Tag Archive | reiassan
Under Scrutiny, a story of Rin & Girey, a Giraffe Call continuation perk
From the poll for continuation story from December’s Giraffe Call. This one ran short, so I will also write a bit of something to the runner-up.
This comes after:“Come to Bed” (LJ)
In Bed (LJ), after “Come to Bed” [Beta]
Morning After (LJ) [Access-list only]
Virginity/Celibacy (LJ), a drabble.
Reiassan has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ.
Arinya found the way her captive was gaping at her to be very strange. She’d known he’d have a reaction, of course, and even if he hadn’t been staring, the warmth of his hand on her hip was a clear giveaway.
“So.” He coughed uncomfortably, and seemed to be trying to bring himself to move away, or at least move his hand. She made it easier for him, pressing her hand down more firmly on his and scooting closer. That just made him cough again, and repeat “so.”
“So,” she echoed, smiling at him.
“So,” he repeated, this time in Bitrani. “I am the reason you have not had a lover since the war ended.”
“That is part of what I said, yes,” she answered in the same language.
“Would you like me to leave, then, so you could find a lover without interference?”
She sighed. Were all Bitrani men this stiff-necked, or was it only this one that she’d brought home with her. “If I wanted you to leave, Girey-whose-mother-didn’t-give-you-enough-name-to-scold-you-with, I would have asked you to leave.”
“I like my name,” he protested. “And you don’t have to scold me.” She could see the moment when the rest of what she’d said sunk in. “So you want me to stay.” There was tension in his voice that she didn’t think she’d ever heard before. “And you want…” His voice cracked. “What do you want from me?”
A very good question. She wished she had an easy answer. Taking him with her had seemed so much more reasonable when they’d been at the front. Now, in her bed, by the light of day… “Roll over.”
“What?” he asked, almost a squeak, hardly befitting his dignity as… well, any of his dignity.
“Roll over, please.” Before she lost her nerve or did something they’d both regret. Staying chaste had seemed like such a wonderful idea when she was young, and it really had been practical in the army, but now, faced with this warm man in her bed… now she was beginning to have her regrets.
He rolled over, perhaps just out of the habit of obedience, because he was moving his hands as if they were still shackled together. “That, I have to note,” he mumbled, until he got his elbows under him to get his face out of the pillow, “is not an answer, not unless you Callenthe have funny ideas about answering… which I guess you do.”
“We do,” she agreed. “It’s part of being raised to diplomatic positions – or the army or priesthood, which are about the same.”
“Heh,” he chuckled, and then again, this time a little strained. “Ah… Rin, Arinya, what are you doing?”
What, indeed? “Straddling your bum, what does it look like?”
“Well, it looks a lot like the linen of your pillow from this position. I know you said you were inexperienced, but…”
She silenced him by pushing his face into the bedding. His hair was greasy; they both still needed a bath, desperately. Well, one foot after another. She pulled the blankets off his shoulders, down to his waist, and studied him.
Wisely, now he said nothing, holding still, cautiously tilting his head to one side and regarding her through a stray curl of hair. In addition to a bath, they both needed a haircut badly.
“Try to breathe naturally,” she murmured. “Relax. I am not the enemy.” He had scars on his chest; she’d seen those before, over their season on the road. But none on his back, nothing but muscle, slightly atrophied, and freckled, mole-dotted skin. Slowly, she set her hands just above his spine.
“If you were the enemy,” he replied, “I’d be in trouble.”
She said nothing to that. She had been his enemy – and now he was her captive, in the heart of her territory. By some lights, he was already in deep, deep trouble. Instead, she felt the energy running through his body, the connection to the small courtyard outside her room, the tree which had been growing there since the palace was built, the feel of the life in both of them.
“What…?” he asked, as she began to sense the energy within him, seeking out imbalances.
“It’s the step before a massage,” she answered, most of her attention on the way his muscles pulled and shifted, the way the tendons were stretched, the hitch in his shoulder from the way he’d held the shackles.
“A…” He turned over, frowning at her. “I’m not asking you to be a…” he trailed off, and muttered, “I don’t know the word in Callenian. It’s not a nice word.”
“Healer?” she asked, knowing that’s not what he meant. “You have pain there, Girey. I can soothe it.”
He flushed, discomfort – and, she thought, a realization of the position he’d just put himself in – making him angry. “You know that’s not what I meant.”
“I do. But it’s what I meant.” She set her hands on his bare chest, just left of the scar that had damaged his shoulder. “Girey, you have pain, old pain, and pain that I caused. As a healer, I’d like to fix it. As Arinya – I’d like to get my hands on you.” She smiled down at him, wishing her gut wasn’t twisting as she admitted that. He was the enemy, wasn’t he?
“You don’t have to demean yourself…” he tried again.
“Then don’t demean what I’m doing.” She traced the lines of his shoulders, poking gently where she could see the pain flaring up. “Roll over, and let me heal you.”
Slowly, reluctantly, he rolled over. Facing his back, she was able to tell him, “the word you were looking for? It’s ‘bed-warmer’ if you want to be rude, ‘courtesan’ if you’re flattering.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/236734.html. You can comment here or there.
Linkback Incentive Story: The Enemy’s City, a story of Reiassan
This is the linkback incentive story for the January Giraffe Call. (here on DW and here on LJ. It is set in the Reiassan ‘verse, at the same time as the Rin & Girey story, but with different characters.
Be sure to tell me if you have linked to the call. Thanks!
