by Amy Lane
Aylan nodded again, but this time without the laugh. He couldn’t laugh at his panic at seeing the little girl hurt. “There she was, sitting on the kitchen chair while Torrant bandaged her knee, naked as the day she was born, and bleeding.” He took a breath and let that last word sink in. Then he met Trieste’s eyes. “He’s that naked, after the snowcat, and a thousand times more hurt. And… and touching him then would be just wrong.”
“Ah,” she assented, and there was the tiniest bit of regret in her eyes. Of course, he thought, she’d never seen Torrant that naked. She’d never believed she had the strength. “I think I understand.”
There was silence between them as they both contemplated their friend, their gift from the Goddess, curled up in a ball of self-defense, as vulnerable as a downy bird in a nest. Trieste broke the silence first, but her voice was still respectful of it.
“Well, your papers will be drawn up by tonight, and we’ll be eating dinner late, because we have some sort of state function. I’d like you two to eat with us—we’ve got a little room in our apartments. Could you?”
“Absolutely,” Aylan said, nodding appreciatively. His eyes met hers, but his hand never stopped its stroking. “It would be our pleasure.”
Trieste stood up and kissed him on the cheek, saying, “And don’t get mad, and don’t let him get mad, but we’ve put together some clothes for him—besides the ones they’ll be dropping off for you both tonight. It’s something to make him look like a regent’s son, not that I think the Moons ever put much stock in that sort of thing. It will help him fit in, and he never notices his clothes anyway, unless Yarri makes them.”
Aylan smiled because it was true and inclined his head. “Again, thank you. You’ve really done us up well—” He hesitated and then grinned so she knew he meant it in all affection. “—Spots.” Next to him, he felt a shift in Torrant’s weight, and his hand finally stilled.
She laughed, and he was grateful, and she moved toward the door. When she got there she turned around, and avoiding his gaze, ran her fingers across the chair back in front of her instead. “Uhm, Aylan?” she said casually and listened for his “Mmm?” in response. “Uhm….” She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, she was looking at him full on. “You have a day now, a whole day, before he goes to his beloved and when he’s recovered from his demons. It’s more than some lovers who actually were meant to be ever get. You may want to use it, yes?”
The door closed behind her, and he was left blinking in shock. Then he felt long, poet’s fingers wrapping around his calf, and he looked in surprise into Torrant’s clear hazel eyes.
“I’m not naked now,” he said softly, and with a suddenly sweating hand, Aylan pushed back the hair at his temple one more time.
“Do you want to be?” he rasped, in a terrible attempt at sounding casual. Torrant captured his hand and held it to his cheek and then turned his head and kissed the side of Aylan’s calf. Aylan gasped and slid down in the bed, his knee bending a little and his shirt riding up to reveal some very dangerous territory.
“Have you ever doubted it?” Torrant asked, rolling so his head was now between Aylan’s thighs, and his breath stirred the fine hairs of the pale, muscular flesh.
“I’ve never wanted to take advantage of you,” Aylan whimpered. Torrant had turned his head to kiss that soft, soft, barely hair-covered skin. When he turned his head again to look up Aylan’s body with limpid, predatory eyes, his mouth was within inches of Aylan’s groin, and the nearness was… excruciating.
“I am taking advantage of you, brother,” Torrant said seriously. “Don’t you ever doubt it. I am still—” He grimaced. “—soiled by what I’ve done. You—you are the most honorable man I know. If you still want to touch me after seeing what I am….” He dropped his head, in shame, probably, but it put his lips directly on… directly around….
“Then what?” Aylan managed breathlessly. He wanted everything said between them so there was no talking left.
“Then I’m not so profane that I’ll soil Yarri with my touch,” Torrant whispered, as if ashamed of using his friend so terribly, even though Aylan had been begging him to do it for years. “Your touch will cleanse my body, cleanse my sins, brother. Can you live with that?” He placed a delicate kiss on top of the swollen flesh lying at his mercy.
Could he live with it? Aylan wanted to laugh, but it would have come out as a sob. “I’d die for it!” He groaned, and he grabbed Torrant’s hair and pushed at his friend until he was engulfed, swallowed, warm and safe and dying under the exquisite wonder of Torrant’s mouth.
