Highland Dragon Master

by Isabel Cooper

  It cast her arousal in its own light too. When Erik’s fingers reached the cleft between her legs and found it wet enough to dampen her thighs, he added the sin of pride to that of lust. “Eager,” he murmured against Toinette’s neck. “You can’t tell me otherwise now.”

  “Neither can you,” she said, and canted her hips so that her thigh rubbed against his cock, a slow, hard grind that had Erik seeing stars and biting his own lip for some measure of self-control.

  Every instinct told him to move, to rut blindly against Toinette for the short time it would take to satisfy himself. Barely he gained mastery, long enough to undo the laces of his hose with a clumsy hand. “Hold still,” he growled.

  For once, Toinette did as he told her. He thrust inside her, sudden and rough. The way she caught her breath made him pause for an instant—she was no virgin, of course, and she’d been giving every sign of enjoying their roughness, though he didn’t doubt that even she had limits—but in that instant she’d wrapped her legs around his thighs and risen up to meet him.

  “Well?” she gasped, a challenge and a demand.

  Erik met it eagerly, drawing back only to plunge forward with the same savage motion. This time he kissed her, delighting in the parallel heat of her mouth and body, the strength with which she responded, the sting of her nails raking down his back, and the pressure of her thighs at his waist. There was no time for subtlety, no will for restraint, only lust as elemental and unslacking as the storm had been at its height.

  Even with his mouth on hers, Toinette was crying out before long, making desperate guttural noises that rose in pitch as her hips pumped frantically against Erik’s. He cupped her arse in his hands to hold her against him and drive deeper, faster, until finally Toinette bowed her back and screamed, inner muscles clenching over and over again around his cock.

  Had Erik needed further sensation to find his own climax, that would have easily done it. As it was, he had only to let go for pleasure to twist its way upward from his bollocks, pulsing outward in a lightning strike of ecstasy that hit over and over again.

  Slowly the world settled back into its expected form around him, and Erik looked down into Toinette’s pleasure-hazed eyes. As long as the moment had been in arriving, he couldn’t quite believe it had finally happened—and in such a way—but neither could he regret any detail.

  * * *

  “Do you think they heard us?” Erik asked, glancing over one naked shoulder toward the path that led to the beach.

  Toinette stopped combing pine needles out of her hair and shrugged a nonchalance she wanted to feel. “Doubt it,” she said, and meant that. “You didn’t hear us when we were fighting the plants, and we were louder.”

  “You were further away.”

  “Not that much further.” Actually, they’d stopped a good distance from the gravesite—neither of them being fool enough to spar, let alone swive, where blood-drinking vines might still be lurking—but sound often carried further than people thought. “They’re likely making noise enough of their own, and we don’t hear that.”

  Erik smiled, distinctly smug. “We werena’ paying very much attention, were we?”

  Undeniably, he had a point. Toinette couldn’t even reprove him on the grounds of overconfidence, especially when his smile still retained a trace of sensuality and the afternoon light slanted alternate patches of brightness and shadow over his muscular chest, giving the crisp hair there an even more intense glow.

  “No,” she said, going back to her hair. The pine needles were legion. That only supported Erik’s argument that Toinette hadn’t noticed any of them insinuating themselves. “But it doesn’t matter. Mortal hearing’s far shorter than either—and it wouldn’t distinguish the sounds we were making from, say, animals crashing around.”

  “Not too far off, at that.”

  “Speak for yourself,” she said. “And most men take their shirt off before bedding a woman. Just a piece of helpful advice for your future.”

  Erik shrugged. The muscles in his back rippled, a sight that commanded Toinette’s attention almost long enough for her to miss his response. “I was hot,” he said, “and you hardly gave me time.”

  “Hmm,” she said. Since she’d not bothered with her dress except to let Erik hike up the skirt, she had no real response, save for bending down to find the cord she’d used to bind up her hair. In so doing, she missed Erik tying his hose—a pity, both to miss it and that it happened. The soreness around her ribs gave her an idea. “They’ll believe we were sparring, if we tell them. Especially with your lip. If they did hear anything, which they didn’t.”

