Disclaimer: I don't own Hetalia or its characters.

Summary: While imprisoned and facing execution due to illegal potions brewing, Alfred Jones- a street prostitute and bootleg magics brewer- is given an offer of freedom by the Chief Priest Ivan Brangiski, in exchange for his services as an undercover agent to expose and remove the corrupt, Marchioness Natalia, and her consort Marquess Toris. [Crack fantasy hooker Mills & Boon romance AU]

Status: Complete

Genres: Fantasy, Drama, Romance, Suspense, Crime, Parody.

Warnings: See the Genre's list. There will be a couple scandals or two in here. Also, a heavy emphasis on Drama, Crime, and Romance. Also, since this is an M-rated fic, there will be heavy scenes not intended for a general audience. With crude language and explicit scenes at some parts, this is not a light story for those who are faint to the heart, or could/does not stomach mature themes. If this applies to you, this is not for you. You are warned.

A/N: This is my first time setting a story in a medieval time period. Based on some research, during this time period, there was a great distaste and hatred towards witches, people who did magics, and people who were involved in the supernatural/occult. Because of its prevalence in heavily religious societies in Western Eastern Europe, those who were seen as 'abnormal' or 'peculiar' in this period, were many times, accused of being witches or occultists, and were often placed in jail, and more often than that, executed. Because I wanted to make a historically-correct work, I wanted to get as much information as I could to make this a wholly believable fiction piece. So, some things we would expect to happen in modern times, will not be applied here. Take that into consideration.

A/N (2): Also, this is will be the first time I have a double pairing in a story! Usually, there are no pairings, or in some cases, only one paring in my stories. However, this will feature two parings Rusame and Beliet!

Extended Summary: Alfred Jones hid his magic and took up bartering his flesh for coin after watching his father burned at the stake. But one day, an aggressive client cries "witch!" and Alfred finds himself in the citadel jails. An unexpected reprieve appears in the form of shady priest Ivan Brangiski, who offers to release Alfred in return for his services... both physical and magical... in bringing down his hated enemy, corrupt Marchioness Natalia and her consort Marquess Toris. Alfred has no intention of betraying another witch, but he'll take the chance for freedom... and to play with the delectable priest's guilty lusts while he's about it...

"It is a Dark Era, one when a lusty lad will do what he must to survive. Even if it means bartering flesh for a palmful of coins. . . Forced to watch his father burn at the stake, Alfred Jones knows the danger of the gift he inherited - a powerful magic that must stay hidden. Until one night when he's accused of witchcraft and Alfred finds himself behind prison walls, awaiting certain death with a roguish priest unlike any man of the cloth he has known. In reality, Ivan Brangiski is as far from holy as the devil himself, but his promise of freedom in return for Alfred's services may be his salvation. Locked into a dubious agreement, Alfred resents his plan to have him seduce and ruin his lifelong enemy. But toying with Ivan's own lust for him is enjoyable, and he agrees to be his pawn while secretly intending to use him just the same..."
-Based on 'The Harlot' by Saskia Walker.

The Harlot's Poison

Carts rattled as they came in under the gateway of the Great City - to what they called the city proper, as it was deemed the poorer houses outside the city walls were not. Yet the people who lived in those houses had a better chance entering the city to find work, or to find business among the rich population. Prostitution was one such thriving business. The whores of the city would sidle in under that oppressive archway, pretending respectability, hoping not to catch the attention of a particularly difficult guard and be thrown out into the mud, at risk from the wheels of the rattling carriages.

Alfred had legitimate business selling potions and ointments from the heavy box he hauled around over his shoulder, the business his father had passed on to him. He remembered the many lessons his father had taught him- which consisted mostly of putting the family's dismal wealth to good use. Arthur had tried so earnestly to set up his eldest son to a future that had ample prospects of a decent living. But, stubborn Alfred let those repetitious lessons to fall upon deaf ears. Alfred had little reason to adhere to those fear-ridden rants that his father sprouted from his mouth every hour, but he would never forget the day he had watched his father be dragged into the centre of the city square to be burned at the stake. It occured now to Alfred, that those nonsensical tirades his late father enjoyed so much, had taught him a skill. Though undesirable, it had taught him that if he was going to offer any extra 'special' wares, it was safer to do so out of his own body, than by offering the magical trade Arthur had dealt in to truly earn enough to survive.

His father would not have approved, but he had been dead for years now, and had approved of very little Alfred had done while he was alive. Besides, he had everything he required to ensure the more unpleasant risks of his secret profession were no threat to him. He could use his oils and potions and magic to guard his health, and never advertise the fact the abilities were there.

Today, it was not raining, the first day of the week to escape such a fate, and the city was cleaner than usual for its prior drenching. The layer of muck that usually caked the streets had washed into the channels that would bear it down through the city walls, beneath the outer city below, emerging at the outlet where children scoured through the waste for items rich men had lost.

Alfred took up a position on an empty trading stand on a corner. He was a ruggedly handsome man, still young but less so than he had been, and anticipated perhaps needing soon to use spells to obscure the signs of his aging. Yet he still had an unlined face, square jaw, and striking blue eyes, and underneath his clothes, a body that was slim and solid in addition to well-exercised and skillful. And most of his clients were regulars who would only grow suspicious if he suddenly started to look younger.

He had sold two potions by the time a man came up to him and made the street finger-language sign for business? A potion more and he'd have settled for the earnings of the day and returned home, no extras required, but refuse a customer with no good reason and it could get around. Alfred made the responding sign for agreement, then sketched out his terms and charges wordlessly against his palm. The man nodded. Alfred closed up his portable shop and hauled it back over his shoulder, having no intention of leaving his wares. Then he followed the client down the nearby alley.

The King's Nose was down there, but the man veered away before that, into a discrete nook between buildings. 'Great', Alfred thought. No room, no bed, outdoors sex and the client wasn't even good-looking. He should have quit after selling those two potions.

He didn't particularly want to get on his knees in the dirty nook, even before the man started pulling on his hair and hauling his head around. Alfred resisted the urge to bite his manhood, but only managed to keep so much hold on his temper. "That's it!" He pulled back, angrily, losing a few tufts from his scalp. "I don't have to put up with-"

The man followed his movements, hands snatching to gain his purchase back, not just tugging Alfred's hair but circling one of his hands around his throat. Alfred choked as the hold tightened, the client dragging him back. "I'm paying you, I can do what I want with you." Alfred's head bounced off the wall they'd been making their transaction against.

In times like this, the magic came like drawing breath. Alfred heard the crunch as the man's fingers broke, all of them bending backward against the natural angle of the joints. The would-be client was slammed to the opposite side of the nook, and Alfred fell to his knees anyway, too dizzied to stay upright.

He was relieved, at first, when he heard the strangled noise of fear and the man's feet taking off in a fast retreat away from him. Then he heard the bastard open his mouth and shout the usual, well-worn shout: "Witch! WITCH!"

Swearing, Alfred tried to move, getting up to stagger along, leaning on the wall. He was still struggling to catch breath through his hurting throat. But there had been incidents before, and he'd survived before. He just needed to find the safety of anonymity. Somewhere there were lots of people.

Given that the wailing man had ten fingers visibly broken in a rather extreme manner, Alfred's magic had not been subtle or helpful when it came to keeping his secret. He might still be able to laugh this off, though. Enough people tried to call witch as an all-purposes tactic to cast blame that the city guard actually tended to take such accusations with a lot of eye-rolling. But trying to bluff his way out was still far riskier than ducking inside the King's Nose and hiding amid the drunken cavorting of the clientele there.

He fell inside and the guardsmen burst through the door at a run a moment later. Alfred's accuser was in their midst, shaking in rage and pain - good - while he tried to hold out a signet ring on a chain, between the heels of his palms.

Alfred's alleyway client, who had been too stingy to pay extra for a room and their comfort, was nobility.

Damnation! The guard weren't so easily going to laugh it off and give up early if there was the word of a noble involved. The eyes of the unpleasant man were scouring the room even as Alfred slipped into the back, hoping he remained unseen. The Nose had more than one secret exit, that was why it was so popular among rogues. He'd have to lie low for some time... could he even risk going back for his box of wares, abandoned in the nook? He'd have to build up his livelihood again without it, and if he was lying low he wouldn't be able to do any business in the other fashion...

Screw the box. He'd have to subsist off the wilderness for a few weeks and re-make those potions while he did so, make another box too. It would be difficult, but better than getting caught.

His luck wasn't even so kind as that.

His repugnant client must have spotted him as he slipped out the back of the taproom. The guard surged through before he'd set his hand on the panel that hid the drop-down into the cellar and the scramble out through the converted coal chute. He had a split second to decide whether or not to fight. Use his magic to fight, and prove beyond doubt what he was, and never be able to walk openly in the city again.

He chose otherwise. He feigned surprise, drawing back from their hands with a yelp of protest, and did not resist any more than any other protesting citizen that plied an illicit trade. "That bastard struck me - hit my head against the wall! Damn right I broke his fingers. They all cry 'witch!' when a whore gets the drop on them, you fellows know that as well as us!"

A public whipping for whoring was better than burning, or permanent necessary self-imposed exile. Alfred pushed his magic down when the guard seized him and marched him off, while behind them his former client crowed.

The dungeons of the Great Citadel were as grim and gloomy as reputation had it. Alfred, in the half day and night he had spent there so far, had steeled his heart against the screams and settled merely upon the hope the people extracting them would not come for him. His magic was still there, a bright and brilliant thread undiluted by the priests' overconfident charms made in the name of a god that his powers obviously did not recognise. If it came to torture, he would have to fight and reveal himself, and any number of things could happen. Strong as his magic was, the chances were still considerable that it wouldn't end well for him.

Morning had long since slipped in through the narrow window high up above his head by the time the door creaked open and one of the black-robed priests finally entered.

Alfred shifted uneasily in his chains. He had not matched his powers against a witchfinder before, if that was what this man was. He looked forbidding enough, certainly, with the stark black of his robe making his complexion even paler; his trim beard and moustache and flowing long hair almost the same black. The only colour upon him was his eyes, which were brown. Too warm a brown for this place.

Realising he was staring, Alfred dragged his head aside, lest he be caught in some priestly mesmer. He stubbornly looked into the furthest corner while the priest shut the door and then paced a half-circle around his chained position, back and forth.

"...Well, aren't you interesting," the priest said.

Alfred clenched his jaw. "Whoring gets a fine or a public whipping," he said, sullenly, trying to strike just the right tone. "What am I doing here? When am I to be sentenced? Surely you don't believe that-"

"You are a witch," the priest rode over him. "And a strong one. I can see the threads of it glowing in you. Yet you freely admit yourself a whore, willing to face punishment for the lesser crime. And you have not manifested your powers against the guards, or against these prison walls, unwilling to call the life that you know over, when it may yet be salvaged by such nerve." He knelt in front of Alfred, bringing his strong-featured face on a level with his. "Don't," he said sharply, as Alfred flexed his power against his chains. The priest reached out and grabbed his arm, scattering the beginnings of the spell.

Alfred had been utterly surprised by the move, but gauged the strength put into the other man's disruption and knew that he could bring more to bear than the priest could counter. But he hesitated. The other man was very close, touching him, violet eyes brighter and warmer from this vantage, and it was strange-

"I believe you have a skill set that may be of great use. I think we can make a deal to both of our benefit."

