A Match for the el Maiens Ch. 13

"Give me your favour, I will do whatever you ask," Hanya said.

"Come back to the hotel," Clair murmured persuasively. His long lean fingers ran caressingly through Hanya's blond hair cropped short at the back and sides but Hanya's hand came up and seized his tightly, gripping so that the bright new wedding ring flashed on Clair's finger.

"Give it me here," he said in an intent rough angry voice full of tears that brooked no denial.

His fingers had gone to the side of Clair's hose to pull at the buttons there, he was dragging at the hose and exposing Clair's cock and balls to Arianna's gaze. She saw Clair's head going back on the bedcovers as Hanya's fingers caressed Clair's sex, lifting the long cock free, pulling the maroon silk from around Clair's buttocks and pulling the hose down. His head came down, he slid to his knees by the bed. He took Clair's cock in his mouth and began sucking on his cock, fingering the round balls nestling in the coils of dark hair around Clair's sex as he did this.

The virgin bride stood silent in the doorway watching. She watched as Clair's face softened into such beauty of affection and desire that it made her quiver. She heard him gasping and moaning at the skilled manner in which Hanya Vashin sucked on his cock, his thin muscular body in the rippling maroon and gold silk writhing over the bedcovers, his arms flinging out so that her wedding ring flashed again on his finger.

Vashin was kneeling between Clair's legs, his rangy straight back in the red tunic upright, his hands on Clair's knees to push them apart. He took his mouth slowly from the rigid long shaft of Clair's cock. He slid his tongue up and down it. Arianna watched Clair suddenly rise up in the bed and push Hanya back into it, pull the army boots from Hanya's legs with quick expert ease. Hanya was hurriedly pulling off his breeches and underpants. Clair was pulling a condom from the pocket of Hanya's breeches and putting it on his own hard standing cock, that was so much bigger and longer than Arianna had imagined a man's sex could become. Her stomach clenched. Her own sex, wet and soft in excitement, seemed to quiver at the sight of her husband's long cock.

She stood with her fingers twisted tightly together, the marriage and betrothal rings on her finger were cutting into the next finger. She watched her husband take his junior officer by the back of the neck and press the kiss to his firm mouth. Clair pushed legs still in only partly stripped down hose and knee-high boots between Vashin's naked legs. She watched them make love in her bed.

When Clair had finished heaving and moaning in Hanya's arms, the low hard curve of his muscular buttocks rising and falling to thrust down between Hanya's willingly parted legs, Hanya uttering guttural cries which Arianna listened to in a wide-eyed state of yearning; when Clair was lying still with his head pressed into Hanya's neck, Hanya Vashin lifted his head round Clair's shoulder and looked straight into her eyes from a face suddenly flushed and soft with satisfied passion but his beautiful blue eyes were as icy as the snow-covered back hills of Sietter in mid-winter.

She knew then that she would never have her husband's favours unless his lover gave his consent. Vashin was a brilliant cold clear thinker of military strategy. He had astutely described her to her husband in her hearing as a beauty who might be able to seduce Clair. She was herself a high intelligence and she realised that in doing this Vashin was telling her that her physical charm and fertility counted for nothing if pitted against the passionate embodied partnership which the two young men had shared for years.

But what she felt was that they were so beautiful, that their passion was so fierce and gorgeous and flaming bright, that she was nothing beside the love they had each for the other. Hanya Vashin thought she was a beauty. She could bear a child for Clair, who needed one to secure the succession - but beyond that, he was someone who loved children and wished for a family of his own.

Vashin was not a family man, he was scared she might steal Clair el Maien from his arms but when she looked at him lying holding Clair el Maien so close after persuading such a fierce favour out of Clair el Maien's body, she felt she was dull and dreary, so bookish and virginal. She could not believe Hanya Vashin was jealous of her. When he looked into her eyes, to say, I knew you were there all along, I only did it to show you, she lifted her proud head and looked straight back at him with her own blue eyes clear and unveiled and his fell and she stepped back and left them to it.

Vashin was a clever military strategist. He had always known that Clair would have to secure the succession within the honourable hoop of a marriage ring. He had refused to marry Clair himself partly for this reason, out of his love for Tashka and his and Clair's wish to spare her bearing children when her heart was set on a military career.

Arianna's was a mathematical brain. If there was a problem then a solution must be forged in the heat of her thinking. She thought that in time she would be able to put a reasonable proposal to a clever man like Vashin. She was clever too so she did not admit to herself that part of her motivation in considering this arrangement was because she longed for the passion she had seen the two men share and was even willing to be a complaisant Lady and not a wife if she could be close to such a hot fierce pair of handsome young male lovers, close in their grateful affection if not in physical passion. If she had admitted this she would have been too intelligent not to realise what a fool's game that would be to play.

There were other reasons she would enter into such an agreement. It would mean she had a secure future. The mother of the future van Sietter would be well-placed and might be able to ask for freedom to do all kinds of things she preferred, rather than things which were thought proper Lady-like behaviours.

She walked away without the coloured thread she had gone to look for and said to the Sietter Dames in her new marital family's sitting-room, "stitching is boring. I am going to the King's University library. You need not accompany me."

