Thangaiku Theriyaamal Amma Magalai Oothen
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A Match For The El Maiens Ch. 13 free porn video
Thank you so much for the comments so far! I can get stuck into a much bigger re-write than I’d envisaged now. I’ll post all the chapters to the novel. If you have any further feedback, I would be very grateful. Diolch yn fawr!
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Clair stood with his hands deep in the sink of soapy water, staring mindlessly out of the big scullery window at the sunny kitchen gardens. Gently he turned bowls and plates, wiping them clean then handing them to that scallywag of a pot-boy Caja who rinsed them in hot water and put them on the draining board.
Lord van H’las had been gone a week. Pava had finally set off for court (his black eye had faded to his relief). Vadya and Tashka were packing to rejoin Sixth H’las. Arkyll and Hanya were ‘helping’ Tashka. They ran eagerly around her, dropping piles of freshly laundered clothes on the floor and treading on her papers. Tashka pretended to be a fat, old and unreasonable General, barking orders at them and sending them on missions for things she did not need so she could actually get some of her gear stowed.
Clair was distraught to see Tashka go. He had hoped he might not take it so badly since she was no longer at risk of being hung for spying. But when he woke, he knew it was going to be a bad day. He sent a feeble excuse to the meeting which Arianna had asked him to attend.
The castle servants had been on the watch for him. They were always ready to take pity on him when something was happening which might upset the delicate balance of his mind and emotions. When he arrived in the kitchens, glaring sulkily from narrowed slanted grey eyes, the cooks merely continued in their duties and when he sidled into the scullery like an intruder in his own home Caja just moved aside so he could join him at the sink.
At a time like this a simple task was such relief. It passed the time, usefully. Clair could handle the bowls and plates gently as he wished he had been handled in life. The sunny view of the orderly rows of vegetables going back down to the fruit bushes in the kitchen gardens was soothing to his tortured heart. After an hour he would look at the pile of clean dishes and feel as if his life had some purpose after all.
When they had finished the washing up, instead of going straight to dry the dishes that lazy dog Caja jerked his head to the door into the gardens. Clair followed carelessly. In the mood he was in it was nothing to him that Caja should take advantage of his being there to sneak out.
Some of the kitchen maids were taking a well-earned rest on a sunwarmed beam of wood put beside the kitchen door in amongst pots of herbs. Caja sat down with them and lit a pipe of foul cheap tobacco which he passed to Clair. The rank smoke of Caja’s evil weed caught the back of Clair’s throat and made him cough and tears come to his eyes but that too was a sort of comfort. He sat wordlessly by Caja in the sunshine, hearing the kitchen maids chatter like birds and staring away at the vegetables and fruit, the old grey wall at the back of the gardens, the hills climbing up in green and purple sunlit heights beyond.
He could hear a commotion in the kitchens behind him. As he turned his head, Arianna burst suddenly through the door into the herb garden. Clair jumped and breathed too much smoke in, coughing and spluttering he looked nervously up at her.
She stood tall and ice-eyed above him, her hands on her hips. Lisette had put her into an elegantly cut suit of black linen, a narrow collar of white lace flowers fell over the lapels of the jacket, she had diamonds in her ears and on her fingers. The black and the diamonds made an intimidating beauty of her, with the narrow glare on her face she looked like the Angel of Judgement.
‘M-my Lady,’ Clair spluttered, starting to get to his feet. ‘Er, how was the meeting?’
‘What does’t think?’ Arianna spat out at him. ‘We set this meeting up for your benefit and sents’t to say,’ her voice took on a mocking whine, ‘was’t ill with the stomach ache! What was I to tell them? How coulds’t do it to me!’
‘But …,’ he hesitated, looking at her uncertainly. ‘I did not know. It was only with some merchants. You did not say …’
”Only some merchants’!’ she mimicked him. ‘Ar’t so stupid about politics that wills’t say: ‘only some merchants’!’
Clair’s eyes narrowed into slits. He felt his temper rising and pushing the tears up with it. ‘Do not tell me I am stupid at politics!’ he hissed. ‘I have been offered a place on one of the King’s Councils.’
‘Oh which one,’ she drawled. ‘The Council for hunting and flirting?’
His eyes opened suddenly wide but he gritted his teeth and said to her: ‘I will not talk to you in this way.’ He turned to the kitchen door to go.
‘There is a messenger come for you,’ Arianna said abruptly. She held out two white packets of paper both addressed to him in the same curling and clearly feminine hand.