"A deal," Alfred said flatly.

"Indeed." The priest stood up, turning his back momentarily. Alfred did not put an energy-dagger between his shoulders. "But first, I have been lax. Your name is logged as Alfred Jones on the current documents. Son of the executed Sorcerer Arthur, if I'm not mistaken." Alfred merely grunted, putting no particular confirmation into the noise. "My name is Ivan Brangiski."

"Ivan of where?" Alfred asked. "Of what?"

"It's merely a name." Ivan - Ivan? - flicked a hand dismissively. Clearly his parents had had pretensions to nobility.

"That's almost as ridiculous as the idea a priest could have any deal to strike with me," Alfred said. "This is some new method of trying to extract confession."

"I know you're a witch," the other man emphasized dryly.

"So are you," Alfred burst out, scandalized by the hypocrisy. Only another magic sensitive could have done the things he just had. The priest was undoubtedly also a witch. Was that the secret of the priesthood, that they were no better than what they hunted? He hadn't previously ever been close enough to any of the black-robed witchfinders to tell if there was any magic in them. If that was the case, calling out this man's power would help him nothing.

Ivan Brangiski's face fell into very severe lines, and he looked worn and tired. Humanity, however, looked better on him, stirring something in Alfred that his dark countenance had already begun to spark in the initial impression of him. There had been few enough people Alfred had ever truly lusted for, working as he did, with the secret that he kept. An atrocious chance that a man like this should prove to be one of them.

"So we both know enough to cast the other to burn," the priest said, genially. "A deal would seem sensible."

Alfred bit his lip and glared, the animosity he projected hopefully obscuring the heat in his body and regard. "Are you going to release me from these chains as part of your deal?"

Ivan wafted a hand. "I should think you can do that yourself." But the keys were jangling from his hand when it rose again. He held off, but Alfred glared silently until he bent forward to use them, refusing to visibly reveal himself. This could still be a perverse trap.

"I will let you out," Ivan said, his head hovering above Alfred's. "You will walk with me past the guards, into the citadel, to the abodes of the priesthood. There I will furnish you with finer clothes, and a new identity, and an excuse to be near to the enemy I wish you to bring down. Once there, with your magic, with the physical wiles of your profession, you will inveigle your way into her world, and by one method or another, find me a means by which to break her power."

"Her?" Alfred had not expected that. "Who?"

"Mar·chion·ess Natalia, Prince Langinan's Royal Advisor and Chief Inquisitor, somewhat charmingly known colloquially among the court as the Beast. She has a consort, but they are known to take toys with no visible detriment to their marriage."

"You're insane," Alfred exclaimed.

Ivan patted his face, the touch electric. Alfred surged up into it despite himself - and despite the chains that still dragged down on him. Ivan's cheeks tinged pink as he retreated a step from the unexpected advance. Alfred grinned at the outburst of colour in his pale complexion, proof that unseemly desire lurked in the priest as well as his unseemly magic.

"But you will do it," Ivan said, the key touching the chains at the edge of the lock.

Alfred jerked his head. "What choice do I have?" Almost certain ruin or death, versus... a very complicated, dangerous situation, by report, but also the chance to inveigle himself not only into the affections of the priest's target, but the priest himself? He would take it.

"I thought you'd do," Ivan murmured, and the chains clicked free.

Walking unencumbered out of the prison alongside the sleek, dark-robed priest was very strange. Upright and side to side, there was little discernible difference in their heights that could not be caused by Ivan's better quality footwear, which clicked on the stone floors as he walked. Had Alfred's clothes been less poor and patched, he could have imagined himself equal to the man, free and striding beside him in such a setting. Certainly there was an ease in the other's manner he would not have expected. Ivan had the paperwork and took him freely through all of the checkpoints.

Walking into the priestly quarters was even stranger. The buildings were grand and smelled of incense and smoke... but they were echoing and hollow, lofty and serious, and something in Alfred objected that they were no place for the man beside him to be.

Ivan became flustered when they ran into other serious and forbidding men in the corridors, who stared at Alfred.

"You don't bring whores here often?" Alfred asked, teasing, but since he could be discreet, waited until the door had closed behind them and Ivan clunked a heavy key around to lock them in again, this time in a large apartment that was at least empty of other people.

"There's no way they could know-" Ivan started, then choked and looked annoyed as he realised he was being teased. "You can wash, and you can sleep - if you need to. I'd imagine last night wasn't very restful."

"I've had better," Alfred murmured, distracted by looking around. He was aware that Ivan was watching him take in his living space. Alfred opened the few doors and examined what was on the other side of them, closets all apart from the bathroom. He turned back and pointed at the large, lush canopy bed. "Your bed... What exactly do your priestly vows entail?"

He had the satisfaction of seeing Ivan flush again, then grow cross. "Even if I wanted to, with an unwashed witch who's likely been had by half of the city in his, what, certainly over twenty years?"

"I wasn't doing that for all those years." Alfred stretched, easing knots out of his body that the chains had put in, twisting enough to raise the hem of his shirt to reveal a good slice of flesh, as well as show off the trim lines of his torso. "I'll wash," he said mildly. "You know... it isn't so many... I didn't start until after my father was executed. And magic, anyway, keeps me clean. Your dick would be safe enough from the raging croides, or anything else."

"I didn't bring you here for-!"

Laughing, Alfred went into the bathroom, leaving the door half open. He started to strip whilst running the water. "You could join me right now-!"

His only answer was the door being firmly, fully shut.

Grimness descended upon him with the privacy. Ivan didn't want him, only wanted to send him off to the bed of a dangerous enemy. Perhaps Alfred should make his escape now - the small window, with the help of magic, would perhaps suffice for that. Yet Ivan could still ruin him, and despite what he knew, no-one would believe him if he made counter-claim of the priest having magic of his own, and such an action would still not save his own skin.

Worse still, he was reluctant to completely part ways with the strange priest. Being his spy might yet give Alfred chance to become closer to him.

He soaped up and washed down his body, getting rid of the prison grime and the dirt of the streets before that, enjoying the novelty of the abundance of warm water. In the priests' houses, it seemed they had heated water and heated floors, with pipes running below. A different world-

The towel on the rail wasn't fresh, and he thought happily of it being around the priest's body while he nestled it around his. He emerged from the bathroom with the square of cloth hanging around his hips, and Ivan looked up and crossed himself and spluttered at the sight.

"You're doing this on purpose!"

"I wasn't going to put the filthy clothes back on. Besides, I'll be sleeping, so what would be the point?" He pulled the towel clear and used it to scrub a last few times through his hair while Ivan looked away.

"For free," Alfred enticed, climbing into the bed and pulling back the covers for the other man to follow. "Help me to gage the character of my new employer."

Ivan looked at him with horrified, reluctant want, and actually took a step closer before he stopped himself.

Then he didn't stop himself, and Alfred was a little surprised to find him swiftly in the bed, his hands on Alfred and smoothing over his damp and flushed-hot skin, sliding across his waist, his hips, up his chest. Alfred caught his fingers and pulled them up to kiss them, sucking digits one by one into his mouth. The priest trembled, like a virgin.

The idea only empowered him, that this powerful, status-holding man could truly be so naive in this one thing. Alfred rose up and kissed him, sliding a tongue into his mouth, claiming his breath. He teased Ivan's tongue while the other man grunted protest, and searched amid the robes for a handful of flesh.

The breath left him as Ivan abruptly pressed him onto his back and held him down, breathing hard, whole weight leaned upon the hands on Alfred's chest. "You are so beautiful," he panted, "and too keen. What mischief is this?"

"It's no plot." Alfred reached for Ivan's face. "You're beautiful, too. I want you."

"A whore... a witch," Ivan panted, shaking his head.

"Priests can have sex," Alfred asserted. He wasn't sure at all, because while he'd done business with a few, they'd hardly been openly flaunting the fact. Still, he knew that taking up the cloth didn't make them eunuchs.

"With women," Ivan choked. "I... we... we don't have to...?" He made a gesture that caused Alfred to laugh.

"All my oils are in the box I lost when I was taken," he said. "So unless you have a substitute..."

Ivan flushed red over as much if his skin as Alfred could see and shook his head.

"I can do plenty without you inside me, or me inside you-" Some preferred it that way. The assurance seemed to calm Ivan, and he let Alfred pull at his clothes. Underneath the robes were a black undershirt and white long johns, which were a magnificent source of amusement, but the priest would not allow himself to be disrobed any further, moving Alfred's hands away when he tried.

"This is enough," he said. "Show me what you will - like this."

Alfred nodded and moved to kiss him again. He manoeuvred them over, straddling Ivan in the large bed, pushing his groin down into the other man's covered one. Ivan moaned and stared up at him through slit eyes.

Alfred braced himself with a hold on the other man's shoulders and rocked there. His own arousal was slower than usual - the situation was still stressful, and he did not wish to resort to magic with someone who could sense that he was doing so... Ivan might get the wrong idea and take offence. But his cock was filling and hardening now, and he could feel the response through the staid underwear. He watched the changes in Ivan's breathing. He could tell even through the cloth barrier that the other man's size would be pleasing.

He slid down Ivan's body, hands trailing over the visibly defined chest beneath his undershirt - a crying shame to hide it. When his head was level with the bulge of Ivan's cock, he gripped both hands over prominent hipbones and tongued the bulge through the fabric. Ivan made a new noise, a high pitched whimper that delighted Alfred. He put his hand down and continued to work his lips over the covered bulge, nuzzling and caressing it with his chin and his cheeks and his mouth.

"Oh, God - God!" Ivan whimpered.

"I'm not his work, remember," Alfred rasped. "Can I-?" His fingers teased at buttons that led into forbidden territory.

"Take it out!" the priest gasped, as Alfred had known he would. "Take it out!"

Alfred grinned. He had to be painfully compressed in those pants by now, and it was even hard to extract him once the buttons were unfastened. The first swipe of Alfred's tongue along the length of him from root to tip had him starting to come. Alfred mumbled a spell fast from habit and then engulfed him thoroughly, stroking with the movements of his throat, flexing his neck, and swallowing down as Ivan came.

"You are... the devil's work indeed," Ivan hissed, lying wrung-out on his back like a damp rag.

"Maybe," Alfred responded smugly, climbing back up the bed and taking his own cock in his hand under the sheets. "But I'm one of his best."

After the sex, Ivan let Alfred sleep through the afternoon. Alfred was aware of him leaving, and much later of the priest standing over him for a while with a mixed regard, then crawling into the edge of the bed again. Even after all of that, and a night spent side by side, Ivan was stiff and standoffish when morning finally came around. As if he'd reasserted to himself what this was about, he merely made sure that Alfred was washed and dressed in fine clothes, then sent him on his way.

Too much to hope that in one day he could prompt enough possessiveness the other man would be loath to share him with an enemy. The enemy was still more important.

"Natalia is dangerous," Ivan told him before sending him out. "She... has cursed her enemies before. She ill-used her own twin sister, her very twin, terribly, usurping her power and consigning her to be a near-prisoner in the palace tower."

"Is that who you avenge?" Alfred asked, disappointed by the reverence in the priest's voice. When, he'd said he'd slept with women, did he mean this woman?

Ivan's lips went tight.

Alfred frowned. "If she can throw curses..."

