Dark Enchantment (2 page)

‘That’s not what I came here for.’

‘You’ve been sent to kill me?’ she said faintly. The other possibility flared like a firework in the night. ‘Or am I to be taken to the Emperor?’

Mershen’s mouth twisted. ‘The Radiant Emperor considers that only the expurgation of Imerho’s bloodline will fit the crime of his treachery. No descendants, Surya. None may pray for him.’

She covered her mouth. She had no cause to expect anything less, but the fear was like a black tide rising in her.

‘I’m sorry, Surya.’ His voice dropped, became gentle. He sheathed his blade and pulled his cloak over his head, discarding it.

‘He made you do this?’

Mershen blinked, like a wince. ‘I volunteered.’ And when he saw the betrayal in her eyes he added: ‘I will make it swift and
honourable.
There are others who would not, Surya. You must be brave, as your brothers were.’

‘My brothers …’

‘All died with unbroken hearts. No one can question your family’s courage.’
Just their loyalty
, he left unsaid. ‘Now you must live up to that.’

He doesn’t want me to start screaming and weeping, she thought, recognising the command in his words. That would sicken him. ‘I’m not ready,’ she whispered.

‘No one is. But you are of warrior blood, Surya. You can do this.’ His eyes held hers, implacable but not cruel. He was the object of all her fears, and yet perversely the only source of comfort.

She stared. ‘Yes,’ she said at last.

‘Is that gold thread in your robe?’ he asked, and she nodded. ‘Undo it. Better you bare your neck.’ Quietly his hand went to rest on the pommel of his blade. He sounded calm; if any man was capable of being a reassuring executioner then it was he. But there was something in his eyes that betrayed him.

Dry-mouthed, Surya laid aside her bow and fumbled with the fastening at her throat, perversely ashamed that her fingers were so clumsy. Every loop of braid was agonising. She pictured the way he’d smiled at her from the palace balcony, the smile she’d held secretly to her heart. She did not really know this man, she reminded herself. She only knew that he’d watched her warmly, long ago. At that memory her heart cracked. ‘I have a request,’ she blurted, not looking at his face. ‘Before I die.’

‘Yes?’ Mershen folded his arms, a little wary.

Under her fingertips the pulse in her throat was hammering. ‘Honour my wish, please, my lord.’

‘What is it?’

‘Do you remember the women’s archery practice at the Imperial Palace?’

Ever so slightly he let his guard down. ‘Of course.’

‘You’d watch us.’

The hard line of his mouth softened. ‘Upon occasion.’

She bit her lip. ‘You’d smile at me when we passed.’

‘Yes.’ He was almost smiling now, sadly. ‘It was one of the better parts of my day.’

‘You were … fond … of me?’ Her voice nearly cracked.

He nodded, his dark eyes filled with regret.

Surya took a deep breath. ‘I don’t want to die a maiden.’

Those eyes widened. ‘What?’

‘You smiled at me. Do you know what you did to me? That became my reason for going each day. I wanted that smile. I wanted the way you looked at me …’

A line appeared between his brows.

‘… I thought about you all the time. What it would be like if you did more than smile. What your hands would be like on me. What you were under those robes.’ She should have been scarlet with shame saying these things to a man, but the blood had fled from her face when he entered the room. ‘When the war started I prayed for your safety, just as I prayed for my brothers’ lives. More so. I hoped there would be peace. I wished in time you might …’ With a supreme effort she dragged her gaze up to meet his, finding it astonished and full of pain.

‘You’re shaming yourself,’ he said thickly.

‘I don’t want to die, Glorious General, not without knowing what it is like: the feel of a man’s skin on mine.’ She took a faltering step forwards. ‘What it would be like to have you on me, and in me, as I have dreamt. Please. Before you –’

He closed on her, his hand gripping her arm. ‘This is wrong,’ he rasped.

‘And what
you’re
going to do isn’t?’

He flinched. ‘Have it your way.’ Seizing her by the shoulders
he
whirled her sideways and slammed her against a pillar, nearly knocking the wind out of her. His hands were rough and determined; he tore straight through the fastenings of her robe and wrenched the cloth open, ripping the thinner material beneath to bare her breasts. Surya shut her eyes, shrinking back into herself; he was too big, too strong, too fierce. He smelled of sweat and horses. Under his armour he was all hard muscle and his thighs were crushing hers. His hands grabbed her soft little breasts like he wanted to squeeze the life from them.

