By My Side ... (A Valentine's Day Story)

by Christine Blackthorn

  "Sleep."

  And she did.

  Trap

  Over the next few days Elena began to feel like little more than an extension of Reschkar's presence. At night, his body moved below her, the gentle swing of his walk mesmerising at times. And when they found their rest during the day, he spooned her, his warmth a bulwark against the unforgiving cold as they slept.

  Even carried on his back, exhaustion pulled on her, the quickly falling temperatures seeping her strength more effectively than the effort of moving on her own had done before. She was amazed by the orcs. Their bodies seemed to be designed to withstand the hardship without even the slightest diminishing of their abilities. On the heel of that thought came a moment of intense shame. In truth, that was exactly how it was. They had been bred for nothing but that reason -- as the perfect soldier and beast of burden, their only purpose in life to serve the supernatural courts. For millennia, they had been seen as nothing more than mindless animals and courts had been proud of the successes of breeding programmes, showing off, and trading, their best specimen. Travelling among the orcs made her intrinsically aware of their, for lack of a better word, humanity. They were nothing like animals.

  The biggest surprise was their acceptance of her in their midst, their unfailing care in their interactions with her. The orcs were not a gentle race, had never been allowed to be. In their normal interactions a backhanded slap was more common than a quiet word, aggression a basic character trait. And still, from the first, when her inability to keep up had been an evident hindrance, there was a gentle caution in each word, each gesture directed towards her. Often when she had struggled through the snow, hands had caught her before she fell, their touch always soft, always careful. The only temper directed at her came from Reschkar.

  It was the fourth night of travel, the second night he carried her on his back, when she experienced his prodigious temper for the first time. The relaxation his warmth and her exhaustion had forced on her when he had first lifted her to his back the night before, had melted away under the embarrassed discomfort of waking in his arms. Her body had been pressed into his, the evidence of his arousal, of his physical desire, only too apparent against her back.

  She had struggled to get away, the reaction instinctive -- just as his deep growl had come from instinct. Visceral, primordial fear had risen in her even before she was completely awake. From his flared nostrils, she could see he was able to smell it. There was revulsion in the sound with which he had let go of her. In disgust, Reschkar had risen even though the sun was still above the horizon.

  That sound, the repulsed undertone of the snort, seemed to be a blueprint for his mood that waking. It might be the case that the early rising had forced the black mood on him, or the imposed closeness to her body over night, but his only form of communication that evening were disgruntled snarls and dark looks. He had avoided her, leaving it to the women to bring her food. Only when the time came to break camp had he appeared besides her, swinging her onto his back once again without so much of a word.

  Her body was stiff and uncomfortable against his back as they moved off, her obvious tension an encumbrance to his movements. She was holding herself apart, minimising their touch. It had nothing to do with any dislike, or repugnance, she might feel for him. Elena had rued her stupid moment of fear, the insult she had given him without intention. She knew she was safe with him, and from him, until they reached the end of their journey. Only when he would begin to try to bond her, when he would realise that he was not able to, would she lose her use to him. Until then, he would do all he could to keep his prize safe.

  No, her tension was borne more out of a desire to make herself somehow lighter. But as the night progressed, his movements jarring against her stiff body, the distance between her and his warmth undermined her body's ability to preserve heat. With the discomfort of the cold, her tension only increased, her muscles starting to tremble and seize.

  Elena concentrated on controlling the shivers along her body, her fingers so cold they barely were able to hold onto his shoulders. It reached the point when she knew she had to do something or fall. Her body was moving towards the limit of its perseverance, as was her mind. She was tired and cold, exhaustion a mounting weight on her ability to act and think. Before she could think of a solution, of a way to admit to her weakness without losing the last shred of dignity, he rummaged for something in one of the pouches attached to his belt, then held it out to her. At first she had not understood that the leathery strip he presented to her was food of some kind. It took his growled "Eat" to make her react.

  But instead of taking it she shook her head. It felt wrong to take the food when in comparison to the others she was doing very little, being carried safely on Reschkar's back. It felt like an indulgence.

  "Eat" He repeated.

  "No."

  It was a near repetition of the milk incident. She wanted to explain to him why she would not, could not, take the jerky but was afraid her teeth would chatter were she to open them in order to form the words. Her lips were painful in the cold, almost agonisingly so. She could taste old copper from where her skin had split over various places on her lips and was now seeping blood, her skin brittle and dry from the icy conditions. He snarled at her, the sound throwing a terrifying echo against the high walls of the mountains. Everything stopped, it seemed as if each and every being in a hundred kilometres circumference froze in its path, waiting for the explosion to come.

  "You will eat."

