The Stone in the Skull

by Elizabeth Bear

  There were no nuns in the filigreed passages between the walls. No shuffling cloistered footsteps. No murmur of hummed prayer and song.

  The queen really was alone. Not just presenting him with the appearance of intimacy. She had made herself utterly and completely alone.

  Except for the Dead Man.

  It was unprecedented. The Dead Man’s experience of royalty was extensive, and stretched over dozens of cities and half the wide, long world. He had never seen a duchess, much less a queen, alone in a room before.

  She looked at him with concern. Standing, she was even a little taller than he: she was stately, and he was not tall.

  He didn’t mind.

  It was an expression of trust that took his breath away. He felt something in his breast that had hung loose since he became a wolf’s-head, a masterless man, swing into place and lock tight like the clasp of the box that was his heart. He was her animal now, and as he felt it he rejoiced in it. Service had won him back, and while he knew there would be doubts and discomfort later, for now there was only poignant comfort.

  He was home.

  “I just understood something,” he said. It was all he could make himself admit right now. He gestured to the space. “The walls aren’t pierced with passages.”

  “This room lets me think.” She smiled. “Everyone needs some kind of sanctuary.”

  She sank down again on the cushions and patted one near her. “There,” she said. “I am seated, Dead Man. You may be seated, too. Would you care for tea?”

  He sank down—not in the place right beside her that she had touched, because being in the place where her hand had stroked seemed at that moment unbearably intimate. But lower down on the heap of cushions, so that his head was closer in level to the queen’s shoulder. His knees were even with her feet.

  “Yes,” he said, “I would like some tea.”

  The patterned shawl had fallen away from her feet, which were bare. Her toes seemed to him remarkable, and not just because the nails had been painted the color of mother-of-pearl. Where did one get such lacquer? he wondered. What Wizard’s art was involved? Was it costly?

  Of course it was costly if it adorned a queen. Like the clinging fabric. Like whatever oil scented her hair, intoxicating and redolent of nutmeg. He stretched out his legs and leaned back, on the theory that if he pretended to be more comfortable than he was he might trick himself into feeling more comfortable than he was.

  She said, “You have traveled far.”

  He nodded.

  “Is there someone at home?”

  “There is no home,” he answered, surprised by his own honesty. “When there was … my home was as much someone as it was someplace.” He had been looking at her hands, which were shapely and strong, unencumbered by rings or fingerstalls. Her only jewelry was the snake torc around her neck and the simple gold rings in her pierced nose and ears.

  She said, “The blade is an icy finger beneath the ribcage, groping for the heart.”

  He recognized it: the translation of a famous line of poetry, by a poetess of his own people from several generations before. The poem was about history, and heartbreak, and how they were not that different.

  “Tell me what you have decided about the battle,” he said at last, for something to say. A topic that did not feel like a knife edge. And what she had said she brought him here for, after all.

  She leaned forward. She lifted a wand—a long piece of cane—from the landslide of upholstery and used it to tap a blown-glass stallion gently on the withers. “So this was Kithara Raja’s light horse, which he managed to station uphill of the battle by dint of having possession of the ground before the enemy arrived.”

  “An advantageous position.”

  A lock of hair had gotten loose from her braid. She smiled behind it, glancing at him sideways. “One would think. And the raja did. And so did his generals, and the generals of his enemy.”

  “Who was the defender?”

  “Kithara Raja,” she said, her tone suggesting she was slightly astonished he did not know.

  “Your history is as obscure to me as mine is to you,” he told her gently. “I can discourse for hours on the First, Second, and Fourth Battles of Aheera. Have you heard of them?”

  Her brow knitted. “What happened to the Third one?”

  He shrugged. “No record survives.”

  That made her laugh aloud—a quick delighted sound very unlike her queenly chuckle. She seemed so young without her paint and performances. He swallowed the unsettling realization that if his daughter had lived, his daughter would be older than this queen.

  “Must have been quite the battle.”

