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[Fair warning: the steamy scene continues.
The following text involves sensuality of the male persuasion.
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The last lesson Faunos learned was that pleasure could be so intense, it almost hurt. He had lost all sense of time and place. The only anchor to reality was the body moving against him, within him, the heat and strength he could not have denied if he had wanted to.
Pleasure shocked him, and his own desire to surrender to, drown in it, shocked him even more. He heard his own voice cry out, high and sharp, as he embraced the possession, hands like claws urging Soran --
And then it began. It always started out as a weightless sensation, as his thoughts grew jumbled, and the phantom scents of lilac and jasmine and bergamot wafted around him, scents from the drowned lands. He opened his eyes to look up into Soran’s face, which was sheened with sweat and twisted with effort and self-absorption.
Soft light glowed from beneath Faunos’s skin, but Soran’s eyes were squeezed shut, he saw nothing. The faint light grew, and tiny firefly sparkles began to dance around the chakra points. Lilac and jasmine wreathed Faunos as surely as if he had knocked over the oil jars, and if Soran were one Iota less absorbed in his hunt for completion, he would have seen it all.
Panic seized Faunos by the throat. He dragged in a single breath, held it and begged the gods for help. It had to stop, it must. He heard himself cry out the names of Helios and Mayat -- and some mighty hand cast him down like a rag doll, over the edge of pleasure. As suddenly as the Power had begun to run away from his control, it was over.
Again, he cried out, just as Soran froze in a sublime moment, enraptured, tortured, stretched taut. For almost a minute the witchfinder was still, content just to breathe. The blue eyes opened at last, dark and replete. His chest was still heaving as he moved away and went down on his back to rest.
The loudest sound in the pavilion was the rasp of their breathing, the crackle of the brazier, the soft plucking of strings from the corner where the blind harper sat. Faunos stretched his limbs, felt out his muscles, one by one, and ouched.
“I hurt you,” Soran said bluntly. “I know I did. There's no other way, but next time will be infinitely more pleasurable.”
“So I’ve been told.” Faunos pulled his knees into his belly to ease his spine, rolled over and sat up with another ouch. His mind was a maelstrom, his thoughts scattered on the winds. He knew only that the witchfinder remained ignorant, and there was wisdom in flight “I have to go,” he muttered, though the greater part of him longed to pull up a sheet, try the wine, doze in the hot draft from the brazier.
“Go?” Soran echoed, disbelieving his ears. He got up on his elbow and laid one arm over Faunos to stop him. “Go where? I’ve never had a bedmate desert me.”
“You’ve never bedded a freeman,” Faunos guessed, husky, still breathless. “Have you? You’ve always had courtesans, concubines, who do as they’re told no matter what they think or want.” He looked away. "You gave me leave to go.”
“I take it back,” Soran said silkily, “for I’ve changed my mind. You know my name. With a single word, I can put a collar on that beautiful neck of yours and have you delivered to the palace as my property. No one in this camp would speak against me. In fact, they’d envy you, for you’ll live in the breath of the gods, in the short, noonday shadow of Helios, where high priests and kings lay their heads at night.”
Faunos’s heart slammed painfully at his ribs. Soran was not exaggerating -- it sometimes happened that priests and princes chose a companion from the street, and the most ridiculous thing the chosen one could do was protest. What should have been a great honor swiftly became an imposition, when the fool was collared as a bondsman, indentured to serve in the palace until he or she was granted manumission.
He swallowed hard on a dry throat. “All right. I can stay a while longer.”
“Till I give you leave to go,” Soran purred, stroking his neck, his shoulder. “I want you again. I’ll be most gentle, there’s no need to fear.”
“I don’t fear,” Faunos told him, and it was almost true. He had no fear of Soran, only of being bonded to the palace while the old books rotted in the sea cave, and Galen fretted for him. And of being recognized for what he was. The sheer foolishness of coming here had begun to settle on him like a physical burden, and already he felt trapped as the rabbit in the snare.
The witchfinder leaned over and kissed him, hard, deep, searching. Against all his better judgment, Faunos embraced him, and thrilled at the hard press of bone and sinew, the sharp tang of fresh sweat, so male, so primal. He brought Soran down onto the divan, and then they were wrestling, trying their strength like colts.
It was a match Faunos could not hope to win, though he threw his full measure into it. Soran could probably have broken him, if he had wanted to, but he exerted just enough to get the better of Faunos, and have his way.
In the end Faunos took an unholy kind of pleasure in losing the bout. In minutes, skin gleaming, chuckling in delight, Soran was up again – young and eager. Faunos took a quick breath as he rasped, “Over, over!”
On his knees now, Faunos let pure sensation engulf him. The Power throbbed in his belly as pleasure coursed along his nerves, but this time he knew what was happening, and the prayers to any god who would listen were already on his lips.
He groaned in denial as the Power coalesced in the pit of his stomach and spread outward, shimmering in every extremity. His teeth closed on his lip, drawing blood there, and he murmured to himself in the ancient language, which Soran could never have understood. “No, not now, not here, please gods, not with him!"
His hands clenched into the silk in a desperate bid to control it, for if he did not smother the Power, choke it off before it began, the witchfinder would surely know. Soran was too wild to hear the old, old words, and could not have known what Faunos was saying.
By an effort of sheer willpower Faunos clamped down on the energies surging inside him. Galen was still trying to teach him how to control it; he had years of studies left, before he would be the master of the forces that consumed him.
Pleasure dwindled away with the Power, and for him it was already over while Soran was still hunting. He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, waiting for Soran to be done, and at last it was the witchfinder who cried out, low and growling.
Moments later Soran grew heavy on him, and Faunos knew he was asleep. Exhausted, spent. He had earned the rest. Very carefully, he disentangled his limbs and stood shakily by the divan. He felt odd – a little bruised, a little raw, and inestimably sad.
More than anything, he wanted to swim. He dressed quickly, and Soran did not move as Faunos studied him in the lamplight. He looked so young now, when sleep stripped away the arrogance of rank. He looked almost like a boy, Faunos thought. He stooped, touched Soran’s face but did not wake him. He murmured in his sleep – quite unlike the witchfinder, the hunter who trapped and captured those who had been marked for arrest. In sleep his face was gentle; and he was a gentle lover.
And he would no doubt be spitting with fury when he woke and discovered himself alone. Without a sound, Faunos opened the flap and stepped out into the sharp night air. At his feet, the camp master had just stoked and lit a second pipe. The man’s eyes glittered with ribald humor as he watched Faunos go by. No need to ask if satisfaction had been delivered, Faunos knew. He must have heard every whimper, every cry. He gave the camp master a hard-eyed glare and stalked away.
Midnight was long past. By the stars, dawn was not long away as he skirted the dunes and climbed the cliff path. The storm had washed in mounds of bull kelp, which had already begun to smell a little rank in the light of the full moon. He wrinkled his nose at it as he hurried back toward the ruins of the old city.
Turn page to Chapter Ten part two...
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