by Nhys Glover
“I love you,” I whispered into his mouth, as I ran my hands down the hard planes of his chest.
“I have waited so long to hear you say those words. To feel their truth in every cell of my body. You are so beautiful to me, Shardra. So very beautiful.”
And as he said the words he began to do some exploring of his own. But unlike me, he chose to separate our lips so he could look at what he was touching. I was still too thin. I barely had any breasts to show for my twenty suns of life, for my womanhood. I had never even bled as a woman should.
He traced a gentle finger down my neck, across my shoulder and then down, outlining the slight curve of my breast. Circling one nipple, he became fascinated by the way it grew pinched and hard at the attention he showered on it.
As if touching wasn’t enough, he leaned in and closed his mouth over the dark brown circle. He sucked experimentally, and when I squirmed with pleasure, he did it again. Then he looked up with a joyful grin, as if my reaction to his ministrations was the greatest pleasure he had ever known.
Too much pressure. How could I be worth all he had suffered for millennia? I was a skinny, half-mad girl who knew nothing of life. Nothing ordinary, anyway. I knew plenty about Devourers and scrying pools and other planes of existence. None of that made me interesting or worth knowing.
“I could never have ordinary. I doubt I would ever want ordinary. Though I wish you were ordinary, only because I know how being extraordinary has harmed you. Shardra, you are worth all I have suffered. Never doubt that!
“From the moment you awoke at my side, barely five suns old, freshly consigned to that cave they called your ‘new home’, I have known the most profound joy imaginable. Instead of continuing to drown in my own misery, I began truly living.
“From my memories, I began to pluck the best scenes of the world I had known before the Devourer did his worst. Using them as templates, I built a place for you to enjoy. And every time you came to me, I shared the pleasure you gained from what I created. The long walks, hand-in-hand. The splashing fights we had in the river. And the swing. Do you remember when I made you that swing I copied from your memories of your old home?”
My eyelids seemed to flutter oddly. He had made that swing for me? I had thought... well, I had thought it was just left there by some other child. Though I had never seen another person in his world.
“Where did it go, that swing?” I asked, remembering that I had not seen it for suns now.
“You grew too big for it and lost interest, so I let it fade. It was hard to find other things to entertain you as you grew older. There was nothing from your own memories I could draw on. And I had nothing from mine. So I experimented a bit, remembering how I liked to explore. For several suns there, I made strange flowers and stones you had to search for by climbing and crawling. You seemed to enjoy those games. That is the word, is it not? Games?”
I nodded. Again I was thrust back in time to the out-of-place structures that appeared on his grassy plain. Every time he encouraged me to explore them I discovered something new, something wonderful, hidden at the heart of the construction. And every time I did, I clapped my hands in delight and saw an answering expression of delight on my comforter’s face. I had not understood that expression. Now I did. He had fashioned it all for me, and when I gained pleasure from it, he did too.
“If not for you, I would never have grown up to be who I am. Had I only had that pile of toys my parents sent to me, or the half-hearted efforts of my nurse to play with me, I would have never developed my mind. Though, even as I say that, I have to wonder how what happened in my dreams could develop my mind...”
He drew said mind away from further contemplation of the past by suckling my nipple again. This time I gasped, the pleasure so intense I could do nothing else.
Would his nipples be like this? They were smaller and flatter than mine. I was not even sure I could draw one into my mouth as he was doing to mine. But I wanted to try. I wanted to use him as my playground, exploring him as I had explored his structures as a child.
With a moan that was a cross between disappointment and anticipation, he fell onto his back, drawing me along with him. While he lay quietly beneath me, I began to taste his silvery skin. From his lips, I had already discovered it wasn’t metallic tasting, as I had expected. But now I focused on it, trying to determine what it reminded me of.
No, I had nothing. It tasted like nothing I had ever known before. Not like my skin, which tasted salty and unpleasant. Or it had, when I was in the cave. I hadn’t tasted it since I became clean. Smelled it, yes. Tasted, no.
Sniffing in his scent, I contemplated it for a few moments. Again, very different, but pleasant and familiar. Of course, I had known his scent since I was a little girl, so it was bound to be familiar. And loved.
Each time my tongue lapped at him, he drew in a sharp breath. His muscles tensed too, as if he was preparing to jump to his feet and... what? Run away?
He laughed light-heartedly. “Run away? From you? When have I ever left you? You are the one who has always left me. And I have lived in pleasurable expectation of your return every moment you were gone.”
“Then why are your muscles bunched?” I asked in confusion.
“Because I want to touch you and do more, but I also want to revel in the sensations, new and exquisite, you are eliciting from me. It is a torture to be caught between the desire to act and the desire to be acted upon.”
“Huh,” was all I could think to say in response.
I turned back to his chest and began licking and kissing my way to his grey nipple. When I flicked at its tip with my tongue he moaned. Encouraged, I tried sucking it into my mouth. Frustrated, I discovered I couldn’t. Instead I grazed my teeth over it and was rewarded with another soft moan.
