by Jez Morrow
Xan’s sword arm held Devon’s shoulders, his shield arm circled around Devon’s waist. Xan’s left hand roved lower to grip Devon’s muscular cheek. Xan pressed Devon’s body hard against his own, grinding his cock against Devon’s cock.
Overwhelmed in fiery sensations, Devon felt the sudden absence sharply when Xan let go. Xan shoved Devon backward away from him.
It was a hard push. Devon fell on his back onto his wide bed. Xan was stripping off his top. Devon watched the mesmerizing knit and flow of the great muscles in the gladiator’s arms and sides as the tunic came off over his head. Xan’s dark blond hair came loose from its tie and fell about his great shoulders. Xan bent down to pull his boots off, then his breeches. Devon still had his own sandals on, laced up his calves. He was trying to get them unlaced, but Xan descended on him.
Devon lay passive. He meant to be passive, but his hands forgot. His palms slid down Xandaras’ arms and across his back, feeling the hard, flowing contours of muscle. Devon’s fingers ran through Xan’s thick mane.
Xan closed his teeth on the low nub of Devon’s left nipple, sending a jolt of fire through Devon that speared down to the tip of his cock. Then the flat of Xan’s tongue became a broad brush as he tasted Devon’s skin down the length of Devon’s lean body.
Xan’s mouth came to Devon’s belly chain. Xan clenched the fine chain between his teeth, broke it and threw it out of his way with a leonine toss of his head.
Xan’s mouth came down on Devon’s cock, surrounding it with smooth fire. Devon threw his head back, trying to swallow back his cries. His hands closed in fists in Xan’s hair. Devon drew up his knees so the masculine stubble on Xan’s jaw brushed Devon inside his thighs. Devon heard the click of Xan’s teeth on his cock ring. He felt Xan’s tongue roll around it. Devon’s cock swelled against the metal in pleasured pain. Devon refused to come. Not now. Not yet. This would be once and never again. He needed to stretch this feeling to forever, even while it burned and goaded now, now, now. Tears pressed at his eyes.
Suddenly empty air moved on his wet sex. Xan lifted off him.
Xan brusquely turned Devon over, facedown on the bed. Xan’s hands closed on Devon’s hips, and pulled his ass toward him so Devon was on hands and knees in a position to be mounted.
Xan knelt between Devon’s legs and reached across to Devon’s night table.
Devon looked back over his shoulder to see Xan’s body move like a great prowling beast. Xan’s bulky muscles elongated as his arm extended. Blade scars showed white and deep on his sun-bronzed skin. Xan retrieved a phial of scented oil.
Xan pushed Devon down onto his forearms. Devon’s cheek rested against the sheet, his ass thrust up.
The sesame oil, warmed in Xan’s hands, felt light and satiny in the channel between Devon’s buttocks. Xan spread it up and down Devon’s cleavage. He paused at Devon’s anus and circled it. Devon shivered.
Then Devon felt the backs of Xan’s fingers on his cheeks as Xan oiled his own cock.
Devon waited, trembling. The first touch of Xan’s sex on Devon’s ass made him grunt, startled, excited. Xan’s thick, satiny-oiled cock started its ride between Devon’s buttocks, sliding back and forth in the rut. With each pass over his anus, Devon wanted to beg, Please.
At last, at last, the bulging head of Xan’s cock paused, pressing at the tight entrance.
Devon caught in his breath.
His thoughts shrieked. Just put it in. Come in. Come in.
And then, miraculously, came the push. Dizzy with lust, Devon submitted. The muscles that guarded those gates relaxed and Devon took Xan’s sex inside his body with a welcome embrace.
Xan moved in and out with slow, luxurious strokes.
With tear-blurred vision, Devon saw their joined bodies in a reflecting glass. He saw Xan gazing downward, tension in his face, a vertical crease in his brow, as he watched his own cock go in and out of Devon. Devon was not sure if Xan was admiring his own thick, hard rod or the sight of Devon’s body taking him in. Xan’s hands moved on Devon’s buttocks, stroking and squeezing.
