♖ 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.

Serves him right, you had thought. Though part of you ached, not quite yet freed by the torture you were condemned to.

All he had done day after day was shove you around and order you to his dirty work. And such lonesome never came as any surprise, not when you were left with a lease on a house you could no longer tend to, and police officers urging you to find lodging. And so you did.

Comfort came in the company of an elder woman in the middle of town. The suburb was gentle, much like you had been used to as a child you’d imagined, semi-detached houses lined the street, with fences of steel and wire, hardly white picket, but families flooded every one. All of them loud, aware, loving. She had not such luck, her husband also dead, abandoned by her sons, and a ripped flyer flapping on the outside of the gate asking for help.

Simple laundry and grocery shopping help.

Company.

That’s what it really was. And you had taken it as soon as you saw it, snatching it from the wire with a trash bag full of clothes and necessities shoved in your hands, red and stiff from the biting cold.

The lady was kind, mostly quiet, but offering with a good pot of stew always left boiling on the stove, and in return of your chores, your stay was welcome in the stuffy, moth-ball smelling room just down the hall from hers.

And you were alone, together, until you weren’t.

Not until he, showed up. The boogeyman, the creature of a man who had walked in with the door unlocked, snow tracking his worn boots across the wooden floor. He didn’t claim the house, nor give either of you reason for his stay, nor did he ask to. Only few words, soft and chilling with no menace.

I live here now.

The look you and old woman shared was one startled and unsure, but you found it best not to argue, his large frame towering in the doorway between wooden beams. His clothes were something ragged and old, a dark brown and pale green kilt dragging at his knees, and a haircut you’d have imagined seen nowhere from before the early eighties.

Though after a while, you were glad you didn’t argue. He proved useful, and oddly, kind. He didn’t talk much, though when he did it was strange, broken syllables coming out drawn and long, half uttered sentences far too straightforward than you had been used to.

He settled himself into the room farthest from you and the woman, a dusty, dark room near empty with just a bed and a rocking chair. The bed, from what you could see peeked through the crack of the door, stayed made, unused. Like the man didn’t sleep. The cracking of the chair rocked like a tap dripping, shuddering the house all the way from the upstairs.

The Widow.

That’s what he called you, and that’s what you were. Simple and plain just as he was. Though it wasn’t spoken as you were titled with it, burdened as a reminder, it wasn’t something that belonged. A Spider. Something natural and intelligent and cunning. And spoken in his matter of fact terms, the low gravel of his voice and the ancient tongue of his accent, it had almost made you proud.

Proud of what you were, who you were.

Ole Munch, he told you his name was. Rather fitting, for how odd the man was. ‘Oola Moonk’ it came to be pronounced, but you preferred ‘Oola’ and he had not reminded you, or maybe not cared to correct you. He answered to it every time, the steady turn of his head with the same pull of his eyes landing on you.

His hands reached for what you couldn’t, a simple plate form the highest shelf, or the heaviness of a door getting in your way, packed from the snow. He was there, always. So much so you wondered how much he watched. And yet you were entirely unaware.

Ole studied you, from the very moment he passed in the doorway, announcing his arrival before turning right to the stairs, to every morning and night you had greeted him. Awkward and on guard still, but something poked deep within your chest. Something clinging about his presence.

And from what you could tell, he did not mind your own. When he was around of course, often slinking away into the darkness when the old woman had settled for bed and you had laid underneath your covers, listening.

Sometimes he told you he was leaving, no reason, or destination in it, other times he didn’t. But he waited, waited for the very moment all of the lights would turn off and the doors would close. A humble kindness.

He noticed the very things others did not.

“From what?” He moved behind you, chest looming few inches from your back, your breath catching a you had folded the last of laundry from the dryer. You took in the space he had not, a finger only pointed to your arm. A large scar there. Long and curved, raised by the slightest rosy and etched.

“My hus— my ex husband.” Your head turned, breathing sharply as you corrected yourself, your voice wasn’t small, only recalled as your finger traced it, his head leaning over your shoulder to get a better look. He did not ask further questions, the way your face scrunched told him all.

