The blows raining down, Scarlet thrust his arse back, welcoming them, urging on more punishment, and fighting his bodily instincts to cringe and shift away. His flesh screamed for relief, tears welling in his eyes—but this was what Scarlet wanted, what he needed. More importantly, it was what his captain wanted of him; he could sense it.
And with the tearing, burning pain in his arse, his cock grew harder and harder. It became agony—not just the whip, but the matter that he could not touch himself without falling forward flat on his face, although he was startled to realize that even the ability to support his own weight was slipping beyond his power. Scarlet scrunched his eyes shut and felt his elbows buckle. His forehead pressed to the wood platform, he tasted salty tears on his lips, and his surrender became absolute. He felt a final lash of exquisite agony, and then the whipping stopped.
As his body cried out silently, Brien’s much stronger arms hooked under his, turning him and pulling him up onto his knees. Through tear-blurred eyes, Scarlet stared up at the terrible face of Brien, the Green Man. And then his gaze slid down over gleaming muscle to his captain’s prick, no longer shadowed.
It was every bit as splendid as he had imagined; a virile power twitched and flowed through throbbing veins to its glistening head. Scarlet’s cravings rushed through him like a flood tide.
“Fuck me,” he murmured.
Something dangerous flashed in the green eyes embedded in the mask. They couldn’t. Despite his delirium, even Scarlet recalled that.
It did not make his thirst for this man any less irresistible. He had to have his captain inside him and experience the power of his magnificent shaft. Borne upon a deluge of pure instinct, Scarlet mustered his every last ounce of strength and urged himself forward, panting hard. He hardly knew what he would do, but he was absolutely certain he wanted to do it.
He moistened his lips. With trembling hands, he grasped Brien’s thighs and wrapped his mouth around his captain’s cock.
Chapter Ten
Scarlet screwed his eyes tight and concentrated on the sensation of having his master’s incredible length in his mouth. He moved tentatively at first, his need to taste and to please spurring him on, and everything he tried felt wonderfully natural. His lips skittered up and down the shaft, tasting and exploring every inch with ravenous desire.
Intense warmth radiated from the larger man’s body as he licked salt, sweat, and something sublimely and potently Brien. Scarlet couldn’t get enough of the flavour of him. Sliding back to the tip, he pried his tongue between the slit, relishing the slip of skin against his captain’s moist arousal. The intimacy of the moment swept him away, and nothing remained tangible to him beyond the huge, hard member in his mouth and the desire that swelled and tantalized in his own needy shaft.
He’d never taken a man in his mouth before. He’d never had the chance. But Scarlet threw himself into the task as if this were what he’d been born for. It felt so right. Too right. The Green Man had taught him of nothing like this.
Perhaps he could gratify his captain with more than his mouth. Scarlet pried his hands from where he’d clamped them motionless against Brien’s thighs and pawed at them as hungrily as he devoured his master’s cock. Gravitating through coarse hair toward Brien’s groin, Scarlet discovered the thick root of his shaft and tight, dimpled sacs. While he’d never been shown what joys could be had through caressing another man’s member with his lips, the rough touch of the real Green Men had brought Scarlet much pleasure down here. Eager to hear Brien’s moans and feel him writhe, he cupped and kneaded his master’s balls.
The sudden clenching of a fist in his hair ignited a new spark of consciousness in him. Very gently, very slowly, Brien pushed him away. Brien was shaking, his struggle against the onslaught increasingly evident. But Scarlet’s desperation struck violently. He had to let Brien understand how truly he submitted, and that surely no flow from the fouler spirits could feel so right.
Shaking too, Scarlet slid his smaller hands over Brien’s. Stroking, almost clawing, he urged Brien to hold him fast, penetrate him deeper, and willed his captain’s power to engulf him as he wished it to, and as he innately knew it should.
It was hard to read emotion through that terrible mask, but he could sense Brien’s struggle waning, and Scarlet’s silent pleas were not in vain. The hand in his hair grasped ever tighter, the flood of heat becoming more powerful by the heartbeat. Then Brien started moving, thrusting his erection harder and deeper, plunging to the back of Scarlet’s throat. From the knuckles digging into his scalp, from his master’s thighs, and above all, from his prick, the energy seared into Scarlet and sapped his control.
