Chapter Seven
In Which I Agree to Something I Never Thought I Would
Oaths and agreements manifest much like spells and wishes—the weight of a far greater force binds them into reality.
~Big Book of Fairyland, “Rules of Magic”
My head spun with the awfulness of it. “You can’t let that happen!”
“I can hardly marry all of them, foolish Gwynn.”
“Don’t toy with me,” I snapped, trying to lift myself off his lap, but he held me firm, even though I levered the heels of my hands on his shoulders. “I can’t stand by when there’s the possibility of annihilation of the human race. I won’t allow it.”
“All I care about right now is protecting you,” he returned with ferocity.
“I’m one person and my children—even if I refused to marry you and had fully human ones, which I don’t think they would be because the ‘humans’ in Faerie are still contaminated with magic—wouldn’t be enough to carry on the race. Titania must be stopped!”
“Believe me, I’ve been trying.” He gritted his teeth, looking pained.
I realized I’d dug the claws into his shoulders, and blood was running in bright rivers down his chest. “Oh God! I’m so sorry.” I lifted out the claws and gripped the ledge again, pushing away from him in earnest. “I’m awful. Just let me—”
“No, Gwynn. I won’t die and you are not going anywhere until we finish this conversation. Stop reacting and think.”
Think? Usually he told me to stop thinking. His canny gaze focused on mine, a slight cock to his head. A clue in what he’d told me then. Something he couldn’t say directly. I rewound the conversation in my mind, searching for something salient in what he’d said. Believe me, I’ve been trying.
“You’ve been trying to stop Titania?” I’d hoped, but hadn’t been sure enough to count on it.
He just regarded me, lips pressed together. Score.
“That’s what the baby thing is about,” I mused. I needed my grimoire, all of my notes and theories on why Rogue wanted my firstborn child, what Titania did with them, why they had to be half-human, half-fae. It was all tied up with how I’d been drawn into Faerie in the first place and with changelings and I didn’t know what all. Then it crystallized.
“Oh. My. God.” I breathed the words, very nearly a prayer, though I’d never been religious.
“That’s why she’s courting the Wild Hunt. They are her ticket through the Veil somehow.” That realization severely irritated me because I’d been toying with the same idea, dammit. “And the Black Dog—no wonder she wanted you under her control. And the babies, she’s using them as changelings, right? They’re something like her secret agents on the other side, so she can, what? Conquer—”
He pulled me in for a kiss, stopping my words. “Even here it’s best not to say too much aloud, my brilliant Gwynn.”
I leaned my forehead against his. “I don’t know what to make of this all.”
“You don’t have to solve every problem this moment. But do you understand now that if we have any hope of defeating her, then I must do everything I can to protect you?”
“Yes.” I did see. It wasn’t romantic, but the reasons were good ones. More, I believed he’d told me the truth. “But I feel like I’m marrying you for your health insurance or something.”
His hands flexed on my waist, then slid up and down my back. “Make it clear for me. Are you saying you promise to marry me?”
I sat back a little. The rare times in my princess-obsessed youth that I’d nursed fantasies of this moment, I’d never imagined a proposal like this. Rogue, with his wild magic, feral sexuality and the black-thorned pattern ranging over his face and body, now running with rivulets of blood, would never fit anyone’s definition of Prince Charming. Absurdly a line from Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” went through my head—a song I’d always considered irritating, if not downright anti-feminist. And yet some deep programming in me wanted to know where my diamond was.
“Do you laugh at me?” Rogue’s voice came out edged, his eyes glittering into dangerous.
“No. Sorry.” I rolled my eyes at myself. “A silly thought, leftover from apparently far too many Zales commercials.”
“What does that mean?”
“It doesn’t matter—really.”
“Gwynn.” He used that demanding tone that never failed to make me shiver. Speaking of anti-feminist. “Tell me.”
