All Along the Watchtower: Submerged by Neale Sourna [romantic erotica, historical fantasy short story / novel excerpt]

from Book One

General Prince Consort anahk Tor was a hard, dangerous man, among a standing army of thousands of hard, dangerous men, but he was, nevertheless, impaled in the most tender part of him from the first moments of the formal evening meal, with the newly arrived young Tar-Rus princeling, Rüsj­ma­ha­dan, for “an official consult of great import” about the prince’s impending marriage.

And the prince’s consult was with the powerful Shaman Prime of The Children of The Great Mare, Princess Dara.

My Dara, thought Tor, no, rather Tor felt—My Dara—to his deepest core, as this . . . boy encroached upon that sure feeling, but Tor was not absolutely certain how, and needed to be absolutely certain, with the double wax seal still fresh upon the new peace treaty between his king and Her Queen, and his recent love joining with Dara, the royal heir.

There was a difference in dialect with Rüsj­ma­ha­dan’s entourage, and so Tor missed the subtle, idiomatic, and sly, humorous meanings of what the young prince’s visit was fully about.

The reason sometimes clearly embarrassed the young man, yet always he appeared honoured and deferential to Dara, intimately so; in a man to woman fashion, in a new lover to new lover fashion.

That sort of thing anahk Tor, better know as “The Destroyer of Nations,” would notice. http://stories.neale-sourna.com/Watchtower1_submerged.html