A Web of Stars by Idrils Scribe

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Chapter 8

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When the sounds of pursuit died down at last — the chitinous clicking of limbs and those horrid spidery voices would long haunt Arwen’s dreams — Legolas reined in his lathered horse. They had ridden hard and far in a northerly direction, out from under from the south’s blackened leaves and strangled glades. 

Here, the forest’s song lay green and open about them. 

Legolas swayed in his saddle. He was favouring his arm, where the spider’s bite stood red and swollen against his pale skin, but he straightened his back, undaunted. 

“Come, Arwen. This way.” He pointed to what seemed an impassable knot of brambles strangling a venerable oak. 

Arwen hesitated to force her poor, exhausted horse into that thorny tangle, but to her astonishment the stallion went eagerly. Legolas sang a Silvan song, his voice hoarse and soft, and the brambles opened before them. 

The instant Legolas fell silent, the vines knitted tight once more. They stood inside an open space beneath the oak’s mighty crown, an enclosed bower of green. This must be a remote Silvan hunting camp, judging by the neat stack of wood resting beside a well-used firepit. 

Legolas stumbled, wobbled, then plopped down on the deep leaf-litter beside the fireplace, his eyes glazed with pain. His face was the palest Arwen had ever seen, moon-white and sharp in the clearing’s half-light, and suddenly she wished nothing more than to gather him up into her arms and ease his suffering. She knelt beside him and began to tug at his sleeve, rolling it away to expose the spider bite. When she reached her mind to his, the touch chaste and proper as a healer’s, even that clinical illusion of intimacy poured warmth down her limbs. 

The bite may have been glancing, but spider venom was impressively caustic. The wound was a swathe of blistered and sloughing skin all the way up his arm. A sharp, sour odour stung her nose, like the muriatic acid jewelsmiths used for etching. Legolas was silent, his eyes shut tightly, but when she peeled back his sleeve his breath came in great, groaning gulps.

“Your tunic is soaked with venom. Take it off.” Arwen had never been much of an actress, to the despair of her rhetoric teachers, but now she did capture Elrond’s bedside manner of detached authority. Legolas obeyed her without question. He looked even younger and more lost in his undershirt. 

She had no alkaline solution to rinse the wound, but had to make do with water. Then she  Sang as she debrided it as best she could with the meagre contents of their packs. She had honey for salve, but little more than a torn-up undershirt to bandage the arm, and could only hope that the linen would not stick to the wound. Legolas sat still and straight as she worked.

“There. That should keep until we get you home.” Arwen picked up Legolas’ discarded tunic from where it lay crumpled amidst the leaf litter, careful to avoid the venom-soaked sleeve. The summer night crept towards dawn. No Elf would call this cold, but Legolas was shivering nonetheless as his body battled the venom. He needed his clothes. She could think of nothing for it but to draw her hunting dagger. 

Legolas sent her a strange look as she cut through the buckskin of his tunic with a jerking motion, chopping off the fouled sleeve and dropping it at her feet, where it lay coiled like a snake. His face was as pale as the bandage.  

She breathed deeply, then threw out the words. “I was foolish to goad you into coming here. Forgive me for this, and for what could have happened.”

Legolas was indignant. The dappled light of dawn painted him in copper and gold, his hair a luminous flame above the pale expanse of his face. “My decisions were my own.” 

He winced as she helped him pull what remained of the tunic over his head. “Remember that I am a warrior of the Greenwood,” he continued. “If I must die defending her I shall gladly do my duty.” 

At that much pompousness, she could not help but inject some practicality. “Will your father be of that same mind?”

Legolas shook his head, suddenly dejected. “He will tan both our hides.”

Arwen sought his eyes, and dared a smile. “Yet another peril we must brave together.”

Legolas, too, smiled. 

Beautiful. 

He was looking at her like he had caught that thought, still and poised in anticipation.

Arwen leaned in and pressed her lips to his. 

His skin was warm, with a light scent of forest and woodsmoke, but his lips were soft as silk. He held still, awaiting what she would do next, and only when she took his face between her palms to pull him closer did his good hand come up and twine around her head, his lips opening for a deeper kiss, all sweetness. A soft ohhh escaped him, then, and a cresting wave of arousal coursed through his mind. The thrill of having done that to him drove her onwards. 

She opened her mouth against his, hot, eager, seeking , adding teeth to the soft skin of his neck and he keened — ai Valar he keened for her. The sound filled her belly with liquid heat.

Legolas drew her closer as best he could with one arm, his body now hard and hot and impossibly alive against her. Arwen had heard of this, the way lust blooms hottest amidst the stink of death, life reasserting itself in a desperate rush of desire. He seemed to feel it too, for the next hard, hungry meeting of their mouths was as inevitable as breathing... 

Do I want to marry him? 

She had been asked that very question so many times, and still she did not know the answer. 

