"Haply thou art the Arch-Fiend's daughter, come to harry me until I be undone body and soul."

"Nay, only thy wife, fair and mortal," she said virtuously. "Chaste, too, so far this day."

He leaned on his elbow, ungirding his golden belt. The linked bosses dropped to the carpet with a rich chink. "Thou art uneasy in the state, I trow."

Agreeable it was to trade words and luftalk. But the turn of his broad wrist, competent and brief, and the sound of the belt falling gave Melanthe pause. She drew her knees up, uncertain if he would mount her and have done—she did not object; she welcomed it, for that by God's send she would breed his child, but experience of four times, thrice with Ligurio and once with him, taught her that it marked the swift conclusion to all love-liking.

She had been most delighted with this play and was not eager to see it end so soon. As he leaned over her, she put her palm upon his chest. "What study is this, learned monk? Yet lacks my instruction. The first and second sins of lust only have I beheld."

But he did not answer, only gave her a thorough demonstration of the first again while he loosed the buttons on his doublet. She could feel the force of his intent; he had grown impatient with disport and love-amour. With a little dejection she let her hand relax, trailing it upward, sliding her fingers idly in his hair as he lifted himself over her.

She spread her legs, yielding obedience to what she owed him. Her body tensed slightly, anticipating the discomfort.

But he did not lie hard upon her; instead he held his weight up and kissed her mouth, and her throat, and her breasts. She sighed, savoring, drowning and pleasuring in the last moments.

The freed cloth of his shirt and his doublet brushed her skin. He drew hard on her teat. The sensation shot through her, half pain and half ecstasy. She clutched the loose velvet, pulled and arched, trying to bring him down to her.

"Merci." She gasped, all her muscles contracting with each tug and sweet spike of pain. "Merci, merci."

He made a wordless sound, moving away, downward, shaping her with his hands. She wanted him back for more; she dragged at him, lacing her fingers in his hair, but he was leaving her, pulling away in spite of it, dropping kisses down her belly.

Just as she would have exclaimed in despair of his withdrawal, he pressed his mouth to her quaint. He held her hips and touched her with his tongue.

The delicious bolt of feeling transfused her. She trembled beneath him, drinking air, moaning between her teeth, her body twitching as if seized by each lascivious stroke. She tilted her head back, lifting her breasts and her spine and her hips, pressing up to him to take the waves of lust, asking, begging—demanding with her flesh.

He rose above her. For the moment that they were separate, she whimpered in anxiety: she wanted him to go on kissing her that way, but he sat back and pulled off the doublet and shirt, baring shoulders muscled as fine and thick as the destrier's. He reached down to his hose and breeches that showed his full tarse through linen, crammed heavily against the cloth.

She felt distraught. He would use her now, and it was over, and she was near weeping for the feeling he had given her that still demanded more.

He released the lacing on his breeches. She lifted up her arms to embrace him as he came over her. She did not flinch, though he was so much larger than Ligurio; she lay herself open for him despite her thwarted yearning.

He rested on his hands, looking down into her face. "Lady," he said, with a quick grin, "in thy studies, that last that I taught thee—falls it within the thirteenth sin, indecent manner of embrace."

She made a faint wild laugh, a mindless answer, for he was lowering himself on her, this time using his body as he had used his hands and his tongue to urge that impossible pleasure. In surprise she felt it coming again as his hard member pressed at her, parting her a little with each push, until the head was inside her.

His arms trembled. He stared down at her, a blank distance in his look, a blindness. He drew air in his chest, his grin going to a baring of his teeth as he drove himself into her.

Though his size was a sore burn, she took him deep. No coupling she had ever known to be like this. His unchaste kiss, his unchaste touch, his breath a harsh sob at her ear; his weight on her and his penetration to the very depth of her. Over and over she rolled and shoved herself wantonly against him—and culmination came upon her like an ambush.

"God save!" she cried. Her back arched. Her body shuddered, beyond command. She died as he did, in full ecstasy, lost and cleaving to him in the flood.

* * *

She slept against Ruck's chest, on the floor, turned to nestle with one leg drawn up and her hips curving, her hand resting possessively on his waist. Propped on his elbow, he watched the firelight play orange and rose over her skin.

