Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “Yes.” He shivered again, and Aylan spoke angrily into the sudden snow-coated silence.

  “I’ve got clothes and a cloth—come on, Torrant, we’ll go take care of it.”

  Torrant looked at him gratefully but shook his head. “I’m sorry, I can’t ask you to—”

  “I’m not waiting for your permission, brother! Now let’s go before Trieste’s offended senses make her head explode!” Torrant nodded and took one last look at Aldam to make sure it was all right. Aldam nodded bravely, so he wheeled his horse and cantered off behind the copse of trees. When he could no longer see Aldam’s misery or Trieste’s repulsion, he threw the blanket down so he’d have something to stand on and slid off his horse.

  AYLAN TOOK one last glare at Trieste. “Goddess, girl! You’re awfully eager to take the good and leave the bad. I pity the king who’s going to have to freeze his balls off in your bed when he does the blood work ruling needs.” With that, he wheeled off and rode behind the trees, where he found Torrant standing woefully on the blanket, trying to clean his chest with handfuls of melted snow.

  “Dueant’s blue balls, Torrant, wait a moment,” Aylan swore, then swung down and took the cloth from Torrant’s shaking hands. Reaching under his horse’s saddle, he pulled out a skin full of water that had been warmed by his horse’s sweat as they labored to follow the trail of Aldam’s abductors. Aylan soaked the cloth and went to work on Torrant’s chest and throat while Torrant stood there and tried to make his teeth stop chattering.

  It didn’t work. Aylan swallowed as his hands worked on Torrant’s cleanly muscled chest, set his jaw, and continued working stoically at the gore. With gruff, impersonal movements he set his hands on Torrant’s shoulders and turned him so he could work on his less saturated back. When that was done, he turned him back around, taking in the sharpened nipples and the blue tinge to the skin on a body that had lost far too much warmth but none of its appeal.

  Aylan gave a martyred groan. Torrant may have looked like a man, but there was something very young about Aylan’s friend, shivering away his willpower in the cold. Aylan gathered his cloak around them both and pulled Torrant’s unresisting body into the shelter of his arms, then rocked him until the shudders eased a bit.

  A darkened hollow was created between the bright-cold skin of their faces and the breath that commingled in shadowed pants between their chests. Aylan sighed and almost giggled when the chill of Torrant’s nose grazed his stubbled jaw. But their torsos were still not touching, and the shroud of Aylan’s arms and cloak was not enough to stop the shivering that racked Torrant’s body from the taut depths of his stomach to the blue-tinted tan of his skin.

  With a tortured sigh and a muttered curse that probably offended all three gods, Aylan seized Torrant’s frigid, wet hands and shoved them under his shirt, clamping them under the pit of his arms with a decidedly unmanly shriek. Then he extended his forearms and pulled Torrant tight against him—so tight he could feel the line of his abdomen muscles through sweater and shirt, and the ripple of the terrible shivers syncopated Aylan’s breathing. So tight that when he felt the bulge of Torrant’s body along the crease of his thigh, and his own answering engorgement along his stomach peeping into the cave of dark outside his breeches, he knew neither one of them was particularly surprised.

  The moment was abruptly fraught with the intimacy of warmth and dark inside the brutal white of the frozen world around them. Then Torrant spoke, and Aylan cursed the streak of nobility he would have sworn he didn’t possess.

  “Trieste will probably never touch me again,” Torrant mumbled into the muffled wool span between their bodies.

  Ah, Dueant, god of compassion, have mercy. “Sure she will,” Aylan replied briskly, rubbing his hands up and down Torrant’s muscled arms and mostly succeeding in not letting the touch of warmth become a caress of attraction.

  “She was appalled,” Torrant whispered miserably, and Aylan gave up trying to make his touch impersonal. His palms slunk along the hardness of Torrant’s biceps and glided up to the velvet-columned blades of collarbones.

  “Spots won’t want to move on to another lover—you took all the courage she has.” His hands were kneading now, and he leaned just enough that he was talking with his lips against Torrant’s temple, his breath stirring the fallen streak of white at Torrant’s brow.

