A Wilderness of Glass Read online

  Her merman. The thought made her jerk, and the comb snagged in his hair hard enough to make his eyelids snap open. The purring click abruptly became a pained whistle.

  “I’m sorry! So sorry!” She dropped the comb in her lap to pat his hair and shoulders in apology.

  Ahtin whistled again, softer now, reassuring. He captured one of her fluttering hands, flattening her palm against his chest. His hand was hot, like the rest of him, and Brida was reminded that the differences between them went beyond the surface visuals to more subtle elements. She would have turned blue by now were she submerged in cold seawater for any real length of time. Her feet were already numb from wading through the surf to reach this side of the cave.

  “You are cold,” he said with a frown.

  “And you most definitely aren’t.”

  Maybe what she thought had been fever when he lay beached among the seaweed hadn’t been from sickness or injury but simply from lack of the water to keep his body cool.

  “What is Brida?” he asked, repeating the same question from their second meeting.

  She shrugged. “Strength.” Had he forgotten?

  Ahtin shook his head and raised her hand to inspect her fingers, the slots between them where no webbing stretched, the short half moons of her nails, pale against skin still deeply brown from the vanished summer sun. The contrast between her skin and his—deep earth on shallow sea—beguiled her. They were land and water, human legs and dolphin tail with nothing in common except an abiding fascination for each other and the connection of the rescued to the rescuer.

  His clear brow knitted into a frown. “No. Strength, yes, but more.” He struggled to express himself. “You are this light.” He gestured to the sorcerous light still shimmering around them. “This pool. The moon. The sun.”

  Comprehension dawned, and once more the heat of a blush crawled up her neck, into her cheeks. “Beautiful,” she said. “Those things are beautiful.”

  Something in her tone alerted him that she understood what he tried to impart, and the frown smoothed away. “Beautiful,” he echoed, reverence in every syllable. “You are beautiful, Brida.”

  The last time a man had called her beautiful in such a way, it had been when she lay in Talmai’s arms the night before he left Ancilar to board a deep-water ship at Matalene harbor a league from Ancilar. She’d dreamed those agonizing moments more times than she cared to count after she learned he’d died at sea. Time had passed and the keen sorrow from that particular memory was blunted now. When the merman called her beautiful, butterflies, not tears, spiraled up inside her.

  She didn’t move when he leaned in even closer, and his hands settled on her hips, slippery hair shrouding them both. His sigh matched hers when his lips grazed her cheek, tickling her skin with the lightest touch as they mapped a path over the bridge of her nose to her other cheek before drifting up to caress her temple and eyebrows. She closed her eyes against their feathery pressure on her eyelids. Her lips parted as his mouth rested briefly on hers and stayed.

  Did merfolk kiss?

  The question drifted across her thoughts before fading. It didn’t matter. If he didn’t know, she would teach him and hold close in her dotage the wondrous memory of it.

  He twitched against her when she took his bottom lip between her lips and lightly sucked, exhaled a moan when her tongue traced its outline, tasting a hint of brine. Strong hands dug into the folds of her skirt to hold her hips even harder, and he surged against her, the powerful flex of his tail almost carrying him out of the water.

  Brida’s eyes snapped open and she pulled away to stare at Ahtin who stared back with a gaze gone almost completely black. Heat poured off him like a furnace, and he loosened his grip on her body long enough to touch his mouth with one fingertip.

  A series of clicks, much too rapid and unfamiliar for her to translate, spilled from him before he went silent, scrutiny never wavering as he searched for a word.

  “Kiss,” Brida told him. “That’s a kiss.”

  “Kiss.” He drew out the end of the word as if savoring its sound and texture.

  She smiled a tentative smile. “You like it?” The gods knew she certainly did.

  He wore the same look as when he licked the spoon she’d given him. A quick nod, and he reached for her, drawing her closer to him until the lower half of her skirts floated in the pool, drifting around him like a spill of blue ink in the luminescent water. “Land magic,” he breathed across her mouth. “Teach me, beautiful Brida.”

