When the last deep ripples of pleasure faded, Lonen rolled onto his side again, murmuring an apology for crushing her. Oria hadn’t minded though. She’d loved feeling him lose himself in her, his mind going thoughtless but for the sensations of her, his love and delight in her bathing every pore like soaking in a perfumed and steaming bath. She whimpered a little as he slid out of her, leaving her empty again.
“Are you sore?” he asked, levering up on an elbow, a concerned frown twisting his scarred eyebrow, the flickering candlelight softening his features.
“No,” she answered honestly, throwing her arms over her head and stretching in luxurious satiety. “I just miss having you inside of me.”
He smiled, a hint of surprise coming from him and he stroked a big hand over her body, lingering to cup her breast, tracing the curve of her waist to her hip and down her thigh, his gaze following the movement. Feeling like a cat being petted, she wished she could purr. “I like being inside you,” he said, gaze returning to hers, eyes full of silvery heat. “But I promised you other pleasures, too.”
“We’ve done those,” she replied. “I like those things, but this is new.”
He laughed, levering himself up and going for a basin of water set over a warming candle on a nearby table. Sweet herbs and dried flower petals floated in the water and when he handed her a cloth soaked in it, the steamy fragrance rose up. She cleaned herself, moving leisurely to draw his eye. He stood by the bed, cleaning himself also, his heavy cock now lax. Wicked desire shimmered from him, his thoughts shuttered, and she wondered what he might be planning.
“Believe me, what I have in mind is new also.” He held out a hand for her cloth and she gave it to him with a little pout—one difficult to maintain at the sight of his gorgeous behind flexing as he returned the bowl and floating cloths to the warmer. She’d seen him naked plenty of times, but it seemed she’d never get enough.
He joined her on the bed again, tossing back the furs to expose her fully. Pleased with his admiration, she slid her legs together, a sinuous dance for him alone.
“You are so beautiful, Oria,” he said throatily, crawling over to straddle her on his hands and knees, “and I plan to taste every bit of your luscious body.”
Languidly she slid her arms around his neck, ready to draw him into a deep kiss. And he obliged her, but only with a brush of lips. Instead of sinking onto her, he moved to brush soft kisses along her jaw, to the sweet spot under her ear that made her shiver, then down her throat. She moaned, low and long, a sort of human purr, and he made an answering hum of pleasure.
Her arms fell back heavy as he continued to explore, lingering over the thin-skinned pulse points and slight hollows that sent her senses thrumming. Sometimes he nipped lightly, other times bestowed soft rains of fluttering kisses, followed by hot licks, then drawing her skin into his mouth as if he would devour her in truth.
She dissolved into a flurry of soft cries and pleas. Plucking at his shoulders, she tried to urge him between her spread thighs, but he wouldn’t be moved, instead taking her hand in his to deeply kiss her palm, then each fingertip, drawing her fingers one by one into his mouth, an indescribable sensual delight. He kissed his way down her arm, lingering at the hollow of her elbow, then tracing the tender underside of her arm to the near-ticklish skin at the side of her breast. Her nipples tightened in anticipation of his clever mouth on those sensitive points, but he circled around the one without touching, lavishing her breast with sensation, teasing and stirring her to a frenzy.
With a cry of frustration, she seized his head trying to move him to her throbbing nipple—but he only laughed, husky and darkly amused, and took her other hand into his mouth. With infuriating patience, he repeated the performance on the other hand, giving each finger meticulous attention before making his way down her arm, exquisitely slow, maddeningly thorough.
By the time he reached her other breast, still not touching her nipples, Oria had enough. Her magic swirled in the air, raking light claws down his back as she clung to his shoulders. “Lonen,” she panted, half in plea, half in warning.
He raised his head to stare her down, his face set in ridged lines of intense arousal, eyes flinty with determination. “No tricks, sorceress, or I’ll stop.”
“Don’t you dare,” she breathed, lifting her breasts to him, torn between begging and berating him.
