The Sparrow King #5
Sparrow stepped towards her, wetting their luscious lips with the tip of their tongue, sharp teeth glittering as their hand tightened around hers. “And in the stream, you wanted me to chase you, didn’t you Damiana?”
Their grip on her hand was tight, almost vicious with desire. She nodded.
“Your desire is for me to hunt you down like prey and consume you?”
Again, Damiana nodded, her eyes squeezing shut as her cheeks flamed.
Sparrow’s lips caressed the shell of her ear, their body close to hers. “Want no more, sweet one. I have wanted to taste you from the moment we met.”
And then they were gone, across the hollow from her when she opened her eyes, no evidence at all in their countenance of what they had just expressed.
Damiana’s head spun. She pushed the back of her hand over her hot forehead, and found it damp.
Her heart raced, but she was not certain that she had not also imagined this moment passing between them.
Had any of it been real? She had to go home and think.
She looked at the pictures she’d made, anger building within her at the thought of them being stolen to enrich her brother’s life—to be claimed by him—perverted by his theft.
“I hate to hand these all over to Ansel, they are some of my best work.”
“Then don’t,” Sparrow suggested, plucking one from the pile. “Take this one and leave the rest.”
Damiana took the one Sparrow held out to her, afraid that if their fingers grazed hers that she might burst into flames again, or worse, beg to stay. “I should go,” she said instead.
Sparrow only nodded, gesturing for her to follow. When they reached the path, they stared at one another for a long moment, so long that Damiana wondered if time might have frozen, the way it seemed to before. Eventually, she turned to go. When she looked back, Sparrow was gone
The next day and every day after for several weeks, Damiana waited for Ansel to leave and then the little polecat would arrive, staying a respectful distance away from her geese who hissed at her presence.
Then she spent the afternoon in Sparrow’s garden, talking to the trees, and drawing while Sparrow read poetry aloud.
They never spoke of the visions again, but at night, in her cot at home, they burned in Damiana’s mind.
When she bathed in the lake near their house, she thought of Sparrow’s hand on hers, the promise that they wanted the taste of her on their perfect lips as she touched herself beneath the cold water, her skin hot and fevered as she fulfilled mere fractions of her desire.
One day, Damiana arrived at Sparrow’s cottage to find a beautiful variety of handmade paints and brushes waiting for her in the garden. “Are these for me?” she breathed, hardly daring to believe what she saw.
Sparrow’s wicked grin answered her. They brought out paper, and canvas they’d stretched over wooden frames. “I thought you might like to paint here.”
And so she did. Damiana painted the conversations between the pines. The gossip of the maples, the magic of the oaks. Canvas after canvas, she painted the song of the forest, the knowledge of a wider world beyond the village.
When she was done each day she washed her hands in the stream and she and Sparrow rested in the hammock spun from spider-silk, strung up high in the branches of the trees she loved, trading books of poetry between them.
They took turns reading aloud to one another in the cooling afternoons, the lines of verse enough to warm them.
Damiana did not complain when the slim volumes they shared shifted from odes to the seasons or nature, to sonnets of devotion, of barely leashed passion.
Her lips curved around the words, caressing each as though it were the lover she dreamed of, the one she hoped for—the one whose body pressed against her own.
When they passed the book between them and their fingers brushed, she wondered if Sparrow felt the touch in their soul, as she did, if they too thought of that first vision in every moment. She dared not ask.
One day, as late summer chilled into autumn, Sparrow pulled the wool blanket over them, the mere recitation of the poetry a dull ache between Damiana’s legs. “Will you never kiss me?”
The book fell from Sparrow’s fingers, onto the soft carpet of leaves below them. “You had only to ask, sweet one,” they murmured, just before their lips met hers.
Their mouth tasted of crisp apple and darkest honey, and in what felt like mere seconds and eternity at the same time, their legs tangled between hers, bringing blessed friction to all the places Damiana had ached for them.
Her back arched as their clever fingers found their way into her hair, beneath her dress, and finally where she needed them most.
