“All right. I will do as you ask. We shall resume and I will not stop no matter how you beg. But, Lady,” Ari grasped her jaw in his right hand while his eyes bored into hers, intense, commanding, “you will obey me without fail. Our lives rest on your obedience.” Ari released her jaw but continued to hold her gaze.
She swallowed hard. I thought I was frightened before.
Through endless hours, he teased her to the edge, always bringing her back before she broke. True to his word, Ari no longer needed her to tell him when to stop. It was as if he had crawled into Fleur’s head and with ungodly precision driven her repeatedly to the brink of climax, then stopped.
At every apex of her arousal, his baritone sternly ordered, “Not yet, Lady.” All the while, in the background, the sigil crystal glowed through a brilliant spectrum of colors, its humming vibrations increasing in volume and range.
In ringing tones of supreme authority, he repeatedly demanded she respond to him verbally, “Yes, Ari.” By the strength of his unbending will, he forbade her the tempting retreat into insanity.
She dimly recognized her loss of rational thought. Her years of study in meditation, the centering mantras she had committed to memory were as dried leaves before the firestorm of arousal that was her warlord and cinnagin.
Lost inside herself, she could only cling, tenaciously, to one outside influence—DeTano. He forced her to.
She was distantly aware of a large, eight-sided, stone room with windows all around. Somewhere in the back of her brain, she identified it as the Chambre Cristalle, but then insatiable, monstrous lust clawed away at her mind, swamping awareness. Her whole body pleaded for respite. Between her legs knelt a man, but all she saw was his straining erection. She labored to move herself to it, writhing on the raised bed. Moaning, she tried to form the words to beg but only managed unintelligible grunts.
“Fleur! Look at me. Fleur! Obey me. Open your eyes. Open your eyes!” the voice demanded. “Obey me, Fleur.” The voice broke as hips pounded hard between her thighs. She fought to look at him. Close above her, wildly feral eyes demanded her obedience. A man, his hair, forehead and shoulders dripping with sweat, tortured her.
“Stay with me. Look at me,” he snarled.
She could scarce hear him! The diamantorre were near-deafening, the room full of glaring brilliant light. Screaming, keening wildly, she clung to the man who cruelly tormented her.
“Fleur!” He shouted, throwing his head back and brutally slamming into her. “Fleur, now. Come now!”
* * * * *
Ari’s mind floated, disembodied, cocooned in the vast, amorphous awareness that was Her, the Senzienza—Verdantia’s sentience. Then out of the nothingness:
Warmth. My child. Be welcome.
Her thought, if he could call it that, seemed to echo through a timeless void—no future, no past—only the everlasting now. He lacked the vocabulary to convey his experience of Her. The words did not exist in any language. Another impression began to form:
Approval. The female.
A sense of Her deep satisfaction suffused his awareness replaced by a concept that expanded until it immersed his entire being in urgency:
Insistence. Find the other.
Then, leaving him with a sense of profound approval, She withdrew.
He swam slowly up a long, dark tunnel to consciousness following the softly glowing radiance of his bodily tether. He lay quietly on the luminous diamantorre dais, feeling the weight of his flesh, experiencing the air passing through his nose, the expansion of his lungs, simply occupying a body again. He focused on pulling his physical faculties together. Falling face first onto the marble floor would not add to his gravitas.
He had savagely fought to control the vast radiance powering through their bodies, a veritable tsunami of energy coming in mind-numbing waves, paralleling their sexual climax. His mental discipline, indomitable from years of harsh training, had strained to its uttermost to hold focus on the transference of the volatile current from their minds and bodies to the diamantorre. He had struggled grimly to maintain his concentration through one white-hot surge after another until he feared his iron command would fail. Abruptly, the firestorm had subsided and he had floated bodiless, a gossamer thread of brilliant white linking him to his physical form.
The experience of Her presence is humbling. What does “find the other, mean? She has never conveyed meaning so clearly—or so obscurely. She definitely approves of our princess.
