Of Thorns and Fruit
by Gloriana
TITLE: Of Thorns and Fruit
AUTHOR: Gloriana
ARCHIVE: M_A
PAIRING: Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan
CATEGORIES: First-Time, Romance, AR (under the archive definition, AU under mine)
RATING: Adult
NOTES: Yet another story from a flashslash prompt, but this one went into the Con*Strict zine in July: thanks to Sian for early release of these stories. More thanks to GlassHouses, the Emu and the hubby for their timely and intensive betas. Beware the Terry Pratchett homage, and if such things amuse you, look up the original name of the flower 'impatiens' on Wikipedia when you're done.
DISCLAIMER: George Lucas owns these lads, and would disapprove greatly of the uses I put them to, I'm sure. But they're just so *tempting*...
SPOILERS: None.
FEEDBACK: All welcomed. Positive to me, please; negative or equivocal to list or me as you see fit: gloriana@virginqueen.com
SUMMARY: In a kingdom far, far away, a young man falls into a deep sleep, from which he cannot be woken.
WARNINGS: Nada. Zip. None. No honestly - forget the last one I posted here! This is really innocent, sweet stuff. Except for the sex. I couldn't forgo the sex :)
Once upon a time, in a small town in a small kingdom, there lived a young man who was exceptional in only a few ways. He had eyes that changed colour with the sky; he was always ready to act rather than to talk; and when he laughed everyone around him grew happier. He laughed a great deal.
The other exceptional thing about him was this. One night he went to sleep; and the next morning he did not wake up.
When his father lumbered up the narrow stairs to his attic room, the young man did not even stir. His father shook his shoulder and stroked his ruddy hair; and when he didn't wake, feared that he was ill, and called for his mother.
He slept through that day, that evening and that night. By the third day his mother was in tears, and his father sent for a physician whose fees he could barely afford.
"He is not dead," the physician said, holding a mirror to the young man's mouth to watch its silver face mist over. "Did he get a blow -perhaps to the head?"
He had not. The physician left them with a small green bottle of sickly sweet medicine, and instructions to put a drop of it on the young man's lips every five hours. The medicine proved worthless.
After ten days they knew the young man must die, no matter what the cause of his illness, for in his sleeping state he could not drink water or eat food. Wailing with grief they carried him downstairs, wrapped up in his sheets, and laid him on the kitchen table which would be his bier.
"He doesn't look ill to me," one of his nieces murmured while they watched the nine-night wake over him. "Shh," her cousin replied, poking her in the ribs.
But the percipient niece had a point. People whispered that the young man's skin glowed with health; and then they said out loud how sturdy his limbs still were, and how even his breathing. Of course news of his mysterious illness spread quickly, for this was a small town. The parlour of the little house filled with strangers, gawking to see the living corpse. It was not long before a priest happened by.
"He is not cursed," the priest said, on less evidence than the physician had gathered. "You must take him to the church: we will look after him there." The crowd lifted the table on their shoulders and carried the young man away. The priest followed behind, thinking with satisfaction of the alms that people would pay to touch such a miraculous body.
In the suddenly empty house, the young man's parents stared at one another. Then his father quietly closed the door.
The priests in the church dusted down a sarcophagus in a side chapel and laid the young man's body there, on the cold stone. They unwound the sheets from his naked limbs. They dressed him in fine white clothes embroidered in blue. They opened a casement so the sun shone on his face, showing clearly that his body was not decaying; and at night they lit gold-rimmed candles by his feet and head.
The people came.
They fingered his soft cropped hair and touched his warm flesh, then stared at their hands in wonder. They brought gifts to leave by his feet, and took away with them tiny scraps they tore off his clothing, tucking them into the pouches where they carried their other talismans: hares' feet and dried cat claws. The priests replaced the tattered clothes without complaint: the value of the gifts left behind was far greater than a bolt of cloth.
