The van Sietter Bride Pt. 01 of 03

His father, far more sophisticated in his sexual ethos, would have understood but his mother was appalled. There was an horrible inquisition even including his own mother desperately asking whether he had taken the proper precautions of using a condom to protect Tisha. It was agony. His mother was blushing like a basket of apples and crying with shame, saying, "How coulds't take advantage. Consider the power has't over her in her position". Tisha! the angelic slut of the kitchens who had such power over the men. He was bewildered at first until he realised that she thought he was the one who had seduced Tisha. She was probably the only person in the whole castle who thought Tisha might be in any way an innocent.

And Tisha was so cross that she never let him fuck her again, although he begged and pleaded that he had persuaded his mother not to make his father send her home with a small fortune in her pocket. Tisha was outraged at the prospect of being sent away from the castle full of cosy corners where it was so easy to lure some panting footman or a gardener under the rose-bushes. Or the pretty young future sworn Lord (so sweet as a strawberry and just old enough for the picking of his favours) into a larder with a few old cushions carelessly slung on the floor.

His cock stirred softly to remember how she flashed a look and said, "come yer, I'll give ya a special treat," in that warm sticky voice that was like the jam he used to sneak.

What a treat! The gentle hands on his body, the caressing lips to his eager mouth. She was notoriously sweet to the kiss and her fingers played so tenderly on his buttons then in his underpants and around his suddenly thrilled cock. He started moaning anxiously, flicking his eyes back at the larder door. "Du not fret," she whispered with a warm wet caress of her tongue in his ear for good measure "I c'n lock it n' I 'ave dun." Her fingers came away from his cock, groping in his pocket, then she grumbled crossly: "What kinda young man are ya! Lord Arkyll, no condom for a poor maid. I s'pose I mus' give ya a kiss for now and ya must come back to take my favour." The selfish wench, she always expected the men to take the precautions for her. She flashed him such a warm laughing cross look then suddenly she was on her knees with his cock in her sweet soft mouth, he was leaning back on the door helplessly grunting with pleasure. The sucking on his now rigid hard shaft, the fingers caressing up and down a vein in it which was standing out and throbbing with the blood coming thundering to his loins, caressing his balls which were so tight, he was not going to be able to take it much longer, he longed to stay there but he was bursting to go and all too soon his hips were bucking and jerking, he was shooting off into her sweetly kissing expert mouth.

He was so careful, only going down there to go down on her once a week. Well, possibly he had trotted into the kitchens twice in the week but surely no more often than he had always done. Ever since he was a little child he had been sneaking into the larders while the castle snoozed in a nap, after the jam. That little weasel, how did she come to realise that it was no longer raspberry jam he was enjoying in there, instead it was the creamy pink cunt of the generous kitchen-maid, so juicy to his excited tongue, so warm and welcoming to his happy thrusting cock.

Arkyll's lips curled in rueful admiration of his sister's vengeance on him. He gave a last surreptitious sighing grin in the direction of Tisha's luscious backside (against which he had once or twice been allowed to bump his excited hips and press his stomach as he came into her warm tight cunt from behind) disappearing towards the kitchens as he walked on through the entrance hall.

Mind, he had been a bit disgusted when Tisha suggested he get his foster brother Hanya to join the two of them in the larder. Poor old Han, he was so beautiful they used to say thirteen Angels danced on his broad shoulders. He had hair like the sun and beautiful round blue eyes, his cheek used to be so golden-brown with the tan in Summer, pale as milk in Winter. He was older than Arkyll and had just taken a commission as Lieutenant in their fathers' infamous old troop Fourth Sietter. His big muscular body looked so gorgeous in his red tunic with the gold-embroidered collar and the thigh-length brown boots, women and men, they were all swooning over him wherever he went.

He loathed it. He used to have a glaring frown on his lovely face, looking like the Angel of the Sword striding down the castle corridors until Arrie came dancing down shouting, "C'mon Han! Are you coming for a ride? I'll race you," and he would run off with her to the hills to gallop laughing where nobody looked on him softly. That little snake never looked softly on a soul, until she grew up and one day for some wild reason of her own she looked on Hanya.

