The Duelist 9, page 17
“Yes, ma’am,” I teased, and I saluted as if Shay were a superior officer.
She huffed, a little embarrassed, but I didn’t miss the pinkish tinge that rose to her cheeks when I called her ma’am.
Interesting.
“I’m sure both of you will be perfectly capable and willing to do that sort of thing without being quick-marched to it,” Zoie said with a wry smile, and she put her hands on Shay’s shoulders to steer the phoenix-woman back toward the door. “You two have fun, now!”
“We’d have more fun if you were both staying,” I said, and I reached out to catch Shay’s hand to kiss it as I threw a cheeky wink at Zoie.
“Next time, my love,” my cat-wife promised me, and she threw an equally cheeky wink to Amaya before she and Shay finally departed, which left Amaya and me alone.
Amaya turned to me with such a wily-looking smile, I was sure she must have learned it from Zoie.
“Is that true?” she asked me. “In your world, marriages aren’t completely official until they’ve been consummated?”
“I think it might vary from culture to culture,” I answered, and I couldn’t keep the mischievous grin from my face. “But where I was from specifically, yes.”
“Well, then,” the oryx-woman remarked as she sidled closer to me, and her rain-colored eyes broke my gaze to look at my lips. “I would hate for you to feel like I wasn’t properly respecting your culture.”
“I don’t,” I murmured. “But if you want to make absolutely sure… I wouldn’t say no.”
Amaya leaned forward to close the gap between us, and this time when our lips met, it was with all the passion and heat we hadn’t been able to show at the actual ceremony, surrounded by all our friends and Amaya’s own big sister. I found myself pulling at the straps of her silvery dress, and it slid off her shoulders to pool at her ankles like a puddle of mercury. Her hands made quick, light work of the various buttons and sashes that comprised my own wedding attire, which felt more like a formal military uniform than a suit, even if it lacked actual armor.
By the time we tumbled back into the mountain of pillows, we were both naked, and I was already kissing my way down Amaya’s body to between her legs. I grinned into her skin when she fisted both of her hands tight in my hair and threw back her head with a high-pitched cry, and I didn’t let up until I felt her shuddering and tensing beneath me.
Even though she’d barely touched me by that point, I was hard. Just at the sight of her like that, completely bared, without even the uncertainty of what would happen in the future between us now. She was my wife, and I was her husband, and we were never going to let each other go.
“Alex,” she breathed, and she reached down to grasp and stroke me in her hand.
I managed to mostly swallow a choked-off groan, but I put my hand on her wrist to stop her.
“No,” I said and leaned down to kiss her. “I won’t-- I want the first time to be proper. With you. I want to feel you.”
“I want to feel you, too,” she admitted and took my face in both her hands to kiss me. Her lips parted in a moan as I pushed inside her slowly, and she was less kissing me than simply pressing her lips against mine as she hiccupped gasping little breaths each time I moved inside her.
“You’re beautiful,” I moaned into her mouth as my cock rubbed and thrust deep inside of her velvety tunnel. “Incredible. Fantastic woman. My wife.”
Shay was the Incarnate, Nova a Lakuna, and Zoie was a Varthan warrior of unmatched ferocity, but Amaya was just as amazing. Not just for her augur abilities, but for how kind and gentle she was, how sweet-natured.
“Husband,” the oryx-woman agreed breathlessly. “Oh, please. Alex, I want to-- please, I want to.”
“Me, too,” I replied, and I nuzzled her neck as I fought to hold on. “Mercedes, I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she gasped as her head tipped back, and she bit her lip as she got ever closer to that edge. My rhythm was starting to falter as I, too, got tantalizingly close. I could practically taste it, as surely as I could still taste her. “Please, please, please, Alex, fill me up-- oh!”
Every muscle in her body tensed as she came with a cry, and I followed after her not even a whole second later. Something deeply satisfying rolled through me as I poured what felt like a gallon of my cum into her, and I groaned her name into her collar until I was spent and laid atop her.
