Tempi watched them impassively, as if scoring a wrestling bout. Marten was gesturing frantically in my direction. “Kid,” he hissed urgently. “Get back here! Kid! Come back!”
I turned back to the stream. Felurian was watching me. Even from a hundred feet away, I could see her eyes, dark and curious. Her mouth spread into a wide, dangerous smile. She laughed a wild laugh. It was bright and delighted. It was no human sound.
Then she darted across the clearing, swift as a sparrow, graceful as a deer. I leapt to the chase, and despite the weight of my travelsack and the sword at my hip, I moved so quickly my cloak flared like a flag behind me. Never have I run like that before, and never since. It was the way a child runs, light and quick, without the least fear of falling.
Felurian ahead of me. Into the scrub. I dimly remember trees, the smell of earth, the grey of moonlit stone. She laughs. She dodges, dances, pulls ahead. She waits till I am almost close enough to touch, then skips away. She shines in the light of the moon. There are clutching branches, a spray of water, a warm wind ...
And I have hold of her. Her hands are tangled in my hair, pulling me close. Her mouth eager. Her tongue shy and darting. Her breath in my mouth, filling my head. The hot tips of her breasts brush my chest. The smell of her like clover, like musk, like ripe apples fallen to the ground ...
And there is no hesitation. No doubt. I know exactly what to do. My hands are on the back of her neck. Brushing her face. Tangled in her hair. Sliding along the smooth length of her thigh. Grabbing her hard by the flank. Circling her narrow waist. Lifting her. Laying her down ...
And she writhes beneath me, lithe and languorous. Slow and sighing. Her legs around me. Her back arches. Her hot hands clutch my shoulders, my arms, pressing the small of my back ...
And she is astride me. Her movements wild. Her long hair trails across my skin. She tosses her head, trembling and shaking, crying out in a language I do not know. Her sharp nails digging into the flat muscles of my chest ...
And there is music to it. The wordless cries she makes, rising and falling. Her sigh. My racing heart. Her motion slows. I clutch her hips in frantic counterpoint. Our rhythm is like a silent song. Like sudden thunder. Like the half-heard thrumming of a distant drum ...
And everything stops. All of me arches. I am taut as a lute string. Trembling. Aching. I am tuned too tight, and I am breaking....
CHAPTER NINETY-SIX
The Fire Itself
I
WOKE WITH SOMETHING BRUSHING at the edges of my memory. I opened my eyes and saw trees stretched against a twilight sky. There were silken pillows all around me, while a few feet away Felurian lay, her naked body loosely splayed in sleep.
She looked smooth and perfect as a sculpture. She sighed in her sleep, and I chided myself for the thought. I knew she was nothing like cold stone. She was warm and supple, the smoothest marble grindstone by comparison.
My hand reached out to touch her, but I stopped myself, not wanting to disturb the perfect scene before me. A distant thought began to nag at me, but I brushed it away like an irritating fly.
Felurian’s lips parted and sighed, making a sound like a dove. I remembered the touch of those lips. I ached, and forced myself to look away from her soft, flower-petal mouth.
Her closed eyelids were patterned like a butterfly’s wings, swept in whorls of deep purple and black with traceries of pale gold that blended to the color of her skin. As her eyes moved gently in sleep, the pattern shifted, as if the butterfly fanned its wings. That sight alone was probably worth the price all men must pay for seeing it.
I ate her with my eyes, knowing all the songs and stories I had heard were nothing. She is what men dream of. All the places I have been, all the women I have seen, I have met her equal only once.
Something in my mind screamed at me, but I was bemused by the motion of her eyes beneath her lids, the shape her mouth made, as if she would kiss me even while she slept. I swatted the thought away again, irritated.
I was going to go mad, or die.
The idea finally fought its way through to my conscious mind, and I felt every hair on my body stand suddenly on end. I had a moment of perfect, clear lucidity that resembled coming up for air and quickly closed my eyes, trying to lower myself into the Heart of Stone.
It didn’t come. For the first time in my life, that cool taciturn state escaped me. Behind my eyes, Felurian distracted me. The sweet breath. The soft breast. The urgent half-despairing sighs that slipped through hungry, petal-tender lips....
Stone
. I kept my eyes closed and wrapped the calm rationality of Heart of Stone around me like a mantle before I dared even think of her again.
What did I know? I brought to mind a hundred stories of Felurian and plucked out the recurring themes. Felurian was beautiful. She charmed mortal men. They followed her into the Fae and died in her embrace.
How did they die? It was fairly simple to guess: extreme physical stress. Things
had
been rather rigorous, and the sedentary or frail might not have fared so well as I. Now that I stopped to notice, my entire body felt like a well-wrung rag. My shoulders ached, my knees burned, and my neck bore the sweet bruising of love bites from my right ear, down my chest, and....
My body flushed and I struggled deeper into the Heart of Stone until my pulse slowed and I could force the thought of her from the front of my mind.
I could remember four stories where men had come back from the Fae alive, all of them cracked as the potter’s cobbles. What manner of madness did they exhibit? Obsessive behavior, accidental death due to separation from reality, and wasting away from extreme melancholy. Three died within a span of days. The fourth story told of the man lasting nearly half a year.
But something didn’t make sense. Admittedly, Felurian was lovely. Skilled? Without a doubt. But to the extent that every man died or went insane? No. It simply wasn’t likely.
I don’t mean to belittle the experience. I don’t doubt for a second that it had, quite naturally, deprived men of their faculties in the past. I, however, knew myself to be quite sane.
I briefly entertained the notion that I was insane and didn’t know it. Then I considered the possibility that I had always been insane, acknowledged it as more likely than the former, then pushed both thoughts from my mind.
