Page 99

Lyr pulls back. His eyes feel prickly with tears. “How did you stand it?” Lyr says, the memory of watching Damon’s lashing bright in his mind. “How did you live through a flogging like that?”

“I thought of you,” Damon says, reaching over and stroking Lyr’s side. His voice drops, grows raspy, “I thought of you. Of you spending as I tongued your hole. I wanted to live to do that.”

Lyr gasps. A shiver of pleasure ripples through him. “Please,” he whispers.

“Thank you for coming here,” Damon says roughly. “Thank you for finding a way to get here and save me.”

“You saved me,” Lyr says.

“Nevertheless,” Damon strokes a thumb over Lyr’s face. “When Doroth Zain freed you, you could have run. You could have left me to my fate here. And now I am tired, I am weary from fighting for an empire that wants me dead. I just want to take some pleasure for myself. Now, please, let that pleasure be your body.”

“Damon, I want that, please I do.” His voice drops low with arousal at the thought of what is about to happen. “You can take anything you want from me. Do anything you want. Please, Master.”

“Slave,” Damon says lovingly, kissing Lyr’s cheek, “we may not have our palace in Felgrace, but we have this. You will attend me in bed.”

“Are you sure you are healed? We can wait.”

“No, we can’t. I can’t. You asked me why I did what I did for you. I did it because I could not face a world without you in it. And I cannot face a world where I do not have this. Lyr, you have bewitched me.”

Damon kisses Lyr again, this time with a passion that makes Lyr forget everything else. It doesn’t end before they are ready – like so many of the other kisses they’ve shared.

Damon takes his time kissing Lyr, touching his body. He runs his fingertips over the lines scarred into his thighs and the swirls scarred into his shoulders. He examines the symbols and runes scarred and branded onto his back. And all the time he does the runes on Lyr’s chest glow.

They get brighter when Damon slides an oiled finger into Lyr, spreads Lyr on the sheets and kisses down his chest, spreading his thighs, licking over his hole. As he did in the Coupling Grove, he licks Lyr until he’s begging for Damon to fuck him.

They make love for so long. Lyr did not think it was possible to spend so many times. More times than he thought he was capable of. Damon inside him, Damon’s hands on him. Damon seems to delight in seeing it. He cries out and shakes in Damon’s arms over and over again.

Later, as the sun rises, Lyr spends with only Damon’s fingers inside him, cock untouched. Damon watches his face. Kisses it. Calls him beautiful.

Days pass like this on Sanvicta. It feels like a kind of sweetened dream. Lyr can’t spend all his time in Damon’s bed. There are things that must be done. Cooking and carrying and cleaning Damon’s wounds.

But every night – and at intervals throughout the day – Damon makes love to him with a greedy passion, leaving him sobbing and shaking until he falls into a deep sleep in Damon’s arms.

It is hard to stay worried about surviving the winter when he is half-blind with pleasure, walking around on shaking legs, marks from Damon’s teeth and fingers covering Jareleezi’s old scars.

One night, when Damon is deep inside him, he looks down at Lyr and pants, “This is a sin of the body,” as if the statement arouses him. Lyr can see sweat prickling his brow, the muscles in his arms that ripple and strain as he takes Lyr so hard that Lyr sees stars swim before his eyes.

“It is,” gasps Lyr, amazed he can speak at all.

“If I’d known how sweet the punishment for my sins would be, I would have confessed them to the Rose Court years ago.”

23

DAMON

Damon’s recovery continues.

One morning, the wind is snapping cold around the keep, but Damon has been up and walking around inside for days. He has been to the cellar and inspected the supplies for himself.

He can climb the stairs to the bedchambers and he and Lyr have moved the linens back upstairs and now, every night they sleep together in a bed.

Damon wonders if Lyr really knows how cold it can get in this part of the world. The winter here will be like nothing he has known on Klish or in Jur-Mattan. They ought to start chopping down trees and collecting fuel. But Damon suspects they may not survive long into the winter.

There are still supplies, yes, but the supplies run low.

He wonders if his father will risk the wrath of the Rose Court and send them a ship of goods, or if he is too much a coward.

Damon decides to simply enjoy what he has.