by R. Cooper
Raymond moved without a sound, and Cal found himself pushed backward until his shoulders were against rough bark. Raymond’s hands skimmed over his ribs through his tunic, then settled at his sides. No more than that, but Raymond was breathing harshly.
His breath was hot over the cold tip of Cal’s ear. “I would like to have you.”
Cal curled his fingers into the wool of Raymond’s sleeves, pleased at the heat and the taut feel of muscle. He tipped his head back. “And I have offered.” He offered now, his mouth ready to be plundered, but though Raymond leaned in to let Cal taste his words, he did not kiss him.
He brushed his nose across Cal’s cheek. “You will have many when you return to the Court.” He tugged at Cal’s green hood, pulling it down so he could breathe beneath Cal’s ear, and whine, very, very quietly, when Cal grasped whatever fabric he could to pull Raymond closer.
“I… no.” Cal was already squirming at this strange, barely there touching. He turned his head to allow more, and a passing hint of Raymond’s lips at his skin was nearly his undoing. “No.” His voice shook. “I think I shall be in mourning.” Raymond went still. Cal held him tighter. “Seven years I will be gone. It is blink there, and forever here. There is so much I will miss.” He dared further, sliding his hands up to Raymond’s shoulders and then his into his hair, coarse and thick. “So, will you not? With so little time left? If it will not break some vow or take your soul—or would you be forgiven if you lie with me? I have never been clear on that question, and the priests will not answer me.”
“Callalily,” Raymond said, low and unhappy, asking Cal to stop tempting him, as though his face was not buried in the crook of Cal’s neck.
“Is there a vow?” Cal wondered with real surprise and then a hot burn of envy. He took pleasure in tangling his fingers in Raymond’s hair, only to then feel sorry and smooth it back down. “Who are you faithful to, my woodsman?” he whispered. “Who must I fight for you?” He petted the curls around Ray’s ears and enjoyed Raymond’s shiver. “I will. You were not meant to be alone. You were meant to have arms around you, and I will ensure it, even though they may not be mine. But I wish…”
Raymond kissed Cal on his cheekbone, made a rough, animal sound, then pulled Cal to his chest as though Cal were a feather. He ran his hands up and down Cal’s back and growled at the tip of his ear.
“You cannot stay here,” Raymond said, tugging Cal’s hood up and off his head so he could resettle at Cal’s neck and breathe deep against his bare throat. “They would never allow it,” he insisted, distressed for reasons Cal could not understand when Cal was so blissfully warm now. Raymond’s hands were on him, skimming over wool to find Cal’s heart, his ribs, the plane of his stomach. “They might continue to ignore it if we kept to these hidden meetings, but you could never stay. Not as my—they would not allow it.”
“They cannot touch me,” Cal reminded him breathlessly. “There would be consequences.”
Raymond tightened his hands and bit out frustrated words. “You keep saying that.”
Cal stopped as the realization hit him. “Have you been protecting me with this distance?” he gasped, outraged and happy in ways he had never expected to be, but then, he had never thought to be protected. “Have you ached and burned with envy and desire as I have? Raymond, please. Please take me now.”
Raymond raised his head. His eyes were pained and beautiful. “This is more than a tumble.”
“Of course, it is,” Cal agreed, stroking Raymond’s hair and nearly standing on Raymond’s feet to reach his face. He pulled and Raymond came down to him, easily, with a weak sound that made Cal want to kiss him sweet and slow.
He did so, with heat licking through him. The cold air was nothing more than a distant shiver when this kiss became another, and Raymond urged him back against the oak once more. Raymond was tense, hard muscle under Cal’s hands but so yielding when Cal gave him kisses and offered his neck for Raymond’s breath, and his mouth, and eventually his teeth.
A hint of them, a scratch on delicate skin. Raymond whined quietly, as if he knew what he had done to Cal with just that, or maybe as if he wanted to do more, and Cal was abruptly certain he would have Raymond tonight. He opened his mouth to make the offer again, happy to warm Raymond’s bed, and Raymond sucked in a breath over Cal’s damp skin and lifted him from the ground.
