by Jenna Grey
“I don’t really feel that tired now,” he said. His hand slipped down to her breast and he gave it a little squeeze. Lily laughed.
“Men ‒ fey or human, you’ve all got just one thing on your mind.”
“Well, now we’re married, we can do what we like without feeling in the least bit guilty.”
Lily pulled a face.
“That wasn’t exactly how I pictured getting married. I mean I never expected to walk up the aisle looking like a meringue, but… well, I don’t really feel married. It just sort of happened without us even noticing it.”
“But we have the blessing of Hecate and the Powers that Be… that’s as married as anyone can be. They’ve joined us together and that’s worth more than a bit of paper, written by men.”
Lily gave a wistful smile.
“Of course, you’re right. But it would be nice to have a proper wedding when all of this is settled and over.”
“I promise you a wedding to rival all weddings,” he said.
“Just a little wedding will—”
Connor silenced her with another kiss, this time demanding, his mouth eating hungrily at hers. She didn’t object, but slipped her tongue into his mouth, letting their tongues entwine. It was a good kiss.
Connor slipped his hand up under Lily’s sweatshirt and she could feel his hands, warm through the thin fabric of her tee-shirt and the lace of her bra. She wanted his skin next to hers, wanted to feel flesh on flesh. He tried to get his hand inside her bra, but it fitted too tightly, so he reached around the back and struggled with the fastener, until it popped, and Lily’s breasts were exposed. She made a small noise of pleasure as she felt his hot palm over her breast, his thumb playing over the nipple, making it hard. He bent forwards, closing his mouth over it and sucking gently. She reached down and found that he was rock hard, the shorts tenting at the front, straining to keep him contained. She slipped her hand inside and began to massage him, gently wriggling the shorts down his thighs so that she could get to him more easily. He made a noise that was a cross between a moan and a whimper, kissing her harder and almost bruising her mouth. He fumbled with her jean’s zip and slipped his hand inside, kissing her the whole time, desperate and eager. She felt his fingers edge over the top of her panties, his hand resting on her pubes, rubbing his thumb gently over her groin and forcing her to let out a small moan. He moved his hand down between her legs, sliding into the crevice, his touch delicate and sensitive, his fingers stealing inside her like a thief. Lily pulled off her jeans and panties, leaving her lying on the old potato sacking which scratched and tickled her behind.
“These sacks aren’t exactly silk sheets are they? I’m going to get friction burns,” she said, but she laughed as she said it.
Connor didn’t answer, but moved over the top of her, his naked body pressed against hers; his shorts had joined Lily’s jeans, somewhere in the pile of hay. His hardness slipped between her legs and he just lay there, nuzzling her gently for a few minutes, his warmth seeping into her. He began stroking his hand across her opening, using his fingers to make her wide enough and wet enough for him. She was dry, probably because she was so stressed and anxious about everything that was happening to them. Connor guided himself to her opening and she felt him push his way inside, a gentle push, edging his way in. He got himself about halfway in, then he thrust himself up into her with one long, hard push, and began to move against her, slowly, carefully. It was gently and comfortable, his movements lazy and unhurried. She made a contented little noise as he glided in and out of her, rotating his hips slightly in smooth undulating movements so that he touched every part of her. This was what Connor was to her, not passion or lust but comfort and safety, a reassurance and shelter from the horrors around them. She didn’t care whether she orgasmed or not, she just wanted to feel Connor inside her, feel all of him next to all of her. He moved against her, on and on, that same careful and languorous movement, until she did start to feel a weight building between her legs, a wonderful throbbing that was almost too much to bear. Connor finally let himself go inside her, silently, just an escape of air from between clenched teeth.
“I love you so much,” she said.
“I love you too,” he whispered back.
They lay locked together for some moments before Connor finally pulled out of her. Then they slept, wrapped in one another’s arms.
