Chapter Three: Hale
Baron Hale of Hawkshead, passed the reins of his horse to a waiting groom and, pausing to clap the lad on the shoulder, exited the stable yard in the direction of the Hawkshead Keep. Though it would have encompassed barely a tithe of the immense bulk of Castle Grey—Hale's childhood home—the Keep was still a forbidding structure. The first Baron of Hawkshead had ordered it to be built atop the high hill whose peculiar shape gave his fiefdom its name. From this place of strength he had commanded the loyalty of the lands for many miles around. Time had weathered smooth the heavy black stones since then, but had done nothing to make the walls less defensible or imposing.
The two men-at-arms on duty outside the double oaken doors saluted smartly as Hale approached.
"Good even, my lord," said the senior of the pair.
"Good even, Haldric," Hale replied. He had become Baron of Hawkshead for less than a year, but already he knew each member of his staff, and particularly his guardsmen, by name. It was a habit of his years in Rivenland's military. A good commander knows his troops.
Passing through the oaken doors and into the hall beyond, Hale noted the torches were already begin to burn low in their sconces. His evening's ride had taken him farther afield than usual. At thirty-six years of age, Hale still had a soldier's build and bearing. His blue eyes were sharp and piercing above a hooked nose and strong jawline. He wore no beard and kept his dark hair pulled back in a short tail. A few strands of silver already gleamed among the jet, giving Hale a slightly grizzled air. Broad shoulders and thick biceps strained the finely woven fabric of his doublet and a sabre scar adorned his right cheek. More scars and weapon calluses were visible on the baron's large hands, as he lifted one of the torches from its bracket, using it to light his way up the winding stairways of the Keep's central tower.
On the second landing, Hale espied Goodwife Tyrol just entering the door the to servants' stair. She carried a guttering candle in a shallow clay dish.
"Good even, Mistress Tyrol," Hale called softly.
The elderly woman dropped Hale as deep a curtsy as her stiff limbs would allow. "Good even to as well my lord. Is there something you require?"
Hale smiled and shook his head. "Nay mistress, I am well. How fare the ladies of my house?"
The Goodwife had been the baroness' maid when she was a girl and a nurse to the baroness' four daughters' by her first husband. Though the girls were now well past the need of any nursing, the youngest two being fully eighteen years of age, it was still her habit to checking on the young ladies every evening. For this obvious devotion, and for other reasons, Hale was always careful to be nothing but courteous to the Goodwife.
"Her ladyship is fitful," she admitted. "The babe in her belly wakes her with kicking and her back and feet pain her."
"Do you judge it serious?" asked Hale. "Shall I send for a healer?"
"Nay, nay milord," the Goodwife assured him, shaking her greying locks. "She endured worse during her last confinement, for all that she was not then one and twenty. And grumble though she will I know she is glad of the chance to make you an heir before her bearing years are done."
"That may be some ten years hence," Hale pointed out.
"Mays and ifs make beggars of princes," the Goodwife chided gently, as though Hale were a thoughtless boot boy and not the lord of the Keep. "Though, truth to tell, I hope you are right. I should like to see my lady thronged round with pretty children to keep her smiling when I am gone."
"That is what I hope for too," said Hale. "Though I pray she may have your company as well for many years to come."
"Thank you my lord," said the Goodwife smiling.
"And what of the young ladies?" Hale asked as Goodwife Tyrol turned back to her dusty stairwell. The look she gave him was sharp and knowing, but Hale thought there was more of indulgence than condemnation in it.
"I would hazard that they fain more weariness than they feel, my lord, and a little of my raspberry tea seems to have quite settled their stomachs."
"What would this little family do with out you mistress Tyrol?" Hale said with feeling.
"I could not say, my lord" she replied wryly. "Though I dare to guess that with or without me it should not stay a 'little' family very long."
Hale chuckled warmly and the Goodwife bobbed another creaky curtsy before departing. The Baron of Hawkshead proceeded upstairs and, laying aside the snuffed torch aside, entered his solar. A great four-poster bed dominated the center of the round stone room. The heavy drapes of rich, wine-colored velvet were drawn, but Hale could make out the soft rustle of cloth and low whimpers that issued from behind them.
