SEVENTEEN

 

 

Melanthe drew a breath, tasting him on her lips, inhaling his scent. "And what hast thou mastered in thy study, learned husband?"

He seemed to grow abashed, turning his face away. "My lady, it is all nonsense. Better thou shouldst sayen me how to give thee pleasure. Ne am I accomplished in luf wiles, truly."

She drew her palm down the soft nape of velvet on his chest. "I would hear what thou hast learned. For my pleasure." With a light pluck she freed the topmost golden buttons on his doublet.

He made a low unhappy laugh. "I know well that ye wields more skill in this art than I."

She stepped back. Standing in the half-light, he appeared no innocent, but a man full in prime of carnal boldness, no more chaste than a stallion might be chaste, being beautiful and strong and only what it was, a creature made for life and union.

"But a child am I in the craft," she said lightly. "Thou moste be my master, or nill we proceed far."

He made no move, but stood with his hands open, a signet gleaming on his middle finger, the light sliding on his golden belt.

She lifted her eyebrows. "Or be thou courageous in war and coward in chamber, knight, for shame?"

She had not expected such a crude hit to touch him, but he flushed at her words, response so quick that she thought it a taunt he must have heard before. The severity came into his face again, the hunting coldness. He closed the space she had made between them and lifted his hands. Without speaking, he began to unfasten her gown.

Melanthe stood still. The cote-hardie was not an elaborate fashion, but simple and warm for traveling, ermine-lined and buttoned. He pushed it off her shoulders. The fur hem brushed over her hands, dropping to the carpet.

Her white damask kirtle laced beneath her arms, fitting to her body. He loosened the cords. She felt the lace slip and knot in an eyelet. He worked at it, looking down, his face close to hers. A line formed beside his mouth. He gave the tie a tug, and then a jerk, breaking it, a force that made her take a step backward for balance. Without even unlacing the other side, he lifted the damask over her head and tossed it away.

Through her linen, she could feel the cool air. He opened his hands over her, his palms against her hips with only her thin shirt between.

Melanthe closed her eyes. Abruptly she put her arms about his neck, arching against him on tiptoe as she had done before, seeking that delicious sensation he had given her at Torbec.

Velvet touched her breasts. She could feel his hard belt, and silk and pressure against her belly—but somehow she could not come within reach of the pleasure. With a small sound of frustration, she fell back onto her heels.

He pulled her closer. "Lady," he whispered against her ear. "Lie you down."

His hands slid upward, lifting the linen with them. On the eastern carpet before the chimney, he stripped her of her shirt, baring her of all but her white hose and garters, drawing her down with him as he knelt.

She lifted her chin defiantly, resting back on her elbows, refusing to be mortified by her nakedness like some fluttering novice nun given to visions and starvation. Shameless, he had called her—so let him see.

But she was terrified, her heart beating so rapidly that she was sure he must discern it. She wasn’t a delicate blonde beauty, frail and dainty—she was dark-haired and white-skinned, and not a girl. Above the garters at her knees, she had two bruises on one thigh from some encounter on their wild travels, and another at her hip. He could not have spanned her waist with his two hands, and her breasts were too full to be the high round strawberries, or nuts, or even pears, sung of the ladies in romances.

He only looked at them for an instant, before he averted his face and closed his eyes, sitting beside her with his weight on his hand.

She lost her rebellious nerve and curled upright, hugging her legs to her. "Uncommon sour I am to beholden, then," she said sullenly. "Iwysse, a hag as old as thee!"

"What?" he said, in a distracted voice.

He looked strange and uneasy, frozen in place. For a moment she was in fear that he was near a swoon or a fit.

"What passes?" she demanded, catching his arm.

He moistened his lips, pushing off her hand as if she offended him.

"Avoi!" she hissed. "Do not say me thou art praying now?" She let go and plumped back upon a cushion. "Monk man!" 

"I am counting," he said tightly. 

She stared at him. "Counting what?" 

"The chimneys." 

"The chimneys!" she cried.

He opened his eyes, looking straight ahead over her. "The chimneys, the doors—for God’s sake, ne do I hardly know what I count." He drew a breath. "I am—better now."

He glanced at her, and then away again. Melanthe curled her fingers in her crumpled shirt. "Depardeu, I will cover myself, to spare thee this dire distress."

His hand landed firmly over hers. "Nay—lady. If you please." He turned a look full on her, his eyes near dark as the deep evergreens, the hidden life of winter. Like a secret his faint smile touched his mouth. "In faith, is nought affliction, but too great bliss."

Melanthe regarded him a moment. His courtesy was beyond calculating; he might say anything to maintain it. "In troth?"

He crossed himself, his face sober. She asked suspiciously, "N’is not my body uncomely, thou think?"

