♖ Ana ♖

The trees begin to thin by such small degrees he does not mark it at first. Trunks stand farther and farther apart, the undergrowth giving way under his boots to softer ground. Above, the sun has gone to a pale smear behind steel-coloured cloud, drained of all warmth and shape. He keeps on a little farther by stubbornness alone, one step and then another, until the wood opens sudden and wide before him. His knees fold. His sword slips from his hand. He goes down full-length upon a patch of yielding grass, too spent to break the fall, cheek turned into the damp. Somewhere close by, the world gathers itself into a single sound: the low hum of water. A bank, then. A shore of sorts. His last crossing, he thinks dimly. When he shuts his eyes, the red at last gives way to black.

He had wanted knighthood so long it seemed, once, the whole shape of a life. In younger years, trailing after his old master, watching and learning, he had thought of knights as men made for roads and vows and hard duty borne plain. He had not thought on how they died. Or rather, he had thought it would be as his master died: after long service, after years spent in defence of those weaker, with witnesses near at hand to mark the passing of a good man. Age upon him, and peace of a sort. Duncan had carried that picture without knowing it, as boys carry many foolish certainties. Never had he reckoned with ending this way—alone in a red wood, blood soaking into strange ground, unable even to say whether the last fight had been won or lost.

His fingers have gone cold. So have his feet, his arms, the long hefty span of him. The chill is working inward, creeping from the edges, and the rest of his body feels heavy in some queer and dreadful way, as if the earth has begun to claim him piece by piece. It is a weight alien to him. Duncan has known weariness, hunger, what it is to ache clean through after a day in the saddle or a hard bout in the yard, but this is different. This is heaviness without labour and cause. One that drags a man down and means to keep him.

Suddenly, warmth spills over the back of his neck.

He comes to in a jerk of breath, half-lucid. A face hangs over him, close enough that he sees the beads of water trembling on skin, the startled wideness of her eyes. Her mouth is parted. It is full of teeth, small and shining and far too many, and she watches him with the still intent look of something wondering whether he will go peaceably.

Duncan swallows. Even that hurts.

“Have you come to carry me over?” he asks, and his voice shakes like an old man’s.

She says nothing. Only cocks her head, studying him.

He tries to wet his lips and cannot. “Beg pardon,” he murmurs, for courtesy’s sake if nothing else. “I never thought death would have so fair a face.”

Her gaze shifts at that, though whether in surprise or hunger he cannot tell. Then, the dark takes him again.

A noise comes from within the trees. At first it reaches you through the water as blunt disturbance only—stamping passed down through mud and root, a dull knocking felt more than heard. Then come the sounds above it: groans and wails like some wounded thing, and the shrill scrape of metal grinding on metal. When your head breaks the skin of the pond and your ears clear the water, the truth of it comes plain: no beast; a man. His shape flickers between the trunks, hunched and monstrous in the dim.

You keep low beneath the spread of frogbit and white water-lily. The pond has taught you patience. Through the torn green of it, you watch him blunder nearer.

He is vast. Not merely tall, but made on a scale that puts him wrong against the wood. The trees themselves seem to crowd back from him. Iron drags at every step he takes. What serves him for a second skin has gone red in places where the blood has soaked through and dried and soaked through again. He has no helm. His head hangs bare. Whatever face he was born with is all but lost under blood, mud, and the blackening swell of bruises. He comes on bent at the middle, one hand clamped to his side, the other still wrapped stubborn round a sword that appears to grow heavier with each stagger.

Men do this. They go out under bits of cloth and beasts sewn on shields, under one lord’s temper and another lord’s hunger, and tear one another to ruin over slights, borders, pride, inheritance, the old dead grievances of old dead men. They fight their fickle battles over fickle things and pay the dear price with their fickle lives. You do not know what quarrel has opened this one from rib to hip. You do not know whether he earned such an end entire. Yet if he is witless enough to wear steel and bleed for some lord’s cause, then it is grace enough from any god that he should die in a place as fair as yours.

It makes your work easier. There is no need to sing for him. No need to show him a glimmering shoulder through the reeds, no need to sweeten your mouth and set a trap in your voice. Someone else has done all the hard part already. They have wearied him, broken him open, driven him half-blind right here. All he must do now is come near enough.

And the fool does. You see the moment the trees begin to fail him. The ground changes first. Leaf mould gives way to blacker, softer earth. Moss fattens green around the roots. Sphagnum swells at the water’s edge in thick, wet hummocks, bright as something lit from within. He stumbles into the clearing as if he has reached the last place appointed him and knows it.

One more step. Another. Then his knees give way.

The sword drops from his hand and vanishes into the moss with hardly a sound. He falls face-first onto the bank, onto soft bright spread of grass, all that huge bloodied length of him striking the earth. He does not even throw out a hand to save himself. For a breath he lies still.

Then the pond gathers itself around him and gives him one last sound: its low hum against the shore.

Near enough.

You draw yourself from the water slow as a reptile, hands first, then shoulders, then the long drag of the rest of you through weed and black silk mud. Pondweed clings between your fingers. Duckweed pearls green along your wrists. The smell of his blood hangs so thick in the damp that it touches the back edges of your tongue. Fresh. Salt-rich. Strong. Flesh like that would feed you well. Might make you stronger too.

Without the trees to diminish him, and laid flat upon the bank, he looks no smaller. He is still an enormity. A felled thing, all sprawled in a ruinous heap. Breath yet labours out of him in thin, rattling bursts. So he lives. Barely.

You sink nearer, careful with your hands, with your weight, your mouth already parting over the place where neck meets shoulder, where the flesh would be hottest and the taking quickest, when—

He jerks. You go still at once and wait.

His lids drag open.

Blue. A strange clear hue infants keep before the world has time to weather it into something harder. His have stayed. Though pain has driven the sense from his face and left his gaze loose with it, the colour remains clean. A row of copper lashes rims it. Tells you what the blood and mud had hidden: that the hair under all that filth must run copper too.

He swallows. Winces for it. Looks at you straight on, with no flinching, no scramble to crawl back, no fumbling for the sword gulped by the moss.

He asks his question, and for a beat you only stare. Then it comes plain: he thinks you are the thing at the edge of life come to fetch him. A ferrier. A final guide. Death with a wet face and a patient mouth. The more he speaks, the less appetite you retain.

I never thought death would have so fair a face.

And there it is. It is not the praise that stays your teeth. Men have wanted beautiful things before. Men have called you fair with their hands already reaching. Men have named your mouth sweet and your body finer than any liquor, and meant only hunger by it. This is another thing. Stripped of wits by blood-loss, emptied near to death, believing you his last companion, this knight speaks to you as though you are owed gentleness. He thinks he has met the end of his life and chooses, in that meeting, to be kind.

You have never seen the like.

For a moment longer you remain above him, bent close enough to feel the heat leaking from his body into the chill air, your own hunger held open and waiting. Then his eyes slip shut again. The weight of him settles back into the earth. The bank goes quiet save for that poor, thin rattle in his chest.

