Spellbreakers (26 page)

Later, while they sat by the fire eating and chatting,
his hair dried up and fell round his cheekbones again, clothing his face in
shadow and mystery once more. Daria itched to pull it behind his ears again, to
gaze into his eyes,
drink
in the lines of his gorgeous
mouth.

When they finished eating Daria cleared her throat and
said that she would have another dip in the hot waters.

“You were right, hunter,” she said. “I do feel like a
new woman.
Ready for anything, in fact.”

Ljung smiled at her. His eyes reflected the glow of
the fire in two hot orange sparks as he sat back against a tree trunk, wholly
relaxed. “There is an ancient legend, about this place,” he said, in a low,
soft voice. “That a mother dragon laid a litter of eggs here, in a secret
subterranean cave. But the lands broke and changed before the young dragons
ever hatched and they were trapped underground forever. According to the story,
it’s their imprisoned fire that made the water hot, and the power in their
blood gave it healing virtues. It’s all a bunch of fibs, if you ask me, but
charming nonetheless.”

Daria smiled, made a strangled noise which might pass
for an answer, and blushed appallingly. She looked at him, straight in the
eyes, and announced again that she’d go and have another hot bath.
In that tub right over there.
The one by
the broken pillar.

If he didn’t get her message, she’d need to write him
a letter.

****

Ljung watched her go with a smile still lingering on
his lips.

Even now, for a moment, Naya’s face, her old smiling
self, swam fleetingly before his eyes.
The same strange
mixture of boldness and shyness.
Unusual in an elver
woman, or so it seemed to him now, but then, she had been so young.
Perhaps that was what brought her back so strongly. Daria’s youth, her
enthusiasm.
The same, the same, the same.
He shook his
head to chase his phantoms away. Naya was gone, and he had survived. Amazingly
he was still alive, although for too many years he had walked under the
shadows. No more. That spell of gloom was broken. There was light and laughter
here, if he would only go and seize it.

He looked at Leal, who was sitting by the fire in
silence, wiping her knife clean. She stared up at him with a gaunt face, which
took him fully aback. The phantoms stirred again.

What’s going on with Leal?

There was no doubt that Daria had invited him to share
her bath, and much more, as openly as she dared, and he had expected Leal to be
part of it. But maybe that was the elvren offhand way. Perhaps humans were more
squeamish about sharing a lover. Or maybe it never had occurred to Leal that
she’d be welcome to join.

“You coming?” he whispered, reaching out towards her
with his right hand, and hoping that he was not making some irreparable
mistake, offending Daria, or Leal, or both.

Leal opened her mouth twice, blushing. He smiled, and
she faltered, undecided. She looked almost pained. Then she nodded, with huge
round eyes, like an enchanted child. She got up, not taking his hand, and
stumbled off towards the pools like a sleepwalker.

Ljung frowned, confused. Before going he added wood to
the fire, until it burnt bright and high. The moon was shining palely through
the mists, but he thought the girls might like the light. He pulled his shirt
off over his head and walked into the mist.

****

Daria was sitting in the hot water, her back resting
on the smooth stone lip of the tub. She was shaking all over like a leaf, out
of sheer agitation of spirit. She could hardly breathe, in fact. She had never,
ever imagined that one could feel so powerless in the grip of pure, racking
physical yearning.
What did he do to me?
she
wondered.
Is it a kind of magic? Mares behave like this in spring, if a
stallion is around, but damn, I am no mare in heat. Am I?

She sat up in the steaming-hot water and hugged her
knees to keep from shaking, but her teeth chattered on.
Please, come to me,
Ljung Leuksen Sinkka’a-Reissu,
she prayed in silence. But to begin with, it
was just Leal who arrived. At any other time Daria would have rejoiced, but
right there and then she was too tense to reach out to her friend and lover.

“I can go away if you prefer,” said Leal very softly.
There was a strange changeful expression on her face, as if she was fighting a
war with herself. “I should not be here. I
should
go.”

“What’s up, princess? I thought you liked him, too. We
can, you know, share, right?”

“Yes, yes, of course. It’s not that, it’s just
that...”

“You are not making any sense, you know?”

Leal nodded frantically. She was actually wringing her
fingers. Daria watched her, blinking.

“Never mind,” said Leal.
“Too late.”

Daria almost asked what she meant by that, when a long
firm hand, cool in the surrounding steamy heat, gently cupped her neck. She
almost jumped out of the water for the shock. She suddenly realized that she
had never really believed that he would come.

“Shh-sh...” he said as if to a bawling child, and she
didn’t know whether to giggle or hit him. She settled for splashing his face
with a handful of water, and he laughed.

Then his hand ran down the curve of her neck to her
bruised shoulder, a slow, firm caress that sent shivers down her spine.

“How’s this feeling now?” asked Ljung, massaging her
shoulders very lightly.

“Absolutely heavenly, actually,” she said, sighing.

“Good.”

He smiled. She could hear the smile in his breath, as
a small puff, warm behind her ear. He kissed her neck where his hands had
caressed her, and she shivered all over. Oh those lips, those full, gorgeous
lips. They felt as good as she had dreamed them, but she had never dreamed
right the texture of the skin on his chin, cheeks,
throat
.
Even if he had shaved earlier there was still a roughness that she had never
kissed before, a precious roughness that she adored. It framed the smoothness
of his lips and enhanced it. It made a bristly, tingling path where his mouth
ran like healing honey. Daria bent her head forward. The kisses rained softly
down her neck and shoulders while his hands gently caressed her arms down to
her elbows and came up again along her sides, cupping her shoulder blades, two
thumbs digging lightly along her spine. She exhaled deeply, and the shaking,
chattering and tension left her completely. She sat in the water in a state of
perfect bliss.

