Chained Soul by Eva Chase
18
Talia
“So, this spring is supposed to heal people?” I ask, peering over the bow of the carriage at the terrain ahead. Only the faintest gleam of water shows in the distance.
“Not specifically from curses,” Sylas says from where he’s standing next to me, guiding the vehicle. “And like much of the natural magic in this world, it isn’t entirely consistent. But many fae have reported severe ailments that were washed away by a soak in the waters. We don’t want to leave any stone unturned.”
Because nothing my mates thought had a better chance of working has accomplished anything so far. Because despite everything they and Madoc have done for me, I woke up this morning feeling weaker than ever before.
The prickling sensation in my chest has expanded and sharpened. It’s not as unbearable as the worst fits, several more of which struck me last night in quick succession, but harsh enough that I hesitate to breathe too deeply, avoiding the jab of discomfort that’ll come. My heartbeat stutters at odd moments for no clear reason. And every now and then a splinter of pain pokes down to my gut.
I feel like I have a jagged-edged creature growing inside me, getting more restless by the hour.
Corwin can tell because he can sense quite a bit of that through our bond. I don’t have the energy to shield him from much. I haven’t told my other mates more than the briefest of details about my worsening condition, though.
They already know the situation is dire. They’re already worried enough. The fact that we’re taking this trip even with war on the horizon proves it.
“Even if it doesn’t help anything, a good soak is always enjoyable for its own sake,” Whitt says in a more typical wry tone, though I can hear the tension creeping through underneath. “I fully intend to take advantage of it.”
“We can’t have Talia in the spring on her own anyway,” August points out. “If a fit came over her while she was bathing, she wouldn’t be able to concentrate on keeping her head out of the water.”
Corwin hums in agreement, and I restrain a grimace. So many considerations I never expected them to have to make. It wasn’t that long ago that I told them to stop hovering over me because being pregnant didn’t make me an invalid. I am an invalid now, thanks to the curse.
The questions that’ve haunted me more and more since the curse’s effect intensified gnaw at me again. What if we can’t cure it? What if I only have a few weeks left? A few days?
I swallow hard. I knew I wouldn’t have a full fae lifespan with my mates, but I thought I’d at least get a full human one. I meant to reach out to Jamie when I didn’t have to worry as much about the tensions of the fae world harming him—but even if I can’t wait that long, how can I appear in his life out of the blue if I’m just going to really die on him right after?
Corwin steps closer and brushes a comforting hand over my head, sending a rush of devotion through our bond at the same time. We’ll find a way. Whatever it takes. It won’t come to that.
He can’t be sure of those words, but I shove the grim thoughts away anyway. They don’t do me any good. They only add to how much awfulness the curse can make me feel.
I will not lose hope like I almost did in the cage in Orion’s throne room. I will not let the Murk king win.
A stretch of dark stone comes into view up ahead. As the carriage slows, passing into that area, I can see it’s not just dark but pure black. But there’s something soft about the blackness that gives the impression of a thick blanket or coat of fur, not the polished chill of the obsidian stones that made up the old castle at what’s now Hearth-by-the-Heart.
Just looking at the darkly opaque surface calms something deep inside me. When Whitt and August help me out of the carriage, I find the ground is lightly spongy under my feet.
“It’s a type of moss,” Whitt tells me, observing my curious reaction. “It grows all over the stone here except right in the spring itself—and this is the only place in the realms it grows. Some have speculated that it’s what gives the water its healing properties, but no one’s really sure. Taking the moss away and trying to make a cure out of it elsewhere has never worked.”
There are so many mysteries in the fae world. I find that somehow reassuring—that it isn’t so odd that we’d have trouble unraveling my curse, that it’s just the way many things work here. And overall, this world hasn’t turned out so terrible, so maybe this situation won’t either.
My mates lead me to the water. At the other end of the springs, a stream spills down a shallow, slick slope where the moss-covered rocks rise a few feet in the air. Then it courses into five separate pools, the one in the middle as large as my bedroom back home and the others less than half that size.
“I just… get in?” I say.
Sylas nods. “To ensure the full effect, if you’re going to get any effect at all, it’s best to soak for an hour or so. But I understand it’s quite pleasant. If you start to feel unwell, just tell us.”
I nod and start to pull off my dress. Whitt chucks his clothes aside with no apparent concern for modesty, which doesn’t surprise me, and the others follow suit more slowly.
Corwin leaves on his boxer-like undergarments and sits at the edge of the pool. “It seems wise for one of us to be observing from outside the water.”