He surveyed her with a molten stare, taking advantage of her arched back to slide his hands beneath and hold her there, draped over them. “In time, sweet. But only if you’re good. No magic.”
With supreme effort, she withdrew the mental claws, drawing the magic back into herself—which only made her feel more like exploding. “Be quick about it,” she said through gritted teeth, “or I’m liable to tear the palace apart before I realize it.”
He tsked, gently chiding. “You wanted to practice control.”
She growled in frustration, choked off when he pressed a deep kiss to the hollow at the center of her collarbones, then licked her, in one long, hot and slick caress down between her breasts all the way to the top of her pubis. He lingered there, dipping his tongue into her belly button, holding her in a firm grip as she writhed and mewed.
A wail escaped her when he flipped her onto her belly. “Every bit of you, Oria,” he reminded her in that sensual, graveled voice, gathering her hair and draping it to the side to expose the back of her neck. “You might as well resign yourself.”
“You’re so cruel,” she whimpered, undulating with need as he pressed his mouth to the nape of her neck.
He sank his teeth into the thicker muscle where her shoulder met her throat, and she sobbed at the intensity of it. “Yes,” he murmured, licking that spot, gentling her, then nipping at the skin along her spine on his way back up to her nape. “And you’re all mine to do with as I will.”
She moaned in resignation, letting him play his games, taunting and teasing her as he tasted every bit of her. As he made his way down her back, she lost all sense of time, of the edges of herself. Becoming only her skin and the unending sensations of his hot mouth and raking hands. She didn’t protest as he continued past her bottom down her legs, to her toes. The backs of her knees, the hollows of her ankles, the tender arches of her feet, all quickened to his caresses, each dissolving her a little more.
She’d gone blind and deaf, insensate to everything but the dark magic he worked on her body. So when he kissed his way up her inner thighs, she only groaned, unable to bear any more, unable to resist.
When he spread her wide and put his mouth on her sex, she climaxed in a wrenching convulsion that had her tearing at the bed cover. She screamed, spine arching and head thrown back, and Lonen held her plunging hips in his hands, tongue an incredible sensation on her most delicate tissues.
Though he wasn’t done with her, licking her through the orgasm, prolonging it, driving her still higher. When she neared peak again, he slid into her, and put his mouth on her nipple, sucking hard as he pinched the other.
Beyond the ability to make sound, she fully and completely shattered, becoming shards of starlight, swallowed in the blackness of night.
Oria tried to keep to a smooth pace as she made her way down to the dungeons. With every movement, however, each set of stairs she descended, aches and twinges reminded her of Lonen’s vigorous lovemaking. He’d wrung her dry, seemingly inexhaustible himself.
The ribald remarks she’d heard the Destrye calling to each other about women walking funny in the morning kept echoing in her head. Apparently, they were based at least somewhat on reality. Though she’d experienced penetration before, nothing had prepared her for her husband’s extremely well-endowed efforts. To make matters worse, when she’d commented on it, he’d only looked terribly pleased with himself and not sympathetic at all. Men.
“But you’re happy?” Chuffta asked.
“Oh yes,” she reassured him. “Just sore and tired—and not willing to give Lonen any reason to expand his already big head.”
They hadn’t slept much at all—just naps here and there—because every time she stirred, it seemed to awaken his insatiable hunger for her. Not that she minded. She’d known from their first wedding night that Lonen was a creative, sensitive, and generous lover—totally at odds with his barbarian mien—but she hadn’t quite expected the intensity of being skin to skin with him. Or what access to her skin allowed him to do to her. He’d promised to consume her and she indeed felt entirely as if she’d been chewed up and left boneless.
“Perhaps you should sleep more,” Chuffta offered solicitously. “Or see a healer.”
“I don’t need a healer.” She mentally laughed, and also cringed, at the thought of telling even Baeltya about it. The thought of Vycayla somehow becoming involved…. No, no, no. “I’m fine, really. I got used to riding a horse after all, and this is—” She cut herself off, realizing how Lonen would laugh his ass off at that analogy.
