Chapter 8

Chapter8

Iam given cool rags to clean up with, and then I’m perched at the head of a long table and fed extravagant foods—venison pies topped with elaborate shiny crusts, seared larks, and roasted swans with outstretched wings and eyes made of sloe. Hippocras jellies and rosewater tarts, wines and meads and confections of spun sugar so delicate they melt on my tongue. The raw fruit I forbear to eat for now, until I can make sure I’m not going to enchant myself with an apple slice or something, and I sprinkle a little mortal salt on everything I eat, even on the sweet things and in the wine.

Felipe was right earlier, and at every table, I see vessels for holding salt—ornate containers made of gold and glass and gems, in the shapes of great ships and singing mermaids. I also see I’m not the only one making use of them, although out of the entire hall, there are only two or three of us. But still, I draw some comfort from the fact I’m not the only mortal here. Not counting Felipe, who seems to be in a four-hundred-year-old category of his own.

I ask the fairies eating with me about the hunt tomorrow, and I’m told it will not matter that I’ve never hunted before and I’m not exactly an equestrian. It’s primarily the queen’s hunt, really, they explain. A private Samhain tradition.

I’m not the one being hunted, am I?I ask them, entirely serious, and they laugh and laugh like I’ve told the world’s funniest joke.

What a waste of you that would be!

Which isn’t exactly reassuring, but I still extract from one of them that I’ll be unhunted tomorrow, which allows me some measure of relief.

The revel seems unending. The fucking goes on and so does the dancing and feasting, and at some point, I find my eyes sliding closed and my head slumping against Idalia’s shoulder.

“Go to bed, little mortal,” she chides.

“I don’t know if I can find my way back to my room,” I admit. Felipe is no longer in the hall, and I’d feel like a child asking Idalia or Maynard for help finding my way back.

“The leaves are waiting outside the door for you, are they not?” Idalia says, the same way someone might explain how sidewalks work. The moth bobbing next to her face seems equally bewildered by my ignorance, because it flaps in place for a long minute, antennae moving in my direction, before finally drifting toward the more educated banquet guests.

I grab my coat from the dais and stumble, tipsy and full, to the doors of the hall and open them to find the orange and ruby leaves waiting for me. I follow them through even more unfamiliar spaces—galleries and grand staircases I’m certain I haven’t seen before—and then past a shadowed opening that looks like it leads to some sort of large chamber.

“Have fun?” a voice calls from the darkness.

I stop—the leaves sighing as they too stop and sift backward in my direction—and I peer into the murk. A few solitary candles flicker at the front of the space, illuminating pews and a carved rood screen. There are statues and painted panels and a gleaming font at the front. It is almost like a chapel, like a church, although I don’t see anything recognizably Christian about it—or recognizably mortal, for that matter.

Morven steps forward, still wearing his outfit of all black, his cape swaying around him as he stops.

“I did,” I say.

“It’s good that you enjoyed yourself tonight,” he says. The shadows seem to hang off his eyelashes and cling to the underside of his lush mouth. “It will not last long.”

“Yeah, because I’m leaving as soon as I can,” I say. The wine sharpens both my attraction and my irritation. “You can stop being so grumpy with me, by the way. I didn’t ask to get kidnapped.”

“And I didn’t ask to kidnap you,” Morven says. “But it is my sister who wears the crown, and so I’m hers to command until my oath of fealty has ended. However long that might take,” he adds, and then he strides out of the chapel and into the daedal knot of the castle. Even his stride is brooding, unhappy.

I wonder if the queen knows how much her brother dislikes serving her. I wonder if treason is ever on his mind.

When I get to my room, the leaves sag to the floor in apparent relief, and I open the door to find a steaming bath waiting for me in the middle of the room. Rose petals—a red so dark they’re nearly black—swirl on the surface of the water, and on a table next to the enormous copper tub are various soaps and oils as well as a large linen towel.

I strip, throw my bloodstained dress over a nearby chair, and climb naked into the bath before washing and soaking until I’m clean and limp-limbed. Between the feast and the orgasms and now the hot scented bath, I must admit Faerie has charms to counterbalance its bloody horrors.