“Beautiful,” I murmured to her again.
“So are you,” she told me, and she stroked the hair back from my face with a soft smile. “My husband.”
“My wife,” I said and leaned up to kiss her.
I wasn’t entirely sure how much time we spent there, how many rounds we went. At some point in all of it, my new wife and I drifted off, exhausted and sated. We were only roused to waking by the unmistakable caw of Rufus on the other side of the door to the little chamber.
“What is it, Rufus?” I asked around a yawn, and he hopped forward to present the note tied to his leg.
It was a message from Jenner.
Chapter 13
Jenner’s message had clearly been written in an excited hurry, judging from the uncharacteristic scruffiness of his penmanship. I struggled a little to read the hastily-scrawled words, which I eventually realized were explaining that he, with the help of Sha-Kane, had uncovered something potentially very useful about Lake Lakuna.
“What is it, my love?” Amaya asked. She hummed contentedly as she stretched out across the pillows, and sunlight from a small window above us dappled across her pale skin. “Is something wrong?”
“The opposite, I think,” I said, and I shifted to lie back down so I could drop a kiss onto her bare shoulder. “Jenner thinks he’s found something that could help us. Well, help the Omish.”
“Oh?” Amaya perked up and rolled onto her side to look at me, with one of her arms folded under her head. “What is it?”
“Just that it involves Lake Lakuna,” I said as I kissed her lips. “He wants me to go meet him in his study. Nova might be there. Do you want to come with?”
“Of course.” She smiled. “Nova was so sweet at the ceremony, I don’t want to give her the impression I don’t like or trust her. And I want to help the Omites, too.”
I leaned over to kiss her forehead this time and then grinned at her. “I’m glad there’s no ill will between you and Nova. The pair of you are quite similar, I think.”
Both of them had murky ties to a grand destiny, destinies that would understandably have made them reluctant to trust people. But instead, they were unrelentingly kind and gentle.
I loved them both so much I almost wondered if my heart would burst.
I scrambled around for where Amaya had flung my pants last night and pulled them on without bothering to reassemble the complex layers of shirts and sashes that had been the rest of my wedding attire. Amaya slipped back into her dress, and after we made a quick stop at my bedroom to change into clean, practical clothes, we headed to the study to find Jenner.
He was standing before one of the desks in his study, and he was looking over several sheets of paper, as well as several books. Councilman Sha-Kane was also there sitting in one of the leather armchairs that creaked every time he moved, though Nova was nowhere to be seen.
“She’s sleeping in the bathroom, still,” Jenner said when he noticed me looking around the study. “I didn’t want to involve her in this just yet, since I don’t know how she… how she feels about the Lake, given how it’s the home of her people. And a symbol of a… a rather difficult past.”
‘Difficult past’ was a pretty kind way to say ‘abusive, perverted father,’ but I decided not to comment on that out loud.
“Fair enough,” I said. “So, what did you find out about Lake Lakuna?”
“Well, it’s really Councilman Sha-Kane who sparked this,” Jenner said in a suddenly much more enthusiastic tone. “Thanks to him, I was able to contextualize a lot of information about the lake and the Lakuna Children I already had, I just didn’t know how it all fit together.”
“It was a pleasure to finally have a useful outlet for my accumulated knowledge, Mr. Jenner.” The osprey-man raised his teacup in a gesture that was half a sort-of toast and half an acceptance of thanks. “I enjoyed putting my experience to good use.”
“Then you have my thanks, too, Councilman,” I said with a smile. “How can it help us, then, Jenner?”
Jenner grinned at me with nothing short of glee, and I could just imagine him as a younger man, like some bright-eyed college freshman thirsty for knowledge.
“Lake Lakuna is actually Om’s largest and oldest tithe pool,” he said.
My eyes went wide. “It’s what?”
“We have good reason to believe it is one of the few natural tithe pools left not just on Om, but in all of Aventoll,” the koala-man went on. “Which could potentially make it integral to helping the Omites replenish their water supplies.”
