Demon King (45 page)

“So the wolves will become sheep, eh?” Bairan said skeptically.

“No. First we’ll make them into tame wolves, and send them out after their wilder brothers. Then we’ll change them into sheepdogs, for I don’t believe those mountains will ever be truly peaceful. The best we can hope for is that these sheepdogs will be grudgingly obedient under their shepherds from Maisir and Numantia.”

“You’ve studied this well, I see,” Sala said, looking at the maps.

“I didn’t wish to make a total idiot of myself if the plan was completely impossible,” I said. “Now it merely looks like a grandiose unlikelihood.”

Both the king and Ligaba Sala smiled.

“If peace, or something sort of resembling that, came to these regions, Numantia and Maisir wouldn’t have any excuse for war, either,” the king said. “Would they, Ambassador?”

“Not as long as both nations truly wanted peace. But if someone truly wanted war, well, all this would be so much bum fodder,” I said. “A man who wants a brawl can generally find one, even in the calmest tavern.”

“Equal armies, equal governments?” the king said, with a question mark.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “With frequent conferences between the emperor and yourself, or between your emissaries. So no misunderstandings can develop.”

“Interesting,” mused Bairan. “Now, if you’d said you’d just had this idea, I would’ve laughed and thought you mad, or a dreamer, and I’m nervous in the company of either. But since your emperor’s endorsed this plan … hmm. Interesting. Either this has merit, or there’s two madmen about. I don’t know, Ambassador á Cimabue. Perhaps we could set up a couple of regiments and see what develops. Start at one end of the frontier, with one state.”

“Excellent change, Your Majesty,” I said hastily. Of course I’d planned we would begin slowly, rather than jump in everywhere at once, but an idea is always more digestible when one thinks it one’s own.

“Very well. Let’s try this out. Ligaba, would you and the Numantians work out a scheme?”

“Gladly, sir.”

King Bairan stood. “Your emperor chose wisely when he sent you, Ambassador á Cimabue. I think you’ve done both countries a true service, and in time to come, perhaps your name will ring greater than either mine or your emperor’s.”

“I thank you, sir.” I bowed deeply.

Bairan moved toward the door, then stopped and touched my sleeve. “Damastes, you seem disturbed. Is there aught the matter? If so …”

“No, Your Majesty,” I managed to say. “I just didn’t get much rest last night making sure I’d not make any blunders today.”

He looked in my eyes. “Very well,” he said, voice skeptical. “But don’t forget my offer. A matter this imposing must be judged by calm minds.”

• • •

Now there was little for me to do. Sala and Boconnoc began hammering out the details, and it was well for me to stay in the background. I could wallow, I could drown, in my anger and depression.

But there was Alegria.

Thinking of her, thinking of the shabby way I’d treated her, calmed my rage, my hurt, and I forced myself to behave less like a child, and worry about something beyond myself.

I had an idea, and determined to carry it out. Perhaps the setting would inspire the change.

• • •

“At least when I take you out of Jarrah, it’s to a great castle,” Alegria said skeptically.

“A depressing great castle.”

“You
are
the picky sort. Besides, how could it be depressing, if it’s where your favorite … favorite … whatever I am came from? Damastes, just what am I to you? You don’t have to answer that honestly.”

“Then I won’t,” I said. “Quit yammering, and help me unpack the sleigh. You’re behaving like a nervous bride on her wedding night.”

“Aaah?” Alegria looked innocently around. I threw her into a snowbank. She sputtered, flailed, and I, like a genteel oaf, extended a hand. She grabbed it and yanked. I yelped and fell, face-first, into the snow beside her.

“That was unfair,” I managed to sputter when I surfaced.

“You’re right,” Alegria said. “I’ll pay the penalty and let you kiss me.”

“That sounds like a proposition.”

“Of sorts,” she murmured, and I did as she asked. The kiss lasted for some time.

“Mmmmh,” she said softly when our lips came apart. “I’d say do it again, but I don’t know how snowproof these furs are.”

“Snowproof,” I said. “I had six spells cast to make sure.”

“Then kiss me again.” I did. She ran her gloved fingers across my lips. “Congratulations,” she said.

“For what?”

“For not being a gloomy-mug like you’ve been since … since you know.”

“I got tired of feeling sorry for myself,” I said truthfully.

