by Nhys Glover
"So thirty fully trained men with magic. What kinds of magic?" Moyna asked, with growing interest. She had been reluctant to accept there were Elemental Masters not born to the Godling up to this point. She had believed the existence of Elemental Mistresses was the Goddess' way to right the magical gender imbalance the Godling had wrought.
"All kinds. All elements. Though I know of no other thought-readers like Red." Trace smirked a little at the name he'd given Flea. He'd used it on her while we'd walked out, watched her flare up, and had clearly chosen to continue using it, just to rile her up.
"Red?" Moyna queried, one eyebrow arching.
I answered for him. "Flea. He calls Flea Red for obvious reasons. You know of Flea, so I was told."
Moyna nodded. "A unique talent, and one that could prove very useful in this war."
"I have already found a possible use for her magic," I began, wishing I'd had a chance to run it past Flea first before offering up her services. But the secret Masters were too valuable to let slip through our fingers, and we did need to know they were genuinely converted to our side.
"Any magic dampeners?" Darkin asked, likely thinking Flea would be of no use if there was one of those in the group, or any had access to that kind of magic.
Trace shook his head. "Not that I am aware of. Certainly. one such as that would not be welcome in our midst. Our magic is all we are. All we are good for. Threaten that and we are less than nothing."
"That's shite!" I swore with annoyance. "You have value way beyond your skills."
"What have you in mind?" Moyna interrupted, bringing me back to my plan and covering up my unladylike language. She didn't approve of my commoner husbands or the way I let them influence me.
After scowling briefly but pointedly at Trace, just to reinforce my opinion, I turned back to Moyna. "Trace will return to the Brotherhood and convince as many as he can that our cause is just. He will bring those who may join us to a rendezvous point, where Flea will listen in to discover who might turn traitor on us. Those genuinely interested in joining us will be brought here to the stronghold, where they will be put to use as something other than guilty secrets."
Moyna cocked her head to the side and studied Trace closely. "What is to say you will not return to the Godling and inform on us. What you plan to do is incredibly dangerous."
Trace looked at me and gave a cocky smile. "I would rather follow the Goddess than the Godling. She's better looking. And danger is what I live for. I walked into this stronghold alone and stole your most prized possession right from under your nose. Seeking out my brothers and convincing them to change sides is insignificant next to that."
"But what of those who might turn you in for your talk of joining the rebellion?" Pointy-beard said.
"What rebellion?" Trace laughed. He seemed to have taken to my plan and was already working out the finer details as he was challenged. "Any who seem unwilling will simply forget I ever mentioned it. If Red finds a traitor in the pack later... Well, by then we will all be long gone."
Moyna looked around her and saw nodding heads. "Very well, we agree to your plan. As for you, Goddess, will you now join your husbands at the new Airling Training Centre?"
I nodded. "I will. Darkin and I will involve ourselves in the plans for our army's use. It may well be that its involvement will end the war for good."
Heads around the room bobbed in agreement. In my mind, I saw a hundred airlings flying into battle, and the Godling's forces unable to fight an attack from the air. My airlings would be equal to ten mayhap twenty men each.
We left the meeting shortly after the discussion on the airlings had ended. Though I wanted to nut-out a plan with Trace and Flea, the late hour and exhaustion were making me see double.
"Telling Flea − or maybe asking Flea might be the best option in this − to be involved with the plan for the Abominations can wait until morning. You are dead on your feet and Trace isn't much better," Darkin told me when I raised the idea sleepily.
I looked at Trace and saw how he was struggling to hide his many aches and pains. "Have the healers looked at your wounds?"
He nodded. "They were very complimentary in that regard. Said that whoever had tended me had worked magic on me."
I gave a little laugh. "At the time I thought it was all the moss' doing. I didn't know I had healing magic."
Trace's eyebrows rose. "I did not know you had healing magic."
I shrugged. "I have more magic than I know what to do with, to be honest. I wish it were transferable. Give someone magic, like you take away a memory."
Calun turned to me, and I saw something flicker in his eyes as he opened to me. I saw his idea immediately. 'What if you could?'
'Surely the Goddess would already have gifted the magic where it needs to be. Me doling it out might be... I don't know, like I was going against her greater plan?'
'What does your Knowing say?'
'You know as much as I do on that.'
'So you need to go into your inner place and find out. What would it mean to the war if airling troopers could shoot fire down on the enemy, or lightning bolts? They'd be unstoppable.'
I swallowed hard. Give away my powers? Powers I hadn't fully explored yet? But it was a waste to have them all bottled up in one person. There was only so much I could do with them at any one time. And if anything happened to me, then they'd all be lost.
'I will see what the Knowing says,' I said to Calun and turned back to the others.
"Do you all find that as annoying as I do?" Trace asked, glancing between Calun and me.
Rama growled a little. Dark scowled. But Jaron answered the stranger in our midst.
"They'll tell us if we need to know. It is what it is. Having been in her head on many occasions, I can assure you it isn't anything special. So much girlie chatter is exhausting."
Girlie chatter? Me? I gave my youngest husband a shove to show him what I thought of the idea my head was filled with girlie chatter.
