I laughed slightly, watching her go with what I’m sure was a certain twinkle in my eye. Ah, Branwen!
What a relief to be on good terms with her again—to have finally, fully forgiven her in my heart. Receiving the Scepter—receiving Exigence—had cured me of any remaining ill will I bore her. Now I understood that her betrayal, like all the misfortunes that had befallen me in my life, was part of a very concrete plan that Weltyr had for me. It was not uncommon for even largely secular folk to talk of Weltyr’s plan in a general sense, a notion that was expressed often to comfort someone amid grief or another setback.
But now I understood that it was, so far as I could tell, a tangible reality. Weltyr’s plan was not some far-flung abstract. The plan was reality: I was living Weltyr’s plan, an expression of his will, and my reclamation of the Scepter had been part of that.
Surely, then, the child conceived by myself and Gundrygia was also part of that.
What was this Wotsung line of which I was a part? What was it that the witch treasured in my seed, and why was it that Weltyr had blessed her, of all the women I had come to love in the past weeks, with the implantation of my first progeny?
Then again…had she received the first? While on my way to the commissary, I passed a pair of parents who smiled as their young daughter nicely entertained her upset brother. The mother, it appeared, was already with child again, and rested a light hand upon her stomach. Children could come quickly enough in concert when it was one woman, but when a man distributed his passion between multiple receptive females, well…suddenly a certain notion presented itself to me, making tangible what was once a distant abstract. It seemed somehow impossible that I should be a father; therefore, the very likely possibility that I had succeeded in inseminating a few of Valeria’s durrow friends had not meant anything much to me in the Nightlands. It had just not seemed real.
Now, not just aboveground but flying over it, I knew I had engendered life. My own body had succeeded in passing on some parcel of myself that now grew elsewhere—and, perhaps, not just in Gundrygia.
Not just, either, in Valeria’s friends.
Valeria, Branwen, Indra and Odile all sat talking softly in the commissary when I found them crowded around a small table directly near the entrance.
“And here’s the lucky man,” said Odile, drawing an empty seat from the table adjacent to them and scooting her own over to give me room. “We were just talking about you.”
I laughed, sliding into the offered seat. “Good things, I hope.”
“Only that you don’t know how lucky you have it…some kid was staring at us just now, but he went on through to another compartment.”
“If I were a stranger to this table, I have to admit I’d be inclined to stare, too.”
The women giggled brightly around me, a choir of angels. Beneath the table, Branwen’s boot slid against mine. Clouds and blue sky rolled merrily past the window behind us. Soon enough, a porter came by with the order the women had made.
After, bellies full, we returned to our seats and promptly fell asleep sitting up. Valeria leaned against me, mouth slack, and Branwen against her; in the row ahead of us, Indra and Odile drooled against each other between snores.
I was the last to fall comfortably asleep.
IF IT’S NOT ONE THING
VALERIA SHOOK ME awake gently, though when the task proved difficult her motion grew more vigorous. I was amazed to open my eyes only to find the cabin dark and the world outside much the same. Five hours must have passed; maybe more. Blinking through my heady stupor, I asked her to repeat herself and this time had better success at understanding what she’d just said into my ear.
“Branwen’s just gone to wait for you in the cargo hold,” she whispered, her voice a sultry tone that fired my loins and made me yearn for her greater closeness. “I told her I’d wake you up for her.”
“You should come, too.”
Laughing softly, Valeria slapped me on the arm. Her velvet lips nuzzling against the ridge of my ear, she told me, “Maybe if you think there’s enough room, I’ll come next time…for now, I’ll let you two take the risk of getting thrown off the airship.”
“They’ll wait until our next landing,” I assured her with a doggish smile, leaning in to exchange a lingering kiss before sliding up from my seat. “Which way is it, now?”
Soon I moved stealthily down the aisles of the Swan, past the other, more soundly sleeping passengers. Valeria had directed me to go to the back of the economy compartment and several hallways beyond. Avoiding the porters by hiding momentarily in a latrine, I just barely managed to sneak through to the baggage area where Branwen awaited me.
There, in the dark, my voice a whisper, I called, “Hello?”
“Here,” sang Branwen, her pale body reflecting the moonlight pouring through the porthole of a door in the compartment. My desire for her flamed in an instant, though I was still barely awake after such deep and necessary sleep. I would, however, defy any man to look at Branwen’s nude body on the offering beneath the moonlight and remain the least bit tired. Her stiff pink nipples and small tuft of gold pubic curls were the only interruptions in the milky flesh that stretched upon a bed she’d made of her clothes and cloak. With these beneath her, outstretched upon a few of the crates the Swan was due to transport, she was a veritable Anroa of the Airship. I would have done anything to see her rendered in fresco just then: a portrait to forever seal into the wall of my heart.
Seeing me, her thighs spread slowly open.
