cat from an overzealous, overfriendly dog.

“I know it’s hard,” Ellyot said quietly, “having to disguise a thing like that, having to pretend that you don’t feel the way you do, having no one to confide your broken heart to when the person that you’re not supposed to care for at all turns out to be a wanking git. But those things can either make you mean or make you strong. We need your help—in fact, we’ve missed you with us. But we needed to see which it was going to be, right?”

“It was a crush,” Eljean rasped from a suddenly raw throat. “It was over before it was real.” Oh gods…could he, of all people, pray to unforgiving gods? The oath he wanted to swear right now had nothing to do with Oueant’s honor or Dueant’s pride because Ellyot Moon was right there staring into his eyes, and the lines of his face were so clean, those brackets at his cheeks so deep, and that cleft in his chin and sinful, wicked mouth…

Eljean swallowed, closed his eyes, willed his breath not to quicken, and by the time his eyes were open, Ellyot had moved away and was leaning against the step railing, twinkling a smile at Eljean as though the dumb arse hadn’t just turned his world upside down by a close conversation.

“Good!” Ellyot was saying, and his grin was infectious. He held out a hand for Eljean to grasp, and as Eljean propelled himself up he was hit square on with what looked to be an old, mended peasant’s shirt. “Here,” Ellyot told him, turning and moving towards, of all things, the Regents apartments, “You’re going to need that. You could put an eye out with those things before the sun heats up!”

By the time Eljean realized that Ellyot was referring to the little pebbled nipples, hard on his chest, they were in the lobby of the building, and Ellyot was swapping pleasantries with the guard who took the night to morning shift, watching over the precious young rulers of the kingdom of Clough.

In the past, Eljean had breezed right by the old relic—he was nothing but decorative, a remainder from a past when the regents had first forced the principle ruler of Clough to give the other landowners a voice, and the woman who had ruled at the time (some two hundred years ago) kept trying to have the dissenting landowners killed in their sleep.

Ellyot seemed to think differently. While Eljean struggled out of his cloak and into his shirt, the old man and the young regent discussed everything from the old man’s grandchildren to the chickens his wife liked to raise, to how to find the best minstrel group in the city. Suddenly the older man twinkled up at Ellyot, and his next words both floored Eljean and made Ellyot blush.

“Oh, you go ahead and talk about that lute player like I haven’t heard about you…sneaking away at night to play at the The Amber Goose.”

“Lies,” Ellyot shrugged, his grimace saying otherwise. “Lies, lies and damned lies…what I do at The Amber Goose can not possibly be considered lute playing, not after having heard Triane’s Kiss playing there last…” he stopped abruptly, and grimaced again, this time for another reason, and old Jems gave him a shrewd look from the wooden slatted chair he sat in.

The concierge, who sat up higher at the raised desk caught the exchange and said mildly, “Some madness was meant to pass, young Ellyot. Life is too short to worry if you’ve heard pretty music from the wrong people or not.”

Something indefinable passed through Ellyot’s eyes then—a terrible mixture of emotions that Eljean certainly couldn’t define, although he thought that, perhaps, one of them might be rage…But Ellyot’s expression stayed genial, and he put his palms together and bowed slightly.

“Excellent advice as always, gentlemen, and I thank you for the conversation as well. Now, if you don’t mind, Master Eljean and I have things to attend to, right Eljean?”

Eljean nodded, fastening his cloak around his shoulders over the shirt. It was loose in the shoulders and short at the waist, making him think that it had been tailored expressly for the wide-chested Ellyot, and it was soft from repeated washings. Eljean tried very hard not to think of ways to keep that shirt.

“Well you make good and sure to sneak out the back, young sir!” Jems called after them as they turned to leave. Eljean stumbled and recovered just in time to hear Ellyot complete the thought of what was obviously a common exchange between the two of them.

“What else is being young good for, if it isn’t to sneak about!” he called, and Eljean hurried to catch up.

“What was that about?” he asked, trying not to frown at the old concierge and the even older guard, who apparently knew more about Ellyot Moon than he did.

“Visiting,” Ellyot replied briefly, looking surprised. “They’re nice old men—and they know a surprising amount about the lot of us—it’s good to have them on our side.”

“But…” Eljean grimaced. How could he say, But they’re old? without sounding like a shallow, self-centered ass? Apparently there wasn’t a way, because he was still sputtering for words when they blew through Ellyot’s room, coming out on the patio side, before Eljean could even ask Ellyot what they were doing or comment on the décor. There were lots of small, personal items, he noted in his hurry—small wooden figures, a battered child’s doll--things other people had given him that he seemed to like keeping, and Eljean wanted a moment to linger over them—but not today.

Ellyot put two hands over his head at the edge of the wooden fence, gave a heave and an agile swing of his legs, and disappeared into the alleyway behind the apartments. Eljean, who was tall enough to see over the edge of the fence standing, gaped at his fellow regent for a moment with his mouth open.

Ellyot grinned up at him expectantly. “You can make it, can’t you?

I mean, I can help you, but it’s going to be a lot more difficult going over that,” he gestured at the stone wall that bordered the alley, “and we’ve got a long day ahead of us.” The wall was a good three hands over Eljean’s head, and Eljean could only stare at it, perplexed. Weren’t the guard’s barracks over there?

But Ellyot was waiting, so Eljean gathered his wits—and his muscles--and heaved and grunted his way over the wooden fence, wondering what folly ever led him to believe his body was in good shape. When he landed on the ground beside Ellyot, he barely had enough wind to gasp, “Are we really going over that?” before Ellyot took off at a trot down the alleyway.

They were indeed. When they reached the end of what Eljean took to be the guard’s barracks, Ellyot crouched and gave Eljean his linked hands as a vault. Eljean found himself awkwardly hoisting his body over the edge of the white-painted stone, and about the time he was hanging from his fingers, wondering how long the drop was if he let go, Ellyot had vaulted to a crouch at the top of the wall. Eljean was so surprised he let go and landed on his arse, and Ellyot sighted a spot about eight feet down on the ground from where he crouched. Before Eljean could even ask, Ellyot started running along the foot-width of the filled, cinderblock wall, and with a hop and a handspring off the edge, he tumbled twice in the air, landing on his hands in a small spot of springy grass, where he collapsed his elbows and tumbled into a roll to his feet.

The look of freedom, of unfettered joy on his face as he bounced up from the roll and did a handspring forward was enough to break Eljean’s heart. He didn’t have the wherewithal to even chide his friend for showing off as he himself struggled to his feet and brushed off his stained black trousers.

“Damn!” he muttered, trying to be casual even when his heart was pounding with the exultation of just seeing something like that so close. “You make it look simple!”

“I’ve practiced most of my life,” Ellyot said easily. “Yarri and…” he stalled then, and something so profoundly sad crossed his expression that Eljean almost whimpered. “Yarri and my brothers, we grew up doing that, off of the pipes and hay bales and stable doors in the barn.” He flashed a broken grin then, as though pretending those brothers hadn’t been killed in that very barn. “We taught our cousins when we got to Eiran.”

“Oh,” Eljean replied, feeling inadequate. It hit him, then, that there was an entire world to Ellyot Moon that he, Eljean, would not have any experience with. The thought depressed him.

“Hurry, Eljean—we’re late!” Ellyot urged, and Eljean was forced to actually run a little, as Ellyot’s purposeful trot took them pelting through the rough cobblestones of the Goddess ghetto.

If anyone had asked Eljean fifteen minutes before, he would have said he had no idea how to get to the ghetto unless it involved going through the marketplace and going from there—his way would have taken an hour, at best. If he hadn’t had to watch his feet quite so avidly so he didn’t break an ankle on the terribly crooked stones, he would have allowed himself to just gaze at Ellyot with his jaw dangling in awe of where this intense, magnetic man had taken him on what had once promised to be a lonely sort of day.

Ellyot practically skidded to a halt in front of a neat, rough wood building with a sign hanging from the eaves that read The Amber Goose. The building looked familiar, and he caught his breath, his eyes darting to another tavern a few doors down the newly built boardwalk. It was just as neat from the outside but somehow to his mind seedier and full of foul desires. That tavern he’d been in before, but he tried very hard to keep the knowledge from the young regents he’d learned to think of as friends.

A golden god was restlessly pacing the in front of the tavern, and he gave Ellyot a long-suffering look as they rushed up.

“This? You’re late for this?” The god with the curling yellow hair shot Eljean a disgusted look and Ellyot thumped him on the shoulder good-naturedly.

“Be polite, Aylan. It wasn’t fair—I pretty much kidnapped all his mates and didn’t tell him where they went. I thought since Stanny was showing up today, he could help us out.”

Aylan gave Eljean another grudging once-over, and Eljean felt free to return the glare. Besides curling yellow hair that was scraped back into a haphazard queue, Aylan was barely an inch or so shorter than Eljean himself…He had bluer-than-blue eyes, a sculpted mouth and cheekbones that could cut steak. He also had a possessive air around Ellyot that was surprisingly hard to read.

“I’m Eljean, from the house of…” Gamely he extended a hand.

“I don’t care.” Aylan folded his arms, and if anything, his glare intensified. Ellyot leaned over, grasped Aylan’s arm at the shoulder, and aimed a finger at the golden god’s midsection. Aylan gave a yelp and a smothered giggle before he caught Ellyot’s finger, and Ellyot danced backwards, laughing as he dodged a wrestler’s grasp.

Aylan gave up, holding his hands up and rolling his eyes. “Fine, fine, you bloody wank—he can stay if he can be useful. Your hordes are waiting, oh Regent Healer of Clough.” Abruptly the laughing concession on his face stalled and the air around the three of them sobered. “It’s going to be a hard day, brother,” he said at last, gently. “I hope you’re ready.”

Ellyot drew a deep breath, and assumed a face that was almost frightening in its calm assumption of competence. “Right—you know I’m always ready, brother. You give Eljean a job, and we can start. Anybody critical?”

Aylan’s mouth tightened, and he nodded. “The guards found a safe house for the girls last night…the two worst cases are prepped and in the back room, but you’re going to need to stitch.”

Ellyot cursed foully, lines of pain etching themselves into the corners of his eyes. “Triana and Arue are back there?” he asked softly.

“Yes—and Torrell brought in that anesthetic/aloe concoction that works so well.” Aylan clapped a sustaining hand on Ellyot’s shoulder and Ellyot sighed grimly, pushing at the swinging double doors from the brightness outside to the cool tavern within.

“Let’s get busy.”

With that they pushed into the cool darkness of the little tavern, Eljean blinking furiously to make sense of what was inside.

“Eljean!” Aerk called from where he sat, surrounded by children with a book on his lap. “Good! Ellyot said he was going to bring you in today—we can use some help!”

Eljean looked about him in quiet wonder. Although the building was most obviously a tavern on other days—there was a bar with stools and rough-wood tables with folding chairs, a rack of shelves with sweet glass bottles filled with sweeter poisons, and an ale tap— today, it was most definitely a surgery.

Women thick with child waited on the chairs, and some thoughtful soul had given them crates on which to prop their feet. Mothers sat on stools and cradled children with runny noses and flushed cheeks, and children played at Aerk’s feet while looking anxiously at parents resting on makeshift pallets against the back wall. There were others too—men with bandaged limbs from a job gone wrong, young girls who would meet no one’s eyes, young men cradling strained shoulders or bruised knuckles. The tavern was reasonably large for such a place, but on this day, it was full to bursting with people looking for succor.

Keon was moving from pallet to pallet, offering folded parchment cups of water with more compassion than grace, and refreshing the cool compresses on the foreheads of some of the sick. Jino was moving among the pregnant women, using his famed charm with ladies to ask them how they were feeling, and keeping track of their answers on small sheets of parchment fixed on a board in front of him. Marv and Djali were talking to the mothers of the sick children. Marv was flashing that winsome, crooked-toothed grin of his while feeling tender foreheads and keeping notes as Jino was, and Djali…Djali, helpless, hapless Djali who couldn’t say two words in a group without stumbling over both of them, was smiling gently at the children. He would reach under his cloak for each one and pull out a sweet—something medicinal, if Eljean had to guess—and a toy. There were tiny sewn poppets for the girls and little wooden horses for the boys and by the way the children smiled or spoke to him, it was clear that they knew Djali well. He was their favorite uncle, cousin and big brother rolled all into one.

Eljean recovered from his complete surprise—this is what his fellows had been doing on the rest days without him? Caring for the sick? Minding their children? Why would they worry about…

A sudden, sick sensation dropped his stomach to the floor.

This was illegal. He had voted on the issue himself—people in the Goddess ghetto were not allowed to congregate for any reason that involved their gifts or ‘foul practices of medicine’. There were no hospitals or midwives in the Goddess ghetto because, according to the headmaster of Dueance University, “The medical practices of the Goddess followers come into direct conflict of the beliefs of the sacred followers of the gods.” At the time, he hadn’t cared—the bill had been proposed by the consort, and all of the younger Regents had simply followed his lead. The only thing Eljean’s father demanded, actually, was that he not displease any of the elders in the hall. And this—this— facility is what he had voted against.

He himself had been a tool to make it illegal for a people to care for themselves.

Apparently Ellyot Moon had taken it upon himself to care for them.

“Eljean?” Aerk prompted, and Eljean swallowed and met Aerk’s eyes. The same sort of self-recrimination was in Aerk’s gaze that he knew was in his own.

“Absolutely,” Eljean murmured dazedly, “whatever I can do.”

Aerk set him to work questioning the children with the sick parents. “When was the last time you ate? Was it tasty, or too old? Are you cold at night? Why—are you needing blankets or firewood?” The ghettoes were a swamp—sometimes, a fire was needed just to drive off the infection bearing mosquitoes that plagued this section of town, in spite of the summer heat. For each child or set of siblings, a package was produced with clothes or food or blankets—whatever was needed that the ailing parent couldn’t provide. Some of the children, Eljean was told, would not be going home with their mother or father. Many of the adults were sick with hunger or exhaustion, and would be cared for in other homes while the children went to the safe houses that hid them from the guards.

“Safe house?” Eljean had questioned when he’d first been told where the dark-eyed little boy on his knee was going. “Why do they need to be kept safe?” Aylan had mentioned something about a safe house being discovered by the guards, as well—and stitches.

Keon looked away, obviously disturbed, and the boy on Eljean’s knee burrowed his head into Eljean’s arm. “What do you think, Eljean?” Keon asked roughly. “They can’t defend themselves, the priests have spent years telling the population that any sort of sexual deviation is their fault—what do you think local brigands or even the guards do if they find unprotected children?”

The child made a little keening sound, and Eljean, who would have said he didn’t care for children, wrapped his arm around the boy’s shoulders in protection.

“Did we do this?” he asked in quiet horror.

“No,” Keon shook his head. “I asked Ellyot, the first time I was here. Ellyot said…” Keon looked away. “He said this wasn’t our fault—but now that we knew it was truth, we had an obligation to change it.”

Eljean looked over to the curtained taproom. He’d heard muffled sobbing and moans coming from the room periodically for past hour. Tw o girls who would need stitching—the thought of where they needed to be stitched made his stomach roil.

“How could we not know, and we’ve been living here. And he just…shows up, and he knows exactly what we’ve done?”

Keon shook his head and shrugged. He looked tired, and his dark, cynical eyes were bloodshot. They had been in session late the night before—how early had Eljean’s friends awakened to perpetrate this act of kindness?

“Have you seen him, here?” Keon asked after a moment when he scowled at the flowered curtain. Eljean shot him an evil look, and Keon grimaced in apology and continued. “You know how most times he just sits back and watches us, and smiles when he approves or looks thoughtful when he doesn’t?”

“Mm,” Eljean nodded.

“You won’t see him like that here.”

Eljean raised his eyebrows, but Keon had moved on with purpose. The conversation stuck with him though, especially about an hour later, when he moved back towards the taproom to get another packet of blankets and food for a family that had just arrived. The curtain was pulled aside—the girls who had been treated had apparently been taken out through the back way, and he heard Ellyot’s voice from surprisingly near. Turning around, he saw Ellyot through a gap in the curtain, facing a tiny, barely-adolescent girl wearing a boy’s tattered breeches and a man’s overlarge shirt, and with dark brown hair that looked as though it had been cropped with a belt-knife.

“Arue,” Ellyot was saying softly, taking the girl’s hands in his, “you were so very brave in there, helping us. You must let me know if it ever hurts too much, helping the girls who have been…injured…violated the way you were.”

The girl shook her head, and looked down. “Feels better,” she said gruffly. “Would rather help than sit and watch them bleed.”

From his position, Eljean had a clear view of Ellyot’s face, and the pure empathy that passed over it turned a knife somewhere in Eljean’s middle.

“I know you would, precious,” Ellyot said, stroking her hand gently. “But I need you to watch them too. Make sure they take care of themselves.” His hand moved up to the girl’s forearm, which was covered with even slice scars that appeared to have been healed over for several months. “Make sure they don’t do any of this.”

“Sorry.” The girl studied her feet, but she apparently trusted Ellyot to keep up his gentle touch on her arm, and Eljean’s breath caught tightly to realize how deep that trust must have run.

“Don’t be sorry, sweetheart,” he murmured. “It’s not your fault. Just be well.” Somewhere from the depths of his toes, Ellyot pulled up a grin and his gentle hand went to the girl’s shorn hair. “And let your hair grow—short hair cannot keep you safe, but your beautiful hair can bring you pride and joy.”

The girl shrugged, but the corners of her mouth were turning up shyly, the compliment having clearly found its mark.

“Now tell me,” Ellyot continued, “do you still guard Aylan while he sleeps?”

And suddenly the girl’s eyes were no longer at the floor. “Oh yes— he makes me feel safe.”

“Good girl—I sleep easier knowing that you’re there. And you’re right to feel safe around him--he’s the most honorable man I know.”

A grin crossed the girl’s face that was so sudden and so impish, that Eljean’s heart ached for the child she should have been. “You know, he says the same thing about you, Triane’s Son.”

There was a pained laugh, and then Ellyot’s voice took on a conspiratorial tone. “Well, you know that even Oueant’s son lies sometimes.”

The girl burst into a peal of impish laughter at the irreverence, and Ellyot asked her to go fetch his next patient.

And Eljean was left standing in the corner with his heart beating in his throat, a thousand suspicions behind his bright eyes, and a terrible, terrible longing burning in his chest.

The day continued, and before lunchtime even, Eljean was exhausted. However, since none of the others seemed to be stopping and resting, he continued with his tasks until a young woman wearing a bar-maid’s apron around her middle and a white streak in her fair hair came up to him with a tray of sandwiches and a jerk of her chin to indicate the counter full of pitchers of water.

“You all need to eat,” she said softly. “Tor…Ell…Regent Moon told me to make sure you took a sandwich and a moment off your feet. He said you were looking knackered.”

Eljean whipped his head around to see if Ellyot was actually outside of the taproom to be making these observations, but a very young woman who was very heavy with child had just lumbered through the curtain, and Ellyot was nowhere to be seen. Eljean called his attention back to the shy barmaid and he smiled, but his mind was still chewing over the things he’d heard—including her own stumbling over Ellyot’s name.

“Why do you call him Triane’s son?” he asked through a mouthful of sandwich, settling his bottom down on one of the stools up by the bar.

The girl flushed, and she cast a furtive look towards the closed curtain.

“No, you didn’t say it—I heard someone else use it. Why?” He swallowed gratefully—for all the want in the ghettoes, the food was amazingly good.

“Triane’s the Goddess—she looks after the gifted, the healers, the poets, the dispossessed…isn’t he all of them?” she asked at last, and Eljean almost choked on his sandwich. Did ‘gifted’ mean what he thought it did?

The girl caught his amazed look and realized she might have said something untoward. With an awkward curtsy, she was suddenly at Djali’s side, and Djali, with another amazing turn of grace, was smiling at her with such beauty that his round, dreamy face was abruptly handsome, square and capable. His clumsy fingers were now deft as he took the tray from the girl and placed it on the bar and then assisted her to a nearby stool, bending his head solicitously to her conversation and answering her with complete seriousness shining from his sweet, sloe eyes.

Eljean wanted to bang his head against the bar to clear out the confusion of what he had believed he knew, and what was proving itself to be true with every moment in this odd day.

“He wasn’t always this smooth with Triana,” Jino said next to him, also munching on a sandwich.

“That’s Triana?” Then the not-quite adolescent girl must have been Arue.

“Mmm,” Jino swallowed, “She’s the barkeeper’s daughter—they give the place over on the first rest day so we can come in. Aerk and Keon said you should have seen the place the first week they were here. Apparently the guards picked a fight with Aylan there, and they had to work fast to get it ship-shape before people came in.”

Eljean looked at Aylan. The golden god had been everywhere this day, and all of the people in the makeshift little clinic seemed to know him. The children, especially, had clung to him, and he had greeted them all by name. Aylan’s efforts had brought in most of the stores of supplies for those in need, and he seemed to be the driving force behind placing the children whose parents were too sick to care for them.

“Where did the care packages come from?” Eljean asked, now that he’d found someone to talk to. He’d been talking to the ghetto denizens all day, and the conversations had been enlightening—but those people had treated him with deference and more than a little fear. It was good to talk to a peer again, someone who wasn’t half afraid he was going to pull out a dagger and knife them where they stood for the white streak in their hair or the person they called ‘beloved’.

Jino shrugged, the gesture making him look young and fragile, in spite of his hard, wiry body. “We’ve been bringing supplies these last weeks, but I understand that before that, Ellyot’s uncle, the one he lived with in Eiran, has been smuggling stuff in here for years. Remember that lace bill?”

Eljean nodded. Ellyot had arrived for the vote just as the last bell tolled, freshly dressed and looking as though he’d never run out of the hall, sick, bleeding and desperate. He’d proceeded to stand up and give an impassioned, fearless oratory that had resulted in one less tax on the people of the Goddess. After the vote he’d promptly disappeared, and hadn’t shown up the next day. When Eljean had seen him after the rest days, he’d been pale and lean, as though he’d spent too many sleepless nights running for his life.

“I remember,” he said now, dryly.

“Well, he told Aerk that he and Aylan had been smuggling wool in for two or three years before Ellyot showed up to claim his place.”

Eljean blinked and looked hard at Jino, who shrugged as if anticipating his next question. “Why the wait?” he asked anyway.

“I asked him that,” said Aerk, coming up beside them after having heard the last part of the conversation.

“What’d he say?” Eljean was feeling restless—he wanted to hear the end of this, but he was looking around the room and realizing how many more people had to be seen, cared for, given to, and he could tell by Jino’s gulping of the last of his food that he was not the only one overwhelmed by the need in this place.

“He said that all he wanted was to be with his beloved and do a little good in the world. It wasn’t until Triannon burnt down that he realized he didn’t have a choice in the matter.” Aerk waited a beat, wile Jino and Eljean digested that last bit of gossip, and then walked forward for his own food with a “Triana, my darling, what culinary masterpiece have you cooked up for us today?” Triana giggled, and Jino broke the silence by going up for seconds, and Eljean sat and nervelessly wiped his fingers on the hem of his borrowed shirt.

His beloved. Ellyot didn’t speak of her (him?). He had never spoken of a beloved. Eljean suddenly remembered a tattered cloak with loud gold lining. It had been wadded up on Ellyot’s bed as they’d passed through his room, as though someone had slept with it bunched up in his arms. Her. Ellyot Moon really did have a beloved, and it was a she.

Eljean fought the urge to kick something and cry. Instead, he picked up his little board of questions and names, and went to the newest family that had sat itself down at a newly available table. ‘Do a little good.’ Well, since he was there, he might as well.

Less than an hour later, he got locked in the storeroom behind the makeshift surgery, and although he really did kick something, he found he had something better to do than cry.

He could listen.

Getting locked in the storeroom was an accident. He was looking for a crate to hold yet another care packet, and Djali was asking him for a rhyme for the word ‘auburn’. Djali was frequently doing this—long before Ellyot Moon, he had fancied himself something of a poet, and now that Ellyot Moon had entered their lives with his eloquent tongue and stylish turn of phrase, (and that well-played lute, spied upon their first day of acquaintance) Rath’s son had been unstoppable in his quest for the perfect love poem. Even now, as he worked with his shocking competence, his brain was apparently busy, unable to leave his saddest passion to rest.

So Eljean needed his crate, and Djali needed his rhyme, and together they watched until a patient came out and none came to take her place. Eljean slipped into the taproom and saw that Ellyot was sitting at what looked to be a makeshift surgery table, tilting his head back in weariness. Eljean didn’t want to interrupt that moment, the quiet contemplation, a scant second of regeneration. If he was emotionally exhausted from tending to the children of the sick, he could not imagine what it must be like to stitch wounds, quiet coughs, and give hope, any hope, to people who had been too hungry for too long.

He took a quick left into the darkened, over-sized pantry that Olek and Triana called the storeroom, and found the stack of crates in the back. And that was when Aylan shot past, shouting, carrying the body of what looked to be a twelve-year old boy in his arms.

He slammed the door shut as he went, and as Eljean turned, dreamlike, and moved to the door, he heard the dragging of furniture and an unmistakable thump of something shoved against the door. The door was mostly a rough plank, secured by leather straps acting as hinges on the wall. The handle was a round hole cut out of the plank and Eljean gave a whuff and sank to his knees, looking through the hole for a severely limited view beyond. All he could manage at first was a view of the two men from the arse down (not a bad view really, but not helpful in the least) and the edge of the table, which is what had been jammed against the door. There was a window on the opposite wall, with sun streaming down, and it seemed clear that Ellyot needed the light.

The boy on the table had messy brown hair—that was all Eljean could see of him, because his head was only a few inches from the hole in the door.

He heard Ellyot swearing clearly, and suddenly the things he could see were not nearly as important as what was being said.

“Oueant’s bloody tears, Aylan—what happened?”

Aylan’s next word was so foul that Eljean almost stumbled back. Young boys used that word when they wanted to irritate their parents. Adults didn’t use that word unless they were on the verge of breaking something.

“The guards…he was in a Goddess boy brothel so they thought that was excuse enough.”

The boy cried out, and Eljean could see the hand on his brow. “Hush…hush…” Then the sound of ripping fabric, and from the angle of Aylan’s golden head, Eljean surmised the boy’s breeches were a thing of the past.

“Oh gods…” The despair in that eloquent voice was enough to make Eljean whimper, but nobody heard him because the boy had started what sounded like his last round of screams from a raw throat, and Ellyot’s next words were strong enough to drown him out.

“It’s all fine, boy,” he said firmly. “No worries. I’m just going to do a little wishing, and all that pain is going to go right away.”

“You can’t!” Aylan protested over the whimpers. There was another gentle, long-fingered hand in that tousled hair—Aylan was more than just a gruff horse’s arse, apparently.

“I have to—he’s going to bleed out otherwise, and cauterizing the wound to make it stop bleeding would kill him!” And then, before Eljean wondered what it was he couldn’t do, Ellyot said clearly, in a voice that seemed to glow, “The man who did this to you deserves more, in truth, than you have suffered, but what you have suffered will be, in truth, what he receives.”

The boy’s screams ceased immediately, and there was a heavy sound hitting the ground, followed by a round of swearing from Aylan that made Eljean’s eyes widen.

“Stop it, Aylan,” Ellyot said with weak humor, “you’re scaring the boy. Could you do me a favor and find him a new pair of trews? I’ll clean him up.”

“You can barely stand!” Aylan spat.

Ellyot, who seemed to know exactly how to settle the irascible Aylan lifted a hand and murmured, “Then help me up, brother, and I’ll sit down and work.”

“Gods!” Aylan grunted, and there was the sound of a stool being dragged across the floor. Then, with less heat, “Could you save both, do you think?”

“Mmmmm. No. The one that was ruptured has simply disappeared, and the skin has healed over it.” His next words were apologetic. “Excuse me, young sir—I’m going to touch you in a very personal way, like a lover. Only I’m not a lover, I hardly know you. I’m just trying to make you better, right?”

Another whimper, this one merely frightened, and after a few ‘mmmhmms’ Ellyot spoke again. “Right. You’re going to be mostly whole, young man—even your backside seems to have healed well. You’ll only have one stone, but you’re a brave boy—I think you can be braver with one stone than most men with two, don’t you agree? With twice the practice and a little luck, you’ll probably be able to sire a few more brave boys, if that’s your leaning, what do you say?” Ellyot’s voice was weary—terribly weary, but it was infused with warmth and, amazingly enough, hope. And still, as Eljean put together what Ellyot was saying with what had been done to the boy, he felt a wash of anger that almost cleansed him of hope altogether.

“Here’s some spare trews,” Aylan said, coming up from wherever he’d gone. His voice now sounded right near Ellyot’s, and with an exquisite shafting of jealousy, Eljean imagined him standing right behind Ellyot, with a hand on his shoulder. “No, here, let me put them on—you’ll need to rest a moment before you see anyone else.”

“I can help with trousers, Aylan,” Ellyot’s dry voice had rolled eyes in it. “I’ll let you take him to one of the resting pallets.” Then, to the boy, “Can you stay in a safe house for a while? No more being a Goddess boy, right?”

“I hate it,” the boy whispered. “I hate it. But my family’s hungry…”

“I know,” Ellyot said quietly, and Eljean could see another long- fingered, fine-boned hand stroking the boy’s brow. “Maybe while you’re in the safe house, we’ll find a way to feed your family that doesn’t involve you in that place.”

“Please…”

“Absolutely,” Ellyot promised that terrified, stricken voice, “Whatever we can do.”

A Goddess boy? At this age? Eljean felt sick. Memories suffused him, terrible, sick-making memories of coins left on an end table, awkward mornings and eyes that could not be met. Yes, he’d known Goddess boys—but he’d known them fully grown, fully consensual… not children, castrated and raped in a fit of temper. Still, his own memories made him want to throw up on the floor of the storeroom. For the first time since the door had swung shut, there was not enough air in the room, and he felt well and truly trapped.

“Here, I’ve got you,” Aylan now, and there was a shifting as the boy was taken from the table. Eljean could see Ellyot’s hands, wiping the table down with cloths and what smelled to be wood-grain alcohol. And another towel, and another, and when the towels stopped showing red, then pink, then a faint brown through the door-handle, the table was clean to Ellyot’s satisfaction.

The towels were picked up and thrown somewhere for laundering, and Ellyot was back on the stool in front of the table. He’d sat down heavily, and Eljean was surprised enough to see his head come down, table level, almost even with his own eyes. Instinctively he flinched away, leaning backwards against the door like a child playing hide and seek. It was stupid—he had entered the storeroom for valid reasons, but he’d been there when Ellyot Moon had done…had done what? The implications of what he knew were huge and baffling, and Eljean didn’t want to suddenly burst out into the quiet of the now-clean surgery without thinking them through.

A few moments passed, moments during which all Eljean could hear was his own breathing, although he was trying so hard to keep it still in his chest that he was bringing spots to his eyes. Eljean focused his vision on a wrapper of dried meat and contemplated snacking on it out of boredom, until there was a rustling from outside, and Aylan’s voice again, and this time the tenderness, no matter how exasperated, was unmistakable.

“There. I’ve relegated the minor cases to Djali and Triana—they’re competent enough—and you have an hour’s reprieve. Stanny should be here in two or three hours, so maybe we can keep you from doing anything arse-stupid for a while. Now eat and nap and that’s an order.”

“Funny,” Ellyot mocked gently, “you don’t look like Aunt Bethen.”

Aylan made a pained sound. “Ah, gods…if only Bethen were here. She would have kept you from doing that. Or Yarri…”

Ellyot laughed. “Yarri thinks I can do anything,” he said softly. “I would have done it just to keep her believing just that.”

“Foolish arse!” There was a smacking sound, and Ellyot made protest, but Aylan overrode him. “Yarri knows exactly who you are and what your limitations are. You underestimate her. Now eat.”

An exasperated groan. “I’m not hungry, now leave me alone.”

“The hell I will—if we have to sit here all day I’ll see you eat that sandwich and put your head down. I know what the gift takes out of you, especially when you do something that drastic. If you’re not hungry, it’s because this Goddess-forsaken pisshole would upset anyone’s stomach…”

“’deh, I’b ea’bi’g,” swallow, “Will you stop lecturing me now?”

“I don’t know why I should,” Aylan replied dryly. “I can’t believe you brought that vain little cock-pigeon here this morning.”

“Eljea’m?” Another swallow. “What’s wrong with him?”

A humorless sound. “He wants you—that’s what’s wrong with him.”

A grin Eljean could almost hear. “Jealous?”

And a shudder he could hear as well. “No, brother. Not to knock your tremendous appeal, but if we were doing that, here? I’d lose my mind. I worry enough about you as it is. If my skin never got a break from you, my mind would eat itself up with fear.”

A hard swallow. “Eloquent, Aylan. I’m sorry—I really am…you know, Stanny is coming…”

A sudden fist slamming down on the table startled all of them. “If you tell me to go back home, I will be as close to hitting you as I ever hope to be in my life.”

A sigh. “You’re right, the people need you…”

“The people?”

A humorless laugh. “Are you going to make me say it? Haven’t I told you in a thousand ways? You’re my lifeline here. She may be the reason I breathe, and my heart pumps in and out, but here? You’re what gets me up in the morning. I couldn’t look my friends in the face and lie to them, if I didn’t remember whom I loved, and what I was fighting for.”

A reconciling silence, and Eljean risked a peek through the door handle again. He saw the two hands on the table, one covering the other, with a tenderness beyond any Eljean had ever had from a lover. She may be the reason I breathe and my heart pumps in and out. And yet, If my skin never got a break from you, my mind would eat itself up in fear. Eljean was more confused than he ever had been, but there was no denying the tenderness in that touch of hands.

“Eljean’s all right,” Ellyot said into that healing silence. “He’s just like all of them, you know…young, callow…”

“He’s our age…”

“Well yes, but no one has taught him…or any of them for that matter, how to be men.” Ellyot gave a sigh. “Does it ever surprise you that all fathers are not Lane Moon?”

Aylan laughed humorlessly. “Now you’re showing how spoiled you are—it surprises me every day that Lane Moon loves me like a son.”

A frown, then, probably. Eljean could imagine the expression crossing Ellyot’s face—that lower lip would purse, just so. “It shouldn’t surprise you. You’re worth the love. I just mean that these boys—they’ve grown up just…void…of anyone teaching them right and wrong. And they’re hungry for it. You’ve seen them listen—stories, poems, heroes. Eljean is no different.”

“He looks sneaky,” Aylan grumbled.

“You’d be sneaky too, you randy git, if you’d had to hide every hard-on you’d ever sprung because it wasn’t for the right person. You’re lucky enough to like girls—don’t tell me you haven’t had a few women here--Arue watches you like a play, and then tells the rest of us, you know. But not him—he’s like Tal. Every desire he’s ever had, he’s had to hide or sneak or pretend did not exist. When you can’t get laid, you’re an unlivable bastard…Just think about what he goes through.”

“You hide your hair with every breath, don’t you?” Aylan asked softly, and Eljean would have been almost amused to hear a snarfling, gobbling bite taken from a neglected sandwich if he hadn’t wanted to hear the answer to that question. Aylan didn’t seem to be amused either. “You’re done chewing now—answer my question, brother.”

“It’s not important,” Ellyot murmured.

“It is too—you said we’d give this a year. I can tell by how much night work we have that you’re doing well in the hall—I just don’t know how much more of this you can stand.”

“I thought I was supposed to nap?” Ellyot’s voice became light, teasing, and suddenly Eljean knew exactly why Aylan was so angry all the time. Getting the man to take care of himself was like picking a bouquet of flowers from the Whoring moon herself.

“You alone are worth this entire shitehole of a town, Tor…Ellyot,” Aylan said quietly, with an intensity that vibrated the floorboards and shook the flour from the shelves. “If you think I’m going to watch you kill yourself here, when our family needs you…”

“That’s Goddess thinking,” Ellyot (what was that other name Aylan was going to say?) replied wryly. “Even Lane would tell you that this situation needs the gods’ perspective.” Abruptly, even to Eljean’s limited vision, Ellyot pulled his hands in front of him and rested his head on them, muffling an enormous yawn in his arms. “Let’s not argue,” he said through the yawn. “Did you send that messenger to those boys?”

“Yes—they’ll be here when Stanny arrives. I wish we could talk Arue into going…”

“Gods,” Ellyot yawned again. “If only. But she won’t leave without her brother, and he won’t leave without Torrell…”

“And Torrell won’t leave his people…I know, I know. Too damned much honor here…”

“And not enough joy.” Ellyot mumbled the last bit, and as quickly as that he was asleep, snoring gently on the slab of the backroom table.

Eljean would have thought that Aylan, gruff , competent Aylan who had been a whirlwind of activity in the tavern that day, would have left then on some vital errand or important task that only he could accomplish. Instead, he sat quietly, eating (or so it sounded). Every now and then Eljean could see his hand going to Ellyot’s chestnut colored hair and stroking gently.

Eljean was just starting to fight the compulsion to stand up and scream I’m in here you two gits, let me out!!! when there was another clatter from the front of the taproom. Aerk’s voice suddenly burst in through the curtain, calling with no small amount of panic for Ellyot, and the man who had abruptly fallen asleep on his own hands was bounding up like a rubber ball off a granite floor.

“Wha…”

“Guards…one of them’s wounded…”

“Well bring them in!” Aylan said wolfishly, “We’ll cure all their ills!”

“Not here, Aylan!” Ellyot hissed. “In fact, you need to stay back. The rest of us are regents—you go out there and you’re their target again.” Then, to Aerk. “Tell him I’ll be right out.” A rustle, and Aerk disappeared. “I’m serious—in fact, go out to the alleyway. If I have to bring them in here, I don’t want you anywhere near.”

“Wonderful!” Aylan snarled, “Exiled to the children’s table.”

“Get out there you wank!” The last word was punctuated by a slamming door, and Ellyot’s footsteps sounded past the pantry again, leaving Eljean alone and wondering what his next move would be.

The Healer’s Song

Oh gods, there were two guards in Torrant’s makeshift hospital, and one of them was bleeding out from his crotch. For some reason, when Torrant had wished the boy’s wounds on their perpetrator, he had assumed the man would collapse safely in the guard’s barracks, and the rest of the world could make of his slow and painful death what it would. Having him show up in Torrant’s surgery scant moments after he’d cured the bastard’s victim was not in that hastily erected plan.

“We know what you’re doing here!” the smaller, un-wounded man was saying. He had fine blonde hair and a narrow, almost pretty face. “If you don’t help my friend, then we’ll make sure Rath knows too.”

Torrant raised his eyebrows, and knew that his face was as hard as it ever got when he was human. “That’s unlikely, since then he’d have to tell the world what he’s doing to get such a wound—or do the sodomy laws pardon the guards automatically?”

The pretty guard dropped his eyes. “That’s none of your business…”

Torrant had a sudden, sick suspicion. “No—but this arse-ripper made it yours, didn’t he?” Almost gentleness in his voice then. Perhaps the man deserved it.

The blood washed under the man’s fair skin, and Torrant knew he’d been right. Dammit why couldn’t this man be as monstrous as his sallow-faced, spittle-riven partner?

“He’s a good man,” the blonde guard murmured, and it sounded as though he was trying to convince himself.

“Good men don’t rape boys in brothels they helped to build,” Torrant spat…The wounded man gave a groan then, and fell to his knees. The movement must have jostled his groin because he let out a hoarse scream before his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed on the floor.

“They’re just Goddess whores!” the pretty guard screamed, and Torrant’s sympathy faded with immediacy. He looked around him, dazedly, at the children huddled around Aerk, sharing food as though they’d never seen it, and at the parents, spread on the pallets for the ill or the exhausted because food and hygiene had been stripped from them like rights and dignity. He looked at the young regents—his friends, in spite of all the lies he had told them—and thought of their shock, their disillusionment, when they’d seen what one human could do to another, when the law said that it was right to do so. Someone was missing—he noticed that—but mostly what he saw was that they had the right to make amends without being persecuted by the Consort.

“Well then,” Torrant murmured, looking the young guard in the eye, “you shouldn’t mind that none of these ‘Goddess whores’ will treat your friend. And since I’m serving them, I guess my touch is tainted as well.”

The man’s eyes widened, and he began to shake his head, and Torrant’s eyes bled blue because simply turning the men away was not going to be enough.

“You think the Goddess and those who serve her are nothing. You have killed Compassion with Pride. What you do not have eyes to see in truth is the truth you will not find,” he intoned, and the younger guard’s eyes grew blank and his lips moved as though he were talking to someone inside his own head. With a whimper and a heave he turned around, hauling his friend with him, and slow foot-dragging step by painful step the two of them walked through the swinging doors and into the over-bright sunlight outside.

Marv ran up to Torrant then, his tightly curled hair sticking on end from nervous hands ripping through it. “Dueant’s bright helmet, Ellyot—what did you say to him to make him go away?”

“Words,” Torrant said dreamily. The world lost it’s hard, cold, snow-cat focus and became the dim color of tarnished pewter. “Deadly words.” From the back room there was the racket of a table scraping the floor and wood colliding with wood, and two facts fitted together neatly in his fading brain. “Oh, that’s where Eljean went…”

The next thing he heard was the thump of his own body hitting the wooden floor.

“Where’ve you been?” Aerk asked Eljean as he and Marv hoisted Ellyot Moon between them, his limp arms over their shoulders.

“I got locked in the storeroom,” Eljean replied shortly, although he knew that Aerk’s quick mind would eventually ask questions about that. “Here—bring him back to the table.”

Eljean blocked out a path and together Marv and Aerk brought the unconscious Ellyot into his own surgery and laid him out on the table, which was at a decidedly odd angle in the dead center of the surgery.

“Where are you going?” Aerk asked as Eljean trotted to the door.

“Aylan can help him,” Eljean replied, opening the back door, “He knows about the gift…” Dueant’s big-arsed mouth—did he really say that? Aylan was glaring at him from the open door as though Eljean’s throat were about to become a thing of the past, so yes, he really must have. No wonder they had kept him in the dark for weeks, Eljean thought miserably. It was obvious he couldn’t keep his heart in his chest or his thoughts behind his mouth to save his life.

“Yes, you really said that,” Aylan barked, reading his mind— or the open expression on his face. “Now what in the seven darks happened?”

Aerk looked from Eljean to Aylan for a moment, and then nodded, as though filing the blurted secret for later. “Two guards came in—one was bleeding out from between his legs. They…” An uncomfortable look with Marv, who took over.

“They talked—it…it sounded like Ellyot guessed something bad about them,”

“No kidding!” Keon snorted, coming in behind the curtain with Jino behind him and Triana as well, clinging to Djali’s hand.

“Aylan,” Triana said carefully, looking sideways at the large number of tall, broad-shouldered young men squashed in the same small room, “if you recall that boy you brought in?”

Aylan nodded, and then grimaced. “Yes—I understand—what did…he…do then?” The hesitation was slight—a fledgling’s down-feather of a breath, and if Eljean hadn’t known to listen for it, he would have dismissed it altogether.

“He started speaking poetry!” said Djali in an excited little burst. Djali had trouble writing poetry in a quiet room with a pen and ink— the idea that someone could simply ‘speak’ as a poet had obviously impressed him. Djali’s face fell then. “But I can’t remember the exact words.”

Aylan nodded with a sigh. “Can anybody remember if he used the word ‘truth’ when he spoke?”

“Twice.” This from Jino, who was rubbing his chest in distraction.

“Damn.” Aylan ran his hand through his bright hair, pulling it from its queue and then pulling it back and refastening the band deftly. “Right, all of you—he’s going to be fine. He just needs rest more than ever, that’s all. Can we function without him today? Are there any cases he absolutely must see? He can come back in tomorrow—I’ll take him to homes if I have to—but right now, he needs to curl up in a dark corner and sleep until Stanny gets here, right? No disturbances, no ‘Ellyot I just need’s’…Just sleep.”

“The store-room is dark and cool,” Triana said softly, and Eljean nodded in enthusiastic affirmation.

“I’ll put down some blankets,” is what he said quietly.

“Good,” Aylan reached down and to Aerk and Marv’s mortification lifted their friend by his lonesome, grimacing at how little he really weighed. “Triane’s generous bosom, people, don’t any of you make sure he eats between bells?”

“They assumed I was grown, brother,” Ellyot murmured weakly from his arms, and Aylan grunted as he waited for Triana and Eljean to prop up a bed out of flour sacks and old blankets on the floor of the storeroom.

“They’re dumb-arsed sots, all of them—any idiot can look at you and see you need cozening.” Aylan murmured against Ellyot’s temple, and the regents exchanged looks and took that opportunity to duck out and resume their duties in the front. “Eljean, wait a bit,” Aylan told him when he would have left. Eljean stopped at the doorway like a guilty child, his heart pounding rhythms through his belly. He heard Aylan in the storeroom, and couldn’t resist peeking his head in to watch the unflappable, gruff , golden god settle his friend down with more tenderness than Eljean had seen one human show another in his life.

“It’s almost too cool in here, for all the heat outside,” Aylan was saying. “I’ll cover you with one of these blankets, and let you sleep.”

“Right, mama,” Ellyot said dreamily, and at first Eljean thought he was simply joking with his friend, as he had earlier when he’d mentioned his Aunt Beth, but Ellyot’s next words sent a chill clean through to his bowels.

“If I sleep too long, the soldiers will come and Yarri will die too… don’t let me sleep too long…”

Aylan’s pained whuff of air told Eljean that he wasn’t the only one who was chilled. “You’ve already wakened, my friend. That battle’s been fought. Now go to sleep so you can fight this one, right?”

“’Night, Aylan. Love you.”

“’Night, brother. Love you too.”

Aylan’s shoulders were sloped as he closed the door behind him, and he stood still so long, with closed eyes, that Eljean was debating turning to leave. Aylan’s voice stopped him.

“How did you know Ellyot was gifted?” he asked quietly.

Well, his dumb mouth had crafted this box of shite, it was time he waded in it to see what would grow. “You locked me in the store room by accident,” he said baldly. “I heard all sorts of things I don’t understand.”

Aylan pinched the bridge of his nose and cringed. “Of course we did,” he murmured, laughing bitterly at himself. “Of course we lock the one wank with an open mouth--and a blazing crush--in a storeroom while we’re perpetrating bloody miracles. How about we bugger each other on top of the regent’s hall while we’re at it? I mean, crucifixion can’t hurt that much, can it?”

“Speak for yourself,” Eljean interjected with dignity. “I’m not looking forward to crucifixion at all!”

To Eljean’s everlasting surprise, Aylan laughed for real. “Right, then. He vouched for you and you have your own arse to save. I might not have to kill you after all.”

“You wouldn’t,” Eljean said with a surprising certainty. “He said you were Oueant incarnate. You wouldn’t kill a man in cold blood for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Aylan’s face hardened, and his lovely blue eyes became as cold as a snow cat’s gaze in December. “Don’t you believe that! Honor’s heart is in Joy’s hands—remember that, princeling. There is not much I wouldn’t do to keep that boy safe, even from himself. Do you hear me? You know a few secrets; you’ll do your lame-arsed best to keep them. All of that I believe. That your life is important enough to save, even though it’s a risk to his? You’d need to do some fast talking to convince me, and I’m not in the mood for conversation. Now go out with your friends and work and do some good, but don’t think you have an elbow into his life because you know a secret, you hear me?”

Eljean nodded, swallowing painfully because he’d been hoping just that. “I hear you,” he murmured, feeling as alien as he ever had. “I’ll dream about your song.”

Aylan shook his head and watched the other young man disappear through the curtain. No—odds were good that it wouldn’t be Aylan’s song that Eljean would dream of that night.

‘News From Home’

Stanny arrived just at suppertime, coming in through the back door of the tavern by the alleyway, and only the sound of his voice roused Torrant from his sleep in the storeroom. He was pale and fever-eyed as he stumbled out, and Aylan’s growl of “Nice going, genius,” was off-set with a casual arm to the elbow to steady his almost shambling steps.

“Stanny!” Torrant cried, throwing grateful arms around his gigantic, red-headed, big-hearted cousin. “Triane’s white smile, cousin—it’s good to see you.”

“It’s not good to see you T…Ellyot!” Stanny said broadly, his eyebrows puckered unhappily. “I mean, I’m glad to see you, but I haven’t seen you look this bad since you were sick in the barracks, back at home.”

“He’s been doing too much,” Aylan said quietly, with meaning, and Torrant glared at him in impotent frustration. Stanny was not quick— he did not take hints easily. But once he took a hint, the meaning would be locked in his slowly churning mind like a giant fallen tree in a rolling river. Eventually that giant, water-sodden tree trunk would hit something or somebody smack in the face, usually the next time Stanny opened his mouth.

“Thanks, Aylan you git-riding wank,” Torrant replied with rolled eyes and a (weak!) elbow in his friend’s side. “And as for you, Stanny, I’ll forgive you for greeting me with that shite if you tell me you can, uhm, deliver that package that Aylan told you about?”

But Stanny’s mind would not be turned. “Yes, of course I can,” he replied genially. “It will take a while to deliver—you know that, right?”

Aylan sighed and smacked his head with the flat of the hand not holding Torrant upright. “You’ve got my route, don’t you!”

Stanny’s smile dropped a few degrees and the sun grew a little less bright. “Evya hates it when I’m gone now—I don’t know if we can do the long route much longer. If I can make the snows, pretty soon it will just be deliveries here.”

Torrant and Aylan exchanged glances, and for the moment they were in perfect accord. “Stanny,” Torrant said after a charged moment, “you may be able to stop making deliveries here…” He looked up at the other regents, who had gathered in the back room out of nothing else but sheer, stinking curiosity. “The gentlemen here—they’ve been giving their time and finances to the ghettoes. They think they can start bringing the wool in on their own. They’re regents—they don’t need passes or clearance to enter the city.” There was a silence, as both Torrant and Aylan prayed that Stanny wouldn’t be hurt. “It would be safer for you.”

Stanny’s expression was a surprise—it was both knowing and sly, and Torrant mentally reminded himself to never underestimate Yarri’s cousin. “You mean it would be safer for you,” he said in a way that was both very mild and so much like his father that it made Torrant’s chest hurt. “No. Don’t worry cousin—I have things to keep me busy here, and the family would rather lose the income of the entire route than leave the two of you without a lifeline.”

“Things…” Torrant began, only to be cut off by Stanny’s bland smile. “Never mind—you won’t tell, and I won’t ask. But Goddess, it’s good to see you!”

“I only wish I could stay longer,” Stanny replied mournfully. Visitors to the city were allowed one day, two at the most, inside the gates before they were called before the Consort and asked of their affiliation. Of course, lying would be prudent, but since the punishment for lying was to be thrown in the hidden dungeons and tortured, no one wanted to risk Stanny’s safety.

“We’ll be able to visit all night, right?” Stanny asked then, and Torrant and Aylan met stricken eyes. The two guardsmen—who knew where they had gone to die? Torrant was certain that the one whose memory he’d wiped would not last long—he’d had to put a formidable push on the man’s mind. That didn’t come without a price.

“Part of it,” Aylan replied quietly, glowering at the young regents who were patiently waiting for their turn to meet the Moon cousin. Aylan could see their group infatuation with Torrant—it didn’t surprise him, although Torrant was, of course, oblivious. Aylan could foresee all sorts of evils that might befall them because of Torrant’s appeal— and his obvious affection for his friends—alone…“We have some…”

“Night work,” Torrant supplied blandly, feeling as green as he ever had. “We have some night work we may need to attend to, when every one else retires for the evening.”

“Night work?” Aerk said, curiously. “What does that mean?”

“It means its work, and they do it at night,” Jino enunciated, keeping a precious expression on his pointed features.

Marv smacked him upside the head, and Torrant took that moment to laughingly introduce the regents to his cousin. “We can’t run the clinic without them,” he praised when he was done, and Stanny obliged him with his own laugh.

“Of course, you didn’t tell Da about the clinic at all,” he prodded with another one of those looks that was disconcertingly like Lane. “You must be exhausted.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Aylan muttered, and Torrant tried for another elbow to Aylan’s ribs. He almost fell over and Aylan’s sigh practically rattled the floorboards.

“Stanny,” Torrant said with a desperate change of subject, “tell us about home. How are your Mum and Da—we…” he swallowed then, and felt Aylan go dangerously still next to him. Oh, yes, Aylan was as hungry for news as he was: their spirits were starveled and shriveling for words of the people they loved.

Stanny’s expression was unusually perceptive. “Let’s unload first, then let me sit down. If you feed me, I will gossip just like Mum.” His smile was as sweet and broad as it had ever been.

“We’ll help you unload,” Aerk offered, “as long as we get an ear to the gossip.”

There was no polite way to refuse, but Torrant’s chest burned, and his heart inside it, for a moment of Yarri, a scrap of her, a story from Stanny that would tell him that their night, that wonderful, sadness-wrought night had meant the same thing to her that it had to him. He knew it did—he knew her heart better than he knew his own name, especially here, where he had more than one—but oh, gods, he was like any other lover. He needed to see her, know of her, touch some part of her, so he could believe she was real. He was painfully aware that a discussion with Stanny was as close as he would get.

Unloading took no time at all with the lot of them, and Torrell showed up with a passel of boys to help distribute the wool and the goods that Stanny had brought. Soon enough they were done and venturing back inside The Amber Goose. To Eljean’s surprise, it was now a tavern again. It was, if possible, even more crowded than it had been during the day.

“Who’s that for?” Eljean asked, looking at the little space towards the back. There was a stool there, with a battered lute case at the foot of it, and a glass of water at the ready.

“No!” Aylan barked, glaring at Torrant. He was all but supporting Torrant’s weight, although he was doing it so deftly that Stanny hadn’t noticed.

“I have new songs I want him to bring her…” Torrant began.

“No!”

“And how will he know the melody if I don’t…”

“NO!”

“SING THEM!” they both shouted together at the end. They stood then, toe to toe, heating the room temperature with their glowers.

Torrant stepped back, purposefully taking his full weight on knees that, he was prepared to believe, supported him on prayer alone. “Please, Aylan,” he murmured, “It gives the people such hope.”

Aylan shook his head bitterly. “Why did I come here if you were just going to kill yourself by degrees anyway?”

Torrant took a deep breath and leaned forward, standing a little on his tiptoes and looking wryly up at his brother. Aylan sighed, and leaned forward and they touched foreheads for a moment—a thing they could not have done on the streets of Dueance, but were very comfortable doing in this little tavern.

“Tomorrow is a rest day,” Torrant reminded him. “If you like, you can sneak in through the patio and watch me sleep,” he mocked gently, but Aylan wasn’t smiling.

“I will live up to that,” he said after a quiet moment. “Now go play, and then come talk to Stanny and rest up. There will be…”

“Night work. I know.” Torrant smiled gamely at the regents and at Stanny, who were watching the conversation with unabashed interest. “Have we put on enough of a show?” he asked with a grim twinkle, and the regents laughed, but Stanny didn’t.

“I will have to tell Da exactly how it played,” he said, and Torrant cringed.

“Serves you right, you git wank.” Aylan gave a sour smile. “Now go.”

Torrant smiled so brightly that Triana, who was walking by, dropped her drink tray, and Eljean fell bonelessly into a chair, which was—fortunately—right behind him. Djali bent solicitously to help the little barmaid with her burden, and when the glasses were all put away there was a sudden silence in the tavern.

He had been writing songs for her this last month. They had made love for one night—one night, after a lifetime of waiting, and then he’d left. It was imperative, as necessary as blinking and breathing, that she know he was thinking of her while he was gone.

His fingers played with the strings of the borrowed lute, tuning, refining, and then, when the pitch was just right, he poured out the melody and his heart with it.

The wind that touched your face this morning

Graces me tonight.

I can smell your hair upon the wind

That says good-bye to light.

Your laughter rings in every bell,

Your sobs in every toll.

The moons weep stars when we’re apart.

I miss you more than you can know.

I loved you since I held you:

A baby in my arms.

I watched your steps amazedly.

I kept you safe from harm.

And now we two are grown, it seems

The world is upside down.

You keep my heart safe in your hands

As long as I’m your own.

Oh keep my heart safe in your hands

And know that I’m your own.

Eljean listened to Ellyot’s song with eyes that grew too bright. Oh, yes, he had a beloved—there could be no doubt at all. The song ended and there was a suspension of heartbreak and quiet, and then applause shook the little tavern with joy.

“You’re not alone,” said a voice nearby. “Most of us have been in love with him in one way or another since he and Aylan first visited.”

Eljean came to himself in a moment, and realized that he was sitting alone, at a tiny table towards the middle of the tavern. He also realized the man who was speaking to him was not one of the regents, but that he did know him. A suffocating heat washed his body in the terror-sweat of discovery. He hadn’t lied to Aylan: he hated pain. He feared crucifixion with every fiber in his being. He stared at his companion like a light-struck deer at night.

The dark-haired, pale-skinned young man twisted his mouth in a sardonic smile, and he bent to the table so that he could speak softly. “Don’t worry, Eljean—I won’t tell your regent friends how you know me.”

And now the flush of fear was replaced by a flush of shame. Eljean summoned his most gracious smile; he did not know it, but he had his own glamour when he was being genuine. The flat and pointed features of his narrow face assumed a plain and fragile beauty when he smiled. “Good evening, Zhane,” he said softly. “It’s good to see you.”

“I almost believe you mean that!” Zhane was surprised into saying, and Eljean fought to not duck his head.

“I do.” It was true. Zhane had been for sale, and Eljean had purchased, but the young man had shown a sense of humor in bed, and a certain tenderness towards Eljean’s chronic embarrassment, and his crushing fear of revealing himself to the others from the Hall of Regents. “Would you like to sit with me?”

Zhane’s smile went from sardonic to flattered. His eyes were brown and thickly fringed with lashes, and until Ellyot had arrived in Dueance with his eyes of clear hazel and his chest-breaking magnetism, Eljean had secretly thought he was the most attractive young man he’d ever seen. “I would, Eljean. Thank you.”

“Oi—Eljean—who’s your friend?” Marv asked from a nearby table, and then looked surprised when Jino elbowed him sharply in the side.

“This is Zhane,” Eljean replied, keeping his dignity on like a cloak. “We spent a night drinking together at a tavern down the way.”

“Drinking?” Aerk was surprised enough to say. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you drunk, Eljean.”

“You’re missing out on a sight, then,” said Zhane dryly. “You pour enough wine into him and his mouth will start running like a startled horse. I hope nobody trusts life or death secrets to this boy, because they will be out before he can give his first belch.”

Eljean wondered if the embarrassment sweat soaking his borrowed shirt was actually toxic. He hoped so—it would be pleasant to just go toes-up and not have to endure this moment of his life spilled out in front of the friends he had been oh-so-careful not to alienate with his terrible shame.

Aerk caught Eljean’s eyes with a gentle, twinkling smile. “Well, the moons forbid that we know any more of Eljean than he chooses to tell us—water only, Eljean? Or could you manage to hold your tongue with cider?”

Eljean smiled gratefully. “Cider would be wonderful,” he murmured, and then Ellyot began to play again and the table fell silent with the rest of the tavern.

When Eljean later remembered that night watching Ellyot Moon perform, he would remember Ellyot’s own words, overheard through a plain wooden door.

They’ve grown up just void of anyone teaching them right and wrong. And they’re hungry for it.

His songs were teachings—there was no other word for it. They were treatises on peace, descriptions of bravery, and textbooks of human behavior, all wrapped up in simple lyrics of a boy and a girl and the forces that drew them apart. There was even a song about parents, waiting up for children, giving them love and advice over a breakfast of berries and sunshine. Eljean was aware that he and the other regents were all staring at the makeshift stage with wide eyes and slightly parted mouths. Here they were, the honor of this angry, corrosive country, and their shining joy was that of little boys, being told a story by a campfire.

They could have listened for hours, but there was a slight faltering at a string, a drop in a tone that should have risen, and then Aylan was half out of his seat and Ellyot was finishing up the song and bowing his head as a concession. Yes. It was time for all good boys to stop and rest.

The applause and whistles of gratitude as Ellyot quit the stage were deafening, and when they were done, Eljean found that he had to, very carefully, very discretely, wipe the corners of his eyes.

Zhane leaned in, keeping his distance impersonal, and said softly, “All of us, Eljean—you are not alone.”

Eljean tried a smile then, a game smile, while the other regents were surreptitiously trying to gain back their own composure. Zhane smiled back, gently, and teased a whisper of a touch upon Eljean’s thigh.

“Will there be more performers, then?” Eljean asked, trying to cover his reaction, his arousal, with an inane question.

“Yes,” Zhane nodded, “and I am fortunate, tonight, in that I don’t work. I may do what I like with my time.”

“What you like?” Eljean repeated dumbly, and he flushed even deeper when Zhane nodded like a stalking tiger.

“And what I like, young regent, is to spend my time with you.”

Eljean took a hasty sip of cider and looked around to see if any of the others had heard, but they were all talking about the next performers, whom they apparently were familiar with. No one had heard. No one need know.

“I’m honored,” Eljean said then, accepting the proposition with, had he known it, a very gracious incline of his head. Better a stolen night in the arms of a willing lover, than an empty one, pining away for what he could not have.

“Between the two of you, you’ve dropped three stone in weight, and neither of you had any to spare.” Stanny took a sip of his ale and watched as ‘Cousin Ellyot’ tuned up for what would be his last song. Stanny had no subterfuge in him—he was well aware of that, and not all his news from home was good. He knew now—had known, actually, from his first glimpse of Torrant with his pale, gaunt features and his feverish eyes—that very little of his news on the return trip would be much better.

Beside him, Aylan grunted in response, mostly in agreement, and

Stanny had known him long enough to know that if he didn’t ask another question, that could be the last the man would say.

“So,” he asked conversationally, knowing that in spite of their willingness to talk this night, the regents had somehow been maneuvered into sitting well behind them, “what should I tell Da about ‘night work’?”

Aylan almost spit up his ale. “Goddess, Stanny!” he choked when he could actually speak again. “Are you really going to ask me that here?”

“Nobody’s listening,” Stanny smiled that broad smile, and Aylan narrowed his eyes. Just hearing those words made him want to check the room, and he was well aware that checking the room would be the thing that made everybody look at him. Judging from the wink Stanny gave him over his mug of ale, Stanny knew it too.

“And you wouldn’t have asked the question if you didn’t know,” Aylan accused.

“I want to hear you say it,” Stanny replied evenly, dropping his voice accordingly. “Tell me you’re assassins. Tell me that in addition to his standing up all day and risking his life wearing another name, you’re both risking your lives in the ghettoes, keeping the population safe. Tell me that you take whatever strength you’ve got left and pour it into this place on your rest day, and that he’s so exhausted, I can almost see into his skull through the shadows under his eyes. Tell me that.”

Stanny dumped ale down his throat with a shaking hand, and Aylan did the same. He and Yarri’s easy-going cousin had always gotten along—they had worked together in the days as partners in Lane’s successful shipping business and downed pints of ale as brothers in the nights afterwards. They had sat to family dinners together, and given each other gentle grief about the sad (or not so sad) condition of the other’s love life, and Stanny had wryly chided Aylan about his helpless attachment to Stanny’s youngest sister. Until this moment, hearing Lane’s shaking anger in Stanny’s deeper, rougher voice, Aylan would not have used the word ‘love’ to describe that relationship, but he supposed there was no other word for it.

Torrant started to play then, and their conversation stilled. Aylan closed his eyes as he listened, and for this moment, with Stanny at his back, pretended that the two of them were back at Triannon, and that the future was bright, and that doing what was right was easy.

The sour note made him look up—Torrant never played wrong, not in public—and although the error was quickly covered, Aylan almost groaned looking at him. He was feverish with exhaustion, and their night was far from over.

When he was done, Aylan half stood up, but Torrant nodded his head with a sweet grin at his audience, and bowed. As he took his seat next to Aylan to wait for the next band, Stanny cleared his throat and looked at Aylan, making it clear that now the three of them were together, he expected an answer.

Aylan looked at Torrant, the brother he loved more than life, and fought the temptation to put his head on the table and pour out all of his misgivings to Lane Moon’s son, because of anyone, Stanny would understand. But there were two things for which Torrant would never forgive him. One was dying, and the other was giving up.

“You can’t tell Yarri,” is what he said at last, looking miserably into Torrant’s eyes. Torrant, using that exquisitely sensitive intuition that he wore like skin, knew that there was something important brewing between his cousin and Aylan, and with Aylan’s tortured plea, he knew what it was.

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t!” Stanny demanded.

“Because she’ll come here,” Torrant replied calmly, accepting a cold pint of water from Triana with a smile. He looked to Stanny as though they weren’t discussing everything the three of them held dear. “Yarri will come, and she’ll bring Roes and Aldam with her, and then there will be the five of us in mortal danger and not just the two. And Yarri isn’t a statesman. She’s not a politician. When she was six years old she hit a guardsman on the head with a rock, and she hasn’t changed her approach to those things which make her angry. You think it’s hard for us now, living two lives…”

“Three lives,” Stanny said stubbornly, and Torrant took a swallow of his water and sighed.

“Fine. Three lives,” he conceded wryly. “If you think it’s hard for us, living three lives, just send Yar…” suddenly his throat closed up around her name, and, Goddess help him, he had to fight the urge to crumple his face and sob the syllables into Aylan’s strong shoulder.

He breathed evenly a few times, and was barely aware that Aylan had found his hand under the table and grasped it firmly, stroking the back of it with his thumb. “Just send her here,” he breathed at last, past the mountain of grief crushing his chest. “Send her here, and watch the chaos explode!”

Stanny’s own eyes were bright. “You’re right,” he said, looking determinedly around the tavern. Stanny didn’t like to be thought of as weak. “You’re right that she’d make it harder. But she’d also keep you safe and strong, keep you from…” Stanny shook his head then, finding words, and Torrant’s heart was too fraught to fill the silence.

“Mama’s dropped almost as much weight as the two of you,” he said after a pause, and both of the other men blinked in surprise at the change in the topic. “Aldam came by to see her and suddenly he and Roes got posted to Wrinkle Creek again, and Ma won’t say why and Da won’t talk about it. There’s a new priest in town, and he’s left handfasting alone, but he’s started in on what rights a woman owes a man. There’s some in the village that’re weak, and they’ll listen.”

He looked at Torrant. “The miller’s boy is one of them, and he’s not believing Yarri’s spoken for, in spite of all the family that’s saying so.” Now his eyes found Aylan’s. “And Starry’s been sewing red flowers on the flounce of a skirt she’s hoping to wear for next year’s Beltane. She still can’t officially wear them, but she keeps talking that next year, you’ll see her in the red flowers, and you’ll know it’s not such a long wait.”

Aylan strangled an unexpected little cry of pain before it was born, and now Torrant tightened the grip on their hands and still, Stanny wasn’t finished.

“The priest came to my parent’s house, going on and on about how the red flowers are obscene, that man shouldn’t know about a woman’s monthlies, and women should hide themselves in shame,” Stanny continued, his voice gaining strength even as he broke them, “and all Starry says in return is that her music will drown out the sound of a mean wind. He looked at my sister like she was crazy, and told her she was just a girl and wouldn’t know the truth for the lies in her loins,” an almost laugh here, “and Da took him by the scruff of the neck and threw him from the house, but he’s come knocking since…”

“Oh Goddess,” Aylan gasped, his fingers going cold in Torrant’s grasp.

“Stanny, enough!” Torrant cried, standing up with his fingers still entwined in Aylan’s.

“And the cat died!” Stanny finished over him, standing as well. The hidden tears in their shouts weighted the small joy that had built up in the little tavern.

Torrant abruptly sat down. “Anye?” His voice was absurdly small, for a man who carried so much consequence.

“Yes,” Stanny murmured, sitting down too. “She lay down in Mum’s chair in the evening, and didn’t rise up the next morning.” He looked away. “Yarri wrote you letters—but she left it out and didn’t want me to tell you.”

“Anye, the cat,” Torrant murmured, working hard to keep his voice clear. He looked at Aylan, holding his chin as firm as he could, trying hard to keep the little boy lost-ness from his expression. He failed. “We brought her over the mountain, you know,” he said conversationally, and Aylan gaped at him.

“I’d known she was old…” Aylan murmured, surprised. As long as he’d known Torrant, he’d known Anye—but it hadn’t occurred to him that the cat had made that fateful journey over Hammer Pass in the winter. He was about to ask Torrant what had possessed him to try to shoulder one more burden when he had been only a boy, when Torrant spoke up again, resolutely putting Anye the poor old fluff -ball behind him.

“It won’t stop, Stanny. This litany of horrors battering at the family’s peace, it’s not going to stop. If we leave here now we could stop them in the short term, but they’ll just keep coming back. With the exception of time and bad fortune,” a grimace at the obviously still-raw wound of Anye, “most of these problems need to be stopped here, and only here!” With a harsh exhalation Torrant breathed away some of the pain that had built up behind his chest, and looked around at the sudden interest in their table. He took a visible breath to relax his shoulders and tipped his head back as though looking at an open night sky. In a moment he was calm, and the face he turned to Stanny was reassuring and kind.

“Tell your Mum and Da that we miss them,” he said at last, begging.

“Tell Aldam that we need him here—Dueant’s child needs to be here to bless the place, because no one else is—but that I’d worry myself sick if he were actually to come. Tell my…” oh gods, holy Goddess… could he even say her name? “Tell Yarri,” he said at last, “that I think of her every day. Bring her the songs, sing them for her, let her hear that I miss her.”

He looked at Aylan, who nodded and wiped his mouth with his whole hand. “Tell Starry that her music has finally stopped fighting his fate, and that he plans to dance with her this Beltane, when she can wear her flowers. Tell them about the clinic, if you must.”

He looked around to the regents who, although the crowd had gone back to their conversation, still sat, looking at him for a sign of his weakening, looking to him for guidance and help and inspiration, the only model they had ever seen for how to walk like men and lead with wisdom.

“But please, don’t tell them about the rest,” he begged. “Don’t tell them how you saw me today, tired and foolish from the damned gift. Don’t tell them that Aylan looks haggard from worry, or that we have to beg each other to eat and rest. For sweet Triane’s sake, cousin, don’t tell them about ‘night work’. What we’re doing here, we’re doing for them—if we were to leave now, the good we’ve done could never be gotten back. The goal we’re working for—it will never be gained, because people will see that the one person to ever stand for human rights in this unholy place has given up, and that humans don’t really matter at all.”

Stanny nodded and sipped his beer, and some of the tension left the air with his sigh. “You’ve always been good with words, cousin,” he said roughly, “but I’ve never been good at hidings and lyings.” He finished off his pint and sighed. “I’ll try. I’ll try not to panic them, to worry them, to send Yarri scrambling for the first good horse to take her here on a fast wind.” Stanny shook his head. “I’ll try, cousin, but my face is open, and it always has been, and I promise nothing.”

Torrant’s and Aylan’s hands parted then, with a sweet little caress from the pad of Torrant’s thumb to the inside of Aylan’s wrist, and Torrant nodded his gratitude. “Fair enough,” he said at last. And then he grinned, strained and tired but ever optimistic. “And it’s good,

Stanny— by the time your route takes you home, for all we know our task here will be done!”

Stanny looked around the room, at the gaunt people in raggedy clothes, gathered together and desperate for hope. He grunted then, because as much as he loved the two of them and believed in them, even Stanny knew it would take longer than six weeks to fix this sort of pain.

They stowed Stanny’s cart in the alley behind the tavern and Stanny himself in Aylan’s apartment.

“Now stay put,” Torrant warned. “You’re good in here, and the two boys will be along in a moment to keep you company.” He shivered, trying his best not to frighten his cousin but at the same time not wanting to understate the situation either.

“It’s bad out in the ghettoes at night,” he said at last, meeting eyes with Aylan, who nodded. “The guards are always looking for safe-houses so they can take the children and put them to work in the brothels or the regent’s homes or to just use them for sport and cruelty. Tw o years ago you could sleep in your cart outside, and no one would have noticed, but as the people in the ghettoes get hungrier and more desperate, the Consort gives the guards more leave to hurt them. The brigands and the thieves know this—they take advantage of it every chance they get.”

“I don’t understand,” Stanny was puzzled and appalled.

“I don’t either,” Aylan muttered at the same moment Torrant said softly,

“I’ve figured it out.”

Both of them looked at him, and he shrugged. “He’s trying to force a revolution,” he said at last. “He’s trying to force a rebellion. You haven’t heard him in the hall. He’s very cold, and very condescending, and he keeps telling the regents that the Goddess folk are like naughty children, and if they’re not kept exactly just so, they’ll turn savage. At the same time he has the Secretary General give leave to his troops to ravage the ghetto. He’s waiting for the people to break, and prove him right.”

“And then what?” Stanny wanted to know. Torrant could hardly look at him, the answer was so appalling.

“And then he puts down the revolution. Completely.” Torrant turned his bleak eyes away from the both of them. It was something he had held close to his chest in the past days, but given Stanny’s desire to bring them home, he felt he had no choice.

Aylan made a retching sound in his throat, and his chest heaved as though he were trying not to vomit. “Genocide?” he whispered, his eyes lost. “What if they don’t break?” he asked at last, a sort of desperate hope in the voice of a man who grew up with few illusions.

Torrant met those lost eyes with his own purpose, the purpose that drove him past sleep, past endurance, and past reason. “If they don’t break, then they die anyway—you’ve seen it. Either way, it’s coming, my brother,” he murmured, “and we’re the only force in the world here to stop it.”

“Have the other’s figured it out?” Aylan asked, with a painful conflict of hopes. The first hope was that they hadn’t, and therefore hadn’t betrayed his growing attachment to young men who were so much like himself. The second hope was that they had figured out Rath’s endgame—and that they were on board to help.

Torrant shook his head. “Aerk and Keon—they’re close. They’re smart—now that they’ve started helping at the clinic, the basic injustices are starting to grate on them. Marv and Jino…they see what’s close to them, and now that they’re closer to the problem, they’ll see what the problem really is.”

He laughed then, wryly. “And Eljean has his own small world to be involved in.”

“Yes, and it all revolves around you,” Aylan replied dryly, the dreadful weight of Torrant’s revelation easing for a moment, and Stanny looked at him, surprised.

“You’re the handsome one—why isn’t he in love with you?”

Torrant’s bark of laughter surprised them all, but he couldn’t stop it. He laughed until he could barely stand, while Aylan shot him looks of complete disgust. When he could catch his breath, Torrant wiped his eyes, still chuckling, and said, “That’s what he gets for being a total wank, cousin. Nobody notices he’s the prettiest!” With another chuckle, Torrant sobered, and gave Stanny a quick, hard, hug. “Stay here, wait for the boys, be safe. We’ll be back in the morning to see you off .”

And together he and Aylan slid out the window and into the alleyway below. It was dark, and their night work waited.

Night Work

Eljean tried very hard not to wake Zhane. He dressed silently in the summer-scented cool dark, but a wide-palmed hand with chapped fingers wrapped around Eljean’s wrist as he sat on the narrow bed to put on his boots. It was the only flat surface in the tiny room—a creaking metal frame in what was barely a corner of a crumbling wooden building, shored up in patches with bricks and bad mortar. When Eljean had seen it, he had been suddenly haunted by memories of bills being passed to limit construction in the ghettoes, ‘for the safety of the children in the environs’, but this morning it was not guilt over his performance as regent that was bothering him.

He tried very hard to be a man as he peered into Zhane’s brown eyes through the dark, and the sadness there told him that he’d both succeeded and failed.

“Still afraid of sin, Eljean?” Zhane’s voice was rough in the mornings, but his words were even rougher.

“I’m working on it,” he murmured. He didn’t like leading, felt awkward being dominant, but he disliked pain or even the fear of pain more. Zhane had been patient with him, with his clumsy lovemaking, and the embarrassment that had followed.

Those thin fingers grasped Eljean’s chin, and the intimacy the touch assumed made the blood flow under his skin. The air was suddenly charged with warmth and the memories of sex.

“Do you wish you’d had the wine?” Ah—the gentleness of that question!

And suddenly being a man was no longer so difficult. Eljean grasped the hand at his face and laced his own elegant hand with the work-roughened fingers that had roamed his skin the night before. Zhane had been thin enough to count his ribs, his skin dark enough to show the scars of living in the ghettoes for most of his life, but still, in bed, he had been magnanimous, giving generously of a full and wealthy soul.

“No,” Eljean shook his head, and, wonder of wonders, managed a small, true smile. “If I’d had the wine, I would have ruined things with talking.”

Zhane smiled his appreciation, and nodded his head. “But I’m no Triane’s Son, am I?” he asked mockingly, and Eljean flushed even deeper. “If I’d been Triane’s Son, you might have forgotten about sin.”

“It’s not your fault,” Eljean cleared his throat, then stroked Zhane’s cheekbone with his thumb. Oh, his first real lover, the first man in his bed who had been neither paid nor too drunk to protest what they’d done the morning after, and he knew too, too much about Eljean’s heart for comfort. “I’ve heard talk of sin since I was a baby. The only sin you’ve ever seen is what my people have done to yours. If I blush for sin, it’s because I believe in it—not because you made me do it.”

Zhane turned his head and sucked Eljean’s thumb into his mouth, and Eljean groaned a little in memory and anticipation. Zhane released his thumb, and Eljean slid it down the side of his lover’s cheek before bending over for a kiss. He tasted himself on Zhane’s tongue, and for a moment it was exciting, remembering the things their bodies had done together in the night.

Zhane was the one who pulled away. “It would be sweet to lay here all day,” he murmured, “but the sun is nearly up, and you have so much to lose.”

“Mmmm…” It was a sound of protest and resignation. Zhane pushed him away with a little laugh.

“Go, Eljean. Triane’s Son is waiting.”

“Triane’s Son is in his flat, dreaming of a pretty girl!” Eljean protested, with a laugh, standing up to pull on his boot.

“Triane’s Son is out on the streets, doing murder,” Zhane said seriously, shocking him badly. “You didn’t know?” he asked, when Eljean had to sit down, his weight making the bedsprings groan and the frame rattle.

“He’s a regent!” It sounded absurd, even as he uttered it.

“He’s protecting you!” Zhane responded, sitting up in bed and allowing the faded blue coverlet to slide down his thin body. “Did you think that those two guards would just go away and forget to mention all of the young regents helping my people?”

“Night work…” Eljean murmured, suddenly seeing things he wished he hadn’t.

“Yes.” Zhane sat up and pressed his bare chest to Eljean’s back, and Eljean remembered that he was wearing Ellyot Moon’s shirt. “Are you no longer in love with him, now that you know what he is?”

Eljean closed his eyes, seeing Ellyot as he had been the day before in the sunlight on the steps of the regent’s hall, tumbling off a wall for the sheer joy of it, resting his head on his arms in unspeakable weariness. He saw his long-fingered hands comforting a child, and then the aftermath: Ellyot, fever-eyed and joyful at seeing his kin and singing in a dim little pub, with his eyes closed in longing. That beautiful young man, with all of his gentleness was outside on the streets, committing murder?

“I don’t know what he is,” Eljean said truthfully. “Do you?”

“He’s our savior, Eljean—I think that makes him more important than your crush, don’t you?”

“Mmm.” It wasn’t a real answer, but then, Eljean didn’t have one. “Will I see you again?” he evaded, still smiling in hope. “May I bring you pretty things, clothes, sweets…do the things that lovers do when they can meet eyes in the morning?”

Zhane kissed the back his neck, the faint stubble of his dark beard rasping pleasantly, but even the touch of his lips on Eljean’s skin was sad. “I don’t work during the first rest day,” he murmured. “I would like to see you then, yes.” Work. Eljean had forgotten that Zhane had been ‘working’ on their first night together. “But,” Zhane continued, as though fully aware that Eljean’s jerk into reality was complete, “I would prefer you pay me nothing, not even foolish trinkets, if you don’t mind.”

A thick swallow, a truly painful comprehension. “I understand perfectly,” he rasped, and then he couldn’t bear the conversation anymore. He kissed Zhane, hard, abruptly, and with some of the confidence he had been missing the night before, and then grabbed his cloak where it lay crumpled on the floor and fled the dim little room.

He remembered his way from the night before, and in the chilly pre-dawn he could see no sign of movement—certainly no guards, which had been his main fear. So when he heard voices coming from an alleyway behind a crumbling, uninhabitable building, he came as close to wetting himself as he ever had in his adult life.

And then he recognized the voices, and almost fell against the wall in relief.

“Dueant’s broken nose, you’re still bleeding!” Aylan’s harsh tones were unmistakable, especially when he was admonishing Ellyot about his health.

“I’m sorry—I was slow tonight—I got in your way,” Ellyot apologized, and Aylan’s frustrated growl was more eloquent than words.

“You were distracted—I never should have let you go out. We’ve got to stop the bleeding—can you change again?”

“Mmm.” That was negative. “I refuse to let you go out alone. And no, I can’t change. If I do, I’ll have to channel a little to stay upright, and then Stanny will know something is up.”

“As opposed to now when you’re soaking through your gods-be-damned shirt?” There was a fury in Aylan’s voice, Eljean noted with surprise. Whatever the two had done this night, it must have been awful.

“The wound would have killed you,” Ellyot said softly. “Don’t get that way—I will survive, and it would have killed you, and this is just practical, that’s all.”

“Practical suffering. Nice, I like that. Now wait…” There was a ripping sound and some harsh breathing, and then, Ellyot’s suppressed “Auughh!”

“Serves you right, you wanking git arse!” Aylan snapped. “You couldn’t have just killed them, passed out in the street, could you? You had to get all noble…”

“I was trying to see if they’d told anybody…” hiss, “Oueant’s bare ass…Aylan, you’re going to open it more!”

“You were trying to give them a fighting chance!” Aylan accused and Ellyot, as open as he always seemed to be, didn’t deny it.

“The younger one…he’d been abused. You know that, right? If the bleed in his brain didn’t kill him…I thought that maybe it might…”

“Make him a better person?” Aylan’s sarcasm was unmistakable, and then his voice sank to something approaching tenderness. “Make him Aldam?”

Ellyot’s sniff was full of dignity, even heard around the corner of a crumbling building in a filthy ghetto. “Nobody can be Aldam but Aldam.”

Eljean heard a half-choked laugh, and Aylan’s next words made it clear that all was forgiven. “There, it’s as good as it will be until you get some sleep and another change. If I’m quiet, I can sneak in while Stanny’s sleeping and get us each another shirt.”

“Good plan,” Ellyot praised, and Eljean wondered if the man ever said something that wasn’t meant to warm his listener.

There was quiet then, as the air turned a soft gray and the two men worked to still their breathing after their hurried doctoring.

“That last song you played…the one about berries in the morning?” Aylan broke the silence unexpectedly.

“The one called Berries in the Morning?” Eljean could imagine the sweet, chiding half-smile on Ellyot’s face, but he could not imagine it while Ellyot was soaking through a wadded bandage with his own blood.

“That was about Auntie Bethen, wasn’t it?”

“Mmmm—do you think she’ll like it?”

“I…it’s just…every morning when Stanny and I would stay out, to drink, to get laid, to whatever…I’d get home in the morning, and it’s the only home I’ve ever had, you know? Even Triannon never felt like home. And there’d be Bethen, knitting, eating, whatever she had to do to stay awake. And you’d be sure…” Aylan choked a little, on laughter or tears Eljean couldn’t tell. “You’d be damned sure that whatever you did the night before had been so horrible, so depraved, that it would have to be kept secret from the family for all time…”

“And then Bethen, or sometimes Lane, would tell you that they loved you. And it would suddenly seem not so bad.” Ellyot’s voice had grown a little stronger, and between the two of them, Eljean could almost yearn for a home that would feel safe.

“Can I ask you something before I break into my own rat-hole for my last shirts?” Aylan’s voice was so low that Eljean had to strain to hear it.

“I’ll have Coryal send you some more,” Ellyot murmured, “and sure, brother—you know about everything there is to know.”

“I don’t know what would cause you to bring a terrified ball of fur and claws across Hammer Pass in the winter. What possessed you, brother, when the odds were so stacked against you as it was?”

A half-laugh. “The same thing that made me steal her fat pony, which, I might add, was almost as useless over that damned mountain.”

“What was that?”

A sigh. Even Eljean, listening around corners, hugging the wood of the building he shared with the two men so closely that he would have splinters in his back for days, could hear the reluctance in Ellyot Moon’s voice.

“I was all she had. The day before, she’d had a home, and brothers to fill it, and a father and two mothers and friends and family. That morning she had me and that…” Oh no…now Eljean knew why he’d been so reluctant to answer the question, and why Aylan had spoke of confessions and safety before he’d asked it. It was a near thing—Eljean could hear how near it was, even around a building corner--but Ellyot Moon managed to keep his composure.

“Her cat died, and I wasn’t there,” he said thickly, “and crying over it isn’t going to change it.”

“No tears today, brother?” Aylan’s voice sounded sad, as though he would have welcomed them.

“Oh no, brother,” Ellyot returned, his breath hitching with several kinds of pain. “Not when we’ve so many more to shed—that’s a thing I can feel in my bones. Now go and sneak into your flat for those extra shirts—I’d like to at least have breakfast with Stanny before he goes.”

Eljean took his moment to leave, sightlessly fleeing a scene he could only envision. He was running so quickly and so blindly that as he approached the enormous brick wall that he had no idea how to scale without Ellyot’s help, he almost ran into Djali’s struggling, grunting backside.

As it was, the sight of those flailing legs was enough to make him snort laughter, and the sound made Djali lose his grip, flounder in midair for a moment, and then land solidly on said backside with a thump and a groan and a grunt.

“Good gods,” Djali said bemusedly from the ground, his moon face never quite losing its smile. “What are you doing here?”

Eljean realized he’d rather die than answer that question honestly to one of his friends. “Nothing,” he mumbled, his face flushing a brilliant scarlet in the gray light. “Nothing happened.”

Djali’s smile was both understanding and sweetly superior. “That’s too bad for you, Eljean, because my stars were realigned and the moons set right in their orbits last night.”

Eljean found himself chuckling, truly happy for the usually hapless Djali. “She’s a lucky girl,” he said, meaning it. “Now here, I think if you use my hands as a vault, and if you help me walk up the wall once you get there, we might be able to get back to our flats before the guards wake up.”

It took some puffing and some muffled swearing—Eljean was highly amused to hear Djali use the phrase ‘Triane’s purple tits!’ and was pretty sure he must have gotten that one from Aylan—but eventually they were both on the other side of the wall, trying to figure out which apartment was Eljean’s (who was on the ground floor on the far wing from Ellyot) by counting rooms. They failed miserably and had to resort to peeking over the patio to see if they recognized the room inside. Djali himself still slept in his rooms in the Consort’s palace— sneaking into his own bed was damned near impossible.

“If we have to keep this up,” Eljean panted, hopping up and down to look over a fence with a drop off behind it, “I’m going to plant a damned flowerbed as a marker.” He could see a perfectly made bed through the many panes of glass that made up the double doors onto the patio. Definitely not his flat.

That made Djali laugh. “Yes—it was so much easier following Ellyot to the ghettoes. This was the first night he didn’t escort us back.”

Ellyot flushed. “He was…busy.”

Djali came down from his tiptoes quickly, having almost been caught by the older regent who lived in the flat he was peering into. “I know what he was doing, Eljean,” he whispered, as the two of them crouched to the far side of the next enclosure. “I’m not a child. The guards would have done so much harm if their story had spread.

Better they die than Triana’s home gets burnt down with her in it, you think?”

What a good man Djali had become, when Eljean was not looking. “It doesn’t bother you?” Eljean asked at last, as the two of them slunk down to the next patio fence. They were talking in low tones, hoping not to disturb any more sleeping regents. “I mean…” deep blush, a hope he wasn’t wrong about what his friends knew and what they pretended not to, “I commit treason just by wanting what I want…but you? You’re the Consort’s son…”

Djali looked down and took a moment to lean against the fence of their chosen patio of the moment. “Ellyot Moon has shown me more kind words, more attention and honest praise in two months than I’ve seen my entire life in the damned palace—at least from people who weren’t paid to keep me happy. If my father wants my loyalty, he needs to buy it with more than pretty clothes. Did you hear them, this morning, coming back from their night work?”

The abruptness of the question had Eljean reeling back from the fence as he was peering over it, but that was good, because for no reason at all, Eljean had tears starting again, and he was tired of feeling like a little girl. “Yes…I’m getting to be good at eavesdropping.”

“You know…I don’t care if they’re lovers or not…I think sometimes I’d give my life in an instant to know that someone loved me the way they love each other.” Djali didn’t look at him as he said it—he had moved on to the patio beyond Eljean and was spending all his attention frowning over the wooden partition, and he gestured Eljean over to make sure he recognized the right place.

“Does it look like a hurricane hit it?” Eljean asked, ignoring, for a moment, the chest-aching implications of the last thing that Djali had just said. Djali nodded, and Eljean sighed in relief.

That nameless emotion kept trying to break through, but Eljean stomped on it tightly—he would be a man about this, he would. “You’re right,” he murmured, “about that other thing—about being loved.” He took a deep breath and pulled his emotions together. The apartment he could see past the double paned glass doors was a complete disaster— the bed was torn apart and his clothes were scattered in piles all over the floor and the wardrobe doors were wide open because the wardrobe was too full to house what was in there. It was exactly as he’d left it. “My flat at last—would you like to sleep on my couch for a bit?”

It wasn’t until Djali was snoring on his davenport in a borrowed shirt, and he was pulling himself under the covers in his own clean nightshirt that he fully let go and howled sobs into his pillow, and even then, he couldn’t define what he was crying for. His lost chance with Ellyot Moon? His found lover, who would share his body with countless others in the next week, and not accept a penny from Eljean? His new understanding of his friends, and how he had chosen better than he knew? Maybe it was all of it, and added to that, the terrible memory of Ellyot Moon’s misery over a cat he’d brought with his sister over Hammer Pass. Eljean couldn’t answer the why of it. All he could do was weep.

It wasn’t until much later that he asked himself why he hadn’t gone into the alley to help the two heroes when he’d heard that Ellyot had been hurt. It had been a cowardly act, when Ellyot and Aylan already knew how much he knew about the two of them.

The answer left a sour taste in his mind, and well it should have.

The only help he could have offered would have been Ellyot Moon’s own shirt, and that, he was resolved to never give up.

Aylan’s three middle daughters regarded the Healer soberly, each one covertly petting a kitten that they thought their parents didn’t know they’d smuggled to the Faire. Torrant caught Yarri’s eye as he sang and nodded towards the kittens, whom, he was sure, were from the latest litter of one of Anye’s many descendents.

Yarri shook her head and rolled her eyes, and looked pointedly at Aylan. Aylan rubbed the bridge of his nose and shrugged, one arm around his lovely wife.

Starren grinned with no remorse whatsoever, and Torrant shook his head, continuing the bridge of the tune and looking down at the three girls with a sweet, forgiving smile.

The youngest of the three—named Sunset by her father, after her mother’s hair or so he claimed, ventured closer. She had heard the stories of the Healer and the youngster who would be his beloved, but this was the first time the cat was mentioned.

“That was very brave,” she told him soberly, and his smile dimpled on one end. She smiled back, an open, glorious smile so much the mirror of Starren’s as a child that Torrant felt his heart take wings and fly.

“I have a weakness for little girls and kittens,” he told her with a wink towards her wriggling pocket—and another one towards Yarri.

Yarri sniffed, pretending her heart wasn’t softened, but Sunset’s smile turned slyer, wily, and now she was the spitting image of her father, and Torrant had to fight to keep his voice clear. “And pansy purple eyes,” he finished. Sunset blushed, and the Healer continued his song.

Part V—In the Shadow of the Cold Moon

Rath

If Rath had been an imaginative man, he might have figured out how the younger regents were escaping the environs of the regents’ apartments, the Regents Hall, and the palace without being seen. His east-facing window overlooked the Regents square, and every rest day morning he stood there religiously and watched the comings and goings from the regents’ flats—the whole reason they were there .

The debacle of nearly three years before, when a number of the young people had been discovered doing perverted, unmentionable things, had led him to the conclusion that keeping the ruling body of Clough as morally pure as its leader could allow for no more private estates. Just the thought of it made him shudder. His own son hadn’t held a seat at that time, and had been kept as far from the people his own age as possible, but the risk that moment had held for the house of Rath—it was unimaginable.

Of course, Rath thought in frustration now, being unimaginable was the whole problem. He knew the younger regents had to be getting out. He had heard rumors of them, the Secretary General’s guards had reported seeing them, and Ulvane…

Rath looked over his shoulder at his wizard tracker. He was a shriveled, wizened man, his brother-in-law, and what had once been a healthy head of dark, wiry hair with a white streak blazoning down his brow like an obscene tapestry of sex and corruption was now a dirty grayish bird’s nest, and the white streak blended right into the lank mass at the man’s shoulders. Ulvane kept telling him that there were filthy wizards right under his nose, that the foulness of the Goddess had invaded his House of Regents, and it wasn’t that hard to guess the source.

Anyone could see that Ellyot Moon was just as lousy with the Great Whore’s pox as his father had been. The whole idea made Rath shudder. Ellyot was, as his father before him, uninvited, and unplanned. Rath hated anything that was unplanned. The world was ordered perfectly. The twin moons obeyed that law—they rose and set in predictable orbits, and the sun, too, could be documented in an almanac with regimented punctuality. It was the wandering moon, the whoring moon that was the aberration, and Rath hated the irregularity, the unpredictability of that moon with everything in him.

It wasn’t natural, and his wife’s death just proved that.

If anyone had asked him, Rath would have said that he loved his wife. If he were truthful, he would have said that he just didn’t understand her. If he had possessed the imagination he needed to realize that the regents were all sneaking out of the back of the apartment complex and vaulting over the wall to get to the Goddess ghettoes, he would have realized that what he didn’t understand, what he had never understood, was why she would have chosen to love him, when he had been the first to admit that the moons that drove them, that pulled at the tides of their hearts, had inhabited two completely different orbits.

He himself had no choice but to marry her—she was one of the few female regents at the time, and she had such a following that she was sure to be elected Head Regent at the next election. She had looked at him after a meeting he had found irritating because of it’s disorganization and had winked at him, inviting him in on a joke he did not get.

“They’re interested—that’s good,” she’d said brightly. He frowned.

“It’s messy. We accomplish more when things are quieter.”

Her grimace had been good-natured, but it rankled at him that a woman would contradict him so publicly. “ Well yes—but accomplish what? A bill to give the regents their own flats? What good is that? Most of them have their own townhouses anyway. Today we’ve funded sewage in all quarters of the city! That benefits people who’ve been trying to stay healthy for years!”

He had wanted to tell her that if they couldn’t worship some orderly gods, it was simple justice if they fell ill to the chaos of their own squalor, but she had all of that power, rolling in her wake. It had made her round face and round bottom temporarily excusable. Even as she grinned at him and asked if he would like some dinner during break, he was making plans to change her diet, so that her face would not be quite so round. Fat was messy, and it offended him in the same way the poor did with their constant disorganization. Any fool could organize a peaceful home—those who couldn’t, he was sure, deserved what fate dealt them.

So Yahnston Rath had no idea of what had attracted his wife to him, but he was honest, at least with himself, about what had made her so attractive to himself. Romance and kindness were for fools, but political aspirations were acceptable motivations for anything, as long as one had the greater good in mind.

Rath felt that his urge to help the greater good excused the fact that his love for his wife was based strictly on what he could gain from her as opposed to what her open heart would have given him freely.

He almost lost all to be gained when she died in childbirth. He blamed her death on the Goddess moon too. His plans had been perfect—but childbirth was as unpredictable as that damned, gloating moon, and her body had rebelled at his seed in it as his body had rebelled at the thought of touching her after she had conceived. Ugh! Her body had been functional but not desirable when he’d shared her bed. But after he’d gotten her with child? Everything puffed up, swelled, grew in size and odium. He didn’t like the female body as it was—things were always jiggling or leaking fluids, and his wife had never had the grace to be embarrassed by this.

“We’re animals by nature, Yahnni,” (Oh how he’d hated that nickname) “The fact that our reasoning is as sharp and bright as the stars is what makes us wonderful!”

But she had been ill with her pregnancy, which had made it easier and easier for him to usurp her duties. She had won by popular vote, and her people followed him out of love for her. He had resented that as much as he’d enjoyed using it. They were fools for following a creature who was such a slave to puffy ankles and queasy moods. Women were weak, but the men who let them believe they had anything approaching the ability to lead were simpering idiots, and he had no sympathy for the way he used their affection. If they had attended to the matters at hand—the elimination of weakness and disorganization—in the first place, he wouldn’t have been so driven to intervene.

Her death had almost undone his entire three years of duplicitous servitude to a woman who repulsed him. How could he keep the regents under control when the person he was supposed to be serving as proxy had died?

He would never admit that it had been his wife’s midwife who had provided the answer.

Rath detested the man on sight. What sort of man made his livelihood tending to women during the abomination of childbirth? It stunk of magic (which he refused to believe in, all evidence to the contrary) and the warmth of the man’s smile and the brown of his kind eyes reminded Rath of composting shite.

But hate him or not, Torrian Shadow had calmed the terrific caterwauling that accompanied the junior Rath’s entrance into the world, and for a moment, Rath had been supremely grateful.

And then the man stuck his head out of the birthing room and started commanding Rath’s very own servants. His arrogance had been horrific. And now, remembering the moment, Rath could hear the echo of the man’s voice, even in his sanctified, clarified, sterilized white sitting room that surveyed the very seat of power of the strongest, most civilized nation under the three moons. The voice set up a vibration of unease that seemed to penetrate Rath’s stomach, and if he’d had an imagination, or believed in magic, even in a magical land, he would have said he was haunted.

You—come here and hold the baby. Yes, he’s fine. Now rock him. You, come here—I need your hand here. Please, just keep pressure. Oh, Goddess…that bleeding…

The commands had been done softly, without heat, and Rath was content to let Torrian Shadow do his work, while Rath, himself, did the paperwork from the day’s regent session. Standing now, nearly twenty-three years later, Rath could recall that it was legislation on the river—some simpering soul seemed to feel that it should be allowed run-off , or the current would be enough to sweep the unwary through the slough and over the falls at the edge of the city. Rath would veto it, eventually, but he had been seriously surprised when the midwife had stormed out of the bedroom in a fury to confront Rath, when

Rath hadn’t so much as looked at his wife straight in the previous six months.

Did you know she was like this? Was she complaining of being thirsty? Of dizziness? Of nausea?

Well, how was Rath to know? She was always whining about something. Who knew what was important and what was simple puling weakness? Rath had been busy trying to run a country into civilization—he hadn’t had time to sort out whatever she had been babbling during their time together. He had, in fact, done his damnedest to tune it out. Some of his disgust must have shown on Rath’s face, because the Healer had shaken the white streak from his eyes and sneered.

Oh—I see. You’re a twin-fanatic. Go back to pretending this doesn’t involve you, and I’ll try to keep your property alive.

The words had been a slap in his even-featured aesthetic face, and Rath found himself suppressing a snarl. But Torrian hadn’t even stayed to see him react, he’d been back in that foul smelling, chaotic room, ordering around Rath’s staff as though it were his gods-given right.

At last it was over. His wife died, calling his name, but he had seen no reason to go in. She was dying, and even the magic-fouled healer could do nothing to stop it. Rath was busy pacing, trying to plan a strategy to keep the ruling position that his wife had given him. He was honestly surprised when the midwife approached him, holding a contented baby who seemed to be sucking some sort of milk from a clean rag. It was helpless and wrinkled and ugly, and Rath knew immediately that it would resist any schedule he tried to set for it. Well, that’s what his staff was for.

You’re not interested at all?

No. It was a boy—that was the best thing that could be said about it. Dimly, in the back of his mind, Rath was wondering if he could cull a suitable female from the hoard of regent’s sisters and daughters who attended the weekly balls and social events that were a deplorable part of his duty.

Well, don’t worry about the political cost. I’m sure you’ll get more than enough pity to stay on the throne.

Oh? At last, a solution to his conundrum. A light at the end of the tunnel—people would pity him, and he would stay in power.

How marvelous—and his wife was dead. He’d never have to answer to her silly thoughts about the feelings of the poor, or her ridiculous, soft-hearted ideas about how little it really mattered what moon a body was born under. Of course it mattered, because the moon you were born under put you in your place, and your place in this world was everything, and now there was no sweet-voiced, beloved erratic creature of emotion to interfere with that true tenet of leadership. And of all people, the Healer that he would rather have run over in the road than have in his apartments had been the person to present the idea.

Rath smiled then—his first honest expression in front of the midwife, and the man actually recoiled. Rath’s glacial, colorless eyes had met the brown eyes of the Healer, and Rath was surprised again by the man. There was cunning and rebellion then, and a desire to protect the child in his arms that seemed stronger even than the desire of the dead woman in the next room to bear it.

In a sparking instant, the Healer bent his head over the child in his arms and started to whisper over it.

“What are you doing?” Rath wanted to know. And still, the whispering, the hurried, frantic whispering. “Stop it. Stop it! He’s my child. He’s my flesh and blood!” And as Rath approached the midwife, his arm upraised, determined to stop the man from fouling what was his, the man with suddenly blue eyes looked up, a terrible flash in triumph.

“I’m done. I’m done, and you have better things to do than hold your own son. Don’t worry, Consort. He’ll grow up just fine without you.”

“What have you done, you filthy heathen? That’s Yahnston Rath the second…” Rath growled, furious that this man should have any relationship with his property other than simply catching it as it slid out.

“His mother named him Djali—all of your staff heard it,” the midwife said, and after that and for the rest of the night, Torrian Shadow ignored him. As though he knew for certain that Rath would rather vomit on his own lap than go into the room with the blood and the shite and the carcass that had incubated his heir, he simply held the baby to his chest and crooned to it, pushing past the door and into the bedroom. There he gave the baby to one of the maids, who managed to take one of the back hallways and put the infant in the nursery that Rath’s wife had prepared. When the maid was gone, Shadow finished singing his rites for the dead.

When he was done, he donned his cloak (it had been a chilly night in late fall) and after some hasty instructions to the maid about diet, had gone to sweep out of the room.

“What have you done?” Rath stood in front of the man, in front of the door to the bitterly chill night beyond, and the man merely looked at him, evenly, his triumphant brown eyes promising something…something that Rath instinctively knew he would be unable to fathom.

“I wished him to know love,” Torrian said after a moment, and when Rath’s lips might have curved in a dismissive sneer, the King Consort was surprised to see that Torrian held the same sneer, and it was aimed at his monarch!

“That is an inconsequential wish.” But his voice was uncertain.

“I wished him to only trust love,” Torrian corrected, that superior expression still taunting Rath to do something about it, “which means that he may have spawned from your loins, but unless you change your heart, King Consort, he will never be your son. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have my own family to look to.”

And then the arrogant bastard had swept out of the room.

Even today, the memory made Rath shudder. He had tried very hard not to believe in it. After he’d had Ulvane track down the Healer by his gift and the man had died by the side of the road, gagging on his own blood, Rath had tried to convince himself that there was no such thing as magic, and that a person would trust the man who sired him and gave him food and clothing. Love was irrelevant, and almost as imaginary as magic.

But somehow, things had gone sour.

To start with, Ulvane had fallen into a corkscrew slide to madness. Rath told him that the Healer killed his sister, and it had been enough to turn the man into a raving lunatic, a perfect killing machine. But after that, every time Rath made him track down a wizard, a user of the gift, a child of the Goddess, Ulvane had become less and less of a man and more and more of a rabid child, chanting to himself, agonizing over his words, lost between what Rath told him to do and what his gift told him to do and the blood that he’d seen spilled in the name of his poor sister, the one person who had ever done him kindness. Rath relied on the man less and less, until now he was simply penned up in these rooms, roaming them aimlessly, like a feral cat confined to a packing shed, and muttering to himself in a kaleidoscope of times gone by.

But that was not the worst of it.

The worst of it was that the Healer’s curse had come true. Djali never learned to trust his father and was never grateful for the ordered, perfect world of school and clothes and functions that the boy was given. During Rath’s once weekly visits to the nursery, Djali buried himself in his nanny’s skirts—any nanny, because Rath continually dismissed the women. He disliked it that his son trusted them more than his own father, and although the dead Healer’s mocking laughter followed him whenever he turned a woman on the streets for doing her job, he continued to try to make a difference with the boy.

It was no use. He was willfully dreamy, just like his mother, right down to his mother’s repugnant moon face and her recalcitrant, colorless hair.

Djali had been ripe for the plucking when Ellyot Moon came to town, and Rath could not, for the life of him, figure out what his son was doing on his rest days with the son of the one rival he’d hated even worse than Torrian Shadow.

“He never raised rebellion, you know.” Ulvane had a horrible habit of speaking to the things that Rath was thinking and not what he had actually said out loud.

“The Secretary General says differently,” Rath answered. Of course, the man hadn’t been the Secretary General then. He’d just been an ambitious soldier who was all too happy to subscribe to Rath’s idea of order

“The Secretary General would sodomize his own father if you asked him,” Ulvane giggled and Rath looked at the man, absolutely shocked. Mad, yes. Frighteningly truthful, sometimes. But crude, for no reason? Unless, of course… “But he’d rather sodomize you!” Ulvane giggled some more, spittle flying out of the corner of his wrinkled mouth. Ulvane was actually younger than Rath, but his broken mind seemed to have broken his body, and he moved and looked the picture of dotage and senility.

“You shouldn’t say such things,” murmured Rath faintly, truly disturbed. One of his own? A filthy sodomite? Surely not. Surely it was Ulvane’s madness…but even in the pit of madness, Ulvane had never been wrong about the Goddess’ children before.

“You doubt,” murmured Djali’s uncle, a crafty, sly-ways look coming into his rheumy eyes. “No doubt that Owen Moon was a traitor, but you doubt that the man who would condemn a family to death would sell his soul to suck your…”

“I SAID YOU SHOULDN’T SAY SUCH THINGS!” There was a cracking sound as Rath’s fist slammed into the glass-topped table in front of Ulvane.

“Your brain is full of shouldn’ts,” Ulvane sang, “which is why it’s full of can’ts.” He giggled again, right in Rath’s face, and his spittle flew out as Rath gaped at his own fist, the center of a network of cracks working it’s way outward to the white metal frame.

“You need rest, Ulvane,” Rath murmured. He called for Ulvane’s keeper impatiently, and the man was shuttled away, but his words, in that whiny, old, senile voice would not leave with him. Not that pap about the Secretary General—nonsense, of course. Although, rumors about his soldiers, and the things they had done in the ghettoes were… upsetting…the fact was the man had done more to further Rath’s agenda of order than anyone else in the administration. The Secretary General was a stouthearted man who didn’t quail from the distasteful things that needed to be done, that was all. Satisfied on that account, Rath tried very hard not to dwell on the destruction of Ellyot Moon’s family.

It would have been easier, of course, had Ellyot Moon and his sister not survived.

Rath always wondered who had burnt down the barn—he had left orders to let it stand, to paint it with the blood of the family in the symbol of the three moons, with the Goddess Moon ascending. Everybody would know the Goddess trash Owen Moon had given haven to repaid his kindness with the violence and anarchy of their kind.

To have his monument to misdirection burned down, when he’d thought nobody had lived…well, it had not been a part of his plan, and Rath didn’t like it when things didn’t go to plan. But he had never imagined the barn had been burnt down by family.

Ulvane had said something about a cat and a tree at the time, but that was more than ten years after the death of Torrian Shadow, and Ulvane’s usefulness out of the castle was questionable at best. Besides—a cat and a tree? Was the cat going to strike the tinder herself?

Rath shook his head now, resuming his perch at the wide double doors, searching the courtyard for any sign, any hint, of where his son had gone the week before and not returned from until nearly dinnertime the next day.

Djali merely widened his round eyes when Rath had questioned him.

“You’ve never bothered with me when I’m actually here, Consort, I don’t know why my whereabouts should bother you now.”

And then, the boy had had the nerve to simply walk away, leaving his father gaping after him like a dog dying of a stomach bleed.

And Rath had known, simply known, that Torrian Shadow’s curse had worked, and that the boy had found a leader to love and to trust and it wasn’t the man who had spawned him. As much as he detested his son and resented his duties as father, it rankled that his offspring shouldn’t be grateful for what he grew up having. What if the moons had seen fit to have him birthed in the ghettoes? Didn’t the cow-stupid pig-turd have the sense to know that his lineage was noble and his birth a fortunate act of the stars? If Rath had still allowed worship of Dueant as the god of compassion, he would have insisted, then and there, that Djali fall upon his face and prostrate himself before the force in the universe that allowed him to have a full belly and clean clothes his entire life.

What really bothered Rath was that he had the feeling the boy would have had too much honor to lie to the weak woman’s god in that way.

What was he thinking? Rath shook his head, trying to get rid of the convolutions that his son’s unexpected behavior had put there. It would all be made better in the next week—Rath had made sure of it.

There were few things that a well-prepared dinner party couldn’t cure--especially when your chef was gifted with a few long-acting herbs that most mothers wouldn’t let their children near in a pretty meadow.

Oh, yes, by the second rest day of next week, Rath’s problems with Ellyot Moon would be over.

Invitation

“He’s going to try to poison you, you know that, right?” Aylan’s voice, thick with annoyance, almost wakened the new child in Torrant’s arms.

“Shh…” Torrant glared at him. He was in the middle of singing the birthing rites—a practice he’d learned at Triannon that he’d loved so much, he regretted he hadn’t done it over Yarri’s and Starren’s wrinkled, downy little heads when he’d held them. Of course, he’d sung to them with love in his voice, and it amounted to the same thing, but to call it a rite of love, to make it a ritual of blessing…well, those words held a lot of power. Especially here, where love and blessings were both so rare.

“Fine, fine…I’ll wait until you’re finished,” Aylan huffed, and then turned around to pester one of the other young men about why going to eat at the home of the Consort King was madness in the first order.

It wasn’t as though they weren’t aware of their danger. It was just, as Djali said despairingly, looking at his friends over coffee as they’d compared invitations the previous week, that you didn’t refuse an offer from the King of Clough.

Torrant tried to think of it as a positive thing. Rath was afraid of him—afraid of them when it came right down to it—and that meant that their work on the legislative floor was having an impact. But now they had to survive dinner.

“Ellyot, make him stop!” Eljean complained, his narrow shoulders hunched and his green eyes haunted.

Torrant laid the child in the spare cradle that Olek kept in the back room for births just like the one he’d helped with. The mother was swaddled and asleep in a pallet in the back room, and the family was frantically trying to find a place for the poor woman and her child to stay, since the floor of their flat had collapsed, which is what had precipitated the birth in the first place. In addition to the other hurts of childbearing, the woman had to contend with lacerations on her legs, her thigh, and a scrape down her back incurred as she’d gone through the floor. Delivering the baby safely and keeping the mother calm had taken all of Torrant’s skill—the thought of going to Rath’s this night, of all of them, was daunting.

Aylan was following in Eljean’s wake, the expression on his face the same one Stanny had possessed when worrying his mother about working the family business, or, even earlier, trying to get on the town’s ball team, when he was neither fast nor agile, only large. It was the expression of a dog with a bone, and inwardly Torrant groaned. Of course Aylan had gone after Eljean. The group’s weakest member, the one most frightened of this dinner party with the most to lose would be the easiest one to persuade to do something risky. Like leave town altogether.

“Aylan, stop badgering him—we’ve discussed this already, and we don’t have a choice.” Aylan’s answering expression was both mutinous and terrified—Aylan had grown up in courts with people like Rath, and he was convinced that none of them had the wherewithal to face Rath in his natural habitat. Torrant sighed and ran his fingers through his brown hair, feeling the slight tingle of the spell that kept his white streak from showing. Maybe Aylan had a point.

“Look, brother,” he said at last, keeping his humor intact, “if I show you something,” he looked up, aware that the other regents who had been ill-at-ease all day were looking to him over the heads of their patients for some hope as it was, and were listening to this conversation with desperate ears, “if I show you all something, will you take a breath and have some faith?”

“It had better be spectacular,” Aylan said shortly, and Torrant grinned at him, his best lip-curling, heart-stopping smile, the one that made even Aylan put his hand over his belly to still a reluctant flutter.

“It’ll knock your socks off . Now I need you to gather a few things for me…we’ll all meet in the back room when you’re done…”

Ten minutes later, all of the regents were gathered back, crouching over Torrant’s shoulder while Aylan stood, arms crossed, raising dubious eyebrows at three bowls. One was filled with a basic herb salad from Torrell’s window garden. The other two were filled with all of the toxic plants that Torrell used to distill his best, most potent medicines.

“Are we ready? Marv, give us your belt knife, will you?” Marv always carried one because he liked the look of the handle and sheathe at his belt. It was his favorite possession—oiled and sharpened to a gleam, and he handed it over without question.

“Right, then.” Torrant adjusted his crouch, closed his eyes and hoped that what he was about to do wasn’t really a surprise to any of them, then he opened his eyes and touched the belt knife to the contents of one of the bowls. “The food looks excellent, Consort,” he said with a smile and a grim wink at Aylan, “I hope that it is, in truth, as good as it looks on the plate.”

“Nothing’s happening,” Jino said in disappointment. His usually well-coifed hair was a mess of distracted ringlets, and his pretty face was uncharacteristically grim.

“That’s the control bowl, lackwit,” Keon said tensely. “Can we see what it does with the bowl full of poison, please, Ellyot?” Keon would usually have tried for humor, but none of them had felt like laughing in this past week.

“Absolutely.” When he repeated the words this time, Torrant felt a distinct tingle through the belt knife, and sure enough, the toxic ingredients in the bowl began to shrivel and writhe, looking less and less like salad and more and more like compost as they watched.

“But won’t the Consort be suspicious of your gift if your food starts wriggling around on your plate as we watch?” Aerk asked, fascinated and appalled at once.

“He’s already suspicious,” Torrant pointed out, “and if we all pretend we’ve seen nothing, he’ll have no choice but to apologize and send for another plate of food. The fact is, he’ll know that we know, and with any luck that alone should be enough to keep him from killing us in front of the rest of his dinner guests, right Djali?”

Djali swallowed and nodded. “Right—he’s nothing if not conscious of his appearance. He might sentence us all to death on a rest day for trumped up charges, but he wouldn’t want anyone to think it was personal.”

“But what if you’re not the only one he’s trying to kill?” Eljean asked, and Torrant could tell by the grimace on his face that he despised himself for the question.

“That’s what the other bowl is for. Now here—it doesn’t have to be skin on skin, but we all have to be touching each other…”

“Now there’s a comfortable thought in this city,” Aylan remarked dryly, and Torrant shot him a disgusted look.

