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“If you seek to humiliate me, I can tell you now that you will fail,” Ferdinand declared. “It is perfectly normal for young men to seek out educational materials so they might better understand the bedchamber.”

Hannah snickered. “Normal for young men, is it? I suppose the fact-finding mission Lady Edelgard sent me upon when we were at Garreg Mach was entirely abnormal, then?”

Ferdinand stared at Hannah. “You mean to say—you bought educational materials for Edelgard?!”

“On the matter of intimacy between women, yes. She had certain… feelings, and wished to understand them better.” Hannah smirked. “Perhaps you can relate.”

“I must admit, I struggle to imagine you at the stall for educational materials in Garreg Mach village, much less at Edelgard’s behest.” A question occurred to Ferdinand, and as with so many questions he had for Hannah, he had to carefully consider how to ask it without inflaming her prickly pride. “I imagine you did not… inspect them very closely.”

She flushed a little. “No. I only skimmed them, to ensure I’d brought my lady the best literature available. Perhaps I should have overcome my embarrassment. My ignorance has made itself all too clear.”

That was when Ferdinand finally realized that Hannah did not seek to humiliate him at all. She sought the education that she had been too afraid to consider in her teenage years, living a boyhood that did not suit her. He sighed fondly. “I do not find you to be lacking in any way. I believe I have made that very clear. Nevertheless, I will grant you permission.” Ferdinand reached for a stack of well-worn texts atop his nigh-overflowing bookshelf and gently pulled three books from near the bottom. He took them to his couch, maroon with taloned eagle feet. Hannah sat beside him and, rather than leaning in to look over his shoulder as he’d hoped, she swiped the books from his lap and let it fall open onto hers. She pointed at the spread and said triumphantly, “You liked this one especially.”

Like most spreads in his erotic volumes, it had an etching on the recto and a corresponding poem on the verso. The etching was very familiar. It featured a woman clad only in an elaborate necklace reclining in a bath, her breasts and spread legs visible above the water. Beside the bath stood another woman, her embroidered mage robe open. Beneath the robe she wore nothing but a wooden phallus, secured with ties about her hips. The woman in the bath smiled, her posture relaxed, but her lover was different. She stared hungrily down, her hand wrapped around the base of the phallus, perhaps pressing it back into her rosebud to pleasure herself. Outside the bathhouse, a boorish voyeur peered in through the window. The poem on the verso was from his point of view. Typical, he could hear Dorothea say in his mind.

Hannah’s pointing finger fixed on the voyeur. Her eyebrows rose. “Ferdinand, have you a Peeping Tom fantasy? How scandalous!”

“No!” Ferdinand cried. “I despise the spying wretch in that image—I wish he were not there!”

“If you have acquired a sudden distaste for spying wretches, I fear for the state of our courtship, my dear.” Ah, how Ferdinand wished his cruel mistress would call him “dear” when she was not teasing him!

“You are hardly a spying wretch! You are a master of your craft, and a consummate professional who would not use your talents to merely gratify your lusts.”

Hannah smirked. “I’ve hardly needed to, given how little you wear when you train in brawling. In public, no less. When your spectators learn that I get to see you completely bare, I shall need to tighten the magical security on my quarters.”

Ferdinand felt heat rush to his face. He was no fool; he knew that he had his share of admirers. It excited him unreasonably, however, to think of Hannah at war for his affections. Hannah did not go to war for anything less than her highest ideals.

“If not the voyeur,” Hannah said, “what drew you to this image so? Is it that the lovers are both women? I hear many men are titillated by the idea,” she said, with a touch of contempt.

Ferdinand sighed. “Why do you assume the worst of me, darling? I thought we were well past those days.” He took her hand and squeezed it. “I assure you, I have no desire to intrude upon the privacy of women, whatever they may be doing.”

Hannah looked away. Ferdinand knew her well enough: she was ashamed, but refused to admit it. “I have never had…” Her eyes flicked to the page. “Fantasies. Of that sort. I have had… feelings. But fantasies felt like distractions from my duty, and besides, I could not hold many specifics in my mind, even if I cared to. I suppose intimacy seemed impossible to me, as a man. And now, there is much I do not yet understand about my new life.”

Now Ferdinand understood. Hannah was lashing out against that which she did not understand. It was a long-standing motif in their relationship, and they had each been guilty in their turn. “Perhaps my reading materials can help.” He smiled, but he meant it in earnest. He was still trying to learn what she liked, after all, and it seemed she did not truly know, herself.

