Leda

Chapter Forty-Six: Violent Colours

With her fingers pressed to her lips, Pella Fabiac stifled a scream, her body arching from the bed. Castor shuddered when he came: driving into her, holding her down. She whimpered, turned her head to one side and buried her face in the pillow as the Emperor collapsed, his control over her body diminishing as his seed leaked out from between her legs. Now spent he rolled away but she continued to lie face down; her breathing slowing, her arms splayed across the quilts.

Fabiac interested him. Of course, he'd had his pick of the court whores and courtesans as a young man growing up in Colvé. But they all seemed to blur into one: a fusion of velvets and silks and gauze, of sweat-slick flesh and perfume, of lips opened in his service, of kisses and long, drawn-out, pleasure-racked moans. Fabiac was different. There was a hardness to her; an iciness which, he persuaded himself, he melted every time he bedded her. He enjoyed her struggles, her protests, her pretence at resistance, the way he had to grip his hands around her wrists, to crush her beneath him; her final submission rendered so much the sweeter.

Propped on one arm, he watched her as she rose; the way she stalked over to the washstand, all hurt pride. How she bent and swayed, splashing her face with water.

"I must return to my husband," she said flatly. "He'll be wondering where I am."

The light was gathering. He detected greyness through the slim slit of window pane, where earlier all had been dark. "He'll recognise you're paying homage to your Emperor." Castor managed a feeble smile.

"I don't think he'll quite see it like that."

Castor cocked his head on one side. "Is he a traitor?"

Fabiac turned from him, dropping her nightshift over her head, its gauzy folds sliding over her curves, masking them. "He's your most loyal subject, your Majesty."

"Remind him to keep it that way."

"I will. Will that be all, your Majesty?" She observed him with a look which hinted at scorn. Castor felt himself shrivel and shrink, suddenly conscious of his own nakedness.

"Yes," he said, dragging drapes and blankets over his body. "You may go."

She left, lowering the latch with barely a sound, leading Castor to wonder with a vague stirring of unease whether this hadn't been the first time that Pella Fabiac had found her way into a stranger's bed. But, he reassured himself, she'd never found her way into the arms of an Emperor before.

For some reason he thought of Josen and almost with a pang of fondness. Where was his brother now? Josen would have bedded half of Dal Reniac, had he come north ˗ the men as well as the women, Castor thought with a shudder of distaste. His brother's appetite for the flesh of other human beings was insatiable. Where was he now, though? Perhaps he'd not played the traitor at all. Perhaps he'd been dead all this time, butchered by the Riverside scum. He'd always warned Josen that was where he'd end up. Raped and stabbed to death or drowned in a Riverside dock. Bringing shame upon his house and upon the palace. Well there were only so many times you could protect a man from himself. But now that Josen was gone, Castor felt truly alone...surrounded by his men, it was true, guarded by Vebæc's sword, his spies in every corner of the empire. But...alone.

He rose, splashing water across his face and groin and chest, and thought of calling for a page to help him dress and shave...later. The empty bed, its stained sheets and creased quilts ˗ somehow, it rebuked him. Castor dragged on hose, vest, tunic and trousers, seated himself before a mirror, lathered soap by himself for the first time in his life and plastered it across his face. Then he picked up the razor, opened it and held it to his own cheek.

A sudden knock at the door had him slip, the razor nicking his chin, blood pulsing through the soap and onto his hands. Cursing, Castor threw the blade back down as if it were a glowing lump of coal, staggered from his chair and dragged a towel across his face.