The Care and Feeding of Griffins (47 page)

“I do not.”  His voice was hoarse, scarcely more than a breath.  “And that is why you must.”

“
Okay.”  She pulled her hand away and turned onto her other side, away from him.  The arm that had draped the bedding around her withdrew.  She closed her eyes and tried to find sleep.  She still felt calm, but there was a part of her that regretted what she’d done.  He was her friend.  There were some things a friend just should not do.

56.  The Tower Bedroom

S
he dreamed of a tower and herself in the topmost chamber.  The only furniture in the room was a wide bed with a silken canopy, but there were marble halls, crystal torches, gold-gilt mirrors and hanging curtains on every side of her; everything a jewelbox and herself the priceless treasure it protected.  She wore a gown of deep, midnight blue, the bodice breathlessly tight where it shouldn’t be and scarcely there where it should.  Her breasts were pressed into creamy swells beneath a spiderweb arrangement of diamond strands, so that she shimmered with every breath.  Her hair was pinned up, finely arranged beneath a delicate crown.

There was a window, only one, and she looked out and saw a tapestry of green and gold stretching out forever.  Arcadia in summertime, she knew.  The Valley of Hoof and Horn laid out for the inspection of its possessor.  This palace grew out of the mountains, probably near to where Antilles lived now, and her heart beat a little faster when she heard footsteps behind her.  Despite the bruising grip of her bodice, this would be a pretty nice dream if she turned around and saw Antilles.

So she turned, a smile of welcome already on her lips, and there was the magus.

No more homespun for him; he wore robes of violet and gold, and his handsome face was capped with a jeweled crown.  He wasn
’t just the lord of this valley in her dream.  He was its King.

The magus didn
’t speak.  He came to her in bold strides and slipped his hands around her waist, pulling her to meet his mouth in a conqueror’s kiss.  It was a dream, all right, because despite the surprise that flared in more lucid mind, she immediately returned the embrace.  Her lips accepted his crushing assault, opened to it, welcomed his thrusting tongue and forceful breath.  She had no control.  She was a bystander in this body, forced to feel its arousal even as her true self recoiled, bemused.

The magus?  Why the magus?  Probably just because he was human and her subconscious was toying with an Adam and Eve theme.  But gosh, how creepy.

Worse than creepy.  There was something actually repellant about his touch, something disturbingly familiar.  It made the ardor with which she received him that much more shocking.  She didn’t want this, but she couldn’t stop him and she couldn’t even express the slightest unease.

His hands stroked through the threads of diamonds to seize her breasts, squeezing hard enough to bring a gasp from her lips.  She wanted it to be a gasp of pain, but the way in which she arched into his palms made it clear it was supposed to be a gasp of passion.  His thumbs rolled and pinched her nipples erect and he drew back to admire them hungrily before one curt yank ripped the bodice open.

Taryn sucked in her first non-constrictive breath since the dream began and let it out in her only voluntary act since the magus’s arrival, laughing with delight.  He looked startled for a second, and then hesitantly pleased, but when he advanced to explore the spoils of his plunders, she stepped back.  A scowl crashed over his features and in the next moment, Taryn found herself cupping her own breasts, offering them with a coy smile she couldn’t believe she was making.  The magus pulled her roughly to him, ravishing one in his mouth.  She felt his tongue rubbing over her nipple and moaned, wishing the sound held even a fraction of the repulsion that inspired it.  Then he sucked the tender bud between his teeth and bit, sending a bright bolt of pain straight down her spine.

Taryn
’s mind was reeling even as her fingers clutched the magus’s head more firmly to her savaged breast.  She was supposed to be overcome with desire, but he was making absolutely no effort to give her pleasure.  He was taking, everything he did purely for his own enjoyment.  She felt like the poster in a horny teenager’s bedroom.  She wasn’t a partner.  She was the pin-up he was masturbating to.  Why was this
her
dream?

“
Oh, master!” she heard herself groan.  “My lord, oh, you melt in me so!”

