75. Turret

News of Perpatane’s collusion with other cities, settlements and territories, spreading their gold-fueled campaign, now was at the edge of most conversations in the keep.

It was thought that Perpatane encouraged Eccleston to break trade agreements with Tintar, hoping for war.

It was suspected that Perpatane had wanted to invite the restrained invasion and bring the wealthy mining bloodlines of Eccleston to their side, simultaneously using the invasion as a way of warning other small countries and territories, the savagery of Tintar was to be feared.

Jeremanthy told Alric who later told me that the king of Perpatane wanted the coastline and instead of tariffs paid to Tintar, he planned to wage a war for the entirety of my new country.

All Tintar could do was secure their infantry, cavalry and navy at its borders, hunkering down for winter and remain vigilant for an attack, though most thought it would be foolish for the Perpatanian army to try and trek through a frosty Nyossa or trudge around the forest up through the marshlands, which were full of vile reptilian creatures that slumbered in the murky water, waiting for their hibernation to be disrupted by meat.

This news was eclipsed by Eefa’s difficult delivery of a baby boy she named Winger.

We had all visited the new mother, child and his great grandmother at the brewery several times.

Eefa was softened by motherhood.

I wondered at the father again, surmising that at her age, it had to have been a man taking advantage.

She never, to my knowledge, spoke of his name or his story.

Winger was red and screaming but we all liked to hold him, offering Eefa and Bronwyn a reprieve on rest days.

As the celebration of The Turn of Trees drew new, the comfort of my evenings with my husband was polluted by my own jealousies.

As I made my way to my dinner from the earth temple one such evening, merry despite the doom that Archpriest Yro had prophesied, I was anticipating finishing the book about the boys in Nyossa when I spotted Alric talking to Vinia at one of the many entrances that intersected with the dining hall.

I did not let myself observe them.

I did not let myself try to read their manner and what it must mean.

I swept past them in a rush.

I could not bear to see it.

I would visit my turret window at the top of our stairwell.

It had been the first bit of happiness I had felt in Tintar, seeing those views of sea and city laid out before me.

Desperate for the cool air of the window, I trotted up the stairs, my mind and body tired.

I knew the dining hall would be bustling.

I was not hungry enough to weather conversation.

That is why I did not hear them until I was on the landing before the last set of turret stairs.

Thank the gods, only one of the sconces was lit, the flame guttering and weak.

Thank the gods the darkness of early winter days and the wind outside concealed my approach.

Helena was sitting on the third step up from the landing.

Thatcher was hovering over her left side, his mouth on her neck, his left hand at the handiwork of undoing the front of her dress, her stays and pulling her shift down.

He exposed her small breasts over the square neckline and whispered in her ear.

She lifted a half-hearted hand in protest, but he pulled the garments down farther.

Her eyes fluttered close, her head tilting towards him.

“Please, dove,”

he said.

“Please do not hide my little rosebuds from me.”

Her face slackened and her resistance dwindled to a squeak in her throat as he took first one and then the other in his mouth.

“Do you like my mouth, bride?”

he asked, replacing it with his left hand.

She arched up under his palm, her head falling backwards on the step behind it.

“Answer me, little dove.”

“Yes,”

she exhaled. “Yes.”

“Do you want this mouth betwixt your thighs?”

She thrust her chest upwards again under his hand.

“Yes.

Please. Please.”

Making quick work of it, Thatcher planted his knees on the first step, pulled all of her skirts up to her waist, even those gathered under her, so that her bare body slipped onto the cold step beneath and placed his head between her legs, kissing her softly on her sex.

She let out an ardent whine, hoping for more.

He sat back a little and put his hand where his mouth had been and then inside, pumping her slowly with his fingers, kissing her inner thigh with his mouth.

Her gasps were anticipatory.

They had done this before.

“Your man makes it good for you, doesn’t he?”

“Ye— Yes,”

she said, rocking her hips with his hand.

In his voice was a smile.

“And what is your man’s name? Say my name.

You know how it makes my prick hard and my heart warm.”

“Caleb,”

she sighed, her hands gripping the step above where her lower half rested.

“Caleb. Caleb.”

The echo of her cries of his name snapped me out of my daze at this sight and I whirled, running back down the stairwell, hoping the multiple layers of tanned leather that coated the bottom of my winter boots did not hit the stone steps with much sound.

I went as fast as I dared without crashing downward.

I was steps away from the next landing, but could still hear everything.

