by Amy Lane
“By Triane’s white shirt, boy, why?”
Torrant looked away, flushing.
“We saw that kiss. Boy, the entire town saw that kiss. I think there were babies conceived this night because of that kiss in the full view of the world in the center of town on Beltane morning. By Oueant’s stiff spine and Dueant’s blue balls, Torrant Shadow, why would you not bed that girl this summer and handfast her later?”
“She’s seventeen, Aunt Beth!” Torrant burst out, frustrated that he was the only one who seemed to see this. “She’s seventeen, and she deserves a full year of courting—but do you know what she deserves more?” He stood and turned, hoping if anyone understood about a woman needing to make her own way, it would be Bethen Moon.
“A man who would die for her?” Bethen asked ironically, and Torrant practically growled with his frustration.
“Any woman can have that, but a young one deserves more. She deserves a choice. She deserves to know I am not the only moon in the sky. I….” A moment from the night before crossed his vision: Yarri on his lap, her lush hair around her shoulders, her eyes closed and her mouth open for another kiss. Her vest had been unlaced, and her breasts—full and lush like the rest of her—had been sweet, soft, and pillowy. He’d wanted to sink into her, because he had never touched anything quite like this softness and yielding womanhood and he wanted it—he wanted her in a way leaving any wanting, any desire for anybody else in his life, as pale and blurred as a charcoal drawing of a moon in a tarnished mirror.
With a groan, he sank back to the table and put his face in his hands, scraping his hair back and peering out from a window of fingers like a fugitive from his own conflicting desires. “Oh Goddess, Aunt Bethen. It’s the right thing to do, this wait. I know it is. I know it’s right, and it’s noble, and it’s the mark of being a good man that I want to give her this last year to try her womanhood out on the world, but Dueant’s soft little mouth, Aunt Bethen, how am I going to do it?”
“What do you want, boy?” Bethen asked with a little amusement and some concern. It was not in her nature, it had never been in her nature to push her desires to the back and think that made the world a better place to be.
“I want her!” he groaned wretchedly into the table. “But—”
He hadn’t confessed to Lane yet. The first botched delivery he and Aylan had made, Lane had heard about. But Aylan had returned just last week, and they were going to tell Lane together about the new set of guards who were “testing the purity” of the children in the Goddess ghettoes, and how Torrell had held his weeping, bleeding daughter, whom Torrant had just stitched in places only lovers and midwifes should see after she was out of diapers, and begged the two of them to please, for the sake of the Goddess, take care of these brutal “caretakers” over the citizens with no voice at all.
Aylan had helped plan, because he knew the city and knew where the guards could be accosted without the Goddess’s people coming to be blamed, and he’d been nearby with the cart. Torrant had been the one who had dropped from the sky and murdered the men with a swipe of a razor claw.
The two of them had gone from being spies and smugglers to commissioned assassins, and telling their father figure was going to hurt, more so because they weren’t sure he could tell them they had been wrong.
And he could tell by Bethen’s peace at the moment that she was ignorant of the threats to Roes at Triannon.
“But what?” she asked gently, seeming a little alarmed by the quality of his silence.
“The world is a frightening place, Aunt Bethen,” he said at last, resting his chin on his fists as he had when he’d been a child at this same battered table. “I’m starting to think I’ve trained my whole life to help make it sane. How do I take her now, make love to her, stake my claim, when I may have things to do that are bigger than us? And I certainly can’t ask her to make that choice now. Have you seen what happens to women when they marry too young and have babies too soon and they have no men to help them. The world just keeps hammering away at them until the lines in their faces deepen, and suddenly they’re no older than me but they look older than grandmothers I’ve tended, great-grandmothers if it comes to that!” Ah, Grete—her heart had always been twenty, at best! But then, Grete had never had a Mackel or an Ulin with a hard fist and a heart twisted by lies. He grunted, suddenly tired. “I can’t do it to her. I just can’t.”