“Hmm,” Whitt says. “Don’t want to get your feathers wet?” He winks and jumps into the gently flowing water.
I slip in more carefully, August sliding into the water next to me and holding my arm to make sure I’m steady. The moss might only reach the edge of the pool, but the rock surface my feet come to rest on has a rippled texture that makes it easy to grip.
The water, warm enough to immediately relax my muscles but not steaming hot, glides against my skin and around my shoulders. A sigh slips out of me, and I lean back against the wall, not really feeling up to doing more than that.
Corwin eases over so I can rest my head against his knee. He glances at Whitt, who’s making a slow circuit of the pool, and I catch a flicker of good humor through our connection. “What’s that you’re doing, then?” he asks. “The dog paddle?”
“Oh!” Whitt clutches his chest as if wounded, his eyes sparkling. “Shots fired across the bow by Lord Bird.”
August laughs, and Sylas shakes his head at all of them, sinking into the water up to his chin. Then he makes a gesture beneath the surface alongside a quick movement of his lips, and a little wave rises up to splash over Whitt’s head.
As a giggle tumbles out of me, the spymaster mock-glowers at his brother. “Now I’m getting ganged up on by two arch-lords. I see how it is. But you forget that it’s never wise to tangle with an expert in strategy.”
He hasn’t even finished speaking when a wave of his own shoots out of the water. Sylas dodges it—right into the path of a sudden larger one that completely douses his dark hair.
Swiping the wet strands away from his face, Sylas chuckles. August takes the moment of his distraction to aim a well-placed swell of water at the back of his brother’s head.
“Now who’s getting ganged up on?” the Seelie arch-lord asks with an amused glint in his dark eye.
The three of them swim, feint, and dodge around the pool, each getting drenched by one of the others in turn. A smile stays on my lips, watching them horse around like, well, wolf pups at play. How long has it been since they could really relax?
August ends up ducking past me, and I can’t resist taking the opportunity to splash water over his ruddy hair with my cupped hands. He swivels with a grin and gives me a quick peck with his slick lips.
And I realize that I can fully enjoy the moment. The jabs of pain inside me have retreated. The prickle is still there, but dulled to its previous intensity. I don’t know if that means much of anything, but it’s enough of a relief that my smile widens.
I nudge myself away from the side of the pool. “I want to float,” I announce.
“And what the mite wants, she’ll have,” Whitt says.
He catches my shoulder, making sure I’m steady in the water as I stretch out on the surface. Rivulets stream over the mounds of my breasts, and a flicker of desire reaches me from Corwin watching, but he reins it in.
The water holds me up in its warm embrace. I drift along, each of my Seelie mates guiding my path in turn with a tender touch to my head, my side, my hip. The sky stretches out above me, perfectly blue.
In that moment, I want to float like this forever, as if the world itself is holding me up, as if nothing could drag me down beneath the surface.
After a while I feel the urge to move again. I paddle around a bit and then come to a stop by the edge again. “I am feeling better,” I tell my mates.
“That’s wonderful.” August swims over and tugs me into an embrace.
I nestle against him, but with the pain retreating, the feel of his naked skin against mine sets off a spark of my own desire. I tip my head, seeking a longer kiss.
August obliges with a pleased growl low in his throat.
A headier heat floods me with the meeting of our lips. My limbs slide against his, and he cups my breast beneath the water. The slow rotation of his thumb over the peak has me whimpering against him in an instant.
I can feel all my other mates’ gazes on us, but they don’t rush to join in. Corwin gives off a sense of caution, wanting to be sure I don’t end up overwhelmed. They’re going to let me take the lead.
I want this so much while I can enjoy it. I kiss August harder, arching into his touch. Another growl reverberates through his chest.
He holds me against the wall, careful not to press too tightly, and tucks his knee between my legs. The movement of it against my sex makes me gasp into his mouth. His tongue teases over mine, and he shifts the attentions of his hand to my other breast.
For a while, I just rock there, floating on pleasure as much as the buoyancy of the water, each graze of his thigh against me taking me farther from the worries of the present. Just as I’m starting to tremble with the sensations spiking toward my release, August pulls back.
“I can do better than this,” he murmurs.
Hoisting me up, he sets me on the edge of the pool with my legs still splayed. Then he presses his face where his thigh was before, lapping his tongue over my opening and flicking it across the sensitive nub above.
Bliss ricochets through my body. I lean back on my hands with a cry, unable to stop myself from swaying my hips toward him, urging him on.
