A Match for the el Maiens Ch. 09

Please leave comments for me. Thank you! (Diolch.)

*****

Vadya climbed out of the saddle, looking warily at the people standing at the top of Castle Sietter's steps. All around him, the sunny cobbled courtyard was full of the van H'las retinue dismounting and Sietter servants taking their horses' reins or going to give a hand to H'las servants unloading packs and wagons of stuff or standing decoratively by.

At the top of the broad steps on the side by a ramp, was Lord van V'ta in a black robe with gold scrolls; whose army Vadya had skirmished with the previous autumn - and Tashka had been wounded by his side, and had saved all their lives.

van V'ta's daughters stood beside him with their eyes demurely cast down, one in dark blue, the other in light blue. They were proper Ladies, each with a Guard of Honour to guarantee their virtue. Vadya could just as well have been betrothed to the younger one, had the situation with V'ta been worse. Although as Tashka had remarked she was very young. Vadya had always hoped he would not get some naive child of the high nobility to his bride, whom he would have to coax in his bed.

Pava - who had laughed so heartily at Tashka's description of someone Vadya realised now was a cousin to Tashka - lounged against the castle steps in a green silk suit embroidered with blue and red humming birds. Pava gave him a grin and a wink, Vadya stared coldly back.

That thin fair Lord with the thin cold smile must be van Sietter, the old snake of a politician who was not to be trusted, the father who hated Tashka so much that Tashka had run off from him into a H'las troop.

That tall arrogant-eyed Lord with one ringed hand on his hip and the other on the shoulder of a small boy who was copying his stance exactly was certainly Tashka's older brother. He looked astonishingly like Tashka, only his slanted eyes were grey and his mouth was thin like van Sietter's. He tilted his head at Vadya in a graceful feminine gesture and that too was strangely unlike Tashka's typically salacious wink and nod.

The tall plump blonde beside Lord Clair el Maien with the beautiful blond boy leaning into her motherly red silk skirts must be Lady el Jien. Vadya could see immediately why Pava had wanted to marry her. She had the full figure and high held head of a Queen, she stood back from the menfolk she had been married into, looking with eyes veiled of expression vaguely into the courtyard, not inappropriately catching your eye and winking to make you snigger. She was a tip-top classic beauty, a highly honourable and great Lady, with a body rich in warm plump curves. The veil in her eyes suggested a maidenly modesty and proper subservience to the men standing about her. Her mother had a certain reputation but hers was for high chastity. How could his father have missed catching this gorgeous and honourable daughter of the el Jiens van Iarve for him?

Outside the gates First H'las would be establishing their encampment. They would have difficulty achieving this without entangling themselves with First Sietter or First V'ta already disposed for active battle defence either side of the castle.

'Sweet Hell!' Vadya scowled in disgust, 'all this for me to come to see my Angel-damned Captain. I want to spit in his ... her face. Where is he?'

His father, looking like a soldier of the line in leather jerkin, breeches and riding boots, was going up the broad stone steps to politely greet all the nobles and Vadya also had to go through the formal introductions.

"Lord Pava el Maien van Sietter."

"How do you, Lord van Sietter."

"Commander-Lord Clair el Maien van Sietter, formerly of Fourth Sietter."

"I trust you enjoy good health."

"Lady Arianna el Jien van Sietter."

"Honoured," pick up her hand with two fingers and brush her cool long elegant fingers with his lips. The small blond boy smiled angelically up at him from her skirts and she lifted her veiled blue eyes to introduce him as, "Sir Hanya Vashin." A frown clouded Vadya's eyes. He knew the name as that of a Sietter hero of the battle of Shier Bridge but he gently pressed the fingers which Lady el Jien nudged the boy to offer and gave the innocent child a smile in return for his sweet shy smile.

"Lord Arkyll el Maien van Sietter."

"Is it true," Arkyll broke in eagerly, grasping Vadya's fingers inappropriately tightly with his small hand and looking up into Vadya's face with eyes exactly like Tashka's, "that caughts't the bear that Uncle Tashka has as a rug now in his room?"

Vadya's face stiffened. Clair drew Arkyll back, glaring at him. Arianna bent to whisper to him. Arkyll replied in a piercing voice: "I only asked. It is not wrong to ask, is it?"

Captain-Lord Fiotr el F'lara van Vta, formerly of First V'ta. Lady Laienne el F'lara van V'ta. Lady Ilya el F'lara van V'ta. Commander-Lord Pava el Jien van Vail of Ninth Vail.