Devon’s mind floated away in miasma of bliss, then jerked back to the blade-keen awareness that a man’s cock was sliding in and out of his ass. Xan’s strong, calloused hands were broad and warm, his touch intimate, almost loving. On the in-stroke, Xan pushed his sex all the way in up to the haft, so that Devon felt Xan’s balls against his groin.
Every sinew inside him was singing.
Devon hadn’t ever wanted to want this man. But he did. All gods, Devon did want him.
The world was charged with magic. Life was never more vivid.
The chamber was fragrant with wood and spice. The earth exhaled verdant scents through the open window.
The most splendid stallion rode him, penetrating and withdrawing deliciously. Tears formed in Devon’s eyes as if gazing into too bright a light.
Just when Devon thought he was already engulfed in starfire, Xan reached down and forward to take Devon’s cock in his hand.
All his dreams exploded into a million real shining pieces. Xan’s hand moved up and down on his sex, tight and hard. Devon’s sex convulsed. He spurted white cum on Xan’s great hand.
Then Xan was pulling Devon up and back with him into Xan’s lap, still impaled. Devon stifled the moans in his throat, but he couldn’t contain his gushing joy as Xan’s hand moved up and down on his cock. Xan’s sex pulsated inside him.
The motion brought Devon back up to the razor edge of ecstasy. Lamplight shimmered through the prism of tears clinging to the tips of his eyelashes.
Wet warmth spread inside him with Xan’s ejaculation and Devon shot back to the heights again, coming again hard and straining as Xan climaxed inside him.
Dawn filtered through the gauze curtains of the high, wide windows of Devon’s chamber in the summer palace.
Bird songs and soft breezes drifted inside. The satin sheets were a rumpled glorious mess.
Xan had left Devon’s bed long past midnight when Devon was sated and could respond no more.
Devon woke vibrating on an ecstatic note, spent, used, and Oh my gods.
He had lost a virginity of sorts. Not that he hadn’t had a dildo in there, but that was like a candle flame to the noonday sun compared to the thrusts of Xan’s sex. A pleasant shiver of memory passed through his body as he relived the wash of sexual heat that was Xan coming inside him.
It hadn’t been enough for Xan just to take his release with Devon. Xan had to control him, bring him to heights, master him and make him come again and again.
Devon’s skin was sticky this morning. He liked it. He liked the heady musk on his sheets.
The hair on his pubis was stiff with dried cum.
He did not want to bathe. Xan’s scent was everywhere on him. Devon inhaled the male fragrance.
At last, because decorum demanded it, he rinsed himself clean, washing away Xan, his scent, his seed.
He retrieved his crown from the floor, put on his dignity—and cut off his cock ring.
Devon rode high in the saddle. His thighs were toned iron hard and stirrups were a Raenthe invention, so he was not desperately uncomfortable, only a little tender. And he would die before he rode in that soft, sumptuous litter.
He felt dazzled, floating, his body reverberating with the echoes of sexual splendor.
Where have I been? Have I ever been alive before?
It was as if he had been underwater all his life, holding his breath. And this, this was what life in the sunlight felt like.
Xan left even Devon’s fantasies in ashes by comparison. Real sex was sudden and brilliant as a lightning strike. Devon was still reeling from the wonder and sheer beauty of it.
It was something that should have never happened. And now he knew with exquisitely cruel clarity what he was missing.
So be it. He couldn’t exactly undo last night. Not that he would choose to forget it. Ever.
He held himself haughty on the ride out of Laklare.
So
did Xan, looking easy and unaffected and unbearably sexy. Xan had the relaxed look of a well-fed lion.
The sex would be nothing for Xan, of course. It had been sex. A reward for a job well done. And a chance to play the master to his Sovereign. Xan’s heart had not been touched.
Devon tried to match the barbarian’s nonchalance, tried to make his eyes lie, but Devon was afraid he was beaming.
Devon gazed at the colors in the fields as if he’d never seen them before. Everything around him was brilliant. Wind songs whispered through the trees.
The troop was approaching the border of civilized territory. Xan wore his sturdy longbow strapped across his back. The quiver hung from the front of his saddle.
