Chapter 9
PRINCE KALIQ rode into the village the next afternoon and he directed his horse to the tiny tent shared by Lara and Og. Lara sat outside beneath an awning, sewing. The giant was nowhere to be seen. The girl looked up at him. He held out his hand. “Come!” he said imperiously reaching down for her.
Lara stood and let herself be swept up onto the prince’s horse. “How masterful you are,” she teased him mischievously.
“I do not know why I want you,” he said. “You look like an old crow in your enveloping black garments. And you are ignorant beyond any I have ever known.” He moved his horse away from the tent and toward the entrance to his palace at the bottom of the cliff.
“You want me because you have seen me without my enveloping garments,” she told him. “And you want me because you desire to teach me your ways,” Lara said. “I am a mystery to you, my lord, am I not?”
“You are not stupid,” he admitted.
“Nay, not stupid, just ignorant,” she mocked him, and he laughed.
“I will probably fall in love with you,” he grumbled, “and you will break my heart, Lara, won’t you?” He guided his mount past the cliff’s entry, and onto the inner road.
“I told you yesterday, my lord, that I do not believe in love. It does not exist. But I am also now informed that for the Shadow Princes love is paramount. If you know that I will break your heart, then it is best you not fall in love with me,” Lara advised him.
“Love is not a logical emotion. It will not obey the science of reason,” Kaliq told her. “That is the first thing you must learn, Lara. Love happens. There is no rationale for it. You cannot control it, or the passions it arouses.”
She was seated before him on his stallion. One arm held her gently but firmly against him. He wore white silk trousers, and an open-necked white silk shirt. About his waist a black sash was wrapped, and his boots were black leather. She found her cheek resting against his bare chest. His skin was smooth, warm, fragrant. “I don’t understand,” Lara told him. “You speak in riddles.”
“It is because you don’t understand that I have come for you today,” he said. “Someone as beautiful as you are, Lara, should not be ignorant of the pleasures of love. What happened to you in the Forest that you encased your heart in ice?”
“I am told daughters born of faerie women have the same cold hearts as their mothers,” Lara said.
“Only if they choose to,” he responded.
“What can you know of faeries, my lord? You are not one, are you?”
“Nay, I am a Shadow Prince, but I had an ancestress who was a Peri. Faerie blood runs in my veins, thought not to the extent that it does in yours, Lara. Now tell me of the Forest, and why you enclosed your heart in an icy cold. We shall not cease riding until I have learned all.”
“Surely we are almost there,” Lara said.
“We will not be there until I have learned what I need to know of you,” the prince said in a stern voice. “Tell me.”
Lara looked up into the handsome face, and began to speak. “The trader swore I was meant for a Coastal King in order to protect me from the Forest Lords. But they offered him far more than he had hoped to obtain for me. He was afraid it was a ruse, and so I advised him to accept their offer but refuse to make the trade until we were at the borders separating the Desert and the Forest. They were not pleased, but they agreed. And so it was done. I later learned it was my faerie heritage that fascinated them. They wanted to get a child on me to ease or even erase a curse placed on them by Maeve, the queen of the Forest Faeries. They thought a faerie child born of my loins and their seed would soften her heart against them. Of course it was madness on their part.”
“Why did they want a child with faerie blood? The Forest Lords do not mix their blood with that of outsiders,” Kaliq said.
“Yesterday I said it was Og’s tale to tell, but I realize now it is mine, too,” Lara told him, and so she did, beginning with the murder of Maeve’s faerie kinswoman and ending with the slaughter of all the Forest giants, but for Og. “The giants knew the Foresters’ shameful secret,” Lara continued. “Maeve’s curse had made it impossible for them to breed children upon their own women. Stealthily they mated with outsiders, giving those children to their wives, who claimed them as their own. And with each new generation born, the blood of the Forest Lords grew thinner and thinner.
“The Foresters allowed Og to live because they believed he didn’t know their secret,” she said, “but he did, for giant memory is passed on in the womb. He was trained to serve as his people had served.”
“The Forest giants were known for their gentle natures, and kind hearts,” Kaliq said softly. “They would not have known how to fight back against the Foresters.”
“If not for Og I should not have escaped, and would soon be dead,” Lara replied. “He knew what I did not. That no woman with faerie blood will give a child to a man she does not love, or at least desires, and when he told me I was terrified. Both the Head Forester and his younger brother were pumping their seed into me several times daily. They were beginning to become suspicious as to why my belly was not growing with a child of theirs. They didn’t care which one of them fathered the child on me, but they wanted that child, whom they believed would be their salvation.”
“Were you a virgin when you came to them?” he asked her.
Lara nodded. “That was the other reason I was so expensive.”
“And when their bodies joined with yours what did you feel?” he asked her.
“My body had begun to respond to the younger brother, Enda, but I hated them both,” Lara told him. “When the Head Forester would lie with me, I would slip away into the deep recesses of my mind. It was easier then to bear him.”
Prince Kaliq’s eyes filled with tears at her recitation. “That you should have suffered so, my beautiful Lara,” he said, his voice choking. “Please, I beg of you, let me show you what true passion between two friends can be like. I will not lie to you. I do desire your body, but only because it is such a beautiful body, and should be loved as only I can love it.” He bent and brushed his lips against her mouth.
“You seek me for your pleasure,” Lara said low.
“I seek to give you pleasure!” he corrected her. “Those cloddish Forest creatures know naught of pleasuring a woman of any ilk. They know only how to grunt and sweat over a woman’s body. They think nothing of the woman. She is a vessel to them in which they hope to grow their seed.” His blue eyes were stormy with his angry words. “You are meant to love and be loved.”
“And what am I to you, my lord prince?” Lara asked quietly.
“A comely woman to be admired, caressed and utterly adored,” he told her. “I would worship at the shrine of your beauty, Lara,” the prince said fervently.
“You want no child of mine then?” she asked him.
“No,” he told her quietly. “I want only you, and the pleasure we can give each other, Lara. Nothing else, I swear!”
They were suddenly at the entrance to the hallway of the palace. The stallion stopped, and a servant lifted Lara down from the saddle as the prince leapt down behind her. Taking her hand in his, he led her into the beautiful corridor she had previously been in the day before.
“Will you trust me to teach you the joys of passion?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said simply. His words had intrigued her. Was there more to two bodies uniting than just grunting and straining? “I am curious as to whether what you hint at is real, or merely a belief you refuse to give up.”
He laughed. “You will soon see, Lara. You will soon see, but first we shall watch my favorite stallion choose his mares and mate with them.”
“Did that not happen yesterday?” she asked him.
“I would not allow it without you,” he told her.
“I am not suitably garbed to be seen publicly on your balustrade, my lord,” she told him.
“There is time to prepare you,” he told her. “Come! You must be bathed. You have, I fear, the scent of the