Your mouth closes.

In your world, the choices are plain: eat or spare, whether it is your own kind or any other. Each is a way of keeping, in the strictest sense of the word. Who is kept in the belly and who in the groin depends on the keeper’s strength, or mercy. Just now, both are at war within you. You are stronger than the dying knight, for the moment. Yet you can see exactly how much the ugly world of men would lose if he were gone. And how much you might gain if you chose to keep him, the way a maiden keeps a man.

“Stócach amaideach,” you groan. A foolish lad indeed.

Both hands go to him first at the shoulder, to test the matter. Give him a shove—nothing. A second, harder. His body shifts no more than the grass does under him. The iron makes a carcass of him. Nearly seven feet of man, all breadth and bone, dressed up in rings and plates enough to drown an even bigger creature outright. You bare your teeth at him though he does not see it.

There is no hauling him anywhere like this. Not up the bank, not into the reeds, not to the shelf of drier ground beneath the alders. You might drag a stag. You might drag two men grown soft on bread and ale. This one is another matter. The blood has not emptied him of his size.

With a sound low in your throat, you drop flat upon your belly beside him, tail lashing once against the water and sending a fan of duckweed spinning. Mud cools your ribs, slickens the gills there. Annoyance goes hot through you all the same. For a little while you lie there glaring at the side of his ruined head, as though the knight has done this on purpose purely to spite you.

Then your eyes go to the armour. That, at least, can be mended.

You push yourself up and set to work. His belt first, stiff with wet and caked dark. The buckle fights you, so you wrench it free. Then the straps at his shoulders. His surcoat clings where the fabric has dried to him. Under it the mail hangs heavy as river chain. You plant one hand in the moss, coil your tail hard beneath you for leverage, and tug until the weight of it gives with a dull wet drag. Piece by piece, you unmake him from what men have put on him. A pauldron slick with mud. A vambrace. The quilted jack beneath, sodden through. Rings of mail whisper and clink against one another as you peel them back from his chest.

He grunts once when you shift him. Still alive enough to object. “Be still,” you mutter, though he has no say in it now—more of him comes free.

The body under all that iron is much as the rest promised: broad, hard, made thick with labour rather than vanity. His chest is furred copper-gold where it is not slicked flat with sweat. Old scars lie pale across his skin, each one laid down by some earlier foolishness survived. New hurts crowd among them. One brow is split deep enough to mat blood right through his lashes and into his hair. Purple has risen ugly under one eye and along the hinge of his jaw. His shoulder is swelling wrong beneath your hand, whether wrenched or bruised hard enough to half-dislocate. The worst lies at his side: a long slash below the ribs where flesh has opened and opened again with every step he took through the wood. Blood still wells there in slow thick gleams.

You draw back and look at it. A man should have dropped sooner from such a wound. This one had walked. Again you click your tongue at him, softer this time.

The bog gives you what you need, as it always has. You know where the thick green pillows of sphagnum swell brightest above the black water, where soft rush grows in clumps fit for binding, where yarrow lifts its ragged leaves higher up the bank, spared the deepest wet. You move quick, gathering with both hands. Sphagnum in great dripping handfuls. Yarrow torn bitter at the stem. A strip of bark from the willow bent low over the far edge of the pool. When you return, you rinse the moss in clear seep-water where it runs cold from the stones, then squeeze it once between your palms.

He does not wake when you clean the cut. His body only flinches under yours. Blood loosens and runs anew beneath the water. Mud comes with it. You work your fingers carefully through the parted flesh, clearing grit, clearing leaf-rot, clearing whatever would fester if left in. When the wound is clean enough to judge, you bend close and press your mouth to the torn edge of him.

Your saliva floods warm.

It tastes of iron and rain and man. Under your tongue the flesh stirs, not closing whole and clean—that would be a greater gift than he has earned—but quickening. The bleeding slows. The raw edges draw tighter. Heat gathers where your mouth has been, the body taking instruction from yours. You do it again, lower, then once more along the deepest part of the gash until your jaw aches and the blood comes less freely.

Curiosity keeps your hands on him after the bleeding eases. You set them at his hips, thumbs fitting into the hollows where hard muscle sheathes over bone, and wonder how such a frame would feel beside yours, under yours, pinned between your tail and the bank. For a moment you lower your cheek to the warm plane of his belly, where coarse hairs narrow and point the way down. Then, before sense can catch up, you slip a finger under the damp edge of his braies and lift. There the weight of him rests, soft with unconsciousness and still imposing.

“My, my,” you murmur, mouth wetting at the sight. No smaller than the males of your own kind, only stranger made—smooth where they are barbed, blunt where they are built for tearing. Pretty. To unwrap him and coax him up in your hand would not be difficult. But you want him back at full strength. Better to let the blood replenish before it is asked to labour elsewhere.

After, you pack the cut with sphagnum, dense and cool, pressing the moss into the cut place until it drinks what still seeps out. You bind him round with rush and the torn strips of his own undershirt, winding them firm beneath his back and over the waist. For the brow, more moss. For the swelling shoulder, willow bark chewed soft between your teeth and laid in a mash against the worst of it. You wipe your wrists across your mouth and sit back to inspect your work.

He looks only a little less like carrion, but it will have to do.

For a while you remain beside him as dusk thickens in the reeds, one hand spread on the broad plane of his chest to feel the rise and fall. It still rattles. It still rises. Great fool that he is, he keeps choosing life even senseless.

With the worst of the grime rinsed from him, the other kind of pretty emerges from under the wreck. His hair, where it dries in the last of the light, indeed burns a dark copper, made richer still by the sinking sun. Fair skin lies under it, though hard-used, and across the breadth of his cheeks there runs a scattering of freckles so pale they only show when the blood is gone from them. Strange, that a face built on such a scale should keep anything of boyhood about it. Stranger still that it does not make him look foolish. Only unguarded.

A giant sleeps at your shore, broken open, and he is gentle.

“Fathach caoin,” you murmur, as though naming him might make the task lighter. Then, with a weary glance at the bank and the darkening pond beyond: “You had best prove worth the trouble.”

He’s seeing orange. Warmth bakes him into the ground and paints the inside of his lids. Dunk feels significantly alive for someone who’s welcomed death with tranquil acceptance. Something binds his ribs quite tightly and the morning chill lakes his chest with gooseflesh.

He frowns before his eyes are even open. The hurt is there, yes, but dulled to something he knows how to bear. Instead of the white-red tearing he remembers and the feeling of his side coming apart each time he drew breath comes soreness. Pull. Throb. The pain a living man may yet complain of.

Slowly, as if he half expects the effort to prove too much for him, he pries his lids apart.

Sunlight drives in, bright and merciless. Duncan winces and shuts them again, turning his face away. For a little while he lies still with his teeth gritted, waiting for the hot dazzle behind them to settle. Then he tries anew, more careful, peering through his lashes first.