“Sparrow,” she cried out. “Yes, yes…”
Sparrow’s moan of approval mixed with hers. “Take what you need,” they urged.
“What about you?” she whimpered. Their answering grin was wicked. “Your pleasure is all I need for now, my love.”
For now. Which meant there would be more of this.
More time, more chances to do all the things she’d dreamed of together.
Damiana tumbled over an edge she’d never known existed, lost in Sparrow’s starlit depths, the flames within her becoming an inferno.
In Sparrow’s arms, as she fell through worlds of pleasure, she lit from within, finding the center she’d been searching for all her life.
In Sparrow’s arms, Damiana found the thing she desired most—home.
Summer faded into the cool damp of autumn, and the little time Damiana spent at home caring for the garden and her geese was blurred by thoughts of Sparrow.
The divine noises they made when she tasted them.
The feel of their fingers in her hair, grazing over her bare skin by firelight in the woods, of their mouth on her as she screamed their name to the skies.
She made plans for leaving. For taking what little was hers, including the geese.
There was nothing left here for her, and she would go.
Ansel spent more and more time in the village anyway.
He was rarely home when she arrived back from her trysts in the forest. Damiana sometimes wondered if he had found a wife.
It would ease her mind if he had. The cottage was too small for more than the two of them.
Ansel was not the kind of brother who would gain pleasure from bedding his bride within earshot of his sister.
She had always known that when he found someone that she was likely to be sold to a villager, or turned out entirely.
This was better. She would disappear, and he could bring whomever kept him from home so often to take her place.
Damiana didn’t envy the woman, but it could not be her concern any longer.
On the morning of the first frost, Galin did not arrive to lead Damiana to the cabin and Sparrow.
Neither did the polecat come the next day, or the day after that—and Damiana was suddenly afraid to go into the forest alone.
For nearly a week, Damiana watched for her little friend, but she did not come.
Each day she retreated into the house to read one of Ansel’s books, worried by the turmoil in her mind.
She had never feared the forest in her life, but she was terrified of it now.
Terrified to even approach the garden gate.
Fear had her in its grip, and as the hours and days wore slowly on, Damiana wondered if she might be losing herself.
Further, she wondered if the time had finally come that Sparrow’s curiosity about her had faded.
A month dragged on. Damiana watched the moon and stars change, and waited for the hurt she felt to fade.
Ansel came and went, speaking often of the village women, which confirmed her suspicions that she had very little time to escape.
Surely, he must have found a wife for him to speak of their bodies in such a way.
It was how her father had spoken when her mother was alive.
He spoke of the village women lasciviously, and then took her to their bedroom, where he spoke loudly about his desire for them as he took his wife.
The memories were not pleasant ones, but Damiana had taken it as the way of marriage.
It was the way of the village men, after all, to break and humiliate.
To speak of others while they bedded their wives.
Damiana might not have friends in the village, but she knew the ways of its inhabitants.
Strange as she had always been to them, they treated her as though she were invisible.
They spoke of things they should not in her hearing.
Things she wished she never had to know, and would never forget.
Six weeks after her last visit to Sparrow’s house, she went to feed her geese, but they were gone. She ran into the cottage to tell Ansel, but he only shrugged. His movement was far too casual. He knew what happened to the geese.
“Where are they?” she asked, her voice taking on the low tone she’d heard Sparrow use. She sounded dangerous, even to herself.
Ansel’s eyes snapped to hers, rage flashing in them. “Hold your infernal tongue, sister. Speak not of things that do not concern you.”
“They are my geese,” she insisted. “They concern me.”
The laugh that spilled out of him was oily, soiled with evil. “Nothing here belongs to you, Damiana. It all belongs to me. Your plants, your geese, your dress—even you belong to me.”
“I do not,” she spat back. “I belong to no one but myself.”
She had not thought he was standing so close to her, but as his hand struck her face, she regretted her inattention. He had hit her before, but not often, and never so hard, and never twice. But now, he hit her again, across the other cheek.
“Remember your place,” he snarled. “Remember that without me, you are nothing. Think on that, sister. You live by my grace. Try harder to earn it.”