Chapter 3: Deidrue
Lyra woke first, as she had every morning since leaving the forest. Grey light crept through the shutter cracks of the inn room and lay in thin bars across Dante's shoulder. He slept on his back, one arm flung out, his breathing deep and even, and she was curled against his side with her cheek on his chest, listening to the slow drum of his heart.
Warmth. That was the thing humans did not know they had. His body threw off heat like a banked stove, and she pressed into it shamelessly, her palm flat on his stomach, feeling it rise and fall. Two hundred years of sleeping alone in cold hollow trees, and it had taken this man three days to ruin her for it.
Her eyes traveled up his body. The stubbled jaw, slack with sleep. The black hair falling across his brow. His chest, lean muscle rising and falling slowly, one small nipple level with her eyes.
She reached out and traced a slow circle around it with one fingertip. He did not wake. She did it again, watching his skin pebble faintly, and as she drew the little ring a thought slid into her, quiet and complete, the way a good idea arrives.
Deidre. Three days away. A city of wonders, the biggest either of them had ever stood in. And here they were, sated and warm and lazy, spending all their hunger on inn rooms and mornings.
Her lips curved against his chest. It would be hard. It would be very hard, in fact, and she almost laughed at the thought. But she had waited so long for the world. She could wait three days for it to be perfect.
She lay still and planned, smiling to herself in the grey light, until the sky outside went white and the town began to clatter below the window.
Dante surfaced slowly, aware first of the cold half of the bed, and opened his eyes to find Lyra already dressed, lacing her leathers at the hip with brisk efficiency. Her hair was combed. Her pack stood by the door.
"You're up," he said, stupidly. "You're... up before me."
"The road is long." She glanced back at him, cheerful, and something in him registered the absence of the look he had come to expect, the heavy-lidded one that usually ended with her climbing back into bed. But she was smiling, clearly happy, and he decided that eagerness for the city explained it. "Rise, cleric. Deidrue will not come to us."
"Good morning to you too," he said, and meant it fondly.
They ate bread at the market and filled the waterskins at the town pump. At the chapel door Dante paused, half a thought toward saying farewell to Sister Alba, and then let it go. There would be letters. Perhaps.
They passed through the western gate in the middle of the morning, past the watchman, who nodded at Dante and stared at Lyra, and then the town fell away behind hedges and the road opened south.
The day went easily. The road was packed earth and old wagon ruts, well walked, and they fell into a rhythm with their strides. Dante told her about his father, a cooper, who had died when Dante was seventeen; about the border town of his childhood and the winter the wolves came down to the pens. Lyra gave him pieces of the enclave in return, careful pieces. The moon festivals. The elder who taught her the bow and never smiled. The streams she had mapped so often she could walk them blind.
"So," Dante said, trying to keep pace from Lyra’s stride. "Why the immense drive to see the human cities?”
"I was a very curious child." She hopped a rut without looking at it. "The tales said the human towns were lit like fallen stars at night. I believed the lamp oil came from crushed fireflies. I argued about it."
"What did you decide?"
"That it was firefly oil, and that humans must farm them in mountains of jars." She glanced at him sidelong. "I am pleased to report I have since revised my position."
He laughed, and the miles went under their boots, and the sun went down over low hills with the road still empty in both directions.
They made camp early enough, off the road in a stand of beeches, and Dante strung the tent while Lyra gathered wood. He felt the flush climb his neck as he pegged the last corner. Tonight, in a tent instead of an inn, she would come to him the way she had that first night, quiet and deliberate and certain, and his body was already remembering her by the time he ducked inside with the light of his scepter floating at the ceiling.
They ate. They banked the fire. They settled into their sheets, her back against his side as it always was, and Dante waited for her to turn.
"Goodnight, Dante," Lyra said softly. "Sleep well."
And she closed her eyes.
He lay in the dark and stared at the little bead of golden light rolling lazily along the tent's ceiling, waiting for his own pulse to quiet. Nothing happened. She breathed slow and even beside him, her long body relaxed, and no hand came to rest on him, no lips found his ear, nothing.
It's the tent, he told himself. She's tired. It was a long day.
He shifted once, carefully, and gave up on dignity. His cock stood stubborn and aching against his thigh, thoroughly ready and thoroughly unwanted, and there was nothing to be done about it but lie there like a fool. The light drifted on the canvas. Eventually his body surrendered and he slept, frustrated and confused.
Morning came cold. He woke and turned toward her, and she was lacing her boots.
He caught her hand as she rose and pulled gently, tilting his face up for a kiss. Lyra leaned down and pressed her lips briefly, warmly, to his forehead.
"We should move," she said. "If we want to reach Deidrue quickly, we walk early and walk long."
She took her pack and went out to the fire pit. Dante lay a moment longer, staring at the empty space where she had been.
Again that night, same story. Again the night after. At the midday rest on the second day she sat close, shoulder against his shoulder, happy, talkative, eating dried fish from the paper packet and asking him questions about guilds. But when he put his arm around her she leaned into it like a cat and nothing more, and when they broke camp she was up and walking.
On the second night he lay listening to her breathing slow, and could not stand it.
"Lyra. Are you all right?"
"Perfectly," she said, warm and easy, into the dark.
Silence. The light rolled on the ceiling. His heart was pounding, which was absurd, and he stared at the canvas and made himself say it.
"Can you tell me what's on your mind?"
She was quiet for long enough that he thought she might have fallen asleep. Then she sighed, a comfortable sound.
"I am just impatient," she said. "I cannot wait for Deidrue, Dante. I am thinking about it all day, every day, and it makes the road feel slow. That is all that is on my mind. Goodnight."
