Wyvern

by Grace Draven

  “Does this feel like a dream?”

  Elsbeth moaned softly and finally opened her eyes. Alaric, the bard who had given her weeks of happiness and eight years of loneliness, stared down at her and smiled. He rested on his elbows and forearms. He was so close, she could see the fine lines fanning from the corner of his gray eyes, the curve of his eyelids. Black hair, streaked russet by the cave’s ambient light, fell across his forehead. It was shorter than she remembered, just grazing his shoulder instead of falling below them. A beard graced his cheeks, accentuating the line of his jaw.

  “Are you truly here, or am I just wishing you to life?”

  His bare shoulders, golden and smooth, flexed. He lowered his mouth to hers and brushed her lips in the faintest kiss before pulling away. “Ah, Beth, if such wishing worked, I’d have wished you to my side years ago.”

  Held spellbound by his smoky gaze, she stared for several moments, drinking in the sight of him as if he were cool water on a sweltering summer day. She’d missed him. Dear gods, had she missed him.

  Elsbeth touched him then, a tentative caress of fingers and palms tracing the slope of his shoulders and neck. Alaric’s eyelids lowered to half mast, and his breathing hitched. He shut his eyes when she ran a fingertip over his cheekbones and across the bridge of his nose. A strong, handsome face with a generous mouth that smiled easily and had brought her to delirium with a simple kiss. A beloved face.

  “I was afraid you were dead,” she whispered, curving her hand against his cheek.

  Alaric opened his eyes and turned his head to nuzzle her palm. “I was dead,” he said, “until a fortnight ago when I heard a fiddler’s music on the cliffs.” A soft kiss danced across her lips. “I didn’t think it possible, but you’ve grown more beautiful with time, Beth.”

  Beth. Everyone, even her grandfather, called her Elsbeth. Only Alaric had ever called her Beth. Sometimes teasing, sometimes passionate, it belonged strictly to him.

  Elsbeth blushed. “Oh, yes,” she said and smiled. Her fingers sketched delicate patterns on his arms. “All these new lines on my face become me so well.”

  Hands, both graceful and rough, slid into her hair, cupping her head. Alaric no longer smiled, and his eyes narrowed. “The woman who bewitched me eight years ago had only half the grace and beauty she has now. You will grow lovelier with every passing year. If you live a wyvern’s lifespan, you will only enthrall me more.”

  Blood, heated by desire and elation, ran hot in her veins. She slid her arms around him, embraced him fully. It seemed more desperate daydream than reality, but he was in her arms once more, the lover she thought gone forever. Elsbeth spread her thighs wider, bringing him fully against her so she could feel his erection through her trousers. He moaned, hands tightening against her head, hips thrusting lightly in response to her silent invitation.

  His lips teased hers with half kisses. “We’ve much to discuss, Beth.” The sweep of his tongue on the underside of her upper lip sent tingles dancing down her arms and legs. “I came back for you.”

  She dug her fingers into his back, shocked at that confession. She wanted to know, desperately wanted to know what happened to him during those lost years, why he had not found her when he returned for her, and who was this man that wore the guise of a wyvern?

  Her hands mapped the ridges and valleys of muscle, moving lower to caress his lean buttocks. “Not yet,” she whispered, trying to capture his mouth for a deeper kiss. Her legs wrapped around his, pulling him closer into the juncture of her thighs. “Not yet. Give me this. Convince me this is real. That you’re real. That I won’t wake up alone in the fallow dark, with nothing but the memory of you next to me.”

  Alaric didn’t hesitate. He traced his tongue across her lips, held her head still and opened her mouth to stroke and plunder. New and yet familiar to her, he tasted and felt as good as she remembered. She helped him remove her tunic and trousers, pausing when she lay before him, covered only in the mage-light illuminating the cavern.

  His hand trembled as it hovered over her hip. “I’ll say it again.” His voice was soft, reverent. “You’re more beautiful now than you were eight years ago.”

  He stood and helped her rise. Elsbeth blushed as he did a slow turn around her. She knew he viewed her with partiality. Nearly a decade had brought the inevitable changes. She was not so firm in some places, a little wider in others. But she chose not to point them out, content to let him admire her.

