16 #2
He bowed his head, rubbing the back of his neck, strands of his hair falling down, obscuring anything she could see of his face. “No, it wasn’t them.”
“Then who?”
He didn’t answer.
She stepped closer to him. “Me?”
He lifted his gaze, still clutching the back of his neck. He rubbed it, thoughtful. “We just had it wrong, Aerhril. We had everything wrong.”
She drew back. She did not like this new and subdued Dathor, all the fire in him extinguished. She didn’t like him at all.
SHE GOT TO go home to see her family for her seventeenth birthday, and it was all very grim. The house was practically empty, and there were only two servants who remained. She gathered that they stayed primarily because they had nowhere else to go. They weren’t getting paid anymore.
Her father and mother were so glad that she was going to marry Celedin. They went on and on about how it was a blessing in disguise when she’d been taken as a ward, that it had been the salvation of everyone.
They hinted that perhaps she could convince the steward to let them come there, and she was horrified at the thought of that, because she could not imagine what the steward and Celedin might do to her entire family if they had them all there to torment.
Raclahad was eight years old, the same age Aerhril had been when she had been sent to the north. Raclahad seemed so young and such a weakling. She sobbed often, and maybe Aerhril should have been more sympathetic, but she wasn’t.
She was angry.
She felt as if everyone she had ever depended upon had let her down.
When she got off the train back in the north, Celedin was waiting for her along with her companion, an elf woman named Flaihir. She was a spinster, aged eight and twenty, who was the daughter of a barlin from further north. She had been with them for only about four months.
“Oh, your train was late,” she said. “Mine was early, and I sat here thinking no one had come to fetch me after all. Then finally, someone arrived and I was so relieved.”
“But we’ve been waiting nearly forty minutes for your train,” said Celedin, looking her over. “I have to say I started to wonder if perhaps we’d have to leave and I wondered what you would do if you arrived in the midst of the night, all alone.”
“Horrid!” said Flaihir. “Whatever the case, we must collect your trunk and be on our way, I think, and—”
“Would you sit here and sob?” said Celedin, leering at her. “I think you would. I remember the way you cry, little yellow pale thing.”
Aerhril did not react to this but Flaihir was all astonishment.
The next day, as they settled down for their lesson—they were learning about the ins and outs of throwing a dinner party, and today was focusing on the way to seat people to ensure good conversation—Flaihir said to her as she opened the book they were using, an elvish book of manners, “Is your future husband that way with you often?”
“What way?” said Aerhril, truly confused.
“His voice was so ugly,” said Flaihir. “And the way he looked at you, my lady, it was as if he despised you.” She was already called my lady, even though she was not yet the stewardess, because she was engaged to be married, and it was a courtesy given to her during the engagement period.
“You seemed not to register it, which tells me it is often that way with him.”
Aerhril lifted a shoulder. “Oh, it’s nothing. We were children together, as you know. You know the way children can call each other names.”
“Perhaps,” said Flaihir, “when they are children. He is grown or nearly. He should not be treating you that way.”
Aerhril did not know what to say to that.
Flaihir looked into the pages of her book. “If you tell anyone that I said this to you, I will deny having said it, do you understand?”
Aerhril’s eyes widened. “What?”
“I think your best course of action is to be so charming at the local dances that you snag the eye of some other elf lord.”
“But I am already engaged, and anyone who wished to marry me would have to pay Celedin a bride price to break our engagement.”
“Oh, that would excite the right sort of man,” Flaihir said.
“There are men out there who would be eager for you. You must choose wisely. Someone a bit older, I think, someone who would be flattered by your attentions, someone who would regard you as a prize. If you wish it, we can switch our strategy entirely to the art of successful flirtation with the intent to snag a man.”
“That’s something that can be studied?”
Flaihir smirked. “But of course.”
“Then… why…?” Aerhril shut her eyes, shaking her head. “Oh, apologies, that was rude.”
Flaihir looked confused for a moment and then the corners of her mouth tugged up in a tight smile. “You mean, if it’s something that can be studied and learned, then why did I not find myself a husband? You mean, you would rather not learn from someone who could not manage it herself?”