Something cold slid down through his chest and pooled there. Impatient for Deidrue. Not for him. He turned the words over as her breathing deepened, and the thought that had been itching at him for two days finally found its shape and bit down: she would leave him there. In the great city, full of wonders, full of everything she had waited most of her life to see. Her errand was finished, more or less. Her curiosity was not. What did a woman like that need with a country cleric from a border town, once the city gates opened?
He slept badly and said nothing.
The third day was the most ordinary of the three, which somehow made it worse. Road, ruts, dried fish, questions about taxes. Dante answered them and watched her the way he had once watched animal sign, and read nothing in her but contentment, which was the cruelest part. She was not unhappy. She was not distant in any way he could name. She was exactly as pleasant as ever, and it was driving him quietly mad.
It was mid-afternoon when the land opened ahead into long golden fields, and there, sitting on the horizon like something out of a child's story, rose the walls of Deidrue. Pale stone, towers, a haze of smoke and noise even at this distance. Dante's heart sank as he looked at it. ‘So this is where it ends,’ he thought. ‘The road, the tent, the two nights in the forest. She reaches that gate and I become the man who showed her the way.’
"What do you look forward to most?" he asked, because he had to know, because the ache needed a name. "In Deidrue. From what I've told you."
Lyra walked a few paces before answering.
"The bazaar," she said. "The three streets of it. And..." a small tilt of her head, "I wonder what their inns are like. Whether they are comfortable."
He glanced at her, and for half a heartbeat her face was open, and he saw it flash across her mouth and eyes, quick as a fish under water: mischief. Pure, concentrated, delighted mischief. Then it was gone, smoothed away behind her pleasant traveler's expression, and she was looking at the walls again.
Dante exhaled slowly through his nose. He gave up trying to understand. Elves, he decided, were simply mischievous creatures by nature.
Deidre swallowed them. The streets were wider than whole buildings in Oakbridge, and fuller than either of them had imagined: wagons, mules, water-sellers crying their wares, a man with a monkey on his shoulder, a woman juggling knives, cloth in colors Lyra had no names for hanging out over the stalls. She stopped so often that Dante learned to walk in small arcs around her. She touched everything she was allowed to touch. She haggled, badly and joyfully, over a carved wooden bird, and the vendor gave her a discount just to end the negotiation.
Hours went by like water. The light was going gold and long over the rooftops when Lyra finally turned to him with the decisive look of a scout who had found what she came for.
"There," she said, pointing.
The inn stood three stories, timber and pale stone, with a sign of a gilded mortar and pestle swinging above the door. Inside, a common room full of low warm light and the smell of roast fowl. Lyra set her silver on the counter without a moment's hesitation.
"One room," she said. "Two nights."
The room was on the third floor, and it was nothing like Oakbridge. A real bed, wide, with a quilted coverlet and a headboard carved with vines. A washstand with a copper basin. Two windows with shutters, a hearth already laid, a candle standing in a proper holder. Lyra closed the door behind them and threw the bolt.
Dante put down his pack. The ache of three days was all in his chest now, and he was too tired and too full of the city to circle it anymore.
"What has been going on with you?" he said. "Truly. Two nights in a tent, Lyra. Three mornings. Nothing. You turn from me, you dodge me, and you are happy the whole time, and I have been lying awake wondering if you meant to leave me the moment we passed those gates." His voice cracked on the last words and he hated it. "Why have you stopped wanting me?"
Lyra looked at him for a long moment. Then she reached up and began, unhurriedly, to unlace her leathers at the hip.
"It was my plan," she said. "All of it. From the first morning."
She worked the laces loose and stepped out of her trousers, folding them over the chair with maddening calm.
"Every night in that tent, I wanted you so badly it was like a toothache. Do you know how long the nights felt? Lying there with your heat against my back, listening to you breathe, knowing you were aching too." Her shift came off over her head. She stood naked in the candlelight, tall and pale and translucent-limbed. "I knew it would be worth it. I wanted our first night in Deidre to be unforgettable. Drowned, Dante. I wanted us starving."
"So you starved us both." His voice had gone rough without his permission.
"I suffered," she agreed serenely. "You have an idea what I suffered. And now."
She climbed onto the bed and knelt in the middle of it, facing him, and spread her knees wide on the quilt. She was soaked; he could see it, the gleam of her at her entrance, her sex flushed and open and visibly pulsing with her heartbeat. Her eyes roamed down his body and came back up, and there was nothing calm left in her voice at all.
"I can't wait any longer," she said, low and full of want and something underneath the want, warm and trembling. "I need you, Dante. Come here. Please. I have been starving for three days and I need you inside me now."
The world narrowed. Dante's eyes dropped to the glistening pink of her open sex and stayed there, everything else in the room falling away: the hearth, the candle, three days of ache. Her pussy pulsed visibly with her heartbeat, flushed dark and dripping, a thread of her wetness slipping down toward the quilt. His hands moved without consulting him. Vest, tunic, boots, trousers, everything hit the floor in a scatter, and he was climbing onto the bed in his skin, crawling up the quilt toward her, transfixed, his cock swinging heavy and hard between his legs.
"Dante—" Lyra started, and then his mouth landed on her.
He buried his face in her pussy like a man coming up out of deep water to breathe. His tongue dragged slow and broad through her folds, gathering the salt-slick wetness of her, three days of starvation in one taste, and he groaned against her. She was sweeter than he imagined. Hotter. His lips closed over her clit and sucked, and Lyra's whole body bowed off the bed.
"Oh. Oh gods, yes."
Her fingers buried themselves in his hair. He licked her in long strokes, bottom to top, then circled her clit with the tip of his tongue in tight, patient rings while her hips began to roll against his mouth, helpless. Her breath came in ragged pieces. The candlelight caught the shine of her wetness all over his chin.
