Sin and Soil

by Anya Merchant

  He took his time, getting a firm hold on where the fruit’s base connected to the lake bottom, and then pushed off with his legs. Once free of their roots, waterfruit were buoyant enough to float on their own, meaning it was a simple matter of pushing them toward the beach and collecting them into baskets later.

  He surfaced right next to Vel, who apparently hadn’t been expecting him, judging from the pitch of her gasp.

  “Your turn,” he said. “Make sure you dive straight down. Otherwise, you won’t sink deep enough.”

  It was a blatant exaggeration, but a woman performing a straight dive downward in a dress would have no real way of keeping it from billowing outward, revealing her slip.

  “Why do I get the feeling that this is a perverted ploy you concocted to peep at my underwear?” asked Vel.

  Damon stared at her, feeling annoyed at his utter inability to come up with a decent counter or denial. In that moment, he made his decision. He’d already come too far to turn back.

  “You’re just trying to avoid doing work, and that dress is only going to get in the way.”

  He made a grab for the bottom hem of Vel’s dress, but her speed surprised him. She pumped her arms and kicked backward, diving downward as he tried to follow. Damon tried to make out her shape underneath the surface, but a powerful tug pulled at the bottom of his trousers before he could.

  “Hey!” he shouted.

  Vel surfaced near the beach, sticking her tongue out at him with unabashed, childish glee. Her dress clung to every curve of her body, revealing the shape of her modest breasts with a distinct lack of modesty. He watched as she sprinted away from the lake, tossing his pants into the mud of the melon patch, before continuing inside.

  CHAPTER 14

  Damon finished harvesting the waterfruits naked and alone, which would have been a pain if more of them had been fully ripe. He still intended to give Malon a full report of Vel’s abdication of responsibility, but the water was the perfect temperature for swimming and he couldn’t resist lounging in the lake for a while before searching her out.

  He collected his pants, washed them off, found his shirt, and dressed. After dragging the baskets of waterfruits back to the shed and making sure the horses were fed and sufficiently watered, he made his way back to the tower house.

  The common room was empty, which presented an opportunity that he hadn’t been expecting. Though Vel had managed to foil his first attempt at finding evidence that would prove she was who he suspected she was had failed, there was another rather obvious route he could pursue.

  The cat mask his festival partner had been wearing had looked expensive, intricately designed, and not the type of possession a woman of class and style would simply throw out at the end of the night. If he was right, and if Vel had continued to travel straight to the farm from Avaricia, she’d still have it somewhere in her bag.

  He hesitated outside of the door of her room, listening with both his ears and his gut. Malon was probably tending to dinner, picking fresh herbs for whatever meal she planned on preparing for the night. Which meant that Vel was either in her room, or sulking up on the rooftop, and it didn’t sound like she was in her room.

  The risk wasn’t a major one. Damon opened the door casually, poking his head through as though he expected her to be waiting on the other side. She wasn’t, and another moment of listening and trusting his senses, he slipped on through.

  Much of the decor of Vel’s room was still familiar to him, even after a decade away. Velanor’s youthful personality had been as close to traditionally feminine as a young girl could approach on a relatively remote farmstead.

  She’d picked, pressed, and embossed flowers to pin to her wall in fanciful patterns. She’d collected rocks and minerals, as well, pink quartz and faux sapphires, jade and fool’s gold. Her love of animals, to a certain extent, had been the outlier, though it was mostly represented in small ways, prized bird feathers and prismatic seashells.

  Damon moved past the old and into the new, eyeing what she’d brought with her. He knew he didn’t have time for an in-depth search and settled for a thorough feel around, pressing his hands against the sides of her traveling bags, feeling for what he suspected might be there rather than performing a complete tear down.

  It didn’t take long for him to find it. Vel’s traveling bags had a number of intricately stitched side-pockets, and an object that felt remarkably similar to a Turning Festival mask had been stuffed into the edge of one of them.