You
what
now?

Suddenly, Taryn was dropping to her knees in a billow of skirts, reaching with trembling hands to massage the magus
’s groin through his equally voluminous robes.  “Oh my master, torment me not!” she begged him.  “Let me please you!”

Taryn
’s stomach clenched into an icy fist and the silent watcher riding this dream out tried for the first time to really wake up.  She could actually feel herself struggling, like a wild bird in a box, and she could feel the hand holding this prison firmly in place around her.  Just for an instant, she was aware of a consciousness, of a piercing and lidless stare pressing on every side, and then the moment shattered apart like cheap glass and she was back on her knees.

She watched dazedly as the magus opened his robes, revealing the broad stripe of his naked body from neck to knees.  She couldn
’t immediately react, couldn’t quite remember where she was.  She watched her hand rise and grasp the thick flesh of his pale penis and it was like watching a marionette move on strings.  Then understanding came flooding back to her and she remembered that she wanted him.  Desperately.  Her lord.  Her master.  Her king.

Taryn opened her mouth, wondered remotely why part of her was screaming, and sucked
at the head of his rising member.  Her tongue traced loving patterns over his sensitive glans as her hand gently stroked him.  Soon she was bobbing languidly up and down his shaft, taking more and more of his length until her lips were pressed to his hips and he fully possessed her throat.  She gazed up at him in rapt worship and he stared down at her.  He wanted to see her eyes, she knew.  He wanted to see her face when he came in her. 

And so she wanted to show him.  She sucked at him, milking him faster and faster, her hands clutching at his buttocks, urging him to thrust harder.  She wanted him to take her, wanted to feel him bruising at the back of her throat, robbing her of breath.  She wanted the musky, gagging bar of him sunk in her, piercing her.  She wanted to feel this spastic tightening and take the wet stream of his cum as it poured over her tongue.  And most of all, she wanted him to see her gazing gratitude as she swallowed and sucked him clean.

“Tell me your name,” he said, his hands resting in her hair.  “All the name your mother gave you.”

“
Call me by any name,” she answered adoringly, and kissed his flaccid member with hungry need.

She felt something slip, adjust, and grip again.  She drew back, suddenly gagging on his flesh, and stared at the penis that hung before her face, still gleaming with her own spit.  What in the hell?!

“Tell me your name,” the magus urged, pulling her to her feet.  “Tell me all your name and let us end this dream!”

She stared at him.

“I want to revel in your reality,” the magus murmured.  His eyes raked down her body, his lips peeling away from his teeth in wolfish frustration.  He seized the skirts that hung from her hips and ripped them so that they spilled around her feet, opening like the petals of a flower.  Now she was entirely naked for him, but it was a sullen glare that admired her.  “I am growing tired of only dreams.”

‘
It’s no picnic for me, either, pal,’ she thought, but all her mouth could say was, “Master?”

The magus pressed the fingertips of one hand to her forehead. 
“Touch yourself,” he commanded.  “Cum for me, Taryn.”  He stepped back, folding his arms to watch over her with a brooding eye.

Taryn displayed herself
before him, caressing longingly at her breasts as the fingers of one hand played at her secret parts.  She stroked herself, traced and teased her innermost folds until dew formed on her fingertips.  She closed her eyes, beginning to enjoy herself at last, losing herself in the sensual bliss of her own devising.  These touches were old friends to her; she traveled through them on familiar paths and came quickly to a shuddering orgasm that painted her thighs.  Her nerves thus awakened, Taryn’s hand slowed to tranquil passes, keeping herself in that golden haze.  The dream could be nicely vivid as well as creepy, it seemed, and perhaps when she opened her eyes, the Sandman would have replaced the magus with someone nicer…Antilles, maybe.  She felt a second, pleasant shiver run through her at the thought, felt a smile draw out her shortening breath into laughter.

“
My wanton little virgin.”

