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As the festival day waned to sunset, revelers of every race lit braziers and bonfires in the streets, unwilling to let the celebration end. Sparks spiraled upwards all across the countryside, and at the center of Armistice City, the Spire of Truce bore the ashen wind impassively, its stony silence far more settled than the sweeping peace proclamations that had recently re-named it. It remained as unconquered by the days of celebration as it had been by the generations of strife.
The uppermost balcony of the spire loomed, Palahuin thought, like a skeptical eyebrow. Still, it was open, and empty, so she seized the moment’s fortune despite the structure’s palpable pessimism. She needed a moment away from the heady churn to catch her breath, and sought it by climbing high into the air like a good daughter of the cliffs. The dark and narrow twist of obsidian stairs, and the blind drop down the tower’s center, held far less terror for a caprin than the merry rigors of too much hope.
Peace had already wearied her, though more from her own concern that it couldn’t last than any real indication that it wouldn’t. It all seemed quite sincere, in fact, she thought as she climbed, feeling along with one hand and one hoof when she couldn’t quite see the dark stone in the dark interior. None of the flat-faced races had bleated at her when they greeted her, no lewd puns about her spiral horns or cloven toes. A gaggle of sulfur gnomes, deep in their cups, had shown her surprising respect, and as a rule they nurtured a proud contempt for “talls” and “tails”, even among their allies. The peace extended even between reluctant collaborators, it seemed. Fur or feathers, skin or scales, every sapient creature on the face of Algul was united in the hope of something new, and that was a miracle. Every decent healer knew you had to be grateful for miracles, however heartbreaking it could be once they left your hands and encountered the world.
Almost at the top, she had to gather up her skirt, hold it across her tail, and leap deftly across a missing stair. It must have been gone a while, as both the natural leaping and landing points were worn, smooth saucers in stone so dense that her leap echoed endlessly. Amazing what habits beings could adapt to. The tall, narrow stairs wanted legs more nimble than most other races of Algul could boast, yet somehow some sparse hundreds of souls had persisted in climbing. She couldn’t presume to guess at the real history of it. It was likely she was the first Caprin to ever pass that way.
Finally she made it to the uppermost archway, and stepped onto the broad crescent of balcony. She minced with cautious confidence to the low-walled edge that had probably once been a proper crenelated battlement, and looked down. Unlike the eloquent wear inside, the citadel’s-worth of rubble surrounding it was freshly jagged, pathless and untried by other revelers. After six solid days of celebrating, few within a hundred leagues were near sober enough to attempt it, she thought. Only the bonfire gusts of heedless music persisted upward and outward with any determination, scaling the city’s central tower and outer walls alike and conquering on every front. Doubtless it carried out across those hundred drunken leagues, and then some, with the brightness of a beacon.. From that dizzy height she was confident that she could see all hundred, stretched out toward the setting sun as every gilded shadow stretched back towards her in supplication.
The terrain beyond the city wall was scarred with a history and character too foreign for her to have known, but too familiar not to read from that high vantage, like topographical phrases plucked from her oldest memories. Foundations built and destroyed and built again. Razed villages that had migrated to higher ground. Fields planted and reaped, blooded and burned, flooded and blighted and gouged with graves, then planted again with a stubborn inexorability that matched the seasons themselves. The land’s scars told of lives upon lives that had been born in war, lived in hope, and ended in pain. She could almost-
No, enough, she thought. Any more thinking and she would be as tired of herself as she was of small beer, fast dancers, and broadly ribald songs.
She closed her eyes and smelled the air. It was good. Complex. The high, cool, rain-clean tides of the upper air jostled and mingled with the warm upward gusts of a city alive. Autumn was coming for the leaves and the green. Before the heady hope had a chance to burn itself out, winter would send everyone into their holds and burrows and barrows and keeps, glades and enclaves to rest deeply and nurture embers. Perhaps when they emerged again the hope would still exist. Perhaps.
She took another breath, determined to absorb and memorize the moment in the fragile balance of scents that drafted skyward as the sun sank lower, twined with the music of bodies milling, voices shouting, horns and pipes and harps sounding, drums that danced without marching, and all of it as real as her own hands, her own heart, her own breath. She took and held it, trying to be still, trying to coax into being whatever unfamiliar thing it was plucking at her heart. At last a tiny mote of feral happiness darted from its hiding place just beneath and behind her navel. It rippled up her spine and out to the tip of her tail, pricked up her long ears, raised the dappled fur along her neck and arms, and tightened her fingers on the hip-high rim of the crumbled battlements around the balcony’s edge. She released her breath with a surprised half-laugh, and took another through her nostrils and into her belly. She wanted to breathe it all in deeply enough for it to saturate her stubborn vigilance and burst her hoary doubts to rubble.
From that high remove the chaotic press of the festival became an articulated weave. The tang of a dozen different types of sweat; of bread ovens and cooking spices and charcoal fires; the ferment of fruit and honey and grain; and here and there, of course, some wayward stings of piss or vomit consecrating the whole area as a place of misrule, but without any other scent of blood lurking beneath, or rot overpowering it all. There were no neglected corpses drawing birds. No pires. No musty funk of fear-sweat or panicked watery bowels. It felt alien, foolish, almost naked. The smiling maw of hope spread open beneath her, warm and glistening, treacherous with possibility and baited with-
Enough, she thought again. Her skittishly expansive joy retreated back into the confines of her earthly silhouette and long, aching bones. She opened her eyes and studied her long, strong, knot-knuckled fingers and the frayed sleeves of her grubby wash-rotted smock. She’d survived. She’d lost much, but saved some. Maybe that was all a good life really was; just sad moments viewed from a high enough place.
The cindered air gusted then, and whipped the tattered pennants. The implacable tower stood unmoved but seemed to sigh. As the wind slackened again she felt a tapping within the stones under her hooves, barely felt but shivering apart her reverie with factual heft.
Someone was climbing the stairs.
Only one. Heavy, deliberate, bipedal, but taking two stairs at a stride without rushing. Instinctive adrenaline rushed down her long limbs, and long practice checked it harshly. She had every right to be where she was… probably. No matter how untested the new laws governing the armistice city were, no one had more right to be there than she had, and if this lone person made themselves her foe, well, she was not helpless. She was good at great heights and with limited ledges… for a healer, anyway..
She moved swiftly and silently to the tower wall and crouched at the far side of the archway. She would see this stranger first as they came through it. Spinal habit made her reach for her knife with her tail, to hold it hidden behind her in case she needed it quickly to hand… before she remembered leaving her knives, and her healing kit, with the innkeeper. Old lessons had insisted it was wrong to be prepared to harm if not also prepared to heal, and new kid-like impulses had wanted to move unencumbered by either role for a few anonymous hours.
