“I certainly hope you weren’t sniffing her in that spot—or any other.”
“What if I did?” He sounded sly and tugged on the dress, freeing my nipple and taking it into his mouth. I clutched his hair, trying to keep my balance. “Would you punish me for it?”
“Not in the way you’re picturing, for you’d enjoy it far too much,” I replied in as tart a tone as I could manage, given the tantalizing things he did with his agile tongue. “And stop that. I am not putting on a show for the dragon.” Any more of a show, I mentally amended.
I could swear I heard a jewellike tinkle of amusement.
Rogue frowned over my shoulder at the dragon. “I believe your friend is indeed observing us.”
“Told you.”
“Perhaps she’ll give us a ride to our own tower then. We can have the champagne celebration you wanted. And I can spend more time enjoying you in this dress.” Though he allowed the scandalously low neckline to cover what it could again, his fingers continued to trace the curves of my bosom. I had to concentrate on what he’d said.
“Dragons are not taxis, Rogue. And how do you know it’s a her?”
“She clearly is and, look, she’s standing up.”
I twisted enough to take a look and, sure enough, the dragon opened her wings, amber eyes gleaming, and held up a taloned foot as if we might climb aboard. Still, I hesitated. “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem right.”
“If we go back through the castle, people will expect us to rejoin the party.”
“Dragon ride it is.”
Rogue laughed and swooped me up to carry me over to the dragon.
“I can walk,” I protested.
“Hush. I’m rescuing you from the tower. Don’t ruin it.”
“Is there even a way to get in the dome from the outside?”
“There is now.” With his usual agile grace, Rogue stepped into the dragon’s palm and sat. The talons closed around us in a glittering cage, making me fervently hope we’d read her intentions correctly. But she leaped off the tower and easily surged across the torchlit complex to the tallest tower, topped by the glowing globe that was ours. A rigid net of flat rungs bisected the tower, a few levels below our room, connected by an encircling ring, for all the world like the kind on hummingbird feeders.
The dragon landed on the ring on her hind feet as if she’d done it a thousand times, the substrate flexing under her weight, but it held. She laid her forefoot on the rung in front of us and opened the talons, allowing us to walk free toward a new doorway that opened onto a landing in the stairway.
Neat work for that fast.
I didn’t mind that Rogue carried me on the flat but narrow rung so I didn’t have to look down. Looking at the dragon over his shoulder, I sent a mental thank-you, surprised when she bobbed her head. She took off and Rogue set me down just inside the doorway. I watched her wing away while he looked up at the illuminated curve of the globe above.
“This should be far enough down that they won’t be able to sit here and peek in,” he commented.
“They?”
“Where there is one dragon, there will be more.” He laced his fingers with mine. “And this one seems inclined to stay.”
I had expected her to keep going, but she landed on the other platform again, dangling her clawed feet over the edge, perfectly content to all appearances.
Letting out a long breath composed of wonder and more than a bit of feeling overwhelmed bit it all, I squeezed Rogue’s hand. “Guess I’d better order some apples.”
* * *
We never got to the champagne, as Rogue bent his considerable focus and nimble fingers to getting me out of the dress he liked so much, and then into bed. I gave myself over to his relentless seduction—easier and oh so rewarding. He made love to me with all the starvation of the first time and I drank it up. In the morning, I would think about the progression of this relationship and the worrisome things Fafnir had said.
The sex, too, provided the exact catharsis I needed to purge the fear and tension from my blood. After the final, wrenching climax Rogue wrung from me, I fell deeply and peacefully asleep.
I awoke once, to a jewel-hued song that echoed through the crystal globe, making it hum in harmony. In bed alone, I sat up to see the sun’s rays pinking the horizon. Rogue moved through the shadows to sit beside me, smoothing my sleep-tousled hair. “Your dragon, greeting the dawn. Go back to sleep.”
“Just what we need,” I grumbled, “a dinosaur-sized rooster.”
