Daylight filters through her window in pale filaments across her eyes. She wakes with a low groan, her ears ringing with the sound of her own pulse. Awareness returns to her in a flood of sensation.
The air is hot and musty with lingering scents of wine and sweat. Aribeth half-expects to wake in her own bed--a simple, spartan thing in her quarters underneath a familiar quilt and her own pillows--and so she is momentarily disoriented, finding herself with a blanket of scarlet velvet brushing along her naked flesh. Her skin is inexplicably cool in the air, and her body sore in places, an unfamiliar but pleasant ache between her long legs.
Aribeth closes her eyes and exhales to steady herself before a soft hand brushes along her thigh beneath the blankets. Her eyes snap open to gaze at Sharwyn's smirking face.
"Ah," Sharwyn murmurs, her half-lidded eyes sweeping across Aribeth's form, the way the paladin wraps herself in the blanket, its scarlet folds draping down the curves of her generous breasts, "good morning, Lady Paladin. Mmm, judging by that incredulous look on your face," she says, her hand snaking along Aribeth's trim stomach to wrap around her waist, "you've slept especially well."
Behind Sharwyn sleeps the form of one especially lucky young man, one arm hanging over the side of the bed. The blanket drapes over his waist, revealing the taut definition of his abdomen, his finely toned chest and shoulders.
All at once the memories of last night repair themselves.
"Oh, Tyr," she murmurs, her eyes looking away across the bedroom, a suite on the second floor of the Moonstone Mask, presently a mess of an overturned chair, a table at its side, a few bottles of wine scattered near a couch, "this cannot be happening to me."
Sharwyn laughs, and Aribeth feels her shapely form rest against her own, curves fitting curves.
"But it did," Sharwyn purrs, kissing along the elf's long throat. Aribeth finds herself gasping, the familiar sensations of Sharwyn's lips against her throat conjuring vivid flashes of the prior night.
****
Aribeth reclined in her bath, her chestnut-brown hair spilling down into the swirling water. She bathed with slow deliberation, luxuriating in the sensations of steaming hot water lapping along the heavy curves of her chest, immersed to her shoulders. She washed herself with soaps fragrant of lavender and peppermint, admiring in a moment of indulgence the qualities of her own body, the way she imagined Fenthick would admire her tonight.
She had long legs, elegant with dainty, pink-soled feet; her arms were shapely, hints of her well-toned musculature suggested underneath that polished smooth skin, fair of complexion. Aribeth rarely indulged in these vanities, this kind of narcissism antithetical to the behavior of proper paladins, who were expected to be beautiful in a pious way, the way the halls of the temple were beautiful: inspiring awe, never lust. But that was her public face. In private, Aribeth was a woman as much as she was a paladin, and during her nights with Fenthick, rare as they may be, she allowed her hair down, allowed herself to feel sexy.
Her hand slipped along the smooth curves of full breasts, pressed adorably together between her arms to accent the depth of her cleavage. She knew that she looked good, and underneath the contours of her plate armor, Aribeth was an alluring specimen of elf. She brushed her fingers along her taut abdomen, imagining Fenthick's hand in place of her own. Her fingertips circled around the slope of her mound between her thighs, massaging softly along the cleft of her sex, small and chaste, her pink labia closed and tight.
"Oh, Fenthick," she murmured, closing her eyes and dipping her fingers inside.
When her bath was done, Aribeth rose from her tub, water streaming down the contours of her elegant form, her hair clinging to her neck and shoulders. Her senses were still reeling from the pleasure of a small climax, a small appetizer in anticipation of her lover. She dried herself and applied a scented oil to her body, giving her complexion a faint sheen that glinted the light of candles arranged around her bath. She wore a long, black robe of silk, tied at her waist, its fabric draped across her front to reveal the upper slopes of heavy breasts pushed together, the length of her deep cleavage.
Her bedroom was empty. Outside her gauzy curtains, the sky had grown red with sunset and cast a long, orange bar of light across her bed. She sighed and reclined on her bed. He'd promised to meet her by sundown. "No delays this time, beloved," he'd said, "just you and I. Sundown. I swear it." She stared up at the roof of her bedroom, the flickering light cast across its surface by the sconces at her wall.
