There had been countless sweet rolls fresh from the oven and, secretly, Melisse always thought Mathilde made them just for her and the other servants without ever saying so.
She unclenched her fists and willed the fire within her to calm itself, to draw itself back into lazy coils and slumber for yet a while longer.
“Can you go into the manor for me, then, Mathilde?”
The cook nodded her head slowly, then said, “But the kitchen fires are done put out. All’s Helene and the others eat is boxed sweets from some foreign place. I swear it’ll rot all the teeth out of their heads if they don’t stop.”
Melisse cut her off.
“No, it’s not the kitchen that interests me. In Lord Perene’s library, there was a book written by someone named Bellamere. You are lettered enough to find it, I think.”
But Mathilde’s face fell and she shook her head.
“Yes, I’ve letters enough to find it if it was still there. But it ain’t anymore.”
“But how can you know, Mathilde? There are hundreds of books in the library. What’s more, I can tell you just where to look and it shouldn’t take long if they haven’t moved it.”
“No, girl. You don’t understand. It’s not there because there aren’t any books in the library now.”
“What?” Melisse asked.
“One night during the week of feasting and drinking, the fires had burned low in the hearths, so those drunken fools took to throwin’ the Lord’s books in and Helene just laughed and laughed as they did it.
“They kept on a’going until there was nothing left. All her father’s precious collection gone and fallen to ash.
“She was just as drunk as they were and when the last book finally turned black in the flames, the servant men said she said something right strange.
“They said she laughed with a sort of strangled sound, then said to no one in particular that now he would never bother coming back, now that his past lay in ashes.
“None of us could figure what she meant. It made no sense...any of it. Her father not yet cold in his grave and his daughter thinking she could keep him there if she burned his books.
“We thought it was crazed grief that made her just watch as all those strange people burned each and every page that mattered to her father.”
Melisse shook her head.
“No, Mathilde, she wasn’t speaking of Lord Perene.”
The young woman reached back and pulled the hood of her cloak over her head before saying, “A wise woman told me that what I seek lies to the north of here, but I didn’t want to listen. You are right to warn me away from Helene and her vicious ways. But I promise you, Mathilde, when I have done with other affairs I will come back here and there will be a reckoning between Helene and me.
“And before it is through, you will have your home back.”
She turned back to the door, opening it, then said without looking back, “We both will.”
Mathilde followed after her, but in the space of time it took her to gain the doorway, there was no sign of the young woman.
The only trace that she had ever been there being the stable door itself. There where Melisse had touched it, a wisp of smoke rose from the blackened pattern of the young woman’s fingertips.
Mathilde’s eyes grew wide and round, then she said, “O’ lordy lord...it’s all come undone for you, too, h’aint it..?”
Then she eased the door quietly shut and sat back down on the hay bale to cry a bit more.
Chapter Five: Silas
White stone walls surrounded them. Cut blocks so finely shaped that it was almost impossible to see the joints between them rose up in sloped arches, forming elegant openings upon one of the many turrets of the fortress beneath them.
Only this turret was the sole built directly into the flanks of the stark mountain that ran off into an unbreachable ridge of sheer walls that protected one side of the Estril city.
The location had been ideal during the great war with the Donglin and while the inscrutable race of lizards had never gone so far as to attack the city itself, the white walled bastion would have proved a breaker against which the waves of six legged beasts would have shattered.
Or so the Estril believed. When losses on both sides of the war grew so great that each race feared for its own extinction, an uneasy truce between them had been agreed upon.
Thus fears were allayed that the Donglin would ever attempt the Estril within their own realm. Likewise, the Estril were forbidden that of the Donglin.
The fortress and all the great effort expended in its creation suddenly became entirely meaningless and in the years to come, little by little, it was abandoned as the city center was the beacon to its inhabitants of culture and hedonistic pleasure.
The turret rose high upon the mountainside, but had become inhabited once again after so many long years of disuse.
He leaned in close to her, his mouth drifting back across her jawline, then up to nuzzle at her ear.
The woman’s golden skin fluttered in rich amber tones, the glow of her ardor slipping through her control.
“What’s the matter, Lest? Am I bothering you?” Silas murmured into her ear, then slipped his tongue out to trace down along her neck, just barely touching her as he did.
The Estril female sighed, then arched back against the young man who, not so long ago, had been the simple son of a potato farmer and not the concubine lover to an inhuman creature.
He continued his logical course and ended, inevitably, at her lips which parted as he pressed his own against her.
Her hands went to his back and tugged the thin fabric of his tunic down off his shoulders, then she broke away and echoed what he had done to her. The Estril delicately kissed the skin of his neck, then moved down across his chest before coming to one of his nipples which she took in her teeth.
Her color very warm and amber then, Lest pulled back, stretching his nipple taut before releasing him from the sweet pain of her mouth. Then, it was Silas’ turn to sigh as she continued down his body.
