Chapter 17 #2
Not a bath, though it appeared as one; I thought, deep down, it was so the Fae could study whatever they put in the water that once filled it.
Like humans. Perhaps they watched them drown, and learned we could not breathe without air; perhaps something worse than water had filled this. I looked up at an intestinal nest of chthonium pipes emerging from the ceiling above it.
Or maybe, I thought, snorting to myself, I was overthinking this and it was indeed just a bath.
A Fae had once lived here, and kept his or her laboratory downstairs.
Except there was something so cold and dispassionate about it, so clinical, that I thought my own efforts to humanize it were entirely wrong.
It was not a bath…but it could be, with a little enterprising study.
I circled the tub, finding a black panel on the far side. More of those faint impressions were set in it, but no words I could read. I brushed the first one with my fingertip, and a long, wheezing gurgle echoed from one of the pipes overhead.
Just as I was backing up, with a wheeze and a sputter, water flowed from one of the pipes.
I watched it slowly fill the bottom, and finally reached out to touch the flow. My skin didn’t burn or sting; it was nothing more than water, probably from the same flow beneath the port-window downstairs.
I touched the second button, and a subliminal humming vibration teased my ears. Within moments, the water pouring from overhead was steaming.
I scowled at the control panel. “If you really are just a bath, I shall be terribly disappointed if I don’t get to take advantage of this at least once.”
As the clear water filled the tub, I was suddenly, itchily aware of just how filthy I felt from head to toe. A dunk in the icy underground river did not qualify as a wash by any means. And once I’d bathed, I could rinse that milky blood from Talos before it gunked up his gears…
But I was still wary of the tub. I touched the third button, and the pipe abruptly cut off the water flow, just as a small hole opened in the bottom of the bowl and the water started draining.
I was still tapping buttons, discovering that touching it again merely closed the hole and I could press both hot and cold to adjust the temperature, when a breath touched the back of my neck and I nearly jumped out of my own skin.
“Wroth!” I gasped, spinning around and leaning on the tub. He chuckled, eyes gleaming with satisfaction. “How long have you been there?”
“Long enough to come up with some ideas,” he said, giving me what could only be called a leer.
“Good.” And, as though I had simply needed his permission to do what had been lurking in the back of my mind from the moment I set eyes on the tub, I started unbuckling my belt. “But…”
His blue eyes gleamed. “Talos is guarding the door downstairs. We have this room all to ourselves.”
I dropped my pack, retrieved a bar of soap from the very bottom, where it was starting to crumble within its wrappings, and dropped my belt, sword, and pistol on the pack. “Take everything off. Now.”
“Yes, my lady.” Wroth reached around me, unbuttoning my shirt. His fingers brushed my collarbones, glided over the curves of my breasts, and he slipped the shirt down my arms. I shivered at the sensation of his warm lips moving over my bare shoulder, up to the sensitive spot just beneath my ear.
My hands slid behind my back, finding his belt and unbuckling it swiftly. There was a clatter of runes and bones as it dropped to the floor, and then Wroth’s hands slipped down over my belly, unlacing my breeches and smoothly tugging them over my hips.
We shed our boots and breeches in a frenzy of flying clothes, and I paused just long enough to lay my spectacles and watch with the weapons and grab the soap. Wroth easily jumped in over the high side, letting out a groan of happiness at the heat of the water.
“Get over here, you,” he growled, leaning over to pick me up around the waist and lift me over the edge.
I sucked in a breath as my legs slipped in. After being surrounded by cold for so long, the heat itself was painful.
Wroth ducked down, shaking himself underwater, and rose up, dripping all over me as he parted my thighs and leaned against me. His thick, blunt cock was already aching hard, but he ran his hands up my thighs, squeezing my aching muscles. “Slowly, lover.”
I unbraided my hair, shaking it out over my back, and let him lift me into the water. Slowly I adjusted, the ice melting from my bones, exhaling in relief as he took me in his arms. He held me as I floated, dunking my hair, letting the heat soak in and wash away the icy tension.
I settled back against his chest, the water lapping at my clavicles, and pushed my fingers through my hair with a sigh.
“It feels wrong to be relaxed in a place like this,” I murmured, staring up at the empty, staring eyes of the pipes overhead. “Do you know what this is? Have you seen one before?”
