…em, Axe Me No Questions, And…
Alli tightened her grip and gave my cock a tug, pulling out straight. I felt the thin edge of a cold blade underneath it. Silver, probably, since it wasn’t tingling on my skin.
I became very, very still. She had the better hand, so to speak, but games weren’t won on that alone.
“I wouldn’t have expected this from you, Alli,” I said.
“Clearly,” she replied. “But you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Yeah. I’m not surprised so much as disappointed,” I said. “I didn’t think you were the lackey type.”
“I’m nobody’s lackey, boything,” she said, squeezing painfully. At least she hadn’t picked the other hand to punctuate with. “But since I was going to cut your penis off anyway, there’s no point in not getting Ursula what she wants at the same time. To do otherwise would be like, what’s the expression? Cutting off my nose to spite my face.”
“I don’t think it would be that much like it,” I said.
“Oh, but look on the bright side,” she said.
“There’s a bright side?”
“You, for whatever reason, don’t approve of me ‘raping’—as you put it—human men,” she said. “If I give her your balls, Ursula has enough influence to keep me in elven men until my middling period is done.”
“Do all elves turn insane on their eighteenth birthday?” I asked.
“We’re pretty much abandoned,” she said. “We aren’t allowed in children’s games, or adult life, so we have to come up with ways to keep ourselves entertained. Petros and Nikolaos delight in their clumsy intrigues. Ursula enjoys spectacle. For myself, I’m a huntress at heart.” She giggled and pressed the knife blade in harder. “You should see my trophy room.”
“I know we don’t know each other that well, but I think I’ve managed to pin down why you don’t get laid more often,” I said.
“Gallows humor,” she said. “Very elven of you.”
“That’s not my neck you’re putting the squeeze on,” I said. “But I do have a little elf in me. Sometimes a bit more. You remember my boyfriend, the star assassin on the skirmish team?”
“I remember your master, the great crashing boar, bore, and boor that he is,” Alli said. “Let’s just say we have a bit of a rivalry, even though he refuses to take me seriously. I think de-antlering his stag is a good way of showing him that I mean business.”
So that was it. This was the middling elf equivalent of pulling someone’s pigtails or putting a tack on their chair to get their attention. Of course Alli wasn’t really interested in a mostly human guy.
She wanted what anybody does: what she couldn’t have. In her case, it was the elven guys she saw parading themselves around shirtless or worse. And Iason wasn’t the prettiest of the lot, but he was the buffest, and he was the one that no one could have.
Especially her.
“It doesn’t matter whose dick you have in your collection, Alli, you’ll always need one more before Iason will take you seriously,” I said.
I was no archer, but I’d scored a hit all the same. She grunted in rage, wrenching my cock to the side. The hand holding the knife slipped away a bit. I smashed my head backwards into her face and then rolled over forwards onto my stomach. Alli had already recovered from the headbutt and gotten to her feet in the time it took me to push myself up off the ground. Her kick to my head knocked me sideways to the ground.
She no longer had a knife at my crotch, though. That was something.
“Don’t be such a child,” she said as I picked myself back up and got to my feet. “There are plentiful healers on the other side of those trees. You can get regenerated and will have lost nothing, except a bit of dignity which doesn’t even belong to you.”
“Who, then?” I said.
“The man whose bracelet is on your wrist, of course,” she said. She spat. “The fact that you have to ask just shows how pitifully he’s discharged the sacred obligations it carries. I’ll make you a deal. Come to me meekly with your manhood in your hands and I’ll let Iason keep the bracelet, even though he doesn’t deserve it. Fight me and I’ll take it.”
“I guess your cousin didn’t tell you they don’t come off,” I said.
“Everything comes off,” she said, holding up her gleaming silver hunting knife.
So it had come to this: fighting a beautiful elven woman, me buck naked and her with nothing but a strap-on. I was stronger than she was, and she’d underestimate me, but that wasn’t going to be enough. The rolling and kicking and rolling had taken me further from the one thing that might have gotten me out with dignity intact: the belt with my axe hanging on it. Alli would have had decades of experience on me, and full elven reflexes, but an honest axe was a bona fide artifact. It might be enough to turn the tide, with everything else.
“I’ll take my chances,” I said. “Hands grow back, too.”
“The precious bracelet won’t.”
“Precious to you,” I said. “I’ve got more valuable—”
I let the sentence trail off, while my gaze flicked towards my belt. Can’t say how subtle I was, under stress. So long as Alli was thinking of me as a dumb hairy human, a lot of subtlety wasn’t needed.
“Oh, how pretty,” Alli said, looking at it. “Is that elven?”
“Might be. Don’t know,” I lied. If she was going to get all bent out of shape over people having things they didn’t deserve, might as well let her think it was.
“Of course you don’t,” she said, keeping one eye on me while she stepped back and around to look down at the axe. “Your eyes are too dull. What are you doing with something like this?”
“Just something I play around with,” I said. “I mean, it’s good enough for sparring in class, right?”
That got her mad enough to choke.
“Good enough for—good—humans!” she cried, white skin turning pink. “Perhaps I’ll take more than one weapon from you today.”
She kept her eyes on me as she slowly and gracefully knelt down, hand reaching for the belt. She cocked her arm for throwing, the knife trained on me. She was wary, just not of the right thing.
This wasn’t a diversion.
It was a trap.
