House of Dark Delights (29 page)

Three

A
DIEGA AWOKE
to a booted foot jabbing her in her ribs.

“Wake up, you lazy
slugo.
You, too, Paullia.”

Vlatucia!

The sisters scrambled off their pallets in the cooking hut, squinting up at their mistress in the semidarkness, for it wasn't even dawn yet.

“Fetch something to eat—some bread and mead will do. And some soap and washrags, a razor, a comb, some shears, and two blankets. And a bucket. Bring them to the
Cella. Move.
” She clapped her hands twice and left the hut.

“The
Cella
?” said Paullia in a tone of disbelief. The cave was the most sacred place in the valley, even more so than the nemeton. The only
vassi
Adiega knew of who'd ever been permitted to enter it were those, including her brother Sedna, who'd spent the past half-month building Artaros's strange new shrine. She knew its purpose, Bran having told her even though he and the elders had been ordered by Vlatucia to keep their counsel. They had no secrets between them, she and Bran. He shared everything with her, even his mother's insistence that he marry that strutting, primping little goose, Briaga.

It will never happen,
Bran had assured her time and again.
I'll find a way to make you my wife. I'd die rather than spend my life without you.

His sincerity was unquestionable, but of course his mother had her ways. One thing Adiega had learned from her years under that woman's roof was that Vlatucia got what Vlatucia wanted.

Always.

                  

“I am Lothar,” said a bearish fellow with a truncheon standing guard outside the entrance of the
Cella.
Two others squatted on the cave floor, lashing tall, heavy stakes into a flat panel. All three spoke the Celtice tongue with heavy Germani accents, from which she deduced that they were the same men who had abducted and burned poor Gamicu Ivageni last month on Vlatucia's orders. “You will leave the food with me. I will let him eat when you are done with him.”

“Done with who?” asked Paullia, her arms laden with blankets and washrags.

Lothar chuckled in a way that put Adiega instantly on alert. Turning, he ushered them over a little natural bridge that spanned the cave stream running along the front wall of the
Cella.
The newly carved shrine, a stone statue wearing iron
torkas
and inscribed
DVSIVÆSVS
, stood against the back wall. “Vlatucia, she say she want you to wash him good, shave the face, and cut the hair all off, for the bugs. Put it there, with his clothings, and I will burn it.” He pointed to a heap of tattered rags and animal skins in a bronze-lined fire pit.

“Who are you talking about?” asked Adiega.

He pointed behind them. She turned and started, her bucket of grooming implements clattering to the floor.

Standing calf-deep in the stream, his arms stretched high verhead with his hands tied to a hook of rock, was a very tall, very dirty, very, very naked man. He was thin, but with long, ropy muscles, as if he ate just enough to keep himself constantly on the move. His dark blond hair hung past his shoulders in a snarled mass studded with bits of leaves and twigs; his beard was nearly as long and just as filthy. There were bruises all over him, a gash on his forehead that was just starting to scab over, a large and ugly abrasion on one shoulder, and smaller ones on his knees and elbows.

He was staring intently at Adiega and Paullia, his blue eyes pale and luminous against his grimy face. He said something in a low, hoarse voice, using words in a guttural language Adiega had never heard spoken before.

“He speak the…I don't know how you say,” said Lothar. “The
sprâcha von Norvegen.
You know. From the
nord.
”

“From the north,” Adiega whispered as she crouched to pick up the items she'd dropped and put them back in the bucket. “By the gods, Paullia, this…this man is…Well, he isn't a man at all. He's a dusios. They captured him to put gifted babies in the bellies of the
uxelli
matrons before everybody leaves.”

“A
dusios
? You mean one of those sex demons?” Paullia was eyeing the demon in question up and down with an expression of carnal fascination that was all too familiar to Adiega. Following the death of her husband in battle two years ago, which had put an end to eight years of misery and regular beatings, Paullia had resolved never to marry again. Instead, she cheerfully assuaged her lust with any man who took her fancy, an arrangement that suited both Paullia and the unattached males of Vernem.