He gripped her hips in both hands and pulled her hard against his face, his nose pressed to her mound, her folds smeared across his lips and cheeks, and he breathed her in, tasting, sucking, feasting. Nothing existed but her pussy and the sounds she was making above him, high and cracked, her thighs trembling around his ears.
"Dante, I'm— I'm going to..."
She gushed on his face. Her orgasm broke over his mouth in a hot rush, her pussy clenching around nothing, flooding his chin and throat, and he did not stop. He licked through it, greedy, chasing every wave, drinking her down as she squealed and shook, her heels drumming the quilt. Lost in her fluids, drunk on her, he kept eating her through the aftershocks until the sensation tipped past pleasure into too much.
"Stop, stop," she gasped, laughing and sobbing at once, tugging his hair. "Enough. Enough. I need you inside me. Deep, Dante. As deep as you can go. Now."
He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and rose over her. His cock throbbed with every heartbeat, flushed dark, the head slick, pulsating in anticipation hard enough that he could feel his own pulse in it. She reached down between their bodies and took hold of him, her fine fingers wrapping his shaft, and guided him to her entrance, nudging the crown through her soaked folds until it sat exactly at her opening.
"Wait," she breathed. "Look at me."
He looked. Her blue eyes were wet, huge, blazing.
"Now."
He thrust. The full length of him drove into her in one stroke, her pussy swallowing him to the root, and they both cried out, loud, uncaring of the inn below. Lyra's back arched off the bed and she came instantly around him, her channel rippling down his cock in hard gripping waves, milking him, her mouth open on a broken moan.
Tears stood in the corners of her eyes, spilling back into her hair.
"Never leave me," she whispered.
"I promise," Dante said. "Never. I promise."
He began to move. Long, deep, relentless strokes, pulling almost free and driving back into her until his hips slapped hers, and her pussy clung to him desperately with every stroke, clenching, resisting his retreat, sucking him back in. She wrapped her arms around his back and locked her ankles around his waist, her whole long body wound around him, hauling him deeper with every thrust.
"Harder," she begged. "I've starved for this. Three days. Three days, Dante."
He gave her harder. The bed creaked and knocked the wall. His cock plunged into her again and again, her wetness squelching loudly around him with each stroke, and Lyra lost herself. Her orgasms came in series, one rolling into the next, her eyes rolling back, her mind narrowed down to nothing but the thick shaft slamming into her, in and out, filling her, the only thought left in her skull. Her moans broke into stifled squeals against his shoulder, muffled, helpless.
He could feel his own end building. His balls ached, drew up tight against his body, heavy with a massive load, and every thrust jolted them against her ass. The pressure coiled in his gut, in his perineum, spreading down the root of him.
"Lyra, I'm close."
"Inside me." Her nails scored his back. "All of it. Pour it into my pussy, don't stop, don't you dare stop."
He pounded into her relentlessly, the headboard thudding, her soaked insides seizing around him again, harder than before, one final powerful orgasm shuddering through her whole body, and it dragged him over the edge with her.
His semen surged from his balls, up through his cock, and erupted. He felt every pulse of it, his perineum clenching, his balls tightening against her, the thick tube along the underside of his cock kicking as spurt after spurt after spurt poured into her depths. Endless. His whole groin pulsed cum out of his body and into her, wave after wave, flooding her womb until she was full, until it had nowhere left to go but deeper, and still his cock jerked and delivered more.
Lyra held him buried to the hilt, her legs locked, and moaned low and long at the heat of it filling her.
When it finally ebbed he collapsed onto her, both of them heaving, his softening cock still seated inside her. She pressed her thighs together around him, trapping him in, keeping every drop of his cum pooled deep in her pussy, refusing to let a thread escape.
Neither of them moved. The candle guttered. His heartbeat slowed against her chest.
Then he felt her shaking, and realized she was crying, silent tears running sideways into her hair, her face turned into his neck.
"Lyra?"
"I love you," she said into his skin, and the words came out cracked and simple, no ceremony at all. "I have loved you since our first night in Oakbridge. Perhaps since the snare. I love you, Dante. I really believe I do."
He lifted his head and looked at her, tear-eyed and glowing and utterly unguarded, and there was nothing left in him to be cautious with.
"I love you too," he said. "I love you, Lyra."
She pulled his face down to hers and kissed him, deep and slow and desperate, his taste and hers mixed on her lips, her arms winding around him, and neither of them had any intention of letting go.
Sleep took them tangled together and did not untangle them until morning. Grey light came through the shutter cracks, then gold, then a wide warm bar of sun that crossed the quilted coverlet and climbed the bed. Dante woke face-down against Lyra's neck, his weight settled between her thighs, his cock still buried in her to the hilt.
He lay still and took stock of himself, and of her. His body felt wrung out and singing, every muscle loose, his mind still fogged at the edges with the memory of her. The room smelled of sex, thick and musky, the candle burned down to a stub in its holder, and the sheets under them were a disaster. Their skin was stuck together everywhere their bodies touched, dried sweat and spend gluing his chest to her breasts, his stomach to hers. When he shifted his arm, her shoulder peeled gently off his with a faint tacky sound.
Beneath him Lyra slept on. Her face was slack and utterly peaceful, lips parted, ginger hair spread across the pillow in a bright tangle. Even asleep she looked blissful, the corners of her mouth curved, a faint flush still on her cheekbones. Her sex held him the way it had all night, loose and warm and full, and every minute or so it gave a small involuntary squeeze, her sleeping body milking him gently, keeping his soft cock cradled in a pool of his own cum.
Dante watched her for a long time. Then the thought arrived, sliding in quiet and complete, and he felt his mouth curve.
Three nights. Three cold, aching, blue-balled nights in a tent while she hummed beside him, well-fed and smug. A little revenge seemed only fair.
He moved his hips. Barely. A slow, shallow roll, an inch of him sliding through the soaked heat of her and back again.