"Magic." Ivan voiced it almost in a whisper. "She uses it openly, for no-one would dare contest her."

Damn it, thought Alfred. This grew more dangerous, more complicated still.

"She may see you as being of interest because of your abilities," Ivan said, "but beware. She can... manipulate... powers in others. She can alter-"

Alfred's breath hissed through his teeth. "You! That's why you have-" He saw the confirmation in the priest's stricken face. "She gave this to you? You are the one she cursed!"

Ivan shook his head, almost angrily. "Not only me. Don't speak of it."

"It doesn't have to be terrible!" Alfred burst out, frustrated. Cursed - cursed with magic! That was why this priest hurt so much... because witchery had been forced upon him in adulthood, was not a part of him naturally. Alfred was still offended by his stance. "But it can be a gift!"

"I said shut up!" Ivan raged. "I don't want to hear it from your tainted lips! Don't tell me those things. I only need you to-" he panted the words, overextended "-to destroy her. Publicly ruin her. Discover her secrets. The source of her powers. Political scandal we might use for leverage. All I desire in the world is to see the day we can bring the true witchfinders down upon her, at last."

Alfred narrowed his eyes, disgusted at the thought of betraying another magic user to the priesthood. But he set his hand on his hip and nodded. He would act as he chose, he determined; he did not have to follow Ivan's instructions. They parted ways ill at ease with each other. Ivan loaded him into a carriage, giving his own instructions to the driver, and his parting words to Alfred were, "I will make contact about where we should meet." He gave no timeframe, and despite himself Alfred hoped that it would not be too long. He didn't fear sex, but the magic he hoped to rely upon to protect him might not be a boon, if Lady Natalia was as strong as Ivan claimed and liked to play with other witches. The priest was the one solid point of contact he now had, adrift in an uncertain world of spies and politics.

It was a nerve-racking journey across the city. A pretentious mass of black towers with crenulated walls marked Lady Natalia's domain, and Alfred watched crows flock around the towers on their approach.

A woman met them at a service entrance low in the walls, ignoring the driver but taking Alfred's arm and hurrying him inside the door. He felt the spark of magic in her at the touch. Small, subtle magic, but for a man who hated witches, Ivan Brangiski had strange taste in allies.

"I managed to get you a place on her staff. A vacancy came up among her aides - as it often does. I wasn't certain, but-" She flushed prettily and patted his arm and looked... faintly worried, for a fleeting moment. "I don't think there'll be a problem. You look just right. I'll show you around now."

"-Your name?" Alfred remembered to ask, managing to insert the words into the chatter. If he needed to find her again-

"Oh! Marielle." She made a little curtsey. "I work here as a scribe, but... the kind of records I keep aren't at all the nice kind. When Father Brangiski approached me-"

Alfred snorted at the title and she blinked at him. He waved it off. "I'm sure you're right." Hard to associate that title with someone whom he'd teased such ridiculous noises from yesterday.

"He's such an honourable and mystical man," Marielle amended, as though he'd offended her. Alfred offered her his open palms. "What? He is."

"A man who swears we're the creatures of the devil, who yet uses witches for his own ends?"

"He understands that it's not our fault. We were born the way we were."

Alfred was looking for something better than that in a champion to their cause, but he let it go. He opted not to tell the girl that the holy man had so readily accepted his own advances in bed. A little starry-eyed glamour he should understand, given his own attraction to the priest.

"Why don't you start with this tour," he suggested, "and tell me what my duties here will be." He wondered if he could do them... With some degree of concern, in fact, he wondered, for he had never done anything but witchcraft and remedies and whoring. He could read and write - his herb craft and lore required that - and he hoped it would be enough to build on.

"Duties?" Her face went rather pink. "Oh, er. Yes, I'll show you around, and then I'll show you to the others."

It wasn't until he saw the other 'aides' that he truly understood. To a man they were slim, youthful and fine examples of manhood. Not a set of spectacles, nor ink stains, nor anything that could be perceived as a blemish of any kind among them.

This... he thought blankly, thinking of the collection of scared-faced boys long after Marielle had left him alone in the tiny bedchamber that was his, among a corridor of identical rooms. This woman is not going to be brought down by sexual scandal.

If she could get away with this, and people knew and did nothing, there was no chance for any traction there. Thus was ruled out his one real expertise in the situation Ivan Brangiski had put him in.

If his primary weapon were not to be sex - though undoubtedly this situation would call for that from him, sooner or later - then what?

He would have to find something else.

It took four days for Ivan Brangiski to contact him again, and they were four days Alfred did not much enjoy. He caught the eye of Natalia and her consort, Toris, on the second day he was in their employ, having decided it was best to lie low long enough to get a grasp on the workings of the place before he made any move. He had attempted to bury himself in actually aide-like duties while around the titled pair.

Yet on that second day Natalia had looked right at him and crooked her finger for him to come. She had touched his face and critiqued, "Well, you're a little old." Then his magic had sparked in recognition of hers - and hers was powerful; terrifying - and her complaints had died. Her eyes narrowed and she said, "You. Tonight."

A few of the fearful, grateful fellow aides had filled him in on what she meant as soon as they were done. "You must do everything they say," one gibbered. "Even if it seems terrible, refusing will be worse."

As a matter of fact, they demanded nothing of his body that Alfred's experience did not already encompass, though he had to pretend awkwardness at first. He did not wish to be discovered as a whore and thus a potential plant. Luckily, his magic and his remedies had kept his body perfect and tight, and there was nothing physical to give away how practised he was in the sexual arts. There were always clients who appreciated more whimpers and groans as he was breached, and it seemed he convinced Toris, too, well enough that it was the first time he'd been so used, while Natalia berated the sloppy performance of his head between her thighs. He was more distracted than usual by the element of danger.

It was not the sex. It was the way he felt her hands on his shoulders in the middle of coitus, and her magic creeping in through the touch to push and play with his. The knowledge she was doing that - and that he didn't know exactly what she was doing - introduced a reality to his whimpers.

When he managed to escape them and steal back to his room alone after that first encounter, he sunk himself in his witch-sight and looked inward to examine himself thoroughly, but could find no lasting changes. Her touch hadn't left a stain, and hadn't altered anything, but all the same, it was an alarming level of mystical assault, far too intimate, and nothing he had been prepared for.

He slept half the morning and Marielle, figuring out what had happened, smuggled him lunch and treats to his room. By the afternoon, he'd resumed his duties and by the night they wanted him again.

Again, the sex acts were nothing, but the rest-

He tried, ever so carefully and subtly, to pull his power down and hold it back, so that she could only reach a small part of it, hoping that perhaps she could be persuaded he was not so interesting after all. He answered her steadily more piercing questions as though he were ignorant of witchcraft, untrained and unaware.

It seemed to work, for on the fourth day, she let him off and picked one of the other aides to warm her bed instead. He spent the fourth day assigned to the vilest of tasks in the fortress.

...Because the nights in Natalia and Toris's chamber, even with her disturbing attempts to manipulate Alfred's magic, were not the worst part of this place.

Alfred's room, and those of the other staff, might feel like cells, but there were real cells in the dungeons underneath the fortress, and a world of stench and torture and depravity such as he had never imagined. Natalia, let no-one forget, was the Marchioness of the crown, and there were many ongoing projects imprisoned behind her black walls.

At least, at least Alfred could be glad that she kept such sadistic things separate from the bedchamber. He might have been able to use his magic to block the pain and later to heal the damage, but he didn't want to have to, and he was already concerned enough by the plight of his fellow staff.

After watching Marielle take down the confessions of a half-destroyed man into a ledger, in a session Alfred was required to assist with, he understood thoroughly why she had risked so much to rebel... and why Ivan wanted to call an end to this experimentation and brutality.

On the fourth night, Ivan finally showed himself again. Marielle led Alfred down to the side door once again, from where he alighted onto a coach which journeyed across the city, back to the expansive church quarters of the citadel.

Amazing how much more friendly those cold and towering spires had become in the intervening time.

"You have attached me to a nest of horrors!" Alfred accused, practically jumping on the man when he found Ivan awaiting him off the coach.

Ivan pulled him off, his brow creasing. "Not here." And they went up again to his chambers.

Much of those first few days, Alfred had entertained himself with thoughts of how he would proceed when next he tried to seduce the priest... Get him, perhaps, to show more skin. But since the second night, that had been less on his mind. Now, Alfred found himself jittery and panicked, hardly the calm seducer he had hoped to be. Would Natalia find out about the night time trip? Considering regular life in her fortress, what would he face if he were caught betraying her? And, Gods, he had to go back there.

"You're distressed," Ivan said, after a few minutes of terse exchange about Alfred's progress. Alfred had been trying his best for a professional facade, but apparently that was not working.

"She's a monster," he said.

"I think..." Ivan's tongue crept out over his lips, not entirely without nervousness. "I think you have to be more proactive in your efforts. Perhaps adding you to her household was an error. You need to perk her interest more than you have done, to get close enough to learn anything of value."

Alfred gaped. "I do not want her attention."

"You cannot do it?" the priest posed sourly. "Do you want to be back in the dungeons?"

A return to his cell might be better, so long as the prince didn't decide to send in his Inquisitor. "You would not send me back to the dungeon."

Ivan looked back at him carefully. "No. But I do need you to go back to her. Think of the people she has hurt, and will continue to hurt until she is stopped."

Alfred thought of his fellow aides, who had not chosen to sell their bodies as a commodity, yet had intimacy and worse demanded of them anyway. He thought of the state of the prisoners he had seen. This was an occupation his father would have been proud of; he had always talked big about how witches were there to serve the community, contrary to the condemnations of the church. Alfred groaned and sagged his forehead into his palms.

Ivan left the rooms. By the time, he'd come back, a few minutes later, Alfred had loosened his clothes and collapsed bonelessly into a plush chair. "You can relax here a few hours longer. I have asked the driver to wait."

A few hours... an oasis of safety. Chance to regroup, recover. The tension of being in that place only became fully clear upon leaving it.

"Are you going to help me?" Alfred asked huskily, looking up. He found that the priest's blushes yet managed to rejuvenate and invigorate something in him.

Ivan looked dismayed though. "You've been in her bed."

"You put me there," Alfred returned. "She didn't leave any taint! I can take care of myself."

"Can you?" Ivan searched his face.

"So now you're worried," Alfred pointed out, cattily. "Marielle thinks you're such an honourable man." His sarcasm shot through the statement.

"I am..." He scowled. "You, who don't know what honour is, would-" He stopped himself, unexpectedly, while Alfred was rolling his eyes from what constituted hardly an unfamiliar diatribe. "No, I'm sorry. That's deeply unfair of me. You're prepared to go back. I should not have cast such an insult."

Alfred was not sure he believed what he read that statement to imply. Ivan picked up his hand where it lay on the soft arm of the chair. "You wish me to lie with you? Is that what you want most, with so little time as you have? When you could be-" He made a vague gesture, which Alfred filled in with resting and doing mostly anything else.

But he was far more occupied inhaling in harsh surprise at the unanticipated offer and squirming to his feet. "Yes..." Perhaps that was too eager, but after Natalia and Toris, the chance of being in the bed of someone he liked...