Going back to sleep wasn’t a question, however. I crashed again as if drugged and awoke hours later to the sun high and bright in the sky. As happened more often than not, Rogue was nowhere about. He had been nearby when the dragon woke me at dawn, though he hadn’t been asleep in bed. Maybe he didn’t sleep and that was why he was rarely there in the mornings. Couldn’t be all that compelling, hanging out while someone slept.
Blinking up at the poetically clear expanse of perfect blue above, I took a few moments to scroll back over recent events. Having this vividly intense sexual relationship had proved to be as distracting as I’d anticipated. Made it difficult to keep one’s thoughts on track.
My mental to-do list had become overwhelming:
Feed dragon.
Find out about this cabal.
Deal with pregnancy.
Deal with possibility probability that Rogue remains under Titania’s influence.
Plan strategy for Titania’s surely imminent attack.
Check in on Walter for Starling (retrieve scepter from Athena)
Explore mass-mind web and perfect skills/add to timeline
Add notes to grimoire on recent events.
Plan wedding.
Really I needed to write this down, as the priorities were all out of order. It almost made me miss the days when Stay alive topped the list, for the way it put everything else into perspective. Not that it shouldn’t still be on there. Maybe I’d just gotten back to the point where that was implied and not something to keep at the forefront of my mind. It really irked me to have planning a stupid wedding on the list at all. Maybe I’d take it off and put it on Starling’s list.
And none of this would get addressed if I lolled in bed all day.
I wandered naked down to the bathing room and used the magic chamber pot. No need for indoor plumbing with those handy things, which vanished anything put inside to parts unknown. My hair still had pins in it and stuck out in wild curls, so I brushed it out, leaving Starling’s hair-torture implements in a neat pile. Rogue must have told her to let me sleep or she would have turned up by now. Or she was too far from this room to have her alarm-sense of when I was up and about. Likely both.
Either way, I liked having the quiet and the opportunity to do for myself. I borrowed back a few of the pins, coiled up my hair and took a quick bath, to get the sex-smell off. Toweling dry, I glimpsed myself naked in the full-length mirrors for the first time in what seemed like ages. Did my belly look rounder? I turned sideways and ran my palm over it. I’d never been so skinny that I had a flat abdomen—or, Cosmo-save-me, the daunting concave variety—but I looked more slender than I had since my teens.
The Grueling Journey through the Glass Mountains with Little Food Culminating in Blood Poisoning Diet. It would never catch on.
Despite the slimmer me, my belly rounded out significantly. Plus it felt firm, the hardness of uterine muscle instead of adipose tissue. I had no idea, however, what that indicated for how far along I might be. While some women in my department back at the university had been pregnant at various times, I’d never much hung around for the blow-by-blow conversations on the physical details of the experience. Those seemed to devolve rapidly into horror stories. Mainly I knew some women “showed” sooner than others. Not a big help.
And, though I knew a lot about physiology, particularly fetal and embryonic development as it applies to neural systems, that information all revolved around the internal processes, not how it felt on the out
side. Starling possessed even less knowledge. Blackbird, though she’d given birth, according to Starling, didn’t know human bodies.
Mistress Nancy did though. And had sent me her regards. I’ve done a bit of midwifing in my day. She’d said that during our conversation at the Inn of Seven Moons.
Of course, that had been right before she mentioned how she hadn’t been able to save Cecily or her baby from their gruesome fates.
I shouldn’t juxtapose those things, however. Asking her to help me wouldn’t necessarily recreate the same scenario—that was subscribing to false causation, which led to superstitious thinking. Never mind the seeds of doubt Fafnir had planted, that Rogue could no more resist Titania’s hooks than Fafnir had.
Regardless of anything else, I was no Cecily.
I strongly suspected Rogue had planned it that way.