Not what I was after, I realised. Not enough. I began licking my way downward until he sucked in his stomach so tightly it became a rippled indentation. In the centre sat his belly-button. Or the hole, there was no button. I licked around the hole and delved into it. Something jerked against my cheek, and I turned my attention to a long, hard mass that lay beneath his breechcloth. I had never noticed it before. Surely I would have noticed something that protruded from his body like that. I did not have such a protrusion, but then I knew enough of life to know men and women were not made physically alike.
I reached out and closed my hand over it. Like a living thing, it shifted in my hand. My comforter shifted too, as if I tortured him. Afraid I’d hurt him, I drew my hand away.
“No,” he growled out. “No... not hurt. Pleasure. You give me pleasure.”
Frowning, I returned to my exploration. If touching him could give him pleasure, then I would certainly touch him a little more. But I couldn’t really touch while there was leather covering this odd-shaped thing. It was like a finger, yet thicker and far bigger. What was it for? What did it do?
“It is used to insert the seed into a woman’s furrow,” he explained to me, his voice strangled.
I had seen farmers plough their fields when I was a very little girl. Huge beastlings pulled a metal thing along the ground, gouging deep ruts into the soil. A boy would follow behind to drop seeds from his pouch into the trench. Another beastling would come along then with a flattening gadget that forced the soil back over the seeds.
How was this large finger anything like that?
“I saw the act many times between the sylphs. So I know the mechanics of it,” he told me, his voice becoming even odder. Embarrassed? Was he embarrassed? Why?
“Tell me,” I demanded with all the enthusiasm he had taught me to bring to new discoveries.
He took my hand and folded my fingers into a fist, a loose fist. “This is you. Your body between your legs.” He held up a finger. “This is me. My body between my legs.”
I looked down and saw that bigger finger twitching under his breechcloth.
How did I know what he wore? From my memories of my life before the cave I knew I had never
encountered a piece of clothing like it. Had he explained it to me in the long-distant past, and I had forgotten the telling, but not the name for this odd garment?
It was a square piece of soft leather suspended over his groin by two pieces of thin leather. So different to the breeches men wore in my world, or the gowns women wore. I myself had lived for suns in little more than a thin tube of fabric that covered my torso. Not even a gown.
Nodding slowly, I turned from my musings and waited to see where he was going with this lesson.
Holding my fist with his other hand, he brought the finger from the first hand to my fist, to the narrow hole in the centre of my fist. He pushed in and filled the hole with his finger.
“That is what is supposed to happen. That is what I have seen happen. And it seems to give much pleasure to both the male and female.”
I looked at his face. He was blushing. I had never seen his skin change colour like that before. It was tinted a rosy hue rather than the cool silver tones it normally displayed.
“And you never did this? This finger thing before?”
He shook his head, and from his expression I knew his memories were giving him pain. “I was barely permitted to exist. No one would have allowed me to get close enough to do this with them. My mother hardly touched me, even when I was small. She grudgingly gave me sustenance because the Goddess required it. But there was no affection. I grew up feeling like my very touch was poison. Had the Goddess not spent time with me as I was growing up, teaching me, encouraging me to find pleasure in her world away from the others, I doubt I would have survived. A child needs more than food to keep it alive. Even a child like me. That was why I knew what you needed.”
He had been sitting up on his side as he explained about the finger thing, and now he fell back to stare up at the golden bower above our heads. I had never considered it before, either—the woven, gilded branches that surrounded us—when I awoke in his arms. It had always felt as if I was triply protected. His arms, his wings and his bower.
“So you were loved. By the Goddess.” I drew what little goodness I could glean from the sad story he told me.
“In a way, I suppose. But only in as much as she loved all her creations.”
I took his hand and made his finger stand out again. I fisted my hand and brought it to his finger. I giggled as I pushed his hard digit into my fist and closed it tight so he could not escape again. I tugged on the finger playfully.
He grinned, his melancholy instantly evaporating. In the next moment, I was flat on my back and he was covering my face with kisses—sweet, loving kisses. Reaching up, I tangled my fingers in the long skeins of hair that fell on either side of our faces. I used it to pull his mouth to mine so I could kiss him as a woman kisses a man she loves. And for a long time we kissed, barely able to draw enough air into our lungs before submerging into another kiss yet again.
“Will you find me?” he demanded urgently. The shift of intention shocking.
“Of course. But how?” I answered as I tried to draw my scattered wits together.
“You will be able to sense which direction to go. Trust your senses.”
Before we could kiss again I was gone.
I awoke in the tower room with a smile on my face and more information than I knew we had shared.
Chapter Seventeen
Prior and I were eating supper when the other three entered the apartment. I imagined the Airluds had kept them occupied all afternoon so they stayed sane and left us to our work. Or play, as it turned out to be.
Now all three were staring at me intently, examining me for burns, I assumed. As I had none, I simply grinned back at them. “All is well. Not a singe anywhere.”
Breathing a communal sigh of relief, they found ale and sat down on cushions around Prior and me. I felt a momentary discomfort at having kept them away all afternoon.