As the stranger climbed nearer, she realized, relieved, that they must be a fellow Caprin. Their tread had the singular sure strike of hooves, and the sibilant echo of breath was steady and untaxed by the climb. They leapt the missing stair without stumbling, nearly there. Finally a head leaned into view, level with hers, turned three quarters away, with long peaked ears that drooped from either side, thick dark hair that lifted in the wind, and a glimpse of smooth horns beneath.
But the stranger had only stooped to look ahead, and straightened as he passed the door, adding another full head-length to his height. The shoulders that piled into view like storm clouds were bare and shaggy and broad, the neck mounded with muscle. At his waist there were, thankfully, breeches, and a sinewy tail that swashed a dark inarticulate tassel in balance with his steps. The legs were long, the hooves cloven, but sharp and heavy. As the head swiveled into profile she saw his muzzle was blunter and more pronounced than hers, his horns longer, sharper and forward-swept past his broad brow.
He was a Taurous, one of the heavy shock troops of the vanquished emperor.
Palahuin held very still. She had never met one in conditions of peace. Their home steppes were far from the Caprin cliffs. There was only one that she had ever even spoken-
He turned further and saw her, and like her he became very still. They seemed, in unison, to realize that each was weighing the odds that the other really was who they thought.
He spoke first. “You.”
She nodded to him, straightening as if she had just been smoothing her skirt. “Hello.”
He turned to her more squarely. “Bloodspeaker.”
She cleared her throat. “Yes. I was. I’m surprised you remember. My name is Palahuin. And you are Antillus, Stormbreaker of the Thunder Legion.”
He winced, or perhaps sniffed, “Just Antillus.”
She nodded in shallow sympathy, taking up the bland madness of small talk for lack of a saner impulse, “I supposed many titles have been surrendered in the last week.”
He shook his head, his large eyes fixed in studying her, “No. Long since.”
She blinked at him as understanding dawned slowly. He wore no armor, no arm rings, no bracers, and there were no fresh bald patches where such things should have been. His crimson-dyed braids were shorn, but his hair had grown long again in their absence. “You didn’t go back.”
“No.” His gaze shifted away uneasily, “I did not go back.”
She gaped foolishly as she tried to absorb this, looking down to hide it, brushing at an imagined cinder on her skirt..
“You insult me,” he huffed.
She straightened, “What?”
“You are surprised.”
Palahuin closed her foolish expression with trained calm and a shot of annoyance. Hardly a dozen words exchanged and she was immediately back three years in the past and three hundred leagues away, in a wooden pen beside a reeking battlefield, feeling weary and wronged by his obstinate mistrust and the baffling unkindness of chance that had made him her problem in the first place.
He tilted his head to one side and jabbed one finger pointedly into the opposite palm, “I honored my debt.”
“Yes, I see that,” she said, and resolved to say nothing more to him even as she added, “and I’m impressed by how your language has improved in such a short time.”
He squinted but nodded, as bound to observe a compliment as he was an insult, “Yours as well. I can understand you.”
She shrugged earnestly, “I still dislike this flat-faced elven tongue,” she turned aside from him, a show of trust, and rested her hands on the battlements, “But the things I’ve wished I’d known how to say were helpful guides.” She tried not to indulge in smugness as the tangle of verb tenses tripped flawlessly and fluently into their places.
“I-” he hesitated, and she could feel his skeptical gaze pressing on her from his full height, “I can understand you. This is good.” He turned aside as well and looked out over the ruined plains drenched in slanted, blushing amber. The scent of him mingled with the city and smoke on the air. Road dust. New sweat. Warm skin. Something restless, but not unclean.
The silence was too heavy for the ancient stone to take with any confidence, Palahuin thought, so she heaved it away with a wavering, “I did assume… I mean I did insult you just now. And ever since that day, I suppose. I never believed-” she shook her head, “What I mean to say is, you have proved me wrong. I was unkind, ungenerous, and I apologize.”
He winced, and his sword-hand twitched, “I could not honor your order’s vow and my legion’s oath, so I chose. I changed. Like you. I was compelled… by that mercy.”
She glanced away, feeling a blush as the naked earnestness in his voice propagated in her own memory, the deep rush of recognition that had moved her, compelled her just as he said, to disobey her own promises and her superior’s direct commands. “I didn’t remain with my order either, after that,” she admitted to the empty breeze, “If that makes us… even?”
That turned him fully towards her again, clearly baffled, “You gave it up?”
She studied her needle callouses, and the fresh, perennial miracle burns in the pits of her palms, “Not all of it. My skills remain, and my blessings. I still can use what they taught me. Blood still speaks to me. I’ve done what I could here and there. But the order, the title, the protections… I was invited to leave those behind.”
“Why?”
“Because I disagreed with them. I lacked the resilience of spirit, they said, to withstand the rigors of obedience to their cause.”
His brow furrowed, “I do not understand.”
She shrugged, “I was… sulking.”
His gaze was searching, “Was I the cause?”
She shook her head, “You were a cause, but not a culprit. Healing you clarified the conflict in me, in what I believed about mercy and how it disagreed with what they insisted was true. I knew I couldn’t be obedient anymore.”
He nodded grimly. He considered the weathered stones and seemed to decide against speaking.
“Beyond the vow, though,” she added, heaving the silence away again a little too needfully, “for myself, I am glad that you gave up the war.”
He sighed and flexed his sword-hand again, “Not all of it. As you say, not the skills. Not what they taught me.” He held his silence for a long moment, and she waited. Finally he said, “Do you still think you should have shown me mercy?”
“I-” she felt herself about to say something self-righteous and glib, however true, about never doubting for a moment, but stopped herself, feeling unequal to what a defeated soldier might really be asking, “I don’t think I have worried over that question as much as you have. I cannot answer it with the same weight you put into asking it. What do you think?”
“I have had three years to think about it. I would not have had three years to think about a different decision.”
“It sounds less like mercy when you put it that way.”
He frowned, “I did not mean for it to.”
“I just meant that it sounds like the three years it bought you have not… been merciful.”
A silence straightened him oddly, and he turned to study her face, “Does that trouble you?”
She looked at him earnestly, wondering how much pain- “Yes, very much.”
He leaned away as if a string had been pulled between his shoulder blades. His brow furrowed in puzzlement, then contracted into a scowl, “I will go.”
Her heart panged as he turned, startled at losing company she was sure minutes ago she’d have liked to avoid, “I- wait. Please. I spoke wrongly. I don’t mean to offend you.” She couldn’t begin to guess at how she had, however clearly she had.
He paused and turned, his lour troubled, “Nor I you. If you would rather I were dead I will not haunt you.”
“I-” she gaped, unsure of his motive and therefore unsure how to turn him, “I wouldn’t. Rather. Or haunt you either, I suppose.”
He snorted testily, “You would though.”
“Haunt you?” she joked lamely.
“Yes. No! You would… rather. You would... prefer.” The words flustered him. He bulled through it and turned to go again.
She threw up her hands, frustrated to the point of shouting, “Are all Taurous so easily offended by-” she stalled. She couldn’t even guess what.
