The van Sietter Bride Who Brought Happiness in Her Pocket
by
Naoko Smith

Published by Naoko Smith at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Naoko Smith


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The van Sietter Bride Who Brought Happiness in Her Pocket
aptainofthepeace-Lord Arkyll el Maien van Sietter opened his slanted blue eyes and stared dreamily at the pattern of dancing animals on his curtains.  Light shone vaguely through the threads of the curtains suggesting it was time he got up.  
He knew they were dancing animals although everyone-else said the curtains were so faded that you could no longer see the pattern.  He had stayed on in the old nursery when his father gave his foster brother a separate room and his memory’s eye lay under his eye so he could still make the animals out.  Every so often his father said they must choose some new curtains and he would say, Oh yes papa.  I have some important work in hand with the peace corps but as soon as I have finished I will come with you to the furnishing warehouses.  After a few days his father would forget about it.  
When he was married his father would give him a suite of his own rooms and he would finally leave the dancing animals to the sole view of his memory’s eye.  He held himself in patience about the marriage.  Eventually his parents would come and say they had selected some suitable younger daughter of the high nobility to be bestowed on him.  He had thought of going to court and having a surreptitious look around at free-hearted young Ladies, his parents would be happy to take his wishes into consideration.  Then his sister, the famously beautiful young Lady Arianna, had overset them all, insisting on being inappropriately bestowed on his foster brother Hanya Vashin, so dear in their hearts but only a Knight in rank.  By the time she had got her own way (as ever) they were on the brink of war and first Hanya and then Arrie rode off to the battle-front. None of them felt like organising splendid nuptials for the future sworn Lord while his foster brother and sister, Uncle Tashka the King’s General, his two cousins and an host of friends were risking life and limb to defend the country.  
His door eased open and Lisette, his mother’s personal maid-servant, came in with a tray on which she had his and his mother’s bowls of hot chocolate.  His father must be awake already and down in the kitchens breaking his fast.  Arkyll sat up and took his chocolate with a smile that made his exquisite slanted blue eyes sparkle.  Lisette looked at his smile, his big muscular shoulders coming up out of the bedclothes which slid down to his naked hips, with affectionate indifference.  She reminded him that his mother had asked him to come and talk to her later in the morning.  This meant he could have a lie-in instead of hurrying out to the offices of the peace corps in which he was commissioned Captain so he put his bowl of chocolate on the floor by his bed and snuggled his tanned muscular body with the three scars on his chest and sides back down into the covers.  
With a flick of the exquisite eyes which the gossip-sheets raved about, Arkyll made sure Lisette had latched his door behind her then he leaned over the side of his bed to pull a box out from under it.  He took the lid off and lifted out a catalogue which he had picked up from a curious shop in the back streets of Sietter Town while supposedly on peace corps duty.  
He was a woman-lover himself but occasionally when he was out relaxing over three or four bowls of beer with a whisky to chase them, one of his Lieutenants who was a man-lover would swap interesting details of what he found pleasurable for information about what Arkyll liked to do with women.  Arkyll found these drunken surreptitious accounts peculiarly exciting.  He had considered whether he might also be a man-lover but although he loved his Lieutenant and other men friends he knew he did not want to be fucked in the arse by a man.  He wanted a woman to do it.  
Arkyll inspected the catalogue of dildos and harnesses wistfully.  He felt it was unlikely any of the elegant sophisticated daughters of the high nobility would be willing to fuck him in the arse.  He leaned on his elbow, pursing up the full red mouth, sweet as a bowl of cherries, which the gossip sheets also drooled over.  He only wanted to give it a try.  Possibly if he got an el Wyming or an el Staten for a bride he could suggest it? but he would be sorry if he ended up having the honour of one of those notoriously slack-moralled families under his eye.  He was a member of the peace corps but he was not a pacifist, not like his poor foster brother who had become an ardent pacifist after what he had to see in warfare and he remained in the bloody army because he could not bear in such a situation to let pass from under his eye his beloved junior officers and men.  When Arkyll was off-duty he wore weapons and a pair of gloves in his belt.  He was not keen to be forever threatening his glove to people over some slack-moral el Staten in his marriage bed.  
He lay back with his arms behind his head of short elegantly cut black curls, his broad muscular chest spreading comfortably, his powerful buttocks and thighs settling back into the bed.  After a while he put an hand to a softly aroused cock and began fingering his penis to harden it up.  He pictured some woman with sweet muscled thighs who wore a dildo in an harness which she put to his arsehole.  She pushed it up into him.  Mm-mmm!  The blood was flooding down to his excited cock at the thought.  He gripped his fingers gently on the head of his cock, easing it up and down inside the hood of the skin, focussing intently on the image of the woman pressing the dildo up into his hole.  Some pre-cum slid on his fingers.  Perhaps her breasts might bounce up and down on his back as she came in and out his hole? aa-ah!  He loved breasts.  Ooooh! the big squashy ones, the little ones like apples in his hands.  His Lieutenant said he liked best to be fucked facing his lover – mm-mm.  They had double-ended dildos, you could both get pleasure, the woman would go over while she was fu-u-ucking you-oo-oo-oh!  The sperm spurted in a sticky white mess in his fingers and he relaxed back into his pillows, reaching out for one of the pile of plain clean kerchiefs on his bedside table.  His mother looked so disappointed when he asked awkwardly for a few plain kerchiefs but sweet Hell! to be cleaning your cock in something your mother or sister had lovingly embroidered for you, it was enough to make your poor penis shrink and flop completely.  His father turned his head aside as his mother protested and Arkyll realised he was helpless with laughter and Arkyll was able to say, how silly I am being, perhaps you might do me a whole set for my birthday, mama? and that very night the pile of plain pieces of cloth had appeared by his bed while his wardrobe drawer remained full of the beautiful kerchiefs he carried about in his pocket and which young women stole off him if they got a chance, to his annoyance.  
He would really like to try being fucked in the arse just the once.  Perhaps if he escorted his younger brother to court when Clair went to be a student at the King’s University he could discreetly pay someone and give it a go?  He did not want to buy a favour in Sietter Town because he was often working among the prostitutes and had become friends with most of them.  It was weird to give a favour to a friend, he always felt embarrassed when he saw Dame Jayne Piria at the dances.  He was sorry because he liked her and now he always blushed too much to chat with her.  It was just a friendly fumble in the corridor one time he had a bowl too many and it ended up with them in that corner by the kitchens, Jayne with her back pressed to the wall holding her skirts up and him gripping her by the thighs and thrusting his cock up into her cunt urgently.  He was just starting to get excited himself when she started going off and moaning in a manner he was petrified would be heard by someone so he pretended he had gone off too as soon as she had finished.  
He lay in the bed staring dreamily at his dancing animals, the big-boned muscular physique he had inherited from his el Jien mother relaxed and a contented smile lingering on the full red mouth that also came from her.  He wondered idly what-all she wanted to talk to him about.  

 am not even asking you to offer her a formal betrothal,” his mother said.  
Her voice was pitched to its most persuasive tones:  cooing gentle and honey-warm, the voice she would put on if she had some particularly seditious scheme on the go which she knew his father would balk at.  She sat straight-backed in her chair at her desk in the library, the mathematical papers scattered about her long pale hands resting on the desk.  Around them were the double bank of bookshelves with the gallery round the top, filled with the soft leather-bound spines of books and the wooden boxes of scrolls she had bought.  The other desks were empty.  She had sent her students and the library clerk out while she talked with her son.  
Lady Arianna el Jien van Sietter, daughter of the el Jiens van Iarve.  She had a magnificent figure:  queenly, her head was held high under the weight of elaborately arranged curls of blonde hair with an occasional distinguished streak of white.  Her round blue eyes looked directly into his slanted blue eyes with a limpid clear gaze.  She was too clever to hide any part of this proposal in order to lure him in.  
Arkyll sat still in the chair by her desk:  broad-shouldered and muscular in the leather jerkin of the peace corps.  His exquisite blue eyes which were the same as those of his infamously beautiful uncle’s, the King’s General whose fingers the soldiers clung to in total devotion, looked back at her from his handsome tanned face with the full el Jien mouth:  sweet as a bowl of cherries, and the broad serene brow under his elegantly cut short black curls.  
“I would never ask you to take such an one seriously,” his mother assured him.  “I tell it you plain:  she is a bird-brain with no understanding of arts or literature, science or mathematics, politics or economics.  Lord van Thiel has neglected the family shamefully, never taking them to court to get any appreciation of good music or fine foods, witty conversation or considered argument.  She and the brothers have been brought up in the main by the mother who is but some Dame of the Thiel region who caught van Thiel’s heart in her fingers when he was a young man.  The brothers may be sent to some other region’s army, they will have military prowess to make them appealing to daughters of the high nobility, but this young woman will never take the fancy of any oldest son as it stands.”  
“The poor kid must have some qualities,” Arkyll said with a curving smile of the full red mouth they shared that managed to be both rueful and amused.  
“el Shosta says she stitches,” his mother was unable to refrain from curling her curved lip at this.  Arkyll glanced at the cuff of his own shirt:  only an everyday cotton one but beautifully embroidered in a complicated pattern of flowers.  “She is a good seat on an horse, of course.”  
“All the el Shostas can ride,” Arkyll acknowledged.  He waited but his mother appeared to have run out of appealing characteristics which might attract oldest sons of the high nobility like himself to the honourable daughter of the el Shostas van Thiel.  After a while she sighed and said, “I tell it you straight.  She is pretty but she is a rustic ignoramus from a back region.  van Thiel will take her to court this Winter but she will not get herself bestowed without ... something to push her.  van Thiel knows he cannot ask you to be taking her seriously, he only wants the help of someone ... high in honour to secure her happiness.”  
When she lifted her eyes to him they gleamed softly with maternal pride.  She put one long-fingered elegant hand out and rested it lightly on his strong arm above the beautiful intricate interlacing of flowers she herself had stitched on the cuff of his shirt-sleeve, sliding it down to give his big work-roughened gentle fingers an affectionate squeeze.  
She had always been determined that her children should not be treated with the flattery and favour normal to members of the high nobility.  She had barred the King’s University from offering his young brother the splendid suite of rooms they thought appropriate for the younger son of the el Maiens van Sietter, and of el Jien the great mathematician and economist.  She made them give him instead a room he would have to share with some peasant from who knew where who had got on in his studies only through having a good intellect.  But because of this lack of favouritism, she knew the quality of her own children.  Arkyll was the catch of his generation in marriage:  handsome and wealthy, strong of body and happy of heart, with the famous kind courtesy of the el Maiens.  His involvement in the peace corps was looked at askance but he was not, like herself and his foster brother, a pacifist.  He was like his father:  a man of honour.  
“What does papa say?” he enquired, raising one dark eyebrow above his exquisite slanted blue eye.  
She laughed like a peal of golden bells.  “My dear,” she said, “your father is disgusted by the whole scheme.  He says if ar’t taken in by van Thiel’s wiles and he has to have this young woman for a daughter by marriage he will never speak to me again.  Bear it in mind, he has met her.”  
Arkyll grinned at this.  
“Your father will be well content to give van Thiel the No,” his mother said, a quiet resignation creeping into her voice.  “Perhaps I can pretend I tried to sway his opinion but he has too firm an hand on my reins for me to influence him.”  They both sniggered at this, the round blue eyes and the slanted blue eyes flashing sideways so that for a few seconds they looked alike.  “van Thiel might still give me his counter,” she said wistfully.  
She had always been the more indulgent parent although she made other people treat them without favour.  His father, the sworn Lord and battle-scarred former commanding officer of a field troop, had been the one who exercised a stern discipline over the children and the household.  (Well, not over Arrie, of course.)  But this was politics.  His father kept the family and the management of their rambling castle home under a keen grey eye, sharing responsibilities for the region with his Lady wife.  She went to sit on the King’s councils at court and it was she – together with her brother the King’s Minister for Trade and Employment – who would put together proposals for which she sought the voting counters of fellow members of the high nobility either through reasoned debate or by the manipulation of marital and blood kinship networks.  Nearly the whole Eastern side of the country was in her pocket.  Even that old reprobate van Athagine with his regional and family traditions of contorted and absolute tyranny was the formerly close pleasure-hunting friend of her husband’s.  If she flashed him her ankle he would often grin and finger the knotted old scar on his chin and lick his full lips regretfully and chuck her his counter.  Lady Maive el Vaie van Soomara always threw her counter in with Lady van Sietter’s, they were careful not to speculate whether this was in apology because Arkyll’s father might have been a bit more than a friend to her once or twice.  Lady van Soomara was a famous honourable slut and there was so much gossip about his scandalous father from the days before he settled into domestic happiness with his family and the Lady wife he had accepted as a political match that it was hard to know what to believe.  
The one region in the East which Lady van Sietter could not count on to support her work was Thiel, where the sworn Lord was that ignorant buffton Clair el Shosta, who would rather go fishing in his own region’s lakes and rivers than debate the interests of his people at court.  He would be delighted to have any excuse to entrust his counter to the handsome brood-mare who tossed el Maien van Sietter’s counter about.  He was too stupid to understand how seditious were the democratic politics of Lady Arianna el Jien van Sietter, that proud beauty who would sometimes smile and talk to you in a cooing warm honeyed voice about stuff that bored you but she rested her hand on your stubby rein-roughened hand and lowered her lashes over her lovely blue eyes in her smile and you gave her a besotted smile back and your counter.  The virgin slut.  She would wave her considerable charms in your face but she had no intention of giving you any favour so small as a kiss and a quick fumble in a corridor.  You were extremely careful not to offer her more than a besotted smile.  That bookhead el Parva van Selaine still had a thin white scar on one cheek he picked up off van Sietter only for writing a poem praising the lovely Lady van Sietter’s domestic virtue.  Although van Sietter’s brother, General-Lord ‘Tashka’ el Maien van H’las, used to snigger and say van Sietter was not troubled for the famed chastity of his Lady wife:  pure as the snow-fed streams flowing into the River Arven.  He felt slighted because el Parva had failed to realise he was the one kept their castle home in such good order, not her.  Ho ho ho! what a story, that jolly dog Tashka el Maien was a joker alright.  That story about the farmer’s daughter, eh, eh?  Er um ....  Did I ever tell you about that time Tashka el Maien and Commander-Lord el Gaiel van H’las took my encampment to save el Jien van Vail from a practice raid I had planned?  Ho ho ho!  
Lady el Jien had a raft of proposals coming through key to her principled plans of humanist reform and suddenly Commander-Lord Clair el Shosta van Thiel, formerly of Second Thiel, had appeared at the gates of Castle Sietter, reluctantly making his way to court when he would much rather stop on a two-three weeks in the famous hunting territory of the Sietter Hills and then just go home.  He wandered into the library and sat down at Lady el Jien’s desk, looking at her with an hangdog expression of anxiety in his brown eyes and twirling his precious voting counter in a fidgety careless manner among her mathematical papers.  When she sent the students for some fresh air and the clerk to get them tea and biscuits, he blurted out an extraordinary appeal to her.  
Now here was her handsome bright-eyed laughing son lounging in the chair by her desk in the rough utilitarian peace corps jerkin which on his fit big body made the silly maidens sigh and throw themselves into languid attitudes as he walked by.  He grinned and said, “so van Thiel wants me to ... sniff around the young Lady’s skirts to get the other dogs coming sniffing.”  
Her pale warm face twitched in distaste.  She sighed and admitted it.  
“Perhaps you might consider it a day or two,” she said in a forlorn voice.  She lifted her proud head:  fair daughter of the el Jiens who had not chosen what man would take her hand in marriage and her favours in his bed, whose marriage had brought great renown and prestige to her oldest brother the sworn Lord of Iarve and only incidentally happiness to herself.  “The poor young woman,” she said softly.  “She is awkwardly situated.”  
The kind-hearted Captainofthepeace-Lord Arkyll el Maien van Sietter of the peace corps gave an heavy sigh and turned his exquisite slanted blue eyes aside.  