But there was no room for discomfort or comfort anymore. Time was running out. We didn’t know how close the Godling was to unleashing The Jayger, but we knew it was close. And we were still not The Five, and still had no idea where the key—or circle or ring, or whatever the frag it was—could be found.
There was only one part of that mess I had any control over, and I was determined to complete it. Not that it was any hardship. I no longer felt like the Goddess was whoring me out to men She’d selected. I truly loved all of them, and I felt honoured that they found me worthy of their affection.
“Always worthy,” Prior whispered into my ear from where he lounged at my side, closer than he’d ever sat before. It was as if we’d already committed to each other. And maybe we had. Was commitment conditional on words or the physical union? I didn’t think so.
“So there will be three of us sleeping without you tonight?” Laric said with a little less lechery than usual.
I didn’t even allow myself to blink in embarrassment or guilt. “Aye, we are going to see how far my abilities take us. We already know Prior can get aroused without burning anything up. If he’s touching me. We just don’t know whether I can keep focused well enough when in the thro– ”
“You don’t have to go into details,” Zem interrupted gruffly.
It was like I was choosing Prior over him. Like I was rejecting him.
“I’m doing it this way so I can keep focused. If there’s more than one of you... It will be harder,” I explained with more patience than I would have expected of myself. “And I don’t want anyone getting burned.”
“Not even me? I’m willing to take a burn for the good of The Five,” Laric said, keeping it remarkably non-sexual, given the topic of conversation.
“Build your bonds with Zem, and then we’ll risk you getting a few burns,” I told him pointedly.
“Takes two...” Laric said, glancing at Zem who was scowling at him.
“If you weren’t such a lecherous, disrespectful bastard I’d be all right with you,” Zem snarled. “It’s not me that’s causing the problems. And having you make it seem like it is just riles me up even more.”
“I’m trying, all right? It’s a habit. A bad one, I’ll admit. But you try being the bad lad all your life and see what you turn into. I’ve had a quarter turn to make changes that would likely take suns!”
Laric sounded frustrated and a little defeated, as if he couldn’t imagine himself ever getting it right. Not in a quarter turn or a lifetime.
“Just try,” I said. “That’s all any of us can do. Try. I’m trying to wield my new magic, Prior his arousal, you two can at least try to be friends. Talk it out, fight it out. But try.”
“I think fighting it out might work,” Rama said, coming into the room from the corridor leading to the children’s rooms.
“I wasn’t serious,” I spluttered out, shocked at the very idea of them choosing to get bloodied over this.
“But I am. Men don’t talk their issues out like women. We fight them out. So, gentleluds, shall we adjourn to the arena? Landon, you have maps to study here, I assume?”
Laric nodded, gesturing to a pile of scrolls in the corner. Suddenly I knew what was going on. Yet again my men were being removed so I could get on with what I needed to do with Prior. Except for Landor, who was expected to remain in case his healing skills were needed.
It was a little heavy-handed, but I appreciated Rama for it.
“Aye, go beat each other bloody, and don’t come back until you’re at least speaking civilly to each other,” I said, embracing the ploy.
Like naughty boys being taken off for their punishment, Zem and Laric left with Rama. He’d make sure neither came to too much harm, I knew.
“That was probably a good idea, although I know you hate it,” Landor said into the silence left in the room after the door closed.
“I can’t think of anything else that might work. Rama shares a lot in common with those two. If anyone knows what might work it’s him,” I admitted.
“Do you want me there?” Landor asked tentatively. “I can watch without intruding, bu
t I might be able to nudge you back if you start losing focus.”
“You could do that?” I asked, suddenly warming to the idea. If I lost focus, neither Prior nor I would be aware of it until it was too late. And Landor could handle seeing me with someone else. He’d so far only ever been with me that way.”
“You stay back, all right. Unless absolutely necessary,” Prior cautioned.
Landor nodded. “I might need some relief after, but during, I can stay alert.”
I ginned at him, rather enjoying the idea of helping him get the relief he’d need after watching Prior and me together.
We immediately headed for Prior’s room, all of us aware that the fight would not last all night. But I had no plans to return to Zem’s bed after being with Prior, so I wasn’t sure why I felt the need for haste.
Once we were in the room, Landor took the chair beside the bed and relaxed into it. Prior and I stood facing each other, staring into each other’s eyes. His were filled with fear and doubt. What mine said I had no idea. That I was determined, that I wanted this? That I doubted I could keep my focus continually?
I glanced at Landor, needing his reassurance. He gave it by lowering his shields so I could read his confidence in me. And his arousal at the idea of what we were doing. I got from him that we made a beautiful couple, the two of us. Prior big, black and muscular; me slim, white and feminine. When I let down my hair to finish the image for him, my bright red curls falling wild around my shoulders, I felt more than saw his smile of appreciation.
Prior reached out and fingered a curl that lay on my shoulder. “You let it down so rarely. I suppose I should be happy about that. My mind would always be going places it shouldn’t if this was constantly on display. Fire. It is like out-of-control fire. Utterly beautiful.”
I lifted my arms over my head, a wordless request for him to help me remove my tunic. He did so, though his hands were shaking a little.