He didn't give Ivan much opportunity to get the words out, tightening his fingers around the hand he'd been gifted and reaching with his free hand for Ivan's face. Moving in to kiss him, he walked the priest backward to the bed. There, he curled him over the edge of the plush mattress and pushed on top of him, pinning his hand, dragging at his clothes. Ivan's magic, unwanted and maligned a thing as it was, flared and curled into his, as if Natalia's treatment had made him more open to that. Which gave Alfred pause... But the magic in Ivan felt right, for all that the man didn't want it; felt like another layer of potential intimacy, and not a threat. Still, Alfred dialled things back, not wanting to alarm Ivan.

He would not risk anything spoiling this. He didn't think he'd ever wanted anyone so much.

Ivan groaned under him and Alfred succeeded in wresting both their pants unfastened and gaping. He reached down to handle both their rods, pulling them into his fist together. Ivan made a thin sound as Alfred's cock slid along the length of his. Alfred breathed hard and gathered concentration and thrust. Ivan mewled and clutched both hands to Alfred's ribs. The feeling of being the one in control was heady, and needed, so needed. He moved until Ivan's head was flung back prettily upon the sheets and his breaths were all but sobs as he spilled onto his own stomach and chest. Alfred kept his hand on his own cock as he let the other man's spent member free. He shifted his hips to hump Ivan's thigh as he ducked his head to plant kisses on the priest's red-bitten lips.

"I dwelt upon this for four days, having sent you to her," Ivan gasped, his hand finding Alfred's waist again, sneaking beneath his clothes. His other arm unexpectedly curled right the way around and dragged Alfred in close, tightly. "How could I forgive myself, for so using a man-"

Alfred buried his face and kissed Ivan's neck. "I'm yours to use. Just promise me back - when we're done - you won't throw me away."

Ivan groaned, not an entirely positive noise considering the question. Alfred briefly held the hope it was only because he'd felt the dampness soaking into the cloth over his thigh as Alfred came. But no. "I have never felt such things with a man before. You ask too much. I gave this much as a comfort, after what I had asked of you..."

Alfred bit him and made him yell, then rolled over and sat up.

He stayed there a minute, on top of the bedcovers, finding his balance. Ivan, after his snooty declaration, seemed to have zoned out, spread-eagled on his back.

"We will need more than sex or scandal, or even the truth, to bring down Natalia," he told Ivan, bitterly. "You have the wrong spy. Oh, I'll go back - but I don't think I can do it."

"You need to overpower her," Ivan said, rough and quiet, "as you just did me."

"She's dominant," Alfred countered, "and there are two of them. She's also less interested in fiddling with my body than with my magic."

Ivan sat up, curling his knees under himself lithely, looking at Alfred with a new spark of interest. "And there?"

"I don't know enough to - I can barely hold her back. I've never had sex with a witch who could do that before. It's like she wants to have sex with my magic, too."

"I... I felt you, back there," Ivan said slowly. "That was what you meant, wasn't it? That weird interaction. I don't have much sense of the magic - I try my best not to. But... if practice is what you need... if it would help in this endeavour..."

Apparently, he did not wish to wait for a decision. He reached for Alfred's face and let the power in their bodies intertwine. That initiative was a little too like Natalia, and Alfred stiffened, but reached up and held Ivan's arm there as he sensed imminent retreat. If it felt like Natalia's approach, after all, then all the better for practice.

He did not think either of them had ever experienced anything like the feeling of losing themselves in each other's power before.

They burst out of it together, both gasping, but Ivan thrashing and physically flinching away. Alfred was merely stunned. Despite his best intentions to practice, that had ultimately not been like Natalia.

"She's... different," he said roughly. "She can do things. We... we're the same. We touch each other, explore, but we don't change the geography." He grimaced and shrugged at Ivan's evident distress. "Sorry."

"No." Ivan shook his head. "More exposure to this sort of thing might still aid against being caught off-guard when she does it." He was trembling. "I'll... I could do it again, but... not..." He swore. "You need to go." He grabbed Alfred's arm urgently, indicating the clock on the wall. "Look how much time has passed!"

"Damn." Ivan was right. Alfred stood and started rearranging his clothing, aiming for a modicum of respectability.

"I'll try not to leave it so long before contact, this time, but... you were unavailable, these last two nights."

"We still need more resources," Alfred said, fastening his belt. "This Lady Audrey, Natalia's twin sister... does she know what you're doing? Is she an ally?" He had heard more things about the woman over the last four days, and anyone Natalia hated so much was good with him.

"She is my benefactor," Ivan said warily. "But as for this scheme..."

"Can you make of her an ally in this?" Alfred asked, a fraction desperately. "Is she a witch? If Natalia is her twin, witchcraft runs in families." He and Ivan were not enough to go against Natalia, if it came to that, even without the complication of Toris's powers, which while not on Natalia's level, Toris knew how to use far better than Ivan did his. With a third ally, equal in power to Alfred or better, they might stand a chance.

"I... have never asked."

And nor would he have touched, with he a priest and she a noble woman. Alfred grimaced.

"I'll find out, on both counts," Ivan said, with new determination. He clutched Alfred's arm. Magic played between them again, but less intrusive, more soothing and familiar. He blinked. "That's... new." He shook his head. "You must go, Alfred. Be careful. Stay safe."

His deep, soulful brown eyes looked gratifyingly agonised at the idea he must once again send Alfred away in such a fashion. Despite the seriousness of the situation, Alfred could see that the priest was at least partway ensnared, and he smiled.

As terrifying as the prospect was, Alfred couldn't escape the inevitability in Ivan's advice to be proactive. He was not going to get any closer to Natalia and Toris than he already was while he remained a passive plaything, and therefore he was not going to get anywhere at all.

Natalia had selected Chris, earlier in the day - a sulky, nervous older boy with some kind of wayward... charm, that Alfred suspected perhaps had been inflicted upon him as a joke, as it contrasted so startlingly with his dour personality. As the others retired to rest from the daily duties of the fortress, Chris nervously lingered in the main hall. In the centre of the hall, Natalia and Toris were still making a laughing spectacle of some unlucky trickster-magician - the white rabbit and card trick kind - that another courtier had sent to them as a presumed joke. Alfred lingered, too, unseen.

When they tired of mocking the trickster and sent him on his way (and really, he had no idea how lucky he was that they didn't want to keep him), they switched their attention to Chris, and Alfred came out from the shadows. He set his hand on Chris' shoulder and turned him. The other man jumped under the touch, expecting no-one else to be there.

"Go," Alfred instructed.

"I- I-" It was clear that Chris was afraid to go without Natalia's say.

"What do you think you are doing?" Natalia demanded of Alfred. Toris, highly amused, watched over her shoulder.

"You don't want him, you want me." Alfred jerked his chin up and defiantly brought all his appeal to bear - bolstered by an undercurrent of witchery to at least equal Chris' peculiar charm.

Natalia raised her eyebrows and Toris grinningly suggested to Chris, "Yes, why don't you go?"

Chris practically ran. The servants had cleared out, leaving silence under the echoing words of their exchange. Alfred was left alone in the vast, empty hall with the two sorcerers.

"I'm not like them," Alfred said.

"I had wondered if you had more to reveal." Natalia stalked a circle around him. The tension was sharp. If it snapped a certain way, the result would be unpleasant. "So you are a knowing bearer of that power I sensed."

"I need to know what to do with it," Alfred said, trying to keep the tremble out of his voice. "I need you to teach me."

She laughed. "I don't need an apprentice."

"...But maybe there are ventures for which we could use another person able to wield power." Toris stepped forward to speak in her ear, while he caressed her neck. "And I've told you I like this one, love."

"You took his place," Natalia said. "You realise that an obligation still comes with that, even were you to earn special status. We can already have you in any way we wish. You cannot think to trade access to tutelage for base seduction."

Alfred shrugged. "Also unlike them, I'm not afraid of your bed."

Natalia's smile was broad and cruel. Toris grimaced and tipped his head in a certain long-suffering gesture behind her.

They did, indeed, test him for that statement that night. They knew sex spells he did not - unsurprising, when most of his, he had created for himself - and plundered his body to its limit. But though the pleasure-pain of it did test him to his limits, it did not spill over them: he was no amateur. He could still take what they doled out and return them pleasure.

Though that became its own source of anxiety. "You came here skilled."

"It would have been... stupid... to come here with nothing," Alfred gasped.

"It was stupid to come here," Natalia said, "when you are no more than a street slut with a few tricks."

"I knew enough to keep myself clean… and enough to fool you." Alfred's heart thumped as he said the words, his breath and body strained by the precipice this discussion hung over, as well as what Toris was doing.

Natalia's fingernails dug into his face. "You did not fool me. You merely managed to offset my curiosity for a few days. Toris likes you, but aside from that spark of power within, you are dull and too old."

"Let me show you the full range of what I can do, and you won't be bored."

"If I had wanted prostitutes-"

"Oh, let him try," Toris waved dismissively, and Alfred loosed his breath slowly, trying not to display too much of relief as Toris pulled out of him and the hot aura of power that had oversensitised all his nerves around the penetration faded. "He made it this far, and he played the part of the ingénue well enough. It could be hysterical to bring him to court and throw him at Cedric, to see if the big fool nibbles the bait."

Natalia glared. "If we could do that, it could be done back to us," she hissed, and Alfred's life hung on a knife edge. "How do we know he is not my sister's? Or Brangiski's?"

Toris laughed. "If he is sending whores against us, then we are living in unprecedentedly interesting times."

The breath Alfred had been holding released. It was clear from Toris's tone how little credit he gave the idea. A good thing Alfred had already been exercising such tight control of his breathing throughout their physical activities, for it hid that reaction, too.

"You do want to keep this one," Natalia said, with a clear streak of sarcasm, the accusation of spying forgotten.

"I don't actually like your little mice, dear," Toris returned. "Full of fear and squeaking so distractingly when we play with them. I'd rather a loyal hound or trained hawk, capable of some function as well as decoration."

"Hmph." Natalia tossed her head and lay back. "Well, let us see where these vaunted skills of his really lie."

If that was meant to be challenge or threat, Alfred was on home territory now. He lay between her thighs and worked keenly until he had Natalia gasping and drumming her heels, then turned his attention back to Toris - who was easier to please anyway - once she lay sated.

"We should have been recruiting from the streets all along," Toris grunted as he finally came and Alfred swallowed him down. His fingers clutched in Alfred's hair and their spasmodic movements told of his pleasure.

"Only if you want nibbets and raging croides from most of them," Alfred said. "I told you, I'm unique."

His change of relationship with Natalia and Toris did not bring with it any ease in tension. After that first night, he learned that Natalia not only intended to take the request of apprenticeship seriously - and that her tutoring could be a horror in itself - but that she regarded his magic as offered up to be as much her plaything as his body.

His practice with Ivan helped him a little, and he was able to keep some private core safe from her, yet he still trembled with her hands on his shoulders and her power delving into his, widening out and changing things within him... To make him more useful to her, she said.

No man was worth this, and hell with Ivan- Yet Alfred was already here, and there was no escape for him, no change of mind available in these circumstances. He had to endure.

With the ordeal came trust, however, and a few days later, he found himself sent alone on a mission into the city. Where Ivan met him.

Once again, it had been four days, and Alfred was not blind to the manner Ivan had shadowed him for quite some time before finally revealing himself. After Alfred had stepped up his campaign to get close to Natalia, it was the first opportunity of any kind Ivan would have had to make contact in person, but after promising he wouldn't let things go so long this time, he could at least have sent a message through Marielle.

