by Vela Roth
A brilliant scheme. A flawless invitation. The crowd might dismiss the unusual phrasing of his question as a foreigner’s odd choice of words, but she cherished his private message to her. Do you, Lady Cassia, wish?
Do you, Cassia, want it for yourself?
She wished. She wanted. Nothing and no one would stop her from saying yes.
“With pleasure, Initiate Ambassador Deukalion.” Cassia slid her hand into Lio’s in front of the entire embassy, the court and the king.
Strains of lute and the patters of drums set a rousing pace. He had chosen the perfect dance. A spirited one, but one that kept two partners close to one another more than any of the other pattern dances.
“This is our dance.” His voice wove around her, well and truly a spell. “No one will interrupt or hear a word we say.”
Before she could find the right words to thank him for such a gift, they began to move, and he took her breath away.
His supple power had lured her from across the room. Now, so near, his body seemed to summon something out of hers. This was dancing as she had never known it. Her body was not a tool for keeping her partner at a distance. Her body was part of her, which gave her the power to turn feeling into action and bring him closer. She threw off her limbs’ rigid discipline, let the music banish her tension, and moved with him.
The steps brought them shoulder to shoulder, his words near her ear. “I waited all night for this.”
He was not fighting for breath. She didn’t know where she would find the air to speak. But she would not waste this rare moment. “I hoped.”
He smiled. “Wanted.”
“More than I can say.”
“I would gladly dance with every woman in this room again, just to hear you say so.”
At arm’s length, then near, then far away. They clapped, and his sleeves slid back, exposing wrists and forearms still concealed in tight undersleeves. His sensual grace teased her from under a veil of silk. He was as light on his feet as light itself, and yet every time he grasped her hands she felt the sureness in him.
Every touch of his hands brought them close, but not close enough. She loved the distance between them that let her look at him and hated it for keeping his body too far away. His movements were exquisite, but not near enough to her. Not against her.
She wanted to feel him dance. To hold him while he moved. To find this rhythm skin to skin, their bodies rubbing, his hands roaming, nothing more between them. That dance, too, would defy all she had known and expected. He would join himself to her, and it would be like his bite, his kiss, his touches. She would enjoy it.
This was desire. Lust. She was capable of it.
The dance dragged her away again and wasted valuable moments while other hands gripped hers. Then Lio was waiting to take her to him again. To this brief treasure of a dance, and this chance to speak freely.
“I want more, Lio.”
She saw surprise in his gaze. Eagerness. Longing.
She pressed on before words deserted her. She let her own new, strange, powerful longing drive her forward and found words she had never had before. “Don’t leave so soon tonight. Stay with me.”
His eyes shone. “Are you sure? You don’t have to rush yourself.”
She could hear the music around them, hear the dance nearing its end. But she looked only at his face and felt only his hands. “I want to see you bare and touch your skin. To know what all of you feels and tastes like. Just as you take my blood inside you, I want to take part of you inside me.”
She would never forget the stunned expression on his face. He almost lost his place in the dance. Now it was he who struggled for words. She watched every shade of emotion his face revealed to her, aware too of his body, leaning toward her as if the space between them were a string pulled taut and ready to snap.
“Cassia.” His resonant voice had descended into new depths. “I swear I won’t part myself from you till dawn.”
The full implication of his words took root in her thoughts, so ready for them. She could have him with her, against her, inside her till the sun rose. “I hope dawn doesn’t come.”
“Where I am from, the sun never rises.”
The dance came to an end. She must drop his hands. They could not linger here.
“I’ll be waiting,” he promised. He swept away into the crowd. A moment later, she could no longer spot him in the hall. He had departed for his nightly drink.
Nay, his feast.
Falling
All that remained of the night must be hers. Cassia could not afford to gamble on Perita’s plans. This occasion required precise arrangements.
When Cassia made it back to her rooms in the hour before midnight, Perita looked up from a lap full of mending and narrowed her eyes.
Cassia felt all too aware of the heat that lingered in her cheeks. She stood straight and still as always, but the thrumming in her body felt like an audible chorus she had carried into the room with her for all to hear. “Are you not making merry with your family tonight?”
“That’s all right, Lady.”
“You know you are more than welcome to take the night off, Perita.”
“Thank you, m’lady, but I’d just as soon not wake to mending that still needs doing.”
Cassia resisted the urge to take the mending in hand and hurl it out the window. “In that case, have you brought me that new batch of soap yet?”
Perita ducked her head. “I’m sorry, no, Lady.”
“You were trying to finish the mending first,” Cassia conceded. Why did she feel the need to concede anything? “But that can wait until after I’ve had my bath. Surely your father is still awake on a festival night like this and can spare me some more of his tallow soap.”
Cassia readied herself to face her handmaiden’s usual protests that the soap the tallow chandler made from his leftovers was destined for laundry and not fit for humans. But tonight the girl kept her vocal opinions on her father’s craft to herself.
Perita stood and deposited her work, needle and all, in the chair in her stead. “Yes, Lady.”
