It was a good orgy, as orgies go, which is to say that it was a great time. Since it was raining, we pushed a couple of beds together, zip-tying them so they wouldn’t come apart at the wrong moment, and held the frolic indoors. One-on-one sex was starting to become rarer than threesomes and moresomes in my life, but I’m not complaining. Still, five is a lot. Fortunately, Lesseth can fit into any group.

Literally.

“Aw,” Lysandra said at one point to Valeria, who was on the floor. “Poor little paladin, all tied up while everyone else has fun with Abby’s big –”

“Secret,” Gren interrupted.

“It’s hardly a secret now!” objected Lesseth.

I wondered if the whole cucking the demon thing had gone to Lysandra’s head a bit, but Valeria just squirmed the way she always did.

“That was clever,” Lysandra said to me, “making it so she likes being tied up. I wonder what you’ll make me like doing?”

“I am not –”

But I got distracted. When a very submissive orc is licking your pussy, and a slime demon is giving you a blowjob, and a lovely troll is nibbling on your nipples, it’s hard to concentrate. You’ll probably have to trust me on that, although I think they probably would have managed to distract me even if I had just one set of parts.

“Sssh,” Gren said. “Do something with her mouth. You know, we could really do this better with six of us.”

I groaned, but then Lysandra straddled my face, and I got to lick her sweet pussy. I wasn’t sure where Gren planned to fit two more – or was it one more, and she was counting me? I stopped wondering and lived in the moment.

In the morning, I kissed them all goodbye. The change in Kendala was noticeable, though. She couldn’t stop smiling. It was hard to believe that I had been reluctant to touch her, or that it had made any sense. Still, it had been right at the time. I needed to understand her more – and perhaps I needed Xyla’s trickery.

I was sad to see them go. Home wasn’t just an old tomb in the middle of the woods, and a bunch of zombies. It was the people. Not that I was going to let myself feel sorry for myself. I’d always been happy living alone, and some time to focus on Valeria and Xyla was not a bad thing at all. Still, one of the things I’d been looking forward to about home was the bustle of it all. My employees were now all stationed elsewhere, and with Gren and Lesseth gone too, the place felt quiet.

The way to take advantage of that was to read up on making windmills and other prepper subjects, so I did. My situation was not the same one the preppers imagined. I couldn’t hoard fossil fuels, for instance, and have it do me any good. Or could I? Could I build a combustion engine from scratch to power a generator, and still buy the gasoline? I hadn’t tried to take a simple gallon of gas across. It’d be something to test. And I could surely make alcohol locally, and use that to power an engine. Or make something wood  burning, although it’d have to run on deadwood or we’d have to import the wood, and if I needed this stuff there was already going to be a wood shortage.

I had a lot of things going for me that a prepper couldn’t imagine, starting with a society that was used to growing food and building shelter without any of those modern conveniences. My society had not broken down. And of course, I had magic, and, as Jill once pointed out, an amazing medical system in Valeria and Talos. I skipped large sections of the books I was reading, because they simply didn’t apply to me.

I hoped there was a way to keep the gate, and just stop it from expanding. Maybe they were two separate issues: the gate wasn’t expanding, but Amaranth itself was bleeding through the gate into Earth. Too many maybes.

I liked reading books, don’t get me wrong, but mid-afternoon, I wanted to do something. Maybe the experts on gates would tell me, and maybe they couldn’t.

“The problem is,” I told Valeria, “that I know the solution might involve big changes that have to be made quickly, but I don’t really know what the problem is.”

She nodded. “So focus on the problems you know about.”

“Kathy is taking care of most of it. Jill is on her way down to help with the gold and the gems. There’s not really that much for me to do, until I get the new boiler. We have fewer people living here than we did, even once Lysandra comes back, so there’s no need to expand. What issues still remain.”

“Well, you could build a nursery. Gren’s due in six months.”

“That seems like a way off.”

“Well, then, there’s Zargaza.”

I chuckled. “Look, just because I’m down to two wives at the moment…”

“I wasn’t suggesting you needed to have sex with her, Abby. I was saying she’s a problem that still needs to be solved. You haven’t exactly left that in a stable situation.”

I shrugged. I’d lived most of my romantic life in “unstable” situations. I accepted that things were always in flux. This marriage thing was new in my life and if any of the women I was married to wanted out, I’d let them go with love. I didn’t trust in the ceremony to make things stable. I didn’t even trust that if I worked hard, things would be stable. Stability was an illusion. I had to admit, it was an illusion I liked. But stuff always happened. Stuff you couldn’t figure in advance.

Romance was like life that way, and the gate was just the obvious example in my life. It had changed my life before, drastically, and it might change it drastically again. I wasn’t about to start taking people for granted, but I did rely on and trust my friends and lovers.

“Let’s go find Xyla,” I said.

A squirrel jumped from a nearby tree the moment I said that, to land at my feet. It got up on its hind legs and looked at me expectantly.

“Nutty?”

The squirrel nodded vigorously.

I reached in my bag and got out some nuts, and he ate them from my hand. “Would you mind leading us to Xyla, Nutty?”

He hopped twice and then bounded off. Realizing we couldn’t go that fast, he stopped to let us catch up. Then he led us through the forest, dashing ahead, then waiting, then dashing again. Squirrels just don’t do a sedate pace well.

“It would have been faster just to ask him to bring her,” Valeria remarked. “She’s amazingly speedy through these woods.”

