“I think maybe you ought to go give your mother a hug and kiss,” Aru suggested gently.
“All right.” He climbed down from the bench and beat a hasty retreat into the infirmary, leaving Viera alone with Aru.
Feeling suddenly self-conscious, Viera turned back to the stove, pushing pans around without purpose. Aru’s gaze was a palpable weight on her back, not unpleasant, but unnerving.
“Inella is much improved,” he said at last.
Viera closed her eyes and tried not to be disappointed. What did she expect? A declaration of love and devotion? Just because her world had irrevocably changed last night did not mean he would feel the same. Hadn’t she seen it time and again? No matter how a man was moved by moonlight, it was business as usual when the sun rose. Clearing all trace of emotion from her face, she turned. “She still has pain in her ribs.”
He fled her glance, seeking safety behind his cup of jaffha. “Another session then.”
Her stomach clenched, equal parts anxiety and anticipation. “When?”
“This afternoon, I think.”
“I’ll be ready.”
His brows drew together over the rim of his cup. “Actually, I thought you could take Mai and the children out while I work today.”
She kept her face carefully mild, even as the pain of his rejection flowered in her breast. He didn’t want to draw from her. He didn’t even want her there to assist. “All right,” was all she could manage.
His eyes flicked to her, then away. “Inella is well enough, she doesn’t require a surrogate,” he said reasonably. “But the mother and the children will only be a distraction, or worse.” He picked at his food as if his appetite had abandoned him. “Would you talk to Inella first? Let her know what is involved, so that it will not come as such a shock?”
“All right,” she said evenly. Everything he said was true, of course. Inella was nearly healed, and Viera would be more help in keeping the woman’s family out of the way, but that didn’t make it sting any less. She thought about how they had parted last night and could not help but regret the indifference with which she had dismissed him. She hadn’t felt indifferent. In that moment of repletion, every cell in her body had yearned toward him until it was all she could do to lie back down and not throw herself into his arms. She had a purpose, though, to guide her. She could draw him with sex, but holding him would require something more, something deeper than carnal weakness. All she had to do was withhold that something and wait for him to realize he wanted it. Then she would have him, even if it destroyed them both.
For a moment, he looked like he might say more, but then he clamped his lips shut and scowled into his jaffha.
Viera turned back to the stove, clutching her purpose like an anchor.
“I’m going to take Mai and the children back to the house this afternoon,” she told Inella. “See if there’s anything to be salvaged.”
Inella forced a smile, a spoonful of sweetened porridge raised to her mouth. “I doubt there will be much. We’d already pawned nearly everything we had that was of any value. I’m sure thieves and looters will have taken the rest.”
“Still…”
Inella frowned. “Vin has a toy rabbit he sleeps with. A dirty, ragged thing my mother made out of scraps of cloth. I can’t imagine anyone else wanting it.”
Viera smiled. “I’ll look for it.” She paused, choosing her next words with care. “While we’re gone, Aru is going to finish your healing.”
Inella swallowed hard and set her spoon back in the bowl. Her eyes searched Viera’s face. “Will it hurt?”
“Not at all,” Viera said softly, taking the bowl from Inella’s nerveless grasp and setting it aside as heat flooded into her cheeks. “Quite the opposite.”
“What will he do?”
Viera placed her hand on the sheet covering Inella’s belly, just above her mons. “He will place his hand here, and draw the energy from your womb into himself. With his other hand, he will guide that energy to mend your body. After, you will sleep for a long time. When you wake, you will be as fit and strong as before. Aside from a few scars, it will be as if you were never injured.”
“What will it feel like?”
Viera felt her cheeks grow even warmer. “Sublime. Delightful. It is the most sensual feeling I have ever experienced.” Not counting last night.
Inella’s face paled. “Will he…?”
“He will not touch you other than necessary. But if you feel like touching yourself, you should do so. With every culmination of your body’s energy, more power will flow to his purpose.”
