Forest Mage (54 page)

She halted outside it and turned to face me. I could not help myself. I pressed close to her. She set her small hands against my chest and laughed up at me. “You like me already, don’t you, big man?”

“That I do,” I breathed down at her. I reached past her for the doorknob. Her hand was there first, stopping mine.

“I’m going to do you special,” she said quietly. “Trust me. I know what you’ll like.”

She turned from me to face the door, and as she did, she let her breasts, free beneath her simple shift, brush against me. Was it deliberate that her buttocks rested lightly against my thighs before she opened the door and drew me into the small room?

A single candle, a tall fresh taper, burned in a clay holder beside a rumpled bed. The room smelled of sex and other men, and at any other time, I think I would have found it a repulsive odor. Tonight, it was an aphrodisiac. I followed her in, shutting the door behind me. “Sit down,” she bade me, and when I started for the bed, she caught at me and said, “No, not there. In my chair. Sit down. Lean back. Be comfortable. I want to show you something.”

It had begun to seem to me that she was much more like the friendly little kitchenmaid of my first experience than the whores I’d known since then. I could not take the foolish smile from my face. I sat down in a chair in the corner of the room. “Watch me!” she bade me, as if I could have stopped myself from doing so. She reached down and took the hem of her shift in both her hands, and then, in one smooth movement, she lifted it up and over her head and then tossed it to one side. She shook her tousled hair free, and her breasts moved with the gesture. She was completely, smoothly naked. She danced toward me. “Let’s not hurry. Touch me first. However you want. Then I’ll touch you.” She halted before me, feet a little apart and eyes closed, inviting me.

I leaned forward in my chair and ran my hands over her warm, soft flesh. I touched as I pleased, hefting the weight of her soft breasts, discovering the warmth between her thighs. She gave a sudden shiver as I did so. I tried to pull her to me, but she jumped back and then said suddenly, “My turn. Lean back. Shut your eyes.”

I did as she bade me, lost in delight at her playfulness. I felt her tug at my belt, and then the bliss of buttons giving way to her nimble fingers. For one instant, I was free, and then, to my shock, I felt her clamp her mouth on me. I opened my eyes, jolted to my
core at such wild and strange behavior. I knew it was not what I wanted. I tried to pull free of her, but she held me fast, and in another moment, I suddenly knew it was what I wanted beyond all else. I gave a groan of protest and delight and then surrendered to her. It was happening far more quickly than I intended, and with an intensity that left me mindless. I had read of such an act, in one of Caleb’s more depraved journals, but I’d certainly never expected to take part in such perversity. I felt unmanned that she had taken such control of me, and yet completely dominant as she knelt before me with my fingers tangled in her hair. Her small hands pressed against the overflow of my belly, holding it back. I clasped her head between my hands and feared my own strength, for her skull felt fragile as a child’s. Sensations I’d never even imagined coursed through me. In the moment before her skillful tongue freed me from all thought, I knew that I wanted, more than anything, to grant her such bliss as she worked upon me.

And even in the midst of sexual release, I felt the telltale tingling of the magic moving in my blood. Her mouth came suddenly free of me and she gave a wild cry, a sound as elemental as a doe calling for a mate. She fell bonelessly to the floor in front of my feet, her wet mouth ajar and moaning. “Are you all right?” I asked her in alarm. I clutched my clothing around me and knelt next to her. Her eyes were rolled back in her head. She took a shuddering breath, coughed it out, and then gasped in another one.

“I’ll get help,” I told her, and tried to rise. She grasped at me with vague hands.

“No. No, please. I’m all right. I think.” She tried to sit up, and then collapsed back to the floor. “That’s never happened to me before,” she said in faint wonder. “That was…oh. I don’t know what that was…” Her voice trailed off into incoherence.

“Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be?” I asked her. “Mutual?”

“I…don’t know, I suppose. I didn’t know.” She caught a ragged breath. “I didn’t know,” she said, almost defensively. “I didn’t know it was supposed to be like that.”