  “I-I don’t want anybody who’s afraid of me,” Torrant stammered, only now it wasn’t the cold that made him stammer, and he too leaned forward, just enough, and tasted the saltiness at Aylan’s neck, and Aylan’s eyes drifted closed in what was the closest thing to exquisite pain he would ever want to imagine.

  “Then you want a fool,” he murmured with the barest touch of soft lips at the whitened temple. “Because only a fool wouldn’t see that you are an extremely dangerous young man.” With an effort that cost more of his heart than he’d imagined he had, Aylan lifted his arms and pulled Torrant into an embrace that was more brotherly than loverly, except that it brought the head of his erection in contact with the warm skin of Torrant’s belly.

  “I’m not dangerous.” Hot tears plopped down Torrant’s flushed face, burning through Aylan’s sweater and scorching his skin.

  “Of course you are, baby,” Aylan murmured, closing his eyes against the awful tightness in his throat. So quickly Torrant couldn’t counter the movement, he backed away and whisked a shirt and a sweater over Torrant’s now warmed body. As he helped his arms through the sleeves and looked at Torrant’s stunned, awakening eyes, he was grateful he’d had the clothes ready on top of the horse, and his hands had neither faltered nor fumbled.

  “For instance”—Aylan added, wiping a hand across his damned wet cheeks—“right now, you are in serious danger of breaking a friend’s heart.”

  Torrant opened his mouth to say something, but Aylan jerked his head sharply—the only indication besides the wet cheeks that his emotions weren’t under control. “No!” he said more gruffly than he meant to. With a deep breath, he took Torrant’s warmed hands in his own and placed a delicate kiss on the cold-reddened knuckles.

  “No,” he said again, more gently this time, handing over Torrant’s boots. “Trieste will forgive you later, and now we have a job to do.”

  TORRANT BOTH wanted and didn’t want to see Aylan’s expression as he led him to the clearing where the bodies lay, but that curiosity died as soon as they entered the terribly silent space. He was not prepared to view the carnage with his own eyes.

  In order to kill the armed men, he had needed to reach claws or fangs under hauberks and under helmets, ripping, gouging, and tearing with force to reach jugular veins and rip out stomachs and hearts. The result was seven men covered in the blood that had fountained spectacularly from severed throats and destroyed intestines, spread over the ground. The least horrible ones stared heavenward at what had once been their own spraying blood as their emptying bodies chilled in the snow. The most horrible ones had died writhing, churning the snow into a dark-pink mush, cradling their spilling entrails and fighting the weight of their armor to turn protectively on their sides in order to leave the world in the same positions in which they entered. The agony twisted and scored into the muscles of the faces of these men was more awful than the effluvia that they died in.

  Torrant stood and surveyed the ravages of his anger, fighting hard with his own stomach to bear this, at least, like a man. It took several silence-shrouded heartbeats for him to lose that battle and fall to his knees to vomit into the snow.

  Aylan held his hair back from his face until he was done, and neither of them spoke until Torrant stood, moved to the captain who was the farthest away, and hefted him by the armpits, grunting a little as he pulled the body out of sight from the initial battle.

  “Where are we going?” Aylan asked. He was dragging a body of his own and his grunts rang in the brittle cold hush of the woods.

  “There’s a cliff over this way,” Torrant panted, “with an overhang of snow. As soon as it gets even a l
ittle warmer, that overhang is going down in an avalanche. By the time anyone finds the bodies….” His words trailed off: he didn’t want to voice what came next.

  “They’ll be mangled, frozen, decomposed, and chewed on,” Aylan finished for him. “No one will even guess what hit them.” There was frank admiration in his voice, and Torrant shook his head violently against it.

  “It’s awful,” he muttered. “It’s awful even to think that way.”

  “That’s because you haven’t been raised as a court spy,” Aylan disclosed breezily and then could have smacked himself when Torrant dropped the body he was dragging in surprise, stumbled back, and fell into the dry snow with a crunchy plop.

