Dark Enchantment Read Free

the strapping of his breastplate. His words burned.
    ‘Ah.’ Of course; it was the ceremony for the wedding night: to offer one’s maidenhead to the goddess as a pure sacrifice. A woman who did not – oh gods, he was kissing her throat now and her whole body was shaking with the heat of those kisses – risked dying impure and being rejected by the gods. Oh. The tears were back again, brimming in her eyes. ‘I don’t know the words.’
    He pulled back momentarily to look her in the face. ‘Nor do I.’ He shrugged his breastplate off and laid it to the floor, deliberately making as little noise as he could. ‘Think. You must have heard women talk.’
    ‘Yes.’
Think?
She couldn’t think. His big strong hands were on his belt now, uncinching the kilt of straps that protected his thighs. There was blood all across his scraped knuckles. There was a green stain on the front of his tunic from the breastplate. She touched the fabric, feeling for his heartbeat beneath the padded linen. He grabbed her hand and pushed it down to his crotch. Beneath his tunic and calfskin breeches something surged hungrily to greet her.
    ‘Divine Tesub,’ he groaned, prompting her.
    ‘Divine Tesub …’ Her mind was capable only of focusing on one thing: that this was
him
, this was his cock. This was what she had dreamed of and blushed over in secret and shaped in the hot still air of her bedchamber. He was making her touch it. He was moulding her fingers round its thickness. He was breathing hard as she measured its length with her clumsy hands. ‘Divine Lady, I am a virgin,’ she breathed. ‘Give me courage this night.’
    ‘Good.’ Whether he was referring to her prayer or her actions, she couldn’t tell. His voice was low and urgent.
    ‘Let me give my husband pleasure – Oh!’
    ‘What?’
    ‘You’re not my husband …’
    ‘It will do,’ he promised.
    ‘Oh. Let me give him pleasure that he may teach pleasure to me.’ Her words were coming out in a stumbled blur, her focus torn between them and the live thing in her hands, muscular as a snake. ‘Accept the blood I shed, Divine Lady …’
    He was peeling away the belt that held her quiver of arrows.
    ‘Accept my … my sacrifice, Divine Lady …’
    He was loosening the drawstring on his breeches.
    ‘Divine Tesub …’
    ‘Is that it done?’
    Surya gaped and nodded. There was more: something about bearing the wound given to her, something about fertility, but she couldn’t remember the words because the soldier’s weapon had sprung out unsheathed into her grasp and she could not get over the heat of him, the girth of him, the solidity.
    Mershen touched her lips. ‘Done well, Surya.’ Then he pulled up the skirt of her robe and slipped his hand between her thighs. Flesh parted before his fingers just as her lips parted under his. She was wet; it came as much of a surprise to her as to him. She shook, grinding her spine against the pillar. No one had ever touched her there; no fingers but her own had done
that
. His fingers were rough-textured but careful in their movements, slipping up her shallow furrow.
    ‘Yes?’
    She nodded, wide-eyed.
    ‘Good.’ He was smiling, but it was not the warm conspiratorial smile she remembered; it was something wilder and harder edged and loaded with foreknowledge and regret. His fingers slipped in and out of her, painting her the bright hot colours of desire. She felt like she was changing shape under his touch, being moulded into new contours. Her own hands slackened, bereft of direction. She couldn’t even see him properly; her eyes kept fluttering closed of their own accord. ‘Good,’ he murmured again, then slid from her and grasped her under the curve of her rump, lifting and holding her close to him as he carried her over to the couch nearby. The couch, Surya thought dimly, where her mother used to lie and watch the clouds caress the mountaintops.
    She could feel his erection pinned between them and pressing into her