The young man's fame spread. Pilgrims forged new paths to the town, and the inhabitants let out their parlours, their storerooms, even their cow byres as lodgings for the passing crowds. In the early autumn the lord of the manor returned to oversee the harvest on his lands, and it was not long before he visited the church.
"He is most extraordinary," the lord said; with some justification, for the young man had now been sleeping for a quatremester, and still showed no signs of ill for it. "I will take him to the court. He will make our village famous there."
He had the young man borne away by his guard, who put the young man's body on a pallet covered in a purple velvet cloth and carried him to the lord's stable. They kept their pikes at the ready as they passed through the silent mass of unhappy townsfolk. The lord followed behind, well-pleased with his idea. He had noted the comeliness of the young man's limbs, half-bared under the shredded clothing: he thought a visit to his quarters might become quite the thing among the young ladies at court. Future prestige and influence beckoned.
The young man was placed in a cart and the cart was decked with fruits of the autumn harvest: shiny red apples, plump blackberries, sheaves of golden wheat. Soon a long train set off for the city: the lord, his horse caparisoned in gold, followed by his companions, his servants, the soldiers still in formation round the cart, and finally a tail of pilgrims, travelling by horse or mule or long shanks as their means dictated. Every night the lord had the fruits from the cart distributed among the pilgrims and fresh ones laid down; for he was not a foolish man, understanding well the ways men's minds could be influenced.
Indeed, within days stories began to spread about the miraculous cures eating the fruit had caused. Warts fell away; coughs and fevers subsided; a crippled beggar walked. By the time the cortege reached the city, high expectations had already been excited among its citizens, who welcomed the lord with a parade all the way to the great cathedral.
The lord, who had hoped to put the young man in his own rooms in the palace, was most displeased; but one look at the size of the crowd was enough to have him change his plans. Still, he made sure the young man was laid on the marble altarpiece of his own family chapel; and that a phalanx of his guards was posted there. Satisfied, he left for the palace, confident the courtly gossip that evening would centre on his name.
In the small hours of the night the last of the train of pilgrims came tiredly into the city, their clothes covered in the dust of the long walk. Above them the autumn moon shone cold and clear. The young man's parents slipped away from the others, down an alley to find a stoop where they could rest. Their small bundles clutched to them, they snatched at sleep until dawn.
The king came to visit the cathedral the next afternoon. His chancellor had already gone that morning, dressed in tradesman's clothes; and had reported that he could detect no fraud. He had concealed a long steel pin in his sleeve. When the guards had been occupied with the crowd he had pricked the young man's thigh in a single stab. Blood had oozed; but the young man had not stirred.
"Your advice?" the king asked, who knew both to employ competent men, and to listen to their opinions.
"Take this in hand yourself," the chancellor replied. "Either the boy is truly blessed, or else he is a freak of nature. Neither God nor nature will remain with him forever: he will die, this year or the next. But in the meantime he is a focal point to rally the people, and that power should lie in the hands of the crown, not the church or the nobility."
As he walked up the wide aisle of the cathedral preceded by bowing priests, with the lord of the manor at his elbow and his chancellor following closely, the king bore all these arguments in mind. But they fled from him the minute the guards stood aside from the chapel door.
"He's just a youth," the king said, stepping across the lintel. The young man's cheeks were as flushed as the autumn roses that had been tossed around his body; and his limbs were as pale as the cyclamen left by his feet. He still lay on the velvet the soldiers had put under him, but the crowd had stripped him and no-one had thought to cover him again.
The king shivered. He turned to the lord, a frown between his thick brows. "Is that not a hard place to put him?" he asked, glaring down at the man.
"Your m-majesty," the lord said, "I haven't had t-time since we arrived -"
The king cut him off with a wave of his hand. "Does the boy have any family here?" he said over the lord's head, addressing the crowd. His deep voice carried effortlessly in the sudden quiet of the great church.
When no answer came, he asked again. "Does he not have any relatives to care for him?" The crowd waited: few of them had come from the small town, and none knew the young man themselves.
