Chapter 2: Poison and Passion in the Moonlight
The mist clung to Gareth’s cloak like a second skin, cold and relentless. He moved alone, a shadow against the deeper black of the forest. Leaving the others at the ridge had tasted like cowardice, but Ser Willam’s wounded shoulder and the raw panic in the men’s eyes demanded a single, silent approach. He was good at this. The part of war no ballads sang about: the creeping, the waiting, the cutting of throats in the dark.
He found the main camp by smell first—woodsmoke, dung, the sour tang of a tannery. It was a chaotic scramble of hide tents and lean-tos, nestled in a ravine. Too many. A direct assault was suicide. But on the periphery, slightly apart where the clean scent of herbs cut through the camp’s stink, he saw a smaller, dilapidated tent. A healer’s place. Weakness, or opportunity.
Caius would be guarded at the heart. But a healer might know things. Might have weaknesses of their own.
He slid through the undergrowth, a phantom. The herbalist’s tent was a sorry thing. Bark and reeds woven into sagging walls. Shattered pots lay scattered like bones. From within, the glow of a low fire painted the hide orange. He heard the soft clink of a mortar and pestle.
Gareth drew his dagger, the well-worn hilt fitting his palm like a promise. He envisioned it: a hand over a mouth, the blade at a soft throat, whispered questions. He pushed the hide flap aside and entered in one fluid motion.
The air was thick, pungent. Drying bundles hung from the crosspole. A young woman with a waterfall of black hair was bent over a grinding stone, her back to him. Perfect.
He crossed the space in two strides. His left arm hooked around her torso, yanking her back against his plate. His right hand brought the dagger to her throat. “Not a sound,” he breathed into her ear.
She went still. Then she laughed.
It was a low, startling sound, devoid of fear. “The steel knight,” she said. Her voice was younger than he expected. “You’re late. I thought you’d come before moon-high.”
Her hand, small and quick, shot up. Not to claw at his arm, but to strike backwards. He saw the flash of a slender blade, no longer than a finger, dark with something sticky. It skittered off his rerebrace, but the tip caught the bare skin of his wrist where his glove had torn in the earlier fight.
A sharp, cold burn. Not deep. A scratch.
But instantly, his forearm went numb. The dagger slipped from lifeless fingers, thudding into the dirt. A poison. Fast-acting. His vision swam, the tent tilting. He stumbled back, his left arm losing strength. She spun, a whirl of black hair and fierce brown eyes. She drove a foot into his chest, knocking the wind from him. He crashed down, his armor a deafening clatter in the small space.
She was on him before the world stopped spinning. She had his own dagger now, pressing it against the leather of his gorget. “Looking for your lost prince?” she sneered. Her knee dug into his gut. “He’s being… entertained.”
Rage, hot and clean, cut through the venom’s fog. His right arm was dead weight, but his left still worked. He bucked, using his greater mass and the sheer, brutal leverage of his armor. He rolled, pinning her beneath him. The dagger was lost again in the struggle. He trapped her wrists above her head with his one good hand, his body a cage of steel and mail.
She fought like a wildcat, twisting, spitting, trying to bite. Her hips bucked against him, seeking a weakness. He drove his armored thigh harder between her legs to still her, grinding it against her core.
A shock went through her. Her furious snarl twisted, melted into something else. Her struggles didn’t cease, but their nature changed. She arched her back, pressing herself against the hard, unyielding metal. Her breath hitched, becoming a sharp pant.
“Is that all you have?” she taunted, but her voice was thick, breathless. Her eyes, wide and dark in the firelight, held his with a challenge that was pure fire. “Your prince is getting fucked raw by Bronwyn. And you… you just pin me like a fucking beetle?”
She surged up, her mouth finding his in a brutal, biting kiss. It wasn’t affection; it was a battle. Her teeth cut his lip. He tasted blood and her—herbs and something wild. The numbness was creeping into his chest, a cold tide. But a hotter, darker tide was rising in answer to her.
He tore his mouth away. “You’re poisoned,” he grunted, the words slurring.
