by Amy Lane
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, 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 desperate to clamber up onto that ledge and patter toward 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 heels and caught up with the others, shoving through the crowd to get in front of them. He cut through the people with the strength of his grief and his anger and the force of his fury alone.
They cleared the square and had turned toward the back of the regents’ apartments automatically when he stopped them, his voice clogged as he fought 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 that was 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 told them. 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 very rattled to almost slip his name, but mostly he just tried not to howl.
“Good idea.” He stumbled, whatever magic of will that had held him up for a moment deserting him. Aylan caught him, felt the blood, and 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, and sagged a little into Aylan’s arms. Eljean moved 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 standing on his own. “I’m so worried. He was too calm.” Torrant shuddered, feeling the physical ache in his arm and his leg, where the bones were still reknitting. 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 and shaking, wiped his eyes with his sleeve and nodded grimly, trying to control his own breathing.
There was a terrible silence, and Torrant felt 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 toward 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 plowed into the back of him. The two jostled toward Olek, knowing Eljean was tight on their heels, and searched the crowd for Djali.
“He left.”
Torrant turned toward Triana’s brother, Duan, who usually waited at 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 twisted. “They said a giant cat tried to save her.” It was not enough.
“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, turned toward Olek, and knelt 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 with Aylan hot on his heels, passing a panting Eljean as he arrived.
“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 water’s edge. It was the common area of the river—children played there 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 could 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 into the water. “Ellyot…. Ellyot…. Torrant!”
Torrant turned toward 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, arms, and 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’d 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 hear about, the abomination 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 the 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,” Eljean 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 his uncle in revenge!”
Torrant made a sound then—one only Aylan heard and wondered how, in this night of tragedy, that little moan, half hidden by harsh breathing and chattering teeth, could still hurt. He took a breath and stepped back, breaking the contact between their bodies and severing any suggestion of intimacy it implied.
“You hate me,” Torrant 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 toward 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 nobles’ 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 they squelched their way in.
The others had made it to the pub, and Torrant had seen the cart with its sad load 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 said to the grieving father, “may I see those sheets now?”
Olek had them in his hands. He had been reading them, and probably rereading 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’s people do well,” he said softly, “it’s sing.” To nobody’s surprise, he let his silver streak show through the magic. “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 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 moonlight, 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 heart’s blood
Cannot measure your worth,
So why would I need it
