by Amy Lane
The man had been howling at the sword scratches, but now his eyes widened. “You really are the son of the gods, aren’t you?” he asked, awed, and behind him Aylan rolled his eyes.
“Oh, absolutely,” Torrant replied, without hardly twitching a whisker or exposing a fang. “Now tell us the three locations, and we can….” He stopped. This man was a predator. This wasn’t the first boy he had raped—it would not be the last. As if reading his mind, the boy in the shadows jumped out.
“You can’t let him go!” he cried, shoving past the man-beast in the alley to issue a vicious kick to the guard’s genitals. The man went down with a grunt, not having enough wind to howl.
“Well, I didn’t want him to know that!” Torrant responded with exasperation. He gave a growl of frustration and sank to his knees, hoping the man’s mind was really as weak as it seemed.
“Now see here,” Torrant said shortly, “this face and this fur—it isn’t my only gift. My other gift is torture—and you have two choices. You can tell us straight out and hope for the best, or I can make you tell me, but it won’t be pretty. We may still kill you, or we may still hurt you, but either way, it will go easier if you give us what we want.”
Perhaps it was the no-nonsense tone of voice, or perhaps the feline features—including the tongue the snowcat periodically stuck out to try to wipe the stench of the alleyway off his nose—or perhaps the man was really as weak as all that, but in a moment they had three places to look for their turncoat wizard and a quandary on their hands.
They dropped the man against the stone wall and retreated a foot or two to talk about it.
“I don’t like killing in cold blood,” Torrant said reluctantly, and Aylan nodded, but they both looked at the piece of shite, blubbering in the filth, and shuddered.
“He’ll do it again.” Aylan sighed.
“We can’t let him do it again,” Torrant agreed, but at that moment the boy, who had been standing with his back to them while watching the sobbing guard like he might watch a poisonous snake, grabbed Aylan’s dagger from the sheath at his belt, lunged at the man, and caught him at the hollow of the throat by sheer luck. The man gurgled, thrashed, and died, and the boy collapsed next to him, sobbing, covered in blood, vomit, and shite.
“Did you expect that even a little?” Aylan asked in shock, and Torrant shook his head violently.
It took them a while to calm the boy down and take him to the dark of the river to wash him off as they dumped the body. They took him to Aylan’s flat then (which had been more of a haven than a place to sleep lately) to bunk for the night, and told him to wait until he talked to one of them before he returned to the brothel, if that was what he wanted to do. Neither of them could think of a word of reprimand for killing a monster in cold blood. Later, this would bother them—it would bother them more than either of them cared to admit—but there was other, more awful business to attend to that night.
The second location they tried—a respectable-looking apartment in a nonghetto quarter near the river—had two bored guards sitting outside, cleaning their nails with their daggers. Torrant and Aylan met eyes—this had to be silent and permanent and there could be no witnesses. Shite detail or not, there would be no witnesses this night.
Soundlessly, Torrant dropped to the ground on four paws and ripped the guards’ throats out in two swipes of razored claws. He stood then as a man and regretted not washing his paws off as a snowcat, but it didn’t matter. The blood would not have been any less horrid if his hands were licked clean.
Without waiting, because he knew Aylan would be at his back soon enough, he kicked through the door in half-beast form and growled menacingly at the resentful young man huddling on a pallet of dirty blankets in a corner of the room.
“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” Torrant demanded, feeling the anger at this particular betrayal surging at his chest. “Have you been coerced? Did they threaten your father? Your other sister? Tell me something, Duan. Give me a reason, any reason, to believe you didn’t choose this path on your own!”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Duan spat. He had been a handsome young man—thin, as were all in the ghettoes, but well favored and tall, with longish brown hair that sat well with his white streak, and a pleasant face. In the weeks since his sister’s death, his face had become a puzzle of bitter lines. His hair had grown lank and dull, and his clothes—which Triana had kept neat and patched for him—were less than rags on a thin wood frame. Littered around his pallet were several earthen jars of what smelled to be the foulest, cheapest wine made anywhere in Clough.