"Do you think I'm watched?" was Alfred's first low question, though. He resisted the urge to look around. It had not been difficult to pick Ivan out of the crowd, but then he was very aware of Ivan, of the feel of the other man's presence - perhaps, after their magic had linked, that awareness was even on a whole new level.

Ivan's face was noncommittal. He said, "I've heard some alarming tales from Marielle of what you've been doing. Witchcraft rites with Natalia and Toris..."

"You wanted me to get close to them." Alfred gripped his arm, dismayed and offended. "I don't want to do these things. I don't like her touching my magic. They can have sex with almost whoever takes their fancy, I wasn't going to be able to get close enough that way. Revealing myself as a full witch and asking to learn from her was the best I could come up with to make this work!"

Ivan stared at him, taking in his anger; and it was possible he'd come across as more rattled than he would have wanted to let on. But Ivan pushed aside his doubts and said, "All right," with demonstrated relief. "We don't have a lot of time, Marielle said, but I thought I could rent one of the rooms over the Fleece... If you want that."

Alfred swallowed and said nothing, merely followed him through the push of the crowd and entered the nearby inn. He made himself Ivan's shadow, waiting while the priest - in dark-coloured regular clothes today instead of priestly attire - made the transaction with the man behind the bar.

Ivan's whore, that was what he was, he thought sourly. Those who could overhear the exchange at the bar would know. He had become a witchfinder's whore. With the power Natalia offered, if his pretended allegiances were real, as Ivan had suspected of him after he had risked so much-! To think he had laid himself bare to the most powerful magic-user he'd ever encountered, for the priest's sake! As Natalia's shadow, at least sooner or later there would be a possibility of gaining enough power and influence he'd never have to do this again.

But he shuddered and balked. The cost was too high. Ivan might not be much of a priest, but he at least seemed on the side of minimising harm rather than causing it. The harm Natalia did...

Alone in the plush room, Alfred sat on the end of the bed. He got as far as kicking his shoes off, and then stopped.

"You don't want to do this?" Ivan asked. He'd unbuttoned his gentleman's jacket, and placed it on the back of a chair. "You were eager before. I had even come to accept-" He pressed his lips shut and fell silent. "Perhaps I was inconsiderate. These last days have clearly been an ordeal. Look upon this, then, merely as a place to talk in safety."

Alfred nodded slowly and sagged his head toward his knees, just at the thought of some place to relax.

"I had resolved to risk my body," he said, after a moment, "But not my magic. I do not know how to deal with people such as these."

Ivan sank down next to him, collar loose and hair flowing. "Prostitution doesn't seem a natural partner for witchcraft and herb lore," he mused. "How did you come to this trade?"

Alfred frowned and shook his head, angered by the question. "I watched them burn my father. I was... seventeen. I was ready to use my magic, to do something to stop them. But there were too many for one boy to fight. And I could feel him willing me to cowardice."

Ivan made an oddly distressed noise, and put his hand on Alfred's thigh, rubbing warmly, soothing.

"I made the decision... I would not trade in magic under the trappings of hedge remedies as he had done. I would trade something else. My ability... lends itself well to choosing to feel or not-feel, to enhance feeling in others. I could both offer my body and keep it my own at the same time."

He shook his head. "I should have taken greater chances. Perhaps I would be as they are, then, someone who studies the magic, who made themselves powerful. But... in a different way." He shot a furtive look at Ivan, not wanting him to misunderstand. "Someone who used it for better purposes. Better than them, and better than a street-"

"Don't." Ivan's touch grew harder, and he reached his other hand across his body to set on Alfred's shoulder. "You did what you needed to at the time. There is still time to do more. You are in the process of great deeds brought to your door by the virtue of who you are, and the chance that allowed me to employ you."

"'Employ'?" Alfred curled his tongue around the word. Use was a better one. Alfred was getting paid only in sex and distrust.

"I am sorry I doubted you," Ivan said, sharply. "If we are not going to do the rest, then with what time we have, are you able to tell me anything about your mission today?"

Alfred sighed and pulled the messenger satchel from his shoulder. "She gave me a box to deliver. I didn't open it."

It was a very small, ornate box. Ivan's fingers unfastened the ribbons and it fell apart in a shape like a flower. He startled and paled as what looked like a tiny ball of soot was revealed, cradled in the centre.

Alarm bells rang inside Alfred's head even before the thing rose, levitating slowly, and seemed to veer drunkenly between the two of them, as though in a kind of indecision. Alfred held up his hand and willed, stop, and it dropped back into the box-flower, rolling to the space in the centre again. He grabbed the box from Ivan and snapped it closed.

Ivan was trembling. "That... I've seen that before."

Alfred was tying the ribbons with fervour, into far tougher and less ornate knots than they had been to begin with. It was fortunately secured when Ivan grabbed him, hard, and the box rolled onto the bed, though Alfred's eyes followed it first in sharp alarm.

"I have seen that before!" the priest repeated, his eyes wide and his pale face sheened with sweat. "What she did to me..." He started to unlace his shirt.

Ivan had been so guarded about his skin, and Alfred had particularly never seen his chest. He learned why as flickering handprints were revealed across Ivan's body. They held a shimmer of black and gold, that changed without it being in any way a factor of how the light caught them. They were overlain in places, some slightly overlapping the others, patchwork and messy. At least a dozen of them... Alfred stood and slowly circled him as Ivan dropped his hands down and waited through the examination.

"This is how she gave you magic?" Alfred said. "She used those things and... laid hands on you?"

"They must be some physical form of raw power. I had not truly connected it before now, only thought it the nature of whatever spell she used at the time. But to see that thing, to see it move like that-"

Alfred nodded. "I sensed it was drawn to the magic in both of us." He'd also sensed that it meant them nothing good, which made him fear for what it would do to its intended recipient. "I cannot deliver this and bring harm to someone else for her."

"I'll take it, and I'll talk to him," Ivan said. "We can foster the appearance that something has happened, without alerting her that her 'gift' was never delivered."

Alfred nodded, relieved.

Standing at the end of the bed, they looked at each other, Ivan bared with all Natalia's handprints upon him. Alfred tentatively reached out and touched one, mapping his fingers to the smaller hand. Magic sang under his palm.

"It's not evil," he said. "She made it a part of you, or else you already had a little, unrealised, and she built upon that. Many people do, to varying degrees."

Ivan grimaced and shook his head, not wanting to know. But he reached out to touch Alfred in return, stepping into his space and also pinning the hand that touched him. "We have more time now, if you're not delivering this."

More natural desires stirred in Alfred once more, after the scared-sick control that sex had been about during the last few days. He touched his free hand to Ivan's face, curling fingers around his jaw and brushing Ivan's lips with his thumb. "Has the priest come to want to be seduced?"

"I wasn't always a priest," Ivan said, wryly. "There was a time I would never have imagined myself taking up the cloth."

Alfred closed his eyes a moment, sliding his hand down the other man's cheek and listening to the rustle of beard beneath his skin's passage. "You went to the church right after she made you a witch."

"I thought the Lord could drive the magic out. Truth is, I don't think He ever even tried." Ivan's mouth twitched down at the corners, under Alfred's now very intently focused gaze. "Truth is, I'm not so convinced any more that it's the evil the Church and the Law would have it."

"Natalia's is," Alfred said, then kissed him.

It was a different kind of lovemaking, this time. They bared themselves fully for the first time, stripping the rest of their clothes by increments as they touched, and felt, and tasted. Natalia's handprints were an affront to Alfred's witch-sight, but he tried to disregard them in favour of the man beyond.

When they were fully naked, stretched out on the hired sheets, bodies golden in the lamplight and the filter of the heavy drapes on the windows, Ivan took the pot of scented lotion that had been provided on the hired room's dresser from Alfred's fingers. "I will," he said. "I'll do this."

Alfred frowned, trying to figure out quite what shade of meaning that held. His face was very close to Ivan's, though, and the intent was backed firmly by Ivan's expression - and his underlying anxiety. "You've never been with a man like that," Alfred protested.

"I've never been with a man either way," Ivan said. "But your clients, they - you-" He flushed, his skin darkening amusingly.

"Usually it's that way around," Alfred agreed. "That's why-?"

"I won't be a client of that sort," Ivan insisted. "Even if you're working for me."

Alfred held out his hand for the lotion to be returned, seeing that it was a tenderly-meant gesture. "I can still do the preparation, if you like?"

Ivan looked entirely too nervous to muster words of response, and Alfred took the lotion from him anyway, unable to help but laugh. "I'll distract you while I do it. Don't be afraid if at first it feels a little uncomfortable or strange." He slid his mouth onto Ivan's cock, and slid slick fingers into Ivan's hole, and enjoyed drawing the most remarkable noises from him.

When he crawled back up the other man's body and, chest to back, begun to press into him, Ivan drew in breath with a tone like he was discovering something remarkable. Alfred kissed his shoulder and held him close and moved very slowly, easing the other man into the experience.

With the novelty and intensity, Ivan did not last very long, and Alfred pulled out with a mind to finish off between Ivan's thighs and the solid slabs of muscle that formed his buttocks. Ivan grunted unintelligibly and urged them to turn around. Face to face, he took Alfred's cock in his hand - an odd wonder in his face that made Alfred realise he'd taken it inside himself before he'd ever so much as taken it in his hand. The erotic addition of the priest's odd shyness sent Alfred over the edge in just a few strokes. He grunted Ivan's name and reached to entangle his retreating fingers.

"We... really must clean up and be leaving," Ivan wheezed, spoiling the fantasy.

"Try to find the black blobs - her power source - or how she attains them," was the course of action Ivan had given him, this time, adding, "Send me a message via Marielle when you do. I will be ready, and let us both pray that it also provides us with her weakness."

Alfred had nodded but had said, "You pray. You're the priest." He did not voice how Ivan's stunt of offering himself had thoroughly melted his heart and how he longed for the next time he could be with the other man with a new fervour. Ivan's assertions - with his words, with his body - though not direct, they seemed indicative of wanting a partner in Alfred who was an equal. Dare Alfred assume...?

No, he told himself. Quite simply, Ivan surely had a life of his own to return to once he had achieved his goal of bringing down Natalia. It was as surely a life that someone like Alfred had no place within.

He returned to Natalia. Ivan had given him enough, with what the priest knew pertaining to her targeted noble, for Alfred to convince her the meeting between them had taken place as planned and he had passed on his nasty delivery. Alfred's own unpleasant contact with the black sphere was enough to supply, in answer to Natalia's question of how the gift had been received, "He looked shocked. I left quickly."

"Hmph." She remarked with ill temper, "Next time, stay and observe, or how are you to learn, let alone report back to me the look on his face as he implodes."

Alfred hid his wince. "What was it?" he dared ask. "The thing that was in the box."

"Power, instructed to shape," she responded caustically.

"How do you form it into such a thing, outside of a person?" Alfred truly had never heard of any such feat, in all his learnings about witchcraft. People carried magical power. It could be imbued in objects, like an enchanted or cursed weapon. He had never heard of anyone managing to siphon it into a raw physical form.

"More advanced than your level," she said dismissively. "Patience, apprentice." As much as she'd said she wanted nothing of apprentices, she seemed to enjoy slinging the word at him.