Her comment stunned me. It had never dawned on me to wonder if whores enjoyed their work. I had assumed they did, for the most part, or why had they become whores? Then I rec
ognized the cruelty of that thought. Had I ever imagined that Amzil enjoyed the whoring she did to keep her children alive? “I’m sorry,” I said quietly, not quite sure what I apologized for.

“Don’t be,” she said, slowly sitting up. She peeked up at me shyly, her face full of confusion touched with awe. “You didn’t even touch me,” she said. “I don’t understand what happened.”

Her hair had fallen across her face and clung to her sweaty brow. With one finger, I lifted a sheaf of it so I could see her eyes. She continued to look up at me. “It is supposed to be like that,” I assured her. “It’s always supposed to be this good.”

I helped her crawl up on her bed and tenderly tucked a blanket around her. I knew she was a whore and I’d had the time I’d paid her for. She owed me nothing more than what she had already given me. Reluctantly, I started to leave her there, but with a cry, she caught at my hand and drew me down beside her. “Stay a little while,” she said quietly. “I don’t want Mama Moggam to make me bring another man back here. Not just yet.” She gave a sudden shiver. “It’s like it’s echoing in me,” she said.

I lay down beside her. “You’re warm,” she said, and moved closer to me. She put her head on my chest. “I feel like I could fall asleep.”

“If you want, you can,” I told her. For a time, I held her close in a warmth that I suspect neither of us had felt in a long time. In its own way, it was better than the sex had been.

The candle had long since guttered away to leave us in blessed darkness when I heard a heavy pounding on the door. Stiddick’s voice rousted us. “You! In there! You’re done now. Leave!”

I startled awake, for I’d dozed off for the second time. Even so, I would have lingered for another go-round, but she pushed at me lightly. “No. Enough. Good-bye, big man.”

As I walked out, Stiddick was waiting in the hall. He pushed past me to get inside. As the door swung shut, I heard him ask her, “Did he hurt you? I never known you to let a man stay so long.”

When I walked down the long hall to the entry room, I found it deserted and the fire burning low. Hitch was long gone, I was certain. I rode a surly Clove home in the cold and dark of early morning. Several days later when I came to town again and dined
in the mess hall with Ebrooks and Kesey, I heard that rumors about me had circulated through the lower folk of the town. Ebrooks muttered that some were saying I was strangely endowed or unnaturally skilled. Fala had told the other whores that she’d never had such a man. The next night, she’d refused to work. Within the week, she’d abruptly left the brothel’s employ. No one knew where she’d gone, and Kesey warned me to stay away from Sarla Moggam’s, for the brothel owner blamed me personally for the ruination of one of her most profitable whores. My brief spark of fame among the enlisted men was poor compensation for the loss of a welcome at the brothel, nor did Hitch’s evident enjoyment and mockery of me about it make it any easier to bear.

But I held tight to the moment of true tenderness that I’d shared with Fala, and wished her well, wherever she had gone. It was the one warm night I enjoyed that winter.

E
very season must eventually give way to the next.

There were times, during that winter in Gettys, when I doubted the truth of this. It was the darkest, coldest time I’d ever passed in my life. Now that Spink had enlightened me as to the nature of the magic that seeped through Gettys’ streets like a fog and Hitch had confirmed it, I was more attuned to it. I could feel the ebb and flow of the bleakness that afflicted the town. I could sense, without entering the woods, the days on which terror and panic emanated from them, and the days in which weariness and discouragement lurked there. None of that, however, put me any closer to bettering my own state of mind, let alone to breaking the magic’s hold on me.

