Chapter 12
Gwen’s eyes looked as big as chestnuts. “It’s ours?”
Elain surveyed the warm interior of the chapel, outfitted with a few extra touches to make it feel more welcoming: an extra oil lamp, a linen cloth for the small table, and a second stool. “It is.”
“But what about Palahmed? Where will he sleep?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters!”
Elain shrugged. “He’s going to try his luck at the brothel.”
“The brothel costs coin.”
“Then he’ll sleep in the hall. Gwen.” She stepped close and pulled Gwen to her. “Caron gave it to us.”
Gwen looked about, guilt and happiness warring on her features. “It would be awfully nice.”
“And you’ve seemed tired lately. Sleep will be more peaceful here.”
At that, Gwen glanced up at her slyly. “You think so, do you?”
“Won’t it?” she asked, playing along, even as her cock responded to the glint in Gwen’s eyes.
In response, Gwen unfastened her belt and let it drop.
Just a few quickened breaths found them in the bed, skin to skin.
“Mmm,” Gwen said after drawing a deep breath. “Smells nice.”
“Palahmed helped me scavenge fresh ticking. Had to borrow hay and wool from the winter stores.”
Gwen grinned. “Borrow?”
“Liberate.”
“What a collaborator in seduction your friend is.”
“He’s supremely sentimental, and he’ll never admit it.”
“Well, then, I’ll keep his secret. For now.” Her hand skimmed down Elain’s hip. “I’m far too occupied to make trouble for Palahmed.”
Indeed. Elain rolled on top and, supporting her weight on her hands and knees, dipped her head to nuzzle Gwen’s neck. Gwen shifted under her, arching her back. Her breasts rocked with her movements, heavy and enticing, and Elain took one in hand, kissing its plushness. Using her tongue, she drew rings all around it until Gwen slipped urgent fingers into her hair.
Elain fell hungrily onto a nipple, drawing it into her mouth with more force than she intended. Gwen corrected her wordlessly, tightening the grip in her hair until she eased up. Elain gave her breast an apologetic kiss and crossed to her other one, treating it more gently.
As she suckled, Gwen’s legs brushed up and over her hips. She writhed, moaning softly, and Elain lifted her head just to see the lamplight shine on her pale hair. Curling her tongue along Gwen’s lower lip, she asked a silent question. Gwen answered with a sigh, and then they were kissing, Gwen tasting faintly of peppermint.
“Roll over.”
When Elain lay on her back, Gwen bent and lavished her nipple with lips and tongue. The little flicks made her want to wriggle away, but then Gwen was kissing down her breastbone, down to her navel, and down…
She raised her head. “May I?”
Elain didn’t know precisely what Gwen was asking permission to do, but she had a fair notion, and yes, yes, she wanted that very much, yes—
Gwen laughed softly at her incoherent response. Wrapping gentle fingers around Elain’s cock, she smoothed her cheek up the shaft. “Soft.” Kissed it with plump lips. Ran her tongue from the base to the tip, where she licked in a tight swirl. She tasted her lips. “What would you like?”
Elain guided her hand to stroke. “And your mouth. As much as you want.”
“I want everything.”
Gods, and she could have it. This chapel, this bed, Elain’s body—and all the ways they could think to combine those elements.
Gwen took one more long lick and then sucked Elain into her mouth.
It was hot and snug and perfect, though she couldn’t have articulated it so clearly, so tangled were her faculties. Gripped by the slick heat of Gwen’s mouth, it was all she could do not to pump and thrust like a hare chased by a fox. She clutched the bedding to hold herself still while Gwen explored, but Gwen was a quick study and discovered Elain’s stones were particularly sensitive. Stroking them with her knuckles, she watched the effect on Elain, which was an almost pained moan.
“So beautiful,” Gwen said, then took her down again.
Beautiful. No one had ever called her that. Not one person. Not Palahmed in his most gregarious moments nor Bedwyr on their wedding day. Granted, they were men and too stupid to be borne sometimes, and her wedding day had been as much a pretense as the silly performance the whores put on every year to stave off late-winter restlessness. But it might have been nice to hear it once.
She wasn’t self-conscious about her body. Bodies came in all sorts, as many sorts as there were people in the world. When she’d run away from home, she’d been able to do so because she’d been certain of two things: that she was a woman, and that someday she would discover exactly how her body would serve her in that capacity. In the years since, she’d found a few answers. This body had kept her alive. It had enabled her to do the varied work Caron had set her to doing. It had been the impetus for her bargain with Uthyr, and as desperate as she must have been to come to that agreement—made with a warlord whose ruthless reputation was well-known, for the benefit of his son, of whom she’d known almost nothing—it had brought her to Gwen.