“We’re all friends here…”

“Speak for yourself,” Jino said, eyes twinkling in spite of the grim situation, “Marv’s been trying to get his hand on my arse for years…”

“You wish, you git!” Marv cuffed his friend on the arm playfully. “Just remember if you make a play for me, I’ll throw one of my sisters at you instead.”

“How many do you have?” Torrant asked. He’d heard them mentioned before but hadn’t been able to get a bead on how many.

“Five!” Marv muttered in disgust, “Jessee, Megee, Lysee, Kylee, and Keree. They’re all at the town estate now—if we’re not careful, you may have to dance with them at the Autumn Ball.”

“Well, won’t that be ‘Marv-ee’,” Keon smirked and Marv socked him the same way he’d socked Jino.

“Get bent, all of you! Can we hurry this up?”

Torrant and Aylan were actually chuckling at Marv’s antics, but Torrant nodded. “Yes—now we need to make this real, so it just needs to be a touch of knee to knee, or foot to ankle, and unless we’re planning on starting a new fashion trend, it should be through clothes. Right— everybody touching?” Eljean’s hand trembled a bit on his knee, but he ignored it. “Here, Aylan, you take the knife and touch the bowl.”

Aylan did as he was asked, and Torrant repeated his phrase. All of the young men gave a shudder, and Aylan gave a strangled yelp and tried not to drop the belt knife. In a moment that feeling of muted lightning passed, and they were all huddled around the bowl of poisonous greens, watching as they writhed and wriggled until they looked like rotten food instead of a tasty, deadly salad. As a collective all of the men let out a deep and shuddery breath.

“Fair enough?” Torrant asked, and they all nodded in agreement. “Good. Now we have to make sure we’re all touching our food with our fork when I say the words…”

“My father always says a prayer to the twins before we eat. Everyone pretty much digs in after prayer,” Djali informed him, and Torrant nodded, smiling in approval.

“Excellent—thanks for the head’s up, Djali. With your help, we might be able to get through this dinner healthy and happy.”

“And hungry!” Aerk said dryly, and Torrant laughed again.

“Amen—we may have to ask Aylan here if he’ll smuggle some edible food to my room for afterwards.”

Aylan nodded relieved, just a little, that he wasn’t sending his brother into the lion’s den unarmed. For all his pretty words, it was very hard for Torrant not to say exactly what he thought.

“You couldn’t keep me away,” Aylan affirmed. “I’m dying to hear all about it!”

“Hey, Ellyot,” Marv asked as Torrant stood from his crouch around the three bowls, “if you’re gifted, where’s your streak of hair…ouch! Jino! Would you stop kicking me in the shins brother—you’ve been doing it for weeks, and I don’t know when you got that clumsy!”

Jino hid his face in his hands. “I’m sorry, brother,” came his muffled words to Torrant. “Apparently he thinks that ‘tact’ is something you stick in a wall to hold things up.”

Torrant sucked in wind from the gape he had assumed at Marv’s bald words about his gift. He snapped his jaw shut in a moment, though, because he had counted on them knowing about it before he had showed them his way to get around the possible pitfalls of Rath’s little dinner party.

“No worries,” he told Jino with a little sigh. “You all want to see my white streak?” he asked, actually feeling relieved. It was hard enough, week after week, as he came to love these young men like friends and brothers, to keep his name from them. The least he could do, he figured, was give them this little bit of truth and wonder.

“Well yes!” Aerk said, with that same forthrightness that Torrant had admired from the first, and the others seconded him.

Torrant winked at them all and released the tiny bit of magic that kept his hair all brown, and it was Eljean who broke the silence. “It’s gorgeous,” he murmured in wonder.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Aerk said dryly, “but it’s definitely more a part of you than the plain brown, isn’t it?”

Aylan couldn’t contain himself, and being the closest to Torrant he reached out and separated the white lock from the rest of the chestnut brown hair. “I miss it,” he murmured, and Torrant caught his hand and squeezed.

“It hurts to hide things,” he said at last, looking at them with troubled eyes, and then, lightly, as though he didn’t mean every word, “and now we’d better go out and tend to our patients, or I’m liable to reveal all my secrets, and we wouldn’t want that, now would we?”

He took a breath and his hair turned back to brown, actually shocking them all a little with the wrongness of the color. He avoided their eyes then, as he turned to go, and missed the sorrowful, speculative look that passed between the young regents, Eljean included. Aylan watched them, and it was very clear that they were all wondering exactly what else it was that ‘Ellyot Moon’ was hiding.

“Nothing personal,” he barked into the uneasy silence, and they all—Torrant included—stopped to look at him.

“Hwah?” That was pretty much everybody.

“Don’t make the conversation too personal. I know you…” he scowled around the room, “I know all of you by now. You’re going to want to argue—and they’re going to want to lecture you, and that’s well and good. That’s what we’re here for, and if he doesn’t kill you first you might as well make the best of the opportunity. But nothing personal. Don’t,” he commanded, looking hard at Eljean, “talk about the crucifixions,”

“Like I’m that brave,” Eljean muttered, and Aylan just kept lecturing inexorably over him.

“Don’t,” he pinned Djali with a glare, “mention Goddess-born rights,”

“But that’s what we’re here for!” Djali protested, and still, Aylan kept on going.

“And don’t,” and now it was Aerk and Keon, “get pulled too far into a discussion over the book-burnings.”

“But how are we going to stop them?” Aerk demanded, and Aylan grudgingly responded.

“The same place you’ve been trying to stop it all along—the legislation floor.” Aylan sighed and ran a hand through his curly hair, dislodging his queue. Without even thinking about it, Torrant fetched the band from across the room and ran it back, handing it to his friend with a grin.

“Don’t try to butter me up,” he huffed, taking the band but working hard to keep his serious face on. “Don’t even try. You know your pain centers—pretty much anyone you’re related to, and Triannon. Just steer away from them—these people like to think they can keep what’s personal separated from what they regard as ‘business’. To these people, talking to them about personal political hot topics at the dinner table is as distasteful as talking about your relationship with your favorite tight fist in the dead of night when you’re on the legislation floor. Don’t do it. If you want to avoid violence like you’ve been trying to since we got here, keep it one step removed from your heart, do you hear me?”

Torrant bowed, deeply and seriously. “I hear you, brother,” he said gravely, “and if you promise you’ll have food waiting in my rooms when were done, I may even follow your orders.”

The Sour Taste of Truth

Ulvane knew what ‘Ellyot Moon’ was hiding, and it wasn’t a long held unrequited love on the part of the Secretary General.

No, Ulvane had made that part up, because whenever Rath thought about Owen Moon’s son, the urge to blurt out the real identity of the man’s father nearly overwhelmed him.

And Ulvane had done so much harm to his people, to his sister’s people, already. As Rath had brooded over Ellyot Moon, Ulvane had felt the urge, the byproduct of being on Yahnston Rath’s leash for too long. It was a terrible, twisted duty of a broken man and a broken mind to bring satisfaction to his master, his tormenter, the man who had betrayed him in the worst of ways. For once, just once in twenty-two years of servitude, Ulvane fought it.

He won. Rath hadn’t believed him, had, in fact, sent him away, where he could giggle, ‘Torrian Shadow, Torrian Shadow, who is the son of Torrian Shadow…’ into his pillow for the rest of the night… wishing the whole time that he could smother himself in it, and give Torrian Shadow’s son a chance to make things right.

Rath had given orders to hide him during the dinner party. But the moment Torrian Shadow’s son passed the threshold, Ulvane knew. He felt the tingle of his gift, telling him that one of the Goddess’ chosen was in his presence, showing him in an instant what his gifts were, and how best to appeal to his heart.

It would be easy for Ulvane to evade his captors—the women assigned to him were usually kind, because otherwise he threatened to expose himself and his unattractive madness to the other visitors at the palace. The kindness meant the woman could be easily eluded. It was a simple matter of some sneaking about, and then some courage in his stomach, and reckoning and absolution were in Ulvane’s grasp.

The Moons in Eiran lived in a small house made with hand-cut, sanded boards, and ate at a big butcher’s block table that had been scrawled on by little ones learning their letters, knocked about by growing boys roughhousing where they shouldn’t be, and slept on by more than one generation of cats. The floors were sanded wood, swept clean once a day and oiled once a year, and covered on most surfaces with felted rugs or rugs woven of rags from previous generations of clothing.

The furniture in the Moon home was an eclectic mix of battered, reupholstered couches and divans and heavy-duty wooden chairs, and Bethen’s embroidered tapestries had covered nearly every wall, until they were replaced by Roes’ or Yarri’s or Starry’s, as the young women grew. The only breakable in the house was the carved cuckoo clock that Bethen and Lane had received when they married. It was anchored securely above the fireplace, and was, as Bethen was fond of saying, the nicest, most out-of-place object in the entire house.

The Moons of Clough had lived in a stately mansion, with stained and varnished wood. The kitchen table had been a little battered, and usually covered with placemats, because the entire household ate there, and the boys of the house were growing fast and spilled soup as a rule rather than an exception. The floors had been oiled and sanded once a year and allowed to weather for the rest of the time, and the décor had been heavy on books and tapestries and light on small, breakable things, unless they had been on top of the solid oak book case, and far from Yarri’s clever hands.

The living quarters of the palace in Duance, the capitol of Clough, were decorated in white. The floor was tiled in white, the table was glass-topped, white-painted wrought iron, and white rugs topped the tile floors in all of the rooms except the sitting room. The sitting room featured a full-bodied snow-cat skin.

Torrant found the snow-cat skin the least repulsive feature of the entire quarters. At least, he though sadly, looking at the brother of his hidden life, Rath’s true, predatory ruthlessness was on display for all to see, and not relentlessly coated in layer upon layer of ceramics, oil, and lies.

Torrant sat with the other young regents on one side of the great banquet table in Rath’s dining room and smiled stiffly at the humorless older man sitting across from him.

“So,” Torrant said gamely, with a sideways shake of his head to Eljean to warn him from the wine, “is it always so hot in Dueance this time of year?”

“You should know, Ellyot,” Minero of Trexel answered sourly. “You claim to have lived here during your youth.”

Torrant dredged up a gamine smile, and even some twinkling eyes. “Well yes, sir, but I was a youth. We ran outside, rode horses, felt wind on our face, bathed in the swimming hole come evening. We didn’t stand about in three layers of linens and a fashionable cloak with a velveteen hat and pretend we were so powerful that even the heat didn’t bother us. I was just wondering how many weeks I had left of washing out my small clothes during the break between sessions, that’s all.”

Minero of Trexel paled. “That’s unfit for dinner conversation, young man, and you know it.” The man’s dyed dark hair was suddenly in full view as he pointedly turned to the man next to him to speak.

“Not really,” Torrant muttered to Eljean on his left. Eljean tried to mask a snort of more-than-nervous laughter with a swallow of wine, and when he saw the expression on Torrant’s face he gaped with almost comic realization of the fact that they didn’t know if the wine was poisoned or not.

Torrant grimaced and shook his head. “Don’t worry,” he murmured to Eljean in an undertone. “He has to pour the wine from a carafe— unless it was in the glass, it’s probably damned hard to dose just us and not all his staunch supporters on the other side of the table.”

Eljean blew out his breath in relief and met Torrant’s wry gaze with miserable green eyes. “If I was any more poof about this, I’d be on the front gates,” he murmured, and Torrant looked at him, hard. Not even Eljean was that indiscreet. Before he could lean over and ask a question, or check his wine goblet to see how much Eljean had drank, Rath entered the room to sit at the table, and they all rose to greet him.

He looked as he always looked—tall, aesthetic, with perfectly iron-gray hair and iron-gray mustache. His clothes were as black as the room was white, as though he enjoyed the perfect contrast, and although he affected a smile for his guests, the lines in the corner of his eyes and around the bottom of his mouth made it clear that the expression was unfamiliar. He surveyed his banquet guests with an obvious satisfaction—as though the symmetry of the evil on one side of the banquet table and the good on the other pleased him somehow. After that long, obvious survey of the world as he saw it, the guests settled themselves, the first course was served, and Rath bowed his head in prayer.

Torrant was suddenly aware that Aylan had been right. He was unsuited for this line of work, because even if it cost him his head, he couldn’t pray with the man who had killed his family—not even a prayer to the one god of Rath’s that he believed in.

He kept his head upright and his eyes on the head of the table during prayer. Rath raised his head after a moment of what appeared to be earnest contemplation of the virtues of Pride in one’s country and was surprised enough at Ellyot Moon’s steady gaze to flinch, and then try to cover his surprise with an overly genial invitation to eat.

“Why thank you, Consort,” Torrant said with a small smile. Underneath the table he felt Eljean’s knee on the one side of him and Aerk’s ankle against his own. Down the table, everyone—both his regents and Rath’s across from him—had their forks on their plates, ready to dig in. “I truly hope everything is as good as it looks.”

His smile didn’t even break as his and Eljean’s food began to writhe on their plates like dying worms on the fisherman’s hook. Aerk, however, darted his gaze from Torrant’s plate to his own, untainted food, and Eljean looked in disbelief at Marv’s perfectly normal plate of greens next to his own, fouling, composting plate of poison.

The silence at the table was weighted with the gravity of a dark star, and Rath’s face paled, then flushed, then paled again, as his gaze locked with Torrant’s, and the Consort realized that whatever pretenses he had attempted to keep in front of Owen Moon’s son had just died a wriggling, brown death.

It was Aerk who broke the silence, apologetically but with his usual forthrightness. “I’m sorry, Consort—apparently your chef didn’t inspect what he sent out of his kitchen. It appears that Ellyot and Eljean have some sort of…” he floundered then, knowing exactly what it was that had been in their food, but not wanting to say it.

“Contamination,” Torrant supplied smoothly. He smiled winningly, although his eyes stayed as cold as hazel ever got. “It seems that something was on our plates that wasn’t supposed to be. Is it possible to take it back?”

Rath swallowed. “Of course,” he murmured. “My apologies to you both—I have no idea what came over my chef. He’s usually so conscientious.”

“Oh, I’m sure he was this time as well,” Eljean burbled, and then closed his eyes, hard, as Torrant glared at him. With a deep breath he opened his eyes and shook his head, as though trying to clear it, and Torrant widened his own eyes. Of course. The wine. Eljean was susceptible as it was, but there was probably something in their glasses to make talk come just a little more freely.

“Well,” said the Consort, visibly pulling his composure back on— and looking decidedly predatory towards Eljean and his goblet of wine, “feel free to drink with us as the chef re-prepares your food.”

“In truth, Consort,” Torrant murmured, alerting his regents even though he couldn’t actually send his gift out to seal a spell, “wine on an empty stomach is always a bad idea.”

Marv was so startled by the warning that he actually dropped his wine goblet into his salad, spilling it over his doublet and hose and swearing without thinking as he jumped out of his chair and danced backwards, trying to keep the red from staining anymore of his best outfit.

“Dueant have mercy,” Torrant said burst out in an honest laugh, “Djali, could you show him a place to clean up?”

“Sorry, Ellyot,” Marv murmured as Djali rolled his eyes and escorted him out, and Torrant didn’t care who heard his affectionate, “Clumsy wanker!” as he left. Enough was enough. They were the ones who had almost been poisoned, and his friends had nothing to be sorry for.

He turned towards the table a great deal less nervous than he had been, only to find that the opposing side of the table as well as Consort Rath was glaring at him as though he’d actually dropped his trousers and waggled his skinny white arse in their direction. He heard his friends’ captured breaths, as well as Eljean’s suppressed squeak as the full force of that frosty regard hit them, but he was beyond being hurt by anything these men could do.

“What have I done now?” he inquired pleasantly. “Did I wear the wrong color? Comb my hair the wrong way? Is the word ‘wank’ worth a death sentence now?” The servant who had been by to clean up Marv’s mess tried to give him a plate of greens, but he waved the man off . He was damned if he’d have so much as a sip of water from these people, but he was also damned if he’d leave early, either.

“Dueant is the god of pride,” Rath said, sounding extremely put out. “I know you grew up in a backwater, but really—haven’t you been here long enough to learn our ways?”

And the debate was on.

“Why would I want to learn that one?” Torrant asked, wishing for a glass of water to swig, because it would make a nice counterpoint. “Pride is nothing to worship, and you can’t make me.”

“Why would you want to worship compassion?” asked Minero across from him, not trying to be condescending or even to sneer. The man was honestly surprised. “Compassion is a woman’s virtue. Pride is what men have in their right to provide.”

“Honor is what makes a man provide for his family and keep them safe,” Torrant corrected. “Pride is what makes him think he has the right to more land than his neighbor, or to beat his woman when she didn’t serve him quick enough. Pride is nothing to worship…”

“But why worship a weak virtue?” Rath asked, realizing that one of his most trusted advisors was quickly getting talked down.

“Compassion is weak?” Torrant asked, letting all of his incredulity show. “You think that compassion is weak? Let me tell you something,” he relaxed into the debate now, conscious that Marv and Djali had returned with their own composure renewed, and that the rest of Rath’s regents had felt easy enough to begin eating. His own people, Djali included, were refusing to touch their own food, and he silently thanked them for that show of solidarity. “When my cousin was four or five, a group of ten-year-olds tried to drown the family’s kitten. Now I healed a lot of injuries that day—bite marks, black eyes, lumps on skulls, terrible bruises. But the only injury my cousin suffered was a strained wrist and bloody knuckles, and that kitten lives today to be the terror of the mice in Eiran. That, gentlemen, is the strength that compassion gives you.”

There was a reluctant chuckle from the table, and Rath had to concede the point. “Well, apparently your cousin is a fearsome warrior. He must be the apple of the family’s eye,” he said condescendingly.

“She is indeed,” Torrant replied with a terrible grin. “Just put her loved ones in danger and watch her go to battle.”

“But that is an individual case!” Rath protested when the chuckles had died down. “You can not train soldiers in the worship of compassion—it weakens the group!”

“Well how do you train them to heal their comrades?” Jino asked unexpectedly. “It doesn’t make sense not to train a soldier to heal with compassion…”

“Too much coddling makes them weak!” growled the Secretary General from Rath’s right hand.

“And too much pride, when a body is brought low, breeds despair,” Torrant pointed out. He had spent enough years watching farmers, angry that an injury or illness wouldn’t let them provide for their family, take out their frustrations on their wives and children not to know that. “And despair weakens honor. A desperate man will take his own life, or desert, or threaten a friend, whereas a beloved friend will throw himself on a sword to save his whole, healthy companion and spare him from harm.”

“In some men,” Rath murmured, “but most men are animals. They need to know pride or they won’t bother with honor.”

“You say that because it’s easier to teach pride than honor,” Torrant argued. “I’ve seen your library, Consort. Lots of books showing men how to get the same score on a series of questions as the man next to him in rank and file. And when they all get that perfect score, and they all think the same way, then what?”

“You have the perfect soldier!” the Secretary General seemed to think this was obvious.

“You have the perfect cheater!” Djali interjected, laughing, and Torrant looked at him, interested.

“Djali, don’t be stupid,” Rath dismissed, but Djali, looking at the respect in his hero’s eyes, was undeterred.

“Consort, you haven’t seen them…they buy and sell the answers to those tests like Keon here buys and sells books!”

“It’s actually worse!” Keon seconded. “Because they’ll throw their brother to the dogs before they get caught. Is that what you want to breed in a soldier, Secretary General?”

“The tests are a sound method of assessment,” the Secretary General replied with dignity. “There is no system that guarantees that cheating won’t occur.”

“How about a system that rewards them for their behavior and effort rather than their perfect answers?” Aerk prodded.

“That’s time consuming…”

“What you mean is that it’s too individual!” Aerk responded passionately, and Torrant wanted to applaud. These were the discussions they’d had over coffee, during lunches, as they walked to the convocations. These were not his opinions, being echoed blindly by zealots, these were the opinions of his friends, whom he respected, and his friends were arguing well.

“There is no room for individuality when you’re building a nation!” Rath scorned. “That is why Dueant must be the god of pride! Pride doesn’t know individuals, it thinks of the greater good.”

“Which is exactly the sort of reasoning that allowed your soldiers to try to barricade children in a school as it burned down!” Eljean blurted, and Torrant looked at him, pained. The background noises of forks hitting plates and people murmuring comments on the side abruptly ceased, and all that Aylan had warned about came to pass. People used to dressing the truth in their favorite clothes were offended when it was spoken nakedly in their presence. Eljean looked at all of the impending silence and the icy faces opposing them, and Torrant honestly thought his poor friend was going to throw up.

“That was a simple misunderstanding of orders,” Rath said, and Torrant snapped his eyes around to his enemy. That was a blatant lie—and everyone at the table was a witness to it.

“That’s not what you said,” Torrant surprised himself by murmuring numbly.

“I’m sorry?” Rath looked equally shocked.

“My first day here…what you said was that the children in the school were a threat. You told the soldier who escaped that they were tricky…they would grow up to be dangerous…” Torrant’s voice trailed away as he realized that the regents opposite him and his friends were staring at him as though he had turned into the snow cat, and then lectured them on politics wearing fur and fangs. “You all must remember…”

But it was clear that they didn’t, and in a moment the crushing weight of what he was fighting descended on his chest and he found himself floundering for speech.

“I have marked,” said Rath smugly, digging into his main course, which Torrant and his friends had refused, “that the worshippers of the Goddess tend to be disorganized, like women at a sewing basket. In fact, those who favored Dueant as the god of Compassion have the same qualities—distracted, absent minded, they rarely document anything. Just like gossiping women, they frequently witness falsely against each other simply because they are so busy discussing the truth, then never actually record it.” Rath paused and took a healthy swallow of wine. It was all Torrant could do to breathe, in and out, and convince himself that the reality he knew to be true was the same truth that Rath was erasing, just with words.

“In fact, I think it’s very clear that if the Goddess and her children had anything to do with the rule of the country, the ideal ruler would be as soft and as womanish as my son here!”

While Torrant was reeling in shock and pain for Djali, Eljean’s strange talking affliction kicked in. “Your ‘womanish’ son here landed a prettier girl than would look at any of you trolls!” he burst out, and Torrant whirled to him in sheer frustration.

“Eljean, my brother,” he said with an exasperated smile and a hand on the shoulder, “I think it’s best if from here on out, the only truths you utter are the truths you want the world to hear.” Eljean startled, and Torrant felt the distinct tingle of sorcery being counteracted. And that was enough.

“Eljean, Djali,” he said calmly, standing, “I think we need to excuse ourselves to gain some composure.” Eljean and Djali fled behind him, and he closed his eyes briefly against the damage he would have to repair between the two of them. “And everybody else: You all speak of ‘womanish’ qualities as though they are synonymous with weakness and ignorance. My Aunt Bethen wrote the foreign policy of Eiran when she was in labor with her fourth child. My…best friend’s mother helped to save my life with an illusion when she was facing certain death. There is nothing ‘weak’ about being ‘womanish’, and pride is far more vain and corrupt than compassion could ever be. Your son, my lord, is a fine, capable, noble man and I would be proud to work by his side or fight at his back. If his qualities are ‘womanish’ then that’s the biggest compliment that’s been paid to nobility and strength in this house, probably since the day he was born. Excuse me please.”

He found Djali and Eljean in the hallway behind the dining room, holding each other’s hands as they shook in reaction.

“I’m sorry…” Eljean was whispering, trying hard not to choke on his own panicked breath. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…I’m so sorry, my friend…I didn’t mean…”

“What came over you…she hasn’t done anything…”

“Lavatory. Now,” Torrant commanded, and when they reached the impeccably white tiled room, Torrant shoved them both into it and pulled Eljean’s shuddering, sobbing body into an embrace, murmuring soothing things into against his sweaty hair as though he were a child until he quieted. Djali waited, looking miserable and distraught, obviously trying very hard to keep a lid on his temper until he got an explanation.

“It was sorcery…some sort of sorcery—I’m not sure where it came from, but it was aimed almost directly at Eljean and myself, just like the food…”

“Why me?” Eljean demanded, his voice still thick and shuddery.

“Because,” said a feeble voice behind them, “Rath thinks you’re a sodomite, and he wants to know if you’ve dragged his son into your evil ways.”

“Uncle Ulvane?” Djali was clearly surprised. “You got out?”

An old man with a bird’s nest of dingy yellow-white hair and a track of saliva shining his chin dodged into the lavatory like a kid playing hide-and-seek.

“My fault…” the old man muttered. “My fault, Willa’s son…all my fault…”

“You’re gifted,” Torrant said with a shock of recognition. He couldn’t say it any better than the spell and the old man simply smelled the same. “That was your geas that took Eljean down…”

“My spell…my fault. Torrian Shadow was all my fault.” The old man’s rheumy eyes focused abruptly on Torrant even as Torrant tried to stop his blood from freezing in his chest and throat. “You’re the cat and the tree, and your father was all my fault and your family was all my fault and Willa’s son…Willa’s son…”

“Old man, what was the geas for?” Torrant asked, hoping his friends in the front weren’t going to suddenly start spilling all of the things they didn’t want known into that room full of malevolence. He couldn’t, wouldn’t think of the things the man was saying now about his father, about the day he and Yarri had almost been caught fleeing from the slaughter of their family, or about how close these things were to the knowledge of the young men who had trusted him with their lives.

“Secrets…Rath wants the only secrets in this house…but it was weak. So weak.” Again, that strange sharpening of the eyes. “Torrian Shadow made sure it wouldn’t work on Willa’s son. Birthing rites… he sang Goddess rites true and fine, and it’s a blessing he met you and you loved him. But your friend here…” Those eyes turned inward now and lost their point. “Too many secrets, too many fears. He took wine from the table, and the geas found a way in.” A grave look now was aimed at Eljean. “You mustn’t take food from the hands of your enemies, boy.” Helpless tears began to bathe Ulvane’s face, and he scuttled in closer to Torrant, clasping his hands.

“And it’s my fault. I was keeping secrets…I had to keep Rath focused on his own people…my secrets…” A sudden urgency filled the old man’s voice. “Boy, my secrets could kill you all. And I can’t do that to Willa’s son. I can’t. I can’t do that to the son of Torrian Shadow and Owen Moon. All of that blood on my hands, and I can’t…” And now his voice broke completely and he wept into Torrant’s hands. “I can’t escape it. My dreams are red and my heart is twisted by the things I’ve done. Please, boy, you must kill me…please…I don’t want to betray you…I knew you from the moment Djali came home with you in his heart and if you don’t kill me you will die and you will fail and…Oh, Goddess, just let me die!” He couldn’t speak anymore, the sobbing was so complete, he just crouched on the floor gibbering in panic, and Torrant crouched with him, meeting Djali’s eyes in hope of more information.

“He…” Djali swallowed. “He tried to hang himself once, with his bed sheet when I was about five,” he said at last. “The Consort had the woman who was watching him hung in his stead, for treason, while Ulvane and her family watched.”

“Dueant’s much maligned arse!” Torrant swore, appalled by the story and by the choice he was being asked to make. He scrubbed his face with his hands.

“Ellyot…” Eljean asked, calmer now that he was more sure of his own senses, “Who is Torrian Shadow?”

“A midwife,” Torrant answered, his eyes dreaming into the remorseless white of the tiled walls. “I’m guessing the midwife who delivered Djali, here, and,” he closed his eyes and swallowed, “and probably one of Rath’s first victims.”

“But Uncle Ulvane just said he…” Djali’s voice trailed off , and he looked straightly at the gibbering, sobbing man in Torrant’s arms. “Yes. Yes, my father could have done that. He could have told him… anything, I guess…”

“Your mother’s death,” Ulvane said distinctly, his tear-stained hands pushing back his sweaty, dingy hair. “He told me that Torrian Shadow killed your mother, and I believed him. I was young, and weak, and Goddess help me, I needed someone to blame. I didn’t realize until later…so much later…after so much blood…”

The old man took a shuddery breath and spoke directly to Djali, his face assuming for a moment a younger, cleaner countenance, with brown-ish eyes that may have once been the most handsome feature in an ordinary man’s face. “I’m mad, boy-o. This moment, this is as clear as I’ve ever been. I need to die, and die quietly, or I will betray the last thing I hold dear, and there is no absolution for a traitor like me…” a tremor seized him, and the sobs threatened his body again, and Torrant couldn’t bear it anymore.

“Don’t worry about it, old man,” he murmured gently, pushing his vision of truth into the man’s mind with just enough force to start a small bit of bleeding, just a little pool of blood, pushing against the fragile brain and the skull, that would grow bigger and bigger as the night wore on. “Don’t worry about it…you’ve been absolved by the son of Owen Moon, by the son of Torrian Shadow, by your sister’s son, by your people. You’ve been forgiven, washed in the Goddess’ tears. Go sleep now, dream of Djali when he was a child, remember the times you saw his smile, and know that smile was for you.”

“Bed…” the old man murmured. “I should go back to bed… my keeper should be looking for me soon. She’s a good lass…I don’t want her punished.” He looked up at Djali and smiled, the expression transforming his face once again to the hale, handsome, happy man he might have been. “And the boy…he’s everything Willa wanted him to be. Such a brave boy, fighting for the world. He’s got a smile like sunshine, Willa’s boy.”

“Kiss your uncle’s cheek and wish him goodnight, Djali,” Torrant said roughly through hot tears he couldn’t fight. The weakness and nausea of using his gift this way were secondary things to the terrible sadness of what he’d just done.

Djali looked at him, startled, comprehension and protest dying on his lips even as they dawned. “Good night, Uncle Ulvane,” he said thickly, shaking his head at Torrant. “Pleasant dreams.”

“Good night boys.” And with one last, sunny smile, the old man toddled off to his deathbed, leaving Torrant and Djali to sink to their haunches side by side, sitting on the bathroom floor next to Eljean like children.

“Will it hurt?” Djali asked after a fraught moment of shuddery breaths and harshly controlled tears.

“He’ll dream of you as a child,” Torrant said, mastering himself. “And he’ll dream that Torrian,” oh, he couldn’t finish that name, could he? “Torrian Shadow will come to you and pick you up and play with you like the father you deserved, and Owen Moon will laugh at you as you roll around on the ground with my brothers, and when he wakes, he will be behind the moons with them all, and it will be true.” He counted ten breaths then, and abruptly stood up and washed his face, knowing that the dinner party would be more than wondering where they were, and not caring any more than he had to in order to get them all out of there alive.

“And tonight,” he continued in a stronger voice, “you are going to go pack your things with Eljean and meet us at my flat. Eljean, is it good if he sleeps on your couch for a bit?”

“If he can still stand me after tonight,” Eljean ventured, and they tried a grim smile for him.

“Just don’t start telling me about your dead childhood pets, and I think we’ll be fine,” Djali ventured back, and then they both tried a small, hollow laugh. “But Ellyot—what will we do about Triana? Is she in danger?”

Oh, holy Goddess. “Yes,” Torrant murmured, “and no. I think you’ll be watched, Djali—you’re going to break away from him, he’ll want to know what you’re doing. We need to be aware that you’ll be watched, and you need to warn Triana that she might be in danger. You shouldn’t go out unless you’re with another one of us.” He shot a quick grin at Eljean, “Since your roommate is also seeing someone in the ghetto, that shouldn’t be a problem. You may want to cool it down for a while, or only see her on nights when we’ve all been at the clinic. You’re an honorable man—I trust you to do what you must to keep her safe. Just remember…”

Torrant looked away and thought of the father he couldn’t remember, dying by the side of the road in a pool of blood as his mother told him. He thought of Qir and Tal, his brothers, who had lovers when they’d died, lovers who had died that same night.

“Just remember that innocence is no guarantee of safety, will you my friend?” he begged at last, and Djali nodded.

“We need to win this, don’t we?” he asked, and Torrant nodded.

“We really do. Now you two go and pack, and I’ll get the rest of us out of here. Slip out the back way if you must, but meet in my flat as soon as you can.”

When Torrant got to the banquet table, the silence was as glaring and repellent as the white tile in the bathroom. The young regents, his regents, sat, arms folded, legs extended under the table, their main courses congealing on the table in front of them, while Rath’s cronies ate in a pointed silence across from them. Torrant felt a smile wash the last of the grief from his features, and decided that this sort of pride—pride in friends of high character—might not be such a bad thing after all.

“Gentlemen,” he said with a bow and a telling look at Aerk, Keon, Marv and Jino, “If you will excuse us, Eljean is not feeling well, and we’re going to escort him back to his quarters.”

Rath was so surprised that they weren’t going to observe the niceties that he almost dropped his fork. “But…but dinner isn’t over yet!” he protested, and Torrant’s smile turned sardonic in half of a beat of his broken heart.

“Especially since none of us are comfortable eating, Consort.” He bowed and the others rose, pushed their chairs in, and did the same. “We’ll see you on First day, on the floor. You seem to have attached a caveat to the bill I proposed asking for hunger relief in the ghettoes. I plan to have something to say about that. Gentlemen, good night.”

And with that they filed out of the banquet hall and towards the stairs down to the front foyer. Knowing they were being watched, the five young men maintained a stoic silence until they had marched somberly out of the palace and across the courtyard to the apartment complex, and by the time they got there, the silence was so embedded in the night that they kept it until Torrant let them all into his flat.

The Importance of Dreams

Aylan was waiting for them when they arrived, and by the looks of it, he’d bought out half the marketplace and set it up on Torrant’s dresser in his burgundy, dark-wooded bedroom. The stiff and somber silence that had settled on them during that long walk across the courtyard shattered into bounding, chattering pieces when they saw the food.

“Where’s Djali and Eljean?” asked Aerk, after he’d swallowed half a meat pie in a gulp. Sweat had soaked through his shaggy dark-blonde hair and all of them were flushed and starving.

A knock on the door answered his question about Djali and Eljean, and the young men dodged in, carrying two large cases apiece filled with Djali’s things.

Everyone quickly settled on Torrant’s bed, eating the simple food with groans of contentment.

“What is that story about the country mouse and the city mouse?” Keon asked, sucking the last of a pastry off his teeth. “About a crust of bread eaten in peace as opposed to a banquet eaten in danger?”

“Wishing you were a country mouse?” Aerk asked with a raised eyebrow and another bite of meat pie.

“Wishing I could crawl up Rath’s leg and bite him soundly on the ego with my pointy diseased teeth!” Keon bit out, and it was a mark of how much strain they’d been under that the others hooted and whistled in agreement.

“I’ve had nightmares about being naked in public that went better than that,” Marv stated, and for once Jino didn’t even try to cuff him on the arm or kick him in the shin.

“You all did beautifully,” Torrant said, meaning it…“You should have seen them, Aylan—they did us proud, debating like professionals, showing solidarity when none was asked…”

“Except me,” Eljean muttered, and a sudden, recriminating silence descended as Torrant walked across the room to his friend and seized his shoulders as he hunched in the corner by the French doors and the armoire, standing on tiptoe so he could touch foreheads with his friend.

“You were attacked by sorcery…”

“Which I apparently let in with a sip of wine…”

“You’re drinking water freely in my room, Eljean—it’s not in our nature to reject hospitality when it’s offered.” He sighed then, and dropped his head and wanted to laugh, because the difference in their height was such that it almost rested on Eljean’s chest. Sometimes being shorter than everyone else made his gestures more intimate than he’d planned. He shook his head then and backed up, tilting back to look in Eljean’s eyes.

“It’s not in our nature to think that people will cover a deformed truth with a pretty lie, and that the world will only see a pretty lie.”

“Wait a minute!” Marv demanded, bouncing on his toes. “What is this about sorcery!”

“And what is all of Djali’s stuff doing in your entryway?” Jino asked, and the questions suddenly flew thick and fast until Aylan put two fingers in his mouth and whistled at them like Lane Moon would whistle for a horse. There was peace again, and Aylan, relieved just to see them all alive and bickering, leaned back against the wall (since the chair, the bed and the chest at the foot of the bed were all taken) and gave them a palm out, open-eyed gesture indicating that they should proceed in an orderly fashion.

“Perhaps we should let Ellyot speak,” he said reasonably, then held up a palm to forestall any protests, “and when he’s done, you all can add your observations, yes?”

It went much more smoothly after that.

By the time Torrant was done, doing most of his speaking while pacing back and forth across the room, Aylan had slid down the side of the wall and put his face in his hands. He finished speaking and nobody spoke; the young men just sat there with fragments of their supper still clasped in their hands.

“I’m sorry, Djali,” Torrant muttered, scrubbing his face with his hands again. “I’m…”

“Don’t be,” Djali replied quietly.

“I’m…”

“Don’t be.”

“But I have to be…don’t you see…you could think it was vengeance, working through me tonight, and you need to know it wasn’t.”

“Vengeance for what?” Aerk asked sharply, and Aylan hissed, because Torrant had left himself wide open for that question, and explaining why he would want vengeance for Torrian Shadow was out of the question.

“Vengeance for tracking me and Yarri after our family was killed,” Torrant murmured, surprising Aylan into looking at him. “We were the cat and the tree that he heard…we were…” Torrant trailed off , lost abruptly in the place that Aylan knew the bad memories lived. “We were huddled against a tree, with the family cat clutched in her arms, and I knew a ‘wizard tracker’ was coming. I…I used my gift. I told Yarri to think like a cat—she’d followed Anye around enough that it shouldn’t be a stretch…and I…I grew roots, and branches, and had leaves for hair. And suddenly the wizard tracker was gone, and Yarri was pounding against the inside of my bark for me to let her out.”

“I know why you did it, Ellyot,” Djali was saying now, his voice gentle and the compassion on his face making him a picture of true Dueant. “You did it because he asked you to. You did it to give him…” Djali, always in search of the elusive perfect word, shook his hands and his head trying to find one, and for once nobody interrupted to help him out. “Absolution!” he cried at last, the triumph in his voice bringing the first smiles to the room in over half an hour. “You let him die in peace, without betraying me, or his people, or our cause anymore. You told him he was forgiven…” Djali’s voice was choking up now, and Eljean unexpectedly moved to the bed and threw his arm around the son of the Consort in an attempt to console him. “It was the best death he could have asked for—the most merciful thing you could have done. Don’t be sorry, Ellyot. Eljean and I…we know that vengeance was the furthest thing from your mind.”

“But it won’t be the last thing on Rath’s mind,” Aylan broke into the silence, “and you all know we might have to deal with that tonight.”

“Not tonight,” Djali surprised them by saying. “The Secretary General was getting pretty tipsy by the time we left—I don’t know if he’ll be able walk to the compound to issue an order. The Consort never really issues those orders himself, so…” he looked directly at Aylan, “Triane’s Son and Oueant’s Son might have a rest tonight.”

Aylan groaned. “Triane’s best dance, who’s been calling me Oueant’s Son?”

Aerk laughed, in spite of the gravity of the moment. “Triane’s Son—that’s what the buzz at the clinic said this morning.”

“You manky wanker!” Aylan burst out at Torrant, and in spite of the exhaustion and the ache in his heart, Torrant laughed back at him.

“If I have to be Triane’s Son, you might as well get a spiffy name too!”

Aylan reached out to the throw pillow Jino offered and pitched it at his brother’s head, and some relieved laughter echoed through the room.

The impromptu ‘party’ broke up shortly after that, the young men moving quietly to their own rooms, Marv and Jino taking Djali’s cases to Eljean’s flat on their way. Torrant and Aylan had warned the two men not to visit their lovers in the ghettoes without a tail of their own, and promised to tell ‘whomever might be interested’ why the young men couldn’t visit as much as they wanted.

When the quiet had seeped completely back into the bedroom, and Torrant was seated cross-legged on the bed, scribbling furiously onto one of his music parchments, Aylan said, “He wants you.”

Torrant stopped writing and looked up. “Who?”

“Eljean.”

“Eljean has a lover now—I’m sure his little crush has faded away.” Torrant bent his head back down and wrote a few more words to the lyric that had been rattling around in his head since he’d left Rath’s den of poison. If they weren’t out in the ghettoes, being the bane of the Dueance guards on the first rest night, Aylan almost always slept in Torrant’s room. They had roomed together very successfully—and reasonably platonically—when Aylan had stayed at Wrinkle Creek, and Aylan appreciated the bed with springs and fresh ticking once a week. He also appreciated that Torrant didn’t sleep—not really—unless his brother was there to watch his back and to warn him if the two of them were needed.

“How many lovers do you think I had before our little moment in the sun?” Aylan asked, annoyed that Torrant would not see what seemed so obvious to Aylan himself.

Torrant snorted, picked up his lute and thumbed a melody from the strings. “I don’t even want to guess,” he murmured, closing his eyes and making another notation.

“Torrant, this is bloody important—what is it you’re writing there that won’t allow the fact that this boy with a crush is the weakest member of our little brotherhood—one indiscreet word, one bad day, one temper tantrum near the wrong crowds, and he could get you killed?” Aylan shoved himself off the chair by the lamp—he’d been trying to read a ‘forbidden book’ that Stanny had smuggled to them, and while usually he appreciated a good romance, he was annoyed that Torrant wasn’t taking this seriously.

Torrant looked up and met Aylan’s gaze with a serene, level look of his own. “Eljean is Eljean—we can neither change the way he feels nor predict what he will do in the future. What we can do is give him unconditional acceptance which is, I’m damned sure, a thing he’s never had offered to him before in his life. Like you said, you had a crush on me for years, and not once in all that time did I feel it necessary to shove you away or hurt you because I did not feel the same way. Just because I don’t feel the same way about Eljean as I do about you doesn’t mean I should treat him with any less dignity, right?”

“He’s dangerous, and you have a serious blind spot about this!” Aylan protested.

“He’s young,” Torrant shrugged, “and if I have a blind spot it’s because I can’t believe I’d be the object of all of this attention if I wasn’t Ellyot Moon, the lost child of the last rebel in Clough.” Torrant’s face suddenly darkened, and he frowned at the lyrics in front of him, and then, in a fit of dissatisfaction he made as though to scratch out the entire work.

“Wait!” Aylan cried, saving the song before he even knew what it was about. “What are you writing, anyway? I’ve never seen you try to destroy your work before!”

“Auuuuuughhhh!” Torrant gave a cry of sheer frustration and barely remembered to cap his inkwell before throwing himself backwards on the bed and running his hands through his hair. He felt the tingle where he kept his white streak hidden and in a giant exhale he let the spell go, just for a moment and tried to put his thoughts in order for his friend.

“Torrant…” Aylan said, frowning at what was in front of him, “This is shite…this is political propaganda at its worst…We must worship Triane because joy is part of life? Ugh. Here…wait…let me destroy this for you. I want to pretend you never wrote it!”

“Be my guest,” Torrant breathed, staring at the ceiling above him and remembering a window in the loft of a barn, open to the stars at sea. The wrinkle and rattle of the cursed piece of parchment didn’t even phase him.

“Why did you write this?”

Torrant sighed. “No one remembered,” he murmured. “No one remembered—it was the day I walked in, and Rath was telling the last survivor of Triannon that the Goddess’ children were ‘tricky’— they would grow to be dangerous, and that’s why they needed to be killed. But tonight at dinner…he said ‘It was a miscommunication among the leadership.’ It’s total shite, but no one remembered. Not his men, not even our boys—none of them remembered. I just…I wanted something in print. I’m just so afraid that if we get caught, and our bodies strung up above the Goddess-blighted city, no one will know why!” He took a shuddering breath and continued to fight the helpless tears, sliding into his hair from the corner of his eyes. “Poor Ulvane,” he rasped thickly. “The man begged for death, Aylan, so he wouldn’t betray his sister’s son—doesn’t that sort of courage deserve to be remembered?”

“Mmmm,” Aylan murmured, wondering if Torrant even realized he’d forgiven the man who had wielded the knife that shed his father’s blood without even a batted eyelash. In a heartbeat, he had understood that the hand that held the knife was not the will that had driven it home. Didn’t that sort of compassion deserve to be remembered? The room was quiet for a moment, while Aylan fought his instinct to take his brother in his arms and comfort him in any way he could, when he remembered a tune, a melody of Torrant’s that had been sung by a group of women at the marketplace as he’d been buying food.

“They’re still singing ‘Berries for Breakfast’,” Aylan said into the hush. “They’re singing it at the marketplace, they’re singing it as they work, they’re singing it to their children as they fall asleep…”

“Who’s singing it?”

“People. All the people in this otherwise shite-acular town. They’re singing your song because it touched their hearts. Facts are easily forgotten, my brother. Feelings resonate in your bones until your last breath.”

Torrant sat up and wiped his face, and Aylan closed his eyes to squash that temptation to take his brother in his arms, especially now, when he had a reason to hope.

“A song?” Torrant asked…“About what?”

Aylan had to laugh. “About the things that touch your heart, brother. The things you’re most passionate about,” he grimaced because he knew this was going to be rough on the both of them, “the things that hurt you. If you want the people here to know how their lives are hurting the world, you let them know how they’ve hurt you. Words, mate—they’re your bread and butter, they always have been.”

It wasn’t as simple as that, of course. Aylan knew that with this one suggestion, he was sentencing Torrant to an evening of exile in the place where his worst memories lived. But he also knew that Torrant was right—the one thing Rath had going for him was that no one truly knew the extent of his perfidy, because the facts were never documented, and the news that he was out and about in other countries being a shite-arsed-wanker would never be read to his own people.

Torrant looked at his brother, at his over-pretty features, especially that lovely, pouty mouth, and wondered how Aylan could have once thought that all he had were his body and his looks. It was a brilliant idea, really. In the back of his mind, Torrant remembered Lane Moon, saying something about how maybe he would change the world with words. More recently he remembered a small woman who had given her life to save the books of poetry she had loved the most. Well then. If poetry could be a weapon, who better to wield it?

“You won’t leave while I’m working?” Torrant asked, and his heart in that quavering voice was as naked as Aylan had ever heard it when the snow cat wasn’t involved.

“If you don’t mind my snoring, that’s a promise,” he murmured, and crawled up the bed to put his head on the pillow and close his eyes. He knew that Torrant would reach out and touch him, if he were asleep. Touch his hair, his cheek, rub his thumb on Aylan’s jaw, if Aylan weren’t awake to feel it. Torrant wasn’t in love with him— certainly not the way he was in love with Yarri—but he needed that physical reassurance that his brother, his friend, his family, was there, nearby, where he could be touched.

“I know you’re awake,” Torrant murmured, his pen scratching frantically on the parchment with excitement and hope.

“You’ll forget,” Aylan murmured back, not even sure if Torrant heard him in his creative haze. Torrant’s free hand absent-mindedly reached out and rubbed his friend’s arm.

“Mmmm…” he mumbled, and the night spun on.

He worked until dawn peeped through the windows of the double doors, the melody apparently playing in his head, because he very rarely picked up the lute, but instead hummed the song as he was writing the words. When he was done he stood and stretched, then covered Aylan (again! The man was always flopping spread-eagled when he slept) with one of the blankets Bethen had stuffed in their luggage. Then he stripped off his own breeches and hose and his satin huntsman (which had long since been unlaced) and crawled into bed in his lightweight linen shirt, not caring about the wrinkles since it was laundered soft.

As his mind relaxed and his body tightened around itself in sleep (he never relaxed in sleep) he thought of Yarri. He’d been thinking of her as a child, as he’d written the ballad of the two of them, escaping the deaths of their family, but something in him longed to touch her as an adult, as the fiery, competent, lovely woman who had lain with him before he’d set off here, to this morass of politics and despair. In his mind he conjured an image of her so perfect, so true to life, that he could smell the chamomile and yarrow that she used in her shampoo.

He sighed a little, forgetting Aylan on the other side of him, and formed a little cocoon in the hunch of his shoulders, and as sleep claimed him he disappeared into this little world and dreamed. He dreamed of red-gold hair like rough silk, and sober brown eyes in a piquant face. He dreamed of the smell of yarrow, chamomile, and roses, and the chiming, jingling, singing sound of bells.

He dreamed of Yarri.

He met Yarri’s eyes at this part, and she smiled gamely back.

She had told him—numerous times—that the worst part of his absence had been just that: his absence. But he had seen what life in Eiran had been like after he and Aylan had left. He had seen the stalwart, covert fight of the people in Eiran to keep the soul of what made them good in the face of the sickness that had crawled into their midst like a rotting worm to the inside of a sweet, innocent apple.

Tonight she shook her head, much of her earlier irritation set aside in an attempt to be strong for him as he did this. No matter whose bed he shared at the end of Beltane, it was a certainty that he needed all of them— every last child, every last cousin, every last friend, to sing with him now.

As she watched the terrible guilt weight his shoulders, even as he lifted his head to his children—every last one of them with a white streak in their hair—and sang, she wondered yet again if she could ever convince him that this part, the part he’d seen in his dream, had been the easiest part of the whole business.

That was when Evya caught her eye and smiled with a lift of her eyebrows, her face still pretty and her sloe eyes still lovely after all these years. Stanny’s beloved had become part of the strength of the family since those awful days, but she had always said rather ruefully that the only real hand she’d had in the deeds of Triane’s Son had been to hand Yarri a bag of hammers.

Torrant had always told her soberly that without a bag of hammers, all would have been lost.

And every year, Yarri met her sister-by-marriage’s eyes and reaffirmed what they all knew: small acts of kindness and bravery often won the war.

Part VI—The Yearning Moon

Dream of Beloved

The orphanage was just as Torrant remembered it, even in the dream.

Yarri and the children had painted bright, happy murals on the yellow recycled sailcloth that hung on the walls, and even carpeted the floors of what was once Lane Moon’s winter overflow warehouse. He had since rebuilt a larger building and donated this one to the victims of Rath’s policies, and Yarri, perhaps being an orphan herself, had taken on the orphanage as her livelihood.

Of course, Yarri was only eighteen, and in spite of the fact that the place had been her idea, and she knew every child by name and had been teaching the youngest ones their letters from the time she could first sneak away from the schools she was supposed to be going to in order to do so, she did have supervision. The town elders, of whom Lane was one, volunteered two or three days a month to come in and assist and take funding requests to bring to the town meetings, but it was Yarri who provided the driving will to make the place thriving and happy and warm.

She had help—before Torrant left and Roes had moved to Wrinkle Creek with Aldam, Roes had been a frequent presence at the orphanage, and the children had often teased that Roes was even pricklier than her name. Aylan had worked there between traveling jobs for Lane, and other young people who had come to play with the Moon children as they were growing made the orphanage their livelihood as well.

Evya, Stanny’s wife, was there as often as Yarri. So was Aln, who, mourning for his brother and his lover, both part of the militia killed in defense of Triannon, seemed to take more solace from his work with the children than he did from the company of any of the adults of the town.

Aln was there this day, as well, and Yarri’s automatic hand on his shoulder was covered with Aln’s own, long-fingered hand, as well as a great deal of gratitude.

“It’s looking good!” she praised, taking in the poster with letters and numbers on it. The poster was to encourage reading—they were going to hang it over the treasured shelf of the books rescued from Triannon. The orphanage, which had housed so many of the students after the attack, seemed the logical place to gather the precious little volumes of poetry and stories. The colors were bold purples and oranges and blues and greens, and if there was not enough yellow in it for Yarri’s liking, she was pretty sure that was her own bias and not to be confused with any other fact. She and Aln had always enjoyed drawing together, but until Kert had been posted at Triannon with the militia, Aln had always been too wrapped up in his beloved to spend much time working with her.

“Have you heard from Stanny?” he asked, and Yarri bit her lip and shook her head.

“It was going to be a few weeks for him to get back,” she murmured. “I’m sure he’ll be here by the next rest day.”

“He’s been gone before,” Aln told her gently, not talking about Stanny, and Yarri’s face tightened, and her throat got full. She shook her head, hard enough to make herself dizzy.

“This is different,” she said roughly. “You know it. I know it. And the damned priest seems to know it as well.”

“Has he been back to your house?” Aln looked concerned. Most of the other town elders tolerated the priest, shining him on when he said something outrageous or pushy or dumb. We don’t want to attract attention, Lane, the Constable had intoned quietly at the swimming hole last week, where the two of them seemed to do most of their business in the summer. He was not, however, so quiet that Yarri, with her group of charges nearby, hadn’t heard him. She certainly hadn’t had any trouble hearing Lane Moon’s answer. We dishonor those boys if we don’t hold fast to what we know is true. And that had been the end of it.

Yarri’s smile was a little thin, but it was still a smile. “Uncle Lane won’t let him in the house, not after what he said to Starry. He’ll come knocking, Auntie Beth will offer him the scrapings of the pot if he’ll eat it on the porch, and that’s as far as he gets. The rest of us just walk right by him, like he’s another wicker chair.”

There was more—there were the things he said to her, quietly, under his breath, as she was walking by, and the things he said to Carl, the Miller’s boy, when she wasn’t around, but she didn’t want to go into these things with Aln. Aln had enough problems remembering to breathe in and out, remembering to tie his shoes and brush his bird’s nest brown hair and eat to sustain his slender, bony body. The last thing Aln needed was to be burdened with…

“There’s more you’re not telling me, isn’t there?” he asked quietly, and she grimaced in return. “Don’t treat me like I’m made of glass, Yarri. I’m in mourning—I’m not stupid. And I’m not so far gone as to let a friend put up with the sort of shite the priest can throw to the four winds without at least offering to help.”

“What’s he been saying to you?” she asked in sympathy.

Aln gave her a sour look, and with a final glance at his handiwork, began to put the paints away. The children were all out playing with Evya, but they would be in soon for snack and a nap for the younger ones, and quiet reading time for the older ones, and if the paint was still out, the mess would be spectacular.

“The usual,” Aln responded finally, making sure the colors were in order, “he says the same thing Clough’s been spewing about my sort since before you and Torrant came over the hill. It’s just…” He looked up, towards the raftered brown dark of the ceiling—they’d been trying and failing to think of ways to convert that vast space above them into another story. Their resources just didn’t stretch that far.

“It’s just harder to hear someone tell you that your love was wrong, when your lover isn’t here to tell you it’s been right all along,” Yarri finished for him, and then wanted to kick herself for her honesty when Aln’s tears spilled over.

“I’m sor…” she started, but Aln pulled her into an embrace—the first time he’d allowed anyone to touch him, really, since Aldam had brought him out of a sorcery-induced sleep when the news of the lost militia at Triannon had surfaced.

“Don’t be sorry,” he whispered hoarsely into her hair. “Don’t be sorry, and don’t let that bastard get to you, and don’t ever forget that your beloved is fighting for all of us, you hear me?” A muffled sob, a shudder in her arms. “He must succeed, because I won’t even think that they died for nothing. Take heart from that, Yarri. It’s all I’ve got…” And then he couldn’t speak anymore, and in a moment, Evya and the children were coming in, and Evya’s bright voice sobered quickly when she saw Aln pulling reluctantly away from Yarri and wiping his face with the back of his hand.

A year ago, even less, and Yarri would have thought the worst of Evya—expected her to assume the worst, expected her to ignore Aln’s pain, expected her to do something that would show the same person who had led Stanny a less-than-merry courtship dance over the last four years or so. On this day, Evya surprised even Yarri with her thoughtfulness.

“Children,” she said to the suddenly sober mob behind her, “I think Uncle Aln’s having a sad moment—can we all show him how much we love him?”

Another person, perhaps, would have hated the babbling tide of young people that washed over Aln at that moment, the younger ones hugging and kissing and reaching out to flutter his back with little taps of comfort. But not Aln, and in a moment he was smiling through his tears and embracing the children he took such joy in.

Yarri moved to Evya with a grateful smile. “That was brilliant— thank you!”

Evya smiled back, shyly, pushing her straight dark hair out of her sloe eyes. She’d known very well how much the family had disapproved of her. But since she’d stood by Stanny and the family’s decisions after Triannon, the close-knit, protective Moon clan had opened to her just as she’d opened to Stanny, and she was grateful for their support. “It’s good to see him smiling at them,” she murmured. “He hardly says boo to a mouse at home.”

Aln had been staying with Evya since Stanny had left. She’d made noises to Yarri about letting him stay even when Stanny returned. It’s not like we have children yet, and the flat is just so big. And Stanny was going to be away a lot, until the situation in Clough was resolved. She hadn’t needed to say that last part, but Yarri had agreed with her at the time, simply by reading her mind.

“He’ll be here next rest day, you think?” Yarri asked now, in the quiet as Aln got the children their snacks. It was practically their only conversation these days, and Evya’s level glance as she went to the cold box in the corner of the warehouse that they had set up as a kitchen, told Yarri that they needed to find a better conversation to have.

“I think that even when he gets back, the priest is not going to stop hounding you,” Evya replied quietly, and then laughed a little at Yarri’s surprise. “It’s not hard to know what the two of you were talking about. You won’t talk to anybody in the family about the priest, and Aln’s perhaps the only one who’s seen what the man can do with his sharp tongue like you have.”

Yarri shuddered, and stood on tiptoe to get the cookie jar from the top of the cold box. Evya shooed her away—she was tall enough to look Stanny mostly in the eye, and her beloved’s little cousin was at least three hands short of doing the same.

“Are you going to tell Lane?” Evya asked when she had given the ceramic jar to Yarri. “You can’t just keep pretending the priest doesn’t exist, or that the miller’s boy isn’t stalking you like a shadow stalks a hawk.”

“I don’t want to worry him,” Yarri said in a small voice, feeling younger than Evya for the first time in their acquaintance. “Auntie Beth…” Yarri shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about this either. She swallowed, and pulled the common-sense cloak of strength over her shoulders that she had always worn, and that it had often seemed Torrant was the only one who could see beneath.

“He needs to come home, that’s all. He needs to make them all see sense immediately, and he needs to come home.”

Evya nodded, and unexpectedly leaned in to kiss Yarri’s cheek. “Of course he does. And he will!”

It was Aln’s turn to sleep in the cot-room to oversee the children, along with two members of the general militia who were assigned the duty--since Triannon, nobody was taking any chances with the children of Eiran, especially not the dispossessed ones, with only the city itself to mind them.

So Yarri’s good feeling lasted her, even as she made to leave the orphanage, and Evya had handed her the heavy leather bag of tools that they had been using to make general repairs. “I know why you won’t say anything,” Evya had murmured, “but I know that it’s getting dangerous—even for you. Remember--you’re Lane Moon’s daughter, by Oueant’s strong hand! Your cousin is the strongest, most hale man in the town, and your beloved and his friend are three-moons-blessed heroes. You take nothing from no one, much less a shite-kisser who can’t manage his own fly without pissing on his feet!”

Yarri smiled then, grateful beyond words to Evya, and Evya shooed her on her way.

It would have felt like whining to complain, because Yarri knew all the reasons why she couldn’t make waves, but the heavy bag had felt good in her hands, and for once the helpless, stomach shredding anxiety of meeting up with Carl Mildew or Priest Eamon left her alone as she walked out of the side door and into the westering sun of the summer evening.

Of course, the good feeling lasted just long enough for her to cross the main street of Eiran in front of the warehouse. As she walked between two close-set business buildings to get to the second level road—the one she lived on with her Uncle and his family-- her stride was firm and sure. She was looking forward to getting home and making dinner, since Aunt Bethen had been too tired lately to cook. Starren and Cwyn had asked her, discreetly, if she could step in, since their own days were busy and they were all tired of cold sandwiches, and she had. Everyone praised her cooking—but as Aunt Bethen grew more and more tired, they found themselves missing burnt rice and flavorless stews as well.

But still, she was happy to get home this evening—in fact, she was humming to herself—one of the songs that Torrant had written for her. The bag swung over her shoulder making a satisfying thunk against her thigh in time to the music in her head, and her stride was confident and purposeful. Right up until she heard footsteps echoing behind her, and could tell by the sound in the alleyway that she was not alone.

The footsteps hurried, trying to be stealthy, and Yarri continued as though she hadn’t heard a thing. When she could smell the flour dust and hear the rustle of clothing behind her, she whirled around, swinging the weighted leather bag at the miller’s son’s head.

It made an impact like an unholy cathedral bell being beaten with a corpse, and the young man fell to the ground, howling. Yarri stood her ground, clutching the strap of the bag in her hands tightly, ready to swing it again.

“You hit me, you silly bitch!” The boy whined, and Yarri swung her dainty little foot back and landed a solid kick in his thigh, for good measure.

“You don’t sneak up on women in alley ways, you stupid moo!” she growled. “If you don’t mean harm when you do it, you deserve to get clocked just for being dumber than a bag of hammers!”

With a grunt the boy shoved himself to his feet, smiling evilly through crooked teeth when Yarri backed up to let him. Then he realized that she was testing the arc on the bag to see what her weapon’s range was, and the nasty smiled disappeared.

“The priest says if you’re unmarried, you’re fair game,” he snarled, and she laughed fierce joy in his face.

“I’m spoken for. You know it. The whole town knows it. And even the priest wouldn’t say ‘fair game’. I’m only ‘fair game’ if you can catch me unawares, Carl.”

She let the bag’s swing slacken and moved closer to him, threatening him with her scant height. “And I promise you, sweet thing, that if you ever catch me unawares, and do to me what you’ve been dreaming of since your first wilding failed because your thing shriveled in your pants and died, if I don’t make you pay, my family will tear you apart. I’ve kept no secrets from them. If they find my body, bloody and broken, like that poor woman on the way to the orphanage with her baby shrieking in the basket beside her, you won’t be able to hide behind your father’s lies this time. It’ll be my uncle, and my cousins, and my beloved and his brothers of the heart, and if it needs to be, the thrice-blessed Queen of Otham—there won’t be enough pieces of you left to flush down the river. You may as well take your chances with my tool-bag here, right?”

She picked up the bag’s swing, feeling the strain in her muscles because it was truly heavy, but taking satisfaction from the way Carl backed up anyway.

The tool bag had been heavy on her shoulders, but now, watching the boy’s pale face blanche almost green, and spittle track down the sides of his mouth as he backed away, she’d gladly carry the damned thing every day for the rest of her life if it would give her this much power over what frightened her.

Suddenly the boy’s expression changed to one of triumph, and he started howling in pain again, as though she’d just hit him and even harder than the first time.

“Oww! Yarri! I was only asking you for help! Owww!! Priest Eamon, help me!!!”

“Yarrow Moon, shame on you!” The priest thundered. Or he tried to. In fact, he tried frequently and valiantly to imbue his voice with authority. The sad fact was, although he was Torrant’s age, he had none of the qualities that made people want to follow her beloved to the pit of the star’s dark just to cushion his fall when he hit the bottom.

And Yarri had heard what he’d muttered at her when she passed, and the condescending prayers behind her back as she walked down the road. Oh, he pretended for the town’s sake to be sympathetic to her. He talked mournfully of how sad it was that she had lost her family to the misguided Goddess worshippers at her family’s holding, and no amount of gainsaying him—on anybody’s part—would make him change that story. But she knew him for what he was—there was no disguising the monstrous black fly under the fine silk robes he tended to wear.

She heartily wished him safe passage back to Clough, but even Yarri knew that her beloved couldn’t afford to have the one man in Rath’s government who knew that Torrant Shadow was not really Ellyot Moon there in the city as Torrant was practicing his deadly masquerade.

She’d been there the night Lane had called the town elders in to conference about the very real danger—to all of them, yes, but especially to Aylan and Torrant—that the priest posed.

It had been Auntie Bethen who had arrived at the decision of letting this one stay in the town’s environs.

This one, Auntie Beth? Yarri had asked reluctantly. She already regretted taking part in running the last one out of town. He may have preached loudly against the handfasting traditions, but that one, at least, had cared about the little population he saw as his to care for. He had even done his stint in the orphanage—a thing that Priest Eamon, at least, avoided like the plague…Ah, gods, it felt as though she would forever be throwing rocks out of trees and hitting the wrong wanker on the head.

This one is the only one that’ll matter, darling. Bethen had been giving reasons to all of the town elders, but she had been speaking directly to Yarri. This one knows you’re betrothed to Torrant Shadow. He’s heard the boy described, right down to the Goddess streak in his hair, and if he goes to Clough and sees a boy matching that description walking around as Ellyot Moon, he’ll know enough to get our boy hung over the gates. No, sweetheart. Short of assassination, this is the best way.

What about assassination, mum? Cwyn had not been invited to this meeting, but everybody knew that keeping the boy out of anything— including the pants of anyone he set his cap for—was a venture with high odds of failure.

The rest of the town council caught its breath at the audacity of the suggestion, but the Moon clan knew better. Their loved ones had been killing to keep people safe since Torrant, Yarri, and Aldam had first stumbled down the hill.

It had been Lane who had voiced the reason they couldn’t. No—if this one dies, Rath’ll just send another, and that one will know about Ellyot Moon. The whole town would have to lie, and that’s one hell of a secret to keep, now isn’t it?

And so Yarri had heard the priest’s veiled comments, the slurs on her family, the snide comments about her beloved, and how he’d most likely just spread her legs and run for the hills like any Goddess-slut. She’d swallowed them with as much grace as she could spare because anything she said in self-defense was another weapon the man could have to destroy Torrant, and with him, all of Eiran’s hopes. And, of course, her reason for following one breath with another.

“An offense to the gods!” she scoffed now, in response to the priest’s admonition. “Do the gods say I can’t defend myself against a prick busting through it’s fly?” She kept the bag in its swinging arc as she spoke. Torrant wouldn’t thank her for getting hurt because she was too worried about him to defend herself.

“I’m sure you misunderstood…” the priest began.

“It’s hard to misunderstand a coward sneaking up behind you in an alley, priest.” She hawked phlegm from the back of her throat and spat at the man’s feet, because she was angry, and she was scared, and she was tired of feeling helpless in the face of these spit-sneaking men and their gods-given right to anything they thought was weaker than they were. “Just like it’s hard to misunderstand when you call me a ‘whoring bitch’ under your breath, and it’s hard to misunderstand when you tell me that the man who saved me from murdering evil-stink when he was not more than a child, ran away like a coward. You can say it, and your shite-brained followers can repeat it, but I know what I know and I will not let your lies change my heart.”

Faugh, but it felt good to tell them these things! What good was strength when you had to hide it from the people who needed their face hammered the most?

“Are you saying that your heart is beyond redemption, my child?” the priest asked, and although his voice was sad, his eyes were looking at Carl as though he expected the puling ninny to do something about this out-of-control woman and her magic bag of hammers.

Yarri swung the bag backwards hard enough to catch Carl in the chest, and when she heard his breathless ‘ulf!’ she bared her teeth like a cat intent on shredding mice.

“No, priest, I’m saying you are. Now the two of you can leave this alleyway two ways. You can leave it now, on your own, or you can leave it later when you wake up to haul your carcasses off to lick your wounds. Make your choice soon, Eamon, because I’m itching to get one of you good!”

Carl was moving again, she could feel it, and she could feel the strain in her swinging arm. Before her muscles could tremble and betray her, she clocked him good upside the head, gaining strength from the sound he made as he hit the dirt beside her.

“It’s proof of how godless your people are, that you’d even think of defying me!” Eamon snarled, and Yarri tilted her head back and laughed. It was an ugly sound, but then she was in the throes of an ugly, killing mood.

“Don’t look at me, priest—it was your people who took compassion out of the moons!”

Eamon closed in, and the bag swung up over her head and down, hitting the arm he’d extended towards her with a satisfying crunch. The priest howled but stayed erect, his other hand coming out with a knife.

The first thing he did with the knife was cut the handle of the bag as it swung, sending the hammers sailing out of the alley to land with a thump in middle of the road in front of Yarri’s home.

“You’re going to kill me, priest?” She was not as afraid as she should have been. He closed in on her, and she leaped sideways over Carl’s inert body. Eamon tripped on him, and her laugh made his face twist.

“You forget,” she baited, moving steadily towards the other end of the alley. To the orphanage. To witnesses. To safety. “I’ve lived in this town for twelve years. My beloved was the town Healer before he was of wilding age. My uncle is one of the town elders. You kill me, and you won’t live long enough to gloat to your king—you’ll just die, and the last sound you’ll hear will be the jeers of the people who love me.”

“The consort won’t let them live that long!” the priest hissed. “And you’ve needed killing your whole life. The gods are on our side!”

And then his eyes widened, the knife dropped out of his hand, and he fell to his knees. Yarri jumped out of the way, and he fell face forward, gurgling blood, with the hilt of Cwyn’s favorite dagger protruding from his back.

Cwyn was standing at the end of the alleyway—the one closest to home.

“Did he just say the gods are on his side?” he asked casually, sauntering into the shade of the alley as though the priest wasn’t thrashing at his feet. His dimples were flashing with the force of his fierce grin, and his tousled, cow-licked brown-hair was even more wild than usual, but he certainly didn’t look like a fifteen-year-old murderer by any stretch of the imagination.

“I have no idea,” Yarri panted, looking in disgust at the dying priest. Without warning, she swung her foot back and kicked him in the head. It hurt her foot, so she moved to his ribs. “What I do know,” kick, “is that we weren’t going to kill,” kick, “this piece of shite,” kick, “because now they’ll send us another one!” Kick, kick, kick, kick!

“Cwyn!” she sobbed as her cousin pulled her back from the groaning man. “Stop!”

“No, you stop!” he growled, shoving her against the wall and speaking tensely into her eyes. She cursed the day he’d passed her up in height—about three years before—and then, because her hands were pinned, she sniffled into her shoulder.

“Are you better now?” he asked, and she nodded, sniffling and shuddering again. “Good, cousin, because you’re right—the man needed killing, but we need to think on this. I have an idea that might keep another priest out of Eiran, but I’m going to need your help, are you with me?”

Yarri took another deep, quivering breath and nodded her head, ashamed of falling apart in front of her younger cousin. She’d spent her whole life telling him to stop being such a butterfly, and here she couldn’t even concentrate on bailing them both out of murder! The priest gave another gurgling moan, and they both turned towards him in disgust.

“Ugh…” Yarri made a face. “Cousin—could you do something about that?”

“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 upwards, 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 for real.

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’ joy.”

Torrant came awake abruptly. Aylan was shaking him rapidly and there was a pounding on the door that probably woke the entire complex. Without thinking about it, he sprang to his feet, the shout of Yarri on his lips, when he realized that 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 is 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 regent’s 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.”

A sneer, curling under the white mustache. “Oh—was that him, being his own man, last night?”

Torrant’s own 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 that 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 reminder 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 right 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 that 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 the 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 from 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 of his scruples from the night before vanished. The last three months and Torrant had never been this naked, never been as fragile as he seemed right now. Sitting down 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 murmured soothingly, and Torrant angrily mastered the shame of his body with his iron will.

“I dreamed of her,” he murmured 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 that it was almost a caress. His hand resumed it’s 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.” A stroke along Torrant’s jaw-line with a calloused 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-boos 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 by 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 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 blonde, 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.” 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, made 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 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, and then clapped his hand on his brother’s back. It wasn’t until Torrant startled 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 murmured 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 in his arms.

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

Aylan’s initial plan had been to simply 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 into 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 the 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 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, this 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 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 strong 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 sort of 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, half snort, half sob, 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.

“Goodnight, Djali.”

“Goodnight, brother.”

When morning came, cool and gray at last, Eljean swung out of bed first to go to the privy, and when he came out, Djali was waiting. The two of them met eyes for a moment, and Djali said, “I bet they won’t be up and about for another couple of hours…”

A slow smile came across Eljean’s features. The week before, he and Zhane had stayed in bed until the sun was high in the sky, and he had needed to sneak past what felt like a battalion of guards in order to get home.

“We could stay until the afternoon bell…” When the rest day curfew was over.

“And walk home together through the marketplace…”

“As though we hadn’t done anything wrong.” Eljean’s wicked smile made Djali smile back in response.

Djali’s smile abruptly faded, and for the first time Eljean noticed that his eyes were not the glacial blue of his father’s, but a warm, faded brown. “We haven’t,” Djali said soberly. “Done anything wrong, I mean.”

Eljean’s grin grew wider. “Hurry up and pee, Djali—I want to miss the changing of the guards.”

Later that afternoon, Eljean kissed Zhane a hurried goodbye—the bell releasing the curfew had rung, and Eljean couldn’t bear, after the sweetness of the afternoon, to watch his lover get ready for work.

Zhane stopped him as he’d made to run out the door, taking his hand, dropping a kiss on Eljean’s knuckles. “You know I have to, right? You know my family will starve, right?”

Eljean fought against saying ‘I have money’. He wanted to scream it. He wanted to take this bright young man with the wicked sense of humor and the sloe eyes out of a place where a ‘decent flat’ meant that the floorboards were only rotting in places. He wanted to live with him, if only for a short burst of the affair, in a place where they did not have to hush themselves at night for fear of the soldiers who might walk by.

If nothing else, Eljean wanted him to not have to prostitute himself in the back alleys of the ghettoes, making his living off of the contempt of the same people who passed the laws that wouldn’t let him earn an honest living elsewhere.

All of this passed behind his eyes, and Zhane laughed fondly.

“Eljean, if you’re going to keep working for Triane’s Son, you’re going to have to mind your expressions better!”

Eljean tried to smile, failed, and nodded. “Just…” he started, shook his head again, and tried one more time. “Just let me know, please, when it’s safe to offer?”

Zhane pulled back, seeming to gather dignity out of the steaming, thick air. “It will be safe to offer when you’re no longer in love with Triane’s son,” he said evenly, and Eljean had to look away.

“I don’t know why,” he murmured, “but caring for him doesn’t mean I care for you any less.”

“But you cannot be my Prince Charming, Eljean, and take me away from all of this, unless I am your heart’s desire.” Zhane smiled as he said it, and forced his voice to lighter notes, and still, there was something of heartbreak in his face that made Eljean, just this once, take Zhane’s face in his hands and push him back against the wall, pinning him there and devouring his mouth in the sort of kiss that made their skin catch fire and groans come from their chests that they didn’t know they were making.

It took so much more than he’d known was in him to pull away, and Zhane’s eyes were still closed in wonder as he did. Eljean dropped a kiss on each closed lid, and whispered “Wait for me,” into the curve of his ear, before backing out of the room as though his own conscience were at his heels.

When he burst into The Amber Goose he saw Djali and Triana tucked quietly into a corner, holding hands and leaning in so close that their mouths sometimes brushed cheeks, or lips, or ears.

Djali saw Eljean standing at the swinging doors and nodded unhappily and then bent down, picked Triana up against him and kissed her so soundly that when he finally put her back down her knees nearly buckled. Djali grinned, hauled a chair from a nearby table behind her and settled her down into it and then dropped a quick kiss on her forehead before meeting Eljean at the door.

As he neared the doorway the end of curfew as announced by the bells, and the two of them made for the marketplace to walk the hour home that it took when they weren’t sneaking down alleyways.

They had just turned from the main ghetto avenue onto the evening market when they ran smack into Dimitri and learned the true meaning of gnawing fear.

Dimitri looked shocked to see them at first. What was truly surprising was the speed at which he pasted a ghastly smile on his face and greeted them, insinuating himself between the two of them as they walked.

“Hullo, gentlemen!” The false heartiness was nauseating. “What are the two of you doing in this neck of the woods so close to curfew?”

“We’re here to sodomize a Goddess boy, Dimitri—go tell my father that and leave us alone.” Djali’s eyes, the ones that Eljean had just noted for warmth, were as cold and hard as river rocks at thaw.

“Oh come now!” Dimitri protested, “I was only doing what my King requested of me—keeping an eye out on his beloved son.”

“Did you hear that, Djali? You’re a beloved son now!” Eljean made a show of moving between his friend and their betrayer, and Dimitri glared at him.

“Better than a poofty Goddess boy!” his contempt showed through in earnest, and Djali sneered at their old tormentor.

“You know, Dimitri, it’s really not saying much when your only claim to moral superiority is that you don’t shag men. You could beat up old ladies, eat an orphan’s kitten for breakfast and rape a virgin and her sister before lunch, and you think that because you’ve never kissed a man, you’re still a good person.”

Eljean snorted laughter so hard he was afraid he had spit across the street. “But probably not a considerate lover!” he howled and Djali laughed with him.

“I don’t see what you two think is so funny!” Dimitri huffed. “You’re both near the Goddess quarters of the city right after curfew. If it weren’t for your father, Djali, you could be crucified for that alone!”

“My father would love to see me crucified,” Djali told him, sobering, “if it weren’t for how bad that would make him look in front of the other regents. And what about you, my friend? How is it you’re here?”

Dimitri’s eyes darted sideways, and the two men could easily guess.

“Why, your only other excuse, besides visiting the ghettoes to rape little girls and eat their kittens, is that you were here to spy on us. By all means, report to my father we were here. Tell him that we were out after curfew, and took refuge in a coffee shop when we saw the guards. Tell him the owner was nice and grateful for the silver. Tell him anything you want, actually—including that bit about sodomizing a witch, but don’t expect me to be all excited about trusting you with my activities or being injured by your cruelty, because that time has passed.”

Eljean and Djali kept walking, even as Dimitri stopped and watched them with, it appeared, haunted eyes. “All I ever wanted was to be your friends!” he shouted, and Eljean looked behind him at the man he’d thought he’d die for.

“All you ever wanted was someone to look down on,” he said, the truth dawning on him at last. “It’s hard to look down on people when you’re so damned low, Dimitri. Remember that the next time you go hunting for friends.”

They kept walking solidly, neither of them looking behind them after that. As the market place became more and more the higher-end set of merchants that they recognized, Djali let out a long whistle and a sigh.

“Do you think he saw us come out of the Amber Goose?” he asked anxiously.

Eljean shook his head negative. “No—but I do think he’s going to be on our tails for as long as it takes to bring us down.”

Over the crowds of early evening people shopping for their dinner produce, Djali saw men wearing his father’s livery and he swore. This one was something colorful about Triane’s violet -tinted bosom, and Eljean thought he needed to start paying more attention to Djali’s curses because they were getting pretty spectacular.

“Did you enjoy your day, brother?” Djali asked as the men neared them.

Eljean nodded and made an affirmative sound somewhere, and Djali nodded decisively towards one of the men.

“Good—because between Dimitri and the funeral services, I don’t know if we’re going to get another moment like it in quite a while.”

And with that Djali moved forward to make a very convincing show of being shocked by his uncle’s death.

Triane’s Son Rising

Torrant crouched on top of the wall that divided the back alley of the regents’ quarters from the Goddess ghettoes, and prayed beyond prayer that the damned guards never learned to look up.

Something about the Secretary General’s visit the previous week must have alerted the man as to how the regents had been getting out of the regents’ courtyard without alerting Rath or any of his cronies, because the night after their ill-fated dinner at the palace, guards had patrolled that back alley at night with clock-work regularity.

Torrant and Aylan had become adept at reading that clock, timing jumps, leaping over unsuspecting heads—Torrant had, while Aylan was sleeping, placed another spell on his cloak, asking that it help Aylan’s feet soar like his heart did, in truth, when he thought of Starren Moon. Aylan had caught on the first time the missed leap that should have landed him on top of a guards head had, in fact, landed him ten yards beyond, in the shadows of Eljean’s porch.

“You couldn’t have thought of this sooner?” had been his sour response. “This is even handier than having you bleed for my thrice-damned wounds.”

“You’re welcome,” was Torrant’s dry rejoinder, and Aylan rolled his eyes and that had been that.

But tonight, Aylan was not with him. With a burst of his little-used charm, as well as his good looks and some luck, he’d managed to chat up a young performer that he’d saved from the guards in the market-place. After advising the young woman from the Desert Lands that the people of Duance were right-bloody prigs about young ladies in leotards, no matter how purple, especially in public, and loaning her some clothes from the stores at the clinic, Aylan had talked her into performing after Torrant at The Amber Goose that rest-day.

Torrant’s new song had brought down the house, and since he didn’t take any tips, young Selken had more than earned Torrant’s rations from the young regents who thoroughly enjoyed her sinuous rhythms to the contortioning music in her own sinews. Aylan’s reward for the regents’ generosity had been a squeal, and a hug, and quickly whispered suggestion in his ear that had him both flushing and dodging out of The Amber Goose to his own flat within moments.

Torrant wished him Goddess-speed, and urged him to take the night off , and then walked Aerk, Keon, Marv, and Jino back to the Regent’s courtyard the long way. Djali would be staying in the palace this night so he might be ready for the funeral show the next day. The other regents had all wrapped pastries, jerky, bread and hard cheese and put it in his trunk, so he might never have to take the meat from his father’s table again.

Eljean had gone to the tavern three doors down, in search of Zhane, who had not shown up this evening as he’d promised.

Eventually the young men were all ensconced in their own beds--or their fellow’s couches. The general unease that permeated the regents could be seen in the fact that they paired up and took turns sleeping at each other’s flats. Djali and Eljean hadn’t been the only ones who had needed reassurance after the dinner in the home of their king.

Torrant went back to the ghetto, over the heads of the guards, to make sure that there weren’t going to be any special retaliatory surprises, in light of the funeral the next morning.

Djali had been of two minds about the matter.

“I don’t know, Ellyot—the place could either be swarming with guards, to prove that father isn’t sentimental about his mad brother-in-law, or they could be nowhere to be found besides our backyard, simply to keep the peace. I know what he thinks is bad form, but not much about the workings of his mind, to tell the truth.”

Torrant needed to be sure, and so he had gone.

He’d been bored stiff , especially without Aylan to keep him company. He skulked the now-familiar back alleyways of the ghetto, seeing neither denizen nor intruder in the heavy, end-of-summer night.

As he watched the two guards below him trudge from the far end of the alley towards him, (still not looking up!) he sighed.

Just as well. He was damned tired,

He had delivered a slough of babies in the past week—most of them coming, as babies will, in the small, dark, body-aching moments of the night. Since he and Aylan were out and about in the ghettoes anyway, this alone would not have been too much of a hardship, but the guards, too, had been a full presence since Ulvane’s death.

They could not, in conscience, kill every guard who got in their way. They spent most of their time dropping down on the men, bashing them on the heads with their sword hilts, and dragging their bodies somewhere, anywhere, but the Goddess ghetto, where an attack on a guard would be met with full retaliation. The guards, for their part, must have been too embarrassed to admit that they’d been ambushed, because there was never a furor and an uproar about the misplaced night watchmen, and they’d been doing this sort of thing (to fewer guards, for the most part) for the past four months, since they arrived in Dueance.

(Aylan remarked, just the other night, that he could count the dents on the helmet of the guard that he had bashed. Torrant wondered that the man didn’t just die of too many concussions, and then both of them had checked carefully to make sure the man wasn’t just feigning unconsciousness. He had been, but not for long.)

This week there were twice as many guards to drag to the marketplace, and even when he was partially turned snow cat, it was a hardship.

And the Regents’ Floor had been a nightmare.

Convinced that his brother-in-law was a victim of the Goddess’ brethren, Rath and the Secretary general had spoken passionately for a purging of all of the white-streaked gifted in the ghettoes.

“But what would you do with them?” Aerk asked when it was his turn on the floor.

The answer was frightening. Apparently, some of the funds taxed from the ghettoes in the last year had been allocated to building a giant brick barracks on the hills overlooking Dueance, to be used for the ‘reeducation’ of the Goddess folk.

“I’ve been outside the city, Consort,” Aerk had replied numbly, “and I have seen no such building.”

“Construction has just begun,” came the cool reply, “but in light of recent events, I think it prudent to round up the suspected perpetrators and keep them in a makeshift camp until it is completed, in the spring of next year.”

Aerk’s face turned white then, and Torrant knew without looking that so had the faces of the other young regents—and their growing number of supporters in the upper tier. If his own palms were any indication, there were an awful number of clammy-handed, terrified and shocked leaders of a country that had just spiraled out of their control.

“Consort, there is room for three moons in the sky,” Aerk had said almost desperately. “Why is there not room for Triane’s children in our city?”

“Just because the Whoring Moon is in the sky,” Rath had replied thinly, “does not mean we have to follow her.”

“And just because Triane doesn’t follow your will,” Torrant called, hailing Aerk off the floor from the ante-room and speaking even as they crossed paths, clasping and releasing icy hands in passing, “doesn’t mean She whores!”

For once in the entire five-day nightmare of a session, Rath was caught unaware.

“I’m sorry?” he’d asked stupidly.

“You assume that because your brother-in-law is dead, he was assassinated by Triane’s children. Why? What connection had Triane’s children to Ulvane? I understand he rarely, if ever, left the palace. What would they have to gain by bespelling an ill man?” Torrant tried to keep the relentless anger out of his voice. He had to pretend, at all costs, that he wasn’t aware that Ulvane himself had been a Goddess child.

And he had to pretend, even to himself, that he wasn’t the Goddess gifted who had murdered the poor old man.

“I…” Rath looked at the Secretary General, and then at the whole of the Regent’s Hall as though the answer should be obvious to all of them. What he received in return was the stare of the entire house of Regents who thought he should have an answer.

“You’re talking about segregating and…and what? Torturing? Lecturing? Starving? Whatever it is you have in mind for an entire race of people, you’ve planned it without our consent, and now you’re talking about implementing it early without even giving us cause to believe these people have done anything wrong!”

“He was found dead without a mark on him!” Rath sputtered in confusion.

“As I would have been, had I eaten at your table,” Torrant replied equably. Into the shocked inhale around the room, he added, “You do recall, sir, that our food was not wholesome. Perhaps Ulvane accidentally ingested a little of it.”

Rath flushed and then paled, little red patches lacing his cheeks and throat. “How exceedingly ill-mannered of you to bring that up,” he muttered.

“I wouldn’t have had to, if you’d even considered it as a cause!” The regents were with him. Torrant could feel it—they were following the conversation, and Rath’s foothold was looking more and more precarious. He might not defeat him completely in this one conflict, but he could inflict some damage.

“Are you trying to say I killed my wife’s own brother?” Uh-oh. Rath knew how to play on the sympathy of the hall if on nothing else. People still remembered Willa fondly—Torrant needed to tread lightly here.

He laughed, kindly, as though reassuring a child. “Of course not, Consort. Everyone knows how warm your feelings must have been for your wife’s family.”

Torrant met the Consort’s eyes, and if nobody else in the room knew, Consort Yahnston Rath knew that Ellyot Moon was fully aware of the lie.

“But Consort,” Torrant continued, his tone as reasonable as a kind uncle’s, “has it occurred to you that if the Goddess folk were going to kill anybody, Ulvane would not be their primary target?”

Another collective intake of breath, this one so deep that there didn’t seem to be any more air in the room left to breathe.

“What do you mean?” Rath asked hollowly, and Torrant felt great gratification in noting that now Rath’s face was as white, and his hands probably as clammy, as Aerk’s had been earlier.

“I’m saying that you seem to be very much alive, sir. And since you’re the one who has treated the Goddess’ people like animals for more than twenty years, we can probably safely assume that there was no assassination involved in your brother-in-law’s death. Perhaps he was just ready to die, and that is all.”

For the first time since Torrant’s arrival after Beltane, Rath actually stood from the dais where he’d sat for twenty-four years, making decisions about a people he hated. He breathed, purposefully, his chest heaving in and out and the air making shuddery sounds as it cleared his teeth.

But he had not stayed in power by losing his temper, and he had not managed his country by doing something so messy as to screech spittle at a regent on the floor.

First he assessed Torrant, and saw that Ellyot Moon was neither flinching, nor backing down.

Then he assessed the Hall of Regents and saw that their stare was pinned on him, to see how he would answer the logic of Ellyot’s argument. When he realized that the onus of the defense was on his shoulders and his alone, he nodded, with a glitter in his eyes that told Torrant that they’d all better grow eyes in their necks, the better to watch their backs.

“Well, then,” Rath said at last, “perhaps it wasn’t assassination after all.”

He smiled thinly, and Torrant didn’t move from the floor, because that smile reminded him of the smile the Secretary General had worn before he’d born the news to Rath that had destroyed the Moon family—right after Yarri had hit him on the head with a rock.

“Perhaps,” Torrant had agreed, still not backing down.

“Good, then. Should we move on to the next item?”

That’s when Torrant’s work had begun in earnest. So Torrant was exhausted, edgy, and almost too tired to sleep well without Aylan beside him. He hadn’t dared to let his white streak down since that one dream of Yarri, but the temptation to do so, just to smell her, hear her voice, dream of her sharp brown eyes looking at things with intelligence and strength…oh, there were many things that kept him up at night, that was a certainty.

And now he almost missed his chance to jump over the guard’s heads, he was so invested in his woolgathering.

With a leap that was part snow cat and part exhaustion, he landed with a thump inside his patio, overbalancing a little when he tripped on the flowerbeds, and rolling into the glass doors with a thump.

Uh-oh.

The last thing Torrant had time for was planting flowerbeds.

A light came on inside the flat, and Minero Sawdust of Truxel began cursing loudly over the squeals of what sounded to be a very much younger woman.

Outside of the patio, Torrant heard the sound of guards. Trying very hard not to panic, he pulled a little more Goddess gift over his features, making his face more snow cat than human, and covering his gloves with a layer of fine white-tufted hair.

On a deeply drawn breath he howled his loudest snow cat-snarl, and lunged at the glass door. Pounding full out, the snow cat crashed through Minero of Truxel’s patio doors and into his bedroom, running on powerful haunches at full speed.

Eljean had always hated this tavern. He’d heard about it from the derisive conversation of another regent, complaining bitterly about how the godlessness of the Goddess people could be seen in ‘that faggot’s bar’ right inside the quarter.

It had been before he’d started taking breakfast with Aerk and the others, and he’d been so lonely.

But now, with new eyes, he saw that The Gander’s Sauce didn’t look much different than The Amber Goose. The interior was plain-cut boards, weathered by time and traffic, and the oil of shoes on the floor and hands on the counter and tables. It was made smoky by candles, and the musicians were happy to be there, making a meal from the thing they loved best. One of Olek’s sons was behind the bar instead of Triana, but not all of the clientele was male.

If Eljean hadn’t seen one of his fellow regents, skulking in the corner with another man, avoiding his eyes, he would have actually felt at home.

And then he saw Zhane, sitting at one of the tables in the middle, smiling gamely at a much older man. The older man seemed lonely, and not horrible at all, but he was smiling at Zhane with hope, and Zhane was smiling back with an understood promise, and Eljean knew that his lover was working tonight after all.

He fought the urge to scream epithets and kick something, followed by the urge to pull Zhane out of the room by his white-streaked hair.

But Eljean was a self-confessed coward, and he hated physical pain, so, instead, he walked politely up to the table and hoped the reproach in his eyes wasn’t too naked as he asked the older man for a moment of Zhane’s time.

Zhane had the grace to look embarrassed. “I was going to send you a note,” he murmured, looking away.

“Why are you working tonight?” Eljean tried to sound reasonable, but he knew that the growl of possession was mixed up with the whine of hurt and it wasn’t a very attractive sound.

Still, there was no eye contact with those limpid, dark-fringed, sloe eyes. “I…I think maybe we shouldn’t do this anymore, Eljean,” Zhane murmured, and Eljean’s hand flew out on it’s own to cup Zhane’s chin.

He had led. It had been his own fear of pain that had started it, but he had led when they were together, skin to skin, and he found he wanted to stay in the lead.

“What are you talking about?” He glared down at his first true lover, the first man who had ever allowed him to touch another man with joy. “We…you mean something to me!” Oh Goddess. He hadn’t felt this naked in bed.

And now Zhane did meet his eyes, and his own were flashing. “But not as much as Triane’s Son, do I Eljean? Right? I mean something to you, but you’d still take him if you could get him, right?”

“Wouldn’t you!” Eljean snapped back and was surprised when Zhane stayed toe to toe with him. “You’re the one who told me that ‘we were all a little bit in love with him’, right? Weren’t those your exact words?”

“But you’re not a little bit in love, are you? You’re in love enough to buy his clothes for him, aren’t you?” Zhane spat back, and Eljean rocked back on his heels and laughed in surprise.

“I wasn’t the only one, you git!” he retorted, honestly shocked. Of course, the thought permeated, Coryal. Coryal would have told his lover about what had happened after the session yesterday.

“We all bought his clothes!” Eljean explained now. “Would you like to know why?”

“Not particularly.”

“Well too damned bad. Because the man saved your ghetto, as awful as it is. It was going to be worse—he saved all of you yesterday. Rath had them—do you see that? Rath had them ready to go out and round up your people, everyone with a Goddess streak, every boy in the brothels…he was going to round you all up and put you in a camp outside of town, and the only person in his way was Triane’s Son. You should be so lucky as to lie down at his feet and die for him, and all we did was buy him some clothes!” Eljean’s voice was escalating, and for once he wasn’t afraid of who heard him.

Zhane was frowning—not in protest, but as though trying to put the facts together. “I’m sorry, Eljean—it’s not the laying down and dying for the man that I object to. It’s the laying down with him. And I don’t understand…you’re always wanting to buy me trinkets—is it that he will let you…”

“He didn’t let us, you silly sot!” Eljean’s vision swam with Ellyot Moon on the Regent’s floor, his face white with anger, his eyes flashing that uncanny blue.

I don’t understand, Consort. What do you mean, ‘contingent upon their obedience’? We’ve commissioned the blankets already—the weavers are waiting for their payment—some of them have staked their winter’s survival on our business. Are you saying you won’t authorize us to pay for the blankets unless…

Ellyot hadn’t been able to finish the sentence, he’d been so outraged. And now the Consort’s expression was as coldly smug as a lizard at a convocation of flies.

It’s a simple solution, Regent Moon. You want supplies for the Goddess folk, and I want reassurance they won’t use their gifts against those of us who follow the gods’ true path. If they agree to the camp outside the walls for re-education in our ways, then we will keep their families warm and fed during the winter.

Ellyot’s eyes had flashed that hot, glacial blue again, and he had drawn himself up in a way that made people forget that he was average height at best.

I think, Consort, that if you are going to give people a choice between maintaining what small civil rights they have left and freezing to death under the justice of your cold gods, that they will take their chances with the stars’ dark. It’s not like they believe in it anyway. But don’t bother yourself on account of your weavers, who might also starve to death. I’ll purchase the blankets myself, thank you, so that the gratitude of the Goddess ghetto might not be a burden you have to endure.

“You should have seen Rath’s face,” Eljean said now, trying to explain, badly, to Zhane in the bar thick with candle-smoke and desperation. “He…it never would have occurred to Rath that someone would sacrifice so much of their own for a people he’s been trying to crush for years.”

Zhane was shocked. He’d heard about the ‘Blanket Bill’ as it was called—they all had. Given that they had been selling any wool they had for food over the years, something as small as a blanket or two might keep the entire population from freezing to death over the winter.

“Can he afford that?” Zhane asked, stuttering over his words.

Rath asked the obvious question too, hoping his condescension would lessen the heroism of the offer. It didn’t.

Owen Moon’s dream horse, Consort. Ellyot’s expression had been a study in grim triumph. Every time that horse gets his jollies, my family adds to its coffers. But even if Courtland wasn’t such a wonder, you can bet that my uncle would sell off half his shipping business to see that this abomination doesn’t take place.

During their midday break they had accompanied him as he’d taken the bag of gold coins he kept in his cupboard to the master of the weaver’s guild to make sure it would be enough. He didn’t have to tell the others that he’d thought those coins would have lasted a year, and the weaver must have seen it in his face or heard the story, because he had taken only three-quarters of the original price without a word and given the rest back to Ellyot.

Ellyot had thanked him, charmingly, and then he had shrugged off the other’s concern about his financial situation. I’ll be good when Stanny comes to town in the spring. Lane’s always trying to give me gold— it’ll thrill him to finally have me take it.

And then he had excused himself to go talk to Coryal the tailor. He hadn’t said a word, and his expression had been open and friendly, but as he’d left their company, his friends had all met eyes, and they’d known.

Aerk had been the one to speak first. Wait up, Ellyot—we’ll come with you. And as they’d caught up with him, for the first time since his moment on the floor, they had seen the embarrassment flooding his now-prominent cheekbones, as well as the tightness around his mouth.

I don’t like disappointing Coryal, he’d said as they’d drawn near him. He depends on our trade, you know. If I let him know now, he might be able to let out some of the clothes for other things and what the hell are you doing?

As they’d neared the tailor’s shop, Marv and Jino had flanked him and turned to face him, cutting him off . Aerk, Keon, Eljean and Djali had walked around them and entered the tailor’s shop. They had returned with the two packets of clothes that Coryal had been holding, and without a word they continued to walk Ellyot to his flat.

When Ellyot attempted to thank them, he’d been cut off by Marv. Shut up. We don’t want to hear it. And if you try to pay us back we’ll cheerfully beat the hell out of you. Keon wears more clothes in a week, and he’s a Goddess-wandering slob.

And that had been the end of it.

Until now, when Zhane had been jealous of an act of kindness for a friend.

“You should see your face when you talk about him,” Zhane murmured now, still, after hearing the whole story. “It’s like you’re talking about the Goddess moon herself.”

“Did you not hear me?” Eljean asked a little desperately. “Of course I worship him—you would worship him too, if you saw him do these things, throw himself between your people and destruction again and again, and do it with grace and humor…and then smile at you and make you feel as though you were the only person on earth who mattered. Wouldn’t you be a little confused about what your heart is saying? But I’m not confused about you. My love for him doesn’t make my l…”

“Don’t say it!” Zhane’s limpid eyes were bright, trembling with what he feared to hear said and feared to shed.

“My love for…”

“I don’t want to hear it!” Zhane shouted, pulling the attention of the entire tavern their way. “You can’t come to me and tell me that you…that you…”

“Love…”

“…me and worship him.” Zhane’s voice dropped, and the tears trembled on his rich fringe of lashes and fell. “Don’t you know what you’re doing to me, Eljean? I have to go out into the world and share my body with it when the only person I want to be with…he loves me fine, but his true beloved is a god.”

“I’m not stupid, Zhane.” Eljean took the moment to move into Zhane’s space, reach out a slender hand and capture a tear with his thumb. “I know that the worship will fade, and all that will be left is admiration for a friend. I’m willing to weather through it…can’t you?”

Zhane drew a breath on a sob, and another, and leaned his head, just for a moment, a sweet moment, on Eljean’s chest. Then he shook his head and stepped back, away from Eljean’s arms and the open, naked hurt on his lover’s face.

“This doesn’t have to be forever,” he choked, wiping his face on his shoulder. “Just…take some time. Indulge your crush…get laid and see if he’s all you’ve got him cracked up to be…”

“He has a beloved…” Oh Goddess, could Zhane really do this to him?

“I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth if you come back to me Eljean…”

“She’s a girl, Zhane…” Please, not now. Not when he was finally remembering what love felt like.

“But I need to know you’re not settling for the poor Goddess boy, because I…”

“Zhane, please.” Was he really begging? He was, and it would be worth it if only Zhane wouldn’t…

“I love you. I do. And I don’t want to be with you and think that you were always thinking of him…”

Oh Goddess. He was. Eljean felt cold in his bowels and a lead-weighted glacier in his chest. “For the love of Triane, Zhane, don’t do this.”

Zhane wiped the last of his tears on the shoulder of his shirt—a worn cream-colored linen one he’d taken from Eljean, actually—and held his hands out, palms flat, in finality. “Come back to me when it’s only me, Eljean…But for now, please go.”

Eljean stumbled out of the tavern blindly, numb to his toes, so befuddled by misery that it was by Triane’s grace alone that he found his way to the wall behind the regents flats without running into and over a guard.

Triane’s Son Bleeding

Torrant knew that the placating smile on his half-snow-cat face must have looked ghastly, but the guard was determined to stop him and Torrant didn’t want to hurt the poor old geezer.

“Please, Jems,” he growled, cursing the change in his throat that came with disguising his features, “I just need to get away!”

“You’ll not harm these young men!” Jems was old and he was fat, but Torrant could see love in every stately wave of the rusted sword at the old man’s side, and he swore to himself again. He had moments, maybe, before half the guards of Dueance came crashing around him and he would be as dead as the real Ellyot Moon.

“I don’t want to harm them!” Torrant cried, spotting the slatted chair and backing towards it so he could step up to the concierge counter, and from there, hopefully, he had enough strength to bound over the old man’s head and out the front door, where he could change form…“I’m just trying to get out!”

After his spectacular entrance into Minero of Truxel’s room, and the very rapid exit accompanied by the screams of three (!) extremely young and very naked girls, Torrant’s first idea had been to run to his own room and simply disappear. He had been yards from his room when a contingent of guards rounded the corner, and he had been forced to run in the other direction, losing himself in the rabbit warren of rooms and side-hallways that made up the regents complex. Finally, he found the main hallway to the front foyer, and thought that he was home free.

He’d run into Jems hard enough to knock the older man down. He’d been so surprised that he’d offered the man a hand up, only to be greeted by a rusty sword aimed at his chest instead, and their subsequent battle had taken all of Torrant’s skill, not just to defend himself, but to not injure the old night watchman who was merely doing his job.

“If you’d wanted to get out, you should have gotten out before they changed the rules for you!” the man replied now, his gray fringe of hair shaking on his shoulders as he puffed with the exertion. Torrant heard the same regret in Jem’s voice that he heard in his own, and cursed in the name of every god he knew.

Ah…there! He’d made it to the chair, and had one foot on the counter, and…

“Ouch! Jem! You old bastard! Stop stabbing me, dammit, I’m trying to save your life!”

The sword cut had gone deep, and Torrant was bleeding enough to soak through his black breeches and coat his hands as he grabbed the counter to pull up. Still, he heaved his body up over the counter, catching another, shallower cut in his calf and slipping in his own blood, sprawling to his stomach across the counter. His sword clattered on the tile floor, and he grunted, swore, and rolled until he fell painfully off the counter to all fours. He rolled again, ducked Jem’s last blow, and grabbed his sword as he came up…

…just as Jem, going after him over the collapsed wooden chair, tripped on the slats and fell forward heavily, impaled on Torrant’s sword to its hilt.

Torrant and Jems regarded each other, face to face, in a kind of horrible surprise, until Jem’s mouth opened for the vomit of blood that came after a stab through the heart and lungs.

“No.” The clamor of the guards forced Torrant up and got him moving by instinct alone.

“No.” He pulled his sword from the body of the old guard, refusing with his words to believe that the harmless old man had actually died at his hand.

“No.” He turned, bloodied sword sheathed, his own blood mingling with Jems’ on the floor as he ran heavily towards the door, only to see yet another contingent of guards running towards him. In desperation, he turned up the stairwell that ran from the main entrance, and started leaping stairs two at a time, leaving bloody footprints in his wake.

“no no no no no no NO NO NO NONONOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!”

His screams of denial echoed behind him as he ran.

Eljean was standing on his tiptoes, wondering distantly at the lack of guards in the back-alleys, when he heard a ruckus from the second floor. He had just pin-pointed the source of the shouts when he heard a crash of glass and a terrible, inhuman howl of pain and anger, and then a thump and a second, more panicked scream.

He looked up just in time to see some sort of animal, running on all fours, hurtle through a window-pane and sail through the air while struggling with the drapery that had tangled up around the creature’s paws.

Its trajectory would bring the thing right on top of Eljean.

By the time Eljean’s brain had caught up with where the snow cat was going to land, his long legs were already trying to eat up the ground between him and the fence of the guards’ barracks, but it was too late.

The thing landed on all fours, rolled in a pattering shower of glass and blood, and ripped the curtain off its face as it came up crouching, and then rolled again to take some more of the momentum off of that spectacular leap.

On the cat’s second roll, it caught Eljean up in its path, and the two of them tumbled about on the dirt and crabgrass of the back alley until the creature finally rolled free of Eljean’s entangling limbs. The snow cat stood and wobbled, looking as surprised and stunned into Eljean’s face as Eljean looked up from his back wondering what in the name of the star’s dark had just happened.

He couldn’t get his breath, not to pick himself up, not even to save his life from the dreadful, blood-soaked white-tufted predator gazing at him in something like despair. Hazily, from the back of his mind, he heard the shouts of the guards as they did an about face and made to run all the way around the complex and into the back alley. A dim alarm sounded in his head—he didn’t have much time to take advantage of that empty alleyway, and he was wasting it gaping like a fish from this undignified position on his back.

Then the snow cat began to move. Slowly, obviously trying very hard not to stagger, it padded to the same corner of the wall that Eljean had just vacated, and giving a whimper and a shiver, it managed to shake much of the glass that had been tangled in its fur onto the walls around it with an ominously sharp tinkle. Then it looked at Eljean, and even in the dark, Eljean could see its eyes, which were such an uncanny blue that they could still be seen by the light of Dueant, the only moon up. They reminded him of someone, of a recent expression of embarrassment…he couldn’t quite place it…and then…

And then the lines of the snow cat began to blur with terrifying quickness, and after some stretching and some popping where nothing should have stretched and popped, Ellyot Moon stood in the giant cat’s place, biting his own palm as he screamed pain into his cupped hand.

Eljean screeched like a girl and scrambled backwards, bumping his head on the guards’ fence behind him…“Oueant’s blazing eyeballs!”

Ellyot Moon shuddered some more, let out one more terrible, whooshing groan of agony into his hand, and shivered with his whole body, then turned towards Eljean, his customary command coming to cloak his pain like the battered black cape at his shoulders.

“Be afraid of me tomorrow, Eljean,” he commanded breathlessly. “Right now, if we don’t clear out, they’ve got us.”

And Eljean knew him—his features were blurry in the dark, and his eyes were the frightening, preternatural blue—but that voice, although lower in range, was still the kind, capable voice of a man who had been commanding his own destiny for quite some time.

Eljean had no problem obeying.

“You’re hurt,” he whispered harshly, even as he scrambled to his feet. In the dark, the wet of the blood could be seen on Ellyot’s clothes, and Ellyot nodded curtly.

“Well, I can be hurt tomorrow too,” he whispered harshly. “Right now, can you make it over if you give me a lift up first?”

Eljean nodded. He and Djali had become much better at leaping this wall since that first awkward morning.

“Good. Your flat is closest, do you mind if we head towards it?”

“Not at all,” Eljean murmured, lacing his fingers, and as Ellyot scrambled clumsily, with an unaccustomed heaviness, to the top of the wall, Eljean looked in fear at the blood that had dripped onto his hands. “Should I get Aylan?”

Ellyot grunted a ‘no’, and together the two of them scrambled down and then across the alleyway, conscious that it was only empty now because it would be roiling with uniforms in a scant few moments. When they got to Eljean’s patio fence, Ellyot stopped and ripped his shirt off from under his cloak, putting it on the ground to step on.

“Go inside and get a sheet—something you don’t love,” he gritted. “If I leave blood on this fence, we’re as good as dead.”

Eljean just gaped at him, his own skin hurting from what he knew Ellyot must be enduring.

“Now, Eljean! I’ve got enough blood on my hands as it is!”

And after a breathless moment of ripping the top sheet off his own bed because he could give horse’s shite about his Oueant-pissed sheets, he returned, and Ellyot climbed wearily over the fence, holding his shirt in his hand and making sure he left no blood-trace behind him at all.

He used the sheet to walk on when he got inside, slogging through the piles of clothes on top of the carpet until he reached the tile of the bathroom. From there, he called for towels, which he was going to need to mop up.

Eljean arrived in a moment with the towels, and looked in surprise into his cream-tiled bathroom to see Ellyot Moon, standing mostly naked in front of his own mirror, pulling small bits of glass from his white-fur coated skin.

The fur was everywhere, dappled like a snow cat’s, and although it didn’t disguise the leanly worn muscles of his back or his chest or the taut line from buttock to thigh, it did make very clear the fact that there was much more to Ellyot than met the eye.

Ellyot caught Eljean’s wide eyes in the mirror and grimaced, rolling his slitted blue eyes a little. “See anything odd?” he asked, with grim humor, wincing as he pulled a particularly large piece from his hip. Besides the fur, his skin was covered in cuts, some deep, most shallow, but all of them seemed to be healing as they closed, leaving red blood, blackening in the lovely silver of his fur.

Ellyot had to twist towards him to get that last piece of glass, and Eljean made a sound like milk curdling early when he saw all of Ellyot Moon from the front. His voice hit an octave it hadn’t hit since boyhood. “Something odd?” he echoed.

Ellyot laughed, strangely enough as though he were truly, kindly amused. “Mmm…yeah. You know. An extra head? Angel’s wings? A funny sort of mole on my arse?”

“Oh thaaaat…” Eljean was trying to play the game, he really was. But his heart was hammering in his stomach, and his breath was frozen in his lungs. “Well, Aylan’s right—you don’t eat enough.” Ellyot’s muscles were ripped and knotted from too much exercise on too little fuel, but they were still very defined. With a horrible cross between reluctance and eagerness, Eljean’s eyes slid down Ellyot’s front once more, and that weird sound bleated from his throat again. “And other than that, uhm, your manhood seems to be almost Goddess-gifted in proportion,” Ellyot’s gurgle of laughter actually warmed him enough to continue, “and your eyes are a very peculiar shade of blue.”

Ellyot nodded his head in approval, and then closed those eyes and ducked his head over the sink, scrubbing his dry hair with his hands to get out any hidden shards. When he stood again he met Eljean’s eyes in the mirror, and now his expression indicated that they were all right to go ahead and mention the unmentionable.

“I’ll talk about my eyes in a moment,” he said softly, a look of weariness crossing his subtly altered and alien features. There were distortions there in addition to the fur—a too-thin lip that pulled up in the center, a wider, flatter, more triangular nose. “In the meantime,” Ellyot continued from that wider, fiercer face, “is there anything else?”

“You missed a piece,” Eljean muttered after dropping his eyes from that disturbing countenance to the fur-covered body, which was almost less disturbing by comparison. He moved forward and, after hesitating with his hand stretched out towards Ellyot’s backside, he got a grunt of approval and grasped the piece of glass between his fingertips and tugged. Ellyot didn’t even flinch as it came loose, but Eljean felt a little sick as the blood trickled down over the curve of Ellyot’s backside, and the cut began to close up like a shirt being stitched from the wrong side.

Eljean’s dry swallow was loud enough to echo in the now silent bathroom.

“And, uhm,” Eljean swallowed again, “you seem to be wearing a really ugly shirt.”

“You don’t like?” Again, what looked to be a genuine smile, “Aylan and Yarri have always thought it became me. Even Aldam thought it was useful.” Ellyot went back to his glass search. After a wince and more rolled eyes in Eljean’s direction, he turned his back and spread his legs to dig a piece out of the crease of his thigh.

“They’ve probably seen it a few more times than I have,” Eljean stalled, thinking quickly along the lines Ellyot was leading him. The entire family knew. It was, perhaps, their greatest secret, and Eljean had stumbled upon it like he’d stumbled upon so much of what he knew about Ellyot. By chance and freak accident. “When did you first have occasion to wear such a remarkable shirt?” And by its own volition he found a long finger was moving towards Ellyot’s upper arm. Without asking permission, or even acknowledging the intimacy of the act, Eljean stroked the skin and closed his eyes, finding the texture as gorgeous under his fingertip as it had been on the living, breathing snow cat Ellyot had just been.

Ellyot cleared his throat once, twice, and Eljean looked up to meet those Goddess-blue eyes as Ellyot watched him caress the leanly muscled, fur-covered bicep. His hand stilled, but Eljean couldn’t seem to rip his fingers away.

“We were crossing the mountain,” Ellyot rasped, his eyes flashing a surprisingly hot shade of blue, “and we were running short on food. I’d never been good at killing, but…” he looked away then, and Eljean found he could pull his hand away after all.

“We’d seen the snow cats—they were everything I wasn’t. Ruthless. Efficient. Predatory. My gift is truth…I just had to truly wish I had those things and…” he shook his head, dropping his chin, his face still averted. His hair, rarely trimmed most days and out of its queue now, hung over his face, his white streak evident in a sharp contrast against the darkness.

Eljean thought the tender curve of his neck against that iron-flare of muscles at the slope of his shoulders was the most vulnerable thing he’d ever seen.

“And you became what they needed,” Eljean supplied, understanding just a little. He had never had the knack of being what was needed. His father had needed a man, not a man-loving-boy, and Zhane… Zhane had needed him to be someone who wasn’t tempted, wasn’t half-drunk on arousal, wasn’t yearning for a naked witch-man, covered in the fur of a beast.

“It was all I could do,” Ellyot murmured, still looking away. He jerked his head up then as though listening, and his breathing quickened. Eljean realized that he had whiskers, still, in the puff of skin over his thinned lips, and they crinkled along with Ellyot’s nose. He heard something. Something threatening.

“Listen, Eljean…they’re going to knock on the door in a minute. I’ll just be a friend, crashing on your couch, taking a shower. But when they’re gone…”

Ellyot’s head swiveled, and those frightening blue eyes bored into his.

“Eljean, when they’re gone, when I come out of the shower, my eyes…they’ll be normal. The Goddess…I can’t hold on to her for too long…not when I’m hurt. Not when I’m weak. She’s what’s keeping me on my feet right now—I’m about bled dizzy, if you must know the truth. I’ll need a change of clothes, maybe even just a blanket to roll up in for your couch…I’m…”

And for the first time since he’d changed from an injured snow cat to a desperate human, Eljean saw embarrassment cross his features.

“I’m weak, when She leaves me.” Ellyot dropped his head again and shook it, as though trying to keep his thoughts. “I’m as bare as a naked five-year-old-girl with a skinned knee, right? You…you might not know me. I need you not to worry. Let me cry like a child, mewl like an infant…whatever. I’ll come back. I need you to know I’ll come back. It’s nothing you did—it’s just one of the prices you pay for the Goddess’ gift, that’s all. Ye ken?”

Eljean blinked at the unfamiliar expression.

“Do you know, Eljean? Do you understand?”

Ellyot’s strong fingers came and took Eljean’s chin, forcing Eljean’s green eyes to confront that magically blue gaze. “Come on, Eljean… don’t fade on me now. You’ve been a real trooper tonight. I need you to acknowledge that for a minute here, I’m going to be helpless, right? You’re going to be the grown-up. Can you do that?”

Eljean cleared his throat, feeling the warmth of those fingers seep into the cold of his skin and his fear.

“I’ve been changing my own skivvies for years,” he said with some semblance of smartness, and was rewarded by Ellyot’s tired grin.

“Good—I knew I could count on you…Now they’re coming…I put everything into the hamper, the bloody parts tucked as into the middle as I could get them. If you leave the hamper on the inside of the bathroom door, odds are they’ll be afraid enough of a naked man to leave me alone. Hopefully, they won’t be going through your trash to see the glass in the waste bin.”

Eljean’s eyes strayed to the bin beneath Ellyot’s feet. The glass was all red-tinted, and Ellyot had to shake him for a moment when it seemed as though Eljean’s knees wouldn’t hold.

“Are we good?” he demanded, and Eljean met his eyes, sure that the blue was less intense than it had been, and nodded, wishing he was brave.

“Excellent…” Ellyot made to turn away.

“Should I go get Aylan?” Eljean asked again before Triane’s Son walked into that shower and lost whatever it was that was holding him together.

“NO!” Ellyot barked, but his shoulders seemed to slump a little more, and that neck curve… it became heartbreaking. “He’s happy, and it’s dangerous outside tonight.”