He watched them closely the rest of the day and into evening. He thought that the black substance was on Natalia's mind. Maybe they - she and Toris - would try to work with it, or create more of it, soon. He hoped it hadn't come from a living person, but he was terribly afraid that was ultimately what they were using the prisoners for. A shudder ran through him.

At the point of the evening after Natalia and Toris had dismissed everyone, he stayed, risking all to lean unobtrusive against the wall and spy on them, veiled by a swath of heavy drapes by a window. He tried to curl back his own magic upon itself, clouding his presence against their discovery. Hopefully also against eyes and ears, so long as he didn't physically stand right in front of someone and make himself impossible to ignore.

"There is some activity in court that I don't quite understand," Toris said to Natalia, across the room. Toris had been out of the residence most of the day, Alfred had heard from the report of the other staff. "Getting rid of Vince will undoubtedly diminish her support, but there is word that your sister entertained a visitor."

"I suppose she must still have entertainments," Natalia said scathingly, even as Alfred's insides turned chill. Ivan, he thought. Did they mean Ivan, visiting the Lady Audrey? "Her gathering support base is a secondary matter, when she lacks the power to challenge me again, either mystically or politically. Come, now, stop being coy. The identity of this 'visitor'?"

Toris shrugged. "A man, cloaked. We have no spies in her household itself, as you know - her people are so depressingly loyal - and he did not show his face outside. He proved annoyingly adept at losing the tail we put on him afterward."

"Too adept?" Natalia asked sharply, but Toris shrugged again. Alfred was almost too distracted by relief to catch the implications of her next words. "We must prepare more aether source. Some kind of confrontation is looming. I can feel it."

Alfred watched the two of them exchange glances. Then Natalia gave a tight, decided nod. They went to another of the heavy drapes decorating the walls and pulled back the curtain to reveal a hidden door. Natalia opened the door with a key taken from around her neck.

There was an amulet that Natalia only ever took off to hang on the corner of her bed frame at night; a sphere the size of a small egg on the end of a chain. It was this she had cracked to take out the key.

The curtain pulled closed after them and Alfred waited several seconds before daring to follow and try the door. They had left it unlocked - and when he opened it, he discovered that the door only locked from without. In fact, the door was-

-an illusion, of sorts. Alfred was in a cave, surrounded by huge slabs of cold rock on all sides. A green glow seemed to illuminate the whole of the place, and Natalia and Toris were standing a matter of ten or twelve feet from him, within the cave's centre.

There was a dizzying pull, churning within him, at the same time as utter panic slammed through him at how close he was to the enemy. Somehow, he managed to hold himself and his magic together, and control his breathing enough that he did not alert them with noise. The spell he was using held, and they were distracted, and they did not see him, engaged as they were.

Something else had happened as he stepped through the threshold. This place felt... perhaps not so much unnatural, since it had its own pattern and place, but not natural to this world. Clearly, when the door he had entered had been located a flight of stairs up from ground level in Natalia's residence, and its interior lay underground, they had crossed some boundary of space. Had they even crossed worlds?

It felt more than alien enough to fit that theory.

Natalia and Toris were distracted, locked in a process that seemed to be calling power up from the firmament. The magic felt raw in the cavern, a heavy and unpleasant feeling, scratching at Alfred's senses. Had he not been accidentally shielded already by his veiling spell, stepping into it would have been much worse. Even with the spell, he couldn't tune it out.

Together, Natalia and Toris teased the magic to ooze out of the rocks and come to them. It came in the form of black stuff like oil, moving in threads on its own, twisting, organic, reactive. But they called it into their hands and then crushed it, and it became solid, dead and ominous, turning into those soot-black balls the like of which she had wanted him to deliver, and had also once used to bestow unwanted witchcraft upon Ivan.

Alfred dared to touch his hand to the rock face near him, and felt the power stir there. He knew he could call it out of the rocks, if he tried, though its source was innately different from his own magic. He wondered if it would twist him to use it, the same way it had twisted Toris and Natalia. He broke the connection and stepped away.

Toris and Natalia were finishing, and it hit him abruptly that if he did not leave, they would see him. He couldn't hide himself and stay in the cave to investigate further, because they would lock the door from the outside and trap him. He backed out quickly and quietly, keeping control of his panic as he half-fell through the curtains and his stomach lurched with the re-entry to the ordinary world.

But, this was enough, surely? If he could take the key, that would give them control over Natalia's power source. It was not helpful that she had only just made herself a new supply of those soot-balls of power, but at least she had a limited number of them.

First, he had to tell Marielle to pass on what he'd learned to Ivan, as well as the news that Toris knew someone had been paying visits to Lady Audrey. Which meant that whatever they were going to do, they had to act soon.

He hurried away to find the scribe.

Alfred remained unsure of what Ivan's system was for passing on these messages, but he received his reply in little over an hour: I have arranged with the Lady Audrey to act at dawn tomorrow. Natalia dislikes to rise too early with the morning, so we will strike in the early hours. If you are able, take the key while she sleeps and either leave the residence to join us, or wait on hand to join our attack from within, as circumstances dictate.

Alfred ground his teeth as he read the note, then destroyed it more forcefully than necessary. It was going to be horrendously risky taking the key from Natalia, yet Ivan thought that he could do it, just like that.

He decided to wait until the small hours of the morning to take the key, timing the risk as close to the attack as possible, leaving the least chance for Natalia to notice the theft. For his plan to work, he would have to lie still and awake beside them throughout most of the night.

Alfred did his best to tire them out, using all his charms and skills - non-magical, for the most part - to build up their ardour and keep them going, and trying to encourage, where he could, the bulk of the activity between the two of them, facilitating their lovemaking rather than becoming a part of it, whereupon he'd likely only succeed in tiring himself out.

He almost did, anyway; dozed, afterward, but fortunately awoke while the darkness was still in force. He eased his way out from between them under the sheets, wriggling down the bed and out of the bottom. He disentangled himself, then crept to the head of the bed where Natalia's amulet hung. Holding his breath, he reached his fingers toward it. The magical protections he felt weren't unexpected, but they were complex. He lost track of how much time he spent, standing there, trying to ease his way around them.

Natalia's magic was strong and clever, but he was no novice. He had worked with these tools his whole life. He was pleased when the resistance in the trinket finally caved and it recognised him, let him safely touch it and take it up...

Natalia's hand snaked up from the bed and clamped around his wrist. "I knew you would turn thief the instant you had a whiff of real power," she hissed.

Alfred yelped and dropped the locket. It bounced and cracked open upon the floor. Natalia was standing up, her other hand rising to his throat. He tried to resist her physically, but her stronger magic knocked him back. He realised he wasn't going to be able to fight her. Instead, he managed to kick the fallen key under the bed and stamp the locket closed under his foot as he pretended to merely stumble back and away...

"You..." Power crackled in the air. Natalia's eyes were wild and full of darkness. Toris sluggishly grunted a question and turned over in the sheets behind her, arms flailing out for either one of his bed partners to slightly absurd effect. "So greedy for power, are you, that you came to steal mine? Well, then..."

Alfred was horrified as he felt the energies gather to realise he knew what she was going to do. "Don't!"

Like Ivan, in reverse. As she had done in the cave, when she drew power from the rocks. She clawed her hand in the centre of his bare chest while he was pinned in place and...

Pain. A hundred pinpricks of agony as his resisting, reluctant magic was forced out through his skin. He opened his mouth but no sound would come out, even though to scream would have been a release. He watched his magic run in tiny black rivers into her hand, until his sense of what was happening closed in to the sight of that alone - until even the pain had diminished, as he lacked enough of witch-senses anymore to feel a supernatural injury - until she had taken everything, and he watched her crush it to just another of those soot-balls in her hand.

She let go of everything at once and he fell to his knees, choking on his despair and inability to believe what had just happened. Not only had he failed Ivan, he had-

He'd lost his magic. Lost everything-

Natalia's key sparkled from his vantage, tucked under the bed, out of her sight as she bent to pick up the closed locket. It hardly seemed to matter. What did he care about that, about Ivan or any of them now?

But...

He hadn't failed Ivan yet, and there was raw power lying around everywhere on the other side of the door that key opened. Maybe there was still hope.

Alfred scrabbled to regain his feet. He didn't want either Natalia or Toris coming down to floor level. "Give it back!" he howled. "My magic - you-!" The protest would be expected, and the despair was not necessary to feign.

"If you are a very good servant, and prove yourself loyal and true, then after many years, I might consider allowing that," Natalia said. "Or consider giving you some magic back. I think that I like the taste of this too well to part from it." She held up the black sphere and crushed it.

Alfred watched the powdery residue sink into her palm.

"No..." But it was too late. She showed him her clean hand, then shoved him away with it as he reached for her. His head hit the headboard and he fell on top of Toris.

"Now," Natalia said, "I need to know if you were working with someone else."

Alfred stared at her dumbly. He no longer had any magic to stop her taking what she wanted from him. But he mustered: he had to at least try: he held to the fore of his brain all the confused outrage of his false persona. The man who'd wanted to sleep his way into their affections, who just wanted the power. Who the hell would he be working with, it wasn't like he had any intention to share?

He wasn't sure if it worked, but then she shook her head and said, "We don't have time for this. If he was stealing the key for someone else, they could be coming here now. Toris! Find something to bind him."

Toris's sluggishness earned further ire from her, and in the end it was Natalia who tied Alfred's wrists to the headboard using Toris's belt. She seized her sleepy consort and dragged him out.

Alfred, appalled and shaken as he was, still knew exactly what he was doing if he let anyone tie him up, and knew how to hold his wrists to ensure his easiest possible freedom if necessary. It took him only a short few minutes and minor scrapes of skin to attain his freedom. He was breathing in heavy gasps more from what had happened before than from that effort.

The determination that had ploughed him through extricating himself took him as far as the great hall, reeling across its wide, empty floor with Natalia's key in his hand.

Why had he thought this was any kind of hope? He no longer had the witchcraft to manipulate the raw power in the cave if he went inside. So much of the world was dead to him, lost now. He could not give himself his own power back...

Only anger and fury, and probably outright lingering shock, kept his eyes dry... Those, and a new hope, rising in him.

Ivan could, perhaps, restore his power. Lady Audrey, too - she might be a more likely bet, assuming she had greater knowledge and control of her gift.

Either way, Alfred had the key. He held the only access to Natalia's power source. Though he had never held it while he could feel the energies within it, it was surely more than just a key. No regular lock, this, that could be picked, the door no regular door that might be broken.

He could no longer stand by his allies with magic, but he had done this much. Now he had to warn them, if he could. Natalia knew they were coming...

Where did Natalia keep the 'aether source' once she'd extracted it? She had taken his magic inside herself, but surely she couldn't keep all of it that way? ...Though it might explain why her power was so overwhelming. Well… wherever she kept it, if they could not part her from it physically, they would have to wear her down; force her to expend everything she'd taken...

Being down a witch was going to make all the difference, Alfred realised. Ivan was expecting his support.

Marielle. Marielle had power... not on the scale of Natalia, or Toris, or his own lost witchcraft, but could she restore him, if not actively help to fight Natalia herself?

...Marielle could also be in danger, if they were looking for spies. He should not ask her to risk exposure - or risk herself in a potentially dangerous magical exercise - for his own gain. He should get her and the key out of there while they could still leave.

