by Ridgway, Bee
• • •
He stood before her, bare and forked as God had made him. She looked him up and down, and he felt like she was lighting him on fire with her eyes. He was bruised and scratched up and much the worse for wear, but her gaze seemed to heal all his wounds.
“Come here, Ignatz,” she said.
“My name isn’t Ignatz.” He walked forward, and stopped by the bed, looking down at her.
She reached around and held him at the small of the back, then slipped her hands lower, spreading her fingers over his ass. She kissed his cock. Sweet, sweet, sugar-sweet longing spread from her lips, down the length of him, and back again. Then she raised those heavenly eyes to his, and he realized that she was welcome to call him any name that she liked, and she was also entirely correct that he was going to beg. “Please,” he whispered.
• • •
“Ignatz . . .” Alva pushed her fingers into the hair that dusted his chest. She had come to love the name. It was perfect for him, with that abrupt, rough beginning and that sharp ending, tied off with a dashing zed.
“I’m not sure that was good for your head. You fell asleep like a fallen giant and you slept for hours.”
“It was very good for me. Not so good for you. Greedy me.”
“I fully expect you to reciprocate.”
He pulled her to him. “I shall. Are you still in this damned night shift?”
“Indeed. Isn’t it shocking?”
He fumbled with it, trying to get it off of her.
She sat up and raised her arms, to make it easier. He slowly slipped the resented garment up and off of her. She relished the feel of it whispering over her, with just the hint of his strong hands guiding the fabric. The promise that nothing would be between those hands and her flesh, very soon, very soon . . . now. She sighed as she felt him slide his hands back down her bare flanks. When she opened her eyes he was looking directly into them, and the darkness of his eyes startled her. He seemed to be seeing her for the first time. Then his gaze slipped down the length of her. She shivered, and felt the bright ache as her nipples tightened. He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her knuckles, one by one.
• • •
It was when he was buried in her, and she was on top, arching her back in order to clench his cock against just the right place, and calling to the heavens what was now surely his real name, Ignatz . . . that was when he knew. He was in love, totally and irrevocably. And when he knew, he came. She was poised there for a moment, her fingers in between them, fluttering like wings. Then she plunged, and hurled her pleasure down toward him, but instead of striking, she came down to rest, lightly and sweetly on him, not a hawk, but the feather of a hawk. . . .
A bird metaphor. She seemed to call them up in him.
“Mm,” she said.
“Mm,” he agreed.
She rubbed the back of a hand to an eye, nuzzled into his neck, and was asleep on his chest.
• • •
Two things made teaching Alva different—and more difficult—than teaching any other student he’d ever had. First, he didn’t want her to learn to jump, because he wanted her to stay forever in this little twelfth-century room, far from Bertrand, far from Hannelore . . . but very, very close to him. And second, he had never taught anyone to jump when he couldn’t feel the River himself. He always felt it along with his students, always guided them by touch and empathy. Now his concussion was in the way, and teaching Alva to jump was like teaching someone to read when you yourself can make neither head nor tail of the alphabet.
It was much easier to simply seduce her again.
But it was at the most inelegant moments—when he was gazing up the length of her from an interesting position between her thighs, or when he was arched over her, her hands pinned beneath his to the featherbed, and her heels pressing the backs of his thighs to encourage him to greater and greater efforts . . . it was at moments like these, when a normal woman would at least pretend to be lost in ecstasy . . . it was at these exact moments that she would ask, in a voice as calm as a Sunday afternoon, when he intended to teach her to jump.
It was enough to drive a man bent on distraction and delay entirely mad.
And so he found himself trying, both of them fully clothed in the twelfth-century garb lent to them by the landlady. “It is both the easiest and the most difficult thing to do,” he said. “And the first thing you must do is learn to find the River. I cannot feel it myself, just now. Normally I would ask you to take my hand, and I would reach for it in my mind. I would make the first mental effort to jump, and bring you along with me. Often that will trigger the feeling of the River in you.”
