Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Two bodies writhed together in the piercing candlelight. 

A pink tongue flicked out, wetting black lips. Familiar lips. As if on cue, they curled into a sick, teasing grin. “Is something the matter, Captain?”

Captain Jorlan Duskryn folded his arms across his chest. “No.”

“No…?”

When his silence extended, Ilvara lowered her hips with sharp finality. The drow underneath her groaned in pleasure. He reached up to caress her bare breasts and, arching her chest, the Mistress of Velkynvelve allowed it. 

“Your obstinance grows tiresome.” Ilvara began to slowly circle her hips, a move Jorlan knew well. 

The drow captain remained at his place by the door where he had entered. He squinted against the hateful light, turning his half-scarred face into a hard, cragged visage. Instead of making it look as though he could barely see, the expression only served to chisel his features into sharp, yet handsome, relief. “...you called for me, Mistress,” he reminded her at length, barely avoiding spitting the title out of his mouth. 

Ilvara hummed, the sound purring low in her throat. The curve of her naked back undulated as she continued to ride her current consort. Thinking to distract him, remind him of what he had lost, no doubt. Humiliate him. It seemed to be all she thought about these days.

At least, as far as Jorlan was concerned.

There could not be anything further from his mind. His gaze narrowed in on her face, rather than on the floor--for she would have laughed to see him cowed and chastised so--or on her body--for he refused to give his tormentor such satisfaction. Jorlan found himself not unmoved by the display, however. Yet it was not lust that filled his veins with hot passion, but the overwhelming urge to wrap his strong hands around Ilvara’s throat and keep squeezing until there was no more breath left in her lungs. Hatred brought lust with it, as it always did, but the second son of House Duskryn had great practice in matters of control. 

Besides, he’d had better sex from the whores at the Jeweled Box than at any point in Ilvara’s bed.

Shoor Vandree grinned up at him, upside down, from his position beneath Ilvara. The stupid fop who’d helped Ilvara help orchestrate this humiliation in the first place. White teeth flashed on his dark face. 

Jorlan ignored him. 

“The prisoner,” Ilvara sighed, finally returning to business. “No doubt she is feeling quite proud after that bit of theatrics in the slave pit.” She leaned down, nibbling along Shoor’s jawline. He moaned under her attention. “See that she learns the consequences of rebellion.”

Deft fingers slid between their bodies as Shoor sought to pleasure her. Ilvara smiled through slitted eyes, enjoying the deepening shadows on her ex-lover’s face and the soft creak of Jorlan’s armor, that told her how hard he was fighting to avoid betraying himself. She even allowed her current consort the privilege of her breast in his mouth, a taste of skin and sweat. 

“Mistress.”

“The lizardman who screamed for her, the barbarian,” Ilvara mused. “Yes, cut off his hand and have my brother deliver it to her cell. Torture the rest.”

“Mistress.”

It was a narrow margin, but Jorlan only just managed not to slam the door on his way out. Ilvara’s laughter followed him all the way down the hall.

~

“Lady Lolth,” Jorlan muttered under his breath, “bless this web I am about to weave.”

Quick, soundless footsteps brought him in short order across the prison compound. It was a miracle Menzoberranzan even had a prison, given the fact that most drow who defied society--or found themselves on the wrong side of a priestess--were simply killed outright. Yet Velkynvelve hung suspended from a series of stalactites, screened by a web of spider silk. Through it Jorlan could still see the glowing outline of prominent houses and of course the descending light of Narbondel. On the hated surface, it might be said to be sunset. 

Soldiers and slaves alike scrambled to get out of his way. There was no arguing with the Captain when the fury was on him. And the fury was always on him these days. 

Fire sparked as Zariah drew her chain across the wall of the slave pit. She dove to the side to avoid the rampaging quaggoth Ilvara had trapped in the pit with her. Each time Zariah lashed the chain, Jorlan noticed, the half-drow sorceress barely squinted. Even Ilvara, seated and perched on her throne above the pit, flinched at the sudden brightness. 

Jorlan allowed himself a single nod of recognition. The prisoner might be a mage of no small talent, she might be a filthy half-blood, a stain on drow society and an outcast--but she was still the daughter of Jarlaxle Baenre, and not to be taken lightly. A life on the surface might not have prepared her for the rigors of the Underdark, nevermind Menzoberranzan, but her father’s blood was strong enough to have left her no small measure of the same ability that had kept the infamous mercenary captain alive for over five centuries. 

Taking a physical risk Jorlan was not sure he would have chosen himself, Zariah skidded to a stop, tossing a handful of sand at the quaggoth’s face. As he roared she fell into a controlled tumble, coming up in just the right position to leap onto the creature’s back. Taking the chain in both hands and hauling on it with all her slim strength. Zariah threw the whole weight of her body into the task. Somehow--some-bloody-how--she wrestled the creature’s breath away from it, breaking its rage and bearing the quaggoth down to the ground.

Jorlan remembered that look. As Zariah snarled, a tumble of white hair obscuring her face, scrapes weeping blood from her cheeks, her eyes pierced him. No pupils at all, just the shimmer of gold like a pair of coins, flipped and sparking in muted firelight. What he saw there, in her panting, defiant gaze, belied the sullied bed of her heritage. It belied her savagery and inherent, bestial nature. 

Determination.

…and cunning.

Jorlan gave little thought to the scar that pulled his skin so taut as he scowled. It didn’t matter what Zariah thought of him. He wouldn’t give her a choice. Let Ilvara laugh, let Shoor fuck Velkynvelve’s self-styled ‘Mistress’ all he liked. Let them get away with their unsuccessful assassination attempt on his life. Let Ilvara pretend it was his ‘disfigurement’ that had shoved him from her bed. They both knew the truth. 

Nothing was ever so simple as it seemed, not here. 

~

Zariah lifted her head from the pallet where she lay. A subtle clink of metal reminded her instantly of her status as a prisoner. The shackle around her neck connected to a heavy adamantine chain that descended between her breasts and split into two more chains that attached to shackles on her wrists. All along the length of the dark metal there glowed runes in elegant drow-script, stealing her magic so that she could not escape. 

Remembering to focus her gaze to see outside the spectrum of visible light, Zariah was surprised to see none other than Captain Duskryn turning the key in her cell door. She scrambled to sit up on the stone bed. There was a black look on the man’s face, the sort that portended nothing good.

“Capta--”

The rattle of bars cut off the end of her query. 

Jorlan’s momentum only slowed as he entered the cell. He pulled the door shut behind him, hearing the satisfying clack of its heavy latch come down. There would be no escaping for his prisoner, not today.

His prisoner.

The thought behind that title made him smirk. The scarred side of his face tightened as his lips pulled back. Let Ilvara stay in her chambers, let her remain on her throne, content in her false sense of security. Jorlan would weave a different web, and he would start here.

“Baenre,” he said.

His grin pulled even wider--though, for Zariah, it was not very much at all--as he crossed the room on silent feet. Velkynvelve, and everything in it, was his to do with as he pleased. Looking down on the young drow woman, if it had not been for her striking eyes, he might have mistaken her for a trueborn daughter of her house. After all, Zariah had those delicate Baenre cheekbones, as distinctive as they were beautiful. Jorlan remembered well her other features, as he had been the one to strip her and store her adventuring equipment upon her arrival at the prison. Ilvara had watched him do it, too, perhaps to keep him from pocketing any of her more useful items, or perhaps to keep him from what he was about to do anyway. It had been the latter, he decided, yet another test of his patience to see if he would react to the body of any drow woman as he had once lusted for his Mistress. 

There would be no more mistresses for Jorlan Duskryn.

Gold coins shone up at him. Intelligent and watchful…for a half-breed. 

“Stand when you address me,” he commanded. To his pleasure, Zariah crept off the stone ledge that served as her bed, her body feline in movement beneath her grey prison tunic. “Hold out your hands.”

Uncertain, Zariah extended her wrists. Was he…freeing her? One shackle fell away, allowing her to finally move her arms independently of each other. She rubbed at her wrist. “What…are you--”

Jorlan slapped her. One hand in her tunic, the back of the other cracking across her cheek, already hollowed some with hunger and captivity. Zariah made a pained, rather delightful noise. She swayed but managed to retain her balance. 

