He half-expected nothing at all to happen.
Instead, he felt as though the world spun with him as its axis.
When his vision cleared and his head ceased swimming, he found himself in a grove. Saplings had replaced the ancient trees. Fog clouded the sunlight overhead. The distant and familiar cacophony of Hyde Park filled his ears with the echoes of hoof-beats, rattling carriage-wheels, and frivolous conversation of passers-by. He stood alone in a ring of toadstools. Neither Butcher nor Gawain nor any hint of the ruins remained.
Jack stepped out of the ring. He had arrived whole and hale, so it seemed, and as he strode off, he found a familiar path soon enough which led him back to Knightsbridge, just as his hosts had promised. Apart from the delicious ache in his arse, nothing remained of his evening encounter.
Or so he thought, until he arrived in his barracks and, in removing his coat, found it rather heavier than he recalled. He delved into his pockets. There he found three shillings and a grey feather.
“‘When shall we three meet again,’” he murmured to himself, twirling the feather in his fingertips and not bothering to suppress his grin.
~
Winter Solstice
Blackthorn Briar, Court of Oak and Holly
The Fae Realms
Winter Solstice
“You don’t have to do this,” said Shrike. “A word of surrender would do.”
“No,” Wren replied with shocking rapidity. “It’s all right, I—” A nervous laugh escaped him. He bit it back. “I’ve rather looked forward to it.”
They lounged together upon Shrike’s wool-and-rabbit-fur cloak laid out on the roof of the old warren watchtower. Shrike had built a fire to chase away the nearest tendrils of frost on the well-worn stones. Still, his breath left him in a cloud which mingled with the mist that poured from between Wren’s bespeckled lips. Holly and mistletoe bloomed along the crenelations surrounding the rooftop, having grown along the walls as Shrike and Wren ascended the tower to perform the Solstice ritual.
No raucous throng surrounded them. They sat alone together in their own realm, beheld only by thorns and ice and what round songbirds hadn’t yet sought shelter in warmer climes.
“As a king once advised his princely son,” Wren had said when he broached the idea of a private ritual rather than a public ceremony, “by being seldom seen, we may be ne’er seen but wondered at.”
Shrike didn’t quite follow. Still, he felt satisfied to trust Wren’s judgment in this matter. From what rumours he’d heard in the Wild Hunt, the Queen of the Court of the Silver Wheel still intended to hold her own hollow rite of blood.
The true magic, however, would be done here and now.
Wren had shucked his boots and frock coat when Shrike had spread his cloak over the stones. No sooner had Wren admitted his eager anticipation of the act than his hands fell to Shrike’s tunic ties. Shrike never tired of watching Wren strip away the layers to reveal the body Shrike knew almost as well as his own. Still better than watching was joining in, and so Shrike gladly untied Wren’s cravat in turn. All told, their vestments fell away with far more tenderness and far less violence than they’d done in the Midsummer ritual. But Shrike felt no less passion as his lips chased his fingertips across Wren’s exposed skin, and Wren shivered with more than cold beneath his bruising kisses.
Corded muscled rippled beneath Wren’s freckled skin. The last six months had seen him unchained from his desk in the dim chambers of Staple Inn and sent him hunting, harvesting, and hewing. His slender arms had thickened to meet the challenge and his narrow shoulders had broadened beneath the yoke of honest labour. There still remained some tender softness beneath the trail of dark hair running down from his navel. Everywhere else, however, had hardened.
Much like Shrike did as Wren straddled him.
Wren himself already stood at half-mast. He stiffened further as Shrike took them both in hand, their cocks sliding together in his fist, twin blades in a single sheath. Wren’s clenching fingers buried themselves in the rabbit-fur lining of the cloak. Then he recovered himself and began fumbling through the folds. From a hidden pocket he retrieved a glass vial of oil.
And almost dropped it again when Shrike traced his cock-head on an upward stroke.
A huff of laughter escaped Shrike at Wren’s shudder and bitten-back moan. Wren repaid him by nudging his hand out of the way to take command of their twin staves and slather both in glistening spermaceti.
Then he rose up on his knees, slid himself forward, and reached back to align Shrike’s cock-head with his hole.
Shrike ran his rough hands over Wren’s rigid and trembling thighs. Wren had seen more sunshine in the last six months than had graced him in over a decade in London, or so he said. It had brought out his freckles more than ever before. Even now, on the cusp of winter, on the darkest night of the year, they trickled down over the tops of his thighs. Shrike idly traced a pattern between the disparate speckles. Wren shivered anew.
And impaled himself on Shrike.
Breaching the tight muscle felt like an arrow-shaft piercing a silver ring suspended on spider-silk at the far end of the field—pride in claiming a prize few others could ever hope to achieve, and disbelief at one’s own luck in attaining such a victory. An honour indeed, one which Shrike well appreciated the gravity of. For as Wren had never before penetrated another’s body in the way he’d done to Shrike on Midsummer, nor had his own body ever been penetrated by another.
Until Shrike.
The soft, hot, silken sheath clenched around him. The sight of his shaft sinking into Wren by fractions of an inch proved almost as intoxicating as the sensation of slipping in ever-so-slowly toward the hilt.
