Thrax

 But she had also learned that there was another side to them.  Thrax had told her that there came a point when a Knight was not so decorous and courtly.  They were as dominating in s*x as they were aggressive in battle.  When the armor skin came off and a Knight was ready to deploy the weapon of his maleness, his bedmate became the absolute captive of his desire.  And Agena was ready and willing to surrender unconditionally…

…until he had told her how he really felt.  And it had killed her arousal as surely as if he had run her through with his multiblade. 

That left her where she was now, in bed, sitting up by herself, still in the gown that she had worn for the express purpose of offering herself up for pillage and plunder, where she had expected by now to be naked under his awesome nakedness with her legs in the air, submitting to Thrax’s every thr*sting demand.

How had it all taken so sharp and shocking a turn?  How had it come to this?  Agena cursed herself on some level for being so naive as to expect the course of s*x with this weredragon to run as smoothly as it had with the others.  And yet, this of all times, it should have been even more certain. 

This was not just the meeting of two would-be lovers.  This was not even a date.  This was arranged, ordained, and sanctioned s*x.  It was the entire reason they had been introduced.  It was not really naive at all to think she should even now be the recipient of Thrax’s pumping, pounding ardor.  And truthfully, she could not even blame him for the things he had said, the way he felt.  He had a point.

…in commanding me to surrender my body for breeding, my world is telling me that I am not its protector but its property.  That was what he had said.  And damned if he wasn’t right.  Agena realized what he was really saying.  The custom of his people was essentially putting Thrax to pasture, using him for stud service.  Treating him as breeding stock.  Why shouldn’t he object to such a thing?  Why shouldn’t he see it as a trespass on his very dignity? 

At the moment, the only thing that surprised Agena was that more members of the Knights and the Corps, and more of the Lacertan population in general, did not object to this whole system of Lottery and Courtship.  Or, if they did object, that they were not a great deal more vocal about it than they were.  There was an element of the violation of people’s rights about this whole thing, and in her eagerness to become a mother, Agena had completely overlooked it.

 Lacerta was a free society, after all.  It was not a dictatorship; it was not under absolute rule without the consent of the governed.  The people of this planet seemed to have willingly entered into this system and been willingly complying with it for generations.  Was it only the fear of their society and economy collapsing, their world and their very lives falling into ruin, that had brought such compliance?  Was the sheer will to survive really so strong that people would hand over their reproductive freedom for it? 

Agena thought long and hard about the question.  Mating, reproduction, and child rearing: these were among the strongest and most powerful drives in all of life.  They were basic, not only to humans but to every other species that humanity had ever encountered in its travels. 

They were a common denominator of existence.  The need to be free of any form of oppression was great as well, but the Lacertan way of life suggested very strongly to her that there was at least one thing even more profound: the need for a future, the need to continue.  The need to pay forward life itself.  In a way, it seemed that not bringing new life into the world was almost a fate worse than death.

These were all very deep and meaningful thoughts, she knew.  They explained a great deal about the situation in which she now found herself.  But they did not change one basic fact: Agena did want a child.  And she wanted to have it by lying under Sir Thrax Helmer in bed or wherever else he wanted to take her. 

She remembered her suggestion of releasing him from this pairing and re-entering the Lottery to be paired with another, and her heart wept at the thought of it.  She did not only want to bear the child of a Lacertan, and she did not only want to bear the child of a Knight.  She wanted Thrax’s child, conceived in a union with Thrax’s body, with Thrax’s erect maleness flooding her with Thrax’s seed.

She wanted this Knight.  She wanted his s*x.  She wanted him. 

*****

Watching the recorded holotransmissions of Agena playing at her sport, Thrax wondered why he had paid so little attention to sphereball all these years.

Thrax, too, lay in his own bed on his own side of the Chateau suite, but he had whipped off his trousers and retired naked as he always did.  And the member at his loins throbbed half-erect and nagged at him, reminding him bitterly that it should not be so idle tonight, filling him with a displeasure that he wished were the ecstasy of having it inside the female lying by herself just a short walk away.

 By now, he had no doubt, he should be well on his way to his first clim*x and release from screwing Agena Morrow—the first of many that would go on into the very small hours of pre-dawn.  Instead, he was sitting up on sheets that should be thoroughly rustled by his naked thrashing with her and had called up from the Chateau computers’ memory a recorded game of sphereball that Agena had played.  The 3D recording hovered over his bed, showing him a tableau of Agena in competition—and how magnificent she was.

Her sport was a demanding one.  Sphereball was played in a room shaped like a geode, a large, upright bowl which was sealed with a transparent force field.  The force field was in place to prevent the ball flying out during competition.  Inside the bowl, two players waited for the ball to be fired from a special launcher into the spherical shape of the chamber.  The players wore boots whose soles created a surface tension that enabled them to run up and down the interior of the bowl, even running and maneuvering upside down.