She pushed the doubt from her mind by reaching for the lacing on Legolas’ tunic, the tanned deer hide supple and alien beneath her fingers. As Arwen’s hands worked, the coarse leather caught at her nails, so different from the softness of his skin beneath — it made Arwen’s blood rush, a heady sensation. He let her loosen the ties and pull it off over his head, baring the pale skin of his chest, a tender contrast with his sun-darkened arms. 

Legolas sat there, awash in gold from sunlight filtered through a sieve of leaves. His skin was dappled in it, patterned in his forest’s light. Aware of Arwen’s eyes on him, he raised his chin and stared back, his gaze unnervingly deep. Arwen merely looked at him, drinking the sight of his body like cold spring water.

Then she moved and set her lips to the divot beneath his throat, breathed warm musk, and revelled in the strangled moan she drew from him.

His vengeance was delicious. He knelt up to undo her shirt, eyes asking as he went. She had to help him lift it off over her head and undo her breast band, and then he swallowed and sat very still for an instant. 

“You are so beautiful,” he whispered, almost reverently. His voice was the colour of that fine whiskey her brothers brewed in winter: dark and amber-gold. It seemed he could not meet her eyes. His boots scuffed the forests’ leaf litter as he moved. The earthy smell of beech-leaves and mould rose up. “You are like...”

Arwen refused to be compared to Luthien yet again; not here and now. “Touch me!” she demanded, in a harsh whisper. 

He did. First he stroked her breasts with just his fingertips, admiring, very carefully. Then, beyond all expectation he leant forward to press small, feather-soft kisses to the skin, the flutter of his eyelashes like butterfly wings against her. Arwen drew a great gulp of breath.

“You are so beautiful,” he whispered again, and then he lowered his head and took a nipple into his mouth, and it was her turn to close her eyes and moan in delight. 

She sank backward, leaning against her pack as he licked and suckled, gentle and yet not. It was good — ahhh, it was good.  He had done this before, she realised then, to other women, and jealousy leapt within her like a snarling wolf. 

She would do better. He would find her the best. 

Legolas’ finger stroked down to the ties of her breeches. “May I?”

She could not find words, nodded, and he untied them and pulled them down reverently, as if unwrapping some precious jewel.  

She rolled to the side to take the rest of her clothes off. An undignified wriggle with tangled legs, and then she was naked before him. Legolas could not stop watching, eyes wide to catch every detail: the pale expanse of her legs, the thatch of hair between them, and glimpses of moisture within.

His fingertips stroked slowly, leaving a trail of sensation. Gooseflesh sprung up in their wake. Down from the valley between her breasts, down to her belly, down, ever down to the dark hair, and then lower still. Sweet and hot his hand rested there — motionless, teasing — and she shuddered. 

Dipping his head, Legolas tasted the skin of her belly, breathed her scent, then lapped at that sweet place where her leg met her body until the pulse of her great artery leapt and sped beneath his lips. The feeling must have pleased him, because he rested his mouth there for a moment, warm against her skin, and breathed her in. 

She wriggled, then twisted her hips sideways so his mouth went where she wanted it. “Please. We have little time. Do not waste it.”

“Is this a waste?” His little chuckle, a mere puff of air against her skin, made her gasp. “As the lady wishes.”

A fall of wheat-blonde hair fell across her thighs in a silken caress, and then he bent to her.

Legolas was a man of many talents, it seemed. He did this well and thoughtfully, though his position must have been awkward with only one good arm to take his weight.

Arwen leant back and allowed the sensation to overtake all thought until she was flying: lost and found and adrift all at once. 

Within that ecstasy, images flapped at the edges of her mind, frantic like birds' wings beating against glass. Arwen knew it at once: a vision. Irmo’s hand, the blessing and curse of her House. The Sight swirled and eddied, cresting along the waves of her body’s pleasure: 

A white city, banners flying in the morning wind atop the great spire of its citadel. A great desire took her, wild and inescapable as a flood, to fly up like a bird, like her grandmother Elwing once had, to speed to that white city and rest upon its spires.

When she came down from her high, Legolas was looking at her with a strange emotion in his eyes, and seemed almost hesitant to touch her. She pulled him down, against her, finally laying skin to skin, the warmth of him a delicious contrast with the cold ground.

He was hot and hard, shuddering as she took him in her hand. His face was even more beautiful in the wild abandon of pleasure. Beautiful, and wholly Elvish. Suddenly she desperately wanted to see more of it, and she rolled over to pull him on top of her. For a moment, they were an awkward tangle of arms and they had to adjust for his wound, but then he lay between her legs, his face above hers. 

“Have you done this before?” His breath was warm against her.

“Only … unofficially.” 

He smiled knowingly. “Ah, you Noldor hypocrites.”

“How many lovers did you have?” she retaliated, indignant. 

