The Raven King

I slept like an untroubled child last night, after leaving you. It is the gift of my condition. Thoughts hasten deep slumber, and resolve themselves into fascinating dreams for my entertaining and benefit, rather than besieging my mind and causing insomnia. I wake to the scent of clean skin, washed in pure, fresh water, without soap. It is a woman's skin, that much I know. It is familiar, and I open my eyes. My stomach gives a sickly lurch. It is the mother of your firstborn, big again with your child. I loved her once, and looked to her wellbeing as to my own, but time and space have separated our hearts, and I have nothing for her but a vague and ugly dismissal. Still, it is strange, she looks at me still with affection in her grey eyes.
'You slept well?'
'I did.' I struggle to sit up, a motion at my feet bringing my eyes round to face her son, and yours. He is nearly three years old now, green-eyed and golden-haired, like you, handsome and overfed, his love for the world defiant, innocent. 'What brings you to my room at this hour? The sun has scarcely risen.'
'I thought I would find him here.' she speaks of you. There is none other in her eyes.
'We had a disagreement yesterday, did you not observe?'
'Your disagreements are generally resolved in bed.' she shrugged. 'Besides, it isn't as though he would consent to sleeping anywhere besides your room.'
'Apparently he has.'
'No.' she gestures to the chaise lounge. Your boots are at its side, your jacket and shirt slung casually over it. 'He always comes back to you.'
'I have never turned him away.'
'Before now?'
I clutch at my forehead. What happened last night, after I left you? How had you managed to creep into my room? Did you watch me sleep? Did you think of joining me in my bed? 'It is very early.' I hesitate to rise, my body bare between my sheets. 'Go break your fast. My kitchens are plentiful.'
With an effort, she lifts herself from the bed, taking her son by the hand, and makes her exit, stage right. I drag the duvet from my skin, inhale the fragrance of crushed lavender that is strewn, every night, across my bed.
From behind my dressing screen comes a rustle, and you emerge, barefooted, hair loose around your blue-limned shoulders. Without a word, you invite yourself to my bed, slipping in beside me, and I do not fight your arms around me. Your scent, as ever, soothes me.
'She enters without announcement.' you sigh in frustration.'
'As do you.' my mouth has gone dry at your nearness, I hope you cannot feel the rise in the rapidity of my heartbeat.
'That is different. You are in need of me.'
'Am I, then?' the laughter comes, unasked for. 'Am I truly, my lord?' my tone mocks, but ah, you do know me so well. I rise from the bed, in a desperate bid to distance myself from the heat of your skin, the brush of your fingertips. I pull the drapes apart, and the warm, dry sun, so newly born in the fragile morning light, smiles down on me. I turn, and the heat creeps down my back. You are at your length on the bed, a predator defanged, your power over me evaporating with the night.
'I know you have a lover.' you do not avoid my eyes. 'I know he cares for you, perhaps he even loves you. Whatever he says, there is no strength over you in his words.'
'And in his deeds?' I reply, bitterness poisoning my temper. 'Those deeds you perform, all the ways you allegedly display your attachment to me, where are they?' I shrug my shoulders, shameless in my effusion of feeling. 'They lie in the bellies of other women. It seems that you, too, have only words.'
'Do you fault me for it?' you demand, sitting and shoving your hair back from your forehead in frustration. 'Will you blame me, when I am thus surrounded by all the proofs of my folly? Do you think I would not, in this moment, renounce the world if it meant gaining you? Is that what you wish?'
Ah, how deeply you misjudge me. 'I have never asked you to give anything up.'
'But you have wished it.'
'I have wished for nothing more than what I have--the love of a good man.' well, perhaps he is neither entirely good nor entirely man. There is a pause, during which you study me, you stand, and I wish for nothing more than to evaporate, like the dew. I feel your need to touch me straining against your self-control.
'I have played you false.' I would release you from your love if only I knew how. 'I have thought of you simply as another woman to betray. But when others have seen what I am on the inside…' you struggle for a moment with your thoughts, 'they have abandoned me. You only began to accept me when you had seen the worst of me, and you have never once let go of me, in your heart. Am I mistaken? You have always had a gift for interpreting me. I never thought a time would come when I would wish myself hidden from you.'
'No. you are not.'