“Address me properly.”

Zariah spat at his feet. “Go fuck yourself.”

The world whirled around her. Zariah found the breath knocked out of her as her back slammed into Jorlan’s chest, one of his arms pinning hers, seizing her wrists, and the other hand squeezing at her jaw, her throat. He did not miss the shudder that ran through her as his long fingers brushed her face, her soft skin. The anger that was also lust that was also ambition surged inside of him. “Ah-ah,” he scolded quietly, his lips nearly meeting Zariah’s ear. “Good pets mind their manners.”

And there it was, just as he’d expected.

Zariah’s breath hitched in her throat, and not entirely out of fear. 

He remembered dressing her in the grey tunic she now wore. Carrying her to this cell and shackling her. So light in his arms. That searing golden gaze when she had been brought before Ilvara the following day. Barefoot. Uncertain of how to walk on stone. Her head held high. The way her face had… changed when he’d tucked the handle of his whip under her chin and tilted it up to look at him. 

“If it isn’t Jarlaxle’s half-blood bastard. Let’s have a look at you.”

Only a moment as her gaze searched his face, took in his sneer of disgust, the snarl in his tone when Ilvara called her inside and Zariah’s guard jumped to obey. She might be only half-drow but, whatever else she was, Zariah Baenre was no fool. 

“Be careful of bastards,” she’d said calmly before the stone doors swung closed behind her. Not venomous, not proud. “They bite.”

Collected. 

Even in the slave pit, with no weapons, Zariah had surprised him. He’d thought the quaggoth would slice her to ribbons for sure, and that then he and Ilvara would both have to explain to Matron Mother Duskryn why their bait to catch Jarlaxle had been damaged. Perhaps Zariah did have more of her father in her than whatever blood some sun-baked surface whore had given her. 

She stomped on his foot. Her bare heel did nothing through his thick leather boot but Jorlan’s grip tightened on Zariah all the same. A tumble of wavy white hair--unbraided, for he had had to do that, too--fell over her shoulder, a little curtain of softness between them. Zariah twisted to look up at him, disheveled. “What do you want?”

Jorlan’s long fingers crept around Zariah’s jaw, the pad of his thumb pressing briefly on the plushness of her lower lip. “You did not live with your father,” he said. It was not a question. “Otherwise, you would not have to ask me.”

Zariah swallowed. Her heart raced in her chest and she knew they could both hear it. Never in her life had she been so close to a drow man who wasn’t her own kin. Oh, there had been a few boyfriends and male friends back in Waterdeep--but nothing like this. Even the infrequent visits from her father could barely be counted as contact with another drow. Jarlaxle was often ‘distracted’ by her mother, and seemed to have only cursory time available for his bastard daughter. At least there had been one thing upon which Jarlaxle and her mother had both agreed in regards to her upbringing--no contact with her own kind. 

Especially not men. 

No amount of parental blockade could stop a young girl’s dreaming. It was practically a fact of the multiverse. 

And Jorlan, scarred and hardened by two centuries in the Underdark, was not an unhandsome man.

For a few moments Zariah found herself unable to reply. She licked her lips. When had her mouth gotten so dry? Jorlan’s chest was warm behind her, and his bare arms held her caged as surely as bars. Something heated sprang to life inside her. Zariah tried to ignore it.

“If you’re going to sacrifice me to Lolth,” she said, attempting an even tone despite her breathlessness, “get it over with.”

Jorlan pressed the pad of his thumb to her lip again, and he was immediately rewarded with another tremble through his prisoner’s curved form. “I had something else in mind,” he said coolly, managing to sound detached despite his own growing heat. “Something that serves us both.”

There was a sighing of metal as Zariah’s free hand sought purchase to outweigh her sudden wash of anxiety and found it--in Jorlan’s belt. As if by accident, her reaching brought them closer together. Her body pressed to his, quite firmly. Firm enough to know exactly what it was that he wanted.

“You said our families were at war. You said I was a half-blood.” Zariah could not stop the flush rising to her face, and she wondered if he could see it. “That I was no better than an animal. That I disgusted you.”

“If you stop struggling it will go easier for you.”

This time, the heat did not even so much as ask her permission. It flooded her, from throat to between her legs. Zariah pressed her thighs together. It didn’t help. 

Jorlan traced a single finger up her arm, along her shoulder, and up to behind her ear. “I will do as I please,” he said, the hunger in him only making his statement that much harsher. He was not a gentle man. A dominant man in a world that required him to bury his true proclivities and sexual tastes with anyone who was not a slave or a whore. “And if you are a good girl for me, I will release you.”

“--on one condition,” he continued when Zariah made that delightful whimpering sound again. “That if you survive the Underdark to find your father, that you never speak of what happened between us.” 

Zariah bit her lip. “Ilvara will kill you,” she said. “She’ll know you let me go.” Gods, surely she wasn’t considering…? But the need in her body was unmistakable. She’d known she liked it rough for a while, but like this? Here? In a prison, with virtually no say in the whole affair either way, and with her captor no less? She ought to fight, her common sense told her. But without her spellcasting focus, Zariah knew she wouldn’t make it very far. There were many guards, slaves, and spiders between here and any subtle passage out of the prison complex. And her mother had been a practical woman, after all, though it was far more than mere practicality that had made Zariah in the first place. 

“I will go to Ched Nasad,” Jorlan laughed drily, the image of Ilvara posting on her new lover flashing across his mind. The sarcastic sound descended into a growl of certainty. “She’ll never find me. I’ll be rid of this place.” Rid of his mother and her whole ridiculous plot to capture the leader of the Bregan D’aerthe. May she catch the man and immediately regret her decision.

It was always a gamble, as a drow, to try to pick the winning side when the chips were still in the air. But he had seen the look in Zariah’s eyes, he had seen her intensity. Well, he’d thrown his hand in. Time to see where it lay.

“Whatever you want?” Zariah asked quietly, in truth because she could hardly gather the breath for more. “If I please you, you’ll let me go, get me out of Menzoberranzan?”

Adding more to his bargain. Defining the terms. Oh, she was a sharp one. 

Jorlan put his lips to her ear, in a murmur meant only for her. “I’m going to fuck you until you can’t walk, Zariah Baenre. I’m going to finish inside you. I’m going to hurt you and spank you until you can’t move an inch without thinking of me. As many times as I want. Whenever I want. And when I am satisfied, I will set you free and set you on the path back to the surface.”

“And my friends?” 

He bit her ear, hard. Zariah strained, trembling and gasping, in his arms. Her back arched. Brows furrowed in desperate wanting and she gripped him all the harder. 

“And…my friends?” she asked again, when she’d gotten her breath back.

This time, Jorlan took hold of her chin and forced her to look up at him again. To see the stern severity of his scarred face, the burning in his red eyes. “Don’t bargain for pittance with a treasure you would have already given me for free.”

“I could…say the same,” Zariah gasped. 

And there it was out in the open, the bolt that nailed them both. What they had both been thinking, each in their own way, since that first meeting. 

“Let’s have a look at you.”

Dime novels had not prepared Zariah for the intensity in Jorlan’s expression. She couldn’t tell if he wanted her because he hated her or because she actually attracted him. No virgin, but gods, in his arms she almost felt like one. Of course, she and Crowhix the barbarian had found each other’s beds on the long journey north. Feeling his warmth at her back the whole way through Neverwinter Wood. That was nothing compared to this, as warm as a candle next to a roaring bonfire. 

Zariah dropped her gaze--hesitantly, she hoped--to Jorlan’s lips. A silent invitation, learned more from page and print than real life experience.

A sharp heave forward on the chain, the shackle at her neck. His eyes were something like rubies, Zariah thought vaguely as Jorlan stole her breath away, covering her mouth with his. Zariah’s fingers skidded across Jorlan’s armor as their bodies twisted, facing each other. She rocked on tiptoes a moment, one foot coming off the ground for balance as the prison captain swept the young sorceress up in his passion.

