by Jean Johnson
Titles by Jean Johnson
DAWN OF THE FLAME SEA
DEMONS OF THE FLAME SEA
GODS OF THE FLAME SEA
The Ia’Verse
First Salik War
THE TERRANS
THE V’DAN
THE BLOCKADE
Theirs Not to Reason Why
A SOLDIER’S DUTY
AN OFFICER’S DUTY
HELLFIRE
HARDSHIP
DAMNATION
The Destiny Universe
The Sons of Destiny
THE SWORD
THE WOLF
THE MASTER
THE SONG
THE CAT
THE STORM
THE FLAME
THE MAGE
The Guardians of Destiny
THE TOWER
THE GROVE
THE GUILD
THE TEMPLE
Shifterai Novels
SHIFTING PLAINS
THE SHIFTER
Anthologies
BEDTIME STORIES
FINDING DESTINY
Specials
BIRTHRIGHT
The Temple
Jean Johnson
INTERMIX
NEW YORK
INTERMIX
Published by Berkley
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2018 by Jean Johnson
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
INTERMIX and the “IM” design are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
ISBN: 9781101592007
First Edition: February 2018
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Acknowledgments
I want to give my thanks to everyone for their patience. Discovering yet another chronic illness has taxed me to the edges of my ability to cope. I have had to relearn what I can and cannot do in a day, a week, a month, and yes, even a year. But I pledge to you, so long as I can communicate, I will strive to keep entertaining you with my stories.
This novel contains depictions of BDSM, which is short for Bondage, Domination, & Sado-Masochism, which does indeed range across a wide spectrum from sensation play to D/s, or Dominance/submission. If any of this intrigues you, please do a lot of research reading before attempting anything; the author does not assume any responsibility or liability for anything you try.
I do, however, strongly urge you to follow the kink community’s general motto of “Safe, Sane, & Consensual,” meaning you study and do all that research on the theory of whatever you want to try first. Then you take plenty of safety precautions; don’t go wild with what you try, nor try any crazy ideas. And always, always play with the full, free-willed, thoroughly informed consent of any partners you may play with. This includes ensuring there is full and free, uncoerced consent throughout the scene, all the way through to the end. You and whoever you play with each has the right to say No at any point in time and the right to have that No respected and heeded.
As promised, I sought out long-standing members of the kink community to read and evaluate this novel in advance; they have approved its contents as a story that indeed follows the SS&C motto (and have told me I did an excellent job describing the protagnist’s introduction to sensation play). If you’d like to learn more about these things, there are resources both good and bad lurking out there, too many to be listed in this acknowledgment. I recommend asking around, getting several recommendations from several different people, and taking your time to read many different sources. Some will be highly educational, and some will be apocryphal, but by following the SS&C motto, you should be able to figure out which is which with relative ease. Or just contact me through my website (www.JeanJohnson.net) and I will give you some links to a few that I feel can be recommended.
As always, I hope you will enjoy this next installment of tales from the Destiny universe.
~Jean
Contents
Titles by Jean Johnson
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
About the Author
Chapter One
Synod gathers, tell them lies:
Efforts gathered in your pride
Lost beneath the granite face.
Painted Lord, stand by her side;
Repentance is the Temple’s grace.
“Failures!”
Krais frowned and tried to turn away, but his father’s voice chased him down the corridor, down below the ship’s deck. The crate in front of him had fallen from the stacks, two of the ropes having frayed and snapped in the cargo net meant to hold it safely in place.
“How dare the Goddess give me such worthless sons—pathetic failures, all three of you!”
No, don’t touch it—don’t touch—! His fingers scooped and clutched, and the lid popped free just as he got the crate halfway upright. The bulk of the weight forced the crate to tilt and drop, and his arms just . . . they just reflexively closed in, rushing his hand into the opening. Those fingers came away sticky, smarting at a stab of pain from the sliver of potion-coated glass that raked across his fingertips.
Lust speared through him even as the wounds burned and ached. He clenched his hand around the flogger filched from the bo’sun’s chest, raised it to beat his own back—No, don’t do that, it didn’t work! It didn’t—
Pleasure exploded across his back, soaking in bloodied ribbons down through his limbs. It mixed badly with the sound of his father’s voice ranting and cursing his sons. Especially Krais, his firstborn. Painfully aroused, Krais struggled to find a defense, an argument, a . . .
A voice threaded through this nightmare of a dream. A voice that painted shimering letters across the turmoil within his mind, like the liquid gold of sunrise on waves.
Hush, little writer; don’t say a thing!
Granite reveals redemption’s face.
Accept your penance with no objecting.
Silence leads you to the right place.