  Chapter Five

  “Why do humans cover like this?” Ahtin picked at the folds of her skirt, rooting for the shape of her thigh hidden beneath the heavy wool.

  Like the night before, they spent these hours together in the sanctuary of the cave lit by Ahtin’s magic. And like the night before, they kissed and explored, learning each other’s taste, the shape of leg and tail, shoulders and arms, cheekbones and necks, chest and breast.

  Brida stroked a hand down his side, contouring her palm to the ridges of muscles that laddered down his torso to his narrow waist and the smooth flesh that denoted the beginnings of his tail. The heat of his body kept her warm in the chilly cave. “For protection and warmth. Our bodies don’t get as hot as yours unless we’re sick. Clothing keeps us warm and protects our skin from other things too.” She nudged his chin with her nose. He obliged her by bending to eagerly press his mouth to hers, cool lips against hers, warm tongue sweeping the interior of her mouth.

  She had taught him that the previous night, and he’d been an enthusiastic student of what he called her “land magic.” Brida might have taught him even more were it not for the far-off hint of a whistle. Ahtin’s fluke slapped the water, and his features had pinched with annoyance.

  “I must go,” he told her, leaning his forehead against hers with a sigh. “Come back, Brida?”

  Caution dictated she should have said no, but she’d thrown that notion to the wind the moment she’d first seen him injured on the beach. “Tomorrow,” she’d agreed.

  He’d led her out of the cave, staying by her side as she waded back to the level, drier shoreline. No threatening dorsal fin raced toward her, nor had any appeared tonight, for which she was thankful.

  None of this would last. She’d never been under the illusion that it could. Ahtin was a dweller of the sea and she a dweller of the land. They’d found literal common ground here, but her life was in Ancilar among her people and his somewhere in the Gray’s liquid wilderness, with other merfolk and creatures savage and sublime. That he was even here now was a wondrous thing in itself.

  She refused to think beyond this ephemeral moment, this hidden place where she and a fabled merman traded loving caresses. To him, she was simply beautiful Brida. Not Brida, alone and widowed, viewed by some as a woman to be pitied while they silently thanked the gods they weren’t in her shoes. The memories she made with him would last her lifetime, gifts of value beyond measure, more precious even than the priceless pearl he’d given her.

  He lifted her braid to wrap its length around his arm, letting it uncoil before catching it in his hand. He painted his cheek and the bridge of his nose with the end. “Swim in the water with me.”

  She shuddered at the idea. “The pool is freezing. At least for me.” It was bad enough that her feet were submerged. If she didn’t have them pressed to the sides of Ahtin’s tail, they’d be numb from the cold. Wading all the way in was out of the question, especially since she’d have to strip to her shift so as to have dry things to wear during the trek home. “Just how cold can it get before you start to feel it?”

  He shrugged. “We can swim in the waters when ice floats there, and we dive deep where it’s dark and no sunlight can reach.” A troubled expression settled on his features, and the hand on her thigh tightened for a moment. “But we don’t stay in one place. Soon, all the mer will swim for warmer seas, where the women with child will birth their young.”

  The bottom dropped out of Brida’s stomach. “How soo
n?”

  “When the aps say so. They decide when the families make the journey.”

  They were migratory, just like the dolphins and the whales. She guessed it might be so. The idea lodged in the back of her mind like a splinter, making her wonder each time she traveled to meet him if he wouldn’t be there.

  Ahtin nuzzled her, rubbing his nose in the soft hairs that lay against her temple. “Swim with me,” he whispered. “My magic will hold back the cold.”

  A tingling sensation spread across her feet, washing feeling back into her toes. Brida pulled away from him to stare at the pool. Ahtin’s palm rested atop the surface. Runnels of fiery light coursed along the tendons and veins in the back of his hand, spreading up his arm. The water grew warmer by the second until it turned tepid.

  Brida laughed, delighted, and kicked her legs so that water splashed behind Ahtin. “Amazing! So much good magic! Can all the mer do this?”

