“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I was just… Your body is doing what it’s supposed to, Kip. I’m the problem. I mean, there are jokes about how all a woman has to do is lie there. ‘Easy as falling off a log.’ Ha!”
Kip could tell she was heartbeats away from breaking down. Tears were not going to help their problem. “Tisis, maybe we should slow down, take it—”
“Slow down? Kip! We’ve only got three days left!”
The law had been passed to protect children from being married off too young by their parents or to prevent marriages of convenience—part of some long-ago fight about taxation or boundaries or testimony compelled by a satrap, Tisis had said.
“Tisis, it’s freezing out there. Come here. We’ll figure this out together.”
She puffed out her cheeks and crawled into the narrow bed with him. He threw the covers over her. He’d been thinking she would lie down with her back to him so they could talk and cuddle, but she lay down face-to-face with him instead.
Before he could say anything, she kissed his neck, and all hope of rational conversation dimmed quickly. Kip still hadn’t blown out the lamp. But her kisses were perfunctory. She broke away almost as soon as Kip went hazy. She reached for a vial on a shelf. Her expression was determined, not impassioned. She poured olive oil into her hand and tugged his clothes out of the way.
Her touch was a shock of pleasure, despite everything, as she spread the oil on him. If she’d continued for very long, Kip would have lost control. But rather than saying, ‘I want to make love with you,’ the expression on her face said, ‘I will not fail my family.’ She rubbed the rest of the oil on herself, and straddled Kip, hiking up her nightgown just enough to get the work done.
There were no more preambles. No soft words or touches. She held Kip in place and lowered herself onto him.
As before, he was stopped almost immediately. She grimaced and pushed harder, harder until she was hurting both of them. She eased off, adjusting him, making sure he was in the right place, and then she banged down again, wincing each time.
Andross Guile had once used a euphemism, calling a woman’s quim the Jade Gate. Kip had thought it embarrassing. Of course, talking with your grandfather about lovemaking was bound to be embarrassing, but why did all the euphemisms have to sound either dirty or childish?
Now he felt as if he were bringing a battering ram to the Jade Gate. The gate was winning.
Tisis began crying, tears streaking silently down her cheeks, making her cosmetics run, and still not giving up. She was hurting Kip, and she was definitely hurting herself.
“Tisis. Stop. Tisis!” Kip whispered.
She didn’t listen to him.
He grabbed her hips and held her still. “You’re hurting me.”
“I can do this,” she hissed.
Much as he’d tried to avoid the common areas in the public baths, Kip had been around enough to know that his horn wasn’t freakishly huge. It wasn’t that; he doubted he could fit his littlest finger inside Tisis. She said it wasn’t her hymen, either. That had broken when she was young. This was pure muscle, and it was clenched so tight that if he’d been inside her when it clamped down, he’d have been left with a jerky stick.
“Tisis, stop.”
She released her hand’s death grip and sat on him, defeated. “What do we do, Kip?” Her sitting felt far nicer than anything else she’d done, but perhaps that was just an absence of pain.
“You’re beautiful,” Kip said. “And I’m lucky to have you.”
Her expression softened from its desperate anger. She lay down on him and rested her head on his chest. She tried to speak, but then dissolved in tears.
Kip figured it was better than her sleeping with her back to him silently as she had for the first three nights. Maybe it was his own fault. With the shock of the battle and their flight and Goss’s death at the Chromeria and Tremblefist’s likely death at the cannon tower and Kip’s declaration that he wouldn’t be going with Tisis to Rath, they hadn’t even tried to make love the first night.
The second night, she’d found out that he really did plan to take the Mighty to war, instead of going to Rath with her. She’d been furious with him, and he’d been mortified at the idea of having to strip naked and expose his body and his scars in front of a woman whose beauty would make a goddess cringe. She’d blown out the lamp, handed him the olive oil, and gotten in bed, legs spread, silent, her whole demeanor saying, ‘Just get it over with, you animal.’
Despite a lack of personal experience, Kip hadn’t been completely clueless—he’d thought. Tisis had gotten spitting mad with his fumbling, finally taking charge herself. And… nothing. He’d found nowhere to go when he was on top, not because he was an idiot; he’d found nowhere to go because there was nowhere to go. They’d pretended to sleep, back to back.
The crew’s jokes the next morning had been unbearable. And that was when Kip had missed his opportunity. He should have confessed to… whom? One of the Mighty? None of them had even hinted that something like this was possible. The randy captain? Ugh. Someone, anyway, that things weren’t going well. Or going at all.
But how stupid could you look? What kind of mockery did that invite? I took a beautiful woman to bed, and I didn’t know what to do?
The third night had been better and worse. Tisis hadn’t told any of her slaves, either, apparently as ashamed as Kip was. She’d failed her family too many times, she’d said. She wasn’t going to fail again. But she’d decided she wasn’t going to take it out on Kip, and then she’d begged his pardon.
They’d made some perfunctory moves at kissing and caressing—and tried and failed again. She’d been furious, but not at Kip.
I should have made love with Teia when I had the chance.
The one thing Kip had thought he’d definitely be getting when he’d agreed to marry Tisis, he was being denied.
Maybe he should let the marriage be annulled.
But Andross had assigned Kip to this task. He would assume that the failure was a deliberate betrayal. The Chromeria needed Ruthgar bound to it by the Guile/Malargos marriage. This was bigger than Kip, bigger than his frustration. Tisis and her family needed it, too, though the Guiles had gotten the better of the bargain. She had been a hostage of the Chromeria, a guarantor of the end of the Blood Wars between Ruthgar and Blood Forest. She could leave Big Jasper legally after she was married, but leaving before that without permission was a breach of the articles of peace—something damn near akin to an act of war.
In normal times the Ruthgari hostage leaving without permission would be a diplomatic gaffe understood between friends. During a war in which the loyalty of Ruthgar was in question, it would be far worse. If Eirene Malargos actually was on the brink of siding with the Color Prince, regaining her beloved sister would give her freedom to join him if she wished it. If the Chromeria handled the gaffe poorly, though, threatening her, it might actually push her into the Color Prince’s camp. Annulling their marriage could mean breaking an alliance.
Tisis’s sobs had quieted, and she shifted as if to get more comfortable to sleep on Kip. Which was actually really nice. Way better than frigid silence. But the motion made her leg brush Kip’s horn. Great. Here for a moment he’d nearly forgotten about it. She froze.
She sat up. Her makeup had run, and her eyes were puffy, and there was clear snot under her nose. “I should at least take care of you,” she said, her voice sniffly, right on the verge of crying again.
It was not a thought that hadn’t occurred to Kip in the last four nights.
Kip the Lip was back, already speaking: “In the history of the world, there have been five great unromantic invitations to romance, but this… this outshone them all.”
She pounded a fist on his chest. “Kip! Not funny!”
“You’re smiling.”
“I am not.” But of course she was. Her face was a war of humor and frustration and despair and tears. “It’s either smile or cry, and I hate crying.”
“I have an idea,” Kip said.
“What?”
“Not a good idea, mind you.”
“What is it?”
“All I can promise is that it’s a little better than crying.”