nights with a house full of company; the twelve months that had passed had turned her into someone new. Now, though her parents gestured for her to join them and their guests, she snuck away down dark and chilly corridors to find a place in the attic to sit alone.
She blew on the frost-covered windows to look down to the barren gardens below. They weren’t empty, as she’d expected them to be. Footprints marred the smooth whiteness of snow-covered plots. And in the corner by the gate, a huddled figure clawed at the ground. Mira watched it scrabble in the vegetable plot. Perhaps seeking the remains of a gourd or something else? Had some poor vagrant stolen into her garden to look for food?
Pity moved her, and Mira left the attic to sneak past the rooms full of merrymakers. She crept to the garden without shoes or even a cloak to keep her warm, so intent was she on finding out who she’d seen from her window above. The snow bit at her toes and the wind gnawed her fingertips, but it was nothing compared to what the traveler must have felt.
“You must come inside,” she insisted to the scarf-covered face. She couldn’t tell even if the visitor was a man or a woman, so bundled and wrapped in layers was the figure. “Get warm. Have something to eat.”
When they went inside, however, Mira’s father was not pleased at his daughter’s kindhearted gesture. There was no room at his table for a beggar, be it woman or man. Not even in his kitchen, not even to eat the scraps unfit for dogs, and he made the bundled visitor go back into the snow even before it had time to unwrap one of its many cloaks.
“Father—” Mira protested, but the nobleman wouldn’t hear her plea.
“I will go,” said the beggar, whose face was still hidden. “But you should know who you’ve turned away.”
The guests who’d gathered around the scene gasped when the beggar pushed back its coverings to reveal the face of a beautiful, if cruel-eyed, woman. Everything about her was dark. Her eyes, hair, even the blush of her lips and tongue were dark rather than red. She looked around at them all before settling her eyes upon Mira.
“Your daughter has far better manners than you, old man,” said the dark fairy. “She will be your salvation, as she tried to be mine.”
The nobleman was too smart to try to beg forgiveness from the dark fairy. “Don’t take her!”
The dark fairy laughed; in the garden the flowers shivered beneath their blanket of snow. “I don’t want her, old man. Just as you would like nobody else to want her either.”
“Please,” begged the noblewoman, stepping forward. She was no less wise than her husband, but women know the ways to deal with one another and the dark fairy was still a woman. “Please don’t punish our daughter because of our foolishness.”
The dark fairy laughed. “Worry not, lady. I won’t make your daughter hideous to the eye, nor make it so toads fall from her lips with each word. No, lady, I shall grant your daughter a gift, instead, for the generosity she attempted to show me. And in giving her the gift, I shall punish you.”
The dark fairy clapped her hands and the guests drew back as one, each hoping not to draw her attention. The dark fairy smiled and waved her hand. Her veil of cloaks and scarves fluttered.
“You shall be desired,” she told Mira. “And you shall desire.”
“That’s it?” cried the nobleman, perhaps not so wise as he believed himself to be. “That’s the curse?”
The dark fairy drew her hood back over her face and opened the door. Snow swirled inside and melted on the floor. The gathered company shivered in unison.
“Until your daughter finds completion, old man, you will slowly lose everything you have. Pray hope she finds it before you are beggared and must rely upon the unkindness of strangers.”
With that, the dark fairy was gone.
The nobleman reached out his hand to Mira, who didn’t take it. Nor did she reach for her mother, who wept with fists pressed to her mouth. Mira looked around the room, at the men and women gathered there, and something swelled inside her that she’d never felt before.
Heat flared inside her belly and lower, between her thighs. She pressed a hand to herself there, and the other to the swell of her breasts where more heat rose. She bit back a gasp at the look one of her father’s friends was giving her. His eyes burned dark with an emotion she couldn’t name, but that she felt echoed in her own.
Then she knew what it was, that fierceness, that burning, that flush on her skin and the flare in her gaze.
Desire.
It began at once.
Without regard to her parents or the guests assembled in their hall, Mira went to the man staring at her and let him put his mouth on her. Nobody stopped her. Nobody said a word when he took her by the elbow and led her upstairs and rid her of her virginity. Her mother wailed and her father gnashed his teeth, but neither of them stopped it.
Neither of them could stop it.
Mira’s first lover was not handsome, but he was bold, and he fucked her so thoroughly that first time she couldn’t walk the next day. Yet despite the hours of intercourse, the kisses he rained over her body, the things he did to her, she didn’t feel complete. In fact, when it was finally over and her lover stole away from the sweat-soaked bed, all Mira felt was emptiness.
Clearly, this would not do.
Already her parents’ guests had fled. The staff, no longer loyal to a house accursed, left as well. The hearths lay cold, the fowl uncooked. Her father had locked himself in his counting room, counting out his money. Her mother had pricked her thumbs with every spindle in the house, but could not sleep.
Mira washed the scent of the man from her body and discovered that a fingertip slid against the pearl hidden inside her soft folds could bring her pleasure so intense it weakened her knees. Was this, then, completion? She stroked again and dipped a finger inside her heat much the way her lover of the night before had used his cock to fill her. She moaned and bit her lip, grasping the edge of the wooden bathtub, as pleasure coursed through her.
And then…nothing.
Frustrated, she stroked harder, pulling on her nipples. Heat rushed through her veins and she sank to the rush-matted floor of the chamber. She pumped her hips upward against her now-grasping touch, and still the sense of something building inside her grew and grew without cease. Without release.
She could not eat, nor sleep, for the fire consuming her took up so much of her attention. Yet instead of turning her ill, this fever only made her all the more beautiful. She saw it in her looking glass. Her hair was like shining silk. Her eyes, each as lovely as a jewel. Her mouth, ripe and plump and ready for kissing.
In the past her father had hoarded his gold, but now he received an uncommon summons from the king to pay some taxes to which he’d never before been held. He wept as the messenger carried away bag after bag of clinking coins. Her mother sought the solace of the wine barrel. This was but one day after the dark fairy’s curse, and Mira knew she had to find her completion soon or everything she’d known her entire life would be lost.
She made it known that she was now entertaining suitors, and as bad news travels fast, so did this. On the fifth day after the fairy’s curse, men had begun lining up outside the gate. Most of them, she assumed, had come for a chance to wet their pricks inside her, though a few of the more intelligent would have known that the man who managed to satisfy her would gain more than a willing cunny in which to spill his seed, but a vast portion of her father’s rapidly diminishing fortune, as well.
Mira cared little for her father’s fortune. She cared more for his happiness, and her mother’s, for though they had not bred or borne her, she loved them as dearly as if they had. Truth be told, she loved the line of men waiting to fuck her, too, for the fairy had been right about desire being a gift.
And still, no matter how many men entered Mira’s bedchamber and touched her, no matter how many urged her body to writhe and squirm