by Amy Lane
When you’ve left me first?
I’ll go down to the river, too wounded to cry
And fly through the water as you fell from the sky.
My heart will not beat, if you are not nigh.
Oh wait, my beloved, and to your arms I’ll fly.
Oh Triane’s beloved, I’m too wounded to cry.
The last notes of the song died from the silent tavern, and Torrant set the lute down gently and walked away.
He was barely aware that the others followed him through the doors, but when he heard them on either side of him, he wiped his face again, then took a shuddering breath and met Aerk, Keon, Marv, and Jino’s eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, feeling inadequate. He was intensely aware of Aylan, standing in his habitual position at the back of the group. He could hardly look at him, he was so ashamed. Aylan had warned him, had anguished over their plan, the risk to the people who trusted Triane’s Son, and now… oh Goddess. Oh, Djali.
“Did you find his body?” Aerk asked.
Torrant breathed hard, through his nose, trying to keep himself together for this, praying he could be the leader they needed through it. “He had… carved Triane’s mark in his chest.”
“Oh gods,” Aerk replied faintly.
“I don’t understand,” Marv said. “Won’t that, like, set all of Clough against the ghettoes? Rath will slaughter them!”
“He would.” Torrant nodded, not meeting anybody’s eye. “He would if the body were to be found.”
“Oh gods,” Keon echoed.
“What did you do?” Jino asked, knowing the answer already.
“They pushed him out into the river like trash!” Eljean answered for him, the bitterness in his voice sharp enough to make Torrant cringe.
“That’s not fair!” Aylan spoke up, his voice shaking.
“Neither was leaving Djali for carrion!” Eljean almost shouted, and to Torrant’s surprise, it was Aerk who spoke up.
“They had no choice, Eljean! Do you want what happened to Triana to happen to the whole of the ghettoes? Do you want it to happen to Zhane?”
“You keep Zhane out of this….” To everyone’s surprise but Torrant’s, Eljean tried to charge Aerk, and Torrant blocked his body, then forced him back against the wall of the alley.
“You want to hit someone, Eljean?” he rasped into Eljean’s face, keeping him pinned—in spite of the height difference—by sheer force of will. “You want to hit someone? You hit me. I’m the one you’re angry at! I’m the one who failed! You lost your brother, your best friend. I’m the one who let him die. Hit me!”
Torrant stepped back into the center of the alley, muscles shaking, cheeks slick with tears, his entire stance screaming pain, and dared the man who had used his body to assault him.
“No,” Eljean said, confused, going limp. “Oh Goddess… no. I’m….”
“If you say you’re sorry, I’ll throw up,” Torrant ground, and Eljean recoiled from the slap of his words.
“You had to do it,” Jino murmured into the vibrating silence, and the others agreed. “Rath would have brought destruction on all of us. Oh, Djali….” His voice broke, and Torrant absently wiped his cheek on his shoulder and nodded.
“He would have. He may still. He’s going to be at us tomorrow. You all know that?”
Eljean’s knees abruptly buckled, and he fell, unaided, onto his backside, still leaning against the rough bricks of the house behind him.
“Right.” Torrant nodded as though someone had said something. “We can do this two ways. We can all leave, slink away into the night, and leave the Goddess’s people to fend for themselves….”
“Or?” Aerk asked, appalled.
“Or we can brazen it out. We can go to Rath and tell him enough of the truth to keep us in the hall and keep us fighting.”
“Oh Goddess,” Eljean moaned, shoulders shaking.
“But whatever you decide, you have to decide it now.”
“Of course we’ll stay!” Keon protested. “If we can’t face him down knowing what he did tonight, what kind of men are we?”
“The smart kind,” Torrant answered, closing his eyes in weariness. “Remember, all of you, you’ve seen the man and the monster. You need to remember who you’re following if you decide to see this through.”
Marv wrinkled his nose in total puzzlement, his slightly crooked front teeth showing. “Rath’s the monster, right?”
Jino shrugged. “Unless he’s talking about the snowcat…. Ellyot—you weren’t talking about yourself, were you?”
In spite of himself, Torrant felt a half-forged laugh forcing its way from his chest. “As a matter of fact, I was. But never mind. I’ll see you on the floor tomorrow.”
