He sagged with relief, heart thunderous from the shock of that last sudden move.
Wished he’d been carrying some kind of weapon.
FUCKING, SOMEWHERE, ON COOL, DEW-DAMP GRASS IN A RING OF mist-shrouded standing stones, under stars he did not recognize. There was a flavor to it, a raw abandonment that stung him like a blow across the mouth—Seethlaw sprawled naked and ivory white on hands and knees before him, panting and snarling like a dog as Ringil crouched and thrust into him from behind, hands hooked in and hauling on the hinge of the dwenda’s bent body where hips and thighs met. A shivery sense of exposure came and went through his flesh, as if the standing stones were silent but tautly aroused spectators who’d paid to watch what the two of them were doing. Ringil, feverish with lust, reached around for the dwenda’s cock, found it stony hard and pulsing at the edge of climax.
The feel of it slipped the final leashes on his own control; he heard himself growling now, saw himself as if from a height outside the standing stones, hammering madly against Seethlaw’s split buttocks, pumping the shaft in his hand until it kicked against his grip and the dwenda howled and clawed in the grass and Ringil came in his wake, as if in answer to the call.
And sagging, and collapsing forward, like a burning building coming down into the river, hand trapped beneath the dwenda’s body as they went down, still frantically milking Seethlaw’s cock into the wet grass, face pressed hard between the broad pale shoulders, laughing and sobbing and the tears again, icy this time, as they spilled onto the dwenda’s skin.
ACROSS LOW HILLS UNDER A SKY THICKLY CARPETED WITH STARS, THERE was a road of black stone built for giants. Its surface was broken and weed-grown underfoot, but it extended for a full fifteen or twenty yards on either side of them. Walking it, from time to time they passed under pale stone bridges higher than the eastern gate at Trelayne. Off to the right, there were clusters of towers gathered on the flanks of the hills like sentinels. Ringil’s eye kept sliding out to them. There was something wrong with the architecture. The towers had no features, were as basic and flat-edged as a small child’s drawing of buildings, only taller, so tall they looked stretched beyond any humanly useful dimension.
“Does anything live in those?” he asked Seethlaw.
The dwenda cast a long glance at the towers. “Not if there’s any other option,” he said cryptically. “Not from choice.”
“You’re saying they’re prisons?”
“You could argue that, yeah.”
For a while, Jelim walked with them on the road, but it was a Jelim that Ringil had never known. The moody good looks were changed, weathered into something older and wiser than Jelim had ever had the chance to become. He looked, Ringil thought vaguely, like a successful young shipmaster, well traveled enough to have grown wise, still not aged enough to seem weary. He chatted away with coffeehouse aplomb, smiled often, and touched Ringil with an open confidence that belonged in some fantasy mural Grace-of-Heaven might commission to go with his bedroom ceiling.
Ringil stared at him.
At some point he couldn’t clearly recall, Ringil had given up arguing with his ghosts.
Anyway, this time the ground felt a little more solid. The tenuous image of cheery evenings around the hearth with Gingren might creep in, but it stood no earthly chance of gaining any real foothold in his head.
Still, when Jelim leaned across and tousled his hair up, kissed him casually on the neck as the other Jelim always had—it hurt. And when the alternative left him, no farewell, just a slow fade, exclaiming
