Official Reckoning Page 10

  “Oh fuck…” I whispered as my head dropped back.

  She softly chuckled as she released me with a soft pop and pulled away. She was enjoying herself, I could tell that much, and for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why she’d stopped.

  One hand pulled my trousers the rest of the way down and tossed them aside as she settled between my thighs, both hands on my cock and stroking it in smooth, languid motions. She watched my reactions while staring deeply into my eyes, and smiled each time I shuddered, moaned, or gasped in response to her teasingly slow pace.

  She rolled her shoulders as she lowered her head and pressed a light, tender kiss to the tip. Her movements sent the shoulders of her top down and release both of her breasts as her tongue flickered out to play with the head. Another wave of need rushed through me and dragged a growl from my throat as I watched her. I wanted more. She knew that. It seemed like she was egging me on.

  She sucked the head into her mouth and softly moaned as her eyes closed, her tongue tasting and toying with it before she pulled away, earning another growl from me.

  It was quickly abated however as she pushed her top aside the rest of the way, as well as the rest of her clothes, until we were both completely naked. She eyed me with a smirk as she dropped back down and wrapped her breasts around my shaft, moaning and toying with her nipples as she fucked me with her breasts.

  It was a wonderful, delectable sight. I reached down to stroke her hair and felt a light burn in my left hand as I pushed the same pleasure that I felt back into her. Sure, she felt it through the bond, but sharing the full sensation was enough to draw a long moan from her as her head dipped to let her tongue lather the head that poked out from between her breasts with attention.

  “Fuck me,” I gasped and shuddered as she moved faster and faster while tasting the precum that appeared on the tip.

  She didn’t respond. Not verbally, anyway, but the way that she moved closer, not holding her breasts around me anymore but taking the responsibility with her mouth instead told me that she had every intention of acquiescing to my request.

  Her right hand wrapped around the base of the shaft as her lips wrapped around the head. She sucked me into her mouth as she pulled me closer and moaned around it as her head bobbed. Her left hand massaged my balls and toyed with them as she sucked me deeper and deeper into her mouth. I felt her smile around my cock, then pull away to inhale before she dove down to suck me in again. I followed my instincts and let the magic flow into her at a quicker, rougher rate.

  She moaned louder and I realized that her hand had dropped away from my balls and slipped between her own thighs, enjoying herself as much as I was.

  I shuddered as the rush of pleasure reached me as well. I watched her grind into her hand, her head still bobbing vigorously on my cock, and felt the warm, wetness of her lips pick up speed. She pulled me closer. Her free hand fell away and grabbed my ass and pulled me closer, which sent me deeper into her mouth until her throat wrapped tight around the shaft. She pulled back, sucked in a deep breath, and then dropped again just as the bed underneath us rocked forward.

  Her hips bucked into her hand as I felt her orgasm wash through our bond. Her mouth sucked me in deeper and her eyes closed as she focused on the pleasure rushing through her. I gripped the back of her head as my pleasure started to crest.

  She moaned and kept on moaning until my cock twitched inside her.

  “Fuck… Braire,” I gasped. She pulled back and sucked on the head as I filled her with my cum. Her hand wrapped around the base and stroked more and more cum from me until I dropped back on the bed, gasping for breath.

  “Oh gods…” was all I could manage to say as she kept on sucking until there was nothing left to draw out. Once she finished, her head came up and she licked and then smacked her lips at me.

  “I’ve always wanted to try that,” she whispered and grinned at me as I struggled to recover.

  “Was it everything you thought it would be?”

  “I think it needs to be said that I’m rather addicted now as well,” she replied and crawled back over me to place a light kiss on my lips. I smiled, still tasting a bit of myself there.

  “You’re welcome for that,” I replied and quickly licked my lips. She draped herself on top of me and laid her head on my chest, which heaved as I struggled to catch my breath. These moments were enjoyable, I had to admit. Sure, the fun during sex was to die for, but lying next to each other and basking in the afterglow was just as important.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I heard a familiar voice from the doorway. Braire scrambled off me in surprise and I jumped up, trying not to fall off the bed as I turned to the door, which had been silently opened by Aliana and Norel.

  They both looked rather furious, I thought.

  “What?” I asked, as I looked at them and wondered what I’d done this time.

  “Doing that right as we’re in the middle of a meal with the fucking Official?” Norel snapped and stepped further into the room. “And the mayor of this little city on top of that. Do you know how hard it is to focus on anything when two members of our bond are cumming?”

  My mouth opened, fairly sure that I knew the answer, but neither seemed to be in the mood to hear any excuses.

  “I’m… sorry?” I said and finished with a questioning tilt of the head, wondering if that was what they wanted to hear. I didn’t mean it, of course, but I needed to make some sort of effort to look and sound apologetic.

  “Yes,” Braire said. “Absolutely sorry. Both of us. Won’t happen again.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Aliana said. She still looked annoyed, but also more than a little amused. Although she’d had to hide her own arousal while in company, I could tell that it hadn’t been a terrible experience. Norel felt the same.

  “Me neither,” Norel snapped, then shook her head and chuckled. “I’m fucking exhausted. We should rest, but we’re talking about this tomorrow morning.”