Jaron laughed. "Does that mean I'm sitting out tonight?"
"Nobody sits out tonight," I answered severely, though I was only joking. Right now sex was the last thing on my exhausted mind, although I had an idea that wouldn't remain the case for long. I needed my men. I needed our connection on the deepest level available to us. And sleep was irrelevant next to that.
I turned my attention to Trace and leaned up to give him a peck on the cheek. "Sleep well. Tomorrow we start planning in earnest. I'm glad you agree and will go along with my idea."
His dark eyes were warm as they looked down at me, but I could see my comment about nobody sitting out had touched a nerve. He was going to have to get used to the change in our relationship fast.
"The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of bringing my brothers over to the rebel side where they really belong. I think they will be open to it when they find out they are not a mistake of nature. I know I like seeing myself through your eyes." The love in his dark orbs made my chest ache. I loved him far more than I should.
Trace gritted his teeth and his expression grew stony as I let my men lead me away. But there was nothing I could do about it. We were never meant to be, no matter what life path we'd taken back there in the woods.
Once in our room with the door closed, I stood staring at the huge bed I shared with my men. It looked enticing. So very enticing.
Before I knew what was happening, my clothes were being stripped from my body and I was being led to that bed. I collapsed face-first into it with a long moan.
"I ache all over," I muttered into the soft bedding.
"We know, and we're going to fix it," Dark said soothingly.
I turned my head to the side and saw that my men were now naked and had taken up positions around my body. When had that happened? Had I fallen asleep for a minute? Calun was at my head, Rama and Jaron at my feet and Darkin, with a bottle of healing unguent, was at my shoulders.
"I need to tell you something," I muttered tiredly.
"Can it wait?" Dark asked.
I shook my head like a little girl. "No. I need to say I am sorry, and I hope you can forgive me and trust me again. For what I did with Trace."
Calun's fingers buried themselves in my hair and began to knead my aching scalp. I felt his unconditional love rolling over me as an almost physical thing. It said I had nothing to be sorry for, nothing that needed forgiving.
Dark stroked a hand down my back. "If you can forgive me for what I did, then I can surely forgive what you did. Especially as you have no plans to continue the relationship now you remember us. Or so Rama told us."
"That was different. You were following the Will of the Goddess."
"And you weren't? It seems to me that it was all her work − letting you lose your memories and be stolen away. Maybe even the beastling attack. Your Knowing would have warned you what was coming if she had wanted you to avoid it. But she put you where you needed to be to bring Trace, and possibly his brothers, into the fold."
That he'd come to the same conclusion as I had made me feel a little better. But one thing was still gnawing at me.
"I shared pleasure with him so soon after supposedly losing my husband."
Rama laughed as he took up one of my feet and began massaging the sole, working his thumb deep into the centre of it until I moaned with relief. I hadn't been aware of just how sore my feet were until he'd started working on them. But he must have. Or they must have, to have come up with this idea.
"A husband you would never have known existed unless you had evidence you had a babe," Jaron pointed out, taking up the other foot and working magic on it in the same way Rama was doing to its partner.
"I knew someone existed. I felt the love, even if I didn't remember the source or object of that love. So by allowing..."
"Sweetling, stop," Jaron interrupted. "It doesn't matter now. You're back with us, and that's all that matters. Are we jealous of the time you spent with that bastard? Sure we are. Does it change anything between us? Not in the least. What has changed things, and will take a little while to heal, is the damage done to our brother-bond. And that has nothing to do with you and will be fixed by us in our own time."
I looked up at Dark as he began to knead my shoulders with the slick oil on his hands. I moaned at the painful pleasure his touch elicited.
"They're not as quick to forgive as you," he told me as he dug his thumbs into tight muscles.
"They need to be. You did what you had to do. Have they no understanding of what it is to be a leader and to have to make the hard choices?" I muttered.
Calun worked my scalp and soothed my soul a little more.
"Let it go, my fearless defender," Dark said with amusement in his voice. I couldn't see his face now, as I'd closed my eyes to fully appreciate the healing each man was doing on different, aching parts of me. "If any of them had made my choice I would have fought it. I fought it. Which means I need forgiveness from myself now, more than I need it from any of these idiots."
The grumblings around me were half-hearted. It was as close as they were going to get to mending their breech for the moment.
Rama and Jaron had finished working on my feet and must have found some of Dark's balm because something slippery was now being worked into my calves and thighs. As hands moved ever closer to my core, I began to feel a new tension in my body. But this one had nothing to do with walking leagues through wilderness, carrying a half-conscious man on my shoulders.
Darkin moved from my shoulders down one arm as Calun finished his head massage and moved to the other arm. Four sets of hands were stroking along my limbs like the tide − long slides up and long slides down my arms and legs in unison. I was putty in their hands, melted wax puddled on the bed, utterly overtaken by the sensual deluge of gentle but insistent hands.
I moaned into the bedding. The need for sleep evaporating a little more the longer my men worked on me. I should have been so relaxed I was falling asleep, but it was the opposite.