Daylight came, and Lily groaned herself awake. She was reluctant to move, because it was surprisingly cosy, snuggled against Connor’s bright heat. He stretched and then curled back up again, pulling her into his arms, and wrapping himself around her again.
“Can’t we stay here a bit longer?” Lily asked.
Connor gave a low moan, and opened his eyes. Lily opened one, and squinted up at the sky through the uneven roof slatting. Bright light poured in through the holes in the planking. She sat up and instantly felt a bitter blast of cold air on her face, making her skin tingle. She yawned, and watched her breath steam outwards and hang on the air for a moment before floating off into nothingness.
“God, it’s got so cold. It feels more like the middle of January.”
Connor kicked back the potato sack covers, and felt his clothes.
“At least my clothes have steamed dry.” He hesitated and huffed out a lungful of breath, then lifting his chin, he sniffed the air. “It can’t have got so cold so quickly.”
Within seconds they were both shivering.
“We need to find warmer clothes, we’re going to die from exposure if we stay in these things much longer,” Lily said. She was desperately cold and she had a full set of clothes on, Connor must have been frozen in just that skimpy outfit.
She pulled out her spare set of clothing from under the cover; she had laid them on the hay, hoping that it would dry them out a bit, and it had. She finished them off with a little bit of extra magic, until they were toasty warm and put one layer on over the top of the other. She could hardly move when she’d finished and looked like Mr Staypuft, but she did feel warmer.
“God, it’s freezing,” Connor said. He was shivering so badly that his teeth were chattering.
“Something doesn’t feel at all right. I can see our breath, and the floor is like ice.” Lily looked up at the sky through the broken slats of the roof, and saw a bright, clear blue sky.
“I have a very bad feeling,” Connor said.
“Only one way to find out...”
They both scrambled from their hay bed and made for the large, very dilapidated barn doors. Connor put his hand to the worn wooden handle and pulled. It was stuck solid, not locked, but jammed shut somehow; the top half did its best to open, but the bottom half was wedged solid. Lily put her hand over his and they pulled together. It finally gave with an ominous grating sound. There was ice around the bottom of it, and through the gap was the bright pure light of fresh snow.
“This is so wrong,” Lily said, fear getting the better of her.
They scraped the door open further and stood, wide-eyed, staring out at the scene before them. It hadn’t just snowed ‒ the snow was feet deep, the trees, mostly evergreens, were heavy with a thick frosting of white. It was the perfect Christmas card scene.
“What the hell’s going on? This is just crackers, we’ve dropped into bloody Narnia,” Lily said.
“What?” Connor asked.
“I didn’t mean that literally, I mean... well, it doesn’t matter. This isn’t right. There is no way this amount of snow could have fallen and settled so quickly, we were only asleep for a few hours.”
Lily turned to Connor and was surprised to see that he was smiling.
“Lily, don’t you understand?”
“Understand what?” she asked, exasperated.
“This isn’t Midgard, we’re not in the world of men any more. This is Otherworld.”
Lily looked around and realised what should have been obvious to her, right from the beginning. This wasn’t Cornwall; this could never be Cornwall.
�
�You mean we’re home?”
“Not home exactly. I think this is the realm of the Lords of the North. The Winter Court.”
Lily, rather stupidly, rushed to the back of the barn and peered through the slats at the area behind the building, as if she expected to see a meandering Cornish lane outside. Instead there was just a great plain of unbroken snow for as far as the eye could see.
“This is crazy. You mean the whole barn has just been teleported to Otherworld? What is this, the Wizard of Oz?”
Connor was actually grinning.
“Don’t you think that Hecate has the power to do whatever she wants? This would have been nothing to her. This is the best thing that could have happened to us,” Connor said, exuberant. “We’re almost home!”
Yes, they were almost home, then why was it that Lily felt so disquieted? She should have been bouncing with joy; for most of her life she’d been desperate to get back to Elphame, back to her family if they still lived, and here she was closer than she had ever been before, why did she feel so miserable? When she thought on it a little more, though, she realised that she should be overjoyed. Hecate had delivered them exactly where they needed to go… almost. Just a pity she hadn’t delivered some nice ski-wear and emergency supplies to go with it.
