Authors: Kyell Gold
Marhik and Jherik watched them, and when they’d left, Jherik said, “Fine. I’ll have the list to you by tonight.”
He made to leave, but Marhik stopped him with a paw to his chest. “Jherik. Listen, I’ll be leaving tomorrow.”
“I
know
.”
“To fight.”
“Maybe.” Why did he have to keep bringing that up?
Marhik sighed. “I might not be coming back.”
Jherik stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“It’s war, Jherik. You know, fighting for real, not in the sparring room. People die.”
Jherik snorted. “Not you.”
“What do you mean?” Marhik’s ears flicked; his muzzle tilted to one side.
“I mean...nothing.” He started to walk past his brother again.
“Jherik, do you get what I’m saying? I might never see you again.”
His brother’s earnest love and worry perversely made him even angrier. “Oh, Cougar will protect you. She always does.”
Marhik shook his head in confusion, and Jherik’s rage and frustration boiled over. “Everything
always
goes your way. You get to lead the soldiers into battle. You get everything right and I can’t even remember to address the mayor as ‘his honor.’ You get to marry Viana!”
“Cougar’s teeth, Jherik,” Marhik sighed. “You don’t even
like
girls!”
There was a certain satisfaction in making his even-tempered brother swear. Jherik savored it only briefly. “It wouldn’t matter if I did. You’re the one that matters. You get to raise a family and be baron and ...”
“I thought you didn’t want to be baron.”
“I don’t!”
“You pretty much gave up on the priesthood when you fell asleep during your own Lustration.”
“That’s all just hand-waving and words. Cougar doesn’t care if we go to services or how we worship.”
Marhik’s ears flicked. “I know what you think of the services,” he said quietly. “I was just pointing out that you haven’t exactly gone out of your way to take the options open to you.”
“There
are
no options open to me.”
His brother sighed again. “Fine. I’ll see you in the morning if you come to see us off. Then you’d better get busy recruiting. If you don’t feel that’s beneath you.”
Marhik turned on his paws and walked away, and for once, his tail was lashing too.
Jherik left that evening to go to the southernmost town in the barony, the one that was four hours ride from their manor and not on the way to Caril. He took only his valet, a young raccoon named Yakua, with him. The following day, he visited the mayor of the town and explained the need for recruits, and rode back to the manor. Marhik and the fifty soldiers had left at first light. And, Jherik noted bitterly, Marhik hadn’t even waited for his recommendation.
So began again his cycle of boredom, anger, and excitement. He rode to visit the mayors of the other two major towns in the barony, helped examine the new recruits as they arrived, and assisted Master Winson, the old badger, as he got them ready to become soldiers. They got thirty-eight young males, which was more than Jherik had been expecting, and according to Winson, at least ten of them had the makings of good soldiers. The rest could be trained.
But the absence of the soldiers on their way to Caril meant that Jherik had to spar with less skilled opponents. His sparring sessions were over quickly and did little to dissipate the tension he felt growing inside him every day. He grew so frustrated that he drove one new recruit to tears, and thereafter he was banned from sparring with the new soldiers.
This made his days worse, because he blamed his mood and the restrictions laid on him on his absent brother. He snapped at his valet, avoided his father, sat alone at meals, and only with the greatest restraint managed to be polite to Winson. The badger had initiated him as a young cub and tolerated no rudeness, even from Jherik.
About a week after Marhik’s departure, Jherik found himself in bed, unable to sleep. His thoughts were a turmoil of emotions, and the images of his brother, his father, and his former colleagues now on their way to Caril and glory would not go away. Fists clenched, he wished he had some way to relax, and then he remembered back to four or five years ago, and slowly got out of bed.
Yakua slept in the front room on a small cot. Jherik passed him by and stepped into the hall to light a candle from the torch, then went back into his bedroom, closing the door behind him and locking it.
