by Amy Lane
And landed, his face alone partially changed as a disguise as he poured out of the shadows behind the guard.
“Well then, what would you suggest?” he growled. He was unprepared for the guard to jump, run, trip, and land on his right shoulder with his hand scrabbling on his left hip for his sword. With exaggerated gentleness, Torrant brought his sword tip down on the man’s hand, stopping the scrabbling. He kept his sword within touching distance as the guard swept off his dignity and stood up, chuffing a little from his spectacular crash.
“What was the question again?” the poor man asked from behind the face guard on his helmet. He was obviously miserably embarrassed.
Torrant tried to keep from laughing, and it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “I asked what you would suggest. It’s not like you wear signs. ‘This guard rapes children.’ ‘This guard does not rape children, but he does rape the men in the boys’ brothel.’ ‘This guard rapes no one, but he’ll steal anyone who is hot on the black market for child servants right now,’ or, my favorite, ‘This guard looks for excuses to kill anyone in the ghetto because he’s a sadistic bastard who—’”
“Enough!” There was a furtive swipe of a hand below the nose guard of the helmet. “Do you think I’m proud? Do you think I watch children run from me and I dance a jig?”
“I think you wear a uniform, and it’s been disgraced so often that you have to get what comes with the uniform.” Torrant was aware that his voice was angry and bitter, and he questioned the wisdom of starting this conversation. It seemed like the compassionate thing to do at the time, but now… his voice was growling in his chest, and he started to doubt his ability to let this man live.
“I wear a uniform? Would you be interested in seeing what’s underneath that uniform?” Defiance, hurt.
Torrant sighed. “Why not? Just once I’d love to be proved wrong about what a cesspool this place is.”
The guard reached under his chin and unbuckled the strap, then swept the helmet from his head. Torrant looked at the back of his head curiously, then he saw a faint shimmer around the guard’s face. Oh… oh Goddess.
“Turn around,” he commanded roughly. The guard turned around—he was about Torrant’s age, with swarthy skin and bluish black hair cut short around his head. At the top of his short-cut hair was a spot of white against the darkness. Torrant reached out and stroked the buzz of hair, feeling the tingle of magic that made it real. At once, the weight of his terrible deception seemed to triple, as he imagined years—ten or fifteen years—of the same deception he endured, only worse, a thousand times worse, because instead of showing his gift at night, or in the privacy of his friends’ company, this man went onto the streets and persecuted his own people to hide who he was.
“You haven’t changed my opinion of this shitehole of a town,” Torrant said roughly. “What is your talent?”
The guard flashed a humorless quirk of a strained mouth. “Children. I’m a protector of children.”
Dueant’s tears. “Do you have any?”
“Two boys. My oldest is six—I figure he’s got about six years before I have to teach him how to hide who he is.”
“Would you like to get the hell out of here?”
He looked at Torrant with bright and burning eyes and didn’t flinch at the furry distortion of his face. “For the sake of sweet Triane, please?”
“I can’t just trust you, you know that?”
Those burning eyes—maybe brown, in the light?—didn’t flinch. “Anything. I’ll do anything you ask. I’ll leave my wife; I’ll kill my silly drunken partner in the next alley—anything, but don’t sentence my boys to this.”
Torrant sucked air in through his teeth. “All I really need, sir, is a handshake.” He extended a hand, covered in a light sheen of fur, and shook the trembling hand across from him. “There. Now tell me truly, do you mean to betray us? Because if you do and you lie about it, I wish you all of the agonies I bear in my flesh at the moment, in truth and for real.”
The man blinked, probably because he too felt the shimmer, the tingle of magic as it crossed his palm and burned into his body. “I will not betray you,” he said and shivered again as the tingle passed through him.
“Good. Will your wife?”
“She may. I wasn’t planning to tell her.”
“Are you the kind of man who would just leave a woman, then?”
“No… ouuuu….” His knees buckled a little. “Fine. Yes, I am. She would probably turn me over to the consort, and our children too when they come of age. I thought I could look past her blindness of the Goddess’s children. I was young and stupid, but I won’t abandon my babies to her. I won’t.”