  Alaric, on the other hand, was as flawless as she remembered. The gift of wyvern magic, she supposed. Lean and muscled, he moved with a feline grace, unaware of his extraordinary effect on her senses. Or so she thought. He met her gaze with an amused one of his own. Not only was he aware of her perusal, he reveled in it.

  “Still find me appealing, beautiful Beth?”

  “I’d be blind not to,” she said, gaze drawn to his cock, stiff and jutting from a nest of black curls. She smiled. “Still as proud too.”

  He brought her into his arms. Elsbeth sighed in sheer pleasure at the feel of his skin on hers. “Eight years,” she said. “Yet this feels the same.”

  “No.” He bent to kiss the sensitive spot where her neck and shoulder met. “This is better.”

  Alaric made slow love to her then. Unlike the first time they coupled years earlier, this wasn’t frenzied or desperate. He took his time, and Elsbeth savored his touch. He kissed and licked her everywhere, leaving no part of her untouched by his mouth. When he spread her thighs and lowered his face to her curls, she’d sucked in a breath, eager for the feel of his tongue on her, inside of her.

  He played havoc with her body and her senses, stroking and sucking while she pleaded with him not to stop and then begged him to halt before she expired. When he brought her to orgasm, her cries carried throughout Maldoza.

  She returned the favor, pleasuring them both by taking his cock in her mouth. He stood before her, hands buried in her hair as she knelt, sucking him leisurely. It was a slow torture she performed. Her tongue ran the length of his shaft, the sensitive vein along its underside. His bollocks were cool in her hands, his taste salty in her mouth. It wasn’t Elsbeth on her knees who was the supplicant, but Alaric whose thighs shivered beneath her palms and whose hands clenched her hair. His climax was as intense as hers, his knees buckling as he filled her mouth.

  They loved through the long hours of the afternoon. Alaric reasserted his earlier claim, taking her in ways that left no part of her untouched or unbreached by him. It was a loving debauchery, and Elsbeth gloried in it.

  In the aftermath, they lay spooned together. Elsbeth, satiated and exhausted, was almost asleep. Alaric’s fared no better. His voice was faintly slurred when he spoke. “Do you want a bath?”

  It was an effort to respond. “Later,” she mumbled. Her eyelids dragged down, despite her best efforts to keep them open. She was half afraid of slumber, afraid this was indeed a dream, wondrous and fleeting as a zephyr. And she had so many questions. Instead, she yawned and entwined her fingers with Alaric’s where they rested between her breasts. “I like your scent on me.”

  He hugged her close and chuckled. The sound soon changed to a gentle snore. Elsbeth fell asleep to its steady lullaby.

  “Why didn’t you tell me in Ney that you were more than a man?” Elsbeth crouched in front of a wash bowl Alaric had given her and sponged herself clean.

  “Because you might have thought me less than a man if I did.” He bathed beside her, golden skin glistening with water droplets in the lair’s magic light. “Think on it, Beth. I had a difficult enough time convincing you to even speak to me, being that you thought me nothing more than a drifter with a glib tongue and evil designs on innocent village maids.” His mouth turned up in a faint smile. “You were wrong about that you know.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “What? The part about your glib tongue, or the evil designs on village maids?”

  Alaric laughed and danced tickling fingers down her ribs, making her wiggle and laugh as well. “
The last. I had designs only on one woman, and she did not fall easily to my charms.”

  “That’s because you used the wrong charms at first. I fell quickly enough after you ate my cooking without complaint. Had I known then you could just as easily enjoy an uncooked haunch of ox, I might not have been so seduced.” She toweled off with a dry cloth and returned to their pallet, keen to have him against her once more.

  “And you’ve still the sharp tongue to go with that fiery hair.” He joined her, reaching out to curl a lock of her hair around his finger. His smiling face sobered. “The wyvern is who I am, Beth. The man merely an enchantment. One that took me nearly three hundred years to master and another fifty to grow comfortable with.”

  She captured his hand and kissed the back. “But the heart’s the same. Do you know there have been times when I’ve watched your face and seen something beyond the scales and those horrendous teeth—an expression, especially when you made some joke, that reminded me of Alaric the bard. I thought it just the sad yearnings of a lonely woman. I wanted to see similarities simply because you shared the same name.”

