Chapter 3

Petra

I watched her in the seeing disk Ty had given me. She had long blond hair and wore a crown of leaves and twigs upon her head, her elegant horns poking out of the fauna. Her skin was pale as milk in the moonlight, her eyes as blue as the Seren Seas, and her lips the color of a bright-red rose.

I’d hoped that somehow, after the wild magic had set upon Kingdom, Myra might have been set free of the curse. So much of Kingdom had been affected. But my hopes had been dashed the moment Ty had handed me the spelled seeing disk.

Myra gazed down into the ever pool with an empty hollowness in her sky-blue eyes, forever out of my reach, forever lost.

And yet Tymanon and I now went to find the Fates.

Again.

Again for me, but not for Ty. I’d tried going to the Fates once, what seemed like a lifetime ago, but it’d been only a year since I’d tried to free Myra. I’d not been successful. I’d gotten close, but had ultimately failed.

My heart thumped wildly in my chest. I knew I was not capable enough to challenge the Fates for an answer alone. None could enter the Isle of Gnósi without first passing the three, and the three changed at the whim of the Fates themselves. The three could be anything—questions, trials, tests, puzzles, a test of brawn or skill. Anything. I could not help hoping that maybe this time, the outcome would change.

I traced the lovely face of the trapped satyr. In the love games, I’d been able to forget about my duty to Myra. Faced with constant challenges, I’d been too busy and exhausted to do other than pass out at night’s end. But with our return to Kingdom returned the driving need to reclaim her. My obsession of the past year was back and burning like a flame inside my breast.

I traced her beautiful face, wishing with all my heart she’d look up at me, just one more time. But I was naught but a ghost to her now.

“I promise, Myra, with all my heart. I promise.”

Closing my eyes, I pocketed the disk and hung my head. Exhaustion laced my very bones, not just from the thought of Myra, but from the run. Trying to keep up with a centauress in her prime was not a task for the faint of heart.

But I would give Ty no cause for concern. I had just as much reason to go to Gnósi as she did. I did not believe it was coincidence that the one place I needed to go just so happened to be the place Galeta the Pink had tasked us to go. I’d been around Tymanon enough now to recognize a pattern when I saw one. I only wished I understood it. I was nowhere near as clever as my friend.

A shrill cry pierced the night sky.

Tymanon!

Jerking to my feet, I didn’t think. I just turned on my heel and ran, pulse pounding so furiously I tasted it on the back of my tongue. It was easy enough to follow her trail, and in minutes, I cut through a bush. The stream was navy-blue and dancing with threads of moonlight, looking like fireflies and fairies. There was a ripple of water at the very center and a dark shape floating beneath. It had to be Tymanon.

But she did not appear to be in distress, and slowly, my heart rate settled back down to normal. I should go, give her peace, stop looking.

I was rooted to the spot, unable to move, mind frozen as I watched her shadow twirl beneath the water, wondering just how deep the stream had to run for her to be so fully immersed. The heart that had just returned to a normal rhythm was again beating furiously.

She was an incredible archer, able to strike objects at what seemed an impossible distance. I’d not seen Tymanon miss yet. She’d even put Baba Yaga on her toes. I was not a shabby fighter, but I’d not been created to be one, either. Much of what I now knew, Tymanon had taught me. She was a brilliant fighter. My true strengths lay elsewhere, in places I doubted a centaur would ever learn to appreciate.

Cupping my hands around my mouth, I was ready to call out to her just to assure myself that she was well. I was beginning to feel foolish for having run here as I had. If anyone could handle herself, it was Ty.

But I still couldn’t make myself leave. So I inhaled deeply and cupped my mouth. Just as I was about to yell her name, the water parted and out rose a nymph. The words left me completely.

She was a water nymph with long, dark hair streaming like a waterfall down her perfect neck and covering the globes of her perfect breasts, giving a tantalizing hint of dusky rose-colored nipples as she inhaled. Instantly, my mouth watered for a taste of them, and sexual desire coursed through my body like a bolt of lightning, making all the fine hairs on my body stand on end. My cock grew heavy and hard. I hadn’t felt this rush of need in so long that I rocked back on my heels, almost losing my footing.

What was a water nymph doing in these waters? Why had she traveled so far from home? I wet my lips, body feeling electrified by the beautiful female’s presence.

Then eyes the color of melted amber blinked up at me, and I trembled. I knew this nymph. I’d spent many nights with her beneath the stars, talking endlessly about everything and nothing of importance. This nymph was my companion, Tymanon.

