Please leave comments for me. Thank you! (Diolch.)
*****
Commander-Lord Clair el Maien van Sietter opened his slanted grey eyes and stared dreamily across his floor. Dim light through his curtains glinted on a china statue of a Northern peasant girl which Tashka had brought back for him the previous spring from P'shan. Her china smile and the bright glaze of her wide-hipped trousers were softened in the dimness of the early dawn. Clair smiled to think of Tashka. Then his mouth tightened to remember that he had been obliged to let his own brother go into a situation of high risk in a H'las troop. Although Tashka was curiously glad to go, and insisted to stay even after van Sietter finally agreed he might come safely home.
Clair felt restless, his muscles tense after the hard riding of the day before. He lay unable to drift back to sleep, his eyes floating anxiously from the china peasant girl across the cushions to a neat pile of books and then a basket of candied fruit with some wrappers loose among them. His thin mouth and his eyes curved in a sudden smile of extraordinary sweetness. Arkyll must have come in to eat the sugared fruit while he was away.
After he had lain a while waiting for sleep to carry him back off, he traced a sensual pattern across his thigh with thin fingers running under his nightshirt. Dreamily he fingered his penis which was still soft and small, he fondled his own balls. He was thinking about breasts: big and soft. His cock was rising surprisingly quickly in his thin experienced fingers as he traced over thoughts of putting a hand about a breast like that. He tried to remember what the areola looked like, had he ever seen it? Stupid fool, he had never thought to put his mouth to her breast and get that nipple hard and the pleasure trickling around her body from his sucking on her breast, even a lick of the nipple might have done it. Were they large or small nipples? Had he ever seen them? There had been so many since. She had been ripe for pleasure, her cunt soft and wet to his fuck even without his teasing her nipple. (Was it large or small?) He could have given her such joy, and had fun himself, if only he had been able to think of it, and then he would be able to remember the nipples to those big soft pillowy breasts ...
With an annoyed gasp, he realised he was attempting to get himself off while thinking about fucking his own Lady wife. He rolled irritably onto his side, his penis slowly subsiding without the pleasure of orgasm. He caught sight of the pictures on his box-desk by the bed. In an excess of emotion the day before when he found out that Arianna had taken Hanyan into their parental care without his having to come up with some story as to why this child was so particularly under his eye, he had put the sketches of Arianna el Jien and Hanya Vashin up there. They stood side by side, with a sketch he had once drawn of his brother officer Pava el Jien and the four Lieutenants of whom Pava had been so proud: Tashka and Tashka's friends. Clair stared at the two sketches of little Hanya's father and Arkyllan's mother.
He loved the two children with all the passion of a hot heart. He had always hoped for a family but even so he had never realised how much happiness - and how much heartbreaking anxiety - it would mean to have children. And her, she loved them too. He had not expected this of the big blonde beauty with the sleepy veiled cow's blue eyes to whom he was forced into giving his ring. She was such a perfect Lady, of course when he heard she was with child he came home to arrange a string of nursery servants so that she might continue to spend her time as she wished. He had imagined she would start going to court - probably not when he was playing about there but he was already beginning to spend time elsewhere. But she was up to her big blue eyes in plans for the nursery, already locked into a maternal love that was often lured into indulgence and that provided Arkyll with a constant affection in which he grew so happily. (Her indulgence was a problem but with Hanyan also resident in the castle, Clair could keep a disciplined eye over Arkyll and correct it.) She never spoke of going to court or to her home in Iarve or to visit her cousin Pava el Jien in Vail. Her gaze seemed completely turned in on his baby in his castle home.
He had supposed this was all she wanted, the child to play with. He was well content to think it, to leave her cocooned up in the castle with their baby while he took what measures were necessary to keep her honour bright. He provided the one nursery-maid to support her but left her to enjoy their child as he would have liked to have done. Now he was beginning to realise there was something else on the go. She did not spend her days sewing little garments and doing school-work with Arkyll; she looked strained as if she did not have sufficient time and needed him taking off her hands. Clair leaned up on his elbow in his narrow bedding, frowning off across the floor of his room past the piles of books and bowls of sweets, sculptures and a wheeled toy horse on a string.