“Why is that so funny?”
“It’s a human thing. Listen along as I work with Nolan, all right? Just anything you notice.” She nodded at the guard who unlocked the door for her to enter the lowest level of the dungeon. In better times, Lonen had told her as they curled together sleepily, a newly married couple could be expected to stay in their rooms for days—or even go off together somewhere—and he offered for them to take a day or two. But she hadn’t needed to read his mind to know that, as much as part of him yearned to closet himself with her, he also itched to get after the business of the realm.
In truth, she should start learning her responsibilities as queen, but Lonen had preempted that impulse by telling her that her priority should be dealing with the sorcerous Báran taint in Nolan and his men. He hadn’t said aloud, but they both knew that the first priority for Dru and the Destrye was planning for the inevitable next attack.
Or, rather, forestalling that possibility by taking the war to Bára.
“Do you think we will—go back to Bára and attack them?”
“Strange to think about, hmm?” Strange, indeed, to consider how she’d once stood at the balustrade of her high tower and looked out over the desert, straining for news of the battle she couldn’t see. Now she’d be the enemy. But not to destroy Bára. No: to save it.
Nolan’s ranting echoed down the tunnel of the corridor, the volume of it seeming to make the torches flicker, though Oria knew that shouldn’t be possible. Adjusting her barriers, she steadied herself as she came around the last corner. As usual, he paced his cell, waving hands in the air as he raged.
Also as usual when Oria wasn’t there, Natly perched on the stool. She seemed to be trying to talk to Nolan. She didn’t hear Oria’s approach immediately and started when Oria called out a hello, by way of warning. Glancing over her shoulder and quickly away, Natly brushed at her face. When she met Oria’s gaze, her defiant one glistened still with tears.
“I’m surprised you’re out of bed already. Your Highness,” she added, a beat too late for true courtesy, not quite enough to be insolent.
Oria figured she’d be none too polite to a woman she knew had just crawled wobbly-kneed out of Lonen’s bed—more likely she’d be inclined to murder—so she ignored the slight. “I have work to do,” she replied with a calming smile and gestured at Nolan. “Any changes?”
Natly bit her lip. The Destrye woman always groomed herself beautifully, fit for the queen she longed to be, so her lips were painted in crisp lines of glossy crimson, her dark eyes artfully highlighted with cosmetics, and her black hair piled in an artful tumble of curls and jewels. Oria was glad the ladies assigned to her had insisted on braiding her hair—adding the gold circlet—dressing her in a new gown and decorating her with subtle cosmetics and discreet jewelry. She wore her wedding cloak. The silk-lined emerald satin was heavy enough to keep her warm in the pervasive chill of the palace without her needing to expend magic to warm herself, but it was a better weight for indoors than the shadowcat fur cloak. Lonen had noted that her wearing Arill’s colors would help establish Oria in her new role, too.
Lonen had similarly girded himself for the day ahead, and there had been something companionable and intimate in their shared ritual of donning their costumes as rulers.
And in the knowing that she’d return to him at the end of the day and remove it all again. Had she thought herself sexually exhausted? Apparently not, because the thought of what might occur once night fell had her flushing in anticipation.
Natly noted the blush, narrowing her eyes knowingly. Lonen had likely polished all those bed skills, those many clever tricks of his, with this woman. Once that realization might have made Oria jealous, but not now. To have had Lonen in her bed and lost him…Oria could only feel sorry for Natly, which the Destrye woman would not abide.
“I think he’s worse,” Natly finally said, her tone far less brash, and Oria recalled herself to the important matters at hand. Natly even stepped aside, not quite offering Oria the courtesy of acknowledging her rank, but making way for them both to observe Nolan. “I stayed until late last night and have been here a few hours. I don’t think he’s slept at all.”
Nolan seized the iron grate barring the cell, shouting incoherently, eyes glassy and wild.