After locating a robe, I went upstairs, took my grimoire to a sort of wide armchair, which had a view of the waterfall, and curled up in it to make my list and notes on all that had occurred. Before I had worked for long, Rogue strode into the room, wearing a long cloak and carrying a basket.
“Good morning, lovely Gwynn.” He dropped a kiss on the top of my head, the scent of fresh air wafting over me, and set the basket in my lap.
“What’s this?” I surveyed the fruit. “Breakfast?” Or lunch, judging by the slant of the sun.
“You said last night that you wanted apples.” He unclasped the cloak and tossed it aside, then fingered the coil I’d forgotten I’d put my hair in. “You have your hair up?”
“To keep it dry. I took a bath.”
“May I take it down then?”
“Sure.” I said it casually, but it moved me somewhere deep inside that he wanted to. This daily intimacy and attention still took getting used to. With gentle pulls, he removed the pins, unwound the twist and spread my hair over my shoulders. Then he sat on the floor, gazing out at the view and leaning his shining head against my knee.
“Fafnir has been captured and the doppelgängers dealt with.” He offered that information much as he’d set the basket of apples in my lap. Buttering me up or making up?
I shivered, though, at the thought of multiple mes running around the castle complex, still dressed in last night’s seductive gown. An eternal walk of shame. Good that he’d taken care of getting rid of them. “Who were they, anyway?”
“Some of Fafnir’s cohorts. They’ve been returned to their proper forms. And Fafnir has been neutralized. He won’t bother you again.” He sounded too satisfied with that. Hopefully that wasn’t as grim as it sounded.
“So, he’s captured, you say?” All these things I didn’t think about upon awakening for my list. Where are my doppelgängers? Did anyone capture the bad guy? No, I took a bath and fretted about the pregnancy.
“Yes. Your Athena found him and he’s biding his time in silver until we’ve decided what to do with him.”
I flinched a little at the mention and Rogue untucked my bare foot from my robe, brought it over his shoulder and kissed the hollow next to my ankle, right below where my silver cuff had once contained me. The touch soothed me.
“As for the other things that just flew through your mind, I took care of them, thus you didn’t need to. We can share such responsibilities.”
I threaded my fingers through his silky hair, as always unable to resist touching him. A surge of affection filled me. In many ways it didn’t matter what doubts I harbored or that a psychologist would likely hand me a list of the ways in which my relationship with Rogue fit the term dysfunctional, I loved him, fully and completely.
I felt right in my skin when we were together in a way that I didn’t when we were apart. It was an odd sensation, because it wasn’t as if I felt wrong without him—I just felt more right with him. A rightness I’d never before experienced in my life. That meant I had to do my best to make this work. Love as an active verb, as I’d once told Starling.
Not that difficult when he gave me the least thing I mentioned wanting. He’d brought me a basket of apples.
“This was very thoughtful of you—all of it. And thank you for the apples.” I took one and bit into it. Perfectly crisp and sweet.
“I didn’t magic these up either. I picked them for you.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“You think magic is easy for me and means nothing.”
“That’s not true.” I ran my fingertips over the curls of his ear auricle, the way he liked. “Not everything has to be a grand gesture. I greatly appreciate the thought, but I don’t think I’m that high maintenance.” Not like Titania was, most likely. Probably where all of this was coming from. More baggage. More reasons not to be that way.
“Then why did you mention apples, specifically?”
I puffed out a sigh for my carelessness. Note to self on accidentally assigning quests for Rogue. “Sorry—I meant the poisonous apples like at Castle Brightness. It turns out the dragons eat them.”
He fell quiet, contemplating, moving his head slightly under my caress, the way a dog showed it was enjoying being petted. “Perhaps it’s time you told me more of your adventures while I was...away. And why you’re so bothered this morning.”
I shouldn’t be surprised that he read my emotions so easily. Though this whole thing of him being interested in how I felt seemed like a new phase for us. Go figure.