Finally there was a stirring from the back of the cathedral, and an old man pushed forward, his wife clutching his hand. "Sire," he said, dropping to his knees, "he is my son." The woman knelt silently beside him, tears washing the dust from her face. The king could see that she was trembling.
"Take them to the palace," he ordered, turning to his chancellor. "Make sure they are given hot food, new clothes, water to wash and a good room to stay in." He clasped the old man's shoulder briefly, then strode to the high altar, all eyes following him as he climbed the pulpit stairs.
"This young man will be brought to the palace," he declared to the assembled mass. "There he will sleep until he wakes, in the finest bed we can make for him. But he will not be put on display. He is not an animal in a travelling show, to be prodded or poked at will." The anger in the king's voice was enough to keep the crowd quiet while the royal guard bore the young man away.
Yet the king was no fool himself: he could read the dissatisfied faces of his subjects and the frown his chancellor wore. So after the young man was safely gone, he turned to the people again.
"Some say the young man is blessed," he spoke out, regaining their attention. "If that is so, his blessings should be shared among you all, not kept for a few to benefit from."
The crowd began to mutter in approval. "Thus we decree," the king went on, "that anyone who brings a bedsheet to the palace will receive it back once the young man has lain upon it for a night, so that the owner shall have whatever virtue his body may impart." A deep sigh ran through the congregation at these words, but the king held up his hand for silence again.
"Bring the finest sheets of silk," he said, "but also your old cottons, softened by the scrubbing of many hands. Rich gifts and poor: all will be accepted as long as they are smooth against his skin. This we decree."
Joyfully the people streamed back out into the streets, rushing to attic storage trunks and warmed linen closets. The chancellor gave the king a look of dry appreciation. "Very impressive," he said. "You've managed to deflate the market in relics, regulate its supply *and* give a boost to the textile industry, all while maintaining your own popularity. I wonder that you bother with a chancellor at all."
If the chancellor had thought those were the reasons for the king's actions, he was soon disabused of the notion.
The king had the young man put in the circular room at the top of the strongest tower of the palace (which had been a fort, in earlier times). He ordered the royal bed, in which he himself had been born half a century before, carried up the stairs piece by piece. Mattresses were piled upon its slats; fowls gave up their down for the quilts put over them; pillows lay like snow drifts on top. There the young man was placed under the king's stern supervision, the softest of sheets tucked round his naked body.
He slept on.
The king would have no curtains pulled across the windows, in hopes that the young man might waken with dawn's light. Instead, as the days grew colder, he made sure a fire was always burning in the grate. The young man's mother would sit there every morning, sewing while she talked to her sleeping son. She was a seamstress by trade. Her husband, who cut and cured and tooled leather, would join her in the evenings, stroking his son's hair as he told his family the news of the day.
On occasion the king visited them there. He would speak kindly, encouraging them to hope that the young man would soon awaken. His certainty soothed their worried hearts. With his chancellor, he was less sanguine. "It is tragic to see a young life so wasted," he murmured, watching the young man's still face.
Wisely the chancellor made no reply; but he was uneasy. The king's infatuation was clear to see; and whether the young man was cursed or blessed, asleep he was not a fit companion for the ruler of a country. Most vexing was the question of an heir. The queen and her only child had both died of a pestilence some twenty years previously; the king had never taken another consort. The chancellor had promoted various worthy young men and women from the court, first as potential marriage partners, then as potential heirs by adoption. The king had been gracious; but noncommittal. This obsession was new.
The king, for his part, ruled himself with as firm a hand as he ruled his country. He continued to involve himself in affairs of state; he promoted trade and invention; he held dinners for his court. He did *not* spend hours in the young man's room, as would have been his preference.
But there was one luxury he allowed himself. Every night, when the young man's parents had gone and the lights were about to be dowsed, the young man's sheets were changed. The king insisted that he should choose the new linens and oversee the disposal of the old, which went into a basket for the young man's mother to embroider with the royal crest, and were then returned to their owners.