Ellyot’s face moved a little more towards normal, and his whole body seemed to sag. “There are things I’ve done…”

He shook himself, hard, and Eljean knew that he didn’t want the Goddess to slip away until the men were gone. “Now go!” he ordered at the last, and Eljean backed out of the bathroom as Ellyot shut the door.

The water started just as a knock sounded from the hall.

Dealing with the guards was quick and painless—they were looking for signs of destruction, not of collaboration, and so after a quick scan of the flat, (and a rather puzzled question about whether or not it was always this much of a disaster) they had quickly moved on to the next door.

What was not so quick and painless was waiting, pacing outside the bathroom, kicking the dirty clothes into a pile, stacking the clean ones he hadn’t folded on top of his armoire, finding clean sheets for his eviscerated bed…and still, waiting.

A half an hour later his room was cleaner than it had been in the year since he’d moved to the city, and Eljean knew from experience that the water must have gone cold. What was taking him so long?

Images started flitting through Eljean’s mind—the sagging body, those sloped shoulders, that terrible vulnerability to Ellyot’s neck.

He was suddenly very much afraid for the man in the shower.

Eljean gathered his scant courage, his non-existent boldness into both hands and opened the door.

Triane’s Son Needing

Torrant couldn’t seem to get up off the tile floor, even though the water was getting cooler by the second.

He wrapped his arms around his knees and shivered and shivered and wondered how long he would have to be in the shower before he stopped seeing Jem’s blood on his hands.

By the time Eljean walked in, his toes were tingeing blue. Oh gods…Eljean! Torrant looked down into his lap so he wouldn’t have to see his hunger, his half-ashamed, half-voracious yearning to touch more, hold more, be more to Torrant than Torrant had to give.

He was so tired of being strong.

He didn’t look up when the water shut off , or when the towel wrapped itself around his shoulders. Eljean was taller than he was and--like Aylan—he had no problem wrestling him up from the floor or drying him off like a child.

Unlike Aylan, who, when he had succumbed to the urge to touch, had always been sure, confident, and fluid, even in his reluctance, Eljean’s touches were uncertain. Torrant felt a thumb skip along his neck, along the knotted clench of muscle at his back, and then it stopped. He wanted to laugh at the uncertainty, at the delicate, butterfly hesitation. He wanted to smile at Eljean and make him feel accepted at the same time he told him regretfully ‘no’.

He wanted to cuddle into Eljean’s arms like a hamster and burrow away from the world.

“Can you walk, Ellyot?” Eljean was saying, and Torrant frowned at him, forgetting for a moment who he was, and then remembering.

His knees kept threatening to buckle.

“Food,” he murmured drunkenly. He was starving and parched— all that blood. He was lucky the cut to his thigh had healed partially when he’d changed, or he would have bled out in the alley after they’d climbed the fence.

“Right. I’ve got some stores…” Eljean was guiding him through the flat to his freshly made bed. The coverlet was brown, and Torrant scowled at it because brown wasn’t yellow.

“You didn’t get it off the floor, did you?” Torrant raised his head, looking around. “Because I can see a lot more carpet now than I could!” The carpet was cream colored, and Torrant had a passing fancy that maybe all of the clothes had been a way to keep it clean.

There was an embarrassed laugh at his side, and Eljean’s hand, which was helping to bear him up, slipped from the towel and touched a naked hip.

Torrant’s erection was immediate and electric.

Oh, Goddess—no. Not now. Not when he was weak, and Eljean was willing. Not when he’d sell his skin for someone to tell him that it would all be fine in the morning. Oh, Triane’s tears, please not now!

Eljean cleared his throat, and again. “No,” he said gruffly, at last. “Here…I’ll be right back…” and with that he fled to the front room, presumably to his cupboard for some bread and cheese.

Torrant tried to wrap the towel around his burgeoning waist while Eljean was gone, and he had limited success. Things were anchored flat pretty much, but nothing had gotten smaller. Fortunately, when Eljean got back with the food—and a shirt that would hang down nearly to his knees—the problem, and the awkwardness that attended it, were temporarily forgotten.

The food all but disappeared, and Torrant washed it down with gulps of water from a glass Eljean kept in the bathroom, looking anxiously to see if there was more. Eljean wordlessly provided some jerky and fruit after that, and the second snack seemed to have replaced some of the blood loss, because he was suddenly thinking better.

“Thanks, Eljean. Here—let me just put on your shirt and borrow some breeches, and I’ll be able to walk to my room and be out of your hair, right? I’ll even buy you bre…hey…” In amused irritation he batted at Eljean’s hand, which had started tracing patterns across his chest. Eljean had apparently lost all of his embarrassment, though, because he wasn’t easily deterred.

“These…” touch, flutter, touch, “All of these?” he asked, looking into Torrant’s eyes with increasing agitation.

Torrant seized his hand, just to stop the distraction of that appealing stroking of his bare skin, and looked to see what he was talking about. “The scars?” he asked, to make sure.

Eljean stood and reclaimed his hand, then knelt on the bed to get behind Torrant and touch his back now. “All of them…” he repeated, tears in his voice.

“Eljean…I heal quickly—it hurts, but when I change form…”

“I don’t give a damn how fast you heal!” Eljean cried, smoothing his hand against Torrant’s back. Torrant managed not to lean into that touch and cursed how much he seemed to want it. “Look at you!” Another touch traced a wound that sliced from his back to his hip.

“I’m sorry—I know it’s probably repulsive…”

“I could give a DAMN how it looks!” And suddenly Eljean’s arms were wrapped around his shoulders and his face and all of that glorious black and curly hair was tickling the skin of Torrant’s back. “All of these scars, Ellyot—all of them! I saw you, the first day you came here. You were glorious, you know—I wanted to weep at how beautiful you were…”

“I had scars then too!” Torrant went to take Eljean’s hands from his chest, and found that his hands simply stayed there, rubbing Eljean’s fingers, hoping to soothe some of the other man’s agitation. He felt for the first time the bruise on his palm, from where he had bitten through when he was changing, and hid it against the back of Eljean’s hands.

“A fraction…a tenth of what you have now. Great Goddess, Ellyot—have you been bleeding for your people twice a night since Beltane?”

There were tears sliding down Torrant’s back, and he couldn’t let his friend grieve for him—it wasn’t right. This hadn’t been Eljean’s pain to share—Torrant had meant for no one but Yarri and Aylan to ever know the extent of his injuries. It was embarrassing. It seemed to give what he was doing a glamour and a martyrdom that he was not comfortable with.

He turned a little, not minding the towel, and wrapped his arms around Eljean, pulling his friend’s face into the crook of his shoulder.

“Hey,” he whispered, “it’s not that bad. I’m fine. I’m alive. Aylan’s alive. Don’t worry. I don’t want you to worry about me…”

Eljean drew in a breath on a sob, and another, and his hands roamed Torrant’s chest at will, feeling the ridges of the uglier scars, and the smooth, sanded divots of the wounds that just took skin. Torrant closed his eyes, hating himself in this moment because he didn’t love Eljean, not that way, but the touch…oh, it felt so good to be touched.

“Eljean,” he murmured, his voice strangling, trying to keep his humor. “Eljean, my friend…you have a lover, and while Zhane might forgive me he’d never forgive…”

Eljean turned shiny green eyes towards him, his face a study in hurt. “He broke up with me…said…” Eyes closed, a resolution made, and then Eljean suddenly looked like the adult Torrant had begged him to be. “He said I needed to know if you were a man or a god…”

Torrant tilted his head back and groaned aloud. “I’m not a god…” he started, but while his neck was bared, Eljean placed moist lips against his exposed vein and kissed him, and the rest of the words were lost in a hiss of arousal.

“Eljean…” he gasped. “Eljean, I have to go…”

“Let me take care of you…” Eljean whispered against his neck. His lips traveled, throat, collarbone, a graze of teeth against his chest.

“Oh Goddess,” Torrant moaned, knotting his fingers in that lustrous black hair, thinking to pull Eljean’s head up as his tongue laved his stomach, his teeth nibbling just enough to make him gasp. “Eljean… please…I still have ouch!” because Eljean’s hand had grazed the partially healed stab-wound on his thigh, “See? I still have wounds…”

“Let me soothe them,” Eljean murmured, gazing up Torrant’s broad chest, his chin digging suggestively into the softest part of Torrant’s belly.

Torrant breathed, and tried to stand. Eljean slid down even lower, and the towel fluttered to the floor. Torrant sat down in a hurry, finding the cover of Eljean’s body less disturbing than his own nakedness. He fought a very real urge to weep, to sob, to purge the anguish of his deeds and the horror of his night on this very innocent seducer. Ah, Goddess…

“Eljean,” he smoothed the hair back from those sweet, mesmerizing green eyes with hands that shook, “baby, I have blood on my hands… please don’t make you touch you tonight…not with blood on my hands…”

Eljean sat up a little, so that his chin rested on Torrant’s shoulder, and his hot puffs of rapid breath dusted Torrant’s throat. He seized one of Torrant’s hands and brought it to his mouth, kissing his palm, and then looking carefully when he saw Torrant wince.

“It doesn’t hurt?” Eljean asked, laving what was still a bite-shaped bruise. “I saw you…biting your own flesh so you wouldn’t scream…I know that there’s lies upon lies in your life, but don’t tell me it doesn’t hurt.” He kissed the injured palm again, and then pulled Torrant’s thumb into his mouth, sucking gently. Torrant popped the thumb free and stroked a high cheekbone, rubbing in careful circles, thinking that this was the time to walk away.

“Pain is penance, Eljean,” he murmured, shifting his weight to the balls of his feet and moving past the weakness of his knees, “and I have much to pay for. You need to let me go.” He was doing it, he was standing up, still looking soberly into Eljean’s eyes when Eljean took his hands and kissed his knuckles with enough gentleness to make the wobble in his knees sit him down again on the bed, hard.

“You’ve paid for our sins enough,” Eljean murmured against his hand. “Let me touch you, and take some of it away.”

Torrant’s will bent, his better judgment wavered, weakened, a wall of water, crashing around his feet. His eyes fluttered closed, and he touched Eljean’s cheek again with his thumb.

“No,” but he didn’t try to move.

“Let me,” whispered Eljean, kissing up his arms, to his biceps, tickling the crease of his arm with his tongue.

“This isn’t fair to you…” Oh, Goddess, please…please give him the strength to stand and walk away.

“Let me,” murmured Eljean from his neck again, kissing, rubbing his chest, rubbing his thigh, the upper inside of his thigh, grazing the swollen pleasure at his groin.

“Ahhh…” Oh…sweet Triane…it had been so long since Yarri had touched him there, had taken him into her soft mouth, her sweet hand, the haven of her body. “This isn’t fair to…” And he couldn’t even say her name, he thought in agony. He couldn’t even bring her into this bed to ward off his seducer, because Eljean didn’t know that he wasn’t Yarri’s brother but her lover instead. His head pitched forward on a whimper, and he closed his eyes against thoughts of her, here, in this alien city, when he had done murder and worse than murder and she was not there to comfort him.

“Let me, Triane’s Son,” Eljean murmured against his spine, smoothing a hand from his neck to his buttocks, making Torrant groan in sudden, complete acceptance of hands on his battered skin.

Let me…let me…let me…let me… Oh, once, just this once, when he was so weary, to let someone else make the decisions…

Let me…let me…let me…

Eljean led, Eljean kissed, Eljean caressed, and Torrant lay, eyes closed, and allowed Eljean’s mouth on his skin, his hands on his pleasure places, his soul to lay claim to a name that hadn’t had an owner for long years.

Let me…let me…let me…

Merciful Dueant, Holy Triane, Violated Oueant…please…just please…please make it right, just for a moment, just for now, just for tonight.

Let me…let me…let me…

And so Torrant did.

And when Eljean was pressed along his back, invading his flesh, Torrant clutched the strong arm across his chest and broke, sobbing like a child.

Later, Eljean lay spooned against Torrant’s back and rubbed his shoulders as the last of the sobs choked out into the privacy of a pillow, murmuring what he thought would be soothing, grown-up words to calm him.

“Poor baby,” Eljean said at the last, when he thought the final, shuddering breath had cleared his lover’s chest. “You’re not made for this business anymore than I am.”

“No,” whispered the man in his arms, “no. Ellyot always was the better hunter.”

Abruptly, he fell asleep, leaving Eljean staring wide-eyed at the sleeping figure in the holy lover’s dark.

Torrant awoke before the first gray of dawn, sharply aware that he was not in his own flat, and that Aylan would break down the door of every flat in the complex if he didn’t find Torrant there when he arrived at dawn.

He rolled naked out of bed and thunked solidly on all fours, wincing. His body hadn’t healed all of his hurts the night before— sometimes, when he had been very badly wounded, even the change from the snow cat to human couldn’t fix everything.

And sometimes, unaccustomed activity left its own sorts of soreness.

Oh Goddess. Torrant turned and looked at Eljean, his narrow face hidden under that curtain of black, curly hair. With a little whimper, Eljean rolled over in bed, snuggling into the warmth where Torrant had just been, and Torrant scrubbed his own face with his hands.

Aylan was going to kill him.

He closed his eyes on that thought, and went looking for the shirt and breeches he had been preparing to wear before…before…

Oh, he didn’t want to think about that. How could he have been so weak? And Eljean…poor Eljean. He wasn’t going to understand.

Aylan had known—he had always known—that Torrant’s heart hadn’t wanted what his body seemed to crave in those moments after the Goddess left him, and he was stuck in the human consequences of what Her body allowed him to do.

Eljean was going to think this was love.

Yarri would have known better, he thought dismally, pulling on his breeches and fighting the urge to weep—again! Yarri knew about what his body did, the shameful weakness that overcame him.

He stopped as he was pulling the borrowed shirt on over his head.

That wasn’t true, he realized dimly. Yarri didn’t know. She had been too young, when he’d first been the snow cat, and they had both been recovering during much of the time after that. Aldam knew, he realized, his heart giving another throb for his missing brother, hopefully safe back in Eiran or Wrinkle Creek. Lane had known, and Bethen had known.

He swallowed against a sore, dry throat and fought the urge to sink to his haunches and rock himself, mourning the hole in his chest that his family left.

The only thing that kept him on his feet was the thought of Aylan, who was here, and whom, he hoped, would forgive him anything.

With a dodge into the patio, he found his boots and his black cloak, both of which had been shaken free of glass the night before—probably by Eljean while he’d waited for Torrant in the shower. He heard a murmur from the bed, and sighed, resisting the sudden compulsion to just jump the patio fence and run for his own back yard.

“Hey,” he said softly, coming inside to sit on the bed and put on his boots.

“You’re going?” Eljean’s voice rose with hurt at the end of that second word, and Torrant hid a grimace.

“Aylan and I always spend rest day together,” he said, lacing his boot. “If I’m not there by the time Aylan gets back, the ruckus the snow cat caused is nothing compared to the fit he’ll throw looking for me.”

“So…” Eljean pushed himself up on an elbow, his narrow, palely muscled chest exposed by the falling sheet. “You just go to your flat, take off your boots, and pretend that last night didn’t happen?”

Please, Torrant thought with pain, please, Eljean, don’t do this. “Oh, I’ll confess to Aylan,” he said with a smile into those pretty green eyes, trying to get Eljean to smile back, “and to my family. We don’t do secrets like this one; it’s not how we work.”

Eljean bit his lip, looking down at his hand as it rested on the rumpled sheet. “So I’m a confession? A mistake? Something to get off your chest?”

Ah, Dueant, forgive me. “Not at all,” Torrant murmured, taking Eljean’s hand to his lips and kissing, nipping his palm just a little.

“Then what am I?” Eljean asked, looking into his eyes and begging for something, anything, to reassure him that the night before hadn’t been a mistake.

Torrant closed his eyes, and remembered the taste of dried apples, eaten while sitting on a cave floor, contemplating an uncertain future. “Sweetness,” he said softly, and leaned down and kissed Eljean’s cheek. “You were sweetness.”

A small smile, then, graced Eljean’s narrow features, and a sudden soberness…“May I have the honor, then,” he said, looking down at their still-twined hands, “of knowing the name of the man in my bed last night?”

Torrant sucked breath in past his teeth as though he’d just been hit. “I’m sorry?”

Eljean swallowed, and looked him in the eyes. “You said ‘Ellyot was always the better hunter’. And you called Yarri’s name in your sleep…nobody calls their sister’s name like that. Nobody asks a sister to wait for them the way you pleaded with her as you slept. Please… you…you trusted me, with your body. With your heart, even for just a night. Could you not trust me with your name?”

Torrant shook his head, muttered, “Aylan’s going to kill me,” and closed his eyes against Eljean’s suddenly wise gaze.

“Ellyot Moon was killed in the barn with the rest of the family,” he said at last, and as it always did, speaking that one truth aloud ripped his chest open, spilled everything else worth seeing before him to read in bloody runes. “His sister, Yarri, had been taking a nap with one Torrant Shadow, who had been raised with Ellyot and Tal and Qir just like a brother. He and his mother were in the family paintings—Owen Moon had even sent money ahead to his brother, Lane, for Torrant’s schooling. Torrant…” his throat caught, speaking of himself this way, “Torrant knew that the one thing the family would have wanted was for him to keep Yarri safe, and so he did.”

Eljean reached up and touched his face, and his fingers slipped and skated along a taut cheekbone.

He cleared his throat. “Everything else I’ve told you is true,” he murmured, “but…but they kept sending priests and soldiers for Yarri, and they thought I was Ellyot…and Torrant Shadow could sneak into Clough and kill Rath anytime he wanted, but…”

He let that last sentence trail off , and then stood abruptly. “I’ve got to go,” he rasped, hating himself, wanting Aylan so badly his hands shook.

“But only Ellyot Moon could change the world that killed his family,” Eljean supplied that last part, sitting up in bead and ignoring the sheet as it slid down to his waist. “I’m sorry I hurt you…”

Torrant shook his head again, and moved towards the front door, checking the spell on his hair and fingering the divot in his ear as he strode. “I’m going to go by the complex canteen and get breakfast,” he said, keeping his voice casual. “Meet us in my flat in a bit—we’ll just mooch about, eating, reading forbidden books, laying low during the curfew. Djali will be at the funeral all day—no reason for you to be bored.”

He was talking too much, and as he opened the front door and ran smack into Djali, he could only be happy that he’d been talking about inconsequentialities.

“Hey, Djali,” he murmured easily, looking into his friend’s startled eyes.

“I forgot my dress cravat,” Djali said, looking a little stunned.

“Well,” Torrant shook Djali’s hand soberly, “my condolences, Djali—it’s going to be tough day. Let the rest of us know if there’s anything we can do for you.”

Djali nodded and stepped aside to let Ellyot Moon pass, and then hurried into Eljean’s room to see Eljean, leaning back, his hands laced behind his head as he stared up at his ceiling thoughtfully.

The state of the sheets could leave no doubt as to what had happened the night before.

“Eljean!” Djali said, looking at his friend with pleased surprise. “You and Ellyot?”

Eljean met his eyes and grimaced. “It wasn’t…it wasn’t real,” he said at last, looking into his best friend’s eyes with what he hoped was a philosophical expression.

“Then what was it?” Djali asked, going to Eljean’s wardrobe to look for his cravat. Eljean had the best clothes; they both knew it. Djali could afford more, but Eljean had the better taste.

Eljean smiled a little, allowing some of the dreaminess to creep into his eyes and his voice that he had carefully hidden from Elly…from Torrant. “It was…sweetness,” he murmured. “A gift. The kind of gift you don’t ask for twice.”

“Yeah?” Djali asked, a kind smile in his eyes as he found the cravat and started doing the complex knot required. He was always bad at this part, and his hands muddled helplessly.

“Yeah,” Eljean laughed. He swung his legs off the bed and wrapped a sheet around his hips, although Djali wouldn’t give a tinker’s shite if he forgot the cover or not. With a clucking sound he shooed Djali’s hapless hands away from the cravat and started doing the knot himself.

“But that doesn’t mean you’d turn it down if he felt like giving again!” Djali accused with a laugh, and Eljean finally let loose and laughed with him.

“Damned straight, my friend. Damned straight.”

The Name and the Man

Aylan knew something was wrong, and Torrant’s hasty note saying ‘Out for food, back soon’ did nothing to make him feel any better.

There were clothes belonging to a stranger crumpled in the corner of the room.

If Torrant had simply (please Goddess!) gotten lucky the night before, a liaison with no attachments and no complications, the clothes would have gone with the wearer. And the bed didn’t look slept in.

By the time Eljean knocked and just turned the knob into the room, Aylan was on edge enough to tackle him as it was.

But the door was hardly closed behind the puppy when he breezily enquired, “Hey—is Torrant back with the food?”

Aylan pressed Eljean back against the wall with a forearm to the throat so fast that the taller man didn’t even have time to squeak in surprise.

“Where did you hear that name?” he graveled, and he could tell when Eljean closed his eyes that the damned useless git hadn’t been aware of the danger he’d put them all in until Aylan had almost killed him over it.

“In bed…” Eljean bleated and Aylan released him so abruptly that Eljean stumbled and fell to his knees. Aylan, on the other hand, kicked the door, the legs of the couch and punched through the armoire door, swearing when he pulled a deep splinter from his hand, knowing it wouldn’t bleed.

“Aww, Oueant’s black eye, I’d rather it was during torture!”

“Why!” Eljean demanded, remembering for a moment that he was just a smidge taller than Aylan, and drawing himself up to his full height. “I know about Y…his beloved. I know he doesn’t feel that way about me. What’s so gods-blighted wrong about giving him a little solace, a little comfort, when he needs it?”

Aylan closed his eyes and looked at his flawless hand. He swallowed, and looked back at Eljean. “How bad was it?”

Eljean shrugged. “I don’t know all of it…”

Aylan shook off the question, and went back to being angry. “It doesn’t matter.” He kicked the couch again and hoped that Torrant felt that one in his bones. “It doesn’t matter,” kick “it doesn’t matter,” kick, “it flat out doesn’t matter, because no matter how bad it is,” kick, “you don’t take advantage of him!”

He rounded on Eljean again. “If you fancied a man who didn’t fancy men, would you get him drunk and feel him up? Would you?”

Eljean flinched, knowing his shoulders had fallen into their habitual slope. “No,” he mumbled, “but it wasn’t like that…”

“It wasn’t? How do you know what it was like? When the Goddess leaves him he…he needs, do you understand that? He needs to know he’s still him, that he’s still human.” Ignoring the damned burgundy-and-blue-brocaded couch, Aylan sat down on the damned rich blood-colored carpet, looking miserable. “He needs to know someone will care for him, no matter what…sex isn’t ‘no matter what’. Sex is ‘if it keeps working’. That’s not what he needed.”

“It’s what he seemed to want…” Eljean muttered, his voice clogged with hurt resentment.

“Did he lead?” Aylan asked bluntly, looking hard at him from his cross-legged position on the floor, and Eljean blushed and ducked his head even further.

“No.”

Aylan dropped his chin to his fist, and sat there, contemplating the door that Torrant would come through in a moment. “Then it wasn’t what he wanted.”

“How do you know?” Eljean whispered, and Aylan didn’t have to look to see the crystal shards of tears trembling on his lashes.

“That boy always leads,” Aylan murmured, feeling his own blush creep up his cheeks. “He doesn’t want to, but it’s all he knows how to do.”

At that moment, the door burst open followed by an irritated—and limping-- Torrant who was balancing a paper sack full of pastries under one arm and sucking on a new scrape on the back of his hand.

“Dueant’s squashed stones, Aylan,” he griped, “what in the hell are you doing to yourself!”

Aylan stayed where he was, scowling, and then he looked sideways. Torrant looked sideways to see Eljean, backed up against the wall, trying miserably not to cry.

“Sweet Oueant’s morning movement,” he blasphemed, and then kicked the much abused couch himself before turning to Eljean with the food.

“Ignore him,” he murmured, moving into the poor boy’s breathing space. “He’s a grumpy wanker, he always has been. Triane knows why some people find him charming.” Torrant handed Eljean the bag, and smoothed a tear away with a thumb. “You’ve nothing to be ashamed of, right Eljean? It was me, my weakness, my consequences…”

Eljean seized his hand then, looked at the still-bleeding scrape and then at the splinter of wood Aylan had torn from his own hand. “You are bleeding twice for all of us, aren’t you Triane’s Son?” he asked, the faintest tinge of irony in his voice, and Torrant aimed a scowl at Aylan that would have made anybody else run for cover. Aylan stuck out his tongue.

“I’ve lost as many brothers to this country as I can survive,” Torrant replied mildly. “Now sit,” he pulled out a chair from his small dinette, “and eat!” He pointed imperiously to the bag of bread, cheese, and pastry. “We’ll be out in a moment, after I remind this bugger how to treat a guest.”

“You never treated me like that,” Aylan replied sourly, lifting his hand for a pull-up. Torrant grabbed his ear instead, and ignored Aylan’s outraged squeal as he dragged his angry brother scrambling to his feet into the bedroom for a chat.

“Would you like me to get you a puppy to kick, Aylan?” Torrant burst out once the door was closed, “Because a puppy might fight back!”

“How bad was it?” Aylan asked, going toe to toe with his brother, knowing that his advantage in height irritated Torrant to no end.

“That’s not the point!”

“The hell it isn’t!”

“You told me to take a lover!”

“How bad was it, that you took him!”

Torrant took a step back and broke eye contact, nervously, looking sideways. “He’s a good man,” he muttered.

“That’s not what I’m asking,” Aylan said, lowering his voice as well.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Torrant sat heavily down on his bed, reaching absent-mindedly under his pillow, where he kept the cloak that Yarri made him. Silently, staring at the deeply colored carpet, he stroked that little bit of soft weaving, seeing her favorite color yellow behind his eyes.

“You don’t have a choice,” Aylan replied, and the bedsprings groaned as he sat down too.

Torrant looked at him then, his pain as naked on his hardening features as his scars had been on his chest the night before. “Oh, Aylan,” he murmured, his voice hollow, “Oh Goddess, the things I’ve done…”

Aylan wrapped an arm around his shoulders and pulled him in, knowing that this had been the comfort he’d needed the night before when he’d turned to Eljean.

“Nothing,” he said firmly into Torrant’s hair, “could make me afraid to touch my friend.”

And half strangled by irritation, half drawn out by questions, the story of the night before came out while Aylan rocked him, whispering soothing things into his hair.

He finished up and stood, scrubbing at his hair and rubbing his eyes hard, as though they burned.

“What am I going to do?” he asked, groaning.

“About Jems or about Eljean?” Aylan asked back, stretching out on the bed. He was sleepy—the kind of tiredness that came from a busy week without enough sleep of any kind, followed by a period of rest where the body knew what it wanted.

“Oh gods…about them both!” Torrant leaned back against the wall. There was a moment of quiet then, and as if struggling for words, he said, “I was going to send money to his family, to keep them from starving this winter. I mean, it wasn’t much, ye ken? But it was all I could do. It was all I could think of, and it felt like doing something— anything!—to make it better, right? And then I remembered…”

“You don’t have any money?” Aylan asked, shaking his head.

“Pretty much,” Torrant agreed glumly.

“Don’t worry—that much I can cover. The rest is going to be the healing in your own soul. I need to know then. What about your heart, brother? Are you still going to have the heart for the fight?” Aylan looked at him soberly, and was rewarded by a fierce, grim look from Torrant that did much to take the weakness away.

“With you at my side to protect, brother? Have no doubts.”

“Fair enough,” Aylan nodded, knowing it wasn’t fair and that it wasn’t over. “And now for the really tricky part…”

“Eljean,” they both breathed simultaneously.

“What am I going to do?” Torrant wondered. “He…” Torrant ran his hands through his hair, leaving it in complete disarray without the band to secure it back. “He was so very kind, Aylan. He didn’t know…I tried to tell him, but how do you tell someone something like that? He…”

Abruptly Torrant sat down on the bed and allowed his shoulders, just for a moment, to slump, rolling them under Aylan’s rubbing fist as his friend kneaded abused muscles. “He needs something…I should do something…It’s not fair. He has done nothing wrong…nothing that deserves being discarded like a broken toy. And he’s a friend.”

“Wonderful,” Aylan groused, giving a particularly tight knot a thumb and a twist. Torrant yelped, and Aylan sighed in capitulation. “Give him something.”

“What? Like a gift?” Torrant frowned.

“No, you wank—like a part of you. Goddess! You’re the prettiest man I’ve met, inside and outside of my dreams-- why didn’t you get some experience in this sort of thing before now? Give him something personal. Something real. Something that will let him know that he’s important, even if it’s not the sort of important he wanted. Give him something of yourself, even if it’s just your mother’s real name. You understand?” In spite of himself, Aylan yawned, and Torrant stood.

“Get some sleep—I might be in to nap in an hour or so. And yes, I understand. In fact, I think I know exactly what he’ll need. But first, I need to go breakfast with him, and then I’ll give you the details.”

Torrant bent down and kissed Aylan on his forehead. “’Night, brother. Love you.”

“’Night brother, love you too.”

It turned out that Eljean was a fair backgammon player. Torrant won their first three games—but it was by no means a walk in the park.

“Aylan can dust the board with my sorry arse,” Torrant laughed after the third game when Eljean swore soundly, “but then, after playing Stanny and Aldam for so long, it’s not like I had practice.”

“What about Yarri?” Eljean had the temerity to ask. The look of restrained agony on Torrant’s face made him wish he hadn’t.

“She’s fair at it,” he said after a moment. “She always would rather I read to her, or sing. And then, while I was busy, she liked to illustrate…”

“Illustrate?”

Torrant yawned, wide enough to crack his jaw, and he rolled his dice for the fourth game. “Pictures. She loves color…draws pictures, makes pretty things out of cloth and yarn. It’s an art, the way she can look at a bolt of cloth or a crayon or a skein of yarn and then make something beautiful and…and so very her. She loved to draw the stories in the songs or the histories…”

He smiled a little dreamily as Eljean rolled double fours and moved. “She made a mural, for the orphanage…it hangs on sailcloth, and it’s just the pier out to sea, with children all dressed for the Beltane faire, ready to dance, walking up the main road.”

Torrant found that he was blinking heavily, and it was hard to swallow.

“I was going to handfast her, this Beltane,” he murmured, not sure, really, why he was confessing this, except for the fact that Aylan already knew and now, with Eljean at least, he could savor the pain of saying it aloud.

Eljean rolled another double, and he contemplated the dice as though they had sprung legs and were conspiring to let him win. “Why didn’t you?” he asked roughly, not wanting to look up and see what was moving over his lover’s face.

“Triannon,” came the harsh answer, and it was surprising enough for Eljean to raise his head and see the grim, terrible anger in the eyes of Triane’s Son.

Suddenly, Eljean recalled Ellyot Moon’s first spectacular day on the floor. “They were after Yarri,” Eljean affirmed, for the first time seeing how all of that history could weigh in on that one moment in time.

“I don’t want to talk about Triannon,” Torrant said mildly.

“I still don’t understand what happened,” Eljean pressed, and then backed away from the fierceness in Torrant’s eyes.

“What happened is Rath sent an entire company of soldiers to sack a college, hoping to kill Yarrow Moon…”

“But you said Yarri didn’t go to college…”

“Yarri’s cousin—Stanny’s sister?—Roes was there. Rath knew it was ‘the Moon girl’, and because he’s as dumb as a bag of hammers, he tried to kill one girl and an entire student population. Aldam and I got there about two seconds before the army, we had just enough time to warn the militia—which was there to guard Roes, I might add, and to ward off this sort of thing, because we didn’t think he was going to send entire company for one smallish woman and a bunch of children—and get everybody out. Everyone at the east side militia died. Everybody. Our friends and playmates killed three people for every one who fell.”

“But that leaves…sixty, seventy people. There was only one survivor.”

Torrant looked up at Eljean and allowed his eyes to flash blue.

Eljean dropped the backgammon pieces in his hands…“Gods…”

“No,” Torrant replied, his voice overly casual. “Not the gods.”

Eljean swallowed and picked up his backgammon pieces, and Torrant continued.

“I told you I have blood on my hands, Eljean. Did you think I was joking?”

“No.” Another swallow, and then the question that had been weighing on Eljean’s mind since Aylan had asked.

“Last night…What happened?”

Torrant closed his eyes, and the blue went away and a terrible weariness fell over his shoulders and the planes of his face. “You’ll find out soon enough,” he murmured, “and perhaps when you do, you’ll decide Zhane is more appealing company. But until then I think it’s my move.”

Torrant moved and then Eljean moved and Torrant yawned again and again until Eljean, feeling dense, realized that Torrant was staying awake—barely—just for him.

“Go lay down,” he ordered gently, and Torrant gave a half-hearted shake of his head.

“I invited you…”

“I’ll read one of your books…take a nap on your couch…”

“The others will be by when the bell rings,” Torrant told him through a yawn. “Invite them in, if you like. We can have dinner before Aylan and I go out tonight. I’ve got something I want to run by all of you…” He yawned once more, this time so widely that his eyes almost rolled back in his head, and Eljean actually laughed and shooed him back to his bedroom.

“One thing,” Torrant said from the doorway, and his eyes looked suddenly much more awake, “the name ‘Torrant Shadow’—that’s not to be said, not here. Not even Aylan calls me that in this place. Right?”

Eljean flushed, remembering Aylan’s reaction to that name earlier. “I understand.” And a sudden, enlightening thought. “Torrian Shadow’s son?”

Torrant hissed through his teeth. “Indeed. And that there’s another name that shouldn’t be repeated.”

Eljean’s brow wrinkled. “Shouldn’t Djali know?”

The weariness that washed over Torrant’s face was enough to let him know this thought was far from new. “Soon,” he murmured. “After the pain of Ulvane has faded, after I’ve had a,” yawn, “nap.”

Eljean nodded, reassured, and waved him on, and then Torrant was gone and the door was closed.

He picked through the bookshelf that sat next to the small table and found one titled Goddess Stories of Eiran. The face plate 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 then, 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 actually 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 Torrant had given credit to the storyteller, the name written was none other than Torrant’s own.

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 laying 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 up, 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 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 that 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 be going 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 that 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 just sat, dumbly, looking at him with miserable eyes. “Don’t worry,” Keon murmured. “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 and sat up on the counter by his cupboard and took a bite before he started talking.

“Gentlemen,” he murmured, “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 murmured. “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 punchline 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, and his eyes, 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 towards 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 any time 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 towards 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 towards securing the funds and the materials to set up exactly what Rath had 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 hmmm.” 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 possibly hate him so badly. He remembered Torrant’s closed eyes, his terrible sobs, his yielding but inactive body. Eljean wrapped his arms around his middle, all of the pleasure of the promised weekend flown and gone 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 blonde watchdog of a brother.

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

Yarri had never, not once, not 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 that 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 Duance and the Old Man Hills—that there would be plenty of namesakes for Ta l and Qir for generations to come.

‘Ellyot’, though, he had never named to rest as a member of his beloved dead—so their eldest twin’s name was sealed.

Their one daughter carried the twin burden of their mothers’ 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 coming home from 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 this 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 this was the reason these passages about Eljean in particular had always troubled her, and perhaps the reason Eljean’s namesake 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 very 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 VII—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.

“Because he’s lived his whole life being told what he can’t be…I’d like him to see what he can?” Torrant was taking advantage of this moment when nobody expected anything of him to lean back against the plain boards of the tavern and turn his face to the mid-morning sun. He’d felt as close to happy as he could remember since they’d come to this city, and he figured that the source of his happiness must be because they were actually waiting to leave the damned place. It certainly couldn’t be Aylan, who hadn’t stopped fretting about this plan since Torrant had sprung it on him the week before.

“Yes, but you can minister to his bruised heart inside the city…” Aylan looked pained, and Torrant sighed. If Aylan wasn’t careful, he was going to ruin Torrant’s little buzz of joy.

“You said to give him something,” Torrant murmured, being patient. “I have no music in my heart for him…this is what I’ve got.”

“Yes, but…” At last! Stillness from that long, fluid form, and Aylan turned his almost-violet eyes on his brother and friend. “This is going to be hard. So hard.” Aylan said at last, his whispered voice falling without echo in the little muddy alleyway. “Are you sure you want him to be there?”

Torrant kept his eyes closed, and his face serene. “I need you with me,” was all he said.

“But what about…”

“This is all I have, Aylan. I need you…he can come too. But you I need.”

Aylan grunted. “Am I going to need to leave the two of you alone?”

A faint flush tinged Torrant’s cheeks, but his eyes still stayed closed against the brightness of the sun. “Wouldn’t that be nice? But not necessary. There is a purpose to this mission besides my sex life, you know.”

Aylan gave up his pacing and his fretting and came to join Torrant, allowing the sweetness of cool sunshine to kiss his own face. “Your heart is so bound up in duty, brother,” he said at last, “I wonder if it will strangle on itself before you set it free.”

“Hush,” Torrant murmured. “I was enjoying the peace.”

They stood there, absorbing the sounds of the rest day market in the distance, the familiar voices of the regents and the patients coming from inside the pub, the call of children from the shadowed quarters behind tenements and in small alleyways, as they learned to play hidden games that secreted their childhood in their hearts on this falsely-bright, beautiful day.

“Are you sure…”Aylan began.

“He’ll come,” Torrant replied easily, almost dozing in the feeling of freedom this moment was giving him. “His heart will give him no choice.”

“Oh gods, we’re late!” Eljean heard the clock bells toll, and struggled around the cobblestones of the full market. He and Djali had spotted Dimitri standing on one of the far patios and obviously waiting for someone as they’d tried to go the back way this morning. The long way around through the market place had been their only choice.

“He’ll wait for you!” Djali laughed, following hard upon Eljean’s heels. “He invited you, didn’t he?”

“Yes but…” Eljean slowed, not because either of them were winded, but because he wanted this last moment of reassurance with Djali before he subjected himself to Aylan’s scorn and Torrant’s leadership, both together for two days alone.

“But what? You think it’s because he didn’t want to be alone with you?” Djali grinned at him, and Eljean thought, not for the first time, how square and solid Djali’s face had become, where it had used to be merely round and soft.

“I don’t know why he asked me,” Eljean said at last, trying not to sound as lost as he felt. “I just know he did…and I should be thinking about how to get Zhane back, and all I can think about instead is that…that…” he looked around in what even he knew was a clumsy form of secrecy, but he couldn’t help it.

“That Triane’s Son wants you?” Djali asked, just loud enough for Eljean to hear, but not loud enough to carry.

“But he really doesn’t, you know,” Eljean fretted, meeting his friend’s eyes again, and even Djali, who had become like a brother in the past two months, didn’t offer false comfort on this matter.

“No,” he murmured. “You’ve seen his face when he talks about his beloved…he can’t even bear to say her name…”

Eljean nodded unhappily. He hadn’t told Djali that he knew her name. He thought that he should have. He thought Torrant was right, and that, like Aerk and Keon, Djali would understand. But still, he remembered that horrible night at Rath’s, and Djali’s uncle, muttering about killing Torrian Shadow, and Eljean couldn’t bear to see Djali come to believe that the man they had been following for the last three months had betrayed him. Especially since Eljean had grown more and more sure the only lie Torrant Shadow had ever told anyone was the lie of his name.

“He said I was ‘sweetness’,” Eljean said at last into the quiet between the two of them.

“There are worse things to be,” Djali agreed.

“We probably won’t have any time alone together,” Eljean muttered, betraying how very very much he wanted there to be, how very very hurt he would be if there were not.

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Djali comforted, and Eljean turned a sudden, brilliant smile at his brother of the heart.

“You are a horrible wank, and if you weren’t my roommate I’d probably be getting shagged silly by now!” he teased, and Djali’s answering grin and playful sock in the arm were everything Eljean had ever wanted in a brother.

They saw the cross street for the ghettoes in the distance, and their original urge to hurry was back upon them. Eljean broke into a trot with Djali at his side, and together they raced to Eljean’s date with Ellyot Moon.

A short time later, Eljean was riding next to Aylan in a battered but clean little merchant’s cart, and the man everybody knew as Ellyot Moon was riding beside them on what even Eljean—who knew little about such things—had to admit was a magnificent (and magnificently fat!) horse.

“I’ve been neglecting you, haven’t I?” Torrant soothed, as Heartland tried to get frisky in the traffic. “He gets exercised daily at the stables,” Torrant said, looking up from the pouting animal, “but we used to spend days together, and I think he missed me.”

“I think he missed the treats you spoil him with!” Aylan said dryly, clicking to his own horse, a strong and serene gray who didn’t seem to mind one way or the other being hooked up to a cart or ridden like her friend under Torrant.

“He always did have an appetite like his father!” Torrant sat up in the saddle then and rode proud in the slanting sunshine under an autumn-blue sky. Eljean looked up at him from his seat on the cart: his hair was caught back in a smooth queue, and his hazel eyes were crinkling up at the corners in a rare moment of open-hearted happiness. Eljean’s heart swelled. This was the man Ellyot Moon and Torrant Shadow had been born to be.

Getting beyond the city gates was a brief matter of Ellyot and Eljean introducing themselves as regents—apparently the guards had a list— and vouching for Aylan. They didn’t even try to search Aylan’s cart, and Eljean caught the smug look of triumph Ellyot and Aylan cast each other, and felt dense. Of course. The cart may have held their camping out supplies for this night, but in the future, carts like this would hold families, blankets, building supplies. Leave it to Ellyot to plan things out—no wonder he was such a stunning success at backgammon!

After the breathlessness of the gate, the ride was beautiful. The sun was hot, of course, but there was an indefinable promise of a cool-down near evening, and the shade of the oak trees that lined the scorched grasses of Clough gave the illusion of a lightening to the heavy air. Ellyot rode quietly, with his head cocked a little to the side, as though listening to conversations that Eljean and Aylan weren’t privy to.

They stopped at midday for lunch at a flat place where the river and the road were not that far from each other. They sat in the shade of white-barked trees, which wove their branches overhead, and Aylan asked if he remembered anything.

“I remember how much I loved that first summer in Eiran, that’s what I remember!” Ellyot laughed, wiping the sweat from his forehead on his shoulder.

Aylan cocked an eyebrow at his friend, and a startling look of vulnerability crossed those lean, hazel-eyed features. For the first time in hours, Eljean remembered that his name wasn’t really Ellyot Moon.

“I remember that Moon never let us go near the city,” Torrant answered after a moment. “I remember that in those last months he used to warn us all—Tal and me in particular—never to wander off family lands, but he wouldn’t tell us why. He didn’t want us to live in fear.”

“Tal?” Eljean asked tentatively.

“My…” Swallow. “Our…” Swallow. “Ellyot’s brother,” he finished at the last. “My hair was starting to turn,” Torrant murmured, not looking at either of them from his magically covered fall of chestnut hair, “and Tal…” a half smile, “Tal had men who didn’t know they liked men eating out of his hand. There was no hiding Tal—it would have killed him to try.”

“Oh,” Eljean answered from numb lips.

“Moon just told us it was dangerous…but he tried so hard to keep the ugliness out of his home.” Torrant shrugged, and with an active effort, was suddenly Ellyot Moon again.

“Right, so we need to get moving if we’re going to leave first thing in the morning. I want a good look at the ‘relocation site’ outside the city before we get back.” Ellyot Moon went to take the horses to the river for another drink, his shoulders straight and his walk as steady as Eljean had ever seen it.

Eljean nodded and moved to clean up, and he saw Aylan, gazing after Torrant Shadow with fear and pain and helplessness in his eyes. Aylan turned to Eljean almost angrily.

“He’s letting you see a part of him he doesn’t even want to show me,” he ground out almost viciously. “If you hurt him, I’ll make your life miserable—however long it lasts.”

In his innocence, Eljean couldn’t even imagine a world in which hurting Torrant Shadow was possible.

After another two or so hours of riding, Torrant took a sudden turn onto a path that was semi-overgrown with weeds and an incursion of blackberry bushes on the side by the river. There were more potholes and hardened clay washouts than actual road.

“Can you get through?” he called behind him. “It used to be wider!”

“We’ll manage,” Aylan muttered next to Eljean on the jouncing, squeaking buckboard. “If we don’t break an axle first,” he added to himself.

“Here, let me get down.” Eljean slid clumsily off the wagon and stretched, wincing at the pain in his arse. If he could have ridden a horse worth a damn, he would have rented one from the regents’ stables, and after the day next to a taciturn Aylan on the buckboard, he was starting to think that learning to ride a horse better than a sack of grain might be worth the trouble.

As Aylan piloted the cart, Eljean strode a few feet ahead and tried to point out the easiest way to go, as well as drag a few large branches across an overgrown road that had once been clean and well traveled.

Aylan was giving him an entire education on the art of taking a deity’s name in vain (at the moment Compassion was getting one heck of a beating) when the stream of swearing stopped. Eljean looked up from the branch he was dragging across the path to see Torrant, sitting on his horse and looking overhead, into the trees.

“Elly…” Eljean began, at the same time Aylan said, “Torrant, brother, what do you see?”

Torrant shrugged. “Ghosts. Don’t worry about them—they won’t hurt you.”

Aylan gave a particularly vicious curse and slid off the buckboard, leaving the damned horse to do what it wanted (which was, apparently, stand still and munch on a hummock of dried grasses) and walked up to Heartland, who was sitting patiently, waiting for orders.

“They’re hurting you,” Aylan said quietly. “How about you tell me what they look like, and those ghosts might leave your poor heart alone.”

Hesitantly, in halting words and choked sentences, Torrant told him the details of a day that started with two boys wrestling on their way to the barn to do their chores, and then grew complicated by a girl throwing a rock from a tree.

“I didn’t know that!” Aylan laughed kindly, reaching up to Torrant and silently urging him down from the horse. “It sounds like Yarri, though.”

“It was almost a defining moment in her life,” Torrant agreed. “We never talked about it—I never wanted her to blame herself, because if she hadn’t thrown the rock, something else would have started it. We know that by now. But I think that, in her mind, she has always had that moment to live up to. If she could throw a rock at that soldier then, well then, what could she do when she was ten? Or twelve?”

“Or seventeen, going door to door to get new clothes and blankets for the orphanage,” Aylan grimaced, and Torrant grinned at him as his feet touched the ground.

“That girl can do anything, you know,” he said, and Eljean felt his heart lift to see such an expression of joy on his lover’s face. Suddenly he knew what the saying meant, ‘Love is not jealous or possessive’. He would have given anything, even his one night with Torrant, to see this man look this happy.

“If the memory of her can keep you alive here, then she will have done enough,” Aylan said gruffly.

Torrant had no words for that. He tried a half-smile, but it came out nearly as haunted as his hazel eyes. “Here—let’s look around the property a bit—I’m thinking that we can take the cart around—there’s another branch of the main road that goes around the back. If we unhitch Gracey and lead her, we can get back to it faster.”

Eljean listened to Torrant fill the screaming in his heart with orders and felt a horrible chill. Why was he here?

“Right,” Aylan soothed. “Right.” With that he turned and enlisted Eljean’s help in unhooking the gray and slipping a walking bridle over her head. In moments the wagon was abandoned and the three of them were walking down the overgrown courtyard.

“You can see the remains of the house,” Torrant pointed to his front, where, barely visible beyond the trees was a stone foundation, covered in the wreck of rotting, half burnt wood. “And the barn was over there.” He made a vague gesture to his right, and Aylan stopped, dropped the reins and deliberately turned to him.

“Where, brother? I did not see where you were pointing.”

Torrant didn’t look at him. “There’s nothing salvageable there, Aylan,” he murmured. “Maybe some old rusted pipes or what have you, but nothing you can use to…”

“Ask me if I give a pig’s flying shite, brother,” Aylan replied mildly. “I was asking you to look at the barn.”

“Do I drag you to the Jeweled Lands, brother, and ask you for a guided tour?” Torrant’s voice rose in pitch. Cracked a little. Broke Eljean’s heart.

“No, but if you did, I wouldn’t have a chance in the star’s dark to escape without you poking at my wounds to make sure they were healed. And there’s nobody there that I’d weep for, brother. There’s nobody there I cry out for in my dreams. Now you look at the rubble of that barn and you weep as a grown man for the people you couldn’t weep for as a child, dammit!” Aylan took Torrant’s shoulders in his hands and shook him, turning him against Torrant’s physical resistance, until they scuffled, like the brothers Torrant once had. Torrant was winning, too, grunting, holding back sobs, until Aylan swept out a leg, taking Torrant’s feet out from under him, and he fell to his knees facing what had once been the prettiest barn in Clough.

There was nothing there, not anymore. Most of the trees had burnt down with the barn, and the saplings that had grown in their place weren’t big enough to hide the rubble of the cracked foundation.

There were no bones to be seen, although there was no guarantee that they weren’t there below the accumulated leaf mold of twelve years; Torrant could only be grateful that they weren’t visible now.

“You should have seen it, Aylan.” Torrant’s voice was curiously empty, hollow, as though waiting to be filled with grief. “It was big— the barn itself was almost as big as the stables in Clough. There were stalls, lined up…you can see them, the fire didn’t get them all…” He pointed to a dilapidated line of stalls that wrapped halfway around what had once obviously been a training corral. “We painted it, every two years. White barn, red trim—I think Owen Moon was prouder of that barn than he was of his own house. But not…” A sniff , a wipe of his face, almost absentmindedly, on his shoulder.

“But not what?” Aylan urged, sinking to his knees in the dust to help support Torrant, wrapping an arm around those broad shoulders.

“But not prouder than he was of his own family,” Torrant managed on a whisper. His shoulders were shaking, vibrating with the effort to hold in his grief, and Eljean turned away for a moment, unwilling to watch that much pain.

He cursed himself as a coward, his eyes averted, staring sightlessly at a series of cottages on the far side from the barn. Many of them had collapsed roofs, but not all. There was a large common building with a line of broken-paned windows staring at him, and reflected in the shards of those windows he saw two men, kneeling on what was left of the road, one holding the other in comfort.

And not looking at them couldn’t stop their words from reaching him.

He turned back, in time to hear Torrant say, “Our mothers were raped, and Moon was beheaded, and the twins had fallen defending each other and Ellyot…Ellyot was stabbed in the back, trying to protect me and his baby sister and it wasn’t fair…it wasn’t fair…oh Goddess… Goddess it was so wrong…” And then there were no more words.

And not even Eljean’s cowardice could keep him there, static, watching Aylan bear the burden of his comfort alone.

In a moment he was kneeling in the dust next to them, his arm wrapped around Torrant’s other shoulder, feeling the scalding of his sobs as it filled the overheated space between the three of them.

Like Aylan, he was rubbing Torrant’s back and murmuring sounds of comfort.

Like Aylan, he was weeping in time.

Of course Torrant eventually shook them off , wiped his face, and pulled himself into order. As though he had merely sat down for a moment, he rose to his feet on his own, and then gave them both hands up out of the dirt. “This isn’t what we came for,” he said roughly.

“Isn’t it?” Aylan asked ironically, and his reward was to be hauled into a tight embrace, and then released just as abruptly.

“There’s a swimming hole, down there beyond the barn,” Torrant pointed to where the trees grew smaller to their view and thickened around what was obviously the river. “I say we scope out the buildings, see what wood is salvageable and how many of the workers quarters will be able to be rebuilt, and maybe make some plans for putting a main building up on the least-wrecked foundation, and then gather the wagon and the horses and meet back at the swimming hole.”

He was talking too much. They all knew it. There was nothing to do but go along with the plan.

“Torrant, uhm,” Aylan looked at Eljean, turning circles to get the dust off his backside, and Eljean looked blankly back. Aylan rolled his eyes and sighed in frustration. “Brother, about the outbuildings…how hard is it going to be for you to look into them and see…?”

“They were herded into the common room,” came the flat reply. Eljean looked in surprise to the larger outbuilding, the one with the fractured windowpanes. “Yes, that’s the one,” Torrant affirmed, and then he hesitated, his eyes locking on Aylan’s.

“Brother…if you don’t mind, I’d rather not look in there,” Torrant rasped, and Aylan nodded his head.

“That’s what I was thinking,” he replied, and again, an oblique look at Eljean. “How about I go check out that building, and you two can go look at the stalls?” He turned and rooted around in the saddlebags slung alongside of Torrant’s monstrous, docile stallion. He came out with a scrip of food, a skin of drinking water, and the summer-weight cloak that Torrant had worn that morning but had taken off as they’d ridden. He thrust this odd assortment of things into Torrant’s hands and the lines between his eyes grew deep and his expression became as cranky and ill tempered as Eljean was used to seeing.

Torrant took the armload and squinted at Aylan in complete puzzlement. He made one of those shrugging gestures, the kind that good friends or family could interpret as ‘Wha?’, with an expression on his face to match.

Aylan’s scowl became more pronounced, and he threw it Eljean’s way with so much force that Eljean practically ducked. “Go make some better memories, brother,” Aylan growled, and Eljean almost laughed as a slow, burning flush worked its way up from the back of Torrant’s neck to his throat and over his cheeks.

“You. Are. Such. A. Bloody. Wanker.” Every word was hushed and enunciated, and Aylan’s grin in return almost called the breeze to the windless trees.

“A thing for which you have worshipped me, every day you’ve known me.” Whistling, Aylan took Heartland’s reins and turned towards the outbuildings, mindless of the grisly task before him.

Torrant shook his head, rearranged his burden until the food and water skin were folded inside of the cloak and sighed. He looked over at Eljean and shook his head, then gestured Eljean over with his chin.

“Let’s get going. We’ve got the shorter job—he’ll meet us by the river. Come.”

Eljean fell into stride next to Torrant, surprised, as he often was, by how quickly the shorter man moved. There was quiet for a moment, as they swung a wide arc around the barn, and Torrant looked reluctantly at the rotted husk of the house.

“It was big,” Eljean commented, mostly to breach the thick silence of the hot day.

“It was gracious,” Torrant affirmed. “The family was big—my mother and I lived in spare rooms too.”

“Why not with the workers?” Eljean asked, and Torrant shrugged.

“My mother. She was so…competent. Kles needed help with the three boys and helping Moon run the lands, and my mother was just so good at everything. I think we started out using the rooms like guests, but Owen said that within a week, mom was indispensable—Kles told me once that she didn’t know how they had survived without her.”

Eljean thought that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, but embarrassment kept him silent on that score. “It seems like a nice family,” he said instead, and then was embarrassed by how inane it sounded.

“It was the best.” They were near the stalls now, and Torrant approached one and kicked at the bottom, ‘hmm’-ing when he found that the wood was still sound. With a sense of purpose, he set his burden down and stood on tip-toe, pulling at the top, and knocking at the posts that held the stall in place.

“That’s good, you think?” he asked, and Eljean followed his lead, nodding in the affirmative. One of the boards gave under a pull, but it was simply a matter of rusted nails. “Strong wood—any tree that grows far from the river out here has to have deep roots and a strong trunk.”

Torrant yanked some more, and found that the rusted nails gave way easily. He started to pull, and kick and push and jerk, furiously ripping the stalls apart, one board at a time. Eljean followed his lead for a couple of moments, and then he heard the muffled swearing, the anger, spitting, incoherent, inchoate, anguished.

He turned and watched as Torrant, whirling, working feverishly, bleeding through shredded hands and scrapes on his elbows and knees, single-handedly tackled the line of stalls, ripping, tearing, pounding on the sound and knotty posts with his fists and his feet. Eljean startled and gasped with every squeal of nails, with every cracked board, and he was afraid to jump in, to intervene, to still that whirling body, exploding with the rage and grief of twelve years.

Finally, finally, he watched as Torrant ripped the side of his hand on a wicked nail, and every time he flung that hand at another obstacle the blood flew in shining arcs, glittering in the late summer sun.

And he could take no more.

He was taller, he figured with a gulp. He had reach. Tentatively he moved behind the frightful emotional dervish. Torrant swung an elbow back that caught him in the midriff , and although he lost his breath, he realized that it didn’t kill him, and he moved in stronger this next time. With a heave, he wrapped his long arms around Torrant’s shoulders, stopping that frantic thrash of movement, closing his eyes and holding tight until the straining muscles stilled against his chest, all of that strength coiling in on itself until there was only the two of them, breathing in the dust of the high sun.

An ominous, low growl vibrated from Torrant’s chest.

“Oh gods, am I about to be dinner?” Eljean wondered out loud, trying not to panic.

“You will be if you don’t move,” Torrant graveled politely, and the intimacy of the position suddenly hit Eljean and he released Torrant so quickly they both stumbled.

Torrant breathed deeply, and wiped his forehead on his shoulder, looking at the pile of weathered lumber he’d hurled at his feet. “That’s a good start,” he rasped, “but I think the rest of the job will have to wait.” His voice sounded, for all the world as though his grip on his self-possession had never splintered like the pile of wood at his feet.

“Right,” Eljean breathed, for lack of anything better to say. “Absolutely.”

Torrant strode forward then and picked up the bundle of food and cloak, and kept walking towards the river. Eljean trotted to keep up with him, eventually finding himself wading through a narrow path that wound through blackberry bushes to open up on a sandy beach, where the river had carved a divot in the ribbon of its course, and eddied in to take a break under the shade of the broad-leafed trees at the edge.

“The blackberry bushes used to be cut back to there,” Torrant gestured to the ends of the ‘C’ that made up the little cove, “but I guess after twelve years, they’re going to want to take over.”

Torrant spread the cloak then, up under the trees, where the grasses started to thin with the sand of the beach, and threw the scrip and water skin on top. Without a word, he stripped off his sweaty, dusty shirt, and took it to the river, swishing it in the water and using it to wipe down his face and his neck and his chest. Eljean heard him suck air in through his teeth when the water shocked his open cuts, but other than that, and the sound of the river heaving its way through the weighty yellow of late summer, there wasn’t another sound.

“I’m sorry,” Torrant said clearly into that heavy quiet.

“For what?” Eljean asked. He was filling his eyes with that broad back, the lumps of the vertebrae under the scarred skin looking fragile and sturdy at once. He was pale from all of his time in the Hall, but not too long ago he’d been tan. The scars stood out against his skin, pink and vicious, and a wave of empathy and desire washed over Eljean, leaving his knees weak and his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth.

“I didn’t bring you here to see me disintegrate like some pathetic child,” Torrant snapped, his anger so obviously self-directed that Eljean flinched.

“You’re entitled,” Eljean muttered, from a dry mouth. He watched as Torrant used his wet shirt to wipe himself down again, sponging off his neck and, unconsciously, sighing a little as his body cooled.

“Well, I’m still sorry,” Torrant said again, shaking his shirt out and rinsing it again. “It’s not why you’re here.” He stood then and turned around, patently looking for a place to hang it up. His lips turned up a little, in a self-deprecating way, when he saw that the best place was a branch right by Eljean’s head.

“Well, why am I here?” Eljean asked, trying hard not to stare obviously at the muscular chest. There was so little of softness left of Torrant’s body anymore, Eljean realized with a hard swallow. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t a terrible beauty to his leanness, to his scars, to his strength.

Again, the self-deprecating curl to the lips. Torrant was near enough now, hanging up his shirt, that Eljean could feel the coolness of the water on his skin, and the heat of the heart-coursing blood underneath. He smelled like horse, and dust, and river. He smelled like strength, and all Eljean knew of desire was roused with that scent. He fought the urge to bury his face in Torrant’s neck and simply inhale. But Torrant wouldn’t look at him, fixing his eyes instead on the bright gold shirt, tugging at it until it was hanging perfectly on the branch.

“A gift,” Torrant said into the thickened quiet. He’d turned his head a little. His breath, when he spoke, dusted the fabric at Eljean’s shoulder.

“Angh?” It was as coherent as Eljean was going to get. He was tall enough, and high up enough on the slope of the beach, to see the top of Ell…Torrant’s head. He wanted to stroke the dark brown hair back from the lean-featured face, and see the lip curl in a shy smile. He wanted…oh, he so simply wanted.

“I wanted to give you…you tried to give me solace, Eljean. You tried to give me haven. I just wanted to give you something… give you what you wanted to give me. That’s all.”

Oh gods…he was so close. Eljean’s heart bumped painfully in his throat, and he needed to see Elly…Torrant’s eyes, to know what was in them, to know for certain if this hot, still afternoon was going to be what he had longed for.

When he spoke, what came out of his mouth was thoroughly unexpected.

“Aylan said you like to lead,” he mumbled.

Ah, that did it—there were those hazel eyes, looking up into his face and the devastating half-smile, exposing the grooves around Torrant’s lean mouth. “I do,” he answered wickedly. “It’s all I know.”

“I’m…” Torrant moved closer. The space between their bodies was a matter of inches, and that lean chest was his for the touching. Eljean swallowed, and looked in curiosity as own hand came up and splayed across the center of the scarred masterpiece that was Torrant’s body. He could feel the heartbeat beneath his palm, and it wasn’t steady.

“I’m afraid of pain,” Eljean admitted rawly, his hand stroking, remembering the electricity of the sleek skin, raised scars and all.

Torrant met Eljean’s eyes deliberately and moved closer, placing his nose delicately in the hollow of Eljean’s neck and breathing in, bumping his nose along the tenderness of Eljean’s throat. “The pain is worth it,” he murmured. An evil little tongue came out and touched the corner of Torrant’s mouth. “The pain makes the rest exquisite.”

Eljean’s breath caught, and Torrant turned those wicked eyes on him fully. Without meaning to, Eljean closed his own eyes, and felt that wonderful, battered, strong chest move under his fingers as Torrant leaned forward, using his breath to trace the narrow line of Eljean’s jaw, leaning into the hollow of neck and hair to place soft lips against Eljean’s throat.

Eljean tilted his head back, allowed Torrant’s sweet mouth to move against his throat some more, and groaned.

Torrant took the opportunity to press the line of his body against Eljean’s, and Eljean let the tree support his weight as he realized that Torrant’s lips were the only soft thing about him.

“Once,” Torrant whispered against his ear, the breath making Eljean’s arousal dark and smoky. “Once for you, what you tried to give me. Once where there is only Eljean and Torrant, and no Ellyot and no Zhane. Today. Will you accept my gift, Eljean?”

All his life, he had been such a coward. Now he groaned, and tried to answer, and could find no words. Instead he kissed down Torrant’s neck, traded positions, kissed down Torrant’s scarred, perfect chest, his hardened abdomen, knotted with muscle. He fell to his knees and pulled the cotton breeches over Torrant’s lean hips, leaving him naked in flesh as Eljean felt in spirit. He moved to resume his acceptance, to kiss the fullness that had pooled under the breeches, when he felt strong fingers in his hair, and he looked up to see Torrant, his hazel eyes intense and dark with desire.

“What’s my name, Eljean…” he whispered hoarsely. “Say my name. Say you accept this from me.”

“Torrant,” Eljean murmured against his swollen flesh. “Torrant Shadow, I’ll take any gift you wish to give.”

And then his mouth opened and Torrant groaned, giving him desire and flesh and sex and Eljean swallowed it down.

Torrant led. Eljean let him.

There was a little pain, enough, but then there was only the giving and the taking and the sweetness of the day.

Torrant sat cross-legged on the edge of the beach, dressed in his breeches alone. He had scraped a pile of pebbles to his side, like a child, and was pensively pitching them into the still river, seeing how many times he could skip the stones across the stilled eddies of water.

He looked over his shoulder and saw Eljean sleeping, parts of him draped strategically under the folds of the cloak, his head resting on an outflung arm. He was facing the blackberry bushes, and the curly darkness of his hair seemed to take over his sleeping form.

Who am I?

Torrant had asked the question again, his arms locked around Eljean’s chest, as the laughter from the frantic climax of their lovemaking still hung in the air.

Who am I?

Elly…Torrant.

Torrant had laughed a little, and dropped a kiss on Eljean’s temple to let him know he held no grudges. They stayed that way, still coupled, listening to the rippling silence of the afternoon, slick and panting, until Eljean slid into the sudden sleep of the truly sated.

Elly…

Ellyot.

It was to be expected, Torrant mused darkly. His brother’s name practically dripped from the trees, liked the rotting remains of the rope swing hanging from a branch upstream.

Torrant himself could see the shadows of his family as they had played every warm summer evening, and even some chilly fall ones, bathing and chatting and loving each other in the coolness of this little spot.

The game with the rope swing had been a rite of passage of sorts. Moon would watch the child swim upstream while he was waiting downstream, to make sure the swimmer could fight the current and win, and then he would gravely give the all-clear. The boys (Yarri had been the only girl) would swing the rope up stream, letting go at the highest arc, and catch the current downstream, swimming until they caught the eddy that took them into the family swimming cove, safe on the sandbar along the blackberry bushes.

That last summer, Yarri, who could now safely paddle from adult to adult in deeper water, defied her father. Defiance didn’t happen often, but when it did, it was Yarri who did it—and this time she snuck on the swing while the rest of the family was playing.

Torrant and Ellyot had ploughed through the water as Yarri had bobbed down past the cove, swimming furiously and absolutely refusing to panic.

Torrant panicked enough for all of them. His body was burly with muscle, and he swam strongly but not quickly, plowing through the water like a draught horse, and he fought the current and watched helplessly as she was swept beyond them all.

Ellyot could swim like a dolphin, even though he hadn’t lived to see what one was.

Ellyot cut sleekly through the water as Torrant charged against it, and when Ellyot caught her, they all washed up against the sharp and rocky shore that lay downstream, clinging to each other and sobbing for breath.

When they could finally stand and finally speak, Ellyot had been disgusted enough with his foolhardy little sister to stand up and wash his hands of her.

Next time you try to kill yourself, Littlest, make sure you do it where Torrant can catch you. It’s what he does best, after all.

And now Torrant was two hard weeks of riding away from seeing her at all, and he could only hope she could swim through the rocky waters of a world that Rath was forging out of his own hatred.

And he was treading water, trying to keep his face above water.

He looked back over his shoulder, saw Eljean’s narrow, pale body, covered by a dusty cloak, a trickle of damp down the back of his thigh.

Failing, he thought hollowly. He was failing. He was drowning. That sleeping figure was really the rushing river, closing over his head.

Elly…

In the distance he could hear Aylan clumping through the blackberry bushes, swearing loudly enough to change the river’s course. Torrant smiled. Aylan was being loud on purpose—all the better to let two lovers know they were about to be interrupted. With effortless weariness, he sent a course of will towards Eljean, that he sleep as, in truth, Eljean needed to.

Torrant so badly needed to talk to Aylan.

Aylan looked a little worse for the wear as he sat down on the hill and pulled off his gloves, boots, and shirt. His gloves looked as though he’d had his own fight with semi-rotted wood, and the leather cloak in his arms looked as though he and the blackberry bushes had exchanged more than words. He looked over at Eljean, still sleeping, and frowned a bit. He pointed to Torrant and Torrant nodded.

“I spelled him,” he murmured, choosing another pebble and skipping it nearly halfway across the river before the current took it. “Thanks for wearing the cloak,” he said dryly as Aylan moved barefooted across the sand and crouched down next to him.

“My sweaty chafing pleasure. Are we not swimming naked? Because frankly, my breeches will rub me raw if I get them wet.” He nodded at Torrant in his underthings, just above the water’s reach.

“I didn’t want to swim, I wanted to sit,” Torrant said mildly. “There are places you don’t want sand, right?”

“Absolutely,” Aylan nodded. “Now do you mind if I swim before we talk, or does that git’s nap have an expiration time?”

“I’ll swim with you, if you stop calling him a git.”

They both stood and stripped off their breeches, and Torrant didn’t miss Aylan’s surreptitious look to count the scars since the last time he’d been able to sneak a peek in.

“Did you do enough damage with that glass, mate?” Aylan snapped at last. “Was there another nick you could have given yourself? Inscribed Yarri’s initials on the back of your thigh or something?”

“Well, I was trying for a love poem to you, but your charming temper managed to bugger it up,” Torrant shot back amiably. He himself was open in his admiration of Aylan’s flawless body. His chest and back were tanned from working in the sun, but his backside and legs were pale. Every line of him was refined, marble perfection, masculine and lovely.

Aylan caught him looking and gave him a sly glance. “Taking notes?” He asked with a nod at Eljean’s sleeping form. “Comparing?”

Torrant didn’t need to flush. “There is no comparison. There never has been.”

And now Aylan looked away and flushed. Without answering, he grinned shyly and dove into the water, followed by Torrant.

Instinctively, Torrant swam upstream, heaving his body through the weaker current near the shore, kicking off from the larger stones at the river’s bottom, working, exerting, enjoying the push, until he got to the place they used to land from the rope swing, where he pushed out into the center of the river. He whooped as the river took him, carrying his weight with exhilarating swiftness, until the he caught the back-eddy into the pool.

He came back laughing, exultant, smiling like a little boy, and Aylan, who had watched him with bemusement laughed back for a moment, and then he could no longer mask the pang of sadness that clenched his chest.

“What?” Torrant asked.

“Nothing…” Aylan shook his head, spattering water from his curly hair.

“No…what? We don’t get to do that…not here. Not when we’re the only two people in the world we can talk to.” Torrant grinned and positioned his hands for maximum splashing effect. “Talk or you’ll be snorting water out your nose for a week!”

Aylan grinned back, and got ready to duck. “I just miss that damned smile, you pretty wank. I used to love it when you’d flash it when things seemed their worst…”

Torrant refused to sober, and grinned instead. “Well, things are looking pretty dire for you, mate…I’m betting you’ve forgotten how to defend yourself!”

Their skirmish was swift and furious and ended with Aylan using his height shamelessly, anchoring his feet on the bottom where Torrant couldn’t touch, and wrapping his arms around his friend to haul him down for a sound ducking. They came back up from the bottom laughing, Aylan’s arms still wrapped unselfconsciously around Torrant’s shoulders. Torrant leaned against him and floated, for this particular sunlit, sparkling moment, very content to let someone else bear his weight.

“Mmmm…nice,” Aylan murmured against his ear. They stayed that way, absorbing the peace for a moment, and then they both sighed in tandem. The sun was slanting westward, and it wouldn’t be fair to let Eljean sleep past time to swim comfortably.

“It was bad, then, in the common room?” Torrant asked lowly, leaning his head back against Aylan’s shoulder.

“It was bad, brother. I imagine it was worse when it just happened.”

“mmm…” Torrant snuggled unconsciously into his friend’s embrace. “I remember the night Starry was born…I’d helped, you know, with those children, when they were born. I’d held all of them, when they first came into the world, and there was Starren, red and wriggling…and surprisingly peaceful, for a newborn, if you can believe that.”

“I can,” Aylan said mildly, pleased to hear it anyway.

“And all I saw in my heart were those six children I’d helped bring into life, and then the only one who was still alive…”

“Was Yarri.”

“Was Yarri. And I made this vow, you know, to keep Starren safe, to keep this family safe, like I couldn’t keep my family safe here.”

Aylan tilted his face back to the sun for an excuse to close his eyes. “Ah, brother, you break my heart,” he murmured.

“Well you save mine,” Torrant murmured back. And then, almost brokenly, “Why couldn’t we, again?”

“Wha?”

“Why couldn’t we be lovers?” Oh, his voice was so hurt. “You spent eight years chasing me…I know you realized we’d be better off as friends, and believe me I was relieved. The last thing I wanted to do was hurt you every time you saw me and Yarri together, but just…just here. Where the world is upside down. Why couldn’t it be us?”

Aylan closed his eyes against the glare from the water, nuzzled Torrant’s temple, wondering if his brother realized he had let his white streak of magic show. “I had a reason,” he murmured. “When we got here, and I saw that terrible gift you’d made me…I had a reason. It was supposed to protect me, right? To keep me from always worrying, from being consumed by you…but now?”

“What now?” The hurt was lifting a little.

“Now, I’m still consumed. I’d become drunk on the Moon family, secure in our numbers. You’re my only family here, and I’m terrified for you, all the time. I wish we could spend our nights together, just so I know you are safe. And it has nothing to do with the love I feel for Starry, and very little to do with what I felt for you in school. I just…I want to keep you safe, that’s all.”

Torrant laughed a little, humorlessly. “Oh, brother, I wish you’d have let me know before last week.”

“What happened today?” Aylan asked soberly.

“He called me ‘Ellyot’,” Torrant murmured, embarrassed.

“The wanking git,” Aylan murmured in comfort, and his heart eased, just a little, when Torrant laughed.

“Is it time to wake him up?” Torrant said reluctantly, and he knew the answer anyway and turned in Aylan’s arms, surprising him with a kiss, an embrace, twined legs warm under the cool river water. Aylan’s mouth opened, and Torrant tasted river water, coolness, and the strength had always been a part of his friend. He groaned, wanting more, taking everything his friend could give, his family, the one person he loved whom he could touch, could protect, could claim.

Aylan gasped as Torrant pulled away, and both of them knew what their bodies were doing where the water was touching them.

“What was that for?” he asked, strained.

“That was for making me see this through.” Torrant looked up to shore and released his will.

“Oi, Eljean!” he called. “Are you going to sleep all day, or did you want to rinse off a little?”

Eljean shook his head and began to push himself awake like a surprised puppy, and Torrant and Aylan moved away from each other, careful not to touch like that again where Eljean could see.

Terrorism

The rest of the trip home was even more sobering than the visit to Torrant’s past.

The journey itself had been pleasant. The heat and the scorching sun hadn’t abated, but Torrant and Aylan chatted, entertaining Eljean with their talk of school, of family, and of Trieste and their time at Triannon. Eljean had never heard them speak of Trieste—but the affection in their voice sounded almost brotherly, and he enjoyed the idea of them, running around school, being young and carefree and interested in things that didn’t hurt.

But then they rode to the hills to the west of the city, and even as they stretched their legs for the walk around the base of the very new building, Eljean could tell that Torrant and Aylan saw something that truly disturbed them.

“I don’t understand this plan at all,” Eljean said, standing in the middle of the construction. “It looks like a waiting room and a suite,” he murmured, toeing the middle of the foundation, looking at what was planned to be an enormous building, with differences in foundation and materials from the outside to the inside.

“But the waiting room has concrete for a foundation, and the suite…”

Torrant and Aylan kicked around the granite that had been carved out of a local quarry. It was cut and set seamlessly, set apart from the concrete by several starting rows of cinderblocks, again, set seamlessly.

At the ‘back’ of the interior room was the beginning of a giant chimney.

Eljean squinted at Torrant and Aylan. “It looks like a kiln, doesn’t it?”

He watched as both of them swallowed, hard enough to work their throats.

“Don’t do it, brother,” Aylan said hollowly. “Don’t do it. You haven’t eaten enough in the last two days to sustain a mouse.”

“Don’t do what?” Eljean asked, non-plussed.

“Oh Goddess,” Torrant whispered, white-faced and drawn. “Sweet Triane’s tears, he’s right, it is a kiln.”

“Don’t do it,” Aylan begged, knowing that if Torrant lost his breakfast, then he would follow.

“Why build a kiln this far out of the city—and build it this big? What are they going to cook in it?” Eljean asked, still completely puzzled.

But Aylan looked away, unable to meet his eyes.

“Torrant?” he asked, looking at the size of the building up in the pleasant green foothills. He couldn’t seem to see what his two companions thought was so awful.

“What are they going to cook in it?” Torrant echoed, as though from far away.

“Yes…what would you cook in something this big?”

“People. Lots and lots of people.” And with that Torrant ran to the grass outside the building and bent over, retching and hurling, and as Eljean looked at Aylan to beg him to deny it, Aylan ran over to join his brother, getting sick in the long deep grass beyond the abomination that was Rath’s new project for the Goddess’ chosen people.

“What are we going to do about that?” Aylan asked later, as the buckboard jounced along the uneven path that went from the city gates to the ‘re-education camp’.

It was the first thing any of them had said after all three of them had sicked up in the tall grass. They rinsed their mouths and spat, and then mounted up and ridden away as quickly as possible.

“You know,” Torrant murmured after a moment, “three years after Yarri and I came over Hammer Pass, Rath blew the switchback trail that led up to the mountain with sulfur and saltpeter.”

“I remember that,” Eljean said in surprise. “He blamed the Goddess’ people.”

“Well, the survivors saw Rath’s livery, so I’m assuming he was lying,” Torrant told him sardonically. “But I’m also thinking that we may take a page from his book.”

“That’s a lot of explosive,” Aylan cautioned, clucking to the horses to slow down. They were too close to the city to shout this conversation over the squeaks of the cart. “It may take a week or two to gather that much…we’d have to do it from different places…have maybe Torrell or some of the others with that sort of gift put it together.”

“Let’s make it an even month, brother. From what I could see, they won’t finish that…” he spat, “that thing before the snows fall. But I don’t want to give them time to rebuild before the snows, if you know what I mean.”

“I do,” Aylan agreed. They’d had a year, to either change Clough or kill Rath—that had been the promise they’d made. By next spring, the remainder of the Goddess’ people in Clough needed to be out of Rath’s clutches, and Rath needed to be either dead or deposed. They needed to destroy that thing when there was no potential to have it spring up again like a diseased mushroom, grown in gore.

“Wait,” Eljean stopped for a moment, looking as though something had just dawned on him. “Isn’t that treason? Isn’t that terrorism? Are you really asking me to be a part of that?”

Torrant and Aylan met grim eyes over Eljean’s head, and Torrant brought Heartland just a little closer to the cart, the better to lock eyes with a nervous Eljean and let a very placid Heartland navigate himself.

“Eljean,” Torrant murmured, “I’m going to ask you this once. And after that, I need you to remember your answer—or not—depending on what you decide.”

“No,” Eljean mumbled.

“I’m sorry?” Torrant asked, confused.

“No. No, you don’t have to erase my memory. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I spoke up that way. I am. I’m trying every day to be braver…I swear I am…” he was babbling, like a silly child, and about to burst into tears.

“It’s fine, Eljean,” Torrant said gently, “I just…I don’t want you involved in anything you don’t want to be. We grew careless, speaking that way in front of you…I don’t want our…” he grimaced, “our intimacy to force you to do anything against your morals, that’s all.”

“My only morals to date have been the ones that saved my skin,” Eljean said baldly. He looked away, watched Heartland’s graceful, lazy canter and then looked up the beautiful shiny bay coat to see the man who rode him, finally, finally, meeting Torrant’s eyes.

“I would do anything to save the memory of the last two days,” he said at last, unmindful of Aylan. “I would commit treason, become a terrorist…whatever I needed to do, to not be ignorant again.”

If he’d thought this declaration would make Torrant happy, he was disappointed. The expression on that lean, handsome face was almost haunted.

“You may regret it, Eljean, but you’re grown. I’ll treat you like it. Don’t worry—we won’t tell you the details. You can be as surprised as anyone else, if you like.”

Eljean grinned crookedly, his narrow face looking like a shy child’s. “That would probably be best,” he said, and Torrant winked at him as they rode on.

Six year old Djali, Aylan’s youngest, started to move in on his beloved Uncle Torrant as the part about Moon Hold faded away. He dragged Triana, Ellyot’s oldest daughter ( Torrant’s oldest grandchild) with him, and in spite of her rumbly tummy, Triana went.

This was the part where their names were mentioned. They liked this part—a lot.

Torrant looked at both of them and smiled, and he and Aylan met eyes over their heads. Yarri, seated a little behind him, snuck a hand out to the small of his back and rubbed with gruff comfort.

If only, if only…

Part VIII—The Sacrificing Moon

A Dizzying Fall

Aerk and Keon were waiting for them inside the shadow of the smaller city gate as they rode up.

A group of guardsmen, led by Dimitri, had charged their way into The Amber Goose in the blue of the morning before the curfew bell rang. They had left with Triana, half-awake and terrified, dressed only in one of Djali’s old shirts, which she had slept in.

“Djali ploughed into our flat, terrified,” Keon burst out, after Torrant hauled Aerk behind him on Heartland and Keon had boarded the cart, “and we couldn’t think of a damned thing to do—we told him to wait for you, but the minute curfew rang, he was out of the flat like a shot. I think he went to see the Consort…but…”

“Oh gods…” Torrant muttered, his mind working furiously. “Holy gods, merciful Goddess…” His hands were shaking and he had to fight the wave of blackness and nausea that swept over him. The thought of Triana, innocent, timid Triana, facing Rath by herself…and Djali, confronting his father without his friends…sweet Dueant, violated Oueant, holy Triane…

“Aylan, take the horses as soon as we get to the Regent’s square, right?”

“What are you going to do?” Aylan asked, alarmed.

“I’m going to go knock on Rath’s door and ask for our friend’s sweetheart back—can you think of anything else to do?” His voice pitched and cracked cracked, on the word ‘sweetheart’, all of his worst fears encased in the idea of Rath holding someone he loved hostage, knowing how that situation must end.

“Not a damned thing,” Aylan muttered. “Oh gods…”

They were all deadly silent, picking their way through the heavy traffic after curfew with white-knuckled care and all possible speed, but Torrant made them pull up and dismount before they were within a block of the regent’s square.

“Go, brother,” he murmured to Aylan. “I’ll meet you at the Goose as soon as I can…”

“I’ll come back…”

“Don’t. You take too many chances near the regents as it is.” They had never really discussed with the other regents why Aylan wasn’t open with his presence at the regents square. Three years before, Aylan had been involved in a sexual scandal in the heart of Dueance—one that had ended in the suicide of two friends he’d held so very dear. Neither of them had wanted to dredge up memories, or expose Aylan to the risk of being recognized—and crucified—but right now, as Torrant saw his friends, his pawns, in their terrible danger, it was foremost on his mind.

“Stay out of trouble,” Torrant said now, trying to be a disciplined leader instead of a panicky friend. “Go to safety, I’ll be there when I can.”

As he spoke, the last lance of sun stabbed past the walls of the city and the lot of them headed from the main city street to the regent’s square, and towards the Consort’s palace.

“What are we going to do—just knock?” Aerk asked nervously, and Torrant dodged past an important looking woman with bleached hair and dark skin who gave him and the others a narrow, disgusted look as they passed.

“You are,” Torrant muttered, thinking as he went. The front of the palace was looming—larger than the Regent’s Hall, taller than the flats across the way. It was built of marble and granite, all in square lines and bulky, imposing blocks. Sneak in? Yes, Torrant could do that. Knock down the front? He could see how it would be daunting—but his friends were game for anything and he wouldn’t hold them back.

“You and Keon are going to go knocking on the door, asking to see the Consort, asking to see Djali—whatever. You’re both in good standing, you both have the right to be there…do what you can to get inside that place, and maybe talk Djali out of attacking his father with a mace and a rusty sword while you’re at it.”

“And you and Eljean?” Aerk asked, looking at Eljean doubtfully.

“Where are Marv and Jino?” Torrant asked, thinking, thinking, but never fast enough.

“Probably looking for us…”

“Eljean—I need you to go get them. Bring them back to the stairs before the palace. Djali is going to need back-up, whatever the outcome…”

“And you?” Keon asked, curious.

“I’m going to be doing what Rath fears most…” Torrant muttered. “I’m going to be using my gifts on the very walls of his palace.”

“No!” Eljean looked at him, panicked.

“No what?” Torrant snapped, looking up from his planning daze.

Eljean looked furtively at Aerk and Keon and Torrant shrugged him off . “They can be repulsed by my monster some other time,” he snapped. “Do you think I’m going to risk Djali or Triana when the snow cat can save them?”

They were up the stairs now and in the shadows of the giant columns and the stone canopy, meant to shade speakers and to help the acoustics from the palace steps. The combination of the shade and sunset made the night air chill. There was no business at the palace this evening, and all of the guards stood at the foyer on the inside, so the wide stage of the entrance was all but deserted. Torrant stood stock still in the shadows of the palace and gazed up the side of the building. There were ledges, windows, and balconies, all of them very square, very gray, and very balanced, to go with the columns and arches and clean lines of the palace itself. The balconies were far apart—but not too far for the snow cat.

He aimed a glance to the side, where a tall stone wall partially separated the palace from the Regent’s Hall, which sat perpendicular. The wall was a good ten feet shorter than the stone canopy over their heads and there was a smaller gap—about the length of a medium sized human—between the canopy and the side of the palace proper. To a snow-cat’s eye, the whole works looked like a personal staircase to the palace balconies. The buildings were designed to form three sides of a square, with the public road pouring into the courtyard making up the fourth side, and the palace, sitting across from the regent’s flats, was the secondary building. The architecture meant that while they could easily scope out the palace, the shade of the columns, the canopy, and the columns themselves worked to shield the young men from view of the quad as they gazed up at it, trying to reason some hope from the cold-prickled terror that walked their skin.

“I can climb that,” Torrant murmured to himself.

“You’ll scare Triana silly,” Eljean said desperately, looking furtively at Aerk and Keon.

“Triana knows,” Torrant told him absently, very aware that Aerk and Keon were looking avidly at him, wondering what they were talking about. “Triana has been raised around magic her entire life… do you think Olek’s food and ale comes from the substandard supplies allowed in the ghetto alone?”

He gazed up the side again, and then squinted, swearing. Without a word he ran down the stairs and looked back up at the same spot. “Buggering-git-wanking-arse-shite-crapping-motherless-pig-goat-slug!” he burst out, and the others followed him down.

Aerk sat abruptly in the middle of the courtyard. “Oueant’s slit vein…Ellyot—what are we going to do?”

Triana didn’t know how to write—at least not well. It had been illegal to teach the Goddess’ children letters and numbers from the moment they’d been herded into the ghettoes. But there could be no doubt as to what the symbol, the large circle looming over the intersecting smaller circles, would mean. It was the Goddess moon, and it was inscribed on the glass pane of the balcony window in blood.

“In the shade,” Torrant said hoarsely. “If this works, I’d like to keep my head and my place on the floor, thank you very much.”

They scrambled back up to the relative protection of the stone canopy and the columned arches, and Torrant ran behind the arch to the right, the one closest to the stone wall and the stone canopy above their heads.

He spared some attention for the two very puzzled men staring at him, and gave them a game smile.

“Gentlemen, if what you’re about to see makes you want to change sides, do me a favor—wait until Triana and Djali are safe, could you?” He waited for their wide-eyed nods, and then abruptly turned into the snow cat as their jaws dropped to their feet.

They all watched in awe and fear as the giant predator made its way to the stone wall, making the leap to the top in one bound. Another bound, and it was above their heads, on the stone canopy. Before they could run to the gap between the canopy and the palace wall to see what their compatriot was doing, there was a ruckus from the great double doors. They jumped, their hearts thundering in their chests and Djali was spilled out at their feet by a pair of gloating guardsmen.

Djali was pounding on the great oaken doors, splitting his hands against the bolts that held them together and screaming Triana’s name, before the echo of their closing had faded from the courtyard.

“Djali!” Aerk barked, and between him and Keon, they managed to pull their desperate friend back into the shade of the column, and as one, the young men were gathered there, facing the wall, when Torrant made his first leap.

“Holy gods!” Djali breathed, just as Marv and Jino ran up breathlessly behind them, tired of being trapped in the rooms. They too raised their faces to the dark-gray face of stone, and they swore under their breath as they saw the terrible cry for help, written in blood, and the creature who was, without a doubt, Triane’s Son, bounding upwards, balcony by outcropping by ledge.

“Is that…?” Marv asked, and this time Eljean kicked his shin before he could let out the name that might damn them all.

Instead of protesting, Marv turned eloquent eyes towards all of his friends. Aerk gulped, and nodded, and they resumed their staring.

Night had fallen in the time it had taken for them to gather in the quad and watch the snow cat’s ascent, and only the last violet vestiges of twilight remained in west to speak of daylight.

When the blood-stained glass door burst open, Djali’s pale shirt could be clearly seen, fluttering around Triana’s slender body as she flew back against the stone railing of the balcony, screaming epithets at the people inside the room. Her sun-and-strawberry-colored hair was loose around her hips, and she looked both fragile and terrifying. For a moment, there was hope, just a spark of hope, that Torrant’s leaping figure would get to her before whoever was in that room had a chance to hurt her.

“Oh gods,” Djali groaned, and then screamed her name again.

“What’s wrong?” Keon demanded. “What are they going to do?”

“He was deranged!” Djali couldn’t keep his eyes from his beloved on the balcony, screaming until her voice cracked, until the echo itself cracked, smashing around the walls of the indifferent square. “He told me that I would see how dirty she was, a Goddess’ girl…and I tried to tell him…” Djali was openly weeping now, “I tried to tell him that she was innocent…so innocent…and kind. But he said he would have his guards show me what she really was…”

“TRIANA!!!” he bellowed, his own thunder drowning hers out for a moment. “TRIANA!”

She turned towards the sound and even from the four-story distance, they could see her pale face, her brave smile. She smiled even as she caught sight of Triane’s Son, heading her way, and even, they all imagined later, as she scrambled to her feet on the balcony ledge.

Aylan, who had ignored Torrant’s edict to stay away, could have told them that she was trying to climb the balcony to escape. He would have given much of his soul to tell her that she needed to hold onto the ledge and swing. She would have made it, he thought sickly, watching her teeter there, preparing herself to jump to the nearest balcony, where Triane’s Son was heading.

“Oh gods…”

She ran lightly, her steps sure and faithful that the slender ledge would be under each foot as it landed, and even Aylan thought for a moment that she would make it…

Until a bulky figure, in black and teal livery, burst through the doors after her and hurled its weight clumsily at the gracefully running figure. Triana’s foot slipped, and like a hobbled bird, thinking it could fly, she dove off of the balcony and fell to the ground, bouncing against the edge of the stone canopy first in a spray of blood, her white shirt fluttering around her wheeling body like wings.

Torrant’s roar of agony could be heard all the way to the ghettoes, and Djali’s scream alone brought regents and guards outside to see what had befallen.

All eyes were on the still, broken body, and Aerk and Keon numbly let go of Djali as he ran to his beloved, screaming her name.

Aylan was the only one who looked up in time to watch the snow cat take a foolhardy leap from the balcony he was on to the canopy, and he heard the howl of pain as a fluid shoulder snapped under the unthinkable pressure…The bone thrust jaggedly through the flesh and the fur, and Aylan fought his own nausea at the thought of that much pain. He watched then, mindless of his own weeping, as his brother rolled off the roof of the canopy, changing in midair to pour shakily onto the ground by Triana’s broken body, sobbing in agony and denial.

Only the other regents saw him land, and Aerk and Keon saw the ripped clothes, where the bone had shredded flesh and cloth when he’d broken it, and they helped to support him, mindless of the wet blood that came from his clothes as they huddled around Triana’s body and mourned.

“Oh Djali,” Torrant moaned, working hard to support his own weight and see through the blackness in front of his eyes.

Djali turned a frighteningly calm face towards him.

“You tried to warn me,” he whispered. “You tried to tell me, it wasn’t safe. You knew…you tried to tell me…”

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t here…” Torrant all but sobbed…oh, Goddess…he had to move…he had to stand…he had to do something because the pain…it was his whole body, it was his snapped and healed arm, it was his heart, it was his soul.

“I should have listened,” Djali said simply. “Oh…oh beloved…” He knelt by her then, his knees sinking into the blood puddle that leaked from her skull, and touched her still-warm flesh with a trembling hand, closing the sightless blue eyes. There was a shout then, from the great, implacable open door, and guards came streaming out.

Torrant whirled towards them, and the other regents followed, making a wall between the guards and the body.

“You will NOT touch her!” he cried, his teeth bared and Goddess-blue lightning sparking in his eyes. “We will take her to her family, but you will NOT touch her!”

He risked a glance behind him and saw that Marv had unhooked his cloak, and he, Jino, and Keon were gently moving that terribly liquid body onto the cloak. Aerk turned to help them, and Eljean took an end, and the five of them bore the body away from the profanity of the palace, knowing that Ellyot Moon wouldn’t let the guards assail them.

He also saw the regents and guards that had streamed into the courtyard with Djali’s terrible scream, and who now parted reluctantly for the spectacle of the grim parade. Hundreds of people, watching, delighted by the uproar, no matter how grim, many of them appalled by what their leader had wrought. Hundreds of people who had come to see a death, but only the eight of them there to prevent it.

Torrant looked around at his friends, and knew another swollen river rush of panic.

Seven of them. There were only seven of them in the courtyard. Djali was nowhere to be seen.

Djali Hearth, Child of Joy

Even though nobody in the square wanted to be associated with the young regents carrying the body from the square, everybody wanted to see them—that is the nature of gossip. It took some time for the regents to make their way, bearing their grisly and precious burden with them.

Torrant stood at their backs for a few steps, glaring at Rath as he backed up in their wake.

“This is your fault, Consort,” he snarled. He raised his voice then, pitching it to anyone who was listening. “Is this who you want to lead you? A man who would abduct a girl from her family, and let his guardsmen try to use her like…like…” Oh, he couldn’t finish that sentence. She must have been so desperate to clamber up onto that ledge and patter towards that leap of faith.

He shook his head, barely cognizant that Rath was white-faced, with nothing to say in his own defense. “Your son loved this girl, Consort. Djali Hearth loved Triana Amberlight—and if you think he will ever follow you again, you are as blind as you are cruel.”

With that, Torrant turned on his heel, catching up with the others and shoving through the crowd to get in front of them, cutting through people with the strength of his grief and his anger and the force of his fury alone.

They cleared the square and turned towards the back of the regent’s apartments automatically when he stopped them, his voice clogged and fighting for clarity.

“You need to take…you need to take her the other way, brothers,” he choked. “We can’t climb the fence with her—not like this.”

Marv made a little moan in his throat, and the other men looked at the covered figure, leaking blood through the cloak. Aylan came up behind them, from the shadows, his voice as rough as Torrant’s.

“If one of you can go to the stables and get T…Ellyot’s cart—it will…it will spare us all something,” he murmured, and numbly, the other young men set the body down in the shadows, huddling over it protectively because it was all they could offer. Torrant thought distantly that Aylan must have been so very rattled to almost slip his name, but mostly he just tried not to howl.

“Good idea.” He stumbled then, whatever magic of will that had held him up for a moment deserting him. Aylan caught him, felt the blood, swore viciously.

“We need to get you to your room…I don’t know how you’re standing.”

“We can’t.” Torrant shook his head, tried some of his own weight, sagged a little into Aylan’s arms. Eljean moved then, around behind him, as though to take his weight, and Torrant shrugged him off . “We can’t…we need to go find Djali.”

“Where did he go?” Aerk asked anxiously. “We went to take her body, and suddenly, he was just…”

“Gone,” Torrant nodded, finally, finally standing on his own. “I’m so worried…he was too calm.” Torrant shuddered, feeling the actual physical ache in his arm and his leg, where the bones were still re-knitting. Oh gods…the thought of losing his beloved…the thought of Djali’s bloody, fragmented heart!

He looked at Aylan, who had barely recovered from a nightmare much like this one. “We have got to find him,” he said, and Aylan, pale, shaking, wiped his eyes with his sleeve and nodded grimly, trying to control his own breathing.

There was a terrible silence then, and Torrant felt the relief of the leaden burden of expectation descend upon him and pin him to the ground. “Aerk, Keon—you stay here and guard the body,” he said into that void. “Marv, Jino—you know where the stables are?” They nodded.

“There’s a cart there, and a gray horse in my name. Bring them back as soon as possible but,” he sighed, “mind the gray—she’s had a hard ride.”

He swung around towards the front of the regents’ apartments, gearing his abused body for a run. “Eljean, Aylan—let’s search the rooms first and make sure he’s not there.”

“Where to after that?” Eljean asked, and Torrant and Aylan, running side by side, met eyes.

“Where else.” Aylan didn’t really state it as a question, and Torrant agreed.

“The Amber Goose,” he panted. “But first, we need to make sure he’s not at home.”

Djali wasn’t in Eljean’s flat, but standing in the chaos that the maids never seemed to touch, Eljean identified the one thing missing that would give them all the most fear.

“His sword belt, and the dagger too,” Eljean moaned. He was still standing there, staring at the space against the wall where Djali’s little used weaponry had leaned for the last month, as Torrant and Aylan vaulted the patio fence and across the alleyway. Eljean scrambled to catch up with them, seeing Aylan’s foot disappearing over the stone wall even as he crossed the lot to vault over it himself.

Torrant ran in through the swinging doors of the pub with barely contained speed. When he slammed to a halt out of respect for the crowd of shocked mourners, gathered around Triana’s father, Aylan ploughed into the back of him. The two of them moved forward, knowing Eljean was tight on their heels, and Torrant moved forward, searching the crowd for Djali.

“He left.”

Torrant turned towards Triana’s brother, Duan, who usually waited the pub down the street, and for a moment wondered if he could meet the man’s eyes.

“Duan…I’m so sorry…”

Duan’s fingers came up, touched the holes in Torrant’s shirt, and his mouth barely twisted. “They said a giant cat tried to save her,” he murmured.

“I’m so sorry.” Torrant swallowed. “Djali?”

Duan reached into his shirt and pulled out a thin sheaf of papers. “He told me to give this to you. He told me to tell you that he’s sorry he failed you both.”

“Oh gods.” Torrant unfolded the papers with trembling hands and scanned the pages with growing despair. “He wrote this?”

“He came in and sat at the bar.” Duan’s voice had been hollow with grief, but the more he spoke the more removed it became. Torrant knew, with a sick feeling in his stomach, that Duan had read the poem as well, and told no one.

“We tried to comfort him,” Duan went on, “but he said he wasn’t worth comforting. Then he embraced my father. He embraced me. And he gave me this and left.”

Torrant nodded and turned towards Olek, kneeling down to where Triana’s father sat, surrounded by family and friends. “Olek, take these,” he murmured, not trusting Duan to see that the papers stayed intact. “They’re important.”

And then, without another word, he whirled around into the fall-chilling darkness, passing Eljean as he arrived, panting, and with Aylan hot on his heels.

“What was it?” Aylan asked as they broke into their run again. Behind them they could hear Eljean, wheezing, but determined to be there, when his brother was found.

“It was the best thing Djali’s ever written,” Torrant gasped, tiring quickly.

“Where did it end?”

“The river,” Torrant heaved, and then he saved all his breath for speed.

“Oh gods.” It was the last thing Aylan said for a while as the three of them sprinted through the darkened city streets.

Torrant saw the body first, bobbing in an eddy at the river’s edge. It was the common area of the river—children played here in the summer, the poorer women who didn’t live in the ghetto did their laundry in the clear shallows, and the working men jumped into the water in the afternoon. Everyone knew to be careful, because the river’s tug was strong, and eventually an unwary swimmer would be dragged out to the faster current in the center and pulled over the falls at the edge of the city, to be dashed into rubble on the rocks below the river gates.

Djali hadn’t planned to be found.

Behind him, he heard Eljean’s gasping, choking sobs as Aylan, his brother, fought for breath, fought for grief, fought just to understand what that still form in the three-moon-lit shadows truly was.

Torrant didn’t spend his breath on grief. First he needed to save the body of his brother from the indignity of the cliff rocks below the city, and he didn’t stop to even strip off his shirt before diving into the shock of the cold and coming up at Djali’s body.

“Oh brother, oh gods…”

Even in the dark he could see the blood around the body like a cloud, and Djali’s cold eyes stared sightlessly at the black of the sky, but Torrant cried his name anyway.

“Djali…Djali…brother…no…Djali!!!!!” He pulled the body into his arms and the shreds of Djali’s shirt fell away.

Aylan’s voice next to him was Torrant’s first clue that his brother had followed him. “Ellyot…Ellyot…Torrant!”

Torrant turned towards him dazedly, trying to think, trying to reason and plan. They all expected him to reason and plan…but Djali had expected him to…oh Djali…oh brother…

“We need to move him to shore…” Torrant gasped, feeling his hands and his arms and his chest go numb with the cold.

Aylan shook his head, his shoulders shaking with suppressed grief. “We can’t,” he said.

“Wha?”

“Torrant—look at his chest!”

Torrant pulled back the shirt hanging on that pallid flesh, and his howl of anguish was not entirely human.

“What?” Eljean called from shore.

In response, Torrant pitched his head back and howled again. Eljean stumbled back, unprepared for the fierceness of the grief, and even as the echoes of the roar died among the buildings that distantly lined both sides of the river, Torrant dropped his face to touch his brother’s cheek with his own.

“Oh Djali,” he whispered. “How could you do this to us?”

He and Aylan met eyes then, conscious that soon people would be out wondering at the noise, and together they released the leaden flesh that had once been their friend. Together they braced their feet on the muddy bottom of the river and pushed his body out into the current.

Eljean’s shriek of confusion might have brought the guards running, if they all hadn’t been at the Regents’ Square, milling about the death scene of the girl who tried to fly .

They emerged from the river, sodden, shivering, just as the body disappeared into the silvered dark, becoming another shadow to pitch over the falls at the edge of the city, and Torrant had to block Eljean from running into the water after him.

“How could you! He was our friend!”

“He was our brother!” Torrant ground, “And he wanted the world to know it.”

“Wha…” Eljean’s frantic splashing stopped and he focused on Torrant’s grief-wrecked face.

“He had…” Aylan started, but he couldn’t finish.

Torrant could, oh gods, Torrant could. It was why they followed him, why they’d die for him, because Torrant could finish that sentence. “He’d carved Triane’s moon into his chest, Eljean,” he whispered, grabbing Eljean’s arm and hauling him by force into the shadows. A lamp was lit, and then another, and as they disappeared into the shadows leading from the ghetto, several heads had begun to peer out of doors and windows.

“He what?” Eljean threatened to stumble to his knees, but Torrant wouldn’t let him.

“That symbol, the three moons—the one Triana drew in the window glass—he carved it on his chest.” Torrant’s voice cracked. He would never, in a million years, tell Eljean the rest. Let him suppose that after the terrible mutilation, Djali’s death had been quick at least, a matter of blood-loss from a tender wrist, and then the bone-darkening chill as his body purged itself into the night-river. Don’t let him see, not even to hear about, the abomination that Djali had perpetrated on his own insides with his rusty, blunted sword.

“But why couldn’t we…”

Torrant and Aylan managed to drag Eljean to the shadows beyond the river, and in a cavern of an alleyway Torrant shoved Eljean up against a wall, pressing on a resistant body with his own. “Think, Eljean! Think! What would happen, what would happen to Zhane, to Olek, to any of the people we’ve been serving, if Djali’s body turns up with that symbol on his chest? Rath told people for years that Moon’s own workers rose up and killed him, he’s managed to convince the regents that the Goddess folk are half-animals…what would he do with this mark on his son’s body? Think Eljean, think!”

Aylan saw the pain falling from Torrant’s heart in little silver drops, but Eljean didn’t.

“I hate you,” he sobbed. “I hate you. He was our brother…how could you just push him out into the cold…you bastard—you only did it because you didn’t want him to know you murdered the one person who loved him!!!”

Torrant made a sound then, one that only Aylan heard, and Aylan wondered how, in this night of tragedy, that little moan, half-hidden by his harsh breathing and his chattering teeth, could still hurt.

He took a breath then, and stepped back, breaking the contact between their bodies and severing any suggestion of intimacy it implied.

“You hate me,” he said with an empty voice. “You go ahead. But don’t burn down the ghetto for your grief, Eljean. If nothing else, remember that Zhane would burn with it.”

And with that he swung around, still dripping pink river water, his eyes glinting brightly by the light of the three moons. Without waiting for either of them, he began a stalk through the back-alleys towards the ghettoes.

Aylan caught up with him first, panting and shivering without Torrant’s despair to insulate him from the cold…“Where to?”

“The Amber Goose,” came the short reply. “We need to honor our fallen ones.”

“What…” Aylan swallowed. After the tragedy two years before, he hadn’t been able to honor the lost noble’s children of Clough. “What did you have in mind?”

“I don’t have to have anything in mind,” Torrant supplied humorlessly. “Djali left his own death-song, brother. All that’s left for me to do is sing.”

They entered the pub clumsily, forcing the swinging doors back against the wooden walls with a loud rap, and everyone turned to look as the squelched their way in.

The others had made it to the pub, and Torrant had seen the cart with its sad load in parked in the alleyway. The young regents looked at Torrant and Aylan expectantly.

To a one, their tears broke when they saw the expressions on his face.

“Where…” Aerk asked, but Torrant shook his head.

“Wait, brother. There’s something I need to do first.” He pulled the tears from his voice, relaxed his throat, and only the terrible grief in his eyes showed that his heart suffered. Djali had waited his whole life for one of his songs to echo from the city walls. Torrant would do it no less than justice.

“Olek,” he murmured to the grieving father, “may I see those sheets now?”

Olek had them in his hands—he had been reading them, and probably re-reading them as the young men had torn off into the night, and now his face crumpled as he gave them back to Torrant.

“Oh Goddess,” Olek wept, “the two of them…they made the world better, just being together.”

“They did indeed,” Torrant agreed.

He didn’t see who provided the lute, but suddenly there was one, cradled in his arms, and he moved to his accustomed place in the pub in a terrible, grieving silence.

“If there’s one thing the Goddess’ people do well,” he said softly, “it’s sing.” To nobody’s surprise, he let his silver-streak show through the magic, then. “Tomorrow morning, people, we need to greet the dawn with the song of our fallen.”

He looked up, saw Eljean walk in, and met those furious, grief-muddled eyes with a slightly defiant lift of his chin. His fingers played across the lute’s strings, and he fixed the pitch, and then again, and then he raised his face to the poor, the tired, and the sorrow-stricken.

“ To our fallen, Triane’s children. This song was written by Djali Hearth for Triana, his beloved, and he was one of us.”

By morning, the song would be the staple of every family’s table, it would be sung with the morning bells, and belted out defiantly at every curfew. People would later analyze it, critique the meter, the trite imagery, and the juvenile rhyme—but still, they would sing it.

This blood-soaked evening, sung by Triane’s Son, with the burning Goddess-blue eyes and the dulcet voice, it sounded like the thunder of the moons themselves.

Loveliest Littlest,

Blessed by birth

The whole of my heart’s blood

Is less than her worth.

The stars fell to illuminate

The earth where she stepped

The moons sought to light

The loves her heart kept.

Triane’s beloved, the star in my sky

My heart will not beat if you are not nigh

No my heart will not beat if you are not nigh.

The grimmest of villains

The spawn from the dark

Sought to destroy you,

The heart of my Hearth

Foul fingers of envy

Stole you from my side

Black-hearted, soulless,

He stole my pure bride,

Triane’s beloved, the star in my sky

My heart will not beat, if you are not nigh

Help is on the way, don’t panic, don’t cry,

Oh Triane’s beloved, please don’ t try to fly,

You fought bravely my lover

With true-ringing words

And a blood-painted symbol

To beg for succor

When the evil would have you,

You fought for escape

You dared to dream triumph

In a bold leap of faith

Had evil not grasped you

To Triane’s son you’d have leapt

And we’d be now together

Lovers’ promises kept

But you fell to your death like a star from the sky

And my heart will not beat if you are not nigh

Oh Triane’s beloved, I’m too wounded to cry

I was not there to catch you as you fell from the sky.

My hand to your face

Can only touch cold

To the light beyond stars

Has journeyed your soul

Your smile, my sunshine

My moon-light, my world

You were my reason for living

My Goddess born girl

You’ve gone on without me

So I can but start

To journey behind you

With a few beats of my heart.

The whole of my hearts-blood

Can not measure your worth

So why would I need it

When you’ve left me first?

I’ll go down to the river, too wounded to cry

And fly through the water as you fell from the sky

My heart will not beat, if you are not nigh,

O wait, my beloved, and to your arms I’ll fly.

O Triane’s beloved, I’m too wounded to cry.

The last notes of the song died from the silent tavern, and Torrant set the lute down gently and walked away.

He was barely aware that the others followed him through the doors, but when he heard them on either side of him, he wiped his face, and again, and again, then took a shuddering breath and met Aerk, Keon, Marv, and Jino’s eyes with his own.

“I’m so sorry,” he murmured, feeling inadequate. He was intensely aware of Aylan, standing in his habitual position at the back of the group. He could hardly look at him, he was so ashamed. Aylan had warned him, had anguished over their plan, the risk to the people who trusted Triane’s Son, and now…oh Goddess. Oh Djali.

“Did you find his body?” Aerk asked.

Torrant breathed hard, through his nose, trying to keep himself together for this, praying that he could be the leader they needed through this. “He had…carved Triane’s mark in his chest.”

“Oh gods…” Aerk replied faintly.

“I don’t understand,” Marv said. “Won’t that, like, set all of Clough against the ghettoes? Rath will slaughter them!”

“He would,” Torrant nodded, not meeting anybody’s eye. “He would if the body were to be found.”

“Oh gods…” Keon echoed.

“What did you do?” Jino asked, knowing the answer already.

“They pushed him out into the river like trash!” Eljean answered for him, the bitterness in his voice sharp enough to make Torrant cringe.

“That’s not fair!” Aylan spoke up, his voice shaking.

“Neither was leaving Djali for carrion!” Eljean almost shouted, and to Torrant’s surprise, it was Aerk who spoke up.

“They had no choice, Eljean! Do you want what happened to Triana to happen to the whole of the ghettoes? Do you want it to happen to Zhane?”

“You keep Zhane out of this…” To everyone’s surprise but Torrant’s, Eljean tried to charge Aerk, and Torrant blocked his body, forcing him back against the wall of the alley.

“You want to hit someone Eljean?” he rasped into Eljean’s face, keeping him pinned--in spite of the height difference--by sheer force of will. “You want to hit someone? You hit me. I’m the one you’re angry at! I’m the one who failed! You lost your brother, your best friend—I’m the one who let him die. Hit me!”

Torrant stepped back into the center of the alley, muscles shaking, cheeks slick with tears, his entire stance screaming pain, and dared the man who had used his body to assault him.

“No,” Eljean said, confused, going limp. “Oh, Goddess…no. I’m…”

“If you say you’re sorry I’ll throw up,” Torrant ground, and Eljean recoiled from the slap of his words.

“You had to do it,” Jino murmured into the vibrating silence, and the others agreed. “Rath would have brought destruction on all of us…oh Djali…” his voice broke, and Torrant absently wiped his cheek on his shoulder and nodded.

“He would have. He may still. He’s is going to be at us tomorrow, you all know that?”

Eljean’s knees abruptly buckled, and he fell, unaided, onto his backside, still leaning against the rough bricks of the house behind him.

“Right,” Torrant nodded, as though someone had said something. “We can do this two ways. We can all leave, slink away into the night, and leave the Goddess’ people to fend for themselves…”

“Or?” Aerk asked, appalled.

“Or we can brazen it out. We can go to Rath and tell him enough of the truth to keep us in the hall and keep us fighting.”

“Oh Goddess…” Eljean moaned, shoulders shaking.

“But whatever you decide, you have to decide it now.”

“Of course we’ll stay!” Keon protested. “If we can’t face him down knowing what he did tonight, what kind of men are we?”

“The smart kind,” Torrant answered, closing his eyes in weariness. “Remember, all of you, you’ve seen the man and the monster—you need to remember who you’re following if you decide to see this through.”

Marv wrinkled his nose in total puzzlement, his slightly crooked front teeth showing. “Rath’s the monster, right?”

Jino shrugged. “Unless he’s talking about the snow cat…Ellyot— you weren’t talking about yourself, were you?”

In spite of himself, Torrant felt a half-forged laugh forcing its way from his chest. “As a matter of fact, I was. But never mind. I’ll see you on the floor tomorrow…”

“I can’t…” Eljean protested, and Torrant looked at him, wary. “I’ll follow you, I guess I have to. But I…I can’t face Rath…I can’t…I’d…I’d rush him…I’d kill him…I’d drink his blood…” The fierce words were belied by sobs, and Torrant closed his eyes and then looked wearily at Aylan.

“Brother, Eljean needs to go visit Zhane. Can you take him?”

Aylan’s jaw locked, and the contempt he spit from his eyes would have destroyed Eljean, if he had looked up to catch it. “Me?” he rasped.

“There’s no one I trust more,” Torrant told him truly. “Please, brother. I need to see the others home, and…and Eljean needs to be absent. Simply absent. He needs to be indisposed with grief, where no one can find him for a few days. Zhane’s the best we’ve got.”

Aylan’s glare suggested that the shadows of a darker alley might be better, but he bent and hauled Eljean up by the elbow.

“I’m sorry, Tor…” This time Eljean noticed the glare and broke off , cringing.

“My name,” Torrant Shadow said evenly, with as much dignity as he could muster, “is Ellyot Moon.”

Eljean bowed his head. “Right,” he murmured. “I knew that. I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” murmured Torrant, not looking at him. There was a thick, ungiving silence in the alley then, and Torrant jerked his shoulders towards the route to the regents’ flats.

“Come on—we need to be in our rooms in case Rath sends out guards looking…” He couldn’t finish the sentence. “Come,” he finished simply, not looking at anybody. He was stopped by Aylan’s hand on his shoulder.

“Leave the patio unlocked,” came the terse order.

For a moment, Torrant wanted to object. It was dangerous for Aylan to come back this night, he needed his rest, they would meet tomorrow…but Aylan’s hand felt warm on his shoulder, and Torrant’s body actually shook with the temptation to simply dissolve, come undone, lose all cohesion and melt into Aylan’s unconditional embrace.

“Right,” he graveled, meeting Aylan’s weary, grieving look with his own. “Be safe, brother.”

“Be safe.”

Dreams of Comfort

Aylan knew where Torrant would be when he returned, the taste of his conversation with Eljean still bitter on his tongue. He slid in through the patio, heard the water running, and stripped off his own clothes, leaving them in a sodden heap on the bedroom floor.

There was chestnut and silver hair on the floor of the washroom. The belt-knife used to chop the ragged clumps off lay discarded in the midst of the pile, and Aylan was distantly surprised.

He had thought that after this night, there would be very little short of total catastrophe that could hurt him.

He stood for a moment, lost in the contemplation of that gruesome gesture of self-hatred, hearing the acrid sound of his own voice as he trudged through the fetid alleys of the ghettoes, trying not to break his ankle on the ill-fitting stones of the road.

He trusted you! Aylan had been so angry he almost couldn’t believe he heard himself speak. He had resolved not to speak another word to the wretched excuse for a man at his side.

Djali trusted him!

Aylan turned, and honestly thought about shoving Eljean against a building until blood matted his hair. Instead he took a breath and tried to speak with the honor Torrant had always accused him of being.

You tell me how that trust was misplaced!

He murdered Djali’s uncle, didn’t he?

Aylan had needed to breathe hard enough to make stars dance in front of his eyes to keep his temper. Do you really think he was acting in revenge? Really? Because if you really think the man we’ve been following would do that, tell me right now and I’ll murder my brother as he sleeps.

Silence. Absolute silence. Eljean had the grace to whimper at the thought of Torrant being betrayed so heinously. Maybe it even sank in that he’d done a similar deed with his very suspicions.

Can you not even answer me?

I was angry.

Weren’t we all? You had to take it out on the one person who feels everybody’s griefs like his own?

I don’t know if he truly feels anything! Eljean shot bitterly, and now Aylan did hurl him backwards, feeling some serious gratification in Eljean’s grunt of pain when head smacked wall. It was a good feeling. It allowed him to choose his words with care.