The princess.
When he entered the ritual chamber, his reaction to Fleur had frozen him in place. The embodiment of all he fought for stood before him. Her lovely body spoke of grace and innocence. The light treble of her musical voice had wrapped around his unruly cock and stroked with torturous sensuality. Her exquisite delicacy and naked vulnerability had engaged all his male instincts. The need to defend and protect, to possess her completely, body and soul, had consumed him. Rarely had his duty run so parallel with his desires.
The princess.
He lay on the diamantorre’s brilliantly radiant surface alone.
Did she survive?
Was she sane?
Groaning, he forced his body to move.
Deliriously excited magisters and novitiates, docenti and elders surrounded him as he staggered out of the Chambre Cristalle.
“Magister! Sir! Magister DeTano, you must look! They are gone. All of them, just gone!” The chorus of excited voices called him to a tower window.
“You should have seen it, sir. Astounding! The Haarb legions. They just—disintegrated. They—dissolved.”
Dumbly, he stumbled to the embrasure and scanned the surrounding countryside. Initially, he saw nothing but what he expected, a sickly green ocean of portable dwellings laid out in an orderly grid, cooking fires and armament, tethered horses resting hip-shot in the sun—the organized camp of an invading army. What he didn’t see struck him like a slap to the face. Soldiers. Infantry. Cavalrymen. The seething horde that had filled the battlefields surrounding Sylvan Mintoth like a sea of infesting beetles was gone. The only movements were riderless horses, wandering idly, cropping grass. The air sparkled thickly with a diamond-like haze—the energy field. But it was on the wrong side. No longer between Sylvan Mintoth and the invaders, it now encompassed the empty encampments.
Incredulous, he looked at the docenti closest to him. “I don’t understand.”
“We don’t either, sir. But it is spectacularly thrilling! Sylvan Mintoth’s tower has not sheltered this much area since the original Tetriarch. We must research this to determine what is happening.”
Ari pushed back from the window. Another Tetriarch. Is it possible?
He returned his focus to his present circumstances. “I must attend the princess. When you know something, tell me.”
* * * * *
Ari kept vigil by Fleur’s bedside as she lay comatose; he clasped her limp hand, murmuring outrageous promises if she would only awake—sane. He could manage half an hour in a chair, quiescent, before he had to get up and pace.
Her personal attendants and family members came and left but he could not make himself leave her. He felt a deep concern for her far beyond the customary responsibility he accepted for his partner in the Rites. He did not wish to examine his reasons.
Ari insisted on caring for the princess himself. A savage possessiveness overwhelmed him when any other hand but his touched her. He bathed her with herb-scented water to soothe and cool her fever-blistered skin. He moistened her dry, cracked lips with honeyed balm. He combed gently, patiently, through the tangles and knots in her fine blond hair, fanning its length out on her pillow. He forced small amounts of fruit ices between her lips to give her some sustenance.
Mostly, he sat by her bed, holding her hand clasped in his, speaking softly to her. “Come back to me, Princess. Verdantia needs you. Come back to me, little one. Come back.”
And he paced.
He fought a desperate, though unseen, battle, the outco
me of which was more vital to him than any physical conflict he had ever waged. Ari cajoled and pleaded with his princess not to give in to the madness, asking her repeatedly to come back. Come back to him. He refused to acknowledge the despair creeping into his heart as the hours without response mounted. Grimly determined, he spent more and more time attempting to evoke a response from an insensible, comatose Fleur.
The chamber attendants whispered among themselves about the intimate care Ari gave her. Sari nodded toward him as he gently tended Fleur. “Have you ever seen such in your life?” she asked her sister, Camilla, under her breath.
“Never. Himself looks as bad as our sweet pet.” Camilla pursed her lips and shook her head at his disheveled, gaunt appearance. He had not slept. He had barely eaten. He heard them but he could not bring himself to care.
Sometime into the evening of the third day—he really was not sure of the time—Ari raised his exhausted head from where he had laid it briefly on her bed to meet her weary blue gaze and wan smile.