“A handful,” Legolas sounded casual, as if he were not violating the Valar’s very laws. He gave her a clever look. “How many unofficial ones?”

Far less than a handful, but Arwen would not admit that anytime soon. “Curiosity does not become you.” She softened the rebuke with a kiss. “Come here.”

Here they were, posed at the edge of a cliff. She held his hips as he steadied himself over her, a soft smile on her lips that turned into a frown and a moan as he thrust forward into her. He threw back his head and gasped her name.

He thrust a few times, artlessly, arrhythmically. Perhaps he was caught in an ecstasy like she had felt just a moment before; she whimpered at how he felt inside her, his hardness piercing her, and at the sound a noise caught in his throat and his eyes focused on her, some wonder caught within them. His strokes went even and deep and thorough; she rolled her hips to meet his, wanting to give him pleasure as he gave her.

He was beautiful above her, his good hand stroking the sides of her face and the tangles of her hair, the contrast of his soft lips with the strength of his hips. His forest-brown eyes were wide, he was biting his lip as if to concentrate, to hold on to this moment, to commit every detail of her and of this to indelible memory.

I could love Legolas , she realised, moved by fondness and compassion for her companion in the dangers of this journey. She imagined a deeper love, a love of ages, of shared lives, grown around each other like trees entwined in the forest. 

Yes, I could love him.  

But the vision returned, then, swirling at the edges of her mind: Stars and eagles, sunrise over a snow-capped mountain, an army encamped beneath starred banners, a dark-haired girl dancing in a courtyard of white stone. 

She gasped, utterly lost in the vision.  

I could love Legolas. But if I do, there will be no white city, no starred banner... And my children will be different children. 

Legolas drew her back to the here and now. He shifted, moved an arm beneath her, still buried within her. Grasping her tighter against him, he murmured her name like a prayer as she ran her hands along his strong back. 

She could not tell how long it lasted, this delightful closeness, thrusting and kissing. A heartbeat, an hour, an eternity. 

They laid forehead-to-forehead, mouth against mouth, legs entwined and minds pressed together until he spilled into her with a deep moan.

 

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Once the glow of sex and adrenaline had faded, Legolas grew serious. “Your grandfather came here to offer you up as a weregild,” he said, his fingers caressing the side of her face. “Do you wish to be one?” The words lay between them like an offering, to be taken or rejected by Arwen’s choice.

“We could make our home here in the South,” he mused, his hand stroking soft as a butterfly's wing, down the lines of her throat to the swell of her breast. “I could be my father’s vice regent. Many of our folk will follow me, and dwell with us in Amon Lanc.”

Arwen gave a small sigh of pleasure and turned her body to his, the silken warmth of his skin a delightful contrast with the rough bedroll. She smiled at the thought. “Yes. Those among the Galadhrim who wish to take me for their lady might come. And Grandmother would not be far away.”

“No.” Legolas physically recoiled, alarm in his eyes. “My father would not tolerate her anywhere near him.”

Arwen raised an eyebrow. “I will receive who I will.”

Legolas shook his head. “But this is the Greenwood. Thranduil’s will is the law.” A muscle jumped in his temple, so tight did he hold his jaw. 

Arwen sat up, the cold morning air gripping her naked skin as the blanket slid from her shoulders. She thought of Thranduil’s court, stars ensnared in the canopy, the Greenwood’s courtiers wheeling their eternal circuits around the great hall like moons pinned in their King’s orbit. 

Not so different, in truth, from Imladris. 

In that instant she knew the source of her nagging sense of unease, both at home and in these woods. She would revolve around no one. Arwen Undómiel could not be anything but the centre of her own universe.

She stood, making sure to show off her body to its best advantage. Legolas swallowed, his eyes very bright in the shaded clearing. She retrieved the last of the wine they brought, unstoppered the bottle and drew a long swig. Then she joined him in the bedroll once more. 

“We might not need silver rings anytime soon, but I do like you.” She took another sip, making sure to lick the last drop from her lower lip. Her hand skimmed down Legolas body, and found him more than willing. 

A few strokes had him panting, his eyes wide and his mouth open in a grin of delight. She withdrew her hand, and when his face fell she demurely offered him the last of the wine. 

“Here, to give you strength.”

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Chapter End Notes

"Ahem..." taps mic... "is this thing on?"
This is an important moment in a fanfic writer's career: I proudly present my very first sex scene! First of all I should thank my beta's, who endured a couple of truly excruciating drafts. I hope their therapy is going well. 

Whew. It's written and out there on the internet for all to see! Well, they say the first one is the hardest. Perhaps there are more to come ;-)

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this chapter, about the sex of course, but also the worldbuilding (LaCE-y enough for you?) and characters.

A comment would make me a very happy (and deeply relieved) scribe.
See you next week!
IS