my bones will rest easy next to your bones

-

The walls of Chignon seem to stretch endlessly around Henry. Cold, harsh, restrictive. The hour is late; Alais is asleep, his children either dreaming or plotting beyond his reach, and he is alone. It is too early yet to start a hunt, too late for revelry, and the halls are long and quiet in the dark of night.

The walls are thick, the halls cold, and yet Henry doesn't shiver. He has always moved too quickly for the cold to catch up. His hurried footsteps echo in this cobbled confinement, his path lit only by the candle in his hand.

He is out on the battlement before long, overlooking his lands from above. The winter night is cooler here and he pauses, finally, to let the chill catch up with him.

Eleanor finds him, out there on the battlements. She moves across the walls like a specter in her white nightgown, hair flying loose in the cold night air, flickering candle casting wild shadows on the wall. She is far off, still — too far to see her face or any discernible feature — but this is Eleanor. Unmistakably Eleanor.

He would recognize her anywhere, that is his curse. The price he pays, perhaps, for her imprisonment.

She settles next to him without a word, overlooking the dark lands unfolding before their eyes, and silence stretches out between them. Loneliness too, across the space of years of marriage and war (one and the same to both of them, really; Henry doubts if he'd know how to love another way). It's almost peaceful.

"It is a beautiful night," she says eventually, breaking the silence at last. He looks at her, tries to discern her shape in the night — the angle of her cheekbones, the cutting edge of her eyes — and finds a portrait of shadows and candlelight on her face.

"Has the joyful moment come? Has the great Eleanor of Aquitaine lost her mind at last?” he announces, his voice cutting through the still darkness like a church bell. “It is so cloudy we can hardly see the moon."

"Precisely," she says, unperturbed by his mockery, one hand reaching out to caress his cheek. "Dark enough to hide the flash of a blade."

Her fingertips linger on his skin just a minute. Cool, colder even than the winter air surrounding them, and yet her touch reminds him only of the flames of war and passion. Even her gentleness carries an innate violence. A sweet caress and the threat of blades. Eleanor, too, knows only how to love by carving wounds.

"You wouldn't dare," he says eventually, when the moment has stretched on to become unbearable.

"There you are mistaken," she says, lifting her hand slowly from his cheek. Her pace would seem calculated to anyone but Henry, who notices the hesitance in her movement, the slight shake in her hand when she pulls back. Still, she stands straight, a pillar on the castle wall — always steady, always proud. "I would be a fool to kill you myself, when others — less important people, with far less to lose — want you dead already. Why do the work myself when I know someone else will do it for me, given time? There is a difference between prudence and cowardice that you have yet to learn."

"And yet I still live."

"So you do."

Why? He wants to ask.

"Proof of either your cowardice or your incompetence," he says instead.

"Perhaps I simply do not wish to see you dead — yet."

A swish of her dress, and Eleanor is off again, a shining, candlelit beacon on the battlements. Henry is alone once more.