Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

“I am your pupil,” he said slowly, “but I am not your apprentice. I am not bound to you. I am no longer even your foster child. I am hunting with the sealers for this month, Godmother.”

I lay awake hours into the night in irrational panic, thinking that I should go mad if I should lose him so soon. I knew it would be folly to forbid him to go; well, as he said, I could not forbid him. But if I made him regret the decision later on, he might as easily leave in anger then. Nothing bound him. Even my husband was afraid of me, but I had nothing with which to bind Medraut.

I thought, finally, that I must give him my blessing and let him go on his voyage, that it was the only answer he would respect, and a risk that I must take. And still unable to sleep, I felt that I must tell him now.

It was dark, too dark to see him when I entered the chamber where he worked and slept; I did not need a light to find my way around these rooms. I sat on the edge of his cot and lightly stroked his hair, to wake him.

“Teleri?” he said, and reached out a hand which touched my leg. “You are overdressed this time.”

I was wrapped in a gown and mantle, of course, having been walking in the cold halls of my husband’s holding. That Medraut should mistake me for one of my handmaidens amused me. I grasped his hand and held the palm to my face, that he should know me.

But he did not. He let me hold his hand there against my throat and chin, cupping my jaw. He said gently, “Get out of my bed. I do not want you any more tonight than I did last—”

His fingers and palm were cold. Their light touch sent gooseflesh across my shoulders. How could he not know me—

Truly, truly, I was only trying to shock him into recognition, but I drew his hand down inside my gown, and then suddenly I was reeling with the insanity and sheer delight of his taut, long fingers at once disdaining and tempted by my failing body. He thought I was Teleri—his sure hand held by me reluctantly a moment against my breast, and still he thought I was young. I shivered with bottled laughter, delighted by this game.

“Get out of my bed,” he said again, his voice harder this time, more irritated and less patient.

How reluctant are you, I wondered, and drew his hand lower down my body.

God, his hands!

I was at once besotted with the flattery in their blindness, and blind myself with their cool, burning touch.

Again he hissed at me to leave, and added, “You are lovely, you are arousing, you are all you wish to be. But Teleri, I’m tired, I’m short of temper, and you are not the lover I would choose—”

I shook with laughter. I could scarcely contain myself, but I knew that if he heard my voice the game would be over. In the dark, groping, I bent to kiss him somewhere along his naked ribcage.

“Out!” he hissed. I could not bear that I did not know exactly how excited he was, and reached down to feel the taut rod between his legs. Aroused, indeed.

At this crude invasion of his privates he lost all patience with me, and threw me out of his bed.

No one who knew me would have dared such a thing.

I sat for a moment shaken and trembling in an undignified heap on the floor; then hooked vicious fingernails into his back, which he had turned on me in an exaggerated gesture of dismissal, and tore open his shoulder.

His hand locked around my wrist in a grip of iron, hard and fast. He dragged me up from the floor and back into the bed, and pinned me so between hard knees. His face close to my ear, with one hand hitching up my robes, he hissed in dreadful quiet, “Do you want me so much? Do you really think you want me so much? Do you think I love kindly?” And then he pinned me further with an elbow cruelly pressed against my throat, and as I gasped for breath, he in all fury plunged his lean, hard body into mine.

I screamed silently, strangled by his elbow, unable to warn him of the fearful thing he was doing.

“You’re not Teleri!” he gasped hollowly, enjoying none of this, concentrating on his retributive abuse of me. “Who are you?”

I could scarcely breathe, so how could I speak? I had come to give my son permission to leave me and ended in being raped by him—the thought made me wheeze with choking and hysterical laughter. Suddenly, as suddenly as the livid anger had taken him, he stopped his cold, punishing ploughing of me and let go of my throat. He whispered again, “Who are you?”

“You know who I am,” I gasped.

“Aiee!”

He made a choking noise something like a muffled scream, and struggled frantically to untangle our cleaving bodies.

“Beast,” I flung at him, accusing and wounded as a green girl.

“I!” he cried. “I! You tear my back to ribbons, and call me a beast! Have you any idea what pain—”

“Have you?” I snapped.

That silenced him for a moment, reminding him of his uncharacteristic and mindless brutality. He bent over me still, awkwardly, trying not to touch me, trembling.

“You have not said who you are,” he whispered. “Tell me yourself.”