  Unable to keep a smirk from my face, I nodded, and agreed that we’d discuss it the next day. We’d all had a long one, and after sleep, tempers would be cooler and reason would prevail. Although whether it would do so in my and Braire’s favor remained to be seen.

  “Good night,” I called after them as they closed the door.

  12

  We did talk about it the next morning. And the morning after that. Sometimes in the afternoons, too, as our travels brought us closer to the mountains that made up a natural western border to the Empire. Most of the conversations didn’t end with much of a resolution, as we tended to get distracted, which succeeded in distracting the other two, which resulted in more conversations needed. It wasn’t an efficient system, but it seemed to work for all parties involved.

  I had read a few stories about previous Emperors who had tried to expand the area, but the fact that it was mostly wilderness, peppered here and there with smaller city-states that lacked in natural resources but not in people willing to fight tooth-and-nail to defend their independence, made it difficult. They had their own mages locked into place. Some of them took the place of the lord and even king of their respective city-states. It made those places a lot more work to take over than they were worth. As such, the Empire stopped expansion to the west and focused on consolidating in the South where raiders were known to attack.

  I didn’t know any of this from experience, of course, and even the books I’d gotten my hands on were ridiculously out of date.

  With that said, I had an odd feeling that I’d seen some of these landscapes before. The sweeping hills, the forests, and even the areas that had been cleared for farmland all felt eerily familiar. I couldn’t place it, but it was something that nagged at the back of my head for most of the ride.

  That dream, I realized as we reached the pass between a pair of the mountain range’s taller peaks. The world started to slope upward. What looked like miles above, snow fell and capped the peaks with white that cut sleekly into the green forests that
grew up into it. It was a majestic sight from the ground, and a good deal more impressive from the air. I hadn’t done much sight-seeing during that dream—which probably wasn’t a dream, I thought.

  The pass started to narrow. It looked like it had been cut from the stone by the hands of men or elves. Or hell, what did I know? There were hundreds of other stories of creatures and monsters that would have been able to do it. Sure, there were stories, but none addressed this pass in particular. It seemed, to my mind anyway, that if something that wasn’t the Empire, wasn’t human, had cut this path through the stones, that it would have been recorded somewhere.

  Then again, go back far enough in history, and things became fuzzy. Legends melded with fact, and even as recently—relatively speaking—as the war between humans and elves, history was difficult to discern from fantasy.

  As we reached the end of the pass, I saw a small town. There weren’t too many buildings inside the palisades. Most looked as though they had been put in place as defensive positions, although a few of them looked residential, and even commercial.

  “The town of Huron,” Norel said softly as she came up next to me.

  I looked over at her as I shifted in the saddle. Over the past five days that I’d spent on horseback from dawn until dusk, I had grown more accustomed to something bumping and jostling between my thighs. I was still sore and aching, but it had gotten better. That, or I’d grown used to the abuse.

  “I’ve never heard of it,” I replied and shifted around in the saddle again, which prompted a soft snort from my horse, whose name I still wasn’t sure of. I’d taken to calling him ‘Horse,’ which he took a liking to. He didn’t like ‘Horsie,’ though.

  “It’s officially part of the Empire,” Norel told me with that smile she usually wore when she imparted wisdom. “But very few efforts have been made to integrate it. They have their own armed forces, their own mayor, selected by the people of the town, and they even built the walls. It started out as a small trading post before the war. Once it was over, the town was claimed as part of the Empire, and nobody really cared to dispute it. As long as they pay taxes on the trading parties which pass through, they’re left to their own devices.”

  “Until now,” I murmured. I recognized the town. The accuracy of the details told me definitively that whatever I’d experienced, it wasn’t a dream. The only question I had now was the identity of the woman I’d met. She’d made no appearance so far, and I actually felt a little disappointed, if only because I wanted to know who she was and how she’d intruded on my travels.

  “Night is still a few hours away,” Faye shouted from the head of the column. The pass was now so narrow that we had to ride two by two, which slowed us down as the horses struggled to negotiate the rocks underfoot. “Should we wait in the town for the night?”

  “Well, if we’re going to hunt down golems and the undead, I’d say that the town ahead of us would be a fantastic base from which to push our expeditions out,” I yelled back to her.

  “A good call,” Faye said with a nod and heeled her horse back into a walk. “We should meet in the morning and discuss it further.”

  “In the morning?” I heard Aliana whisper behind Norel and me. We’d become used to bringing up the rear of the group since Faye stayed in the vanguard with the rest of the Lancers. The men themselves didn’t seem to mind one way or another, although I caught them tossing a couple of dirty glances at the elves. It had been quick enough that there was no time to address it with them. It seemed that the story of what happened before when they tried to give elves a hard time had spread.

  I looked at the mountain towering above us. If there was any place to stab us in the back, this was it. Or maybe in the town ahead.

  The sun was starting to set as we headed into the town. It was as good a place as any to spend the night, and talk about how to conduct the rest of our mission.

