Authors: Kyell Gold
The rat closed the window with a scrape of metal, leaving an inch gap. “Doesn’t close all the way,” he said. “Never did, from the time I was a kit.”
Under Coryn’s paws, he could make out faintly a design, stylized wolves and weasels carrying some golden statue. Threadbare patches erased their destination, but from the golden circle, he guessed it was Gaia. “You served here?”
“Oh, aye.” The rat unfastened his cloak and tossed it beside the window. “Mam wanted me raised proper. Course, that didn’t help feed us, did it?” He started unlacing his vest. “You plan to soak in them wet things all night?”
“Uh.” Coryn pulled his cloak off. His clothes and fur were clammy and cold, and the room wasn’t heated. But it wasn’t as cold as the wind outside had been. He lifted his tunic off, and when he’d pulled the wet cloth over his head, he saw that the rat was already shimmying out of his pants, and that he wasn’t wearing anything underneath.
“Don’t worry,” the rat said cheerily, hanging his pants in the wardrobe. “Won’t nobody come up here before daybreak.”
“How long is that?” Coryn’s fingers hesitated near his pants. The problem now was that he couldn’t take his eyes from the rat’s slender build, the way his chest tapered to his waist and then broadened just slightly at his hips. And of course, at those hips, a nicely-sized sheath, made far less modest by the rain-sleeked fur around it.
“Loads o’time. Two, three hours.” The rat ran his paws through his fur and shook them, spraying water around. He started rubbing down his fur, squeezing water from it, and when he got to his hips, his pink paws on either side of his sheath, he looked up and saw Coryn, paw still just resting on his trouser laces. “I got quick fingers if them knots got wet.”
He’d crouched down next to Coryn before even finishing his sentence. “No!” Coryn scooted back on the carpet.
The rat stared bemusedly, elbows on his knees. The white sheath bobbing between his legs and now showed some pink at the end. “When I said we’d plenty o’time,” he said, “I was rather thinkin’ we’d be spendin’ it in more enjoyable ways than just lookin’.”
“I don’t even know your name,” Coryn said desperately, now trying to hide both his staring at the rat’s arousal and the bulge of his own.
“You c’n call me Two-Claws if you like, Legs,” the rat said. “Is as good a name as any, ay?”
Coryn didn’t move to touch his pants. The chill of the room was starting to creep into his fur, but the smell of the rat was overwhelming and immediate. “Why do they call you that?”
“Cause it don’t take me but two claws to get into a lock.” The rat wiggled his right paw. “Or a pair o’pants.”
The matter-of-factness of it, here in a room in the Great Cathedral, just felt wrong to Coryn, and the shadows coming over the rat’s muzzle didn’t help. “Can you show me the Cathedral first?”
The rat tilted his head. “Looks better when sun’s up. Look, what’s with yer? Why’d I bring ya all the way here if yer gonna keep yer clothes on?”
“Sorry,” Coryn said automatically. “I’m just curious.” Slowly, he moved to undo his pants.
“I don’t bring just anyone here, y’know,” the rat said. “Don’t just pick anyone off the street to do a job.”
The flickering candlelight cast annoyance in shadows over the narrow muzzle, but perversely, the remark made Coryn feel better. He undid the last of the laces on his pants. The rat had one paw between his legs, cupping his sheath, stroking his growing erection. Coryn was getting excited himself, the smell of musk and the removal of his clothes overriding his reluctance. He worked his pants off and tossed them aside, then lay back on his elbows, showing off because he couldn’t bring himself to make the first move this time.
He needn’t have worried. His sheath might have been made of silver for as quickly as the rat found it. His pink fingers were cold at first, but his touch was gentle and light. “We’ll warm up quick enough,” he said, climbing over Coryn’s legs to straddle him, one paw around each sheath.
Coryn sat up, putting his larger paws on the rat’s legs, holding him at the hips as the rat rubbed life and warmth into his sheath. He closed his eyes, breathing in the rat’s scent but unable to filter out the smell of the Cathedral and the rain outside. As he relaxed, he felt his tail start to wag, brushing water back and forth along the carpet. The rat--Two-Claws--didn’t make much noise, unlike the breathy, moany boys Coryn had played with before, which only added to the feeling that this was more than just a diversion on a lazy summer afternoon.
