Scars and Swindlers Read online

  “You should drink the tea,” said Tristanne. “No matter how he’s being about it. Men are quite quick to prize the lives of their unborn children over the lives of their wives, but women die giving birth, and you’re young, and—”

  “Tristanne, blazes!” said Pairce, shaking her head at the other woman. “If Sefoni wants advice, I’m sure she’ll ask.”

  Tristanne sighed. “I did it once.”

  Sefoni was surprised at this.

  “Yes,” said Tristanne. “I’ve been to bed with men before, not that I’d like to do it again. I’m sure Pairce has had to drink it as well.”

  “I drink a measure of the tea every morning,” said Pairce. “It stops my cycle and I’ve never fallen pregnant. Most women in my line of work do the same.”

  “I didn’t even know you could do that,” said Tristanne. “Stops it entirely?”

  “Entirely,” said Pairce.

  “I need to know more,” said Tristanne.

  “I’ll be happy to copy the measurements and preparation out for you,” said Pairce. “You should know there’s a chance that it could end your ability to have children permanently, though. Lots of people go off it with no problem, but every once in a while, a woman is rendered barren.”

  “I’d like to be rendered barren,” said Tristanne.

  “I’m going after Haid,” said Sefoni and left the room.

  Pairce got to her feet. “I’ll bring the recipe the next time I see you.”

  “Well, I’m going with Haid in the morning,” said Tristanne. “Write it down now.”

  “I haven’t got it memorized,” said Pairce. “Come by my house later, then.”

  “How about now?” Tristanne got up.

  “I’m going to Cadon now,” said Pairce. “But if you see Haid, you can tell him I don’t mind staying behind. I think he’s right I should be with Cadon.”

  “All right,” said Tristanne. “Later, then. After supper?”

  “Fine,” said Pairce. She swept out of the room as well.

  Sefoni was by the front door talking to the footman there, who was informing her that Haid had left the house and given no word of where he was going. Sefoni was clearly fuming.

  Pairce stopped and interrupted the conversation. She beckoned Sefoni away from the servant’s earshot and spoke quietly. “He’s in love with you. You have nothing to worry about. It will work out.”

  Sefoni gave her an annoyed look. “I said to stay out of it, didn’t I?”

  “And Tristanne’s wrong. Well, she did say that you were young, which is true. You’re young and strong. The chances of your dying in childbirth are very low, and… well, just don’t get scared of things that are silly to be scared about.” Pairce winced. “Sorry. I just gave you advice you didn’t ask for as well.”

  “You did.” Sefoni glowered at her.

  “But Haid seems… don’t you think he’d be a good father?” Pairce mused over it. “I think he’d find children delightful.”

  “If they didn’t get in the way of one of his jobs, that is,” said Sefoni.

  Pairce didn’t respond to this.

  “Where are you going?” said Sefoni. “Are you going to the Sticx?”

  “I am,” said Pairce.

  “If you see my husband, tell him…” She bowed her head, thinking about it. “Just tell him to come home?”

  “I will,” said Pairce, and she was seized by the notion to pull Sefoni into her arms and give her a very big hug. But they weren’t close in that way, and they really barely knew each other. “Are you all right?”

  “Oh, flames take you,” said Sefoni, eyes flashing. She turned on her heel and stalked away.

  Pairce’s shoulders slumped.

  But when she got to the Sticx, there was no sign of Haid, and the bartender Loholt said he hadn’t been in all day. So, she simply descended to the bottom floor and made her way through the darkness to Cadon.

  “Is that you, Darain?” came his voice at the sound of her footfalls.

  “No,” she said. She reached his door. She ran her fingers over it until she found the doorknob.

  “Pairce,” murmured Cadon.

  “May I come in?” she said.

  “Of course.”

  She tried the knob. “It’s locked.”

  “Blazing Darain,” said Cadon, his voice growing closer. “Of course after I said that thing to him about locking the door, he’d do that.”

  She could hear the sound of the lock being disengaged, and then it opened, and she felt a slight whoosh of air.

  “Hello.” Cadon’s voice was close.

  She reached out and her hand collided with his firm chest. It was covered. “You have a shirt.”

  “They brought it this morning.” He was amused. “I can take it off if you’re disappointed.”

  She laughed a little. “No, you mentioned being cold before. I want you to be comfortable.”

  “Oh, I guess you want to come in,” he murmured. “I should move out of your way.” And then she was touching nothing.

  She stepped inside the room, but she didn’t go too far. It was very dark, and she couldn’t see anything. She clasped her hands together. “Did you sleep well?”

  “I did. This bed is comfortable. You?”

  “I was tired,” she said.

  “Darain came to talk to me after you left last night.”

  “I know.”

  “Oh, you spoke to him? Of course you did.” Now his voice was getting farther away. “For all I know, he went straight to your bed and climbed into it to whisper in your ear as you shared the same pillow and talked of how to use me.”

  “You don’t really think that, do you?” She took a step into the room.

  “I don’t know what to think,” he said.

