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'Alright?' he says, and that is the thing that ruins you. You know the stories; wear iron about your neck, mustn’t speak to goblin men, ‘ware beautiful strangers in woods and among barrows. Of course you do. But no daoine sidhe in the stories ever peered ‘round a tree with a child’s curious, quiet confidence and said Alright?
So you are not, perhaps, wary as you ought be. Taken by surprise, you smile, and he smiles in return, and that too is your ruin. There has never been a sweeter smile in all the ages of the world-- certainly, at least, there has never been a sweeter smile in the years of your life-- and it steals your breath as surely as if he'd plucked it from your pocket.
'Are you lost?' he wants to know, and you are-- at least a little. He twists around the trunk like a glittering, pale-and-black snake, hand uncurling in the air between you. An imperious command to follow, or a childish invitation to join him, a dare, a wicked invocation in the sly scroll of his fingers. Take his hand, this way, watch the roots. (but if you come in, you can never leave).
(that's all right; you haven't got much on)
You take his hand, and his smile prickles against your skin like feathers. The moon limns a flash of profile as he turns, and in the cold light his face is vulpine, but he crows like a bird, and tugs you away behind his tree.
You stare, because you can’t not, but you can’t get a fix on him. He is beautiful, yes, clearly beautiful, unless he is altogether grotesque. Within a breath, he shifts from sly and soft-spoken and gently tempting, wry smiles and laughter (and surely there's never been a better thing than to make him laugh, this beautiful man) to something altogether more alien. Removed and aloof and unsettling, features wavering from soft to sharp as chipped granite in an instant, and then back again. He is mercury in the shadowed woods.
The roots are sly as he promised, grasping and curious and hungry, and in your feet and legs is a sweet ache from stumbling and climbing over them, wading through brush and scuffing on half-buried rocks like the tumbled remains of cairns. His feet are bare, and yet he treads through brambles without a cry, and his skin is unmarked.
'Do you have a name?' you ask, and he chuckles, soft and knowing.
'I have a name,' he echoes, and it would be a taunt but for how gentle it is, 'but it’s not for you to know.'
A foolish question, and you feel foolish for asking it, because you know well the stories, of course you do. As you must never give any of the fair folk your name, so they will never give theirs; names are power, and such as they are loath to give it. But the fae only laughs, and in that at least the stories are wrong. His laugh is no sweetly silvered thing like unearthly bells; it’s a giddy cackle, childish like his greeting, and it proves quite impossible to feel foolish in the face of it. His grin is a secret given curving form.
'You can call me Noel, if you like.'
You repeat the name, Noel, taste the way your tongue curls from a soft cup against your palate to a coquette's touch at the back of your teeth, and he gives his hair a preening little flick, as though the name were a new article of clothing you'd complimented him on. It is so daft and so charming that you can't but laugh.
Noel tells tales as he leads you, and you bound and leap and burrow with them into battles in the dells, into the setts and warrens of secret things, dizzily up into the scraped-thin air above the clouds with the frenzied and whooping Sluagh and sinking under hazy, treacle-slow waters to sport with the creatures who live there. He laughs as he reminisces absurdly about a pet starfish he kept as a boy, and then his voice twists into dark, wicked appreciation, warning about the other things that live there, maids and youths with eyes like sunlight and weeds in their hair who make him look like a goblin.
And then he laughs again, like he's caught himself out, a wry admission. 'Well.'
It doesn't feel like such a time you've spent listening to him (though you know, you know; men who disappear for a night and come back wizened and hoary, little girls who return from the woods to find their parents long dead of their years), but it must be. For the moment he pauses in his tale-telling, a sudden sweeping wave of dizziness takes you, sucking like undertow at your calves, and you sway on the spot. Your legs ache. Your hand in his tightens, and your head swims for a blink and a heartbeat, a no-signal television fuzz in your ears, and then-- your back is up against a smooth hornbeam bole, solid as a great standing stone. Your toes curl, the primal urge to grip despite the layer of rubber between them and the ground.
