Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) (45 page)

Catelyn now waited alone in the apartment of Ortis, eating
up as much of Ortis’ stores as she could stomach, rinsing her
clothing and bathing with water that Ortis had brought up from a
well nearby, a pleasant surprise, and packing her gear and
clothing, along with a substantial amount of the reserve food
stores in her pack for the trip to Belkyn.

After she had packed everything that she would need for
the trip, she spent some of her remaining time studying Ortis’
apartment in detail, going from room to room, hoping to discover
some small piece of his personality in the decor or furnishings. But
every piece of furniture was as bland as the Empire’s decrees had
specified they be. In fact if there was a quality to the apartment,
Catelyn would say that it was the very definition of Uriel’s desire to
keep order through monotony.

Nothing stood out, and nothing was out of place. It was
perfect in its homogeny. Precisely the way that the Emperor
wanted.

Catelyn strolled through the apartment, rearranging the
furniture so that it was no longer perfectly ordered, leaving
drawers and cupboards open, tables and chairs askew or laid down
onto their sides. She imagined Ortis’ protests at finding his
apartment in such disorder, but then she soberly realized that
none of them may survive to see this place of refuge again, and her
minor rebellion would not matter a whit.

Finally, she came to Ortis’ room. In the few days they had
been hiding there, she had never come all the way into Ortis’
quarters, and she felt her curiosity tickling at her mind. She
decided that if they were all going to die, there would be no harm
in exploring a little. As she walked into Ortis’ rooms, she came
across something from the Before, an impressive example of
something that she had not seen since she was a child, and the
sight of it took her breath away. Ortis had, in one corner of his
room, a full length mirror held in an ornate wooden frame. It was a
masterful piece of art, and stood out among the rest of the bland
furnishings.

Catelyn ran up to the mirror, marveling as she saw her
own reflection running towards her, and then stop mere finger
widths away. The mirrors she had seen as a child had all been
small, no bigger than her hand, and were usually dirty and
cracked. This mirror was flawless and polished, and her mirror self
was rendered with perfect clarity. She reached out with a hand,
and felt her heart race as her mirror counterpart did the same, but
with its opposite hand. She smiled, and her mirror self smiled
back, showing her mostly straight, but dingy, teeth and Catelyn
stuck out her tongue, then laughed at the sight of her mirror self
doing the same.

The last time that Catelyn had seen her reflection, she had
been just a girl, with no hair and stick straight arms and legs
looking at herself in a puddle of rainwater. The young woman who
looked back at her now was almost unrecognizable to her.

