Meoraq glanced back, then went and knelt by Shuiv again. He pressed his palm against the still chest and bent his neck in a warrior’s bow. “I will envy you, my brother, when you behold our Father’s face tonight,” he said, and looked up through the high, colored window to the heavens. “Take him, O my Father, and receive him well. He is a good man.”

The bailiff grunted approvingly. Not every victor of the arena gave respect to a fallen Sword, but Meoraq did not do it just because it was the custom. Not this time, anyway. He often felt strange in his own skin after a judgment, but this was different. The vision of the burning tower; the word, sukaga; and Shuiv, falling into God’s fires right in front of him—everything seemed braided, bound to him, impossibly heavy.

He felt a sudden restlessness, an urge to call for his pack and just leave. Never mind the exarch and never mind whoever it was that had been summoning him half the year. He knew what awaited him in the next room and there was a time when he would have been eager to go to it, but not tonight. Sheul was calling him. Meoraq wanted nothing in this world more than to answer.

But he could not answer from the arena and men were surely waiting to bear Shuiv away for his final rites, so Meoraq finished his respects. He found Shuiv’s shining sabks and broke the blades, placing the hilted halves carefully at his feet. He said the Prayer For the Fallen and the first three verses from the Book of the Sword. Then he let the bailiff lead him back into the arena hold.

3

They had cleaned away the bath and his pack, but the room was far from empty. The high judge was there, of course, with another bailiff, the court scribe, and two lesser mediators. At their center stood Lord Arug in his grossly inappropriate finery and baubles, along with the servant he had sent running from the court at the trial’s beginning. And behind them all, bowing, motionless, scarcely visible in the shadows, was a woman.

‘A girl,’ Meoraq thought, trying to be severe, to be scornful even. Not a woman at all, but hardly more than a child, to judge by the narrowness of her build and the grey tint to her immature scales. One of the many curses laid upon House Arug. Nothing but that. Nothing worth noticing at all.

And as restless as he was to be gone, he could not stop staring at her.

“My daughter, honored one,” said Arug, bowing almost as low as the girl. “Tem.”

Meoraq flared his mouth in annoyance, but could not quite pull his gaze from the curve of her bent back. His heart, raised in combat, did not slow. A second pulse began in his belly, building to urgent harmony where his cock was contained. She wasn’t pretty, wasn’t the sort who would ever catch his eye if it were his own will, but there must be something in her that appealed to Sheul, because the fires burned in Meoraq and the urge to take her became as violent and undeniable as the urge to burn in the arena.

“Leave us,” he said, drawing a sabk.

Lord Arug and the mediators made their salutes and withdrew. Tem, well-coached, did not.

She bent lower, her hands trembling on the tiles, as Meoraq came toward her and did not move until he stood over her with blade in hand. “This is the blade of conquest.”

“I am a virgin of my father’s House,” she replied.

He stared at her, frowning.

In a moment, she’d realized her mistake. Her eyes flashed wide and she fumbled at her wrist, stammering out breathy apologies. Soon, she had her wristlet off—a shiny thing of woven metal wires, perhaps purchased earlier this day for just this moment—and held it out to him in a shaking hand.

He took it, feeling his spines flex and flatten outside of his control. ‘Breathe,’ he told himself, stabbing his sabk through the delicate band at the nearest exposed wooden beam in the wall. ‘She’s young. She’s nervous. She’s probably fragile. Just breathe.’

He turned around, already reaching to unhook the fastens of his loin-plate. “I am Uyane Meoraq,” he said as he swept his belt away and his cock came thrusting furiously past his armor. “House Arug stands in the shadow of my blade. I am a Sword of Sheul and I demand the right of conquest.”

Tem started to bow again, of all things, only to straighten up fast with both hands raised in frantic supplication. “No, I—Wait! I was meant to run!”

Meoraq managed not to hiss at her, but it was a near thing. Yes, she was nervous, but he was Sheulek and the fires were upon him. He had little patience for these female rituals under the best of circumstances and now that patience was all but gone.

“Run, then,” he said tersely. His toes flexed, ready for the chase, and he had to remind himself that she was no true opponent, only a girl, and easily hurt. He must be the master of his flesh even now, with his cock aching in the open air and every thought his mind could make coated in Sheul’s flame, and he must not harm her.

She rose, sending anxious glances in all directions, as if the empty arena hold were a thicket filled with obstacles that needed navigation. Her roving eye came to him, touching his cock with the weight of a living hand, and she seemed to shrink within herself. She did not run. She did not even appear to be breathing.

So be it. Meoraq strode forward and caught her by the girdle.

She screamed in his face, then clapped both hands over her snout and looked properly appalled with herself. “F-Forgive!”

He was beyond forgiving, beyond offense, beyond caring. Meoraq swung her around and put her firmly against the wall beside the beam where his sabk impaled her wristlet.

“I am a virgin of my father’s House!” she babbled, clutching at the bricks.

“You are permitted to fight me,” he told her, raising her skirt in a fist-hold and pinning it at her back.

She didn’t, either because she feared another insult to the ritual or because she didn’t know how. It made no difference in the end. Conquest, such as it was, was over.

Meoraq wedged her legs apart and fit himself to her opening. She was sealed fear-tight, but arousal made him slick and he pierced her as easily as his sabk had pierced Shuiv.

She screamed again, this time with pain. She did not struggle, but her body, his enemy, tightened at once, working to push him out. He knew by many conquests that speed was the key now, or this muscular sleeve would clench too tightly to penetrate at all without tearing her. Meoraq put a steadying hand on her belly, rocked onto the balls of his feet, and thrust hard.

The girl’s cry swept up into a shriek and then broke into sobbing, incoherent pleas that were only partly directed at him. The rest, as so often was the case, were hysterical cries for her mother. But he was in, his oiled shaft fighting past the constriction of her sleeve until he pushed free into her soft well. There, the grip of her body became a seal at his narrowed base, holding him in even tighter with every futile effort to expel him.

Now that the initial difficulty of sex had been overcome, Meoraq made some deference to the girl, slowing to give the hurts of this first invasion time to ease. She was struggling now, but she was trapped and as he continued to move inside her, the ferocious grip of her body was made to relax by the slow knead of his. Her tears became sniffles and then soft panting. Soon she bent her neck to press her sloping brow to the bricks, arching her back in such innocently lascivious pleasure that he almost forgot himself, that just for a moment, it was almost fun.

Meoraq savored it as long as he dared, then reluctantly brought his mind to focus and began his prayers: “Sheul, O great Father, make this woman worthy.”

The girl interrupted with a moan, her hips bucking back in unskilled, spastic motions. He was briefly overcome by his clay’s carnality, and lost several minutes to mindless, fiery fucking before he regained a hold on his conscious thoughts. Somewhat dazed, he forced himself to a stop, which was not easy to do with the girl thrashing back at him. She was fully open now, and each movement of her hips made the sleeve of her female sex slide along his full length as she rocked back and forth—still a squeeze, but certainly not an unpleasant one—begging him in a largely incoherent way for more. Her hand reached back to catch at his hip; his first instinctive response to this fetching gesture was a fighting hiss, but he shook out of it almost at once. He knew where he was now, and he began again with strong, purposeful thrusts.