  “Open the gates in the name of the Emperor!” Faye shouted at the men in the guardhouse above the gate, who looked down at us with annoyance and suspicion. I saw that the Imperial seal hung from the gates themselves, but they were old, and looked like they hadn’t been replaced or repaired in decades.

  “Who goes there?” one of the guards shouted down.

  “Who… I just fucking told you!” Faye snapped back and indicated the seal emblazoned on her chest. The men looked down, trying to make it out.

  “How do we know that you are who you say you are?” one of the others asked. It seemed that they didn’t want to let us in, and looked for any way out of it.

  “I assure you, if I have to break in and show it to you up close, you will fucking regret it!” Faye roared back at them, not used to this amount of banter with the local guards.

  The men in the guardhouse took a moment to confer with each other before a couple of them quickly descended out of sight. A few seconds later, the heavy wooden gates were pulled open by one of the men. The second ran off into the town and disappeared into one of the larger buildings.

  Faye pushed her way inside the gates and gave the guards that she passed a venomous glare as she heeled her mount deeper into the small town, assuming that the man that had run ahead of us had done so with the intent of letting some figure of authority know that Imperial representatives had just threatened to tear the gates down.

  She had assumed correctly, I saw as the whole cavalcade rode into town. A few minutes after our arrival, a heavy, corpulent man rushed out. He was dressed in some very expensive silks and looked like we had just interrupted him during his evening meal, judging by the red splotches on his multiple chins and a thin stream of grease that ran from his mouth.

  “It has been a long time since we’ve had any Imperial representatives here in our glorious town of Huron,” the man said with a broad smile. “Allow me to extend our most gracious welcomes and happy returns, yes. I am Mayor Falasva. The townsfolk call me Va, and you may as well. Or mayor. Whichever you prefer.”

  “You allow your people to call you by a shortened version of your name,” Faye growled, and dismounted. “Of course, you do. I am Madame Official Faye. You may call me that, and nothing else.”

  “Madame Official Faye, of course,” Va said and offered another sweeping bow. “What brings you to our humble, yet glorious town? You must forgive the zealousness of our guards, of course. We have had a great many troubles with monsters and demons of the night over the past few weeks. You can’t blame us for being a little cautious in our dealings with newcomers.”

  “You bet I can blame you,” Faye said and took a step closer to the man, showing that she was almost a solid foot taller than he was. “Fortunately for you, your troubles with monsters touch upon the very topic of our visit. We have come to rid you of those creatures and would like your permission to base ourselves in your town as we do so.”

  “Of course, of course,” Va replied, smiling and chuckling. “Your help is most appreciated, yes, and you may feel welcome in basing yourselves here. I should warn you that our inn does not have enough rooms for all of your men. I offer what few rooms I have in my personal lodgings, but even then, you will be lacking.”

  “I will take your generous offer and stay in your lodgings, of course,” Faye said with a smile, forced though it was. “Her Ladyship Norel and her companions, including a Varion to the Emperor, will find themselves accommodations in the inn. The rest of my men will either set up accommodations in your local guards’ quarters or set up camp nearby.”

  “Of course, as the Madame Official wishes,” Va said and bowed again. Faye turned around to the captain of her little troop, nodding that the orders had been given even if she hadn’t directed them to him. He bowed in response and called for the rest of the men to move out.

  ”I guess we’ll head to the inn, then.” I looked around. Everyone else appeared to have something to do or a place to go, except us. I didn’t have a preference. With most of the day spent riding, I felt both anxious for something to do and tired. The four of us headed to the in
n where a couple of stable boys were eager to help, although I suspected that their intentions were based on the gratuity they expected.

  I hated the fact that they expected one, since it was supposed to be a reward for a job well done, but the fact that they helped us and that Norel would pay the boys off anyway, made me a little more amenable to it.

  As we entered the inn, the whole of the town started to look a lot more familiar. Even at this time of the evening, barely past late afternoon, really, the place was already in an uproar of merrymaking and all kinds of festivities. It didn’t look like this many people could live inside the walls of Huron, which led me to believe that many of them lived beyond, either as traders, hunters, trappers, or farmers, all living on the borders of civilization with monsters on the prowl.

  And they looked so happy, the lot of them. All my life I’d lived in relative safety, well, right up until all the danger started. I’d always felt like life would change again. Sure, things were dangerous now, but once everything was done, I’d always assumed that things would go back to the safety and comfort of before. With the end of Abarat, I could get back to just training, reading and being with the three sisters.

  All these people, though. They seemed to revel in the danger they lived in. Enjoying themselves. I couldn’t understand it. I envied them their freedom, and their happiness.

  Aliana, Norel, and Braire, on the other hand, seemed uplifted and especially touched when they saw a group of elves at the center of the room. There were dozens of them mixed in with the humans, drinking, and a handful of them took out instruments I’d never seen before. They filled the room with such music that my spirits lifted again.

  The happiness of elves was infectious, it seemed.

  “You’re enjoying yourself,” Norel said as she sidled up next to me and ran her fingers through my hair.

  “What can I say?” I replied as I leaned into her touches. “These people seem happy. Having fun, despite their conditions so far from what we consider to be civilization. Who knows, maybe that is the reason why they’re so happy.”