s he strolled into the huge echoing stone entrance hall out of the corridor leading to the castle offices, the chapel and the library, the flash of a smile caught Arkyll’s eye.  He turned his head and gave her a surreptitious grin back.  Tisha, the kitchen-maid.  His first lover.  She sauntered off into the kitchen corridors, he watched her through his lashes, the warm grin dancing in his eyes and on his sweet red mouth.  
When that little snake Arrie revealed to their mother that he was pinning Tisha’s favours he had the most dreadful difficulty persuading her to allow Tisha to stay on in her job.  That cat.  She only told because he had refused to ford the Arven in flood with her so she could go riding in the hills beyond.  Angels of Hell! the bloody river was nearly in full spate, his father would have nailed him if he had let her go in the spuming waters, Hanya had gone pale when he described it.  And the little snake, she picked a moment when his father was away to let it slip that he was pinning the favours of one of the servants.  
His father, far more sophisticated in his sexual ethos, would have understood but his mother was appalled.  There was an horrible inquisition even including his own mother desperately asking whether he had taken the proper precautions of using a condom to protect Tisha.  It was agony.  His mother was blushing like a basket of apples and crying with shame, saying, How coulds’t take advantage.  Consider the power has’t over her in her position.  Tisha! the angelic slut of the kitchens who had such power over the men.  He was bewildered at first until he realised that she thought he was the one who had seduced Tisha.  She was probably the only person in the whole castle who thought Tisha might be in any way an innocent.  
And Tisha was so cross that she never let him fuck her again, although he begged and pleaded that he had persuaded his mother not to make his father send her home with a small fortune in her pocket.  Tisha was outraged at the prospect of being sent away from the castle full of cosy corners where it was so easy to lure some panting footman or a gardener under the rose-bushes.  Or the pretty young future sworn Lord (so sweet as a strawberry and just old enough for the picking of his favours) into a larder with a few old cushions carelessly slung on the floor.  
His cock stirred softly to remember how she flashed a look and said, come yer, I’ll give ya a special treat, in that warm sticky voice that was like the jam he used to sneak.  
What a treat!  The gentle hands on his body, the caressing lips to his eager mouth.  She was notoriously sweet to the kiss and her fingers played so tenderly on his buttons then in his underpants and around his suddenly thrilled cock.  He started moaning anxiously, flicking his eyes back at the larder door.  “Du not fret,” she whispered with a warm wet caress of her tongue in his ear for good measure  “I c’n lock it n’ I ‘ave dun.”  Her fingers came away from his cock, groping in his pocket, then she grumbled crossly:  “What kinda young man are ya! Lord Arkyll, no condom for a poor maid.  I s’pose I mus’ give ya a kiss for now and ya must come back to take my favour.”  The selfish wench, she always expected the men to take the precautions for her.  She flashed him such a warm laughing cross look then suddenly she was on her knees with his cock in her sweet soft mouth, he was leaning back on the door helplessly grunting with pleasure.  The sucking on his now rigid hard shaft, the fingers caressing up and down a vein in it which was standing out and throbbing with the blood coming thundering to his loins, caressing his balls which were so tight, he was not going to be able to take it much longer, he longed to stay there but he was bursting to go and all too soon his hips were bucking and jerking, he was shooting off into her sweetly kissing expert mouth.  
He was so careful, only going down there to go down on her once a week.  Well, possibly he had trotted into the kitchens twice in the week but surely no more often than he had always done.  Ever since he was a little child he had been sneaking into the larders while the castle snoozed in a nap, after the jam.  That little weasel, how did she come to realise that it was no longer raspberry jam he was enjoying in there, instead it was the creamy pink cunt of the generous kitchen-maid, so juicy to his excited tongue, so warm and welcoming to his happy thrusting cock.  
Arkyll’s lips curled in rueful admiration of his sister’s vengeance on him.  He gave a last surreptitious sighing grin in the direction of Tisha’s luscious backside (against which he had once or twice been allowed to  bump his excited hips and press his stomach as he came into her warm tight cunt from behind) disappearing towards the kitchens as he walked on through the entrance hall.  
Mind, he had been a bit disgusted when Tisha suggested he get his foster brother Hanya to join the two of them in the larder.  Poor old Han, he was so beautiful they used to say thirteen Angels danced on his broad shoulders.  He had hair like the sun and beautiful round blue eyes, his cheek used to be so golden-brown with the tan in Summer, pale as milk in Winter.  He was older than Arkyll and had just taken a commission as Lieutenant in their fathers’ infamous old troop Fourth Sietter.  His big muscular body looked so gorgeous in his red tunic with the gold-embroidered collar and the thigh-length brown boots, women and men, they were all swooning over him wherever he went.  
He loathed it.  He used to have a glaring frown on his lovely face, looking like the Angel of the Sword striding down the castle corridors until Arrie came dancing down shouting, “C’mon Han!  Are you coming for a ride?  I’ll race you,” and he would run off with her to the hills to gallop laughing where nobody looked on him softly.  That little snake never looked softly on a soul, until she grew up and one day for some wild reason of her own she looked on Hanya.  
Arrie was just a scruffy lanky brat then, terrifying them all by her failure to feel fear, whether at riding the wild war-horses or jumping her hunter over the high hedges or climbing the central tower, Angel of Hell! that time she climbed the bloody central tower, what a minx!  Even when she fell in love with Hanya it was not his beauty she looked softly on, she was much too wild a proud creature to give a copper coin’s curse for a smooth cheek or a lovely leg.  Poor old Han.  She knew him to the core.  She had him twisted round her fingers all her life and when she decided she wanted his heart, she just pulled on the strings and he fell like an Angel out of the skies into her arms.  
That little brat.  Even bloody Tisha blamed him instead of her.  She caught Arkyll giving Arrie a few well-chosen words on the subject of being a sneaking spy and Arrie exclaimed, “oh Tisha! he is being so mean to me,” and Tisha said, “What a man!” in biting tones of scorn.  “Du not give him yer mind, Lady Arrie, come with me now n’ I s’ll get ya a bit of cake,” and she put that lovely soft clinging arm around the wild cat’s skinny shoulders and drew Arrie off, tossing back to Arkyll as scornful a look as any fine Lady whose toe he had trodden on in the dance.  

e strolled out of the castle and down the wide steps with the ramp on one side into the courtyard and there he met his father.  
Commander-Lord Clair el Maien van Sietter strode through the cobbled courtyard on long lean legs encased in an old pair of thigh-length brown army boots, soft now with the ceaseless polishing he still insisted on for his kit.  He was wearing a faded old scarlet hacking jacket and had a black hard hat on his head of elegantly cut longish black curls in which threads of grey were apparent.  He was snapping a riding crop irritably on the side of one boot, his thin firm mouth pursed, his slanted grey eye clouded.  His chin was dark and bristly since he appeared to have gone out without letting the men-servants shave him.  Probably he had woken up early and after lying fretting for a while had snatched up these garments to go riding hard out in the hills, pretending to assess the ground for some small hunting party they might undertake since el Shosta van Thiel had turned up to claim their hospitality for a few days.  With his son in duty bound and his daughter on the battle front he had little heart for the hunting.  
He stopped as he saw Arkyll and regarded him with a narrow suspicious slantwise stare.  Arkyll’s slanted blue eyes dipped under the sideways glare of his slanted grey eyes.  
“Um halloo papa,” Arkyll fluted, fidgeting his feet in the tough peace worker boots with the metal toecaps.  “Just on my way to the offices after my chat with mama.  Bit of paperwork to finish off.”  
van Sietter’s lean tanned face seemed to give a quiver, his lip curled in a look of disdain that glinted up into his clouded grey eye.  
“C’mon papa, gimme rein,” Arkyll said with an appealing smile.  “I am not even to offer her a ring, it’s a matter of a trip down East for the fishing and a dance or two:  an holiday.  It is for mama and her proposals for the poor.”  
van Sietter was a man of notoriously high honour who would never speak a slighting word of a young Lady of the high nobility, or even of his own Lady wife, so he said nothing to this but his sniff was eloquent.  “I think it will rain the morrow,” he said coldly.  
“That was an encouraging letter we had from cousin Vadya,” Arkyll offered him.  “Surely Uncle Tashka will prevail before Winter comes and they will come home for mid-winter Angels’ day.”  
His father’s head of elegant black curls under the hard hat tipped mournfully down and he poked sulkily at the toe of his boot with his riding crop.  Naturally he did not have favourites among his children:  his son in duty bound, his two sons in blood, but he adored his wild daughter and broke his heart every day thinking about her away at war.  She was not even by the side of the husband who had always managed to keep her safe from her own wild ways under his beautiful blue eye although at the least of it she was in the offices of his brother:  General-Lord Tashka el Maien van H’las.  Meanwhile, what of her husband, his dearly beloved son in duty bound, the child of the long-lost Captain of his heart.  They had received a stilted letter from his daughter just after she rode off to the battlefront in his wake that mentioned as if it were an aside that when she went by his troop for the two nights and one day she was permitted with him on her way to the Generals’ strategic staff offices, she found that the war-dogs had been let loose too early in a defence of his encampment and had attacked him and presumably had completely torn up what had been a famously angelic beauty.  He had never supposed his daughter cared about the physical beauty of his son in duty bound but when he read the cold words pretending all was well in a situation he knew from his own traumatic experience must be Hell, he feared dreadfully for the young couple he had reluctantly permitted to marry on the eve of war.  
“How about a game of chess,” Arkyll was saying in a coaxing voice but he shook his head mournfully, loosing Arkyll’s hand from his arm and moving his long legs slowly up the steps into the castle.  