  “I considered taking you from Ney, regardless of your wish to stay. You almost saw the wyvern then, ready to swoop away with you.”

  “I shame myself and my grandfather’s devotion by admitting I was tempted to say yes when you asked me to go with you.”

  Alaric stroked her arm. “But you stayed anyway. There’s no shame there. You honor Angus. You stayed for your family. I left for mine.”

  He’d led to the question she’d wanted to ask for almost a decade. “What happened? Where did you go? You never fully explained it to me, only that your kinsmen needed you.”

  “That was a half-truth.” He flinched at her frown. “This enchantment I wear, it’s taxing and requires great strength to hold it for long periods. When I met you, I’d already worn the guise of a man, uninterrupted, for four months. I knew I’d have to change back to my true form while I could still control it. Transforming from man to wyvern in the middle of a human village unexpectedly wouldn’t bode well for me.”

  That last made her shudder. Had such a thing happened, he’d have sent the villagers screaming and running into the woods in terror. But not all. Ney rightfully boasted of brave men—good hunters and seasoned fighters who wouldn’t flee but instead, find the nearest crossbow or javelin with which to kill the beast.

  “The stuff of nightmares,” she said and hugged him more tightly to her. He kissed her forehead. “But that isn’t what kept you away so long. Tell me of those who needed you.”

  “My brethren rarely fly these skies. Our lands are in a far country, one very different from here. With those strange beasts I told you about and others like them. We were struck by a plague. Wyverns dying in mid-flight from some unknown sickness, eggs never hatching, their shells consumed by a black rot. It took our young first, and then the old guardians.”

  Plague. The hairs at her nape rose. Every person’s worst fear. Death came on silent feet and without warning. It held no code of honor, taking the young, the weak, and the old first. The greatest warriors couldn’t vanquish a foe that made no stand but passed nameless and unseen in the streets.

  “What was it?”

  He shrugged. “We never found out. A council was called to discuss what to do.” That same horror making her skin crawl softened his voice. “So few of us left. The pestilence had killed a good half our number, probably more.”

  “I’m so sorry, Alaric.”

  His handsome features were drawn; his eyes darkened to the color rain clouds. “The plague burned itself out eventually, but not before killing nearly all our young.”

  She stroked his face. “Such suffering. Humans have dealt with plagues as well. Families destroyed, children buried. I assumed you’d forgotten me when you left. After dealing with such tragedy, I can see why you might.”

  She squeaked in protest when Alaric crushed her to him. His brows lowered in a scowl, though he loosened his grip. “Never. You flow through my blood like the magic I wield. I came back to Ney, Beth, three years later, but you and Angus were gone. Daldan, the blacksmith, said you’d moved south. I searched but never found you. Too many villages and none knew of a red-headed fiddle player.”

  Elsbeth’s soul soared. He’d returned for her! Made the journey to Ney once more to seek her out. How strange that it was when her faith in his professed love for her had been at its lowest. She kept that to herself. “I rarely played then, only for my grandfather when he asked. I hadn’t the desire at the time.”

  “And how is the old dragon slayer?”

  The post coital languor had vanished with Alaric’s telling of the wyvern plague, but Elsbeth had only wanted to hold him closer, grateful he had not succumbed to the disease, grateful she’d been given this blessing of a chance to reunite with him. His inquiry after Angus served to remind her that this joy was on someone else’s borrowed time.

  Alaric’s eyes narrowed at her silence. “Beth?”

  She took a breath, hoping her voice didn’t warble with the threat of tears. “He’s dying, Alaric. It will be an unexpected boon of merciful gods if he’s still alive when I return to Byderside.”

  He went rigid against her, every muscle tense. Elsbeth stared at him, surprised by the sudden change. His mouth thinned to a tight line. He stared at the cave’s ceiling for several minutes, and it was she who puzzled over his silence this time. “Alaric?”

  She gasped when he suddenly rolled onto her, the gasp smothered under an onslaught of frantic kisses. She sank into him, opening her mouth to welcome his tongue, stroking his in return.

