Chapter 28
Chapter
Twenty-Eight
I all but fling the blankets back the moment he suggests we share warmth, tugging his blankets over me. We’ve had two separate sets of blankets all this time even though we share a bed, simply because it was more comfortable for both of us to have our own space. I don’t care a bit about space tonight, though. Not when I’m freezing and my toes feel like icicles.
I plunge under his blankets, my hands seeking out his to share warmth. He’s turned towards me in bed, and my seeking hands encounter bare chest and muscles. Lots and lots of muscles.
I pause, not because I’m shy, but because I know he is. “Are you naked?”
“I am wearing an undergarment.” His voice is oddly tense in the darkness.
“Okay, good.” I slither forward. “Because you’re really warm and I’m going to put my hands on you.”
He remains still as I move against him, settling myself in. His big body is enormous against mine, dominating the bed. I press up against him, my front to his front, my hands tucking between our bellies for warmth, and I curl my legs up against his.
“Better?” he asks, and there’s a little more ease in his tone.
“Much,” I murmur, and lean in, breathing in his warm scent as he settles my blankets over his, enveloping us in a cocoon. My jaw unlocks and no longer shivers with distress, and all of me relaxes. He smells like herbs and woodsmoke from tending to the fire, and it’s actually quite a lovely smell on his skin. I’m tempted to burrow my nose into his neck and just breathe in from there all night. “Thank you, Nemeth.”
He grunts. “Your chattering was keeping me awake.”
I just smile against his chest. He’s trying to sound stern and grumpy, but I know him better than that. He hovers over me, watching me as if I’m some fragile thing that’s going to break at any moment. I think my blood curse scares him and makes him think I’m more vulnerable than I am. As long as I get my daily medicine, I’m fine. But if he wants to fuss over me? I’ll let him.
My feet are still cold, so I draw my legs up and tuck them between his legs. I’m wearing a heavy dress for warmth, but despite all this, our knees bump. His legs fit together with mine strangely, and he shifts his weight, trying to get comfortable. Right. Time to spoon, then. I roll over, presenting him with my back, and then grab his arm and put it around my waist, tucking myself against him once more. “Better?”
He grunts again.
This time, when I move my feet back and tuck them between his legs, it’s far more comfortable for both of us. I’m half-curled but I like it, because he’s curled around my back, one of his heavy hips practically over mine. I don’t know if he’s aware that he’s pinning me to the mattress, but I like it. I like his weight over me, hugging me against him. The hand on my waist practically covers me from breast to groin, and I’m fascinated with how much larger his hand is than mine. His feet are enormous, too, now that I think about it.
I shift my weight, pressing my backside up against him.
Just as I suspected, there’s a hard wedge of cock there between his thighs, pressing up against my amply padded butt. The hand on my waist tightens, as if he wants to hold me in place. My senses are utterly, wildly alert. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to sleep now, with his thumb-claw practically brushing my breasts and his cock pushing against my buttocks. Perhaps a better woman than me could ignore this, but I’ve always been a bit of a mess.
I move my hips back and forth in a deliberate manner, just because I’m the worst.
I’d love for him to grab me tighter. To haul my skirts up and push my thighs apart and just claim me. To grind his cock against my backside until he comes. Heated, delicious fantasies fill my head and I know some of it is the late hour and some of it is my enforced celibacy, but right now? All I can think about is how good it would feel if he drove me down into the mattress and used me.
“Are you warm now?” Nemeth asks.
I burrow back a little further, just because I’m clearly the only one feeling aroused at the moment. “This is so much better. How is it you weren’t freezing?”
“I’m not a puny human.”
He is most definitely not. I put my hand over his on my belly, fascinated by the large size of it once more. “Why is it that your hand is so much larger than a human hand?”
“Why are yours so small?” he counters. “Go to sleep.”
“Are they big because you have wings and it’s for gripping? I noticed your feet were big, too.”
He sighs, and his breath brushes over my hair, teasing it. “I do not know. We are two different peoples, thus we are made differently. Are you going to ask why my knees bend in the opposite direction of yours? Have I asked you about your tail?”
“Tail?” I hiss. “I don’t have a tail. Do you have a tail?” Is he hiding it under that kilt?
“Go to sleep, Candra.”
As if I can sleep now. I wriggle backwards against him, hoping that he’ll react. Just a small groan. A hitch of breath. Something that tells me he’s noticing how blatantly I’m pressing my backside against him. There’s no response, though, and I fight back disappointment. He’s not interested, I realize.
But if he’s not interested, why does he jerk off to thoughts of me?
The man is a perplexing mystery, but I’m not going to give up. Not now that I’m warm and wide awake. “Are you tired?” I whisper. “Because now I’m not tired.”
“Candra.” There’s a hint of amusement in his voice. “You are impossible sometimes.”
