“Vaelen,” I answered as I picked up my cloak from the peg.
“You turned me away last night.”
I didn’t bother looking at him. “I did.”
“Why?”
I looked at him. The torchlight made him look younger than he was, or older: it was difficult to say which with Vaelen. He existed at an angle to his own age that I’d never entirely understood.
“Because.”
“Because isn’t an answer.”
I looked over at him and smiled. “Yet it’s the only one you’re going to get from me.”
“Evil woman,” he play-moaned. “Perhaps if you turn me away tonight, I won’t be so willing to take no for an answer.”
I raised one brow at him. “You do realize I could turn you into rat shit if I so chose?”
He took the steps that separated us but made no move to touch me. He just stood a few inches from me and made me look up at him because he was so much taller. I was sure he did so on purpose.
“Why does the idea of being turned into rat excrement sound so...divinewhen coming from your delectable mouth?”
“Because you’re an idiot.”
-MORGAN-
My room was cold. I hadn’t banked the fire before I left, and it had burned down to embers while the war council swallowed the morning whole.
But I wasn’t cold, probably owing to the fact that Vaelen’s cock was buried as far as it would go inside me, and I was busily grinding against his stomach as I rode him.
“You are a fucking goddess, do you know that?” he asked as he gripped both of my tits and squeezed them.
“Yes, I’m quite aware.”
I paused my grinding and lifted off him, hovering just over the head of his sizable appendage.
“Please put me back in.”
I chuckled down at him. There was just something about Vaelen that made me want to laugh at him. He was the biggest pain in the ass; yes, that was true. But there was also something so boyish and charming about him that made one want to forget how irritating he could be.
I grabbed his erection and held it right at my opening. Then I inched down on it until just the tip was consumed by my flesh.
“Vaelen, I think there’s... there’s something wrong with the veil.”
He looked up at me, then at his cock. “What’s wrong with it? Looks hard enough to me.”
“Not your prick, you fool,the veil.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I don’t know exactly,” I answered as I lowered myself another inch down his shaft, and he started to reach for my hips, but I gave him the look of death, and he stopped. “It feels... thin.”
Not thin in the way it sometimes got during a solstice or a death tide, when the boundary between the living world and what lay beneath it wore down to translucence before restoring itself. This was different. This was the difference between fabric worn at the elbows and fabric pulled over something that was growing.
It feltstretched.
The oldest part of me remembered the forging of the veil. Not with memory, exactly: I hadn’t been there; only Nymera had at that point, but with the kind of knowledge that lives in blood and bone rather than mind. The part of me that was older than my name.
