by Fiona Zedde
Since all the torchlights in the hall had been extinguished after Nyandoro walked through the door of her rooms, she and Duni stepped out into such a darkness. Nyandoro saw easily in the dark, but Duni stumbled and gripped her arm. She savored the startled hitch of Duni’s breath against her cheek, the luxurious press of her body, the lush breasts and thighs whose taste she vividly remembered. Then, hesitating for longer than was strictly necessary, she turned the torchlights back on with a wave of her hand.
The lights rose on the flicker of Duni’s tongue as she wet her lips, her lashes fluttering down as she looked away and took a step back. Nyandoro calmed her skittishness with a touch although her own blood beat loudly enough in her ears to drown out most of her old fears. They walked through the illuminated hallways together.
With each step she and Duni took, Nyandoro unearthed from beneath the burden of being Rain Queen all the love and desire she’d harbored for Duni over the seasons. The passion she’d felt for her the night they made love and the wildness inside her that had claimed Duni when she was about to marry another. Nyandoro’s heart began a fast, lustful beat. How could she have fooled herself into thinking she could do without Duni?
Nyandoro linked her hands behind her back. “So, this is where I live now.”
Unlike when she’d passed this way before, women ghosted through the hallways, slim and soft, full and hard, their gazes curious as they bent their heads together, their soft whispers making it no secret that they wandered the halls now in curiosity about who Duni was and why she was there. Duni met their gazes with a stiffened spine, and Nyandoro was proud of her.
“This palace is yours?” Duni asked as she straightened the drape of the tunic over her shoulders.
“No. If anything, I belong to it.” Nyandoro’s robes whispered against the tiled floors as she walked. “This is the palace of the Rain Queen and, for now, I am the queen.”
“What?” Duni stumbled to a halt. “But that’s not possible. The elders said she doesn’t exist.”
Nyandoro gently guided her forward with a hand on the small of her back, out to the terrace where she’d had her first, and last, meal with Aminifu. The sky’s darkness was pierced with stars and the moon was a pale, waning disc among them. The brightest of the stars seemed to wink down at them. She braced her arms against the stone railing of the balcony and leaned out into the night. Without the dead men on the hill, or the urgency of committing her life to an entity she’d never previously believed in, the valley where she now lived was actually beautiful. Duni’s shoulder brushed against hers.
“The elders didn’t want to pay the price, and some just didn’t want to pay it to a woman.” Nyandoro sifted through Aminifu’s memories of the talks she’d had with the village elders. She gripped the balcony when she realized one of those elders had been her father. A thick clot of grief rose up, but she quickly swallowed it.
“The rains did come, though,” Duni said. “It was the night you…” Her voice stopped with a hiss and Nyandoro felt her stiffen where they touched. “The elders sacrificed you as the virgin?”
“They did not. It was my mother.”
As Nyandoro said the words, she felt Yemaya’s objection in her mind like a too-cold touch. She drew a steadying breath and pushed aside the familiar anger and resentment she felt toward her mother. But would she have done the same thing to get a girl child of her own?
Duni was shaking her head. “She would never—!”
“She did,” Nyandoro said. “Iya wanted a girl and bargained with Yemaya for one. The catch was that she had to give the child back to Yemaya once she…I became an adult.”
It had been a bargain made out of desperation, Nyandoro realized now. Her mother’s whole life before Jaguar Village was made of women. Powerful women who ruled the village, loved their daughters, and raised them to be leaders. For a woman born into a society like that to have only sons, and five of them at that, it must have seemed the cruelest of jokes.
“Your poor iya,” Duni said softly. Her warm shoulder pressed once into Nyandoro’s again before she stepped away and back.
“Yes. I think toward the end of things, as I grew older, Iya regretted what she’d done. But only because she soon had to give me up.” Nyandoro remembered the last time she’d seen her mother alive, the pride in her eyes warring with shadows Nyandoro had not been able to name. “I…if things had gone the way they should have, I don’t know if I would’ve come here willingly. Or at all.”
