by Willa Okati
“Ah.” Aleksi stroked Berin’s mouth. “Did you pierce them? Sink deep into their arses? Feel them tight and hot, squeezing you until you burst?”
Berin shook his head. “They — they wouldn’t let me,” he managed. “We went no further than this. Rubbing till we came. No more.”
“Have you dreamed of it? Ached to fill, or be filled? Feel the void inside you empty no more?”
Berin shut his eyes tight and whimpered. “Yes. By the gods, yes.”
“Will you let me teach you?”
Somehow, Berin managed to laugh. “Oh, aye. I’d kill you if you stopped now. Only one condition will I set.”
Aleksi tilted his head in curiosity. “Name it.”
“Tell me, afterwards. What happened to make you change so. What’s turned you from the man I dreamed of into a lover eager in my arms.”
“My word on it,” Aleksi said softly. “Now your word: will you trust me?”
“What?”
“Promise you’ll trust me.” Aleksi let his other hand wander down to Berin’s cock, giving it a squeeze, before traveling further, between the cleft of his arse. He searched for the tightly puckered hole and pressed against it. His own cock throbbed with glee as Berin let out a cry and arched upwards. When his finger penetrated to the first knuckle, Berin sobbed.
“Shall I?”
Berin shuddered hard. Aleksi thought he might come then and there, but Berin opened his eyes, wild and fever-bright. “More,” he whispered. “More, please, more.”
“On your back, then.” Berin blinked, but obeyed. Aleksi helped maneuver him into place in the furs. He allowed himself a moment’s regret. “Would that I had a better bed for this,” he said. “You deserve a soft bed and rich furs.”
“Aleksi?”
“Yes?”
“Shut up and fuck me.”
Aleksi laughed, loud and free. He lifted Berin’s lean legs, one in each hand, and slid them over his shoulder. “Relax as much as you can,” he whispered, reaching for a pot of snow-goose grease he had kept as a shameful secret beneath his bed, now to be used for a far better purpose. “Relax, and fly with me.”
Berin proved a better student yet at this part of making love. Responsive to the slightest touch, he writhed and cried out at each new sensation, from the slickness of the grease to Aleksi’s careful stretching, opening him wide enough to admit a cock. Peppering Berin’s chest with kisses in between, lapping up the dripping strands of seed that bubbled out with each pulse of excitement, Aleksi reduced the laughing, joking man to a bundle of frantic lust.
His own blood sang with the power. This — this was magic. Love-magic. The power of lust and desire. It healed, and made all things new.
“Open for me,” he whispered, lining the head of his cock up to Berin’s hole. “Breathe deep, and let me feel you from the inside.”
The sobbing, blissful wail Berin released as Aleksi drove deep went straight to his head. By the gods, he could not hold out long. Unable to speak, he gripped frantically at Berin’s arms, his waist, whatever he could touch, and felt Berin doing the same.
He thrust once, twice, and again. On the third stroke, with their lips locked in a desperate kiss, Aleksi’s body gave a mighty shudder. He exploded, pouring out the years of pain along with his seed. Berin cried out against Aleksi’s mouth, arching up. Warm wetness burst from his cock, slicking their bellies pressed so tightly together.
“Ah… ah… ah…” Aleksi could not tell if he or Berin managed the half-words. Did it matter? Kissing his new lover deeply one more time, he gently slid out of Berin’s hole in a wash of come and, heedless of the sticky mess, pulled and tugged him until they lay spooned tight together.
Slowly, slowly, racing breaths calmed into a ragged rhythm. Aleksi stroked Berin’s stomach soothingly, tracing paths through the wetness clinging there. To amuse himself, he drew a sigil he had learned long ago: mine.
Berin shivered. Then, true to his nature, he began to chuckle, then to laugh. “It goes to show you,” he said. “Life is a never-ending surprise. Eh?”
“I begin to see as much, now. Again.” Aleksi kissed the sweat-dampened curls on the back of Berin’s neck. “Sleep. There’ll be time for questions, and yes, answers, when we wake.”
Berin yawned. “Promise?” he asked, voice drowsy. He raised his hand and pressed it over Aleksi’s.
“My word,” Aleksi swore.
“Good,” Berin said. “S’good…”
Aleksi closed his eyes and looked inside his heart. The swirling maelstrom of misery that he had hugged tighter than any earthly passion had gone, vanished. Melted as snow in a flame. No magics coursed through his blood-stream, but something better, he thought. He did not have a name for it yet, but he thought he might as well call it life.
“My second chance,” he murmured. “My test. Have I passed?”
Somehow, he felt sure that he had. A Solstice miracle had been granted to the least deserving, a gift from the kindly ones. He lived again, and he believed once more.
He felt, deep in his heart, that the gods were smiling on him once again. That they had plans they would reveal in due time. A life that had been waiting to unfold for too many long and lonely years.
Well. He was ready, now.
“Solstice magic,” he whispered into Berin’s hair. “Thank you, my love.”
Berin murmured sleepily, a meaningless sound full of warmth and contentment that somehow managed to mean the world. Aleksi kissed him once again, and held him close, soaking up his warmth too long denied.
Together, they settled down to sleep away the Solstice morn. The beginning of a grand adventure.
And outside, far down in the village, revelers raised their voices in a song of praise to the gods for the start of a new year full of life.
Epilogue
Much had happened since the night of the Solstice. He and Berin had fucked through three days and three nights, stopping only for food and sleep. The wounds on Aleksi’s soul had faded away during that magical span of such deep connection, leaving only thin white scars. Marks denoting lessons learned.
No one came to bother them, not even Berin’s family who might have been worried. Aleksi laughed long and heartily when he made the connection as to why: he and his lover were spending the prescribed span of a honeymoon together.