So, I opened my grimoire to the timeline I’d started, referencing what I’d already added and making notes as I talked. One thing about telling a long story to an immortal, especially a tale punctuated with pauses, was they have near-infinite patience. Rogue barely stirred, listening without comment, until I got to the part about visiting dragons in Walter’s castle.
“You have to be the only being in all of Faerie,” he said, “to have given a dragon’s egg back to a dragon.”
“It smelled the egg in my pocket and wanted it.” She wanted it, I mentally amended, since I was reasonably sure this was the same dragon. Not like it was easy to tell them apart, however. “Why wouldn’t I have given it to her?”
“They’re valuable.”
“So I understand, but I imagine they’re even more valuable to the dragons themselves.”
Rogue laughed and rubbed his cheek on my velvet-covered knee. “It’s just no wonder they like you so much. I’ve really never heard of such a thing before.”
“Walter said they’re drawn to our human flavor of magic.”
“That could be. They certainly don’t mix well with mine.
Rogue sounded rueful and I recalled my theory that the nullifying presence of dragons in Walter’s domain had weakened his abilities. And the distilled dragon’s blood elixir I’d concocted had affected Titania with devastating force.
“Does it affect you negatively—having the dragon here?”
“Why?” Rogue tipped back his head to look up at me, his voice full of amused irony. “Would you run her off for my sake?”
Okay, the image of me fighting the dragon for him was a bit absurd. “Or at least ask her to go, yes.”
He smiled and rested his head on my knee again. “Thank you, my gracious Gwynn. So far, I and the rest of the castle denizens seem to be fine. Your dragon is keeping to herself, and the people seem to be generally excited about the notoriety.”
“Oh. I suppose her presence is a bit attention-grabbing.”
“At this point, the more attention, the better.”
I supposed that was true. Titania liked to take advantage of ignorance, working in the deep shadows of memory loss, mystery and secrecy. Rogue seemed to be going for the fae equivalent of living our lives on the front page, with the major newspapers knowing everything, so that if something should happen, at least our disappearance should raise questions.
No one had missed Cecily. Outside of Nancy and Fafnir, I’d never heard any mention of her. And he hadn’t even known where she was buried until I told him—something I now regretted.
“Shit! I just realized that I sho
uld have used my favor to stop Fafnir from abducting me! Why the hell didn’t I think of that?”
“You managed to extricate yourself without using up the favor.”
“True. Plus he already thought he was saving me so it might have been difficult to word.”
Rogue went still at that. He had an inhuman turn to it, as if he turned his body off, making it momentarily lifeless. Yet, within that stillness, his mind spun, a whirling mosaic of thoughts, images and emotions.
“Saving you from what?” he asked, finally.
“I’m sure you know. Do you want me to say it out loud?”
“Yes, I want to hear what he said. Choose your words carefully, but you have more...freedom to say what you wish without consequence.”
“He said that what happened to him, having his mind turned so that he killed Cecily and gave the infant to the Queen Bitch, could also happen to you. He offered to protect me from you.”
After a time, Rogue moved again, beginning with a long breath that sighed out, cold and lonely. “You should know this. He could be right.”
Part III
Human Trials
Chapter Sixteen
In Which I Use a Lot of Feeling Words
In Faerie, the shortest distance between two points is almost never a straight line.
~Big Book of Fairyland, “General Observations”
“I know,” I replied, feeling remarkably Zen about it for the moment. And touched, that he trusted me enough to admit that. Once, the thought would have scared me shitless and I would have done all in my power to get away. Look at us, and how far we’d come.
Rogue let his head fall back, gaze brilliant blue through his thick black lashes. “You knew, were already in fear of this possibility and yet you did not take the escape Fafnir offered?”
I tucked the grimoire by my feet and leaned over him, brushing my fingers over the pattern on his face that always fascinated me so. “I’ve known since Nancy told me the story. Even before that, I figured something along those lines could occur. That’s part of why I fought you so hard, for so long.”
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