14
IAHIR NEARLY CHOKED on the bread he was eating. There had been bread in the stores at Gathren’s house, loaves of it, and they had taken it all, for it would surely go bad on its own. Even now, they must check it carefully for mold or rot.
This piece was fine, if a bit hard, he had to admit. Dunking it in tea, however, for they had boiled water from a nearby stream and made tea, made the bread softer.
“What did you just say, warrioress?” he said.
“I said, perhaps we should just engage in amorous congress after all,” she said.
“That’s what I thought you said,” he muttered, and put another piece of hard bread in his mouth. He chewed and stared at her.
“I thought you’d be more pleased,” she said.
He swallowed. “I think this is some kind of trap,” he said. “Because, this very morning, I seem to remember your saying that I would never get between your thighs.”
“That was last night,” she said.
“Whatever the case,” he said. “I find it hard to believe you have changed your mind so quickly.”
“Well, I have been thinking it over, and it would probably speed everything along,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
She hunched up her shoulders on the other side of the fire, looking embarrassed and reticent to speak.
He waited.
Finally, she said, “You already must think wretched things about me, I suppose, that I am quite, quite weak-willed and ridiculous. But if I tell you this, you will likely lord it over me and make jokes at my expense and be very horrid. I suppose I want that, actually, because it will make it go so much more quickly. However, I am having trouble exposing myself to it, I find.”
“I am not that sort of man,” he said. “When have you observed me mocking others’ weaknesses, making them feel small?”
“Often,” she said. “You are always and forever teasing me.”
“Teasing is good-natured, it is not cruel,” he said.
“So, that is your excuse.”
He ate more bread. He failed to see how any of this was connected.
“All right, here it is,” she said. “I seem to have sort of fallen in love with you, my lord.”
He nearly choked again. He coughed, pounding his chest.
“I know, I know,” she said. “I am always and forever falling in love with men I should not fall in love with. I seem to be unable to stop myself. And you, of course, have sworn off the entire idea of love—”
“You do not love me,” he said, between coughs. He drank some tea.
“I do,” she said. “And, of course, you think of me like a conquest, as we were saying before, the way men think of women. You will bed me and then tire of me.”
He regarded her. He had never admitted to a woman that he was going to tire of her before. He did not think he should. He should likely have never said whatever it was that he had said to her in the first place to her. He drank more tea.
“So, the sooner that happens, the sooner I will feel betrayed by you and come to hate you instead of love you, and then the whole process will be over,” she said.
“On the other hand, if I drag all this out, and I refuse to let you bed me, it will mean that you will try all the harder, and you will get more and more obsessed with it all, and it would be better if I simply gave in. That would speed things along.”
He scratched his chin. He needed to shave.
Like many Valaedor elves, his whiskers were sparse and did not grow quickly, but they were growing.
He really despised shaving himself, however.
He preferred his manservant to do it, who was ever so much better at it than he himself was.
“I suppose there’s some sense in what you’re saying,” he said.
“But I don’t think… I don’t want to bed you if you’re only letting me do it so that I’ll lose interest in you. ”
“Why not?”
He was not sure. “It seems… it’s not…”
“You are going to lose interest.”
“I suppose,” he said. “But admitting it from the outset, it seems to take a great deal of the fun out of it.”
“It would be a favor to me,” she said. “Because I do not wish to be in love with you.”
“You aren’t,” he said. “If you were, you wouldn’t want me to lose interest in you!”
“Obviously, I don’t want you to lose interest in me,” she snapped.
“Obviously, I’ve been spending the last however many days, Haem only knows, weeks even, contemplating how to make a man like you fall in love with me, which will never happen, so…
” She huffed and took a large bite of hard bread. She chewed.
He looked at her across the fire. The flames were dancing on her face, on her features, her gray-green skin.
He was thinking about how she seemed so pretty and so strong at the same time, how he liked how exaggerated all her female features were, how large her breasts and hips were, how much he wanted to undo her braid and spread out her hair over her shoulders, over the tips of her ample breasts.
His mouth was dry. “Not here, warrioress.”
“Not here?” she said.
“I want it someplace proper,” he said. “With a roof and a bed and blankets and the like. I’m not having you on the ground under those horse blankets we washed out this morning.”