When he grew older and had seen more children grow, he would have known that for all his twenty-five years, he looked to Bethen’s eyes to be still fourteen, and terrified and grief stricken, with eyes as old as the stars. “I brought her here so she could grow up safe, Auntie Beth. When she’s grown, she can choose, and if she doesn’t choose me I’ll wither and die and she can live and be free. And if she does choose me, I can at least comfort myself with the fact that she wasn’t a child when she did. It will be cold comfort, for all I might do in the world, but it will be all I have.”
Bethen found that she was dashing tears away. Oh, this was not how she saw this morning playing out. She’d been so focused on the joy of the two of them, as they’d kissed in the sunshine. But even Bethen knew the sunshine had been a gift, a break, and a lie. Clough was casting shadows enough to cover her beloved little family, even as she looked through the clouds for blue sky.
“You two will make love out of this war, boy. If anyone under the moons can do it, it’s the two of you.” And then she kissed his cheek and took herself to bed, where she would cuddle into her sleeping husband and weep silently until she too fell asleep. He was right. Dammit, the boy was right about the world, but this wasn’t the world she’d planned on her children growing up in, and it wasn’t the world she wanted to see in their plans.
Torrant stayed at the table until he heard the screen slam shut, and he turned his head and smiled at Yarri as she bustled in smelling like sunshine and ocean and Yarri. She swung about the kitchen, cutting bread for herself and asking Torrant if he wanted some milk and pulling out berries from the cold box and generally bursting with so much optimism and joy and with the secret touches and smiles of lovers or lovers-to-be that Torrant found some peace within himself. It was suddenly easy to answer her questions without pain or passion and to break bread as though his talk with Bethen had been only the ordinary mothering she gave to all of them the morning after the wilding. It was suddenly easy to pretend their happy ending was already written, and it was only a year of waiting that stood in their way.
Part VIII—The Warring Moon
“It’s different, I know,” Aylan said, when it came time for them to part ways. “You had such plans that Beltane.”
Torrant grunted and butted his furry head against Aylan’s hand. Yes. Yes, in spite of all the warnings, he’d envisioned such a different future for him and Yarri. For all Torrant had known about the world, it had seemed… possible.
A blood-soaked afternoon had rendered it impossible.
The things he and Aylan had done since had all but obliterated that hope from the world.
But Yarri is here, isn’t she? Here in the heart of my enemy’s city? Here to save me from myself?
For a moment, he had other visions, a vision beyond Dueance, beyond Clough, when he and Yarri and Aylan and the Moons would gather together and watch the seasons pass in peace and joy.
Yarri was there, waiting for him.
All things were possible.
Another Turn Around the Sun
“THEY SHOULD be here by now,” Torrant muttered to Aldam. Aldam nodded, for once not serene at all in the face of Torrant’s mounting tension. Professor Austin and his protégé were supposed to be coming to Wrinkle Creek to relieve the two of them for the summer. They had sent letters and confirmed everything, including the fact that Torrant and Aldam would be picking Roes up again this year from Triannon on their way home.
Providing she would speak to the two of them. Theirs had been the loudest voices in the family to advocate her final year of healing education be done on the
grounds of Triannon and not out in remote places in the other lands of the three moons, as Torrant and Aldam had done.
But they had won—as had Lane, Aylan, and finally, even Yarri and Bethen. In the face of her entire family begging her to not put herself in danger without one of them nearby, Roes had relented. But she swore she wouldn’t be speaking to Aldam, not even in letters, until he came back to claim her for handfast at Beltane.
Her number of letters to Torrant had quadrupled, and the phrase “and you can just tell Aldam….” appeared so often that Torrant had taken to underlining it so Aldam could count the number of times she had most determinedly not spoken to him. Of course, mail service at Triannon had gotten better since the militia had begun serving shifts at the university, and the entire family breathed much easier knowing they had built two barracks on either side of the bowl valley, so the soldiers could alert the students to anything untoward, anything at all.
Aylan and Torrant had made six more trips to Dueance in the last year, and Torrant had killed at least once every time.