hen Arkyll walked into the peace corps offices down in the town his sister officers Captainofthepeace-Dame Lisette Stariel and Captainofthepeace Mimi Jien were standing about in the reception hall by the duty officer’s desk.  Mimi was grumbling about some mission she had been on that morning and Lisette had a casual arm around Mimi’s shoulders.  The young Lieutenantofthepeace on duty was lifting shyly adoring eyes at the pair of them.  
They were both tall and the peace work training had encouraged their physical fitness so that they stood about easily with the strength evident in their long muscular limbs, their firm breasts and backs in the leather jerkins that could turn knives aside.  Commanderofthepeace-Sir Lial Darien, who commanded not only this peace corps troop but had a directing eye over the others which Lady van Sietter was slowly managing to establish in the region, disliked it that they were married and had tried to persuade Lisette to go to the troop in the Maier Pass where she had family.  But the two women argued that even in the army officers of the same rank were permitted to marry and promised laughingly that if they ever had a serious quarrel one of them would apply to transfer.  They questioned whether the code of honour which army officers adhered to was relevant in the peace corps.  At first Darien – an ex-army officer with an horrendous duelling scar down his face – argued fiercely that it was but then he became embarrassed and Arkyll had to join in on his side, his blue eyes sparkling in merriment because he knew Darien had suddenly remembered him that members of Arkyll’s family had scandalously crossed their vows in the army.  
“’Loo Arkyll!” the two women said casually.  “Been out on your mission?”  
“Had to go and see my mother,” he answered.  “Bit of family business to sort out,” he pulled a face.  “I shall have to ask the Commander for leave of absence.”  
Mimi’s dark eyes creased in a sympathetic scowl, she gave a toss of the head so that her curls of brown hair were chucked back behind her in the gesture that frequently caused villains to pause in admiration when she did it preparatory to going in to tackle them and she would disarm them and pin them down even more easily.  
“Sorry to hear it, chum,” Lisette said.  She had cropped her strawberry blonde hair at the back and sides like a soldier and stood rangy, lean and tall, a typical Sietter officer-aristocrat.  Her keen grey eyes used to gleam fiercely on miscreants as she stood with hands on hips glaring at the trouble about her so that they quite often stopped their nonsense immediately, apologised to everyone and slunk quietly off home.  
Arkyll knew that like other military-minded members of the high nobility, van Thiel despised the peace corps.  He had seen van Thiel’s scornful look at his rough leather jerkin and tough peace worker boots, at the belt in which he carried only a wooden baton, no weaponry which might have been useful in defence but might also have provoked more aggression on the part of drunken fools looking for trouble.  
When they were children, he and Hanya of course wanted to be soldiers like their fathers and uncles.  As they grew older they realised that his mother intended them for the peace corps.  It would make such a statement for the future sworn Lord to go not into the smart parade silks of an army officer but into the hard work of the peace corps devoted to helping those who were poor and suffering in the region.  Hanya had always had pacifist leanings and was temperamentally inclined to the peace corps but one day he suddenly said:  “Major General-Sir Dar Vaie is fretting because Arkyllan is going to the peace corps and it is evident Clairan will not be a soldier.  Arkyllan will need someone one day whose humanist principles he can rely on to be Major General of the army, in order to bring it in line with the peace corps.  I have asked the Major General for a commission in Fourth Sietter, the troop where you, papa, and my father in blood and Uncle Tashka and Uncle Pava served so happily together.”  
Major General-Sir Dar Vaie had been an officer of Fourth Sietter himself, their Uncle Tashka’s companion in many scrapes and misdemeanours, a former junior of their father’s and a brother officer of Hanya’s father.  He worshipped the memory of Hanya’s father and venerated van Sietter and he was ecstatic when Hanya asked to go into their old troop.  Their father was much less pleased than you would expect.  He had commanded the troop during the first Sietter-H’las war, leading them in a brutally elegant victorious strategy designed by Hanya’s father in which Hanya’s father lost his own life.  They would say of van Sietter that he broke his heart so badly over what he had to sacrifice for that victory that he went off to court afterwards and broke everyone-else’s heart.  
Hanya liked the army in peace time (and he did look exceptionally tasty in the Sietter colours) but now they were at war and he was having such an horrific time that he no longer wrote even to Arkyll.  The only news they got of him were the army despatches and an occasional cold note from Arrie, part of whose duties were to ride out and deliver the Generals’ orders to the commanding officers of field troops, saying, I had the opportunity to see Hanya recently while delivering him his orders.  We used his interesting adaptation of the Maien Tiger in aggressive defence of the encampment when we came under threat of attack but I may not write the detail of this.  He asks it of you to bear him as ever in your hearts as your loving son and brother.  
Arkyll had recently been entrusted with a difficult mission in which he had spent weeks patiently putting together slender threads of information collected by the peace workers in one of his Units.  Mimi and Lisette knew that Darien would curse at having to get someone-else to take it over and Arkyll himself would miss the demanding and absorbing task which had been such a good means of distracting his thoughts from the sufferings of so many of his family and friends on the battle front.  Every so often it would be necessary for Arkyll to go and spend time on extremely dull ceremonial duties and they would all say, “such bad luck, chum.  Come out for a bowl when you get back.”  
He loved the comradeship of these intelligent, gentle-hearted, fiercely committed workers so tenderly managed under the pale blue eye of the scarred Commanderofthepeace-Sir Darien.  He had missed Hanya dreadfully when Han went into the army;  he could ride down to visit him in Luthian in the Winter but most Summers Hanya went out on campaign.  He could hardly wait to get involved in some work himself and have comrades like the jolly brother officers who came back with Han on leave sometimes.  Then when he started under Darien’s command, he came to appreciate the work they were involved in for its own importance.  He loved it that he went out armed only with his hand-to-hand fighting skills and a wooden baton to break into horrible airless places where starving people, some of them children, were brutally exploited, to insist jovially that the rights of the prostitutes be respected, to argue patiently with drunkards, protect their frightened life partners and children and persuade them to consider how they might better manage their happiness.  It was something like, to be the future sworn Lord not lapped in silks and satins, stamping around looking pretty on the parade ground for silly maidens to swoon over, but to be part of this magnificent project of his mother’s.  
For a while, too, there was Daria.  
She was a Captain down in the Maier Pass peace corps troop:  slighter of frame than Mimi and Lisette, a lean muscular athletic woman, fully fit and physically hard.  Her black hair in the tight little coils was cut close about a warm brown face and a smile so sweet and wise.  He was just a Lieutenant back then, she was several years older than him.  He came down to liaise with them in the Maier Pass on a mission, under her orders.  When the mission was nicely wrapped up with just the paperwork to relax over, they went for a casual bowl in the modest pleasant hotel where Arkyll was staying.  Silly innocent! he was disappointed at first when she appeared alone, he thought the others did not want to come out drinking with the future sworn Lord.  
They were sitting on the veranda looking out into the sunlit vistas of the rolling green and brown hills with the River Arven running smooth and strong down to Port Paviat. Arkyll said something about a walking holiday he had once enjoyed with Han, when they went all the way down to Port H’las and there they went sailing with his uncles and cousins van H’las.  Daria put her hand softly on the back of his neck.  
Her hand was warm and gentle, she brushed the fingers lightly on the nape of his neck where the hairs suddenly stood up in excitement.  He turned his head and looked into her smiling brown eyes with a shy laugh in his slanted blue eyes.  His cock had started lifting and filling already, she was so fit and muscular sitting smiling softly on him with that intelligence vivid in her lovely eyes.  During the mission they had enjoyed discussions about the peace corps work and ways in which the chain of command was embedded in the country via the regional armies.  It had been like being with his family who were all of them sharp keen minds he was so proud of, constantly flashing the debates around him about pacifism and humanism and whether some painting was the finest expression of beauty ever created or some stupid collection of squiggles not properly aligned to the appropriate angle (that was his mathematician mother).  He had enjoyed Daria’s friendly supervision in the work so much and now this too?  He leaned eagerly over and pressed into her kiss.  
Her mouth pressed to his was soft and the lips were opening, her fingers tucking into the curls of his short hair to hold him in their kiss.  She was pushing her tongue gently in his mouth, caressing his mouth with her strong soft tongue.  She drew the tongue back, their lips parted, she said simply, “go to your room, shall we?”  
The pretty little brown breasts that emerged from her jerkin and shirt and bodice over which he could place his big hands.  They were like a pair of small apples to his fingers.  He pressed his lips to one as they sank naked into the bed, flicking at the nipple of the other one with his thumb, making her laugh softly in her throat and her muscular thighs open gently up around his hips.  He lay sucking at her nipples, he could take the whole of her sweet little breast in his big el Jien mouth.  He moved down over her body, kissing the strong ribcage and the hard flat muscles of her stomach.  His fingers ran ahead of his mouth to tangle in the black bush of hair around her sex, slide through to her warm soft wet sex.  She giggled when he gently tickled her clitoris – that splendid Captain whom he had seen staring so sternly at the people they arrested! and sighed and gasped when he put his finger to her juicy vulva, throwing her hips wider still.  He slid his finger to caress the excitable erogenous spot between her vulva and her anus while he stroked her clit with his tongue making her laugh so softly and start to make gentle noises in the back of her throat.  He slid his tongue into the creaming soft muscles of her cunt to the ecstatic tune of her laughing noise. Her hands were still resting in the curls of his hair, starting to tighten on his head with exhilaration.  Her cum was a little tart to the taste, he stuck his tongue around to savour it.  
By now his cock was rock hard with enjoyment, his balls tight to bursting.  She was well on the way and he came surging up in her arms with his slanted blue eyes alight with love and laughter, reaching hurriedly to his discarded breeches to fish in the pocket for a condom.  She put her hands round to hold his big buttocks, squeezing them while he put the condom on so that he sniggered and tossed his head about. 
He put the head of his cock to her sex and pressed in slowly, making her throw back her head of closely cut coiled black hair and gasp, her lovely brown eyes wide and sparkling.  She gripped on his firm big buttocks and her muscular thighs tightened, her slender strong fit body started moving easily in time with his, they pressed close, kissing and gasping and laughing and loving.  The coiled tight excitement was springing in their muscular loins and getting tighter, tighter.  He was thrusting into her faster and she was rising up to meet him then she was chucking herself about in the bed under him with her gentle brown eyes wide and her arms clutching around his big muscular chest.  He was jerking uncontrollably into her one last time and they lay laughing softly in each others’ arms.  
It was the best and she was so much fun, lying with her brown skin lapped in the white cotton sheets arguing with him about pacifism and throwing her lean-muscled legs open for him to lie between and penetrate her gentle woman’s sex.  He did think it a bit unfair that she so much enjoyed his caressing tongue to her sex when she disliked to kiss cock although he never said so, he felt so honoured to have the favours of such a beautiful intelligent officer of the peace corps.  But it was only six months before she gave him the go-by.  His heart was so tangled in her fingers by then that he burst into tears, saying, “but my father likes you!”  
“Yes,” she said, “but you have never introduced me to the notice of your mother.”  
He wept with shame to admit it.  His mother was oblivious to the small affairs of the body and heart which happened all around her and he had just quietly enjoyed the pleasure of Daria’s favours, knowing that his mother would disapprove.  
“I am no maiden of the high nobility who could stand by you when you have to give a formal greeting to the Knights and Dames,” Daria said in that warm wise gentle voice.  “Nor do I wish to be giving up my work just yet for the sake of children, while you must look to secure the succession for the region.  Let us part friends, my darling, and bear each other in affection, not quarrel while we fuck in dark corners under your mother’s eyeline. You are very young, sweetheart.  I am ... a mature woman.  Should you not prefer someone with whom you might play?”  
His father came down to the peace corps offices and enquired if he might be due any leave, pressing a sympathetic hand on his shoulder and offering to take him to court for some concerts, art exhibitions and parties (and to look about at suitable maidens of the high nobility) but he felt revolted by the idea and sulkily said he had some important work in hand, I give you my thanks, papa.  Mimi and Lisette invited him round to their home for dinner and listened patiently to his dreary moaning about how selfish Daria was being.  Hanya was out on campaign but Arrie showed up in the offices, long-legged and slender in jodhpurs and a jumper with a patch on one elbow, saying, “Halloo Arkyllan.  Are you coming for a ride?” with an unusually warm soft flash of her grey eyes and Darien said:  “Leave that paperwork to Stariel, el Maien, and lend Lady Arianna countenance in her ride,” although everyone knew the little wild cat was forever jauntering about the hillsides on her own in a most improper manner.  
He knew it well, this dreadful daughter of the el Shostas would be nothing like the gentle intelligent beautiful Captainofthepeace Daria Inien with the soft warm loving laugh and strong well-disciplined body.  She would be some lazy pussy-cat, silly and low in opinions, yawning when people discussed the poor even of her own region and casting flirting eyes at the army officers.  Well, he was not even being asked to offer her a ring.  Poor kid, what a life stuck in the back region of Thiel.  Let her go to court with a bit of gossip glittering around her silly head to make the men’s eyes turn towards her.  

he was pretty.  
The daughter of the el Shostas was a plump curving creature with golden hair dressed simply on her head.  She had a sweetly full bosom, a tidy curve into her waist and then an appealing curve out round her hips.  She probably had a good fresh complexion from the exercise of running about the Thiel woods and rivers but it was not possible to tell because her cheek was pink with powder.  Her dress was old-fashioned like her hair, Arkyll knew this must be an happy accident.  Thiel was such a back region they would not have access to dress-makers and ladies’ maids skilled in the new fashions.  The tight waist and big skirts suited her figure although the petticoats meant it was not possible to guess at the shape of her legs but Arkyll knew she must be a good rider – they all were, the el Shostas.  He could assume she would have muscular legs with a good definition in the thigh.  
Tisha’s had been a softly indulged squishy thigh but discreet subsequent exploration had led Captainofthepeace-Lord el Maien to decide that he preferred an athletic leg with the muscles delineated so clearly that you could run a finger up the defining groove in the thigh.  Like Daria’s leg.  
For a moment he thought van Thiel and his mother were mistaken, that there would be no difficulty palming off this ladybird on some decent son of the high nobility more her own age.  The daughter of the el Shostas was a bit young for him.  He ought to have gone to court some time back and picked out someone elegant with good political connections and an appreciation of the work he was involved in.  Now here he was, being asked to pretend to an interest in a young woman so she could be taken to the mid-winter Angels’ day balls at court with a flutter of gossip to puff her into the arms of someone suitable.  He knew it was because he was considered too high above her but he felt curiously piqued by it nevertheless.  She was a tidy little handful of curves and probably full of bounce:  fit with running and riding wild in the Thiel woods, possibly swimming in the lakes too.  Naked.  She stood with her head turned to the side, maybe she was blushing under the face paint, she was charming in her old-fashioned green silk gown.  He thought that if they cleaned up her face she would easily catch someone’s eye.  
Then she lifted her head, dipped lashes which he realised were painted so much that they had actually stuck together and put an hand up to cover a snigger out the corner of her painted mouth.  Instead of giving him a friendly greeting, she slid her gaze rapidly over him with a dip of the eyes that he might have thought shy if they had not gone straight to the rank of First Sietter officers dismounting behind himself and his parents:  dashing young blades in the regional colours of red with the gold-embroidered collar and the thigh-length brown boots.  
There would be no problem with her being a slut, of course, but she must learn to be discreet. Men of honour expected to give the glove if a favour was being forced or seduced but they did not like to be constantly throwing their lives in the hazard just because some stupid woman was so careless that everyone thought they could gossip freely about the manner in which she stained her marital honour.  
Still, she looked biddable.  A man with a firm hand would be able to hold her on a tight rein and ensure she behaved with outward propriety.  Maybe she had ... some pleasant pretty chatting ways? although his mother said she was ignorant and his father, who had actually met her at some fishing party of van Thiel’s, was ominously silent about her.  
van Thiel was coming to offer a sword arm to his father, saying “Ho ho ho! you are Clair and I am Clair, we are both Clair!”  van Sietter cast a speaking look at his Lady wife at this but she only looked at him with veiled blue eyes so he grasped the shoulder of his youngest son and pulled him forward, saying with gritted teeth, “yes and this is a Clair, too.  We are all Clairs here.”  van Thiel looked in surprise into young Lord Clair el Maien’s astonished face and then started rolling about with laughter, slapping his thighs and slapping poor Clairan on the back so hard that Clairan, who was slight of frame, stumbled forwards.  Arkyll sniggered into his arm, pretending to sneeze.  
Dame van Thiel was wafting them up the castle steps and down the castle corridors into a small parlour while babbling eagerly on.  She had clearly determined that this was an intimate social occasion and that they should be greeted in a privy manner by the family while the officers and lesser aristocracy of their retinue were directed off to some larger more formal reception room.  Arkyll walked into a room full of flowered fabrics, noticing with another snigger his father wincing because the pattern of the curtains clashed with not only the carpet but the different flowered fabric of the sofas and armchairs.  Normally this was probably a comfortable sitting-room for the ladies, full of sewing-baskets and silly novels.  It had been tidied into a stiff-backed propriety, the cheap ornaments people had given other people as gifts had been interspersed with gold and silver objects which belonged in more formal parts of the castle and there was only a small collection of faded poetry and philosophy books on one side table which Clairan glanced at with a raised eyebrow.  
On the central table were a selection of delicate small sandwiches with the crusts cut off them and tiered plates of cakes, iced biscuits and Soomara chocolates.  This was obviously Dame van Thiel’s idea of a most elegant entertainment for the el Maiens and Lady el Jien.  The biscuits had been iced with the Sietter insignia.  Arkyll was tempted to nudge his little brother and point this out but he preserved a proper solemn dignity since he was being wafted by Dame van Thiel’s excited little hands to a sofa by young Lady el Shosta’s side.  The two el Shosta boys nudged each other and snickered, young Lady el Shosta became convulsed with the giggles, twisting to the side and refusing to turn to him a face in which the blush was so high that it was evident beneath the pink powder.  
“Sevie!” her mother said crossly, “I mean, Lady Sevianne.  Do pass Lord Arkyll those cakes.  She made them herself, your Ladyship, I mean Lady Arianna.  So sweet as any you could buy from the pastry shop.”  
Dame van Thiel was still a very attractive full-figured beauty herself, obviously the source for young Lady el Shosta’s sweet curving figure and the puckered cherub’s bow of her lips just visible under poorly applied paint.  The paint was rather better applied over Dame van Thiel’s mouth.  Since his naive mother was sitting closer to him and his father had been seated in an armchair too far away to kick him, Arkyll made a sweetly smiling long inspection of his prospective mother by marriage’s mature beauties.  Dame van Thiel lowered her lashes over her blue eyes at this with a small smirk in the corner of her mouth that made an alluring dimple dip in and out her cheek before turning to nudge Sevie’s hand holding the plate of cakes towards Arkyll again.  It was plain to be seen how she had succeeded in entrapping old van Thiel, who was sitting uncomfortably upright on one of the sofas, casting wistful looks at the door.  He had probably been a dashing officer-aristocrat in his day:  big and blond, but he was fattening up now in spite of the hard riding he still did at the hunt.  The way he sat on the sofa instead of in some favourite armchair which had moulded itself to the shape of his bottom made it evident that he never spent time in this ladies’ sitting-room.  He was like a dog not normally allowed in the house, watching anxiously for the right moment to beg for a walk – he was just watching for when he might say, “well my dear, perhaps I should take the menfolk to the games room for some billiards.”  Poor old dog.  Because they wanted Arkyll to continue sitting here with Lady el Shosta he would not be allowed to go off and have snifters of spirits and a game of billiards.  
“Y’know, papa,” Arkyll said, his kind heart exercised by the sight of van Thiel’s mournful expression when he was handed a delicate bowl of tea.  “You were telling me how much you admired the arrangements in Lord van Thiel’s kennels.  Will you not ask him to show them you again?”  
“Pleasure,” van Thiel assured his fellow sworn Lord hurriedly and with great sincerity, his eye brightening.  He gave Arkyll a look of intense gratitude.  
Lord van Sietter shot a look of uncompromising resentment at his son, across the annoyed glances of Dame van Thiel at her husband.  He replaced the piled plateful of tiny sandwiches which he had been hungrily scoffing on the table and unfolded his long lean legs from his armchair.  As he turned to go out the room he gave Arkyll a piercing stare from his slanted grey eyes, Arkyll looked back with his exquisite slanted blue eyes limpid with innocent inquiry, successfully repressing his giggle.  
The two el Shosta lads seized the opportunity to rush out as well, chortling loudly as soon as they were out of the door, and Arkyll was left accepting a cake from a plate shakily held out to him by a sniggering damsel who would not look him in the eye.  Young Lady el Shosta was squirming uncomfortably in her seat beside him and sliding anxiously sniggering glances aside at her mother.  Arkyll stopped imagining Dame van Thiel’s plump bow of a mouth wrapped round his cock and took a cake from the plate with a flash of his slanted blue eye at Lady el Shosta beside him.  She cast her over-painted eyes up at him briefly and then suddenly aside but not before he had seen an all too familiar look in eyes that sparkled with nervous exhilaration.  
Suddenly he realised that she had not looked at the young First Sietter officers with an eye calculating which was the easiest fruit to pick from the tree.  He realised that under the vivid paint on her face she was even younger than he had supposed, not much older than his baby brother.  Her manner was that of the young women who would come and hover nearby if he and his peace corps chums were taking tea in a café – women too young to go into the taverns or even the hotel bars.  Mimi, Lisette and his Lieutenant Jamies Velor would start laughing and kicking him, he would kick them back but eventually he would smile at the silly maidens and they would come in a blushing bouquet of rosy cheeks holding out bad reproductions of pictures of him from the gossip-sheets and begging him to scrawl a few words on them.  
This behaviour was not at all what he had expected of some younger daughter of the high nobility, confident of her social rank and brought up in a spoiled indulgence to have an arrogant appreciation of her own beauty and cleverness.  He saw her hunching her shoulders around her lovely curving body and he realised with a qualm at his heart that like so many of these nervous shy maidens who stuttered to beg him for a signature to his picture, she did not even realise she was pretty.  Her figure was not fashionable but he pictured her riding careless in the hunt with her family or fishing the rivers with a bunch of young friends, the unselfconscious smile curving her pouted cherub’s bow of a mouth with no paint on it and her shoulders throwing back to cast the line so that her round bosom lifted.  He thought of her dancing shyly with the young men who would be discouraged from becoming intimate with her and fretting that they did not come asking for her hand because there was something unattractive about her, rather than something about her mother’s repressive eye which made them go elsewhere for a dancing partner.  She would be eaten up by some of the sons of the high nobility like the tea-time treats her mother was anxiously offering his mother.  
His mother had with an effort started a conversation about stitching (which bored her dreadfully although she turned it out supremely well).  Arkyll was about to engage Lady el Shosta in some light chit-chat when he saw with a qualm his young brother Clair shift in the sofa opposite and lean forward, pushing to the side of his plate a biscuit of which he had taken one bite before discarding it as inedible.  
Clair gravely fixed the Lady el Shosta with his serious grey eye.  He was a slender scholar with the delicate el Maien frame and the same features as their sister Arrie’s but he had dark hair which he kept cut shorter than the fashion while she was blonde and they rarely looked alike because Arrie almost always had a cold lack of expression on her face (except when she had just sold you down the river to your mother when an hideously beautiful joy would make her face light up like a pale Angel’s).  Clair’s face was mobile with gentle humour and affection and when thinking something through he would frequently stick his tongue out of the corner of his mouth in a peculiarly appealing manner.  
“Have you read a good book lately?”  Clair inquired in a tone of polite interest.  “I see you have Piria’s classic text on the mundane here,” he added, picking up one of the faded volumes on the side table.  
Arkyll groaned to himself.  It was clearly something that had been suggested to him when he complained that he had no idea what to say to people who did not know anything about architecture or agriculture, V’lava’s darker poems or Hyaline’s laughing watercolours or where to go at court for a tip-top meal of P’shan sweetly spiced delicacies and how to get a table there since that restaurant was always full.  
“Um, such lovely cakes!” Arkyll said loudly but the unfortunate young woman was giggling now and saying, while sliding her eyes at her mother, “Gracious Angels! I do not have time for books, what with the stitching and cleaning stuff and helping my mother with the household, whatever.  I swear, I should like a nice rest with a book.”  
An appalled look came into Clair’s all too expressive face, Arkyll hurriedy repeated his compliment about the cakes but she was only sniggering and giggling at Clair’s horrified expression.  
Such nonsense.  He knew it well, she was obviously a lazy pussy-cat who snuck off from any cleaning of ornaments or flower-arranging they made her do in order to hide in some rarely used room and stick her head in dreadful novels about brigands or pirates carrying off fainting maidens and then improbably refusing to stain their honour, preferring to die in their chaste arms when their cruel vengeful fathers caught up with the unhappy couple.  At the least of it she had not started recounting one of these to his highly intelligent brother who would have been even more revolted than he was to imagine she did not read at all.  Arkyll sat politely inclining his head to the sniggering maiden by his side, repressing his own sniggers and wishing Hanya had been in the frame of mind to appreciate a long hilarious letter about it all.  
Actually the cakes were light and sweet, very tasty.  