“Then get up. You were lying again. This snow’s seeping through.” I helped her up, and again she looked at the rather ramshackle low wooden building. “What is it?” she asked.

“It’s the meeting place Numantian envoys use when they want to meet Maisirian traitors in secret.”

“How’d you hear about it?”

“I asked Ligaba Sala where a quiet lonely place was I could take someone.”

“I guess,” Alegria said, “Maisirian traitors don’t last too long if Sala knows about this place.”

“Guess not. Now, help me carry provisions.”

I handed her two net bags of groceries. She looked once more at the building. “Quaint,” she said. “I guess that’s what you’re supposed to call a building with a tree growing through its roof.”

“Two of them,” I said. “There’s another down there.”

“Wonderful. I wonder if there’s a fire. It’s going to snow.”

“You go investigate. The embassy said there’s a charm-pole that works as a key hung in that little box beside the door.”

I carried the rest of our supplies onto the porch, then led the horses to the nearby barn. There was an unfrozen spring nearby, and I fed, watered, and curried the animals. By the time I finished, a gentle snowstorm had begun. It was nearly the end of the Time of Storms, and the weather was lightening. But it was still cold, especially for a tropic lad, and I entered the house chilled through.

The house actually was a retreat for members of the embassy, although Sala was the one who’d told me about it, saying it had once been used for clandestine meetings, until King Bairan got tired of that foolishness and had a certain diplomat — he didn’t say if it was Boconnoc or not — greeted by a company of cavalry when he arrived to meet an agent. That ended the political uses for the lodge.

It overhung a frozen lake, with porches all around. There were eight bedrooms, half branching off a hall on one side of the main rooms, four on the other side. The center room was low-ceilinged, but huge. I could’ve almost stood in the river-stone fireplace, and the firewood racks on either side reached the ceiling. Around it were thick fur rugs of various animals. Everything was rough-worked wood, including the furniture. The chairs and couches looked as if they’d swallow you if you got near them, and the nap you’d be forced into might last an eternity.

To one side was a dining room and next to it the kitchen, the larder of which was filled with every sort of bottled or preserved viand imaginable. Heating was by wood, each bedroom having its own fireplace. A hot spring rose on the hill above the house, and the water was diverted into the plumbing system, the cold water for which came from a creek.

Two trees rose through the house, each in one hallway. They were supposedly trees of luck and had been blessed when the lodge was built. The place was utterly unpretentious, utterly charming, and a world of its own.

Exactly what I had hoped.

“Well?” Alegria asked. In the minutes I’d been gone, she’d lit two lamps, found kindling, and started it burning with crumpled paper. Three small logs were set in a pyramid over the crackling flames and were smoking into fire.

“Well what?”

“Aren’t you surprised a woman, especially a Dalriada, can build a fire out here in the
suebi
, amid the wolves and dragons?”

“Not at all. You already told me Dalriada can do anything.”

“I may have oversold the proposition. Come, Damastes. Admire me.”

“I always do.”

“Do you?” She rose from where she’d been sitting, cross-legged on a white bearskin in front of the fire. She’d taken off her furs and wore a soft, loose pair of pants, with a robe top that dipped low and tied at the side in matching leopard-skin-like material. She turned, letting the firelight silhouette her body, and once again murmured “Do you?” She unfastened the tie and slipped out of the top. Her body was firm, nipples hard.

She came to me, and I tried to take her in my arms. “No,” she said softly. “There is no hurry, no haste.”

I lowered my arms, and slowly she unbuttoned my heavy fur coat, undid the ties of my fur pants, and let them drop around my ankles. I kicked off my boots and stepped out of my pants, wearing only a loincloth.

“You’re very pretty,” she said.

“Not as pretty as you.”

She bent and kissed my nipples. I ran my fingers down her sleekness.

“I would like to kiss you,” she said, and her lips parted as she spoke. Our tongues wove together, and my arms came around her, pulling her against me. She pulled away, breathing hard.

“I was taught … the first time should be done slowly,” she said. “But I swear I cannot stand it for long.”

“Nor I,” I said hoarsely, and picked her up in my arms. Her knees folded as if she’d lost all strength, and I laid her down on the rug.

