by Amy Lane
Aldam looked at Fredy curiously, his head tilted quizzically to the side. “You’ve been thinking about this for a long time, haven’t you?”
Fredy flushed. “There’s a lot of time to plan revenge on the man who makes you wait in the cold to get bonked on the head.”
Aldam’s answering smile was as cold as sun on an ice pond, but he had no words.
“I think we have someone like that,” Roes mused, thinking about a quiet boy—with sparkling brown eyes like her brother and a white streak in his hair like Torrant—who had a way of getting out of whatever he had been asked to do. She had thought there’d been something uncanny about the boy, and given Fredy’s request, she was pretty sure she knew what it might be.
“There’s more,” Cwyn said, into the pause. “I can’t stay—Rath sent a squad into the Old Man Hills.”
“Because sacking Triannon wasn’t enough?” spat Roes, a lifetime of loathing in her voice. She had been there that day—she’d helped Torrant give books of poetry to students as they fled, so the entirety of the library wouldn’t be lost. She’d heard the tortured roar of their beloved school as it destructed in flames behind her, burying her favorite professor in the inferno. The idea of Rath’s people any closer to her family nauseated her physically, and for a moment, she wondered if she would have to retch in the newly recovered and refurbished sink.
Roes caught her beloved looking at her with a sweet epiphany on his face just as Cwyn shook his head and spoke.
“None of the older regents believed Torrant about there being enough explosive in the city to take out that foundation. Rath knows that some of your old professors are out in the hills—he sent the squad to ‘find weaponry and punish the terrorists who attacked the peace of Clough.’” Cwyn’s tone was a perfect mimicry of Torrant’s bitter parody. They probably “did” Rath better than the man himself.
Roes blanched, and Aldam stepped forward and put his hands on her shoulders. “Of course you need to go,” he agreed. He loved Professor Austin too. “But your horse is done in, and so are you. Go to our room and catch a sleep. Roes will have dinner ready in a couple of hours. Eat. We’ll start our preparations, and you can ride out when you’re well.”
“But….” Cwyn started to spring up, but Aldam, the eye of tranquility in the Moon home, just as Torrant had been the child of joy, leaned over and took the hand of the boy who had been his little brother as surely as he’d been Roes’s.
“I know that you’ve been watching him sacrifice himself,” he said quietly. “I’ve seen him do it. But you may rest assured that even he knows that a well-thought-out ride and a rested animal is better than an exhausted panic.”
Cwyn swallowed miserably and closed his eyes, suddenly looking like the child he had been when innocent in sleep. “Are you sure?” he asked, sounding pathetic.
Aldam stroked his hand as Roes had done. “It’s the only way we made it to Triannon alive and with enough time to spare. I trusted him then, and you need to trust me now.”
Cwyn nodded, obviously trying to pull his dignity around him, and Roes stood up in her no-nonsense way and pulled him to his feet. Only Aldam noticed the little wobble as though her vision went unexpectedly dark. Aldam watched her as he looped an arm around Cwyn’s shoulders from the other side, and together they put their beloved Terror down for a nap. Roes was going to get up and go into the kitchen when Aldam stopped her.
“Rest,” he said implacably.
“But I need to….”
“Rest.” He smiled to sweeten the word. Roes was usually the leader—at least in front of people. She was articulate and headstrong, and Aldam admired those things in her as he always had. But today he knew something that she either didn’t or wouldn’t, and although he wouldn’t tell her what he knew before she was ready, he would have the last word here.
“Aldam….” She dimpled at him charmingly and refrained from telling him he was behaving absurdly.
He smiled that lovely smile again and put some of his healer’s gift into it this time. “Rest.”
And no one was more surprised than Roes when her eyes closed and her head hit the pillow next to her little brother.
WHEN THE two of them awoke, Aldam had cooked dinner for the hold, and the rest of the relocated families were finished with Fredy’s preparations for war.
