ABELOEC’S TONGUE MADE LONG, SURE STROKES AROUND THE edge of my opening, then a caress at the top as he moved downward again. Mistral’s hands played with my breasts in the same way he kissed, as if he could not fill his hands with enough of my body, as if the sensation was something that he had to have. He rolled my nipples between his fingers, and finally moved his mouth from mine to join his hands at my breasts. He took one breast into his mouth, as far as he could, as if he would truly eat my flesh. He sucked hard, and harder, until his teeth began to press into me.

Abeloec moved up to that sweet place at the top of my opening and began to roll his tongue over and around it. Mistral’s teeth pressed in slowly, as if he were waiting for me to say stop, but I didn’t. The combination of Abeloec’s mouth, sure and gentle between my legs, and the inexorable pressure of Mistral’s mouth on my breast, tight and tighter, was exquisite.

A soft breeze danced across my skin. A trickle of wind pushed strands of Mistral’s hair across my body, pulling strands free from his long ponytail. His teeth continued their relentless press. He was crushing my breast between his teeth, and it felt so good. Abeloec’s tongue flicked fast and faster over that one sweet point.

The wind blew harder, sending dead leaves skittering across our bodies.

Mistral’s teeth were almost met in my breast, and it hurt now. I opened my mouth to tell him to stop, but in that moment Abeloec flicked that one last time I needed. He brought me screaming, my hands flinging outward, upward, searching for something to hold on to, while Abeloec built the orgasm with tongue and mouth.

My hands found Mistral. I dug nails into his bare arms, and only when one of my hands reached for his thigh did he grab my wrist. To do it, he had to release my breast from the prison of his mouth. He pinned my hands into the dry earth, while I screamed and strained to reach him with nails and teeth. He stayed just above me, pressing my wrists into the ground. He stared down at me with eyes flickering with light. My last sight of his eyes, before Abeloec made me fling my head from side to side, fighting against the pleasure, was that they were full of lightning, flickering, dancing, so bright it made shadows on the glow of my skin.

Abeloec’s hands dug into my thighs, holding me in place, while I struggled to break free. It felt so good — so good — that I thought I would lose my mind if he didn’t stop. So good that I wanted him both to stop, and never to stop.

The wind blew harder. Dried, woody vines screeched in the growing wind, and trees creaked with protest, as if their dead limbs would not last the wind.

The lines of color that fed out from Abeloec, red and blue and green, grew brighter with the wind. The colors pulsed bright and brighter. Maybe because the light was so intensely colored, it didn’t so much push back the darkness as make the darkness glow — as if the endless night had been brushed with neon lights.

Abeloec let go of my thighs, and the moment he did the lights dimmed, just a little. He knelt between my legs and began unlacing his breeches. His modern clothes had been ruined in last night’s assassination attempt, and he, like most of the men who rarely left faerie, had few things with zippers or metal buttons.

I started to say no, because he hadn’t asked, and because the magic was receding. I could think again, as if the orgasm had cleared my mind.

I was supposed to be having as much sex as I could, for if I didn’t get with child soon, not only would I never be queen, but I’d probably be dead. If my cousin Cel got someone with child before I got pregnant, he would be king, and he would kill me, and all who were loyal to me. It was an incentive to fuck that no aphrodisiac could match.

But there was something sharp under my back, and more smaller pains up and down my body. Dead branches and bits of plant poking and biting at me. I hadn’t noticed it until after the orgasm, when the endorphins were receding at a rapid rate. There’d been almost no afterglow, just mind-blowing orgasm, and then this feeling of fading, of being aware of every discomfort. If Abeloec had missionary position in mind, we needed a blanket.

It wasn’t like me to lose interest so quickly. If Abeloec was as talented with other things as he was with his mouth, then he was someone I wanted to bed, just for sheer pleasure. So why did I suddenly find myself with no upon my lips and a desire to get up off the ground?

THEN A VOICE CAME OUT OF THE GROWING DARK AS THE LINES of color faded — a voice that froze us all where we were and sent my heart pounding into my throat. “Well, well, well, I call for my captain of the guard, Mistral, and he is nowhere to be found. My healer tells me that you all vanished from the bedroom. I searched for you in the dark, and here you are.” Andais, Queen of Air and Darkness, stepped out from the far wall. Her pale skin was a whiteness in the growing dark, but there was light around her, light as if black could be a flame and give illumination.

“If you had stood in the light, I would have not found you, but you stand in the dark, the deep dark of the dead gardens. You cannot hide from me here, Mistral.”

“No one was hiding from you, my queen,” Doyle said — the first any of us had spoken since we’d all been brought here.