  “You think badly of me because I’m a strumpet. You’d typically never stoop so low to bed a woman who sells her favors. I’m beneath you.” She said this as evenly as she could, no inflection in her voice. It was better to get it all out in the open, and it wasn’t as if she wasn’t used to men thinking badly of her, thinking of her as filth.

  “That’s not true,” he said. “You don’t know what I used to look like. No woman was impressed by my bare chest, let me tell you that.”

  She’d seen a few paintings, and he had seemed small and skinny, she supposed.

  “Anyway, I’ve paid my share of women for favors,” he said. “So, you’re not beneath me. Not at all.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “It’s only that… well, I suppose it is my prejudice against your profession that makes me wary,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I was sixteen, I met a courtesan at a party held in Mercett,” he said. “She was expensive, but I was a cownt, and I paid for her dresses and her coach and her jewels and to parade her around on my arm wherever I went. I’m afraid I was smitten. I wanted… oh, I don’t know what I wanted or what I thought. I knew it was impossible that I could marry her, but I thought that perhaps if I truly wanted it, I could make it happen. I didn’t share my plans with her, however. I didn’t want to give her false hope until I had some idea of how I could manage it. I knew my family would not approve, and that my stepmother would be scandalized. Anyway, it turned out not to matter, because I discovered she’d been skimming money from my purse while I was sleeping so that she could run off with my valet.”

  “Oh,” said Pairce again.

  “I was heartbroken,” he said. “I shouldn’t have been. I should have realized that it was all a farce between us. She was pretending. I should have only been pretending too. I simply… I don’t know. I’ve never been good at it, I suppose, at keeping it pretend.”

  “Me either,” said Pairce.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was seventeen, and he was a regular,” she said. “He came in every Thursday to see me, and he was always short with the full amount to have me for the night, and I always let him stay anyway. He would hold me in his arms and t
ell me that he was saving up money to go and herd cattle in Allemande, that he’d take me with him, and we’d have a little ranch house, and that I could have a herb garden in the window and… well, one day I was ill and he took up with another girl and he never came back to my bed. As far as I know, he still doesn’t have a cattle ranch, nor has he ever saved up any money. I believed him, though. He was the first I believed, but he wasn’t the last.”

  It was quiet.

  She moved through the darkness towards him. “Do you… you don’t think I told you that story to manipulate you, do you? I don’t know what kind of idiot I’d have to be to do that. I know what men like, and it’s to be told that all the other men before them have been nothing, and they are the only ones who’ve ever made me feel anything at all, and that their skill in the bedroom has actually made me respond in spite of myself. They definitely don’t want to hear about how stupid I am when it comes to men who are only using me and paying me for the trouble.” She collided with something and she let out a little noise, but then she realized it was the bed. She backed away.

  “Are you all right?” Cadon was there now.

  “I just ran into the bed.”

  His hand found hers.

  She wrapped her fingers around his.

  “I have no skill with bedding women,” said Cadon quietly. “Truly. None.”

  “Oh, I beg to differ,” she said. “I remember you had this way of… of thrusting that was… wondrous.”

  “Of thrusting?”

  “Yes, and I know it was some sort of skill, because you were rutting against me before the light went out, and you were all instinct at that point, and it was different. That had to be skill, what else could it be?”

  He chuckled. “You have just finished telling me how you’d manipulate me, and now you attempt it anyway?”

  “No, I didn’t mean…” She laughed, embarrassed. “I didn’t say that it was… I mean, maybe it was because of your size, but…” She must be blushing. She was glad he couldn’t see. “You can’t think I’m saying that manipulatively. You’re objectively large.”

  “Whatever you’re doing, it’s working.” His voice dropped two octaves.

  “Sorry,” she whispered. “I know we said we were going to try to take things slow.”

  “Yes,” he said. “We did say that.” He tugged on her hand, pulling her closer.

  Now, she was against him, one hand on his chest, tilting back her head as if she could see his face.

  He brushed her hair behind her shoulder and then trailed a thick forefinger over the back of her neck. “We should not go to bed together, I don’t think.”

  She shivered where he touched her. “A-all right, I suppose.”

  “Because it makes it easy to feel things,” he said. “It’s dangerous. And because I want you very, very badly, and I don’t trust myself when it comes to you.” His hand went down, over the back of her dress, palm against her back, drawing her even closer to him, so that her body was pressed into his.

  She sighed. “That makes sense.”

  His mouth was on hers, engulfing her. His tongue nudged its way inside her mouth, a sweet revelation.

  She opened her lips to accommodate him, to stroke her tongue against his, to bask in that goodness.

  He pulled her even closer, deepening the kiss.

  She grabbed fistfuls of his shirt.

  He broke away, panting. “Apologies.”

  “Well.” She was out of breath too. “Kissing isn’t going to bed together.”

  “That’s true. It’s not.”

  “I think it should be allowed.”

  “You make a good point,” he said.

  Their mouths met hungrily again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  AFTER PAIRCE LEFT, Sefoni sought out Tristanne to ask if she knew where Haid might go, and Tristanne said there were a few places they could check, so the two took off together to look into various taverns.