Sky. Reeds. The hard gold of morning laid over black water. No seven hells. No pale halls. No ferryman either.

He pushes himself up on one elbow. At once the world tells him several impossible things. His chest is bare to the air. Something coarse and damp is wound round his middle and under one arm, binding him up with more ingenuity than neatness. Looking down, he finds his side packed thick with green-brown moss where blood should have been. Another clot of it has been pressed to his brow. When he touches the binding with cautious fingers, he feels the pull of torn skin made tighter, cleaner, less ruinous than he remembers.

Dunk stares. “Well,” he mutters hoarsely to no one. “That is queer.”

A pile lies beside him on the bank, close enough that he might have reached it in the night had he been able. His surcoat, his mail, his sword belt, the quilted jack beneath—everything dark and stiff with dried blood. His sword has been laid atop the heap as if set there by a hand that understood what it was. The sight of it turns his stomach strangely. So he had not dreamt the fight, nor the wound, nor the red wood or the black water at the edge of it.

He looks again at the moss stuffed into his side. His hand goes once to his chest, as if to make certain the heart is still there and working—it is. A touch too fast, perhaps, but stout enough. He draws a deeper breath to test himself and finds the pain sharp but bearable.

Someone has saved him. The notion is so unlikely that it holds him for another moment, blinking in the sun, bare as a babe from the waist up and swaddled in reeds like some marsh-born fool. He is still trying to make sense of it when the pond beside him breaks with a sudden heavy splash. Something larger than a fish. Considerably larger.

He turns toward the sound and finds you already looking at him.

You lie stretched along a flat rock at the water’s edge, belly to the stone, chin propped in your hands as though you have been there some while, waiting for him to wake. There is nothing shy in the stare you give him. It is the stare of a creature keeping watch over what it has caught. Your claws rest plain against your cheek, curved and dark at the tips. Behind you, the long reach of your tail trails down into the pond and moves through it in an idle sweep that sends rings over the black water.

It is a tail fit to shame his legs. Longer by far than any fish’s ought to be, thick where it begins, made with a strength that shows even in stillness, it narrows and lengthens until the water takes it from him. Where it passes below the surface, it almost disappears. The pond seems to claim it for its own. Under the water it turns rich moss-green, flickering pale now and then like the quick side of a fish. Above the water, the scales catch the morning sun and answer it back in shifting colours—green first, then blue, then a coppery rose, then something gold at the very edge of each movement, bright and hard as the back of a rose chafer.

Dunk’s gaze follows the whole splendid length of it before he has the wit to stop. By the time he reaches the place where human’s buttocks should be, heat is already climbing his neck. He jerks his eyes aside and only worsens the matter for himself. Your body broadens there in a way that leaves him shamefully aware of himself, aware too that he is gaping and that you have likely caught him at it. He goes higher in haste, seeking some safer sight, and finds none waiting.

The scales climb and thin along your shape, framing the inward draw of your waist and the line of your spine before scattering into singular bright points that glitter in the sun like freckles thrown there by a careless hand. Along your ribs, slits open and close in a steady rhythm. Your forearms are drawn carefully over your chest, though what catches him hardest is your face.

He had seen it once before through blood-loss and darkness, and thought it the face of death. Morning does nothing to disprove him.

Your mouth is wet and soft-looking despite the sharpness of your teeth. Your lashes cast faint shadows. Your brows pull together in what seems meant for sternness, though something in the set of them goes sweeter than severe. You watch him with an intensity that strips him bare quicker than the lack of shirt ever could. Duncan swallows and feels the movement all down his bruised throat. Intimidated hardly begins to cover it.

He wets his lips once, then reaches blindly for the nearest bit of cloth from the heap beside him and drags it awkwardly across his chest, as though that might restore some part of his dignity. It does very little. Still, he gathers what remains and bows his head as best he can from where he sits.

“M-m’lady,” he says.

The word leaves him before he can better it. He has no notion whether you are a lady, some water-spirit, or a peril he ought to fear a deal more than he does. Courtesy is what he has, so courtesy is what he gives you.

His eyes lift again, wary and earnest both. “I would thank you,” he says, a touch hoarse, “if thanks is what’s due. Though I confess, I do not rightly know to whom I owe my life.”

“Dúisithe faoi dheireadh.”

Awake at long last.

You roll from the rock with scarcely a sound but for the slick slap of your body leaving stone. A moment later your tail hauls a great sheet of water in his direction. It strikes his shoulder and chest and darkens the shirt bunched there in his fists.

“You must wash,” you tell him. “You may no longer be dying, but other people’s death still clings to you. It disturbs me.”

“Beg pardon, I—” he stammers, blinking water from his lashes. “I’ve bled on your shore.”

That wins from you a laugh, full-chested and bright. You drift onto your back with the ease of something born to water, and the movement sends your hair sliding from your front. The glimpse of side-breast that follows is enough to set Duncan’s head swimming worse than the blood loss did.

“That you have,” you say. “Nothing cold water will not clean. Come—” You pause, eyeing him. “What kind of knight are you?”

“A hedge knight. Ser Duncan the Tall,” he says, eyes down.

At that, Dunk climbs to his feet, clutching the shirt. Then, as if seized all at once by the knowledge that standing half-naked before a water spirit may call for some greater decency, he drags it hastily over his head and very nearly tangles himself in it besides. When he straightens, he finds the cloth has shrunk by half a war. The hem catches well above where it ought to, leaving a broad strip of his stomach bare. Duncan could swear your mouth parts a little at the sight.

“Ser Duncan the Tall,” you repeat. Your hand spreads over the skin of the pond, fingers trailing. “Come. I’ll show you where the water runs clear.”

He goes as bid, though each step he takes toward the pond has a measure of caution in it, as if the water might change its mind and bite. The bank gives under his weight. Mud takes his feet to the ankle and holds them there a moment before letting go with a soft obscenity. He comes on anyway, the chill already rising from the water before he has set so much as a toe into it.

When he does, it is cold enough to strike a sound from him. He sucks breath through his teeth. The next step brings it to his shins, the next to his thighs. By the time it has him to the waist, the whole of him has gone tight with it. His wounds wake afresh under the shock. Cloth blooms and tugs round him under the surface, braies and shirt both dragging with the pull of the current. You move ahead with idle ease, and he follows as far as his long legs will allow. Half because you bade him, half because there is little else to do now but trust the creature who has already had him helpless and left him living.

The pond proves stranger the farther in he goes. The black stillness near the bank gives way to movement. Water threads colder and quicker round his knees, then his thighs, shouldering itself through narrow places between stone and reed. Ahead, it clears to glass over a bed of rock and pale sand. A basin, he thinks dimly. A widening in the course of some hidden run, where stream feeds pond and pond feeds stream in turn. He has just enough time to marvel at it before his next step finds nothing.

The ground drops clean away.

