Lady of Light and Shadows

by C. L. Wilson

  Her fingers curled in his hair, gripping his head and holding it to her. The tingling laps of his tongue, the teasing brush of his hair…mercy! She was weightless, floating in warmth and sensation. Nibbling kisses trailed down her belly and lower. Her eyes flashed open. «Rain?»

  He smiled and lifted his head from her breast but did not release the Spirit weave that pressed tantalizing kisses all around the soft, flame-colored curls between her legs. «Las, shei’tani. Let me give you this. I promise you will like it.» The Spirit weave moved lower, directly into those curls. Her eyes widened, but she didn’t ask him to stop. Taking that as encouragement, he ducked his head to capture her lips. His tongue dove into the sweet, soft cavern of her mouth just as his weave dove into the softer, more secret cavern between her thighs.

  Good, sweet Lord of Light. Ellysetta’s eyes closed as wave after wave of unimaginable pleasure bombarded her senses. Heat and pressure built, every stroke of his tongue matched by an even more devastating stroke of his weave. Her hands gripped his shoulders, fingers digging into the lean muscle. He hadn’t been bragging about his mastery of Spirit. Even though she knew which touch was him and which was his weave, both felt equally, devastatingly real. The muscles in her legs and belly drew tight. «Rain…Rain, please…» His Spirit flicked with warm, insistent pressure over a spot that seemed to control every trembling nerve in her body. She cried out and her senses shattered.

  Holding her trembling body to his, Rain spun a powerful jet of Water, propelling them towards the surface of the ocean, and they burst through the cresting waves like dolphins leaping from the depths. The momentum carried them forward onto the beach, where a rapid weave of Air cushioned their descent. He landed lightly on the sand, Ellysetta in his arms, a scant two steps from the blanket he’d spread out beneath the pella tree.

  He knelt on the blanket and lowered her gently beside him. Water streamed from his hair, dripping salty wetness. With a wave of his hand, he dried them both.

  She stared up at him with a look of dazed wonder. “That was…was…”

  He smiled. “I am glad you liked it.” His eyes were glowing, burning. He’d given her release but taken none for himself. Need still pounded inside him.

  Ellysetta’s breath caught in her throat, and a new spiral of desire wound tight in her womb. He was so beautiful, so fierce, and yet so achingly gentle with her, always making sure the choice was hers and freely made. He had a power so vast he could have bent her to his will with scarcely a thought, but he used none of it to persuade her.

  She sat up and laid a hand on his bare chest, marveling at the silky smoothness of his luminous skin, the power contained in so much beauty. He froze, kneeling beside her as her hand trailed down his side, over his ribs and the rippling, defined muscles of his abdomen. The front of his trousers shifted as the hard length of flesh still hidden beneath them pulsed against the fabric, as if reaching for her.

  Her own brazenness amazed her. She was kneeling beside him, utterly naked and not the least bit embarrassed by it. Instead, she wanted him naked too. “Take these off.” She trailed her fingers across the waistband of his trousers. “I want to see you.”

  He waved, and the thin cloth dissolved into wisps of insubstantial mist.

  Ellysetta caught her breath. She wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the male form. Between the paintings of the old masters in the museum, her giggling discussions with Selianne after she’d wed, and Rain’s own Spirit weaves, she knew the basics of what to expect. Even so, nothing had prepared her for the reality of Rain or the rush of fierce desire that filled her at the sight of him.

  He was beautiful. Everywhere. Especially there, where his sex rose up from a nest of dark curls, a thick, silken column of alabaster flesh topped with a broad, slightly rosy, rounded crown. She reached out, needing to touch him, to feel that part of his body so different from her own. Her fingers closed around his shaft, and her thumb brushed across the velvety head. His skin here was so soft…and so hot, burning like a flame in her hand. His sex pulsed in her palm, and with her fingers still curved around him, she stroked down the silken length, then back up. Tingling bursts of energy shot up her arm, leaping from his body to hers.

