This is how we find balance together, as a woman and a man, a king and a queen.
Will o’ wisps danced on the path, leading us to a cottage that was built into the trunk of a huge tree. The door was open a crack, and candles glowed in the windows. Axel led the way, opening the door and surveying the room with a glance and a sniff. “All seems safe here,” he said.
The room was round and covered in roots and vines that grew around a hearth. The bed was made up neatly with quilts and pillows, and there were two chairs drawn up to a table food and drink. The table was one long log, smoothed of bark, but still rounded, with a stub of branch sticking up and curving around like a hooked nose. It all looked innocent at first but there was a seething tension to the room, an eagerness, as if the walls had eyes. The vines on my dress lifted toward the vines on the walls, flowers brushing leaves. I had this feeling the very walls would like to suck me up into them and caress every inch of me.
“It doesn’t feel that safe,” I murmured.
“It all depends on whose hands you’re in,” Axel said. “Augustus, I want you to be well ready for Rose to fuck you. I know you’re a patient man. I’m going to enjoy some dinner first, and I think you should stand by the wall and see what happens. And I hope you’ll fight because I find it very arousing when you do.”
Chapter Thirteen
Augstus
The walls sprung immediately to life and snatched my wrists up, hugging me against them. Then my feet. And then everywhere—my shoulders, my chest, my thighs.
Axel didn’t have to tell me to fight. There was genuine adrenaline pulsing through me like I was on the hunt.
No, like I was the hunted.
“I want to look at you, Rose,” Axel said. “While I eat.” He scooped her up by the waist, spread her thighs open, and sat her nether hole down onto the nub jutting from the table. She whimpered a little at its hardness even though it wasn’t very large. He laid her back, catching her wrists in one of his strong hands, until she was laying down on the table with her legs dangling. Her body swallowed the smooth little bit of branch, so I couldn’t see it anymore, but she could clearly feel it, while the phallus stood erect from where it was nestled between her folds, keeping her nether lips slightly spread around it. Her skin was taut against her ribs, her full breasts heaving with her quick breath.
For so long I had commanded the King’s Vine and been in control of Rose. Now, as I watched her, I was losing command of myself as the vines threatened my resilience, holding me close as a lover while they snaked under my trouser buttons and popped them open, releasing my throbbing member only to tighten around it, keeping me restrained.
Otherwise I might have come right then and there as I watched Axel, pinning down Rose’s hands as he drank the wine and ate a few small tomato tarts. He washed them down and then he handed his cup to her.
“Hold that there,” he said softly, and he suckled her breasts and stroked the horn between her legs. She convulsed with pleasure, the base of the horn stimulating her as she appeared like some creature beyond male or female. Her hips pumped unconsciously and I was sweating to imagine her thrusting that into me.
As I thought about it, the vines crept under the back of my trousers. They were penetrating me from behind now. Tightening around my cock and my balls. Holding me fast.
I let out a scream, transcending pleasure into torture.
But craving every moment of it.
Axel looked at me now and then, just to admire me, as he continued to slowly make love to Rose’s body, caressing and tasting the most precious corners of her skin like she was a sculpture and he was blind and deaf. Not just her nipples, but the swell of her belly, only showing her pregnancy if you knew how thin she normally was—the curve of her hip—the V-shape of her legs to her sex—the arch of her feet. Back to the other end of her, her delicate fingers, from which he removed the cup.
I knew so well the places where she liked to be touched, the places that would stimulate her no matter how tired or reluctant she was. I was her king, and it was my job to know so I could fulfill my duty night after night.
Axel knew them too.
I was trying my best not to scream, but I did fight, not just because Axel asked me to but because my body acted of its own accord against this violation.
“Oh gods…” Rose tossed her head.
Axel picked her up by her wrists and plucked her off the table. “Now I want you to do everything you can to stimulate Augustus before you fuck him.”
“Augustus…” Her eyes hooded and she licked her lips unconsciously as she stroked my hair back off my sweaty forehead and slowly unbuttoned my shirt. Her hands spread over my chest to my shoulders and then dug back down to my belly, a few times over, almost like a cat enjoying a scratch. “Mm…I can’t bear it. I can’t bear how agonized you look. Can you bear it a little longer? I think you must…”
She slid her hands down my trousers, cupping my buttocks, tracing the lines of the vines that were slowly stretching me and readying me for her.
Her satin tongue slid along my lower lip before pulling it into her mouth, and then surging into mine. She kissed me deeply as she reached down and held my cock in her hand, feeling it straining. I moaned, my shoulders pulling hard at the vines that held them.
“I like this,” she whispered in my ear. “I like it when I can feel every inch of strength inside you bursting to take me, pin me down, fuck me until I’m spent…but you can’t do a thing. You can’t even speak.”
“Rose…please…just…”
“Yes…when Axel says so.” She dropped to her knees and took my cock in her mouth, sucking on it, and I screamed and raged. Axel came up to me, his fair hair a little disheveled, and a twinkle in his eye, and gave me a very tender kiss. Much too tender for all the pain I endured.