  Damon fished it out, quickly discovering that it was tucked within another smaller, silken carrying case. He was in the process of undoing the drawstring when the sound of the door snapping open posed a sudden interruption.

  “Leandra’s bush!” shouted Vel. “What do you think you’re doing, Damon?”

  Vel was far faster than Damon had ever given her credit for. She stole forward, snatching the bag out of his hand before he could get so much as a glimpse inside of it. Damon managed to resist the urge to dive after it, though he was left wondering if his restraint had been a mistake in the following seconds.

  “What’s inside that bag, Vel?” he asked.

  Her eyes narrowed into offended, pale blue slits. “What does it matter?”

  “Velanor.” He let the edge of his frustration into his tone. “Open it. Now.”

  “Or what?” she snapped, crossing her arms. “We aren’t kids anymore. You can’t just boss me around and expect me to bend to your will. I was a lady-in-waiting to Princess Kastet. Do you even understand what that means? Of course you don’t, you don’t even—”

  Damon’s anger got the better of him. He made at grab for the mask. Vel leaned backward, holding it above her head and out of his reach. He had too much momentum to arrest his movement, and they collided together, falling onto her bed in a tangle of limbs.

  “You oaf!” Vel let out a girlish grunt as she tried to wriggle away. Damon knew he’d gone too far to stop, at that point. He pinned her body with his shoulder, grabbed the bag, and stripped it from her grasp.

  Vel bucked her hips, trying to knock him off, her body grinding against his. Damon undid the bag’s drawstring and withdrew a resplendent Turning Festival mask in the style of a golden cat, indistinguishable from the one he remembered.

  A small, reasonable part of him had been hoping he’d find a different mask, that his intuition had tripped up somewhere along the line and left him with an imagined version of events. Instead, he was left with only the reality of the situation, the cat mask, Vel’s familiar body wriggling underneath him, her eyes still glaring with furious defiance.

  “Damon!” she shouted. “True Divine, Damon! Get off me this instant!”

  He kept her pinned, wary to her ways and not ignoring the possibility that she might grab it back from him and try to destroy it if given the chance. Her dress was still damp from their earlier swimming in the lake, and their wrestling had shifted it downward, revealing a hint of the edge of one of her pink nipples as her chest continued to heave for breath.

  “Vel,” he said, more softly. “On the night of the Turning Festival I… There was a woman wearing a cat mask who I… spent time with.”

  Vel’s anger faded, and she caught him off guard with a teasing smile. “You spent time with her, did you? You needn’t use a euphemism in place of the word sex, Damon. I’m familiar with how it works.”

  “Are you, now?” He wiggled the mask. “Vel. I need to know if—”

  “That mask isn’t unique,” said Vel. “There were dozens of identical ones in the stall of the vendor I bought it from. It’s not as expensive as it looks, either, though it wasn’t exactly cheap.”

  Doubt ran through him like the first taste of frigid winter winds. Vel had always been an adept liar, but what proof did he have that she wasn’t telling the truth?

  It wasn’t inconceivable for there to be more than one of the same style of mask. Why did he feel so conflicted, as though part of him had been hoping to catch her, to find evidence
of something so illicit and wrong?

  “You thought that you’d bedded me?” Vel let out a rather unladylike snort. “Are you jesting, Damon? What sounds did I make while you were working my body, hmm? Was I loud, or quiet? Or did I whimper like a blushing virgin?”

  “Enough,” he said, feeling his face heat up.

  “Did I beg for it, Damon?” Vel made an exaggerated lewd face and rolled her hips, grinding her crotch into his. “What were you planning on doing once you’d outed me here on the farm, you pervert?”

  He exhaled through his teeth, pushing off his bed before she could stir his anger any further. He felt his humiliation rising in hot waves as he headed for the door, hesitating as his instincts turned the situation over, as they always did.

