The Wizard in the Woods, page 40
part #2 of Lords of Arcadia Series
The Dragon watched her with his burning eyes. As her sobs waned, he said, “My daughter is gone and there shall never be another, but there shall always be a Romany for you. Return to your valley and the lord who holds it. There shall be letters.”
“No,” Taryn gasped. She still pressed her hands in obsessive futility to the crux of her thighs, but though her voice was hoarse, it did not waver. “I won’t accept that. I won’t let there be another life in danger just so I have mail. I won’t.”
“There will always be dangers,” the Dragon said. “But my children are Romany. They go where they will. I love them all, but she was the one that I loved best, and I allowed my voice to fall from her for the sake of my pride.”
The Dragon turned around, his hands rising to rest on the delicate curve of an eggshell. He said, “Taryn Aine MacTavish, your father calls to you from the world that gave you life. Let me give to you his voice. And if you would thank me…forgive him all the injustices a sire may inflict upon his young. We let no daughter wander but those that we love best.”
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49. It Is Time
The Dragon took her home. He didn’t need to tell her how long it had been since he’d had the skies beneath him; his great wings cracked as he first unfurled them, but the skies took him readily. He leapt out into the dawn, uncoiling black as a second night, and circled wide over his aerie as his people gathered to watch.
When he returned to land, the hurricane of his wings knocked Taryn flat. He extended his head to lie beside her, his long neck stretched gracefully along the rock. “Ride,” the Dragon said, a single word that burned bone-deep.
Taryn hesitated, aware of the watchful eyes of the Pathfinders, but knowing also that there was no way down from the aerie without wings or a Road.
“Ride,” the Dragon said again. His claws flexed, digging trenches in the stone. “Let me bear you home.”
Hesitantly, she swung a leg up behind his head to straddle the powerful neck. The knots of his spine nudged at her in a delicate place and she squirmed as she settled, trying to fight the rush of memory his contact swelled in her. Her thighs gripped him tightly; she bent to lock her arms likewise, unable to feel anything but his embrace.
The dizzying rush of that first leap was lost in the sensual storm that assailed her, but then the power of flight was able to overwhelm 349
even his impressions. Taryn craned her neck to see as much as she could beyond the living shadow that she rode.
The mountain dropped away. The Pathfinders, mere dots that swiftly vanished altogether from sight. Clouds and snow blurred together over stone. He rose higher, letting white envelop all there was, and then let memory come to her of a time when he had known dragons.
He sailed upwards over the clouds, letting her remember the mating rituals of his kind, the aerial maneuvers of flight and fire that wooed many a reluctant female to accept his courting, and then taking them with him to greater and greater heights. There, with the air at killing thinness, they would lock together and fold their wings tight, plummeting to earth in a howling wake with tails entwined, mating in a frenzy too furious to even feel, and breaking apart at the last instant, sometimes close enough to feel one’s claws skim over the ground (knowing always that there were those who had broken on the ground and there ended their burning lives for all time).
Taryn hugged him close, her hips grinding at him in the throes of his remembering, even after the images themselves began to fade. She looked down and saw the lake, no longer stretching out forever, but just an oddly-shaped swimming pool in a big backyard. She saw dark patches of forest reaching through the plains. There were so many trees from up here, and so close together. And there, in its own little pocket of plains, was the wizard’s wood and at its center, the dark dot of his cottage.
Seeing something recognizable in all this diminutive majesty brought a nauseating vertigo up through all her senses at once. Her hands numbed, her eyes closed. Taryn slumped sickly to one side, feeling as from a great distance the Dragon’s spike of alarm just before she slid away into empty air.
Nothing all around her then but the wind. It pushed at her, roaring, and she had a moment outside of time, unsure of who or what she was. She was a dragon, falling to earth, and she had no mate to share her final flight. She tried to open her wings, realized she had none, realized secondly that the forest below was opening up into an ocean of spears, every one of which was aimed at her. She could feel no fear.