Cassia went into her bedchamber as if that were all. As soon as she heard the door to the corridor open and shut, she hastened back into the hearth room. She picked up the mending, carefully fishing Perita’s needle out of the folds. A freshly laundered tunica. Not for long. “Knight, dockk.”
He pressed closer to her, sniffing and curious at this unusual activity. When she began to give him a rubdown with the tunica, he swished his tail.
She returned the garment to the chair, dropped the needle in its midst, and carefully collected any obvious tufts of dog fur. It would not do for Perita to notice before her eyes started burning.
By the time Perita returned, Cassia lay stretched out on her bed with her eyes shut to create the appearance of exhaustion. But all she could see behind her eyelids was Lio’s face when she had said those words to him. All she could think of, lying here on her back, was what it would feel like to lie beneath him.
She went into the hearth room to collect the soap from a pouting Perita. Without a glance at the mending, Cassia returned to her bedchamber in customary silence and went through the motions of preparing for bed.
When she heard the coughing, she went to stand in her doorway. No sign of Perita by the fire. Cassia walked past the abandoned mending and into the dressing room. There the handmaiden stood over the washbasin, rubbing a wet cloth over her face.
“Perita? Is aught amiss?”
The handmaiden startled and looked up. At the sight of her, Cassia felt an unfamiliar discomfort. The girl’s eyes were swollen and streaming with moisture that was not from the rag, and her hands were red with the first signs of a rash. In the silence between them, Cassia could hear Perita wheezing.
“I’m so sorry,” Cassia said.
“Can’t be helped.” Perita turned her face into the cloth and coughed again. When the hacking spell ended, she stood there with her chest heaving and labored to get her
breath. “I thought it was clean before I started mending it.”
“I’m so sorry,” Cassia said again.
She stood, her hands at her sides, as Perita washed her hands. No amount of water would ease the welts rising on her skin.
“Perita, you must take the medicine the mages gave me for you. Don’t do any more work tonight. Just drink the tonic and get some rest.”
“Thank you, Lady.” Perita turned away toward the cabinet where they kept medicines.
If Cassia were Hesperine, would she hear the rattle in Perita’s chest as the girl struggled for air? Would she feel her fear?
Cassia turned on her heel and deserted the room. She returned to Perita’s chair by the fire and sat down to finish the mending. In the dressing room, glass clinked on wood. A stopper came out of a bottle with a pop. Cassia’s thread knotted, and she tore out her work and started over.
Presently she heard Perita throw back her blankets and crawl onto her pallet. Within a quarter of an hour, Perita’s wheezing gave way to the easy, steady breaths of sleep.
Cassia put down the mending and went into the dressing room. Kneeling beside her handmaiden, she touched Perita’s shoulder. The girl did not stir. Cassia patted her flushed cheek. With a groan, Perita turned her face away and burrowed deeper into her blankets. An instant later, her breathing resumed its restful rhythm. Cassia breathed a sigh of relief and a hushed thanks to the mages for medicine that worked. With unintended side effects like heavy sleep.
Cassia dumped the unfinished mending into a covered basket by the hearth and made for her bedchamber. She knelt before the chest at the foot of her bed. As she opened the lid, her palms broke out in a sweat. She rubbed them dry on the blue-gray gown she still wore before she began rummaging through the rest of her meager wardrobe.
Two plain, practical gowns, as far from beautiful as possible, as she had intended. Two fine, elegant gowns, as unattractive as she could make them and still meet the requirements for appearances before the king. That was all.
It probably meant little, what she wore tonight. Lio had never seemed to care about such things…and in any case, she would not be wearing it for long.
But it did seem to mean something to her. What did she wish to be wearing when he disrobed her?
She crouched there on the floor of her room, aware of her colorless, ratty hair and skin chapped from daily washing. She could not stop it: a flash of an image in her mind’s eye. Solia, resplendent in a velvet gown, her hair a veil the color of the sun, with the sheen of fragrant oils upon her skin. Anointed for her promise dance. Embalmed for her death.
Cassia shut out the memory and stared into the darkness of her own room, breathing in the fragrance of the floral charms she kept in her clothing chest.
This was not the same. She was not the same. And Lio…he was from a completely different world.
How did she wish to anoint herself not to make, but to break the most binding mortal vows? What did she wish to don not as a betrothal gown, but as a vestment for her presentation to Hespera?
No husband would ever take her maidenhead as a marital right. She would gift her virginity to a Hesperine as a reverent treachery, a forbidden pleasure, an unashamed offering to his profane goddess. Tonight Cassia would fall as far as she could under the Eyes that saw all women as sacred, no matter how forsaken.
First Tryst
Tonight his desire was even more ravenous than his thirst. This was true hunger. Lio rejoiced in it.
Even if it did mean one more drink from the deer. Lio peeled his tongue off the roof of his mouth and grimaced at the aftertaste. He paused in his effort to ready the shrine for Cassia’s arrival and cast a cleaning spell on his own tongue so she would actually want to kiss him.
He had thought he could never force another swallow of deer blood down his throat, now that he had tasted her. But for her sake, he could and had. Coming to her tonight on a full stomach would result in the best experience for her. He must ensure he had the patience and self-control she would need from him.
