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Coming into Pinburg was always a surprise for Andras. There were no suburbs to speak of, few outlying villages, and only scattered farms beyond the long wooden palisades. The Bridweld Forest, a dense tangle of cedars, white pines, and oaks, extended right up to the gates.
One moment, you were trotting down a forest road, feeling utterly alone in a shadowy green world, and the next moment, you were in town, and your horse was striking sparks from a steep cobbled street.
Not that Pinburg was much of a town. There were a handful of larger houses, and a small cathedral, too. But most of the homes were rough log cabins with roofs of thatch or cedar shingles. The inhabitants were, by and large, equally unpolished. A lot of them were trappers and scouts and “hunting guides”—a common local euphemism for smugglers. They wore towering fur hats, like the raiders of the Loshadnarodski steppes, and only about one man in four had a decent pair of shoes on his feet. They were fiercely independent, and their city reflected that. Pinburg had no grand public buildings, no graceful parks. People kept to themselves most of the time. The city existed less as an outpost of civilization than as an incursion of the wilderness into civilized life.
In the last year, Pinburg had become a major army encampment, too. Bandits and rebels roamed the forest, and the crown prince had made the city his headquarters to pacify the district. He had been mostly successful, which was why Andras and the Keneshire militiamen had been released after only half a year’s duty. The last thing Andras had expected, when he and Geert packed up their tents and left, was that he would be returning only a couple weeks later.
He knew he ought to avoid his former comrades. His mission would be called treason if the royal family caught wind of it, and it would be no excuse to say, “My mother told me to do it.” Unfortunately, there were only so many inns and taverns, and Andras had frequented all of them with Geert during their off-duty hours. He chose one of the more obscure, a grubby little place with moldering half-timbered walls called the Cedar Bough, down by the River Telga.
Only moments after he’d taken a room, he was recognized by an old acquaintance, though luckily not one from the army. Will Laurie was the stable boy, butler, and all-purpose manservant of the house. He was also a strapping lad with a chiseled jaw and a taste for buggery. All he had to do was smile and say, “Why, it’s you again, sir,” and Andras felt himself getting hard. He took a look up and down the hall, pulled Will into the room, and locked the door after him.
Will had a jar of oil on him. Of course he did. Andras was troubled only briefly by his conscience. It seemed like a rather shabby thing to do when he was on a mission to woo and win a princess. But this thought was driven out of his head by a much more pressing concern, which was the choice of whether he wanted to give or to receive. Will, like Andras, enjoyed it both ways. They debated the issue as they undressed, hands stroking, lips searching. In the end, they flipped a coin for it, and Andras lost. Or, more properly, he won the right to get fucked by Will.
He had missed that feeling. Geert had preferred to be on the receiving end, and Andras had almost always obliged him. So it was a while since he’d been fucked.
Andras had intended to go out that evening and try to find a reliable guide to Briddobad, or at least a map or two. But he stayed in with Will and a bottle of whiskey, instead, and he fell asleep utterly exhausted and deliriously happy. “Maybe I owe it to myself to have one last, good fling,” he thought.
Will seemed to have similar ideas. The next morning, the handsome stable boy showed up with a tall, buxom young blonde on his arm. “I remembered you liked girls, too,” said the boy, and he introduced his companion as his cousin Clara.
The girl claimed to be a milk maid, though she seemed to have discovered a profitable part-time job. She was halfway undressed when she paused, hands at the ties of her underclothes, and hinted a small gratuity might be in order. Andras readily handed over sixpence. He had no idea if Clara really was Will’s cousin, or if she was a girl he’d picked up in an alley somewhere. But she was built like an Immani statue, and the way Will kept running his hands over her hips and backside made Andras want to tackle them both into bed and tear their clothes off with his bare hands.
“This is my last chance,” he thought. “Soon I’ll have to stop doing this sort of thing.” Or would he? How difficult would it be to make a trip back here to Pinburg every once in a while? Why shouldn’t he, when his mother had been screwing the king for five years? No one would really care, would they?
“Will tells me you’re getting married,” Clara said, in a low purr, as she walked over to him, swaying her hips.
“Um...I suppose so.” Had he actually told Will that? Maybe he had. They had been awfully drunk the night before.
“So who is she?” the beautiful milk maid asked, kneeling down and starting to unlace his trousers.
“No one you know,” Andras said hastily. “Just a girl I met at school.”
She reached in. “Lucky girl,” she grinned. No doubt about it, this was more than a part-time job for Clara. He was lost in the moment, and he came so fast he felt obliged to apologize.
“Why are you sorry?” she giggled, wiping her lips. “That’s what I was aiming for, after all.”
