A Match for the El Maiens

Copyright (c) 2015 Naoko Smith

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Arianna stood quite still in the doorway of the library.

Clair was sitting at her desk where her papers on her mathematical theorem were all spread so carefully, pinned into place. Beside him stood a tall fair Sietter man, lean and handsome – the Hanya Vashin type, but so young. The young man looked down shyly at the floor. Clair leant over the desk, clearly attempting to encourage the man, his slanted eyes with that charming sparkle in them, his thin firm mouth smiling in so kissable a way while he spoke honeyed words to lure you on to tell all your deepest secrets.

No, no

, her rational mind said.

He never plays at sex in his home. He offered you a marriage of mind and body and heart as well as words – a marriage of two souls; he knows that with you that means he must keep his body for you alone.

Clair's head turned so gracefully above the open grey felt jacket with the high collar under which his breast was lapped in an elaborate white lace of flowers. He leant across and tapped the young man's hand where it lay on some of the papers on the table so that he would lift his head up and look into those beautiful slanted grey eyes.

It was his last day! His last day before he rode off to the Generals' strategic staff in Port H'las. How could he do this to her on his very last day? Could he not have come and offered his favours to her? She wanted him so much! Arianna gave a gasp of jealous rage which she sought to suppress as soon as she had made it but Clair had heard. His head lifted and he looked across at her, he stood up behind the desk.

"My Lady," he said with a warm smile. "You come timely."

Oh indeed

, a voice inside her scoffed. She remained in the doorway staring at him from a still expressionless pale face.

Clair was beginning to look puzzled. The young man was turning towards her, his face still shy but now also full of eager hope. Arianna looked coldly back at him.

"This is Arkyll Inien," Clair said. "He was studying in the H'velst Mountains but an unfortunate family circumstance has led to him having to come back to Sietter. I took the liberty of writing to B'dar recently and asking if he might know of two-three students who could come here and work with you on your theorem. I thought if you could delegate some of the work, as I used to delegate to my junior officers in the troop, you might be able to finish your theorem, even while I am away and you have to have the management of the castle as well as work of the region under your eye. I had intended to show you B'dar's reply if he were to send details of anyone who might be suitable but he wrote direct to Arkyll who has come here keen to talk to you about any possibility that he might work under your direction. Perhaps you might spend an hour with him just now? er, talking to him ... about your work?"

The statuesque face of his Lady wife remained expressionless. She stood in the doorway staring at the two of them quite still for a minute and then she said: "I ... prithou .... One moment." And disappeared.

The two men stared after her, disconcerted. Arkyll Inien's fair lean face fell into anxious lines. "Have I offended Lady el Jien at all?" he asked in a worried voice. "I ought not to have presented myself in person. I should have writ."

"No no," Lord Clair said, thinking, 'I should not have writ to B'dar myself, I should just have suggested she do it.' "My Lady just ... needs a moment. And so, er, tell me again of your thesis." He turned his persuasive patron's face towards the young man, leading him on to talk of his work as he was so used to do with poets and artists and scientists and all kinds of people.

Out in the corridor, Lady el Jien van Sietter had run over to a window embrasure where she pressed her head against the cool stone sill and allowed the tears to flood down her suddenly flushed pink cheeks. She sobbed silently in the window, the cold autumn light pouring over her flaxen head, her shaking shoulders in the green woollen dress, her hands hanging by her sides and the tears running down her face.

So much of his energies had been bent on making good arrangements for the castle management so that she would not be troubled. He made arrangements for the children's schooling and to find another nursery-maid so that she would not be reliant solely on Ria. He even went to discuss with the book merchants whether they could bring scrolls and parchments from the King's University all the way down through the parallel trading route then by sea to H'las, up the river to Port Paviat and through the Maier Pass to her. Now this! and she had so vilely, jealously misunderstood.

She pressed her green woollen sleeve to her eyes, gently so that she would not leave her eyes red with tears. Sniffing, she mopped up the tears from her face, took a deep breath and went to interview this prospective student.