  Vel had stopped teasing him abruptly, almost as though she was wary of pushing her luck, which would only make sense if she did have something to hide.

  “I feel so foolish.” He flashed a smile that blatantly contradicted his words. “You’re right, though. The young woman I bedded did seem rather eager, certainly on the verge of begging for it. I told Austine as much. We both had a laugh about it. It’d been a while since I last bedded a true noblewoman, and this one moaned like a dockside whore.”

  Vel blinked a few times, but it was impossible to tell whether it was out of annoyance, outrage, or plain disgust. “Your last true noblewoman as well, most likely. You should have savored the moment.”

  “I somehow doubt it will be the last.”

  He locked eyes with Vel, wondering if the tension he felt was real or imagined.

  CHAPTER 15

  Damon spent the next half hour in and out of the common room, refilling the tower house’s supply of firewood and then rekindling the hearth. Malon arrived back just after he’d managed to coax to life a strong flame, carrying a bundle of fresh herbs and wild onion.

  She was in a good mood, judging from the smile on her face and the eagerness with which she flitted about the room. Vel entered the common room upon hearing the door open, and the earlier awkwardness and tension Damon had felt toward her was forgotten as Malon set down her harvest and began assembling the rest of the necessary ingredients for dinner.

  “It’s just going to be stew again,” she told Damon. “I have more of the salted beef, but little else as far as food goes. You aren’t sick of it already, are you, solas?”

  Damon was sitting next to her at the table, and she set her hand on his knee, which sent several varieties of warmth emanating into several sections of his body. She was wearing her apron again, and her red braid had snuck into the loop of fabric holding the upper half around her neck.

  “If it’s half as tasty as it was last night, expect me to ask for seconds and clean my bowl twice over,” he said, with a smile.

  “I suppose it wouldn’t make much difference if I complained, would it?” Vel was leaning against the wall next to the hearth, somehow managing to look both aloof and annoyed.

  “I wasn’t asking you, seta, so yes, it makes no difference.” Malon slid the chunks of salted beef she’d been cutting to the side and began tearing up the wild onion. “Assuming you can set aside the expectations court food has imbued you with, I think you might find it to your liking.”

  Damon shot Vel a glance, expecting more of her haughty disdain. She seemed to pause instead of speaking freely, and then surprised him.

  “I used to like stew, as a girl,” she said. “I think… It’s possible that I might even have missed it a bit.”

  Malon flashed a smile that originated as much from her eyes as it was from the mouth. Damon helped her as she began carrying ingredients over to the pot boiling over the water, adding them at her instruction, everything timed to cook just so.

  “Did the two of you manage the chores well enough?” she asked. “I saw that the melons were harvested, at least.”

  “We did,” said Vel. “Damon and I split the work. It all went rather smoothly.”

  She flashed a sweet smile. Damon was on the verge of sharing his own, rather less equitable version of events when he saw the combination of pride and relief in Malon’s expression. He was again struck by just how beautiful she was, pale and freckled, skin smooth and flawless to a degree that almost made her seem of an age with him or even Vel.

  “I’m so glad.” Malon reached out, taking both Damon and Vel’s hands. “It means the world to me that the two of you are here.”

  “I… still haven’t agreed to stay indefinitely,” said Vel. She gave a small, self-defeating shrug. “But I would be lying to say that I’m not glad to see you, aesta. And to be home, at least for the time being.”

  Malon grinned and pulled her into a tight hug. Damon was smiling too, though it was undercut slightly by his awareness of the fragility of the balance that existed between them. He’d spent most of the day trying to confront Vel and find proof of something that would likely devastate Malon to know about.

  “It’s ready,” said Malon. “Please, sit. I want both of you to tell me something interesting of your time away.”

  Damon glanced at Vel, more out of reflex than out of choice.

  She furrowed her brow, but then gave it some thought, tapping a finger against her lips. “I doubt I mentioned this in my letters to you, aesta, but I suspect that one of the more prominent members of Merinian court has… a bit of a crush on me.”

