19
Aire
Over the coming hours, hickory trees gave way to hazelnut groves and wild plum orchards. Landmarks swept by in a tableau of color. River rapids, fern caves that ancient faeries once called home, and skyscraping trees carved with mammoth fox and stag busts.
Nicu veered in every direction, his eyes clinging to each majestic sight. Because Briar taught her son to ride well, he clasped the reins with ease, his attention spirited away by the speckled fawns leaping across a glen belted in mist, their spindle legs kicking up leaves.
It required diligent effort to keep the lad seated.
Were my liege to dismount and sprint into the forest, he would fail to perceive the distance expanding between us.
Indeed, one nerve-wracking time, he did hop off the palfrey and raced to greet a pack of squirrels, prompting Aspen and me to retrieve him.
In short, I had suffered multiple heart attacks since our departure.
The Royal Son had no technical idea how extensively he traveled from his family.
Otherwise, this journey would have afflicted Nicu’s sensitive conscience.
No one on this pure earth was kinder or more empathetic than he.
Unfortunately, explaining the logistics would only get us so far, and the scale of this odyssey would not hold for long before my liege forgot the impact.
As dusk became afternoon, my concentration fluctuated between Nicu’s trajectory behind us and Aspen’s ass bouncing between my thighs. Withholding several jagged noises, I shifted to prevent her buttocks from chafing my cock.
“We should seek a place to rest.” I contemplated the wind’s direction. “No one shall disturb us tonight.”
“You know, in all these years you’ve never given a name for that trick,” Aspen prompted. “Ready to confess you’re a visionary?”
I pursed my lips. “Seers do not walk this earth.”
“Only because they went extinct along with the faeries, giants, and merfolk.”
“Nor am I a fae.”
“I know,” she mock-sighed. “It’s depressing, isn’t it?”
Wholly out of character, my stallion made a puffing noise of amusement. Evidently, he’d decided to be magnanimous, leave the palfrey alone, and pick on his commander instead. Switching allegiances to Aspen, it appeared he found this exchange uproarious.
Grimacing, I steered the courser through a winding brook.
I would not take the bait. I would not engage. I would not—
“In any case, none of that means those mystic beings didn’t fuck humans,” Aspen continued, “which tends to produce ancestors.”
My posture straightened. Her astute observation had been voiced before by many. Winter scholars theorized the same hypotheses, arguing that such traits skipped numerous generations, if they didn’t fade entirely.
Until now, I never cared to address it. Yet Aspen’s curiosity roused a dormant place in my mind. Very well, I wanted to indulge the female, as much as I wanted to ask her questions of my own.
“There was a woman in my lineage,” I confided. “A sylph who read signals in the wind. I’m the only one in my bloodline who inherited this ability, but there’s a distinction between that and clairvoyance.”
Aspen uttered a sound of surprise. “You’ve never told the clan.”
“No,” I murmured against her crown. “I have not.”
She endeavored to conceal a shiver. We fell quiet, processing the confession.
Every dip and rise of the terrain thrust our bodies against one another.
Her spine dragged against my pectorals, her tailbone caressed my abdomen, and the crescents of her breasts skated over my biceps.
Heat coursed to my sac. Another mile of this, and my dick would require a girdle to keep from rising.
As I drove the stallion along more suitable turf, my riding companion took pity, scooting her curves nearer to the pommel. “So… um, nice weather, yeah?”
As long as a storm didn’t produce a mudslide, I did not give a shit about the weather. To illustrate that point, I made a noncommittal sound. Most would take brevity as a request for peace and quiet, whereas this female translated my withdrawal as an opportunity for harassment.
“Oh come on,” she baited. “Work with me, Aire.”
“I have no use for chitchat,” I declared. “And neither do you.”
“Fine, but either we pipe down and let the awkwardness of our kiss get in the way, or something’s got to give.”
“Not for a second do I believe you have the slightest interest in waxing poetic about the ambience. You are not that kind of woman.”
“Hey, now,” she chided. “I fancy a good setting.”
“Only if it includes a furnace and tools to forge a deadly object.”
Now it was her turn to grunt in acknowledgement. Triumphant, I hid my smirk. This female had a talent for provoking my competitive side.
“Sure, but it’s different out here,” she admitted, marveling at a toadstool grove where the caps had darkened to a fatal ruby shade. “We’re miles from civilization, surrounded by mushrooms that spark the good kind of mind trips for free, and—”
“Over my deceased carcass will you and Nicu partake in woodland drugs,” I groused, then barked in surprise as she jabbed her elbow into my ribs.
