Which wasn’t easy, with them straining the silk of her camisole with its tiny straps and its deep cut into her cleavage.
Kip loved Teia, but Tisis. Holy shit. Woman, you are the reason some ugly smart guy invented language—simply so he could have some chance against better-looking men to woo you.
In typical Kiply fashion, though, he’d realized he loved Teia and then married Tisis not half an hour later.
‘With my body, I thee worship,’ part of their archaic wedding oath went. Well, that part was going to be easy.
She stepped close enough that she pressed that worshipped body against him. “This’ll put the cream in the kopi,” she said.
Kip was familiar with the bitter drink, and at first he thought it was sexual innuendo. He was about to say something about her skin being lighter than his, so what they were actually trying to do was put kopi in cream.
Unless by cream, she meant his—
Then he realized she meant, ‘This will be the finishing touch.’ Not an innuendo.
Right. Excuse me for going there.
“Tear my camisole,” she said.
“Nrg?”
She grabbed his hands. “Like we were so passionate you ripped it open last night.” Her eyes sparkled as she put his hands on her chest, clearly loving the game.
The second night they’d actually tried to make love, Kip had nervously deferred to Tisis to lead things. She’d said she was only technically a virgin, so Kip figured even that made her way more experienced than he was. She’d gone quickly from tearing off clothes to attempting penetration, and after that hadn’t happened and she’d been left fuming and trying to blame him, it had seemed like too much to ask to say, ‘Hey, do you mind if I just play with your body a bit? I like it.’
On the fourth night of their marriage, with the addition of olive oil and a singular focus on breaching the Jade Gate lest their marriage be annulled and they start a war that no one could win and that would kill tens of thousands of innocents and be remembered ignominiously for all time, Kip hadn’t gotten a chance for his playfully wandering hands to wander much at all, playfully or any other way.
“Kip?”
“Mmm?”
“The camisole?”
“Mm-hmm?” he said, lost in the gloriousness under his hands. “Oh!”
He cleared his throat and tugged gently on the deep neckline of her camisole, trying to ignore that a camisole of this material, with this much lace, and dyed this color, might cost more than all the villagers in Rekton would have seen in a year. Inside, Kip was still the poor boy, and he wondered if he always would be.
“Oh, for Orholam’s…” She grabbed his hands in hers and helped him tear the neckline down to her navel, but then she held his hands there. They both hesitated. She did some kind of undulating feline movement into him that did all sorts of wonderful things. “I never did take care of you, did I?” she asked.
“It wouldn’t take long, I promise,” Kip said.
She looked at the door and grimaced. “Verity’ll be here any—”
Kip slid his hand from silk to silken skin, and she stopped speaking.
She looked up at him with suddenly fiery eyes, as if she were furious. She threw a leg up on his hip and grabbed his face in both hands. “Why, Kip? Why? Why do I want to be naughty with you when I can’t, but when it’s perfectly acceptable and I have all night, then I can’t? Dammit!” She ground her hips against him angrily, kissed him, and bit his bottom lip. Then she pushed away from him.
Never breaking eye contact, she shimmied out of her underthings and peeled off her camisole, throwing each to a separate corner of the room. She tousled her long blonde hair. She scooted into the narrow bed and pulled the covers only over her legs, as if she were totally comfortable being nude in front of her husband. Which, of course, was what Verity needed to believe.
“Ah! Idea!” Tisis said. “Love bites. We’ll have to do that tomorrow. Tunic, Kip. Off. Then get over here and give me some whisker burn on my neck. Quickly.”
Kip’s mother had once said that if he pulled a funny face for too long it would get stuck. Could the same happen if your horn was up for too long? What if it got stuck? Orholam, let it not be so. The Blackguard blacks that the Mighty had been allowed to take were a nice camouflaging black, but they were also tight.
There was a knock at the door, and Kip realized suddenly that somehow the plan had always been that he answer the door naked. And then he had to pretend to be comfortable with that. Like he was the kind of man who would answer the door naked because wow, after a night like last night, who could think about clothes?
