by AJ Lancaster
When she woke, the first thing she did was check the heartstone. Its colour had definitely deepened, now a vivid cornflower blue. The second thing she did was look around for Wyn. She found him draped in a chair on the other side of the room. His wings were relaxed, spread carelessly over the low back, and he was frowning down at the leather-bound book in his hands. A strange, fond feeling curled around her heart. She’d never seen him arranged so artlessly in his fae form; he only went winged when there was some purpose to it.
She studied him, in the moments before he looked up, the man she was trying her hardest to marry. The father of the child she was trying her hardest to keep.
He wasn’t human. He was as fae as this strange place of hushed whispers, as the leviathans in the deep and the dragons in the skies. As the blood butterflies had been. And she loved him.
She reached for Stariel through her ring, felt only a faint, thread-thin acknowledgement in return. How long had they been away, now? She’d lost all sense of time, but she thought it couldn’t have been more than a day or so. Still, it was longer than she’d hoped to be gone.
Wyn looked up and lost all his artlessness with the motion. His wings rose higher, pressing more tightly against his spine, as if that would somehow make them disappear. “How are you feeling?”
She tested her stomach, found it hungry rather than seasick. “Good. Hungry.” At least she’d figured out how to use her thin line of connection with Stariel to settle her nausea. Did that count as making progress with her land-sense?
Wyn produced an apple, putting the book aside to come to her side but retreating again before she could touch him.
“There are kitchens here,” he told her. “And a pantry stocked for an army, with preservation spells enough to make me feel a poor housekeeper by comparison.”
“So at least we won’t be starving to death in our imprisonment.” She eyed the apple suspiciously. “Eating it’s not going to get me stuck here for a hundred years, is it?” she asked, remembering some of the fairy tales she’d heard as a child.
“We are already stuck.” He told her of the exploring he’d done. “Koi has already tried a number of spells to try to break out. Though this is a library, so if the information exists anywhere, it’s probably here.”
“I take it making a second Gate out isn’t as straightforward as I want it to be?”
He shook his head. “The problem is that one needs an anchor, and the anchor for a Gate spell is usually made at the destination and then brought to the origin point. As the dusken rose came to Stariel.”
Hetta finished off the apple. “Is that the only method?”
He waved at the book he’d been reading. “Irokoi thinks we might be able to find an alternative, though I admit I have difficulty following his magery. That could be either his madness or my own poor knowledge of such things.”
“Hmm.” She got off the bed, went to find the facilities and spent a long moment watching running water emerge from a tap. Faerie plumbing. Perhaps it was best not to speculate how that worked when they were underwater.
When she returned to the room, Wyn had withdrawn back to his chaise. She walked over to him and he stilled, feathers flattening down. He wouldn’t meet her eyes, but she climbed into his lap anyway, bringing their faces close together.
His eyes went dark and smouldery. Still, there was a hesitation to him as she traced the sharpened lines of his face, not so unfamiliar now as it had been. A guardedness that prompted her to wrap her arms around his neck and haul him into a kiss.
“Hetta…”
Her insides flipped pleasurably, a slow warmth coiling low in her body. She shifted her hands over his shoulders, till they brushed the top of his wings. Wyn tensed at the touch and she pulled her hands away.
“Sorry,” she said.
“No, don’t be—it’s—it’s good.” All the small feathers at the top of his wings fluffed up. Embarrassment. “You don’t—ah—mind?”
“Mind that you’re feathery? No. It’s new, obviously, but not a bad sort of new.” She walked her fingers slowly over his shoulders again, and he went absolutely still. “Should I stop?”
“No.” His voice had gone deep. “It’s—they’re just—ah—sensitive.”
“What exactly do you mean, sensitive?” But she cautiously returned to lightly brush the top of his wings where skin met feathers. He made a rumbling sound deep in his throat that she’d never heard from him before, and the gold motes in his irises flared.
