by J. M. Frey
“Forsyth,” she pants in reply. “Holy—ffuh!—yes, Forsyth. God, c’mon, move. Take me, take it, take it, take it! C’mon!” she moans, and then sighs in pleasure as I pitch us both forward. She lands on her back on the bed, raising her legs to hook her ankles against my spine. “Come on, fuck me.”
I do not need be told a second time. I withdraw just enough to tease the folds of her with my head, and then I drive back in, decisive, an opening parry that has her arching up off the bed to return the volley.
“Yes, right there, right there,” she pants, urging me to move, and I begin thrusting in earnest.
Her moans get higher, breathier with each slam of my hips against hers, and I take the opportunity to explore her breasts with my mouth, careful not to bash my nose against her ribs. This leaves her writhing and red-faced.
Pip’s hands curl against my neck and the small of my back, nails digging in, leaving marks that will hurt in the morning, rubbing against my collar and the back of my saddle, and it is delicious. It’s a struggle to lift my head far enough to look at Pip, to just drink her in. She is flush and gleaming with sweat, rosy and soft and shaking and wonderful, tensing and relaxing by turns, growing tighter with each thrust, straining, reaching for her own climax.
Pip looks helpless with her own need, fighting it as much as she is striving toward it, tears in her eyes as she tries to make it last, writhing against the cheap mattress like a sacrifice on a marble altar. Her throat is bared like a flag, flying an invitation to debauched battle.
Sweat drips from my eyelashes to roll down between Pip’s breasts. At least, I think it’s sweat. I don’t think I can spare the breath to cry, though I can feel sobs pooling at the back of my throat, pleasure and joy and gratitude and something else, something so much more trying to get out, to be said, to be shared and understood. It’s beyond bearing, the feeling of our bodies juddering together, hardly able to breathe. I reach out to sweep away the tendrils of hair that stick to Pip’s cheek, brushing them away from the bruise I left on her throat, wanting to watch as it gets darker, redder as she gets closer. The hair clings to my hand, tiny begging tongues of silk, and with a shuddering cry, I am dragged under by the first convulsions of orgasm.
Pip follows me quite soon after, and I collapse to the side, skin alight with sensation and sweat; I haven’t even withdrawn from her body. The way she turns into me, eyes closed and lips curled in satisfaction, makes me think that she does not plan on letting me go anytime soon. I am quite all right with that. I would like to stay here, buried inside her, protected and wanted, trapped in the cage of her limbs, a willing prisoner to her pleasure, until I grow hard and insistent again.
Pip smells like apples and leather and effort. She tastes like salt and sex and cider. She’s warm and heavy, smooth and sweaty and earthy, real in a way that I’m not sure I’ve ever entirely believed in before. She is a Reader. She is a creature from beyond the veil of the skies, and yet she is here, curled against me, holding me. I can feel the ebb and flow of her breathing as it slows, the patter of her heart returning to a more normal rate in counterpoint against my own, and the idea of ever letting go of her is such a physical pain that I shove all thoughts aside and pull her closer, ignoring the stickiness of our combined efforts.
Instead, I lift my head to nuzzle, seeking Pip’s lips mainly by feel, wanting to kiss her until we forget how to breathe by ourselves, forget that we were ever once two separate people.
“Well, and a good morning to you, too, Master Turn,” Pip sighs contentedly against my mouth.
Twelve
Four days later finds us standing at the edge of a sheer waterfall, Pip pouting over the rim at the impossible drop. “Some goddamned Yellow Brick Road this has turned out to be! There’s gotta be a way down,” Pip says.
“Yes, there is,” I repeat, exasperated and still pointing eastward, the map half unfolded and dangling from my hand like a banner. “Two days’ ride that way.”
“I mean here.”
“And even if we could climb, what of the horses?” I ask. “Dauntless might find his way down to us, but I doubt Karl is well-behaved enough to follow him.”
“Well, we’ll have to come back up for them, then.”