“Good.” Torrant nodded. At the very least, the spell was working.
“Tell me something.” The guard panted, leaning his weight a little on the crumbling wall next to him.
“If I can, when I’m finished. It turns out I need someone like you—military training, a stout heart. But you’re going to be in charge of families: women, children, half-starved men. I won’t give them to you if I think you’re a danger to them.”
“They’re my people….” He whined then. It was not a full-out lie, but a truth he didn’t believe. “Right—they should be my people. But my father made me hide myself—he knew what was coming.”
“So, would you kill one of your mates? Your fellow guards, the men you diced with, confided in, your brothers? Could you kill someone if he came at you while you were defending these people you don’t know are yours?”
He sucked in a breath. “If I was protecting my children, even somebody else’s children, I could kill anybody—maybe even you…. Ah, sweet Dueant, I was kidding!” That last groan made Torrant smile. Good. He had a stout heart and a healthy fear of Triane’s Son—all in all, one of the first fortunate things to happen since a stolen sunlit hour at Moon Hold.
“Right, then. Can you meet someone, first rest day, at the smaller western gate? Have your sons, important things—winter clothes, as much food as you can carry, maybe small items of comfort. Don’t tell them they’re going forever, but make sure they kiss their mother good-bye.” Behind his matter-of-fact growl, he was trying not to do a victory dance. Finally… finally an answer to one of the problems he and Aylan had been chewing over in the last few weeks. If nothing else, he’d like to tell Yarri that Roes and Aldam would be safer than naked in the abandoned home of their family.
There was a terrible pause, and for a moment, Torrant wondered if he had misjudged the man. Then he realized—this had been a gamble. The man had been speaking the truth in theory, but he had to come to grips with the reality of saying good-bye.
“What’s your name, sir?” Torrant asked after a terrible, fraught moment, when the guard’s wide cheekbones and shadowed eyes glimmered in what was left of the starlight.
“Fredy.”
“Fredy, I’m offering you a way out. It may or may not be more successful than what you’ve been doing so far, and I’m not going to lie to you—there’s going to be danger. But you know what Rath’s doing on the hills above Dueance, don’t you?”
Fredy shook his head. Apparently this was not common knowledge.
“A giant oven, Fredy. A kiln, to cook our brethren into ashes and memories. And since Rath’s killed off our poets and forbidden us to read and write, only a few songs will survive us. Are you ready to go now?”
“Oh Goddess….”
“Are you ready?”
“Triane’s sweet breath… yes. Get my sons out of here. Let me protect them like a man and not a coward….”
“Good, then. There will be someone to meet you, first rest day, right?”
“Right….” There was a hesitation in the man’s voice, a “one more thing.”
“Fredy,” Torrant asked with a light heart, “was there something you wanted to ask me?”
“Triane’s Son, you inflicted me with all your pain. For a minute. For a lie I didn’t know I told. It hurt so bad I wet myself, you know th
at?”
Torrant did, although the smell had blended in to the stench of the alleyway.
“How do you bear it? I bore it for a moment. How do you bear it, night after night?”
Ah… ah Dueant’s breath. “One cut at a time, brother. One cut at a time. Now, should I dent your helmet again, or will your partner buy it if you just wander to another quarter of the ghetto and take a nap?”
“How’s ’bout you dent it when it’s not on my head, yes? Enough of us have been bashed enough times, no one will check for a bruise—but it sure would be nice not to get one tonight.”
Torrant almost laughed and complied with the request. “Now stay there, and I’ll bring your friend. You can wake up together and forego the rest of your night’s walk.”
He made to swing himself up to the rooftop when Fredy stopped him. “You promise, right? I get my children up on rest day, and they tell their mother good-bye, and you’ll get us out of here?”
