fic, Pegasus, "And There Was No Mark On Him"
Alternate title: "Ooh Erex! A Fan Fiction," or, the one where the feisty redhead has hooves. Pegasus fic, Erex/Tilbad (remember them? from Fthoom's tale at the end?), obscurest of the obscure in interspecies romance. This was meant for Porn Battle, but as so often happens I copped out. On the bright side, I'm now 2 out of 3 with the Pegasus perv-ups, so Redfora and Oraan had better watch their backs.
And There Was No Mark On Him
*
The Great Gate opened. Every head turned as the pegasus king's daughter paced into the court, stepping like a soldier on parade. So smooth was her strut that she flowed down the aisle like molten copper, and she gleamed like a new copper coin--every inch of her, from her nose to her wings to the wisps of her tail--a coin before it was touched by grime or grubby fingers. If someone had asked Tilbad what color he liked best for a horse (not that pegasi were horses, but they came in the same set of colors, more or less), until that day he would have said black, or gray, or dark bay with a blaze, but from the moment he saw her there was only chestnut.
She reached the dais and sprang up on it, almost launching into a glide over the final steps. A few of the white flowers tucked among her feathers came free to scatter like stars upon the floor.
Then she stood silent, posed, waiting for him to speak. He was supposed to speak first: that was the rule.
Collecting himself as best he could, Tilbad stepped forward. With a dry mouth and a cracking voice (he would hear about the cracking from his brothers later) he began to recite his speech about Excellent Friendship. The pegasus princess stood appraising him, taking the measure of him from his shock of brown hair to the boots on his too-big feet. Her eyes seemed to be laughing the whole while, and the worst of it was Tilbad couldn't even blame her. He managed at least not to flub any of his speech.
When he had finished he heard someone say, in the voice of a smiling lady, though no one in the audience had uttered a word: I thought you'd be taller. But I suppose you'll do.
*
They told no one that they could speak to one another. Neither of them had ever heard of such a thing, and both the human king and the pegasus king were burdened by troubles enough. Something so accidental as being able to talk couldn't be so awful a sin, Erex said, but the longer they kept their secret, the more impossible it became for Tilbad to think of telling it. To confess might only bring him low in his father's eyes. He worked hard at his signing, so his rapport with Erex might not seem so inexplicable. He worked hard at all his lessons, and hardest at the bow and the sword.
His brothers needled him at first, in the early days, about being bonded to a girl pegasus. They stopped teasing when they saw Erex in the air: how she flew like a flung dagger, faster and nimbler than either of her elder brothers, and dove like a screaming falcon when she stooped. The fiercest of a fierce brood, King Ascur called her. There was never any question, for either her or Tilbad, about the army: they joined as soon as their parents gave them leave.
The soldiers of their company called her Lady Red. When she went sailing over their ranks to beat her wings and trumpet her battle-cry, they would raise their fists and rattle their swords and roar: For Lady Red! For Erex! Some industrious soul made a banner, a red pegasus rampant on a field of gold. Within days she was blazoned on every shield in the battalion.
She took it as her due. Better than that stodgy old coat-of-arms with the acorns, she said to Tilbad, tossing her head before bending to drink from the bucket he held. She was lathered from their morning practice--both of them were, but the sweat only made her shine the brighter. She always shone. He wished the bucket in his arms were a golden ewer.
Those are my acorns, you peahen, he said. But he agreed. It's not as if I got to pick.
Well, your company has picked, and can you fault their choice? Do I not rouse the blood of fighting men better than acorns? She tossed her head again as she raised it, flinging a spatter of droplets from her chin to his cheek. Before he could wipe them away himself her wing flickered, and he felt the swift kiss of feathers on his skin.
*
On their second campaign they slew an entire nest of nourindours without losing a man, thanks to her aerial reconnaissance. The company made camp outside the village they'd defended, swamping the single tavern with victorious carousing. When the barkeep and her barmaids brought flagons of ale to the courtyard, the soldiers carried one as if it were a trophy to Erex, shouting for a toast to Lady Red.
Erex whinnied once and plunged her muzzle straight into the flagon. The cheers that followed were deafening.
I like it well enough, she said to Tilbad beneath the din. But I'd rather try the stout.