  Alaric slowly lightened the kiss, nibbled the corners of her mouth before raising his head. “Why didn’t you tell me before now?”

  Elsbeth ran her fingers through his silky hair. “Because you were Alaric the wyvern before now, and I knew you as nothing else. What interest would you take in my life beyond my music and what inspires it?” She smiled. “Besides, were you me, wouldn’t you be cautious about singing the exploits and praises of someone who wears the hide of a relative, distant though it may be?” He didn’t return her smile, only gazed at her with a troubled expression. Her smile faded as well. “What’s wrong?”

  Alaric sighed before rolling off her and rising to his feet. Elsbeth gasped. Gods, what a beautiful man. She shook her head. Or wyvern.

  He held out a hand to help her up. “Let’s get dressed. I want to show you something. Proof of merciful gods.”

  He took her back to the roofless cavern. Night had fallen since they’d made love in Alaric’s lair, and the space was doused in shadows. Above them, the dome of bright stars glimmered, reminding her of Maldoza itself with its sparkling of tiny rocks imbedded in its pocked façade.

  Alaric raised his hands and breathed on his fingertips. Captured moonlight, white and cold, spread from his hands. It passed along the floor, trickling along the rocks like the underground spring. Shadows fled to the corners, leaving the high silhouettes of birds sleeping in crevices in their wake. Elsbeth sucked in a small breath. Here in the blue glaze of mage-light and stars, Alaric’s sculpted profile was ethereal, peaceful.

  He turned at her soft exclamation. “What?”

  She smiled. “You’ve the look of a man well satisfied and content with his world.”

  He smiled in return, traced a meandering line down her throat with a gentle finger. “And you’re a woman well-loved.”

  The smile faded, and his eyes darkened. “I put all my faith in your silence, Beth. You must tell no one of this.”

  Tell no one of what? Elsbeth blinked, confused. She’d assumed he wanted this place kept secret and had no intention of remarking on it when she returned to Byderside. Angus had often accused her being more close-mouthed than a hermit monk under a vow of silence. He didn’t exaggerate.

  She touched Alaric’s arm. “I would never betray you.”

  He nodded, took her hand and led her across the cavern’s rocky floor to a splinter of
darkness wedged between two walls of sharp rock. From one angle, it looked like nothing more than a long shadow cast by the play of illumination on the cavern walls, but when Alaric brought her around to the second wall, she discovered a tunnel large enough to accommodate several people with ease.

  She peered into its gloom. Alaric sent more of the pale mage-light into the tunnel, and Elsbeth gasped at what it revealed.

  “An egg!” She didn’t wait for his permission to enter, but stepped onto the raised ledge and hoisted herself inside for a closer look at Alaric’s newest secret.

  The egg was massive, nearly twice the height of Alaric in his human form. Save for its size, it looked like any bird’s egg, with a pale blue shell mottled with brown spots. It lay in a nesting of black rocks and flushed a lavender shade at intermittent moments, as if keeping time with a silent heartbeat. The nest was hot. Where Elsbeth had shivered in the cavern’s main space, she now broke out in a sweat.

  She glanced at Alaric, eyes wide. “Is this…?”

  He wore a guarded expression, as if he was unsure of her reaction to his revelation. “Wyverns mate every other spring. The females bear a single egg, and it is the males who hatch them. A female’s fire isn’t hot enough to keep the egg warm. When she hatches, I’ll return her to her dam.”

  “She?”

  Seeing that Elsbeth was more fascinated than put off, he climbed into the tunnel with her. His hand stroked the air just above the egg’s surface. “See the color of the shell? The blue cast marks it as female. Were it browner, it would be a male.”

  He waved a hand to the main cavern. “This place offers not only protection, but space. When she hatches, she will have the room to practice her flight in preparation for her journey to her dam’s territory.”

  Elsbeth walked slowly around the egg, admiring the miracle of a life in the making before her. Alaric’s child. Offspring through the mating with a female wyvern. She smiled to herself. Somehow, she could find no jealousy within her. It was hard to see a creature a thousand times larger than her and possessed of scales and wings as competition. “What will you name her?”