  He lunged, catching her by surprise and bearing her back upon the cushion of fine sand. His body, the entire full, deliciously naked length of him, pressed against hers. Skin to skin, hot and heavy, a seductive weight that made her legs part and curve up around his thighs in instinctive invitation. His body gave one great, trembling quake, then froze, every muscle locked solid, hard as steel.

  “Merciful gods, shei’tani.” His eyes closed and he pressed his face into her neck. “Don’t do that again.”

  “But I want you, Rain. I want this.” She reached for him again, but he caught her hand in an iron grip.

  “Ellysetta…” His voice was a rough scrape of sound, ragged with need. “I want you too, shei’tani. And I need to mate with you now. Teska, let me spin the weave.” He groaned as the tairen surged against its bonds, reaching for her, roaring against its confinement.

  A shocking wave of hunger crashed over Ellysetta—fiery, voracious, overwhelming. She shuddered in its grip, feeling the hunger invade every cell, twisting want to clawing need. It rose up, fierce and demanding. She needed him. Now, inside her. Completing her in truth the way he’d completed her so often now in Spirit.

  “No weave,” she commanded, her voice low, bordering on a growl. “Just you and me, as we were meant to be.”

  Dear gods. Every muscle in his body clenched in agony. “There’s nothing I want more, shei’tani. I crave it so fiercely, it would frighten you to know.” He dragged in a deep breath. The gods could not have devised a more insidious torment than this: Ellysetta, wholly untouched by any sensory enhancement, not just urging him to take what every instinct of his Fey and tairen souls was screaming for him to claim, but commanding him to. “Teska. I swore an oath to your father. I cannot break it.”

  Now he could scarcely believe he’d been so stupid as to make such a vow. No mortal had a right to govern what was shared between a shei’tan and his mate. When Sol Baristani had pressed Rain for his oath that there would be no mating before marriage, Rain should have refused. But he’d wanted the guarantee of time alone with Ellysetta each day, to court her slowly and win her trust so the bond between them could form.

  “I didn’t swear that oath,” she protested. “When you wager with tairen…” She squirmed against him, her hips wriggling until his heart nearly exploded in his chest.

  She was going to kill him. Without a blade, without a spell, she was going to be the ruin of him. Within, the tairen roared and lunged against its bonds, raging, furious, driven mad by the need to claim its mate.

  “I swore it,” he rasped. “I’ve already bent my oath as far as I can. This would break it.”

  Her eyes flashed. For a moment he feared she would demand what he had no more strength to resist, but instead she said, “Then spin your weave, shei’tan. Now.”

  Spirit rushed from his hands in twin rivers of magic so dense and shining, the whole world took on a glowing lavender tinge until the weave settled to illusory perfection. He spared only the smallest fraction of his concentration to spin his leather breeches back into place in the desperate hope of keeping his honor intact. His hands and mouth he gave free rein, falling upon Ellysetta’s sweet body with ravening hunger just as the Spirit Rain caught the Spirit Ellysetta in a fierce, hungry embrace.

  She reached for him with greedy hands and growled in frustration when they found the warm barrier of his leathers rather than the heated naked flesh she wanted. Her fingers dug into the waistband and tugged. “Take these back off,” she insisted, then cried out as his mouth closed around the sensitive peak of one breast, setting her blood on fire.

  Hands, mouth, teeth, tongue, both real and magic, worked their way down her body, finding every sensitive spot, tormenting every nerve ending until every fiber of her body came alive with hot, electric sensati
on. The muscles in her thighs began to tremble, then to quake as in both body and mind her passion exploded in a breathtaking rush. But even before the first shudders ceased, he began working his magic again, driving her to a second, more powerful climax, then a third.

  “Rain, dear gods, you’re going to kill me.” Tremor after tremor shook her, the pleasure intense and ceaseless. She could no longer tell what was real and what was illusion. Her hands gripped his shoulders, nails digging into his skin. “Come to me.”

  “Not yet.” His face was fierce, his eyes blazing like the sun, as he began driving her with relentless determination towards yet another orgasm.