“Take my hand anyway.” She held hers out. “Now. How do I find the River?”
Dar put his hand in hers. It was elegant but strong. He loved it. He wanted to kiss it. He wanted to press it, open-palmed, to his mouth. . . .
“Ignatz!” She was laughing. “You are incorrigible!”
“Do not call me Ignatz when I am trying to teach you. That name has come to signify something very different. I am Dar.”
She blinked. “Dar? Really? What kind of name is that?”
“It’s my title. I am Lord Dar.”
She frowned. “Well.” She looked him up and down. “That’s as may be. But Ignatz you shall always be, at least to me. It is a good, honest name, even if you came by it falsely. A good name for a time tutor. And what about Vogelstein? Where did that come from?”
“A stone I found. A fossil of a bird, trapped in stone. Many millions of years old. It is on my desk in my Devon home.”
“Sweet Chuck,” she said.
He barked a laugh. “Yes! For you I shall be Ignatz, and he shall be Sweet Chuck, forevermore.”
She leaned across the bed and kissed him. “I like your scruffy, laughing face, Ignatz,” she murmured.
“It is your fault, this time, that we are abandoning the lesson,” he said, flipping her onto her back.
“Oh, no.” She twined her arms around his neck and drew him down. “It is Sweet Chuck’s fault.”
• • •
Rather than teaching her how to jump, he was teaching her to dance. “I told you, on that blasted mosaic floor,” he said. “First thing when I’m better, we’re going to the Savoy. We’ll go to the costume room in the catacombs and get you dolled up flapper-style and we’ll go to the Savoy.”
She stood in his arms, already proficient at the waltz after only a few hours’ instruction. Now they were working on the Charleston, and that was harder. She had no familiarity with jazz rhythms, and she kept laughing when he started singing “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.”
“We shall simply waltz,” she said. “And sit out this Charleston madness. We shall waltz at the Savoy.” She smiled. “What a wonderful word. Savoy!”
“It takes its name from the duchy in the Alps. Savoie in French. And you will Charleston. You must.”
“Savoir? To know?”
He smiled. “No, my hungry one. Savoie. Savoy. If you must know, it derives from the Latin sapaudia. Land covered in fir trees.”
“You know a great deal about it.”
“It is my favorite place.”
“I think it very strange that you love a hotel most of all in the world.” She fitted herself into his clasp and began doing a little waltz step. “Why-do-you, live-in-the, eighteen-hun-dreds?” she asked, in three-four rhythm. “When-you-love, the-nine-teen, twen-ties-so, much?”
He spun her around and onto the bed. But instead of following her there, he stood, looking down at her. He sighed. “Because I have commitments,” he said. “I am bound to the blasted flea-infested, freezing, and benighted eighteenth century. I cannot entirely abandon it.”
“Why?” She put her hands behind her head and smiled up at him, a heartbreakingly sweet expression. He was, he thought to himself, hers to co
mmand. “You are Ofan. You can live anywhere, any when.”
“And still,” he said, “I am bound. It is a condition of my birth.”
• • •
During their third night at the inn, Alva opened her eyes and knew they must leave. She knew it because she could feel the River. Perhaps all of Ignatz’s talk about it had finally sunk in, or perhaps he was getting his talent back, and she was wrapped up, naked, in his arms, and his ability was thrumming in her veins. In any case, she felt it—deep and wide, all around her, the push and the pull of human feeling. It was grand. It was sweeping. It was too much, it was agony, it was drowning her. . . .
“Alva.” He was awake, thank God, and he was wrenching her back, holding her shoulders in his strong hands, his voice commanding her to attend to him. “Alva, focus on me. Open your beautiful eyes and look at me.”
“Ignatz!” She gasped his name. “The River!”
