Truly, truly, I was only trying to shock him into recognition, but I drew his hand down inside my gown, and then suddenly I was reeling with the insanity and sheer delight of his taut, long fingers at once disdaining and tempted by my failing body. He thought I was Teleri — his sure hand held by me reluctantly a moment against my breast, and still he thought I was young. I shivered with bottled laughter, delighted by this game.
“Get out of my bed,” he said again, his voice harder this time, more irritated and less patient.
How reluctant are you, I wondered, and drew his hand lower down my body.
God, his hands!
I was at once besotted with the flattery in their blindness, and blind myself with their cool, burning touch.
Again he hissed at me to leave, and added, “You are lovely, you are arousing, you are all you wish to be. But Teleri, I’m tired, I’m short of temper, and you are not the lover I would choose—”
I shook with laughter. I could scarcely contain myself, but I knew that if he heard my voice the game would be over. In the dark, groping, I bent to kiss him somewhere along his naked ribcage.
“Out!” he hissed. I could not bear that I did not know exactly how excited he was, and reached down to feel the taut rod between his legs. Aroused, indeed.
At this crude invasion of his privates he lost all patience with me, and threw me out of his bed.
No one who knew me would have dared such a thing.
I sat for a moment shaken and trembling in an undignified heap on the floor; then hooked vicious fingernails into his back, which he had turned on me in an exaggerated gesture of dismissal, and tore open his shoulder.
His hand locked around my wrist in a grip of iron, hard and fast. He dragged me up from the floor and back into the bed, and pinned me so between hard knees. His face close to my ear, with one hand hitching up my robes, he hissed in dreadful quiet, “Do you want me so much? Do you really think you want me so much? Do you think I love kindly?” And then he pinned me further with an elbow cruelly pressed against my throat, and as I gasped for breath, he in all fury plunged his lean, hard body into mine.
I screamed silently, strangled by his elbow, unable to warn him of the fearful thing he was doing.
“You’re not Teleri!” he gasped hollowly, enjoying none of this, concentrating on his retributive abuse of me. “Who are you?”
I could scarcely breathe, so how could I speak? I had come to give my son permission to leave me and ended in being raped by him — the thought made me wheeze with choking and hysterical laughter. Suddenly, as suddenly as the livid anger had taken him, he stopped his cold, punishing ploughing of me and let go of my throat. He whispered again, “Who are you?”
“You know who I am,” I gasped.
“Aiee!”
He made a choking noise something like a muffled scream, and struggled frantically to untangle our cleaving bodies.
“Beast,” I flung at him, accusing and wounded as a green girl.
“I!” he cried. “I! You tear my back to ribbons, and call me a beast! Have you any idea what pain—”
“Have you?” I snapped.
That silenced him for a moment, reminding him of his uncharacteristic and mindless brutality. He bent over me still, awkwardly, trying not to touch me, trembling.
“You have not said who you are,” he whispered. “Tell me yourself.”
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.