The Wildness Within

Anchor and Solace 2

'It's dangerous.'

'What changes?' Ash said quietly, his lips brushing against Augus' ear, and Augus tried to switch off his awareness, tried to ignore the shiver of sensation that moved down his neck. He was the one who enjoyed control, and this situation was swimming away from all his self-mastery. 'Here, let's make it easier, Augus. Look at it this way. I keep doing my thing with Gwyn. You keep doing your thing with Gwyn. We make sure he's okay with it. And we just...wait and see what happens?'

Augus' heartsong was dominance, not...waiting and seeing what happened. He needed some basis of control in this, and unfortunately, he could have it, if he let himself assert his will over Gwyn, in concert with Gwyn's. He could feel Gwyn's wrists twitching beneath his touch, feel the way his skin was cooling where the circulation was being stopped. Augus tightened and relaxed his grip several times to encourage more circulation, and then suffocated Gwyn's wrists once more.

Gwyn grunted and bowed into him with something that could have almost been yearning.

'Gwyn? What do you think?' Augus said.

'I'm okay,' Gwyn said. He made himself look up, moving as though his head was heavy. 'I asked, didn't I? You said no.'

Ash's hand massaged the back of Gwyn's head gently. Rhythmic, firm motions that Augus knew very well himself from a lifetime of Ash soothing him, in the rare moments that he let it happen. Gwyn was so touch-starved, that he simply turned malleable beneath them both; the grip Augus had on him, Ash's drugging touch. It all worked well, the three of them. Augus' lips thinned and he looked away, trying to gather his thoughts.

Gwyn didn't react to things entirely predictably. Whatever resilience he'd had all this time, he wasn't as passive as Augus sometimes assumed. He'd said himself that some of his rescuers had attempted to assault him, rape him, and that Gwyn had always stopped them. That he was even able to do that after Efnisien hurt him so often...

'Gwyn,' Augus said, thinking it through, 'how often did Efnisien capture you?'

Gwyn's hands tightened predictably, he huffed a breath through his nose. Ash leaned closer, splayed his fingers more, gathering more of Gwyn's hair and massaging deeper.

'Two...three times a year, I think,' Gwyn said. 'Sometimes a day and I'd escape. Two days. A week. It was bad if he...had me for a month or more. But rare. I fought. He's...not weak, but he's not canny either. He doesn't think like I do. I know where to escape to. He looks behind shrubs and rocks, I can hide in the canopy or at the bottom of lakes too.'

'And the rest of the time? What did you do? Where did you go?'

Gwyn's breathing evened out again, so this wasn't a question that stressed him as much as the others. Augus risked transferring his grip on Gwyn's wrists to one hand, so that he could stroke languidly along Gwyn's forearm. He had absolutely no body hair aside from his eyebrows and eyelashes, and his skin was smooth and unmarked, and goose pimpled nicely, wherever Augus' fingers went.

'I slept...in the woods,' Gwyn said. 'I made a few hides, and for a few years I lived in a badger's sett and the badgers left me alone. I had to make it larger but they were good about it. But cousin he...left traps. Trapped the badgers. Trapped me. Filled in the sett with rocks and mortar and poison. It was...there was always something. Winters were hard.'

Winter was hard in the Ethallas forest. What was so charming and woodsy in spring and summer would become a barren, snowy, unforgiving wilderness as soon as the Autumn Equinox passed and the Winter Solstice neared. There were times when Augus and Ash nearly hadn't survived Ethallas, its snows and frosts.