  “You know a great deal about mortal hearing.”

  “I know how to pretend it’s the only kind I have.” The cord was broken. Of course. Toinette sighed and shook out the remains of her skirt. “If your senses are too good, people think you’re odd.”

  “I suppose they might,” said Erik, sounding as though the thought had never occurred to him. “My whole family is odd, if you ask their villagers—either at Loch Arach or my father’s keep.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I heard. A few times, in my youth. Never seems to do your people any harm.” Toinette fought to keep bitterness out of her voice.

  It was an easier struggle than it had been at other times. As Erik had perhaps intended, at least where the sparring was concerned, everything that they’d done in the clearing had helped. Toinette had lost herself in the moment, in pain and pleasure and the mix of both. Action had burned off her nervous energy and broken her mind out of the sharklike circles in which it had been moving.

  “Anyhow,” she said, “if they do know what happened, what does it matter? They know everything else now.”

  Toinette tossed her hair back as she spoke and thrust out her jaw. She could speak boldly enough, as though she didn’t wonder what further doubts such knowledge might cause among her crew. She could go halfway to convincing herself.

  Yet, when they returned to the beach, she took care to stand some ways apart from Erik.

  The men fell silent at their approach. Samuel looked to have been silent already: he sat on a rock, staring out across the ocean at the setting sun. Sence and Marcus, building the fire, likewise probably hadn’t been talking, knowing Sence, and Franz was crouched by their shelter, rosary moving steadily and slowly between his fingers. His lips stopped moving as he looked up, but that was all. John kept cleaning fish, but Raoul, to whom he’d been talking, let both knife and flesh dangle from his hands.

  Toinette had gone most of her life without being the object of uneasy stares. It had happened twice in the last week, and it felt no easier than it had at thirteen. As she’d learned to do, she kept her head up, her shoulders back, and her hands dangling loosely at her sides, badly as she wanted to do otherwise—cover her neck, for instance. She doubted that Erik had left any marks, and surely he hadn’t left any that would stand out in the dim light of early evening, but she couldn’t be certain.

  All of the crew were alive. Except mayhap Franz and Samuel, all of them seemed capable of keeping on with the tasks that would let them stay that way. None had attacked her.

  One had to start somewhere.

  Toinette started by standing and waiting, with the last light of the sun coming down over her shoulder and the waves washing up the beach. She stood with empty hands and let the men decide when they would speak to her, if they would speak at all. She didn’t look at Erik.

  There were such moments: you stood at the wheel and watched the storm, knowing that it would break or not, and you’d weather it or not, and you’d done all you could. Gamblers spoke of letting the dice fall, and riders—which Toinette had never been—of letting the horse have its head. At times, any action but waiting could only hurt your cause.

  Her stomach rolled. She felt sweat collecting under her arms and behind her knees. Nobody could see any of that, so it didn’t
matter. She thanked God for fifty years’ practice not being sick.

  “What do we do now?” Sence asked. At first, a human voice sounded almost alien, and the words might have been Greek. But he went on, asking without panic or complaint, simply acknowledging that the future hadn’t vanished, only changed. “Do we live out our lives here?”

  “We eat first,” said Marcus, and bent a gimlet eye on Raoul. “If we’re not too busy gawping to get the food ready, that is. I told you: it’s better to make plans with everyone who might have knowledge, and it’s better still to make them on a full stomach.”

  “Can we help with the fire, then?” Erik asked.

  Sence shook his head. “Just about done, m’lord. Best sit down.”

  Toinette was glad he’d suggested it. She wouldn’t have liked having to ask, and she wasn’t at all sure how long her knees would hold her.