“This nonsense? It’s more likely to tell me what I would never care to imagine.” She turned the page, and her eyebrows rose. “Who, pray tell, would want to look at this?”

The man in the etching had the look of a scholar, seated near a desk stocked with books and writing implements. However, rather than studying, the scholar reclined nude, a servant girl fanning his burgeoning arousal with an elaborate fan of white feathers.

“I think he is rather handsome,” Ferdinand said, “but I doubt he pays his staff enough for what he puts them through.”

Hannah laughed, one of her sudden, startled laughs that he treasured. “Very well, then. Not everything in this volume is to your taste.” She turned the page again. The poem on the recto extolled the virtues of morning lovemaking, while the etching on the verso showed a man pinning a woman to the bed by her wrists, folding her in half as he thrust into her. Her eyes were very wide, with tears gathered at the corners. “What about this one?” Hannah said.

“I have never liked this one either,” Ferdinand admitted.

“Why not? This is quite the passionate embrace.”

“I do not like to see a woman powerless,” Ferdinand said in a rush. “My mother is often sickly. Not long before I arrived at Garreg Mach, I learned that my father would seduce women in our employ while my mother was indisposed. She looked so bleak when I asked her about it! A terrible look of resignation, as if her feelings meant nothing. The woman in the image looks so fearful and helpless I cannot bear it.”

Hannah did not react with any surprise to his account of his family; it was, of course, her business to know such things. But at his final outburst, she tilted her head and hummed thoughtfully. “Interesting. When I look at this image, I see something entirely different. This woman does not strike me as frightened.” Hannah traced the wide-open, tearful face with her fingertips, and did not need to say that she knew all too well what a woman looked like in the throes of terror. “I believe she is overcome with pleasure to the point of tears. I imagine she wanted to be held down this way. Perhaps she even asked him.”

Ferdinand’s mouth was suddenly dry. “And why would she do that?”

“Perhaps she trusts him very deeply,” Hannah said, low and soft. “Perhaps she knows that his hands are powerful, but she will feel entirely safe within their grasp. Perhaps she likes the touch of power when it is tempered with gentleness.”

“Nguh,” said Ferdinand. His mind was full of rushing waves like a sea cave. He pushed the book off his lap with less care than the volume deserved. He stood over Hannah, took her wrists, pinned them to the back of the couch, and leaned down to kiss her. She moaned into his mouth and squirmed, but his grip kept her firmly in place. She arched upward, as if to get closer, but he held her at wrists and mouth alone, and she strained against empty air. As he kissed Hannah, he could taste her power. She could blast him backward with a spell any time she liked, but she chose to yield instead. Ferdinand intended to reward her for it.

He set his knee up on the couch cushion between her legs. Against his knee, through the fabric of his trousers and her skirts, he felt her heat, twitching in response to the pressure. He leaned in, moved his mouth to the sensitive crook of her jaw, and she said in his ear, a little breathlessly, “Thank the flames. I wasn’t certain how long I would have to talk about that etching before you caught my meaning.”

Ferdinand drew back and pouted at her. “You could have simply told me your desire!”

Hannah scoffed at him, utterly undaunted by the vulnerability of her position. “If it is so simple, then why haven’t you told me what you like so much about the etching of the women in the bathhouse?”

Ferdinand fought down his frustration. She was right, even if she insisted on expressing herself in the most infuriating way possible. She had revealed the shape of her deep-held ardor, so it was only right that he show the same courage. He let Hannah go, sat beside her, and took up the erotic volume once more. As Hannah idly rubbed at her wrists with her thumbs, he flipped back to the first etching they’d viewed together.

Ferdinand pointed at the confident woman standing over her lover. “She is what I like about this etching. She is a mage. She holds the wooden implement she wields as if she knows precisely how she means to use it. And she looks upon her lover so eagerly, holding nothing back! Her power and assurance come through so strongly through the artist’s craft.”

Hannah studied him. “Do you wish to emulate her power and assurance?”

Ferdinand laughed. “No, my dearest.” He leaned toward her. “To tell you the truth, I would like to see you wwield an instrument of pleasure such as hers. Andd then… perhaps you could show me your power and assurance.”

Hannah stared at him, slightly open-mouthed. Perhaps it had not occurred to her that she could use a wooden phallus in place of her own, which Ferdinand knew from his one glorious chance so far at touching it to be sweet and soft as a sun-warmed rose petal. Her rosebud, mellowed by the Brigidian magic she used to develop her womanhood, was suited to many pleasures, but not to this pleasure in particular.