With a sound low in his throat, he stretched out his legs and lay at his length alongside her. He laid his hand between her breasts and drew his knuckles downward, over her belly. His dark lashes lowered. He smoothed his hand up to her knee and down her hose to her ankle, up again, then between her legs, burying his fingers in her curls.

"My lady, thou art lickerous." He smiled, pressing the heel of his hand against her.

And there it was, the pleasure, the sensation she remembered. Her breath caught. Her body seemed to stretch, to move outside of her mindful accord, arching up to meet the touch.

"Ah," she said, and strove to check her unsteady voice. "Ah, but this is a riddle." She took refuge in a mocking tone. "Lickerous to taste or lickerous lustful?"

"The both," he murmured, "an I prove fortunate."

She gave him an arch look. "This is luftalking indeed. I will think me I’m at court to hearen such."

His thumb slipped downward, seeking. Melanthe gave a little start and pressed her legs together to prevent him.

"Lady, thou art now at my court, where I rule." He gently resisted her effort, opening her knees. He stroked her, the inside of her thighs, her quaint, up and down again, touching her openly, making her flinch each time his fingers passed over that spot.

Her breasts and her body tingled. "Stop," she said, with a sharp intake of her breath.

"Nay, thou hatz bid me teach thee wicked delectation. This is the second sin of lust, my lady. Unchaste touch."

His thumb moved in a slow pulse. She swallowed. "That I can believe—is a sin," she said.

He shifted, moving up on his elbow. "And this is the first—" Without ceasing the stroke of his thumb, he leaned over her mouth. "Unchaste kissing." He tasted her with his tongue, then invaded deep. His fingers slid into her sheath, intruding, pressing, and stretching her. Melanthe whimpered into the double commixtion, the velvet weight and the hard graze of his jaw. Her heels slipped down the carpet; her legs strained as if she could have more.

He drew away, brushing his lips against her temple. While Melanthe searched for air, he bent to her breast. He kissed her there, at the same time thrusting his fingers full to the very depth of her.

All air seemed to vanish; she panted to regain it as he caressed her with his tongue, suckling her as if she were sweetmeat. Her body rose to him, to his mouth and his hand—unchaste beyond any recognition or heed that virtue might exist upon the earth.

"Unchaste kiss...unchaste touch." His breath was close to her skin, brushing and warming her as he spoke. "The third sin of lust is fornication, but we are wed, lady, so ne cannought I teach thee fornication. Ne also the fourth, o’less thou art a virgin, that I may seduce thee from thy purity."

"Nay," she whispered, curling her fingers in the thick silken nap of the carpet. "Not a virgin."

"I thought me nought so." His lips moved over her shoulder, a gentle searching. She could feel him smiling against her. "Ne can we adulter, neither by single or double, ne commit sacrilege—lest thou art under a religious vow?"

She gave a breathless laugh. "Look I to thee like a holy woman, knight?"

He lifted his head. "God shield," he said, with a sudden fierceness. "Nay, ye looks like my wife, fair and mortal—and no thing that we do between us be sinning, by the word of Saint Albert."

She lay against the cushion. In her life she had made certain that men thought her iniquitous, lethal in her loves and passions. The Princess Melanthe looked like no one’s fair and mortal wife. But she had never before lain naked beside a man, uncovered, without shield or mask, reckless.

"Nothing?" She made a pout, stretching her arms overhead. "Alas, thou wilt destroy all my wicked disport."

He caught her chin, rubbing his thumb across her lips. "Does thou nought drive me to inordinate desire, wench, which is deadly sin, wed or no."

She brought her arms down about his shoulders. "And is thy desire now ordinate, learned monk? Haply we will delay this loving then, and take us to the chapel for a day and night of prayer and fasting, to prove thee."

"Haply thou art the Arch-Fiend’s daughter, come to harry me until I be undone body and soul."

"Nay, only thy wife, fair and mortal," she said virtuously. "Chaste, too, so far this day."

He leaned on his elbow, ungirding his golden belt. The linked bosses dropped to the carpet with a rich chink. "Thou art uneasy in the state, I trow."

Agreeable it was to trade words and luftalk. But the turn of his broad wrist, competent and brief, and the sound of the belt falling gave Melanthe pause. She drew her knees up, uncertain if he would mount her and have done—she did not object; she welcomed it, for that by God’s send she would breed his child, but experience of four times, thrice with Ligurio and once with him, taught her that it marked the swift conclusion to all love-liking.

She had been most delighted with this play and was not eager to see it end so soon. As he leaned over her, she put her palm upon his chest. "What study is this, learned monk? Yet lacks my instruction. The first and second sins of lust only have I beheld."

But he did not answer, only gave her a thorough demonstration of the first again while he loosed the buttons on his doublet. She could feel the force of his intent; he had grown impatient with disport and love-amour. With a little dejection she let her hand relax, trailing it upward, sliding her fingers idly in his hair as he lifted himself over her.