Nothing in her face changed, but her pussy responded at once, clenching down around him, and a small sound escaped her lips, soft as breath. He did it again, slower, dragging his crown along her front wall. Her inner muscles gripped and released, gripped and released, working him in her sleep. A thin trickle of last night's cum squeezed out around his shaft and smeared between them.
"Mm." Her brow furrowed faintly. Her hips gave the tiniest tilt, seeking.
He kept it up, lazy and patient, stirring himself in the mess he had left inside her, and her body slowly surfaced toward him. Her breathing deepened. Her fingers curled against his back. Her eyes moved beneath their lids, and her lips shaped a word with no sound in it.
"Dan... te..."
She woke by degrees, and he watched it happen: the fog rolling off her, the bliss thickening rather than clearing, her hips beginning to roll up into him without her fully knowing why. Her eyes opened at last, heavy and glazed, focusing on nothing. Her whole mind seemed to be sitting in her pussy, drunk on fullness, on heat, on the slow sweet friction he was feeding her.
"Good morning," Dante said gently.
She blinked at him. Her eyes were enormous and unfocused, blue lit gold by the sun, and she smiled a slow, stupid, wonderful smile.
"Morning," she breathed. "You're... in me."
"I am. We should get our day going, Lyra. It's morning. Deidrue is waiting."
"Mm. Later."
He held her gaze, kissed the tip of her nose, and pulled out of her.
It came free with a thick wet sound, a rush of cool air and a flood of his cum following him out, spilling down over her folds and onto the ruined sheets beneath. Lyra jolted as if splashed with cold water. Her whole body clenched on nothing, and her face crumpled.
"No," she said. Her voice cracked on it. Tears welled instantly, spilling down her temples into her hair. "No, no, Dante, put it back. Why did you, put it back in me, please."
"Morning," he said again, merciless and loving, and drove back into her in one deep stroke.
She gasped, and the gasp turned into a long shuddering sigh of relief that seemed to come all the way up from her toes. Her pussy seized around him and then melted, accepting him home, and her eyes fluttered half shut. His cum squelched around his shaft as he seated himself to the root and stopped, buried deep, holding still.
"There," he murmured against her lips. "All better."
"You are a monster," she whispered, wrecked and glowing. "A kind monster."
He kissed her, slow and deep, and then, with his mouth still on hers, withdrew again.
Lyra cried out against his lips, an offended, wounded sound, and her hips chased him off the bed. Her hands flew down and clutched at his ass, trying to haul him back, and the tears came again, angrier this time, frustration crackling through the bliss.
"Dante! I swear by every leaf, if you leave me empty one more time I will tie you to this headboard and ride you until you beg. Come. Back. Here."
"It's morning," he said, solemn as a prayer. "We really should get going."
"You are not serious."
He was already pressing back into her, but this time he came down over her fully, forearms bracketing her head, his chest flat to her tacky breasts, his whole body wrapping hers, and he sank in slow and deep and held there. He turned his lips to her ear.
"That," he whispered, "was for the road. Three nights, Lyra. Three nights of lying behind you with my cock aching and you humming like a contented cat. That was twice for every night."
She was quiet a moment. Then she laughed, wet and guilty, and wrapped her arms around him and squeezed, locking him against her, her ankles crossing over his thighs, keeping him buried exactly where he was.
"I'm sorry," she said into his neck, not remotely sorry and both of them knowing it. "I'm sorry, it was cruel, it was very cruel. You suffered so beautifully. Forgive me."
"Ask me again in an hour."
They lay still.
The sun climbed the wall. The city noises came up faintly through the shutters, carts and cries and a bell somewhere. Dante's soft cock rested in her flooded depths, and her pussy worked on it without either of them doing anything at all, slow rhythmic squeezes, milking him, coaxing blood back into him. His cum trickled out around his base with every squeeze and pooled under her ass. Twice he stirred involuntarily against her cervix, a small blind twitch of his shaft in the heat, and each time she hummed and tightened.
"You're doing it on purpose," he said at one point.
"I am not doing anything. My body is doing it. I am merely lying here." She nipped his earlobe. "It likes you. It is trying to keep you."
"It's doing a good job."
An hour passed, easy as water. At some point the last of the game drained out of it and what was left was simpler. They lay tangled in the wrecked sheets, sticky and filthy and unwilling to move, her hand over his heart, his face in her hair. Her body had gone from hungry to simply holding him. Dante felt the afterglow cool into something steadier underneath it, into the plain enormous fact of her, and knew she felt the same.
"We have a whole city," he said eventually. "Two whole days of it. The bazaar, the river district, the guild halls if you want. Food from the coast. People from further south than anyone maps."
"I want everything," Lyra said. "I want all of it, and I want you beside me for all of it." She squeezed him once more, inner and outer. "But you should pull out now, cleric. The day will not wait, and I am leaking all over a very good quilt."
"Don't want to say it."
"No one ever does." She kissed his cheek. "Do it quickly."
He drew out of her slowly, and she sighed anyway, a long sad exhale, her sex clinging to him to the last possible inch before releasing him. His cum followed in a thick slow stream, soaking the sheet beneath her ass, and she pressed her thighs together and lay looking mournfully up at him.
"Empty," she said. "Look what you've done."
"What we've done. And we'll fix it tonight."
"Promise?"
"Sworn on the pendant."
They cleaned up at the copper basin, taking turns with the water and a cloth, laughing at the state of each other. Lyra's hair was a catastrophe and her inner thighs were painted with dried white streaks; Dante's chest carried the red impressions of her nails and his back the thin stinging lines of them too. The cold water made her hiss and made him yelp. She washed between her legs thoroughly, wrung the cloth, and looked faintly bereaved at what went down the basin.