“Culmination? I don’t… I have never…”
“Never what? Never touched yourself?” At Inella’s sick look, understanding dawned on Viera. Never had an orgasm? It could not be. “But you were married.”
Inella drew herself up. “Ned was always a respectful husband. He never did anything to hurt or embarrass me.”
Or pleasure you, was Viera’s unspoken reply. She wondered what it must be like, to lie back and submit in a marriage bed that held no joy. The fact of Inella’s prostitution now seemed an appallingly profound act of self-sacrifice.
“Don’t worry, my dear,” Viera said, squeezing her hand. “Your body will know what to do. And when it is done, you will understand why men willingly pay to slake their desires.”
Aru lay beneath his blankets and vowed to stay there, even if sleep did not come to him all night. In a darkness as pale as daylight to him, he listened to the soft, muffled sounds of her preparations for bed, the splash of water as she washed her face and hands, the rustling of fabric as she slid from her clothes and into her night-things. His manhood pulsed, hard and demanding, straining toward the door of her bedchamber, drawn to her as if by a lodestone.
He would not go to her. He would not. He was strong enough to promise himself that much.
He told himself again that she was beneath him. Repeated words in his mind that he had heard so often from the lips of his people. The Andun may pretend toward grace and erudition, his father had told him once, long ago, but in truth they are barely raised above the beasts of the land. Their lives spill forth like running water in a frenzy of brutality and rutting, until all they are or ever might have been has soaked meaningless into the dry earth of eternity.
It was no less than the truth. But Aru was mortal now, and he had come to understand how different a truth can look when beheld from the other side of it. Those qualities his father so scorned held a perverse appeal for Aru now. If the Andun spent their days in pursuit of sex and violence, then at least they were forthright and honest in their desires. If the Andun were little better than animals, at least they were a part of the world, and not—like the Darjhi—eternally and ascetically apart from it.
Aru closed his eyes and saw her body lying splayed before him like an offering. Saw himself in the glory of his waking fantasy rear above her, taking her with hands and mouth and cock, her flesh enclosing him, accepting him, her limbs wrapped about him as if in their mating they could fuse into one being. He remembered the reality of her fingers dancing across her own aroused skin last night, her eyes on his face, huge and worshipful, as a desire he had never known arced and flowered between them.
According to his father, she was little more than an animal. To Aru, she was a goddess.
And he could never have her. In truth, it was he who was beneath her.
He thought of his wife, Zharina. Of those moments they had stolen under stars and moon and spreading, silvered branches in the forests of the Deathless Land. Of kisses nearly chaste in their restraint, of caresses so light and tender they seemed cool, almost sterile. The Darjhi did not rut. The Darjhi were not animals. For them, lovemaking was a refined and delicate art, as a psalm written by virgin poets forever one step removed from the human body and the human heart. A thing that must be elevated from the realm of flesh to a form of worship and obedience, a joining of souls, the bodies themselves incidental.
He tried
to imagine Zharina touching herself like Viera had done, pale, graceful fingers toying with the raspberries of her nipples, plying the polished jewel of her clitoris, slipping inside the moist warmth of her cunt. But when he looked again at her face, it was not Zharina, but Viera. He shook his head. His wife would never have touched herself like that. She would never have consented for him to touch her like that. She was above such worldly desires.
Aru was not. By degrees, he realized his hands were around his aching cock, sliding slowly up and down its length. In chagrin, he snatched them away, clenched them together under his pillow where they would not be tempted to stray. And even as he strained to hear some small sound of her, he swore he would not rise from his bed, would not walk across the rough planks of the landing to stand at her bedroom door. He would not repeat what he had done last night, because though he had not touched her, had not set so much as a finger upon the creamy perfection of her skin, in every way that mattered he had soiled the covenant of his marriage vow. And that vow was all he had left of what he had been before his fall. The last pathetic shred of Aru the Darjhan, now that he was Aru the Omahru-azhi.
He would be strong, and he would not go to her. Fool that he was, he never considered she might take the matter out of his hands.
