← Samuel the Rogue: Where the Feathers Fall

Chapter 7: The Sun-King’s Court

“Don’t look down, don’t look down, don’t look—ah, fuck, I looked down.”

I dangled from Aeolin’s talons like a fresh kill, the ground so far below us it might as well have been in another realm. The trees around us must have been hundreds of feet tall. His grip on my shoulders hurt, but he’d set those deadly talons so they didn’t break my skin. Small mercies, I guess, when you’re being carried through the air by a harpy.

I was starting to get used to the Aerie’s mating season. It was still intense as hell, but at least I could think straight again. You stop hearing a racket if you’re around it long enough, I guess, except this racket was harpies doing things that would make even the most experienced brothel worker blush.

“Where exactly are we headed?” I called up to Aeolin, trying to focus on our mission rather than all the fucking going on below us. Honestly, the novelty was wearing off. After the first few hundred flying sex positions, they all started to blur together.

“Deeper,” Aeolin grunted. “To the center.”

As we flew on, I made out an enormous structure in the distance. It was an arena woven right into the central tree, bigger than any nest we’d passed, and we’d passed plenty. “What is that?” I asked, staring.

“That’s the Sun-King’s Court,” Aeolin said. “Zephyra will be there.”

He sounded bitter about it, and like he still missed her, and I felt sorry for the poor bastard.

Instead of flying straight at it, Aeolin veered toward a smaller entrance on its side. He set me down on a thick branch that served as a sort of natural landing platform, and I pressed my back against the trunk of the tree, grateful for something solid behind me.

“We can’t just fly in through the main entrance.” He scanned the area. “Too many eyes. We’ll have to go through the corridors.”

I looked into a tunnel formed by intertwining branches. It was dim in there, with only a few chinks of daylight breaking through the leaves, and I didn’t like the look of it one bit.

“The Sun-King’s Court is a bit of a labyrinth.” Aeolin’s feathers bristled. “Stay close. It’s easy to get lost, or worse.”

I didn’t need to ask what “worse” meant. The sounds coming out of the tunnel made it plenty clear: moans, screeches, wet slapping, and somebody getting the shit kicked out of them.

We went into the tunnel on foot. Every few steps we ran into somebody new fucking or fighting, and sometimes both.

A harpy with emerald plumage straddled a silver-feathered male, her talons raking his chest as she rode him so hard the branch under them shook. A third harpy joined them, ducking under her wing to suck at her clit while she screamed her head off. Their juices dripped off the branch and soaked into the moss. I’d never made anybody scream like that in my life.

One male harpy slammed another against the wall, wings flaring wide. Blood smeared across their chests where talons had struck, and the attacker shoved the other’s face into the bark and mounted him from behind. He thrust with brutal force, pinning his rival with one hand while his other hand clawed at the rival’s hips. The defeated male arched back into it, moaning low, his feathers trembling and his cock dripping onto the bark. I hugged the opposite wall and got past them as fast as my bare feet would go.

“Is it worse in here than out there?” I whispered, ducking out of the way of a pair of harpies who tumbled past us, oblivious to our presence as they clawed and bit at each other.

“Much,” Aeolin muttered. “It’s where the strongest, most dominant harpies come to... assert themselves.”

We continued through the winding passages, ducking under low-hanging branches and stepping over exhausted bodies, and I cracked my head on more than one of those branches. The passages had all grown out of the tree itself, crooked and wild, guided by generations of harpy hands, I guessed. Some passages were so wide three harpies could fly side by side, and others were so narrow we had to turn sideways to squeeze through.

The farther in we went, the worse the scenes got. Blood mixed with other bodily fluids on the floor, and it was slick and sticky under my bare feet. The place stank of musk, sweat and blood. Twice, we had to backtrack when we found our path blocked by a particularly violent orgy. “How much further?” I asked.

“Almost there.” Aeolin paused at a junction where three corridors met and tilted his head to listen. “This way.”

He led me down the rightmost passage, which sloped upward. The noise swelled into one huge roar. More light filtered in, and the passage widened.

The corridor spat us out onto a small ledge high up the side of the main arena of the Sun-King’s Court.