Arrie was just a scruffy lanky brat then, terrifying them all by her failure to feel fear, whether at riding the wild war-horses or jumping her hunter over the high hedges or climbing the central tower, Angel of Hell! that time she climbed the bloody central tower, what a minx! Even when she fell in love with Hanya it was not his beauty she looked softly on, she was much too wild a proud creature to give a copper coin's curse for a smooth cheek or a lovely leg. Poor old Han. She knew him to the core. She had him twisted round her fingers all her life and when she decided she wanted his heart, she just pulled on the strings and he fell like an Angel out of the skies into her arms.

That little brat. Even bloody Tisha blamed him instead of her. She caught Arkyll giving Arrie a few well-chosen words on the subject of being a sneaking spy and Arrie exclaimed, "oh Tisha! he is being so mean to me," and Tisha said, "What a man!" in biting tones of scorn. "Du not give him yer mind, Lady Arrie, come with me now n' I s'll get ya a bit of cake," and she put that lovely soft clinging arm around the wild cat's skinny shoulders and drew Arrie off, tossing back to Arkyll as scornful a look as any fine Lady whose toe he had trodden on in the dance.

---

He strolled out of the castle and down the wide steps with the ramp on one side into the courtyard and there he met his father.

Commander-Lord Clair el Maien van Sietter strode through the cobbled courtyard on long lean legs encased in an old pair of thigh-length brown army boots, soft now with the ceaseless polishing he still insisted on for his kit. He was wearing a faded old scarlet hacking jacket and had a black hard hat on his head of elegantly cut longish black curls in which threads of grey were apparent. He was snapping a riding crop irritably on the side of one boot, his thin firm mouth pursed, his slanted grey eye clouded. His chin was dark and bristly since he appeared to have gone out without letting the men-servants shave him. Probably he had woken up early and after lying fretting for a while had snatched up these garments to go riding hard out in the hills, pretending to assess the ground for some small hunting party they might undertake since el Shosta van Thiel had turned up to claim their hospitality for a few days. With his son in duty bound and his daughter on the battle front he had little heart for the hunting.

He stopped as he saw Arkyll and regarded him with a narrow suspicious slantwise stare. Arkyll's slanted blue eyes dipped under the sideways glare of his slanted grey eyes.

"Um halloo papa," Arkyll fluted, fidgeting his feet in the tough peace worker boots with the metal toecaps. "Just on my way to the offices after my chat with mama. Bit of paperwork to finish off."

van Sietter's lean tanned face seemed to give a quiver, his lip curled in a look of disdain that glinted up into his clouded grey eye.

"C'mon papa, gimme rein," Arkyll said with an appealing smile. "I am not even to offer her a ring, it's a matter of a trip down East for the fishing and a dance or two: an holiday. It is for mama and her proposals for the poor."

van Sietter was a man of notoriously high honour who would never speak a slighting word of a young Lady of the high nobility, or even of his own Lady wife, so he said nothing to this but his sniff was eloquent. "I think it will rain the morrow," he said coldly.

"That was an encouraging letter we had from cousin Vadya," Arkyll offered him. "Surely Uncle Tashka will prevail before Winter comes and they will come home for mid-winter Angels' day."

His father's head of elegant black curls under the hard hat tipped mournfully down and he poked sulkily at the toe of his boot with his riding crop. Naturally he did not have favourites among his children: his son in duty bound, his two sons in blood, but he adored his wild daughter and broke his heart every day thinking about her away at war. She was not even by the side of the husband who had always managed to keep her safe from her own wild ways under his beautiful blue eye although at the least of it she was in the offices of his brother: General-Lord Tashka el Maien van H'las. Meanwhile, what of her husband, his dearly beloved son in duty bound, the child of the long-lost Captain of his heart. They had received a stilted letter from his daughter just after she rode off to the battlefront in his wake that mentioned as if it were an aside that when she went by his troop for the two nights and one day she was permitted with him on her way to the Generals' strategic staff offices, she found that the war-dogs had been let loose too early in a defence of his encampment and had attacked him and presumably had completely torn up what had been a famously angelic beauty. He had never supposed his daughter cared about the physical beauty of his son in duty bound but when he read the cold words pretending all was well in a situation he knew from his own traumatic experience must be Hell, he feared dreadfully for the young couple he had reluctantly permitted to marry on the eve of war.

