Chapter 7: The Feast and the Summons
Edran Vosk held the bow exactly as long as courtesy required, then straightened and let his eyes do what they had clearly been doing since the doors opened: counting.
"Your Majesties." His voice was dry as old paper. "The hall seats forty-two tonight. Two are absent with fever, one is the watch on the west wall. I trust you will not take the number as a slight."
"A precise welcome," Ray said.
"The only kind worth giving, Majesty. Will you sit."
They sat. Amber arranged her gown, arranging with it the angle of her collar, so the marks at her throat caught the torchlight for anyone at the table who cared to look. Several cared to look. Edran's gaze touched the marks once, filed them somewhere behind his counting eyes, and moved on to the head of the boar being carried in on a platter the width of a shield.
The boar was magnificent. Crackling skin glazed with honey and rosemary, tusks polished, an apple in its jaws that some kitchen boy had clearly buffed for the occasion. It went down the length of the table trailing steam, and the household fell on it with the restraint of people who had rehearsed their appetites.
Edran poured for them himself, refusing help with the decanter. "Tuesday's kill, as my steward will have told you. Fourteen stone dressed. I had it hung six days, no more, because I could not be certain of the day of your coming and six days is the outside of good meat in a warm spell."
"You counted on our arrival," Amber said.
"I count on everything, Majesty. It saves surprise for the things that deserve it." He lifted his cup. "To the King and Queen. Long lives, sound ledgers."
The hall drank. Somewhere down the table a man with a soldier's scarred knuckles bellowed the toast a second time for the benefit of the far end, and the far end roared back.
It was at the far end, past the cups and the carving and the candle-glow, that Amber found her.
Mara. In her serve dress, gray wool with the household's plain collar, hair damp-braided and pinned, moving along the benches with a ewer of mulled wine. She refilled a knight's cup, a steward's, the scarred man's, never spilling, never rushing. And when she turned to walk back down the line she passed through a drift of torch-warm air, and Amber smelled it over the boar and the wine, faint and unmistakable, lake water and pine and the cold, beneath the girl's clean skin like a confession pressed flat between the pages of a ledger.
She had not had time to wash properly. She had come straight from the cistern lie to serve her King and Queen.
Amber watched her set the ewer down at the niche by the buttery door and take up the bread basket instead. Mara's eyes came up the length of the table the way a tongue comes to a loose tooth, once, quick, and dropped. Her flush ran down under her collar.
Edran was talking. "The third bastion, Majesty, since you will ask eventually or your steward will. The crack in it is older than my grandfather. It has not widened in sixty years because I have measured it every spring and every autumn, and the numbers do not move."
"They will if you keep boring me with bastions at a feast," Ray said, and the old man's mouth twitched, the closest thing to laughter his face seemed built to allow.
"The eastern door, then." Edran said it as mildly as if he were passing the salt. "Unguarded since my grandfather's day. King Aldric liked a private way down to the water. My grandfather kept it so, and recorded why, and I keep the record." He cut a slice of crackling with surgical neatness. "Old kings are useful that way. They leave behind them a great many doors, and one learns which of them creak."
Amber reached for her cup. Her heart was perfectly steady, which was its own kind of skill. "And do you keep the record of which of them creak, my lord, or only the door?"
"Both, Majesty. The record and the creak. Though the creak I heard only tonight, at the turn past midnight, and the record I will consult in the morning." He ate the crackling. "The boar, Majesty? The loin is the cut worth having. My grandfather thought so, and he dined with a king."
Ray took the loin. Amber took the loin. The meal went on, and under the noise of it Amber counted in her turn: three courses, toasts, the household's faces. A girl at the far end with lake water under her collar and a secret the size of a crown in her keeping.
The toasts came thick as the wine was generous. To the union. To the late King Aldric's memory. To Ravenshold's walls. Each one bought her a pocket of cover, forty raised cups, forty tilted-back heads, forty throats busy swallowing.
Under the third toast she caught Mara's eye and held it this time, deliberately, until the girl's ears went red. Then Amber let her gaze drop, once, in a small plain motion, toward the stair that led up to the royal apartments, and back to Mara, and away. Nothing anyone else at the table could have read. A Queen glancing at her wine.
Mara nearly dropped the basket. She caught it, curtsied at nobody, and fled to the buttery door with her face the color of the roasted apple.
"You're doing the household's arithmetic for them," Ray murmured against her ear, under cover of the fourth toast.
"I'm doing mine. We were promised nightly attendance at our summons." Amber drank, unhurried. "I summoned. Quietly. Edran counts everything, but a glance is not a thing that leaves a record."
