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When, for the sixth time in as many days, the Lord Seneschal of the Koniortos Court says, “Stop flirting with my wife!” and when said wife, rather than gamely ignoring him, turns to Ortus and rolls her startingly beautiful eyes, it portends — something, Ortus is not quite sure, in the moment, what, but something.
Whether the portent is relieving or disquieting proves likewise challenging to parse. Labouring under the impression that he has been transgressing some mode of Fifth formality, he has said, it seems, nearly as many stupid things as possible. This has required him to explain, or, at least, to attempt to explain, that he merely speaks objective truth. His praise acknowledges the scholar. It would hardly become the Cavalier Primary of a House not the lady’s own, he explains now, to make comment upon the woman.
“And furthermore,” he adds, in consternation, “This Cavalier Primary values words too highly to misuse them.”
The lady is nodding gently, attentive, which together with the eye roll must signify that she, finally, believes him. But what the Lady Pent appears to believe him to the extent that she should share with him this private joke portends — he cannot yet quite seize it.
The other cavalier is, as is his wont, attempting to clarify that he has always believed Ortus, and is only making humorous observation. As Ortus listens, accepts that there is no duel for honour in the offing this time, either, some small part of himself, some secret, selfish part, begins to whisper, well, and why shouldn’t she believe you? Who wouldn’t accept the protestations of such an innocence, the better to avoid unpleasant and unwanted overtures?
And this voice, this unpleasant and unwanted voice compels him to inquire whether he believes himself. Whether he has indeed been — been offering praise to the woman as much as the scholar, and wanting her to receive it as such. We are living in misunderstandings, he thinks, miserable. Our questions are rendered worthless by our replies.
Because if, in fact, he has been, as the man whose graceful brow is currently creasing in Ortus’ direction has so casually put it, flirting with the Lady Pent, and this in front of her husband and cavalier; if he has thus transgressed their doubled sacred bond, why, then, have they both been so unbearably nice about it? They must find him a pitiable creature, unworthy to such a degree of serious consideration that he ought to slice out his own tongue, rather than try their patience so.
For, yes, overwrought, the other cavalier has not paused for breath. He says, sun-bronzed face warming with the red of agitation, “Listen, man! We’re all friends here, aren’t we? I really do want to joke with you! Us two especially, us unconventional cavaliers — we ought to be able to find some common ground! And I’m sorry if I keep bollocking it up and, err, suggesting that it’s thinking Abigail is perfection. I just mean, well. Well!”
He grinds to a halt, hands raised and face arranged in a grimace of uncertainty, begging Ortus to understand with the body that speaks louder than any words can.
Us two. Emperor save him from what he cannot understand. Ortus presses two fingers to his own frontal bone and tries to smother the infant words crawling toward his tongue, to no avail.
“Us two?” he repeats aloud. “Are you indeed so unconventional? Allow me to enumerate your graces; you are: a swordsman, where I am none; a gallant, where I possess a timorous constitution; devoted to your necromancer, where I am at best an ancillary appendage; elegant as a song, and humble as the winging night, and handsome in the way that lower men would boast of.”
Those luminous eyes are widening, soft mouth a perfect o, but Ortus finds he cannot stop the flow of words. “In short, you are the kind of cavalier that one could write into a poem, and thus! If you are unconventional, I must note with devastation that the corps of the Emperor’s own is much diminished in these latter days, and I must protest that though I am but a pale shade of my own forebears I am nothing but the most conventional of Ninth House cavaliers. I serve at my Lady’s pleasure as her beast of burden; I live only here and there in little words. Never mine, the dauntless heart that beats, as one, within the breast of that prince of cavaliers and, though you may disclaim it, in your own.”
He finds that he is breathing hard. He finds that his palms are sweating. He finds that he cannot bring himself to regret any of the words that he has just said, although he knows that he will lie awake tonight and berate himself, in turn, for each of them.
Rather than anger or disgust, though, there is something — what would one call that? warmth? wonder? — in the brown eyes staring into his. “D’you really think I’m — well. That is to say — all of that?”
When Ortus cannot bring himself to answer, his counterpart grins widely.
“If more cavaliers were like you, Ortus, I might’ve spent more time in the barracks in my misspent youth!” To this completely opaque pronouncement he adds, “Nothing like a strong voice and a strong set of shoulders to make one weak around the knees a little.”
