The Book of the Blessed

Eight

“The Blue Order does now, and always has, strenuously rejected the new and false idea that true love exists only between two people. Love is like the light of a mirror, and the more who share it, the greater the intensity and strength of the light.”

- Hersagion of Immrachyr,

High Priest of the Gannayon Provincef.1485-1516

The Blue Temple

In those days, the lamps and the fires of the Blue House seemed to burn higher. No matter what happened in the streets below, a happy humming ran through the seven floors of the old Temple. Now and again it was whispered that things were about to change. They were about to change. Derek came back with news that Ash was still in the city and kings and princes were gathering, ostensibly to honor Cedd, but really to await the death of Anthal.

Despire the coronation, there could only be one king at a time, and Anthal, sick as he was, had not abdicated. The coronation was the sign that he was not long for this world, and that the moment his eyes closed Cedd was the anointed King.

Derek’s mind, so often preoccupied with matters of state and the state of the temple, was eased, not only with Conn, but in the bed of Master Hyrum. Cal, who had always known and loved Hyrum was neither surprised nor coerced. When Hyrum asked for him, though the Abbot was like a father to him, Call disrobed without shame and came into his bed, and the two were like expert loves, laughing as they took each other to great heights. It was revelation to both of them, as Cal put it, that they could have been like this all along. Cal’s fingertips traced the chest of Master Hyrum and he murmured, “Funny, no matter how I love you, I love you. It all feels the same.”

Matteo had spent his morning in the blue rooms having laughable intercourse with a man who talked endlessly and pulled on his penis like a baby bird pulling on a worm. He was only to glad to take a shower and move onto someone else. The dark rooms of the sanctuary were not necessarily better than the blue rooms, but this morning he was surprised in them, as later was Quinton, and the two of them talked in hushed voices about having been with the Master.

When it was Conn’s turn, there was no trickery or surprise. He simply received the message and went up to the seventh floor.

“I knew there would be no need and no way to fool you,” Hyrum said.

“No need,” Conn agreed. “But no way?”

“You are witched eyed. You cannot be lied to.”

“My power is not great.”

“I think,” Hyrum said, “your power is greater than you know.”

With almost a shrug, Conn disrobed and stood before Hyrum, a lithe caramel colored reed, tawny hair sticking up, penis sticking out like a compass. With more measured moves of an older man, Hryum rose and lifted his robe off as well.

Conn came to him.

It was if the lovemaking with Hyrum had placed the spark of fire in Conn now too. It was the wandering heat he’d felt in Derek, in Gabriel, in all of them. As night passed to dawn, Conn lay under Hyrum, gasping, almost screaming with a pleasure he’d never known, and rose from the bed, changed. He bathed just in time for the sunrise, and exhausted, still humming, he returned to the rooms he shared with Derek, only to see this night, Gabrie; shared the bed too. Wordlessly, Conn mounted mounted the bed, and climbed between them.

Early in the morning Conn woke up full of heat and desire. On either side of him, hot and firm and soft as life were his lovers. Lying on their stomachs they were just blinking in and out of sleep. He loved them so much. He kissed one and then the other, and he placed one hand on Derek’s long white back, another on Gabriel’s. He stroked them gently and they both sighed. He moved his hand down to the small of their backs and they shuddered. He massaged their asses and they sighed, mouths open. They made child noises. Gently, he slipped a finger into each of them, and both boys’ mouths opened. Their eyes flew open in amazed wonder. While Conn worked them they moaned, grasping their pillows, then the sides of the mattress. And then, Conn kissed them. He kissed them down their backs, first Gabriel, burying his face in his red curls, and then Derek and then again, all the way down until his tongue moved inside of them, from one to the other and they both cried out now. They shouted a little now. Derek banged on the headboard with his fist and shuddering sounds escaped from Gabriel. Conn’s mouth worked on them, his hands reached around and kneaded them. Derek and Gabriel looked at each other, eyes wide. Suddenly they began to kiss. As they kissed fiercely, Derek reached down and brought Conn up. The older boys kissed, pressing together with Conn between them, going up and down Conn’s body until, gently, Derek turned him on his stomach and Gabriel, entranced into a strange contemplation, watched Derek fuck him. His mouth was half opened. His eyes glazed over. Conn grabbed the mattress and his eyes went dull under Derek’s thrusting. It ended all too quickly in an orgasmic flood, Derek’s hands bunched on Conn’s shoulder, the cords of his neck strained, his red face to the ceiling, his cock, thick, wet, spewing, deep inside of the younger boy. But when Derek came out of him, still stiff, his cock wet, Conn reached for Gabriel, and Gabriel came to him. Now it was his turn. Now they were together. He wanted to hold it in. He did, a little longer, making love to Conn the same way he did when they were in private, holding back his burst. Derek was there, exhausted, on his side, watching. In a way it was like they were doing this for him. When it was time to let go, Gabriel almost mourned it. Conn gave a long whimpering cry.