She slipped into his room like a wraith through the open door, her pale robe whispering about her ankles, her hair like a dark waterfall pouring down her back. Her hips swayed as she approached the bed and set her candle on the stand there. He could only stare, sitting like a helpless child with his knees hugged to his chest as her eyes kindled flames of need all across his skin.
“Please…” he said. Please go, and do not come back. Please leave me alone. Please do not make me erase the one clean, unblemished thing in my life, the last lingering vestige of what I was before I became…this.
Please…
But all his words dried up in the desert of his mouth as she slid her robe from her shoulders. The fine silk murmured across her skin as it fell, caressing the stiff peaks of her nipples before it pooled like water at her feet. Her body was as he remembered it, pale and lustrous and yet irrevocably anchored in the world of the flesh, a thing of earthly, carnal beauty. All the grace of her limbs was centered on that one place his gaze returned to again and again, the triangle of dark curls that guarded her woman’s secrets.
From behind her back, she produced a strange object, like a horn of polished ivory, round at its ends, etched with smooth grooves and ripples like ancient water-carved stone. She held it in her two hands, her fingers gliding over its sleek contours, and as he watched her caress it, he suddenly knew what it was. What she was going to do with it while he looked on.
A trickle of semen ran down the length of his cock and he nearly went blind with lust.
He could not control his breath. His heart slammed like a caged and wrathful beast against his ribs, pumping ever more of his life’s blood into the straining pole of his cock. He watched, wordless, helpless, hopeless, as she drew the length of the horn across her parted lips, dragged its round tip down the column of her throat to her breasts. She caressed herself with it, and with her skilful hands, and he felt every touch mirrored in his own tortured flesh.
With the tip of the instrument, she pressed against her mound, against the glistening bead he knew lay hidden there. Her eyes were fixed on his face, watching his reactions, and he knew he was an open book to her, every emotion plainly written across his features. As she came closer, he edged away until he huddled on the very corner of the bed. She climbed up onto the mattress on hands and knees, her gaze locked onto his, her shoulders hunched like a cat poised to leap upon its prey. The object was clenched white-knuckled in her fist, like a weapon.
“Please…” he said once more, even as his own fist wrapped around his stiff member and pulled. He no longer even knew what he begged for, only that he begged.
She knelt facing him, her knees spread wide, her back arched, her shoulders flung back so that her nipples jutted like threats. Wetting her lips, she drew the head of the ivory cock up the softness of her abdomen and between her breasts. Her other hand slid down to nestle between her thighs, nudging open her nether lips, and at once the room was filled with the scent of her.
She took the tip of the horn in her mouth, pulling it deep in. Though it was thicker and longer than Aru’s member, it vanished almost completely between her lips. He could see how her throat worked to swallow its length, and in the swirling maelstrom of his desire, he imagined that it was his own flesh pressed hard against the back of her throat.
The cock emerged from between her lips, inch-by-inch, shiny with her saliva. Smiling, she rubbed it on her nipples, the wetness from her mouth making them tighten into hard knots of flesh.
“Where shall I put this, Aru?” she whispered, her voice a low purr.
He made a sound then, one that resembled no word in any language he knew, a choked moan of incoherent need. His entire body was aflame, and he could no more have asked her to stop than he could have stopped himself.
Her breath quickened, and she drew the ivory cock a little further down toward that beautiful, perilous, infinitely tempting triangle. “Shall I put it here?” she asked, guiding it between her legs so that it slid along her wet furrow.
“Yes,” he croaked in a voice not his own.
“Inside my cunt?” she whispered, and he saw her hold the horn poised at her entrance. Her skin was flushed and shiny with sweat, her lips parted on swift, gasping breaths, and he knew that even as she seduced him, she seduced herself as well. They were caught up in it now, and neither of them could find a safe path to morning, save the one she had set before them when she first walked through his door.
“Yes.” His hand worked his cock, his eyes fixed upon that smooth ivory rod she held ready to impale her. “Show me. I want to see.”