Bewildered, Ortus defaults to: “I assure you, I am perfectly sincere —” and is saved from having to expand upon his sincerity in a way that would surely only damn him further by the Lady Pent rather extravagantly clearing her throat.
“Do please keep flirting with my husband,” she says, sounding tranquil, if a little put-upon. “But I would really rather if you both continued this a little more quietly, or perhaps elsewhere, and left me in peace to read!”
Her husband chuckles, shrugs as if to say what can you do? Scholars!, and seems on the point of asking Ortus to walk with him to elsewhere to continue whatever intricate Fifth House ritual they seem to have been conducting. Inter-House communication, though they speak the same language, is profoundly difficult; he has been coming to know this on an almost cellular level since arriving here to the First House, but never more so than when communing with the Fifth. And yet, to keep away would be impossible.
“I cannot but profess —” he begins, but this time it is the cavalier who cuts him off.
“I’ve heard this one before,” he says. The glow is fading from his face and Ortus finds himself obscurely disappointed. “Your definition of not-flirting and mine are, I think, quite a ways apart.”
The lady nods, vigorous. “Yes, Ortus, really. How anyone accomplishes romance on the Ninth, I’ll never understand!”
No one, Ortus wants to tell her, at least in living memory, has ever accomplished romance on the Ninth, not in the sense that she means it. They are a House devoted; they accomplish devotion; they do not stoop to petty compliments and the dance of courtship as other Houses do. But there is a closed-off look, now, to the faces of both the lady and her seneschal If not quite offence then some very close kin to that emotion, so he swallows what he had thought to say and instead offers his apologies.
“No, no need for that,” the lady says, gentle.
Her cavalier adds, “But if ever you change your mind...” and Ortus has never been more grateful for the strident tones of his necromancer.
Back in the drafty Ninth quarters, while his own lady mutters and stomps in the next room, Ortus lies awake and regrets all of his words, in order.
And yet he cannot deny the truth of them: that Magnus Quinn (and should he feel a thrill, at thinking Magnus, at the taste it leaves on his tongue when he mouths it, soundless, into the blackness of the night?) shares all the qualities Ortus has always been drawn to in other men, their participation in the type most fully incarnated by Nonius. Colour, in the black and white of the world; warmth, against its chill. That the Lady Pent is something more than a formidable necromancer and a power in her own right — a woman, there, he has thought it, of talent and grace and gift, of uncompromising good humour and glowing, radiant beauty.
Why should people like that — people like that who have each other — be remotely interested even in the strong voice and strong shoulders that Ortus can admit he possesses?
Even if he could parse it, understand what might make them open to any advances he might be bold enough to make (bold, him! a joke in truth, that!), he cannot imagine how he would go about the making in itself. It is not right — it is not worthy of the life he has immortalised in writing and failed so utterly to live — to covet another person’s spouse, even if one is coveting both simultaneously and together. And even if it were, even if the flower of chivalry himself would say yes, let’s, Ortus Nigenad is not that flower of chivalry, nor indeed its pale imitation.
He resolves: he must now only speak to them in plainness, and keep within his own heart the qualities he finds so praiseworthy, lest they misperceive his will and think he could allow himself to sully them.
Despite his best intentions, he almost immediately transgresses.
They are, once again, in the library, the steel panels gleaming dully in the light of the First House’s sun, and the Lady Pent says something witty and wise and Ortus cannot help but compare her mind to those rays, illuminating all around her.
Her husband says, “Stop flirting with my wife,” but his hand has lighted on Ortus’ upper arm in an attitude even Ortus’ not inconsequential vocabulary can only term caress. His blood is fizzing beneath his skin. He thinks, vaguely, that he might be ill.
“Magnus,” the lady warns. “Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.”
He only laughs. “Persistence is hammering at the board until the nail goes in.”
Ortus hears the exchange as if through a thick veil. He is rooted to the spot by the weight of that hand, his arm and the pit of his belly throbbing in sympathy, his heart pounding through his ribs in a way he’s written countless times but never felt before. The battle-fever, the blood-hunger; the desire to plunge one’s sword in and in and in until it is wet and dripping — there has always been a doubling there, of sense; a sword is death but to a cavalier it is their very life life, and so it must also symbolise the penetrative act of regeneration, but this is the first time that Ortus has understood so clearly what that doubled sense is saying.
