by Amy Lane
Trieste’s restraining hand dropped from Aylan’s sleeve. “I don’t understand…. You bunk women too,” she added, and was surprised at the pained and self-deprecating grin that twisted his lovely and sardonic lips.
“We both listen in doorways, Trieste,” Aylan said with as much gentleness as she had ever heard in his voice. “Owen Moon—whoever he might be to Torrant—was the last man in Clough to oppose Rath, and all of the madness that has followed. Our friend there saw the execution of his family because they stood for some things that are very dear to my heart, and maybe to his. He’s not going to need a lover right now. He’s going to want revenge, and if we’re going to keep him from riding hell-for-leather back to Clough to get himself killed, then I’m the next best thing. Can I go now, or did you really want to try your hand at getting skewered on the fencing mat?”
“One last question.” Trieste was determined. “Why do you care? You never have to go to Clough in your whole life.”
“Just because it’s not happening to me, doesn’t mean it’s not happening. And it obviously happened to him,” Aylan answered bleakly, and Trieste let him go, wondering with a cold stomach what friend of Aylan’s had ended up dying of thirst and blood loss, pecked to death by crows on the battlements of Dueance.
By the time Aylan caught up with Torrant, he had made it to the fencing arena and was there, by himself, sweating already by working his forms with strain in every muscle. Unnoticed, Aylan went to the lockers and retrieved his own practice sword—Torrant was using the thicker saber blade, as opposed to the thin foil—and helmets and pads for them both.
He came up behind Torrant just as he had finished his repetition and called out, “Oy—blue eyes—take a helmet, and spar with me before you hurt yourself.”
“My eyes aren’t blue,” Torrant retorted, catching a helmet and putting it on nonetheless.
“They are when you’re torqued, sweetums.” Aylan smiled wickedly, as though knowing that would make Torrant angrier.
“Stop trying to bed me. I’m not interested!” Torrant snapped, his hands fumbling with the buckles of his gear. His muscles trembled, and Aylan wondered how close he was to just picking up his sword and going after Aylan.
Abruptly, he stopped fumbling with his equipment and stood. Aylan watched his eyes fade to hazel, and his breath still, as he brought himself under control.
“Of course you’re interested.” Aylan moved calmly with his own equipment, as though aware that any nervousness would make Torrant edgier. “Everyone’s interested. That’s how the Goddess made my body—not all of us are gifted with magic, baby, some of us are gifted with….”
“Sex?” Torrant supplied, seeming both curious and furious in the same breath.
Aylan’s mouth twisted sardonically. “Seduction,” he murmured, allowing just such a look to twist his lips before he pulled his helmet down. He wanted Torrant to remember him looking sexy and wanting—it would make the sparring more violent.
“I don’t want to be seduced.” Abruptly, the fight was on. Pass, attack, feint, retreat, attack, press, press, press, retreat… stalk, hit, stalk, hit… see if the prey fights back.
Of course it did. “Everyone wants to be seduced…. Watch it!” Torrant’s last hit had gone dangerously out of the acceptable pass zone—and dangerously near parts of Aylan’s body that he was particularly fond of.
“I don’t,” Torrant insisted, and his blade was very close to seeking out something vital. Torrant snarled, like he was thinking of sinking his teeth into Aylan, and for the first time ever, Aylan didn’t think that was sexual.
“Of course you do.” Aylan used the moment of inattention and caught Torrant’s saber on the side and used it to force him back against the wall. Neither of them observed mat boundaries today. Aylan was a bit taller than Torrant, and as thick in the chest. In sheer, raw strength it was hard to match that relentless advance of steel against steel. They stood for a moment, muscles trembling, faces so close Aylan could see Torrant’s eyes through the face mask.
“I don’t even like you,” Torrant hissed, struggling to force Aylan’s blade back. With a heave he did so, and Aylan leapt back and out of the way before his chest could catch the wild hit. “You’re mean, and you’re arrogant, and you use seduction like a weapon!”