He didn't like it. He wanted his magic back now. The absence hurt; gaping within him. But it would be better to regroup and retreat. The priority had to be warn and escape. The key was a victory in of itself, but not if they were fool enough to hand it straight back to Natalia. Ivan would surely also suffer if he arrived only to be caught by his enemy, unawares.

Alfred had to go now.

It was maybe the hardest thing he had ever done, to turn his back and relegate his lost witchcraft to later. He re-dressed hurriedly in his room, forcing a hole in the lining of his jacket to hide the key. Then he went to find Marielle.

He'd initially been afraid he'd be picked up just wandering the corridors, no longer having the ability to hide himself. But the rest of the staff were used to seeing him around, and seeing him enjoying special privileges in the bargain. Still, when a hand tapped the back of his shoulder, he thought it was all over. He spun...

...Marielle. She'd found him first - fortunate perhaps, before he caused a stir searching for her down the corridor where the female staff resided.

"-You scared me," he gasped, as she was still quailing from her fright at him coming around on her swinging.

She'd grabbed his arm to stay off a blow. Now, she stared at her fingers, clearly puzzled. "You... Something's different."

"I was caught," Alfred said roughly. "We need to warn Ivan and get out."

"But the plan...!"

"Natalia suspects someone's coming, even if she hasn't managed to link everything through me yet. She's been... taking magic... from some other place that's saturated in it. She can take it from people, too. She took it from me."

"Oh!" Marielle clearly understood the loss; he could see it in her face. "We'll... we'll fix it." Her hand returned to his arm, this time with a soft pat, an offer of comfort. "But we must be quick and leave now! It's almost time!"

"I needed to fetch you. We all need to get far away from here. Do you know where they'll be trying to enter?"

She nodded. "I was about to go down and let them in."

Ivan was already at the back door, accompanied by a hooded lady at his shoulder, when Marielle opened it. The guard outside stood frozen like a statue against the wall, in no natural pose. Alfred thought he caught a glimpse of bright hair under the edges of Lady Audrey's hood, cast into relief by silver moonlight reflection, but he couldn't sense her magic.

"...Alfred?" Ivan seemed to sense something was wrong as soon as he saw him. Alfred surged toward him, feeling relief at the comparative safety - or at least friendly company - and Ivan gripped his arms. "What happened?" It wasn't the lack of magic Ivan noticed, too unpracticed to note the difference in his touch. Ivan would not be able to help much in a stand against Natalia, Alfred thought heavily.

"She took my magic," he said, a lump in his throat with the admission, no time to hold back for his own shame. "We need to run. It's not all lost, but we can't face her now."

"Took...?" Ivan's expression was startled, and it filled momentarily with longing. It should have been an expected betrayal. Of course it wasn't something he would understand.

Alfred's rage blazed, and he shoved Ivan in the chest, punching him away with the heels of both hands. "Because of you!" he choked, only just managing to stifle the words from being yelled. "Because you made me go after her, she took my magic! I did everything you wanted-!"

Ivan whooped for breath and, doubled over, dragged his head up with visible difficulty to stare at Alfred with stricken eyes, realising his mistake. "I didn't mean-"

"No, it's only what you want, isn't it? You think we're all damned, so you think this is a reprieve...!"

Alfred was ready to go for him again, his outrage at what had happened soaring, uncontrollable, finding its only available target. Ivan had used him, had stuck him in this deal and as a consequence-! It would have been better to risk the jail and the citadel's 'justice'!

Two hands cut in and pushed them apart before he could do anything more. "Stop! We can't fight each other, and absolutely not here. If we must retreat-" Lady Audrey looked at Alfred, waiting for clarification.

He was stunned by her, now she'd pulled the hood back to confront them. Blonde hair and grey eyes reflecting the moonlight. She was almost the image of Natalia. Oh, Natalia's hair was a shade darker, her eyes crueller... He could tell them apart... But it was uncanny, all the same. "She - she knows you're coming," he stammered. "You... You're-"

"Twins, yes," Audrey said dryly. "I know that look from too many people who've been on the wrong side of her. And you're right, we should go."

"Oh, surely not!" cooed a familiar voice, and it was the same voice. Their words overlapped so that Alfred was hearing it from two directions at once. "Don't stop fighting on my account. So... it was you, after all, darling Alfred. I took you for too mercenary and brazen to be working for anyone but yourself. So clearly professional in your experience between the sheets. It's a shame. Toris will miss you." Toris was a step behind her, pouting.

Natalia's voice turned more clipped as she changed her focus. "Sister. It has been some time."

"Go," said Alfred, roughly, stepping forward and stretching his hand out to gesture the others back.

"Alfred," Ivan objected.

Natalia's lips were curled into a mocking smile for Ivan as she jeered, "I can't believe you became a priest! Really, now, I remember you as a fine sinner, so many dirty deals and underhand acts. Oh, but look what happens as soon as magic is in the picture! Of course that would besmirch your soul, as all the rest never did!"

Alfred darted a look at his face - Ivan looked stricken, his plans falling down around him.

"Don't listen to her, go!" Alfred cried again, and swung on Natalia and Toris, letting his venom and despair out in full. "You took my magic!" He stripped his jacket and flung it at Ivan as though casually, only having a split second to try and tell Ivan with his eyes how important that was, before he wheeled back around and yanked up his sleeves, completing the gesture of a manoeuvre made with intent to fight them. "I want it back!" Being recaptured was not worse than being forever without his witchcraft. He had thought he could run, but he could not.

At least if he stayed, they might someday return it to him. And he could provide a distraction, now, to allow the escape of everyone else. "Go, Ivan," he ordered again.

Ivan... was not going, the jacket clutched by one sleeve, but dangling limp and almost unnoticed in his hand.

"Everyone, go!" Audrey ordered, and Natalia squawked surprise as the thrown spell hit her and glimmered between the two women like a wall. "This will hold them, but not for long."

Alfred still hesitated. His feet refused to carry him away from his lost magic, or any chance of getting it back. "Lady, she took my magic..."

"Yes, Alfred!" Natalia hissed, pounding upon Audrey's invisible wall, clawing at it. "Run away with them! Abandon any chance you'll ever be a witch again!"

"Alfred, please." Ivan's hand touched his shoulder, the other offered in front of him. "I - I'm so sorry. But... please." His eyes were wide and dark and strained. "Come back with me."

"Both of you!" Audrey snapped, her skin pale and damp with effort. "I do not know everything about the methods she uses, but if she took it, took it all, it may be that she cannot return it, unlike she would have you believe."

Toris's expression turned appalled, as he grabbed at his consort. "You didn't take it all?!"

"Of course not!" Natalia said quickly, but she had been very angry, and Alfred could read the lie in her face - along with the unexplained horror on Toris's.

"Alfred, Alfred... Please! Come with me!" The earnest desperation in Ivan's voice reached Alfred at last. He was starting to turn as Natalia's hand ripped through Audrey's spell with a shrill sound as if the fabric of reality was tearing.

"You prince of hypocrites, Brangiski!" Too long I let you languish, thinking your misery and self-hate well worth your little plots against me. Tolerating your continued anguished existence! You sent a whore and a witch to ingratiate and spy on me?! Then I say, enough! I have toyed with you long past the point where you have become too troublesome to live, wretch!"

"Sister, no!" Audrey raised her hand to make a reply that would not be mustered in time. Alfred had no magic left with which to protect. The only thing he could do was to try drag Ivan out of the way. If Natalia's intended death-strike tagged him, too, then after all, what did he have left to lose?

He was not sure what happened at first. The spell fizzed around him, and he felt it, and knew it had... confusion blossomed, along with the knowledge he was about to die. At least he had the satisfaction of knowing he'd blocked it from Ivan. Ivan's hands gripped Alfred's arms and horrified eyes stared into his as if he could will him not to die. Alfred did not have the same sense of the energy as he would have had before... when he had been a witch. The air crackled. Then it was as if the energy was swallowed up. His stomach dropped and the hairs on his skin flattened. Darkness seemed to rush inward on him...

It left, just as abruptly. Natalia or Audrey cried out and he staggered, blinking around only to find to his startlement that it had been Natalia who cried out in pain, and it was Natalia, now, who was a slumped shape on the ground, with Toris desperately falling to his knees beside her and Audrey running to join him.

"...Natalia, you fool...!"

"Dead..." Toris gabbled, shocked, breathless. "She is dead. Oh, love, your fool temper..."

"She is dead," Audrey said, mustering, "and by her own hand. There is nothing we can do for her. And it is for the best."

"What did she do to him?" Ivan lunged, leaving Alfred standing blankly and still so unclear what had happened at all. When Ivan tried to grab Toris, the more experienced witch drove his hands back, and Alfred moved to intervene. Restraining Toris, he could feel, after a fashion, all of Toris's attempts at spells sliding off him. Not the way he'd been able to feel magic before, like it was a living thing inside him, but in a sort of absence and repulsion as they tried to find purchase. The sense of it was growing stronger all the time.

"You..." A final gurgle and Toris's efforts to use magic ceased. He looked hurt and worn-down by his exertions, his face strained. "There were... prisoners, early on, who she drained completely. We had to kill them - using mundane means, we killed them - before we could ever study them properly. No magic would work upon them. Even the small spells in the cells and around the fortress were unstable around them. We could only surmise that everyone is meant to have at least a little magic. When you take that away, something... else comes in to fill up the gap. She was... she must have been too distracted by anger. You understand? We always left a little."

Audrey whispered, "Such a thing..."

"Alfred, please, I always liked you," Toris begged. "You know that." Certainly he had liked Alfred's body. "I didn't do this...! If you let them turn me in, I will be burned."

"I..." Alfred's grip faltered. It was true, and he still could not submit another witch to that fate.

Audrey sighed and put her hand on Toris's arm. "I will not let them burn you, Toris." She ran her gaze over Alfred and Ivan. "I will take charge of him. I will take charge... of all of it." She raised her chin and her eyes slid over the outer walls of the fortress.

She looked so like Natalia, and some new sense in Alfred could feel a push-pull in the energy fields between them, like they were point and counterpoint, that was fading even as the blood settled in Natalia's corpse.

"Natalia..." Toris sighed, his eyes rising from the slumped, dead woman to the living one, filling with such morose hope.

"You were never her sister," Alfred said with sudden inspiration.

Audrey tipped her shoulder. "A magical accident, handling too much raw power... aether, we called it. I am the parts of Natalia that Natalia rejected."

Alfred stumbled a step back. "How... how did I sense you were linked? I don't understand. If she took everything... Am I still a witch or not?"

"You are far from ordinary," Audrey said, frowning, "but as to what you are, that is something nobody yet understands. I will have to do more study. Perhaps once I have mastered all the secrets of Natalia's experiments, the things she learned since we were split which lie sealed and hidden within this stronghold, I will be able to tell you more."

Alfred hissed air through his teeth as he remembered the key. He gestured urgently for Ivan to return his jacket, located the key in the lining and pulled it loose. "Here. Here. This is the key to the secrets of Natalia's stronghold."

Despite all he had lost, he appreciated Toris's gawping amazement, while Ivan's proud eyes gave him a feeling of warmth.

"I did not realise," said Ivan, folding his hand over Alfred's elbow.

