26
IAHIR WANTED TO be proficient at pleasing her.
He wanted to know what he was doing, and he wanted to be able to do it whenever she needed it.
But he also wanted to play hide and seek with her nipples and her long, long hair, which was wavy when it was released from the braid, and he found her bewitching with her hair down, so bewitching that he might have fallen into enjoying the look of her more than finding ways to please her.
But came against his leg just like she usually did, and when he slipped into her, she was wet and she clamped her slippery walls around him and breathed his name over and over again as they moved together.
He didn’t last very long. They fell asleep entwined, his release sticky between them, and they were both exhausted.
He thought it was as much because of the emotional toll all of this had taken on them as from the long journey they had been on.
And in the morning, he had to leave her again. He wrote her a note, saying that he hoped he would not be gone too long, but he had a feeling he might be.
Upon leaving, the first thing he did was have ice delivered.
The second thing he did was to go to the kitchens at the keep and have someone take food to her doorstep.
The third thing he did was to go all the way to the top of the tower to light the flame there.
The fourth was to find out where the servant had gone who was supposed to see to the flame.
“People are leaving all the time, my lord,” said the servant who he found.
“No one quite knows what becomes of them, but they are going. It’s safer in the country, they are saying.
The orcs are coming for the other cities soon, they say.
If your family had any sense, they would go to one of their country houses, they say. ”
He hadn’t thought of that. They actually didn’t have a number of country houses, but there was one house in the country.
They went there sometimes in the summer, because the crush of Cirlahir in the summer could be too much for his mother.
They could never stay long, because his father could not bear to be parted from his laboratory.
His father would leave the country first, and then, weeks later, would send for his wife, because he could not bear to be parted from her either.
He and Gathren could perhaps go there, he thought.
Ah, but then he would have to leave here. He wanted to leave here, of course. He hated it here. But he’d also known that he had to come back. Some shred of honor he still had buried within him, perhaps, some sense of responsibility.
This was his family, and of them, he was the only one with any capacity to handle the world changing in this way.
And it was all his own fault. He’d sentenced himself to this.
Iahir tasked the servant he’d spoken to with seeing to the flame, and the servant had bobbed his head and said, “Yes, my lord,” but Iahir was fairly certain that servant wasn’t going to see to the flame.
Iahir supposed he couldn’t fault him. After all, it was a lot of work, and it required waking oneself at intervals all night to make sure the flame was lit.
After that, he left the tower, gathered himself, and decided he might as well just get right down to it. He could wait for his father to surface from the laboratory, which could take days, or he could go there himself.
Maybe he wanted his father to rage at him and throw him out of Cirlahir. Maybe that was exactly what he wanted, because then he could wash his hands of all of this, say he had tried but been foiled. Then, he and Gathren could go off together and… what?
What would he do with Gathren?
Well, fuck her a lot more often, for one thing. Spend a lot more time with my mouth on her nipples.
But finding places where they could comfortably do that sort of thing was increasingly difficult, he had to admit. No one wanted an orc and an elf together. He found himself wondering about that Dathor orc and his little slip of an elf thing. They had gone north. Should they go north?
The laboratory stretched over an entire floor of the castle here. It was not at the very bottom, for the very bottom was the dungeons, rooms that were damp because the tide came in and sometimes drowned the prisoners kept there—not that they kept anyone in the dungeons anymore.
No, no, if someone was being punished like that, they were entirely disposable. They should do some good for the world by being put in the laboratory.
His father went through various phases. Sometimes, he was convinced that what afflicted his mother was caused by something external, and he spent a great deal of time administering external things to people in the laboratory to see if he could create the same effects on them and thereby know what the source of the problem was and then cure it.
But this had not worked out, in the end, though his father had never quite let go of the idea. No matter how many things he tried, there were always other things to try. Perhaps it was from drinking too much seawater. Perhaps it was from contact with horse dung. Perhaps it came from flies.
Some of the things that his father did to people had really horrific effects.
Iahir remembered being down in the laboratory sometimes, as a small boy, because his father could not be bothered to leave the place to speak to him, and the sights of the swollen, diseased, mangled bodies that would be on gurneys and tied to walls and lying motionless on the floor.
The truth was that his father killed a lot of people.
Not on purpose, Iahir supposed, but that was almost worse, because his father simply didn’t care if they died. They were worth nothing to him. They were used by his father, used to try to cure his mother and his brother, and that was all that his father cared about.
The other phases were sometimes less deadly but worse in other ways.
His father had eventually decided it was a mental malady, that it did not come from an outside source, but that, instead, it came from within.
So, this meant that his father needed to introduce something into his wife’s body that would cure the problem.
And to see what would happen, he would first experiment on other people.
It might be as simple as having them take various tonics. If these were well tolerated, his father might even give them to his wife or to his son.
But Iahir’s father also did various awful surgeries sometimes, opening people up and trying to graft various foreign elements onto their organs. These were almost always failures. Gruesome, gory failures. Often, people bled out on his father’s surgeon table.
Iahir remembered the laboratory as a nightmarish place of screams and blood and doom. He did not like it there.
But he went.
The laboratory was vast. It was all open, no demarcations of rooms, just cots and gurneys that lined the walls.
Most of them were empty when Iahir got there.
His father could be anywhere. He had a cart on wheels that he pushed around the place, and he would have all of his pertinent tools arrayed on that cart, so that he could take his work anywhere.
Iahir started walking. The windows here had all been covered on the inside, covered with boards, and Iahir supposed this was so people could not see in, but it meant that it was very gloomy, the only lights from oil lamps and candles.
(His father had not agreed to have the castle outfitted with the new gas lamps, though the castle in Renegahan had been.)
He found his father’s cart, with a number of bottles sitting on it, but his father was nowhere in sight. Iahir turned a corner, ready to call for his father.
And there the man was, at one of the windows, pulling the wood that had been nailed up to cover it away to peer outside.
The light lit up a long line of white against the older elf’s face.
His hair was a pale orange color, something neither of his sons had inherited, taking after their mother instead.
Iahir should say something. He didn’t. He stood and looked at his father, looked at the light illuminating lines on the man’s face, and he was still and silent.
Eventually, his father turned away, saw him, started, and then barked out a laugh, putting a hand to his chest. “Iahir, you can’t sneak up on a man like that!” Another laugh. “You’re home.” His father looked him up and down. “Well, then, let’s go upstairs for a proper chat, I suppose.”
Iahir raised his eyebrows, surprised by that.
He did not think his father had ever once voluntarily left his laboratory for him.
Iahir did not think he registered to his father in that way.
Only when necessary had his father taken time from his experiments to see to his son, and this had usually been because Iahir had done something wrong.
He’d done a lot of things wrong, really, all manner of mischievous things as he grew.
Mostly, his father had ignored those things, but occasionally—if Iahir wrecked an expensive sailing boat or if it was rumored he’d gotten some envivtain’s daughter with child (he had not, never touched the girl)—his father might leave the laboratory to set things to rights.
“Come along,” said his father, going over to retrieve his cart, which he pushed around until he came to the foot of the stairs upwards. Then, without seeing if Iahir was following, he left the cart and began to ascend the stairs.
But Iahir did follow. He was happy enough to leave the laboratory behind. “Is there no one down there?”
“I let some of them go myself,” his father said, “but the rest seem to have been set free by some of the rogue servants. You may have noticed we are bleeding servants currently? But then, I suppose this is all your doing.”
Iahir stopped on the steps, his heart squeezing nearly painfully.