He halted, though his momentum seemed to go up his spine into his hackles. “You mock me.” It had the hallmarks of a warning.
“I don’t understand how! Finally we can talk, talk to me!”
He did, but in Taurous, muttering low as he turned and stalked towards her.
Her heart skipped to a higher rate, matching his pulse on the air, but instinct seized her handily and she did not move. A high place, a heavy attacker, smaller motions taken smartly would win. His speed would send him over the ledge if she moved at the last possible second. Still, she raised her hand to stop him, dropping back half a pace to find her balance in case she had to turn out of his path, touching the battlement with her short tail to assure herself of the available distance. Less than a forearm-length. She would need to-
She was so ready to turn to let him by that it felt almost like a dance when he caught her wrist and turned her with him, moving intentionally through the space she had blocked and stopping with his back to the ledge, her hand on his chest. He opened his hands at his sides as he snarled, “Take it back, then.”
“I- I do, I take back what I said.”
He grimaced impatiently, “Take back what you did, if you regret it.”
She shook her head, “What did I do? I don’t underst-” Pain panged up her arm from his blood so aggressively for a moment she wouldn’t have heard a reply. She shook her head again to clear it, “You want… me… to push you?”
“If you regret saving me. The years you gave me have not been full of mercy.”
She foundered in his implications, unable to think clearly through the pain in his blood. It was not rage. He was grieved to the point of frenzy. It had troubled him long enough to trigger him so fiercely when touched. Instinct again gripped her, the healer instead of the fighter, but also to remind her that minimal motion was key. She shifted her balance and he flinched. It wasn’t rhetorical, he really believed she would push him, and that he had no right to protect himself.
“Antillus,” she said softly, “You do not understand me.”
He nodded, “On this we agree,” it was defensively snide, but so poorly aimed it did not cut through her detached concern.
She nodded very slowly, anxious at his high dudgeon so close to a fatal ledge, “And I think that I do not understand you. But I am going to move backwards, and I would like you to keep your chest against my palm. That is what I want. Does that make sense?”
“It does not make sense, but I understand your words,” he rumbled reluctantly.
She took a step back, and he followed her away from the danger. A good start, perhaps, at last. She took another, and he followed again. He was the one that initiated a third step, and she reached with her short tail to gauge how to meet the tower wall gently as their motion put her back against it. She breathed relief even as his imposing size blocked out the sunset and covered her in shadow.
“You are trusting me,” he said, deeply enough that she felt it in her fingertips, “I am trusting you. We are…not enemies.”
She nodded, “No enemies anymore. Not here.”
He gloured doubtfully, and put his palm to the wall beside her ear. When she did not flinch he brought it slowly back towards himself, letting the heel of his hand rest on her cheek, his index finger pressed in the spot between her horn and ear, the rest below her ear and cupping her jaw. In his pique he was almost feverishly warm, and his touch, his radiant heat, was welcome, on an animal level, in the cool air.
“You mean me no harm,” was all he said.
She nodded, recalling the lore, “You would sense it if I did.”
He nodded, “And you have no weapons.”
She nodded, her fingers flexing against the sword-arm side of his chest, “And yet I have wounded you.”
He stepped back, breaking contact, “It is your right. My debt is unpaid,” he looked at the stones at the base of the archway, “Since meeting you… the years you gave me… I have not been entirely merciful. I have only not been a soldier.”
“Oh, I-” she stumbled, trying to put the distinction into words, “I didn’t mean I hoped you had been merciful all the time, I hoped the time… that the things you have faced because you lived, were merciful to you.” She shook her head, missing the awareness of his rushing blood to tell her if she was making sense to him, “And not as a… as a condition. I never- I mean I did what I did freely, even assuming-” she cut herself off, not wishing to revisit the earlier insult, “I just mean that I hold you in no debt. And anyway this is not a place where the terms of the war apply anymore,” she gestured vaguely at the open air with its floating music and merry columns of bonfire sparks, “The order only wanted your body not to continue feeding the war. They don’t demand that people in a dangerous world become complete pacifists.”
“Ah,” he nodded, and turned, resting his forearms and elbows atop the crumbled battlements again, maybe a little embarrassed. She moved to his side and took up the same posture.
“I think war is a hard habit to break,” she admitted to the air.
His sigh rumbled with assent.
“Have you… have you spent any time wishing I hadn’t healed you?”
He squinted at her sidelong, “Have you?”
“No.” She hoped that was clear enough. Unable to leave well enough alone, she added, “I made my choice. I don’t regret it.”
“You left the order.”
“Well, yes,” she didn’t quite understand his emphasis. Her choice to heal him was partly what got her disinvited from the order. But she didn’t want to quibble, “I tried to balance their wishes and mine, at the end. I still think they got the better bargain.” She smiled wryly to herself. It would be like the bloodspeaker abbess, in the final calculation, to think a stormbreaker being healed was worth it if it meant unloading Palahuin. Despite their shared vocation, they’d never really gotten along. She’d felt tolerated for her talents, and only barely.
When he spoke again, his voice sounded far away in thought, “Do you know where the bloodspeakers went? After they left?”
She shrugged, trying not to sound bitter, “Not entirely. I’ve had no news of them. I’m certain they followed the war, but I’m not sure which front they might have been at when Mirekeep fell. They will have to return to the abbey before winter, I expect.”
“Where is this abbey?”
She opened her mouth, blithely helpful, but it caught in her throat realizing how he probably remembered the abbess and the order even less fondly than she did. The dour healers had condemned him, hastily, to the mercy of his wounds or else to the mercy of her blade, forbidding her to heal him. She shook her head to stop staring and blurted, “It’s… far from here. Why?”
He hadn’t moved or seemed to notice, still staring far, “I should find them.”
Palahuin swallowed, her spine stiffening though she didn’t straighten up, “I… don’t see why that’s necessary.”
He sighed again, impatient, “I am sure you don’t. ”
Her own rising hackles seemed to pull her to standing, “I am not naive.”
He looked at her with puzzlement, but also annoyance, still leaning, unthreatened, “I do not suppose you are. You say my debt to you is paid, I owe them one also.”
However much she had disagreed with the order, however much she resented being dismissed for following her conscience, she wasn’t about to send a stor- a former stormbreaker to their abbey on a mission of not-mercy. “You can’t- I can’t help you with that.”
He narrowed his eyes at her as he stood straight, “You make me think the rules of war still live here, with you. By your vow I should leave and not return.”
He turned towards the archway, but she moved and blocked him, “Maybe I do still harbor some resentment. You have a right to yours in turn. But I can’t want you to go there.”
His hands flexed closed at his sides, “Move. I will not be your prisoner.”
“You’ll be someone’s prisoner if you go to a bloodspeaker abbey with this debt on your mind. Are you insane?”
His tone was adamant, “I owe them thanks for their mercy.”
“You should let it go. The abbess’ decision… it wasn’t personal.”