Yes! This was right. Now it was Brien who dictated the rhythms, fucking Scarlet’s mouth with an overwhelming intensity. If Brien had not held him firmly in place, Scarlet would have been sent sprawling back onto the cart. But he did not fight back. This was the unknowable pleasure he’d sought out when he’d taken Brien’s shaft into his mouth. Scarlet was achingly hard now, his cock slick and ready. The merest contact against it would surely be enough to make him come.
Scarlet’s eyes flew wide. The tempestuous coupling was growing almost too much. Brien’s balls slammed against his lips and cheeks, shaking him so ferociously that he couldn’t focus on anything solid. Still he caught a flash of starry, emerald eyes, more awesome even than the grotesque wooden mask that failed to hide them. And more vivid than even that, Scarlet could at last picture his captain beneath, his jaw squared and his teeth gritted as he took his pleasure. He could feel the man’s engorged prick swelling, the skin taut, and every jolt and thrust into his throat made breathing difficult—but it was a wonderful brutality, beyond anything he had ever dreamed of.
His hunger was as scorching as his captain’s cock. He needed to feel Brien’s hot, salty seed pumping inside him, spilling and gushing down his throat. Scarlet would swallow every last drop. Working his tongue the little he could against the underside of Brien’s cock, Scarlet pleaded with his eyes stretched wide, willing his master, his captain toward orgasm.
It was the mask. It had to be. The moment it closed in over his natural features, Brien felt a rush of power. He’d already been hard, but now he felt his cock swelling to what seemed like supernatural proportions, just as the Green Man’s cock had done in his dream. And that beautiful boy, kneeling at his feet, his eminently fuckable arse bared, naked to the elements.
His.
He had to claim him, mark him, although a faint niggle of rationality prevented him from simply ramming his cock between those welcoming buttocks.
“You are not allowed to penetrate him…”
Each thrash of the whip had seemed like an extension of his own majesty, like a lightning strike from his loins into Scarlet’s arse. It was wonderful, although not enough. Nearly screaming with need for real contact, Brien had tried to convince himself it would have to do, his rational mind vying with the bestial appetite that boiled through the mask. Even if Scarlet wept and begged, he had to resist. And he had been doing so damned well. Right up until the moment the boy wrapped his mouth around his cock.
Scarlet’s lips and tongue felt like molten satin, and the itch that had already been building now veered between bliss and agony. He resisted with all he had left, but those wide blue eyes just kept on pleading—nay, demanding—that he take control, until he could deny Scarlet’s need no longer. The power must be his.
Tightening his hold on that silky hair, he fucked Scarlet’s mouth, increasing in strength until he realized the momentum was all his own. He could feel his rapture building, pulsating and throbbing until he balanced on the verge.
Brien’s orgasm came upon him in a flash of blinding light and a thunderbolt crash. Staggering back as if divorced from his own pleasure-racked body, Brien jerked his cock from Scarlet’s mouth, heedless of the skim of teeth against tender flesh, and watched the remnants of his seed splatter over tightly scrunched eyelids and pale, moon-drenched skin. After any other sex
ual encounter of such magnitude, he might have fallen back, boneless and spent, into the wooden throne. But not tonight. The mask and his cock still vibrated with a latent energy that held him rigid, staring down at the wide-eyed, shocked woodsman.
Scarlet was gasping, as if still struggling to breathe. Part of Brien wanted to hold him, to wipe away the semen that streaked across those delicate features and to hook that daft little braid, which drooped in front of his upturned, semen-splattered nose, behind his ear. Yet he held himself still and aloof, towering over Scarlet, and let the rest of the world seep gradually back into focus.
Slowly it dawned on him that the world was on fire. The twisted oak behind him, the low scrubby woodland where the women had been performing their strange charade, and the house in front of him: all were in flames.