She felt curiously good in fact, as though she were coming home after a long day.
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A dark cloud spread out below her. The Dragon’s shadow, pouring itself out hugely over the wizard’s wood. The howl of wind died to silence in the heartbeat before jaws closed on her.
She fell into a moist blanket of tongue and then the head raised—the Dragon pulling out of his dive—so that she rocked back in the grip of gravity again. She smacked up against the interlocking prison of his teeth, realizing all at once that she was inside a dragon’s mouth.
Absurdly, her first thought was to wonder how she tasted.
‘As old leathers taste,’ came the answer, riding a wave of his relief and concern.
She gripped his teeth, pressing her face to the spaces between his slightly-opened jaws for fresher air, and watched the mountains circle back in from the north and grow larger. She saw the overlook at the foot of the path that led to Antilles’s cavern and watched it spin around as the Dragon circled in to land. Taryn shifted onto her knees excitedly as she saw Antilles burst through his doors, an axe in each hand and Aisling screeching bravely at his heels.
She felt the shudder of the Dragon’s weight as he settled high on the jagged mountainside, well out of swinging range. The Dragon turned laboriously, keeping his head (and Taryn) level as Antilles charged off the path to meet him.
“Do not tempt me, wretch!” Antilles roared. “I swore to seek no vengeance, but I will tolerate no boast of the murder you have done! If you have come to show me bones, I’ll have your own for answer! Get hence, contemptible snake! Lord of murderers!”
All of that ended in sharp silence as the Dragon’s mouth opened and Taryn sprang out. Every nerve tingling from the Dragon’s unshielded touch, she threw herself at her minotaur, wrapping her arms around his neck and her legs around his hips. It wasn’t the place maybe, but she didn’t care. She seized his head and kissed his bizarre bull’s mouth with radiant passion.
His axes clanged deafeningly as they dropped. His hands pulled her away so that he could stare, and then brought her back with equal violence to be pleasantly crushed against him. Aisling leapt, twisting in mid-air to try and catch at her boots. The sound of her young griffin crying “Home! Home!” was nearly lost under Antilles’s hoarse sobs.
The Dragon watched them, unblinking, unspeaking. She could feel his wistful longing like phantom touches on her heart, but like the memory of his secret name, it could not completely translate itself to her.
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She stretched out her own mind clumsily, inviting him to share her senses and felt him venture gratefully into those tender spaces to taste her love and joy.
At last, Antilles raised his head. He set Taryn on the ground and stepped before her, his horns low and every muscle locked and rigid with fury. “I will not forget her safe return,” he said stiffly. “No more than ever I forgive the theft of her by your shard-borne and villainous spawn!”
“But I do,” Taryn said.
Antilles swung on her, but it was the Dragon whose eyes Taryn met.
“If it hadn’t been for Romany’s help, Aisling would have died.
If it hadn’t been for her help, I never could have come here. I considered her a friend and she died trying to do good for me. I’m sorry for that, sorrier than I can ever say. But she died here, she died on the path to my door…and I’m human.” Taryn sighed, suddenly hugely depressed. “I understand why they came for me. I understand their grief and rage. I understand they needed to see someone suffer, after all the ages and all the misery and all the deaths…they needed to see justice done.”
Antilles drew a breath to speak, and Taryn turned around and quietly said, “They needed to see someone be sorry enough to cut off a thumb for them.”
He flinched. His words died unspoken. He dropped his eyes.
Taryn moved past him to hold her hand out to the Dragon. “If you need forgiving, then I forgive you. Please forgive me.”
The Dragon’s tongue slipped out to touch her palm. She felt him in her heart, sorrowing, yearning. Then he raised his head and opened his wings, his mighty body swelling into the skies. The wake of his wings flattened Taryn, knocked Aisling fifteen feet down the path, and sent a ripple through Antilles’s fur as he glared upward. The Dragon circled, blackening the sky, and his voice filled their minds with the magnitude of his will and thought.