Then they dressed, and the trouble began.
Dante laced his trousers and reached for his tunic, and Lyra, pulling her leathers up her long legs, paused to tuck his collar flat and let her hand run down his chest. He caught her wrist and kissed her palm, and she stepped in and pressed her whole body against his back while he tried to pull the tunic on, her breasts firm against his shoulder blades, her mouth at the side of his throat.
"Lyra. We just agreed."
"We did. I am honoring the agreement. I am simply... standing near you."
"You are nuzzling my neck."
"I am standing near you with my face."
He turned in her arms and they looked at each other, both half-dressed, both flushed, and broke at the same instant. He pushed her back against the door and kissed her, open-mouthed and greedy, and she fisted both hands in his shirt and pulled it half off him again before either of them found the sense to stop. It cost them another quarter hour, breathless and laughing and pulling each other's clothes straight again between kisses, before they finally got out the door.
The common room below was bright and busy, smelling of fresh bread and frying eggs. They ate standing at the counter because neither could bear to sit still, sharing a loaf and a pot of honey, and the innkeeper's wife watched them with a knowing smile and said nothing.
Then they were out, into the street.
Deidrue in morning light was louder than Deidrue at dusk, if such a thing were possible. The sun struck the pale stone and threw it white; vendors were shouting their stalls open up and down the lane, shutters banged, a mule team argued at a corner. Lyra's ears turned like weathervanes toward every new sound, and her eyes went from wonder to wonder faster than Dante could follow them.
"Where first?" he said.
"Everywhere." She took his arm, threading hers through it, and pulled. "Start at one end and do not stop until the other."
They went deep into the city arm in arm, her pointing, him naming things, both of them beaming like fools and caring nothing for it. The morning opened ahead of them like a book with no end of pages.
The first hour belonged to the bazaar. Lyra moved down the three streets like a woman living free for the first time, touching everything: brass lamps, bolts of dyed wool, jars of candied ginger. She bought a small mirror on a leather strap and hung it from her belt, then a carved bone comb.
"How have you not run out of silver yet?" Dante asked as she counted coins into a spice-seller's palm. "You've bought half this street."
Lyra paused. The coins were fewer than they had been that morning, and he watched her count what was left, and the pause got longer.
"I am," she admitted, sheepish, sliding the purse back onto her belt. "Starting to, rather. I planned well, but I planned for a shorter errand." She looked away down the row of stalls, toward the pale walls and the gates beyond. "It might be a good idea to go back to my woodland home at some point. To get more. The enclave holds old silver, and perhaps I can convince them to bestow more."
The words sat a moment between them, heavier than she had meant them to be. Then she turned, took his hand, and laced her fingers through his.
"But that is a problem for another day. Today we forget about it. Today there is only this."
There was, in fact, quite a lot of this. By late morning they had drifted to the edge of the bazaar, into a small cobbled square where a crowd had gathered, and there they stopped and did not move for an hour.
Five entertainers had claimed the square. Two musicians, one with a fiddle and one with a drum, a juggler working six lacquered balls, a fire-eater, and a woman in a red skirt who danced with a tambourine and an indifference to the world that Lyra found magnetic. The fiddle ran quick and bright, the drum drove it, the juggler threw his balls through hoops and behind his back, and the crowd clapped the beat and threw coins into a hat.
Lyra stood motionless in the press of bodies, her hands pressed together under her chin, her lips parted. When the fiddle hit a run of notes, fast as water over stones, her eyes went wide and her breath stopped. When the dancer spun and her skirt flared, Lyra actually gasped.
"Is it always like this?" she whispered, not looking away. "Do humans simply... do this? In streets? For nothing?"
"For coins, mostly. But yes, in streets. Every big city, most days."
"Wow," she said, half to herself. "I never once heard human music." Her eyes were shining. She was laughing without knowing she laughed, every muscle of her face alive, the copper band on her arm catching the sun, her whole body turned toward the music like a plant toward a window.
Dante stopped watching the performers. He watched her instead, the joy breaking over her in waves, her hair burnt bright in the midday light, and something in his chest turned over quietly and settled into place. Whatever came next, whatever she decided, he would follow this woman around markets for the rest of his life and call it a good one.
The juggler finished, and the crowd roared, and Lyra clapped until her palms stung. She threw her last small coin into the hat herself, gravely, as if paying a debt to art.
They ate at midday at a restaurant with cloth on the tables, the first Lyra had ever seen, and Dante ordered for both of them on instinct: river fish in a butter sauce, greens cooked with garlic, bread still hot. Lyra tried the fish with the wariness of a scout approaching unknown terrain, and then her eyes closed and she made a sound that made the waiter smile.
"Human cooking," she said, "may be the greatest of all your achievements. Forget the walls. Forget the bazaar."
"It's not even the best food in the city."
"Then I will need a longer life," she said, and went back for more.
The afternoon thinned into walking. They crossed a bridge over the river district, watched barges loaded with casks, stood a while in front of a guild hall arguing companionably about whether the stone lions outside were majestic or merely fat. The light went long and gold. Their feet ached and neither mentioned it.
It was on the last stretch, the lane climbing back toward the gilded mortar and pestle, that Lyra squeezed his arm. Not the casual hold they'd kept all day. A slow, deliberate press of her fingers, her cheek almost touching his shoulder. Dante turned his head and found her face soft, unguarded, the corners of her mouth curved without effort, her eyes on nothing in particular, on everything. His heart did something small and irrecoverable.
Neither of them spoke. The lane carried them up the hill and the inn's sign creaked overhead, and they went in.
The room had been made new. Fresh sheets, white and crisp, the coverlet straightened, the candle replaced with a whole one, the copper basin filled with clean water. Dante stopped just inside the door and thought of the state they had left it in, the ruined sheet, the basin cloth, the smell that had soaked into the very quilt, and felt the heat climb his ears. Whoever had changed that bed had seen everything they had done on it. He offered a silent prayer for good fortune to the woman or man who had.