To van Sietter she said, "they gossip so much. I hope wills't not be sending a contingent of Dames with me to Castle Sietter. My husband has asked me to go there and await his return from war. I had rather be alone there than with a gaggle of such gossips."

Her father by marriage gave an amused laugh. He indulged her willingly since she appeared to be so complaisant a wench - and as she had guessed, after what he had been through with his own Lady wife he was morbidly anxious about gossip. He was not quite so amused when she obstinately refused to sign over the large income from her marriage settlement lands to his management.

She returned to the familiar quiet life she had always loved among books and scrolls. She said to herself how content she was to live outwith the turbulence of passion in which happiness could be as much at risk as were her husband's and his lover's hearts.

She finished the embroidered shirt. She sent it to her husband's lover, to try to say, we can quietly come to a reasonable agreement. She pretended it was not for his beauty lapped in the soft silk stitched by her fingers, for her husband's thin fingers taking it from his lover's hard-muscled rangy lean body.

She knew Hanya Vashin must have died before receiving the shirt. It must have gone wrapped in the undelivered parcel, with other gear that Tashka chucked in with the dead when she loaded the Fourth Sietter carts with the wounded and took back to the Generals what remained of the troop after Vashin's victory which had cost them so dreadfully dear.

Turning from this memory of passionate love-making which she had privately enjoyed for so long, Arianna lifted her flushed tear-stained face back up to look directly into her husband's slanted grey eyes. "Hads't been with Vashin years living together," was all she said. "I would have been a fool to imagine that could be set aside like an old story-book that no longer excited your heart. I was glad at the least of it that I did not have to take van Sietter into my bed."

They sat still together, his hands on her arms, his eyes looking into her face. Arianna's eyes had fallen, she had let her hands fall into her lap beside the two packets of innocent paper that seemed to belong to another world.

She understood now why Tashka and the castle servants had always turned the subject when Hanya Vashin's name came up, why Sevianne Inien had been told not to talk to Clair's Lady wife about the problems she faced because she had borne the son of the future sworn Lord's lover. van Sietter had threatened them, fearing that if she were to discover Clair's dishonourable affair she would break the marriage on terms disadvantageous to him. They had all tried to protect Clair by keeping this semi-secret from her that she had always known but was too polite to try to ask about in more detail. Too perfect a Lady, as ever, so they had imagined she would be shocked if they told her the truth about why Clair felt a parental love for Hanyan.

Arianna lifted her head, Clair lifted his eyes to meet hers, "and so ... since was't so in love with Hanya, why dids't lie with me, after ... after losts't him?" her voice was flat and quiet but Clair knew she was waiting for the wound which his answer would inevitably deal her.

"You came to me," he reminded her. "I was mad, whatever. You would come and lie beside me so I took you. What did I care, I had lost Hanya forever," his voice crumpled into tears again. "There was the succession to think of and there you were. He took Sevianne so why would I not take you. I was so angry with him for dying! I tried to revenge myself on him through you. But, Anna, I am not only man-lover, like Hanya was, it is the same to me if my lover is a man or a woman and you ... Well, you were there, I was lonely and seeking any means to forget what I was suffering. I fell into your arms and one night I nearly kissed you. A kiss would have been a betrayal of Hanya far beyond a favour.

"Oh my dear. We quarrelled so much! I was so angry and bitter grieving but sometimes when you fought with me, it made me laugh. Do you remember how you came with that Namoon School painting for me, mid-winter Angels' day, after we had that fight about where to hang Hyaline's bloody Harvest Coming Home, and I was dreadful to you because ... I liked the painting so much. I could not bear it that you knew what-all to give me. You slung the box of jewels they got for me to give you to the side, I can see your face now - so red with fury that your blue eyes shone bright out of it. I had to look aside to hide the laugh I was making. After losing Hanya, I could not bear to care in such a way for anyone!"

His voice went momentarily high then he murmured, "I went to court to try to forget Hanya, to forget how to love. I took any company that offered itself of a night so I would not have to sleep alone. There were a lot of offers, women and men. I did not care what people took from me, my favours or my jewels, so I did not have to be alone the nights and remember ... Oh, Angels! Hanya, oh, Hanya, you are gone!" His whole frame suddenly shook with a passionate fit of sobs, he fell to his knees, his head came down into Arianna's lap, his hands pushing the two packets of letters away, his arms wrapped about her waist.

She let her hands fall on his shoulders, began to stroke his head. She ran the locks of his elegantly cut hair through her fingers and patted his shoulders which shook with tears. He pressed hard into her lap, shaking with grief.

She did not think about the love-making she had been lured into spying on between her beautiful husband and his handsome Captain so many years before, which she had always treasured in her heart as her ideal of passionate love, nor about the mad mean-spirited way he had taken her offered love and they had made a child, nor about how afterwards he rode away and indulged in a string of silly one-day-one-nights to break her heart. Her face was soft with pity for him. She said to herself: 'Well, he is my husband. I may hold my husband and have his tears, is it not. His kisses are any silly creature's but his troubles and his tears are mine.'