  He nodded. “Not a complete massacre on both sides, but none of the officers survived. Or if they did survive, they deserted, and never after admitted having been there. But you were telling me something unexpected about Kithara Raja’s light horse. What was the name of his attacker?”

  “He was a foreign prince,” she said dismissively. “A reaver from one of the horse clans.”

  Her voice held nothing but scorn for the barbarian. The Dead Man felt his lips twitch. How easily he recognized his own youthful opinions on her lips. Even as he knew her provincialism for naiveté, it filled him with a sense of kinship to her.

  “So how did he defeat Kithara Raja, when Kithara Raja had the advantage of terrain?”

  She smiled. “He used an illusionist to conjure up the appearance of reinforcing troops, and he arrayed the phantasms among his own men so that one could not tell that they left no footstep and raised no dust. Of course, Anuraja knows the history as well as I do—”

  She was brilliant and beautiful and soft, and another lock of hair was sliding from her braid even now. She turned away and said, “Syama, go to sleep now.”

  The bear-dog lowered her watchful head to her paws and sighed.

  The Dead Man unhooked a brooch and dropped the veil from across his face. And while she was staring at him in wonder, considering his features as intently as if she had never seen a nose or lips before—he moved to kiss her.

  Softly, as was appropriate for a first kiss. No passionate clinch that she would have to struggle to escape, but just the fingertips of one hand resting on her shoulder to steady them both. He looked her in the eye as he bent close, noticing for the first time the flecks of amber and green catching light in their coffee depths.

  She leaned toward him.

  Their lips brushed.

  Her breath came in sharply. Not a gasp, and not a sound, precisely. She didn’t pull away, though, and when he laid his other hand against her cheek she nestled into the touch like a stroked cat. After a moment, she leaned in and began to kiss him back.

  It was a dance, and they took turns leading. Her breath grew ragged, but no more ragged than his. Now she made a sound—a little, eager moan.

  He raised his hand and cupped the outside curve of her breast, so small and so heavy through the softness of the woolen drape. She pushed against him, and he ran his hand down the length of her waist to her hip. Only now, as she leaned into him, did he allow himself to curve his fingers into the softness of her flesh under the softness of her garment, and pull her closer still.

  She placed her hands against his chest and pushed him back quite suddenly.

  He did not resist. He went where she willed, even if it was away. “Mrithuri,” he said, daring greatly to speak her name. More greatly, he thought, than when he had kissed her.

  Her eyes were dilated, the lashes damp. She drew a flustered breath.

  “I cannot,” Mrithuri said. “I—I can be rajni in my own right only because I am a virgin. We would be found out. This is a palace. And I cannot—I cannot—get with child.”

  “Oh dear girl,” the Dead Man said. “Who told you that all there was to love was that? Let me show you how we worship where I’m from.”

  He waited. She shivered, her cheek satiny against his fingertips that were roughened by cold and swordplay. Her life hadn’t
been any easier than his, however. He could sense the steel in her, work-hardened and also brittle.

  “I was nine when my father was assassinated,” she said. She met his eyes, her own seeming transparent despite the darkness of them. “Nine years old when I became my grandfather’s heir. For a decade I was nothing but, and now for half that time I have played the role of raja and rajni both. I was raised to this. Honed to it. I do not know how to be anything but a rajni.”

  “Then decide as a rajni,” he said.

  She pondered that for a long-enough time to seem an eternity to his passion-addled senses, though it was probably only moments. Then her lips curved and she lifted her chin.

  “Attend me,” she commanded.

  He kissed her neck, and the soft skin behind her ear that smelled spicy, woody, resinous, heavily sweet. Her hair was dressed in some oil scented with dragon’s-blood resin and vanilla, he deduced. It made the inside of his nose itch slightly, but the intake of her breath and the way she arched her neck to give him more of her skin made him stay, and nuzzle, and nip. He nibbled the lobe of her ear, flirted it with the tip of his tongue, a little promise of his intentions if she had been sophisticated enough to read it. She responded with an artless gasp and a shudder that made him swell in anticipation. He made an appreciative noise of his own when she took advantage of his pause for breath to reciprocate, hesitantly, kissing the line behind the hinge of his jaw where his beard faded into naked skin. She was cautious but not clumsy, and he smiled as he thought of the future.