Eyes still closed, I lay there, enjoying a quiet languor of a sort I’d never felt before. I savored the moment, then opened my eyes and prepared to make my escape.
I looked around the pavilion at silken draperies and scattered cushions. These were only ornaments for Felurian. She lay in the middle of it all, all rounded hip and slender leg and lithe muscle shifting underneath her skin.
She was watching me.
If she was beautiful at rest she was doubly so awake. Asleep she was a painting of a fire. Awake she was the fire itself.
It may seem strange to you that at this point I felt fear. It may seem strange that only an arm’s length from the most attractive woman in the world, I was suddenly reminded of my own mortality.
She smiled like a knife in velvet and stretched like a cat in the sun.
Her body was built to stretch, the arch of her back, the smooth expanse of her belly going taut. The round fullness of her breasts was lifted by the motion of her arms, and suddenly I felt like a stag in rut. My body reacted to her, and I felt as if someone were hammering at the cool impassivity of Heart of Stone with a hot poker. My control slipped for a moment, and a less disciplined piece of my mind started composing a song to her.
I couldn’t spare the attention to rein that piece of myself back in. So I focused on staying safe in the Heart of Stone, ignoring both her body and that nattering part of my mind forming rhyming couplets somewhere in the back of my head.
It wasn’t the easiest thing to do. As a matter of fact, it made the ordinary rigors of sympathy seem simple as skipping. If not for the training I’d received at the University, I would have been a broken, pitiful thing, only able to concentrate on my own captivation.
Felurian slowly relaxed out of her stretch and looked at me with ancient eyes. Eyes unlike anything I had ever seen. They were a striking color ...
The summer dusk was in her eyes
... a sort of twilight blue. They were fascinating. In fact ...
With lids of winged butterflies
... there wasn’t any white to them at all....
Her lips the shade of sunset skies
I clenched my jaw, split that chattering piece of myself away, and walled it off in a distant corner of my mind, letting it sing to itself.
Felurian tilted her head to one side. Her eyes were as intent and expressionless as a bird’s. “why are you so quiet, flame lover? have I quenched you?”
Her voice was odd to my ear. It had no rough edges to it at all. It was all quiet smoothness, like a piece of perfectly polished glass. Despite its odd softness, Felurian’s voice ran down my spine, making me feel like a cat that’s just been stroked down to the tip of its tail.
I retreated further into the Heart of Stone, felt it cool and reassuring around me. However, while the majority of my attention was focused on self-control, the small, mad, lyric part of my mind leapt to the fore and said: “Never quenched. Though I am doused in you, I burn. The motion of your turning head is like a song. Is like a spark. Is like a breath that billows me and fans to flame a fire that cannot help but spread and roar your name.”
Felurian’s face lit up. “a poet! I should have known you for a poet by how your body moved.”
The gentle hush of her voice caught me unprepared again. It wasn’t that her words were breathy, or husky, or sultry. It was nothing so tawdry or affected as that. But when she spoke, I couldn’t help but be aware of the fact that her breath was pressed from her breast, past the soft sweetness of her throat, then shaped by the careful play of lips and teeth and tongue.
She came closer, moving on her hands and knees through the pillows. “you looked like a poet, fiery and fair.” Her voice was no louder than a breath as she cupped my face with her hands. “poets are gentler. they say nice things.”
There was only one person I’d ever heard whose voice was similar to this. Elodin. On rare occasions his voice would fill the air as if the world itself were listening.
Felurian’s voice was not resonant. It did not fill the forest glade. Hers was the hush before a sudden summer storm. It was soft as a brushing feather. It made my heart step sideways in my chest.
Speaking thus, when she called me a poet, it did not raise my hackles or make me grit my teeth. From her, it sounded like the sweetest thing a man was ever called. Such was the power of her voice.
Felurian brushed her fingertips across my lips. “poet kisses are best. you kiss me like a candle flame.” She brought one of her hands back to touch her mouth, her eyes bright at the memory.
I took her hand and pressed it tenderly. My hands have always seemed graceful, but next to hers, they looked brutish and crude. I breathed against her palm as I spoke. “Your kisses are like sunlight on my lips.”
She lowered her eyes, butterfly wings dancing. I felt my mindless need for her slacken and began to understand. This was magic, but nothing like what I knew. Not sympathy or sygaldry. Felurian made men mad with desire the same way I gave off body heat. It was natural for her, but she could control it.
Her gaze wandered over my tangle of clothes and belongings strewn messily at one corner of the glade. They looked oddly out of place amid the silks and soft colors. I saw her eyes settle on my lute case. She froze.
“is my flame a
sweet
poet? does he sing?” Her voice trembled and I could feel a tenseness in her body as she waited for an answer. She looked back at me. I smiled.
Felurian scampered off and brought back my lute case like a child with a new toy. As I took it, I saw her eyes were wide and ... wet?
I looked into her eyes, and in a flash of understanding I realized what her life must be like. A thousand years old, and lonely from time to time. If she wanted companionship she had to seduce and lure. And for what? An evening of company? An hour? How long could an average man last before his will broke and he became as mindless as a fawning dog? Not long.
And who would she meet in the forest? Farmers and hunters? What entertainment could they provide, slaved to her passions? I felt a moment of pity for her. I know what loneliness is like.
I took the lute from its case and began to tune it. I struck an experimental chord and carefully tuned it again. What to play for the most beautiful woman in the world?
It wasn’t hard to decide, actually. My father had taught me to judge an audience. I struck up “Sisters Flin.” If you’ve never heard of it, I’m not surprised. It’s a bright and lively song about two sisters gossiping while they argue over the price of butter.