Page 25

Wings and Flowers

I’ll admit, I was pretty skeptical about all this sacrificial bride stuff. But getting married over a vat filled with the real Princess Seraphyne’s blood turns out to be a pretty auspicious way to start a wedding.

Maybe because it’s the last Eryx Oblation the Stone Fae ever request. As the old planet saying goes: “We don’t need to go for human—we got human at home. ”

“Is that truly an old-planet saying?” my husband asks out of the blue.

I still my shadewing pen over the parchment I’m using to write the final entry in the diary Veyrion gave me for my birthday—after learning the hard, super-hurt-wife way that humans celebrate birthdays, and I wasn’t just telling him the date over and over for his personal records.

“Dearest Gargoyle King, what have I told you about reading over my shoulder while I write?”

“Likely the same thing I’ve told you about my dislike of that nickname. But this…” He bends over—way over—because I’m sitting at the desk he got me to go with the diary once I explained (again) that humans have a thing about chairs.

“This I like,” he murmurs, running his fangs along my neckline. A taloned hand cups my breast over my thin night shift. “Just a few more moonscycles until I can taste your sweet blood again.”

An erotic shiver passes through me as he flicks a thumb over my nipple. For whatever reason, watching his clawed hands on my body never fails to arouse me.

But… “I’m not done writing yet. I have to finish this entry.”

“Is that not what daytime hours are for?” He brings his other hand around to massage my other breast. Both of them are larger and even more sensitive these days.

I groan, letting my head fall back against his shoulder as he continues to cajole me.

“Besides, you’ll have plenty of time after the babe is laid.

Have you written upon that subject in the diary I gifted you for your twenty-sixth birthday? ”

The low swirling heat dies at his mention of our upcoming delivery.

“Not yet.” I glance down at my slightly swollen belly, then quickly away. “I’m pretty backed up on entries, which is why I need you to give me a moon tick.”

“Fine. Though I do not like this game you always win—proving I can deny you nothing.”

With an amused huff, he straightens to full height. “I’ll go to the chamberlain’s quarters to check on the peace treaty negotiations with Solmane—and to provide you with your requested space and quiet.”

“Thank you. But, Veyrion…” I grab his hand before he can leave. “I love you so very much. Please know that.”

He regards me with the much gentled glow of his red gaze. “And that love is the greatest prize I have ever known,” he assures me before leaving.

That night, I finish writing about our wedding, and the honeymoon that followed, which was basically going to Aralysse to…

Well, Veyrion insists on calling it “claiming your rightful place as their supreme ruler.”

I preferred to pitch it as taking over from the exiled royal family as a queen in absentia—one who levies fewer tariffs and demands fairer treatment for all.

In any case, everyone but a few of the Aralyssean nobles accepted my self-nomination with great cheer. And those dissenters are quietly being replaced by merchants and chamberlains happy to support my delightful, healthy, thriving, people-first agenda.

In fact, Skorrin has already approved several requests from Stone Fae warriors to transfer to Aralysse.

Officially, it was to help secure our new most-favored breadbasket kingdom as they collaborated with Elephim and the Mountain Goats to create a light-and-steam magick version of a train that would run from my coastal gift kingdom, through the other three breadbaskets, past the Wastelands, with a hopeful last stop in Solmane.

But in the privacy of our chambers, Veyrion confessed that after seeing our happy state—and hearing the… ah… voracious nature of our lovemaking—he suspected a few of his soldiers had become curious about taking human wives.

Initially, I felt guilty for this influence.

There had never been a Stone Fae–human union in their kingdom’s history. Veyrion even flew to one of their outer territories to meet his eldest sister’s son—his firstborn nephew—and subtly groom him for the possibility of having to take the throne when Veyrion died in another hundred years or so.

I pointed out we didn’t even know if Stone Fae and humans were biologically compatible.

He answered, “If they do manage to find a love this passionate, it will sustain them over legacy. Do you know that because of you, I’ve rewritten my brother’s story? He loved his husband, and they died without ever having to lose each other. How fortunate to be commended to Eryx at the same time.”

Had I once accused my husband of having no art inside him? I’m still occasionally rocked by the poetry that falls out of his mouth.

Not that we didn’t still have our conflicts, I write in my diary.