And when Coryn looked up, the rat was looking back at him with a faint smile under intently focused eyes. Nobody had ever held him so strongly with a look; nobody had ever met his eyes and seen him like that. When his father ordered him to do things, he saw an apprentice. His mother still saw a cub. He barely knew his sister, even though they shared a room; he worked in the fields with the field hands while she tended the domestic animals. She’d come home recently smelling of sex, but had ignored his questions. And she hadn’t said a word when he’d come home that one time directly from Kika’s barn and crawled into bed with her juices still damp on his groin. To the other field hands, he was the farmer’s son; when he played games (clothed or otherwise) with his friends, they never opened up to each other. He was Coryn of Blackmane farm, always. But Two-Claws here had no idea where Blackmane farm was. He didn’t even know Coryn’s name. He just knew Coryn, and that was special.
He didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to get to know Coryn better. His paw kept moving with nice, even strokes, not the quick jerks of the boys on the farm or the uncertain touches of the girls, who sometimes seemed frightened of his erection when it emerged from his sheath. Two-Claws, belying his name, held Coryn’s shaft in all five fingers, holding it against his smooth paw pads while his thumb tweaked the tip in a way Coryn had never felt before. He squirmed delightedly under the rat’s weight, holding the rat’s hips down to his legs, which were tingling and jumping already.
“Eager, ain’t we?” The rat was looking down at him with a wider smile, one that showed off his prominent front teeth.
“Sorry.” Coryn’s paws rubbed around the rat’s waist, finding it as slender and muscled as he’d imagined. He tried to relax, but the rat wasn’t stopping his strokes, and as each movement of the small paw sent more and more intense shivers through Coryn’s body, he twisted and bucked harder.
“No worries,” the rat said. “But I’ll ask ya to take charge of this here, while I devote my attention to you.”
He guided Coryn’s paw to his own sheath, closing the wolf’s fingers around the long, thin length protruding from it. Coryn did his best to match the rat’s strokes, sliding his paw up and down. At first, overcome by his own sensations, he moved as jerkily as the farm hands he’d just been thinking scornfully of. Hard as it was to get himself back under control, he forced himself to relax, or at least, he forced his right arm to relax.
He managed it, or hoped he did, but the rest of his body was passing beyond his control, His hips jerked upward under the rat’s caresses, his breath coming in short pants through his teeth. He couldn’t stop himself from moaning as the sensations built and grew. His paw, the one not wrapped around the rat’s shaft, clenched around his hip, and he shut his eyes, breathing in the scents of the stone, the candle, the rain, and above all, the mingled musks of himself and the rat, all of it working its way down his muzzle to his chest. There the scents met the surge of blood from his groin, and as his body surrendered to the delight of climax, his voice burst forth in a loud moan that rang against the stone.
His muscles felt as hard as the stone beneath the carpet, tight and tense and spasming as he emptied himself on the rat’s paw and his own stomach. His moans died down to breathy panting, the shudder of his orgasm dying down slowly. The first thing he did was start stroking the rat again, because his paw had stopped when his climax had started.
“Ah, y’don’t need ta keep up wi’that now.” The rat grinned. “Jus’ lie back and relax, an’ open yer muzzle.”
“My...” Coryn let his paw be removed from the rat’s shaft. The rat scooted up his body, rubbing wet fur past his sheath and spent shaft, no doubt getting it sticky as he settled on Coryn’s chest. He leaned over and lifted Coryn’s head, bringing the wolf’s nose right up to the tip of his pink shaft. Coryn could see streaks of pre at the tip, and another drop swelling as the rat settled into position.
“Yer okay, right?”
Coryn was more afraid of performing badly than he was of having the rat in his muzzle. He’d only ever done that to himself, and the last time had been years ago. “Sure,” he said, and craned his head forward.
“No teeth,” the rat said as Coryn parted his lips, tongue already lapping at the salty fluid.
“Mm-hmm.” Coryn closed his lips as the rat pushed his hips forward, the shaft sliding along his tongue. He did his best to keep his lips closed and his teeth out of the way as the rat rocked back and forth. Because his paws didn’t seem to be doing anything else, he brought them around the rat’s hips and pressed them to the wet fur, riding along with the motion rather than helping it.
“Ooh, that’s the stuff,” the rat said. Up past the white expanse of his stomach and chest, his pointed muzzle was bobbing up and down in time with the movement of his slender hips. The rat’s other paw had moved behind Coryn’s head as well, supporting it as he pushed his shaft between the wolf’s lips and back, forward and back.