“A widow weaves her web, but she is more than it. It does not finish. She rebuilds.” His voice pressed over your shoulder, your eyes meeting for a fleet of second, his chin tilted high, unmoving as you ducked back. And then he was gone.

He had a habit of such things. And you had come to decode every one of his sayings, not as difficult as it first proved to be.

And just as he had noticed, he seemed similarly protective, over the house, over the old woman. Over you. Guarding, he had called it, ‘Like a dog in the yard.’ But the way he moved, slow and steady, it felt almost shielding. Neither of you had gone out much together, and you preferred to stay indoors any way, but the one time you had, was met with a young scraggly man who claimed to be the owner of the house you were staying in.

The shovel scraped hard across the pavement, leaving a trailed line from the road to the door, a makeshift path surrounded by blankets of freezing white. It had been one hell of a chore for the day, one you’d taken upon yourself in order to even get out of the house for the lady to get some groceries. A path she had walked nearly every day. And just as you turned, the buttons of your woollen coat done up tight—

“What the fuck are you doing?” A measly voice called out, your back straightened as you cocked your head, balancing against the shovel.

“I uh.. shovelling snow?” You looked around, huffing a small, obvious laugh, eyes landing back onto him. He was scrawny, long blond greasy hair tangling at his shoulders, a cigarette hung between his lips.

“Yeah, no fuckin’ shit. Who are you?” He stepped toward, striding toward you.

You opened your mouth to speak, grimacing at his rudeness, but he stopped you short.

“You know what, it doesn’t matter.. where is she?”

“Indoors.”

Your fingers planted tighter around the shovel’s handle, bones cracking lightly from the cold, a presence standing just short of your side. A familiar step crunched forward, slower, more calculated than the asshole stood in front of you.

“This is what the old crone has going on now, a freakshow and a maid?” His eyes raked over you, and the tall man beside you, his tone spitting and careless. Your fist clenched tighter at that, the insult, about the same woman who had taken you in.. and you had only guessed from then on.

Her son.

“You have no right to talk about her like that.” You spat back, feet planting harsh into the damp concrete.

“Or what?” The curve of his lips slanted smugly, taking a long drag of his cigarette, and at that you started forward. Rather, you tried, a hand clamped around your forearm, tightened and careful.

“Shut up.” You looked back at him, though his words weren’t for you. He did not look at you, eyes casted solely onto the man in front of you, stumbling back onto slightly.

“I didn’t ask you, shitbird.” He quipped.

“Shut the fuck up already.” Ole grimaced, the deep lines of his faced carved tight and red in the cold, barely bothered by the man’s empty threats.

“Oh fuck this.. ma, what is going on?” The man pushed past you both, the grip loosened on your arm, gaze piercing back into yours after it had followed him inside.

“Time should not be wasted. They take too much up themselves.” He analysed, hand falling, hovering just so in the air and flexing as you took yours to your side. There was a pause between you then, and you gave him a small nod, understanding even with the eyes rolling back into your head.

He wasn’t wrong. Even if you both knew one thing, he deserved that swing you were about to give him.

“A boarder, you holdin’ out on me ma.. how much is he paying ya?” That’s the last you heard, trudging your way back inside into the warmth after a few moments. The woman had looked past the younger man, indeed her son, to you as she smiled softly shaking her head. A look of knowing, as you gave her an apologetic one back, and you don’t want to overstep more than you were about to. You reached the stairs, climbing them just as Ole moved in after you, the door closing heavily behind him, a short glance to the back of your head before turning into the hallway toward them both.

Your back fell into the covers of the bed, swarming you in a warmth, your hands splayed over your stomach, slowly picking at the skin, tangled in attempts to keep the heat in. You listened in, their conversation muffled between floorboard and pipe, and the incessant nagging in the back of your mind.

It may have been curiosity, morbid and intrusive, or the fact that in such closeness you had grown comforted by the company around you. The older woman yes, sweet and kind as she was, she was strong, and had taught you more in the past few weeks than most had in your lifetime. But the other one, that’s what was more, it was him.

He was odd yes, peculiar in all the ways you had seems ancient. But part of you burned at the thought. His voice, his gaze, the coded manner of speaking that was something thoughtful. That feeling in your chest had settled elsewhere, deep in your belly, a flush that you couldn’t quite name, but it burned. And from that, you longed for it, his touch.