“A dumb thing—in my world you’d give me a diamond ring when you asked. Which is hardly relevant because it’s supposed to represent a financial sacrifice and you could just magic one up. Besides, it’s antiquated and really kind of sexist because it stems from the need to display wealth to prove you can support a bride. Which is also not relevant in this situation, because—”
“Gwynn,” he said again, interrupting my babbling, but gently this time. “Are you nervous?”
Oh shit, I was. My heart fluttered and I gazed into his so familiar but terribly alien face. What the hell was I getting myself into? And why did it seem to matter so much?
“Maybe,” I admitted. “I mean, this is kind of huge. Like, the whole rest of my life huge.”
“Did you have other plans?”
Once upon a time, I could have said yes. Before my life took a hard left turn into crazy.
“Wait.” I grasped at the straw. “You still haven’t told me the tenth reason.”
“Yes, I have.”
“No—the last one was the all-humans-must-die ninth one.”
“Please don’t say that outside this chamber.”
“I won’t. Only to you. You have to trust me.”
“I do, my Gwynn.” Rogue ran his hands up my back, coaxing me to lean into him, his mouth hovering just under mine. “The tenth reason is that I care for you, more than anything else. I love you—you taught me how to think and feel in a different way—and I want you with me always. You are the partner and lover I never knew to dream of—only enough to wish for. Tell me you’ll be that.”
I melted. See? He could have skipped right to number ten, suckering me in with the romance, after all. I probably should find out what all the rules were for being married before I committed, but...what the hell. We could always negotiate later.
“Then yes.” I said the words I’d never seriously thought I would. “Yes, I will marry you, Lord Rogue.”
I’d expected one of his fierce and possessive kisses, some of the victorious triumph he’d showed on other occasions when I finally capitulated to whatever he’d been maneuvering me into. Though—and maybe I was kidding myself—this didn’t feel like a defeat. As if he knew it, too, he kissed me on the cheekbone, butterfly light, almost reverent. He kissed my other cheek, then the center of my forehead. It felt ritualistic and I trembled with each brush of his lips, deeply touched. Drawing back, he waited, solemn.
So I followed suit, kissing him first on the patterned side of his face, then the other, then the center of his forehead, the spot the Hindus called the third eye.
“It is agreed?” Rogue asked, more of the ritual.
“It is agreed,” I echoed.
Something shifted between us, like a cord tightening, the strength of the vow like a magical binding that rippled through me. For a blazing instant, I felt it in him, too, as if I saw through his eyes, felt the slow turn of the Black Dog deep in his soul, the answering slice of the cat’s gliding acknowledgment. If agreeing to this marriage unified us so profoundly, I wondered what the final ceremony would do.
Not that a ceremony of devotion had helped Fergus and Blackbird—in fact, quite the opposite. Memory holes had led to secrets that forced them apart.
“They are not sorcerers.” Rogue spoke against my cheek, hearing my thought though. “It is different among us. Or so I’ve heard. Such matches are rarely made.”
His lips whispered over my jaw, his hands winding in my hair to tug my head back, allowing him to trail kisses down my throat, sweetly thrill
ing. Something about the emotion of the moment made every kiss penetrate my skin. As if he’d managed to reach inside and touch the deepest, most vulnerable part of me.
“I want to be inside you, my forever Gwynn.”
He lifted me, hands below my thighs, and lowered me onto his erect cock. Impossibly, he felt larger than ever, filling and stretching me. The pleasure reverberated, amplified between us. Holding my hips still, he pumped in and out of me, stoking me with sensation so keen it became a knife that might cut me open. It killed me that I couldn’t touch him, because I wanted to, to sink claws and teeth and take more of him inside me.
He laughed, breathlessly with rising desire. “Then take me.” Tipping back his head, he exposed his throat, laughing again when I fastened my mouth there, sinking my teeth into the muscle, releasing some of the powerful pressure in my groin. My platinum claws firmly on the stone ledge, I dug them in, too, holding on while Rogue worked me from the inside out.