After a while he got up and put the two pictures away again in the box with Tashka's letters, leaving out the sketch of Pava and his clutch of handsome young laughing Lieutenants. The four young officers were so beautiful and so intelligent that they were nicknamed
the Angels
. They rose rapidly under Clair's loving command in the Sietter-H'las war, every one was a Commander now; except his beloved brother - the brightest and most beautiful of them all.
When Clair walked into the huge stone-flagged kitchens, still only dimly lit by the dawning light through the windows, the night cook was dozing in a chair by one of the big ranges. He left the man snoozing while he fetched eggs and sugar from one of the larders. Working with a swift and quiet efficiency, he beat up a sweet omelette for himself, heating some jam to go in it. He cleared the table and the dishes he used in concentrated dreamy pleasure as he went. By the time he sat down at the end of the long table to the side of the kitchen with some coffee perfectly brewed as he liked it, the kitchen staff were starting to come in. They smiled to him but they knew he did not like to talk while he was breaking his fast.
As he was finishing off his meal with an apple that he cut into careful segments, there was a sudden movement, the kitchen staff all starting to rise from their places, scraping their chairs. He looked up to see Arianna coming in. He said to the servants: "Sit down, I pray you. My Lady will not ask you to leave your breakfast on her account." He pulled out a chair round the corner of the table to his for her, dragging a plate of chocolate pastries over towards it.
He took in with a quick flick of his grey eyes the fetching figured white and green dress that gathered about Arianna's full bosom, the little hairs sticking out of her plait and a smudge on her cheek revealing that she had not even washed her face. Evidently she had rushed down to catch him without taking the time to dress properly. Her casual untidiness made the appeal of her big curving body seem easier of access; he was forever telling Lisette she must dress Lady el Jien in a more formal style to prevent people thinking she might welcome their flirtation. This dress was reasonably smart if informal, not like that horrible pink rag. It was just that her hair needed doing (and her face a wipe with a cloth!). She was looking at him with her sleepy untidiness softening what appeared to be an anxious expression. He wondered ruefully what bloody birds' nest she had made in the household accounts.
His eyes lingered on the bosom of her dress. The laced bodice and the cut in to the waist made the shape of her big breasts evident, ordinarily she avoided a close cut of the cloth, choosing dull garments which did not flatter her curving figure. Dimly he imagined what it would be like to give her a favour from behind, holding those big soft breasts, playing with them and squeezing them to add to his and her pleasure. He thought regretfully that he ought to have tried it while he had the opportunity. Surely he had pressed a hand to those breasts once or twice, his hands seemed to remember them if his mind could not. The callow kid that he had been! bewildered and wounded in his mind, regarding it as a duty to take that body of soft curves in his arms to fuck her as she lay submissive and even more ignorant than he was below him. What a missed set of pleasures, if he had known then what he knew now about how to get a young woman on the go.
His dreamy face suddenly flushed up and he scowled. Angels' sake! he was as bad as his own footmen, after everything else he had brought on her head, to consider insulting her with his sexual attentions.
He was going to have to see the two footmen who used wheelchairs later. He did not think Fiotr, who had been a trooper under his command, would be so mad as to cast eyes on Lady el Jien van Sietter but he had noticed a sly shyness in Petra's eye as the man offered her some dish at dinner the previous evening. His face became cold with the scowl still on it, his eyes slid up to Arianna's face and he saw that her face had become cold and he frowned. What now, what grievance was she going to choose from the many he had offered her to hurl at his head?
Arianna's heart beat quicker with fear to see Clair cold and frowning, her face veiled over with coldness to hide her fear. Why must he be so hard to them all? Petra the steward was saying Clair was going to talk to the footmen. He was always packing off the young footmen as soon as they relaxed instead of going about so formally to fetch and carry. Was it a crime, for them to enjoy some sporting fun in the hallways racing their wheelchairs? but he was so unreasonable about it. She sat down by Clair, her head lifted high and proud. Dar brought her Hyaline bowl of drinking chocolate before returning to his own place further down the table. Tashka had commissioned the bowl for her from the artist Hyaline together with a set of wine bowls. Clair had grinned teasingly when he found out the wine bowls were for young van H'las but he was careful what he said nowadays about Tashka's passionate allegiance to the commanding officer who ought to have been a sworn enemy of the family's. He had gone too far teasing Tashka once about el Gaiel van H'las and Tashka punched him so hard that Clair had a black eye for a week.
