My body was trembling, my sex wet with anticipation of what I knew would be a hard, animal claiming.
“This is interesting,” Aurek said.
“I need her,” Ezeru grunted, struggling with his own buttons. He stopped, breathing hard. “I thought the heat would pass once she was pregnant.”
“Well, it’s possible you’re not ‘in heat’ anymore,” Aurek said. “It’s possible this is just the way you’re going to feel whenever you see her or smell her or hear her voice, because you know she’s yours and such a thought is so unbearably wonderful that all you can think of is wanting to feel it again and again. And then we just call it ‘in love’…”
“In love. I expected that to feel more…lofty.”
“Nah. Not unless you’re already a lofty sort of person. It is, just as much, a torturous, violent sort of feeling…but enough talk. Don’t leave ripe fruit hanging on the vine.” Aurekdel’s hand drifted to my hungry sex and his fingers stroked me there, in a brief tease, before he went back to his own business, whatever that was.
“Love…” Ezeru looked at me. He unfastened his trousers buttons with a tad more patience.
Maybe I should have said something poetic about love back to him. But I was only thinking about how much I wanted to feel him, and I made a little pleading sound instead.
In another moment, I got what I wanted as he shoved my knees up and plunged deep into me. Ezeru certainly wasn’t the most patient of lovers. But I had Aurekdel to seduce me, and Oszin to treat me like a princess. I screamed with satisfaction as Ezeru took what he needed. His hands gripped me, his breath quick, and I would belong to him until he was sated. Once he succumbed to his desire there was nothing to do but ride his strength, my fingers digging into the covers, my breath coming fast. Warmth swept through my in waves, each one coming to settle on the shore of my desire as Ezeru clutched my legs, stroking me fast, every thrust pushing me higher, until the sensation felt like I was flying.
He shouted with pleasure and relief as he came hard inside me. I came at the same time, but in a soft, unsatisfied sort of way. I needed more. He slowed down, his breath ragged.
“Mm…” Aurek made a satisfied sound. “Sounds like you’re really taking to your role, King of the Rock Dragons.”
“My role…what’s that? We’ve already produced children.”
Aurek sat down beside me on the bed and leaned close enough to give me a brief, teasing kiss. “Keeping our queen in her place.” He tweaked my nipple, while I was still shuddering from the aftershocks of the orgasm. It was rippling through me slowly, even still, never quite catching somehow. I suppose it had been too many days of admiring Aurek and Ezeru without satisfaction.
“Have mercy on me…,” I breathed to Aurek, because I knew more was to come.
“Is that what you want?” He lifted my shoulders off the bed, supporting me. Ezeru was still inside me.
Aurek’s fingers brushed my chin, and he drew me into a slow, sensual kiss, his tongue exploring me gently. My core was blazing, blooming with wet heat, and I whimpered. Aurek’s arms were around me, supporting me, and Ezeru didn’t draw back. He slipped his hands around my waist, and when Aurek drew back, now he kissed me too.
“I could have you again,” he whispered.
“Again?” Aurek said. “How are you already ready to have her again? Did you ever really stop having her the first time? You really are some sort of otherworldly creation.”
“Don’t make him feel bad,” I said.
“Bad? I’m jealous.”
“I don’t feel bad about that,” Ezeru said. “I don’t think you’re really done yet, are you, Himika?”
“N—no…” Aurek was fondling my breasts gently now, driving me to distraction.
“Well, I want to finish what I started,” Ezeru said, with another one of his very quick smiles, as if he wanted to look happy but his face wasn’t used to the shape.
Meeting my eyes—Ezeru’s eyes were always so serious, hardly even blinking—he pushed deeper into me again. This time, he was slower. I could feel every single inch of his length pushing in, and drawing back. In and out, in and out, slowly, so slowly… My back pressed against Aurek’s bare chest.
