My erotic retelling of the tale of True Thomas and the Fairy Queen, elements of which are also found in stories such as Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin.
Read part one of The Rhymer’s Queen here: Thomas’ Leavetaking
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Part Two: A Feeding in the Murky Wood
“My love, my love. Wake now.”
Thomas opened his eyes to find himself languishing on the soft ground of a quiet, green wood, his head held gently in the lap of the Queen. Stroking his hair, smoothing his tense brow, she sang to him: “My love, my love, my poor unseeing one…”
Her voice lullabyed him. The softness of her dress and the scent of her beneath it… such a strong sweet medicine to him. Sighing with the dream of it, he moved to bring his hand to touch her where the silver green silk of her skirt made a valley between her thighs. But… his hands… his wrists… turnings of rough rope wrapped behind his back… bound!
A black anger shot through him, a twisting struggle to free himself. But he struggled only to prove that his ankles were also lashed together, bound in the same chaffing rope. He voiced his protest, he tried to cast the thought of it, the shock of these bindings, from his mind.
Calmly, she stroked his face, smoothed her fingers against the stubble along his jaw. Because she was both Queen and woman, she soothed him, waiting until he calmed enough to look at her. And when he did, there was a sweetness about the betrayal in his eyes, the accusal, the helpless pleading that rendered her whole body more soft but also more ruthlessly alert.
“Ah, my boy,” she smiled and bent to kiss his cheek. “Did you think I would not protect you? Serve your need? This land is dangerous.” Her hand, almost lazily, made its way over the broad expanse of his chest. It lingered as her fingers brushed across his nipples tightening beneath his wife’s careful fine spun linen. Her smile at that moment was a secret one, turned carefully away from him. “It’s best this way.”
Thomas, shocked beyond his capacity to understand his predicament, glanced wildly around him. He lay upon her, bound, in a twilight wood. A sky of gray and a glimmer of silver swirled above. And the trees… the trees were of a green he had never seen in all his living days.
When he looked closer, he saw that those trees were not simply made of a strange color, but that they were… sentient… dare it be true… breathing. Were they trying to speak to him? He was indeed mad, enchanted now, he was sure… in the grip of a wanton dream.
But the sound of her laughter overtook that other barely discernible language he thought he heard — the ancient green sound of the trees.
She saw his wondering and said, with a kind indulgence: “Oh, my love, my poor boy… never mind those sounds, those old moldy mutterings. They are not true. Not true.” She laughed to herself and added, “not yet, true.”
Then, changing her mood like the light, she shifted herself and pushed Thomas’s bound form upright in one graceful movement. She gently helped him arrange himself into a sitting man. And when he was situated such, she kissed him, a chaste little kiss, first on the cheek, then another on his forehead, and then…
Thomas began to fall down and down into his mind, down through long years and miles of longing. And as she slowly lowered her head into his lap and kissed the place where he was already rising to her, he groaned from the very bottom of his breath and thrust himself toward her mouth.
…and when She tastes you, that Delicious Queen, once She tastes you, you will become forever famished…
Her delicate fingers quickly undid the lacings at his waist and brought forth his root. Thomas sighed with the sudden freedom of it, as all men do, but when her hair brushed across the velvet skin of his cock, he whimpered and curled and twisted in on himself. He became like a dog on a leash, crouching and pawing before a punishment.
He wanted her mouth like he had never wanted a woman’s knowing before. And to his happiness, she brought her lips to him there and licked the impossible tautness all around. She tasted him and took her own languid pleasure in doing so.
She laughed at his groaning, his little thrusts, and placed one kiss upon the crown of his shaft. Then just as quick as he had risen to her, she flicked her small tongue out to catch the one perfect pearl he offered there.
When Thomas dared to let his gaze wander down to her, he saw not the golden-haired woman he expected, but a long yellow snake flicking her tongue, coiling into his lap, opening her jaws…
A long frozen moment passed before Thomas realized that the scream he heard came from his own throat.