He was able to make it up to her later, though. The three of them spent almost two hours together, and by the end of it, he was pretty sure they had done absolutely everything two men and a woman could ever do, in every combination. Occasionally, Clara would feign an attack of conscience, but a few more pennies would always convince her to keep going. Andras couldn’t think when he’d felt so thoroughly spent, in every possible meaning of that word. He considered asking Clara to stay the night, but then the bells of the cathedral rang midday, and the girl got up and began dressing.
“I’ve got to go churn butter.” She mimicked the motion with one hand. “It builds marvelous grip strength, you know.”
Will said he needed to go back to work, too, and they both headed out, leaving Andras alone in bed, tired and slightly sore, but feeling very pleased with himself.
Their footsteps had hardly faded down the hall, however, when the lock of his room clicked again, and the door swung open to reveal a small, dark woman in a deep blue riding dress. There was nothing indecent or even provocative about the cut of her clothes, and yet their practical design did nothing but call attention to her slim waist and unusually long legs. As for her face, she would have been quite pretty if it hadn’t been for the hard, grim set to her jaw, and the angry crease in her forehead.
“Lord Andras Byrne?” she asked.
“Um...who wants to know?” he stammered, pulling the blankets up to cover himself. “How did you get in here?”
“I picked your lock, obviously.” Looking around, she sniffed at the air and wrinkled her long, straight nose. The room probably smelled a bit ripe, though he couldn’t tell anymore. “Been enjoying ourselves, have we?”
Her Myrcian was very good, but there was a trace of an accent. And not a Sahasran accent, either. Oddly, she talked almost as if she were Loshadnarodski.
“My name is Lady Rada Kaur,” she said, crossing her arms and coming over to stand by the bed. “I’ve been sent to guide you to Briddobad, where you will meet,” she sniffed again, “the woman who will be your wife.”
She paced around the room, and nothing seemed to escape her notice. She stopped to examine the odd stains on the chair and the handprints on the wall by the mirror. She looked into the rubbish bin, where she no doubt saw the lacy chest cloth Clara had been forced to discard after it was torn in the heat of passion and reused, first as a blindfold, and then as a makeshift washcloth.
With her hands on her hips, Lady Rada turned to face him again, one thin, black eyebrow raised. She seemed to be demanding an explanation.
“I had a bit of a party,” he said. It was starting to dawn on him that this was not going to make a good impression when Princess Elwyn heard about it. “I don’t suppose we could let this be our little secret, could we?”
She glared at him as if he were a particularly nasty louse, the kind other lice might look down on for giving the rest of them a bad name.
“Let me make one thing clear, Lord Andras. Her royal highness is a very dear friend of mine, and if I thought for a moment that you would behave this way after you were married, then I would be going back to Briddobad alone.”
His first impulse was to tell this woman to mind her own damned business. His second impulse was to tell her it hadn’t been his idea to go to Briddobad, and that if he’d had his own way, he would still be back in Formacaster with his Zekustian lover. But that was neither politic nor fair. He had agreed to go see Elwyn, and since he had taken on that mission, he had a duty to see it through.
Rada had a point, and he knew it. He had known it yesterday, when he first spotted Will, and he had known it the whole time Clara was visiting. A man who was serious about winning a girl’s heart didn’t run around like a stag in the rut.
He gave her his most sincere look and said, “I promise you I’m going to try to change. I won’t be like this if I marry her.”
She looked far less than satisfied. “We shall see, Lord Andras. We shall see.” Bending down, she picked up his trousers between her thumb and forefinger. After holding them at arm’s length, she tossed them on the bed like she was disposing of a dead carcass. “Now get dressed, please. I’m waiting for confirmation from my colleagues that the way through the forest is safe, but we will need food and other supplies when we leave.”
“Safe?” He shook his head. “Most of the fighting is over, or haven’t you heard?”
“Most, but not all. You were last here in the company of an army, my lord. You’ll find it’s an entirely different matter to ride through the forest in ones and twos.”
He couldn’t help snorting with laughter. “No offense, but clearly you made it through.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I realize this may be difficult for Myrcians like you to understand, but just because I’m not built like a draft horse doesn’t mean I can’t take care of myself.”
“Fair enough,” he said, with a nod of respect. “So when do you think we’ll be leaving?”
“I can’t say.” She frowned thoughtfully. “It might be a day. It might be a week. But we have to be ready the moment I get the word to proceed.”
“And what do I do in the meantime?”
“Whatever you like.” Then she corrected herself. “No, you may do whatever I like. And I would like you to stay out of trouble, please. Try not to do anything to call too much attention to yourself. Like reenacting the last days of Paradelphia in here, for instance.”
“I’ll do my best,” he said.
As she headed for the door, she said over her shoulder, “I hope you do a good deal better than that.”