He could have died there and been reborn again, but as sweet as that mouth felt where he was turgid and achy, he had dreamed for too long about how it would taste pressed against his own. He was strong. He loaded crates and sat a saddle for a living—and it gratified him to haul that broad chest and lean body up against his own by main strength. When Torrant was even with him, breathless, a glaze around his swollen lips, Aylan wrapped his legs around those lean hips and felt the sleep shirt ride up under his heels. That backside was as taut as he’d ever imagined.
“This is one night,” Aylan rasped, panting with want. “One night, and we are not to be. But this is important. You hear me?” He didn’t wait for a reply before crushing Torrant to him, feeling that quirky, playful, serious mouth under his own, and tasting him, all of him, strength and compassion, honor and joy. A banquet for the soul, this taste would need to last him for the rest of his life, and as the kiss deepened, became torrid and desperate and beautiful, he thought it just might make it that long.
Ah, glorious. Torrant’s naked body, solid muscles, gorgeous flesh, smooth skin marred by scars Aylan had not seen before. The first time, it was their mouths pressed together, their bodies bucking, scarcely more than an animal rutting, but the kiss, forever and ever, transformed the rutting, made it somehow sublime.
Aylan slid a hand between their bodies and grasped Torrant’s manhood. Torrant buried his face against Aylan’s neck and grasped Aylan’s in turn, and for a brief, heady moment, Torrant explored him, tightened his fingers, felt girth, stroked slowly, felt length, teased with his thumb, felt sensitivity, and Aylan couldn’t … couldn’t…. Four years he’d waited, and he didn’t want it to happen so….
Torrant spilled hotly in his fist, and Aylan crashed over his own precipice, black sparks shooting behind his closed eyes. He came back down slowly, Torrant still on top of him, their bodies still undulating, not satisfied, not even after their climax.
“That was—” Torrant began.
“Short,” Aylan finished for him.
Torrant’s full mouth with the crooked upper lip curved upward. “I have more in me,” he said, hips never ceasing that needing rhythm.
“Good,” Aylan said seriously, searching his hazel eyes. “I have so much more to share with you, if we’re not meant to be.”
Again.
Mouths this time, tasting, licking, pulling, sucking—a lovely moment when Aylan held Torrant’s flesh in his mouth while his own hard flesh was being held in Torrant’s, and every move Aylan made was dutifully, gloriously repeated. The grunting, animal sound Torrant made when he convulsed and Aylan tasted his seed was followed by Aylan’s own, less dignified cry as he burst, shaking and crying, his vision black and his body so needing the man in his bed he couldn’t breathe.
A third time. Aylan knelt before him, vulnerable, spread open and oiled, and Torrant’s body invaded, penetrated, delicately, irrevocably, made Aylan his.
Lovemaking, in as many forms as they could, exploration, flesh, laughter, orgasm, sex.
One led. One followed. One showed the other how. The other showed one why.
When they were done, laughing, groaning, and in desperate need of a nap before they bathed again and went to dinner, Torrant rested his head on Aylan’s shoulder, as he often had when they’d been rooming together in Wrinkle Creek.
“It was good?” Aylan asked tentatively, pulling his friend�
�s hair back from his face. For a moment, that upper lip quirked, and those eyes softened, and under Aylan’s hand Torrant looked young and carefree, perhaps as he should have if his life had been different after all.
“It was wonderful!” he said enthusiastically, and Aylan laughed.
“You sound hard up, brother. It’s not like you look like the rough side of a shoe!”
Torrant turned a little so he could see Aylan’s eyes. “And it’s not as if you haven’t been to see the tavern girl two villages over for the last year either.”
Aylan grimaced. “Ouch!”
“You make my second lover, Aylan. I only plan for there to be three. If you haven’t guessed, you’re special.”
Aylan felt the absurd urge to weep, and he had to turn away so he wasn’t imprisoned in those clear hazel eyes.
“What?” Torrant demanded gently, turning fully so their bodies were aligned, delicious salty skin to delicious salty skin.
