by Amy Lane
“Who’s here?” Yarri asked blankly. She sat down too, mostly because she was exhausted, as she had been for the last two months. She hadn’t looked too closely into the reason for her weariness and her uncertain stomach, even though she knew in the back of her mind what was causing it. She had no problem admitting to herself the reason she avoided the subject—she simply didn’t want to confess what she’d done to Torrant. Of course, after their reconciliation, she probably would have started the tea again. She had meant what she’d said about trusting him. But by then, there had been the possibility of… of that thing she wouldn’t think about.
And although she might have wished to go back and rethink the decision, she refused, under any circumstances, to risk unmaking it.
“Trieste… who’s here?” Yarri was alarmed now—she’d never seen Trieste look so frightened.
“Alec. The military of Otham. The militia of Eiran. For the love of Triane’s knickers, Yarri, he’s even got a few companies from Cleanth!” Trieste wiped her mouth again, looking positively ill, and Yarri blinked through the spots in front of her eyes.
“Why?” she wondered aloud. “Why would he do that? He couldn’t have known how badly things were going….”
In the last months, Rath had gone mad. Incensed by the numbers of his regents and elite who had, in fact, attended their own Solstice dinners, as well as by the increasing pressure from the Regents’ Hall to change his policies toward the Goddess folk, Rath had simply… forgotten that he was answerable to a people at all.
The guard recruitment policies became mandatory—every man not housed in the ghettoes was required to spend two months a year in the corps, and desertion was a hanging offense. Suddenly, the number of guards in the ghettoes—terrible cold or no—doubled, and Torrant and Aylan would have probably dropped from exhaustion if the younger regents hadn’t stepped in. Eljean had, at Torrant’s request, attended to other duties, but after two weeks of a four-by-two rotation in the ghettoes at night, they’d been ready to drop as well, and Aerk had given an impassioned speech about the cruelties the guards were encouraged to wreak on the helpless and the poor.
Two nights later, without warning either Rath or Aerk, six regents who didn’t know Ellyot Moon’s true identity walked the streets of the ghettoes at night.
The next morning, they stormed the floor, demanding an explanation from Rath. Rath told them that the trouble those guards had been anticipating would stop with the arrests he’d made—and with the crucifixions that had happened without approval from the regents’ floor.
Torrant had slipped out of the hall then and run desperately for the outside wall, but the temperatures had been below freezing the night before, and the ten musicians, poets, and students from Dueance University who had never been part of the Goddess ghettoes were already savaged, stiff, blue, and dead, their blood freezing into spikes even as it dripped from their wounds. Numbly, the snowcat had recognized the band members of Triane’s Kiss, and his roar of grief and pain had drowned out the bells that signified the Regents’ Hall had dismissed.
The activity in the ghettoes had eased up then, but the situation in the Regents’ Hall became truly hopeless.
Torrant and the younger regents had petitioned, fruitlessly, for a list of the crimes of the dead students—and they’d been ignored. At urging from Yarri and Trieste, many of the regents’ wives and daughters had managed to add more names and more voices to that petition. And they’d been ignored. The profound disregard for the opinions of the nonradical regents inflamed even the more conservative in the hall, and they had raised their voices in protest; the charter that ruled the nation of Clough was being overturned, and they needed to be heard.
They’d been ignored.
And then… nothing. The regents had complained, they’d whined, they’d sniveled, and Rath had nodded and smiled in that condescending way but said nothing. He had, effectively, usurped a country with an elected governing body, right from under that body’s nose, simply by passively ignoring them and continuing to make his own decisions.
The one time Ellyot had dared to mention “impeachment,” the bloodbath in the ghettoes had gone on for three days. It had spread too, no longer limited to the ghettoes. Beatings went on in the university’s taverns, in the homes of the poets, and in some of the poorer playhouses, where actors played lip service to the patriotic plays that were allowed simply so they could ply their trade. Torrant and Aylan couldn’t be everywhere, but Goddess, how they had tried!