The trees began to shake then (with laughter?) and she raised her head unhurried, to smile at him with such understanding and compassion that his heart leap from his chest and the short quick burst of tears that sprung from his eyes splashed down hot and shameless between them.
“Lady,” he gasped and sputtered, “I saw… you were… you were not…”
She touched her fingertips to his mouth to close the words there and explained, “You saw nothing… nothing that you did not intend to see.” She looked into his eyes a very long time, to calm him, to keep him there. His soul caught in the timelessness of her eyes as surely as his body was caught in her ropes, Thomas came eventually to realize that her hand was stroking him.
Maddeningly, slowly, she drew forth his seed. Suddenly, with a kind of pain, he cried out and against his own will, overflowed in her hand. He gave himself, poured himself out to her even as he sat enchanted, prisoned by her eyes.
When he had spent himself complete, she calmly took one last slow slide of her fist along the length of his cock and, without taking her eyes from his, brought her hand to her mouth and began to lick at that harvest of creamy seed.
He watched her mouth, the way her lips puckered, how her pointed little cat tongue lapped at her own slick fingers. Before he could imagine what was about to happen, he felt his jaw go slack, his lips part for her. And when she began sliding her fingers into his mouth, his head seemed to tilt back of its own accord.
He heard her sigh and he closed his eyes and suckled at his own seed like a hungry animal. The bitter taste of it entered back into him like a deep, ancient enspelling, a dark widdershin working.
In his mind he saw a picture of his own ending… a circle of a snake enraptured with its own tail. She was feeding it to him, his own death, like a witch mother feeds her dark makings. At the sound of her low groan in his ear, he abandoned himself to it, this obscene feeding. He sucked himself from her hand, a man famished for his own demise.
A long delicious time later, he heard her voice, distantly, sweetly instructing him: “You may not partake of any food in this land that does not come from my own hand.” And with that she began to gently thrust her fingers in and out of his mouth. “Do you understand, my love?”
Thomas could only mutely nod his head and gaze at her through his half-mast eyes. She thrust her fingers deeper, her long nails grazing the threshold of his throat. “Suck,” she hissed, and her face darkened, and her whole body tightened toward him as she rose up on her knees to hover over him. “Suck your own seed, your own spent life.”
Thomas struggled to do as she said, he struggled to suck, but she only forced her fingers deeper. His eyes watered and he struggled to breathe, to accommodate her command, this terrible invasion. Finally, he could take no more. His mind wild now, he panicked. How could she be so strong? He struggled in earnest now not to obey, but to escape the force of her violating hand.
But as he began to buck and arch for breath under her, her other hand slid behind his skull. Long fingers weaving themselves into his hair, she held him still and waited with him for a breathless second before she finally buried her fingers, her entire small hand, deep in his throat.
“Suck yourself!” she snarled. Her nostrils flared and her out breaths came in loud half-moans. She held him there like that, fucking his throat with her small delicate hand until his whole body undulated in its bindings, until his eyes went wild and fluttery, until the trees themselves began to whisper their warnings.
Finally, herself breathless with effort and abandon, she pulled her fingers from his throat and wiped them, slick and hot, on his cheek. Poor Thomas gasped and grabbed for the sudden air. Half crying, half in rapture, he finally found his voice. But try as he might, it would utter no words. Only the hoarse grunting animal sounds of relief came from his throat.
The Queen watched with a feral attention as her Thomas regained his breath, grappled toward what composure he had left to claim. And when the chaos of hurt and anger which stamped his face finally turned to a quieter arrangement of acceptance, she said, her voice hard and demanding: “Thank me, Thomas, for I have fed you. I have fed you the only sustenance that will keep you alive in this land.”
Already taken deep by the drag of the unwilled within him, already long ago enthralled, Thomas obediently whispered his thank you like a gentle dreamy prayer.
Immediately a loud cracking slap cursed his face. “Say it to please me!” she corrected. And a series of humiliating slaps followed. “Say it in the way I want to hear it! Say it true, Thomas!”
