Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

I had not ever meant for such a thing to happen. But I, of all, ought to have known that it could: I, who bore him by my brother; I, who had suckled him on Greek myth, as he said.

“You know who I am,” I repeated.

His voice was full of horror. “I did not know. I did not know!”

“You did not know me,” I said, nearly as shaken as he, “but you knew what you were doing.”

“This is what happened to my father,” he said through his teeth.

“No,” I said coldly. “I invited him. You forced me.”

“You deceived me!”

“I deceived Artos, as well,” I said. “But your father would never use any woman so ruthlessly as you have used me.” I shivered, scarcely able to believe what he had done. “You are not like your father.”

“No,” he said, still speaking through clenched teeth. “I am like you.” He hovered over me, close but not touching me, intimate but not invasive. Caught in the nightmare of his own fury and recklessness, he added in a fierce, icy whisper, “I am not so easily toyed with as my father. I might desire more of you.”

I am sure he meant it only as a threat; but I realized then that I had him trapped, that the finch was mine forever, if I took this to its logical conclusion.

“Do you?” I asked.

He wrenched at my hair in frustration.

“So, so, so.” I touched his wiry hand, and men lightly caressed his hair, calming him in the same warning and assured way I would have calmed him as a child. It was automatic, and eerie in how surely it worked on him. “Medraut, don’t hurt me.”

He let go of my hair with a soft sigh. “I was not thinking. I am not thinking. I don’t know what to do.”

“Don’t try to think.” I twined an arm around his neck to draw him down to me until his mouth was breathing hotly against mine, and then he lost all reason, and we clung and kissed frantically. I could not stop shaking, nor could he cease his choking sobs, until he tore our mouths apart and moaned, “What am I to do?”

“You need not do anything. Nothing has come of it. Let go of me, and I’ll go back to my chamber and you’ll go back to sleep—”

“Nothing has come of it!”

“Not unless you finish what you began,” I said softly. “Is it true that you cannot love kindly? Show me. You owe it me.”

“I will not finish! I was wrong, I acted evilly—”

“Must I command you?” I said in a voice that he surely knew not to challenge.

He gave a wordless cry of disbelief and said in bafflement, “You cannot want this!”

“What do you fear?”

“The wrath of the gods,” he answered swiftly.

“You said I was beautiful.”

“Yes, but…” He sighed. “And arousing, as I said. I am lost.”

“Come,” I said. “You are not Odysseus. There are no gods that care. Prove to me your courage.”

A long moment of absolute stillness, and then his whispered assent.

“I’ll do it.”

He moved inside me slowly and sweetly, tentative this time, exploring rather than invading. It was as though he expected me act of incest to be different, somehow, from the same act with any other woman. And when we were entwined softly and comfortably and he began to accept that indeed he was not about to be struck down by a blow of lightning, he murmured at my ear, “Godmother, have I grown too old for you to begin to suckle me?”

“Do it, do it,” I murmured in return.

“This is madness,” he said, and laughed, and closed his mouth over my breast.

He would not know until too late how thoroughly I had caged him. I would clip his wings, and train him to sing at my command, and pinion him if he tried to fly.

I was thinking only of how I should triumph over my brother by this act, but I had not realized how sweet it would be to have Medraut as a lover.

I say we were lovers, but love—I think I do not know what love is—I have trained all my sons to revere me in some cross between fear and devotion. What binds Medraut to me is deeper and harsher even than that, though, tempered with his clear-sighted understanding for what I am and why I do the things I do, and tainted with the lust that brought us to quivering ecstasy in each other’s arms for nearly two years. He always thought of our love as tainted. He could not ever put aside the knowledge that what was between us was a universal evil, an immortal sin; and still he took me to his bed.

All of it, all of it comes back when I think of him: child and man. How once, when he was six, he had been made to kneel all night on one knee at the foot of my bed, naked and with his head bowed, because he had dared to contradict me. Again, twenty years later, his silver head between my legs, his hungry mouth and tongue in the secret places of my body, his long and gentle fingers. How he would look up at me men, with the eager, half-frightened expression I knew so well from his babyhood: Have I pleased you, Godmother, is it enough, will I not be punished this time? He would by day hunt fiercely, work in the fields, drive himself as hard as he had ever done; and then he would come to me for instruction. How much of yourself, of your soul, are you willing to barter for today’s scrap of arcane information?