Ciranelle did not know what to think, not just of this city, not just of this country, but of everything, of her entire life, as it had been overturned, twisted around, and turned on its head. She knew what she thought, at least, of her captor, the arrogant peasant Inalor.
“Arrogant peasant” didn’t begin to sum it up, but since Ciranelle only knew about a hundred words of Callenian and her captor knew less than that of Bitrani, it would have to do. It was enough to tell him to keep his hands off of her. Again. And then again.
She admitted to herself, if to no-one else, that she rebuffed his attentions mostly because she could, because he owned her, had claimed her fair as the sunshine for his war-bride, and yet still allowed her to push him off like a nervous plowboy. The power sent shivers through her.
Sadly, that wasn’t all sending shivers through her, and it was her only power. Her situation, as fun as it might be, was more than a little terrifying, when she gave herself time to think. And these people – not the arrogant peasant, but the rest – were so strange.
And the way they looked at her was worse than their strangeness, worse than the funny way they talked or the strange clothing they wore, clothing that Inalor had made her wear by the simple process of taking away everything else. Even in her strange-buttoned qitari, Ciranelle looked strange. Exotic.
“Exotic” was new to her, and Inalor had had to translate the word, painstakingly, slowly, with gestures. “Exotic” should mean dark-haired beauties with forest eyes and tan skin, not her, not her blonde hair and blue eyes and threatening sunburn. Not Ciranelle, ordinary enough that she should have been overlooked.
“Come here.” Inalor grabbed her arm, not roughly, but firmly enough to remind her that she had not, indeed, been overlooked, that of the twenty women hiding in the ducal manse’s wine cellar, he had taken her. The mostly-decorative shackles on her wrists clanged and jangled as he pulled her.
“What?” she asked obstinately, digging in her heels, though the stone-paved road gave her very little traction. Frustrated, she repeated herself in Bitrani: “What? What is it you want from me, you difficult little man? Why won’t you just let me go? Send me back to my mother, won’t you?”
“He will not send you back to your mother because that is not the way things are done.” The accented but clear Bitrani that answered her startled Ciranelle into silence, long enough for the speaker to come out from around Inalor. “Surely you knew that. Your people do the same.”
“I know it,” she admitted cautiously. Who was this strange woman, her hair neither Bitrani blonde nor Callanthe black but a muddy in-between color, her brown skin freckled, her Callanthe tunic a customarily Bitrani rust-red? “But I don’t have to like it, do I?” The Three help her if she did.
“You don’t have to like it, of course not. I’m assuming you don’t want me to translate your… complaints… to Inalor?” The woman raised an eyebrow, amused at Ciranelle – amused! – and a little mocking, as If she was saying I know you better than you know yourself.
The worst of it was, she was right. “Please don’t,” Ciranalle asked unhappily. “It will only make him glower. He does that enough already.” And as much as she enjoyed the power saying “no” gave her, she knew it had limits, and she wasn’t nearly ready to find those edges.
“I assumed as such. It’s more entertaining to yell when no one can understand you, isn’t it?”
Ciranelle didn’t like the way the woman smirked knowingly at her. “It’s easy to yell and holler when you’ve been taken away from your home,” she answered shortly, “taken from everything you know.”
“That’s what my father always said,” the woman answered sympathetically. “He said there was a point where he decided to stop fighting, not for my mother’s sake, but because fighting was just wearing him out.”
“Your father?” Ciranelle tilted her head. She knew it happened, but…”
“A war groom, yes.”
She flinched. “How can you say such a thing about your own father?”
“Well, in Callenian it’s not so dirty. Not dirty at all, actually.” She paused. “That, as a matter of fact, is part of why Lord Inalor hired me to translate.”
“Part of why? Lord? Hired?” Ciranelle boggled.
“One question at a time,” the woman smiled. “First, let me explain to my employer.” She turned back to Inalor – Lord? It must be a joke. – and spoke with him in fluent, smooth Callenian for a few minutes. Ciranelle caught very few words – her name, “getting along.”
When the woman turned back to her, her expression had changed; she looked hard, businesslike, distant. “Lord Inalor hired me to translate a conversation between the two of you. It is his desire, as you enter his home city, to be perfectly clear about the situation that you are in.”
Ciranelle swallowed hard. That didn’t sound good. “When did he have time to hire you?” she asked, instead of the questions she wanted to ask, instead of screaming. Lord. Lord, again. “I don’t know what there is to explain, either. I know the position I am in. I’m his whore.”
The woman spoke rapidly in Callenian, frowning deeper and deeper; in return, Inalor frowned deeply and spoke back to her, short, staccato syllables, with broad, angry hand gestures. She hadn’t seen him that angry in all of their trip here. She hadn’t seen him that angry when she rebuffed him.
Slowly, the woman turned back to Ciranelle and translated. “I think we have having that problem again, that you had in speaking about my father. Inalor wishes me to make it very clear to you that you are not, in his mind, a whore of any sort. You’re his wife.”
“How can I be his wife?” she protested. “He dragged me from everything I know. He…”
“He captured you as legal and right spoils of war, as our people – both of our peoples – have been doing as long as there has been war, and made you his wife.”
“He…” She sat down, perplexed. “He can do that, without me knowing about it?”
“He can, although it’s courteous for him to take you to the temple. He says he intends to, by the way, when you stop yelling at him quiet so much.”
“He… he intends to marry me?”
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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/230657.html. You can comment here or there.