She looked closely at her face, and marveled at who was
looking back at her.
Her red hair, which she normally kept trimmed to her
jawline was long now, hanging to shoulder length, and unkempt
and tangled. She hadn’t been able to brush it since before all of the
events of the past several spans, and it showed. Not that it had
been particularly neat before, when she had been blind. She hadn’t
packed the makeshift comb she had fashioned from an old metal
vent plate. She ran her fingers through it, trying to untangle the
worst of it as she continued to study the rest of her face.
Her forehead and cheeks were smooth, but she could
make out the faintest hint of undulating rings of pale skin,
radiating outward from around her eyes, and encircling her upper
face like a mask. To Catelyn’s shock, not a trace of the scar tissue
from the damage that had been done remained, just these ghostly
lines across her face; a reminder of what had been done to her as a
child. She moved her fingers from the task of untangling her hair
and ran them along the skin of her face. It was smooth to the
touch, and reminded her of that of a newborn, which she had
touched once during one of the many outings her family had
attended with the other chosen parents, when she herself had been
a child.
Her eyes were green, but where they had been quite an
ordinary shade of dull green before, at least as far as she
remembered them, they were now radiant, catching and
amplifying the light in ways that she could only describe as
abnormal. Silena had said that her eyes glowed when they had
been out in the dim pre-dawn light. Catelyn stepped over to the
lantern in Ortis’ room, and closed the shutters, making the room
darker. Even from where she stood, far away from the mirror, she
could see her reflected eyes indeed caught the dim light in the
room and glowed in the gloom. Catelyn also noted that her vision
in the darkened room was as good as it had been when the lantern
shutters had been open. It seemed to confirm her suspicions that
whatever had restored her sight and repaired the damage to her
face and eyes had also changed her.
She opened the shutters on the lamp and her eyes
returned to normal, or normal for how she was now, shining like
gems. She approached the mirror again, and as she did, she
watched how she walked, placing her weight on the balls of her
feet and the swaying of her hips and the bounce of her breasts
under her clothing. Seeing how her body had developed, a thought
came to Catelyn which caused her to blush and look around her,
even though she knew that she was alone in the apartment.
She stood a pace away from the mirror, looking at her
body, so different from the child’s body she remembered. The
thought which had occurred to her earlier blossomed into a deep
curiosity, and she reached her arms up and pulled her shirt up
and over her head. Her pale skin was as she remembered, but
everything else was different. Her sojourns of training had given
her definition in her arms and shoulders, and they were broader
than she remembered, yet still feminine. She looked at her breasts,
and cupped them in her hands, feeling their weight and the
softness of the tissue. As she felt the, she let herself imagine
Duncan’s hands on them, and her breath caught in her throat. She
felt a flushing in her body that she had never experienced before.
She wanted to stop herself, but her nipples responded to
the thoughts now coursing through her mind, and stiffened. She
ran her fingers over her breasts, and when she touched her
nipples, pleasure radiated through her body in a number of places.
Her eyes half closed now, she imagined Duncan’s lips on her
breasts, and she felt a tingling in her lower body, between her legs.
Catelyn felt her cheeks flush in embarrassment at the
realization of what she was doing, but she didn’t stop.
Her parents, especially her mother, had talked to her
about what she was experiencing in her body right now and how
she had changed from a young girl into a young woman. She had
experienced this fleeting curiosity about her body before, but after
she had lost her sight, her only priority had been survival. Not
once in the sojourns since her life had been so radically altered by
the bloodfire had she had the desire or the opportunity to explore
her body this way. She had constructed fantasies in her mind
which made her feel good, but those thoughts had never led to her
touching herself this way.
She opened her eyes and saw a young woman staring back
at her, one hand moving across her chest, which was flushed now,
her breasts swelling with desire. Her other hand she moved down,
and undid the drawstring of her pants. They fell to her ankles, and
she stepped out of them, to stand naked before the mirror. She
took note of her hips, and how much wider they were. When she
had last seen her body, it was slender and straight, and now she
had the budding curves of a woman, even if she was still skinny.
These last few days in Ortis’ refuge, eating what she could from his
stores, had enabled her to gain some of that weight back which
she’d lost while being imprisoned by the Emperor.
She focused now on the small tuft of dark red hair between
her legs, and as she did, she again felt and saw her cheeks flush at
the thoughts that were taking over her mind. She welcomed them,
but at the same time she felt a sense of shame, which she couldn’t
fully explain. She knew that having thoughts about sex was
normal, and her mother had talked to her about the many different
types of things people did with one another for pleasure. But this
was the first time in Catelyn’s life, that such ideas reached out
beyond just being concepts in her head, and were they taking hold
of her in a real way.
She had felt the flesh of her sex many times before when
she bathed of course, but it had never given her pleasure and she
had never experienced anything like she was feeling now.
She approached the mirror closer, until she was standing
just in front of it, and tilted the top edge of the mirror back slightly
so she could see herself looking down into it. She spread her legs
just enough to examine herself, something else that she had never
done before.
The hair between her legs was short and slightly curled,
and beneath, she could make out the fleshy parts of her sex. It
looked and felt both familiar and alien to her.
The thoughts in her head now turned to Duncan, and how
it had felt to have his hands on her arms, and she reached down
and explored herself with her right hand. She parted the sensitive
folds of her outer lips and looked at the inner surfaces of her sex,
and saw the glistening wetness there. She closed her eyes in
pleasure as her fingers explored herself in ways that sent shivers
from the base of her neck all the way down her body to the tips of
her toes, and she reached out and clutched the mirror with her
other hand to steady herself.
Her breathing grew faster and heavier as she moved her
fingers, back and forth, tracing the most sensitive parts of her sex,
her thoughts racing through scenarios with Duncan holding her,
caressing her, kissing her body, filling her with his manhood, and
then as she imagined the last of these thoughts, she experienced a
sensation unlike anything she had ever felt before. The feeling
swept up and over her like an intense wave, and she couldn’t think
and her breath came out in gasping moans, and her pleasure
peaked so much that she lost control and dropped to her knees,
pressing her face to the floor and flexing her feet and toes
involuntarily.
The waves of pleasure were like a radiant flower of light
blossoming in her mind pulsing over and over, and she felt warm,
and safe, and it enveloped her for whispers. Gradually, the waves
ebbed and her breath returned and her muscles relaxed. When she
felt calm again, she stood and looked at her naked body in the
mirror, a light sheen of sweat visible on her chest and legs. She
raised a hand and tilted the mirror back, and then padded over to
her clothing and redressed herself.
Her mother had explained how sex could lead to this kind
of climax, as she had called it, but Catelyn realized how inadequate
words were at describing the sensation. She felt herself blush
again, this time at the thought of what she had just done, and she
smiled, and whistled a tune to herself as she left the room of Ortis
and returned to the room where her pack was, and spent the rest
of her time thinking.
She thought of her life up to this point, the people she’d
met and loved, the things she had seen in her youth, and later had
done alone without her eyesight. And she thought ahead to what
awaited her in Belkyn, and eventually what might lay beyond the
Wall, as she waited for nightfall.

Catelyn cinched the pack on her back tighter, pulling it
taut and shifting it so that the bulk of the weight of it sat above her
hips. A part of her was still tingling from earlier, and she let a
slight smile play upon her mouth at the memory. Looking back on
it, she didn’t really know what had taken over her, but it had been
wonderful. She had never imagined that she could ever feel that
good, or be so swept away by something so powerful. Her sole
experience with anything even remotely like that had been serious
conversations about the topic with her mother, who wanted to
prepare her daughter for the inevitable reality of human coupling.
Because of her mother’s own experiences with the men of the
Imperial army, there was almost always a sense of cool
detachment when she talked about the subject. The exception was
when she talked about how it was different between her and
Catelyn’s father Tomas, but she chose not to explain how, only that
it mattered more when you really cared for the person.

Catelyn began to understand exactly what that meant. She
didn’t have any such deeper feelings for Duncan specifically; she
hardly knew him and she was aware that her reaction to his
holding her was purely physical. But in that moment, it had been
easy to imagine how it might feel to be more emotionally
connected to someone in that way.

She chided herself for being so distracted, and refocused
her attention on the task at hand. She was twelve blocks away from
Ortis’ apartment, which she had left as soon as the sun had set,
climbing to the roof with her pack slung to her back. She had been
making her way along the dusty rooftops for the better part of
three prayers, and she still had many more to go.

Catelyn stood and angled herself sideways to make her
way down the sloped roof she had come to rest on, her feet already
blackened from the tarred roof tiles. One thing that she had been
mildly unprepared for as a result of regaining her sight had been
seeing just how dirty her feet got as she maneuvered along the
rooftops.

Growing up barefoot, she was no stranger to dirt on her
feet, but the thick blackness of the materials that she trod through
routinely honestly took her by surprise. She would need to find a
wash basin when they got through the Belkyn Channel to the
warehouse where they would stay for a few days while they scouted
the situation inside the city.