by Amy Lane
But that was fine, thought Torrant, lifting his nose to scent the air. All three moons were out, and Triane was close to earth this early in the night, so close that when he lifted his face to her, he could almost feel her glow, like a silver-orange sun. Since he wasn’t running for his life, his whiskers came up, and his mouth opened a little so he could pant and taste the wind. His breath puffed in the shivery air, and Oh! it was a moon-flavored wind, and such a good night to hunt like a shadow on the rooftops of this unholy place.
Ah, there it was. The next house’s overhangs were especially deep. With a careful jump—
He could hear the guard below him, wheezing, sucking in air like a sewage pump, too winded to keep up the caterwauling Torrant had feared so badly when the man had first bolted. Nobody had ventured out to help the man then, and pad and pad and pad, and….
… leap
… crunch, slash, gurgle, gurgle, wheeze, and die.
No one was going to witness the death of walking shite in the darkness now.
Goddess, that had been easy. Torrant loosed a mighty snowcat roar among the ghetto alleyways, and another. Then he sank his teeth into the man’s shoulder and pulled him back deeper down the alley. They couldn’t afford for the man’s body to be found anywhere near the Goddess’s ghetto. That would bring a swift and bitter retribution down upon the heads of the residents. While he’d been prowling the rooftops, he had seen the unmistakable moon glitter of a canal, winding its way along the middle-class part of town. Aylan had told him there were shallow spots, where children splashed in the summers, but the middle of it ran very, very deep, and very, very fast, and it had been rerouted so it formed a mighty waterfall on the eastern side of the city, near the gates. Anything lost in that river was lost for good, chewed to bits at the bottom of the waterfall, food for fishes as it ran its twisty way toward Hammer Pass, and then underground toward Eiran. It wasn’t as close as he would have liked, but it wasn’t too far either, and if he could haul this piece of shite there and come back undetected, it wouldn’t be too much of a bother to do it one more time for a body about a third of this man’s size.
Torrant changed partially to make it easier—he had hands and walked upright, but he was aware of the thick, fine layer of white-and-black fur that covered his body. Actually, he’d thought as he’d been hauling that body over his shoulders like a sackful of bony water, it wasn’t too uncomfortable going this long partially changed. It would be easier if he were naked, because his clothes kept catching and pulling on his fur, but all in all, he was grateful for the times Professor Gregor had run him through drills like this in school. It was never a skill he’d thought he’d use, but he was glad he had it.
AYLAN MET him with the cart on his way back
“How is the family?” Torrant growled as he reached into the cart and grabbed the body, which was wrapped in the lanolin-saturated horse blanket they’d used to cover the bottom of the cart.
“The family is fine,” Aylan sighed, rubbing his face with his hands and barely raising an eyebrow at Torrant’s halfling state. Aylan himself was exhausted. Torrant would probably not change fully back to himself until there was absolutely no need for him to be useful to anybody. “However…,” he continued.
“They’d like very much for us to go away until the next time we have a delivery,” Torrant supplied dryly. It didn’t sound grateful, but they couldn’t blame the little family. Too much gratitude could find another round of guards knocking at the door, threatening their lives or their bodies, or to haul the children into slavery of the worst sort, the kind that destroyed dreams and innocence and humanity until there wasn’t even the soil of those things left to sprout hope again.
“Torrell’s exact words, almost.” Aylan tried to laugh, but Torrant was shouldering the body as though it were the horse blanket alone and not the blanket wrapped around a body, and the sight gave Aylan the shivers.
“Stay here, brother,” Torrant told him. “I’ll be back before Triane moves more than a degree on the horizon, yes?” Then he was gone, bounding into the silvered shadows. Aylan huddled alone in the dark of somebody’s home, watching his breath steam and trying to hide his heartbeat from the family behind the walls.
Torrant was good to his word. Some instinct made Aylan look up to the rooftops, where he saw the snowcat, all near two hundred pounds of muscle, fur, and teeth, gliding under the moon in a symphony of fierceness. His enormous, tufted paws made no sound on the red shale roofs, and only a faint, catlike plop sounded when he landed.