Also its penchant for kidnapping.

After a long time soaking and staring at the moon outside my window, I climb out of the bath and dry off. In the wardrobe, I find a long robe made of a soft ivory fabric, thin enough to show the shadow of my navel underneath, and I walk over to the bed. It’s a four-poster, etched with roses and spiral motifs, the head of it carved with the same antler-headed man from the door of the room. The curtains are a plush green velvet, embroidered with raven-colored rose petals, and the sheets are a silk so white and crisp that they remind me of freshly fallen snow.

I don’t lie down. I stand with one hand on the curtains, my fingers moving idly over the sable blooms—blooms that are so close to the color of the queen’s eyes.

This is my consort, a mortal worthy of a stag’s heart and a stag’s kiss.

I don’t know what I feel right now. The night went about as well as a night in fairyland could go—I’m not enchanted or dead, and I’ve struck a bargain that will help me get back, safely, to my own world. Plus I had great sex.

So why am I suddenly so restless that I can’t stand it?

Is it greediness? Loneliness? Fear?

I walk to the door and open it, unsurprised to see the leaves shivering on the floor.

“I don’t know where I want to go,” I say, which is a lie and I’m not supposed to lie here…although maybe lying to the leaves doesn’t count. They continue to tremble in place, but there’s something judgmental about it now.

“Okay, fine,” I concede. “I do know where I want to go. I want to go to her.”

The leaves start moving, like they thought I’d never ask, and soon we’re moving through the castle again. Again, it’s almost all unfamiliar to me, and I know if I were to attempt an escape, my best shot would be while I was outside the castle walls. I don’t know if I can even find my way to the front door on my own—and I feel like the enchanted leaves are probably not enchanted to help the queen’s prisoners escape.

After a long climb, I find myself in another tower, standing in front of a door lacquered to a red gleam. I hesitate a moment, feeling stupid in my see-through robe and having no good reason to knock on her door.

But the leaves brush against the wood, as if saying, Stop being such a coward, this is the right door—and then the door swings open of its own volition, revealing a chamber much like my own, but much larger, and much more…well, much more her.

Rather than roses, the room is carved, stitched, and painted with stags and antler motifs, to the point where some of the stools and chairs have legs made of antler and bone. The tester of her canopy bed is likewise made of antlers, and the silk curtains hanging from them are the rust-red color of the hills in autumn.

A large desk is set below one of the windows, and shelves and shelves of books line most of the space—enough to make me wonder how there are still more to fill the library downstairs. Roses climb up the walls on the far side of the room, full-blown and weeping dark petals onto the floor, and near the desk I see the denuded stem of a single rose, its shredded petals withered on the loose papers scattered across the desk. Like someone had plucked the living rose from the wall for the sole purpose of tearing it apart.

It’s the large copper tub in the center of the room that snares my attention in the end. A twin to the one in my room, it’s also dotted with rose petals, and it makes me wonder if the petals in my own tub had come from here, from this room.

If maybe the queen herself had chosen the roses for my bath.

And even more than the tub itself, it’s the woman sitting inside it that draws me to a halt. The only other person in this room. Her dark hair is piled atop her head and secured in place with two pins of bone. Damp tendrils curl at the nape of her neck, and water glistens along the elegant curve of her shoulders. And her back…

I draw closer without meaning to, not sure I’m seeing correctly at first. The light from the fire only does so much, and the single candle flickering on the table next to the copper tub creates tricks of shine and shadows.

But no, as I step forward, I see the light hasn’t betrayed me: just below the wing of her scapula, her pale skin goes clear and translucent, like glass. And after a feathering of trapezius muscle, the muscle too turns clear, so I can see the articulation of her spine and the graceful arcs of her ribs. And past them, the red bellows of her lungs.

I can see inside her body.

I’m frozen, staring at her back, at this so very inhuman part of her, when she speaks without turning around.

“Come here, Janneth,” says the queen, and I obey, hoping she’s not absolutely furious with me for walking in on her naked and bathing.