It was a shameful confession to make, she knew. A debt was a debt. She turned away from the stars to press her back into the terrace stones. Before her, Duni stood haloed in the torchlights from the adjoining room, the brightness of the lights threading through the dark corona of her hair like veins of gold.
“You would have come,” Duni said. “Even before we made promises to each other, you wanted to leave the village and see other places. No obligation would have kept you in Jaguar Village for the rest of your life. You would have come here, and I would have been by your side.”
Nyandoro felt the truth of what Duni said. She loved her family and her village, but she would’ve left them in a rabbit’s heartbeat to see other parts of the world. Guilt twisted in her belly.
“It’s not a bad thing to want more than you have,” Duni said.
“It is when it ends with my family being slaughtered.”
Duni made an impatient gesture. “Stop taking the blame for what happened. Bargains were made before you were born. Rain Queens already existed. You don’t have as much control over your life as you thought. And that’s all right.”
Nyandoro twisted in self-mockery. Duni had realized in a few moments what it took her many moons to know and then to acknowledge. No, she was not in complete control of her life, and that made her want to tear the world apart. She sighed at her own foolishness. “I’ve missed you,” she said.
Duni crossed her arms under her breasts, jerked up her chin. “Not enough to return to the village for me.”
“Enough to leave you alone. This life will be hard.”
“Harder if you decide to live it alone,” Duni said. “As much as you hate choices being taken from you, you took mine away when you didn’t ask if I wanted to be with you here.”
Nyandoro swallowed thickly. She had. “If I asked you, what would you say?”
“Asked me then, or asked me now?”
“Yes.” Nyandoro laughed weakly. She reached back and gripped the edges of the terrace until she felt stone cut into her skin.
“I—” Duni shook her head. “I want a partner, not someone who will make decisions for me.”
Nyandoro’s stomach dropped. Not even the strength of a millennia of Rain Queens could stop her from dreading the rejection coming at her like a swiftly thrown spear. She would release Duni. She would—
“I would have said yes then.”
Nyandoro cracked open and the pulpy meat of her all too human feelings poured out. “And now?”
“And now…” Duni uncrossed her arms and turned away, her face hidden mostly in shadow. “I don’t want to be a fool again. I don’t want to be left behind like last season’s wife.”
The curve of Duni’s cheek, her bare shoulder, and the warm slope of her hip were etched in moonlight, everything else was obscured in darkness. It would have been easy for Nyandoro to penetrate this darkness, but Duni was protecting herself. As she should. Nyandoro had laid her bare before, had made promises, and now those promises were spilled blood in the dirt.
“Stay here. Please.” The words left her mouth in an unplanned rush and she felt Duni react to them, half-turning toward her. “We’d planned to be family to each other before. We can be that still.” Now she was the one begging for the future she had thrown away before.
“Can we?” Duni asked.
Nyandoro’s whole being trembled with Yes. She nodded, afraid of what else would fall out of her mouth if she opened it.
Duni drew a loud breath and looked around the night-darkened terrace a
nd to the bright rooms beyond the archway where they stood. With the lateness of the day, the palace was mostly asleep. All the children had been quieted. In the half circle of smaller buildings extending around the courtyard, only a few torchlights glowed. But Nyandoro could feel the aliveness of the entire palace. The throb of its wholly feminine heartbeat.
“Show me more of this place,” Duni said. “If this is to be my new home, I want to know everything.”
Gladness. Relief. Nyandoro’s head lifted from the sudden lightness of it all. She nodded again. “Okay.”
So she showed Duni the palace and, as they walked through the wide hallways and quiet rooms, told her everything. From the moment she had left Duni slowly waking up in the room where they had made love, through the horror of her kidnapping, to finally when they saw each other in the wreckage of Nyandoro’s family compound earlier that evening.
Nyandoro had braced herself for the pain of retelling it all. Those moments of terror and confusion, of new power and loneliness in the aftermath of Aminifu’s death and her ascension to the throne of Rain Queen. But instead of being flayed alive by the things that happened, it felt like an unburdening. Yes, the pain was there. And it was stark and unforgiving, and she could do nothing to bring her family back. But Duni listened to her, touched her arm, hugged her waist, cried with her, and then they were wrapped in each other’s arms on Nyandoro’s big sleeping mat.