Jorlan surfaced from the kiss briefly, taking a fistful of Zariah’s tumble of white hair and yanking her back just far enough to make his assessment. The flush across her dark cheeks, one he could have easily made out, visible light or no, had somehow passed through their kiss, warming his own body more than the normally-stoic man would have thought possible. Zariah’s shoulders shuddered as Jorlan’s strong hand seized and kneaded one breast. Her gold eyes fluttered closed and when his lips next met hers, Jorlan was rewarded with the heat of her chest pressed eagerly to his. 

Whores fought and slaves were always unsatisfying.

It had been too long for Jorlan Duskryn. Far too long.

Here, he could do what he liked. Make his prisoner bleed, make her scream--in pain or pleasure…or both. He could all but choke the life out of her and, now he was certain of it, he would feel as her body squeezed his prick in hungry response. 

Ilvara could rot in Avernus.

Zariah clung to Jorlan as the captain shoved a hand between them, under her tunic. Everywhere he touched he left a trail of fire, one his mouth echoed, teeth nipping down her shoulder. Her smallclothes fell to the floor. 

Making brief noises of protest and surprise, Zariah found her back pressed to the stone bed. Jorlan’s devouring momentum chased her backwards. She scraped her backside hoisting up onto the ledge, but the sting faded almost at once. His fingers entered her almost a moment later and Zariah’s cry drowned at the back of a new, hard kiss.

Jarlaxle Baenre’s daughter, helpless beneath him. White hair spread out like a wavering halo on dark stone--or a web of his own weaving. Eager hips pressing into his hand, moans and whimpers of delight far removed, and far better, than any sarcastic disinterest Ilvara had ever feigned. How far his ambition had gotten him--and so easily!--when his mother and Ilvara had gone to this much trouble without so much as even a whisper as to whether their news of ransom had even reached Luskan at all. 

If the mercenary himself ever found out, Jorlan knew that would be the end of his own lease on life, even if Jarlaxle had to track him to Ched Nasad or beyond. 

It only made the conquest all the sweeter.

He retreated another moment to look at his prize. 

Feeling as if the chains against her skin were now of very little consequence, Zariah wound her free hand in Jorlan’s hair and pulled him back down. 

Chapter Text

“My father--”

“Your father ,” Jorlan interrupted sharply, “has fucked nearly half of Menzoberranzan. For money, to bribe, to start a war, or to satisfy himself.” He crossed his bare arms over his chest. “What makes you think your mother was special? ”

Zariah drew in a wet breath that strangled the retort in her throat. Tears stung the edges of her eyes. “He loved--”

Jorlan’s palm cut through the air, full of finality. “No drow loves anything save himself. I’m surprised Jarlaxle remembered her address, nevermind her name.”

“But--” She blinked rapidly, but it did not keep the tears at bay. Here they were, out in the wilds of the Underdark. Escaped. Free. Free to make a run for the surface as soon as they passed out of this thick section of the faerzress. Zariah’s fingers bunched in the crimson sleeves of her shirt as she pressed her arms tighter to her chest. “Why are you…” She shook her head. “After all we…”

The ex-captain of Velkynvelve almost pitied her. What normal drow was not ready for the twisted knife of betrayal? Zariah’s confusion marked her as a surface dweller far better than any outward difference between them. Jorlan folded his arms, everything about him cold. He shrugged, as if her distress was of no consequence to him. “Did you imagine I cared for you?”

“I thought--” Zariah felt sick. Her stomach hung like lead from a tenuous swing. The memory of Jorlan’s hot kisses, burning, burning her as she opened her body to him. She had been full, full of him and his lust--and yet now his words scraped her raw, and left her empty. 

“I used you,” he spat simply. “As you used me. We owe each other nothing.”

Later that night Zariah pressed her face to Crowhix’s familiar, scaled chest and let her tears run freely. Her dear friend, her lover of many months now, held her all the more tightly to him. The lizardman looked down at her out of slitted yellow eyes, not unkindly. 

His long tongue lapped comfortingly at Zariah’s bare shoulder. “Forget him,” the barbarian said. He waved the bandaged stump of his arm--for it had been severed, in the end, his bloody hand tossed in Zariah’s cell. To cow her, perhaps, but it had only strengthened her resolve. And it was Jorlan, too, who had done the severing. “He does not deserve you.”

Zariah sniffled. She was young still, by elven standards, and her heart had not been bruised or caged by centuries of Menzoberranzan’s coldness. How to put words to the way she felt? She had wanted Jorlan honestly. Had he not felt the same? Could he lie with his body, as well as his words? There had been something between them, hadn’t there, as the experienced captain spread her legs and lay down with her. Something real--even though it was fleeting.

“He said my father doesn’t…doesn’t love…” She couldn’t bring herself to say it aloud.

Crowhix ran the claws of his other hand through her tumble of long, white hair. He hissed, low and displeased. “The Father,” he began, for his vocabulary in Common was not nearly so good as his Draconic, “sent little Meepo to Zariah. That is love, yes?”

Across the small alcove they had chosen as their resting spot, Meepo, a small red kobold dressed in scrappy leathers, had curled himself up with his tail over his nose. It was he who had escaped Ilvara’s ambush, he who had taken Zariah’s spellcasting focus--her necklace--and her stallion, running all the long way north to the River Mirar. Then west, to Luskan, until he finally arrived at Fort Kurth. It had been little Meepo, of all of them, who had evaded capture and hunger to fall, exhausted, at Jarlaxle’s feet…clutching Zariah’s necklace tightly in his tiny claws. And it was little Meepo, too, who had poked his head out of the warren-hole in Zariah’s cell, chittering excitedly, to deliver it back into her hands. 

Zariah nodded slowly. 

She cast a look over her shoulder at Jorlan’s silhouette near the alcove’s mouth. Only just--Zariah caught a flash of his gaze as he looked pointedly away. Was it her body he was watching as she tumbled with another man? Was it the closeness she and Crowhix shared, and did Jorlan deride her weakness for it? Or, perhaps, he really did not see her as anything but an animal, soiled as she was by her mixed blood. 

“Yes,” she murmured, curling an arm around Crowhix’s lean hip. “Father wouldn’t have helped Meepo rescue us if I…if we, if Mother and I meant nothing to him.” Zariah tried to ignore the uncertainty in her own voice. She did not want to think of Jarlaxle as a man who chased his own lust to any bed he could find. Not when her mother waited, so lovingly, to greet him each autumn when the Eyecatcher dropped anchor in Waterdeep Harbor. 

Those were questions for later, Zariah decided, as Crowhix swept his forearm along the back of her thigh, coaxing her leg up over his waist. Zariah let her eyes flutter closed as she gave herself over to the familiar, comfortable joining. They twined, quiet as two lovers could be in a cramped space surrounded by the sleeping pallets of friends and companions. 

Jorlan Duskryn settled into his watch. He would see Zariah safely to the surface. He had given his word. Perhaps, now an exile from his home and his house, his word was all he had left. Honor was not prized among the drow of Menzoberranzan, and after all, he was not tagging along because he liked the Baenre girl. But he had to hold on to something. 

Dignity.

Yes, that was it. He had to keep his dignity. Jorlan swept his fingers in the tin of rothe fat he used to keep his leathers supple, and began to work it into the folds of his boots. It was a familiar task, and one that gave his mind permission to wander. 

He wouldn’t follow her. He wasn’t like those lizardfolk and the two kobolds, savage species prone to servitude. No. No more mistresses or masters for Jorlan Duskryn. He was his own man, now. 

Once again, he risked a glance over his shoulder. Clearly, in the dark, he could see Zariah twined with the lizardfolk barbarian; her lithe, naked and sophisticated body so different from the hulking, stupid brute who rutted her. The part of Jorlan that sought social advantage scolded his decision; he should be the one in Zariah’s arms. He should be plying her with affection and attention. She was a Baenre, and Jarlaxle’s daughter besides, and he surrendered a superior position by ignoring the girl completely. 

The part of him that had rebelled against Ilvara shouted louder. In the end, Zariah would only use him, too. In the end, it would all be the same. No, better to distance himself and strike out on his own. Better to be hunted by his house, his ex-lover, and the Bregan D’aerthe--so long as he lived his own life, on his own terms. 

Better to die free than to live a slave.

And if that made him cold--so be it.

~

“So, you’re the Duskryn boy, hm?” Beniago tapped his finger to his cheek in mock casualness. “Velkynvelve’s infamous captain.”