A dripping form crouches beside me, and Whitt’s voice reaches my ear with a tickle of heated breath. “Can I help take you to even greater heights, mighty one?”
I manage a nod, punctuating it with a whimper as August eases a finger inside me. He pulses it inside me in time with the rhythmic swipes of his tongue, and Whitt trails his fingers over my damp skin. The spymaster strokes down my spine and across my belly, then up to circle my breasts.
My head tips farther back, and Whitt leans in to support it. His fingers swirl closer and closer to my pebbled nipples as August suckles me harder. Then, just as the final surge of pleasure crashes over me, Whitt squeezes the tips of my breasts.
The extra jolt of delight sends me careening even higher. I moan, clutching his arm, my other hand grasping at August’s hair.
As I come down from the high, Sylas gets out of the pool next to us. Watching the water stream over his massive, muscular form sends a renewed flare of hunger through me.
I reach for him, and he smiles, scooping me up as if I weigh nothing at all. It’s like floating in the pool, this sense of being totally supported above the ground… except in Sylas’s arms, I can also do this.
I twist against him, tucking my hand behind his neck to tangle my fingers in his hair and tugging his mouth to mine. With a groan, he claims my lips. My hip brushes the hard length of his shaft, already fully erect, and a pang forms between my legs—a longing to be filled.
But I can still feel Corwin watching all this, restraining himself. The passion inside me needs all my mates with me for it to be fully satisfied.
I beckon the Unseelie arch-lord through our bond, and he rises. “Perhaps our mate needs to see just how well we can support her,” he says as he walks over to us, with an unexpectedly husky note in his voice that makes me twice as eager as before.
The raven shifter grips my thighs, and Sylas loosens his hold so that Corwin can adjust me against him, spreading my legs. He teases his fingers over my sex before positioning me over Sylas’s rigid length. A strained sound of impatience escapes me, but he has to know this isn’t all I need from him.
I want you in me too. If—if you want too… He’s never taken that role before.
The only response I need is the rush of desire that careens into me through our connection. Corwin lowers his head to nip my shoulder as I sink down onto Sylas. He eases one hand away for just long enough to wrench down his boxers. Then he brushes his fingers over my other entrance with a soft murmuring that turns his touch silky with conjured slickness.
Sylas nuzzles my cheek and my neck, dappling my jaw and throat with tiny kisses and grazes of his fangs. His hardness seems to swell even more inside me, filling me with a giddy burn. Then Corwin is sliding into me too, inch by inch, until I’m suspended between the two of them, held up by the potent mix of love and lust we’ve conjured together.
They move together as if they’ve worked in unison their whole lives, as if no border or animosity has ever divided them. Corwin’s enjoyment of our closeness and the carnal delight brought by the squeeze of my muscles around him flows into me in a continuing current. All I can do is ride the growing surge, propelled higher and higher between them, weightless amid the torrent of pleasure.
Heat sparks all through my torso and sizzles through my veins. Oh, my love, Corwin says silently, his breath ragged against my spine. Oh, my soul. Sylas steals another kiss, his groan carrying into it, and Corwin bites down on my shoulder.
I come so hard it’s as if I’m literally flying, soaring up into that endless blue of the sky. Quivers radiate through every nerve in my body.
The searing bliss of Corwin’s release flings me even higher. I lose my breath, shuddering and then gripping Sylas even tighter as I feel him tense and jerk with his own peak.
How could anything be wrong when we can feel this way together?
Exhaustion rolls back over me as the two arch-lords lower me to the ground. I reach for Whitt and August to join me too, and my four mates sit in a ring around me, supporting me on the ground just as two of them did in the air just minutes ago.
My breath evens out, my muscles going slack. I wish I could go to sleep right here, and maybe not wake up until the nightmares of my waking hours are over.
But those horrors aren’t going to leave of their own accord. After a short rest, I force myself to stir. “We should get back. Whatever the spring can do for me, it’s already done, right?”
Sylas kisses my temple and meets my gaze with his mismatched eyes. “We can spare more time if you want to relax here a little longer.”
Can they really spare it, though? I won’t be able to relax if I start worrying that I’m keeping them from everything else they need to be focused on for too long.
I ease to my feet. “I can relax in the carriage. I do feel a lot better. Maybe this was what I needed all along.”
The hope in those words stays with me for the first several minutes after we set off toward the Heart. I snuggle in between Whitt and August on a cushion they’ve set on the carriage floor and drift into a doze.
I’m half asleep when the next attack of the curse hits me, cutting through me so deeply and sharply a scream bursts from my lips.