The guards were finally called back into the barracks, and the city huddled in terror and shock. The “sons of the gods” dragged their bloodstained, wounded selves into Torrant’s flat the next morning and fell into bed, where Torrant had bled all over the sheets for most of the day. They awakened when Yarri and Trieste slipped in through the back way and tended to them like children. Yarri wouldn’t speak of the new scars healing on her beloved’s body, but she would wake for the rest of her life from nightmares in which Torrant never stopped bleeding. Trieste never mentioned, even to Alec, the beloved of her heart, the way Aylan, her old nemesis, had wept against her as she’d bathed his perfect, unscathed body. But wept he had, tortured by the things he’d seen and the things he’d done and by the sword strokes he’d let through his guard.
The city assumed an unhealthy, waiting stasis after that. The ghettoes curled in on themselves. Enough families had been evacuated by the time Cwyn left to warn Roes that there were plenty of vacant buildings to burn for heat, and the efforts in the fall ensured that no one starved to death—even if everybody was heartily sick of rice.
Criminals, brigands, and the dispossessed began to move into the crumbling tenements, and the lives of those who remained were even more tenuous. It was written in every decrepit arc of the skyline, in every shattered windowpane, in every drafty hallway, in every empty, broken-stoned street that, for better or worse, this would be the last winter of the Goddess ghettoes.
Occasionally the guards would run into the ghettoes, seize the first person they could find who looked like a member of the Goddess folk, and disappear with him or her. The bodies were found in the slushy river, torn, mutilated, and violated, obviously before death.
They were left in the icy water as a warning to the force that activated hope in the ghettoes, the force that had been working to save the people there.
The name Triane’s Son had been repeated more and more often in the Regents’ Hall. The snowcat had been mentioned in equally hushed tones, although Rath pretended that he himself hadn’t seen the animal. The regents who had become appalled by Rath—and that was more and more of them—spoke the name reverently, prayed for the cat faithfully, with fearful, hushed voices.
Torrant often wondered how they could not see that he and his fellow wraith-thin, hollow-eyed, battered, scratched, and bandaged friends were, all of them, Triane’s Son.
Maybe the truth was that they did—but it didn’t matter. The Regents’ Hall had apparently forfeited all their power to fear of Rath’s reprisal should they act. If Torrant and his friends couldn’t evacuate the ghettoes by the time the summer drove the people out of doors, the odds were, it would be for the worse.
Today on this thin, bitter, green-tipped day, when crocuses asserted their right to live from the frozen cracks in the city, Trieste and Yarri looked at the letter held in Trieste’s shaking hands and wondered if Alec had brought salvation or slaughter.
And that was when a solid, deep man’s voice could be heard at the front door. “Halloo… is anyone home? This is the right place, isn’t it?”
The two women looked at each other like underwater swimmers, or dreamers meeting in the same dream.
“It couldn’t be,” said Yarri stupidly, because Alec had obviously made it through. “It’ll be another two or three weeks before the snows clear from Old Man Hills.”
And then Stanny walked into the drawing room, with smudges on his broadly grinning face and an ungodly amount of dirt on his boots. Yarri and Tries
te both squealed in tandem and ran to embrace him, shrill and breathless with incredulous questions.
They had barely gotten the entire story out of Stanny—and fed him, at his repeated requests—when the bells chimed to let out the Regents’ Hall.
“It’s early today,” Trieste remarked darkly. “That can’t be good news.”
The foreboding of the early bells was enough to darken the mood, and Yarri, anxiously because she knew the answer, asked the hard question.
“Stanny… that’s wonderful that you came through the hills. I can’t believe Alec came with you. It’s amazing. You’ve surprised us all—in fact, you may have saved us all. But….” She looked away, and the pain of the thing she hadn’t wanted to think about for the last four months knocked the breath out of her.
“How’s Mum?” he asked, his own eyes bright.
“Right, cousin.” Yarri nodded, and felt for Trieste’s hand. “How’s Aunt Beth?”
