Free A Strange and Ancient Name by Josepha Sherman

weightless. It was surely over.
    Wasn’t it?

V
    NIGHTWALKER

    A sleek Faerie woman curled up on either side of him, Ereledan, smoothly golden in candlelight, hair a bright, tangled flame, lay awake and brooding.
    He had waited so long, more patiently than anyone who thought they knew him would ever have believed. He had let the tedious years go by without a hint of regal ambition, hiding behind the mask of a shallow, sensation-hungry fool, waiting only for the passing of time to safely dull the memory of late, deposed Grandfather. Perilous Grandfather.
    But he had waited long enough! Serein had been dead for nearly a full moon-cycle, and yet here Ereledan lay, no closer to his goal since before the night of that disastrous duel with the half-blood prince and the equally disastrous meeting with his kin, when he had rambled and stammered like a mindless fool . . . What if something like that incredible loss of control happened again? It could destroy him . . .
    “Nonsense,” Ereledan muttered. The first had been . . . too much wine. The second, too much tension. He was thoroughly himself again, as both these lovely creatures could attest. And his difficulties these days had nothing to do with wine or mental quirks. No one would meet with him, no one listen to him—Dammit, he wasn’t even sure anyone was receiving his messages. Ever since that message-bird had returned to him with great, bleeding gaps in its side, as though some larger, more deadly creature had deliberately driven it back, Ereledan had suspected the truth: “Charailis.”
    She was next in line for the crown, the cold-blooded creature. And so, while she plotted whatever lurked in that devious mind of hers, she was making sure he stayed neatly in his place, no threat to her, nicely submissive—
    “Ha!”
    It was nearly a roar. The women stirred sleepily. One of them giggled and reached out a caressing hand. At first, Ereledan almost knocked it away, angry at her singlemindedness. But wasn’t that total devotion to her art exactly why he’d taken her and her sister to his bed? What he wanted in all his women? (And yet, once there had been another . . . a woman unlike any he had ever known, sweet and lovely though fully human. Blanche, gentle, lonely Blanche . . . She had loved him. But, unlike Prince Laherin and his own human love, he hadn’t appreciated the gift offered him. Oh no, he’d been a fool, he’d lightly used and abandoned her. And only then, far too late, realized he’d forever lost that one true love.)
    No. He wouldn’t think of the past. Ereledan forced himself to relax, letting the woman’s soft hand rove where it would, toying just for a moment with the fantasy of it being Charailis in his bed instead, her long, elegant body cool against his own, her hand, with its silvery nails, exploring his body. Powers, no! She’d probably gut him like a fish with those claws!
    He shivered as the hand ran ticklingly down his chest, down his stomach, down . . . And after a bit Ereledan grinned, mentally murmuring the words of a restorative spell, and pulled the giggling woman to him. But just before he let his mind surrender with his body, the Lord of Llyrh told Charailis silently: Try to block my plans, will you? We’ll see how you like it!

    ###

    In her white and silver bedroom, lovely Charailis lay alone, fuming. Serein dead for a moon-cycle now, and she no closer to Hauberin than she had been on that night of his Second Triad celebration.
    “Ereledan.”
    When none of her little messenger-sprites had reached the palace, returning instead with their small forms trembling with fatigue, whispering words of blinding fogs and swift, perilous winds, she had suspected. When her prized matched team of white, winged steeds had literally grounded themselves, suffering broken flight feathers in a fight—they, who never fought—she knew who must have goaded them on.
    “Ereledan,” she repeated softly.
    Who else could it be? Who else was her chief