Doppelganger

by Logan Jacobs

  The tree trunks themselves flexed slightly beneath her as she reached the middle, and I could hardly breathe, certain that my own handiwork was about to crack in half and drop the loyal warrior to her death while I looked on helplessly. I was about to scream out to her to run, or jump, or something. But then with a few more steps Elodette seemed to reach a more solid section, and a few more steps after that, she was nearly at the other end.

  Then, her left hind hoof punched through the platform between the two trunks. One plank swung loose and Elodette froze as Ilandere screamed. But the underlying trunks and the rest of the platform, including the parts that supported the centaur’s other three hooves, held together.

  “I am fine, Princess,” Elodette said with a tortured pretense of calmness. As she leaned her weight onto her other hooves, she attempted to withdraw the trapped hoof, but it was wedged fast.

  Ilandere moved forward and seized her handmaiden’s hands in hers. Elodette kicked down with her trapped hoof and dislodged it. Then the hoof crunched back up through the gap as Ilandere yanked the other centaur forward with all her might. Elodette reached the shore. The one of me that stood among the group there could see that she was pale and trembling despite her efforts to be completely nonchalant.

  But the gap her hoof had left behind wasn’t a very big one, and I knew that any bridge that could survive a giant centaur’s crossing mostly intact wasn’t going to have a problem with my merely human-sized self. So I strolled across casually.

  “Shall we proceed, then?” I invited the group.

  “Yes. I shall carry Willobee, now that he no longer has a carriage to ride in,” Ilandere announced as she swung him up onto her back. The gnome looked very nearly as ecstatic to be perched on his favorite silver-dappled seat again as he had when I granted him the gems for keeps. Then Ilandere looked over at her handmaiden expectantly.

  “I suppose the human girl may ride upon my back, just this once,” Elodette volunteered reluctantly.

  “Thank you. It is an honor,” Florenia said gravely, which erased much of the disdain from the centaur’s expression. She even knelt to allow the beautiful duke’s daughter to climb onto her back.

  That left the two ponies for Lizzy and me. Lizzy was standing closest to Damask, so she mounted her. I contemplated the potential pleasures of riding behind the she-wolf and having my body pressed up against hers, and I knew that she would be eager to tease me in every way she could while we rode, but I didn’t want to slow the group down unnecessarily by burdening one pony with two bodies. So I re-assimilated and mounted only Diamond.

  Then we were once again on our way down the road toward the mysterious village of Ferndale.

  The bridge solution had been a success. There was only one thing that still troubled me about the incident. Who had destroyed the original, and why? Did it have anything to do with Ferndale’s troubles? And if so, were the people of Ferndale trying to keep outsiders away from them? Or were other people trying to keep the villagers of Ferndale trapped on their side, apart from the rest of the world?

  Chapter Ten

  We traveled for the rest of the day at a slightly faster pace than when the ponies had still been dragging the carriage. Damask and Diamond seemed slightly disoriented by the change and tended to drift toward each other to trot along side by side just as if they were still in their harness. We did not stop for a midday meal since we had used up the last of our food stores at breakfast.

  When it began to get dark, we chose a spot with wind shelter and clear lines of sight to set up camp. Of course, now that we no longer had the carriage, setting up camp really just meant dismounting and unloading our packs. Willobee never even hobbled his ponies to keep them from straying too far. He insisted that it would run contrary to their every instinct to leave his side. I didn’t mention the fact, but it seemed to me that the ponies worshipped and adored the centaurs even more than they did their gnome master, especially the radiant princess.

  I had been a little wary of the unwanted attention that a fire might draw the night before when Elodette had attacked us and proved my fears justified, but I did not feel that way tonight. We were so far off the beaten path by now that we had not met a single other traveler all day, so there was no incentive for brigands to prowl these parts. There also weren’t any temples nearby that I knew of, which meant that we were likewise unlikely to encounter Thorvinians on the warpath. And if we did, I relished the prospect of annihilating them, now that I had a peerless archer who could also trample warriors beneath her hooves, a giant wolf who would rampage gleefully through their ranks, and both of my selves available and well-armed, unlike the night of the massacre.