Menda? Speaking of a prophecy . . . ? Not the full prophecy, of course; his Goddess did not recite all eight lines in his mind, just the first four. In fact, he couldn’t even see Her, though there was a slender, tanned woman at the edge of his vision. The
wind played with her wavy brown locks, and with the sculpted, flower-petal skirts of her calf-length white dress. He tried to approach her, but she remained the exact same distance from him however fast or slow he tried to walk.
. . . A dream. This was a dream. A jumble of memories from six months ago.
That realization pulled him back into the waking world, into a realm of ropes cradling his muscles, the scents of salt and tar, fish and seaweed, of unwashed clothes and sweaty, salt-rinsed bodies. The lingering ache in his shaft, aroused by his suffering, warred with the pressing need in his bladder for a refreshing room. Not that he’d get one on board a ship, since the only choices they had were a slops pot or aiming over the rails, but . . .
Pain jabbed him in the thigh, a poke from something unpleasantly pointy. Twitching fully awake in his hammock, Krais swung his arm up and out of the hammock netting, striking at the offender. His fist hit something meaty, and he heard his youngest brother, Gayn, yelp from the bruising thump. He would have struck again, cracking his eyes open, but the natural rocking of the ship versus the hammock swung Krais out of range.
“Ow! You stupid smear! That hurt,” Gayn complained, stepping farther back out of range to rub at his shoulder without risk of a second smack. He rubbed awkwardly; the arm that had been broken six months ago had been set properly by the Nightfall Healers, set and healed, but a bad storm two weeks ago had badly rocked the ship. The youngest Puhon brother had cracked his arm hard on a doorframe. He wasn’t the only crewman injured, but this time, something had gone wrong in the re-healing.
That injury gave him constant little aches along his outer forearm, making the youngest Puhon brother irritable. Krais knew he should give his sibling some slack in the sails. Whatever had gone wrong, a standard bone-healing spell wouldn’t fix it, though they had all tried; all three brothers, the ship’s captain, the ship’s mage, who wasn’t a fully trained Healer since that wasn’t a strong affinity in his magic . . .
Chronic pain—however low-key—could drive anyone into a chronically irritable state. Until his own suffering, Krais hadn’t understood just how exhausting any form of constant stimulation could be. He and his brothers had always been quite healthy, and had never had to struggle for more than a few weeks at most with any injury, any illness, any source of suffering.
But even accounting for the ache goading Gayn’s anger, Krais’ brother was a pain, not just suffering from one. Gayn had always been a little too like their father, Puhon Dagan. Krais had tried to be like him. Foren had tried. Gayn simply was. Their father had looked down upon his sons, watched their efforts, and had most often praised the youngest of the three Puhon boys. That praise had only encouraged Gayn to emulate their sire all the more.
He also was not going away, and he didn’t look the least bit repentant about the pencil gripped in his injured hand. Gripping something seemed to ease the ache, in a weird way. It was, however, a reminder that Gayn could use the writing stick on him again.
“Don’t poke me and I won’t hit you, you pointless pencil,” Krais retorted. He did so instead of making some sort of concilliatory reply, justifiably irritated at being robbed of much-needed sleep. The closer they came to the shores of Mendhi, the more these jumbled nightmares plagued him.
Since Gayn didn’t look like he would be going away, Krais unrolled from the hammock—on the far side of it from his brother—and frowned at at his sibling. He did so while steadying himself against the rhythmic sway of the ship, one hand touching the nearby wooden planks of the bulkhead. The glow from the mage-globe by the door hadn’t been turned up, but neither did daylight shine through the porthole outside.
Given how tired he felt, Krais thought he might have slept only an hour or so at most. There should have been no reason for Gayn to disrupt his sleep. “Why did you wake me so early? What’s happening?”
Gayn wrinkled his flat nose, the subtle lines of his facial tattoos making him look a tiny bit wrinkled, and thus quite a bit older than his tender twenty-one years. “You didn’t wake up when Father started yelling at us through the mirror next door. You should’ve been there, getting yelled at, instead of Foren and me. He yelled extra hard at us for your faults.”
“Suffer. It’s my turn to sleep,” Krais stated, frowning at his sibling as much for news of yet another scrying as for the rude interruption.
Their father refused to let up on expressing his disappointment in his sons. Their failure had been prophesied by multiple Seers, but no, that wasn’t good enough for Puhon Dagan’thio, Elder Disciplinarian of the Hierarchy. Nothing would ever be good enough for the Elder Disciplinarian of the Hierarchy. Not even his own sons.