You are a foolish, callow child, and I regret that I ever thought better of you. If you cannot see the difference between the man and the leader, you profaned him with your touch.

They had walked in silence through badly cobbled streets of mourning to Zhane’s little flat, and Aylan had shoved Eljean behind him and told him to wait like a puppy outside Zhane’s door. Once inside, he’d given Zhane enough coins to keep his family fed until they could start smuggling people out of the city, and enough to keep him off the streets. Zhane looked at the coins distrustfully, eyeing Aylan with doubt.

What are my duties, for all of this coin?

Just keep your boy from moon-calfing all over the man trying to save your arse.

There was a broken-hearted sadness in Zhane’s next words. I’m not sure if I have that power.

Aylan felt himself softening. Zhane was a victim, as innocent as Triana, even if Eljean was not half the suitor that Djali had been. You do, brother. He may not see the man, yet, but the god has definitely fallen.

Zhane nodded. Smiled a little. Well, lucky me he doesn’t see the man as you do.

Those words haunted Aylan now, staring at that pretty, shiny chestnut hair, piled thickly on the crème tile.

He turned towards the shower, knowing the water would have run cold, and bent to his friend, his brother, his lover, crouched naked in the corner, shivering under the freezing weight of his heart.

It seemed like forever before Torrant’s hands warmed up, and Aylan was toweling mournfully at the gouged chop-job of his hair, without a blessed word he could say for comfort. Suddenly, he put the towel down and ran to Torrant’s cupboard, throwing on some breeches and a shirt without caring about the fit.

“Stay here, brother. I’ll be right back.”

A minute later he was knocking on Jino’s door--Jino, whose curling hair was always trimmed and dapper. Marv answered, the tracks of grief marking his brown face, and wearing the same rumpled clothes he’d worn earlier. The divan behind him was a mess of sheets.

“Brother, can I borrow some hair shears, please,” Aylan asked politely, and Marv blinked, hard.

Jino came out in a sleep shirt from the bedroom and after a puzzled minute, a pair of delicate scissors was retrieved from his bathroom.

When Aylan left, Marv and Jino exchanged bemused glances. He had been red-eyed, sloppily dressed and his yellow hair had curled wetly and wildly around his head. He hadn’t once tried to explain his odd request.

“Do you get the feeling,” Marv asked, his nose wrinkled a little in puzzlement, “that more goes on in their lives than we even know about?”

Jino nodded at him with wide, dark eyes.

For his part, Aylan returned to find Torrant in the exact same position on the bed, wrapped in a towel, and with a sigh he stood his brother up and took him into the bathroom.

“Do you have any idea how much this hurts me?” he asked, snipping off a particularly ugly end and standing back to admire his handiwork. What had been the treasured silver streak now fell shortly over his brow with another, spared, section of the chestnut color, and the sides and back were trimmed very close to the scalp. He was surprised that it looked decent—too, too short, but decent. He was even more surprised by the sound of his own voice.

“I’m sorry,” Torrant whispered. He was facing the mirror, but his eyes were gazing sightlessly beyond it, not even seeing the destruction he’d wrought. For a moment, under the towel, it was easy to imagine his shoulders clean, unblemished and narrow with the vestiges of boyhood. For a moment, Aylan saw the young man who had captured his eyes with his kindness and his awesome fire.

“You should be,” Aylan snapped back, his voice breaking. “Taking all this grief to yourself and not sharing. Selfish git. You’ve always been selfish. I don’t know why I’ve hung with you for so long.”

Torrant’s mouth twisted at the sides, and that fatal lip curl made a shy appearance. “It must be Aunt Bethen’s cooking,” he murmured, and Aylan stopped his ministrations, so grateful for the family joke and the mention of home, that he put the scissors down, wrapped his arms around Torrant, and buried his face in the haven of his shoulder, weeping.

Torrant the healer had no choice but to turn and wrap his arms around his brother in comfort.

The towel dropped to the floor, and it was only the two of them, their flesh and their sorrow, and their knowledge of each other. They weren’t beloveds, and the touch didn’t feed their souls, but it was all they had. It was almost enough.

When it was over, Torrant fell into a dreamless sleep, his body folded so tightly in on itself that Aylan wondered that he didn’t wake up in pain. Aylan cradled him against his shoulder like a child. Unlike the misery of his mind and heart, his body was actually feeling pretty good. The aches of the day had been scrubbed clean by the abrasive pleasure of their coming together, and he had to laugh as he stroked the trimmed chestnut hair. Oh, had he never met a child with sunset-colored hair, he would think this was all love had to offer.

Torrant had always known there was something more. It was one of the things Aylan loved about him, his complete faith that there was more to love than the sweet feeling of flesh. It was what gave Aylan the faith, in this still moment, to think of Starren Moon, to wonder what her womanhood would offer him, and to give thanks that he had seen so much of her childhood.

He stroked Torrant’s hair again, and kissed his forehead, and was not disappointed in the least when Torrant whispered Yarri’s name.

Torrant was dreaming. His heart and his soul were as naked as his body in Aylan’s arms, and he was dreaming of Yarri.

Yarri

“You two are as nervous as a cat by the tide…why don’t you just go home, for sweet Triane’s sake!” Aln’s voice held exasperation and compassion as he bent to pick up the basket of cookies Evya had just dropped in the paint Yarri had dropped not a moment before.

The children had picked up on their jumpy mood, but instead of responding to it by acting out, they were unusually quiet. The silence itself was worrying on Aln’s nerves, like the oppressiveness of the clouds before storm.

“Waiting at home would be worse than waiting here,” Yarri said, moving back to the kitchen area for some towels and a waste basket, and Evya nodded wholeheartedly. “Stanny’s letter said sometime this evening…”

“He’s just been gone so long!” Evya burst out. “I know he had stops to make, and he visited Roes and Aldam in Wrinkle Creek…”

The two women snorted in tandem, because they had not been happy about that. Professor Austin had come to Eiran to work with the other survivors of Triannon to raise resources and rebuild, and since Eiran now had three full-fledged healers, and several in the student body that had been housed about the town, Roes and Aldam had been called back to Aldam’s snug and expanding house. Between Torrant and Aylan in Clough, Stanny running the merchant’s route, and Roes and Aldam in Wrinkle Creek, the family felt spare and thin indeed.

“And he had that ‘other thing’ he’s been doing!” Yarri came back and shoved one of the towels at Evya, who, although better at keeping secrets than the family had first suspected had finally let something drop about the ‘special project’ keeping Stanny busy for the last couple years, as well as making the family a fortune by selling rich farm dirt and metal ore.

Evya wrinkled her nose and stuck her tongue out at Yarri, and Yarri rolled her eyes. Together they both turned to Aln, who had opened the can of worms anyway. They rarely complained, either of them, about how badly they missed their beloveds. Now that Stanny was due home at any moment, their hearts were ready to unburden themselves of some of the loneliness.

“Maybe he had a chance to write a letter?” Yarri suggested wistfully, picking the cookies up and throwing them in the little trash can. It had been her most secret hope, but she hadn’t given it voice, in case all she received was Stanny’s account of his visit. (And Stanny, Goddess bless him, was not at all good at telling stories. She was afraid she would have to pull his hair and then his teeth and then his toenails to get some substantial news.)

“For you,” Evya said gently, patting her back and nudging her out of the way with her hip at the same time, “I’m sure there’s at least a song.”

“I bet Stanny’s bought you something from every town!” Yarri suggested brightly, and Evya smiled.

“I asked for scarlet and indigo from the mountains—I want to dye some lovely cloth and piece us a handfast blanket,” Evya made the shy admission as she bent to the floor and scrubbed at the glop of blue craft paint with a big, stained towel they used just for such spills. Evya had refused to handfast Stanny in the past—she had never wanted to commit to their love that strongly.

“That would be wonderful,” Yarri beamed at her from the sink, washing her hands. She heard the thump of the smaller door in the vast space, and turned to see Cwyn in the entrance, jerking his chin towards Yarri. A tentative smile lit on her piquant little mouth like a shy bird, but he shook his head quickly negative, and she and Evya both gave depressed sighs.

“I’d better go see what he wants,” she murmured, wiping her hands on her skirt, but she already knew. If it wasn’t news about Stanny, it was another round of letters from the priest.

Embarking on a career as a forger had never been her intention, but it pretty much amounted to Cwyn’s grand scheme to keep the government at Clough from noticing that their priest had gone missing. Lane had agreed to it—of course, since he’d helped Cwyn lug the two bodies they’d left in the alley that day into a cart that was bound for their dumping spot on the river, he hadn’t had much of a choice. Since he’d been lying about seeing Carl Mildew since that day as well, Yarri figured that if he could do that, then she could, at the very least, do a little bit of calligraphy in the family name.

Cwyn had needed to flirt a little with the junior post-master in the militia, but since the man had already been a playmate, he had been easy to convince. Every week a round of letters came from superiors in Clough, and every week a round of letters went back in the priest’s handwriting. Yarri had to say the forgeries were some of her best artwork, and she thought even Torrant would be impressed with her story-telling skills.

She made the man sound like the fire-breathing soul of Rath’s genocidal philosophies, the scourge of the unrighteous in the little city-state. In fact, she was pretty sure that thanks to her creativity, he was on his way to being promoted—it was almost a shame he was dead.

“Is the post in?” she asked quietly as she neared him, and he nodded, his eyes glinting. The little (well, not so little) terror thought this was the greatest game ever—she was glad that he and the junior post-master seemed to be staying on good terms because it gave him someone to brag to about the whole affair. Cwyn tended to change bedmates often enough that a little monogamy was a breath of fresh air.

“You’re going to have to get creative this time,” Cwyn murmured. “They’re asking if you would be willing to come back to Clough for the snows.”

“Oh gods!”

“Something about an ‘ultimate resolution’—I don’t know what it means, but it sounds like bad news for our boys in Dueance.” Cwyn ran his tongue around his teeth and chewed his lip. Yarri got the feeling that all of Torrant’s stories and poems and books on history had made a bigger impression on her young cousin than they had on her.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, gnawing on the back of her third knuckle. It was a nervous habit she hadn’t known she possessed until they’d watched Torrant and Aylan disappear down the main road of Eiran that last time…Since she’d watched the two bodies of her greatest enemies disappear into the river, the skin on that knuckle went from worried to shredded.

Cwyn shook his head, and there were sudden shadows in his eyes. They all looked like that these days, Yarri thought with a vicious nibble. It had been bad enough when it was Torrant and Aylan, but since Aunt Bethen had gotten…thin. And tired. And since Aldam and Roes had needed to leave…well, there had been too many shadows, even in Cwyn’s eyes.

“I’m thinking that they need to win,” he murmured, and for a moment, there was nothing about joy in his eyes at all. “I’m thinking that the things you’ve been reading and the things you’ve been writing back are abominations. I’m thinking that Torrant and Aylan were right when they said this had to be done.”

Yarri was saved from answering when Starren came running in, scarlet skirts flurrying around her ankles, knocking her older brother out of the way. Her sunset-colored braid was so frazzled it was more of a guideline than a rule, and her pale face was flushed in blotches.

“He’s back!” she panted. “He’s back, and he’s brought refugees!”

Yarri took one step in the direction of the door to rush out and grill Stanny for news of her beloved. Then she took another step into adulthood, when she moved back and looked at Evya.

“Go,” she murmured tautly. “He’s here…the news will wait.”

Evya didn’t need to be told twice, and they all moved from the doorway as she sprinted by them in a swirl of plum-colored skirts, dashing her cheeks as she ran. Yarri touched Starren’s shoulder before she could follow, and Starry turned to her as easily as that child did everything.

“There is news, isn’t there?” she asked wistfully.

Starren smiled her sweet sunshine smile, as graceful and open as the dawn. “There’s a whole packet of letters and songs, just for you.”

Yarri nodded, then wiped her eyes with practical fingers and turned away nodding. “Good,” she murmured, “tell him I’m glad he’s back— I’ll be home for dinner.”

Starren left, but Cwyn didn’t immediately follow. Instead he leaned against the doorway, looking at her with those shadowed eyes. His brown hair was a curly mess around his head, and his vest was its usual jaunty cut, but there was something odd and adult about his gaze.

“What?” she asked, keeping her voice irritated because it kept her from losing complete composure.

“Mama’s really sick,” he said ruminatively.

Yarri swallowed. “Yes, yes I know.” Bethen had tried to hide it—in fact, she was still hiding it. None of the townsfolk had remarked on her tiredness yet, or the haunting pain in the bright brown eyes. Lane, certainly, behaved as though nothing were amiss, but Cwyn…Cwyn had always depended on Bethen--to read his moods, to keep him in line. More and more these days, he had been the one taking her chores from her and telling her to rest.

“I can’t watch her be sick, anymore, Yarri,” he murmured quietly. “I can’t. I want to join them. One day, you’ll wake up, and I won’t be here, and you’ll know where I’ll be…”

“Cwyn!” Yarri looked at him, appalled. “You can’t. We need you.” It was the truth, she thought frantically. More and more, as Bethen had been sick, Cwyn had taken on the family responsibility that Torrant and Aylan once shouldered.

“But the world needs heroes,” he said with a glint in his eye. “I think I could be one.”

“The world needs men!” Yarri returned fiercely, moving in to her cousin, even as she had to look up at him, “and real men know when to serve their family and when to serve the world.”

“So which one’s Torrant?” Cwyn taunted. “Which one’s Aylan? You tell me—are they here, serving their family?”

“No,” Yarri returned, her brows pinched into a scowl so the tears wouldn’t escape. “No, but if anyone else could do what they’re doing, you’d better believe they would be. No one can be your mother’s son for you, Cwyn—that’s a job all your own.”

And then, because she couldn’t bear this conversation anymore, she turned away from him and went back to Aln to make sure the rest of the spill was wiped up. Aln looked at him with questioning eyes, but Cwyn just shrugged and smiled, his usual gap-toothed, sexy-evil grin back in place, and he went back out the little door at the back end of the warehouse.

“What’s the little terror planning now?” Aln asked as she returned, trying to lighten Yarri’s mood up. They had sat together in the stables, when Yarri had been but a child and Aln and Kert had been courting.

Torrant and Kert had liked to ride together, and Aln had never cared for horses. Yarri’s fat pony had been made for pets and smaller children, so she used to give rides to them. Aln had watched, bemused, as they had all endured Cwyn’s antics as a child, and now he watched as the handsome young man stormed away with pain in his eyes.

Yarri tried to dredge up a smile, but she couldn’t. “He’s planning to be a hero,” she murmured, moving over to the tiny ones who were done with their cookies and juice and yawning for their nap. “He’s planning to be a hero, and I just told him he had to be a nursemaid.”

“Who says nursemaids aren’t heroes?” Aln asked, catching up to her and bumping her shoulder with his.

Yarri gave him a sad smile and a happy voice. “My point exactly!” and then she poured all of the warmth and optimism that she wasn’t feeling into her voice as she took a washcloth to tiny hands and mutinous mouths and lined them up for their last nappy change. She was trying very hard not to count the hours until she could leave Aln with the militia and run home to at least the memories of her beloved.

When she arrived home, she walked into the snug, crowded kitchen with the butcher’s block table and right into Stanny’s cheerful embrace. She looked past his shoulders and around the rest of the family, she was surprised to see two strange young men at the table, eating Starren’s cooking as though it were fruit off the moons themselves. It was then she remembered Starren’s words about refugees.

She smiled kindly at the two young men, and then looked at the twin expression of focused speculation on Bethen and Lane’s faces. Something was definitely not to their liking.

“Hello,” she introduced hesitantly, making eye-contact with Lane who nodded at the young men. “I’m Yarri…”

The dark-haired young man, the one with the open face and sloe eyes, stood up and smiled happily, shaking her hand with enthusiasm. “You’re Ell…Torrant’s beloved. We’ve heard all about you!”

Yarri looked surprised. “You have?” She was reasonably sure Torrant hadn’t been spreading word of her as ‘his beloved’ all through Clough!

“His songs,” the young man nodded. “I mean, he never used your name, so when we thought he was Ellyot, we didn’t know it was you—but since Stanny here told us his real name, there’s no one else those songs could be about!”

A slow, shy smile flushed from her cheeks. “Really?” she asked, the sure knowledge that her beloved hadn’t forgotten her warming a stomach made cold by Lane and Bethie’s grave looks.

“Yarri,” Lane said, his steady voice breaking into her thoughts, “these young men are Quin,” the dark one bowed with a smile, “and Cal.” The surly blonde one nodded his head in her direction. “I think you might be interested in how they came to meet Torrant.”

Stanny made a shuffling sound, and she looked at him for more information, narrowing her eyes and quirking her eyebrows when her cousin was less than forthcoming.

Stanny hid murky-green eyes from her, picking at a rough place on the wooden counter, and touched Evya’s hand as it encircled his broad waist…“You’ll want to hear their story first.”

Yarri listened to the two young lovers, ingenuously talking about meeting in an alley, when interrupted by a ‘magic cat-man’.

“It was pretty funny, really!” Quin said enthusiastically, enjoying being the center of the family’s attention. “I mean, there we were…” he looked surreptitiously at Starry, who rolled her eyes and made a ‘carry on’ gesture with her hands, “You know…” his own hands were doing inarticulate, suggestive things, and in spite of the tension in the room, Yarri found herself laughing a little.

“I remember,” she murmured dryly, although it had been one night, not one tryst among many.

“So there we were, just about to…you know, and he comes running up out of nowhere—he had to leap over us and he practically ran up the side of a building to slow down…and his shirt was all bloodstained and torn…he was something to see!”

“Dueant’s bare white arse,” Yarri murmured faintly. “In broad daylight? He was wearing the cat in broad daylight?”

“There’s more,” Bethen said somberly, and Yarri closed her eyes.

“We knew he was going to be giving help to the ghettoes!” Cwyn protested, “What is the big deal!”

“A rest day clinic, Cwyn!” Bethen returned, entreating her son to listen. “Regents to help—what if one of them decides to betray them? What if—even worse—one of them is harmed for his involvement?

Do you remember Aylan? Do you remember his poor heart, after that?”

“Aylan will live!” Cwyn protested. “What he is doing is important!”

“Not more important than his life!” Starren protested, and Cwyn turned towards his little sister and took her hands in his own.

“Yes,” he nodded savagely, “yes, Littlest, yes, more important than his life. Can’t you see that this is beyond the boys we love—they’re more than that now? They’re heroes—they’re larger than themselves, and we should be proud of them!”

“Oh yes!” Quin nodded, and even Cal nodded with some enthusiasm. “There would be so many more children taken, so many more crucified, if it wasn’t for what Triane’s Son does at night!”

Everybody turned to him in shock, because this wasn’t the clinic, and it wasn’t ‘Ellyot’ arguing on the Regent’s Floor and it wasn’t a little ‘surreptitious’ stalking as the cat.

“At…at night?” Yarri said faintly, and Starren had the presence of mind to push the solid, raw-wood kitchen chair behind her so she had some place to sit down.

“They call it night work,” Stanny said with obvious reluctance, and the whole family turned towards him in dull surprise.

“Night work?” Bethen asked, and Lane provided her chair, and then wrapped his arms around her shoulders so she wouldn’t fly apart.

Stanny nodded, and even as Torrant dreamt the moment, he cringed as Stanny related the half-starved, half-crazed, half-witted version of himself that he’d been that day.

“Power?” Yarri asked, feeling her hands shaking. She took a chomp out of that knuckle, and didn’t notice that it started to bleed again. “He used his gift on a guard? He and Aylan go out on a regular basis, fight battles, he goes home, changes, stands on the floor, and confronts Rath? And he’s running around the city as that cat, saving people, and using his gift…do you have any idea what it costs him to alter a memory like that?”

Everybody looked at her in dumb surprise.

“Do you?” she demanded, fighting clear memories of her beloved, young and distraught, falling to his knees in the dusty road to be sick, and of his helpless weeping when it was over. He had done this, he had done these terrible things far away, and she hadn’t been there to comfort him. His and Aylan’s awful undertaking, their utter aloneness assaulted her like a predator in a back alley.

“This isn’t what he said he’d be doing.”

She turned to Bethen and Lane for confirmation, and they nodded soothingly, because that last statement had been almost hysterical.

“This isn’t what he said!” Her voice rose, and Bethen heaved herself painfully out of her chair and came to lay a calming hand on her shoulder, but Yarri stood and shook it off .

“THIS ISN’T WHAT HE SAID!” she cried, and on that note she turned on her heel, her braid whipping behind her, her skirts twirling so quickly around her ankles that she almost tripped as she stalked out of the kitchen and towards her room, purpose written in every line of her small body.

“Where are you going?” Cwyn asked in surprise.

“Where do you think I’m going?” Yarri snapped over her shoulder. “I’m going to pack!”

Yarri’s room had been tiny when she’d shared it with Roes, but now, when it was hers alone, it was perfect: snug, airy, filled with billowy, pale yellow curtains with blue accents. The bare boards of the floor had a bright rag-rug to keep the draft off of cold feet, and the armoire was full of fewer dresses than her Uncle Lane wanted to buy her, and more than she thought she needed. The wood-framed bed she used to share with Roes was still there, but with only one person, it was vast and comfortable, when it had once seemed cramped and tight.

Yarri had been looking forward to sharing it with Torrant for a bit, before they built a practice in Eiran, near the orphanage.

Critically she looked at the armoire and started pulling out her best dresses. Trieste had bought Torrant and Aylan new clothes before they’d left for Clough, and she told Bethen in the letter following their departure that it wasn’t enough. Apparently, regents and royalty were expected to wear a scandalous number of outfits in a week, and she was pretty sure Torrant would spend much of Courtland’s proceeds on looking the part of a role he never wanted to play. And now she had to join him.

Just as she decided to take all her best dresses, and to find a place to buy more when she got to the city, she heard footsteps coming into the room and she turned to meet Bethen. She could remember, she thought wistfully, when Bethen’s footsteps were quick and light enough to belie her size, and her entire body rustled into a room, her energy seeming to push out from her as she moved. Not today.

Today, Bethen moved like a very old woman. She had always been tall and plump, but the flesh seemed to sag from her large frame, and the lines in her face—until recently, all laugh lines—seemed to press painfully into her cheeks and around her nose. Her hair, always a rusty-gray combination, had gone almost all yellow-silver.

Yarri looked at the woman who had been her mother for twelve years. Bethen had taken her in, read her stories on her knee, taught her to knit and what she knew of cooking. It hadn’t been much about cooking, but since the main ingredient had been love, it had been all Yarri needed to know. Bethen had helped her embroider the red flowers on her dress after her first moon cycle, and held her for long hours, weeping, every time Torrant had mounted his horse and ridden away from her, the one person who loved him best.

All these years that she had needed Bethen, and now, more than ever, Bethen needed her, and she was leaving.

When her anger at Torrant hadn’t done it, seeing Bethen, looking older than her years and ill and lost, made her throat tight and her eyes shiny.

“Oh, Auntie Beth…”

Bethen shook her head and smiled, her eyes still bright as new wool, in spite of all the changes that illness had wrought. “Don’t say it, sweetling…”

“But you’re not feeling well…”

“I’ll be fine. No, no,” when Yarri might have protested, “I won’t make you stay. At least,” she amended, “I won’t make you stay more than a couple of days. Lane is getting the cart, and a great deal of money together, and Cwyn will take you. You’ll stop by Wrinkle Creek and tell Roes and Aldam what is happening, and maybe meet an old friend as well.”

“Who?” Yarri asked, still trying to assimilate all of this planning into the middle of her ‘jump on the first fast horse she could saddle’ scenario.

“I don’t know—not for sure…I need to write a letter and…”

Bethen’s mouth turned up sardonically, “if I’m not mistaken, so do you, right?”

Yarri put her hand to her mouth. She had almost forgotten the priest!

“Oh no! What should I do?”

Bethen shrugged. “Tell them the sea air has given you rheumatism and you can’t travel.”

“Really?” It sounded highly unlikely to Yarri, but Bethen shook her head, laughing a little.

“The higher-ups in Clough—I don’t think they’ve ever been beyond their borders. If they have been, it was to look down their noses at those of us in the dirt. They’ll think it’s likely, even though we know that it’s mostly the fisher-folks and the sailors and the women who do tight, tight needlework who have the problem. And that way, when the handwriting changes to your Uncle Lane’s…”

“They’ll have to accept that it’s true!” Yarri smiled, the most practical part of her absence dealt with, and then her face fell, and she reached for Bethen’s hand—the one not holding the full canvas sack. “But you…”

Bethen nodded, “My darling, I want you back by spring—I mean, I can give no guarantees, right? But it would help, if you’re back before Beltane, at the very least.”

No guarantees. Yarri dashed her eyes with her hands. She was planning to leave Bethen, and Bethen was planning to leave all of them—there could be no doubt about it. “I can’t leave you when… when you might not be here in the spring!”

Bethen cupped her foster-daughter’s cheek in her palm and stroked away another tear as it threatened. “Of course you can,” she murmured. “You must! Do you think I can stand it, that our boys are so far away from us, and nobody can go to their rescue? You need to go. You need to keep them safe and be the reason they come home if it gets too hot for them in Clough. You need to remind them what haven is all about.”

Yarri threw her arms around Bethen, and Bethen squeezed her in a hug that, although from a more delicate body, had all of the strength of will that Yarri needed to feel. “Haven is all about you, Auntie Beth…”

Yarri murmured into Bethen’s neck, and Bethen’s voice was suspiciously thick when she spoke again.

“And now it will be all about you and Roes and Starry and even Evya…you will be haven and home. It’s all I’ve known to teach you, right?”

Yarri couldn’t speak for a moment, and they clung together in the bright sunlight of Yarri’s window, until Bethen made a small sound, maybe of pain, and Yarri sprang back, horrified that she could have hurt her.

Bethen shook her head and held out the bag, smiling through wet eyelashes and holding out the canvas bag. “It’s just that this is getting heavy, sweetling. Here—you need to pack this. It will keep you from getting too caught up in what the boys are doing, and keep you grounded where we need you.”

Yarri opened the canvas bag. “Wool?” She gestured vaguely to her own project tote—in fact, one that had been made for Bethen by Trieste, some years ago. “I’ve got three jumpers working for…”

“Torrant, and one for Aylan, yes, I know—and you’ll have time to work on them too, darling. But I’m talking about a calendar of sorts… here.”

She started pulling out brightly colored hanks of fine yarn that was often combined with sewing thread and used for socks or sometimes used alone for slightly heavier lace shawls. “Here—that’s thirty-four hanks of sock yarn, with the thread for the heels and toes, and two hanks of lace—enough for a shawl apiece. You make what? Two pairs of socks a week, if that’s what you’re doing?”

Yarri nodded. She often knit while supervising the little ones, or reading to them as they went down for their nap. Socks were good for such activity—there was not much attention used on a sock, and everybody needed them. “Yes…”

“Well, then. That’s seventeen, eighteen weeks of knitting, all told, with some to share and some in case of accidents and such. Nineteen or twenty weeks if you use the odds and ends, you see?”

Yarri tried to do the math in her head and failed—math had never been her strong suit, even simple figures. Unless it dealt with sticks and string, she was hopeless.

Bethen shook her head. “I should have dragged you to those classes by your tiny, shell-like ears!” she laughed genuinely. “If you leave by the end of this week, you’ll have from Samhain until just after the snows melt, sweetling. That’s your window. If you run out of yarn before you’re on your way back, you’ll know to start—I know you, Yarrow Moon, daughter of my heart. If you have no wool in your fingers, you’ll harry whomever will listen until you gather some. Even your beloved. Even the joy of our joy.”

Yarri looked again at the spectacular spectrum of hues and tints, from magenta to gold, from forest green to sunshine yellow, from pale blue to rose, and everything in between—even a few, lovely, misplaced neutrals--waiting, just waiting for the venture to begin. These looked familiar, she realized. She had seen these hanks—some of them for years—always, always, asking when they could be made-up.

Later, later my dear. I want time to savor those—they’re too beautiful to hurry through. Especially the lace.

“Oh, Auntie Bethen…” she murmured, sinking down in the midst of all that treasure, saved for a day that Bethen would never have. “Oh Auntie Beth…you’re never going to…you won’t have time to…”

She slid past the bed to the floor, in the puddle left by her breaking heart, and Bethen sank down next to her, and now she wept quietly in her beloved Aunt Bethen’s arms, knowing keen, sharp, ripping, aching grief one more time. Because they knew, they both knew, that in spite of Bethen’s best efforts, guarantees were thin, and eighteen weeks might be too long.

And Yarri would still leave.

Far away in Clough, Torrant whimpered and turned in Aylan’s arms, his lips finding and kissing his brother’s bare chest in an attempt to pull all of the comfort slick skin could offer.

“Shhh…” Aylan whispered, feeling in his bones the morning bell that would wake the regents had one or two precious hours before it rang.

Torrant’s eyes opened, the grief and exhaustion of the night before slurring his vision with torpor. “Yarri’s coming…” he mumbled, wanting to say more, wanting to spill all of his mind’s visit home into the breath between them, but unable to fight the weariness that deadened his limbs while his heart screamed in protest. His poor body simply could not manage to wake for all of it.

“Really?” Aylan asked, in the same state. “Thank Triane.” And then they both fell asleep, clenched tight in the only comfort they had.

Half Healed Wounds

Torrant cringed as he made up his cravat in the mirror, and tried to even out his breathing so Aylan, perched like a carrion vulture on a chair outside the bathroom, wouldn’t spot the sign of pain.

The bones that had snapped through his flesh the night before had not completely healed, and the pounding he’d given them afterwards had apparently spawned more small fractures and wounds that were waiting for a change of form to completely re-knit.

Torrant was tired enough that dressing for the floor was a challenge—he wasn’t going to be able to change again, at least until after the session, and so he would have to live with the pain.

“I saw that,” Aylan said mildly. He didn’t tell Torrant, but during their love-making the night before, he had felt the anomalies of the injuries under his friend’s skin. His touching had been especially tender, but Torrant had been too broken to feel the extra care.

Torrant ignored him. “We have to make her go back,” he said, looking past his own image in the mirror. He knew what he would see—the sunken eyes, the grief-lined face, and—especially--the recently butchered hair. All the times that people had called him beautiful and he had never cared, but now, all he could think of was what she would see. It would hurt him to death, if Yarri didn’t think he was beautiful anymore.

“We can’t,” Aylan replied, keeping his voice even with an effort.

“We must!” Torrant gave up on the tie and turned to Aylan desperately. “You can ride out and meet them…you can get word to Roes and Aldam, telling them not to come! Don’t you see…the terrible danger she’ll be in here?”

Aylan scrubbed his face with trembling hands and shook his head. “Don’t you see, brother? The only thing that’s keeping me from trussing you like a dead pheasant in your sleep and hauling you home by main force is the fact that Yarri’s coming to keep you alive.”

Torrant gaped at him, and then, that familiar clenching of the jaw. “That’s not fair!” he protested. “What we’re doing here is important— you know that—it’s more important than you, it’s more important than me…”

“And what you don’t understand is, if there is no you, there is no ‘great undertaking’—these people will not be saved if you’re not here, and if it takes Yarri’s presence to keep you alive and make this happen, then I say let her come!”

“But she had to leave B…” Torrant swallowed and turned away, and Aylan came to him and turned his shoulders around, nimble fingers shaking as they worked deftly at the cravat. He met Aylan’s eyes then, and saw his own misery reflected there. “How could she leave Bethen?”

“Because she left her with Lane and Starry and Evya and Stanny,” Aylan choked back. Helplessly his hands went to Torrant’s wet-combed hair. It had been so pretty in the sun as they’d played in the water, loose around his face, the white streak practically glittering in all that dark. “Don’t you see? Bethen taught us all about joy—she’s the reason we know why it needs to be saved. She knows that. That’s why she helped Yarri pack.”

A weak trickle slid by Torrant’s nose, and he wiped it away with irritation. After the night before, he was so tired of tears. “If Starry were coming here, you’d go stop her,” he said at last, feeling small and petty for even bringing it up.

Aylan forgave him even as the words were uttered. “If I left to go stop her, you would continue the fight.” He swept Torrant’s suit at his shoulders and turned him around again to straighten it at the back. Considering what Ellyot Moon was walking into this session, looking his best was mandatory.

“I can survive without Yarri,” Torrant said stoically. It was hard to keep dignity in his voice when it was breaking, and the only thing keeping him from dropping to the floor and howling was the knowledge that the rest of his friends were going to be at his door in a moment, waiting to go out for coffee before confronting Rath like a snow cat in his cave.

Aylan shook his head, screwing up his face as though he wanted to kick something. “I’ve done this before, you know. I know what you’re feeling. But you’re not running home with your tail between your legs to let your heart heal in the hands of the family—no, you’re staying here, hoping that what’s left of your soul will keep you breathing until it gets done. You won’t last without her, brother. I wish I was enough,” he took a deep breath, and then another, and still his voice was not going to stay strong, and he still had to finish, “Triane’s bloody red heart, I wish we were all the other needed. But you need her.”

Torrant’s hands came up to hold Aylan’s, which had never stopped their fussy, restless grooming. “You’re doing fine,” he reassured with a weak twitch of the lips, and Aylan waved him off .

“I’m not saying I’m planning on leaving—I don’t know if even Yarri can do it alone. But I need help, mate. I can’t live like this anymore. You’re breaking my heart and you won’t let me care for you…I need her to make you care for yourself.”

Torrant looked at him, their faces naked and pale and haggard, and tried hard not to notice the shaking in his own hands, the tremble to Aylan’s jaw, the terrible fragility of both of them, just a hair’s breadth away from the helpless chasm of being too weak to step forward.

“Please, brother,” Aylan begged, sensing his wavering. “Please don’t send her away. She’s your only chance to get out of here, and just like you couldn’t survive my death, I’m not going to live through yours. Please, Torrant…just, please, that’s all. Please.”

“You wank.” Torrant took several deep breaths and got himself under control, and he leaned forward to kiss Aylan’s temple, nuzzling his friend’s pretty yellow hair. “You wank—she’d better not get hurt.”

“Of course she’ll get hurt,” Aylan replied soberly, refusing to be embarrassed. He’d beg and weep like that on the square in front of the entire benighted city, if that’s what it took. “It’s inevitable that Yarri will get hurt,” he repeated, an infinite sadness in his voice. “But she’ll survive. You won’t take one more hit and keep going, not without her.”

There was a knock on the door, which was fortunate because

Torrant was a breath away from apologizing for his weakness, and then Aylan may have needed to break something then.

The young regents were all dressed like Torrant—their darkest, most formal suits, their ties impeccably done. As one entity, they took a deep breath of shock when they saw Torrant’s hair. In spite of Aylan’s best efforts, there were bare spots, next to the scalp, that had been too badly mauled by the belt-knife to fix.

“Ellyot,” Aerk murmured in concern, and Torrant affected not to hear him.

“Right—we need to have our story straight. For all of you, it’s not much of a story. You simply need to say that you brought Triana’s body to her family, and you heard the song. Based on…on Djali’s state of mind at the time, you can assume that… that our friend is dead,” his voice barely cracked. He was both proud and ashamed.

“Ellyot,” Keon tried to interrupt, and Torrant continued over him.

“If he asks for confirmation of the song, leave the question to me—I won’t leave you all hanging, you’ve got to trust me on this, I won’t just let him savage you on the floor…”

“Ellyot!” Marv, Jino, Aerk and Keon all shouted in tandem, causing Aylan (who had flopped on the divan with a desperately feigned disinterest as the door opened) to jump and turn on his knees, staring at them all with eyes hungry for something, anything, that would give Torrant hope.

“I’m sorry?” Torrant’s jaw was clenched like a twisted spring, and his voice was one-half gruff and the other-half young.

“This wasn’t your fault,” Aerk said gently, extending an embarrassed hand to pat Torrant on the shoulder.

“Uhm, right then.” Torrant made a business out of pulling his battered sword-belt from the corner and fastening it over his green coat and huntsman, mindless of the sweltering early-autumn heat. He turned around, expecting that the young men would have moved towards the door, but they were standing there, regarding him with a gentle resolve.

“It’s not you’re fault,” Keon reinforced, and Torrant flushed and nodded, and made to move past them, and Aylan was as surprised as Torrant when the group of young men didn’t give way.

“It’s not your fault.” Marv and Jino spoke in tandem and stood, facing him, their bodies as implacable as their good nature.

Torrant stood, arrested, for the first time in their knowledge looking hunted. They could see his heart beating in his throat as he hovered between action and misery, between acceptance and denial.

“We need to hear you say it, before we leave,” Aerk said into the hush. He shook his long bangs out of his almond eyes and his throat bobbed with a nervous swallow.

“I…” Torrant stopped, closed his eyes, and tried again. “You trusted me. This…you weren’t supposed to get hurt.”

“You told us the risks.”

Eljean hadn’t knocked, and his quiet words were greeted with surprise and hostility. He saw the hostility and flushed, unable to meet anyone’s eyes but Torrant’s.

“Ellyot,” he murmured deliberately, “you have never been anything less than honest with us. Even when you lie, you’re telling us all the truth you have.”

Torrant’s cheeks went so pale that Aylan wondered for a moment if he wasn’t going to simply fade from existence as they watched.

“Djali trusted…” he started and Eljean cut him off .

“Oh now somebody listens to me? I’ve always been wrong. I’m a coward—Aylan’s always known that about me—do you think I wouldn’t be afraid of my own grief?” Eljean tried a smile, but it quivered on his long face. He looked as though he’d dressed while sprinting through a hurricane, and his eyes were too weary for the smile to be anything other than an attempt. And then he really took a look at Torrant and his hand moved up to cover his mouth. “Triane’s tears…your hair!”

Torrant looked away. “Your cravat’s a disaster, Eljean,” he said to the back of the couch. “You need to fix it before we go.”

Eljean shook his head, and wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand. “You say it first—you say what Aerk told you. It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault.”

“Djali…” Torrant began again.

“Would never have known happiness, if he hadn’t known you,” Aerk supplied gently. “Please, Ellyot. You cannot bear the sins of the entire city on your back. It will break you, and we need you unbroken.”

At last Torrant turned and met their eyes…“My brothers,” he murmured, “I came here to change things…and I forgot that change can be a terrible, destructive force. I will give credit—much credit— where it belongs. Djali’s father…” Torrant turned his head and spat on the rich carpet. It was a crude, violent gesture, but none of them recoiled from it. They all felt their bile rise at the mention of their enemy. “I can’t tell you it’s not my fault,” he continued, even as they swallowed and paled…“Not until I feel it in my heart.”

There was an awful, fraught and weighted silence, and he and the regents regarded each other tensely. The regents loved him, he realized with a tightening chest. That hadn’t been part of the plan.

He smiled into the broken silence then. It was a small, pale imitation of the smile that had made Aylan’s heart race for nearly ten years and had longed to see the night before, but still it was there, real and beautiful, and Aylan’s breath caught because he’d been wondering if he would ever see that quirk of the lips, again.

“But…but that you want to stand up in there with me, that you’re willing to do this together,” he looked at Eljean, the tightness in his eyes easing up a little, “that you’re here this morning,” the tiny smile flirted a with his mouth again, “it may give me heart to go on.” He swallowed then, “Now someone fix Eljean’s tie, and let’s go. We’re going to need coffee and food before that bell rings, or we’ll never make it through the day.”

The words seemed to give them heart, and they managed some quiet talk and even some grim banter as they paused at a cart in the square for coffee and pastries under the orange-tinted blue-sky sunshine.

“Look at that,” Keon muttered darkly, nodding to the place on the tan marble steps where Triana had fallen. It had been scrubbed clean in the night.

The others regarded it soberly until Torrant spoke. “He won’t be able to cleanse the deed from his conscience quite so easily,” he said with conviction, and the others nodded, and quietly finished their breakfast.

When Aerk saw that Torrant had left off the ‘pastry’ portion of his breakfast and settled for coffee, he bought an extra and nodded Torrant over to a quiet place in the shade of the stone canopy overhead.

“Eat,” he said quietly, and his voice held just enough authority to get Torrant to take the bread as it was shoved in his hand, but not quite enough to make him put it in his mouth.

“I’m not…”

“We know.”

Torrant cast a puzzled look at the pastry…“Know what?”

“Know who you are. Keon and I—we’ve known for months that you’re not Ellyot Moon. But we know you love his family like your own—probably more, because I think I love your family more than I love the git who sent me here and left me to flounder. But we know your real name—Eljean obviously does. I’m not sure about Marv and Jino, but they might have guessed, and either way we’ll tell them as soon as this terrible day is over. Whatever you are hanging onto in the name of honor, whatever little piece of self-hatred you are grasping with broken fingers, Torrant Shadow, you let it go right now,” Aerk’s voice shook, “and you eat that damned pastry, because I could swear I saw the sun shining through your hands a moment ago, and we can’t afford to have you fade away before this is done.”

Torrant looked at Aerk in amazement, taking a bite of the sweetened bread before his brain even registered he was thinking about it. “Is it that easy to…?”

“No.” Aerk shook his head. “We figured it out because Keon reads every damned thing, and because I have a head for songs. We’ve known for a month, he and I. We didn’t say anything because we thought it wasn’t our place.” Aerk looked away, suddenly embarrassed by the uncharacteristic show of force. “It’s still not…it’s just that…”

Torrant laughed a little and shook his head, responding with a full mouth. “Thank you. Just…thank you.”

And then the bell rang, and they guzzled what was left of their mugs before they gave them back to the wary vendor and ran for the tan marble of the Regents’ Hall.

Torrant was shoving the last of his breakfast in his mouth as he went.

Aerk and Keon had to hold him up under the armpits, ten hours later, as he lost whatever was left of that scant breakfast in the bathroom.

“Dueant’s rotten fish,” Aylan muttered, stunned by his brother’s gray pallor and clammy shakes. Torrant had rushed in grimly, the regents at his back, and then practically swooned over the porcelain toilet in the bathroom. “What in the star’s dark happened in there?”

Aerk shook his head, keeping a tight hold on Torrant’s shaking body and looking none-too-hale himself. “It was unrelenting,” he murmured, not allowing Torrant to have his own weight back. “They didn’t let us eat or drink—it was the six of us, in the center of the Hall, answering the same questions phrased six dozen ways, from either the Consort or one of his cronies. What did they think we were going to do? Suddenly confess to the murder of his son?”

“Yes,” Torrant rasped, passing a shaking hand over his face. “He’s got another pet wizard on a leash, hoping we’ll do exactly that.”

“Oueant’s fat white ass.” Aylan stood jerkily and grabbed Torrant’s old duffel from under his armoire and started stuffing it with clothes.

“What are you doing?” Torrant asked blearily, looking at him in wonder. Then: “No. No!” He stood, and with strength they could have all sworn he didn’t possess he grabbed the duffel from Aylan’s hands and started pulling his clothes out. “We’re not leaving!”

“Did you not hear yourself?” Aylan demanded. “I’d say that’s the last bleeding straw, mate! A new pet wizard, trying to get a confession out of you?”

“Well he didn’t, did he?” Torrant returned, an unhealthy flush spreading over his cheeks. “Do you think I’d be this undone just by standing and answering questions? My gift is truth, remember? What do you think I’ve been doing for the last ten hours if it wasn’t making sure the truth was heard!”

“Well it’s been heard!” Aylan snatched the duffel back, unbalancing Torrant and sending him sprawling across the floor. He muttered an oath then that probably turned the sky black, threw the duffel sideways (where it smacked a bemused Keon across the face) and went to his knees. “The truth has been heard, and it’s time for us to get out. You said it yourself, Yarri’s coming, it’s too dangerous for her here, and you need to leave!”

“Yarri’s coming?” Marv echoed. “Why would Yarri come if he’s not really her broth… Ouch, dammit Jino, are you trying to kill me… oh. Never mind.”

Jino rubbed his elbow and glared at his friend, although the looks from the rest of the room were decidedly kinder.

“If you were any more dense, you’d sink the earth below the star line,” Jino muttered, and Marv flushed.

“I just like things clear,” Marv said with dignity, and the tension in the room loosened like an undone knot in wool.

“We can’t go now,” Torrant said, still kneeling on the carpet, the shakes taking over his body again. “We’ve given too much…lost too much to give up now. Someone in the ghetto has been shanghaied or bribed into Rath’s court, but we can’t let it stop us…”

Aylan sank to the carpet, remembering inanely that he had gone back to sleep not long after Torrant had left, and took his brother’s hands in his own. “Look at yourself…Yarri’s going to kill me if she sees you like this.”

“Right back at you, brother,” Torrant smiled without humor. “We can’t leave,” he added somberly. “The Sec/Gen left early—Rath wasn’t pleased to have Djali’s words about setting the guards on Triana spoken in front of the entire Regent’s hall. There’s going to be night work to do.”

A silence like the beginning of a baby’s hurt shriek thudded through the room, as all of the young men looked at their leader, his face gray-green from the stress of the day, and heard him talk about going out into the night to protect the ghettoes. And, just like a baby’s shriek, the chaos that followed was deafening.

“Are you insane?”

“You’re certifiable, do you know that?”

“The only place you’re going is to bed!”

“What are you going to do, puke on the sadistic killers?” This last was from Jino, and it was so incongruous that the rest of the group stopped talking to stare at him. Aerk broke the rather stunned silence with a short laugh.

“I don’t think it will come to that,” he said dryly. “I think we all need to patrol the ghettoes, and let Ellyot here get some sleep.”

“When do we get to call him by his real name?” Marv complained, and Torrant and Aylan both snapped a sharp “Never!”

“The less you know about Ellyot Moon, the better,” Torrant said softly, meeting Aylan’s pained glance with his own. “What if you get caught by this new pet wizard? What if Rath knocks on your door and calls you in for an interview? If you never knew my real name, you’d never be accused of collusion—it was what I was trying to avoid in the first place.”

“After today,” Keon replied thoughtfully, “I don’t think Rath can touch us…No, no—listen!” when Torrant and Aylan would have protested. “At least not like that. We stood on the floor and accused him of kidnapping a girl from the ghettoes—and the entire hall saw the dead girl on the steps. We told him he’d driven his own son to suicide. And the entire city is singing Djali’s song. Between that song, and Ellyot’s ballad from a couple of weeks ago, the whole world is beginning to believe that Rath is not the benevolent ruler he’s managed to lull us all into believing.” Keon stroked his chin and then scratched his head through his dark, wiry hair. His eyes were round and dark, and when they sharpened in speculation, they were scalpel-fine and dangerous.

“People are starting to ask questions,” he continued, reasoning. “Now, the time might have been when he could have, say, poisoned a couple of us, and people would have called it an accident. He might even have called us on the floor for treason, and they would have believed it. But he sweated us today…he sweat us hard, and none of us broke. Not even you, and I guess you were keeping us from the worst of it.”

“But not needing to worry about being poisoned in public is one thing!” Torrant protested, struggling to his feet. He used the back of the couch to push himself up and stood in front of them, weaving but resolute. “Going out to face down the guards…”

“Publicly, ‘Ellyot’!” Aerk stressed his name. “What you and Aylan have been doing…it’s invaluable, and so many would have died without it…but if we go out and put a public face on the protection of the ghettoes…”

Torrant nodded, a little panicked. “I agree—you’re right. But not without back-up. You boys haven’t touched a sword in months!”

“It’s not our swords we’ll be flashing, Ellyot,” Jino said gamely, and still Torrant wouldn’t back down.

“Fine. Come with us. But you’re not going without me.”

There was a chorus of negatives, and then Aylan held up his hand. “Right, brother,” he said, swallowing. His purple-blue gaze locked with Torrant’s clear hazel eyes. He would ask the others later, how long those eyes had waxed Goddess-blue during their public depositions, and would be appalled at the answer, but right now, they were simply Torrant’s eyes, fatigued, grief-ridden, but still human and still beautiful.

“Right—we’ll do whatever you say, but you need to prove to us that you’re whole and able.”

Torrant’s adorable, quirky upper lip curled back warily. “Fine,” he said, wondering what Aylan had in mind. He stood to his toes, pulled out his sword and took an offensive stance. “Name a figure, any figure—I’m good.”

“No, no…nothing that elaborate.” Aylan’s own pouty mouth was compressed grimly. “Just one simple thing.”

“I’m waiting.” Torrant relaxed his stance a little, and they all pretended they didn’t see the sweat popping out on his ashen forehead with that little bit of exertion.

“Right then,” Aylan licked his upper lip. Torrant was the only man on earth who would forgive him for this, and the only man on earth whose forgiveness Aylan needed. “Change.”

Torrant blinked. “Clothes?”

“No, you wank—change forms!” Aylan wondered if he was really that fatigued or if he was being deliberately obtuse. “This morning you couldn’t change forms to re-knit your broken bones—I saw it. You’ve said all along that the cat is your advantage. You’re one hell of a swordsman, mate, I won’t deny it, but if you’re too wiped to use your form, then it’s just as well you stay here and hoard your strength. Tonight is one night in many. Today on the floor was only a prelude to the sweet little hell I imagine Rath has been planning for you since you arrived on the scene. You change into the cat, and we’re good to go. If you can’t…well then, you sit back and let us take care of it for one night, are you hearing me?”

Torrant glared at him with inescapable venom. “You are Oueant’s piss in a paper cup.”

Aylan actually smiled. “That’s the deal.”

“Fine.”

He had never made the change with so many curious eyes on him before, and the uncomfortable sensation of his muscles crawling across his skin like determined snakes seemed amplified times a million this night. And then all of those snakes constricted angrily around the broken bones of his upper arm, and he collapsed to his still-human haunches, barely aware that Aylan, unmindful of his two-inch feline teeth, had wadded up a throw pillow and shoved it in his mouth to help quiet the whimpers he was shamed to admit were escaping. Oh Goddess…it was slow…so slow…usually the pain was a ripping, a tearing, an explosion of agony but this…this was breaking a bone and setting it, second by excruciating second. He locked swimming eyes with Aylan’s, drawing strength from the terrible compassion in his friend’s face, and kept going, whimpering some more as he felt the broken ends of the healing fracture grind together when they knit up completely.

His vision swam, the usual iciness he experienced held at bay by the horrible pain, and he could tell from the way Aylan looked away that although he had flopped to his side in the snow cat’s form, his eyes, his all-too human eyes, had yet to change. He lay, panting, licking as far up on his foreleg as he could to somehow ease the terror of nerve-endings destructing and resurrecting underneath his skin, and, mindless of the other regents who were simply regarding him with fascination and sorrow, looked back at Aylan, mutiny and misery in every line of his furry, powerful form.

“All of you,” Aylan rasped, scrubbing his face with a shaking hand. “Even the eyes, dammit. Even the eyes.”

Torrant mreweled, a pitiful, beat-kitten of a sound, and closed his eyes and tried again. He was so tired, he couldn’t even roar in agony when the last of the change completed the healing of his bones.

He was aware that Aylan and Eljean were on their knees next to him, both colored the only warmth in the snow cat’s vision, the warmth of those he would protect. Both of them were stroking hands soothingly through his thick fur, mindless that it was soaked with sweat.

Then Aylan bent over and whispered in his ear, spattering sweat which sparkled off of the delicate white tufts of fur there. “Good, brother. Well done. Now change back, and we’ll go hunting together.”

Torrant passed out towards the end of the second change, so he had no recollection of being stripped down and washed, or of having a sleep shirt thrown over his head as he was toweled dry and put into his own bed. He certainly had no memory of the regents (some of them having returned from their own flats, where they pulled out their much neglected sword-belts) slipping out of his patio doors with Aylan at the lead, or of Arue’s wraithlike form sliding into his room scantly an hour afterwards, to curl up in the chair by his bed, and watch him as he slept.

In Between Times

Three hours later, there was a pounding at the door, and Arue was shaking him awake. “Healer…Healer…it’s the Consort!”

“Triane’s purple tits…” Torrant slurred—it was one of Aylan’s favorites—and then he recalled himself. “Goddess!” He scrubbed at his face and stumbled out of bed.

Before he even cleared the doorway to the front room, Arue hissed, “Healer, your hair!” and Torrant knew with total certainty that if he hadn’t just slept, he never would have had the strength to do even that little bit of magic.

As it was, he didn’t have to feign the exhaustion that had him slumping against the doorframe as he flung the door open into Rath’s startled face.

“Did you forget to pin me to the rack, Consort?” he asked, fuzzily. “Otherwise, I could have sworn it was late and I had the right to sleep.”

Rath’s eyes were cold and compassionless—and his lip, under his mustache, was curled up with displeasure. “Where are your friends?”

Torrant was suddenly wide awake, but he kept his eyes drooping and blinking as he yawned. “I would assume they are grieving,” he replied, having the pleasure of watching the Consort flinch. That had been one of his major scores against the administration during the day, and it had been nothing less than the truth.

You all look like hell, sneered the Sec/Gen. What have you been doing that makes the lot of you look like dissolute drunkards, coming off of a bender?

Grieving, sir, Torrant replied grimly, but I notice that you and the

Consort look fresh and shiny this morning. I’ll have to assume that you show your humanity in other ways.

Rath flinched then as he flinched now, and Torrant’s eyes were no longer sleepy as they met his enemy.

“I still don’t see any proof that I have anything to grieve,” Rath answered coolly, “and I have reports that there are regents wandering the streets of the ghettoes, singing that cursed ballad…”

“Your son’s death song, Consort,” Torrant corrected gently. “Here, I’ll be right back.” He closed and locked the door then, knowing that Rath would be too stunned at the rudeness to protest, and went to the battered leather cloak hanging from the hook behind the door in the bedroom, pulling out the sheaf of papers that Duan had given him the night before. Something niggled at him now, about Duan’s anger, and his reluctance to tell anyone what he suspected Djali might be doing, but he put it on the back shelf of his mind and opened the door to his enemy again.

“It’s in his hand,” Torrant murmured, opening the papers so that Rath might see it. He had no intention of letting the Consort actually have Djali’s death song, in spite of the fact that every musician for a twenty-mile radius of Dueance had probably already transcribed the lyrics and Torrant’s makeshift melody as the song had been sung during the course of the day. “And in his tears and blood as well.” The teardrops on the ink were unmistakable—and so was the horrible, blackened crust used to transcribe the symbol of the three moons at the end.

The skin of Rath’s face tightened inexorably back, revealing a hideous skull’s snarl, and eyes that bulged when they shouldn’t have. “You made him do this…my son’s silly love of words, of poetry…it would have died, and he would have ruled after me. He wouldn’t have been perfect, but…”

Against his will, Torrant found a grim laugh forced out of his chest. “His silly love of poetry? Consort, do you know what it is you hold in your hand there?” Torrant pulled it from Rath’s grasp before the bastard could crumple it in his fist.

“The last delusions of a foolish boy!” Rath spat, and for the first time— the only time—something like grief crossed the man’s features.

But it wasn’t grief for Djali—at least, not the Djali that Torrant and his friends had loved.

“You’re so wrong.” Torrant shook his head and ran his hands through his shorn hair, feeling the small buzz of magic where his disguise hid the last of who he was.

“You’re wrong about all of it. In a thousand years, your madness will be dust—it will be a cautionary tale, one that we tell children. No one will remember you—or me for that matter. No one. But they’ll be singing this song. Your son’s song will outlive us both and it will teach the world that love is stronger than madness.”

For a moment, Rath looked shaken. Truly shaken. “My world will be perfect,” he insisted.

“Consort, was there something you needed to tell me? I assume you mean to depose us again tomorrow, and you get to sit through the proceedings.” Torrant’s legs actually ached from standing so many hours—he imagined the other regents were pretty tired by now as well, and felt a pang that they were walking the ghettoes without him.

“Make them stop!” Rath’s normally pale features flushed blotchily, and in the morning, Torrant would take this as a good sign. It was the first time he’d seen anything approaching color in the face of the enemy. Tonight, leaning weakly against the doorframe and thinking longingly of the bed he’d been exiled to, it was all he could do to laugh.

“Since they’re out there against my express wishes, I’d say that this movement for freedom in the ghettoes has grown beyond both of us,” he murmured, almost to himself. He looked his enemy in the eye again. “As it should be, since we’re talking an entire people here, and not just a few of my friends.”

“Your boy-puppies are interfering with my guards’ ability to protect the people!” Rath said icily, and now Torrant grew grim.

“My fellow regents are serving their people, and your guards will be able to rape children and steal from businesses another day,” he said evenly, and that unhealthy blotch in Rath’s face spread.

“If the guards are sometimes carried away in their zeal…”

“It’s because you told them to be,” Torrant threw back. He knew it was the truth—but he had not expected to score such a direct hit, because the flush disappeared and Rath was left pale, clammy, and shaken.

“Who told you…” he whispered. “How did you…are you in league with that vigilante? What do they call him? Triane’s Son?”

So Rath had heard of him. Torrant suddenly felt much less like laughing. “Consort, two of my friends are dead, and you’re the cause. My other friends are in the ghettoes, protecting people from you, and I have been asked to remain behind—apparently to answer your questions. Either way, I am not with them. I can only assure you that I have never felt less like the son of joy in my entire life. Now if you’ll excuse me,” a wholly un-feigned yawn threatened to take over his jaw and throat, “I will do what the young regents insisted, and retire.”

And with that, Torrant shut the door in the Consort’s face and threw both bolts. He stumbled to his cupboard for his sword belt and an old towel so as not to get oil on the bedding, and flopped into bed with the sword next to him. Arue was still in the room, shivering in the corner chair.

“Don’t worry, little one, he’s gone” he murmured, and was surprised when she scrambled from the chair into the bed with him, forcing him to move the sword a little so they could both fit in half the bed. She clung to him through the covers, shivering, and he remembered the times Yarri had snuck into his room after they’d arrived in Eiran, suffering from a dream of her parents. “Sh…sh…sh…” he murmured into the girl’s growing hair, wondering that she’d even trust a man at all after all that she’d been through at the hands of the guards.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you, Triane’s Son. Thank you.”

Ah…he thought muzzily, his body sucking him into sleep almost vengefully. Of course…because Triane’s Son wasn’t really a man, was he?

The god fought the urge to weep, and started to snore gently instead.

Aylan arrived sometime before dawn and removed the sword before throwing an afghan over Arue, then stripping to a sleep-shirt and climbing into bed next to him.

“Don’t you have a flat of your own?” Torrant mumbled.

“At the moment, it’s filled with sleeping regents. Bad dreams?” Torrant felt more than saw Aylan’s nod at Arue and the sword belt.

“Bad company.” He tried to sit up in bed, but was pushed down with humiliating ease, so he gave a brief account of Rath’s visit to Aylan’s gold chest-hair as it peeped out of the shirt. He finished with, “How is it the regents are sleeping in your flat, but you hauled your manky arse into mine?”

Aylan chuckled and kissed his forehead. “Now be nice…I know you can’t hold a grudge longer than you can hold your breath. The alley’s full of guards, and I’m better at sneaking than they are. They’ll meet you for coffee, same time, same place, and you can all debate on the scintillating moral fiber that kept you from skewering that piece of cat-yak as he stood on your doorstep.”

“No mystery,” Torrant yawned. “You were right, and I could barely stand. That doesn’t mean I have to love you for it, that’s all.”

“But you still do, right?” There was something in Aylan’s tone that made their sleepy banter suddenly very important.

“Aylan, brother,” he started, but he was tired, and tired of having his heart cracked like an egg and pushed about in a frying pan, so he started again.

“Aylan, did I ever tell you the last thing I said to Ellyot?”

Aylan’s arms tightened around his shoulders, and Torrant breathed his sweat and his worry—and his love.

“He was teasing me because I couldn’t hunt. I told him to piss-off . He was laughing as he walked away. When I woke up, he was distracting the guards so I could get Yarri out, and he could die quick.”

Aylan sucked in a harsh breath, his words having shriveled up into gravel.

“Aylan, I’m tired. I’d like to go to sleep now. Good night, brother. I love you.” Torrant burrowed into Aylan even tighter, and Arue shifted a little on the bed now that she had more room on top of the covers.

“’Night brother,” Aylan responded, their comfort ritual suddenly pounding in his ears like bells. “Love you too. Dream of Yarri, right?”

“Mmmm.” And Aylan actually felt the tingle against his chest as Torrant let that last little bit of himself go.

The week wore on…Torrant, Aylan and the regents took turns wandering the ghettoes at night—with the exception of Eljean, of course.

Eljean had gone that first night, but at one point he’d needed to draw his sword against a couple of brigands and the shaking in his hand had made them laugh before Aerk had rolled his eyes and pulled out his own sword. Since then, Eljean had been relegated to lookout, and to getting useable information from Zhane.

At the moment, it didn’t matter-- since his conversation with Rath, the streets of Dueance had been surprisingly quiet. Torrant wasn’t sure how long it would last though, so patrol they did. There were always bullies from the town who would wander into the ghettoes to make trouble, and garden variety criminals who took advantage of the poor living conditions to make their own dens in the crumbling tenements—it kept them all busy enough.

They continued with their plans to evacuate the ghettoes as a whole. Since the regents now knew enough to get them hanged should things go awry, Torrant briefed them on the plans, and assigned every regent a rest-day week to start moving people. Zhane’s family was scheduled to go first, and after that Olek and Torrell were preparing a list of likely candidates. Neither of them would consent to go, but Torrant thought he was close to convincing Arue and her brother Iain that they would be needed on the farm…Torrell was thrilled.

“You know, they’re going to be naked there, if suddenly Rath gets this idea too.” Aylan was leaning against a powdering stucco wall, cleaning his nails with his dagger in the full light of the three moons. It really had been that quiet at night, and a sudden resurgence of heat made a mockery of the chill that had frosted the air the week before. They had ducked into the alley to pull the leather cloaks off their shoulders and catch a hopeful breeze.

“I’d thought of that,” Torrant agreed, turning his nose to the wind in a supremely cat-like gesture, had he known it.

Aylan studied him with narrowed eyes. His brother was making more of those, these days. There were times when they were hunting that he could swear Torrant was twitching whiskers he didn’t have. There were times at rest that he caught Torrant panting, with his mouth open and his tongue tasting air between his teeth, and a few moments when he saw Torrant’s spine rippling as though there would be a tail twitch at the end of it.

Since that terrible change the night after Djali died, it had taken very little at all to make his eyes spark that deadly Goddess blue.

Aylan had all but abandoned his own flat, slipping into Torrant’s patio every night, mostly so he would let his guard down while Aylan had his back, and dream of his one reason to be human. Torrant reported on Yarri’s progress every morning, from gathering supplies and leaving snippets of future letters for Lane to copy, to Cwyn’s sudden, terrible bout of sobbing on his mother’s skirts the night before they left.

“Just like when he was small,” Aylan said to that. “He’d be the worst child—rotten to the core, destroying toys, kicking his sister, hitting the cat…and then he’d suddenly be the joy of our joy, and even Starry would love him.”

Torrant had looked worried. “Starry hates being left behind. You can tell she wants to come to you…it’s pushing at her skin. But she’s all that Bethen has left.”

That had been the morning after Torrant’s terrible change as well, and Aylan’s knuckles still hurt from where he’d tried to put his fist through the outside wall of the apartment building. So did Torrant’s, which didn’t make Aylan feel any better.

This night, with no guards to bonk on the heads, they were gnawing on this other bone, but it wasn’t getting any smaller with the chewing.

“What we need to do,” Torrant said, his face closed against the light from the moons, like a cat in the sun, “is recruit one of the guards… ouch!” Because the dagger had slipped and Aylan had split a cuticle.

“Are you insane?”

“No mor’n ‘oo!” Torrant said around his third finger, which he’d popped into his mouth to take away the sting. He popped the finger out and showed the back of it to Aylan, and then continued with his thought. “Most of them don’t want to be here, have you noticed that? I swear, more of them are dropping before we bash them than after, and for the last two nights I’ve passed several huddled in the shadows weeping. I’m thinking the Sec/Gen put every sympathetic guard on ghetto detail the moment Rath put me together with Triane’s Son. It’s the crap detail—no one wants it. If they’re caught being sympathetic, they get their pay docked or their family is affected. So putting them here makes them either scared or mean. I think we find the ones that are scared and offer them a way out.”

Aylan shuddered. “Are you really going to put these people into the hands of someone whom Rath can’t trust?”

Torrant grinned, that disconcerting flash of blue in his eyes taking Aylan by surprise. “Now brother, I didn’t say there wouldn’t be a failsafe, now did I?”

Aylan remembered their first visit to Clough together, when that glimpse of Goddess blue sweated him cold for two days. Abruptly that sweat was back, freezing his breath in his chest and soaking his linen shirt even more than the heat.

“What are you planning, brother?”

“I only have what the Goddess gives me, brother…shhh… someone’s coming.”

It turned out to be town men, emboldened by the lack of guards, come to the ghettoes to raid the child-brothels they had heard so much about. Torrant leapt out from behind the wall, growing the snow-cat’s head as he poured in front of the hell-raisers like a liquid shadow. That fur-tufted head, sitting on the man’s shoulders, was a fearsome enough sight, but when Torrant threw back his ears and roared, the sound bounced off of the crumbling mortar of the ghettoes like one of Cwyn’s old rubber balls and he was even more frightening. The town men shrieked simultaneously and turned back towards the market place, running as though the star’s dark were about to swallow them whole.

Torrant’s face and eyes were his own by the time he ducked back into the alleyway to find Aylan silently laughing so hard he could barely stand. Laughs had been so few and so far between that Torrant found himself joining him, setting off another round by mentioning that the biggest of the men had pissed himself and left a trail all the way back to the market.

The laughter faded, and the two of them met eyes under the three moons, and an entirely different heat flared between them than what had permeated the summer air just moments before.

“That will be the last of them, you think?” Aylan asked, wiping bright eyes.

“For tonight, yes.” Their eyes met again.

“How long until Yarri gets here?”

“Three weeks.”

“Some people, who weren’t meant to be, never have one night,” Aylan said softly.

“We’ve had at least two, brother. Are you ready for bed?”

An entirely different chill and tingle had taken over Aylan, and he could only nod and follow Torrant back to the flat in the regents’ quarters, his heart pounding in his ears.

Later that night, when both their hearts had subsided and Aylan threw open the patio door to let in a breeze to cool their sweating bodies, Torrant allowed the last of the magic to fade, and dreamed some more.

This night, he dreamt of Bethen.

The Strongest Heart of Joy

She was sitting on Yarri’s bed, holding one of Roes’ old rag dolls, and watching the curtains billow in the stiff , chill breeze off the ocean. Even in his dreams—perhaps especially in his dreams—Torrant couldn’t see her any way but beautiful. When he’d first opened his eyes in Eiran, after hauling Yarri and Aldam down the mountain in a fever daze, she’d had curly auburn hair with a few silver ones at her hairline, and lines at her eyes and the corners of her mouth from smiling for most of her life. She’d had freckles and round cheeks, and the most expressive brown eyes he’d ever seen—including Yarri’s, although Yarri’s eyes might someday equal Bethen’s, after she had some living behind them.

He’d seen her through Yarri’s eyes, with the shock of the harsh lines that her illness had drawn, but here, through his own eyes, he saw the Bethen he remembered from his adolescence, the Bethen who would never change.

There was a movement behind her, and she turned and smiled, and her beloved entered the room.

Lane didn’t seem to age, perhaps because he had always been a little wise beyond his years. There was more gray in his hair and silver in his beard, but the lines around his merry-blue eyes were the same. The soul-deep sorrow was new.

“See something interesting?” he asked, sitting behind her and twisting to wrap his arms around her waist. She sighed and leaned back into him.

“Seeing this house full,” she murmured. “It doesn’t feel right with only Starren here.”

“We can stop them, you know. They probably haven’t gone very f a r.”

Ordinarily, Torrant would think he was joking, but his voice was gruff and clogged and there was nothing light about the look in Lane Moon’s eyes.

“No.” Bethen shook her head hard and tried to pretend that teardrops didn’t just fly into space to spatter where they would. Discreetly (and a little late) she wiped her face with her apron. “It would have killed Cwyn to sit here and watch…and we need those boys back here alive, now more than ever. It doesn’t matter if they get here before or after…this…this house and this town just needs them. Yarri will make that happen.”

“That’s a lot of faith in a small girl,” Lane murmured. A pure and dazzling smile, without a hint of sadness lit up her face through the tears.

“She has your family in her—she’s big enough for the job.”

But the melancholy was too pervasive to leave Lane, even with her smile. “It’s not right,” he said gruffly, burying his chin into her shoulder. “It’s not right that you should be here, alone, with only one child to care for you.” Some heat crept into his voice. “I still don’t understand why Professor Austin had to send Aldam and Roes to Wrinkle Creek.”

Bethen’s shoulders shook with a suppressed laugh. “I think that would be perfectly obvious, Lane—it’s because I told him to.”

Lane was shocked enough to release her waist and stalk around the bed, coming before his wife to kneel and take her hands in his. “Bethen…Bethen… why? Why would you send Roes away now?”

Bethen shook her head, still laughing a little. “It wasn’t Roes, my darling, it was Aldam. That foolish boy kept trying to ‘heal’ me—I would wake up, and feel better for a day or two and Aldam would be pale and shaking for a week or more. I finally figured out that he had been healing me in my sleep. I asked Austin…Austin said that eventually, Aldam would succeed,” her voice dropped, and all the laughter faded, “but the consequences,” she murmured. “Neither of us could have lived with them, my darling. I told Austin to make them go away, and that for once, there was something that Roes was not to know.”

“Were you going to tell me?” Lane demanded, hurt.

“I just did,” Bethen replied mildly, and when Lane would have jerked away from her, she held his hands with a strength that surprised both Lane and a dreaming Torrant.

“It was when you wouldn’t talk about it, Lane,” she said gruffly. “Remember?”

“I’m an ass,” Lane Moon said from a raw throat. “I’ve always been an ass. Why would you want to be married to someone who wouldn’t see something like that?”

Bethen smoothed rough, working hands around her husband’s dear face. “Because of why you wouldn’t see it, beloved,” she whispered, and dropped her face to his for a kiss that made even a sleeping Torrant uncomfortable to witness. Lane pulled away and dropped his face into her lap, wiping his cheeks on her apron, and Bethen licked her lips a little in what seemed to be shyness, tasting his tears.

“I’d understand why you wouldn’t want to…” she said hesitantly, wounded. “I know you can feel…lumps and things…I’m not beautiful, not that I ever have been.”

Lane looked up from her lap. “I always want to,” he said, and even through his tears there was a hint of the dry humor that had pulled Torrant through some difficult years into manhood, “and I’ll always think you’re beautiful. But I’m afraid…Bethie, what if it hurts…I don’t want to hurt you…”

Bethen actually laughed, and again, to Torrant’s sleeping ears it was the sound of all joy. “Oh, Lane,” she chuckled, “after thirty years, do you think I don’t love the sweetness more than I hate the pain? And how much longer will I have both? Kiss me, beloved,” her voice dropped, and there was no more laughter in it. “Please kiss me. Let me know sweetness, yes?”

Their lips met, and this time Torrant truly could no longer watch, not even to dream. He awoke to Aylan holding his shoulders and whispering in comfort as he wept in his sleep.

“Mama?” The little man at Bitsy’s side was tugging for her attention with her skirts.

“That’s not you, is it?” The child was confused, and Bitsy stopped rocking the fussy baby on her shoulder long enough to stoop down and clarify.

“No, poppet, that was my grandmamma—I was named for her.”

Young Prince Aerk, as the family called him, thought for a moment. “My grandmamma isn’t going to get sick, is she?”

Bitsy looked over her shoulder to where her mother stood, her graying red hair mercilessly scraped back into a practical bun. “Not anytime soon,” she murmured, looking affectionately at her father, who had his hands protectively on Roes’ shoulders.

She believed it, too. Aldam would never let his Roes leave without him.

Part IX…The Changing Moon

Triane’s Son Waiting

A week later, Torrant patrolled under a single chilling moon, and thought a little yearningly of Aylan, asleep in Torrant’s bed. He wished he could insist that Aylan sleep in his tiny, crumbling flat with the sprung couch—he knew he should. But no one had noticed yet—or if the maids who came in periodically and cleaned the bathroom and swept the rug had noticed, they certainly hadn’t reported that another man was living in the same room as Ellyot Moon, the newest almost-regent.

He told the other regents that he didn’t think it necessary to actually push for a majority. “For the moment, they’re listening. Rath’s milking the sympathy for everything its worth, but…”

He hadn’t needed to finish that sentence—the evidence that something was amiss in the Consort’s house had been all too damning, bleeding on the courthouse steps. Not even Rath attempted to maintain the fiction that Djali was still alive.

So it wasn’t necessary for ‘Ellyot Moon’ to officially become a regent, and although nobody said it, he could tell they were all relieved that they wouldn’t have to force their fellow regents to believe a lie.

Which was fine—they were making progress. He and Aylan still patrolled at night, but the guards had thinned out enough that they were splitting up the work, and the five young regents had taken turns working in pairs in the early parts of the night to simply patrol the area. Some of the others on the floor who had been sympathetic in their voting had started to come along. A sudden influx of blankets and food found its way into the clinic the last rest-day, and Torrant, at least was encouraged.

But the giant structure on the hill rise above the city continued to grow like a stone wart, and they still hadn’t found a solution to the problem of guarding the people they were smuggling out to the secretly re-established Moon Hold. He hadn’t discovered where Rath was keeping the Goddess’ gifted who kept trying (at unexpected times) to force his hand on the floor, and as of yet, he could get no other regent to publicly accuse Rath of abducting Triana, and these complications were not encouraging.

In fact, they were downright frustrating, and as Torrant was visited with dream after dream of Yarri’s progress towards him, he could only marvel that she seemed to be able to accomplish anything, while he was stuck on just these two problems.

“Do you know who’s coming now? Bethen’s big ‘surprise’ at Wrinkle Creek?”

He woke Aylan up out of a sound sleep in the wee hours after this dream had visited—and he hadn’t been happy to wake from it. He had been taking an inordinate amount of pleasure in the dream from just looking at Yarri. She was so beautiful—her brown eyes sparkled, and her lovely autumn colored hair rippled past her full hips. Her yellow dress all but sang of the brightness in her soul, and her body was just so lush… Was it because he had been surrounded by nothing but regents or sick people for the past months, or was it just her? He didn’t know, but he knew that as the true dreams continued and she started to get closer to him, he started to fixate on her body or her face in total enchantment.

Breasts. His beloved had soft, pillowy, sweet breasts—when was the last time he had even looked at a woman for that feature when it hadn’t been purely functional? The answer was easy—it had been the last time, the one time, he’d been in her arms.

When Trieste entered the dream, dressed simple and fine in a dress of dark blue linen, he hadn’t noticed her breasts at all. She made an unlikely, gracious presence in the red-dusted cedar woods of Wrinkle Creek. In the background of the dream he could see the house he had roomed in with Aldam for nearly four years as they’d served the people in the hills. Aldam had been upset, he could tell, because there was an added room over the center of the house—the part with the best foundation and sturdiest walls. Aldam always did his best carpentry when he was unhappy.

Yarri, Trieste, Roes, and Aldam were packing four wagons for the lot of them—Trieste even had a retinue of servants, including a sturdy, practical steward who was discussing with Roes how to pack so that when Roes and Aldam swung south to head for Moon Hold they didn’t have to split up belongings. Aldam had been calmly taking direction from Trieste in the easiest way to cover his white streak, which was nearly unnecessary since his hair was almost white-blonde on it’s own. When he’d pointed that out, a look of pain crossed Trieste’s features, and she and Yarri had met eyes in a clear plea on behalf of the Queen of Otham to see if Yarri could keep her beloved friend out of danger.

Yarri had shaken her head firmly, saying, “No. It’s not going to happen. Not for Torrant, and not for you.”

And that was when Torrant had sat up in bed and awakened Aylan.

“Aldam and Roes? And Trieste? It will be quite the reunion!” Aylan was grinning, his white teeth flashing in the moonlight from the patio window, and therefore he was not anticipating Torrant’s smack on the back of his head. “What was that for?”

“All of them? Damned bloody all?”

“Well, not all of them here. Aldam’s not stupid, you know. He’s heading for Moon Hold, using, I might add, the same deduction you used to establish the new colony there.”

Torrant had blown out a breath and thrown himself back against the pillows, his bare chest starting goosebumps around his scars. “Oueant’s tears, what in the name of the star’s dark are they thinking?” he asked the air in general.

Aylan frowned, not caring for the way Torrant shivered outside of the blankets as he pulled the comforter up under his friend’s chin. Torrant scowled at him and Aylan shrugged, completely unrepentant at his fussing. “Perhaps they’re thinking what the regents and I have already figured out, brother. You may be the one man who can save the world, but it’s going to take a bunch of us to save you.”

Torrant snorted then and curled up on his side, burrowing into Aylan’s smooth-skinned comfort. Their legs tangled under the blankets and Aylan’s arms came around Torrant’s shoulders, his palms skimming the ridges of the scars that had so appalled Eljean.

“So,” Aylan murmured into Torrant’s shorter hair, “how did she look?”

Torrant didn’t even have to guess which woman Aylan had been referring to. “Lovely,” he replied, falling back asleep even as he answered. “She has the most amazing breasts.”

Three nights later, in the dank recesses of the rough-cobbled alley between crumbling red and yellow brick walls, Torrant could still hear the warmth of Aylan’s chuckle, and it kept him still. He wondered, then, at his hubris, that he thought he could come to this city all alone and make a difference, when, in truth, he could hardly do it even with the help of all his friends.

He heard a sound then, and shrank back even further into the shadows, waiting to see who it was. He could smell the sweat on metal and hear the clink—had, in fact, scented the guard coming for some minutes now. But he wanted a glimpse of him, to see if it was the guard he had been thinking of.

Soundlessly, he reached above him and hauled himself up onto the roof of the building next to him, and crept above on the shingles, thankful for once that all three moons were down. It was hard to be quiet on the roofs of the ghetto—most of the buildings were falling apart, the roofs were in disrepair, the shingles sliding out from under his feet if he trod even a little wrong. But he and Aylan had been moving quietly in the ghetto for months, and he was good at it now. In silence and shadows he trailed the man from the rooftops, wanting to see where he was going.

The guard suddenly stopped, looked behind him and around him, and then made an abrupt turn. Apparently he was going into a deadend alley.

Torrant crept along the edge, waiting for the man to come out.

The guard started talking to the crumbling mortar instead. “Hullo…whoever you are?”

Torrant fought the urge to yelp, and the man just kept talking, as though fully aware he had an audience.

“The man who has been knocking me on the head for months? I know you’re out there. I don’t know how—but I can tell by now.”

The man looked around, tried looking above but couldn’t—his helmet impeded his vision. It made things very simple for Torrant and Aylan these past months, but for right now, the lack of visibility didn’t matter. He continued to talk to the dark night chill.

“I know which nights I’m going to be belted on the head, whether I have a partner or not. My partner’s drunk you know—I left him several alleyways back, weeping in the shadows. If he gets one more whack on the skull, the local leech said he may never wake up. Not that he’s a good man, but I thought you’d like to know. It’s nice of you not to kill us when you have the chance, but it is taking its toll.”

Torrant took a deep breath, and for a sudden moment felt the weight of all the deaths on his soul. Poor, mad Ulvane, fragile Djali, innocent Triana, gallant old Jem…the nameless, faceless men who hadn’t been so lucky as to just get knocked on the head.

Without knowing who he would be when he stood, he leapt…

And landed, his face alone changed partially as a disguise as he poured out of the shadows behind the guard.

“Well then, what would you suggest?” he growled. He was unprepared for the guard to jump, run, trip and land on his right shoulder with his hand scrabbling on his left hip for his sword. With exaggerated gentleness, Torrant brought his sword tip down on the man’s hand, stopping the scrabbling, and kept his sword within touching distance as the guard swept off his dignity and stood up, chuffing a little from his spectacular crash.

“What was the question again?” the poor man asked from behind the face guard on his helmet. He was obviously miserably embarrassed.

Torrant tried to keep from laughing, and it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “I asked what you would suggest. It’s not like you wear signs. ‘This guard rapes children’. ‘This guard does not rape children, but he does rape the men in the boy’s brothel.’ ‘This guard rapes no one, but he’ll steal anyone who is hot on the black market for child servants right now’, or, my favorite, ‘This guard looks for excuses to kill anyone in the ghetto because he’s a sadistic bastard who …’”

“Enough!” There was a furtive swipe of a hand below the nose-guard of the helmet. “Do you think I’m proud? Do you think I watch children run from me and I dance a jig?”

“I think you wear a uniform, and it’s been disgraced so often that you have to get what comes with the uniform.” Torrant was aware that his voice was angry and bitter, and he questioned the wisdom of coming down to start this conversation. It seemed like the compassionate thing to do at the time, but now…his voice was growling in his chest, and he started to seriously doubt his ability to let this man live.

“I wear a uniform? Would you be interested in seeing what comes with the uniform?” Defiance, hurt.

Torrant sighed. “Why not? Just once I’d love to be proved wrong about what a cesspool this place is.”

The guard reached under his chin and unbuckled the strap, then swept the helmet from his head. Torrant looked at the back of his head curiously, then he saw a faint shimmer around the guards face. Oh… oh Goddess.

“Turn around,” he commanded roughly. The guard turned around—he was about Torrant’s age, with swarthy skin and bluish black hair cut short around his head, if Torrant’s superior night vision was any indication. At the top of his short-cut hair was a spot of white against the darkness. Torrant reached out and stroked the buzz of hair, feeling the tingle of magic that made it real. At once, the weight of his terrible deception seemed to triple, as he imagined years--ten or fifteen years--of the same deception he endured, only worse, a thousand times worse, because instead of showing his gift at night, or in the privacy of his friends’ company, this man went onto the streets and persecuted his own people to hide who he was.

“You haven’t changed my opinion of this shitehole of a town,” Torrant said roughly. “What is your talent?”

A humorless quirk of a strained mouth. “Children. I’m a protector of children.”

Dueant’s tears. “Do you have any?”

“Two boys. My oldest is six—I figure he’s got about six years before I have to teach him how to hide who he is.”

“Would you like to get the hell out of here?”

A pair of bright and burning eyes met Torrant’s, and didn’t flinch at the furry distortion of his face. “For the sake of sweet Triane, please?”

“I can’t just trust you, you know that?”

Those burning eyes—maybe brown, in the light?—didn’t flinch. “Anything. I’ll do anything you ask. I’ll leave my wife, I’ll kill my silly drunken partner in the next alley—anything, but don’t sentence my boys to this.”

Torrant sucked air in through his teeth. “All I really need, sir, is a handshake.” He extended a hand, covered in a light sheen of fur, and shook the trembling hand across from him. “There, now tell me truly, do you mean to betray us? Because if you do, and you lie about it, I wish you all of the agonies I bear in my flesh at the moment, in truth and in real.”

The man blinked, probably because he too felt the shimmer, the tingle of magic as it crossed his palm and burned into his body. “I will not betray you,” he murmured, and shivered again as the tingle passed through him.

“Good. Will your wife?”

“She may. I wasn’t planning to tell her.”

“Are you the kind of man who would just leave a woman then?”

“No…ouuuu….” His knees buckled a little. “Fine. Yes. I am. She would probably turn me over to the Consort, and our children too when they come of age—I thought I could look past her blindness of the Goddess’ children. I was young and stupid, but I won’t abandon my babies to her. I won’t.”

“Good,” Torrant nodded. At the very least, the spell was working.

“Tell me something,” the guard panted, leaning his weight a little on the crumbling wall next to him.

“If I can, when I’m finished. It turns out I need someone like you—military training, a stout heart. But you’re going to be in charge of families—women, children, half-starved men. I won’t give them to you if I think you’re a danger to them.”

“They’re my people…” A slight whine then—not a full-out lie, but a truth he didn’t believe. “Right—they should be my people. But my father made me hide myself—he knew what was coming.”

“So, would you kill one of your mates? Your fellow guards, the men you diced with, confided in, your brothers? Could you kill someone if he came at you while you were defending these people you don’t know are yours?”

A breath, a pause, some real thinking. “If I was protecting my children, even somebody else’s children, I could kill anybody—maybe even you…ah, sweet Dueant, I was kidding!!!” That last groan made

Torrant smile. Good. He had a stout heart and a healthy fear of Triane’s Son—all in all, one of the first fortunate things to happen since a stolen sunlit hour at Moon Hold.

“Right then. Can you meet someone, first rest day, at the smaller western gate? Have your sons, important things—winter clothes, as much food as you can carry, maybe small items of comfort. Don’t tell them they’re going forever, but make sure they kiss their mother goodbye.” Behind his matter of fact growl, he was trying not to do a victory dance. Finally…finally an answer to one of the problems he and Aylan had been chewing over in the last few weeks. If nothing else, he’d like to tell Yarri that Roes and Aldam would be safer than naked in the abandoned home of their family.

There was a terrible pause, and for a moment, Torrant wondered if he had misjudged the man. Then he realized—this had been a gamble. The man had been speaking the truth in theory, but he had to come to grips with the reality of saying goodbye.

“What’s your name, sir?” Torrant asked after a terrible, fraught moment, when the guard’s wide cheekbones and shadowed eyes glimmered in what was left of the starlight.

“Fredy.”

“Fredy, I’m offering you a way out—it may or may not be more successful than what you’ve been doing so far, and I’m not going to lie to you—there’s going to be danger. But you know what Rath’s doing on the hills above Dueance, don’t you?”

A shake of the head. Apparently this was not common knowledge.

“A giant oven, Fredy. A kiln, to cook our brethren into ashes and memories. And since Rath’s killed off our poets, and forbidden us to read and write, only a few songs will survive us. Are you ready to go now?”

“Oh Goddess…”

“Are you ready?”

“Triane’s sweet breath…yes. Get my sons out of here…let me protect them like a man and not a coward…”

“Good then. There will be someone to meet you, first rest day, right?”

“Right…” There was a hesitation in the man’s voice, a ‘one-more-thing’.

“Fredy,” Torrant asked with a light heart, “was there something you wanted to ask me?”

“Triane’s Son…you inflicted me with all your pain…for a minute… for a lie I didn’t know I told…it hurt so bad I wet myself, you know that?”

Torrant did, although the smell had blended in to the stench of the alleyway.

“How do you bear it? I bore it for a moment…how do you bear it, night after night?”

Ah…ah Dueant’s breath. “One cut at a time, brother. One cut at a time. Now, should I dent your helmet again, or will your partner buy it if you just wander to another quarter of the ghetto and take a nap?”

“How’s bout you dent it when it’s not on my head, yes? Enough of us have been bashed enough times, no one will check for a bruise…but it sure would be nice not to get one tonight.”

Torrant almost laughed, and complied with the request. “Now stay there, and I’ll bring your friend. You can wake up together, and forego the rest of your night’s walk.”

He made to swing himself up to the rooftop, when Fredy stopped him. “You promise, right? I get my children up on rest day, and they tell their mother goodbye, and you’ll get us out of here?”

Torrant turned his Goddess blue eyes towards his new defender of Moon Hold, and extended his hand. “Truly, Fredy, if your intentions are true, then you have all the protection I can extend, although most of it is on your shoulders.” A tingle passed along their nerve endings, and Fredy’s eyes widened. It was the truth, and no one could doubt it.

And with that, he swung himself on the rooftop above his head, and set about to fetch the guard weeping drunkenly to himself about three blocks over.

Holding Breath

When Torrant had visited the consort’s palace for that disastrous dinner, he had been escorted into the entryway and conducted up a set of stairs to Rath’s personal apartments. The great blonde doors to the ballroom, more than four times the height of a tall man, had been closed, and Torrant hadn’t bothered to peer inside. On this night, they hung open, and he stood in the shadows of the door and the stairs, trying to get a glimpse in to the glittering white ballroom, its chandeliers lit with a thousand candles, and the women dressed in their great swooshing dresses inside the room itself.

Yarri was in there.

“So, are you going to go in?” said Aylan at his elbow, and Torrant turned to him in a panic.

“Oueant’s bloody eyeballs, are you mad? What if somebody sees you?” Oh Goddess…all the precautions they had taken to make sure that nobody from Aylan’s crowd of three years ago had seen him, and here he was, in full view of Rath and the fickle gods…had the man no sense?

“I flirted with,” there was a pause while Aylan fought the urge to spit on the white marble, “Essa’s maid…her entire party is planning on coming late. You and I will be long gone by then.”

Torrant shook his head. The discreet orgies that Aylan had attended three years before had ceased—most of the people involved had either run away to their family estates in the country or renounced all of their friends and claimed they’d been coerced.

Essa, the vindictive bitch who had started the public outcry against them had gotten everything she wanted—she became the town cause célèbre, the poor victim of the Great Whore’s turpitude; she kept all of the friends who sided with her anyway, and had a chance to publicly disparage the ones who hadn’t licked her pretty toes; and she had married the betrothed of the girl she had driven to suicide, while the body of Brina’s brother cooled beside her. Aylan had been in the room, a step away from the blade Brina sank into her own throat.

In spite of his original plans, Torrant had no time to spare for the socializing that was supposed to come with his station—he had attended no fetes, seen no shows, danced at no balls. He did not regret these things—they had never appealed to him anyway. But if he had ever been tempted, even the least little bit, all it would have taken was one thought of running into the twisted excuse for humanity that had wrought so much terrible havoc in Aylan’s heart.

He wasn’t sure what he would say to the woman. The more time he spent as the snow cat, hiding from the anguish of his heart as a human, the less he was certain he could live with what he would do to her.

And now Aylan was standing here, next to him, putting himself at risk of recognition.

Torrant shook his head, tempted to grab the man by his curling hair and drag him back to his flat in the ghettoes, where no one could touch him. “You need to get out of here—I told you we would meet later for the job.”

They had followed Dimitri one night, figuring that as Rath’s new favorite foot-washer, he might have a line on the wizard who had been pushing at the regents during the last month and a half on the floor. They hadn’t seen the gifted one, but they had heard his name dropped by a scornful Dimitri to an indifferent guard. Torrant had asked a distraught and tearful Olek and had the rumor confirmed.

It was Duan, and he had volunteered.

He was apparently moved on a nightly basis, but they knew which guards fed him—and, thanks to the gratefully relocated Fredy, they knew that two of them would be in the ghettoes tonight. Two guards, alone, on their turf—they would have Duan’s location by the time the night was out.

They planned to have taken care of Duan one way or another, before the Regent’s hall reconvened.

“Do you think I’m leaving you until I’ve seen Yarri’s hand on your arm?” Aylan was saying now, shaking him a little bit at the shoulder. “If you were shouting at her from across a crowded ballroom, you might— just might, mind you—still keep up the madness that she should go back home. But the moment she touches you, it’s over. Either she’s here to stay, or you’re on the next wagon out, but either way, I don’t get to watch you kill yourself with your own damned heroism and I can sleep again.”

Aylan had a self-satisfied smile on his face, and Torrant glared and fought the urge to kick him in the shin like a child.

“What are you two arguing about?” Eljean asked, sauntering up indolently wearing a slickly cut black huntsman over a black tunic and very tight black breeches. Although their brief interlude had faded like moonlight on a shadowed river, even Torrant (hell, even Aylan) had to admit he looked good.

“Aylan, whose presence here puts his life in danger, I might add, is trying to give me away like a girl’s father at a hand-fasting,” Torrant replied sourly, and Eljean’s immediate laugh was silenced by Aylan’s grim look.

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to do—I would really like to see the two of us ride out of this shitehole alive, if you don’t mind, and I think Yarri improves our chances dramatically.”

“Oh…” Aerk murmured, walking up to the three of them with Keon at his elbow. They were both dressed in their best huntsmen and breeches, but Aerk’s shaggy hair was too long to go without a queue and too short to stay in it. Keon had combed his own dark, wiry hair, but the cowlick in the back remained the same.

“Yarri’s here,” Keon finished Aerk’s thought, “that’s why you’re attending tonight!”

Torrant looked at both of them in complete confusion. “But I thought you two weren’t.”

“Well we are if you are!” Keon responded with a grin, and Torrant shook his head and went back to studying the crowd for signs of Yarri and Trieste.

“Are you going to just stand there?” Jino asked, Marv on his heels, and Torrant felt a vague ache at his temples.

“Has it occurred to you all that maybe I didn’t want you here?” he asked a little desperately.

“Not really,” Marv responded, fidgeting with the lace at his collar. Jino stopped him with a frustrated tap on the shoulder and pulled a hank of it out of his huntsman and fluffed it, ignoring Marv’s slapping hands. “Why wouldn’t you want us here?”

Torrant flashed a faint smile at their by-play and was about to answer when: “Oh Goddess…”

He’d seen her.

Unlike many of the other women, who were wearing great full skirts fluffled with satin and lace, Yarri was wearing a rather simple dress in a sumptuous autumn color. The waist started right below her full breasts and skimmed her hips and thighs, and suddenly all he could think of was the way her mouth had tasted and her eyes had glinted and her skin had swaddled his body in radiance one early summer night.

“Ellyot…” Aylan murmured. “Ellyot…Torrant!”

Torrant expelled a harsh breath and dragged another one through burning lungs. “What?”

“Breathe, dammit!”

“Oh.” Torrant nodded. Yes. Breathing was a superlative idea. Couldn’t beat breathing for keeping a person alive. Oh gods, oh Triane, she was looking his way! On his next very useful breath he had dodged behind the great doors again and was flattening himself against the wall.

“What’s the matter with him?” Marv asked Aerk, who rolled his eyes and shrugged.

“I think he’s nervous—would you quit bouncing, you’re making me nervous now!”

“I look like hell,” Torrant murmured.

“You look all right,” Aerk said, shrugging at the other young men. “That’s a nice color…”

In fact the autumn orange and green huntsman made his eyes look almost like hearts of topaz, and his shorn hair was just long enough to look carefree and a little bit shaped. As he had been getting ready, Aylan had given him a full-out, mouth to mouth, tongue to tongue, body to body goodbye kiss that had rushed the blood to everyplace but his head, and told him that he looked amazing.

Right now, looking at her across the crowded ballroom, seeing her stand out like an autumn colored lighthouse on a dismal gray pier, he couldn’t think of why Aylan would have thought he was presentable at all.

“Which one’s Yarri?” Keon asked, and Marv looked in, and pointed.

“That one…the short chesty one with too much red hair?”

“I think she cut it,” Torrant said randomly. It certainly looked shorter, and although he shouldn’t complain, the idea that, once again, she had to cut her hair to survive this place hurt him like he hadn’t imagined.

“Who is she standing next to?” Jino asked suspiciously. “I know her—she was introduced in the Regent’s Hall yesterday, right after you left…wait, isn’t she Princess…no… Queen Tri..”

“Queen Trieste of Otham,” Torrant and Aylan said absentmindedly.

“She’s looking good, isn’t she?” Aylan asked encouragingly, and Torrant nodded a little, still pale.

“You know Trieste…she could make sackcloth look good.”

“You look fine,” Aylan reassured when it looked as though he was just going to stand there, pale and clammy, clinging to the shadows like a baby to a blanket.

“I’m thin, Aylan. I have scars all over my body. I lost my mind and butchered my hair. She’s going to take one look at me, decide I’m not worth the trouble and go riding off into the hills.”

“Impossible!” Aylan laughed, at exactly the same time Aerk and Jino looked at the both of them and said, “You two know the Queen of Otham?”

“Some of us better than others,” Aylan replied, rolling his eyes in Torrant’s direction, but Torrant didn’t hear him. He was too busy panicking.

“Maybe it would be better if she rides back to Wrinkle Creek,” he muttered to himself. “She really needs to not be here. It’s dangerous here. I know it’s dangerous here…”

“What’s wrong with you?” Eljean asked in bemusement, but when Torrant met Eljean’s green eyes to answer, his own hazel eyes got wider, his face got even paler, and for a moment, all the young men wondered if they were going to have to catch him as he fell to his knees.

“Nothing’s wrong with me,” he murmured, an unreadable, twisting expression on his face as he looked at his greatest mistake. “In five minutes, every person I’ve ever slept with is going to be in that ballroom, but there’s nothing wrong with me. Not a blessed thing.”

Eljean flushed terrifically, and Aylan burst out laughing. “You know,” Aylan said philosophically, sneaking a flask of something stronger than cider out of his cloak pocket and giving it to Torrant to sputter over, “I don’t know if a ballroom would be big enough to hold all the people I’ve ever slept with.”

Torrant shook his head, a little fortified by the drink and a little more fortified by Aylan’s amused calm. “You have no idea,” he said on a puff of air, and in spite of Eljean’s discomfiture, the young men all laughed, and a little color returned to Torrant’s face and he squared his shoulders and moved away from the wall.

“What are you going to do?” Aerk asked kindly.

Torrant smiled then, and it was brilliant enough to make even Keon and Marv stumble. “My girl’s here for a dance—I’d better ask her, you think?”

With a burst of confidence and joy, he strode through the giant doors into the brilliantly lit room. The sound of string instruments warming up drifted in after him.

“Wait a minute,” Aerk said, in sudden realization, “he’s going to ask her to dance? But they’re supposed to be brother and sister!”

Aylan blinked at him. “So?”

“So I don’t know what you people do in the country, but in the city, that’s unheard of!” Aerk squinted up at Aylan in a confusion of panic and exasperation.

Aylan frowned. “Its just figure dancing, right? Not a waltz? It should be all right?”

Aerk blew out a frustrated breath and even more shaggy hair escaped its queue. “Have you been paying attention to where you live, mate? That’s not how it works here.”

“Well you’re not going to stop him!” Aylan’s chest hurt…no… not now, not when they were so close to an actual touch on the arm, a connection, a chance for the world to be made right again.

Aerk looked at him curiously, and then squinted his eyes and frowned, his fine brain working busily. After a second, during which they all watched as ‘Ellyot Moon’ made his way across the crowding ballroom, he turned to his friends. “Marv—didn’t you say your sisters are here?”

“They’re right over there—like a pack of rabid housecats, why?” Marv pointed to a group of nicely dressed young women with wildly different features and hair colors, all born within a few years of each other.

“Good grief, man!” Aylan exclaimed. “How busy was your father?”

Marv shook his head in a long-suffering gesture. “I don’t want to talk about it. Why are we walking towards my sis…” It took Marv a moment sometimes, but he wasn’t stupid.

“No. No. NO!”

“Please no?” threw in Jino, looking with a pained expression at one of the taller girls who had a wealth of cocoa-colored ringlets spangling her shoulders from the crown of her head. Absently he ran a hand through his perfectly coifed, curly hair, making it stand out in stunning disarray.

Aerk and Keon looked over to where ‘Ellyot Moon’ was making his way to his sister, and together they caught their breath. The tide had less pull to the moons.

“Not a chance,” Keon murmured. “We need to grab our partners and gather round them—maybe we can shock the assembly with a new trend or something, but they have got to have some cover…” Suddenly a painfully insincere smile graced Keon’s lean and angular features. “Lyssee, sweetheart, are you feeling like a dance?”

“What do you want?” Lyssee was one of the two taller girls, with straight dark hair and dreamy almond-shaped eyes, but her gaze honed itself in on the obviously hurried and flustered young men coming her way.

“Marv—are you going to answer her?” asked the girl with the cocoa colored curls.

Marv winced. “Look,” he said to all of them, doing everything with his body but digging a hole in the marble floor with his toe, “I really, really need your help. I know we delight in making each other miserable, but this is bigger than the lot of us, and if I could explain it I would—but for now, would you dance with us?”

“No-oh!” gasped one of the smaller girls, a redhead with startling green eyes. “What? Is it ‘dance-with-your-sister’ day?”

“Yes,” said Jino uncompromisingly. He looked over Kerree’s shoulder to ‘Ellyot’ and the short, plumpish girl with the overabundance of brown/red/gold hair. “Please—whatever…” he cringed, looking at Kerree again, “whatever history we may have, is there any way you could simply give us this for our friend?”

Suddenly everyone—regents, sisters, even Aylan—became unaccountably sober. The hole Djali had left never gaped so very large.

Kerree met her sisters’ glance. “Of course,” she said after a moment. “Ladies, pick your partners.” With that, she seized Jino’s arm and hauled him towards the floor, where the musicians were just a few more tuning notes from breaking into song.

Aerk ended up with Kylee, the sweet, round blonde, and because she had an edgy smile and a caustic sense of humor, he enjoyed himself. Keon and Lyssee squared off almost adversarially. Keon spent the rest of the evening flushing as Lyssee rolled her eyes at his half-hearted attempts at conversation. Marv bent his arm to escort Meggee— perhaps his mildest sister, although she suffered no lack of intelligence. It was probably for the best, he decided with a sigh, as his dark-haired, blue-eyed sister took his arm and smiled gently. Meggee would be less inclined to chide him as they danced.

Jessee eyed both Aylan and Eljean speculatively—they were both tall, and she was by far the shortest of the five girls. Before she could make a choice, Aylan bowed apologetically.

“I’m afraid that aside from Yarri and her cousin Roes, the Lady Trieste is the closest thing I’ve had to a sister—while you all square off , I’ll go ask her to dance,” he took Jessee’s hand then and kissed the back of it, “but it will pain me exquisitely to leave such charming company. I do have a weakness for redheads.” With that parting remark Aylan sent a meaningful look at the rest of the party to move towards Torrant and Yarri before the dance started. Then he set off to the pretty, dark-haired woman who was eyeing the reunion of ‘Ellyot Moon’ and his ‘sister’ with a certain long-suffering bemusement.

Jessee watched him go with star-spangled eyes, barely noticing as Eljean bowed awkwardly and took her arm.

“Is he always that…that…that beautiful?” she asked somewhat breathlessly.

“No,” Eljean replied sourly, mentally rehearsing every dance he knew and hoping that whatever the musicians played, this would be one of them. “Usually he’s an out-and out surly pratt who would as soon spit on you as say ‘hullo’. What he just did there was like watching a rabid dog dress himself.”

Jessee looked up (way up!) at Eljean, who was busy looking across the room at Ellyot Moon and the short girl in the plain dress. “You don’t like women even at all, do you?” she asked musingly.

Eljean glared at her. “Would you like to get closer to the Consort to say that?”

“Don’t worry—I’m very discreet. In fact, I’m pretty sure most of my suitors feel the same way about women. I make a good friend for that sort of suitor.”

Eljean looked at her, wholesome smile, green eyes and all, and felt his eyes go wide. “Well where in the star’s dark were you when I first came to this Goddess-blighted city?” he asked crossly, and she laughed.

“Here—when we start dancing, if you focus on my hands when they’re up, it will help you not stoop so much as we move, you think?”

Eljean couldn’t help but grin back at her, and as the grin lit up his face, Jessee sighed. “It would figure,” she murmured philosophically, but her smile never dimmed.

Jino’s conversation was far less pleasant.

“So, are you going to tell me why we’re trying to distract attention from your friend and his lover?”

Jino tripped and swore, and eyed the as-of-yet empty dance floor in despair. “She’s his sister,” he hissed, glaring at the girl who, of all of Marv’s sisters, had caused him more aggravation than any other female of his acquaintance. Although he tended to groom extensively, he found himself wondering at the cut of his huntsman—was it too loose? Too tight? Something felt off about it, and he hauled at his collar to make sure he could breathe.

Kerree eyed the two people in question with sharp amusement. Ellyot was standing, just standing, near the girl, his face sober and polite as they made what appeared to be civil conversation. The strain of the two of them not touching was enough to make her breath constrict in her chest, even from this distance. They had to touch. It was imperative. The wrongness of their skin being apart was like the wrongness of snow falling upwards—it could not be allowed to happen.

“And I’m Triane, Goddess of Joy, so pleased to meet you!” Kerree chortled in disbelief and Jino forgot his embarrassment and put his face close to hers in order to hush her up.

“Regardless of what you think, that girl is Yarrow Moon, Owen Moon’s daughter, so just keep your sarcasm to yourself!”

Kerree was a little stunned—it had always been so easy to needle Jino, she hadn’t truly comprehended how serious he and Marv had been. “Wait a minute…” Kerree was also extremely bright. “If she’s Yarrow Moon…” she looked at Jino in shock. “You follow him! You…you and my brother and your friends…you’ve been following this man… did Djali even know?”

“Djali wouldn’t have cared,” Jino said somberly. “Djali would have followed him regardless. He’s been as open as he can with us…and now you know enough to crucify us all. Are you happy with that much power?”

Kerree’s troubled expression was answer enough. “Your friends are…” she began, but then she gasped. All of Ellyot’s friends gasped, because they all saw it. The torches burned brighter, the chandeliers glowed, and that refractory C-string on the viola was suddenly gloriously in tune.

“Dueant’s temper—we need to get over there!” she exclaimed.

“Dueant is the god of compassion,” Jino replied calmly. “Swear by him rightly, and I’ll have faith that we make it.”

And as a party, they gathered around Ellyot Moon, who had just taken his sister’s hand.

Oxygen

As Torrant drew nearer to where Yarri stood looking anxiously out at the assembly from Trieste’s side, the light, the noise, the myriad colors, the high and low voices, the discordant strings, the frantic efforts of his friends, all of these things ceased to be.

Triane’s blessed kiss, how could he have ever left her?

He moved closer, remembering all of the times he had returned to Eiran after spending time at school or his internship at Wrinkle Creek. He had lived to watch her shriek and scramble out of a tree and into his arms, and even when she was still a child, even when Trieste had been with him as his lover, they had still slung arms about each other and not parted for hours upon hours.

Not running to her and swinging her up into his embrace was an effort that made his jaw clench and his teeth grind.

Then she saw him, her piquant, round-cheeked face swinging to him unerringly through the crowd, and he heard the clamor and roar of cathedral bells, drowning all thoughts in the space between the beating of his heart.

They both kept moving, walking towards each other, and when they were close enough to feel the heat off the other’s bodies, they stopped, their eyes locked, a misery of things that they could not say flashing between them.

“You’re looking well,” he murmured inanely, his gift for courtly speech doing him justice for the moment.

“You look…” she shook her head. “You look magnificent and like hell, both at the same time, do you know that?”

A small smile twisted his lips. “I am aware that I’ve looked better.”

She glanced away for a moment, saw something that brought her back to herself, and turned back. “Trieste said we mustn’t touch,” she murmured unhappily, a discordant xylophone of sound. “I think if I don’t feel your skin under my hand I might scream, but she says…”

“I was going to ask you to dance,” he interrupted, and the smile that graced her features made his heart start beating again—except it was pounding in his stomach, and that was somehow wrong.

“That’s good,” she beamed at him. Then her expression grew thoughtful. “You don’t seem surprised to see us,” she murmured. “I thought at least you’d be surprised…”

“I dreamed about you.” His voice was rough, gravelly with the agonizing relief of those small glimpses of her. “I saw you coming. I couldn’t…” and now he had to look away, because it was almost a lie. “I tried to make Aylan ride out…to tell you to go back. To tell you it was too dangerous and I was fine…”

“You don’t look fine!” she hissed, her brown eyes boring into his.

He swallowed. “I’m alive,” he replied with as much dignity as he could muster, “and it is still more dangerous for all of us to have you two in the city than outside of it!”

“You’re alive?!” Her voice raised a notch and with a quick look around her she ground it down relentlessly. “You’re alive—do you think that qualifies as fine? If I found you bleeding in a ditch, would you have told me that you didn’t need my help because you were ‘alive’?”

He fought and lost the urge to grin. “If I were bleeding in a ditch, I would have to concede that I wasn’t ‘fine’,” he said, his eyes sparkling, his gorgeous smile urging her to smile too. He was alarmed when she didn’t—his smile was his best defensive weapon against her fearsome will.

“You are too thin,” she said, her voice very near tears. “You are too thin, and you have butchered your hair, and I can see from here that your eyes have not matched your smile in a very long time. If I can see that, how bad are the things that I can not see, ‘brother’? What is there under the surface that you have let nobody heal?”

He swallowed, and took a step back. “I have not needed a babysitter in a very long time, ‘sister’,” he replied coolly, but she didn’t miss the way his face flushed, or the heat rising off his body as he stepped back.

“What is it?” she asked, her voice suddenly gentle.

“You cut your hair too,” he said through a closed throat, and now she flushed.

“Trieste’s maid insisted…she kept trying to put it up, and it was too heavy to stay.” There was a miserable pucker at her eyes, and Torrant had a moment to wonder at the argument that would have precipitated the newer shorter hairstyle, which allowed the complicated coif that tumbled from her crown to her neck. It would not have been pleasant or easy.

“So I cut it,” she said at last, almost defiantly. “What is your excuse?”

She took a step forward, inviting confidence, certain that he wouldn’t back away from her again, not willingly, and was appalled when he stepped back a second time.

“Sweet Dueant’s tears…what on earth would make you afraid to be near me?”

He looked away, saw Aylan kissing Trieste’s hand. The eyes of both his friends were fixed on him and Yarri. “Oh, Goddess, Yar,” he whispered, not even sure if she could hear him, “the things I have done.”

He looked back at her, and she was close enough to hug now, but he dare not. The vibration around them started at his toes and worked its way up—he had no idea what would happen if he took her into his arms, but he knew it would have nothing to do with the touch of a brother for a much loved sister.

She knew it too, because her touch on his bare wrist was full of more self-restraint than he would have fathomed from her. Her fingers felt a little clammy, but warm, as though she’d been clenching her hand, and her skin was soft, so very soft, sanded to sweetness by the feel of yarn through her fingers.

He felt air, sweet, true air fill his lungs above the stench of the city for the first time in months.

She came a little closer to him, and her other hand was cupped around the invisible mystery between them that they had both kept sacred since they were too, too young.

“This,” she murmured, holding that cupped hand between their chests, “this is all that matters. In this space, you told me, everything is good. That hasn’t changed.” For the first time he heard her choke on the sound of his name, dammed up behind her tongue.

“No,” he murmured, cupping his other hand on top of hers in comfort, “you’re right, of course, that is the one thing that can never change.”

Aylan and Trieste let out a long breath when those two cupped hands met in the space between Torrant Shadow and Yarrow Moon, and then they met eyes and laughed.

“It is so-oo not funny how their well-being controls the entire lot of us!” Trieste exclaimed, and Aylan gave her a weary smile.

“Of course not,” he murmured. “It’s the most deadly serious thing in the world.”

Trieste looked at him with a deep compassion. “It has been very hard on you, watching him here?”

Aylan swallowed and looked away, tucking Trieste’s hand in his arm as they headed towards the dance floor. The other regents had gathered around the oblivious ‘brother and sister’ and were, by numbers and presence, maneuvering them both onto the dance floor.

“I have no words,” he said at last. “There are so many painful things that need to be done, and he’s taken it upon himself to do them all. We’ve gotten help,” he nodded at the regents, “but the cost. Oh, Trieste, the price of what we’ve done…”

Aylan found that he couldn’t continue. He watched as Torrant and Yarri faced off on the dance floor and the others assumed their positions in the double facing line that began the figure. Trieste looked at his hardened, leaned profile, and touched his shoulder gently, with all of the sisterly affection in her soul.

“Here, Aylan,” she murmured, troubled. “Let’s dance and pretend for a moment that we’re back at school, and that your worst worry is your next bed partner.”

Aylan flashed her a grin, the remnants of that callow boy gone completely, even in his best, brightest smile. “Tell me that I can sleep in your stable or your servants’ quarters instead of the ghettoes tonight, and it’s a deal!”

“Tell me you haven’t been sleeping in the ghettoes!” she asked, appalled.

Aylan raised his eyebrows. “Well, mostly I’ve been sleeping in ‘Ellyot’s’ flat—but I have the feeling I might be out on my ear tonight.”

Trieste shook her head. Already, she could foresee a long, taut period of stealth and subterfuge—things that she and Torrant had never been good at. “If it will keep you out of some poor girl’s bed tonight, of course,” she said with gentle mockery and a hand on his arm. He put a hand on top of hers, and they progressed to the dance floor.

“You know, Spots, if I’d known you were going to turn out so wonderfully, I might have been nicer to you in school.”

Trieste grinned back, the gentleness still there, and faced him and curtseyed. “Never you mind, you horrible boy—I’ll find a way to exact revenge later.”

Aylan tilted his head back and guffawed, his teeth glinting and his smile and charm suddenly in full force from his booming laughter. The younger regents were so shocked hearing that sound from him that with the exception of Torrant, they missed the cue to the first step, and the rest of the world almost got to see the moment when Torrant wrapped his arm around her waist and held her hand with the chiming of bells that weren’t there.

Almost.

“You still need to get out of this city within the week,” he murmured to her as they moved through the figure. His hand lingered at her waist. Her thumb rubbed the back of his wrist before release.

“Only if you come with me, brother,” she said sweetly after they parted, moved around the next people in line, and reconnected.

“You know why that can’t happen!” They held crossed arms before them, and two steps in, and two steps back, and two steps in…

“Because you’re stubborn enough to get yourself killed before you leave this task to someone else?” she snapped, and they whirled away from each other and into the next figure. For a moment, Torrant was bewildered to find himself face to face with Trieste.

“I see your customary grace has deserted you?” she asked kindly as he blinked at her with stupid eyes, his feet completing the steps on their own.

“She’s being obstinate,” he muttered, and she shook her head.

“If you could see yourself from her eyes, you’d know who was being willful.”

“I have a goal, here, Trieste, and it’s of sizeable importance!”

They whirled, his palm passed Yarri’s in allemande as they exchanged glares, and then he was back talking to Trieste. “Oh, please!” she continued. “I’ve heard nothing but the greater good since we set out— Cwyn was insufferable about it all the way here!”

“Where is he, by the way?” Torrant asked, not daring to look around the room as they moved down the line.

“At my town-home—we were able to lease a place for the winter.”

“Well good—make sure he stays there as often as possible!”

They whirled into allemande again, and when Torrant found himself across from a partner, he was facing Yarri again.

The music was such that it picked up speed, and the figures were performed with increasing rapidity until the music’s crescendo, when all the dancers would be breathless and laughing. For Torrant and Yarri, the tempo of the music only served to underscore the passion of their argument.

“Trieste agrees with me!” Yarri said triumphantly as they clasped hands and whirled front, then back, then front again.

“Well Trieste is unaware of the danger!” Torrant snapped, coming face to face with her as her hair tumbled forward. Unconsciously, his hand came up to her face to push it back, and even as she glared at him, she moved her cheek into his touch.

“You can’t go around calling all the women in your life foolish because they disagree with you!”

“I’m not calling you foolish,” he protested, and the music picked up the tempo a little. “I’m saying your thinking is all Triane and no Oueant…”

“You mean Rath’s Oueant or our Oueant?” she asked quickly, whirling into his arms and then away, her skirts whipping around her ankles and her hair lashing the air around her head.