Remarkably, he came before I did, with a wrenching spasm of his lean body, dissolving into incoherent cries of ecstasy that rippled through the skin in my mouth. I followed a moment after, releasing my teeth and throwing back my head with the uncontrollable arching of my spine.
Trusting Rogue to keep me from drowning altogether.
Trusting that, somehow, there would be a happy ending to all of this.
* * *
When we returned to the bedchamber the great crystal dome was ablaze with sunlight. For the first time, I got a good look at Rogue’s domain.
Fascinated—and maybe needing a little distance due to the emotional earthquake that still had my heart feeling raw and my thighs watery—I went to the curved wall, my claws clinking as I reflexively put up a hand to keep myself from falling through the transparent surface. Not surprisingly, our room occupied the tallest tower of many that rose out of a massive assembly of rambling wings, courtyards and barrier walls with wide walkways atop them, all formed of brilliant black stone that glittered in the midmorning light.
The moat that circled the vast complex shone a silver blue with an abalone sheen. Not as wide as the Mississippi, but huge to my Westerner’s eye, it was formed of a natural loop in a river. A sense of premonition crept up my spine. Much like the geography around Devils Tower.
I’d fallen into Faerie from there, near that black, corrugated rock that rose from the circle of the Belle Fourche River. From a distance, the conglomerate of Rogue’s castle might look much the same as the tower. I’d known I’d come through somewhere nearby, but the intersection of the two worlds gave me a brief moment of dislocation, like an inadvertent double image. The overlap in look, feel and even name seemed portentous in a way I hadn’t yet grasped.
I scanned the green hillsides in the distance, wondering if I would recognize the exact hill where I’d awakened—a futile search, of course, as they all looked much the same.
At Devils Tower, the much smaller river made a partial loop around the monument. In this landscape, someone had created a channel between the river loops to form the circular moat. Probably at the front of the castle, where a somewhat narrower section would allow the drawbridge to span it, were it down. But it was up and the iridescent spiney hump of an elephant-sized moat monster lazily patrolled the waters.
Along with the secured drawbridge, every wall and tower bristled with the Cylon-esque soldiers, like the ones Rogue sent to escort my friends. Everything I spied showed that Rogue was braced for attack.
“Do you expect her soon?” I asked him, without taking my eyes from the view, scanning the horizon for any indication of my crew. They would be days in arriving, however, if Rogue’s estimate had been correct. Still I couldn’t help worrying about them. Not that I’d given them much thought during the past twelve hours or so of sex-drenched mindlessness.
“Expect? No. But I would be a fool to be careless at this point.” Rogue, who’d been standing back, giving me time to absorb it all, came up behind me and stroked a soothing hand down my hair. “Titania is unlikely to come at us with a direct physical attack. However, because she knows I know that, it pays to cover that avenue as well.”
I nodded absently. To my left, the river streamed away from a great waterfall, which dropped over a sheer cliff in a single unblemished sheet. It looked as though it could have been engineered, like those falls from infinity pools—if humans could design one that fell a mile or more without breaking up or vaporizing. After circling the Castle of the Dark Gods, the river meandered off to my right, slow and lazy after circumnavigating the loop, winding through an endless meadow of indigo flowers.
I knew they would be blue stargazer lilies.
“Do you like what you see?” Rogue asked, much as he’d asked if I liked the room. It both gratified me, that he cared if I liked everything, and also worried me, as if the other shoe had yet to drop. Something I didn’t think I should tell him.
“It’s beautiful—but mostly satisfies my curiosity, since I couldn’t see anything before. Everything out my windows was gray.”
“It seemed wiser to conceal the location of my castle from you.”
I looked over my shoulder at him, raising my eyebrows. “In case of what?”
His mouth quirked, but he didn’t smile, just wound a lock of my hair around his finger. “In case I failed to exact an appropriate bargain from you and my enemies managed to turn you against me. Or should you have come after me yourself.”
