Daniel frowned. “Why did she want all of us?”
Timothy rolled his eyes again and it dawned on Daniel that perhaps she did, in fact, want all of them.
“She told you this?” Daniel walked forward. “When?”
“You are not going to be a good future-seer, brother.” Timothy slapped his shoulder. “She’s astute. I think she wants the same as Mama.” He snorted.
Why would a woman want two husbands, or with them, three? The priests considered it a barbaric practice, one that showed unrepentant ways, and Ingund came from a good, church-going family.
They were all good, church-going families. Mama, Papa, and Father did not answer questions, to stay with their good, church-going ways. They told their boys that they harmed no one, so why would God harm them? His parents made more sense than the priests on a lot of subjects, but authority was authority.
Nor did Daniel understand how a woman would wish to be cruel to her husbands. Papa and Father were not brothers, and at home shared with each other the same love and affection they shared with Mama. Living any other arrangement would make Daniel feel as if he lived in a desert.
“I don’t want to live like that with you.” He scratched at the back of his head.
Timothy’s eyes rounded as if Daniel had just slapped him across the face.
Daniel wasn’t going to love his brother like that. “You are my brother.”
Timothy walked away. “You will have a wife. You will need to live with a woman no matter what you desire.”
Unlike Marcus, Timothy did not look identical to Daniel. He was broader at the shoulders and his dark hair glinted with golden highlights different from the bluish tones in Daniel’s hair. Timothy’s eyes were green-blue like Father’s, whereas Daniel and Marcus looked at the world through iron-gray irises.
Timothy’s view of life was also different.
Daniel always thought that he and Marcus looked remarkably like Papa and that Timothy looked like their larger Father. On the other hand, Timothy carried Papa’s gentler nature, and Daniel and Marcus Father’s sharper wit. They were truly the sons of two men.
Daniel followed his brother along the descending path. They slipped on the mud. Both young men turned their attention toward not stumbling. The hill sloped gently but the drizzle glimmered on the stones and plants, and Daniel did not wish to fall.
Nor did he wish to be second-husband to a nice-enough girl. Not that it would happen with Ingund, anyway.
The path leveled and they rounded the massive oak marking the outer edge of the outcropping over the pool. Bushes and trees grew up to the cliff and if one was not careful, one could skirt the wrong tree and end up in a painful fall into the water.
Timothy vanished between two trees. Daniel twisted around a crooked trunk.
He smacked directly into Ingund.
She touched her finger to his lips. “Shhh…” She’d braided her brown hair into a bun on the back of her head, and from the scent of her, had recently bathed in lavender-laden water.
Timothy will be happy, he thought.
His brother burst from the trees, generously smiling for Ingund, his attentions diverted completely to the round hips and breasts in front of him. “Hmmm….” He pulled her away from Daniel and into a tight, intense embrace.
Timothy’s color changed, and warmed noticeably. His back straightened even as he curled around Ingund, his arms, chest, shoulders—his hips—cupping forward. Slowly and deliberately, he stroked his fingertips along her cheek and the curve of her neck. “You are beautiful,” he whispered, his eyes closed and his face buried in her skin.
Ingund grinned.
When the boys were small, they would accompany their mother as she made her way around the countryside, stopping at farms and other villages. Most people did not know the true meaning of Parcae, but they knew that the family had a knack for calming feuds and settling disputes, and they paid handsomely for the help.
Daniel had seen many people grin the way Ingund was now. Those who felt vindicated grinned like that. People who worked toward a goal and who got what they wanted grinned the way she grinned.
Winners, both those who earned it and those who didn’t, looked exactly the way Ingund did right now.
“Hush!” she giggled, then nodded toward the bushes. “We’re not the only people here.”
Timothy ignored her words and danced kisses over the hem covering her cleavage.
His brother’s focus was not to be deterred. Daniel shook his head. How could a woman occupy a man’s mind so completely?
