Chapter 13

Chapter13

Morgana feeds me salt from a small pouch in her bag, having me lick the grains off her fingertips, and she watches me as my head clears.

“I still want to lick your cunt,” I tell her, utterly sober, and she laughs. It’s the first real laugh I’ve heard from her—bright and bell-like, like the feeling of a blue Highland sky on a summer’s day. The wide smile on her face almost hurts to look at, it’s so dazzling.

“I’d be a bad host if I didn’t give my guest what she wanted,” Morgana says, and then she settles back against the tree, draws one knee up, and allows me to fall under the spell of the fairy fruit all over again.

I don’t know how long in human time we stay there by the stream, kissing and fucking, since the day is suspended in silvery autumn light. But I do know I have to sleep for several long hours in the middle of it. I do know by the time she feeds me more salt and we walk back to the pavilion, my mouth is swollen and my pussy is sore. In my old life, it would feel like a walk of shame to enter the pavilioned feasting site with disheveled clothes and mussed hair, but since there are already several fairies fucking around us, there doesn’t seem much to be ashamed about. Indeed, the queen herself strides into the camp with her torn breeches flapping around her thighs and a few stray leaves caught in her braid, and she seems no less regal for it.

We wash and change for the feast—me into a soft-pink gown held up with thin straps and stitched with crystals, her into a black silk dress with a plunging neckline and the pattern of thorns picked out in silver thread. It’s strapless, with black ribbons crisscrossing down her arms, their silk tails tied at her wrists and draping all the way to the rug-covered ground of her pavilion. Her hair, freshly washed, dried, and wound up in an elaborate style, is set with her antler crown, and as usual, she wears no other ornament, save for her ring.

When she turns, I see the very beginnings of her glassed back peeping above her gown. Enough to draw attention, but not enough to be truly vulnerable, perhaps. I think of Morven having to hide his heart, and shudder. It would be a vulnerability anywhere, but here in Faerie? It’s more like a curse.

The feast begins at twilight, right there under the low misty sky. Fires burn in a circle around us, and a glowing blue haze seems to fill the air, making the forest as well lit as the hall was last night, even as night comes. Trestle tables are arrayed in front of a temporary dais with two simple but heavy chairs atop it; already the tables are heaped with food: berries and hazelnuts and stuffed mushrooms, cakes made of oats and honey, glossy red apples, and meat pies with flaky golden crusts.

Neither Morven nor Sholto is here, but I see Maynard and Idalia thick in the fray and Felipe seated at a table near the dais. Together, Morgana and I sit and toast and feast. Together, we listen to Maynard sing us ballads; we watch courtiers dance reels and leaping, whirling waltzes; we watch as Morgana’s stag, which has been roasting over an open fire, is carved and served.

I frequently catch Morgana looking at me like she’s wondering when she can have me flat on my back again.

Finally the feast gets to the point where almost no one is looking to the queen anymore, because the merriment is so high and the fairies are all drunk or fucking (or both), and Morgana slips her hand into mine. “When I stand, follow me quickly,” she says. “Let’s not be seen.”

I do as she says, and we slip into the shadows behind the dais before the rest of the court can mark our absence, although I notice Felipe watching us, his face solemn in the bonfire light.

She’s smiling when we duck back into her personal pavilion, the light of the candelabra flickering along the high lines of her cheeks and casting shadows under her long lashes.

“I’ve never snuck away from my own court before,” she confesses, standing in the middle of her tent and looking around like a kid who’s just played hooky for the first time. “I feel a little giddy.”

As someone who used to play hooky as often as I could get away with it, I have to laugh a little at her wonder. “It’s pretty great,” I say, and then I think of how responsible I’ve been for the past few years. “Even when it’s a job you want to do, actually doing it can be exhausting sometimes.”

Her fingertips drag across the table in the middle of the tent as she walks to a high-backed chair and sits. She pats the surface in front of her, indicating where I should sit, and yes, please. I hop up in front of her and make sure my skirts aren’t trapped under my legs, just in case things get interesting.

She leans back in the chair and studies me with dark eyes. “Are you speaking from experience? About the job?”

Well. Yeah. “I’ve spent the last five years of my life fighting against time, money, and student visa renewals so I could learn to be an archaeologist,” I explain. “But now that I’m on the brink of moving into the field for real, I sometimes wonder if I made a mistake.” I pause and then sigh. “Actually, I started wondering if it was a mistake after the very first class I took.”