She waved him silent and walked over the dry grass. The wind that had been whipping the leaves was dying now, as the colors died.

The last of the wind fluttered the hem of her black robe. “Wind?” She made it a question. “There has not been wind in here for centuries.”

Mistral had left me to drop to his knees before her. His skin faded as he moved away from me and Abeloec. I wondered if his eyes still flashed with lightning, but was betting they did not.

“Why did you leave my side, Mistral?” She touched his chin with long pointed nails, raised his face so he had to look at her.

“I sought guidance,” he said in a voice that both was low and seemed to carry in the growing dark. Now that Abeloec and I had stopped having sex, all the light was fading, all the flow on everyone’s skin was dying away. Soon we would stand in a darkness so absolute that you could touch your own eyeball without first blinking. A cat would be blind in here; even a cat’s eyes need some light.

“Guidance for what, Mistral?” She made of his name an evil whine that held the threat of pain, as a smell on the wind can promise rain.

He tried to bow his head, but she kept her fingertips under his chin. “You sought guidance from my Darkness?”

Abeloec helped me to my feet and held me close, not for romance, but the way all the fey do when they’re nervous. We touch one another, huddling in the dark, as if the touch of another’s hand will keep the great bad thing from happening.

“Yes,” Mistral said.

“Liar,” the queen said, and the last thing I saw before the darkness swallowed the world was the gleam of a blade in her other hand. It flashed from her robe, where she’d hidden it.

I spoke before I could think: “No!”

Her voice crawled out of the darkness and seemed to creep along my skin. “Meredith, niece, do you actually forbid me from punishing one of my own guards? Not one of your guards, but mine, mine!”

The darkness was heavier, thicker, and it took more effort to breathe. I knew she could make the very air so heavy that it would crush the life out of me. She could make the air so thick that my mortal lungs couldn’t draw it in. She’d nearly killed me just yesterday, when I interfered in one of her “entertainments.”

“There was wind in the dead gardens.” Doyle’s deep voice came so low, so deep, that it seemed to vibrate along my spine. “You felt the wind. You remarked upon the wind.”

“Yes, I did, but now it is gone. Now the gardens are dead, dead as they will always be.”

A pale green light sprang from the darkness. Doyle holding a cup of sickly greenish flames in his hands. It was one of his hands of power. I’d seen the touch of that fire crawl over other sidhe and make them wish for death. But as so many things in faerie, it had other uses. It was a welcome light in the dark.

The light showed that it was no longer her fingertips that held Mistral’s chin upward, but the edge of a blade. Her blade, Mortal Dread. One of the few things left that could bring true death to the immortal sidhe.

“What if the gardens could live again?” Doyle asked. “As the roses outside the throne room live again.”

She smiled most unpleasantly. “Do you propose to spill more of Meredith’s precious blood? That was the price for the roses’ renewal.”

“There are ways to give life that do not require blood,” he said.

“You think you can fuck the gardens back to life?” she asked. She used the edge of the blade to raise Mistral up high on his knees.

Doyle said, “Yes.”

“This, I would like to see,” she said.

“I don’t think it will work if you are here,” Rhys said. A pale white light appeared over his head. Small, round, a gentle whiteness that illumined where he walked. It was the light that most of the sidhe, and many of the lesser fey, could make at will; a small magic that most possessed. If I wanted light in the dark, I had to find a flashlight or a match.

Rhys moved, in his soft circle of light, slowly, toward the queen.

She spoke: “A little fucking after a few centuries of celibacy makes you bold, one-eye.”

“The fucking makes me happy,” he said. “This makes me bold.” He raised his right arm, showing her the underside of it. The light was not strong enough, and the angle not right, for me to see what was so interesting.

She frowned; then, as he moved closer, her eyes widened. “What is that?” But her hand had lowered enough that Mistral was no longer trying to raise himself up on his knees to keep from being cut.

“It is exactly what you think it is, my queen,” Doyle said. He began to move closer to her, as well.

“Close enough, both of you.” She emphasized her words by forcing Mistral back high on his knees.

“We mean you no harm, my queen,” Doyle said.

“Perhaps I mean you harm, Darkness.”

“That is your privilege,” he said.

I opened my mouth to correct him, because he was my captain of the guard now. She wasn’t allowed to simply hurt him for the hell of it, not anymore.

Abeloec tightened his hand on my arm. He whispered against my hair, “Not yet, Princess. The Darkness does not need your help yet.”

I wanted to argue, but his reasoning was sound, as far as it went. I opened my mouth to argue, but as I looked up into his face, the argument fell away from me. His suggestion just seemed so reasonable.