The Shepherd's Daughter

It was hot, and it felt both scalding and comforting as it washed across her from within, infusing her with something of his primal power and energy and he slowed to a stop as he looked down at her, bare to the world and slicked with sweat and saliva and their mixed fluids, her virgin's blood painting her thighs and staining her skin as he devoured her with his eyes and caressed her bare flesh with one powerful hand, possessive and needy. His hunger after his passion was great and her succulent flesh was there, tempting him with the softness of her, with the scent of her pleasure and her arousal. But he had spent his five boons, the first for her name, the second for her dance; the third for a maiden's first kiss and the fourth for her virginity. The fifth and final boon was the pleasure he had taken from her flesh, was the use of her as a vessel for his seed and while he hungered greatly he could not break his own geas. She had outwitted him and he had to cleave to an ancient contract that had been largely forgotten for a thousand years. He watched as she languidly smiled and when she reached for him again, he was only too eager to give in to his passion once more.

*

In all they loved five times there in his barrow beneath the hill and when they were both sated she slept, peaceful and content, exhausted and ignorant of the hungry eyes that gazed upon her. The King Under the Hill was ravenous in the wake of his sated lust and his hunger was great. He slavered as he looked upon her tender flesh, the thought of devouring her, of rending the flesh from her bones, of swallowing her still-beating heart was a sore temptation but his own magic held him in check. But he raged against it, fought the chains that bound him for the smell of her sex and her blood was potent and his intellect was still subsumed in favor of his feral instinct. The chain was wearing thin and had Moira been awake she could have fled then and he wouldn't have been able to follow. But she was still insensate there on his bed of furs and with a last act of desperate will he fled his den to hunt, for he had heard the clatter of hooves upon stone, heard the bleat of a lost ewe and smelled through the heady perfume of lust the whiff of woolen hide. He glanced back a single time at the woman still asleep there in his den, and then he was gone.

*

He returned much later and still she slept, exhausted by her trial and he gazed long at her sleeping form before his hands found the discarded rawhide sling and the five plain stones that he had glamoured to appear as gemstones to her eyes. He closed the stones in his fist and pressed them with his will and his strength and his magic and when he opened his hands they were in truth the gems that he had made her see. Then he clenched the cord of leather with his other hand until he had made it into a string of fine silver chain and he set to work, his hunger slaked and his patience restored. When he was done, he gathered Moira up with one powerful arm and carried her out of his cave.

*

Moira woke to the cool kiss of a light rain and the distant call of a familiar voice. She swooned in the cool shower and before she could regain herself, she was found. It was the familiar face of Sean, but he was different somehow. When he saw her his eyes grew wide and he called out, his voice laced with urgency and fear.

"Da! Da, I need ye here!" He called out and moments later their father came round the stone and stopped as he saw her.

"Moira?" He asked quietly as he approached and she smiled wearily at him.

"Aye, da, tis me. I should ha'e come home when I saw yon coulds, but I dinna want tae leave the ram." She said as her brother took off his wool rain cloak and wrapped her in it. She thought nothing yet of her state of dress as her father knelt over her and looked in awe at her.

"She doesna look a day older, da." Sean said in awe and their father nodded.

"What mean ye, Sean Larabe? I was just gone a night..." She started but her father shook his head.

"Nae, lass. Five years ye were gone, five years we thought ye dead, lost to bandits or wolves. We couldna even find yer bones. Yer ma died of grief when ye were lost. And now here ye are, not a day older and wearing rags that look to have lain in the weather for five years." He said.

"We ha' come looking for a lost ewe and I found ye here, sleeping on the rocks." Sean said as her father and the other two men, both hands that worked the fields, looked on in awe and fear.

Moira opened the cloak and looked down at herself, at the dress that the King Under the Hill had torn from her so casually that now showed no sign of the rent, but looked weathered by five years of seasons, tattered and faded and worn to rags. Five boons the King Under the Hill had claimed from her, and five times they had loved. But as a result, she had been gone from the world of mortals for five years, though for her only a single night had passed.

She was able to walk back out of the torlands and to the old house there on the chalky downlands that her family had lived in for generations. There was an ache in her loins as she went, but she said nothing of it to her family, bearing the pain stoically. When she was home she ate enough for any five strong men and then slept for two days. She was ever quiet after that five year night, not quick to laugh as she had been before and often when the summer storms came she would sit awake all night at the window as if she were waiting for something. She lived a quiet life with her family, but she never told them where she had spent the five years that they had missed her. There was no mistaking the swell of her belly, however, no hiding the child that grew within her and when her son was born, nine months after she was found, he was a small, quiet boy with black hair and wild green eyes shot through with gold. She named him Lannoch, which in the old tongue means 'prince' and his story was longer in the telling. The only secret she kept better than the name of Lannoch's father was the silver necklace with five bright gemstones that she hid away for the rest of her life, only taking it out when the moon was full and the sky was clear, when she would let the silver flow through her fingers as smooth as silk and the gemstones cast the light of the moon back against her pale skin in a scintillating dance that never, even unto the end of her days, failed to make her smile wistfully and look north, to where the torlands lay.

None know what happened to Moira, for she never married and when she was old, her red hair turned gray and her son a grandfather himself, she left the little house on the downs and walked into the rocky torlands once more. She vanished there, leaving no trace behind but her discarded dress caught on a rock at the edge of the tors. But to this day, centuries later, it is said that when the storms of summer blow across the loch, if you are close to the tors and you listen closely you can hear cries and moans of passion echoing among the rocks.

End