by Lisa Cach
As soon as Terix and Bone were gone, Maerlin started stripping off his clothes and shoving them in a leather bag.
“Eager, aren’t you?” I said, hands on my hips.
“It’s impossible to do up there,” he said, pointing with his chin at the nest as he hopped on one foot, pulling off a boot. “Better strip down yourself.”
A gust of winter wind wormed its way inside my cloak and sent its cold hands groping across my skin. “I’ll take my chances.”
He shook his head. “You can’t climb in those skirts, and your cloak will act like a sail and pull you off the tree.”
He was right, of course. I gritted my teeth and started to peel off my warm, soft clothing. As soon as my cloak was gone, the cold set in in earnest and I yanked the remainder off, shoved them at Maerlin, and scrambled up the ladder. The sooner I got up there, the sooner I’d be in those furs.
I felt him on the ladder beneath me, and as I reached the top I could feel the warmth of his body behind my legs. “Grab on to that rope there,” he said, and guided me through the hand- and footholds he’d put in place to get high into the tree, and then out along one of its branches. For a moment I made the mistake of raising my head and looking out to the west, and felt my heart drop through my stomach and out into the open air. From the ground, the nest had not looked so very high; what I hadn’t realized was how much the tree leaned out over open air, and how the hill fell away beneath it, sloping steeply downward, down, down, to the valley far below. The nest that had seemed only twenty or thirty feet in the air now felt an endless mile above the ground.
A shudder of cold racked me, and I realized my hands were going numb. In a flare of panic, I feared I’d lose all control of my body in the cold and tumble down through the branches to that distant valley floor. A gust of wind buffeted me, turning my body to ice.
“Nimia, you have to let go of that hold to get the next.”
I whimpered.
He wrapped an arm around my waist and hoisted me. I yelped and scrambled for my handhold, but he forced me away from it to the next one. “Just two more steps and you can get in the furs.”
I tilted my gaze to the nest, which no longer looked like a flimsy bit of whimsy high in a tree, but the most stable, secure, warm, and inviting bed I’d ever seen. I flew through the last few holds and tumbled into the depths of the nest, the ropes creaking and sagging beneath my weight. I burrowed into the furs and pulled them up and nearly over my head, my teeth chattering.
Maerlin was standing on the nearest branch, only one hand holding him secure, apparently not caring that he was stark naked and that the raw temperature had shrunk his cock to a frightened mouse peering from a thicket of dark red hair. The winter wind tossed his hair in a mad halo, tendrils whipping across his face, the yellow-green of the mistletoe behind him, and the gnarled black branches all around creating an otherworldly setting that made him look more like a mythical god than a human man. For a swaying moment, I wondered if any of this was real.
Then the bastard grinned at me. “I knew you’d climb faster if you were freezing.”
“You shouldn’t anger a woman who’s soon going to have her hands on your balls,” I said as shivers skimmed over my flesh. I couldn’t see his balls due to the cold and the hair there, but it didn’t look as if he’d been tattooed there. Spirals adorned his slender hips and spread over his broad shoulders as well as his neck and his other joints, stark black against his pale white skin. There was no fat on his body, nothing to hide the long, smooth, sculpted muscles that spoke more of grace than of power, though I knew he had both.
He jumped down into the nest, making me shriek as I was flung upward, then rolled down toward his weight. “Told you it was safe,” he said, kneeling amid the furs.
“What if it rains?” I asked, my face near his carved-stone belly, and for no reason I reached out to lay my fingertip against his navel. His belly flinched at the unexpected contact.
“Then it rains,” he said, looking at me strangely. I had the satisfaction of knowing I could unnerve him, if only a little. “We should be dry enough.” He showed me how he’d pierced holes for laces around the edges of the biggest, roughest furs, furs from a bear. They would form an outer cocoon, a bag of sorts, inside of which we would nestle with the softer furs.
