“It would be an end of sorts but it would also be a beginning, like the loss of your virginity.”
He could not have made a better argument for death but when the prince suddenly closed his eyes, as if in pain, she felt lost and afraid. “Loric?” There was nothing preventing her from running into his arms.
He received her with a fierceness that would have crushed her bones if love hadn’t tempered it and she wondered how she could ever have doubted him. She completely forgot about the Lord who waited silently for them to slip apart and become conscious of something other than each other again.
“I won’t let you take her,” the prince vowed passionately over her head. “Why don’t you obey your own high-and-mighty principles and leave us alone?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “Because you can’t—that’s why. You’re hooked! Imagine the buzz of all that energy, Mirabel, as they fly from world to world sampling their sweetness, but it’s a risky pleasure. It’s tempting to fall into the flower and drown in its nectar. Yet since you can’t drown, you end up killing the flower because it can’t digest you. You burn straight through its heart and buzz on to another one!”
Mirabel was both shocked and impressed by the prince’s astute and irreverent challenge of a Lord.
“There is some truth in what you say.” His guest did not sound offended. “This world is uniquely dangerous. The bands of energy surrounding it caught us like arms and pulled us down, at which point our consciousness acted on its core as a man’s sperm does on a female’s egg, to put it in the way you would best comprehend.”
“Have you forgotten it was you who created us?” The prince continued to challenge him, “My way of thinking is only a web spun by the nature of your being.”
At that moment Mirabel loved him more than she ever had. She kept her cheek pressed against his chest, absorbing his warmth, soothing the icy sharpness of her nerves with it. Too much was happening too fast. She was caught in a landslide of events she feared would crush the sapling of their love—the magic of his soul and hers becoming one. When there was no response from behind her for what felt like a long time, she reluctantly peeled herself away from Loric and looked over her shoulder.
There was no one else in the chamber with them.
“They love to fence, Mirabel, but when an expertly turned phrase penetrates to the very heart of a matter, they get annoyed and leave.” The prince smiled sadly. “They are very proud bastards.” He slipped an arm beneath her knees and lifted her up against him. “They have a right to be but they don’t respect you unless you stand up to them.”
She was safe now in the horizon of his embrace. She could ask without being afraid, “Why does he want me to die?”
His hungry kiss felt like the answer to everything while she was lost in it, soaring and swimming and tumbling all at once.
“The whole time you were locked up in your room, I was trying to convince them to let you stay here with me, Mirabel. They wanted to take you away. They said there was no place for you in this world and that your abilities would only cause you suffering.”
“I don’t care!” She buried her face in the safe and wonderful space formed by his neck and shoulder. “I want to be with you!”
“I know,” he whispered.
“So you won’t let them take me away? I can stay with you?”
The defiant light in his eyes flickered like a candle in which the wick is only so long. “For now, my love.” He set her back down on her own two feet but kept a firm grip on her hand as he led her toward his white rug. “It’s fortunate for us that everyone’s attention has been diverted to the plains and Greenpalm. There’s been another raid, which gives me time to think.”
“To decide what you’re going to do with me?” That terrible hunger was rising in her again just looking at him. What she wanted more than anything was to care for him and to see him happy, yet some other part of her wanted something else altogether…
“I know what I’m going to do with you.” He shoved her down onto her hands and knees. “That’s hardly the problem.”
“Oh, my lord…” She couldn’t wait another second for his first hard thrust. She longed for the controlled sensual devastation that would follow—it was the only time she was truly at peace.
“Lords, I missed you!” He flung her violet skirt up across her back. Beneath it she wore black stockings held up by garters that bit into the fine material and pressed into her flesh.
She whimpered when his possessive fingers dug into her skin, clutching the cheeks of her buttocks and prying them apart. She dreaded he might take her that way. “Oh, please my lord!” she begged.
“Quiet!” He let go of her with one hand to spank her ass. “If you speak again until I give you permission to do so, I’ll punish you, Mirabel, more severely than I’ve ever punished you before.”
She held her breath, waiting for his penetration, and when it came, slowly and gradually instead of all at once, she moaned in gratitude and arched her spine, pushing her hips back toward him, desperate to feel his full length buried inside her.
“Don’t move!” he commanded, spanking her again, and then he possessed her the way she longed for him to. Her arms trembled from the strain of holding herself up and it wasn’t long before she lost sight of all her thoughts and frustrations for a few blindingly transcendent moments as she climaxed.
*
Mirabel always loved resting peacefully in his arms after they made violent love.
He stroked her hair and said, “I suppose being in touch with the Lords ever since I was a little boy has made me who I am. The frustration of not sharing in their power might explain my unusual erotic appetites.”
“They seem perfectly normal to me, Loric.” She said his name whenever she could because it was a nourishing sweet to her soul. But then it was as if she bit into a shard of glass as she thought out loud, “What did you do to satisfy yourself before me?”
He laughed and pressed her even harder against him. “I was never satisfied before you, Mirabel. But if you must know, there are always plenty of ladies willing to help me find a little relief. I did my best not to scare them away but I often did.”