Before long a gittern appeared, then a fiddle and a flute, and the carousing turned to dancing. Erex reveled in the music: alula-hands were too weak to pluck strings, and at court she was always mad for the luthiers. She watched the dancing, too, with ears pricked. It was a rowdy sort of estampie, not much different from court dances. Tilbad tried to envision how it would go with four feet instead of two, and not arms but wings.
Perhaps he drank more than he should have. When the musicians struck up "Red is the Rose" he found himself standing flushed in front of Erex, bowing as he would have to a lady in the ballroom at court.
*
He wasn't meant to touch her. He wasn't meant to, but as they made their way from the tavern to his tent only her wing and shoulder were keeping him upright. Better for a prince of the realm to lean a bit on his pegasus, surely, than to wind up face-down in the street.
In his head she was singing. Tilbad didn't understand how a voice in one's head could sing when there was no pitch or timbre to it, but he could hear her all the same, singing clear is the water that flows from the burn, but my love is fairer than any. His chest grew tight as he listened; he felt as if something--a cough, a lump of dust, his heart--were clogging his throat. When he tried to clear it, the noise turned to a groan.
You're not going to be sick, are you? asked Erex. If you are, you'd better warn me, because I don't fancy trying to clean puke from my mane.
If he were going to be sick--and it was not out of the question--her mane was the last place he would do it. He was on the brink of telling her so, with besotted determination, as they entered the tent, when suddenly she stiffened under his arm. Her wings mantled, and for a dreadful gut-freezing instant Tilbad thought he had given her offense. Then he turned and saw what she had seen already: that there was someone in his bed.
It was a girl, a young woman, perhaps a few years older than himself. Her hair was in auburn ringlets that uncoiled down her neck. Her lips were painted, her bodice undone far enough to divulge more than than it hid. She had been smiling, or about to smile, but at the sight of Erex she gave a startled oh! and clutched her shawl to her chest.
Dumbly, Tilbad thought her hair was rather pretty--and then he realized, just as dumbly, why he did. He flushed all the way to his shins.
"I--I think there's been some mistake," he said.
Erex, whose nostrils had flared, let out an abrasive snort.
That was enough for the girl, who snatched up her shawl and ducked a bow, begging her lordship's pardon as she fled. Erex folded her wings to let the girl dash out of the tent. She snorted again at the gust of perfume, and stood looking over her shoulder when the girl had left.
What was that about?
If he tried to shake his head it would only aggravate the spinning. His hand was still on Erex's withers. He wanted to slide it up the curve of her neck. Instead he slumped away from her toward the bedroll. Never mind.
Was she what your people call a "whore"?
After months in the army Tilbad didn't ask where she had learned the word. I expect so. A gift from his senior officers to their hapless lord, most likely. He sat down heavily beside the bed.
Hmm. Are you sure you don't want me to fetch her back? I'm sure I could catch her.
Erex, he groaned. Please don't.
*
His pillow reeked. It might have been the floral stench that woke him, or the foulness of his own mouth. Then he remembered the girl, and the fact that he was sprawled face-first where a prostitute had lain in wait for him. Blinking, he lurched up from the bed.
He was alone in the tent. Erex had gone--of course she had gone. He had told her to go damned churlishly. Then he had staggered out of the tent to piss, staggered back in to do unmentionable things in his bedroll, and fallen asleep in a funk. A princely evening, all told. Wiping his mouth with a grimace, Tilbad took a draught of water from his canteen. He splashed some over his face, belted on his sword, and straightened his tunic before stepping out into the night.
From the village came the noise of revels unabated. His men-at-arms were nowhere to be seen. He could not have slept long; the moon was still high, nearly bright enough to walk by. He stood, looking toward the village lights. Then he set off in the opposite direction, around the outskirts of camp to the field beyond.
It was a hayfield, newly mown; his boot soles crunched the shorn stalks beneath his feet. Here and there a haystack loomed, easily the height of a man, darker mounds against the darkness. There was little wind, but the night air and the smell of cut hay cleared the tatters from his head. He would return to the village and his men in a moment.
Halfway through his circuit he heard wings above him, between himself and the sky. If he looked up he could just make out the shape of them, moving in smooth sweeps against the moon and stars. She was singing in time with her wingbeats, the same song as before, revising the words as it pleased her. Come over the hills, my bonny broliglag, come over the hills to your daaaarling.