To her astonishment and deep delight, he flushed, feathers fluffing up once more. “Ah—exactly what you are thinking, I suspect.”
She frowned. “Surely not. That seems impractical, for one, and for another, I’ve seen you brush against things all the time!”
He drew back one of her hands, bringing her palm to his lips. His warm breath tickled, her skin prickling with anticipation, and when he pressed a kiss there, the point of contact sent heat pulsing through her.
“And you use your hands for all kinds of mundane things,” he countered. “Touch is situational.” His shrug rustled his feathers. “But the inner wing is more sensitive. Wings are intimate. Wing-touches are reserved for kin, friends, and…lovers.” His voice dropped on the last word, and he flared out a wing in invitation.
The heavy currents of desire swam lazily in the room, but Hetta could see the knife-edge of vulnerability in his eyes.
She took the invitation and shifted so she could run her hands over his feathers. The primaries were firm and silken to the touch, and she traced the filaments upwards. This is you, she thought. It was admittedly a little strange, yes, but not…unwelcome. There was something deeply satisfying in stripping back a layer of Wyn’s carefully built walls. This is you, she thought again. And I love you.
“Can I?” she asked, tugging at his shirt.
He nodded, shifting so she could reach, both tension and arousal in his posture as she undressed him. The body feathers nearer his back were smaller, bright metallic arrows of silver-tipped blue against his brown skin. They were much softer than his primaries, and when she put a hand between his bare shoulder blades, he shivered.
“Is that—?”
His answer was a wordless sound of encouragement.
She pressed against his back and wrapped her arms around him. “I love you,” she whispered in his ear. The tense line of his shoulders relaxed fractionally.
He breathed out in a slow, careful exhalation and let her rest against his back. The room held nothing but the sound of their heartbeats, the heavy warmth of him against her cheek.
She reached up to stroke the planes of his face, subtly sharper in this form. She mentally overlaid his more usual features, trying to reconcile his two halves.
“Oh,” she gasped as his hands found their way under her blouse and began to tease their way over her sensitive flesh.
He gave her an innocent look, as if to say ‘who, me?’, but since his fingers didn’t pause in their teasing, it wasn’t very convincing.
She squirmed, laughing.
“That wasn’t the reaction I was going for,” he complained.
“I was just thinking what a good job I did of debauching your innocence.”
He began to chuckle and buried his head in her shoulder, his mirth vibrating through her. “Hetta, are you congratulating yourself for my skills?”
“Yes, I think I am.” She grinned at him, unrepentant, and ran her hands through his hair. In his mortal form, the strands were a pale white-blond; now it was as if platinum had somehow been cast into a soft and touchable form. Her fingers moved up, exploring the smooth shape of his horns. He went still again.
“That feels very strange,” he admitted. “I am…not as used to this shape as I should be.”
He shifted his horns from her grasp and kissed her. How could everything still feel so urgent between them? Hetta had thought familiarity might ease it, except the reverse had happened. Now, desire was intensified by intimacy, by the knowledge of sound a
nd touch and smell.
She wasn’t sure which of them the motion came from, but the result was the same. They tumbled back towards the bed in a tangle of limbs and feathers and discarded clothing.
Magic hummed to life around them, hers and Wyn’s both, and Wyn paused. She read the hesitation in his eyes, a discordant note amidst the rising heat between them. A tiny flicker of lightning glowed briefly in his irises.
“Trust yourself,” Hetta told him impatiently. She caressed the hard planes of his body. A choke of laughter startled from his throat as her wandering hands found their way lower.
“Are you…attempting to distract…me?” he asked, voice strained.
“Yes. Is it working?”
He arched in pleasure, and the sight sent a deep thrill of satisfaction through her. “Yes.”
After that there were no more words, only sensation and the heavy haze of magic.
Afterwards, they lay entwined, one of Wyn’s wings draped across her body.
“You make a particularly good blanket like this.” Hetta stroked the feathers covering her.
