For what seemed forever the two of them stared at each other. Then the woman smiled down at him—not just a smile, but a grin. She made no move to cover herself; instead she cast a quick glance back over one shoulder, then leaned out farther and beckoned to him.
Arlian took another step forward, then hesitated—what was he doing? Who was this woman, displaying herself so brazenly? Could she really want him to approach? An urge to turn and run began to build—but at the same time he couldn’t tear his gaze away from her.
“Come on,” she called down to him. “Do you like what you see?”
His mouth opened, but nothing came out. He tried to swallow, but his throat was suddenly too dry. His hands clenched into fists.
She was just a person, another human being. He had spoken fearlessly to women as a child; why should it be a struggle now?
Of course, none of the village women had been naked, and so far as he could recall none of them had been so beautiful.
“I like it,” Arlian managed to croak, and he took another step.
“Then can you climb? If you can get to the window I’ll let you in, and you can look all you want. You can do more than just look!”
Arlian was utterly confused now, but for a moment the desire to get closer to her, and the desire to get out of the cold, completely overcame his shyness and uncertainty; he trotted across the yard and flung himself atop a handy barrel, then jumped for the sill of the open window. His fingers caught the edge, but could not hold, and he slid back down, missed his footing on the barrel, and fell to the ground.
The woman laughed, a musical, watery sound that filled him with a great swelling urgency and a ferocious embarrassment. He leaped to his feet and looked around the yard. He didn’t dare look at her; he was certain his face was bright red with shame, and that the tightness of his pants was obvious and offensive.
“I’m sorry,” she called from just above and behind him. “I shouldn’t laugh. Can’t you find a way up?”
He turned and looked up at her. He licked his lips, then cleared his throat and tried to speak.
He got a strangled noise out, then had to stop and cough. He looked down to collect his wits, then back up.
“I take it I can’t use the door,” he said, actually getting the entire sentence out cleanly.
“Oh, no!” she said, her smile vanishing. “Not dressed like that! They’d beat you half to death.”
“Ha!” he said, though even then he could not possibly have explained why he would react to such a threat with bravado instead of caution. The possibility that he might be doing something foolish and dangerous occurred to him, but it simply didn’t matter; he desperately wanted to get in that window, get at that woman.
At the same time he wanted to run away, but he fought that impulse down. He looked around for something he could use to mount the wall.
Inspired, he ran to the unlocked woodshed and pulled out a good-sized chunk of unsplit firewood, hoisting it up on his shoulder—he realized after he had it up that it was solid oak, or perhaps ironwood, and must have weighed at least fifty pounds, but nonetheless he hauled it across the yard and thumped it down onto the barrelhead, standing it on end. Then he leapt up on the barrel, stepped up onto the log, and thrust himself upward at the window.
This time he was able to get his chest onto the windowsill and his arms through the casement, his fingers clutching at the inner edge of the sill. The woman had moved back at the last possible moment to avoid his lunge, but now she leaned forward and grabbed the back of his stolen shirt, helping him haul himself upward and into the room.
She was not totally naked after all, he saw as he tumbled in, but clad in a lacy white skirt slit up the front, and a golden girdle wrapped around her waist. She was kneeling on a windowseat. An elegant glass and brass lamp on a wall bracket was burning brightly, lighting her face beautifully.
He was lying on a fine parquet floor, looking up at her and at gauzy curtains behind her. The air around him was warm, and thick with a cloying, sweetish smell—and with a confusion of other scents as well, including lamp oil and sweat and several he didn’t recognize.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“You’re in my room,” she said, with an impish, irresistible smile. She settled into a sitting position, her legs tucked underneath, and looked down at him. “Now, who are you? What sort of desperate creature have I just invited in?”
“My name is … is unimportant,” he said, staring hungrily at her, almost in awe of this gorgeous creature. He had caught himself at the last moment; his name would probably mean nothing to her, but he did not want to risk it. Word of an escaped slave named Arlian might well have spread this far.
She was so small, he thought as he stared—smaller than any of the miners, even Rat. He had forgotten that women were so small and delicate looking. And her skin was impossibly smooth and soft, her face and chest utterly hairless.
She laughed at him.
“Ah, then, Unimportant,” she said, “welcome to my humble home! Might I call you something shorter, perhaps? Trivial, or Minor?”
“Not Minor,” he said. It was too close to terms he did not want to be associated with. He was vaguely aware that he ought to come up with a name for her to use, but he couldn’t think clearly enough to suggest one.
“But Trivial is acceptable? Or just Triv?”
“Triv would be fine,” he said, as he untangled himself and sat up. He was breathing heavily, and not entirely from the exertion of getting in the window.
He shifted, but his breeches remained uncomfortably tight.
She shifted her own position, as well, and his breath came out in a shudder.
“Tell me about yourself,” she said.
“I don’t…” he began. Then he asked, “Where am I? Is this an inn?”
“An inn?” She laughed again. “Not exactly, no.”
Just then he heard a shout from outside, and the rattle of harness—that coach at the side door was leaving. She looked up, and out the casement.
“Did you see any other horses out there, or coaches?” she asked.