“I’m sorry, Your Majesty,” I say, sinking to a knee when I reach her, making sure to bow my head too. “The leaves opened the door, and I know I shouldn’t have come inside, but I didn’t notice you at first—”

“But you did notice me, and you still stayed,” the queen observes mildly. “Well, if you’re here, I may as well put you to use.”

I think of the way she looked at my mouth in the hall, and I flush hot.

“Yes,” I whisper, half eagerness, half fear. “I’ll be of use.”

“You may look up, Janneth,” the queen says, sounding amused. “I’m not a Gorgon.”

“Are Gorgons real too? Like fairies?” I ask, looking up to see we’re nearly at eye level like this. Tiny water droplets hang in the hair that’s come loose from the knot on her head and slide down her collarbone and chest, and I can’t help but be aware of how naked she is below the petal-strewn water of the bath.

I want to look so badly, I want to touch, and perhaps she knows what I’m thinking, because she gives an imperial tilt of her head to the edge of the table, where a small cloth is folded next to the soap.

“Wash me,” the queen orders, and I move to obey, rolling up the sleeves of my robe and settling myself behind her. My hand trembles a little as I dip the linen in the water and then ready it with soap. And it’s ridiculous given the things I’ve gotten up to before now. Washing someone’s back shouldn’t rob me of breath.

But here I am, shaking and practically panting, while the air smells of soap and there’s metal and gallons of water separating my body from hers.

I press the wet, soapy cloth to her back and drag it up, carrying warm water with it, and she lets out a sigh that’s so human I nearly drop the cloth.

And then I find myself eager to hear it again. And again.

“Yes, Gorgons are real,” she says after a minute. “As real as you or me. Most things are real, nightmares and dreams both. Sometimes,” she says, a wet, slender hand toying with a floating petal, “the dreams become nightmares.”

I’m watching the water sluice down her back, over a tableau of things never meant to be seen: muscles rippling, lungs swelling and shrinking, bones still pink with blood.

It should be horrific, it should be wrong, and yet it is so beautiful that I find myself speechless. Except to say: “Sometimes the opposite is true, Your Majesty.”

She doesn’t speak at that, and the only answer is the crackling of the fire and the drip of the water. The wind buffeting the castle from outside. And then she finally replies, “This is true.”

I begin washing an arm, moving to the side so I can wash all the way down to her fingertips, and then I do the other side as well, wondering how much she’d like me to wash her, because the innocent places are dwindling.

She settles the question by settling back against the tub, arching her long neck as she rests her head against the edge and closes her eyes. “You may continue,” she says, in a regal, used-to-being-obeyed manner. And so I do, soaping her neck and chest and breasts—high handfuls with tips that grow taut and stiff as I massage the cloth over them. The front of her is not translucent like her back, at least as far as I can see, but there is a faint flush on her chest from the warmth of the water. Maybe from something else.

I clean my way down her stomach, and then her thighs part under the water, as if in unconscious response.

“Have you ever been someone’s pet before?” she asks. Her eyes are still closed.

I’m glad of it, because I don’t want her to see whatever’s on my face right now.

Lust, shame. Longing.

“Not for lack of trying,” I say. I try to make it light, but it comes out the way it feels. Which is lonely.

“Humans don’t often want to be pets,” she remarks.

“I used to want nothing more,” I say, breathing out as I feel the tight divot of her navel beneath my fingers. “But no one wanted me. So I told myself to stop wanting it altogether because it hurt less that way. Because then it felt like a choice.”

I can’t believe I just admitted that out loud. Shit. The last thing I want is for the queen to know what a needy, lonely mess I am.

“I find it hard to believe no one wanted you,” the queen says.

I try to explain in a way that doesn’t make me sound too pathetic. “Do you remember when I told you that I always want more?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not—an easy thing. For a lover. Even a”—I’m not sure if they know these words in Faerie, but I go on anyway—“even a Dominant has limits on how much they want to give. Even the people who say they want a twenty-four-seven submissive find themselves sick of me. Because I want to be pushed further and longer. Because I want more and more and more. It’s greed. It’s too much. I’m too much.”

