A Shiver of Light

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I FORGAVE HIM when he made me yell for a much more fun reason, and the first orgasm in months filled my body, flowed over my skin, and brought me screaming. I screamed his name while his fingers brought me, and my nails carved my pleasure in red scratches down his arm, and across Galen’s back, because that was what was under my fingers when Rhys’s hand pushed me over that delicious edge.

My skin had not glowed until that last push of pleasure; only then had my pale skin filled with moonlight glow like the clouds had finally been blown away and the light of a full moon could bathe the world in its luminescence. My skin ran with power and I could see swirls of greens and golds from the corners of my vision and knew it was the colors of my own eyes alight with magic.

My magic brought theirs, and Rhys’s skin was an answering shine to mine, so that it was two moons entwined, filling the world with a light so bright it would make mortals shield their eyes for fear of losing sight, or mind, from the beauty of it. His one eye glittered like three jewels, carved sapphires in a range of blues from palest blue, as if the sky could burn with its own color, a blue so rich, as if cornflowers could explode with their own beauty, and then the color of the ocean where it runs shallow and warm, as if the sun truly did rise from the water in a burst of glory.

He leaned over and kissed me with lips that were the soft pink of sunrise to the ruby glow of my own. I saw his hand held above us; there was red shining on his fingers as if the color of my lips had been spread like slick fire across his hand. It was my blood from bringing life into the world, and it glowed like every other part of us, thick with magic and the grace of Goddess.

He lifted away from the kiss and there were afterimages of the colors of our lips like a Doppler effect that you could see with your naked eyes. My hands fell back to the bed, all of me limp; my eyes fluttered back into my head with the pleasure of it, and I could see the light of my own irises inside my nearly closed eyes, so that when I tried to open them the world was edged with emerald and molten gold fire. The term afterglow had a whole new meaning for the sidhe.

The bed moved, but I couldn’t see past my fluttering eyelids and the radiance of my own eyes and skin, as if my own magic blinded me.

Someone kissed me, and I knew from that first touch that it was Galen, because the sky didn’t glow the pale green of spring leaves, but that was the color that joined mine, so that the greens of my eyes and the green of his seemed to blend and flow together as we kissed. Where his hands touched me the light flared. I couldn’t see it, I could feel it, so that a thrumming warmth followed at his touch, and when he slid his body cuddling close to mine, that warmth pulsed between us, until I couldn’t breathe for a minute, and when I did it was a gasp, as if I were already putting my mouth around things much deeper than his kiss could ever be.

He whispered against my lips, “I want to feel your mouth around me.”

I breathed out, “Yes … please.”

He got up on his knees beside me. The fire was beginning to fade so that he looked less magical and more just Galen, but that had been magical enough to me since I was fourteen. My own glow was fading so that I could see him without the shine of my own eyes clouding my vision. He smiled down at me, and I gazed up the long length of him. The one thin braid spilled down the side of his body, the tip of it curling around his groin, so that I reached for the braid first.

“I miss when all your hair was this long,” I said.

“I’d grow it long again for you.”

I smiled up at him. “I would like to make love to you just once with all that wavy green hair surrounding us.”

He grinned. “Did you have a crush on me, or my hair, when you were young?”

“You, but the hair was beautiful. Why did you keep just the one tiny braid?”

“Because the queen’s commandment was worded in such a way that I could cut all the rest, so long as I kept some of it this long.”

“It was still a horrible risk, Galen. She could have found a reason to punish you for cutting that long hair that she’s so fond of.”

“And that proves we are high court sidhe; that’s really why we grow our hair out, Merry, and why anyone not of the court is forbidden long hair. It’s just another way to say we’re better than everyone else.”

“The custom didn’t even start until after the Unseelie began to lose their powers,” Rhys said, as he walked toward the bed, a towel folded in his hand.

“I thought it was older than that,” I said, still running Galen’s braid through my fingers.

“No, the queen decreed it to make sure that at least visually we would be different from the rest of the Unseelie Court.”

“You’re all sidhe, tall, elegant, gorgeous, and that’s true no matter what hair you have,” I said.

“True, but the nobles were afraid, Merry. Our power, our magic was what made the rest of the fey, the ones who called themselves Unseelie, let us rule them. Without that our rule was in jeopardy.”