That flared his eyes with disbelief, “There is nothing more personal. I will not try to explain honor to you.”
“I beg your thrice-damned pardon?” In that moment, for just a moment, she calculated the odds of sending him over the side if she rammed him, her shoulders squaring in pique, not out of any willingness to kill to protect her old colleagues, but just because he was being such an ass.
His brow rumpled and he glanced away, but took a step into her all the same, “Get out of my way. What I owe is none of your concern.”
“None of my concern?!”
“You just said as much!”
“Yet I’m the one without an understanding of honor? You think it wouldn’t still shame me for you to visit your gratitude on a bunch of monastics when I’m the reason you’re able to do it?”
“So you do believe I owe you. Very well. I thank you, healer. Thank you for sparing me your mercy that day in the dirt.”
She winced at the bile in it, feeling bested and confounded, and he took a surprisingly nimble sidestep to get by her. Without a plan she turned and shoved him past the archway’s edge before he could cross through it, “I take it back!” she shouted, flustered to the point of tears, “Not what I did, your life is yours, I’m not sorry and you can’t make me be, but I take back what I said! I’m not sorry that I insulted you, I wasn’t wrong to believe you were a monster, and I…” she grasped around for some third thing that might still be hers to revoke, “And I don’t think your language has improved at all! I didn’t “spare” you! That isn’t what that word means!”
He opened his mouth to respond, paused, and closed it again self-consciously, derailed by her pedantry more than the narrow possibility of her violence. He straightened and his weight eased backwards, disarmed, “I- what?”
“I didn’t ‘spare’ you,” she shouted again, though faltering as she heard how silly it sounded. She wasn’t wrong, though. She couldn’t “spare” someone she had never intended to kill.
“You…” he seemed to search inside his head for help and came back with nothing, “What?”
She scowled, suddenly unsure she understood words either, feeling like it was worse to need to explain an insult than it was to explain a joke, “You say I ‘spared’ you, but that was never the choice I had.”
He shook his head and huffed, “Fine. You had no choice. Thank you for obeying, then,” he amended unhelpfully, “however much you have resented it as a slight to your pride.”
Before Palahuin could compose a similarly unmoored retort, the fitful wind interrupted, gusting grit from distant roads that stung her cheeks and made them both wince. When she was able to start again, she was more confused than before, and tried to speak carefully, neutrally, “My memory… is not the same as yours, I think?”
He tossed his hair and huffed dust from his nostrils. The wind subsided and he leaned closer, seeming somehow even larger, yet less menacing in his engaged perplexity. “Explain your memory,” he held up a hand as she started to reply, “Small words, and slowly.”
The bulk of him, his smell, and the desperate frustration at the edge of a waning day prickled along her scalp as the memory volunteered itself. It took her back to the order’s camp alongside the festering battlefield; the small, hastily consecrated “temple room”, just a stall with an open side, each panel wall sharing with identical cells, blocking none of the sounds of prayer and pain and pleading. Spiral stakes as long as her arm had been drilled into the exhausted dirt by attendant ogres. The stormbreaker’s limp hands had rested palm-open in short chains that linked to the stakes, for her safety. He’d been propped sitting against the nearest wall. She recalled how the low table, barely a tray on legs, had sat by the small fire behind her, barely a broken torch-end in a dish. The wind that day had been cold, but not as cruel as her luck. Or his.
He had been one of the last pulled alive from the war-churn’s flotsam. The battle had taken long days amassing, though the bloodspeakers had barely received recognition in time to be considered neutral attendants. They were warned to treat only those whom both sides left for dead, which meant hours of unquiet waiting while the aligned clerics and the carrion birds got first review of the carnage, and then blurry hours of desperate haste as the sufficiently-hopeless were gathered, triaged, stabilized, and brought to their meager stalls from among those beyond pain.
Some overeager novice had dealt her the fool card, hauling and binding this stormbreaker, this Antillus, into her cell near the end of her strength for the day, putting her in a grim dilemma. She wanted truly to save life, mend pain, obey her vocation, but she was forbidden by the order to mend anyone to fighting health unless they would swear to abandon the war. That was the bloodspeakers’ vow, and stormbreakers were, by those terms, considered unsavable.
Stormbreakers were monsters. They loved war, resented aid, and were dangerous to healers due to their inhuman might and mindless thrashing. They wasted precious time refusing the vow if healed to wakefulness, and broke it if they were made strong again, or so she’d been told. Healing a stormbreaker, the wisdom said, was no contribution to peace. It violated their most cherished moral precept, philosophically, by making godly healers into blithe butchers that simply prepared choice cuts of doomed meat for a ravening war’s next feast. There was no true mercy in it. Her skills were only allowed, under those circumstances, to offer him a less painful, less lonely death.
But she had countenanced a lot of failure that day, and her soul was more weary of facing death than her hands were of fighting it.
More than that, his wound was an abomination. An arrow in the back. It had struck him from behind and above, probably a very high volley, a very long shot. His killer might never have laid eyes on him. Or, even worse, the fletching had broken off, so it could as easily have come from his own side. The madness of it was at once dull and excruciating.
The shaft had entered where his neck met his shoulder blade, missing the bone and burrowing through muscle and nerve until it pricked at the outer sac of his lung, the arrowhead shaped to work itself deeper every time he shifted too significantly. She hated that. Senseless. Honorless. Just random callous futility sprayed about like arterial blood, day after sunless day, eating up all the substance of the souls and lands and years around it.
She hated volley-wounds, whose evil she knew well, more than she feared the first stormbreaker she’d ever seen up close. His breathing had been deathly shallow, his muscles deathly still, not from weakness but discipline, caution, and agony. She could feel that. His blood on her hand told her how he was wounded, and the ferocity of his will to live regardless. He might even have been able to survive it on his own if the muck in his fur hadn’t already begun to steam with fever.
From three years away, she spoke raptly into the wind atop the spire of truce, “You were wounded. You were assigned to my stall. It was a novice’s mistake, I think, pulling you in. We were probably the only ones that would have been able to tell you were still alive, but we weren’t meant to-” she paused and swallowed, too ashamed to say aloud what the order thought of his kind, “You were delirious. You’d lain too long since the battle. There was too much cold in your bones, too much filth in your wounds, and too much of your blood in the dirt. But you were still strong. Strong enough to kill a healer by accident.” She stopped at what she could only interpret as a flicker of a proud smile at the corner of his mouth where he might have thought she couldn’t see. She pursed her lips, “Do you remember much of that?”
“I remember being felled, trampled, half-drowned in the muck. Later dragged and chained and propped. I was very numb. I had to hold very still. I thought it was a slave cart until I felt the dry earth under me. Saw light.”
Palahuin snorted, “I wish we’d had carts that fine.” He blinked at her without anger and she nodded, “pardon me, continue.”