She was still trying to find the courage to tell him that another man had been inside her. She had to tell him. Her guilt was a thorn on which her happiness was painfully snagged and the only way to free herself was to confess. “When you were up here arguing with the Lords,” she began tentatively, “the White Lord dined with me in my room every night.”
“I know. I had you watched, remember?”
“Yes.” She was suddenly angry. “But your guards did not see that he drugged my wine and erected his tower inside me!”
“Excuse me?” He sat up.
“But it was as if nothing happened, my lord, I swear it. I didn’t feel anything. He put rue in my wine and told me you could never claim me, that only he could give me a life—”
“I’ll kill him!” He stood up and his hand rose to his hip but he was naked—there was no dagger there. Of his three weapons, only her personal favorite hung between his legs. He went in search of his clothes. “They knew all along what was happening and yet they didn’t tell me! They deliberately let it happen to punish me for challenging them!”
“My lord, please!” She hurried after him, trying to hug him off balance as he quickly slipped into his leggings but his silver stare cut into her and he shoved her away, picked up his heavy belt and secured it around his waist.
“You don’t understand, Mirabel. I’m tired of being caught between the worlds. The Lords tell me what to do while everyone else lusts after my power. They don’t realize how little I actually have!”
She had never seen him so angry and she couldn’t help but admire how beautifully dangerous he looked. His appearance scarcely reflected the impotence he claimed in the keep’s affairs. “I don’t believe you.” She planted herself before him.
“Excuse me?” he said coldly and she lost all the warm contentment flowing thr
ough her from their lovemaking.
“Just look at you, my lord. You do not look at all powerless and I know you would not just blindly follow orders even if they did come from the Lords.”
His hand rested threateningly on the hilt of his dagger. “When you’re young you think you know everything, Mirabel.”
She smiled away the insult, caressing his chest with both hands. Her search for fulfillment had left faint trails across it that followed no fixed direction. On his skin there was a growing map of her unorthodox lust. “I know they give you much advice but they don’t force you to do anything, do they?”
“You don’t understand. We were fashioned by the Lords’ desires and that’s what they still see us as—their fantasies—even though this world gave us an objective life of our own. That’s why they don’t exactly know how to handle us and that’s why you especially have divided them in half.”
“But if we’re their living dreams, why don’t we know and understand everything as they do?”
“Mirabel, our kingdom is only a charming toy to them, a playground of all their values clothed in the most appealing conceptual styles of their long history. Do you understand? Our culture is a cozy quilt of all their warmest, fondest memories. We’re the ideal aspects of their past cleaned up of all the pain and blood…well, most of it.”
“I knew the White Lord was only an excuse!” she exclaimed. “It is really the Lords you wish to fight. You have no intention of killing the White Lord for my sake.”
“No, Mirabel.” He gripped her arms. “It’s true that was my first impulse and part of me wouldn’t mind cutting his balls off and letting a dog play fetch with them but I know it’s me you love and such savage self-gratification is not permitted a ruler, either of a kingdom or of his own heart.”
“Oh yes it is.” She tickled him, trying to provoke him, but all he did was pin her arms behind her so her back was to him.
“And you, my lady, must learn to behave like a princess.”
She didn’t dare think what he might mean by that. “Then teach me all you know about my father’s people. I’m tired of learning things in little bits and pieces!”
“I know!” he murmured. “It’s big pieces you like.”
“Yes…”
“Well, let’s see. What else can I teach you?”
“Are all the other princes like you? I mean, do they communicate with the Lords as you do?”
“Yes, I’m part of a web spun by the Lords to catch all the information they hunger for about us, or about themselves—it all depends on how you look at it. I, for one, have come to the conclusion the difference between us is somehow only an illusion, like the past and the future, since one cannot exist without the other.”
“But then what is the present?”
“You are!” he breathed into her hair. “Maybe that’s why I like it so much inside you, why time ceases to exist, because this sweet space between the past and future of your thighs is the very nature of time!”
“Please, tell me more about this web of Lords,” she begged.
“Do you want to know what would happen if I should die, Mirabel?”
“No!” she gasped in an agony of joy as he nearly lifted her off the floor with the hard hand cradling the space between her legs.
“If my successor has not yet been chosen or reached maturity, my rival takes over, your other charming suitor.”
“Visioncrest would fall into the hands of the White Lord?”
“Unless, of course, I leave behind a wife.”
*
Was it frustration that they did not share in the Lords’ powers that made their lovemaking so dark and violent? Mirabel found herself pondering this possibility. It was indeed as if they longed to strip each other to the bone and prove their flesh was only a garment they could slip on and off at will. He let her have his blood as if he could literally pour himself more, as if he commanded the supernatural vintage of his veins from above and beyond his body’s fragile vessel.