“There were horses in the stable.”
“How many?”
He blinked uncertainly. “I didn’t count.”
She frowned slightly. “Did you see any other coaches, though?”
“No,” he replied, puzzled.
“Good. Then we should have some time.” She swung the casement shut and latched it, and dropped the hooked-up curtain back in place.
Arlian watched her breasts bob as her arms moved, and had to struggle to keep his hands on the floor, rather than in his breeches or on her—though he wasn’t sure he would have had the nerve to touch her.
Then she turned back to face him, and swung her legs out, so that she was sitting upright on the windowseat. Arlian saw with a shock she had no feet—both legs ended at the ankle in neat pink stumps.
“Now,” she said, “what am I going to do with you? Am I going to get a straight answer out of you?”
“I don’t…” Arlian began. Then he stopped and swallowed hard, staring at her.
It was too much. He could no longer find words at all. He was too tangled up in confusion and lust.
She laughed.
“I think,” she said, “that you’re too distracted to tell me anything. And I also think that I know how to solve that. If you’d just carry me over to the bed, I’m sure we can take care of the problem.” She pointed over his shoulder.
“Bed?” he gasped. He turned, and saw a great pink featherbed atop an oaken frame; a pink silk coverlet lay askew atop it, and pink lace bedcurtains hung from a pink silk canopy. Round silver mirrors were set into each corner of the canopy, angled to face the center of the bed. Another glass-based oil lamp stood on a bedside table amid a clutter of fancy bottles and jars, casting a warm glow across the entire arrangement.
He made a wordless noise.
“Please?” she said, holding out both her delicate arms, palms turned up be
seechingly.
He rose unsteadily to his feet, reached hesitantly for her—and then, when he felt her soft skin and saw her welcoming smile, his reservations faded away; he snatched her up in his arms, whirled about, and plunged with her into the waiting bed. Before he had even gotten both his feet off the floor she was untying his breeches.
And then he was lost in an unfamiliar but delightful sea of perfume and flesh and sensation.
10
Sweet
He let his breath out in a long, contented sigh and lay a moment longer, staring at the ceiling. Then he turned to look at her grinning, heart-shaped face as she lay propped on one elbow beside him.
“Where am I?” he said. “Who are you?” He wanted to ask why she had seduced him, as well, but couldn’t think of any decent way to phrase it.
“You’re in the House of Carnal Society,” she told him.
“The what?” he asked.
She giggled. “It’s a brothel, silly! Hadn’t you guessed?”
Arlian looked at her in embarrassed confusion. “What’s a brothel?” he asked.
“Oh, my dear … where are you from? Well, never mind, you’ll tell me that in a moment, I’m sure. A brothel—well, among other things, men come here to pay for what you’ve just had as a gift.”
Comprehension finally burst upon him—he had encountered the concept in conversations in the mines, under a cruder name, but had had no idea how numerous such institutions were, or where they might be found. Certainly there had been none in his home village.
Apparently they did exist here, wherever he was. “Ah!” he said. “And you…”
“I live here,” she said. “I’m called Sweet.” She grinned and tilted her head entrancingly. “You can judge for yourself whether the name fits.”
He smiled back at her. He was warm for the first time in days, and feeling just fine in other ways, though he was still dirty and underfed. “I’d say it does.”
“Well, good. Thank you. Now, who are you, and how did you get here?”
Arlian hesitated. “I’m from a village on Smoking Mountain,” he said.
She looked puzzled. “There’s a village on Smoking Mountain?”
“Well, there was,” he said. “But dragons destroyed it, and my family was killed.”
“Oh, you’re from Obsidian?” she exclaimed. “But that was seven years ago, and I thought everyone there was killed! Were you away when it happened?”
He shook his head—and his voice shook as well as the memories poured back. He had not spoken of the disaster, or his family, in years—not since Hathet died. Some of the other miners had mocked him whenever he mentioned his past, refusing to believe that he had survived seeing dragons, sometimes refusing even to believe he had ever been free, or knew who his parents had been, and in time, to avoid their mockery, he had stopped speaking of his former life.
But this woman knew about the attack, knew his village’s name—and knew it had been seven years.
Seven years in the mines. So he was eighteen, then?
“I hid in a cellar,” he said.
“And you lived? The dragons didn’t find you? How wonderful!”
He looked at her face, at the sincere interest and pleasure he saw there, and realized that Sweet was younger than he had first thought—she was perhaps no older than he, not much more than a girl.
“But how did you get here?” she asked. “What have you been doing all this time?”
“I was … I was working in the mines, in Deep Delving,” he said. He didn’t see any need to mention that his stay there had been involuntary. She might already know that the mines were worked by slaves, but he did not care to be the first to mention it.
“Oh—that’s why you’re so pale, then, where you aren’t burnt?” she asked.
He nodded.
“But you left?”
He nodded again. “And came here,” he said.
“To Westguard? But why?”
He shrugged. “It seemed as good a place as any.”
“I suppose,” she said doubtfully.
“You don’t like it here?”
She snorted derisively. “Oh I just love my work, of course! Catering to every sick whim of any man who can pay the fee…”
“Oh,” he said, his warm comfort suddenly vanishing. He sat up and looked at her. “You’re not here by choice?”
