“What I’d like is a piss and my bed.”
He stamped out of the hall for the former; and, much later, having emptied the skin of beer he’d taken from a servant, he returned and found his bed.
Hansen was awakened by the sound of the bar sliding between the staples of his door, locking it from the inside. There was no light at all.
Hansen swung his body erect at the far end of the bed. He didn’t get up because his legs were tangled with furs. He’d do himself more trouble than help by the noise he’d make trying to free them.
In Hansen’s right hand was an iron pry-bar, half a meter long. He held his breath and the weapon, waiting for the intruder to make his move.
“Do you have the time now, Hansen?” whispered a woman’s throaty voice. “Or should I send you one of the serving boys?”
A woman’s voice, the smell of a woman. . . . Hansen’s body began to shiver.
The plank bed trembled as she rested her hand on it, then sat down. “Are you afraid?” she murmured.
“No,” Hansen lied. “Why are you—”
Her fingertips, then her palms, slid through the hairs of his bare chest.
You bet he was afraid of Krita. She was her father’s daughter, headstrong and violent—and surely frustrated in a dozen different ways, ready to light a fuze in order to watch the explosion that would follow.
Taddeusz was out in the hall, slumped in drink over the table. If he even dreamed—
But it’d been too long since Hansen made love to a woman. He hooked the pry-bar over the edge of the bed and reached for Krita.
She wore a robe of thick, clinging material. He fumbled with it for a moment.
“Wait,” she said, imperious in the darkness, and pushed Hansen’s fingers out of the way. Ribbon-ends brushed him as she untied them; then her strong hands pulled his face down to her breasts. Despite her cool demeanor, Krita’s heart was beating fiercely and her nipples were already erect.
They made love with a swift violence that embarrassed Hansen—it had been a long time—but thrilled the woman to the point that at climax she bit his shoulder to stifle her cries.
He continued to stroke into her, uncertain as to the etiquette of sex here on Northworld—and individuals were more different than cultures, besides.
Krita murmured in question, then fell into the rhythm again. Her head tossed and she moaned, “Oh Penny bless me . . . oh bless me . . . oh, oh. . . .”
She buried her face in his shoulder again, this time without biting, and began shuddering through a series of multiple climaxes while Hansen thought of Krita’s father and the fact her breasts were flatter and broader than they had seemed when he glimpsed them beneath her dress.
“Oh, gods . . . ,” she whispered as she let her body go limp. Her fine hair pooled over his hands. He imagined it in the light of the hearth, black with auburn streaks colored by the glowing coals.
“Why did you come here, Hansen?” she asked. Her fingers kneaded the great muscles over his shoulders, then traced down the knobs of his spine.
“Chance,” Hansen said in the honesty of the moment.
He realized as he spoke that his honest statement was almost certainly untrue. North and the Consensus were playing a game, and Nils Hansen was one of their pawns.
But that truth wasn’t one to speak here.
“But I’m probably the only person on this—” planet, but he wouldn’t say that “—kingdom who can make Golsingh’s dreams a reality. And that’s what I’m going to do.”
“Then you really intend to help the king?” Krita said. She chuckled. “Taddeusz hates you, you know?”
“Yeah, I’d figured that out.”
“He thinks you’re a deliberate troublemaker.”
Her fingertips lightly massaged the place she’d bitten. Hansen felt it burning. She’d broken the skin for sure . . . but it wasn’t anything that’d show with his clothes on. “He thinks you were sent by Frekka to bring down the kingdom.”
Hansen snorted. “He wouldn’t think that,” he said, “if he’d been where the battle was being decided the other day instead of haring off on a private war of his own. Golsingh’d be cold meat today if it weren’t for . . .”