“You cannot force me from you for I know the means to control you,” he murmured, ignoring the way my fingernails dug into his arms. “Also, I believe I know another thing. Why do you travel in company with the Chama Aesnil? She is able to give you no assistance, no more than unnecessary hindrance and distraction. For what reason did you continue all this way with her?”
“Please, no more!” I whispered, unable to control my writhing. “Daldrin, please, I beg you!”
“I am Dallan,” he answered with vast amusement, “a man who knows full well your recent intentions toward him. You melt to my touch, wenda, yet shall you continue in dire straits for a time, as a beginning to your punishment. You may now answer my question.”
“I . . . I merely followed Aesnil,” I gasped, understanding nothing of what he wanted, only what he was doing to me. “She is fam—familiar with this area as I am not. I could not have regained my freedom without her.”
“Mere excuses,” he snorted, staring down at me. “Your having secured mounts and food for the both of you would surely have repaid whatever debt to her you stood in. Yes, I have spoken both with her and with the denday who found you and she. I am told that Aesnil would surely have escaped into the forest, had she not spent so long a time attempting to take you with her. My cousin was more difficult to extract information from, yet a strapping and the promise of another succeeded in loosening her tongue. She had refused to leave you for you had twice given her her life back, when it was all but lost. I believe there is a bond between the two of you, one you are incapable of ignoring even should my cousin fail to honor it. Is this not so?”
“Yes, yes!” I wept, trying to toss my head back and forth despite the unmoving fist in my hair. Of course I knew Aesnil would still be free if she hadn’t wasted time trying to take me with her. Her actions might have been caused by fear on her part of trying to reach Vediaster alone—or she might have begun feeling something like real concern for me. If I hadn’t been all used up I would have known which it was—and I couldn’t forget about it until I found out one way or the other for sure.
“And so I thought,” he breathed, satisfaction flaring in his mind. “In that event, I am able to use a lesson learned from my beloved cousin herself. I will release you from the chain and allow you to return to yourself—yet does Aesnil’s well being depend upon your refraining from the use of your powers. Should you use them and I am affected, others, watching, will know of it and see to Aesnil. Do you understand the words I speak?”
“Yes, I understand!” I sobbed, but not only from what he was doing to me. He had trapped me, damn him, trapped me!
“Excellent,” he chuckled, pulling my head back by the hair again. “Now the following days will be filled with pleasure rather than strife.” He lowered his lips to mine and kissed me hard, opened the collar around my throat and tossed it away, then finally let me go. It was as though I’d been holding a live electrical wire, and had only just managed to release it: the immediate shock was gone, but my nervous system was still remembering the current that had been forced through it. I lay slumped on the furs, unable to move, my mind still whirling as fast as my blood.
It took a few minutes before I was able to force myself up on one elbow, and by that time Daldrin—Dallan—had moved the tray of food closer to the bed and was stretched out along the edge of the furs, nibbling some dried fruit and moving his eyes over me. Just because he was controlling what he felt from having touched me didn’t mean he wasn’t feeling it, and the jarring of his emotions began upsetting me all over again. I reached a slow hand over toward the fur he’d thrown aside earlier, but he didn’t miss the movement.
“No,” he said, putting no special emphasis into the word. “You have not my permission to cover your loveliness again.”
“What do you intend doing with me?” I demanded, more than annoyed that he’d treat me that way. “Are you merely going to sit there and stare at me from this day on?”
“You could not have forgotten me this soon, wenda,” he grinned, reaching a hand out to run one finger over my calf. “Best you remember that the foul mood your need instills in you may bring punishment rather than an easing of that need. Guard your words carefully when you speak to me, else I shall recall them when the time has come to see to previous matters which stand between us. I shall not warn you again.”
The amusement didn’t leave his face, but his eyes and mind had hardened in a way that was clearer than any threat. I still didn’t like the way he was treating me, but I swallowed down what I was feeling and tried again.
“I would know what you mean to do with me,” I said, wishing I didn’t have to ignore the urge to pull my leg out of his reach. “Am I now your prisoner—as Aesnil is?”
“My cousin is not my prisoner.” He laughed, taking another mouthful of dried fruit. “She has been made a slave in this house, as I was in hers. I believe the experience will do much for her, teaching her the fate she bestowed so unthinkingly upon others. As for you, my little bird, you will be taught obedience.”
My expression must surely have told him what I thought about that, as he laughed aloud when he saw it.
“No, it will not be nearly as difficult a task as you think to make it,” he said, sitting up and twisting around to put his feet on the floor. “We will begin with seeing to your feeding, go on to having you bathed, and then your lessons will begin. Come here. ”
I hesitated over moving closer to him, but I really had very little choice in the matter. Aesnil had wasted her opportunity to get clear of the riders who were about to find us, and I couldn’t very well thank her by deserting her in return. If there was a loophole in Dallan’s trap, I’d have to wait there until I found it. Slowly, with a reluctance the man didn’t miss, I moved myself across the furs until I was right behind him, tending neither to the right nor the left. It seemed the safest place to be just then, but when he twisted first right and then left and still couldn’t reach me easily, he experienced a flash of annoyance that ended my safety. He twisted around once more, all the way to his right, hooked me with one unreasonably large and muscled arm, then pulled me over into his lap.
“I care little for the manner in which you obey even the simplest of commands,” he growled, the annoyance still with him and trying to grow stronger. “Now, rather than see to your own feeding, you may put your arms about me.”
He was getting too close to anger for me to hesitate even long enough to ask him why I was to put my arms about him, but once I had done it I no longer had to ask. He was broad and hard, tanned and strong, and in order to put my arms even part way around him I had to lean very close, my chest against his. Even before I’d left Central I couldn’t have been that close to a man like Dallan without feeling something, and I’d been yanked out of the Centran culture and forcibly adjusted to a much lustier one. His skin was firm and warm under my hands, the hair on his chest cushioned and caressed my breasts, and I was suddenly—strongly—reminded of what he had just been doing to me.
“You may not draw back again.” he said, obviously reading the intention in my thoughts as he looked down at me. “Though your discomfort is as keen as I had hoped it would be, I find the posture most pleasant. You will take your food in silence, and consider what lack of proper obedience has brought you.”