5. Clash of Stone and Steel
Clash of Stone and Steel
Several Minutes Earlier Talyn
Talyn strode down the hall toward her quarters in the servants’ wing as quickly as she could with the message leaf clutched tightly in her hand. Thank the Protector she had quick reflexes and was able to snatch the message out of the air to port away with it before anyone saw her.
Well, she suspected Samhail might’ve seen movement out of the corner of his eye in the training yard where she’d been watching him, but no one had raised an alarm yet.
Not that she’d be safe much longer if Sandrian was so careless as to send her another message in the middle of the day where anyone might see her receive it.
Gods above, what if she’d been with Cyra when the leaf had come in?
The leaves were expensive, not the kind of magical object a normal person would have around, and she would’ve been at a loss to explain to Cyra or anyone else why someone was sending her one.
On the other hand, she’d been expecting this message for days now and was eager to see what it said. She was ready for this job to be over, so she hoped the leaf contained either orders to abort her mission or the go-ahead to kill the Lord and Lady of Hiraeth.
Talyn’s hand was on the door to her bedroom when the stone on the bracelet she wore suddenly glowed green, and she swore under her breath. She thought Cyra had gone to lunch, but apparently the lady wanted a bath before eating, and Talyn – or Leeda, as Cyra knew her – was being summoned to help.
Talyn tapped the stone to indicate she was aware of the summons and was on her way, but she went into her bedroom first to stash the message.
She pulled the curtains on her window, lit the lamp near her bed, and sat down on the mattress.
She quickly unfolded the message leaf and read the three-word note.
She stared at the words, letting them sink in, then folded the paper and slipped it into her pillowcase on the underside of her pillow before heading out of her room and up to Cyra’s quarters on the fourth floor.
Cyra was already undressed and in her robe when Talyn entered the master chamber a few minutes later. A tray of food with enough for two people sat on one of the tables, but the lord was nowhere to be seen.
Talyn groaned inwardly. Cyra was self-sufficient, and the tray for two confirmed what Talyn had suspected. The lady didn’t want help with her bath. She wanted company.
“Leeda, did you have lunch yet?” Cyra asked. She gestured to the tray. “I didn’t want you to go hungry while you helped me with my bath.”
Talyn surveyed the tray of sandwiches, fruit, cakes, and a bottle of wine. She didn’t want to encourage Cyra, but she was hungry, and she likely wouldn’t get a chance to eat if Cyra kept her here, so she took a plate and added a few items.
“Thank you, my lady.”
Cyra had befriended her former lady’s maid, Raina, but Raina lived in Polaris now after the attempted coup a few months ago.
The woman was the illegitimate child of the late Lord Ursan, and she’d begun training as the potential heir apparent for Polaris’s Triumvirate seat. Quite a step up, to say the least.
Cyra clearly missed her friend, and she’d been trying to establish a relationship with Talyn ever since they’d met.
Cyra still saw Raina on occasion, but the women’s respective duties kept them away from each other often.
Talyn, on the other hand, was always at Cyra’s beck and call, always just a summons away when the lady felt lonely.
“How’s your day been?” Cyra asked, and Talyn stiffened.
She tried to avoid answering questions whenever possible because Cyra had truth seeing abilities, and it was difficult to carefully word her answers so she wasn’t outright lying. This question was innocent enough, but it would only lead to more.
“It’s been fairly productive,” Talyn said. “How has yours been, my lady? You seem to be in better spirits today.”
It was no secret in the house that Cyra’s father Aramis had been killed a few days ago when he’d accompanied the lord and lady on some business they had, but for once the servants were short on the details of how or why he’d been killed.
Only Talyn herself knew Aramis had died confronting Sandrian and a small group of his forces in an abandoned temple on the outskirts of Rowe.
She knew this because Aramis’s death was due to information she herself had passed to Sandrian.
The healer was an innocent man who hadn’t deserved to die, and his death weighed heavily on Talyn, as did the grief Cyra now carried. The people Talyn killed usually deserved it to some degree, and she wasn’t used to feeling guilt over someone’s death.
Cyra gave Talyn a small smile. “I received some good news today. The deal to buy that vineyard outside of Solandis went through. I’m officially a vineyard owner again.”