She came walking lightly into the library, her home within a home – not the place where she most loved to be, the one where she did not even think about it, she just went there and worked whenever she could. She lifted a face flushed and pretty, completely melted from the cold white look she had turned towards the two men earlier. She looked in her green dress like the Arven River in spring when the ice melts and the birds are singing and the hills are suddenly verdant with new life. She smiled warmly with that wide sweet red mouth and her eye sparkled as brightly as a spring sky. The two men stopped talking and stared as she came up to them.

She looked full into Clair's slanted grey eyes, pressed his hand and said: "I thank you, my dear." She turned to handsome young Arkyll Inien to ask about the studies he had undertaken with B'dar's mathematical colleagues.

"Um," Clair said, looking suspiciously at the two of them: fair and handsome by the mathematical papers, "well I will leave you to talk." He went slowly off to the castle offices, casting a cross look back at his Lady wife, suddenly so beautiful, smiling encouragingly into young Arkyll's face, to get him to talk to her: el Jien the great mathematical mind whose equations B'dar used to cite in his lectures.

Two hours later, he came walking back to the library with some papers he wanted to ask her about. He thought she was likely still to be there, drawing diagrams on the board, pulling books and scrolls out and arguing that,

No, no! this was the

only

way the problem could be approached

, her pale face flushed with passion and her blue eyes sparkling with excitement.

She was there on her own, standing by the desk smiling down at her papers. She lifted her head as he came up to her. Her eyes were a soft blue and warmly happy with the pleasure she got from the life of the mind she revelled in.

"My dear, I prithou pardon me for troubling you," he began, looking back down at the papers as he approached, "Tarra tells me that you ..."

She caught hold of the lapels of his jacket in the grip of her long pale fingers and pulled him into her kiss.

Caught completely unawares, Clair threw the papers onto the library floor and gripped her to him with hard passionate arms. His mouth opened to hers, his tongue began to flick at her soft wide mouth, sweet as a bowl of cherries. Her mouth was moving softly in her kiss, she had started sucking gently on his tongue, he tried to soften his flicking desirous tongue in response. She was pulling the lapels of his jacket towards her so that he was pressing up against her big soft breasts, now she was pushing him back, back onto the table of papers. Chess pieces went clattering on the floor, papers floated away, some tore from the pins holding them to the desk. His eyes opened wide, he reached hurriedly out and seized the buttons of her green dress, pulling at them with hasty thin fingers, tearing them out the button holes. She was tugging at her dress herself with one hand, the other hand still gripped on the lapel of his jacket, her mouth opening to his in their kiss, his tongue pressing into her mouth. She made a low moan. He was about to put a hand into her dress onto one of those soft breasts in the bodice, to start pulling the hooks out of her bodice.

There was a most inopportune flurry at the door, his eyes flicked sideways. He knew it was one of the servants, of course they never knocked and he had left the library door wide open. He was turning back as quickly as he could to the hooks of her bodice, he was willing, he was eager to take her favour on the floor of the library with the door wide open.

But her head had flicked up and across. She too had realised that someone had come in and seen them. She started to think again, to think about what she was doing. She had flung her own husband on her mathematical papers to get his favour with the door wide for anyone in the castle to come in and see them. Who knew who it had been who had come in just then. Her face was already flushed with desire, she went a deeper pink with embarrassment. She let the lapel of his jacket go from her stiff long fingers, stood up and gave a kind of gasp.

Clair sat up on the table of scattered papers and chess pieces. He stood up and put a hand to his head. Arianna was hurriedly doing up her buttons again, flushed and trembling, her head bent down.

"Um, er," Clair said. "Yes. I ... I might just go ... lie down." He stumbled off out of their library, his eyes wide and his breath coming fast. His legs trembling, he stalked rapidly down the corridors to the family quarters, down the veranda, staggered into his room and, slamming the door, he fell over to his bedding, dragging the buttons out on his breeches. He lay down with a moan, his hand going to his rigid erect cock. He lay with his wide grey eyes staring off into the room, thinking about his hand on her breast in the simple lacy white cotton bodice, about her soft big body which for a brief time she would bring to lie under him in this narrow roll of bedding. He gripped his fingers on his cock, rubbing quickly up and down, moaning with need, quickly quickly. The familiar warm energy came surging up through his loins, his buttock muscles tightened, he was making quick high gasping moans as the impulse came thrusting up in him and he was spurting into the sheet of his bedding with a final series of cries.