“I know. I know. Hold me. Don’t let it sweep you away.” He held her almost brutally, as if he were hauling her away from the edge of a cliff, careless of her comfort. She could feel the intensity of his concentration; he was clearing her mind with his own, pushing the River away. Rebuilding the present around them, the little room, the quiet night.
When it was over, he was covered in sweat. “Jesus, Alva.” He collapsed back onto the mattress, half-dragging her on top of him. He stroked his hands roughly down her hair. “Talk about the deep end. That was too much, too fast.”
“I awoke in it,” she said. “It must have been that I could feel it in you, or that you taught me more than you knew. But you have your talent back; you kept me from being swept away.”
He nodded. “Yes, it’s back. But I don’t want it at that price.”
“Ignatz. We have to go. We have to return.”
He closed his eyes, and now she could tell that he was testing the River. “Yes,” he said. “We must go. I can sense it, too. And clearly, I am well enough to take us both.” He frowned. “No time like the present.” It was a joke, but he said it bitterly.
“This has been . . . very lovely,” she said, withdrawing from him. She pulled the covers over her nakedness.
“No.” He tugged the blanket away. “No hiding. Come here.” He grasped her chin and kissed her demandingly. “We have to go back, but you are not going back to the Guild.”
She laughed against the intensity of his kiss, and he pulled away, glaring at her.
“My dark and brooding time tutor,” she said, tracing his three-day beard with her fingertips. “You are such a passionate, abrupt creature, when all is said and done. Your urbanity is only another one of your disguises, isn’t it?”
He cursed, and reached for her, but she put a hand against his chest, holding him at a distance. “Of course I’m not going back to the Guild,” she whispered.
“You are not?”
“Do you think I could, after what I have seen? I want to break the Guild. I want to save Susan, and Ed if he will come. Bertrand, too, if he will forgive us.”
“Bertrand is where he needs to be. He is my one hope, my double agent.”
“We need more than that.”
“I know . . . but I can’t see how . . .” Frustration flitted across his face. “Just kiss me,” he growled.
But she held him back. “Ignatz . . .”
“I shall teach you,” he said. “Everything I know. But it isn’t enough. They are strong.”
“I do not want to remain your student, Ignatz,” she whispered, slowly releasing the pressure against his chest and letting him come inch by inch closer to her. “You are going to work for me, with me.”
“What do you mean?”
Alva hardly knew, herself, but found that as she spoke the words, the idea sprang into being, fully fledged. “I am going to found a university. You, me, Susan, and Bertrand, when he can slip away. We shall be the start of it. We are going to learn everything we can about the talent, all of us together. No hierarchy, no punishments. No growing old before our time. And before we are finished, we shall have the Guild on its knees.”
“You are laughing.”
“Because I am happy. And determined. And I have found the reason for my life.”
“A university?”
“Call it what you will. A school, a cloister . . . we shall study the talent. Hone it. And the Ofan will become something real, something powerful.”
He was no longer pressing toward her for a kiss. The passion that had been driving him toward her shifted from his loins to his head. “You are Robin Hood,” he murmured. “You!”
“Robin Hood? Stealing from the rich, giving to the poor?”
“I mean that you’re the leader I needed,” he said. “Someone who could see the forest for the trees. Someone to fit the Ofan to a cause. How could I have known it would be you? When you walked into my absurd draper’s shop, and I thought you were nothing more than a flighty little wigeon . . .” His passion flipped palpably back to where it had been a moment ago. “Robin . . .” he murmured.
“Does that make you Maid Marian?”
He raised an eyebrow, and took the kiss that had been hanging between them, sweet and hopeful as a cherry.
• • •
The Peckham pub was more crowded than it had been the last time; it was a Saturday, and the small group of old men who had perched at the bar, swiveling their eyes like grasshoppers, were joined now by younger people, louder people. There was disco on the jukebox. Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes, to be precise, and the fog of beer and cigarettes was laced with the smell of hash and Old Spice. The jump from 1145, and now the smells and the sounds and, frankly, the sight of British people wrapped up tight in polyester made Dar’s head hurt. He pushed his pint away.