Clair looked blankly at the paper packets with the green ink address flowing down them then he looked up into Arianna’s blazing blue eyes.
‘Sweet Hell!’ he said savagely. ‘I suppose I may receive a letter, may I not? Is that a crime now, to have a correspondence with a friend!’
‘Take them!’ she shouted and flung them onto the flagstones among the blue and green decorated clay pots of herbs.
Clair turned his head about, his eyes moving from the letters to her furious face. She was livid with rage, her eyes as hard as her diamonds. The corners of Clair’s mouth started to pinch up with temper, his eyes narrowed again to slits.
‘I am tired of all this!’ Arianna shouted. ‘Why do I stay here? I work so hard … for Sietter and for the good of the people. People tell me to trust you, so I do. I invite you to hear about my work and what happens? Sends’t to say has’t a stomach ache and then tells’t it to me: ‘Oh, they are only merchants’. In your absence I must take care of your lands and your children and your castle and you, what does’t? Runnest to and fro as it pleases you, flirting with whosoever catches your idle eye! I am tired of this, I am going. I can go too, I shall go home to Iarve!’
‘No!’ Clair screamed.
Caja and the kitchen maids suddenly scattered back into the kitchen like pigeons leapt upon by a cat. Arianna stopped with her wide red mouth still open and stared at Clair, her rage turning suddenly into heart-stopping fear.
Clair’s face was wild with emotion, his grey eyes were narrowed to slits through which he peered at her, completely beyond reason. His thin mouth twisted white at the corners. Arianna gave a gulp and took a step backwards, she was stopped short by one of the bigger pots.
‘I … I can go if I want,’ she said.
Clair fell to his knees and caught hold of her skirts. She tried to step aside from the pot and from him, reaching down to pull at her black linen skirts tight held in his lean tanned fists.
‘You’ll not go! You’ll not leave me!’ he hissed in a low menacing growl, tugging her skirts towards him. She had to stoop with the strength of his dragging hands, she pulled savagely back.
‘Let me go, let go of me!’
‘I will not, you’ll not go! I’ll never let you go! I’ll imprison you here if I have to but you shall not leave! Do you think your brother will defend you against me? Prianne has told me he does not care what I do so long as I keep you quiet here, and I will!’
Tashka was suddenly there, that was whom Caja and the maids had run to fetch. Her strong hands gripped his and pulled them off Arianna’s skirts. Arianna stumbled back again and stood staring at them from petrified blue eyes. Her heart was hammering in her chest. Clair was hanging in Tashka’s grip and her husky voice was exclaiming: ‘What are you saying? Think what you are saying to your Lady wife!’
He hung in her hands, his head bowed suddenly down. He could no longer control the terror that seethed through his veins: to lose
Tashka, to lose Arianna, to lose the children, his family, to lose Hanya Vashin. He could not work through the loss and grief that surged through him and distinguish what was real, what had been whipped up by his overwrought feelings. He made a sudden savage pull, broke free of Tashka’s grip and ran back into the castle.
Tashka started after him, then she turned to help Arianna go and sit on the warm rough wooden beam among the sweet-smelling herbs. She put her arm around Arianna’s shoulders. Arianna leant into her embrace and burst into tears.
‘Anna!’ Tashka said, in a gentle, husky and reproving voice. ‘What have you done? You know how he was after Shier Bridge, do you want to drive him mad again?’
Arianna pushed her away, putting her face in her hands and sobbing into her long fingers with the sapphires, gold and diamonds flashing on them in amongst her tears. Tashka sighed, leaning back against the stone wall of the kitchen under the scullery window. She stared at the kitchen gardens and the green and purple hills beyond the garden walls, waiting patiently for Arianna to stop crying.
‘Shall’t always take his part!’ Arianna accused her.
‘Ay, of course,’ Tashka replied, swinging her graceful close-cropped head sideways and smiling lazily. ‘He is my brother and was my Commander and I love him. He is the only man who can make me cry with rage, he is the only man who can resist my tears, we fight like cats and dogs and I love him with my whole heart. Anyone who gives him grief may have my glove. (Saving your sweet self, my dear, of course.) I love him just as you do.’
‘I hate him!’ Arianna growled. ‘I have tried to show him my work, just as saids’t I should, and he could not be troubled to come to the meeting. He even said: ‘it is only some merchants’. How stupid can he be!’