“Did you sleep much?” Oria asked without thinking, then wished she could take back the inconsiderate words.
“I couldn’t,” Natly bit out, her voice and spiky emotions daring Oria to say anything more.
“Nolan is fortunate in your devotion,” Oria said instead.
That threw Natly off course, and she paused, reeling back whatever words she’d been poised to hurl at Oria. She gazed at Nolan with a strange expression on her face, her emotions a tangible snarl of worry, anger, fear—and love?
“I loved him once,” Natly said, confirming it. “Long ago. Forever ago, it feels like. He didn’t love me, but at least he wanted me.” Rather than the brash, confidently aggressive woman Natly had presented herself as before, she sounded small in that moment, even forlorn. “Even after he returned, and Lonen… was with you, I offered to be his lover—we’d always been good together that way—and he ignored me. As if that part of him had died. I hate what’s become of him.”
The way Nolan’s once-handsome face contorted in his insane ire, spittle flecking his filthy beard, Oria didn’t blame Natly a bit. She couldn’t imagine seeing Lonen in such a state. And it was all her people’s fault. Whoever had turned Nolan’s mind—Oria’s brother Yar or someone else—the guilt belonged to Bára.
“I’m going to help him,” she told Natly, setting the resolve in herself as she said the words. “Maybe you should go rest. Come back later and—”
“You can give me orders,” Natly said in a flat, malicious voice, all softness gone. “Because you are Queen of Dru now, and I’ll obey. I won’t give you reason to have me exiled for disloyalty. But don’t pretend that you care a fig for me.” She gathered her skirts and strode off in a brisk, athletic stride, jewelry chiming as she went.
“Good riddance, I say,” Chuffta remarked. “She makes my ears hurt.”
“How can she make your ears hurt when you can’t literally hear her.”
“I don’t know. She just does.”
Privately Oria had to agree that the area felt calmer without Natly’s prickly presence—which was saying something given Nolan’s noisy behavior—though she also felt petty thinking it. Natly had suffered a great deal and lost her planned future. Oria should try to be more generous in her thoughts. She sat on the stool Natly had vacated and cleared her mind. Lately she’d been drawing on the sensations of flying to get there, evoking that calm, in-the-moment peacefulness of simply existing in the world. Back in Bára, Chuffta had helped her meditate by guiding her into trances that at least mimicked hwil.
Now she found that she could slip into that state—not hwil, which never had made sense to her—but a place of being, in the most profound and basic sense; a point of equilibrium, a still, quiet place she’d found in the inferno of the derkesthai cavern. Lonen’s delicious torment had brought her to a similar place, one where she accepted the flow of existing without trying to control it. As if she had immense wings like Chuffta’s, she soared on the currents of the wild magic.
Once those unpredictable currents had destabilized her, dragging her under and drowning conscious thought, driving her nearly insane. When she’d begun using the ancient mask of her ancestress, which she and Lonen had dug out of the unnamed sorceress’s tomb, the magical artifact had focused and exacerbated the effect—to the point that it had nearly killed her. Lonen had overreacted, wanting to take it from her. But after the trials with the derkesthai, Oria felt confident she could use the mask effectively, with no damage to herself.
But she kept the mask out of Lonen’s sight anyway. He hadn’t mentioned it since they had found each other again—possibly with so much on his mind, he’d forgotten about it, or thought she’d lost it in the molten lakes of the derkesthai caverns—so she hadn’t brought it to his attention. If they took the war back to Bára, then she would need to have the mask in hand. She and Lonen could fight about it then.
For the moment, she’d hold the mask in reserve. She held on to that steady core of balanced self, sailing with the magic, absorbing it into herself and becoming one with it. Not helplessly tossed about, but integrated.
One with the flow of the magic of the world, she moved the flow of it with her. If she let herself, she could spend hours distracted by the rivers and streams of different kinds of magic, each with its own particular quality. They’d be different scents or flavors, if magic was chemical. Or colors, if magic flows were a visible thing. They’d be different notes in a song if magic could be heard, the melodies and harmonies related to the source of that magic.