“Dying,” he replied bluntly, as was his way. “Cwyn arrived on Solstice eve—probably the only thing that got her through the winter. The last town meeting happened at Mum and Da’s house, or she wouldn’t have made it down the street, but”—he narrowed his eyes—“by Triane, she had the strength to make sure we sent a militia contingent with Alec when he asked.”
Yarri swallowed, suddenly wanting the woman who had been her mother since she was six years old more than she wanted to see the sun in the sky. “How long, Stanny? If… if we left, down your magic tunnel, through Clough, could we make it?”
Stanny grinned suddenly. “I hope so!” he exclaimed. “It’s pretty much why I came—I’ll be damned if I don’t bring at least Roes home with me.”
Yarri grinned a little. “We’ve got some time, then?”
“Mum’s a fighter, but three, maybe four weeks.”
A tiny sound was wrenched from Yarri’s chest, and she put her hand over her mouth to stop it. When she spoke again, her face was twisted in the scowl they all remembered from her childhood. “That’s not fair,” she said obstinately, and Stanny nodded in agreement, and then she had to change the subject.
“So… you really tunneled under the walls and into Aylan’s apartment?” she asked, trying hard not to dissolve at the thought of Aunt Beth, bereft of so many of her children and dying by moments.
Stanny took her hint and began talking about support beams and brush-covered entrances and the surprisingly lucrative enterprise of selling dirt.
In a short time, they were interrupted by Torrant and the other regents, who were thundering their way up the front steps and into the hallway.
“And I’m telling you,” Torrant was saying, his voice as hard as Yarri had ever heard it, “that I’m not leaving the lot of you here. If I leave, you’re coming with me!”
“But he knows!” Aerk was arguing back. “He knows—you heard him today! He all but accused you of being Triane’s Son! ‘Some of our younger members think they’re kin to the gods, but I’ll show you all how they’re barely human!’ Ellyot, he was looking right at you!”
“Well, if he wants to be a man about it and pull it out in the open, I’ll be glad to show him the snowcat as I rip out his throat!” Torrant all but shouted, the door closing behind them with a thunder. Trieste and Yarri met pained eyes. The regents had been begging him to leave as soon as the snows melted. They feared for his life, and he didn’t argue with them on that score. But he’d put them in danger—he knew it, they knew it, and he wouldn’t desert a brother. It had been a bone of contention for at least the last month.
“Besides”—Torrant’s voice dropped to more conciliatory tones—“we all know that it’s not just the guards anymore. The whole city is being taken over by criminals because they don’t fear reprisals.”
He stopped as he entered the room, his eyes widening. “Triane’s purple tits. Stanny, what in the hell are you doing here?” But he laughed as he said it, his grin making his dimples pop and the grooves at his mouth carve into his lean face.
Torrant and Aylan stepped into a hearty embrace with their cousin and then listened in awe to a story that began with carving a path through the middle of a mountain and another one under a city and ended with an army hidden in the woods outside of Clough.
It was such a wonderful story, with such potential for a happy ending, Torrant had to cover his mouth to keep from laughing in pure joy by the end of it.
“That’s perfect,” he said, his mind working busily. Eljean, watching him from his place in the crowd, could see the backgammon pieces falling into place.
“What do you have in mind?” Aylan asked cautiously. Their situation was desperate, and, like Torrant, Aylan wouldn’t desert a brother. But the idea of a tunnel under Hammer Pass seemed fantastic, like the idea of a star spinning down from the sky to offer them all a towline out of the city.
“We evacuate the ghettoes in the next week,” Torrant replied, ignoring the gasps from the regents. It could be done—in fact, it could be done easily, as long as there was at least one of them in the ghettoes at all times to escort the families through the ghettoes between curfews. “When everyone is safe at Moon Hold, with a contingent of Alec’s forces for protection, we have the militia escort them out under Hammer Pass to Eiran—Yarri, Trieste, that’s you too.”
“Where will you be?” Yarri asked, bristling.