“It won’t kill you. Just slows you down.” Her hips rolled again, a deliberate, sinuous motion against his thigh. “Slows everything down. Except this, maybe.” She grinned, a wicked, terrifying flash of teeth. “Fuck me like you hate me or slit my throat, but don’t you dare stop.”
It snapped something in him. The mission, the poison, the shame of their failure—it all condensed into a raw, urgent need to feel, to dominate this one, small, furious thing. To have control where he had none.
He released her wrists. She didn’t pull away. She scrabbled at his belt with frantic fingers, loosening the leather, tugging at the laces of his breeches. He helped with his left hand, clumsy. He shoved the fabric down just enough. She was doing the same, yanking her own trousers and smallclothes down her thighs, kicking them aside.
There was no finesse. No pretense. He was heavy on her, the cold links of his mail pressing into her soft stomach. She guided him, her hand wrapping his half-hard length—the poison’s work—and positioning him at her entrance. She was soaked, her heat palpable even through the numbness spreading in his veins.
“Come on, you steel-plated bastard,” she hissed, her legs wrapping around his hips, her heels digging into the back of his thighs. “Do it. Fuck me.”
He drove into her. A single, brutal, bottoming thrust. She cried out, a sharp, guttural sound that was pure triumph. She was tight, impossibly so, a slick, clenching fist of heat around his cock. The sensation cut through the poison, a bright, painful line of feeling.
He set a punishing pace, each drive of his hips slamming her body into the dirt floor. The tent poles shuddered. Dried herbs rained down on them. He fucked her with the grim, focused intensity of a man trying to exorcise a demon. It was anger, it was fear, it was the crushing weight of a lost prince and a dying kingdom. It was all of it, channeled into this raw, wet, slapping rhythm.
“Yes!” she shouted, her nails scraping against his back plates, finding no purchase. “Like that! Just like that, you fucker!”
Her words ignited him. He gripped her hip, his fingers digging into soft flesh, holding her still for his thrusts. The wet, messy sounds of their coupling filled the fragrant air, a brutal counterpoint to the gentle crackle of the fire. He could feel his own end building, a hard knot low in his belly, fighting against the cold lethargy of the toxin.
She came first. Her body locked around him, a series of violent, internal convulsions that squeezed his cock relentlessly. She threw her head back, a silent scream etched on her face, her back arching so sharply he thought it might break.
It tipped him over. With a ragged groan that was half a sob, he spent himself inside her, a deep, pulsing release that felt less like pleasure and more like a hemorrhage. He collapsed onto her, his dead right arm trapped awkwardly beneath them, his left arm giving out. The weight of his armor crushed the breath from her, but she didn’t complain. She held him, her small hands coming up to tangle in the short, sweaty hair at the back of his neck.
For long minutes, there was only the sound of their breathing, laborious and slowing. The fire popped. The numbness was in his other shoulder now, creeping towards his heart. A strange calm settled over him.
She stirred beneath him. “Get off. You’re crushing me, and you weigh more than a dead boar.”
He rolled, his body protesting, every movement slow and difficult. He lay on his back beside her, staring up at the smoke-blackened ceiling of the tent. His cock, soft and wet, lay against his thigh. She pulled her trousers up, then, with a startling gentleness, reached over and tugged his up as well, lacing them loosely.
“The poison,” he managed to say, his tongue thick. “Antidote.”
“Maybe.” She sat up, looking down at him. Her hair was a mess, dirt smudged her cheek, and her lips were swollen. She looked utterly ravaged and completely in charge. “Your prince. He’s alive. Bronwyn won’t kill him. Not yet. She needs him as a message.”
“What… message?”
“That you can’t win.” She stood, brushing off her clothes. She walked to a cluttered shelf, selected a small clay cup, and poured a viscous green liquid from a stoppered horn. She came back and knelt beside him. “Drink. This will counteract the numbness. Not all the way. You’ll be weak as a kitten for hours.”
He didn’t have the strength to refuse. He let her lift his head, tilting the bitter, earthy concoction down his throat. He choked it down.
“Why?” he asked, as the cold tide in his chest began, infinitesimally, to recede.