"Sweetheart," Pava murmured, giving Vadya his sword hand and looking warmly into his face with laughing green eyes. "I have been dying for you to come."

"I bloody hope you will die for this!" Vadya hissed in his ear. Pava tried to hang onto his hand and pull him into a hug but Vadya wrenched his hand from Pava's grip.

He looked around the top of the steps then down at the grooms, stable-maids and kennel-hands ranged up in the courtyard. Where was Tashka now, then? Perhaps they had stuffed the treacherous ... thing in a Vilandian troop but wherever the scum was hiding, Vadya would find him ... her.

"I think Tashka went out for a ride," Pava said airily. "Let us go inside, for a cool drink."

Vadya noticed one of the grooms looking over at the stables then the groom snapped his gaze back in front of himself. He turned to go down the steps towards the stables.

"Vadya," his father dropped a hand on his shoulder and gripped it. His voice had a warning note in it.

Vadya swung back and surveyed them all, standing at the top of the steps in their elegant silk garments. "I think," he said coldly, "we might all accept the fact that there is no need to formally introduce my betrothed to my notice, might we not? I should like a few moments in private with her. If no one has any objection." His voice was heavy with sarcasm, his brown eyes glowered hotly at them all, his big generous mouth set in a sullen line. His face was sweaty and dusty and angry.

Clair went one step down towards Vadya but Pava took his arm and pulled him back towards the castle entrance. Clair went slowly, his anxious grey eyes still cast back at the angry big-shouldered young Commander striding away towards the stables.

Vadya walked into the dim straw-littered stables and peered into the stalls, his eyesight blurred coming into the dimness from the bright sunlight. "Maien!" he said but there was no reply. He walked down past the stalls of horses, dust danced in the bars of sunlight that fell through windows in the roof. He listened to the clatter of hooves behind him as the grooms led their horses in and the bruffing noise horses made into their hay for the clink of a rapier or dagger then he found her, leaning on the partition of an empty stall, flattened out against it as though that would hide her. She was wearing dark blue silk doublet and breeches with pearls stitched into the puffed sleeves of her doublet and a pearl swinging in her ear. Delicate lace showed at her collar and cuffs. She also wore thigh-length riding boots. He knew exactly how it had been. First she thought she would face him out, be there with the others to greet him. She thought that her brother and her former Captain and his father would ensure he offered her propriety in public so she put on a formal silk suit. Then she decided that the sight of her in breeches and a doublet would only enrage him the more. Her father would be no protection; the old snake van Sietter would make no protest if her betrothed felled her to the ground with a blow. She would have decided to go out for the day on Jewel, come sneaking back when perhaps Vadya's rage might have simmered down. It was unlike her, but she had misjudged it, left it too late, torn between wanting to get it over with and wanting to avoid Vadya's anger, so he had caught her before she had time to saddle a horse.

"So!" he hissed at her, his eyes snapping. "Spy, traitor ... traitress ... oh damn you!"

"Sir," she said in that husky familiar voice, turning to face him and standing as if to attention. Even in this most difficult situation, she got it exactly right. Not quite the stiffness of a stance she would have adopted on formal parade since they were both in civilian clothes but clearly the demeanour of the junior officer. She used the H'las stance, her feet apart and her hands loosely clasped behind her back. He knew now why she had always had a tendency to snap her heels together - the Sietter soldier's stance.

It made his breath come short and the blood start flowing uncomfortably in his loins to see her there. She was dressed just as she had so often dressed when they went out - perhaps to some exhibition of paintings followed by dinner. But suddenly now he knew she was a woman. That time her shoulder was slashed open in the duel in Thiel and she lay so still for him to bind it up for her, clutching her shirt and some other garment to her chest, she had been hiding breasts with her ripped shirt and what he had assumed was a vest. His penis stirred in his breeches to think about it: she had breasts and a woman's sex. He could enjoy playing with her with his tongue and his fingers, even his penis, in all the same ways he had done with any of his former lovers. If she allowed him into her bed. His junior officer.

Looking at this honourable young officer with her close-cropped hair and military stance, he found it impossible to believe that she had kissed him while drunk in a hotel in Port Paviat. On the other hand, he thought it very likely she had started vomiting if her senior officer had tried to kiss her. The thought of that kiss that might have been made his cock stiffen harder in his breeches. It would have been permitted, he would not have been hung for taking it. She was his junior officer but she was also a woman, that particular woman whose body was to be offered to him to father children with.

