The Fae King Can't Lie, and He Says He Wants Me novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: What the Court Can Smell

Casimir announces the Witness smells of the King, Nia makes the King say everything he smells on her, and in the archive he kneels and tells her how good she is until an unsigned note slides under her door.

Four hundred heads turned toward my stool.

I put down my pen.

"Say that again, Master of the Hounds," I said. "All of it."

Casimir smiled.

"The Witness smells of the King. I said nothing else."

"You said it to be heard as something else."

"I cannot say what is false."

"Then say what's true, in full."

"Otherwise it's a true sentence built to mislead, and I'm a human, and you've just done it to me in front of the court."

The silence had a shape now, and everyone leaned into it.

I stood up and folded my arms.

"I smell of the King because he took my hand for my oath yesterday, in front of every one of you."

"You smell of wet dog and a dry well, my lord."

Somebody in the back choked and turned it into a cough.

Emrys didn't move, but I saw his mouth twitch once at the corner.

"Is there anything else you'd like me to say aloud?" I asked.

Casimir's smile had gone thin.

"Not at this time."

"Then the court is at your service, my lord, and I'm taking notes."

I sat back down with my pulse going.

He had scored a hit, and we both knew it.

Everyone in this room could smell what had happened to me last night.

An hour later I was in the archive, which was the only place Hob would tell me nobody went.

It was a long vault under the roots, with shelves of rolled treaties.

A skylight of green glass showed the sun as a coin.

I had my back against a case and my forehead on my fist.

"I can't be here," I told the empty room.

"I can't sit beside him for a year while every lord in the Hills reads my skin."

"They read it as an answer."

I spun around.

Emrys stood in the arch, with his coat over his arm.

"I told Hob not to send anyone," he said. "Then I came myself. I'm sorry."

"Don't apologize for being right." I pressed my palms to my eyes. "I've never been the thing that people smell on someone else."

"What do you mean?"

"In Cardiff, the man I lived with told me I was a lot."

"Too loud, too much, too big for the rooms he wanted me in."

"He was a fool."

"He was an ordinary man. That's the problem."

He crossed the floor and stopped in front of me.

"I'll say what I smell on you, if you'll let me."

"You smell it too?"

"Yes. Tea, ink, cold air, and yourself." His voice dropped. "You're the best thing I've ever had in this room."

I laughed, a wet shaky laugh.

"Stop it. You'll make me believe you."

"I'm trying to."

I took the yellow raincoat off my shoulders and dropped it on the stone floor between the shelves.

"On your knees," I said.

His eyes went dark, and he went down at once, on the coat, in front of me.

I leaned back against the case and unbuttoned my jeans with hands that weren't quite steady.

"I want your mouth," I said. "I want it right now."

"Yes."

He drew my jeans down my thighs, slowly, and pressed his mouth to the inside of my knee.

I shivered.

"Higher."

He kissed up my thigh, hot and slow, and then his breath touched me through my underwear, and I made a sound.

"These too," I said.

He pulled them off and put my leg over his shoulder.

He looked up the whole length of me with his green-gold eyes, and said, low:

"I've been thinking about this since the hall."

He put his mouth on me.

His tongue was flat and warm and unhurried, and it went through me.

I grabbed the shelf behind me with one hand and his hair with the other.

"Oh, fuck," I said. "Emrys."

He hummed, and I felt it everywhere.

He licked me slowly, from my entrance to my clit, and circled it with the tip of his tongue until my knees shook.

"Slower."

He slowed.

"Harder."

He pressed his tongue flat against me and drew it up, and the whole archive swam.

His hands gripped my hips and held me against the case.

He ate me.

"You taste like heaven," he said into my skin. "I mean it. Nothing in the Hills tastes like you."

"Don't talk. Keep doing that."

"Yes, Witness."

I laughed and then I couldn't, because he sucked my clit into his mouth and I forgot how.

I came with his name in my throat and my fingers knotted in his hair, my thigh shaking against his shoulder.

He didn't stop.

He licked me through it, softly, until I whimpered, and then he rested his forehead against my hip and breathed.

"That's twice," I said, when I could talk.

"I'm counting too."

He kissed my belly, and I slid down the case to sit on my raincoat next to him.

I put my head on his shoulder.

"Let them smell it," he said into my hair. "It's true. I'm not ashamed of one second of it."

"I am a little."

"Of what?"

"Of how much I like being told I'm good."

He turned my face up and kissed me, and I tasted myself on his mouth.

"You are good," he said.

"You are enormously good. I don't repeat compliments, so you'll have to keep earning the next one."

"That's the cruellest thing anyone has ever said to me."

"I know."

When I got back to my chamber, an hour before supper, a square of paper lay on the floor just inside the door.

It was folded small and sealed with no wax, and it was written in a hand I didn't know.

"Ask him how old he is."

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