She studied him, her head tilted. “Because I’m not stupid. Bronwyn sees only the war. I see what comes after. Or what could.” She traced a finger over a dent in his breastplate. “When they trade you back for supplies, or a treaty, or whatever Bronwyn decides… remember this tent. Remember that the enemy isn’t always just the one in front of you with a blade.”
Footsteps sounded outside, heavy and purposeful. The hide flap was thrown open. Two of the wild women, armed with spears, stood silhouetted against the grey dawn light.
Isla’s face shut down, becoming a mask of cool defiance. “Found this one sneaking around,” she said to them, her voice flat. “Poisoned him. He’s harmless now.”
The women nodded, stepping in. They hauled Gareth to his feet. His legs wouldn’t support him; they dragged him. As they pulled him from the tent, his last sight was of Isla, kneeling by her fire, not looking at him, grinding her herbs once more with steady, precise strokes. The smell of crushed mint and old blood followed him out into the cold, new day.
The smell of crushed mint and old blood followed him out into the cold, new day. He was dragged, a sack of dead weight in their grip, past smoldering cookfires and curious, hardened faces. They threw him into a small, stinking pen woven from blackthorn branches, his body landing beside another in the damp earth.
It was Caius.
The prince was curled on his side, still in his stained underclothes, shivering. A rough wool blanket lay discarded nearby. A fresh, livid bruise bloomed across his jaw. His eyes, when they opened, were hollow shells of the idealism Gareth once knew. “You came,” Caius whispered, the words slurred with exhaustion. “I told you not to.”
“Orders die with the king,” Gareth grunted back, pushing himself up with his one good arm. The antidote was a slow burn through his veins, feeling returning in prickling waves. “You’re not king yet.”
A bitter smile touched Caius’s lips. “No. I’m something else here.” He looked towards the center of the camp, where Bronwyn’s larger tent stood. “She… she uses the humiliation as a weapon. It works.”
“It’s a blade that cuts both ways,” Gareth said, thinking of Isla’s fierce, welcoming mouth, the punishing heat of her. He shifted, his body aching in strange places. “The healer. Isla. She gave me an antidote. She spoke of messages. Of after the war.”
Caius blinked, some clarity returning to his gaze. “A bridge?”
“Or a trap,” Gareth sighed. “But when your only tool is a hammer…”
“…everything looks like a nail,” Caius finished the old adage. He sat up slowly, wincing. The morning light revealed the deep lines of fatigue on his young face. “I have been nothing but a nail here.”
The hide flap of Bronwyn’s tent was thrown back. She stood there, a silhouette against the glow of her hearth fire. She pointed at Caius, then crooked her finger inward. The command was clear. Caius met Gareth’s eyes, something shifting in their blue depths. It wasn’t fear. It was a cold, grim calculation. He stood, moving with a stiffness that wasn’t entirely physical, and walked towards her.
The tent’s interior was warmer now, the fire built higher. The scent of her—pine, iron, and sex—was embedded in the very hides. She said nothing as he entered. She merely watched him, arms crossed, a strip of supple leather in one hand. It was a leash, the kind used for hunting dogs.
“On your knees,” she said, her voice devoid of its previous taunting heat. It was flat, a command expecting compliance.
Caius didn’t hesitate. He knelt. The dirt floor was hard and cool. She stepped closer, her bare feet appearing in his vision. She looped the leather around his neck, not tight enough to choke, but with a firm, possessive finality. The buckle clicked.
“You understand this?” she asked, giving the leash a small, testing tug.
He looked up at her. The firelight danced in her green eyes, but the anger was gone, replaced by something more complex—a weary curiosity. “It’s a symbol,” he said, his voice steady. “Of ownership.”
“No,” she corrected, her lips thinning. “It’s a truth. Your people leash the land with fences. You leash men with laws. This is simpler. More honest.” She dropped the end of the leash. It lay coiled on the ground between them like a dormant serpent. “You are mine until I say otherwise. Your life, your body. Mine.”
Caius looked at the leather lead, then back up at her. The hollow feeling in his gut solidified into a cold, sharp point. He had been passive. A recipient. He saw now that passivity was just another kind of cage. To break a cage, you sometimes had to pick the lock from the inside, even if it cut your hands.