  Aylan pulled a sardonic smile from the pit of his stomach, and with a posture as armored as the dead man he was dragging, he swaggered over to his friend and offered a hand. He was surprised when Torrant took it and used Aylan’s weight to lever himself out of the snow, and even more surprised at the gentle kiss on his own knuckles, a touch that seemed to tingle on his skin the rest of the day.

  “We cannot choose where the gods leave us to be raised as men, Aylan,” Torrant said quietly, looking him square in the eyes. Torrant’s eyes remained a steady, human hazel at the moment. “If you think I don’t know the sheer dumb luck of being orphaned twice and ending up with good men to father me both times, you’re mad.”

  Aylan flushed deeply, and for the second time that day he fought tears. He and Trieste had carefully never mentioned their parents or the cold, manipulative homes that only very rarely sent letters, which were usually orders. Trieste’s last letter from home had been years ago—it told her she had a very meaningful date with Alec of Otham. His had been the year before. He had sent the rest back. So neither he or Trieste mentioned home, but both of them fed deeply on Torrant’s and Aldam’s easy banter of the Moon clan. Aylan hadn’t realized how pitifully transparent that love-hunger had been.

  As it was now he nodded hard, and the two of them resumed their burdens and edged the bodies as far out on the snowy overhang as they dared, then trudged back the way they came.

  IN ALL, it took eight trips. They lugged the last man between them on the fourth trip, and the last horse’s saddle between them on the last. As the badly cleaned, chain-studded leather clinked into the snow, Torrant stumbled in weariness and caught his foot on the body of a guard. He whirled, tripped on another body, stumbled again, and finally crashed down to all fours, face to face with a staring corpse whose eyeballs were covered in blood.

  Abruptly he was surfeited of the horrors of his own consequences. His humanity slipped badly, and his vision sharpened to cold as he threw his head back and let out an outraged, echoing yrowl through his throat to steam in the chill air. The ripping hole it made in his chest hurt so good that he raised his head and howled revulsion and self-disgust again and again until his eyes deepened back to hazel, and it was only Torrant, who screamed rhythmically and hoarsely while Aylan wrapped his arms around his shoulders and rocked him back and forth, whispering calming lies in his ears about everything being all right.

  Geographical Distance

  TRIESTE WAS waiting for them anxiously in the frosty night, shifting from foot to foot and hoping the tray of soup and hot chocolate waiting inside the door would still be warm.

  She and Gregor had cajoled Aldam back to the school, his disconsolate tears made more heartbreaking by his fretted refrain of having let Torrant down.

  “I should have stayed and helped.” He must have said it a thousand times until Trieste’s own misery had snapped back at him.

  “So should I, Aldam. We can’t all be heroes now, can we?” She looked away then, not wanting to see Aldam’s reproachful look, but before she could spur Hammer into a terrifying trot, she felt Aldam’s hands reach across the space between the horses to touch her leg.

  “He will understand.”

  Trieste shook her head bitterly. “I wouldn’t. I just made love to him and then totally abandoned him when he needed me. I’ll be lucky if Aylan doesn’t clean him up on his knees in the snow.”

  Professor Gregor made a surprised and disapproving sound behind them, and Trieste looked at him contritely. “Sorry, Professor.” Even though she wasn’t.

  “I think Aylan’s a better man, and Torrant a more constant one, than you give them both credit for,” Gregor told her gently. “You are both young, I know, but give things a day, a week, to calm your hearts, and they’ll be speaking more clearly.”

  “He’s very wise,” Aldam told her guilelessly, and Trieste’s smile was less bitter this time.

  “That’s why he’s the teacher,” she said wryly, and the rest of the ride home was far more comfortable.

  But now, watching the last of the lean light fade from the silver and shadowed wood of the bowl valley, she was not sure about any of it.

  I knew he’d come. That was Aldam’s other refrain, the one which haunted her the most. Torrant would come and save him—he’d not had a single misgiving. It was what had kept him sane during the abduction. It was what kept him brave as they returned, and it was the mantra he’d sung to himself as Prof Gregor had used his own gift to sing him to sleep.

  “He had no doubts,” she murmured softly as she and the professor slid out of the young men’s dorm room.

