Keeping It Real (33 page)

angry she shouted out loud and with a single blow of her hand struck a reasonably sized branch from a

tree she was passing.

'Lila?'

She found herself staring at Dar. She wasn't sure he had ever called her by name before. It was

effective, if unmagical. 'Sorry,' she said. She picked the branch up and pushed it
back towards its old

position but then let
it fall to the ground. The sap smelled rich and sweet
and soon filled the warm

afternoon air around them. Bizarrely she noticed she was standing in paradise
.
She scuffed paradise's

grass with her foot. 'My fellow traveller doesn't like the idea of helping out'

'Then you had better leave him alone.' Dar glanced at the branch. Insects were already gathering at the

break in the trunk, to eat the sugary sap. Dar bent down and took some of t
he
sticky stuff onto his hand,

licking it off his fingers. Lila ignored it. She felt hungry, but she had the tokamak. Dar had nothing.

'How do I get
rid of him?' she asked quietly.

'Exorcism,' came the reply. Dar took his knife out and stripped the bark from the branch expertly
.
He

tore away the inner layers and started eating them, then used part of the outer section to fashion a cover

for the wound in the trunk. He trimmed the wound on the tree itself, hacking it into the right shape, and

then patched it quickly. "They die,' he said. 'Trees like this die of a bad wound, and Tath will die if you

root him out unless he can find another willing heart.'

'Willing?' Lila repeated, taken aback. 'I wasn't willing.'

'It was a Game,' Dar said, chewing carefully. 'You played it. You lost it. You were willing.'

'There was no Game!' she protested, furious
.
'How could there have been? There was no wild magic
.

There wasn't
time.'

'Elves carry the wild magic in their
andalune
when they have passed through it
recently. It
takes time

to wear off. Tath had the skill to

control that
.
.He might
not
have wanted to play with you in his mind, but
his
chi
was stronger than that. It saw its chance when he knew that
I was likely to kill him, and it
took it. You must have felt the sting of it

when it happened.'

'But I didn't agree. I didn't know the rules . . .' She trailed off and shut her mouth firmly, swallowing the

rest of what promised to be another worthless excuse. One day, she thought, she must remind herself to

stop making them. But she couldn't stop raging at herself for her stupidity. The presence inside laughed at

her.

Dar looked at
her with what she thought might be sympathy. 'I keep forgetting how young you are,' he

said. His gaze was very intent and steady
.

Jus
t
when I need ano
t
her bu
tt
on pushed,
she thought angrily
.
'Why, how old are you?' she

demanded.

'Old enough,' he replied in a strange tone. He stepped forward, holding out a strip of the white,

dripping bark to her. 'You must be hungry. Taste it. It will make you feel better.'

Lila found herself looking into his slanted blue eyes. They were exactly the same brilliant colour as the

Sathanor sky. She was surprised to see that they held hunger of quite a different kind. She began to lift

her hand to take the bark, but stopped, uncertain about what his offer really was. She was alert for any

zing of magic, but she didn't feel it. She felt the strangest pressure from inside, still hating herself, and from

outside the opposite, as if Dar was offering her a road out of its miserable flat plain. She was on the cusp

of some inner movement she didn't understand and it was all balanced on her decision to accept one or

the other version of some verdict on herself. She said no and Dar said yes. She scowled and stared at

him, all her senses on overdrive trying to suck more information out of the moment so that
she could

calibrate it and make a decision based on solid logic, using her Al-self to its utmost to judge. But that

didn't help.

As she continued to hesitate Dar reached out and put a piece of the soft bark against her lips. Her

heart was racing. She felt her skin flush but her lips moved of their own accord and opened. He pushed

the strip gently into her mouth with his fingertips. In taking it she inadvertently brushed his fingers with her

lips and tasted the salt of sweat and earth and the sweet sugar on them. Lila felt lost in a world she hadn't

noticed was there until now. All this sensing and feeling, all this strange intimacy . . . she thought of Zal

and saw him lying on a bier, stone

cold dead. She stood beside it and there was a torch burning in her hand and she could not light the fire.

She stood and the torch burned down to ash in her hand and she stood for ever until she was a statue of

metal and bone. She heard Zal's voice in her head, as though he could see the image too . . .

'You silly fool. I'm not
dead if you do. You're dead if you don't.'

Dar's eyelids closed and he staggered as if he was drunk. Lila knew the feeling - hungry intoxication -

because she felt something surging in her veins and it
wasn't
the sugar. She couldn't
help herself. She

licked his fingers.

They were in each other's arms in a heartbeat. Dar's lean, hard body shook, very like Tath's had, but

this time it wasn't fear doing the shaking. Lila felt Dar touch her face, tracing the line of the magical scar in

her skin. He was intent
and serious as he let
his finger touch her lips again, very lightly, following the

shape of the top lip across its bow and then pressing more firmly against
the lower lip.

Lila swallowed and watched his blink rate decreasing, his heart speeding up to match hers. He pressed

harder, watching her mouth. As she let
it
begin to open she saw his face mirror the action unconsciously,

lips parting, his eyelids lowering.

Lila took his finger in her mouth up to the second knuckle and closed her lips and tongue around it

gently. She caressed the hair at the side of his face and stroked the strange, angular line of his cheek,

surprised when he took hold of that
hand, synthetic skin or not, and placed her palm against his mouth.