When she wasn’t pondering this issue, which weighed on her feelings the way Loric’s body pressed against hers after their violent unions, Mirabel was marveling at how beautiful the world was. Colors had achieved a whole new depth and vibrancy, as if the Lords’ maidservants had been blending the world’s dyes since the beginning of time and they had finally gotten them right just in time for her wedding. The dirty streaks of ill feeling flowing through the keep did not affect the sky’s flawless blue or the luminous green of freshly leafed trees that stood watch over her happiness. She spent as much time as she could beneath their open arms. She told them how much she loved her lord without speaking and she felt them absorbing her feelings the way they did the sunlight. Squirrels going about the business of gathering their humble treasures casually regarded her as an equal. Birds dining on worms in her presence seemed to rid her personal universe of all cold doubts and fears. And spiders spun the long moments of the day toward the night’s hungry heart—the haunting source of her contentment.
Loric had warned her that his announcement would split Visioncrest like a lightning bolt and that the two halves would then crumble into smaller conflicting factions. For at least one moon, he warned her, his reputation would be in ruins. No one but the White Lord, however, would dare question his will, even though the popular belief would certainly be that he was breaking too many rules. For one, he was marrying the daughter of a convicted murderess. This was enough to shock the older ladies speechless, although, unfortunately, not literally so. Secondly, no one knew who Mirabel’s father actually was. Thirdly, she was suspected of possessing unusual and highly questionable powers. She had no moral education to speak of, no respectable family history, nothing. The prince, they would say, the Lords bless him, he had been so wise and even-tempered until now, was obviously bewitched. The raven-haired creature beat her body against his and flew off with a little more of his reason every night—there was no doubt about it. His subjects weren’t blind. They had glimpsed the fresh scratches and the pale scars on his chest despite the careful effort he made to conceal them.
The younger generation scoffed at their parents’ superstitious fears. They felt it was high time the prince found himself a wife. Mirabel was ravishingly beautiful so of course all the ladies were jealous of her but the poor girl wasn’t to blame for her mother’s sins. And hadn’t she been punished enough for her tainted blood by growing up completely isolated on the kingdom’s most remote and savage peak? As a result she behaved oddly sometimes and didn’t know exactly what to say or, more importantly, what not to say, but it was obvious from her height and her fair skin that her father was a man of the kingdom, maybe even a prince himself.
Perhaps Loric knew for certain who he was. Perhaps she was the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman. The prince probably wasn’t marrying as far below his station as everyone believed. And, for the Lords’ sake, hadn’t she saved a little boy’s life? It was the season for love. Everyone should be happy their prince had finally found it himself. It was the time of year—which began when the first flowers shrugged off their cold sheet of snow and stretched toward the sun—for young men to travel from keep to keep and pluck away the fairest ladies blooming within them.
Mirabel cared not a bit for what the people said about her but she didn’t like Loric being subjected to all their biting opinions. It made her feel he was bound naked to the forest floor while an entire anthill crawled over him. If he moved the slightest muscle—if he showed any sign of weakness—he would be consumed. It didn’t matter how you behaved, she concluded. You could never please everyone.
The ceremony was not until late autumn, the traditional season to wed. Loric had also wanted to give his subjects as much time as possible to accept the idea. Yet to Megran the approaching festivities were the most important thing in the world. Her troubled heart had found a second store of strength somewhere and she had already begun her preparations for the feast even though it was moons away. She was obliged to order so many ingre
dients from other keeps, she explained to Mirabel, that if she didn’t begin right away everything wouldn’t be ready in time and she would shame her prince on the most important day of his life. He had justified her faith in him by asking Mirabel to marry him and she was more devoted to his culinary pleasures than ever before. “I’m cooking for two now.” She winked. “And soon maybe for three?”
Mirabel smiled back at her but said nothing in order not to disappoint her. Loric had never even mentioned the possibility of their having children together and she was careful to drink her special tea every morning to prevent another life from taking root in her womb. Sometimes she prepared the infusion up to three times a day if he had sewn a dangerous amount of his seed in her moist darkness. Perhaps this was selfish of her but she had never thought of herself as anyone’s mother and Janlay, she realized now, had not been a very good one herself.
Megran noted her silence on the issue of children and smiled indulgently, clearly believing Mirabel would feel differently in a few seasons, once she was Princess of Visioncrest. “You’ll have to settle down once you’re married, you know,” she commented, happily inspecting some freshly picked cucumbers. “You can’t go wandering out in the forest all by yourself and other things like that. And, of course, someone else will have to take your place in the gardens.”
“What?! But what else will I do all day?”
“Why, be a lady, of course.”
“What do ladies do?”
“Why…nothing.”
This conversation deeply troubled Mirabel. She definitely did not want to give up her work. She very nearly worshipped the prince, it was true, but there was still more than enough room left in her heart for her unassuming plants. She would never stop watching over and caring for them. This was going to be much more difficult to do with the human part of her realm.
Chapter Eight
Mirabel stood perfectly still as she was fitted for as many gowns as a rose has petals. Every now and then the two younger seamstresses took turns sticking her with a pin as if by accident but their deliberate carelessness didn’t hurt as much as the memories of Janlay that were threading themselves through her thoughts and piercing her heart. She had closed herself to recollections of her mother for so long she was aghast now at how vivid they were. The needles and threads, buttons and thimbles, the bundles of cloth and the half-finished garments strewn around the room slipped her back into emotions she believed she had outgrown. Her chest felt tighter and tighter from the pressure of all the tears she had refused to shed since her mother disappeared.
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