  Professor Gregor turned toward her then, his fine and warm brown eyes compassionate and challenging. “Torrant brought Aldam and a six-year-old child through Hammer Pass in winter at the age of fourteen, Trieste.”

  “I knew that!” She shouldn’t feel defensive, she thought wretchedly, she shouldn’t, she shouldn’t, she shouldn’t. He’d been covered in blood. He had killed people. This shouldn’t be her fault.

  “You know that as words. Have you ever thought about what that feat would take, my dear? A person would have to be so iron-steel resolved that nothing, not a soul, not a sword, not even a snowstorm, would hurt the people he cared for. Aldam saw this when he was young—he hasn’t forgotten it’s still inside his friend.”

  “Brother,” Trieste supplied automatically. Not a soul, not a sword, not even a snowstorm. The words started to vibrate in her chest, and they were calling her attention elsewhere.

  Gregor had smiled. “See—even that. Aldam is Torrant’s brother because he loves him like a brother—he’s made them brothers to you, and even to Aylan through sheer force of will. Just think about it, sweetheart. Even if it’s only a short-term love, you need to truly know who it is you are loving.”

  Not a soul, not a sword, not even a snowstorm.

  Trieste’s parents loved her like a pawn. Trieste’s teachers loved her like a student. Unless Alec of Otham turned out to be an extraordinarily sentimental fool, she was not likely to have anyone in the world ever love her for herself. Especially not with the intensity of a Torrant Shadow.

  Not a soul, not a sword, not even a snowstorm.

  It explained why she was standing out on the northwest side of the school, freezing to the ends of her fine, dark hair as she watched the two silhouettes on horseback come down the hill in the silver twilight. She’d asked some of the younger students—the ones who had cajoled rides from Hammer and Clover on their rest days—to be in the stables when the boys arrived. There would be fresh food and water to greet them, as well as eager hands to groom Aylan’s skittish bay and the strange gray warhorse Torrant had been riding when they’d met in the woods. It also meant that only moments after their arrival, the two figures plodded wearily from the stable to Trieste.

  “You arrange the grooms?” Aylan asked, exhaustion trembling in his voice. She nodded, and nodded again at his and Torrant’s weary “Thanks.”

  “There’s warm food right inside.” Torrant was avoiding her eyes, but she couldn’t tell if that was because he was tired or because he was embarrassed or because he and Aylan had done more than just hide murder in the day.

  “Thank you again,” Torrant said quietly. His voice sounded funny—hoarse and gruff and thready, and Trieste look
ed at him sharply, relieved when Aylan did the same.

  AS TRIESTE turned around, Torrant stumbled, and she rushed to his side to help him catch himself. Aylan was on his other side, his reflexes a little slower with the cold and the fatigue, but in a moment, Torrant had two arms around his waist and two anxious sets of eyes—one gray and one lavender—peering unhappily into his face. He tried to smile reassuringly but realized there were spots swimming in his vision, and he couldn’t be sure what his expression actually was.

  “I’m fine,” he murmured, although he remembered this feeling from his trip down Hammer Pass, and it wasn’t a feeling of well-being.

  “He’s flushed!” Trieste exclaimed, looking to Aylan for reassurance. She opened the door to the hallway, and both of them got a good look at Torrant’s face, and Aylan swore, in detail, at length, and in a voice not much stronger than Torrant’s.

  “You idiot—you couldn’t tell me you were getting sick?” Aylan exclaimed, putting a hand like a snowdrift on Torrant’s blazing forehead.

  “Ouch!” Torrant complained peevishly. “Trieste, make him stop touching me with hands like ice!”

  “You’re going upstairs and straight to bed!” Aylan’s voice sounded, if he’d known it, a little like Trieste’s.

  “I’m going upstairs and straight to shower,” he corrected. “I smell….”

  “You’re both eating first!” Trieste stopped at the tray and handed them both a mug of soup. It had cooled just enough for Aylan to gulp his down hungrily, but Torrant only sipped a little, then made a face when it hit his throat and another when it invaded his stomach.

  “Really,” he murmured, eyes closing as he leaned back against the paneled wall, shivering, “I’d feel better if I washed.”