“What’s our plan?” asked a frowzy Roes as she tried to finger comb her mussed reddish-blonde bun into its usual sturdy efficiency. She was still sleepy enough to stumble a little, forcing Cwyn into the kitchen wall as they walked in, and instead of shoving her back, Cwyn took her elbow and steered her to the table. It was a big, tough, sanded block table, made of spare parts from the pile of scrap wood Aldam had found where the stables used to be, and it looked reassuringly like the table in the Moon home in Eiran. Roes settled herself in front of it and then shot her not-so-little brother a sharp look that he completely missed.
“Fredy has traps in place,” Aldam said, ladling stew into a wooden bowl. In his dreamings, Torrant had missed the large entourage of stock and winter stores Aldam and Roes had brought, gifts from the women of Wrinkle Creek. They had enough beef on the hoof to last them the winter and a fair amount of flour. To supplement those stores, the children had been gathering grain to feed the chickens Aldam housed in a sturdy lean-to that shared a wall with the old workers’ quarters. Between the beef and the herbs and wild tubers Aldam had dug before the frost made the ground too hard, the stew he was serving now was hearty and good, and there would be eggs for breakfast. As a whole, the Goddess folk were gratefully looking forward to their most plentiful winter in years.
“And?” Roes demanded, and Aldam’s mild-blue eyes were patently elsewhere, even as he handed Cwyn a bowl. Roes frowned. That neutral, perverse set to his mouth was Aldam’s way of refuting things he knew his audience didn’t want to hear.
“What?” she insisted, and he continued his seemingly endless search for the perfect wooden bowl in which to dish her stew.
“Cwyn, you can ride Roes’s horse—they’re both good animals, but her gelding is bored. He’ll be happy to get out.” Ah—there it was. He pulled the other bowl out of the drawer and concentrated on getting Roes the stew from the bottom of the pot. She liked her food strongly seasoned.
“When do I ride?” Cwyn asked, stopping in midgulp to look at the stew appreciatively. Aldam and Roes had always been the best cooks in the house, with Yarri and Starren a close second. Although Trieste’s cooks had been proficient at dishing tasty chow, nothing tasted as wonderful as home.
“In about two hours,” Aldam said sadly. The boy looked tired, yet, and sad. Aldam still wasn’t sure what had been driving Cwyn since his mother had fallen ill, but it had been an even harder taskmaster the day before. At least what was driving him now was as simple as saving people he cared for. Aldam could understand that motivation. It was what set the beat of his heart.
Cwyn nodded, and, ever practical, went back for another taste of stew.
“What will I be doing?” Roes asked, eyeing the stew appreciatively. She took a bite and grimaced. “A little heavy with the salt, are we?” Aldam took the bowl from her without a word and took stew from the top. He had the look of a man who was marking another item on a mental list.
“We,” Aldam said deliberately, “are going to hide under the old house in the ice storage cave with the children.”
Roes blinked. “The hell we are!”
Aldam ran a hand through his wild white-blond hair, disarranging it so badly that his white streak of the gifted was completely lost. “The hell we aren’t,” he replied with deceptive equanimity. “We will protect the children. It’s what I’m best at, and you’re not bad at it either.”
“But, Aldam—I can fight! You know that! Torrant’s been teaching us swordplay since… since…,” she sputtered, not able to form words for a time without the two of them in her life. “Dammit, beloved!” she finally snapped, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “I want some gods-curse
d blood!”
Aldam smiled, the extra-kind smile he saved only for his Roes. “Of course you do, beloved,” he said softly, dropping to his haunches in front of her. “But my baby is making you tired and taking away your balance. She needs you to stay out of the fight for now. You can fight later.”
Roes blinked at him dumbly, and Cwyn’s mouth dropped open, stew fragments tumbling into the bowl under his chin.
“Baby? Roes, don’t you know how these things work?” Cwyn asked, wiping his chin with the back of his hand. His sister was still staring speechlessly at her husband, her mouth opening and closing without rhythm.
“The tea…,” Roes said numbly. “I packed it for the trip. I thought it would only be a week or two….” Those were the last words she spoke for a while, as her mind caught up with what her body had known for weeks.
