A Royal Affair (23 page)

I thought for a moment. “Perhaps they did not want it in the first place.”

“What do you mean?” He turned on his side too. We were inches away from each other, speaking in low voices.

“I’ll show you.” I sat up, cross-legged, facing him, and reached out my hand, placing it upon his raised hip. Under his loose shirt, it was bony and sharp. His eyes tracked the movement and stayed firmly locked onto this small contact. I let my hand travel down to the front of his breeches. He was definitely concentrating now. “See?” He turned to look at me, a question upon his face, and then he felt the knife at his throat.

He swallowed. “I did not see that coming.”

“I did not intend you to. I kept you pleasantly distracted by stroking your hip.”

“They have been stroking my hip,” he murmured.

“Yes, I believe that, metaphorically, they have.”

“So, where is their knife?”

“You have no army left now in Hesse-Davia….” He sat up and swore. I put a hand on his arm to restrain him. “You are right, Aleksey, we need to get into the command tent. Would it be manned at night?”

“Yes. Or guarded, at least.”

“Then we must create a diversion, draw the guards away, and gain access. How long would you need?”

“I don’t know! I must read the plans, not take them. They must continue to believe their deception is successful. But all this may only be a miscalculation on my part. Maybe they have reduced their army numbers since I lived here.”

“What does your gut tell you?”

He agonized about this for a moment, then said, “That we have been played for fools.”

“All right, then. We can do nothing without planning. Sleep tonight, and we will work out a way to create a diversion tomorrow and put it into effect tomorrow night when the command tent is erected once more.”

“I must have time to
read
the plans, Niko. And study the maps. It will have to be a good diversion.”

I lay back down, thinking of various strategies. “It is a pity you did not bring Faelan on this mission. A wolf run amok in the camp would have been a nice diversion.”

“I beg your pardon, but Faelan does not
run amok
. Besides, I could hardly bring him, could I? Prince Christian of Hesse-Davia is known to have a tame wolf, I am sure, even in Saxefalia.”

“It must be nice to loom so large in your own imagination.”

He did not respond to this but lay down, head on folded arms, staring at the tent roof. I turned on my side away from him and determined to sleep. It was not to be so. As I was on the edge of the long fall, he said, “Tell me, Nikolai, why you reacted as you did when I kissed you. I have been thinking about you all day and have concluded that someone must have hurt you once very badly for you to react so. Am I right?”

I kept my back to him. “I do not want to talk about this.”

“I had it so carefully planned, you see—that I would pretend we were going on a spying mission. We were entirely alone, yet still you thought it was a game as the soldiers play in camp to entertain their comrades. How could it have been, with no one to witness what we did but ourselves? Which had been my intention.”

I turned over to face him. “This was a ruse? This mission? To get us alone?”

He nodded. “I am losing my faith in my soldierly abilities. My plan was a resounding failure.”

“I wouldn’t say that. We are sleeping in the very heart of the enemy, now suspicious of his plans and about to have those suspicions confirmed.”

“I was not referring to that plan. I meant my plan to seduce you.”

I think my face must have given away my shock at his words. He shrugged. “I have nothing to lose in admitting it now—now that it has failed. I thought wrongly that you would welcome my kiss. I have never tried to seduce anyone before. I am clearly not very good at it.”

I lay back again to give myself some tiny measure of distance. “You seemed to be managing very well at the brothel.”

There was a distinct pause. “Do
you
have to seduce whores? I just pay them.”

I closed my eyes, more distance. “You are telling me your only experience has been with whores?”

“Who else would it be with? I am a prince. I can hardly disgrace my position with young women of court… who I would not have to pay… I suppose.”

“I meant… with men.”

He sat up, staring at me. “Men! I have never even considered it before. To be honest”—he flung himself theatrically back onto the bed—“I do not think I will again. It is far too confusing.”

“You are not… intimate with Johan?”

He turned to me, astonishment on his face. “He has already
told
you that I am not! He
has
told you, yes?
He told me that he had told you
!”

I thought this confusing rush of words over for a moment. “Judas’s bollocks.”