“You thought about this carefully.” I imagined him lying awake at night, mentally designing this odd bed for us. There was a ruthless practicality to it that should have taken away any sexiness, and yet . . . the very practicality of it was arousing. He’d built this nest to have sex with me in a particular way, at a particular time. It might not show desire, but it spoke of his intention, and his determination to fulfill it. I was perverse enough to feel a tingle in my loins at the thought of him planning it in such fine detail.
“I think about everything carefully,” he said, and showed me how to get into the cocoon. Turning away to double-check the straps, he added under his breath, “Too carefully, perhaps.”
It wasn’t the first hint he’d given me that he wasn’t as calculating, as devoid of emotion, as he often appeared. There were moments when I knew he wanted to be other than he was . . . as did most of us, I supposed. I didn’t know if any of us could ever make those changes come true.
He crawled into the bag beside me, a gust of frigid air coming with him, his elbow landing in my stomach as we turned and shifted and struggled to make ourselves comfortable while the woven ropes beneath us tilted and dipped and seemed bent on jumbling us together. Then at last he settled, sitting half-up with ropes and furs supporting his back, his skin like ice as he drew me onto his lap, my back against his chest. We were embedded in the furs, but our heads were free, and with his arms securely around me I could at last look out through the sloping sides of our woven cage without flinching, and take in the vast sweep of the valley beneath and the roiling, darkening clouds overhead.
“This must be how eagles feel,” I breathed. “You were right, it’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced.”
His arm tightened around my waist. “Then for once, something I planned turned out right.”
I didn’t need psychic contact to know how much that meant to him. Too often, his gifts of wonder turned into episodes of horror for the recipients. “Do we have to call the storm? I don’t want to close my eyes.”
A vibration in his chest told me he was silently laughing. He spoke near my ear, his breath the only warm thing about either of us. “Then don’t. We’ll enjoy it like this, until we want to do otherwise.”
“Everyone’s waiting for the wind.”
“You can’t rush magic.”
I decided to believe him, and nestled even closer, seeking crumbs of body heat. The usual languid desire was there, flowing back and forth between us, not yet strong enough to overcome the chill and the view.
In a faint way, being here with Maerlin reminded me of when I’d belonged to Sygarius. Maerlin was older than me, powerful, far more sexually experienced, and there were times I was frightened of him. His insistence that I trust him was seductive in a way I wasn’t sure I liked, reminding me of times when I’d had no choice but to let a man make decisions about my life. There was a silent offer of security in that giving up of my own will, a feeling of comfort, as if I were handing myself into the care of someone wiser who would make all the best choices for me. It was tempting to lay myself before him as I had been forced to do before Sygarius and declare myself his for the molding, in the belief that he would guide me and teach me, and sculpt me into the woman I wanted to become.
That was the danger of the seduction: for the man’s all-knowing, all-caring power was an illusion. No man would ever look out for my wants and needs as well as I would. No man would make decisions that put my well-being above his own. No man could know the woman I was meant to become; only I could discover that. Only I could guide myself along the right path to my future, following the
urgings of my own heart.
Maybe for this one strange day, though, I could trust Maerlin and give myself over to him. Hanging here in the branches, the mistletoe of the druids above us and the whole world below, I felt as if we had stepped together out of the known world. There was magic in being here, magic that Maerlin had created, and I wanted to release myself into it. To hold back out of caution would be to rob myself of an experience that could surely never come again.
I trusted him. Goddesses help me, I did. His repeating it so often had made it so.
Our bodies slowly warmed and I drowsed, listening to the wind in the branches and feeling the gentle rise and fall of Maerlin’s chest. Feeling relaxed and secure in our aerie, the arousal caused by our contact felt more like a sleepy pleasure creeping over me than a call that must be answered. Even when that timid mouse in its red-thatched home was swallowed by a thick snake, I felt no need to do more than shift my thigh so it had room to swell. The lust stole across me so peacefully, with so little threat, that for a short while I wanted to let it reach its own end without my moving a muscle. I felt as if my body could reach its release on its own as it rose gently on a tide of desire, untouched by either me or Maerlin. The lust sank into my loins, bringing the familiar heavy ache of need and a sense that my sex was stealing all thought and purpose from me.