'We have always understood one another, you and I.' you hold out your hands in supplication. 'In the months I did not touch you once, do you know what that took from me? When my brother fell in love with you, do you know how empty that drained me?'
'You scarcely spoke to me in those dreadful times. You were going to be a father for the very first time, and I believed you wanted escape from the superfluous prison of my love.'
'How ever? How could I dispose of the only thing I knew held me in proper sight, neither revering nor despising me? How forsake the soul at which I learnt love's true nature? How despoil the sacred tie that more than emotion binds?'
'How dare you speak to me in poetry, you vandal!' the bile rises in my throat, and all too late, I realise it is not you I am angry with, but myself, for my damnably duplicitous emotions. Yes, yes!--I love you too well to let you go, but I love him too well to deceive you. I cannot be a woman divided. I cannot separate myself between such compelling men as you and the Raven King. I cannot lie, and say I love only you.
'I have never expressed my heart with the heart's true bounty.' you come toward me, closer, but do not offer to touch me. It is maddening.
'And this is your god-honoured truth?' I laugh raggedly. 'I would follow you anywhere, but I know you would soon tire of me. I cannot give myself wholly to you. I never have. Why this folly? Why now? Why could you not love her?'
'Because it is you, always you!' you throw your hands up. 'When we were only come into our first desires, when we knew love could divide us should we attempt it, we were both wary. We are older now. We knew it would come to this. I, at least, knew I would come to you in the end. I wanted to test myself, improve myself for you. But if you remember, I always returned. In the moments when the best of me flourished, I gave them to you. I suppose,' your shoulders seem to drop, and you turn away a little, 'I suppose I believed you thought the same.'
'I am not so safe a port in your storm of discontent, my one love,' I draw toward you, and the heat of your skin is the briefest barrier before my hand rests against the thrum of your heart. 'I am not so constant as you.' my words are hollow in my own ears, and I can see, in the glimmer of hope behind your eyes, that you see straight through me.
'You lie.' your words are punctuated by your mouth descending, like so much molten desire, on mine, all power and passion, and the flavour I have craved since the moment I tasted you. I cling to you, overcome, my breasts sliding against your chest, my nipples hardening with the friction, warmth spreading between my thighs.
You lift me, and as my legs grasp your waist for support, your hands take hold of my rear, and I know by the firmness of your grip that there will be bruises imprinted in my flesh. I grapple for leverage, my mouth bearing down on yours with an intensity I have no power to brook, and, limbs tangling, you fall with me to the bed.
Your recovery from the tumble is easier than mine; I am pinned beneath your glorious body, the length of your torso crushing me. I am marvellously helpless, and you take my wrists, hold them stationary above my head. My struggling is ineffectual; the weight of you rests on my arms, and I cannot dislodge the muscular weight of you. I hold my breath, anticipating the moment you will penetrate me roughly, take me, violate my will and bring me, breathlessly, beyond the edge of reason. But you have gone still, and there is an intensity in your eyes that more than intimidates. I see this look in you when you're sitting at your easel, painstakingly tracing all the thoughts spilling from your brushes and charcoals, and my breath hitches as you lean forward, running your lips against the length of my collarbone, the abrasion of your unshaven face like the scratch of a graphite stick over raw canvas, as you begin your preparatory sketch on the surface of my skin.
'You know,' your voice, as deceptively casual as ever, ghosts across my breasts, eliciting a shiver down my back, 'it has been some time since I saw you like this, with your skin catching the early sun, your eyes like molten obsidian, your heart beating like a pagan war drum beneath mine.' your smile makes my gut twist. How to put into words the sensation of your utter possession of me?
'You have been away four months. I have been here.'
'Dallying with your secret lover.' your eyes harden, and you roll your hips against mine, your phallus gliding along my smooth, slick netherlips. 'You must learn, my darling, that I am to be consulted in all things.' I sigh raggedly as your mouth travels lazily to a nipple, tongue laving gently before your teeth sink into it. You want me to cry out, to wince in pain, but I withstand as you alternate between a slow grind of your teeth and long licks, still thrusting against me, activating the hidden pearl of nerves between my legs. I am still restrained, but you know you could have submission with a gesture. It is not what you want. You want a reason to punish me. You lift your mouth from me. 'You must tell me,' I detect a new element to your voice. It is no longer controlled, silky, but the husky guttural rasp in your throat corresponds to the eager twitching of your member against my thigh.
