He brought me screaming, fingers digging into my own thighs, holding my place, holding my place, while the orgasm shook me, took me, and my body spasmed around his. My screams were lost in the violence of the storm, but I heard Mistral cry out above me, a second before his body thrust inside mine one last time. He came inside me, and the lightning struck the earth like a huge white hand.
I was blinded with white light. I dug my nails into my thighs to remind myself where I was, and what I was doing. I wanted his release to be everything he wished. But finally, I had to collapse to the ground, had to let my legs unbend. I lay on the dry ground, panting, trying to relearn how to breathe.
He collapsed on top of me, still inside my body. His heart was beating so fast that it felt as if it would spill out his body and touch me. Rain began to fall, gently.
His first words were breathless. "Am I hurting you?"
I tried to raise my arm to touch him, but still couldn't move. "Nothing hurts right now," I said.
He let out his breath in a long sigh. "Good." His heart began to slow as the rain fell harder. I turned my face to the side so the drops wouldn't be hitting me full on.
I'd thought the weather inside the cavern would stop with Mistral's orgasm. But though the storm had ended, there was still a sky above us. A cloudy, rainy sky. It had not rained underground in faerie for at least four hundred years. We had a sky and rain, and we were still underground. It was impossible, but the rain on my face was warm. A spring rain, something gentle, to coax the flowers out.
He raised himself up enough to pull himself out of my body and lie by my side. I felt moisture on his face, and thought at first that it was rain. Then I realized it was tears. Had the rain come because he cried, or did one thing have nothing to do with the other? I did not know. I only knew that he cried, and I held out my arms to him.
He buried his face against my br**sts, and wept.
Chapter 7
ABELOEC, MISTRAL, AND I GOT TO OUR FEET IN THE SOFT SPRING rain. It took me a moment to realize that there was light now. Not the colored shine of magic but a dim, pale light, as if there were a moon somewhere up near the stone roof of the cavern. I couldn't see the ceiling anymore. It was lost in a soft mist of clouds where the stone had been.
"Sky," someone whispered, "there's sky above us."
I turned to look at the other men who had been held outside the glowing circle of Abeloec's magic. I turned to find out who had spoken, but the moment I saw the others, I didn't care. I didn't even care that it was raining, or that there was sky, or some phantom moon. All I could think was that we were missing people: a lot of people.
Frost and Rhys were white shadows in the dimness, and Doyle a darker presence by their side. "Doyle, where are the others?"
It was Rhys who answered. "The garden took them."
"What does that mean?" I asked. I took a step toward them, but Mistral held me back.
"Until we find out what is happening, we cannot risk you, Princess."
"He is right," Doyle said. He walked toward us, gliding graceful and nude, but there was something in the way he moved that said the fight wasn't over. He moved as if he expected the ground itself to open up and attack. Just watching him move like that scared me. Something was horribly wrong.
"Stay with Mistral and Abe. Frost with Merry. Rhys with me."
I thought someone would argue with him, but they didn't. They followed him as they had followed him for a thousand years. My pulse was thudding in my throat, and I didn't understand what was happening, but I was almost certain in that moment that the men would never obey me as they obeyed him. I understood, as he stalked over the softening ground - with Rhys like a small, pale shadow at his side - why my aunt Andais had never made love to Doyle. Never given him a chance to fill her belly with child. She did not share power, and Doyle was a man whom other men followed. He had the stuff of kings in him. I had known that, but I hadn't been certain until this second that the other men knew it, too. Maybe not in the front of their heads, but in the very bones of their bodies, they understood what he was, what he could be.
He and Rhys moved toward a fringe of tall trees, their branches stark and dead against the soft, rainy twilight. Doyle was looking up into the trees, as if he saw something in the empty branches.
"What is that?" Mistral asked.
"I don't see...," Abe began; then I heard his breath draw in sharp.
"What, what is it?" I asked.
"Aisling, I think," Frost whispered.
I glanced at Frost. I could remember some of the other men who had been touching the trees. Adair, for example, had climbed a tree. I remembered seeing him up in the branches in the middle of all the sex and magic. But I didn't remember seeing Aisling after the magic hit us.
"I saw Adair climbing a tree, but I don't remember Aisling," I said.
"He vanished once we entered the garden," Frost said.
"I thought he had been left behind in the room with Barinthus and the others," I said.
"No, he was not left behind," Mistral said.
"I can't see what Doyle is looking at."
"You may not wish to," Abe said. "I know I don't."
"Don't treat me like a child. What do you see? What's happened to Aisling?" I pulled away from Mistral. But he and Abe were still between me and the line of trees. "Move aside," I said.
They glanced at each other, but didn't move. They would not obey me as they obeyed Doyle.
"I am Princess Meredith NicEssus, wielder of the hand of flesh and blood. You are royal guards, but not royal. Don't let the sex go to your heads, gentlemen - move!"