“I didn’t tell you these things for you to feel sorry for me.”
“Good. Because I don’t feel sorry for you.” Duni’s voice was husky from crying. Her damp face pressed into the crook of Nyandoro’s neck, her longer legs curled up and draped over Nyandoro’s. “I feel love for you. I think you’re brave. I think you’re merciful to only kill the chief who ordered your family killed.” Her warm breath puffed against Nyandoro’s skin. She threaded their fingers together. “I would have destroyed the whole world.”
Nyandoro blinked slowly up at the arched ceiling above them. The crystalline stones gleamed in the dark. “It’s a good thing this happened to me and not you then.”
Fingers dug sharply into her waist. A fresh flood of tears wet her skin from where Duni’s face was pressed against it. Those tears felt like her own.
Nyandoro held Duni tighter and turned them until they were face-to-face. Very carefully, she wiped away Duni’s tears with her thumb, soothing the warm skin of her cheeks then her nose, her chin. The tears stopped and wide onyx eyes blinked at her. “Will you be my wife?” Nyandoro asked.
“Yes,” Duni said without hesitation. “And you will be mine.”
The relief rushed through Nyandoro like pleasure. She traced her thumb along Duni’s plump lips and they parted, revealing a sheen of teeth, the pink wet of her tongue. “Wife.”
Duni’s lashes fluttered down and her mouth curved up. There was something behind that look, but Nyandoro didn’t press for it. Instead, she waited for whatever it was to reveal itself.
The room was silvered with moonlight. Ocean waves whispered in the distance, and the scent of Duni’s mint-rubbed skin was a growing distraction. Nyandoro breathed her in. With her eyes still averted, Duni toyed with the edges of Nyandoro’s robes, her fingers lightly tracing the curve of a breast that the gapping cloth revealed. “So, I will be your wife along with all the others?”
The something revealed. Still, it took a moment for Nyandoro to realize what she meant. The Rain Queen’s many wives, the seven who’d chosen to stay after Aminifu left.
“They are mine to care for and shelter, nothing else,” she said. “You are mine to love.”
“But things will change.” Duni finally met her gaze and her fingers stilled their movement.
Nyandoro knew she was remembering what a naive and young girl had said to her by the village river so many moons ago.
One wife. One love. One shared future.
“Maybe they will change,” Nyandoro said. “Even with this new power, I cannot see the future. What I know is that I love you, and you are my family. These things will never change, no matter who comes into our lives.” This was a promise Nyandoro would keep. No matter what.
The smallest of sighs left Duni’s throat. Relief. She smiled shyly and slid her leg over Nyandoro’s, pushing up the cloth of her robe. “I thought I would die and never hear you say that to me again.”
“What?”
“That you love me.”
Although Nyandoro didn’t want to admit it, that might have become true. “Well, you haven’t died,” she said. “And you’ve heard me say it.”
“Yes, I have.” Satisfaction thrummed through Duni’s voice.
Nyandoro touched the bare expanse of Duni’s back that had been tempting her all night. Appreciation hummed in her throat. The skin under her fingers radiated a seductive heat and was soft, reminding her of how Duni felt all over, like a honey flower blossom in high summer, and of how well she’d responded to Nyandoro’s youthful fumblings in that long ago bed.
“I’ll try not to take it personally that you haven’t said the same to me.” She trailed her hand up Duni’s naked back and up to where the soft tunic tied at her neck.
“There is no point in me telling you what you already know,” Duni said.
Nyandoro smiled at the sweet intake of Duni’s breath as she untied the tunic and pulled it down slowly, revealing Duni’s breasts to the moonlight and to her gaze. Her nipples were already tight with arousal, puckered and berry dark in the warm room, ready for her mouth. She dropped the tunic on the floor.
“Every woman wants to hear that she is loved,” she whispered a moment before she kissed Duni’s cheek.
Duni breathed softly and stretched into her touch, hands sinking into Nyandoro’s waist as kisses trailed down her throat and to her shoulders. Her skin was soft and Nyandoro missed that. The blurred nights and days of her captivity had had her falling into memories of them together, loving each other, as she clung stubbornly to proof that she had something to live for besides revenge.