“I don’t use it like anything, sweetheart,” Aylan gasped, parrying a vicious overhand. “I just am. You think I’m mean to Trieste? How mean would it have been to have bedded her and left her? These other girls here—they’re happy to play. Your little Spotty?” (Leap out of the way, tumble, parry, spin, leap again, lunge, attack, duck!) “She would have pined for a year….”
“So you were trying to be kind?” Gods, he was relentless. Aylan was suddenly glad they were using their blunt, tipped swords, because he was not sure he would have survived. The onslaught of blows was furious, fast, slippery, and brutal, and Aylan spent the next few panicked moments trying to make sure the sword didn’t get through his defenses and break a bone or leave a bruise. Goddess, that one was close. Aylan abruptly wished Trieste was there to calm Torrant down.
“I didn’t say that!” Aylan shouted in defense. “I just left her alone, that’s all!”
“Then why don’t you do me the same favor?” The gritty sound of ripping followed this flurry of attack, and Torrant stopped abruptly. They both looked in shock as Aylan’s pale skin appeared beneath his pretty indigo shirt. Torrant dropped his sword with a thudded clatter and bent, hands to knees, chest hauling in and out, and Aylan tried to help calm him down.
“I want you,” Aylan said plainly, his words rougher than he’d intended. His emotions had been exposed along with his upper arm, when that sword had ripped through fabric. “But I’m not here because I want you.”
“Then why?” Torrant tipped his head back and gulped some more air, and his voice sounded… odd. Growly. Gravelly. Odd.
Aylan took his life in both hands and moved closer, until he could put his hand on his opponent’s back and feel his own glove grow damp with Torrant’s sweat and revel in the heat radiating through the fabric of his shirt—the one with the neat little stitches at the arm. Torrant’s warmth filled him like wine, and he realized with a shock that he might not have wanted anybody as much in his life as he wanted this gifted peasant, right here in the fencing arena. But Aylan wasn’t stupid. He knew when desire could do him harm and when it could do everybody good, and right here and now he was pretty sure it could do him harm, so he stuck to the question at hand.
“Because Rath killed your people, and he wants to kill people like me, and I thought we could share a common enemy, that’s all.” The bunched muscles under Torrant’s back relaxed, and he ripped off his face mask and stood. Aylan kept his hand between Torrant’s shoulder blades, rubbing.
“Are you saying that makes us friends?” Torrant was still panting, although his breath was back, and he turned an intense gaze to his opponent, and Aylan’s breath caught. Torrant’s eyes were the blazing blue of a frozen heart, with the oblong irises of a cat.
“Allies.”
Aylan was mesmerized, both attracted and terrified by the lovely changes in a face he’d already found beautiful. Torrant’s cheekbones were raising and widening, slowly, as though he were fighting the change, and his jaw was narrowing. Sharp feline teeth were beginning to protrude from under the tan and pink of his lips. In spite of his resolution not to get too close, Aylan found himself bending down slowly, because that up-quirk of an upper lip was screaming to his mouth and his tongue and his chest and a quivering place in the heart of his loins, and he wanted… he needed….
“Allies….” Torrant’s eyes closed, and in the years that followed, Aylan comforted himself with the thought that in that heartbeat of closed eyes there was longing.
“Yes….” Oh gods, their lips were going to touch, and Aylan could almost weep with the longing for that feel of skin.
“Allies don’t stalk each other.”
Torrant jerked back from the
kiss as though pulling back to himself, and then, in a fluid slick of grace, skin, bones, and fur, the young man Aylan had been about to seduce was a snowcat with haunches as high as his thighs and a heavily muscled chest.
Aylan was later proud he didn’t shriek like a girl, especially because the snowcat that was Torrant pushed its big, black-striped, white-furred head against his thigh like a housecat looking for affection, and before Aylan could fully comprehend that this housecat had razor claws and could eat him for lunch, he petted back, scratching behind his ears and under the spiky fur at his chin. The snowcat rubbed his cheeks against Aylan’s thighs like a cat marking territory, and after a rather personal and violating sniff at Aylan’s hard, swollen crotch, the cat gave a terrific and confused “Yrooooowwwwwww” and trotted out the open door of the fencing room and into the valley outside.