“Did it work?” her broken voice whispered.
Disbelief and exhaustion struck him temporarily mute.
“Yes,” Ari murmured after a short pause. Thank the gods.
His hand moved to cradle her cheek. His thumb outlined her full upper lip. He cleared his throat—there seemed to be something lodged in it—and repeated more clearly, “Yes, my Princess, it worked. The beacon streaming from Sylvan Mintoth is intensely powerful. It is—” Ari stopped, groping for words, his customary smooth command deserting him. “Unparalleled. I have never seen its like.”
“Oh. Well. That's good.” Fleur nestled further into his hand, her eyelids closing. Her whisper caught his attention.
“My Lady, did you say something?” He leaned his ear close to her mouth, not sure she had spoken.
“Umm…” She was fading. “I heard you, Ari,” she breathed out. “I came back to you.”
As Ari watched, she released a deep sigh and slid into a natural sleep, a slight smile tipping her lips.
His mouth curved as he gazed at her slight form. “Sleep, darling girl, your capital is safe,” he whispered.
Standing, he softly kissed the back of her hand and went to find a bed.
In spite of his exhaustion, sleep eluded him. He could not put to rest the extraordinary thoughts chasing around his brain. No other partner in his extensive past had caused the violent reaction he experienced when touching Fleur. There was something “other-worldly” about it, as if Fleur was a conduit for all Verdantia’s power, as if She channeled her vast energies through his princess’s body. The sentience had whispered a message of satisfaction at their pairing. Extraordinary. Unprecedented.
“No,” he groaned. I don’t want to care for her. I will not care for her.
Again Ari wondered at the cryptic “find the other”, turning the possible meanings over repeatedly in his brain. He stared at the ceiling until the weight of exhaustion pulled his eyelids closed.
* * * * *
Ari laid his vicious mood the following morning at the feet of his troubling thoughts, particularly the terrible risk the princess had taken. No matter the peril to the planet, her value to Verdantia made any gamble with her life too costly. She and Patricio needed that point driven home.
Now, he thought venomously, would be an excellent time to pay a visit to a certain elderly L’anziano.
Pounding up the staircase to Elder Patricio's chambers, picturing the ways to slowly prolong the elder’s death, Ari met Patricio coming down accompanied by a fellow member of the L’anziano.
Lifting Patricio’s bewildered companion by the collar of his robes, Ari flattened him against the limestone wall. “Stay out of this, Eirdale.”
“Conte DeTano.” Elder Patricio was an emaciated shadow of himself.
Jerking his poniard from its sheath, Ari held its deadly point directly under the elder's chin. A small red droplet immediately formed, then trickled down Patricio’s throat, to be joined by another, and another until a rivulet of red flowed down Patricio’s neck and into his collar.
“You vile, loathsome, repugnant excuse for a man, how could you do it? Hmm? And you say you have feelings for her, you contemptible pile of maggot-ridden offal. A fifth-level novitiate! Are you even aware of how close I came to losing her?”
Falling back, a hand clasped to his neck, Patricio sat abruptly on the step. “Yes. Oh yes,” he whispered. He looked up at Ari with tears filling his rheumy eyes. For the first time Ari could ever remember, Elder Patricio appeared utterly defeated.
“I will accept whatever you wish to do to me, Conte. It cannot be worse than these final few days. I died every minute of every hour she just lay there.” The elder's voice broke and he hunched over on the limestone step. His shoulders shook spasmodically.
Ari sheathed his knife and looked upward. Frustration roiled through him. Damn, damn, damn. It is beyond me to kill this pathetic creature.
Pulling a linen square from his sleeve, Patricio wiped his face and inelegantly blew his nose. Inhaling raggedly, he straightened a little.
“We know what you did for her, Conte DeTano.”
Bracing his hands on his knees, pushing himself awkwardly upright, Elder Patricio stood unsteadily and faced Ari.
