Daughter of the Witcher Ch. 02

She bucked over and over. She raked his back without meaning to. He raised his head to look at her and it almost started her off on another one just to see that face look into hers.

He seized her breast and clamped his mouth over a nipple and at that instant, Annikki squeezed the other nipple that she'd found then Louhi did have another ...

She did.

With his help and with Annikki's...

She'd managed a second orgasm, or, ... maybe it was just,... Well to her delight, he was still going, though his seed was already in her.

They rested a bit after that and had a little more of the ale, down to sharing it and not giving a damn who had started any one particular tankard. It just wasn't important. They talked and laughed and all three of them found out that Taran really liked to have his balls caressed gently whenever, but he thought that he might especially like it when he was fucking somebody, so both of the girls stated that they'd help with it.

Taran had been sitting, but at one point, he reached for Annikki and pulling her to him, he eased them both down as he laid on his back, taking Annikki from behind with Louhi's help as Annikki lay on her back on top of him. He was fucking her 'very sweetly' as she'd described it while it went on and Louhi loved the way that her girl was so accessible to her like that, so she had a bit of fun with it, loving those small and very firm little wonders there on the girl's chest.

Louhi drew some inspiration from it and she learned that to her, it was a very fine thing to be able to lick both that beautiful prick and the cunny that it was buried in at the very same time while they went at it slowly.

When Annikki moaned and shuddered, they lay there just a little, and then she got off while Louhi knelt before him, facing away and leaning right down.

"Come Taran," Annikki chuckled as she straddled her friend's back, "Let me guide you in and Louhi can have her turn."

As he mounted Louhi and began, Annikki moved so that her thighs were over Louhi's waist and Annikki held onto Taran's shoulders so that she could she could kiss him while rubbing her sex against Louhi's lower back, but it didn't last all that long before Louhi complained of discomfort.

"I am and have been many things to you in our bed, Nikki, but I stop when I must be your playhorse," she groaned.

Annikki was contrite and a minute later, she slid under Louhi and reached for her.

Louhi settled back down onto Annikki's chest and began to mouth her breasts and Annikki held her gently while Taran made love to her and she reached back between her thighs when she could to touch his scrotum for him. Whenever he showed that he was slowing, she waited until he pressed himself in and stayed a few moments. She pet him back there then and it made things a little more affectionate to both of them.

Louhi came and it was a very pleasant orgasm to her, but Taran hadn't yet that time, and by their own rules, ...

It was Annikki's turn and she lay on her back while Taran lowered himself to take her. There was a fair size difference between them, so Taran didn't lie over her. It was all fine to Annikki after that and she invited Louhi to lower herself over her face, if she was careful not to pull her hair with her knees.

Louhi liked the idea and knelt very carefully. When she felt Annikki's mouth and tongue beginning, she moved just a little to get herself situated and then she leaned forward only a little so that she could hang onto Taran.

The motions of his thrusts made it a little dizzying until she closed her eyes, feeling his kisses against her neck and the way that the hair on his chest worked miracles for her breasts. Annikki came first, Louhi second, and it went on until Taran was done and it was Annikki who cooed to him softly as he filled her.

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As the night grew old, Annikki mouthed Taran's genitals, adding her soft kisses, more out of a want in her to show him her feelings. Louhi lay trading quiet kisses with Taran.

"You never gave me your answer," Louhi said quietly as she kissed his forehead, "You have not fallen in with a pair who can think of only one thing. Do you choose to look back, Taran, or do you choose to look ahead? I can offer you some help if you would want it, though to go where I would lead will need some courage."

"I would know," he said, "if it brings me into any kind of light where I can see what truly happened to me, then I must know, Louhi."

Louhi nodded and lay on her side with her leg over Taran's ribs so that she could hold his face against her breasts.

She needed to do that so that she could hold onto his head a little tightly and hold her own head over his.

She needed to do that to show him how she felt and also to keep him as still as she could in a way that told her that he was still awake and listening.

And, ...

She needed to do it all so that she could tell him of the things that she'd gotten from him and where his impressions were correct and more importantly, where they were just incorrect assumptions.

She told him the truth in a very soft and gentle way.

She told him that three hundred and seventy-odd years ago, a boy was born and named Taran mac Entifidich. He grew to be a man and learned to be a king of his people, groomed for the role by his uncle, who was the king at the time. He had a love affair with another man which ended badly and he went back where he was needed to be.

Another man was born on the most northerly of the Shetland Islands at or near the same time as Taran, just a boy who also grew to be a man and that man was torn out of his life one day by the mage who Taran had spurned. That man lost his knowledge of himself and was kept in a state of stasis most often, knowing little whenever he was brought out of that state for the mage's pleasure. The tattoos on him were done as he'd lain in that state once because the mage had wanted to remember them.

After the deaths of Taran's wife and children, the situation had come to the notice of the Caitt holy men on the southern island and the comatose and nameless man was brought to the temple.

While Taran mac Entifidich the king mourned what was lost to him, the mage found the comatose man and was attacked and killed by the holy men. The nameless one was kept in an even deeper sleep then, suspended between life and death for all of Taran's long reign.