“Say my name again.”

“Say— Say my name,”

Helena panted.

I clapped a hand over my mouth.

I did not know my genteel, proper friend, my ladylike sister could speak in this way.

Thatcher gave a shout of rowdy laughter that resounded down the stairwell.

“Lusty dove.

Do you want me to say it now or when I am spilling into you?”

“Both,”

she rasped out.

“Say it now and say it then.”

He laughed again with joy, but his voice was hungry as he began to say her name.

Helena, over and over.

Helena. Helena.

I regained my bearings and kept running, down one step and another.

I was close to what I guessed was the third or fourth landing, when I heard a voice from below over those from above.

Rounding the turn, I saw Alric, walking up from the descending turret step up onto the landing I had been racing towards.

“Edith?”

“Quiet!”

I hissed, barreling into him, propelled from my flight, my hands flying over his mouth.

I tried to catch my breath as he stared at me over my hands.

Realizing my body was flush up against his and that through his undershirt and tunic with his leather breeches I could feel him, possibly even more intimately than when I had bathed him, I pulled away, my hands leaving his lips last.

I took a step back and pointed upward.

We stood, eyes on each other, as a rhythmic thump, her cries and his repetition of her name all floated down towards us, amplified by the bluff rock.

“Bloody Thatcher,”

said Alric, sighing and putting his hands on his hips.

I smiled and whispered, “I was running away as fast as I could without them hearing.”

“He has an officer’s rooms with a door that locks.”

“Some enjoy the possibility of being discovered,”

I ventured, feeling an acute affection at his response, so sensible my husband.

He shook his head.

“He and Perch both.

So loud when they swive.”

“Ah, you have not slept through Perch and Mischa either.”

“No, I have only pretended.

I thought you were asleep.”

He was making that Alric smile that was, on any other face, no smile at all.

Gods, what this man was to me, his scent, his manner, his gait.

And he did not know.

He thought he was my unlikely friend.

He did not know that I lay beside him in that spacious bed, aching, melancholy with want of him.

He did not know the restraint I had exacted in washing off the training yard mud from his sinewy frame.

He knew none of it.

“I have half a mind to go up there, if it were not for the lady,”

he muttered.

“Please do not.”

“I won’t.

If it were some… some slattern.

But it is his intended and I’ve respect for her.”

His guilt over her rape on the Nyossa road hung in the air between us and because I now knew his expressions, I wanted to stop any self-recrimination.

Perhaps emboldened by Helena, I drew closer and put my hands on his chest.

“While they may not have sought privacy, I think they thought they had found it.”

I gave him a push.

“We should go.”

Any excuse to touch him I would take.

Had I no shame?

He did not move, surprised at my hands on him.

He drew breath.

I luxuriated in touching his chest, expanding and depressing beneath my palms.

Was he offended? Had I been too forward?

Then he put his rough hands over mine and drew them down between us.

“You are always right, Edith.

I was looking for you anyway.”

“And why is that?”

He pivoted to one side, my left, tucking that hand in the crook of his right arm.

“I cannot abide another meal with soldiers.

It has been weeks since I ate a meal with a person not drenched in sweat and dirt.

I would ask you to dine with me.

Half the Procurers have left for the city tonight.

They start to celebrate the Turn early.

But I am hungry.

The hall will stop serving soon.

Thatcher and his lady should be sating another appetite.”

There was a beat as we took in the noise made by Thatcher.

Alric frowned.

“So unbelievably loud,”

he said under his breath and guided me down the next stairwell.

He began telling me quite bland updates of the Procurers’ training of their newly chosen man as we descended.

Had the noise from the turret ruffled him the way it had me? Was that why he rambled? The man never spoke unless he must.

Did he also wish that were us? Why was it the volume that he found distasteful?

And then I knew, with a surety in my belly, that this man, this tightly wound soldier, my methodical Procurer, my orderly, scrupulous husband did not take his pleasure like his brothers-in-arms.

He took it with a rushed breath into a neck, a furtive, hasty exhale into his lover’s hair.

He took it in the dark and he took it in secret.

And that knowledge, more so than Thatcher’s growls of “that’s it, dove, that’s it,”

or Perch’s fervid, midnight hollers, sent a thrumming through my blood.

I leaned into him, content just to be on his arm for now.

I must bridge this gap.

I must show him that our bed could be our bed.

This fine man, as rigid as a harp-string, how would I pluck him?