My nostrils flared. I should go, turn around, beg her forgiveness for staring upon her nudity. Nymphs enjoyed being admired, especially by my kind. Satyrs had been created for the chase, and nymphs created as our perfect heart’s desire.

My heart beat like a bloody drum in my chest as I tracked a path of water that slowly and languidly ran from the curve of her collarbone, down between the vee of her perky breasts, along the center of her flat stomach, before finally coming to rest at the patch of dark hair between her thighs.

I took in a trembling breath, clenching my hands, as the night suddenly seemed to fill with cricket song and the scent of pine needles crushed beneath my hooves.

As a satyr, it wasn’t as though I hadn’t stumbled across a nymph or thousand in my day. The outcome was always the same. She pretended to run away, going just fast enough to give me the chase my kind so craved, but keeping close enough that eventually I’d catch her, trap her, and make her mine in every sense of the word.

My cock grew even harder, my calf muscles twitched, and every instinct within me wanted to chase.

She blinked, mouth parting just slightly. A light stain of blush touched her cheeks. “Petra?”

Her sweet voice finally broke the spell, and I rocked back as if smacked. What was I doing? This was Ty, not a nymph, not a female to slake my lusts upon. This was my friend, my companion.

“I’m... I’m so... bloody hell.” Holding up my hands and shaking my head, I backed up. The heat of a blush stained my cheeks, making them feel on fire. I needed to apologize, but the words simply wouldn’t come.

She blinked, looking at me with hesitance and shock, and I hated myself. I should never have stood gaping like a fool. I should have left the moment I realized she was alright.

“Petra?” She said my name again, husky voice caressing the vowels and causing me to fight a moan.

Shaking the grossly inappropriate thought from my head, I cleared my throat. Tymanon was not a nymph. She was a centaur. She would not welcome my advances.

“Dinner,” I said, voice deep and reverberating with a thread of a growl as my brain finally decided to help me out.

She looked down at herself, a frown tugging on her lovely lips, before looking back at me. I knew she knew. Her quick mind had worked it out. Nymphs lived only to serve and be served. Convivial, but without much else in their heads, they were simple, lovely creatures that satyrs valued above all things. And right now, my centaur friend resembled one so much I was fighting against instinct and nothing more.

I expected her to chastise me, to rush from the water and strike at me with her fists, to yell. Anything. I deserved it for disrupting her privacy as I had. I swallowed hard, turning my gaze to the left of her. I needed to stop seeing her, needed to stop imagining her coming out of the water with arms open and a smile of welcome greeting on her lips. My heart banged roughly in my chest.

“All right, Petra,” she said quietly. “I’m nearly through here. What you heard was the shock of the cold, but I am well. You have no need to worry.”

My nostrils flared. She had given me an easy out, a way to salve my pride. I would not look at her again, not like that, not with lust shining in my eyes. But I would always remember. Goddess, she was beautiful. I’d only ever seen the centauress and had admired her feminine human parts, but the horsey parts hadn’t done anything at all for me.

I didn’t know a centaur could shift. Inhaling deeply as a white-hot shudder ran all the way through me, I turned swiftly on my heels and ran for camp with the desperation of humiliation.

What was happening to me? I’d never reacted this viscerally before, not even to a nymph. I’d had hundreds of nymphs, and there’d always been appreciation and lust for their feminine wiles and beauty, but I’d never felt as though my soul had wept within me when I’d seen them nude.

With shaking hands, I took the soup off the hot stone and split it into the two bowls I’d learned to carry in my pouch always since the start of the games.

I had a magicked pouch, one Tymanon had given me after I’d casually said how much I’d admired hers. The pouch was able to carry anything and everything I wanted within. No matter the dimension or weight of it, anything could fit. It was a brilliant piece of magic and one I thought no self-respecting centaur would ever carry upon their person. Their abhorrence of all things magic was well known far and wide. But I’d learned quickly that Tymanon was far different than most of her kind.

Staring into the crackling flames, I told myself not to remember, not to think about the voluptuous curves of her hips and rear, the trimness of her waist. My cock grew harder, and I knew she’d see it when she returned, knew she’d know why I was so bloody hard.

It was because I was a satyr, and I’d just seen nude female flesh. It was biology, nothing more, just the reaction any satyr male would have when confronted with the nubile beauty of a nymph. I’d seen Ty’s breasts many times before when she had cleaned her leathers. But it had never created this kind of explosive reaction within me. My mind had not erupted with lusty images of her and I intertwined, of touching her in places I’d never touched before, of her touching me, of her screaming out my name as I worshipped her throughout the night.

