The Young in One Another’s Arms

The company decided only to scope out the level of these ruins where they entered, before they starting settling in for the night. The one route they had found to descend deeper was a staircase cut into the sides of a wide shaft near the structure’s center– well away from the entrance, but where any creature that might lurk deeper could be seen coming the whole way up. In a room just off the top of this staircase, Rufio slumped against a wall. Before he could begin rummaging for his bedroll, Atia grasped his arm, prodding where he had been bitten.

“You’re sure you’re alright?”

Rufio felt… like a kid, again? Like a teenager? As Atia’s eyes cast their light on the rips in his tunic and the new-grown pink skin beneath, his thoughts straddled a thin wall between the purest innocence and the most ravenous depravity.

“Right as rain. I wasn’t hurt that bad in the first place, and Hadrian didn’t miss any spots patching me up. Are you fine?”

She blinked. “It never touched me.”

“Sure, but… the way it tried. Are your nerves steady enough now?”

She laughed faintly. “You’re a lunatic, to still be worried about me. But I appreciate what you did. It was very brave.”

“It was to be expected. Experienced or not, I knew what agreeing to hunt a monster entailed. I only pulled my own weight.”

She shook her head, wavy bangs breaking free from the sweat-plaster her helm had formed. “Do you have any idea how many men would have frozen stiff in your position? Everyone who tries their hand at fighting monsters faces a test like that, sooner or later, and most fail, the first time. Many quit or die before they get a second chance. My first real taste of danger did not go half as well, though that was a very long time ago.”

“If this is your life, it must seem that way, yes.”

She met his gaze, seeming to consider. “You should stay on with us, Lucius. My father would be glad to have you. I would be glad to have you.” Those dimples crept back onto her face, and a dam broke within Rufio.

“King’s Grace, you’re beautiful.”

His heart froze mid-beat when her smile retracted a little, but her eyes held on his, and she seemed to take a moment to work through the surprise, brushing some hair behind her left ear while she figured out what to make of it, before a wry twist in her mouth announced her decision. “Bold move, going straight for the boss’s daughter after the first kill. You’re very brave indeed, or very foolish.”

“There are places where wisdom and folly are entwined too closely to separate. The field of battle is one such place, and the heart another. I think, if I give myself a chance to sleep off today’s terrors, I will not be so wise when I wake up.”

She leaned in close, and whispered in his ear. “Then maybe you shouldn’t sleep, tonight.”

He threw his bag back over his shoulder, took Atia’s waist, then cast a furtive glance around the room as he guided her out through one of the circular archways, to the landing above the stairway. Valens, blessedly, seemed lost in sharpening his sword, hardly even paying attention to Ere as she rubbed his shoulder playfully, much less to the rest of the room. She, however, noticed the two of them, and shot Rufio a knowing wink.

The Aleani had ruled most of Rhatia since before Rufio was born, and in his experience, the northern barbarians were a chaste, even prudish, people. A friend of his in Catonium, who did most of his thinking below the waist, had mentioned making a habit of attending Sacrifices of Atonement conducted by ethnically Rhatian priests, rather than Aleani. Each priest used his own judgement to demand an offering for the pyre from each penitent, based on their means and the gravity of their sins, and Rhatian priests tended to rank sins of lust alongside white lies and petty backbiting, while their fellows of the northern kindred, even if they had attended the same seminary, ranked them closer to apostasy or murder.

Ere, however, had been making advances continuously since the fight, heavy-handedly enough to breach even Rufio’s ineptitude for picking up on such things, and directed at whichever man of the company happened to be nearest. Perhaps the Aleani in Rhatia were of a more rigid mind on the matter than their kindred back in their northern homeland, or the culture of Lyria or of an adventuring company had loosened her attitudes, or she was just of a nymphomaniacal disposition.

He hoped one of these explained it.

When he had been an apprentice, his master in the iconographer’s craft had fancied himself something of a philosopher. The old man had much to say on trauma, about soldiers who survived a few too many attempts on their lives, or women who survived forceful attempts, successful or no, on their bodies. Perhaps his fascination with both these forms had stemmed from the siege of Catonium and its aftermath, the beginning of Rhatia’s fall to the barbarians when the elderly Nephilic iconographer had been a boy.

What he said of the second kind was this: that afterwards, both extreme reactions to physical intimacy, complete aversion to touch or urgent desire, were common. Drawing away from contact was a search for safety by way of isolation, while drawing towards it sought the same thing by way of control. Rufio worried that Ere had known or guessed the Leupin’s intent, and was scrambling madly to assert control of her own body.

But she gave no outward sign of such a motivation, and this was a dark line of thinking. Atia leaned her head on his shoulder, and he pulled himself away from it.

He looked back again as they stepped out onto the landing. Longinus met his eyes accusingly, then shrugged. Whatever his thoughts about his sister’s choice in men, he would let her make them.

The landing above the stairway wrapped around it on all sides, and had several more circular doorways to alcoves smaller than the room they had come from. They ducked into one, and began to undress. Rufio wouldn’t have thought there was anything simulating about peeling off layers of armor and winter clothing, but as he and Atia each cast chainmail and a sword belt on the floor, the loud thunks of metal and wood lent gravity to the act of undressing, heightening his anticipation.

Atia was only partly undressed when she pressed her hands to the wall and stuck out her hips invitingly, but Rufio shook his head, took her in his arms face-to-face, and pulled everything either of them was wearing into a heap on the floor before they began.

When they had finished their first time and detached themselves from the wall, Rufio dug his bedroll out and laid entangled with her for awhile, staring down the black pit below them.

“Does your first time always go this well, when you attempt something new?”

With that, Rufio was disabused of a virginal fantasy: that he would be too self-assured to ever feel flustered or abashed again once he was no longer a virgin. “You could tell it was my first time, huh?”

Her laugh, blessedly, could be mistaken for nothing other than affectionate. “I could tell before your belt was off.”

“And I suppose it wasn’t yours.”

“My first in many years, if that makes you feel any better.”

His eyes came off the dark reaches and into hers. “Many years? How young were you?”

“Oh, about the same age you are now, if I guess right.”

Right. Nephilic. Not everyone with those surreal eyes aged at the same rate, but none of them, once fully grown, aged nearly as quickly as ordinary folk like him. “...Is it still rude to ask a woman’s age after you’ve already made love to her?”

“Forty-eight.”

He drew a deep breath.

“I didn’t think about it earlier, but I suppose that makes me something like twice your age.”

“Twice my age exactly, though I would have sworn up and down you were younger than me. Dare I ask how old Valens and Longinus are?”

“My father is one hundred and twenty-seven years young. You thought he was in great shape for a man in his fifties, didn’t you? You were probably right about my son, though, he’s your age.”

He propped himself up suddenly. “Longinus is your son?”

He would have grown indignant at being laughed at so often by his lover, if it wasn’t such a beautiful sound. “There are plenty of women in this world who would kill, I suppose, to be mistaken for the younger sisters of their sons. Just remember that not everybody will be as they seem to you in Aureliopolis, either. The blood of the Nephiloi runs strong in the capital, too, if not quite as strong as in Lyria.”

“I thought you wanted me to stay here, with you. I was that bad a lover, huh?”

She pressed against his chest. “I should have minded my tongue better, until my father said something. You’re getting back on the road after this expedition, and he, I, and at least one or two others of the company are coming with you.”

Before he could ask why, her tongue was in his mouth, and her body was upon his with both the vigor of youth and the experience of age, and all reason and thought of the future was lost to him.