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Category: Erotica/Gay-Lesbian Erotica/Romance
Description: Abandoned by their employers in a hostile city, Adian and Matti, together with former slaves Devi and Sauda, must find a safe place to spend the winter. While searching, Adian and Devi struggle to remember how to love each other. The unexpected return of some old friends prompts a flight to the mountain fastness of a rebel people. Have the companions found a home at last? Will Devi and Adian finally learn the hardest lesson of all: that true love might just be the work of many hearts? Find out in this sequel to Master of None: The Eight of Pentacles.
eBook Publisher: Torquere Press/Arcana, 2009 http://www.torquerepress.com
eBookwise Release Date: April 2009

6 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats: OEBFF Format (IMP) [111 KB]
Words: 22137
Reading time: 63-88 min.

Prologue

Devi's Dream

In his dream, Devi was fucking Adiún, frantic and free, on the riverbank outside Keoded short days after his emancipation.

Adiún's damp hair coiled around Devi's wrists, twined with his fingers. In Devi thrust, and in and in, with nothing more than spit and river water to ease the way. He knew he was hurting Adiún, and he knew Adiún wanted it.

Heat fizzed up his spine and raced along every nerve until even his fingers and toes felt about to burst apart with orgasm. "With me, Adi-love," he whispered fiercely in the beloved ear. He hadn't been brave enough to use the endearment in the waking world, not since he'd been rescued from the slave camp. But in his dream, he was brave, not broken. He thrust again, courageously, wild with love and gratitude and the jagged shards of desperate regret and terror.

It was too much. The hair around his wrists tightened, solidified until it wasn't Adiún's hair at all, but strong hands grinding the bones in his wrists together. His thrusts into Adiún's willing body became hopeless bids to free himself from a heavy, careless man with the face of any and all of the men who'd fucked him in the brothel. He'd never screamed in the brothel, hadn't fought once; the procurer had beaten it out of him. He'd never hurled invective or ridicule. But here, in his dream, he twisted and hollered and tried to kick. Hard hands held him down, and a hard prick sought, then won, entry.

"No, no! Tides, please! I am not for you, not yours! Please!"

He came awake still begging. Sauda's face above him was indistinguishable from the dark of the tent only by the brightness of her eyes. Adiún's arms were around him, not restraining him but catching him instead, easing him out of the nightmare with soft words and gentle caresses.

"All right, love?" Adiún's voice, sleep-slurred and warm, murmured from under his ear, tempting him to relax back into their blankets instead of letting his panic send him crawling to Sauda. He wasn't alone anymore, and neither was she; they no longer needed to be each other's everything as they had been in the brothel or slave coffle. That truth, welcome as it was in daylight, was difficult to remember in the dark.

He laid his head on Adiún's shoulder and succumbed to the petting of his shamefully short hair, which even after weeks of freedom reached only to his chin.

Matti's gentle voice reached him as the light in the shelter began to grey into morning. "We have you," he said softly.

Devi nodded, hoping the others could see him do it. He didn't trust his voice yet. Trusting anything but the nightmare took effort, no matter how much evidence of his new truth, his new friends, and his old love, presented itself.

His world was a tidal sink, and he'd forgotten where the solid land lay.