Krais was exhausted from years and years of fighting for his father’s admiration, his father’s love. He no longer cared to give and give to their sire, with nothing consistently or frequently returned to him or his brothers in reciprocation. A stranger had cared more for his well-being than his own father. A stranger Krais had been sent to kill, and who knew he’d been sent to kill her, had shown more care for him than his own flesh and blood.
Having no intention of staying awake long enough to be yelled at again, Krais dismissed the yet-another-scry-scolding news. Instead, he adjusted the hammock netting so he could return to sleep. Just when he got it untangled, the tallest of the three Puhon brothers entered the cabin. Twenty-six and a thumb’s width taller than Krais, Foren ducked a little on entering. The ship carrying them was Mendhite made, so the doorways were taller than those found in most other nations, but he was still quite tall even for a Mendhite, and the rocking of the ship made anyone over six-and-a-half foot-lengths duck. All three brothers exceeded that.
All three were tall and strong, like their father. Smart and loyal, like their father. Hard and cold, like their father. . . . Except Krais could not bring himself to follow blindly anymore. He was still tough, but he was no longer quite so hard and cold. Still, his brothers were not going to let up on him. They were loyal to each other, but being raised mostly by their Disciplinarian father, with their own mother choosing to aid her husband in being equally strict with her sons, they had not grown up with any soft sides. Disciplined, but not soft.
“Did you come to dip your pen in my blood as well?” Krais asked dryly, eyeing his middle-born brother. “If you’re going to write out my sins, do so silently. I need my sleep.”
Foren narrowed his dark brown eyes, so dark they looked black under anything less than full light. “I should, given how you weren’t awake to take Father’s ire from Gayn. No, the lookout in the crow’s nest has spotted the Second East Lighthouse of Mendhi. The captain and the navigator both calculated we’re less than six hours from port if I keep the sails full with enspelled winds.”
“That means we’ll be at the heart of the city before the break of dawn,” Gayn murmured. He cradled his arm, rubbing at it. For once, he looked hopeful rather than irritated. “I can get a competent Healer to look at this thing.”
“We did the best we could when it rebroke,” Krais pointed out with a sigh. Tired and just wanting sleep, he fussed again with the hammock netting. “We have no more priests of the other Gods on board. Our own went home months ago. Our duties are nearly discharged . . . and then, Menda willing, we’ll find the time to recover from this whole debacle.”
Foren frowned at him. “You began all of this with more enthusiasm than either of us.”
He tried to say, I’m about to be punished for something beyond my control. But a voice echoed out of his memories, ethereal, immortal, and accompanied at the corners of his eyes by the swirling scrawls of hundreds of languages. The tongues that had been spoken and written at the Convocation of Gods and Man half a year ago.
. . . Hush little writer; don’t say a thing . . .
Instead, Krais merely said, “I am tired, I have less than six hours in which to sleep, and I doubt we will get any more sleep for a full day once we arrive. We will need to mak
e a report in person to the Hierarchy on our failure in foreign lands . . . and explain the cost and expense of staying abroad for several months more than we should have, after having our entire fleet commandeered by the Gods.”
“Well, I can’t sleep,” Gayn countered, scowling at him. “I don’t see how you could. The Hierarch—“
“I know very well that the Hierarch, the Elder Exchequer, the Elder Priest, the Elder Disciplinarian”—their own father—“the Elder Librarian, and for all I know, even the Elder Agriculturalist will all want to how we failed, why we failed, and how we can somehow shoulder the blame for their plan,” Krais retorted. “We never had a chance. Not when the Gods Themselves decreed it. But they’re just going to blame us, whipped on by the Elder Disciplinarian.”
Foren actually smirked a little at Krais’ play on words. Gayn, however, frowned. “Do not mock the solemn responsibilities and duties of Father’s training and position. If I weren’t needed to help him in other ways, I’d whip you myself for speaking so disrespectfully of the Hierarchy!”
More like if you hadn’t failed the honor-tests of the Disciplinarians . . . for reasons unknown to anyone but the Goddess, Krais thought. He kept his mouth shut on that thought. Instead, he simply said, “It is late, and I will need my sleep. Especially since you seem to think I should be the one attracting all their energy and attention in this matter. Goodnight, Gayn. Goodnight, Foren. I am going back to sleep.”
Foren grunted, turned, and left the cabin, closing the door behind him. Gayn muttered under his breath, but moved over to the pallet set in a net resting partially on the cabin floor; his injury did not allow him to mount a hammock easily, so wrapping its sides in a sort of sling to keep the occupant from rolling was the next best solution.
Tugging on the edge of the hammock as he turned, Krais hitched his rump into place, then swiveled his body around, settling in with what by now was long-practiced balance. The swaying of the hammock mollified some of the swaying of the ship, lulling him toward rest.
