by Amy Lane
“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 midmorning sun. He felt as close to happy as he could remember since they’d come to this city, and he figured the source of his happiness must be because they were waiting to leave the damned place. It certainly couldn’t be Aylan, who hadn’t stopped fretting about the 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 said, 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 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 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 said. “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 the 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 marketplace 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 agreed. “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 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 from 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 at the corners in a rare moment of openhearted 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 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 cooldown 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, and a startling look of vulnerability crossed those lean, hazel-eyed features. For the first time in hours, Eljean remembered his friend’s name wasn’t really Ellyot Moon.
“I remember that Moon never let us go near the city,” Elly—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 said softly, not looking at either of them from his magically covered fall of chestnut hair, “and 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 imagine a world in which hurting Torrant Shadow was possible.
AFTER ANOTHER two or so hours of riding, Ellyot 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 spending 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, who was 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 the meaning of the saying “Love is not jealous or possessive.” He would have given anything, even his one night with him, to see Torrant 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 said. “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, and 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 that took Torrant’s feet out from under him. 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 they weren’t there below the accumulated leaf mold of twelve years. Torrant could only be grateful 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—th
e 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….” He sniffed and wiped his face almost absentmindedly on his shoulder.
“But not what?” Aylan urged, sinking to his knees in the dust to help support Torrant and wrapping an arm around his broad shoulders.
“But not prouder than he was of his own family,” Torrant managed to 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 as, his eyes averted, he stared 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.
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.