"I had hoped you would later, and at least kept hold of the jacket until then," Alfred retorted.

Ivan's face formed into a slightly squashed expression. "Well, it's yours, so I wasn't planning to... It smells of you." He lifted the torn fabric to his lips in awkward demonstration, the gesture oddly shy and sweet.

"This was well done, on everyone's part." Audrey looked between them and then beyond them, to encompass Marielle. "She could not be allowed to continue." She returned her gaze to Alfred. "We will find out what your altered status means... If your powers can ever truly be restored to what they were. Ivan - I can teach you to use your gift. Unwanted as it is, it should nonetheless be understood. And Marielle... I trust you to guide me through the secrets of Natalia's fortress... A more reliable guide than Toris, I do suspect. Will you return with me?"

"Oh!" Marielle wrapped her arms around herself and swayed, pale with the strain of everything that had been happening around her. "I... yes, I suppose so."

"Alfred, there is place for you here, still, if you also wish to stay and be a part of these enquiries." Audrey raised her eyebrows. "A place that does not require you to warm anyone's bed." The addition was directed at both Toris and Ivan.

"-He is coming with me," Ivan cut in, and his hand caught and very firmly held onto Alfred's. "Where he will most certainly be warming my bed," he added, although it made his face darken with blushes so fierce they were visible on him even in shadow.

Despite his elicited promises, and the signs that he had wanted to read so much into, Alfred had still thought that once their spy game was over, it would all be over. Caught off-guard, he hesitated. "You truly mean that?"

"We can return here tomorrow, or any time you wish to explore Natalia's research," Ivan said. "But... if you wish it..." His voice faltered. He looked away, uncertain. "Your home could be with me."

"Surely that would be-" Alfred started.

...Too scandalous for a priest, by far.

"A whore?" Toris chuckled. "Oh, Brangiski..."

Alfred glared at him. "Last I checked, you had the same taste."

"Shush, Toris," Audrey reprimanded. "As for the rest of you, do not worry about this one. He will remain under permanent house arrest. I do not think he will get any untoward ideas. After all, I know him very well."

Arms encircled Alfred from behind and breath curled against his ear, lips pressed warm and damp against his neck. "What do you say?" Ivan whispered, kissing his neck. "Everyone else is where they belong. Come home with me tonight."

Alfred nodded, feeling breath and lips shift against his skin. "...All right, I will."

It occurred to him slowly as they journeyed back in Ivan's awaiting coach, across the darkened city, that they were not headed back to the citadel and Ivan's priestly chambers, but somewhere else. Alfred grasped the edge of the window and looked out uncertainly, trying to determine their route, and the reason.

"What is it?" Ivan asked.

"Where are we going?"

"My home." Ivan swallowed. "I was not always a priest, as Natalia was free to point out. If we are to be together, it seems there are ties which I must cut."

"You would-?" Alfred, startled, shook his head and gave up, not knowing quite what to articulate into words. Ivan's hand on his shoulder drew him back, and he made an effort to relax against the hard rest of the seat, with Ivan's declarations of intent buzzing in his head.

He did not know what he should make of this relationship. He had felt the pull of attraction to Ivan from the very beginning. Maybe it had been Ivan's own magic, as for the first time in his life he felt the call of someone who could match him like-for-like.

No longer. Alfred had lost his magic, and in the normal world, he was not equal to Ivan. As compounded by his first sight of what Ivan termed his 'home' - a walled noble's compound on the edges of the city. Alfred's spirits sunk into his boots, and his skin prickled in horror. "This is-?"

Ivan smiled and nodded, and raised his hand through the window to the guard at the gate, who did not look surprised.

"Oh, no-" Alfred reached for the carriage door. "I am not coming, not to be some playboy lord's toy." Not after Toris and Natalia, and the things Natalia had said about Ivan when he was not a priest. "I will take care of myself, and go work for Audrey."

Ivan piled out of the carriage after him, his face cut with confusion and dismay. "Why should this change anything? I thought you would be pleased, for look, here - I have the means to finance whatever we decide to do. Whether to support the cause of witchery used right, or to target those who abuse it, such as Natalia- I am still me, Alfred, the same man you have known this fortnight past. I was in the priesthood for many years. After years of abstinence, the man Natalia said I once was is thoroughly gone. Nor am I made for the priesthood, clearly."

Brightening his mien determinedly, Ivan caught Alfred's shoulder, stepping in close. "You are the one who re-awoke me to desire." Ivan hesitated. "Is it that you do not wish to give up your life, as you have known it? Your... trade?"

I've already... Alfred stopped the words reaching his tongue. Ivan was talking about whoring. Alfred's response probably came out as bitter as Ivan's prior admission. "I did not intend to give up my magic." He could have taken joy from Ivan's offer had he only made it out of Natalia's clutches intact. "The rest matters for little beside that."

Ivan pursed his lips. The guard was too close by. Alfred had spoken the words low, but... "Come inside, at least, to discuss this," Ivan said, his voice falling low as he leaned in to Alfred. "Please."

Alfred nodded. He could hardly refuse it.

He was shown to a chamber with loaded decanters of fine drink on a sideboard, and plush furnishings that included huge, comfortable chairs. Ivan was waylaid talking to the staff, who were not many, but notably lively for the hour. Alfred wondered at how Ivan had readied his old home to bring Alfred back to, in presumed victory. He tested the decanters by scent and poured a glass of something dark, sweet and thick, to prove that he was not too awed to take the liberty, but he drank little of it. He sat on the edge of a fine chair, and poked the remnant of his magic... or what had 'crept into him in its place'...

He could feel the things around him seeming to snap and ping against an energy field within him. His sense of their energies was becoming greater as he grew more familiar with detecting shifts in the subtleties of it. It was clearly dangerous, where it interacted with too much natural magical energy. Natalia had died because he had no means to control it. Her power had struck at him with force and it had rejected it back at her with the same force.

It was something, even if it was tricky and subtle and hard to control. He didn't much like the thought of being negative force, but he comforted himself that he was still a witch of sorts.

...Everyone was a witch of sorts, if that theory that everyone had a little magic bore true.

Ivan came back, movements stilling in the door after an apparent rush to return, face falling into seriousness. He crossed to Alfred on the chair, fell to his knee, and moved the glass from Alfred's hands so that he could take them in both of his.

"I am sorry," Ivan said, "about your magic. I had not imagined such a consequence. It was remiss of me not to think of this as a risk I was asking you to take." He rested his forehead on their joined hands.

After a moment, Alfred wriggled a hand free to stroke his long hair. A while longer, and he opened his knees wider and pulled Ivan closer, until he could feel the other man's weight and warmth against his body where it mattered. Longer, and he drew Ivan up into a kiss.

He did not feel like reaching for words. What he'd lost, words could not encompass. What he'd gained was very different, and he had no way of equating the exchange, could not decide if the ultimate scale was balance or gain or loss. Everything now would be different.

He kissed Ivan as substitute for thinking for a while, feeling Ivan reciprocate, soft lips and moist mouth, stubble and fine hair occasionally moving against his lips.

"I thought to corrupt a priest," he said eventually, pulling back, keeping Ivan's face between his hands.

"Mission successful," Ivan said, venturing a smile. "Re-corrupted, anyway. I am handing in the robe tomorrow. I would swear, in any case, that I learned more of the divine in my worldly travels on the ocean as a youth than ever I learned in the seminary."

"It was meant to be a game," Alfred said, "and a little bit revenge, for what you asked me to do. But a lot of it was... something else, as well."

"I know." Ivan's curled arms started working under his clothes.

Alfred frowned. He could not see how this worked. "This place, your family, your reputation," he reeled off with a touch of annoyance.

"None of the above to speak of, really," Ivan countered. "My family are long dead. My retainers kept the home should I ever retire from the priesthood or sign it over at last to the cousin who will be sorely disappointed now. There is no impediment against you staying with me, Alfred, and now that Natalia is vanquished, we can do exactly as we please."

He hesitated, and his eyes scoured Alfred's face carefully. "I should like to continue a quest along similar lines. To work against those like Natalia, who give magic an ill name, and champion a cause to try to amend the teachings of the priesthood that all such skills are the product of evil."

Alfred tipped his head, thinking on the offer to champion this cause coming now, when so very recently it would have been all he could wish for.

"I know, it is a bitter gift." Ivan's face flickered. "But I believe that you could still be a part of this fight, and... you are also still you."

Alfred wasn't sure he felt very much like himself at the moment. It was true enough that he had not thrown aside all allegiance to his lifelong beliefs when his witchcraft had been stolen. But the magic had been in him, always, and he did not yet know what he would do so changed. "I-" His voice cracked as he tried again to articulate. He closed his eyes and shook his head against Ivan's palm.

He realized, as he blinked and Ivan loomed closer over him, as he felt dampness and warmth on his cheeks and eyelids, that Ivan was kissing away his tears. Oh...

"I..." His breath shuddered. He had always had magic, but he had never been in love before. "I would join your new crusade, though I can only hope it still has use for me like this. Especially if I am to save my seductions for only you."

"I sincerely doubt," Ivan said, "that you will ever prove useless."

Alfred kissed him hungrily and gave himself over to desire. He pulled Ivan down into the plush chair, and it was dawn before they made it to a bedchamber.

END OF STORY

A/N:

So, this story was based off Stephen King's The Colorado Kid. Since that and this story share similar plotlines, I'll use King's book as a reference.

When I read it the year it was published, speaking only for myself, the publishing event of the year was not HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE. Believe me, I love the thought of thousands of school-aged children standing in line at midnight to buy a book - but I wasn't there. However, I gladly stood in line way past my bedtime to pick up a copy of THE COLORADO KID by Stephen King. What's not to love about a new King novel, a paperback original published by the newly indispensable Hard Case Crime imprint?

It turns out that the book was nothing like I had expected. It's not a hard-boiled detective novel - no faces through the window, no sex beyond the sultry Glenn Orbik rendering on the cover, no gunshots, either on or off the page. What THE COLORADO KID is, however, is a finely rendered mystery with a gently philosophical touch that, incidentally, contains some of King's best writing. Yes, even this late in the day, The Man is still The Man.

So what did I expect from a reading of THE COLORADO KID? It is, at its essence, a discussion over coffee, kind of the New England equivalent of MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, wherein the elderly editors of a weekly newspaper serving Moose-Lookit Island off the coast of Maine take an interning reporter to school with the account of a death occurring more than a quarter-century beforehand. The deceased was discovered on Moose-Lookit with no identification, though he later became known as the Colorado Kid; his death was apparently the result of choking on a piece of steak. But with the "how" solved, the questions raised in the minds of the newspapermen - related to the journalistic w's - remain.

It is the story of that investigation, told in retrospect. There is charm to the narrative, not the least of which is the result of King having a bit of fun with the reader. He very implicitly interjects himself into the narrative throughout the novel - all I will say is that it is self-evident from the first page - but this work is not a mere piece of whimsy. Some of King's best writing is contained in the very last paragraph of this fine work, but please don't skip ahead to read it. It is built entirely upon what has gone before, not only in THE COLORADO KID, but also in King's entire body of work. And for that alone, I would have stood in line at midnight.

Isn't that similar to this?

Do you see it?

If you were able to see it, write about your findings in the comments!

Thank you for reading my story, and I'll greatly appreciate the feedback!

-Enchanting Grace