  Nineteen

  The fish was good, silver-white and flaky, and if boiled nettles weren’t precisely what Erik would have chosen as a dish to go with it, hunger did not leave him inclined to be picky. Eating occupied both his mouth and hands, so that he didn’t fall into the temptation to fidget, nor to talk only to hear his own voice.

  In time, as the food vanished and the process of digesting perforce calmed the men slightly, Marcus sat forward. The fire leapt up, and his bearded, angular face looked saturnine in its glow. Yet the men turned to him without hesitation. Even Franz had roused himself from his endless prayers long enough to eat, and now his eyes stayed on Marcus, not on his rosary nor darting nervously from side to side.

  “It seems to me,” said Marcus, “that we can split our problems in two. Half is what to do right now, and that’s best planning like we’ll be here through winter, at best.” His voice was calm and dry: businesslike. When none of the men spoke out, he continued. “We’ll need better shelter. Could be we should move higher up the cliffs. We’ll need a good pile of wood and stores of food. We’ll start with all of those tomorrow. Prepare for the worst, yes?”

  “Then what’s the best?” Samuel asked. “Do you think we’ve a chance of getting home?”

  Marcus shrugged. “If there is one, I don’t know it. I wouldn’t. That’s where I’ll give you the wheel, Captain,” he said and, with a quick gesture to Toinette, sat back.

  Her face in shadow was like a statue in a long-forgotten temple, all hint of feeling drowned in deep contemplation. Idly her hand played with the ragged hem of her skirt, winding a loose red thread around her finger again and again. “I’d not give anyone false hope,” she said, her voice slow and measured. “I’ve seen nothing like this before, nor heard of it. Nor have I fooled with magic for”—she hesitated before bringing out the words—“for longer than any of you has been alive. I wouldn’t be the one I chose to fight it. Yet I was trained, and Erik more, and from what I do know, most spells can be broken.”

  Only then did Toinette turn her head, asking Erik to speak with a gesture very like Marcus’s. He wondered briefly if she was aware of the imitation, then answered her unasked question. “Aye,” he said. “It may be a matter of raw power, or the right set of circumstances. We’ve no way of knowing yet—but there is a chance.”

  “How can we know, then?” Samuel asked.

  “Toinette and I—and any of you who wish to learn magic, to some degree—can start learning more tomorrow. We’ve magical ways, scrying and that, but,” he added, remembering how little the visio dei had worked before, “the best way forward may be on this earth.”

  Across the fire, Sence waited for him to elaborate, while John watched with narrow eyes and asked, “Why?”

  “Magic needs a point of attachment to the mortal world. An anchor, if you will,” he added, knowing his audience. Long ago, Artair had spoken of flames and wicks, but water worked as well as fire for metaphors. “Often that’s a person, but I doubt there’s anyone but us living on this island.” Recognizing the possibilities in that statement, several of the men crossed themselves. Erik went on quickly. “It’s most likely that the spell’s bound to an object—it might be a place, but that’s a sight harder.”

  “And if it’s the whole island?” John asked, his eyes narrow.

  “Then our task is even easier, in some ways.”

  “Breaking strain,” Toinette put in. “Or more room for holes, maybe. Size isn’t always the best defense—you remember that time in Rome, John, and that little wretch with the knife?”

  John winced and put a protective hand to his thigh. His face changed briefly too, in a way that spoke of more than thought and remembered pain. Toinette was again his captain, the woman who’d been in Rome with him and likely fought in whatever brawl they spoke of. For a little while, he forgot dragon and Scot and They brought us here.

  As when she’d imitated Marcus’s gesture, Erik wondered if Toinette had intended just that.

  “No use wondering,” Marcus said. “We’ll find out, and we’ll work from there. Tomorrow morning I’ll say who’s for building and who’s for food. We’ll need you two as well, should we have to go further into the forest, but for now best that you figure out what’s happening here.”

  “That it is,” said Toinette.