Jorlan glared at him, red gaze searing. He said nothing, but the inner fire of his hatred needed no words to be as plain as the surface sun.

A single nod from Beniago and the drow guard holding Jorlan’s right arm drew back a fist and slammed it, hard, against the other man’s jaw. Jorlan reeled from the blow, blood spattering the granite flagstones beneath him. The impact knocked him to his hands and knees, but he was quickly hauled upright again by two other guards, one of them with a hand tight in his hair. 

“I do not answer,” Jorlan snarled, “to ‘ boy ’.” He winced, taking another punch, this time on his left cheek. Blood ran between his teeth. “Hit me all you like.” Jorlan spat on the ground, narrowly missing Beniago’s expensive black boots. “Man or woman. Matron or patriarch. It won’t make a difference.”

Beniago spread his fingers in an elegant shrug, one his leader would have known well. “Captain Duskryn, then--”

“Jorlan. Just Jorlan.”

“I understand you accompanied Lady Zariah out of the Underdark,” Beniago forged ahead, overriding him and eager to waste no more time. The handsome sun elf features melted away as he dismissed his surface glamor with a thought and crouched down, meeting Jorlan’s hard stare, crimson to carnelian. Although sheathed, the capped tip of his sword’s scabbard grated on the flagstones. “What is she to you?”

Jorlan watched Beniago’s expression a long time. A single wrong answer in this ‘little interview’, and he was a dead man. “...we travel together, that is all. When I have learned all I need to of this awful place and can go my own way, that will be the end of it.”

Beniago chuckled. It was not a kind sound. 

“You,” the younger drow said, poking Jorlan’s chest where he still wore his Velkynvelve uniform, “you expect me to believe that you were responsible for the care of Jarlaxle Baenre’s daughter, and that you did nothing with her? No drow of Menzoberranzan, and certainly not a Duskryn, would be so monumentally stupid.” Beniago flexed his fingers where his ring of truth-telling warmed against his skin. “I wonder,” he said, pondering aloud, “if Lady Zariah would say the same if I were to ask her.”

Zariah’s skin burned against his, as if she were a living flame. The strength of her magic shone through despite the runic bindings. Though her wrists had been freed, she still wore an adamantine collar around her neck. Silver runes glowed through her curtain of white hair. Jorlan’s hands tightened on her hips and he pulled Zariah back against him with enough force to cause her to cry out. 

“Half-breed.”

The degradation earned him a shuddering response and that tight smirk tugged again at Jorlan’s scarred lips. Without so much as asking his permission, his hands hauled Zariah upright, until they were skin to skin, his chest to her back. Still a little damp from the bath he had insisted she have, her hair fell over his arm, his shoulder. “You enjoy this,” Velkynvelve’s captain hissed in her ear. 

Zariah whimpered, the sweet sounds from her mouth as animal as the way she leaned back, pressing their bodies firmly together. 

“You’ve needed a proper drow to show you your place.” Jorlan turned her chin to look up at him. Those coin-gold eyes glimmered up at him, so honest, so lost in the heat they stoked between them. He faltered, but only for a moment. No drow should look at another like that. It was…too alien. Zariah had too much of the surface in her. Yet, despite that, despite her eager and utter submission to his touch, right now what she had too much of in her was Jorlan himself. “You’ve needed to be under a man--say it,” he growled, “I want to hear you say it.”

“Please…” Zariah panted, her thighs shaking already from the vigor and length of their lovemaking. Jorlan was a man of no small stamina--or aggression. “Let me--” She swallowed. The air here was so dry. “--let me please you, Captain.”

Jorlan’s grip tightened and Zariah found the spear of his cock rammed hard against her cervix. She moaned helplessly. “Be more specific, Baenre,” she heard him snap curtly.

Grasping forward, Zariah found her position once more on all fours. Slowly, she lowered her shoulders until she could press her cheek to the softness of the Captain’s mattress, his silk sheets. Her entire body ached deliciously. An urge to close her eyes and weep reared itself in her breast, in loud competition with the tingling peace of physical relief. He was right, of course. It was exactly what she had always wanted from a man--a drow man. 

“...fuck me, please,” she whispered. “Use me. Finish inside me. Use me however you like, just…” Blindly, she groped for Jorlan’s hand. Finding it once again on her hip, she pushed it back until his rough palm cupped the round curve of her ass. Zariah squeezed her eyes shut, a hot flush spreading across her face, her chest. “Hurt me. Teach…teach me my place. Show me where I belong.”

“And where is that?” Jorlan’s prick twitched hard. He could feel the ache in his balls, the subsequent need for release, building. 

Zariah pressed her forehead to her hands, shivering from the sensation inside her. So slick with her own desire that all she could feel was the heat of it. “At your mercy, Captain. Beneath you.”

Jorlan could not help but chuckle as he struck her ass with a satisfying sound and her body clenched down around him. “See that you remain that way.”

“I am certain,” he bit back to Beniago, his stare never faltering, “that she will say whatever pleases her. You Baenres always do.”

To his credit, he barely winced as the next fist came flying

~

Jorlan pulled away but Zariah’s tender hands coaxed him back. He grimaced as she dabbed at his forehead with a damp cloth. “It’s nothing.”

“Be still,” she huffed softly, “this will only take a moment.”

Jorlan looked away. He took in the room around them, Zariah’s personal suite at Fort Kurth. Although the walls were drab stone, Zariah had decorated them with colorful tapestries and paintings. One such painting hung at the zenith, a large portrait with several figures Jorlan could easily guess staring out at the two drow who now occupied the room. Who but Jarlaxle Baenre sat in prominence on a red velvet-cushioned throne, looking pleased and--Jorlan thought--quite full of himself. He held a small Zariah on his knee, the laced and scalloped edges of her white dress overflowing and contrasting with his serviceable black leathers. The same scrimshaw necklace that had become her spellcasting focus hung about her neck. Behind the throne, instead of a mountain of treasure, there lay the bulk of a gold dragon. Its enormous head snaked around the throne, with Jarlaxle’s free hand caressing the scaled ridge of its brow in a gesture of calm confidence and entitled affection. The dragon’s tail, Jorlan noticed, circled the throne protectively. It was as if the dragon’s body held just a little tension--one that Jarlaxle commanded so long as the painter did not get too close. 

The cloth passed over a particularly tender bruise and this time Jorlan did wince. “Your father’s men say I should stay away from you,” he said as Zariah’s fingers glowed softly, the swelling under them diminishing. 

“I am sure they worry about me,” Zariah replied, “I was lost on the road for some time and I, well, I did leave Waterdeep without warning.”

Silence stretched out between them. Jorlan tried not to think about how close they were, or how soft Zariah’s body was where she leaned against him. “When Jarlaxle returns, he will finish what his men started.”

“Father will do no such thing--”

“I do not need you to protect me,” Jorlan cut in. “I need no woman. I can take care of myself.”

Zariah withdrew. She settled her hands on her hips and fixed him with an unimpressed purse of her lips.

Jorlan relented. He waved wordlessly and Zariah leaned in again to tend to him. 

“...I look after you, all of you, because I want to,” she said quietly after some time. A delicate cough. “Because I care about you.”

“You shouldn’t.”

She huffed. “And why not?”

“...our houses are at war,” Jorlan explained once more, stating something he felt he had said a hundred times already. “No other drow will bother to understand the dynamics of your little group before choosing to condemn me to death, merely for my association with you. Now that you are home, now that you are settled, there is no reason for me to wait around for the inevitable to happen once Jarlaxle returns to Luskan. If I am lucky, I will be well on my way to Ched Nassad by the time he arrives.” 

Finally, Zariah lowered the cloth and set it aside slowly by the washbasin. “Don’t go,” she said quietly. “Please, stay with me.”

If he did not look at her, perhaps the tender thing that had been growing inside him would not hurt quite so much. “Baenre, it’s not that easy--”

“ Zariah ,” she begged. “Please. Call me Zariah.”

The world stretched out between them. The ways they had each been raised as foreign to each other as sea is to fire. At length, Zariah laid a gentle hand on his forearm. “If you…” She swallowed, feeling the flush rising. “If you are going to leave us, then…would you consider…that is.” Gold freckles sparkled in the seaside sunlight that streamed in through the westward-facing window. Zariah let the silence pool, unsure of how to fill it. 