Am I? I’m clearly not the impossible one. His big hand is a breath away from landing between my thighs, his cock is pressing up against my backside, and I’m the one being unreasonable? I want to laugh at the irony of it. “Want to play our game? We can skip the dares and just tell each other secrets. It’s too cold to get out of bed anyhow.” I blow a breath out and watch it fog in the air.
I wait for him to give me a grumpy sigh or tell me to go to bed. Instead, his weight settles in against mine, his delicious hip heavy against my thigh. His chin presses against my hair. “What do you want to know?”
“Do you have a tail?”
Now I get the heavy sigh. His hand twitches against my belly. “Ask me something else, Candra.”
“I’m going to assume that’s a yes, since if it was a no you wouldn’t be so fussy at me.” I tap a finger on the back of his hand. “But fine. Tell me when your birthday is.”
“My birthday? Do you truly celebrate such childish things?”
“Why not? Birthdays are a celebration of you. What makes that childish?”
“My people do not celebrate birthdays after you come of age.”
I tap his hand again. “Well, I’m human, and I want to celebrate it, so humor me. When is it?”
He’s quiet for a moment. “On the seventeenth of spring, I will be twenty-eight.”
Born a short time after the last people in his family were in the tower, then. “Were either of your parents in the tower?”
“My aunt.” He pauses. “She was never the same afterward.”
Mine neither. My aunt Calliope was older when she went to the tower, and my mother (Calliope’s much younger sister) said that she was never quite right in the head afterward. That she preferred to sit in the darkness and liked a small, quiet room. She moved to a monastery not long after she returned from the tower and died a few years later. My mother rarely spoke of her, and whenever I asked about the tower, I’d been told that it was Meryliese’s duty and not to worry about it.
Now I wish I’d pressed more.
We’re both quiet for a long moment, and then Nemeth’s mouth brushes against my hair. “That was two questions, you cheat.”
Two questions? Oh—the tower and his birthday. “Well, ask me two questions, then.”
“Your birthday?”
“Alas, I am high summer, three days after solstice.” I smile into the darkness, cocooned against him. “Didn’t feel much like celebrating this past year. I just turned twenty-four.” I pat his hand again. “Next question.”
“Did you leave a lover behind?”
Oh. I’m surprised he asked that. Perhaps he’s not as detached as he’s pretending to be at the moment. I stroke my fingers over his hand on my belly and consider my answer. Most men don’t like hearing that a woman has experience in bed. They seem to think that we don’t have needs or desires like they do. That we’re supposed to be pristine, virginal goddesses until they deign to stick their cocks into us and “make us whole” or some such drivel. Erynne waited for her marriage to Lionel, and she told me that her wedding night was so awful that she cried for a week.
I’ve never regretted being free with my favors. But I also don’t want Nemeth to think less of me. “I left a great deal of lovers behind,” I say, deciding to go for a teasing manner. “But if you are asking if I had my heart on someone specific, the answer is no. Court was just…court. Everyone there was bored, including me. You amuse yourself the best you can, and sometimes you end up in someone’s bed. It means far less than you’d think. It was mostly flirting, and sometimes flirting would go a little too far. But no heart attachments, no.”
I hold my breath, waiting for his response. Waiting to see if he’s going to shame me for my immorality.
“So…this Balon…he is not a great love of yours?”
Oh, is he jealous? I’m thrilled to my core at the thought. “Balon? Please. He wants to marry a Vestalin.”
Nemeth chuckles. “So it is not true love?”
I snort. “Very clearly not. He got bored and stopped visiting. If he really loved me, he’d be out there constantly. He’s just fascinated by me because I’m an incorrigible tease and I have an important family name. Even if he was in love with me, his family wouldn’t allow it. Balon will need heirs.”
“Ah. So you don’t wish to give him heirs?”
I pause. “No one will marry me. I have the blood curse, and it makes me barren.”
“This blood curse. You’ve mentioned it before. What is it?”
I turn my head, as if I can look back at him in the darkness. His breath fans over my face, and it’s warm and pleasant and surprisingly cozy. “How many questions are you going to ask? You’re not very good at this game.”
He squeezes his hand over my belly, sending a pulse of heat straight through my body. “Just tell me. I wish to know.”
“Do your people not have the blood curse then? The First House of Darkfell?”
“No curse at all.”
Figures. I consider for a moment, wondering if I should tell him. He’s still the enemy, even if I enjoy cuddling with him. Even if I’m starting to have filthy daydreams about him. Would he use this information against me in the future? But…we made a promise that whatever was shared in the tower would not be used against each other. I decide to trust in that. “The blood curse dates back to Ravendor Vestalin, the first of our line. Have you heard of her?”
“Everyone has, yes. Even those of us monsters in Darkfell.”