“Then we find the Winter Court?” Lily asked, trying not to sound too ungrateful.
“Where else would we go? We need to get their fast to warn Elidor not to take any action until we get that ring.”
“What if he won’t listen. I mean, look at us. Do you think he’ll believe that we are the future King and Queen of all the Seelie courts?”
Connor’s face went back to its usual solemn frown.
“Lily, we are the King and Queen, and we have the power to validate our claim.”
And even dressed in those silly clothes, he looked every inch the King as he said it.
“If we don’t get you some clothes soon, you’re going to be the Frozen King of the Seelie She,” Lily said.
Connor rubbed his arms to try and warm himself but his skin was losing colour, his face ashen, his lips almost blue, his nose too, he was shivering so violently that it was almost as if he were having a fit. There was no way that either of them could go out in that weather dressed the way they were.
“We can use the potato sacks to cover us!” Lily said.
Connor must have had the idea at the same moment she did, and rushed to the pile of sacks. rummaging through the pile to find the cleanest; they all stank, but they would keep them from freezing to death. They would be large enough to cover most of their body mass if they did some quick redesigning. Lily pulled out her small knife and slit a top along one of them for Connor’s head to go through. She helped him get it over his head and giggled as he held his arms out and did a quick pirouette. Although quite ridiculous, it was a decent enough tunic, the sort that ancient Britons used to wear, over leggings.
“You look like a stone age hunter,” Lily said.
Connor didn’t laugh.
“They’ll probably find me frozen in the snow in a thousand years or so and shove me in a museum somewhere.” Lily slit open another sack around the edges to wrap around his shoulders to make a cloak, fastening it at the front with one of her scrunchies; the smaller sacks they could put over their heads to make a kind of hood. Even Lily knew that most of a person’s body heat was lost through their heads.
“Better?” she asked.
Connor pulled the cloak a bit further around him.
“A bit. My legs are cold, though.”
“Wimp,” she said, teasing. She slit open the last large sack. “Step into it. We can tie it around your waist, like a long kilt and it will keep your legs warm.” He did as he was told, and they both burst out laughing.
“If we meet any of the Djinn, we won’t need to attack them, they’ll just die laughing,” Connor said. “It’s a good job we can use glamour, because if anyone saw me dressed like this, I’d die of shame.”
“What about our feet? I think we need to protect them or we’ll get frostbite. Oh, I know. I've got some plastic bags… they were meant to be loo bags… you know in case I had to… well do… you know what, but we can use them over our feet to keep them dry, and wrap sacking over the top for insulation.”
“Smart,” Connor said pulling her against him in an abrasive hug. Lily stood on tiptoe and kissed his stone cold mouth.
“Of course.”
When she had finished, they both looked like extras from Ten Million BC, but Lily did feel quite a bit warmer. Her stomach wasn’t that impressed by the improvement in their circumstances, but the rest of her was beginning to feel just a little bit more optimistic. After all, with Hecate taking care of them, how could things go wrong?
Connor had already regained some of his colour, and although shivering a bit, looked much, much better.
“Come on, let’s get going. My stomach is going to start a rebellion if it doesn’t get food soon.” Lily said.
“No, wait just a minute,” Connor said, pulling her back. “I really don’t want to go out there without a weapon. Ahriman might not be able to kill us directly or even indirectly, but there could be all sorts of wild beasts out there. If we get ambushed, unarmed, it could be dangerous, even with our magic.”
Lily blanched. She hadn’t thought of that. They both looked around to find something they might use to defend themselves. Connor spotted something almost immediately. He walked over to the old broken packing case in the corner; it was made from solid looking wood and was barely held together by cross bars of wood. Where the case had split apart the wooden bars and broken of ‒ one of them had a large four inch nail protruding from it. Connor prised it off and lifted it, testing the weight; it was heavy enough to make a good club, and if that nail hit anything square on it would do terrible damage. Connor swung through the air with it a couple of times and seemed satisfied.