“I still want you,” Aurek whispered, his fingers stroking my sweet spots. Now he pushed me more into Ezeru’s arms and nudged into my nether hole. Aurek had never claimed me there; he had the thickest shaft. His body promised intense sensation. I was ready. I was ready for them to fill me, to become a part of them. One never knows when it might be the last time, I thought, and now it can never be too much.
There were tears in my eyes. “More…”
“More? I think that’s all we’ve got,” Aurek said, with a soft chuckle. “Two isn’t enough now?”
“No…I guess not…” I shut my eyes, holding tight to Ezeru while they quickly found a rhythm with me. Before long, I was driven to a true climax, the one I hadn’t quite reached before, so intense that I was keening and begging, and when it was over I practically shoved them away. I couldn’t handle anymore. Maybe Ezeru couldn’t either, now, because after a few loud groans of pleasure he was breathing raggedly.
“It’s all right, don’t panic now,” Aurek said, giving Ezeru a little pat on the shoulder. “I hope we didn’t break him.”
“No, no,” Ezeru said. “Far from it. I feel cleansed after these moments with you.”
“Cleansed?”
“The mist kingdom felt like such a hateful place. I’ll need a lot of good moments to smother it.” But he tried out another brief smile, and his fingers brushed the spot where Aurek patted his shoulder. “It isn’t just this, my queen. It’s every moment I spend with you…and King Aurekdel and King Seron. You treated me fairly from the start. I can imagine a day where I might only ever think of Dvaro and Izeria in passing.”
“Dvaro,” Aurek said, “is dead. So that’s one you can banish from your mind.”
I collapsed onto the bed. but before I knew it, Ezeru was picking me up and pointing me toward the bath. “Wha?”
“We’ve made a mess of you,” he said. “One more scrub, unless you would like me to lick it up. That is what a rock dragon would do with his mate…”
“Not now! I would die!”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Just imagine if Seron and Oszin were here,” Aurek said.
“If they were here, they could do whatever they wanted to me,” I said. “I can say that…since they’re not…”
“Lucky them, eh.” Aurek walked to the window, and stood there with the sea air blowing at his hair. I knew what he was thinking. I would bet he had his own count of days, and his own count of nightmares.
Chapter Five
Oszin
The cell door slammed shut on me. I wrapped my hands around the bars. “Can I ask you something?”
“Yes. You may.” Izeria seemed a little friendly to me, as murderous queens go. I guess I’d been useful.
“If you wanted him dead…why didn’t you just poison him yourself? A little bit over time, even?”
“I could have done that,” she said softly. “Somehow…I just couldn’t bring myself… Silly as it sounds. It was easy, wasn’t it?”
“I guess it was. Just a few drops in a cup. I’ve done worse.”
“Haven’t we all,” she said, and then I was sorry I’d given her a chance to say we were the same.
“What now?” I asked her.
“Well, you’ll be fed well enough, and I won’t kill you, and you ought to be very thankful to have that much,” she said. “You came here as an assassin. It was lucky for you that I found you useful, but I won’t forget why you came either.”
“I don’t expect you would.”
“You’ll rot here.” She paused. “Well, actually, we’ll be moving north. So you might rot there. You’ll hear reports, of course. I have plans for your kin. I know the high dragons will never follow me as a beloved queen, but they might kneel to me in terror before long. I have sent
some of my dragons to meet your friends, and they are armed with one of the more rare and dangerous of all mists. One that will steal away a person’s memories and make their mind as fresh and open to persuasion as a child.”
What? I knew my face betrayed some fear, damnit. I hated being trapped here, unable to do anything about it.
“I’m going to use it on Ezeru, of course,” she said. “Because I did make some mistakes with him. Huge mistakes. I guess he was more…sensitive than I realized?” She sounded a little incredulous. “It’s not too late to fix them, though… Dvaro hated Ezeru. That was always the trouble. But he’s done now, and I will tell Ezeru that he is…” Her mouth scrunched. “He’s special, isn’t he? I didn’t mean for him to be so very special. I just meant for him to be strong. Our own creations get away from us.”