“I saw your shape,” he squinted at the horizon, “a shadow, between me and the light,” he bobbed a hoist finger at her horns, “and for a moment dreamed I was home. It…” he sighed, “It made me confused.”
He fell silent, his gaze distant though it was locked on his hands, so she continued, unconsciously tucking her hair behind a horn, “I’d never treated a stormbreaker. They should have thought to bind you facing the wall. Your horns, and your delirium. made it dangerous to reach for the arrow…I needed you to understand...” She felt it again as his scent, half real and half remembered, curled across her senses, and she longed to make peace with him..
He turned his head away but his tone drew closer, “I understood. I could not touch you to assure myself,” he parted his hands and studied his wrists, “but I understood. It was not your fault. You were tired and sad, weary of the war. I- I understood. You would have had every right to leave me to a slow death instead. It was a hard thing you were doing, to show me mercy.”
“I didn’t see it that way.”
He squinted but did not look at her, “I think that this is what I do not understand.”
“I… I didn’t feel like I had a right to let you die. Did you think my vows were less important to me than yours were to you?”
He huffed, “I did not, no. I spent a long time thinking, after. Can vows made in fever break pledges made in futility? Can one do honor to their dishonor?”
“What did you decide?”
“I decided that the pledge I made… I had pledged to serve the emperor until my life ended. But one does not need to die for a life to end. That life ended when you gave me a different one.”
She couldn’t hide a smirk.
He shrugged, ducking his head to conceal his own amused embarrassment, “It… it was a silly decision. A lot of very brave ideas become silly when you’ve been shot in the back and trampled by your company.”
She nodded avidly and leaned towards him, “No, I understand you. That’s what I had been feeling, too. The morbid silliness of it all. Trying to sort out all that heavy squalor with complex philosophy and airy piety. And you, you were… well, even if you weren’t, it was more than anyone should bear. I couldn’t let anyone suffer that.”
He nodded, his look sad but warm, “I understand you. You would have had my forgiveness as I died.”
She shivered at the thought of how it would have been if he’d still died that day after all she’d squandered to save him, “I might have had yours, but I wouldn’t have had mine.”
He looked at her again in earnest puzzlement, “How long did it take you to think you would have regretted it?”
“No time at all. Almost from the second I saw your wound.”
“But then why-” he shook his head, confounded, “If you knew that the whole time, why did you leave the order?”
His question was a contradiction she couldn’t parse. She could only answer the last part, “The abbess asked me to leave and I agreed. She had little patience for disobedience.”
He scowled, “So…you did not tell her that you spared me?”
“No I- I mean, yes, I did. I did tell her. I confessed that I disobeyed.”
His heavy brow lowered as he squinted, “But… you didn’t.”
She blinked, disliking his contradicting her, “I told her everything that happened.”
He blinked at her in kind, “But also that you disobeyed?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“What?”
He squinted at her, baffled, “Would they have forced you to stay otherwise? Why did you lie?”
The nonsensicalness startled her almost as much as the accusation, “I didn’t lie! How dare-” she caught herself. She wasn’t a bloodspeaker anymore. She hadn’t so much honor to reflexively defend. He just didn’t understand the language she was using, obviously. She spoke more slowly, “I confessed. I told her that I healed you and let you go.”
“But…also that you disobeyed?”
“Well yes, clearly.”
“Why?”
“I already told you! I couldn’t bear to let you die.”
“What?”
“I disobeyed because I couldn’t let you die.”
“Wait,” he held up his hands, checking himself against frustration and speaking slowly, “I was there. She scolded you. You spared me. You did not disobey.”
Again Palahuin blinked, stunned silent. She tried again, slowly, on the parts he had correct, “After she scolded me, I healed you.”
He gestured with condescending slowness of his own, “That is what I mean. You spared me.”
“That isn’t what that word means!”
“It is!”
Even without honor to defend, her impulse to pedantry ran with greater depth and force than his irritated growls, “But I didn’t!”
He looked at her genuinely agape, “The knife! The mercy of… You had…” he shook his head and turned from her, paced away several heavy steps and then back. He half-turned again and dropped with surprising lightness upon the floor of the balcony, his back against the tower wall, one knee up, the other leg straight.
“I sat, like this, and you were-” He gestured her closer, plainly flustered.
In the strangeness of their disagreement she didn’t even think of the strangeness of the instruction. She knelt across his shin, face to face as he slouched, as if nearness would help clarity. It did, a bit. It was just as they had been.
He spoke slowly again, his mood a high suspension of incredulity, “You knelt, near as this, and I heard you. You did not speak well, and I did not hear well, but I understood. You asked for my vow so you could heal me, and I…I could not answer in your words. My brains were too fevered. I could not lift my hands to touch you-” he lifted a hand towards her cheek, halted bashfully, “to tell what you intended, I mean. Then you reached, you picked up a knife. I understood that. You stroked my hair, spoke to me. Or maybe you were saying a prayer for me. I…” he looked down and did not continue.
Palahuin leaned closer to hear what he wasn’t saying, reaching behind his horn and resting one hand on his mane to remind him, “You…?”
“I…” he sighed, “I was grateful that you did that. That I would die with some mercy despite being unable to ask for mercy. Then the other, your abbess, she passed the doorway and scolded you. I remember it so clearly. She forbade you from acting the... the butcher. So you put down the knife…”
Realization crashed loudly in her head and she shouted over it, “I wasn’t going to kill you!” She covered her mouth, having shouted in his face, then shook her head, “Antillus, no, it… I… The arrow was deep. The fletching had broken off, almost none of the shaft was left above the skin it had worked in so deep. I didn’t think I had enough magic left. I’d have had to cut the arrow out. The words I was saying, I… well I guess you could say I was praying… that you would hold very still or else…” Palahuin closed her eyes, “What she said was, she was admonishing me not to heal you if you had refused the vow. It’s a saying we have, ‘we are not butchers’. It means, oh gods this… it means that we do not cut and dress your body just to feed it back into the war. Without the vow not to return to the fight, healing a soldier isn’t mercy, it’s butcher’s craft.”
“She…” he gazed at the place in the air where the abbess would have been, “she told you not to heal me.”
Palahuin nodded, “For mercy’s sake, but yes. That’s why I didn’t want you to go to the abbey I thought… oh… oh you really meant to thank them. That wasn’t… a euphemism for revenge.”
He shook his head, “It was not.”
“And now?”
“Still not.”
“Well that’s a relief.”
He didn’t seem to hear. “But you did it,” his scowl was more puzzled in comprehension than it had been in confusion, “You healed me against orders? Why?”
“Like you said. I was sad. Tired. Stubborn. And you were not what I expected. I thought…maybe I thought I could get your vow after.”
“You did?”
She shook her head, “I… no. I didn’t really care. I mean I hoped but… I wasn’t hopeful, if I’m honest. It’s not what we were meant to expect from stormbreakers, regardless of what they say.. It would have been madness to think you’d feel bound by…” The words pulled her throat tight behind them, the memory rising up with an almost stifling warmth, “But you weren’t what I expected.”
