Lawless lands

Fortunate winds made a liar of the map. Two days. That was all the water asked, and Beidou took it with a grin that said she would still charge Ningguang for a week.

The sailor girls never earned their bonus.

They tried. The parody uniforms still flashed when they climbed rigging. They still found reasons to bend near the cabin door. It did not matter. The pride had decided the crossing was for rest, and rest, in practice, meant Aether was either under one of his own or asleep with three of them using his chest as furniture. Nonsexual, more often than the sailors would have believed: Lisa reading against his side, Shenhe sitting close enough to share cold, Rosaria’s fingers in his hair while she watched the horizon like it owed her something. When sex happened it was inside the cabin and it was not a public trough. The crew learned to hate favorable weather.

Lynette learned the shape of the ship faster than the routes.

By the first evening the women had fully accustomed to her as theirs. Not a guest. Not a new sister waiting for a vote. After someone — Yelan, almost certainly — mentioned the House in the same breath as the Knave, the last softness went out of the arrangement. They were not cruel. No one starved her. No one raised a hand for sport. They simply stopped treating her like an equal. Rosaria pointed at a spilled cup and Lynette was already kneeling with a cloth. Xilonen held out a tool and did not say please. Ganyu sat and Lynette’s lap became a cushion without a discussion. The collar did the talking. The House history did the rest. Lynette’s ears stayed forward through all of it, leaking quiet satisfaction whenever someone used her like furniture that could fetch wine.

Lisa took her turn on the second afternoon, when the light on the water was too pretty to waste on strategy.

She wanted it sensual. She said so with her mouth already on his, swinging a thigh over his hips in the narrow bunk, settling onto him facing him so he had to look at her while she worked. No bounce. No punishment pace. A slow, wet slide that let him feel every inch of the change in her. His hands found her waist and then lower, and there it was: the faint swelling of her abdomen, barely a fact, the earliest proof that Mondstadt’s first gift had taken and stayed. He thumbed the curve. Lisa shivered and smiled into the next kiss, riding him like the swell was part of the conversation.

(https://im.ge/i/QQuJIRx)
(artist: miyu)

“You can feel it,”
she murmured.
“Good. I was wondering when you would bother to notice with your hands instead of your eyes.”

He kissed the words off her. She moaned, soft, and kept the rhythm lazy enough that talking stayed possible.

“Nod-Krai,”
he said against her mouth.
“Tell me what you actually know. Not the postcard.”

Lisa rolled her hips, took him deeper, and thought in that warm, scholarly way she used when she was also getting fucked.

“It is lawless,”
she said, breath catching.
“Not in the romantic bandit sense. There is no body that writes rules and then sends men to make you obey them. If something needs enforcing, the people there do it themselves. Live and let live is the closest thing they have to a constitution. You do not get a magistrate. You get neighbors, and knives, and the understanding that tomorrow you still have to share a harbor.”

Another slow rise. Another kiss. His palm stayed on the little swell like a bookmark.

“And the rest of it,”
Lisa went on, eyes half-lidded,
“is why certain kinds of women never leave. There is no court for the ugly sexual crimes other nations name and punish. The islands did not write those words into a book and then forget them. Over years the place simply… selected. The ones who hated the way desire can look like taking packed up. The ones who wanted that edge — who got wet at being used without a polite conversation first, who liked the theater of not being asked — stayed. They built a culture out of it. It is not a sermon. It is just what the water kept.”

She clenched around him when she said kept, a small scholarly tremor, and let him lick the next moan out of her.

“Frostmoon Scions,”
she managed, after a few more gentle strokes.
“Lauma leads them. From what reached the Akademiya they are less a church and more a crowd of fanatics who treat the moon goddess like an idol. Posters. Offerings. The kind of devotion that would be embarrassing if it were aimed at a singer and is faintly alarming when it is aimed at a divine body that is, if your machine is right, getting weaker.”
Lisa’s smile went crooked.
“Fangirls and fanboys with ritual knives. Charming.”

Aether lifted into her, still slow, and felt her belly brush his. She made a sound that was almost a laugh.

“There is also an Abyss problem,”
she said.
“Rifts. Mondstadt sent part of the army. Jean would not have done that for a rumor. So whatever is chewing on those islands is real enough to borrow knights. Live and let live does not apply to things that crawl out of holes in the world.”

She kissed him again, longer, riding through a climax that stayed quiet on purpose, forehead to his, the swell under his hand the only urgency in the room.

He came in her like a thank-you.

No announcement. No change of pace that turned the bunk into a claim. Lisa was still seated on him, the lecture warm on her mouth, and he simply held her hips and packed her occupied depths again — a slow, thick pulse against the place that was already doing the work of keeping his first gift. She felt it and laughed under her breath, forehead to his, the faint swell of her belly pressed between them like a third party to the gratitude.

(https://im.ge/i/QQuJGox)
(artist: miyu)

“That is a very rude way to grade a lesson,” she murmured.

“You talked,” he said. “I listened. This is the only homework I have.”

She clenched around the second load anyway, scholarly and shameless, and let him stay there until the ship’s motion changed.

The Harbor soon came within reach.

The difference was in the wood. The long easy run of open water became a series of small corrections, Beidou’s voice going short and practical overhead, the sailor girls suddenly useful for ropes instead of bonuses they were not getting. Aether kissed Lisa once more, thumbed the curve of her abdomen, and eased her off him. She dressed like a woman who had just been thanked inside and did not mind walking onto a new nation wet.

On deck the pride assembled without a speech.

He stood at the rail and looked at what Lisa’s words had been pointing at. Nod-Krai did not rise like Liyue’s geometry or Inazuma’s locked beauty. It sat on the water the way a place sat when no one had been elected to make it pretty: mixed timber, ice in the shadows, flags that did not match, a harbor that looked used by people who settled their own arguments. Live and let live, written in docks instead of ink.

“Scions first,”
he said, mostly to Rosaria, because she would be the one who decided if first meant immediately.
“If they treat the moon like an idol, they will know where she hurts. Better than walking inland until a rift introduces itself.”

Rosaria’s mouth tilted.

“Fanatics and a missing goddess. You do know how to pick a first door.”

“Lisa made it sound like the door would open if we knocked politely and looked like an audience.”

“Then we knock,”
Dehya said, already checking the gangplank with her eyes.
“Politely. With weapons where they can see them.”

The ship settled into her berth with a final groan of rope.

Beidou leaned on the rail and did not offer to come. Her job had been the water. The water was done.

“Try not to fuck the first cult you see until you’ve asked for directions,” she called down. “I like this hull. I want it back.”

Aether lifted a hand, which was as close as he would get to a promise, and started down the gangplank with the pride at his back.