“I can tell you one thing about it,” I said as her fingers encircled the haft.
“What?” she asked.
“It doesn’t like thieves,” I said as she went to close her hand. The axe spun around in place, the head where the handle had been—where her fingers had been. Emphasis on “had“. Ouch. The belt attached to the axe whipped around and caught her legs. She went down on her ass, hard. Her lack of elven gracefulness could probably be attributed to shock and pain. She’d thrown her dagger aside, out of surprise or to grab her wounded hand.
“It’s not elven,” I said as the axe flew towards my waiting hand. “It’s sidhe-made. If you weren’t too busy looking down at humans, you might have remembered that you guys copied a lot of your schticks from the real fair folk.”
“You think I need both hands to beat you?” Alli said.
“I think it would help, yeah,” I said. “If I were an elf, I’d do something fancy like cut off your other one in retort. I’m not, and I don’t think I could pull that off. So, you either start elven-striding in the direction of Treehome, or I’m going to put the head of my axe in your stomach. Got that?”
She nodded and reached for her tunic with her bloody hand. Her clothes were on the ground between us. Much closer to her than to me, but I didn’t like her getting any nearer than she was.
Don’t humiliate her, Jamie. It was my own thought, my own voice. I answered it. Too late. She’d had a grudge against me by proxy to begin with. She wasn’t going to forgive me for being merciful now.
“Leave those,” I said. It wasn’t just my dick that wanted to see her backside now. An elven huntress in the woods really didn’t need both hands to be dangerous. The longer she stayed, the more likely she’d recover enough to try something.
It was too late already. She made like she was going to pick up her tunic and then rolled past it and came up on her feet in a dead run towards me.
I threw the axe. What happened after that was her fault.
She could have moved out of the way easily. Instead she decided to be fancy.
She decided to catch it.
The honest axe that turned its blade on thieves.
Her scream as it tore through one of her fingers and into her hand was the sickest, most soul-wrenching thing I’d ever heard.
Her fault. I pushed my revulsion down. I was a big burly barbarian beast. That’s what humans were.
“How many hands do you need to beat me?” I asked when the axe flew back to my hand. She looked at her ruined mitts and then looked at me.
For one wild moment, I thought she was going to charge me anyway.
Finally, she turned and was off through the woods. Gone in the blink of an eye. I stood, axe at the ready, turning around, pricking up my ears for any sign that she was coming back.
When I was sure she was gone, I cleaned off my axe blade on her tunic and then pinned it and her breeches to a tree with her knife. I hung the pack off the handle. I wasn’t going to take trophies.
That done, I threw up and got dressed. I took a look around the little clearing to make sure I had my bearings before I headed back through the trees. That was when I noticed the little woodcutter standing at the edge of the clearing, the same faerie man I’d encountered before.
Either that, or his twin brother.
“Uh, hi,” I said, trying not to sound brusque.
“Hello again,” he said. Same one, then.
“How long have you been watching?” I asked.
“Only since the beginning,” he said. “You’re a bit of an idiot, aren’t you?”
“Only when sex is involved,” I said.
“You don’t seem to get up to much that doesn’t involve sex,” he said. He laughed. “You might consider taking up a hobby.”
“I like cards,” I said. “Darts. Table games.”
“You’re a gambler,” he said, stroking his tangled beard.
“Yeah.”
“Well, that much is obvious to anyone,” he said.
“Look, can I help you with something?” I said. I tried to be patient, but I was also trying not to shake or throw up again.
“It’s possible,” he said. “Probable, even. You did before.”
“I should be getting out of the woods,” I said.
“That’s even more probable,” he said. He pointed at the hunting knife I’d stuck into the tree. “You might want to take that with you.”
“I might but I don’t,” I said. “I don’t want to escalate this any further than I have already.”
“Fine, don’t listen to me,” the little man said, throwing up his hands. “Not that anybody ever does, mind you.”
“Is there something I’m going to need it for?” I asked, but he turned and started walking away. I’d already fulfilled my daily requirement of stupidity. Maybe it was dumb to disregard his advice, but it would be even dumber to follow one of the sidhe—even a friendly one—deeper into the woods. Iason had chewed my head off enough about taking unnecessary risks where the wee folk were concerned already.
I looked at the knife, but decided it wasn’t worth it. You might want to take that with you, he’d said. Not “you should”, but “you might”. I’d just seen a vivid illustration of what the little people thought about thieves. This could be a test to make sure I really was worthy of the axe. Tricking Alli into trying to steal it was stretching a point, after all.
It was longer going back than it had been coming in, but the forest hadn’t shifted around me and a hundred years hadn’t passed. Still it felt like I’d stepped into another world, walking away from a bout of rough sex and a bloody confrontation and into the bright sunlight and the crowds and the fucking dragons.
I wouldn’t tell any of the girls what had happened, I decided. Violet might pick up on some of it, and I would tell Marlot eventually, but I wanted to talk to Iason about it first. The elves really were a world apart from humanity. He would have the perspective to understand it without a lot of shock and horror.
Not that it wasn’t shocking and horrible. I just didn’t think I could deal with that from my friends. I had plenty of it on my own. The sex had been consensual, if only by a hair, but I felt violated by what Alli had thrust on me.
There were other things I needed to talk to Iason about, too. For one thing, it would be a long time before I willingly set foot—or hoof—in Treehome again.
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