He puffed a laugh into the dark. What's a broliglag?
Wouldn't you like to know. Are you feeling more amiable after your rest?
I am, thanks to your highness. Did you try the stout?
I did, and it's ever so much better than the ale. I shall never let them bring me ale again.
She dove so low he felt the wind of her rush over him, buffeting his hair, and it seemed as if she would land--but then at the last minute she soared up again. When she did it a second time Tilbad realized she was baiting him. It was an old game: they had played it in the fields outside the palace when they first bonded. At her next pass he stretched up an arm and leapt as if to catch her by the tail. His fingers whisked through empty air.
He heard her whickering, not only in his mind but with his ears. Before long his heart was in his throat again, and he was grateful for the dark that kept him from really seeing her. The sight of her flying sometimes--often--always seized him with wretched longing, not only for flight or for her beauty, the longings anyone felt when watching pegasi in flight, but for those and a tangle of other things he couldn't begin to speak.
If you weren't such a good boy, she sang from above, you might've ridden me before it was too late.
She had offered, years ago, before he outgrew the possibility. I know, he said. There wasn't a day he didn't rue his poor twelve-year-old self.
You were too much a foal then to know better. Shall I give you another chance?
She swooped. It had been years since she misjudged a landing, so when she bore down practically on top of him, Tilbad knew it was no mistake. He stumbled. Her wings swept round to steady him before he fell.
Her nostrils were wide, and the pace of her breath was quickened from the flight, but she'd hardly begun to exert herself. She thrust her nose into Tilbad's hair and snuffed. You've been the most confounding thing, she said, shaking her mane. So much of courting is smell, for us--it helps you to know if someone's right, and if they're ready. I've known for ages you were right, even if everyone else would disown us for it. But I didn't know what ready smelled like, with one of you. She began to nuzzle downward, whuffling. Tilbad kept very still. I think I know, now. Or am I wrong?
All the hair on his arms was standing on end. Maybe the hair on his head as well. He tried to swallow. You can't mean--but she did. Other parts of him were likewise on the verge of standing upright. Erex, he began, a little desperately. This is just as bad as flying together. Maybe worse. He thought of doing with her, really doing, the things he thought of when he was alone in his tent with his shame wrapped in his palm. Worse. A hundred times worse.
Her muzzle brushed his cheek, grazing his jaw. Don't you mean just as good?
He drew a haggard breath and held it. Then his hands were on her neck, both of them clinging, and he didn't know how he would wrest them away.
She drew him into the dark, away from village and camp and the risk of being sighted, to the far end of the hayfield and the line of trees at its edge. He clung to her as they went, half-reeling over the stubble of mown hay as if he were still drunk, while his pulse hammered and his mind produced a compendium of ways one or both of them might step in a mole-hole and break a leg.
A shadow obscured the moon. Tilbad understood they had reached the trees as Erex shouldered against him. He couldn't touch enough of her fast enough. He felt as if he were scrabbling, not caressing, like a frantic cat trying to scale a wall, but she shivered her wings and set teeth to his shoulder, hard enough to make him flinch, and said your hands, Til, you don't know, you can't know what it's like. She put her fragile alula-hands in his hair, on his face. They crept like soft-bodied moths over his eyebrows and lashes. When she bent her head to nudge him, firmly in the chest, he grasped her head and kissed her poll just as firmly, hooking his fingers in her mane.
Her muzzle kept burrowing downward. As she breathed around the drawstring of his trousers Tilbad thought his legs might fail, if not his heart, until she seized a fold of the cloth in her mouth and tried to yank it down. Protesting, he dragged his hands from her long enough to fumble with the laces, and only then remembered his boots. Erex, he said stupidly, I've got to take off my--
I don't see why. She was lipping his bared length, rubbing her crushed-silk cheek to it, and Tilbad heard a strangled gulp that had probably come from himself. Hmm. Does it get any longer? No? I suppose we'll make do. You'll have to put your back into it, little man. And don't tell me you can't manage standing up.
Before his manhood could suffer further, as he stood there in the dark of a hayfield with his boots still on and his trousers half-shucked, the princess of the pegasi wheeled to present him with her rump.