That hadn’t been his addition to the plan, he was sure of it. Even if Kip were slow-cooked in a stew of sexual satiety until he fell to pieces, he didn’t think he’d ever not want to cover himself.
“My lady, my lord? Breakfast,” Verity said from outside.
“My lord husband, would you get the door, please, and then come right back to bed. It’s so cold without you,” Tisis said loudly. She grinned at him.
Kip shucked off his tunic, acutely aware of Tisis’s eyes on him. Part of him knew that his modesty was ridiculous at this point. Though he’d kept his tunic on during their abortive attempts at intercourse, she knew how he looked by now. Still, it was one thing to know he was fat, another to see it.
He held his tunic in front of him in one hand casually, covering as much of belly and groin as possible, and popped the door open. Even with that, beyond Verity, he saw a sailor try to get a glimpse beyond Kip at the nymph they all knew lay within.
Kip just gave the man a self-satisfied smile, and closed the door after Verity came in, balancing a silver tray in one hand and a steaming bucket of water in her other.
Verity was a gnarled oak stump of a woman, wider than she was short, with silver hair that had once been blonde, holding far stronger ideas of how lords and ladies should behave than any lord or lady Kip had ever met.
“Oh, is it time for breakfast already?” Tisis said. She yawned and stretched luxuriously, uncovered.
Kip forgot about the plan. He dropped his tunic from nerveless fingers.
He snatched it off the floor, almost colliding with the slave through his sudden lurch in the tiny cabin.
“Perhaps milady would prefer to bathe and dress first?” Verity asked.
Kip tried to slip around behind her just as she bent over suddenly to put down the bucket. His groin brushed against a bottom so large and wide that Ferkudi would faint.
Mercifully, his fist and the wadded tunic ran interference in the split second before Kip could twist, taking the contact on his hip rather than his horn. He made it past her, but his motion jostled her as she set down the bucket, slopping water on the floor.
Verity stood slowly, leaving the bucket on the floor. With the air of one extremely put out, she sighed, looking at the mess. Then she glared judgment at Kip, naked as he was. Kip swallowed.
“Does my lord need something?” Verity asked.
Kip had picked up on the very subtle cues that Verity didn’t approve of Tisis’s marrying without her sister Eirene’s consent. She had extended that disapproval to Kip himself.
“Sorry,” Kip said.
She sniffed and turned to Tisis, muttering none too quietly, “A proper lord would know not to apologize to slaves.” She raised and brightened her voice: “Milady?”
“Only a sponge bath?” Tisis asked, disappointed.
“I fought the captain long and hard, milady. He avers fresh water is too precious on a voyage to be used for bathing.”
Verity took a folding screen and set it up to block Tisis from view, though the logic of that escaped Kip. Verity spoke aloud, too, as if the screen were a real barrier. “I see that your lord husband has mussed your braids. I suppose we shall have to set aside a few hours to fix them this morning. I think you should also speak to him about procuring a room slave.”
“What?” Kip interrupted. “Why would I need a room slave? We have y
ou.”
“I’m not that kind of room slave, my lord. You’ll need to get your own for that.”
Tisis started laughing immediately, but Kip didn’t understand.
“My lord doesn’t need that kind of room slave, Verity,” Tisis said. “I’m keeping him quite contented.”
“Many a lord tells his wife that while seeking additional pleasures on the side. But a lord who strays must have the decency to do so safely, so as not to bring disease and dishonor to his house.”
“Verity!” Tisis said. “I’ll not have you speak so.”
Kip caught up only slowly. First, he wanted to laugh incredulously. Verity was worried he wanted to take her to bed? And then all the rest crystallized as dirty whispers, not quite directed at him, but definitely directed at him.
He had long felt like a bumpkin lost in the tightly circumscribed manners of the nobility, and the customs of slaveholding were the most opaque to him, and made him more reticent than anything else.