“What did you think I could possibly have done against you or this fortress?”
He gave me a cagey look, then wound my hair several more times around his finger, drawing me closer. “I didn’t know, did I? You were an unknown quantity with enough power to yank yon river out of its banks.”
“And now?”
“Now?” He tilted his head, studying me. “I suspect you could do most anything you set your mind to.” His mouth brushed mine in a lazy kiss that, impossible as it seemed, roused my blood yet again. “So it’s good to have you on my side. If,” he qualified, “you remember to keep your wits about you. You still have a great deal to learn.”
Okay, that dampened my enthusiasm. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I assume that lessons will resume?”
“Yes.” He let go of my hair, leaving it draped in a perfect ringlet over the breast of my robe, as if it had been wrapped around a curling iron. “Though we should plan the wedding first. Invitations will need to go out.”
“Oh no—I’m totally letting Starling do the wedding planning. If she wants to,” I amended, remembering some of her dissatisfaction at being assigned the less-adventuresome tasks. I wandered over to my grimoire, which was waiting on the workbench Rogue had made sure to have here for me. I wouldn’t tell him that either, how much it meant that he paid attention to my habits and occupations. With a judiciously placed claw, I opened the cover, flipping the pages to the Rules of Bargaining section. So much to add about the marriage stuff and here I was, unable to grip a pen. Maybe I could write magically? A thought occurred to me.
“How are people invited, anyway?”
“Via Brownie, of course.”
Of course. So, even with their amazing speed, it would take them days to reach everyone.
“Who all will we invite?”
“Everyone who matters. You can make a list.”
“Ha-ha.” Though he might not realize I already had a list of everyone I’d encountered, plus all the people I didn’t know who’d sent me tribute to curry favor. At least, as far as Athena had gotten in memorizing them for me. “How soon do we have to do this wedding?”
“Have to?” Rogue came over and leaned against the bench, crossing his long legs at the ankle. “I want it as soon as possible. Don’t you?” His voice had an edge, one I knew to tread carefully.
Now that the giddiness had started to wear off—especially with the evidence of all of the various rules I’d painstakingly observed and collected on other topics staring me in the face—my nerves were getting to me. I should have investigated before I agre
ed.
Too late.
“It’s just that great, big weddings like the one you seem to have in mind take a lot of planning. That’s the only reason I wondered.”
“No, it’s not the only reason, but you need not fear this, Gwynn.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.”
“It seems really unwise to me to make a big spectacle when Ti—the Queen Bitch is determined to come after us. Wouldn’t an event like a wedding, with all of our friends and allies gathered together, be a great time to attack? What if she shows up?”
“Of course she’ll attend—she won’t be able to resist the invitation.”
My mouth literally fell open, the ten thousand things I wanted to say to that all jammed in my throat, crowding each other to come out. Finally I seized on one.
“You cannot be serious.”
“I’m always serious.”
Which was a lie. Though he looked deadly grave at the moment. I paced to the crystal wall and back, bursting with the need to do something about this horrible plan. I envisioned something like the christening in Sleeping Beauty, with Maleficent showing up in all her evil glory to curse the newborn Aurora. This was how it always worked in fairy tales—someone stupidly invited the nutbag relation, who then wreaked havoc on them all.
“You’re going to all of this trouble—” I flung a hand in a wild, encompassing gesture at the fortified walls “—to then invite her in? That’s insane.”
“No more insane than not inviting her and risking even greater wrath.”
“But she could scope things out. Learn all of your secret defenses and so forth.”
He smiled at that. “She’s been here before. Another visit could hardly matter.”
That sunk in as though I’d swallowed a stone. Or taken a bullet to the heart. Suddenly, all those dreams or visions or whatever they were, rushed back to me. You know that there is less of a boundary between dreams and reality than you’d like to think. In those dreams I’d had while we were apart, when he’d been Titania’s captive, I’d seen him as her lover. Both of them laughing at me.
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