**Forgiven. All forgiven. It is time, lord of the Valley. I am old, I am grieving…and it is time.**
He swept away in a roar of wind, cracking branches to drag in his trail as he flew over the plains.
Aisling came staggering back before the Dragon had left the skies to hiss threateningly at the departing shadow. Honor satisfied, he pounced happily at Taryn’s leg, and she bent to lift him into her arms.
She cradled her griffin, but her eyes were on Antilles. He had his back to 352
her still, his face turned to follow the vanished dragon. It bothered her that he was choosing not to look at her.
“I would have fought them,” he said at last.
‘And they would have killed you,’ she thought, but said instead,
“I know.”
“And died,” he continued, proving that however she may try to spare his ego, Antilles could only be honest. “Such is my strength. But you…you went to them.”
She could think of nothing to say.
Now he turned, fixing her with eyes bright and wounded. “You let them set chains on you,” he said, his voice harsh. “You them bear you out to die when you knew you had done nothing!”
“If they’d come for you, wouldn’t you have gone if it meant preventing a war?”
“They should have come for me!” he shouted. “I am lord! The burden was mine and you—” His voice broke. He bent his head, chest heaving, and said noting more for a long time. When he spoke again, it was with calm. “You have suffered enough.”
Silence. Taryn watched him stand unmoving before her, tense with anger and lingering fear.
“Gosh,” she said mildly. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”
He looked at her sharply, and she gave him an ironic smile.
“If suffering were nothing more than a quota every person had to fill,” she explained. “Then, when you’d done your share and something bad happened, you could just show your card.”
He frowned.
“Potato famine? Nope, sorry, I’ve suffered enough. And presto! Potatoes!”
“Potatoes!” cried Aisling.
Taryn shook her head, still smiling. Her hands busied themselves with the short feathers surrounding Aisling’s beak. “It doesn’t work that way, Tilly.”
“Nay.” He took a step toward her and stopped again. “Nay, it does not.”
“Romany died,” Taryn said. Her stomach clenched and she looked away, her eyes burning. “She didn’t just die, she was killed. I can’t even imagine how horrible it was. It must have been a fellcat.
Nothing else could have…torn…”
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Antilles reached her, pulled her to him and held her tight. Taryn turned her face into the comfort of his chest, seeking the sound of his heart.
“And they thought I’d done it,” she finished. “Because she’d kept me such a secret. They followed her Road to me. They thought I’d done…that…to her. And they thought you were going to let me get away with it. And haven’t they suffered enough?”
His hands stroked down her hair, and she returned the gesture in her own way, smoothing down the feathers on Aisling’s head.
“I’m so sorry I scared you,” she said. “If it helps, I was scared, too. But I can’t be sorry for what I did. It—”
“Seemed the right thing to do,” he finished for her. His sigh moved her whole body and blew hot down her neck. “Aye, I know.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“Never, lady.” His arms tightened. “Never.”
“Will you forgive them?”
Silence. His hand drifted up her back to touch the place her halter split, to touch the ragged gash left in her by the whip. He would find bruises later, she knew, where their rocks and their boots had found her. His breathing steadied, but coarsened. He caressed her future scars and considered his answer.
“Aye,” he said, and despite the bitterness in his voice, her heart soared. “I will say it so, at any hand, until I come to believe it.”
“My brave warrior.”
“Call me thy lord,” he told her.
“Wouldn’t that mean I’d have to obey you all the time?”
“Aye.”
“My brave warrior.”
Antilles laughed once, then took Aisling from her arms and set him on the ground. “Hunt thee a fletcher mink,” he commanded, and the griffin ran off. Antilles lifted Taryn into his arms and nuzzled at her neck. “That should grant us time enough.”
“I guess that would depend on what you had in mind.” She tipped her head to nibble at his throat and then laughed as he kicked open his doors.
“I have it in mind,” he said, bringing her to his bed, “to hear thee call me lord, if only once in thy entire life. Ah,” he murmured, as his hand slipped beneath her breeches to caress her. “Thee has missed me.”
