She paused as if considering her words. “a shadow.”
I smiled. “I already have one.” Then I checked to make sure. I was in the Fae after all.
Felurian frowned, shaking her head at my lack of understanding. “another I would give a shield, and it would keep him safe from harm. another I would gift with amber, bind a scabbard tight with glamour, or craft a crown so men might look on you with love.”
She shook her head solemnly. “but not for you. you are a night walker. a moon follower. you must be safe from iron, from cold, from spite. you must be quiet. you must be light. you must move softly in the night. you must be quick and unafraid.” She nodded to herself. “this means I must make you a shaed.”
She stood and started walking toward the forest. “come,” she said.
Felurian had a way of making requests that took some getting used to. I’d discovered that unless I was steeling myself to resist, I’d find myself automatically doing whatever it was she asked of me.
It wasn’t that she spoke with authority. Her voice was too soft and edgeless to carry the weight of command. She did not demand or cajole. When she spoke, it was matter-of-fact. As if she couldn’t imagine a world in which you didn’t want to do exactly as she said.
Because of this, when Felurian told me to follow her, I jumped like a puppet with its strings pulled. Soon I was padding along beside her, deep in the twilight shadows of the ancient forest, naked as a jaybird.
I almost went back to grab my clothes, then decided to follow some advice my father had given me when I was young. “Everyone eats a different part of the pig,” he’d said. “You want to fit in, you’ll do the same.” Different places, different decorums.
So I followed, naked and unprepared. Felurian struck out at a good pace, the moss muffling the sound of our bare feet.
As we walked the forest grew darker. At first I thought it was simply the branches of the trees arching over our heads. Then I realized the truth. Above us, the twilight sky was slowly growing darker. Eventually, the last hint of purple was gone, leaving the sky a perfect velvet black, flecked with unfamiliar stars.
Felurian kept walking, I could see her pale skin in the starlight and the shapes of trees around us, but nothing more. Thinking myself clever, I made a sympathetic binding for light and held my hand above my head as if it were a torch. I was more than slightly proud of this, as the motion-to-light binding is rather difficult without a piece of metal to use as a focus.
Light swelled and I caught a moment’s glimpse of our surroundings. Dark trunks of trees rose like massive pillars as far as the eye could see. There were no low-hanging branches, no undergrowth, no grass. Only dark moss underfoot and the arch of dark branches overhead. I was reminded of a vast, empty cathedral swathed in sooty velvet.
“
Understanding her tone if not her words, I broke the binding and let the darkness rush back over us. An instant later Felurian leapt at me and bore me to the ground, her lithe, naked body pressed against mine. It was not an entirely uncommon occurrence, but this time the experience was not particularly erotic as the back of my head struck a knuckle of protruding root.
Because of this I was half dazed and nine-tenths blind when the earth shuddered slightly beneath us. Something vast and almost perfectly silent stirred the air above us and slightly off to one side of where we lay.
Poised atop me, one leg on either side, Felurian’s body was as taut as a harp string. The muscles of her thighs were tense and quivering. Her long hair fell over us, covering us like a silk sheet. Her breasts pressed against my chest as she drew a shallow, silent breath.
Her body thrummed with the rhythm of her racing heart, and I felt her mouth move where it rested near the hollow of my throat. Softer than a whisper, Felurian spoke a gentle, edgeless word. I felt it press against my skin, sending silent ripples through the air the same way a thrown stone makes circles on the surface of a pond.
There was a soft sound of movement above us, as if someone was folding a huge piece of velvet around a piece of broken glass. Saying that I realize it makes no sense, but still, that is the best way I can describe the sound. It was a soft noise, the half-heard sound of deliberate movement. I cannot tell you why it made me think of something terrible and sharp, but it did. My forehead prickled with sweat, and I was filled with a sudden pure and breathless terror.
Felurian went perfectly still, as if she were a startled deer or a cat about to pounce. Quietly, she drew a breath, then spoke a second word. Her breath brushed hot against my throat, and at the half-heard word my body thrummed as if I were a drumhead soundly struck.
Felurian turned her head a bare degree, as if straining to listen. This movement pulled a thousand strands of her splayed hair slowly over the entire left half of my naked body, covering me in gooseflesh. Even in the grip of my nameless terror, I shivered and gave a soft, involuntary gasp.
There was a stirring in the air directly above us.
The sharp nails of Felurian’s left hand dug hard into the muscle of my shoulder. She shifted her hips, and slowly slid her naked body up along my own until her face was even with mine. Her tongue flicked against my lips, and without even thinking I tilted my head, reaching for the kiss.
Her mouth met mine, and she drew a long slow breath, pulling the air out of me. I felt my head grow light. Then, her lips still tight against mine, Felurian pushed her breath hard into me, filling my lungs. It was softer than silent. It tasted of honeysuckle. The ground shivered beneath me and everything was still. For an endless moment my heart ceased beating in my chest.
A subtle tension left the air above us.
Felurian pulled her mouth from mine and my heart thumped again, sudden and hard. A second beat. A third. I pulled in a deep, shaking breath.
Only then did Felurian relax. She lay atop me, loose and supple, her naked body flowing over mine like water. Her head nestled into the curve of my neck and she gave a sweet, contented sigh.
A languid moment passed, then she laughed, her body shaking with it. It was wild and delighted, as if she had just played the most marvelous joke. She sat up and kissed my mouth fiercely, then nipped at my ear before climbing off me and pulling me to my feet.
I opened my mouth. Then closed it, deciding this was probably not the right time for questions. Half of seeming clever is keeping your mouth shut at the right times.
So we continued in darkness. Eventually my eyes adjusted, and through the branches above I could see the stars, differently patterned and brighter than those in the mortal sky. Their light was barely enough to give an impression of the ground and surrounding trees. Felurian’s slender form was a silver shadow in the darkness.
We kept walking, and the trees grew taller and thicker, blocking out the pale starlight bit by bit. Then it became truly dark. Felurian was little more than a piece of pale darkness ahead of me. She stopped walking before I lost sight of her entirely and cupped her hands around her mouth as if she were about to shout.
I cringed at the thought of a loud noise invading the warm quiet of this place. But instead of a shout there was nothing. No. Not nothing. It was like a low, slow purr. Not anything so loud and rough as a cat’s purr. It was closer to the sound a heavy snowfall makes, a muffled hush that almost makes less noise than no noise at all.
Felurian did this several times. Then she took me by the hand and led me farther into the dark where she repeated the odd, almost inaudible noise. After she had done this three times it was so dark I could no longer see even the faintest shape of her.
After the final pause, Felurian stepped close to me in the dark, pressing her body to mine. She gave me a long and thorough kiss that I expected to become something more involved when she pulled away and spoke softly into my ear. “quietly,” she breathed. “they come.”
For several minutes I strained my eyes and ears to no avail. Then I saw something luminous in the distance. It disappeared quickly, and I thought my light-starved eyes were playing tricks on me. Then I saw another flicker. Two more. Ten. A hundred pale lights danced toward us through the trees, faint as foxfire.
I’d heard of fool’s fire before, but never seen it. And given that we were in the Fae, I doubted this was anything so mundane. I thought of a hundred faerie stories and wondered which of those creatures could be responsible for these dim, madly dancing lights. Tom-Sparks? Will o’ wisps? Dennerlings with lanterns full of corpselight?
Then they were all around us, startling me. The lights were smaller than I’d thought, and closer. I heard the hushed snowfall sound again, this time from all around me. I still couldn’t guess what they might be until one of them brushed my arm as lightly as a feather. They were moths of some sort. Moths with luminescent patches on