Jorlan rose to his feet, quiet for a long, long while, looking down at her. She really would let him leave, just like that. Jorlan tsked and shook his head. Foolish, the both of them. And yet, it was as if, by allowing him, a male, to choose, he knew at once that to leave was no longer a choice available to him. 

Before he could open his mouth, Zariah reached into her belt pouch and pulled out a silk handkerchief. The rich purple folds sighed as Zariah opened it to reveal a small, onyx spider-shaped brooch. “I…er. I got this for you,” she mumbled. “In Neverwinter. The sun won’t hurt your eyes as long as you wear it, um…” 

Almost gingerly, he lifted the brooch out of her hands. Something inside him felt shoved off-kilter. “It--Zariah, you cannot give me this. It’s, the expense alone--”

She drew in a shaky breath. He’d said her name! “It is a gift.”

“I cannot accept this. I will not owe you--or anyone else--a debt.”

“Captain--”

“Just Jorlan, please.”

Zariah folded his fingers over it. She looked up at him, open and honest. “Jorlan.” A squeeze of his wrist. “I hope it keeps you safe…wherever you choose to go.”

In a sudden rush, a sudden flood of warmth to his breast, his hands were on her shoulders before he quite knew what he was doing. Tasting her once more, and now he knew that the taste of her lips was sunlight and fresh air. Summer things. Sweet things.

There was nothing sweet in Menzoberranzan. 

Breathless, Jorlan withdrew. Zariah’s panting, glittering expression met his own and when he pressed their bodies together again it was in a frenzy of desperate kisses. Nothing like before. As far removed from that first moment in the prison as it was possible for him to get. “Please,” he said again, quietly. 

He had nothing to give. Nothing but himself. No title and no house. A man of no consequence save for his skill in battle.

“Jorlan,” Zariah whispered, barely able to gain the breath to say his name. “I--”

His fingers met her lips. There was no need for Zariah to speak for him to understand what it was she wished to say. If he allowed her to speak what was on her heart, then he truly would not be able to leave. “You will come to bed with me,” Jorlan told her, not bothering to ask permission. “To please me and satisfy me. You will do so here, in your father’s house.”

Zariah swallowed, hard. Every part of her ached for the inner peace of submission, no matter what harsh cost she might have to pay to get it. If only he would take her and she could lay her head on his thigh afterwards. Ease the knots from his shoulders while he treated his leathers each night. Many months ago now they had left the Underdark, escaping the darkness and Ilvara’s wrath in the same breath. Zariah had tried to include her new sullen ally, to be kind, despite his haughty dismissal. Despite his wish to leave she had tried to at least show him there was more to the world than the harshness of the drow, the paranoid secrecy of Menzoberranzan. 

Jorlan cupped Zariah’s chin, tilting it upward unexpectedly. Unexpected, but not hard. “Where do you belong, Zariah?” he purred. 

Somehow, in their kissing, they had turned around until the back of Zariah’s knees hit the bed. A shiver ran through her. She reached up, sliding her hand over his chest and heart. “Wherever you want me,” she replied.

“And where is that?” Jorlan was so close now, his forehead nearly on hers, the bridge of his nose and hers hovering only a hair’s breadth apart. 

The flush had truly reached her cheeks now. Zariah closed her eyes. “Beneath you, on all fours like an animal.” A half-breed beast. A savage.

A slave.

To her surprise, when Jorlan stripped her and lay her down he pushed her knees apart and climbed over her. Her nipples pebbled in the cool autumn air despite the fire in the grate. Jorlan’s skin, deliciously dark, felt firm to the touch. Strong. Zariah’s hands curled over her heart as she looked up at him. She looked away as he undid her small clothes and tossed them aside. 

“Do I, though?”

“Hm?” 

Jorlan paused in the unlacing of his own breeches.

Zariah pressed her cheek to her pillow, not looking at him. “Do I…please you?” Her fingers curled tighter. 

For a long moment the drow captain blinked at her, his mouth open. Did she really not understand the answer to such a simple question? He wouldn’t be fucking her if it wasn’t good --not now that he had his own choice in the matter. “Do…you want to please me?” he asked, almost unable to keep the incredulousness out of his voice. One white brow arched.

Again, those coin-gold eyes turned to regard him. Too full of honesty. Not honesty faked or forged, he realized, but for no other cause than that she saw no reason not to be her whole self before him, naked in ways more than physical. How foolish. How innocent, how like a surface-dweller. And how real, too.

“...since the moment I met you,” Zariah said, barely loud enough for him to hear. 

“Let’s have a look at you.”

He snorted. “You would have swooned for any drow man who showed you a modicum of attention. Females will do what they will.” But not this one, he reminded himself. Not this woman. 

“There was…something about you,” she whispered, her gaze not letting him escape. “That made me want to…But, if you wish to leave I will not force you to stay. It is only…” Zariah trailed off.

“Only what?” Jorlan snipped, leaning back over her. 

Zariah felt as if her heart would thunder out of her chest. It was a wonder Jorlan did not comment on it, so loud did her blood beat an incessant drum. “I would miss you,” she said at last. “So let me please you tonight. You…” 

You look so lonely, she wanted to say. 

Jorlan reached down and cupped Zariah’s cheek in his scarred hand. It was still new, this feeling inside him. New and strange, and he wasn’t sure he liked it at all. The feeling, whatever it was, flooded his breast as he lay atop her. It cracked open a fissure in the stone of his discipline, one he had not known was truly there until she had shown him the onyx brooch, gleaming black and perfect in the evening light. As if it had been growing, all this time, without his permission. Until it was wide enough to admit… this. 

“Ah,” he said. “Tell me where you belong, Zariah.”

Her name was velvet on his tongue, and even sweeter when he kissed her lips. “ With you,” she said, so close that it was as if her reply had jumped, from skin to skin, with nothing in between. 

“Yes.”

Chapter Text

Zariah threw up her hands and screamed into the chilly Luskan night. Bracing her feet in the driver’s box while Crowhix handled the reins, she kept her balance as the black carriage careened past the high walls of the Mirabar Shield compound. 

Carousing shouts--of dismay or excitement she couldn’t quite tell--echoed from within the carriage box. At length the shutter slid back with a sharp thud of wood and glass. Jorlan stuck his head out, his white hair streaming in the wind. “Zariah!” he snapped, one arm hanging onto the side of the carriage for dear life. “Zariah, stop this carriage this instant!”

Ignoring him, she reached down and stripped off her red tunic, exposing her torso and breasts to the night air. She crowed again, a mad cry of fierce, fierce joy. 

They had made it! Defeated three giant kings and rescued a rather beleaguered Jarlaxle from captivity at the hands of Ilvara. What had once been a trap for the mercenary had become a mission of revenge against his daughter for the evil priestess. It was no easy thing to keep a man such as he contained--and it had been harder than Zariah wanted to admit to free him. But all that was behind them, now! Behind at last. 

The carriage screeched as it made a sharp turn along a narrow alley, heading straight for the long switch-back descent to Dragon Beach. Glass shattered somewhere behind them but Zariah paid no heed to the shouts of dismay that passed them by. 

“My Lady! Your decency!” Darendel, her quaggoth friend rescued as well from Velkynvelve, tried to shove his large paws in front of her chest. 

“Don’t bother!” Jorlan snarled back from his position inside the carriage. “She doesn’t have any left!”

Zariah spread her arms wide, laughing. It was so good to be alive! The giggle bubbled up from inside her, seizing her slight frame even as the carriage wove down the steep cliffside track at breakneck speed. 

At last, shouting and protesting the whole way, the carriage struck sand. It came, abruptly, to a halt, spraying its occupants out onto the deserted beach. Zariah lay where she fell while her friends groaned beside her. 

Crowhix thumped the sand with his huge, scaled fist. “Again!” the barbarian shouted, a cry his brother Uanju echoed, but without getting up. 

Jorlan heaved for breath, combing dust and grit out of his hair. “You’re all insane.”

“Oh, I dinnae ken ‘bout that,” chimed in Leo, their high elven archer. He raised a slender hand. “Might be fun.”