Daniel turned away. Let them fondle each other. He was more concerned about not getting caught engaging in stupid behaviors.
Two voices wafted up from the pool, one higher-pitched and feminine, the other the deep, smooth baritone of a warm-sounding male. The man sounded alive. Maybe not happy, but most definitely unconcerned about “getting caught.”
Images popped unbidden into Daniel’s mind as he pushed back the leaves. Was this man as large and smooth as his voice? Did he move with the solid muscles and athletic grace Daniel imagined? Did the water cling to his skin and the drizzle to thick, dark hair?
Daniel’s fingers opened a gap in the leaves.
A cooking pot hung over a crackling fire on the shore of the pool. Clothes rested on a large rock directly behind it—a pair of black leather trousers and a black tunic, along with a lighter-colored woman’s archery uniform. Off to the side, near the trees, two horses grazed.
And no more than thirty feet away, the man, his back to Daniel and his body clad only in the black metal-studded leather bracers covering his forearms, stood naked in the pool.
Chapter Two
Pool water clung to the man’s broad, defined back and his raven black hair. His warm skin gleamed as if touched by the sun itself. He looked to be as tall as Papa and Father, perhaps slightly more so. Or, perhaps, the obvious strength oozing from the hard line of his muscles made him seem larger than any other.
Ingund touched Daniel’s hip and he flinched, now pulled from his thoughts about the man in the pool. She grinned again, but this time her skin looked as flushed as his brother’s. Timothy continued to pay no heed to the world and seemed to have been consumed whole by his task of unlacing Ingund’s clothes.
“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” she whispered.
Daniel returned his gaze to the pool. A woman lay on one of the boulders, her breasts thrust outward and her legs slightly spread, as naked as the man. Daniel hadn’t noticed her before.
“Yes,” he said.
Ingund’s hand moved to his crotch. “As beautiful as you and your brothers.”
She squeezed.
The intensity of the desire pulsing from his hardening cock surprised him. He thrust against her hand, but he didn’t look at her. He watched the man cup water from the river and rub his hand over his bicep.
Beautiful, he thought. Beauty wasn’t a reflection of a form. It wasn’t the stillness a woman held to allow her suitor to take in her curves and ratios. Beauty was the outcome of grace; the product of perfected movement. Beauty arose from the processes of muscles and the articulation of joints and bones.
Beauty only happened when the proportions of a man matched his strength, speed, and, when one came close enough to hear the quiet whispers, his humor as well.
Ingund’s fingers made quick work of his trouser ties. By the time she freed him, his body had found its own strength, speed, and humor.
Both of her hands stroked him with a deliberate rhythm. Daniel’s eyelids drooped.
In the pool, the woman said something Daniel did not hear and the man’s entire face smiled—eyes, cheeks, ears as well. His arm and shoulders rippled as he slicked back the hair crowning his head from the almost-shaved sides of his scalp.
Yes, beauty only showed itself in grace and movement.
The woman slid down her rock and into the pool. She waded over, her hips pushing against the water’s pressure, and stopped in front of the man
. Her hand rose.
She touched his chest and he responded the way Daniel knew he would. The way only a man who moved the way this man did, could. He deliberately touched; deliberately kissed. He learned and he focused.
His broad body shifted and blocked all sight of the woman but Daniel saw her hands slowly work down the man’s torso, her fingers pressing into his flesh, before stopping over the top curve of his strong, square backside.
Timothy grunted. Daniel did not look at his brother, nor did he fight when Ingund’s lips replaced her hands.
In the pool, the man’s hips thrust forward. He looked up at the sky, and his back rippled.
Daniel rippled with him; rippled in time and pleasure, his body responding to the beauty manifesting in the pool before him. How would he feel to touch the man’s skin; to be touched with such perfection in return? Did the man smell of the golden sunshine Daniel imagined he did? Did he taste subtly of salt or of woodfire? Did the glint in his eyes match the light dancing over the water clinging to his skin?