He chuckled. “I like it when you curse like that.”

“Then you are a very bad boy, for it is a sign of a dissolute life spent amongst bad men.”

“Tell me, please, Niko. When you… lashed out like that, you put me in mind of a dog I found once at the castle gate. I went to pet it and it bit me. The guard said he had been kicked one time too many, and that no act of kindness now to him was tolerated.”

I turned once more so we were face to face. I stared into those beguiling eyes. I bit my lip, thinking. “I have never told anyone. It is hard to speak of.”

“I am not anyone. I’m me. Tell
me
.”

I smiled, and something happened between us with that smile: warmth, a connection. He took my hand, idly playing with my fingers, watching them rather than me, and it gave me the space I needed to speak. “I lived with the Powponi for fourteen years, although I had no way to gauge this at the time. I worked it out later from records of my birth, which I found in my old parish in England. I was twenty and—”

“Three years younger than I.”

“Yes. Three years younger than you. Very young and immature, therefore. There were many colonies establishing on the seaboard. Some we had managed to dissuade from settling—”

“Dissuade?”

I sighed. “We massacred them. Satisfied?”

“I’m sorry. Go on.”

“But then they were too many. Like a swarm, we could not fight it. We adapted and began to trade with them. I met a man.” I stopped and saw him once more in my mind: James Harcourt. This was not going to be easy. I decided to shorten the tale. “He liked me, saw what I was—”

“A white captive?”

“No, Aleksey, not that. Use your head. He wanted me to return to England with him when he sailed. I forgot to say that he was the first mate on a whaler. They had enjoyed a very successful voyage and were returning to Plymouth. I wanted”—
him
—“to see the world. I accompanied him. He was not—”

“Niko.”

“What?”

“Just tell me. Close your eyes and just say it.”

“You want to know? All right, I will tell you. As soon as we left sight of land, he took me, and when he had done with me many days later, he sold me to his crewmates at excellent rates whenever he could make a sale. It was a very long voyage back to England. So there you are. That is why I do not travel by ship, and that is why I—” I flung myself onto my back, angry, suffering again the pain of not only the physical horror I’d endured, but memory of the emotional pain as well. Until that voyage, I had never allowed another man inside my body. My sense of always being an outsider with the Powponi, always having to prove myself the strongest, the fastest, the most
savage
, had also led me to see being taken as womanly, proof I was not the warrior I wanted to be. James Harcourt and his crew not only hurt my body, they destroyed my hard-won sense of myself.

I had fallen in love and thought that love would be my whole world.

Aleksey didn’t say anything for a long time. When he did, he put a hand gently to my face and turned it so I was forced to look at him. “I was only a boy when I found that dog. I believed the guard and was angry about my arm—where it bit me. I avoided him from then on. Now that I am a man, I would return to him day after day until he did trust me.” He leaned over and clumsily kissed me, just missing my mouth. He shifted position, and then his kiss was perfect. He must have tasted the salt upon my cheeks, because he kissed my eyes.

I wanted his mouth on mine once more and showed him so by turning and seizing him, forcing him back. He opened his mouth first, his tongue seeking mine. The touch was charged when it came, that spark once more igniting the fire that lay below. I shifted over onto his bunk, lying heavy upon him, our kisses becoming almost painful in their intensity. I could feel the urgent arousal of a very young man against me. It felt as if I were rubbing up against the hilt of his sword, so solid and hard had our kisses made him. I was close to disgrace. I needed to stop or go to places that were far beyond his understanding as yet. This was his first real kiss with a man. I knew it would be overwhelming for him. I began to soften the intensity. Open mouth with tongues engaged turned to soft kisses around his lips, but he was having none of it. He pulled me closer, wriggling beneath me, all mouth and tongue again. I smiled into the kisses but murmured, “Aleksey… enough. Be calm or… you will undo me.”

“I
want
you to spill upon me.”

I gave him a stern look. “That is hardly fit for a prince or a general to think or say.”

“I am neither. I am your servant, Niko, or have you forgot?” He slid his hand between us and began unfastening my breeches. “Let me see you.”