Torrant turned his Goddess-blue eyes toward his new defender of Moon Hold and extended his hand. “Truly, Fredy, if your intentions are true, then you have all the protection I can extend, although most of it is on your shoulders.” A tingle passed along their nerve endings, and Fredy’s eyes widened. It was the truth, and no one could doubt it.
And with that, he swung himself onto the rooftop above his head and set about to fetch the guard weeping drunkenly to himself about three blocks over.
Holding Breath
WHEN TORRANT had visited the consort’s palace for that one disastrous dinner, he had been escorted into the entryway and conducted up a set of stairs to Rath’s personal apartments. The great blond doors to the ballroom, more than four times the height of a tall man, had been closed, and Torrant hadn’t bothered to peer inside. On this night they hung open, and he stood in the shadows of the door and the stairs, trying to get a glimpse into the glittering white ballroom, its chandeliers lit with a thousand candles, and the women dressed in their great swooshing dresses inside the room itself.
Yarri was in there.
“So, are you going to go in?” said Aylan at his elbow, and Torrant turned to him in a panic.
“Oueant’s bloody eyeballs, are you mad? What if somebody sees you?” Oh Goddess, all the precautions they had taken to make sure nobody from Aylan’s crowd of three years ago had seen him, and here he was, in full view of Rath and the fickle gods. Had the man no sense?
“I flirted with—” There was a pause while Aylan fought the urge to spit on the white marble. “—Essa’s maid. Her entire party is planning on coming late. You and I will be long gone by then.”
Torrant shook his head. The discreet orgies Aylan had attended three years before had ceased. Most of the people involved had either run away to their family estates in the country or renounced all their friends and claimed they’d been coerced.
Essa, the vindictive bitch who had started the public outcry against them, had gotten everything she wanted. She became one of the twin gods’ chosen, the poor victim of the Great Whore’s turpitude; she kept all the friends who sided with her anyway and had a chance to publicly disparage the ones who hadn’t licked her pretty toes; and she had married the betrothed of the girl she had driven to suicide, while the body of Brina’s brother cooled beside her. Aylan had been in the room, a step away from the blade Brina sank into her own throat.
In spite of his original plans, Torrant had no time to spare for the socializing that was supposed to come with his station—he had attended no parties, seen no shows, danced at no balls. He did not regret these things; they had never appealed to him anyway. But if he had ever been tempted, even the least little bit, all it would have taken was one thought of running into the twisted excuse for humanity that had wrought so much terrible havoc in Aylan’s heart.
He wasn’t sure what he would say to the woman. The more time he spent as the snowcat, hiding from the anguish of his heart as a human, the less he was certain he could live with what he would do to her.
And now Aylan was standing there, next to him, putting himself at risk of recognition.
Torrant shook his head, tempted to grab the man by his curly hair and drag him back to his flat in the ghettoes, where no one could touch him. “You need to get out of here. I told you we would meet later for the job.”
They had followed Dimitri one night, figuring that as Rath’s new favorite foot washer, he might have a line on the wizard who had been pushing at the regents during the last month and a half on the floor. They hadn’t seen the gifted one, but they had heard his name dropped by a scornful Dimitri to an indifferent guard. Torrant had asked a distraught and tearful Olek and had the rumor confirmed.
It was Duan, brother to the dead girl, and he had volunteered.
He was apparently moved on a nightly basis, but they knew which guards fed him—and, thanks to the gratefully relocated Fredy, they knew that two of them would be in the ghettoes tonight. Two guards, alone, on their turf—they would have Duan’s location by the time the night was out.
They planned to have taken care of Duan, one way or another, before the Regents’ Hall reconvened.
“Do you think I’m leaving you until I’ve seen Yarri’s hand on your arm?” Aylan was saying now, shaking him a little bit at the shoulder. “If you were shouting at her from across a crowded ballroom, you might—just might, mind you—still keep up the madness that she should go back home. But the moment she touches you, it’s over. Either she’s here to stay, or you’re on the next wagon out, but either way, I don’t have to watch you kill yourself with your own damned heroism, and hey, hello! I can sleep again.”