“Congratulations, my lady. That’s wonderful,” she said truthfully.
Despite herself, Talyn didn’t mind Cyra, and she was happy the news of the vineyard had cheered the lady up.
Talyn’s work didn’t really allow her to make friends, something she’d resigned herself to a long time ago. Cyra didn’t even know her real name, nor had she ever seen Talyn’s real face – no one had – and that kind of deception wasn’t conducive to friendship.
Most of the forms and faces Talyn took nowadays were female.
She could only stretch herself so wide or tall, although her natural height gave her a few more options in her shifting.
Other shapeshifters might be able to push themselves further, but even with Talyn’s own limits, the possibilities were still endless.
She could make herself taller or shorter by several inches either way.
She could narrow her hips or plump her breasts if she thought the situation called for it, but she’d found that holding a shape with larger breasts – her own real ones were decently large – for too long made her back hurt for several hours after she returned to normal.
As a child she’d transformed into little boys on occasion because their body size and proportions weren’t that different from little girls at that age, but she stopped doing so as she grew up and her body became that of a woman and changed in ways beyond her control.
There’d been a time her body had grown so rapidly that she would shift back to her true form only to find it now looked different, her breasts a bit larger, her formerly slender, gangly legs now more shapely.
She’d been about fourteen when she changed into a male again for the first time since childhood, and the feel of the foreign appendage between her legs had taken her by surprise.
She hadn’t bothered to make that change to her body when she was a child, hadn’t even known the thing was there at the time, but there it was now.
Still, the notion of what she could do with a cock didn’t occur to her until she was nineteen.
She’d needed to infiltrate the house of a man who liked young, effeminate men, so she’d taken the form of his favorite servant after the boy had gone to bed for the night.
She’d been shocked to feel the dick between her legs start to harden after she’d killed her target, and an idea was born.
She’d gone straight to the nearest brothel when she was done with her job, intent on trying out the cock.
She sat in the lounge of the place for almost half an hour, watching the prostitutes work the room.
The women there weren’t as skilled at seduction as the courtesans in the pleasure house where her mother worked, but she’d finally caught the gaze of one she thought was pretty, and the woman had serpentined her way across the room to ease down onto Talyn’s lap.
Talyn’s eyes had rolled back in her head as the woman ground her ass against her cock, and she’d nearly thrown the girl onto the floor in her haste to rise and get to one of the private rooms.
She’d been sure she was doing the prostitute a favor. She was, after all, a woman herself, so she knew what a woman felt during sex and thus what they wanted. She’d had grand visions of satisfying the prostitute so thoroughly the woman might even refuse payment for her services.
In reality, the sex had been quick and awkward. The male body Talyn wore was too unfamiliar, the movements too foreign from the man’s side to be in any way satisfying for the woman who nevertheless grunted and moaned beneath Talyn in a poor imitation of pleasure.
It occurred to Talyn later that letting the prostitute be on top might’ve helped, but she’d been too excited by the prospect of getting the full male experience to consider it at the time.
Talyn had dropped a few coins into the woman’s hand afterward, thanked her, and left hurriedly to go find a safe place to change back into a form she understood better.
She’d changed into a male a few times after that, but she’d learned her lesson and hadn’t attempted sex as a man again since.
As a rule, Talyn wasn’t usually aroused by women, but she could appreciate Cyra’s beauty nonetheless as she helped the lady disrobe.
She’d done her best to keep Cyra at arm’s length during her time here. Figuratively speaking at least. She had to touch Cyra to attend her, and the consequence – as she’d seen today in the training yard – was that Cyra had unwittingly syphoned Talyn’s ability to port.
That’s how Talyn assumed Cyra had taken the power anyway.
The rumor among the servants was that the lady had only to touch someone to syphon their ability, and thus far Talyn had found the servants were generally correct in their information.
Talyn could only hope Cyra either hadn’t syphoned her masquing ability as well, or at the very least, didn’t know she had it.
“My lady, you have a bruise on your back,” Talyn pointed out as she helped Cyra down into the bathtub.
She used to think Cyra got the bruises from her husband, but she knew better now. She’d seen today exactly when Cyra had gotten the bruise in question.