*Weekly updates* "There are no leashes now, no bindings," she says, her voice a dark lullaby in the flickering candlelight, "and it is their sacrifice that gave us this. Nothing can ever repay it. No one can ever take it from us. So now, in this hal...
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It's in the dead of night, amidst the city's noiseless slumber, that he hears it through the dark: a soft knock on his door. In the fog of slumber, he first thinks it a dream, an eerie, lingering thing in the halls of his mind, but then he hears it again.
He briefly considers the black sword, sitting on his armchair, as he approaches the door; but though the hairs on his neck tingle and the skin pebbles and shivers across his spine, he leaves the weapon be. His days of swinging blindly have passed.
The hall is in full darkness when he opens up to it, the moonlight peeking through his curtains providing the only illumination. Its rays scatter around him and shimmer, gray-blue, across a pale face he will always know, no matter what.
"Is something the matter?" he murmurs, confused, as Fae pushes past him into his room. She's wearing a dark robe and it is thin, playing around her legs in smoky wisps.
She's a dark daydream and, between the room, the time, and her, he has to look away.
I'll be thinking about this in the Jarles, he knows. Every night.
"I can't sleep," she says, jolting him out of his musings, pulling his attention back. "Can you?"
Not now, he thinks, but he ends up only saying: "Not much."
She stands, staring at him for a minute, and he stares back, perplexed, but also trying not to look directly at her.
"You're leaving tomorrow," Fae says, her voice a feather whisper, her hands fiddling with the collar of her robe.
You're leaving tomorrow and we don't know when you'll be back, is what is left unsaid, but Caj thinks he can see it in her face.
"Caj," she says, and he feels the way she says his name shiver down his spine. "Caj, can I kiss you?"
It's the most absurd thing anyone has ever asked him. He nods so quickly his teeth clack together.
She touches him gently, carefully, soft lips and skimming fingertips, and he thinks she must truly be made of smoke, vapor, and his hand goes out, catches the side of her face to assure himself she's here, she's real. Real, like before.
He feels her shiver more than sees it, and his touch invites more of hers—arms wrapped around his neck, body pressed against his own. She deepens the kiss and he holds her, holds her steady and there, next to him.
There are a thousand things he'd like to say, a thousand words, but he drops down, sets a kiss on her throat, the throat he once saw bruised and mottled, that spiraled him into rage and icy fear. He sets his mouth at her pulse point so he can feel it, rapid and drumming against him.
"Caj, can we—" Fae's voice cracks somewhere above him, strained, and her hands fumble with the knot of her robe. "Can you—"
Yes. He nods against her neck, mouthes it against her skin. His hands undo the knot and she takes them and guides them inside.
He takes to counting the fluttering intakes of her breath, marking carefully, fastidiously every gasp, every quaver. She takes to gripping his hair, to pushing her own hands up underneath his shirt, over his chest, across his thighs. They've stumbled back to the edge of the bed and she's on top of him, over him, and this is what he's going to remember, this is going to be the ember that glows deep inside him in the long intermediate months. Maybe years. But no, not years. Surely not years. And the fear of it tightens in his grip and she gasps, clutches him back harder, kisses him harder.
It ends with him on his back, in the bed, tangled in sheets and half-pulled off clothes, and her, there above him, like white fire in twilight, a ghost ship at sea. His compass, his beacon.
His queen.
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A/N: Sometimes we keep it short and sweet, and I need a little sweet this week. 😊
Chapter Notes: Caj swung the black sword with disastrous consequences in Prodigal's "The Other Foot Falls" and saw Fae's bruised neck in "Still You, Still Me."