ying with his head on his arms thrown back onto the pillows of his bed staring at the canopy above him, Arkyll heard a gentle tapping on his door.  When he lifted his head and called out, “Halloo!” Clair opened the door and came to sit on the bed beside him, looking at him in an hilariously stern solemn manner.  Arkyll lay back in his pillows, raising one dark eyebrow in question over his warmly affectionate slanted blue eye.  
“Arkyllan,” Clair said in a voice of quivering appeal.  “You are not truly going to offer for that ... that person are you?”  
Arkyll laughed.  “C’mon, Clairan, gimme rein,” he said lazily.  
“I prithou!” Clair said, still intent in appeal.  “You cannot seriously want to offer for ... that silly bitch!”  
“You are being very rude,” Arkyll said sternly, leaning up on his elbow in annoyance at this.  “Shut it, Clairan.  You do not understand about these matters.”  
“Yes I do!” Clair said.  Arkyll saw in consternation that his lip was quivering.  “I know that mama wants van Thiel’s counter for her programme of proposals.  I know how many people will benefit, so much poverty may be weeded out, but I beg it of you, Arkyllan, not to sacrifice your own happiness for that.”  The tears suddenly spilled from his round grey eyes.  Arkyll sat up quickly and gave him a soft buffet on the shoulder before putting an arm out for Clair to lean in to his shoulder.  
“Stop being a goose,” he said, giving his brother’s cropped head of hair a casual caress.  “I am not going to offer for her.  She is rather young, eh?  They just want me to pretend to be interested then she can go off to court and the other silly sons of the high nobility will come chasing her.  There now, shut it, you soppy bit of biscuit.  Gimme rein.”  
“I was so worried!” Clair cried, sobbing now with relief.  “C’mon, Arkyllan, confess it.  She is a silly bitch.”  
“I shall not say such a cruel thing about anyone,” Arkyll said angrily.  “Never mind a ... shy and sweet young woman who has not been brought up to the high standard of discussion and morals which we have.”  
“Well it is not nearly so cruel as the things Arrie will say if you bring home such a bird-brain,” Clair pointed out, wiping his sleeve over his eyes.  
A quiver of apprehension went through Arkyll only to imagine what his sister would do to some silly bitch like Lady el Shosta if she were ever brought in a wedding coach to be the Lady wife of el Maien van Sietter.  How fortunate that he was not going to marry her – for her!  
“Why do people imagine mama and papa would make you take someone like that?”  Clair demanded indignantly, “when they let Hanya and Arrie choose to marry each other for love.”  
Arkyll laughed.  “Han does not have to think about who he marries,” he said.  “He is not of the high nobility, silly goose.  He is a Knight.”  
Clair looked surprised to realise that the oldest brother under whose affectionate eye he and Arrie had always run about was not after all the same as they were.  He said slowly, “but Arrie.  Papa was only fretting because Han was riding to war direct from the honeymoon.  He never tried to put up Arrie like some disgusting piece of meat for sale.”  
Arkyll smiled.  “No,” he said, “not papa.  But mama was hoping to bestow her on Stevan el T’fel van P’shan.”  
“What?!” Clair cried indignantly.  “That kid who showed off about his skating when we went up to P’shan for the winter sports!  He is even younger than me.”  
“He was a skilful sportsman even then,” Arkyll answered.  “That was a long time ago.  He is a young man now.  In a two-three years they will send him to someone’s army.  He will probably go to be cousin Vadya’s junior officer.  He is some years younger than Arrie but he is an oldest son and will inherit what is the wealthiest region in the country.  She would have suited the el T’fels, she is a woman of high honour and el T’fel would give the glove if any man of slack morals so much as looked at her.  She would have helped them with the defence of the region and she liked the winter sports almost as much as she loves her horses.”  
He watched Clair think about young van P’shan with whom they had once enjoyed an happy holiday playing at the winter sports in the H’velst Mountains.  The el T’fels with their slanted dark Northern eyes and thin wiry frames made for dashing young officers.  He watched Clair think about Stevan el T’fel grown up and wearing the double-breasted black tunic with blue details of the H’las army.  
“Why do they not palm off that silly girl on el T’fel,” Clair demanded crossly.  
Arkyll smiled patiently and said, “because she is a silly girl.  I mean young woman.  She must get someone serious like me showing an interest in her to make them think she is something more than a silly woman.”  He knew the proud van P’shan family would never look at Lady Sevianne el Shosta van Thiel.  
“There must be someone-else who would take her,” Clair complained.  
“You mean like el V’lair van Athagine?” Arkyll suggested.  Clair pulled a revolted face.  “If they do not give her a bit of a show the poor kid will end up with el V’lair or one of the el Statens,” Arkyll explained.  “van Thiel knows he ought to have got her a bit of polish but it is too late now and he is her father.  He loves her like we love Arrie and he wants to try to get her someone decent who could make her happy, not see her chained in Athagine.”  
“Arrie did not go to Athagine,” Clair said fretfully.  “Why cannot this silly girl get a Knight like Arrie did.”  
Arkyll laughed out at this.  “She is not a wild cat like Arrie,” he said in amusement.  “She is just a biddable pussy-cat who does as she is told.  Arrie has to suffer a lot of gossip about being allowed to marry Han.  Uncle Tashka has had to threaten the glove to get men to leave her alone in the strategic staff offices because they imagine that since she was bestowed on a Knight of the back hills who is known to be a pacifist nobody cares what-all becomes of her honour.  People say papa ought to have brought her to some oldest son’s bit not let her kick her heels up and run off with Hanya.”  They both grinned to think anyone might imagine their poor father could control their sister’s obstinate wild ways.  
Clair said slowly, “mama and papa never came to ask me to think about anyone.”  He lifted his round grey eyes shyly to his brother.  
Arkyll laughed and punched him softly in the arm.  “Of course not, darling,” he said.  “Your preferences make you ineligible.  Now go off and get some rest so you can dance to break all the young girls’ hearts like you usually do.”  
“Shut it,” Clair said with a blush and a shy snigger.  He was a kindly soul and always very sorry when he realised his friendly ways had lured some poor young woman into feelings for him which he was incapable of returning.  Unfortunately with his delicate el Maien prettiness and his dreamy scholar’s eyes lit up with his friendly open-hearted smile they would always be chucking their unwanted hearts at his fingers.  Never mind the string of panting officers who came hustling more aggressively around him to his adolescent embarrassment.  Clair el Maien was a cerebral rather than physical being, more their mother’s than their father’s son, and having to learn to put on the cold repellent look of his sister’s ice cold beauty in order to make clear how choice he was of his body.  
As he went off out of the room, he said, “Such luck!  I have found quite a pile of novels under the bed in my room.  Jolly stories about brigands and pirates and whatnot.  Should you care for one, my dear?”  
“Um no, I give you my thanks,” Arkyll said, repressing a snigger as he lay peacefully back in the bed.  