Jorlan grumbled. He picked himself up and made his way over to Zariah. Bending over and bracing his hands on his knees, his scowl pulled his scars taut and menacing. “Jarlaxle is going to kill you,” he said matter of factly. “I didn’t see a replacement carriage in the stable.”

Still laughing--wheezing, more like--Zariah waved his concern away. She took his proffered hand and hauled herself to her feet. “He can buy a new one.” Breathless, she pulled Jorlan down for a quick kiss. He stiffened only a little. Public affection was not his strong suit, no matter the amount of weeks since they had cracked open each other’s hearts. “Come on,” she urged. “Get the picnic basket, I know a spot.”

“Lady of Lies preserve me.”

Zariah chuckled. 

Somehow, they managed to rouse everyone to their feet. The dark was no challenge to any of them and Zariah soon directed her friends past a clump of sea-smooth dark rocks to a deserted crest of beach, bone white under the autumn moon. It was the work of only a few minutes for Leo to round up enough driftwood and soon he had a fire going. Darendel spread out the blanket and pillows while Drett set up the food. 

“What are you doing?” Jorlan sighed as Zariah started to undo the lacing of her breeches. 

“Swimming, of course,” she replied matter of factly, glancing up at him through her fetching curtain of disheveled hair. “What else?”

The drow captain took one look at the sea, black and endless all the way toward the hated horizon. “No.”

“I think ye mean ‘aye’,” Leo chuckled, likewise stripping off his shirt. 

“No,” Jorlan said again, looking in disbelieving askance around him as the lizard brothers also began to lose their clothing. “You’re all mad.” He scowled as Leo gave Zariah a quick swat across the ass. That was new. 

Many things were new for Jorlan Duskryn, the concept of ‘fun’ being chief among them. Trust, warmth, harmless mischief; all of it so strange, so alien and foreign. This merry band of misfits was too loud, Crowhix and Uanju too boisterous, Leo too flirtatious, and Zariah too…too…

Her grin flashed at him over her naked shoulder as she dipped her feet in the cold surf. 

Jorlan gave up. “Very well,” he sighed, “I can see Jarlaxle never taught you when to quit, either.”

His leather vest hit the sand. With very little effort he swept Zariah off her feet and carried her out into the dark water. Only a slight grunt left him as the cold assailed his senses. Surely, the protective ring he wore kept him from feeling the worst of the chill, but it was still unpleasant. Zariah twisted in his grip, protesting all the while.

“You don’t have to do this!”

“I do.”

“Jorlan--wait,” Zariah laughed, struggling to get a hold on him. “You wouldn’t really--”

The drow captain opened his arms and dumped his lover into the sea. “I would,” he replied, with some amused self-satisfaction as Zariah arose, sputtering and clawing her hair out of her eyes.

A cold wave splashed over his naked back and Jorlan whipped around just in time to get another spray of frigid sea water directly in his face. Coughing, he tried in vain to clear the stinging from his eyes. “Leominar,” he growled as the elven ranger laughed, “you’re a dead man.”

“Water fight!” Zariah shouted from behind him. 

Still on shore, the lizard brothers echoed her cry with their own savage roars of excitement. Jorlan, dearly wishing he could still feel his toes, held out his hand as if he could stop their mad advance through the surf. In the end, it wasn’t Crowhix or Unaju that brought him under, but a surprise jump of Zariah on his back. 

Spluttering and snarling, Jorlan rose from the black ocean more intent on murder than any zealot of Bhaal. He would not be humiliated! He was a prince of Menzoberranzan, a noble son and weapons master--for whatever that was still worth. He was Jorlan Duskryn, and he had gained his position at Velkynvelve through no small amount of underhanded trickery and viciousness. 

Zariah’s gentle hand on his wrist stole the wind from his rage. “Jorlan!” she murmured eagerly. “Jorlan-- look. ”

As her prestidigitation swept the salt from his aching eyes, the world finally came back into focus. They had all stopped for a moment, even Crowhix and Uanju, faces turned to the sky. Zariah floated on her tiptoes, up to her bare shoulders in the water, white hair plastered to silver, keeping her place as the tide tugged back and forth at her slim body. 

“Oh, they’re never this clear in Waterdeep,” Zariah murmured happily. “It’s been ages since I saw so many. Aren’t they beautiful?” 

Far overhead, dozens of streaks of colored light blazed across the heavens. The yearly meteor shower arced over Luskan, filling the tapestry of the night with sparkling motes of breathtaking brilliance.

“...Yes,” Jorlan said quietly, never taking his gaze off Zariah. Every facet of every dying star reflected in her coin-gold eyes. And it seemed to him in that moment that he did not, after all, mind the endless sky so much. “Very beautiful indeed.”

~

“ Marry Zariah?! My daughter?” Jarlaxle threw his head back in mirth. His guffaw echoed down the stone hallway of Fort Kurth, causing no few servants and Bregan D’aerthe to poke their heads out to see what all the noise was about.

Jorlan glared at the floor. His hands balled into fists at his side. Leather armor creaked as he held his temper in check--but only by a thread. 

“Do you take me for a fool?” the foppish mercenary continued, giving a depreciating shake of his head, a movement that caused the feather in his hat to wave wildly. 

“Sir,” Jorlan ground out, unable to keep the growl from his voice. To be humiliated by Ilvara was one thing--to have Jarlaxle Baenre laugh in his face was quite another. “Your daughter and I--”

Jarlaxle waved his protest away as if it were no more substantial than smoke. “Am I to believe that the Duskryn boy has left behind the prejudices of his house? That you had no part in capturing and detaining my little girl? That you did not take advantage of the opportunities presented to you? Am I to believe that Captain Duskryn is a chaste and considerate man?” Jarlaxle’s one ruby eye narrowed as he assessed Jorlan’s silent rebuttal. He rested one wrist on the doorframe, standing so casually where Jorlan had found him at the entrance of Jarlaxle’s private quarters. 

Beyond, into the master suite, Jorlan could easily see the sleeping form of a wood elf woman. She lay curled amidst silken, lavender sheets, her long braids unbound in wavy mahogany tresses. Zariah’s mother, also recently rescued from captivity. Soren still bore the bruises from her time at the hands of the Dragon Cult. Even from his place in the hallway Jorlan could see that the woman was hollow-cheeked and worn. Jarlaxle had hardly left her side since their return to Fort Kurth. Indeed, for several days he had carried Soren everywhere throughout the complex, waiting patiently for the effects of the Cult’s magic to fade, and for those coin-gold eyes to open once more. If he was anxious over her magically-induced sleep, he had done well to hide it.

Jarlaxle caught Jorlan’s glance into the room. His gaze roamed over the younger drow, missing nothing. “Do you know what love is, Duskryn?”

Jorlan’s attention snapped back to Jarlaxle and he was not surprised to find all casual good humor gone from the other man’s expression. No, there was the look of a drow--a real drow. Hard and unyielding as a map of stone, one ruby eye like fire blazing, watching the heat move through Jorlan’s skin, waiting for it to betray him. And it did, it always did, the heat in Jorlan’s body leaping to his face and chest; hot blood rushing below, warming the memory of illicit lust. Jorlan was not--had never been--a chaste or considerate man. It was all the confirmation the mercenary needed.

Between the two of them, Jarlaxle well into his fifth century but Jorlan only in his second, it should not have been a contest. The two men moved in the same breath, Jorlan to entreat--Jarlaxle to strike. Only instinct saved Velkynvelve’s ex-captain, his forearm brought up in a flash to stave off the dagger’s edge. Their scuffle lasted only a few short seconds, as silent as the grave, as silent as only drow could be. 

Jorlan huffed with the effort of bracing himself against Jarlaxle’s strength. The dagger’s edge, razor-sharp, did not even hurt as a single drop of blood rose and stained the blade. “I…love your daughter,” Jorlan snarled through gritted teeth. Jarlaxle’s hand had trapped his other wrist, painfully tight. 

“ Ssinssrigg ?” Jarlaxle spat. “You should have crumbled with the rest of that prison complex, if that is all you know of love.” He pressed in and Jorlan grimaced, the ex-captain’s forearm nearly shaking from keeping Jarlaxle at bay.