The room was hot, and it smelled like sweat and the long night and fucking. They all three, sprawled, limbs together, their stomachs sprayed by their semen. No one said a word. Conn wanted to say, “No one would mistake us for brothers now.” He liked it when they all did this, though they often felt bad afterward. He didn’t want them to feel bad, so he said, “Come and hold me. Come clean off, and then come and hold me.”

Derek got up a little unsteadily and made his way to the bathroom. Somehow Derek was different after Derek had been inside of him, and Derek’s body would seem different still when, inevitably, in their room tonight, the older boy asked Conn to fuck him. Derek returned with a cloth and gently he wiped off Conn, and then Gabriel, and lastly, up and down his own chest. Lightly he put the cloth on the bureau, and then he went to shut the curtains and hide the light from the world outside.

Drowsily, he climbed into bed and Conn pulled him in. Gabriel lifted up the covers.

They slept.

The Rootless Isle

Tonight on the Rootless Isle, Nimerly’s dreams troubled her. Long ago, when she was just a girl, she lay in the dark, often filled with terror from the visions her budding power gave. Her grandmother said, “When you are troubled, rise up and go to the water. Go to the Earth. Go to the Mother, and open your soul.”

So now, many seasons later, after her grandmother was long gone, and her mother and her sister, after her cousin turned enemy, Coviane, was also long gone, Nimerly, daughter of Viviane, rose in the half light and went into the empty room. Blank lay the wooden table, and blank were the white walls, grey in the night. She went into the next room, to the long brass candle holders and the black candles. She set them down on a table, and put the little light between them. She took an old wick and lit candles from them. Their light turned the black room golden. She lit the censer, and now the small brass dish burned with a heavy sweetness, and she folded her long hands over her knees and sat down and murmured a spell, a prayer, a sound from before language was born.

Nimerly, daughter of Viviane, was the sister of Essily. They were like dark and light, grandaughters of the Mighty Lady who had ruled the Rootless Isle before Coviane. Essily with her golden hair and golden skin, Nimerly, wide of frame with her red-brown hair cascading down her back. When their mother lay dying, and had chosen Nimerly, Nimerly said she must go out into the world as their aunt Senaye had done, that the title should be passed to Essily. When Essily did not desire it, though it was her duty, though it had been both their duties, it passed to Coviane, the Ladyship, as if it were a bone no one wanted, she not the heir but the third choice, and long before this Nimerly had gone out into the world and was gone some time before she returned with their Aunt Senaye, the one who should truly have been Lady, and her little boy, Ohean.

“He will be raised here,” Nimerly said.

“A man has no place on the Isle,” Coviane said.

“This one does.” Senaye said.

“If you wanted things to be so,” Coviane said, “then you ought to have been Lady.”

Senaye and Nimerly ignored their cousin. Everyone knew Senaye, daughter of Messanyn, Senaye the Shapeless, Senaye of Many Colors, was in all things but the very title, Lady. In the past, hadn’t there been a Lady who stayed on the Isle and one who went out into the world, and now that Senaye remained here, ever was Nimerly going out into the world, sometimes for years. When Nimerly returned again it was with her own child, Meredith.

When Meredith was three, the White Plague broke out, and the envoys came from Westrial, across the short water, the half-Royans with hats in hands, and begged them to come to the King’s City. Kingsboro was ravished with plague, the Queen dead, her only remaining son a boy whose black eyes burned with hatred. Essily had remained with that King after they had all gone, and she returned some time later with a golden haired boy.

“This is a proper place to raise a prince,” Nimerly had said.

“Who are you?” Coviane snapped. “Or who are you?” she turned to Essily. “I am the Lady of this Isle. You do not rule! You gave up the ruling.”