  Fury underlay each word and she felt the large body under her shake with suppressed emotion. The hand with which Elena reached for the food was trembling, though not from fear. Later, she would wonder why even in the face of his fury, snarling teeth and the predator's body primed for attack under her, she was not afraid, not really. Nothing moved, no one spoke until she had taken the first bite. It was hard, the taste of the jerky overwhelming the cold bitterness in her mouth with salt and dry spice. She was certain no one had ever gnawed on a piece of dried meat with quite such a rapt audience.

  "Your body needs the fuel to stay warm."

  The explanation was grudgingly given, as if he was unused to have his actions questioned, even in this small way. Why had he explained? Better not to ask, not whilst his body was vibrating in suppressed anger against hers. Not even she was that foolhardy. And still he had felt the need to say the words, to give the barest of explanations, to soothe her anxiety over his snarls. It was as if he was following a compulsion, an invisible book of rules only he could see. She took another bite, the leathery strip of meat slipping under the grip of her blunt, human teeth. Elena recognised the harsh undertone of venison.

  The salt-coated meat hurt her lips, the grains torturing the open wounds, but she did not dare take the food from her mouth, even for a moment. Holding his intent gaze, she chewed, each movement stinging, but the gradual relaxation of his body against hers told her she had been right to eat what he had offered, no matter the pain in her lips. On the third torturous nibble he finally relaxed enough to turn back to the path and resume his even pace. And just as if he were a weathervane, the other orcs followed suit, their sudden alert tension dissipating, relaxing back into the calm alertness that had characterised their travels until then. Elena wondered if it was a result of slavery, of the absolute dependence on the whims of those in charge, which made them all so sensitive to Reschkar's smallest change in mood or if there was something intrinsically captivating about him. She feared for her own sanity that it was the second.

  "Thank you." She had no idea if he heard her whispered words but the tense grip with which he supported her thighs around his waist eased a little and she felt a sigh shake his large frame. With his relaxation, her body found her own.

  Her world narrowed to her life carried on his back, his scent a constant invasion coating her reality, the movement of his body below hers the only link to the world around them. For every move she made, his body moved with hers. Every time he handed her a
strip of jerky, or some dried fruit, the food held some remnant of his taste. Everything was filtered through him, was tinged with his presence, his will.

  And each time she accepted another offering from his hand he seemed to relax a little more, the act of feeding her holding some mythical, deep meaning to him. A constant reassertion of his power over her.

  When he did not make her eat, he encouraged her to talk. Though he himself barely spoke a word, he made her tell him of her childhood in the courts, how her parents had abandoned her before she had been able to form a memory of them, of her life under Adrianus's protection. When he asked about the first time she met the vampire lord, she got lost in reminiscence. Her curiosity had led the little girl she had been into the library long before she could reach the door handle out of her own power. Under the grudging attention of the Vampire Lord, who had made this room his den, she learnt to read, to write, to figure.

  Initially, however, Adrianus had been less than enthused to see her invade his sanctuary. She remembered those first few times she had toddled into the room which seemed to hold all the treasures of the world to her. The night before her nanny Greta had finished the book they had been reading and Elena had thought to find another, not satisfied with the speed with which the overworked woman was able to fulfil her demands. The first sight of the library had robbed her of her breath, the first look at the scowling Vampire Lord growling at her had sent her running. But she had come back. Nothing would have kept her away after that first view of those rows and rows of books, of stories -- or the man she secretly dreamt of as her father.

  And she had worn him down, eventually. By her next birthday, the fifth of her life, she was ensconced deeply within the Vampire Lord's life, court and library. She would most likely have turned into the most spoiled, most demanding child on the planet from all the attention she received. After all, she was only a child, and one surrounded by an assortment of supernaturals, many centuries old, for whom biological imperatives meant they were rarely able to carry, or create, many offspring. And in some ways she was spoiled -- spoiled in attention, in stories told, in games played -- but less so in material matters.

  Whoever thought Vampire Courts were rich and opulent affairs had never come to visit the court of Innsbruck. Adrianus was too bad a manager to stray far from bankruptcy, and too ethical to force his followers to take the brunt of his mismanagement.

  A pang of homesickness had let her heart skip a beat. She missed Adrianus, the absent-minded scholar of her childhood. She missed the stories, missed the man who had spent hours upon hours explaining to her some obscure poem, some long forgotten verse form. It mattered little that over the last few years she had come close to hating him. She still missed him, talking to Reschkar, relating one anecdote after the other, only made her realise how much.

  But she had begun to miss him long before leaving the court. Her inability to bond, and the ever increasing pressure on her, mixed with the barely veiled disappointment in the eyes of all who met her, had destroyed more than just her self-confidence. It had destroyed the intimate strands of love holding her to her family.

  Elena answered his inquiries openly, not only in honour of the promise she had given, but from her innate sense of fairness. She spoke even when her words revealed her own inadequacies, her failure to bond on so many occasions. She had long since learnt to separate herself from her pain, to live with the failure she was. Not even when he began to quiz her directly on the bonding process and the different measure that had been taken, did her voice waver from its deliberate and passive tone.

