Free The Forest of Forever by Thomas Burnett Swann Page A

whip. He felt a touch of soreness in his flanks but otherwise Zoe’s remedy and a restful sleep had worked a miracle. He ought to prove adequate, perhaps competent, possibly proficient. True, he had promised to wait for Kora at least a year. But it was for her sake that he was making his sacrifice. Surely she would understand, approve and appreciate.
    Saffron sat beside him and, holding both of his horns, stared into his eyes. Then, with a hand no larger than a maple leaf, she rumpled his mane.
    “Never trim it, my boy. It becomes you too well. And such large, lovely ears! They’re translucent in this light. Like mother-of-pearl.” For Kora’s sake no sacrifice was too great. If necessary, he decided, he could endure further sacrifices.
    First she was lying beside him. Then she was in his arms. Then her little tongue was flickering over his lips and her hands were teasing the hair on his chest into curls. There was something, after all, to be said for a skinny woman.
    She had invited; now it was time to accept the invitation. When a lady opens the door and offers the hospitality of a warm hearth, does a man stand shivering in the snow? He entered the house with alacrity and, being a gracious guest, not without gifts…
    Smiling, she took the gifts and, still smiling, she bit his ear. He slapped a hand to the bite and felt the dampness of blood. A love nip, he supposed. But why had her teeth met with quite such determined force?
    She kicked him. A love kick? Hardly. He must have angered her. Perhaps she felt that he had treated her frail little body like that of a buxom Dryad. Perhaps, accustomed to her drones and in spite of what she said about them, she had wanted mincing caresses instead of stalwart embraces. His experience with women did not extend to Bee queens.
    “Saffron,” he started to apologize. “I’m used to the Dryads. If you’ll just tell me how—”
    She spat in his face. She became a hybrid of hybrids—griffin, hydra, chimera—and her body entwined him like a python, her arms constricted like tentacles, her thighs resembled a snapping sea turtle. Together they tumbled off the couch and momentarily his big frame was airborne as Saffron fluttered her wings with a frenzy of passion or anger or whatever possessed her.
    That’s it, he thought. She wants a nuptial flight! But I’m just not equipped to satisfy her.
    That wasn’t it, either. With her fourth kick he lost his patience. Eunostos had known passionate women in the four years since he had come of age, but Saffron’s passion appeared to be born of fury instead of ardor: a venomous, vitriolic contempt for drones, Minotaurs, Men—males in general. He could not fathom her subtleties; he did not philosophize about the female who demands ascendancy, the goddess who requires the sacrifice of the god, the spider who devours her mate.
    He simply fought her with his impaired but still prodigious strength. He was not a soft-bellied drone and he was not to be used or misused. She had bitten his ear; he bit her arm with teeth which a beaver might have envied. She kicked; he butted with horns whose heaviness gave them the force of small battering rams. She squeezed; he caught her neck between his hands and she fluttered like a chicken doomed to the pot.
    In the end, the captive guest captured the house by storm.
    Indignant but not in the least gutted, panting but not winded, a few scratches and bruises added to those sustained from the Panisci, he flung her onto the floor and sat on the couch to glower down at her frazzled body.
    “And you call that lovemaking? What do you do when you hate a fellow?”
    Her wings were frayed. Her tiger-striped tunic lay in shreds at her feet; the impeccable queen of the Thriae looked like a wench after a street brawl.
    She stared at him with a stupefaction which rapidly became rage. “You weren’t fair. You resisted me!”
    “What was I supposed to do? Lie down and be bitten into chunks?”
    “I’m a queen, you