I hadn’t meant it to be a speech, but it had turned out that way. Stunned silence followed in my wake. I glanced toward Khanaarre with a small smile, poured myself another cup of wine, then turned my blandest possible gaze on Elana. The prince endured my undivided attention for less than a minute before fleeing the room. Rennin followed barely a moment after, and I could hear them scrabbling down the rope ladder to the ground.
Stunned silence fell in their wake.
“Khanaarre,” said Maosee – the darkest of Khanaarre’s mothers, taller than me, and possibly stronger, judging by the bulge of her arms, “what just happened?”
I met Khanaarre’s eyes again. She looked embarrassed and scared and a half dozen other things I couldn’t quite name. So I nodded and then stood, taking my cup, and left by a different portal than the prince had.
I found myself on a small balcony, one of several that sprouted from the body of the oak like mushrooms. The one we’d come in over, of course, had the rope ladder. This one boasted a rope bridge, some twenty feet above the ground, leading to an outbuilding of some sort, high in another tree with its own mushroom-like balconies that ran halfway around. Crossing the bridge without dropping my wine was more of a struggle than it should have been, at that point in the evening, but I managed.
The central home-tree was clearly the work of skilled treesingers: all flowing lines and living wood. This structure appeared to be the work of skilled but mundane tree-shapers and carpenters. It boasted a proper door, not just knot-like portals, and a bench that ran halfway around the balcony. I was tempted to test the door and see what lay within but that seemed rude, so instead I sat and sipped my wine.
Full night had fallen long ago, and the thick foliage cast the compound in deep darkness – I had barely been able to see the rope-bridge as I crossed it. I could faintly hear Elana and Rennin on the ground somewhere, furiously discussing this latest revelation about their chosen wizards. I felt a little sympathy for them, but only a little: I had guessed, and with far less information available to me than they had likely had. How had they met Khanaarre that she was above basic scrutiny? Or was I putting too much faith in the sole surviving heir of a failed dynasty?
Well, we’d see how this fell out, just as we’d seen with my own revelations in the Lightning Plains. They did not need Khanaarre the way they needed me, but I rather thought that they loved her a great deal more. Perhaps this would be what made my decision for me, one way or the other.
Some time passed. Eventually, two figures emerged from the central tree. One descended to the ground and went in the direction that I suspected Elana and Rennin had gone. The other crossed the rope bridge to join me, and quickly revealed itself to be Khanaarre, carrying her bag over one shoulder and mine over the other.
“Are we going somewhere,” I asked, only half joking.
“Not far,” she said, inclining her head toward the door. “If you would be so kind?”
“Of course,” I said, and stood to open the door for her. Apparently, my random choice had been prescient.
“This was my room,” she said, leading me in, “before I began my apprenticeship. My sister Llaariiah moved in when I left. But, she’s away, now, and I think it best if you and I are somewhat removed from her grace for the night. Nallaro is bringing them back to the main house, now.”
The room was pitch black, at first, but Khanaarre conjured a light after she set down our bags, just inside the door. Her magelight revealed a round room with a vanity to one side of the door and a bookshelf to the other. A circular nest of cushions took up a bit more than a third of the floor, flanked by round, shuttered windows, below each of which was a cedar chest that appeared to double as a bench. Above the bed and filling what little other wall space remained were elaborately hand-carved shelves, each nearly overflowing with hand-carved art objects of wood and antler. Khanaarre watched me take in the room.
“The woodwork and scrimshaw are my sister’s,” she said. “I didn’t take up art until my old master started teaching me to make puzzle boxes.”
“She’s quite skilled,” I said, settling into the chair at the vanity.
“Yes,” Khanaarre agreed, pulling her wizard’s chest out of her pack and expanding it to full size.
“I’m sorry if I embarrassed you,” I said as she began digging through the chest, presumably for night clothes.
She didn’t answer right away. She found what she was looking for and laid it carefully atop the wizard’s chest. She didn’t turn to face me when she spoke, her voice thick and a little stilted.
“Only one other person has ever stood up for me like that.”
Now she stood and turned to me.
“Come on,” she said in a lighter tone. “Let’s get a bath.”
Half-drunk and wholly bemused, I nodded and followed her. A second rope bridge that I hadn’t seen led from this tree-house to a second outbuilding, this one older and larger and wholly made by sorcery. Bead curtains covered the portals to this building, rather than heavy leather like the main home-tree, admitting just enough light for us to strip by.
“Three generations ago,” she said, leading me down the stairs, “when everyone in my birth mother’s family was a treesinger, there was a thriving city not far from here. But there was an earthquake, and the course of the river changed, and the hot spring that fed this bath house dried up. But my family was too stubborn to move. Briefly we were famously eccentric. But then the sorcerous gift left us, and we were just regular eccentric.”
I could hardly see anything. I kept my hand to the wall and followed her down by careful steps and the sound of her voice. The first few steps under my feet were wooden, then – to my surprise, and physical shock – they were cold stone.
