An Oath to Obey

by Lucy Leven

  She pressed her tongue to the slit at the top of him again as she worked, an awful tease, enjoying the pulsing twitch of his girth under her hands, the same pulse that quickened and fiercened with every firm press and slide of her grip.

  That quickened and fiercened until the Beast reached down to take her chin between thumb and finer, to urge her gently away, a whispered word of warning passing his lips.

  But Claria shook her head against his touch, and teased him anew, tracing the little slit again with the very tip of her tongue, in that way she had come think he liked very much indeed.

  And so it was that the Beast’s grips tightened in his hair, a wonderfully, thrillingly possessive touch, and with a rumbling roar, he spilled his pleasure.

  It came powerfully, in great stripes, and Claria could only take but a little in her mouth before the sensation of it overtook her and she coughed, pulling away. But as she pulled back, the Beast yet spilled, striping long and hot, painting her lips with his pleasure, and her cheeks, and her chin, dripping there.

  The Beast took one harsh breath and laughed — a startled, joyful sound. Down he reached for her, drew her up and into his lap and into his arms. And there he licked her clean, with long, teasing strokes of his tongue.

  And when that was done, he kissed her, just as long and just as well, until she had barely breath left within her. Gasping, Claria drew back. A smile came to her lips, and she licked them, still tasting his salt.

  “A hearty meal, lass?” he asked.

  Claria laughed, and to her it sounded as the Beast’s laugh had — full of such unexpected, uninhibited joy. “Most delectable,” Claria said, laughing still. “And you, Beast?

  “A generous meal, true enough,” he said. “But…”

  “But?” Claria said.

  Her answer: in a playful swoop, with a playful laugh, the Beast lifted her up onto the table, sending platters spinning and goblets tumbling. He laid her out, and all at once, those clever finger began slipping up her skirts and drawing down her smallclothes.

  “But,” the Beast carried on, grinning up at her, sly and sharp, as he dipped his head between her thighs, “I think I shall satiate my own hunger with the sweetest of morsels.”

  And so, in the warm glow of the fire, he gave such pleasure to her, and Claria’s gasping, hitching laughter lit up the quiet, just as warm.

  To Bathe

  Claria woke from a strange, unsettled sleep. No dreams had teased her. No nightmares harried her.

  Her sleeping mind had been oddly blank instead, a fog of strange indecision.

  The Beast, though he had bedded her and pleasured her well, was gone from his lair when she woke. But that was no great surprise: he had a guest to entertain after all.

  When Claria came to dress that morn, the castle presented her with another pattered muslin, not quite so intricate as the evening last, but awfully pretty all the same — prettier than what Claria usually wore for a day about the kitchens.

  So pretty, in fact, that it seemed quite the folly to hide such a beautiful thing under an apron.

  But Claria did not tell the castle so. She let it dress her instead, let it tie her apron strings tight and secure, let it loop a little strand of coral beads around her neck and fix her hair very prettily indeed, with her curls tumbling at her brow, and with her cheeks gone a little pink without the slightest touch of rouge.

  The kitchen was quiet and calm, and her work was repetitive. In the doing of it, Claria’s mind went somewhere else entirely, a pleasant, calm place where she need not think on anything, for her hands knew their work without her conscious thought to guide them.

  And at that work they were occupied until a quiet voice, calling to her in greeting, roused her from her trance. Claria blinked awake and looked up from the dough she was kneading.

  The Captain was watching her from the doorway of the kitchens as the Beast often liked to do.

  “The master?” he asked, smiling when he saw he had her attention.

  Claria let the dough settle onto the tabletop and tangled her hands in the folds of her apron instead, wiping them clean. “In the library at this time of day, Your Grace.”

  The Captain grimaced a little, formed a pinched line between his brows that made his scar pull tight in a manner that looked most painful. “You need not,” he said.

  Claria regarded him, all confusion. “Your Grace?”