Aribeth sighed. She waited. The sky grew darker, and gradually the stream of light across her bed receded into a meek strip below her window. She rose; she lounged on her couch, swaying her ankle. She had a cup of water. Aribeth found herself making excuses for him more and more often these days. Tonight was the third night he'd let her down, and after lounging on her couch with her hands across her stomach, rehearsing in her mind the way she'd greet him--an icy stare across the length of her bedroom, bashful smiles from him and perhaps a bouquet of roses from the Lord's Gardens, some murmured apologies between tenuous kisses after which she would, with his arms around her waist and the heat of their breath mingling, forgive his tardiness--she grew sick of waiting. Hope became concern became annoyance became anger.
Aribeth approached her window and flung open its shutters. She'd give him one last chance, one opportunity to be there when she looked down toward the roads below her balcony. Nothing. A few guards in the tabards of Neverwinter, swords at their hips; some well-dressed merchant riding past the building, but no sign at all of a panicked Fenthick rushing on foot toward her door with flower petals trailing from the bouquet crushed under his arm.
So be it, then, she thought. She stripped off her robe with militant efficiency, flung it on her bed and changed into something more presentable to the public. It wasn't that he'd kept her waiting. Aribeth believed powerfully in the virtue of patience, one that he admittedly tested on nights like these. Rather, she reflected as she threw on a low-cut shirt of black and midnight blue above a dress that flowed past her long legs, he had embarrassed her. She lay about on her bed like some blushing, lovestruck maiden waiting for her paramour to fling open her bedroom door with a rose between his teeth.
Fenthick had made her feel like a fool. She was not inclined to forgive him.
Aribeth left her bedroom and traveled swiftly down a long flight of stairs that lead into the building's foyer, where she encountered a surprise handmaid mopping at the floors.
"My lady?" she asked, in a voice that mixed surprise and sympathy.
Aribeth sighed. "I am going out for the evening."
The handmaid frowned. "I am sure Master Fenthick is caught up in his duties at the temple. I am sure he did not mean--"
"--Not a word about Fenthick," Aribeth said, articulating his name with a small hiss in her dulcet voice, "if you please." The handmaid winced and nodded in solemn understanding, and Aribeth sighed again. She combed her hand through her chestnut tresses, freshly washed, oiled and scented. "If he comes for me," said Aribeth, her dress whisking past the polished ground as she went for the door, "tell him I am incredibly disappointed in him."
She slammed the door behind her.
The city of Neverwinter spread out before her in a landscape of rooftops and roadways, bright steeples that rose from a canopy of sloped brick roofs the same reddish color of the perpetual glow enveloping the city.
Aribeth was not often seen without her scalloped plate armor and a sword at her hip. She wove through the traffic of crowds, past the rattle of horse-drawn carts, past roadside eateries and around leering clusters of rough-looking men who paused to watch the svelte form of this elegant elf walking unescorted. Here she felt a degree of comfortable anonymity, not Lady Aribeth de Tylmarande but an elf of the city in expensive looking garments, with a proud, uplifted chin and a stern look on her face.
She didn't know where she was going. Aribeth walked on pure impulse, brooding silently as she did, without any plan or intention more specific than getting away from her bedroom. She ignored her share of cat calls and whistles, walking on until her subconscious had led her before the doors of the Moonstone Mask.
***
Sharwyn reclined against Damon's form, a smile on her lips. She and the young guard had formed something of a casual relationship, seeing one another now and then when he was off duty and she sufficiently bored. He was a good lover, energetic and tireless, only a year or two younger than she, with wheat colored hair and green eyes, a wry smile, and a deliciously muscled physique consequent of his diligent training. Tonight they lay across a cushioned divan in the Moonstone Mask, her shapely figure resting across his chest, his arms around her waist. Now and then they sipped together from a broad bronze saucer filled with a spiced wine.
All around them, the Moonstone Mask thrummed with a constant, languid hedonism. Men and women lay and laughed in each other's arms, indulging one another in a coquettish stroking and petting that never quite devolved into foreplay: there were private rooms for that. Wine poured into great bowls, spiced with a mild narcotic that excited one's senses, and sweet-smelling camphor drifted from censers in long, thin tendrils of smoke.