“Forbidding the non-sidhe from growing their hair past their shoulders didn’t change that,” I said.

“People, even the fey, are very concerned with appearance, Merry. We looked different. We were allowed a privilege that the common folk were not. I believe it did help set us apart.”

“Just having long hair doesn’t make us sidhe,” Galen said.

“No, but it was a visual reminder of power. People are more likely to follow you if you look impressive.”

“True leaders can rule if they are in rags, my father always said.”

“Essus was always wise, and correct, but since not all nobles of the court were true leaders it helped for all of us to look impressive and powerful.”

“Even if we were not,” Galen said.

Rhys nodded. “Even if some of us were not.”

I noticed he said “some of us.” I was betting he didn’t consider himself one of the powerless ones. Rhys had been one of the lesser lights in the court during my lifetime, but I was learning that once upon a time he had been very major indeed.

“What’s the towel for?” Galen asked.

“In case we want to bring Merry again, while she screams her pleasure around our bodies.”

Galen had a look that was almost pain. “In case, why wouldn’t we?”

“We don’t want to make her sore.”

Galen nodded. “Oh, right, sorry, I’m a little distracted.”

“A little,” I said, and slid my hand over his balls to cup them loosely in my hand.

He went very still and then looked down at me, eyes slightly wide.

“I want you more than a little distracted,” I said, and moved in toward his body, letting the braid drop to his side. I leaned in toward the soft, waiting part of him, my eyes rolled upward so I could watch his face. His body was already partially erect before I got a lick along the shaft of him. His body gave that involuntary quiver that I loved, because it was something that they couldn’t control, a sign of pure eagerness.

Licking him meant that he was mostly erect by the time I slid my mouth over the ripe head of him and down that long, thick shaft. He wasn’t as hard as he could get, but from one spill of my mouth over him, to come up for air, and then down again, he was harder yet—hard and eager.

I slid my mouth over him again, and he flexed inside my mouth, that eager involuntary twitch against the roof of my mouth. It made me tighten my hand around the base of him and make soft, eager sounds around him as I began to drive my mouth harder and faster over him.

“Goddess,” Galen said, his eyes closed, and he reached outward, as if searching for something to steady himself with, but there was no headboard to this bed.

Rhys climbed onto the bed and grabbed Galen’s hand. Galen turned and looked at him, eyes wide, and managed to gasp out, “Thanks.”

“You can return the favor,” Rhys said, grinning.

Seeing the two of them on the bed hand in hand both excited me and made me want to make Rhys work for it. I started sucking harder as I slid over Galen, and then taking as much of that delicious hardness into my mouth as I could and still be able to suck on him.

Galen’s hand convulsed, and I watched Rhys’s arm flex, muscles cording as he held the other man steady on the soft surface of the mattress.

“Now you’re just being mean,” Rhys said, with another grin.

I couldn’t actually smile with Galen in my mouth, but my eyes smiled for me, and Rhys shook his head at me, smiling, too.

Galen began to burn for me as if the spring leaves could swallow the sun and make it shine out through the fresh, pale green of those first fragile leaves. Each green curl was edged with sunlight; the thin braid sparkled as if thin gold wire had been woven in with the green. I’d seen Galen shine before, but never edged in gold, as if sunlight and molten metal were edging the moonlight paleness of him.

Every inch of him was shining and thrumming with energy, including the part that I was going down on, so that it was like a reverse hummer, his body humming with energy inside my mouth and down my throat as I pushed it those last few inches so that it was impossible to suck anymore, or swallow, or breathe. I didn’t stay down that far long, but the sensation of that power vibrating across my tongue, between my teeth, and down my throat was incredible. When I had enough air to make sounds they spilled from my mouth in eager, excited whimpering noises. Gods, it felt so … good!

My skin began to fill with moonlight again, an answering moon to the sunrise of Galen’s power. He made a harsh sound and managed to gasp, “Close, I’m close.”

We’d been doing this together often enough that he knew to warn me so I could decide whether I was swallowing or he was finishing by spilling on me. I tasted the first sweet hint that he was very close.