He reached out, not for her, but for the end of the leash. He picked it up. The leather was warm from her grip. He held it out to her, his arm extended, his eyes locked on hers. An offering. An invitation.
Bronwyn stared at the proffered leash, her expression unreadable. A long, silent moment stretched between them, filled only by the crackle of the fire. Then, something flickered in her gaze—surprise, challenge, a dark spark of understanding. She took the leash from his hand.
In one swift, violent motion, she yanked it sideways. Caius sprawled onto his hands and knees, the jerk rough against his throat. She didn’t stop. She walked around him, a predator circling, until she stood behind him. The leash pulled taut, keeping his head low, his back arched.
“You want honesty, princeling?” she murmured, her voice a low thrum. “Let’s see what you’re made of.”
She didn’t undress him. She simply tore his loose trousers down his thighs, the fabric ripping at the seams.
She simply tore his loose trousers down his thighs, the fabric ripping at the seams. The cold air hit his bare skin, but the heat of her gaze was worse. She stepped closer, her own leathers still on, the promise of another violation hanging between them. Caius waited, muscles coiled, until her knee pressed into the dirt beside his hip.
He moved faster than she expected. His hand shot out, not to push her away, but to snatch the loose end of the leash still wrapped around his own neck. He yanked it hard, the leather burning through his fingers. The sudden jerk pulled Bronwyn off-balance; she stumbled forward with a sharp gasp. He was already twisting, using his body weight to roll them both.
Now he was on top, her back pressed into the dirt floor. The shock in her green eyes was a bright, fleeting thing, quickly swallowed by fury. “You little—”
He didn’t let her finish. He looped the leash around her throat once, twice, pulling it tight against her windpipe. Her words died in a choked gurgle. He used his other hand to fist in her long, tangled red hair, pulling her head back to expose the column of her neck. “Mine,” he snarled, the word ripped from some deep, dark place her humiliation had carved in him.
He kept the pressure on the leash, not enough to kill, just enough to steal her breath and her fight. She bucked beneath him, strong and wild, but his weight and leverage held her down. With his knee, he shoved her legs apart. Her own trousers were still on, but he didn’t bother with lacings. He tore at the hardened leather with a brutal, grunting effort, his fingers finding the gap and forcing it wider.
“You wanted honesty,” he hissed into her ear, his voice raw. He yanked her hips up, positioning her on her hands and knees. He spat on his fingers, rubbing the moisture over himself, hard and aching, before guiding his cock to her exposed entrance. He drove into her in one brutal, unforgiving thrust.
She cried out, a sound of pure, ragged shock that was quickly strangled by the leash. He rode her like an animal, each movement a piston of reclaimed anger. The wet, slapping rhythm of his hips against her flesh was obscenely loud. He tightened the leash, watching the veins in her neck stand out, her face flushing dark. “Is this the truth you wanted, you savage bitch?” he growled, pulling her hair harder, making her arch her back.
He smacked her ass, the crack of his palm on her skin sharp in the tent. Then again, harder, leaving a red handprint blooming on her pale skin. “This is what you made me.” He fucked her deeper, each impact jolting her body forward. She was tight, clenching around him in involuntary pulses, her body betraying her rage. He could feel her heat, her wetness, and it fueled his own violent rhythm.
“You leash everyone,” he panted, his thrusts becoming erratic, harder. “Your people, the forest, me.” He leaned close, his breath hot on her ear. “Now feel what it’s like to be the dog.” He came then, with a final, vicious surge, spilling inside her with a guttural roar. He held himself there, buried deep, the leash still taut in his fist as he emptied himself.
For a moment, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing. He slowly loosened the leather from around her throat. She collapsed forward onto her elbows, coughing, gasping for air. He pulled out, the movement slick and finished. He stood, buckling his torn trousers, looking down at her sprawled form. She turned her head, her green eyes blazing up at him, not with defeat, but with a new, ferocious recognition.
He dropped the leash onto the dirt beside her. “The message has been received,” he said, his voice cold and final. Then he turned and walked out of her tent, into the grey light of the camp, leaving the hide flap swinging behind him.