“I can’t,” Eljean protested, and Torrant looked at him, wary. “I’ll follow you. I guess I have to. But I-I can’t face Rath. I can’t…. I’d…. I’d rush him. I’d kill him…. I’d drink his blood.” The fierce words were belied by sobs, and Torrant closed his eyes, then looked wearily at Aylan.
“Brother, Eljean needs to go visit Zhane. Can you take him?”
Aylan’s jaw locked, and the contempt he spit from his eyes would have destroyed Eljean, if he had looked up to catch it. “Me?” he rasped.
“There’s no one I trust more,” Torrant told him. “Please, brother. I need to see the others home, and… and Eljean needs to be absent. Simply absent. He needs to be indisposed with grief, where no one can find him for a few days. Zhane’s the best we’ve got.”
Aylan’s glare suggested that the shadows of a darker alley might be better, but he bent and hauled Eljean up by the elbow.
“I’m sorry, Tor….” This time Eljean noticed the glare and broke off, cringing.
“My name,” Torrant Shadow said evenly, with as much dignity as he could muster, “is Ellyot Moon.”
Eljean bowed his head. “Right,” he said, cowed. “I knew that. I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” Torrant said stiffly, not looking at him. There was a thick, unforgiving silence in the alley, and Torrant jerked his shoulders toward the route to the regents’ flats.
“Come on—we need to be in our rooms in case Rath sends out guards looking….” He couldn’t finish the sentence. “Come,” he finished simply, not looking at anybody. He was stopped by Aylan’s hand on his shoulder.
“Leave the patio unlocked,” came the terse order.
For a moment, Torrant wanted to object. It was dangerous for Aylan to come back this night. He needed his rest; they would meet tomorrow, but Aylan’s hand felt warm on his shoulder. Torrant’s shook with the temptation to simply dissolve, come undone, lose all cohesion, and melt into Aylan’s unconditional embrace.
“Right,” he graveled, meeting Aylan’s weary, grieving look with his own. “Be safe, brother.”
“Be safe.”
Dreams of Comfort
AYLAN KNEW where Torrant would be when he returned, the taste of his conversation with Eljean still bitter on his tongue. He slid in through the patio, heard the water running, and stripped off his clothes, leaving them in a sodden heap on the bedroom floor.
There was chestnut-and-silver hair on the floor of the washroom. The belt knife used to chop off the ragged clumps lay discarded in the midst of the pile, and Aylan was distantly surprised.
He had thought after this night, there would be little short of total catastrophe that could hurt him.
He stood for a moment, lost in the contemplation of that gruesome gesture of self-hatred, hearing the acrid sound of his own voice as he trudged through the fetid alleys of the ghettoes, trying not to break his ankle on the ill-fitting stones of the road.
“HE TRUSTED you!” Aylan had been so angry he almost couldn’t believe he heard himself speak. He had resolved not to speak another word to the wretched excuse for a man at his side.
“Djali trusted him!”
Aylan turned and thought about shoving Eljean against a building until blood matted his hair. Instead he took a breath and tried t
o speak with the honor Torrant had always accused him of having.
“You tell me how that trust was misplaced!”
“He murdered Djali’s uncle, didn’t he?”
Aylan had needed to breathe hard enough to make stars dance in front of his eyes to keep his temper. “Do you really think he was acting in revenge? Really? Because if you really think the man we’ve been following would do that, tell me right now, and I’ll murder my brother as he sleeps.”
Silence. Absolute silence. Eljean had the grace to whimper at the thought of Torrant being betrayed so heinously. Maybe it even sank in that he’d done a similar deed with his suspicions.
“Can you not even answer me?”
“I was angry.”
“Weren’t we all? You had to take it out on the one person who feels everybody’s griefs like his own?”
“I don’t know if he truly feels anything!” Eljean shot bitterly, and at that Aylan did hurl him backward, feeling some serious gratification in Eljean’s grunt of pain when his head smacked wall. It was a good feeling. It allowed him to choose his words with care.
“You are a foolish, callow child, and I regret that I ever thought better of you. If you cannot see the difference between the man and the leader, you profaned him with your touch.”