She regards me. “Then why go on? Why not find something else?”

I don’t know if I can answer that. At least not in any way that makes sense. “The past used to feel so magical to me,” I say. “Which sounds stupid now that I’m here in a place where magic is real—but that’s how it felt. Like there was this mystery just beckoning, and all I had to do was reach out my hand and part the veil, and I’d be inside it. As if the way the past made me feel was how the past would be like to study.”

“And that wasn’t the case.”

I brace my feet on either side of her chair, the hem of my dress falling into her lap, crystals against thorns. “Archaeology sometimes has this way of reducing everything to the most pragmatic version of itself. There’s very little room for feeling and fantasy in what’s supposed to be a science. And even though I still love it—and even though it feels like the one thing in my life that has an appetite to match my own—it’s bleeding me dry of who I used to be. Eventually everything will be small and recordable and quantifiable and contained, and that will be that. And sometimes I’m afraid that this is how everything is in the world—that any person, hobby, or place is a mirage about to disappear. You think you love something, you think it will love you back, but then the closer you get, the further it draws away from you. The more you realize that, rather than the thing itself, you loved the way it made you feel when you knew nothing about it instead.”

I suddenly feel very depressed.

The queen puts her elbow on the arm of the chair and then props her head on her hand. It’s a more informal pose than I’ve ever seen from her, forest sex aside, and I like it. It makes her look arrogant, a little disdainful, and it’s very hot.

“As to archaeology, why is it the only magic left in your life?” she asks. “Not counting your time here, of course.”

I push my face in my hands. “It’s embarrassing to talk about,” I mumble into my palms.

“I like embarrassing,” she says. “I like uncomfortable.”

I look at her through my splayed fingers, and she looks back at me, entirely seriously.

“I mean it, Janneth. Some lovers might enjoy gifts of jewels and gold, others might want ballads or praise, but I have no need of those things. Instead, I want to see inside you. I want every ugly secret and thwarted hope; I want whatever makes you flush and squirm and hate yourself at night. I suppose it might be because, in the most literal sense, people have always been able to see inside me, but it could just as easily be that I’m more than a little sadistic. Whatever the reason, you need not treat your humiliations as things that will diminish what I feel for you. Your trust in showing them to me will feed me, delight me, because you delight me. It is like seeing your heart naked, or your mind naked, and I think as I’ve established earlier today, I like seeing you naked very much.”

Her stare burns steadily into mine as she adds, “I meant what I said last night.”

Whatever you do, I shall find pleasing, because you are mine.

I know I’m staring like a dumbass right now. But it had never occurred to me that someone could like messy people, that someone could find their embarrassments interesting or their revelations anything other than cringeworthy.

It’s rather…freeing, actually. Like it doesn’t matter if I do something wrong, if I get too needy or too clingy. It will all be delicious to her.

“So now,” she says again. “Why is archaeology the only magic left in your life?”

I lower my hands, keeping my eyes on hers. Her gaze feels reassuring in its possession, as if she’s used the ribbons on her arms to tie me tight to her, like she’s already slipped a leash around my neck.

“I want things too much,” I say simply. “So I had to stop. If not the wanting, then the wanting where everyone could see. It exhausted people, but it exhausted me too, you know? I hated feeling so needy, so gross, like some kind of vampire that couldn’t quench her thirst no matter how much she drained from the world around her.”

“You should never be less than yourself.”

I sigh. It sounds like something a therapist would say, something that feels true inside a cozy, quiet room, only to ring hollow when you’re hopelessly in love after only a single date or when you’re making your friends wince because you’re so sloppy at the club. When you’re the person who wants to go out again, wants just one more drink, one more kiss, one more dizzy moment to sew up the night. It was why I kept burying myself in archaeology, despite the way it narrowed my world, because at least it would welcome my relentlessness, my restlessness. Another long night in the library? Another email pestering the grant coordinator about delivery of funds? Another several hours in the lab refitting pots? Archaeology would take it all, and it would never tell me I wanted too much from it.

So what if it killed the last of my fantasies, the last of my dreaminess? It had as much for me as I could ever wish for: a bottomless well of work to do and problems to solve.

“I don’t say that as a platitude or a vacant reassurance, nor”—a smile tips the corner of her mouth—“would I say it to just anyone. Sholto, for example, would endear himself to me more if he were quite less himself. But for you, Janneth Carter, what does the world gain by you folding your hungers into the smallest possible square? When your hungers are so very lovely and have led you to dig into the earth for answers to questions most mortals have forgotten to ask?”