The man took off not long after, a scuffle of boots and an air of silence leaving him. The door only closed once, though it opened again. And you didn’t hear from her son after that.

All of you took yourself to bed early, rather the two of you that slept did. She had said goodnight to you in the hall, catching you just as you made your way to the bathroom, the soft cling of your sleep shorts a welcome comfort in contrast to the scratch of heavy itchy cotton.

—

You weren't sure how it happened. But there was an ache in you that you couldn't quite break from. Like a coil that tightened itself around you, working it's way up every inch of your body, your nerves pressed tigher with every movement and thought you attempted to push back.

Until you refused to, refused to deny yourself any longer. 

Your fingers trailed down your body, taking your own time, feeling down the curve of your breasts, running along your stomach down beneath your sleep shorts. The covers twisted under you, shrugging with every rise and fall of your chest and arch into your hand as you began to fuck yourself, running your fingertips through your folds, damp and needy. You needed this. You bit back a moan as you circled your clit, tugging the coil tighter inside of you, rubbing slow at first and then harsh, testing a finger into your entrance and curling. 

He was there. In your mind, igniting your body more than your touch had. And you had imagined it was his, bigger than yours, swarming your body as he ran his hands down it, gripping and grasping at your frame as he did your arm in the yard. You pushed two fingers in, thrusting them lightly as your other fingers worked at your sensitive bud, mouth falling slack as your head rocked back agaisnt the covers, knees bent up as you angled deeper. His breath breathing along your skin, tongue working along your skin, fingers pressed tight into your cunt. The thought made you salivate, wettening the back of your dry throat as you came with a strangled moan. 

It was him that did undid you, even if he had not touched you. Yet.

—

It became routine after that, a nagging that never ceased. His presence was enough, stalking around every corner, watching through the windows, a hand when necessary, but never beyond it. And somehow that worked you up more, agitating you in every way that felt wrong, and right. And so you kept it quiet, attending to your tasks as well as you could, day in and day out.

Laundry, kitchen, cleaning, shovelling, repeat. 

And when the house fell quiet, and night appaorched, surrounding you all in darkness. You too did the same. Your hands dipped between your legs, drawing whine and moan unkempt from your lips without resolve, your arousal coated your fingers, dripping juices from your weeping hole, and down onto the mattress.

You were lost in it, in every thought, every image that you dared not to speak aloud. It wasn’t shame, perhaps guilt, greed, of what you could not take and yet wanted to.

Wants that no other person should know about. That no one should know about. And yet they did. Eyes were on you, you felt them form every corner, burning into you from the walls and dark corners of every room. And in your lonely hour, the only seemed to sharpen.

A pair, heavy set, near black, haunted just outside of the door. The crack in it left opened, it had not been a conscious thought, nor as you had pulled yourself to the comfort of covers and warmth. Barely room for a breath between it, darkness meeting darkness, your body only silhouetted by the twinkle of moonlight creeping through the window. Worn boots scuffed across the floor in complacent strides, the sound of crusty creak of the door being pushed open just enough to move through.

Though only your moans filled your ears, muffled whimpers of desire, your own undoing as you pumped your fingers deeper, curling and prodding you flesh, pressure building enough to foracsblt snap, but nothing came of it. You worked at yourself harder, a hand cupping your breast through the thin material, swiping a finger over your swollen clit, but it was of no use.

“Temptation is not weakness, it is restraint.”

Fuck.

Your body jolted, your hands tugged from the waistband over your shorts as you moved to sit up. He stood over the bed, unmoving, the blackness of his pupils studying you all over, and you had never felt so bare. He had seen it all, the man before you, more than he had when his ears pricked up at your moans, standing entirely unaffected, the way his head tilted at you, for longer than you had realised.. longer than you imagined. The writhe of your body, the sheen of flush that marked your body in your desperation.

Your knees knocked together, shuddering at the thought, and you swallowed it down, patting the bed with red hot heat flushing your cheeks. An awkward offer, but the only one you had managed, your throat impossibly dry.

He hesitated for a moment, moving only a single stride before dipping the mattress beside you. There wasn’t any need for explanation, his body rising at least a head over yours as you sat next to one another. You had been this close before, always stepping between each other in hallways, moving about the house in rhythm, but this was different.

