by Amy Lane
And then his letter was sent, his duty to his honored dead discharged, and he turned to Yarri and kissed her hand gracefully, in public, as any brother might do as a light gesture of farewell.
“Be safe,” he ordered softly. “Stay close to Aerk and Eljean—make Trieste do the same. The Goddess folk won’t hurt you, but there’s no guarantee the guards will behave tonight.”
He looked up and met Aerk’s eyes, and then waited until the others followed Aerk’s suit and gathered around him.
“Your one priority tonight,” he said somberly, “is to make sure the women get home safely. Don’t take any detours; don’t get heroic around the guards. I’ve told Olek that Aylan and I are leaving, and he’s spread the word. They’re going to break up an hour before schedule. If the guards are looking to capitalize on any lingerers, they’re going to be sorely confused. But that doesn’t mean to take chances. I’ve made a very public showing tonight. You all can’t stay much longer, or we’ll blow the lie that I’m here, right?”
“Right.” Aerk nodded, met the eyes of the others, and they all agreed.
“I’m trusting you all with….” Torrant swallowed and tried for some composure, but he had just been speaking to Ellyot from his silent, screaming heart, and his chest felt too raw for dignity. “Trieste and Yarri… please. Just… please?”
Aerk’s very sober nod helped put his heart at ease, but it was Eljean who truly calmed him down. “You just make sure Aylan’s cloak doesn’t get any uglier,” he muttered, “and we’ll make sure nothing else gets damaged. I promise you that.”
Torrant flashed him a quiet grin. “I thought you were going to Zhane’s tonight.”
“Not if I’m needed as a human shield. I have some sense of chivalry, even if I don’t have the desire to follow it up!” Eljean snorted and rolled his eyes, and the rest of the regents gasped in surprised laughter.
Aerk turned his thoughtful, almond-shaped eyes toward Torrant and seconded the plea to be safe. “If it’s up to me to argue on the floor, we’re doomed,” he said with a grimace. “You’d better come back.”
“You are a better leader than you know,” Torrant told him truthfully. Of them all, it was Aerk who could see their cause through if Torrant could not, and Torrant ignored Aerk’s flush of denial and turned toward his beloved.
He caught Yarri, her back lit by the bonfire, looking at him with a puckered brow. “Of course I’ll come back.” He smiled reassuringly. “Think of me as ‘highly motivated.’”
More laughter, and then he and Aylan got a round of claps on the back, and they turned to go. Yarri followed them to the shadows of the nearby alley, pulling Torrant into the depth of the darkness and framing his face with her hands. For a moment, the only sound was the silken rasp of her palms on his cheeks, and the only movement was that of her lips against his. She tasted of roses and ocean, of yarrow and warmth, and he lost himself in her, his beloved, his home, and then pulled back and kissed her on the nose.
“Away with you,” he said, “or no one’s going to believe we’re brother and sister ever again.”
“You take good care of Cwyn,” she warned, “and make sure Aylan comes back with his skin intact.”
“I’ll do my best,” he said dryly, wondering that she didn’t tell him to watch himself.
“You take care of them, and they’ll take care of you,” she reasoned and then slid out of his arms like mist in wind, with the tinkle of disconsolate bells. He let her go and followed an impatient Aylan into the darkness. Aylan put his kerchief over his head and eyes, and Torrant half changed his form. They knew this dance; it was as comfortable as skin.
Cwyn
WHEN CWYN was barely three years old, Torrant rescued him from a foolhardy dash into a road after his favorite toy. At about that same age, he would often complain so vociferously about inanimate objects not moving to his specification that his mother would answer the question “Mama, what’s wrong with Cwyn?” with a recitation of his birth date—because really, the pull of the sun, moon, and stars on his headstrong psyche was the only explanation she had for him screaming “Mama, make house move!” at the top of his lungs.
He once wailed an entire night because his father, finally out of patience, had picked him up and put him to bed and not allowed him to walk there on his own.