  The Captain offered her another smile, but this one did not quite reach his eyes. “I am a duke only by dint of the last duke’s untimely death,” he said, “and I am a duke of nothing, my lady, save a burned-down tumble of stones.”

  His careless, dismissive tone served to spark a tiny prickle of annoyance. “But you have tenants to care for, do you not, Your Grace?” Claria said.

  Now it was the Captain’s turn to appear all confusion. “Yes, my lady. Many.”

  “Then you are duke of a good deal more than a tumble of stones,” Claria said. She heard the tightness in her tone only after she had spoken and was dismayed with herself for it — for who was she to speak so to a man such as he?

  But the Captain seemed unperturbed by her censure. Instead, “You are quite right, my lady, and that is why I have come to visit the castle, and to visit its master, you see.”

  Claria shook her head. She did not see. Not at all. “Your Grace?”

  “The Duke was my brother,” the Captain said, that familiar smile blooming on his face, “and my brother was a drunkard and a gambler both. He gambled away all our family coin and died in the fire he set when he was three sheets to the wind, the same fire that burned our castle to ashes.”

  Claria stared at him, aghast. “I— I am so very sorry,” she began, but the Captain waved her apology away.

  “We had no love for one another,” he said, “and a castle, no matter how fine, is only a pile of stones.” Another rueful smile. “Well, save this castle, of course. And you are right — I have many tenants, and they look to me for care and for protection. And so that is why I am here.”

  “In the kitchens?” Claria asked, so engulfed again in her confusion that such a question seemed almost sensible.

  “Ha!” A cheerful bark of a laugh burst from the Captain. “Yes, in the kitchens. And in the castle too. For the master of this castle intends to lend me the funds to make my estate profitable again, and to tutor me in the ways of such high society. I am nothing but a turned-out soldier after all.”

  Again, that same gentle smile, the smile that seemed so at home upon his countenance.

  “I cannot do anything for the castle,” he carried on. “Nor should I wish to. For it is rotten to its scorched marrow, an utter waste of coin. But the old gatehouse is liveable, and I have slept in far worse.”

  He said those words with a lightness that made them all the more painful to hear, for they stood in such stark contrast to the ragged silver of the scar that sliced through his handsome face.

  If Claria had ever thought herself brave, then her bravery seemed nothing to the courage of the man who stood before her.

  The Captain nodded to the dough. “I think you well like to bake?” he asked.

  “And cook,” Claria said, “yes.”

  “It is a talent I have never possessed.”

  “Nor needed to, I would think.”

  “True enough,” the Captain agreed with a laugh. “For when you find yourself on the march, my lady, you will eat anything put before you that has known the lick of a campfire. Even some that has not.”

  Claria said nothing, even though he had taken her meaning all topsy-turvy and not at all.

  She had meant a man born to a noble family should never have known the need to cook for himself — and she had been wrong, as it seemed she often was when it came to the Captain.

  He was watching her now, a soft, thoughtful look upon his face. “I remember you, you know.”

  “Your Grace?”

  “From the day on the road,” the Captain said, quite plainly, quite evenly, “
with the ruffians and the honey cakes.”

  Claria’s breath caught and stuttered just has her heart did. He remembered her. Claria. Her gallant officer remembered her.

  The Captain must have seen that he had shocked her, for his handsome face became awfully serious suddenly. “You were very brave that day,” he said, “and I am glad that you are gone from that place — the village at the crossroads.”

  “As — as am I.”

  The Captain nodded, tapped his knuckles to the table, and it was then that he seemed to notice the tray of honey buns that lay there, still glistening and sticky from their last glazing. A small smile shaped his mouth. “Ah, and I remember these too,” he said. “May I?”

  “Of course.”

  The Captain took one between finger and thumb and bit it clean in half. The other half soon followed, and the Captain smiled at her as he licked his fingers clean. “This is the most delicious thing I have ever tasted. Then and now.”