I asked him for this, she told herself. I will bear it. I will endure it. It’s what I wanted.

He was panting hard through clenched teeth. This wasn’t even lust: it was anger. Anger at her for rejecting his honour, anger at an emperor who would insist on such a task – and most of all anger at himself. Involuntarily she cried out as his fingers bit painfully into her flesh. Without warning he went still, one hand on her shoulder, one squashing her left breast, her nipple pinched between his fingers. With his head bowed over hers, he made a noise almost like a sob. Then, ‘Surya.’

She bit the inside of her lip to staunch the tears that were burning at the back of her eyes.

‘Do you really want this?’ he groaned.

She whimpered. Then he lifted her face to his and kissed her. His lips were dry and a little chapped, and there was no anger in them at all, just deep pain and a fervent, haunted desire. She shook beneath them, opening to him, dissolving as his kisses soaked into her. He tasted of wine and blood and exhaustion, but he was warm on her cold skin and she pressed against him, trembling. A tear she had not held back slipped down over her cheek and he caught it on his thumb before brushing his lips across the planes of her face, as if he were tasting her skin.

‘Have you prayed to Tesub?’ he breathed, his mouth hot at her ear and throat.

‘Hhh?’ She was incapable of speech at that moment.

‘Ask her to accept your maiden sacrifice.’ He was pulling at the strapping of his breastplate. His words burned.

‘Ah.’ Of course; it was the ceremony for the wedding night: to offer one’s maidenhead to the goddess as a pure sacrifice. A woman who did not – oh gods, he was kissing her throat now and her whole body was shaking with the heat of those kisses – risked dying impure and being rejected by the gods. Oh. The tears were back again, brimming in her eyes. ‘I don’t know the words.’

He pulled back momentarily to look her in the face. ‘Nor do I.’ He shrugged his breastplate off and laid it to the floor, deliberately making as little noise as he could. ‘Think. You must have heard women talk.’

‘Yes.’
Think?
She couldn’t think. His big strong hands were on his belt now, uncinching the kilt of straps that protected his thighs. There was blood all across his scraped knuckles. There was a green stain on the front of his tunic from the breastplate. She touched the fabric, feeling for his heartbeat beneath the padded linen. He grabbed her hand and pushed it down to his crotch. Beneath his tunic and calfskin breeches something surged hungrily to greet her.

‘Divine Tesub,’ he groaned, prompting her.

‘Divine Tesub …’ Her mind was capable only of focusing on one thing: that this was
him
, this was his cock. This was what she had dreamed of and blushed over in secret and shaped in the hot still air of her bedchamber. He was making her touch it. He was moulding her fingers round its thickness. He was breathing hard as she measured its length with her clumsy hands. ‘Divine Lady, I am a virgin,’ she breathed. ‘Give me courage this night.’

‘Good.’ Whether he was referring to her prayer or her actions, she couldn’t tell. His voice was low and urgent.

‘Let me give my husband pleasure – Oh!’

‘What?’

‘You’re not my husband …’

‘It will do,’ he promised.

‘Oh. Let me give him pleasure that he may teach pleasure to me.’ Her words were coming out in a stumbled blur, her focus torn between them and the live thing in her hands, muscular as a snake. ‘Accept the blood I shed, Divine Lady …’

He was peeling away the belt that held her quiver of arrows.

‘Accept my … my sacrifice, Divine Lady …’

He was loosening the drawstring on his breeches.

‘Divine Tesub …’

‘Is that it done?’

Surya gaped and nodded. There was more: something about bearing the wound given to her, something about fertility, but she couldn’t remember the words because the soldier’s weapon had sprung out unsheathed into her grasp and she could not get over the heat of him, the girth of him, the solidity.

Mershen touched her lips. ‘Done well, Surya.’ Then he pulled up the skirt of her robe and slipped his hand between her thighs. Flesh parted before his fingers just as her lips parted under his. She was wet; it came as much of a surprise to her as to him. She shook, grinding her spine against the pillar. No one had ever touched her there; no fingers but her own had done
that
. His fingers were rough-textured but careful in their movements, slipping up her shallow furrow.

‘Yes?’

She nodded, wide-eyed.