He pitches forward with all his size behind him and vanishes in a single great plunge. Water slams into his ears, nose, his open mouth. Something hard clips him on the face as he goes down—stone, sharp-edged enough to split the lower lip—and the taste of blood bursts quick over his tongue. For a flurried instant all he feels is cold. He flings out an arm and finds no purchase. Then, hands seize him under the pits.

Even now, with his clothes heavy, the water takes enough of his weight that you can haul him. He comes up hard, breaking the surface with a ragged gasp that tears at his side. Blood slips bright from his mouth and strings briefly from his chin before the current steals it.

“Forgive me,” he coughs, wiping at his lip with the back of his wrist.

Your eyes go to heaven, or whatever part of the sky may serve in its place.

By the time you guide him to firmer footing, the bottom has steadied under his soles, though the river still holds him high—up beneath the arms, cold at the ribs, tugging at his clothes. He stands there dripping and raw-lipped while you watch him as one might watch an ox brought in mud-caked from the field.

“You must undress.”

The words strike him near as sharply as the stone did.

Dunk blinks. “That would not be decent.”

“It would be fouler still to put those rags back over clean wounds.” Your gaze flicks once to his side, to the bindings gone dark in patches where the water has touched them. “You would ruin my work.”

That shuts him up more thoroughly than any modest protest might have done. “Aye,” he says after a moment, head bowing of its own accord.

His fingers fumble at the hem of the shirt. He peels it away in stages, the cloth reluctant to leave him. Across from him you have sunk almost wholly beneath the surface, all save the upper plane of your face and the shine of your hair fanned around it. The water holds your shoulders, your belly, the long hidden strength of your tail. Only your eyes remain fully above water, fixed upon him without so much as a blink, and something about that unwavering regard makes his hands clumsier still. He feels all at once too large for his own body, too visible in it, as though every inch he uncovered made his size, his awkwardness, his youth plain.

He gets the shirt off at last and stands with it bunched stupidly in one hand. You come nearer.

There is scarcely a sound to mark it. One moment you are several feet away, the next the water has shut and opened round you again at his side. You dip below the surface to inspect the wound, and Dunk, who has faced armed men before with steadier nerves than this, goes rigid all through. Cool fingers find the knot at his ribs. They work it loose with an efficiency that leaves no room for fantasy, yet fantasy arrives all the same, unbidden and hot. The reeds slacken. The binding eases. He lifts his arms because it seems prudent to put them somewhere, and winds up standing with them out from his sides in a posture so awkward he would laugh at it himself were he not busy dying of shame.

The moss comes free in blood-dark clumps. They spin away upon the water and catch in eddies near his hip. Your hands return. This is the first time he truly feels them: not the fact of being tended, but the touch itself. Your fingers are cool, though warmer than the current. Slender and firm. Certain in what they mean to do. They pass over the torn place at his side, then farther across him as you steady him with a palm spread low on his belly.

Every part of Dunk seems to wake.

Heat pours through him so fast it is near alarming. It starts where you touch him and goes everywhere else with indecent speed—up his throat, across his chest, down into the water where he would rather remain altogether unreadable. He fixes his eyes on the far bank. On a stand of reeds. On anything. The hand on his stomach holds him with easy confidence, keeping him from swaying while you clear the wound, and he throws all his strength into stillness. He holds himself rigid. Even the smallest movement seems perilous to him now. His breath goes thin and careful. His body, treacherous great thing, feels poised to answer even that much.

Water laps softly at his waist. Your hair moves against his skin once, a drifting brush, and he nearly groans from so little. He swallows and keeps his gaze pinned ahead.

The effort of seeming untroubled occupies him so completely he is half convinced he manages it. Then he hears himself breathe—thin, careful, wholly unlike a man at ease—and knows the game is lost.

When Duncan stands, you realise he has not borne the name The Tall in vain. He rises and rises, broad as a gate, sun-struck and awkward and shamefully magnificent. Your mouth parts, caught between awe and a hunger that sits perilously close to longing.

You lead him through the water towards the clearer part of the basin, and your fingers itch to lay hands on him again. The fool manages to stumble, worsen his hurts, and apologise for it besides, which makes your heart swell in a way that sits badly in your chest. His reddened lip distracts you so thoroughly that you duck beneath the surface to wash him.

While you work, it becomes noticeable.

Above the waist, Duncan holds himself as if discipline alone might carry him through it. He stands in the basin like some half-ruined statue planted there by an older people, chin up, mouth set hard when you peer at him through the wavering skin of the water, eyes fixed stubbornly on the trees beyond your head. His hands stay spread from his sides, fingers splayed, as though touching you by accident would be the greater impropriety.

Silly man.

Below the waist, his body keeps no such vows. It knows you and answers. Your hair drifts with the current and combs across the taut plane of his belly. At that, his pelvis gives the smallest, betraying hitch. Lower still, the thick shape under his braies stirs and knocks against the damp cloth, a blunt, eager motion that sends a small heat through you sharper than any craving. He goes all the stiller for it, as though he might shame the flesh back into obedience by refusing to move another inch.

When the work is done, you decide to be cruel enough to enjoy it.

You rise slowly, fingers following the plane of his stomach, and break the surface so close to him that he starts. Water spills from your lashes and straight across your open eyes, and still you do not blink. “It heals well,” you tell him.

“H-how?”

“All the tricks the hedge-witches know too. Plants, mostly. And then some wound-licking, like all beasts do.”

You watch the meaning strike. First confusion, then comprehension, then a flush that begins high on his cheeks and runs everywhere: down his throat, up to the tips of his ears, even into the split and swollen shape of his mouth. His gaze jerks away and comes back again, poorer for somewhere to rest. It is a lovely thing to do to him.

His hands drop beneath the water, too late to hide what has already announced itself. When he looks at you again, the blue of his eyes has gone grave enough to pin. “You’re no beast to me,” he says, and says it like an oath.

The words catch you wrong-footed. Before you can think better of it, you lunge and wind your arms round his neck, bringing your mouth near enough his bruised lip that he must feel your breath there. “I am a beast,” you hiss. “You live because I chose not to feed. Because I chose to keep you.”

His answer is stranger still. Instead of putting you off, he catches you. His hands come to your waist on instinct, spanning so broad they nearly cover the gills laid along your ribs, steadying you where the water shifts under your weight. “Keep me?” he asks, and the words come rough, thinned by the effort it costs him not to notice how your breasts have pressed to his chest.

You nod. “Even if you run from me, it is no great loss. The world has too few men who can look death in the face and mind their manners. Too few who, once made prey, speak kindly to what means to devour them.”

“Are you,” Dunk asks, voice gone low and uneven, “meaning to devour me?”

You smile at that, slow and mean. Your tail coils round one of his legs, the fin dragging light along the inner seam of his thigh. “Would you have me?”