*
They had few chances after that, as the war only worsened. When chances did arise they took them. Sometimes it seemed absurd to Tilbad that they were not discovered--not because they were incautious, but because he was afraid his face concealed nothing when he looked at her. If no one suspected, it was because what he and Erix did lay so far beyond the pale that no one thought to suspect. And if his face concealed nothing, well, half a battalion of the king's army doted on their Lady Red, so why should her prince not do as much.
At times Erex behaved as if she were determined to expose them. On long marches she would glide above the standard-bearer at the head of the line, where the sight of her could hearten the tired soldiers. Which was all very well, and good for morale, except for the remarks she tossed down to Tilbad as she flew.
How I envy your horse. But what a dull brute he is, to have your legs wrapped round him all day and still go plodding on as if he scarcely noticed. Your princely thighs--
He struggled to school his face. Erex!
Or perhaps he does notice. Perhaps he dissembles. At this very moment he is sighing "O, if only my lord were a stallion--"
He's a gelding!
And have you never seen a stallion mount a gelding? If you say you haven't I'll call you a liar. If I were a stallion I'd cover you so hard you wouldn't walk for days.
A lesser man might have sputtered. Tilbad twitched as if from a bee-sting and shifted in his saddle. He would have dismounted to spite her if he hadn't felt weak in the knees.
Erex gave a breezy sigh. When this war is done you must take up hunting, and then we can go into the woods every day, and I shall have my way with you as often as I like.
I thought your people didn't care for it, he said, in a feeble effort to divert her. Hunting.
We don't. And I don't. You'll be much too busy to shoot anything.
It'll look bad if I never come back with game.
Truffle-hunting, then. And we'll take a very useless dog.
Having settled this she reversed course in midair to make a pass down the ranks of marchers. The men were too weary to shout for her, but their backs straightened and heads lifted as she soared over them, mane streaming, flanks glittering in her chain-mail croupiere.
For his own part Tilbad had not dared to think beyond the war. In this as in all things her fearlessness emboldened him. His brothers were betrothed; if he acquitted himself well enough in other ways, perhaps a penchant for bachelorhood could be forgiven. He was, after all, only a third son.
*
When the war ended he did not take up hunting. His father wanted him to wed: not straight away, but soon. Knowing only the half-truths the dying roc had told him, the king believed his son would recover in time. Of course Tilbad must marry. His brothers were gone, and he was heir.
It was the first duty he would ever shirk in earnest, as well as the last. As he put his head down on the soft grass where she lay, he thought how like her it was to have led him to their marriage bed.
*
And There Was No Mark On Him
*
The Great Gate opened. Every head turned as the pegasus king's daughter paced into the court, stepping like a soldier on parade. So smooth was her strut that she flowed down the aisle like molten copper, and she gleamed like a new copper coin--every inch of her, from her nose to her wings to the wisps of her tail--a coin before it was touched by grime or grubby fingers. If someone had asked Tilbad what color he liked best for a horse (not that pegasi were horses, but they came in the same set of colors, more or less), until that day he would have said black, or gray, or dark bay with a blaze, but from the moment he saw her there was only chestnut.
She reached the dais and sprang up on it, almost launching into a glide over the final steps. A few of the white flowers tucked among her feathers came free to scatter like stars upon the floor.
Then she stood silent, posed, waiting for him to speak. He was supposed to speak first: that was the rule.
Collecting himself as best he could, Tilbad stepped forward. With a dry mouth and a cracking voice (he would hear about the cracking from his brothers later) he began to recite his speech about Excellent Friendship. The pegasus princess stood appraising him, taking the measure of him from his shock of brown hair to the boots on his too-big feet. Her eyes seemed to be laughing the whole while, and the worst of it was Tilbad couldn't even blame her. He managed at least not to flub any of his speech.
When he had finished he heard someone say, in the voice of a smiling lady, though no one in the audience had uttered a word: I thought you'd be taller. But I suppose you'll do.
*
They told no one that they could speak to one another. Neither of them had ever heard of such a thing, and both the human king and the pegasus king were burdened by troubles enough. Something so accidental as being able to talk couldn't be so awful a sin, Erex said, but the longer they kept their secret, the more impossible it became for Tilbad to think of telling it. To confess might only bring him low in his father's eyes. He worked hard at his signing, so his rapport with Erex might not seem so inexplicable. He worked hard at all his lessons, and hardest at the bow and the sword.
