by Terina Adams
“Fate is a cruel master. I stopped believing in it long ago.”
“I believe in you. And I believe in us.”
Cerac’s lips brushed the surface of mine, a gentle invite. I accepted, leaning close and pressing my mouth on his. Our kiss was that of innocent children trying it for the first time, but the slow and tender touch teased a desire down between my legs. I leaned farther toward him, forcing the pressure of our lips, wanting him to know I needed him tonight.
He pulled back. “I’ve brought plenty of food. You need to eat.”
“I am hungry. No, I’m starving. But not for food.”
This close, my vision was filled with his eyes, until I pulled his head closer with my hand in his hair and closed my eyes so that I might float away from this world with him when his lips touched mine. In the darkness of this new cruel, isolating and unforgiving life, Cerac’s soft, warm lips became my sanctuary. His breath in my mouth, his hands on my skin and I was not a prisoner to Hunrus, but a desired equal to his brother.
Cerac’s hands wound their way underneath my wet clothes and suddenly the barrier of my garments was too great. I wanted to feel his hands map my body, his tongue lap the river water from my skin, his body press firmly against my own, for him to be in me, so that we might become one and I could forget my life.
I pushed him down onto his cloak, then bent to run my tongue across his chest, over his hard nipples, along the ridges and grooves of his muscles, kissing and nipping and licking the parts that were bare to me.
“Rya,” he moaned, then sat up. “Tonight is the night I should devote my mouth, hands and body to you.” He whispered the words onto my lips.
“Then do it.”
I pulled my wet clothes from my body and tossed them away without care as to where they landed. Cerac inhaled a sharp breath upon seeing my naked body in the firelight. “You are so beautiful,” he said as he peppered kisses across my shoulder.
“Don’t deny me anymore,” I said.
He fumbled for the ties at his waist with desperate hands and shucked his pants. I took his hands and placed them on my breasts, gasping when they touched my sensitive nipples, uttering soft sounds of pleasure when his hands caressed and squeezed the hard points.
“Tonight and every night I will worship you,” he said, and I believed him regardless of the truth, that tonight could be our last, because that was what this moment was for, building a fantasy like my father had spun for me all those nights ago when he brushed my mother’s hair.
“If you want to worship me, then lie down on your back.”
He hesitated, his hands still fingering my nipples. Maybe he had never been with a woman when she was on top, an aggressive and domineering position for a man to accept. Driving into a woman when she was on her back or on her knees was what men did because they were the stronger ones, the lords at all times. Stars knows I’d never done it myself, but tonight would be different.
“You are a victim of my fate as much as me, but I am the one who will be robbed of any dignity and hope when I am forced to cross the border tomorrow for having done nothing more than exist. Give me this one moment to make my own choice, Cerac. I don’t want you to enter me when I am on my back like a dog exposing its belly to the aggressor. I want to take you into my body myself, so that I may pretend for this moment that I am in control, strong and worthy.”
Cerac lowered himself slowly to the ground, his eyes on me, accepting, devotional and loving.
“You are always worthy,” he said.
I straddled him and settled myself down onto the length of his shaft, lying hard against his stomach. Cerac groaned the moment my wet warmth touched his skin, and his hands found their way to my breasts. He cupped them tenderly but worked my hard points between his thumb and forefinger.
I’d never sat astride a man, but my body began to undulate of its own free will, sliding along his rigid length like it had been born with its own secrets beyond my reach until now. It had been so long since I’d felt the tingling sensation of passion, the mounting pressure of need.
My skin became more than the outer casing of my body, it became another point of pleasure as Cerac’s hands ran all over me, over my shoulders, my breasts, across my stomach, following the contours of my hips and down to that secret place of ecstasy, that small bud at the top of my opening. With one touch, I turned to fire.
“Let me inside,” he gasped in a raspy breath, massaging and kneading my bud with the tip of his finger. The mark on his wrist glowed brighter than the sun, so bright it reflected off his torso and into my eyes. I closed them but did not turn away, wanting the glow to bathe my face. “I want to be worthy of your choice,” he groaned. “I want to…feel…you hugging me tight.” His passion was building like my own, so his words came out short and choppy like he was struggling to hold the rush back.
I rose onto my knees and fingered his shaft, lifting it from his torso, lifting it to the sky so I could position myself on top. Gently, carefully, I lowered, feeling his girth press at my opening. I was slick and ready, so when I lowered farther, he slid in smooth and warm, stretching and filling me so completely I thought I would shudder my way to my release right then. Every inch he went in, I was undone. Once he was so deep there was no way to go deeper, I was ripped apart from my inhibitions and the woman who set out on this path of death.
I rode him, I rode him wildly, my body undulating in a rhythm all its own, and because his hands rested lightly over my breasts, my nipples were rubbed against his palm, turning more than one part of my body into a sensation of agonizingly glorious torture.
I was doing this to him and not him doing it to me. I arched my back, pushing my breasts farther into his palms, and groaned my pleasure to the sky. I was untamed, feral and free, a prisoner whose shackles had been released.