Noel has one hand on your shoulder, supporting you with no effort at all, a strong thigh braced against yours, and his face is all mild, curious concern. 'Poor thing. Here, you're hungry; one of these little fruits.'
Plucked from a bush or produced from some hidden pocket, you don’t know, but suddenly between his fingers is a fruit, a small thing like a persimmon, splendent as a jewel, translucent orange flesh that nearly aches with the promise of juice within. He holds it to your lips for you (just the barest brush of his fingertips against the skin under your mouth, and his skin is so soft, and he smiles so bashfully, as if it were a mistake), and all the stories you have ever been told-- who knows upon what soil they fed their hungry, thirsty roots-- are forgotten in the actinic, wild smell of it and his gentle smile.
It is the sweetest thing you have ever tasted; so sweet and sharp and fresh it makes you want to sob, and it bursts like an eyeball between your teeth. You feel like liquid, nothing but blood and nerves and skin strung taut as a drumhead. Swallow down the pulp, feel the slick slide of seeds down your throat. Your cunt throbs-- heartbeats, drumbeats-- and you want to dip your head to taste his fingertips, to hook your legs around him and draw him close, grind against him, shameless and unheeding until you too burst like the fruit.
When he kisses you, his skin tastes of bitter resin and salt.
He draws you down with kisses, laps up your helpless whimpers and sighs like he covets their taste, lays you out, both embowered by the Stygian drape of his cloak. Under your back is moss, spongy hillocks of it, cool and moist against your naked skin, and his hands (they are gilt with rings, and his nails, his nails; no inhuman claws, no, but see how they fade unpainted from black at the beds to gleaming silver at the tips) flutter like moths over your face, your hands, your stomach. Too light a touch, and you arch into it as if drawn, but his face is consumed only with his own curiosity, as if he is entirely innocent of his effect. They’re like brushes, the soft touch of his fingers, like he wants to paint you, delighted and fascinated by you, like you are something alien to him.
He laughs again when you reach for him, your hands for his belt, and smiles his crooked smile. 'Later,' he promises, though you can feel the heat of him through his trousers. Now, you mean to protest, but then his hand is between your thighs, sweeping firm, short strokes, all his many rings warm against your flesh, and all right, you think dazedly. All right. Later.
There is his sweet mouth at your breasts, and his lips are swollen plump and damp such that they look like fruit themselves, and his clever fingers on you, and inside you, and all the while he's watching you with rapt, hungry fascination, You're unmoored, groggy and lost. At your sides, your fingers clench helplessly, hands tearing up great clots of moss until a laugh buzzes against your skin.
'Never said you couldn't touch,' he murmurs, and something high and ragged wrenches itself from your throat as you bury your hands in his hair.
He laughs, exultant, and curls his fingers hard inside you. He plies and plays you with hands and then, and then, his hot mouth on you, soft dark head between your thighs and the nudge of his nose and his wicked tongue curling and lapping and pressing until you can only cling, mind all gone to wood-dark and wet-red want and the heady clench of muscles. And then you are spread apart like stormwater on the moss, and he strokes you through the crashing rush of your orgasm until there's nothing left in you but shallow, heaving breaths and the twitching buzz from your thighs all the way down to your toes, vision blurred through eyelashes that feel stuck together.
'Nice,' he says, with a grin and a little bob of his head, like you'd impressed him somehow. It's absurd, silly and endearing and so human that you have to laugh, curling helplessly into it, giddy and drunken, until every breath is an ache. He watches as you laugh, and seems well pleased.
Together, once you are able, you pull your clothes back on. Your shoes get left behind, but you seem not to need them as he conducts you further on. His hand in yours is faintly sticky now from where it had been buried in your cunt, and your whole body shivers with the cool sensuality of damp earth and fallen leaves under your bare feet.