“I want you to love me now, please love me now,” she whispered. “All my places want you, Damastes. Do not stop until they’re satisfied.”

I kissed her tiny navel, ran my tongue inside it, and her fingers fumbled with the ties to her pants. She raised her hips and I slipped her pants off, and she lifted one leg and let it fall to the side. She had but a tiny tuft of hair around her sex, and I kissed it, then moved between her legs, and let my tongue move back and forth down there, caressing the small hardness between her lips.

Her hands moved in my hair as I loved her with my mouth, and her breathing grew faster, harsher. She gasped, jerked against me, groaned, but I didn’t stop. “Come to me now, please now,” she said, and I obeyed, moving up between her legs, rubbing her sex with my cock, back and forth. She was wet with her own juices, wet with my saliva. I pushed slowly, firmly against resistance, and it broke, and she cried out. I didn’t push farther, but moved gently back and forth, fractions of an inch, and then she moved with me, moaning. I moved deeper within her, and her legs came up around me, and she pulled at me. I kissed her, and her tongue searched my mouth frantically. I moved back, almost out of her, then thrust deeply and she cried out again, this time in joy, and I repeated the motion and paid for my long months of stupidity and denial — I gushed inside her.

“Hells,” I muttered.

“Hush,” she ordered, and her fingers moved down, around the back of her thighs, touching my balls, the base of my cock, here, there, and suddenly I grew firm again. Now we moved together, first lovers, but it was as if we’d done it time and again, partners in a long-rehearsed dance, and then she shouted aloud, her head rolling, and her muscles spasmed around me, and I came for the second time. Her face was contorted, eyes closed, and I stroked her wet body for long moments until her eyes opened.

“I was right those long months ago when I said I was lucky.”

“No,” I said. “I am the one who’s lucky.”

“In time, that may be true,” she whispered, and rolled me over onto my back.

“That was once,” she said, and rose to her knees. She knelt and caressed my cock. “Ah, little one, you have not been doing your exercises, or you’d not be tired. You need some encouragement.” She used her tongue on the tip of my cock, then pulled my foreskin back and slid her teeth back and forth on the head. Her tongue touched me here, there, while her fingers stroked my balls, my ass, my abdomen. I was firm once more, and she moved back and forth, taking my entire cock into her mouth, her tongue flat underneath it, and once more the world spun. It was my turn to cry out. She lifted her head and swallowed.

“The real thing tastes better than any of the compounds they gave us,” she said. “Or at least yours does.”

I pulled her up beside me and kissed her.

“Twice,” she said.

We lay contentedly together, caressing each other, feeling the warmth of the fire, and the greater warmth of another, invisible fire about us.

“Would I sound like a fool if I said I love you?” I said.

Her eyes snapped open in surprise. “N-no. Of course not. But …”

“But what?”

“I … This isn’t supposed to … Oh, hells, I’m confused!” Tears started, but she rubbed them away.

“I’m sorry,” I joked badly. “I’ll never say that again.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

She took a deep breath. “I love you, Damastes.”

“Nice that we agree on things.”

We kissed.

“Do you know when I fell for you?” I shook my head. “It was that very first night, when you threw that tablet off the balcony.”

“Now, wait a moment,” I protested. “That doesn’t make any sense. I said no chains, so — ”

“So I put them on. But who said love is a chain?”

I made a face, didn’t answer.

“Forget about her,” Alegria said. “That’s gone. That’s over. Think about something else.”

“All right,” I said slowly, a bit embarrassed, but still curious. “I’ve got a question, but you don’t have to answer it. That first night, you cut yourself, so that people wouldn’t talk about what didn’t happen.”

“Yes?”

“And tonight it seemed, it felt, like the first time you’d made love.”

“I thought you said you were a country boy.”

“I am,” I said. “You’re confusing me.”

“Haven’t you heard any of the old jokes about the poor girl who’s been known to like the haystacks and the bumpkins she finds there, and then some old rich farmer decides he’s got to marry her? But only if she’s a virgin?”

I did remember those ancient jests that invariably finished with some young lad ending up in a place the old farmer thought exclusively his. “I do.” This could have been embarrassing, as Alegria said. But suddenly it struck me as funny. “So as part of your graduation ceremony, when you became a full-fledged Dalriada, you stood in line while a midwife put a certain stitch somewhere?”