Hands slid up my inner thighs and reached my nether lips. Others stroked down my back and between my cheeks. Others still, slid down to stroke along the edge of my half-buried breasts. So many hands doing so many magical things to me.
"Over," Dark announced, and I was only too happy to oblige. But I didn't have to do anything. Strong hands took my body and turned it, as if I weighed no more than a feather. And I was floating as light as a feather during this blissful interlude.
More oil and more stroking, massaging, kneading hands, until I was going slowly mad from the erotic pleasure of it. I kept my eyes closed. Though I could tell who was where just by the sense of them, I didn't want the individuals to interfere with the unification of the bond they were weaving around us with every stroke, every caress.
A mouth closed over mine, another over a nipple, a third over another nipple and a fourth over my cleft, licking and tasting and sucking where they would. We had done this before, but it had never felt this good, this right. Four mouths on the most sensitive areas of my body, kissing and sucking and laving me until I cried out my first release.
I felt their satisfaction, their pleasure, and then I understood it. I'd had my barriers down the whole time and they'd been experiencing the sensual pleasure of skin being stroked, skin being sucked and licked, along with me. And my climax, too, had felt as if it was their own.
I smiled as I panted, opening my eyes so I could see Calun looking down into my face. My gaze met green orbs filled with satiated pleasure.
"Missed you, missed this," I said with almost no voice.
And then the mouths went on with their torturous bliss, until I was screaming out their names, screaming out to be filled.
Dark collapsed onto the bed and then hauled me over him so I was lying with my back against his front, his hard cock pressed between my cheeks. I was slick with oil, and Dark must have added more because we slid against each other, slippery and friction-free. Rama came down over me, just as slick with oil. Hot and slick. He slid his body up mine, making me conscious, if I hadn't been before, of his very attentive cock between us.
For a long time I was slid and sandwiched between two hot bodies. It reminded me of the pool at the cavern. Rama was kissing one shoulder as he slid over me while Darkin kissed the other as he slipped under me.
I opened my eyes and saw Jaron and Calun watching us, working their own cocks at the erotic sight we made. I was almost completely hidden by the much larger muscular bodies, and yet they could all feel what I was feeling. And I could feel what Calun was feeling as he pleasured himself.
When it happened, I wasn't sure, but I felt that Rama was no longer sliding outside my body, but inside. He'd breeched my core and was continuing to slip and slide from within. A different rhythm started up between the brothers, a different ebb and flow. I wanted to wrap my legs around Rama's hips, but that would have lost me the feel of Dark's cock as it slid between my cheeks. I could hear from his rasping breaths that he was close to coming.
When he did explode and his hot flow coated my back, I pushed on Rama, making him fall to his back so I could be on top. I reached for Calun. I wanted him in my mouth more than anything else right then. It was almost an ache, my need to taste him.
He was there before I had finished the thought. I let him take my head and move it over him as he needed, while Rama took my hips and moved them as he needed. All the while the delicious tension was building inside me again.
Something wet was on my back. A cloth, wiping away the evidence of Dark's pleasure. Then more oil stroked onto me by hands, down my back and into my crevice, before a finger breeched me there. I broke apart at the novel, invasive sensation and pulled away from Calun, so I could breathe in gasps of air. Gods, what was that? Why would something so alien send me over the edge so suddenly? But there was no time for considering it. The sensations were continuing to bombard me.
My climax pushed Rama over the edge and he drew out of me so he could spill his seed between our bodies. T
hen I was being hauled up by my hips from behind before the cum touched me, and moved away from Rama so Jaron could sink deep inside and Calun could move in to regain possession of my mouth.
But I wanted to do more than just suck his cock. I wanted to nuzzle into his balls and lick them, suck each into my mouth in turn, drawing them down in a way I knew Calun loved. The images I sent him had him eager for me to do what I wanted. It was not as easy as I pictured it though, given the increasing internal tension Jaron's thrusts was creating. My few brains cells left to me were focused inside me, on seeing in my mind Jaron's long hard cock pumping in and out of my liquid inner folds.
And who was there, between my outer folds, circling my pleasure nub? Dark? Gods, Dark! What was he doing? Sucking me there while his brother was inside me? How? Oh, Gods, I didn't care how, just that he was doing it! And sending me over the edge.
The release was hard and ferocious. Calun couldn't hold back from the force of it. I'd wanted him to come in my mouth, but this climax had caught us both by surprise. He wrapped my hair around him as Rama loved to do and splintered apart.
And when Jaron pushed his thumb into my back entrance again I shattered once more. But it wasn't over. They weren't finished with me yet. Dark continued to suck on my nub while Jaron pounded into me with his hard cock and pressed just inside my tight circle in time with his own thrusts. I came again and again and again in quick succession until I couldn't take any more, and my legs began to shake and give way under me.
Jaron surged one more time and came on a roar. A moment later, Dark slid up under my body so I could collapse onto his chest with Jaron on top of me.
Calun moved in close on one side while Rama did the same on the other. I was sandwiched in so tightly on all sides by solid, burning male flesh that it was hard to breathe. And I felt supremely safe, sheltered and loved. More than anything I felt loved.
Chapter Seventeen
FLEA