There were even times when I allowed myself to wonder if that was what I truly desired. As the days slowly lengthened and spring softened the snows by day, I had time to ponder Hitch’s warnings. I could see, now, the danger of using the magic I’d been
given. I’d intended good for Amzil, and perhaps exposed her to danger. Had I cheated the man who had owned Clove? But there were times when I’d felt the magic’s tingle, and no evil had come of it that I had seen. Perhaps it was not as Hitch saw it, a dangerous balancing act between my will and that of the magic, but only the much older idea that the more power one has, the more carefully it must be wielded. If I was trapped in this fat body, and if the magic was to have a hold on me, might I not learn to use it wisely and perhaps even well? Such were my thoughts in the evenings, at least, when I lay alone in my bed. I will confess that, a time or two, I tried to summon the magic so that I could use it in small and harmless ways. Could I kindle a fire with it? Command water to freeze or turn a stone to bread as magicians did in the old Varnian tales of magic? Those were feats I attempted and failed at. Afterward, I laughed at myself for such foolish fancies. But late at night, I would again wonder if such magic was that different from commanding vegetables to grow, or waking a whore to true passion’s reward.

Summoning the magic, I decided at last, demanded not will or intellect, but emotion. I could not raise such emotions in myself simply by thinking of them, any more than a man can truly make himself laugh heartily when nothing has amused him. Recognizing that the magic raced in my blood only when strong emotion summoned it was a solid warning to me that it was unlikely to be something I could ever rationally control. Wisely, I decided to leave it be.

During the day, I did my best to keep myself busy. I missed books desperately, so much so that I often resorted to rereading my own journal entries and adding notes in the margin from my older and wiser perspective. I’d lost a strap from Clove’s harness somehow. It took me most of a day in town to get another one from supply. I saw Spink there, but we gave no sign of knowing one another. I came home feeling angry and depressed.

I cut and stacked the wood that I’d brought from the forest. When that log had been reduced, I forced myself to once more take Clove and reenter the woods. I chose a day when only fatigue threatened, and forced my way through the glum discouragement
that tried to overwhelm me. My trophy was another section of the trunk from the dead snag. Resisting the urge to lie down even in the snow and take a rest demanded all my willpower. Even after I reached my cottage, weariness debilitated me, and there I did surrender to a long afternoon nap.

Having to battle magic just to have firewood awoke me to what the road workers had to endure daily. Hitch had said that my connection to the magic gave me a slight immunity. I wondered what Spink and Epiny battled each day.

When I was a boy, my father had kept me continuously occupied with lessons and chores. At the academy, the first-year schedule was deliberately designed to be both demanding and exhausting, the better to keep young men from finding mischief when they had free time. That winter was the first time in my life that I’d had dragging hours with nothing to fill them. There were dozens of ways I could have improved my cabin, of course, but the most I did was devise elaborate plans. The dull seep of magic from the forest drained my will.

As the snows melted and the sap ran in the trees, the tiny leaf buds swelled on their branches. The forest beckoned, with game trails to follow and hunting that could fill my dinner pot with meat, but the prospect of battling either terror or fatigue dimmed my enthusiasm and kept me close to home. Every morning, I’d stand by the spring with my water bucket and gaze up into the forest depths. Birds flitted there, and new green leaves bedecked both trees and bushes. I longed to enter, and knew it was a foolish wish. It was a relief when the thawing ground allowed me to resume my gravedigging. It gave me a physical task to occupy my body if not my mind.

One welcome aspect of spring was that the supply wagons began to once more make the long eastern journey to us. The dusty windows of the mercantile stores were uncluttered and wiped clean. Fresh wares were displayed in them: shining tin washtubs, woollen and cotton goods, a gleaming long gun with a curly maple stock that no man could pass by without ogling. Within the store, new casks of pickled herring from the far coast had arrived, along with fresh stocks of sweet fruit preserves and bright packets
of garden seeds. All these and much more were bait for hearts and eyes jaded by all the oldness of winter. Yet I had come to the store that day not for anything so gleaming and grand but only in the hope of looking through some of the newspapers that had finally reached us. The articles in them might be weeks or months old, but they were a link to Old Thares and the cities of the west that gave us an inkling of the changes going on in the greater world.