Because Tymanon hadn’t been a nymph, I’d never viewed her as anything other than my temporary companion. I hadn’t known what to expect when we’d first met, certainly not the friendship that we developed, the trust, the easy relationship that’d been built between us. There’d been times in the games when I’d sought her out, not out of boredom, but because I’d genuinely wanted to be with her and only her. Through our long days and nights together, I’d grown close to my companion.

I enjoyed Tymanon’s mind more than I’d expected to, enjoyed her quick wit and the way she thought so deeply about the world around her. Conversations of the philosophical nature didn’t tend to happen much with my normal companions. Satyrs and nymphs tended to obsess over lust, sex, and desire.

It’d been a novel experience to be with Tymanon in the games and see her for something other than her beauty. In fact, I’d rarely seen that at all. It wasn’t that I was blind. Her upper half was lovely, slim of waist and full of breast. Her face was pleasing, not as striking as a nymph’s, but of course, whose was? Nymphs were created to be the feminine ideal of beauty. There was nothing in all of Kingdom as beautiful as they were. That they had vacuous, pretty heads never bothered me much, until a year ago, when my entire world had changed and I stopped being the frivolous, selfish satyr I’d always been.

I met Tymanon, and I suddenly saw women as something other than a body to slake my thirst on. I still remembered the first time I truly heard her laugh, not in a sexual, teasing way, but with pure, unfettered joy. I was mesmerized by the rich sound of it, oddly enthralled by her, and desirous to hear that sound often. It had become my goal in the games to hear it at least once a day, and I’d gotten pretty good at teasing it out of her.

I loved the way she spoke about the world, the rich depths of her intelligent mind. I became obsessed with plumbing its depth. It seemed, no matter what I asked of her, Tymanon almost always had the answer. And if she didn’t, she’d find it.

When I first met Ty, I brushed her off as being just a centaur and hadn’t expected us to get along very well. But over time, I noticed she was far from the typical female of her kind. There was a kindness to her that seemed lacking in others of her race, and she was thoughtful too. She often went out of her way to find me fruits and vegetables to go along with the meats she preferred to eat. She was also brave. I’d seen her in action inside the games. The accuracy of her arrows was astonishing.

Tymanon was nothing like the females I associated with. Then one day, I blinked and realized just how pretty she was. Where I hadn’t noticed it before, suddenly it was the only thing I saw. Her features were comely and pleasing to look upon. She had strong teeth, just shy of being fully equine. They were large, but fit her face. There was nothing all that delicate about her. Her nose was sharp, her chin slightly pointy. But her lips were soft, and her eyes were large, the color mesmerizingly amber, so clear a brown that I often found myself staring deeply at them as she spoke.

The entire package together was surprisingly alluring in its own way. I imagined any centaur male would feel pride calling her his mate. A frown tugged at my lips at that thought.

Centaurs and satyrs, the mix of the two was laughable at best. There was nothing about her lower half I found attractive, and I knew she’d say the same for mine if she ever saw it. I swallowed hard, rubbing the muscles of my stomach as I thought about the legs I’d seen her wearing tonight.

Human legs.

She’d been partially submerged, but I’d seen her thighs. The muscle was lean, supple, and smooth. Her skin was a burnished shade of bronze. When we’d been kicked out of the games, I’d thought my mounting attraction to Ty would wane, that I’d get around other females and lose interest, that what I had been feeling was nothing more than a result of being locked away together, and that she’d been the only female afforded me.

But all this week, I’d seen comely females aplenty and hadn’t had even a passing fancy for any of them. My thoughts had still been only for Ty.

Grunting, I shifted on my seat. My cock was still hard, too hard. I needed to think of something else, anything else.

Light blue eyes came immediately to mind, and the shrill, piercing cry I’d heard echoed on the breeze when Myra had been locked away, our bond splintered, nearly obliterated, and feeling like I might die of it. I thought of the way my heart beat, skipping and pausing, making me hurt so badly I rolled off the bed on which I’d been pleasuring yet another nameless nymph.

Myra’s cries still echoed through my head. I could have thought of nothing else that would have so quickly shunted the blood from my cock. I was flagging in seconds.

A twig snapped to my right. My jaw clenched. The scent of Ty’s familiar honeysuckle perfume hovered like a cloud before me. I twirled on my seat, looking over at her. She was back in centaur form, head held high but not looking at me.