he made a reasonably pleasing appearance at the ball that night.  Well, of course her face was painted in a manner which caused his father’s face to glaze over and even his mother to look startled but she wore a pleasant old-fashioned dress in blue satin with silver lace cast over the full skirts.  After considerable discussion between van Sietter and Lisette her lady’s maid, it had been determined that Lady van Sietter’s figure was best suited by the old-fashioned full skirts too so she did not draw the van Thiel ladies’ attention particularly but Arkyll saw to his concern Dame van Thiel and young Lady el Shosta cast intent looks at a couple of the Sietter Dames who had worn the dashing new slim cut fashionable at court.  
Arkyll had gone along in a dark grey raw silk suit, cut in the latest style for men and with flowers embroidered at the bottom edge of the jacket and around the high collar in a blue which picked up the blue of his eyes.  An earring studded with a flower of tiny sapphires and with a grey pearl dangling from it swung in his earlobe.  His jacket was longer than the old-fashioned waist-length doublets which the van Thiel menfolk wore and hung over the belt of weaponry slung low around his hips but vents in the side allowed you to see that he would easily be able to put an hand to his gloves or the decorated handguards of his sword and dagger if he so wished.  
van Sietter also wore the latest cut of jacket, in a severe undecorated dark blue, which fitted so perfectly around his hard body and under which the weaponry swung so carelessly that all the men were as usual nervous around him.  He had booted Clairan into a lovely suit of soft green silk and loaned him a jade earring since Clairan had forgotten his own jewellery but Clairan refused to wear weaponry since he was not a man of honour but a pacifist.  
Arkyll reflected that he must get his mother to talk to her mother about her manner of dress.  He was sure that as soon as the two silly pigeons got to court and saw the ladies going about in the new cut they would rush to buy Lady el Shosta a dozen new gowns and it would not do for her. Those narrow skirts and the low cut V neck would not flatter her curving sweet figure.  The old-fashioned gowns with the bounce of the petticoats gave her rustic regional ignorance a charming appeal that would be lost if she forced her rounded breasts into the new cut in an attempt to make herself appear tall and slender.  
The new cut was designed for women like his sister.  Well in fact it had been designed for his sister.  He could see her in his mind’s eye in an ice-blue satin dress that the famous artist Hyaline and his life partner the former King’s seamstress ran up for her with an high stiff collar up around the back of her neck, a delicate white lace of flowers cast over the whole that made you think perhaps she might one day melt out of the Ice Princess which her expressionless face suggested she was.  The slim skirts ran down her long legs from her slender waist so strong from riding, scandalously suggesting the elegant shape of them as she moved in the shimmering satin skirts.  She was suddenly so beautiful, even to his careless brotherly eye which had often seen her legs in jodhpurs and thought nothing of them even if they were being delicately suggested by the shimmering swish of satin skirts.  He turned laughing to Hanya and saw Hanya’s face golden bright with lust staring at her and he suddenly realised how dangerously alluring the sight of her legs was.  They both turned to van Sietter, he adored a bit of come-hither in a dress so he was just watching her with a rueful pride then van Sietter’s face suddenly clenched up in thunderous wrath and they turned back and saw she was dancing in the arms of that scum el V’lair van Athagine.  
Angels of Hell!  el V’lair’s father old van Athagine was still a friend of their father’s and of Uncle Tashka’s (although Uncle Vadya never would give him a sword hand) so their father could not give young van Athagine the No for a dance.  Old van Athagine was a damned reprobate but his son was a disgusting scoundrel whose company the younger el Maiens avoided.  Arkyll felt a quiver go through his shoulders to see his sister:  tall and fair and pure, with el V’lair van Athagine breathing down her neck.  He saw out of the corner of his eye Hanya’s hand clench so hard that the knuckles went white on the hilt of his sword where it swung in his belt beside the big muscular thigh in a brown thigh-length army boot but Hanya could not give the glove over Arrie, they all knew she was kissing him but he had not offered her a ring.  The kid was so young, that was why, their father had said to poor Hanya that she could not possibly know her own mind so he kept his favours in his pocket.  She was so young she probably did not know el V’lair’s disgusting reputation.  The scum was laughing at something she had said, some innocent remark and that louche villain had the nerve to laugh down her neck, his fingers loose around her strong hand always so perfectly in control of her horses, his horrible hand groping her slender ice-blue satin waist.  el V’lair’s head lifted and he saw them looking at him dancing with that flower of the high nobility whom all the oldest sons were starting to sniff at:  the honourable daughter of the el Maiens.  He gave a disgusting grin and turned her in the dance and Arkyll saw that her normally cold expressionless face was shining with the wicked beautiful laughter of a pale Angel as she looked deep into Hanya’s angelic beautiful blue eyes creased with torture to have to see her dancing with an oldest son who could come and ask for her body to be bestowed on him in exchange for the rich wine-growing region of Athagine.  
Angels, that wild one. The oldest sons of the high nobility ought all to breathe a collective sigh of relief that she ran off with a Captain-Knight of her own region instead of coming to be bestowed on any of them.  None of them did:  that proud beauty, they looked wistful if they met him and hesitantly asked after Captain-Lady Arianna el Maien of the King’s Generals’ strategic staff offices and whether he had any hopeful news of the war, would she be riding home any time soon?  Oh how he longed to see her cold face come riding back through the grey stone castle gateway with her husband by her side, and run himself ragged trying to guess what wildness she might be about so he and Han could save her from the worst of it.  
Meanwhile there was this soppy biscuit to consider, standing in her best dress sniggering anxiously and shoving at her younger brother who was poking her in the backside.  Dame van Thiel suddenly snapped a fan on the boy’s head with a furious whispered expostulation, Arkyll pretended he had not seen any of this, repressing the amused curl of his sweet full red mouth, his slanted blue eyes sparkled round to Clairan with laughter.  Clairan was looking forbiddingly stern, obviously outraged by this childishness.  
He had not offered her any ring so he was not in any way obliged but this was an excellent way to get the tongues waggling.  Arkyll stepped up to the uneasy cluster of the van Thiel family and said courteously, “Lord van Thiel, may I ask for the honour of Lady el Shosta’s hand in the first dance?”  
van Thiel was red-faced with gratitude.  Dame van Thiel nearly burst into tears of joy, giving Lady el Shosta such a shove in the small of the back that the poor young woman stumbled and nearly fell into his arms.  Arkyll adroitly caught her by the waist and one hand, supporting her weight easily through the adaptation of a move he had learned in the peace corps.  He turned, slipping her hand in his arm to stand with her while they waited for the musicians to strike up.  
Inevitably the silly bitch, er biscuit, was sniggering and giggling helplessly.  This would not enhance her reputation so he looked at her with a fierce glare and said in an unusually harsh tone of voice:  “Do you have an opinion on the war?”  It lacerated his heart to expose himself to thoughts of those so dear to him on the battlefront but he must find some way to get her to appear sensible.  She was not actually that bad, just a sweet little pussy-cat who had been brought up in some slack lazy way and required firm management.  
“Oh um er, sort of,” she stuttered.  Then she said shyly:  “My uncle is at the war.  Mama had a letter a two-three weeks back but they may not write how it is truly going, may they?”  
“No,” he said softly, “but it is always good at the least of it to know ... people are still alive.”  
“Your sister and brother are at war,” she said.  
“Yes,” he answered her.  He stared off at the empty wooden floor of the big old dining hall with its tables cleared away for the dancing and the people surging chattering around the edges.  When she gave his arm a gentle squeeze with her hand, he looked at her in surprise.  He smiled softly and sadly at the young woman who also feared for family members at war.  His slanted blue eyes that she had so often read descriptions of in the gossip-sheets (they were like sapphires, they were like the eyes of newborn kittens, they were laughing or sparkling or flirting) slid away from her hesitant sympathetic gaze with a flash of tears in them.  
When he took her in his arms for the dance he became much more hopeful of her chances.  She probably did a lot more riding and running about than they would admit to and so she had a physical fitness that allowed her to move with lithe grace in the dance.  Her curving waist was surprisingly firm under his big fingers, it was hard to resist the temptation to grope her sweet curves while pretending to just be moving her about, to pull her closer to his cock which was swelling softly under the cover of his long jacket and let her weight press on it.  She swung prettily down the floor from his hand, laughing with a sweet pleasure shining in her over-painted eyes.  
Arkyll loved to dance even when he was not feeling tempted to grope his partner and he was supposed to be behaving in an improper manner with her so he asked her for the next dance too and threw himself enthusiastically into the enjoyment of dashing up and down, lifting her and swinging her about, feeling the swish of her big skirts wrapping around his legs, laughing down at her with those exquisite slanted blue eyes as she laughed up at him with her over-painted round eyes.  He realised because he was so close to her that her eyes were brown, pretty with her blonde hair.  He made a mental note to tell his mother to tell her mother to stop disguising this by slathering her eyelids in blue under the mistaken impression that blonde hair should have blue eyes to achieve some spurious ideal notion of beauty.  
van Thiel and Dame van Thiel and his mother were grateful.  His father watched with an expressionless face before turning to politely offer his hand to Dame van Thiel for some more sedate dance, lightly kicking his youngest son in passing as he did this to remind him to go and seek some suitable partner.  
Arkyll felt he had begun compromising himself well with the two dances he had given Lady el Shosta and took a break to eat some snacks and share a joke with Clairan before offering his hand to some other over-excited flattered young women.  He interleaved the good dancers with some plain women who probably did not ordinarily get even the one dance, ensuring that he handed them over onto some Knight or officer.  The officers of the ceremonial First Sietter troop in their gorgeous red parade silks with the gold-embroidered collar knew what the van Sietter family expected of them in this regard and went to it willingly.  The First Thiel officers in fetching brown and gold were surprised but acquiescent.  The First Sietter officers were dreadfully young because the older ones had transferred into field troops to go to war, Arkyll had to kick one or two of the gigglier ones and he and the First Sietter Commander grinned indulgently at this.  He was sorry to see that Lady el Shosta had been obliged to go up and down with some ruddy-faced boar of a Knight, obviously some old friend of her father’s.  She looked reasonably happy to be jigging up and down in the dance but he thought it was a pity they had not made sure she got the pick of the young men to make her laugh and her eyes sparkle so that she could set off to court confident of her charms.  
His poor old papa.  Arkyll went to the musicians and had the pleasure of a word then trotted over to the down-hearted van Sietter to say:  “C’mon papa:  the men’s dance.  You’ll give me one dance before I break my heart over Lady el Shosta, eh?”  He sniggered and winked and smiled to see his father’s lean handsome face light up.  His father loved the men’s dance, which he used to dance at the hunt balls with Uncle Tashka, the two of them going up and down the wooden floor stamping their boots, throwing each other’s long lean bodies to and fro, laughing and flashing their infamously charming eyes about.  
As the music for the men’s dance started up the dancers surged chattering off the floor and stood around the edges, raising their hands ready to start clapping.  Arkyll wrapped a muscular arm around his father’s lean hard back and felt his father’s strong thin arm wrap around his back.  Two of the First Sietter Lieutenants had come out on the floor to join them and one of the more flirtatious had naughtily sought the hand of a First Thiel Captain who had come with a titillated gleam in his eye.  The music started and they went stamping and laughing up the floor, Arkyll swinging his father’s tall lean long body about and pulling it back, his father jerking Arkyll’s muscular big-boned body to and fro, his slanted grey eyes gleaming with fun at the unexpected treat of the men’s dance he loved.  
As they came panting and laughing out of the vigorous dance, Arkyll bethought him that it was time he rescued Lady el Shosta from boring buffton friends of her father’s and took her up and down the floor again himself.  He looked about the big dining-hall, in amongst the gowns and silken outfits, but he could not see her.  He gave a puzzled frown and eventually he strolled over to her mother who was refreshing herself with a bowl of wine punch and laughing merrily with some other Dames, clearly highly relieved it was all going off so well.  She tilted her eyes at him with that alluring smirk in the corner of her plump mouth and the dimple dipping in and out in her cheek.  He liked a mature lover, she usually brought experienced skills and sometimes some interesting new trick to his bed and his father did not ordinarily trouble him about any one-day-one-night set of favours he collected off someone who would not expect him to be offering his ring but he stood well back from Dame van Thiel without an answering smile.  They had come here for van Thiel’s counter for his mother, not for his glove on behalf of his wife’s honour, and poor young Lady el Shosta would become down-hearted and cease to sparkle with happiness if she thought her own mother had lured the prize of the marriage market away from her own shyly emerging physical charms.  
“Sevie?” Dame van Thiel said, taking a quick look about herself, “er, I mean Lady Sevianne must ...  perhaps have gone to see about the snacks.”  
He looked coldly at that and she blushed, putting her bowl of wine punch down and saying she would go and bring the silly minx ... the Lady Sevianne back to the dancing.  She was that conscientious, Captainofthepeace-Lord Arkyll, such an help in the management of the household.  His mother would find her a great help around Castle Sietter.  Er, his father.  
Arkyll reflected that the gossip would be even more beneficial if it was rumoured that he and Lady el Shosta had snuck off out of the ball together so he said he would take the air and cool himself down.  
He strolled down the corridor towards the castle entrance, turning over in his mind some issue related to the mission he had been involved in.  When he overheard a scuffling through an half-open door, he initially assumed it was the flirtatious First Sietter Lieutenant and the First Thiel Captain and put a bit of speed on but then he heard a squeaky voice say, “No, no!” and he knew it was a woman.  
“Come on, you minx,” growled a male voice.  “It is not the first you have given and that lovely young Lord is not serious for you, I know that.”  
Arkyll shoved the door back to disclose Sevianne in the grip of the ruddy-faced buffton Knight who was a friend of her father’s.  His peace corps training took over.  He was in the room with the disgusting boar in his grip, one arm twisted up the man’s back, the wrist of the other in his tight fingers.  He dragged him off Sevianne and chucked him to the side of the small chamber into which the loathsome scum had lured her for his groping hands to violate.  
She stood staring at him with her eyes wide and her chest starting to heave up and down in terror in the bosom of her blue silk gown.  He could see the hysterics coming, he turned and gripped her by the arms, saying in an intense hiss:  “Not here, not now, you silly bitch!  Save us the scandal!”  Luckily she burst into tears at this instead of starting to scream her head off.  
Arkyll turned back to the Knight, who was standing with his head towards them, holding his arm, a savage grin on his face.  “What, no glove?” the Knight said in a sneering tone.  “No, you do not truly want her honour under your eye, do you? pretty peace corps boy.”  
Arkyll stepped up and seized him by the lapels of the jacket and shovelled him back against the wall, staring intently into his face.  “Do you want it?” he snarled in a voice hoarse with rage.  “Do you want the glove of el Maien van Sietter over his ... betrothed?”  His slanted blue eyes had become cold slits through which he peered at the man he shoved back so easily.  
The Knight looked startled and Arkyll could see him thinking it over.  He was remembering him that Arkyll wore a sword and dagger and gloves in his belt when off duty, he was a member of the peace corps but he was not a pacifist.  He was a man of honour.  
He was the son of el Maien van Sietter, who marked el Parva van Selaine in the face for only writing a poem addressed to his Lady wife;  he was the nephew of el Maien van H’las, that infamous cold killer in the duel who had slaughtered like animals those who had stained the el Maien family honour.  
“I never meant any thing, Sevie,” the Knight whined, looking round at her standing and sobbing helplessly.  “You mistook me ....”  Arkyll shoved him against the wall again and he hurriedly muttered, “I beg for the Lady’s pardon.”  
“Get out,” Arkyll said, slinging him at the door.  He resisted the temptation to kick the Knight in the backside since with his peace corps training he knew this might cause the Knight to rethink taking the glove.  Sevianne’s reputation would never survive him fighting some louche boar of a Knight over her honour.  An handsome young officer would have been another matter.  
Sevianne was still sobbing and crying, her plump little fingers clutched up together in the skirts of her dress, the paint streaked down her face.  Arkyll regarded her ruefully.  The aristocrat in him recognised that there would be no getting her back to the dining hall for a couple more dances so she could waft off to court on a golden cloud of gossip suggesting that she was so desirable even el Maien van Sietter rather than some buffton old friend of her father’s was sniffing her bottom.  Then the peace worker remembered that the poor kid had nearly been raped, he went over and bent to look gently into her face, saying:  “Did he ... did he take your favour?”  
She stared speechless into his eyes.  He remembered him that he was the last person she would want to confess such a thing to and his face clenched up.  But there was no other peace worker here.  He stood back from her and said in as bland a tone as he could manage, “If you care to tell me what has been going on, perhaps I can help you arrange matters.”  
After a while she sobbed out, “I thought ... it would only be a kiss.”  
Arkyll absorbed this surprising information then enquired, “You ... prefer his kisses?”  
She looked into his gentle handsome humorous face:  the serene broad brow with the dark curls elegantly tumbling over it, the exquisite slanted blue eyes so kindly bent on her, the full red mouth soft with sympathy.  He was gorgeous.  She knew he was not supposed to take her seriously but even to be able to pretend that this delicious staple of the gossip-sheet menus was chasing her skirt had been Heaven.  She had never hoped for more than the callow young officers who were not wise enough to give the chance of her favours the go-by but she had vaguely stupidly fantasised about el Maien van Sietter seeing something in her he liked (although what there could be that he could not find in an hundred other girls was a question) and ending by giving her a romantic kiss.  Instead she had been found by him in this horrible situation, which in one of her novels might seem sexy but in actuality made her feel cold and shivery and as if she was some ragged dirty thing for men to wipe themselves on before throwing aside.  Her paint-streaked tear-blotched face suffused with scarlet.  She blurted out:  “No! of course not.  I ....  He ... has always had a kiss.  He never tried ... this before – just made me give a kiss.”  In the wide brown eyes staring into his he saw that habitual frozen blankness which in his work he sometimes had to see in young people’s faces who had been exploited in this way by someone they were obliged to treat with trust and he would struggle not to make obvious how angry he felt on their behalves.  “When I was a little girl,” she said, as if this would explain the matter to everyone’s satisfaction, “he used to give me a sweetmeat but ... of course not now.”  
Arkyll stood with his face immobile to hear this.  