“Better than nothing,” he said, tucking it into his belt. “Now we can go.”
Chapter Eight.
They stepped out into a white world that seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. In the distance Lily could see mountains, their summits lost in banks of low cloud, misty purple shapes against the skyline. The trees, off in the distance, hung heavy with coats of snow, and it seemed to Lily that they were on the edge of a great forest of evergreens. The barn itself stood in the middle of a great expanse of unbroken snow. Lily drew in a lungful of freezing air and it stung her throat and cramped her lungs. Lily could never remember feeling cold like this before, and her nose and cheeks were already stinging.
“The world looks so big,” she said, letting her gaze drift from one side of the horizon to the other.” She was suddenly overwhelmed by it all, not just the sheer scale of the place, but overwhelmed by what they were doing, and what they had to face. “Which way do we go?”
Connor’s face tightened in profound concentration, his eyes scanning the landscape as if he was looking for something, but Lily knew that wasn’t the sense he was using.
“That way,” he finally said. “I'm sure we have to go that way.”
Lily had learnt by now to trust Connor’s fey intuition. He had never let her down yet. She slipped her sacking-mittened hand into his and they began trudging through the snow. Their feet were sinking knee deep into it, virgin snow, apart from the odd track left here and there from some indigenous animal.
Within a few minutes Lily’s legs had began to ache terribly, her feet sinking into the loosely packed snow, so that every step was an assault; she couldn’t feel her fingers and toes, and each breath she drew in tortured her lungs. Every step felt like a challenge she couldn’t possibly meet. Despite the make-shift hood her ears were stinging, and she couldn’t feel her running nose; then it got so cold that even her nose stopped running. Lily doubted that half an hour had past before she realised that this wasn’t going to work. They were going to die.
“Maybe we should have tried to make some sort of snow shoes out of the b
roken wood from the crate. It would have stopped us sinking into the snow so much,” Connor said.
Lily gave a disgruntled ‘humph’.
“In the Lord of the Rings, Legolas hardly made a dent in it when they were trekking up the mountain. Pity it’s not like that in real life,” Lily said, plaintively, as she stumbled and landed on her hands and knees in the snow. She gave a heartfelt curse and managed to drag herself upright again, but her jeans were wringing wet, her legs stinging.
She stopped in her tracks and turned to Connor.
“This is no good. We are going to die, Connor. You know it, I know it. As soon as night falls, we’re going to turn into ice lollies. What are we going to do?”
Connor, much to her surprise was smiling.
“What?” Lily asked.
Connor raised his arm and pointed to the trees a few hundred yards in front of them. Coming from the dense clump of trees was a huge reindeer. It was impossibly large, a great majestic stag, with antlers that looked like the branches of a great tree.
And it was walking towards them.
“I called for a taxi and I think that’s our ride,” he said, grinning at her.
“You’re kidding!”
But of course he wasn't, and as the great beast came closer, Lily could sense its thoughts and knew that it was glad to help them. There was a kind of bright intelligence in his dark eyes, and Lily got clear images from his mind of the freedom and pure wild joy he felt; it made her heart beat just a little faster, and a thrill run through her entire body. The stag reached them and knelt down in front of them, its head bowed, the great antlers scraping furrows in the snow.
“Thank you for coming to our aid, Master Stag. We’re greatly in your debt,” Connor said.
The stag snorted his reply, shaking its noble head to clear the snow from his antlers.
Even with the stag recumbent, Lily couldn’t climb up onto its back without Connor helping her. He boosted her up and clambered up behind her. Lily gave a little scream of fear as the beast sprang up, with deceptive grace, and she wrapped her arms around its tree trunk neck, clinging on for dear life.