“Yes.” Aldam beamed at their little brother, content to let Roes flounder for a moment. “You may tell Bethen that we’ll name it after her.”
At the mention of his mother’s name, Cwyn blinked stinging eyes as quickly as he could. For the first time since Aylan had pounded down their door, he realized that if he was lucky—and, if he forsook the glory of the fight for the hard job he’d deserted at home—he might get to see his mother for the winter. And he could tell her this.
“She’ll like that,” he said roughly, fighting the urge to put his head on the table and weep like an infant. Blessed with his sister’s pragmatism, he finished his stew instead.
All the while, Roes stared at her husband in shock until Aldam picked her bowl up from the table and put a spoonful of stew in her mouth. She swallowed and then cupped her own hands around his as they held the bowl. He fed her again, and she swallowed again, mindless of the tears plopping in her dinner. When she was done, he set the bowl aside and took her face in his hands.
“Don’t cry, Roes,” he said kindly, putting a healer’s hand on her abdomen through her skirts. “You’ll be fine. I promise.”
“I’m not scared, dammit.” She sniffled. “I’m happy.” And then she proceeded to waste more time sobbing against her beloved’s shoulder.
The Fury of Dueant’s Son
CWYN LEFT, thundering on the back of Roes’s sturdy, quick gelding, and Aldam and Roes took brooms and rags to the bottom of the damp ice pantry under what used to be the Moon home. Roes, who normally didn’t succumb to much of anything, confessed to a cumulative attack of the “oogies” (her word) at the number of spiders, snakes, and field mice residing in the basement pit. Aldam wasn’t fazed by much that was living, and so while Roes swept after him and dug the privy, he took responsibility for spider squashing, field mice shooing, snake wrangling—at one point Aldam reluctantly killed a rattlesnake with one competent strike—as well as shoring up the wooden frame reinforcement. Aldam didn’t move quickly, but he moved efficiently, and the hour before sundown, when Rath’s men were due, the hiding space was ready.
The men and women whom Torrant and the other regents had smuggled out were tough-minded people: they had survived twelve years in the ghettoes, and now that they’d tasted freedom, they were not about to let it be ripped away from them like a stolen pastry. They hid in trees with ropes and rocks, manned tripwires and tree-made catapults, and crouched in the brush holding pitchforks, hoes, and sharpened wood.
In addition to their crude weapons, the makeshift army carried a strong-kicking heart muscle of resentment, bitterness, and anger to propel them. Fredy ran about the compound, naming last-minute changes in who would hide where and giving instructions on how best to use the weapons they had. Roes couldn’t help feeling left out, but Aldam’s news had shocked her badly. For once she was willing to take her beloved’s orders.
Knowing something about children, Roes had the youngest members of the compound go gather their most precious thing and bring it into the ice cave. (Oh gods, were they letting the twelve-year-old twins fight? But they weren’t her children, and she hadn’t grown up in the ghetto, so she wisely held her tongue.) These children had grown up in want—their most precious thing was probably the easiest decision they’d ever made. Ragged dolls made of scraps and love; ratty blankets, worn soft and shapeless; the occasional wooden toy, smooth and shiny from little fingers and smuggled in a pocket—their mothers had known enough not to leave these things behind. Roes knew enough to give the twenty or so children something to cling to in the breathless dark, waiting for the world to fall down around their ears.
They heard the pounding of hooves and the first scream from a tree above ground, and then screeching, cacophonous sounds.
Roes and Aldam had heard these sounds before—these were the sounds of Triannon. The children, who had spent much of their lives being hidden, might not have heard an out-and-out battle before, but they knew the sounds of violence. There were no whimpers, no moans, no restless bodies—just the eerie, terrifying silence of children too frightened to breathe and a total dark, broken only by the occasional gleam of too-pale skin and wide, shiny eyes.
The silence was broken by a shout directly above their heads, and Roes had time to lament that no one had been able to cover the trap door with debris before a helmeted head thrust into the dark and an imperious sword gestured in and thrust itself around.
Roes felt the sudden urge to urinate. Then Aldam spoke up and came forward, and the urge went away, along with the urge to breathe.