He jerks at the touch and clutches you tighter before sense returns and he tries, clumsily, to loose his hold. You do not let him. “I—” he begins, and fails. His throat works. “I oughtn’t—I mean—”

“Do you fear me?” you ask. “I gave you the force your body needs to mend itself. If I had wanted you dead, I had better chances of it when the bank was drinking your blood.”

“No,” he says, and then, because truth seems to drive him even where he would rather hedge, “No, only—I swore vows. To defend the innocent. To do no dishonour where I can help it. I’d serve you gladly for what you’ve done, but—”

Understanding comes over you whole. It is there in the way he cannot meet your eyes for long, in the care with which he holds even the body he wants, in the shame that seizes him over wanting at all. This vast creature of iron, oath, and sinew; this man all through in his shoulders, his scars, the weight between his legs, the old-fashioned decency that dogs him like a second shadow—and here, hidden in plain sight, the untouched part of him. The boy still tucked inside the knight.

“You’ve never had a woman,” you say softly.

Dunk shakes his head once. Abashment settles red along his skin again, deeper this time, and something like fear goes with it.

It makes you ease. Your grip slackens, though you do not yet slip from where you hang at his neck. “Does it pain you?” you ask, and bring a hand to his mouth. Your thumb passes over the split in his lip, smearing what blood has dried there. He flinches hard enough for the water to stir round you both, then gives a small, unwilling nod.

“Would you like me to mend that too?”

“Please,” Duncan says, and his lids lower as if in surrender.

You lean in and lick the cut clean. His eyes shut fully; yours stare. Your  mouth closes over his lip and draws at it, then worries it with the gentlest edge of your teeth, careful of the torn place. His arms gather you closer. Strong. Enormous. Built for hauling men from saddles, for splitting shields, for holding fast—and now holding you with such caution that the thought of what else those arms might do goes through you like fire.

His mouth parts under yours. The sound he makes is so slight you nearly miss it, a breath more than a voice, and you take it in greedily. He breathes through his nose, hard and unsteady, one broad palm spread between your shoulder blades as though to keep himself from crushing you nearer.

So you deepen it. Your tongue goes into his mouth with all the boldness he lacks, while his answers with a care that undoes you more thoroughly than hunger ever has. He tastes of river water, blood, and the plain, clean want. A hand leaves your back and comes up to your face, awkward in its tenderness, pushing the wet fall of your hair behind your shoulder. From a single kiss you know enough: he would be fervent and quiet both, and all the fiercer for how he tries to govern himself. But the fear in him stays your hand. He is not yours for the taking.

You draw back by degrees. “There,” you murmur, close enough that your mouths nearly brush again. “It should trouble you less by morning.”

Then, you force yourself to loosen from him altogether and turn half away, though it does nothing to cool the ache low in your body. “You may remain here until you are mended. A day or two, I think. I’ll bring fish. You may make a fire on my bank if you like. And after that, you may go—if going is what you want.”

When you look back, he is standing just as you left him: dazed, eyes gone bright as wet glass, his bruised mouth drawn into a frown as though he does not trust the ground under him. He swallows once. “I thank you for your kindness, m’lady,” is all he says.

He is grateful. For the food. For the fire you let him light. For the mercy of being allowed to remain what he is at heart, though Dunk has the growing sense that it is you who preserve his virtue, not he yours. That first night he sleeps with his belly full, his side held in a band of warmth, his body laid in the soft cradle of the grass. The fire cracks and settles beside him. Beyond that comes the lazy wash of water and the faint shifting drag of your tail through it.

He dreams.

Of your mouth first, cool and clever on his split lip. Then of it lower. Of his own full of your breast, drinking at you like a starving babe made monstrous. Of his hands running up the long strength of your tail until they find your hips and hold them down. Scales scatter over your back in his dream like coins on a saint’s cloth, and he counts them with his tongue. Your hair winds round his throat like a ribbon and pulls when you want him closer. Your hands go to his backside and drag him hard against you, and the force of it jars through his whole body until he wakes with a gasp, hot through, his cock throbbing so fiercely under his braies it near doubles him.

For one sick instant he thinks you must have seen it. Then shame takes him by the nape and he turns hard onto his belly, as though the earth might swallow what his body has done. By the time the dawn has thinned the mist, the linen between his legs is damp and cooling and he can scarcely bear to think of himself at all.

You spare him the privacy of not noticing, or else you are kind enough to pretend. Dunk does not know which. He only knows he would split his lip anew for the chance to taste your tongue again, and the knowledge sits in him like a brand.

Until now he has always known his body in one fashion only. As weight, reach, hunger, ache. As a thing for fighting in and sleeping hard upon. As something too large for most benches, most doorways, most rooms, most companies of men. It serves him well enough with a sword in hand and badly enough when there is no sword to hide behind. His business has always been to master it, to make it useful, to keep it from frightening decent folk more than can be helped.

Around you another kind of knowing steals over him. He feels your eyes on him and they do not hold the flinch he is used to. Sometimes there is curiosity in them. Sometimes amusement. Once or twice a look that smoulders so plain it puts heat into his face and lower. At moments there is even fondness, which disarms him worst of all. He is certain he looks at you much the same and wonders if you know it. Wonders if a creature such as you can smell want on a man the way a hound scents blood.

Decency remains dear to him. Dear as his vows, dear as any lesson Ser Arlan ever gave him. Yet for the first time in his life the thought of something softer and stranger than his own calloused fist closing round him keeps him restless at night and tight-strung through the day.

That day passes in your company. He tells you of his old master, and you listen with your head tilted and your hair afloat round you in the shallows like weed in a current. In return you show him the marsh as though it were a keep under your charge. You tell him of your kind in scraps, never enough to satisfy him. You show him where the yarrow grows white at the edges of the reeds, how to gather sphagnum from the wetter ground without taking rot with it, how willow bark must be chewed soft before it will give up its bitterness proper. He watches your mouth while you work and has to look away when the thought comes of what else he might lay between those teeth for gentle use.

He mends quickly. Quicker than he ought, perhaps. By the second evening he can stand without feeling the world slide off its hinges beneath him, and that ought to please him. Instead it leaves him sore in some place no salve will reach. For you have not only spared him and kept him, but released him besides, and Dunk has seen so little mercy in the world of late that he scarcely knows what to do with this kind. It does not feel like mercy at all. It feels like a hole opening in his chest as the light goes out, broad and clean and incurable.

He lies wakeful by the bank while the last of the fire gnaws itself into red. After a time he rolls to his side and watches you drift in the water, half-lost in reeds and moon-glimmer. You hum into the night, low and strange, the tune turning back on itself like current in a narrow place. It puts him in mind of no song he knows. A marsh spirit’s song, perhaps. Or a prayer said by something older than men.

He thinks, not for the first time, how beautiful you are. Not in the dainty fashion of courtly tales, all ribbons and rose-leaf mouths, but in some harsher, truer way. Beautiful as deep water, as polished stone, as the flash of a fish’s belly before it is gone. He thinks too how lucky he is that it was you who found him and not some greediest thing the bog had hidden. Any fiercer creature might have taken the copper from his purse, the sword from his hand, the flesh from his bones. You took only the blood he could spare and then gave him back the rest. It feels almost as if some god bent close to him in the dark and chose, for reasons of its own, to be gentle.