He cleared his throat, “What were you expecting? Of a stormbreaker.”
She confessed, “A machine, a killing thing. Wiry hair and coalfire eyes, like the songs.”
“There are songs?” that odd little smile again.
She nodded, his smile catching, “There are songs. Fangs like daggers, so on and so on. And from any distance it seemed true enough. You were matted all over with gore…”
“So were you.”
She ignored that, “But when I touched your blood…” she rested a hand on the slope of his neck, “I felt… you. And a pulse, and a catch in your breathing. You felt pain. You knew fear. You smelled… well awful, but ordinary awful, the way we all smelled, covered in it, afflicted by it as I was, and it made me know there was something underneath that in you, just as there was in me. And I didn’t… I didn’t want that to die.” Her hand dropped, and her voice with it, “I couldn’t let you die.”
“So you… butchered me,” he sounded amused, but not mocking.
Her smile twitched “You certainly put up a fight, but yes, I guess I did.”
“I wish I could have touched you… I mean that I wish I could have understood what…” He leaned his head back against the wall, “I didn’t understand.”
“I wish I had done more to make you understand. I could have.”
“I doubt it.”
“It would have been easier on both of us.”
“I doubt it.”
She shrugged, “Maybe not. I don’t know. I’ve… thought of it often. Weighed and reweighed it.”
“You have troubled me as well. Often.”
They were both quiet a long moment then he said in startled tones, “When I woke up, when I quit that place… no one was there anymore. Not for miles. They were long gone but you had… come back?”
She shook her head, “I never left. Not until you started to wake up.”
“They left you there?”
“Well, yes.”
“As suddenly as that, they left you, just for healing me?”
She shook her head, “No, not exactly. They left because they had to follow the war. That was the vocation. I stayed. You slept for almost three days, they could only wait for one.”
He goggled, “I did not realize. I had long since lost track of the days.”
“You were still very unwell.”
“I thought-” he sighed heavily, “I apologize for what I thought of you.”
“What was it?”
“That you had come back to kill me. That I had woken up just in time to avoid it. That was why your scent was still there while the others were long gone.”
She shrugged, “Not a bad guess, considering. Apology accepted.”
He absentmindedly rubbed his wrists, “I suppose there were clues. As I slept you shifted my chains, both hands to one ring, and one ankle to the other,” he smirked at the memory.
“Yes.”
“Did you pray over me?”
She shook her head, “I don’t know any prayers. Bloodspeakers aren’t that kind of order.”
“Then what was it you were saying, before the abbess interrupted you?”
She sighed, fighting a blush, “I…was… begging you. To hear me, to hold still, to pardon me for how it was about to hurt, to let me cut the arrow out because I was so tired I thought I couldn’t do it with just a miracle.”
“I would never have guessed that.”
“I suppose not. You thought I was going to kill you for honor and sanctimony. Not a lot of begging in those situations.”
He shifted his weight and changed the subject, “And when it was all over… I remember waking alone… but there was a scent, still warm… you had slept beside me.”
She fought a smirk of her own, “It was cold. I don’t like to be cold.”
“They left you there with nothing. A punishment.”
She shook her head, “A necessity. We… they had nothing to leave me. They travel light and in poverty to avoid bandits and suspicion. Yours had wealth enough to wage war over and left you for dead anyway.” She sighed bitterly, “Monsters.”
”You slept with your back against my front, your neck across my arm…” he breathed in as if to check his memory against the scent of her, “and you slept like that. With a monster with coalfire eyes. To save me from the fever.”
“I was saving my own life too. I was too tired to move. If you had died I expect I would have frozen beside you.”
He regarded her with a bafflement that made her uncomfortable.
She shrugged, “It was arrogance, exasperation with the unreasonable demands of sanity maybe, far more spite for the war than courage,” she idly gripped at his shoulders, kneading the heaped knots to spite the awkwardness, and true to her expectations it made him close his eyes, “I was confident your rising blood would wake me before it woke you. I was right.”
They sat like that for a while and she tended him, his arms hanging looser, his head falling back. The habit of it was comforting, and seemed in keeping with the reckless kindness and casual joy all around them far below. She hit a tender spot, an old wound, and he flinched, stopping her, but he did not sit forward or open his eyes.
He sighed, “Did you dream?”
She nodded, hoping that she didn’t blush even though he wouldn’t see, “A little.”
He nodded as well, “I dreamt.”
“Of what?”
He opened his eyes and looked past her into the waning light, “Of this. Of peace. And then waking up on that bare plain alone, the sky flat grey, abandoned and adrift but having survived, having been saved, it felt…”
She nodded, “Like a new world.”
He nodded, “Still bloody, still dirty, but… new-born. Reborn.”
Her hands were still on his neck, and she had not thought of moving them. She felt the shift of his blood, his intent to move, and got up to let him do so unencumbered as she had that day.
“I am glad,” he said, sitting very still as she got up, “to find that you too are real. More real than I remember.”
She went to the edge of the balcony, turning away, “What is it that you remember?”
“A resentful, thwarted goddess judging me.”
She laughed genuinely and pressed her palms on the stones, “I suppose ‘resentful’ is correct..”
“Thwarted executioner, then.” He got loudly to his feet.
“Or butcher,” she muttered, “I butchered the vow well enough.”
“I am grateful that you butchered your duties. And mine.”
It was a grander notion than she could accept, “They were largely in tatters before I met you. Mine were, anyway. I frequently healed those I perhaps should not have, in the eyes of the order. You were only the last.”
“I…had my doubts as well.” He said nothing else but approached her cautiously, just as she was beginning to shiver, before she had even realized it was getting chilly. He leaned forward, sharing warmth by common wordless decree. She kept her hands on the battlement, and he rested his on her shoulders like a heavy cloak. He squeezed gently, rolling the twanging cords of her muscles with surprising delicacy, dissolving and freeing clots of soreness she had all but accepted as part of her body. “I have never trusted it when told not to question.” He tended to her that way, out and in along the slopes of her shoulders, squeezing and rolling, for long minutes as the dying sky changed from red to purple. She was grateful to be faced away from him as the unfamiliarity of simple physical care for her body squeezed grateful tears from her eyes. Unbidden, she wondered if he were willing to do more, whether that would be madness.
“You truly never thought of ending me?” he asked behind her ear, still unbelieving.
She shook her head, “No. I could see something different in your eyes for me, though.”
“I never wanted to hurt you. There would be no honor in it.”
She laughed, “I don’t believe you. The way you glared…”
He made a growling sound in his chest, but his hands became no less gentle, and she resisted a thrill of fear. She relented a little, “I could be wrong. I wasn’t touching you when you glared at me. I couldn’t know what was in your blood. But it seemed obvious enough.”
“I wanted to scare you. I wanted you to flinch.”
“Hmm. Why?”