“When Khiilitir and my aunt Neriishai grew up here, they collected rainwater in a cistern their mothers had built above us,” she went on. “After Neriishai left, though, and Khiilitir made her marriage circle, Nallaro invented a way to redirect a nearby stream back to the bath. And now …”
Khanaarre uttered a word of power, and light bloomed around us, revealing a beautiful stone grotto, half natural and half cut out, roots crawling carefully down the walls, soft moss gathering in the corners. Among the roots were two pipes: one coming down from the ceiling, one coming straight out of the wall. Water poured out of the wall-pipe, continuously filling a stone pool. Khanaarre smiled and, with another word, the icy water shimmered, and erupted into steam.
“Now we have a proper bath, again.”
She had conjured the light in front of us, casting herself a silhouette in front of me: all sharp edges and long, lean, muscular limbs. She climbed into the bath ahead of me, drifting through the water to the far side where bowls and jars of soaps and lotions lay waiting. My breath hitched as I followed after her.
Clean water poured in from the pipe in the wall and back out through a half-hidden drain in the far side of the grotto. The burble of the water over the rocks and the splashes of our movements echoed in the close stone confines, despite the roots that broke up the stone walls. We scrubbed ourselves clean of a week’s worth of sweat and grime, passing soap and scrub-brush back and forth in companionable silence. Then she moved close and turned her back to me.
“Help me with my hair?”
I did. It took us most of an hour to undo the countless tiny braids, piling the gold caps in a spare bowl at the edge of the pool. When we had freed it all from its confines, we soaped it gently and combed out the week’s worth of accumulated dirt and grime until it spread out over the water between us like a sheet. I envied her hair: thick and dense and soft and strong. I ran my fingers through it. I thought self-consciously of my own hair, short and unruly, years from recovering from my unplanned return to the Holy Empire.
Clean at last, Khanaarre ended her spells and we left the grotto. We found towels in the room above, wrapped ourselves in them to make our way back to her room through the chilly spring night, our dirty clothes thrown over an arm. I had spent more than half my life in Vencar, where nudity in the bathhouses and sometimes publicly was a matter of course. I knew that elves were less modest still. We had all bathed together at every opportunity in the wilderness, and even in the Holy Empire. And yet, in that moment, I found myself deeply self-conscious about my nakedness, and the possibility that we might be seen by our companions or Khanaarre’s parents. Back in the bedroom outbuilding, safely behind heavy curtains and a closed door, that shy nervousness did not abate.
Khanaarre’s magelight still burned, hovering near the ceiling and filling the room with warm yellow light. I was about to reach for my wizard’s chest, in search of a tunic to sleep in, when Khanaarre turned to me and dropped her towel to the floor. I could not stop myself from staring.
She was almost as tall as I was, and she held her head high and proud so that her still-wet hair poured down her back in a silken cascade, only a few night-black strands gathering on her strong, red-brown shoulders. Her large dark eyes were wide and clear and bright, and her lips were wet and slightly parted. A drop of water trickled down from her sharp collar bone to her pert breast – small, by human standards, but still bigger than me – and dark brown nipple.
I opened my mouth to say her name, but no sound came out.
She smiled, and walked slowly toward me. My heart beat hard in my chest. She closed the distance between us. I wanted to let go of my towel or reach for her or something, but I was frozen in place by surprise and desire. She took my face in her long, strong hands, and she kissed me. Suddenly, her mouth against mine, I could move again, and I wrapped my arms around her naked back, squeezing her tight against my body before letting my hands run up and down, over and under and into her hair.
We were both panting when she took a step back to undo my towel, pulling it off of me and throwing it to the floor beside her own. Her eyes moved up and down my body. She smiled, licking her lips.
When she moved, I thought she was moving toward the bed and I started to follow. Instead she went to her wizard’s chest, where she’d left a silk bag beside a change of clothes and from which she pulled a shining phallus of sculpted amethyst.
“Oh,” I said, stunned to stupidity.
“Oh, yes,” she said, holding up the crystal dick with one hand. With the other she tossed the bag into the bed.
She came back toward me, again moving much more slowly than necessary. She kissed me again, one hand on my hip, the other running the tip of the cool crystal wand up my thigh to my hip to my belly to my breast, then across my collarbone and along the side of my neck. I moaned into her mouth, and she laughed.
Gently, oh so gently, she turned me so that my heels brushed the edge of the bed. Then she pushed me in. I fell backwards into the soft, pillow-encrusted mattress. I had sobered up some in the bath house, but my head had still been muzzy from the wine. Now my mind was whirling and incoherent. My whole body was light and bright with euphoric desire.
She loomed above me, every inch of her nakedness clearly illuminated by the magelight overhead. Everything I had admired discreetly in a hundred streams. Everything I had caressed and tasted that night by the Eastern Veil. Every sharp angle of her hips and shoulders. The wiry corded muscle of her arms and legs. The soft swell of her belly and her breasts. The hot flush of her desire that darkened her cheeks and her chest and her belly and her mons. The inviting pink folds of her labia, already glistening with lust. My own body was already responding in kind.
“Spread your legs,” she said, holding up the dildo like a royal scepter.
I did as I was told, delightfully resigned to my fate.
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