She spread her legs, yielding obedience to what she owed him. Her body tensed slightly, anticipating the discomfort.

But he did not lie hard upon her; instead he held his weight up and kissed her mouth, and her throat, and her breasts. She sighed, savoring, drowning and pleasuring in the last moments.

The freed cloth of his shirt and his doublet brushed her skin. He drew hard on her teat. The sensation shot through her, half pain and half ecstasy. She clutched the loose velvet, pulled and arched, trying to bring him down to her.

"Merci." She gasped, all her muscles contracting with each tug and sweet spike of pain. "Merci, merci."

He made a wordless sound, moving away, downward, shaping her with his hands. She wanted him back for more; she dragged at him, lacing her fingers in his hair, but he was leaving her, pulling away in spite of it, dropping kisses down her belly.

Just as she would have exclaimed in despair of his withdrawal, he pressed his mouth to her quaint. He held her hips and touched her with his tongue.

The delicious bolt of feeling transfused her. She trembled beneath him, drinking air, moaning between her teeth, her body twitching as if seized by each lascivious stroke. She tilted her head back, lifting her breasts and her spine and her hips, pressing up to him to take the waves of lust, asking, begging—demanding with her flesh.

He rose above her. For the moment that they were separate, she whimpered in anxiety: she wanted him to go on kissing her that way, but he sat back and pulled off the doublet and shirt, baring shoulders muscled as fine and thick as the destrier’s. He reached down to his hose and breeches that showed his full tarse through linen, crammed heavily against the cloth.

She felt distraught. He would use her now, and it was over, and she was near weeping for the feeling he had given her that still demanded more.

He released the lacing on his breeches. She lifted up her arms to embrace him as he came over her. She did not flinch, though he was so much larger than Ligurio; she lay herself open for him despite her thwarted yearning.

He rested on his hands, looking down into her face. "Lady," he said, with a quick grin, "in thy studies, that last that I taught thee—falls it within the thirteenth sin, indecent manner of embrace."

She made a faint wild laugh, a mindless answer, for he was lowering himself on her, this time using his body as he had used his hands and his tongue to urge that impossible pleasure. In surprise she felt it coming again as his hard member pressed at her, parting her a little with each push, until the head was inside her.

His arms trembled. He stared down at her, a blank distance in his look, a blindness. He drew air in his chest, his grin going to a baring of his teeth as he drove himself into her.

Though his size was a sore burn, she took him deep. No coupling she had ever known to be like this. His unchaste kiss, his unchaste touch, his breath a harsh sob at her ear; his weight on her and his penetration to the very depth of her. Over and over she rolled and shoved herself wantonly against him—and culmination came upon her like an ambush.

"God save!" she cried. Her back arched. Her body shuddered, beyond command. She died as he did, in full ecstasy, lost and cleaving to him in the flood.

 

* * *

 

She slept against Ruck’s chest, on the floor, turned to nestle with one leg drawn up and her hips curving, her hand resting possessively on his waist. Propped on his elbow, he watched the firelight play orange and rose over her skin.

For as long as he remembered, ever when he discharged his seed, even from the first of his marriage to Isabelle, he had come into his wits again with his spirit borne down by melancholy. A nameless sorrow possessed him, a presage and knowledge of loss.

He knew to expect it, but the expectation brought no remedy, only an acceptance of something that God saw fit to impose on him. In his years alone, when he had given in to his lusts in secret, the grief had sometimes hardly left him from one trespass to the next, only abated by his vision of his perfect lady and confession. Its durance was sometimes days and sometimes only as long it took him to fall asleep, but ever the deep trist was there in the afterward, as it was with him now.

Softly he moved his hand over her, a gentle stroke. With each breath he could feel the tips of her breasts touch him. He could lower his lashes and look at them, marvel among many marvels. Without her gowns and jewels, she had a womanly shape, all roundness and long lines, not so coldly slender as her close-cut fashionable robes made her appear, but sweetly pillowed and cushioned, full ripe in life.

In his despair her comeliness made him think of how he would lose her. It must be impossible; he could not imagine any future in which he would have this moment again.

His finger trailed down into the shadow between them. He followed an odd flaw in the satin of her skin, an irregular line from her merkin curls up to her belly. He drew his fingertip downward, tracing another beside it, and another. They were strangely feminine, faint and light, soft at the edges like no scars he had ever seen in a wide experience of battle wounds. He wondered at how she might have come by such ghostly marks, but the very idea of questioning the Princess Melanthe on such a topic as her flaws made him smile inside himself.

She would freeze him in his place. She would not understand him, that he only wished to know more of her, nor believe that because she was not perfect beneath her furs and silks and jewels, he loved her the more. Arrogance and unexpected blemish, and such courage to ride with him alone. Shameless and coy by turns, her marvelous blue-lilac eyes sulky with fear that he was repelled by her appearance.