His abdomen was a rippled young man’s stomach. His life of working hard had left him hardened while still in the prime of his life. Long hours at the plow, even longer hours in the stables, all of it had sculpted him into firm lines of muscle that furrowed and smoothed as he shifted under Lest’s ministrations.
Then her hand, hot and strong, slipped between his legs, drawing him out to stand rigid and proud.
She lowered her head to him, almost as though the wife to an elite military general paid reverence to the human before her.
Her mouth was hot and humid as she took him between her lips, then her tongue came snaking out along his entire length. At one time, it would have frightened him, but he had become accustomed to the fluid changes of Estril bodies, and what Lest did next was extraordinarily pleasurable.
She took him fully into her mouth and all the while her tongue lengthened until she was at his velvety sack. That marvelous, moist tongue rolled his balls from side to side as she worked up and down his shaft.
All resistance had evaporated over the past months of his captivity. Silas had come to understand that whatever might happen, his continued efforts of defiance would serve little, while compliance might lead toward his purposes.
In that time, he had become the willing companion to the Estril noblewoman, and his youthful fires of lust and desire had been well stoked by her. They coupled in every way imaginable. Tireless, they searched out new and different ways of pleasuring one another until, at last, Lest grew fearful of the jealousy their behavior might ignite in her husband, Raffiran.
Silas had seen little of the General, but what he had seen was enough to convince him that Lest played a dangerous game and when she suggested that they take a more subtle approach to their meetings, he had agreed.
So it was that Silas found himself so often alone in the great fortress. Free to wander its endless corridors, or climb to peer from its many parapets. Yet, he remained as captive a
s much as any caged beast, for Lest would not allow him to return to the realm of men.
At moments like these, he could almost forget that he had effectively become a slave while she brought him unerringly to the brink of orgasm once again.
He followed her movements, his hips moving in time with the long strokes of her lips around his member, then with a heavy groan, he came into her hard.
His body arched as she did the thing she knew he enjoyed the most. As he came, she wagged her tongue back and forth at the base of his cock, but she did it so rapidly that it could sometimes carry him over the edge a second time.
This was one of those times. The flexing of his hips stuttered, then he felt himself lift up even harder than he had been just a moment before, and then he was sliding down the mountainside in an avalanche of pleasure as a second climax rolled through his body like boulders rampaging as they fell.
Without thinking, a word slipped from him as his body contorted under the influence of the Estril female and the extraordinary things she could do with her mouth when she willed it.
“Moongirl.”
It was no more than a whisper, but it had the power of a thousand trumpets sounding the alarm.
Lest broke from him and her color rippled through her skin, the amber shifting to a violent red.
“I told you, Silas. I will not have you utter that woman’s name here ever again.”
Her features were rigid as her anger. She stood up and took a step backward from him, but he could feel the heat of her fury from where he was.
“It’s not even her name. You took me away before I could ask her,” he replied, his chin held high, the defiance within him awakened once again.
The Estril looked down at him and her sudden red rage slipped into vivid pinks as she said, “You mean to say before you would have burned alive, Silas. If I had not taken you, you would have died. Make no mistake about this.”
He sighed. It had become an old argument between them, and as he had learned during his time with her, Lest never stayed angry with him for very long.
“As it is, I cannot understand how you can harbor these...these feelings for that woman. From what you have told me, you barely spoke to her before she destroyed all that you ever knew.”
“Of course,” he answered her, “You’re right. It doesn’t make sense. Except that I felt something then. Something that I know she felt, too.
“And since then, maybe that has been all I’ve had to hold on to. Maybe she represents what my life used to be before all of this.”
He looked around himself, then said, “All this is not my life. I’m not supposed to be here. And you know it.”
Lest turned away from him, then he saw a deep blue color swirling through the pink that made her body glow despite the bright light of day all around them.
“After all this time, why can you not feel something for me...anything for me...the way that I do for you?”
Her question hung between them as Silas stood up and went to her.
He placed his strong hands upon her shoulders, then turned her around to face him.
“And why can’t you understand? If you care about me, Lest, then let me go. Give me my freedom if I matter that much to you.”
Her head was down, but then she looked up at him. Her eyes were a lovely almond shape, surely the most beautiful he had ever seen, and then they sparkled like the finest jewels as tears gathered upon them.
“You make me regret the day that I foolishly chose you for my toy. You were supposed to be just a game...a way to amuse myself from time to time.”
She broke from his grasp, then rushed toward the stairway leading down and away from him.
At the first step, she paused, then said without looking back, “I do not release you, Silas, because I cannot. My feelings for you will not allow it.”
Then she fled from him and the guilt he represented.
Silas turned back to study the city that lay sprawling before him, so far below.