Who looked up at her now and drew off with a sound like a kiss. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m only thinking how good you make me feel.”
Gwen smiled and gave her hip a light slap. “Well, stop thinking and start making some noise, will you? What’s the good of this hideaway if we can’t rattle the rafters a bit?”
Then she lowered her head, and Elain slipped her fingers into her hair, and Gwen sucked and stroked until the peaceful little chapel on its island in the mist proved quite a raucous place after all.
~ ~ ~
When Gwen met Morien at the stables, she was fairly bouncing.
Today would be her first visit to Lord Ban of her own volition, and it made her feel expansive. She was directing her own destiny, and though it had come about as a happy result of delivering Rhys’s message, she could return to Ban—be useful to him—thanks to her own skills in reading and writing.
She supposed this was what life must be like for someone who practiced a trade. It felt good to have a useful skill and even better when someone wanted to employ it. Life as a warlord’s daughter had had its benefits, no doubt, but this was something else altogether.
This was freedom.
If she hadn’t shared with Elain precisely how she was occupying herself… Well, that was something she felt too good to examine just now. Even her nausea had abated somewhat. She plucked a peppermint leaf from her belt to head it off.
“You’re very cheerful,” Morien said as he helped her mount her horse.
“Life is wonderful, Morien.”
“Life is cold.” He gestured to the snow that had fallen overnight and the slushy churn in the stable yard. To the leaden clouds threatening more.
She supposed it could seem bleak, if one didn’t have so many good things happening to them. For them. By them. “We’ll just have to pick up our pace, then, and warm up a bit.”
Morien resisted her every attempt to provoke him into racing, citing treacherous conditions that were really only muddy, at worst. His punishment for reining in her enthusiasm was getting his ears talked off for the several miles of their journey. By the time they were dismounting in the yard before Lord Ban’s hall, though, she had him chuckling in his deep, sweet way, and he’d admitted one couldn’t fully appreciate the warmest months without enduring the coldest.
Lord Ban’s chambers were plenty warm. Downright stuffy, and she slyly looked for a way to bring some fresh air into them. The best she could do was to prop open the curtains in the doorway.
“It’s drafty,” he said loudly and grumpily.
“It’s refreshing,” she replied and waited for him to counter her.
But he only waved her closer. “I know,” he murmured. “I prefer them open. My steward is a pain in the arse about keeping them shut.”
She grinned. “Our secret, eh?”
He shrugged. “’Til he comes back to make our lives miserable.”
Misery did indeed return in the form of the steward. Carrying two crates himself and trailed by two household boys with one box apiece, he left the chamber heaped with scrolls of vellum and parchment… and closed the curtains.
Gwen stepped lightly to them and listened. As soon as she heard his voice receding, she opened them again.
“Ha!” Lord Ban said, cackling. “An accomplice.”
She crossed to the crates. “All of this is unread?”
“And unanswered.”
“I’m surprised that steward hasn’t insisted on reading them to you.”
“He deals in trade markings only, and figures—just enough to keep the household supplied. Latin would confound the poor fellow.”
“Well, then, let’s begin, shall we?”
Ban sighed. “And so the accomplice turns taskmaster.”
She spent the day sorting the missives into rough date order. The steward came and went several times, fussing around Lord Ban and clucking at the piles Gwen had made on the chamber’s broad oak desk. The third time he closed the curtains behind him, Gwen gave up. The room had freshened considerably, anyway.
When she found the appropriate stack for the final letter, she set the crates along the wall. “There.”
“I’m exhausted,” said Lord Ban from his nest of cushions and blankets.
“You didn’t do anything,” she said, feeling frisky.
He scowled at her. “The cheek.”
“I think we should respond to at least one letter today, just so we can say we made a start.”
“Sounds tiring.”
“You can make your steward deliver it.”
Lord Ban snapped his fingers. “Ink’s in that cupboard. Quill and vellum in the desk.”
In fact, she cajoled him into answering five letters. She had to promise an additional visit for each one.
“You know,” she teased, “arithmetic tells us the ratio of letters to visits isn’t going to hold up.”
“Ah, but I’m ahead of you.” He paused to cough. “I’ll start getting responses, and then there will be more letters.”
“Clever.”
He tapped his temple. Then he broke into another bout of coughing, and her chest ached for him. The steward returned and all but shoved her bodily from the chamber, but not before she confirmed she’d be back the next day.