As Taran the old king lay dying, the one-time acolyte of the high priest came to create the illusion of the king's death and had the body brought to the temple in the Shetland Islands once again. There he transferred the king's memories and consciousness to the sleeping one.

For their own reasons, the holy men wanted to present their king resurrected to the people in an effort to show that the Christians weren't the only ones who could manage something like raising their lord from the dead.

But the attempt failed and the temple became little more than a tomb and was sealed.

The only thing, Louhi whispered to Taran, was that; though there was no true resurrection and that it had been more of transference where the poor nameless and used man would then have a life to step into, it had worked, only three hundred years late.

As she held him tightly and crooned the truth into his ears, she made him understand at last that he was in fact, not a king and never had been. He was still the unfortunate islander who had lost almost everything but his long and empty life to the wants, needs, and desires of others. He just had the king's memories and that was all.

"Those poor ones," she whispered, "the queen and her children. They weren't yours, Taran. They were King Taran's loss, not yours. You suffered your own loss in this – even more than what I have said. You have lost who you were and what you knew – not King Taran's life, but your own."

"They were mine," he whispered in his quiet and subdued rebuttal.

"Do you remember your mother's face?" she asked, "Can you see the color of your father's eyes? Did you have a sister? Can you tell me any of these things?"

He paused then, as she knew that he would. Because she hadn't found anything like that in him. It wasn't there. He was looking for high people in his clan. What she knew was there – if he could even recall them, were poor subsistence farmers, eking out a living out of nothing on a rock on the edge of three oceans. She didn't have names for them, that was all. But King Taran knew only the North Sea, while the other man knew it as well, and also the Norwegian Sea and the icy North Atlantic.

The other man had been born where the waves of all three met and he'd sailed and fished them all to stay alive when the fish ran.

King Taran mac Entifidich had never seen two of the three nor ever caught a fish in his long life.

Louhi drew a slow breath then, knowing that she'd come to the edge of pushing in his buttressed and fortified walls using nothing more than her quiet and gentle words.

"You had a woman once. I feel her name as Gretta. You were taken from her and she likely never knew what happened to the man she loved so much."

Taran had been listening. All of the time that it took, he'd been listening, trying the fit of what he'd heard against the things that he knew. He would have said that it might have been that way in a hypothetical sense, but not in reality. He might have allowed that it could have happened, given the things which he knew could be done by the ones who had taught him what he knew himself.

But that wasn't the same thing as believing it.

The trouble was that he wasn't King Taran from what she said, and he knew that she had some ability – he could sense it to a degree. To someone who'd had a life with no bumps of jerks in it where they didn't know what had happened, what she'd said could be easily dismissed. But he'd had a life and now he was, ... who? He was missing centuries, and to his mind, he shouldn't even be alive right now.

The nameless man who had been taken was far away from having much of anything left to relate the other side of this to. He didn't know his name. He only knew that he was Taran mac Entifidich. It was the only name which came to him.

But hearing that one word triggered something long forgotten and which lay buried very deeply.

Gretta.

It came to him as a very soft echo from somewhere once the actual sound had faded in his ears. He thought about it, but nothing came to him for several moments. He only heard the echo in his mind.

An echo is an almost-resonance which tries, but fails to last and then fades away.

But it didn't fade away.

It slowly grew to become a pale memory which only grew more vivid as though rising from some place deep inside of him where it had lain forever - an image of a thin girl who had loved him once.

To likely any other man, she wouldn't have been much to look at in her worn woolen dress and tattered cloak with a skin held overtop as he saw her walking to meet him at the door of their poor home when he came back freezing cold and wet. He brought her a handful of clams and a few seabird eggs for them to eat. Her hair hid a lot of her face as it was blown by the wind from behind her until she moved it so that she could kiss him as though he was a fine lord back from an important journey.

It didn't matter. Her smiling eyes told him all that he needed to know.

He watched her as she closed the door of the stone hovel to shut out the wind before it could blow the little fire out again. What he'd managed to find for them wouldn't be enough, but she didn't care and that was evident in the way that she smiled.

There were a few pieces of driftwood mixed in with dried sheep dung burning fitfully in the fire, providing what little heat that it could to the single room hut. He saw the careful way that she cooked the eggs and the clams, fearful more than anything to see them slide out of the pan to the dirt floor, though it hadn't happened yet to that point. To one who had the recollections of a king, it didn't get much poorer than that.

But her face as he remembered it said a lot.

And the image of her after their poor meal, still hungry and lying naked in their bed for him said so much more. He remembered the sound of her voice then, pleading a little to hurry to her so that she could have him against her again.

They fumbled and laughed like a pair of children under the only blankets and skins that they had to their names with even their cloaks on top of that to try to stay just a little warm as she loved him.

Taran managed to face something for which he had no explanation ever since he'd woken up in what had been his tomb. Nothing made sense from front to back and top to bottom – none of it. Especially the jump in his knowledge of feeling as though he lay weak, old, and dying to waking up young and strong again in that tomb. He'd been stiff and cold, but he'd been alive.

The image of his own self-knowledge was coming apart.