ame van Thiel shouted and made excuses and blamed everyone but herself, getting redder and redder in the face.  van Thiel blustered and ramped up and down the carpets of the floral ladies’ sitting-room, past van Sietter sitting very still in an armchair with a cold lack of expression on his face, Lady van Sietter sitting on one sofa with her back very straight and a veil in her blue eyes, her face cold pale and statuesque, and Captainofthepeace-Lord el Maien standing on the hearthrug in front of the low flickering fire.  Finally van Thiel turned on his daughter who was sitting on the other sofa with her shoulders hunched, contorting her sweet plump figure into an hideous lump, her face still blotched with tears and streaky with face paint.  He said pitifully:  “I might have known you would put a spoke in the wheel and ruin it all!  Is this what it comes to? I invite so fine a young man as any stupid cow of a girl could wish to have pretend an interest in her to our home and you treat him to such an entertainment!”  Arkyll saw Sevianne’s head lift and her face went pale under the streaks of paint so that her eyes became brown woodland pools in which the terror lurked like wounded deer seeking a last desperate refuge. “And now I’ve to give the glove to a man who has fought by my side and ridden to the hunt with me for years,“ van Thiel whined.  
van Thiel was of course going to take his daughter’s honour under his eye so he was just venting his grievance about losing a long-established and pleasurable companionship with a former comrade in arms but at this, van Sietter jerked upright out of his armchair and stalked over to Sevianne on the sofa.  He rested an hand on her shoulder and squeezed it, turning a face livid with hot scorn on van Thiel.  
“Give the glove to yourself,” he snarled, “if you cannot keep the honour of your daughter safe under your eye, never mind her happiness.”  
Dame van Thiel leapt improvidently to her husband’s defence, declaring:  “You are a fine one to tell us of how to keep a daughter’s honour bright!  Bestowing your own daughter on a mere Knight.  They said she could even have got el T’fel van P’shan but you threw her away on a Knight of your own region, just for the sake of his father!”  
van Sietter’s lip curled and his slanted grey eye flashed.  “While her honour was under my eye, Captain-Lady el Maien was never suborned to sell a kiss for a sweetmeat!” he hissed.  “I bestowed her mindful of her happiness although I knew it would expose both her and myself to slack-mouth gossip.  And I taught her to defend her own honour if she so pleases.”  Suddenly he said, “I beg for your forgiveness, Dame Sevianne.  You are overset and I am wrong to push you in such a situation.”  He gave an heavy sigh and added, “Any man who tries to take the honour of my wild kitten under his eye has my sympathy,” his grey eye, his thin mouth were soft with tears, “but yours is not a wild cat like mine, just a little chicken whose honour has been attempted by someone sneaking in under the cloak of friendship.  I ... know how that feels, Clair, but before you go and give the scum what he deserves for it, be mindful of your little one.”  He pressed his hand on Sevianne’s shoulder again, looking down at her with that gentleness which he bent over all those who came under his eye:  his former soldiers, his servants, his children.  “You must not blame yourself, my dear,” he said softly.  “You must not think we will think the worse of you because some scum floated close to your skirt.”  
But in the desolation of her pretty shallow brown eyes Arkyll could see she knew that the gossip rippling out from this ball was wrecking all her hopes:  for the rest of the evening’s dancing, the trip to court, the marriage of high honour and prestige enhancing her family’s position, all lost and her to sit on in the back region of Thiel, stitching and listening to her parents grumbling irrationally about it.  She was not like his mother or his sister or his colleagues in the peace corps, women who went out into the world seeking knowledge and challenging injustice while the men fell adoringly at their feet.  Marriage was everything to her but she must be taken, she might not choose on whom to depend for the happiness in home and family which she longed to enjoy with honour.  
And here was his beloved mama, sitting stiff-backed on the sofa with her blue eyes veiled to disguise the pity she felt for a young woman awkwardly situated and her regret at the wreck of her hopes for van Thiel’s counter and her splendid humanitarian programme.  
When he stirred on the hearthrug they all looked at him:  desolately, hopelessly, with sympathy, wistfully.  He stood big and muscular in the suit cut to the latest fashion, the candlelight sparkling on the sapphires and grey pearl in his ear and on the rueful smile in his exquisite slanted blue eyes, the curve of his warm red el Jien mouth:  sweet as a bowl of cherries.  
“Mama,” he said, “may I have the pleasure of a word?”  They were all surprised at this but not as surprised as she was when they had stepped outside the room and he said to her, “have you got some sapphire ring with you that you no longer care for, my dear?  Any old sapphire ring will do;  I will get you a much nicer one for mid-winter Angels’ day in return.”  
He had remembered him that that soppy biscuit loved to read romantic novels about pirates and brigands.  Of course he would ask for her to be bestowed on him in marriage in order to save her from this dreadful mess but if he had to send her the ring by King’s messenger in some mundane way she would be down-hearted and her soft brown eye would not sparkle nor her little bow of a mouth curve in the kissable smile.  
His mother gripped her long pale fingers on his arm, looking with intent anxiety into his face, her round blue eyes suddenly clear with the veil ripped away from them.  He gave her a smile back that was cherubic with innocence;  that same smile he used to give when he had been accused of stealing the jam:  Oh no, I never would, his father would become incandescent with fury at the lie, outraged that any son of the el Maiens should stoop to such subterfuge.  She sighed, her head went down, then she lifted her head to smile softly into his slanted blue eyes and then she sighed again.  She had always looked forward to his marriage, imagining that this would bring someone with similar intelligence to her own as a companion to her in her work.  She would be glad to get van Thiel’s counter, which would be in her pocket forever now.  But she did not think it was worth it, to get a daughter by marriage of the likes of Sevianne el Shosta.  
When they were sitting together in the splendid guest room which had been assigned to Lord and Lady van Sietter, Lisette brought them Lady van Sietter’s jewellery boxes.  Lisette was thrilled at the prospect of a new young Lady wife for the van Sietter family.  She opened a small box to show to Lady van Sietter who took it with the smile still regretful on her wide warm el Jien mouth and then showed the ring to Arkyll:  an huge heart diamond with tiny sapphires embedded in the setting around it.  She said, “this was my mother’s betrothal ring.  Would this please your heart, my son?”  
“Oh yes,” he said with a twinkle of the blue eyes which gossip-sheets said were like sapphires.  “My maternal grandmother’s ring, I would probably have held her in great affection – if we had ever spent much time with her, so her ring would have particular meaning for me.  Very romantic, my dear.  Eminently suitable.”  
“We-ell,” she said with an hesitant slide of the eyes at Lisette, who sniggered, “my mother was an infamous slut in her day.  Nearly as scandalous as your father,” she sighed.  
He burst out laughing, saying, “that sounds promising, my dear.  I will buy you some splendid set in return:  bracelet, necklace and all.”  
“No no,” she said affectionately.  “I will do much more than this for you if I may.  And for her,” she added hurriedly.  
Arkyll strode back into the sitting-room where the van Thiels were sitting sullenly on one sofa while Sevianne sobbed on the other in the sympathetic curve of his father’s arm.  His father looked suspiciously at his mother coming in behind him and his face became crosser when she gave him an angelic look of innocence in reply.  Arkyll went and knelt in front of the silly daughter of the el Shostas, raising blue eyes to her in which he was unable to repress a sniggering laugh at this romantic game he was playing.  She was leaning back from him with her tear-bedewed face anxious, in fears that he had some tease on the go.  His father had taken the opportunity to give her a rough cleaning with his kerchief so that she looked as if she did ordinarily have a prettiness about her, when her cheeks were not blotchily red and swollen and her eyes creased up small with misery.  
“I beg of you to do me the honour of bestowing your hand on me in marriage,” Arkyll said, adding hurriedly, “although I realise it is most improper of me not to have approached your father first and can only live in the hopes that he will smile on my suit and not cut me to ribbons for my impertinence.”  van Thiel started spluttering behind him.  He held the ring carelessly out to her, the firelight and candlelight flashed in the diamond and made rainbows run over her face. His father stiffened in disbelief at the sight of a ring with which he was probably all too familiar in rather different social settings.  “We el Maiens usually give sapphires of course,” Arkyll said.  “This ring was my maternal grandmother’s betrothal ring and has particular meaning to me.  I hope you will find it acceptable although the main stone is a diamond?  Happy to buy you any other you have a preference for, my dear, of course,” he added in a final mumble.  He was starting to laugh too much to keep up the charade.  
Her face suddenly flushed with joy, the brown eyes which lifted to him sparkled in a tremulous appealing delight almost as much as the diamond.  It was almost worth it.  
“Mama!” she was saying, lifting her head in excitement.  
Dame van Thiel was already there staring incredulous at the ring which Arkyll slipped hurriedly onto Sevianne’s trembling finger.  He got stiffly off his knee and stepped back into the joyous embrace of that undeserving dog van Thiel’s arms.  They were bustling all about with excitement, van Thiel going to call the servants to fetch something very special from his cellars then coming back without calling to look again in disbelieving wonder at the precious ring on his precious daughter’s finger.  “Give the man a kiss then!” he cried.  “No no!” Arkyll said hurriedly.  Sweetmeats or sapphires, he did not want a kiss bought from anyone’s lips unless she was a properly trained prostitute.  
Later, as he walked back to their room with his Lady wife, van Sietter said in a tone of immense displeasure, “here’s a fine basket of fruit you have landed us in.”  
“Promiseds’t it me woulds’t never speak to me again if this came about,” she reminded him demurely.  

rkyll sat in one of the flowered armchairs in the ladies’ sitting-room alone with his head in his hands, staring at the carpet which clashed with the armchairs and with the curtains, and wondering what he had gone and done.  What was Captainofthepeace Daria Inien going to think of this silly bitch on his arm?  What were Mimi and Lisette going to think?  What would Tisha ... his mouth twisted wryly at the corner.  No, Tisha would approve of the comely young bird-brain with her big round hips so promising for easily pushing out the van Sietter babies.  He knew exactly what Arrie would think and she would say it in no uncertain terms.  
He heard a noise behind him and sat up to find that van Thiel had come back in the sitting-room and was wending his way between the armchairs.  Arkyll had no wish to be exposed to more of his future father by marriage’s nonsense and started to get up but van Thiel nodded his head insistently to make Arkyll sit back down again.  Arkyll saw with a qualm that he was holding a tray with a decanter and small bowls on it.  
“Ver’ special brandy,” van Thiel slurred.  “Las’ bottle.  Won it off van Athagine one time.  Took his encampment inna practice raid.  van Athagine’s own brandy.  Ver’ special, my son.”  He blubbed a bit to call Arkyll his son.  
Arkyll calculated that van Thiel must have won the brandy off van Athagine at least twenty years previously and if it was from van Athagine’s own cellar it was certain to be a rare treat so he accepted a bowl and sniffed it expectantly.  
van Thiel sat staring solemnly at Arkyll and finally he said:  “My son.  Everyone was cross when I ran off with Sevie’s mother.  Only a Dame, no polish, not fit for the sworn Lord,” he pulled an expressive face and Arkyll briefly saw through the weathered skin and wrinkles and little layer of fat a laughing careless young officer-aristocrat with blond hair and brown eyes like Sevie, who had engaged in practice battles with Arkyll’s uncles in the Vail plains and Thiel woodland where they liked to practice the summer manoeuvres – when they were at peace.  “Never regretted it,” van Thiel said solemnly.  “Comfortable.  Like to come home of an evening and take my ease, not be troubled with a lot of stuff about art and politics and whatever.  Excellent mother,” he said with emphasis.  “Devoted.  Always had my happiness under her eye.  Eh?”  He looked anxiously at Arkyll.  
“Oh yes, sir,” Arkyll said politely.  He smiled at van Thiel’s owlish solemn drunken face, his slanted blue eyes crinkling appealingly.  “I like to take things easy myself.”  
He took a cautious sip of the brandy, reflecting that it would certainly be pleasant to have the compensations of someone maturing in his bed into the luscious charms of a tame tigress like Dame van Thiel to look forward to.  He smiled again, in deep appreciation.  The brandy truly was superb.  Almost worth it.  

wing to the war and the van Thiels’ eagerness not to let him slip through Sevianne’s plump little fingers with the sapphires and diamond on one of them, Arkyll was able to push for a modest and early wedding the following Spring.  Sevianne said, “Oh! no trip to court?” mournfully but Arkyll glared at her mother and said in repressive tones that he would take her himself on an honeymoon trip.  He had no intention of letting loose his prospective bride in unsuitable garments featuring the new cut at parties where el V’lair and those slack-moral el Statens would come sniffing around her skirt.  
He walked down the corridors of Thiel Castle from a final bowl with the menfolk, resplendent in a dark blue silk high-collared jacket and breeches, a flight of birds embroidered in silver flashing up and over one shoulder.  Sevianne had made a pleasing appearance one step in front of her father at the chapel door.  His father had arranged for one of the older ladies’ maids from the Castle Sietter staff to go down to Thiel and lend her advice on the el Shosta bride’s trousseau.  Tillia had clearly gained considerable influence (well worth the double pay van Sietter had been obliged to give her to get her to go to some back region where the women-lovers only had rough bars to go to instead of pleasant sophisticated cafés).  Sevianne had still been wearing the charming old-fashioned dresses which suited her best and had learned to manage her face paint so that you could actually see how pretty she was.  
Since it was to be a modest wedding, Arkyll had been able to get away with saying he would hold a splendid dinner for his friends on his return instead of inviting them to come to Thiel with him.  He could easily make this a lads’ and lasses’ night and leave Sevianne out of it so he did not have to see the pity in the wise beautiful eyes of Captainofthepeace Daria Inien or the forbearance of his chums in the peace corps because politics meant he was obliged to take the hand of a silly bird-brain.  
His father had of course insisted on a privy chat with him about it all.  The old man had said it straight that if Arkyll was not happy with the match he would break the betrothal and take the glove off van Thiel himself and that he thought this would be perfectly sufficient to get Sevianne well on her way at court.  But to his father Arkyll could admit that he was content to take Sevianne for his Lady wife.  He could explain to a man with a sophisticated appreciation of sex who had enjoyed relationships with all manner of people besides his own elegant and intelligent Lady wife, some only of rough good humour and affectionate friendliness, that although he had always imagined he would take someone to his bride who would be like the other members of his family, superior to him in intelligence and throwing schemes and ideas at his head to make him sit up and run in excited circles, when he saw a soppy biscuit like Sevianne so incompetent at getting herself out of a mess she had not got herself into and when her brown eyes lifted to him with a gratitude so warm that he knew she worshipped him more than she did the Angels, he changed his mind.  His work for the peace corps was absorbingly interesting, it was ethically crucial and it was exhausting.  Sometimes at the end of a long day, he did not want to go back to his clever family with their laughing arguments and fascinating accounts of painting or humanism or whether the peace corps ought to be re-organised in some less authoritarian structure – a process which would be a great nuisance to himself and his chums if his mother actually tried it out, so he felt obliged to join in the argument even when they argued about whether his opinion was more valuable because of his experience in the peace corps or should be barred because he was involved in their work and so could not but be partial.  
Instead of going home he would often go off with Lieutenant Jamies Velor and have several bowls of beer and some cheap food from a roadside stall and they exchanged childish details of sexual activities and sniggered.  As van Thiel had said it, sometimes you did not want to be troubled with a lot of stuff about art and politics.  And she would be an excellent mother, he could tell.  He could always have some side-slip affair.  His father delicately made it apparent that there would be no difficulty in paying for an apartment in Sietter Town if Arkyll found Lady el Shosta uncongenial.  He knew he was easy-going and he had no objection to keeping the slack behaviours of some silly bitch under a firm hand.  Nobody could ever be as much trouble to them as that wild cat his sister.  Lady el Shosta was young, she was biddable and she was in an incredulous craven state of trembling happiness to have handsome Arkyll el Maien whom women sighed to read about in the gossip-sheets for her lover.  He would have no trouble booting her into doing whatever he wished her to do.  It was probably worth it, especially since he could keep a discreet mistress who would know how to pleasure his body once he had the succession secured.  Arkyll loved sex but he only liked to have one lover, not to slut it about.  He would rather have kept his favours for his wife but if necessary he knew he could keep her on a rein and a mistress on his heartstring.  