I break off, pissed at myself. I should not have said all that. I didn’t even want to say all that, not out loud, not to her, and I’m hot with embarrassment. I don’t want to be needy or grasping or pitiable. I’ve spent so much time trying to corral myself into a respectable archaeologist precisely so I wouldn’t be those things.

But the queen seems unfazed by it. There is no distaste in her expression, no pity. Her eyes are open but hooded, and she stares at me.

“There is not so much difference between those with the greed to take and the greed to make,” she murmurs. “Both are hard ways to be. Both are lonely.”

I duck my head, unable to take her gaze right now. Not that looking at where I’m washing her stomach is helping my composure. Between the drifting petals, I see the delta of her sex: a delicate triangle of curls, a glimpse of dark pink under the ripples of the water.

“Janneth,” says the queen. Her voice is quiet. “Take care of me as a pet should.”

There can be no question of what she means, and I’m surprised at the relief I feel at the command. Like maybe part of me was worried I was too much to have even as a bargain consort-pet. Even for an immortal fairy who smiles when her enemies bleed at her feet.

I drop the cloth under the water and then splay my hand directly on the warm skin of the queen’s stomach. I feel the muscles underneath, taut and still, and then she exhales as I push my hand lower.

Her curls are shockingly soft, and when I trail my fingers to where her body opens, I find her slick even in the water. Slick enough to make everything slippery. Slick enough that she must have been ready for this for quite some time.

She closes her eyes, a faint shiver going through her as I graze her clitoris, stiff and needy at the apex of her. “Yes,” she says. Only that.

“You…you should tell me what you like,” I say, sliding the pad of my finger over her swollen clit again.

The queen opens her eyes to blink at me, as if this is the most surprising thing I’ve done all night. Not march up to an orgy to prove a point, not come into her rooms at night unannounced. But the small, almost-pedestrian question about how she likes her cunt touched.

“It pleases me to have you as my pet,” she says finally and then closes her eyes. “And so whatever you do, I shall find pleasing, because you are mine.”

“Oh,” I say, without meaning to have made a noise at all. But somehow she said the one thing I’ve been needing to hear for years.

I am pleasing. I am hers.

Even abducted, scared—even with a bloodstained dress still crumpled up in my room—the words thrill me.

I lower my head again so she can’t see me swallow, fight back a giddy smile, blink back tears. I’m a fucking mess.

“And trust that I will not be shy about taking what I want regardless,” she says, her tone casual and unbothered, like she hasn’t just spoken aloud one of my most secret appetites, like she hasn’t just given me a promise I wish for all the world she will keep.

Lust swims through my blood as I caress the tumid part of her that needs touching, slowly at first. Not because I particularly think she wants gentle but because I don’t want it to feel like I’m trying to rush this.

I want her to know I love being her pet, for however short a time I’ll be one. And that if there’d been no bargain at the banquet, no transaction of safety, I’d probably be here anyway, offering myself up for her to use however she’d like.

Her eyes are still closed, her red lips parted the smallest amount. Her stomach hitches when I change my strokes from up and down to side to side, her thighs falling as far apart as they can in the tub. The water sloshes; petals stick to my arm and to her breasts. There’s a scent on the air that’s so heady I can barely stand it, and it’s not the petals in the bath or the roses blooming on the wall, and it’s not the soap I used to wash the queen, and it’s not anything I can even describe, because what it smells like makes no sense. It smells like the way I felt as a teenager at my first girlfriend’s house, the blankets over our heads as we kissed for the very first time in the dark. It smells like Edinburgh at night when the fog is up and the lamps are lit against smoke-stained walls and every narrow alley beckons me forward to find its secrets.

It smells the way I used to feel about magic and history and secrets. Like something more was waiting for me—like if I just went to the right place, just turned the right page, just cracked open my chest a little bit more, I would find a special story meant only for me. A special destiny, a special life.

That’sthe smell in the air.