Nope, still the magus.  His hand threaded through hers, sharing the damp of her passion.  He rubbed with her, then pulled her roughly against him so that he could breathe into her mouth as he fondled her sex.  His kisses were loathsome, but she was powerless to refuse them. 
“Tell me your name and you can have me.”

Like that was such a great incentive.  Taryn turned her face away.

The magus blew out a curt sigh and gave her a push.  Her knees bumped the bed and she fell backwards into satin.  He advanced on her, shedding his robes and flinging his crown aside with an expression of grim enjoyment—the look of a man who wants to stop smoking and yet still finds himself lighting up that damn cigarette.

“
Pointless,” he said, gripping her thighs and yanking her to him.  “Utterly, foolishly pointless!”  He seized her hips to tilt them up and suddenly was inside her, a sensation so fundamentally alien to her that Taryn had difficulty feeling it at all.  The magus didn’t appear to have the same problem.  He groaned from the soles of his feet, his eyes shut tight, rocking atop her in hard, tight rhythm.  “I!  Am tired!  Of dreams!”

But was this one?  Suddenly, Taryn wasn
’t so sure.  A lot of disturbing details were adding themselves together in the back of her mind—she knew she was dreaming, she couldn’t move or talk, she called him master and lord, she couldn’t taste him, she hadn’t appeared to have a hymen when he penetrated her, she could barely feel him in her—growing and darkening like thunderswells before a storm.  And he was a wizard, wasn’t he?  He was a wizard and he kept asking for her name.

Taryn felt it again, that double-exposure of senses, the feeling that this opulent room and everything about it was just a thin veneer over a blank box.  Only she felt real. Even the man pushing in and out of her seemed to fade a little bit, as false as the marble halls he
’d surrounded her with.

She looked at him, at the flushed and strained face driving back and forth above her.  She said,
“This isn’t really happening, is it?”

His eyes snapped open.  They were blazing, literally, tinting his cheeks with white light.

She tipped her head to one side, faintly annoyed.  “It isn’t,” she said.  “I’m sound asleep, and you’re…you’re sitting somewhere whacking off, aren’t you?”

The look of guilty shock that bloomed on his face was priceless.  Taryn put her hand on his chest and pushed.  She moved him back and into the air easily, as easily as if he were made of paper.  Which, in a sense, she supposed he was.

“This is my dream,” she said indignantly, as though scolding him for snacking between meals.  “And I don’t want to be dreaming of you.  Go away now.  Shoo.”

His mouth opened.  Distantly, she heard some incoherent cry of rage, but it was no louder and no more significant than a sigh.  He blew away, smudging out into pale mist and then was gone.  The marble walls and palatial trappings went with him.  Taryn sat in the black box of her empty dream and finally lay down again.  She rolled over, closed her eyes, and fell through into another place. 

This time, there was Antilles.

57.  A Payment of Flesh

T
aryn came out of sleep gradually to the agreeable sensation of having her arm petted.  And long, slow, sensuous strokes they were, performed by a nicely-leathered hand.  Someone was playing with her hair as well, lifting it and letting it fall in much the same lazy fashion.

She was content to drowse there, feeling these affectionate touches without thinking too much about where they were coming from.  But sleep was going out from her like a tide and as wakefulness came in, clarity came with it.  She discovered she was not just lying there in
Antilles’s bed, she was actually snuggled up against him.  Her cheek was pillowed on his warm chest and her arm thrown around his waist.  That was the arm being petted, and that being the case, she was pretty sure she knew who was petting her.

She smiled and the hands abruptly stilled and then removed themselves from her person.  She raised her head from his chest and looked into his face, stern as only a bull
’s could be.  “Your fur is all poofy again,” she informed him.

He struggled to hold onto his impassive expression and finally gave up and tossed his horns. 
“And you are sorely disheveled.”

“
Winsomely,” she corrected.  “Winsomely disheveled, I believe you meant to say.”  She dropped her head back atop his chest and listened for the beating of his heart.  Her arm continued to lie draped across his flat stomach.  She remembered with sleepy pleasure the feel of his fur under her hand as she’d traveled that intriguing terrain.