Every gathered muscle, every fluid leap, every twitch of whisker, every happy puff of heated breath to taste the frosty air, felt like terrible, ferocious, innocent joy.
In a bound, Torrant poured out of the air above, landing in the cart with a distinctly feline growl that was, without a doubt, a laugh.
Aylan looked at the laughing feline of death drolly. His heart was still thundering from seeing Torrant as free from worries, self-doubt, and crushing responsibility to himself or his family or his gift as he ever had been, but he didn’t let Torrant know.
“You think it’s funny? We can’t leave until daylight, you know. It’s late autumn, and you just dumped our spare blanket into the river. Any ideas, oh furry one?”
In answer, the snowcat leaned practically into Aylan’s lap, his thick coat and recent activity throwing off heat like a glassblower’s forge, and Aylan had to admit, he’d be pretty comfortable snuggled next to all that.
“Yeah, yeah—you’re just suggesting this to try to get out of the whole bending-over-in-the-wool-bale-hut idea,” he grumbled, unrolling the one bedroll from beneath the seat into the back of the cart. Aylan knew (although Torrant probably didn’t) that they were very close to the merchant’s quarters here. It was hard for human eyes to see in the moonlight, but many of the alleyways here were stacked with crates filled with wares. Everything from glass tumblers to late-season squash would be available in the market the next morning, and the market ran perpendicular to the street they were on, about two blocks up. It was not unheard of for merchants to sleep in their carts after delivering their goods since the city gates had first started locking up at night. In fact, before he’d established his cover with the regents’ circle, Aylan had spent more than a few nights there. It was far enough away from the ghetto not to be suspect, and no one noticed one more cart in the morning.
After he laid down on the bedroll, he covered himself up with the one blanket and wadded his cloak up under his head. He remembered their last campfire mournfully and hoped the cat was really as warm as he’d promised he’d be. Then Torrant flowed over the seat of the cart and stretched out full length. He rolled slightly so a massive fore and aft leg draped over Aylan’s body, and all the silky, tufted hair in the loose skin between legs and stomach came with them.
Aylan made a little pout as the cold was simply gone and a heavenly, protective warmth surrounded him. And if he rolled to his side, just like that, with his backside against the cat, and his knees tucked up to keep his middle warm—
“Oh….” He shuddered, burrowing even further into the warmth, and he could swear the cat chuckled in his ear. Then it licked him, thoroughly, from nape to ear to jaw, until Aylan laughingly told him to stop—he was taking away skin, and there was a feline chuckle again. Torrant was terrifying, Aylan thought, and he could leave a bloody mess in his wake like most cats, only proportionately larger; but as a friend, the snowcat could be surprisingly nice to have around. It was a comforting thought, made more comforting by the soothing rumble from Torrant’s narrow, fur-covered chest, and it made sleep easy to find.
Aylan awoke once before dawn and remembered being cold, but the heat came back quickly and he slept for another hour. When he awoke again to the sun peeping from the east down the alleyway, there was a loaf of bread and two strips of bacon at the foot of the cart. He turned toward the snowcat and saw a pink tongue the size of a dinner napkin cleaning thick whiskers in a self-satisfied way.
“I
take it there was more bacon than that?” he chattered, sitting up and reaching for the two strips. They would probably have been offered dinner at Torrell’s if the guards hadn’t intruded, and his stomach was rumbling just looking at the thick-cut and fried slices.
The snowcat yawned, showing teeth as long as Aylan’s thumb, and Aylan realized he had been covered some time during the night by another cloak. Forest green, with an improbable bright-yellow lining (Yarri had made it, after all), it was unmistakably Torrant’s. The cat must have changed back, at least partially, to take the cloak off and cover his friend with it, and Aylan was grateful for the thoughtfulness. He remembered the moment he’d seen him on the rooftops and was a little sad. Absolute, responsibility-free joy didn’t last long, did it?
