THE MOMENT ABELOEC LAID ME DOWN ON A BED OF CASTOFF clothes, our skin began to glow. It was a thin layer of my guards’ shirts and tunics, just enough so that I wouldn’t pierce my body on the dead vegetation. It amounted to all the clothing the men were wearing, which hadn’t been much — and it left them all nude. I could still feel the dry sticks, crumbling leaves, dry and withered, crushed underneath me.

It wasn’t the feel of the ground in winter. No matter how cold the winter, how deep the snow, there is a feeling of waiting in the ground then — a sense that the land is merely asleep, and the sun will wake it, and spring will come. Not here. It was like the difference between a body that is deeply asleep and one that is dead. At a glance, your eyes may see no difference, but if you touch it, you know. The ground that Abeloec’s body pressed me into held nothing — no warmth, breath, life. Empty, like the eyes of the dead that but a moment ago held personality, and now are like dark mirrors. The gardens weren’t waiting for reawakening; they were just dead.

But we weren’t dead.

Abeloec laid his naked body against mine and kissed me. The height difference meant that all he could do was kiss me, but it was enough. Enough to conjure that moonglow inside our bodies.

He raised up on his arms to stare down at my face. His skin glowed so bright that again his eyes became like dark grey caves in his face. I’d never met any sidhe whose eyes did not glow when their power came upon them. His long hair spilled out around us, and the white lines in his hair began to glow softly blue, like before. He raised higher on his arms, almost in a push-up, so that his body was suspended above mine on hands and toes.

Pale blue lines glowed through the white of his skin. Flowing images of vines and flowers, and trees, and animals. Nothing stayed, nothing lasted. There weren’t that many lines, and they didn’t move that fast. I should have been able to tell what kind of vine, what fruit, what animal, but beyond small, or large, it was as if my mind couldn’t hold the images.

I traced the blue with my fingers, and it trailed over my hand, tickled and teased across the white glow of my own skin. And even staring at my own hand, I couldn’t tell you what plant it was that grew and flowered there. It was as if I weren’t meant to see it, or at least not to understand it. Not yet, maybe not ever.

I stopped trying to make sense of the flowing lines, and gazed down the length of Abeloec’s body where it stretched above mine. He held himself above me like a shelter, as if he could have stayed there forever and never tired. I reached down his body, worming underneath his steady strength, until I could wrap my hand around the hard length of him.

He shuddered above me. “I should be touching you.” His voice was strained, thick with effort, but effort for what? His arms and shoulders, and legs, were utterly still above me as if he were stone instead of flesh. It wasn’t his strength that gave his voice that thick sound. At least not strength of body. Maybe strength of will.

I squeezed gently around his shaft, and he was hard, so terribly hard. His breathing changed, and I could see his stomach fluttering with the effort to stay steady above me. “How long has it been?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” he said.

I stroked my hand up and over the head of him. His spine bowed downward, and he almost fell on top of me, but then his arms and legs went back to their firm stance. “I thought the sidhe did not lie.”

“I do not remember exactly, ” he said. His voice was breathy now.

I slid my other hand down to cup his balls and gently play with them.

He swallowed hard enough for me to hear it, and said, “If you keep doing that, I’ll go, and that’s not how I want to go the first time.”

I continued to play with him, gently. He was so hard, quiveringly hard. Just holding him in my hands, I knew that the phrase aching with need wasn’t merely words. He glowed and I could feel the power in him, but he did not throb with it the way the others did. It was a quieter power, this.

“What do you want the first time?” I asked, and my voice had gone deeper, thickening with the feel of him in my hands.

“I want to be inside you, between your legs — I want to make you come before I do. But I do not know if I still have that kind of discipline.”

“Then don’t be disciplined. This time, the first time, don’t worry about it.”

He shook his head, and the blue lines in his hair seemed to pulse brighter. “I want to bring you such pleasure that you will want me in your bed every night. So many men, Meredith, so many men in your bed. I don’t want to wait my turn. I want you to come to me again and again, because no one brings you as much pleasure as I do.”

A sound made us both turn our heads; we found Mistral kneeling beside us. “Hurry up and finish this, Abeloec, or I will not wait to be second.”

“Would you not worry, as I do, that you pleasure the princess?” Abeloec asked.

“Unlike you, I’ll have no second chance here, Abeloec. The queen has decreed that this time is all I will ever have with the princess. So no, I am not so worried about my performance.” He ran his hand through my hair, pushing deep so that his fingers brushed my scalp. It made me cuddle my head against his hand. He closed his fingers into a fist, and was suddenly jerking my hair tight in his hand. It sped my pulse in my throat, tearing a sound from my mouth that was not pain. My skin blazed to white-hot life.