He walked up to her through the straw, took her by the shoulders, looked into her exquisite slanted blue eyes glancing to the side, bent forward and pressed his mouth to her rose-petal mouth. Briefly he felt with his lips the small curve of her lips. Tashka gave a cry in the kiss, pushed him away and stood in the straw, her blue eyes wide, her breath suddenly fast. Her scarred fingers flickered towards the dark blue pearl-sewn gloves in her belt and then round the curved elaborately decorated hand-guard of her rapier. Then she took them from her sword and ran them over her cropped short hair, her mouth set into a sullen pout that emphasised the soft pink kissable curve of her lower lip.

He let out a sudden hiss of frustration and fury, snatched one of the heavy black riding gauntlets out of his own belt and snapped it into her face, catching her in the mouth. Tashka's head flinched back.

"Well!" Vadya snarled. "Put up your sword, vixen, spy, soldier's bitch!"

Tashka stood quite still on the straw-littered floor, no longer in any regional army stance since her head was turned down away from him.

"Come on, liar, pale Angel, scum," Vadya said, glowering at her from angry brown eyes.

"I could not offer to kill you, my Commander," Tashka said in a stifled low even voice.

"No!" Vadya exclaimed. "You are a woman! You should never have learned to kill at all!"

Tashka heaved a sigh at this, more exasperated in tone than regretful, to Vadya's fury. She stood staring at the floor so that he still could not see her face.

"Never try your tears on me!" He snarled. If he saw her crying he knew that he would give way, submit, give her anything she asked for. He could not bear to think of those exquisite blue eyes flashing with tears in sorrow. If she used such a girl's trick on him as to weep for anything he would give it to her even if it were to ask him never to kiss her again.

"No sir," she said, lifting her head up. Her chin was set firm, her eyes were dry. He saw that her face was thinner, her eyes looked tired with dark marks under them.

There was a trickle of blood down her chin. He had split her lip with his glove.

"I have seen you drunk," he said bitterly. "I have held your head while you vomited. I have heard words from your lips that I never used, stories that made me blush. I have seen you kill; I have seen you kill over my honour! What kind of woman do you think you are? Answer me!"

"I am a bad woman, sir," she said in a voice without expression. She stared at him with the unspoken rider to her statement clear in her stance: legs slightly apart so that she would be perfectly balanced if she moved her right arm to her rapier sword. A bad woman but an excellent young officer.

She had not even moved to wipe the blood trickling from her lip down her chin. The blood began to drip into the delicate lace of her collar and run along the threads, a scarlet stain spreading through the lace.

"Let me see to your lip," Vadya said at last in an angry voice.

He took out his kerchief and dabbed at the thread of blood, one hand holding her chin steady. She stood as still under his hand as she had lain that time in Thiel, even then her face never quivered with tears of pain. They would all say what an Angel of a killer Maien was, she never showed emotion in the duel, it would barely register on her face even if she was wounded although she always showed a proper feeling afterwards about any lifeless body she had left about the place.

When he had finished cleaning her chin, pressing the kerchief on the split in her lip till it stopped bleeding, he frowned at her. He could not think of her except as the charming young Captain whose smiles were the desire of the whole Second Quarter, whose honour he had thought was for him to watch over, not ask to be bestowed on him. It was horrible, bizarre to find out she was a woman and feel his body leaning towards her and his cock rising in desire for her and think that this was not forbidden. She was his junior officer but they were offering her to him for a bride.

"Will you kiss me?" he asked and blushed and glowered at her.

"Mm," she said hesitantly. "So you ask it."

"Why not?" he demanded resentfully.

She flicked a quick blue look at him. "Well," she mumbled. "It is strange to kiss my Commander." She gave an embarrassed grin and blushed.

He put up a hand to cover his eyes then pulled it away and said with a grimace, "this marriage may have to be, for the sake of our regions. You might try to get used to kisses."

She poked the toe of her boot in the straw, looking away from him.

"Would it be against your preference?" he asked more gently. "You have never kissed a man, I dareswear."

"'Course I have!" she said with a sudden snigger and a scornful toss of her head.

"Who?" he asked in surprise. "Who was it? Is it not my right to know? Pava? Have you ... with Pava?"

"Sweet Hell!" she said angrily. "He was my Captain! What a disgusting idea!" She made a revolted face. "When they tried to betroth me to him I ran away to your troop."

