by Amy Lane
“Whadya mean ‘we,’ Spotty?” asked an amused voice behind them, and Torrant turned around to confront perhaps the most beautiful young man he had ever seen. The boy’s eyes were a brilliant, sparkling purple-blue, set deeply behind a pair of knife-edged cheekbones, and alone they would have arrested anybody’s attention, but they paled compared to his mouth. The boy’s lips were full in the center, ripe, almost as soft-looking as a girl’s and strong around the outsides like a man’s. At the moment they were thinned with derision, but even the hint of cruelty at the corners made them dangerous and attractive, and not off-putting in the least.
In spite of his failed wilding, Torrant knew what attraction was about. He’d felt it for some of the young women in the village of Eiran, and the occasional young man, but he had never seen features on someone so obviously fashioned by the Goddess for both beauty and pleasure. His breath nearly stopped in his chest at the thought of what those lips could do to his body.
Then the boy’s words sank in. Torrant looked from his daze at Trieste, just in time to see her shrink into herself and become the stammering, terrified little rabbit that had greeted him and Aldam at the registrar’s office instead of the animated, chattering friend he’d known for the last hour.
Suddenly those lips didn’t look so lush anymore.
Trieste swallowed and smiled nervously. In a rabbit, it would be seen more as a whisker twitch than a smile, and Torrant had the sudden impulse to put himself between her and this obviously nasty predator. “Hullo, Aylan.” Again, that twitch took over her features. “These are our new students—Torrant Shadow and Aldam….” She turned toward him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get your surname, Aldam?”
“Moonshadow,” Aldam said complacently, and Torrant’s eyes grew wide—he didn’t recall ever knowing Aldam’s surname. He hadn’t realized that Aldam had adopted his family in name as well.
“Very… hm… nice…,” Aylan was saying, and Torrant put his attention back on the predator, who was now eyeing him like a tasty snack. “You’ll have to bring our new friends around more, Spots. They may make you worth knowing after all.” His eyes raked up and down Torrant’s body again, taking in his green shirt—still torn from his conversation with Yarri the day before—and spending an especially appreciative moment on Torrant’s white lock of hair.
“We’ve been going here since we were small,” Trieste apologized, ducking her head and lowering her eyes. Torrant found he very much wanted her to stand up straight and look him square in the face again.
“We know all each other’s dirty little secrets, don’t we, Spots?” Aylan’s insinuating smile made Torrant’s stomach turn over.
“You must not know her very well at all if you can’t see more to her than spots.” Torrant smiled, knowing the expression was not as pleasant as it should have been. He was fighting to keep his vision clear and in full color, when a pall of black, white, and red kept threatening to veil the world.
“Oh, Spotty knows how we see her, don’t you?” Again that sneer, that threat to make her life unpleasant, and Trieste furled so much into herself that Torrant was afraid she would disappear.
“Calling her names is not likely to make us your friend,” he snapped, aware that he was suddenly seeing Aylan in red, and that two sorts of hungers were thrumming through his confused body. One of them pooled in his belly, the other one pooled in his thighs, and suddenly the need to be somewhere else was overwhelming. He smiled at Trieste, making sure it was a real smile, in spite of how he knew his eyes must look. “Didn’t you say you were going to show us the stables next?” It was a lie, of course. They knew where the stables were, and the dining room was actually the end of the tour, but for the first time since Beltane the snowcat was threatening to rear its head uninvited, and he needed to be outside.
Aylan was undeterred. “Trieste will have to bring you by my quarters, then,” he all but purred. “She knows how I like to introduce myself to interesting people.” The smile on that full and gorgeous mouth became terrifying with its implications. “And I adore blue eyes.”
He sauntered off with a gait designed to show anybody watching that his back and his waist and his hips were as well formed as his mouth—but neither Torrant nor Trieste were watching.