Brien wrenched the mask from his face and cast it aside. Stooping, he grabbed Scarlet’s arm and pulled him up. A strong wind buffeted against them. The woodsman still looked stunned.
“We’ve got to get out of here.”
Scarlet did not respond. Only when he dragged in a lungful of smoke and coughed did awareness of what was happening appear to strike. His glazed eyes sharpened, and he reached back to grab his cloak. Brien was already dragging him from the cart, steering them away from the blazing oak.
“What just happened?” asked Scarlet; his voice sounded distant and vague.
“I have no idea.” Truly the question reverberated around Brien’s mind, and he flashed a perplexed grin. “Something just went right—or wrong. And sweet Jesus, boy, where did you learn how to gobble like that?”
Scarlet snatched his wrist away, the fury on his countenance glittering as brightly as the flames. Brien reached to grab him again. “No, wait…”
Too late. Scarlet was off, threading his way into a tunnel of absolute darkness between the fire and the chaos. Brien made chase, but only for a second. The smoke made his eyes water; he doubled over and coughed. A quick glimpse back over his shoulder told him that most of the fourteenth-century timbers of the Great Hall roof were ablaze, wind-whipped orange flames nearly lost under a cloud of billowing smoke. For a moment, he just stared.
How could he not feel a pang of mourning for his childhood home, even one he loathed? Creating a spectacle was one thing, but this had not been part of the plan—at least, not any that he had been privy to. But if burning the house had been the intention, he could not fail to be aware that Arya and her followers were also bidding a hasty retreat, and that surprise and panic tinged their cries. There was no sign of Hastings and his sons; he guessed they’d fled quicker than anyone.
Spotting Arya directing her followers back toward the track, he closed in quickly. “What the hell just happened?”
She must not have caught his question amid the clamor, for she greeted him with one of her own. “What in the name of the Mother Goddess did you just do? By what right—no, by what magic did you bring down fire from the skies?”
“What the devil?” Brien nearly choked on his disbelief. Ruffling her fingers through her hair and sending sparks flying, Arya looked about as shaken as Brien felt. They hurried onward, side by side.
“I can light a flaming torch in a variety of colours, I can mix a potent love potion, and I can even cast some powerful spells if I put my mind to it. But to bring three thunderbolts streaking down simultaneously from the heavens when there’s not even a drop of rain in the air? Sorry, Melmoth Brien, but that’s beyond my powers.”
“You don’t think I was responsible for that?”
“You were. I felt it. If I’d realized what you were capable of, I should never have allowed you anywhere near Scarlet again. Where is he?” She stopped and grabbed at Brien’s cloak. “You didn’t leave him near the fire?”
“Of course I bloody well didn’t. He…he ran off.”
“I’m not surprised. By the Goddess, you truly must channel all the greatest powers of the bloodline.”
Her rambling made his head hurt as insistently as the brambles were tangling around his ankles. Brien could not deny that he’d felt something strange shift within and without him. Yes, and at the time, it had truly seemed like some enchantment had been cast over him by the mask. But Melmoth Brien believed fucking was fucking, not some mystic act of union. Surely there was nothing more to it than finally getting some action after over a day of frustration in Scarlet’s company and the freak contrivances of the weather. Surely? He rubbed his palm across his brow.
“Look here, I wasn’t up to anything other than playing along with your charade. I don’t relish seeing the old place burn. And, God…you think I was in control back there? A man can be pretty helpless, you know, when somebody wraps their mouth around his cock. Bloody hell, and that boy’s no expert, but he’s certainly keen! I’m surprised Scarlet doesn’t make his living down the Southampton docks.”
“You have no idea what power flows within you.” Arya’s voice grew hoarse. She sounded as near the end of her wits as Brien was. “And you penetrated him when I had expressly told you to refrain. Traitor or not, a being who cannot take governance of his own powers can only be destructive.”
“Oh, in the name of God, I wish it was you who was burning, you crone!” Brien regretted his words instantly, and with his guilt came a new clarity of purpose. “Look, I’m sorry. I need to find Scarlet. I have to be sure no harm has come to him.”