When Aleksi teased Berin, Berin only grinned and said, “Well, I’d hoped for the best. Told folks if I didn’t come back straightaway with my tail between my legs not to hunt me down for at least a half-week. Lucky me, eh?”
“No,” Aleksi had said, drawing Berin in for a kiss. “Lucky me.”
At the end of the honeymoon three-day, the two men went down into Nayanka proper, hand in hand. Without many words, they came to the agreement that Aleksi would follow Berin, as Berin had once followed him with such devotion. No one made so much as a single comment to see Aleksi moving himself into Berin’s rooms above his workshop, and he received only nods and smiles when he ventured into the village for the first time. The two were a couple, wed properly in the eyes of the gods, and that satisfied the lot.
Slowly, slowly, Berin gently nudging him every step of the way, Aleksi began to involve himself in Nayanka’s doings. First by teaching Berin’s young cousin to read. Others came, adults and children alike, eager for the gift of letters and the magic of words. When Aleksi realized he had discovered a greater power than any ever promised to him in the Great Temple, he laughed and whirled Berin about in a mad dance.
Luckily, Berin didn’t mind Aleksi’s whimsies, but gloried in them. They whirled and spun down the main street of Nayanka to the laughter and applause of the villagers, and finished with a deep, heated kiss beneath the arch of the city gates.
It was then Aleksi decided he would seek out his own spells and work the magics he found himself capable of. Each day, it seemed, he discovered something new or re-learned an old trick to put to good use. He planted herbs during the growing season, dared to pray for their health, and harves
ted a goodly crop that would give Nayanka medicine all through the coming months of snow. He began holding small services in the inn for those who cared to hear old stories of the gods, and found there to be more power in simple fables than the most eloquent of discourses he had once been so proud of creating.
More, he found himself asked to perform weddings, and once the babies began arriving for the year, ran around busy as the midwives. The gods had been rich in their blessings, indeed, and showered them down on Aleksi as well.
Beneath their kindly hands, his curse lifted, his magic growing like a strong young rose from a withered husk, Aleksi flowered back into life.
“Are you happy?” Berin asked him one evening, as they sat before a blazing fire. Their hands roved lazily over each other, warming up to anticipated lovemaking, but content to pet and caress for a little while yet. He kissed Aleksi’s temple, then bit playfully at his earlobe. “Content to be a carpenter’s wife?”
Aleksi laughed — ah, how good it felt! — and jostled Berin. “Here, now. I’m no wife. You’re the lady in this match.”
“Lady, am I?”
“Oh, yes. Dainty as a china doll, with your curls and eyes and —”
“Dainty? Why, you — oh, you’ll pay for that, you will —” Berin pounced Aleksi and rolled him over into the furs, where soon all talking and joking was forgotten for the sake of probing tongues, clutching hands, and eager cocks rubbing hard against muscled bellies until they came in a cloud of glory.
When Berin fell asleep, Aleksi lay awake a bit. Thinking. So much had been given to him as reward for trusting the gods. His curse had been broken, not in the way he had yearned for, bringing him glory and honor, but better: love, acceptance, and friendship.
“I thank you, kindly ones,” Aleksi whispered against the top of Berin’s head, soft, so as not to wake his drowsing mate. “You have given me so much, when I had rejected you. My life is new. I am new.”
He heard a peal of laughter, echoing as if coming either from very far away, or inside his own mind. “Beloved son,” spoke the tenor voice he remembered so well. “We only opened a door. It was you who walked through it, who found love, and found life again. You honor us with the magics you invent. The time of the High Temple is drawing to a close, and it is men like you who will see us honored into the future.”
Aleksi’s hair ruffled as if invisible fingers combed through it. “The curse was only ever a blessing in disguise,” the voice said. “The trials but a test. You have passed, faithful servant, and pleased us well.”
A great weariness, peaceful and warm, settled over Aleksi like a cloak of finest fur. “Sleep now, in the arms of your mate,” the voice crooned. “Know I am with you always.”
“Will we — will we meet again?” Aleksi asked, struggling to keep his heavy eyelids open. “What is your name?”
The voice chuckled. “My name is whatever you wish it to be, and yes, we will meet again. This Solstice, and each one ever after. For you will keep it in my honor, and so will Nayanka, and thus there will be magic from age unto age.”
“I will craft a spell in your honor…” Aleksi yawned.
“I need no magics but love,” the voice said. “Love, and teach others to love as well.”
“Aye.” Aleksi tucked his cheek against Berin’s messy hair. “Thank you, my mother.”
The voice, slightly feminine now, laughed. “You are welcome, my son. Now, sleep. Sleep, and wake, and live and love.”
“Amen,” Aleksi said, drifting off to sleep. “Amen…”
* * *
And that, my children, is how the blessing of the All-Goddess, the Kindly Lady of the Solstice, came to favor our small village over the holiest of temples. That is the story of Saint Aleksi and his mate Berin, to whom we pray.
Now go forth, and sup your Solstice ale in all their honors. Ho-la! Ho-la! Joyous Solstice to all forevermore!
The End
Willa Okati
Willa Okati has far too many ideas for her own good, but is having the time of her life writing them all down. She has a very patient husband who puts up with seeing his wife pounding on the keyboard at 5 a.m., a hard-used coffee pot that she calls her best friend, and cats who think she’s quite insane, but as long as she feeds them, will put up with anything. She adores anything that goes bump in the night, especially if it lands in the bed.
Willa loves to hear from readers. You can reach her at [email protected] or visit her website for more information, excerpts, and links to other books at www.willsheornillshe.com.