His hands slid down her arms and he leaned forward to rest them by hers on either side. She pressed her tail carefully down to avoid touching him below the waist, but leaned into him as much as she could without lifting her hands. He took her by each wrist, his large hands not needing to squeeze very hard to close, “Do you know how it feels to be chained? It’s maddening, that lack of control. I thought if I could get my hands free, make you free me, I could think more clearly, find the right words.”
“So when you were glaring at me, growling at me, menacing me with the fact of your horns if I tried to reach the arrow… you were begging, too.” She surprised herself with her boldness in teasing him, and with how she hoped he would respond.
He gave a measured growl, his grip tightening without hurting, “You chained so many for the sake of your mercies, and you do not know the feeling of being chained yourself?”
She pulled back a little but could not lift her hands against his constant, firm grip bearing her down, “No. I’ve known fear. Constraint. Lack of choice. But no, not literal chains.”
“It’s a unique kind of helplessness. Most would do anything to get free. Even pledge their lives to a senseless war.”
She had to admit, there was something provocative about the unyielding feel that wasn’t’ just his blatant challenge and impropriety. She couldn’t lift her hands or straighten back against him. When she tried, really tried, his chest trembled in a restrained chuckle. Reluctantly she nodded, but her tail twitched, “You’re right. I feel what you mean. To be willing to do anything,” Her tail found the leg of his breeches over his thigh and pressed tellingly “to reclaim one’s power from another.”
Taurous tails were not prehensile, and he clearly hadn’t guessed that hers was until then. A strategic flub, she thought archly. As she traced up his thigh, she felt his blood juke uneasily, but he did not release her, and he did not become anxious. He did bend a bit more, moving his hips further from hers, pressing her more firmly with his chest, rubbing gently as he breathed, “What would you do?”
She felt reckless, willful against constraint. It was ever her failing, and if he wanted her, he was playing on it brilliantly, “If you would know, let me show you.”
He growled again, defiance blended with longing. The two things contested a long moment before he chose a third. He put his mouth to her bare neck, nuzzling in a way that made her gasp. He furrowed and nipped at her, and she could only shift from foot to foot. Finally he whispered warmly in her ear, “Beg me.”
She was scandalized almost to laughter, “Beg you?”
“The way you did when I was helpless, when I could deny you only my vow and my survival. Beg me again to let you touch me, now that we can understand each other.”
She struggled instead, sure as she had been then that if she could find a way to touch him she could make him willing to be touched. She shifted her considerable weight, pulled with her formidable strength, stretched her tail towards him as far as she could but could only graze him, could barely budge him. He flexed his chest against her back, hinting that he was only using a fraction of his strength to keep her still. “Beg me, healer” he growled, and returned to grazing along her neck, “Make me understand you. Make me willing.”
She stretched her neck and sighed, “Please.”
He shifted his breeches against the tip of her tail briefly. Her blood thundered in her ears. With more earnestness she gasped, “Please, I beg you, let me touch you.”
He groaned as if something in her voice had, indeed, touched him. He murmured, “More. I know you’re capable of better than that.” but his posture crept more of his body against hers even as he pretended to deny her.
“Have you dreamt of my begging you?”
He nodded against her skin, skimming the hairs back and forth with a delightful intensity.
“Please,” she whispered, stretching the word with tormented longing, “Please let me touch you. I need-”
He lifted her hands from the stone and wrapped them around her midsection, still holding her wrists, pressing each palm to the opposite hip. She shifted against him, snaking her slender tail between his legs to press and caress along the seam of his thigh as he ground against the back of her pelvis. With each hand pinned, she gripped and pulled at her shift with strong fingers until the seam above and below her tail at the back released several inches of torn stitching in either direction. More free to move, she plucked with her tail at the front of his breeches and the coarse ties came loose. He gasped as his naked shaft slipped out into the cool air and the warm ministrations of her touch. She coiled it about him as tightly as she could, tugging and guiding him towards the hole in her clothes.
He stopped just short of being drawn within her skirt, breathing heavily with notes of moaning at the base of every exhale, “Wait, wait…” he was struggling to gather his thoughts under such an unexpected chance, he let go of her wrists and embraced her back against him at the waist instead, “You beg well enough, I free you,” and he silenced his mouth against her neck again. She grasped and stroked at his neck, his cheeks, his thick mane, as his cock slid readily between her thighs and along her nethers until she was fully astride it, her own tail forced to release him and instead slide back between his thighs to stroke and beckon his heavy scrotum. He leaned into this encouragement, pressed too close against her for his tip to threaten penetration, grinding his length along her vulva as she squeezed him with her thighs.
“I mustn’t take you,” he murmured, almost meditatively, as his grinding crept more and more into rhythmic thrusting, “You are not mine.”
She groaned and grabbed his wrists, pulling his hands to caress her chest, which he obliged greedily, “Must I beg you?” she murmured back, her slit engorged and sopping with his attentions.
He hauled her back tighter against him, his voice cracking, “I must not, but beg me.”
She lay back into him and let her breath babble words of entreaty into the air that gusted around them high above the city. She longed with every fiber that he would pull back far enough, tip her forward, press inside, and churn her like an angry sea, and she let every ounce of that longing spill out into groaned words of entreaty. She begged profanely, pleaded, swore her life plus a thousand years to the worship of his body with hers if he would only press himself inside her and pound her with savage mercy, every word making the fantasy of it more real, making her body more eager, more certain.
He rode without mercy between her thighs, holding her hard against shifting to take him, thrusting and thrusting until his whole body went rigid and he spilled seed in hot jolts onto the inside of her skirts. Gasping he collapsed forward, bearing her down, catching himself with his hands on the battlement, nuzzling the back of her neck as she gasped and caught herself in kind, but not in relief, her loins still panged and quivering.
Her cheeks were hot as fever, her heart racing, “Selfish, stubborn bastard.”
He straightened and turned, his steps unsteady, pulling up his breeches without fastening them, holding them with his hand as he slid his back down the tower wall, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting… you to speak… so well.”
She rolled her gaze skyward, where a sprinkle of stars had begun to wink back at her. Her nipples were so hard they ached. Everything ached. But every word of entreaty she knew had been used up. Back to smalltalk, then.
She cleared her throat hard, trying to undo the tightness, “You had never been ministered to by a healer, had you? It occurs to me, if you’d never seen a surgical knife…”
He sighed and shook his head, limber and exhausted, “No. Never.”
She glanced back, “Some of your scars are quite terrible. You were just left to recover from such things on your own?”
He huffed a grim chuckle, “I am quite resilient.”
A shiver crept up her skirt and she gripped her opposite elbows, “No one should have to be that resilient.”
He shifted and grunted, “It has its advantages. Come here.”
She turned and he was beckoning her back to his lap. She took a few steps towards him, carefully reticent, “What do you want now?”
“The thing we are still doing. I did not mean to be selfish.”
“Demanding redemption? Still seems selfish.”