In appearance, Cwyn had merry brown eyes and a killer set of dimples, matched with a cleft chin and teeth that were entirely straight except for a slightly crooked front tooth. He made men rethink their choice of bed partners and women rethink their monogamy, sometimes both at the same time, and as of yet, he’d left no one with a regret—and he had never been left in the cold.
In short, it was not in Cwyn’s nature to wait, to let other people plan for him, or to follow orders. It never had been.
He chafed at the gates, fretted until even the placid, even-tempered Heartland turned skittish—a fact Torrant thanked him for sharply after he and Aylan had ghosted out of the shadows and onto the horses. In short order, they were galloping beyond the city’s little-used west gate.
Cwyn talked inside his head during the hard ride to the construction site of the abomination. It now had the beginnings of walls and gas pipes laid but not yet connected to a site of natural gas deep in the foothills. In fact, he managed to tell himself half a dozen stories regarding how he would stand up to his older cousin and to Aylan, convince them of his rightness for night work, convince them that he had, after all, left his sick (dying) mother as she tried to recover (die) in peace. He could never actually embrace the hard word either out loud or silently, though, and so his speeches, even delivered in his head, lacked the conviction of truth.
But still, he was a little miffed when, after all the buildup to his making a bid to do a man’s share of the night work, Torrant’s terse order was simply to “Mind the horses and try to distract any guards who come by, but don’t kill them.”
It obviously wasn’t that he minded the killing. He’d had a chance to run to the market and talk to the peoples in the Goddess ghettoes, and as far as he could see, most of the people who worked for Rath needed killing right out of hand. He seriously doubted he had the foresight or the patience to talk to a guard the way Torrant had, and then to give the man a chance to redeem himself? The only reason his cousin (or foster brother or brother of the heart or whatever Torrant was to him) didn’t infuriate Cwyn’s notoriously short fuse was that, in truth, Cwyn was somewhat dazzled by Torrant’s brilliance, his generosity, and, of course, the fabulous attraction to any sex Torrant wanted to turn that quirky smile and dimples toward.
If Cwyn hadn’t grown up knowing that Torrant was Yarri’s and that Aylan was Starren’s, the simple fact was that he would have been completely infatuated with both of them; but just because he wasn’t infatuated didn’t mean he didn’t have (and acknowledge) a healthy dollop of hero worship toward them both.
It was, in fact, what had driven him to Dueance with Yarri, once he’d realized that his mama was (dying) not getting better.
It rankled to have to rein in that hero worship with the horses he minded while the two of them went off and planned to blow stuff up.
Their plan had been pretty ingenious—and had been spawned by their constant deadline of destroying the giant kiln right before the encroaching snows.
“At this rate,” Aylan had remarked glumly, when their every plan seemed destined for the waste bin, “the best we’ll be able to do is pour water on top of that granite slab and skate on it come winter.”
“Well, yes,” Aerk had pointed out with that almond-eyed guilelessness he had, “but it still wouldn’t be good to skate on, because the water would get in the seams between the blocks and expand when it freezes and buckle the slabs anyway.”
And then he’d been surprised when everyone from Marv and Jino to Keon and Eljean had looked at him slowly with incredulity and amazement in their eyes.
The regents had been taking turns for the last six weeks, smuggling families out of the ghet
toes and to Moon Hold in preparation for winter. Torrant and Aylan had actually been bitterly disappointed that they wouldn’t be able to do that very thing this weekend—as upset as Torrant was at their closeness to Dueance, no one could deny that the two of them wanted badly to see Aldam and his Roes.
It had become part of that errand to visit the granite slab on their way home and take a fine augur and several fine augur bits, since one bit was only good for one hole in the granite, and burrow tiny holes as deep as the bit could go, and then fill the holes with water.