"How about a game of chess," Arkyll was saying in a coaxing voice but he shook his head mournfully, loosing Arkyll's hand from his arm and moving his long legs slowly up the steps into the castle.

---

When Arkyll walked into the peace corps offices down in the town his sister officers Captainofthepeace-Dame Lisette Stariel and Captainofthepeace Mimi Jien were standing about in the reception hall by the duty officer's desk. Mimi was grumbling about some mission she had been on that morning and Lisette had a casual arm around Mimi's shoulders. The young Lieutenantofthepeace on duty was lifting shyly adoring eyes at the pair of them.

They were both tall and the peace work training had encouraged their physical fitness so that they stood about easily with the strength evident in their long muscular limbs, their firm breasts and backs in the leather jerkins that could turn knives aside. Commanderofthepeace-Sir Lial Darien, who commanded not only this peace corps troop but had a directing eye over the others which Lady van Sietter was slowly managing to establish in the region, disliked it that they were married and had tried to persuade Lisette to go to the troop in the Maier Pass where she had family. But the two women argued that even in the army officers of the same rank were permitted to marry and promised laughingly that if they ever had a serious quarrel one of them would apply to transfer. They questioned whether the code of honour which army officers adhered to was relevant in the peace corps. At first Darien -- an ex-army officer with an horrendous duelling scar down his face -- argued fiercely that it was but then he became embarrassed and Arkyll had to join in on his side, his blue eyes sparkling in merriment because he knew Darien had suddenly remembered him that members of Arkyll's family had scandalously crossed their vows in the army.

"'Loo Arkyll!" the two women said casually. "Been out on your mission?"

"Had to go and see my mother," he answered. "Bit of family business to sort out," he pulled a face. "I shall have to ask the Commander for leave of absence."

Mimi's dark eyes creased in a sympathetic scowl, she gave a toss of the head so that her curls of brown hair were chucked back behind her in the gesture that frequently caused villains to pause in admiration when she did it preparatory to going in to tackle them and she would disarm them and pin them down even more easily.

"Sorry to hear it, chum," Lisette said. She had cropped her strawberry blonde hair at the back and sides like a soldier and stood rangy, lean and tall, a typical Sietter officer-aristocrat. Her keen grey eyes used to gleam fiercely on miscreants as she stood with hands on hips glaring at the trouble about her so that they quite often stopped their nonsense immediately, apologised to everyone and slunk quietly off home.

Arkyll knew that like other military-minded members of the high nobility, van Thiel despised the peace corps. He had seen van Thiel's scornful look at his rough leather jerkin and tough peace worker boots, at the belt in which he carried only a wooden baton, no weaponry which might have been useful in defence but might also have provoked more aggression on the part of drunken fools looking for trouble.

When they were children, he and Hanya of course wanted to be soldiers like their fathers and uncles. As they grew older they realised that his mother intended them for the peace corps. It would make such a statement for the future sworn Lord to go not into the smart parade silks of an army officer but into the hard work of the peace corps devoted to helping those who were poor and suffering in the region. Hanya had always had pacifist leanings and was temperamentally inclined to the peace corps but one day he suddenly said: "Major General-Sir Dar Vaie is fretting because Arkyllan is going to the peace corps and it is evident Clairan will not be a soldier. Arkyllan will need someone one day whose humanist principles he can rely on to be Major General of the army, in order to bring it in line with the peace corps. I have asked the Major General for a commission in Fourth Sietter, the troop where you, papa, and my father in blood and Uncle Tashka and Uncle Pava served so happily together."

Major General-Sir Dar Vaie had been an officer of Fourth Sietter himself, their Uncle Tashka's companion in many scrapes and misdemeanours, a former junior of their father's and a brother officer of Hanya's father. He worshipped the memory of Hanya's father and venerated van Sietter and he was ecstatic when Hanya asked to go into their old troop. Their father was much less pleased than you would expect. He had commanded the troop during the first Sietter-H'las war, leading them in a brutally elegant victorious strategy designed by Hanya's father in which Hanya's father lost his own life. They would say of van Sietter that he broke his heart so badly over what he had to sacrifice for that victory that he went off to court afterwards and broke everyone-else's heart.