Cal wrapped his legs around him and leaned back without fear, letting Raymond nip at his flesh and soothe the sting with kisses while pushing between his thighs. The world would know what Cal had done by the bark and moss ground into his tunic, the marks Raymond would leave on his skin, but he did not care.
Cal was as hard as the oak at his back and shivering with it. “Do you not want me?” he asked, a tempting will-o-the-wisp and as desperate a man as ever was.
Raymond steadied Cal against the tree before reaching beneath Cal’s tunic. “More than you can know.” He turned his head to catch Cal’s mouth and his gasping, shocked breaths in a kiss. Raymond reached beneath his clothing too, brought their bare pricks together and kissed Cal for every pleading cry that slipped past his lips and carried through the forest.
He whispered Cal’s name as he should not have, held him there and made him weak and would not bed him properly, and it did not seem to matter to Cal’s body, which was alight and stinging. Cal’s lips were plump and hot from biting kisses, and sweet kisses, and their mouths brushing as Cal panted and begged for him. Raymond had undone Cal with one hand. Cal closed his eyes to deny it and stave off his pleasure, but Raymond dropped his head to bite a mark onto his neck, and Cal grasped Raymond’s hair at the pain and pleasure of it and finished with a feverish little cry.
He hid his face in Raymond’s shoulder and clung to him, and then did nothing but murmur nonsense to encourage Raymond to spend on him. He thought he begged more, which was no way to bargain, but when Raymond finally stopped and his seed was hot and thick on Cal’s skin, and they were both still and panting for breath, Raymond dragged his nose through Cal’s hair and put his lips to his brow and said, “Callalily,” the way no one else ever would.
Cal let his eyes fall closed, and only opened them when it seemed Raymond was trying to set him back on his feet. Cal locked his arms around Raymond’s neck and held him tight despite the quivering in his limbs and the pleasure that had left him slow. He was certain Raymond could have untangled himself and walked away without much trouble. But he did naught but sigh into Cal’s hair and reposition his hands to keep Cal with him.
If Cal had known all it would take was throwing himself into Raymond’s arms, he would have done it at their first meeting.
Raymond was taking deliberate breaths over Cal’s hair and his ears, then down to his throat again. His lips were soft over the marks he had left, which throbbed and stung in a way that made Cal want to ask for more.
“Are you sorry?” Cal wondered quietly, speaking of other things with Raymond’s curls half-looped around his fingers. “Did I force you to break your vow?”
He smiled when his ear was kissed.
“You did not force me to do anything,” Raymond answered, gruff.
“Perhaps,” Cal agreed, a hum in his blood. “But if I could persuade you easier, woodsman, we would have done this long before, and many more times since.”
“But you would go.”
That Raymond would say this and still nuzzle Cal’s cheek burned through Cal’s stunted, half-fae soul.
“Terrible woodsman,” Cal told him, with a wobble in his voice that made Raymond pull back. Cal turned his head and blinked away the tears that would come. “That is the deal that was made. My mother loves my father, but she is fae and cannot live here, and he too human to stay in the Court. When I was born, she could have kept me, but she cannot deny him anything, and did not want him to be left alone. It was a kindness.” It did not feel kind in this moment, but the intention surely mattered, as it always did with faery magic. Cal wriggled, stubbornly avoiding Raymond’s gaze, but s
hook his head in protest when Raymond gently set him down.
Cal’s tunic fell back into place as he stepped forward to get Raymond’s arms around him once again. He put his face to Raymond’s chest. “I did not bed you expecting you to keep me,” he whispered, muffled. “Even without this… I did not expect that. But I will wait for you. It is a small act. A fool’s gesture. But one I will mean.” Cal licked lips buzzing from their many kisses, then swallowed. “If I should return and find you wedded and blissful, well, it will not change my heart. But I wished you to know, before I am gone. It was a struggle to say it in my early visits, but the words fall out of me now, like this.”
The tips of his ears were beginning to grow cold again. His face was so very hot.
Raymond huffed a pained, long breath, a boar at the end of a fierce and arduous hunt, and then dropped his shoulders to bring himself close to Cal’s height. He buried his face against Cal’s neck and spoke quietly.