“Sister,” Nimerly addressed her by the formal title, “we are all three rulers, you only the foremost. This Isle is ruled by the Nine.”

Coviane said nothing to her cousins until Essily sickened, and was sent away to the Farthest Isle. There she died, and to compound her sin, Coviane had her body burned so that only her ashes returned to the Rootless Isle. In the midst of this sorrow, while Nimerly wept, Coviane insisted Anson be sent away to Westrial.

When Senaye had heard of it, Ohean and Nimerly were already traveling to Kingsboro with Anson.

“He is with his father now,” Coviane had told her kinswoman. “Do you or Nimerly believe you have the right to him?”

“I curse you,” Senaye had said simply. Her face had been covered in tears, but now she stood straight, and her short black hair seemed to sizzle with electricity. She raised one hand, and it hung in the air before her face.

“I curse you,” she repeated, “by air, and by water, by the fire and by very earth. May you never rest easy, may your womb be closed, and may you know your end tied to the beginning of that boy whom you have sent away, our kin. For I tell you, when the old king dies and the new king rises in the land to the north, then shall you pass from this world too.”

It was no light thing, no thing where Coviane could simply respond that she was cursing her cousin in return, and so she stood there, glad her great skirts hid her shaking knees, and Senaye, full of rage, had taken only a one bag of possessions, and her horse and ridden from the Rootless Isle, never to return until the day fulfilled when, around the time Edmund became King of Inglad, Hale and North Hale, dispossessing the conquering Dayne king, Sweyn, Coviane had also died through disintery, and Nimerly at last took her place.

Nimerly did not travel to see Anson immediately. It was nearly two years before Nimerly traveled with her daughter Meredith and with Ohean, who was by then seventeen and living in Rheged. The journey from the southern shore of Westrial to Kingsboro, through the southern peninsula was weeks, not days.

When they reached the high walls of the city and saw a great keep, strong, forboding, reaching into the blue white sky, Nimerly was reminded that, though they called the Ayl the New People, they had been in this land a thousand years, and their walls and towers looked ancient. The ramparts of this mountainous castle made her, tall woman that she was, feel small.

“We have only to walk through the gate, Cousin,” Ohean said, lightly.

They went through the open gates into the great city, and Nimerly noted how Meredith took to it, her eyes everywhere. She had loved the cities too, though neither the western cities of the Royan, nor these cities of the Ayl were home to her. Now she saw Ohean scanning everyone, everything and then the trumpets blared.

“Make way, make way, for the royal house, for King Anthal and his Queen, Emmaline, and for the royal children.”

Nimerly felt disoriented and small here, though she was tall and brown, auburn haired, broad shouldered. Meredith was nearly tall as she, but she pulled her daughter closer as the streets opened for the guards on white horses, and then the flapping banner of Westrial with its wyvern. On white horses came the King, his Queen, that same Prince Cedd, grown larger and prouder and beside him, waving, a blue eyed golden haired boy.

“So like them,” Nimerly marveled. “More like an Ayl than his black haired brother.”

“He looks so happy,” Meredith said.

Her mother studied the prince as he departed, waving, his stepmother, the new Queen, caressing his hair.

“I thought to take him away and bring him back one day as a child of the Isle, for his own safety,” Nimerly said. “Now I know it was not for his safety, but my desire for my sister.”

She turned to Ohean.

“You are the Lady of the Rootless Isle,” he said. “Say what you want, and we will do it. I believe, in time, he must come to us anyway.”

As the royal party passed, Nimerly murmured, “But not today. I came all this way simply so we could turn and leave.”

Anson never returned to the Isle. Surely he had forgotten it. Tonight, in her visions of the nephew she had put out of her mind, Nimerly knew he had not only forgotten the Isle, but most probably knew nothing of it, thought his mother little more than some witch who had disappeared into the mist. He had no idea of who he was. Word had come, but too late, that Anson was not regarded as second prince, but guard to the King, the same title one would throw out to a bastard. Even after all the King’s sons but Cedd had died, this did not change.

As she gazed into the black water, fires rose. Scenes of death and burning as she had seen when the Daumans under King William had struck not five years ago were before her. Now, Nimerly felt her age, and as she had seen war raging across the fields of the south, now she saw, even while sitting in the semi darkness of her room, fires, feuds and disruption touching the land again.