So the king stood at the foot of the young man's bed while the gentle hands of his serving men moved the young man's body from side to side. Flashes of creamy flesh, the blaze of the red thatch at the young man's groin so bright in the shadowy room - these were the images the king stole away with. And if, in the dark of the royal bedchamber, his hand drifted to his own groin, he could at least tell himself that he had done no more than look.
Meanwhile the winter wore on. While his people stuffed their chests with miraculous bedclothes, the king instituted a search for the cure to the young man's condition. The first call was to the royal physician.
The king stood silently by while he conducted a thorough examination of the young man.
"Do you have any idea of what's causing it?" he demanded when the royal physician was done, and the covers drawn up again.
The physician, who had seen two of his predecessors dismissed and a third imprisoned, knew better than to pretend to a competence he did not have. "No, your majesty," he demurred. "But perhaps in some small apothecary's a potion might be tucked away..."
The king set a reward for anyone who could find or make such a potion; but, because he was a sensible man and he found the young man too dear to risk, he made one stipulation. Whoever brought the potion would have to drink half of it themselves. After four cases of poisoning, only one of which proved fatal, he abolished the reward.
He had the monks search their scriptoria; the professors read their learned books; and the seamen recite their shanties. Nowhere was there a mention of anything as strange and marvellous as the sleeping young man.
When the winter snows were turning to dirty slush on the city cobbles, the king decided to take the last step. Leaving his court and chancellor behind, he rode up into the hills, into the grey banks of cloud that hid the bones of the land. For three days he rode, and for three days he walked, leading his horse up a trail too steep to ride. Finally he came to the hut of the auld hag: nothing more than a shed crouching between two huge boulders, which were all that was left of a mountain. He bent his head to enter the door.
"Ye be late," the auld hag grumbled. "Been holding tea for ye this hour an' more."
The king, on his best manners, apologised and even complimented her on the smell of the soup. He sat down on one side of the fire, his long limbs wrapped around a low stool, while the auld hag creaked away on the rocking chair opposite. It was quite some time before they ate, and even longer before they spoke: the auld hag believed in uncomfortable silences.
Finally she wiped the last bit of soup from her chin with a lump of bread. "So," she said. (Her name was Ydrithe, though few men still remembered that.) "Ye be sure this young man of your'n is no fraud?"
Gratefully the king laid his bowl aside. He described in detail how the young man had slept through the winter; how the chancellor had first tested him with a pin.
"It's not a pin that will do to wake the likes of him," the auld hag cackled. "He needs pricking with a thorn bigger'n that." She leaned forward, the rocker groaning beneath her. "Of all the men in the kingdom, ye should know."
The king's face grew dark with anger. He surged to his feet. "Who are you," he said, his voice trembling, "to hold out the temptation of what I want, but may not take?" He turned on his heel and walked out, knocking over stool and soup as he left.
"I'm Ydrithe," the auld hag muttered; and in revenge she sent a small cloud to follow the king, and sit drizzling on him all the way back to the city.
The king ignored the auld hag's words as best he could for the next few months.
At first there was the hope that the spring equinox would bring a change. Buds unfurled; birds composed new mating songs; lambs sprung up like snowdrops. But the young man still slept.
Early summer brought the roses to full bloom, and sent larks gliding from the tower windows into a wide blue sky. The king's courtiers danced around the maypoles, orange ribbons fluttering in the breeze. But the king's thoughts rested with the young man, who would experience none of this. The king mourned for his loss.
At night, other emotions took him. He was no longer young himself, but he was not yet old; and the sight of the young man naked against the sheets haunted him. The graceful arch of the young man's foot, the curve of thigh swelling into buttock, the shadowy cleft between those plump cheeks - he couldn't stop thinking about them. That little dark hole, occasionally glimpsed.
The true summer heat settled early. Fires were no longer lit in the young man's room. Instead the windows were flung open in their casements and the quilts packed away. One night the serving men laid fine lawn over the young man's sleeping body: it caught in the crease between his legs. The king went sweating to bed.