“You will not.”
Cal shivered, but did not follow, and Raymond did not explain. “I will not find you?” Cal guessed at last.
Raymond growled, truly growled, like a beast.
Cal felt the sound in his toes and in his heart. His hand went to the back of Raymond’s head, gentling. “Raymond.”
The sound stopped, or altered, became a low whine and then a whisper. “You will not find me wedded,” Ray admitted in a rasp against Cal’s skin. “It is not our way.”
He had no people in the village, or in any of the villages nearby, not that Cal had heard of.
It was not the fae part of Cal that was pleased to hear that Ray would not marry. Nonetheless, he frowned. “But you do not like to be alone, my woodsman, though you have chosen it. You like to speak to me, to my father, to the miller’s wife and a few others. You put flowers around your home. You would make a fine husband. I can even arrange it, if you like.” The fae part of Cal was suddenly in agreement with the rest of him, all gnashing teeth and sickly envy. But he knew what love was, saw it in his mother’s selflessness in giving up the human she adored because her life was not for him. Raymond was very tense now. Cal continued to pet him. “I could ask the Faery Queen for a boon. A blessing from the Queen herself. A nice wife for you! Or, mayhap, a nice fellow from the village, to assist you, you can say to others. Plenty of them eye you and will likely leap into your lap at the offer. For that, I cannot blame them. You are—”
“No.”
Delight slipped through Cal despite being interrupted. “No?” he wondered with feigned innocence. “Have you decided to bark at me again?”
“No wife.” Raymond scraped his teeth over skin still damp and stinging-hot from his last love bite. “No fellow.” He nearly sneered the word. “You should not have kissed me when you cannot be mine, Callalily of Hillston and the Wildwood.” Cal sucked in a breath but managed not a sound. “You have known the pleasures of the procession, and seen the trooping faeries in all their splendor, the Court itself. I am nothing to that. I am not a soldier or a lord. I will never spend more time in the village than I can help—I can’t.” Raymond tightened his grip on Cal and Cal did not think Raymond even knew he did it. Then he growled again, and it was not a thing for a mortal, godly man to do, not at all. “You are desired and lovely, and if humans don’t see this, the fae will. That, I have always known.”
“I am human, too,” Cal reminded him feverishly. “I cannot stay in the Court forever, even if I wanted to.”
Raymond stopped growling, stopped breathing, and then pulled back. He stared at Cal as if the darkness did not matter and there was nothing hidden from him. Cal stared at him in return, letting Raymond see whatever was writ on his face.
“You don’t want to?” Raymond finally asked.
Shame hit Cal all at once, mortifying and cruel. But the truth had to be said.
“There has never been a claim on me strong enough to keep me, in this world or any other. There is not likely to be, as I cannot wed as humans do, and because the fae like me, but are too aware of my human side to choose me for a consort. The only one aside from my mother who cares for me as me, half-creature, Cal of two realms, is my father. So, no, I do not wish to go, but there is naught I can do about it.” Cal summoned more courtly manners, and made himself smile. “But that is not talk for now, when I am in your arms at last, my woodsman.”
“Raymond. Not woodsman.”
Raymond was soft again, and Cal was going to break.
He attempted a light tone, despite that. “You give a fae your name?” Cal clucked his tongue. “Foolish mortal.”
“I gave it to you when I met you,” Raymond reminded him, and tugged Cal forward until their bodies were flush.
“So you did.” Cal was weak-kneed for confusing little kisses at his crown. His voice shook. “I thought you simply did not realize what I was.”
“You gave me yours.” Raymond seemed to be sniffing Cal between the kisses. Strange that Cal should not mind. But he jolted as he realized that Raymond as correct. Cal had introduced himself as Callalily, and given a man he did not know his name. His true name. And the sound of it in Raymond’s mouth had not once ever given him pause. “’Callalily of Hillston and the Wildwood,’ you said, and I stayed. I built a cottage between the two, though I am far from my family, and I stayed.” Raymond sniffed Cal again, and then made a noise that Cal could not describe as anything other than satisfied.
“Oh.” Cal curled his fingers into the laces of Raymond’s jerkin and pulled sharply. “Oh, but you did not speak.”