He did not lower his hand, “For the sake of my tattered honor,” he lowered his chin and looked up at her seriously, “I beg.”
She knelt primly, graciously across his knees, but when he raised his hands she leaned back and crossed her arms, “Your hands stay down.”
He cocked his head to the side, but obeyed her.
She sat forward and gazed at him a long moment, remembering. She reached and put one hand lightly on the ridge above his eye, tracing a path to the crease below his horn and above his ear. His breathing slowed, he blinked languorously. She caressed him again, then on both sides at once. His hands crept from the floor to his thighs, but he did not reach for her.
“What was it you said to me,” he asked, “that first time we talked.”
She huffed, “We? You didn’t say a word. Not until after.”
He shrugged, his chest swelling with slow breaths, “I was dying. And you were… scolding me.”
“I wasn’t, I was… Telling you… that you could kill me without trying and I didn’t mean you harm,” absently her touch meandered to his shoulder. As before, she couldn’t reach where the arrow had been. She knelt up straighter and shuffled a little closer to him on her knees. When his eyes focused on her, she murmured in caprin, “Be calm, be still, trust me.”
“Those were the words. The prayer that was not a prayer. I remember.”
“How could you? You were dying..”
“You have haunted me a great deal since then. I kept them so I could ask someone someday.”
“You thought I was passing sentence.”
“You sounded very wise. I was almost ready to accept my fate.”
“Until you saw the knife,” she sighed.
“Instinct over intent,” his biceps twitched at the memory.
“Thank Faun the chains held.”
He nodded agreement, following her with his gaze as she stood, still straddling his legs. She grabbed him by one horn and pointed his eyes down. He snorted and tossed his head, but she caught him by a handful of hair as well. He wasn’t weakened as he had been then, but he allowed the memory to play out.
“My abbess passed by, said I should not waste my skills on your meat. She was a devoutly beneficent woman… but her family was from Alua..”
His head nodded lower, and he said darkly, “I understand.”
She knelt back down slowly, still holding his mane, “When you saw the knife, you jolted, you hit the wall and the arrow went into your lung,” she winced, “and I had to choose. So I chose your life, and held on for mine.” She knelt down and pressed against him, her fingertips tingled, “It isn’t easy to dissolve an arrow with magic,” her palms burned at the memory, “It exhausted me. And you.”
He arched his back, and she slid her arms around his waist, below the ribs where his lowered arms allowed. He stretched earnestly and groaned, perhaps feeling some sympathy in the memory just as she did. She gripped tight, pulling them against each other length to length so he would not buck her off, feeling a surprising firmness under his clothes that had not been there before.
She shifted pointedly and he shrugged, “I am resilient.”
She shifted again to pile her damp skirts to the front and rest her bare loins against his. He put his hands on her knees and started to protest, but she pressed them away, “You are chained, remember?”
He nodded guardedly. She ran her hands along the creases beneath his horns, “Be calm, be still, trust me.”
“You mean to do something that you should not do,” he offered with a catch in his voice.
“I won’t if you tell me no. If you don’t want me to,” she meant it, praying fervently that he wouldn’t deny her.
“It is dishonorable to take you… without at least some vow.”
She tried not to laugh, but couldn’t help it, “I’ve given up on vows. You know that. But is it dishonorable to you if I’m the one taking? You’re chained, after all. You can’t resist me. I could do anything to you like this.”
That smile tugged at him, and he put his palms flat on the floor. He rumbled some words she did not know.
She slid her hands down his belly, gradually peeling back the flaps of his clothes, “What does that mean?”
“That I shall… fight no more.”
That touched her, but she didn’t relent. His neck rolled back as she positioned him and pressed, savoring the pluck and thrum and full ache as the firm lip of his cock’s dome passed the tightest outer ring of her, the mounting pressure as she took his whole length, the long moment of rest as he twitched, fully sheathed, and then the knowing anticipation as she began to grind.
She came too fast for her liking. His body was apt to meet all her needful spots, and she levered and rode on him with an instinct and a hunger. The smell of him and his keen readiness made a hot frission with her own, and the acid tingle he raised in her loins climbed readily to a spot behind her navel where the pressure of it built and built and finally burst in a spray of tingles and a sweeping wave of contractions that shook her and bent her and snapped her head back again. The tension of how many years, blown away like cinders in a few moments.
She collapsed against him in resigned relief as she had when she had saved his life.
“Please let me hold you” he whispered into her hair. She nodded as his arms swept up around her and held her together. He groaned, still hard within her, and could not resist shifting to rub, instinct conquering intent. His chest thrummed a growl that permeated her whole body.
“Antillus,” she caressed his face, “Should you stop?”
He gave a pained moan and nodded, not stopping, “Soon…”
Her body hated her for resisting, another sweet wave of tension already building, “Because you know… oh… oh… you mustn’t take me. It will… oh faun’s balls that’s so good… it will go against your honor… to take me…”
He nodded, “Soon…I’ll stop before…” words failed him and his slow grind became a churn. She felt as though her body were melting into his, like there was no sky, no tower, no war, no peace, only him and the motion and the heat it was building.
“If you don’t stop now, I won’t be able to stop you…I can’t even want to now…”
He had begun to strain and tremble, “Could you beg me?”
“Not to stop…”
“No,” he snarled, grabbing her hips and clutching her into his thrusts, making one rebellious force of their two bodies. The world dissolved. The pressure of him inside her swelled and pounded and finally burst, matching her pulse for pulse as she shook and broke with him.
Far away, she could hear cheering and music. She returned to herself slowly, across leagues of contractions and aftershocks. She rested her cheek on his shoulder, riding the swells of his winded gasps. The keening of his blood settled, and as she caressed his sides, he put his arms around her again.
The wind gusted, and his chest rumbled, unsettled.
“Your honor is safe,” she said towards his ear, “I will not tell. We can walk away as we did before.”
“We can not be said to have walked away. That arrow changed our fates. We have always been returning to each other here.”
“That may be true,” she admitted, “I had not thought of it like that. I… I think we have very inconvenient natures.”
He sighed, uneasily contented, “I think,” he said, “that honor… and vows… have used us badly. We should not bind and we should not beg. But also… we have not finished returning.”
“Perhaps not. I do not feel entirely finished.” He leaned and looked at her abruptly, and she smiled, “In my soul, I mean. I’m still returning.”
“I think it would be alright,” he murmured under her ear, “if I were to… belong with you… for a while. Maybe just until spring. And we can see how this new world takes. Whether peace lasts.”
“Would that preserve your honor?”
He nodded, stroking her hair drowsily, “Perhaps. I don’t care. Might as well try it.”
She thought of her cozy home in the distant, snowy cliffs, “Are you any good at climbing?”
He glanced around them at the open night air and snorted, “Obviously.”
“Then I say yes, you can come belong with me. For a season. Or an age. But no vows.”
He nodded, “No vows.”