Torrant was surprised that he could find the way out of the school to the stables, but find it he did, with Trieste and Aldam trotting to stay behind him. He came barreling out of the side door and across the clearing, making it into the forest beyond the stables before they could catch up, and when he got to the trees, he grabbed at the bole of one of the bigger redwoods, threw back his head, and roared.
He heard Trieste give a breathless little shriek and the horses whinny. The sounds alone—now that his antagonist was not here—were enough to make the sky fade from gray to blue, and the earth from black to brown. He found himself with his head resting against the tree trunk, dragging air into his lungs like a swimmer up from the bottom of the surf.
“Who in the name of the twin gods’ nadir was that?” he panted, and Trieste giggled nervously from his side.
He couldn’t look at her immediately, and he turned instead to Aldam’s reassuring face. Aldam checked his eyes carefully and nodded, then said: “If I could have, I would have turned into a wolf and then ripped him apart.”
Torrant shuddered. “I wish that’s all the snowcat wanted,” he murmured for Aldam’s ears alone. Finally, he felt safe enough to turn to the pretty girl who had made him feel so welcome in this new and frightening place. “He’s beautiful, but is he always such a… a… jerk?”
Trieste laughed. “He knows he’s beautiful.” Her voice was bitter, and nobody needed to ask why. “And he bunks the beautiful. Boys or girls, if they’re pretty, they all get the invite to his quarters. He’s not going to be happy if you shrug him off.”
“Too damned bad!” Torrant growled. “And if he ever talks to you like that again, I’ll rip out his spleen.”
“Aren’t you attracted to him?” Trieste asked, seemingly unable to handle being defended.
“Who wouldn’t be?” Torrant shuddered. “But you’re as pretty as he is, and if he can’t be civil to you, he’s not the kind of person I want to know. Aldam, let’s go unpack.” He stopped long enough to bow shortly to her, a ceremony that also seemed to take her aback. “We’ll see you at dinner, then?” His voice rose hopefully, and he didn’t understand why she blushed.
“Of course,” she replied after a flustered, breathless sort of moment between the two of them. “I’d be happy to—you’ve got less than an hour.”
“See you then.” With that, Torrant fled back to his room to make it his own and to ignore the flooding of blood, anger, and embarrassment that seemed about to deprive him of reason.
Trieste
TRIESTE WATCHED the boys flee back across the field bemusedly: first they had torn out here so Torrant (Ellyot? The whole school had heard the rumors that “Torrant Shadow” was really Ellyot Moon) could have some air, and now, in spite of that terrifying, terse conversation, he and Aldam stood as close as any brothers, trotting fiercely back. But he had said he’d see her at dinner, and he’d sounded like he was looking forward to it, and she couldn’t possibly deny that every place her heart beat inside her body fluttered with joy when he turned that charming smile and those lovely hazel eyes in her direction.
Except, for a moment, as he’d been pulling his temper together at the base of the redwood tree, his eyes had seemed almost blue.
But that didn’t matter. Not at all. Because he had defended her. Aylan had been there, all blinding beauty and serpentine swagger, and he had smiled right into Torrant’s eyes with that pull, that sensual magnet that had been beguiling people into his unholy little orbit since they’d been eight years old and had shown up on Triannon’s doorstep on the same day.
“Oh,” he’d said, his eyebrows raised in derision. “You’re plain.”
That had summed up their relationship from then on: She was plain and beneath
his notice, and he, Aylan, was the planet around which the moons revolved.
But today, the charming boy, the beautiful boy with the shock of white hair in the chestnut, the grooves around his mouth, and the amazing, kind, hazel eyes had told Aylan—Aylan—that if he couldn’t be nice to her, he wouldn’t be his friend.
Trieste leaned against the same tree Torrant had and put her hand to her flibbertigibbet heart. It wouldn’t matter, she thought wistfully. It wouldn’t matter if Torrant took that visit to Aylan’s room, became another notch carved into his ordinarily plain wooden bedframe, another one of the beautiful whose bodies Aylan explored for his own. If Torrant ate dinner with her, enjoyed her company, smiled at her again, if he just stayed her friend, she might be able to survive these last four years of school.
