Page 31 of The Fae Queen's Captive
I don’t know how long in human time we stay there by the stream, kissing and fucking, since the day is suspended in silvery autumn light. But I do know I have to sleep for several long hours in the middle of it. I do know by the time she feeds me more salt and we walk back to the pavilion, my mouth is swollen and my pussy is sore. In my old life, it would feel like a walk of shame to enter the pavilioned feasting site with disheveled clothes and mussed hair, but since there are already several fairies fucking around us, there doesn’t seem much to be ashamed about. Indeed, the queen herself strides into the camp with her torn breeches flapping around her thighs and a few stray leaves caught in her braid, and she seems no less regal for it.
We wash and change for the feast—me into a soft-pink gown held up with thin straps and stitched with crystals, her into a black silk dress with a plunging neckline and the pattern of thorns picked out in silver thread. It’s strapless, with black ribbons crisscrossing down her arms, their silk tails tied at her wrists and draping all the way to the rug-covered ground of her pavilion. Her hair, freshly washed, dried, and wound up in an elaborate style, is set with her antler crown, and as usual, she wears no other ornament, save for her ring.
When she turns, I see the very beginnings of her glassed back peeping above her gown. Enough to draw attention, but not enough to be truly vulnerable, perhaps. I think of Morven having to hide his heart, and shudder. It would be a vulnerability anywhere, but here in Faerie? It’s more like a curse.
The feast begins at twilight, right there under the low misty sky. Fires burn in a circle around us, and a glowing blue haze seems to fill the air, making the forest as well lit as the hall was last night, even as night comes. Trestle tables are arrayed in front of a temporary dais with two simple but heavy chairs atop it; already the tables are heaped with food: berries and hazelnuts and stuffed mushrooms, cakes made of oats and honey, glossy red apples, and meat pies with flaky golden crusts.
Neither Morven nor Sholto is here, but I see Maynard and Idalia thick in the fray and Felipe seated at a table near the dais. Together, Morgana and I sit and toast and feast. Together, we listen to Maynard sing us ballads; we watch courtiers dance reels and leaping, whirling waltzes; we watch as Morgana’s stag, which has been roasting over an open fire, is carved and served.
I frequently catch Morgana looking at me like she’s wondering when she can have me flat on my back again.
Finally the feast gets to the point where almost no one is looking to the queen anymore, because the merriment is so high and the fairies are all drunk or fucking (or both), and Morgana slips her hand into mine. “When I stand, follow me quickly,” she says. “Let’s not be seen.”
I do as she says, and we slip into the shadows behind the dais before the rest of the court can mark our absence, although I notice Felipe watching us, his face solemn in the bonfire light.
She’s smiling when we duck back into her personal pavilion, the light of the candelabra flickering along the high lines of her cheeks and casting shadows under her long lashes.
“I’ve never snuck away from my own court before,” she confesses, standing in the middle of her tent and looking around like a kid who’s just played hooky for the first time. “I feel a little giddy.”
As someone who used to play hooky as often as I could get away with it, I have to laugh a little at her wonder. “It’s pretty great,” I say, and then I think of how responsible I’ve been for the past few years. “Even when it’s a job you want to do, actually doing it can be exhausting sometimes.”
Her fingertips drag across the table in the middle of the tent as she walks to a high-backed chair and sits. She pats the surface in front of her, indicating where I should sit, andyes, please.I hop up in front of her and make sure my skirts aren’t trapped under my legs, just in case things get interesting.
She leans back in the chair and studies me with dark eyes. “Are you speaking from experience? About the job?”
Well. Yeah. “I’ve spent the last five years of my life fighting against time, money, and student visa renewals so I could learn to be an archaeologist,” I explain. “But now that I’m on the brink of moving into the field for real, I sometimes wonder if I made a mistake.” I pause and then sigh. “Actually, I started wondering if it was a mistake after the very first class I took.”
She regards me. “Then why go on? Why not find something else?”
I don’t know if I can answer that. At least not in any way that makes sense. “The past used to feel so magical to me,” I say. “Which sounds stupid now that I’m here in a place where magic is real—but that’s how it felt. Like there was thismysteryjust beckoning, and all I had to do was reach out my hand and part the veil, and I’d be inside it. As if the way the past made me feel was how the past would be like to study.”
“And that wasn’t the case.”
I brace my feet on either side of her chair, the hem of my dress falling into her lap, crystals against thorns. “Archaeology sometimes has this way of reducing everything to the most pragmatic version of itself. There’s very little room for feeling and fantasy in what’s supposed to be a science. And even though I still love it—and even though it feels like the one thing in my life that has an appetite to match my own—it’s bleeding me dry of who I used to be. Eventually everything will be small and recordable and quantifiable and contained, and that will be that. And sometimes I’m afraid that this is how everything is in the world—that any person, hobby, or place is a mirage about to disappear. You think you love something, you think it will love you back, but then the closer you get, the further it draws away from you. The more you realize that, rather than the thing itself, you loved the way it made you feel when you knew nothing about it instead.”
I suddenly feel very depressed.
The queen puts her elbow on the arm of the chair and then props her head on her hand. It’s a more informal pose than I’ve ever seen from her, forest sex aside, and I like it. It makes her look arrogant, a little disdainful, and it’s very hot.
“As to archaeology, why is it the only magic left in your life?” she asks. “Not counting your time here, of course.”
I push my face in my hands. “It’s embarrassing to talk about,” I mumble into my palms.
“I like embarrassing,” she says. “I like uncomfortable.”
I look at her through my splayed fingers, and she looks back at me, entirely seriously.
“I mean it, Janneth. Some lovers might enjoy gifts of jewels and gold, others might want ballads or praise, but I have no need of those things. Instead, I want to see inside you. I want every ugly secret and thwarted hope; I want whatever makes you flush and squirm and hate yourself at night. I suppose it might be because, in the most literal sense, people have always been able to see inside me, but it could just as easily be that I’m more than a little sadistic. Whatever the reason, you need not treat your humiliations as things that will diminish what I feel for you. Your trust in showing them to me will feed me, delight me, because you delight me. It is like seeing your heart naked, or your mind naked, and I think as I’ve established earlier today, I like seeing you naked very much.”
Her stare burns steadily into mine as she adds, “I meant what I said last night.”
Whatever you do, I shall find pleasing, because you are mine.
I know I’m staring like a dumbass right now. But it had never occurred to me that someone couldlikemessy people, that someone could find their embarrassments interesting or their revelations anything other than cringeworthy.
It’s rather…freeing, actually. Like it doesn’t matter if I do something wrong, if I get too needy or too clingy. It will all be delicious to her.
“So now,” she says again. “Why is archaeology the only magic left in your life?”