Lyra had no such complications. She walked to the bed, turned, and flopped backward onto it with her arms spread wide, a crash of ginger hair and long limbs, and lay there looking at the ceiling with a smile carved into her face.
"Tired?" Dante asked.
"Completely. Wonderfully. I have walked more today than in any week of my life, and I would do it again tomorrow without hesitation." She turned her head toward him. "Dante. Thank you. For today. I will never forget it. I will never forget any day since the snare. Every single one of them is kept."
He sat on the edge of the bed and unlaced his boots, and then he lay down beside her and gathered her in, her back against his chest, his arm over her waist, her long body fitting against his as if it had been measured for the purpose. Through the shutter cracks the city made its evening noise, distant and unimportant.
He thought about the future. It arrived uninvited, the way such thoughts do: an elf from an enclave that humans rarely saw, and a cleric from a border town with a surveyor's appointment and a one-room posting. An order that might not smile on the arrangement. Elders on her side who blamed his kind for everything. Could two people like them actually build something? A life, a household, whatever shape it took? He turned the question over and found he could not answer it, only that he wanted, with a ferocity that surprised him, to try.
Beneath his ear, Lyra's heartbeat was slow and deep. She had gone still, and he thought she slept, until he realized her attention was turned inward, entirely on his chest. His heart beat on, heavy and steady, and she listened to it the way she had listened to the fiddle, memorizing it, losing minutes to it, learning its rhythm the way she had once learned streams. Some time passed that neither of them counted.
"Lyra," he said at last, quietly, into her hair. "Tomorrow. Should we head back to Oakbridge? It would put you closer to home. Make the return easier, for when you go for funds."
He felt her go tight around him before he felt her arms, her whole body clenching and then opening, and then she rolled and crushed herself against him, arms locked, face buried in his neck, holding on firmly.
"Yes," she said, muffled. "Yes, that is probably best. It is probably best we do."
They lay clinging to each other, and there was an ache in it now, a sweetness with an edge, the knowledge sitting between their bodies that the road home led away from this, back toward duties and elders and whatever the world thought it was allowed to give them. Neither said it. Both held tighter.
After a long while Lyra stirred. She pulled back just enough to look at his face, and then she blew a slow stream of cool air across his nose and lips, deliberately, until he blinked.
"Tonight," she said, "should be filled with passion. Like any other night. More, if the day has earned it, and the day has earned it."
She slid out of his arms and off the bed and stood in the middle of the room, candlelit, and he propped himself against the headboard to watch.
She began with her belt, drawing the strap slowly through its buckle, letting the small mirror and the bone comb clink. Her eyes never left his. She unlaced her leathers at the hip one eyelet at a time, far slower than she had ever laced or unlaced anything in her life, and let the trousers slide down one long leg and then the other, stepping out of them with a dancer's care. She turned, letting him see the shape of her backside in the small cloth she still wore, and looked back over her shoulder at him.
"Still with me, cleric?"
"Barely."
"Good."
Her shift came next. She gathered the hem in her fingers and drew it up her calves, her knees, her thighs, an inch at a time, her translucent skin appearing in the candlelight like something surfacing through water, and held it there, teasing, her hips swaying faintly to a rhythm Dante suspected was the fiddle from the square. Then she pulled it the rest of the way over her head in one motion and tossed it on the chair, and stood naked, tall and pale and utterly certain, her small pink nipples tight in the cool air.
Dante had not moved except to grow hard. His cock pressed obvious and aching against his trousers, and he made no apology for it, and she looked at it and smiled a slow, wicked, loving smile.
She crossed to the bed on her knees, crawled up over him, and undressed him with the same unhurried greed. She pulled his shirt up his chest and off. She worked his trousers down his hips, and his cock sprang free, thick and flushed dark and already pulsing, the head slick.
"Lovely," she breathed. "Three days ago I had never had one in my mouth."
She lowered her head and licked him from his balls to his crown in one long stroke, her tongue broad and wet, and Dante's hips jerked off the mattress. She did it again. Then she took his balls into her mouth, one and then the other, sucking them softly, rolling them in her hot wet mouth while her fingers stroked his shaft in slow pulls, and Dante groaned and fisted the fresh sheets.
"Lyra. Gods."
"Mm." She released him with a wet sound and wrapped her lips around his crown, sucking hard, her tongue working the ridge and the sensitive underside in firm circles. She sank lower, taking him deep, until the head nudged the back of her throat, and she hummed around him, and the vibration went through his whole groin like a struck bell. She pulled back up, slow, her cheeks hollowed, her tongue dragging along the underside the whole way, and then dove down again.
She sucked him greedily, gloriously, one hand cupping and kneading his balls, the other braced on his thigh, her ginger hair curtaining over his hips. Spit ran down his shaft and gathered at the base. His cock swelled harder under her mouth, pulsing against her tongue, and she felt it and pulled off to admire him, stroking him with her fist.
"There it is," she said, satisfied. "Pulsing. Hard as an oak. Perfect." She gave the crown one last lingering lick. "I could do this until you spent yourself down my throat, and believe me I am tempted. But I want it inside me more. I want it so badly my insides ache."
Dante pushed himself up on his elbows, breath ragged, ready to reach for her. Lyra put a hand flat on his chest and pressed him back down against the pillows, and then she turned away from him on the bed, went up on all fours, and paused there, her back a long pale line, her ass raised toward him, the full presentation of her body offered without a trace of shyness.