“It’s nothing.” Aylan shrugged. “We’re going to be late, that’s all.”
The clock on the mantle proved him right, so Torrant hopped up, and Aylan didn’t have to answer him, though Aylan knew in his heart what his reply should have been. He’d waited eight years to hear the person he cared most about in the world say that one thing, and it turned out that not only had he known it all along, but they hadn’t needed to be in bed for him to believe it after all.
DINING WITH the queen and king of Otham in their private quarters turned out to be delightful. After a week of horrors, sitting at the table and chatting with old friends could have been desperately unreal, but Trieste kept it simple. She talked longingly of home.
“Bethen has been writing me, but it’s not like being there. Do you all still meet at the swimming hole in the summer?”
Torrant and Aylan said yes, and were happy to entertain her with stories of Cwyn and Starry, of Roes and Stanny, until both she and Alec were laughing with full hearts. They finished one story of how Cwyn got kicked out of school, again, and they finally just sent him to the orphanage so Yarri could teach him his basic letters and numbers and he could get it over with, when she stopped them and frowned.
“Now this I don’t understand—if the people of Eiran aren’t deserting these children, where do they come from?”
“The Old Man Hills, mostly, since Clough has closed her borders,” Torrant answered, sipping gingerly at his wine. He and Aldam had been lucky to have tea or cocoa to drink—he wasn’t used to wine. He wanted to keep his head. “Things are getting progressively better, but for a time, the priests from Clough were haunting the land, and if a woman wanted to make a better life for her children, it was Eiran, or Otham, or Cleant to the east….”
“It’s your fault, you know,” Aylan said, only partly in jest. “You and Aldam came to Wrinkle Creek and spoke so glowingly of a place where women didn’t have to be beaten into a powder that they started migrating to Eiran in droves. Whatever happened to that behemoth with the tiny wife and child I took home with me anyway?”
Torrant flushed. Where did all these scars come from, brother? I don’t remember you bleeding so much when we go “hunting.” He heard Aylan’s voice in his head from just hours ago as Aylan had traced that long-ago crescent-shaped wound from Choa’s axe.
The wounds heal more quickly when I change form—but it hurts like hell, and they don’t go away completely.
Torrant realized the company was watching him just sitting there blushing, and he blushed some more. “He left a few scars,” he said after a moment, not daring to look at Aylan. “But he, uhm, was eventually found in the woods, giving something back to the land from which he came.” He tried an ingenuous smile then, and it worked because Trieste and Alec laughed, and the conversation moved on.
AS THE evening wound to a close, Alec asked Torrant to look over his letters of introduction, leaving Aylan and Trieste alone.
“I’m glad to see you made good use of your time,” she said sweetly, and he smiled back in kind.
“I try never to refuse a lady’s request.” He smirked, and she laughed.
“So,” she said after a moment, casting a surreptitious glance to where her husband stood at his desk, explaining the letters and their destinations. “Scars?”
Aylan tried to control his glare in Torrant’s direction. All those wounds Aylan had never seen—Choa’s axe had been the oldest of them. “When he goes ‘hunting,’” he told her grimly. “He gets hurt—a lot. He never lets us see. This afternoon—” He flushed and tried again. “This afternoon I saw a lot of near misses—swords that landed on his shoulder instead of his heart, an axe blade buried in his flank and not his groin.” Aylan shuddered again. “Goddess, Trieste, it almost made me glad he’s going as Ellyot Moon. He won’t be ‘hunting’ if he’s arguing politics in the Regent’s Hall.”
“Where has he been hunting that he gets injured so much?” Trieste asked astutely, and Aylan inwardly cursed himself. He would have to learn not to speak so candidly. It didn’t used to be a problem, before he met the Moons.
Aylan gave her his blandest smile and lied so obviously she would have no choice but to back down. “Nowhere. Nowhere at all.”
Her sun-kissed face turned shock white. “He’s already been to Clough?”
“Sh!” But Torrant hadn’t looked up. “Oh gods, I must really be getting bad at this,” he muttered. “Yes, we’ve been to Clough—Dueance, if you must know the truth—and how you made that jump I’ll never know.”