  She let him open the soft wool robe. It slipped away from her torso, draping back from the sleeves and leaving bare her body. She was skinny, her ribs a strangeness against the palm of his hand as he smoothed her garment aside. Her small breasts were sandy brown, and nipples soft as silk and dark as saddle leather tensed against the hollow of his palm. All along her left side ran rows of tiny, paired marks—a few scabbed sores, some concave and shiny and pink, the vast majority white starbursts like tiny pinpricks in her skin. Scars, obviously: some recent, some old.

  He brushed the tip of her nearer breast with a closed mouth. When she arched, he murmured, “So many hurts,” and kissed one of those. He let her feel his breath. She stiffened in a way that made him wonder if it had been a mistake, and put her hands into his hair.

  “Shall I stop?”

  But her fingertips curled against his scalp, and she exerted her untrained strength to hold him where he was. So he remained, and let her press his face into the ridged striations of scarred velvet skin stretched over her ribs.

  He breathed and let her hold him. At length, she spoke.

  “It is the snakebite. They’re a thing of Ancient Erem. But not poisonous. Or rather—poisonous. But not very. And in small doses, the poison clears your mind. Makes your thoughts fly like quarrels from the crossbow, swift and straight.” Her tapered fingertips touched the white stars that stippled the sugar-brown outer edge of her breast, her ribs.

  She set him back with her fingertips and he went at the gentlest pressure. But though his heart ached with loss for a moment, he realized quickly that she did not seem to be refusing him. She hooked her thumbs, instead, into the waistband of the white wool trousers and skinned them down. He caught a glimpse of the hollow of her inner thigh, the tight dark curls of her delta as she drew up her knees, kicked the trousers off her feet with one mermaid gesture.

  She half-turned, showing the angle of hip bone, the outer shape of her hip and thigh. She was so thin it didn’t curve, exactly. More pale paired dots outlined her hip, her thigh. She had left the dip of waist, which would be left uncovered by a blouse and drape, unscarred.

  She said, “I started using the snakebite when I was made heir. It made my mind more … adult.”

  The scars were like flour dotted on the brown surface of a bun, like the speckles on the flank of a sun-warmed lizard. He passed his hand over them, imagining that if his own skin were not so rough with care and work and war and itinerancy he might feel them as tiny dimples, or as rough spots that might catch.

  “I wish things had been different for you,” he said.

  She startled, eyes widening, then sighed and smiled. Whatever she had been about to say—by her half-raised hand, a similar gentle wish for impossible clemency from the dead past—failed in her mouth. She swallowed it and said, instead, “We can’t go back there. We can only go forward. Picking scabs only makes the scab bleed, and scar more heavily in the end.”

  She was right. Such wisdom from a young queen. But her rightness only served to fan the spark of melancholy that flared in him.

  Well, if nothing else, perhaps he could extinguish it in her body.

  “Lie back, my queen,” he murmured. “If you will.”

  She caught his eye and frowned, but did so, reclining on the cushions in the embrace of her open robe. She seemed unselfconscious in her nakedness—royalty were accustomed to having people around them in every state of undress, after all. But when he paused for a moment to appreciate her, a tiny line drew itself between her eyebrows. She said, “Is something wrong?”

  “No, my queen,” he answered. “You are lovely.”

  He leaned over her and kissed her mouth again, a gesture she returned hungrily. The faintest taste of honey lingered on her tongue from some sweetmeat she had consumed before he entered the room. When he broke the kiss, she quested after him, and he let her catch him for a moment before leaning back.

  He divested himself of the discommoded veil, of the old red coat—he stroked it as he laid it aside—of his shirt, and his boots, and his socks, and his trousers. He knew she was watching, and took his time so her eyes could linger.