“You will leave.” Raymond grasped Cal through his clothes. “They told me you will leave, and I knew it was true. But I stayed,” he added, as if he knew Cal’s every worsening, sad thought and wanted them gone. “If you will mourn me, if that is more than desire for me and you do not want to go, then I will stay. One year or seven, it does not matter. Or, if you must go, I can go with you. I will tell the Faery Queen myself, if she will not release you.”
Cal closed his eyes. “I would like to see that,” he remarked faintly, though he doubted very much that even Raymond would confront the Queen in such a way. “Although, she will already insist upon meeting—Raymond? Did you… did you say you would wait?” The words could not be real, yet Raymond had no reason to lie. “You will go with me?” Cal opened his eyes, then lifted his head to try to study Raymond in the dark. “You… but even if I were a woman, we could not be wed. I am of the fae, and the priests say I have no soul.”
Raymond snorted. “And the priests will tell you I am touched by the Devil, as if all wolves are evil, and all men are pure.”
Cal stared at him in bemused wonder. “You speak nonsense now. I am telling you that I am this—that I love you but I do not expect gallantry or flattery. Although, you have never been one to flatter. If anything, I am the one to praise your strength, and your clever hands, and oh, the lightning in your eyes now, Raymond. Raymond, who gave me his name at our first meeting.” Cal frowned thoughtfully despite the ongoing nuzzling from his woodsman. “You didn’t know I wouldn’t trap you with it. Why would you do that?”
“It is our way,” Raymond huffed at him, teasing Cal somehow, though Cal knew not the joke. “You could command me, but you never have.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Cal admonished sharply. If he had known he had that power… he could not think of what he might have done. No, he knew already that the only thing he would have done differently would be to ask what he was still afraid to ask now. “Raymond,” he began, confused and pleased and alive with a mortal’s uncertainties. “Raymond, do you— Do you hear that?”
Distracted by the call of distant horns, Cal jerked out of Raymond’s arms, and was only partially aware that Raymond curled his hands and let him go.
“I’m sorry,” Raymond said, while horns signaled a joyful arrival and dire warning that echoed in Cal’s ears. “If I frighten you….”
“Frighten?” Cal turned to him before spinning to track the sounds. “Don’t you hear it?” Hi
s breath caught and he reached for Raymond, trying in vain to shove Raymond behind him. If he heard the sounds but Raymond did not, then it meant the fae had not yet crossed into this world. But it would not be long now. “It’s too early!” Cal’s voice cracked. “I am supposed to have more time. I’m meant to have more time!”
Silver light more brilliant than the moon shot through the gaps in the trees and made the Wildwood sparkle. The ground trembled with the footsteps of countless horses, so much that Raymond, who had not heard the call to the Hunt, would still feel it.
“If I ask her,” Cal whispered feverishly, “if we are clever, surely there will be a way to end it. Or she will allow you to join me—but you cannot have meant that. You’re a man who doesn’t know the faery. I would not trap you. And I still cannot ask you to wait. Perhaps we can shorten the years, or she will know a way. Raymond?” Cal asked a moment later, when there was no reply and nothing for his hand to grasp.
He stretched his arm and splayed his fingers but found only air.
Cal already felt the pang of loss, and the long, slow, stretch of years with nothing to do but wonder if he’d been forgotten. “I was meant to have more time.”
Riders in rainbowed silks appeared before him, all of them beautiful, all of them gray and meaningless to him now. Their massive, white and black mounts moved delicately over tangled roots, a wondrous sight that Cal could barely stand any more than the ribbons on their halters that dangled to the forest floor. Servants with banners followed them, and shining knights of blue and gold, barefooted archers dressed in furs, with crowns of oak resting on their pointed ears.
They nodded to Cal, each of them, and slowed to a stop in a circle around him.
Cal turned again to watch the procession, hunters with no clothes but bits of feather and grass instead, servants with flagons of wine or trays of fruits that did not grow at this time in this world.
Behind them, the last to arrive, on a black bear with no saddle, was the Faery Queen.
Cal dropped to one knee and lowered his head.