“You be good for these womens,
ja
?” Lothar went over to the dusios and yanked his head back by the hair. “So I don't hurt you no more.”

The dusios bared his teeth and snarled as he kicked out savagely, water spewing all over the
Cella.
The Germani landed on his back with a howl of pain. Sputtering invective in his own tongue, he leapt to his feet and slammed his truncheon into the stomach of the dusios, who kicked again, roaring,
“Hrøkkva!”
This time his captor managed to scramble away in time.

Dusting himself off, Lothar told the sisters, “Vlatucia don't want me to hurt him too bad. You tell me when you cut off hair so I can burn it.” He returned to his post in the corridor outside.

The dusios, still a little breathless from his tussle with Lothar, was staring at them again, in a way that made Adiega shiver. He growled in frustration as he yanked at the ropes binding his wrists, but they held tight. That part of him that hung between his legs seemed to be somewhat larger than when they'd first entered the
Cella,
she noticed.

“What are we going to do?” she whispered to Paullia.

“You shave him and cut his hair,” she said, setting her blankets on the floor but keeping the washrags. “I'll wash him.”

“But…”

Paullia took the dish of soft yellow soap from Adiega and approached the dusios slowly, giving him her best man-tamer smile. “I wash?” she asked, miming the rubbing of a washrag on the soap, and then on him.

He stared in apparent bewilderment and suspicion at the soap as she stepped down into the stream, the bottom of her skirt floating on the surface of the water.
“Hverr…?”

“Soap,” she said, dampening the rag in the river and rubbing it on the soap. “Don't you have this where you come from?”

He recoiled when she reached up to wash his face.
“Ekki!”

“It won't hurt you.” Paullia rubbed the soapy cloth on her forearm, then dipped her arm in the water to rinse it off. “See? Clean.” She sniffed her arm, smiling as if in pleasure as she inhaled. “Wouldn't you like to be nice and clean?”

This time, when she went to wash his face, he stood still for it, though he still looked apprehensive. He seemed to relax somewhat as she carefully dabbed the wound on his forehead; her gentleness must have put him at ease.

“Could I have that bucket, Adiega?” Paullia filled it with water, telling him to close his eyes as she held it over his head, but of course he didn't understand. “I don't want your eyes to sting. Your eyes.” She pointed to his eyes, and then her own, which she closed tightly as she mimed pouring water over her head.

He closed his eyes. She rinsed his face. “Adiega's going to cut your hair and your beard now,” she said, making a scissor shape with her fingers and pretending to chop off her braids. “Go ahead, Adiega. I don't think he'll give you any trouble.”

“Adiega,” he said, as if testing the feel of the word in his mouth.

“Yes, that's right.” Paullia pointed to Adiega and said her name again, and then she pointed to herself. “Paullia. Paullia.”

“Paullia.”

“You?” She pointed to him, waiting with an expectant expression.

He hesitated, as if unsure just how friendly he wanted to be with members of a clan that had just captured him and tied him up in a cave. Finally, he said, “Elic.”

“Elic,” Paullia repeated as she lathered up the washrag again. “What a lovely name.” Gesturing to herself, she said, “Woman.” She pointed to Adiega, and then to herself again. “Woman, woman. You?”

He didn't answer.

“Dusios?” she asked.

He looked dismayed that she knew this.
“Álfr ok dusios,”
he said.

“I think he's saying he's both an elf and a dusios,” said Adiega. Elic watched her closely as she stood at the edge of the stream, cutting off tangled chunks of hair and setting them aside to be burned. She'd planned to trim it close to the scalp, but since he appeared to be free of lice and fleas—perhaps his kind were immune to them—she decided to leave it brushing his shoulders.

“Let's get those ears clean.
Ear,
” she said as she ran the washcloth around it.

“Ear.”

“That's right.”

“Eyra,”
he said.

“That's your word for ear?”

“Eyra.”