He leads you-- where? There is no gate, no enchanted mound, no carved and hollow hawthorn through which you pass, and yet, in a moment distracted by his sweet smile you are no longer in the woods. You would call it a sidhe; the walls are earthen, packed and ancient, and great, tentacular roots thick as a man’s chest snake down like supporting pillars, but above, impossibly, is nothing but night sky. The stars seem sharper, realer than you have ever seen them, and the dark between so profound you feel you might pitch into it for a single unsteady step.
Your skin prickles with goosebumps, and Noel dips his head to taste them, teeth pressing against your neck. ‘Not the fairest of our dúns, but it suits me well enough. You’ll like it. People do.’
For the first time since he found you, it is not an effort to look away from him. The walls, as he leads you, give way to colonnades, buttresses; bowers and gardens that drip with obscene verdancy; a cavern of delicate curtains of rock, half melted and fluted columns, wavering in ochres and roses and lit glimmeringly by torches. Above, still, is the impossible, terrifying sky, and everywhere, everywhere there are people. Some pay you no heed, but others stop, leaning against the walls to eye you, a trickle of faerie folk assembling like stones in a stream.
The crowd is clad in a cacophony of hues that make every colour of your memory a wan and evanescent thing; some have hooves or feathers, others faces just slightly too sharp or too flat to quite sit right to the gaze. One, tall and stately, bearded, broad and bare-chested under his rich cloak, looks nearly human but for his eyes; no mortal man ever had eyes like that, the brown of peat-bogs where millennia-old dead things sleep. He has a staff in his hand. Noel sees you looking, and laughs in your ear.
‘The Lord of the Forth,’ he tells you. ‘And the Lady. She leads the troop when they go a-foraying.’
Next to him, the Lady is as tall as the Lord, with a face like an axeblade, and the horns that spring from her thatch of tawny hair are gilt with beaten copper, enamelled in dripping carnelian like a glut of bright blood. A soft stroke of one of the Lord’s long, blunt fingers against her wrist, and she catches you looking. She does not smile, but one eyebrow lifts in a brushstroke of amusement.
Beside them, a pair of girls murmur, heads bent close, bright-and-dark, faces painted and smiles agleam with warm roguery. One of them has claws. You can feel the way your skin would part under them, iron blood and the white fatty tissue beneath, and your cunt clenches. You're still wet from before, and the thick sourness of your arousal is heavy in your nostrils, the scent of human amid bitter bark and earth smells, warm animal hide and the strange perfume of burning oils. You imagine them spreading your legs, the one without claws stroking you, dipping her fingers between your lips to draw them out dripping for the dark girl to taste, sticky and glistening. You imagine tasting them. The girl with the claws has gleaming tufts of silky fur curling from the points of her elbows; you wonder if it would be there on her thighs as well.
They are beautiful; the Lord and Lady are beautiful; they are all beautiful, and you want them all with a desperate, uncomprehending hunger.
You do not think you have said this aloud, but you must have, because Noel laughs again. ‘All of them? Greedy.’
The blood is already hectic in your veins, clamouring at you, and now your hairline tightens in a blush, hot under your eyes. But he only sighs, coos, all appreciation and amusement, nuzzling soft against your face (so gently, like a wild cat marking its scent) inhaling as he runs the point of his long nose along your cheekbone.
‘Spare your blushes, darling,’ he murmurs, and he is grinning again. ‘Greedy is good; I like greedy. You may yet, at that. But first, there is to be a feast tonight. You’ll come?’
It is not a question, it can’t be. You could not refuse even if you wished it. And yet all the eldritch angles of his face have gone soft again, shy and hopeful.
'Of course', you say, or you think you do; of course.
Once more, Noel lifts his hand to your mouth, tracing a finger over your lip. It is a spectre of a touch, so light you nearly cannot feel it, save for the way it catches and tugs, elastic, at the skin of your lip. His eyes are bright with something that makes you shiver, and you are suddenly, desperately thirsty. You wonder if they will have any more of those little fruits at the feast.