They had walked in silence through badly cobbled streets of mourning to Zhane’s little flat, and Aylan had shoved Eljean behind him and told him to wait like a puppy outside Zhane’s door. Once inside, he’d given Zhane enough coins to keep his family fed until they could start smuggling people out of the city, enough to keep him off the streets. Zhane looked at the coins distrustfully, eyeing Aylan with doubt.
“What are my duties, for all of this coin?”
“Just keep your boy from mooncalfing all over the man trying to save your arse.”
There was a brokenhearted sadness in Zhane’s next words. “I’m not sure if I have that power.”
Aylan felt himself softening. Zhane was a victim, as innocent as Triana, even if Eljean was not half the suitor Djali had been. “You do, brother. He may not see the man, yet, but the god has definitely fallen.”
Zhane nodded and smiled a little. “Well, lucky me, he doesn’t see the man as you do.”
THOSE WORDS haunted Aylan now, staring at that pretty, shiny chestnut hair, piled thickly on the crème tile.
He turned toward the shower, knowing the water would have run cold, and bent to his friend, his brother, his lover, crouched naked in the corner, shivering under the freezing weight of his heart.
It seemed like forever before Torrant’s hands warmed up, and Aylan toweled mournfully at the gouged chop job of his hair, without a blessed word he could say for comfort. Suddenly, he put the towel down and ran to Torrant’s cupboard, where he threw on some breeches and a shirt without caring about the fit.
“Stay here, brother. I’ll be right back.”
A minute later he was knocking on Jino’s door—Jino, whose curling hair was always trimmed and dapper. Marv answered, the tracks of grief marking his brown face, and wearing the same rumpled clothes he’d worn earlier. The divan behind him was a mess of sheets.
“Brother, can I borrow some hair shears, please?” Aylan asked politely, and Marv blinked hard.
Jino came out in a sleepshirt from the bedroom and, after a puzzled minute, retrieved a pair of delicate scissors from his bathroom.
When Aylan left, Marv and Jino exchanged bemused glances. He had been red-eyed, sloppily dressed, and his yellow hair had curled wetly and wildly around his head. He hadn’t once tried to explain his odd request.
“Do you get the feeling,” Marv asked, his nose wrinkled a little in puzzlement, “that more goes on in their lives than we even know about?”
Jino nodded at him with wide, dark eyes.
FOR HIS part, Aylan returned to find Torrant in the exact same position on the bed, wrapped in a towel. With a sigh, he stood his brother up and took him into the bathroom.
“Do you have any idea how much this hurts me?” Aylan demanded, snipping off a particularly ugly end and standing back to admire his handiwork. What had been the treasured silver streak now fell shortly over Torrant’s brow with another spared section of the chestnut color, and the sides and back were trimmed very close to the scalp. Aylan was surprised that it looked decent—too short, but decent. He was even more surprised by the sound of his own voice.
“I’m sorry,” Torrant whispered. He was facing the mirror, but his eyes were gazing sightlessly beyond it, not seeing the destruction he’d wrought. For a moment, under the towel, it was easy to imagine his shoulders clean, unblemished, and narrow with the vestiges of boyhood. For a moment, Aylan saw the young man who had captured his eyes with his kindness and his awesome fire.
“You should be,” Aylan snapped back, his voice breaking. “Taking all this grief to yourself and not sharing. Selfish git. You’ve always been selfish. I don’t know why I’ve hung with you for so long.”
Torrant twisted the corners of his lips until that fatal lip curl made a shy appearance. “It must be Aunt Bethen’s cooking,” he said, and Aylan stopped his ministrations, so grateful for the family joke and the mention of home that he put the scissors down, wrapped his arms around Torrant, and buried his face into the haven of his shoulder, weeping.
Torrant the healer had no choice but to turn and wrap his arms around his brother in comfort.
The towel dropped to the floor, and it was only the two of them, their flesh and their sorrow and their knowledge of each other. They weren’t beloveds, and the touch didn’t feed their souls, but it was all they had. It was almost enough.
