Chapter 6
Aeldryc
The next morning, I knocked on Pip’s door, waiting as always for him to respond. It was locked from the outside, but it didn’t seem right to just barge in. When he didn’t answer, I knocked again, frowning.
He couldn’t have escaped, could he? I quickly turned the lock and swung the door open, hit with a wall of steam. Pippin emerged in a towel, hair dripping, skin flushed, joy radiating from him.
Well, that was better than the tears he’d had in his eyes last night, I supposed.
“I didn’t realize that box in the back of the water closet was a shower.” He announced it like he’d discovered a continent. “I was trying to sponge bathe myself in the sink! You might have mentioned that there was a legit rainwater shower head right behind the wall.”
I watched a bead of water trail down over a pectoral muscle that was far more defined than I’d been expecting, then cleared my throat, unable to remember what he’d been saying. “Ah. Well, yes.”
“It’s hot and it has such good water pressure. How? How do you have plumbing?”
“We have—” I paused, frowning. “Do you not have plumbing?”
“We have electricity. Cell phones. Televisions. Plumbing comes with all of that.” He tilted his head. “Okay, if we’re being honest, I’m not super educated on how plumbing works, but, you know, I’m pretty sure there’s like, pumps or something.”
I wasn’t much more aware of how plumbing worked than he was, but I tried to pretend to be. “The palace has a pipe-house. It works with steam, elemental magic, and pumps too, I suppose.”
“Steam and magic?”
“Essentially.” I studied him, confused. “Last night—“
“Thank you for the art supplies! Look, I made the trousers you gave me into shorts!” He spun and picked up a pair of tiny trousers off of his bed. “You’ve inspired me to embrace the adventure.”
“Ah.” His towel had slipped and my eyes were fixed on the dimples at the base of his lower back, which seemed to be robbing me of my ability to speak.
He turned back around. “So! What’s up?”
“I came to check on you and discuss next steps.”
“I’m clean, so I suppose the next step would be breakfast. Oh! and coffee. Do you have coffee? It’s a hot drink that perks you up. I’ve had nothing but water since I got here!”
“We have tea.”
His face cycled through the five stages of grief in three seconds. Then he rallied. “Tea is fine. I’m adaptable. What’s for breakfast?”
“Get dressed first.”
“Already handled.” Pip grabbed the shorts and another scrap of fabric and disappeared into his washroom.
He emerged ten minutes later, and I understood immediately that “handled” didn’t mean what he thought it meant.
He had taken the perfectly sensible black trousers that I’d found for him, and cut them considerably shorter.
He had paired these with a dark waistcoat from the same wardrobe, worn unbuttoned over nothing: no shirt, no undershirt.
Just the waistcoat hanging open to reveal the same flat, toned stomach I had been attempting not to look at since the moment I’d found him on a country road.
“You destroyed the clothing,” I said.
“I improved the clothing.”
“Those were perfectly functional trousers.”
“And now they’re perfectly functional shorts.
It’s an upgrade. You’re welcome.” He did a small turn, and I watched the waistcoat swing open wider, revealing more skin, and the shorts were—they were very short.
Shorter than the sparkly ones he’d arrived in, if such a thing was possible. “How do I look?”
Like a problem I was not equipped to solve.
“You’re supposed to wear a shirt under that waistcoat,” I said.
“Only if you have no imagination!”
There was no point in arguing, so I led him to the officers’ kitchen for a morning meal, his first outside of my quarters. It was a compromise, he got to leave his room, but didn’t expose too many others to his questionable fashion choices.
The kitchen staff had left bread, cheese, cured meat, and fruit, and Pip fell upon it with the enthusiasm of a man who had not eaten a proper meal in days, which made me wonder if I needed to feed him something else at our dinners. Perhaps he didn’t like stew as much as he liked cheese.
He’d been quiet during every meal I’d had with him, but today, something had shifted, and he began to talk.
He talked while he ate. He talked between bites, during bites, and occasionally through bites, and by the time he was on his third helping, I had learned more about his life than my formal interrogation had extracted in an hour.
If I’d known three days ago that all he needed was a shower and some art supplies, I’d have introduced those things to him sooner.
“So here’s what I’m thinking.” He gestured with a piece of bread.
“We should go back to where I landed. The field. Maybe there’s something there.