The small bookshelf in his room held books that he had borrowed from his grandfather’s library about weapons, tactics, and battle techniques. But in the back of one of the drawers of his desk he had two other books, taken when he and Marhik had found a more private library of their grandfather’s, some six years before. There had been no fighting over the books they found; Marhik took the well-used majority, all of which featured females in various states of undress, and Jherik, who had realized just a year before that females held no fascination for him, took the two that Marhik didn’t want. One, titled “Bare Muscles,” featured a large bear, muscled and shirtless, holding a smaller but just as muscled raccoon, both very obviously male. The other, titled “Lucky Three,” showed a naked wolf with two naked otters obviously enjoying themselves, though all their privates were cleverly hidden. The books might have raised some questions about the cubs’ grandfather except that they lay at the bottom of the pile, dusty, uncreased, and unblemished.
He’d never been able to explore his feelings, but he read “Bare Muscles” over and over again, sometimes switching to “Lucky Three” for variety. The styles were similar--both were authored by a “P. Zinsky”--but he found that reading about the strong, powerful bear excited him more than reading about the frolicking of the wolf and his two otter playmates. He read the books for a year, until he knew them so well that he didn’t have to get them out any more. And when he didn’t get them out, they faded from his life, becoming a guilty adolescent memory rather than a secret pleasure.
For the last few years, his self-gratification had been quick and almost mechanical. He’d lost his virginity to a soldier when he was seventeen, had slept with a couple of the others since then, but never more than once. His most constant companion was his own paw.
Now, he returned to those shelves, seeking a memory of pleasure that he could barely recall. Maybe it was kid stuff, but it had been fun kid stuff, and he was beyond caring if what he did was appropriate any more. No one else would care, either, even if they somehow found out.
He took “Bare Muscles” from the back of the drawer, set the candle on his bedside table, and opened the book. It fell open to a passage that was one of his favorites; he’d pressed the book open there many times as his paw worked. He traced a claw down his sheath, feeling it stir as he read.
Muscles shifted under the fur, as if the rolling hills had come alive and were dancing under their arboreal blanket. Damien found himself lifted into the air as easily as a cub, massive arms barely straining as the paws under his hips settled him down again. He felt the amorous pressure under him and tightened his own muscles playfully before yielding gladly to the invasion.
Josef made a low ululation of pleasure, a basso profundo arrow that shot to Damien’s chest and thrummed there. He pressed his paws against the bear’s tight, hard chest and massaged there in time with the rhythm of their bodies. The heat of Josef’s breath enveloped his muzzle with the tender caress of a paw, a deep warm fog in which Damien’s whiskers could not navigate. Together they moved, together they were as one, brown fur blending with grey, hard and rippling, the motion like the rolling of clouds before a storm.
Jherik responded quickly to the words and his own touch. He knew that some of his adolescent fantasies had involved Corrif, but he was no longer interested in the old wolf. Instead, his thoughts turned to Mishel, a very well built young coyote who had just signed up in the wave of recruiting. Jherik was sure he had noticed Mishel’s eyes linger on him, and so now he imagined those eyes meeting his as he lowered the coyote’s muscular legs into his lap, imagined that the strokes on his long shaft came not from his paw, but from the tight rear of Mishel, and imagined that his paw was closed around the coyote’s hard member. He could see the tawny fur and the nicely shaped arms and chest in front of him, bucking up and down...
The storm clouds built, Damien’s breaths like the precursor wind, Josef’s rumbles like the distant thunder that sends farmers scurrying for shelter. Damien felt his fur tingle as though the clouds were full of power, gods in their bodies gathering thunderbolts for one enormous flash of lightning. Looking into Josef’s eyes, he saw the same sparks mirrored there, the gleam of light like that found in the depths of a precious gem, and like the gem, the bear was tough and hard: his chest, his stone-solid arm that supported the wolf’s weight, his thighs like fur-covered rock under Damien, and of course the hardness the bear was sharing with him. Damien himself was taut and hard all over; he could watch his arms flex as they rubbed the bear’s chest, but his eyes were fixed on Josef’s.
And when the lightning came, it seared them both, wrenching the high keening of the full force of the storm winds from Damien, while Josef voiced the loud roll of thunder. Damien felt the splash of passion’s rain between his tight, heaving stomach and the bear’s, and he wished the lightning would never fade.