“So, back to Wrinkle Creek to hole up for the winter?” he asked the snowcat.
In response, Torrant bounded up to the cart seat and changed back in the same motion, leaving Aylan gasping for breath at the fluidness of the magic, and Torrant gasping in the cold.
“Can I have my cloak back, brother?” Torrant asked through his own chattering teeth, but when he looked back over his shoulder, Aylan saw his eyes were still that shocking, black-rimmed, Goddess blue.
Numbly, Aylan nodded, trying hard not to stare, and pulled his own cloak around him while handing Torrant his. Grabbing the purloined bread to set between them, he scrambled up to the seat of the cart and was a little surprised when Torrant gave him the reins. Torrant had always been the better horseman—even when dealing with placid, slow-thinking beasts tied to a giant wooden matchbox with a bed.
“I don’t know how much longer I can stay halfway,” Torrant said lowly, trying to keep his voice light through the chatter. “And when it goes, it’s going to go fast and bad.”
Aylan nodded, understanding more, perhaps, than Torrant himself suspected. As free from conscience as the snowcat had been the night before, the man who held the conscience in both bodies was bound by his morals always. Torrant wouldn’t just be exhausted. He would be appalled.
As they made their way down the cobbled streets, Aylan could once again feel his anxiety grow. He always felt like this when facing the guards under the walls of lover’s crucifixion. Now, with Torrant sitting next to him, the blood of two king’s men murders lying under his frigid blue eyes, the fear once again pressed Aylan’s heart against his chest with massive weighty paws.
The fear wasn’t made any better when they had to pass through the town square, with the avenue leading to the regent’s apartment building, the convocation hall, and the palace to their left. As he and Torrant clattered with the rest of humanity through the corrupt town, Aylan could hardly believe how free and happy people seemed to be. They walked with baskets in their hands to a market one-eighth of the city wasn’t allowed to attend freely, past buildings which threw away lives and dealt deaths as easily as the children trotting through the streets would deal cards for a game of Jack. In this part of town—and it was so close, so unfairly close to the tiny, coarsely lined, painfully neat ghettoes eking out their cleanliness with terrible sacrifices of children and bread—the women wore dresses that could feed a family like Torrell’s for a month.
“Easy, brother, you’re growling,” Torrant warned mildly, with a touch in his voice he remembered not to apply to Aylan’s hand.
“Well, I guess this place brings out the animal in all of us, doesn’t it?” Aylan asked bitterly, but they had passed the square by now and were nearing the guard’s station by the main gate. It was time to turn those terrifying eyes to another burly man who would rather ignore the magic in them than chase down another body for the battlements.
When the gates to the city were a speck on the horizon behind them, Aylan breathed what felt like his first real air in over twenty hours, and Torrant fell asleep so abruptly he would have toppled off the cart if Aylan hadn’t grabbed his arm and hauled him back onto his lap.
Torrant mumbled something that sounded like “sorry,” and Aylan pulled the horses to a stop and tucked his friend into the back of the cart, his forest-green cloak with the improbable yellow lining tucked securely around him.
He slept soundly until they reached their campsite from two nights before. A hollow in the foothills right at the tree line; it provided shade and cover if they wanted it but gave them a full view of the plains of Clough. It was then, as Aylan was preparing a fire and cursing that he’d had to leave Torrell’s in such a rush because the bread was all gone, when he heard the snowcat’s almost silent “plop” out of the wagon, and wondered why Torrant hadn’t stayed human. In less than half an hour, the snowcat returned with two rabbits in his mouth, and Aylan thought he knew the answer.
The cat flopped down by the fire, staring moodily into the flames, if a cat could be accused of doing such a thing, and Aylan dressed the rabbits and set them to the spit to cook. Torrant lay there, twitching his tail, until the rabbits were done and the spit moved to a nearby flat rock. Aylan was uncertain what to do. If Torrant had wanted to eat a rabbit as the snowcat, he would have eaten the poor thing raw. The snowcat put his head on his paws, and for a moment, Aylan thought his eyes were that brilliant, dark-clear hazel he loved so much….