Duan had a spatter of it dripping down his chin and onto his rags, mixed with sour vomit.
“What did we do to you to earn this betrayal?” Torrant demanded. There could be a changing of the guard at any moment. Whatever they did here, it would have to be done soon.
“My sister is dead!” Duan slurred, and Torrant’s anger snapped.
“So are my brothers and my fathers and my mothers and my friends! I’m here fighting the man who did this to us. Why are you fighting me!”
“You!” Duan spat. “You and your friend and your fighting and your scheming! You brought this down on us! You’re the reason my sister is dead!”
“And who told you that? Rath or the wine?”
“Does it matter?” A wine jar went flying through the air, shattering on the ground at Torrant’s feet. Torrant dodged as Duan kicked another one at him.
“Of course it does!” In a fluid leap, Torrant was over the broken chairs and low table that furnished the room and landed on the tiny pallet. Almost in the same movement, he kicked out with his foot and took Duan down, leaving him gasping, lying on his back. “It matters, because if you believed Rath, he lied. If you believed the wine—well, that lies too. It matters because we can’t have you doing this anymore, but how we stop you is up to you.”
Duan glared up at him from his back. “You want to stop me? Kill me. Rath’s right—we’re monsters. The things you and I do on the floor—we’re vile, pushing at each other with our will….”
“If you believed that, why didn’t you betray me in reality?” Torrant demanded, his sword tip at Duan’s throat. “You know who I am—at the very least you know I should be in the ghettoes….”
“I couldn’t work against you if you got me crucified, now could I?” Duan asked bitterly, and Torrant blinked. He had forgotten there was more than one reason Duan worked in the Gander’s Sauce.
“Well if the people you’re working for will crucify you for being what you are, don’t you think you’re working for the wrong people?” Torrant asked in desperation. “I don’t understand why you would do this to your people… to your cause… to everything we’ve worked for. How can you live with yourself after this? What if these people kill your father? Your other sister? How could you live with yourself then?”
There was a sudden silence, and Duan regarded him from his position on the pallet, the sharp blade at his throat. “I coul—” he began, but they never got to hear the rest of his answer.
At that moment the door burst open, and what seemed a small company of guards burst into the room. Duan, half-drunk and desperate, jerked upward in startlement and slit his own windpipe and jugular on Torrant’s sword.
Torrant pulled the sword free to defend himself and then stared at the blood in horrified fascination while the guards looked at Duan, thrashing weakly in death, with their own stunned horror.
Torrant and Aylan met eyes and then looked at the guards, and before the guards broke the tableau, he’d sheathed his sword and was the snowcat, snarling, ripping, shredding, and carving a passage in the armed bodies through which Aylan could pass.
Fighting on the ground was not the snowcat’s strong point. After the first few guards went down with shredded groins, he took a risk, stood on his hind legs, and pushed the guard in front of him backward—taking a vicious rip to the side—into his fellows, where he died on their swords and knocked them
backward as well. Torrant stood on top of the body, propped up by the struggling bodies of the man’s fellows, and had an easier time reaching arms and heads and shoulders from that point. Aylan was at his back, catching any of the men or sword slashes he missed, and he trusted that nothing would get through.
The battle was quick, nasty, and malicious, but after a few moments, the doorway was clear. Torrant circled around until Aylan, running on the bodies of the fallen, leapt out of the miserable little apartment at a flat-out run. Together they disappeared into the shadows of the alleyways of the merchant quarters, the angry shouts of the few remaining guards pursuing them into the dark.
Torrant followed Aylan then, since Aylan knew more of the city better, and both of them were winded and bloody as they panted in the yard next to a generous and beautiful home that had obviously just received a fresh coat of paint and some new drapes.
“This is Trieste’s,” Aylan panted, sure of himself. “She said she could put me up while she was in town. Did you want to come in?”