After all eternity passes in an instant, his arm bare again and the Fifth pair returned to their respective tasks, Ortus stammers, for the first time since his childhood, and makes another hasty exit.
When they see each other again, not a day later, neither of the other mentions the exchange, the touch, what it betrayed — so nakedly! — of his own desires. And yet, somehow, the pattern repeats: he will feel compelled to point them to their own soft or shining glories, and one or the other will make some gesture, touch some part of him with some part of them.
He becomes accustomed to the shape and size (and to! The size!) of the cavalier’s calloused hands. To the weight of the necromancer’s head where her brow lands on his shoulder, his temple. To the brush of fingers over the hand he has splayed on the table, or the nudge of a foot against his.
They touch him all the time, it begins to seem, and he feels lit by it, a kindled flame that must be shining out from beneath his skin, that makes him crave enough to dare. He grows bold; he speaks a verse on the curls that tumble across Quinn’s brow, another on the delicate angle of the Lady Pent’s wrist. He commends the one for bright humour and the other for bright insight, weaves them into the stanzas of light that he cannot stop composing.
They do not push him further — he is grateful for this, even as he thinks the want will swallow him whole, now that he has seen it for what it is. These small explosions are enough, pockmarking the surface of him with the signs of Fifth House passage. Always the soft invasion, always shielding the iron fist of their inevitable possession (every inch of his almost worthless territory! The portent was of conquest, and he is open for the taking) in the velvet glove of their forbearance. He could have staved them off, he thinks, if he were stronger.
But, thank the Emperor and all the long decline of the Ninth House’s cavaliers: he is not stronger. He is ripe for the treaties they come bearing, willing to trade all his careful store of words for the small concessions of their touch.
It does not occur to him that they might have more to bring to their negotiations, not until it is much too late.
And yet they are the Fifth House, rich in trade goods, and they themselves are generous and warm, his friends, for whatever value that word has in the not-life they seem to be living together, here in this place that seems a greater nightmare every day, a hell no sacred text could ever have described in all its deathless horrors.
In retrospect, it was perhaps inevitable that, seeing how he opened to their overtures, unfurling like the petals of a sun-warmed rose on Rhodes, they should begin to negotiate in earnest.
The lady is first, as she should be in all things. She says, one grey and dreary afternoon, “Ortus, I think we’ve gotten quite beyond the denial stage, don’t you?”
He says, “My lady?”
“What I mean is, Magnus and I would really quite like it if you’d come to bed with us — or, if you’re not into that kind of thing, if you’d tell us what you would be into, so we could try it out with you.”
He says again: “My lady!” and has to sit down, hard.
“And enough of my lady,” she adds. She is looking quite closely at him, as if he were an artifact. “I’m not some little heroine in one of those silly cavalier-and-princess tales from the Third. You know the type I mean, can’t do a thing themselves. When you say my lady, it makes me feel like one of them. Or like my grandmother, bless her, and I don’t dress well enough to be the one or the other.”
Her eyes, when he meets them, are shrewd. “I know it’s not what you mean by it, but really.”
“It is hardly what I mean,” he manages. He has, in unfortunate point of fact, been painting her in his mind as the object of the unfulfillable kind of longing that those tales are about, her and her husband both, but he takes the point that this is not a song, for her. “You are, in fact, in flesh and blood and bone before me, Lady — Abigail. I merely mean to say — to express my devotion, and my reverence.”
“That’s just it!” she cries. “Less of the reverence and more of the flesh and blood and bone, if you take my meaning. I don’t mean for you to stop with all the poetry — I quite like most of it, to tell you the truth; there’s nothing like having one’s eyebrows compared to graceful arabesques to make one feel like quite the beauty — but I do think we could insert a bawdy verse or two. And use each other’s names.”
She pats his hand with hers, and then, while he is still processing the implications of bawdy verse or two, she makes her way out of the library. His gaze is drawn, inexorably, to her, so he is able to catch — and to return! — the smile that graces her lips when she turns back to look at him, the gentle arch of her arm as she gives him the smallest of waves.
Not two days later, the — Magnus; he has been practicing, as commanded — Magnus slings an arm around Ortus’ neck, giddy as a child with a new book, and says, “So I’ve been thinking, we ought to start out slow. See how we fit together, like. It seems to me like we have plenty of time to do it right, although I could also be persuaded to toss caution to the wind and leap, err, directly into the fray, as it were. Always liked that martial imagery, all the crossing swords bits, although I don’t suppose any of that is meant to sound as sexy as it does, eh?”