“I don’t know,” I say, a little absently. I think of the friends I’ve made in the past year or so, Alfie and Fran?ois and a few others, friends whom I’ve been careful only to let see the most curated version of myself. Because even good people—even very cool, very smart good people—have their limits of patience, empathy, and good taste, and I’m done testing limits.

Or at least so I thought. Because here in Faerie, the limits seem as wide as the moors. Where else could I be a royal consort, eat a raw heart, fuck in the forest? Where else could I feel like I’m exactly the right amount and never too much?

“I’ve built a good life by folding myself into small squares,” I say finally. “I’ll graduate into a field that already has people waiting for me. I have friends who like me well enough.”

“But who do not really know you,” the queen points out. “Nor do you have lovers who know you longer than a night. Or even longer than a few hours, since you slip home before dawn.”

My lips part. “I—I haven’t told you any of that. How do you know?”

Her gaze is steady. “Do you want the truth?”

“Of course!”

“I’ve been watching you for a long time. Since you called for me.”

“Called for you?” I echo. I literally have no idea what she’s talking about.

Her hand finds my foot, and she strokes along the edge of its silk slipper. It’s a firm enough touch to feel more possessive than ticklish, like she’s petting me for her pleasure instead of my own. It makes me want to purr.

“Last Samhain, do you not remember?” she says, still with that idle stroking of my foot. “You called for me.”

I think back to last year, sitting in my tiny flat in Edinburgh, loneliness heavy in my chest. Since my final year of undergrad, I’d been determinedly easy, and it had netted me all the results I’d hoped it would. I had a mentor who liked me in Dr. Siska, I had a few friends who weren’t close but not too distant either. I had decent sex often enough to keep me from deleting my hookup apps.

But I’d been miserable, tired, uninspired. Nothing felt stirring anymore, nothing felt fun. And then I looked out my window and saw the torches moving through the narrow Old Town street.

I knew immediately I wanted to be down there. I shoved on shoes, grabbed a coat, and ran down to join the procession before I could change my mind. There were people painted woad blue and scarlet red, dancers dancing, singers singing, and all over shouting, chanting, drums, drums. The cold air felt crisp with a feeling I hadn’t felt in so very long, and I’d closed my eyes in the crush of the crowd, one speck of grad student in the great scheme of nothing, and I surrendered myself one last time to the hope for magic. I begged magic to stay, to take me, to claim me, and when I opened my eyes to see the Summer King and Winter King facing off among fire and dancers and drums, I knew I wanted to be wherever that was real and not at all pretend.

I knew I’d offer up my heart whole for it to be real.

“Please,” I whispered. I remember how the word was swallowed immediately by the drums. “Please take me. Take me and I’ll go. I’ll give you anything.”

I hadn’t been whispering it to anyone, had barely even whispered it to myself. The last gasp of a hope I had to smother and bury in the backyard of my mind so I wouldn’t be haunted by it any longer.

“You heard that?” I ask now, still utterly confused.

Morgana nods, like of course, she heard a hushed plea over the clamor of drums and the trilling of half-naked neopagans. “Edinburgh may be at the very edge of the court’s lands, but it’s still my land. I hear every bargain offered by a mortal—which is a far smaller number than it used to be. Yours was the only bargain that intrigued me. So I watched you. I watched you through mirrors and puddles and the shine on the face of your watch and the glass of your phone. I watched you and I…” She pauses, looks down at my foot. Her hand now curls over the place where my metatarsals anchor to the rest of my foot. “I grew fascinated by you. I have wanted you for a very long time, Janneth.”

A year. She’s been watching me—wanting me—for a year. And while it’s been a mortal year for me, it’s been a Faerie year for her, at least twice as long. And then I remember the cairn, how Maynard knew my name when he found me, that they were looking for me.

For whatever opaque reason she has, it must be you. No one else.

Because she had been watching me. Because she’d chosen me, because I’d already made some kind of bargain with her without even knowing it. That’s why I was taken. I’m not sure what to do with this information, because I should feel angry or scared or violated. I should not love that she watched me, chose me, took me for her own.

I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t.

“So this is why you kidnapped me,” I say, trying to keep my voice neutral. Kidnapping is bad. I am wholesale, unambivalently against kidnapping and against being kidnapped.