I may even have let it flow to its own ends, climaxing as if in a dream, except now I heard the hum of my golden swarm, trapped in their wall of gold, exerting a pulsing pressure on the bonds that held them. After being taunted by my brief dalliance with Terix they were angry, demanding to either be let out, or for the hive to be completed. The feeling of insistence, of something building and about to burst, infected me with their fervor. My hive wanted satisfaction, and I knew only one way to get it.
Maerlin! I said his name as much a moan as a cry for help. I turned in his arms to face him, holding on to his shoulders for balance as I swung one knee over his hips to straddle him. I reached down for his cock and had just butted its head against my gates when his hands gripped my hips, holding me off. I writhed in his hold, trying to lower myself onto him.
Nimia, wait, he said, his voice joining me not in my head, but in the nonspace between us where the visions came. Instead of being an invasion of my mind, it was a joining beside me.
It’s happening again. Can you hear them? Can you see the wall? They need more. They need to feel you inside me . . . I barely made sense to my own mind, my sense of myself and of my swarm conflating in my desperate body. They sense you; they can taste your power. They want you, Maerlin.
I hoped that he could understand my inner babble, for calm thought was beyond me. I felt a flutter of gratitude that I had told him all that I could of what had happened on Mona; how I’d held off my powers as Tanwen had instructed, but didn’t know now how to free them. Maerlin’s powers didn’t come to him like a golden swarm—he’d heard of no other Phanne’s that did—but he’d assured me that he understood the channels our powers could take, and how they could get dammed up. And undammed again.
You’re afraid of them, Maerlin said. It’s your fear that traps them, that holds them in the wall.
I don’t know what they’re trying to do, what they’re building, what will happen when it’s done . . .
You’ve got to set them free, or you’ll find out.
They’ve never been like this, so angry, so impatient, I said. I don’t know what they’ll do if I let them out.
They’re part of you. You cannot fear yourself.
I can!
Imagine opening the wall, brick by brick, Maerlin said, his voice a calm certainty in the center of the throbbing hive. Let them fly out.
They’ll attack you!
They’re frightened and hungry; all they want is to come back into your light. To be with you, where they belong. Nimia, trust me. He lowered me onto his cock, my gates stretching wide to accept him.
I moaned and dug my fingers into his shoulders, and the hum of the trapped swarmed swelled, deafening me to all else.
Open one brick. Maerlin held me impaled upon him, my stamen just touching the base of his rod. I tried to move, to rise upon the sweet thickness within me, but he was too strong. One brick.
I whimpered, my thighs flexing to no avail. I needed to move.
And one brick was the price to pay.
I imagined placing my hand upon a brick, and feeling the violent buzzing behind it. It would fly out and sting me in the face, I was certain of it—
—and I didn’t care, if it meant I could slide myself up his cock and plunge back down again; if I could grind myself on him, my stamen brushing that hard, low belly with its fiery thicket.
The brick vanished under my touch and a hum of power shot down my arm. In reward, Maerlin lifted me until all but the plum-shaped head of him had withdrawn. He held me there, hovering, my gates pulsing and trying to draw him inward.
Another, he said.
For a moment I did nothing, savoring the ravenous hunger of having him taunt me with this partial entrance. It was like being with Sygarius again, when I had given the wrong answer in hopes it would mean punishment . . . which meant it had been the right answer all along.
Gods, Nimia, please, one more brick.
I felt the need in him, in the thick, swollen aching of his staff, the heaviness of his balls. I tightened my gates, squeezing him in a kiss unlike any other. He jerked, his shaft thrusting half-inside me before he could stop himself.