Frowning, Hale moved to the foot of the bed, one hand upon his belt knife, and twitched open the curtains. In the center of the bed, lying on top of the tangled coverlet was Baroness Bountiful of Hawkshead. She was alone and utterly naked, her pale skin radiant in the moonbeams that stole in through the chamber window. Her eyes were fast closed, but her eyelids flickered and breathless noises escaped her slightly parted lips. Her long ash blond hair was damp with sweat and further beads gleamed on the swollen mounds of her belly and breasts. More than eight moons with child, Bountiful was a tight as a drum and large enough that the casual observer might have been forgiven for supposing that she carried a hippopotamus' foal rather than a mere scion of House Greyleon. Her bosom, which had been large enough to startle men into slack jawed wonder since she was a girl of thirteen, had only expanded further with every child she bore, while losing little of their exceptional perkiness. This new pregnancy was no exception and the mounds of quivering flesh that now bounced and shook as the baroness stirred and whimpered in her sleep were truly enormous.
Hale's frown melted into in a broad grin. Quietly, he lifted his hand from his dagger and stripped out of his boots and clothes. His cock sprang free of the discarded loincloth with all the eagerness of a seasoned warhorse hearing the sound of trumpets once again. None could doubt that the blood of Greyleon ran true in Hale, for he had inherited King Potent's legendary length and girth.
Yet it was not with this throbbing battering ram that the baron began his conquest. Instead he bent low over his wife's crotch. The deep musk of her dreaming need reached his nostrils, filling them the bouquet of a vintage wine. A wet stain was already spreading across the coverlet where Bountiful's cunt brushed it. At Hale's request, she had begun a shaving the hair around it once a again, a practice she abandoned some eighteen years ago upon the death of the previous baron. Now though her skin was smooth as silk once more, which made it easy for Hale to see how swollen and flushed—hot and almost purple—the lips between her legs had become.
Hale's heartbeat quickened and he flashed out his hot, wet tongue. Gently, he licked up the hood that sheathed Bountiful's clitoris. The little nub was so stiff with desire that it might have been a wooden bead. Bountiful moaned aloud as Hale rubbed it with his tongue. The taste of her, warm and briny, flooded his mouth and his hunger mounted. He began to kiss Bountiful's clitoris, hard, fast, and without cessation until he was sucking on her nub like a lustful lamprey.
Bountiful awoke from a dream of water monsters to find Hale sliding two thick fingers in and out of her dripping cunt, wriggling them inside her, while he sucked lustily on her throbbing clitoris. A disoriented wave of terror collided with her arousal and set off the orgasm that had been building.
Hale felt his wife convulse under his touch and grinned as he lifted his mouth from her loins. Her juices gleamed wetly in his lips and ran down over his cleft chin. He ran both hands over the mountain of her swollen belly, up the length of her until his questing fingers brushed the quivering flesh of her mammoth breasts. He seized them roughly, drawing his thumbs hard over her stiff nipples. He was rewarded with a shuddering moan from Bountiful and a gentle trickle of pale milk.
"Hale," Bountiful gasped out. "I dreamt...it was awful...Hale, listen!"
"My ears are open," Hale said, walking himself forward on the bed so that he was bent over his pregnant wife, their eyes on a level. The tip of his rock hard cock just brushed the lips of Bountiful's cunt making her moan aloud.
"God trample on you, Hale," she hissed. "I had a nightmare."
Hale rolled his hips in a circle so that his cock rubbed more insistently at Bountiful's loins. "Really?" he asked. "You seemed to be enjoying it well enough."
"No," protested Bountiful, biting her lip in the effort of concentrating through the sensation of her lord's cock scraping over the swollen lips of her cunt. "It was awful. I was swimming in Hawkeye Lake and then there these...oh!...these things in the water, like...ooh...leeches with children's faces, only I was a child too, I think, except...ah!...except I can remember them sucking on my...oh, yes...on my tits, so I guess I can't have been. And then...oh...and then...oh, oh, never mind just hurry up and fuck me, you beast!"
"Are you sure?" asked Hale. "I can keep listening."