  He grinned at her compliment, pale eyes glittering in the cave’s half light. “When we must. It helps the laboring merwomen and the infants when they’re born.” He tugged on her skirts. “Now will you swim?”

  With the pool now more temperate than a bath, she had no reason to refuse. She’d learned to swim as a child. Too many who lived by the sea lacked the skill and had paid the ultimate price.

  Brida stood and stepped farther back from the pool’s edge to shed her clothes. Ahtin watched her, silent, curious. Once she was down to her shift, she hesitated. The garment was thin and wouldn’t drag her down in the water the way her heavier garb might, but it was still long and restricted the movement of her legs. She played with the neckline, considering. None of the merwomen she’d seen in the group who had come for him and his niece wore coverings across their breasts. The trappings of such modesty were a land dweller’s concept, not that of the merfolk, who would find such covering not only unnecessary but also foolish. Raised within such a culture, Ahtin likely wouldn’t make much note of her breasts if she bared them. Her legs though...that was another thing altogether.

  Grabbing her courage with both hands and shrugging away her embarrassment, she stripped off the shift, letting it fall atop the mound of clothes at her feet. The cave’s chilly air raised goosebumps on her skin from her ankles to her scalp, and she scampered toward the pool, hugging herself in a failed bid to retain her body heat.

  Ahtin caught her, hands on her waist, and lowered her into the pool. He smiled at her happy sigh, letting her go when she pushed gently against his chest to paddle the pool’s circumference. He joined her, sleek, and quick, and quiet.

  As she predicted, his gaze flickered briefly over her torso before focusing on the wavering outline of her legs as she tread water. He reached down, grasping one of her knees to lift it for closer inspection. Brida grasped for the pool’s stony shore behind her to keep the merman from her tipping her backwards. He flashed her an apologetic look before returning his attention to her leg, exposed to the air from lower thigh to foot.

  “Two tails,” he said, gesturing to her other leg still underwater.

  Brida snorted. “Legs. They’re called legs.”

  He repeated the word, then nodded to show either his approval or his understanding.

  She pointed to her toes, wiggling them for emphasis. “Toes.” Her foot jerked in his grasp while he counted the five digits with ticklish touches. At his inquiring taps on her skin, she revealed the name for each part of her leg. “Foot. Arch. Ankle. Shin. Calf. Knee. Thigh.” Every touch sent sparks shooting through her body. Was it possible to catch fire while immersed in water?

  The tell-tale series of low-pitched clicks started low in his throat, a vocalization of his growing arousal. Her lessons in kissing had taught her as much as they taught Ahtin. In those interim moments when they’d come up for air, she’d caught a good look at his erection.

  Displayed with neither shame nor arrogance, his cock had emerged from where it lay hidden behind the longer vertical slit in his tail. Pink in color and broader at its base than its tip, it had nudged the inside of her thigh covered by the fall of her skirt. They might be human woman and merman, of different origin with different bodies, but mating instinct possessed an accurate aim.

  At the moment, his erection rubbed along her buttocks as he floated her on her back, and his breathing was as rapid as hers. He lifted her a little higher with one hand until the chilly air washed over her nicely warmed skin and pebbled her nipples. With the other, he stroked the line of her body from collar bones to the triangle of dark hair between her thighs.

  Brida’s breathy moan made the ridges marking his eyebrows arch and his lips curve into a pleased smile. He repeated the caress, pausing to trace the curve of her breasts and tease her nipples with the barest hint of a touch.

  “You are made like the merwomen here. You feed your young the same way?” Brida nodded, hardly able to retain a thought for more than a moment. He continued his journey down her body, stopping once more at the juncture of her thighs. “Here you are different.” She gasped as his fingers slipped lower, finding the entrance to her body. The heartbeat of her own arousal pulsed there, and her legs parted wider to give him better access. “Not so different, beautiful Brida,” he said in a low voice before slowly sliding a finger inside her.

  Brida’s gasp echoed throughout the cave. She clutched his supporting arm with one hand and gripped his opposite wrist with the other, torn between wanting him to stop and urging him to keep going, use more than a finger on her. Use that lovely cock rubbing so teasingly against her backside, promising a pleasure she’d all but forgotten in the years since Talmai had died.