At one time her words would have left him feeling bitterly disappointed, but now he knew better.
Instead, he smiled. Sooner or later, she would release him. A simple farmer he might have been once, but now he was fast becoming a learned concubine, one that knew if he pushed her away this time, when next he held her, she would love him even more.
He knew it was cynical and just as wrong as the crime he accused Lest of committing against him. But he would stop at nothing to escape the Estril and return to his own world...even at the cost of his own soul.
Raffiran looked down to see his hands sunken to the forearms in molten stone.
Their voices had carried easily to him as he watched them from another parapet of the fortress.
He had watched as they cavorted like beasts, shameless in all that they did. His hands held onto the edges of the stony opening as he had looked on.
Now all that he saw was tinged in red, the liquefied rock in his hands running in hot slag to slump down to the floor.
His anger blazed through him, then it lifted into an inferno as he watched his wife being humiliated by such a paltry creature.
He hated humans. He hated that the Estril had recently taken to walking about in what was clearly human form, his own wife setting the recent style as she refused to return to a more natural, fluid form.
Raffiran now knew why. She did it for the human. He was the reason that she had taken him away from court to hide him where she thought he would be safe. But not before all the courtesans began following her example, as if it was simply the latest trend.
He shook with anger as he pulled his arms free of laval stone that bubbled and burned as his rage rose to such heights as he had not felt since the madness of battle during the war with the Donglin.
Even he had taken to the new style and as he looked down at himself, he was disgusted with what he saw. He had allowed himself to be infected by the presence of the human, as they all had.
As his wife had.
His corporeal form dissolved, yet the blood red color of his ire did not relent. Raffiran held himself still, reaching out with his senses, searching for the presence of his wife. But she had already gone beyond him, only the trace of her terrible sadness lingering behind her.
It was laughable for him to feel jealousy over such a weak thing as a human. And that is what he told himself as he roared toward the man looking out over the city.
No, what he was about to do was to remove the taint of an unclean, poisonous animal from their realm.
Lest would never know for certain what happened and in time he would make her love him again. He would make her look at him like she had at the human.
Silas felt the turret shake, then a half moment later, he heard the mountain roar.
Only the sound that shook everything around him in heavy reverberations did not come from behind him, from the mountain at his back.
The terrible anger he heard came from before him.
Then he saw it, a red fire ball that erupted from a tower a short distance away, a fire ball that grew and grew as it came.
He stepped back, wondering if he should flee. Wondering if he should try to call to Lest for her aid.
But as the blazing sphere arrived, he knew that it was already too late, then the flames flooded all around him.
The last thought he had was that his hair was burning, the smell of it horribly acrid, then the red flames gave way to a white heat like that of a thousand suns and Silas knew no more.
Chapter Six: Melisse
The countryside was like much of what she had seen in her recent traveling. Lush, verdant, hillsides rolled on all sides of her.
Melisse had taken to traveling in daylight. Before, moving quickly, too quickly to be human, she had preferred making passage at night when the shadows would lend their aid at hiding her. And when they did not suffice, the darkness let those observers who caught some glimpse of her believe that she was but a fluttering of leaves or some other thing they might imagine, rat
her than face the truth of a woman who swept by them in a silent blur.
For now, though, the weather had turned bright and calm, a clear blue sky shined down and the feel of it upon her skin felt like a blessing.
She passed more and more people the closer she drew to Urrune. At first, most were smiling as if they, too, could not help themselves after weeks of dreary rain that fell as if the heavens had meant to drown them all.
But as she neared the town itself, even the sun could do nothing for the downcast expressions she saw written upon the visages of the folk she crossed.
It was if they knew something she did not. The brief glances that stole her way seemed to suggest that soon, she, too, would learn that there was no reason for light spirits in the vicinity of Urrune.
Melisse entered the outskirts of the town. It grew up slowly, just like so many other villages that had swollen over the years, its edges keeping to simple, humble dwellings, while the interior of what might rightly be called a city, grew in height and also in standing.
Thatched roofs gave way to tiled roofs, many in bright and varied colors.
She supposed that she had gone far enough to the north that builders did not bother ferrying slate from so far south where it was quarried from the very mountains she returned from.
No doubt somewhere close were any number of ateliers that baked local clays into such myriad colors.
Still, the faces she saw were serious, strictly uninterested in anything that might speak of joy. As if their very buildings were meant for some other people who could appreciate them, while they, themselves, travailed under the heavy knowledge that they all seemed to share.
Neat, cobbled streets took her quickly to the town centre and there, as she had hoped, were a number of merchants stalls ringing a central plaza. Often enough, she had seen its mirror in other towns. Sometimes at the feet of large cathedrals...other times, spreading out from what passed for local government seats.
The Marechal Chronicles: Volume IV, The Chase: A Dark Fantasy Tale Page 8