“I’ll be here—for just a minute longer.” Torrant met the eyes of Aerk, Keon, Marv, Jino, and Eljean in turn. “When everyone is safe, we go to the Regents’ Hall, and we tell them that Alec of Otham has an invasion force around the capital city of their country. If they don’t want to lose their country and have it torn apart by the rest of the lands, then they need to depose Rath and elect another ruler. And then, we leave.”
“We what?” Aerk asked, shocked.
“We leave,” Torrant answered him calmly. “We walk out the door to the Regents’ Hall, and we never look back. Don’t you see? Rath’s been using the Goddess folk as a scapegoat for the bad things he’s done—well, we’ve taken them out of the equation. For us, he’s been using them as blackmail. If we push too hard, innocent people die. Well, we take them out of the equation. All that’ll be left to this city will be the madman on the throne and the cowards who let him stay. The outcome will be up to them.”
There was a shocked silence, and Torrant suddenly flushed. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, looking away. “I grew up somewhere else. I assumed… you…. This is your home. We can come up with another solution.” He looked up then, with a tentative smile and such an obvious fear of having offended his friends, the brothers he’d stayed in Clough to protect, that Aerk’s almond eyes slid sideways as he looked around to the other regents to see if they were as surprised as he was.
“No, it’s not that,” Aerk said, smiling reassuringly. “It’s just that it’s so simple. As murky and twisted as everything has been this winter… I never thought the end would be so simple.”
“If it’s so simple,” Yarri said, breaking into the tentative agreement written on everybody’s face, “then it won’t matter if I stay one more week or not. We can go home together.”
Torrant’s look at her was gentle and chiding at the same time. “Yarri, dearest, you know that in another week you could be showing—you really need to leave as soon as possible, you think?”
As a whole, everybody in the room turned to stare at Yarri in shock, and Yarri felt her face go hot and red under their scrutiny. “Show?” she asked weakly.
Torrant flushed again, that surprising shyness washing his face and making their audience chuckle in strained notes as what he said sank into the room.
“You’re having twins, Yarri—you know they show early, even for a first-timer like you.” He smiled encouragingly, his expression faltering at her stunned expression. “You knew, right?”
Trieste and Stanny were on either side of her, and when she reached out, they immediately caught her and helped set her down on the plush chair she had just vacated.
“I thought,” she murmured, not able to meet anyone’s eyes. “I suspected…. I didn’t….” She looked up at him, and the understanding and affection in his eyes made the rest of the world fade into the background, like furniture. “How long have you known?”
Torrant’s face grew brighter, and later Yarri would note that his expression in that moment was as close to the boy she had grown up with as she had seen this long, bleak winter, and as close to human as he would be for long months to come. “Solstice morning,” he murmured, moving through the “furniture” to kneel by her. “I… I felt it happen….”
“Happy Solstice, beloved,” she murmured, taking heart and some joy from his quiet laugh. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
And then the hardness came back to his jaw, the speculation, the constant planning, that feline sense of calculation she had learned to love with the rest of Torrant, even if she didn’t like what it made her beloved into. “Because I was happy, so happy—but I was also angry, and I didn’t want to fight with you, not about this, not here.”
“I….” Yarri looked away, wondering how she could say this so it wouldn’t sound like the whining, spoilt child she had felt like when she realized she was pregnant. “I would have changed it, after our fight… but by then… I was afraid….”
Torrant raised her hands to his lips, kissing the backs of them, and she felt his hot cheeks against her smooth skin. “I’m not angry now, Yar…. I’m happy. I understand. But it’s all the more reason for you to leave with Trieste, right?”
Yarri sniffled and shook her head. “Wrong. It’s all the more reason for you to hurry and keep to this plan, keep to this promise. The only other promise you’ve ever broken to me was the promise to handfast last year. You won’t break your promise to leave with me and your babies. You won’t break your promise to get back to say good-bye to Aunt Beth. I know this much about you, and it’s that these promises are more sacred in your heart than any others. You go ahead and save all the world, beloved, but you take me out of this city yourself.”