Cerac growled and bucked up into me, forcing himself deeper, and I gasped with the spasm of burning fire that threatened to tear me apart. The glow from his mark surged brighter and it felt like a bolt of heat had ripped straight through my core, igniting a feeling so great it was as if I ceased to exist.
I looked down at Cerac and found his eyes on me. By the light of his mark, his face softened into the worship he promised he would give me. Looking into his eyes, I felt something slide away. The barriers that had always existed between us, master and servant, man and woman, stranger to stranger, slipped away. If it was possible two people could be one, then this was that moment. There was no distinction between my ending and his beginning. Our bodies were connected in the most intimate way, grinding and rubbing against each other, but this went beyond the connection of our bodies. This went deeper into a place where our physical form no longer mattered. Primitive and raw, stripped bare to our basest needs, we floated away on pure sensation.
And then it came, building and building, a great shuddering wave that exploded through my body. I spasmed and cried his name as I was torn apart by sublime ecstasy. The waves rolled on and on, suspending me high above all things.
Cerac lurched to sitting, locking me into a savage embrace. I felt his heart beat wild and heavy, banging against my chest.
“Let me take you now, Rya, for I have not found my own release,” he said, his voice a strained grumble.
“Do it,” I demanded.
Arms gripping me tight to his body, Cerac rolled us over, keeping us intimately connected. He rose to his knees, dragging my lower half off the ground with him. With arms at my waist to support me, his muscles bunched and knotted in his chest and arms along with the ridges across his stomach as he braced his legs apart and pounded into me, hard and fast, his balls slapping against the pale, puckered skin of my anus. His mark’s brilliance lit up his face so that he looked more god than human.
Morick had never driven into me with demanding, furious strokes and I’d never ridden him abandoned and free. Cerac and I rutted like animals, grunting and groaning through a feeling so good, so savagely beautiful that I felt I would die an exquisite death. I
could not, surely could not shatter into another orgasm. But it was there, rushing through my groin like molten metal, tearing a cry from my lips. I was dimly away of Cerac plunging in deep to a grinding halt before shuddering and vibrating and growling through gritted teeth as he pumped himself to his own release.
He collapsed onto me, sandwiching my body with his, our hearts beating like drums against each other’s skin. I’d never felt so unbound. My body throbbed and tingled as it struggled to come down from its height.
Cerac pulled me with him as he rolled to his side. I snuggled close, tracing the outline of his mark as the glow faded. The fire warmed the back of me and Cerac’s body warmed the front. If only I could suspend this moment and not just in my memory. But it didn’t matter that such a thing was impossible, for at least I’d had this.
24
The divide between the living and the dead lands ran across the earth like an ugly scar demarcated with a deep fog creeping across the ground, wrapping its misty fingers around the trunks of the trees, creating a shroud of obscurity for anything that lurked within, waiting for us to enter. My skin bumped and prickled with an eerie presence not visible to the eye.
“Right, this is it. I’m in no mood to linger, so line up in front of the cart and receive your rations.”
The male prisoners were in no hurry to climb from the back of the cart. They inched forward on their bottoms, taking as much time as they could. An impatient soldier strode forward and poked at the closest with his sword. “Come on then, you useless lot. The sooner you’re in, the sooner you’ll be out and we can all go home.” He chuckled to himself.
Cerac swung his hand behind, barring me from dismounting as I shuffled to lower myself. He got down first, then opened his arms, waiting for me to slide into them. We became the main focus for both the prisoners and soldiers alike. In my head, I could hear the stories they would tell the prince on their return. And how cruel everyone would be when they heard I was not one of the successful gatherers, if any of us were successful at all.
“Take what they give, and also take mine. That way you are assured of not running out.” Cerac disturbed my dark thoughts.
He strode across to the rest of them and swiped one of the packs from the soldier’s hand. The soldier’s top lip curled into a silent snarl but he held his tongue. Cerac saw nothing of this while he rummaged through the thin-looking pack on his return.
“There are the basics.” He went through his own saddlebag and shoved extra food and warmth into my pack.
“Don’t fill it so that I can’t carry it,” I teased, but he wasn’t in the mood.
“I have brought this for you.” He pulled the sword I’d trained with from its sheath and turned it so the blade glinted in the sun. I could tell him it would make the prisoners greedy for a weapon, especially when faced with something as hideous as the ragool, but this was his way of gaining some control and power over the situation, something he’d lost with the poison in my system.
I hitched my pants leg. “I also have this.” I showed him Ryhan’s dagger. “One of the prince’s men gave it to me. Not all his men are loyal.”
“It appears as though you are gathering your own loyal following.”
“One soldier is hardly a following.”
“One soldier and a marked. That’s good odds.”
For a second, when we looked in each other’s eyes, we were somewhere else and not about to say goodbye, but life never allows you to escape.
“Lift your arms,” Cerac demanded. When I complied, he wrapped the leather strap around my waist and secured the sheath in place.
“In case you can’t get a fair strike, a random stab is better than it sitting in its sheath the whole time.”