‘Good.’ He was smiling, but it was not the warm conspiratorial smile she remembered; it was something wilder and harder
edged
and loaded with foreknowledge and regret. His fingers slipped in and out of her, painting her the bright hot colours of desire. She felt like she was changing shape under his touch, being moulded into new contours. Her own hands slackened, bereft of direction. She couldn’t even see him properly; her eyes kept fluttering closed of their own accord. ‘Good,’ he murmured again, then slid from her and grasped her under the curve of her rump, lifting and holding her close to him as he carried her over to the couch nearby. The couch, Surya thought dimly, where her mother used to lie and watch the clouds caress the mountaintops.

She could feel his erection pinned between them and pressing into her as he took those few steps. He laid her down upon the padded brocade, readjusted her skirts and the hem of his tunic, then bent over her, guiding his cock with his hand. Surya got her first proper look at that swarthy, turgid length, angled towards her from his open breeches, the skin so tight it was glossy.

‘You know what to do.’ It was barely a question.

‘Yes,’ she whispered, parting her thighs. Blood from her: blood from him. It was the way of their people.

He butted up against her sex, slipping a little in her juices till he found the angle. Then Mershen moved his hand from his cock to her mouth, covering her firmly as he pushed home. She arched her back involuntarily, trying to withdraw, but he pinned her tight and surged in, and she couldn’t cry out or even breathe so she bit him, hard. Then he was still again, and there was air and his blood in her mouth, and they were both panting and sweat was running down his temples.

‘That’s it,’ he grunted through bared teeth. ‘I’m in. I’m in. It’s done. You took it.’ She saw the bloody crescents left by her teeth on his palm as he withdrew his hand. He licked his thumb then delved down between them to touch her at the point of
their
juncture. And then all the pain went away – though he was still hard as teak within her, though he was rocking in deeper now, push by push, stretching her wider – because he was sliding his slick thumb over her clit, teasing the pain from her flesh and transmuting it to pleasure.

She forgot the pain and the fear. She forgot everything but what it was to feel him moving on her, to feel his mouth on her skin as he bent to her breasts or nuzzled her throat, to feel the unyielding hardness of his thighs pressing hers apart. She tasted the salt of his sweat and slid her hands up under his tunic to grasp him about the ribs and back. Her fingernails dug into the declivity of his spine. His muscles worked under her hands like those of a galloping horse. His gaze brushed hers, boring into her yet unseeing. His hair swept her face and clung to her lips and tongue, sharp with the taste of smoke. Only dimly at first did she recognise his desperation: that he had fought in battle, butchering men of his own blood, then ridden two days from the field to do something his soul recoiled from. He was exhausted and frantic and needy, heartsick and burning with lust. His thrusts grew fiercer. He groaned curses under his breath. He was taking her and taking from her. Ravishing her. Burying himself in her. Drowning in her.

She opened within, layer after layer, to receive him. She’d never felt so huge, as in the end she encompassed the man, the mountain they lay upon, the world and the burning sun itself.

He called upon the gods as he came, despairing.

Afterwards he lay quietly upon her, their hearts racing together. Then he eased himself up on his elbow and stroked the hair back from her wet brow. ‘I didn’t hurt you …’

‘No,’ she lied.

His lips tightened. ‘Surya …’

He didn’t look like a man who’d just taken his pleasure;
he
looked stricken. She wondered to see it. At this moment – just for this moment, while the sunlight still streamed through her veins – she was free of fear. She touched his face with her fingertips, memorising those dark eyes and that warm mouth for her journey. She could not bring herself to smile, but there was no tension in her as she closed her own eyes and turned her head away, baring her throat. ‘Be quick.’

He heaved himself from her, his hands reluctant to let her go. She felt the wetness between her thighs, the pulse in her belly. She heard his feet on the floor, the clink of his swordbelt, the long intake of his breath. He would be skilful, she knew, with the blade. It would be swift. She touched her breast with her fingertips, where his hand had last lingered. He was not unkind. He was simply a man of honour, doing his duty as best he could when it left him no choice.

But there are limits to every man’s honour.

For far too long he held his action, while Surya clung to the fading sunlight glow in her breast, willing it not to die. Then she heard him step forwards. He took her wrist. He pulled her upright and she sat, head swimming, trying to focus, feeling the burning in her rent sex.