  So while Elodette went off to hunt down some dinner, the rest of us built a large and toasty blaze by which to warm ourselves. I doubled myself to help with the fire-building, which also provided both Lizzy, who remained human for the purpose, and Florenia with laps to sit on afterward. Ilandere lay down close to the fire and allowed Willobee to lean back against the warmth of her horse flank although she made him remove his chainmail shirt first because she said that the metal links poked her. The little gnome quickly fell into a contented sleep, and the ostrich plume in his cap bobbed with the rhythm of his snores.

  “What you did with that bridge today was wonderful,” Ilandere told me, in a soft voice so as not to wake the gnome, “and I know that Elodette was very impressed, too. Even if she’d never admit it.”

  I knew the princess was right. It was funny, because Elodette hadn’t been impressed at all by my ruthlessly efficient takedown of a dozen mounted bandits in defense of Nillibet’s order, even though she’d witnessed that too. Maybe that was because killing was a familiar skill to her whereas bridge-building wasn’t something she thought she could do herself.

  When Elodette returned shortly after, she had an entire doe slung limply over her shoulders as if it weighed nothing.

  “Sorry,” the dark centaur said. “I was hoping to find something a little smaller, to feed us for just one night, but I figured you guys might be getting hungry while I was gone, so I just settled for this.”

  I didn’t even have time to reply before Lizzy started jabbing me with her elbows and hilts as she thrashed around in my lap flinging off all her clothes and accessories. Then, I had less than a second to appreciate the sight and sensations of her naked body before I was suddenly being crushed beneath a mountain of musty-smelling fur.

  “Don’t ever do that to me, please,” I said to Florenia through my non-smothered mouth as we watched wolf-Lizzy trample over me in her haste to get to the meal.

  Lizzy reared up on her hindlegs, reached out, and casually ripped off an entire deer leg. Then she padded back over to nestle against me while she crunched her way down the meat. She sprayed me with blood, gristle, and little shards of bone with every chomp. “It’s bad manners,” I explained to the ex-vestal, since Lizzy clearly wasn’t listening. “The beating-me-up and chewing-with-your-mouth-open parts, anyway. I don’t mind the stripping part.”

  “Hmmm. Using the carriage for a bridge earlier was a very ingenious solution, but I do rather wish there had been another way,” Florenia sighed. “I haven’t forgotten that you promised to repay me for the loss of my duchy tonight. Perhaps there is a clearing nearby that we could use?”

  “Outside?” I said with concern. “But the ground is frozen and everything is dark. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “You won’t,” she whispered. “I am in agony now, Qaar’endoth.”

  I still hesitated, but I wasn’t really fooling either of us.

  “Alright,” I agreed. “After dinner we’ll sneak off. Come on, let’s help Elodette with that deer or she’ll feel unappreciated.”

  The golden-skinned aristocrat did not have the first clue about how to skin or cook a deer. So I instructed her to fetch sticks and whittle the ends into points while Elodette and I set about the process.

  We strung the doe up by the neck from a sturdy branch using the leath
er sash from my surcoat. Then we slit its belly open and started pulling out the organs. I carefully severed the translucent, urine-filled bladder and threw it into the bushes, but Lizzy padded over and started eagerly slurping up the rest of the spilled organs while Elodette and I worked above her. When I reached the slimy gray loops of intestines, the she-wolf was ready to eat those too but I pushed her snout away with my hand. She whined.

  “Your breath,” I explained.

  She hung her huge shaggy head and gave an annoyed little growl, but she did not make another go at the intestines.

  Once Elodette and I had finished clearing out the intestines, we started with strategic cuts around the neck and elbows of the deer and carefully peeled off its hide. Lizzy gnawed on the discarded hide while the centaur and I carved steaks and handed them off to Florenia, who impaled them on her wooden stakes to cook them over the fire.