Then she lowered her chest slowly to the bed, her shoulders and cheek sinking into the fresh sheet, her arms extended above her head, and kept her hips high in the air. The position opened her completely to him: the tight pucker of her ass above, and below it her pussy, flushed dark pink and visibly pulsing with her heartbeat, glistening with her own wetness, her folds swollen and dripping a clear thread down her inner thigh. She reached back between her legs with her own fine fingers and spread herself open for him, holding her pussy wide, baring the soaked entrance where his cock was meant to go.
She looked back at him over her shoulder through her hair, her blue eyes heavy and blazing, and her voice came out low and stripped of everything but want.
"I need you now, Dante. Right now. Get behind me and put that cock in my pussy. Make me never forget."
His hands were on her hips before she finished the sentence.
Her skin was cool under his palms at first, then warmed where he held it. Dante knelt behind her, her hips raised high and open, and his vision narrowed to nothing but the sight of her. Her cheeks were tight and round, pale with that faint translucence, and between them she held herself spread with her own fingers, dripping, offered.
He squeezed. Both hands closed on the firm round globes of her ass and kneaded them, slow and deep, thumbs digging into the give of her flesh. Lyra made a low sound into the sheet.
"You like that?" he softly asked.
"I like everything you are doing. Do not stop."
He played with her. He pressed her buttocks together and her holes closed, her pucker tucked tight above her swollen folds, then he pulled them wide apart and both opened to him, her pussy gaping wetly, the tight rose of her ass flexing in the candlelight. Close. Open. Close. Open. Lyra's breath hitched each time, her slickness becoming more apparent.
He lowered his head.
His tongue dragged up her slit in one long, broad stroke, from her dripping entrance all the way to the tight pucker above it, gathering her wetness, and Lyra's whole body shivered under his mouth. He did it again. Then he sealed his lips over her folds and sucked, drawing the soft swollen lips of her pussy into his mouth one at a time, tugging them, releasing them wet and shining, licking along the seam of her slit between pulls.
"Oh. Oh, that is..."
She didn't finish. His tongue found her entrance and pushed in, twirling, circling, intruding into her hole with slow lazy spirals while his nose pressed into the cleft above and brushed her puckered ass. Lyra jolted. Her butthole puckered tight against the tickle of his nose and she moaned into the mattress, a muffled, helpless sound, her hips pushing back onto his face without her permission.
He felt it. He felt her pucker clench and wink under the bridge of his nose with every pass of his tongue below, and it drove him hungrier. He gripped her cheeks harder, spreading her wide, and buried his face between them, licking deep into her pussy, slurping the fresh flood of her arousal off his own lips.
"Dante." Her voice was crushed into the sheet. "Dante, your mouth… I cannot… it is too good, I..."
He moved lower. His tongue found her clit.
He circled it once, twice, then closed his lips around the swollen bead and sucked, flicking the tip of his tongue across it in fast strokes while two fingers slid up and pressed into her soaked channel from below, curling against the front wall of her.
Lyra came apart.
She squirmed, her hips jerking and twisting under his grip, trying to escape the intensity and grind into it at the same time. Her orgasm broke hard, her pussy clamping around his fingers and gushing against his chin, and Dante did not stop. He kept sucking her clit through it, kept fucking her with his tongue, drinking everything she gave him. Her cum flooded his mouth, thin and sweet, like spring water over new leaves, and he savored it, rolling it over his tongue before swallowing, then going back for more.
"Stop… No, don’t stop. I am becoming undone, I am..." Lyra mind was melting from the pleasure.
He gave her one last broad lick through her folds and straightened.
He rose up over her slowly, deliberately, and pressed his torso flush to her raised hips on the way, dragging his chest and stomach up along her open sex, smearing her slick over his chest, his abs, her wetness coating his skin from navel to throat. Lyra looked back over her shoulder at him and watched it happen, and her face dissolved.
"Oh!" she breathed. "You mark yourself with me. You are covered in me."
She moaned, long and broken, her whole body shuddering at the sight of his glistening chest in the candlelight, her fluids painted across his holes-kissed skin. He knelt back behind her, took his cock in his fist, and rested the tip at her entrance.
He did not thrust.
He held it there, the crown barely parting her soaked folds, kissing the mouth of her pussy, and waited.
Lyra understood at once. He saw her shoulders square. Then her inner muscles flexed, and she began to pull him in.
It was slow and obscene. Her pussy gripped the head of his cock and drew it inward in tiny milking pulls, inch by inch, her inner walls rippling down his shaft in waves, working him deeper like her body was drinking him. There was nothing of him in it. He knelt still as stone, his hands resting on her hips, watching his cock vanish into her a fraction at a time, pulled, swallowed, slurped deeper, until the last inch slid home and his hips met her ass with a soft slap.
"Full," Lyra gasped. "I am so full of you."
Her orgasm hit from the fullness alone. Her pussy clamped down around him and pulsed, clenching in hard waves from her entrance to her depths, and each wave dragged him a fraction deeper, seating him more securely inside her, milking him before he had moved at all. Dante groaned through his teeth. Her channel rippled around him again and again, hot and gripping, and he had to lock his knees not to spill right there.
"Your turn," Lyra whispered into the sheet, her voice wrecked. "Move. Make love to me, cleric. It is your turn."
He took hold of her buttocks, one cheek in each hand, thumbs pressing into the soft crease where thigh met ass, and pulled out to the crown and drove back in.
Lyra screamed into the mattress.
This position put him deeper than anything before. Each thrust bottomed out against her cervix, her hips held high for him, and on every stroke his balls swung forward and slapped wetly against her clit. Slap, and she gasped. Slap, and her eyes rolled. The sound filled the room, flesh on flesh, her arousal squelching around his shaft, the bed frame knocking the wall in a slow heavy beat.
Dante held her ass and fucked her, and he looked down at what he held. Her cheeks spread around his gripping hands, and above his plunging cock her cute little pucker flexed with every stroke, winking tight, opening slightly, clenching again, twitching with the shock of each impact. He watched it, mesmerized.