Aylan fought the temptation to sit where he stood and cradle his disappointment like he wanted to cradle his burning groin. Instead, he gathered the fallen equipment—his dropped sword included—and put it back in the locker, then set off to find Trieste.
She was pacing in the park area, annoying the other students who were taking advantage of the late fall sunshine to study. She was so distracted looking for Torrant that she almost didn’t recognize Aylan as he walked up to her.
When she did realize who he was, she almost tackled him with questions.
“Where is he? Is he well? What did you do to him?”
Aylan didn’t recall ever seeing Trieste so impassioned—or standing up to him so boldly. With a tiny, amused shock, he realized she was only a couple of inches shorter than Torrant. She’d always seemed smaller. Did I do that to her? Suddenly his policy of belittling her to make her keep her distance didn’t seem as brilliant as he’d thought it for the last ten years. But he couldn’t dwell on that now.
“Where’s his sweet-faced brother?” he asked instead. “I think we’re going to need him—I’ll explain on the way.”
THEY FOUND Aldam in the science wing, calmly debating with the slouching, middle-yeared professor of biology as to whether or not the sleeping frog in his hand had to die in the name of Aldam’s education.
The man was being phenomenally patient. “It is important that you know how these things work, Aldam. I know you can heal it without looking inside it, but wouldn’t it help to know what it was you were healing?”
“But he’s not broken!” Aldam said simply, “If I had to heal him, I’d open him up and see. It would be worth the risk, but right now, he’s not broken. Why should I hurt him to see what his insides look like?”
“But if you look at this frog, think of how many other frogs you wouldn’t have to look at in order to help.”
Professor Austin looked like he was on the fraying edge of his patience, but Aldam was as serene as he always had been.
“Well, I’m not going to start opening up perfectly good people in order to see what might be wrong with them!” The young man gave a sunshiny smile, and the professor rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Where’s Torrant, Aldam?” he asked in desperation. “Torrant will help you with this….”
Trieste intervened. “Torrant actually injured himself fencing,” she announced, with apprehension in her voice. Aylan thought she was going to faint after he told her that Torrant had turned into a big predator and stalked away. If Aylan hadn’t caught her, she would be in a woozy pile in the middle of the corridor. “We need Aldam to help.”
“Is it bad?” Professor Austin was suddenly concerned. “I mean, Aldam is very talented, but does he need me?”
Aylan and Trieste exchanged looks with more than a little bit of panic on Trieste’s end. Aylan took over. “He’s fine, professor.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “It’s in a rather… sensitive… area…. I think he’d be more comfortable with his brother there….”
The professor leapt back a step as if to distance himself from the problem. With apparent relief, he gave Aldam a little push out the door with Trieste and Aylan to hurry them all on their way and out of his classroom.
“You’re lying,” Aldam said sternly as they took the first turn in the corridor toward the outside. “What has happened that would make you lie to a professor?”
“Maybe we just didn’t want him to know that your… brother… can grow teeth and eat people,” Aylan snapped, and Aldam stopped so abruptly Trieste ran into his back.
“If he had wanted to eat you, you would be dead already,” Aldam said with absolutely no irony. “And if both of you”—he looked over at Trieste and as if to make sure he had her absolute attention—“would stop playing cat and mouse games over him, then he might have gone all term without needing to stalk rabbits.”
Aylan breathed hard through his teeth. By the twin gods of compassion and honor, how could he have gotten it all so wrong? “He’s a predator,” he whispered. “All this time, I thought he was neutral—a healer, an observer, a poet….” They had all enjoyed Torrant’s playing during the evening hour.
“He’s both,” Aldam snapped, out of patience. “But unlike you, Aylan, who only stalks people for sport, when Torrant’s had to stalk it’s been in deadly earnest. He doesn’t let much rouse him to the snowcat. You should have stopped when his eyes turned.”
“We had fencing masks on,” Aylan said numbly. It wouldn’t have mattered, he knew. He’d wanted to see those glacial-blue eyes. Those were the eyes that wanted him. Apparently, that was also the side of Torrant that wanted him for dinner. “What do we do?”