  Claria’s cheeks burned hot. The Captain had been an officer of the King’s army, and born of noble blood besides. He had eaten in the grandest of parlours, feasted in the highest of banqueting halls.

  To say such a thing about her simple honey buns…

  It was senseless flattery, of course, but for all that, his pretended politeness did not feel pretend.

  “Thank you, Your Grace,” Claria said, her voice scarce louder than a whisper.

  And there was the grimace again. Claria did not know why he shaped his face so, when it seemed that it must pain him. “Please, my lady,” the Captain said, “do not feel that you must—”

  He cut himself off then with a faint noise of frustration, as if his words eluded him. And Claria, still caught up in that pleasant mortification he had stirred in her, could only lift her eyes to his, questioning.

  It felt overwhelming to meet his gaze so openly, but meet it she did, and she found that gaze was soft and a little sad. “Your Grace?”

  “My name is Estienne,” the Captain said, oddly, intensely sincere. “It is Estienne. For you, my lady, only that.”

  Claria took a breath and stretched her hard-won bravery. “Then thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Estienne.” And the time came to find if she might stretch her bravery just a little further. So, “And my name is Claria.”

  The smile Estienne offered her then was as soft as his gaze, but it was not sad at all. “My lady,” he said. “Claria.”

  The Captain — Estienne — left her not so very long after, and left her in an equally strange, contrary mood.

  Claria swept the Great Hall from door to door. Then she found the lower windows all streaked with goodness knows what, so she fetched a stool and a rag watered with vinegar and scrubbed them clean. But when she found the flags she had swept only moments before were covered with dust anew, she found reason to suspect the castle and its clever hands.

  “I will not collapse into a pile of ash if I am not kept busy,” she told those watchful shadows. “Indeed, look.”

  Claria made a show of stopping by the grand fire for a moment, of sitting down on the inglenook so that she might warm her toes by the grate.

  But doing so served only to put her in mind of how much she wanted to order the logs in the kitchens’ fire baskets — for the castle had such a particular way of stacking them, upon which the castle and Claria did not agree at all.

  But she also so wanted to prove the castle wrong, to prove to it that she was capable of idle nothingness…

  Oh, but it was only one chore, and it would take her hardly any time at all.

  Claria got to her feet and could not ignore the faint sense of vexatious glee emanating from the shadows.

  “If you would only place the logs as I asked,” she told them, “then I would be sitting by the fire still.”

  A few steps and she passed into the passageway to the kitchens. But there she stopped, for she found that one of the low doors that lined that same passageway lay ajar. Claria reached for the heavy iron handle, meaning to swing the door closed, and that was when the faint murmur of voices came her way.

  Claria knew the door. It opened to the long, slanting tunnel that led to the bathing chamber beneath the castle. She put her ear to the gap and listened more closely: an echo of distant laughter and the chink of goblets.

  The Beast and Estienne.

  It seemed that they were in the library no longer, if they had ever been there at all, and it seemed that they were enjoying themselves well indeed.

  A little waft of the chamber’s heat slipped through the open door and washed over her. Claria sighed at the feel of it. She enjoyed the chill of winter, true enough, but the chill that day was fierce indeed. It was not the first time she had stopped by a fire to warm herself.

  And so Claria decided: she would venture down into the chamber and see if the Beast and Estienne wished for more wine or a bite of bread, and she would enjoy a little warmth on the way.

  She swung the door open and then closed behind her again, and then she lifted up her skirts so that she might see her feet as she descended the slippery stone steps. More of the chamber’s steamy heat met her as she was but halfway down, and she had to stop a moment to blow the curls back from her brow.

  She carried on until she came to the point where the tunnel turned and arched out into the chamber proper.

  Flaming torches lit the space just as they had on her first day in the castle, casting a thousand fiery shades of gold.

  In the dancing light, she could see that Estienne and the Beast lay on the glistening stone beyond the steaming hot pool, over at the far end of the chamber. They had oiled themselves — clear from their gleaming skin — but they had not yet scraped themselves clean, for their strigils lay cast aside.