Daniel wanted to know, to share in that grace, to experience it, to cause it, and perhaps, to receive it. But he was young and, as his brother reminded him, the fate ahead of him involved the correct wife with whom to breed the correct next generation of Parcae seers.
He didn’t touch Ingund. He let his mind replace her with the perfection in front of him; with the sway of the man’s hips and tightening muscles of his back.
Timothy moaned and Ingund suddenly pulled off Daniel. They rustled next to him, Timothy and Ingund rocking against each other.
“Inga…” his brother groaned. Timothy wanted her for himself.
Let them paw each other. They were nothing compared to the visceral, bone-dancing pleasure of what he watched. Daniel wrapped his hand around his cock.
In the pool, the man groaned, and Daniel moaned with him. His hips bucked, and Daniel bucked. They came, one and the same.
Daniel tipped toward the tree trunk, his breathing heavy and his knees on the verge of buckling. His head swam with what he could only call wonder. It wasn’t a scent or a sight or a smell. It wasn’t physical, yet it was—and it filled his body from the base of his throat all the way out to the tips of his fingers and toes.
Behind him, Timothy whispered and Ingund giggled.
In the pool, the man picked the woman up out of the water as if he lifted a cloud. Her face appeared over his shoulder, her eyes bright, and she looked directly at the brothers’ hiding place in the stand of trees.
Right at the trees. Right at Daniel. Right through his wonder.
Daniel flung backward and the hole through which he’d watched the man and the woman popped closed. The branches snapped together, their leaves rubbing and shredding.
They knew. They let Daniel watch.
What should he do? How should he deal with this? He should be embarrassed. He was embarrassed. He’d spied. They were a couple, a normal couple like all the good people at the church, and he’d spied.
This would not end well. It could not—
Behind the now-closed hole, the air shimmered. The trees shifted as if something large moved across the ridge. A low rumble-purr filled the air.
Daniel yelped.
A large cat-like eye appeared in the hole, then vanished as if it had never been there.
Daniel fell on his ass in the mud.
What did he just see?
Chapter Three
Daniel’s papa once told him about the family who’d long ago built the ruins. They’d traveled out of the lands on the other side of the southern mountains. Their wealth and influence had been as great as it was vast, and they’d birthed one of the greatest emperors in all of Rome’s grand history.
The land on which they now walked and farmed had once been the estate of a cousin or perhaps a son of the Emperor Trajan, a name Daniel recognized from his mother’s many books and scrolls, but which otherwise meant nothing to him.
How could it? Rome continued, but Constantinople was, to Daniel, no more accessible than Heaven. Stories of the Emperor Justinian filtered through the countryside—the Empire raided coastal towns and demanded local tribute—but they brought the people here no more health and prosperity than the Frankish kings and lords who currently collected taxes and demanded the tithing of grains and goods.
The ruins, though, offered Daniel a place of solace, and after the embarrassment at the pool, solace was what he needed. The village thought the ruins a place of ghosts, but the spirits of the dead only haunted if you did not listen. Daniel had the knowledge needed to read the words the now long-gone inhabitants painted on their walls, and he heard the whispers they left in their now-empty pools. The Romans were not ghosts; they were echoes.
The estate had once been a grand place, with many wide rooms along arched patios, opening to the sun and the air. Stairs hinted that at least one area of the structure had held a second floor. In his explorations he’d found several baths, including one still clean and fresh, fed by a channel from the river. More than once on particularly hot summer days, he’d snuck away to cool his growing body among the broken, “haunted” halls.
He sat on the stones of a toppled wall, his back to the singing river down the slope, and stared out at the meadow he knew had once been a vineyard. Grapes continued to grow here. Papa harvested what he could, and made wine for the year. Some harvests he sold to the tavern in the village.