e opened the door to the bedchamber which they had laid out as a bridal suite and went in to find her sitting on the bed.  
Clearly she had become nervous sitting there waiting for him and she had got up onto the bed and tucked her legs under herself like a young girl sitting in her single bed and wondering if an handsome Knight will ever come for her honour.  She wore some sort of heavy rose-pink silk thing which clung close to her.  He was disappointed at this, he thought they knew that the old-fashioned look suited her better and would have dressed her for him like so.  Her head was stooped and her loose long hair streamed all over her shoulders, the golden strands sparkling in the candlelight against the rose-pink silk of her robe.  She looked terribly young and shy.  She had been dressed up as an appealing dish for him, her sweet young pink body arrayed in the rose-pink silk and her own golden hair.  He knew he was not getting her virgin favour but he reflected with a disappointed sigh that he would of course allow her some time to overcome any anxieties she might have about lying with him.  Yet another one whose happiness he was to consider! that was how it was when you were the future sworn Lord, the happiness of all of them was under your eye to consider.  
As she heard him come in she lifted her head suddenly, and her shoulders went up, her bosom lifted to him.  
Holy Heaven! look at the thing.  It had an open front down to her waist where it was only caught together by a knot of ribbons.  He could just see the curve of her naked breasts hanging in the dimness in there waiting for his hand, pale yet dusky in the rosy shadows cast by the silk robe.  The soft clinging silk outlined all her curves:  her shoulders, her breasts, the curve in to her waist, her rounded hips, the soft muscular legs.  Ooh, those legs he had been wondering and wondering about, would they be the legs that he thought they might be, because of all the riding she must be doing?  
But he must be patient, he must consider her happiness.  He latched the door behind him and started walking across the red patterned rugs on the floor, opening his mouth to say something reassuring.  
She surged off the bed, the pink silk shimmering over her luscious curves like water, her hair flowing back over her shoulders, her hands going straight to the buttons of his breeches.  She started dragging the buttons out of the holes in eager haste, pulling down his breeches, flinging herself to her knees at his feet.  She lifted out his cock which was still soft and small and put it straight into her mouth.  
Arkyll gasped, his exquisite slanted blue eyes flew wide open, he grunted in arousal.  The blood was hammering down to his penis, which was growing under the caress of her lips at an incredible rate.  She was doing something so exhilarating with the tip of her tongue to the head of his cock that his hips had already started bucking towards her, his hands going to shove her head at him and force her to take his cock deeper in her mouth.  
With an effort he gripped his hands on her head and pushed it away.  
Her head came up with the face lightly and prettily decorated:  a golden line coiling around her lovely brown eye, her mouth from which he had just hauled his cock glinting golden.  Her brown eye was soft with disappointment, her cherub’s bow of a mouth pouted sadly.  The candlelight glistened off the sad golden pout, his eyes creased up with lust to see the gleam on those soft pouting lips which had just been wrapped around his cock.  
“Do you not like a kiss to the cock?” she enquired mournfully, still kneeling in a pool of heavy rose-pink silk at his feet on the patterned red rug with that pretty face tilted up to him.  “I like so much to give one and I thought it might please you.  I will do whatever you prefer, of course, my Lord,” she added in a tremulous submission.  
“Shut it, you silly bitch!” he grunted, sitting heavily back on the bed and gasping with the effort to calm the ecstatic impulses shooting round his sexual organs.  “It is my wedding night!  Gimme rein.  I want it slow.”  
She gave a sudden giggle, tipping her head sidelong with a titillated flash of her brown eyes, to hear the famously courteous Lord Arkyll el Maien address her like so!  She turned her head side to side, watching him with those pretty brown eyes relieved and her golden pout of a mouth parted hopefully.  Tillia had said to her that although the el Maiens were famous for their inappropriate politeness to servants and dependents, they spoke to each other in arrogant tones of command.  Tillia said that if Arkyll were a bit sharp and rough-spoken to her it only meant he thought of her like family.  This degree of rudeness seemed highly promising! 
“C’mere,” Arkyll grunted, holding out an hand.  His exquisite blue eyes flashed laughingly at her.  When she put her hand in his, he pulled hard, easily dragging her body up to his.  He began fingering her buttock through the heavy rose silk of her robe, slapping her fingers away when she attempted to play with the stiff erect cock which was half-exposed in his unbuttoned breeches.  “Know a lot about kissing cocks, do you?” he grunted, more for something to say and keep her off his cock long enough for him to settle it down.  
“Well it is not a proper favour, to kiss a man’s cock, is it?” she said blithely.  
He raised a dark eyebrow over a blue eye.  “Yes it is,” he said with great firmness.  “And if you do it ever again to any other man I will kill him,” he added.  His blue eye glinted up at her where she was standing above him.  
“Oh no no,” she said earnestly.  “Of course I would not even kiss another man than you.  I mean on the mouth,” she blushed prettily.  “But you will like me to kiss your cock, will you not?”  She looked sidelong at him through her long strands of golden hair with a naughty gleam in her eye and the blush dying down in her cheeks.  “You will not deny me the kiss to your cock.  In the interests of securing the succession, of course.”  Her hand was creeping up his leg again, he pressed his hand down on it to stop her.  
Sweet Heaven! he had in his hands – literally in his hands, a slut on an heartstring.  She was like him.  She loved to give and take a favour – but only to one lover, and he was to be that fortunate man.  He could barely contain himself with excitement but now he desperately wanted to get and give pleasure not shoot it all off in a two-three minutes uncontrollable release of the exquisite tension in his loins.  
He started pressing his mouth to her neck, waiting to be less excited so he could put his fingers to her sex and find out what state of arousal she might be in without going over himself.  Unhelpfully she was thrusting her hips at him in a manner suggesting she was more than ready for his favour.  He gripped his fingers on firm round buttocks under the slippery silk which his fingers slid on – oh! the riding, her legs must be like young trees:  pliant and strong.  He gave a moan, pushing her excited exciting body away from him. 
Sevie stood back from him in the warm golden light of the scented candles all around them.  She gave a wriggling shrug and the heavy rose silk robe slid over her shoulders and poured down off her body like a waterfall.  He sat panting on the bed staring greedily at the round breasts like sweet pale buns with a pink cherry on the top thrusting through the long strands of golden hair, the delicious curve in to her tight small waist, the rounded hips and those legs:  oh yes, yes! look at that line down the hard muscles of her thigh.  
He must tell her mother to make her keep up the riding.  
He could tell her himself, she was his Lady wife and she was no high intelligence to argue it out with him.  She was a biddable pussy-cat who was looking at him with eager adoration in her silly brown eyes.  She would do whatever he said she should do and she would like it.  
He would buy her two matched horses and take her out riding in the famous hunting territory of the Sietter Hills and he would generously allow her to fuck him senseless in the smaller of the two hunting lodges they owned.  He gave a thrilled grin, holding out his hands.  She came walking into them, her body quivering with anticipation of the caress of his big fingers.  They gathered up her long hair, pushing it back over her shoulders out of his way, ran lightly over her pale skin, brushing her nipples so that she giggled and wriggled, poking teasingly into her belly-button, fingering the golden-brown coils of hair around her sex and then going to run slowly down the defining line of the muscles in her thigh.  
Angels, she had a beautiful body.  He had always realised it.  From the moment he saw her first, an over-painted butterfly on the steps of her father’s castle, he had looked at her curving figure and realised there was a storming lovely under her gauche manners and the paint.  He would not tell her so, of course, now that he had realised what he had in his hands.  If she thought she was that beautiful she would imagine she could go off flirting and playing in the pink-fingered set.  She thought they were like brigands and pirates, romantic and sexy.  Arkyll spent his days working with thieves and prostitutes, they were not in the least romantic and he liked many of them as friends of a kind but he knew that the pink-fingered set his father had once moved in at court were a dishonourable collection of cold-hearted exploitative men and women whom his sister and mother kicked away like dogs if they came sniffing at their heels.  Well, like they would if they were ever so mean as to kick a dog as if it were some dishonourable scum.  He did not want his little Sevie to get caught in the traps of the pink-fingered set and to have to end by breaking his marriage to her and send her to live out her days on her marriage settlement lands, painting her face in the effort to lure in Knights and officers and think that was more exciting than being happy with a family of her own.  Then he would have to have some dull Lady to wife, some elegant woman to go riding with his sister, talk philosophy with his brothers, be an intelligent companion supporting his mother in her political work, be a tactful helpmeet to his father about the castle;  and not to be there for him to play with, the future sworn Lord who spent his days trying to secure their happiness and he wanted there to be someone whose job it was to secure his and here she was.  Arrie would hate her, Hanya and Clair would be kind to her but they would despise her, his mother would grit her teeth and do her best and she would always be crossing blades with his father about matters of the household management.  He would have to put her to the bit to control her silliness but her body in the bed would be his to enjoy and now he had realised that she would be an eager participating companion in his pleasures not just a nice set of curves to fuck while she pretended to moan because he felt bad at heart if she had no pleasure of it.  He had told a little lie, letting people think he had taken her for the sake of her happiness when she was in a mess and to give his mother van Thiel’s counter and to secure the succession for the region.  Actually her ripe little curves had always made his cock hard, he wanted her for his own purposes.  When he asked his mother to let him have a ring for her, his mother had realised he wanted her and she reluctantly accepted it.  His parents had expected to choose his bride but they had always been willing to take his wishes into consideration.  He had had to tell his father in the end, he could not lie to van Sietter.  
He gave an happy snigger, standing up to start undressing.  She wanted to help him but she was too eager, it was too exciting to have her plump little fingers with the diamond and sapphires and the delicately patterned circle of his wedding ring flashing on them, tugging insistently at his buttons so that they were almost tearing them off – and trying surreptitiously to go and feel his rigid rod of a cock with the balls swinging behind it.  
“Get down, silly goose,” he laughed, smacking her fingers away and pushing her lithe collection of plump muscular limbs at the bed.  
“Call me a bitch,” she said with a naughty flash of her pretty brown eyes.  
He sniggered in delight, one hand pushing gently at her, the other gripped on her leg to hold her to him in contradiction to his words.  “You are a naughty Lady,” he said.  
“Yes but you like it,” she giggled.  
He laughed and pressed his hand round between her thighs, pushing one finger gently up for a little poke about in the wet warmth pulsing with desire for him.  She started trying to sink down on his finger, holding onto his arm – she was that hungry for it!  
“Lie down and let me have a look at you,” he suggested.  His blue eyes were bright and sparkling with fun.  “Bitch,” he added.  
He had meant he just wanted to run his eyes over her body while he got the rest of his clothes off.  His jacket and shirt had been tossed with unusual carelessness onto a nearby chair but he still had not only his unbuttoned blue silk breeches but his knee high boots and the belt of weapons on.  
She laid herself back over the soft embroidered quilts and silken sheets, the plump softly muscular limbs, the sweet curving body sinking into the bedclothes and her own long golden hair, her mounds of round breasts like delicious cakes on display for his hungry mouth.  She opened out her legs, her gorgeous muscular thighs.  She put her plump little fingers to the lips of her sex in among the coils of pubic hair and parted them, opened them to reveal to his wide-eyed blue stare the little horn of her clitoris:  erect with anticipation of pleasure, the rose-pink glistening muscles at the entrance to her cunt.  She reached out and pulled a pillow under her hips, opened herself out again and tilted to make sure she displayed the dark hole of her arse, puckered as if for his kiss.  
He gave a quivering moan and dug urgently in his pocket.  Her eyes came up with a question when he produced the condom, he grinned desperately at her and said:  “Forget the succession.  Gimme a two-three years pleasure first.”  When he spoke his voice was guttural with lust.  He was rolling the condom on quickly, she would have to have him in boots and belt of weapons now, he was burning for her favour.  
He knelt between her invitingly open legs, running his hot gaze all over her body.  Her face had become so soft and sweet to realise he did not want her just for the sake of the region, her limbs were lying back passive in submission to his pleasure.  All day every day and often in the nights he considered the happiness of others:  his family, the servants, the people of his region.  But she was his Lady wife and a biddable slut on his heartstring.  Her happiness lay in securing his.  
He pressed the head of his covered cock to her cunt and she gave a sigh, spreading her hips wider to him.  He did his best to restrain his explosive lust and make it a gentle thrust up into her, shoving deep into her cunt, his big hips pressing up between her wide-spread hips, laying his heavy body over the sweet curves of her rounded body.  The buckle of his belt pressed between them both, into their soft bellies, now that he was comfortably in he felt able to take the few seconds necessary to pull out the buckle, shoving his weaponry away so it clattered careless off the bed while he did her favours honour.  
She was rising up to meet him, soft and slow, her arms coming around him.  He looked into soft brown eyes that adored him, he pressed his mouth to her mouth, their lips curling gently and insistently in the kiss.  She gripped her arms about his broad chest with the three scars on it, thrusting her hips up to his hard thick cock which came pushing down into her cunt at last giving sweet satisfaction to the yearning appetite within her.  She started grunting into his kiss, he was aware of his own guttural cries as the feelings rippled out through him, through her, his cock sunk thrusting into her cunt, her hips thrusting her cunt up about his cock, the hips, the loins, his hand gripped on a buttock as round and sweet as a bun, his lips pressed in the kiss, he was cumming, cumming with a series of cries into her writhing thrusting body, she was gripping him so close and warm in the thrills of her own orgasm.  