Her hands are on her hips, her chin thrust out, jaw clenched, and, in that moment, I wish she were a man, wish she were Pointe, so I could just punch her and be done with the argument. Though, I’ve never actually punched Pointe, either. Infuriating, infuriating woman! Instead, I say, “Pip, you’re being ridiculous.”
“Am I?” she seethes. “Fine, fine!” She casts around for a moment, clearly looking for another argument or some way of convincing me. In the end, she just drops Karl’s reins, making it clear that she has no plans to remount. He takes this as his permission to wander over to a bit of scrub and start nosing at the summer grass, and Dauntless strains against my hold to join him, jealous. I let go, as well, and simply glare at Pip.
“Why are you making an issue of this? It’s only two days. That will still leave us forty days to finish the quest.”
“Because we are here, now,” Pip insists. “Who knows what we’ll run into between the cave and whatever lies on that path. The cave’s right below us, and it seems stupid to go all the way around!”
There is something in her voice, in the insistence of her words, in the way she refuses to budge from the lip of the river, that makes me pause. Her feet are planted, heels dug in, as if she is resisting some unseen force trying to press her backward. Her fists are clenched, firmly held away from the sword at her belt. Something is very wrong.
“Pip,” I say slowly. “What is it really that has you so upset?”
Her eyes flash to the east, where the path I prefer continues along the slate-rock edge of the cliff, squeezed between the brambles of the dim forest and the open air. Perhaps I am mistaken, but an expression of utter terror seems to flit across her face—just a glimpse—before she screws her eyes shut and shakes her head hard, as if trying to dislodge something tangled in her hair.
“Nothing,” she says, but the word comes out strangled. She raises her hands to her throat, tugging at the collar of her shirt, as if it is choking her, and coughs once. When she speaks again, her voice is normal, if filled with annoyance. “I just don’t want to waste any time.”
“Pip, what’s wrong?” I take a step forward, hands raised with the intent of checking her throat, making sure some magical creature hasn’t lodged itself against her skin, but she steps away. Alarmingly, it is backward, closer to the lip of the cliff, as if threatening to jump if I lay hands on her. I freeze immediately.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she lies. She stares at me with such desperation in her eyes that I fear I have missed something vital. With a flash of annoyance, I realize that my brother had been correct; Pip’s eyes do shine emerald in the sunlight. “Just. Just, please, can we try to find a way down here?”
“Yes,” I say, immediately, hands out and palms up, begging her not to take another step toward the roaring water. “Yes, of course. As you wish.”
“‘As you wish,’” she sighs back to me, and takes two giant steps forward, eating up the gravelly ground between us, flinging herself into my arms. “Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome, Pip,” I say. “Although, I must say, I’m confused as to why this is an issue at all. What is happening with—”
I am interrupted with a kiss that is passionate and just as desperate as the look on her face was earlier. She begs, with every thrust of her tongue, with every inch of her pressed against me, for me not to complete my question. Not to ask it at all, in the first place.
“Okay,” I whisper into her mouth as we part for breath. “Okay. Okay, I understand.”
“Thank you,” she whispers back. She unwinds her arms from around my shoulders, steps past me, and goes to fuss with Karl’s bridle, clearly attempting to end our conversation.
I am unsure how to feel about it. Pip has been, by turns, sullen and thoughtful, and t
hen gleefully affectionate. She does not regret our encounter it seems, and has, in fact, demanded an encore every night since. And yet, there is something . . . regretful about her, something contemplative and perhaps guilty which hangs in the air around her when we ride. When we talk, she is filled with happiness and the desire to connect. But when she thinks I am not looking, she is sad.
I am reminded, sharply, of the times I caught her crying in Turn Hall. I thought it was loneliness then, or a yearning for home and hearth, but now, I’m uncertain. This new sadness might be the same as the old one. At first, I thought it might have been a result of our intimacy—regret, mixed with uncertainty and the joy of our coupling. The demand for more kept me on the back foot, as it were, and so I wait each night for Pip to initiate. She has, inevitably, and it has been marvelous, but still the sadness lingers.