Gradually, however, she’d begun to learn to accept magic as its own thing. She didn’t perceive it with the same parts of herself that smelled, saw, or heard things. It could be that the part of herself that sensed, drew in, and manipulated magic had nothing to do with her physical body at all. Thus, comparing her magical senses to physical ones would only lead her down false paths.
She’d been mulling this, contemplating it in the last days while flying on Chuffta and distracting herself from anticipating the wedding. That had been a good event, no doubt about it, but it felt good to have their personal lives settled, and their political ones, too. Now she could concentrate on her sorcery.
And her first big project: finding the magical corruption in Nolan.
Removing it would be the second ambitious project.
In the still place, she shut out her physical senses, aware only of the world formed entirely of magic. There, Nolan’s shouted epithets didn’t exist, nor did the hard stool or the chill, dank air of the dungeons. Even she didn’t exist, exactly, nor did Chuffta, but they were together, swimming in an endless sea of magic.
“Or flying.”
“Yes. I’m going to look in a different place this time. Tell me what you notice.”
When she’d tried before, she’d looked into Nolan’s mind, the way she read Lonen’s thoughts or sensed the wordless images from Buttercup. With no time to spend with Nolan the day before, and lots of time to mull while all the ladies decorated her for the wedding, she’d realized that Yar—or whatever sorcerer had worked this magic to poison Nolan’s thoughts—would predict that Oria could read them.
Till now she’d thought that Yar assumed her to be dead. A reasonable assumption, since no sorceress had survived long outside of the walls of her city and its sustaining source of sgath. She herself had thought she’d die. Likely she would have, if not for Lonen’s stubborn determination to save her life, and his ridiculous optimism that he could thwart everything the Bárans knew about how sgath and the wild magic worked.
Never mind that he’d turned out to be right.
Oria had realized that whatever opened Nolan’s mind to Báran influence could be a two-way connection. The golems could also operate that way. The silicate constructs were given packets of sgath to animate them and instructions to follow, but Oria could receive and well as send through her magic portals. Surely a sorcerer could, too. Which might mean that Yar had been aware that Oria had survived ever since the Golems attacked her and Lonen in the desert. If so, he might’ve gained even more information once Nolan found them at the borders of Dru.
Worst of all, he might now know everything Nolan knew about Dru and the Destrye.
That realization changed nothing—they could hardly prepare for attack any more than they had—so she hadn’t mentioned this possibility to Lonen. Not yet. Not until she tested her theory. If Yar had anticipated that Oria would read Nolan’s thoughts, then the taint lay somewhere Yar believed Oria couldn’t access.
So, this time, instead of looking in Nolan’s chaotic thoughts—an unpleasant experience, regardless—she looked at other parts of his being. Particularly the masculine aspects. Yar wouldn’t easily relinquish his ideas of the superiority of male grien and the sorcerers who wielded it. Even though he’d personally witnessed Oria using grien, active magic supposedly beyond the reach of women, that self-absorbed and self-congratulatory ego of his would blind him to the truth. She was gambling that he’d consider anything male beyond her ability to comprehend.
Sifting through Nolan’s masculine nature, she found it grounded in the physical body. From there the personality stemmed, partly shaped by the physical, partly by the non-physical. To her surprise, she found that the eternal aspect of Nolan—that which had existed before his birth and which would move on following the death of his body—was neither male nor female.
“This could explain why you can access both sgath and grien,” Chuffta noted quietly, observing along with her. “You’ve found that the world of magic exists beyond the physical. If you are not your body, then your use of magic is neither male nor female.”
“Balance in all things,” she remembered the Great One trying to explain. “Finding the point of equilibrium could mean between masculine and feminine also.”
He agreed, wordless in their connection in this space.
She moved into the parts of Nolan’s identity where his sense of himself as a man resided. And there, she found what she sought.