“The guards they are sending are brutal,” Torrell had said wearily, “but it’s more than that. The priests are doing their work well. A little girl was caught within a half a block of the ghetto because she got lost. She was beaten to death for defying the curfew by a group of schoolboys, while the priest who taught them shouted encouragement because she was a spawn of the dark.” Torrell’s breath caught, and he stroked his own daughter’s shorn hair. She’d cut it herself, in a moment of anger, of hatred for herself, and for what had been done to her, and he obviously mourned the loss of the shiny brown curls as he mourned his baby’s lost innocence. “She was only four,” he said at last, closing his eyes, and Torrant and Aylan had met eyes over his head.
“Feeling hungry, brother?” Aylan had asked lightly.
“Absolutely,” Torrant replied, his eyes bleeding to blue slowly, as though he’d been savoring the bloodlust chilling his heart and warming his belly. “I think I’m going to go eat myself some priest!”
And so he had, just as he’d done in Wrinkle Creek, only this time he knew exactly what he was doing.
And so it had gone. For every delivery of wool, there had been a man or two who was worth killing. They stopped hiding the bodies, if they could help it, and the words Triane’s son began to make their way around the ghetto. Still, it wasn’t enough. Torrant would prowl among the rooftops of the Goddess ghetto, smelling hunger, disease, and want with every breath, know it wasn’t enough, and wonder what else he could do.
Aylan would journey back to Eiran and tell Lane of their exploits, and Lane would age before his eyes. Even as he gripped arms with the man he considered his son, Lane would mutter to himself that he didn’t know what else they could do. And Aylan would hold Torrant’s head after every mission, as he wept and vomited and howled, and would hush in his ears that they were doing all they could—there wasn’t anything else they could do.
Yet, Torrant found he had an idea, a way for Triane’s son to be more effective, a way to effect change among the whole city—but he hesitated. He hesitated because he had nearly made a promise to the woman he had loved since she’d drawn her first breath, and because she was waiting for him, soft and sweet and powerful and willing, to hold his hand in the Beltane sun and claim him for her own. He wanted to keep that promise with everything in his being, and he was tired of waking up with despair in his heart and the taste of blood in his mouth. Goddess thinking, Lane would say, but then, weren’t the people in the ghettoes calling him Triane’s son? How else should he think?
But being Triane’s son was not what was on his mind at the moment. Professor Austin and the student he was training up were late—more than a day late. Not wanting a repeat of last year’s near miss, they had offered to come back to Wrinkle Creek a week early if only their relief could arrive a few days earlier, and Austin’s last letter had said this would be fine.
“Your people are late!” Pansy said from the porch as Torrant and Aldam paced the front yard like jungle cats. Torrant leapt in the air, coming down in a crouch because he hadn’t heard her there, and she’d startled him. Aldam tripped on his own feet, but his startlement was not quite as spectacular.
“I know,” Torrant said, coming slowly up from his crouch. “It’s not right. Austin would never be this late.” Professor Austin had always been early for class and downright militant when it came to his students arriving on time. There was something very wrong in the air, and Torrant longed to change into the snowcat and sniff the currents of wind to see if they would reveal the source of that ominous wrongness. Instead, he gave Pansy a thin smile. “Is there any more iced tea inside?” he asked to give her something to do.
Ernst had built her a snug little house, and he worked long hours farming his own land to keep them happy and prosperous. Pansy kept their home neat and their two cows and seven chickens fed and happy, but Ernst was gone from dawn until dusk. She’d enjoyed helping at the surgery—and after four years, Torrant and Aldam’s reputation as being trustworthy was impeccable. Ernst was as comfortable letting her go to the healer’s house a couple of times a week as Torrant and Aldam were having her there on the days when the surgery was open. She had helped last summer as well, and the locals were more inclined to trust their replacements when Pansy was there to introduce everybody like friends. Of course, it helped that Rora and her husband visited often, little Tal in tow. Pansy’s smile when they came in would have been worth it, even without her help.