He closed his eyes and kissed it, then slid his tongue up between her fingers as she sucked his. It
turned

her on more than she'd felt
before, even more than Zal, and she didn't understand it at all. The cool wash

of Dar's aethereal body spread across her skin and became warm, became almost muscular. And then

she felt a strange opening sensation in her chest, a feeling of unlocking and springing back, and from the

centre of her being Dar's soft touch was matched by Tath's unfolding
.

Dar felt it; she saw his surprise, his confusion just like hers, the sense to stay away from each other

completely swamped by the heart's drive to join, the body's need for contact to soothe itself
.
In that

instant
Lila remembered all she'd forgotten in the last
forty-eight
hours, all her trauma and her loss, her

self-hate and her fear for Zal. She realised she hadn't
missed it
and how good it
had felt to be running in

this wild place with a friend, even if he'd been her mortal enemy until. . .

whenever. She took his hand, removing his finger from her mouth and placing his palm against
her breast

instead, moving forward to kiss him on the lips. She felt an all-over kiss that was
andalune
as the two

elves synchronised and merged across the surfaces of her skin in an intimacy she was unable to share.

This might be enough for Dar, even for Tath, she thought, but she didn't have an aetheric side and it

wasn't enough for her.

She slid her hands strongly against Dar's waist and down, pressing his hips against her, then in the next

moment leant back to get rid of some of the hardware getting in the way. Buckles and laces caught

against
each other as she fought
with the unfamiliar closures of his clothes and hers. Dar stepped back

and helped her out, frequently pausing to replace his mouth on hers and to caress her. His kiss was all

hunger. Hers too. They were starving and they were bread to each other. All that she could think of, all

that she wanted, was to have him inside her. She wanted to know if this side of her was still alive.

Dar spun her around and backed her up against the tree. She hit
it
hard, straggling with the wretched

clothing, wriggling to make it easier, groaning in frustration when he had to stop and yank Tath's tight

leggings further down on her. But then she felt him and it was all right. She got both hands on his hips and

drove herself down on him as he pushed back into her. The sensation was as purely divine as anything

she could imagine
.
She heard his gasp of pleasure and the anticipation of more of it Then they were

moving together and she lost awareness of anything but the perfect feeling rising, riding Dar hard and as

mercilessly as he rode her, all the way
.

Baby,
she heard Tath whisper to her, but it was a word formed from a knot of lust and pleasure of his

own, so she let it go
.
She didn't know who he was referring to. She didn't care.

When it was over they let each other go carefully and politely, no more kisses, only gentle, efficient

touches enough to separate
.
Lila pulled her trousers back up as she slid down the treetrunk, her body

liquid and vibrant, warm and suffused with Tath to such a degree that
he was a part of her in that minute.

Dar reclothed himself and sat down beside her. He put his hand out onto her booted foot, gripped it

briefly, then lay back on the sandy earth under the tree's shade, panting, his eyes closed, free arm thrown

across his face to shade it from the sun.

After a few seconds he lifted his arm and looked at her. Lila looked

back, smiled, a little self-consciously, and held out
her hand
.
He took it
and pulled himself upright. He

pressed his shoulder into hers for a moment, letting his head fall towards her, and she let
her head rest

against
his, rubbing her stomach.

'I think without
baldrics may have been better,' she said.

Dar glanced at her and laughed, reflexively touching the buckles of the sword belts that
crossed his

chest. 'I am sorry.'

'Don't
be.' She showed him that the rest of his carefully picked bark had been ground in the dirt and

threw it aside for the insects. 'It tasted nice.' She felt absurdly happy. Its excess was in direct proportion

to her expectations of what lay ahead. "That was . . .'

T know,' Dar said, tightening the laces on his tunic, and they both laughed
.
'Where is he now?'

'Everywhere,' Lila said, shrugging as he looked to her for more explanation
.

'Let's go,' Dar stood up with an effort. 'It's another day's walk at
least.'

Lila walked across to the steep edge, a few metres away from them, and looked down. There were

still hundreds of rough and rocky metres to descend. If she'd been able to plan . . . but there were no

hang-gliders here and no suitable materials to fashion one. She picked up Tath's bow and set
off after

Dar, doing nothing to disturb the wellbeing she felt, knowing it
was going to be short lived. With every

step she was aware of Tath's presence, but it was no effort and no intrusion. He was mercifully silent.

It
took another two hours to climb down the steep escarpment. They slid on scree, climbed boulder

falls and jumped where jumping was possible. By the time they reached the valley Lila had surveyed it

extensively and took issue with Dar's geography
.
She was certain that
Sathanor was not a valley at all
.
It

was a crater
.

She didn't mention it
to him, part of her spy instincts, abused as they were, kicking in to prevent it She

knew that the only reason Dar had told her about Zal was that
he had burned his bridges everywhere

else
.
It
was a little weak of him, but she could understand it
.
And she reserved judgement on its truth.

Hot, sweaty and starving she turned on her coolant system and was glad when Dar saw fit to take a

minor detour to get more water. Idly she calculated how far behind schedule the concert tour was by

now, and wondered if there were any temporal loops she might use to make the disaster a little less

disastrous. It was a science fictional dream. Nobody had ever travelled in time.

Tath, recovered from his psychic liaison with Dar, found this veiy amusing. She was dismayed to find

that
the activity seemed to have restored his health somewhat. He told her he didn't think she was going