The next day was Midsummer. The king was forced to attend a feast that quickly became a romp, young couples cavorting through the dances. At the high table, the chancellor sat to the right of the king; the young man's parents, at his bidding, to his left. In all the cheer, their three were the only faces of sorrow.
"It will be a year tomorrow," the young man's mother said quietly, her words almost lost in the opening chords of a dance.
A year, two years, more - the king imagined the hall gone to ruin, the dancers long in their graves and the city abandoned, while in the tower room the young man slept on untouched.
Yet that was not the moment he made his decision; nor did he make it in the tower room later, as he chose the next set of sheets for the young man to lie on. These were of green cotton cloth: so worn that pinholes of light shone through every inch when the king held them up, but soft as suede against his fingers. After another scrubbing, they would be little more than rags.
The palace was as slow to sleep as the sun had been to set; but at last quiet came. In his chambers the king paced, his wine-red robe wrapped around him, until dew was settling on the roses and even the crickets began to drowse.
He had cast the auld hag's words aside as a cruel taunt. A king he might be, but he did not place any confidence in the miraculous powers some claimed for a king's touch, any more than he believed in a bedsheet curing illness. Yet the auld hag had given him temptation where he had sought for hope; and it was this that wore on him.
A hundred years hence the young man might awaken, pricked or not. The king would be dead then, folded away in his grave and rotted like moth-eaten cloth. But now he was quick; and still virile; and the hunger that had been slowly building in him was too strong, like a weight of water that finally overwhelms a dam. He snatched up a small pot of unguent from his bedside, thrust it into the pocket of his robe, and went padding up the stairs, feet bare on the cool stone.
The guards by the young man's door had fallen asleep. He slipped past them and pressed the door closed behind him, turning the key in the lock. There was a little moonlight still, although the tower windows faced east and the moon had long since passed. In the bed the young man lay on his side, legs sprawled, his cheek pressed to the pillow.
The king parted his robe, his hands shaking although the night air was still warm. Taking out the unguent he oiled himself until his phallus stood stiff from his body, swollen and urgent. He let the small pot slide back into the pocket and dropped the robe to the ground, where it lay like a pool of spilled burgundy.
It seemed incredible to him that the thunder of his heart alone was not enough to waken the young man, whose lashes remained closed but whose lips parted slightly, like a bud about to bloom. The king wanted to kiss that mouth wide open, yet now he feared the young man's improbable awakening almost as much as he feared the young man's determined sleep. So instead he gingerly lifted the old sheet, slipped into the bed behind the young man, and pulled it up over them both.
Cuddled in the soft cotton, the young man's body was warm. Slowly the king inhaled the sleep-scent, heady and drowsy and rich with the odour of skin. The nape of the young man's neck against his lips: fine hairs tickling him, and the king's fingers slipping across a curve of buttock, in their oiliness sliding into heat. One finger pushed deeper.
The young man sighed.
It was a small sound, no more than the rustle of sheets might hide, and the young man might have sighed that way every night since he had fallen asleep, and the king been none the wiser.
Nevertheless, the king's heart leapt.
He waited for the sound to be repeated, but it was not. In his disappointment he pushed again, his finger sliding up to the knuckle; and he was taken by the silken warmth beyond the first tight ring of muscle. Here, in this intimate place the king could explore only with his skin, the young man was intensely beautiful. Closing his eyes, his breath shuddering across the tips of the young man's cropped hair, the king pressed the little hole open until another finger could join the first.
Even in sleep, the young man yielded so sweetly. The flesh, taken by unconscious reflex, pulled tight and then eased round the king's fingers, softening into a welcoming warmth. He twisted, slickening the passage in readiness for his entry: for it was clear to him that the first prick of a thorn could not be altogether easy. He kissed the young man's shoulder to gentle the feeling of his fingers slipping out.