His brothers needled him at first, in the early days, about being bonded to a girl pegasus. They stopped teasing when they saw Erex in the air: how she flew like a flung dagger, faster and nimbler than either of her elder brothers, and dove like a screaming falcon when she stooped. The fiercest of a fierce brood, King Ascur called her. There was never any question, for either her or Tilbad, about the army: they joined as soon as their parents gave them leave.
The soldiers of their company called her Lady Red. When she went sailing over their ranks to beat her wings and trumpet her battle-cry, they would raise their fists and rattle their swords and roar: For Lady Red! For Erex! Some industrious soul made a banner, a red pegasus rampant on a field of gold. Within days she was blazoned on every shield in the battalion.
She took it as her due. Better than that stodgy old coat-of-arms with the acorns, she said to Tilbad, tossing her head before bending to drink from the bucket he held. She was lathered from their morning practice--both of them were, but the sweat only made her shine the brighter. She always shone. He wished the bucket in his arms were a golden ewer.
Those are my acorns, you peahen, he said. But he agreed. It's not as if I got to pick.
Well, your company has picked, and can you fault their choice? Do I not rouse the blood of fighting men better than acorns? She tossed her head again as she raised it, flinging a spatter of droplets from her chin to his cheek. Before he could wipe them away himself her wing flickered, and he felt the swift kiss of feathers on his skin.
*
On their second campaign they slew an entire nest of nourindours without losing a man, thanks to her aerial reconnaissance. The company made camp outside the village they'd defended, swamping the single tavern with victorious carousing. When the barkeep and her barmaids brought flagons of ale to the courtyard, the soldiers carried one as if it were a trophy to Erex, shouting for a toast to Lady Red.
Erex whinnied once and plunged her muzzle straight into the flagon. The cheers that followed were deafening.
I like it well enough, she said to Tilbad beneath the din. But I'd rather try the stout.
Before long a gittern appeared, then a fiddle and a flute, and the carousing turned to dancing. Erex reveled in the music: alula-hands were too weak to pluck strings, and at court she was always mad for the luthiers. She watched the dancing, too, with ears pricked. It was a rowdy sort of estampie, not much different from court dances. Tilbad tried to envision how it would go with four feet instead of two, and not arms but wings.
Perhaps he drank more than he should have. When the musicians struck up "Red is the Rose" he found himself standing flushed in front of Erex, bowing as he would have to a lady in the ballroom at court.
*
He wasn't meant to touch her. He wasn't meant to, but as they made their way from the tavern to his tent only her wing and shoulder were keeping him upright. Better for a prince of the realm to lean a bit on his pegasus, surely, than to wind up face-down in the street.
In his head she was singing. Tilbad didn't understand how a voice in one's head could sing when there was no pitch or timbre to it, but he could hear her all the same, singing clear is the water that flows from the burn, but my love is fairer than any. His chest grew tight as he listened; he felt as if something--a cough, a lump of dust, his heart--were clogging his throat. When he tried to clear it, the noise turned to a groan.
You're not going to be sick, are you? asked Erex. If you are, you'd better warn me, because I don't fancy trying to clean puke from my mane.
If he were going to be sick--and it was not out of the question--her mane was the last place he would do it. He was on the brink of telling her so, with besotted determination, as they entered the tent, when suddenly she stiffened under his arm. Her wings mantled, and for a dreadful gut-freezing instant Tilbad thought he had given her offense. Then he turned and saw what she had seen already: that there was someone in his bed.
It was a girl, a young woman, perhaps a few years older than himself. Her hair was in auburn ringlets that uncoiled down her neck. Her lips were painted, her bodice undone far enough to divulge more than than it hid. She had been smiling, or about to smile, but at the sight of Erex she gave a startled oh! and clutched her shawl to her chest.
Dumbly, Tilbad thought her hair was rather pretty--and then he realized, just as dumbly, why he did. He flushed all the way to his shins.
"I--I think there's been some mistake," he said.
Erex, whose nostrils had flared, let out an abrasive snort.
That was enough for the girl, who snatched up her shawl and ducked a bow, begging her lordship's pardon as she fled. Erex folded her wings to let the girl dash out of the tent. She snorted again at the gust of perfume, and stood looking over her shoulder when the girl had left.
What was that about?