Bertrand sat across from him, stiff with some emotion Dar couldn’t read. Was it outrage? Grief? Dar had fought with Alva over who would meet Bertrand and tell him the truth—she wanted to be the one, or if not her alone, then at least both of them. Dar insisted it was his job, and by God he was going to do it by himself. In the end, Dar had won by dint of simply walking out of the room, down the stairs, and onto the deserted street. He’d looked up at Alva, leaning out the window of the little inn and calling for him to come back in. He’d blown her a kiss, bowed, and jumped away from 1145.
Now Dar wondered if he had been right to insist on coming alone. Bertrand was behaving so strangely. Alva might have managed to shatter the stone that encased the young man.
“I’m sorry,” Dar said, leaning his elbows on the table and massaging his eyes with the heels of his hands. “It just happened.”
Bertrand said nothing. And when Dar lowered his hands and looked at him, his expression had not shifted one muscle twitch.
“Are you going to tell me to go to hell, Bertrand? Punch me? Kick me in the head until I’m well and truly dead? Something? Anything? Jesus, man, I’ve just told you that I made off with the woman you thought was going to marry you, and that I’m fresh from three days of twelfth-century frolicking—”
The punch came quickly and decisively. As he leaned back stanching the blood with a paper napkin, Dar thought for a moment or two that he might have a broken nose. But no, he decided as he blinked and tenderly twiddled the bridge, it was intact. He would remain hawk-nosed, but straightly hawk-nosed. And then, because he was an evil bastard, he thought about how Alva would be glad that he wouldn’t end up even craggier than he already was.
When he finally was able to look at Bertrand again, it was only to see him sitting there with the same cold expression on his face. What the hell had happened to the kid? Besides suffering massive betrayal by the two people he loved most in the world . . . Dar groaned, and reached again for his rejected beer. “I’m an asshole, Bertrand . . . I’m sorry. I’m going to sound like you now, but I can’t help it. I’m in love. It just happened.”
“You do not soun
d like me,” Bertrand said, his voice clipped. “You sound like your own pathetic self. And although it will likely surprise you, I have no interest in discussing Alva Blomgren, beyond planning how to manage Hannelore. It is neither your peccadilloes nor Alva’s that are worrisome. I have now seen what the Guild is doing, and I am ready to begin—in earnest—my mission of deep infiltration.”
“Right.” Dar took a deep breath. “That’s fair, if unnervingly robotic.”
“Hannelore is desperate,” Bertrand said. “She doesn’t know who stole Alva, or why, or where she was taken. She is searching all up and down the River. But because she has failed to train any of her own Favorites to jump in time, she is at a disadvantage. She is neither sleeping nor eating. She keeps me constantly by her side, and speaks of training me to jump, so that I might help her in her search. So far that is only talk.”
“She has no suspicion that you are a spy, that you can already jump?”
At that, some distant emotion did flicker across Bertrand’s face, but Dar couldn’t tell what it might be. “No,” he said. “She has no suspicion. She never did suspect either me or Alva of spying, as it turns out. Hannelore is terrified of betrayal, and so she set us up to betray one another, as a test. When we did not turn on one another, her faith in us was redoubled.” He lifted his beer, but set it down again, untouched. “I am now entirely in her confidence, and she has made me her official heir, unless Alva returns. Once she decides that Alva is dead, or gone forever, she says she will begin the transfer of power.”
“But that’s terrific news, Bertrand.” Dar forgot the pain in his nose and his head. “You’re in.”
“Yes,” Bertrand said, and Dar was shocked to see a glimmer of satisfaction in those strange green eyes. “But only when Alva is proven to be dead.”
“Are you suggesting we should kill Alva? Because you realize I can and will kill you—”
“Be silent.” Bertrand pointed a finger at Dar. “You are an upstart lordling, Dar. And you have overstepped your bounds by a good, long way.”