  She didn’t want this again. She wanted him, not making her fly apart, but flying apart with her. Conscious thought shredded, and wild, insistent instinct rose in its place. She reached for the rigid bulge of his sex, cupping him through the heated leather. Using the technique he’d shown her, she shared the essence of herself with him. Energy leapt from her body to his in a streaming rush: hot, electric, exquisite. He gasped, nearly losing control of his weave as the dazzling force poured into him.

  “Now,” she insisted.

  Flames scorched him. She wasn’t begging any longer. She was commanding—and not only by sharing her essence. With the same instinctive, unintentional yet astonishingly powerful weave of Spirit he’d seen her use before, she was pushing him, urging him to fulfill her. Compelling him.

  He could not deny her. In truth, he didn’t want to even if he could.

  In his weave, Rain’s body sank deep into hers, and she cried out at the glorious fullness of it, the feeling of wholeness and completion. Their Spirit bodies began a fierce rhythm, limbs twining, hips rising and falling in unison.

  Rain’s throat strained as the need grew and skin stretched taut over bunching muscle. Every soft cry wrenched from her lips was a flame cast upon tinder. He poured himself into his weave, poured his magic across her senses.

  Without warning, the wild force of her own untamed magic erupted around them both. Spirit threads dense with power exploded from her, writhing, twining, merging with his weave, driving him with the same relentless mastery as his Spirit drove her. Spirit Ellysetta locked her legs about his hips and rolled on top of him. His breath caught as he looked up at her: wild, glorious, fiercely female, her eyes blazing, her hair a nimbus of living flame around her. An ancient warrior goddess from the time before memory.

  She rode him, her silken hips rising and falling, her inner muscles clasping him so tight each movement was an agony of delight. His weave surged around her and he gave himself up to hers. Nothing else in the world existed except him and her, and this breathless dance of Spirit that grew faster and wilder, until pleasure shattered them both and their cries merged with the rhythmic crash of the surf tumbling across the sands of Great Bay.

  “I don’t know what came over me,” Ellysetta muttered yet again as she and Rain alit in the cobbled courtyard at the back of her family’s home. The hot blush in her cheeks hadn’t faded since they’d left Great Bay.

  “I don’t know either, but I hope it comes over you again. Soon.” Rain grinned and dodged her slap with a warrior’s rapid reflexes.

  His grin faded quickly when he caught sight of Bel standing grim and silent in the back doorway of her parents’ small home. The look in Bel’s eyes was one Rain recognized, and it never boded well.

  “Ellysetta.” Rain lifted her hand and pressed a quick kiss in her palm. “Give me a moment, shei’tani. I’ll be in shortly.”

  She frowned at them both, realizing something was up, but then nodded and stepped past him into the house.

  When she was gone, Bel spun a quick privacy weave. “I’ve heard from the quintet we sent to Norban. They found Sian and Torel’s steel, along with scores of barbed sel’dor arrows, scattered over what was obviously a battlefield.”

  Rain’s mouth tightened. The news wasn’t unexpected—they’d already presumed the worst—but the sel’dor arrows…Barbed sel’dor arrows had been the Eld soldier’s weapon of choice against Fey for millennia. “Has Dorian been informed?”

  “Marissya brought him the news a bell ago. He says it’s not enough proof to act. That anyone could have made the arrows—or even dug them up from an ancient battlefield.”

  Anger and frustration curled in Rain’s belly. Dorian was determined not to see the truth before him—as if by ignoring the signs of the growing Eld threat, he could make it simply go away.

  “There’s more,” Bel said. His face was grim. Whatever more there was, it wasn’t good.

  “Tell me.”

  “One of the men they were seen talking to in Norban—a pubkeeper—is missing, too, and is now presumed dead. Sebourne’s already calling for an investigation of the Fey.”

  Rain closed his eyes. That was all they needed. More weapons in Lord Sebourne’s anti-Fey arsenal.

  “That’s not the worst of it, Rain. Our warriors found another Fey’cha where Sian and Torel were slain. A red blade, bearing the mark of Gaelen vel Serranis.”

  “Does Sebourne know that?”

  “Nei, thank the gods. None know but our warriors. I told them to destroy it.”