“We owe you an immense debt. The governing council of the L’anziano agrees. If you wish to dissolve the marriage contract between your Houses, it will be so.”
Ari stood, fulminating, mute, face to face with the Elder. What do I say? Fuck. What do I want? Fuck, fuck, fuck! Long seconds drew out as the two men faced off, not even a foot separating them. “You will take better care of our Principessa Royale in the future, Elder, or I will ensure you die in truth.”
Patricio shrank back slightly, then straightened. “As you say. Conte DeTano, as you say,” he solemnly confirmed. “And the contract?”
Ari opened his mouth to speak, only to snap it closed. Why am I hesitating? Fuck. I don’t know. He tried to kill the man with his eyes, the only weapon left to him. “I’ll think about it.” Quickly turning, Ari rapidly descended the stairs.
As his boots made a staccato down the stone steps, Ari heard Elder Eirdale’s quiet comment. “I would take that smirk off your face, Patricio. If he turns around and sees it, you are a dead man.”
Eirdale was correct, but Ari had seen naught but death for far too many years. He didn’t turn around.
* * * * *
“Sari, bring me a day dress, please. I am getting up.” Fleur finally felt her legs would not collapse as soon as they bore her weight. “I think the green and gold, and ask Melinda to come dress my hair.”
“Yes, m’Lady, are you sure you are ready?”
“Oh, Sari, I think five days in bed is long enough.” Fleur smiled. “I am certain that stacks of paperwork obscure my desk and my counselors will have fallen into despair at getting anything signed. Yes, I must get up.”
“Ma’am?”
Fleur raised her eyebrows in reaction to Sari’s hesitant query. “Yes, Sari?”
“High Lord DeTano has been asking to see you. Shall I tell him you will give him audience?”
“Ari?” Fleur perked up.
“Yes, m’Lady.”
“Yes, I will see him and I have changed my mind. Bring me my rose and silver dress. It is my favorite.”
Sari smiled knowingly and Fleur felt her cheeks flush. My warlord. I owe him so much.
Unfortunately, when he joined her, Ari did not seem to notice her becoming dress or the hair Melinda had spent an hour arranging. He never got close enough to smell the rare scent she daubed behind her ears in an unusual moment of womanly hopefulness.
When her guard announced his presence, she turned with a smile on her face only to be met with furious reprimand. Ari barely graced the threshold before he began.
“You took a horrifying risk, Princess. Don’t do it again.” He took an aggressive step toward her and stopped. “We did not succeed because of your self-mastery. That is dangerously und
er-developed. We did not succeed because of your discipline. That is precariously inconsistent. We did not succeed because of your three years—by the gods, three years—of study. That is appallingly inadequate. We succeeded because of your obedience.”
Fleur winced. “You will need to speak up. I don’t think they heard you on Triton.”
A vicious snarl of curses followed her rejoinder. She moved to the window, putting distance between them. “Goodness, Ari, you are creative. I don’t think that last is anatomically possible.”
She looked out the window sightlessly and could not help the gently pleased expression covering her face. “Well, however it happened, we—umm, well, you, actually—did succeed.”
Turning away from the window, she smiled shyly. “I think we are magick together.”
From across the room, she watched a muscle tic in his cheek.
“My anger perturbs you not at all, does it, Princess?”
She shrugged. “I have been raged at by parliamentary leaders and incensed royal counselors—and I assume you have met my father. One irate warlord…” Again she shrugged. “You don’t measure up.”
The glare he threw at her promised violence. Clenching his hands at his sides, he swept out. The door slammed violently behind him. It vibrated hysterically then came off its hinges with a resounding ka-boom!
Her personal guard burst into her apartments, weapons drawn. The four men, swords in their hands, peered down at the broken door, then looked up at her expectantly.
“Princess?”
She waved her hand dismissively. “Conte DeTano took exception to something I said. Just put the door to rights, please.”
She contained her irritation until the re-hinged door closed behind the last guardsman. Alone, she threw up her hands and wove a random path around the room.
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