I kissed him some more, mainly to distract him so I could think. I had wanted this for so many months; why was I hesitating now? I had no doubt that I could take him. He was urgent, young, unthinking in his passion. As I had once been. But this time and place was not what I wanted or needed. This thing between us was a distraction now. He had no idea of the impact of what he was asking. He grew impatient and pushed me off onto my own cot so he could use both hands on my laces, and very soon he had his reward. His eyes opened wide at the sight of me, exposed, swollen, leaking. My eyes closed. I was lost to the sensation of his hands upon me—to the thought that his fingers touched me there. He didn’t need any skill or experience for what he achieved then. I would have released from his mere presence alone. I cried out as I shot high and long. I heard his soft moan of pleasure at the sight, but when I went to release him, I discovered it had been more than just pleasure from my stream.

He buried his face, embarrassed, into my chest. “I’m sorry. I was too eager.”

I chuckled. These things happened. I made to reassure him so, but he was already asleep.

I planned to stay awake to not waste this first night of having such incredible delight. He lay with his head upon my chest, my fingers in his hair, and I felt a lightness of heart that had eluded me since childhood. Perhaps wise men are right: a problem shared is one halved. I had never told anyone of that fateful voyage to England. I had not yet told Aleksey the full horror and possibly never would, but on that bed, with my fingers in his hair, I could almost recall the creaking of wood without an instant surge of sickness and dizziness, as if a deck rolled beneath me as I lay humiliated and in pain. I fell asleep, still deep in the bowels of the ship in my mind, and woke once to the familiar nightmare, but this time I did not call out or wake my sleeping companion, which was good. I enjoyed this novelty of waking with another in the middle of the night and pitied anyone who took such things for granted: the comfort of the warmth, the sense of security and peace. It was a great novelty to me and all the more precious for that. I was tempted to wake my sleeping general and see what commands I could coax from him, but we were in a place of considerable danger should we be discovered, not only enemy spies, but fornicators of the worst kind. You can only be put to death once, of course, but I had no intention of that happening now to either Aleksey or me.

I woke again to the familiar sounds of an encampment of men stirring. Aleksey was waking too. We were both in that half moment between sleep and full consciousness when thoughts gather and memories return. Ours returned to us at the same time. My caution of the night was now overcome by my familiar morning urgency. With a groan of pleasure, our mouths came together, hands sought and fumbled. I was determined this morning to see him, for I had not yet and very much desired to. When released from his breeches, his cock was indeed a thing of wonder. All men take a great interest and pride in their cocks. You can see proof of this in the very youngest of our gender, strutting around and hoping to be admired before we are even aware of purpose. I have never met a woman, whore or otherwise, who gives a man as much admiration of his cock as he thinks it merits. This was the first time Aleksey had ever genuinely had his cock admired as it truly deserved. It was, as I have said, a thing of incredible beauty: long, pale until the tip, where it mushroomed out to a dark flushed pink, betraying his excitement. He had released me too. A man cannot fake interest or excitement or arousal. My intense pleasure at our activity was as evident as his. In one shift of my hips, I had us together in my hand. He did not speak but watched, then arched, and it was over. It had such great novelty attached to the act that we were in awe of what we did, as if we were the first men to wake together on a bed and to do such a thing.

We returned to kissing, but we had no time. It was incredibly frustrating to hear the increasing sounds of decampment. I had a momentary image of our tent being left isolated on an empty, ravaged field and us left kissing within. It would not do. Aleksey was the one to ease us apart, his hand coming sticky off our cocks, his lips off mine to whisper, “We must stop.”

I was glad he was still himself: general and prince. Anything else would have been false, and I had been played false before. I nodded, and we were all business: summoning hot water and attempting to wash away the sin of the night. This was not easy, as Aleksey’s breeches were still damp from his spills and my shirt was soaked, but I knew we would not be the only men so, only that our ruin had a uniquely
shared
provenance. I do not claim that we were entirely professional or behaved merely as friends as we had on the long march sharing a tent in
his
army. We enjoyed a great deal of horseplay with the water.