Then Hannah looked thoughtful, in a way that looked promising for future embraces. “I think I could make you feel my power in many ways.” She lifted a hand, and letters of a strange alphabet flickered along her hand like afterimages of the sun. Ferdinand could not look away. She spread her fingers wide, then pressed her fingertips to his chest. He gasped. Her fingers seared him through his shirt. It reminded him of when she’d dripped hot wax from a bayberry candle upon his skin. If Hannah had learned to replicate the effect even through clothing, then she could deliver him this sweet hot sting anytime she wished. He shivered. Her fingertips traced up to his throat, and he could only whine and buck his hips. She slipped a stinging-hot fingertip into his mouth, and he sucked on it even as his tongue spasmed.

Hannah let him go, leaving him gasping for breath. She reached for the book in his lap and turned the  pages backward. The previous etching showed a man leaning forward on a large rock beneath a tree, his rear upturned. He wore a robe, but it was so short that it could very easily be flipped up for his lover’s enjoyment. He looked back over his shoulder at his lover, a winsome shepherd who was eagerly pulling down his trousers. It was a stirring scene to behold, but Hannah held nearly all of his attention. She looked from him to the page and back, then leaned into his side, snaked an arm around his waist, and plucked at the laces of his trousers. She pointed at the man leaning on the rock with her free hand, and cupped him through his braies with the other. She said directly into his ear, “Is this what you would do if I strapped that implement onto myself? Would you await me with your ass in the air and a smile?”

Ferdinand ground up into her hand. She squeezed him a little too hard, and he abruptly remembered that she had asked him a question, and she was not the type to patiently await a response. “N-no,” he managed to say. “I would want to kiss you and feel the shape of the phallus between us. I would not be content to wait.”

He felt Hannah smile against the side of his face. She unlaced his braies and drew him out. She put the book to the side, making room in his lap. She made a twisting gesture with her hand, and a luminous gel appeared around it. It looked like the corrosive sludge she summoned against her enemies, but more luminous, an almost golden purple. He felt a thrill of danger when she reached for his eager arousal, but there was nothing to fear. The gel was soft and smooth and cool, and it warmed as her hand glided over him. “You’d be eager, would you?” she purred into the shell of his ear. “Might you pin me down like you pinned me to this couch? So you could ride the device exactly as you pleased?”

Ferdinand thrust and leaked helplessly into the magical gel around Hannah’s hand. He barely even registered that he had been asked a question, and emitted mangled syllables instead of a reply.

Hannah slowed her strokes so he could hear each obscene squelch of the gel as her fist closed around his crown. With her face right up against the side of his head, he could feel her hot breath. “And what if it were me, looking over my shoulder at you so eagerly? Then what?”

Ferdinand moaned and thrashed in Hannah’s grip. “Oh, Hannah—then I could be patient—I would take my time with you. You allow yourself so few pleasures—I would fill you to the brim with it, and only then would I chase my own bliss within you. If you would allow me—”

He felt it when Hannah’s breath hitched, a stutter of air against the side of his face. “Allow it? If you keep talking such glorious filth, I may find myself begging for it.” Hannah reached into his braies with her free hand and cupped his jewels with biting-hot fingertips. Ferdinand whimpered, utterly helpless in her grasp.

“Would you?” he gasped. She sped up the pace of her magical, beautiful, slippery hand. “Would you let me make you feel—the way I know you deserve—”

Two of Hannah’s stinging fingertips pressed behind his jewels. At the same time, she kissed and sucked on the shell of his ear. Ferdinand overflowed with joy and love, pulsing his seed into Hannah’s ensorcelled hand.

As soon as he was sufficiently recovered to open his eyes, he found that Hannah had sent the magical gel back to whatever realm it had come from, along with Ferdinand’s emissions. He blinked at her hand in stupefaction. Hannah only kissed his cheek and tidied him away in his braies and trousers. Ferdinand felt that his honor as a gentleman compelled him to reciprocate, but his mind was too addled to make good on that promise just yet. His eyes fixed on the erotic volume Hannah had set aside. “Tell me, Hannah. Did you learn what you hoped from the educational materials of my youth?”

“I believe I did learn something from that particular volume.” Hannah hooked two fingers under Ferdinand’s chin and drew him in for a kiss. “But I think we can do so much better than that.”