  Vel Serranis. Again. Had the dahl’reisen slipped so far down the Dark Path that he’d thrown in with the greatest enemy of the Fey? Had he slain all those Celierians in the north, murdered Sian and Torel, and sent that boy to stab Ellysetta after all? Rain’s heart clutched at the thought.

  Gods help Celieria and the Fading Lands if the dahl’reisen and the Mages had joined forces. And gods curse Rain for an unworthy fool if he didn’t get Ellysetta and Marissya both out of Celieria and to the safety of the Fading Lands without further delay.

  “Thank you, Bel.” Rain dispersed Bel’s weave and went inside, heading immediately to Ellysetta’s side.

  Sensing his turmoil, she brushed her fingers across the back of his hand. Tendrils of peace and concern wafted over him. “What is it, Rain?”

  He stroked her fingers with his own and lifted them to his lips for a kiss. “Do you trust me, Ellysetta? To do what is best for you and your family?”

  She searched his gaze, then nodded. “Yes, of course I do, Rain.”

  “Then there is a thing I would ask of your father, but I want your approval first.”

  “I wish to be released from my pledge to wed Ellysetta next week, so we may instead wed tomorrow, after the completion of the Bride’s Blessing.” Rain announced the request baldly as he, Ellysetta, and her parents sat at the small Baristani kitchen table. Bel and the rest of the quintet had taken the twins into the parlor to occupy them with unwrapping the last few dozen wedding presents and give Rain a measure of privacy for his discussion.

  “Tomorrow?” Lauriana protested. “You can’t possibly be serious!”

  Sol frowned in sharp concern. “Why the hurry?”

  Rain glanced down at his hands. His fingers flexed, wanting to wrap around the comforting grip of sharp Fey steel and confront the faceless danger he’d sensed for so long. “At twelfth bell tomorrow, Celieria’s Council of Lords will convene for the final debate and vote to open the northern border to Eld. You know I’ve been working all week to prevent that from happening, but unless half a dozen lords change their minds or the king invokes primus—neither of which is likely—we know the vote will pass. I want Ellysetta out of the city and on her way to safety before the sun sets on a Celieria that welcomes Mages within its borders.”

  “Safety?” Lauriana challenged. “You think we’re foolish enough to believe that’s what waits for her in the Fading Lands?”

  “More safety there than here,” Rain said.

  “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  “Madame Baristani, have you forgotten that someone tried to kill your daughter last week—or that something attacked her through her dreams just four nights past?”

  “You Fey are magical creatures. Who’s to say you didn’t stage both attacks just to convince us Ellie’s in danger?”

  “Ma
ma!” Ellysetta protested.

  “Laurie!” Sol scolded at the same time.

  Rain’s eyes flashed dangerously. “Do not dare suggest the Fey would ever harm Ellysetta. Every warrior in this city—every warrior in the Fading Lands—would die to spare her the slightest wound. Two already have.”

  Sol stared at Rain in shock. “What?”

  “I sent two Fey north to find out what they could about Ellysetta’s origins. They were murdered.” He covered Ellysetta’s hand with his own. She’d been upset when he told her the news, but it had helped to convince her of the seriousness of the threat. He hoped her parents would be equally understanding. “I received confirmation of it today when we returned from our courtship bells.”

  “Murdered…by whom?”

  “We believe it was the Eld, which means if the trade vote passes—as it appears it will—the same folk who murdered my men will have much easier access to Ellysetta and your family.”

  Unblinking brown eyes regarded him solemnly. A long moment passed in silence.

  “Sol!” Lauriana protested. “You can’t seriously be considering his request.”

  “How would you feel, Laurie, if she were hurt—maybe even killed—because we were too selfish to let her go?”

  “Will it feel any worse than when we send her to the Fading Lands and she loses her soul to these godless sorcerers because there’s no one there to be her beacon?”

  “Mama!”

  “Laurie!” Sol stared at her as if she’d grown two heads. “What’s gotten into you? The wedding’s already been agreed to. She’s going to the Fading Lands. The only question is whether she goes tomorrow or a few days after that.”