by Bryn Colvin
His orgasm rocked through her, fierce and rewarding. She felt it almost as keenly as she might have done her own, but there was a safe distance with this and no need to give of herself. Liss had thought she wanted everything of him and to offer herself up entirely, but the years had left their marks and she had been closed to herself too long to become free so readily.
They sought rest in each other’s arms and Liss wondered if her lover appreciated the vast stretches of distance that still lay between them. Physically they might have returned to one another, but her soul still wandered, lost and troubled.
Chapter Three
It had been a long time since Liss had last woken to the sounds of a stirring camp. At first she thought herself a child once more, back in her father’s tent, waiting to hear if he had gone, already, or if the great man still lay in slumber. As her senses returned and she remembered herself, Liss had a moment of panic, thinking she was under attack. Gradually, full recollection conquered this fear. She lay still with her eyes closed, listening and wondering what sort of life this little community led. She thought about her coming to these companions of old and whether they would truly have a place for her. After so long alone, it would not be entirely easy to return to communal living and already she felt a hankering for her old freedoms. She was afraid, she realised and having thought everything lost once, she did not dare believe some of it might be returned to her. To lose her lover and what remained of her community for a second time would be beyond all endurance.
“Hey, Liss, are you awake? I’ve got some food for you.”
Arl’s voice seemed to come from a distant dream. She pulled the blankets across her chest and sat, pulling open the side of the tent to allow light and air in.
“I’m awake.”
The bowl in his hands steamed and in it was a dark mush she did not recognise.
“Moseley nuts and dried martas,” he said.
She took the bowl, scooping up a portion of the contents with her fingers. It tasted sweet.
“Thank you.”
“You seem real enough,” he observed. “I’ve dreamed of you appearing out of nowhere so many times, this morning I doubted it had happened.”
“I am here,” she replied, “although I’m not sure I believe it myself yet.”
Arl’s eyes showed signs of sympathy and care, which Liss found difficult.
“How did you manage to survive alone for so long?” he asked.
“By refusing to die. But I’ve not been alone. I travelled several seasons with a dozen Illyans and they taught me something of the forest.”
“I’ve heard of them: Fierce and wild.”
She laughed, “Oh, in some ways, but honest and true. Blood matters to them almost as much as it matters to us, but they were tolerant of me. I might have some of their bloodline.”
“You found your mother, then?”
“I will never know. I must put that behind me now.”
“Will you stay with us?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Then you’ll have to learn to live as we do. We don’t fight as much, although Dothrin is very keen that everyone should be able to fend for themselves. We live differently now.”
“How do you mean?”
“You remember when we were children, when we travelled the plains and the company would strip the land bare before it moved on?”
“I remember.”
“You can’t do that here.”
“Why not?”
“It’s hard to explain. Many of this company are like Dothrin; their mothers came from amongst the plains people or even from as far afield as these forests. They all know stories, tales and rumours—things passed down to them. I’ve learned a lot I didn’t know, about this land and its inhabitants. You cannot fight the forest. To fight the forest is to die. I’m not about to go against that.”
“The forest is strange,” she said, “like a living, breathing thing and, sometimes, when you walk alone, it’s as though you can almost hear its thoughts.”
“It is eerie.”
“There are places the Illyans won’t go, that they say are bad luck. And the dark roads…” she shivered, “to think I stood upon one once.”
Arl nodded.
“You mean those great banks, don’t you? I hadn’t heard them called that before. I wonder where they go.”
“You can feel their presence from a mile away.”
“Come,” he said, “would you hunt or forage?”
“I am too slow for hunting today, best forage I think.”
They walked together quietly for a while, scanning the ground for the large moseley nuts, with their fibrous husks. From time to time, Arl paused to leave little markers.
“I find I get lost too easily,” he said. “I’m not the only one who’s taken to doing this.”
“The forest consumes you,” she said, absently. “You can walk for hours in a straight line and come back to where you were, or stand on a peak one evening and on the next see it from so far away that you cannot believe you walked so far. It steals your reason after a while.”
Liss stopped then and looked up at the rustling canopy high above. Sunlight filtered down between the branches and she saw the large, blinking eyes of a small mammal before it darted out of sight. However strange and unruly it might be, the forest was also relentlessly beautiful. It called to her, tempting her to plunge into its overgrown depths and forget herself. It was a madness she had been fighting for a long time.
~*~
The tower stood on a high hill, surrounded by dense forest and dark skies. Liss found herself in the centre, looking at twelve stone figures that stood around the perimeter, all looking out towards the distant horizon. As she walked from figure to figure, Liss saw that some were perfectly carved, while others were little more than crude blocks of stone. In the dream she thought this seemed familiar and wondered if she had been to this place before. A figure of a woman, decked out in furs and skins, with feathers in her hair and something other than human in her features caught Liss’s eye. She stood before the statue, knowing she had stood here before, but recognising it for the first time. There were traces of Annis in that face and hints of a thousand other faces. The woman was Iylla, shape-shifting mother to the Illyan kith. Beside her stood a fair young woman with a longbow, then a hooded man, a wizened crone, a maidenly woman with a wistful face, a man who gazed up towards the stars. These, she thought, must be the other kith parents—Loric and Straif, Maisry, Silla and Tolth. She could not be sure which was which.