If he tried to shake his head it would only aggravate the spinning. His hand was still on Erex's withers. He wanted to slide it up the curve of her neck. Instead he slumped away from her toward the bedroll. Never mind.
Was she what your people call a "whore"?
After months in the army Tilbad didn't ask where she had learned the word. I expect so. A gift from his senior officers to their hapless lord, most likely. He sat down heavily beside the bed.
Hmm. Are you sure you don't want me to fetch her back? I'm sure I could catch her.
Erex, he groaned. Please don't.
*
His pillow reeked. It might have been the floral stench that woke him, or the foulness of his own mouth. Then he remembered the girl, and the fact that he was sprawled face-first where a prostitute had lain in wait for him. Blinking, he lurched up from the bed.
He was alone in the tent. Erex had gone--of course she had gone. He had told her to go damned churlishly. Then he had staggered out of the tent to piss, staggered back in to do unmentionable things in his bedroll, and fallen asleep in a funk. A princely evening, all told. Wiping his mouth with a grimace, Tilbad took a draught of water from his canteen. He splashed some over his face, belted on his sword, and straightened his tunic before stepping out into the night.
From the village came the noise of revels unabated. His men-at-arms were nowhere to be seen. He could not have slept long; the moon was still high, nearly bright enough to walk by. He stood, looking toward the village lights. Then he set off in the opposite direction, around the outskirts of camp to the field beyond.
It was a hayfield, newly mown; his boot soles crunched the shorn stalks beneath his feet. Here and there a haystack loomed, easily the height of a man, darker mounds against the darkness. There was little wind, but the night air and the smell of cut hay cleared the tatters from his head. He would return to the village and his men in a moment.
Halfway through his circuit he heard wings above him, between himself and the sky. If he looked up he could just make out the shape of them, moving in smooth sweeps against the moon and stars. She was singing in time with her wingbeats, the same song as before, revising the words as it pleased her. Come over the hills, my bonny broliglag, come over the hills to your daaaarling.
He puffed a laugh into the dark. What's a broliglag?
Wouldn't you like to know. Are you feeling more amiable after your rest?
I am, thanks to your highness. Did you try the stout?
I did, and it's ever so much better than the ale. I shall never let them bring me ale again.
She dove so low he felt the wind of her rush over him, buffeting his hair, and it seemed as if she would land--but then at the last minute she soared up again. When she did it a second time Tilbad realized she was baiting him. It was an old game: they had played it in the fields outside the palace when they first bonded. At her next pass he stretched up an arm and leapt as if to catch her by the tail. His fingers whisked through empty air.
He heard her whickering, not only in his mind but with his ears. Before long his heart was in his throat again, and he was grateful for the dark that kept him from really seeing her. The sight of her flying sometimes--often--always seized him with wretched longing, not only for flight or for her beauty, the longings anyone felt when watching pegasi in flight, but for those and a tangle of other things he couldn't begin to speak.
If you weren't such a good boy, she sang from above, you might've ridden me before it was too late.
She had offered, years ago, before he outgrew the possibility. I know, he said. There wasn't a day he didn't rue his poor twelve-year-old self.
You were too much a foal then to know better. Shall I give you another chance?
She swooped. It had been years since she misjudged a landing, so when she bore down practically on top of him, Tilbad knew it was no mistake. He stumbled. Her wings swept round to steady him before he fell.
Her nostrils were wide, and the pace of her breath was quickened from the flight, but she'd hardly begun to exert herself. She thrust her nose into Tilbad's hair and snuffed. You've been the most confounding thing, she said, shaking her mane. So much of courting is smell, for us--it helps you to know if someone's right, and if they're ready. I've known for ages you were right, even if everyone else would disown us for it. But I didn't know what ready smelled like, with one of you. She began to nuzzle downward, whuffling. Tilbad kept very still. I think I know, now. Or am I wrong?
All the hair on his arms was standing on end. Maybe the hair on his head as well. He tried to swallow. You can't mean--but she did. Other parts of him were likewise on the verge of standing upright. Erex, he began, a little desperately. This is just as bad as flying together. Maybe worse. He thought of doing with her, really doing, the things he thought of when he was alone in his tent with his shame wrapped in his palm. Worse. A hundred times worse.
Her muzzle brushed his cheek, grazing his jaw. Don't you mean just as good?