“This once, I’ll forgive you for assuming I’d get him high,” she reprimanded.
“Apologies,” I conceded. “That was unfair of me. But forage for those narcotic spores, and you’ll do more than hallucinate.
Pick the wrong ones, and bid your esophagus farewell.
Out here, we have no Winter King to heal us from dark magic, sink holes, hunting traps, poisonous crops, fauna bites, stinging nettles, venomous insects, rabid marsupials, strangling roots—”
“And people call me pessimistic,” Aspen remarked while pushing a low creeper out of our path. “Anyway, I was going to add that we’re surrounded by more vibrant colors than I’ve ever seen in Autumn, and it’s a golden afternoon. Look at everything this kingdom gives us. What do you see?”
“Trees.”
A sarcastic sigh vented from her lungs. “Certain men in this clan are overly chatty.”
“Do not compare me to Jeryn,” I protested.
“Why not? If you ask me, the pair of you should start an antisocial club.”
“In my defense, I’m being taciturn because I figured you weren’t done with your dissertation. Go on, continue. Take your time. Meanwhile, I’ll be sitting behind you, guarding us from certain death.”
“Smart ass.”
“Wise ass.”
Despite ourselves, dry chuckles slipped from our mouths. My warhorse and Nicu’s palfrey clopped around a mound of leaves that only appeared harmless. Step on it, and we would plummet to the ends of the earth, provided we landed at all. After avoiding this trap, Aspen’s tongue cut loose again.
“So tell me about this ancestor of yours,” she invited. “Did she get randy for a human, shag them senseless, and end up pregnant?”
“With child,” I corrected, snapping the reins. “I cannot believe you’d defile intimacy by using that other term.”
“Really?” Aspen balked. “Of all the phrases I just rattled off, you’re picking ‘pregnant’ as the most controversial?”
“I see no reason to explain myself for… What the devil are you up to now?” I demanded as Aspen rifled through one of the saddle packs. “What are you searching for?”
“Your string of pearls. It seems you misplaced them.” While I bristled in annoyance, the snarky woman ignored me, abandoning the pack. “Truly, you act like you’ve never met Poet before. Much less Flare, Eliot, Cadence, Posy, or Vale. Least of all, me.”
“I’ve never pretended to embrace their vagaries either. That said, I don’t concern myself with how the rest of our fellowship comports themselves.”
“So you’re singling me out. I hope you don’t expect me to feel special.”
“I expect nothing, dammit! I have no idea why your expletives unnerve me more than the others do. However, I thought you’d grow out of that foul tongue by now.”
“Did I taste like I’d grown out of it?”
Autumn flay me. I floundered with the leather straps, a surge of heat rushing to my face and phallus. To answer her would be the equivalent of stepping on a landmine.
The instant my cock jolted against her ass, Aspen tensed. “Shit. Sorry about that. It wasn’t—”
“Better to quit while you’re ahead,” I warned.
“Am I ahead?”
A breeze cut through the passage, and my head snapped east. “Stop.”
Misconstruing the request, Aspen threw up her hands innocently. “Okay! It was only a question.”
“Quiet,” I seethed under my breath.
As the current swept a leaf from the ground, Aspen paused. She could not sense the shift in this atmosphere, but she did grasp my low register and the stallion’s ears pinning forward.
Conditioned to engage with threats, the warhorse struck one hoof against the ground, ready to attack. I settled deeper into the saddle and marginally tightened the reins.
“Hold,” I said in a hush.
The horse steadied long enough for me to focus. A tail of wind slithered through the trunks. The temperature dipped to an eerie degree. Restlessness stirred among the undergrowth.
“Nicu,” I muttered slowly while scanning the forest. “Do not move.”
My liege had already stalled his antsy mount. Like Aspen, he couldn’t have noticed the disturbance prior, but he did comprehend the tension in my voice.
Steel hissed as Aspen drew the axe from her garter. “Aire.”
My eyes swerved, following her trajectory. That solitary leaf fluttered, a translucent swatch of wind scooping it from the earth. Unlike my companions, I discerned this clearly, as if this zephyr was a tangible thing.
The breeze kicked up speed, pushing through our clothes, a sharp whistle reverberating across the woods. In its wake, the dark red leaf spiraled high, leveling with our gazes like a drop of crimson blood.