She mapped Duni’s skin with her fingertips, stroking the invisible line from her throat to the round of her belly, the delicate underside her breasts, the wings of her ribs, but did not touch where Duni squirmed for the most.
“Nyandoro!” Duni’s hands tightened in her hair, trying to guide her mouth to her breasts. But Nyandoro laughed and blew warm air against Duni’s skin, slid her hands down to her hips, her thighs.
“You’ve been in my dreams since I knew what wanting a woman was,” she whispered. She nipped Duni’s throat, licked the faint hurt, and did it again and again while Duni moved restlessly in the bed. The smell of her arousal rose salty and wet from between her thighs.
“You’re cruel…” Duni breathed.
“Only when I don’t give you what you want right away.” Her mouth hovered at Duni’s collarbone. She traced it with the wet flutter of her tongue. “But I’ll always take care of you.” She kissed the middle of Duni’s chest then licked the sweat from her skin. “Always.”
Duni choked out a ragged gasp when Nyandoro’s mouth closed on her nipple, and it was the sweetest thing she’d ever heard. The fingers in Nyandoro’s hair gentled then slid down her neck, caressing and scratching in a mindless rhythm, then lower on her back to twist into her tunic. Duni’s breath shivered out with each suck and tease from her mouth. She tasted of her bath and mint oil, her skin slick and soft. Her nipples slid under Nyandoro’s tongue, and Nyandoro moaned into the sweet skin, so very grateful she was able to do this again. To feel her again and get another chance at happiness.
“I missed you,” Duni murmured. “I miss feeling loved…feeling safe.”
“I’m here,” Nyandoro whispered against the curve of her breast. “You’re safe.”
She moved lower and discarded her own clothes until she and Duni were skin to skin, heat pressed to heat. Her love opened her silken thighs and Nyandoro slid her fingers between them with a trembling sigh. The wet clasp of her like a dream she’d had a thousand times, undilu
ted pleasure and the anticipation of even more. Nyandoro touched her and felt as if she was being touched in return, enjoying the wet slick of Duni under the sensitive pads of her fingers, around them, inhaling her scent, savoring the thick sounds of her fingers moving inside Duni’s drenched quim. It was a deep and languorous fuck. A gradual teasing of Duni’s pleasure to the surface and holding it there with slow and deliberate circles of her fingers.
“Ny—!” Duni’s nails raked her shoulders.
Nonsense words flooded from Duni’s mouth, her quim clasping and sucking wet around Nyandoro’s fingers that curled up, searching for that sweet place inside. The collective knowledge of the Rain Queens was good for many things.
Duni cried out and bucked into her, hips diving up. “What—what are you doing to me?”
“Loving you…”
Moonlight spilled over Duni’s luscious nakedness, her thighs spread wide, back arched, her long throat and wetly parted lips. Sweat glowed on her skin and her hair was wild around her face. She was so beautiful that Nyandoro didn’t want to stop looking at her, wanted instead to keep watching the hungry thrust of her hips, the furred quim and her fingers fucking in and out, glistening wet.
Even more arousal trickled down Nyandoro’s thighs at the sight. “You feel so good.”
So good that her mouth watered for a taste. She dipped her head between Duni’s spread thighs and latched her mouth onto the swollen pearl of her pleasure, licking as her fingers plunged slick and fast into her. Duni hissed and grabbed her head, pressing harder into Nyandoro’s face.
Duni tasted of rain forests and pleasure brought out in the open. She tasted of everything Nyandoro had ever wanted in a woman. But she wanted more. Rising up, she fit her mouth once again to Duni’s breast, moaning in pleasure at the firm texture of the nipple under her tongue but incredibly, she could still feel her mouth on Duni’s sex, the firm slip and salt smell, but she wanted it all. Wanted to touch Duni everywhere and bring her pleasure and erase the memory of their time apart. Nyandoro breathed into her neck, nibbling along her throat and licked the curved shell her ear. Duni made wrecked, broken noises, her body’s movements nearly frantic.