Holy shit.

The arena was a huge bowl of woven branches in the middle of the tree, big enough to drop all of Willowbrook into with room to spare, with multiple levels and tiers formed by massive branches. Shafts of sunlight streamed through gaps in the canopy above, throwing bright patches of light that moved across the arena floor as the branches swayed in the breeze. The corridors had been cramped. Out here I could see the whole mess at once. Hundreds of harpies filled the space, some perched on branches and the rest swooping through the air, and most of them were busy fucking or trying to kill each other.

A harpy soared overhead with two males clinging to her mid-flight. One clung between her legs with his cock inside her, and the other sucked at her breasts as she twisted through the air. Her orgasm hit with a shriek, and the male inside her came seconds later, cum splattering down onto the tier below. I made a note never to stand under anybody in this place.

And down on the arena floor, at the center of it all, lit up by the biggest shaft of sunlight, was Ignis the Phoenix.

Aeolin had undersold him by a mile.

He looked like a god who’d come down to show off, and he was preening like one. His feathers were every color at once, and they threw the light around in ways I didn’t think feathers could. I’d half expected him to be on fire. He wasn’t, but he glowed anyway, and nobody in that arena could stop looking at him. He was ripped, too, maybe even more than Brutus.

What would it feel like to be worshipped like that? “Wow,” I blurted. “I mean, he’s...”

“I know,” Aeolin said, and it sounded like it hurt.

Ignis was surrounded by a swarm of females, all vying for his attention, rubbing up against him and spreading their wings for him. Zephyra was right up front. I knew it was her because Aeolin went rigid beside me, staring straight at her. Her golden-amber feathers stood out even from this distance. She was pressed against him, her wings spread wide, and Ignis was fucking her right there in front of everybody.

I was half-hard and hated it.

I glanced at Aeolin. His talons had dug into the bark of the ledge. Ignis was having the time of his life with Aeolin’s ex, and he couldn’t have cared less that Aeolin existed.

Maya had looked at Brutus like he was everything I wasn’t, and the two of them had acted like I wasn’t even there. “I’m sorry.” I put a hand on his feathered arm. “I know it doesn’t help, but... I get it. I really do.”

Aeolin pulled himself together. He straightened and pointed toward a far corner of the arena. “There. My spear.”

I followed his finger and saw it: a fancy-looking spear dumped against the wall down on the arena floor, in a pile of discarded belongings. “They just tossed it there?” I asked.

“I left it when she...” Aeolin hissed, and that was as far as he got.

While Aeolin glared at his spear, I went back to staring at Zephyra. Even from the ledge she looked like the queen bee of that whole crowd.

This time I noticed a ring on her finger. It glowed with its own light, bright enough to see from way up there, and I was pretty sure normal rings didn’t do that.

The males nearest her went even crazier for her than they did for Ignis. They shoved and crowded to get close to her, and I figured that ring had something to do with it.

One male harpy near her dropped to his knees, panting, cock twitching, untouched. Just watching her made him come, his cum splashing across her talons as he moaned. She didn’t even look at him. As far as I could tell, all her attention was on Ignis and what he was doing to her.

As I watched, Ignis hauled her against him, and she arched into him right away. During one thrust hard enough to lift her off the floor, she flung out a hand, and the ring flew off her finger. It bounced and rolled to a stop near the wall, not far from Aeolin’s spear.

My heart kicked hard. That ring had to be worth a fortune, and it was lying right there where somebody like me could grab it.

I’d come to the Aerie to help Aeolin get his spear back, but now I saw a bonus prize, a little something extra for Samuel Thornwood, aspiring rogue extraordinaire.

“It’s impossible,” Aeolin said beside me. “We can’t get to my spear with Ignis down there.”

I stared at the ring and the spear and tried to come up with a plan. It might have been impossible for Aeolin. But a rogue would call it an invitation, and I was a rogue. Sort of.

“I have an idea,” I said, and I could feel the grin spreading across my face, the same stupid grin that always got me into trouble. But then again, trouble was my middle name.

Actually, it’s Bartholomew, but that’s not nearly as impressive.