  His body was worn, and marked with combat and privation. He trusted her to accept him for who he was, if he was who she wanted, and to see the kinship in the scars each of them bore. When he’d laid his clothes aside he came back to her—she had come up on her elbows to watch him—and kissed her again while she leaned up and ran one soft hand over him, tracing and exploring.

  “You’re like wire,” she said. “Like those statues they make of twisted wire, every fiber like a muscle. You should eat more.”

  The last, with childlike sincerity, made him laugh out loud and stroke her spine, like a string of cut jewels under her skin. “You should eat more. I have been hiking through the mountains for more than a season.”

  She let her hand drop lower, and rested her fingertips against his shaft. Though he had roused already, he felt himself stir more, and watched her eyes widen. “Like silk,” she said.

  He stroked a wayward lock of her hair. “This is not like silk,” he said. “It is coarse and shining, like the glossy mane of a strong mare.”

  Her hand closed around his shaft—still hesitant. He smiled at her. “A man doesn’t mind a firm grip,” he said. She gave him a little, exploratory squeeze. “As long as it’s not too firm. Gentle with the jewels, though.”

  She laughed. “I know that one.”

  He ran a hand down her belly and cupped his fingers and palm against her sex. She was warm, but closed tight as a flower-bud, and though sweat from the hot damp wet her body, only a little slickness wet his fingertips.

  That was fine. If this was to be his only opportunity to touch her, he thought he might enjoy taking as much time as she seemed to want. He pressed gently, dipped his head, and applied his tongue in arcs and swirls along her collarbone, down her breast, to her nipple. He suckled lightly, and when she seemed to want more pressure, he offered it. She gasped and arched up to him, her thighs parting, and he felt the first yielding of her sex.

  He pressed the heel of his hand against her mound, letting her feel his teeth but only just. She whimpered, teeth stretching her lip, eyelashes fluttering. He slid his other hand beneath her ass to support and lift her while he made slow firm circles against her with the first. Her hands were fists now, her forearms pressing down against the cushions and the robe that trapped her shoulders as she lifted herself to him. Her breath, too,
was coming faster. He watched the tendons in her throat tense as she turned her head to the side.

  When she opened, slick and soft at last, he waited still. Waited until she pushed herself insistently against his touch, hips jerking sharply to create friction. Waited until he could slip one finger gently between her petals and feel the wetness flow. He touched her entrance lightly, but did not press against it. She was so wet now that his finger might have eased inside without effort, and he was determined to obey her taboos.

  Instead, he slid his hand up until he found the long bud at the heart of her flower, and stroked it softly.

  She gasped and almost cried out. He squeezed her behind reassuringly and grinned at her. “Don’t scream,” he whispered. “There’s a guard outside the door. I’d hate to be run through before you were finished.”

  “Finished?” she asked.

  So he showed her.

  Slowly at first, as she roused, and then faster and stronger he stroked her. He felt the moment when her own tiny phallus drew down and away into her body, heard her gasps come swift and sharp. Her sweat-damp legs wrapped around him, hot and moist. He watched her face, once he had her rhythm, and thrilled to see her press her fist to her mouth hard, eyes crushed closed fiercely, sobbing as she fought for silence.

  Then, suddenly, she arched up in the throes of a sweet convulsion. Both her hands flew to cover his, and she clutched him to her, hard. Her heels kicked at the cushions; her head stretched back and bared her throat, which worked as if she wanted, in truth, to scream—but she mewled, only.

  He wanted to weep with her beauty, her abandon. “Goddess,” he whispered, and spoke a prayer to his own Scholar-God, as was appropriate in times such as this.

  She held him hard for long moments before she melted. She fell against the cushions and lay panting, undone, her limbs all strewn in sweet abandon. He lay beside her, head pillowed on her belly, and sighed.

  He held her until her breathing slowed a little, and so it was some time before he stirred. He raised his head, though, to find her watching him down the length of her body. He kissed beside her navel and said, “Yes, sweet?”