The next statue in the circle showed her a young man, his bearing regal, his body armoured. Liss was sure that last time she had seen this place, only six of the statues had resembled people, but here was a seventh, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Dothrin. On around the circle were five unidentifiable figures, some a little more clearly human than others.
“Where am I? What does this mean?” she asked, but the wind brought her no answers.
“Who I am doesn’t matter any more,” she thought. “That is what this means.”
Chapter Four
Dothrin watched his lover walk away from the camp and felt despair gnawing at his soul. The evening was drawing in and, behind him, the pleasant sounds of returning foragers and hunters filled the air. Things were going well for the company and he felt, more than ever, that the forest itself was welcoming them in, offering them its secrets and sheltering them. In the few days she had been with them, Liss remained a creature apart. She slept in his bed, but her eyes gazed out at a distant world that he could not see, haunted by memory and loss. He wondered if her years of hopeless wandering had wounded her mind beyond all healing. Instead of the proud, ambitious girl he had lost his heart to, he found an unfamiliar, isolated woman. She was more Ice now than ever she had been when her comrades laid that name upon her. He feared her leaving but knew that, if it was not in her heart to stay, there was precious little point trying to keep her. The forest called to her, he could see tha
t, called her away from the relative sanity of its borderlands and into its peculiar depths.
In a branch above Dothrin’s head, a trio of scarlet and purple lozzies sang down the sun, their voices melodious and enthralling. He wondered if he should let Liss vanish away or if he should try and find her and push through the barriers she had created around herself. He had never been a man to choose passivity, but he felt little hope of success as he followed the winding path between knotty root systems and moss-encrusted boulders.
Sitting with her back against a broad trunk of some mighty tree, Liss looked out into the forests beyond, her expression devoid of life. Dothrin squatted down at her side.
“If you want me to go away, you have but to ask,” he said.
When she said nothing, he found himself a seat on the soft plant-life and made himself comfortable.
“Liss”, he said, “I can’t take away the past for you, nor the pain of it. What I can tell you is this: there’s always the future you have not yet found and it’s not always the past that makes our way for us.”
She turned slowly, confusion creasing her brow as she blinked uncertainly at him.
“What did you say?”
“There’s always the future in front of you and you don’t have to be ruled by the past.”
“That wasn’t it. What you said before.”
They looked at each other in mutual incomprehension.
“It’s just, you reminded me of something.”
“What?”
“My coming of age vision. I am the future you have not yet found and proof that it is not always the past that makes our way for us. A half carved statue spoke those words to me in my coming of age vision.”
She remembered then that her latest dream had shown an additional statue who wore her lover’s face.
“This will be a kith group,” she said. “In years to come, they will remember you as a kith parent. I’ll expect they’ll call themselves Dothrinians or something like that.”
“You think so? You think we’ll become part of the forest people?”
“We already are, it’s in our blood. You just haven’t made a name for us yet.”
“What makes you so sure?”
She laughed quietly.
“I dreamed it.”
“Do all of your dreams bear fruit?”
“I don’t know yet.”
He stroked her cheek affectionately.
“You seem a little more like your old self.”
“Perhaps.”
“What was your vision? I am the future you have not yet found?”
Hearing those words from his lips sent a shiver down her spine.
“Yes,” she said, “maybe, yes.”
“What are you thinking, my Liss?”
“There is no going back, there are only what few of us remain. I’ll never know what happened at the tref, what became of my father. I’ll never know if Annis was truly my blood mother or just some cruel trickster. I can’t let that be all that I am.”
“Now you do sound like yourself.”
“Do I?”
“Most certainly.”
“I’m not sure who I am anymore.”
“You are Liss Crowfeather,” he said, reverentially, “daughter of Math Wolfstrong, lover of Dothrin Firehound.”
“Firehound? You never told me that before. It’s an odd choice.”
“I was going to be ‘wild horse’ until my coming of age day, but my vision showed me a pair of hounds running through a forest. They were white, like milk, I’ve never seen creatures like them. Their eyes were red and burned like fire, so I took my name for them. I’ve never much shared it.”
“There are such hounds,” Liss said thoughtfully, “Annis had a pair and I have seen others. The Illyans work with them, but they cannot be trained or taught. There are mysteries to those hounds that I don’t begin to understand.”
For a while, neither of them spoke, as both considered the implications of the visions they had seen on the brink of adulthood.