Is this magic? Is this, too, a kind of magic? What is
he doing to me?

Ljung stood up behind her, and some lucidity came back
to her when his hands left her. She looked at Leal, who had swum to the far
side of the pool. Her face was picked up by the orange light of the fire. She
was gazing up at Ljung, entranced, and Daria turned to look at him.

He was taking off his boots, and his trousers. In the
misty darkness Daria could only make out his slim silhouette against the foggy
orange blaze of the fire. A moment later he was sliding in the water beside her,
and she shivered again. Then his arms closed around her, wiry and hard yet
infinitely tender, and she hugged him tight, feeling the firmness of his
shoulders and neck against her face, and his waist between her legs. She almost
drowned in the perfection of that first moment of conquered intimacy.

“Oh, you are so...” she whispered in his ear, among a
shower of kisses. But she didn’t know what he
was,
just that she was wholly lost in him. She felt the shapes of his face with her
lips and her cheeks. She sat back to touch his throat and his chest with her
hands. He let go of her waist to lean back, beckoning to Leal to join them, and
he spread his arms on the edge of the tub. He didn’t say a thing; he just sat
back, and let himself be touched, explored, discovered.

****

Leal watched them embrace in a turmoil of conflicting
feelings.
 
She wanted nothing more, right
then and there, than throwing herself in his arms with the same abandon,
forgetting everything she was and had ever been and might still be. She just
wanted to be a free woman,
a nobody
without any
special quest or destiny to fulfill, free to make love to him, free to live her
life with him, if he would have her. And yet the words of Jalal the Faded rang
on and on in her head.
The world is littered three times deep with folks who
didn’t make it to their destiny and didn’t get into the books, because they
settled early, and married the girl next door...

But I am not marrying Ljung,
thought a rebellious voice in her head.
I just
want to make love to him for one night. I just want to be free for one night.

That’s sophistry,
said the
auntish reasonable voice in the other side of her head.
Marrying is purely a
form. This, here, now, is real. How can you bring a pure heart and
life-changing love to the Ice Waste if you fall in love with the first elver
you meet in the forest?

Too late for that.
I am already in love with him. Tonight might be real
or a dream, but it changes nothing.
That
closed the inner dialogue. That and Ljung’s naked body beckoning at her through
the water like a different source of heat.

He is the dragon blood and the fire, his are the heat
and the power,
she thought deliriously.

She swam across and joined her two lovers, trembling
with anticipation. Ljung put an arm around her and pulled her close, and she
joined Daria in exploring his body.

She kissed his throat first, regretting that he had
shaved, and then forgetting about it entirely because even so his skin was a
wonder of contrasting textures, and it was completely new, and uniquely his,
something she had never even dreamed before. She pulled his long hair away from
his face and kissed his cheekbones, his eyebrows,
his
nose. She became vaguely aware of Daria’s hands traveling over his chest. She
joined her in following the lines of his body, and then she forgot all about it
when he whispered, “Come here,” and turning her face to him kissed her lips.

That kiss might have lasted a minute, or an hour or
forever. Leal sank in it like in a dream, lost herself in the startling
sharpness of his teeth as they bit lightly into her lower lip, the muscular
wetness of his tongue as it circled the contour of her mouth and then pried it open,
gently but firmly. He pulled her head closer, kissing her harder, a hungry
kiss,
his
tongue deeper and deeper in her mouth,
lashing and lapping, and sucking.

I should take notes. I’d wake up from a sleep of a
hundred years with a kiss like this,
thought
a small lucid part of her head while she forgot about all other parts of her
body, her whole soul existing only in her mouth, her whole life in the kiss.

When he let her go, he smiled. His lips were still
touching hers, and the smile came to her as a feeling of curling softness and
exhaled breath. He held her chin between her fingers one last moment and gave
her lips a parting peck before turning and kissing Daria.

Leal slid between him and the edge of the tub when he
sat up to kiss Daria, and she held him from behind, kissing his shoulders, his
neck and spine, feeling his narrow waist between her thighs, his back against
her belly. With her arms around him, she let her hands roam down the front of
his body touching
both him
and Daria’s pointy breasts,
her belly, her sex. Finally she met what she had been warily looking for, the
bouncing, smooth, stiff length of his member.

****

Neither Daria nor, she was sure, Leal, had ever been
with a boy before, or even seen a naked man, but they had been raised in a rural
world where the ins and outs of love-making were, in their bare essence, clear
enough. There were mares and stallions, dogs and bitches, so Daria thought that
she knew perfectly well what to expect when her hand first closed around
Ljung’s member.

Still, she was amazed once more by the unexpected
textures, the mobile silky softness overlaying the unyielding hardness, the
bouncy, quivering life of it.

Oh, oh, I love how this feels in the hand.
Smooth and shapely, and perfectly right.

“Wow, hunter,” she said hoarsely between kisses. “How
can you possibly walk around the forest all day with
this
?”

Ljung laughed on her lips and kissed her again.

“It’s a bit like a bow, you know?” he said between
kiss and laughter.
 
“It’s not usually
strung.”

“It strings up quickly enough, though,” said Daria,
making up a new language on the go, because she was way out of her depth, and
in a commotion of hopeless, overexcited confusion. Ljung laughed again.

She felt his hand taking hers and guiding her to seize
his member, stroke it gently, up and down.

Don’t strangle it, Daria. Just make it part of you;
feel it in your hand.
Gently.