As he traced the marks, she caught his hand, folding up her leg up with a quick move, as if to hide herself. Her eyes sprang open. "What art thou about?" she asked sharply.

He locked his fingers into hers and leaned over, caressing her brow with light kisses. "Inspecting thy great age and ugliness, wench."

She brought his hand up, making him rest it on his own thigh, trapping it firmly there over the black hose he still wore. "I’ve lost count of these times thou hast called me wench. Thou moste be flayed alive to atone for them all. It is a great tragedy."

"Bassinger will make a woeful lay of lamentation, to remember me."

She stared at the base of his throat, unsmiling. He regretted speaking of Bassinger, bringing the world into their seclusion. To distract her, he loosed his hand from her hold. He cupped her breast, caressing his thumb over the dark rosy crown.

She drew in a swift breath. The shade of a frown hovered between her brows. She slanted a look up at him.

"Thou hast lied to me, monk man. Thou art no abstinent from women."

He shook his head. "I have told you troth, my lady, fore God."

"Nay." She rolled onto her back, gripping his wrist. "What of this manner of—kissing and touching? Depardeu, where hast thou discovered such things?"

He lifted his eyebrows. "This?" He made a slow circle with his thumb. "Lady, I have been married. A husband will touch his wife so."

She gave him a look as offended as any scandalized abbess. "Mine did not!"

Ruck tilted his head, resting his cheek on his fist. "Did he nought? Ne cannought I say why, my lady, but that pleases me for to hearen."

"And—did I not mean only—this—but thy...unnatural kisses. I think me only lewd gallants and carpet knights know of such perversions!"

He ceased his caress and lowered his eyes. She seemed truly agitated by the transgression. To be sermoned by the Princess Melanthe, of all people, made him think he must verily have been immoral to the worst degree of vice.

"Forgive me, my lady." He set his mouth. "I thought—such a one as you, wise in luf-amour—I thought me you would knowen these things, and like them. Ne will I nought offend you so again, I swear it."

She curled both her hands about his. "Nay, nay, thou mistakes me. I did—I took pleasure, wee loo, how could I say thee I did not? But—" She turned her face to him. "Where indeed hast thou learned them, if not from dissolute women and harlots?"

"Ne haf I recourse to harlots." He withdrew his hand, staring down at the silken carpet between them. "I wit it from confession."

"Confession!"

"Yea, lady."

She sat up. "Priests I know who are full of impurity, but I did not think they taught it in the church."

"They ask—" He plucked at the nap of the carpet and looked up at her sideways. "Do they nought ask questions of you, my lady?"

"Iwysse. Have I been idle, or proud, and suchlike?"

"No more than that?"

She hugged her knees. "Envious? Angry? Grasping? Gluttonous?" she recited, and lifted her shoulders in a shrug. "Had I one would clatter and carp that I adorned myself too fine, until I wearied of it, and had him disappointed and another in his place."

"Oh," he muttered. He picked at the motley silk.

"They inquire of thee else?"

He scowled. "Yea. Of my lust." He spread his fingers, rubbing them back and forth over the nap. "They ask, haf I nought engaged in lecherous touches and embraces—and when I say I haf nought, asks the confessor in another way, haf I nought touched a woman on her breasts, or her body. And neither does he trust me no more than you, my lady, when I say him nay, and asks again, as if I had said yea, then did I nought touch her womb-gate and her merkin? And did I nought kiss her there and on her teats, for to make her lewd? And did I nought mount her unnaturally, as the beasts couple, or let her mount onto me? And did I nought do it on a holy day?" He made a snort of misery. "And then do I think of little else, I say you my lady, when I go out, but what I might do if I had me a wife and might usen her."

"Avoi," she said softly, but he could hear mirth in her voice.

His jaw hardened. "So, if ye believe me—ne did I nought learn vice from harlots."

"Haps thou couldst teach them!" she suggested.

He lay back with a deep sigh, stuffing a cushion under his neck and clasping his hands behind his head. She regarded him, and then reached up and touched his bent knee.

"It is because they take measure of thy form and vigor, and cannot conceive that a man like thee would be continent. So did that priest reckon me for excess in adornment."

He had not been perfectly continent, but he was not going to tell her more of the grinding inquisitions he received on the matter, not when the worst crime she was required to acknowledge appeared to be excess adornment.

"Is true, then," she asked, "that those things be not sin in marriage?"

"Some say yea, and some nay." He remained staring between his knees.

"Thou hast studied much on this matter?"

He nodded.

She rocked back on her hips and laughed. "Forsooth, we shall send thee to confession full oft, monk man, for thy further instruction!"

He let his gaze wander up to the window, to the chimney— to her, as she sat curled with the warm firelight on the curve of her back. He smiled slowly. "As God and my liege lady command me."