Her breath left her in a rush, and her eyes drifted half shut. As if under a spell cast by his words, she turned on the bed and leaned forward onto her hands. Her bottom thrust high in the air and the sweet, perfect flesh of her cunt was offered up to his gaze. As he watched, her fingers slid between her labia, spreading them wide open. Her clitoris was like a jewel cradled within the softness of her mound. In his mind, he saw himself lean toward her and press his mouth to it, suckle it, stroke it with his tongue. He saw himself rising above her, burying his cock in her delicious female flesh as his fingers slid one by one into the tight ring of her anus.
She held the fake member between her legs. It was white like bone against her soft, pink pussy. She wielded it like a painter wields a brush, her movements deft and full of artistry. She teased herself with it, circling her opening, nudging the tender bud of her clit. Her cunt answered with a release of translucent fluid that trickled onto the ivory length of it. And then she was pushing it inside her sheath, burying it so deep he thought it might disappear. Her breath hissed in between her lips, and a shudder took her when the thing finally nudged up against her womb. Aru could only stare, his hand stroking and stroking on his own fevered flesh.
Her scent engulfed him, her body encompassed his vision until she was all he saw. As she fucked herself with the ivory cock, she began to make small, plaintive, mewling sounds in her throat. His universe had shrunk until it was her alone, her and his weak, mortal flesh, her and the need of her. She was as a goddess who demands worship above honor or justice or any other good thing in the world.
Fluid dripped from the stretched opening of her sex and pooled onto the sheet. A part of him longed to press his face to that patch of wetness, drag his tongue along the damp linen, and then turn and catch her honey on his lips.
She glanced back at him over her shoulder, her eyes searching, her hand still plunging the ivory cock in and out of her swelling cunt. He knew she was close. He could feel it in the trembling tension of her muscles, the heat of her skin, the wet, hungry warmth of her panting breaths.
“Come for me, Aru,” she hissed, arching, stretching ever closer to
her crisis. “Give me your seed. Ah, Aru!”
And he was on his knees, obedient as a slave, choking with the force of his release. He tugged furiously on his bucking cock and watched as his come spattered the twin globes of her bottom to drip down the seam of her buttocks and over her puckered anus. She was crying his name, over and over, as if she could claim him that way, as if she would have the very gods know he was hers. And as he watched, her sex performed that stunning, mesmerizing clamping down, grasping at the ivory cock as if it would never let go.
He closed his eyes and buried his face in his hands. How could he have let this happen? Again, god help him? How could he be so weak?
When he looked again, she was slinking like a satisfied cat off his bed, rubbing her musk-anointed hands all over his blankets. Aru knew what she was doing, how she marked his linens with the scent of her arousal, and he knew that even if the smell was washed away, he would never be free of the memory of it.
She bent to pick up her robe, and all he could do was stare at the perfect roundness of her buttocks, the glistening wonder of her cunt. And even as shame and regret assailed him, he knew he would do this again, over and over. She was a sickness in him now.
She left as quietly as she had arrived, her naked length gleaming in the candle’s glow, her robe whispering across the floor where it trailed from her hand. His throat closed and he almost wept—relief and loss intertwined.
When he finally reached for his blanket, his hand encountered the cool smoothness of the ivory member. She’d left it behind.
With great care, he took it in his hand. Lifted it to his face and breathed in deep through his nostrils. Gods, her scent. Gooseflesh rose all across his skin as a host of carnal images danced before his mind’s eye. Men and women, their limbs a tangle of quivering pleasure, pressed one so close upon another it was impossible to tell where one body ended and the next began. Feminine lips stretched around turgid male flesh, hard, masculine hands roaming across a soft, blushing landscape of breast and belly. A glistening cunt speared by fingers, tongue, member, and all manner of objects, the more commonplace, the more indescribably erotic. And for a moment—no more than that—an image of himself on hands and knees, and of Viera rising up behind him, sliding the carved shaft he still held in his hands deep inside him, in that place which now held such dark and brooding fascination for him.
Healer's Touch Page 4