And also it makes me hungry. Ferociously hungry. My mouth is watering.

The queen takes my hand and, with imperial assurance, pushes my fingers down to the slick breach of her body. She barely waits for the two fingers I give her before she rocks her hips into my hand, fucking herself not only on my fingers but against the heel of my palm.

The balls of her feet are braced against the tub as she arches. She’s so soft inside that I think I might die.

She climaxes abruptly, faster than I would’ve thought it would take, and there’s a distant part of me that wonders if it’s been a long time for her, like it had been for me. If even in a court of orgies and excess, she’s denied herself to the point where a hand between her legs in the bath is such a relief that it only takes two minutes for her body to culminate.

She turns her head away as she comes, toward the far wall, so I can only see the long line of her neck, her hair sticking to it, and the curve of her cheek and jaw. I think her eyes are still closed. Her hands curl around the edge of the tub, white-knuckled and tight-gripped, and her flushed, petal-strewn chest heaves. She’s squeezing my fingers in slippery flutters, and I suddenly wish I were in the bath with her, or that she were out here with me, or that I could at least see her face…but I can’t deny I like this too. Making her come like a servant might, like it’s just part of her bath, part of her nightly ritual.

She softens slowly, her head still turned away. The fire pops. When she lifts her hands, fresh rose petals, dark as the night sky, fall from the edge of the tub into the water.

I stare at them as they float and swirl on the surface, like miniature boats. My fingers are still gripped by her, and it occurs to me with a blast of dizzy wonder that I just fucked someone who can conjure flower petals from thin air. Someone whose lungs and blood-pink ribs are visible to the naked eye.

That she’s a queen too somehow seems like the most normal part of it all—although fingering royalty isn’t exactly a common occurrence for me either.

I slide my hand free and, without thinking, lift it to my mouth. A habit as old as sex, and I think nothing of it, although when she turns her head and watches me do it, her expression turns ardent. Like I’ve just done something that thrills her to her core.

She tastes perfect—sweet, sour, salt, an entire meal with dessert after. There’s a hint of rose too, but as I keep sucking my fingers, the taste changes. And now it tastes like how the air smells—like electric sex, electric hope. Like a long-ago version of myself who dreamed and hoped and lusted without restraint.

And before I can even decipher how pussy can taste anything like that, the world floods itself with magic. Suddenly, like a gate has pulled up and dizzy, heady everything is sluicing into the room as if the room were a rose-lined bowl. The fire is brighter, citrine and scarlet and even a deep, deep blue. The autumn moon burns like a dark red sun through the window. The stars are brighter than I’ve ever seen them, and there’s more of them than I’ve ever seen, so many more, and the Milky Way is a mottled, glowing smear through it all.

I look back to the queen, and she is—she is luminescent, a mysterious burn like the moon outside, at once cool and light-giving. Her eyes are the darkness that the night sky no longer is with its glut of stars, and her mouth is the shape of all my wild and secret thoughts.

And why have I made them secret? I am sitting next to a glistening queen in her castle, my fingers still in my mouth, my mind blowing wide open, and all I can think is: Why?

Why have I been pressing myself into the shape of someone easy, someone composed and guarded and temperate, when I’m none of those things? When I don’t even really want to be? When what I really want is to be as hungry as I can be, as messy as I can be, as much?

When what I really want is someone or someplace insatiable for my insatiability?

And god, I’ve never been hungrier than I am right now—and yet never have I felt this sated, this alive. Is this what fairy sex is like? Why didn’t this happen in the hall, then, with Maynard and Idalia?

And what does it matter when the queen is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and all I need to do is lick every drop of water from her skin until she lets me have another taste of her directly from the source?

“Janneth,” the queen says. Her voice is musical, a full song when she speaks, and I can’t believe I didn’t hear it before.

It’s a lonely song—wind on the hills, a single deer in the trees—but it’s the most exquisite sound I’ve ever heard.