I remembered with some embarrassment how I’d literally crashed through the canopy of trees when I’d first arrived on the island. This had, among other things, meant a significant amount of damage had been done to the Omites’ water-purifying system, and thereby meant their supply of drinking water had been put at risk. I was especially eager to help rectify that mistake, and the fact it now appeared like it would be my last act on Om before we moved on to the next island, there was a nice symmetry to it.
“Then we have to find out everything we can about the lake,” I said eagerly. “It’s only right we do everything in our power to help the Omish, after everything they’ve been through.”
Not just at the hands of Krev Alda, but as a result of the demons that had sprung up when the island’s Heart became sick.
“Jenner suspects Lake Lakuna’s capabilities as a tithe pool were interfered with when the Heart of Om first became ill,” Sha-Kane said. “Now that Shay has healed the Heart, it stands to reason its tithe pool abilities have been restored. It just needs to be… sparked back into action.”
“Like jump-starting a car,” I said, but then I realized neither man had the faintest idea what a car or a jump-start was, so I waved my hand. “Never mind. The point is, you need someone to give it a little boost? A head start?”
Now that I was once again using words he’d heard before, Jenner nodded enthusiastically.
“Precisely. And I think we know just the candidates.”
He gestured first to Sha-Kane, then to Amaya.
“Me?” my oryx-wife squeaked, and her eyes went wide. “Why me? I’m not a mage.”
“No, but you are an augur, as well as an acolyte of Mercedes and the Order,” Jenner said in that kind, almost fatherly way of his. “The Omish believe fervently in the natural progression of all things. If you could… bless the ceremony, I imagine that would do a lot to assuage their concerns.”
“Tithe pools are all about purifying and providing sacrifice,” I agreed with a nod. Belief was a powerful thing. As best I could tell, there was no reason why the Heart of an Island becoming ill would cause demons to spring up from the ground like some weird white blood cell immune response. It was ‘magic,’ but what powered magic, if not belief?
“Alright,” Amaya said with a nod. “I’ll bless the ceremony. So, I suppose that means Councilman Sha-Kane will preside over it?”
The osprey-man nodded and gave a slightly-proud ruffle of his feathers. “I have a fair amount of experience in tithe-purification. Over the course of my travels, I have seen many tithe ceremonies performed. On some Islands, its seen as fortuitous to have foreigners and visitors perform the ceremonies, as it is believed to strengthen the Islands’ interconnections and thereby their connection with Mercedes.”
“We are all of one family and one Heart,” Amaya said, with the air of quoting something.
I hadn’t read much of the religious scriptures of the Order-- and honestly, I had little interest in changing that-- but her words sounded like something that would have come from those books.
“Exactly,” Sha-Kane said with a warm smile, and I could see in his expression he was pleased Amaya was now officially part of our family. She was the sort of person who would look out for Shay and Horus. For his children.
“Then, shall we get to it?” Jenner asked, and I could see he was practically bouncing with anticipation. This was probably the sort of culturally, and historically, significant event he usually only got to read about, rather than witness with his own eyes.
“The sooner the better,” I agreed. “Councilman, can you get Overseer Kohen and Elder Elmer to come to the lakeshore?”
“Of course,” the osprey-man said, and he got to his feet, quickly thanked Jenner for the tea, and headed out.
“Having Anwaar there might be useful, since she is a mage,” Amaya said. “And as my mage-partner, my own abilities will be stronger if she is nearby.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “Plus, we need Horus there, anyway. The lake is pretty big, I don’t know if one Asher’s blood will be enough. Not without bleeding me dry, anyway.”
I knew, logically, the amount of blood sacrificed did not have to be proportional to the amount of water being purified, since that wasn’t how magic or blessing worked. However, I still wasn’t too keen on being the only one slitting their arm and letting their blood drip into the crystal-blue waters.
Lake Lakuna was, after all, fucking massive.