“Sure, but she’s always out doing things, and I don’t want to interrupt. Also, I’ve sat on my butt all day.”

Valeria laughed. “Drove you nuts, did it?”

Nutty stopped, dashed back to me, and looked up at me expectantly. I fished out some more treats. “You said the magic word, Val.”

“Oops.”

“Hi! Looking for me?” said a familiar voice from behind.

I turned to look at Xyla. She was in oak today, an interesting break from the maple leaves she usually preferred. “You look lovely.”

She looked down at herself. “These old things? They were just something I threw on.”

Only Xyla could be wearing three leaves and nothing else, and think it was the leaves I was complimenting.

“Anyway,” she said. “I’ve got a few things to take care of, but I’d love to sleep with you tonight, and Val too, I take it, or you wouldn’t have brought her along to ask. Did you have something special in mind? Vines for Valeria? Hey, Gren would like that. See what I did there?”

“Actually, we wanted to talk about Zargaza. I wanted to. Talk to both of you.”

“What about her?”

“Abby has been leading her on,” Valeria said.

“Abby!”

I frowned. “I don’t think I’ve been leading her on. She’s been pretty aggressive in her pursuit of me, and I –”

“You should have seen the kiss, Xyla,” Val said.

“Oh, I wish I had!” Xyla exclaimed.

“I don’t see how that’s leading her on. She wanted a kiss, I kissed her. She wants more, sure, but I don’t think that’s leading her on.”

“Are you going to give her more?” Valeria asked.

“I don’t know.”

Xyla grinned. “Bring her into the forest and I’ll restrain her for you.”

“Um, if she’s into that maybe, but I’m not going to do anything without her consent.”

“Oh, she consents alright,” Val said. “You know that’s not the problem.” She turned to Xyla. “Now, what I think is that Abby needs to start acting like a Queen. And an Uber whatever.” She knew what it was, I thought, she just didn’t want to say it.

“Absolutely,” Xyla agreed. “Wait. That doesn’t mean – Abby, this is my forest.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “Except for where the crypt is.”

She hesitated, and then said, “Sure. That’s ours.”

“How does being a queen change anything, anyway?” When Val said it, it was uppercase, but I didn’t think of it that way. “It’s just a title.”

“The point is, that to lie with you I think that Zargaza should have to recognize you as Queen of Abbyland,” Valeria said.

I shook my head. “That’s not the way this works. I don’t want anyone sleeping with me because of my title. I want them to like me for who I am, and I for who they are.”

Valeria nodded. “And that’s why your lovers include the princess of the trolls, and an elvish princess who is the Arch Fiendess of Tartarus. You can’t fool me, Abby. You’ve been making dynastic moves for a while, and Zargaza is another piece in the puzzle.”

It shocked me that Valeria, who I tended to think of as wholly good, if a little self-righteous at times, and of course very kinky, was being so realpolitik about everything.

“And of course, that means you should marry her,” Valeria went on. “To cement the ties that bind the orcs to you, and your descendants.”

“I’m not marrying her,” I said.

“Why not?” Xyla asked, curious.

“Because I don’t want to. Because she needs to be there, ruling her people, and I need to be over here. And while we might go do different things now and then, and that’s fine, in general, for this whole marriage thing to mean something to me, it has to be the people who I basically live with.”

“I’m not sleeping in that crypt, Abby,” Xyla pointed out.

“No. You’re not. But you’re – well.”

“In our forest,” Xyla said.

“Oh, it’s our forest now, is it?”

Xyla nodded. “It is, Abby. And it’s part of Abbyland. I just… it’s still mine, too. It’s a dryad thing. I can’t give it up, you know. Without the forest, I would die. In another forest, I wouldn’t have my powers, assuming I could even get there somehow. The forest is almost as much a part of me as my body. And my body, well, that’s yours, too, in a way, but it’s also mine, ultimately.”

“Of course.”

Valeria smiled. “It’s nice to pretend my body is Abby’s, sometimes. I think that’s why I like being tied up. But it’s just pretend.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Everyone owns their own selves.”

“I meant that it belongs to L’shan,” Valeria said. “Speaking of which, Abby – you could control us, couldn’t you?”

I shrugged. “I can charm someone, and make them feel they are my friend. If they want to sleep with me, they might do so under the charm spell when they’d decide otherwise without it. It doesn’t control anyone, just moves them to think of me as positively as they can. And I have a spell that allows me to cause someone to have a fetish – it works very slowly, and I’ve never used it. I suppose I could make someone have a fetish for, well, chicks with dicks. But even that wouldn’t control them, even if it would mess them up if they couldn’t have me. In fact, they might react all sorts of ways, including having trouble sharing and doing all sorts of things as a result.”

“You’ve never used it,” Valeria repeated.

“Never.”

“Ever been tempted?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“When you and Talos wanted to kill me, I started to think that the ends might justify those means. He was obviously into me. And you, equally obviously, had a proclivity for bondage. My spell could amplify something like that and – well, make you value that above all else.”

“Even L’shan?”

I shrugged. “Let’s not test it.”

Valeria shuddered.

“I can’t imagine ever using it,” I said. Although obviously, I had imagined it.

Xyla hmmed. “You know, I think Kendala would love to be, um, molded by you.”

“No.”

“Ethics,” Valeria said, with a grin.

Xyla rolled her eyes.

“No, I don’t think it’s that so much. I think I –” I paused because it was a new thought to me. They waited for me to finish. “I like her the way she is.”