Oh gosh, she
’d actually done that, hadn’t she?  And she’d have done a lot more if he’d let her.  And here she was, cuddling with him even though she knew how he felt.

But hang on, did a man who wasn
’t interested really play with the hair of his sleeping bed-partner?  She didn’t think so.  And besides, he hadn’t said he wasn’t interested.  In point of fact, he’d said—

He
’d said stop.  And she had to respect that.

Taryn sighed and rolled over, away from the warmth and wonderful solidity of him. 
“I’m making you uncomfortable,” she said.  “I’m sorry.  I guess I’ve been alone too long.  I’ve thrown out all my manners.”

“
Perhaps I have been alone too long,” Antilles replied in a low, musing tone.  “I was not uncomfortable.”  He pushed himself up and stepped out of the bed, going to open the door for Aisling’s morning constitutional.

Well, here she was, back in
Antilles’s cavern at the start of a brand new day.  She wondered what she’d ought to do with it.  If she hung around here too long, she knew she’d only say something embarrassing to both of them.  They were just starting to feel like real friends.  She needed not to complicate that.

“
So.”  Antilles left his door open against Aisling’s eventual return and came to stir up a fire for tea.  “What will you with this grand day?”

She thought about it and shrugged. 
“I’ve got plenty I could be doing, that’s for sure.  I’ll just have to pick something.  Insulate my potatoes against the frost, I suppose, and after that…I guess I’ll start shelling my tent.”

He eyed her as he placed a round, flat pan on the coals
—a griddle as black and shiny as a seal’s eye—and said, “I do not know the term.”

“
I need to build a sturdier frame around my tent and cover it over with branches so it doesn’t collapse under the weight of the snow.  Hopefully, it’ll act as a little extra insulation too.”

“
Ah.”  He kept staring for a second more, a frown growing on him.  “For that, I would expect you require an axe.”

“
I have one.”

“
Aye?”  He showed surprise for an instant, swiftly followed by profound concern.  “You mean to say you have chipped a sharp stone.  Nay, Taryn, you require an axe.”  He rose and reached one down from his wall.  A little one, hardly a hatchet in his great hand, with a twin head of fat, batwing blades.  He held it out to her.

She didn
’t take it.  “I can’t accept that, Tilly.  I can’t pay for it.  And I have an axe.”  She smiled to show him how confident she was in her stone-knapping abilities.

Antilles growled, a sound better befitting a bear than a bull, and came at her with horns low and wickedly gleaming.  He seized her by her belt loops, hauled her bodily to her feet and thrust the short haft of the baby bipennis under the waist of her jeans. 
“One day,” he said, curtly releasing her, “and I pray it will be soon, you will learn to obey my will without this constant crossing of it.”

His irritation was lemon juice in the open wound of destitution.  She yanked the axe back out, her cheeks burning with humiliation. 
“Do you have any idea what it feels like to go from being self-sufficient to being a…a beggar in some foreign country?” she demanded.

“
I do not.  Nor do I care.  I reserve my caring for the bodies of those under my protection, not for their feelings.  You—”  He raised his hand, but paused before thumping her in the chest.  He pointed at her face instead.  “You are never going to see out the winter if you are not better shored against it.  That is fact, human, and the sooner you accept it and the aids offered you, the better.  If you allow your stubbornness to have sway over your actions, you will kill yourself and your griffin.”

Taryn opened her mouth and, to her horror, burst into tears. 

Antilles didn’t exactly leap away, but he stepped back in a hurry, his eyes wide.  Aisling came on the run, skidded to a stop as he stared at her, and then whipped around and attacked Antilles’s left hoof.

He
must have gotten in a good bite too, because Antilles let out a bellow and staggered back, making an obvious attempt to keep his balance without kicking a griffin across the room.  And Aisling, her fierce prince, Aisling was just as vicious as an otter, snapping and grappling and bristling as he savaged the ankle of a Cerosan easily fifty times his size.