But Professor Austin hadn’t arrived the day before, and now the dusty wind through the trees was hot with sunshine, cedar, and the oppressive air of tight expectation. Pansy with her tart tongue and iced tea were about the only things tethering Torrant and Aldam to the crust of the world on this edgy, fidgety day.
Torrant heard his heart beat hard enough to rumble the ground. Then he realized it wasn’t his heart but the gallop of horses, and he barely pulled Aldam, with all his bulk, out of the way. A slope-shouldered, swaybacked, graying gelding burst into the clearing, stopping short enough that his momentum almost sent him over on a weak shoulder, taking the professor with him. Torrant and Aldam rushed to steady the trembling animal and pull the exhausted professor off his unaccustomed saddle and onto the ground. Torrant took the reins as Aldam bore up the tall, gangly professor’s weight. Pansy, hearing the ruckus from outside, came to take the horse from Torrant. “I’ll walk the animal. You see to your friend!” she said, and he didn’t have breath to argue with her.
There was an arrow protruding from the professor’s shoulder.
Aldam all but carried Austin into the surgery and was ripping his shirt away from his arm even as Torrant washed up and brought in the sanitizer and the instruments. Torrant looked at the thing and shuddered. It had hit the man in the back and stopped at the shoulder blade—there would be no pushing it through, and ripping it out would leave enough shredded flesh to keep him busy for an hour. Something bad was happening, and it was happening at Triannon, and Roes was there, and….
Torrant had a patient who needed tending and a promise he’d made in the names of Oueant, Dueant, and Triane. Aldam’s hands were rock steady as he gave their old mentor the bitter-tasting tea that would put him to sleep for the procedure, although his eyes as they met Torrant’s were anguished. Roes. There was danger in the direction of Roes—and then Austin was asleep, and Torrant felt for the arrowhead so he could cut the flesh instead of ripping it. First skin and then muscle parted under his finely honed knife. The arrow came out, and he placed delicate little stitches among the layers. He washed the wound with alcohol to prevent infection and then packed it with powdered yarrow to control bleeding. Professor Austin’s breathing remained the breathing of deep sleep throughout the entire procedure.
At last they were done, and Aldam met Torrant’s glance, his buried anxiety suddenly burning in his open blue eyes.
“Wash up and pack our saddlebags with food and medical supplies,” Torrant said tersely.
“Get the horses ready to go. As soon as he wakes up and we know what to look for, we’re on the road.”
Aldam nodded wordlessly and turned to go do what he’d been burning to do since Austin fell off his horse in their front yard.
“And, Aldam?” Torrant’s voice was dark as his brother turned toward him. “Strap my sword to my saddle.”
“My saddle,” Aldam said. When Torrant blinked in surprise, he added, “If we need a sword, you won’t be human. Yarri’s not the only one who listens at windows when you confess to Lane, Torrant. I know what you do in the city.”
Torrant was left staring at Aldam in shock, followed by a profound sense of sadness.
“He shouldn’t have to know,” he muttered to himself. He and Aylan barely spoke of what they did when they went to Clough.
“He’s always known,” Professor Austin said from the table weakly. “You have always been dangerous, my boy—Aldam and Aylan just loved you anyway.” And Torrant was once again surprised.
“You are supposed to be asleep,” he said stupidly, pulling an old clean shirt from a drawer in the back, where they kept a supply of clothes for just such emergencies.
“I was. Aldam dosed me very well,” Austin slurred, “but I had to wake up to….” His eyes drifted shut again, and Torrant slid the shirt over his head, hoping he wouldn’t have to do anything else to wake the poor man up. His face was deeply lined, and his usually unkempt silver-brown hair was a sweaty mess. He had been riding, Torrant suspected, fast, hard, and wounded for many hours. As Torrant moved the shirt over Austin’s affected arm, the professor startled like a sleeping baby, crying out, “Soldiers! Emory, no!” Then his eyes popped open, a bleary green, and Torrant forgot his imperative to let his patient sleep and pressed him with questions.