He has been preparing for — well, not exactly for this, but for the Fifth’s next sally, so he can say with something approaching equanimity, “On the contrary. Death is but the final glorious moment before the cycle of a life can begin anew, in prosody if not here in the resurrected world. There is thus always an eroticism to every flash of blades, the pulsing beat of life flowing into the combatants where each touches his opponent. A shared ecstasy of bodies doing as they were made to do.”
And Magnus blinks rapidly and says, “God’s teeth, man. Is that a ‘yes’?”
To which the only possible reply is, “I believe so, if you are indeed asking the question.”
They are, it seems, indeed asking the question; on the way to the Fifth’s quarters, Magnus leans into the library and says “My love!” and Abigail looks up from her book and says “Really?” and does not wait for his response before she is springing to her feet and springing through the door, before she presses soft kisses first to Magnus’ cheek and then to Ortus’.
“Oh, I’m so delighted!” she exclaims. They are walking, not so briskly as to feel hurried but certainly not dawdling, and Ortus is beginning to feel as though his body belongs to some other being, that he has ascended to a higher plane and is simply watching the orbits their physical forms make around each other, all three of them. Where he might have felt himself an interloper he is, instead, a vector for the pattern’s greater intricacy, its expansion like the veritable stretch of bone beneath an adept’s fingers, latticework and lace, fragile, ductile strength woven like a fabric around the space between each fragment.
He watches himself, the pivot point for their two arcs; watches Abigail take his place, then Magnus, no clear or steady centre but the endless, turning gyre of them, and he almost does not notice the dark arch of the doorway until, soul suddenly seated in his flesh once more, he finds himself passing through it and into the chamber beyond, like dying or like being born.
A buzzing has installed itself beneath his skin. His very teeth ring with it; he is all atremble from the marrow of his bones, a state which only worsens when the door is closed behind them and Magnus undoes the first two buttons at his collar.
There are curls there, too, Ortus sees. His gaze is snared by them, a bird grateful for the wire. They are coppery-bright in the First House’s watery daylight where it slants through the window to illuminate this — this vision he’s been granted. He wants to collapse to his knees in front of it, as if at the steps of the highest altar. And, miracle upon miracle, his flesh responds when he asks it to follow the impulse of his bones. As much cavalier as he could ever hope to be, he wades into the battle: his knees hit the floor and he presses his face to Magnus’ hipbone. His hands fit tight around the muscled backs of Magnus’ thighs, two columns set astride the world to which Ortus’ vision has narrowed.
“God’s bones,” Magnus breathes, voice gone tight. His own hand comes to scrabble at Ortus’ shorn scalp. Behind them, Abigail laughs, light and quick and bright; a jewel-toned insect alighting on the warm and fragrant earth.
The sound is a lodestone and Ortus’ eyes no more than dark and blunted iron; he turns his head to meet her gaze and sees that she is smiling with the purest pleasure. He feels his own mouth stretch in answer even as he is pressing his skull back into the cup of Magnus’ palm. His eyes flutter at the scratch of blunt nails, but he is rewarded for keeping them open: Abigail, businesslike and beautiful, pulls her sweater over her head.
As her arms come back down, knitwear tossed somewhere he does not care to track, the swell of her breasts is like the First House’s tides, rolling slow and full across the strand of her body. He feels trapped, marooned; beneath his cheek, Magnus’ own sea-tide pulses, blood-warm and sweat-musked. There is ocean on all sides of the island of his body, lapping at his shores. He thinks he would welcome drowning.
“Love,” Magnus invites, voice hushed and splinter-rough. The hand not anchored to the back of Ortus’ head extends out and Abigail moves in, graceful as music, as if she, too, can feel the tide-rhythm and is dancing with it.
Another kiss for Magnus’ cheek, then she ducks to tilt Ortus’ own head up with her cool and slender fingers and bring her lips to his — and, oh, that he were not on his knees already, so that he might show her how she has undone him and with such a simple act! His eyes do fall shut, then, and his mouth opens that she might consume him, Magnus’ hand keeping him firmly where he needs to be.
When she has had her fill and pulls back enough for breath, he whispers my lady at her mouth, against her wishes but unable to constrain the fervour of his voice.