During their last visit, on a day so crisp and chilly that, without gloves, one’s hands would ache, Marv and Jino had seen cracks start to appear near the seams of the slabs. Whooping and hollering, the two of them had spent the day almost until dark, drilling holes, chipping stone away, drilling more, going to the side of the slabs and drilling even more, then going thirsty the entire ride home to fill every crevice with water.
It had frozen every night since, and Torrant and Aylan reckoned that “Ellyot Moon’s” very public appearance at the bonfire would be a very, very good time to go back and fill those deepening cracks with the sulfur/saltpeter mixture Rath had used to detonate the switchback trail to Hammer Pass eight years before.
And now, Cwyn was waiting in the chill Samhain night, staring at the naked trees and crisping his way through their fallen draperies with four bored horses and a strong man’s load of sulfur and saltpeter. Torrant and Aylan were building a fire on top of the granite slab, and he was listening to a guard relieving his bladder in the bushes.
They hadn’t thought there’d be any guards, and for a moment, Cwyn was unspeakably excited at the prospect of using his little dagger. Fight! Dance! Kill! Maim! The game of violent joy thrilled his blood, and for a replete moment the idea of jumping on the man’s back and biting his throat with his steel tooth was enough to set his body blazing with exultation.
For Triane’s sake, boyo, don’t kill anyone!
Torrant’s exasperated words rasped his skin, pulling him down from the high of blood lust and causing him to skulk a little farther back into the star shadows of the Samhain night. He had all this anger, he fretted. He had all this pain, this worry for his family, this grieving for his mother. If only he had some outlet for it all.
But he didn’t even have sex. This whole city was daft and fouled by the lack of sex. Sex had to be done secretly; sex could only be done with certain people. And all the while, the worst profanations of the best joys were going on in secret, and he didn’t want any part of them. And it wasn’t just the sex; it was singing or writing or, hell, whistling at the wrong moment or wearing breeches that were too short, and it all, all of it, led to grisly violent death.
Killing would have been such an easy answer.
But he’d promised. And although he regarded Torrant and Aylan too much as family, his regard for them was still tinged with just enough hero worship to not want to let them down.
Torrant had told him that a dagger blow to the back of the neck just so and the guard would be….
Triane’s steaming pile of shite—the bloody guard just burst out of the bushes, young, diddling with his fly, his moon-pale face as surprised to see Cwyn’s as Cwyn was to see his.
Moved by the twin impulses of supreme frustration and the need to shut the man’s gaping maw before he started screeching like a barn owl, Cwyn did something so uniquely him, only his mother could have predicted it.
He kissed the man.
He was just reaching for the dagger at his waist when the man kissed him back. Dueant’s bloody hysterical laughter! Who could have predicted that?
Certainly not Torrant and Aylan, who almost tripped over the two-backed pair grappling bare-skinned in the shivery chill. Aylan choked on an oath that would have turned the sky red, and Torrant clapped a hand over his mouth and pulled Aylan back into the brush, speaking to him so softly that his lips touched Aylan’s sensitive ear, and among other things, Aylan was battling both arousal and the urge to giggle like a little girl.
“We told him to distract any guards!” he whispered.
“We didn’t think there’d be any!” Aylan snapped back, his eyebrows raised at Cwyn’s technique. The young terror should have been raised in Aylan’s home court in the Jeweled Lands, because there was no doubt that his seduction was flawless.
“They must have noticed the holes…. Here—you stay, and I’ll go finish.” With a whoosh of mammal-scented air that indicated he’d partially changed, Torrant hefted the bulk of the gunpowder, making sure to drop a trail of it after him as a fuse, and flitted through the trees back toward the foundations like a dream.
Aylan watched nervously as Torrant ghosted away. There weren’t supposed to be any guards here—there hadn’t been in the past. Had somebody noticed the needle-width holes in the foundation or the pending cracks? So far, just the holes themselves wouldn’t be able to stop the terrible function of the giant kiln, but maybe someone had figured out that a bigger act of sabotage was on the way.