‘Of course he does not understand about the merchants,’ Tashka said. ‘You’ll need to tell him much more about it before he understands what you are doing. When first you reveal to him how close you are dealing with merchants, he will be appalled. He will probably forbid it! and you will have a fine fight about it.
‘We two are el Maien and half of us is from the North, we are proud like pale Angels. You’ll have to do much more to get him to understand about merchants. The only reason I understand is that I have spent hours talking the matter over with my Lieutenant Hanya Lein. Sweet Angels, when first he said his family were dealing with Lady Arianna el Jien van Sietter, the only reason he did not get my glove in his face was that I could not reveal you are my sister by marriage!’ Tashka laughed. ‘I had to button my lip and listen to him talking to my other Lieutenant Trait about what the merchants could do for the people of this land if the aristocrats would only give them their way. Slowly I saw the sense of it.
‘On any road, I owe the merchants, after they saved my life in V’ta. But, Anna, what pale Angel inspired you to call a meeting with merchants for Clair on the day before I am leaving? He cannot bear me to leave, it makes him ill.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Arianna said mournfully, lifting her head up from her hands. Black eye makeup was smeared under her eyes, Tashka pulled a kerchief from her pocket and wiped her face for her with scarred fingers. ‘Master Jeraie from Arventa was coming to Sietter town on other business, so I asked Clair and he said he would m-manage it.’ She burst into a fresh fit of sobs.
‘He has been trying to show you he cares,’ Tashka said, patting her briskly on the back. ‘What of those chocolates he bought you to thank you for taking care of the guests while he had to mind the kitchens. Can you not show him you care?’
‘Chocolates!’ Arianna scoffed, her face flushing with indignation again. ‘What of those letters! Do not tell me Clair cares for me, he gets letters in that handwriting every week.’ Her face crumpled with tears again, she put her head heavily down in her hands and wept.
‘What do you care, since you hate him?’ Tashka enquired, getting up to pick up the letters. Arianna seized her arm.
‘Leave them be!’ she said. ‘If I do not know her name, I can pretend there is nothing in it for me and stay here. Where would I go? I cannot go without the children!’ She started sobbing so hard that Tashka was obliged to help her into the kitchens and make her drink iced water.
‘Go and pick up those letters for Lord Clair,’ she instructed a footman in an undertone. ‘What are you looking at?’ she grumbled to the kitchen staff, who were in fact carefully getting on with their work and not looking at their sobbing Lady sitting at the side table with a large handkerchief pressed to her red-rimmed eyes. ‘I suppose the Lady Arianna may get stung by a wasp without your permission, is it not? Jamies! go and fetch Lisette, Lady Arianna needs … a cold compress and to lie down. Caja! no not you,’ with an irritated look at his gravy-stained apron and slouching posture, ‘tell one of the footmen to go and let Laran and Tarra know your Lady is indisposed too, now, and the merchants must come back to meet her and Lord Clair another day.’
~#~*~#~
Someone was knocking at his door. It must be a servant with lunch. After seeing him in such a condition they must have decided to knock, not come straight in. Clair was hungry but he could not bear to face the servants after treating them to such a scene. He lay still in his bedding as he had lain all morning. Even when Tashka came and tried to talk to him he stared blankly into her loving blue eyes and said: ‘Leave me be.’
He had thought of nothing as he lay there, he had lain in despair, trying not to think, not to remember. Images and memories kept fluttering in the dark spaces in his head. His mother’s desperate kisses and the grip of her guard Fiotr’s hand on his shoulder when they left with a baby Tashka. The dull agony of long evenings in the castle when Tashka was away at risk of hanging in a H’las troop and only a quarrel with his stupid Lady wife could keep him from screaming with terror for his beloved brother.
The scream so anguished that it rose above the clamour of battle. Turning to see the tall mailed figure of Hanya Vashin, his beautiful blue eyes wide. Hanya’s arms jerking out, the helmet falling from his fair head cropped at the back and sides. The blood that suddenly spewed from his mouth into Clair’s face as he fell into Clair’s arms with a H’las spear sticking out of his back.
Clair’s door opened and Arianna nudged her way through it with a tray of food. She had changed into that disgusting old pale pink cotton dress which did not suit her. He knew how it was, the light colour made her feel as if she could just be some silly young girl from Iarve who did not need to trouble her head too much. He thought it was the dress he most hated out of her wardrobe. Not only did this one make her lovely curving figure look odd, it was like a servant’s dress and made her appear to be lower in degree and more accessible to flirtation.