He lay still in the bedding, staring with his wide grey slanted eyes at the painting of red hands rising up towards blue and gold stars and a moon hanging on his wall. He loved the hot surge coming through him in orgasm but sometimes afterwards he would feel so desolate and alone. He lay still, longing for a warm human body in which to press that impulse towards life and happiness.

For so long he had sought only some fun and escape from love in casual physical games he played at in sex with any body that came his way, even now he thought he would be reasonably content with some stranger's body in his arms, against his legs, around his cock. It was easy to be with somebody about whom you knew little or nothing so you could imagine you had a close intimacy when all you had was the warmth of the common humanity you shared. If you got to know them you found they did not like lace lingerie, were bored by the fine distinctions between Northern and court architecture, hated riding and it was over. It was better not to get to know them.

He knew now, though, that he had gone beyond that. He would never wholly recover from what they had put him through in warfare but he had got to a place where he could bear to be loved again and he wanted it so much. He wanted someone who liked a ride in the hills even when it was raining, who could make a witty joke with him about some idle matter so that he would suddenly laugh in the middle of the mundane business he was undertaking, who would argue about politics or a comic novel or art or what cake to have for tea. He wanted someone who would take his favours and make of them something beyond a bit of fun in the bed, put the little pieces of intimacy offered up in favours together with some other friendly bits and make a happiness in which they might live side by side.

When he saw her again with the children and her brother Hanya, she had the veiled look in her eyes. They had a family lunch in the sitting-room and afterwards they played board games. Hanya went off at supper time to deal with some correspondence that had arrived for him and they sat chatting while the boys ate.

After the children's supper, he had to go back to the castle offices. When he got there, Hanya el Jien was sitting with Laran and Tarra. Hanya lifted that scarred golden face and stood back from a table where he had laid out several letters and a despatch box of the kind the King's Heralds used to put papers in.

"I prithou pardon us," he said, "that Anna and I could not tell you before. We have only received this packet of letters this afternoon. When Anna realised that it would be a problem that the arms merchants will charge you so dear – unfortunately they have to abide by their treaty with van Sietter according to their own mercantile notions of honour – and because the H'las treasury has been stripped with the lack of trade in the region, she and I wrote to our bankers. But it is of course difficult to get letters of credit through the Sietter Hills just now and Anna and I are not entitled to use the King's messengers. These have had to come right round by a mercantile route through Vilandia.

"Anna and I pray you to ask van H'las to accept these funds and use them as he will. I will tell it to you, this is not the half of our monies, even though Prianne is holding back our income from our estates in Iarve, so if you in H'las need more, prithou write to us and we will send it. I wanted to send all of it but Anna prevailed, she said this should be enough. She has also said, musts't tell van H'las it is to be used for arms for the men, not for playing cards with Tashka." They both laughed. Clair came forward, touched by this gesture, and looked casually at the papers set out for him. Then he gasped and his eyes opened wide to see the enormous sums of money that his Lady wife had command of. No wonder she had never bothered to complain of it, that he and his brother cost her so dear! No wonder that she carelessly spent so much on her library and would buy a hunting horse as a betrothal present as easily as a silk cravat, or even a stables for her husband's lover and only care that it might mean her marriage might be about to be broken.

"Hanya," he said, "I cannot ...!"

"It is not for you, Clair," Hanya said carelessly. "It is for the H'las army and for them to win this war so that we can take our case for the poor to court and so that we may have a politics that considers the people, not the narrow interests of the likes of Prianne and Lord Pava. Of course, my brother, if needs't money, has't only to ask," he grasped Clair's offered sword arm and his eyes creased in what passed for the smile on his scarred face as he looked into Clair's warmly affectionate eyes.

