Edene’s lips curved. “I like you more for what you’ve not done, then.” Her one arm slipped around his waist—still under the tunic—and her other hand emerged to take his and slide it down across her face. She brushed his knuckles with her lips in passing. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
* * *
Temur’s mother Ashra was the daughter of an Aezin prince, bartered in marriage for politics once already, before the Qersnyk khans had claimed her from her Uthman husband. She had gone to Otgonbayar Khanzadeh as his third wife, and she had borne him only one son that lived—Temur, who had grown up surrounded nevertheless by his father’s other children, even after his father died.
Ashra had taught Temur all sorts of things. One was that she thought herself lucky to have come to Qarash, for before that she had been a captive in the women’s quarters of an Uthman household, and the women in the Uthman Caliphate went veiled and shrouded and lived as the property of men, secreted away in female quarters where they saw none but their husbands, their fathers, their brothers, their sons. This was done out of respect for them as living incarnations of the Uthman Scholar-God and Her Prophet, Ysmat of the Beads, Ashra had said.
They could have professions—they could be scientists or physicians, historians or mathematicians, in honor of the Scholar-God and Her Prophet. But learning did not free them to walk in the air. Ashra herself had been raised to the Scholar-God’s religion, but her Aezin father practiced it differently. Ashra had chafed under veils.
And in the Qersnyk lands women rode free; they owned white-houses and all the livestock (except horses—though women might ride, horses belonged to men and men milked and maintained them, unless there were no adult men in a family); they could divorce their husbands; and no one cared in whose bed they lay until they married. And sometimes not even then.
And so when Edene led Temur to his bed and drew him down upon it, there was no one to say her nay. By the fires of her clan, an ayl or so off, children cried and women sang; pots clattered; the cracked voice of Altantsetseg rose above the din. Someone took up a working song and other voices joined.
She slipped the toggles on his coat, opened his belt, and put it aside. She unlaced the collar of his shirt and made him raise his arms over his head so she could pull it off. She placed his knife neatly beside the bed, and she untied the wrap of his trousers and drew those, also, down.
And then, as he reclined upon the scratchy wools and the fleeces, she knelt over him and slipped the knots from the loops that held her shirt closed. She let the wide sleeves slip down her arms and showed him her breasts. She hooked the trousers down, and the light of the rising moons silvered her belly and thighs and laid mysterious shadows across the alluvial fan of her sex. Those same shadows cupped her breasts, stroked her throat, and defined the line of her jaw. Temur wanted to reach in and trace them with his hands.
Temur’s breath quickened, first, then became strong and deep. The night air cooled his flesh. When he reached out a hand and laid it against Edene’s arm, he felt the tiny prickles as her skin tensed around fine hairs. She covered his hand with her own, calloused fingertips scraping, and drew it across her breast so his thumb grazed her nipple.
“It is permitted to touch,” she said with a ghostly smile.
So he did.
Her hands drew swaths of warmth against him; her mouth, arcs of fire that burned then chilled. She pressed him against the blankets, her skin smooth against his chest. Wool scratched his shoulders pleasantly. She threw one round, soft thigh across his hips so he gasped aloud when the rough wetness of her sex brushed the underside of his. She reached between them and grasped his shaft, and he did more than gasp: He arched to the touch, bearing her weight up. From the Tsareg fire, there was a burst of conversation, but Temur couldn’t care. What could they see, anyway, looking from the glow of embers into the dark?
“You are the stars,” he said to her, words from an old tale to make her smile.
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” she said, and grinned as she lifted his sex in her hand and glided down to envelop it.
She smiled at the intake of his breath, long and ragged, and the soft moan that followed. She was …
She was honeyed silk and heat and horsewoman’s strength as she rocked against him and rose up on the old-ivory pillars of her thighs and brought herself down again. She was softness, lush dimpled softness of arms and flanks wrapped around strength, like a bent bow. She was the fall of cool hair across his throat and his burning face, like water to a man sick with sun. She was the smell of sweat and pungent oils. She was the warmth of the night, and seventeen moons rose over her shoulders while she rode him with the same purpose and intensity with which she raced her mare.