He put his knees in the gap between the young man's legs; grasped one hip; covered the young man; bore down.
Through tightness and sudden quick spasms, into the opened channel and deeper yet, his staff ploughed. In, in - so wonderful, clasping him until the very root of his sex was clutched by the little pucker he'd spread. Body and balls and thighs and mouth: all pressed against the young man, skin to skin, inside and out.
The first withdrawal and thrust back in were so sharp a pleasure that the king could hardly bear it; but neither could he stop. "Won't you wake for me?" he begged in a voice now low and rough. "Ah, it is too late. I must ride you to the end, whether you know of it or not."
The second thrust, the third - his prick moving in warm oiled softness, the tight ring sliding down his foreskin to his root. He wanted to pierce this young man, to ream him so deep that even his dreams would be full of the ache of it.
And then the king stopped thinking about that, too, and became merely a man rutting on a bed, consumed by the warm body beneath him. He grunted and pushed, his buttocks quivering under the sheets, as eager as any ram mounting an ewe. He put frantic kisses on the young man's freckled shoulders. His strong hands pulled the young man's hips up to him so he could plunge with ever more force into where he needed to go.
His seed gathered in his balls. The texture of that soft sleeve of flesh, rubbing his skin, sending intense delight and sharper need spiralling up through his entire body -
His breath left his mouth in little startled gasps just before he came.
His chest heaving, he collapsed back down to the bed, his face hidden in the pillow behind the young man's head. His hand stroked flanks now covered in his own sweat.
There was a small cough. "Who are you?" the young man asked.
The king froze, astonished.
"I am your king," he finally said. His phallus, wilting, slipped out of the young man's hole.
"I see," the young man said. "So I suppose this is not my bed."
The king raised himself up on one elbow, and tentatively lifted his hand to the young man's shoulder. The young man rolled on his back towards him. They stared at one another.
"You have such beautiful eyes," the king whispered, entranced. Awake, alert: it was as if the fled spirit had poured back into the young man. The king marvelled at how the cleft chin now spoke of stubborn determination; how the wide mouth seemed mobile and about to smile. And those eyes...
"I don't know what colour they are," the young man said abruptly. "Everybody tells me something different."
In the moonlight they were silver, but the king did not think the young man would believe that: there was a decidedly no-nonsense cast to that chin, and a little frown-line between the young man's brows. The king would have moved to kiss the frown away, if he had not been terribly conscious of the difficulties of the situation. "I have things to tell you that you will find grievous," he said instead. Gently he spoke of the year the young man had spent asleep.
The young man listened with a solemn face, neither questioning nor interrupting the king's succinct account. "My parents?" he asked, when the king was done.
"Here in the palace. Will you see them now?"
The young man's hand moved to stay the king. "Not yet, if you please. I - am not ready."
"Then let them sleep," the king said huskily, very aware of the hand on his arm. "We will wake them with the joyous news tomorrow."
The young man nodded. His fingers moved, exploring the muscle beneath their tips. "You're older than you look on your coins," he said. He moved his hand to touch the king's face. "And your profile doesn't show a broken nose."
"They draw me from my other side," the king said, abashed.
The young man smiled. "Your mouth is kinder than they let on, too."
The king did not know what to say to that.
"I remember your voice, I think," the young man continued, the frown-line becoming more marked. "And my parents'. But before them there were only strangers, reaching out for me -"
"It's alright," the king said, clasping the young man close to the length of his own body. "We brought an end to that. You're safe here."
They lay quietly for a few minutes, the king's hands cradling the young man's head, the young man's legs intertwining with his.
Then the young man said, "I smell roses. Is there a garden near?"
"They climb up the tower," the king replied, shifting his weight to let the young man free. "But there is a walled garden below."
"I want to go walking there."
There were no clothes for him in the bedchamber, so the king put his own robe over the young man's shoulders and wrapped himself in the old worn sheet from the bed. Together they unlocked the door and slipped past the dozing guards.