Paullia scrubbed and rinsed and scrubbed and rinsed, trading the names of body parts with Elic as Adiega snipped his hair. Feeling more at ease now that Elic hadn't managed to rape and kill them both, she washed it, then trimmed and shaved his beard.

“Ooh, Adiega, look how handsome he is without all that nasty hair,” Paullia said, standing back to take him in. “Makes you wish you were one of those
uxelli
matrons he's going to be siring babes on, doesn't it?”

“Not me,” said Adiega, noting with amusement how Elic was looking back and forth between them as they spoke, although he couldn't understand a word they were saying. “The only man I want to…you know…do that with is Bran.”

“Then do it!”

“I'm not like you, Paullia. I can't feel right about it unless I'm married.”

Paullia was kind enough not to mention the fact that a marriage between Adiega and Bran was looking unlikelier by the day.

“Chest,” Paullia said as she ran the soapy cloth over Elic's upper torso.

His gaze lowered to that part of Paullia's body. What with her standing knee-deep in the stream and pouring bucket after bucket of water, her dress had gotten soaked through, conforming all too well to her feminine contours.

“Brjóst,”
he said, his voice pitched a bit lower than it had been, that hungry look returning to his gaze.

“Brjóst,”
she repeated, trailing a hand lightly over her right breast.

Elic met her gaze. She smiled into his eyes.

Paullia trailed the washcloth down his belly to his masculine organ, which she proceeded to wash with exceptional thoroughness, Elic straining toward her as he grew fully erect. She closed her soapy fist around him and stroked.

“Betr,”
he murmured, thrusting into her hand.

“What are you
doing
?” whispered Adiega. “Are you
crazy
?”

“I've never seen a man get so hard so fast,” Paullia said. “What I wouldn't give to feel
this
inside me.”

“That Lothar fellow will come in and see you,” said Adiega as she darted a wary glance at the corridor.

“Just warn me if he starts heading this way.”

“Paullia,
please,
” Adiega begged.

“You've never seen a man expel his seed, have you?” Paullia asked. “You should watch this. It'll be an education for you.”

“Ekki,”
Elic groaned. He was twisting his body as if trying to make Paullia let him go.

“Um, Paullia,” Adiega said. “I think he wants you to stop.”

“Of course he doesn't want me to stop,” said Paullia as she stroked him harder, faster.

“No, I think that's what
ekki
means—‘stop,' or ‘no.' He's grimacing.”

“They do that.”

“Ekki, ekki!”
Elic was quivering, his expression pained.
“Ekki!”

Startled, Paullia released him, saying, “I…I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Elic, I…”

He shook his head, his breath coming fast, his face flushed. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

                  

Late that night, Adiega was awakened by straw crackling in her sister's pallet on the floor beside hers in the cooking hut. At first she thought Paullia was just restless, but then she heard a low, masculine moan, and she realized her sister wasn't alone. It wasn't the first time Paullia had brought a man to her bed while Adiega was sleeping—or trying to sleep; it wouldn't be the last.

Looking over, Adiega saw the moonlit form of a man rearing over her sister, blankets covering him to the waist, the muscles in his back and arms straining with every thrust. He was very tall and clean shaven, with unbraided blond hair.

Elic?
By the gods, it
was
him. How could this be happening? How could he have gotten free? As Adiega and Paullia had taken their leave of him this morning, the three Germani were securing their barrier of wooden stakes over the entrance to the
Cella
by means of iron bands encircling the natural columns to either side of it. In addition, one of them, Lothar said, would be standing guard at all times.

Elic's thrusts grew swift and hectic as Paullia clutched at him, her breath coming in high-pitched little pants. He stilled, a strangled groan issuing from his throat as Paullia bucked beneath him.

He settled on top of her, rubbing his face on her hair.

She let out a deep, satisfied sigh. “That was lovely.”

“Líka
©
i,”
he murmured.

Sitting up in bed with her blanket clutched to her chest, Adiega said, “Paullia, Elic can't be here. He must have escaped from the
Cella.
We'll get in terrible trouble if he's found here.”