“It’s just me,” he lied calmly, watching the way the man was blinking. The trap door was off to one side of an elongated oval—the opening didn’t shed any light on the hidden children, so the man couldn’t see who was down there.
“What are you, some sort of baby, hiding down here in the dark?” the guard spat, and Roes heard Aldam mutter “horse trader” under his breath, and then she thought her heart would stop in the freeze of her blood. Those words held such terror for her beloved, such awful import and….
And he was walking up the earthen stairs with only a carpenter’s hammer in his hand, and she realized he’d brought it down in their frantic cleaning to reinforce some of the older wood supports. His free hand ghosted over hers in the darkness. Then he was walking away from her, and she couldn’t even fall to her knees and weep, or his act of protection would be in vain.
That’s when she remembered whose daughter she was.
Before her next heartbeat, she’d grabbed her husband’s hand and followed him into the betraying light.
He looked at her with gentle reproof, and she returned it with a tearful glare. She was damned if she’d send him out into the frosty naked sunset with a “horse trader.”
When they got to the top of the stairs, both of them looked around with hard eyes, and Roes almost laughed. Whoever this guard was, he was one of the lucky ones—she saw a lot of armored teal-and-black liveried corpses, but very few injured farmers. There were sounds of battle farther off, by the road, and as Roes turned her attention back to the callow, bitter face behind the nose guard of their particular officer, she was suddenly chilled by the fact that they were the only people standing in this area of the hold.
The young guard made a grunting sound, like a laugh but not quite, and suddenly Roes’s focus was all on the enemy.
“So, everybody else is out there, dying for your great Whore. What’re you two doing, pissing yourselves in a hole?” he asked, and Aldam tapped the hammer idly against his thigh. Roes looked sideways at her husband, and for a moment she saw what the guard would see—vacant, absent blue eyes; a round, slack face; rounded shoulders; and no particular response to the winter air gone strange around him.
But that’s not what Roes saw. She saw a brave man, deep inside himself with thought. She saw arms made strong by honest labor, a deceptively wide chest, and a hammer.
She saw a fellow healer, her first and only lover, and the father of her child.
The chill in her abdomen thawed as Aldam snapped suddenly sharp eyes to the guardsman.
“We were doing the same thing everybody in the hold has been doi
ng. We were minding our own business. What are you doing here, frightening innocent people?”
“Innocent! Look at my squad!” The man’s voice trembled, and Roes had a sudden pang for the young man. He was older than Cwyn, but not by much. Then his lip curled into a sneer, and his eyes wrinkled in contempt, and all sympathy drained with the blood from her face. The young man advanced on her, put out a rude hand, and grasped her breast.
Her very tender breast.
Roes smacked his hand and kicked his shin, snapping, “Ou-uch, dammit, that hurt!” And then his hand flicked out in a practiced gesture and cracked across her cheekbone, breaking her nose and sending her sprawling to the ground, an ugly guffaw following her down.
She hadn’t hit the ground before Aldam’s hammer hit the man on his helmet, square between the eyes, and the guard fell apart like a marionette with no joint screws. Pieces of him plopped to the ground, fingers first, forearms, shoulders. His head thunked to the ground with an extra rattle inside the helmet, and cleanly, as though sliced, every part of his body connected by tissue or cartilage separated and fell where it would.
Roes stared at the mound of now-bleeding body parts, fought the urge to scream, and then fought the urge to retch. Completely numb, she took the hand her beloved extended and allowed herself to be hauled to her feet and her hurts to be checked. When she turned so she could no longer see the carrion pieces that had once been human, she spit blood to the side and gingerly wiped her nose, then looked into Aldam’s furious, tender blue eyes.
“Beloved….”
“Wait—I’m setting your nose,” he ordered. His fingers came alongside it with a tingling that meant he was taking her pain away with his gift, and she felt a crunch of cartilage as her nose was realigned to where it belonged. Suddenly, breathing became easier, and the pain faded from nauseating to irritating. He used a ripped portion of his shirt to wipe the blood off, and she felt normal again.