~#~*~#~

Arianna, staring into the drawer of lingerie in her wardrobe, could feel Lisette hovering behind her. The maidservant's restrained longing for her to dress in some of these barely existent garments was so great that she did not dare say anything for fear her enthusiasm would make Arianna shy. Arianna lifted out a sort of string with a frill hanging off it and gave it an incredulous anxious look.

The morrow Clair would ride away to war. He was less likely to be injured or killed than Tashka out in the field. 'But if we lose,' Arianna thought, thinking about how Commander-Sir Lial Darien had predicted they would lose.

If they lost, Clair would be dragged back to Arventa, a traitor to his own father. There was another heir, Arkyll, and Lord Pava had a second and young wife. Clair's life was not worth much to him.

If they lost, she would be taken from this castle and sent home to Iarve – particularly now that she and her brother had funded the H'las war coffers; but she would never arrive there. Lord Pava had early in her marriage tried hard to jostle her into handing over to him the management of the wealthy Iarve estates which were her marriage settlement, this latest manifestation of independence was beyond even her insistence on keeping her own money in her own hands. Prianne had tried fair means and foul to get her to give up the work she was devoted to, which he was convinced was against his interests. She did not know what he might do to her, she no longer knew who her oldest brother was. If they lost this war she or Clair or both of them might die. She would never again see that arrogant, quarrelsome, expensive, promiscuous beauty; that fair-minded, hot-hearted, attentive man with experienced fingers, her husband.

She reached into the wardrobe and started pulling at the skirts of the dresses hanging there, getting into the row of dresses in the back, ones she had never worn, hanging in linen bags to protect them. She pushed her lip out with a determined pout. Her eyes were desperate, so full of yearning.

Clair scrawled his signature across a final set of papers for Tarra and Laran, lifted his head and smiled at them. He was still in the grey felt suit and cotton shirt with the flowering lace collar he had been wearing all day. The flowered lace collar had lost its crispness and was drooping softly about his chest now but he thought as it was his last night, and although he and Arianna had been put up on high table with her brother in some misguided notion that this gave them family time, he might get away with not changing.

"You'll have a drink with me?" he suggested, reaching across to press Laran's arm in wordless gratitude. He had witnessed years of service from the older man, who now demonstrated his devotion in not going over to van Sietter even though he was nearing retirement. They knew van Sietter would make him suffer for it if van Sietter won the war. "My Lady will come here to fetch me when it is time for us to dine."

They were lifting their bowls for a toast and Laran was just saying a wish for a good journey for him when a sound at the door made them turn their heads.

Clair nearly dropped his bowl.

Arianna stood with her hair elaborately arranged on her head. One alluring curl drooped bouncing down past her cheek, her cheeks were pink with powder and her eyes stared out at him from a full make-up in purple and gold. Her mouth was as red as a cherry tart, glistening in the candlelight. From her ears dangled a long gold chain with tiny rubies glinting in it, it hung from one ear under her chin and across to the other earlobe.

She wore a black and gold figured gown with a neckline plunging so low that it had to be held together with a thin gold strap across her big breasts. Through the gap in her dress, Clair could guess at the sight of tiny bits of black lace. Lisette seemed to have decided not to put a jewel to dangle in the cleavage of that creamy soft bosom or perhaps Arianna had balked at it.

Tarra had choked on his wine and Laran was staring at her with his mouth open. Arianna looked at them in a nervous horror. Tarra's eyes lifted to hers were full of an appreciation of her beauty that was not what she wanted. She was going to have to work with him again the morrow, she did not want him leaning close to her at her desk with that look in his eye. Laran's face was hotly disapproving. She preferred that, although she felt sorry for it. Her face blank of the anxious emotions she felt, veiled and cold, she looked past the two servants to Clair.

He was looking sidelong at her, an appreciative gleam in his eye and a smile curling the corner of his thin mouth. Was this the way he would look at some sugarplum at court? and he would flirt with her and later lure her back to his room? But suddenly, thinking about what she had heard of his days at court, she knew he had never bothered to look at anyone appreciatively or flirt with them to lure them back to his bed. They came for him, throwing themselves in his way, wearing dresses like this to try to catch him; he did not care, he took whatever fell in his path and moved on, careless.