The dance swung her back into his arms, and she had a personal and up-close viewing of his misery. “If you think I’m proud of what I’ve done here, you haven’t been paying attention,” he said, his bleak voice causing the rest of the dancers in their party to shiver.

“Then why stay?” she demanded, angry at the pain in his voice, angry at the terrible struggle against defeat in the set of his shoulders, angry that he should stay here where his beautiful spirit was so in danger of being crushed.

“For us!” he cried, as they clasped hands in an allemande and then traveled around their circle, allemande-ing with other dancers that they barely saw. The music was rushing now, and other sets of dancers were tripping, laughing, falling into gay heaps of giggles and lightness. The regents and their shanghaied dates were keeping up with the music desperately, holding the weight of this private conversation in their frantically tripping feet.

“For all of us,” he continued as they met again. They spun from the allemande into another side-by-side figure, their feet blurring, their chests heaving and their faces flushed. “I can not keep our family safe until I make the world safer for us to live in.”

“We will survive without this,” she gasped. “What good is our freedom if you are not there to share it with us?”

He looked at her and almost stopped dancing. “What good is being together when our children will live in fear?”

“Fear isn’t death!” They stepped out and regarded each other for two beats of music before the musicians took a breath and started the final roundel. The music resumed furiously, and,

“Tell that to the two wankers Cwyn felled in a back alley, Yarri,” he hissed, and this time she did stumble, and his hand was at her elbow to haul her up.

“Well then,” she recovered, running lightly on her toes, “all the more reason for you to come home!” She taught these dance figures to frightened children and by the three gods she was not going to let them best her, not now.

“What do you want from me?” he cried, finally out of patience as they whirled away from each other and past the dazzled, fraying dancers in their set.

“I want you to come home. If you loved…us… you’d come home!”

He could see the naked glint of tears in her eyes and cursed himself for this entire scene…There had to be a better place to have this conversation. The hunger to be near her, the hunger to connect with her…it had driven them both to do this foolhardy thing.

“If you loved me,” he gasped, as the music climaxed to a finale, “you’d wait!”

The music crashed to an end, and they stood, three feet apart, glaring at each other in a clash of wills that dominated a ballroom. They were flanked by twelve exhausted, sweating people who were bowing dazedly with the final chord as the rest of the dancers in the ballroom erupted in frenzied applause. Their breath caught together, and Yarri opened her mouth to resume the argument when Aylan showed up at her elbow and the line of winded dancers made way for the next set.

Like magic, Trieste was at Torrant’s elbow, urging him off the floor, helping him find his feet when he was too busy locking eyes with his beloved to actually see where he was going.

“Ellyot,” she breathed, “Ellyot…” she gave a vicious pinch. “Ellyot!”

“Ouch—Trieste, I know you’re there!”

“Well pay attention to me, Ellyot Moon,” she hissed, “or someone’s going to think you’re ensorcelled or something.”

He breathed deeply and he and Yarri broke their electric gaze. He caught Trieste’s frantic, exhausted glare, and found himself laughing a little.

“Well, I see we put the rest of you through your paces,” he murmured, taking Trieste with him to the punch table.

“People will be talking about that dance for years,” she snapped in disgust. “Why couldn’t you just wait until later?”

He gave Trieste a cup of punch, and then his complete and undivided attention for the first time in the night. “Because if I get her alone, I’ll never let her go,” he said simply, and she almost dropped her glass.

“Well,” she said at last, resigned to share a fate with the only family besides Alec that she’d ever had, “you’re going to talk alone before she leaves, and I’m thinking you’d best accept whatever you two come to terms with then. I see why you don’t want to go—you’ve been making progress. We’ve heard about it. Word of the fiery young regents on the floor has even made it to Otham. But T…Ellyot—you can’t do this forever. And you can’t do this alone.”

Torrant grinned at her, a fair approximation of the grin that had melted her heart when they were younger. Then he was gone, moving to clap the young men, Aylan included, on the back and congratulate them on a set well danced. Before he left her side he said, “Now there’s where you’re wrong, Lady Trieste. I am certainly not alone.”

He and Aylan left shortly after that, but not before he’d kissed the hand of every one of Marv’s sisters and thanked them for a lovely set.

Four of them smiled and laughed, and then flushed as his lips touched the back of their hands, but Kerree did not. Instead, she kept his eyes with her own and cast a sideways glance at Yarri, who was standing next to Jessee and trying to make polite conversation with Aerk and Keon.

“You two need to stay out of the public eye together,” she murmured, but with direct intent. “Only the blind could miss what you are.”

“And I think a blind man would have heard us,” ‘Ellyot’ replied dryly, “but I do take your point.” Then he was gone into the darkness with Aylan, leaving the proceedings so dim and drab that when Aleta and Essa entered, their retinue nearly a fifth of the entire assembly, there was scarcely a ripple of interest.

Eljean stayed at Trieste’s side, and watched the two of them disappear out the door.

“I know that look,” the Queen of Otham murmured, and Eljean looked down at her and smiled. She was a pretty woman—almost as tall as Torrant, with fine dark hair and a willowy grace that was unmistakably attractive. Torrant had hardly noticed her as he was dancing with the short girl with the big chest and unruly autumn colored hair.

“What look is that?” he asked mildly, and then he caught her all-to-perceptive gaze and looked away, flushed. “That obvious?” His heart thudded in his throat and then his stomach, and then it fluttered in his chest. He was supposed to meet Zhane this evening, after the ball, and he wondered miserably if this terrible moment of regret would haunt him then, too.

“It’s only obvious to a fellow sufferer,” Trieste said kindly, laying her hand on his arm. “Yarri told me she encouraged him to take lovers… she was afraid his heart would get too lonely.”

“I don’t think I was what he had in mind,” Eljean said roughly, and Trieste patted his arm.

“He’s only ever had one person in mind,” she said meaningfully, and his smile grew a little more lost.

“I don’t know how to feel about that,” he mumbled, half to himself. “The world felt better when they touched.”

Trieste leaned in, the kindness never leaving her pretty, elegant features. A long ago summer evening echoed in her voice, and the silhouettes of a happy young man and a child in front of an orange sea danced behind her eyes.

“Just remember, he was never really yours to begin with. Not even a little tiny bit, not even at all.”

Eljean found a perfect understanding in her blue-eyed gaze, and suddenly wondered what it would be like to have a sister.

Providence

Torrant and Aylan hit the apartment first to gather their gear and then slipped silently into the night. It was, in fact, fairly easy—most of the guards were around the ball, since Regent Minero had raised a big stink that week about how they were all in danger from ‘this Triane’s Son’ character.

Given that Triane’s Son had disturbed the regent during activities that could have gotten him imprisoned-- if not crucified-- Torrant had to wonder if it wasn’t his wife and daughter making the stink at home, before the stench rolled into the Regents Hall. Either way, the guards were all out protecting the elite, and Torrant and Aylan could have been a brass band instead of shadows of the chill breeze coming off Hammer Pass.

The wind-shadows huddled in the ghettoes, crouched in the darkness of an alleyway filled with rotten crates, rotting fruit, and used wine, waiting for an evil man to burst out of a crumbling brothel with a terrified boy in his grip.

The waiting time was filled with self-doubt.

“I can’t believe I did that,” Torrant murmured to himself, his breath pluming a little. This close to Samhain, the weather was not so much cold as damp—summer ended abruptly the week before, but true, chill-crisp autumn had not yet started. The days were still warm, but this day had been hazy and soft with clouds.

“The argument during the dance?” Aylan asked cheerfully. His entire demeanor, actually, had been disgustingly cheerful since they’d left the ball. “It was amazing… they’ll be talking about that one for decades!”

“It was stupid,” Torrant muttered. “I can’t believe I put us in that sort of danger.”

“Don’t beat yourself up over it—Yarri did her part. Besides, it’s good to see you bollix things up—it makes me believe you’re human.”

Torrant rolled his eyes. “As though that whole debacle with Eljean wasn’t enough proof of that! Or, hey! If we really want proof of my imperfection, there’s always…”

Suddenly Aylan wasn’t across the alleyway from him anymore, he was right there eye to eye, his angry breath dusting Torrant’s face. “Don’t say it. Djali was no more your fault than the death of your family… and Eljean…” Aylan looked over his shoulder and spat. “Eljean was Eljean’s fault—the first time was as honorable as getting a fourteen year old drunk and then taking yes for yes. The second time was a gift, and he shat on it, and that’s not your fault either. No.”

Aylan backed up and made a visible effort to control his temper. “I’ll stand by it. The only real mistake you’ve made so far, mate, has been that dance. And I’ll treasure it ‘til the day I die. Now hush—he’ll be out in a moment.”

They retreated to their shadows again, and to their own thoughts. Torrant spent the first minutes fretting about how to make Yarri return to Eiran, as soon as the fastest horse could carry her.

But thinking about her led to thinking about her, remembering her voice, and her eyes, and her smell…ah, Triane’s perfumed breath, her smell! For the first time in months, his blood beat warm from his chest, and his skin fit around his muscles in a snug and tidy fashion, like skin should, and not like a giant’s robe on a child’s body. For the first time in months, air was air and not fouled and fetid drain water, weighing down his shoulders and his lungs until he could no longer breathe from the ache of missing her. For the first time in months he was hungry—even for food, but mostly for her.

For the first time in months he was whole and well and strong.

He could send her away, he thought, suddenly calm. Oh, yes he could. But the odds of his surviving after she left were considerably shorter.

Aylan looked at him across the alleyway, and saw the smile, all of it, beautiful, like sunrise, or children playing in water. Aylan almost closed his eyes and laughed at the sight, but at that moment there was a commotion at the door, and business to be done.

The guard had done this before. He knew that if he grabbed his victim’s neck, the fear would be worse and the control would be more. He knew the things to say to make the boy comply, the threats to the family, the threats of more pain. He knew how to make the boy feel worse—telling him he deserved to be violated, telling him he wanted it. He knew all about raping children in alleyways, but he didn’t know to expect the nightmare contortion of cat and man threatening him from the front while his partner wrenched his arm behind his back and held a knife to his throat.

“So…Duan,” Triane’s Son said conversationally to the guard, after calming the terrified boy who was crouching in the shadows, “where is he?”

“Tonight’s not my night with him,” the guard whined. “How would I know?”

“Oh,” Torrant shrugged, plied the end of his sword on the stays of the teal and black liveried trousers until they were in tiny pieces, then took a couple of strips of the man’s skin with them, “I don’t know… you lot haven’t been too bright so far. I figure you’ve got what? Two, three hiding places for him, am I right?”

The man had been howling with the sword scratches, but now his eyes widened. “You really are the son of the gods, aren’t you?” he asked, awed, and behind him Aylan rolled his eyes.

“Oh absolutely,” Torrant replied without hardly twitching a whisker or exposing a fang. “Now tell us the three locations, and we can…”he stopped. This man was a predator. This wasn’t the first boy he had raped—it would not be the last. As if reading his mind, the boy in the shadows jumped out.

“You can’t let him go!” he cried, actually shoving past the man-beast in the alley to issue a vicious kick to the guard’s genitals. The man went down with a grunt, having not enough wind to howl some more.

“Well I didn’t want him to know that!” Torrant responded with exasperation. He gave a growl of frustration and sank to his knees, hoping the man’s mind was really as weak as it seemed.

“Now see here,” he said shortly, “this face and this fur—it isn’t my only gift. My other gift is torture—and you have two choices. You can tell us straight out, and hope for the best, or I can make you tell me, but it won’t be pretty. We may still kill you, or we may still hurt you, but either way, it will go easier if you give us what you want.”

Perhaps it was the no-nonsense tone of voice, or perhaps the feline features—including the tongue that came out periodically to try to wipe the stench of the alleyway off of the snow cat’s nose—or perhaps the man was really as weak as all that, but in a moment they had three places to look for their turncoat wizard, and a quandary on their hands.

They dropped the man against the stone wall and retreated a foot or two to talk about it.

“I don’t like killing in cold blood,” Torrant said reluctantly, and Aylan nodded, but they both looked at the piece of shite, blubbering in the filth and shuddered.

“He’ll do it again,” Aylan sighed.

“We can’t let him do it again,” Torrant agreed, but at that moment, the boy, who had been standing with his back to them while watching the sobbing guard like he might watch a poisonous snake, grabbed Aylan’s dagger from the sheath at his belt and lunged at the man, catching him at the hollow of the throat by sheer luck. The man gurgled, thrashed, and died, and the boy collapsed next to him, sobbing, covered in blood and vomit and shite.

“Did you expect that even a little?” Aylan asked in shock, and Torrant shook his head violently.

It took them a while to calm the boy down and take him to the dark of the river to wash him off as they dumped the body. They took him to Aylan’s flat then (which had been more of a haven than Aylan’s place to sleep lately) to bunk for the night, and told him to wait until he talked to one of them before he returned to the brothel, if that was what he wanted to do. Neither one of them could think of a word of reprimand for killing a monster in cold blood. Later, this would bother them—it would bother them more than either of them cared to admit—but there was other, more awful business to attend to this night.

The second location they tried—a respectable looking apartment in a non-ghetto quarter near the river—had two bored guards sitting outside, cleaning their nails with their daggers…Torrant and Aylan met eyes—this had to be silent and permanent and there could be no witness. Shite detail or not, there would be no witnesses this night.

Soundlessly Torrant dropped to the ground on four paws, and ripped two throats out in two swipes of razored claws. He stood then as a man and regretted not washing his paws off as a snow cat, but it didn’t matter. The blood would not have been any less horrid if his hands were licked clean.

Without waiting, because he knew Aylan would be at his back soon enough, he kicked through the door in half-beast form and growled menacingly at the resentful young man huddling on a pallet of dirty blankets in a corner of the room.

“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” Torrant demanded, feeling the anger at this particular betrayal surging at his chest. “Have you been coerced? Did they threaten your father? Your other sister? Tell me something, Duan. Give me a reason, any reason, to believe you didn’t choose this path on your own!”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Duan spat. He had been a handsome young man—thin, as were all in the ghettoes, but well favored, tall, with longish brown hair that sat well with his white streak and a pleasant face. In the weeks since his sister’s death, his face had become a puzzle of bitter lines. His hair had grown lank and dull, and his clothes—which Triana had kept neat and patched for him—were less than rags on a thin wood frame. Littered around his pallet were several earthen jars of what smelled to be the foulest, cheapest wine made anywhere in Clough.

Duan had a spatter of it dripping down his chin and onto his rags, mixed with sour vomit.

“What did we do to you, to earn this betrayal?” Torrant demanded. There could be a changing of the guard at any moment—whatever they did here, it would have to be done soon.

“My sister is dead!” Duan slurred, and Torrant’s anger snapped.

“So are my brothers, and my fathers, and my mothers and my friends! I’m here fighting the man who did this to us—why are you fighting me!”

“You!” Duan spat. “You and your friend and your fighting and your scheming! You brought this down on us! You’re the reason my sister is dead!”

“And who told you that? Rath or the wine?”

“Does it matter?” A wine jar went flying through the air, shattering at the ground at Torrant’s feet, and Torrant dodged as Duan kicked another one at him.

“Of course it does!” In a fluid leap, Torrant was over the broken chairs and low table that furnished the room and landed on the tiny pallet. Almost in the same movement, he kicked out with his foot and took Duan down, leaving him gasping, laying on his back. “It matters, because if you believed Rath, he lied. If you believed the wine—well, that lies too. It matters because we can’t have you doing this anymore, but how we stop you is up to you.”

Duan glared up at him from his back. “You want to stop me? Kill me. Rath’s right—we’re monsters. The things you and I do on the floor—we’re vile, pushing at each other with our will…”

“If you believed that, why didn’t you betray me in reality!” Torrant demanded, his sword tip at Duan’s throat as he lay. “You know who I am—at the very least you know I should be in the ghettoes…”

“I couldn’t work against you if you got me crucified, now could I?” Duan asked bitterly, and Torrant blinked. He had forgotten there was more than one reason Duan worked in The Gander’s Sauce.

“Well if the people you’re working for will crucify you for being what you are, don’t you think you’re working for the wrong people!” Torrant asked in desperation. “I don’t understand why you would do this to your people…to your cause…to everything we’ve worked for— how can you live with yourself after this? What if these people kill your father? Your other sister? How could you live with yourself then?”

There was a sudden silence, and Duan regarded him from his position on the pallet, the sharp blade at his throat. “I coul…” he began, but they never got to hear the rest of his answer.

At that moment the door burst open, and what seemed a small company of guards burst into the room. Duan, half drunk and desperate, jerked upwards in startlement and slit his own windpipe and jugular on Torrant’s sword.

Torrant pulled the sword free to defend himself and stared for a moment at the blood in horrified fascination while the guards looked at Duan, thrashing weakly in death with their own stunned horror.

Torrant and Aylan met eyes then, and looked at the guards, and before the guards broke the tableau, he’d sheathed his sword and was the snow cat, snarling, ripping, shredding, and carving a passage in the armed bodies through which Aylan could pass.

Fighting on the ground was not the snow cat’s strong point. After the first few guards went down with shredded groins, he took a risk, stood on his hind legs and pushed the guard in front of him (taking a vicious rip to the side) backwards into his fellows-- where he died on their swords and knocked them backwards as well. Torrant stood on top of the body, propped up by the struggling bodies of the man’s fellows and had an easier time reaching arms and heads and shoulders from that point. Aylan was at his back, catching any of the men or sword slashes that he missed, and he trusted that nothing would get through.

The battle was quick, nasty, and malicious, but after a few moments the doorway was clear. Torrant circled around until Aylan, running on the bodies of the fallen, leapt out of the miserable little apartment at a flat out run. Together they disappeared into the shadows of the alleyways of the merchant quarters, the angry shouts of the few remaining guards pursuing them into the dark.

Torrant followed Aylan then, since Aylan knew more of the city better, and both of them were winded and bloody as they panted in the yard space next to a generous and beautiful home that had obviously just received a fresh coat of paint and some new drapes.

“This is Trieste’s,” Aylan panted, sure of himself. “She said she could put me up while she was in town. Did you want to come in?”

Torrant swiped at bloody whiskers and gave a little whimper. In his human form he would still be covered in blood. He didn’t want Yarri to see him like this. Violently he shook his head, wincing as blood spattered from his oily guard hairs and whiskers. There would be rain soon—it was apparent in the chilly, oppressive air. Hopefully he wouldn’t leave Trieste’s alleyway looking like a charnel house for long.

He nuzzled Aylan then, snuffling, smelling for blood, and he didn’t smell much of it. Aylan bent and touched noses to him.

“’Night, brother. Love you.”

Torrant’s long, rough tongue came out and washed/sanded Aylan’s face, taking away the blood spatters and the sweat and leaving his brother breathless and laughing. On that note, he turned and trotted off into the shadows, bent for nothing but his own bed.

Yarri remembered.

They hadn’t danced at a Beltane since she was seventeen years old—that was one of the things that Rath had stolen from them, and she had never forgiven that monster for the theft.

But it didn’t mean they didn’t dance.

Samhain, Solstice, Midsummer’s Night, they would dance. There were moments even now, as their age grew golden and thin as autumn sunlight and her hair shimmered more silver than gold, there were still moments. The light would tip the trees, the strings and horns would play sweetly, and Yarrow Moon would meet Torrant Shadow’s eyes across a crowded town green, and the world would forget to breathe.

They wouldn’t even feel their feet moving as they crossed towards each other. Children would stop chattering, grandchildren would stare at them in bemusement, and for a glorious moment they would be young and in love and seeing each other for the first time in months, and their bodies would tingle from excitement and fear and, most of all, from heart-stopping joy of being able to touch the one true beat of the other half of their hearts.

Yarri closed her eyes at this part of the song and felt the heat of her husband’s skin as it seeped through his plain linen shirt.

Some years, this moment of the song was the only reason she stayed to hear it.

Some years, she stayed for the host of moments that followed.

Some years, the pain of those moments almost kept her from getting out of bed at all come Beltane morn.

A phrase caught Yarri’s ears then, a pretty turn of words for the pretty Queen of Otham, and Yarri looked unhappily out into the crowd for Aylan’s namesake.

Trieste had always claimed she’d had no beloved dead to speak of, and so her three daughters had all been named after the men she had loved. Alex, Torran, and Ayline had been sent to Eiran for fostering when they reached their teens, because their mother loved her time in Eiran and with the Moon family’s eager blessing, she wanted to give them time with family as a gift. This is how Torran and Ellyot had met and fallen in love.

Trieste’s youngest, Ayline, was being fostered in Eiran now. She had spent her first week in a high dudgeon, because she was not exactly happy about being named after ‘some wanker who called mama ‘Spots’’. Aylan had grown on his namesake—as he had on her mother before her—and now she was particularly protective of him. Starren had teased him about how his charm still came out to play, but the truth was, they were both moody, pissy people when it suited them, and Aylan was the first person to stand up to the young princess and let her know that not every adult in her life would bow before her temper.

This was her first year listening to the Beltane song, and she had sat, in open mouthed amazement, hearing of Aylan’s bravery, and her own mother’s involvement in the ‘Political Uprising’ that she had read in her history books but never connected to the people in her life.

At this moment, she looked over at the man she’d been named for in a peculiar kind of puzzlement.

“I don’t understand,” she murmured to her sister, Torran, a tiny woman safely ensconced in Ellyot’s arms.

“You don’t understand how Aylan was a hero?” Torran asked, a little surprised. The man had ‘hero’ written in every glare from his intense blue eyes as well as the air of protectiveness he wore like a battered leather cloak.

“No…Aylan was definitely a hero,” Ayline said with some emphasis, “but I don’t understand why one of us wasn’t name ‘Eljeane’.”

Torran laughed a little, the kind of laugh that made her eyes sting, and she looked to her husband’s wayward, searching twin brother. “Because when all was said and done,” Torran murmured, hoping she saw some contentment on her brother-of-the-heart’s features this year, “Eljean wasn’t mama’s name to give.”

Part X— The Coupling Moon

You’re Mine, Said She

He could smell her on his patio. He whuffled along the wooden fence at the place she had gone over, and then whuffled along the packed dirt of the tiny enclosure, mostly to accustom his cat-self to the smell of her, but partly to buy some thinking time…human girl, roses, yarrow, kindness, wool…oh, Goddess, she smelled glorious.

When he got to the patio door, he paused for a moment, gathering the wherewithal to change form without swearing about it. The wound on his side was pretty deep, and it would hurt badly with the change, not to mention that it might not heal all the way. The snow cat sighed and grunted, and then there was the twisting, muscle-y sensation and the white-blindness of pain. He wrestled with his boots and his last pair of hand-knitted socks without holes for the moment, knowing they were muddy and dirty and not wanting to track onto the carpet. Finally his very human hands let himself into his apartment.

“You’re late,” she murmured from the couch in the visiting room. There was an oil lamp on low, and as he padded through the bedroom and could look over her shoulder, he saw that she was curled up on his divan, knitting a bright turquoise/orange sock and reading a book at the same time. “I thought I was going to have to go back to Trieste’s to beat that damned curfew bell.”

“And walk in the dark?” he objected, feeling silly but unable to help himself. He shook his head and padded towards the bathroom, with one object in mind. “It’s dangerous out th…Yarri!”

Because she had set her knitting down and come to stand in front of him. Her hair had fallen from its coif, and her lovely autumn-colored ball-gown showed signs of having scrambled over the fence, but her lightly-freckled cheeks were round and soft, and her bright-brown eyes were droopy and tired…oh, she looked like an invitation from a warm bed, just breathing in front of him.

“We’re not in public,” she said softly, her brown eyes making the sort of contact that buzzed electric inside his skin.

He felt himself leaning forward, and then took a quick step back, startling her. “I’m covered in blood,” he said somberly, looking away. “Please don’t make me touch you covered in blood.”

Her eyes widened and her lips parted, and then she got a good look at him in the lamplight and paled. “It was bad, tonight?” she asked hesitantly, and he used the question to take another step backwards towards the washroom.

“It was what it was,” he sighed, not sure if he could even venture to explain the terrible chain of near-misses with moral depravity that had dogged him and Aylan this time out.

“Is any of that yours?” she asked now, her voice a little stronger as she followed him to the bathroom.

He stood on the tile in his bare feet and looked at her with a bit of pained self-deprecation…“Yar?”

Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t get to see you naked now? I thought the time had passed for those sorts of niceties.”

He laughed grimly, trying to find an even expression that would stay at his eyes when all he wanted to do was wince in embarrassment. “Do you have no sense of romance, girl?” he asked after a moment, grimacing. “I’ve not seen you for near on six moons—I’d really like for you to see me as something other than a battered killer. Could you do that for me, Yar? As a personal favor? Let me shower and put on some breeches and then I can walk you home in the moonlight so you’re not trapped here like a rat in a cage all tomorrow?”

Her expression softened. “You will never know how I see you, you silly boy,” she murmured, with no play in her voice at all, “but I’ll go sit nicely for now.”

“Thank you,” he said, giving a courtly bow there in the middle of the washroom. As she closed the door, he was hanging his beaten leather cloak on a hook on the wall.

Walk me home? The thought came out of nowhere, just as she was settling down on the divan again. Walk her home? Escort her through the streets at night so she could spend the day cooped up with Trieste, fretting about all they had yet to talk about?

She’d be exiled behind the star’s dark first.

Suddenly she wished she had showered as she’d waited. Her hair was tumbled randomly and her dress…well, it had looked better earlier that evening.

It would, in fact, look better off .

With determination she stood and did just that, loosening the stays in the back with some difficulty—must all of the dresses she and Trieste ordered require a ladies maid to secure?—and then hauling the whole thing over her head in a loud mutter of taffeta and satin brocade.

There—she took a breath. Much better. Her chemise was pretty fancy, with lace around the cap sleeves and over the bosom, and her knickers under the petticoats had little bits of green embroidery on them, which she couldn’t understand at all since these people professed to be so chaste she didn’t know who would actually see that bit of whatnot. But all in all, once she slipped off the petticoats and the white embroidered stockings and the pantaloons (and loon was right— because the designer of that bit of clothing could not have had all his faculties about him!) she felt not only more comfortable but…

Desirable.

He wanted her. She knew he must. She had frissioned the scorch of his eyes up the backs of her arms this evening as he’d entered the room. His every touch seemed to pull her heart closer and closer to the surface of her chest, until it beat throughout her skin, in her throat, on the curved surface of her bones. He wanted her. He loved her.

And she had been a fool, a fool and a weak-willed child to just let him walk away from her this summer, when even a fool should have seen that he could not do this alone.

With a huff of indignation at her foolishness, she pulled the remainder of the pins out of her hair and shook it down her back, sniffing with dissatisfaction as it came just beneath her shoulder blades instead of down past her hips. How she was supposed to make any decent sort of braid out of hair this short was beyond her, but Trieste said it would make a difference, and so she had gone along with it.

She would not, would not tell him about how Trieste had found her, moments after the maid left, weeping mournfully over two-foot lengths of hair that had been discarded in the waste bin of her room when she was supposed to be getting ready.

She would certainly not tell him that Trieste had heard about the last time Yarri had gotten her hair cut so severely—when she was six years old, and Torrant had been forced to hack it off with a belt-knife to try to keep her safe on the road. Trieste felt bad then—awful in fact—but there had been no changing it, and, Yarri sniffed now, it was only hair.

And she would refuse to comment on his hair until he told her why he’d butchered it in a far less friendly way than she’d trimmed hers.

Good. She had her back up now, and sitting in the dark, half dressed, waiting for the other half of her heart was not quite so daunting as it had been. She listened then, and heard the shower taps turned, and some movement as he dried himself off . Then she heard a muffled swearing and some rummaging-around sounds—she presumed he was searching the cupboard under the sink—and some more swearing.

Abruptly the washroom door was opened by a young man obviously in a temper and she wondered if he even checked the couch to see if she was still on the divan as he pounded his way into the bedroom.

He rounded the corner with a towel clutched around his hips in one hand, and a brown adhesive bottle and a short length of gauze clutched in the other hand.

He saw her sitting there, on the edge of the bed in the dark, dressed in her small clothes, and he almost dropped the towel. Then he dropped the gauze and bottle when he was recovering the towel, and then almost lost the towel again as he was recovering the gauze and the bottle.

“Breeches,” he said dumbly, clutching everything at his waist. The ends of the towel flapped woefully at his thighs. “Breeches. I was going to…but I needed…but you…home. Walk. Breeches.” He stared at her, his face more naked than his body—even without the towel—and breathed, “Oh Goddess,” which was the loveliest thing Yarri hoped to hear.

Smiling with the smugness of a beautiful woman, Yarri stood and moved towards him. “Here,” she murmured, taking the gauze from him.

He visibly flushed, even in the dark. “I need to…” His now free hand made a vague gesture, and then she noticed the dark, seeping wound on his side.

“Torrant!” She half-laughed in exasperation. “Why didn’t you change forms before… wait. There’s scar tissue around this… You did change!” she accused crossly. Then, in horrified wonder, her hands found the scars, gleaming just a little in the borrowed lamplight from the other room.

“Triane’s tears!” she swore. “Beloved—I could swear you were a better swordsman than this!”

Torrant choked off a laugh, partly because her touch, her tender, gentle, arousing touch was making a hash out of his desire to dress and walk her home like a gentleman, and partly because her acerbic words were the perfect balm for the wound of Eljean’s thick pity. With brusque movements she took the gauze from his hands.

“I assume there’s more of this?”

He nodded and gestured to his armoire, where he kept a length of loosely woven linen for the occasion. He usually ripped off a few lengths at a time—this time, of all of them, he hadn’t had enough to dress the wound.

“In there,” he murmured. He should, perhaps, make noise about how he could dress his own wounds, but he didn’t. She wanted to touch him, she wanted to talk to him…of all the times he had come to this miserable little flat alone and bleeding, having someone here to make a fuss over him was too much of a luxury to bollix up with pride.

“Are you going to tell me about it now?” she asked, coming back after giving the linen a few hearty rips. She had seen him dress enough hurts back at home to know what to do, and had dealt with enough small crises with the children to have some practical knowledge. He had cleaned it already; all she had to do was make a pad of some of the linen, and use the adhesive on his skin to make the pad stick. Her movements were efficient and sure, with none of the irritating fluttery touches Eljean had graced him with. Her every breath, her every irritated ‘humph’ helped to ease the memory of that night from his mind, and etch her indelible presence on top of what was left.

“I’d rather hear about your trip,” he murmured, letting her touch him, enjoying the heat from her body and the fall of her hair across his shoulder.

“I thought you’d dreamed all about it.” Her irritable reply was muffled as she ducked under his arm to wind a length of gauze around his torso to help hold the pad in place.

“I knew you were coming, but it was all you—I didn’t see much of Roes and Aldam, or Trieste.” He smiled in the dark, over her head as she checked the bandage again. “Just you.”

She reached across him and set the rest of the gauze and the adhesive bottle on the end table and then crouched in front of him, her eyes searching for his avidly in the dark.

“Just me?” she asked, her voice gruff with invitation and longing. “I told you to take other lovers.”

He closed his eyes, and his hands came down on her shoulders, kneading at the smoothness of her skin through the thin bands of the chemise. “I tried. One was a disaster, and the other was Aylan. It was as it has always been, Yarrow Moon. Just you.”

She rose up a little and he bent, but he didn’t claim her mouth right away. He nuzzled her temple, moved his lips by her ear, dragged rough, shaking hands through her hair. His movements were not sure, they were jerky and uneven, and she rubbed her cheek against his seeking a closeness he seemed to be denying her.

“Why won’t you kiss me?” she asked, her voice thready with hurt.

“I can’t be gentle,” he trembled. “I want to be…”

His whole body quivered, as he touched her shoulders again, slithered his hands down her upper arms to her elbows, circled her waist over the damned small clothes, the heat from his palms burning through the thin layer and making her tremble too.

“I have no gentleness,” he muttered against her temple. “I just want you.”

Her hands came up to his chest, fingers splayed, and she kneaded his muscles, smoothed his skin, teased the little points of his nipples, and he gasped.

“Ah…gods, Yarri.” He leaned his forehead against hers. “I can’t be gentle…you deserve tender, and all I have is need…”

For a moment, as his eyes were closed and he fought the tremors that urged him to possess her roughly, to take her, to own her, for just a moment, she was afraid. She was young, and he was her everything, and for a moment, she was afraid she would not be enough.

She would not allow that. He needed her. She had to be enough simply because he needed her.

“Then take me roughly,” she panted into the space between them. “There will be time for gentle later. Sweet Triane’s tears, beloved, I need you now.”

He smiled, his eyes still closed, his breath coming in short little bursts against her ear as his need threatened to break free. “Yarrow Moon, I will handfast you one day—you mark me, right?”

“Shut up and kiss me,” she murmured, and he did.

Their mouths met and it was a tumultuous heaven. He kissed her again and again, never giving her time to retreat, never giving her time to breathe, and when she was tempted, even a little, to back off and ask for time to breathe she fought it and kissed him back, kissed him harder, met his need and fed it.

His hands were everywhere, hard and demanding, and part of her was shocked. Their one night together had been all sweetness, tender revelation, gentle passion. This moment was taking, hunger, voraciousness, and his touch was exhilaration and terror in the same place, so she met him back. She refused to cringe at every new smooth or rough closed tear in his flesh, she refused to weep for the scars on his body, she only touched him, fed her own need, eased her own longing, told him with her hands on his chest, his shoulders, his back, that she wanted him in any shape, with any wounds, unhealed scars and all.

He reached under her chemise and was raising it over her head when he heard the loud ‘rrrrrrip’ of shredded fabric and his touches abruptly stopped. He pulled back from her, gasping, eyes screwed shut as he attempted some self-control.

“I’m sorry,” he panted, trying a shaky kiss on her sweating forehead. “I’m so sorry…I should walk you home…”

“Why?” she asked, kissing the corner of his mouth, her own breath making her chest heave. “So you can go do this badly with someone you’ll kick yourself for later?”

“Yar—ri!” he pulled back now, gasping a pained laugh, but she was having none of it.

“I’m here.” She pressed her bare chest against his, almost groaning at how right it felt to be skin to skin. “I’m here, and you can’t make me go away. Love me. Love me anyway you can. I won’t run. I won’t cry. I won’t be afraid. Everything I’ve ever wanted is right here, in my arms. I won’t give it up, not for Rath, not for Aylan—and not because you’re afraid of being too rough or too hard or too damaged. Now go blow out the lamp, beloved, and come to bed.”

He held her face in his hands then, and kissed her softly, and when the kiss grew, he didn’t fight it, but he didn’t let it master him either. She was here. She was in his arms. She was kissing him back.

Her breasts against his chest were wonderful, but not enough. He wanted to feel them, and he did, pushing her back with his hands and his kiss until she was on the bed beneath him, moaning, and breathless. It was sweet, but heaven was waiting, and when she parted her thighs for him and he slid inside her waiting flesh, he had to bury his head in her shoulder and shudder at the perfection of her, at the haven for his heart that would always be Yarrow Moon.

He began to move, and the breathless rush that they’d felt on the dance floor returned, but better, worse, exquisitely, painfully, star-shatteringly wonderful, and unlike on the dance floor, their rhythm never rocked less than pitch perfect.

For this moment of bell-chordant moonlight, it was only them, only the two of them, dancing the most perfect dance of all.

Afterwards, he couldn’t stop touching her. They were lying on their sides, close enough that they could feel the other’s breath on their faces. His outside hand was restless. It smoothed back her hair, ran a finger over her shoulder, the rich outside curve of her breast. They never had turned off the lamp, and he devoured her with his eyes in the borrowed light, taking in her every curve, delighting in tiny freckles on her nose and the pudgy little pinch in the crease of her arm.

She smiled at him, losing to the sudden modesty that assailed her as she hid her face in her pillow.

“What?” he murmured, and she tried very hard not to giggle.

“I’m not beautiful,” she said at last, peeking out at him from under her hair, and the horrified denial in his eyes warmed her to her toes.

“You’re perfect.” He propped himself on his elbow and ran his palm from her shoulder to her elbow, the wonder on his face as open as a child’s.

“You’ve been around too many men in the last few months,” she protested, and he rolled over to his back, laughing.

“I’ve been around only men for the last few months—but that’s not why you’re lovely,” he laughed, rolled back to his elbow and poked playfully at the plump of her breast again. “I woke Aylan one night, you know. I’d been dreaming about you, and I was mad because you were dragging Trieste here too…and all I could tell him was that your breasts were amazing.”

“Oh Goddess!” She hid her face again. “He must have thought you were daft!”

His laughter faded, and he looked away. She matched his pose on the pillow then, and touched his chest to bring him back to her.

“What is it?”

He shook his head. “We were so desperate, for family…for hope. He probably would have thought your breasts were amazing too—and I wouldn’t have held it against him.”

Torrant looked at her as she assumed an unhappy quiet, wondering how she seemed to glow in the dimness of the pale light. “I’m so weak, beloved,” he said at last, his voice sober. “If I were a better man, I’d have sent Aylan out and made him send you away. If I were a better man, this night—that terrifying dance, making love to you—it wouldn’t have happened. But I’m not a better man. I’m only me. I’ve missed you. I’ve needed you. And you seem to love me for the flawed piece of work that I am. I can’t give you up. I can’t send you away. I need to stay here—there is so much to do. Stay with me. I promised a year. If I haven’t done what needs doing in a year, I’ll come home with you, and we’ll try this in another way.”

Sudden tears started in Yarri’s eyes. “Bethen may not have that long,” she murmured, and tears answered in his own.

“I dreamed that too,” he replied gruffly, “and it kills me. But I can’t leave things as they are, and we’re trapped here in this city—in a week, maybe two, the snows will fall, and all we can do is hope we get home soon enough to say goodbye.”

“You’ve done a lot of dreaming while you’ve been here,” she sniffled, and he rubbed her cheek with her knuckle.

“Only when Aylan had my back,” he told her. And then he told her about when his dreams were true and when they weren’t, and her own fingers found his shorn hair fretfully.

“Why did you cut it?” Her fingers found the white lock at his brow—he had released his disguise without thinking when they’d been together.

He didn’t know what his expression must have been as he captured her hand and kissed it, but suddenly the tears that had broken in her eyes overflowed. He kissed her knuckles, and then wrapped his naked limbs around her bare, soft body, breathing softly against her cheek and looking somberly at her from shadowed hazel eyes.

“Kiss me,” he commanded into the shell of her ear. “Kiss me. I can hurt you with truths soon enough.” Their cheeks rubbed together like silk as she moved her lips to his and all talking stopped for the moment.

This time there was tenderness. This time his touch was more than gentle. This time their bodies moved slowly and her climax was breathed softly in his ear instead of screamed into her bitten hand. This time she touched his scarred chest and felt his heart beat underneath, the heart of the healer, the poet, the boy who had loved her all her life, and knew that the man who moved inside her loved with that same heart.

This time was captured sweetness in the sacred sanctuary of their cupped hands.

Sister Moon

Later that day, Ellyot Moon and his young friends would make a very public show of escorting the youngest Moon home a couple of hours after curfew had ended—long enough to allow that Miss Moon had probably been escorted to her brother’s flat immediately after the end of curfew, and had since completed her visit.

Which was, as Torrant said when he and the regents were discussing the matter, exceptionally lame, and yet the best they could do. “I’m such a fool for not getting you back before the dawn bell,” he’d fretted quietly in the bedroom as the young regents gathered in his sitting room.

“I kept you busy,” she said with a grin and a blush, and he kissed her soundly and gratefully before he went in to talk to his friends and followers. She followed soon after—the kiss had mussed her, and she wanted to appear non-mussed, and they greeted her cheerfully. None of them were surprised to see her there, and she wore such a natural smile (along with Torrant’s breeches and shirt) that whatever discomfort they all would have felt dissolved like the darkness at the beginning of curfew.

Of course, explaining her presence had been the source of debate over the next several hours until curfew ended.

About ten minutes after the end of curfew, Aylan slunk over the patio fence, a package of ‘day clothes’ in his hand for Yarri.

“And we’re all invited to Trieste’s for dinner,” he said grandly, taking an apple from the table and glaring Eljean out of one of the two chairs at the table so he could prop it back on two legs against the wall.

“I thought we just ate dinner,” Torrant replied blankly, looking at the fruit, cheese, and bread the others had brought from the canteen when they’d come knocking.

“Which could explain why the two of you are too thin to thread through a needle!” Yarri said through a mouthful of bread and cheese. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor as Torrant took his customary place on the counter, and she did it so casually that the other regents, schooled in etiquette and rules of court, didn’t even bother to blink.

Keon grinned—he and Yarri had been taking turns chiding Torrant about working too hard, and it was fun to have another target.

“Piss off , little sister,” Aylan said mildly. “If you’d had the night we had, you’d be off your feed too.”

“Sweet Dueant’s arse-kicking toe!” Torrant swore, surprising everybody, “I could have gone all day without you bringing that up!” He ducked as Yarri threw an apple slice at him.

Aylan said “What?” and then remembered himself with a grimace, just as Yarri ripped into him once again about telling her what had happened the night before after all.

“Oh, little sister,” Aylan said somberly, quieting down the raucous laughter of the entire group, “you do not know what you are asking, sweetness. It’s not that we want to keep secrets it’s just that…” and he and Torrant met bleak gazes across the room.

“Last night was bad,” Torrant said, picking up the thread as he always did. They would have told the regents—there was no reason to keep it silent now. “Duan is dead, along with a number of other guards, and tonight promises to be a study in retribution.”

“How did he die?” asked Aerk quietly into the sudden tense silence, and Torrant and Aylan shrugged.

“By my hand,” Torrant sighed, and Aylan burst out, “That’s not fair—that’s not fair to yourself or to him!”

In spite of the seriousness of the situation, Eljean found himself laughing—they rarely disagreed on anything in front of the others. “Oh come—you must tell us what happened!”

Torrant wrinkled his nose in Aylan’s direction. “It was really like we were being spared,” he said at last. “Like the Goddess has some amazingly dire choices coming down the road, and she let us off the hook with these two so the next wouldn’t be so hard.”

With that he outlined the events of the night before, and as he spoke, he watched Yarri grow wide-eyed and somber at the details.

“Why would he do that?” she asked when Torrant was done. “Why would he…profane his people that way?”

The rest of the regents winced, but they were circled behind the girl on the floor and she couldn’t see. Torrant said, “He had cause, Yar—but now that everyone’s up on events, I think we need to think about getting you home.”

Conscious of being manipulated, Yarri stood, regarding Torrant evenly from bright brown eyes. “Excellent,” she said sweetly, “but while you’re out prowling the streets for mice tonight, beloved, don’t think I’m not going to be sniffing out some things on my own.”

And with that, she made her purposeful, no-nonsense way to the bedroom to change.

Torrant scrubbed his face with his hands, looking about at nobody in particular. “I’d give anything for her not to hear that particular story,” he said, mostly to himself.

“Which part?” Marv asked curiously, looking sideways at Eljean, who flushed.

“That part she knows,” Torrant replied dryly, “if not by name. But the whole of it…” He shook his head and sighed again. “There are some things I wish she never need know.”

“Fat chance!” Aylan snorted and Torrant gave him a dark look.

“Are we really all going to dinner?” he asked. “I don’t want to impose on Trieste you know.”

“Oh relax!” Aylan smiled, a thing that made all of the regents decidedly uneasy. “It’s not like you eat anyway!”

Torrant laughed, actually laughed, and his smile was brilliant and breathtaking, and as he stood to change his shirt and get his cloak from the bathroom, the rest of the regents exchanged looks of hope instead of worry. Suddenly, to a one, they all adored Yarrow Moon with the fierceness of a snow cat’s love for its cub, and they looked forward to dinner far more than they had.

Yarri didn’t realize it, but her arrival in Duance was a social event of epic proportions.

Ellyot Moon had arrived to much shock and little fanfare, and then proceeded to spend all his time working. It had been a disappointment. He showed up to no dances, attended no theatre events, and had accepted only one dinner invitation.

After the death of Djali Rath, the hope he had carried of being a new person of interest in Clough had died a swifter, even more brutal death of its own.

But Yarrow Moon, and her elegant, interesting friend Trieste, Queen of Otham, were women. As such, they were not expected to know anything about politics, and they were certainly not expected to have anything important to do. They had one duty—to visit and to participate in the complicated, feline hierarchy that occupied the wives, sisters, and daughters of the regents.

The bell ending curfew had barely rung when invitations and cards began pouring in. Trieste fielded the first onslaught, brought in by her rather confused steward who was used to his queen issuing invitations instead of the other way around.

“You’re the Queen of Otham!” the poor man protested, and Trieste grinned at him, her feet tucked under her bottom as she readied her quill at her portable writing desk.

“Apparently, that makes me an oddity, but doesn’t really give me any rank,” she returned, her eyes dancing. She was grateful that the last five years of not taking herself seriously as Queen of Otham were finally paying off .

The valet (who had left a wife and two children to come serve Trieste voluntarily, because she was his queen, and the whole family loved her and he couldn’t just let her leave King Alec’s side without family to help her) sniffed unhappily. The idea of anyone not valuing Trieste as all of Otham did was upsetting. The idea of her being insulted was infuriating.

“Relax, Suse!” Trieste chided, resisting the urge to ruffle the mass of dark curly hair on the young man’s head. “It will be vicious and backbiting and all of the horrible things that we managed to weed out of Otham, except this time Yarri will be there to help. We have each other’s backs, as the men say, right?”

Suse smiled radiantly—he had adored Yarri since she arrived at Wrinkle Creek on Trieste’s heels. It was hard not to love a woman who could help bridle a horse, load the wagon, cook dinner, and then allowed herself (unwillingly!) to be dressed like a princess and taken to a ball. If Yarri and Trieste were together, nobody would dare insult the two of them.

The trick would be getting Yarri to see it that optimistically.

Hoping that the crowd of young men around the medium-sized banquet table would help Yarri keep her temper, Trieste introduced the subject then.

“We have to visit who? Why?” Yarri asked, all surprise through a mouthful of potatoes.

“Well, I guess we have to visit all of them,” Trieste said thoughtfully. “It’s not like you’re at home, where you have the orphanage to occupy your time. But it’s important that we keep up these appearances…”

“And helpful too!” Torrant said surprisingly. Yarri looked dourly at him and he shrugged. “There were not nearly as many guards out last night as there could have been—because Minero’s wife and daughter complained. You remember—if Aunt Bethen wanted something from the council and didn’t want to put up with Anse, she’d ask Uncle Lane to bring it up. Of course, most of the time she’d do it herself, but she couldn’t—not here. Not since Rath’s made it illegal for women to be regents. But that doesn’t mean the women don’t have a way to have their opinion voiced. You two go and get more of the wives and the daughters on our side, and their husbands will be happier to vote with us on the floor.”

Yarri brightened then at the thought of helping, and took another bite of potatoes. When she was done swallowing she said, “So, who are we going to visit first?”

Trieste blinked and called up the name. “Aleta Moss and her daughter…I forgot her name…”

Aylan, who was plowing his way through his second plate of food dropped his fork and looked uncomfortably on the food left on his plate. “Essa,” he said into the sudden silence. “Her name is Essa, and I’d really rather you didn’t make that call.”

Torrant swore, and Aerk looked at him oddly. “Essa Moss—is that the same Essa who started the purge about two years ago?”

“That’s the one,” Torrant affirmed, casting a sideways glance at Aylan’s blotchy, pale/red countenance.

“The purge?” Jino asked. “Isn’t that when the orgies stopped?”

“Orgies?” Cwyn perked up from his side of the table. He’d greeted Torrant and Aylan with bone-crushing embraces, but had been disturbingly quiet since. He kept looking at Torrant speculatively and Torrant dreaded what the precocious young man would ask of him next.

“Don’t look at me,” Keon grinned, “the purge brought them to a halt right before I was about to be invited!”

“Oh gods,” Aylan muttered, going completely pale, “I’d forgotten about that. Jarrid had just put you on his ‘invitation list’ hadn’t he?”

“You were there?” Keon asked, and suddenly everyone at the table was looking expectantly at Aylan, who himself was looking as though he’d rather be drinking tea with Rath himself.

“It’s not something he likes to discuss,” Torrant said firmly, throwing himself in front of Aylan socially as he had been physically during the last months. At that particular moment the evening bell rang, signifying the guards’ change of shifts, and Torrant took that opportunity to duck out of the subject for the time being.

“We have to go,” he murmured, standing. Time stopped for them all as he bent to kiss Yarri on the cheek and nuzzle her ear a little, and then he was stepping away from the table.

“You’ve hardly touched your food!” Trieste exclaimed, ignoring his plea for them all to stay seated and standing up to meet him. “How do you expect to go out and…and…”

“Adventure?” Cwyn supplied excitedly from his end of the table.

“It’s a little more difficult than adventure!” Torrant returned good-naturedly, striving to get out of the room before Yarri picked up on the food thing. “But you can come see for yourself next rest day—we need help in the clinic.”

“What, I can’t do ‘night work’?” Cwyn demanded, at the same time Trieste said, “Don’t think you can get out of it that easily!”

“No and yes!’ Torrant answered cheekily, and Aylan met him at the doorway—he was almost clear, when Trieste and Yarri stood up and said, “We’ll walk you out!”

“Not a word!” he muttered to Aylan, and Aylan laughed in spite of himself.

“You two!” Trieste said imperiously as they neared the front door, “You, Torrant, are going to make your way here for dinner an hour after the session lets out. Aylan, you too—I don’t care where else your day may take you, I know you’ve been working in the ghettoes, and I might even help you on some days, but as of right now, you’ll spend two hours a day here, where we can see you eat and watch you relax, and check on your hurts from the night before, is that understood?”

“Oueant’s heartburn, Trieste!” Torrant protested. “We’ve managed to survive this long without you mothering over us—why do we need a wet nurse now?”

“I’m not a wet nurse,” Trieste shot back. “I’m the Queen of Oueant-bleeding Otham, that’s what I am, and Torrant, if you looked this bad after stumbling down Hammer Pass, I’m surprised they didn’t give you up for dead!”

Aylan muffled a snork of laughter, which was a mistake, because it brought Trieste rounding in on him. “And you—you put on a good show and all, eating like a pig in slop, but I’m not buying it for a minute. You haven’t weighed this little since you were eleven years old—and you were a runty little rotter then, so that’s not saying much!”

“Runty!” Aylan protested, trying to keep a straight face and failing.

“Don’t you laugh at me, Aylan Moon,” Trieste snapped back seriously. “You two take risks every night—don’t think I don’t know that. We can’t make you stop doing it—apparently it comes with your purpose here, and if Yarri can live with it, then I must. But if you’re not even going to bother to take care of yourselves, I will call my husband’s guard in here and have them box you up like big dumb animals and ship you home, cursing my name through the air holes!”

“Oooh, good one!” Yarri praised. She was standing next to the Queen of Otham, listening with appreciation.

“It was one of yours,” Trieste acknowledged modestly. “You used it on the road.”

Torrant was holding his hands out placatingly and Aylan was hiding behind him. “We will try…try,” he emphasized when both the women looked as though they might argue, “to be here four nights a week.” He braced himself, feet apart, and took on a firm expression that looked, for all the world, like Lane Moon, on the few occasions he’d ever been forced to put his foot down. “We can’t promise more than that, Trieste. Yarri,” he began warningly because she had opened her mouth as well, “you need to promise me something in return.”

“What?” Yarri asked warily.

Torrant flushed, and moved nearer. “No more visits like last night’s unless you talk to me first,” he murmured.

“Torrant!”

“I’m serious—they have virginity laws here…I would be put to death cleanly, if we were ever caught, but you…” he shuddered. A month ago, a regent’s niece had been stoned to death in front of a jeering crowd. Torrant would carry the picture of her broken body in his nightmares. “Please, beloved. Please. We will meet—I’m not daft enough to believe that either one of us won’t try for it. But please be careful. Please, let’s plan and not surprise. Rath knocked on my door not three weeks ago—the Secretary General’s been there too. There are demons in every corner here—I don’t want one of them to bite you.”

“I’ll consider it,” she said softly. “It would, perhaps, be easier to keep me from acting rashly if I were to see you more nights than not.”

Torrant’s upper lip began a slow curl, and the grooves in his cheeks deepened, revealing dimples. “You and Trieste have been giving lessons,” he said with delight, “but now we really have to go.”

“Wait,” Trieste ordered, “Aylan, will you be staying here tonight, at least?”

Aylan grimaced. “Not tonight, Spots. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the place to flop and all, but the regents’ flat is closer to the ghettoes—if Yarri’s not going to be bunking with Torrant, I’d rather sleep there if you don’t mind.”

Trieste blew out a breath—he was right and she knew it, but she was having a terrible time living with the idea that she couldn’t keep the two of them safe now that she was in the same city with them. Dammit—they were her family!

“Well then,” she said at last, leaning forward and giving her one- time enemy a kiss on the cheek, “you two take care of each other, right?”

“It’s what we do best,” Torrant replied with a bow, and then he whirled and was gone, Aylan at his heels.

“Mmm…” Trieste was not entirely pleased with how that had gone. She had gotten very used to giving orders in the past five years, and was not pleased to see that those two were still not wonderful at taking them.

“They are very obstinate, aren’t they?” Yarri said thoughtfully.

“And you’re not nearly as violent about it as I would have thought.” Trieste regarded her one-time rival with narrowed eyes, and Yarri’s smile made her want to back up a step.

“Oh, but my Queen, we have guests for dinner—there’s so much more conversation to be had this night, isn’t there?”

And now instead of wanting to back up, Trieste found herself smiling in kind.

The Goddess Orbit

Torrant and Aylan were trotting through the alleyways of the richer quarter of town—the place where the regent’s families resided during the winter—and after making the observation that there was less piss on the walls and more food in the trash in the regent’s alleys than there was in the ghettoes, Aylan said: “Well, that went better than I expected,” before pausing to put his customary kerchief over his face to disguise his features and his bright curling hair.

Torrant laughed quietly and shook his tufted ears out of his hood. “If you think that’s over, you haven’t been watching the same girls grow.”

Aylan flicked a startled eye through his black mask. “What can they do about it?”

A tiny scream echoed from across the river, followed by frantic shouts and the jeering of masculine voices. Torrant broke into a trot and muttered, “Brother, the mind trembles,” before hauling into a full-out run.

Before Ellyot Moon had arrived in Duance, Keon had been considered the best storyteller of the group, and as Trieste and Yarri walked back into the dining room he was the hub of the wheel again, although he looked decidedly less comfortable now than he had before the advent of Ellyot Moon.

“Beyond that they’re dead, I really don’t know anything,” he was protesting now. “I watched Aleta and Essa whip the crowd into a killing frenzy from my old room. The girl’s lover got up, denounced Brina and her entire family, and they screamed until our eardrums bled. The entire benighted frenzy stormed the Troy home, looking for the ‘den of iniquity’ but from what I heard, all they found was an empty room and two bodies. After that, the purge was on—anyone they named was hunted down. Not that they found more than one or two of them. Most of the others had been tipped off . But they weren’t my crowd really. Although according to Aylan they could have been!” Keon shook his head in disbelief—either of his narrow miss or his narrow hit, they couldn’t tell. “And I have no idea how Aylan would even know!”

“I would,” Yarri said soberly as she sat down at her plate, not necessarily thinking about how much this information would mean to the people who had been following Aylan and Torrant for months. Her food was extremely unappetizing she realized, and had a sudden insight as to why Torrant was so thin.

She looked up from the congealed pork chop, saw that all eyes were on her, and an evil little smile graced her face. “Do you all want to know?” she asked innocently. “You would need to be sensitive around Aylan, of course—this almost killed him. But you’ve all put a great deal on the line for the two of them—maybe it’s important for you to know why they’re so dedicated.”

Five sets of young eyes looked up at her expectantly, and that unholy little smile bloomed like a fully potent cabbage rose. “Of course,” she almost purred, “I would like to hear a few stories myself.”

To a one, the young men put down their forks uneasily, and met rolling eyes in the knowledge that they’d been caught like fat, gullible trout.

“Oh my!” Trieste murmured drolly. “It looks like we may have to postpone dessert.”

“Now, Yarri,” Aerk placated, “that’s really Torrant’s story to tell.”

“That isn’t entirely true,” Trieste murmured as Suse cleared the table. “Now is it, Eljean?”

Eljean looked like a light struck deer, and then a handsome strawberry flush washed his pale skin.

Yarri iced her wicked smile with a bit of playfulness. “Oh dear— that would make you the disaster, then wouldn’t it?”

The pretty flush drained out of Eljean’s face. “I suppose it would,” he said through a dry throat, and Yarri relented.

“Now don’t feel bad, darling—I really don’t have to know details. In fact, I’d be willing to trade my story for only one of yours—and it doesn’t have to be the one where Eljean takes a lover. Suse, would you mind if I had dessert right now?” She added that last because food was suddenly looking much more appealing.

“Whatever you say, Miss Yarri,” Suse indulged. Yarri beamed at him because she’d enjoyed his company and his stories of his wife and children on the journey from Wrinkle Creek to Duance, and because he’d been very kind about helping her find her way around the world as a regent’s daughter instead of a merchant’s niece.

“So, uhm…” Aerk said nervously, breaking the silence as the unacknowledged leader when Torrant was gone.

“Mmm?” Yarri smiled sweetly.

“What story did you have in mind for trade?”

“It’s only a little one, gentlemen, a grooming matter really…”

“Uh oh,” Keon said, catching on at once.

“Please don’t…” Aerk muttered, closing his eyes so he wouldn’t glare at Eljean, who appeared as though he wanted to take lessons in looking exactly like the tapestry cushions he was sitting on.

“Don’t what?” asked Marv, desperately trying to leap where the others had gone. For once, nobody smacked him on the back of his head or stepped on his foot, and he was still in the dark when Jino shook his head like Aerk and closed his eyes.

“Don’t make us tell her why Ellyot cut his hair,” Jino supplied, and Marv’s eyes widened. He looked up at the table to where his leader’s beloved was taking a dainty bite of a cream pie.

“Oh gods,” he said in wonder. “You’re just like him!”

Yarri grinned at him and licked off a little bit of whipped cream from her nose. “Except apparently, I have amazing breasts,” she agreed, and focused on her pie while shock rolled from their faces like thunder.

She was asleep on his bed when he and Aylan got back to the flat that morning, dressed in what was apparently the servant’s breeches and a black cloak. She had Torrant’s green and gold cloak wrapped in her arms.

“Dueant’s bloody hangover!” Torrant swore. He shook his head at Aylan. “Looks like you’re on the divan, mate.”

“Did she come by herself?” Aylan asked, concerned.

Torrant didn’t even need to change form—he put his nose in the air and closed his hazel eyes, opening them again and shaking his head. “She must have done a number on all of them—she had escorts.”

Aylan blew out a breath and pulled off his kerchief. “Brother—this isn’t good—she can’t do this all the time, its suicide.”

Torrant knelt by her side and touched her cheek. It was sticky with dried tears. He tried a game smile at Aylan. “Here—let me shower first. I think this might be the only time.”

“What makes you think that?” Aylan asked, settling down on the other side of the bed with a grunt.

“She can only hear that story for the first time once.” With that he stripped his bloody clothes into the hamper, and Aylan caught a new scar on his backside, a small one, that had just healed on his cloak that evening.

“That’s not the only story she needs to hear,” he murmured, just loud enough for Torrant to hear, and Torrant turned to him, his eyes sparking with something like fear.

“Please—not that,” he murmured. “Not now.”

“Then when?” Aylan asked gruffly. “When do we tell her why Triane turns to blood?”

Torrant grimaced unhappily. He wouldn’t take back that magic even if he could. “After She sets, mate, after She sets.”

“Bugger,” Aylan spat after he’d disappeared around the corner. Next to him, Yarri opened sleepy eyes and frowned.

“Torrant?”

“Making himself sweet for you,” Aylan murmured, smoothing her hair back from her face and giving the battered cloak a little pat. “Not that you deserve it, pulling this shite on us after he all but begged you not to!”

“I’m sorry,” she sounded honestly contrite. “I just couldn’t…I know it was a month ago but…but I wasn’t here for him. I wasn’t here. His heart just gets ripped open like that and all he had was…”

“Me,” Aylan supplied dryly, and Yarri ‘mmmd’ and snuggled in a bit to his thigh.

“You’re wonderful,” she acknowledged gently, “but you’re not me.”

“Think much of ourselves?” he asked wryly, but he kept brushing her hair back from her face. He was thinking about all the times he’d arrived at the Moon home after traveling around the lands of the three moons, and Yarri had been part of the family that had greeted him. He was thinking about the year after the debacle of the house of Troy. After a winter of bunking down with Torrant and Aldam, he hadn’t been sure he could live with the rest of the Moons again. Yarri had forced him to do the dishes and help her with the children and, on more than one occasion, play with Starren when he didn’t think he could face himself through her eyes.

“Not as much as I think of you and my beloved,” she murmured, peering up at him. She’d called him a worthless player once, early on in their acquaintance. She couldn’t love a brother more. “What are you thinking?”

A small smile lit the darkness of the square little room. “I’m thinking that he sleeps in a tight little ball—he’s like eight stones of iron shot, punching a hole in the bed. Unless he dreams of you.”

She didn’t know what to say to that, so she was quiet for a moment, stroking the supple leather of his battered cloak. She squinted in the poor light, rubbing her fingers over a couple of raised rips that looked as though they’d been sewn back together from the inside. “This is really the ugliest cloak I’ve ever seen!” she said with a little laugh. “Torrant got a new, pretty one,” she indicated the old scrap of green and gold that she had found under his pillow, “why don’t you?”

Aylan turned an inscrutable face towards hers, and his eyes, so used to being angry or frustrated, or musing, were now sad, shadowed by a cross between guilt and anger that was too complex to read. “I would if I could,” he replied cryptically.

In the washroom, they heard the water turn off , which saved him from another uncomfortable question.

“Come back in here after you shower,” she ordered, laughing only a little at the appalled expression on his face. “No—we won’t be doing that—not tonight. I just want you both here. I just want to comfort you, even if it’s too late. That’s all. Are you good with that?”

He tried to laugh, but it didn’t come out right. Torrant was humming to himself as he dried off , and Yarri caught his eye and they both smiled.

“I put more linen in there in case he needs it,” she murmured, and Aylan looked at her again. What would it be, five, six years, before Starren was this old? Hadn’t he been this old when he had first seen the boy with the hazel eyes and the white stripe in his dark hair, looking young and vulnerable when he was, in fact, the strength and the wisdom of them all?

Far be it from Aylan to turn down the offer of comfort from an older, wiser soul than his.

“If you two are naked when I open that door, I’m never speaking to you again,” he threatened, and she laughed softly.

“Now we both know that’s a total lie!” she accused, and at that moment Torrant rounded the corner with another towel draped around his hips. He started rooting through the armoire for a sleep shirt, and Aylan grunted.

“Get another one for me—apparently I’m bunking down with you two tonight.”

Torrant’s eyes met his beloved’s, an exquisitely gentle expression darkening them in the borrowed light from the washroom. “Of course, brother,” he murmured, and threw Aylan a shirt as he crossed to the bathroom.

“It’ll be too bloody short on me!” Aylan groused, disappearing through the door.

“Will not, you big wanker,” Torrant muttered, shrugging into his own, which was, in fact, past his knees. “I had a bunch specially made for him,” he explained to Yarri, keeping his voice down so she’d know that Aylan didn’t know this.

“How very wise,” she murmured, and sat up in bed, opening her arms so he’d come into them. “I love that you had sleep shirts made for him, but none for yourself.”

He grinned a little, his eyes sparking in dark. “Until last month, it was pretty hot, Yar. I mostly slept in my small clothes—or naked!”

“Pervert,” she smiled at him, but the reason she was there darkened her expression as he sat next to her in a rustle of bedclothes and crisp linen, shivering a little.

“We’re going to need to start our own fire in here soon,” he murmured, giving a nod to the small hearth in the sitting room. “It really is getting cold.”

“We heard the song,” she said abruptly. “It made it into Wrinkle Creek as we were coming down, as well as the one about you and me, crossing Hammer Pass.”

“That’s good,” Torrant replied, no tone at all in his voice. “Djali would have liked that.” A tiny puff of air, the empty disguise of a humorless laugh: “He always wanted to be famous for his poetry, you know.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” Her hands came to ruffle through his short hair, and she could tell by the strain in his body that he was trying not to shake her off .

“Of course it wasn’t…here, let me get another blanket.” He made to get off the bed, but her hand on his arm stopped him. It was a determined, fearless hand, and he wondered, almost bitterly, if she was ever as frightened by his emotions as he seemed to be.

“We don’t need another blanket,” she murmured throatily. “We just need each other.”

“I don’t want to live this again.” His voice sounded odd—reedy, constricted. Don’t make me touch you with blood on my hands. There was some blood you couldn’t wash off .

“Then just live the part where you know I forgive you.” She sat up in bed, and wrapped her arms around his stiff shoulders. “I’m not Eljean, beloved—I won’t turn on you because I don’t like what you’ve done. I’m not a child—I’m not afraid of the snow cat, and I know now that he’s not Ellyot Moon. He’s all you.”

Torrant scrubbed at his face, resisted her warmth. “The bell rings in less than four hours,” he protested.

“Then you’d better talk about it now, because I’m not giving up and you need your beauty sleep.”

There was a silence when there shouldn’t have been. There were a thousand flip, lighthearted things he could have said, and he said none of them. They sat in the silence, listening to their own hearts beat and heard Aylan in the shower, singing the song that Torrant had written for Trieste and Yarri, their first year in school. He’d once confessed to Torrant that the tune and the words haunted him with Starren’s image.

“He has a decent voice,” Torrant said softly, off -topic as it seemed. “None of the regents know—they’re all afraid of him.”

“He’s bloody awful to them,” Yarri snorted, and Torrant had to agree.

“It was to protect me, you understand. He remembered—he remembered that thing with Jarrid and Brina. It’s never really left him alone you know. He still blames himself—maybe forever. And the thing with Djali…” Unconsciously Torrant fingered the divot in his ear, the scar where Ellyot had a birthmark. “The thing with Djali was so much like Troy, and not once has Aylan said ‘I told you so.’ Not once has he pulled out the ‘I warned you about this, you stupid git, why didn’t you listen!’”

“Why do you think that is?” Yarri asked, wiping her cheeks on the back of his sleep shirt.

“I think it’s because as awful as he tried to be, he started to love them too. I think Djali’s death hurt him as much as it hurt me.”

“Well,” said Aylan, coming out of the washroom unexpectedly, having thrown the sleep shirt on over a wet body, “how could you not love Djali?”

“It was impossible,” Torrant agreed with a strangled laugh. “He was such a mess…do you remember his first day in the clinic?”

“He dropped everything we gave him,” Aylan affirmed, “and most of it on Triana’s toes.”

“He always wanted me to rhyme these impossible words—if the word was purple, orange or silver, he’d put it at the end of a line, no question,” Torrant continued, his voice a terrible clog of affection and grief. “And he kept trying to compare love to things like stuffed dolls or well-made work-benches…he was the most hopeless poet.”

“His song was lovely,” Yarri commented, and was not prepared for violent wracking spasms that convulsed Torrant’s chest, nor for the way Aylan launched himself into Torrant’s arms, sandwiching him between the two people he loved best, forcing him to grieve and accept comfort.

“Oh gods yes,” Torrant choked into Aylan’s hair, “his last song was all anyone could hope for!” He bent his neck then, accepting Yarri’s kisses and her tears, and her forgiveness.

The Least Political Moon

“This is not going to go well,” Yarri predicted grimly as she and Trieste stood on the grand marble steps awaiting entrance into the Moss town house. She hugged her rich gold wool shawl around her shoulders in the brisk yellow wind that whipped over the city walls. Samhain was in less than a week, and there would already be snow and frost in Eiran. Hammer Pass would be four feet deep, but here in the city, it was still late fall.

“Look,” Trieste said patiently for the fiftieth time, “it’s going to be fine. As long as we’re subtle about it, it will be perfect. We go in, we let her know we don’t approve of her or her politics, and then we sip some tea, smile thinly over cookies, and leave. Word will spread, we’ll stop getting invitations from her cronies, and all of the people sympathetic to Goddess people will keep sending them. And we’ll have lots of good things to tell…your brother and his friends.”

In spite of the near miss with ‘Ellyot’s’ name, Trieste looked thin, elegant, and unflappable in fashionable dark lavender, her gray eyes as calm as a summer ocean. Yarri eyed her sourly and resisted the urge to fuss with her hair again. The maid had whined some more about it being too heavy to stay properly, but Yarri would be damned if she’d cut it again—there were enough hurts in Torrant’s life, and she would spare him this small one if she could.

The night before had shaken her--more than she wanted to admit. They had huddled together like children in a war, Yarri on one side of Torrant and Aylan on the other, until the exhausted men had fallen asleep. She’d had plenty of sleep in the last six months. She still had enough reserves to lie, wide-eyed in the dark, and wonder if her beloved could survive the task he’d set for himself.

She was pretty sure he could—she had wonderful faith in Torrant. He had saved her life more than once, he’d saved Aldam at least three times that she knew of—he’d even saved Roes a couple of times, and Roes was frighteningly self-sufficient. But the cost to him…it was terrifying.

Lane Moon had said more than once that the difference between the gods’ thinking and the Goddess’ thinking was that the gods looked at the bigger picture, while the Goddess looked only on the faces in her glow. Torrant was looking at the fate of all of the Goddess’ children in Dueance. Yarri was only looking at the fate of one man.

That thought had haunted her, even as she’d fallen asleep by his side. It haunted her as Aylan—with the help of Trieste’s valet-- helped to spirit her out of the regents’ dorm a few hours after Torrant had kissed them both good bye and left for the hall in the morning. It haunted her even as she’d napped, and when Trieste had awakened her with her tea.

Since the week before Beltane, she’d been adding a special herb to her tea to prevent conception—no babies, she’d thought happily, until Torrant had built them a home and was well established as the town healer. She’d added the herb for the entire summer, just on the hope that something would happen quickly and he would come galloping back on his damned fat stallion. She’d continued to add the herb to her tea as she’d journeyed through the Old Man Hills and into the foothills of Clough, knowing that when she arrived at Duance, come dark skies or high seas, she would be spending nights wrapped in her beloved arms.

This morning, she had sat at her little breakfast table and stared at the ground brown powder capsule sitting next to her tea as she always had it, and then she met Trieste’s eyes. Without saying a word, she’d taken the capsule to the waste bin by her desk and thrown it in, and then resumed her seat, meeting Trieste’s wide eyes with a steely calm of her own.

“Bethen gave me one calendar, now I’m making another,” she’d said with more serenity than she felt. “He will make me pregnant—of that I have no doubt. If he doesn’t finish his job before I start to show, he’ll have to take us home.”

Trieste had looked as though she’d wanted to argue—but she hadn’t. She had simply nodded thoughtfully and offered Yarri bread and fruit, then talked of other things.

But now, getting ready to face an enemy who dealt with subtlety and intrigue, Yarri wondered how Trieste could trust her to manage either. Trieste’s mind must have been wandering in the same areas, because as she wielded the unpardonably tacky gold-plated knocker, she cast a look at Yarri that was at odds with her soothing words the moment before. Yarri met her friend’s anxious look with one of her own, and Trieste managed a weak smile.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said gamely, “that mouse in my luggage was very subtle, remember?”

Yarri grinned. “That was what? Eight years ago?”

“Seven,” Trieste supplied, listening for approaching footsteps.

“I must have learned something in seven years, right?” Yarri asked hopefully, and Trieste gave her a warm, almost maternal grin back.

“Triane’s soft-footed slippers, girl, let us hope so!” Then the doors swung open, and they were welcomed into the lion’s den.

Aleta Moss must have possessed the worst taste in history, Yarri concluded as they followed a footman down the hallway. The walls were burgundy and black, and may have been fitting in a brothel, but as a visiting space they were just oppressive.

“Black carpet?” Yarri asked dubiously, and while Trieste kept a very schooled expression on her face, her reply of “Maybe it hides the bloodstains,” was enough to make Yarri nearly lose her composure just as they were brought into the poisonous blue sitting room.

Aleta herself stood up to greet them, with Essa at her elbow. Both women had their short, dark curls elaborately coifed, and had something sprayed in their hair that looked like—Yarri said later—a combination of flour, water, and the glue the children used in their craft projects at the orphanage. They were both wearing a dramatic puce and green, and Yarri, who had lived most of her life with her fist clamped around a crayon or a paintbrush fought the nauseous stirrings of a stomach moved more than it cared to be by the color around her.

Instead of throwing up on the black carpet, she pasted a smile on her face, and followed Trieste’s deep curtsey with a more perfunctory one of her own, and managed a ‘pleastameetya’ that almost sounded like real words.

A footman took their wraps and reached for their bags, but both of them waved him off with a smile, so they were gestured to a rather stiff looking divan with no back to speak of. They met rolled eyes and sat, getting a look around the room and spotting and smiling at two of Marv’s sisters in the spread of ten or so women who had arrived beforehand. Then Essa grandly restarted the conversation about how tiresome winter would have been if they’d had to stay in their holding in the foothills.

Trieste nodded in response, and when it looked as though none of the other women were venturing to comment she said, “Otham gets cold, but not too snowy—and really, there’s only room for one royal residence, so we pretty much stay there.”

“Ellyot says it’s very grand though,” Yarri supplied helpfully, reaching into her bag for her current project and handing Trieste hers.

“Well, he’s only been once, and the circumstances were not wonderful,” Trieste said regretfully, tugging at her yarn end so she could make her first stitch. “I’d like to show you all the mass of it one day— Alec and I have had a wonderful time furnishing all the unused…”

She trailed off and looked at Yarri, and the two of them looked up to see that the crowd of women mesmerized by the work in their hands, and not in a good way.

“I beg your pardon,” Trieste said tentatively, shrugging at Yarri. “We didn’t mean to bore you all.”

“What are you doing?” Essa demanded with an incredulous gesture at the little sets of needles and bright yarn.

“Knitting?” Yarri answered uncertainly.

“What?” The young woman had a narrow, pointed face and a squashed, upturned nose, and although normally very attractive, her outraged squint did nothing for her appearance.

“Oh!” Yarri actually felt relieved—she could answer this question. “Socks! I’m knitting socks!” It was the same turquoise and orange pair she’d been working the night before and she held the half-completed stocking up to demonstrate. “It’s one of Aunt Bethen’s best colors,” she said a little sadly, and Trieste patted her knee.

“Why?” Essa asked, and although she caught the jagged edge of sarcasm, Yarri was starting to wonder if, in addition to being mean, the woman wasn’t simple too.

“I don’t know—she’s always liked contrast,” Yarri responded, “and she really loves bright colors.”

“Why. Are. You. Knitting?” Essa spelled out, as though Yarri were simple.

Yarri was far from simple. “Because everyone needs socks?” she ventured guilelessly.

“Then buy socks! Your dressmaker must sell them” Essa was looking wildly around for some support—Trieste, at least recognized the superior look she shot over their heads to the other women—but there was a ripple of kind laughter, and Trieste thought with wonder that they might actually have allies before they even fought the first skirmish.

Yarri spoke slowly, as though to a traumatized child. “Why would I buy them when I have over thirty balls of yarn with which to make them?”

Essa spoke the same way, only with a tone of voice that would make that child whimper and cry. “Why would you make them when you are supposed to be having a conversation?”

“Oh—I understand now!” Yarri nodded her head, and Trieste caught the glint in her eye—she was being disingenuous now, and getting angrier by the moment. “You think I’m not smart enough to do two things at once. Don’t worry, Lady Moss, if I can knit and teach children their letters at the same time, I can certainly knit while gossiping with you nice people.”

Essa gaped like a puzzled frog, and Kerree, sensing a screech coming that would possibly peel the hideous wall-paper off the walls, jumped in. “You teach children? You’re awfully young!”

Yarri gave a pleasant smile and a self-deprecating shrug. “Better heads than mine tend to the real teaching—I run the orphanage. When they get old enough we walk them to the village school, but until then Aln, Evya and I teach them their letters and read to them.”

“You run the orphanage!” Essa was destined to be outraged this day, but she spoke at the same time Lyssee asked, “How do you have enough orphans for an orphanage?”

Yarri chose to ignore Essa and answer Marv’s dreamy eyed sister. “Well, mostly we get yours,” she began thoughtfully—an answer that suddenly had the complete attention of every woman in the room.

“What do you mean, you get our orphans?” a small, plain woman in a pin-neat gray dress asked sharply.

“Well, the girls who have babies out of handfast…I’m sorry—you call it wedlock—their babies would get labeled and thrown in the ghettoes, and their mothers would be stoned to death or imprisoned, so they cross the Old Man Hills in the middle of winter to get their babies to Eiran.”

“How often does that happen?” Aleta dismissed, trying to recapture the conversation.

“That’s half the orphanage,” Yarri shot back sharply. “The other half are from women trying to get away from their husbands.” She thought of Junie, the young woman Torrant had sent back with Aylan a few years before. Junie had died exhausted from the journey to birth to a healthy, happy little girl—who would never be beaten as Junie had. “Your priests tell the men that women are things—you can kick a thing in the stomach if it serves your dinner cold. The women who want better for their children come to Eiran—sometimes they’re sick, or hurt, and sometimes they just leave the babies at the doorway.”

Yarri looked around and realized that the women were hanging on her every word, so she shrugged and kept going. “We used to just foster them, you know? But that’s two countries worth of foundlings in one small city state—that’s when we started the orphanage.” She switched needles then, in the stunned silence, and looked at Trieste, who was nodding, her own needles clicking.

“Otham gets them too—right now, our foundlings get brought to the castle and we try to place them, but we’re going to fill up like Eiran.”

“Oh my!” Aleta snorted, “Whatever will happen when the little island of Otham is overrun with foundlings! What-ever shall we do?” She cackled then, an ugly sound, and Yarri answered her squarely, meeting Aleta’s poisonous green with her own solid brown eyes and an open anger.

“They’ll grow up and come back to the country that spawned them and left them, looking for revenge,” she said thinly, wielding her cable needle without thought. “Crimes against innocent people don’t just get ditched in a doorway or left to bleed to death in a washroom without some comeuppance, you know.”

Aleta started to sputter, but Essa, with a wide-eyed glance at her mother was suddenly all diplomat. “Well, we’re only women,” she said lightly. “What can we do?”

“Willa Hearth was a woman and she ran the country,” Yarri replied mildly. “My Aunt Bethen takes…took her knitting to town council meetings, and spoke when she needed to. Trieste here sits in with Alec’s cabinet…”

“With my knitting,” Trieste chimed in mildly.

“With her knitting,” Yarri amended with a smile, “and makes decisions every day.”

“Not the three rest days!” Trieste exclaimed, and although she and Yarri weren’t meeting eyes, Yarri knew that like hers, Trieste’s were twinkling.

“Your Aunt Bethen was on the town council?” one of the women from the back of the room asked curiously.

“Oh yes!” Yarri adjusted her seat so that she could see more people, and was not just facing her two dethroned hostesses. “You should have seen her—she was one of the driving forces behind the orphanage. The mayor kept trying to shut her down, but she’s…she’s been a force to be reckoned with.”

The woman who asked the question—obviously a friend of Jessee’s, a tiny woman with blond hair and a pleasant little face—nodded and asked another question before anyone else could. “How did you come to run it, if I may ask? You are terribly young.”

Yarri laughed and flushed, but Trieste answered for her. “It may have had something to do with the fact that they couldn’t keep her away from it—she kept sneaking away from her schooling to teach the little ones how to draw and how to knit. The family finally just gave up and gave her the job.”

“How do you know the family so well?” another one of Marv’s sister’s asked—Kylee if Trieste could remember correctly, and for a moment, the conversation ebbed, drifted away from anything difficult, and focused on Ellyot bringing friend’s home from school.

There was much that Trieste and Yarri left out. Neither of them mentioned Aylan, for one thing, and their stories of ‘Ellyot’ were edited. But Aldam was described in detail, as were Roes and Stanny and Starren. Cwyn was mentioned—but both of them grew tense and brittle when he was. Too much of what made up Cwyn was illegal and repugnant to the people of Clough—and Cwyn lived near enough to be prosecuted.

“But I don’t understand,” said Kerree, “she raised four children and helps run the town—why?”

Yarri and Trieste both blinked. “Because she lives there?” Yarri laughed. “She wanted some say…”

“Well, I’m sure the priest they sent there will cure her of that!” Essa laughed, and Yarri felt a flush steal up her bodice and hoped it didn’t spread to her face.

“Well,” she said with some asperity, her needles clicking madly, “since she kept this last one from being run out of town on a rail, I’d say his permission is immaterial.”

“So she’s willing to be converted?” pounced Essa eagerly.

“No,” Yarri pretended to think and then looked up brightly, “she just felt that this one was so stupid he couldn’t do too much damage.”

There were outraged shocks and gasps, but Aleta wasn’t going to let the insult to the priest go.

“Well,” Aleta said with a prim pinch of her thin lips, “Willa died, so we don’t have to worry about women running things in Clough!”

“That’s too bad,” Trieste said evenly. “Since many of the laws that Rath has passed pertain to women, it’s too bad someone in the Regent’s Hall doesn’t have a say.”

“What are you going to talk about—screaming children and their whoring mothers?” Aleta scoffed. “I’m sure the men have more to worry about than orphaned children in the Regent’s Hall, do you think?”

“I’ll be sure to tell the children that when they come back to Clough looking for blood,” Yarri said, with such a gamine, playful look on her piquant little face that Aleta had to blink hard to decide how to respond, and by the time she opened her mouth to say something, someone else spoke up.

“Is that why your brother came back?” Kerree asked soberly.

Yarri put her knitting down and met Kerree’s eyes, reassuring her that her brother and his friend weren’t being used as pawns.

“If my brother returned for revenge, Rath would have woken up dead, and that would have been the end of it.”

“He’s not a god!” Aleta spat, and before Yarri could respond, Trieste spoke.

“Did you know Rath’s soldiers took Ellyot’s foster brother one solstice morning? Just kidnapped him as he was walking through the woods, missing his sweetheart.”

“I hear the man is stupid!” Essa guffawed. “Are you sure he got the details right?”

“I saw the livery on the dead soldiers,” Trieste replied levelly, and now her knitting was in her lap as well, “and I can tell you the only thing you’ll ever need to know about Ellyot Moon. When it comes to protecting the people he loves, not a sword, not a soldier, not even a snowstorm is going to get between him and his people. He brought Yarri and Aldam down Hammer Pass in the dead of winter when he was not more than a child. He’s here to change what’s coming out of your country. If you want a say in that, you need speak up—change is coming. We can hear the roar of it in Otham, and if you can’t hear it in Dueance it’s because your own chatter over dresses and dances is drowning it out.”

“Well, isn’t that presumptuous of him!” Aleta shrilled, finally getting a chance to speak. “Who says we need change here? My household has never had it better—who says we need to change the way we’re doing things?”

“Besides the entire Goddess ghetto that is?” Yarri asked, her knitting working furiously in her busy fingers, fueled by a healthy dose of anger.

“Those policies are meant to keep the rest of the citizens happy!” Essa responded sententiously.

“Oh yes?” Yarri’s hands were suddenly shaking too hard to keep knitting, and her cold, sweaty fingers were fouling in the fine yarn. “Tell that to Brina and Jarrid of Troy.”

There was a collective intake of shocked breath, and even Essa’s dark complexion grew pale: her skin dewed slightly in the heat of the sitting room as the women sat shocked, regarding the two new people with wide, stunned eyes.

Trieste let loose a cross between a laugh and a sigh, and stood gracefully. Yarri followed, trying hard to make her jerky movements smoother, and only feeling clumsier by the effort.

“Don’t worry, Aleta,” Trieste said sweetly, as Aleta’s mouth gaped open and closed and the woman obviously floundered for the words to order them out. “We’re leaving.”

The two of them swept out of the sitting room, back through the hallway with the hideous carpet, and were pleasantly surprised to find that the footman had rushed back down the hall and was waiting in the foyer with their wraps. He apologized and told them both that the horse and carriage would be around shortly.

“So much for subtle,” muttered Trieste as they were waiting.

“You started it!” Yarri protested, and Trieste’s grin back was wry.

“I did indeed. I’m thinking your family has taught me a lot in the last years, yes?”

Yarri’s smile was all six-year-old girl. “It’s nice not to be the only one up in trees, hitting wankers on the head with rocks!”

Trieste laughed softly, and their carriage pulled up and the two of them exited with their heads held high.

Before their carriage had even made its way through the crowded city streets, Suse had been plagued by footmen, running messages to the house.

As Trieste predicted, many of them were there rescinding their master’s invitations to visit.

But many more of them bore invitations and calling cards asking for further acquaintance—and, Trieste was sure—further conversation about women and the leadership of Clough.

Justice for the Honored Dead

The next week, Torrant argued on the floor of the Regent’s Hall for the right to build a bonfire in the ghettoes in order to celebrate his honored dead on Samhain. It took him two days of standing on the floor and arguing alone, because the others agreed that only his passion could sway the floor from insisting that the time for the Day of the Honored Dead had passed.

His final argument, the one that had swayed the entire assembly, had been a demand to honor Djali, the son of Consort Rath, and his beloved, Triana.

The fact that he was not planning to be there for the entire ceremony sat in his stomach like a shattered glass full of acid.

That rest day was Samhain, and Torrant and the regents spent the early part of the day in the clinic. Olek, broken-hearted as he was at the loss of his two children, kept the Amber Goose open for no other reason than to give his people hope. Torrant and Aylan hadn’t been able to tell him the truth about Duan—they’d told him that he’d died bravely, and for their people. Torrant had run behind the tavern and thrown up, the lie had rankled so badly.

But the clinic remained open, and on the rest day the regents were accompanied by Yarri, Trieste, and Marv’s sisters—and all of them had an armload of blankets and supplies. The extra help made such short work of the waiting patients they were able to retreat to Trieste’s house for a few hours before the bonfire.

Trieste occupied the other regents in her drawing room—Torrant heard them reading out loud from one of the books he’d loaned Keon, while he sat quietly in the study, writing his letter to his honored dead.

He heard a rustling, and although he didn’t turn his head, he did close his eyes and breathe softly so he could savor the scent of her. She was freshly bathed with her hair in a functional braid, and wearing a wool skirt and a thick blouse, because it was chilly outside and they would be leaving soon. She put her hands on his shoulders and rested her chin on the top of his head for a moment, and he fought the urge to hide his words from her sight.

If she was old enough to take to his bed, she was old enough to see into his heart.

“Dear Djali,” she began softly. Her hand moved up, and he caught it before she could gnaw on her knuckle, kissing the poor scarred finger softly. She sighed and readjusted her position so she was resting her chin on his shoulder, and wrapped her other arm around his shoulders.

“I’m sorry, so sorry that I allowed your beloved to die. I’m sorry I couldn’t stop you from hurting yourself. You put your faith in me and I betrayed it, and my only way to make it right is to fix the world that trapped you and forced you to gnaw your own heart out in such cold absolution. Your song is being sung far and wide, now, my brother, and every time I hear it, my heart breaks that you are not here with me.

Triana, my bright little bird, take good care of your Djali…” her voice trailed off then, and she wiped her wet cheek on his clean collar as she finished the letter. There were people in the letter he hadn’t told her about, things he had done that she didn’t know, and then there was their family, dead these twelve years. By the time she was done reading, she had circled the desk and sat in his lap, and he just sat, hugging her, unsure of what to say.

“All this,” she said through a clogged throat, “and you won’t be able to stay?”

He buried his face in the hollow of her neck then, and tried for a certain dark humor. “How long do you want that list to be, beloved?” It was apparently the wrong thing to say, because she put her hand to her mouth and gasped, and for a moment he wished passionately that his much vaunted ability with words would stop failing him with the person he most wanted to see heart to heart with.

“Shh…” he murmured, and shifted her so he could stand and hold her, sheltering her, keeping her from the chaos of the world he was fighting for both of them.

“Cwyn wants to come with you,” she murmured into his chest, and he swore. Yarri tilted her face up to him, her lashes spiky with tears, and he bent his head and kissed a salt drop from the corner of her mouth. His skin suddenly tightened, and his stomach, and his body, and in a shiver of anticipation he realized that it had been a week since he’d had time to hold her like this, a week since they had…since they had…

“He can’t!”

The wrench between what came out of his mouth and what his body wanted was so violent that he was surprised his eyes didn’t pop. She stood on tiptoes and rubbed his lips with hers, teasing the grim line of his mouth with her tongue.

“He’ll follow you. Whatever it is you’re doing that’s taking you away from us tonight, he’ll follow you. He knows it’s important, and he wants to be a part of it. You know him—and you know he’ll help if you let him and hinder if you try to stop him…”

“Gods…” Torrant swore, because she was right and because his hands were fisting in her skirt, and he could feel her stockings underneath it, and wondered if she had those tiny small-clothes underneath them, or if she was…ah, gods, his hands hit bare flesh, his palm coming up to cup her bottom, while he delighted in her little cry of surprise and arousal.

Yarri whimpered and her face fell into the hollow of his neck and shoulder, her breath tickling the sensitive skin there. “Just let him come.” She kissed his neck…ah gods, her soft lips, nibbling under his jaw. “Give him a job to do. He’s spent months feeling useless.” A delicate little tongue running from under his jaw to his ear, flicking there for a moment, and then her voice and her breath in the porch of his ear, “He’s capable of so much…”

Torrant gasped, and then his hands ran over her bottom under her skirts, finding her tender, slick flesh and probing delicately.

Yarri’s little cry of surrender would have had him agreeing to haul the moons down with both hands for a thorough scrubbing. Inviting their prickly, trouble-prone cousin on a bit of night work was nothing at all.

“Yes…” he whispered back in her ear, rubbing his jaw on the wetness still tracking her cheeks. “Yes… just…now?”

“Yes…” she murmured back, “oh yes…please…” And he lifted her then, capturing her mouth in a sweet, salty kiss, and still holding her, shuffled backwards, using his backside to close the study door abruptly while they forgot sorrow and remorse for a breathless, electric interlude, totally lost in each other.

“You’re joking, right?”

Aylan squinted at him as he woke up from a nap and Torrant briefed him on Cwyn’s accompaniment. Aylan still spent some time at his flat—the folk in the ghettoes had gotten used to him being there, and in spite of Duan’s betrayal, Aylan liked being there for them. They were his people, now, as much as they were Torrant’s, and he wouldn’t trade that for a new flat—no matter how appealing Trieste’s spare bed. But that didn’t mean he didn’t enjoy the rest day at Trieste’s either. Where Torrant’s flat had seemed like luxury after the broken couch and broken windows and broken floorboards of his own flat, the safety and airy space of Trieste’s bedroom and the big bath tub really were luxury, and Aylan was hedonistic enough to want to take advantage of that.

Being awakened from his nap on clean sheets after a soak in the tub with scented soap interfered with his self-indulgence, and this news just made him cranky.

Torrant smiled apologetically, and hoped the hour he’d spent in the study didn’t show on his face—or any other part of him visible to Aylan. He’d told Trieste he’d wake the man up for dinner, since he had unwelcome news anyway, and now was rather wishing he’d let Yarri tell Aylan while they were eating.

“He’s spent the last five months being completely helpless,” he said now, because even though Yarri (the brat!) had been using undue influence, what she’d said had hurt his heart just a little with the truth. He knew that feeling. “He needs to feel useful—and you yourself said he was good at this. We couldn’t have made a cleaner kill than the priest and the miller’s boy, and we wouldn’t have hesitated, either of us.”

Aylan sat up in bed and wiped his eyes, and then squinted even harder at Torrant. A slow smile crept up his full mouth, the kind that had made Torrant’s knees weak when they’d been younger.

“Yarri talked you into it, didn’t she?” he asked, and to his delight a hard flush bloomed from Torrant’s neck at his badly tied cravat to his hairline.

“She may have said something, yes,” Torrant replied with a stoic straight face, “but she was right.”

“Of course she was right—she’s going to be right as long as you do your thinking with your bollix and not that thing on your shoulders,” Aylan laughed, getting out of bed and going for the clothes Torrant had brought him when they’d stopped by the regent’s flat.

“Well there seems to be some blood flowing to them these days,” Torrant said with dignity, “I’m sure not all their decisions are bad.”

“Well if their thinking gets me killed, you wank, I promise you I’m coming back from the star’s dark to cut them off!” Torrant yelped and protested, but before Aylan’s hearty laughter could him drive him out of the room, Aylan stopped him with a question.

“Your letter, mate—you finish it?”

Torrant couldn’t look at him. “All written, signed sealed, proofed by a child who holds my heart.” He tried to say that last with a light voice, but Aylan wasn’t buying it.

“When they get that letter, they’ll tell you that it’s not your fault.”

Torrant’s eyebrow went up, and his upper lip quirked. “I’m sure Duan would disagree heartily,” he murmured, “but point taken. The study’s open, if you’d like to write one.”

Aylan’s look was particularly wide and shiny-eyed. “Right. Djali might like to know how those little twins were doing at the clinic.”

Torrant nodded, heading for the door. He’d forgotten that detail— but then, he’d had more people to write for. “Absolutely—but hurry— you need to be there for dinner so we can tell Lane and Bethen’s third child that he gets to be in mortal danger tonight.”

Cwyn, of course was insufferably delighted.

“Do I get a sword? I’ve been practicing!”

“A dagger should be sufficient,” Torrant said warily, watching the way the young man’s eyes sparkled. He had to remind himself that by the time he was Cwyn’s age, he had already brought Yarri and Aldam down from Hammer Pass and disposed of his own share of bodies in the interim. He rather thought he’d been less gleeful than Yarri’s cousin, but he didn’t think he’d been any more capable.

“What about a cloak? One of those black leather cloaks like the two of you would be amazing—except not as beat up as Aylan’s. That thing looks like it got lost in a slaughterhouse.”

Torrant winced and Aylan actually put down his bite of beef.

“You’re right,” Aylan murmured hollowly, “it is absolutely imperative that you don’t get a cloak like mine,” and then he shot Torrant a look of unadulterated venom across the table that Torrant returned blandly.

Yarri, sensitive to some undertone she didn’t understand, looked at the two of them curiously. She looked to the regents to see if they had caught anything—she’d learned that the body of young men seemed to serve as an emotional barometer to her beloved, and their expressions could very often gauge what it was she had missed when he’d been here, in the heart of enemy territory, without her.

But the regents were all talking among themselves, discussing Torrant’s apparently impressive showing on the floor that week. He had thanked her earlier—told her with frank admiration that he wouldn’t have been able to pull it off without some of the regents she and Trieste had swayed through their wives—but Yarri doubted she had done anything of importance. She had heard her beloved speak, and she knew to the pounding blood throbbing in her chest that his passion could sway anybody with a heart or a mind.

Cwyn started asking questions about what he would be doing that night, and the strange tension between Torrant and Aylan evaporated like the salt-breezes of Eiran. Yarri almost resigned herself to having to ask him again when they were alone when she saw the expression on Eljean’s face.

Tormented did not even begin to describe the torsion in Eljean’s eyes as they fastened on her beloved’s face, and yearning was twisted beyond agony and into fury in the lines carved at the corners of his mouth. Yarri’s mouth opened with a soft gasp, and she sliced a look of scalpel sharpness in Torrant’s direction, but he was answering a question from Cwyn and didn’t see. She caught Eljean looking at her, that terrible excruciating fury still burning from his gaze, and the words in his heart practically scored themselves across her eyes.

He has a secret you should know.

“So,” Yarri asked pleasantly as they were walking in the crisp early twilight towards the bonfire in the Goddess’ quarters, “why don’t we buy Aylan a new cloak?”

Torrant looked at her warily through the golden blue light, wondering that her cheeks could glow so brown when she hadn’t been able to run loose in the city as she had in Eiran. Then, he checked on Aerk who was at her other arm to see if he thought anything was off in the request. Aerk shrugged, and Torrant continued the conversation warily.

“We could,” he murmured, and it was true. As he’d told Aylan, the cloak was blooded now. Regardless of what Aylan wore, the magic would continue to course under their skin, fed by the life in their veins until death freed it.

“Is there any reason you haven’t gotten him a new one?” she asked with that unrelenting pleasantness that told him she suspected something.

Eljean drew up on Torrant’s other side, and he automatically checked to make sure Aylan was in the midst of the party with his black leather hat so he would be harder to see. The plan was to walk to the bonfire in a group, and then separate from the group after they burnt their letters, sending their thoughts to beyond the stars. After that, they would make their way to the smaller west gate. Cwyn was waiting there with the horses, and they would hopefully be well and gone from the city before the evening curfew bell rang. They would finish their job sabotaging the ugly, terrifying structure on the hillside and camp nearby (although not too nearby, if their plans worked right) to return the next day after the afternoon bell.

“Right, Ellyot,” Eljean was saying sweetly, “why don’t we get Aylan a new cloak?”

Torrant cast him a dark look, with some surprise in it. He and Eljean had gotten on fairly well in the past weeks. After Eljean’s return to the Regent’s Hall the morning after Djali’s death, it seemed as though whatever the two of them had been was just as well forgotten, and Eljean’s sense of self-preservation, as well as his sweet and self-deprecating wit had made him a valuable asset to the group. Yarri’s arrival seemed to have smoothed over any rancor Eljean had held towards him. Although Torrant had never spoken about how she’d come to know all the details of that awful night, he had guessed that Eljean had supplied most of them.

He’d been so relieved to have the moment of the three of them, smelling the sweat and sorrow in Aylan’s hair, having Yarri’s soft cheek against his own, that he hadn’t been able to mind.

But this secret—this one was between him and Aylan. No matter that Eljean had stumbled upon it, revealing it before Torrant himself was ready was unpardonable.

“Aylan is welcome to wear any cloak he pleases,” Torrant replied mildly, “but it won’t alter the usefulness of the one he’s wearing now.”

“Really?” Eljean demanded, his voice hard and surprised and dismayed.

“Really.” Torrant allowed his eyes to flash blue as he looked at Eljean, hoping that Yarri wouldn’t catch it.

“Then why does he keep it?” Yarri wanted to know, and Torrant couldn’t look at either of them.

“Penance,” he said with an artificial smile aimed at the wide walkway between the marketplace and the river, “for not paying better attention at fencing class.”

Yarri’s eyes narrowed, and she opened her mouth to argue, but they were waylaid by a guard bent on harassing the regents, mostly. Torrant was the one who walked to meet him, and although nobody could hear what he was saying, everybody who knew what it meant watched his eyes flash blue.

Torrant returned to the group a few moments later, while the bemused guard stood, his hand cupping his private parts and smiling vaguely.

“Obnoxious prick,” Torrant muttered, returning to the group. Yarri caught the trembling in his hand as he tucked it back into her elbow.

“What did you do?”

“He seemed so fond of that body part, I gave him permission to get better acquainted with it.”

Yarri put her hand over his and felt that it had gone cold. “Time was, you would be on your knees, vomiting in the street when you did that,” she murmured, and Eljean cocked his head, interested.

“I’ve had some practice since then,” Torrant admitted. “You may have noticed, but according to Rath, I’m not entirely human.”

“Bollix,” Yarri hissed, but Torrant bent his head towards her, and for the first time, the regents saw an expression that looked brotherly on his face.

“There are things I’ve had to do, little sister, and things I’ve had to get good at.” His eyes, even in their normal, human, hazel color, were so intense that Yarri suddenly looked even younger than her barely eighteen years.

“So I don’t get to comment?” she asked, trying for irritation, but mostly just looking lost.

But Torrant, being Torrant, smiled a little, comforted her, kissed her temple, gave her a voice. “Your comments are welcome, Yarrow Root. Whether or not I follow your advice, well that’s a whole other story.”

Tonight it worked.

“You have your letter, ‘Ellyot’?” she asked, smiling tentatively.

“Next to my heart. Yours?”

She cupped her hand at her chest and looked to him hopefully. Her smile grew stronger when he did the same.

The gathering in front of Olek’s for Samhain was both subdued and cheerful. It had been a long time since the people in the ghettoes had been allowed to honor their dead, and now they had so many more names to honor.

During the clinic, Yarri and Trieste had helped to console the children and young people who hadn’t been allowed to learn to read or write, lest their ‘unholy doctrines propagate’. Many of them had lost parents or siblings, and they wanted to write letters, telling their missing ones not to grieve—they would all be together soon.

The two women had written a lot of letters that day, and as Yarri watched the children venture to the fire, lips moving as they asked the Goddess to take their words to the stars, she ignored the ache in her wrist and thought that she could write a thousand more.

With a glance at Torrant’s face, hollow cheeked and shadowed in the firelight, for a sudden moment Yarri saw, truly saw, the wellspring of his passion, the lifeblood of his sacrifice. Her hand locked with his, and together they advanced to the bonfire and cast their letter into the flames, both of them murmuring the names of those they had lost.

Tal, Qir, Owen, Kles, Myrla… Yarri glanced at her lover, wearing her brother’s name. Ellyot. Father, mothers, brothers…oh, I miss you. I don’ t remember much, I was so small, but I remember love, lots of love, like a giant bubble between me and the pain of pebbles on my feet. Forgive me when I hesitate, forgive me that I don’t want to sacrifice him to your memories. You left me with a shield from the cold, with a smile when I’m sad, a warm body for my womanhood, with a lover and a protector with the other half of my heart, forgive me if I don’t want to lose him too.

Torrant’s face gathered intensity as he tossed his letter to the flames, and she saw his lips move with unfamiliar names.

Ulvane, I’m sorry…you gave your life to protect him, and I failed you. Djali, Triana, I’m sorry. I promised you a better world, but it didn’t come soon enough. Mama, Kles, Owen, Tal and Qir, I’m sorry. You gave me life, and Yarri to protect, and I’m risking it, I’m risking her, because I couldn’t come back to you in that barn and save you. Ellyot…his eyes narrowed, and his jaw clenched so tightly a vein at his temple throbbed in the firelight. Ellyot, my brother, my friend, I’m so sorry. I stole your name, the man you could have been, and I’m not working fast enough, I’m not doing enough to make our people safe. I’ve borrowed your memory, soiled your identity, and it all hangs so fragile, like a door with a hinge of grass. Forgive me, my brother, for getting snarled in my own pain, and not doing more to honor who you were, who you could have been, my brother of the heart.

And then his letter was sent, his duty to his honored dead discharged, and he turned to Yarri and kissed her hand gracefully, in public, as any brother might do as a light gesture of farewell.

“Be safe,” he murmured. “Stay close to Aerk and Eljean—make Trieste do the same. The Goddess folk won’t hurt you, but there’s no guarantee the guards will behave tonight.”

He looked up and met Aerk’s eyes, and then waited until the others followed Aerk’s suit and gathered around him.

“Your one priority tonight,” he said somberly, “is to make sure the women get home safely. Don’t take any detours, don’t get heroic around the guards. I’ve told Olek that Aylan and I are leaving, and he’s spread the word. They’re going to break up an hour before schedule— if the guards are looking to capitalize on any lingerers, they’re going to be sorely confused. But that doesn’t mean to take chances. I’ve made a very public showing tonight—you all can’t stay much longer, or we’ll blow the lie that I’m here, right?”

“Right,” Aerk nodded, met the eyes of the others, and they all agreed.

“I’m trusting you all with…” Torrant swallowed and tried for some composure, but he had just been speaking to Ellyot from his silent, screaming, heart, and his chest felt too raw for dignity. “Trieste and Yarri…please. Just…please?”

Aerk’s very sober nod helped put his heart at ease, but it was Eljean who truly calmed him down. “You just make sure Aylan’s cloak doesn’t get any uglier,” he murmured, “and we’ll make sure nothing else gets damaged. I promise you that.”

Torrant flashed him a quiet grin. “I thought you were going to Zhane’s tonight.”

“Not if I’m needed as a human shield—I have some sense of chivalry, even if I don’t have the desire to follow it up!” Eljean snorted and rolled his eyes, and the rest of the regents gasped in surprised laughter. Aerk turned his thoughtful, almond-shaped eyes towards Torrant and seconded the plea to be safe.

“If it’s up to me to argue on the floor, we’re doomed,” he said with a grimace. “You’d better come back.”

“You are a better leader than you know,” Torrant told him truthfully. Of them all, it was Aerk who could see their cause through if Torrant could not, and Torrant ignored Aerk’s flush of denial, and turned towards his beloved.

He caught Yarri, her back lit by the bonfire, looking at him with a puckered brow. “Of course I’ll come back,” he smiled reassuringly. “Think of me as ‘highly motivated’.”

More laughter, and then he and Aylan got a round of claps on the back, and they turned to go. Yarri followed them to the shadows of the nearby alley, pulling Torrant into the depth of the darkness and framing his face with her hands. For a moment the only sound was the silken rasp of her palms on his cheeks, and the only movement was that of her lips against his. She tasted of roses and ocean, of yarrow and warmth, and he lost himself in her, his beloved, his home, and then pulled back and kissed her on the nose.

“Away with you,” he murmured, “or no one’s going to believe we’re brother and sister ever again.”

“You take good care of Cwyn,” she warned, “and make sure Aylan comes back with his skin intact.”

“I’ll do my best,” he said dryly, wondering that she didn’t tell him to watch himself.

“You take care of them, and they’ll take care of you,” she murmured, and then slid out of his arms like mist in wind, with the tinkle of disconsolate bells. He let her go, and followed an impatient Aylan into the darkness. Aylan put his kerchief over his head and eyes, and Torrant half-changed his form—they knew this dance, it was as comfortable as skin.

Cwyn

When Cwyn was barely three years old, Torrant had rescued him from a foolhardy dash into a road after his favorite toy. At about that same age, he would often complain so vociferously about inanimate objects not moving to his specification that his mother would answer the question, “Mama, what’s wrong with Cwyn?” with a recitation of his birth date—because really, the pull of the sun, moon, and stars on his headstrong psyche was the only explanation she had for him screaming “Mama, make house move!” at the top of his lungs.

He once wailed an entire night because his father, finally out of patience, had picked him up and put him to bed, and not allowed him to walk there on his own.

In appearance, Cwyn had merry brown eyes and a killer set of dimples, matched with a cleft chin and teeth that were entirely straight except for a very slightly crooked front tooth. He made men rethink their choice of bed partners and women rethink their monogamy, sometimes both at the same time, and as of yet, he’d left no one with a regret—and he had never been left in the cold.

In short, it was not in Cwyn’s nature to wait, or to let other people plan for him, or to follow orders. It never had been.

He chafed at the gates, fretted until even the placid, even-tempered Heartland turned skittish—a fact that Torrant thanked him for sharply after he and Aylan had ghosted out of the shadows and onto the horses. In short order, they were galloping beyond the city’s little used west gate.

Cwyn talked inside his head during the hard ride to the construction site of the abomination—it now had the beginnings of walls and gas pipes laid (not yet connected to a site of natural gas deep in the foothills). In fact he managed to tell himself a half a dozen stories regarding how he would stand up to his older cousin and to Aylan, and convince them of his rightness for night work, convince them that he had, after all, left his sick, (dying) mother as she tried to recover (die) in peace. He could never actually embrace the hard word either out loud or silently, though, and so his speeches, even delivered in his head, lacked the conviction of truth.

But still, he was a little miffed when, after all the build-up to his making a bid to do a man’s share of the night work, Torrant’s terse order was simply to “Mind the horses and try to distract any guards who come by, but DON’T kill them.”

It obviously wasn’t that he minded the killing—he’d had a chance to run to the market and talk to the peoples in the Goddess ghettoes, and as far as he could see, most of the people who worked for Rath needed killing right out of hand. He seriously doubted that he had the foresight or the patience to actually talk to a guard the way Torrant had, and then to give the man a chance to redeem himself? Well, the only reason his cousin or foster brother or brother of the heart or whatever Torrant was to him didn’t infuriate Cwyn’s notoriously short fuse was that, in truth, Cwyn was somewhat dazzled by his brilliance, his generosity, and, of course, his fabulous attraction to any sex he wanted to turn that quirky smile and dimples towards.

If Cwyn hadn’t grown up knowing that Torrant was Yarri’s, and that Aylan was Starren’s, the simple fact was that he would have been be completely infatuated by both of them, and just because he wasn’t infatuated didn’t mean he didn’t have (and acknowledge) a healthy dollop of hero worship towards them both.

It was, in fact, what had driven him to Duance with Yarri, once he’d realized that his mama was (dying) not getting better.

It rankled to have to reign in that hero worship with the horses he minded, while the two of them went off and planned to blow stuff up.

Their plan had actually been pretty ingenious—and had been spawned by their constant deadline of destroying the giant kiln right before the encroaching snows.

“At this rate,” Aylan had remarked glumly, when their every plan seemed destined for the waste bin, “the best we’ll be able to do is pour water on top of that granite slab and skate on it come winter.”

“Well, yes,” Aerk had pointed out in that almond-eyed guilelessness he had, “but it still wouldn’t be good to skate on, because the water would get in the seams between the blocks and expand when it freezes and buckle the slabs anyway.”

And then he’d been surprised when everyone from Marv and Jino to Keon and Eljean had looked at him slowly with an ocean spray of incredulity and amazement in their eyes.

The regents had been taking turns for the last six weeks, smuggling families out of the ghettoes and to Moon Hold in preparation for winter. (Torrant and Aylan had actually been bitterly disappointed that they wouldn’t be able to do that very thing this weekend—as upset as Torrant was at their closeness to Dueance, no one could deny that the two of them wanted badly to see Aldam and his Roes.)

It had become part of that errand to visit the granite slab on their way home and take a fine augur (and several fine augur bits, since one bit really was only good for one hole in the granite) and burrow tiny holes as deep as the bit could go, and then fill the holes with water.

During their last visit, on a day so crisp and chilly that without gloves the hands would ache, Marv and Jino had seen cracks start to appear near the seams of the slabs. Whooping and hollering, the two of them had spent the day almost until dark, drilling more holes, chipping stone away, and drilling more, going to the side of the slabs, and drilling even more, and then going thirsty the entire ride home to fill every crevice with water.

It had frozen every night since, and Torrant and Aylan reckoned that ‘Ellyot Moon’s’ very public appearance at the bonfire would be a very, very good time to go back and fill those deepening cracks with the sulfur/saltpeter mixture that Rath had used to detonate the switchback trail to Hammer Pass eight years before.

And now, Cwyn was waiting in the chill Samhain night, staring at the naked trees and crisping his way through their fallen draperies with four bored horses and a strong-man’s load of sulfur and saltpeter. Torrant and Aylan were building a fire on top of the granite slab, and he was listening to a guard relieving his bladder in the bushes.

They hadn’t thought there’d be any guards, and for a moment,

Cwyn was unspeakably excited at the prospect of using his little dagger. Fight! Dance! Kill! Maim! The game of violent joy thrilled his blood, and for a replete moment the idea of jumping on the man’s back and biting his throat with his steel tooth was enough to set his body blazing with exultation.

For Triane’s sake, boy-o, don’t kill anyone!

Torrant’s exasperated words rasped his skin, pulling him down from the high of blood lust, and causing him to sulk a little further back into the star-shadows of the Samhain night. He had all this anger, he fretted. He had all this pain, this worry for his family, this grieving for his mother… if only he had some outlet for it all.

But he didn’t even have sex—this whole city was daft and fouled by the lack of sex. Sex had to be done secretly, sex could only be done with certain people…and all the while, the worst profanations of the best joys were going on in secret, and he didn’t want any part of them. And it wasn’t just the sex, it was singing or writing or, hell, whistling at the wrong moment or wearing breeches that were too short and it all, all of it, led to grisly violent death.

Killing would have been such an easy answer.

But he’d promised. And although he regarded Torrant and Aylan too much as family, as cousins or brothers or kin or whatever the hell they were, his regard for them was still tinged with just enough hero worship to not want to let them down.

Torrant had told him that a dagger blow to the back of the neck just so and the guard would be…

Triane’s steaming pile of shite—the bloody guard just burst out of the bushes, young, diddling with his fly, his moon-pale face as surprised to see Cwyn as Cwyn was to see him.

Moved by the twin impulses of supreme frustration and the need to shut the man’s gaping maw before he started screeching like a barn owl, Cwyn did something so uniquely him, only his mother could have predicted it.

He kissed the man.

He was just reaching for the dagger at his waist when the man kissed him back. Dueant’s bloody hysterical laughter! Who could have predicted that?

Certainly not Torrant and Aylan who almost tripped over the two- backed pair, grappling bare-skinned in the shivery chill. Aylan choked on an oath that would have turned the sky red, and Torrant clapped a hand over his mouth and pulled him back into the brush, speaking to him so softly that his lips touched Aylan’s sensitive ear, and among other things, Aylan was battling both arousal and the urge to giggle like a little girl.

“We told him to distract any guards!” he whispered.

“We didn’t think there’d be any!” Aylan snapped back, his eyebrows raised at Cwyn’s technique—the young terror should have been raised in Aylan’s home court in the Jeweled lands, because there was no doubt that his seduction was flawless.

“They must have noticed the holes…here—you stay and I’ll go finish.” With a whoosh of mammal scented air that indicated he’d partially changed, Torrant hefted the bulk of the gunpowder, making sure to drop a trail of it after him as a fuse, and flitted through the trees back towards the foundations like a dream.

Aylan watched nervously as Torrant ghosted away. There weren’t supposed to be any guards here—there hadn’t been in the past. Had somebody noticed the needle-width holes in the foundation? So far, just the holes themselves wouldn’t be able to stop the terrible function of the giant kiln, but maybe someone had figured out that a bigger act of sabotage was on the way.

A few feet away, Cwyn and the young guard twined limbs, thrusting, grunting, their act nearing its frenzied completion, and Aylan supposed that he could ask the guard what he was doing near the construction site when they were done and dressed. It would be something to do besides wet his pants with worry while Torrant danced deathly with the black powder he was currently spreading over the slab, hoping that enough of the powder would seep into the (hopefully dry—oh, please, let their efforts with sticks and cotton-wool have proved fruitful) fissures coating the surface and dipping down into the heart of the granite. Of course, that hope was secondary to the hope that the friction of the powder pouring through the funnel or getting inadvertently stepped on wouldn’t ignite the whole thing prematurely, but that possibility didn’t bear thinking about.

And he would not, positively would not, think of what Torrant had urged him to do if they were discovered.

Cwyn was refreshingly quiet during sex, but the guard, whose every moan seemed both surprised and resoundingly loud, made a really tremendous, ripping groan of completion and then collapsed, face down, Cwyn sprawled over his back. The little space between the trees was ripe with their breathing for a moment, and then Aylan crouched down and got Cwyn’s attention with a tap on his shoulder. The fact that the young man didn’t corkscrew to his feet confirmed Aylan’s suspicion that Cwyn had been aware of at least one of them for the last several moments.

