Chapter 15 Glimmers in the Forge #2
While other recruits struggled with more physical tasks, Gessa approached the mare slowly, speaking in a low, soothing murmur. Her hands were gentle as she worked the brush through the mare’s tangled mane. The horse, sensing her calm, eventually quieted and leaned into her touch.
The rhythmic stroke of the brush brought a sudden pang of memory.
Shadow. She wondered where the brave gelding was now, if the stable master in Hillston had found him a home that understood his fire or merely a plow to break his spirit.
The guilt of selling him still lingered, a dull ache beneath her ribs, but as this young mare blew a soft, trusting breath against her neck, Gessa silently thanked him.
He had carried her to freedom; the least she could do was pay that kindness forward.
From across the stable, Hal, a senior recruit in his third year, who was treating a minor scrape on his own horse, watched her for a moment.
He offered a small, friendly smile. “You’ve got a way with them,” he said quietly.
“Most recruits come in here with all the grace of a falling rock. Ken doesn’t say much, but he notices that kind of thing. ”
Later, in the deep quiet of her own small room, the unrelenting heat seemed to press in from the stone walls.
Beyond her door, the corridor was silent save for the drone of night insects and the distant, muffled cough of another restless recruit in a nearby room.
Gessa lay on her cot, the thin sheet stuck to her skin, feeling trapped in the small, hot space.
It was in that sticky stillness that her memory sparked.
The satchel.
With a jolt, she sat up. The petition for dissolution. In the exhaustion following the long day, she’d completely forgotten. Lolly needed them for the first courier in the morning.
Dressing quickly, she slipped out into the humid night.
The moon was high, but its light seemed trapped in the heavy air.
Heat lightning, silent and ethereal, flickered on the horizon, promising a storm that never came.
The sticky air was a trigger, transporting her back.
She remembered nights like this at Ironwood, the air thick with unshed rain and dread.
She would lie awake, praying for silence, knowing that boredom and heat often made Polan cruel.
She shook the memory away, focusing on the here and now. She was tired of giving Polan space in her head. The anxiety she felt tonight wasn’t the cold dread of a victim. It was the warm panic of a student. This errand was an act of her own freedom.
She nearly collided with Galt emerging from the kitchens.
The figure that detached itself from the shadows was built on the scale of a young bear, a hulking silhouette of broad shoulders and thick limbs that seemed to fill the moonlit courtyard.
He froze, caught in the act, his expression not one of fear but of wide-eyed, boyish guilt.
In one massive hand, he clutched a stolen apple, which looked comically small, like a child’s toy.
His honest, open face, usually quick to a grin, was a mask of comical surprise.
Then, seeing it was only her, his features softened, and a slow, conspiratorial wink crinkled the corners of his gentle eyes.
At that moment, he wasn’t a fellow recruit; he was just a big, friendly boy, miles from home and hungry for a midnight snack.
“Kitchen raid,” he whispered, his voice a deep rumble. “Don’t tell Mace.”
“Your secret’s safe,” she whispered back. The brief exchange warmed her, a feeling of shared, easy camaraderie.
The administrative wing was quiet. A single lamp glowed from the upper quarters of Aris and Lolly, the door propped open a few inches to tempt a nonexistent breeze.
Gessa raised her hand to knock, but a sound from within stopped her cold.
It was the unmistakable, rhythmic, urgent creak of a bedframe, a sound she knew with a sickening familiarity that coiled in her gut.
A low grunt followed, male and strained with effort.
She froze, her knuckles hovering inches from the wood.
A cold, bitter wave of pity for Lolly washed over her.
He is taking his pleasure, was her first, immediate thought.
She pictured Lolly beneath Aris, enduring it with the same silent, stoic duty Gessa had been forced to learn.
Her own body went rigid with remembered shame, and she was about to turn away from another woman’s quiet degradation when a different sound stopped her.
It was a sigh from Lolly, but it wasn’t one of resignation. It was long, breathy, and shivering with a pleasure so genuine it was an alien language to Gessa’s ears. It was a sound Gessa had never made in her life.