“I can’t say I relate.”
She shook her head. “What am I doing, talking to some human? Well, it doesn’t matter, that’s why. I know you’re not making it out of here alive. I will see to it. But if you’re smart, I’ll let you live a long, long time. We let Perina live a long time. I think you know about that.”
“You let her go,” I said, for some stupid reason.
“She was a bad influence on Ezeru. So she had to go, and Dvaro had to go. Now, I will be the queen, and Ezeru will be my heir. My prince. I’m going to marry him to one of the most beautiful mist dragons in the kingdom, and she’s a good fighter too. They’ll be happy together. That’s how it should have been all along.”
“Don’t you worry that somewhere, deep down, Ezeru will still know?”
Her eyes snapped to me and it was obvious that she was very worried about this. “You are a handsome little human. Be good and quiet, and I’ll find a use for you. Oh, yes…you can’t even turn into a dragon. So you’d be a companion for someone. An older woman, I think, would be best. We don’t need any human babies here.” She reached through the bars and smacked my cheek. “Be good.”
I grabbed her arm and twisted it back, not enough to hurt her, but enough to warn her. “I want to make it clear, then. That is something I won’t do. I really don’t want to die, but if the choice is between being a dragon’s plaything and death, I’ll take death. I will always take death rather than being forced against my will.”
“Ohhh…but you would never know you were being forced,” she said. “You would be so high on mist. You would accept it all. Something to think about.” She wrenched her arm away. Before she left the room, she looked at me again. Her looks sent ice down my spine.
I didn’t really know what she wanted.
I had a lot of time to think back on killing King Dvaro. Putting the poison in his cup wasn’t hard. But watching him froth at the mouth and curse and the way his skin turned a weird color as he clawed at the ground…
Poison really was a shameful way to kill someone. I lay back on my shabby cot in the cell and prayed to the Kamiri gods to forgive me for doing something like that. I couldn’t call it cowardly; I was trying to help Aurekdel and Ezeru get revenge.
Sure was anticlimactic, though.
Izeria is the one who raised Ezeru. Maybe she was the power behind the throne…
As Dvaro was dying, Izeria held his hand and genuine tears flowed down her cheeks. At least, they certainly seemed genuine. It was bizarre to watch. Even as guards were handcuffing me and dragging me out, I was watching her. We were the only two people in the room who knew what had really happened, and there she was, looking for all the world like she was really suffering. Like she really loved him.
I certainly would have been fooled. Which meant, this was a very untrustworthy woman, one who could honestly weep for a man she’d just murdered.
In my cell, I kept shivering, even though it wasn’t cold.
It was a rectangular room, about the size of the main room in the tiny cottage where I grew up, which felt pretty claustrophobic to me these days. But our cottage had windows. This room didn’t. The walls were made of stone. It felt like a castle basement, which I guess it was, and occasionally I heard rock dragons chittering or someone crying out.
I never thought I ran any risk of dying alone in a basement.
But I’d volunteered for this. And I had killed Dvaro, after all. Maybe not the way I’d intended, but he was dead.
No one brought me dinner that night. My stomach growled and gnawed. I’d forgotten what this felt like. It brought back aching memories of my mother counting out money and days, puzzling over how to make it stretch. It was just the way life was; all our neighbors lived the same way. But when I become the captain of Himika’s guard, I knew my mother would never count money like that again. And she never would. I trusted Himika to make sure my parents were provided for, even if something happened to me.
I tried not to think about Himika too much.
If I died, I would cause her so much pain.
I wondered what my parents would think. They knew the price of their son rising in the ranks.
I think they’d understand more than Himika would. It would hurt them, but…poor people can’t afford pain the same way rich people can.
I had a lot of time to think about all of that, lying there in my cell, waiting for someone to feed me, more helpless than I’d ever been in my life.