Their bare feet stepped quietly through the sleeping corridors. The silken robe, too large for the young man, trailed behind him on the floor. Tucking in the ends of the sheet, the king felt as if they were small children escaped from the nursery, on a secret adventure in the middle of the night. In the moonlight he saw the flash of the young man's smile.
The door into the garden creaked shut behind them. Out of the tower's shadow, the moonlight silvered old stone walls, making the white roses shine and turning the red roses into cups of ink. The dew wet their feet as they wandered through rows of sweetpeas, impatiens, lavender and thyme.
"Do you remember how you came to sleep so long?" the king asked.
The young man stopped beside a gooseberry bush trained up the garden wall. The berries nestled safely in their bed of brambles. "I ate a golden pear," he said, quite matter-of-fact. "A fruitseller in the market told me it would bring me good luck - I paid a whole shilling for it."
The king closed his eyes, briefly appalled. "This fruitseller. She wasn't an auld hag, was she?"
The young man clicked his teeth. "Would I be so stupid as to eat a golden pear from an auld hag? No, she was a young hag. She said her name was Ydrayne."
"Ah," the king said.
The young man gave him a severe look. "It was your head that paid for it," he said.
They walked on.
"And do you remember," the king said diffidently, reluctant to broach the subject of their lying together but knowing it had to be done, "how you came to wake?"
The young man was silent for a moment; and then he smiled, a mysterious and knowing smile. He put his hand down to cup the king's genitals through the sheet. "I remember well," he said, stroking his thumb across the soft contours that the sheet outlined.
The king shuddered. His phallus began to rise.
"I would like that again," the young man whispered, touching his lips to the king's collar-bone. His fingers moved with slow skill.
"As would I," the king managed. He shifted to spread his legs, feet awkwardly wide apart, as the young man's hand went lower.
"But first," said the young man, fondling behind the heavy balls, his palm a solid bar between the king's thighs, "it's time for you to judge the prick of my thorn. Perhaps I am not as large as you, but I will give you all I have to give."
The king would have whimpered, for the young man had found his opening and the smallest fingertip of cotton sheet was gaining entry. But the young man's mouth had closed over his, stifling any sound.
They kissed for a long time, the king leaning down into the richness of the young man's lips while the young man continued his intimate caresses.
Finally the king broke away. "Please," he said. He flung the sheet onto the dewy grass, and laid himself down. "Please."
There was just enough unguent left in the pot in the king's robe. While the young man spread the oil around his hole, the king writhed under the young man's fingers. "You are magnificent," the young man murmured, his hands deliberate and sure. He rose up over the king, his limbs glistening in the moonlight.
The king saw that the red thatch at the young man's groin was almost black in the shadow, and his cock was outlined against it, curling up to his stomach sturdy and strong. A bead of milk had gathered at its tip. The king closed his eyes as he was taken.
Was this the force that had woken the young man? A barb thrust deep into the core of him and his belly convulsing, every nerve alive to the presence of the thick invader. He gasped with the power of it.
"My king, my king," the young man said brokenly. He held the king's knees apart; pushed in again.
So they moved, the king clutching at the young man's shoulders, the young man quick and eager, giving no quarter in his awakened hunger. Yielding to him was the sweetest thing the king had ever known. The heavy member filled the space behind his testicles; the young man's moans, an old silence within him.
The best of all was having that warm body, so wonderfully alive, shoving, pushing, needing, demanding he respond. Willingly he did, until the delight of it was too much and his seed spattered on his stomach. Above him the young man stiffened and arched; and came.
In the quiet after, the young man's body heavy across his, the king listened to a nightjar flutter past. The moon was slipping away behind the garden wall. He stroked the young man's hair insensibly.
The young man sighed and turned his face into the curve of the king's enfolding arm. "It is very strange to wake up, and find the world has turned over."
"I am sorry for it," the king murmured into his hair. "But your home is still there. You can go back."
