Abeloec raised the cup, taking my hands with it. We raised the cup together and he lowered his head. His lips hesitated for a breath on the edge of that smooth horn, then he drank.

He kept tipping the cup back, until he had to drop to his knees so that my hands stayed on the cup while he upended it. He drank it down in one long swallow.

On his knees, releasing the cup, he threw his head back, eyes closed. His body bent backward, until he lay in a pool of his own striped hair, his knees still bent underneath him. He lay for a moment so still, so very still, that I feared for him. I waited for his chest to rise and fall. I willed him to breathe, but he didn’t.

He lay like one asleep, except for the odd angle of his legs — no one slept like that. His face had smoothed out, and I realized that Abe was one of the few sidhe who had permanent worry lines, tiny wrinkles at eye and mouth. They smoothed in his sleep, if it was sleep.

I dropped to my knees beside him, the cup still in my hands. I leaned over him, touched the side of his face. He never moved. I placed my hand on the side of his face and whispered his name: “Abeloec.”

His eyes flew open wide. It startled me. Drew a soft gasp from my lips. He grabbed my wrist at his face, and his other arm wrapped around my waist. He sat up, or knelt up, in one powerful movement, with me in his arms. He laughed, and it wasn’t a mere echo of what I’d heard in my vision. The laughter filled the room, and the other men laughed with him. The room rang with joyous masculine laughter.

I laughed with him, them. It was impossible not to laugh with the pure joy in his face so close to mine. He leaned in, closing the last inches between our mouths. I knew he was going to kiss me, and I wanted him to. I wanted to feel that laughter inside me.

His mouth pressed against mine. A great cry went up among the men, joyous and rough. His tongue licked light along my bottom lip, and I opened my mouth to him. He thrust himself inside my mouth, and suddenly all I could taste was honey and fruit, and mead. It wasn’t just his symbol. He was the cup, or what it contained. His tongue shoved inside me until I had to open my mouth wide or choke. And it was like swallowing the thick, golden honeyed mead. He was the intoxicating cup.

I was on the floor with him on top of me, but he was too tall to kiss me deeply and press much of anything else against my naked body at the same time. Beneath us was a fur throw that lay on the stone floor. It tickled along my skin, helped every movement he made be something more, as if the fur were helping caress me.

Our skin began to glow as if we’d swallowed the moon at her ripe bursting fullness, and her light was shining out from our skin. The white streaks in his hair showed a pale luminous blue. His charcoal-grey eyes stayed strangely dark. I knew that my eyes glowed, each circle of color, green of grass, pale green jade, and that molten gold. I knew that every circle of my iris glowed. My hair cast a reddish light around my vision: It shone like spun garnets with fire inside them when I glowed.

His eyes were like some deep, dark cave where the light could not go.

Abruptly, I realized that for a long while, we hadn’t been kissing. We’d simply been staring into each other’s faces. I leaned up toward him, wrapped my hands around him. I’d forgotten I still held the cup in one hand, and it touched his bare back. His spine bowed, and liquid poured across his skin; though the cup had been emptied before, it was full again. Heavy, cool liquid rushed down his body and over mine, drenching us in that thick golden flow.

Pale blue lines danced across his skin. I couldn’t tell if they were under his skin, inside his body, or on the surface of his glowing torso. He kissed me. He kissed me deep and long, and this time he didn’t taste like mead. He tasted of flesh, of lips and mouth and tongue, and the graze of teeth along my lower lip. And still the mead ran down our bodies, spreading out, out into a golden pool. The fur underneath us flattened in the tide of it.

He spilled his mouth and hands down my body, over my breasts. He held them in his hands, gently, caressed my nipples with his lips and tongue until I cried out, and I felt my body grow wet, but not from the spreading golden pool of mead.

I watched the pale blue lines on his arm flow into shapes, flowers and vines, and move down his hand and across my skin. It felt as if someone traced a feather across my skin.

A voice cried out, and it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Abeloec. Brii had fallen to his hands and knees, his long yellow hair spilling down into the growing pool of mead.

Abeloec sucked harder on my breast, forcing my attention back to him. His eyes still didn’t glow, but there was that intensity in them that is a kind of magic, a kind of power. The power that all men have when they spill themselves down your body with skilled hands and mouth.

He moved his mouth over me, drinking where the mead had pooled in the hollow of my stomach. He licked the tender skin just above the hair that curled between my legs. His tongue pressed in long sure strokes over such innocent skin. It made me wonder what it would be like when he dropped lower to things that weren’t so innocent.