Aylan had a self-satisfied smile on his face, and Torrant glared and fought the urge to kick him in the shin like a child.
“What are you two arguing about?” Eljean asked, sauntering up indolently wearing a slickly cut black huntsman’s vest over a black tunic and very tight black breeches. Although their brief interlude had faded like moonlight on a shadowed river, even Torrant (hell, even Aylan) had to admit he looked good.
“Aylan—whose presence here puts his life in danger, I might add—is trying to give me away like a girl’s father at a handfasting,” Torrant replied sourly, and Eljean’s immediate laugh was silenced by Aylan’s grim look.
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to do. I would really like to see the two of us ride out of this shitehole alive, if you don’t mind, and I think Yarri improves our chances dramatically.”
“Oh,” Aerk said, walking up to the three of them with Keon at his elbow. They were both dressed in their best huntsmen and breeches, but Aerk’s shaggy hair was too long to go without a queue and too short to stay in it. Keon had combed his own dark, wiry hair, but the cowlick in the back remained the same.
“Yarri’s here.” Keon finished Aerk’s thought. “That’s why you’re attending tonight!”
Torrant looked at both of them in confusion. “But I thought you two weren’t.”
“Well, we are if you are!” Keon responded with a grin, and Torrant shook his head and went back to studying the crowd for signs of Yarri and Trieste.
“Are you going to just stand there?” Jino asked, Marv on his heels. Torrant felt a vague ache at his temples.
“Has it occurred to you all that maybe I didn’t want you here?” he asked a little desperately.
“Not really,” Marv responded, fidgeting with the lace at his collar. Jino stopped him with a frustrated tap on the shoulder and pulled a hunk of it out of his huntsman and fluffed it, ignoring Marv’s slapping hands. “Why wouldn’t you want us here?”
Torrant flashed a faint smile at their byplay and was about to answer when: “Oh Goddess….”
He’d seen her.
Unlike many of the other women, who were wearing great full skirts fluffled with satin and lace, Yarri was wearing a rather simple dress in a sumptuous autumn color. The waist started right below her full breasts and skimmed her hips and thighs, and suddenly all he could think of was the way her mouth had
tasted and her eyes had glinted and her skin had swaddled his body in radiance one early summer night.
“Ellyot,” Aylan prompted. “Ellyot…. Torrant!”
Torrant expelled a harsh breath and dragged another one through his burning lungs. “What?”
“Breathe, dammit!”
“Oh.” Torrant nodded. Yes. Breathing was a superlative idea. Couldn’t beat breathing for keeping a person alive. Oh gods, oh Triane, she was looking his way! On his next breath, he dodged behind the great doors again, flattening himself against the wall.
“What’s the matter with him?” Marv asked Aerk, who rolled his eyes and shrugged.
“I think he’s nervous. Would you quit bouncing? You’re making me nervous now!”
“I look like hell,” Torrant said desperately.
“You look all right,” Aerk said, shrugging at the other young men. “That’s a nice color….”
In fact the autumn orange-and-green huntsman made his eyes look almost like hearts of topaz, and his shorn hair was just long enough to look carefree and a little bit shaped. As he had been getting ready, Aylan had given him a full-out, mouth-to-mouth, tongue-to-tongue, body-to-body good-bye kiss that had rushed the blood to everyplace but his head and told him he looked amazing.
Right now, looking at her across the crowded ballroom, seeing her stand out like an autumn-colored lighthouse on a dismal gray pier, he couldn’t think of why Aylan would have thought he was presentable at all.
“Which one’s Yarri?” Keon asked, and Marv looked in and pointed.
“That one—the short, chesty one with too much red hair?”
“I think she cut it,” Torrant said randomly. It certainly looked shorter, and although he shouldn’t complain, the idea that, once again, she had to cut her hair to survive this place hurt him like he hadn’t imagined.
“Who is she standing next to?” Jino asked suspiciously. “I know her—she was introduced in the Regents’ Hall this afternoon, right after you left. Wait, isn’t she Princess… no, Queen Tri….”