Their hips collided in a steady, lustful rhythm, meeting with a smack at the bottom of every stroke, her ass rippling against his hips, his balls drumming her clit. Dante set the pace and kept it, deep and even and relentless, and Lyra surrendered to it completely. Her orgasms came in rolling waves now, one breaking before the last had faded, her pussy milking his cock in long gripping pulls with each one, over and over, her mind buzzing down to nothing but the fat shaft sawing through her, in and out, in and out, filling her to her limit.
"Dante, Dante, I cannot count them anymore, I cannot..."
"Don't count. Just feel."
They savored it. He held the rhythm for a long while, unhurried in his urgency, and the pleasure built between them layer on layer. Sweat ran down his painted chest. Her thighs trembled and soaked. The room filled with their sounds, moans and slaps and the wet suck of her pussy, and neither of them wanted it to end, and both of them could feel it ending, growing, swelling toward the edge with every stroke.
His climax gathered in his gut like a flood behind a dam. His balls drew up tight, aching, slapping her clit faster, and his cock began to swell inside her, thickening, stretching her walls around him.
"Lyra. I'm going to cum..."
"Yes. Do it. Fill me up, Dante, give me everything, I want it all, I want..."
One final thrust. He buried himself to the hilt, his hips crushing against her ass, and let go.
His cock kicked and erupted. Spurt after spurt of hot cum surged up his shaft and poured into her, a massive load, thicker and longer than any before, three days of longing behind it. He felt every pulse rip through his groin, his balls clenching against her, the thick tube under his cock pumping jet after jet into her depths. His cum splashed against her cervix and pooled there, hot and heavy, filling her womb, spreading through her until she was brimming, until there was no room left and still more came.
Lyra moaned loudly into the mattress, a long unbroken cry, feeling it splash and pool against her deepest place, her pussy seizing around him in answer, milking every pulse, drinking his seed down the way her body had learned to want it.
"Deep," she sobbed. "So deep. I feel every drop. Don't pull out. Stay… Stay..."
He stayed.
He stayed buried to the root inside her, his cock still jerking with the last weak pulses, and neither of them moved. His cum sat in her like heat, sloshing faintly when either of them breathed. His erection faded slowly, by degrees, over long minutes, his softening cock still cradled in her flooded warmth, and she held him with her inner muscles the whole time, gentle, refusing to let him go until there was nothing left to hold.
At last he sank forward and lay his body down along her back.
His weight settled onto her, chest to her shoulder blades, his spent cock still seated in her, their skin sticky with sweat and her cum and his. They panted lightly together, his breath on her nape, her cheek turned into the pillow, and neither of them had the strength or the wish to move.
Dante kissed the back of her neck. Then her shoulder. Then the ridge of her spine between her shoulder blades, one slow kiss at a time, working up to her hairline and back down again. Lyra hummed under him, half conscious, drunk on bliss, her eyes closed, her whole long body limp and open beneath his weight. She relished it, the press of him, the heat, the fullness, the hand that found hers and laced their fingers into the pillow.
"Weight of a grown man," she murmured, slurred and happy. "On top of me. Full of him. This is the finest feeling my body knows."
The candle burned low. The city noise beyond the shutters thinned as the evening wore on, cart wheels giving way to distant laughter, then to a lone bell, then to nothing much at all. Neither of them stirred to snuff the light. Dante's cock had slipped free at some point, neither could say when, and his cum had leaked slowly out of her onto the fresh sheets in a warm spreading patch, and they had both decided without words that it did not matter in the least.
Night came down over Deidrue, over the bazaar and the river district, over the city of wonders, and it found the two of them tangled together in a room on the third floor, his arm over her waist, her hand over his heart, her body still warm and full of him.
Lyra turned her head and pressed her lips to the arm beside her cheek.
"Every day," she said sleepily, "is a new page. And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. However many the world gives us."
"All of them," Dante said into her hair. "I promised."
She believed him. She had since the snare. She slid down into sleep with his heartbeat under her ear, learning it still, and he watched over her a while in the dark, listening to the city, feeling her breathe, holding the woman he loved.
Their love held through the night, unbreakable, and neither the order, nor the elders, nor any road between the deep forest and the human towns would find an easy way through it.
Dante stirred first, deep in the small hours. His arm had gone numb beneath her, and he eased himself onto his side, and the motion broke the last of the seal between them. Lyra made a small sound of loss at the cool air that rushed in where his chest had been.
He gathered her up, both arms under her, and rolled onto his back with her settled along his body, her cheek on his sternum, one of her legs hooked over both of his. His back met the mattress with a grateful crackle. "Better?"
"Warmer," she murmured. "You are a better bed than any bed."
He laughed, low, careful not to shake her. Her hair spilled across his chest in a copper spill, and the candle had guttered to a thumb-width stub, so the room was all amber and shadow. He found the curve of her lower back with one palm and stroked it, slow passes, and she melted into him by degrees, her breathing slowing.
She breathed him in. Sweat and honey and her own scent all over him, and under it something that was only Dante, warm skin and a trace of the inn's bread. She memorized it the way she memorized trails. She wanted to be able to find it blind.
They began to kiss without deciding to. A press of lips to his collarbone. His mouth in her hair. Her lips finding his nipple, idle, a brush more than a kiss. His answer at her temple. Little ones, scattered, unhurried, the sort that carried nothing but themselves, and her heart went soft and huge in her chest with every one.
His hand wandered down her back, following her spine to the base, and there it lingered, kneading the round firm cheek of her ass with slow appreciative squeezes. She smiled against his chest.
"You are fond of that part of me."
"I am fond of every part of you. That one is conveniently placed."
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.