“Zariah is everything to me.” Sweat beaded on Jorlan’s brow. One moment of inattention and he was a dead man.

Jarlaxle’s handsome mouth twisted in a sardonic grin. “Forgive me if I find that difficult to believe. You’ve used her.” The dagger opened a thin, red line on Jorlan’s neck. “She’s nothing but an animal to you, worse than a slave.”

“If--” Jorlan grunted. “If you would only ask her--”

“I want it from you!” Jarlaxle snapped, the weight of his body forcing Jorlan to his knees as they remained, locked in contest. “Lie to Zariah if you will-- but not to me. ”

Jorlan grimaced. “I love her,” he said again, trying to free his grip but finding Jarlaxle to be the stronger. This was what he had dreaded, not because he feared to die, but rather because he knew that Zariah’s surface-driven love for family denied Jarlaxle his true cunning, his true prowess, his drow nature. After all, what daughter wished to believe that her father was a heartless killer? “Tell me, Baenre,” Jorlan managed as the dagger bit still deeper, “are you so willing to risk Zariah’s happiness?”

“It is a risk I am willing to accept,” Jarlaxle said, and there was never anything more cold in him than there was in that moment. “You are a man of Lolth.”

“We are both…” Jorlan felt the line of blood run down his neck and disappear into his collar. Distantly, as if it had not yet caught up with the sharpness of the blade, a dull ache pounded in his veins. “...men of Lolth.”

“But not my daughter.”

Jorlan went to shake his head and then thought better of it. “No,” he said. “Not your daughter.”

“And I mean to keep it that way.”

Before Jarlaxle could press his advantage, there came a sound so faint Jorlan was not sure what had distracted the mercenary. Then, in a change so sudden that Jorlan had to throw his arms out for balance, Jarlaxle--and his deadly dagger--all but vanished from his side. He had moved so quickly that Jorlan barely registered it. Well, he thought, rubbing his neck, there was a reason Jarlaxle had remained in charge of Toril’s deadliest mercenary band for well over three centuries, perhaps longer. It was easy to underestimate the man, with his foppish hat and generally genial attitude. Jorlan frowned. He would not make that mistake again.

Inside the master suite, Soren had begun to stir. Jarlaxle stood at her side, as still and vigilant as if he had never left it to begin with. With more care than Jorlan would have thought the deadly mercenary capable of, Jarlaxle laid the back of his hand on Soren’s cheek and then her forehead. Soot against wood, the colors of their skin in stark contrast to one another.

“Darling?” Jarlaxle said softly, so softly that Jorlan almost didn’t hear him--almost. 

Soren turned with a soft sigh of silk sheets and nuzzled into Jarlaxle’s palm. Her own fingers came up and curled gently around his wrist, a trap as gentle as a cat settling into the lap of one who has many things to do. Jarlaxle held his breath, but Soren did not stir again. 

For many long minutes Jorlan stood in the hall, not knowing whether he should leave the couple to their privacy, or take this opportunity to put a knife in Jarlaxle’s back. Our houses are at war. Wasn’t that what he had told Zariah? And it was true, too; a story he had been taught as long as he could remember. Would Menzoberranzan take him back if he did away with Jarlaxle Baenre, and perhaps more importantly, did he even want to go back? Oh, Jorlan missed the city of his birth and the Underdark well enough. But it wouldn’t be home . 

That thought brought him up short. He had never stopped to consider that word, that strange surface wish to belong somewhere. To be at peace with a place…or a person.

“The things we do for love,” Jarlaxle murmured, delicately moving a stray lock of brown hair from Soren’s freckled face. “To love…it is so much more than living and dying.”

Jorlan studied Jarlaxle’s silhouette, trying to guess his motive. Eventually, though, he gave up. Likely no one could decipher the mercenary’s mind, no one but the woman who lay, trusting and oh so very helpless, in front of him. 

“...let me guess,” Jorlan said drily, “it is about whether we are willing to follow them. No matter the distance, no matter the pain.”

With a flick of thought to one of his many rings, the mercenary summoned a chair from the other end of the room. He sank into it, ready to resume his vigil, regardless of how long it might take. Hours, days, weeks; none of them substantial next to the warmth in his breast. After all, she was a dragon and he a drow. 

They had time. 

Very carefully, Jarlaxle lifted Soren’s arm until he could press her other hand to his cheek. 

“Yes,” he said, and to speak of love--real love--was suddenly, for a drow, no longer such a sacrilege. “Even if it means not going very far at all.”

~

“Come back when you’ve discovered how to be a man.” 

Come back.

Come back to me.

Jorlan sat back on cushions of silk and velvet, his sword in his hand. A subtle line of tension ran throughout his whole, strong body. There would be no surprises tonight.

Across from him knelt Zariah in the middle of a complex spell circle drawn from her own blood. The candles at the four cardinal directions guttered as their time ran out with every drip of ebony wax. She had begun this ritual alone, reaching out in the vastness of her sorcerous power to seek aid for the final battle that loomed in front of them. Ever so subtly, her hands gathered into anxious fists in her lap. 

Jorlan frowned and he sat at sharper attention. It would not be long now, he noted with a glance to the candles. Either Zariah would return to him before her strength gave out, or something else would take possession of her body while her spirit remained abroad, trapped in the Abyss. And if that should happen, well…at least he was prepared. 

Zariah Baenre was his , his and his alone. If some demonic creature attempted to claim her, Jorlan knew he would not hesitate. Long fingers fluttered over his sword’s blade. His love--his wife --would come back to him. She would. There was no other alternative.

He would not permit it. 

Shadows loomed long and cold as the black candles wept dark wax across the tiled floor. Irregular heat appeared on Zariah’s cheek as if someone, somewhere whispered to her. A sure sign that her circle could not protect her forever. Jorlan wanted nothing more than to go to Zariah and shake her awake, call her back and damn the consequences. 

“What can I offer to a goddess?”  

A soft clicking came from behind her and Zariah shuddered as Lolth lowered her beautiful face just enough to whisper. Elegant elven features drew back from pointed teeth. Eight red slits, easily mistaken for tattoos, opened eight red eyes across her forehead and cheekbones. Her voice was perfect, strong yet feminine. Her skin the lovely, dusky color Zariah had come to expect from true drow. A beauty that put all else to shame.

On the other end of the connection, Zariah’s body stiffened. She made a soft cry of distress; a strangled, mewling sort of noise. Jorlan sat straight up, knuckles paling as he gripped his sword. For his wife, he promised himself, he would make it quick. Painless. Still, he held on, not daring to disturb the battle of wills taking place until he could be absolutely certain who had won. 

Lolth’s fingers, long and sharp as claws, settled heavily on Zariah’s shoulders. “It is simple, my child,” she said, and her voice was something like blood and something like honey. Was that why Corellon had loved her so? “I want Jarlaxle Baenre dead--” Too many teeth. Too much hate and vile bitterness. 

“--and I want your mother to kill him.”

Something like a nightmare. Something like bliss.

Zariah took hold of the now-tenuous connection between her body and spirit and heaved with all her strength. All at once the Demonweb Pits vanished, the outcropping of bone and dust crumbled beneath her feet and she fell. Down the line she came, hurled and buffeted by a power far greater than her own. Whirling and tumbling inside a storm, driven by a great wind. Try as she might, she could not control her screaming descent. Planes flashed by, faster and faster; soot from Avernus caking her throat, stinging her eyes; claws of roiling shadow tearing through her, freezing her soul; brine choking her; searing, undying flame scorching every inch of bare skin; she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t bre--

A husband knows his duty.

Zariah came awake all at once, her lungs gasping for air. She struggled in Jorlan’s grasp, flailing wildly as if she still careened through the liminal space between worlds. Yet he held her close, pinned to his chest. Gradually, as her surroundings began to come into focus, Zariah quieted. She retreated from his drowning, possessive kiss only enough to satisfy her body’s needs. Deep breaths, life-giving breaths, returning sanity and clarity. One hitched in her throat and she shuddered, overcome by all that she had seen and heard.

Before she could so much as open her mouth to keen, Jorlan seized her chin in his hand. “Wife,” he growled, urgent and low. “Look at me.” 