  It was still early, before luncheon, and some of the taverns were not yet open.

  Maybe that was why they didn’t find him, but as far as they could tell, he wasn’t out drinking. Tristanne kept asking questions about what had happened, and it started to set Sefoni’s teeth on edge avoiding them. (“Did he take you in the carriage, then?” “Why do you think he said he hurt you?” “Did you do it more than once, or was it sort of a prolonged continuation of one long rutting session?”)

  For this reason, she eventually parted ways with Tristanne and went back home.

  The footman Maister Jones told her that Haid had come home while she’d been gone, and that he was upstairs in his bedroom overseeing packing for his trip north with Tristanne—or rather arguing with his valet, who was trying to pack him up for a hunting trip not an excursion on horseback, sleeping on the ground under the stars (or at least that was what Haid was roaring when Sefoni reached his room.)

  She knocked on the door. “Haid?”

  It went quiet in Haid’s bedchamber. Then he came and opened the door. “Sefoni. You’re not coming.”

  “I want to talk,” she said.

  He took a deep breath. He turned to his valet. “No neckbows, if you please. Warm clothing?”

  The valet sighed. “Sleeping on the ground, Your Grace? Truly? It’s hardly appropriate for a man such as yourself.”

  Haid turned back to Sefoni. “Let’s talk in the library.”

  “All right,” she said.

  “If we stay here, I’m going to strangle my valet.”

  “You could dismiss him from the room,” said Sefoni.

  “No, you and I cannot be alone in my bedchamber.” He went past her, hurrying down the stairs.

  There was nothing for her to do except to follow him, so she did. She hurried down after him. He was several paces ahead of her on the next level. He strode past her own bedchamber and then flung open the door to the library.

  She reached it a moment later and came inside.

  He had gone to the other side of the room, behind a round table surrounded by chairs. “You stay over there. And leave the door open.”

  “All right,” she said, furrowing her brow. “I don’t see why that matters.”

  “It matters because you want to talk, and trust me, I’d rather just kiss you.”

  “Oh,” she said. Well, she mouthed it. Her voice had lost any and all strength, and her stomach turned over. She wanted him to kiss her too. She started to go around the table, to go to him.

  He held up a hand. “Stay there. Talk.”

  She clasped her hands together, out of sorts, hardly able to remember why she’d been looking for him.

  “Well?”

  Oh, yes, right. She licked her lips. “You didn’t hurt me, you know. Tristanne says that you told her that you did, but I promise you, it was not that way.”

  “You said you were sore.”

  “Well… afterwards, it hurt, but during…”

  He nodded. “Ah. I suppose that makes sense.”

  “During the ordeal, I could not have managed it without you. I was in agony, and I needed you, and you gave me… you gave me what I needed. So, there’s no… you oughtn’t feel…”

  She could see his chest rising and falling with his breath, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Anyway, I just wanted you to know that,” she said. “I wanted to make sure, because when we spoke before, you said that you weren’t sad it happened, but Tristanne said you felt guilty—”

  “To the blazes with Tristanne.”

  “Oh, indeed. She’s very nosy.”

  He reached up and put a finger under his neckbow and tugged on it.

  “I know you said that after some time had passed, maybe I would change my mind about what happened between us, but I… I don’t think I will.”

  “I don’t know why I’m even wearing a neckbow.” He began to untie it. He yanked on it, pulling one side free. He balled it up and shoved it in one of his pockets and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. “So, is that all?
I thought you were going to attempt to convince me to let you come along to the north.”

  “I do still want to come along,” she said. “But I suppose you’re not going to let me. Really, though, I don’t see why it should be your decision. You can’t simply order me around all the time.”

  He came around the table and started toward her, his dark eyes flashing.

  She took a step backwards, in spite of herself.

  He stopped in front of her. “I’m never going to stop ordering you around, Sefoni, just as I’m rather sure you’re never going to stop refusing to listen to everything I say.”

  “I don’t refuse to listen to everything you say.”

  “If I had given you cainlach because I wanted to bed you and you didn’t want to bed me, it would be monstrous, do you deny that?”

  “That’s not what happened.”

  “Did you have plans to surrender your virtue to me yesterday?”

  “Well… no.”

  “So, it was against your will?”

  Her mouth worked. She sputtered. “But it wasn’t your fault.”

  “I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility that you might need time to process it, Your Grace,” he said. “I’m trying to do the right thing, and I don’t ever do the right thing, so I’m not any good at it, and you are making it harder.”

  Her lips parted.

  He kissed her.

  She wrapped her arms around his neck.

  He walked them backwards until they collided with a shelf of books.

  She gasped.

  He broke the kiss. “I’ll go to the north. You’ll have time. Maybe when I get back, we’ll know if you’re with child. It’s a good plan. Just recognize that and go with it, please?”

  She reached up to touch his lips. She had once thought his lips were shaped like sin. They felt like sin too.

  “Sefoni?” His voice was ragged.

  She pressed her mouth into his, thrusting her tongue into his mouth. She arched her back, pressing her breasts against his chest, sliding one of her hands up his neck into his hair.