"It leaves a record on her face. She's gone the color of the tablecloth."
"Then she'll be easy to find in a crowd."
The last course was honeyed pears and a cheese Edran named by the hillside it came from, the way other men named their children. The hall had loosened by then, the scarred knight singing something about a miller's wife, the stewards refilling lazily, the watch changing outside with a rattle of pikes that nobody inside pretended to hear.
Amber set down her knife, folded her napkin, and laid her hand on Ray's arm.
"Your Majesty has had a long road," she said, at a volume meant to carry to the head of the table. "If the household will forgive us, we'll retire. The boar was worthy of my lord's grandfather."
Edran rose. So did the hall, chairs scraping back in ragged, unpracticed unison, forty-odd people bowing to a Queen who had eaten half a pear.
"The pears keep, Majesty," Edran said. "Most things do. The rooms are warm; the girl Mara was set to attend you tonight." His counting eyes rested on them both, bland as milk. "I chose her myself. Steady hands, quiet feet. She has never once been late, and never once been seen where she ought not to be. A rare combination, in my experience."
"The household is in good order," Ray said, and it was not a question, and Edran did not answer it as one.
They rose. Amber took Ray's arm and let him walk her out at a Queen's pace, unhurried, her spine straight under every eye in the hall. Only at the door did she turn her head, and found Mara standing at the buttery niche with the bread basket pressed to her chest like a shield, watching them go, wet-braided and wide-eyed and already, unmistakably, beginning to move.
The great hall doors boomed shut behind them. The stairwell beyond was dark and cold and smelled of pine smoke, and Amber was pulling him up it two steps at a time before the echo died.
"She'll ring the bell before we do," Ray said.
"I know. I want to be the one who answers the door."
Above them, faint through the stone, a bell gave one small ring. Then a second. Amber laughed, low and wicked, and took the last flight at a run.
She reached the door with her hand already on the iron ring, and Ray had not even cleared the landing. He stopped in the corridor, catching his breath, and watched his Queen listen. A second ring of the bell, fainter, from the service stair side. Then soft footsteps, and a pause, and nothing, as if the girl on the other side were gathering herself.
Amber opened the door herself.
Mara stood in the torchlight with the bread basket abandoned somewhere below and her hands clasped in front of her apron. Her braid had dried crooked. Her cheeks were still blazing from the hall, and her breath fogged fast in the cold corridor.
"Your Majesty. The bell rang, so I came, only His Lordship said I was set to attend you, so it was proper, I thought it was proper."
"It was proper," Amber said. "Come in before the whole household counts you standing at our door."
Mara slipped inside. Ray shut the door and dropped the bolt, and the fire in the chamber had been rebuilt high, the furs on the four-poster turned down, someone's careful hands at work while they ate. The girl stood in the middle of the warm room dripping cold air, looking from the bed to the King to the Queen as if she had forgotten which of the three had summoned her.
"Take off the apron," Amber said, unpinning her own wet braid and shaking it loose. "The rest can wait until you've stopped shaking."
"I'm not shaking, Majesty."
"You are." Amber crossed to her and took her wrists, unclasped them, held the cold fingers in her own. "Your hands are ice. You ran here."
"From the buttery stairs, yes." Mara's voice steadied a little. "I dropped the bread basket in front of the steward. He'll count that too, won't he? Bread on the floor."
"He'll count a nervous girl carrying too much," Ray said. "Nothing more."
"Nothing more," Amber repeated, and smiled. "That's the whole art of it, Mara. Every secret should look like a small mistake."
Then she pulled the apron over the girl's head and undid the household collar with two fingers, and the gray dress followed onto the floor at Amber's pace, not the frantic shore pace, unhurried, button by button, while Ray banked the fire and came back to stand at her other side. Naked, Mara was smaller in firelight than in moonlight, pinker, the gooseflesh on her arms where the corridor cold still clung.
"Tonight you're not learning," Amber said, walking her backward toward the bed. "Tonight you're being used. Is that what you came for?"
"Yes." It came out ragged. "Yes, please."
"Get on the bed. Hands on the posts."
Mara climbed onto the black velvet and furs and gripped the carved posts, kneeling, her back a smooth pale line, her ribs rising and falling. Ray knelt behind her and ran his palms up her thighs, spreading her, and she made a sound low in her throat when his thumbs parted her.
"Wet already," he said. "From a bell and a corridor."
"From the whole feast," Mara gasped. "I served wine with my hands shaking, knowing what was coming. I could think of nothing else. I nearly dropped the ewer on the scarred knight."
"You'll drop nothing tonight," Amber said, shedding her own gown, "except your mouth open on my cunt."