In all of the time since – a long year of wandering and seeing what wasn't what he'd known – in all of that time, he'd held himself together in what might be termed the madness that he perceived around him. He didn't know the people. They didn't know him or who he was. He'd been strong and staunch to himself as he went, looking for something or someone whom he knew.

Now ...

Taran mac Entifidich would have never known, but the proof to him that he was not that man came to him with the very next thought.

He didn't need to ask himself who Gretta was.

The worst part of this never-ending horror descended on him then, threatening his realization just by its sheer weight.

"Where is Gretta?" he groaned from the comfort and warmth of Louhi's breasts.

Louhi held him a little tighter and she kissed the top of his forehead for a moment and then whispered, "I do not know where her bones lie. Somewhere on the most northern island. I know nothing of her, only who she was to you before you were taken to be someone else."

He thought about her again.

He remembered that she'd had almost no breasts, just slightly puffy nipples. Gretta always made her little jokes to him that she was hoping that she'd get something when it was time to feed the little ones that she knew they'd make together one day. He hadn't cared at all. He'd loved those little things so and could spend whole evenings with her under the blankets nuzzling his face against her little chest as she held his head there and sighed.

He remembered how she'd mewled so softly into his ear that time long ago as she'd rocked him while they copulated because she'd asked him for it. He could see her face right there, looking at him as though she held a lord in her arms, her head lifting to offer him her throat because she loved the way that he kissed her there.

They were nothing and nobody; only a half-starved pair of young people so much in love. He'd heard what she'd said in her quiet little sighings to him over and over until she'd whimpered in her very shy way when she came, almost ashamed to have let out her small cry and the hissing little breaths during the long moments when he'd thrust so gently into her, holding each time to prolong it for her.

He could feel the instant that he spent into the girl who was still hungry, but would never say a word of it to him, though the growling of her stomach often betrayed her. He'd done his best and it was all that he could find. The fish weren't running and there weren't enough spring lambs yet. But she'd known it when it happened and she smiled up and said that she wanted it all from him.

He felt himself giving her the seed that she wanted, knowing that she'd need to feel it afterwards with her fingers to prove to herself that she'd pleased him, no matter what he'd said to her that she always did. It meant something to Gretta anyway to know that he'd filled her with his seed.

To him from his present standpoint, it was only the seed of an impoverished young man – though to her, it was the proof that the greatest of men still loved her so.

"I, ... " He moaned in a way that spoke of his heart, torn through yet again, now that he knew at last, "I am not Taran."

He couldn't stop the sweetest of sad memories which now flooded his mind. He knew at last what was whispered in the words of Gretta's love for him. He heard the name. He'd seen her looking up groaning a little as she took his next gush in her mouth out of two different kinds of hunger at the same time.

"I, ... I am, ... I am Cuilén."

The last recollection was the feeling of Gretta's young and skinny body wrapped around her man under the thin covers with her head against his chest looking at him. They were on their sides as they tried to sleep afterwards. He felt the stinging at the edges of his eyes as he remembered her smile in the flickering dimness of the little fire. He said that he was sorry that he couldn't find more for her to eat.

She'd laughed that joyful little laugh of hers and he heard her voice then, "You bring me home a little feast in the evening, Cuilén, and that's what it was – the finest feast. You give me the best sort of fucking that a girl like me could ever want in a warm bed and you do it the way that I love just for me, and then you feed me again afterwards to my joy."

He remembered how it felt when she'd kissed his chest, the girl who'd held his heart as though it was everything to her - because it had been.

"I want no apology from my man when he's done those things for me. I want you in my arms every night and I'll not want for any more than that. We might starve to death at some point – if we don't freeze first, but I'll always be yours and I'll love you forever, Cuilén, I'll love you forever."

He started to cry then, his one remaining and final straw broken at last.

He finally knew who he was as the sobs came out of him. He couldn't stop because he knew more than that and he cursed his empty life even more as he felt Annikki crawl up to lie behind him and lean down to kiss his wet cheek and his ear so very softly while she wept for him along with Louhi.

He knew that his Gretta was dead.

He knew that an observer might have said that starvation was the cause if she'd been found there in their bed without him, or she might have lost the battle and frozen to death one night, and he knew that they'd be wrong.

While he fished when he could, or did whatever they needed so that they could live in their poor way, Gretta did what she could to look after their few animals and they met every day back in their humble little place. To them, it was certainly no castle, but they'd been happy there.

He had no memory of how he'd been pulled out of that. He only remembered them parting for another day and her soft kisses.

He didn't know anything at all about what happened to Gretta after he hadn't come home to her anymore, ...

But he knew without a doubt that whatever the final cause had been, it had only been the end of her anguish.

What had likely killed his Gretta more certainly than anything was the same thing that was killing him now by the way that his chest felt.

And if it didn't, he implored whatever cruel gods there were that it would kill him as his mind added the extra bit of torture.

He knew that he was more lost than he ever had been; lying in the arms of two beautiful women who whispered that they cared for him while he wept over what he'd lost to a man who hadn't cared about anything but himself.

He knew at last that his name had been Cuilén.

And worst of all was the way that his mind brought back her face to him behind his closed eyelids.

" - and I'll love you forever, Cuilén."