The thought leaves him raw. Absently, he says into the reeds, “I shall be in your debt all my days.”

You start as though struck. Your head comes up sharp from the water. The humming breaks. For an instant he thinks it was the words alone, but then you turn too quickly and the long of your hair snags in the split crotch of a root thrust out over the bank. At once you jerk the wrong way. The strands draw tighter. Water slaps. You hiss—a quick, furious sound more like an otter’s than any lady’s.

Dunk is on his feet before his side has time to object.

“M’lady—hold still.” He stumbles the last step and drops to one knee at the bank. You bare your teeth at him, half in pain, half in temper, one hand tangled in the caught mass while the other braces on the root. The more you pull, the worse it winds.

“Do not tell me to hold still.”

“I only meant—” He stops himself, for this is plainly no hour to explain. “Only let me help.”

You glare at him through the dark shine of your wet hair. Then, with a muttered Mo chreach in a tongue he does not know, you cease fighting it. It sounds like it means Curse it.

The caught strands are wrapped tight round a knob of bark and threaded through a split in the wood where floodwater must have worried it open. Dunk sets both hands to it with more care than he has ever given a blade-edge. Your hair is slick as river weed and finer than any silk he has touched, and every time his knuckles brush the side of your neck your breath goes short. That does not help him any.

“There,” he murmurs, though there is not yet any there to it. “I have it. Near enough.”

“You do not.”

“Ah,” he admits. “Not yet.”

A laugh catches you by surprise then, small and unwilling. It startles him worse than your teeth did. He glances up. You are watching him with your mouth parted a little, all that fierce, uncanny beauty drawn close and strange in the moonlight.

So he bends back to the work, patient as any septa with a snarl of thread, prising one lock free after another while the bank smells of mud and willow and the water keeps kissing softly at your ribs. By the time the worst of it loosens, he is breathing hard, and not only from the ache in his side.

What comes over him then Dunk could not have said, not for all the gold in Casterly Rock. Perhaps it is the sight of you bent fierce and helpless over your own caught hair. Perhaps the feel of it still sliding over his hands. Perhaps only the thought of leaving at dawn and going from this place with nothing of you but the memory of your mouth. Whatever it is, it has him speaking before sense can catch up.

“Would you like me to braid it?”

You stare at him. In the moonlight your eyes look blacker than the bog. “Can you?” you ask at last. Then, with that sharpness that never quite leaves you: “And will my bare chest not shame you?”

A breath of laughter from him. “It surely will,” he says, honest as ever. Then some small, stubborn courage rises in him from parts lower than his vows and lodges square in the chest. “But I’d count it an honour besides.”

“Yes,” you say, quick and certain, as though you had only been waiting for him to prove worthy of the task. “Braid my hair.”

So you turn your back to him and come nearer the bank, sitting, while Dunk settles awkwardly behind you. He is no great hand at it. Once, long ago in Flea Bottom, he watched women plait one another’s hair on stoops in the evening light, fingers flying while they gossiped and laughed and cuffed any boy who stared too long. He remembers only the principle: divide, cross, gather, keep even. His hands are built for reins and sword-hilts, not this. Still, he tries.

The first pull earns him a flick of your tail and a hiss through your teeth.

“Beg pardon,” he mutters.

“Do not beg. Learn.”

So he learns. A little. Enough to draw the mass together and work it down into something serviceable, if not handsome. It lies thick as a rope by the time he reaches the end, damp and heavy in his hands. All the while you sit strangely still for a creature of current and appetite, save for the occasional impatient twitch when he tugs too hard. Dunk does his best not to notice the whole smooth span of your back before him, bare where moonlight finds it, narrowing to the wet dark of your waist. He notices it all the same. By the end of it his mouth has gone dry.

“Done,” he says, and hears how weak it comes out.

Then, gods above and all the stranger gods below, you turn.

Moonlight has you whole this time. No reeds in the way. No water to break you into pieces. You come between his spread knees with the slow certainty of something that has already decided the matter, and settle there close enough that the cool of your skin reaches through his clothes. “Thank you, ser,” you say, and sweetness in your mouth is a far more dangerous thing than any hiss.

His heart turns over so hard it near stuns him. Before he can think what he is about, he takes your hand and bows his head to it, pressing his mouth to the back of it in a gentlemanly way, as though you were some great lady and he a proper knight with a proper title to his name.

Your fingers curl against his. Still holding, Dunk takes your palm and turns it over in both of his. He brings one claw to the split in his lip and presses until the cut opens fresh. Pain bites, quick and clean. He keeps your finger there while the blood wells dark along his mouth and watches what comes over your face when you see it.

“Would you mend it once more?” he asks.

Your answer is to catch the end of the braid in one hand, wind it once round the back of his neck, and draw him in.

This time there is nothing medicinal in it. You drink from the torn place with open greed, tongue hot and searching where before it had been careful. Dunk makes a rough sound into your mouth and grips at your waist, all thought burning off him in a rush. The blood is hardly there before you have taken it. What remains is the kiss itself, deep and wet and ruinous, until his head swims worse than it did from the blow that felled him.

“I thought,” you breathe, the words broken by another hungry press, “you meant to leave me without letting me have you.”

His eyes roll back with the force of wanting. He gathers you closer without meaning to, one arm under you, the other firm at your back, and rises in a single clumsy surge to his feet. The movement tears at his side and he barely feels it.

“Have me,” Dunk says, and there is only naked truth to it. “Gladly. I do not know what you see in me, m’lady, nor why a wonder such as you should want aught of mine—but if you do, I’d be the world’s greatest fool to deny you.”

You look at him then as if he has said something finer than he knows how to say, and for once you do not mock him for it.

So he carries you.

He carries you as though he was built for nothing else, down from the bank and over the water to the flat stone where first he saw you rise, pale now under the moon and waiting like an altar. Your arms stay looped round his neck. Your braid drips cold against his shoulder. His pulse beats wild where your breast is pressed to him, and by the time he sets you down, his hands are shaking with the effort of holding back all the things he means to give you if only you will show him how.

For one wavering instant he only looks at you, chest labouring. You give him but a moment to stand there in it.

One of your hands goes to him, greedy and unashamed, and the touch of it through the cloth strikes through him so hard he bows like a man hit low with a poleaxe. Breath leaves him. His fingers claw at the air beside him before finding the rock. Heat tears through his middle, bright and ruinous, and with it a helpless sound he has not the dignity to swallow back.

“Mercy,” he says, though there is no true wish for it in him. “Slow—pray, slow a little.”

Your eyes flash up at him, bright with appetite and amusement both. He feels warm to the throat, near trembling, and still he tries for courtesy, for order, for some scrap of knightly manner in a place that has stripped him of all armour worth the name.