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The moisture he found was the Dragon’s influence, not that Antilles needed to know that. And as Antilles divested her of her clothing, the Dragon was as far from her mind as the average annual rainfall of the Amazon Basin. The Dragon may have awakened her body, but her heart was always for Antilles. She lay back for him, opened to his expert touches, and gave in to the giddy rush of pleasure, making no effort to do anything apart from just feeling! Every sense was amplified, every nerve humming a hair’s breadth from pain, and she came almost at once, greedily impaling herself on his questing finger.
She seized his wrist and held him in place, single-mindedly seeking more, and when she was satisfied that his attentions would continue, she reached for him.
He tried to block her with the reminder, “I need no priming,” but she pushed past his gentle resistance and cupped him between her hands, feeling with fresh wonder the shape of his desire for her. He was beautiful, brazenly rampant, and with each pass of her hand, he only grew harder. She shifted around to better hold him, rocking back against his welcome invasion until she found a place where they could both be accommodated. There, she stroked him in lazy bliss, memorizing him, loving the shape and the feel and the heat of every radiant inch of him until she felt like crying. Overcome, she bent, and heard his harsh gasp as she took him into her mouth.
“Nay, Taryn!” he groaned, but his hands told a different tale.
His fingers thrust hard into her tight passage. The other came to her head, holding her against him.
“Hush, thee,” she whispered, and lathed her tongue in swirls from his base all the way to his swollen glans, lubricating the milking actions of her fist. There was something in her that knew how to move, how to tease and torture, and she let it have full rein in her, wanting only the greatest pleasures for him. “Let me serve my lord.”
“Ah,” he panted, his hips thrusting toward her as she swallowed him. “At last I am thy lord. But will thee obey?”
“That depends—” She paused to suck lightly at the underside of his shaft. “—on what your commands are. And if you can think of any at all—” She swept her hair across him and then took him fully into her throat for two slow passes of her lips before finishing, “—then I’m not doing this right.”
He made an incoherent sound that he might have meant for encouragement. The movements of his hand at her sex had become 355
sporadic and distracting. She crawled away from him to resettle herself and he immediately lay back and pulled her onto his chest, her legs on either side of his head.
Oh, those grazers.
Taryn closed her eyes in dreamy delight as Antilles pressed his muzzle to her hot core and thrust his tongue deep inside her. He was surprisingly agile with it and she was beyond the need for skill. Every minute flex of the powerful muscle brought a new crash of pleasure home to her. She writhed against him, lost in syrup-thick desire, savoring the feel of him filling her mouth with heat. She wanted to taste him when he came, but he had other ideas.
With a groan, he pulled her from him and set her before him as he rocked onto his knees, entering her in one easy thrust. His arms enfolded her; he pulled her back to envelop her fully and bent over her, his belly hard against her back. She rocked with him in gleeful harmony, taking as he gave. He said her name with every breath, in tones of mounting passion and urgency. In his voice, she heard his fear that he had lost her and she gave herself to this, his reclaiming.
His hands gripped at her, almost painfully so, as he shuddered his cumming, but he did not release her. His arms tightened on her waist and shoulders as he knelt back, keeping her astride his lap. He rocked, stroking her hair, now silent. She rested her hands atop his muscular forearms, snuggled back against his chest, and let him hold her small and safe in his arms.
“Was it necessary,” he said at last, “that he carry you in his mouth?”
“Sort of,” she answered sleepily. “He let me ride at first, but I fell off. Oh shit, I shouldn’t have said that.”
He let out an exasperated bellow and threw her suddenly on her back in the bedding. He fell on her, straddling her and pinning her hands above her head, leaning down to fill her eyes with his face. He eyed her in this posture of restraint and grunted his approval. “Here, I like thee best,” he said solemnly. “Just so. I shall fasten thee bindings to keep thee and never more shall thee ride dragons or leap bulls or have at fellcats with stones—”