  "I have failed to bind each year since the age of sixteen, though it was attempted during the traditional binding periods and outside. It is considered unlikely that I will bond in future. However, there is a chance that a change in the preparatory methods might break my shields and allow for a bonding."

  And if not, then he could still use her blood, for as long as it lasted at least. It was the unspoken corollary to that sentence. His large hands began to smooth along the tense strands of muscles under his hands, his thumbs digging into the tension in her thighs, making her realise how stiff her body had become. His voice, though, showed no sign of any excitement or anger.

  "Preparation?"

  It was easier to speak about the ErGer bond as if it was an academic topic, wholly divorced from her own life.

  "Common wisdom suggests that even around Valentine's Day, when an ErGer's mental walls are compromised by the bonding agent accumulating in the blood, it is wisest to impose physical and emotional limits of endurance on her before attempting a bond. The theory is that an ErGer will then, in an instinctive form of self-preservation, initiate the bond herself in order to make her survival a priority to those in control. The most common methods are pain or humiliation over an extended period of time leading to St Valentine's Day. Less common are methods that will push the ErGer to the brink of death -- due to obvious reasons. They can backfire rather badly."

  "Common wisdom?" His voice sounded choked.

  "Adrianus has, quietly, collected a wide range of documentation regarding ErGer. Especially outside the bonding frenzy on Valentine's day, it is necessary to undermine the mental shields of an ErGer through either fear or pain combined with sex. Even on Valentine's Day, there will not be a permanent bond if the bonding partner is not able to suppress the re-establishment of the mental shields."

  A bond outside those days around St Valentine, when the blood agent accumulated and drugged the ErGer, was rare, some thought all the instances thereof as nothing more than pure myth. But as ErGer were so scarce, and as most courts preferred to avoid the bloody duels fought for access to the few there were, rules had been established to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. Any court could hold an ErGer -- but outside those few days in February, a Lord had to allow anyone access to the ErGer, permitting attempts at bonding at least once a month. That was nothing more than the sad reality of an ErGer's life.

  Still, it was hard to continue to speak. The topic cut too close to her heart, brought to mind too well the desolation of her last few years. It was almost impossible to preserve her academic air. But she would tell him. She had promised him she would not withhold any information which might prove useful for a bonding, but if she had to give him the tools to destroy her, she might as well get it over fast. Her words sped up, almost tumbling over each other.

  "There was no way for Adrianus to keep my existence a secret from other courts, and even had he been able to, his own courtiers would have demanded the opportunity to bond me. He bought me three years by insisting I was too young to be subjected to the rigours of bonding outside my immediate surrounding -- but then he had to allow them access."

  She took a deep breath, somehow feeling this did not do the situation justice.

  "He did all he could. Even though he let them try, he made clear that he would only allow it under certain conditions: no blood, no broken skin or permanent injury, nothing that would threaten my wellbeing, no choking or prolonged starvation."

  "How magnanimous of him."

  There was a strange bitterness in his words and for a moment she wondered if he felt betrayed. Her inability to bond was common knowledge among non-humans of all kinds, a tantalising piece of salacious information bandied around to enliven a dull conversation. When her presence in Innsbruck had leaked to the other courts there had been a sudden increase in the visitors to the court but after too many attempts to bond her had failed, the interest had waned.

  Even now there would be one or two a year who found their way to Innsbruck in a fool's hope they could succeed where others had failed, but by and large the world had accepted that she was defective. They thought her disabled in some way which would make a bond unlikely at best. She had heard too often how a disgruntled visitor had counselled Adrianus to simply drain her, to make use of her blood as she was good for nothing else.

  Yes, she had banked on his ignorance as to her deficiencies when she had struck the bargain with him --
but when he had made clear that he knew of her she had assumed he knew all her failures. But what if he had not? What if he, an orc, had not heard all the dirty details of the disabled ErGer, the stone around Lord Adrianus's neck? She knew some called her Adrianus's Folly, a play on the title of his most famous poem, Alexander's Folly, in which he described the downfall of Alexander the Great.

  She must have made a noise, or he had picked up her disquiet from the way she had tensed on his back, for he turned his head to her. There was no anger or disappointment on his features. There was nothing there. His face remained void of any emotion. In some ways, that lack of expression was worse.

  After a moment he continued his inquisition, only mild interest in his voice.

  "Adrianus chose your partners?"

  "Only after he failed to bond himself."

  For the first time in the two nights he had been carrying her, his stride lost its even rhythm, the small stumble making her chin collide with his shoulder bone rather painfully. She tasted salty copper and knew she had bitten her own tongue. Instinct let her shift her weight, counterbalance his sudden move in preparation of a fall -- but she never had to make good of it. He caught his balance and had resumed his even gait within a split second.

  "Adrianus tried to bond you with sex himself?"