“I’ll do as you tell me,” he says, voice roughened nearly past bearing. “Only—show me. I would not wrong you for want of knowing.”

That stills you. The greed stays in your face, but it settles into something more intent. You ease back against the stone and let your body lengthen there, all bold invitation and perverse ease, your hands opening toward him as though calling a beast from the dark. Moonlight gathers along the line of you. Your tail glimmers where it falls away into shadow. Your breast spills softly with the movement, and Dunk, poor soul, is half-struck through by the sight of it.

He comes when beckoned. With obedience and without confidence. With awe, almost. He lowers himself to his knees over you, great and awkward and trying so hard to be careful that you give him a charmed look. The rock receives his weight with a dull scrape. His breath comes hard through his nose. He does not know where to put his hands until you take one of them and place it high, against the soft warm weight of your tit. The other you guide lower.

He shudders. Squeezes your chest and takes note of how neatly the heft of your breast fits his palm. The rest he lets you guide, because the threat of shattering from the sight alone is far too great.

You draw his fingers over the scales until skin finds a hidden place where they part. There lies a slit, smooth and silky and made to unman him. Duncan breathes, “Oh, by the gods.”

“This is where you fill me,” you tell him, eyes rapt. “This is where I want you.” Then, your lips find his once more. He tastes the same tongue that healed him, the same teeth that could end him and did not. Never in his life had Duncan thought he would find anything to swell so sweetly in his mouth as food or ale, yet here it is. How he came all this way with no more than grateful pecks to the cheek and otherwise wholly unkissed feels, all at once, beyond belief. 

All the while, you keep guiding his hand until your body answers him open. And Duncan is made painfully aware that up until now, the body has only ever seemed to him a thing for work. Whenever he had been troubled by primal urges, he tried to throttle the feeling by haste and harshness, or else by the sheer force of his will. Now, as he slides one finger inside you, he’s being shown plainly that bodies exist not only for work. Gods have given them the ability to feel pleasure and it is evident on your face and in the way your shape flutters and arches and pushes itself onto him.

“You’re the softest thing I’ve ever touched,” he whispers, bewildered by himself. By the way his blood shifts places and fills him below the loins until he’s hard. By the way he answers your wetness with his own—pearling at the tip, soaking through the cloth and making the crown of his cock feel cold when he shifts on his knees.

“More,” you rasp, wriggling. “Give me one more.” At that, your hand finds the braid. You draw it over your shoulder and wind it twice round his neck, slow as a tether being laid. Not hard enough to hurt. Hardly hard enough to hold at all. Just enough that he feels the claim of it. Just enough that he understands.

He brings his forehead to yours and the second finger inside, feeling you stretch and swallow him down to the last knuckle. Mere thought of the same sensation enveloping his cock sends Duncan’s head spinning.

When he thrusts gently, the loveliest purr spills out of your mouth. Your face rises and rubs itself on his, lips pulling on his chin and cheek rasping on cheek. “Is liomsa thú,” you murmur.

“What’s that mean?”

“You’re mine,” you tell him. “No soul will know but you and I. But you are.”

“Aye,” he breathes. “That I am.”

“Then give me the rest of you,” you say. “Fill me properly.”

The words slice through him like strong drink on an empty stomach. For half a beat Duncan can only stare, as if he has misheard you and the night will kindly correct itself if he waits.

It does not. You mean it. Worse—better—you mean it without shame, as though wanting him were the simplest thing in the world. No woman has ever spoken to him so. No woman has ever looked at him as though his body were something desired for its own sake and not borne because it must be. Heat surges through him so hard it leaves his thoughts in disarray. He has dreamed, in the clumsy miserable way of lonely men, but dreams had never prepared him for the sound of such words in a living voice, said with your mouth still swollen from his kisses.

When he pulls his hands out of you, they come covered in clear brine. He fumbles at the ties of his braies with fingers that no longer seem wholly his own, and your palm comes over his—cool, assured, impatient with trembling. Your fingers tangle with his and for a moment he can do nothing but hang his head down and watch the two of you joined there. The way you help him find his girth and stroke it. The way your slick coats him. His hand, obeying, as though it has always belonged under your instruction.

“Gods help me,” Duncan mutters. “If you keep on so, I shall shame myself.”

By the time you draw him nearer, he is beyond any rescue. Your hands go elsewhere then—up under the hem of his shirt, stripping the last hindrance from him, then down again with fresh purpose. They travel the width of his sides and settle hard at his buttocks, claiming, directing. Duncan bows over you on a shuddering breath, feeling himself handled like something wanted, something chosen, and scarcely knows how to bear it.

“Have no fear,” you say. “I want you.”

He nods, more to himself than you. “If I hurt you—”

“You won’t.” Your fingers stroke his cheek. “I know your size and I will take it. Courage, my Fathach Caoin. My gentle giant.”

His eyes mist up. He’s there, on the precipice, with your warmth calling him on. Gaze steadfast on yours, Duncan lets himself breach you. And you welcome him like the bravest thing he’s ever seen. Crown already swallowed by your body, yet your face is still clear. There’s an eager stretch around him and a twitch of a tail below him. It coils round his thigh, his knee and ankle, while one of your fists finds the braid once more and pulls, collaring his neck tighter. It’s all the signals he needs to persevere.

The more of him you take, the greedier your answer grows. Claws in his arse, muscles working on his cock in vicious spasms, he manages to fill you with everything some trickster god has given him, and he finds it accepted.

Your mouth is agape. Breath comes through it loud and ragged. “Yes,” you grit, eyes rolling and all of you twitching. “Gods, fuck me. Make me yours.”

“Sweet mercy,” Duncan says, voice gone rough. “You ask it as though I could deny you aught.” His brow drops to yours, air shaking out of him on its leave. “If I am yours, then have all of me.”

At first, he scarcely thrusts. Ruts, more like. Feels the shape of you inside, plastered snugly to him. When he discovers he’s being received fully and without reluctance, his movement boldens. His hips rise and fall, and instinct guides him. Pleasure guides him too, for beyond being permitted, Duncan is being answered as well. With tightness. With the press of your belly into his. With your neck baring and gills there quivering around air whenever he sheathes himself up to the brim.

That is the miracle he never thought possible. With a lifetime of too much ringing around him, awkward and large, he was convinced romance was not written for him. Yet here you are, with hunger gathered on your features and no shadow of hurt visible. It shakes him, that. Here, in your hold, that old wrongness turns. Here what he is suits and is welcome.

“You were made for this as much as for war,” you say, as if reading through his thoughts. “More. I like what you do to me.”

It makes him release his own little stuttered moan. “M’lady—”

Your arms circle his shoulders and hold. “You sound so pretty. All of you is so beautiful, Duncan.”

He searches your face for foulery and finds none. Only bliss and appetite. Only round, wet mouth and dark eyes. Duncan has been commended for strength before, for endurance, for taking a blow and giving one back. None of that has prepared him for the shock of finding that his hands, his mouth, his earnest body can bring a creature like you to such clear delight. With each look, his courage grows.