"I doubt that," the young man said drily. He raised himself up on one arm to look down at the king. Then a smile slowly broke out over his face, until he seemed as gleefully wicked as a child caught in mischief but sure it would be indulged. "Would you come a-courting, then? Sit in my father's parlour and invite me to the local dance?"
"I would," the king said gravely; but the corner of his mouth twitched, the smile-lines creasing.
"And your chancellor having tea in the kitchen, and a hundred servants waiting in the road outside. What a scandal: they'd be talking about it across the seven kingdoms."
"Let them talk. A king can do as he likes."
The young man looked down at him, a speculative twist to his mouth. "Now I remember the tales Nan used to tell, of the things you got up to before you were put on the throne."
"All exaggerated," the king said gamely.
The young man collapsed back down onto his breast. "It wouldn't do, anyway," he said, snuggling back to his place under the king's arm. "A king in our small town? Nobody would get on with the planting, and then where would we be?"
"True," the king said. He took a deep breath. "You might stay here instead, with me. I would make you my consort, and my heir, and until the day I died I would hold you dear. It is little to offer compared to what I ask, but I will give you all I have to give."
It took the young man a few moments to answer; and in that time the king's blood began to pound in his ears. Then the young man said slowly, "I will be your consort; and your knight and champion, if you would train me at arms. But I will not be your heir; for when you die I will follow you."
The king swallowed. "Have you not slept enough," he asked gently, "without courting that deeper night?"
The young man stroked his cheek. "It is nothing to fear."
And that was a wisdom beyond the king's wide knowledge of the world, so he made no answer but to accept it.
Then they lay awake, each learning who the other was by touch alone, until the moon was gone and the night had covered them; and the birds began to call out from their roosts in the dark trees beyond.
"Will you take me again?" the king asked at last, his sex beginning to stir once more with the sun from its sloth. "I have a softer bed in my chamber."
"I might," the young man said; and then he laughed and the king laughed too, because the young man's laughter made him happy. The young man nipped at his ear. "I will. But not in your chamber, for I am sick of beds. I will put you against that wall in the sun one morning, and while you cling to the stone as the vines do I will take you there. I will turn you over a cook's stool in the kitchens one evening, with flour dusting your belly, and I will take you there." He prodded his own uprisen staff against the king's thigh. "I will pull you into a stall in the stables, and roll you over a bale of hay and take you there. And," he whispered, closing his hand over the king's eager member, "one night when everyone is abed just as they are now, we will go into the Great Hall, you in your ermine robes and me to your left and three paces behind. And I will bend you over your own throne, and lift your robes, and fuck you so hard you'll jam your hand into your mouth, in case you wake the palace with your cries."
"Yes," the king groaned.
"But first I want to ride this prick again, and be reminded of how it pierces me."
"Ah - yes!"
And because the young man was always ready to act rather than talk, he did exactly that (and, in time, the other things he had promised, too).
By the time day broke, the sheet they had lain on was little more than rags.
When its owner came to claim it back, it had not been embroidered, because the young man's mother had too many tears of joy falling to see her needle. Nor had it been washed, because every servant in the palace was busy with preparations for the royal wedding, announced in unseemly haste. Its owner grumbled; but she took the sheet away nonetheless.
When she reached her tiny hovel at the back of the fruitseller's market, the young hag shook the sheet out and inspected it with care.
"A Midsummer night's dew," Ydrayne noted, spreading her palm over patches of damp. Her finger traced the outline of darker spots. "Dragonfat unguent - that's rare enough. Ah - the seed of a king! Rarer still. And here: the seed of a knight, a champion of men." Her mouth pursed in satisfaction. "Everything I need."
She folded the sheet again and put it in her pack along with a few golden pears; picked up her staff; and headed out the door. The small wart on the end of her pretty, upturned nose was quivering with excitement. She turned onto the road that climbed out of the city to the hills beyond. "Let that auld hag Ydrithe tell me now I'm not good enough to train!"
~ ~ ~ finis ~ ~ ~
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