  He couldn’t say exactly why that piqued his interest, but for some reason, it did.

  Malon’s reaction, however, was more practical and cautioned. “This crush didn’t progress into anything more, I assume? He was aware that you are still under twenty and ineligible for physical relations and honest marriage, seta?”

  Damon brought his hand to his mouth and let out an uncomfortable cough.

  “Obviously, and, um, I don’t think marriage is what he had in mind,” said Vel. “Prince Gabriel is a bit… eccentric, underneath all the protocol and pomp.”

  “Prince Gabriel?” Damon blinked, unable to contain his surprise. “As in, future heir to the throne of Hearthold, Prince Gabriel.”

  “Yes…” Vel, for once, didn’t luxuriate in the status the moment would have otherwise provided. “He didn’t try to bed me, in case that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “Of that, at least, I’m glad,” said Malon. “What did he do?”

  “He… asked for a pair of my girlshorts,” said Vel. “The manner in which he went about making the request wasn’t exactly gentile, either. I think his time within the royal castle has affected his ability to relate to people, especially women.”

  “He wanted your undergarments?” Damon gaped, struggling to contain his laughter. “Did you go along with it?”

  “He’s the heir to the throne,” said Vel. “It wasn’t as though I could just say no. But he also gives me the creeps, so I wasn’t about to say yes with no reservations, either. I stole a pair of Matron Alexia’s undergarments, and then asked the court jester to use them in one of his crossplay performances, for good measure. I still haven’t the faintest clue exactly what Prince Gabriel wanted or intended with them.”

  Vel folded her arms, looking both thoughtful and, from an outside perspective, incredibly naïve. Malon brought a hand to her mouth, trying to contain laughter as her face began to flush. Damon grinned and made an obscene gesture over his crotch.

  “It’s better if you don’t consider it overmuch,” he said.

  “Gross!” cried Vel.

  Malon let out an involuntary, girlish snort in response to the face she made. The stew was just about finished cooking, and she began spooning them each out a large, steaming portion. Damon could smell the wild onion, along with garlic and the slightest pinch of ground ginger.

  He couldn’t resist taking an early, tongue scalding sip. Malon set out cups and hurried to pour both him and Vel some water before disappearing into the pantry. She emerged with a plain bottle of wine with a smooth cork, and flashed Damon a borderline conspiratorial smile.

  “I should have men
tioned this last night,” she said. “We still have plenty of bottles from last season’s waterfruit wine harvest. Would you care for some, solas?”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  “I would also enjoy a glass,” said Vel.

  “You are still below the age of majority, seta, but I have some juice that you can drink if you’d like,” said Malon. She poured some wine into Damon’s mug and then frowned, realizing that the bottle hadn’t been full to start. “I’ll get another bottle.”

  Damon waited until she had her back turned before winking at Vel and sliding his mug toward her. She blinked in confusion for a moment before quickly drinking it down, so fast in fact that she let out a small cough as she finished.

  “Thanks.” She flashed a grin at him that reminded him of their childhood. “I won’t tell, I promise.”

  “I’m not worried,” said Damon. “I know how practiced you are at keeping secrets.”

  He stared at her, enduring the resurgence of the tension between them until Malon arrived back from the pantry.

  CHAPTER 16

  The rest of dinner was comfortable and familiar. Damon told Malon and Vel the story of one of his more humorous gladiator bouts, which involved him and Austine taking on a pair of androgynous twin assassins, who Austine later ended up in bed with.

  “Hold on,” interrupted Vel. “Were they male or female?”

  “To this day, Austine still won’t tell me,” said Damon. “I don’t think it matters much to him, as long as the targets of affections are attractive and open to being seduced.”

  Vel giggled and looked as though she was about to say something before hesitating in a manner that piqued Damon’s suspicions. With Malon still at the table, it wasn’t a line of questioning which he could currently explore, however.