Her hand holding my foot to her chair feels like home.

“Yes,” she says simply. “This is why. I’m answering your bargain, Janneth. I took you, and now you’re giving me what I want in return.”

“Which is?”

“You,” the queen says without inflection, like this should be obvious by now. She finds the hem of my dress and lifts it over my knees. She pushes my skirt to my hips in a pile of crystal and silk. And then she pushes my knees as far apart as they’ll go, meaning my naked cunt is bared to her.

She touches the soft furrow of me, still sensitive from what we did in the forest, and then shamelessly presses against the tight ring below.

Kidnapping is bad. Magical stalking is bad. You didn’t know you were making a bargain.

None of this is fair, and you should hate it.

I tilt my hips up, trying to chase her touch. She laughs at little at my unabashed need, but she does start toying with my clit, pushing her fingers into my mouth to get them wet and then rubbing the small bundle until I can barely think.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” the queen murmurs. “Tell me something true.”

“I’m thinking that I shouldn’t love this so much,” I breathe. “I’m thinking I should stop you, that I should try to get away.” I shudder as she fits her fingers into the opening of my cunt, sinks inside. “I’m thinking I’m so fucking grateful that I was on your land that night and not the Thistle Court’s.”

Morgana’s eyes flash, as if the mere idea of me being with another queen makes her furious. “You should be grateful,” she says tightly. “The Thistle Court is dangerous.”

“You’re dangerous too.”

She doesn’t disagree. She can’t because she cannot lie.

But she does bend her head down and nip at my inner thigh—hard and swift. “They killed my mother,” she says. She’s still working her fingers inside me as she says this, as if murder is totally normal sex talk. “Two years ago. They murdered her without provocation, without even the pretense of war. We are a Seelie court, they are Unseelie—perhaps that was reason enough, but I suppose what they craved was chaos. They knew the succession wasn’t settled on either Morven or me, that my mother’s untimely death without a chosen heir would create imbalance and strife. And they were right. The two years since I’ve claimed the crown have been like walking along the cutting edge of a knife. Sharp and joyless. Until you.”

Until you.

My heart is a kite, beating around the inside of my chest.

She bends her head, still bound with her antler crown, and for the first time, I feel the hot velvet of her tongue between my legs.

She’s unfairly good at this, knowing just how long to flick her tongue over my clit before replacing her fingers with it and fucking me that way. She knows when to suck and how hard, and she knows how to pump her fingers just right, matching the fullness inside to the work of her wicked mouth outside. The tines of her crown dig into the tender skin of my inner thighs.

I think…I think I’m in love. It’s too soon and she kidnapped me and also she’s terrifying sometimes and also I’ve spent half my time here blissed out on the nectar of her cunt—but also in the flicking candlelight, I see the marks her crown leaves on the inside of my thighs, I feel her mouth like sin itself curling against my flesh, and I think I’m in love.

She’s cold and inhuman, and she kissed me in the forest with heart blood smearing her mouth, and I think I’m in love.

And when I think of her wanting me for the past year, of the way her voice goes low and smoky when she says things like mine and until you…

Well, I don’t know if fairy queens love like mortals do. But even if it can’t be love, the way she wants me is enough. It’s more than enough. It’s more than I ever knew I could hope for.

And so a little voice whispers, You could stay.

I could ask the queen to ignore her promise in the library and let me stay. Indefinitely. I could leave behind student loans and long nights in the lab and app-initiated one-night stands, and I could have an antler crown marking up my thighs, I could have fairy fruit, I could have her and an entire new world.

I could stay.

I come with a hot rush of pleasure, surging against her tongue, and she makes a disapproving noise when I move too much for her. She bands an arm over the top of my hips and holds me fast to the table while she fucks every last bit of my release out of my body. Fingers curling, mouth sucking, tongue like soft, soft fire.

And then, as the clenching waves recede and I can breathe again, she licks me clean and then sits up.

“Not as good as fairy fruit, I imagine,” I joke weakly, and she shakes her head.

“It’s better,” she says, and she can only tell the truth, so who am I to argue?

She reaches up to brush some hair away from my face, and her mouth—still wet with me—parts, as if she’s about to speak.

But she doesn’t. She doesn’t speak. She shakes her head instead, like she’s silently chiding herself. “Let’s get ready for bed,” she says after a moment and pushes back her chair to stand. “Tomorrow brings the negotiations—and the Sanctuary—and some things are better faced with rest.”