Ostensibly, they were for sale, not casual perusing, but they were displayed in a rack on the wall, and I was not the only fellow standing and reading the front pages.

The papers were expensive, and I could spare money only for one. After I’d read it, I might be able to trade it to some fellow reader for his purchase, but I wished to make the wisest choice. At length I chose one with a front-page story concerning a vote in the Council of Lords about taxation. A side column was an editorial on the number of noble sons who had been shifted into roles other than that prescribed by birth order following the previous winter’s plague deaths. Evidently, some cousins who had hoped to inherit titles were seeking legal redress against “heirs who were not truly heir sons.” I took the paper from the rack and then waited, holding a few packets of vegetable seeds and gripping a fistful of coins, for the clerk to deign to notice me. He was the same supercilious youth who always scorned to wait on me. Today he took my money and passed over the journal with the comment, “Are you sure this is what you want? You can’t eat it, you know. And we’ve a stock of plain paper for wrapping things.”

“Just sell me the seeds and the newspaper, please. I’d like to read it,” I replied quietly.

“Ah, he reads! Will wonders never cease? There you go.”

I ignored his mockery, took my paper and my garden seeds, and turned to leave. As I did so, two women entered the shop. One was a woman of middle years whom I’d frequently seen around Gettys. I was puzzled to notice that she now wore a large brass whistle on a fine chain around her neck. But a greater shock to me was to recognize the finely dressed young lady who accompanied her. My erstwhile fiancée looked lovely. Carsina Grenalter was wearing the latest style from Old Thares, I was sure. Her green
bonnet could not contain the flaxen curls that bounced about her shoulders. The cut of her forest-green dress flattered her buxom figure. Little gold earrings gleamed in her earlobes. The fresh air of spring had pinked her cheeks and the tip of her nose. She glanced about the mercantile and gave a strangled laugh. “Oh, my dear Clara! This is dreadful! Is this what they deem a dry goods store in Gettys? My dear, I’m afraid we shall have to send away for the proper buttons and lace if we are to retrim your dresses in the new styles!”

By the time Carsina had finished speaking, her companion was flushed a bright pink. I did not know if it were shame for Gettys’ poor quality of stores, or Carsina’s forthright announcement that Clara would be retrimming her dresses rather than purchasing new frocks. It didn’t matter. I looked at Carsina, and delightful as she appeared, I wondered how I had ever believed I could be happily partnered with such a thoughtless woman.

If I had thought to take vengeance on her, I got it without making any effort at all. Carsina’s eyes had found me; it would have been difficult to miss a man of my size in any setting, let alone amid the crowded shelves of the mercantile. There I stood, unlovely and immense in my well-worn “uniform,” looking back at her. Our eyes met. She recognized me. I knew that from how her eyes widened and her silent gasp. She instantly turned away from me and fled toward the door, exclaiming, “Come, Clara, there must be other stores in Gettys. Let us see what they have to offer us.”

“But—but, Carsina, I’ve told you, this store is the best of them. Carsina!”

The door shut behind her. I hadn’t moved. “Can’t blame her for taking fright,” the youth behind the counter smirked. “And what can I do for you today, Mistress Gorling?”

Clara Gorling was a lady. I’ll give her that. She cast me an apologetic glance before telling the lad, “Well, I thought we were going to look at buttons and lace, but my husband’s cousin seems to have fled. I do beg your pardon. She’s only newly arrived in Gettys. It’s been arranged for her to meet Captain Thayer. Their families are discussing a betrothal. My cousin spent the best part of the winter in Old Thares. You can imagine the shock she feels,
coming straight to Gettys from the society and culture of the capital. Well. As I’m here, Yandy, would you please put up two pounds of herring for me, and two measures of corn meal? At least I’ll get the day’s shopping out of the way.”

She glanced out of the window as she spoke, and I followed her gaze. Carsina lingered outside the mercantile with her back to the store. Did she think I would pursue her? Why would she imagine I would want to, after she had treated me so badly and tried to turn my own sister against me? Yet that random thought of Yaril suddenly made me realize why I had to speak to Carsina. I hurried out of the store.