“Yes…yes, you’re right.” Arya sighed heavily, but she didn’t seem to have taken much offense. “I’ll get the girls searching for him too. But you and I need to talk about this…later. When we’ve both calmed down.”
* * *
Scarlet threw off his cloak and then plunged into the pool, wading toward the depths. Ice-cold water lapped against his thighs, then, much worse, at his groin. He steeled himself the best he could before splashing a wall of water up into his face, running his fingers back through his hair so the glass beads flew from the ends of his braids and were lost beneath the surface. Gritting his teeth, he scraped the skin of his face and neck with his fingernails until he felt it grow red and raw. He didn’t care if he bled. He’d been a fool to believe in Brien, even in a moment of madness, and now he had to be rid of every trace of the faederswica.
Finding a piece of floating bark, Scarlet used it to scrub every inch of his torso, paying particular attention to his birthmark. He knew he couldn’t be rid of that so easily. No, he could feel it burning as if it had been branded into him.
Scarlet was shivering by the time he lifted his arm and scrutinized the symbol of the Goddess. In the first light of dawn, he could scarcely make out the faint outline.
“Goddess, Mother of the Earth! If you won’t help me, who will?” Frustration shattering into an angry cry, Scarlet snatched a lungful of air and then dived forward into deeper waters.
The shimmering surface closed over his head, and he swam through liquid dusk toward midnight black. Bubbles tickled up his face as he let his breath drain away, comforted by the cool, swelling force of the water as it pressed in around him. Then a warning note jolted in his tightening chest, and he kicked his legs, arms striving for the surface. He had almost forgotten he needed to breathe.
The expected pull upward never came. His ankle caught, tangled in something, painlessly held fast. He kicked again, more violently, flailing his hand down his leg. Stringy weeds ensnared him, refusing to untangle or snap. Sheer fright swept through him, and Scarlet struggled frantically. He yanked so hard that the weeds cut into his fingers, but still he could not free himself. His chest was tight and burning, the water roaring in his ears. And then words boomed through his mind and body.
“You come to me so soon, Scarlet? I did not think it would be this way, but in my realm of Niogaerst, I am waiting.”
The voice was as guttural as the moans of a dying beast, distorted by hatred and malice as well as the resonances of the water. Scarlet could guess all too well who called to him. It was the Lord of the Hazel. His servants, the Wild Men of Niogaerst, were imp
atient to take him to their master. Blinking into the inky gloom, he discerned the Wild Men’s hungry eyes, gleaming like black diamonds, and then the flash of a sharp yellow tooth.
Scarlet fought his terror, redoubling his efforts to break his snare before his strength failed and left him at their mercy. He couldn’t speak, but his own will became all-consuming.
I do not belong to Niogaerst, and you will not have me this day!
Finally the weeds gave. Scarlet’s limbs flailed free, but they were growing numb, and water filled his mouth and nose. His consciousness was fading fast, taking with it that nebulous knowledge that he must pull for the surface if he wanted to survive. All he could sense was the roaring in his ears, growing ever louder.
A large hand seized his collar. The next instant, morning chill sank its teeth where water had ravaged, and Scarlet was flung onto the muddy bank. He choked. Somebody rolled him onto his side, his stomach cramped, and he retched.
It took a few moments of lying there, breathing raggedly, for his awareness of anything beyond his struggle to return. Scarlet lifted his gaze to where his arm was stretched out above him on the rising bank. A large hand pressed over his, belonging to a thickly muscled, walnut-brown arm.
With a start, Scarlet looked up and saw the concerned figure crouching over him. It was not a Wild Man, thank the Goddess, and neither was it Brien. Instead he gazed upon a man huger than any of them, brawny, bearded, and ageless. He was clad in furs, and from his shaggy head sprouted a pair of spreading antlers.
“Herne the Hunter,” murmured Scarlet. “Thank you…thank you for saving me. But where…where is…”
Herne’s forehead creased with sadness. “You cannot belong to the Green Man anymore, Scarlet. He has no power to take care of you now the balance of the spirits is shifting. The oak is waning, and the hazel is lord here now.”
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