hen he woke in the night, her naked limbs and her long hair entwined around his naked limbs, he lay a while staring contentedly round the room in the softly flickering low light of the fire and the guttering candles which had burned down low.  After a moment, he drew her shoulder in closer to him and kissed the soft round of the bone at the top of her arm through the fine net of hair cast over it.  As he had anticipated, her limbs moved and her cherub’s bow of a mouth pouted, her eyelids flickered and she woke up.  He would never have been so selfish towards anyone else but he knew she would only give him a thrilled warm sweet smile to be woken in the night to service his wishes.  He kissed her softly, allowing his lips to cling to hers, laying one big hand gently to the side of her silly pretty face.  
“What’s your pleasure, my Lord,” she said with a sleepy snigger.  He laughed.  One day he would be ‘my Lord’ to the whole of Sietter but she was the first one who would call him so;  because she was his Lady wife.  
“My Lady,” he said, because he knew she would like to hear him say it:  the only man who could with propriety call her his Lady until she became Lady van Sietter.  Her hand came snuggling down his body searching out his cock but he blocked it off, kissing her cheek and her cherub’s bow of a mouth a bit more, enjoying the soft expectancy of his stirring cock.  
He thought that the next day he would have a nice lie-in fucking with her and snoozing then if they sneaked into the bath-house mid-morning no one else would be there and they could share the big central pool and fuck in the warm waters with scented oils to add to their pleasure.  Her hair would float out in the waters all around them while they did it, which would make a pleasing picture if he could be bothered to look.  
Sevie cast a leg about his legs, her head snuggling back in the pillows to expose her neck and sweet round breasts to his kiss.  He ran his finger avidly up the groove in her thigh.  
He looked to the side of the bed but they had removed the basket of condoms, obviously in the hopes that he would immediately leap on her and impregnate her to secure the succession.  Well, if the van Thiels and his mother were disappointed that he was not doing so, at the least of it his father would realise he was getting pleasure in his wedding bed and be glad of it.  
He kissed Sevie once more and climbed out of her arms to go to the door and she said, “will you ask for some snacks?” which was an excellent idea when he came to consider it.  
His father must have had the pleasure of a word and made them clear the corridor outside the room he and Sevie had been given.  Arkyll sighed, wrapping Sevie’s silken robe scantily around his big hips to cover his already half roused penis and going along the torchlit corridor until he came upon a footman snoozing in a chair by the other guest rooms.  Distantly he could hear music so they must still be dancing – and snacking.  
The footman brought them a tray of some highly suitable dishes.  Arkyll’s blue eyes lingered with interest on some creamy spreads for biscuits of which the footman had provided a large selection.  He grinned when the footman winked at him and made a mental note to make sure and tip him a large sum before they left to go back to Sietter.  While he and Sevie ate some tasty local cheese and fruit thing, he turned over in his mind the dinner with his chums in the peace corps to celebrate his wedding.  
She had a new dress in her trousseau which she had complained of not being allowed to wear because even her mother said it was not suitable for a young unmarried Lady.  It was a pale plum satin, cut low and square across the bosom to encourage the sight of a deep cleft between firmly supported breasts and with heavy gold embroidery to emphasise the curving bust.  Seeing his young Lady wife’s full figure flattered by such a gown would irritate the so mature Captainofthepeace Daria Inien, who had been wont to ask in a silly way for reassurance as to whether Arkyll really did not mind her breasts being so small.  Mimi and Lisette would be happy to discuss with Sevie going down to the curious shop and advising her on the fit of an elegant harness, perhaps in the Sietter colours of red and gold.  That would be very fetching.  Tisha would make a pet of Sevie and help her bake cakes and Sevie would enjoy that and no one would be so mean as to spoil things for her by telling that Tisha had had Arkyll’s virgin favour – not even Arrie would be that mean.  Arrie would be pretty mean to Sevie but Sevie was a bitch so she would give Arrie a tough run of it.  Although Arkyll’s money would always be on Arrie in a cat-fight.  At the least of it Hanya would be kind and Clairan would send her the latest dreadful novels about pirates from the book merchants around court and the King’s University.  
He leaned over from the tray of snacks and pressed affectionately into her kiss.  He got one of the creamy spreads and smeared it on her breasts and licked it off, curling his tongue around the nipples which hardened under his tongue’s muscular caress.  Sevie sat with a biscuit in one hand and a cake in the other, squeaking with giggles and moving her legs about at this.  The spread had a delicious piquant tone in the flavour and Arkyll told her to make sure she got the recipe as part of her marriage settlement.  
Once she had managed to finish the cake and had chucked the biscuit aside, he lay down in the rumpled bed with her snuggled in his arms.  She had one leg between his legs against his cock but she had finally got it into her silly head that there were to be years of fun with him so no need to rush headlong into over-excited fucking to get her pregnant, they could have a bit of silly fun first.  
Thinking about the years and years of her finding out ways of pleasing his fancy, he ran a finger down the groove of her thigh and asked tenderly, “is there something you prefer to do?”  
She lay soft and warm beside him considering this before casting him an hesitant and promisingly embarrassed glance and saying, “would you be willing to give it me from behind?”  
His eyes brightened.  Tisha had got him to do this sometimes and it provided an highly pleasurable experience.  (He had been too shy to ask Daria to try out other things than the positions she gently drew him into.)  “Is that your preference?” he asked, running his hand covetously down the curl of her body over her ribcage in to the waist and out over her hip.  He put his finger in that groove of her thigh and ran it up and down.  
“No no, I have never done it!” she giggled.  “One of my friends said ... it was nice.  Tee hee hee! but I never dared ask ...”  She lifted her eyes shyly to him and said, “I only had two ... friends.  When they realise you are friends with someone, they make him go away.”  
“Oh I know,” Arkyll said crossly, giving her a sympathetic kiss.  He reflected grumpily on the number of times his father had cut in on him dancing with someone whose conversation he had come to enjoy while riding out for a picnic or going to a concert or exhibition.  The next time he went to ask for her hand to dance, she would be laughing in the arms of some bone-headed officer or raggedy Knight who was a more appropriate match than the future sworn Lord.  
“You cannot go away, though,” she said contentedly.  “I may give you lots of favours.”  
“Yes, my dear!” he said with a laugh.  “Lots and lots.  I like to play, y’know, and you do too so we will be well content.  And I wonder if you might assist me in my peace corps work,” she looked surprised at this and turned her head hesitantly, clearly not sure if the leather jerkin would look fetching on her.  “In the course of my peace corps duties I often have to search the book merchants’ stocks.  It would be such an help to me if you could spare the time to go down now and then and check for any thing that is ... interesting rather than actually disgusting.  Bring any thing you find back for me to go through it carefully with you.”  She was giggling and wriggling against his body in a most enjoyable way at this proposal, he added, “My mother has a famous library, you know.  She will be so delighted if you show any interest in adding to it.”  They both started rolling with laughter around in the embroidered silken bedsheets and quilts at the very idea of the chaste Lady el Jien van Sietter, pure as the snow-fed streams that come down from the H’velst Mountains into the River Arven, having a section on smut in the library at Castle Sietter.  
“Your mother is ... scarey,” Sevie said eventually, sitting up and looking nervously at him while biting at a finger she put in her mouth.  
“Oh yes,” he said, lying back with his head resting on his arms.  She saw the big muscles of his chest ease out and relax with a thrilled quiver.  “’Specially if you steal her chocolates.”  His slanted blue eyes creased in his snigger.  
Her father and his friends said young van Sietter was a soft servant-lover who went into the peace corps to avoid going to war.  Sevie’s mother said he had good bones to pass on to their children (yuck!).  Sevie’s own friends stuck badly drawn pictures of him up by their beds and said:  “ooh what lovely eyes, he is totally delicious.  This gossip-sheet says he is so sweet his heart is like a Sietter cake with sweet chestnut paste in the middle, yum yum.”  Sevie had seen him chuck aside a battle-hardened Commander-Knight who had been giving her grief.  She saw him treat her brothers with a rough kindly carelessness to which they responded with surprising respect and once when he gave her oldest brother a wrestling match she saw that his chest was scarred and heard him say casually and as if he were a little ashamed of it, that these two had been picked up over his little brother who unfortunately had fetching friendly manners which sometimes overcame the officers’ sense of propriety and that one was some stupid incident with armed thieves when he ought to have been more careful about the lacings on his leather jerkin.  
Ooh! he was totally delicious! and she would lace up his jerkin herself when he went out to the peace corps and make it proper tight so no one ever again hurt her sexy strong Lord and husband and she would never behave in a way to make him give the glove and risk his life on her behalf even though she had supposed previously that she would find this flattering and sexy.  
He was running his hands over her curvaceous body, saying, “c’mon you naughty Lady.  It has been hours since you let me practice securing the succession on you.  I am determined to practice a great deal, you understand,” sniggering and pinching her nipples so that they went hard and aching for his caress, she squealed with excitement.  “Come ‘yer,” he said, pretending to be some rough Sietter peasant and calling her his Lady and saying he wanted to do her proper homage with his cock because she was his Lady.  She shrieked with outraged giggles at this, so disgustingly improper! the idea of having sex with a peasant!  He ran his hands about her soft-muscled limbs, clenching his big fingers on her arm and her hip and her strong little thighs, pulling her about, gathering her long heavy tresses of hair up and casting them over her shoulder, until she was kneeling up in the big bed holding onto the headboard and he could get behind her.  There was no need for her to play with his cock to get him going, he was already stiff and hard, panting with anticipation as he rolled the condom on.  He put an hand to the firm round cakes of her buttocks and a finger to her sex.  First he had a tickle of the erogenous spot between her arsehole and cunt, she was going over already, wet and wide for him but it was his wedding night, he wanted to play and she was just a biddable slut on an heartstring and the heart she was strung on was his.  She would let him fuck her any way that pleased him, as often as he could get into her, and she would like it.  
He put his hand between her legs to finger her clitoris, clenching the fingers of his other hand on her buttock.  She was gasping and moaning already, now the soppy biscuit was saying she had changed her mind, she wanted his favour facing, she tried to turn in his arms but he took his hand away from between her legs and gripped his fingers hard on her arm so that she felt how strong they were, saying with menace, “shut it and do as I tell you.”  She moaned at this, spreading her legs in the craven wish for his hand back between them.  The kind-hearted Captainofthepeace-Lord Arkyll el Maien obliged, continuing to tickle her clitoris in a manner which he knew would be arousing and deeply dissatisfying, keeping her buzzing and her hips bucking in the effort to get him to play to her rhythm so she could go over.  He moved his finger to her vulva and she groaned and spread her legs, attempting to press down on his finger and he teased her for a short while there before sliding the big finger up into her.  He put his thumb to her clitoris, clenched the fingers of his other hand on her buttock and knelt grinning behind her as she went up and down on his hand, panting and moaning.  She went over with a quivering long cry, gripping on the hand between her legs and then knelt in the tossed pillows, clinging to the headboard of the big bed.  He drew his fingers slowly from her cunt in despite of her whimpering and begging him to leave them there and put them to his mouth to lick her juices.  Mmm! it was that time of the month when she was sweetish to the taste.  He ran his tongue all round his hand to clean up her cream.  
Then he came up behind her and forced her slack body up again, setting the head of his covered cock to the wide wet juicy cunt he had already finger-fucked to pleasure.  As he shoved up into her, her head went back on his shoulder, her brown eyes and the pouting cherub’s bow of a mouth wide.  He gave a delighted great groan.  The angle he could get into the tilt of her vagina was such that the sensitive head of his cock got continual tingling pleasure and from the spread of Sevie’s legs and her oh-oh-oh-oh! he knew he had immediately hit on her sweet spot.  He put his hands on her breasts, one of them was covered by her hair which slid golden in his fingers when he gripped them.  
The silly bitch, in her excitement she was wriggling out of rhythm with him, completely out of control and helplessly twitching, impaled on his erect cock.  He chucked his arms up around her shoulders, clasping his hands on the back of her neck.  It proved just as effective an hold on Sevie as it did on drunken trouble-makers, immobilising her in his grip.  He held her firmly in position and started vigorously thrusting his hips so his cock came in and out, hitting her sweet spot, sending Sevie’s senses reeling with sensation and pleasure rippling down his cock.  Sevie was screaming helplessly in ecstasy, he felt a sudden gush of gratitude towards his sensible father for clearing the corridors.  Vaguely he determined to wait a long time before giving her babies.  She would be an excellent mother who would certainly refuse to put her children in a nursery out of ear-shot.  
Sweet Heaven, sweet Heaven! the feeling riding up and down his cock as he rode in and out of her cunt.  She was going over in a molten quivering screaming submission in his grip and the muscles of her vagina were gripping on his shaft, sweet Heaven! he was screaming with pleasure himself, he thrust up into her and pressed hard, pushing it out into the condom inside her, grunting with pleasure, he pressed into her wide pleasured body in ecstatic joy.  He felt a sudden gush of warmth trickling around his strong thighs and knew with an additional thrill of joyous pride that he had pleasured her so thoroughly she had ejaculated her waters.  He quivered and gasped and laughed and came out of her, trembling, his thighs wet and glistening, so that finally he could take her in his arms and lie facing – to the drier side of the bed.  
He had exhausted her and she only lay panting in his arms, staring at him with wide brown eyes in which danced the animal joy of being thoroughly fucked in the manner which best pleased my Lord el Maien.  He knew she would want to boast about what they got up to with his chums in the peace corps but he felt sorry suddenly to think that poor Daria might hear about it and feel jealous and he determined to tell Sevie to save it for the kitchen maids.  Tisha and the voluptuous Dame Jayne Piria and the gorgeous stable-maid whose favours he managed to pin a couple of times before the other stable-maids turned her over to woman-lover would just be happy for him.  He would offer her a lot more to boast about in exchange for being discreet with his colleagues.  And he would give her a bloody good tongue-lashing if she did not do as he told her.  He ran his finger down the groove in her thigh and lay drifting to sleep himself and turning over in his mind in what manner to fuck her when he woke up:  her on top of him like Hanya preferred it?  Oh yuck yuck! he did not want to think about Hanya fucking with his sister any way whatever, yuck!  Maybe take Sevie from behind again?  Bit too soon to suggest he fuck her in the arse?  Might be nice to just do it facing.  He lay with the warm curving body of the honourable Lady Sevianne el Shosta van Sietter completely played out in his arms, the blood throbbing softly around his heart.  He lay in great happiness, having successfully secured for himself an animal in the bed who would always dance to his pleasure.  



About the author
Naoko Smith is a pseudonym.  You can read more about me on my blogs Anthropological Mum and Feminist Erotica and can be my friend on Facebook.  

The van Sietter Bride Who Brought Happiness in Her Pocket is the fourth of the stories set in my feminist utopia.  It takes place just before the second novel and has a companion piece The van H’las Bride Who Brought Honour in Her Pocket, which takes place just after the second novel.  I decided to charge for The van H’las Bride, although I would have liked to have put it up free, because it contains spoilers for the first novel and I thought if it was free people would read it before giving my novels a go.  
These two stories are about two cousins and the very different women they marry.  The cousins are both oldest sons of the high nobility, men of honour who have been brought up to be more thoughtful about those around them than most of the high nobility.  Arkyll el Maien van Sietter is a bit of a playboy.  He’s always been happy in himself and while he deeply admires his clever family, he’s not bothered about not being that bright himself;  he’s easygoing and lazy so he’s happy to listen and be guided by others in most things.  He’s expecting to have to marry someone like his family:  intelligent and elegant, but during the story he realises he actually just wants someone with whom to play.  His younger cousin Vadya el Gaiel van H’las is one of his relatives who are at war during this story.  Vadya is brighter than Arkyll, not as handsome but known to be sweet at heart.  The family tragedy recounted in Heart’s Home leads to him losing hope of an honourable bride, until he meets a young woman of intelligence as well as beauty, the daughter of Anastelle Yrai and Hanya el Jien (The Low Lovers of Anastelle Yrai).  

The full set of stories is:  
I.An Honourable Slut
A man on man fantasy romp for anyone who likes men.  
II.A Match for the el Maiens
When Commander-Lord Vadya el Gaiel van H’las’ father proposes a marriage to him he knows it can only be a political match.  The most likely candidate is the enigmatic Lady Anastelle el Maien van Sietter.  But what of Vadya’s mysterious Captain, Tashka Maien?  Is it Vadya’s hands on an horse’s reins Tashka most admires, or the large endowment Vadya will bring to his wedding bed?  And what is it that keeps the honourable Lady Arianna el Jien van Sietter, Lady wife to Commander-Lord Clair el Maien, in the el Maiens’ rambling old castle home full of dark secrets.  
III.The Low Lovers of Dame Anastelle Yrai
Anata Yrai likes to play - with low lovers.  
IV.The van Sietter Bride Who Brought Happiness in Her Pocket
She was clearly full of bounce but Arkyll was only supposed to pretend he liked her.  
V.Heart’s Home for Arrie el Maien 
The wild daughter of the el Maiens, the cold-eyed Lady Arianna, was an high-stepping beauty.  She chose to marry a dashing Captain-Knight of her own region – her father’s son in duty bound – just before he rode away to war, and then to follow her uncle, General-Lord Tashka el Maien van H’las, into the strategic staff offices.  Her misguided kindness towards her cousin Esha el Gaiel van H’las proved to be even more fateful a step in the long and stony path to her heart’s home.  
VI.The van H’las Bride Who Brought Honour in Her Pocket
The el Gaiel men are rumoured to be well-endowed.  
VII.The el T’fel Affair
The most inappropriate of lovers for Stevan el T’fel van P’shan.  
VIII.The Secret of Lady el V’lair
The daughter of the el V’lairs is wild - all the el V’lairs are wild, as wild as the wind.  Lady el V’lair is chained and lives among her brother’s chained Girls.  When she meets happy-go-lucky Captain-Dame Anastelle ‘Tasha’ Vashin out on manoeuvres in the grassy plains of Vail the honourable Captain discovers an unexpected sweetness in the Lady el V’lair’s temper – along with the always anticipated sweetness in a curving body suddenly free in love.