I shake my head a little, and you increase the pressure on my wrists. I draw my breath in sharply, but stare back, resolute. I feel my wetness increase. God, if you penetrated me now, my crisis would be gone in a single thrust.
'You have not even heard what it is I wish to hear.'
'And I care nothing for it.' the raw desire in my voice gives you pause, and for a moment, there is a flash of something, not tenderness, not desire, behind your green eyes.
'Do you not?' your lips lower to my belly, tracing the rim of my navel with your tongue, as your fingers ease on my wrists, flowing like water to knead my breasts, testing their firmness and yielding. As my hands are released, I take the unspoken permission, and grasp your shoulders, shoving you off me and turning with you as you catch yourself before falling, readjust to the centre of the bed, and our positions are reversed.
'And if I wished to hear you out, would I hear a demand, or a request?' my hands, hungry for the feel of you, rush eagerly down the strong, convex chest, tracing your abdomen, the lines of your pelvis, grasping your phallus by the base. You gasp at the contact. Deliberately testing, sliding my hands up its length and down, cupping your testes, lowering my mouth to engulf you in wet heat. I tease you for a moment, wondering when you will overpower me, throw me back and have your way with me, and I dare to raise my eyes toward yours.
You are studying me, with that damnedly inscrutable expression, and I fear that I have displeased you. You sit up, pull me forward, cradling me gently against your chest. Your tongue traces lazily over my lips, a pilgrim's journey, but as a surge forward to return the kiss, your arms restrain me.
'You would hear a desire,' you murmur, the breath of your voice a soothe to my frayed and aroused nerves. 'I want to hear you tell me the truth, if only once, even should you deny it someday.'
'And what if you have already formed an opinion of what the truth is?'
'I know only when you lie to me. I see the regret in your eyes, how you seek to compensate by presenting your body to me, how you withhold your heart and hide behind the mask of physical love. You give me everything, and still nothing. You glut me with the gift of yourself, but I am starving for a glimpse of you.'
'Your poetry, I have said, is ill-timed.' I shrug, and begin to slither out of your arms. 'I have no truth for you. You know I have been yours. My heart, I fear, is but a paltry meal, and you have long since consumed it whole.'
'And this new lover of yours? What will he have?'
'My body, my faith.'
'Ah, does he then merit what I could never coax from you? Betimes I think you a mannequin, with no beating blood in your veins.'
'My blood is warm enough for him,' I say, unthinkingly, and am astonished by the glare you send my way. I have never known you to be possessive of me, or demanding, and I say as much.
'I have never wished to possess your body. I am not your bondskeeper, to hold you in a dungeon of my love. It is this essence of you, that I, of all men, have been the only recipient. You have never given yourself so wholly to another, and now, I fear you have.'
'We have known one another since childhood,' suddenly stricken by my love for you, I take your hand in both of mine, 'I have been yours, without once hesitating. I have never thought anyone else worthy of my love. I am conscious of the power that accompanies my blood, and doubtless you are as well. We have spoken as much to one another.'
'You are irresistible.' I cannot but smile coyly at the passionate declaration from your lips.
'And yet I am responsible to give people back the gifts of their own will. Should I take freely the love that my history has torn from mankind, I should be no better than an unheeding Fae. And mayhap it is an unequal partnership that you and I share.'
Something flashes in your eyes, and you seem to understand. 'He is Fae, then. Your lover.' I shake my head. 'He is a Changeling, then?' I cannot lie to you, and my silence acquiesces for me. 'A Changeling, with the power of attraction that you have. Shall, then, I make a fool of myself, in the attempt to keep you? No, no. Indeed, I have been fool enough.' you begin to pull yourself together, from my bed, and you will not meet my gaze.
'Stop. Please. Please, this is madness.'
'A moment ago, you were angry with me. A moment ago, you wished me gone.'
'And then you touched me.' I plead with you, maddened by the feminine nonsense boiling in my brain.
You pause, perhaps fighting your own instincts, and I wish now, more than ever, that I could see into your mind. Finally, your sad smile reminds me that there are few things worse than Fate. 'We are too late, you and I.’