Hanya liked the army in peace time (and he did look exceptionally tasty in the Sietter colours) but now they were at war and he was having such an horrific time that he no longer wrote even to Arkyll. The only news they got of him were the army despatches and an occasional cold note from Arrie, part of whose duties were to ride out and deliver the Generals' orders to the commanding officers of field troops, saying, 'I had the opportunity to see Hanya recently while delivering him his orders. We used his interesting adaptation of the Maien Tiger in aggressive defence of the encampment when we came under threat of attack but I may not write the detail of this. He asks it of you to bear him as ever in your hearts as your loving son and brother.'

Arkyll had recently been entrusted with a difficult mission in which he had spent weeks patiently putting together slender threads of information collected by the peace workers in one of his Units. Mimi and Lisette knew that Darien would curse at having to get someone-else to take it over and Arkyll himself would miss the demanding and absorbing task which had been such a good means of distracting his thoughts from the sufferings of so many of his family and friends on the battle front. Every so often it would be necessary for Arkyll to go and spend time on extremely dull ceremonial duties and they would all say, "such bad luck, chum. Come out for a bowl when you get back."

He loved the comradeship of these intelligent, gentle-hearted, fiercely committed workers so tenderly managed under the pale blue eye of the scarred Commanderofthepeace-Sir Darien. He had missed Hanya dreadfully when Han went into the army; he could ride down to visit him in Luthian in the Winter but most Summers Hanya went out on campaign. He could hardly wait to get involved in some work himself and have comrades like the jolly brother officers who came back with Han on leave sometimes. Then when he started under Darien's command, he came to appreciate the work they were involved in for its own importance. He loved it that he went out armed only with his hand-to-hand fighting skills and a wooden baton to break into horrible airless places where starving people, some of them children, were brutally exploited, to insist jovially that the rights of the prostitutes be respected, to argue patiently with drunkards, protect their frightened life partners and children and persuade them to consider how they might better manage their happiness. It was something like, to be the future sworn Lord not lapped in silks and satins, stamping around looking pretty on the parade ground for silly maidens to swoon over, but to be part of this magnificent project of his mother's.

For a while, too, there was Daria.

She was a Captain down in the Maier Pass peace corps troop: slighter of frame than Mimi and Lisette, a lean muscular athletic woman, fully fit and physically hard. Her black hair in the tight little coils was cut close about a warm brown face and a smile so sweet and wise. He was just a Lieutenant back then, she was several years older than him. He came down to liaise with them in the Maier Pass on a mission, under her orders. When the mission was nicely wrapped up with just the paperwork to relax over, they went for a casual bowl in the modest pleasant hotel where Arkyll was staying. Silly innocent! he was disappointed at first when she appeared alone, he thought the others did not want to come out drinking with the future sworn Lord.

They were sitting on the veranda looking out into the sunlit vistas of the rolling green and brown hills with the River Arven running smooth and strong down to Port Paviat. Arkyll said something about a walking holiday he had once enjoyed with Han, when they went all the way down to Port H'las and there they went sailing with his uncles and cousins van H'las. Daria put her hand softly on the back of his neck.

Her hand was warm and gentle, she brushed the fingers lightly on the nape of his neck where the hairs suddenly stood up in excitement. He turned his head and looked into her smiling brown eyes with a shy laugh in his slanted blue eyes. His cock had started lifting and filling already, she was so fit and muscular sitting smiling softly on him with that intelligence vivid in her lovely eyes. During the mission they had enjoyed discussions about the peace corps work and ways in which the chain of command was embedded in the country via the regional armies. It had been like being with his family who were all of them sharp keen minds he was so proud of, constantly flashing the debates around him about pacifism and humanism and whether some painting was the finest expression of beauty ever created or some stupid collection of squiggles not properly aligned to the appropriate angle (that was his mathematician mother). He had enjoyed Daria's friendly supervision in the work so much and now this too? He leaned eagerly over and pressed into her kiss.