“Please, Axel…”
“The first time of many,” he said. “Let’s get you to the bed.”
The vines let me go and all my blood was free to flow again, hands and legs and cock tingling. My erection grew stiff and I couldn’t believe my skin bore only faint lines from being held by the vines. It felt like I had been close to exploding into pieces. I felt like I should be bleeding.
Axel tied me down on the bed face down, just like in the dream, and smacked one of my buttocks.
“How long have you imagined this day?” I growled. “To seem so sure of yourself?”
“This is how I always am,” he said. “Whether I’m in your service or you are in mine, I do know I’m quite a good specimen and none of my lovers have ever complained.” He laughed. “But then, I don’t remember much about them. I am bound to Your Majesties and isn’t it hard to remember that anything else ever existed?”
“Yes…,” Rose said.
I couldn’t see them but I heard him go to Rose. “Let’s get this good and slick…”
I was already so aroused, that I was afraid I might ruin it all and come before Rose even touched me. I thought of all the times I had to tell her when to come and when to hold back. How did she stand it? But I was more excited when I considered that she eventually had learned to obey my every command.
And now my wife, who had been the perfect servant of my whims since the day she was offered to me, was about to violate me, and I already knew that she would not be gentle. I knew that whenever she had the chance, Rose would take her small revenge.
These thoughts hung in my mind, two strands twisting tighter and tighter together, one of fear and one of mad desire, until I heard Axel say, “Go and do whatever you like to him.”
I felt her crawl into bed above me, hands like prowling paws, breathing with anticipation. She put her hands around my hips and urged me to change my position a little. And then the tip of the horn, hard and soft and slick at once, pushing its way in as Rose sighed.
She moaned and I knew she felt it too, the sensation and pressure traveling down the faery wood and ringing through her as she stretched and filled me. But the phallus was not so big th
at she couldn’t thrust it in and out. She quickly realized that she could flex her little hips and make me scream.
“Oh, Augustus…I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a man and take instead of give. It’s like the first time all over again.”
“I’m…going to explode, Rose.”
“No,” she said. “Not yet. You have to hold back. Let me have a little fun, at least.”
I screamed as she rode me, leaning closer to me so her round breasts smacked against my back, and it grew more and more unbearable as I thought of how she must look. That moment seemed to last forever and all I could think of was trying to obey her as my cock grew more swollen and my skin blazed.
And then as she fucked me, she wrapped a hand around my cock and pumped. “Come now, my love.”
For a second I feared I might be too pent to ever let go again. I felt like I was more likely to die than to simply release. But then it happened, just as it should, hot seed spilling out of me, all over her hand and the sheets beneath me.
It really was like the first time all over again, satisfaction mingling with confusion, the aches and pains of skin that had never been touched much less driven hard. When it was over, Axel pulled her off of me and fucked her himself, as she sat straddling his knees and he slid his hand up and down the horn. By the time I had watched them, my desire was already rising again, and I’m sure the spirits of the Wicked Revels were fully fed.
Chapter Fourteen
The Wicked Revels thumped along to its own beat. What seemed, at first, to be pure frivolity was more than it seemed under the surface.
Every night, there was music and dancing. There was Queen Alexandra and King Ladinus presiding with her joking and calling for louder, faster music, and her faery husband watching carefully to make sure that no one’s joy twisted into cruelty.
Alexandra was very kind to me, and seemed to watch out for me especially.
“You’re very hard to read, Queen Marie Rose,” she said. “I think you’re a happy woman with those two handsome mates of yours, but then at times you seem very sad. They treat you well, don’t they? Because if they don’t, I’ll do something about it. The Queen of the Sun Palace isn’t a willing position from what I understand.”
“Oh, no…I am willing,” I said. “Maybe I wasn’t always. But then again…well, it’s confusing.”
“I guess that answer is good enough,” she said. “We don’t always know what we want until we’re experiencing it. Ladinus can be very cold and dominating. My parents were concerned back then, but I’m wild about him. I chose wisely, in the end. He is my perfect counterpart to be King of the Revels.”
“Do you mean he married into the Revels? I thought it was the opposite! Aren’t you human?”
“Yes, I am human. Human-ish. My parents became the King and Queen of the Wicked Revels, ousting the Magus who once held the throne. They were both humans but seem more like faeries now. The magic here rubs off on everyone.”
“You ousted the man who was on the throne? Er, your parents?”
Alexandra paused. “Well, yes.”
“Was he a bad king?”
“He wasn’t a bad king, but he ended up being wrong for the job.”
“Oh…” I wondered if that was how things were with Augustus and me. It did always feel like we were trying very hard to fill shoes we didn’t quite fit. And then the people grew furious, and I grew furious back, to see them blaming me for all the trouble when I hadn’t meant to do anything wrong. Maybe that was all it really was. Augustus wasn’t a king at all. Perhaps he was also a sort of Magus.
“I’m sorry. I’ve worried you.”
“No, you’ve made me think.”
It seemed at first as if no one worked, but the sun actually did rise in the morning, and the Revelers slept late and then got to business. Queen Alexandra gave us a tour of the village and set us straight.