She climbed onto the bed, hooked a pillow under her own hips, and lay back with her knees apart, auburn hair spilled over the furs, looking up the girl's trembling body. "Bring it here. The way I taught you on the rock, only slower. You have all night now, and no moon to rush us."
Mara bent between her thighs. The first lick was careful, flattened and slow, and Amber's breath left her in a long unhurried sound, nothing like the choked cries of the lake. She had a bed now and she used it, hips rolling lazily, one hand resting light on the back of the girl's head.
Ray spat into his palm, worked it down his cock, and pressed the head against Mara's slit. Her second time was easier than the first; she was slick and open and pushed back onto him without being told, taking inch after inch with a moan she fed directly into Amber's cunt.
"There it is," Amber said. "Fuck her properly, Ray. I want to feel her voice."
He set a deep steady rhythm, his hands locked on the girl's hips, driving her forward into Amber's mouth with every stroke. The furs shifted and slid under three moving bodies. The fire popped. Mara's cries vibrated up through Amber's flesh in pulses that matched his thrusts, and Amber threaded her fingers into the damp braid and held on.
"Harder," Mara sobbed against her. "Please, harder, I've been thinking about it all through the pears."
"Pears," Amber laughed, arching. "She was thinking of your cock through the pears, Ray."
"I was counting his thrusts in my head," the girl babbled, "to keep still, like counting the crack in the bastion, I couldn't, I lost count at forty."
Ray drove in hard enough to knock the count clean out of her, and her arms buckled, and Amber caught her by the shoulders and pulled her down flat, keeping her mouth buried, riding her tongue through it while Ray fucked her into the Queen from behind. The bed frame creaked once, a deep wooden groan, and Ray thought, distantly, that Edran would have filed it.
"Close," Amber said, her thighs tightening around the girl's ears. "Both of us. I can feel her clenching around you, Ray, she's nearly there."
"Mara," Ray said, "come when she does."
The girl nodded frantically into wet flesh, and Amber came first, a slow rolling shudder this time, her heels pressing into the furs, her hand fisted in the braid. The clench of it dragged Mara over with her, her cunt seizing around Ray's cock in hard fluttering waves, her scream muffled and endless against Amber, and Ray buried himself and spilled into her with a grunt, flooding her, holding her hips down on him while he emptied.
He pulled out slow. His seed ran white down the inside of her thigh and she stayed where she had fallen, face pressed to Amber's belly, breathing like a bellows.
"Better than the rock," Amber said, stroking her hair.
"The bed creaks," Mara managed, into the furs.
"Let it creak. It's our bed." Amber lifted the girl's chin, studying her flushed face. "Now up. I'm not finished with you, and neither is he. You watched us take each other's mouths. Tonight you'll learn the middle of it."
Mara's eyes went wide and went down, to where Ray still glistened with both of them, and she reached for him without needing to be told this time.
"Good girl," Amber said, and drew her knees up.
Mara's hand closed around him, still slick from the fuck, and Ray watched her look up at Amber as if asking permission to begin.
"He's just been inside you," Amber said. "Taste us both. That's the middle of it, love. A mouth that's only ever tasted one thing at a time is half educated."
Mara bent and took him in. Her tongue was more deliberate now, tracing the length of him, gathering the mixed salt of her own spend and his, and she made a small startled sound at the flavor and then went back for more. Ray's hand found her damp braid. He let her set the pace, watching her learn the weight of him on her tongue, the way her lips settled at the ridge and held.
"Wider," Amber murmured. "Relax the throat. He likes the head of it pressed deep, against the back of your mouth. Go until your eyes water, then keep going."
The girl obeyed. Her jaw went slack and she pushed down, gagging once, twice, and then her throat opened and she swallowed him to the root, her nose pressed into the coarse hair at his base, her eyes streaming up at him and shining with pride.
"Look at that," Amber said. "Fast learner."
"Too good at it," Ray said, and pulled her off by the braid before his spine gave out. Her mouth came away red and dripping, grinning.
"And now her," Mara rasped, voice scraped raw. "Please. I only did what you showed me on the rock. I want to do it properly."
"Then watch first." Amber slid down the furs until her head found the pillow and crooked two fingers at the girl. "Come here. Kneel over my face."
Mara scrambled up on trembling knees, straddling Amber's head, facing down her body. Amber's hands gripped her thighs and pulled her cunt down onto her waiting mouth, and the girl sobbed at the first slow stroke of her tongue.
"That's what I want you to learn," Ray said, settling behind Mara, his chest against her back, his cock hardening again against her ass. "Not just the licking. The reading. Every twitch means something."