  We had all tried to work in relative silence so we didn’t disturb the gnome, not because he was really in such desperate need of more sleep, but because it became an amusing game to see just how much he was capable of sleeping through, and to practice communicating with each other using only hand signals and other gestures.

  As it turned out, it wasn’t even Lizzy’s loud smacking, slurping, and crunching noises that finally awakened him. It was simply the aroma of the venison once it started to sizzle in its juices over the fire.

  The gnome’s huge knobby nose started twitching furiously with his glowing eyes still shut tight, and then after a minute he sprang to his feet, which did not increase his height all that much.

  Florenia handed Willobee the first steak, medium rare, with a flourish, and he squeaked out his thanks and settled down to munch it while Ilandere giggled uncontrollably. Even with deer juices streaming through his already filthy lavender beard, the little gnome’s table manners appeared positively demure compared to wolf-Lizzy’s.

  The nubile ex-vestal handed Ilandere the next steak, which she accepted graciously, but she barely even nibbled her portion. The only thing I had ever seen the centaur princess consume more than a few bites of was an apple.

  Florenia gave me the third steak, and I passed it to Elodette.

  “Thank you, human,” the dark-haired huntress said with some hesitation, as if she still did not quite trust my intentions. But that was a drastic improvement from just one night ago when she had been trying to convince Ilandere that I was a depraved monster.

  “You know, I quite understand why you would disdain humans,” Florenia told the centaur as she placed another steak into my hand.

  “You do?” Elodette asked as she stared at the beautiful human woman suspiciously.

  “Oh yes,” Florenia replied. “They are very easy to manipulate. They are vain yet insecure. They all tend to be a lot more alike than they realize. But…”

  “But what?” Elodette asked.

  “But, Qaar’endoth is not a human,” Florenia informed her gravely. She pressed a tender kiss at the corner of my jaw and then turned back to the fire carrying the two raw steaks that the centaur had passed her.

  I hoped I was not deceiving the excruciatingly desirable duke’s daughter. I knew that I was faithful to Qaar’endoth, and I felt his spirit burn for vengeance within me, but I did not know if that necessarily meant that I was actually the embodiment of the god. Yet as ironic as Florenia’s tone could be regarding everything else, she seemed more earnestly convinced of my divinity than I was myself.

  Once Florenia had roasted a second steak for Willobee and one each for herself and my other self, we settled down to eat them with her between the two of me, her legs across one of my laps and her head resting on my other chest. Lizzy had disappeared into the woods with a growl that I believed translated closely to, “Getting seconds.”

  The venison was the tenderest, juiciest, and most delicious that I had ever tasted. And it did not compare in the slightest with what came next.

  When Willobee had eaten his fill and dropped back off to sleep again using Ilandere’s warm flank as his bed, and the two centaurs lay quietly chatting over the snores of the gnome, Florenia looked over at me with pleading in her hazel eyes, so I nodded and drew her off into the woods, while my other self remained behind to watch over the camp and ensure that Lizzy returned safely.

  When I judged that the body with Florenia was out of earshot of my other body at the campfire, we stopped. Then I kissed Florenia roughly, like I was claiming her mouth as my territory. She threw her arms around my neck, and I lifted her up and grabbed her ass in both my hands while she hooked her slender legs around my hips. As we continued to kiss, she moaned and flexed her legs to press herself harder against my erection through the fabric of both of our clothing.

  I held her in place with one hand and struggled to find the hem of her long, cumbersome layers of now dirt-stained pink robes in order to reach my other hand up underneath them, but when she realized what I was trying to do Florenia promptly disentangled her body from mine and stepped backward a pace. Her eyes burned into mine, her expression unreadable. In the darkness her extreme beauty was almost eerie in a way that made me think of some kind of supernatural creature that was about to kill me or perhaps suck my soul from me.