“Enjoy yourself?” Aylan asked softly, and Cwyn’s merry-brown eyes were half-hidden by his eyelids in a completely unrepentant satisfaction.

“Best moment of the last month,” he affirmed, giving his new best friend a reassuring pat on a lightly furred bottom.

“Good—would you mind asking you new husband if he’s got any more friends out in the wilderness? T…Triane’s Son is dancing in the moonlight, and I would really love for him not to get caught, right?”

Suddenly Cwyn’s eyes were all sharpness and interest. “Right, brother. My apologies…it’s just that you two did say not to…”

“Kill anybody,” Aylan supplied dryly. “For the record, this wasn’t what we had in mind. Now could you ask him?”

“Mind if I get his name first?” Cwyn asked hopefully. “He’s really very sweet—I’d like to keep him for a while.”

“Knock yourself out. I mean that.” Aylan turned away in disgust, trying to give the poor man some privacy as he struggled with his trews and armor. From the corner of his eye he saw Cwyn turn to him with a clucking motion and gently do up his trousers and divest him of his armor. When the guard realized that the armor was getting set gently on the ground, he made a half-hearted protest, but Cwyn silenced him with his usual good cheer and pragmatism.

“What—you’re going to go back and find the evil Whore-worshiping sodomites now, mate? Hate to break it to you, but you are one!”

“Won’t my mother be surprised,” replied the young man in a complete daze.

“Well, given the gods-blighted shitehole you grew up in, I suggest you don’t tell her!” Cwyn said with that irrepressible humor.

“Not see my mum again?”

The guard was stunned, and Aylan didn’t blame him. Casting Cwyn a venomous look, Aylan took charge.

“Look, uhm…”

“Grand,” the young man supplied, looking lost.

“Really?” Oh gods, he was losing time, but this surreal conversation in the darkness didn’t seem to be gaining any daylight no matter how long it went on. “Grand what?”

“Grand Wind.”

“Really?” Aylan said again, and then realized that he was dancing in anxiety. “Look, uhm, Grand, are there any more of your lot out?”

“Sodomizing traitors, you mean?” The bitterness wasn’t lost on Cwyn, who winced.

“Guards, Grand—are there any more guards who will come and kill us all for yours and this one’s” a nod at Cwyn, “little frolic in the woods? Is anyone going to come looking for you?”

Grand blinked. “We’re supposed to meet in the clearing with the building…”

“OUEANT!” Aylan swore, his whisper violent enough to make the young man back up. In the moonlight, Aylan could see that he had a pretty, triangular face with dark lashes and brownish hair, and although he privately thought a lot of Cwyn’s taste, he could have cursed his timing on both faces of the three gods. “When?”

“Mmm…” Grand looked at the sky and frowned. “When Triane rises—not too long now, we’ve got about fifteen minutes or so…”

Fifteen minutes. Aylan blanched. “Oh gods…” he flung himself up on his horse, grabbing Heartland’s reins in the same motion.

“Cwyn—you put him on the back of your horse and ride west as fast as you can…”

“West, but we were going back to the…”

“There’s no cover there—in an hour, if we ride hard, we should end up in the trees, and we’ll be able to put in for the rest of the night. When this goes down, they’re going to be looking for us…and it’s going down in a few heartbeats, so you two get gone, right?”

Cwyn’s eyes opened and closed slowly, followed by his mouth, as the suddenness of the danger seeped in through his own self-involvement. “They’ll kill him too, won’t they?” he asked, feeling thick.

“Gods, little man, what did you think we were doing out here?” Aylan asked harshly, “Now GO!”

Cwyn may have been self-absorbed, but he wasn’t stupid. He and Grand Wind were pounding through the trees on the back of one of Courtland’s fastest offspring before he realized that Aylan had returned to the little clearing, some part of their strategy clearly occurring to him that he’d almost forgotten.

Oh gods…Dueant’s headache, Oueant’s dysentery, Triane’s cramps… the fuse. They couldn’t light the fuse from the granite slab. The entire plan depended on Aylan staying in the clearing and lighting the fuse, but he couldn’t do that with Torrant on top of the kiln floor, playing with the damned powder.

And there would be guards there, in…how long? Aylan looked at the horizon, trying to determine where Triane would rise and when…

Shite. Holy Triane mother of shite, there She was!

Aylan swung off his horse fumbled in his pocket for the flint, praying as he had never prayed before, and then found the line of black powder as the fuse.

He struck the flint experimentally, making sure it would spark, and then took a deep breath and bellowed, “Triane’s Son, CLEAR!”

Torrant was so shocked his voice cracked an octave as he shouted back “WHAT!”

“Enemies, dammit. CLEAR!!!”

There was only a heartbeat of uncertainty, although Aylan must have aged a year in it.

“Strike, dammit, STRIKE!” And Aylan had to trust that Torrant was clear.

The flint hit with a clear spark, and in a chilled breath the fuse sputtered its lightning way along the ground towards the giant kiln of the Goddess’ children. Aylan mounted his poor, confused horse, grabbed Heartland’s reigns one more time, and rode for all he was worth.

The pounding of the bloody great horses practically jarred his teeth loose, and it was a good thing Heartland was as happy to run as he was to sit munching grass. But both the horses were used to quick getaways, and neither of them were carrying a double burden, so Aylan was not surprised to catch up with Cwyn after they cleared the stand of trees below the construction. Cwyn, perched on his stirrups and looking under his arm suddenly sat down and turned his entire body, in spite of the awkwardness on the back of a fully galloping horse, and Aylan had to look behind him to see what shocked Cwyn so badly.

The snow cat was gaining on them.

In strides of acres, not feet, the man-sized cat was bounding, heaving, bunching his muscles, digging in his haunches, bounding towards them, closing, closing…

The concussion of the hellfire orange explosion behind them sent the cat rolling, almost unseated Cwyn’s terrified passenger and made Aylan look forward instead of backwards. Then there was another, smaller explosion, and then a series of them, the noise deafening, the shock of them sending cold fear from Aylan’s stomach to his spine, in spite of the heat at his back.

When he looked back again, Torrant had nearly caught up, was crouching for a leap that would have felled the horse as he was hunting, and he coiled, bunched, and sprang, his shape morphing fluidly into a man’s in mid-air, as he landed smoothly on Heartland and took the reins.

Aylan looked at him and shook his head, shooting a relieved grin just to see that they were all alive, and Cwyn looked back and shouted, “Nice, cousin, very nice!”

And another concussion blew in the chaos behind them, and a flaming granite rock fell from the sky and knocked Aylan off his horse.

He rolled, coming up, not even bothering to swear at his own pain because he knew it wasn’t his for long.

“Torrant!”

Torrant slumped over his saddle and was fighting for breath, trying not to scream.

“You all right?” Torrant gasped, as his horse danced in place, too frightened to stand still, especially not when Torrant was too weak to hold him with anything but will.

“I’m fine—you…” Aylan clutched his horse’s reins and watched helplessly as Torrant threatened to fall off the creaking leather saddle.

“Get back on. Let’s go. We’ve got an hour before we hit the woods…” A ripping groan shook him then, and he sat up using what seemed to be will alone. Cwyn had turned around in confusion, and was sputtering, “But…but it hit Aylan…”

“Go!” Torrant commanded, and as always, Aylan was helpless to resist.

The next hour was torturous. Aylan’s whole shoulder felt the pressure from the wound that wasn’t there, and when he put up his hand to feel his cloak, he felt two large holes, on in back and one in front, knitting up slowly as Torrant continually both slumped and sat up on his horse.

They were within sight of the tree line when Torrant simply toppled off of Heartland’s back, without even a whimper. Aylan shooed Cwyn onward, and jumped to Torrant’s side.

“Change,” he commanded harshly, feeling the blood soaking through the shirt underneath Torrant’s unblemished cloak. “Change, and it will heal.”

“Absolutely, brother,” Torrant responded dryly. “Where do you suggest I get the strength?”

“Your bloody toes, if you have to—you’re not going to just lay here and…”

“Don’t say it!” Torrant almost laughed, even though his head was pillowed on Aylan’s lap. “I’m not that bad off , really. It passed through—it just needs to stop bleeding, that’s all. Here…”

He sat up then, and unclasped his cloak so he could reach his shirt, jerking it sharply and ripping it in half. Aylan helped him shrug off both sides, and at Torrant’s direction he folded the clean side up and made a pad over the shoulder, tying it off with strips of the hem.

“There…” Torrant grunted, sat up, and looked levelly at Aylan for some help to stand. Aylan didn’t take his offered hand—instead he got behind Torrant, bent over and literally hauled him up from the waist. Torrant wobbled for a moment, reached out, grabbed the horse, and leaned across the saddle. Aylan swore, and pushed his friend up until he was sitting the animal properly, and together they broke into a painful canter. Aylan felt a dagger of anxiety in his stomach with every jounce of the horse, every bump in the road, and for an eternity, a chilly eternity of listening to Torrant’s teeth chattering and his breathing labor past the pain, they made their way towards the line of oak trees that marked the changing topography of Clough.

It wasn’t until they were almost there that Aylan thought to ask about pursuers.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Torrant rasped. “They started closing in at your shout, but I’d been in their sights for a few moments…I didn’t know how to tell you to go, and then I heard you…”

“Bloody wonderful for me,” Aylan muttered. “My timing’s finally on.”

Torrant’s rusty chuckle was almost reassuring as they looked for signs of Cwyn and his reluctant passenger.

Moons Maturing

Cwyn paced in the limited span of three oak trees, huddled together for secret reasons of their own, and asked himself how everything had gone so wrong so quickly.

Grand Wind was not happy at all to be by his side.

“I can’t go home?” he asked for the fiftieth time, and Cwyn stopped his pacing and spared a moment for the young man whose life he had changed in one ill-advised tumble.

“Look—I don’t know what you want me to say!” Cwyn threw up his hands, scanning the horizon and breathing a sigh of relief when he saw (finally!) two horses at an easy canter, heading in their direction. The rider on the biggest horse was slumping in the saddle, but obviously still controlling the reins.

“I want you to say that it didn’t happen!” Grand replied bitterly. “I want you to tell me that I can stay in the Dueance Guard and let my mum keep her home. I want you to tell me that I can still marry a nice girl and settle down and have children, and that I’m not a filthy sodomite for the rest of my life!!!”

“Auugh!” Cwyn looked a little desperately to where Torrant and Aylan were slowly cantering towards them. Torrant didn’t look so good in his seat on the saddle, and he still couldn’t figure out how it was Aylan who had been knocked off his horse but Torrant was the one who’d been wounded. “There’s no law that says you can’t marry a nice girl and squirt out babies like watermelon seeds, Grand. All that happened tonight was you got to see what the other side of the fence was all about, you see?”

“But what about mum? Why can’t I see my mum?”

“Because life’s not fair!” Cwyn retorted, running his hands through his wild brown hair. “Because mum’s don’t always understand what their boys are all about, and the really spiffing ones, the ones that know everything and love you anyway, well they don’t always get to stay, now do they? Sometimes they get sick and they tell you that it’s the ways of the gods or some shite like that and the solid truth is that the gods don’t give a shite and life isn’t fair!” Cwyn lowered his voice and rubbed a shaking hand over his face, peering into the darkness, relieved that they were getting closer and that Torrant hadn’t fallen off the horse and died.

He had a sudden, random memory of Torrant and Aylan, one summer, playing tag with him and Starren and Stanny and Yarri, and how his mum and dad had snuck into the water behind him and grabbed his foot and dunked him when he’d least been expecting it. They had all laughed a lot, even Roes and Aldam who had been sitting at the river’s edge and dangling their feet in the shallows—because he’d been the champion dunker of the family. He could still see them, laughing boys, tight as any brothers, with their heads tilted back and their teeth straight and white and as beautiful as anything he’d ever seen, including his first woman, including his first man, they had been handsome and strong and beautiful, and now they looked lean and dangerous and frightening. And still, still, Aylan hadn’t yelled at him for fooling around in the woods on this terrible, chill night where even the moonlight cut like diamonds.

He became aware that in the silence of their little glen, his new lover was crying softly, and he sighed. His mum would have understood about the sex, he thought rightly, but she would never forgive him for making the poor kid cry.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured miserably. “I really am. I had a choice between bonking you on the back of the head or kissing you senseless. And I was still planning on knocking you on the back of the head, except…”

“Except I kissed back,” came the clogged reply.

“That you did, boy-o,” Cwyn almost laughed, “and you’re going to have to live with it. But don’t worry about your mum getting put out of her house, right? We’ll stow you somewhere safe—somewhere you can make a difference, but where no one will care who you shagged on a wild Samhain, right? But we’ll get word to your mum, and money’s not a problem, we’ve got a bit. And maybe, maybe when all this is over, you can go back to Dueance and find that girl, right?”

“Right,” Grand said listlessly. He was crouched on the frosting ground, and he wiped his hands on his sweaty breeches.

Cwyn came next to him and squeezed his shoulder. “Now come on—wouldn’t you rather know that the part of you is in there? You know, the part that just went down on your knees for me and never looked back? Wouldn’t you rather know that it gave you joy?”

“No,” Grand whispered, his eyes glazed with tears and depression. “I’d rather not know anything of the sort. I was happy with my future as I saw it. What right did you have to come and rip that away?”

Cwyn sighed, and heard the clopping of the horses. “None at all, I guess,” he murmured, before stepping out of the clearing and getting Aylan’s attention.

Aylan slid off his horse and took Heartland’s reins from Torrant, giving both sets of reins to Cwyn as the horses came to a stop inside the clearing. “There’s a brush in my saddle,” he murmured, “give them some water and groom them—have your friend help you—I’ll get out the bedroll and get him situated.”

“Is he going to be all right?” Cwyn asked, worry cracking his voice. Damn it, hadn’t it changed fully a few years back? No matter.

Aylan leaned his pale, clammy forehead against Torrant’s thigh as he rested in the saddle. “I’ll be fine, Cwyn,” Torrant reassured faintly. “Really. I need a little sleep, some food and water, and then I’ll change into the snow cat and the wound will close up. I should have changed back there only…”

“We were running and you had the horses to deal with and you thought you’d be a bloody hero,” Aylan snapped without heat, moving so his cheek rested on Torrant’s thigh now. Torrant’s hand, long- fingered, kind, poetic and healing, rested in Aylan’s bright hair for a moment.

“Everything except the hero part,” Torrant smiled weakly, “but I am going to need to get off this damned horse…”

Cwyn and Aylan set to work, and in short order, Torrant was laying, bare-chested, on his bedroll, and Aylan was searching through the saddlebags, swearing. “Dammit, Cwyn, I thought I told you to pack extra blankets!”

“I did—I gave them to Grand…”

Without bothering to reply, Aylan stalked over to their reluctant companion and ripped the blankets off his shoulders, ignoring his startled protest and bringing them to where Torrant was laying, trying to sip from the canteen and nibble on some dried meat.

Torrant smiled, although he didn’t open his eyes. “That wasn’t nice,” he murmured, “and give me a few moments and it will be unnecessary. I’ll spend my night as the snow cat and you get a fur coat as a cover.”

“I can’t believe that damn rock—it came out of nowhere!”

“Relax, brother,” Torrant murmured. “It would have killed you—I promise I’ll live.”

Aylan sat with a tortured grunt. “I hate this.”

“Well, it’s gotten us this far—don’t knock it until we’re done and out of town.”

He looked so pale against the shadows, eyes closed in the moonlight, chest moving deliberately up and down. Aylan took his hand and started to talk about the Regent’s Floor, just to take his mind off of the terrible wound in Torrant’s shoulder, the one that had been flooding blood the moment the flaming bit of shrapnel had passed through Aylan’s body.

“We’re close, you think?” he asked, stroking Torrant’s hand.

“We’re getting there. We got our Samhain bonfire while they were having their damned hero’s parade. If we can fight the backlash from this, we might get Solstice. More and more of the regents are conceding the obvious, fewer of them are getting hung up on stupid questions like ‘Do you have proof” when it’s something a dead bat could see. It’s slow, but change is coming…”

Torrant’s voice was drifting off , and Aylan thought the time had come. Reluctantly he reached over and tilted the water, giving Torrant a hearty, sputtering swig.

“Are you ready brother?” he asked quietly.

“As I’ll ever be…” And with that, the change started rippling up Torrant’s body at a fraction of its usual speed.

As his shoulder started to knit, slowly, ever so slowly, his roars bounced off the oak-dotted foothills, scaring crows from meadows of grain nearby.

Cwyn took the first watch, while Aylan huddled next to the snow cat just to monitor Torrant’s labored breathing and the amount of blood the wound continued to ooze. They gave the extra blankets to Grand and huddled on the other two bedrolls, then traded off midway through the night. By then, the shaking in Cwyn’s hands from hearing a creature in so much pain had eased up a little, and he could scratch the great cat behind the ears like he had as a boy.

Cwyn had to stifle a laugh when the snow cat gave him a lazy tongue bath as he was settling down to sleep, but he didn’t tell Torrant to stop it. The action was comforting, like his mother’s brief, hard kisses on the cheek when he’d done something heinous and she was letting him know that she may be mad, but she still loved him.

Aylan awakened him as the sky lightened, and Cwyn hauled a protesting Grand behind him, feeding the boy dried fruit and a chunk of his bread as they went.

“Say hullo to Roes and Aldam for us,” Aylan said wistfully. Knowing how close they were and not having time to visit ached like a wound that wouldn’t close. “Tell Aldam not to worry too much—he’ll only build something and I don’t know how much of that lumber is sound.”

Cwyn nodded, and went to clap Aylan’s shoulder from the top of the horse when he saw the new, ugly addition to Aylan’s battered cloak. His eyes met Aylan’s with dawning horror, and Aylan grimaced and turned away.

“It wasn’t my idea,” Aylan said roughly, and Cwyn found he was dashing at his burning eyes.

“Does Yarri know?” Oh, damn, his nose was starting to run in the gods-cursed cold.

Aylan shook his head. “So many other things to tell her,” he said bitterly. “Always something more important to talk about than himself, right?”

“Da loves you more than me, you know that right?” Cwyn asked, not sure what was in his voice, or riding his mind to say such a thing.

“Horse shite!” Aylan laughed, shocked.

“No—it’s true. I mean, he loves me, I could never argue it, but you—you were everything he’s ever wanted to be. You, Torrant, Aldam—you’re the children they chose. Even Yarri is kin—you three they took into their hearts without any blood to ask them. Tell me you’re honoring that, would you? Tell me the two of you are honoring how badly we need you home when my mother dies.”

And now Aylan was wiping at his eyes. “Ah, Cwyn, you gods-cursed little terror—you are so like the both of them, and the best parts, too, not the dregs at the bottom like you think. Of course we’re planning to come home. This is just his way of making sure it’s the both of us, not just him.”

Cwyn nodded, and then gave Grand a scant warning on the horse behind him before taking off for his sister and Moon Hold.

Aylan and Torrant waited until late morning to leave. In the meantime, they ate some more of the stores, including a rabbit Aylan caught while they were waiting. Eventually Torrant changed form, and then changed into Aylan’s spare shirt. Aylan cleaned up their camp, and the two of them mounted their placid horses.

Together they made their slow, easy way to Dueance, just a regent and his friend, enjoying the lack of curfew outside the city. Aylan’s face blanched about halfway there when he saw the blood seeping through the bandage at Torrant’s shoulder onto his second worst shirt. Torrant said nothing, but the lines at his mouth were white with pain.

They made it to the gate right when Cwyn, who had been riding full out, made it, and they arrived at Trieste’s with an hour to spare before nightfall.

Yarri was pacing the back entrance, waiting for them to arrive— she’d been there since the curfew ended. When they burst in, dusty, weary, sore, but infinitely glad to be somewhere warm and friendly, she practically leapt on Torrant, and he swept her up in his one good arm--using the other for balance--and kissed her soundly on the mouth until her breath caught, and she pulled away, embarrassed in front of Cwyn and Aylan.

“So that’s how to get her to stop nagging!” Cwyn teased. Yarri looked at him sharply, because there was an age in his merry brown eyes that hadn’t been there before, and she wondered sadly if their precocious terror had finally grown up a little.

“But I don’t advise you try it,” she answered dryly, just as Trieste swished in, all fine woolen skirts and seriousness.

“You three are back just in time—we saw the explosion from here, and the whole of the regent’s quarters has been a hornet’s nest of people being called in. The others have hidden out here, but you’re going to have to clean up and report within a half an hour, or there’s no way we can keep up the façade!” Her lovely oval face was set in lines, and she stood, hands on hips, as authoritative on her own turf, had she known it, as Bethen was on hers.

Torrant and Aylan both nodded and went trotting down to the servant’s quarters where a big tub of warm water had been prepared. (Almost none of the townhouses had showers, Trieste had reported with deep disgust, and many of them didn’t have hot water. It seemed unthinkable that a city of this size should have omitted that from it’s planning, and Aylan had made an acid comment about it being a hallmark of Rath’s pseudo-civilization that he should think a hot shower was a luxury instead of a necessity.)

Cwyn stood in the little entryway from the stables for a moment, looking confused, and then murmured, “I’d better go brush their cloaks—it won’t do if the two of them are all clean and their cloaks look like hell.”

“Will they need any bandages?” Yarri asked anxiously—Torrant’s usual strength had not been all there as he’d held her.

Cwyn nodded. “Yes. Yes—if you could bring me some…”

“Cwyn!” Trieste burst out, almost laughing but mostly concerned. “What happened? You’re never this quiet—I should think you’d be bursting with news about your grand adventure!”

The look Cwyn gave her was miserable and confused. “Let me get my own bath,” he said, with a painful effort at lightness, “and get those two on their way. Maybe I’ll remember how to talk then.”

But Trieste and Yarri exchanged troubled looks as he moved wearily and purposefully towards the servants’ washroom. They highly doubted that whatever was weighing down Cwyn’s usual irreverent heart could be washed away with mere water.

Torrant and Aylan were bathed and dressed in minutes, but Yarri had heard what sounded suspiciously like a yelp and a growl of pain coming from the servants’ bath in the interim. She was about to march into the bathroom and see what was going on when Trieste grabbed her, practically by the ear, and took her to the front entryway to see them off .

“But he’s hurt!” Yarri hissed, aware that the other regents were in the hallway, waiting for Ellyot Moon to show.

“Yes—but Aylan’s taking care of him. They know how to do this, they’ve been doing it for years—yes, years. If he wanted you to baby him over this right now, believe me, you’d be doing it! Has it occurred to you that it’s harder to see you while he’s flying from one danger to the next than to not see you at all?”

Yarri was still sputtering in outrage when the men came striding down the hall.

“I’m just saying you should stay here!” Torrant was protesting as they neared. “Last night was brutal—Marv and Jino said they could take tonight and we should trust them!”

“Yeah, well, they won’t be able to patrol until the convocation’s over. I trust Marv and Jino just fine—it’s Rath I don’t trust!”

“You can’t go alone!” Torrant’s voice rose with exasperation, and Cwyn stepped forward.

“I’ll go,” he said quietly. “Don’t worry, cousin—I’ll watch his back.”

Torrant looked at him closely, in spite of the increasingly loud heartbeat of the hour. “Right,” he murmured, all thought. “Just don’t grow too old to quick, right Terror?”

Cwyn actually popped a dimple with his grin. “Thanks, Da,” he said dryly, but some of the terrible wisdom seemed to lift from his shoulders.

“Flatterer!” Torrant shot back with equal dryness. He looked up and smiled at the regents then, and if they saw the white lines at his mouth or the tightness in his eyes at the smile, they either pretended not to notice, or they were so used to marks of pain on his face that they really didn’t. “Are we ready to go? Do we all have our story straight?”

There were nodded assents, and Torrant turned to Yarri, a tired smile on his face, only to see her staring at his shoulder under his cloak with unhappy eyes.

“I can see it now,” she murmured, and she thrust her hand inside the left shoulder of his cloak. He winced, and she brought back her hand, looking unhappily at the blood on her palm that had seeped through the bandage. “How will you hide that?”

“I’ll wear my cloak inside—there’s no heat this time of night, it will be too cold to do anything else.” He caught her hand and kissed the shredded knuckle, and she gave him a faint smile in return.

She glanced at Aylan, preparing to make a tart remark about how at least Torrant’s cloak didn’t look so bad when she saw the distortion on his left shoulder. Her eyes widened, and then flew to Torrant’s face, but he and Aylan were exchanging pained glances of their own. Her head slowly turned and there was an unnatural silence in the anteroom as she scrutinized Aylan’s ugly, battered, scarred leather cloak. When she turned back to Torrant, even the regents could hear every puzzle piece fit back in its slot with a stony little clink.

Suddenly her hands were at Torrant’s shirt, tugging it upward, out of his breeches, and when he tried to step backwards she grabbed the collar without looking at him and jerked him in place—any movement and the shirt would have ripped, and he didn’t think Trieste had another one that would fit.

“Uhm, Yar?” he tried to keep some humor in his voice. He knew where this was going, but her anger was a catastrophic wave getting ready to demolish a beach.

She ignored him, and her hand traced the scar that slanted across his chest, and she looked at Aylan, gesturing him imperiously closer until she could trace her hand across the supple, beaten leather.

“Uhm, Yar?” Torrant repeated, still hoping to put off this argument until somewhere, anywhere, but in front of Trieste, in front of the regents, in front of Aylan, “Yarrow—you know that dream where you’re standing naked in front of a crowd of people and…”

“Shut up!” she snapped, one hand mapping the scars across his torso, his stomach, the small of his back, the other exploring for the counterpart on Aylan’s cloak. They were not identical—Torrant had incurred wounds of his own, and in the horrible suffocating silence there was the occasional pause where she found a scar that did not have a match, and then her eyes would flash to his face.

She didn’t map every scar, in the end.

In the end, she’d had enough. She planted her hand squarely in the middle of Aylan’s chest and pushed, and he took it for the dismissal it was. Her furious, devastated brown eyes found Torrant’s, and he had to look away.

Her hand left his chest and came up in a stinging slap across his cheek that brought his gaze right back down to hers.

“How. Could. You?” she ground between her teeth, and then whirled away and fled the room before he could answer.

Torrant brought his hand up to his cheek and closed his eyes tightly. After another painful moment he looked up and met the incredulous eyes of the regents, all of whom were glancing from Aylan’s cloak to his exposed chest with both wonder and horror.

Torrant cocked his jaw and shook his head, warning them away from the subject. “We still have to go,” he said with dignity, tucking his shirt back in. His look at a furious Trieste dared her to add her piece, and she backed down, although her face was flushed with anger. “Remind her that I love her,” he murmured.

“You should be so lucky!” Trieste snapped, and then she whirled in her turn, following after Yarri.

“I could talk to her,” Aylan said as Torrant’s followed the others out the door.

Torrant’s grimace was hard acres from a smile, but it was all he had. “I think that would be a very painful idea right now,” he said wryly. From the emerging bruise on his cheek, it was clear that he wasn’t talking simple emotional pain either. Aylan nodded with sad lavender eyes, and then Torrant whirled and was out the door to lead the regents waiting for him in the frosty twilight.

Myrla-Kles, Torrant’s middle child and only girl, was the spitting image of her mother—with the addition of a brilliant streak of silver in the autumn gold of her hair. She adored the Beltane song and listened to it every year with enough intensity to note the changes that happened from year to year, as her father added more moments to the chaotic time in verse.

She was Torrant’s only musical child—she’d been privately practicing the versions she’d heard on her own lute since she’d been gifted with it at her fourteenth Solstice—although her practice had grown scanter as her belly had grown larger with her first pregnancy.

Today, she heard something new that caught her attention, and she murmured, “I didn’t know they’d ever quarreled,” quietly to her cousin, Bitsy.

Bitsy shrugged and balanced her fussy baby on her shoulder and looked to her mother and father, who made the trip from Wrinkle Creek every year, especially to hear this story.

“They quarrel every year at Beltane—I would imagine the reasons are the same.”

Kessie (as her father called her) wrinkled her nose at her sharp-tongued cousin—it was untrue in the first place, and an over-simplification in the second. She had known, even when very small, that the feelings the Beltane song engendered in her mother were complex and painful. Every year she watched in amazement as her father kissed those wounds all over again and healed her mother’s heart, but she wouldn’t go into that now, not while she was listening to her beloved ballad.

Bitsy saw her cousin’s disgusted look and rolled her eyes—it was bad enough that they were surrounded by epic love stories and moon-destined lovers. Did they have to idealize a perfectly fine relationship by denying a logical quarrel?

With a sigh she left her (very) pregnant cousin (and her very best friend, in all actuality) and made a move to shift through the mess of cousins and siblings and the babies of cousins of siblings. Bitsy got closer to her mother, noting that Roes’ Moon’s usually pragmatic expression was dreamy and unfocused, her brown eyes looking backwards through time. It was the sort of look that mum always had when she was thinking about her father, even when he was right behind her, rubbing her shoulders.

“What were you doing during all this, mum?” she asked quietly. She knew that her parents had been involved, but she had never really understood how. But then, she was as practical as her mum, and sitting through the Healer’s yearly story had never been her strong suit.

“Shhhh…” her father cautioned, his mild-blue eyes on Torrant’s face with his familiar expression of comfortable worship. “Our part’s coming.”

Bitsy tried to meet her mum’s expression—the way Roes Moon smiled at

Aldam’s devotion was usually a balm to Bitsy’s cranky spirit, but she wasn’t smiling this time. With a shrug, Bitsy turned towards the Healer who birthed her and her babies, the man who had sung lullabies to her from the time she was very small.

She forgot sometimes, she realized, that this gentle, ordinary man was a hero. She was pretty sure he wanted it that way.

Part XI—Moons in Winter

Aldam

Aldam was more than surprised to see Cwyn twice in the same week.

His wife’s brother came haring through the scant inches of frosty snow barely a day after his unexpected appearance to drop off the bemused and bitter young guard.

Grand had known Fredy from the barracks, and although he was reluctant to tell anyone why he’d suddenly decided to join the Goddess folks at Moon Hold, he was more than happy to take orders. Fredy, busy setting traps and building a small, hidden stand that a person could huddle in warmly to watch the road, was happy for the help. He met young Grand’s eyes, nodded his head and shook his hand, and just like that, they had another member of the military on board.

It was none too soon.

The Goddess folk had been working steadily at making the old workers’ quarter snug, wind-proof, and livable for winter. Aldam, seeing that they had things well in hand—with lots of practice at using old building supplies and making them work a second and fourth and sixth time around—had taken advantage of the old foundation of the barn and made use of the still very sound plumbing around it to begin an entirely new building.

Aldam enjoyed carpentry, but was not so good with people; he tended to do his best work when he was uncomfortable or worried or upset.

The snug, sprawling clinic/cottage where the barn used to be was beautiful, and coming along at a surprising clip—in fact, two rooms were habitable after only two weeks, and Aldam and Roes stayed in one, using the other one as a kitchen/surgery until Aldam got the actual surgery completed.

Aldam had been worried about Torrant for a very long time.

And now that Cwyn was dashing in, frantic, gulping air, apologetic about abusing his poor horse to the point where the exhausted thing was on the verge of collapse, it appeared Aldam would have more to be worried about.

Roes took over with her usual lack of nonsense. First she gave Cwyn water, then she ordered one of the older boys to take the horse down to the river, where they kept a constant fire to warm water for washing, and to give it some tepid water and a brisk rubdown. Then she sat across from her little brother and stroked his hand like she had done when he was a child, capturing his wild eyes with her own calm brown ones, and waited until she had his attention.

“Right then, Terror,” she said gently, “now start from the top.”

The evening session had not gone in Ellyot Moon’s favor at all.

Torrant argued passionately, but Rath, fueled by just enough information to make him dangerous, had insisted that there was a pocket of Goddess’ terrorists outside of the city gates. One of the guards had survived the explosion just long enough to tell investigators that a group of men had been riding west, and Rath had made the logical (albeit erroneous) jump to Moon Hold.

Trieste’s household had been awakened only a few hours before dawn, and Aylan burst inside, calling for Cwyn to run the message. Cwyn had stumbled, still pulling on clothes, to the stables, and Aylan yanked the bag of provisions from Yarri’s hands as she’d been packing it. He slammed the connecting door to the stables in her face even as she sputtered in surprise.

Torrant was there with Cwyn’s already saddled gelding, penning desperate messages to Professor Austin with shaking hands. His face was pale and his cloak was thrown back at the shoulders, revealing a very bloody shoulder. Cwyn had a sudden intuition as to why Aylan had been so abrupt to Yarri, moments before.

Then Torrant spilled out the total of the danger, and Cwyn had other things to think about.

“There’re soldiers coming this way, just to check and see…” Cwyn sputtered now, at his sister’s table, suddenly aware of how fragile his sturdy sibling really was.

“How many?” Fredy asked. He had come in to see what this dramatic entrance had been about.

“Only about thirty…”

“Only!” Roes exclaimed, forgetting that she was supposed to be calming things down.

“Well,” Fredy said, thinking fast, “we only need to kill twenty or so…”

“What?” All of the Moons looked at him in surprise, and he grinned at them. His sons had taken to Roes right away, and when he’d been busy setting traps, Aldam had taken time out to read to them and give them tasks that made them feel welcome. Fredy was more than grateful to earn his keep.

“What Goddess gifts do we have—have you been keeping track? Does anyone have a gift that would send a few men back to Dueance, telling everybody that the company fell into the river or deserted or circled around and went to Eiran? We kill everybody else, but we give the survivors a story that will make Rath look like a fool.”

Aldam looked at Fredy curiously then, his head tilted quizzically to the side. “You’ve been thinking about this for a long time, haven’t you?”

Fredy flushed. “There’s a lot of time to plan revenge on the man who makes you wait in the cold to get bonked on the head.”

Aldam’s answering smile had been as cold as sun on an ice pond, but he had no words.

“I think we have someone like that,” Roes murmured, thinking about a quiet boy with sparkling brown eyes like her brother and a white streak in his hair like Torrant, who had a way of getting out of whatever he had been asked to do. She had thought there’d been something uncanny about the boy, and given Fredy’s request, she was pretty sure she knew what it might be.

“There’s more,” Cwyn said, into the pause. “I can’t stay—Rath sent a squad into the Old Man Hills.”

“Because sacking Triannon wasn’t enough?” spat Roes, a lifetime of loathing in her voice. She had been there that day—she’d helped Torrant give books of poetry to students as they fled, so the entirety of the library wouldn’t be lost. She’d heard the tortured roar of their beloved school as it destructed in flames behind her, burying her favorite professor in the inferno. The idea of Rath’s people any closer to her family nauseated her physically, and for a moment, she wondered if she would have to retch in the newly recovered and refurbished sink.

Roes caught her beloved looking at her with a sweet epiphany on his face just as Cwyn shook his head and spoke.

“None of the older regents believed Torrant about there being enough explosive in the city to take out that foundation. Rath knows that some of your old professors are out in the hills—he sent the squad to ‘find weaponry and punish the terrorists who attacked the peace of Clough’.” Cwyn’s tone was a perfect mimicry of Torrant’s bitter parody. Had either of them known it, they ‘did’ Rath better than the man himself.

Roes blanched, and Aldam stepped forward and put his hands on her shoulders. “Of course you need to go,” he murmured. He loved professor Austin too. “But your horse is done in, and so are you. Go to our room, and catch a sleep. Roes will have dinner ready in a couple of hours. Eat. We’ll start our preparations, and you can ride out when you’re well.”

“But…” Cwyn started to spring up, but Aldam, the eye of tranquility in the Moon home, just as Torrant had been the child of joy, simply leaned over and took the hand of the boy who had been his little brother as surely as he’d been Roes’.

“I know that you’ve been watching him sacrifice himself,” he said quietly. “I’ve seen him do it. But you may rest assured that even he knows that a well thought out ride and a rested animal is better than an exhausted panic.”

Cwyn swallowed miserably and closed his eyes, suddenly looking like the child he had been, when innocent in sleep. “Are you sure?” he asked, feeling pathetic.

Aldam stroked his hand as Roes had done. “It’s the only way we made it to Triannon alive, and with enough time to spare. I trusted him then, and you need to trust me now.”

Cwyn nodded, so obviously trying to pull his dignity around him, and Roes stood up in her no-nonsense way and pulled him to his feet. Only Aldam noticed the little wobble as her vision went unexpectedly dark. Aldam watched her as he looped an arm around Cwyn’s shoulders from the other side, and together they put their beloved Terror down for a nap. Roes was going to get up and go into the kitchen when Aldam stopped her.

“Rest,” he said implacably.

“But I need to…”

“Rest.” He smiled, to sweeten the word. Roes was usually the leader—at least in front of people. She was articulate and headstrong, and Aldam admired these things in her as he always had. But today he knew something that she either didn’t or wouldn’t, and although he wouldn’t tell her what he knew before she was ready, he would have the last word here.

“Aldam…” she dimpled at him charmingly, and refrained from telling him he was behaving absurdly.

He smiled that lovely smile again, and put some of his healer’s gift into it this time. “Rest.”

And no one was more surprised than Roes when her eyes closed and her head hit the pillow next to her little brother.

When the two of them awoke, Aldam had cooked dinner for the hold, and the rest of the relocated families were finished with Fredy’s preparations for war.

“What’s our plan?” asked a frowzy Roes as she tried to finger comb her mussed red/blonde bun into its usual sturdy efficiency. She was still sleepy enough to stumble a little, forcing Cwyn into the kitchen wall as they walked in, and instead of shoving her back, Cwyn took her elbow and steered her to the table. It was a big, tough, sanded block table, made of spare parts from the pile of scrap wood Aldam had found where the stables used to be, and it looked reassuringly like the table in the Moon home in Eiran. Roes settled herself in front of it and then shot her not-so-little brother a sharp look that he completely missed.

“Fredy has traps in place,” Aldam said, ladling stew into a wooden bowl. In his dreamings, Torrant had missed the large entourage of stock and winter stores that Aldam and Roes had brought, gifts from the women of Wrinkle Creek. They had enough beef on the hoof to last them the winter, and a fair amount of flour. To supplement those stores the children had been gathering grain to feed the chickens Aldam housed in a sturdy lean-to that shared a wall with the old worker’s quarters. Between the beef and the herbs and wild tubers that Aldam dug before the frost made the ground too hard, the stew he was serving now was hearty and good, and there would be eggs for breakfast. As a whole the Goddess folk were gratefully looking forward to their most plentiful winter in years.

“And?” Roes demanded now, and Aldam’s mild-blue eyes were patently elsewhere, even as he handed Cwyn a bowl. Roes frowned. That neutral, perverse set to his mouth was Aldam’s way of refuting things he knew his audience didn’t want to hear.

“What?” she insisted, and he continued his seemingly endless search for the perfect wooden bowl in which to dish her stew.

“Cwyn, you can ride Roes’ horse—they’re both good animals, but her gelding is bored. He’ll be happy to get out.” Ah—there it was. He pulled the other bowl out of the drawer and concentrated on getting Roes the stew from the bottom of the pot. She liked her food strongly seasoned.

“When do I ride?” Cwyn asked, stopping in mid-gulp to look at the stew appreciatively. Aldam and Roes had always been the best cooks in the house, with Yarri and Starren a close second. Although Trieste’s cooks had been proficient at dishing tasty chow, nothing tasted as wonderful as home.

“In about two hours,” Aldam said sadly. The boy looked tired, yet, and sad. Aldam still wasn’t sure what had been driving Cwyn since his mother had been ill, but it had been an even harder taskmaster the day before. At least what was driving him now was as simple as saving people he cared for. Aldam could understand this motivation. It was what set the beat of his heart.

Cwyn nodded, and, ever practical went back for another taste of stew.

“What will I be doing?” Roes asked, eyeing the stew appreciatively. She took a bite and grimaced. “A little heavy with the salt, are we?” Aldam took the bowl from her without a word and took stew from the top. He had the look of a man who was marking another item on a mental list.

“We,” Aldam said deliberately, “are going to hide under the old house in the ice storage cave with the children.”

Roes blinked. “The hell we are!”

Aldam ran a hand through his wild white-blonde hair, disarranging it so badly that his white streak of the gifted was completely lost. “The hell we aren’t,” he replied with deceptive equanimity. “We will protect the children. It’s what I’m best at, and you’re not bad at it either.”

“But Aldam—I can fight! You know that! Torrant’s been teaching us swordplay since…since….” she sputtered, not being able to form words for a time without the two of them in her life. “Dammit, beloved!” she finally snapped, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, “I want some gods-cursed blood!”

Aldam smiled, the extra kind smile that he saved only for his Roes. “Of course you do, beloved,” he said softly, dropping to his haunches in front of her. “But my baby is making you tired, and taking away your balance. She needs you to stay out of the fight for now. You can fight later.”

Roes blinked at him dumbly, and Cwyn’s mouth dropped open, stew fragments tumbling into the bowl under his chin.

“Baby? Roes, don’t you know how these things work?” Cwyn asked, wiping his chin with the back of his hand. His sister was still staring speechlessly at her husband, her mouth opening and closing without rhythm.

“The tea…” Roes said numbly. “I packed it for the trip…I thought it would only be a week or two…” Those were the last words she spoke for a while, as her mind caught up with what her body had known for weeks.

“Yes,” Aldam beamed at their little brother, content to let Roes flounder for a moment. “You may tell Bethen that we’ll name it after her.”

At the mention of his mother’s name, Cwyn blinked stinging eyes as quickly as he could. For the first time since Aylan had pounded down their door, he realized that if he was very, very lucky—and, if he forsook the glory of the fight for the hard job he’d deserted at home--he might get to see his mother for the winter. And he could tell her this.

“She’ll like that,” he said roughly, fighting the urge to put his head on the table and weep like an infant all on his own. Blessed with his sister’s pragmatism, he finished his stew instead.

All the while, Roes just stared at her husband in shock until Aldam picked her bowl up from the table and put a spoon full of stew in her mouth. She swallowed, and then cupped her own hands around his as they held the bowl. He fed her again, and she swallowed again, mindless of the tears plopping in her dinner. When she was done, he set the bowl aside and took her face in his hands.

“Don’t cry, Roes,” he said kindly, putting a Healer’s hand on her abdomen through her skirts. “You’ll be fine. I promise.”

“I’m not scared, dammit,” she sniffled, “I’m happy.” And then she proceeded to waste more time, sobbing into her beloved’s shoulder.

The Fury of Dueant’s Son

Cwyn left, thundering on the back of Roes’ sturdy, quick gelding, and Aldam and Roes took brooms and rags to the bottom of the damp ice pantry under what used to be the Moon home. Roes, who normally didn’t succumb to much of anything, confessed to a cumulative attack of the ‘oogies’ (her word) at the number of spiders, snakes, and field mice residing in the basement pit. Aldam wasn’t phased by much that was living, and so while Roes swept after him and dug the privy, he took responsibility for spider squashing, field-mice shooing and snake wrangling (at one point it was a rattlesnake which Aldam reluctantly killed with one competent strike) and the wooden-frame reinforcement. Aldam didn’t move quickly, but he moved efficiently, and the hour before sundown, when Rath’s men were due, the hiding space was ready.

The men and women whom Torrant and the other regents had smuggled out were tough minded people: they had survived twelve years in the ghettoes, and now that they tasted freedom, they were not about to let it be ripped away from them like a stolen pastry. They hid in trees with ropes and rocks, manned tripwires and tree-made catapults, and crouched in the brush holding pitchforks, hoes and sharpened wood.

In addition to the crude weapons, the makeshift army carried a strong-kicking heart muscle of resentment, bitterness, and anger to propel them. Fredy ran about the compound, naming last minute changes in who would hide where and giving instructions on how best to use the weapons they had. Roes couldn’t help feeling left out, but

Aldam’s news had shocked her, badly. For once she was willing to take her beloved’s orders.

Knowing something about children, Roes had the youngest members of the compound (oh, gods, were they letting the twelve-year old twins fight? But they weren’t her children, and she hadn’t grown up in the ghetto, so she wisely held her tongue) go gather their most precious thing and bring it into the ice cave. These children had grown up in want—their most precious thing was probably the easiest decision they’d ever made. Ragged dolls made of scraps and love, ratty blankets, worn soft and shapeless, the occasional wooden toy, smooth and shiny from little fingers and smuggled in a pocket—their mothers had known enough not to leave these things behind, Roes knew enough to give the twenty or so children something to cling to in the breathless dark, waiting for the world to fall down around their ears above ground.

They heard the pounding of hooves and the first scream from a tree above ground, and then screeching, cacophonous sounds.

Roes and Aldam had heard these sounds before—these were the sounds of Triannon. The children, who had spent much of their lives being hidden, may not have heard an out and out battle before, but they knew the sounds of violence. There were no whimpers, no moans, no restless bodies. Just the eerie, terrifying silence of children too frightened to breathe, and a total dark, broken only by the occasional gleam of too-pale skin and wide, shiny eyes.

The silence was broken by a shout directly above their heads, and Roes had time to lament that no one had been able to cover the trap door with debris, before a helmeted head thrust into the dark and an imperious sword gestured in and thrust itself around.

Roes felt the sudden urge to urinate. Then Aldam spoke up and came forward, and the urge went away, along with the urge to breathe.

“It’s just me,” he lied calmly, watching the way the man was blinking. The trap door was off to one side of an elongated oval—the opening didn’t shed any light on the hidden children so the man couldn’t see who was down there.

“What are you, some sort of baby, hiding down here in the dark?” the guard spat, and Roes heard Aldam mutter, “horse trader” under his breath, and then she thought her heart would stop in the freeze of her blood. Those words held such terror for her beloved, such awful import and…

And he was walking up the earthen stairs with only a carpenter’s hammer in his hand, and she realized he’d brought it down in their frantic cleaning to reinforce some of the older wood supports. His free hand ghosted over hers in the darkness, and then he was walking away from her, and she couldn’t even fall to her knees and weep, or his act of protection would be in vain.

That’s when she remembered whose daughter she was.

Before her next heartbeat, she’d grabbed her husband’s hand and followed him into the betraying light.

He looked at her with gentle reproof, and she returned it with a tearful glare. She was damned if she’d send him out into the frosty naked sunset with a ‘horse trader’.

When they got to the top of the stairs, both of them looked around with hard eyes, and Roes almost laughed. Whoever this guard was, he was one of the lucky ones—she saw a lot of armored, teal-and-black liveried corpses, but very few injured farmers. There were sounds of battle further off , by the road, and as Roes turned her attention back to the callow, bitter face behind the nose guard of their particular officer, she was suddenly chilled by the fact that they were the only people standing in this area of the hold.

The young guard made a grunting sound like a laugh but not quite, and suddenly Roes’ focus was all on the enemy.

“So, everybody else is out there, dying for your great Whore, what’re you two doing, pissing yourselves in a hole?” he asked, and Aldam tapped the hammer idly against his thigh. Roes looked sideways at her husband, and for a moment she saw what the guard would see— vacant, absent blue eyes, round, slack face, rounded shoulders, and no particular response to the winter air gone strange around him.

But that’s not what Roes saw. She saw a brave man, deep inside himself with thought. She saw arms made strong by honest labor, a deceptively wide chest, and a hammer.

She saw a fellow Healer, her first and only lover, and the father of her child.

The chill in her abdomen thawed, as Aldam snapped suddenly sharp eyes to the guardsman.

“We were doing the same thing everybody in the hold has been doing—we were minding our own business. What are you doing here, frightening innocent people?”

“Innocent! Look at my squad!” the man’s voice trembled, and Roes had a sudden pang for the young man—he was older than Cwyn, but not by much. Then his lip curled into a sneer, and his teeth were dingy and his eyes wrinkled in contempt, and all sympathy drained with the blood from her face. The young man advanced on her, put out a rude hand and grasped her breast.

Her very tender breast.

Roes smacked his hand and kicked his shin, snapping, “Ou-uch, DAMN-it, that HURT!” And then his hand flicked out in a practiced gesture and cracked across her cheekbone, breaking her nose, and sending her sprawling to the ground, an ugly guffaw following her down.

She hadn’t hit the ground before Aldam’s hammer hit the man on his helmet, square between the eyes, and the guard fell apart like a marionette with no joint screws. Pieces of him plopped to the ground, fingers first, forearms, shoulders, his head thuncked to the ground with an extra rattle inside the helmet, and cleanly, as though sliced, every part of his body connected by tissue or cartilage, separated and fell where it would.

Roes stared at the mound of now-bleeding body parts and fought the urge to scream, and then fought the urge to retch. Completely numb, she took the hand her beloved extended and allowed herself to be hauled to her feet, and then her hurts to be checked. When she turned so she could no longer see the carrion pieces that had once been human, she spit blood to the side and gingerly wiped her nose, and then looked into Aldam’s furious, tender blue eyes.

“Beloved…”

“Wait—I’m setting your nose,” he ordered. His fingers came alongside it with a tingling that meant he was taking her pain away with his gift and she felt a crunch of cartilage as her nose was realigned to where it belonged. Suddenly breathing became easier, and the pain faded from nauseating to irritating, and he was taking a ripped portion of his shirt to wipe the blood off , and she felt normal again.

“Aldam,” she said again, as his clean-up efforts became more cosmetic, “what did you do?”

“Remember the frog?” he asked, taking another section of shirt and pouring water on it from a flask at his side. He applied the shirt to her knees, which had been skinned on the hard ground as she’d fallen, and she nodded her head, feeling stupid.

“Yes, I remember.” They had needed to dissect frogs in school, and although Roes hadn’t gone through school with Torrant and Aldam, Aldam’s reluctance to ‘break something’ just to see how it worked was legendary. Eventually he had been persuaded to take the frog apart, but first, Professor Austin had been persuaded to find a frog that was already dead.

Aldam moved to her other knee, and she hissed as he pulled gravel from it. Around them, the hold folk were returning in twos and threes, bearing the occasional wounded member with them. Fredy got to them first, four trussed and gagged guards on a lead rope in his hands, and he and the prisoners ogled the remains of Aldam’s only kill with shocked breaths and numb eyes.

“I just thought of the frog,” Aldam was saying calmly as Fredy asked, “Aldam?” in a surprisingly thready voice.

Aldam looked up at him, his summer blue eyes as steely as the winter sky above them. “He hit Roes,” was the simple answer. “You shouldn’t hit Roes.”

Fredy and the hold folk all nodded vigorously in agreement, looking at Roes’ weary smile for reassurance. “Right, got it, no hitting Roes. Ever.”

The men on the lead rope looked at the remains one more time and then at the hold healer who had made the kill. Without a word their eyes rolled back in their heads and they passed out.

“Good,” Grand Wind said ruminatively, earning Fredy’s look of approval. “It will make it easier to give them a story for Rath.”

“They’ll wake up at night with nightmares,” Aldam reproved, and Fredy’s even-toothed smile was as carnivorous as wolves.

“Like he said: good. Now let’s get this all cleaned up before we let the children out, shall we?” And the bemused, triumphant Goddess folk began cleaning up their home, making it safe for the winter.

A Few Difficult Jobs

Cwyn had heard the story of Triannon, and Torrant and Aldam’s terrible, frantic two-day ride to get four days worth of journeying done, but he’d always been more concerned with what had happened after. The battle had always seemed the scariest, most interesting part, and the ride had been secondary—a passing inconvenience in the story of two heroes.

The six-day journey to Wrinkle Creek felt like a thousand years of heaving, exhausted horse, screaming stomach, and cold damned toes. His brain was crammed, exploding with visions of what could be happening to Roes and Aldam, and what could happen to his family if these soldiers raged unchecked. Every breath was an agony of cold, but worse than the cold, it was a crucifixion of anxiety, a terrible flashing etch on the inside of his eyes, detailing the terrible things that swords and steel could do to the bodies of the people he loved. Every moment of rest felt like a squadron of horses, thundering over his chest.

Which is why it only took him four of the six days.

Roes’ gelding--yet another foal of Courtland’s--had been a real trooper, but even the sturdy black bay was stumbling as Cwyn recognized the cedar-treed landmarks of Wrinkle Creek. By the time he found the path that led to the Healer’s home, he was on foot, leading the poor, exhausted animal through two feet of new snow.

He didn’t realize how tired he was himself until his foot slipped on an icy patch under the snow, and he went down hard on one knee. Swearing loudly enough to bring Pansy, the dark-eyed, tart-tongued girl who worked for the clinic, outside, he swore some more when his cold, shaking hands actually dropped poor Artie’s reins.

Pansy took the horse from him with brisk movements, and not a little sympathy. “Go inside—Prof Austin’ll take a look at your knee. You look awful, Terror—what’ve you been doing to yourself?”

“S…sold…ier…s…” Cwyn chattered, and Pansy, who was not stupid, and who had some idea of where Torrant, and then Aldam and his Roes had gone when they left, started calling for the Professor even as she took the horse to the small barn and Cwyn stumbled up the steps to the kitchen of the clinic.

Professor Austin’s middle years were wearing longer on him these days, and plenty of white had infiltrated his dark hair and faded out the stark contrast of his Goddess streak, but he was by no means old and slow yet. The professor had actually taught all of the Moon family who’d gone through Triannon—Torrant, Aldam, Aylan, Trieste, and Roes--although he had only ever met Cwyn in passing. But he’d heard plenty about the family recreant, and had formed certain expectations of the ‘little terror’.

The gangly, sober, frantic child sitting on Aldam’s sturdily built chair in the cozy, bare-boarded kitchen was hardly the disaster he’d been expecting, but he did bring disastrous news.

“How far behind you are they?” Austin asked after pacing a bit. Pansy came in and busied herself with tea, handing Cwyn a mug of it first and then passing an obviously treasured mug into Austin’s absent grasp.

“They should be here late tomorrow,” Cwyn replied, on a satisfying gulp of scalding tea.

“Which way do you think they’ll come?” Austin sipped at his tea, then remembered himself and thanked Pansy.

“There’s only one way, really—the main road, the one that goes past Wrinkle Creek and on to Triannon, right?”

Austin smiled, a foxy, tricksy smile at odds with his weathered, comfortable face. “Tell me, young Terror, did you have to pass over a bridge to get over the narrow section of the river?”

Cwyn blinked. “Yes, Professor.”

That uncomfortable smile widened. “Now, did the river look frozen over?”

Cwyn wasn’t the ‘Terror’ for nothing. Even his cold-numbed mind could leap that devious twist. “Yes, Professor,” he smirked.

“It’s not, you know,” Austin informed him conspiratorially. “That’s why we mark the edges of the bank with red, so the children won’t fall through that thin ice.” The Professor nodded sagely. “The river moves slowly there, with a thick, fast undercurrent.”

“That would be dangerous if the bridge was out,” Cwyn suggested guilelessly.

“It would indeed, young Terror. How are you feeling?”

Cwyn’s brown eyes twinkled mercilessly, and he smiled with pointy teeth. His knee was suddenly feeling much better, and the cold fell away.

“I’m thinking we could have that bridge ripped out and the markers removed before sunset,” he said with relish.

Pansy was dispatched to warn the townspeople that the bridge would be out for a day or two, and Cwyn and the Professor mounted two fresh horses and set off to make it truth.

King Alec of Otham paced his study and re-read Trieste’s last letter for the sixth or possibly seventh time.

Anxiously he looked to the leather divan where she usually tucked herself with her knitting when he was finishing up business for the day. That she wasn’t there, that she hadn’t been there for a month, sent a nice little splinter into his aching heart and made him want to kick something.

Dammit, he missed his wife.

And now, looking at her letter, he was worried about her as well.

Rath was a mad man. They all knew that. When Trieste had gotten Bethen’s panicked letter and started packing for Dueance, Alec had been quick to remind her of the fact. Trieste had taken his face in her hands and kissed him, soberly, and with her full heart in her gray eyes.

“Beloved,” she’d murmured, “this is family. My family has gone into this place…”

“Look, I know you care about him…” Her first lover. She still cared about her first lover. It had never bothered him before, not until that exact moment.

Her smile had been sweet and wicked…“Them, beloved…I care about them. He’s no longer a ‘he’ or a ‘him’, all mysterious and tragic, right? You know that? My two brothers have gone into danger, and my little sister is pursuing them with all the single-mindedness she’s shown her whole life. It’s my job to go help her or go bring them all home, do you understand?”

Alec ran a hand through his silvering hair, his elbow sticking far out at odds with his body. He was a very tall man, with very long limbs, and there were some gestures--the ones he only did in private--that could not be done with grace. Trieste had never felt so honored in her life as she had the day she realized that she saw these moments, these graceless, awkward moments, and nobody else, nobody on the planet, would ever know the King of Otham possessed them.

The last four years had been the happiest of her life, but she never would have known how to love, or how to make a house a home, if it hadn’t been for Torrant and his loud, lovely family. She told Alec so the evening before she left, and he had let her go. She owed them, whether they ever knew it or not, and she had a debt to repay, just by being their family. She told him it was the sweetest weight—it was as sweet, she murmured, as a baby would be, growing inside of her, made from the two of them.

“You think?” he’d asked, pleased, because he hadn’t wanted to press the issue—she’d been so young when they’d married.

“I know,” she’d assured him soberly. “But I need to go do what Torrant is doing. I need to go make sure my family will be safe, and that the world our child grows into is safe. Now, when I can, before my mind gets muddled with Goddess thinking, when I can still play the games of the gods, right?”

It was Goddess thinking that was sending her away from him, he thought dismally, but he didn’t tell her that. Everything she felt she owed the Moons, he owed them double, because the woman his beloved had grown into owed her completion to the confidence she found in their love.

But now, looking at her wistful, lonely letter, talking about the rift between two lovers who by all rights needed to be together for the sun to even rise in the morning, he couldn’t help reading all of the gods’ business in between the lines.

Curfews…Public crucifixions. A Consort’s son, dead by his own hand. Explosions. Kilns for the living. A hero who bore the wounds of too many people.

It was terrifying, all of it. And he wanted her out of it, as far out of it as they could go, exiles into the desert lands or the garden lands, deserting his own little island of sanity to Rath’s insanity, just to keep her safe.

He looked out of the window that sat behind his great granite desk, and sighed. A white lace of snow was heavy against the velvet of the night, and he didn’t have to press his face against the pane to see that the edges of the ocean were frothy with violence against obsidian waves. Otham was at peace and well stored, but this would be the last letter he would get before the seas quieted, two moon cycles after solstice, and Trieste had known it.

He paced some more, wishing for a horse, or a boat, or his wife’s willing body, or anything to take away this terrible, pressing restlessness of knowing she was in danger and being forced to sit, rocklike, while things just happened beyond the reach of the King of Otham.

Reflexively he looked at the corner where his wife should be sitting one more time. When she still wasn’t there, he let out a cry of rage that echoed through the empty private rooms of the palace, and turned and kicked his desk so savagely his toe would be bruised for a week. Fruitlessly, he pounded his hand on the polished surface of the desk, screaming again and again, until his steward came barreling through the door, awakened by the inarticulate and terrible sounds coming from his beloved king.

“Auuuurrgghhh!” Alec cried with one last pound and then whirled around, bellowing his steward’s name. “Crean! Crea… oh. There you are.”

Crean was a spry, thirty-ish, bald man with extreme and arrogant efficiency in all things. He skidded to a halt inside the door and bowed at the waist. “My lord?”

“Crean, I need you to make a list. What things do we need, what preparations do we have to make, to take half our army out of Otham in three months time?”

Crean gaped. “Sir?”

Alec wiped an unwieldy arm across his cheeks, hardly noticing that he was sniffling in a decidedly un-royal way. “Do it, Crean. We leave as soon as the seas are calm, do you hear me?”

Crean nodded, stunned. “Absolutely, sir.”

And with that Alec turned towards the taunting, beckoning blackness, wondering if he could hear Trieste call his name across the waves.

Cwyn and Professor Austin watched impassively from the far side of the river as Rath’s small contingent of soldiers heard the first ominous crack of the ice.

The plan had been geometric in its precise execution and Cwyn was mildly surprised. He hadn’t realized that sometimes, plans actually worked, and as he watched the surprise turn to dismay, and the dismay turn to terror on the faces of the doomed guards, he thought that maybe he wouldn’t write off the exercise of planning altogether.

They had eliminated the bridge the night before. That morning, they had both shown up on horseback and waited, walking their horses to keep them from chilling too badly, until they heard the clink and clop of soldiers, and then they had minced to the very edge of the deceptive and thin ice at the edge of what was really a deep, wide section of river.

The moment the soldiers appeared over the rise to the river, Cwyn and the Professor had jingled their tack and run away.

By the time the soldiers heard that first crack of ice and realized exactly where they were, the entire contingent of forty or so were panicky, breathing dead men.

The river was deep, and the current was strong, and in a terrible explosion of blade-jagged ice and squealing horses, the contingent went down in a floundering, screaming, flailing mass. The minute that black and teal liveried armor hit the water, the men were dragged to the bottom and shoved along with the current. Many of the horses snapped their forelegs with the first break of the ice.

When it was all over, a few of the horses straggled to shore, blowing hard, and Cwyn moved forward to collect them. Although it was probably dangerous should a follow-up contingent be sent, Austin didn’t stop him…Neither one of them uttered a word since they’d watched Wrinkle Creek swallow up forty men and thirty-three horses under her white-crusted black depths…Words just seemed too awful.

But the silence began to strangle them as they cantered back to the surgery, and finally Professor Austin spoke up.

“Well, you’ve done your good deed for the year, young Terror— where to next?”

Cwyn opened his mouth and closed it again, because the first thing that would have popped out of it was not what he should have been planning.

If he had been Torrant, he would have been planning to see if he could make it back to Clough to help Torrant and Aylan, or, if the snows would be too deep, he could stay here, in Wrinkle Creek and watch for more soldiers. Bleakly, he looked behind his shoulder and over the rump of the jouncing horse, out at the narrow gorge of black water, seeing that the skin of ice was trying to reassert itself after all of the hullabaloo was over.

“Where do you think they’ll end up?” he asked remotely.

Austin ‘hmmd’ a little, thoughtfully. “Well, the current is pretty strong. They should be out past Wrinkle Creek in an hour. Then the river widens, but it’s still at least five feet deep—they’ll either end up stuck on the bottom until there’s not much left, or they’ll get dragged out to sea by Eiran.”

“Eiran?” Cwyn’s voice squeaked, and Austin looked at him kindly. He didn’t have much experience with murder, but he had worlds of experience with unhappy adolescent boys.

“You could be there in four days. It won’t snow again for five.”

“Oi?” Cwyn’s merry-dark eyes were suddenly bright and shiny.

“Oi,” repeated the professor. “Are you up for the trip, young Terror?”

Was he?

Stanny grunted and swung his pick again. The snows above Hammer Pass must be getting deep, he thought grimly, because the ground was getting harder, even this far down in the cave tunnel, frozen into the jagged granite of the mountain.

He’d been hewing through the rock-hearted core of one of Torrant’s greatest foes for three years. He knew its moods, he knew its seasons, and right now, he knew that the beast was almost done fighting back.

But winter was going to stop the battle in its tracks—it always did.

Torrant himself had given Stanny the idea to cut a path under the mountain in order to evacuate the Goddess folk from Clough. It had started innocently enough, twelve years before, when Torrant had given Stanny the map he’d made while sitting on a cave floor and channeling his gift through a battered piece of cloth.

Stanny had always loved maps.

Eiran was his home, and he’d always loved it, but he’d also dreamed of ‘beyond’. Beyond the sea was Otham, but what was beyond that? Beyond Clough were the Jeweled Lands and the Desert Lands and the Garden Lands—what was there? What was ‘beyond’?

Stanny had spent Torrant and Yarri’s entire first winter with the Moons staring at that map and wondering what it was like beyond Eiran, up on the mountain. (Since he’d been laid up with a broken leg for part of it, there had been precious else to do!) And then he saw all of the pits marked on the map, and thought about the volcanic soil on the Clough side of the Hammer and the Anvil, and instead of wondering what things were like ‘beyond’ he started wondering what things were like ‘under’.

When he’d first started helping his Da deliver to the ghettoes in Dueance, all he could think of was getting the people out. He’d grown up looking at the ocean, with the promise of ‘beyond’. The people he saw were locked in the tiny rotting brickyard space of the ghettoes, and they were denied ‘beyond’.

It seemed like such a simple solution.

But it had taken three years. Three years of sneaking with a small group of trusted workers, three years of not telling anyone but his father where he was going, not even Evya until just recently, not even his mother. If the heart of the Hammer hadn’t been rotten with pockets left by the cooling lava of the last eruption, it would have taken them much longer. As it was, none of them knew when their picks would resound against what looked to be a solid rock wall, and then echo and plink. It was a good sound—they all knew that sound. It was the sound of instant headway.

It was also the sound of instant danger, and one cave-in had come much too close to making sure the obsidian/granite blackness in the core of the mountain had been the last thing they’d ever seen. The minute they heard that sound, support beams were rushed in from their storage places in the other caverns, and wherever they were working became suddenly that much more secure.

They used the timber from the mountain, and sold the soil and the minerals to the villagers. It was the perfect, self-perpetuating enterprise, and the whole venture might just allow Torrant to leave Clough before Rath found a way to kill him.

If the breathless, freezing black heart of the mountain didn’t kill Stanny first.

But in spite of the dangers, of the cold that seeped into his fingers and his joints even in the summer, in spite of the weight of the mountain, threatening to crush the space above his head, Stanny found that he didn’t hate the Hammer, nor did he fear the omnipresent, pressing dark, or the smell of earth. He didn’t dream of cave-ins the way some of the men did, the ones who didn’t last long on the detail. In an odd way, he’d discovered that this place, this limited, womblike network of caves, was really the ‘beyond’ he’d always imagined.

Because no one but him had ever imagined it at all.

With a rippling of heavy muscles, a legacy of his mother’s broad build, and a heave, the edge of the pick rooted through the cold granite, and there was a sudden, welcome echoing-plink of a sound.

Stanny gave a shout and the other men started dragging in the timber supports.

They were so close, and they just found another cave. Solstice may have come early this year.

The Hardest Job of All

Starren sat quietly at her mother’s side, minding her own knitting as Bethen minded hers. Evya sang sweetly from the kitchen as she washed the dishes, her voice easily the best in the family’s, aside from Torrant’s. The song was sad—as it often was when Stanny was off on one of his mysterious bits of business—but there was an underlying contentment in it. Evya was happy in their home, and now that she and Stanny had stopped ripping the ocean with their storms, Starren and her parents were happy to have her there.

She had certainly served them all well in the last month, helping with the cooking and the laundry and the general clean up. Bethen had been more than grateful, remarking often that the house had never been so clean. Of course that had always been a bittersweet compliment, because truth to tell, it had never been so empty, either.

Starry looked up to where her father sat at the kitchen table, doing accounts. He used to do them in his study, but Starren had the feeling that he’d moved them out to the kitchen table for the same reason she had started knitting by her mother’s side, or that Stanny and Evya had started sleeping in the downstairs loft instead of their flat above the warehouse.

“You look upset, Lane,” Bethen said from her chair, her busy fingers one of the few reminders of her earlier vitality. “Don’t tell me nobody’s buying dry goods this winter.”

Lane’s pause told Starren that he was debating whether or not to share the source of his frustration with his wife. Time had been, when anything at all was food for discussion, but he had been delicate lately about giving Bethen bad news…Starren looked up curiously, just in time to watch Lane’s habit of confiding in his best friend win out.

“That priest got a letter last week, calling him in. It was Rath’s personal hand, this time, something about “Needing all hands in the city to minister to the city…”

Bethen gave a short laugh. “Meaning, they need help controlling the Goddess quarters—I think that means Torrant’s winning!”

Lane paused, pleasantly surprised. “Why yes—you must be right! Go Torrant!” He shook his head then, back to his original point. “But what about the summons?”

Bethen’s hands briefly massaged her yarn. It was a scrumptious peach color, almost the exact shade of Starren’s hair when she was little. It was, she’d told Starren, a baby shawl for Starren’s and Aylan’s children, when the time came. She had a lovely, heart-piercing blue chosen as well, for a boy’s blanket, the exact color of Aylan’s eyes.

“Ignore it,” she said now, thoughtfully. “Simply ignore it.”

“But…”

Bethen’s grin was impish and sweet, and for a heartbeat her age and her illness washed away, and she was as gleeful as a girl Starren’s age.

“It’s perfect—as far as anyone in Clough knows, the snows are too deep to reply anyway. By the time they’ll expect the sodder, odds are good that the state of Clough will be entirely different.” Outside the wind whipped the window panes and the snow lit up the frame of darkness outside. The storm had been coming up from the southwest and threatening for a week. If Triannon had still stood, the sky’s fury would have kept anyone from coming up that way. It was more than wild enough to keep any ‘letter of state’ from being delivered, very possibly for two or three months.

Lane blinked, and his grin was relaxed. “You’re right, Bethie—it really is simple, thanks!”

“Well, beloved, if that’s all that had you worried, would you care to sit down and read to us?” Bethen asked with a little flirt, and Lane was on the verge of telling her he had more paperwork to do, Starren could see it. Instead he stood and straightened his papers and his ledger, marking his place for later, and then moved to the divan to pick up the adventure book they’d been reading since Cwyn and Yarri had left. It had been Bethen’s choice, and it had also been, if Starren remembered, one of Torrant’s favorites when he’d stayed at home.

Evya came in as Lane was reading and she pulled out her work basket as well, piecing diligently on the wedding quilt she had planned as a gift for Stanny during their Beltane handfast. Their father’s reading was interrupted as the women compared projects.

“I need to think of something to make for Cwyn,” Bethen sighed. “I’ve made something for everybody else, but that child…”

For a moment, she stared out past the kitchen and into the blackened night. Yarri’s last letter (which had come with a note from Aylan that had been read ragged) told them that Cwyn would probably be wintering at Wrinkle Creek since the odds weren’t great that he’d beat the snows and get back to Clough. Although Bethen hadn’t been expecting him to make it at all, the news that he was so close and yet not there seemed to make her restless and uncomfortable.

That boy’s needed looking after since the day he was born, Littlest, Bethen had ruminated just that evening. You, darling—you were always too easy to please. When night came, you’d nestle in with anyone, Torrant, Stanny, Roes, and that doesn’t even count Aylan, right?—and it wasn’t fair, because I wanted to hold you too. But Cwyn—he’d take me or Torrant or nobody, not even your father, and you know he worships Lane! But mostly me. And ever since, if I haven’t been there, it’s like he’s lost his keel or his star or his sweet damned mind. It would be nice, this last…this one winter, to have him close. It would be good to know he won’t be in trouble, just for now.

“The pattern will come to you, mama,” Starren murmured now. “It always does, don’t rush it.” Bethen smiled and patted her daughter’s knee, and then they all quieted down and listened to Lane resume the story. Starren, who had always been somewhat of a tranquil child when she hadn’t been tangling with her irrepressible brother, sat back and reveled in the peace for a moment, until her mother’s gentle snoring broke the silence.

Starren’s face, had she known it, aged dramatically for a moment, the angles of her cheekbones becoming sharper, grooves of anger working their way next to her mouth. A year ago, her mother’s evening wouldn’t have been over yet. There would have been clothes to mend and a room to straighten and plans to make with Lane or Stanny or

Roes, if she’d been present. There would have been arguments about the town council, and someone invariably would have pricked Bethen’s unexpectedly passionate temper. A year ago, Bethen would have been awake for two more hours, filling the house with her heart.

On this miserable winter’s night, she was dozing over her knitting, one of four projects she had yet to finish in her project queue. It was going too quickly.

“What are you doing?” Evya asked quietly, and Starren glared at her sister-by-handfast over her shoulder as she slipped Bethen’s knitting needles from her nerveless fingers.

Without answering, Starren marked the pattern, figuring there were four rows from the last repeat, and then slid the needles, connected by their long, smooth leather cord, from the stitches.

“Wha!!!” Evya repeated, but Starren shushed her with a glare, and, unmindful of her father’s surprised look, ripped out the last four rows and slid the needles back in, making it look as though her mother had finished in exactly the same place, only one repeat back.

Carefully, she wound the yarn back into the ball, and put the project back into her mother’s still hands.

“Starren,” Lane murmured pleasantly, “can we speak to you in the kitchen please?”

Starren’s eyes narrowed. Her mother would know that look, and her father knew it too. It was her stubborn look. It didn’t happen often, but when it did she meant business. It wasn’t as though this were the first time she’d done this.

When they’d gathered in the kitchen, Evya stood, arms crossed, her look of outrage unmistakable. If anyone had tried to sabotage her project, she would have peeled the skin from his toes and worked her way up.

Lane, however, knew that his usually tranquil, serene Starry wouldn’t have done it without reason. He simply leaned back against the table, crossed his arms, and smiled slightly until his daughter, his beautiful, long-limbed, easy-moving daughter, began to shift uncomfortably in her house-shoes, playing with the end of her sunset-colored braid as she did so.

“She’s almost done,” Starren muttered resentfully.

“So?” Lane asked, non-plussed.

“So!” Starren couldn’t believe that her father, her handsome, smiling father, could be so obtuse. “So—she’s only got four projects to go after that one! She’s finished wedding shawls for all of us girls—you included Evya—and two baby-blankets a piece. She’s only got me and Roes left, and some sort of gift for Cwyn she hasn’t decided on yet, and that’s it! She’s done! Her project queue’s finished!”

“Oh gods!” Evya blanched, in spite of the fact that she’d been warmed to her toes to know that Bethen had planned a gift for her.

Even a good man doesn’t understand the sacredness of a woman’s project queue. Lane looked at his daughter and his son’s wife blankly, until Starry, in a rare display of temper, stomped her foot, her fists pounding uselessly at her side, as she hissed at them for the sake of not waking her mother. “Don’t you understand? That’s it—these are the last things in her queue forever! Her whole family has gone, Da, and it’s not fair! I know they all have their reasons, and their reasons are all good, but I’m tired of good! She’s raised four children and fostered four more, and dammit, Da, she deserves more than just the three of us! That queue of projects…that’s all she’s got! When that’s done…” Starren stopped and dashed her hands against her cheeks, her voice finally breaking.

“When that’s done,” she murmured, mindful that her father was hauling her up against his chest and she was crying and crying into it and his warmth and his familiar, safe smell of dust and books and sweat, and that it still wouldn’t be better, not even when she was done crying, “when that’s done, Da, she won’t have any reason to stay.”

“Ah, gods, Starren,” Lane murmured, and then he reached out a hand and grabbed a tearful Evya by the front of the shirt and hauled her into the hug as well. There was nothing to say, not a thing that wasn’t the truth, and all they had was each other, the small remnants of his full family, clinging to their core in the heart of his home.

None of them were expecting the door to explode open, and a figure swathed in snow to stumble in, cursing and slamming the door behind him.

“Triane’s purple ti…”

“Cwyn Moon, don’t you finish that sentence!” Starren commanded from her father’s arms. Breaking free from Lane’s surprised, slack embrace she rushed to her brother, and, heedless of the snow or his surprise, or the fact that he shouldn’t be there at all, she jumped on him, sending him back against the wall as she alternately tried to hug him through layers of snow-crusted clothing and beat on his chest in mock-irritation.

“You horrible Terror!” she squealed, tugging on his coat sleeve so she could hang it up in the mudroom. “What in the name of the star’s dark are you doing here on such a night?”

Cwyn looked up at his sister and his father. Now that half his clothing had plopped to the floor in a puddle of melt, leather, and wool, his face looked leaner and his eyes looked sadder, and on the whole he was not the same Terror who had ripped out of Eiran champing at the bit to be a hero.

“I wanted to see all of you,” he said humbly, “and I really wanted to see Mum.”

“Cwyn?” came Bethen’s voice from the living room.

“Don’t get up, Mum!” Cwyn hollered, shedding his last outer layer. “I’ll be there in a moment!”

For once, there wasn’t a single scolding word as Lane, Starren, and Evya picked up his outer clothes and took them to hang in the mudroom and dry. Instead, they all listened, with their hearts in their mouths, as Bethen’s most worrisome child stumbled into the sitting room, sank to his knees, and his dropped head into his mother’s lap.

Song for a Winter’s Night

Trieste still had the other regents to dinner, but although Aylan showed up occasionally, there was a huge, heaving, yawing, dark gap at the table.

For three weeks Yarri had been pointedly ignoring that gap, and the regents-- sensitive that they were responsible for escorting Yarrow Moon outside of the townhouse and for relating all things Yarri inside of the townhouse-- tactfully ignored the gap for her.

And for Torrant.

He wasn’t obvious—ever. He would ask them how dinner was, whether Trieste had anything to report, if the play the night before had been as boring and as pedantic as the legal plays were.

They were the ones who brought up Yarri, the color of her gown, if she had said anything funny or thoughtful, or if she had any news gleaned from her social rounds during the day.

She and Trieste had been planting quite a garden of Goddess supporters, just by teaching the women in their circle to knit. Torrant had been grateful, and had cordially conveyed his gratitude through Aerk or Keon or Marv or Jino, and even through Eljean who took his turn with the others on escort duty.

The hunger in his eyes for news of Yarri was bitter, slicing, and painful.

He and Aylan still went out on the hunt, and there had been some near misses. Aylan started leaving his cloak at the door when he’d entered Trieste’s. Yarri caught him once, with a fresh network of cuts on the disfigured leather, and had run out of the room with a pursed mouth and bright eyes.

She hadn’t joined them for dinner that night, and when the subject came up, Aylan barked something harsh and mean, and the subject was closed.

Every day, Trieste sent a message through Suse, asking for the honor of Ellyot Moon’s presence at her table.

Every day, Torrant replied, Should my lady Yarrow request my presence, I would gladly come.

Solstice was coming, the new year, the day of giving gifts to sustain them through the darkness of winter, and there was something awful about the two of them not speaking before Solstice.

Torrant had fought for—and won-- the right to celebrate the Solstice holiday without being accused of treason for not being at the ‘patriotic dinners’ that had taken place of the worship of the gods. The irony that he apparently wouldn’t be spending this hard-won Solstice with the person he’d fought for the most was strangling.

Tw o days before Solstice, Marv and Jino were out doing the night patrol and dinner at Trieste’s was unusually static. Keon was trying too hard to tell the story of Torrant’s glorious victory on the floor. He mentioned the flashing blue eyes for the fourth time, and Yarri stood up abruptly, overturning her chair with an obscenely loud bang. Her cheeks were blotchy red and for a moment her rushed breathing was the only sound in the suddenly silent room.

“Just tell me…” she started, and looked away. Unfortunately she looked to her left, and caught Aylan’s wary, level look. Her breath dragged into her lungs with a little moan, and she pinched the bridge of her nose, hard, as though trying to squeeze her emotions back into a gift-wrapped box.

“Just tell me,” she said more softly, finally meeting Aylan’s eyes miserably. “Tell me that he plans to live. Just tell me that he plans to live through this. It’s all I want to know.”

Aylan’s mouth quirked, just a little, a tiny smile so close to Torrant’s same expression that for a moment Yarri’s heart leapt. “Of course he does, Yarrow Root,” Aylan murmured gently. “He’s never had plans of doing anything else.”

That night, Eljean slipped out hours before Aerk and Keon, and Aylan overtook him on the way to the regents’ flats.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked harshly, and Eljean avoided the other man’s eyes but kept his determined stride.

“Someone’s got to do something,” Eljean muttered, and Aylan’s laugh wasn’t pretty.

“You, Eljean? Giving romantic advice? Really?”

Eljean’s flush actually steamed the frosty air. “Really,” he returned with dignity. “If anyone can analyze a terrible mistake, wouldn’t I be the one?”

“And what mistake is ‘Ellyot’ making?” Aylan asked, his sarcasm undimmed.

“The same mistake I made,” Eljean answered miserably. “Neither of us had enough faith in Torrant.”

Aylan’s sigh plumed the air. “You’ll want to go in the back way,” he said after a few more squelching steps through the slush.

“Really? Why?”

“It’s bloody hot in the lower rooms when there’s a fire in the grate. He’s been going without his shirt lately.”

Eljean looked quickly at Aylan to see if he was being mocked, but saw nothing but sly appreciation on the other man’s face.

“The back way then?” Eljean asked with enthusiasm.

“Oh absolutely!” came the cheerful reply.

Torrant heard them, of course, but he assumed it was Aylan being uncharacteristically clumsy and didn’t bother with a shirt. He was just sitting on a stool in the front room, playing the lute to himself and making notations on the parchment in front of him. He didn’t look up until he heard the second set of footsteps over his threshold, and then he was too surprised to worry about clothes.

Eljean wasn’t. With a slam of his heart in his ribs, he took in Torrant’s pale, glistening skin in the firelight and realized that the carefully stolen hours he’d spent in Zhane’s arms hadn’t diminished his longing one bit. The painful, yearning lump in his throat was hard to breathe through, so he was content to let Aylan speak first.

“What in the hell?” Torrant began, putting his lute to the side.

“That’s what we came to ask you,” Aylan replied, pulling a canvas-covered paper packet out of his cloak and tossing it blithely.

Torrant fielded the packet and opened it carefully, smiling at the meat and potatoes inside…Aylan rummaged in the cupboards for a moment and returned with a fork and a bowl for the food, and then perched on the counter with an expression that said clearly that he planned to make sure Torrant ate every last bite.

“I’ s’ee all ‘ight?” Torrant asked from between healthy bites. He was glaring at Aylan, though, a thing that told Eljean that if it weren’t for their presence, odds were good he wouldn’t have thought to eat. It was impossible for him to look leaner without looking positively gaunt, and for the first time Eljean wondered at the toll keeping him healthy had exacted on Aylan.

“No, she’s not all right!” Eljean answered for him. “None of us are all right—don’t you see? All of that nonsense about moon-destined, and the two of you make it true! If you’re not touching, the moons are ready to be cast from the skies.”

Torrant swallowed his bite hard, staring at Eljean in surprise. “Romantic advice, Eljean? Really?”

In response, Eljean kicked the couch and grunted, and Aylan leaned back on the counter and laughed. Torrant started to wrap up his packet of food, and Aylan abruptly stopped laughing.

“You never hold a grudge this long, mate—I don’t understand why you haven’t snuck into her room and kissed her until she forgave you. And don’t put that food away. Eat it, or I’m going right back to Trieste’s and telling them both that you look like the muck from a stable. If you think things are ugly now, wait until they descend upon you with soup!”

Torrant took another bite and chewed with thoughtful slowness. Aylan crossed arms and raised his eyebrows—he could wait all night.

“I’m not holding a grudge, you know,” Torrant said at last, after another swallow.

“Then what?” Eljean asked. His foot hurt and he huffed to the front of the divan and sat down at the far end—far away from the glistening, pale, scarred and lovely skin, and those all-too discerning hazel eyes.

Torrant shrugged, looking into the fire. “She’s right. She’s right to be angry. I’m hers—I’ve always been hers, and…well, I’ve risked myself, and she doesn’t understand why.”

“So why don’t you just apologize and get it over with?” Eljean demanded. “I mean, really—after what I did to you, and you forgave me. Why wouldn’t she forgive you?”

Torrant looked sideways at Eljean, and laughed faintly. Then he looked up and met Aylan’s eyes, and Aylan flushed down to the opening of his shirt, under that crisp blond hair.

“I can’t apologize because I’m not sorry,” Torrant said lowly. “I don’t regret it, not for a minute. Anything that lets Aylan sit here, living and breathing, and nagging me to eat—I can’t be sorry for that, even if it hurts her. I’d rather hurt my lover than sacrifice my brother; it’s that simple. I’m just…” he couldn’t finish the sentence, but Aylan could.

“You’re afraid she wouldn’t understand,” he said softly, and Torrant’s miserable eyes met his, and although there was no romance in it, no attraction, not even a hint of the sex that must have passed between them, the look was so intimate that Eljean had to look away.

“I can’t believe you’re afraid of anything,” Eljean muttered, staring at a spot on the once pristine carpet beneath his feet.

“Hurting Yarri is a close second on my list,” Torrant said dryly, the charged moment between him and Aylan apparently over.

“What’s first?” Eljean asked tactlessly.

“Having someone else die for me,” came the immediate reply, and Eljean shook his head.

“I knew that one,” he said, his tone dripping with self-disgust, and Aylan actually laughed, no extra bitterness added.

“She just wants to know you plan to live, that’s all, brother,” he said when he was done laughing, and Torrant widened his eyes, a small smile flirting with the corners of his mouth.

“Oh—well that’s an easy enough question to answer her, you think?”

He looked absolutely shy as he said it, and Eljean’s heart suddenly pounded with affection for this man. Dammit, he’d thought he was done with this!

“Absolutely,” Aylan grinned shamelessly, enjoying Torrant’s discomfiture very much. “I say you go answer it immediately!”

“Tomorrow night, after rounds,” Torrant answered, almost to himself.

“Why not tonight?” Eljean demanded, and Torrant flushed.

“Because the next day is Solstice—and a rest day.” He couldn’t meet either of their eyes. “I…I would like a little time to, well…to make up, if she’ll let me. Right?”

Aylan could barely contain his amusement. “That shows a sound judgment, don’t you think, Eljean?”

“Yes,” Eljean strangled, suddenly tortured by images of what sort of ‘making up’ the two of them would do. Oh, he had thought he could be so adult about this! Abruptly he stood up. “Yes—I think that would be perfect,” he murmured, hoping that he was telling the truth. “Now, if you will excuse me, this little boy must go to bed!”

Torrant rose to see him out, a bemused smile on his face. “Thank you,” he said soberly. “It was nice of you to come by. Will you be at Solstice, for dinner?”

Eljean stopped his rush out the door to think about it. He’d planned on being at Trieste’s, and then sneaking back to the ghettoes to see Zhane. “For part of the time, yes,” he replied, doing his own flush.

Torrant smiled encouragingly. “Good—if she doesn’t kick me out of her bed forever, we can spend Solstice together.”

“Nobody in their right mind would kick you out their bed forever, Ellyot,” Eljean blurted, and then wished he could bite his tongue off and choke on it. It didn’t matter. Torrant heard the name—the name Eljean had fallen for in the first place—and his smile remained cordial and understanding. But nothing more.

“See you tomorrow on the floor, right?”

“Right,” and with that Eljean gave a little bow and fled the room.

The weather turned from cold to freezing the next night—not even the guards were up to doing much but huddling around bonfires on the corners of the streets and drinking from hip-flasks when their captains were elsewhere.

Torrant and Aylan took a quick look around, making sure that nobody was out in the cold or dying for lack of a blanket or firewood, and then ran back to Torrant’s flat for his little packet of Solstice gifts— most of them handmade. By the time they returned, all of Trieste’s household was in bed as they crept in through the stable entrance by the servant’s quarters.

Torrant followed Aylan down the hallway until Aylan turned around and rolled his eyes. “The guest bedroom is down this way, you dumb wank—Yarri’s room is up the stairs and to the immediate left.”

Torrant blinked, and then flushed. “I…you know, maybe I should just take the other guest bed,” he whispered, and Aylan smacked him upside the head.

“If you’re going to sleep in my room tonight, it’s going to be in my bed,” he hissed. “If you’re going to make up with the person you’re supposed to be with, there’s no reason it shouldn’t be tonight.” With firm hands, he turned Torrant around and gave him a little shove.

“Triane’s Son, my sainted arse,” he grumbled, shooing Torrant down the hallway. “More like Triane’s little tiny mewling infant fouling his nappies with his goose-hearted cowardice…”

Torrant looked over his shoulder at his friend and stuck out his tongue, and then soft-footed his way up the stairs to Yarri’s bedroom.

The next day he would see that, like the rest of the house, the walls were painted white, and there was a lovely, understated rug over fine hardwood floors. He would see the white billowy curtains and the white bed frame, as well as the several brightly colored afghans and quilts Yarri brought in to break up all of that unrelenting pale good taste.

Tonight, he only saw Yarri.

He used to watch her sleep when she was an infant. In fact, he had a clear memory of one sunny morning when her mother had propped her up on some pillows in a beam of sun coming in through the living room window. She’d been too young to even smile, but she had turned her wrinkled, alien face towards the window, and stretched out her little spider fingers and monkey arms, and had fallen asleep like that—arms outstretched, reaching for the sun.

Granted, they hadn’t done much sleeping, but during their two nights together, when they’d slept, her arms had done same reaching thing, but towards himself, stretching or folding, or twisting, but always reaching to hold him, to touch him, as though he were her sunshine during the long, cold night.

This night, she had her face turned towards Triane’s light coming in through the window, and her hands tucked against her chest, protecting her heart. Her eyelashes were matted and clumped, as though she had cried for a very long time as she’d fallen asleep.

He was going to venture near and put his palm on her cheek, when she awakened abruptly, and she was staring at him in the dark, with reddened, shiny eyes.

“Beloved?” Her voice was hoarse still, and he wondered how late she had waited for him, hoping he would show.

“Always,” he murmured, coming forward to touch her cheek like he’d planned. She captured his hand there, and closed her eyes.

“You do mean to live, don’t you?” she asked softly, and he knelt near the bed in a crinkle of leather and a slight jangle of his sword and the heavy belt at his hips. He placed his face close enough to hers so they could feel each other’s breath, and made sure her eyes were locked on his.

“Don’t ever doubt it,” he murmured.

“I’m so scared for you, all of the time,” she confessed, and he was moved, terribly moved, because he had been certain that nothing scared her, ever.

“Don’t be scared for me now.” His thumb brushed her cheekbone, trailed down, found her pouty lower lip. His breath caught when it curved under his touch.

“Why’d you wait so long?” she asked, and he pulled back a little.

“Because I can’t tell you I’m sorry.”

She pushed up on an elbow and reached out to him, cupping his stubble-roughened chin in her palm. “I’m sorry,” she said instead. “I’m sorry—I should trust that you mean to live. I should know you wouldn’t sacrifice your brother’s life to make your lover happy. The things I love about you I’ve known all my life. I shouldn’t forget them now.”

“How should you remember?” he asked, leaning into her touch as she’d leaned into his. “Two nights together—how does that make a girl sure of a lover?”

Yarri sat up in bed and moved her hands to his sword belt, and suddenly his clinking noises got louder, and then were punctuated by a big thump as the whole works fell to the ground.

“Let’s make it three,” she said then, and stood up and worked the clasp of the cloak at his throat with urgent fingers…“Let’s make it three nights, and then four, and then we’ll lose count, and then I’ll remember for…”

And then he captured her mouth in his, and the word ‘forever’ was lost in the now, as they touched and touched and touched.

Torrant awoke as a blue and frosty dawn blinked through the window, and burrowed his face a little deeper into Yarri’s hair. Her body, all nude skin, softness, slickness, and warmth, was pressed backwards to his front, and he adjusted his arm so that his fingers lazily stroked her abdomen.

He wanted to freeze this moment in his heart, a lovely tropical fish in the depths of a frozen lake, or a seared etching on the page of his mind. He wanted this moment forever so he could take it out and look at it from every angle, see the texture of her skin under his hand, feel the perfect dim light illuminating the curve of her neck, the glorious rusty-wood color of her hair, the mysterious shadow behind her shoulder blade, and taste the warm, purring contentment in his stomach. His soul was overwhelmed by the harmony of bells.

This moment was the reason for Triane to hang in the sky.

Then he felt it, under the flesh cupped in his palm, a tingling, a magic, a sweetness that made his heart flush and his skin chill with amazement and wonder.

He had been a midwife since his mother had first handed him newborn baby- Yarri and sat him in the corner. He had delivered many babies since, and cared for countless women with that magic flourishing, growing gravid and fecund in the heart of their flesh. He could tell, from the moment the magic first tingled, if the life inside the glittering buzz-cloud was male, female, or not meant to be.

This cold solstice morning, in the heart of his enemy’s land, he felt his beloved conceive.

He literally stopped breathing for a moment, caught up in the wonder of it, and when he did breathe, it was the harsh, ripping breath of a man coming up from an icy plunge into shock.

Yarri murmured, snuggled backwards into his arms, and he buried his face into her hair, trying to squeeze back the tears that were sliding into his pillow.

Of course, he thought bitterly…Of course. Yarri would do this.

Yarri, who was more Goddess thinking than gods’. Honor wouldn’t matter, and all of her compassion would be aimed at the source of her joy.

He wasn’t sure whether to laugh bitterly or joyfully, and in the end, never did decide. He simply prayed to all the gods at once, weeping into his beloved’s hair, as he felt the division of cells, the rushing of blood, the rearrangement of matter in the universe that meant his beloved would live on in their commingled flesh.

They were having sons.

Ellyot’s younger twin looked at his father curiously. He was not a curious person, and had always taken the yearly Goddess story at face value. He had never, until this version of it, put together the year of his birth with the year his father and mother had spent in Clough.

His companion (a pretty young man today, who smelled spicy, like blackberry bushes, and had shown signs of wanting to become a part of the family but who made Eljean feel old) tugged on his hand and looked carefully into his face.

“That was you?” the boy asked, and Eljean nodded. “Your father just called you a miracle!”

Eljean smiled, a complete, incorruptible smile, the kind that had brought girls and boys falling into his bed since he was first old enough to wild. (In fact, since he was a little younger, if the truth be known.) He looked at his father in all affection, and wrapped his arm around his young companion, suddenly infused by the magic of the song as he had never been before.

“He’s always told us that,” he murmured. “All of his children are the children of joy.”

The young man grimaced, the remnants of an unhappy childhood in his sour expression. “We were always told we were the children of someone else.”

With a gentle laugh and a surge of passion and affection for his companion, Eljean wrapped his arm firmly around the young man’s shoulders and pulled him against his chest, leaning down to nuzzle his ear. “Listen then, mate—we’ll learn about miracles, right?”

“Right,” the young man said dreamily. “Absolutely…”

Eljean caught his mother watching him affectionately, hopefully, and he smiled at her, suddenly seeing her as a young girl making a desperate, foolhardy decision with hope and courage and not much else.

He gathered young Jan to his heart even closer and wonder that he hadn’t seen the resemblance between his young lover and his mother as a girl sooner. Jan snuggled backwards and Eljean watched his father with his mother’s brown eyes and felt a kinship for his parents he thought had skipped him over.

Mistakes—they had made mistakes, and learned to live with them and love them more than life itself.

Eljean closed his eyes against the sweetness of the epiphany and listened to his father’s song with a wondering heart as it continued on.

Part XII—The Moons in Spring

The Snow-Melt Convergence

Trieste stared at the letter in her hand and wondered distantly if the winter snows had really returned or if her face had just gone that cold.

“Trieste?” Yarri tapped her shoulder hesitantly. “Trieste—what’s wrong? It’s from Alec—it should be good news, right?”

The winter had been long and bleak—the successful delivery of Alec’s letter had been the first good thing the Goddess fighters (as Aerk had called them in an uncharacteristically serious moment) had seen since Torrant and Yarri’s reconciliation at Solstice.

Or so Yarri had thought, until Trieste had blanched snow-flower pale and sat down abruptly as she’d read.

“They’re here.” Trieste brought a shaking hand to her mouth.

“Who’s here?” Yarri asked blankly. She sat down too, mostly because she was exhausted, as she had been for the last two months. She hadn’t looked too closely into the reason for her weariness and her uncertain stomach, even though she knew in the back of her brain what was causing it. She had no problem admitting to herself the reason she avoided the subject--she simply didn’t want to confess what she’d done to Torrant. Of course, after their reconciliation, she probably would have started the tea again—she had meant what she’d said about trusting him. But by then, there had been the possibility of…of that thing she wouldn’t think about.

And although she may have wished to go back and rethink the decision, she refused, under any circumstances, to risk unmaking it.

“Trieste…who’s here?” Yarri was seriously alarmed now—she’d never seen Trieste look so frightened.

“Alec. The military of Otham. The militia of Eiran. For the love of

Triane’s knickers, Yarri, he’s even got a few companies from Cleanth!” Trieste wiped her mouth again, looking positively ill, and Yarri blinked through the spots in front of her eyes.

“Why?” she wondered. “Why would he do that? He couldn’t have known how badly things were going…”

In the last months, Rath had gone positively mad. Incensed by the numbers of his regents and elite who had, in fact, attended their own Solstice dinners, as well as by the increasing pressure from the Regent’s Hall to change his policies towards the Goddess folk, Rath had simply… forgotten that he was answerable to a people at all.

The guard recruitment policies became mandatory—every man not housed in the ghettoes was required to spend two months a year in the corps, and desertion was a hanging offence. Suddenly, the number of guards in the ghettoes—terrible cold or no—doubled, and Torrant and Aylan would have probably dropped from exhaustion if the younger regents hadn’t stepped in. Eljean had, at Torrant’s request, attended to other duties, but after two weeks of a four by two rotation in the ghettoes at night, they’d been ready to drop as well, and Aerk had given an impassioned speech about the cruelties the guards were encouraged to wreak on the helpless and the poor.

Tw o nights later, without warning either Rath or Aerk, six regents who didn’t know Ellyot Moon’s true identity walked the streets of the ghettoes at night.

The next morning, they stormed the floor, demanding an explanation from Rath. Rath told them that the trouble those guards had been anticipating would stop with the arrests he’d made—and with the crucifixions that had happened without approval from the Regent’s floor.

Torrant had slipped out of the hall then, running desperately for the outside wall, but the temperatures had been far below freezing the night before, and the ten musicians, poets, and students from Dueance University who had never been a part of the Goddess ghettoes were already savaged, stiff , blue and dead, their blood freezing into spikes even as it dripped from their wounds. Numbly, the snow cat had recognized the band members of Triane’s Kiss, and his roar of grief and pain had drowned out the bells that signified the Regent’s Hall had dismissed.

The activity in the ghettoes had eased up then, but the situation in the Regent’s Hall became truly hopeless.

Torrant and the younger regents had petitioned, fruitlessly, for a list of the crimes of the dead students—and they’d been ignored. At urging from Yarri and Trieste, many of the regents’ wives and daughters had managed to add more names and more voices to that petition. And they’d been ignored. The profound disregard for the opinions of the non-radical regents inflamed even the more conservative in the hall, and they had raised their voices in protest—the charter that ruled the nation of Clough was being overturned and they needed to be heard.

They’d been ignored.

And then…nothing. The regents had complained, they’d whined, they’d sniveled, and Rath had nodded, and smiled in that condescending way, and said nothing. He had, effectively, usurped a country with an elected governing body, right from under that body’s nose, simply by passively ignoring them, and continuing to make his own decisions.

The one time Ellyot had dared to mention ‘impeachment’, the bloodbath in the ghettoes had gone on for three days. It had spread, too, no longer limited to the ghettoes. Beatings went on in the University’s taverns, in the homes of the poets, and in some of the poorer playhouses, where actors played lip-service to the patriotic plays that were allowed simply so they could ply their trade. Torrant and Aylan couldn’t be everywhere, but Goddess how they had tried!

The guards were finally called back into the barracks and the city huddled in terror and shock. The ‘sons of the gods’ dragged their bloodstained, wounded selves into Torrant’s flat the next morning and fell into bed, where Torrant had bled all over the sheets for most of the day. They awakened when Yarri and Trieste slipped in through the back way and tended to them like children. Yarri wouldn’t speak of the new scars healing on her beloved’s body, but she would wake for the rest of her life from nightmares in which Torrant never stopped bleeding. Trieste never mentioned, even to Alec, the beloved of her heart, the way Aylan, her old nemesis, had wept against her as she’d bathed his perfect, unscathed body. But wept he had, tortured by the things he’d seen and the things he’d done, and the sword strokes he’d let through his guard.

The city assumed an unhealthy, waiting stasis after that…The ghettoes curled up in on themselves—enough families had been evacuated by the time Cwyn left to warn Roes that there were plenty of vacant buildings to burn for heat, and the efforts in the fall ensured that no one starved to death—even if everybody was heartily sick of rice.

Criminals, brigands, and the dispossessed began to move into the crumbling tenements, and the lives of those who remained were even more tenuous. It was written in every decrepit arc of the skyline, in every shattered windowpane, in every drafty hallway, in every empty, broken-stoned street, that for better or worse, this would be the last winter of the Goddess ghettoes.

Occasionally the guards would run into the ghettoes and seize the first person they could find who looked like a member of the Goddess’ folk, and disappear with him or her. The bodies were found in the slushy river, torn, mutilated, and violated, obviously before death.

They were left in the icy water as a warning to the force that activated hope in the ghettoes, the force that had been working to save the people there.

The name Triane’s Son had been repeated more and more often in the Regents’ Hall. The snow cat had been mentioned in equally hushed tones, although Rath pretended that he himself hadn’t seen the animal. The regents who had been appalled by Rath—and that was more and more of them—spoke the name reverently, prayed for the cat faithfully, with fearful hushed voices.

Torrant often wondered how they could not see that he, and his fellow wraith-thin, hollow-eyed, battered, scratched, and bandaged friends were, all of them, Triane’s Son.

Maybe the truth was that they did—but it didn’t matter. The Regent’s Hall had apparently forfeited all of their power to fear of Rath’s reprisal should they act. If Torrant and his friends couldn’t evacuate the ghettoes by the time the summer drove the people out of doors, the odds were, it would be for the worse.

Today on this thin, bitter, green-tipped day, when crocuses asserted their right to live from the frozen cracks in the city, Trieste and Yarri looked at the letter held in Trieste’s shaking hands and wondered if Alec had brought salvation or slaughter.

And that was when a solid, deep, man’s voice called in through the front door, “Halloo…is anyone home? This is the right place, isn’t it?”

The two women looked at each other like underwater swimmers, or dreamers meeting in the same dream.

“It couldn’t be,” said Yarri stupidly, because Alec had obviously made it through. “It’ll be another two or three weeks before the snows clear from Old Man Hills.”

And then Stanny walked into the drawing room, with smudges on his broadly grinning face and an ungodly amount of dirt on his boots, and Yarri and Trieste both squealed in tandem and ran to embrace him, shrill and breathless with incredulous questions.

They had barely gotten the entire story out of Stanny—and fed him, at his repeated requests, when the bells chimed to let out the Regent’s Hall.

“It’s early today,” Trieste remarked darkly. “That can’t be good news.”

The foreboding of the early bells was enough to darken the mood, and Yarri, anxiously because she knew the answer, asked the hard question.

“Stanny…that’s wonderful that you came through the hills…I can’t believe Alec came with you. It’s amazing. You’ve surprised us all—in fact, you may have saved us all. But…” she looked away, and the pain of the thing she hadn’t wanted to think about for the last four months knocked the breath clean out of her.

“How’s Mum?” he asked, his own eyes bright.

“Right, cousin,” Yarri nodded, and felt for Trieste’s hand. “How’s Aunt Beth?”

“Dying,” he replied bluntly, as was his way. “Cwyn arrived on Solstice eve—probably the only thing that got her through the winter. The last town meeting happened at Mum & Da’s house, or she wouldn’t have made it down the street, but,” he narrowed his eyes, “by Triane, she had the strength to make sure we sent a militia contingent with Alec when he asked.”

Yarri swallowed, suddenly wanting the woman who had been her mother since she was six years old more than she wanted to see the sun in the sky. “How long, Stanny? If…if we left, down your magic tunnel, through Clough, could we make it?”

Stanny grinned suddenly. “I hope so!” he exclaimed. “It’s pretty much why I came—I’ll be damned if I don’t bring at least Roes home with me.”

Yarri grinned a little. “We’ve got some time then?”

“Mum’s a fighter, but three, maybe four weeks.”

A tiny sound was wrenched from Yarri’s chest then, and she put her hand over her mouth to stop it. When she spoke again, her face was twisted in the scowl they all remembered from her childhood. “That’s not fair,” she said obstinately, and Stanny nodded in agreement, and then she had to change the subject.

“So…you really tunneled under the walls and into Aylan’s apartment?” she asked, trying very very hard not to dissolve at the thought of Aunt Beth, bereft of so many of her children and dying by moments.

Stanny took her hint and began talking about support beams and brush-covered entrances, and the surprisingly lucrative enterprise of selling dirt.

In a short time they were interrupted by Torrant and the other regents, who were thundering their way up the front steps and into the hallway.

“And I’m telling you,” Torrant was saying, his voice as hard as Yarri had ever heard it, “that I’m not leaving the lot of you here. If I leave, you’re coming with me!”

“But he knows!” Aerk was arguing back. “He knows—you heard him today! He all but accused you of being Triane’s Son! ‘Some of our younger members think they’re kin to the gods, but I’ll show you all how they’re barely human!’ ‘Ellyot’, he was looking right at you!”

“Well if he wants to be a man about it and pull it out in the open, I’ll be glad to show him the snow cat as I rip out his throat!” Torrant all but shouted, the door closing behind them with a thunder. Trieste and Yarri met pained eyes. The regents had been begging him to leave as soon as the snows melted—they feared for his life, and he didn’t argue with them on that score. But he’d put them in danger—he knew it, they knew it, and he wouldn’t desert a brother. It had been a bone of contention for at least the last month.

“Besides,” Torrant’s voice dropped to more conciliatory tones, “we all know that it’s not just the guards anymore—the whole city is being taken over by criminals because they don’t fear reprisals.”

He stopped as he entered the room, his eyes widening. “Triane’s purple tits. Stanny, what in the hell are you doing here?” But he laughed as he said it, his grin making his dimples pop and the grooves at his mouth carve into his lean face.

Torrant and Aylan stepped into a hearty embrace with their cousin, and then listened in awe to a story that began with carving a path through the middle of a mountain and another one under a city, and ended with an army hidden in the woods outside of Clough.

It was such a wonderful story, with such a potential for a happy ending, Torrant had to cover his mouth to keep from laughing in pure joy by the end of it.

“That’s perfect,” he said, his mind working busily. Eljean, watching him from his place in the crowd, could see the backgammon pieces falling into place.

“What do you have in mind?” Aylan asked cautiously. Their situation was desperate, and, like Torrant, Aylan wouldn’t desert a brother. But the idea of a tunnel under Hammer Pass seemed fantastic, like the idea of a star spinning down from the sky to offer them all a towline out of the city.

“We evacuate the ghettoes in the next week,” Torrant replied, ignoring the gasps from the regents. It could be done—in fact, it could be done easily, as long as there was at least one of them in the ghettoes at all times to escort the families through the ghettoes between curfews. “When everyone is safe at Moon Hold, with a contingent of Alec’s forces for protection, we have the militia escort them out under Hammer Pass to Eiran—Yarri, Trieste, that’s you too.”

“Where will you be?” Yarri asked, bristling.

“I’ll be here—for just a minute longer.” Torrant met the eyes of Aerk, Keon, Marv, Jino, and Eljean in turn. “When everyone is safe, we go to the Regent’s Hall, and we tell them that Alec of Otham has an invasion force around the capitol city of their country. If they don’t want to lose their country to be torn apart by the rest of the lands, then they need to depose Rath, and elect another king. And then, we leave.”

“We what?” Aerk asked, shocked.

“We leave,” Torrant answered him calmly. “We walk out the door to the Regent’s Hall, and we never look back. Don’t you see? Rath’s been using the Goddess folk as a scapegoat for the bad things he’s done—well, we’ve taken them out of the equation. For us, he’s been using them as blackmail—if we push too hard, innocent people die. Well, we take them out of the equation. All that’ll be left to this city will be the mad man on the throne and the cowards who let him stay. The outcome will be up to them.”

There was a shocked silence, and Torrant suddenly flushed. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, looking away. “I grew up somewhere else…I assumed…you…this is your home. We can come up with another solution.” He looked up then, with a tentative smile, and such an obvious fear of having offended his friends, the brothers he’d stayed in Clough to protect, that Aerk’s almond-eyes slid sideways around to the other regents to see if they were as surprised as he was.

“No, it’s not that,” Aerk said, smiling reassuringly. “It’s just that it’s so simple. As murky and twisted as everything has been this winter…I never thought the end would be so simple.”

“If it’s so simple,” Yarri said, breaking into the tentative agreement written on everybody’s face, “then it won’t matter if I stay one more week or not. We can go home together.”

Torrant’s look at her was gentle and chiding at the same time. “Yarri, dearest, you know that in another week you could be showing—you really need to leave as soon as possible, you think?”

As a whole, everybody in the room turned to stare at Yarri in shock, and Yarri felt her face go hot and red under their scrutiny. “Show?” she asked weakly.

Torrant flushed again, that surprising shyness washing his face and making their audience chuckle in strained notes as what he said sank into the room.

“You’re having twins, Yarri—you know they show early, even for a first-timer like you.” He smiled encouragingly, his expression faltering at her stunned expression. “You knew, right?”

Trieste and Stanny were on either side of her, and when she reached out, they immediately caught her and helped set her down on the plush chair she had just vacated.

“I thought,” she murmured, not able to meet anyone’s eyes. “I suspected…I didn’t…” She looked up at him, and the understanding and affection in his eyes made the rest of the world fade into the background, like furniture. “How long have you known?”

Torrant’s face went even brighter, and later Yarri would note that his expression in that moment was as close to the boy she had grown up with as she had seen this long, bleak winter, and as close to human as he would be for long months to come. “Solstice morning,” he murmured, moving through the ‘furniture’ to kneel by her. “I…I felt it happen…”

“Happy Solstice, beloved,” she murmured, taking heart and some joy from his quiet laugh. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

And then the hardness came back to his jaw, the speculation, the constant planning, that feline sense of calculation that she had learned to love with the rest of Torrant, even if she didn’t like what it made her beloved into. “Because I was happy, so happy—but I was also angry, and I didn’t want to fight with you, not about this, not here.”

“I…” Yarri looked away, wondering how she could say this so it wouldn’t sound like the whining, spoilt child she had felt like when she realized she was pregnant. “I would have changed it, after our fight… but by then…I was afraid…”

Torrant raised her hands to his lips, kissing the backs of them, and she felt his hot cheeks against her smooth skin. “I’m not angry now, Yar…I’m happy. I understand. But it’s all the more reason for you to leave with Trieste, right?”

Yarri sniffled, and shook her head. “Wrong. It’s all the more reason for you to hurry and keep to this plan, keep to this promise. The only other promise you’ve ever broken to me was the promise to handfast last year. You won’t break your promise to leave with me and your babies, you won’t break your promise to get back to say goodbye to Aunt Beth. I know this much about you, and it’s that these promises are more sacred in your heart than any others. You go ahead and save all the world, beloved, but you take me out of this city yourself.”

She was openly weeping by the time she was done, and all they could do was watch in stunned bemusement as he whispered softness into her hair.

Other Destined Moons

Starren carefully helped her mother sit up and offered her some water from a pitcher nearby. Bethen accepted, and then took the cup herself.

“It’s a bright and shiny spring day, darling,” Bethen murmured. “Why aren’t you out in it? At least take a walk, right? Bring some of the ocean inside with you when you come back?”

“It’s cold, Mum,” Starren demurred, although she loved days like this, when the sun cut like a razor and the wind chilled the flesh and soothed the sting in the same bluster.

“I didn’t raise you to lie to me, sweetling,” Bethen smiled, and although she was in pain, there was enough of a light-shadow in the expression to brighten the room. “Besides, I want to knit, and I don’t want you to see how slow I am. It’s embarrassing.”

Starren looked unhappily at the knitting in her mother’s hands. It was for Cwyn, and although the thick-headed clod meant well, Starren wished her brother had consulted her before he’d given Mum his answer.

But how would she know that Cwyn would ask for socks?

But darling, Bethen had drawled, blinking at her son in bemusement, socks wear out!

That’s right, Mum, Cwyn had answered smugly, so you’ll have to be around to make me more.

Starren had wanted to bang her head against the wall. Socks? Socks took a week, at most. But Cwyn had a little bit of canniness in him—he started asking for tricksy things, cables, color changes, textural twists… Bethen was currently working on the ugliest, most elaborate pair of socks ever knit under the three moons. They had taken her a month, and Cwyn kept requesting more changes as she went. Bethen had just turned the heel on the first sock, and to Starren’s intense frustration, the pattern was far too elaborate for her to rip out—not only would Bethen have noticed, but Starren wasn’t sure the socks could be recreated.

Judging from how long the sock had taken Bethen so far, Starren guessed that her mother had three, maybe four more weeks to live.

Starren heard a noise outside and her eyes sought the window immediately. She must have failed at keeping disappointment from writing itself along the round lines of her face, because Bethen patted her knee from her chair.

“It’s only Cwyn, coming by for lunch. Stanny’s not due back for another week—you know that?”

And where the hell was Stanny anyway? Resentfully Starren looped another stitch and then jumped up as though stung. It was lunchtime? It was lunchtime and she’d forgotten to fix lunch! Oh Triane’s pincushion, how could she have forgotten! Bethen could hardly eat anything solid these days, and the things that upset her stomach had unforeseen, disastrous consequences that both humiliated Bethen and upset Lane. It was lunchtime and she hadn’t put soup on yet? She needed to boil the stock and…oh, hells, hells, and seven stars of dark, the chicken was still in the coldbox and it needed at least an hour to cook and, damn damn and damn, what had she been thinking!

Starren didn’t realize that she was muttering to herself until her mother called her name and asked for her hand.

“No worries, Littlest,” Bethen murmured, and Starren tried not to squeeze the brittle, fragile fingers in her grasp. “I’m fine—some soft bread, maybe some juice. You’ll have the soup ready for this evening.”

“You need to eat, mum,” Starren murmured stubbornly, and her mother smiled.

“I will, darling,” she said, that light-shadow smile back on her face, “but later.”

Starren nodded, wondering how it was that her mother still seemed to be keeping everything together when she, herself, was falling apart. “I’m sorry I forgot, mum.”

A little wave of the hand, then, a shooing off of any fault on her daughter’s part. “You’re young. You should forget to make lunch. You should be out at the shore—make your brother take you.”

“Mum…”

“No, I’m serious. Take that fat baby of a stallion out—he misses people, since Torrant and Yarri have left.” Bethen tried not to let her voice fall. She missed Torrant and Yarri, she was the one lost without Roes and Aldam by her side, and she talked almost as much about Aylan as Starren did. But no, thought Starry bitterly, it was the damned horse that needed comforting.

Suddenly Starren couldn’t stand their little house, the boarded floors, the comfortable and worn furniture, the hand stitched floral curtains, any of it, any more.

“Right, mum,” she murmured, literally running for the kitchen to throw the chicken in the pot with some water from the sink. There was a terrible clatter, and she remembered a handful of garlic cloves and some salt and then she ran back into the living room, pausing as she went from the bright, west-facing kitchen into the darker sitting room. Her mother was hunched in her stuffed chair, eyes half-closed in an effort to stay awake in the middle of the day, her fragile, hearty hands working painfully on her most impossible child’s most impossible request.

Starren’s heart squeezed so tight in her chest, she wondered that the whole city of Eiran couldn’t hear it beating over the friendly roar of the ocean. Her breath wheezed to a whimper behind her tongue and she had to clench her arms around her middle to keep in the awfulness of seeing her mother bent over her last token of love, alone.