I hadn’t tumbled with a nymph in a little over a year now. In fact, I hadn’t felt the slightest twinge of desire in all that time, not until tonight. Shame and anger were competing emotions within me.

“Ty—” I said with a voice still sounding like gravel.

But she shook her head and held up her hand. “I was nude. You saw me.”

My nostrils flared. I wanted badly to lie, to tell her I hadn’t seen much, that it’d been too dark for me to make her out. I wet my lips. “I did. I am sorry.”

“Why?” She walked around me, planting her hands on her hips.

The leather bindings were around her breasts again, but I recalled their dusky-rose hue with perfect clarity. I looked down at her horse’s legs, strong yet slender and delicate, the hair smoothed down as though she’d brushed herself.

Her fur wasn’t long and shaggy like mine. I must look a beast to her. My lips pursed because until just now, that thought had never once crossed my mind.

“Why, what?” I asked, maybe a bit too sharply than I intended.

But she didn’t flinch. Tymanon met my hard gaze with a centaur’s curiosity. She was always learning, always wanting to know more.

I’d often thought her kind aloof, pedantic, boorish. It was like her people had lost the art of laughter. They rarely did it, or at least not in public. They were scholars and warriors, and that’d been the extent of what I’d really known of her breed.

But I’d been a month in Ty’s company, and I’d begun to see that I’d known next to nothing.

“Why do you apologize, male? Was I not beautiful to you?”

I rocked back in my seat, blinking with shock. She did that to me sometimes, asked me questions that I wasn’t prepared to answer.

If she were anyone else, I might believe she was fishing for a compliment. But that wasn’t Tymanon at all. She was a confident woman who didn’t seem to care one way or another about her looks.

So I decided to be honest.

“Yes, Ty, you are very beautiful.”

Most women would get coquettish and simper or laugh. She did neither.

“I often find myself studying your eyes,” she said.

“My eyes?” I wrinkled my nose. I told her she was beautiful and she mentioned my eyes. I almost laughed.

“They too are beautiful.” The way she said it, she could have been talking about anything—the weather, flowers, dirt. She said it as a simple statement of fact and nothing more. I cocked an eyebrow, hating the sudden feeling slinking through my gut.

I would not name it, and not because I’d never felt it before. I had. But I did not like it. Satyrs were a good-time people. We did not mate for life, and we thought rather low of those who did. Life was meant to be enjoyed, and variety was the spice of it.

She flicked her gaze toward the ground. Without thought, I reached into my pouch and pulled out the rolled up mat of woven grasses I’d made for her back in the games. Luckily, when we’d been tossed out, it’d been daytime and I’d managed to secure most of our belongings from the night previous.

A happy smile touched the corners of her full lips. “My rug.”

A nest of butterflies suddenly exploded inside my gut, writhing and flapping their steely, razor-tipped wings all over the place. Gods above. This was Tymanon. A centaur. A bloody centaur.

And yet when she reached for the rug and our fingers touched, I felt burned.

I yanked my hand back and she frowned.

We looked at one another a few minutes longer before finally she unrolled her mat and gingerly sat in the way of her kind, hind legs going down first before gracefully lowering herself the rest of the way.

But rather than tucking all her legs beneath her, she kept one of her front legs extended out. The pose looked relaxed and oddly... pretty.

My brows gathered. Bloody. Hell.

Ty reached for a bowl of soup. “Thank you for cooking this,” she said, tipping her chin at me, and I nodded.

I was filthy and had wanted to eat after a bath, but I was reluctant to leave my spot. So I picked up my bowl and drank.

I would not eat the meat, though I would drink its broth. Tymanon insisted I eat meat, and though I’d never done it before in my life, I could not deny that the protein did actually increase my strength.

Once I’d finished, I passed her my leftovers. She’d need the meat more than I. We’d gotten into the habit of sharing meals for the past month, and I saw no reason for it to stop now. With a soft smile, she took it, lifted out the chunks of rabbit, and dropped them into her bowl.

Tymanon ate the way she fought—with purpose. There was nothing shy or timid about her. She didn’t care if she slurped while she ate. She’d even belched now and then.

I’d thought it repellent first time I’d heard her do it. Nymphs ate like ladies, if they bothered to eat in front of me at all. Taking tiny little nibbles and always pushing their plates away with piles of food still on them, as though it were a shameful thing to be caught eating before a male.