That afternoon, stuck in the fusty registrar’s office because she dreaded going outside and facing Aylan and his cronies, surviving university had not been a sure thing at all.
DINNER CAME, and, oh fair Goddess, stalwart gods, he came down the stairs wearing a new brown shirt (the last one had been green, and it had what looked to be new tears and tearstains on it) and a much more composed expression than he’d had when he left. Aldam, the round-faced boy with the eyes the color of a late-summer sky and the smile that made a person want to pet a kitten or something, was right at his shoulder, whispering something into Torrant’s ear that made that smile, the one with the one raised lip, appear.
Trieste thought she might collapse into jelly and then evaporate into sugary ooze, right there on the cherrywood floor of the dining hall.
Then he looked up and saw her and turned his smile at her, and first she thought maybe they should register that smile as a bona fide ability. In a way, the smile was sort of like Aylan’s, but without the nasty, sick-to-your-stomach side effects she’d seen in some of the people who had allowed him access to their bodies for his pleasure. It seemed as though sleeping with Aylan rarely came without at least a year of wormwood-strength remorse. Torrant’s smile promised… kindness, she thought in surprise.
He came down the stairs, and both he and Aldam gave her that little courtesy bow—the one she got at her parents’ court but rarely asked for here—and at first she was going to ask who had told them who she was, and then she realized it was just because she was a pretty girl. She flushed again and fought the urge to turn around and run away with the same torrent of words she had heard, with amazement, issuing forth earlier that afternoon.
“Hullo—you’re all dressed and everything. That’s good, because we do dress for dinner, not really nicely most days, but we clean up and everything. The professors usually preside, but school hasn’t really started yet, so we’re sort of on our own. We can sit wherever we like, but we usually split ourselves between gifted and nongifted; the professors don’t tell us to do that, but in the last few years the nongifted, the rich kids, you know, they’ve gotten really superstitious and afraid….”
“Why?” Aldam broke in, putting a voice to the cautious look he’d exchanged with Torrant.
“Because of what happened to the Moon hold.” Trieste was surprised. “I mean, you of all people should know about that, right El… I mean Torrant? The Goddess’ gifted rose up against the Moons, and there was a massacre and….” Because both the boys were growing red in the face and Torrant’s chest was forcing air in and out with a visible effort, and she could practically smell the fury coming off of him.
“That’s shite,” he hissed in a low breath. “I can’t…. People are saying that about Moon hold? How long have they been saying that?”
There was a knife edge of agony in his voice, a pain she wasn’t sure she could remember ever having heard before. “Since it happened… what were we, fourteen?” Her confusion was evident. “I mean… that’s not the truth?”
“No.” Torrant took another deep breath, an angry breath, and when he looked at her, this time she was sure his eyes were blue.
Trieste blinked, her own breath catching in fear. When she looked again they were hazel, but now she was more confused than ever. “How would you know?” she asked. Drine and Alys and some other girls with high-ranking parents from the nongifted dorm came down the stairs, brushing by the three of them, curiously turning their heads as they passed.
Trieste blew out a burst of confusion. “Gods, let’s not do this right here.” She seized Torrant’s (Ellyot’s?) hand and pulled him toward the serving table where she grabbed three plates and passed one to each of the young men. Their silence was numb, and their movements were tense and jerky. The wait between filling their plates and sitting down seemed interminable, but eventually they were all huddled around the end of one of the long, narrow, wooden banquet tables. There were eight tables like it (well, different types of wood) in the vast, rectangular dining hall, and this one was near enough to the exiting door toward the main hall that Torrant didn’t feel quite so caged. Those were his words exactly, and Trieste found herself as fascinated with him as she was, admittedly, attracted.
“Are you Ellyot Moon?” she asked as soon as they were settled, and Torrant and Aldam were both so surprised that they dropped their forks even as they were aimed for their mouths.