Wyn made a sleepy sound of agreement and nuzzled at the back of her neck.
It was wonderful to let the world narrow to this cocoon, her fingers moving with slow meditation, a paler contrast against the deep blue silk. Wyn’s feathers were almost the same colour as her ring, she thought idly.
Her hand stilled.
“What?” He’d caught her tension, no trace of drowsiness in his tone.
Hetta stared at her engagement ring, at the piece of stone Stariel had altered in some fundamental way. She held out her hand, the blue stone shimmering with inner fire. “I think I found our Gate anchor.”
31
Further Experiments
It took Marius several minutes to realise that one of the undergraduates in his tutorial was not, in fact, one of the undergraduates in his tutorial. With this realisation, the glamour faded. Only for Marius, though; it remained in effect for the other students, who all continued to blithely accept the newcomer in their midst as if he’d been with them all term.
Marius gave said ‘newcomer’ a ferocious scowl, but Rakken only waved lazily for him to carry on.
Yes, do try to explain my presence to these mortals if you like, Rakken’s wicked smile seemed to say, daring Marius to expose him. Rakken was clearly doing something else as well, damping his…Marius hated using the word ‘allure’ even if it was apparently the correct technical term for the effect, and he was only saying it in his own head besides, but Rakken was clearly damping his allure because he was—for Rakken—relatively unobtrusive.
What would happen if Marius exposed him? Rakken’s glamour was incredibly powerful, but Marius was coming to know the nuances of it. This slipping-in-unnoticed business would only work so long as no one drew attention to the fact. If Marius did that, well, Rakken could resort to a stronger glamour to disappear, but it wouldn’t make people forget the fact that he’d been there in the first place.
Compulsion though…compulsion could make people forget. Not that Marius had seen Rakken intentionally compel anyone since Meridon, but he remembered the power of it then, holding an entire station’s worth of people in thrall. Just the memory of it sent a shiver down his spine.
Would Rakken use compulsion on the students if Marius pointed out his presence? Sadly, he probably won’t even need to. No doubt Rakken would somehow charm them into submission without using any actual magic. Maybe that was simply the mundane magic of confidence, or rather arrogance, though Marius wanted to believe there was still some actual magic to it, because the alternative was a sobering reflection on his own life.
“Er…Mr Valstar?” one of the students prompted, and Marius realised he’d been frowning at the space that contained Rakken for a good thirty seconds. He gave himself a shake.
“Right, right. Where was I?”
At least Rakken didn’t interfere further, and Marius managed to get through the rest of the hour without giving in to the urge to strangle the man. The students shuffled out of the study, Cholmondeley pausing to ask if there was any possibility of an extension, because really, with the rowing come up, a fellow couldn’t be blamed for needing more time, could he?
Marius signed the request off without even a reflexive protest and finally shut the door behind the last of them.
“You know, if you wanted to help with my glamour experiments, you had only to ask,” Marius said evenly. He turned.
Rakken had abandoned his human form and was now sprawled on the deep-buttoned chesterfield, one arm flung carelessly along its back, wings draped over the leather. He’d also clearly abandoned the effort to suppress his allure, because his usual metaphorical shininess had returned in full force.
“Does it take effort, suppressing it?” Marius asked without thinking.
Rakken gave him a sardonic look. “Suppressing what, precisely?” He knew exactly what Marius was talking about.
“Oh, never mind,” Marius muttered. He turned away and began packing up his things, stacking student papers away with an internal groan at the marking he could already see eating into his evening.
“Yes. Not a huge amount, but some.” Rakken grinned, slow and wicked, when Marius looked up. “I am not made to be contained.”
Marius made a disgusted sound. “Oh, sod off.”
Rakken did not, instead fanning his wings out in a leisurely motion, as if he were sunning them. “What has put you in such a mood today, Marius Valstar?”
“Oh, I don’t know; fae princes sneaking into my botany tutorials and distracting me!”
“Do I distract you?”
