Tigerlily and Other Tales

Tigerlily

and other tales of erotic fantasy

Charlotte Stein

Contents

Guarded

Charlotte Stein

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Tigerlily

Charlotte Stein

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Carnal Craving

Charlotte Stein

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Epilogue

About the Author

Other Books By Charlotte

Guarded

Charlotte Stein

Guarded

©Copyright Charlotte Stein 2020

Cover Art by goonwrite.com

Edited by Christine Allen-Riley

This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher/author.

Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Charlotte Stein. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.

The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

This book was previously released in 2011.

Warning: This book contains sexually explicit content which is only suitable for mature readers.

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For AH, who gave me back my inspiration.

Chapter 1

Of the two men who guarded her daily—or held her captive, if you really wanted to be honest about it—Orin was the one she favoured less. At least Ashan would occasionally play at dice with her, and sometimes he laughed and told her jokes about his days on the streets of Haranth and he always met her gaze with untroubled eyes.

But the same could not be said for Orin. Orin rarely spoke, and when he did it was only to say something grave and portentous. He spent almost all of the evenings sitting by the window, staring out at nothing, ignoring her. Or worse.

Like tonight, when he felt it necessary to chide her on the dangers of trying to shimmy down a rope of towels out of the uppermost room of the palace.

Do you have any idea how agonising a fall could be from that height?

She tried not to roll her eyes.

It would be more than agonising. It would mash your bones into paste and turn your body inside out. Is that what you want, Princess? To have your body turned inside out?

By all that was holy, why did he always have to call her that? He knew she wasn’t a member of any royal family. Just because a con artist had given the King a magical future-predicting scroll that only she could read didn’t mean she was a Princess. She’d refused the hand of a terrible man, who’d lumbered her with a terrible ability then stuck her with the worst King in all of the seven lands of Lal.

That was it. That was her life so far. And now here was Orin, berating her with his big arms crossed over his chest and his big, demonic eyes staring down at her and everything just awful, awful.

Orin—come away. Leave her be.

Ah, Ashan. Ever the diplomat. Though she could see even he was starting to flag after her seventh attempt at escape. The fourth and fifth he’d found amusing because she’d dressed herself up as a man, complete with a beard comprised entirely from snatches of Orin’s chest hair, and the chest hair snatching had involved drugging Orin then being quite squeamish about getting under his shirt.

She’d explained it to him in detail while Orin’s eyes had grown wider and wider and her own heart had seemed to pound harder and harder, and the whole shirt thing had somehow felt much more embarrassing than it had actually appeared at the time. In fact, she clearly recalled blushing when she had got to the part about touching Orin—despite having felt only a vague sense of unease when she’d performed the act of hair stealing.

But nothing really approached how she’d felt when they’d caught her the sixth and seventh times. How she felt now, with Orin so angry and Ashan seeming so troubled, somehow. As though both of them didn’t exactly mind her stealing chest hair, but flinging herself off large structures in the desperate hope of escape…

Well, that was beyond the pale.

Just tell us, Princess. What are we supposed to do? You know we do not wish to be in this position, but the King has decreed—

She flashed fire at him then.

Oh, the King, the King! Is that all you have to say, Orin? Is that the only reason you guard me day and night? You know, one day those scrolls are going to reveal some bleak and terrible future and it will be all my fault for reading it aloud. What then?

She knew what then. Orin had warned of it often enough. The King would do something dreadful to her, like flicking out her eyeballs or turning her vagina inside out. And only he, Orin, would be able to pick up the pieces.

Of course, she’d asked him after one of these warning rants what he intended to do about an inside-out vagina, but naturally he’d had no answer. Indeed, he’d seemed to positively turn purple at the very thought of an answer, so she hadn’t pressed the issue.

She just felt like pressing it now.

I suppose the King will decree that I should be thrown in the never-ending pit of darkening death.

He needn’t look at her like that. There actually was such a place—everyone knew it. It lay on the outskirts of Kort, near the dragon’s graveyard.

Even though Orin claimed that dragons didn’t exist, either.

You know he will never. You’re too precious— he said, then seemed to halt right in the middle of his words.

She could almost hear the end to his sentence balancing on the tip of his tongue, and it seemed to trouble him.

But at last, at last he worked it out. —to him.

"Not if I say the wrong words. The wrong future. One day it will read and then the King perished of the pox, and he will have my head. She pushed past Ashan as he reached out a consoling hand to her and went to the window. Just to feel the night air on her face. To breathe in the rich and varied scents of Haranth. Someone, somewhere, was cooking with the spice of dreams, and she drowned briefly in all the things she wasn’t allowed. But never fear. I imagine he’ll let you do the honours."

Ashan took a sharp breath behind her and she winced, but it was Orin who spoke.

That is a cruel thing to say, Amina, even for you.

Of course, she noted two things about what he had said. One—he had called her by her name instead of some ridiculous title no one actually believed in, and two—two…he had called her cruel. It was wrong and backwards, and really it was he who was cruel, but he had said it even so and it clung to her.