I nodded without absorbing the words. My mind had left this place and was moving somewhere outside of my body and above what was about to happen. It was the only way I could protect myself from crying and begging the soldiers not to send me into the forest. With nothing left to be done to prepare me, no further fussing and fiddling to delay the inevitable, I walked, maybe my last steps, toward the waiting guards with my heart pounding louder and faster with every step. Pleas billowed up my throat, but I would not let them out.
Everyone eyed my bulging pack, then lingered longer on the sword around my waist. The prisoners weren’t in very good shape, but there were three of them, and desperation could give a man the strength he needed to succeed. I moved the sheath so it was farther to the side of my hip, shielded from their longing eyes.
“Open up, mangy dogs, and take your medicine.”
The soldier smacked the lips of the first prisoner for not opening them fast enough. He then moved down the line until all had dutifully swallowed the brown ball. A water skin was handed to each, our only allocation, but in their thirst, the three prisoners were already taking more than their rations would allow for the four days. Given where we were, there would be no drinkable water until we made it out.
“Four days and you’re dead, got it? If you find nothing, then don’t bother coming out ’cause we’re just going to send you back in again and again until you give us what we want, or until them creatures in there make a meal of you.” He snort-laughed to himself. “We’re supposed to wait here until the fourth day, and if no one arrives”—he pointed to where he stood—“we’re just going to leave anyhow. Now get going. The longer you hang around here, the shorter time you got in there, ’cause the poison is already working through your system.” He twisted and wriggled his hands over his stomach. “Oh, and another thing. The king would like you all to know that if you survive and bring him what he wants, you will all get a pardon.” The soldier then winked at me. “You got three days, lovey, on account of being the prince’s pick for this job. And you can forget about the pardon.”
Cerac’s fist came out of nowhere and collided with the soldier’s jaw, sending him backward for yards until he hit the side of the cart. He slid to the ground, jaw slack, head lulled to the side. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.
The soldier was forgotten to Cerac the moment his fist connected with him. His focus was on me. He swept me close. I buried myself in his strong embrace, smelling fire and loamy earth, smells that would live with me for the rest of my days as a memory of life and sanctuary. Once I felt my bottom lip wobble and my throat thicken, I pushed out of his hold and turned to leave.
Cerac spun me back and claimed my mouth for the last time. “Come back to me, Rya.”
I gave him my smile instead of my promise, then slipped my hand from his and walked the final distance to the dead forest without looking back.
We crossed over into another world. One that felt laden with doom. It was a place with no color or sound. Each step we took on the scorched ground replaced the singing of the birds in the trees. Fog rose around our ankles, creeping tendrils like molasses around our legs, making it feel like we walked in water. We would be tired very soon if the fog did not abate and give us some relief.
“How do they expect us to see anything in this?” one of the men grumbled. His hair tumbled over his shoulders in wisps, lank and lifeless.
“We need to stick together,” I said.
“I heard the talk in the dungeon. The flowers don’t grow in a bunch. They grow as one. So if we stick together, then only one of us gets a flower.”
“But we are stronger against attack if we’re all together.”
They quietened after that, but I could see I’d not convinced any of them. At the moment they were thinking of their pardon. With the forest as still and quiet as the dead, it was easy to forget the rumors of the wraiths’ terrible pets.
“Let’s see what they gave us,” the tallest of the three said. He pulled out some flatbread, which already looked stale. He took a large bite and chewed it like it was the best thing he’d tasted.
“We should preserve as much of our food as possible. If they gave us these supplies, then it means the task usually takes longer than one day.”
He eyed me as he chewed. “What would you know about starvation? You got enough meat on your bones to last a week in this place without eating, so how about you mind your business about what I do with my supplies.”
“I bet she’s got some lovely stuff to share in her fat bag,” the one with the wispy hair said.
My hand twitched to touch my sword, but I kept it where it was, not wanting to create a divide between us all at this early point in our journey. “We need to leave some sort of trail as to where we are going so that we know how to find our way out.”
“See, that’s why I never took me-self a wife. They think they know best. Always nagging and telling you what to do,” said the third in our company.
I sighed but kept that to myself as well, already sick of their company. Maybe the one with the wispy hair was right and we were better going on our own. These three didn’t seem to have a brain between them. But I’d seen a ragool. I knew what we were up against, and there were a supposed myriad of other creatures that lived in here as well. In truth, I did not want to face them alone.
I looked behind and already the demarcation between the dead forest and the rest of the kingdom had disappeared. I crouched and felt around in the fog for a stick or some other implement to carve marks on the trunks of the trees. All I felt was the powder of soot. It rose into the air and up my nose, making me sneeze. The men did not know I had a dagger strapped to my leg, and I was loath to reveal it, so instead I withdrew my sword and etched a line in one of the trees, creating an eerie scraping sound in the still air. The pale of the bark underneath was easy to see set against the blackened tree.
We walked a little farther, and I scraped another line on a tree, conscious of the noise I made and how it seemed to echo in a place without walls. The men did not bother to wait for me as I gouged us a trail to follow back. I craned around the fat trunk of the tree as I finished another mark, to see the back of the last man fading into a strange shimmering mist. They had not moved that far in front, but already they were disappearing from view.