Rhys’s skin began to run with shining white light, his arm cording with muscle as Galen’s grip on his hand tightened and strained his own muscles to hold on. Then from one minute to the next Galen’s body spasmed, and he cried out, and I plunged that vibrating thrumming down my throat as far as I could, burying my mouth against his body so that every delicious inch of him was in my mouth, down my throat, so thick, filling me up, and that was it: I orgasmed with him in my mouth, my body bucking with him as deep inside my mouth as he would have been between my legs. I felt the flexing as he came down my throat in a hot spill of power and grace. I came up off him enough to scream my orgasm around his body. It made him cry out again, back arching, head thrown back, eyes closed, the muscles on his arm etched in bold relief under his skin as he held on to Rhys’s hand to hold himself on his knees, upright, as a second orgasm took him.

Rhys’s skin shone brighter and I saw the glimmer as his threefold blue eye began to glow. Galen gasped out, “Enough, enough, Consort save us, too sensitive, stop, stop, stop.”

I came up off him smiling, trailing an edge of saliva and a bit of him from his body to my lips. He collapsed slowly to his side, letting go of Rhys’s hand and half-laughing.

Rhys slid his hand through my hair, and I found myself staring at his body, muscled and lean from all the extra time he spent in the gym. No other guard paid as much attention to weights and diet so that the six-pack of his abdomen was carved into his flesh. He was already thick and ready, held tight in front of those amazing abs.

He used his hand in my hair to direct me toward all that yummy goodness, and just that extra bit of dominance from him sped my pulse, started my eyes glowing; my hair was spun garnets and rubies wrapped around the shining white metal of his hand. He pushed himself between my lips and I had to open up wide enough so he didn’t catch himself on my teeth. He began to push himself in and out of my mouth in shallow strokes, nothing that would make me choke, just enough to make me eager for more. I opened my mouth wider, relaxing my throat, and he felt it, because he began to push himself deeper inside me. Now when he thrust deep there was that moment when I couldn’t breathe and my body knew it. Whereas with Galen I had been in total control of how deep, how long, all of it, Rhys had changed the rules with his hand in my hair, at the back of my head, and his own thrusting hips. I made eager noises for him, but not for long and not as loud as for Galen, because he thrust too deep for me to breathe, and without breath there is no sound, just my eyes too wide rolled up to stare into his face, as he looked down at me with a look that made me shudder and finally try to scream my pleasure around him. He moved back far enough so I could scream around him, and then thrust himself deep and hard down my throat, and this time he held my head so I couldn’t come back up right away.

He let me up, and I gasped, catching my breath in harsh, overeager breaths, and then he thrust himself into my mouth and down my throat again. He found a rhythm that was just hard enough, just fast enough, just deep enough that it was nearly the perfect blend of force and pleasure.

Rhys liked gentler, but he knew I didn’t, and he’d learned to adapt himself to what I wanted and needed. I rewarded him by screaming my pleasure around him, and then he thrust one last time, deeper, forcing my mouth tight against his body so that every last inch of him was shoved as deep inside my mouth as he could get, and whereas with Galen it had been my control, my choice, so I hadn’t fought, this wasn’t, and I started struggling just a little. Rhys stared down at me, holding me in place until my eyes watered, and when he drew me back I coughed and choked. He drew himself completely out of my mouth.

“Is it too much?”

I shook my head, coughed, and said, “No, it’s amazing.”

“Do you want me to finish that way, or on those beautiful breasts of yours?”

“On,” I said.

He tightened his hold in my hair; if it had been Mistral I’d have asked for tighter, but Rhys was already rougher than he preferred and I appreciated that. He forced himself into my mouth and down my throat again, and this time he was harder, faster, deeper, so that I had to fight for breath, fight not to choke too much; if his hold on my hair had been tighter it would have hit that switch and I could have taken more, but he wasn’t quite rough enough to make me enjoy all of it.

He noticed and drew back. “Am I hurting you?”

“If you tighten your hold on my hair, take control even more, I’ll be able to enjoy it more.”

He looked a little skeptical, but he did what I asked, fingers digging into my hair until it was painful, but for me that translated into finally relaxing into it, giving myself over to the hand in my hair, Rhys’s strength, the thrust of him plunging down my throat as he held me where he wanted me, and began to use my hair as a lever so that he thrust into my mouth and drove my mouth down on him at the same time. It rolled my eyes back into my head and spilled emerald and gold light inside my closed eyelids, so bright that it was like daylight with my eyes closed.

