Bookworm (32 page)

...And yet, it wasn’t really like her, was it?

The thought bothered her as she looked up and saw Bee smiling back at her. He seemed to be glowing with light, no longer even remotely a stranger. Of course he wasn’t, Elaine told herself; he’d just been inside her. There was no point in moving to conceal the gap between her legs, not any longer. Or in getting dressed...

But did he really love her? And did she love him?

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“But I’m a virgin!”

Daria broke down into giggles. “I hate to break it to you,” she said, “but you’re not, not any longer. I can
smell
him on you.”

Elaine flushed. She hurt, just a little, between her legs. The knowledge within her mind suggested that the first time was supposed to hurt a little for women...and the Modest Maiden had merely ensured that she didn’t feel the pain while Bee entered her for the first time. Some of the authors, the ones who acknowledged that women could have sexual feelings, had noted that it was easier to have sex if the woman was wet, her own body producing the lubricant to make it easier for the man to thrust inside her. But it took time for the man to learn how to encourage her body to generate the lubricant and the potion hadn’t been a perfect substitute.

She tried to change the subject, quickly. “How
much
of him can you smell on me?”

“Let’s see,” Daria said, taking a deep sniff. “Lust, admiration, desire, fear...”

Elaine blinked. “Fear?”

“Guys are just as scared on their first time as girls,” Daria said, with a wink. “Even after they become more experienced, they are still sometimes scared when they meet a new woman. The mere act of having sex, either by entering or being entered, renders a person vulnerable to colossal emotional harm. If you’d told him that he was too small...”

“He wasn’t,” Elaine protested, and then flushed again. “I...”

“You can tell me all about it,” Daria said, with a leer. “Did you have a good time or what?”

“A very good time,” Elaine admitted. “And yet...did I do the right thing?”

Daria leaned over and patted her head. “What makes you think that there
is
a right thing? You had sex with a guy you like and who likes you, instead of a guy who has pushed you into going to bed with him or a guy your parents selected for you and you only met on your wedding day. There’s no prospect of him having given you a child – you took the potion to prevent that – and you’re hardly of aristocratic blood. You don’t even need to worry about the prospect of giving your hubby an illegitimate child.”

She shrugged. “Welcome to the wonderful world of men,” she added. “Look on the bright side. No one can use you as a virgin sacrifice any longer.”

Elaine shivered as Daria’s words unlocked more books within her mind. There were spells that involved virgins – and children – being murdered to feed the darker gods, or summon demons, or merely boost the sorcerer’s power. Each spell lay within her mind in precise detail, some of them presenting a dreadful temptation. She could jump right up through the different levels of magicians if she offered her firstborn son to the demons...

She pushed the thought away, angrily. “I suppose you’re right,” she said. “Does he love me?”

“A word of advice,” Daria said, with brutal frankness. “Young men confuse lust and love quite badly. He may want to build a relationship with you that results in you both being sealed after you develop true love for each other. Or he may only
think
that he does and in reality he hasn’t quite fallen for you. Guys are...S-T-U-P-I-D.”

“I have never had any problems with
that
type of spelling,” Elaine said, remembering one particular trader couple who had come to the orphanage to find someone to adopt. The woman had said that Elaine wasn’t very P-R-I-T-Y. Maybe that was true, but she
did
know how to spell
pretty
. “So...what do you think I should do?”

“Have fun,” Daria advised. “What do
you
want from all of this? Sex? I’d say that you had it – I’m sure he’d be happy to keep having sex with you for as long as you wanted. Love – in that case, work on seeing him outside his apartment, with his clothes on. Get him to take you around the city and see all the monuments. Have a swim with him in the public baths, or go watch a stage show...I think they’re still playing
The Artful Apprentice
at the Odeon.”

Elaine had to smile.
The Artful Apprentice
had been written shortly after the First Necromantic War and told the story of a young magician who had never listened to his master. Eventually, after a long series of humiliating mishaps, he’d managed to turn himself and his wife into snakes, whereupon his master had banished him to the forests outside the city. The play was deliberately written to be amusing, but also educational. Magic could be very dangerous when the sorcerers didn’t bother to think through what they were doing first.