The room pooled around them, dark now without the candles to stand against the northern night. Imperfections and smudges in the blood circle from where Jorlan had crossed their lines began to dry to little more than brown stains on the floor. Only starlight touched the young couple, and that was more than enough for a man like Jorlan to see by. He held Zariah’s chin firmly, even as the tears welled and fell down her cheeks, searching for something-- anything --that would indicate that she was no longer herself. When the weeping began in earnest he relented and pulled her close, tucking Zariah’s face into the crook of his shoulder.

“--she, she was so cruel !”

“I know,” Jorlan murmured. He pet her soft hair. “It is the way things are.”

Zariah breathed in her husband’s by-now familiar scent; leather recently polished, sweat dried deliciously on his skin, and the intoxicating draught of a spice she could not name. “How…how can you…” She left her question unfinished, knowing the answer already.

“Lolth is my goddess, she does not have to be yours.” This time, when Jorlan tilted her chin up, he coaxed her jaw lightly into obedience. “You do not need any god,” he continued matter-of-factly, looking down into those coin-gold eyes, so full of love, so full of trust. “You have me.”

A light pink flush warmed Zariah’s cheeks. She glanced over her shoulder at the circle. Jorlan answered her unspoken query with his usual grim finality. “And not even Lolth may have you,” he said, cold. “Not while I still draw breath.”

It was the work of a few moments for Jorlan to stand, hoisting Zariah effortlessly in his arms. Somehow, he had known she would need a warm bath and calming foods to eat. Captain Duskryn was not one to pamper needlessly--nor really at all, for that matter--but Zariah was content to be cared for, to be instructed as they were still jailor and prisoner, as if she had no choice in what he deigned to do with her. It was a familiar refrain by now, cleaning to his satisfaction, reporting all of what she had learned and seen so that no important detail went undiscovered. Neither could she refuse the light meal Jorlan had sent for. When she protested, she was not hungry, truly, Jorlan took her gently but firmly by the hair and fed her one morsel at a time.

“You have cast a great magic this night,” he huffed when first he guided a sweet fruit to her lips. “Eat. I’ll not have you fainting from starvation while I rut you.”

Blushing, Zariah obediently opened her mouth. She watched Jorlan’s stern visage as his dark fingers picked their way across the silver tray he’d placed on the night stand. How handsome he looked, she thought, her gaze lingering on the knot in his brow--the part of his expression that spoke more eloquently of his worry than he would ever admit aloud. Such attention was not an every night affair, Zariah knew, but she had cast a great deal of strong magic lately, and all of it in preparation for the big battle ahead. 

So much to do and so little time.

And here was her husband, keeping her from exhaustion, regardless of what her father had blessed or not. Here was Captain Duskryn, plying his pet as he saw fit; managing her affairs as if she had no say in how a man chose to treat her. 

Warm wine followed light food and Zariah hummed happily as Jorlan stripped her, his movements efficient and terse. He laid her down on their bed, amid plush foxfurs and otter pelts to ward off the northern chill. Sleep ran hazy around the edges of her thoughts, suddenly burning and stinging stronger than any smoke in Avernus. 

Zariah blinked a long blink, resurfacing only when she felt the heat of Jorlan’s rigid cock between her legs. She wondered, already knowing the answer, if he would have roused her or otherwise continued to satisfy his own lust on her unconscious body. It wouldn’t be the first time she woke to feel his warm release inside of her, nor, she suspected, would it be the last. “Husband?”

Nimble yet calloused fingers brushed at her forehead. “Rest, Zariah,” Jorlan said softly, his voice close and far away at the same time. “Save your strength. I will be gentle tonight, you have been through much.”

She did not feel her arms move so much as she was suddenly conscious of Jorlan kissing her palm, her thumb, the inside of her wrist. “...I could not make a bargain with her, with your Dark Lady.”

“Do not let it trouble you.” 

Though she could feel his stiff prick nestled already between her thighs, her legs hooked over his shoulders, Zariah felt a stronger, truer warmth as strong hands massaged her palm. “I…you were not there when I began my ritual.” When Jorlan did not answer she pressed, “But you came anyway. To wait for me.”

“And kill you, if necessary.”

Rather than alarming, they were…factual words. A nod to the very real reality of high-caliber spellcasting that involved planar travel or summoning. Coming from Jorlan, from a man who had lived his whole life in Menzoberranzan, where priestesses regularly called on dark entities, it was perhaps even a little romantic. Or what passed as such in the Underdark. 

“And you…you do not think I have failed?” Zariah whispered, peering up at her husband through the cool night that surrounded them. “I returned empty-handed. For all my magic, all my cunning, I returned with nothing.”

Jorlan leaned forward. A shift and a growling sigh later, Zariah gasped as she felt the head of his large cock push against her entrance. Heat met heat as he sank inside of her. Jorlan groaned, low, incling still forward until he had Zariah well and truly pinned underneath him in a mating press. All the way, until there was no room left, until they could not be closer. He had done it in one long motion, giving her little time to adjust, and Zariah whimpered in helpless surrender beneath him. 

“You came back to me,” Jorlan said. “Is that not all that matters?”

Zariah clung to his strong arms, their dark smoothness corded with muscle. His hips and hers sang the same rhythm, one not so far removed from the moment Jorlan had first put his little prisoner against the wall and shoved her legs apart. This time, despite his promise to be gentle, Zariah knew every grip, every thrust, every punishing slap against her ass for what it truly was: worry. Worry that she might not return from so dangerous a spell, worry that it would not be her own spirit behind her coin-gold eyes when next she smiled at him. Concern that the woman he had captured and loved might be ripped from his hands and that he would have been powerless to stop it. 

Ssinssrigg.

To love as only a drow could love; passion and pain wound together. Possession to the point of obsession. Yet who else but a drow could call on such a love? Stronger than any lesser vow. She would never need question it, nor fret that he would seek another’s bed. No, that concern was beyond her; she was a Baenre and a powerful sorceress, and once Jarlaxle came around Jorlan would find his social position far more secure than any he might have ever had with Ilvara. Happily, Zariah rocked in time to her lover’s thrusts. Trusting and whole-heartedly, she opened her legs and her chest for this man. And if it pleased him, he could take whatever freedom from her that he wished, and--perhaps more importantly--she would give it without hesitation.

Jorlan laid his palm to cup her cheek and Zariah held his wrist, never taking her eyes off his. “My…beloved,” she gasped.

“Yes, my slave?”

His words sent a shudder through her body, clenching down. Zariah kept above the wave though, only by a fraction, as a sudden anxiety interjected itself. One less ally to join them in the fight ahead, but the price Lolth had named. Gods, the price ! Surely there had to be a line somewhere, a thing she wouldn’t do, no matter how much they could use the divine help against a draconic demi-god. “What do we do now?” Zariah whispered. “Sweetness mine, I’m…I’m frightened .” 

Jorlan’s thrusts decrescendoed to a heady, rolling wave of his hips against hers. He crept in, in and down, deeper than Zariah had thought it possible that he could go. Dark lips caressed her jaw line, the plushness of her mouth. A sharp breath and Jorlan descended to capture Zariah in a devouring kiss. Zariah gave a high hum of pleasure as the wave crested and spilled between them, foam made hot by her lover’s heartbeat. 

Velkynvelve’s ex-captain sank until he could lean, forehead to forehead, with his wife. The pad of one thumb smoothed across her cheek. “You will come through this,” Jorlan said seriously. “Because I will be beside you, no matter what.”

“And if I fail? What then?”

“Then I will follow you.”

“And if I take Lolth’s offer?”

Jorlan’s next kiss began softly. He devoured and bit and hungered until they left each other gasping. “Zariah,” he murmured, “my dragon girl. My slave. My wife. Save the world or burn it down, it makes no difference to me.”

Sighing, she brushed her cheek against his as a kitten might. “You’d…you’d really follow me? All the way to the end?”

“As long as we’re together,” Jorlan said. “All the way to the end.” 

He let out a deep chuckle, one that sprang Zariah’s heat anew. “After all, I can hardly let anyone else have what belongs to me.” 

Zariah’s coin-gold eyes crinkled up at the edges and she held his face softly. “I love you, too.”