She visited Ban every day for a week, and for several hours each day, she read letters and inscribed the responses he dictated from his bed. He seemed to enjoy her presence, though she wondered if she was only a distraction from the rote of his days and nights, or the grimace-inducing remedy the steward pushed on him at least twice a day.
It couldn’t be an easy thing to be bed-bound for someone who had once led warriors into battle. He wasn’t ancient by any stretch, probably about her father’s age, or Rhys’s, and he looked as though he’d been a strong man before his illness. His flesh had shrunken a bit, but the underlying bone belied a large frame. She guessed he wasn’t as tall as Arthur, but not many men were.
Toward the end of a week, the number of remaining letters had dwindled enough that she began to draw out the minutes between the reading and the answering of them. She suspected Ban was doing the same.
“Would you mind taking the warmer to the kitchens for a fresh fill?”
Smiling, she withdrew the pig’s bladder from beneath the blankets. “Certainly.”
She’d taken over several errands like this. For one thing, it reduced the need for the steward to bother Ban so much. For another, though, she just enjoyed helping. Elain had her own work, rehabilitating Palahmed. It just felt good to do something. To have her own days, she supposed.
The cook finished pouring steaming water into the bladder. She tied it off, laced up its leather pouch again, and handed it back. “You surviving in there?”
“Just,” Gwen said, smiling.
“Well, I hope you can keep up your visits, mistress. His spirit’s improved immensely.”
She hummed on her way back to Ban’s bedchamber. She found him somewhat more subdued than when she’d left for the kitchens, and after she’d slipped the bed warmer back under his blankets, she commented on it.
“I was only thinking.”
“Not indulging in sentiment, were you?”
“Perhaps.” He gave her a considering look. “Do you know… I approached your father years ago about you.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed. “My lord?”
“I had hoped to make a marriage between you and my son.”
“Oh. Ta never told me.”
“Didn’t need to. Galahad’s gone.”
He’d been Ban’s only heir. That much had reached her, though she didn’t remember her father saying much more about it. “I’m sorry, my lord.”
“Not as sorry as I, my girl.” Drawing a breath, he visibly pulled himself out of his maudlin mood. “I’m not surprised Uthyr didn’t tell you. He came to Rhys’s at the end of every campaign season, and I’d estimate he received no fewer than fifty proposals for your hand each time.”
“Fifty!”
“He’s a proud father, Uthyr. Anyway, I doubt my feeble efforts were memorable. And I suspect he meant to bind you to young Arthur all along. Is he good to you?”
“Arthur? We’ve scarcely lived as husband and wife.” One evening in the village and a few on the trail to Rhys’s, in fact. “But we’ve been friends for a long time. Most of our lives.”
“Well, there you have it. The best basis for a marriage, if you ask me. I met my Ella when we were both still tadpoles playing in the river. It was a good match.”
Gwen and Morien rode back under a rosy, dusk-bound sky.
“Was it a good visit?”
“It was. It has been, all week.”
“Why do you go?”
She looked at him in surprise, and he shrugged.
“You’re Uthyr’s daughter. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
She snorted. “That’s not true. But I suppose I feel compelled to help him. Lord Ban, I mean.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m able, and I like to be useful. Warlord’s daughter or no,” she added pointedly.
But his question lingered in her mind for the rest of their ride home, because it was one she had privately been trying to ignore: how was it she felt a duty toward Lord Ban, when she’d run from all of her responsibilities at home? From her father, who’d apparently fielded dozens of marriage proposals on her behalf and turned them all down to marry her to Arthur. She knew in her gut he’d done it partly to keep Arthur close. But now she wondered if Bed had been partly right, too, when he’d said Uthyr had chosen Arthur for her because they’d already been friends. Did she owe her father for more than she’d believed?
She pushed the thought aside. It would be moot until spring, at least. For now, she was beholden to Rhys and Caron for hosting her, to Morien for keeping her company, and to Ban for employing her.
But mostly to the woman waiting for her at ride’s end. She hadn’t wanted to tell Elain at first what it was she was doing every day. She wasn’t certain why, except she got the impression Elain might think the work took her too far away. Too far from Rhys’s, from the chapel, from Elain herself. She didn’t know why that suspicion had nagged at her; Elain had been nothing but accommodating, and in the truest sense, what with presenting her with the chapel and all. In one way or another, Elain had provided Gwen everything she’d needed since they’d left the mountains.
Perhaps that was why she hadn’t told her about helping Lord Ban. She’d gotten a taste of making her own way over the past week, and she liked it.
Well, then, surely Elain would like it too.
“Race you.”
“Absolutely not,” Morien said.
She smiled and set her gaze toward home.