I poke him for referring to himself as a monster. The more time passes, the more I’m convinced that he’s just a man. A man with wings and fangs and weird legs and possibly a tail, but definitely a man. He has people, just like I have people. “So you know of Ravendor Vestalin. Then you know that she was the first of her line, and she was born from starlight. She wasn’t given the name Vestalin until her quarrel with the Golden Moon Goddess. Back then, they called the goddess Vestal. That was before we lost the right to call the gods by their names. Have you heard this story?”
“A version if it, but very different than yours, I imagine. Keep talking.”
“So Ravendor was a fierce warrior who sold her sword to whoever would pay her. The goddess was upset because Ravendor had killed the goddess’s son in battle. He was supposed to be impossible to slay by any blade, so Ravendor used a club given to her by a male of the First House of Darkfell. The goddess was extremely upset and appeared in the sky as the Golden Moon for the first time. She demanded that Ravendor and the male from Darkfell pay a penance—to give seven years to the goddess. Seven years of piety and prayer, and the goddess would forgive them. Ravendor agreed, and so the goddess rose the tower from the land itself—this tower—and Ravendor went inside. The Golden Moon hung in the sky for seven long years, watching over the tower to ensure that Ravendor and the Fellian did not leave. Once the seven years passed, Ravendor stepped foot outside of the tower, but the goddess was furious because Ravendor had been blessed by the Gray God during that time and had given birth to a child.”
“The Gray God, eh?”
“Yes,” I say. “And so the goddess named Ravendor as Vestalin—under Vestal’s eye—and cursed her line. Some of the children are born with a blood curse in their veins that will destroy them from the inside out. It’s only through prayers to the Gray God that we figured out a potion that enables me to live.” I shrug. “But that’s why the Golden Moon Goddess rises every thirty years to harass the new generation of Vestalin and your people, and why she gets so very mad when her demands aren’t met.” It’s the only reason the goddess’s name has survived for so long. Mankind lost the ability to refer to the gods by their names in another war, another time, but the Vestalin name has remained even though the names of the Gray God and the Absent One are long-forgotten.
“I see.”
He sounds amused, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. It irks me. “You think it’s a funny story? That everyone in my line has a risk of death? That I have to take potions for the rest of my life because the goddess is angry with my ancestor?”
“That’s not it at all.” He shakes my hand against my belly, as if I’m a child to be jiggled into paying attention, but instead of making me attentive, all it does is remind me that I’m pressed to his body, and we’re sharing warmth, and I’m starting to ache in all the spots that most definitely should not be aching. “You are misjudging me, little princess. I laugh because your story is so different from what I have heard.”
“Okay then, what have you heard?”
His breath is warm against my hair. “Well, the Fellian legends are similar in regards to the war.”
“But?”
“But that the human Ravendor fell in love with the Fellian Azamenth when they went into the tower. It was he that gave her the club that killed the goddess’s son, and they were lovers before they went into the tower and continued when they were there.”
“What?” I practically screech. “Humans don’t marry Fellians!”
“She gave birth to Azamenth’s child,” he continues, his tone chiding. “Which is far more believable than the Gray God touching someone like her and having her give birth to a baby with no father.”
I sputter. “The Gray God?—”
“Are you sure she did not fornicate with a gray man? A Fellian? Because my people are gray. It is entirely possible that the story was twisted over time. My people say Azamenth was devoted to her, and it was Ravendor who betrayed him. The moment they left the tower, she abandoned him for her human lover. He killed himself out of grief and the loss of her. It is why my people do not like humans much. They have betrayed us time and time again.”
I roll my eyes, plucking his hand off my stomach. All the sensual pleasure I was feeling about being wrapped in his embrace has disappeared, and I’m left with vague irritation. “So you’re saying that I’m not born of the Gray God, but that one of my ancestors was Fellian. Do I look Fellian to you?”
“It was many generations ago. Our legends say that the child looked like Ravendor, but his coloring was that of my people.”
I think of my sister’s dark hair and dark eyes—and mine—and how we stand out in the court of blondes back in Lios. “Someone told you a story full of dragon shite,” I declare. If Erynne and I were Fellian, even a drop, we’d be tossed out of the court at Lios. We’d be pariahs, Vestalin bloodline or not. “It’s not true.”
“Is it so very terrible a thing if it is true?” he asks, his voice soft in my ear as his breath tickles my hair.
“I’m tired,” I say. “I don’t want to play this game anymore.”
I huddle down in the blankets and pretend to sleep. My mind whirls with what he’s said. His story can’t be true. Ravendor was a brave hero, the champion of Lios. She didn’t seduce the enemy and betray him. Garbage. All of it garbage.
Either I disappoint Nemeth, or I disappoint my ancestors, my bloodline, and my kingdom.