He ran both hands through his hair again. He’d been training in self-discipline longer than she’d been alive, and tonight he had taken all the appropriate steps to manage his thirst. That was the best he could do, and indeed the correct way to prepare for such an occasion as this. It must surely be enough.
No, there was one more thing to do. He must simply trust himself.
“And trust you, Goddess. You’ve brought me to her, of that I have no doubt. Therefore she must be…” He smiled to himself at the realization. “…in good hands.”
He flexed those hands, coaxing just a bit more moonlight into the ruin he had come to think of as their own. Thanks to the ruins of spells, the chill of winter did not reach in here. But the Goddess’s Eyes peered in at every crack, both waxing with promise. Only a little more bending from him, and the light in the Sanctuary would be at the perfect level for Cassia’s sight… There.
I want to see you bare…
Those words, on her lips. Unforgettable. Erotic. Divine.
Just as you take my blood inside you, I want to take part of you inside me.
Tonight they would live out her wants. And his. There was no difference anymore.
Her presence at the edge of the woods awoke his senses as surely as a kiss. He let his awareness of where he stood fall away and gave himself up to the Blood Union. He walked the path to the ruins under her skin, drifting with her between lingering patches of snow. He breathed with her, feeling her heartbeat as a caress that throbbed in his gums and groin, reminding him he still wore his own body.
Moonlight bathed her, and she thought she could feel it, as one felt the sun. Yes, as a Hesperine felt the moons, one cool and silken, one warm and pulsing, more than just light. A fresh night wind ushered Cassia forward, her only attendant other than the four-legged one who guarded her. Anxiety coiled and uncoiled within her as she fretted, then talked herself out of fretting, then fretted again. But her worries faded beneath the rush of something much more powerful. Desire was a spice in her scent, a fierce heat coursing through her veins, priming her body deep within, where he would touch her.
With a groan, Lio pulled himself back into his own skin. If he had any intention of proceeding slowly, he must rein himself in. Now. He focused instead on his Gift, the source of his power but also the foundation of every self-discipline exercise. He sought to attune himself to the Goddess’s blood within him, which always seemed boundless and perfectly measured, wild and in rhythm with the course of the universe.
But tonight he felt the Gift singing in his veins, rousing his blood. Even his power was overtaken with this hunger. It was beyond control. But Goddess knew it was wonderful.
He heard Cassia’s slippered feet on the broken floor of the antechamber, followed by Knight’s lumbering footfalls. Then came the rustle of a blanket and the swish of a wagging tail.
Lio stepped out into the antechamber. Cassia was kneeling, silhouetted in the moonlight that poured in through the doorway. For a fraction of an instant, she was a shadow even to his eyes. Then his pupils adapted and revealed her to him anew.
Cassia turned her head. Their gazes locked. He smiled at her, and her eyes filled with things he intended to drink down the whole night through. She untied her cloak, and her fingers dawdled at her throat before she let the garment fall away. Her gaze dipped to his mouth. If the silence stretched between them an instant longer, he was going to begin their feast then and there.
Cassia stood and gave him a smile he had never seen, a shy one. “I think we have permission from Knight to go off by ourselves.”
Lio offered the hound a bow, then Cassia his arm. She slid her hand into the crook of his elbow, turning it into a caress. Merciful thorns. It was definitely time to get her alone.
“Hold on tight.” He took a step forward and into the next room.
Cassia blinked and glanced at him, then at the solid wall between them and where they had been standing. “That is never at all
like your handkerchief analogy.”
“Really? I thought the comparison rather inspired, myself.”
“No, it’s much more like…going through a door…” She shook her head.
“Does it disturb you?” he teased.
She gave him a pert smile. “No. I’m quite fond of your magery, which spares me having to stoop under the rubble…and unwraps breast bands.”
He grinned. “Why, I think you’re rather acclimated to my magic by now.”
But her smile faded, and her anxiety fluttered to life again. Her voice grew soft, self-conscious. “You look very fine. Like the moonlight followed you in here.”
“Thank you. I did invite it, so you would be able to see well.” He moved back so he was no longer blocking her view of the room. “And every lover has a right to expect roses, especially upon a first tryst.”
Her eyes widened. She drifted to the nearest wall and reached out to cradle a single bloom in her hand with the utmost care. It looked as if she cupped blood in her palm. She lowered her face to the rose and drew in a deep breath. Her eyes fell shut, and her lips parted.
“How?” she breathed. “They were dead last night.”
“I don’t know,” Lio confessed. “They were like this when I entered. But I can tell you it happened since I began drinking from you. Since I offered our blood on the glyph stone.”
“It is you who carries healing in your veins. It must have taken all these nights of your blood to resurrect them.”
“Or three nights of your green thumb.”
Cassia rubbed a petal between two fingers, testing its texture, as gentle as if she expected it to disappear. “As long as I live, I shall never behold a flower more beautiful.”
Watching her stand against a curtain of thorns in her gardening dress with a blood red rose in her hand, Lio could not agree more.
Her gaze fell to the pile of blankets he had arranged for them in the middle of the room, which he had cleared of stones and debris. All that littered the floor now were rose petals, apparently shed in the vines’ eagerness to bloom.