We all went off to our respective duties, and within the hour, a small congregation had assembled at the edge of the lake, ready to witness the tithe ceremony.
Sha-Kane stood facing out across the water, raised his arms, and called out a prayer to Mercedes while Horus and myself stood on either side of him with ceremonial daggers to sacrifice our blood.
“By your grace and generosity, we ask of you this boon,” the osprey-man announced in what was genuinely a very commanding-sounding voice, and I wondered if he used it at Council meetings when he wanted to be especially listened to. “And in return, we offer the blood of your most blessed warriors, those with the power to reduce the Scourge to ashes.”
Horus and I both raised our daggers, but just before we could actually slice our hands, there was a cry from the crowd.
“Wait a second!”
Horus, Sha-Kane, and I all turned away from the lake to see Madam Morta looking at Elder Elmer, who had one hand raised in a command to stop as the other made gestures for the bat-woman to translate.
“One of your friends has said he wishes to be involved in the ceremony,” Morta said, and a moment later, Bodin forced himself out from between the crowd.
“I do!” he said. “I want to help.”
“Help?” Horus asked. “Do you know how to perform a tithe pool blessing?”
“What? No,” Bodin said blankly. “But the ceremony requires the blood of Ashers.”
“Yeah, Alex and me,” the falcon-man said.
“And Bodin,” Elder Elmer said through Morta.
“Bodin?” I repeated loudly and then winced. “Uh, no offense, man. I just… since when?”
“My father is… was an Asher,” Bodin explained. “So, by Passing Rite, I am, too.”
That explained why Nemis had been able to challenge him to a proper Duel, then. I had just assumed the captain was being overly dramatic.
“Well, congratulations, I guess,” I said. “The more the merrier.”
Bodin gave me a shaky smile and came to stand at my side on the shore of the lake. Someone passed him another ceremonial dagger, and in unison, he, myself, and Horus all raised our hands and then slashed open our palms. Scarlet drops of blood splattered into the crystal water of the lake, and we watched as a soft white glow spread out from the point of contact, until the entire lake was shimmering faintly.
Amaya then stepped forward and crouched so she could place one hand in the water. She murmured something in a voice too low for me to make out the actual words before she turned and placed two fingertips first to Bodin’s forehead, then to mine, then to Horus’.
“So as you have offered and sacrificed, so you shall be given and rewarded,” she said to the three of us.
One of the Omish stepped forward to pluck a single purifying pebble from the water. He dropped it into a cup, and when the water began to foam and froth, the assembled spectators let out a small cheer.
I couldn’t help but cheer along with them. It had worked. Something like relief swept through me as I realized I really would be leaving Om better off than I found it.
“Thank you, Asher Brightwood,” Elder Elmer said through Morta. “Having Lake Lakuna returned to its status as a tithe pool will greatly help the Omish.”
“You have no need to thank me, Elder,” I said graciously. “I caused damage to your water systems when I first arrived. It’s only right I should see that damage repaired before I leave. I’m an Ambassador, after all. I’m meant to encourage diplomacy.”
“Well, you have certainly achieved that here,” the Elder said. “I wish you good fortunes for the rest of your journey.”
“And I wish the same for your people,” I replied and bowed to him deeply.
Elmer made a wheezing sound I took as a chuckle, and Morta reached out one hand to squeeze my arm affectionately, like a proud aunt.
“You have done a lot for the Omish, Alex Brightwood,” she told me. “You may say you do not need our thanks, but you have them all the same.”
“Well, I’m honored.” I smiled. “And I look forward to coming back one day to see how Om will flourish, now that it has a decent Overseer and a proper tithe pool.”
“We would be happy to host you,” Morta assured me.
The others and I then headed back up to the Manta and disembarked. It took me a moment to get used to the sensation of the enormous airship moving again, after it had been stationary for several days, but the subtle sensation of movement was relaxing.
Of course, however, the time to relax was over. We’d all had a fabulous party last night-- among other things-- and now we needed to get down to business.