“It was rude,” said Aerhril. “Truthfully what I mean is that it is impossible to control others in that way. If a man wants you, he wants you, but he cannot be made to want you if he does not want you. I don’t think it’s possible.”
“I am not saying that you can engineer true and lasting love,” said Flaihir.
“But obsession? Brief and intense desire? Make him unable to think of anything besides you long enough to make sure that he does anything and everything to have you, including taking you from Celedin? That I think we have a better chance of achieving. Do you wish to learn? Perhaps you are happy enough with this match you have made.”
“I want him to be very, very rich,” said Aerhril fiercely. “I want to be taken away from this dirty place to somewhere civilized.”
Flaihir smirked. “You are a little southern snob in the end, are you not?”
Aerhril tucked down her head, ashamed of herself.
“No, no, of course you want a rich man,” said Flaihir, closing her book.
“All right, here is the first lesson. Men want to feel necessary. They want to feel as if you need them and you’d be lost without them.
This is why so many women pretend to be helpless around men and why it works so very well. ”
“Pretend to be helpless,” murmured Aerhril, getting out a piece of paper and beginning to take notes. “Got it. Next?”
“No, no,” said Flaihir. “I am not advising you to pretend to be helpless. That’s not going to make a man fight for you. It will flatter him in the short term, but he needs to also feel as if you are worthy of him, that he earns you.”
“Be helpless and aloof?”
Flaihir laughed. “No, no, better. We get to know whoever the man is who we want to target and we find out what it is that he’s good at, and then we manufacture a need for his best and most important talent, so that he feels as if he’s rescuing you by doing something he would do for fun.”
Aerhril nodded slowly. “I see. That’s… that’s very good, Flaihir.” She paused. “How is it that you do not come to have a husband?”
Flaihir shrugged. “I’m ruined, of course.”
Aerhril’s eyes widened.
“Well, don’t tell anyone,” said Flaihir.
“My father did a great deal of work to conceal that fact, and the man who did the ruining was dueled to death. After he died, I was devastated. I did not think I would ever wish to marry anyone. I assumed a life like this was all I could have. But my father had covered it up, and if I had been less eager to move on, to have certainty about the future, if I had waited a year or two, I think my father would not have worried about the idea of it, would not have insisted I be punished for my dalliance.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Aerhril. “That all sounds very awful.”
Flaihir considered. “At the time it was. It was a very long time ago now, though. I have become used to this life instead, and I rather like it. I have more freedom than I ever would have as a wife.”
“Did you use these skills to attract this man?”
“All the women in my family are schooled in these skills. Yes, we all use the arts to secure a husband,” she said.
“But I have to say, if I had not been so good at entangling him, perhaps he would not have been so intent on ruining me. Perhaps he would not have felt so hopeless and out of control that he agreed to duel. Such things can make a man desperate for you, you see.”
Did Aerhril want a man desperate for her? Shamefully, she thought she did. But she did not want a man to get killed for his trouble, she did not think. He’d be no good to her otherwise.
THAT NIGHT, SHE lay awake thinking about Dathor, thinking about what it was that he was good at that she could also have need of.
She thought of his strength and his skills doing all of the chores at the keep.
But she did not think this was the sort of thing that she would use if she were attempting to use this strategy against Dathor.
Wait. Against?
She wasn’t using this against anyone. She would be using it on Dathor, she supposed, but she wasn’t against him.
What was he good at doing that he also enjoyed doing? She wondered, and she couldn’t think of anything.
It had been over a year since they had run away together, a year during which they had seen very little of each other.
She sat out in the sun sometimes, and then she would see him doing his chores, and she might have watched him overly carefully, and he might have looked up and seen her watching him, but this was really all that passed for communication between them these days.
She thought about him too much and watched him too much and still spent time at night with her fingers between her own thighs thinking about him.
Sometimes, she tried pressing her fingers inside herself, but it was hard to do from the place where she could reach and it didn’t feel like much of anything.
But she liked to imagine his big, thick orc cock prodding its way into her, liked to imagine that a lot.
She liked to imagine running her hands all over his bare chest, over the scars on his back, over the muscles on his arms.