There could be a mark, a portal, a big glowing circle on the ground, something.
Because if I got here, there’s a way I got here, and if there’s a way I got here, maybe we can figure out why. ”
It was, irritatingly, not a bad idea.
“You want to ride six miles into the countryside to look at a field?”
“I want to ride six miles into the countryside to look at the field where I appeared out of thin air through what may or may not have been a magic mirror. Yes. Unless you’ve already investigated.”
“We have not,” I said. “Thyren stayed behind after we picked you up, trying to determine where you came from and found nothing.”
“Perhaps I could spot something he wouldn’t notice. A clue!”
The Queen’s orders for me had been characteristically unhelpful: “Keep him. Learn more. Try not to let him touch anything.”
A return to the arrival site was arguably within the scope of “learn more,” and it gave me something to do about his boredom.
Not that I was in charge of his entertainment.
“I suppose we can make an effort. I do not have anything on my schedule today,” I said.
He squealed and clapped his hands, leaping to his feet. “Do we leave now?”
I stared down at my breakfast, then sighed and led him down to the stable.
The morning air was sharp as we crossed the stable yard.
Thom had Bram saddled and ready, because I had sent word ahead, and because Thom was efficient.
Bram assessed Pip with the long, measured stare of a creature who had seen everything the world had to offer and found most of it wanting.
Pip waved at him. Bram did not wave back, on account of being a horse, though his expression suggested that even if he could, he wouldn’t.
“So,” Pip said, looking at Bram with the wary respect one might give a building. “About the horse situation.”
“What about it?”
“I can’t ride.”
“You rode yesterday.”
“I sat in your lap yesterday. That’s different.
Riding is a skill that requires lessons and practice and, where I come from, money that I didn’t have, because horse lessons were for the kids whose parents showed up to things.
” He said it lightly, the way he said everything, but there was a wire of something harder underneath it that I recognized from the interrogation room.
Perhaps this was the truth, dressed up in a joke so you wouldn’t notice it hurt.
I could have assigned him a gentle mare from the lower stables.
There were several, calm-tempered beasts used for transport, perfectly suited to a beginner.
This would have been the sensible thing to do.
The appropriate thing. The thing a commanding officer would do when escorting a detainee on a routine investigative outing.
I held out my hand. “Let me lift you up.”
He took it without hesitation, and I pulled him up into the saddle in front of me. He settled against my chest, and every point of contact tested my discipline: the backs of his thighs against my legs, his shoulders against my chest, and the heat of his skin where it was bare against mine.
Bram turned his head and gave me a look that said many things, none of them complimentary. I ignored him, clicked my tongue, flicked the reins. He held his stare for a quick beat, just long enough to let me know that he was only trotting because he felt like it, then began to move.
The ride south from Feravael was the same route I had taken two days ago with my company, through the winding streets and past the market stalls and out through the city gates.
The morning traffic was lighter, the road less crowded, and without Thyren, Vaelith, and Ilyndra providing conversation, there was nothing to distract me from Pip in my lap.
He shifted. It was a small movement, an adjustment of weight, the kind of thing any rider did in a saddle. But Pip was not a rider. Pip was a dancer, and his body moved with a dancer’s awareness, and the shift pressed his backside directly and firmly against my cock.
I kept my eyes on the road.
“This is beautiful,” Pip said, seemingly unaware of what he was doing to me.
He was looking at the countryside, the rolling green hills of Clovermere spreading out on either side of the road, the wildflowers, the improbably blue sky.
“It looks like a movie set. Like someone said ‘design a place that’s too pretty to be real’ and then just went for it. ”
“It’s Clovermere,” I said. “Nothing special.”
He turned to look at me, and the motion twisted his body in the saddle, and his hip ground against me in a way that sent a pulse of something directly from the base of my spine to the part of my brain that was supposed to be making smart decisions.
“Maybe you’ve looked at it so long you can’t see it anymore? ”
The question was unexpectedly perceptive, and I did not have a good answer for it, so I said, “Watch the road.”
“You’re watching the road. I’m watching everything else.”
Bram’s canter was smooth, but even a smooth canter had a rhythm, and that rhythm translated directly into the repeated pressing of Pip’s cute little ass against my groin. Every time the saddle rose and fell, Pip rose and fell with it, and the friction was—