He drew a haggard breath and held it. Then his hands were on her neck, both of them clinging, and he didn't know how he would wrest them away.
She drew him into the dark, away from village and camp and the risk of being sighted, to the far end of the hayfield and the line of trees at its edge. He clung to her as they went, half-reeling over the stubble of mown hay as if he were still drunk, while his pulse hammered and his mind produced a compendium of ways one or both of them might step in a mole-hole and break a leg.
A shadow obscured the moon. Tilbad understood they had reached the trees as Erex shouldered against him. He couldn't touch enough of her fast enough. He felt as if he were scrabbling, not caressing, like a frantic cat trying to scale a wall, but she shivered her wings and set teeth to his shoulder, hard enough to make him flinch, and said your hands, Til, you don't know, you can't know what it's like. She put her fragile alula-hands in his hair, on his face. They crept like soft-bodied moths over his eyebrows and lashes. When she bent her head to nudge him, firmly in the chest, he grasped her head and kissed her poll just as firmly, hooking his fingers in her mane.
Her muzzle kept burrowing downward. As she breathed around the drawstring of his trousers Tilbad thought his legs might fail, if not his heart, until she seized a fold of the cloth in her mouth and tried to yank it down. Protesting, he dragged his hands from her long enough to fumble with the laces, and only then remembered his boots. Erex, he said stupidly, I've got to take off my--
I don't see why. She was lipping his bared length, rubbing her crushed-silk cheek to it, and Tilbad heard a strangled gulp that had probably come from himself. Hmm. Does it get any longer? No? I suppose we'll make do. You'll have to put your back into it, little man. And don't tell me you can't manage standing up.
Before his manhood could suffer further, as he stood there in the dark of a hayfield with his boots still on and his trousers half-shucked, the princess of the pegasi wheeled to present him with her rump.
*
They had few chances after that, as the war only worsened. When chances did arise they took them. Sometimes it seemed absurd to Tilbad that they were not discovered--not because they were incautious, but because he was afraid his face concealed nothing when he looked at her. If no one suspected, it was because what he and Erix did lay so far beyond the pale that no one thought to suspect. And if his face concealed nothing, well, half a battalion of the king's army doted on their Lady Red, so why should her prince not do as much.
At times Erex behaved as if she were determined to expose them. On long marches she would glide above the standard-bearer at the head of the line, where the sight of her could hearten the tired soldiers. Which was all very well, and good for morale, except for the remarks she tossed down to Tilbad as she flew.
How I envy your horse. But what a dull brute he is, to have your legs wrapped round him all day and still go plodding on as if he scarcely noticed. Your princely thighs--
He struggled to school his face. Erex!
Or perhaps he does notice. Perhaps he dissembles. At this very moment he is sighing "O, if only my lord were a stallion--"
He's a gelding!
And have you never seen a stallion mount a gelding? If you say you haven't I'll call you a liar. If I were a stallion I'd cover you so hard you wouldn't walk for days.
A lesser man might have sputtered. Tilbad twitched as if from a bee-sting and shifted in his saddle. He would have dismounted to spite her if he hadn't felt weak in the knees.
Erex gave a breezy sigh. When this war is done you must take up hunting, and then we can go into the woods every day, and I shall have my way with you as often as I like.
I thought your people didn't care for it, he said, in a feeble effort to divert her. Hunting.
We don't. And I don't. You'll be much too busy to shoot anything.
It'll look bad if I never come back with game.
Truffle-hunting, then. And we'll take a very useless dog.
Having settled this she reversed course in midair to make a pass down the ranks of marchers. The men were too weary to shout for her, but their backs straightened and heads lifted as she soared over them, mane streaming, flanks glittering in her chain-mail croupiere.
For his own part Tilbad had not dared to think beyond the war. In this as in all things her fearlessness emboldened him. His brothers were betrothed; if he acquitted himself well enough in other ways, perhaps a penchant for bachelorhood could be forgiven. He was, after all, only a third son.
*
When the war ended he did not take up hunting. His father wanted him to wed: not straight away, but soon. Knowing only the half-truths the dying roc had told him, the king believed his son would recover in time. Of course Tilbad must marry. His brothers were gone, and he was heir.
It was the first duty he would ever shirk in earnest, as well as the last. As he put his head down on the soft grass where she lay, he thought how like her it was to have led him to their marriage bed.
*