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When we left the gardens, his opportunity would be gone.
If I’d known the others were safe, then I wouldn’t even have tried to argue with the look in his eyes. But I wasn’t sure they were. I wasn’t sure any of us were. I didn’t like not knowing what was happening.
He smoothed his hands along the inside of my thighs, gentle, caressing, but that gentle movement spread my legs with him kneeling between them.
“What’s happening, Mistral?”
“Are you afraid?” he asked, but he wasn’t looking at my face when he said it.
“Yes,” I said, and my voice was soft in the growing wind.
“Good,” he said.
Abeloec answered me, “I am the intoxicating cup like Medb for the kings of old. You have drunk deep.” I turned my head back to look at him where he knelt behind me.
I knew that medb had been a word for “mead,” a sovereign goddess whom nine kings of Ireland had had to mate with before she would let them rule. But most of that was only stories; no one would speak of her among the sidhe, as if she were a real goddess, a real person. I had asked, and been told only that she was the cup that intoxicates. Which had been another way of saying that she was mead. I’d been left to believe she’d never been real.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
Abeloec smoothed his hand along my face. “I give the power of sovereignty to the queen, as Medb gave power to the kings. I was forgotten, because the world turned to chauvinism and there were no more votes for queens. I was just Accasbel. Denied my purpose. Some human literature says I am an ancient deity of wine and beer. I founded the first pub in Ireland, and was a follower of Partholon. That is all I am now to history.” He leaned in close to my face, and I lay back against the ground with his hands on either side of my face. “Until today. I have new duties.”
Just then, Mistral’s fingers found my opening, and I would have turned to look at him, but Abeloec’s hands tightened on my face, kept me looking at him while Mistral began to explore me with his hand. Abeloec whispered, above my face, “There was a time when without me, or Medb, no one ruled in Ireland, or faerie, or anywhere in the isles. The sithen brought us here for a reason. It brought everyone here for a reason, including Mistral.”
Dried leaves rushed across my body like brittle fingers tapping my stomach and breasts. “Let us have our reason back, Meredith,” Abeloec said.
It wasn’t a finger touching me down there anymore, though Mistral hadn’t entered me.
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