The barrier of low mountains materialized out of the mist on the forward horizon. These were not the soaring ice-clad titans of Norta Province, but they were mountains nonetheless, a natural fortress wall that kept the barbarian wild lands apart from the civilized region of Shiliya Province.
There was a passage through the barrier, a narrow divide, sheer and sharp as if the mountain had been split in two with a titan’s ax. That was the Witch’s Cleft.
As the column approached the entrance to the pass, the point guard raised her hand. The column drew to a halt. Something was wrong.
Devon snapped out of his daydreams back to the here and now. He took heels to his horse and rode up to the fore, Xan riding at his flank on his big bronze draft horse.
The point guard, a stout young woman named Rodriga, pointed up at the heights on either side of the passage.
The heights soared straight up on either side. Rock walls crowded the road like a chute for driving animals to slaughter.
Devon spotted the trouble at once. There were no birds. Where were the birds? There should have been birds pecking at the rocks and swooping through the divide, chasing after winged insects on the rising thermals.
Something had arrived before Devon’s troop and scared away all the birds.
Rodriga, who was burly for a woman—burly for a man as for that—volunteered to scout ahead all the way through to the far end of the pass and back.
Devon invoked the gods to go with her and the column waited, restless in the sun.
At length Rodriga came galloping back on her frothing horse.
“Nothing,” she reported. “Too much nothing. Anything you’d expect to scurry into a hole as I came already scurried before I got there.”
“Trap?” Devon asked.
“Trap,” said Rodriga with dead certainty.
Devon looked up to the cliff tops. Before the wild lands were added to Devon’s province, there used to be guard posts on the heights. Once the lands were annexed to Devon’s province, the barbarian raiders stopped coming through the pass to steal horses and cattle, so the guard station was abandoned. Nothing stood up there now but a stone foundation.
“No goats,” Xan noted, his pale eyes narrowed at the high rocks. “Goats are haughty. Goats don’t scare for no reason.”
“What does that mean?” said Devon.
“Something up there hunts goats,” said Xan.
“Lions?” Devon suggested.
Xan motioned no. “Goats laugh at lions,” Xan said. “There are archers up there.”
Devon sent scouts up the cliffs. The men scrambled up the ragged rocks, cursing each other as stones broke loose under the feet of the men above them. They groped and sidestepped and fumbled, graceful as crabs. Devon could see why goats would laugh.
Devon squinted up at the heights. He could just make out some weathered runes carved into the rock face near the top. He pointed up. “Whose marks are those?”
“The Kiriciki,” Xan named the tribe. “They turn their words into marks like the Raenthe do. But I do not read.”
Devon nodded.
The scouts came back down with ravaged hands. The twins Milus and Silas, their heads bald and smooth as a pair of dicks, presented themselves to the Sovereign.
Milus reported, “If there is anyone up there, there can’t be a lot of them. They’re really well hidden.”
“Collie got bit by a snake.” Silas held up the fanged half of a snake and asked anyone in the Sovereign’s attendance, “Is this poisonous?”
“Where is the other end?” Xan asked.
Silas’ twin, Milus, held up the butt end of the snake.
“Not very poisonous,” said Xan. “Collie will itch for a while.”
Devon ordered all his soldiers to helmets, full armor, leather cloaks and shields. The soldiers hated the helmets, especially when the sun was high, but they wore them.
Xan strung his bow. His muscles flexed as he bent the bow. His skin gleamed with sweat under the fierce sun. He tied back his long, thick hair and kept his eyes on the forbidding heights.
Devon ordered the column forward into the narrow pass.
The first arrow pierced through the royal litter’s scarlet curtain and stabbed into the down-stuffed silk cushions where the Sovereign was meant to recline.
Devon was not inside the litter. He was on his black stallion.
The first arrows would have killed him.
Suddenly he was sliding off his horse, dragged down by his belt. He fell hard against Xan, who was hauling him bodily out of the open to the shelter of a great lot of rocks. The air sizzled with a defensive barrage of crossbow bolts from Devon’s men.
Devon was locked in a strong embrace he could not break. He tried, but he couldn’t join his men in the fight. Xan was holding him down.