It’s cruel for me to live in fear of having my head cut off? What a strange thing to say, Orin.

You know that’s not what I meant.

Orin, leave her, she doesn’t— Ashan started.

She could tell even without looking that Orin had shrugged him off. Orin was furious, now, beneath that stoic exterior—the way he’d got when she’d jumped off the roof into the laundry cart, only more so, more so.

She could almost feel it radiating off him in waves—real emotion! He actually felt something for once!

She understands perfectly well that we don’t like having to guard her, that we— Orin began.

"Oh, you don’t like it? How terrible it must be for you to be perfectly free to do whatever you please, apart from when you do your job of guarding a little ninnyhead like me. I’m aching with sympathy for you, Orin, really."

"Stop purposefully misinterpreting my words. I despise being in this position. You know I despise keeping you a prisoner here—how could you fail to?"

Perhaps because you are an insensible block?

This time, Ashan scolded. Happy, always even-tempered Ashan.

Amina! he said, while Orin looked too flabbergasted to speak.

She’d gone too far and knew it. Orin couldn’t help being the way he was any more than the sun could avoid rising. And she knew it mattered to them. If they’d truly been her guards and nothing else, they wouldn’t have done half the things they had—bringing her books when she’d begged and even when she hadn’t, bringing her tapestries from the ladies of the twelfth veil with which to adorn her room, drawing her bath for her when she was weary and the King had called her for yet another long reading.

And if these things sometimes made her feel like a pampered pet rather than a person… Well, that wasn’t their fault. Not by a long shot. They did what they could and now she had called him an insensible block and implied he liked the idea of cutting off her head.

Orin’s face tightened and she could see he wanted to say something more. Something damning, perhaps, that she would never quite get over. But as ever, he held it in, and after a moment of fixing his strange stare on her he strode from the room.

It made her quaver for some reason to see him leave like that. And then when she slid her gaze over to Ashan, he was just standing there, helpless, in the middle of her colourful kaleidoscope of a prison.

If he called her cruel again, she would have to hate him forever. But he didn’t. Of course he didn’t. Instead, he did something worse—he came over to her by the window and put one vast hand on her shoulder. He was smaller than Orin but big in so many different, unusual places.

His feet, his hands—all roughly hewn and thickly knuckled, like Orin’s—his broad shoulders. The features of his face, so almost mismatched. The big, mobile brow, as dark as her own hair, then the thick slope of his nose. Those wide, foggy eyes of his, nearly the same colour as Orin’s but not quite. His were a shade bluer, a shade darker, but she’d still thought them both demons when they’d first been assigned to guard her.

And now… Now she didn’t know what to think half the time. Ashan’s hand on her shoulder was so reassuring, so solid and permanent feeling that she wanted to shrug it off, quickly. Hopefully before it affected her too much.

He doesn’t mean it, Amina, he said, because he was wonderful and dreadful at the same time.

Tears tried to claw their way up her throat and she didn’t know why.

Why did they mix her up inside like this? Didn’t they understand? She needed to get back to the place between the mountains. Sometimes she needed it so much she forgot what other feelings were like.

Did other people go about their day with happiness filling them all the time? What, by the Gods, was such a thing like?

Like riding through the canyons again, on a beast with legs like silver fire, she thought, and remembered Illiria. The aroc’s black fur thick in her fists, its haunches working between her thighs. The thundering sound its great hooves made against the stone as they rode to the plains and beyond.

Oh, the world was great and vast when you had an aroc to ride. Not like these huge hairy animals on which people journeyed in the cities, with big, long backs good for nothing but pack carrying, and those dim, slumbering eyes. Illiria had gazed at her with a sharpness she never wanted to forget, and when they had ridden together it had been as though they were one.

She would never have that again. The thieves who had carried her away had killed her only friend in the world.

It will be all right, I swear it on the Gods, Ashan said.

She could almost believe him. He too came from another land—farther away than the place between the mountains. So far away they worshipped strange beings and all had demonic eyes like his.

She wondered how often he longed to go back to that place at the end of the world.

I am certain it will, she said, which satisfied him enough to take his leave.

Even though it wasn’t the truth. By all the Gods of the Tangled Isles, it wasn’t the truth at all.

They caught her by the edge of the great river, near the forest of toothed vines. Of course, she had known they would catch her sooner or later. They always did.

But there was something different about this time—namely, that she’d never managed to get as far before. Mostly, she never made it out of the city. Once she’d got as far as the outlying farms then almost succeeded in stealing a herded aroc.

But this time she had succeeded. And she had ridden it twenty miles out of the city before they’d even come close to catching her. Twenty miles. It might not have seemed like a lot to the average man, but when Ashan and Orin were on your tail it felt incredible. Preposterous.

They looked shaken and not like themselves when they dismounted from their own beasts. And Ashan kept putting a hand to his brother-in-arms, as though Orin might at any moment charge her down and maybe…maybe put a hand to her. She’d never seen him put a hand to anyone in all her life—except in combat tournaments or honourable battles and the like—but he might do so here.

She’d ridden