Confused, she remained rooted to the spot. Then came Aris’s voice, thick with his own passion but impossibly tender and focused entirely on his partner. “Is that good? Tell me what you like, my love.”
The words were a physical blow. Tell me what you like. Polan had never asked. He had only ever taken, his actions, a silent, brutal monologue.
Lolly’s answer was a broken, breathy moan. “Yes… gods, Aris… don’t stop.”
Gessa’s face burned. She was an intruder, listening to something sacredly private.
Yet she could not pull away. She was mesmerized, the sounds of love and pleasure so beyond her experience.
This was not an act of submission; it was a conversation.
The sounds were not of one person’s satisfaction, but of two.
Lolly wasn’t enduring, she was being worshipped!
Gessa could hear the rustle of sheets, Lolly’s sharp, indrawn gasps, and Aris’s constant, encouraging murmurs, a loving litany focused only on her. She could hear the reverence in his voice and the unbridled freedom in hers. This was what love sounded like.
Her own breath came short and shallow. A deep, unfamiliar heat, entirely separate from the humid night, pooled low in her belly.
As she listened, the sounds from the room built, the rhythm quickening, Lolly’s soft sighs growing into high, aching cries of need.
And in that moment, as Lolly’s voice finally broke in a wave of release so powerful it seemed to shake the very air, an image, violent and vivid, seared itself onto the back of her eyelids.
Ky. His hands on her shoulders. His voice in her ear. His body, lean and strong, covering hers.
The vision was so potent it made her gasp.
The sound, small as it was, shattered her paralysis.
Mortified, her entire body electric with a confusing torrent of guilt, shame, and a wild arousal, she spun around and fled.
The forgotten papers slipped from her numb fingers, scattering on the top stair.
As she clattered down into the darkness, she could hear their voices shift into the quiet aftermath—Lolly’s throaty, satisfied laugh and Aris’s low, teasing response.
She didn’t stop until she reached the suffocating heat of her bunk, pressing her face into the thin pillow, as if she could hide from the sound and the feeling still echoing through her.
Her body was a live wire, humming with a borrowed energy, an arousal so potent it left her trembling.
Her face burned with shame. She shouldn’t have listened. It was a private, sacred thing.
Her mind raced, trying to file away what she’d heard. They must be the exception, she thought desperately. A Master of the Academy and his powerful companion… their life is nothing like the real world.
But then another image surfaced, unbidden.
A memory from years ago, at a local village market, before the last of her spirit had been crushed.
A blacksmith, his face smudged with soot, wrapping a thick arm around his wife’s waist. The woman had leaned into his side, her head resting on his shoulder, and they’d shared a look of such simple, easy affection it had been a puzzle to Gessa even then.
That look, and the sounds she just heard.
.. they felt connected. A possibility she’d never dared entertain began to take root in her mind, fragile and terrifying.
Can it really be like that? she wondered, her mind replaying the sounds of Lolly’s genuine, unrestrained pleasure.
Can a man truly want to share, and not just take?
Her body was still on edge. A strange, hesitant curiosity guided her hand.
Her fingers traced a slow, questioning line from her hip to her collarbone.
It was her own skin, her own body, yet it felt new, like a land she was visiting for the first time.
The nerves beneath the surface tingled, alive and awake in a way that had nothing to do with pain or duty.
The only sound in the small, hot room was the frantic drumming of her own heart in her ears.
Her fingers brushed against her own lips, and with a sharp intake of breath, the image of Ky returned with overwhelming force.
This time it lingered. His face, intense with a focus that was for her alone.
His hands, touching her with that same grounding warmth she’d felt in the training yard.
The thought of it, the possibility of it, was so powerful it nearly stole the breath from her lungs again.
She lay in the dark, trembling, caught between a decade of cold reality and this new, bewildering warmth. The ghost of Polan’s control was still there, a chilling poison whispering that she was broken. But it was by a hesitant question.
A question that felt more like hope than anything she had ever known.