He pulled me off him, hand painful in my hair. I opened my eyes enough to see him stroking himself with his other hand. He spilled in a hot wave of shining white, as if moonlight could be made solid enough to pour down my breasts and drip across them in glistening lines.

He helped me lie down beside Galen, and then he collapsed on the other side of me. “Give me a minute and I’ll get you a washrag.” His voice was breathless with effort and orgasm.

“I’ll get it,” Galen said. “You rest.” I tried to focus on him enough to see the smile I could heard in his voice, but I couldn’t focus that much yet.

Rhys’s hand found mine and we lay there holding hands, relearning how to breathe and letting the fire and light of our bodies began to fade back to something resembling human-normal.

“I so needed that,” I managed to say.

“Me, too,” he said.

I squeezed his hand. “Thank you for being rougher than you wanted to be.”

“I knew that would make it better for you, and if you can’t have intercourse, you need to have the best I can give you.”

“That was good, bestest,” I said.

“I love you, Merry.”

I turned enough to smile at him. “I love you, too, Rhys.”

“I love you both,” Galen said, coming back from the bath with a rag.

“Don’t say that where the reporters can hear you. They’re already foaming at the mouth about Doyle and Frost.”

Galen grinned. “Dude, I love you like a brother. A brother that I get naked with and fuck the same woman silly with, but like a brother, totally.”

Rhys and I laughed, and then he said, “Totally.”

“Very bromance of you both, but it’s starting to run down onto the sheets.”

Galen brought the washrag. Rhys cleaned me up; he had made the mess, as he said. I used the towel he’d brought to dry off, and then we curled up on the bed, with Galen’s tall frame curled around the back of me and Rhys tight against me in front, so that we spooned perfectly. Galen’s long arm came over me and hugged along my arm that was holding around Rhys’s waist, because regardless of sexual orientation most fey had no problem with simple touch. We snuggled under the sheet with the sunlight filling the room and started to doze.

“How can I be so tired?”

“You had triplets less than a week ago,” Rhys said.

“I’m tired because the babies don’t really sleep yet,” Galen said, his voice muffled as if he’d plunged his face into the pillow. If he’d been shorter he would have buried his face against my hair, but if he did that we couldn’t spoon because it moved his body out of position; we’d tried.

“How much of the baby care is falling on you?” I asked.

“Kitto is always there; he helps a lot.”

“What about the rest?”

“Rhys does his share,” he said, and hugged us both with the one long arm.

“I find it restful. It always cleared my head to go hold a baby.”

“Really?” I asked.

“I did some of my best planning rocking babies to sleep.”

“I know you had other children before this, but there are no stories of you as a deity having any.”

His body was tense now, and the doze was no longer relaxing. “It was too long ago, and I didn’t tell my stories to the bards. Holding my son in my arms while he died didn’t feel like something I wanted to be remembered for.”

I hugged him tight, and Galen hugged us both. “I’m sorry, Rhys,” he said.

“I led him in battle, my son. He was tall like his mother, dark-haired like her, too. He was handsome and strong and brave and everything a father wants in his son. He followed me into a battle and he died there. Killed by one of the human inventions, explosives with iron filling. I hunted down every member of the tribe that had fought against us. I killed them all, down to the last baby. I destroyed them as a race, do you understand that, I killed their entire people, even the children, while their mothers begged for mercy. My grief was … terrible, and I tried to quench it in blood and death, and do you know what I discovered?”

“No, I don’t,” I said, voice soft. We held him while he told the awful things in an almost unemotional voice, the way to tell terrible things when they still hurt too much to feel.

“That killing them didn’t bring my son back, and it didn’t make the grief any less. I killed an entire race of people, centuries of culture and invention all gone, because they followed a different god than me, and they dared to fight against me. I forbade anyone to mention the name of their tribe. I wiped them from history itself, and when my vengeance was as complete as I could make it, then my rage left me. All that was left was my sorrow, and that was why I destroyed them, not because of what they had done, not really, but so I could focus my grief into vengeance and not feel the pain of his loss.”