One such conflict came to a head while my father and I were deep in discussion with Yerivian, the royal healer who lived in the Stone Fae village by the lake, about the medicinal plants needed to support his recovery from the magic that had restraightened his spine.

At least I was having an important discussion about medicinal plants.

I was beginning to suspect my father was way more focused on flirting with the healer, whose white hair was streaked with black, and Yerivian didn’t seem immune to my father’s fawning compliments.

I learned that Stone Fae could blush when Yerivian’s cheeks turned a dark gray and he said, “I do not believe I have ever been so complimented by such a charming male.”

I was just about to ask only half-jokingly if they’d like some private time together when my name echoed across the terrace.

Both Yerivian and my father dropped to their knees as the Stone Fae King came storming toward us.

I suppose my otherwise level-headed, loving husband didn’t appreciate my itty-bitty prank this morning...

I’d snuck over to his window right as the suns began turning him to stone—and gave him a hand job mid-transition. Which meant his overlarge phallus was fully erect and fully granite until nightfall.

I rolled my eyes when, without so much as a greeting to Yerivian or my father, he hauled me over his shoulder and stormed straight back to our chambers, without the slightest care that my ever-rotating Stone Fae crew still needed guidance under the Elephim-sourced garden lights until moonsrise.

Poor Rinthiah jumped out of the way and mouthed What did you do? just before he slammed the chamber door behind us.

Let’s just say Veyrion and his shadows were extremely displeased about having a hard-on all day.

And try as I did to convince him—first with teasing and baiting, then, eventually, with crying and babbling while trapped in his merciless shadow binds—he could not see the poetic justice in what I had done.

Ah well. He made it up to me with one of my favorite new positions after I finally gave in and said the safe-word phrase: I’m sorry.

(I adore my husband, but he remains a kinghole sometimes.)

“I’m sorry!” I wailed. “I’m sorry for everything.”

“ Ssh ,” he said, immediately using his shadows to lift me higher along the closest stone wall until my core was level with his face. “Allow me to reward your pretty apology with a necessary soothing.”

And by reward, of course, he meant eat me out for filth .

Apparently, oral sex isn’t a thing in the Stone Fae community, but Veyrion was more than pleased with my awkward demonstration of taking as much of his staff as I could in my mouth.

And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just because this was the first time I voluntarily got on my knees like the rest of his quick-to-bow subjects.

It only took a few enthusiastic sucks and some tongue around his bulbous tip before he exploded between my overstretched lips.

And while Veyrion never let my bad deeds go unpunished, he also never let my good ones go unrewarded.

Using his shadows to hoist me up to his mouth, he propped me against a stone wall with my legs draped over his shoulders so he could “return your most delightful gift.”

With his taloned hands cupping my ass, his black tongue slithered into my tunnel, hot as the heating pads I used for period cramps.

And what couldn’t have been more than a piddly hill of timeglass sand later, I was screaming, sloppily grinding against his eager mouth as I came undone.

By the night of my shadow punishment for the pre-sunsrise handjob, my Stone Fae King had discovered—after lots and lots of investigation—that this was the absolute best way to get me ready to take his insanely large, thick staff.

That eve, he crashed me down on his length and sank his fangs into my neck. I’m still not entirely clear on the science behind fae blood drinking, but apparently, it feeds him with “the kind of sustenance even food cannot provide.”

It also floods both our systems with endorphins and a bunch of other brain chemicals I (again, only half-jokingly) call “party drugs.” Like, there’s no biting if either of us has anything on our nighttime agendas or needs to get up early the next morning.

He must have cleared his schedule, because I ended up taking and taking and ( Oh moons! Yes! Yes! ) taking my punishment until the suns came up.

I’m pretty sure that’s when I got pregnant, I write in the diary. Either way, my period hasn’t come since, and my belly has swollen big with…

Again, my shadewing pen stills.

The truth is, I don’t know what’s growing inside my womb. Yerivian and Veyrion believe it’s an egg. My father and I can only hope it’s a live baby.

Either way, I’ve kept an important difference between humans and fae to myself:

Veyrion has never heard of a mother dying in childbirth—or even of miscarriage.

But human history is full of such tales.

I keep my worries from him, and mostly from myself. I still haven’t stopped living like I only have three days left.