And then Torrant sat, a man, his hair tousled, his hat askew, and his face tucked into the hollow of his knees as he sobbed and shook like a child.
And now Aylan knew exactly what to do, because he had done this before. He moved to his friend’s side and pulled Torrant’s head into his lap and waited until he’d wept himself to sleep.
Part VII—The Courting Moon
Their task was finished, grim as it was, and Torrant wore the snowcat’s form as he walked Aylan through the dismal ghettoes, and then, after they passed the river, through the far more affluent streets of the city proper.
Aylan was quiet, and for a moment, Torrant yearned for that time when it had been but the two of them in Dueance. The layers between them were tightly laced, as complex as woven branches laced with a magpie’s yarn, but their bodies—those had been simple.
The courting dance Torrant would do when he next saw Yarri would not be simple. Nothing about their courtship had been simple.
Except, maybe, that first kiss.
A Short Fall in the Spring
“THEY’RE COMING, aren’t they?” Yarri demanded fitfully as she paced back and forth at the end of the bridge. Torrant and Aldam had swung by Triannon to pick up Roes on their way home for the summer, and the three dots on Torrant’s magic map had stayed at the university for a surprisingly long time. They hadn’t left until late the afternoon before Beltane, and even though they had been moving steadily most of the night (Yarri had only actually gone upstairs to the bedroom she no longer shared with Roes when she saw they had stopped for rest themselves), it was already the morning of the fair. The entire village was gathering, and Torrant was not there yet.
“He promised, didn’t he?” Aylan answered patiently for the billionth time. He himself had carried Torrant’s last letter home, after their last job in Clough. This one had gone more smoothly than the first, and not as smoothly as some of the others they had run since the snows melted. The body count was the same as their first trip, but this time Torrant and Aylan had been asked to intervene between the newer, more brutal guards who were trolling the ghettos for Goddess boys and “serving” girls. This allowed the murders to be planned and executed in the quiet suburbs of the city instead of the ghettoes where the denizens were desperately trying to stay alive in peace. The “job” had gone off without a hitch, thanks to Torrant’s furry alter ego, but Aylan was starting to wonder if he would ever whet his own knife. It had occurred to him that Torrant was doing everything he could to make sure Aylan never had to kill, and the idea was both sweet and frustrating. He had signed up for this little underground, and he shouldn’t have to be protected the way he had always thought he was protecting Torrant.
Especially because the aftermath was still the same.
“Yes,” Yarri hu
ffed, “he promised.” As much as the man ever promised, Torrant had promised to be there for this Beltane. Aylan was aware of the significance of this Beltane as opposed to next Beltane, but he imagined that Torrant’s tardiness wasn’t giving her much hope for their handfasting next year. What could have been so important that they’d stay at Triannon for so long?
Aylan sighed, pretty much able to guess what was going through her head by now. He had spent the winter making himself useful at the orphanage, and his respect for Yarri’s formidable will had grown. There was not a child in the orphanage who wouldn’t stop whatever mischief he or she was up to and contritely start to make better of the mess, with only a clearing of Yarri’s throat and a purposeful lift of her red-gold eyebrows. Because of Yarri, all the children in the orphanage had new spring/summer clothes this year. Of course, Aylan had accompanied her as she walked through the snow to every house in Eiran to ask for money, cloth, or sewing time from the residents, but the force of will it had taken to wheedle old Constable Donis’s wife into picking up her needle for the village orphans had left Aylan speechless. Of course, Lane had donated a couple of pedal-operated sewing machines for just this purpose, and the older children had delighted in doing the cutting, the pinning, and even the embroidery, as long as they had a chance to push the pedal and guide the cloth through the feeder.
Torrant and his determination to stop the goings-on in Clough were the two things in the world Yarri knew for certain she could not change by blind stubbornness and force of will alone.