The streets were muddy and rutted from the rains of spring. Carsina lingered on a cobbled walk, trying to hold her skirts away from the mud without flashing her ankles into view. The spring wind from the mountains tugged at the scarf that she held close to her throat with her free hand. There was no one near to overhear me. I walked softly up to her and spoke in a low voice. “Such a surprise to see you in Gettys, Carsina. I understand you’re here to meet your new fiancé. Congratulations. I’m sure he’ll be as charmed as I once was.”

I had intended my words as a compliment, to calm her and make her regard me with gratitude before I asked my favor of her. Instead, she seemed to regard them as either insult or threat. She turned her head to look at me, eyes flashing, and then jerked her gaze away. “Leave me alone, sirrah. We have not been introduced, and I’m not accustomed to conversing with common strangers.” She took several hasty steps away from me and then paused, staring anxiously at the mercantile door. I knew that as soon as Clara came out, she would flee. I only had a moment to convey my need to her. A soldier who was riding past stared at us curiously.

I approached her again. “Carsina, please. There is just one thing I need from you, a small and simple favor. Won’t you help me out, please, for old time’s sake? For Yaril?”

Her face had gone white and she stood stiff as a stick. She looked all around us, as if fearing someone would see me speaking to her. “Sir, I do not know you!” she said quite loudly. “If you don’t stop bothering me, I shall scream for assistance.” Two ladies
had just turned the corner near Gettys’ only teashop. They halted at the sight of us, staring.

“Don’t do that!” I whispered hoarsely. “You don’t need to do that. Carsina, it’s about Yaril, not me. Once you were the very best of friends. Please, for her sake, help me. She thinks I am dead. I don’t have any way to—”

“Leave me alone!” She all but shrieked the words as she took several more tottering steps away from me.

“Excuse me, ma’am. Is he bothering you?” The voice came from behind me, and I turned, dread in my heart. Sergeant Hoster, puffed up with hostility, looked absolutely gratified to have an excuse to humiliate me. He didn’t wait for Carsina to speak before he barked at me, “Step away from the lady, Gutbag! I seen you whispering at her. She warned you off twice. Now get on your way and leave her alone. Better yet, get back to the cemetery where you belong.”

Carsina stood with her back to me, trembling as if with terror, her handkerchief clutched to her mouth. I knew what she feared, and it wasn’t that I’d harm her. It was that somehow the folk of Gettys would connect her with me.

I spoke deliberately to her back. “I meant no harm, ma’am. Obviously, I mistook you for someone else.” A vengeful demon inside me wanted to call her by name, wanted to announce to every fool on the street who had stopped to gawk that I had once been engaged to her. Coldly I clamped down on the impulse. I must not antagonize her. She was my best hope of getting a letter through to my sister. If I could catch her alone, I could if necessary threaten her with exposure to get her to write to Yaril. But that ruse would have to wait. For now, I lowered my head and stepped back apologetically.

Clara Gorling had emerged from the shop at last. She gave an exclamation of dismay at Carsina’s distress and hurried to her side. I turned and walked quickly away. Behind me, I heard Sergeant Hoster apologizing to her for “the lady’s bad experience. No woman should walk the streets of Gettys alone, more’s the pity. Some of the enlisted men have no more manners than savages. She’s not harmed, ma’am, merely shaken. A walk home and a hot
cup of tea will likely put her right.” He turned and shook his fist at me. “I’d give you the thrashing you deserve, if it weren’t for all these ladies watching. Count yourself lucky!”

Clara Gorling was no shrinking violet. She called out loudly after me, “You should be ashamed of yourself, trooper! Ashamed! Animals like you are why the ladies of this town must carry whistles and walk in pairs just to be safe in broad daylight! I’ll be speaking to Colonel Haren about you! Don’t think I shan’t! You’re a hard man to mistake! My husband will see that you get what you have coming to you!”