“We do not have to be gentle,” Mistral said. He leaned his face near mine. “Do we, Princess?”

I whispered, “No.”

He pulled my hair tighter, and I cried out. I felt rather than saw some of the other men move toward us. Mistral pulled my hair tight again, bending my neck to one side, moving my body a little out from under Abeloec. “I am not hurting you, am I, Princess?”

“No.” All I could do was whisper.

“I don’t think they heard you,” he said. He twisted his hand tight and sudden in my hair. He put his lips against my cheek and whispered, “Scream for me.” The blue lines crawled from my skin to his, and again I saw that outline of lightning on his cheek.

I whispered, “What will you do, if I don’t scream?”

He kissed me, ever so gently against my cheek. “Hurt you.”

My breath came out in a shudder. “Please,” I sighed.

Mistral laughed, a wonderful deep laugh, with his face pressed against mine and his hand still tight in my hair. “Hurry, Abeloec, hurry, or we will have to fight to see who is first.” He let go of my hair so abruptly that this motion, too, hurt a little, and forced a sound from me. Mistral turned me back over to Abeloec with my eyes unfocused, and my breath either coming too fast or nearly stopping for a moment — I couldn’t quite tell. My pulse seemed uncertan if I was afraid or thrilled. But it was as if now that Mistral touched me again, he could not quite give up touching me. He kept his fingers against the side of my neck, as if he wanted to help my pulse decide.

“I do not like to cause pain,” Abeloec said. His body was not quite as happy as it had been.

“Pain is not the only way to pleasure,” I said.

His dark eyes narrowed at me from the shine of his face. “You do not have to have pain to be pleasured?”

I shook my head, feeling the lingering ache where Mistral’s hand had been. “No.”

Doyle’s deep voice came out of the dark. “Meredith likes violence, but she also likes gentleness. It depends on her mood, and yours.”

Both Abe and Mistral looked at him. “The queen cares nothing for our moods,” Mistral said.

“This one will,” Doyle said.

Abeloec looked down at me and began to slowly lower himself toward my body, for all the world like a push-up, except that I was in the way. His mouth found mine before his body pressed into me. He kissed me, and the blue was neon-bright and flared with lines of crimson and emerald. The lines of color flared down Mistral’s hand, and it felt as if those lines were made of rope, drawing his mouth to mine, and drawing Abeloec down my body. He half knelt and half lay across my lower body. He spread my legs so that his body spilled between them. But it was his finger that found me first — testing the waters, I think.

His voice was strangled as he said, “You’re still wet.”

I would have answered but Mistral’s mouth found mine, and I gave the only answer I could. I raised my hips toward Abeloec’s searching hand. The next thing I felt was his hands moving to my hips. The tip of him of him rubbing against my opening.

Mistral raised his mouth from mine and half whispered, half groaned, “Fuck her, fuck her, fuck her, please,” and the last word was drawn out into a long sigh that ended in something close to a scream.

Abeloec pushed himself inside me, and only then did he begin to throb with power. It was almost like some huge vibrator, except this vibrator was warm and alive, and had a mind and a body behind it.

That mind moved the body in rhythms that no mere mechanical aid could ever have produced. I watched Abeloec push in and out of my body like some shining shaft of light, though it was undoubtedly flesh that went in and out of me. Soft, firm, vibrating flesh.

Mistral grabbed my hair again, pulled my head back so that I could no longer watch Abeloec work his magic in my body. The look on Mistral’s face would have frightened me if we’d been alone. He kissed me hard, so hard that it was bruising. I had a choice of opening my mouth to him or cutting my lips on my own teeth. I opened my mouth.

His tongue plunged inside me, as if he were trying to do to my mouth what Abeloec was doing between my legs. It was only his tongue, but he kept pushing inside, pushing until he shoved my mouth so wide that my jaw began to ache. He shoved his tongue so far down my throat that I gagged, and he drew back. I thought he did it to let me swallow and catch my breath, but he drew back so he could laugh. He let loose a roll of masculine pleasure that spilled from his mouth and danced over my skin. There was an echo to it, that laughter — an echo like distant thunder.

His pausing gave me a chance to concentrate on Abeloec. He had found a rhythm that plunged to the end of me, and out, in a rolling slide, a rhythm that would have brought me eventually. But even beyond that, his body pulsed inside mine. It was as if his magic throbbed with the rhythm of his body, so that each time he plunged deep inside me the magic throbbed harder, and vibrated faster.