She’s moved forward in the tub while I’ve been staring at her with my fingers in my mouth. She rises, and then her hands are on me, her arms are around me, and I’m being hauled against her as her mouth crushes into mine. My fingers are still between us, and her tongue flickers over my knuckles, the thin web between forefinger and middle finger, making me moan. I feel her tongue on my fingers like I’d feel it on my cunt, and then when she impatiently yanks my hand down and her tongue slides freely against mine, the surge of need between my legs steals my inhales and exhales.

I press eagerly against her, even as her wet body soaks my thin robe, even with the tub between us, and I find her waist with my hands and search for her hips, and then I—

She pulls back, pressing a finger to my mouth because I’m chasing her kiss, chasing her, needing more. I feel crazed with it, and if she won’t let me kiss her again, I think I might die.

“Pet,” she murmurs, the edge of her mouth curling a little.

I answer with a grin, a wide, happy grin, because I’m so happy right now, in a way I haven’t been for the past few years. The world is beautiful and she is beautiful, and I’m here, and everything tastes and smells and sounds like magic and hidden things.

She looks down at my robe—completely see-through now—and runs an idle finger over the erect tip of my nipple over the wet fabric. “We should get you to bed,” she says.

“As long as it’s your bed,” I say, giving her my best pouty face—which doesn’t last long, because I break into a disbelieving smile right after. I can’t believe that I feel more like myself, here, captive in a mushroom and stag castle, than I did in Edinburgh while building a respectable and interesting career.

She makes a noise. It’s almost like a laugh inside her chest, but it never leaves her mouth. Instead, she stands, takes her towel, and knots it securely around herself. She steps gracefully out of the tub and then takes my hand to raise me to my feet.

“If my bed is what you want, you shall have it,” she says as seriously as a monarch giving a royal decree. “Come.”

I follow her, floating on my feet, ready to follow her everywhere. I feel like the whole world is mine to take a bite out of, like my entire life is ready to be plucked and eaten on the spot.

And then somehow I’m already lying in her bed, my wet robe long gone, cloud-soft blankets pulled up to my chin. It’s like I’m stoned—or drunk—because time seems to slip again, and then the queen is in bed next to me, her face next to mine. Her breath is sweet, and all over again, my body rouses.

Before tonight, I would have made sure to keep close to the edge of the bed, I would have tried to keep my body small, my breathing light. I would have waited until my lover fell asleep and then I would have snuck out, not wanting to seem too needy by asking for another round of sex or staying the whole night.

And that’s if I even got into their bed at all—I’ve gotten very skilled at the quick-and-easy hookups over the past two years. One and done, in and out, on to the next. That way I never burn through someone’s attraction to me, through their patience, through my own self-respect.

But whatever I’m feeling right now, worry about being small and easy is the least of it.

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

And so I don’t stop myself from inching even closer, from reaching for her.

She lets me kiss her and stroke her, and held tight in her arms, I lose track of time, until I can barely keep my eyes open. I never want to stop kissing her, though. I want to kiss her until I die.

“You will need rest for the hunt tomorrow,” she tells me, pulling away.

“Can’t we stay in bed all day?” I ask, because why not.

Another noise from her chest again. That almost laugh. “No. The ruler of the Stag Court hunts every Samhain. It’s a tradition I cannot break.”

I sigh unhappily. I don’t particularly want to be tramping around the wet Highlands this late in the year. Some things just sound cold.

But when I realize the alternative is being away from the queen, my chest aches, like the organs inside it are trying to push free.

So to the hunt I will go.

I force my eyes open enough to resettle the covers around me and then nestle into her. She allows it, although there’s something tentative in the way she does. Like this isn’t typical fairy queen behavior, the after-fuck cuddle. “How is it still dark outside?” I murmur sleepily, smashing my face into her shoulder and rooting until I’m comfortable.

“You might remember I said days and nights move differently than in your world,” she says. “To you, these next two days will feel longer. All the more reason you should sleep now.”

And as much as I need to kiss her again, taste her again, stare wide-eyed at a sky that’s alien in its glittering, bright bustle, I can’t argue with her. With the scent of roses and magic in my nose, I fall fast asleep.