It was baffling to him that when he made mistakes, if anything erred on the side of being too nice—giving a gratuity or looking a slave in the eye or apologizing—slaves resented those slips most. It was as if they were saying, ‘Don’t break the rules. They’re all we have.’
They knew how to deal with abuse, or with being ignored or taken for granted, but making them remember all the privileges of freedom was too hard.
“Hmph,” Verity said. “You’re a woman married now, Mistress, and it’s time you face facts. Your duty in the bed chamber is to provide my lord with children. It is his to satisfy your carnal desires fully. But you have no reciprocal duties on that count. If he desires activities you don’t enjoy or even ones you do more frequently than you wish to indulge him, he has a room slave for that. Of course, as the lady running the household, it is your duty to procure a room slave pleasing to your lord husband.”
“Orholam have mercy,” Tisis said.
“It is his mercy,” Verity said. “What else are slaves for, but to ease the burdens on my lady?”
The old Kip would have shrunk back, would have accepted the slave’s sly insinuations.
Kip swept the folding screen crashing aside. Verity was dunking a cube of soap into her bucket. Kip hauled her up and pinned her against the wall, his fire-scarred left hand around her throat.
“You listen to me,” Kip growled. “I keep my oaths—all of them, including my wedding oaths—and if you impugn my honor again, I swear to Orholam, I’ll throw you overboard for the sharks.”
“My lord, I wasn’t—”
“We both know you were.”
She’d gone limp. Just another slave being abused by another master.
“Look at me. Look at me!” he shouted.
She looked at him with the cold impassivity of a woman who didn’t value her life much. Or perhaps the cold terror of a woman who thought she was going to die.
“You can hate me, but you will not pour poison in my wife’s ears about me. Not while I’m here. Not while I’m gone. Do I make myself understood?”
“Perfectly, my lord.”
He released her. “If you can’t stand to serve us loyally, we’ll sell you immediately. I’ll even let you choose which offer for you we accept. I won’t send you somewhere terrible as a punishment, but I also won’t have you here.”
“Yes, my lord,” she said quietly.
“Now take the laundry and get out. I’ll have your answer by tonight.”
She moved around the cabin more nimbly than Kip would have imagined possible, gathering Tisis’s cast-off clothing and noticing but making no comment on the tears. She mopped up the spilled water, and Kip realized then that he was still naked. Tisis was staring at him, but there was no teasing now. She was holding a cloth up in front of herself, and she looked a little scared.
Oh hells. Did I just jump the wrong way?
“My lord?” Verity asked. “Do you wish me to launder your tunic as well?”
He was holding it in his hand still. “Uh… yes? Yes,” he said. It did actually need laundering. He’d been training on deck daily with the squad, and though he washed himself daily, he hadn’t gotten around to cleaning his clothing. At the Chromeria, you put your dirty clothes in a basket and they magically appeared the next day, clean and folded on your bed.
But he didn’t hand over the tunic.
Verity handed him a towel. “For your sponge bath, milord,” she said. It was big enough that he could hold it in front of himself while he handed her the tunic.
She walked to the door with her pile of laundry. “Oh, milord? Just in case my lady is too delicate to speak of such things, and since you’ll be washing yourself. Do make sure to clean well under your foreskin. A lady’s perfumed garden ought to be fragrant, but a gentleman’s oak should smell only of soap.”
Kip was so aghast that he couldn’t say anything. Tisis snorted. Kip just shook his head, acknowledging that she’d scored a point.
Her mouth pressed to a line briefly to avoid smiling, Verity walked out the door. “I’ll return in due time to dress milady and take the dishes. My lord. My lady.”
It was only as she closed the door behind herself that Kip realized the parting tease had been a test, too: Was Kip the kind of master who would hurt her at any provocation, or had her adultery insinuation crossed one of a relatively small number of important lines? It was the kind of thing a slave would want to know.
He sat down on the bed, not knowing whether he’d passed or failed, or what either meant about him.