“Or there’s the
Perverted Pant
,” Daria added. “Maybe not the kind of play to take someone to see unless you know them very well. It...isn’t exactly clean.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Elaine said, tightly. Even now, after discovering that sex could be fun, there were limits. What sort of person would have themselves transformed into female clothing so they could be worn, without the wearer knowing that they were carrying a voyeur around with them? And what sort of fool would rely on someone else to get him out of his perverted idea of fun when it stopped being funny? “I don’t think Bee would like that one.”

“Ask him,” Daria said. She grinned. “And while you’re at it, you might want to see if he has any skeletons in his closets. A wife back home, another girlfriend, a set of particularly nasty fetishes...men like to think that they have secrets and they’re harmless. Most of the time they’re wrong.”

She shrugged and changed the subject. “There are some advantages to being a werewolf,” she admitted. “You can generally tell what someone likes – or doesn’t through their scent and involuntary reactions. I knew a guy who was...rather brash, although a fairly decent chap. He didn’t know that I was a werewolf, but he never liked putting his cock in my mouth – and it took me weeks to realise that the whole prospect of it terrified him. I might have bitten down hard and removed his cock.”

Elaine winced at the thought. If women were penetrated, it opened them up to the man’s penetration, but the men were vulnerable to losing their most important organ. There were spells – not exactly forbidden, but frowned upon – that placed
teeth
within a female vagina, one of the nastier tricks in the darker tomes. Someone like Millicent would probably have considered it a huge joke.

“So,” she said, finally. “What did you do?”

“I just had sex with him instead,” Daria said, with a wink. “He was a good guy, even though we were hardly soul mates. But if he’d known that I was a werewolf...”

She shook her head. “I don’t think it would have mattered to him that much,” she admitted. “He would have had the same reaction to any set of really sharp teeth.”

Elaine nodded.

“I suggest that you go wash,
thoroughly
,” Daria ordered. “Trust me; your stench wouldn’t just be obvious to werewolves right now. There are magicians who will know
exactly
what you did last night.”

“Understood,” Elaine said. In truth, she was still confused. Did Bee love her? Did she love Bee? Or were they both just driven together by hormones? Was this sort of confusion
natural
when sex was involved? “And after that...”

“I think that we will have visitors,” Daria said, sniffing the air. “I suggest you hurry.”

***

Elaine had never spent long in the shower, a habit that had been hammered into her at the orphanage. Each child was given five minutes of water to wash, after which they were expected to be clean, having washed away all the soap. The matrons had punished any of the children who took longer than five minutes, or emerged still dirty. Even now, even with water relatively cheap in the Golden City, Elaine still needed less than ten minutes to wash herself – and study her body in the mirror.

She looked...
older
somehow, even though there was no single change that she could identify. There were a handful of marks on her skin where Bee’s hands had torn at her, and a whole series of bruises from where the torturer had lashed out at her skin. Dread had provided some basic medical care – stripping off in front of him had been embarrassing – and the damage was well on its way to healing, but it was still visible. She was mildly surprised that Bee hadn’t commented on the bruise. Perhaps he’d thought that they were natural...

...Or perhaps he’d thought that they’d come from her master. It wasn’t unknown for apprentices to be beaten by their masters, even though Miss Prim had never lifted a hand to Elaine or to any of the other girls in the Library. Maybe Bee was beaten by the Empress of the South...she giggled at the absurd thought, although she suspected that Bee hadn’t been a virgin when he’d met her. Perhaps the Empress’s reputation was genuine and she’d seduced him before sending him out on her service.

There was a faint bloodstain on her legs, all that remained of her maidenhead. She washed it away with warm water and then scrubbed her legs clean, feeling a whirlwind of conflicting emotions. She’d enjoyed herself and yet there was a feeling that she hadn’t quite done the right thing. Perhaps it was a form of sexual buyer’s remorse. There would never be a second time that she lost her virginity. Some spells offered her the chance to restore her maidenhead, but it wouldn’t be the same. She’d lost something – innocence, perhaps – when she’d opened her legs and invited Bee to enter her body.