“Of course not!” she said angrily, pulling away from him. “We’re all slaves here; didn’t you see that?” She lifted one leg and pointed at the stump of her ankle.
“What happened to it?” he said stupidly, unable to stop himself even as he realized what must have happened.
“They don’t want us to run away,” she said bitterly. “So they cut our feet off. They couldn’t do that if we were free. Now I not only can’t get away from the customers, no matter what their demands, I can’t run anywhere—even if I had somewhere to run to, which I don’t. I’m not fit to make my living any way but as I do. That’s what happened.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, well aware of the inadequacy of his words. A tight knot had formed in his gut.
How could anyone have deliberately maimed anything as beautiful as this woman? How could anyone do something like that to anyone?
“There’s no justice in this world,” Bloody Hand had said, and here was more proof of his bitter words.
“I’m sorry if I hurt you,” Arlian said. “I’ll go if you want me to.”
“Oh, you didn’t hurt me,” she replied. “You didn’t know any better, I guess—though I don’t know how anyone could be so naive.”
“I just spent the last seven years in a hole in the ground,” Arlian said wryly. “I’m sure there are thousands of things you take for granted that I’ve never heard of.”
She nodded. “You were a miner?”
“I was a slave,” he said. “Like you. Except if they’d cut our feet off we couldn’t have dug the ore, so they just kept us down a hole, where we couldn’t see the sun or feel the breeze. More than a score of us.”
The words caught in his thoughts for a moment— “see the sun and feel the breeze.” The breezes he had felt the last several days had been cold and biting, but he still cherished them.
“You escaped?” Sweet asked.
He nodded.
Enlightenment widened her eyes. “So that’s why you were out there barefoot in the cold, with no coat!”
He nodded again. “I just got away a few days ago. You’re the first person I’ve talked to since I left the mine.”
“You did more than talk,” she said, smiling again.
“You’re the first woman I’ve seen since my mother died, seven years ago,” he said apologetically.
Her mouth opened in surprise; then she grinned again, and flexed her body. “I hope you like what you see,” she said.
“Very much,” he said. He reached a hand out to stroke her shoulder; she allowed it, and pressed her cheek against his hand.
“Why did you invite me in?” he asked a moment later.
“A whim,” she said. “I wanted a little fresh air—my last customer reeked, and splashed perfume everywhere on top of it—and when I opened the window and saw you there, staring at me, it tickled my fancy to invite you in for a closer look. They’re so determined that only the paying customers will see us that I like to show myself to anyone I can.” She shrugged. “And I was curious—we don’t often have dirty, ragged strangers wandering the streets here. The guards don’t allow it.”
Arlian felt suddenly cold again. “Guards?”
“Well, of course—the lords and ladies post well-paid guards in all the major towns around Manfort, to keep the peace and make sure no one interferes with their investments. You’re lucky they didn’t catch you.”
“Oh,” he said, looking at the window—which was tightly closed, a fact he found somewhat comforting.
“Of course, if Mistress or one of the lords finds you in here with me, that might be even worse for you,” Sweet said t
houghtfully. “Sending you back to the mines would be the least they would do. Feet aren’t the only thing they’ve been known to cut off.”
“Oh,” Arlian said again, and again he glanced at the window—but this time he was considering it as an escape route.
“Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll hide you. There’s a closet, or you could squeeze under the bed. And we can get you cleaned up so you’ll pass for a respectable citizen when you go; the guards won’t bother you then.”
“But why would you … we?”
Sweet grinned at him. “Of course, ‘we’,” she said. “I think the other girls would be very pleased to meet you.”
Just then someone knocked on the door.
“Ten minutes!” a woman’s voice called.
“Oh, dear,” Sweet said. “A customer. Help me straighten things out a bit, would you? Then I’m afraid it’s into the closet with you.”
Arlian blinked at her. “Are you…”
But Sweet wasn’t listening; she was looking around the room.
“It’s not bad,” she said. “Lord Drisheen wasn’t interested in anything but me and the bed and his horrible perfume. Could you straighten those curtains, and give me a hand with the coverlet?”
Arlian hurried to the window to adjust the curtains, still slightly askew from his entry; he turned to find Sweet on her knees atop the pillows, pulling the disarrayed coverlet into place. He hurried to assist her.
“Hand me my jacket, would you?” she said, when the bed was reasonably straight. She pointed at a little heap of white satin on the carpet by the bed. While Arlian fetched it Sweet took a brush from the bedside table and, with the aid of a handheld mirror, began fixing her hair. The table held an assortment of cosmetics, and between brush strokes Sweet tallied the little bottles. “Kohl, rouge, talc…”
Arlian cleared his throat.
She looked up at him, and for a moment he was overcome by her charm, the delicacy of her face, and could not speak.
“Yes, Triv?” she asked.
“The closet,” he said. “I don’t want to open the wrong door.”
“Oh!” She pointed to a panel upholstered with pink silk. “It’s right there. There’s a stool, so you won’t need to stand; you must be tired.”
Dragon Weather Page 9