Is it something I have done? Something I have not done, or am not doing correctly? I am very new to lovemaking; perhaps I am missing something. But Pip is coming to her climax each time—and truthfully, as far as I can tell—leaving her grinning and lax with satisfaction.
So what is the problem?
I suggested we begin her sword lessons last night, during the portion of the evening Pip lovingly called the “afterglow pillow talks” (even though I reminded her that neither of us were resting our heads on pillows, per se), and even that had not cheered her. And yet, this morning, when I spent the hour it took for breakfast to cook over the fire showing her how she ought to grip her sword, and the beginning of her stance training, she was giddy with happiness.
“This is going to be so useful!” she had crowed. “I can’t wait to hack at something.”
“We shall have to get you armor if you plan to go about hacking things,” I’d said.
“No steel bikinis,” Pip had rejoined immediately, chuckling. “Those are useless—they actually deflect the blade toward the heart, if there’s only a metal cup molded around each boob.”
“Steel bikini? What’s a ‘bikini’?” I had asked, and couldn’t help but become amorous when she described the standard armor for women in her land. “Worse than useless, and uncomfortable to boot, I’d imagine,” I had agreed with her. “But an attractive fantasy.”
She had begun to reply, a joke on her lips, I could tell. But then she had clutched her throat again and turned away, sheathing her sword. “Enough practice,” she’d said. “Let’s eat.”
“But you haven’t learned to—”
“Enough.”
“Very well,” I had sighed. And now, comparing that behavior to this new insistence that we not go east, and an even greater insistence that we do not speak of it . . . even to the point of, well, not threatening to throw herself off the side of the waterfall, but implying . . .
Every time we broach a topic that she is uncomfortable with, she clutches at her throat. Yet I see nothing there that could possibly choke her.
Pip’s behavior is becoming increasingly frustrating and erratic, and I fear that Kintyre may be right—women become irrational the moment you bed them. Then, of course, I must admit that it is Kintyre who gave that advice, and I cannot expect that much of what he says is viable.
But how else am I to account for Pip’s behavior?
And what else can I do, for now, but watch? I dare not bring it up again, not after she stepped toward that water, not after the way my heart had leapt up into my throat. Keeping my lips shut around my concerns, I join Pip at the horses. She is running her fingers over Karl’s bit guard, over and over again, thoughtful.
“Does it hurt him?” she asks, when I get close. “I mean, in his mouth? To be controlled like that?”
“No,” I say. “Not if it fits properly, which, if you see here . . . see this gap and how this sits just flush, here? It’s fine. He has probably forgotten it’s even there.”
“Forgotten,” Pip muses. “That might be nice. To forget.”
She rubs the back of her neck this time, fingers brushing over the small ivy leaf scar, palm against the love bite I put there four nights ago and have renewed every night since. Does she not like it? Is it that which she is hoping to forget?
Blast! All this second guessing has me turned around like a will-o-the-wisp.
She shivers once, eyes fluttering, and then galvanizes herself. “Right. Rope, water, some nibbles . . . gloves? Yes, gloves. What else do you think we’ll need?”
“Swords,” I say. “The legend of the cave is murky and old, at best, and I don’t know which version to believe. Enchanting sylph, angry sea-witch, a sea serpent’s long-held princess, the ghost of a captain’s wife waiting for her husband to return from sea? Take your pick, the Salt Crystal Caverns have been haunted by every kind of water-ly thing, if you go back far enough in the stories.”
Pip retrieves the Excel from her saddlebag and lays it down on the grass, where Karl and Dauntless can neither nose at it nor step on it. “But all of them female,” she says. “Which means, for Reed, that this is probably going to be some sort of word puzzle. A riddle, or a question we have to answer, or maybe we’ll have to track down information in exchange for the Cup that Never Runs Dry. Or sex.”
She wrinkles her nose. I try very hard not to find her distaste adorable.
“If I ever meet Elgar Reed,” she mutters darkly as she unhooks her water skin from the side of her saddlebag, “I am totally going to make him wear a steel bikini; I swear it. The one from the Boris Vallejo rip-off cover fan-art.”