“Ortus,” she whispers back. She presses her lips over his frontal bone for a tender moment, then unbends herself. When he opens his eyes, hers are warm with some private delight, hands at her skirtwaist where they cover one of Magnus’. “I know it’s a little chilly,” she muses, “but this is all much easier with clothes off.”
“And I would like to see you both,” Magnus adds. “Just speaking for myself.”
How can he resist, he who has already surrendered to their terms? Unresisting, he unlaces and lets fall his hooded cloak; the air is cold indeed, but a fire burns in the space between the three of them, so Ortus feels nothing but the warmth of it. Magnus’ hand disappears from his head, but Ortus cannot be too disappointed, because it goes to pull off Magnus’ sweater and shirt in one hopelessly masculine motion.
Beneath his own sweater, and the threadbare shirt of Drearburh stock that was the finest thing his father left him, Ortus is naught but skin and what sits, slablike, beneath it.
Ashamed of what he bares to them, he says, “I know it is not a sight to sing of, but this body’s purpose has only ever been to carry and to hold. I would —” he swallows, starts again, “I would hold you, both, and carry you whither you would go.”
He cannot quite track the sequence that follows: somehow, the columns of Magnus’ thighs have become roots, twining around the soft shale-rock of Ortus’ own body and threatening to crumble him to dust. His ankles lock them together, his hands slide down to where Ortus has, on instinct, gripped into muscle, holding Magnus aloft.
“God’s balls,” Magnus swears into a biting kiss. “I feel like I weigh nothing! How long do you think you can hold me up like this?”
The teeth at his lower lip, the tongue sliding across the upper; the enclosure of thighs and groin and ankles; he must bring together his mind from where it has scattered into all these points of contact. It is so difficult to think. He says, finally, “Perhaps a half an hour, if you would remain still, and press your hands into my shoulders — they are the holders of what little strength I might lay claim to.”
Magnus presses his hands into Ortus’ shoulders. His callouses scrape on the thin skin there, a friction that makes Ortus, all involuntary shudder, draw their bodies closer than he had thought possible; bellies meet, then chests. The hair on Magnus’ is coarse, a textural counterpoint to the soft wetness of his tongue where it licks into Ortus’ mouth as reward or punishment or simple fact of life, like air or water.
There is nothing in any poem that could have prepared him for this, for the sensation slinging wild across every splinter of his body. He cannot even catalogue them all: the heat and slick, the rough and firm, the insistent throb whose owner he cannot determine; it may be his sword pulsing with the battle-lust, or Magnus’ where they are pressed together, or both, but he feels every heartbeat at the apex of his thighs and he feels, suddenly, that he could not stand here for half an hour without becoming a pillar of pure and unquenchable flame.
He cannot ask it — all his breath is pouring into Magnus’ lungs, all his words have deserted him, but he wants, so desperately, for there to be no barriers between them; to be as raw and vulnerable in all his flesh as he feels in his soul. Magnus’ tongue scrapes against the roof of his mouth. His fingers press bruise-deep between Ortus’ shoulder blades where he clings. His thighs are forge-hot iron branding Ortus’ ribs, his sock-clad heels insistent prods for the beginning of a rolling, rocking rhythm that is as revelatory as the word of the Emperor Undying. They are one creature of pure sensation, panting, sweating, moving, and Ortus has a flash of fear that he might lose himself — no great loss, surely, only he would drop Magnus, and the panic that seizes him is sudden and intense as a blow, driving all sensation away and leaving him, cold and frightened, and — no. Not alone.
Mercifully, they are not alone.
“That’s nearly fifteen minutes already,” Abigail says. “And not a sign of tremble! Pfwaugh, Ortus — exceptional stamina, in the face of that assault!”
Magnus chuckles into Ortus’ mouth, but it’s a breathy thing. They’ve barely begun and already Ortus is struggling to keep up with the pace of revelation. “Inside joke,” the other cavalier pants. He rests his forehead on Ortus’, tender, unafraid of the paint Ortus can suddenly see beginning to smear all over him. “I was always rubbish at assaults. Barely kept up with the class back in the day.”
He tilts back down to press a soft kiss to Ortus’ lips, a dragging pressure that lightens the dark disappointment Ortus feels yawning within him as Magnus unhooks their frames, introducing the chill of air and distance onto sweat-slicked skin.