A man’s strangled cry made me look away from Abeloec’s dark eyes. I knew that voice. Galen had fallen to his knees. His skin was a green so pale it was white, but now green lines traced his skin, glowing, writhing under his skin. Forming vines and flowers, pictures. Other cries drew my attention to the rest of the room. Of the fifteen guards, most were on their knees, or worse. Some had fallen flat to the floor to writhe on their stomachs, as if they were trapped in the flowing golden liquid, as if it were liquid amber and they were insects about to be caught forever. And they fought against their fate.

Lines of blue, or green, or red, traced their bodies. I caught glimpses of animals, vines, images drawn over their skin, like tattoos that were alive and growing.

Doyle and Rhys stood in the growing tide and seemed unmoved. But Doyle stared at his hands and arms, at lines tracing those strong arms, crimson against that blackness. Rhys’s body was painted with palest blue, but he didn’t watch the lines; he watched me and Abeloec. Frost, also, stood in the writhing spill of liquid, but he, like Doyle, stared at the tracing of lines that glowed over his skin. Nicca stood tall and straight with his brown hair and the brilliant spill of his wings, like the sails of some faerie ship, but no lines covered his skin: He remained untouched.

It was Barinthus, tallest of all the sidhe, who had moved to the door. He stood pressed to it, avoiding the spill of mead that seemed to creep like a thing alive across the floor. He held on to the door handle as if it would not open. As if we were trapped here until the magic had its way with us.

A small sound drew me back to gaze at the bed, and Kitto still perched there, safe above the flowing mead. His eyes were wide, as if he was afraid, regardless. He was afraid of so much.

Abeloec rubbed his cheek across my thigh. It brought me back to him. Back to gazing into those dark, almost human eyes. The glow of his skin and mine had dimmed. I realized that he’d paused to let me look around the room.

Now his hands slid under my thighs, and he lowered his face, hesitating, as if he were coming in for a chaste kiss. But what he did with his mouth wasn’t chaste. He plunged his tongue thick and sure across me. The sensation threw my head back, bowed my spine.

Upside down, I saw the door open, saw the surprised look on the face of Barinthus as Mistral, the queen’s new captain of the guard, strode in. His hair the grey of rain clouds. Once he had been the master of storms, a sky god. Now he strode into the room and slipped on the mead, started to fall. Then it was as if the world blinked. One moment he was falling near the door; the next he was above me, falling toward me. He put his hands out to try to catch himself, and I put my arms up to keep him from falling on top of me.

His hand caught the floor, but my hand touched his chest. He shuddered above me on his knees and one hand, as if I had made his heart stutter. I touched him through the tough softness of leather armor. He was safe behind it, but the look on his face was that of a stricken man, eyes wide.

He was close enough now that I could see his eyes were the swimming green of the sky before a great storm breaks, destroying all in its path. Only great anxiety could bring his eyes to that color, or great anger. Long ago, the sky itself had changed with the color of Mistral’s eyes.

My skin sang to life, glowing like a white-hot star. Abeloec glowed with me. For the first time, I saw the lines on my own skin, and the writhing lines of color marched over us, neon blue in the glow. I watched a thorny vine crawl blue and alive down my hand to unfurl across Mistral’s pale skin.

Mistral’s body convulsed above me, and it was as if the lines of color drew him down toward me; as if they were ropes pulling him down, down. His eyes stayed unwilling, his body fighting with muscle and might. Only when he was nearly on top of me and Abeloec, and only the force of his shoulders held his face above mine, did his eyes change. I watched that frightening storm green fade from his eyes, replaced with a blue as swimming and pure as a summer sky. I’d never known his eyes could be that blue.

The blue lines in his skin painted a lightning bolt across his cheek; then his face was too close to mine for me to see details. His mouth was upon mine, and I kissed Mistral for the second time ever.

He kissed me, as if he would breathe the air he needed to live from my mouth, as if, if his mouth did not touch mine, it would be death. His hands slid down my body, and when he touched my breasts he made a sound deep in his throat that was eager — almost a sound of pain.

Abeloec chose that moment to remind me that there was more than one mouth against my body. He fed between my legs with tongue and lips and, lightly, teeth, so that I made my own eager sounds into Mistral’s mouth. It drew another of those sounds from him that was both eager and pain-filled, as if he wanted this so badly that it hurt. His hand convulsed on my breast. Hard enough that it did hurt, but in that way that pain can feed into pleasure. I writhed under both their mouths, plunging lips to Mistral, hips to Abeloec. It was at that moment that the world swam.

I THOUGHT AT FIRST IT WAS SIMPLY THE INSIDE OF MY OWN head, caught in pleasure. But then I realized there was no longer a fur rug, heavy with mead, under my body. I lay instead on dry twigs that poked and prodded my bare skin.