At some point I’d simply stopped caring with Tymanon. Like I always had, I watched as she ate, watched as her strong jaw chewed, as she swallowed. I watched the way her chest inhaled and exhaled, and the way her face glowed with pleasure when she ate.

Tymanon loved her food.

Full lips wrapped around the first truffle—I’d given them all to her—and a throaty moan tumbled through her throat as she sucked it in. Her eyes closed, and she chewed with a look of sublime rapture on her face. The only time I’d ever seen that sort of look was when a nymph had her mouth full of me. I’d never tell Ty that she was positively lewd when she ate, but maybe that was why I liked watching her so much.

My blood stirred like the angry buzzing of a disturbed hornet’s nest, and my pulse thundered in my ears.

“Gods above, Petra,” she sighed soon after swallowing. “Truffles. I do believe you might be my favorite person in the world right now.”

I chuckled, weirdly satisfied to hear her say it, though I knew they were nonsense words. Nymphs had often told me the same after gifting them their fourth, fifth, and sixth orgasm of the night. But I’d never felt the deep-seated warmth of those words as I did now.

Scooping out the rest of them with her finger, Ty continued to chew and moan and sigh, and soon my cock had thickened to the point of pain. Gods above, to go from feeling nothing at all for over a year to feeling as though I might burst? I should have been happier about it.

But I wasn’t.

My thoughts were a jumbled mess of Myra and confusion over my feelings toward Tymanon. Ty was savoring her food, and it was torture for me. I thought the meal rather boring, myself. I’d made far better before, but for an audience who’d neither cared nor eaten much of it.

Burping softly, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand before patting her slightly distended belly.

“Gods, I ate like a—”

“Horse?” I offered with a cheeky grin.

She only rolled her eyes. “I was going to say a pig, but all things considered...” She shrugged, and I found myself laughing.

Being with Ty was so bloody easy. I didn’t have to be a sexual Casanova, didn’t have to chase her, didn’t have to be on all the time. I could simply be me. It was scary how much I liked it.

“So,” she said as she reached into her pouch and pulled out a polished tortoise-shell hair comb.

My insides quivered. I always enjoyed watching her brush her long, silky hair. My eyes drank her in as she performed the first stroke of the night.

“Tell me, Petra. What is bothering you?”

Lulled into a trance-like state as I watched her, I didn’t realize she’d spoken until she cleared her throat and repeated herself.

“What?” I blinked. “Oh, bothering me?”

Amber eyes stared at me with patient expectation.

I pinched my lips together. “I’m thinking about our trip.”

True enough.

“Aye, I’m sure you are.”

Fifty strokes on the one side. With a deft flick of her dainty wrist, she moved to the other side and began the process anew. Each time she brushed, I caught sight of the two small freckles on the side of her long neck that’d always seemed to me to be a set of crudely drawn hearts.

“But there’s more to it than that. You’ve not stopped staring at that seeing disk ever since I gave it to you.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Have you been spying on me, Ty?”

A ghost of a smile pulled at her mouth.

“I have no need to spy on you, gída, not with the way you moon over it constantly.”

I’d not been very happy when, upon first meeting, Tymanon had called me gída. It meant goat in the ancient tongue. Comparing me to a goat was the same as comparing her to a horse, and yet she’d done it with a hint of a smile upon her rosebud lips and, well... I’d not minded it coming from her.

“I do not moon.” Suddenly, I was back to thinking of Myra and scowling down at my hooves.

“My friend,” she said softly, “I do not wish to wound you. Your troubles, whatever they are, are yours. I merely wish to show you I am a friend, if you find yourself in need of one.”

With one final flick, she finished her grooming, and I found myself grumpy about it. Heart feeling heavy, stomach twisted with nerves, and soul weary, I stood to my feet. Myra was my problem. I’d wanted to use Tymanon’s cleverness to see me through the three, but I couldn’t do that to her. My problems were my own, and not anything I could or should burden her with. Somehow I’d figure out a way to help her save Kingdom and maybe, hopefully, work through the puzzle of my own personal war.

“I thank you. I should go bathe.”

A shadow crossed her gaze, and for just a moment, I thought she was disappointed, but I knew that could not be. Tymanon and I were temporary companions, nothing more. Once we’d accomplished whatever it was that we’d been tasked with doing, we’d go our separate ways, me to my forest full of nymphs and worldly pleasures, and her to her books and scholarly centaur males who’d ram their large pricks into her and make her scream out in glory.

Snapping to my feet, I turned on my hooves and marched off, refusing to look back.