She saw Clair flung like a wounded animal in the tangled spread of bedding on the floor. His long muscular limbs were thrown out at angles, his head turned to her was stiff with fear and his grey eyes were stormy with tears. He looked like Arkyll after a crying fit, except that she could see he had not cried. He had held his grief in his heart, lying there and suffering.
Her own heart softened with pity for the agony that was so clear in his stormy grey eyes. She tried to harden her heart, sure that he had fallen in love with another woman. If she did not manage skilfully, he would make her leave the region, the castle she had come to think of as home – and his children.
She walked warily over and set the tray of food down on the floor beside him. As she lifted her head, their eyes met. Their faces were so close, it made her heart rise in her breast. The handsome intelligent eyes staring into her own eyes sent a sparkle of compelling energy fizzing along her v
eins. Clair’s grey eyes were fringed with lashes as long and lovely as Tashka’s that she would tease Tashka about, the shape of his eyes was like Tashka’s too, and the fine-boned face, but his thin firm mouth was his own.
Arianna’s own mouth pouted for the kiss she wanted. Clair recognised the gesture she did not even realise she was making and frowned in puzzlement.
She was getting up to go now but reluctantly. He thought of how she had said it was braver to live through the things he had been through and still love those who depended on him than to be a careless officer-aristocrat. He sat up and with a great effort said: ‘Will you stay a while.’
She went to a chair by his desk and sat in it. He got up, picked up the tray of food and carried it over to put it on the desk and sit in his chair beside her. ‘Have you eaten?’ he asked, breaking the pasty on his plate and putting a piece in his mouth. She nodded her head then leaned her elbow on the table and her head in her hand, staring at the floor.
‘I think,’ she said, in a cool quiet voice, as if she dreaded what she were about to say herself, ‘we had better have the truth between us. Wants’t me to go, is it not? Has’t met someone and wants’t me to go back to Iarve. I would be willing to go but not without the children.’
He dropped a piece of pasty on the floor and stared at her, uncomprehending. ‘What in Hell are you saying!’ he hissed savagely. ‘You stupid cow, what evil dream have you been making up?!’
Shocked by the way he spoke to her, she lifted her head to his eyes and started to cry again. The big round tears rolled out of her round blue eyes, she shook her head at him, her wide red mouth bunching up to try to say something but she could not.
He took a deep breath, looked up at the roof above him, held the breath then let it slowly out. ‘Very well,’ he said, swinging his slanted grey eyes back round to look into her blue tear-drenched eyes. ‘Let us have the truth between us.
‘I will let you go back to Iarve if you so wish it and certainly you had best take the children because I will go mad if you leave me, Anna el Jien. For years I have denied your presence in my life, passing you off as merely the mother of my child. But we have worked together all those years, in the castle, with our child, with the region. The people I love have come to love you. I cannot imagine my home without you to fight with,’ he tried to smile, ‘or talk to about Ladda’s silly quilts.
‘I am … I do not wish,’ his voice trailed away, he lifted his stormy eyes up to the roof, the old beams, the beam with the rope hanging down where he and Tashka used to climb up to get to a cache of apples. He bit his lip as hard as he could without breaking the skin and he managed to force the tears back. He took a draught of ale which they had put in a bowl on his tray.
Arianna wordlessly indicated two packets of letters to the side of his plate.
‘Sweet Hell!’ he gasped. He grabbed them and tore them open, without looking at them he threw them angrily into her lap. ‘Lady Hartha el Farin van P’shan and I,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘have been maintaining a correspondence on a theory of Northern architecture which I have put forward. I imagine her second letter will be to accept our invitation to come hunting in the autumn.’
Arianna went scarlet with shame, her head swung down. She looked at the handwriting on the paper in her lap of an old Lady of the high nobility, who came from a family of famous scholars and had married into a family of notoriously strict morals.
There was always dashing gossip washing in Lady van P’shan’s wake but Arianna knew that although she liked to play at their parties, she was not one of the pink-fingered set. Arianna kneaded the skirt of her dress and crumpled it in her long fingers, not daring to touch the letters which she had so disastrously misunderstood.
‘Are you truly jealous of me?’ Clair asked. She lifted her head, looked red-faced into his eyes and tried to shake her head. He gave a tremulous laugh. ‘I should be flattered, perhaps,’ he said, breaking another piece of pasty off and starting to eat again. She sat still beside him, mustering her courage.
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