"You were betrothed to Pava?" Vadya said, also looking revolted. "They tried to bestow you on Pava el Jien when you had been his baby Lieutenant?"

"I have said it," Tashka said shortly. "I prithou, we do not discuss it."

"Well, who was it you ... I suppose it did not stop at kissing," Vadya said angrily.

Tashka looked defiantly at him, a red blush rising in her lean tanned cheeks. "Tarra el V'lair van Athagine," she admitted in a careless tone of voice.

"What?!" he cried. "Holy Hell! That lady-hunter! Is he not your brother's friend? What did your brother have to say to it?"

"Yes, I know," Tashka said irritably. "Clair does not know, of course. He would have el V'lair's throat out if he knew! I met el V'lair in a tavern one night. He bought me dinner. And wine. I had recently killed a man in a duel, so I was in the mood for wine. He bought me a lot of brandy. He knows my brother. Somehow he guessed what I am," she looked into Vadya's frowning face with an angry glare. "He treated me like a woman, he was the first man ever to have done so. I liked it. A bit. So I stayed with him a whole week, there, just to see what it was like."

He glared back at her, confounded by this revelation. "What was it like?" he blurted out and blushed hotly.

"It was alright," she said indifferently. "I liked it, I mean after the first time. I was too drunk to remember the first time. el V'lair ... knows a lot ... about ... things. But he is a stupid boor and it was wrong of him to take my virgin favour when I was drunk. He did not realise it was my virgin favour he was taking then when he did he was sorry I had been drunk and could not remember it so he said he would give me another and then ... he gave me a whole week and ... it was fun." She looked at Vadya through those lovely long lashes that the troop's Lieutenants would privately sigh over, the blush creeping back up her lean cheeks. "And then he sent me a box of jewellery!" she gave a short hard incredulous laugh. "I sent it back of course and I gave the scum a gift of my own when we met up with him that time in the tavern in Thiel." She rubbed the scarred fingers of her right hand with her left hand and scowled. "Give him his due, he never gossiped of my name as he has of other women."

Vadya had always felt a little sorry for young van Athagine who had lain over the floor in the tavern after Tashka punched him in a way that suggested his jaw had been broken but now he felt a savage satisfaction and hoped el V'lair's jaw had been broken very badly. "Have ... have there been others?" he asked hesitantly.

"Ye-es," she admitted, "But ... not important," she mumbled. "And not recently." She lifted her eyes and looked anxiously at him as though that mattered.

"And what of that woman in P'shan?" he exclaimed suddenly.

"What of her?" she demanded. "What of your own women? I know it was not just kisses that you gave to that cow Lallia or to that pink-fingered vixen Maive el Staten. Am I standing here shouting about it? Would it matter to you if I had loved a woman? I told you Anata was only a friend. It was you who insisted she must be more to me."

"Oh alright," he said grumpily. "My mind is muddled. Give me a bit of peace, Maien. And you must not talk like that about Lallia or Maive." Then he realised that she probably did have the right to be jealous of the women he had lain with and frowned angrily.

She sat down in the straw and leant back on the wooden partition, tall and muscular in her fine silk suit and her thigh-length boots. She fingered her lip, squinting down at it to try and see what damage he had done. Vadya sat down beside her. He leant his big shoulders forwards to rest his arms on his leather-booted knees and stared at a bar of sunshine falling into the stall with dust motes dancing in it.

"Um so," he said, "um, el V'lair treated you like a woman. And you liked it?"

"Ay," she said, her fingers dropping to scrabble in the straw. "I am a man-lover, not a woman-lover."

"Would you not like to be a Lady?" he asked hopefully.

She turned her slanted blue eyes at him with a blatant expression of scornful hilarity and said firmly: "I love to be a soldier. It is everything that is me: to assess the lie of the land and the disposition of the enemy and make up manoeuvres with my fellow Captains; to organise the horses and manage the men and ensure there are the right provisions and equipment at the right time of year. I cannot care for 'broidery. I cannot ride side-saddle or trot along in the rear of the hunting party, crying: Oh la, my kerchief, sirrah! I have dropped it, prithou pick it up for me! Is that a bear, oh how frightened I am! Oh, only a wabbit! It was a very fierce wabbit! I cannot wear a dress. Have you ever worn skirts? There is nowhere to hang a sword and when you run upstairs, you trip and break your nose."