The Book of the Blessed

The

Kingsboro

Austin changed his apparel again. Downstairs the musicians were playing. Now he pulled off the heavy mountain clothing, more fit for a winter time expedition than a jaunt to court, and he went to his dressers and pulled out garments more suitable for the night. The red leotard, so elegant, he pulled up one toe, and then put the other in and then rolled the fitted skin up his body. He stood in the mirror, taking the back of his hand down his sides, over the curve of his buttocks, and down his muscular thighs. He slipped in the cup which lifted but, which he was proud to say, did not enhance, all that was natural. He put on a brown leather vest jingling with silver charms, and then began to slip on charm bracelets, three jingling from each wrist.

Audrey came into the room now.

“What happened to the first outfit?”

“I prefer this one,” Austin stopped, cocking his hip to one side as he looked in the floor length mirror. “It just makes me feel…” he had no words for it. He said, “Bring me your kohl.”

From the time Audrey was a young girl growing up in the mountains, she knew she would have to marry Austin. She was of a noble house, and Austin’s house was the only other one that shared her family’s religion. Otherwise she would have either been packed off south to Zahem or perhaps married into a Hale family in the far north. Even now, Audrey admitted, as she went down the hall, she knew she did not possess the status or wealth to marry into one of the Great Houses.

And so she had married Austin, and he was good to look at, almost pretty. But even before their marriage, he had told her that he loved to do some of the things that women did.

“Sometimes I even like to look like a woman,” he had told her. “Do not misunderstand me. I am not a woman. I do not want to be a woman. But… I do not always wish to look as a man is supposed to.”

She brought him the mascara and watched Austin apply it to his almond shaped eyes. As she sat on the side of the bed Audrey said, “You do that better than me.”

“I should stop borrowing yours,” Austin said, at last. “I should just use my own. I don’t know why I haven’t bought my own. I would like to wear some of your lipstick.”

Then Austin said, raising a finger, “I’m not actually wearing it to the dinner, but I would like to put it on here, now. Wipe it off, leave the stain.”

“I’ve justed walked all the way to and from my rooms. You’ll have to get that yourself.”

“I’m perfectly fine with that, but I want to wear your boots.”

“I don’t mind you wearing women’s boots, but don’t they make them for women with bigger feet? We’ll have some commissioned for you so you stop stretching the toes in mine.”

Austin nodded to this. On his way out of the room, Audrey placed the back of her hand on his firm ass.

He took her hand, turned it to the palm, and pressed it back to cupping him, indicating he liked the way she was touching him.

“Speak, Wife,” he said.

“Make a child with me. Make one with me tonight.”

“Very well, love.” He smiled on her.

“I think,” Audrey said, “I want you to rut with me, but with kohl all about your eyes, and along your chin and around your mouth.”

“Like a beard.”

“Yes. And in your green leotard, dressed like the Wild God himself.”

“To ravish you?”

“Please ravish me.”

Her hand was still massaging his ass and he felt himself hardening under his cup.

“I’ll ravish you until you beg me to stop.”

They went down arm and arm, Lord Buwa and Lady Buwa or, to be more accurate, Lord and Lady the Younger. Nephy Buwa stayed in the heights of the southern mountains these days with his perpetual cold to match its perpetual cold, and sent his son and his daughter by marriage down to live in the city. Far to the south it was easy to forget that the rest of Westrial was not the land of the Zahem, and the Ayl who lived here were golden of skin or even bronze from years of living in the south as well as mixing with the Royan who had lived her long before them. Here, Audrey had heard herself referred to, not unkindly though, as the White Lady.

But, most strange to her, here they could not practice their faith. Not, Audrey noted truthfully, that she greatly wished to, but here they looked like people of no religion at all. Here, where there was not a single Celestial Temple, and no one knew of their intense religious rites, people had no sense of what it meant to practice something that, in the southwest mountains, and down in Zahem, was the dominant religion. She would start to speak of it to her maids, and then stop. Or she would try to speak of it to women who would have been her friends and then realize they could not be her friends because they could not understand.

As they approached the great hall, the strains of music and the singing could be heard:

What meane the rimes that run thus

large in every shop to sell?

With wanton found, and filthie sense,

me thinke it serves not well