“God Himself must have sculpted you,” he blurts, perhaps the worst line of halfway-poetry he’s let escape his lips since he was a chrèchling. But Magnus only flushes darker, down his throat and across the arrows of his clavicle, only presses a hand to his own chest and, closing his eyes, leans back in to bruise their lips against each other like bulls spring-blooded and sun-hot.
“I’ve often said so,” Abigail is saying. “Would you look at those proportions — I’ve always said, even a flesh magician couldn’t improve a thing. I’m glad to know we both have such excellent taste, Ortus. Makes one feel almost involved in all this.”
“My love!” Magnus gasps, as Ortus cries, “Lady!”
“Joke!” she exclaims, but without consultation they have advanced on her, made their attack; she shrieks, “Joke, I swear!” again, through laughter into Ortus’ back where Magnus has hefted her and folded her over Ortus’ shoulder.
The heat of her breath warms his skin as her laughter sinks into his vertebrae. Against him she is pure joy, cool where Magnus runs warm, slight and fragile as necromancers, as birds, as the first fresh buds of spring are. He bars his arm across her thighs to trap her, safe, so he can follow Magnus’ line of sight and advance toward the bed. Never before has he felt what it is to be a cavalier: to have and hold as precious a necromancer’s life, her body and her soul bound into a magic far beyond anything even the Emperor could imagine, though it must be blasphemous to think so.
And it seems to cost Magnus nothing to grant him this, to share the treasure that is his by all their laws to guard and keep, to trust in the strength of Ortus’ arm and the fervour of his heart! A lesser man could never allow such a liberty; there are odes that must be written, that beg for time and space and flimsy enough to encapsulate in language the chivalrous generosity of this glorious destiny shared, this binary orbit expanded, if only for this brief and sunlit afternoon, to allow a third star to join their dance — bone-weary; cold; dark and faintly glimmering though it may be.
He deposits Abigail on the bed, gentle, reverent, and accepts the pull of her hands and the push of Magnus’, toppling him over to hold himself above her. One knee planted below her hip, one between her thighs, hands buried in the bedclothes where her braid is coming loose.
They need no words, although Magnus, having caught his breath, seems to have plenty; they work together to set aside the few rags that still adorn the star-flesh of their bodies, and then they are naked together, limbs a pleasing tangle that writhes as if with one mind and warms and warps the sheets.
The briefest madness overtakes him; he is subsumed by feeling, by texture; loses track of whose hands and legs and lips are whose. All he knows for a time is the delirious pitch of his own wanting, as if everything were deserted and they three alone were sitting on the ruins of the world.
When he comes back to himself, his mouth is on Abigail’s breast and she is arching into him, Magnus’ hand low on his back for leverage as he presses himself to Ortus’ thigh, bowing his chest over Ortus’ back to press sucking kisses to Ortus’ throat, beneath his ear, his shoulder. Abigail’s delicate fingers are as a vise on Ortus’ skull, and seem to clamp just as tightly around where hr husband’s hand presses into the mattress by her waist. Never has there been a fairer prison, or one that merited less the name, than the sweet bars of her phalanges.
Ortus feels flayed open, alive to the elements and the slightest brush of skin. Some force older and larger than he is compels him to swirl his tongue around the dusky peak between his lips. When Abigail cries out, wordless, that same force prompts him to drag the flat of the hand now liberated down her breastbone to her iliac crest, then past, so he can sink two fingers into the forge-fire of her heat.
“Ortus,” she pants, and “Oh, yes, please!”
Her voice shoots along every nerve. He nearly stutters in the rhythm he is slowly sliding into, the roll of Magnus’ hips against Ortus’ thigh shifting their bodies enough that it is as though Ortus is the channel, the conduit of motion and of pleasure between their precious bodies.
“Not a quaver in that arm was seen!” Magnus gasps. His hand, where it has slid low, past Ortus’ lumbar vertebrae and onto his coccyx, is shaking too much to quest inward with much purpose. Ortus glances up from Abigail’s breast to see those honeyed eyes wild with glee and exultation. And although Magnus does not attempt to finish his paean to Ortus’ stamina, something within Ortus’ ribcage threatens to shatter through every bone at the mere thought that he — he! — has inspired poetry, albeit in the clunky and overworked Fifth style.