Aylan would have liked to lead this time. He tried. He kissed his way down the ravaged skin, running his hands down the marked ribs, feeling the corded softness of his stomach. His hot mouth engulfed Torrant’s half-flaccid cock, and he scored the water-softened skin of Torrant’s backside until the twinge of pain caused a muted gasp. Torrant’s hands came up and cupped his head, threading through the coarse, golden curls, gentling over the curve of Aylan’s scalp and cradling the curve of his skull tenderly, holding him in place as sensation took over.
With a little gasp, a tiny cry, Torrant allowed himself to feel, his skin to come alive, and the pleasure that had always been Aylan’s nearness swept him as he hardened, burgeoned, and thrust into Aylan’s mouth. Ah gods… something that was not pain. The shock of nerve endings, firing joy through his body, almost ended in a scalding flash of spend, but as the pleasure swept him, the apathy was forced to leave.
He wanted more of this. More touching, more feeling, more joy, and more Aylan. His fingers twisted in Aylan’s hair, and he stood, trembling. He made a guttural sound to stop Aylan from moving, from tasting Torrant’s flesh deep in the back of his own throat.
“Up,” Torrant commanded, and Aylan cursed that this once, he was still compelled to obey. He stood, and Torrant crushed their mouths together, tongues twining, hearts thrusting against their chests, pounding in their throats as their lips and teeth and tastes clashed and mingled. Aylan gave a whimper. Oh Goddess! This man’s touch was joy! He tried to keep his knees from folding on the hard tile of the bathroom floor.
Torrant’s mouth quirked—it wasn’t really a smile, and for a moment Aylan despaired of ever seeing the expression again—and he took Aylan’s face in his hands for a moment. “We have a perfectly good bed, my friend,” Torrant whispered, that tiny bit of humor saving them both from the tears that would never fully recede this night.
With exaggerated patience, Torrant seized Aylan’s shoulders and pulled him from the wall, making sure their groins rubbed together, the smooth skin of their members skating deliciously on each other for a moment, and then he turned Aylan around and marched him to the bed.
Whether Aylan’s partners were male, female, or both, Aylan always led, always issued the orders, arranged the bodies, kissed until his partner was screaming for release. Unless he was with Torrant. With Torrant, he climbed docilely onto
the bed on his hands and knees and put his head down on the mattress.
“Turn over, you wanker,” Torrant said gently. “I want to see your face. You love me.”
Aylan turned over, welcomed his body with open arms, spread his legs, giving entire embrace with his long limbs. Torrant stroked the stubbled cheeks with his palms, running his thumbs over the tender, full curve of Aylan’s pouty lower lip.
“You love me,” Torrant repeated, his voice throbbing with sadness and desire. “Do you think I don’t need to see that, tonight?”
Again, that crushing, feeding kiss, and Aylan arched against him, shoving his long, thin prick into the crease of Torrant’s thigh and pumping, almost frantically, because he wanted….
“Please!” Aylan begged, suddenly desperate for that possession. Torrant braced himself on his elbows above him, and Aylan saw him mask a twinge of pain.
“I can take your weight,” he gasped, supporting Torrant’s shoulders with his palms. “Just please. Please.”
Torrant sat back a little on his knees, taking some of the weight from his arm. He had been leaking slickly, his thick member slippery with fluid, and all it took was a little rub, and little push, and suddenly he was inside. Aylan gasped hoarsely into Torrant’s open mouth as the possession took them both. Ah… ah… ah…. Aylan couldn’t order, couldn’t lead, couldn’t do anything but let Torrant take him up, up and up, oh gods! With a roughened palm on Aylan’s member, a quick, untender stroking that had Aylan biting his own hand in the exquisite mix of pleasure pain, Aylan saw the ledge of pleasure and rushed at it, full speed.
Oh… oh… oh Goddess thank you, thank you for the blindness of passion, for the sweetness of pleasure.
In a hot splash of spend over both of their stomachs, Aylan was over, gasping, crying, whimpering, and then Torrant thrust into him hard and fast and so passionately. Aylan was lost, crying out, catching Torrant’s tears on his chest, stroking the beloved face as Torrant grimaced in pleasure, and they were both grunting, pleading, begging for release, for the shock of whiteness behind his eyes for climax for pain for ecstasy—for the ease of torment in the arms of a friend.