She finished washing and dried herself with a simple spell, pulling on her bathrobe as she left the washroom. Outside, a small party seemed to have gathered around the table, led by a man it took her a long moment to recognise. Inquisitor Dread had put his robes aside and settled for donning the brown and yellow robes of a part-time worker. Cass and Karan wore the same civilian clothes they’d worn before, but there was something about them that made them seem even
less
like Inquisitors. Princess Sacharissa looked utterly unlike a princess in a light green dancing dress, but it wasn’t her that caught Elaine’s attention.

There was a small dark-skinned man, wearing a grey uniform, who seemed uncomfortable so close to the Inquisitors and Daria...Daria’s face was caught between human and wolf forms, covered in fur and bristling with sharp teeth. Elaine stared; some werewolves could hold themselves in the midst of the transformation, gaining skills that combined both those of human and wolf, but she’d never seen it before. A wolf-man would be a very dangerous enemy.

Daria relaxed and her face slid back to normal, the fur slowly fading into her skin until it became almost invisible. “Your friend here wanted to know if I could be a Limbo,” she said, as she smiled at Elaine. “I can...if not for very long.”

“I understand that you had a good evening,” Dread said, to Elaine. The two bodyguards grinned at her behind Dread’s back. They’d probably been watching...strange how that had never occurred to her, even as they’d been undressing. “I trust you didn’t tell him anything
too
important?”

“I believe you already know,” Elaine said, tightly. The bodyguards were there to spy on her as much as protect her from whoever wanted the knowledge in her head. “Or didn’t you bother to watch me last night.”

“You were very good,” Cass assured her, her bright eyes wide with innocence. “If that really was your first time...”

Elaine flushed, feeling magic flickering around her. But Cass would have little trouble beating her in a fight, even with the technique that had caught Millicent by surprise. It was quite possible that dozens of sorcerers had already reinvented it...or that the Inquisition used the technique themselves to deal with dark sorcerers. They might well have kept it to themselves, using the story about Inquisitors being the most powerful magicians in the world to hide its existence.

“That will do,” Dread said, as Daria started to hand out glasses of juice. She took a special pleasure, it seemed, in giving the most childish container to Dread, who seemed not to notice the implied sneer. “We have work to do.”

He tapped the table, effortlessly taking charge of the meeting. “You already know most of the people here,” he said, to Elaine. “This” – he nodded to the dark-skinned man – “is Cat. He does have a real name...”

“But using it would be a dangerous weakness in my line of work,” Cat said, in a whispery voice that had to be partly an act. Elaine saw the pale skin around his neck and realised, with horror, that he’d once worn a slave collar. “I prefer to be known as Cat.”

“Cat was once one of the most masterful sneak thieves in the city,” Dread said, remorselessly. “He burgled thousands of houses, stealing thousands of Crowns over a period of three years before he was caught in a sorcerer’s booby trap. The Sorcerer Balthazar had never bothered to construct the standard wards around his house; instead, he set traps throughout the building, waiting to see who would blunder inside. He was in the middle of a long-running dispute with the Sorceress Morgana at the time.”

Elaine smiled, remembering the two magicians. They seemed to spend half of their lives as lovers and the other half fighting savagely against each other. Miss Prim had once complained that they’d even had fights within the Great Library, despite all the wards designed to prevent violence inside the building. Everyone knew their story – and everyone feared getting caught up between them.

“So he was caught,” Dread continued. “The Sorcerer handed him over to the City Guard, who had him pushed in front of a judge, sentenced to enslavement and then collared. Once all his loot was recovered, he was sent to work as a menial slave...”

“Which is where you found me,” Cat said, in the same voice. “And you have sworn to make my freedom permanent if I do one task for you.”

Dread nodded and unfurled a map. “Count Lucas, the illegitimate son of the Duke of Randor and also one of the possible candidates to become Grand Sorcerer, owns a large mansion at the edge of High Tory,” he said. “Rather unimaginatively, it is called Randor Mansion.”