He turns his face up following his eyes, helpless, as the flower to the sun. Rhythm never breaking, Magnus swoops down to capture Ortus’ mouth with the flickering heat of his own, dripping sparks as he goes. Ortus’ eyes threaten to close, but he wills them open so he can capture everything for future contemplation.
Past the blurry, too-close line of Magnus’ nose, the furrowed concentration of Abigail’s brow is a transfixing sight, arresting as the first florescence of the plants he’s only ever read about but can imagine fully. He speeds his fingers in her, digs into his planted elbow to push himself more firmly against the staccato of Magnus’ hips, and, together, one into the air and the other into Ortus’ teeth, they gasp and groan and swear, profaning God with how he’s made them feel.
His whole body thrums with the knowledge that he is depended on for this, the fullness of their pleasure-taking, that the paltry skills he has to offer are essential to the pleasure they are building in this bed and that without him — for the first time he can remember — something already beautiful would be less so.
“Go on, then,” he dimly hears Abigail gasp, too transfixed by the rise of her against the heel of his hand to truly parse the words. As if on command, Magnus comes apart with a bellow, sound resonating from deep inside his chest until Ortus imagines they must all be vibrating in sympathy, attuned to the rip and roar of it, the sway of Magnus’ body in the aftermath, the pulse of heat striping Ortus from hip to knee and up across his belly.
“God’s bones,” Magnus swears, “God’s teeth and fucking fingernails.”
He is alight with his pleasure, all the metaphors Ortus has already been testing on him jumbled into one radiant whole, and he makes the picture even more perfect by — oh gallant, gallant! — throwing his still-spasming form toward the foot of the bed to set his slack-jawed panting mouth just above where Ortus’ fingers are still keeping as steady a rhythm as any prayer-bead counting nun could keep, were she so overwhelmed by gladness.
The taste of Magnus lingering in his mouth, the heat of Magnus drying along his flank, Ortus does what any cavalier would do in service of a lady: he leans up and in and swallows Abigail’s scream.
If Magnus’ end had been bright and sudden, the flash of sunlight through a cloud to blind the unprepared eye, Abigail’s is endless as the dream of death. Heat coils out from her in wave upon wave, an ocean coming to the boil and replenishing itself unto eternity. Her fingers spasm, tectonic tremors against where she still holds tight to Magnus’ hand and Ortus’ skull. Her body undulates in rhythmic pulses, clenching and releasing around his fingers where, caught up in her movement and guided by the wavelet ripples of Magnus’ tongue, he keeps gently rocking them into her. Her panting breaths scald his lips, messy, open-mouthed kisses landing haphazard across his face. He thinks to give her space to breathe once she seems to have passed the peak of it, but her iron grip on the back of his neck keeps him anchored to her, keeps them so close he almost cannot bear it. A dream, held on desperately, in boundless happiness.
And then, finally — “Enough, enough, by the Emperor!”
She releases him, grip softening, although she does not let him go far. His bracing elbow is beginning to tremble now, from the weight he has been keeping on it less than from the reverberations of pleasure running through his body in sympathy with theirs’; suddenly, he can hold himself no longer and collapses to Abigail’s side. The elbow unbends with a pop, a small bright shout of welcome, sense-returning pain. Careful, then, with the sense he’s been returned, he withdraws his fingers from Abigail’s warmth, forgetting Magnus until his mouth engulfs them.
Abigal huffs an exhausted laugh in Ortus’ ear. “I haven’t the strength to go again,” she protests. “Magnus, please!”
But Magnus only winks at her, above the fullness of his lips stretched taut around the width of Ortus’ fingers. There is a ringing or a buzzing, some sound in Ortus’ ears that dims all else but the sight, the sensation of that clever, joking mouth at work. He thinks, for a brief, dizzying moment, that some flesh magic must be at work in him, to make his body feel so invincible and so teemingly full of life. There seems a line drawn tight between his fingers and his pelvic girdle, the slow glide of Magnus’ tongue as endless as if it were reaching all his body’s nerve clusters and setting each on fire.
He burns — he pleads, he hears his own incoherent noises and is almost unashamed. And then, somehow, the rip in the fabric of the possible tears wider still. The hands that perform this feat are small-boned, cool against the flushed heat of his face; Abigal turns his face to hers and kisses him, wet and hard and full of teeth.