“Oh, so I’m not good enough for you now?”
“The opposite,” he said. “I want an environment worthy of it. We’ve… it’s been… I’ve wanted it for so long that I want to do it justice. And you deserve that as well. You deserve comfort, not the cold ground at your back and my prodding at you. I can do better than this, warrioress.”
Her nostrils flared. “That’s an odd answer, my lord.”
“What if I…?” He leaned forward. “Attend to me, you are different than any woman I’ve ever met—”
“Which is why you want to fuck me,” she said.
“Yes, but also… I like being around you,” he said. “What if I was in love with you, too?”
“You’re not!”
“Well, I’ve never really been in love, I don’t think,” he said. “I might not really be aware of what it feels like, but I…” He lifted both of his shoulders. “I have been rather following you around, have I not?”
She got up and glared down at him. “What is wrong with you, truly? Why must you be so very, very horrible, Iahir? You could not be in love with me.”
“I could,” he countered, standing up, gesturing with the crust of bread he had left. “You think I’m incapable of it?”
“By your own admission, everyone is incapable of it,” she said.
“Yes, but then you pointed it out, didn’t you?” he said. “That people do manage it, your ashreg and his wife, after all. And I have seen it, too. I have seen it even amongst the nobility. It is rare, but there are men and women who are devoted to each other.”
“Well, we cannot… there is no future between us,” she said.
He thought that through and realized how entirely right she was. He ran a hand through his hair. “Perhaps we don’t do it at all, then. I think it might only end up very painful in the end if we do.”
She gasped at him. “You are serious?”
He reached for her. Realized he was holding the crust of bread. Tossed it. Reached for her again.
She flinched from his touch.
He let out a noise of frustration. He picked up her braid instead. He ran his thumb and forefinger over it. “You could… I do keep women, of course, all sorts of women.”
“I’ll not be your whore,” she breathed.
“No,” he said. “No, you certainly would not.” He let go of her braid.
“You are not in love with me,” she said. “And after you fuck me, you’ll see that. It is because I resisted you for too long, that is all. Once you have had me, you’ll get bored, as you say. You say all men get bored.”
He let out a breath. “Let’s focus on finding your mother. I’m certainly not doing it now.”
“I think I could convince you,” she said, coming closer, putting her hand on his crotch.
He stopped her. “Warrioress.” Perhaps he was mad, because his cock did twitch, and he was tempted, but…
She jerked her hand back. “Truly?”
He did not know what to say for himself.
He felt stupid and strange and… and deep down, sort of frightened of losing her.
He would rather have her company than her cunt, as strange as that sounded.
“Not here,” he finally settled on. “And after we find your mother, of course, we shall be occupied, and… and… perhaps we leave this discussion, truly, and try not to dwell on it.”
She gave him an odd look, a rather terrified look, and she sat back down in front of the fire and began stuffing bread into her mouth and chewing.
GATHREN WAS A bit worried that he meant it.
She did not think he was really in love with her, but she began to worry that perhaps he really thought he was in love with her.
It might seem as if there was no distinction between such things, but what Gathren meant by it was that she knew he would never treat her the way she wanted to be treated, regardless of how in love with her he thought that he was. Of this, she was certain.
However, the fact that he had declined to go to bed with her, this was troubling.
And then he was different with her afterward.
That evening, he was quiet and solicitous towards her as they ate the food they’d brought from her home. He kept staring at her, however, staring at her as if he had never seen her before or something like that, as if she was this curious oddity that he wanted to make sense of.
The next day, they rode in utter silence, and she looked up and found him staring at her again, in much the same fashion, all through the morning and all into the afternoon. They stopped to rest the horses at midday, but he was mostly quiet throughout all of that, doing little but looking at her.
That evening, feeling more than a little out of sorts about it, she decided to try to engage him on the topic of dragons.
He did speak of them, but he did not look at her when he did so. He gazed off into the distance or into the fire or down at his own open palm.
“When I was a boy, I had a theory that they did not take the captives because they wished to harm them, but because they were lonely,” he said. “They almost never took small boys as captives, which was quite a pity, because I desperately wanted to be taken away by a dragon back then.”