A few feet away, Cwyn and the young guard twined limbs, thrusting, grunting, their act nearing its frenzied completion. Aylan supposed he could ask the guard what he was doing near the construction site when they were done and dressed. It would be something to do besides wet his pants with worry while Torrant danced deathly with the black powder he was currently spreading over the slab. Aylan hoped enough of the powder would seep into the hopefully dry—oh please, let their efforts with sticks and cotton wool have proved fruitful—fissures coating the surface and dipping down into the heart of the granite. Of course, that hope was secondary to the hope that the friction of the powder pouring through the funnel or getting inadvertently stepped on wouldn’t ignite the whole thing prematurely, but that possibility didn’t bear thinking about.
And he would not, positively would not, think of what Torrant had urged him to do if they were discovered.
Cwyn was refreshingly quiet during sex, but the guard, whose every moan seemed both surprised and resoundingly loud, made a tremendous, ripping groan of completion and then collapsed, facedown, with Cwyn sprawled over his back. The little space between the trees was ripe with their breathing for a moment, and then Aylan crouched down and got Cwyn’s attention with a tap on his shoulder. The fact that the young man didn’t corkscrew to his feet confirmed Aylan’s suspicion that Cwyn had been aware at least one of them had been there for the last several moments.
“Enjoy yourself?” Aylan asked softly, and Cwyn’s merry brown eyes were half hidden by his eyelids in a completely unrepentant satisfaction.
“Best moment of the last month,” he affirmed, giving his new best friend a reassuring pat on his lightly furred bottom. The guard grunted but didn’t move, proving that the Terror was really as good as he thought.
“Good—would you mind asking your new husband if he’s got any more friends out in the wilderness? T—Triane’s Son is dancing in the moonlight, and I would really love for him not to get caught, right?”
Suddenly Cwyn’s eyes were all sharpness and interest. “Right, brother. My apologies. It’s just that you two did say not to….”
“Kill anybody,” Aylan supplied dryly. “For the record, this wasn’t what we had in mind. Now could you ask him?”
“Mind if I get his name first?” Cwyn asked hopefully. “He’s really very sweet—I’d like to keep him for a while.”
“Knock yourself out. I mean that.” Aylan turned away in disgust, trying to give the poor man some privacy as he struggled with his trews and armor. From the corner of his eye, he saw Cwyn turn to him with a clucking motion and gently do up his trousers and divest him of his armor. When the guard realized he was gently setting the armor on the ground, he made a halfhearted protest, but Cwyn silenced him with his usual good cheer and pragmatism.
“What—you’re going to go back and find the evil Whore-worshiping sodomites now, mate? Hate to break it to you, but you are one!”
“Won’t my mother be surprised,” repl
ied the young man in a complete daze.
“Well, given the gods-blighted shitehole you grew up in, I suggest you don’t tell her!” Cwyn said with humor.
“Not see my mum again?”
The guard was stunned, and Aylan didn’t blame him. Casting Cwyn a venomous look, Aylan took charge.
“Look, uhm….”
“Grand,” the young man supplied, looking lost.
“Really?” Oh gods, he was losing time, but this surreal conversation in the darkness didn’t seem to be gaining any daylight no matter how long it went on. “Grand what?”
“Grand Wind.”
“Really?” Aylan said again, and then realized that he was dancing in anxiety. “Look, uhm, Grand, are there any more of your lot out?”
“Sodomizing traitors, you mean?” The bitterness wasn’t lost on Cwyn, who winced.
“Guards, Grand—are there any more guards who will come and kill us all for yours and this one’s”—a nod at Cwyn—“little frolic in the woods? Is anyone going to come looking for you?”
Grand blinked. “We’re supposed to meet in the clearing with the building….”
“Oueant!” Aylan swore, his whisper violent enough to make the young man back up. In the moonlight, Aylan could see that he had a pretty, triangular face with dark lashes and brownish hair, and although he privately thought a lot of Cwyn’s taste, he could have cursed his timing on both faces of the three gods. “When?”