Aldam sighed and ran his hands through his hair, making the blond strands fuzz crazily. It was a gesture that suddenly made him seem much older to Aylan. “You do nothing. You said he disappeared by the fencing door? I’ll go wait for him by that hillside. When he comes out of the forest, I’ll be there.”
“How do you know he’s gone into the forest?” Trieste wanted to know.
Aldam spoke slowly and patiently, in much the same tones as Professor Austin had used with him. “Because that’s where the rabbits are.”
THEY HID in the shadows of the school building while Aldam sat on the hill in the sunshine. Both of them crouched down, sitting on their black scholar’s robes. Aylan hadn’t realized he’d put his on until he saw he was clutching Torrant’s, which had apparently fallen by the gym locker when he’d gotten his sword. Together they stared into the brightness in a tense silence.
Aylan wasn’t used to silence. He was used to being witty, to chatting, to bantering. Even when that devolved into “ooohhhs” and “ahhhs” of appreciation, it still was not silence, and he felt compelled to break into the stillness if only to comfort himself.
“I think he prefers you,” he stated baldly, making Trieste jump. Her silky, dark hair tumbled forward into her face, and Aylan suppressed a sigh of regret. She would have been lovely to bed, but nothing about her made his heart pound in his chest the way it had when he’d touched Torrant’s back.
“Only to you,” she answered back. “I don’t even know if he likes men.”
Aylan remembered Torrant’s labored breathing, the longing radiating from his lips before the kiss that never was. “That one’s like me,” he said simply. “It’s not the equipment that matters. It’s who’s playing with it. I’m just a wanker that plays at beds, that’s all.”
Trieste looked at him speculatively. “You were honestly worried about him,” she murmured. “I mean, I would have said you didn’t worry about anybody, but he had you worried.”
“I’m not a complete bastard.” He felt a little injured. What? She expected him not to give a frog’s fart for a boy he’d pursued for weeks? Well… he had been a bastard to her.
“Why not me?” It was as though she were reading his mind. “I’ve seen the girls you get naked with, Aylan. I know I’m not the only plain girl in the school, but I’m the only finch you haven’t feathered.”
“Yeah, but, Spots”—she bristled, and he rolled his eyes—“Trieste, they are playing at love. Love has always been pe
rsonal to you. I don’t love you, and I can’t lay you. Why put you in a place where it will matter?”
“You could have just ignored me!” she burst out, ten years of persecuted exasperation in her hushed whisper.
Not that he didn’t know what that felt like. “No.” Aylan tilted his head back against the old brick of the school that had been his home for the last ten years and closed his eyes for a moment, ignoring the pain that crossed behind them. “When was the last time your parents invited you home, Trieste?” He almost despised himself for the throbbing of empathy in his voice.
At her stubborn silence, he laughed, and it was bitter in his own ears. “Yeah… I know. But I would have paid all the money I have to have traded places with you here.”
“Thanks, then,” she said softly, hunkering down a little closer to him in acknowledgement. “For not ignoring me.”
“My pleasure.” Hell. Casting ten years of bad reputation to the four winds, Aylan put a comforting arm around Trieste’s shoulder. “He’ll be back,” he told her softly. “Even if he damns both of us, I don’t think he’d ever leave Aldam behind.”
Brothers
ALDAM TIPPED his head back so his face caught the late morning sun. He just sat there, patiently, breathing in the cedar and redwood smells. This time of year, late-morning sun was almost the only sun they got in the valley before the hills and the trees started casting evening shadows. Even if he was worried about Torrant, these moments in the air were better than being in the biology room, dissecting clammy, once-breathing amphibians.
But he was worried about Torrant.
Aldam was convinced that Torrant could do almost anything—getting them through Hammer Pass had only been the beginning. Torrant was able and quick while working in the warehouse, and he was amazing during their studies. Of course, to Aldam, it was easy to be amazing. One simply had to remember which letters went to spell which words, and that eight sentences made up a paragraph, and the difference between fact and opinion. If a person could do all of that and master algebra, Aldam was extremely impressed, and Torrant understood advanced math as well as physics and geography and that mystery of mystery, politics.