“We take our names before the visions,” Liss said.
“Oh. We did it the other way round. I suppose there was a reason.”
“We’ll never know that either, Dothrin.”
“I don’t know what we’ll do about those old practises. People like to mark important things, but I didn’t understand the half of the rites of passage and I don’t know how to make the drink that brings the visions, I don’t think anyone does.”
“We’ll have to find our own ways. Other people made up what my father did. We can make up our own things.”
“You aren’t thinking of leaving then?”
“I had thought about it.”
“Don’t,” he said, “I want you to stay with me.”
He reinforced this assertion with a kiss, trapping Liss against the bulk of the tree and drawing her tongue into his mouth. The force of his desire hit her like a blow, knocking the breath from her body and rendering her powerless. As the first rush of lustful insanity passed, her mind began to clear and she reached out, cupping his balls in one hand and reaching for his nipples with the other. For a while, they tried to work around each other’s clothing.
“We should go back to your tent,” she said.
Dothrin squinted up at the darkening sky.
“We’ve time enough, it won’t be fully dark for a while yet and there should be a moon up in a while. I think the little one will come first tonight, but I’m never sure.”
“She’s fickle, the little one, you never know where she will go. Do you want to make love to me under a fickle moon?” she teased.
“I’ll have you anywhere I can get you.”
Rising, Dothrin pulled off his tunic and removed his broad trousers. He stood for a while, towering over Liss as she sat beneath him, admiring the silhouette of his hardened manhood and the muscular splendour of his body. Liss stripped quickly, finding herself hungry for the touch of his hands and the warmth of his skin against hers.
The ground beneath them was softened by the riot of leafy plants and a sweet scent rose up from the crushed fronds as Dothrin rolled Liss onto her back and began to caress her breasts.
“Don’t tease me,” she said.
“What are you going to do about it?”
He pinned her arms with one hand and returned his attention to her nipples. Weariness and resignation had been her companions for so long that she had almost forgotten there were other ways of being. She bucked, pushing her chest into his face so that he lost his balance momentarily. That gave her all the time she needed to kick his feet out from under him and send him sprawling.
“That,” she said, as she sat on his back, “is what I’m going to do about it.”
It felt good to wrestle and fight with him. She had not remembered that—the pleasure of trading blows and sparring to see who would gain dominance. Fighting practise and sex play had run so easily into each other in the brief time they had been together. Dothrin made several attempts to roll. His weight was to his advantage and Liss had not practised in too long. She fell, laughing and cursing in the same breath.
“Now I’ve got you.”
He was on her in seconds and she felt the first thrust of his entry, filling her body with the sweet sense of him.
“I’m not going to stop until you come,” he said, “even if I have to stay here all night.”
She knew it would not take that long. At last the past seemed distant and ephemeral, allowing the present to finally become her focus. She could concentrate on living and being, surrendering herself utterly to the man she loved and letting him give her pleasure.
Liss lifted her hips to meet his, matching the rhythm of her responses to the insistent pounding of his sex into hers. It felt as though something was breaking inside her, something fragile but dangerously strong with it, like strands of spider webs. She opened her legs wider for him and stopped fighting. Closing her eyes, she let Dothrin carry her on a slow, unravelling journey out of pain and into
ecstasy. Warmth flowed through her—a deep and sensuous feeling. He licked at her nipples relentlessly, making her toes curl and her clitoris throb. It seemed as though some secret, inner part of her was unfurling like a flower, darkly seductive petals unfolding in response to him, yielding up the most tender and exquisite centre. She could picture his cock, lavishing itself upon the petals, rubbing between them and down into that fragrant, magical depth.
Orgasm took her with a force greater than any she had known before. Nothing in the world existed for her beyond her awareness of his glorious cock gushing its seed into the core of her being, then a wild pulse of sensation flowed out along her nerve endings, running from her cunt down to her toes and up to her fingertips, face and back. A second pulse came, then a third, each more fierce than the last, until she could hardly breathe or think.
Dothrin’s lips sought hers, his tongue sweet in its intrusion, grounding her awareness once more as her reeling senses began to recover from the ferocity of his passion. She held him close, needing the reassurance of feeling his skin under her hands and of holding him tightly. After a short while, he shifted to lie beside her, cradling her head against his chest and stroking his fingers up and down the length of her back.
Closing her eyes, Liss was still conscious of a flower form within her, a persistent dream that seemed reluctant to depart. It was closing now, as flowers tend to do at sunset. In her mind’s eye she watched the petals slowly curling in around the stem, then wither one by one and fall away, leaving a tiny seed at the centre. Basking in the afterglow of pleasure, it took her some time to grasp the significance. As though reading her thoughts, Dothrin said, “You do know how not to conceive, don’t you?”
“I do now.”
“Ah.”
“In hindsight it’s really obvious.”
There was a long silence.