#corlath

...

so, i think harry doesn't even realize she's touchstarved, because yknow. fantasy victorian english repression. when mathin reaches out to correct her grip, or when one of the other riders claps her on the back, or when the king briefly touches her arm*, she does not know why her heart races, but while she draws into herself, she does not stop them.

(*corlath knows his position too well to touch people freely, when they might fear saying n to him. corlath, i think, would understand harry's problem completely. however - )

corlath, ever observant, draws a slightly wrong conclusion from watching harry stiffen every time someone touches her: he thinks she doesn't like to be touched at all. that's fine, he tells himself. she's in a country full of people and customs she doesn't know. it's reasonable so he bids the servants to let her dress and wash herself, he reminds the riders gently not to jostle her around as they do the others, he leaves her alone and thinks all is well. and then they get married.

harry, for her part, has neatly boxed the problem away by this time. (don't listen to her. this is more repression. she hasn't dealt with fuckall.) married people are allowed and encouraged to touch each other, so she clings to corlath like a limpet in private. he's surprised, but definitely not unwilling to indulge her, so most mornings find them curled up in a pile. (often with narknon, sometimes without, because she's very offended by the things they get up to when she's not there.)

eventually, he does ask her about it. "i assumed you didn't like being touched," he says one day. "might i ask what changed?"

"...what gave you that impression," she says, currently in such a tangle of limbs that it's difficult to tell who begins where.

they talk it over. at some point, they admit to each other that they can probably count on both hands the number of people who have ever hugged them, and hold each other a little tighter.

anyway fast forward corlath encourages her to touch him whenever she wants, because there's no one to tell them no. harry, still outlander enough to balk at the idea of PDA, holds his hand under the table, and feels very daring. she touches richard more often, too, reminded that she can - often slinging an arm around his shoulders to annoy him, or hugging him when he leaves. she's shier with jack or the riders, but she accepts their renewed touches with a smile.

Now...this is where Corlath gets into trouble, you see.

Because he has this girl in his tent.  And he’s already been giving her a lot of things--robes and food and being waited on hand and foot by his own hafor.  All of that is not helping his Riders’ opinion that the kelar is trying to get their king laid, because it looks like he’s trying to woo this girl even though--well, she needs clothes that suit the desert, not some six-layered cake of a nightgown, and she’s obviously got to eat, and she’s been kidnapped by people she can’t even talk to.  He’s trying to make her feel at ease.

Normally, no one except the royal family gets this kind of treatment from the hafor, so by the strictest traditions Corlath may have slightly declared her his fiancee, but it was with the PUREST intentions.

But so, he concludes, the girl has to be trained as a warrior, and therefore she needs a horse and a sword and a teacher.  The teacher and the sword he can justify as her nominal lord, but the horse is dicier--she’s not technically his subordinate, and he’s not adopting her, which would be the other two circumstances where it would be socially acceptable to give someone a horse.  

To hell with it, though, he’s the king and she needs a horse so he gives her a horse.  He sells this lie to himself with extraordinary success, but not so much to anyone else.

“That’s a beautiful animal, sola,” Faran says very neutrally, watching the Outlander girl as Tsornin more or less flirts with her.

“Yes,” Corlath says through his teeth.

“The best in our herd, probably, excepting yours.”

“She needs a horse,” Corlath repeats for the fifth time in an hour.

“Mmmhm,” Faran says, and arches an eyebrow very slowly at his king.  Corlath resolutely does not blush, because he’s a king and he made a completely reasonable and legitimate gift based on the needs of someone who could help his country.

And then, of course, Harry up and leaves for six weeks to train with Mathin and the entire camp kind of observes Corlath while he Refuses To Pine and goes “Yeah, okay, sola, a totally logical gift, we believe you.”

So when Harry comes back to the City, triumphant, literally no one is surprised when he gives her the blue stone garden.  It was his father’s gift to his mother when they got married, so obviously Corlath will want to give Harimad something equally dramatic when they get married and this is just...the Damarian equivalent of a DTR talk.  

Corlath knows what he’s doing with this one, and feels kind of guilty.  The Outlander--Harimad clearly doesn’t know what the gift means, and it’s unfair of him to expect anything from her (he did kidnap her), and even more unfair of him to be disappointed when she doesn’t reciprocate the gift giving as the social structures dictate, because of all the things Mathin taught her, courting rituals probably weren’t among them.

But he does still give her the room.

Gonturan doesn’t count as a gift because Gonturan would be mortally offended to be pawned off as a possession, and Corlath knows it, and also Harry is now a soldier in the king’s army and can receive a sword from his hands without any baggage.  But the room and the horse and more robes and more meals that Corlath quietly edits to remove foods Harry doesn’t like...can you blame people for whispering?

And then she disappears during the army’s march and their king is wearing her sash.

By the time they actually get married, Harry has sussed out that the majority of the population believes they’ve been engaged since she arrived in Damar, largely because Innath finally took pity on her.  

She goes to an enormous amount of trouble to buy Corlath a hand-worked leather breastplate for Fireheart on rush order, complete with the royal crest worked in red to flatter the bay’s coloring, and shows up with it in hand and a smug look on her face as she shoves it at him.

“This is for you,” Harry says, triumphant.  “I would be extremely honored if you would marry me.”

Corlath blinks at her.  “Hari, love, we’re getting married in a week, everything is already planned.  But the breastplate is very nice,” he admits.

Harry’s grin widens.  “Ah, but it’s not really polite to do half your wooing when your target doesn’t even know what’s happening.  I have to admit that I don’t actually know the proper forms for how this should go, though.  So.”  She gestures to the breastplate and says, “Will you please marry me, Corlath-sola?”