Taryn giggled through her tears, earning her dumbfounded looks from both of them, and that was even funnier, seeing as Aisling was giving her his with a mouthful of minotaur.  She giggled again, sniffling, and succeeded in knuckling her eyes dry.

“Your water is boiling,” she said.

Antilles glanced toward the hearth,
then looked back at her.  He didn’t move.

“
You’re right, of course.”  She sat down, set his axe on the table and held out her arms to Aisling, who spat out his victim and came at full gallop.  He climbed her arms as she lifted him, snapping his beak anxiously to reach her face and preen her hair.  She suffered his frantic attentions in silence for a while, then put him down and rubbed his feathers for a final consolation.  “You’re right, but you know, when you haven’t got anything else, stubbornness can be a big comfort.  And as long as I could do things for myself, even if they weren’t as nicely done as the way you and Tonka do things, I could tell myself that this was really going to work.  I don’t need to be told how pathetic I am.  I’m trying to settle down on another world at the head of winter with nothing but what I could carry in a backpack, okay, I know I’m unprepared!  I don’t need to keep hearing it.  I’m already scared to death.”

Antilles looked away, made an uncomfortable throat-clearing sound, and moved to take the water off the fire.  He poured it into cups and added tea.

“All I want to do is earn my way,” she said.  “If you’re going to give me things, at least let me pay for them.”  Tears threatened again and she swiped them back.  “But I don’t have anything else to give you, so just…just leave me alone right now, okay?  Let me do this—”

“
Or die trying?”  He shook his head.  “Nay, lady, I will not.”

She sighed and stared at the axe on the table.  It did look very sharp and the edge was certain to hold a lot longer than her stupid rock tied to its stupid branch that had taken eight whole stupid hours to make.

The sound of fat sizzling permeated her thoughts.  He was scooping powders out of tins into a bowl and mixing water in to make batter.  He poured it out in recognizably round flapjacks, and the sight depressed her more than anything he could have said.  He was cooking for her, feeding his poor, starving human again.  She blocked out the sight with the heels of her hands and tried not to start crying again.  Aisling was unnerved enough.

“
There are more ways than one to make payments here,” Antilles said suddenly.

Taryn took her hands away from her eyes and stared straight ahead for a long time before turning around to look at him.  His back was to her, his face lost to sight.  He gave her nothing to read, but that just couldn
’t mean what…what in theory it could have meant.

“
My obligations to my holdings and its people occupy much of my time.  My own needs are oft little met.”

Oh God, it was what that meant.

“If you would pay for that tool,” he said, and rose to face her.  “I would accept a price of flesh.”

She felt her lips parting in a slack-jawed stare.  Last night, she
’d all but thrown herself at him and he’d turned her down.  This morning, he was extorting her.

“
One pheasant, let us say, delivered fresh-killed until some…”  He assessed the axe with a critical eye.  “Some thirty are given.”

“
Pheasant,” Taryn echoed, flames rising in her cheeks. 

“
I would be equally amenable to sungura, to hoppers, as you call them,” he said.  “Or to fish, for as long as they last out, given that two exchange for one pheasant.  Unless, I suppose, you manage a kingswimmer, which is not likely given your method of capture.”  He extended his hand, looking pleased with himself.  “Shall we be agreed?”

“
Agreed,” Taryn said faintly, and clasped his wrist.  She hadn’t been the least bit outraged when she thought he’d been making an indecent proposal, not the least little bit.  Stunned, yes, and confused as all heck, but not even a tad upset.  She didn’t even know whether she felt more relieved than disappointed now that she knew what he’d really been angling for, but she sure felt like an ass.

“
Flesh,” Antilles said, his chest swelling with obvious satisfaction at this arrangement.  “It has been an extravagance for me these many years.  I anticipate a winter spent well-spoiled by luxury.”  He knelt down to turn the flapjacks.

Taryn took her seat again, hiding her blush beneath her hands and staring intently at the tabletop.

And her ex-boyfriends all thought she was frigid.