Perhaps Daniel should return home alone. Timothy would understand why Daniel did not wait for his return from Ingund’s home. Perhaps Daniel should pilfer a bottle of his Papa’s stash and drink to excess. Perhaps piling onto his embarrassment a new, bolder, more public humiliation would distract him from his roiling gut and his burning cheeks.
Ingund’s giggling had not helped. When she and Timothy left for her home, Daniel had instead rounded the bend of the river to the ruins and found himself a cold spot under the gray sky to be alone with his lack of discretion.
If the couple had continued to bathe, he did not know. Nor did he wish to consider the reality of the cat-like eye that had peered at him through the leaves.
A massive, huge, eye of a growling beast.
He’d seen a dragon. A real, living dragon, not a parable dragon or “dragon” as a title, used to describe men of great power and fierceness, though the man in the pool could easily have carried the descriptor with ease.
How was this possible? How could a dragon be so beautiful?
Then it vanished—gone where, Daniel did not know.
Daniel rubbed his hand over his scalp. What should he do? He needed absolution, but for what? For spying on the man or for seeing the dragon?
His quiet voices babbled in the back of his mind. Do not call attention bounced around inside his head. But was it too late for clandestineness?
What punishments were his parents going mete out onto Timothy and Daniel when they found out? Papa’s past-seer would not skip by this particular moment in his sons’ lives.
Voices echoed from along the river. Male voices, three in total, all speaking a language Daniel did not recognize. Were they traveling with the man and the woman in the pool?
One of his still, small voices whispered no.
Quickly, Daniel dropped to the stone floor. If he stayed hidden, they would move by and he’d get a look before he ran the path toward Ingund’s homestead in the village. If he was lucky, he’d catch his brother before Timothy made his way back toward the ruins. If Daniel wasn’t lucky, the men would see him and, perhaps, do both brothers harm.
The drizzle turned the stone slick and the vines a deep, brilliant green and, Daniel hoped, flattened the shadows well enough for him to move unnoticed. Slowly, he backed deeper into the ruins. If he circled around, the other side of the wall offered cover. He might get a look at the foreigners outside, in case he needed to relay information to his father and his papa.
One of the men grunted out a mean-sounding syllable. Daniel froze. Had they noticed him?
The o
ther two responded as coarsely as the first, but with laughter. No, it seemed they were responding to each other. Daniel exhaled, realizing he’d been holding his breath.
Daniel inched toward the end of the hall. If he made it around the corner unnoticed, he’d have a good view of the outside.
A shadow moved a few feet away under the broken arch, beyond the hall.
He wasn’t alone.
Daniel froze again, watching the shadow flicker and flinch. Whoever cast it seemed agitated.
A brown robe fluttered and a priest’s head appeared in the archway.
Brother Antonius jumped when he saw Daniel, but managed to keep his wits enough not to yelp.
Antonius wasn’t much older than Daniel. Seventeen, he said one afternoon. He’d run to the church and begun his studies only a year before. Most days, he watched the world with wide-open eyes and a perpetual look of fascination. He and Daniel had spent many hours here in the ruins slowly parsing the moldy words of Daniel’s mother’s books.
Daniel quickly touched Antonius’s lips before pulling him against the wall. His friend looked whole—no bruises or foreign-blade-inflicted wounds—but he should not be in the ruins by himself any more than Daniel should.
Daniel whispered as he nodded toward the river. “Are you safe?”
Antonius’s bright, soulful eyes sparkled with the rich warmth only brown-eyed men carried. Like the other priests serving the church here, he shaved away a band around his hairline from his temples, over his ears, and to the back of his head, leaving him with a poof of wavy brown hair on the top of his head.
The mane on Antonius’s head didn’t disguise his handsome features. He tended to be cleaner than the other priests, especially the dour Brother Tambor. Antonius also walked the world square-jawed and with strong cheekbones. He could have his share of young women, and probably did, when the other priests weren’t around. Daniel never asked. He didn’t want to know.
Dragon’s Fate and Other Stories Page 2