Torrant swiped at bloody whiskers and gave a little whimper. In his human form, he would still be covered in blood. He didn’t want Yarri to see him like this. Violently he shook his head, wincing as blood spattered from his oily guard hairs and whiskers. There would be rain soon—it was apparent in the chilly, oppressive air. Hopefully he wouldn’t leave Trieste’s alleyway looking like a charnel house for long.
He nuzzled Aylan then, snuffling, smelling for blood, and he didn’t smell much of it. Aylan bent and touched noses to him.
“Night, brother. Love you.”
Torrant’s long, rough tongue came out and washed and sanded Aylan’s face, taking away the blood spatters and the sweat and leaving his brother breathless and laughing. On that note, he turned and trotted off into the shadows, bent for nothing but his own bed.
EVEN THIRTY years later, when her beloved played the lute at Beltane and told this story so it would not be forgotten, Yarri remembered.
They hadn’t danced at a Beltane since she was seventeen years old—that was one of the things Rath had stolen from them, and she had never forgiven that monster for the theft.
But it didn’t mean they didn’t dance.
Samhain, Solstice, Midsummer’s Night, they would dance. There were moments even now, as their age grew golden and thin as autumn sunlight and her hair shimmered more silver than gold, there were still moments. The light would tip the trees, the strings and horns would play sweetly, and Yarrow Moon would meet Torrant Shadow’s eyes across a crowded town green, and the world would forget to breathe.
They wouldn’t even feel their feet moving as they crossed toward each other. Children would stop chattering, grandchildren would stare at them in bemusement, and for a glorious moment they would be young and in love and seeing each other for the first time in months, and their bodies would tingle from excitement and fear and, most of all, from the heart-stopping joy of being able to touch the one true beat of the other half of their hearts.
Yarri closed her eyes at this part of the song and felt the heat of her husband’s skin as it seeped through his plain linen shirt.
Some years, this moment of the song was the only reason she stayed to hear it.
Some years, she stayed for the host of moments that followed.
Some years, the pain of those moments almost kept her from getting out of bed at all come Beltane morn.
A phrase caught Yarri’s ears then, a pretty turn of words for the pretty Queen of Otham, and Yarri looked unhappily out into the crowd for Aylan’s namesake.
Trieste had always claimed she’d had no beloved dead to speak of, and so her three daughters had all been named after the men she had loved. Alex, Torran, and Ayline had been sent to Eiran for fostering when they reached their teens, because their mother loved her time in Eiran, and with the Moon family’s eager blessing, she wanted to give them time with family as a gift. This is how Torran and Ellyot had met and fallen in love.
Trieste’s youngest, Ayline, was being fostered in Eiran now. She had spent her first week in a high dudgeon, because she was not exactly happy about being named after “some wanker who called mama ‘Spots.’” Aylan had grown on his namesake—as he had on her mother before her—and now she was particularly protective of him. Starren had teased him about how his charm still came out to play, but the truth was, they were both moody, pissy people when it suited them, and Aylan was the first person to stand up to the young princess and let her know that not every adult in her life would bow before her temper.
This was Ayline’s first year listening to the Beltane song, and she had sat, in openmouthed amazement, hearing of Aylan’s bravery and her own mother’s involvement in the “Political Uprising” she had read in her history books but never connected to the people in her life.
At this moment, she looked over at the man she’d been named for in a peculiar kind of puzzlement.
“I don’t understand,” she said to her sister Torran, a tiny woman safely ensconced in Ellyot’s arms.
“You don’t understand how Aylan was a hero?” Torran asked, a little surprised. The man had “hero” written in every glare from his intense blue eyes as well as the air of protectiveness he wore like a battered leather cloak.
“No…. Aylan was definitely a hero,” Ayline said with some emphasis, “but I don’t understand why one of us wasn’t named ‘Eljeane.’”