  She made no objection, Erik noticed, to the way her first mate seemed to have taken command. He spoke without waiting for orders, and with no sense of deference. Perhaps it was always so between them in times of crisis—they had known each other for many years—but it stood out to Erik now as it hadn’t before.

  They had no privacy for him to ask her thoughts, nor did he think she’d welcome the question. He wanted to put an arm across her shoulders, to offer comfort, but he knew that it would likely only make matters worse. Instead he sat and stared at the fire, one of a silent crowd.

  * * *

  Blearily, Toinette rubbed her eyes and glared into the purple light of early morning. She’d slept poorly the night before, the day’s events collecting into a ball of weariness that squatted in her stomach and refused to transmute to actual sleep for hours. When she finally had drowsed, she’d woken often.

  In time, she’d remembered the feel of Erik’s body atop hers, his cock deep inside her and his face as he lost himself in pleasure. That had helped—sensation, even remembered sensation, had been strong enough for a distraction—but facing him in the morning, across a circle in the sand, Toinette squirmed inside. Fun was fun, but finding its memory comforting was a step too far.

  “The hour of the Moon,” she said, “is too damned early.”

  “Have a word wi’ the spheres about it, then,” Erik said, his accent speaking of his own lack of sleep.

  Had matters been less urgent, Toinette would have suggested simply putting off the scrying for a while: the hour of the Moon came around a few times a day. She couldn’t have justified the delay in this case, though, not to herself and not to the men. There were few of them awake yet, but Samuel and John both sat watching nearby.

  “You take the shapes,” Erik said, passing her a thin pine branch. “I’ll write the letters, and the men can light the candles. Such as they are.”

  Artair’s training had involved lambskin, bronze, and beeswax candles. On the island, they had sticks and sand, with tapers of wine-soaked firewood and sailcloth as rough torches. In theory, Toinette thought, spells would work regardless. The right elemental correspondences were what mattered most, and the right inscriptions. She hoped most was enough, and also that Erik remembered the inscriptions.

  Yet the process came back to her as any childhood skill would. Walking slowly around, she drew the inner circle, then the five-pointed star, leaving herself in the middle. Samuel and John planted a torch at each compass point. The smell of burning began to fill the air.

  Erik chanted as he wrote the sigils, speaking the name of each. At first the words sounded normal; as he went on, they developed echoes that sounds shouldn’t have had on the beach. When he step
ped into the circle and wrote the last word, his voice was like a hum of bees.

  The lines in the sand slowly filled with blue light. That light rose up around them and then shifted, splitting into lines that reconfigured themselves, midair, to form a net. A word in ancient Aramaic from Toinette and Erik’s throats alike cast that net outward. It grew on the way, though the inner circle stayed around them.

  Through it, in a wall of images around her, Toinette saw the island flick by. She recognized the tall pines and the brush, even the burnt area where they’d found the plants, though it was all faintly blurred and colored with the more extreme shades of magic. The spell didn’t pause to look at the scenery: it sought, as a good hound might do. Magical power left her, a bit at a time, to form the “leash.”

  Then it stopped. Rather, it was stopped. A shock ran through Toinette. She remembered the feeling from falls in her youth. It reverberated up the lines of power and into her. She felt no pain, not exactly, but a momentary whirlwind of sensation. Darkness was part of it—so too was cold—and a thin, whining howl wormed through her mind.

  The spell tried to seek further, but to no avail. If there was a way around the thing blocking it, or a path through it, both required more strength than even she and Erik had together. Toinette raised her hands, drew her power back, and spoke the Latin words that would end the spell. After a syllable or two, she heard Erik join her.

  They collapsed as it faded, both of them dropping bonelessly to the sand. This was the bad side of magic, the aftermath that left the magician wearier than three days of fighting and sicker than three of drinking—although it was far from the worst. Toinette knew that, even as she struggled to make her stomach behave. Scrying spells usually didn’t backfire violently, from what Artair had told her, but she was glad not to have touched off one of those rare occasions.