There was always a divide between me and the girl I loved. Things she would never understand. Of course, I knew it went the other way too. It shocked me the first time I saw her wiping tears. I thought princess never cried, at least, I couldn’t imagine it. Even a crippled princess still had feasts, warm clothes, endless entertainment. I never realized until I saw her that you can’t run from pain either, no matter how rich you are. And when Himika’s father was killed, when she fell into the emperor’s hands…
I wondered why I put myself through all this, knowing that if I was killed, it would be the cruelest thing I could ever do to her.
What was the use of pride anyway?
Did I do this to make her miss me? To make her admire me?
Or did it root back to my mother, worrying over our next meal? She used to sing a song that went, A Kamiri life is pain and sorrow, until the day we die.
Maybe it was true. I couldn’t imagine myself ever just settling down, taking pleasure in Himika, in children, in simple things, like a rich man might.
The small panel at the bottom of the door opened and a bowl of mush was slid in. I ran to the window to see my jailer, but instead I saw Ijaru’s tail quickly turn the corner. Izeria had tried to force the young girl to seduce me, because her father betrayed the king. I wanted to ask her what had happened, but clearly she didn’t want to be seen. She had begged me to take her, so her father wouldn’t lose a hand. Her virginity for her father’s hand…a punishment of pure malice.
“Ijaru!” I hissed.
She turned. “Shh, shh!” Then she ran to the window. “My father is down here. I heard you were here too, so I—well, I heard that the prisoners aren’t getting fed regularly because Peri’s gone. She made sure no one went too hungry. I don’t know if I can always make it here, so eat every bite.”
“How is your father?”
Her eyes lowered. “He is…still all right, for now. I think he might get a bit of a reprieve because the queen is grieving the king.”
“Right…”
“Isn’t she?” The girl was sharp.
I shook my head. “Don’t get me killed, but…keep paying attention.”
“I understand. We never did trust her. That’s how we got into this mess.” Her brows furrowed upward with worry. “My father wanted me to tell you, thank you for being honorable.”
“Even though he might lose a hand?”
“He would rather lose a hand than hurt me,” she said. “And I would rather lose my virginity to a kind stranger than for my father to lose a hand. But he won this round.”
“I have someone I would never, ever betray,” I said. “But honor certainly is a complicated thing sometimes.”
“Did you really kill the
king?” she asked. “That’s what everyone is saying.”
“That’s a complicated question,” I said, pointedly.
“Ohh…” She glanced behind her. “I should go, but…I’ll keep paying attention, as you said.”
I nodded. All I could do right now was plant the seeds of doubt and disarray in Izeria’s kingdom. Maybe something would tug at Ezeru’s mind.
If I was going to rot here under Izeria’s watch, I wouldn’t go down easy.
Chapter Six
Seron
The high dragons had tried to enchant me, my companions told me. They all seemed to know me, but I didn’t recognize any of them, not even the one who said she was my fiancee. They were patient with me as I tried to remember their names, and my betrothed, Emiri, was always checking on me, making sure I ate enough and didn’t work too hard.
They all seemed very nervous. But they had all just heard that the king had been killed, and if I could remember the king at all, I guess I would have been nervous too.
They all spoke very well of the queen, but reminded me that she was strict and had a temper, so she might be upset that our raid on the high dragon castle had failed.
“We’re at war with the high dragons,” said Goru, the strongest warrior of the group. He was still smaller than me, and his form was a little sloppy. But they were mist dragons, so they had other talents to rely on. As we traveled, they knew spots where they could find mist seeping out of the rocks and siphon it off, absorbing it into their skin. Emiri found me calming mist, and gave it to me at night.
“The high dragons are your kin, technically, but we don’t blame you for it, Tanu. You’re one of us. The queen found you as a baby and we raised you as one of our own.”
The Kingdoms of Sky and Shadow Box Set: A Fantasy Romance Page 60