Barbarian shouts bounced between the rock walls, muddled in their echoes. Their words sounded a little like the archaic high speech used in temples. It made the savages sound like angry priests.
Devon couldn’t see his attackers. He couldn’t see anything but Xan, the gladiator’s powerful body covering Devon like a living shield.
A spear stabbed the ground near their rocky shelter. Its wicked iron head was set on a cornel wood shaft. Weasel tails and the red tail feathers of a hawk were tied onto it in savage decoration.
All around them shouts resounded amid pelting arrows, hissing bolts and scraping spears. Devon breathed in Xan’s scent, felt Xan’s pounding heart.
Suddenly Xan let go of him and stood up. Xan nocked an arrow and pulled back his stout bow. He loosed several shots in quick succession. His arrows stabbed at the rocks at the attackers’ feet, backing the barbarians off their high ledges.
The savages—Devon could see them now—wore cloaks of dried grass which made them look like thatched roofs escaped from their cottages.
Devon stood up, wrenched the barbarian spear out of the hard-packed dirt and hurled it back to the heights where it came from. It was a strong throw and he got one of the savages. Just in his knee, but the man was dead when he tumbled down the rocks to the canyon floor. Devon roared for a crossbow.
But it was already over. The hail of missiles from the regiment was too much for the attackers.
There had not been many attackers and now six of them were left dead on the rocks.
Xan rounded on Devon with a scold. “You know that running and hiding is often the best tactic?”
Devon answered, “Not in front of them.”
His men.
A Sovereign could not give a show of cowardice.
Devon could not diminish himself in front of his fighting men.
And not in front of you, Devon thought at Xan.
“You are not making my task of defending you easy,” said Xan.
“Yes?” Devon cocked his head. “Marcus would have named someone else as first guardsman if he’d known this was going to be hard.”
Xan blinked at the insult. Then he pushed on to something else on his mind. “I know this tribe,” Xan said. “This is the Kiriciki. This act is not like them.”
“Apparently it is like them,” Devon said. “Seeing that they did it.”
Xan moved apart to retrieve his horse, which had wandered off in search of tasty weeds among the rocks.
I
gnat, captain of the horse guard, moved in to advise his Sovereign. “Of course the savage knows this tribe. He told them to be here.”
“Did he?” Devon replied. “And why did he not slip a dagger between my ribs when we were behind the rocks and deliver my carcass to them? Xan could have had me any time.”
Ignat muttered, turning away, “So I hear.”
Shit.
It was out. Devon felt himself go pale, then burn. He was not so foolish as to think servants didn’t talk. Devon had not been quiet in his chamber his last night in Laklare.
The servants might have started the talk, but Devon would be damned if he would confirm any rumors. He spoke loftily at Ignat’s back, “If you have an accusation against my first guardsman, tell me something that makes sense and I shall listen.”
Ignat turned around again. “The barbarians were laying in wait for us, ma dahn. They knew we were coming. They knew you were coming.” He jabbed the air with his stubby forefinger. “First thing they hit was your litter.”
Devon went silent. He nodded, but kept his own counsel.
Devon’s men wearily gathered up the dead from the high rocks. The dead were all barbarians. The Raenthe soldiers set themselves to digging in the hard, hard ground. They had no love for the enemy, but they had a duty to the gods to return mortal remains into the earth.
Xan grunted, watching, not assisting, looking foreboding. He held his arms crossed, his muscles tensed, his hands closed in tight, massive fists. His look grew fiercer and fiercer. His thoughts were shouting.
Finally Devon had to command him, “Speak.”
“Why do you defile the dead?” Xan said.
Devon blinked, startled. “Do I? You must believe that is not my intent.”
“Must I? To put them in the dirt is an insult. It is—how do you say—sacrilege.”
A soldier nearby jerked up straight from the very shallow hole he’d dug so far. “It’s good enough for Raenthe!” he shouted at Xan. He made an apologetic salute to the Sovereign and growled, “Good enough for his lot!” He jabbed his spade into the earth. It bit no deeper than a dent.