We held him, because it was all we could do. I made comforting noises, but it was Galen who said, “I would die to protect the babies now; I can’t imagine how much I’ll love them in a few years. I understand why you did it.”

I wanted to look behind and see Galen’s face, but I couldn’t manage it; of all the men in my life he was the one I thought would be horrified at what Rhys had done, not agree with it.

“I pray to Goddess and God that you never know such grief, but remember this, Galen, it’s going to hurt no matter what you do, and vengeance just postpones it. I realized in the end that I was angry with myself, blamed myself, because I had wanted that fight. I led him to his death. I was his father and I failed him, and that was why I killed all of them. Once I understood that, I didn’t want the bards to sing of it. I didn’t deserve any stories. I had made certain that that tribe of people passed out of all memory, all history, so I did the same for me. It seemed fair.”

“But we have the stories of Cromm Cruach,” I said.

“Oh, Merry, that wasn’t my first name.”

“What was your first name?” Galen asked.

Rhys shook his head, his hair tickling against my face. “No, that name, that person, is gone. He died with the last breath of a people that he destroyed for a mistake that was his own. I buried that name with the children I slaughtered, because when they were all dead I understood that they were no more important than my son, but they were no less important either. They could have grown up and been good men, good women, but I stole that chance from them. They were mortal and had only a short time to live anyway, and I stole what few years they had, because my immortal son had managed to die at the hands of human technology. I am deeply ashamed of what I’d done, so I destroyed my name, my stories, my history in a sort of penance, though even that was such hubris, thinking that the dead could be appeased by punishing myself.”

We held him close, we murmured what comfort we could think of, but in the end what comfort is there? Then I thought of something, and had to know. “It took me almost fifteen years to find the murderer of my father. Cel was trying to kill me and all of us at the time, so it was self-defense, but I’m still glad I killed him.”

“Has it lessened your grief for your father?” Rhys asked.

I thought about it. “Yes, yes it has. I feel like I avenged him.”

“If my son had died at the hands of a true enemy, another sidhe worth fighting with all the magic and grace I had back then, maybe it would have been more satisfying, but I attacked people who could not hope to defend against me; I was a truly terrible power to be reckoned with on the battlefield, and I didn’t attack most of them in battle. I hunted them down in the streets, the mountains, anywhere they ran to hide; I found them, and I killed them.”

“Cel was already your enemy, Merry,” Galen said. “We all wanted him dead, because we were afraid the queen might actually give him the throne.”

Rhys said, “You didn’t kill Cel just to avenge your father, Merry; you killed him to keep all of the Unseelie safe from him, and that is worth killing for.”

“You know, most people’s pillow talk isn’t about battle and killing,” I said.

“Boring people,” Galen said.

“Very boring,” Rhys said.

“I don’t know, sometimes I think it might be nice to be a little boring if it would keep us from having to kill people, or keep them from trying to kill us.”

To that there was nothing to say, because we all agreed, that would be nice. “‘May you live in interesting times.’ It sounds so positive, but it’s not,” I said.

“That’s an Arabic curse, you know: ‘May you live in interesting times,’” Rhys said.

“I thought it was Chinese,” Galen said.

“Either way, Merry’s right; a little boring routine might be nice for a lifetime.”

“If you want boring and routine, you’re in the wrong bed,” I said.

He turned in my arms so he could look at me. “Am I? Well, then let’s do something that’s not boring, or routine, shall we?”

I laughed. “We just did that.”

He grinned. “Let’s do it again.” He looked across me at the other man. “Unless you aren’t up to it again this soon.”

Galen grinned back. “You’re the older man in this bed; I’m a young one, I’ll keep up.”

“Old, really?”

“Yeah, really.”

“If I could have intercourse, you could actually prove who can keep up, but you can’t just keep doing me by hand and have me suck you; I’ll strain a muscle in my tongue.”

That made them look down at me, surprised, and then they laughed, we all laughed, but when the laughter stopped we did one more round of “not boring, and not routine,” and lying between the two of them with the radiance of our bodies making colored shadows on the ceiling, so that our magic was brighter than the sunlight itself, I owned that maybe I didn’t want boring and routine anything, but safety for me and the babies and the men I loved, that I did want. Can you be safe and live an interesting life? Maybe not.