The Steel Remains полностью

Shuddering, hinging force as he came into the dwenda’s sucking mouth, it stormed through him, it seemed to want to snap his spine. It hooked him up, then flung him back down on the stone, flapping and twitching and—he realized it with sudden, cold shock—laughing and bubbling out the words oh no, no, no, no . . .

It brought the first tears to his eyes he could remember since his youth, since the carnage of his first battlefield aftermath.

When he was done, when he lay there drained and hollowed out, and utterly still, he felt the dwenda unfasten itself from him, glide upward, and straddle his chest. It reached down and took hold of its own swollen cock by the shaft, rubbed the glans roughly against his cheek and across his face. The mingled-spice scent came with it, headily concentrated now. Ringil followed the soft dragging blows of the prick over his features, opened his mouth and made gentle biting motions after it with his lips. The dwenda hunched over him a little more. He thought it smiled in the gloom as it fed the glans into his mouth, but he couldn’t be sure.

He reached up awkwardly past the body on his chest with his hands, found the skin-thin velvet of the shaft, and gently displaced the dwenda’s fingers with his own. He tried to meet the dark, glimmer-touched eyes above his. He sucked and nipped, was about to go to work in earnest when the dwenda said something in a language he had never heard, and then it pulled clear of him.

“But I want—”

Pulled back down his body, perhaps grinning still.

Reached down with both hands and spread his legs, pushed them hard apart and up, hinging and folding them at the knees. Did something with its hands at the juncture between, the soft sound of spitting, and then there was pressure at his sphincter again, but harder now, thicker, more insistent than the finger had been. The dwenda reared up over his spread and hinged legs, working itself into place inch by remorseless inch, jaw working—he saw it in the dim light—talking to him in the same odd cadenced tongue as before. And he was helping, hugging his legs up and out to make way, thrusting up his hips, his own jaw tight on the repetition of yes, yes, yes, yes . . .

And the dwenda fell on him, brought its face down to within inches and grasped his skull with both hands and split his mouth with another kiss. The thrusting built, gathered a hungry, gulping momentum, and with it Ringil felt himself growing rock-hard once more, saw the dwenda feel it, too, saw a glinting grin in the gloom, and knew suddenly beyond question that what the dwenda had said to him was true, there was no time here, there need be none, none that meant anything at all beyond the surrender to this, all this, the thrusting, the pumping, the fucking, clenched jaw yes, oh yes, oh fuck me yes, yes, yes . . .

And the bonfire in them both now, sheeting through them, turning flesh incandescent with sensation and skin unbearably delicate, stretched to breaking—

And lost, to time and all that mattered in other places that were not this and were not here.

Lost.

THIS TIME, RINGIL WOKE TO HAZY DAWN LIGHT THROUGH NARROW windows, and small garden sounds beyond. He lay in silk sheets, balls and body muscles stung to a pleasant ache, the alkaline odor of his own body fluids mingled with something more spiced and nudging at the edge of his awareness, tugging a faint smile onto his lips. He grinned up at the architecture of the window arch, breathed in the garden air. There was a soft and easy familiarity to it all; it felt like a return to youth. He had one long moment of complete peace, too profound to permit the intrusion of conscious thought.

He smiled again, harder, and turned over.

Dawn.

Recollection slammed him upright amid the sheets.

Dawn. Fuck!

And then it was all gone, the peace and the unthinking bliss, taken jaggedly away from him like Jelim, like home, like the victory they all once thought they’d won.

He kicked himself clear of the silk that wrapped him up, cast about on the floor of the chamber for clothes.

Found them tidied and carefully folded on top of a wooden chest under the window instead.

The Ravensfriend propped casually against the wall nearby in its scabbard.

He stood and gaped at it. Outside the windows, birds made stupid, early-morning noises to counterpoint the sudden stillness. It felt, in some aching way, as if he already knew the room he was in.

What the fuck . . . ?

“Thought you’d have to fight your way out, did you?”