Wroth grumbled a little, his arm tightening around my waist. “It’s better, perhaps, if you don’t ask those questions.”
And that settled that. This was not a bath.
I tried not to picture human bodies reduced to soup in this very cauldron, and it was strangely easier than I’d expected, because my muscles were releasing tension in the hot water, and this quiet moment gave me time to consider that the last several days felt like ten years.
Ten years of fear, and every ache, every bruise, was magnified a thousand-fold, but when one was in constant terror, you had to push those aches to the background until you simply didn’t notice them anymore. The human mind was nothing if not adaptable.
Wroth ran his hands over my body, slowly, reverently, until he gripped my shoulders and began to massage them. I couldn’t hold back the moan that slipped out, sucking in a breath as my sore muscles screamed, melting like butter under his hands.
By the Lady, I truly was a pillow-soft noblewoman, if a few days of hardship could reduce me to this. And of course, in this state of bliss, my mouth moved without any conscious thought.
“Do you think—” I started to say, abruptly cutting myself off. I did not need to ask Wroth personal questions. We were for each other in the dark, and it did neither of us any good to pretend we wouldn’t be returning to the light, where we were nothing. “Never mind. Sorry.”
“You started it, now finish it,” he rumbled in my ear, settling back and pulling me tight against him so I could feel the smooth length of his cock between my legs. The knot at his base was already swelling with need, but he kept his hands where they were.
I sighed. “It’s nothing, really. You can just keep doing whatever you’re doing with your hands…”
Wroth’s hand, perched on my knotted shoulder, did nothing.
“Damn, you drive a hard bargain. Very well. I was going to ask…”
He began to gently massage me.
“Do you think I’m soft?”
His hand stopped again. Wroth leaned forward, craning his head so he could peer directly into my face.
A hot flush rose in my cheeks. “As in, pampered. Pathetic. Unable to handle this.”
His narrow pupils expanded to oblong ovals, but he said nothing.
“How long have we been under here? A few days? And I’m converting what was likely a torture device into a bathtub because I’m sore.
” I shook my head. “Rasmus was down here for months. Your people lived here for centuries. I’ve been here less than a week and I’m tired and sore and sick to death of gruel.
I’m whining about gruel and floating in a hot bath… while everyone from Lonmire is dead.”
Wroth flipped me over with ease, so I floated with my breasts squashed to his broad chest, and he hooked a leg around mine to hold them down in the heat. I wrapped my arms around his neck, staring at the snowy white down covering his shoulders, too ashamed to look him in the eye.
He was quiet for a long time.
“What are you getting out of this expedition?” he finally asked. I felt his voice echo through his chest and into mine, the words filling me. “Why did you come?”
“I came to find them. And…I came for the Fae Artifice,” I whispered, blinking back a prickling sensation in my eyes. “So we can add greed to my list of flaws.”
“But the moment you knew you wanted to come with us,” he insisted. “When we were looking through the village. Why did you decide you had to come?”
I finally looked up at him, my mind on those terrible moments of greed, when I had cupped the black lungs that had dispersed Rasmus’s alchemy and erased the minds of two hundred people so they could be led to an orchard that grew in the dark.
“You said they were your people,” he reminded me. “You promised the children you would find them.”
“And deep in my heart, I wanted the ancient Artifice, too.”
“‘Too’,” he mocked gently. “You did not cross the Iselaine Blind because you wanted the Artifice. You did not ride all through the day and night and shout in the face of a fiend because of greed. You did it because you promised the children you would find their people.”
The prickling in my eyes had become a burning. I hadn’t known about the Artifice then, it was true…but it didn’t change the hot avarice that had risen in me when I beheld it.
“As for pathetic,” Wroth snorted, “Again I ask, what are you getting out of this? Ah, yes, I remember. You have paid a year of servitude to me, to make anything I ask of you. And yet, the knights downstairs are having gold poured into their open hands. Whatever they ask, within reason, I agreed to give them if they survive. But not you. No, you had to come look for your people so badly, you are paying me for the privilege of being terrified, hurt, and exhausted.”
Yes…and I would have the lovely privilege of watching Esteri lai Auvray prepare for their wedding, unless I could convince Wroth to let me make his Artifice well away from Owlhorn.
I should’ve called his bluff and demanded a pile of gold.