“Does Bethen know?” Trieste asked sharply, her color coming back in patches. In the back of his mind, Aylan wondered if he’d realized how much he and Torrant had actually meant to Trieste. But then, she’d been the first little sister he’d ever known.
“She knows some of it,” Aylan replied briefly. Lane had always been their confessor—and he had always shared with his wife. But as their missions to Clough had grown more and more perilous, Aylan was pretty sure the most dangerous secrets—and the ones that would hurt her the most—had been kept from Lane’s beloved Bethie.
Trieste was shaking her head in disbelief, and suddenly she turned wide eyes toward Aylan. “Aylan—who exactly were you hunting in Dueance?”
Enough was enough. The face Aylan turned toward his friend was as empty as a snow-covered meadow. “Trieste, darling, your husband is the King of Otham,” he said conversationally, “and he must look the diplomats from Clough in the eye and tell them as truthfully as possible that he is a friend to their state. He must—Otham is very nearly an island, and Clough has enough land and people to overrun it in a very short amount of time. I would rather not toss around information to get me hanged, if you don’t mind.”
Trieste gasped at first, her face flushing with anger, and then she lowered her eyes in acknowledgment. “You’re right,” she said, fighting resentment. “I… Alec and I….” Her eyes made a sideways journey to where her distinguished husband stood, talking to her ex-lover with kind eyes. “Do you know how we used to look at Bethie and Lane and think—or at least I did—we could never have that? That sort of thing was just not in the cards for us?”
Aylan looked at Torrant and realized that the surge of grief he felt was older than he’d imagined. “Yes,” he said, clear-eyed.
Trieste’s tiny smile was appreciated. “I have it,” she said with quiet pride. “I have it, and with it comes power—the sort of power we used to learn about in school. And you know the way Lane and Bethie used to run the town—not in a bad way, but in that way saying ‘We all live here, we need to make it a good place’?”
Aylan nodded, and she went on.
“We’ve been doing it. I know you’re trying to protect me, and Torrant would probably have told me even less. But Alec and I, we’re in a position to help. Don’t hesitate to ask for it if you need it.” She nodded soberly, and Aylan had a sudden memory.
“You know, Yarri and I spent a lot of time together this winter. We talked about him a lot,” he started, and Trieste’s smile was lar
ger now. “She told me the story about how they met Aldam—have you heard it?”
She shook her head no, suddenly very intrigued.
Aylan sighed, took a sip of his wine, and settled back into his cushion in a savoring way—they would be on the road again in the morning, after all. “It seems our boy there was suffering from a killing fever. When she was old enough, Aldam told her he wouldn’t have made it more than four days on the road. But there was a rough group of men at the inn, and she was practically a baby. He insisted she stay right there in the room. He kept saying he’d be up in a minute, or an hour, but it was a miracle he’d gotten there at all, and still he made her swear she wouldn’t leave. Made her promise, you know?”
She gave another sober nod, her gray eyes avid, as if she could see where this was going.
“If Yarri hadn’t been the little hell-raiser we know and love, he would have died in that room rather than ask for help.”
Trieste made a soft gasp just as Torrant and Alec walked up, their footsteps speaking of mutual accord and respect. “What is Aylan telling you that has you so serious?” Torrant asked lightly, tucking his packet of papers in a fold of his cloak.
Trieste swallowed and looked up at him with speaking eyes. “He was telling me to worry about you, Torrant,” she said roughly, “and I was listening.”
LATER THAT night, Torrant was draped partly over the bed and partly over Aylan with his chin on Aylan’s bare stomach, gazing up with limpid eyes. Aylan was trying to still the beating of his own heart. Their touch was electrifying, and their time in bed aerobic. And, frankly, all parts south were getting a little sore.
“What did you tell her?” Torrant asked, out of the blue of his mind and into the violet of the dark.
“What?” Of all the things Aylan had been thinking about, his conversation with Trieste had not been on the list.
“What did you say to Trieste to make her worry?” Torrant’s eyes were suddenly sharper than crystals, and Aylan had to fight to keep from squirming like a guilty child.