In my mind I lay both my hands against the golden wall and spun in a circle, dragging my palms across the bricks, each one dissolving under my touch and releasing a buzzing shot of power. They came so quickly that they felt like they flowed from a fountain, a steady solid stream into me.
Maerlin groaned and thrust up into me. His hands made no effort to hold me now, and I doubted that they could have if he’d tried. I wrapped my arms around his neck and slanted my mouth down onto his, drawing his tongue into my mouth and suckling on it as my hips took their time with him, rocking in slow arcs that let me feel his whole length.
My swarm hummed inside me, as if they flowed through me instead of blood. There was a quiet ecstasy in their hum, and I knew then that I hadn’t been whole while they’d been locked away. They didn’t try to drain Maerlin, or create that bottomless pit of need in me. Set free, they were sunlight, not darkness.
Wait, Nimia . . . Maerlin’s hands were back on my hips, trying to stop me. I’m too close to— We need to slow down. We need to raise the winds first.
I moved a little, to torture both him and myself.
Do that again and I’ll spend myself.
Are you asking me to, or not to?
Nimia . . . With a groan of pain he lifted me all the way off him. I could feel the shaking in his arms as he fought his own desire, denying himself the warm, enclosing wetness of my passage. “Just . . . rest for a moment,” he said aloud, settling me beside him in the furs.
“I don’t need to rest.” My hand drifted toward his staff and he grabbed my wrist, stopping it just short of its goal.
“You do, if all you can concentrate on is my cock.”
“It feels so good, I can’t help it.”
He said something dark in a language I’d never heard. “This is what you didn’t learn on Mona: the need to keep your wits when your body and your power are begging you to abandon yourself to their wishes.”
That scraped some of the film of lust from my eyes. He was right, of course. I’d gotten into trouble because I didn’t know how to do that. “I don’t have any wits left when it’s like this.”
“No one does. But as much trouble as a normal person will get into when they’re too horny to think, at least they can’t do the damage that someone like you or I can. You have to keep control, Nimia—or next time, it might not be only yourself you hurt.”
I wrapped my
arms over my belly. “If your goal was to douse my passion, you’ve succeeded.”
“Not douse it. Just . . . slow it.” His voice lowered and took on a rough edge. “You can like slow, I think.”
My sex pulsed. “How slow?”
“Come here.”
With a little more awkwardness than was sexy, I did as he bid and again straddled him, only this time facing forward. I supported myself with my hands on his raised knees as he guided his cock inside me at a steep angle, the hard ridge of it rubbing at new pressure points that made me want to bite him and demand he shove his finger up my ass.
When he was fully inside me, he gently pulled me toward him until my back was arched and my head rested with some strain on his shoulder. I could feel the bending of his cock inside me, the angle nearly making him slip out.
“If you try to move,” he whispered against my ear, “you’ll lose me.”
“And if I don’t move?”
With the tip of one finger he lightly, delicately, drew a fine circle around my stamen. I shuddered with pleasure. “You’ll learn to love patience.”
My swarm hummed. The part of me that had liked being Sygarius’s slave buzzed to life. Yes, let me give over control to someone else. Yes, let him guide me, deny me, grant me what pleasures I could find. I’d been warped by what Sygarius had done to me, like a slat of wood left in the rain. Forever bent, never as straight and direct as I thought I should wish.
As always, when the man took control, I felt the greatest pleasure.
Maerlin teased me, taunted me, made me yearn and beg, yet the slightest movement on my part threatened that he’d slip out of me, and I couldn’t bear that. So I wrapped my arms behind me and dug my hands into his hair, holding tight as he fondled my breasts with one hand, my upper folds with the other. He whispered words I didn’t understand into my ear, and through our contact I could feel the control he exerted to keep himself from thrusting. As much as I wanted to feel him penetrating me, again and again, he wanted to pierce me. Our agony was shared.
