Page 33 of Awariye

What? "You did?"

He finished wiping off his hands and met my eyes. We grinned at each other.

"Look at you, coming on my cock," I praised because my man couldn't get any more perfect.

"Look at you, not noticing," he snarked, and I yipped and apologized.

Igor snuggled in my arms, and we made out languidly, relaxed and ready for sleep. I must have dozed off a bit because Igor coaxed me awake and we cleaned up and got dressed before getting back into bed. Ulbrecht had met recently with his warriors out of concern over the unusually mild winter. In the event that incursions at the border might happen even during the dark months, he wanted his men ready at a moment’s notice, so no sleeping naked.

Over the last month, my health had improved substantially. Wren and I had put each other through the paces in an epic review of all of our disciplinary techniques learned at the Monastery, as if we were novice monks again, starting at the beginning with breathing exercises and nourishing and cleansing the etheric and astral bodies.

I'd begun tutoring Evelyn and Sören's kids in the legends, but it was hardly tutoring, more like story time, since I told them any tale they wanted to hear, and so many times over, they were starting to memorize them. This was humanity's oldest and most durable form of information transmission. Take a story, make it fantastical, find children of that age where they want to hear it countless times while imagining it, then you can count on them still knowing those magical tales when they themselves aged. Literacy could be lost in a community, all the libraries burned as civilizations collapsed and cities got sacked, but these stories would persist so long as people lived to tell them.

Wren and I also spent our time going for long walks outside when it was warm enough, and on the cold days, going through the library and making a list of its contents to send to the monastery, in case they wanted a copy of anything. There were a couple of manuals on magic and esotericism that we were already copying, and I'd found an alternate translation of the IcelandicEddasthat I was slowly copying down so the Diana Monastery library could have it.

Then in the evenings, once the day's training was done, Igor joined me.

He'd taken up a daily prayer practice at the chapel that he did by himself before coming to find me each day, and from the light air about him, I could tell spending time in the presence of the lanterns and Kristoff's gods was good for him.

He pulled the blanket up and over us and settled on his back. I sidled up against him, resting my head on his chest, my ear over his heartbeat, which was always so comforting.

My lover wrapped an arm around my back. "Gute Nacht."

"Goodnight," I answered. "Love you."

"Liebe-liebe," he whispered, and we both dropped off.

* * *

Tucked away, warm and safe in his arms, I was sleeping deeply when a commotion pulled me out of my slumber, rousing me slowly and then all of a sudden when the king's voice boomed as he dashed down the hall.

"Igor!"

My lover flew from the bed and in no time threw on his boots, grabbed his belt and sword, and sprinted down the hall after Ulbrecht. I'd shouted in surprise, ripped from sleep and only managing to catch sight of his back whipping around the corner by the time I made it to the hallway.

I scanned the area to find Wren down the hall in the doorway to his and Ulbrecht's room, his hair disheveled and clothes barely on. Wren met my eyes, and that was when I heard the clamor of the men and their shouts, then the horses as the band sped away. Behind everything, like the sound of a steady wind that goes unnoticed, were the distant bells and horns of the relay stations on the mountain, lookouts for these alpine lands.

"That's the alarm," said Wren. "There's a border raid. They're going to fight them off."

* * *

Sagging against the doorframe, I could barely remain standing as fear shot through me, panic drenching my nerves and soaking me in paralysis and terror. Igor, my precious Igor, was about to go into battle and fight for his life and that of the king's.

Wren's voice pulled me out of my fear. "I've got to get to the lanterns. Awariye, will you go with me? I'm worried how strong they'll be in that stone chapel rather than up on the mountain."

That snapped me back to the situation at hand. "Ja, okay. Let's go together. I want to see how it works."

We rushed into better clothes, and I tried to get myself calm and focused, oriented toward a spiritual state of mind. In a brutal sense, someone other than Wren should know how to invoke these lanterns and channel their power, because being isolated up in the mountains without a bodyguard put Wren at all kinds of risk. Should some vagrant harm the monk who had given himself to the lanterns, those gods might withdraw their mandate for the king.

Who better to train as Wren's backup than another monk from the same monastery, who knew the same magic? Especially a bardic one like myself, considering Wren reported having succeeded in funneling their power by means of a sung prayer, a centuries-old poem whose words had become an ode.

I left our room with resolve, carefully keeping my eyes away from our bed, where Igor and I had just been sleeping, the blankets thrown back in such a hurry. Wren led the way and we hustled to the kitchens for bread and wine to offer the gods, then Wren fretfully searched high and low for his dog, claiming Bello absolutely had to be there, that he'd served a purpose last time. This had only happened once before, a trial by fire where Wren was alone with the lantern gods when Ulbrecht and his men fought back a raid.

We finally located Bello, who had been sleeping in the little princess' room. Our arms laden with bread (including some we could bribe the dog with), we set off for the chapel.

I found it rather anticlimactic that the lanterns burned normally as if nothing unusual were going on.

"We still have some time," said Wren in answer to my unspoken question. "They're still riding."

---