That growth proves dangerous soon enough. Wonder gives way to urgency. Urgency mounts toward something steeper. Duncan feels it gathering in him with an inevitability that borders on terror. He has been admitted to a marvel and already fears the speed with which he may be cast out of it. The thought makes him cling harder to what steadiness he can muster. He tries to linger, tries to learn the pace of your pleasure and keep himself to it, but his body has begun to outrun obedience.

“Look at me,” you say. “Keep on, you needn’t worry. You please me—ah—” There’s a twitch inside you that nearly ends him. “You fit me. Gods, you please me—”

What happens after, he cannot rightly say. First, your neck wrenches, then delivers your face close so that you can kiss him. Little mumbles of yes and oh and ones that call on various gods in various tongues flood his mouth. His throat gets cinched by your hair and your arms, and tail wraps round him so fiercely it makes his leg go numb and cold at the toes. Chest flattened against his you moan out his name into the night and then—

He’s seeing white. It overtakes his vision entirely when your body does an unimaginable thing. Traps him in that narrow edge of flesh and milks him for seed. Ferocious and wild, it takes and takes, and Duncan’s understanding of himself alters. He is not taking. He is giving and being wanted in the giving.

“My sweet Lass,” he rasps, manners abandoned. “I never knew—Gods, I never knew.”

Dunk never knew something could feel like this. He’s never been shown that things could live where brutality and tenderness meet. That bodies can do all this: bleed, bruise, fill and empty, hurt and please, all while remaining gentle. His gentleness drives him to a point where he feels sensations folding in on themselves. His toes curl against the stone so much that his foot almost cramps. Thighs harden. Lungs burn, yet he feels the most alive he’s ever felt. His belly tugs so violently it is as though someone has delivered a blow with an iron fist. Amidst all this ruthless undoing, Duncan senses his soul coursing through his blood vessels, pushing through his pores in its rise to meet you.

Warmth becomes warmer. Wetness grows wetter. All of his joins all of yours. The pull empties him of everything he carries right into the snug nook of your body. “Yes,” he mutters. “Yes, gods help me.”

With that, he forgets the weight of himself and falls on top of you off his trembling arms. His face lands right into the curve of your neck and the breath that comes through slits there cools the slickened skin of his forehead.

For a little while you do nothing but hold him through the ruin of it.

Your hand moves slow between his shoulders, then lower, smoothing the hard jump of muscle as if gentling some great spent beast after battle. Praise comes from you under your breath in scraps and murmurs, half words, half wonder, and Duncan, who had thought himself beyond surprise for one night, finds that too much for him as well.

A laugh bursts out of him sudden and helpless, honest as the rest has been. It shakes once through his chest against you. He lifts himself just enough to look down, dazed and shining with it still, then bends and presses his mouth to your forehead with a care that seems almost too tender for the body that has just spent itself so violently.

“There are no words for it,” he says. “None I know, leastways. For making me feel—” He stops there, smiling crooked at his own uselessness. “For this.”

You look at him as if his gratitude is a stranger thing than all that passed between you on the stone. Your fingers stroke through the damp at the nape of his neck, over the braid still looped there like some token of your claim.

“You deserve it more than any man I’ve met.”

The laughter leaves his face by slow degrees. In its place comes something quieter, heavier. He studies you and the dread arrives plain enough then, settling under his ribs where pleasure had just torn through him. Because a man cannot be given such a thing and fail to understand that it may yet be taken away.

“How am I to part from you now?” he asks.

You answer him honestly, as you have answered him in all things. “You are strong for it.”

Then you kiss him and gather him down again, one arm curved round the breadth of his shoulders, the other tracing idle paths along his back until the last fierce throbs ease out of him. Great body that he is, he grows heavier by the moment. Sleep comes on him without dreams. His head finds its rest upon your chest. The braid bejewels his throat and there he lies pillowed on you like something claimed and cherished both.

By morning the chill has found him first.

It wakes in his body and deeper than the body too, in the place where certainty ought to sit and does not. The stone has cooled under him. Mist lies low over the black water. Reeds stand pale with dawn.

Duncan opens his eyes and knows at once what the day requires of him. Whatever quarrel spilled him into your bog has not vanished. Roads still run outward from this place. Men still wait at the end of them with their needs, their vows, their battles. He knows he must rise. Knows too that seeing you again would be another miracle, and that miracles are not things a sensible man counts upon.

When at last he stands on the bank, iron on his body and sword at his hip, you drift below in the water and watch him. “Will you be here,” he asks, “if I come again?”

“I don’t know,” you tell him. “Come and see.”

The words might have been cruel in another mouth. In yours they fall as simple truth.

“But—” You lift a hand and beckon. “Give me your sword.”

He does not hesitate. That, perhaps, startles him more than anything. Dunk reaches for the blade and lays it across his palms before offering it over. You take it with both hands, testing the weight of it, your mouth tightening faintly at the smell of old blood still left in the metal. Then your other hand goes to the end of your braid. For a heartbeat he only watches, uncomprehending, until the edge comes up bright in the morning and he realizes what you mean to do.

“Wait,” he says, too late, and only because the thought of any part of you severed from the rest hits him oddly in the chest.

You cut through it clean. The shorn length lies across your palm, heavy as wet rope. You hand the sword back hilt-first. Then, with more care than men give holy relics, you place the braid in his hand.

“You have earned it,” you say. “Keep it, and remember me.”

Duncan looks down at what you have given him as though it were a king’s ransom or a saint’s finger-bone wrapped in silk. The braid spills over his callused palm and nearly to his knees, gleaming and impossible. He closes his hand round it slowly.

“I should remember you without help.”

“Yes,” you say. “But take it all the same.” Your gaze lifts to his, clear as cold water. “Remain gentle. Do not let the world temper you into something you are not. It has enough hard men already. I will not forget you, Ser Duncan The Tall.”

He comes to the shore in all his bulky magnitude, iron making a burden of him once more. Yet the burden sits differently now. He drops to one knee at the water’s edge, heedless of mud. His free hand comes to your face. Cups it. The skin beneath his thumb is cool and smooth and utterly dear to him. Then he kisses you with all the force left in him, with gratitude and hunger and the grief of leaving all tangled together.

“I’ve a love for you I’ll carry always,” he says against your mouth when at last he parts from it. “You made me a man, Lass.”

Something shifts in your face at that—fondness, perhaps, or pity, or the knowledge that men will always name themselves too small.

“You are more than merely a man, Duncan,” you tell him. “You are a giant. And wherever you go, I will keep you.”

He stays there one heartbeat longer, kneeling in the mud like a man before a shrine, looking at you as if he would learn the whole of your face by force and carry it clear to the grave. Then he rises, slow under the weight of steel and parting, and turns at last toward the trees.

Behind him the water goes on breathing.