“Oh, we have bakers and brewers and seamstresses and hunters and foragers.”
“But it seems to me like everyone is sleeping,” Augustus said. “When does the work happen?”
“The forest does so much of the work for us.” She led the way to a grove. “See these peach trees?”
Their branches were bowing to the ground, heavy with fruit.
Augustus looked appalled. I could practically see him looking around for shears. “Yes. They’ll snap like that.”
“They won’t,” she said, plucking ripe, golden fruit off a tree and handing them to us. “And if we picked every fruit on them, within a week they would be bursting again. There is so much magic here, that the forest does the work for us. Firewood is easy to find. Game is easy to catch. All we have to do is make lovely things to amuse ourselves. So we sleep a while, and work a bit, and dance and drink a while more.” She laughed. “King Augustus, you look like your peach has a worm in it.”
“No. Of course not. It’s just—well, what does the game think about being so easy to catch?”
“We give the forest so much in return. Balance is preserved.”
“I just don’t know what purpose I’d have if everything was easy.”
“What purpose do you have now? You’re a king. Oh, I know, you do like to hunt…”
“It’s not just that,” he said. “I like to make myself useful. It truly brings me joy to build and craft things, and the dances and feasts, well…they’re fine. We have plenty of them too, I suppose.”
I laughed. “Augustus is not really a romantic at his core, but that is his most attractive quality.”
“Surely it isn’t the destiny of every faery just to jump around all night,” Augustus said.
It quickly became clear that we had no purpose in the Wicked Revels, and Augustus wasn’t very happy without a purpose.
“We can ask the high elves for help,” Axel said. “Since you sent your men to help us, we’ll help you. The trolls have become much less of threat thanks to your aid. If we can just wait it out until aid arrives, then we should be able to get some control of the city.”
“Yes, as far as I know Commander Lafiel is still alive, and the northern army should be loyal,” Augustus said. “They could be here in a couple of weeks.”
But we didn’t get many updates, and couldn’t be sure they had ever received our message.
After a week of nothing, a messenger handed me letters that came through the gate to our world, from Julia and Louisa.
My Dearest Friend,
I’m glad you’re safe, more than anything, but I miss you so terribly! Hardly a moment goes by when I don’t wonder what you’re doing and think of us picking out clothes with Madame Bertin and making mischief at the Lady’s Treat. I miss our plays…our games…oh, I even miss stealing a kiss from you, you naughty thing!
…we are safe behind stone walls, in the northern countryside where the people still speak your name fondly. They are much more afraid of trolls than you. But it’s very cold here, Rose. I don’t mean physically (although it is that). There is always a fire to warm my hands, but it was your presence that was the warmest of all.
Love,
Julia
Both letters were long and full of small details about absolutely nothing. It is only with true friends that you can talk about nothing for hours and hours and find it more interesting than a novel.
But then there was another letter, and it was from Merry.
Dear King Augustus and Queen Marie Rose, Honorable Rulers of the Sun Palace,
I’m afraid I have very bad news to report. Lord Merdon tried to calm the crowds and was captured by the Witch and killed. It’s not safe. I don’t know when it will be safe. It is at great risk that I send you this letter.
“Lord Merdon! No!” My breath came strained. “Poor Julia will be devastated…”
I must be honest with you. The situation here is very bad. The people have had some real pain, and while little of it was your fault, it has reached such a fever pitch that I’m not sure how to save you except to give you this refuge in the W
icked Revels.
If you like, you can stay there forever.
If your honor compels you to come home, I am afraid that if you don’t submit to the curse, there will be more anger and more deaths than one mere mage can contain. There is no sense mincing words. If you come, I can’t give you back your throne. I think the best I could do is to give you a disguise. I would try to find a new life in the realm of Revels, where at least you can still be yourself.
“We have to return,” Augustus said.
“You can’t return,” Axel said. “Isn’t that obvious now? She’ll have you killed. She’ll curse Rose. That will be the end of everything.”
“But I see no way for us to have a future here!” Augustus said. “The Wicked Revels has a purpose, but it’s not my purpose. I can’t stand to spend my days here hiding while our friends are killed, and the witch gloats over my city. We have to return. Well, I do. You keep Rose here, of course.”
“There is no way am I remaining here with Axel while you leave me,” I said. “There is no way I would say goodbye knowing I would never see you again!”
“It’s my duty. Someday I might have to face my ancestors in the world beyond, and I will not be known as the king who abandoned his people. If they truly decide they would rather kill me than have me as their king…well.”
“Well!? That’s all you have to say about it?”
I put my arms around him and held him. I understood all too well. My mother would have said the same thing and she would have expected the same from me.
Yes, I would have my own ancestors to face in the world beyond. I imagined what I would say to her. The faeries never treated me like I was one of them.
And I could imagine her arch response. Oh, didn’t they? What about your good friends Julia and Louisa who might be murdered for their association with you? What about the children of the court who adored you? What about the servants who were faithful to you? Your beloved dressmaker? Rose…a good queen can’t pick and choose her subjects. You can only give them your best.
The Surrender of Sleeping Beauty Page 35