  They were laughing again, some old, shared jape, of which they seemed to have many.

  And as she watched them, colour blooming fierce in her cheeks, a thought occurred to Claria that had not occurred to her before. A thought occurred to her that should have occurred to her before — for she was in a bathing chamber, and so were the Beast and Estienne.

  And the Beast and Estienne…

  They were entirely bare. Not a stitch upon them.

  Claria gasped at the sight and the realisation both. At the sound of her unsteady breath, the Beast — so far away and yet he quirked his head towards her. Unthinking, she shifted back into the welcoming shadows of the doorway.

  Claria waited there, her heart thrumming with nerves — and with some other sensation entirely. But the Beast did not call out for her or come that way. Claria let out a gasp this time that was tiny and relieved. It seemed he had not seen her.

  But she could see him yet, from her little hidden nook, and she could see the heavy look in his eyes, that fading, flaring gold.

  It was a look Claria recognised, one that the Beast had gifted her many a time, but she could hardly think nor fathom why the Beast might direct it at Estienne, as he did then, in that quiet moment.

  But then she did not have to think nor fathom why, for the Beast reached out and pulled Estienne to him, rough, sure, his fingers tangled carelessly in Estienne’s white-gold hair. And in that moment, their mouths met and tangled just the same, a lazy, insouciant kiss — and a familiar one. It was clear that the Beast and Estienne knew each other in such base ways, and had known each other so before.

  Claria felt as frozen as the ground outside. Her feet would not move. Even her breath, now, would not gasp.

  But something stirred, a reawakening of that earlier feeling: the sudden, shaming flare of heat between her legs was as wet as the steamy air.

  She watched the Beast and Estienne as they kissed and kissed and kissed, as they lay upon their sides all flush against one another. She watched the Beast run a roving hand up and down the hard, glistening muscles of Estienne’s back, watched him dig a thumb into the dipped muscles above the swell of Estienne’s buttocks and, in doing so, call forth a hearty groan of pleasure of Estienne.

  And t
hat groan sparked movement.

  The Beast rolled atop him, bearing down upon Estienne suddenly with the full weight of his magnificent body, holding him there, so still.

  Claria could see that the sudden shift had pressed them tight together, and tighter now than before, the lengths of both their manhoods hidden between them, hidden in the hot, oiled press of their bodies.

  The Beast began to move, a slick, sliding rut — slow yet, but rising as they went, rutting against one another as they went, seeking their pleasure.

  Their rutting might have lasted minutes. It might have lasted hours. Claria could hardly say. All she could do was watch, utterly aflame, as the Beast and Estienne rubbed and slid themselves against one another, the rhythm of their rut an ancient, primordial thing.

  Of a sudden, the Beast moved again. Brought himself up onto one strong forearm and kissed Estienne once more, their mouths pressed together as slick and as hot as their bodies. He slowed their rutting as he slowed that kiss, so slow that it felt torturous even to watch.

  Claria could hardly imagine how it must feel — did not need to imagine the shivering groan that rent from Estienne, the same groan that seemed to shiver within her, in all those hot, wet places.

  It was a groan that sounded again until Estienne broke free from the Beast’s kiss with a gasp. He slapped his hand to the slick stone with a bark of a laugh and a groan of frustration. “We shall find no relief like this, my lord.”

  His words reached Claria with ease, such was the low arch of the room and the heavy stone of the roof.

  “I enjoy the anticipation,” the Beast said, easily, lazily.

  Another laughing groan from Estienne. “Then I am glad one of us does.”

  The Beast laughed too, paying Estienne no particular mind. Instead, he hitched Estienne’s legs wider and slid their bodies more tightly together, beginning again that slow, lazy rut.

  In the flickering light of the bathing chamber, they looked to Claria like a statue cast in gleaming bronze, ancient warriors caught in a tumble, the strength and the weight of them, the perfection of their honed, hard bodies.