“They should be here,” she whispered over a throat that felt like a carrot through a cheese grater. “It shouldn’t be a choice between me and no one. You should have an entire family here. It’s not right. They should be here, mama. THEY SHOULD BE HERE!”

Bethen’s vast, kind, patience was behind the look she gave her youngest. “They will be,” she murmured, and something indefinable, something that had kept Starren, quiet and patient and undemanding at her mother’s side, snapped, shattered, and disintegrated into gritty gray powder. An angry whimper broke from behind Starry’s pursed lips, and with quick strides she moved to her mother, pressed the active, fragile hands between her own and kissed her hard on the cheek.

“I love you, mum. I’ve got to go.”

And with that, she whirled out of the house, barely remembering to grab Stanny’s thickest sweater and her own cloak from the mudroom as she ran out the door. She practically ploughed into Cwyn as she dashed across the porch.

“Whoa—hold on a minute, lackwit!” He laughed—something he had done a little more often, if a little more wisely since his return in the winter. “What’s the hurry?”

“Mum’s dying,” Starry said roughly. “Isn’t that hurry enough?”

“Today?” Cwyn asked with a smile, only partly kidding, and Starren shook herself a little, trying to articulate the storm pounding about her chest with the force of a freak wave.

“Soon. Where’s Stanny? He said he was going to go get Roes, but how on earth can he wade through the damned snows fast enough to bring her back?”

Cwyn looked at her bemusedly. “Don’t you know?”

“Know what?” Starry looked back at him blankly, and Cwyn shook his head.

“I forget—you’re the good girl who never listens in corners or does anything she isn’t told to do!”

“Right—I rely on you to get into trouble for me, Terror, now what in the name of the star’s dark are you talking about?” Starry’s voice was sharp and grim and bitter—all of the darkness that she carefully monitored so that her mother and father wouldn’t worry about her burned in her tone now like flaring pitch. Cwyn looked at her carefully, surprised and a little relieved. He was so dark and bitter himself, he’d been wondering if he would have to hate his little sister for her damned serenity.

Cwyn told her, and when he was done talking about punching a hole in the mountain that had dominated the little seaside town for their entire lives, she slapped him hard across the cheeks.

Cwyn was so stunned he just stood there, touching what would be a faint bruise across his face the next morning.

“He’s there?” Starren all but screeched. “He’s there?” She turned and glared at the Hammer and the Anvil, knowing that the shadow of that landmark was the last chill that left their hearts in the morning. “Four days? He’s four days away? I’ve been sitting here, dying in pieces, and the one person who could save my heart from screaming has been four days away for a month!”

“Starren…” Cwyn grabbed her upper arms and shook her a little, “Starren—even if he was here, it would still hurt!”

“What?”

She’d been staring at the mountain, trying to fit her mind around the old family pattern. It had taken Torrant, Aldam and Yarri nearly a month to get to Eiran—the family legend was very clear on that. They had been sick, and damned near starving, and Torrant had carried Yarri part of the way under his snow-cat-changed skin. Everyone knew it—it had been a Goddess story at Samhain from her first year. It had taken a month.

But today…today…if a person were whole and healthy, on a horse, not dodging pits or slogging through slow or going miles out of one’s way to avoid lakes and boulders… Cwyn just told her that it would take three days to go under the mountain, and then one more to get through the slush to Dueance, the capital of Clough, the rotten core of all their sorrows.

“Starry—do you think Aylan can take away what you’re feeling here? Because I thought all it would take was joining the fight, and I was wrong!”

“They need to be here…” Starren murmured, her eyes still on the mountain as though it were now the source of all her pain. “They need to be here…” she didn’t realize that her eyes were leaking tears.

“They’re coming,” Cwyn told her, troubled by her distraction, by her intense regard of the mountain that Stanny had spent four years punching a hole through so that they might have a chance to bring their family under it now.

Starren was the only Moon child with blue eyes, and when she turned them towards her brother they were wide, joyful, and gloriously mad.

“I’ll help,” she said, and tore off in the direction of the stables. Cwyn had just finished taking off his boots, and by the time he’d laced them up again and taken off after her, she had managed to saddle Courtland.

He arrived just in time to open the stable door for her as she blew by him on the back of Torrant’s old stallion, running full out, slamming him against the outside wall of the stables and staring dazedly at the spots dancing in front of his eyes.

By the time he could wobble to his own horse and saddle it, Lane had come racing to the stables, asking Cwyn what Starry thought she was doing, galloping through town as though the hells of the star’s dark were on her heels.

Cwyn told his father what he knew, and when he was done, Lane Moon met his youngest son’s eyes with a terrible realization.

“You’ll never catch her,” he said miserably. “Courtland was running like it was his last chance to race—that old bastard can outrun everybody but Heartland, you know that.”

“She’ll come to her senses, won’t she, Da?” Cwyn asked anxiously. He had a sudden vision of his sweet, pale little sister buried under the dark mountain for days, of the suffocation and the absolute, utter aloneness of the black. It would be like the hells of the star’s dark, he thought with a terrible shiver, it would be every bad thing promised them by the false priests of Clough. “She’s got to come back…” He thought of her bright, sunshine hair, and suddenly, of her gloriously mad blue eyes. Oh Goddess. Bethen was all alone here. He couldn’t go get her youngest, her darling for her…what if they didn’t get back in time… “Sweet Triane, Da, we can’t…we just can’t…”

Lane shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. Eiran had sent most of their militia with Alec of Otham—there was no one free to chase her down. And Bethen…Bethen was so sick…so very close to bidding goodbye to her children and hello to the family that Torrant still missed. Lane couldn’t send her one remaining child after their wayward, half-mad flying Star.

“She’s heading for Stanny and Roes and Torrant—she’s heading for safety,” he said at last, “and maybe all this is for nothing, right? Hey—maybe she’ll be back in time to cook dinner.”

But by the time they got back to the house, the chicken was done and falling off the bone. Evya got home in time to add some noodles, and they ate dinner in the sitting room, in silence. Only Bethen seemed serene, as she had been for her family all along.

“She’ll be home in time or she won’t,” she murmured. “Evya, this is wonderful soup, darling—thank you so much for taking over.”

“But Bethie…” Lane was as upset as Cwyn had ever seen him. “Bethen, your children…they should be here.”

“So Starren kept saying,” Bethen murmured. “But she is here— even this mad dash to go fetch Stanny and Roes—it’s all about her heart being here. And so is theirs. And so is Aldam’s, and Aylan’s and Torrant’s and Yarri’s. You all act like this one month, this one week, is all that counts in a lifetime. But it’s not. Starren sat here for a winter, and stared at that mountain that kept her from all of the people who gave her strength, and she never complained, not once. She sat here and watched…watched…”

Bethen couldn’t find a word that encompassed the dreadful wasting of her body, the illness that had withered the spirit of the home she’d worked so hard to fill with life. “She’s watched me dying—and all she wants is her people to help her get through it.”

“But Bethie…she’s our baby…” Lane’s voice cracked. “She’s our baby, and she’s all alone out there…”

“Stop…” Bethen’s voice did break now. “Dammit, Lane. Stop it. She’ll be fine. She has to be. This entire family has run off into the wild-blue at one time or another and had the strength to pull through. Just because she’s our youngest and our,” break, shatter, crack, sob, “darling…” deep breath, “doesn’t mean she doesn’t have the strength to make it home. If nothing else, Aylan will bring her home.” Helpless tears ran down Bethen’s parchment cheeks, and she only waved off her husband’s gentle fingers as he tried to wipe them away.

“Right, beloved,” Lane said reassuringly, although his own voice was nowhere near reassured. “Aylan will bring her home.”

Evya sat quietly, and thought of Stanny, and thought that if she had to wait for her beloved and his family, she was glad she wasn’t alone.

Moons Collide

Starren’s madness receded the second day she left home, and she would rarely speak about her time under the mountain alone, even as she grew older and forgave herself for making the trip at all. But she would wake, cold and sweaty, from dreams the blackened color of burnt wood for the rest of her life. Her trip slogging through the spring slush in Clough had been like a trip through wonderland—even though she was cold and hungry and saddle-sore, any place with sunlight had the grace of joy.

For all of the bravery that pulled her by the heart through the tunnels under Hammer Pass, for all of the forlorn courage that made her follow the river from up in the hills down to Dueance in the valley, she very likely would have been beaten or worse and left for dead within an hour of entering the city. The only thing that saved her was that Eljean had ditched the morning session at the Regent’s Hall. Instead, he was hurrying along the main marketplace towards the ghettoes, doing his part to complete the final, covert evacuation of the Goddess’ people to the old Moon Hold.

It was her hair, he told Torrant over lunch, as they were watching a clean, shivering Starren devour her fourth bowl of steaming soup while wrapped in blankets at Trieste’s table. He had been hearing stories about the Moon family for coming on a year, and along with her sky-blue eyes, Starren’s amazing hair had been the one detail that had been repeated with every family story in which she’d featured even a little.

All that amazing hair… Aylan would often use that line to close her story—either that or, Those beautiful blue eyes…

Eljean glimpsed the hair, glinting under layers of grime in the sun, just as the band of brigands was closing in behind her, ready to seize her and haul her into the deserted ruins that the ghettoes were becoming.

Later, he would wonder at the impulse to save her. He hadn’t even been sure it was Starren—didn’t, in fact, remember to ask her until it was over—but he had seen her, innocent, lost, clutching the reins of a fat, graying stallion and sobbing in the middle of the indifferent crowd that was the marketplace at Dueance, and it had not occurred to him that he was a coward. The other young regents had been out, making the streets safe since Solstice—but not Eljean, not until this moment. In this moment it didn’t occur to him that he didn’t like pain. All that passed through his mind was that he was the only person who could possibly do this deed.

The rest had been easy.

He drew his sword, shouted, waved it around, and watched--mildly surprised and with his blood and adrenaline thundering in his ears--as the three grimy young men took to their heels, ignoring the horse that they nearly spooked in their run.

Starren, turning as the young men took off and seeing what danger she had been in, launched herself at Eljean in a sobbing flurry of ‘thank yous’, Courtland’s reins still clutched tightly in her hand. That unbidden protective instinct, the one that made Eljean comfort a frightened child during his first day at the clinic, had him gentling her and soothing her, calming her down. He detached her from his shoulders and took her hands, stooping a little (only a little—she was much taller than Yarri and nearly taller than Torrant) to look into her pretty blue eyes. And that was when her name clicked onto his tongue.

“Starren? Starren Moon?” It was fantastic—beyond imagining. But then, so were Stanny and Alec of Otham and a standing army until less than a week before.

The smile that broke across her face reminded him of Stanny’s and Yarri’s in its shape, but of Torrant’s in its radiant completeness, its sweet, incorruptible belief.

“You know them,” she said with absolute surety. “You know my…” A sudden doubt crossed her eyes, and she searched for the right names. Like Stanny, he thought fondly, she had never learned to lie. “My cousins! You know Yarri and…El..El…”

Eljean took pity on her, and whispered in her ear, “Torrant, my lady. Yes, I know them. But lets get you to safety first, shall we?”

“And a bath,” she begged.

Eljean actually laughed, dazed a little at the wonder of this young woman clinging to his arm as though he were a hero from one of Torrant’s Goddess stories. “And a bath,” he affirmed.

“And Aylan?” she asked hopefully, and Eljean had a sudden vision of what the sour, taciturn Aylan would become in the face of this sunshine sweetness.

“Oh absolutely!” he said, chortling a little. “We couldn’t possibly leave him out.”

To her credit, Yarri waited until Starren was in the bath and they were working to get her hair clean before laying siege to her with questions.

“Gods, Littlest!” Yarri massaged some more soap into her hair, as well as a concoction made with avocado, mayonnaise and orange rind that would ease up the snarls. “What possessed you to go under that mountain by yourself? You must have been alone, and cold, and hungry…”

“I just…” Starren shivered and looked forlornly into the cocoa Suse had brought her, cooling rapidly on the wooden shelf beside the tub. “I wasn’t hungry,” she murmured. “There were food packets left every so many miles down the passageway, with the torches.” Her shivers got worse. “Every so often, the torches were burnt down…”

Mindless of the water, Yarri reached around her cousin’s back and pulled Starren, wet, soapy hair and all, back into her chest. “Don’t you fret, Starry, my darling, you won’t have to go that way without light again.”

“It’s not the darkness,” Starren whispered. “It’s the people. That’s why I left…everybody was gone…and then…in the mountain…there was nobody…” A sob shook the girl’s body then, and another, and then they were ruthlessly squashed and the emotions that broke in Starren’s voice were squashed flat and toneless as well. “And mama’s going to the star’s dark, and nobody will be there to light the way…”

Oh gods…Yarri wanted to hit something, because she was going to cry, dammit, she was going to cry, and the way her body had been working, it wasn’t going to let her stop. “She won’t be alone, Littlest,” she choked into Starren’s ear. “Don’t forget, there’s my mama, and Torrant’s mama, and my daddy, and my brothers…and her mama and daddy…there will be plenty of people to light her way like torches when she makes that journey…”

“But someone should see her off …” Starry protested, and the seething anger under that quiet voice almost took Yarri’s legs out from under her.

Instead, she wiped her cheek on the shoulder of her dress. “You silly girl—where do you think Stanny is? You probably passed him— and Roes, you lackwit!—on the path. They left yesterday morning with the first batch of Goddess folk.”

“Left?” repeated Starren faintly. “Then why are you here still?”

“We needed to get the rest of the folk out of the city,” Yarri told her carefully, not sure how much her cousin understood about the situation and not wanting to frighten her. “Rath isn’t…he’s not acting rationally. He doesn’t know about Alec’s forces camped in the trees and the hills on all sides. After carving a hole through the mountain, tunneling under the walls to Aylan’s flat in the ghettoes was no big feat, right? So we’re moving the Goddess’ folk outside the city gates, and from there to Moon Hold, and from there, if they want to go…”

“Through the mountain…” Starren said dreamily. A little bit of common sense asserted itself for a moment. “But Eiran…I’ve heard the talk. Eiran can’t take an entire city.”

“Eiran won’t have to—not for long. Once the folk are out of his reach, Alec’s going to demand a new leader.”

Yarri busied herself then with rinsing Starren’s hair, wanting to get her young cousin out of the water and into some dry clothes as soon as possible. Seeing Eljean walk through the door with an exhausted, hysterical Starren on his arm made Yarri realize for the first time exactly what Torrant had felt when he’d seen her in Clough. Never had such a packet of welcome and unwelcome news been tied with the selfsame string.

The guards hadn’t been confining their activities to the ghettoes since Stanny had arrived, but they weren’t the only problem. The problem was, that since the guards had been spending all their time monitoring a small quarter of the city, thieves, cutthroats and worse had come to believe the city was theirs. When the criminal underclass realized that fewer and fewer people were living in the ghettoes, they set up shop there themselves, and spent much of their time terrorizing the rest of the city.

Torrant and Aylan, and then Aerk, Keon, Marv and Jino had all been occupied in the evening hours either keeping taverns and student study halls and musician’s haunts from being raided, or else keeping homes from being invaded, or the unwary or just plain unlucky from losing their goods or their bodies or their lives to the criminals who had no other law to keep them in check. Sometime between Solstice and the beginning of spring, all of their swords had been blooded and their flesh bloodied, and Yarri and Trieste had become very, very proficient at doctoring small wounds. Since Stanny’s arrival, the wounds had grown larger, and their number had doubled.

Eljean had been the exception because, as the least able with the sword, he’d been the natural choice to keep the steady, underground stream of ghetto dwellers running from their various knotholes in the ghettoes to Aylan’s decaying flat. From there they could only follow the tunnel to emerge, surrounded by Eiran’s militia (Torrant had sent word to have as many female soldiers or white-streaked gifted around the exit tunnel as possible) and escorted to Moon Hold. Either way, Eljean’s one job when they weren’t in the Regent’s Hall, had been to keep that stream moving—it was where he’d been heading when he’d seen Starren.

It was a risky enough job, Torrant had cautioned, and Yarri, knowing of their history together, hadn’t begrudged Eljean the worry one bit.

Don’ t stop and talk, don’t flirt with Zhane—you two need to get those folks off as soon as possible. Remember the blankets—they’re all over Aylan’s flat—and Yarri and Trieste have provided poppets for the little ones. But don’ t be a hero, Eljean. You’re one of the folk we’re trying to save, right?

Eljean had flushed then, mortified that Yarri should hear him referred to as a victim. As Torrant had moved on to confer with Marv and Jino, who had been patrolling the taverns that particular night, Yarri had come up to her beloved’s ex-lover to commiserate.

He doesn’t realize how that might embarrass you… she’d murmured, although she herself had been a little surprised by Torrant’s insensitivity.

No—he’s right. Eljean’s flush had deepened. I’m a coward—he’s seen me be one. I’ve told him again and again that I’m afraid of pain. He’s trying to spare me, that’s all.

Yarri looked at him sharply, understanding suddenly, and then she’d smiled at him. Well then he really must trust you, mustn’t he? She’d asked, and the smile that lit Eljean’s plain, narrow features then had given her a glimpse, just a tiny flicker, into the bright spot of a night filled with broken glass and desperation.

And now, toweling Starren off and getting her cousin dressed and warm, that conversation came back to Yarri and she shuddered. The city was so dangerous these days, so terrifyingly bottomless in its capacity to destroy innocence and experience alike.

Yarri wanted a chance to thank Eljean again, for saving their youngest, their littlest precious one from all the hells that Rath could dish out.

But what she had just told Starren about her brother and sister finally seeped in, like warmth through four days of cold.

“They already left?” Starren looked at Yarri, only a soft surprise touching her slack, dreamy expression. She had spent so much of her time inside during this last winter that her pale, peach-tinted skin lost most of the freckles that decorated it in the summer, and Yarri just wanted to stroke her cheek again, and tell her everything would be fine.

But then, if anybody knew things had the capacity to not be fine, it would be Starren after this winter, wouldn’t it?

“Yes, sweetie, yes they are,” Yarri told her with a shake of her head, “and now we have to get you through those tunnels to join them. Aldam’s waiting for Torrant, and then Clough will be empty of anyone Rath feels entitled to hurt.”

Until. That had been the unspoken word among them. Until a little girl held another little girl’s hand in innocence. Until a musician posted a song about joy. Until a child with a white streak was born into a family that had forgotten it was a possibility. In broken whispers in the small hours of the morning, Torrant had confided his most terrible ‘until’ predictions, and Yarri had only been able to comfort him with the hope that Alec’s plan worked.

You have given enough, she’d told him firmly, but she hadn’t believed it even as she’d said it. The kind of evil, of indifference, that permeated the streets of Clough…she and Trieste had seen, as citizens, what the world was like inside the circumscription of the stone walls.

The day before, when she and Trieste had been at market, a child had dropped her doll in the street. After her mother—a proper citizen of Clough-- had jerked the girl’s arm hard enough to make her squeal in pain and then spanked her to stop her from crying, the poor thing had escaped to run in front of a moving cart to grab the doll herself.

Yarri had blocked the little girl’s hurtle and Trieste waited until the cart passed to pick up the doll and dust it off , but the mother, after yanking the poor thing from Yarri’s arms and swatting the doll out of Trieste’s hands, had sneered at both of them to mind their own business and hauled the screeching little girl away.

There was a bitterness, a selfishness, left in the people of Dueance. It was as though they had turned their backs on compassion for their fellows in the ghettoes for so long, that they had forgotten how to feel it for themselves.

Yarri had a terrible, gnawing feeling in her bloated, craving belly, about what it would take to feed that hunger for compassion, and there wasn’t enough love in the world to fix the people of Dueance.

It was going to take life’s blood, heart’s blood. Death’s blood.

Which was why she had to get Torrant out of this blighted, angry place. His entire reason for coming to Clough was rooted in the idea that he was the only man for the job. She needed him in Eiran before it dawned on him that he could save this awful, rotted little world with the last spark of his beautiful life.

“Why haven’t you left already?” Starren asked now, in that same odd, toneless voice, and Yarri grimaced.

“He can’t leave his brothers, Starren. I can’t ask him to. The young men who are helping him—you met one…”

“Eljean—he’s very brave.”

Yarri smiled faintly. “They all are,” she murmured, “and Torrant won’t leave them—they’ve thrown in with him, he needs to see them to safety.” Her voice dropped, because she had seen the toll this had taken—on all of them—but mostly on her beloved.

“They already lost one. In fact, they lost the only man who could have resolved this without Alec’s coup. So we’re getting the people out of the Goddess ghettoes and then sneaking the young regents out, and then we’ll be in that tunnel as well. But not you. You need to be home—for all the reasons you came to get us, you need to be home. We’ll have…”

Yarri’s heart stuttered in her chest. There was only one person who could take Starren back, and he was the one person who had kept Torrant alive for much of this last year. She swallowed, hard, and tried not to let Starry hear the tears and worry in her voice. “Aylan,” she said before the pause became too telling. “We’ll have Aylan take you home.”

Starren seemed to melt, pleasantly, from stiff , frightened child to relieved, relaxed young woman, and for the first time that odd dreaminess didn’t seem out of place. “Mum would be happy to see Aylan again,” she murmured. “She made baby blankets for us.”

“Right,” Yarri said dryly. “It’s your mum who’ll be happy to see Aylan.” And with that she finished dressing her young cousin, and fussing over her now clean and wavy sunset colored hair.

Torrant was the first who arrived at Trieste’s, the young regents behind him. “Eljean!” He called unhappily, “Eljean—did you get that last family moved to the…oh.”

Eljean was standing by the table, along with Trieste. The two of them were watching Starren eat and trying to cull details from the girl while she gulped warm stew.

Even an hour after her bath, Yarri could have told them it was harder than they would have ever imagined—Starren’s pervasive dreaminess had assumed stubborn proportions. Not one of them had gotten a solid answer about what had made her ride under the mountain, all on her lonesome—but then, none of them were Torrant, either.

Torrant took one look at Starry, and made the impossible connections that nobody else seemed able to make. It was what he had always done for the family—it was the way in which he was most like Bethen.

“Hullo, Littlest,” he murmured, coming to crouch in front of her. “It all got to be too much, did it?”

Starren’s chin quivered, and she nodded.

Torrant took her hands in his, stroking them with endless compassion. “It’s a hard task, what you were set to—there’s no shame in falling for a bit—you know that, right?”

A silver tear tracked down her cheek. “But Roes and Stanny already left…” she murmured, and Yarri exchanged a surprised and long-suffering look with Trieste. Oh, sure—they could provide the food and the hot bath, but it took Torrant to bring her to herself.

“Well then, we’ll have to make sure Aylan gets you home with them—we’ll put you on Heartland…”

“But he’s your horse…and I already have Courtland…”

Torrant shook his head, mostly in surprise and exasperation. “Of course you do!” He exchanged rolled eyes with Yarri. “Because you just decided to take a ride one day, and you ended up here, right?”

A slow, sunrise smile glowed across the girl’s face, and she was suddenly nodding animatedly. “Exactly!” she exclaimed. “You know things, cousin—how do you know these things about me?”

Torrant dropped his head, and answered her with an odd, strangled voice. “I’ve known you since your first breath, Littlest. I was even there when you met your moon destined.”

He took a deep breath, and met her eyes then, his tangled heartstrings apparently back in order. “And I’ve sat sickbed with someone, and it wasn’t even someone I loved at the beginning. The heart-grief that can put you through—I’m betting it made you just a little bit mad, didn’t it, Starry-my-girl.”

Starren nodded somberly. “You won’t tell Aylan, will you?” she whispered. “He might think I’m… soft-headed, or weak or something…I…suddenly I just had to go get him, and you, and Stanny and Roes. And the next thing I knew, it was darkness, forever and ever.”

At that moment the front door slammed open. “Oueant’s wilted wand, Eljean, can’t you even finish one lousy gods-bedighted task…” Aylan stopped short, and Eljean watched curiously as an intense, painful parade marched its way across the handsome features. The conductor of that parade was playing his heartsongs, and had the rhythm of a painful, self-recriminating sort of love.

“You’ll tell him yourself, Littlest,” Torrant told Starren gently, as she began beaming towards the door like a nova sun. “Aylan will forgive you anything—we all will, you know that, right?”

Starren blinked and patted Torrant’s cheek. “Thank you, cousin,” she murmured, and then Torrant got out of her way. Not even three moons of gravity could have stopped the girl from launching herself at Aylan and weeping disconsolately in his arms.

Later, when she had calmed down and fallen asleep on his shoulder, even as he sat down to shovel stew in his mouth with her, a larger than comfortable burden on his lap, he looked at Torrant in anguish. Torrant shook his head, and that deadly, quirky upper lip curled up, but sideways, in a sad parody of even his weakest smile.

“Don’t even argue with me, mate,” he murmured. “Give her a good night’s sleep, give you a chance to clear out some of our dearer gear, and you two are the first out of the tunnel tomorrow morning.”

“But…” Oh, there were so many things behind that one word. They had seen ten months of hard fighting and harder loss, and now Aylan was leaving without him?

“I’ll be on your tail, brother,” Torrant reassured him. “As soon as the bell rings, the others and I, we’ll be herding the last few diehards out the door.” Olek, Torell, Arue, Iain, and Zhane numbered chief among those who needed to evacuate. They wouldn’t leave without Triane’s Son (or Eljean, in Zhane’s case), and Torrant had been too grateful for their help with the other refugees to insist. “We’ll be half a day behind you, at the most.”

“Then why can’t we wait?” Aylan asked, still troubled. He was afraid… wordlessly, namelessly afraid that if he left his brother inside the city Torrant would never make it out.

Torrant moved to stand over Aylan, and his hand stroked Starren’s pretty hair. Eljean watched that hand with a lump in his throat. Yarri was on Torrant’s other side, and their hands were laced together so tightly their knuckles were white, and when Torrant bent over and dropped a kiss in Aylan’s hair, wrapping a free arm around him and the half-grown child in his arms, Eljean had to look away. Aerk and Keon chose that moment to walk in from the hall, and the tableau was so startling they were silent immediately, looking at the four of them in wonder.

“It’s time, brother,” Torrant murmured, his lips touching Aylan’s ear. “It’s time to leave me and put her first.”

And oh, Goddess! Eljean wanted to clutch his chest. He wanted to drop to his knees and howl in sympathy with Aylan…with Aylan of all people, because the expression on his face was torn and ripped and bleeding, and nobody in the room could do a thing to staunch that wound.

And then the girl moved in Aylan’s embrace, and she murmured his name, turning towards his chest. “Take me home, Music,” she said then, her eyes half-opening.

“Right, Littlest,” Aylan responded automatically, dropping a kiss into her hair. He looked over his shoulder then and met Torrant’s eyes, and touched the hand in Starren’s hair with his own. It was that look again, the one Eljean couldn’t define. The one that spoke not of sex, but of intimacy, of a brotherhood that had nothing to do with blood.

Eljean’s eyes were caught then by the damned ugly slaughterhouse cloak on Aylan’s shoulders, and he shuddered horribly.

Then again, maybe blood had everything to do with it.

Aylan took a deep, choking breath. “I need to go move those last families,” he said with an apologetic smile at Eljean. “How about I go do that now, and gather the last of my stuff , and come spend the night here.”

“Good,” Torrant agreed. “Rest up.” He looked at Aerk and Keon, both of whom looked like years instead of miles of bad road. “If I’m not mistaken, it’s my turn on the streets tonight, am I right?”

They sighed wearily. “Not really,” Aerk muttered, “but you’ll go anyway. Marv and Jino should be out in an hour—meet at the tailor’s, right?”

Coryal, the friendly tailor, had actually left earlier that month with his lover, the two of them miserable at leaving their homes but clasping hands joyfully, even as they were swallowed up by the blackness of the tunnel behind them. His empty shop had been a convenient place for meetings—near the market street, not far from the ghettoes, but back off the main thoroughfare and away from prying eyes.

Torrant sighed, one hand still touching Aylan’s in Starren’s hair, one hand still locked with Yarri’s. “I’ll be there—should I bring dinner?”

Keon shook his shaggy head—an anomaly, since although he didn’t like to groom, he also didn’t like his hair long, either. “With Marv? Bring food. Always bring food. Now is anybody going to tell us what Stanny’s little sister is doing here, or do we get to hear that on our way through the tunnels tomorrow?” Keon and Aerk met eyes and shuddered—of all the parts of the plan that had been difficult to carry out, they were looking forward to that part the least. But for today, Yarri smiled and relinquished Torrant’s hand, moving towards them with a gait not yet hampered by the weight she’d put on her hips.

“Not much to tell,” she said with a dry look at Torrant. “Just the Moon family madness, taking over at the most inopportune times.”

Trieste, who had remained quiet at the end of the table, watched the interaction between Torrant and Aylan with an indefinable melancholy. Torrant caught her eyes in question, and she smiled just a little. “Spend much more time with us and you too will be throwing rocks out of trees to peg the unwary soldier!” her voice was animated, but Torrant caught her eyes again, and again, that terrible, tragic look.

“You’re too sensible for that, Pretty Girl,” he said gently, and her return smile was bitter.

“If I’m so sensible, Torrant Shadow, what am I doing in this city, at this time, hoping my beloved doesn’t kill us all?” She shook off any attempt he could have made to reply, and started ladling stew from the tureen at the table, putting it on a tray for the boys. She wanted to feed the regents in the sitting room this evening, because all of them—even Eljean—were looking so tired that she was pretty sure they would fall asleep where they sat when they were done with their food. Her heart was so full of worry and care for this new, war-forged family, that she wasn’t sure how she would have answered him anyway.

The Ghost in the Blade

When Starren grew older, she and Aylan would spend years debating who was to blame for what happened next. Aylan would reassure her—again and again—that he had been long overdue to run into a ghost from his past in the shitehole that was Dueance, and he would partly be right.

But Starren, who would never quite forgive herself for deserting her family when they needed her most, would insist that it was her fault as well. If he hadn’t been hurried, fretting over her and of the dire decision to leave Torrant behind she would say calmly, it never would have happened. If he hadn’t been so terribly rattled by the sudden change in circumstance he would have remembered all of the cautions that Torrant had nagged him into using to keep himself safe.

He at least would have been wearing a hat or kerchief over his bright gold hair as he walked through the regents’ side of town, so that Merrick, the man who betrayed his own lover to suicide, wouldn’t have recognized Aylan as he walked by.

Merrick had been married to Essa for the past two years. As he came staggering out of the tavern he was coarsely bloated and red-faced from too much drink, too quickly, from the time the woman he’d truly loved had been found clutching her dead brother, lifeless in a pool of their combined blood. Rumor had it that Merrick didn’t go home unless he was so drunk that dark-skinned, pretty Essa looked like pale, plain Brina, but a question about Brina was likely to land a person a ham-sized fist in the face, so mostly that was just rumor.

But Merrick knew Aylan—at least he had known him during the time Aylan spent in Dueance. Merrick had always been vaguely suspicious of him—Aylan was beautiful, although it was a fact about himself he frequently forgot—but Brina had never looked Aylan’s way. Maybe it had been that Aylan had been sleeping with most of the young landholders at the time—usually in groups—or maybe it had been that, foolish girl that she was, she had honestly loved the man who had denounced her in public on the arm of his present wife. Either way, Brina had been Aylan’s friend, and he’d treasured her and had loathed Merrick proportionately, so the two men had never gotten to be friends.

But as Merrick came staggering out of the pub with his arm slung around Dimitri of all people, he most certainly recognized Aylan when they ran into each other, Aylan literally tripping on his shoes.

“Brina…” Merrick muttered dimly as he and Dimitri emerged. “Brina left me… left me for…”

Aylan’s pansy-blue eyes met Merrick’s murky bloodshot eyes, and suddenly Merrick had an answer to that sentence.

He jerked himself out of Dimitri’s hold and came plowing after Aylan like a lumbering rhinoceros—only Aylan didn’t realize he was horned.

About the time Dimitri said “Dammit, Merrick, put the knife down!” Aylan heard the leather of his cloak rip and felt the equivalent of a cat scratch across his belly. He lunged backwards, and looked at Merrick with his mouth open, as Merrick held up a knife dripping with borrowed gore.

Everybody around the tavern, passersby, Dimitri, Merrick, all looked incredulously at the shallow scratch on Aylan’s pale stomach, and Aylan felt shock freeze his veins.

Torrant.

Dimitri blinked at the dripping blade again, and far off on the other end of the marketplace, Aylan thought he heard the howl of a wild animal, attacked by an enemy he could not see.

Oh gods… Torrant.

He didn’t realize his own knife was out until he’d slashed Merrick’s throat, and while Dimitri was still gasping in bemusement, Aylan slashed his throat as well. And then he was running too fast towards Trieste’s to see their wounds bloom and spurt blood. He had cleared the next block and disappeared into the alleyways before the two dead men fell spasming to the ground.

In less time than it took the rumor wind to cross the city, a contingent of guards came howling from the regent’s palace, swarming the alleyways by the tavern, banging doors, swearing, hunting. Aylan ran, hunted by enemies who didn’t know his face, until he came crashing into Trieste’s front door. He slammed the big oaken double door shut behind him and looked around wildly, not hardly seeing Yarri or Trieste or even Starren as they gathered around him.

“Where is he?” he demanded, his eyes rolling wildly around the entryway. “WHERE IS HE?!!!”

There could be no question as to whom Aylan was asking for.

“Aylan…” Yarri ventured forward and tried to take his hands. “Aylan—you know where he is…what happened? Why are you so… oh…oh gods…oh Goddess…TORRANT!”

Yarri and Aylan sank slowly to their knees as he held out his cloak in front of him, the rent in it wide enough to fit two hand-spans, front to back.

The inside edges of the torn leather were pouring a relentless river of blood onto the cream-colored wood at their feet.

Torrant's yowl had not been in Aylan's head after all.

Jino and Marv heard it while walking through the marketplace, right after Jino told Marv that he was sleeping with Marv's sister.

The two of them had grown up on adjoining farms, and had both come to the city together—voluntarily, actually. They believed that stepping into the world of the Regents would be a powerful, heroic sort of thing to do, and after watching the viciousness and cowardice of the politicians their fathers dealt in, they had wanted a plan for how to grow into strong men.

Marv was his best friend, his brother of the heart. After meeting Aldam this fall and spring, and watching how he and Torrant, even from a distance, had worried about the other's good opinion, Jino had learned first-hand how fierce a love that had not a thing to do with lovers and everything to do with family could truly be. Marv was his brother, and Jino didn't want to betray him. In short, he had been worried.

But not even Marv's bad opinion could have kept him away from Kerree.

After that tumultuous dance, and Trieste and Yarri's subsequent rise in the social scene of Dueance, Jino and Kerree had run into each other more and more often. The fifth or so time they'd met in Trieste's parlor, Jino finally faced the tigress in the den, so to speak, and asked her when she would ever forgive him for their one shared kiss in a shaded alcove behind a crowded dance floor.

He never would have had the nerve to do it, if he hadn't watched Torrant come down to solstice breakfast with Yarri on his arm. If they could make up, could love each other so completely after what seemed such a betrayal of her faith, couldn't he ask the woman who had fascinated him since their shared childhood why she seemed to loathe the sight of him?

Kerree's answer had been more surprising and more terrifying than he had ever dared to dream.

I'll forgive you, Jino, when you repeat it instead of wandering into the night to bed a pretty body with a forgettable mind.

They had slipped away then, and kissed underneath Trieste's stairs. And behind the townhouse, and in the stables, and everywhere there was a friendly shadow and conspiratorial darkness to house them. And then they had done more than kiss.

More often than not, when Jino ran late to the Regent's Hall, or to walk the streets with Marv, he was coming from Kerree's bed, lost in her strong, open smile, and the wildness of her springy hair, and the depth and breadth of her sharp, intelligent heart.

Every time he left her, she would kiss him fiercely, and tell him to be careful, and tell him, to please, for the sake of all the gods and the Goddess, take care of himself and of her goofy, beloved brother. Kerree had seen, even from the dance, that anyone whirled in the frenzy that swept around Ellyot Moon in gale force, would need protection.

At this moment, Jino felt like Kerree’s good opinion and love were protection enough. On this slushy, grim early spring day, surrounded by ruined businesses, vacant buildings lining the marketplace, and frightened citizens who had none of the arrogance they'd shown in the innocent summer, Jino also felt foolish and naïve to actually say a thing like that to his dearest friend.

What he did say was, "Uhm…you know…your sister and I are… sort of…you know…"

Marv looked at him to answer and barely got out of the way of a cart and horse without getting run over. He batted at Jino’s hands as his brother-of-the-heart pulled him to safety. "I know what?" he sputtered with a final slap for good measure. “What are you trying to tell me?”

Jino started to speak with his hands, not sure what they were saying but hoping it was more intelligent than what was coming out of his mouth. "Your sister and I!” Jino’s small, pretty features scrunched up, his apple cheeks for once not popping their customary dimple. He took off his leather wide-brimmed hat, and ran his hand over the once-curly hair he had skull-trimmed over the long, brutal winter. Then he took a deep breath and tried again.

“We’re…you know!" His fingertips meshed and separated and he prayed that this time, just once, Marv would get what he was trying to say without a diagram.

"Holding hands?" Marv asked blankly. His own hair had grown out this winter, the tight, wavy curls becoming longer and fuzzier over his head and under his hat. He hated it long, but like Keon, had lost the time to give to even minimal grooming. Unlike Jino, since his own beloved was many farms away, he really had no incentive to even keep it short.

Jino shrugged with a sigh, and spread his hands a little wider. "Unnnnhhhhhh…" he said intelligently, and then…well, it wasn’t exactly a smile. His teeth were together and his lips were back, but his expression was definitely not a smile.

"Well, I know you're holding hands at least…" Marv reasoned, nodding in time to his friend's encouraging expression.

“Yes,” Jino kept nodding and Marv grinned slyly.

"And I know you’re holding hands because you usually hold hands before you go at it like rabbits under Triane's skirts!"

Jino dropped his hands. "What?" he demanded. "You made me go through all of that when…"

"Did you think I didn't know?" Marv laughed. "I'm not that dim! Kerree, right?" he asked, his brown, handsome face skeptical.

"Yes, Kerree!" Jino shot back, disgruntled. "I'm not that much of a man-whore!"

Marv laughed—a welcome sound, one that hadn't changed at all from that bright summer day when they'd had the new regent to coffee. "Well, you're welcome to her—as long as you don't break her heart!" His grin showed off his slightly crooked front teeth.

Jino shook his head and scrubbed his face. "I'm not planning to," he murmured as he stepped carefully around deep pothole, filled with melted snow and horse-dung. Marv was not so lucky—he fell immediately into it, soaking his foot to his ankle, and Jino almost bent double laughing.

"Laugh all you want, you wank," Marv grumbled, "if we stay at Trieste's tonight, you know you're going to have to share a room with these trousers as they dry."

"Actually," Jino ventured thoughtfully, "I was sort of hoping… I mean, now that you know and we don't have to hide it—from you anyway…"

"Oh sweet Triane's dancing shoes!" Marv swore, shaking his head. "You are so hamstrung—and by my sister! I mean, Kerree is my favorite sister and all, but…but we grew up together! You've got your pick of every girl in the city—and you've picked quite a lot of them…" Marv was hopping on his toes, as he tended to do when he spoke with any sort of passion, even through a squelching boot.

Jino, who had a knack of sitting back in stillness and space, simply stood on the side of the marketplace street and looked at his friend until he grew still as well.

"And the only girl I really want, and I think it's for forever, is her, mate. Your father can go stuff himself—but I need to know we have your blessing on this one."

Marv grinned that crooked tooth grin again and socked Jino in the arm, taking a cuff in return. The two of them mock-sparred, right there in the city street, for all the earth as though they hadn't killed to exhaustion that winter, as though the world they'd grown up in hadn't grown blackness like a mold that they'd been bleaching out with blood for months.

"If you have any babies, you'll have to name them for me, right?" Marv chortled ducking Jino's next punch.

"Only the girl ones!" Jino returned, and he caught Marv squarely in the shoulder, he was laughing so hard.

And that was when the snow cat's scream echoed off the crumbling brick and wood buildings and walls surrounding the city. Women gave muffled shrieks, children stilled their crying, and men began to hustle their families along in an attempt to get home in the waning light. The city had heard that sound too many times this winter to not know that it boded ill for someone.

Marv and Jino dropped their playing and went tearing off down the market place, looking for Coryal's vacant store.

That’s where they found him, in cat form, whimpering in the corner of the alleyway behind the tailor’s boarded store where they had assumed he would meet them, even though it wasn’t his night to patrol.

He saw them and snarled, curling further around himself, and Jino fought the urge to vomit as he saw the cat’s entrails mixing in the rancid spring mud of the alleyway, leaving surprisingly little blood in their wake.

The high pitched, resonating yrowl sounded again, bouncing off the brick walls around them, and the two young men looked at each other, their options playing across their faces.

If they didn’t get Torrant to change, and do it soon, either the wounded snow cat would kill them, or the King’s guards would find them and finish the job, just for being with a creature so obviously magical.

Jino swallowed, and swallowed again, ran his fingers through his skull-trimmed hair, and dropped to a crouch in front of the side of Ellyot Moon he knew the least.

“You remember me, Torrant?” he murmured. “You remember? You’ve changed in front of me before. I’ve seen you—I’ve seen you a couple of times. You scared the piss out of me the first time you changed only part way, did I ever tell you that? It was easier to see you as one or the other—but seeing you as both, in the same body…and your eyes change. Can you look at me now, brother? Can you smell that I’m you’re friend—we’ve killed together and wept together… come on, brother. Let me see your eyes…”

The intelligent, panicked gaze that turned towards Jino’s light brown eyes was a terrifyingly bright Goddess-blue.

Torrant saw the fear in the young regent’s fine-boned, handsome face, and fought back the urge to slash out at him just because he was breathing. He’d heard the word ‘smell’, and trusted, for a moment, the soft, fearful voice coming from the prey in front of him. He curled back his whiskers and breathed, over the stench of his own blood and intestines, over the gagging perfume of his own animal fear and then… there it was.

Some of his snarl relaxed. He remembered this smell. This was a friend. Abruptly his vision changed, and the red heartbeats that were Jino and Marv resolved themselves from the hot burn of ‘enemy’ to the gentler red of ‘ward’.

Marv and Jino exchanged glances. This had to be good, right?

“Good, brother,” Marv said, his usual easy white grin in his dark face making lighter of the situation. “Good. Now, I know it’s going to hurt, but we can’t get you through the streets like this, so we need you to do us a favor. Can you? Can you just remember that you’re human? Can you change for us, Elly…Torrant. Can you change for us Torrant? Please? If you change for us, we’ll take you to Yarri, right? You want to see Yarri again…now come on…let’s see her as men, right?”

The questioning sound that rumbled out of the snow cat’s throat gave them heart.

The high pitched, agonizing howl of pain that followed it, broke their hearts.

But it was a man, a wounded, desperate man, they hauled between them when they left the alleyway, and it was a man who put his legs under him and helped them run to elude the tidal wave of guards that seemed to be suddenly everywhere at once.

Between Torrant’s wound and Aylan’s cloak, there were two blood trails through the city that day. The trails intersected in more than one place, unbeknownst to either of them--which is why it took the guards so long to track them down.

Marv and Jino took the back way into Trieste’s, through the stables, and Yarri, who anticipated their entrance, was there with bandages and water and antiseptic.

When she actually saw the extent of the wound, her hands shook too badly for her to treat it.

“Trieste…” she called weakly, sinking to her knees and taking Torrant’s head into her lap. “Trieste!!!”

“It’s looks worse than it is,” Torrant muttered weakly, and Yarri laughed a little hysterically.

“That’s a relief, beloved, because it looks like you’re dying!” She put her forehead to his, and wondered at the smell of his skin. It was sick, and weak, and unfamiliar, and she suddenly understood how Starry could need to be ‘elsewhere’ after months of tending her dying mother. It was all Yarri could do not to let go of the rope of the here and the now and sink into the abyss of the otherwhere.

“Oh holy Dueant…” There was no profanity at all in Aylan’s voice as he burst into the room and sank to his knees next to his brother, choking on his own pain.

“Are you hurt, mate?” Torrant asked in concern, and Aylan took Torrant’s bloody hand in his.

“You total and complete wanker,” Aylan breathed hard, drowning in nightmare, “How could you do this to me?”

“I’ll be fine,” Torrant reassured, “I just need…”

“A Healer,” Aerk said, crowding into the room with Keon, Starren, Trieste, and Eljean. Eljean gave a little moan and grabbed at the doorjamb for support, and found Trieste’s shaking hand instead.

Everyone looked at Aerk in surprise—it was the first note of sanity since Aylan had exploded in the front and the nightmare of waiting had ensued. “He’s healed worse than that, we’ve seen him.” Aerk looked up at everybody, hoping it wasn’t wishful thinking on his part.

“All the Goddess-folk are gone,” Keon hissed, “and I wouldn’t put him in the hands of those quacks from Duance for all the hope-tainted gold on the planet! The only Healer in the city who could make this right is the one with the wound!”

“Aldam is still at Moon Hold,” Aylan said blankly, and then looked at Torrant and his wound. “Aldam could heal this—you know he could.”

“He was always the better Healer,” Torrant nodded, smiling faintly.

“What about it, mate—can you make it? We have to leave right now…”

“There are guards out there, everywhere…” Jino told them, some of his earlier panic returning.

Aylan nodded. “They’re going to be looking for me—I killed two regents getting this wound…”

“Who?” Aerk asked, wondering at the extent of the backlash, even in the panic over their friend and leader.

“Merrick and Dimitri,” Aylan said absently. “Here, Trieste, get me a sheet—I’m going to wrap it around his middle—Yarri, go get your biggest needle, we’re going to sew it up tight, and we have to do it now and fast. Starren, go help them. We’ve got maybe half an hour before they come pounding at the door.”

“Oh thank the Goddess,” Marv murmured, “I was wondering who was going to get to kill Dimitri.”

“All things considered,” Aylan’s tear-shot eyes met Marv’s gaze squarely, “I’d have preferred he lived.”

Yarri and Trieste both ran out of the room, and Aylan looked up at the young regents. “There is going to be terrible backlash. You all need to leave, and leave now. Herd the rest of the Goddess folk into the tunnels and just go. Don’t pack, don’t wait for us, just go…”

“They’ll find us!” Aerk reasoned suddenly, bleakly. “They’ll catch us in the tunnels—Aylan, you must know that! It’s not a secret where we spend our time. If the lot of us disappear, leaving this much blood with two dead regents in our wake, they’ll find us. It was one thing when we were simply not going to show up for the Hall one day, but not now.”

“We can stall!” Keon burst out. “No, it’s true! We can stall—the guards burst in, and find all of us and a mess of blood and we lie the moons to shame. While they’re sorting through the detritus, you’ll have time to get away.”

“Wait a minute,” Eljean muttered, the darkness clearing from his eyes. He was stumbling back a few sentences in the conversation. “Wait…they’ll catch you in the tunnels…” He looked at Torrant’s pale face, and the mess of blood and fascia welling up under his intact shirt and felt a curious, wrenching sense of dislocation. It wasn’t possible, that Torrant should die, that a wound not even his should kill him. It wasn’t possible that this man should die before him.

Aylan was looking at him without his usual exasperation. “Not if we leave in about five minutes. We’ll be on horseback—I’ll hold him…” Aylan’s voice broke then, and he held Torrant’s head to his chest. “You bastard, you git-wanking-son-of-a-sheep-turd…I can’t even stay and die for you…” he sobbed once, hard. “Isn’t it my right to die for you?”

Eljean watched Torrant’s bloodied hand come up to rest in the bright gold hair as though from far away, and heard his words of comfort to his true friend from a terrible distance. As far as Torrant was concerned, Eljean had always been so far away.

The women hustled in, well aware of having been manipulated, and Yarri and Aylan set about pulling Torrant’s cloak off so they could lay him on the sheet. Trieste turned to Eljean then with a pair of scissors and had him hold the sheet taut so she could cut it in three places and then rip the lengths across. When she was done she handed him the scissors and the excess lengths of sheet and turned to Aylan and Yarri.

Eljean looked at the scissors curiously, thinking of Torrant and Zhane lost in the tunnels under the city, being assaulted by guards when Torrant’s only hope was clearly an unimpeded journey to the gentle brother Eljean had met only twice, but whom he loved anyway.

“Here,” he said abruptly to Starren, and dumped the extra sheets in her arms. As he pulled his shirt free of his breeches, he was dimly aware that it was the same soft green shirt Torrant had thrown at him one bright midsummer day. He’d been wearing it a lot these days, for luck. With a hard-lumped swallow, he used the scissors to cut a slash in the beloved shirt and then shoved it out of the way.

Curiously he pinched a flap of white skin at his midriff , thinking that his skin was looser on his flesh than it used to be, and he’d never been fat. He tilted his head at Torrant’s flapping shirt, and adjusted the slant of the pinch of skin and then looked at the scissors in his hand through surprisingly clear vision. They wouldn’t cut as scissors, he realized, they would be better used as a blade. He locked them open with his good sword hand, caught the tip of the blade under the pinch of skin, closed his eyes, dug in and pulled up.

Starren’s muffled shriek made everybody look up from the hasty seam Yarri was sewing, and everybody watched, trancelike, as more blood spattered to the once pristine floor. The scissors thumped in the middle of the puddle, fumbled by Eljean’s shaking hand.

“Eljean…you hate pain…” Torrant mumbled, and Eljean had to grin through the star’s dark dancing in front of his eyes.

“And the pain of losing you would be the worst of all,” he said faintly, and then, while he had everybody’s attention, “You’ll all leave, I’ll stay. It will take them a while to figure out they’ve got the wrong person—the belly wound will confuse them. You’ll have your time to get away.”

“Eljean…” Aerk said in horror, “Rath won’t just question you and let you go…he’s been torturing people… you know that…”

Eljean shrugged, the ripple making the gaping skin at his belly sting. “What’s he going to find out that he won’t know when you’re gone anyway?”

“I’ll stay…” Aerk said, just as Keon, Marv, and Jino all said, “We’ll stay.”

“We’ll stay,” Aerk said strongly, looking at Torrant in reassurance. “We won’t let him stay in Clough alone…”

Torrant pulled strength from their harsh breaths, apparently, because he struggled against the hands holding him down while Yarri stitched the ugliest seam of her life in Trieste’s best brocade sheet. “You won’t stay at all!” he rasped. “You all will leave, and Rath will have Triane’s Son, and everybody I love will be safe in Eiran!”

Eljean scrubbed his face with his hands and gave an actual laugh. He had always wondered how Torrant and Aylan laughed in the face of pain, terrible odds, and constant fear, and now he knew. Once the pain was there, you had no choice but to laugh, or the pain would be wasted.

“Stop it,” he chided. He bent to a crouch and took the liberty of stroking Torrant’s cheek with his knuckle. “It’s not even your country, you buggering git. Go. Leave with your beloved. Be healed. Let me believe that you are out there in the world. Trust that you taught us all your best lessons—they’ll get me out.” That last part was a lie. He knew it was a lie. But that they’d risk their lives to try seemed to be worth the pain of all the last year.

“Eljean,” Aylan said in a thick voice that hardly seemed his own, “You can’t do this. What am I supposed to tell Zhane?”

Eljean looked nakedly at Aylan, and saw suddenly through the hard-faced façade of the other man. Ten months, and he never knew. Aylan loved them all, as much as Torrant did. His anger, his saturnine sneering—it was all there to shield a tender, sweetly beating heart, and to help him protect the man who tried so valiantly to protect them all. Eljean had to look away, and his eyes fell sightlessly on Yarri’s busy, shaking, purposeful hands as she finished off the seam and tied it in an awkward knot.

“Tell him,” Eljean lied, “that I won’t sacrifice a brother to make my lover happy.”

“Eljean…” Torrant protested, but it was clear from the way his eyes were fluttering back that he wouldn’t be conscious for long.

“You can argue with me when you can stand!” Eljean snapped, and then stood up, grimacing with the pain. Given what Torrant was going through, it seemed disrespectful to still feel such a small wound, but there it was.

“Eljean,” Aylan said, “I can’t tell him…”

“You can and you will.” Eljean wiped his face on his shoulder, and Yarri stood up, wiping her bloodstained hands on her skirt. Looking over her shoulder at Aylan and Torrant, she shook her head, still tearless after her hysterics at Aylan’s arrival.

“I’ll take his gift,” she said thickly. “If you two can’t be gracious about it, I can. I’m not proud.”

Eljean bowed at her, in spite of the pain. “With all respect, my lady,” he said humbly, because he had come to love the brisk, vital little woman, “I await my captain’s command.”

Yarri looked at Torrant, and he, true to all of the bravery in his heart, met her gaze unflinchingly.

“We’ll help no one,” she said with as much strength as she could, “if you die of this now.”

A sound of anguish came from Torrant’s throat, and he fixed his eyes on Eljean with as much irritation as he could spare. “Damn you, Eljean—it was just this sort of decision that I wanted to avoid!”

“The Goddess isn’t always merciful,” Eljean said sagely, grinning slightly to show what a fraud he was…Oh, heavens, he loved those eyes, he thought hazily. They were clear and wise, and seemed to see everything. They were warm and human and beautiful, like the man himself. He’d do about anything to have those eyes look at him the way they were looking at him now.

Torrant would wonder later, because it felt as though a voice not his own moved him to speak. But the words were his, and he could never, ever take them back. “We’ll come for you, brother,” he rasped. “This will heal, and we’ll come for you…don’t ever think we’ll leave you alone…”

Yarri let out a quickly suppressed sob, and held out her arms, then she stood on tiptoes, because Eljean had lost none of his outrageous height and she would not grow again, and kissed Eljean’s wet cheek.

“Thank you, brother,” she whispered. “You can take his word on that—we’ll come for you.”

Eljean ignored the pain, and she was already steeped in her lover’s blood. He wrapped his arms around her and hugged, feeling Torrant’s love by proxy, which had always been the only way he would get it. “I know you will. Keep him safe.”

“All right then,” Aerk said briskly. “Everybody out to the stables— Aylan, you get up on Heartland first, and we’ll get Torrant on the horse in front of you. Yarri, Starren—Courtland’s still saddled, and he’s had a bit of a rest. He’ll carry you easy. Lady Trieste, can we saddle up your little mare for you? What will Suse be riding?”

Trieste was halfway out the door from the hall to the stables when she looked behind her. Eljean was standing, hand clutching the doorframe, looking as lost as Starren had when she’d been dragged inside only that morning, and Trieste’s heart stuttered.

These young men had eaten at her table. She had dressed their wounds, heard their stories, held their hands when the world Torrant and Aylan had begun to take for granted became too much for them. She and Eljean had exchanged many wry looks, mocking their own hearts in the matter of one Torrant Shadow, and she had made countless silent promises to him that someday, the ache would ease.

Someday hadn’t come soon enough for him, and she couldn’t even say she was sorry.

“Saddle the mare for Suse,” she murmured. “Aylan!”

Aylan turned in the saddle, as he was getting ready to haul Torrant up from Marv and Jino’s straining arms.

“Aylan, tell my husband that Rath has me. Tell him to be unmerciful.”

“Trieste!” Aylan protested, but she shook her head savagely.

“You get him to safety, dammit. Tell Alec the same thing you’re telling Zhane—tell him I won’t leave a brother to make a lover happy— but with me, you’d better make sure he knows it’s the Goddess-damned truth!”

There was a sudden clamor from the front door—luckily for all of them it was Aylan’s blood trail the guards had found first.

Torrant was shoved into Aylan’s arms, and Aylan swore, bitterly and long, even as Aerk and the others were leading Heartland to the stable door. “Dammit Spots…”

And then Aerk snapped Heartland in the flank with Courtland’s rein, and the horse took off . Aerk handed the rein to Yarri, who was looking over her shoulder and calling to Trieste as well.

Aerk swore and smacked Courtland, who needed no such encouragement to follow his son out into the back alley towards freedom. Aerk and the other regents looked towards Trieste and Eljean, who had come to the doorway to say farewell.

“Be strong, brother,” Aerk said, refusing to succumb to the contagion of tears. “We’ll fight for you, I swear it!”

“Be safe!” Eljean called, and after they disappeared through the stable door, and when Trieste wouldn’t budge—nor Suse, either-- he took her elbow.

“Shall we answer the door, my lady?” he asked in a passably steady voice.

“Absolutely, sir,” she told him, and gestured grandly for Suse to proceed them down the hallway. “I would hate to keep the King Consort’s men waiting.”

Meetings and Partings

Starren was not the only one who would wake from nightmares of utter darkness for the rest of her life. But when Aylan awoke, in a cold sweat, screaming, it was always Torrant’s name he called.

The refugees hadn’t needed Eljean or Aylan to prompt them to go after all. When the bells started ringing and the guards began to stream from the barracks, the last three-dozen of the Goddess folk in Duance ran for Aylan’s flat and slid in through the window into the bleak corner that was his living room. The space that opened under the floor—which had at one time been used as his privy—was now dug out and shored up. From there it sloped down until it could take six people abreast and, yes, two men on horseback.

The only way to get the horse into the flat was to rip out the sidewall, but Stanny had readied for that contingency before he left. As the horses cantered carefully across the broken, half-set cobble stones, Torrell and his son, along with the rest of the men took rocks from the rubble at the back of the room and hit the frame of the house where the walls met with several sharp raps.

Aylan and Yarri reigned in the horses around their burdens just as the outside wall collapsed. When the dust cleared, they trotted straight into the flat. The people of the ghettoes took one look at Torrant on the saddle in front of Aylan, and parted silently. As they were cantering past the waiting people Zhane stepped forward, his face pinched and devastated.

“Eljean…where’s Eljean?” he asked, frightened of the answer.

“He stayed behind to distract the guards,” Aylan answered honestly. Torrant mumbled something in his arms, and Aylan rubbed his cheek against the shaggy hair. The white mark had been visible since Marv and Jino had brought him to Trieste’s, and seeing it now, against Torrant’s will, made Aylan feel as though his friend were naked in public, and it hurt.

Aylan looked at Zhane, keeping his face as open and honest as he could. He was so raw inside that open and honest was easier than he thought.

“He wanted me to tell you that he couldn’t desert a brother to make his lover happy.”

Zhane’s face showed panic, sadness, and a terrified love for Eljean--but not betrayal. Aylan would always count it as the best lie he’d ever told.

“Let’s go!” Aylan called now, a half-a-beat late. Without realizing it, he had been waiting for Torrant to give the command.

With Heartland and Courtland in the lead, the last of the Goddess people in Duance disappeared into the darkness.

The walk to daylight only lasted a few hours, but Aylan spent that time listening to Torrant’s labored breathing, to Yarri’s soft singing to Starren, and to the periodic calls across the vast arm-span of black that separated the two animals. The Goddess folk were probably murmuring behind him, but that was never what he remembered.

Instead: “Torrant? Aylan?” It was always Yarri. Starren’s face had gone stark white with the first sight of the tunnel, but Bethen and Lane’s youngest daughter wasn’t stupid or selfish or vain. She had seen Torrant’s wounds, she had seen Aylan’s face as he’d crashed through the door, knowing his brother, his lover, his friend had been grievously hurt in his stead. It was awful, being in that heavy, thick blackness again, and she sat her horse and shivered in Yarri’s comforting clasp—but she didn’t complain.

Anything that got Torrant to safety was something she would endure, just like the rest of the family.

“Torrant? Aylan?” Yarri’s voice would wobble in the darkness.

“Hush, Yarrow, we’re here,” Aylan would reply, and Yarri would go back to singing Starry’s favorite song—the one that Torrant had brought home the day Aylan had met the family—to the clopping rhythm of the horses hooves.

Torrant’s heart labored under the scarred skin, and the pain must have been truly horrendous because he twitched sometimes and threatened to send them both out of the saddle. By the time the first glow of sunlight warned them of the over-bright sky to come, Aylan felt as though he’d been bathing in a reeking blind vortex of his own sweat and his brother’s blood for all of eternity.

But suddenly it was over. The people behind them, who had been in too much awe and fear of their wounded hero to make much noise, began to mutter, and suddenly they were blinded. Even the horses, who snorted and whickered, acknowledged the light after the terrible darkness.

When Alec of Otham led the group of soldiers to the mouth of the tunnel, Aylan suddenly wished he were blind again.

In fact, not for the first time nor for the last time ever, he wished he was wounded, bleeding out his life into Torrant’s arms, instead of the other way around.

Torrant, that bastard, he had it easy.

“Aylan?” Alec’s kind, lean face with its dominant blade of a nose was barely more than a larger spot in Aylan’s vision, but he could imagine the puckers of fear that went with the terrible disappointment in that voice.

“I’m sorry,” Aylan muttered, squeezing his eyes shut and opening them again.

“Aylan, where’s my wife?” Alec begged, and Aylan shook his head again, clutching Torrant to him like a shield from the wound of such terrible news.

“We had to leave the regents behind,” he said, looking Alec as close to in the eyes as he could manage, “Trieste…she wouldn’t leave Eljean…”

“Eljean?” The suspicion in Alec’s voice was too much to bear. Aylan looked around with his clearing vision and saw Zhane, his arms around Torrell’s daughter, Arue, busy taking a blanket from one of Alec’s guardsmen and putting it over the girl’s shoulders.

“Yes, Eljean,” Aylan muttered, looking away before he caught those hurt, sloe eyes. “He fancies himself in love with this one…” oh gods, he couldn’t even say his brother’s name! “and ripped himself in the belly to distract the guards while we got away…now we need to get him to Aldam, and soon…”

“Wait a minute…” Alec finally stopped looking for Trieste and started thinking like the gods instead of the Goddess, “Is that the Moon’s youngest daughter?” Yarri had sent sketches of her family to Trieste for the past five years—Alec knew them like he knew his own staff . “Don’t you need to get her home?”

Aylan looked over at Starry, and suddenly he stopped thinking like the gods, and started thinking like the Goddess. “Dueant’s maimed heart!” he swore. She was hunched and miserable, and Yarri kept rubbing her arms and murmuring reassurances into her ear. The two young women were cuddled on the horse with the familiarity of sisters, but it was obvious that not even a sister could ease the terror of being back in the tunnel, even for a few hours instead of a few days.

“Stanny left with Roes a week ago,” Alec said distractedly. “Trieste stayed on her own?”

Aylan pulled his attention back to his other ‘little sister’ and he tried to give Alec all the information he’d need. “She was planning to stay with Eljean as he was arrested,” Aylan said thickly, the full import of this action sinking into his consciousness like a lead weight in oatmeal. “Eljean’s a regent—the other four regents are going to lobby against Rath to try to get them released…” oh gods…a sudden memory of the no-longer young men who had been enlisted to help give out blankets and food in a long ago summer.

“They were supposed to come with us…” his voice cracked into a raw whisper. “We were all supposed to leave together.”

“I don’t understand!” Alec cried, his voice and his ineffable command cracking in agony. “Why would she stay behind?”

“She said…” Aylan remembered Trieste’s secret, wistful looks at her husband’s letters, the way she would mention his name with reverence, and not too often, in case the extent of her homesickness would make them uncomfortable, and he found that the words came much easier than they had for Zhane. “She said that she could not desert a brother, not even to make a lover happy.”

“Damn you,” Alec choked. “Damn your whole honor-bound family…what are you going to do with Starren? Bethen’s ill…”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” Aylan tried not to shout. “We need to…” and oh gods, after that terrible lie to Zhane, these were the words that stuck in his throat, “We need to find somebody to take her home,” he said on the second try. His arms ached, he thought miserably. He had been holding Torrant on horseback—a thing he’d never thought would be a difficulty—but Goddess help him, he’d been doing it for hours, and the ache alone was enough to make him weep.

Suddenly Torrant gave a twitch and a shudder in his arms. “You have to go with Starren,” he said, as pellucid as a crystal fountain.

“Go to hell!” Aylan cried, only to have Yarri and Starren dismount and move stiffly to argue with him.

“They’re going to block the underground pass through the Hammer, Aylan,” Yarri told him gruffly. She reached out her shaking arms, as though forgetting that she was tiny and didn’t have enough leverage to help Torrant down, even if her legs could carry the two of them. There were deep circles under her eyes, and her face was pale and wan. Aylan had roomed with Torrant and Aldam enough to know about the care and feeding of a pregnant woman, and the sudden, terrible weight of responsibility for the people Torrant loved almost smashed the air from his lungs.

“Alec,” he croaked, his own muscles trembling from Torrant’s leaden burden, “Alec—move her. Feed her. Get her a place to sit. We’ll put Torrant on the cart and I’ll take them to Moon Hold.”

Suddenly Torrant’s body felt lighter in his arms, and Torrant’s weary voice marched, weak but clear, giving orders as he always did. “You will take Starren home, brother, and that is the last I’ll hear of it.”

It would have been, but Aylan argued. He argued as Alec’s soldiers hefted Torrant down and the keening hiss that dragged through Torrant’s throat made every voice in the little camp around the tunnel hush but Aylan’s own.

He argued as Yarri shoved big pieces of bread and cheese down her gullet. She and Starren crouched down by Torrant in the back of the cart and Yarri tearfully told her young cousin to give Bethen their eternal love. Alec kept telling them the tunnel would be sealed until the country was settled. It would be weeks before they could leave. This was Starren’s one chance to get out of the country in time to see her mother, and the girl didn’t say a word, didn’t beg, didn’t plead, at all. What she did, in fact, was sit at Torrant’s head and smooth his hair back and whisper reassurances to his quiet messages to her family.

It would have been a betrayal of all the Moons had given them in the way of family, love, and honor to not at least try to get her home in time to say goodbye.

But still he argued. And in the end, the person he was arguing with, the one person who would hear none of his excuses, was the one flirting with the star’s dark.

“It’s time, Aylan,” Torrant muttered, as Aylan tearfully tried to convince him that someone else could take Starren.

“But I’ve had your back for a year, you arse!” Aylan shouted, no longer even pretending the world couldn’t hear. “How can you tell me to leave you now, when you need me most of all!”

“You’re not leaving me to my death, Aylan,” Torrant smiled a little, trying to make the situation less dire, but he had been coughing blood since they laid him in the cart, as though the blood seeping through his cocoon of blankets was not enough of a scarlet scream of grim possibility.

“You’re leaving him to me,” Yarri said gently, taking one last, hard swallow of food that she obviously needed but had no stomach for. Aylan was crouched in the back of the borrowed wagon next to Starren now, and Yarri hopped awkwardly out the end and stretched out an imperious—and steady—hand to help them down. “It’s time, brother,” she said softly. “You’ve had his back for a year—now it’s time to let me take him to his other brother, right? Honor is great for fighting, but not so great for healing—and that’s what he needs. Starry needs her Honor now.”

“Don’t talk to me of gods…” Aylan snarled.

“Then don’t talk to me like you’re not the Son of Oueant!” Yarri snarled back, her first sign of spirit since forcing Torrant to accept Eljean’s dreadful bargain. “It doesn’t matter how this ends, Aylan. The act you would never forgive yourself for is the one where you’d fail your honor. Don’t you see—that’s why he’s telling you to go. Not because he doesn’t want you to see him die,” she squeezed her face tightly, so she could keep talking, “but because he doesn’t want you to regret the choice you should have made. She’s yours, brother. And our family is yours. And you know how you need to serve us.”

Aylan’s cry of anguish once again sealed the camp in silence, and when the echoes had faded, he knelt to his brother and kissed his forehead…“You unlivable wank,” he growled, “if you die, I’ll forsake my honor. I’ll die like Djali, my blood staining the seas, my honor streaming behind me like entrails, and I’ll be able to do it because my wounds will finally be my own. If you let this wound take you, I will never forgive you, and the family will never forgive me, and Triane and Oueant will crash in the sky and burn the world in the flames of their destruction. You live, Torrant. You live. Your beloved is carrying your children, and if that’s not a reason to stay rooted to this world then you are not the man I’ve loved.”

“Aylan,” Torrant murmured, his voice fading into finality. “Good speed, brother. I love you.”

“I love you too…” Aylan choked, and once more he screamed anguish into the bright spring morning. Then he and Starren were on Heartland’s back, thundering towards home without even taking time to wash.

Yarri clambered back up so she could watch them go from the back of the wagon, Torrant’s head pillowed in her lap. Zhane and the other Goddess folk were coming to Moon Hold, although Alec had told them as concisely as he could there were no guarantees of safety there either.

“We’re going in—if they don’t give me Trieste, I’m going to take your precious city and grind it to dust.” It was an oath he took seriously, but Torrant, even from his back, clutching his life force to his body with the force of woven threads, couldn’t abandon his brothers to their fate.

“There are friends in there—good men. They’ll be trying to get her out—please, Alec—they’ve risked their lives. They could have come with us but they stayed… please…” he coughed again, the dangerous cough from his wounded insides that brought up dark blood, and Alec swore, long and angrily, and then gave his word that he would do what he could to keep them safe.

And Yarri thought miserably that there must have been something wrong with her, something defective with her heart, compared to all of the damned glorious children of honor who swarmed around her like flies, because she would have given them all—Eljean, the young regents, even Trieste—just to have her beloved safe and whole in her arms.

“No you wouldn’t,” Torrant mumbled, and she bent down to hear him over the creak of the wheel.

“No I wouldn’t what?” she asked, but she was certain he knew. He’d known her every thought, the deepest darkened corners of her heart from the moment she’d drawn breath.

“You wouldn’t trade me for them.” Yes, oh yes, he still knew everything in her heart.

“I already did, beloved,” she murmured, stroking his shaggy white streak back from his face. Perversely, she wanted him to talk to her. It meant that he was planning to live. “And I’d do it again,” she added, “and not because you’re the savior of the Goddess folk, and not because you’re a Healer who helps hundreds of people. Not because you’re a poet, Torrant Shadow. I’d trade them all just for you, because you’re mine, and you love me.” It was best that he know, she thought wretchedly. It was best that he know how Goddess-blinded she was, had always been, by him. Best he know that she was selfish, and self-centered, and that she had no honor where he was concerned.

If he knew that, knew it all the way in his thread-beating heart, he’d know that she needed him—with all of her selfishness, she would need him to keep the planet from wobbling on it’s axis.

“Of course I love you,” he said dreamily, his consciousness an ephemeral thing. “How could I not love you? You’re my promise, Yarrow Moon, you’re spring after harsh winter, and rain after the closeness of clouds…but I got you too early…I got you too early…I didn’t earn you yet… Ellyot gave you to me…I needed to pay him back.”

Oh gods. She wanted to hang her head and weep. “You paid him back by getting me out,” she told him. “All Ellyot ever wanted was for us to survive…”

Torrant laughed, a hollow, strength-less sound. “You don’t remember him, beloved. He would have grown to be such a fighter… he would have killed Rath already, and this would all be over.”

“No it wouldn’t.” Oh, gods, she had to keep her emotions steady as the cart creaked around them and the obscene sunshine promised warmth it wouldn’t deliver. How was she supposed to get him to Aldam alive if she couldn’t stop weeping? “It wouldn’t be over because Rath’s ideas would still be here…you did what Ellyot couldn’t, beloved.

You’ve killed his ideas. Even if he lives, nobody believes in him anymore. When he no longer rules, Clough will no longer follow him. You did that.” Oueant save her, it was true. All those months, meeting in secret, being constantly afraid for him when he was out of her sight, and it only made sense to her now, when she was defending him from a ghost.

“You’ve done it, Torrant…let it go. Turn all that will on healing… heal, and all you’ll ever need to be again is mine.”

He nodded, falling out of consciousness with her name on her lips, and she stroked his hair and prayed.

The wagon creaked steadily on.

Aldam was waiting for them. It had hurt to give Roes into Stanny’s care, her body lumbering with their daughter already, but she had to bring his love to Bethen.

And he had to stay for Torrant.

Torrant had left him behind, this one terrible time, and it wouldn’t be right in Aldam’s heart until he saw his brother home.

Fredy stayed with him, and some of the heartier men and women who had been smuggled out of Dueance. Roes and Aldam had won some strong loyalties that winter, simply by providing for the people and keeping them alive and safe until spring.

So it was Fredy who gave the first shout that someone was coming, and there was something in his voice, something odd and fearful, that had Aldam running as fast as his large, square body could take him from the newly built porch to the clearing at the front road.

When he saw the wagon with no Torrant on horseback, he knew what was wrong.

Aldam literally scrambled over the wagon’s side before it stopped moving, but Fredy and Grand were there to help Zhane to the front so it didn’t matter.

Yarri was holding his head in her lap, touching his face and singing to him, and his breath was rattling in his chest and there was blood on his mouth and blood everywhere, and when Aldam put his hands on his brother he had a sudden vision of that poor frog, skin pinned to the sides like a grisly butterfly, his internal organs open to the world in a way that was obscene and pornographic. A body was NEVER meant to look like that. Especially not Torrant’s.

“You left me!” Aldam exclaimed, running his hands down the front of the seamed sheet.

“Hullo, Aldam,” Torrant rasped, his smile sweet and pleasant as though death weren’t only a few breaths away.

“If I had been in the city with you, I could have healed you as soon as this happened!” Aldam continued bitterly. He found the seam of the sheet and pulled out his belt-knife and began to rip.

“Aldam,” Yarri said dazedly, riding the ragged weft of exhaustion, “don’t you want to wait until we get inside to…”

But Aldam had ripped the seam, and then the intact shirt-- which he didn’t even question. When he saw the extent of the damage he turned back to his brother, his anger filling his chest. “And if I had been with you, this would not be nearly so hard as it is right now!”

And with that, he put his hands gently and firmly on the ravaged skin, the profanity of organs seeing the light of day, the gore and the fascia, and the horrifying mess of what had once been a perfect body, and glowed.

The whole world stopped breathing to watch Aldam glow, to watch as the silver-gold-violet luminescence took over his hands and then his body (playing wildfire havoc with his fuzzy hair) and then gape as the light spread down to engulf Torrant. The glow stuttered for a moment, around the flesh and disaster of the stomach, but Aldam cried out, fighting as only Dueant could, and the glow took over, strong, sure, and glorious, boiling from both of them until Yarri cried out from the pain of looking at it.

With her shout, it began to fade, and soon there was only Aldam, on his knees next to his brother, weeping a little with weakness and worry. Torrant’s wound was not completely healed, but the things that had fallen out were now back inside, and the jagged, ripped edges were now cleaner, and would heal together with less trouble.

Torrant gazed at his brother with wide eyes, filled with awe. “I’d forgotten how wonderful you are, Aldam,” he murmured his breath easier than it had been in hours. “How could I have forgotten that?”

“It’s your own damned fault,” Aldam snapped. “It’s what you get for leaving me behind.”

There was a silence then, interrupted only by the whickering of tired horses under the arching oak trees. Usually, Yarri thought with a muzzy, wandering mind, Torrant would be issuing orders, organizing things to make them work. “We should get him inside,” she said, trying to make her voice strong, “and get the people situated. Alec said he won’t be able to protect us, and by tomorrow, there will be fighting outside the city. Anyone who gets through will be coming here, and they won’t be friendly.”

She looked at Torrant, feeling the comforting weight of his head in her lap, and realized that for all her brave words, she might not have the strength at the moment to stand.

“I can feel them,” he murmured, snuggling into her as Aldam fussed with his wound some more, getting him ready for transport.

“Mmm?” He would live, she thought, the surge of relief battering at the insulated shell of peace she had built for herself over the terrible journey.

“The babies…I couldn’t feel them in your stomach before…but now…” he smiled, “now I can hear their heartbeats.” Torrant closed his eyes again on this thought, fading into sleep, and Aldam caught Yarri’s darkening vision with his own tear-shot face.

“He still might die,” Aldam said seriously, “but not just yet.”

“Right,” Yarri nodded, the relief receding and leaving her naked. “But he might still live too, right? We can’t lose him, Aldam—you know that. Not and lose…” Bethen too. The family’s joys, the both of them, their celebration of all that was good. But she couldn’t say it. Could barely think it. And what was worse, as Zhane, Fredy, and Torrell hefted Torrant onto a piece of sailcloth to gurney him inside, she didn’t think she could stand and follow on her own two feet. How could she do this, how could she have the strength to be a vessel for his children when she didn’t have the strength to think about a future without him?

“Don’t worry, Yarri,” Aldam murmured, scooping her up and scooting her out of the wagon in Torrant’s wake. “I have you. I’ll put you next to him—you two could never sleep right when you were apart, not even when you were children.”

“Torrant’s right,” Yarri mumbled. “You really are amazing. How could we forget how amazing you are?”

“I just hope I’m amazing enough,” Aldam wished mournfully, and then Yarri, too, was fast asleep.

Both clans were absolutely silent for the part of the ballad when Triane’s Son was in eclipse. Through the years, Torrant’s and Aylan’s children had taken to noticing the terrible, skin-thrumming tension between the two men during this part. It had been their first lesson that some wounds never healed.

Eljean’s companion was the only exception to the general silence. He turned in Eljean’s arms and looked in awe at the older man.

“That’s who you were named for?” he asked with avid eyes. “You were named for the man who stayed behind in your father’s place?”

Eljean shrugged, embarrassed. “So was Ellyot,” he said. “It’s not particularly noteworthy.”

“Oh no,” said the boy. “You were named for someone special—you don’t understand—that’s everything.”

Eljean’s twist of the lips reminded his father, had he known it, of his namesake. “It’s a hard thing to live up to,” he muttered in a moment of unexpected vulnerability.

He looked across the sea of Moons and saw his father looking at his son with compassion and understanding, while his mother looked only at her husband. Torrant had always known the names had been a burden, but, as he’d told his sons on many occasions, it was important to remember who had made their existence possible.

Eljean looked at his father with the same compassion and understanding as Torrant began the riff starting the last refrain of the ballad. His father never spoke of his own burdens, Eljean thought achingly. He would praise Aylan, and Yarri, Aldam and all of the young regents, but he never spoke of the terrible scars on his body, or the fact that he never went without his shirt at the swimming hole. The ripping shrieks that would rend the house during the dark of the morning for the weeks following this song at solstice were never mentioned, and neither was the fact that Aylan, sleeping peacefully at his father’s side, was the only presence that could calm him.

By example and compassion, Triane’s Son had created a generation of pain-locked heroes. Eljean might resent it sometimes, but he never regretted knowing whose name he bore.

Torrant looked at his son again and smiled kindly, and Eljean smiled back, tightening his embrace on his young companion. The music picked up, the bridge began, and the moons and the stars spun their dance through the melody again.

Part XIII—Moons in Eclipse

The Heart of the Star’s Dark

Yahnstone Rath could choose one of three window views from his rooms above the palace.

The north window, the window in his bedroom, faced the mountains. That view made him shudder—they were so much bigger than he was, and so brutal, and so awesome. He hated that he couldn’t subdue them to his will, so he blocked that view with heavy curtains.

The east-facing window looked out partially over the Regents’ Hall, but mostly over the town. He could see the Goddess ghettoes to his right, when he looked out that window, and sometimes, when he was making his plans to purge his beautiful, perfect city of that one last pestilence, he would stare out that window and will the scurrying vermin within to conform to his wishes. That was his planning window, but it wasn’t his favorite.

The view he preferred looked out over the square—he could see the regents’ flats, the Regents’ Hall, the lawn in the center, where his people gathered for the announcements, and the stone canopy from which the unfortunate whore had bounced before landing on the steps of his palace.

He hadn’t been able to shake that image, and as he stood now, studying the lights in the regents flats and trying to figure out who was home and who was out, he couldn’t come up with a satisfying answer as to why the thought of that bouncing body should trouble him. She had been a whore—and worse than that, she had been the whore who had contaminated his son.

That was how he’d thought of Djali, since Rath had seen the abomination of poetry Ellyot Moon had handed him—contaminated.

Djali had been contaminated by the filth of the ghettoes and the soil spewed by Ellyot Moon. His death was immaterial—from the moment Djali first touched Ellyot Moon’s hand in friendship, he had been contaminated, and that’s all there was to it.

And now, that contamination had spread to Rath’s country.

Oh, Rath had been sure that getting them out of his city was good enough—Dueance was the heart of learning, the shining jewel on his crown, showing the world that he had created a perfect place. Building the immolatorium for the Great Whore’s grunion should have erased them, removed their taint from his beautiful city like a spot from a shirt.

But Triane’s Son…whoever Triane’s Son was, really, had changed all that.

The Secretary General entered behind Rath.

The man had another name once—a real name, a name you would call a friend or at least an ally. Before Djali’s contamination, Rath might have remembered him. It was always useful to remember the ambitious and the ruthless.

And the man had been useful—he had done what had needed to be done.

But he had failed Rath in the matter of Djali, and Rath was not good at forgiveness. It was too late to remove the man from office, but Rath found it hard to speak to the man, to confide in him…and thus…his name had simply faded from memory.

But Rath was used to talking to people…someone…anyone in his apartments.

He’d found himself calling for Ulvane this winter, and had been relieved when none of the servants seemed to have heard him.

He had formed a useful association with Dimitri, the young man who had been alienated from the young regents that summer. For a moment he contemplated having the Secretary General call for him, and then he remembered the young man was dead.

The Secretary General cleared his throat discreetly. Oh yes—what to do about the perverted wastrel who had killed Dimitri. Rath remembered now.

“His visitor is ready?” Rath pulled that bit of business from far away. He didn’t like thinking about visitors—especially the real regents, the ones who had let their weaker sons come in and pretend to the station—in his special apartments under the palace. In this particular case, it had been unavoidable.

“Yes, King Consort,” replied the Secretary General. “Are you sure we want to do this?”

“The man claims to have killed another regent…”

“And everybody says he was wounded first…”

“Don’t interrupt me!” Rath snarled, startling even himself. He’d lost his composure. How odd. He swallowed, realigned his features for serenity, and tried to complete his thought. “I know he didn’t kill the two men in the square,” he said evenly. “The man is a flaming Whore’s pervert—everybody knows those people don’t have the stomach for killing. He’s a wailing girl, a faggot—it is not him I want. What I do care about is that he must know who did. And whoever killed those two, so quickly and so coolly, is either Triane’s Son, or knows where the rebel is hiding.”

The Secretary General nodded, seeming to concede the point, and Rath had a moment to wonder at the rabbit-fear on the man’s face. What did have the man so skittered? “I am aware of what we want from him,” said the Sec/Gen (as Dimitri had called him—oh, how that young man had been everything Rath had wanted in a protégé!), “but I am not sure if you realize how determined the regents are that he be freed. They are threatening an impeachment—in fact, they are threatening to hand your crown over to Alec of Otham within the week if you don’t release the young regent and Alec’s wife.”

“I’ve heard.” Rath had heard, but he wasn’t sure he had heard right. The fact was, every time someone mentioned it—and it had been more than mentioned on the floor—his mind seemed to be elsewhere. Suddenly he was thinking about Ulvane, and the smile on his face as they’d found him dead. Or the way that girl’s body had bounced off the stone canopy, and the shocking spray of crimson that it had taken weeks to scrub off . Or the bloodstains on the song his son had written.

He had no son.

“Yes,” Rath said now, because it seemed incumbent upon him to make some response, “I don’t think that will happen.”

“But sir…”

Rath didn’t lose his temper this time. He simply smiled, a benign, munificent smile that radiated peace and complete satisfaction with the way the country was being run. “You don’t understand…” Rishard. That was the man’s name. How odd—they’d been working as a team for the last twenty years. “Rishard—you don’t understand. It won’t happen, because it can’t. Because I’ve been working on this project my whole life. The country won’t be taken from me now. It’s simply an impossibility.”

Rath smiled again, and the Secretary General—Rishard—began to back away slowly. “Alec of Otham’s men have the city surrounded,” Rishard said, his colorless eyes awash in his iron gray brows and his iron gray hair. “There are rumors that they are fighting in the streets of the ghettoes with the brigands there…sir, there’s rioting in the streets. It’s all we can do to contain it.”

“Why would there be rioting in the streets?” Rath frowned. “They’re the Whore’s mewling babies, they don’t fight back!”

“The thing is, sir—I think they’re gone.”

“Gone,” repeated Rath blankly.

“Yes,” replied the Secretary General fearfully. “The only people in the ghettoes now are the criminals we were hoping would kill off the rest of the populace. We’re not sure where they’ve gone, but only the brigands remain.”

“Good,” responded Rath absently, although it was not good at all. It was just that…when he looked out the window just so, he could still see the way her jaw caught the concrete, and her neck snapped, and the bones of her arm buckled and thrust through her skin.

The giant snow cat that followed her down hadn’t been half as awful as watching her skull cave in.

“Good,” Rath repeated. “They’re gone…all gone…all we have to do now…” he turned that unpleasant, vacant serenity on the Secretary General—what was the man’s name again?—once more. “All that’s left to do is find out about Triane’s Son, have someone just say that he’s Ellyot Moon. Just once. And we’ll be perfect.”

“Yes sir.” The Secretary General literally shrank out of his presence. Rath continued to gaze serenely out the south-facing window, into the darkness of the lawn and the brightness of the lights where the regents, his regents, awaited their king’s next order. There used to be a snow- cat’s skin on the floor of this room. He’d had it removed—he couldn’t remember why.

To his left, in the east, there was an orange glow shattered by the facets of the thickly paned glass. To the left, in the east, his city was burning.

Rath maintained his serene vigil into the Regents’ Square.

Brothers In Arms

Trieste sat, shivering, on the cool, dry stone floor, several stories under Rath as he contemplated his mockery of utopia. Her arms were wrapped so tightly around her knees that she almost couldn’t feel her fingers.

She wished desperately for her knitting.

She might have remembered to bring it, actually, but they had… they had…they had…

Eljean was sitting next to her, and his arm came around her shoulders in comfort. She leaned into him, as she often had in the past few days, and he kissed her hair like an older brother.

“I’m sorry about Suse,” he said for the thousandth time, and for the thousandth time she nodded and closed her eyes so tightly her head hurt, and the little bit of bread she’d eaten gnawed like a rat in her stomach.

Oh, Goddess. They’d killed him. All he’d done was open the door, trying to preserve the civility and the innocence—oh, they were innocent. They had all been innocent, in their quest to keep the people safe, to keep Torrant safe. And Suse, in all that innocence, had opened the door…

And been struck in the heart with a sword while the guard laughed at how easily he was killed.

She’d been numb then, as she and Eljean had been taken.

Torrant’s fate had been so tenuous, so in question, that she couldn’t bear to think about it.

Alec’s presence had been so near, and yet so far—a taunting shadow on the outside of her consciousness.

Aylan and Starren…oh, there, she had hope. Hope that they’d make it home in time to see the only mother she’d ever known die, but it had been hope all the same, because they carried her heart with them.

But Suse…plain, practical Suse, who had dealt with everything from moving her possessions to scheduling her appointments…oh, sweet Dueant, what would she tell the man’s children? He had volunteered because his family loved her and loved Alec, and she hadn’t thought… no one had thought…

Oh, Goddess…if they could kill her Suse, her friend…then anybody she cared about could die.

Eljean started talking to her, as he had for the past three days and she listened because he was funny and dry, and because he cared for her and she for him. Plain old uncomplicated brotherly love, right there. It was gorgeous, she thought fuzzily, after the terrible undercurrents between Torrant and…well, anybody who loved him.

It was hard to love Torrant Shadow and not get caught up in the blinding tangle that was the sweet boy she loved at University and the grim, magnetic general who had so successfully undermined a government. And the way his body and his smile seemed to attract everyone… Eljean’s complete physical indifference to her was a soothing relief, she thought now, leaning into his simple, animal comfort.

And Eljean loved her like a sister, and that was nice too.

There was a scraping and a disturbance from the stone hallway in front of their cell, and they both looked warily up.

“You’ve got a visitor,” the guard sneered, “Triane’s Son.”

Eljean wrinkled a nose at the man—he was a short, thin, pox-ridden runt of a man, who had delighted in mashing their bread between his dirty hands as he’d served it to them, and had stayed in the room blatantly to watch Trieste relieve herself in the overflowing bucket in the corner. Eljean had started standing up in front of her as a shield, and once, in a fit of supreme impatience, had dropped his own trousers and waved his manhood around, saying, “Here—watch me take a piss, why don’t you! Oh, I forgot—that’ll get you crucified!”

The man had run away, genuinely frightened of the threat, and Trieste had been laughing so hard she’d almost missed the bucket.

But she had also been incredibly grateful. Eljean seemed such a private man, and he may have worn his heart on his sleeve, but he tried so hard to cradle that sleeve against his chest and keep it from any taint or stain that threatened.

That he’d had the courage to love Triane’s Son seemed to have been the one truly brave act in his entire life.

Trieste could identify with that. If she hadn’t had the courage to love Torrant Shadow, at least for a moment in her life, she never would have known her love for Alec—so much bigger, in the way of a woman and a man—was real.

The guard was still there, still sneering, and Eljean looked at him mildly. “Oh lucky you,” he rolled his eyes, and Trieste took her cue and arched her brows in response, “you got a bribe. Go spend that in the ruins your king has left of the market place, why don’t you? Maybe you can even do it with your skin intact!”

The little man shuffled away in his soiled black and teal livery, and Trieste looked at Eljean, who shrugged.

“I have an idea,” he said in response to her tacit question, “but if it is who I think it is, we’re no better off than we were before.”

He didn’t have a chance to finish, because their visitor entered.

“Triane’s purple tits,” Eljean swore, his eyebrows arched with a complete lack of surprise, “look who’s come to tell me I’ve failed him yet again.”

The tall man under the cloaked hood gave a smile that Trieste could only describe as ‘forced’. “You exaggerate, Eljean,” came the smooth reply, and the hood was swept back. Trieste had to blink, because even among the Moons, such a family resemblance was shocking. If there was a trace of Eljean’s mother in his narrow, plain features, you couldn’t see it by Eljean’s father.

Except, Trieste thought unhappily, she hadn’t thought of Eljean as being plain and unlovely, ever. Eljean had a thoughtfulness about the eyes, and an inclination to smile that obviously never touched this older man’s face.

“Absolutely,” Eljean agreed, his voice as bored as possible. “It’s all my fault, even when it isn’t, isn’t that right?”

The man’s mouth deepened, receding into his lean cheeks so far it almost disappeared. “I’m not here to argue with you—you know they’re going to torture you tomorrow, don’t you?”

Eljean blanched. “The thought had crossed my mind,” he said with a faint smile and admirable insouciance.

“Then what are you doing here?” His father’s voice was harsh, Trieste thought, and she shrank against Eljean, putting her arm around his waist, being careful of the untreated flesh wound at his stomach.

“Haven’t you heard? I’m Triane’s Son.” Eljean’s smile widened, as though the joke of him being the infamous Triane’s Son was too good not to share.

“Don’t be stupid—everyone knows that Ellyot Moon is Triane’s Son. All you have to do is tell us that, and tell us where he is…”

An indefinable emotion crossed Eljean’s face, and he bent for a moment and kissed Trieste’s brow, then gently disengaged himself from her and stood up to move towards the rusty bars of their cell.

He winced as he moved—the wound at his stomach was mildly infected, and the puffy edges of it tended to catch on the blood-stiffened fabric of Torrant’s old shirt. Trieste recognized it their second day in prison—it was one of the lot that she had made up for Torrant when she’d realized that he and Aylan couldn’t be talked out of the mad enterprise of going to Clough.

“Ellyot Moon,” Eljean said now, “is a kind, valiant man. He has done nothing but help the sick and the hungry, and try to convince Clough of her terrible folly. If you want to torture someone, if you need a scapegoat for your precious burning city, you’re better off torturing me. It’s not like I’m an asset to you anyway, is it, father?”

The senior member of the House of Grace blinked, and Trieste recognized that assessing, calculating look. It was a look that Alec had often, when dealing with a diplomat or a fractious landowner. It was a look that Lane or Bethen Moon would be ashamed to turn upon their own child.

“I’m sorry, Eljean,” said his father. “I didn’t mean to try to force you to do anything you didn’t want. It’s just that,” a noxious attempt at a winning smile that didn’t fit the contours of the narrow face, “I know how much you don’t like pain.”

Eljean’s lips twisted. “Yes, Farrar,” he savored the taste of his father’s given name like wormwood, “everyone knows how much I don’t like pain.”

With a care that the savaged fabric didn’t seem to warrant, he separated the torn edges and showed off his puffy, red wound. “I’m surprised I haven’t broken into a puling, whimpering traitor already.”

Farrar Grace stepped back in surprise. “I…I wasn’t aware that you’d already been wounded…” he stammered. “They…they assured me that you hadn’t…that you wouldn’t have…”

Eljean just shook his head. “There was a time,” he began conversationally, “when I would have done anything to please you, you know. I tried to ride horses, but I really think I hate the beasts. I learned how to hunt—even though it nauseated me. I followed you and Quent to the ends of the lands of the three moons. And you turned your back on me for a kiss.”

Now it was Eljean’s father who blanched. “You can’t hold that against me…” he murmured. “Eljean…it was the stableboy…”

“He was killed by Rath’s men in the massacre at Moon Hold, did you know that?” Eljean’s tone never altered, but the underlying import of his words made the nonchalance the more horrible. “Yes—he was probably going to handfast to Tal Moon in the spring. If either of them had lived. You must be so proud, father—two faggots in one mighty swing of your king. And now you’ll be rid of a third. By all means, go and tell the other cowards who hide in the hills and let their country be turned into a charnel house for the insane, what a patriotic citizen you are, getting rid of the Goddess’ children one man at a time!”

Eljean’s voice had risen to a snarl at the end, and Trieste was surprised—and a little relieved—to see the elder Grace flinch and step backwards.

“I wasn’t trying to get rid of you, Eljean,” he muttered, shaken.

“You weren’t trying to father me, either.” Eljean turned his back then and slid down the bars of the cell, then put his arms out for Trieste to come and sit with him. She did, without question, because for the last three days that quiet, human contact had been the thing that kept them both sane.

But Farrar Grace wasn’t through with his son yet. He sank to a crouch so that his lips were even with his son’s ear. “Eljean—I can’t save you from the torture if you don’t talk…I can’t. But here.” He found Eljean’s hand as it rested at his side, and pressed something into it. “These will take away most of the pain, my son. You don’t have to suffer needlessly—not for this villain who has come and poisoned this city against its king.”

Eljean picked up the little paper packet, and looked sadly inside, “May I ask you something, Father?”

“If you wish.”

Trieste risked a glance over her shoulder and saw that the tall man with Eljean’s features and gray in his hair had already stood and moved towards the dim stone hallway.

“That morning behind the stables, if one person—even one person—had whispered to you that choosing the path of the Goddess was not such a bad thing after all, that it didn’t make me less of a person, or less of a man, or—hell--even less of a political pawn, would you still have loved me like a son?”

Trieste saw a raw emotion—the first moment of sincerity in the entire meeting—cross Farrar Grace’s face.

“Perhaps,” he said softly.

“Good,” Eljean replied, still not looking behind him. “It will make the pain worth it.”

With that he crumpled the little paper packet in his fist and pitched it into the privy bucket with a sickening ‘plop’.

Trieste waited until his father disappeared down the hallway to turn to Eljean in a panic. “Eljean…that was…if they’re going to hurt you tomorrow, you want…”

Eljean kissed her forehead absently, his gaze still on a distant, long ago day under a translucent green canopy of trees. The boy who wanted to be his first lover looked at him with such intensity, such purity in his dark eyes, and the whole world seemed to stop for the soft touch of their lips.

“The night before my father caught me kissing my first crush,” Eljean said, his voice in that other still and perfect place, “my father gave me my first taste of red wine. Wine—alcohol, anything that numbs the senses—makes me talk the moons to shame, did you know that?”

“No,” Trieste replied, her heart in her throat. “I didn’t.”

“I told him about Kith’s dark eyes, and how beautiful they were. And the next morning, Farrar just happened to be there, by the muck pile, his boots touching that spot on his property for probably the first time in his life, when Kith touched his lips to mine.”

“Oh, Goddess, Eljean…”

“He wasn’t trying to spare me, Pretty Girl,” Eljean smiled a little, using Torrant’s nickname. It felt right, he thought, because her heart was as pure and as pretty as her elegant, oval shaped face. “He was just trying to get me to talk. I’m a coward, sweetheart, but I’ve decided that there are some things even I won’t do.”

Trieste wrapped her arms gingerly around his middle and wept soundlessly on his chest. “Eljean, my friend, I think you are many things. A coward is not among them.’

They sat like that, quietly comforting each other, until they dropped off to sleep on the cold stone floor.

But Eljean’s father was not their last visitor that long night.

A furtive sound behind them woke Trieste. Eljean had lapsed into a fever dream, his wound troubling him more than he cared to admit. She imagined he must have picked that little personality quirk up from Torrant, and the thought made her heart hurt. Oh, Torrant, you must survive.

Stretching enormously, she stood and stretched some more, then turned and found herself face to face with her husband.

“Oh Goddess!” She threw herself at the bars. Alec was there too, and for a moment they worked at touching hands to shoulders and lips to cheeks between the narrow metal, their movements too hungry for words.

“What in the star’s dark are you doing here?” she demanded after a frantic kiss. “Oh gods, beloved—I’ve missed you!”

“What am I doing here?” he asked, the laughter in his voice edged with anger and hysteria at once. “What are you doing here, Trieste? Aylan told me you wouldn’t leave—they were saddling your mare and everything, and you wouldn’t leave? How could you…”

“Shhh…” she murmured, her hand dropping to Eljean’s head. Eljean jerked under her touch, and he shook himself and turned, standing as he did so.

He didn’t have to be as perceptive as Triane’s Son to gauge the way Trieste was touching the man through the bars and know he was her husband. He took a few steps back and bowed awkwardly, “I’m sorry,” he murmured.

“Don’t be,” Trieste interposed. “Alec, meet Eljean. He…he bought time for Aylan and Torant to get away. Torrant…” oh gods…

“He was alive when I saw him last,” Alec confirmed, “and he was probably happier than Aylan.”

“He took Starren to Eiran, yes?” Please, Aylan, please, for once in your miserable wanking life put someone’s heart above your own honor…

“Yes,” Alec affirmed, and Trieste’s smile on that score did something to ease the ache in his chest. “Good,” he said with some relief, “if everybody’s accounted for, then I’m going to get you out of here.”

“Both of us, right?” Trieste looked behind her to Eljean, their faces lighting up. When she looked back at Alec, he was not nearly so happy. “Both of us, beloved, right?”

“I can get you, Pretty Girl,” he said with an apologetic grimace at Eljean. “Rath hardly knows you’re here. But he’s obsessed with this one,” a nod at Eljean’s direction. “Seems to feel that he’s the key to identifying Ellyot Moon as Triane’s Son. I’m sorry, Eljean—if I pulled you out, there would be a bloodbath, and my men aren’t in position to stop it.”

“I understand,” Eljean said tonelessly, and Trieste’s sharp look in his direction was met with a cavalier shrug. Trieste wasn’t buying it.

“But why!” Trieste looked at Eljean’s face again, so carefully schooled to be happy for her when she deserted him. “They must know by now that Eljean didn’t kill those men in the square—Aylan looks nothing like him, and Ellyot Moon looks nothing like Aylan!”

Alec shook his head. “Aylan? How is it that possible? I thought it must be T…Ellyot.” Alec ground out with a meaningful roll of the eyes.

“The cloak,” Eljean said politely and Trieste shook her head in purely feminine anger.

“Triane’s Son,” she said deliberately, “made sure he received all of Aylan’s wounds…”

“Oh gods,” Alec blanched and actually sat down. “Oh gods…no wonder…” His eyes fell on Eljean’s self-inflicted wound. “All of you, a lot of damned martyrs, all vying for some sort of award for pig-headed selflessness…Trieste, let me call the guard, and we can leave all of this behind…”

Trieste took one more look at Eljean’s expressionless face, and thought of the treacherous little tablets, dissolving in a bucket of piss. “I can’t,” she choked, and shook her head. “Oh, Goddess, I just can’t.”

Alec swore. “Don’t be silly, Trieste—your friend—he understands. The things they might do to you…Rath’s mad, you know that right? He doesn’t even acknowledge that his city is burning…he…he’ll have you hurt because you know Ellyot Moon. He’ll have you hurt because you were foolish enough to stay…” He wanted to roar. He wanted to weep. Oh Triane bugger herself, he wanted to break down the door of that terrible cell and throw her over his shoulder and haul her to safety.

She regarded him miserably, her entire face a study of agonized refusal.

“Please, Trieste?” He should have been ashamed at the humility in his voice to try to cajole one small woman to his will. Oh Oueant’s flaming piss, he was the King of bloody Otham and he was on his knees begging in a filthy prison cell where he’d come to claim his wife.

“No,” she said gently, crouching down to take his hands in hers. “No, beloved. I can’t leave him. It wouldn’t be right…”

“Trieste!” Eljean finally protested, at the same time her husband said, “Beloved!”

“No,” she said again, this time with a little bit of kind laughter in her voice. “No,” she shook her head at both of them, “You men, you think that this ‘brothers in arms’ thing is just for you, don’t you? Well you’re wrong.” She sniffed daintily into her sleeve. “All winter, Alec, all winter I tended their wounds, I watched them go out on the streets and risk their lives—yes, Eljean, even you, although you deny it. Rath had his guards out for three days running once—three days, Torrant and Aylan fought on the streets with no rest, no food…we had to sneak their mattress over the patio and destroy it, because it was soaked through with blood when the two of them finally returned.”

Her fine-boned, delicate woman’s hands gripped the dank iron bars in front of her as her memory made them tight. “The regents—Eljean, and his friends? They stood up and they joined that fight. It was insanity, Alec—it was seven men to an army, and the deepest wounds they suffered were the people they couldn’t save. Yarri and I, we went to teas and we played politics and we worried, every day and every night that they wouldn’t be there for dinner, and I tell you, beloved, that I may not love them like I love you, but I love them.”

She looked behind her at Eljean, and his small smile almost made it worth it. It mattered, this gesture of loyalty. It was, perhaps, the only moment of family Eljean had enjoyed in his entire life.

She continued on with increasing conviction. “I love them all, and I may not be a man with a sword, but I won’t desert them, just like they wouldn’t desert each other. I’m sorry, beloved. I’m so sorry…” her voice broke now, in earnest, and she was huddled on the floor, sobbing into her husband’s hands.

Eljean looked permission at Alec, who shrugged helplessly, his face locked in a painful, bitter scowl. With a nod, Eljean came behind her to comfort her as she told her husband in woman’s words, that she, too, had discovered that maybe she wasn’t such a coward after all.

Her sobbing stilled, and Alec looked at Eljean with frustration and an unbearable impotence in the matter of his strong, brave, and lovely wife.

“Is that why you’re here, Eljean?” he asked bitterly, stroking her fine, dark hair through the bars. “Are you here for brotherhood?”

Eljean smiled through his tears, a vestige of his customary insouciance making him seven shades of beautiful that he would never see. “No sir,” he said smartly, “I’m just here for unrequited love.”

“Of course you are,” Alec barked harshly, leaning his face against the rusty iron simply so he could smell her unwashed hair. “There’s not another reason in the world. I’ll fight for you, beloved,” he promised at last, quietly. “I can promise to raze the city for you. But I can’t promise you that they’ll leave you alone come the dawn. Please come with me…for the love of the moons and the stars in the sky, baby… please?”

“All you have to promise me, Alec,” Trieste said thickly against the back of his hand, “is that you’ll forgive us both if you fail.”

Alec closed his eyes so tightly he saw stars. Dawn was coming, and he’d promised the regents one more day of trying to get the two out without bloodshed should he fail. He wanted to break his word. For the rest of his life, he would wonder at the cost of keeping it, but ultimately, he knew that it came down to a simple answer. He couldn’t shame his wife’s courage with his own cowardice. She loved a man of honor, and he couldn’t disgrace her now.

“I’ll forgive you anything but death, do you hear me?”

She smiled faintly at the command in his rough voice, and nodded, touching his lips with her fingertips. He kissed them and issued more commands.

“Whatever they do to you, as long as you live to breathe in my arms again, that is all I will ever desire.”

“I’ll live for you, beloved,” she whispered, and with an anguished, animal cry and one last, awful, awkward kiss through the bars, he was gone.

Coming Home to Goodbye

Aylan would make the trip between Clough and Eiran under the Hammer many more times in his life, but none of them would have the terror of that first time.

There were torches at intervals, kept bright from the last wave of men come from Eiran to join the fight. There was even food and water at every torch station, and Aylan would later wonder at the impulse the Eirans had to leave succor for each other at every opportunity. So there was food and there was light, but in the few words they ever shared about that journey, both Aylan and Starren would admit that there was precious little in comfort.

They had ridden hard—more than hard, actually, they had ridden until the stout-gammed Heartland was puffing and blowing by the time they reached the entrance of the tunnel. They walked him then, and rested when they could, but the unrelenting darkness had made time irrelevant, and it was such a terrible, groundless feeling that man, girl, and horse had all walked past weariness to get clear of it.

By the time they saw the glow down the tunnel that indicated home was less than a half-day away, they were periodically stumbling with exhaustion. They had made a four-day journey in less than three.

Lane would tell him later that he was weeping when Heartland stumbled to a halt in front of the dear, crowded Moon home, but Aylan wouldn’t remember that.

He remembered Lane’s arms around them both, and the lovely, blissful weightlessness of having his father, the only real father he’d known, welcome him home.

He also remembered Lane’s first words. “Great Goddess—whose blood is that?”

Nearly four days, and neither of them had stopped to wash.

Aylan certainly remembered his fury, his impotent, bitter fury, as the story had tumbled out of the both of them when they were stripping in the mudroom.

Lane was listening in his usual kind way when Roes waddled in with clothes for both of them, and to hear the story with strained eyes.

“Holy Goddess, Roes!” Aylan snapped out of his anguish to find his soul filled with something sweet instead of bitter for a moment. “Are you and Yarri having some sort of contest?”

Roes’ shy delight seemed even brighter than the sunlight after the three days underground. “Aldam’s child,” she murmured, rubbing her belly absently. Aylan reached out and hugged her, and felt her hot cheek on his bare shoulder. “We’re going to name her after Mum.”

Aylan backed up and looked at Lane then, his eyes asking the question he had been afraid to voice since they’d arrived.

“She’ll be disappointed,” Lane said shakily, “that Torrant and Yarri weren’t able to make it home in time.”

Aylan nodded, seeing all the truth he needed in Lane’s suddenly aged face, the gray that had taken over his beard, the lines etched at his eyes. “Well then let us clean up and give her all the news of them, shall we?” he said gamely, and Lane smiled, glad that Aylan understood.

“Of course. She’ll be thrilled to see you both.”

“Da?” Starren’s voice trembled, and Lane turned towards her with his arms open for his baby girl alone. “I made her sicker, Da, didn’t I?”

“Shhh…no, baby. It just got worse fast…it wasn’t your fault… don’t worry…just go in and talk to her, I swear, she’ll be glad to see you.” Lane’s eyes met Aylan’s over Starren’s head, and Aylan had one more lie to add to his ever growing list of truths that would never be told.

Of course the worry had made Bethen worse.

If Aylan hadn’t known who was sitting in Bethen’s customary chair, dozing with some incredibly ugly knitting in her hands, he would have mistaken her for somebody else.

Her hair had thinned, and her skin had shrunk up to outline the bones of her face. Lines of pain had grooved themselves over laugh lines, and the corners of her mouth seemed to turn downward now instead of up. She was covered in blankets, but even those couldn’t hide the lumps under the skin of her arms and her shoulders where no lumps should exist. But when Aylan and Starren entered the room, accompanied by Starren’s hesitant, “Mama?” Bethen smiled brilliantly and held out her arms.

“Come here,” she rasped weakly. “Oh, my babies, I’m so glad you made it home!”

Aylan found himself wrapped in her arms next to Starren and once again, an awe-filled, blissful feeling of weightlessness singing to his heart of home. He found himself humbled, and cared for, and not regretting for a moment that Bethen took this one, last moment to take all his burdens from him and make him feel loved.

He thought he would cry, but he had cried too many bitter tears when he’d left Torrant, and besides--a body won’t let you grieve and howl for hours on end. Eventually it insists that there is dinner to be had, and the mind allows itself to be distracted by simple things. Small jokes get made, moments lighten, because there must be living in the midst of dying, or life wouldn’t be precious enough to miss.

“You know,” Aylan said, his voice passably steady after he’d sat down on the ottoman across from Bethen (and Roes brought him some much appreciated stew) “Yarri is pregnant too.”

Bethen smiled, a wearier smile than the one she’d given him and Starren as they entered, but grateful nonetheless. “That’s wonderful,” she croaked, “Roes—you and Yarri can raise your children together.” She turned to Aylan and refrained from saying the obvious—that she had always wanted to see her grandchildren—and said instead, “I made some baby shawls for you and Starren. I thought I’d chosen the color of your eyes, my boy, but your eyes are so much prettier in person.”

Aylan took her hand and kissed it. “Well, you know your every smile lives on in Starren,” he said with a game smile, and Bethen returned it delightedly.

“My beautiful children…” she murmured, and her knitting, that had been brought up to her chest for a moment, fell down quietly to her lap, and her eyes closed, and her labored breath slowed in sleep, just that quickly.

Starren put down her bowl of stew and picked up the almost completed sock in her mother’s hand.

“It’s really revolting, Cwyn,” she said to the brother who hadn’t stopped hugging her since he came back from bedding down the horse.

“Thank you, little sister,” Cwyn replied dryly, but he didn’t take his arms from around her shoulders. “I tried everything I could think of,” his voice dropped, “It didn’t work—that’s only the first one, and I don’t think she’s going to be able to finish it.”

Starren swallowed and patted her brother’s hands with her free hand. “It’s all right, Terror,” she said hoarsely. “I’ll finish it. I might mess up the second one, but I can try…”

“Absolutely,” Cwyn agreed, leaning his cheek against her still-damp hair. “I’d really appreciate that.”

But Starren didn’t move to start knitting right away, and Roes came in behind them and sat heavily down next to Stanny and Evya in the nearby couch. Lane was sitting on the arm of Bethen’s chair, stroking the once-vibrant hair away from his beloved’s eyes.

Together, they all sat, for just a moment, and listened to her breathing. It was very apparent that the sound might not continue through the night.

The Shore at Star’s Dark

Torrant thrashed around on the plain, sweat-soaked linens and moaned Bethen’s name. Yarri put down her knitting and sponged some water on his blistering forehead, and murmured his name—his true name--in a broken voice.

“Beloved, calm down…you’ll rip your wounds loose again—Aldam just healed you.”

Aldam, in fact, could probably not heal Torrant again in the next few hours without risking his own life. Yarri seriously thought that the only thing keeping him from doing it anyway was the thought of Roes, alone, with his daughter in her womb.

In fact she was pretty sure that same sort of thought was the only thing keeping her beloved tethered to the earth at all.

Aldam said that it would be close—Yarri just didn’t realize how violent Torrant’s fight to live would really be.

He thrashed again, this time calling her name, and she hefted herself up and put her cheek next to his, whispering in his ear. “I’m here, beloved. I’ve always been here.”

Her voice calmed him down—which was the only thing in the last four days that was reassuring in the least.

Torrant’s breathing even out, and she sat back down heavily. She had not truly begun to show, but her waist had thickened, and her bottom felt as though it had broadened like a flatiron in the last two weeks and she was tired, dammit, so she was just not light on her swollen feet these days.

As she resumed her knitting, her eyes wandered around the dusk-darkened little room—mostly to keep from searching the face of the man she loved, looking for vestiges of their shared childhood. As she’d tended him for the last four days, she would hear a snatch of a song from his roughened throat, or see the lines in his face relax with the sound of her voice, and for haunting moments, she could believe that they were both as young as they had been last year, or three months ago, and that his heart was still strong enough to pull him through the fever his wound had brought.

It wasn’t as though his heart hadn’t been taking a valiant stand in the battle already.

At least she knew that when she was looking at the room she wouldn’t find a single familiar thing to wound her hopes. Whatever her hazy recollections of their childhood home contained, these two small, one-floor houses with their many small bedrooms built around a hub of a kitchen were not among them.

She liked looking at the room, actually—Aldam excelled at woodwork, and he and Roes had been trapped in this particular house for much of their stay. Little things, such as the elegantly shaped moldings along the floor and the edges of the walls or shelves with beveling and vaguely flower shaped carvings made the room pleasant and special. The chill fresh air of early spring was coming in through a window shutter that had been hand carved and decorated in a similar way—there had been no panes of glass for the windows, but the fact that Aldam made sure every room had a shutter and a way to look outside spoke volumes about both the man and the hope he and Roes had brought to the refugees at Moon Hold.

Even the bed-frame was a marvel of elegant simplicity, with an embossed rose as the headboard centerpiece, and vine tendrils etched all along the edges.

Aldam had done everything he could to make a pretty place for his Roes, even if it was only for their first winter together.

The recycled wood, carved and whittled and sanded, contained love and hope and joy, and since Torrant’s face, often contorted in agony or battle rage, had none of these things, there were some times when Yarri would just prefer to look at the room and hope.

Every now and then, when his breath rattled in his chest, and he seemed at his absolute weakest, a terrible feline yrowwwlllll would burst from his throat, and when he opened his eyes they would be Goddess blue.

Aldam said it was a good thing. He said that if Torrant got strong enough to call the cat, he’d be strong enough to heal and make it stay, but all Yarri could think was that it wasn’t fair. All those years ago, he had called the cat to save their lives, and now, now that they were old enough to have a life of their own, it seemed as though answering to that thing had almost killed him.

It wasn’t a fair feeling, it wasn’t rational, but when you had been watching your beloved fight for his life for four days, rational didn’t always have a say, now did it?

Yarri heard a noise outside, and looked up.

Aldam hadn’t been her only visitor—Torrell had visited with herbed soups for Torrant and bread and cheese for her. Arue and Iain had slept at Torrant’s feet sometimes—it seemed like a habit for them, and she had been too grateful for their silent, kitten-footed company to object. Zhane had come in and sat with her, and they had spoken of Eljean, and how proud Zhane had been that his darling, spoiled regent had become such a man of honor.

Fredy had come in not long ago and nodded to the others in the room, and they all left hastily.

Something was happening—something Yarri should be concerned about, but no one wanted to burden her with. Torrant would have found out, she thought to herself, knitting one of the last remaining balls of precious sock yarn from Bethen. She had saved the oddments from the skeins, and thought maybe there would be enough for a blanket, and the fact that she allowed her mind to wander to making a blanket for the heartbeats in her belly made her more certain than ever that she was less than worthy a mate for the man who lay in the bed at her side.

There was a sudden clatter, and shouting from outside, and Yarri looked up through the shutter in time to see a contingent of men in the dreaded livery riding up the path to her father’s home.

Her hands froze, and so did her heart, in panic so severe it made her joints ache, and then Torrant took a horrendous gasp, and cried out, “Bethen! Eljean! Oh, Goddess, please!!!”