“Goddess, no!” Torrant burst out, mindless of the meat and the gravy that splattered over his clean shirt.
Trieste could not help herself—she laughed. “Goodness! You’ll not have any nice linen shirts left.” She busied herself with a napkin, dipping it in her goblet of water to wipe the stains off before they set.
“I doubt that,” Aldam told her mildly, cleaning his own shirt. “Bethen packed us enough to wear for a year.”
“Bethen Moon?” Trieste’s motions stilled, and she looked hard at Torrant. “Oh come on. You must explain who you are.”
Torrant flushed and took the napkin from her to finish wiping the mess. Their fingers brushed, and she dropped her eyes before she could see if he’d noticed the heat she’d felt from his fingers. But then he started talking, and her gaze flew to his face, and her self-consciousness melted like sugar on her tongue.
“We were like brothers,” he stated baldly, and she raised her eyebrows, urging him to go on. “Ellyot and I—the family used to say I was their secret twin. Because of Tal and Qir, right? They were twins, and then Ellyot and I were the same age, and we were inseparable, and we were….” His voice faded roughly. “We were brothers,” he said again, looking at Aldam with miserable eyes.
“Like we are now,” Aldam clarified, looking at her to make sure she understood, and Trieste had to smile. She wondered if Aldam realized how much simple charm he had.
“So…,” she urged, because there had been a pause at the table, “there is no surviving heir to the Moon estate?”
Aldam and Torrant exchanged glances. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“Well, then who is it? Because the rumors said all the boys were dead. And then there were rumors that you were really Ellyot Moon, but that your name had been changed to protect you from the Goddess’s get who were swarming over the mountains away from Rath’s vengeance over the destruction of the hold….”
“But Rath himself destroyed the hold!” Torrant blurted, his voice rising high enough to catch everybody’s attention, and Trieste shushed him automatically, and then in earnest.
“Are you sure?” Oh Goddess, she was so confused. Her parents were high-ranking courtiers in Otham—this was not the story being passed around in those circles.
“I was there,” Torrant said unhappily. “I would know, now wouldn’t I?”
“Goddess!” Trieste thought quickly. “Look—Torrant—I don’t know how much you know about politics—but this is important. You need to tell me what happened so we can put about a good story, otherwise….” She sighed, remembering half-heard conversations from her parent’s room, when they discussed who would get himself killed by telling the truth in the wrong way. “Otherwise it’s just dangerous for you—right? And dangerous to the heir to the Moon hold, whoever he is.”
<
br /> There was a weighty moment when Aldam and Torrant exchanged glances that spoke of four years of brotherhood.
“I can tell you some of it,” he said at last, and pot roast and gravy were forgotten for a while as he gave an abbreviated version of that long ago night.
When Torrant was finished, Trieste gestured to his cold food. “Eat,” she ordered shortly, and she picked up her fork and they chewed in silence for a while. The dining hall had cleared out a little, so there was only a quiet, desultory sort of hum in the background.
Of course, Trieste was chewing over more than pot roast. When Torrant and Aldam were finished with their meal, she stood with her tray, and quietly, still thinking, jerked a shoulder. They followed her as she placed her tray on the dish rack and then moved with purpose out toward the stables.
“Can I see your horses?” she asked distractedly, and Torrant and Aldam nodded. It was pleasant outside—the dining room had been stuffy, for all its size.
“Oh, she’s sweet.” Trieste rubbed the velvet part of Clover’s nose. “But that other one,” she gestured at Hammer, “he’s a monster. Is his sire that huge?”
“Bigger,” Torrant told her, taking a brush from the wall and grooming Hammer. Hammer, an unapologetic hedonist, started shivering in ecstasy.
“And just as happy to see a patsy with a brush,” Aldam laughed as he took his own grooming brush and scratched Clover’s rump.
Torrant chucked. “Courtland’s a big baby—it’s why his babies are so popular.” He touched noses with Hammer, and Trieste gasped. Torrant hadn’t mentioned the name of the horse he’d stolen.