  He played her body the same way she played her flute, with a combination of delicacy, prowess, and reverence, learning each curve and reaction as if she were the notes to a song. They floated in the water, Brida no longer on her back but pressed breast to chest with Ahtin, her legs wrapped tight around his middle, her hands clasped at his nape under the slippery cascade of his hair.

  She explored his body in much the same way he had hers, hands marking a path over his shoulders, tracing the color divide that started just under his ears, transitioning from dove gray on his back to the pearlescent shade of ivory on his front, with its muted pastels shimmering just below his skin. “You’re made like human man here,” she said, running her hands down his arms and over his chest. “Different in other places.”

  She traced the helix of his ear, not smooth and rounded like hers, but rimmed with small bony points of various heights. His ear lobe was much smaller than hers, while the auricle was much bigger, almost completely covering the entrance to his ear canal. The low-profile dorsal fin along his back, and of course his tail, were the most obvious distinctions from a human, but Brida found that it was the shape of his ears that most sharply reminded her of their dissimilarities.

  The thought plagued her for the time it took her to blink before she shoved it aside. Those physical disparities didn’t matter. He made her remember happiness and spontaneity, reminded her that wonder existed in the apparent and the hidden. He made her spirit, so long asleep, awaken.

  Ahtin thrust against her with a flex of his tail. “Different here as well?”

  She dipped one hand below the water, reaching between their bodies to grip his cock and give him a quick stroke. His nostrils flared, and his fingers dug into her buttocks. “Only a little, and in a good way.” She kissed him then, not just with her mouth, but her entire being, rejoicing when he enthusiastically returned her ardor, those humming clicks erupting from his throat to tickle her tongue and lips with their resonance.

  Waves lapped around them as Ahtin spread her thighs, opening her wider so that his cock slid long and deep inside her in one smooth stroke. Brida groaned at the penetration, the fullness of him. She squeezed his waist with her thighs, swallowing his rushed exhalation mixed with a groan of her own.

  The back of his tail tensed and contracted against her heels with each thrust, his breathing as stuttered as hers when the
y ended one hard kiss, only to begin another. Their bodies’ positions and the rubbing of his tail against her pelvis in just the right way spiked sensations through her so hard that she climaxed before he did, nearly arching out of his arms with the intensity of her orgasm.

  Ahtin soon followed her, his thrusts growing quicker, more forceful, punctuated by guttural sounds he purred into her ear even as he pumped his seed into her welcoming body. Afterwards, he stretched onto his back, with Brida atop him as they floated in the pool. He remained inside her, still semi-erect. Brida folded her hands across his chest to rest her chin on her knuckles and gaze at his handsome features, a little slack now with satiated pleasure. She suspected she looked much the same.

  What a strange and marvelous thing she had just experienced. A small part of her feared she dreamed all of this: a merman, his magic, the discovery of the merfolk, Ahtin’s strong body beneath her, inside her. Brida feared waking up to discover none of it was real—that life, as she had always known it before the storms had dumped seaweed and a wounded merman on the shore, continued on as it always had. Days of mundane existence and hard work ending in nights of solitary quiet in which she would wonder if she might go mad one day from sheer boredom.

  “What are you thinking, beautiful Brida?” Ahtin’s webbed hands skated down her back, one finger following the indentation of her spine.

  She smiled. Dark thoughts had no place here or in this moment, and weren’t meant to be shared. She brushed them away. “I like being here. With you. I wish we could stay this way for a long time.” Forever, she thought but didn’t say it aloud.

  He frowned a little. “Why can’t we?”

  Struck by his question and his reaction, she shrugged. “Because dawn isn’t far off. I need to be home before I’m missed, and no doubt your people wonder where you go to each night.” In all honesty, Brida was surprised she hadn’t seen even a hint of the merfolk so far besides Ahtin. Maybe they weren’t as nosy and far less enamored with gossip than humans were.