His eyes shot open, hazel, clear-sighted, but seeing something beyond her weary and terrified face, beyond the little room with its cheerful moldings, even beyond the pristine blue spring-twilight sky. He let out the breath on a shudder, blood coming with it, and Yarri looked outside, seeing the soldiers array themselves in front of the house and speak, hearing Aldam’s voice in reply. She held her hand to her mouth and bit down on her palm, hard, in absolute knowledge that Aldam couldn’t be called, not now, just when Torrant sat up in bed and choked, calling for Bethen and Eljean again, screaming from a throat raw with abuse already.

Yarri dropped her knitting and put both hands on his shoulders, forcing him down in bed, and heard, even over the sounds of the forced parlay outside, her own voice screaming at him, begging him, pleading…Please, Torrant, please…please, come back to me, be what you have to, change if you have to, but beloved, oh, please, please, beloved, come back to me…

Eljean had been screaming all day.

They had started with ripping out chunks of his hair, and then shoving exquisitely pointed, glowing-hot spikes under his fingernails, and he had gibbered like the puling rabbit he had always known himself to be.

He had begged for Torrant.

They moved on to other things, worse things, things he in particular had always dreaded, and in those scant moments when they let him recover, he had memories of his body being invaded by hot things and sharp things and obscene things. Cruel hands grabbed the edges of his wound and tore, then rubbed salt in it, and ground in, and he screamed and screamed until he wished the bastard who was screaming would stop shouting long enough for him to think.

And they flogged him and hurt him, and they asked for Triane’s Son.

And he begged for Torrant.

Nobody, not even Consort Rath, knew who Torrant was.

But still the agonies continued until he begged for death, welcomed death, prayed to pass out, and was often granted his wish.

And then he heard Trieste scream, and knew that he had failed, failed in the worst way, if they were doing to her what they were doing to him…oh, oh Goddess…please let her survive. His body was too ravaged, too destroyed…he knew, even in the midst of the desecrations in pain, he knew he would not survive that latest violation, the ripping of skin at his middle, what his intestines were doing in the wake of the piece of heated iron that had been shoved inside him…but Trieste. Not Trieste…not Torrant’s Pretty Girl who had, with his beloved, tried to be mother and sister to them all.

He sucked in a breath to scream and found that it left his chest without screaming. He breathed. The pain was still there, but his mad, animal panic at the pain was forced back, breath by breath … and in its wake, his mind simply stopped for a moment, and he cried out for Torrant, and suddenly, in that clear place left by his unfettered breath, there Torrant was…

On a riverbank, stretched out naked on his cloak in the sun, after that one perfect moment of making love to Eljean and showing him that the pain was worth it.

Torrant, Eljean chanted in that holy place, Torrant, I should have known you then…

Don’t worry about it. Eljean saw the young, handsome face, the devastating smile that curled the upper lip and pulled back the grooves in his mouth. He saw the hazel eyes, and their kindness and their warmth. I forgive you for being confused. I forgot my own name myself sometimes.

But you’re not him, Eljean begged. He died, you’re still breathing. That’s a gift, you know.

Oh, Goddess, those eyes could be so serious sometimes! Even from his cell, as his body was being annihilated one pain-center at a time, Eljean felt the stroke on his cheek and the forgiveness that was always a part of the man he’d loved most in the world.

Gifts have to be earned, came the sober reply, and Eljean was surprised to find suddenly that he was the wise one.

One last touch, one last chance to rub his thumb in the divot in the chin, to stroke the bright white lock that tumbled over the anxious brow. Of course they don’t have to be earned, he said, giving his lover his best and brightest smile, that’s why they’re gifts!

And then another voice spoke to both of them, a female voice, one that Eljean had never heard before. Oh, I like this one boy-o. I like him a lot. I’d be happy to make our journey in his company.

Torrant was no longer naked and--to his relief--neither was Eljean. Torrant ran to the woman, a tallish, plumpish, motherly sort of woman with freckles and bright russet curls and a smile that made all the world as bright and as sunny a place as this riverbank on a perfect day.

Auntie Beth…oh, I’m so sorry…I should be there…I failed so badly, Aunt Beth…I needed you so very much.

Eljean watched, amazed, as Torrant set down his burdens on the shoulders of this stout, imperfect woman who rubbed his back like she would a toddler’s and kissed his cheek the same way.

Oh, boy-o—the only way you could fail us now is to take this journey, ye ken? Me and Eljean here, we’ve got to go. There’s a boat on that river of stars, and it’s going to take us home, but you need to stay. Can you do that for us? Her voice dropped, concerned, sadder than stars. Please, my joy, could you please stay for us?

In a breath, Torrant was no longer the beautiful, if scarred, young man he had been by the end of the summer. Suddenly he was the battered, exhausted, practically eviscerated victim who had been shoved on the back of a horse and told to live for the sake of those who needed him. His body fell into the sun-heated sand, the blood from his stomach wound staining the gold with crimson. I’m so tired, Auntie Beth…

She settled down in the sand with Torrant’s head in her lap and stroked his suddenly shorn hair, and Eljean was dimly aware that somewhere else, his body was frozen icy with something horrible and irrevocable that had been done to it. Distantly, he looked at the river flowing by their little sandbank and saw that it was the color of a black-velvet sky, and in spite of the bright sunshine of their day and the way the light illuminated the dust on the leaves of the blackberry bushes, the three moons and a myriad of crystal-sharded stars were reflected on the rippled surface of the water.

Eljean suddenly hungered to go sit in the little wooden boat on the shore…it would be peaceful there, he thought…so peaceful… the idea of drifting down that river on a day like this was dreadfully magnetic…

Torrant moaned, just once, and Eljean plopped down into the sand next to him, enjoying the feeling of the sand beneath his hands.

You need to stay, Eljean said, more certain of this than he was of anything—even the fact that he would love Torrant to the end of that river and beyond.

You want to stay, Bethen corrected gently. Twins, my darling boy. Twins, like Ta l and Qir, a daughter for your beloved…twins for Ta l and Qir, my boy, a daughter for Yarrow Moon…

But what about Ellyot… the words were so pained…oh, Torrant, Eljean wondered, does your body feel like mine does?

Your survival is Ellyot’s survival, my boy. You are his gift to the world, and like any gift, you don’t have to pay the world a blessed thing. Now live. Live to comfort Lane. Live to be this family’s joy. Live to be Aylan’s balance, and Yarri’s beloved. There are so many reasons for you to stay, sweet boy. You’ll wake up one day, and you won’t be tired anymore, and if being tired is your only reason to go then that’s just not good enough.

Torrant groaned, a ripping, wrenching sound between three moons, and Eljean was surprised and saddened to see that even in this holy place, his eyes could still flash blue…

And then Torrant roared, the snow cat’s breath in the human’s body, and the sound echoed off the water and the hills, off the trees and the dust of what had once been Moon Hold, and then the echoes died down, and in their wake…

…there was a totally still moment…

When Lane bent down and kissed his beloved’s still, cooling brow…

When Yarri collapsed, sobbing, on Torrant’s still, unmoving chest…

When Trieste’s scream of his name echoed in Eljean’s still, soundless ears…

When Aldam stood in front of his brother’s old home, clutching a giant slushball in his large, grim hands and offered the still, amazed bunch of soldiers one last chance to live…

And then Aldam released the last ball of winter’s snow, spattering into the air, each snowflake bespelled with terrible death…

…and the Moon family fell into each other’s arms, sobbing farewell to their beloved mother…

…and Torrant hauled in one, last, glass-shrapnel breath and changed into the snow cat on the exhale, leaving Yarri clinging to his furry neck as he licked her face weakly in reassurance…

…and Eljean stood, alone on the beach with Bethen, offering his arm to her as they walked to the waiting boat.

Yarri sobbed her relief on her beloved’s now whole and perfect snow cat’s body, as a patter of snow whirled through the open shutter and landed harmlessly on her cheek.

Going Back

Aldam stood, surprised, and watched as one half of the small company of soldiers who had made it to Moon Hold disintegrated body part by body part.

It had been Fredy’s idea—as someone with a gift himself, he knew how these things worked. He assured Aldam that all he had to do was think the same thing with the snow in his hand as he had with the hammer, and whomever the snow touched would be doomed.

Aldam had been appalled at the suggestion—not all of them wanted to be there, he protested! What if some of them were like Fredy himself?

So they had worked on the spell a little, and as the slushball glowed in Aldam’s hands, it had been meant to target only those whose hearts would not heal from wishing the Goddess folk harm.

Hence Aldam’s surprise—there were a great many more soldiers left on their horses than he expected, although they didn’t stay there long.

Most of them ended up sliding off their horses to retch in the sloppy mud.

Aldam wobbled slightly and turned to Fredy. “Can I go check on Torrant now?” he asked anxiously. “I heard something in there a moment ago…”

Fredy was staring, eyes wide, at the devastation he had not only predicted, but orchestrated. “Certainly, Aldam,” he said, the awe in his voice lost on his friend. “By all means go in and make sure Triane’s Son will live.”

Aldam turned around happily, and Fredy looked out at the green and appalled faces of the men who had just surrendered to their own reluctance to slaughter.

“All right, maggots,” he snarled with relish, “if you think we’re going to clean up this mess, you’re mad. We’ll let you all live, but you made a right mess out of our home.”

He swung over the porch railing of the little house that Aldam had spent all winter perfecting, and went to the bunch of shovels and wheelbarrows that he’d had the members of the hold who were still in hiding gather when they’d first heard that soldiers would be on the way.

“So before you’re free to go,” he said with an evil little smile, “you’re going to make it bright and shiny again, you hear me?”

Some of the men, hearing his command, looked up at the bodies of the truly evil among them who had fallen to bloody pieces like dismembered chickens, and vomited again.

Fredy just grinned. “You all know, the more of that you do, the more you’ll have to shovel.”

Aldam slept on a cot next to the bed, and Yarri spent the night with her arms wrapped around the snow cat’s thick fur, sleeping for the first time in five days.

Considering how exhausted they were, it was easy for Torrant to awake the next day and slip out of the room unnoticed. He changed form once he got to the privy, and tested the strength of his shaky, human, still feverish limbs by washing himself down in the tub with icy water from the pump.

When he could still stand without spots dancing in front of his eyes, he wrapped a towel around his waist and went hunting for Fredy, who was in one of the other rooms with his sons.

Fredy was just waking up, and was both surprised to see Torrant and grateful for his apparent health.

“You had us all worried, my friend,” he said with a hearty smile and a clap across Torrant’s bare shoulder that made him stumble. Fredy’s eyes narrowed. “And after all of that, you’re not completely well, are you?”

Torrant grimaced and looked away. “May I borrow some clothes?” he asked politely. “My others are…” blood-stained, ripped, destroyed, “not really ready to be worn.”

“Yes, of course, my friend—but why would you not borrow them from Aldam?”

Even after the last year, Torrant was still bad at the casual lie. “I thought you and I might be more of a size,” he said lamely, and had to look away again.

The truth was that if he had to see them again, Yarri and his brave, amazing, wonderful brother of compassion, unconscious and innocent in their exhaustion from keeping him alive…if he had to see them again as a man and not the snow cat, he might not have the strength to leave.

It didn’t matter—they caught up to him at Alec’s base camp anyway.

He heard Yarri’s voice, shrill and angry, as he steadied Courtland to go underground and into the city. He’d been happy to see the old boy in the small, makeshift stable that had been built at the hold, but now he patted Courtland’s neck and said, “You must be getting slow, old boy—I would have thought you’d outstrip their horses easily.” It had been hard to convince Courtland that he wanted to come this way, actually—there were numerous fires inside of Dueance, and the smoke had been visible about two hours outside of Moon Hold.

Courtland snorted and looked at Torrant reproachfully—the idea that he was slower than any horse but Heartland was completely offensive to his horsy senses.

But Yarri and Aldam had him in their sights now, and he found that the weariness that had dogged him for the entire ride from the hold sat on his shoulders like a weight, and he couldn’t fight both it, and the ones he loved.

“I’m sorry,” he said as soon as Yarri got close enough to hear him speak quietly. “I’m so sorry. Leaving you two hurt more than you’ll ever imagine…but I had to.”

Yarri stopped short, and looked away, trying to make the emotional jump from righteous anger to strained understanding in one long heartbeat. “Why? Why would you leave us without even waking us to say goodbye?”

Torrant’s self-flagellating smile was painful for even the camp watchmen to see, and suddenly, the guarded entrance to the city was empty but for the three of them.

“Because I’m not that strong, Yarrow Root,” he said softly. “I’m not that strong…I woke up this morning and…” Oh, he couldn’t gather all those emotions in a simple bushel basket of words, “…and I couldn’t leave you. I just couldn’t. But Trieste’s here, and the regents, and…” this was truth and he knew it, “and Eljean’s dead,” please don’t let his voice break…please…please…too late, “and I need to get them, beloved. I just do. I couldn’t leave them. Not even to spend another precious moment telling you why.”

Yarri sniffed, a fair amount of disgust in the sound. “Torrant Moonshadow, do you think I wouldn’t understand? Do you think you and Aylan are the only ones in this family with a gods-benighted sense of honor?” Another sniff , this one suspiciously wet. “I just wanted to go with you, that’s all.”

“And you, Aldam?” Torrant asked, thrilled to see his brother now that he was conscious and able to speak.

“You can’t leave me behind again!” Aldam insisted, a fair amount of hurt coming through his un-shuttered voice.

Torrant smiled then, worried for them both and relieved they were there.

“You’d better stay out of trouble, both of you!” he told them, but his stern tone was fooling nobody. “Remember, I’m Triane’s bloody Son in that city—it’s my job to keep you safe.”

“Listen to him,” Aldam said with obvious pride. “I didn’t realize he’d become the leader that’s ridden his shoulders. You should have told me!”

“I’ve always known it was there,” Yarri said, sniffling again. “He doesn’t look any different to me than he did a year ago.”

Torrant shook his head. “I’m so glad you never learned to lie,” he said with admiration. “Now shall we go?”

Together, with one of Alec’s lieutenants to take Trieste to safety, they ventured under the walls of the burning city.

The smoke almost choked the tunnel—they had to dismount in order to breathe well enough to continue. Torrant had been channeling enough Goddess to make his eyes blue, but he found himself relying on Her more and more as they traveled through the tunnels. He just hoped She stayed with him long enough to see this day through.

None of them—not even Aldam, who had never seen the inside of Duance—were prepared for the devastation wrought upon the Goddess ghettoes.

Aylan’s flat had been a pile of rubble when the riots started, which is why it had escaped torching.

The rest of the odd assortment of buildings was now a pile of blackened cinders, poorly made bricks, and the occasional body underneath.

Torrant looked out at the wreckage, his eyes unconsciously seeking the places he knew—The Amber Goose, The Gander’s Sauce, Zhane’s flat, the small bakery, the tiny corner outlet where the women would sell their lace on days they weren’t allowed at market—all of it, leveled, detritus, rubble.

Yarri made a sound, muffled by her hand, and they met eyes. “I have to keep remembering…”

“…that all of the people we knew were already gone,” he finished, and she nodded with him. “Yes. Yes. This place was nothing long before this happened.”

He struggled for and found his bearings in the now-visible wall behind the guards’ barracks. The barracks themselves appeared to be empty, and judging from the sounds coming from the marketplace he surmised that Alec’s men were out there fighting a two front battle— one against the guards and the other against the riot they had entered the city to quell.

“All right—let’s get over that wall and I’ll tell you what we need to do.”

They left the horses and Lieutenant Corniel at the mouth of the tunnel, stacking debris over as cover, but leaving enough spaces for air to get through. None of them envied the Lieutenant, but he took his duty underground with some good humor.

“It’s at least a little more action than the other side of the tunnel,” he said cheerfully, and they were all grateful for his kindness as they ventured into the desecrated no-man’s-land that had become the Goddess ghettoes of Dueance.

Some of the smoke was already beginning to dissipate, and Torrant surmised that the fires occurred the same day Merrick and Dimitri were killed.

“Of all the wastes of flesh and bone to provoke a slaughter,” he sighed, shaking his head. “If Aylan was going to kill someone, I’d rather it had been Rath himself.”

“I think he’d rather they had lived and you’d not been harmed,” Yarri said dryly, looking at the wall with a sigh. She was, on the best of days, short and plump, with wide hips. Today, three and a half months pregnant with two babies, was not the best of days. “You really think you’re going to get me up there?”

It turned out that Aldam was both tall and strong, and even if Torrant was still shaking with fever, he had spent the last year pushing his body until it could sustain anything. Picking her up from Aldam’s boost and dropping her lightly on the other side turned out to be no problem whatsoever.

The problem turned out to be explaining to Aldam what Torrant needed him to do.

“You’re not leaving me behind!” Aldam protested vehemently, and Torrant fought the temptation to bury his face in his hands. Instead, he took Aldam’s broad, hardworking hands in his own and stood on tiptoe to bring his foster-brother’s forehead to his own.

“No, Aldam,” he said with some humor, “I’m sending you ahead. You know the men I’m trying to protect—they’re the ones that helped to evacuate the ghettoes. I’ve left them alone, here--they’ve been fighting on that floor for days to get Eljean and Trieste freed. They need to know I’m alive. They need to know I haven’t forgotten them. Alec should be with them—because I begged him to be. I need to get Trieste to safety, and I need to see justice done. Your job is to tell them to hang on a little longer—I’ll be there soon.”

“You’re still sick—do you think I can’t feel that—your skin is like the sun!”

“Well the quicker we stop arguing the quicker you two can drag me back to Moon Hold and cosset me, right?” Torrant shot back with some shaking exasperation.

“What do I tell them?” Aldam asked finally. “What do I say to get me in the door?” Yarri had convinced him to color his hair with dye before they left, and Fredy had helped, but that didn’t mean that hiding or lying was something he did easily.

Torrant smiled broadly, because this would be exactly the job that Aldam would do best. “Tell them you’re Aldam Moon,” he said wickedly, “and then just tell the truth.”

“But your name…won’t Rath learn your real name?” Yarri asked, shocked.

Torrant grimaced. “Beloved, do you think when this is over I’d planned to come back and be regent?” He planted a sudden quick, hard kiss on her mouth that both surprised her and dazzled her in spite of the direness of the situation. “I’ll never again be someone who can’t kiss my lover in public, Yar. If I’ve fought for nothing this last year, I’ve fought for that.”

And with that he pointed Aldam on his way.

“Where are we going?” Yarri asked as they turned and trotted around the other side of the flats. “I thought you didn’t know where they were?” Those mutilated bodies—for a month, the men had been trying to find out where Rath’s secret prison was, and they’d had no luck at all.

“I know now,” Torrant said grimly, taking the left that would bring them behind the Regents’ Hall, and then, with another left, behind the Consort’s palace. “Eljean told me.”

Yarri had heard him, crying out Eljean’s and Bethen’s name before his own heart had stopped. She didn’t need to ask another thing.

The entrance under the palace was small and low, taking a series of sudden stairs to the hallway that led to the prison cells. Torrant listened from the shadows of that hallway for a moment, and then motioned for Yarri to shrink into them and join their number. She listened breathlessly to the clatter as he killed the guards without mercy, and then, when she heard his sharp, anguished cry of grief, she ran down the stairs and over discarded, lifeless bodies to comfort him.

It was so hard to see.

Eljean’s body had been ripped apart, a little at a time. He lay on the cold, filthy floor, naked, bleeding from his mouth and rectum, his stomach splayed out like some sort of hideous butterfly, every inch of his skin desecrated, abraded, destroyed.

His manhood had been ripped off , and lay unheeded next to his body as he had fallen.

The expression on his face was so intimately peaceful, so benignly lovely, that it was perhaps the hardest thing of all to bear witness too, the final, fatal wound to their hearts as they recovered the body of their friend.

They stood there, in the shock of discovery, trying to piece together the things their minds kept refusing to see, when they heard a whimper from a cell nearby.

“Oh gods…Trieste?”

Trieste was no easier to look upon than Eljean. Torrant howled as she crouched in the back of the prison, naked, bleeding from her bottom, from between her legs, from carvings on her face and on her breasts. Her long, fine, dark hair had been hacked from her head and ripped out in clumps, and she pulled at the pieces of it to try and hide her nakedness, even as she huddled, whimpering Torrant’s name.

Yarri stutter-started her mind, and began to rifle the pockets of dead guards for keys, while Torrant turned his sword around and started beating the pommel end against the rusty lock, ranting and muttering as he did.

It was a race, to see who would get the lock first, and he won although his hands were sliced and bleeding to do so. When he was done, and the iron-barred door clanged open, he stood at the mouth of the cell for a moment, just looking at her and trying to calm himself enough to not terrify her more.

“Here, Torrant…” Yarri removed her cloak, and Torrant nodded numbly, and took it from her, then crouched down near Trieste holding it open.

“Shhh…” he muttered. “Pretty Girl… don’t worry. We’re here. We’ll take you home. We’ll keep you safe. They’re all dead now. The bastards are dead, and they can’t hurt you anymore.”

Trieste held out her arms, and he wrapped her up like a baby. She whimpered against his throat as he lifted her to her feet. “He never told them…he called for Torrant Shadow, always Torrant, but not once for Ellyot Moon.”

“I know,” he whispered, “I know.” And then he wrapped his arms around her, and allowed her to weep against him with Yarri pressed behind her, smoothing her back and weeping too.

But grief and weakness were a luxury they didn’t have time for, and Torrant had to peel away from them.

“Yarri,” he muttered thickly, “Beloved…can you get Trieste back to the young Lieutenant? The only reason Alec hasn’t killed Rath and taken over is because they’ve had his wife. We need her safe…can you do this for me?”

Yarri nodded, her arms wrapped so securely around the woman she’d grown to love like family that they moved together as one person. “Of course,” she murmured, thinking ahead to how she was going to get the both of them over that damned high wall already. “What are you going to do?”

Torrant removed his own cloak and wrapped Eljean’s splayed body in the soft, beaten leather—all of its parts and limbs—then closed the wide-opened green eyes with his hand. When he hefted his burden he closed his eyes and kissed the cold forehead. “Oh, my brother, I promised you the pain would be worth it. I never meant this. Ne ve r.”

He met his beloved’s eyes over his lover’s body. “Justice, beloved. This monster has devoured one too many brothers, and now it’s time to chop off its head.”

And with that they staggered out of that tiny, metallic, death-stench of space and into the deadly city.

After they split up, Yarri stopped in the shadows long enough to pull off her sweater and underskirt and help Trieste to put them on underneath the cloak. She had to tug at the strings of the skirt and tie it to make it fit on Trieste’s frame, and she apologized again and again for the pain the wool must have caused Trieste’s injuries, but her friend would have none of it.

“You came for me…I was so afraid he was dead, and you came for me,” she said in wonder, and Yarri smiled grimly and pulled the hood of the cloak over Trieste’s ravaged head.

“Of course he came for you—and of course I came with him. You think this honor thing is just for men?”

Trieste answered with a faint smile of her own…“Now I didn’t say that…” she murmured weakly. Yarri turned and hurried her along the alleyway, keeping an eye out for something to help her scale that horrible wall, and as she found it, Trieste said “You didn’t happen to bring your knitting with you, did you?”

Later, the two of them would wonder that the question didn’t seem odd at all.

“It’s back with the horses—I just cast on a long stocking, if you’d like to work it…”

A small amount of the anxiety that had ridden her brutalized body faded—not much, just enough to blunt the barbed edge of the pain. “Oh yes. Thank you. Thank you so much. I want to knit that sock almost more than I want to bathe.”

“Good,” said Yarri practically, spotting a largish empty crate that would serve their purposes particularly well, “because I think the sock’s closer than the bath.”

With the help of the crate, scaling the wall wasn’t as difficult as Yarri had dreaded. Unfortunately, she landed with a thump right next to one of the brigands who had survived the sacking of the city. He watched Yarri descend, actually, looking up her overskirt and leering at how easy the whole thing would be without an underskirt in the way.

He had Yarri’s arm twisted around her back and a knife to her throat before Trieste descended, and Yarri could only hope Trieste thought to look down before she finished scrabbling to the top of the wall.

“Pretty girl, running around this city today…most pretty girls are all locked up…”

“Ugh…” Yarri protested irritably, too angry to be frightened, “your breath is fetid…a twig brush and some baking soda would do you some good!”

Her arm was hauled up behind her a little more brutally, and then he shoved her on the ground, grabbing the back of her hair and hauling her head back to look at him. The first thing she noticed was that he had no teeth to brush, and the second was that he had no soul to speak of behind his eyes to care.

“Tha’s where a woman belongs…on her knees…”

Yarri’s heart was beating in her throat—it had been, since she’d felt this bastard’s hands on her body when she’d landed in the soft mud. But all she’d been able to think of were the people she’d had to protect—the two in her belly, and the one currently crouched, shivering, on the top of the wall behind her attacker. When the man’s other hand went to the string on his loose trousers and they dropped to his ankles, she couldn’t help but roll her eyes in exasperation.

“Don’t criminals ever have any original ideas?” she complained, her mind racing. He brutal hand at the back of her head tightened and thrust her forward, shoving her nose right into his crotch, and she reassessed her idea of ‘fetid’. “Bathing would be a good start…” she ground, and almost crowed when that hard, grimy hand shoved her head again, making her scrabble her hands in the mud for balance. Every scrabble in the mud brought her hands closer to her boot, and the knife she’d carried there ever since she’d had to fend off two attackers with a bag of hammers.

“Not that there’s that much to bathe…” she tried again, and this time found her mouth mashed up against the man’s squashy, filthy privates. She fought the urge to vomit—although that might have improved the smell.

“If you’re goin’ to open your mouth, bitch, use it for something!” came the impatient snarl, and with it, a drag at her head to pull her up, which made her need to move her knee up, and that brought her hand a little closer…

And then Trieste could no longer watch Yarri suffer the same horrible indignity she’d been made to endure, and she leapt down from the wall with a scream, just as Yarri pulled the knife from her boot and shoved it into the man’s testicles with as much force as she could muster.

The man fell over bellowing like an ox, and Trieste, wearing a pair of boots scavenged from one of the guards as they’d left, kicked him in the non-existent teeth, and then in the chest and in the stomach, and then down, where Yarri’s knife was still lodged and he was bleeding out.

She gibbered obscenities with every kick.

Yarri finally forced Trieste away from the body, which was tricky because she didn’t want to force Trieste physically, but her abused, violated friend was hysterical with rage, forcing Yarri’s hand. She was quite certain the man was dead, and she really wanted to get back to Torrant, but mostly, she was afraid for her friend, afraid this lapse into madness would never stop. She had to pull Trieste, shrieking and kicking away from the corpse of the dead rapist, and then she pulled her knife from his vitals and wiped it on her skirt as she hauled Trieste, numb and wild-eyed—behind her. When his body was out of sight behind the rubble, Trieste broke, sobbing on her shoulder until Yarri’s thin undershirt ran wet with tears.

Aldam was like nothing the Regent’s Floor had ever seen before.

Aerk spotted him the moment he walked in through the great double door, but Aerk was on the floor, and it took some frantic eye-contact with Keon to get the message across.

In his memory, the only other person to sprint that fast through the hall had been Torrant himself, the day Aylan got wounded at the pub.

Keon met Aldam and escorted him to the small antechamber, and Aerk continued his petition to release Eljean and Trieste. They had taken turns for the last four days, and the rest of the regents had begun to get behind them—but it had been slow going without Ellyot Moon. Alec’s presence, (he was currently pacing behind Aerk like a caged panther) and his deadline of nightfall before he used his peacekeeping troops to actually take over the city had proved helpful. The problem had been convincing everybody that he had enough troops.

It seemed that signed and sealed documents from the council of elders in Eiran, the Matriarch of Cleanth and the King of Otham himself weren’t enough of a presence in Rath’s mind.

The rest of the floor, however, had been paying attention to the city disintegrating around their ears, and they were inclined to disagree with Rath and agree with Alec. For one thing, Alec didn’t look insane.

“I’m sorry,” said Consort Rath, breaking into Aerk’s half-minded dialog with more interest than he’d shown in four days. “Who is that young man, and what is he doing here?”

Aldam looked up at Rath and the sunny smile he’d used to greet Keon disappeared, and in it’s place a decidedly righteous indignation.

“You sent the soldiers to Moon Hold!” Aldam declared. “One of them lay his hands on my wife! How dare you.”

There were shocked titters from the floor, and then absolute enchanted silence. Even Rath was sputtering to that particular affront, and Aldam waved his hands irritably at the secretary in the ante- room who was trying to get his attention and simply walked over the barrier.

“Hullo, Alec,” he said, his typically sunny smile taking over his face. He and Roes had visited Alec and Trieste over the summer—Aldam was one of the few Moon faces Alec would recognize by sight, and not Yarri’s pictures. Aldam’s smile turned sober then. “They’re going to get Trieste—he knows where she is.”

Alec’s jaw dropped, and a terrible hope washed his face as snow-pale as his wife’s. “He knows she’s alive?”

Aldam nodded, and glared at Rath some more. “She was when Eljean died,” he said with a terrible glower, and Rath’s face actually flushed green behind his white hair. The Secretary General, who had been standing further and further away from Rath as the proceedings went on, looked at Rath’s face with a nasty-little-boy wrinkle to his nose, as though he’d been vindicated of a petty dispute, and the rest of the regents began to murmur unhappily.

This was not the distraction of some novelty ingénue—this was terrifying.

“What,” said Rath slowly, trying to gather his composure with his words, “is your name, young man?”

Aldam’s face became hard, earth hard, oak hard, hammer hard. “My name is Aldam Moon,” he said proudly, “I’m Yarri Moon’s foster brother.”

As the rest of the regents erupted into chaos, he found a hard smile coming to his moon-featured face. Torrant had been right. He hadn’t even needed to betray any secrets--the truth had been plenty.

The questions came next, from Rath and the few regents he still claimed as his own, and Aldam answered them all with his implacable calm.

Yes, he’d gone over the Hammer with his foster brother and Yarri when they’d been children. Yes, they had all lived with the Moon family for years. And yes, he’d been one of the people to help evacuate Triannon when Rath had sent soldiers to destroy his beloved school.

“You went to University?” sneered Rath, and Aldam’s smile towards the King Consort held more than a little bit of evil in it.

“Yes, sir,” he replied, the unsettling smile firmly in place, “that’s where I learned to dissect frogs.”

Aldam found he liked answering the regents’ questions honestly after that—and years later Aerk and Keon would claim that they learned their best tactics on the floor from that one session with Torrant’s foster-brother—but it was not to last.

The moment Torrant came crashing through the great double doors with his grotesque, fragile burden, all questions came to a halt.

An unnatural hush fell among the tiers, and Torrant ignored the antechamber and simply strode down the center of the room, walking up to the dais where the King Consort sat, and set the body of his brother in arms down at the feet of the man who killed him.

Eljean was nearly unrecognizable to the other regents—but not to his friends. His friends knew the shape of his neck, the few locks of hair that remained, the outline of his cheekbones behind the terrible bruises and cuts on the skin of his face. As Torrant’s cloak fell back from Eljean’s face, Aerk, Keon, Marv, Jino and Alec all advanced and kneeled, holding hands to mouths in an effort to keep their emotions in check. Torrant looked to Alec first. “Trieste will live, my lord—with some help from you. Yarri should be getting her back to your men as we speak.”

Alec’s face turned red, and he nodded curtly. He turned furiously to the waffling regents who had refused to believe the truth as it had pleaded for their understanding.

“One hour,” he spat. “You simpering, piss-drinking cowards have one hour to give me this piece of shite’s head, or I will take your city from your miserable grasp and make it my own.”

Alec of Otham stalked from the hall, roaring like an enraged bear, leaving shock and amazement in his wake.

“I do believe he means that,” Aerk mused, his voice still choked with the tears none of them were willing to shed in the hall.

“He does mean it,” Torrant replied evenly, “and when he sees what this…” he looked at Rath, all of his formidable hatred coming to boil. “You had my friends raped. You had them tortured. You had this one killed. The least you could do is look at him. LOOK AT HIM!!!”

Rath’s eyes were everywhere but on Eljean’s ravaged body.

“Who is that?” asked Minero of Truxel, and Torrant, still kneeling on the dais, stroked the ragged clumps of hair back from the purpled brow.

“This?” Oh, Torrant hurt. His heart, his body, even his mind and his poetry were battered, bloody, and bruised from the cold, brutal winter. But still, he recognized when his poetry was needed, and he tried not to let anybody down.

“This man? This man is nobody.” Torrant straightened, then looked from Eljean to the entire assembly.

“This man is your brother. He’s your son. He’s a fellow regent, or the man who sews your clothes. He’s the child you played with as a boy, and the boy who courted your sister. He’s the man who draws your tap at the tavern or the brother of your best friend. He’s your father, your grandson, your lover. He was my friend, my lover, my brother in arms, and my fellow regent, and it wouldn’t matter if he was the man who cleaned my privy, our King had NO RIGHT to condemn him to die like this. And you all should be ashamed of allowing him to take that right from your whole and healthy hands. Eljean of Grace deserved better than this. He deserved better than you.”

The entire assembly cringed, and the truth that Eljean had been his lover didn’t seem to matter to anybody, anybody at all.

“But you’re all he has now,” Torrant continued, his voice ringing, “and you need to decide. Alec of Otham can solve your problems for you, you know. You’ve all but abdicated your free will as it is. But I warn you—when Alec sees what a mess your indifference has made of his wife, he might not be so sanguine about allowing you to live. As for me? I wash my hands of all of you. My brothers are welcome to accompany me, and if you don’t remember what your gods have made of you, I’m sure they will. Because a country is nothing if the men who rule it are ignorant, corrupt, and contemptible. My brothers are better than you, but it’s not too late to better yourselves.”

Torrant turned his terrible glare to Rath, whose slightly parted mouth was making gibbering movements of words that would never be spoken. Torrant felt his gorge rise, and he spat at Rath’s feet. “And if someone wants to behead this piece of shite for Alec,” he finished, “I might even think about respecting you, but not now. You people who allowed this to happen are no better than he is.”

Rath’s incredulous, profane laughter didn’t even make a dent in the shamed silence that left even their breathing to echo in the carpeted hall.

“You can’t overthrow me!” Rath protested, and he looked at the Secretary General for help. Rishard was glaring intently at a small entrance at the side of the hall, and neither of them flinched when Minero of Truxel roared, “And Oueant and Dueant say we can!”

But the roar of assent from the entire hall did make Rath jump, his wondering gaze snapping open, like an opium dreamer from a long high, and still Rishard’s gaze stayed rooted to the door. His expression was shrewd and calculating; a man doing the math of his odds to live.

Torrant, ignoring the howl of the regents looking for Rath’s blood, followed the chill wind of the Secretary’s gaze to where one of his guards was waiting with an unexpected prisoner at the end of his dagger.

“Sweet Triane help us…” Every corpuscle from his balls to his brain congealed with ice-blue fear, and Yarri’s miserable, apologetic gaze blinked at him from across the room.

Rishard Camp, the Secretary General of Clough, called for his soldiers to defend him and bring the girl. Chaos, true battle-blooded chaos, exploded in that hall of empty words.

Yarri decided that her nemesis was that Goddess damned wall.

Let Torrant change the world, that was well and good; she would be happy when the wall between the Goddess ghettoes and the Regents square was knocked down to rubble, because that was the second time she had scrabbled over the damn thing to land in the hands of someone who wished her harm.

In this case, it was one of Rath’s guardsmen, and since Ellyot Moon had gone missing, his sister, Yarri, was also wanted for questioning.

Well wasn’t that a stinking kettle of rotten fish?

For a minute, it looked as though the man had the same designs as the corpse on the other side of the wall with no teeth and no bollix, but Yarri pointed out that as the sister of a candidate for regency, touching her put his life at risk. She was not so desirable after that, but she was a lot happier about being hauled by the arm to the Regents’ Hall.

As it turned out, that was exactly where she’d been planning to go anyway.

She heard most of Torrant’s speech as she was being dragged through to the side entrance, and what she heard made her even angrier with the people inside…He was so sad, this new Torrant who had barely survived the winter. How could these people look at him, with that pathetic burden in his arms, and not want to change the world that created that excruciating sadness?

And then she was shoved into the room and met Torrant’s flickering, Goddess-blue eyes, and she knew, to the tingling in her back teeth and the aching behind her eyeballs, what stark terror for another felt like when you saw it in your beloved’s eyes

The man with the iron gray mustache on the dais barked an order, and suddenly she was dragged, kicking and struggling, up to where Rath himself wrapped his arm around her throat and added a dagger near her carotid for good measure. She stomped on his instep and bit his hand and got a scratch on her jaw for her trouble, and then she noticed the dirty tide of black and teal flooding in after her to surround the dais.

Shouts echoed with surreal clarity around the room, and Marv, Jino, Aerk, and Keon--who had all been kneeling near Eljean’s body--stood fluidly and pulled out their swords, their backs to Rath and their bodies shielding Torrant as he sank to a crouch and snarled, cat–like, at the enemy he’d tried so very hard not to kill.

Aerk, hearing that snarl, knew that if anyone was going to speak in ‘human’, it was going to be him. “Regents, this is your chance to claim your hall. We’ve been fighting these wankers all winter, trying to keep our people safe—if you think that’s a worthy cause, a little help would be very much appreciated!”

The Secretary General panicked. He saw it—he saw the membership of the entire hall go for their swords, and he saw his chances for survival dying by the blood drop. He panicked the way any coward panics—he lashed out at his closest enemy without thought of honor or of self-defense, and simply killed without mercy. In one quiet, unannounced blow, he skewered Jino through the back and in the heart, leaving him to fall at Marv’s feet without even a whimper of goodbye.

Marv only spent a moment in shock—Jino was so irrevocably dead, the bright black eyes open and shocked, blood trickling from his mouth and gushing through the hole in his chest in quick pumps. There was no question, there was no time for mourning or tears. There was only his brother, senselessly dead at his feet.

Marv’s howl of grief led the scream of retribution that followed, and the soldiers, who had all been facing the few regents on the dais turned to find themselves outnumbered two to one, as the horde of angry senators descended to reclaim their birthrights and their manhood.

Rath, seeing his people turning on him with righteous bloodlust, snarled back at Torrant and made to dig his dagger into Yarri’s throat, when Torrant, more snow-cat than human, but using all of his strength just to stand, let out an inhuman, terrifying yrwowwwllllllllll!!!!! Crouching, on all fours like a cat, he leapt over Eljean’s body in a spring, landing on Yarri and kicking her out of the way with back paws still tethered in boots. Rath shouted and went down on his back, and Torrant opened his mouth around his enemy’s throat, tasting blood as he shredded the monster’s jugular veins and ripped out his trachea, with his very blunt, very human teeth.

Rath didn’t even have time to scream.

As the last breath rattled from the protruding windpipe of the enemy, the monster, the mad, vainglorious, weak man, Torrant thrust his bloodied mouth and chin into the air and howled and howled again.

The howls made Yarri cringe, and she fought the urge to shudder, to curl up into a ball, to let the regents protect her and to pick up the pieces. Instead, she picked herself up and looked out about the room dully. Even her unpracticed eye could tell that the fight was going to be over long before Alec arrived with his reinforcements—half of the guardsmen had dropped their swords and were crouching where they stood. They were staring at the ground, shivering, not wanting to be a part of the bloodbath that was ripping the other half of their number to shreds.

Marv was standing over Jino’s body, laying waste to every uniform in sight, shrieking revenge. Keon and Aerk were standing back-to-back and fighting as they had been all winter, calling out marks as they fought. “To your left, Kee—I missed him.”

“Got him, Aerk, behind you!”

Before the chaos even erupted, Aldam, seeing poor Jino crumpled in a surprised, vacant heap, strode up the Secretary General and without ceremony touched him on the shoulder. Then he leapt out of the way as the man in charge of Clough’s army disintegrated into parts, one plopping, sliding, bleeding bit at a time.

The nearest handful of soldiers to see this grisly phenomenon lay down their weapons and begged for mercy.

Aldam, wearing a grim, angry look, stood with Marv over the body of the young man who had always smiled when he’d visited Moon Hold. Very deliberately, he played with a handful of sand from his pocket, looking about the room to see if he was needed.

If it hadn’t been for Marv’s complete desolation, his shrieking, incoherent, inhuman vengeance for his friend, his playmate, his brother, Yarri could have watched the regents finish the battle. Unfortunately, what was waiting for her at the dais frightened her as this battle did not.

But Marv’s desolation was too close to Torrant’s, and besides, she would wrong them all—her friends, herself, her babies, her beloved--with her cowardice now, wouldn’t she?

She pulled herself up next to Rath’s corpse, listening to Torrant’s feral snarls over the body of his enemy, and reached out her hand, gentling the hackles of his very human hair over his smooth neck.

“Come back, beloved,” she murmured. “You promised you’d come back.”

He turned those inhuman blue eyes towards her, the recognition in their depths screaming ‘mate’ and ‘protected’—but not beloved. Not her name. Not the quiet space between their hearts that had always meant the two of them together.

“Please, Torrant,” she begged, catching his far, stubbled cheek in her hand and pulling him towards her.

With an animal grunt, Torrant shifted, still on hands and knees, and circled, coming to rest with his head in her lap.

Her ravaged overskirt was stained with Rath’s blood now, but if it meant Torrant would come back to her, she’d bathe in the stuff and never look back.

“Torrant,” she murmured, “Torrant…come back to me…you can’t sing to me like this…you can’t sing to our young…come on, beloved. Come home.” Tears, then, when she’d thought she’d grown too strong for them since the night before, when he’d died in her arms and been resurrected.

“I want so badly to go home, Torrant Moonshadow…please come home…” She clutched his head to her bosom, and looked up to realize that the battle, short and fierce as it was, had ended.

Marv sat in almost the same position she sat in, with Jino’s head in his lap, weeping like a lost child. Aerk, Keon, and Aldam were approaching her tentatively, and as she looked up at them, she realized that the entire Regents’ Hall had heard her beg him, not as a sister, but as a lover.

The silence was punctuated by guards pleading for mercy and the incredulous panting of a governing body which had just discovered it did have balls after all.

“He’s not my brother,” she said out loud, hearing her voice echo in the vast hall but feeling like it should be said. “My brothers were all killed at Moon Hold, when I was six.” She swallowed, and felt, suddenly, Torrant’s forehead against her palm, burning with a killing fever, and she stroked the white streak of hair back from his bloody brow. The entire hall was looking at her as though they had never seen her before, when, in fact, she had been to many of their homes since she’d arrived in Clough.

“His name is Torrant Shadow…he saved my life that night. He took me to Eiran. He’s my lover, my mate.” A little half-sob shook her, and she bent down and kissed his ear. He burrowed into her middle, eyes closed, a sense of desperate peace trying to steal over his struggling features. “My beloved.”

She looked out at them. “And we would like to go home now. Can we go? Please?” Something in her broke, and she looked at Aldam beseechingly. “Please, Aldam? Can we go home now? I want so badly to hear the ocean. I think if he only heard the ocean, his eyes would be right again…please?”

Please? The sobs broke in her chest, and she wept hopelessly over her beloved. Aldam bent to touch Torrant’s head, and he grunted unhappily at the sickness that radiated from Torrant’s body once again. But Torrant stirred in her arms, and turned his face up towards hers.

His hand reached out to her cheek, and his eyes fluttered open.

They were hazel, pure hazel, a place between green and brown, with no blue in their depths at all.

“Don’t cry, Yarrow Root,” he murmured. “Don’t cry. I promised you, I’d come back. I promised.”

And she cradled him to her, weeping, and a terrible, respectful quiet settled over the blood-soaked hall.

A terrible, respectful silence blanketed the listeners of The Ballad of Triane’s Son at this point.

Torrant had been very careful when he wrote this passage—he spoke metaphorically, that “ Triane’s spirit filled her son, ripping the life from the terrible one.”

But Torrant and Aylan’s children had grown up in the same house, listening from behind corners as he and Aylan discussed that final moment in hushed voices. Those conversations made it very clear that Torrant’s humanity, his healing and his poetry deserted him at the last, and left him a ravening animal, bent on slaughter.

But the worst part hadn’t been the blood on his mouth or the flesh in his teeth—the worst part was how bitterly Torrant regretted the time it had taken to forgive himself. Could he not see that every lash he gave himself, every self-recriminating remark, every bitter glance in the mirror had weighed double on Yarri’s back too?

Aylan said the same thing to him every year, when the bitterness welled from a wound made fresh.

“You had to heal, brother. Those many wounds you took for us all— did you think you would get away without healing?”

Torrant’s children, being Moon children, had passed that conversation on—it became a watchword, a family axiom, a homily.

At the end they stood, every year--arrayed around their father, the entire clan of them living proof that Torrant and Yarri had survived and loved long and well, but that nothing, not even honest grief, comes without a price.

Part XIV—The Wreckage of the Blood Moon

Moon Hold and Moon Home

The death rites in Eiran were usually brief and practical—there was about enough soft earth between the ocean and the mountain to grow vegetables, but not enough to house the dead. Aylan waited until the spring wind off the ocean had blown the last of Bethen’s ashes out to sea before he saddled up Heartland and rode back to Clough.

The few days after her death and before the funeral had been awful--a dim, hazy hole that had been filled with grief and mourning, and a dreadful black misery that encompassed the entire family. All that made those days bearable were Bethen’s last words, spoken in a sudden delirium before her breath stopped for good:

He’ll live, Eljean my boy. Shall we take that boat now? Then, wistfully, Goodbye, Lane.

Her last breath faded away as gently as a leaf down a peaceful river.

Those words had been all that had given Lane the will to keep breathing in and out—he would have to father them all, when Torrant came home.

They kept Roes sane—Aldam wouldn’t return unless Torrant was ready to come home.

They kept Stanny and Evya moving back into Stanny’s flat with purpose—there would be much more room needed in the Moon household when Torrant, Yarri, and Aldam came home.

And those words kept Cwyn and Starren active and optimistic and working hard with the others to prepare the same basement where Stanny and Evya had been staying, and to fix the room Roes had kept with Yarri into something Aylan could live in. It all would be needed when Torrant and Yarri and Aldam came home.

And now Aylan was going to go and fetch them home.

Lane stopped him before he got on Heartland. “Aylan—son… you know he might not be the same.”

Aylan looked away. He knew. None of them were the same—how could they be? But Torrant—he, as well as Bethen, had been the joy of this family. How much room would be in his heart for joy now?

“I know we’ll still love him, no matter how much he’s changed,” Aylan answered honestly. He’d seen some of those changes before the wounding, before Eljean, before…whatever terrible thing had knotted Aylan’s stomach since the morning they had all awakened and known that Bethen was gone.

Lane nodded, reddened eyes growing shiny all over again. These days, it didn’t take much. “Oh Goddess…I miss them all. Our family needs its joys back—no matter how joyless they are for a time. Go bring them home, son.”

Aylan nodded, and made to mount, and Lane stopped him again with a hand on his arm. Aylan turned, surprised, and Lane opened his arms. Aylan stepped in, warmed, protected, loved…heartened beyond measure. “You are our son, you know that, right?” Lane whispered. “Whether they come back the same or whether he’s so damaged he can never come back, you will always have a home here. Always.”

Aylan caught his breath then and nodded against his true father’s shoulder. “And that, sir, is why I can never leave him.”

“Love you, son.”

“Love you, sir. I’ll be back.”

And with that he swung up on Heartland’s back and rode away without looking behind him.

Aldam wouldn’t let Torrant get out of bed for a week.

Every now and then he would try to sneak out to the porch on liquid knees after going to the privy, but Aldam had developed an uncanny sense of hearing. The entire hold could hear his voice booming through the house, saying that if Torrant didn’t get back in bed, Aldam was packing up and leaving without him.

Torrant and Yarri would meet bemused eyes and he would get obediently back in bed. And promptly fall asleep.

Because his body was not nearly as forgiving as Aldam.

They had brought him back to Moon Hold, feverish and gibbering, and for another two days they watched as his body struggled to recapture the healing the snow cat made for him the night he’d nearly died.

Nobody suggested he turn snow cat again.

After Yarri’s speech to the hall, Aldam had taken matters into his own, capable hands. He had scooped his brother up in his arms and looked sadly at Eljean’s brutalized body, at Jino’s still, bleeding form, and then at the regents he had come to know in the fall.

“Would you like to follow me with your fallen ones?” he asked nobly, and Aerk, Keon, and Marv, their chests still pumping from the battle, had nodded.

Aerk and Keon carried Eljean, but Marv wouldn’t let anyone touch Jino’s body but himself.

Keon—always the strategist—remembered Aylan’s cart at the tunnel, and the trip through the tunnel was shorter than it could have been. They even picked up Trieste at Alec’s camp—now swarming like a red-ant hill with activity, but Trieste didn’t care. She was so happy to be with Yarri and Aldam, whom she knew and who made her feel safe that Alec told her to stay at Moon Hold while he was finalizing the new government in Dueance.

Although it was slushy and still frozen, there was plenty of earth at Moon Hold, enough to hold a cemetery for the fallen, and markers for memorials. Together with Trieste, Yarri, and Aldam, the regents buried their brothers in graves they dug with their own hands, while Torrant was delirious with fever and self-loathing. After that, the sadder, older young men kissed Yarri and Trieste on the cheek and shook Aldam’s hand to return to their ravaged city and help Alec put it to rights.

The other folks at the Hold, unwilling to take the now-open pass to Eiran, began to make the Hold ready for spring. Led by Grand Wind, who planned to bring his mother from the city when it was safe, they found the fallow land which had once been the family’s garden, and gleaned some seeds to plant. They trimmed back the blackberry bushes so there would be more berries and fewer thorns come late summer. They cleared out fallen trees to make firewood for the next winter.

They made Moon Hold a sanctuary for the Goddess Moon again.

One day (or so it felt like to Yarri and Aldam) Yarri’s stomach popped out all of a sudden, and she looked pregnant instead of (her words) ‘whopping fat’.

She would sit next to Torrant as he struggled in his uneasy dreams and put his unresisting hand on her belly. That touch, in the beginning, was all that would calm him down.

When his fever finally passed and he was a restless convalescent, it only seemed to make him sad.

His second day of recovery, when the fever had just broken, Aldam went into Trieste’s room and closed the door. There were some sounds of pain, of discomfort, and then Aldam’s deep, reassuring voice, and Trieste’s painful laughter.

She came out of her room for the first time since the funeral and sat next to Yarri as she was knitting.

Yarri pulled out her last spare set of needles and one of the two precious skeins of lace-weight yarn—this one in a lovely washed indigo-- and gave them to her without a word.

They sat in silence for a few moments when Trieste asked Yarri what she was making.

Yarri smiled, hesitantly, and completed weaving in the last ends, then held out a lace dust-cap in lavender and turquoise, made from one of the few remaining skeins of the precious stash that Bethen had given her on a day that seemed forever ago, before snow covered the ground and froze their hearts.

“Here,” she said, hesitantly. “May I help you put it on?”

Trieste regarded the cap with a hard swallow. They’d trimmed her hair close to her head, but it would still be at least a month before the scabbed patches of scalp grew over with her once-unruly dark hair.

“Yes, thank you,” she muttered from a rusty throat.

Yarri got up in silence, and as she settled the cap lightly on her friend’s still tender head, Trieste said to the space in front of them, “Aldam said I can still have children.”

Yarri bent and wrapped her arms around Trieste’s shoulders, touching her wet cheek to Trieste’s. “I’m so glad,” she whispered. “Oh, sister—I should never have let you stay.”

“You wouldn’t have stopped me.” Trieste took Yarri’s hands and kissed them, and leaned against the arm by her head. “Alec came the night before…before…it began in earnest. And I wouldn’t go with him either.”

“Why…” Yarri stopped herself. She already knew. She’d taken Eljean’s gift knowing full well what he might suffer, and wanting it anyway. “Would it help,” she said instead, “if you knew that I think you’re terrifyingly brave, and that I’m so glad he wasn’t alone?”

“Yes,” Trieste wept quietly. “Yes…it would help. Oh, Yarri—he would have been so alone…”

“But you never have to be again.” Yarri rocked her then, softly.

“His father came,” Trieste said, hoping to get this out when she didn’t have to look either of them in the eye. “His father came with drugs, at the end, to ease the pain. It was bad still, but I take comfort in that—he had some drugs to ease the pain.”

Yarri’s arms tightened convulsively until Trieste shook her off stoically, saying she needed to cast on if she were ever to make anything of the wool in her hands. Trieste made sure that Yarri told Torrant, when they were alone, and hoped that she’d done both her stalwart brothers justice with that one lie.

The women sat then and knit, and kept each other company and kept watch over Torrant’s recovery. After a week, they were almost out of yarn when one of the women from the Ghettoes showed up with a basket of perfectly spun natural colored wool. After finding some roots and an old stash of sunflower seeds, they were back at it again, with some rustically dyed red and blue yarn. They found that they were both making very small sweaters, and neither of them mentioned who would wear them.

About this time, Aerk, Keon, Marv, and Marv’s sister Kerree came to visit.

Alec had been in and out, his visits with his wife gentle and courtship-like, their time together quiet, warm, and forgiving. To anyone’s knowledge, he never once blamed her for choosing to stay. In the meantime, he kept them briefed on the state of the city, but only barely, telling them that Torrant’s friends would have more details.

When those friends arrived to sit at Torrant’s bedside, they all discovered that particular details were important indeed.

“You’re the King!” Torrant asked incredulously, drawing enough strength to sit up and give a strained expression that passed for a smile.

Aerk looked uncomfortable. “It’s Keon’s fault,” he said sourly. “One of his relatives started suggesting he should do it since he was one of the original…” Aerk flushed, “and anyway, Kee threw me under the title like a ball under a runaway cart.”

“Original what?” Torrant asked, looking better than he had all week.

Aerk muttered something that sounded like ‘freff ufm ferrfeerfs’ and Keon elbowed his friend in the ribs and Aerk looked up, red from the roots of his shaggy brown hair to his pale neck under his pointed chin. “Freedom. Fighters. They’re calling us the ‘Freedom Fighters’ back in Dueance, like we’re some sort of bloody-arsed heroes.”

The three remaining regents all gave a collective shudder, horrified to their toes.

Kerree laughed, sadly, but it was a laugh just the same. “Jino would have kicked kittens to avoid that,” she murmured, but Marv had no sense of humor about their fallen brother, none at all.

“It’s not funny,” Marv said. “I keep thinking I see him, you know? Out of the corner of my eye, I’ll see someone with a pale face or dark hair and I’ll think it’s him and then I’ll remember all over again.” He took an angry, fortifying breath, and then looked up pleadingly into Torrant’s eyes.

“Torrant, they’ll never know—none of them. They’ll never know the real awfulness…what Eljean…” his voice hitched, “or Djali or Jino endured. Our brothers will get a footnote in a history book, but unless they’re in a song or something, no one will ever really know…”

Suddenly everyone in the room was looking at Torrant beseechingly, and Torrant looked blankly back at them. Then their need dawned on him and he, as ever, bowed his head to it.

“It will take some time,” he murmured. “I…I feel so emptied out… so hollow now. I’d need to be filled with poetry to do them justice. I don’t know when that’s going to happen.”

They talked of other things after that, trying to entertain Torrant, trying hard, so hard, to see together the future they had all once dreamt of. But Torrant’s face grew more and more pale, and once, as Keon was explaining the idea for a city memorial park in the place of the Goddess ghettoes, he let out a brief, keening wail, staring into the distance at nothing at all.

He came to himself and apologized, saying the park sounded like a lovely idea, but they could see plainly that although they all were grieving, Torrant was sick with the feeling, and all that would heal him was time.

The royal party from Duance left shortly afterwards, but before they left Aerk told them, “The Goddess folk are free to come back to the city now—but they may want to wait a while. This kind of prejudice…it dies hard. I’ll do my best—Alec’s been making suggestions—but…I don’t want anyone hurt anymore.” He closed his eyes and shuddered. They all did.

“I’ll tell them—those here, those who made it to Eiran. I’ll make it known that they’re welcome back in Clough,” Torrant reassured, sitting up with the last of his strength, and they bowed and left.

Torrant fell back against his pillows then and was yanked protesting into more healing sleep, but not before he smiled to himself with a certain grim satisfaction. Aerk would make a fine king—compassion, strong morals, and that wonderful self-deprecating way of asserting himself when the world really needed him. Torrant had seen it all in him, that first day, when all he’d needed on the floor was one more voice.

A week later, late at night, Aylan arrived, crashing through the doors and demanding to know where he was. Yarri and Trieste, who had been cleaning up dishes from the Hold’s evening meal, pointed to the front room, where Torrant (still protesting) had been ordered to sit after dinner.

He was playing restlessly with his lute, with motion but no music in his fingertips, and as soon as he heard the commotion he put the lute down, stood and crossed the room, falling into Aylan’s embrace like the shore to the ocean. Neither of them spoke for a long, long time.

The next day Alec of Otham came to take Trieste home, and Aldam and Aylan packed up gear for everyone returning to Eiran.

Torrant asked Trieste for a moment alone in the living room, but she smiled and refused.

“Trieste!” he said, surprised. “I just wanted to…”

“ To heal the scars on my cheeks,” she said firmly, touching the half- healed red, puffy tissue with a faint smile. He’d been looking at them speculatively since he’d been able to walk. They were supposed to be in the shape of a ‘w’, for ‘whore’—but the guard had bollixed it up, and what was healing on her cheeks looked more like a ‘v’. Alec and Torrant both said it was for ‘valiant’—Trieste found she rather liked that idea.

“I’ve done it before…” he said, tentatively, holding out his two hands as though to give her a gift.

“I know.” She came in from the kitchen anyway, the Queen of Otham, wiping her hands on her apron, and checking automatically to make sure her delicate lace dust-cap was still perched on her growing hair. “And maybe someday, I’ll let you do it again. But you’re not whole yet, and I won’t have you hurting yourself.”

Torrant snorted. “I’m not made of glass, I won’t snap like a lute string—you are all entirely too sensitive to my poor recovering body— I’m fine!”

“No,” Trieste murmured, looking him very much in the Goddess-blue eyes, “You’re not. Your body is still weak—and no amount of disguising your shaking hands after a trip across the yard is going to convince us otherwise. But worse than that—your soul is still fragile. We’ve been here for two weeks, and I’ve smiled more than you have.”

Torrant tried another smile, this one closer to the real thing. “You’re stronger than I am,” he said, believing it.

“That’s not true!” Trieste shook him off , angry, suddenly, that he should think so little about himself. “What happened in that cell was awful, my brother—don’t get me wrong. I’ll be wearing those scars across my heart long after the ones on my skin have faded. But what happened to you this year was relentless. Day after day, every thing that was soft and kind and tender in you—it was raped, as surely as I was. Give your heart some time to heal—spend your strength on your beloved and your young.”

She smiled suddenly, a bright, fierce smile that would have scorched her heart with its intensity when they were young schoolmates, a million years before.

“I earned these scars, Torrant Shadow. I’ll keep them for a while yet—they’ll hurt, but they’ll remind my people that Otham is just a heartbeat—Alec’s heartbeat, actually—from becoming Clough. It’s a lesson worth my humility, don’t you think?”

Torrant was unhappy—he gave a truly tremendous scowl that hid more hurt than Trieste thought he’d have to spare for such a small matter. But he respected her wishes; just as Alec had back in the prison cell, and just as Aylan had, as they’d ridden out of Clough, Torrant abided by her decision.

She crossed the room then and kissed his cheek. “Besides, Torrant—remember, I’ve seen your body without your shirt, and I know what you looked like, young and clean and perfect. My scars are small things, my brother. Heal them later.”

It wasn’t until she was in the wagon next to Alec, and they were riding for blessed, blessed home, that her husband asked her the real reason she wouldn’t let Torrant heal her.

“If you heard that conversation, then you know the reason,” she said chidingly—he must have been in the kitchen, listening in.

“I heard,” he nodded and clucked to the horses. He was happy— they were returning home, his home, with his wife, and his country that needed him. He put the reins in one hand and wrapped his arm around her shoulder. Something in him warmed that no one would be responsible for the healing of her heart and mind but him.

“If nothing else convinced me you two weren’t destined to be lovers,” he continued, “it’s that he didn’t hear the lie in your voice— you’re hiding something from him.”

Trieste nodded and sighed, grateful for the one person she wouldn’t have to hide anything from, ever again. “I am,” she murmured, “and if he’d tried to heal me, he would have known it, and then I would have had to tell him the truth.”

“Which is?” Alec prompted, gratified when she relaxed into his shoulder, in spite of the jouncing of the little wagon. He’d been so afraid to touch her, when he’d first seen her at Moon Hold, looking frail and victimized and violated. But simple, warm, human touch seemed to be something she craved and he would never tire of giving it to her.

“Eljean never took those drugs…I told Torrant and Yarri that he did…but he threw the packet in the privy.”

Alec was horrified. “Oh gods…why?”

“Because otherwise, beloved, he was afraid he would have betrayed us all. Torrant hurts so much… aches so much for that death. It would betray Eljean’s sacrifice to make it worse—at least now. Wait until Torrant smiles again, a true smile. Wait until he plays the lute again. Wait until he sings. If he can do all that, be the joy his family needs, then he’ll be ready to heal me.”

Alec made a suspicious sound and passed his shoulder over his cheek. “You are so damned lion-hearted, beloved. I don’t know how we’d live through this if you weren’t so damned brave.”

Trieste leaned on him some more. “I learned it all from Torrant and Aylan, and then you, Alec—I’m paying him back the best I can.”

“And me?” he asked softly.

“You?” she laughed a little, but a true laugh. “You, darling, I’ll pay you back for the rest of our lives, if you’ll let me.”

He closed his eyes then, and kissed her head, longing for her hair again, but willing to wait.

“Of course, beloved,” he murmured. Oh yes. Things were right again. Trieste, Queen of Otham, was coming home.

Remembering to Breathe

Torrant could only wish his homecoming was as quiet as Trieste’s.

The trip wasn’t so bad, actually. Aylan and Yarri hated being underground. Torrant spent much of his time holding their hands in the back of the wagon or singing quietly when they were on horseback, to make the dreadful chest-weighting pressure of the darkness choke them just a little less.

He liked that part. He felt needed—and what was better yet, he felt like he could rise to the challenge. After Eljean and Trieste, he’d been wondering if he would ever be of use to anybody ever again.

And the dark wasn’t so bad.

The dark was peaceful, heavy in a reassuring way, like a winter cloak. It soothed him, made him believe that he could curl up in it, sleep in it, allow the light to pass him by and become just a quiet, beating heart in the core of the mountain.

But even that might be too loud, he mused the second night, in the back of the wagon, pushed there by his damnable physical weakness and the overwhelming urge to sleep. As he crouched there, his heart thundering in his ears and his breath coming too short from his time on horseback, he thought maybe the blackness would be complete and perfect if only those sounds stopped too.

He tried, tried to disappear, tried to make his breath so quiet it wasn’t there, but one of the passageway torches came by, and he was startled by Aylan’s darkened figure on Heartland’s back next to the wagon, when he’d been out front earlier.

“Don’t try it,” Aylan said softly, seriously. His face was still gaunt— neither of them had put on much of the weight they’d lost.

Torrant gasped in a breath, unaware that he’d been completely trapping the air in his chest. “Don’t try what?” he choked.

“We won’t let you disappear,” Aylan said implacably. With an agile movement he swung off of the horse and into the cart, securing the reins on the corner post.

In the back of the cart he leaned up against the backboard and took Torrant’s head in his lap. “Here, brother—I’ll watch your back, and you sleep.”

Yarri, at Aldam’s urging, did the same thing (but not so agilely) before the light from the torch faded behind them. Zhane---the only one of the Goddess folk to leave Clough for good-- sat on the buckboard with Aldam, talking quietly about anything at all.

“Goodnight, brother,” Aylan said quietly into the encroaching dark, “love you.”

“Goodnight, beloved,” murmured Yarri from Torrant’s other side, “love you.”

“Goodnight,” Torrant replied, letting that soothing darkness take him shallow, breathing to see the sunlight another day. “I love you both too.”

The next day, as a lightening of the air told them they were close to the Eiran side of the pass, Torrant insisted on riding Heartland out of the tunnel. “He’s got a gait like butter!” he protested grumpily. “The only way I’ll fall off of him is if a plummeting star knocks me off my seat.”

Aylan eyed him with supreme dislike from the back of the gray he’d actually ridden out of Eiran a little less than a year before. “That is so not funny,” he grumbled, and Yarri seconded that sentiment from her place in the back of the wagon.

Torrant stopped short, and in the dim light they could both see shock and surprise washing his features. His eyes crinkled, and a real smile actually flirted at the corners of his mouth. “Goddess!” he laughed. “I’d forgotten that really happened!”

He was still laughing when the sun-strike shot through their eyeballs at the end of the tunnel. Their eyes had barely recovered from the searing light of a true spring day, when word of their arrival made it through Eiran. By the time they had taken the side-road past the barracks to the main road, the road was lined on either side by the citizens of Eiran, the people that Torrant and Yarri had grown up with, whom Torrant had worked with at Lane’s warehouses, whom Yarri had bought sugar from or Aylan had drunk a pint with.

The entire orphanage was there, a hand-painted banner with Yarri’s name held in front of the children, Aln at their head, waving at Yarri with a certain relief.

The people who had been evacuated from the Goddess ghettoes were in the front rows.

Without warning, Torrant found that his hands were shaking, and his forehead was sweating, and black spots were swimming in front of his eyes.

“Aylan…” he muttered, shamed and shameless in the sudden surge of fear and failure, “Aylan…I don’t think I can do this.”

Aylan cantered up by his side and smiled at the new leader of the militia, the man who had taken over after a family friend had been killed at Triannon.

“You’re Triane’s Son, brother,” Aylan said quietly. “You can do anything.”

“Aylan…”

“Only you, me, and Yarri know any different, mate.”

“Right,” Torrant said stiffly, putting an expression on his face that, to people who didn’t know him well, passed for a smile.

To his relief—at the first—there was no cheering, no celebrating, just people there waving and smiling. Then, to his horror, something worse than cheering happened.

As their party passed by, the whole of his town, the people who had adopted him and Yarri and Aldam and Aylan, bowed to them, silently, staying that way until they reached the end of the street and took the turn that would lead them to the Moon home.

The minute they disappeared from sight, the cheering and celebration erupted behind them, and Torrant threw himself off Heartland’s back and vomited in the corner behind the new brick tavern. Aylan was there, holding his head and keeping his trembling body upright, and in an awkward moment, so was Yarri, sending an anxious, puzzled glance over Torrant’s back.

“I don’t understand,” she murmured, running her fingers through his hair.

Aldam stopped the wagon and dismounted, waving the two of them off as he made to lift Torrant’s painfully thin body up to the wagon.

“Sod off , Aldam,” Torrant rasped ungraciously. “I’m fine.”

“Then why…” Aldam was puzzled, but not hurt in the least.

“Because,” Aylan said bitterly, coming to take Torrant’s arm, “it’s a lie. Don’t you understand? It feels like a lie. They…they bowed to us.” He and Torrant met eyes, in perfect communion. “Because the people they should have bowed to are dead.”

Torrant took an offered canteen of water from Aldam, rinsed out his mouth and spat.

“I guess we’re all they have, brother,” he said tonelessly, pulling himself painfully back up on Heartland’s back. “I wish there was some way we could give them something more.”

“Been writing any music lately?” Aylan asked archly, because everybody knew about Prince Aerk’s (as they called him ironically) request.

“When I feel like singing, I’ll let you know,” Torrant responded. It had been his response for the last week, but for the first time they heard a thoughtfulness in the answer, instead of the bitter irony they’d grown used to.

It was something.

Lane was in front of the familiar boarded two-story house to greet them, but in spite of all he knew about the last year, he still had to close his eyes against the thin, beaten version of the boy he’d raised to adulthood. Oh, Bethie—you should be here. He’s going to need both of us, and I’m not hardly whole.

Nevertheless, a faded joy touched Torrant’s pale face as he swung down from Heartland on wobbly knees.

He fell into Lane’s embrace as he had fallen into Aylan’s, but his burdens, the ones he had always laid on Lane’s shoulders if only for a moment, stayed his own.

Lane and Aylan met saddened eyes over Torrant’s tense, trembling body.

Oh, this was not going to be easy.

The next night, Aylan woke up with terror in his groin and ice in his chest, hauling breath through his lungs like a strangling rabbit.

He knew this feeling. It was how he and Torrant had awakened in Clough, when they were afraid the bells had rung and they’d missed them, or that they’d finally heard the pounding on the door for their heads that had never come.

Downstairs, he heard Torrant shout out loud, and he scrambled down to the living room only to meet Yarri there, huffing for breath after scrambling up the stairs.

“False…alarm…” she puffed. “He just sat up in bed, sweating like a race-runner, saying, ‘Aylan, the arse-wanking bells…”

Aylan sat down on the hardwood where he stood, his body shaking with laughter at a thing that was not funny in the least. “Gods…” he gasped, panting for breath, “Sweet Dueant’s soft, squishy balls and Triane’s purple tits…that’s why I was awake in the first place.”

Yarri looked at him, not laughing, not even a little bit.

“Please come down and sleep with us,” she said somberly. “Please? He has me to calm him down—and I’m barely enough. Until the night terrors stop—at least for you—please stay with us. I can’t stand that you’re alone.” A tear escaped, and she wiped it away. “Damned pregnancy…I hate it when I can’t say a damned word without weeping like an infant. Anyway, please, Aylan? You can’t just spend a few nights under a mountain and erase a year of fearing for your life every time you close your eyes.”

Aylan was shocked into silence. “That’s a generous offer, Yarri,” he said haltingly, “but for a couple newly married…”

“Bollix,” she looked at him implacably. “If you think the thing that got me pregnant is going to happen anytime soon, you’re mad. I’m afraid to touch him—he coughed blood yesterday, did you know that? After throwing up? He coughed blood and then he hid it from me. From all of us. And he doesn’t sleep—not really. He’s been relaxed as a kitten in bed from the day he woke up from fever…”

“That’s not how he sleeps,” Aylan said, making to stand up. He took her offered hand gratefully, and could almost hear her rolled eyes.

“Do you think I don’t know that?” she snorted, and then wobbled a little on her new gravity base. “And I have no idea how you sleep, but judging from the circles under your eyes, it’s not well either. Come sleep with us. He won’t survive without you, and I don’t think you’ll make it without him, and this family has lost enough as it is.”

She was watery again and angry at it, but Aylan had to agree. Coming home to a Moon house without Bethen had felt wrong in such a vast way, like coming home to an Eiran without a sea.

With a sigh he wrapped his arms around his little sister and was reassured when she snuggled into him. They might make it after all, if Yarri was this strong. If the three of them could gather what strength they had to stand.

“Don’t be afraid to touch him,” Aylan whispered. “He needs to be touched. He wasn’t touched enough before you got to us, and afterwards, there wasn’t enough time for the two of you to touch at all. Touch him—rub his back as he falls asleep. Run your fingers through his hair. He likes that.”

“And you, Aylan? What do you like?” she asked sadly, so happy to have someone to lean on that she felt like she could live with the answer.

“Falling asleep next to him,” Aylan told her after a fraught, raw moment, and she realized that living with the answer was as easy as breathing.

“Then come along, big brother. Let’s go get some sleep.”

Remembering To Live

Torrant said nothing the next day, when he woke up sandwiched between Yarri and Aylan. But when Aylan slid under the covers with him the next night, he curled up and sank like a weighted lead ball into the mattress.

The circles beneath Aylan’s eyes faded after that, and Lane would watch the three of them coming up the stairs from the basement room with kind eyes. There was not much else he could do for them, he thought fretfully. The weight of unhappiness palled over them like funeral ashes, covering the sun.

Torrant made an effort for his cousins—anybody could see that. He teased Starren, who regarded him with sober humor, and praised Cwyn’s newfound self-control. He congratulated Evya with a kiss on the cheek, and shook Stanny’s hand. He said delighted words over Roes’ full belly, and made the comment that she bore herself as fearlessly as her mother did when she was pregnant.

Lane wondered if he was the only one who saw the stark fear behind the boy’s eyes whenever she walked into the room.

Roes asked him, shyly, about a week after their return, if he wanted to feel the child inside her. Torrant always had such an affinity for babies, for the littlest most helpless ones. Lane wasn’t the only one who was unsurprised when what little color he’d regained in his face washed out, and he’d had to excuse himself with shaking hands.

Yarri met Lane’s eyes in utter misery, her own hand caressing her swollen abdomen, and Lane shook his head and went to go after him.

Aldam beat him to it.

After patting Roes’ shoulder, and assuring her that she’d done nothing wrong, Aldam caught up to Torrant behind the house, running in a ragged pattern towards the beach. He fell to his knees halfway there, pulling air into his lungs between curses, too short on breath to even throw up.

“I can’t do it,” Torrant panted as Aldam drew near. “I can’t…I can’t touch Yarri either…it’s not right. It’s not right that I should touch them.” He stretched his hands out in front of him, seeing things that Aldam could not. “I’ve got blood on my hands, brother. Can’t you see the blood on my hands?” He turned an anguished face towards his brother, and Aldam fell to his knees across from him, taking those hands in his.

“I see nothing on your hands that isn’t on my own, brother,” Aldam said with that maddening, implacable serenity. “Is this the reason you haven’t been to the orphanage?”

“I’m…” Torrant shook his head. “I don’t deserve to touch them. You’re good, Aldam. You’ve only ever killed because you had to.”

“That’s not true,” Aldam replied with a little snort of laughter. “The man who hit Roes deserved to die. His death made me very happy.”

Torrant looked up in surprise. “Someone hit Roes?” he said stupidly, and Aldam surprised him with that sunshine grin of his.

“You are not the only one who got his hands bloody, brother.”

“I can’t help you deliver Roes’ baby. You know I can’t. I’m not… good enough. I can’t…can’t bear to think of my hands touching them…” Torrant buried his hands in the sand, clenching them tight enough to dig sand into the creases of his palms.

“You speak as though children stay pure, brother.” Aldam laughed, sincerely, picking the sand up and letting it slip through his fingers. “I think, if nothing else, watching Cwyn and Starren grow should have proved the wrongness of that idea. Children are people. They are…” he struggled for the word, found it, lit up the foggy beach sunshine with another potent grin, “…potential! They are potential. You were potential to be another victim of Moon Hold, but you weren’t. You became our brother and our son. You had potential to be a simple healer, hiding in the hills, breathing your beliefs in fearful secret. I would have, if I hadn’t followed my brother because he left me behind. But you didn’t. You went into the world and did dreadful things, brother. Because all of those dreadful things had the potential to make the world a better place. Yes, your hands are bloody. So are mine, and Aylan’s. So are Cwyn’s. So are Trieste’s and Yarri’s, and no, I’m not going to tell you how, she hasn’t wanted to burden you with it.”

Torrant couldn’t help it—he had to smile at his ‘simple’ brother, and his wonderful, complex faith. “I will ask her,” he said quietly. “But I still don’t know if I can…”

Aldam stood up off of the cold sand, grateful that Torrant hadn’t made it to the wet part of the beach when his legs gave out. He wiped his hands off on his pants and then took Torrant’s hands and hoisted him up with the ease of lifting a thin child while he frowned. “Of course you can. You left me, you wanker. You owe me. You owe me this. But she’s got a good month, yet, so you have time to get used to the idea, and then you’ll have time to get used to the idea of delivering your own. Time, brother. We do have a little of it.”

He frowned at Torrant again as they walked slowly back to the house, shivering from the spring wind off the ocean. “But first, you have to eat.”

Later that night Torrant asked Yarri about the blood on her hands.

Yarri shrugged it off . “It was nothing,” she said with a patently fake smile.

Torrant frowned, and leaned forward to take her hands, stroking their backs with the pads of his thumbs. Yarri’s cheek’s warmed, and with a shock, he realized it was the first touch they’d had which spoke openly of sex between them since that frantic kiss in the back alley of Dueance. He frowned again, and leaned forward, brushing his lips against hers in the tiniest, most ticklish way.

He backed up again with his eyes closed. “Sweet,” he murmured. “I had forgotten how sweet…” He leaned forward to deepen the kiss and was surprised when she jerked away.

“You’re not…well…” Yarri protested, and Torrant looked away, trying to hide his hurt.

“I’m not…” he had to shrug, because he’d always taken this part of himself for granted, dismissing it as irrelevant, or superficial. “I’m not pretty anymore…” he apologized humbly, and was shocked by her hand, cracking across his face.

“Ow…”

“You wanker!!”

“wwwwch.” His shock really left no other word for it.

“You’re beautiful,” she snapped. “You are so golden, you horrible wank that you shine with it!”

“I ripped a man’s throat out with my teeth!” he snarled back, surprised by her anger into shouting his most heinous sin out into the quiet household. “I don’t know how you all can stand to look at me!”

“You were defending me! You were defending me, and I don’t give a damn how that monster died!” She brought a hand to her mouth and gnawed on a bloody knuckle, and he was angry at that too.

“It wasn’t even my sword!” Torrant shouted back viciously. “I live in fear—do you know that? I live in fear that my monster will come out and he won’t know you…he’ll hurt you or he’ll fail you the way he failed El…El…and…” Oh, Goddess, he couldn’t say their names. “Why do you think I’ve been so anxious to hide in my own skin for the past weeks! How could you touch me knowing what’s inside of me!”

“How could you touch me knowing that I left them there to die?!” Yarri screamed, and Torrant took a step back, confused.

“Is that the blood on your hands?” he asked, feeling as though he were in a strange room in a strange city, under a single moon.

“The blood on my hands is some dirty, filthy, bastard of a git who had nothing better to do in a burning city than try to rape anything in skirts.” She spat harshly on the floor. “I stabbed him in the balls and Trieste kicked him in the head and my virtue…” she laughed a little hysterically, “my virtue remained unscathed. Let him rot. I’d do it again. I’d do it twice. I’d stalk the streets and hunt down every arsehole with violence in his bollix for fun, and it wouldn’t change the fact that I was the one who left Eljean in that stinking city to die! I was the one who left my sister with no choice but to stay with him. I was the one who left you feeling helpless and hollow, and I’d do it again, just so you could live, but you know and I know that you’re never going to love me enough to forgive me.”

And before Torrant could stop her, she scrambled up the stairs and across the porch. Torrant heard the door slam behind her as he whimpered up the damned stairs, and watched helplessly as she stalked out into the dark, walking heavily at five months along but still leaving him in her dust.

“Oh shite,” he muttered despondently, “I’ll never be able to catch her.”

Aylan surprised him from the kitchen by saying, “She needs some space, mate. She’s been carrying that burden hard.”

Torrant looked at him unhappily, not sure if he was relieved or irritated that Aylan had heard. “Were we that loud?” he asked, and followed Aylan in. There was some stew on the stove that Starren had made while Yarri had been at the orphanage. He hadn’t been hungry at dinner—he’d made some excuse, but the truth was, he’d been feeling useless and worn. Everybody—including Aylan—seemed to have somewhere to go, something useful to do during the day but him.

“Yes,” Aylan said with humor, dishing out the stew with purpose, “but everybody else is out—there’s a town meeting about how to celebrate Beltane this year. With so many folks from the ghettoes, they want it to be something special.”

“Why didn’t I know?” Torrant muttered to himself, taking the stew and sitting down at the butcher’s block of a table. It was probably delicious, but he couldn’t talk himself into being any more excited about it now than he had been at dinner.

“Because we haven’t told you,” Aylan said softly.

“I know it.” Torrant took a glum bite, and Aylan looked so cheered he took another. “The lot of you could walk on eggs without shattering a single shell. I’m not that fragile, you know.”

“We can still see the sunlight through your hands, brother,” Aylan said, his face all concern, and Torrant tried to shake him off but Aylan wouldn’t let him. “Is that it? What you said to Yarri? Are you eating yourself alive for Eljean? For Trieste? For becoming a monster to kill one? Let me know, mate—tell me. Because you’re not putting on weight. You only sleep when I’m there—and that’s fine and good for me, but it’s no way to be with your wife, brother. You ran away from a pregnant woman today, and I’m sure you poured your soul out to Aldam, but you need to do it for me again, because we didn’t have each other’s backs for a sodding year just to have you wither and waste in your own home…”

“It…it’s worse here,” Torrant mumbled, interrupting Aylan before he could pour any more of his worry into the air.

Aylan stopped short, swallowed and nodded. “That it is.”

“In Clough, all those horrible things were what we did in Clough. It was war, it was…whatever it was, but here…it’s like all that death, it followed us here and I’m so angry at myself for…”

“Poisoning…” Aylan supplied, and Torrant agreed with him, shouted a “Y e s ” into the air that shot his chair backwards and sent him reeling against the back counter, his hands scrubbing at his face.

“Poisoning…how can they…Lane, Roes, Cwyn…all of them… how can they let me sleep here, where Bethen slept, knowing the things I’ve done? How can Yarri let me touch her…let me touch our babies, knowing that I couldn’t protect Eljean. I couldn’t protect Trieste. I couldn’t save them. It was one thing when I was a boy, and I was caught unawares, but this was different. We’d worked to keep people safe. And I still failed. I swore I wouldn’t leave another brother to die—and I did. Yarri may have told him yes, but I was the one he looked to for an order, and…”

His hands beat at the counter behind him, pounding until a drawer handle broke and the pain in his hands brought him back to himself with a muffled scream.

“Auuuuuuggggh—ah!” he punctuated it with a kick at the cupboard underneath the broken drawer, and if he’d been strong enough, that would have been a casualty too.

“And what if it’s not Eljean next time?” Torrant was sobbing freely now, as he had not sobbed when he’d picked up Eljean’s lifeless body, or when he’d kissed Trieste goodbye, or when he’d awakened, warm and breathing and lifeless, completely healed and dead inside. “Oh Gods and Goddess, Aylan. What if it’s you? What if it’s her…”

He couldn’t finish that sentence. All he could do was slide down the abused cupboards onto the floor and sit, huddled, shaking, looking dismally at Aylan as his brother, his friend, his lover, slid down next to him, wiping uselessly at his own tears.

“I don’t know,” Aylan said, leaning shoulder-to-shoulder with him. “Mate, I don’t know what to say. You’d think of all people you and I would know that sort of thing doesn’t come with guarantees…”

“But some things should be sacred,” Torrant said, hating himself for still believing it. “Things like your old lovers, or the woman who’s mothered everyone you’ve ever loved, or the home you went out to defend…” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes again, willing the pain in his soul to simply go away, to stop hollowing him out like a Samhain gourd.

“But what are we going to do about it?” Aylan asked logically. “We could leave it all behind…I’d go with you, you know.”

Torrant snorted a little and laid his head on Aylan’s shoulder the way they had been leaning on each other for the past year. “Where would we go?” he asked, willing to be led anywhere but in his own skin.

“Everywhere. We’d explore—I’ve never seen Cleanth, you?”

“No,” Torrant hiccupped a little, but it subsided.

“Me neither. How about the Garden Lands?” Aylan’s hand came up and stroked through the shaggy chestnut hair.

“I hear they’re lousy with wizards,” Torrant said, trying for a light tone with his clogged voice.

“You’d fit right in then,” Aylan gave a slight smile.

“That I would. What else would we do?” Aylan’s scent was comforting, as it always had been. The foggy thought passed that for this moment of peace, everything, the pain, the scars, the terrible wound, it had all been worth it, for Aylan to be here, talking him through the aching tangle of his own soul.

“We’d drink, every day, until we couldn’t wake up without a pint, and shag anything that would stay still for us,” Aylan mused. He looked down at the no-longer-young man, leaning on him for comfort. Torrant’s eyes were downcast, and his dark lashes fanned his cheekbones, and really, he was still just as appealing as he had been when they were eighteen and he’d been unblemished and beautiful.

Hazel eyes looked up, lighting a bit with humor and attraction, and in spite of himself, Aylan lowered his face, just a little, towards the man who could still lead him to the star’s dark and back. “And if no one else would stay still for us, we’d always have each other,” he said throatily, and Aylan nodded, and swallowed. Hard.

“I’d do it in a heartbeat, if you asked.” Oh, he would. The lure of such a life, nothing to worry about but the absolute surety of Torrant’s love was nearly overwhelming.

“It would be so easy, wouldn’t it?” There was a wistfulness there that all but tore Aylan’s heart in two.

“Oh yes.”

“Just the two of us.”

Ah, gods… “Oh gods yes.”

Their faces were so close together, their lips were almost touching. The press of them would be so sweet, Torrant thought with a slam of yearning. Almost as sweet as Yarri’s lips had been.

“You’d miss Starren,” he whispered, almost begging Aylan to tell him it didn’t matter.

Aylan closed his eyes in pain. “I would. Terribly. I don’t even know if I’ll love her like a woman when she’s of age…but gods, I’d miss he r.”

Damn…damn damn and double damn. But Aylan was still not moving. “You deserve to see how that would work,” Torrant murmured, almost weeping with willingness to simply sink into what Aylan was offering, to settle for the comfort because the entirety of love seemed just so damned hard.

“I do,” Aylan said sadly. “You’re right—I am a good man. I deserve to have the whole thing—the moon-destined mate, the entire family who loves me, the passel of children to worship. You taught me what a good man can have, mate. It’s your fault.” His head dipped that last bit, and their lips touched, and then again, and then lingered, and Torrant felt the wanting build in his chest.

Then Aylan pulled back. “You taught me what a good man can have—and you’re the best man I know.”

Torrant made a sound between a pained laugh and an exasperated sob, and he went back to laying his head on Aylan’s shoulder. “Ah, brother, it was not to be—but it wouldn’t have been bad.”

“But we deserve a chance at wonderful.” The conviction in Aylan’s voice made the hollowness in Torrant’s chest warm a little.

“Absolutely.” They were both quiet then, and they heard the back door open and Yarri’s waddling tread squeak across the floorboards of the living room.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Torrant said, without looking up from the worn floorboards.

“You didn’t follow me,” Yarri said quietly, and Torrant met her eyes with sad humor.

“You were going too fast, beloved. I…I got winded halfway out there today.” He flushed, feeling weak and lame. “I’ll have to work a little to get my wind back.”

“I’m sorry,” Yarri grimaced “I should have thought. But you’re wrong. It was my fault. I told him he could stay.” She wiped the back of her hand across her face. “And I saw that Trieste didn’t come with us and I didn’t go back.”

“And he told you he didn’t take orders from you—I was his captain.” A self-derisive smile tainted Torrant’s thin features for a moment. “And I said we’d come for him.”

“Oh hey—can I get in on this party?” Aylan asked, all sardonic bitterness. “Because I was the wanker who ran into a knife and bollixed up a plan that had a prayer’s chance of working!” He shook his head. “And damn Spots anyway. I…I saw her staying, but you were in my arms and I couldn’t go fight with Trieste when Starren was there…”

Yarri shook her head and stomped her foot awkwardly. “Both of you stop it…I took his gift! Don’t you see? You two can’t blame yourselves for Eljean because that’s what I took with it!”

Torrant made a sound in his throat and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Come here, beloved. Come take my hand.”

Yarri lumbered over and bent to take his hand, and then, looking into his sad, repentant hazel eyes, she gave a sigh and sat next to him, the three of them huddling on the floor like children telling secrets after a game of jacks. He wrapped his arm around her while still leaning on Aylan and they sat like that for a few moments, their quiet sadness as palpable as the smell of the stew coming off the stove.

“Aylan and I were thinking about running away together,” he said lightly. Only he and Aylan would ever know how near a thing it really had been.

“You just said you couldn’t walk out to the beach,” she returned, some humor seeping into her tone.

“I’ll get better!” he replied with comic dignity.

“So will this,” she murmured, and she sighed a little, happily, when his arm tightened around her body, under her breasts and over her belly.

At that moment, Lane walked in from the porch outside and regarded the three of them with only a little surprise. “I guess the pain-storm broke,” he said quietly, going to the cold box and rooting around for some chocolate preserves to put on the cookies Yarri had baked that day.

“We were trying to decide whose fault it all was,” Aylan supplied helpfully, looking wistfully at the cookies.

Lane walked a cookie over to him, dripping with fudge and then handed another to Torrant and one to Yarri. “Which part?” he asked, licking the chocolate from his fingers before going back to the counter and icing four more cookies to put on a plate. He went back to the cold box and got out the milk in the time it took one of them to answer.

“The worst part,” Torrant said at last. “The part where our friends died, and Trieste was…savaged…and our whole world fell apart.”

“Ah,” Lane sat down with his milk, took a drink, and offered the glass to Aylan. “That’s easy—it was my fault.”

Aylan spit milk out his nose.

“No, it was!” Lane protested, no twinkle at all in his eyes. “I was so busy watching Bethen, I didn’t realize how fragile my baby was. There’s no excuse really—she just seemed to be holding the world together with worsted yarn and a pair of sticks and I was so upset over Bethie…” his voice faded, and he met their eyes carefully.

“So it was mine, because I was too weak to keep Starry from going to Clough, and if she hadn’t…”

“That’s shite!” “Bollix!” “Uncle Lane!” The chorus of protests drowned out however he would finish that sentence, and he looked at them with a faint smile.

“You can’t play that game, my children,” he said quietly, “because you’ll be playing it for the rest of your lives and that would be a shame. Sacrifices were made so you could be here, living happily. It dishonors your friends to waste them.”

Torrant was the one who met his eyes, tears breaking in his own. “But it hurts…it hurts to know they were hurt for us.”

“They chose to be hurt for you,” Lane corrected, “and you need to choose to live for them.” He looked away, his own pain breaking in his eyes. “My wife spent months telling me that staring at the star’s dark and wishing you were there was no way to honor the people who made the trip. ‘We’ll be there already, Lane!’” he mimicked, doing a fair impression of Auntie Beth. “’We know what it’s like! You need to be bringing us stories of your side of the river!’ And so I am.

I’m remembering the way Starren looked like every other girl there tonight, and how happy she was to see her friends. I’m remembering the way Cwyn flirted with Aln, and then with Aln’s sister, and then with a married couple from the ghettoes, all in the same sentence. I’m remembering Stanny and Evya, and how they told each other secret jokes during the entire meeting. And when it comes time to join my Bethie, I’ll be able to tell it all to her. Because that’s the only reason I can think of that she had to go and I had to stay.”

They were all quiet then, a whole new pain warming the kitchen, and Lane offered them all another cookie. They shook him off at first, but he pressed again.

“Eat, my lost children,” he chided. “Sweetness—sometimes it’s what you live for—a little bit of sweet between the bitter. It can make all the difference in the world.”

Torrant looked up, the word catching his attention. What was I then? Eljean had asked him after that first, mistaken night. Sweetness. “Thank you, Uncle Lane,” he murmured. “I think I will have a cookie.”

Sweetness.

Remembering to Sing

Triane will wander, and sometimes is lost.

If we follow her brothers, in spite of the cost

She’ll be there to greet us, wherever she roams

Triane will wander, but always comes home.

Torrant frowned at the words in front of him, not sure if they rang true or not. They meant exactly what he wanted to say, he thought, but they were…bald. Bald and barefaced. They needed dressing up and he played with his lute strings to see if he could decorate the poetry a little.

“No, no,” Yarri murmured from her knitting chair in their downstairs bedsitter. “I like it.”

She came in behind him and put her hands on his shoulders as he sat sideways on the bed, and he leaned back into her, laughing a little when her growing belly butted at his head.

“They grew again today,” he said softly, and she bent and kissed his recently trimmed hair.

“They grow everyday,” she told him wryly. “I think one of them just shifted so his arse is sticking out.”

“If he’s anything like his your brothers, he’s probably beating the tar out of his twin behind your belly.” Torrant rolled his eyes and appreciated the quiet moment between them. They had been stealing them back, these heartbeats. Every day there were more of them, moments of the silent understanding that had filled their hearts for all their lives. Torrant treasured them now, as he hadn’t before—he’d spent too long with an empty heart. Every little warm thing that filled it again was golden.

“Are you ready to go?” she prompted, not sure if these walks were a good idea or not. He always seemed so pale and drawn by the time they were done—he swore he was getting stronger, but…but she had seen him, his life leaking out breath by breath. If he so much as panted, she looked to his shirt to see if he was bleeding again, and then to his lips to see if they were flecked with red.

“Absolutely!” he replied, with enough cheerfulness to let her know he was aware of her reservations. “We might see the sky tonight, you know.”

It had been foggy every night for the last few weeks as they’d gone walking—and Torrant had realized how long it had been since he’d looked to the sky, marked the progress of the moons and the diamond bright velvet foil of the stars.

He did remember the dawn he’d felt his beloved conceive, though— maybe that was enough.

“I’m overwhelmed with joy,” Yarri said now, dryly, and Torrant actually laughed, setting the lute down carefully on their quilt-covered bed and starting for the stairs to the living room.

Halfway up, he heard Roes say a rude word, followed by Aldam’s pleasant rumble—repeating the same word.

Torrant’s heart went icy and his hands clammy and he came to a head-banging halt on the stairs as Yarri asked him what was wrong.

“Roes is in labor,” he breathed, wondering if his neck was fluttering with the strength of his panicky pulse.

“Well good,” Yarri said with relief. “She’s been ripping our faces off all week—it’s about time!”

Torrant didn’t have the words for her. He hadn’t told her about what he and Aldam had said on the beach…the intervening time had been so peaceful, he hadn’t wanted to resurrect any pain, for fear of destroying the tenuous pleasure of a quiet heart.

He continued up the stairs more because his wife expected him to than because he felt any real bravery welling up in his chest.

When he got there, he found the family in a predictably organized chaos. Starren was competently boiling water in the kitchen for their sutures and thread, should they need it, Lane was putting old linens and an oilcloth on the bed Roes and Aldam had been sharing in Lane’s and Bethen’s old room, Cwyn had just dashed out the door to tell Stanny and Evya what was happening and Aldam and Aylan were holding onto Roes’ arms as she panted out another contraction in the living room.

“I was…told…” she panted, “that…I’d…have…some… warning…” big sigh, “before this happened!”

“I’ll get some linens,” Yarri murmured, nodding at the puddle of waters on the floor, and Torrant shook his head, a little bit of amusement coming to his aid and quieting the thunder of his heart.

“Roes, one, maybe two women in ten start a birth this way—did you pick it on purpose?” he asked, coming over to take her other arm from Aylan. Aldam expected him to help, he thought, making the panic in his chest subside with a sheer act of will.

The curse Roes aimed at him made him smile a little, and together the three of them made their way to the bedroom.

Much like her mother, when Roes’ waters broke, her body sprinted towards that finish line. Not much more than two hours later, Torrant stood between her splayed knees and endured another round of ripe cursing. That part, he thought fondly, as he cleaned off her body in preparation for the baby, was all Roes—Bethen hadn’t hardly cursed at all during labor, even though the expression ‘Triane’s purple tits’ had been one of her creations.

Roes gave a protracted groan, and a little thatch of what would surely be red curls forced it’s way through a space that surprised him every time with it’s smallness, and Torrant raised his hands to help ease the baby’s passage to the world. It had all been muscle memory, until this moment—motions he remembered from years of working in the hills, from well more than a hundred babies delivered, many of them before he was fourteen.

The muscle-memory served him well, actually, until this very moment, when his hands started shaking so hard he could barely see them.

“Aldam?” he said, leaching as much of the anxiety from his voice as he could.

Aldam was busy holding Roes’ hand, and Yarri was on her other side—together they worked in a strange sort of concert. Aldam assured Roes that everything was going to be fine, while Yarri assured her that the rest of the world were bastards and as soon as Roes got up from childbed, they would get together and annihilate whomever was responsible. Aldam’s way was the most peaceful, but Yarri’s way kept

Roes focused through her contractions, and the din during the delivery was truly incredible.

Aldam looked up and met Torrant’s eyes, and in spite of everything— his wife’s vociferous protests against the labor in general, his own excitement over the birth, the general chaos of the Moon household, Aldam knew exactly what was wrong.

Roes didn’t even notice when Aldam gave her hand to Yarri, and moved around behind Torrant. Aldam made a delighted little ‘oh’ sound that vibrated down to the soles of Torrant’s feet when he saw the baby’s head.

Then he put his hands behind Torrant’s hands, holding them firm and steady, as Roes gave a titanic heave, and that little, oddly proportioned head was suddenly laying wetly in Torrant’s palms.

The shaking stopped abruptly, and without a word, Aldam went back to his Roes in time for Torrant to say, “One more, Roes—and then we’re almost done with this nonsense, yeah?”

“Oh yes!”

And there she was, the same way all babies had been since he’d held Yarri in his arms at her first breath. Red-faced, squalling, angry and confused, little Bethen Moon had made her entrance into the world, and Torrant had been there to ease her way.

Yarri made an able assistant, taking the grumpy little human to where linens and warm, sterile water lay waiting, bathing her and swaddling her into a tight, suspicious little package who settled daintily into her mother’s arms as soon as the afterbirth was delivered and the clean-up was complete.

“She’s too little for mum’s name!” Roes said, wiping at her tears, and Aldam took her, with a look of beatific enchantment on his face.

“Well, she’ll grow,” he said, his contentment so typically Aldam that Torrant found himself catching Yarri’s teary eyes and sharing a smile. “We can call her Bitsy in the meantime—she is a little bit of a thing now, isn’t she?”

Eventually, the new mother was resting, her beloved by her side. Aldam whispered kind things to her and promised her something to eat as soon as humanly possible.

Torrant took the baby out to the sitting room to show the family, presenting her to Lane with a certain amount of pride.

Lane held his granddaughter as he’d held his own daughter, oh so long ago, kissing the top of her fiery red head. “She’s…” he stopped, closing his eyes tight. “Bitsy, right?”

“That’s right, Uncle Lane,” Torrant nodded encouragingly. “Bitsy.”

Lane nodded, and looked his foster son in the eyes. “So what do you think of her, boy-o?”

Torrant grinned, and it was bright enough—real enough to make the whole family stop its breath. “Sweetness,” he said softly, touching the tiny, absurdly long, wrinkled finger with his own. “She’s all that is sweetness.”

Lane’s tears broke. “Of course she is, boy!” With that he held her up to the family, and Torrant stepped aside as new aunts and uncles surrounded the baby and her grand-da. He’d had his moment with her—and suddenly the idea that he would have moments with his own held none of the terror that it once had.

Later that night—when the family was settled, and the new family was sleeping, little Bitsy rocking in her mother’s own cradle, Torrant and Yarri took their belated walk.

The stars were splinter sharp in the spring night and Triane peeped out from under a fog bank on the seaward horizon.

The ocean itself was nearing high tide—Torrant had taken off his boots and Yarri dangled her sandals between her fingers and they walked with sort of an exhausted enjoyment of each other’s company.

“You panicked for a moment,” Yarri murmured, when they’d reached their accustomed stopping place. There was a driftwood log there, which was the perfect size for sitting on and talking—or sitting silently, listening to the crash and the roar and the throb of the heartbeat that drove this place they both loved.

“Yes,” Torrant replied, too enchanted by the night sky to want to talk about that moment anymore.

“But you’re fine now?” she asked stubbornly, and his teeth glinted in the starlight as he smiled at her.

“You are amazing,” he said, out of the blue. “Look at you—you’re beautiful and stubborn, and you can do anything. You keep the orphanage running, and you can barely walk!”

“Torrant!” she protested, because he was dodging the subject.

“I’m just…” he smiled again, the kind of smile where his lip curled and his eyes crinkled, and her heart stopped all the way down to her toes. “I’m just suddenly grateful, that’s all. Auntie Beth said one day, I’d wake up and I wouldn’t be tired anymore, and waking up would be worth it. I think today is that day, that’s all.”

And for once, Yarri let it go. “When did she tell you that?” she asked, taking his hand off the log and stroking it. He’d looked at her, this week—really looked at her. Not as a brother looks at a sister, or a warrior looks at a brother in arms, but as a man looks at a woman he loves…Her heart had started to fill up too.

“The night she died,” he said softly, that hand coming up to cup her chin. “The night Eljean died, and I died, and we all met at the riverside by the boat that would take us beyond the star’s dark.”

Yarri closed her eyes, the warmth of his hand on her face the only anchor to the here and now. “You all met there?” she asked, believing.

“We did—and they told me to stay. And then you were begging me to stay. And so I did.”

“Thank you for that,” she said, and his thumb brushed a teardrop from her cheek.

“You’re welcome,” he said softly. “But it wasn’t my pleasure, I’m afraid. Not until this exact moment.”

Her eyes flew open, and suddenly he was so close to her, and she remembered everything about him so acutely—his smell, the way his whiskers patched his cheeks this long past morning, the way his hazel eyes gleamed darkly in the moonlight… oh, Goddess, it was all there, and in this moment, it was all for her.

Their lips met with a delicate voracity, and then a true brutal starvation, and they kissed each other hungrily, their bodies throbbing with want in the silent midnight.

His hands came up to her breasts, and she gasped for a moment. “I’m not the same,” she said, trying to remember the last time in Clough that they had done this, and he laughed a little, pulling her hands under his shirt. She could feel it there, the smooth, raised expanse of scar tissue that ran from below his belly button to above his second rib. Its edges were uneven, and it was almost half the expanse of her hand, and she still touched him voraciously, hungry for the feel of him.

“Neither am I,” he murmured softly, and she smiled at him, a little bit of seduction in her smile.

“So, uhm, do you want to go back home? I think Aylan’s sleeping on the couch tonight…”

He kissed her in response, and for a moment it looked as though they wouldn’t make it back to the bedsitter after all. And then a sound, a sense, caught his attention, and he pulled away.

“Yarri…” he muttered, to get her attention, and she saw the freak wave coming at them, just in time to stop his attempt to get them up the shore.

“We’ll live,” she said firmly, and he looked at her in surprise. Their hands were clasped tight when the wave hit them, dousing them both nearly to their chins, but they held on to each other firmly, and the water receded before it had a chance to suck them under. They stood there, shrieking, laughing, breathless for a moment, and then he turned to kiss her again, only to find her looking gravely at him, shivering in the dark. Her hand was cupped up at his chest, holding that precious, indefinable thing that existed between them with such awe and care he could swear it glowed in the space of her palm.

He held his own hand over hers, and then they kissed, reverently, sweetly, lovingly, keeping the promise of those cupped hands after all.

It had seemed like such a promise, that they would weather any storm, any wave, together and love side-by-side until the end of a long life.

They had taken it as such, and it was truth.

Oh, there were moments when they’d doubted, the two of them— the morning of their daughter’s birth had almost been the morning of Yarri’s death, and Torrant had very nearly cursed all the gods and his own breaking heart.

But Yarri had strength, and she had her husband and her twin boys, and she too made the choice to walk away from a peaceful river for the grit under her feet on the riverbank, and she too stayed like her husband to discover the joys the world could give them.

And Goddess, there were so very many joys.

There was the moment he played what would become the full scale Ballad of the Three Sons at Beltane—and his family had wept with him, for Eljean and Djali and Jino, for Triana and Trieste, for all of the victims of the mindless hatred that the Moon family had battled at such cost.

There was the moment of their belated hand-fast, Yarri’s burgeoning belly under the spring sunlight a testament to the fact that their hearts had been married long before.

The moment that Aylan moved his stuff back into his room, only to venture down to the bedsitter during the worst of his nightmares, or when Torrant gasped out his name in a sweat, had been a personal triumph for the three of them.

There was the moment Torrant and Aylan had escorted Starren to a newly rebuilt Triannon, a buck-board full of rescued books testament to what they all believed in, and a moment two years later when Aylan and Starren had finally handfasted, because they could not wait until her course at Triannon was done to consummate that waiting love. Torrant and Yarri had cheered and wept to see their true, honorable friend, their beloved brother, happy, peaceful, and seated firmly in the joy of his soul.

The moments of watching the children grow had been magic. They marveled at small things together, from twin boys, making vowels at each other across a sunlit moon, to all the children, running around in a pack at Beltanes, Solstices, Samhains, and summer. They celebrated the discovery by the barely mobile toddlers of a beleaguered and irritated cat—a thousand small moments such as these made that one moment, dripping in salt brine, the heart of all that followed.

They never took it for granted. Not one moment. Not one laugh. Not one touch of their children’s hands in their own or stolen kiss in the peace of the night. If anyone knew that Joy was a fleeting houseguest, it was Torrant and Yarrow Moon.

In fact all of the Moon family lived by that truth: Joy is never still. She knows where She is welcome. Any home that follows Honor and Compassion lets Her in—but it’s not Her nature to stay put. Much of life is like that—the hard choices, the terrible hurts, the moments of “I wish I had…” But as long as the hearts making the choices keep their courses as true as the twin moons, Joy will find her way home.

And sweetness follows.

Epilogue Moons at Rest

Torrant had sung his ballad for nigh on thirty years now, and he always knew those moments when the gods sang with him.

There was a fraught, thundering pause, wherein the collective breath of Eiran was drawn, and then there was the enormous, deafening of applause. He bowed gracefully, every time—even that first time, when the wounds of all of them had still been raw and bleeding.

Tonight, like most nights, he and Aylan met eyes over the crowd. They would not be spending the Beltane wilding with their wives. With a couple years of hard exception after Aylan’s handfasting, they hadn’t spent Beltane in bed with their moon-destined women since that first year, the year Aylan had gotten Torrant roaring drunk for the first time in his life.

The nightmares would be especially vivid for the next few weeks. Those weeks, those terrible moments, were the reason the Moon home may have expanded to hold their two families, but that Torrant and Aylan never parted. Starren and Yarri counted the men’s closeness, their moments at wilding, as a small price to pay for whole, healthy hearts.

Their family watched as the men’s eyes connected, as their wives snuck arms around their waists for quiet, reassuring embraces. Yarri wiped her face on Torrant’s shoulder as she did every year, because every year she was angry with him for hurting, but it was Yarri who usually wept.

“Are we done with this?” she asked unhappily, and Torrant looked at her, shaking his head because she knew better.

“We’re never done with this,” he murmured, and then he accepted Roes’ hug, and Starren’s and Evya’s, and a then a handshake from Stanny’s one child, a sober, somber, big shouldered boy whom everybody trusted with the children, no exceptions. Torrant had worked his way through most of the family, and was moving to Lane to kiss his uncle on the cheek, when his beloved’s insistent tug on his hand let him know that she wasn’t done with this matter either.

“Sweetheart,” he murmured, and then Kessie, the one child who had picked up the lute after him, came up for her hug. He embraced her with both arms, kissing her on top of her red-gold hair and smiling into her sober brown eyes—ah, Goddess, she was so much the spitting image of her mother, a fact Torrant had celebrated every day since her birth.

“Da,” said his dreamy-eyed, star-gifted daughter, “what have you done to make Mum so mad?”

Torrant found himself smiling, because all the gods seemed to be winking at him at once on this matter. “She won’t let me finish, Kessie—I’ve been trying to tell her that I’ll start teaching you the ballad, if you like, and we can sing together next year.”

Kessie—who had loved his pet name for her since she could barely walk—held one hand to her mouth and one hand to her rather swollen stomach delightedly. Her husband—Aerk’s only child, Jino—had been called to Clough on business, but he would be back within the week, which was good, because she was getting too large to get around easily. “Do you think I could do that, Da? I’ll have a handful.”

“Every mother does—don’t worry, Kessie—you won’t have to learn the whole thing right away, but…” he caught the joy in Yarri’s approving eye, and thought of the gray in his hair, and the way his silver streak no longer showed so brightly against the dark, and of the silver frosting her hip-length plait.

“It’s time to let us have our own glory, right Da?” said Eljean from his other side, and his son accepted the hug with wry affection. Ellyot, with Torran--his perfectly tiny wife-- and their two children were suddenly there too, and then River and Night, Torrant’s sturdy, cheerful youngest sons.

“Oh my children,” he murmured, looking at the happy, busy, beautiful, suffering, celebrating lot of them, all of them with the white streak in their temple, all of them gifts from the gods, “You are your own glory. But this story is ours, and it isn’t to be forgotten. I know you’ll all pitch in with the baby and help your sister learn it, right?”

There was a chorus of “Oh, yes!” and “Absolutely!” and enough chatter about it to keep them happily engaged for the quiet hour after the song shook the town, as it did every year.

However, eventually the night wound down. In a brief moment of quiet giddiness, Yarri pulled her middle-aged husband behind a tree and kissed him soundly. He grinned at her, the gleaming of his teeth and the brightness of his hazel eyes undimmed by the thirty years of joy they’d shared, and she smiled shyly back.

“What was that for?” he asked, kissing her forehead reverently. Every year she dreaded the Beltane song. Every year she was grateful for it when he finished.

“Nothing,” Yarri told him, feeling very very young in the trapped quiet of the tree-shadow. Between their bodies she held her cupped hands, a promise between them for more than forty years.

This moment was no different than all the years before.

Torrant held his hands over hers, and together, they breathed the sacredness of their love in the holy dark. It was an older love, wiser and tried, but it was still as vibrant a glow in the shelter of their palms as it ever had been.

She stood on tiptoe and kissed him again, gently. “Go easy on Aylan tonight,” she warned with a smile. “You two are not as young as you used to be.”

“Impossible!” he told her sincerely. “You are as beautiful as you ever have been—I’ll be damned if we’ve aged a year.”

Yarri laughed then, because she knew that the silver in her hair glinted in the silver of the moons, and because she knew her hips had only spread as she’d born their children. She was no longer the laughing girl on the green that she had been when he’d ridden a tired horse in to see their last carefree Beltane and to fall in love with the love of his life. She was no longer the girl who looked forward to Beltane with the complete unfettered joy with which she’d awaited her first kiss.

But it didn’t matter. In his eyes she would always be golden, always dance lithely, always be his.

They smiled into each other’s eyes then, until a child’s piping voice called to grandmamma, and they both went out to shepherd their families to their various beds for the night.

Later, Yarri helped her beautiful daughter waddle her way home, and Torrant and Aylan found that they were walking to the Moon home in the dark of the Beltane night, side by side in the companionable crunching of their boots on the gravel road.

“So you’re retiring the ballad?” Aylan asked hopefully after a moment, and Torrant frowned wryly in the light of the three moons.

“I’m training Kessie this year, but no. You know as well as I do why it needs to be remembered.”

Aylan nodded again, and looped a comforting arm around Torrant’s shoulders. “You’d think, after all these years, it would feel like someone else living that time, but it never does,” he said thoughtfully, with a great deal of pain. “I don’t know what to think of that.”

“I think,” Torrant said, leaning against Aylan as he so often did, “that there was sweetness in the midst of the madness, and I should be very unhappy to lose that memory with age.”

Aylan nodded and then bent and dropped a kiss in Torrant’s hair. “Amen to that, brother, amen to that.”

Together they walked down the main street of the town they’d loved for the thirty years since their return. The ocean glittered in the distance beyond them, the three moons dancing in her wake, and Triane’s Son and Oueant’s Son made their way quietly home.

In Memoriam—a few words from the author

I teach high school in my other identity, and most of the kids know I write—a few of them have even read my books. One of these students, Marvin Wingate, was sitting in my fourth period class last year with his best friend, Jino, and their friend, Carrie, and I was suddenly besieged: “Ms. Lane, can I be in your book? Please Ms. Lane? We want to be in your book.”

“Okay, guys, but remember, I do have bisexual characters—you’ll have to be cool with that.” In my neck of the woods this is an important qualification—students can get VERY upset when the sexuality issue is mentioned, and they needed to understand that this book was about all kinds of tolerance.

“But we’re going to be straight, right Ms. Lane?”

I laughed. “Of course.” In fact, having based Aerk and Keon on two students I’d had the year before, their roles as young regents were already humming along in my brain. For that matter, so was the dance scene, where a number of girls who had already read Vulnerable are featured—again, by their request.

At that point Carrie, who had an unsuccessful crush on Jino chimed in, “And you have to kill one of them, Ms. Lane—I think Jino should die!”

“Right, fine! Jino, prepare to meet your maker!”

Jino—who looks much like he is described in the book, grinned his lady-killer smile. “Awesome, Ms. Lane.”

Marvin, his best friend, pouted. “C’mon—I wanted to be the one to die.”

Marvin Wingate (who also looks a lot like Marv’s description in the book) was in my class for his 10^th and 11^th grade years. His 10^th grade year was rough—he’d gotten into some trouble and was in the process owning up to his responsibilities, and I was impressed by the young man who wanted to grow up and be a good person. His 11^th grade year was proof of that—he slept a lot (well, he did have mono…) but he also participated a lot, and worked hard in his goal to be able to join the U.S. Marine Corp when he graduated. I was so proud of him—I thought that watching this kid graduate would be a real highlight of 2009. I love watching my students grow up—it’s one of the bennies of the job.

Not this time.

One gorgeous, blindingly hot summer day in Sacramento, right after the bell let out, Marvin, Jino and a bunch of other inmates of summer school, went out to Discovery Park to swim in the Sacramento River. Marvin got caught in a current and drowned. Jino was there in the hospital when the time of death was called.

I didn’t hear about Marvin’s death until nearly a month later, and then all I could do was mourn him and wish I had been able to make it to the memorial ceremony.

This book was already in the revision stage, and during the painful rewrite, I examined every word of ‘Marv’s’ appearance, wondering if I should pull him from the text, change his character, allow Jino to live—in short, I second guessed every choice I’d made regarding ‘Marv’, because I didn’t want to cause anyone who read the book any pain on his behalf.

The first day of school, Jino came into my room to talk about Marvin. I fished through my closet of lost and found and pulled out one of Marvin’s camouflaged tank-tops, left before summer vacation, and we both tried very hard to not sink into an abyss of grief. While I was searching for it, Jino asked me about the book.

“We’re both still in it, aren’t we Ms. Lane?”

“Of course you are.”

“And I’m still the one who died, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Good—leave it that way. I want to read it, and I couldn’t stand it if Marvin’s character died.”

“Okay.”

“You know, Ms. Lane—you know, there’s this kid in ROTC who looks like him—mixed heritage, curly hair, that white smile with the crooked front tooth. I see him in the corner of my eye sometimes, and my heart jumps and I think it’s him.”

I’m crying by now, and so is he a little. “Oh Marvin,” I said, shaking my head, “you dumbshit kid…I hope you knew what you were going to do to us.”

Jino nodded. “He pulled a Marine maneuver without backup, Ms. Lane. It was so not cool.”

It wasn’t. It was so not cool. But Marvin would have grieved just as much as Jino is grieving now, and I hope when Jino reads this, he’ll see that brotherhood cuts both ways. Both boys are everything I wanted in my regents—strong, brave, honorable, and full of so much potential to make the world a better place. They were the good I see in my heroes—it’s that pure and that simple.

Marvin, buddy, we’ll miss you in June.