He reached around her, over the curve of her belly, and found Amber's cunt with his fingers, spread and glistening below his wife's working mouth. He circled her clit in slow figure eights, and felt Amber's hips roll under them both.
"Now you," he said, and guided Mara's hand down.
Her fingers were cold from the corridor and Amber hissed when they touched her, then laughed into the girl's flesh. "Cold hands. You'll warm them or I'll keep you under the furs all night."
"Keep her anyway," Ray said.
Mara's fingers found the rhythm he'd shown her, circling, pressing, learning the way Amber's breath changed. And Amber ate her steadily beneath her, patient now, unhurried, her tongue working through the girl's folds in long flat strokes while her heels pressed into the mattress.
"There's a spot inside her," Ray said against Mara's ear. "Two knuckles up, toward my hand. Find it. Curl your fingers like you're beckoning."
Mara pushed two fingers in. Amber's back arched off the furs, a low sound buzzing up through Mara's cunt, and the girl gasped.
"Found it," Ray said.
"Oh." Mara curled her fingers again, watching Amber's face above her own stomach, watching the Queen's composure crack. "Oh, she's so wet around my fingers. She's clenching."
"That's the reading. Do it every third circle. Don't rush."
They worked her together, the King's hand and the maid's, while Amber's mouth drove Mara up toward her peak. The fire cracked. The bed creaked its deep wooden groan. Mara's hips began to stutter against Amber's face, her thighs shaking, and Amber locked her arms around them and held her down and drank her through it, Mara's cry breaking in the middle like a snapped string.
She collapsed forward onto her hands, fingers still buried in Amber, chest heaving over the Queen's body.
"Good," Amber said, wiping her mouth with the back of her wrist. "Now the last lesson. Ray. On your back."
He stretched out on the furs, cock standing fat and flushed against his belly. Amber swung a leg over him and sank down in one slow motion, both of them groaning as her cunt swallowed him to the root. She sat still, full of him, and looked at Mara over her shoulder.
"Come here. Here." She patted the inside of her own thigh. "You're going to learn the most useful thing a third mouth can do. When he's in me like this, you put your tongue where we join. On him, on me, on both. Every woman who's ever shared a bed with a couple has earned her keep that way."
Mara's eyes went wide. "You want me to lick while he's inside you?"
"I want you to make me come on his cock with your mouth. That's the whole lesson."
The girl bent down between Amber's spread knees. Her tongue found the place where Ray's shaft stretched Amber open, dragged up the wet length of it, and Ray's hips jerked up into his wife at the hot flicker of it.
"Fuck," he said.
"That's the boy," Amber said, and started to ride. She rolled her hips in long slow strokes, rising until only the head held and sinking back down, and Mara's tongue followed every movement, lapping at Amber's clit on each downstroke, licking the slick floor of the join, sometimes catching Ray's balls with the flat of her tongue so that he grunted and flexed under them both.
Amber's riding turned ragged. Her nails raked Ray's chest.
"Both of you," she gasped. "Her mouth, your cock, Christ, don't you dare stop either."
"Come on us," Ray said, gripping her waist. "Let her feel it clench against her tongue."
Amber came hard, her thighs clamping Mara's head, her cunt rippling down Ray's length in waves he could count, her cry shaking the candles. The flutter of her pushed him over with her, and he drove up and spilled deep, his groan tearing through the room while Mara kept licking through all of it, greedy and relentless, until Amber had to shove her gently away, laughing, oversensitized.
They ended in a heap, Amber sprawled across Ray's chest, Mara curled at her hip with her cheek on the Queen's breast, all three slick and steaming in the firelight.
"You learn faster than half the court," Amber said, toying with the crooked braid.
"Can I stay till the fire's low?" Mara asked, small-voiced. "The stair is cold."
Ray reached down and pulled a fur over the three of them. "Stay," he said. "If anyone asks, you fell in the cistern."
Mara's laugh was muffled against Amber's skin. "I always fall in the cistern, Your Majesty."
Down the corridor, faint through the stone, footsteps passed and faded. Neither of them moved to count them.
They sent Mara back before the fire had burned to embers, dressed in the gray wool with her crooked braid repinned by Amber's own hands, and the stair door closed on her soft bare footsteps without a sound. Ray bolted it and turned to find his wife already stretched out on the furs, watching him with the green-eyed look that meant she was arranging tomorrow.
"Again tomorrow night," Amber said. It was not a question and she did not make it one.
"You've grown fond of her mouth."
"I've grown fond of the arrangement. A Queen needs one servant who owes her a secret instead of wages." She lifted her arm and he came down into it, her lips finding the salt of his throat. "Ring at the same bell tomorrow. After the last course."