For as long as he remembered, ever when he discharged his seed, even from the first of his marriage to Isabelle, he had come into his wits again with his spirit borne down by melancholy. A nameless sorrow possessed him, a presage and knowledge of loss.

He knew to expect it, but the expectation brought no remedy, only an acceptance of something that God saw fit to impose on him. In his years alone, when he had given in to his lusts in secret, the grief had sometimes hardly left him from one trespass to the next, only abated by his vision of his perfect lady and confession. Its durance was sometimes days and sometimes only as long it took him to fall asleep, but ever the deep trist was there in the afterward, as it was with him now.

Softly he moved his hand over her, a gentle stroke. With each breath he could feel the tips of her breasts touch him. He could lower his lashes and look at them, marvel among many marvels. Without her gowns and jewels, she had a womanly shape, all roundness and long lines, not so coldly slender as her close-cut fashionable robes made her appear, but sweetly pillowed and cushioned, full ripe in life.

In his despair her comeliness made him think of how he would lose her. It must be impossible; he could not imagine any future in which he would have this moment again.

His finger trailed down into the shadow between them. He followed an odd flaw in the satin of her skin, an irregular line from her merkin curls up to her belly. He drew his fingertip downward, tracing another beside it, and another. They were strangely feminine, faint and light, soft at the edges like no scars he had ever seen in a wide experience of battle wounds. He wondered at how she might have come by such ghostly marks, but the very idea of questioning the Princess Melanthe on such a topic as her flaws made him smile inside himself.

She would freeze him in his place. She would not understand him, that he only wished to know more of her, nor believe that because she was not perfect beneath her furs and silks and jewels, he loved her the more. Arrogance and unexpected blemish, and such courage to ride with him alone. Shameless and coy by turns, her marvelous blue-lilac eyes sulky with fear that he was repelled by her appearance.

As he traced the marks, she caught his hand, folding up her leg up with a quick move, as if to hide herself. Her eyes sprang open. "What art thou about?" she asked sharply.

He locked his fingers into hers and leaned over, caressing her brow with light kisses. "Inspecting thy great age and ugliness, wench."

She brought his hand up, making him rest it on his own thigh, trapping it firmly there over the black hose he still wore. "I've lost count of these times thou hast called me wench. Thou moste be flayed alive to atone for them all. It is a great tragedy."

"Bassinger will make a woeful lay of lamentation, to remember me."

She stared at the base of his throat, unsmiling. He regretted speaking of Bassinger, bringing the world into their seclusion. To distract her, he loosed his hand from her hold. He cupped her breast, caressing his thumb over the dark rosy crown.

She drew in a swift breath. The shade of a frown hovered between her brows. She slanted a look up at him.

"Thou hast lied to me, monk man. Thou art no abstinent from women."

He shook his head. "I have told you troth, my lady, fore God."

"Nay." She rolled onto her back, gripping his wrist. "What of this manner of—kissing and touching? Depardeu, where hast thou discovered such things?"

He lifted his eyebrows. "This?" He made a slow circle with his thumb. "Lady, I have been married. A husband will touch his wife so."

She gave him a look as offended as any scandalized abbess. "Mine did not!"

Ruck tilted his head, resting his cheek on his fist. "Did he nought? Ne cannought I say why, my lady, but that pleases me for to hearen."

"And—did I not mean only—this—but thy...unnatural kisses. I think me only lewd gallants and carpet knights know of such perversions!"

He ceased his caress and lowered his eyes. She seemed truly agitated by the transgression. To be sermoned by the Princess Melanthe, of all people, made him think he must verily have been immoral to the worst degree of vice.

"Forgive me, my lady." He set his mouth. "I thought—such a one as you, wise in luf-amour—I thought me you would knowen these things, and like them. Ne will I nought offend you so again, I swear it."

She curled both her hands about his. "Nay, nay, thou mistakes me. I did—I took pleasure, wee loo, how could I say thee I did not? But—" She turned her face to him. "Where indeed hast thou learned them, if not from dissolute women and harlots?"