Jherik’s paw ran faster up and down his length. He could feel the dampness on his fingers from his leaking tip, and his toes curled as pleasure rippled through them. He abandoned the book and leaned back on his bed, still picturing the coyote sitting astride him, naked, seeing the large curves of his chest and the tight flatness of his young stomach, the play of his leg muscles making his sandy-colored fur wave as he rode up and down Jherik’s shaft, his tight rear squeezing and squeezing, just like that...
Jherik clenched his teeth together to keep his throaty roar of pleasure in as his body convulsed in its release. Spurts of his seed landed on his chest and stomach, then coursed down his paw. He kept stroking frantically, lubricated with his own juices, and stopped when he couldn’t stand it any longer, his paw coated in sticky white.
The vision of Mishel disappeared. Jherik lay on the bed, panting heavily, staring at the reliefs in the plaster ceiling as the shadows from the candlelight played over them. His paw trailed lazily through the mess on his stomach. He felt good, but not exhausted, not spent. His tail lashed the bed for several minutes, and finally he got up, wrapped a robe loosely around himself, and slid noiselessly out of the room and down to where the water baths were.
At the family’s baths, he paused. Servants kept them meticulously clean, and any mess he made would be seen and identified the next morning. Most likely his scent would linger, especially given the muskiness of what he’d be washing off. His gaze slid to the door and the soldiers’ barracks outside the manor, where there was a more anonymous water bath. Soldiers wouldn’t be up and about at this hour, not with the grueling schedule the recruits were being given. They would be cherishing every scrap of sleep they were allowed. And the ones who’d been left behind, he reasoned as he eased the manor door shut behind him and walked down to the complex of wooden buildings at the base of the hill, had been left behind because they were lazy and therefore they would be sleeping all night as well. Or else out in the town without permission.
His reasoning seemed to hold. The baths were empty, but a profusion of scents lingered. He felt sure that his wouldn’t be detected.
At first, he welcomed the silence; after a few moments, he found it strangely unsettling. The scents were so fresh and strong that he kept expecting someone to walk in on him. He finished washing his front quickly, then splashed some water over the rest of himself as it occurred to him that he might run into someone on the way back, and while a night bath was odd, it could be explained less embarrassingly than a wet patch from chest to groin.
As soon as he’d done that, he regretted it. He could have just kept the robe closed and nobody would have known, he told himself. Now the robe would just keep his fur from drying. He growled softly. He’d have to walk around and let it dry before going up to the manor.
He paced around the baths for several minutes, then perked his ears. He thought he’d heard a faint sound through the wooden walls of the baths, a sound like a metal clang. Frustration forgotten, he draped the robe around himself and padded silently out, peering to the left and right before heading towards the armory. If one of the soldiers had taken a sword out for a night on the town, that was fairly serious indeed. Unapproved absences were usually overlooked, but soldiers weren’t supposed to take weapons into town unless they were going to battle. That was one of the few items of the barony charter that Jherik did know; as a soldier, it had been drilled into him.
The armory was silent and empty, but as Jherik stood listening to the crackling torches over the night’s silence, he heard panting from the practice room, next door. It stopped a moment later, followed by the swish of a blade cutting the air and a softly muffled grunt of exertion. Curious, he placed his paw on the door and eased it open.
He poked his head through the scant opening and saw a figure moving around. A moment later, he saw the flash of a blade. The torches in the practice room had been put out, so he couldn’t see details, but the figure was smaller than him, and slighter.
“Hey,” he said with mild interest, stepping into the room. “What are you doing here?”
The light coming through the door fell upon orange fur. Gleaming eyes stared at him, and the slender muzzle froze. The sword fell to the floor with a clatter.
“Look, it’s okay, but if you wanted an extra practice session, you should’ve talked to--hey!”
The fox had darted past him and out the open door. Jherik turned, but by the time he got outside, the fox had vanished. He looked around the deserted and silent corridors, and eventually decided the fox must have gone into one of the ten dormitories, and he didn’t feel like waking up all the soldiers just to find him.