Torran laughed, the kind of laugh that made her eyes sting, and she looked to her husband’s wayward, searching twin brother. “Because when all was said and done,” Torran said, hoping she saw some contentment on her brother-of-the-heart’s features this year, “Eljean wasn’t Mama’s name to give.”
Part XIX—The Coupling Moon
You’re Mine, Said She
HE COULD smell her on his patio. He whuffled along the wooden fence at the place she had gone over and then whuffled along the packed dirt of the tiny enclosure, mostly to accustom his cat self to the smell of her, but partly to buy some thinking time. Human girl, roses, yarrow, kindness, wool—oh Goddess, she smelled glorious.
When he got to the patio door, he paused for a moment, gathering the wherewithal to change form without swearing about it. The wound on his side was pretty deep, and it would hurt badly with the change, not to mention that it might not heal all the way. The snowcat sighed and grunted, and then there was the twisting, muscle-crawling sensation of change and the white blindness of pain. He wrestled with his boots and his last pair of hand-knitted socks without holes for the moment, knowing they were muddy and dirty and not wanting to track onto the carpet. Finally his human hands let himself into his apartment.
“You’re late,” she said from the couch in the visiting room. There was an oil lamp on low, and as he padded through the bedroom and could look over her shoulder, he saw that she was curled up on his divan, knitting a bright turquoise and orange sock and reading a book at the same time. “I thought I was going to have to go back to Trieste’s to beat that damned curfew bell.”
“And walk in the dark?” he objected, feeling silly but unable to help himself. He shook his head and padded toward the bathroom with one object in mind. “It’s dangerous out th—Yarri!”
She had set her knitting down and come to stand in front of him. Her hair had fallen from its coif, and her lovely autumn-colored ball gown showed signs of having scrambled over the fence, but her lightly freckled cheeks were round and soft, and her bright brown eyes were droopy and tired. Oh, she looked like an invitation from a warm bed, just breathing in front of him.
“We’re not in public,” she said softly, her brown eyes making the sort of contact that buzzed electric inside his skin.
He felt himself leaning forward and then took a quick step back, startling her. “I’m covered in blood,” he said somberly, looking away. “Please don’t make me touch you covered in blood.”
Her eyes widened, and her lips parted, and then she got a good look at him in the lamplight and paled. “It was bad, tonigh
t?” she asked hesitantly, and he used the question to take another step backward toward the washroom.
“It was what it was,” he sighed, not sure if he could venture to explain the terrible chain of near misses with moral depravity that had dogged him and Aylan this time out.
“Is any of that yours?” she asked, her voice a little stronger as she followed him to the bathroom.
He stood on the tile in his bare feet and looked at her with a bit of pained self-deprecation. “Yar?”
Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t get to see you naked now? I thought the time had passed for those sorts of niceties.”
He laughed grimly, trying to find an even expression that would stay at his eyes when all he wanted to do was wince in embarrassment. “Do you have no sense of romance, girl?” he asked after a moment, grimacing. “I’ve not seen you for near on six moons—I’d really like for you to see me as something other than a battered killer. Could you do that for me, Yar? As a personal favor? Let me shower and put on some breeches and then I can walk you home in the moonlight so you’re not trapped here like a rat in a cage all tomorrow?”
Her expression softened. “You will never know how I see you, you silly boy,” she told him, with no play in her voice at all, “but I’ll go sit nicely for now.”
“Thank you,” he said, giving a courtly bow there in the middle of the washroom. As she closed the door, he was hanging his beaten leather cloak on a hook on the wall.
Walk me home? The thought came out of nowhere, just as she was settling down on the divan again. Walk her home? Escort her through the streets at night so she could spend the day cooped up with Trieste, fretting about all they had yet to talk about?
She’d be exiled behind the stars’ dark first.
Suddenly, she wished she had showered as she’d waited. Her hair was tumbled randomly, and her dress… well, it had looked better earlier that evening.