He feels the tears begin to stream from beneath his lids, down through the ruined remains of his paint, but there is no sting. No pain can touch him where he floats, ethereal, in a sea of bliss. Her lips catch on his, her thumbs caress his eyebrows, cheekbones, flaring nostrils. Against the arm that held him up so long, the softness of her breasts, the bony dip between them. Her cool, sweet body a refreshing torrent, calming the heat that threatened to overtake him.
It should be enough. He could live a myriad and never hope to capture the least tenth of this in words, could never do justice to what they have unfolded between the three of them — but still he craves and craves and craves, a hunger he had never even known he had baring wolflike teeth within his soul. Nor does he know what could possibly sate it, this yawning maw, this wave held only barely back from cresting.
And then: Magnus’ hot mouth leaves his fingers and lands, lips wide, tongue flat, on Ortus’ inner thigh. Only the long-held self-control of the acolyte keeps him from jackknifing from the bed and smashing Abigail’s skull, and his own, into the ceiling. The ungodly sound that even ironclad discipline cannot keep from passing his lips makes Abigail smile into their kiss and Magnus chuckle, vibration teasing up through every sinew.
“Go on,” she says, just as she had to Magnus, and Ortus chokes on a sob.
There is nothing he can do now but endure the onslaught of feeling, sensation and emotion both, as Magnus moves inexorably toward his goal, as Abigail finds Ortus’ hand and twines their fingers into the kind of clasp that would make even the worst of sinners blush. When Magnus’ mouth finally closes around him, galaxies are resurrected in each of Ortus’ joints. It is as if all of him is scattered wide across a starfield, pinned by points of bright and ageless light, and then — sudden as a thunderclap, as a heart attack, as the quicksilver instant of poetic inspiration, he rushes back into a single atom, a shard of bone that implodes under the tremendous pressure of the entire universe.
“I’d like to see even Nonius hold out that long!” Magnus is saying when Ortus finally wakes to language and to reason, and he nearly achieves completion again upon hearing it.
“I yield to thee, my brother,” Ortus manages. “I am e’en now rent near asunder, undone by thy assaults; have pity on this poor abusèd frame and let me pass, in all tranquility, these final precious seconds of my life.”
The Fifth House swears in harmony. Each claims a part of his mouth (“Ow,” says Magnus), and it is ungainly and undignified, but with all the power left within him Ortus tries to kiss them back.
They slow, eventually, and gentle, and lie back to catch their breath. Cavalier to the right of him; necromancer to the left of him; the ghost of his own pleasure in front of him. Hemmed in on all sides and unwilling to retreat, he cannot help but surrender to the glow, but bask in the gentle warmth remaining in the embers of what they’ve done.
It is this surrender that makes him susceptible, makes him careless, makes him nod when Magnus asks if he has any thoughts as to what he’d like to try next.
Next! He can barely contain the splendour of what has been done already, but for them he knows now he would traverse a far worse, harsher country than the field of his own uncertainty. So he nods; so he gives voice to something so perverse he could only even think it thus constrained by the silken cords of their affection; so he says, “It might be pleasing — that is — rather than touched in sequence, we might fit, like lock and key, one into the other all at once” and waits, heart hammering, for them to pull away.
Instead, delighted laughter: Abigail commends the experience of succumbing to impalement (if not in those terms, precisely), Magnus makes a thoughtful face and incomparably rude hand gestures as he contemplates aloud the necessary calisthenic preparations.
“It would be just to thing to have you right between us,” he declares. “Easier to share.”
Abigail’s nod is vigorous. “We might need several tries, before we really cracked it. But, gosh, it would be good, wouldn’t it?”
Beneath their buzzing chatter, Ortus feels himself ease into the oblivion of sleep by slow degrees. Before it can overtake him, he dares greatly: he leans first to nuzzle into Abigail’s cheek, and then to drop a kiss on Magnus’ temple. The effort proves enormous and he cannot keep his head above his neck.
“We’ve well and truly worn you out!” Magnus cries. He sounds inordinately proud.
“Let’s just get cleaned up a little, then we’ll take a lovely little nap,” Abigail suggests.
“The soul of practicality,” Ortus murmurs. His eyes will not stay open. “Most dear and prescient of women.”
As he falls into the dark embrace of sleep, he distinctly hears Magnus say, “Stop flirting with my wife!” and understands, finally, what it means.
I shall… he thinks, muzzily. When I awaken, I shall express my fondest admiration for you both.