  Then the duke’s daughter reached up, unfastened her vestal’s robes, and cast them all aside at once. She backed up even farther to display her body to me in full and watched my eyes devour her. She shivered severely, but she was defiant of the cold and as proud as an empress in the power that she knew very well she wielded. She was so slim that when she moved, I could catch faint traces of her ribs and hipbones beneath her tawny skin, yet her shoulders and hips flared out from her tiny waist, creating a shape that was leanly curvaceous rather than gaunt. A healthy body’s usual share of fat was present, but it had been redistributed from her nearly concave stomach and sleek thighs to the full breasts that rode high on her ribcage and her round bottom. She was not muscular, but her limbs were taut and firm.

  I thrashed out of my uniform as well so that I would be able to feel every possible inch of her skin against mine. Then I grabbed her, lifted her up again, and lowered her gently to the frosted ground. As I propped myself above her on my elbows and kissed her carven nose, she shifted her hips slightly to align my jutting cock with her entrance.

  “Take me, Qaar’endoth,” she whispered.

  I forced myself all the way into her with a single protracted, twisting thrust. She was slick with anticipation, yet so tight that I could not easily fit inside of her, but I could not wait even a few more seconds to ease my way in. I claimed her mouth again hungrily as I bucked my hips and battered against her walls. She cried out in ecstasy and locked her legs around my hips again to pull me in as deep as possible while her hands roamed over my face and hair and clawed at my back.

  After a few minutes of rough thrusting in that position, Florenia drew one leg and then both up across my chest and hooked them over my shoulders so that I could penetrate her even more deeply. I slowed my rhythm significantly. We surged that way for less than a minute, slow and deep, as little gasps escaped her throat. Finally, her breathing became urgent, and her gasps frantic. Her tunnel clenched around me as her body began to shudder, and I allowed myself to relish in my own climax. We both shuddered against each other as we climaxed, and I could see her eyes roll back into her skull when she felt my seed pump into her womb.

  “I am yours forever now,” Florenia whispered as she lowered her legs to either side of me while my shaft was still buried between them

  “Yes, you are,” I said as I lay down against her. I was still hard, so I stayed deep inside of her while we passionately kissed. Then, after a dozen or so minutes’ rest, I fucked her again, and so on and so forth well into the night. The sky had deepened to its darkest shade and then lightened again by the time we returned to camp and fell into a sound sleep.

  Lizzy had returned to camp not long before us, still in her wolf form, with her muzzle even more bloodied than before and her tail was
wagging. The one of me that was standing watch there by the fire greeted her. It seemed to me that even when the circumstances did not demand Lizzy’s wolf capabilities, she liked to wear that form and hunt and sleep in it sometimes. It was not merely a tool to her. It was an integral part of her nature. She licked my face and curled up beside me, not as my complicated and cynical woman for the moment, but simply as my loyal partner in the hunt.

  In the morning we ate more venison for breakfast, and it was as delicious as before, but we could not enjoy it as much because at this point we had run out of water. We still had another day and a half, according to the Nillibetian vestal’s initial estimate, before we would reach Ferndale, so we needed to find another water source before then. Preferably one that wasn’t at the bottom of a steep thirty-foot drop and churning up silt with enough force to shatter bones.

  “We should take rotations today scouting for water, before the situation becomes desperate,” I told my companions as we finished what we wanted of the doe and left the rest for the wild to reclaim. “But I want to put some miles behind us first. When we break at midday we can coordinate that if we haven’t already found water.”

  “Wendy mentioned two other landmarks that we haven’t come to yet,” Florenia reminded us. “Another fork at some point where we’re supposed to go right, and then four windmills.”

  “If it should so happen the windmills are broken, Master, I say we do without wind,” Willobee muttered.

  “But, Willobee, you said the other day that I am the wind,” Ilandere objected teasingly as she lifted him up onto her back. “Don’t you remember that?”

  “Oh, I said that you are a fleet silver wind, and the happy wind that buoys up weary birdlings, and the wind that blows ships back to harbor, and the wind that ruffles pretty tresses, and the wind that rustles golden leaves beneath the moonlight,” Willobee acknowledged, “but what you are not, is the kind of workaday wind that mills generate for laboring purposes. And these alleged villagers in need, they can build their own mills if they are really so much in want of that kind of wind. The bridge was enough. We’ve done our part in the way of being neighborly.”