She turns to fill the skin at the river, and my heart hammers against my larynx. I lunge for the skin and whip it from her hand. “I’ll do that!” I squeak, and then I grimace at how desperate it sounds. “I mean, I’ll fill the skins. Can you pack up some of the travel biscuit?”
Before she can answer, I am halfway to the riverbank, both of our skins clutched in my hands. By the Writer, what is wrong with me? Why am I so panicked?
I take my time filling the skins, looking over my shoulder at Pip as she fixes a small bag of travel rations—biscuits, apples, jerky—and then begins to coil a rope for transport. That done, she rises and looks around for more to do, deciding, apparently, to try to find somewhere to tie up the horses. She takes Karl by the bridle and gently guides him further away from the river, to the line of trees where the giant gray stone slates of the bank begin to give way to scrub grass and then, finally, to thin, malnourished trees.
I don’t like Pip out of my line of sight. I try to pretend that it is because I am madly in love with her and I want her beside me always. But in reality . . . no, I dare not even think what I fear in reality. When she is gone for longer than I expect, the uneasiness blooms into small terror. She’s in the forest. She’s in the forest alone, and I cannot see her. I don’t know these forests. They’re not like the ones at home, where the most harmful thing is a querulous gnome or fox, or a particularly stubborn unicorn.
What if there are ogres in this forest? What if there are wood elves? Dear Writer, everyone knows what wood elves like to do with pretty humans. . .
And then, suddenly, I realize why my skin is crawling and I cannot seem to calm my nerves; it feels like we’re being watched.
“Pip!” I catch myself blurting and snap my teeth closed around the rest of what I was going to say before it can rush out and embarrass us both.
I cap the skins and rush into the forest through the same gap she took. I crash my way through a thicket of undergrowth, tripping on the snarled roots, shoving aside thorny branches, and stumble out into a clearing. There are red scratches on my hands, snares in the sleeves of my traveling robe, but Karl’s flanks and Pip’s hands are fine. They must have found a way around the brier. They are standing on the far edge, near a trickle of a stream, both looking up at something in the canopy.
“Pip!” I call again, and she turns to face me, confusion on her face. Karl nickers.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
I lean against one of the trees in the clearing, panting with relief. “Nothing,” I say.
“I just . . . didn’t know where you’d gone.”
Her eyebrows crumple, and she makes another aborted gesture toward her throat; how can I not have noticed before how often she does so? What has happened to my vaunted powers of observation, the skillful glances of the spymaster, since Pip has come into my life? Or is she merely my one blind spot, where everything she does and says is cataloged but found to be so full of conflicting messages that I cannot parse her?
The feeling of being watched surges, and Pip turns her face back to the branches. “Sorry,” she says to the air, “you were saying?”
“Humph!” a voice croaks from above, sounding so much like the disgruntled caw of a farm bird that it takes me a moment to realize that there are actually words amid the squawks. “Rude. I says, yeah, there’s a way down, but you gotta know where to start, dear, you do, you do.”
Oh, no. A riddling raven. Really? This sort of irritation is the last thing we need right now. The blasted things talk at you for hours, promising answers and never giving them. Sometimes, they even work in tandem with hungry bears, making sure their sentient prey is kept immobile long enough to be made into a meal, the scraps left over for the raven itself.
“And do you know where this starting point is?” Pip asks.
“I do, I says, I do! There’s a stair, there is. I says there is!”
“Oh, don’t encourage the blasted thing,” I say, crossing the glade to stand beside her. I look up, and a massive, inky raven looks back, cocking one glass eye at me.
“Rude!” it caws again. “Rude man, rude!”
“What’s rude is to answer questions with questions, and to take up our time. You probably don’t even know where the best place to start the descent is.”
“I do, rude man, I do! I says!” the raven protests.
“Don’t get it worked up,” Pip hisses at me. “If it gets in a flap, we won’t get anything useful out of it.”
“You won’t get anything useful out of it, anyway.” I grab her hand; she splays her fingers and entwines them possessively with mine. Something tight and miserable within me loosens to be so welcomed, even after our quarrel.