As his hips moved, his tail slid back and forth against Coryn’s sensitive sheath, making the wolf squirm, but he held himself as steady as he could. He was enjoying this, partly because the rat was enjoying it, but also just the feeling of another’s shaft between his lips, the taste of the musk. And he couldn’t help imagining his own hardness pushing up under that tail and into the rat, which made him squirm even more despite the fact that his come hadn’t even dried from his first orgasm.
The rat’s hips jerked faster, his musk stronger now. Coryn circled the shaft with his tongue, and the rat liked that, moaning loudly and throwing his head back. His paws grabbed at Coryn’s fur behind his ears, shoving his head forward onto the trembling shaft, and Coryn obliged as well as he could, thankful for his long muzzle. Any shorter and the rat’s long member would be well in the back of his throat.
At the rate he was going, it felt like it might get there anyway. The rat’s balls swung against his lower jaw, the hips pushing into his muzzle with more and more force. “Oh, wolfy, yeah...yeah...unh!” With a loud grunt, the rat shoved Coryn’s muzzle all the way into his groin. Coryn closed his lips and sucked hard on the long shaft, feeling it shudder against his tongue, and a moment later he felt warm splashes at the back of his throat. He swallowed, holding the rat’s shaking body as tightly as the rat was holding his head.
Even when the rat finally relaxed, he didn’t pull back right away, looking down at the wolf’s muzzle instead. “Ah, that’s a lovely sight, it is,” he said, a dreamy smile stretching to both corners of his muzzle. “Downright angelic.” His paws released Coryn’s head and stroked up his perked ears.
“Mmf,” Coryn tried to say. His tail thumped the carpet.
“Good lad.” The rat slid his hips back, giving his rear an extra wiggle over Coryn’s sheath. Coryn smacked his lips as the long member slid out of it, his head dropping back to the carpet. He stared up at the cracked stone ceiling until the rat’s head came into view. “Wait right ’ere,” he said. “I’m gonna fetch us a li’l something.”
Coryn had no idea what he meant, but he didn’t much care. His eyes were drifting shut now that all his energy was expended. “Mm, ’kay,” he said. The stone ceiling became the ceiling of the small house he would share with the--with Two-Claws. They would steal just enough silver to live, and they would climb around the great buildings of Divalia, dancing on rooftops, drinking...
“Honey wine.”
“Uhh?” Coryn turned his head, getting up on his elbows.
The rat, still naked and half out of his sheath, set two pewter mugs down on the carpet. “Compliments of the Great Cathedral. Reserved for special ’casions.” He sat across the mugs from Coryn, cross-legged. “This felt special, ay?”
“Yeah.” Coryn struggled to sit up, realizing he was thirsty. The rat already had one mug in his paws, raised in a toast. Coryn took the other and lifted it.
“To a night of...” The rat tilted his head, searching for a word.
“Adventure,” Coryn said.
“Ay.”
“New horizons.”
The rat clinked his mug to Coryn’s. “All that. Your health.”
“And yours.” They drank at the same time. The wine was sweet and rich, pouring over his tongue and lighting his throat and belly with a soft, growing warmth. He took another drink, and another, and then the mug was empty.
The rat’s nose brushed his. The scents were blurring together, the noise of the rain more distant now. “Got time for a little rest, Legs,” the rat murmured.
“My name’s Coryn.” His tongue felt thick and heavy.
“Ay, Coryn of Doubleford in Deverin.” The rat sounded sleepy himself. “An’ I’m Two-Claws of Divalia.”
Coryn’s head felt heavy. “Wake me when the sun’s up.”
“Course.”
And that was the last thing he heard the rat say for many, many years.
Sound and light made their way into his dreams. He was standing on the roof of his neighbor’s barn, naked, and the sun warmed him all over. There were people over on his farm, and they were talking about him, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. His father and Kulic of the Whitefoots were talking, and Two-Claws the rat was there, too. He thought about calling to them, but then he thought it might be best if he just lay down on the roof.
When had they put carpet on the roof? he wondered. It smelled old. It smelled like the time he’d visited the Great Cathedral. He opened his eyes and saw the threadbare patches in the carpet, dust motes drifting through rays of colored sunlight streaming through the window.
Slowly, he pushed himself to his feet. The stained glass painted the room in brilliant colors, and Coryn could see the whole thing: the guttered candle atop the trunks, the open, bare wardrobe. All that remained of Two-Claws was his scent and the two pewter mugs, lying empty on the floor.