Marius wasn’t touching that. He still hadn’t figured out what Rakken meant by all this…flirtation, okay, there wasn’t really another word for it. Marius suspected it was for the sole purpose of winding him up, and that Rakken would’ve done it regardless of Marius’s predilections. He turned back to his papers and spoke without looking at the man behind him, though Marius swore he could feel him still, as if melodramatic sensuality interfered with the oxygen content of the room somehow.
“You haven’t heard anything from Wyn, have you?” Marius was pretty sure Rakken hadn’t, but then again, who knew what methods of communication fae had?
“No.”
“They should be back by now, shouldn’t they?”
Rakken sighed. “I would know if he were dead, and your faeland would know if Lord Valstar suffered the same.”
Marius flinched, and then flinched again at the hand on his shoulder. Rakken was too close, his expression more serious than usual. How had he moved so fast? The faint but familiar smell of citrus and storms, the soft and specific sound that feathers made when their owner twitched his wings subtly.
“Time doesn’t move the same way in Deeper Faerie. The delay isn’t necessarily a cause for concern.”
Mother Eostre help him, Rakken was trying to be comforting. Marius moved away, and Rakken dropped his hand. “They’re not going to come back in a hundred years, are they?”
Rakken shook his head. “The dilation shouldn’t be so great, with the Iron Law revoked.”
“Forgive me if I don’t find that particularly comforting.”
Rakken shrugged. “Hallowyn is a fool, but your sister is tenacious.”
“Don’t make yourself ill by complimenting a mortal now,” Marius couldn’t resist saying.
Rakken laughed, warm and genuine, and thank goodness he moved back to the couch, because it was far too easy to forget what he was in these rare moments when he let his guard down. He’s not your friend, Marius reminded himself. He will always act for his own interests, which will almost always conflict with yours. Remember what happened last time you let your judgement be compromised by a ruthless man with a pretty face.
“Not all of you completely lack redeeming features,” Rakken allowed, the glint in his eyes daring Marius to ask whether he was included in that category.
Marius didn’t take the bait. Instead he
took a deep breath and undid his satchel to take out his latest concoction along with another modified quizzing glass. A bit of the rowan-wood had come unstuck, and he hastily tied it back in place.
Rakken rolled his eyes as Marius examined him through it—to no effect. His wings still looked perfectly whole, not a feather out of place. Damn. Marius lowered the glass, squinted, and for his trouble got only a sensation like itching on the back of his neck. Rakken’s feathers still looked perfect.
“I don’t suppose you could use a weaker glamour, could you?” He’d seen unaided through the weaker one Rakken had cast on the undergrads before, but he was pretty sure Rakken used the strongest glamour possible on the ragged edges of his wings.
Rakken fanned a wing in and out with deliberate pleasure; the feathers moved seamlessly, impossible to say where the real ones began or ended no matter how Marius stared at them.
“As I have already explained, Marius Valstar, that would be an entirely pointless exercise. You are increasingly able to see through lesser glamours using nothing but your own will. Therefore, if you saw through a lesser glamour of mine, how would you tell whether your ‘experiments’ were working or not?”
This was a valid point, but, “It’s not like I have any other way to test them!”
“—and I do not see that glamour should be your chief concern in any case.”
Agreed; the compulsion was a much more concerning magic, but—“Asking you to compel me seems even more pointless.” And Marius didn’t much fancy bringing on a migraine.
Rakken carefully matched the fingertips on each of his hands. “You are not the only mortal in the world, Marius Valstar. Or even in this town.”
Marius glared at him. “No.” And thank the little gods that Greg was no longer here and Rakken could no longer suggest experimenting on him. It was the only good thing about his little brother’s suspension—well, that and the knowledge that he was likely safer within Stariel’s bounds. Keeping Greg safe was the reason he hadn’t tried to fight the decision when news of Greg’s brawling reached the wrong ears—presumably the earl’s. Marius was certainly going to have words with the earl about it.