Tisis had pulled the screen back into place, and she was continuing her sponge bath. “You scared me, but it was a good distraction.”
“Huh?” Kip asked, coming out of his reverie.
“Distracting her like that so I could wash myself. She told me yesterday I didn’t smell like sex.”
“As if I’m that smart.” Kip only realized he’d said it aloud afterward, but Tisis said nothing from behind her screen. Kip pulled on his underclothes and his clean blacks.
When Tisis emerged dressed in her moss-green tunic and breeches with a leather belt that emphasized her slender waist, she had an odd look in her eye. “So you knocked down the screen because you were actually angry?”
“Yes?” Kip said. Was this a trick question? “Am I a bully?”
“You’re a lord,” Tisis said as if it were a strange question. “The gentry know your titles, but they also know what you were before you came to the Chromeria. We’ll devour you if you let us, Kip. Even our slaves. That’s what we do when we’re threatened.”
“Is it always to be battles and contests, even with my own side?” Kip asked.
“Only if you lose the important ones,” she said. She saw he didn’t understand. “Kip, in Lucidonius’s time, Karris Shadowblinder was a theatre girl. It was considered the next thing to a prostitute by polite society. No one talks about her as a theatre girl now. She became a Name. There is no middle path for people like you and her. You’re suddenly elevated greatly, and everyone wants to know if you deserve it. Me? I can be some lady born to a great family with one or two excellences, but little else worthy of comment. That path is closed to you. You come in suddenly at the top, and everyone else feels like they’ve been knocked down a notch. You have to prove yourself.”
“Even to slaves?”
“Slaves take not only orders but also cues from their masters. Verity was Eirene’s governess. Eirene sending her to serve me? You think that wasn’t a little dig? My sister was implying that I was acting like a child. But it’s also because she trusts Verity.”
“If I’d known that, maybe I wouldn’t have threatened her with death,” Kip said, grimacing.
“About that. Were you angry because it was true, or because you wanted her to think it was?”
Something about her intensity drove all thoughts out of Kip’s mind. “Because what was true?” Kip asked.
“That you keep your oaths.”
So of course Kip thought immediately of the oaths
he hadn’t kept: one to his mother, to avenge her rape by his father—a story that had all been nonsense from an addict. And then he’d sworn to Gavin that he would destroy Klytos Blue. He’d been doing his best to investigate the Color through the forbidden libraries, but he’d never found anything damning there, and had broken that oath, too. He said, “Maybe I was so furious because I’ve failed oaths before.”
And he told her about them, without too many specifics. She was still a Malargos, after all.
“But you consider your wedding oaths binding, and plan to do all in your strength to keep them?” she asked.
“Yes! Absolutely,” he said.
“But you love her.”
Her. Teia. It was a gut punch. So Tisis wasn’t oblivious. Kip hadn’t said a word about Teia. Tisis had picked that up from what? A few glances?
Do I lie?
After a pause this long, a lie would be pointless, wouldn’t it?
“Yes. I think so. I don’t know. I’ve been infatuated with like four girls in the last two years. Always the impossible ones. Maybe that’s why you’re terrifying. You aren’t just not impossible; you’re not just possible; you’re actual, and the rejection will hurt that much more when it comes, won’t it?”
He’d meant to use the technique his grandfather had taught him: use his blunderbuss of a mouth to his own advantage and see how the other person reacted to whatever outrageous truth he’d fired at them.
Except that Tisis didn’t respond at all. She merely looked at him.
Well, now Kip felt naked in a new way that was nearly as uncomfortable as the first.
Then she said, “When you wouldn’t take off your tunic, were you hiding your scars, or your… stomach?”
“You can say fat,” he said.
“I will not.” She said no more, and he couldn’t help but be impressed by her quiet dignity.
“Did they teach that in lady school?”
He didn’t mean to say it out loud. But she didn’t respond. Again.
“Sorry,” he said.
“How did you get those?” she asked, as if he were being a willful child. Which was sort of fair.
“Too much pie.”