Thomas, suddenly unashamedly crying now, wailed out his thank you. Screamed it again and again. In his full voice, he sang his thanks to this Fae Queen, this demon thing, for the awful sustenance she had forced upon him.
As his litany of thank you’s began to fade into the deep of the wood, Thomas felt her calming, felt her pleased. He felt her unbinding his hands, his ankles. And as he began to float away into some other world, he felt her rubbing his wrists, kissing his palms, cooing to him, dark dark words in another language.
Just as he began to fall into sleep,a horror came upon him, a horror he was powerless to fight against: he felt his heart open to her, to love. Love! No… he could not. But she was licking the insides of his wrists, rubbing her soft cheek against the back of his hands, murmuring a song he once heard the river sing.
He could not…
But she moved to stretch out then, and lay beside his sleepy form. She was a long tawny cat purring her pleasure against him, slowly rippling her body against his. She was a woman, warm and full, pressing, wrapping her warmth around him. She was the pungent earth itself, sucking him in.
He could not…
But even through the blur of this tumble into his magical sleep, he felt his root beginning to rise again for her. He would give his life to enter her, to lose himself there… he would do anything…
. . .
Hours or decades or whole oceans later, Thomas awoke with a start, and his mind sickeningly disorganized itself around him. He sat up too quickly, only to see her fully dressed, calmly arranged and watching from her perch on a low branch of the tree that arched above him.
“Come Thomas,” she reached her hand down to him and flicked her fingers once. “Come. Rise up.”
Thomas’s stomach lurched, but at her command, he scrambled to his feet, weak, but unbound now. Was he still dreaming? “But my Lady…” he began, trying to find a way to tell her of his dream (even now it was fading, slipping though his mind of time), to ask her what place this was… to demand of her a reason for this journey…
She reached down to him, to silence him, and he was lifted, impossibly, to his place beside her on the branch. She arranged him into the crook where the branch joined the massive trunk. She quickly straddled him there and opened her gown to him, her hands guiding his face to her breasts.
He nuzzled and nipped at her skin, the softness of her neck, her shoulders, the mind-numbing forgetting he found there at the palace of her heart. He heard her speak quietly: “We are in my country now, Thomas. Here, all is Dream. You must obey me in all things… for your own safety.” And as she almost absently caressed his hair, she added, “and mine as well.”
After a time, she pulled his hungry mouth away from her breasts and bade him to look out beyond their perch. Thomas saw an endless murky wood all around, covered by a flat dark smoke-colored sky. He suspected firelight in the distance, but couldn’t be sure. For all he knew, that dim flickering light was the Sun himself, called down, brought to heel by this dangerous Queen, this woman-thing he now held to like a forbidden mother.
Her voice came suddenly sweet and girlish, “Pay no mind to that light. It is a silly thing.” She fastened the front of her gown, and brought his attention back to their perch in the tree. “Here is where we will stay tonight, my love. Here in this bower I have made.”
And at her words, Thomas found them tucked into an elaborate nest, a silken-pillowed bed. Delicate Spring flowers scattered around them, and the sharp russets of Autumn leaves. Urns of luscious fruit appeared on little carved tables and curtains of gauzy white encircled them.
Thomas looked at the Queen in shock, but she only smiled as a mother smiles when her child first discovers any common magic. “For you, my love. All for you.”
Thomas’s mind struggled to listen for the sounding of its own sanity. He struggled, but only for a moment. Her soft hands were pushing at his chest, urging him down and down into the voluptuous bed. And as his body gave way, her voice, her singing self came to him then and wrapped itself around him like a sweet-drugged smoke. At once, he heard a girl’s voice, a mother’s, the distant rattle of the hag… dancing all around him, given into the wind, pulling at his heart.
The magic soundings of her voice began to rise and rise until they became a conjuring veil bearing the fall of dark. And when she finally closed her body over his, he saw only the sky beyond her slender shoulder — the last gentle lavenders of evening quickly banishing themselves in fear… the horrible night to come beginning its slow descent.
To be continued…