You wiped a hand over your face, a low exhale breathing from his nose where he was at your side, hands placed into his lap, over the cotton of his kilt. From that angle you could see how frayed it was, ripped and torn, the scuffed and scarred fingers striking the material gently. A breath sucked from your mouth, closing your eyes before opening them again, to meet his, already looking.

“Did you.. see?” You called out to him, feet dangled from the bed, meeting the floor where his crossed it.

“Yes.”

He left no time to let you down easy, to even dance around the idea, and though the flesh at the back of your neck ran colder, you hadn’t hated the idea. Somehow it eased you more, you weren’t imagining it all, those eyes on you weren’t just in your head. Like you had been told many times before. It was real, he was real, and he did not falter at it. There was no judgement, only honesty, and the flicker in his eyes through the dim light casted into the back of your heads, it told you were both one and the same.

The moonlight shadowed his face, leaving most to your imagination and how you remembered it, the scent of woodsmoke and ash filling your nostrils from the closeness. He almost looked pretty, all long limbs partially comfortable.

“The air has changed, thick now.”

You nodded, and he hummed. Hardly loud enough to even make a sound, the bed dipping once more form the release of his weight. But he didn’t leave, not yet, instead he moved to the floor. A heavy thud of his knees shoved to the wood, hands reaching the sides of the bed, where his fingers move to your shorts. You jutted your hand out, grabbing his wrist as he guided it to between your legs. He held your gaze for a moment, slowing as you did, your fingers not quite tight around his skin.

“Sweetness when her hive is stirred, but there is no nectar, only a bite.” His fingers worked methodically, different to your own, longer, slender, the rough pads of his fingers unhooking at the waistband as he had seen you push through it. He took his time, and paused, waiting, listening.

He did not ask, did not need to, but he gave you enough time yourself. To scream, to shove him off, to pull away, but you did not. It beckoned you. Another one of his metaphors muttered, one you had barely registered before the words trailed off, and you had not found it in you to speak some more.

He had made up his mind, as had you.

The material was peeled away, snaking down your legs and dropped to the floor and the tugging in your belly deepened, overcome much like the thoughts you’d had plagued yourself. And that alone that was his signal, the gentle exhale from your breath, wanting an aching.

His tongue darted out in one steady motion, testing through your folds as he parted your legs. Your body arched at the long stripe he licked up your cunt, broad and teasing without meaning to. A feat for a man who had been left without, it was sloppy and inept, with every heat of passion on his breath huffed into you. Like of a man not only starved but denied, once he may have known such a way, you’d imagined, but for now there was only remembering. And he learned quickly, dragging his tongue into you with a clumsy skill, making no other sound other than the wet pattering at your slit.

“Fuck.. there, that’s it.” You whined, breathing shakily, guiding just as he did the same, his hands shoved tight at your thighs, widening them to keep them open. Wet muscle lapped at you, tasing and devouring, tracing every curve and finding every piece that hit nerves sending you bucking into his face.

Your fingers tangled into the hair of the man before you, like one did at an alter, collecting every drop and savouring it onto his tongue from your already dampened cunt. It was messy and torturous, the unkempt work of a feral starvation, his nose pressed harsh to your clit, nudging as he sucked you down onto his mouth, fingers pressing deep into the flesh of your thighs.

He ushered you through your high, the coil, tightened from days of yearning and an edge you couldn’t quite break from, crashing over you in a wave. He licked at you, searching, like finding a missing piece, the first traces of a meal he had been without for centuries. And most likely had been.

But he remembered the feeling, every lap of sweetness, every suckle sending you the release your hand could not give you. His tongue stayed pressed to you, flicking and swirling over your sensitive bud until you shivered, your head thrown to the covers you had fell back onto. The electric shocks graced through your body, your thighs releasing and draping boneless over the bed as he stood.

Two fingers swiped back through you, sticky and cool as the air whispered back over your bare core. He brought them to your lips, arm stretching over your half naked body as he pushed them into your mouth, your tongue flattening onto his digits, tasting yourself.

“She can taste it.”

Sweet and sinful.

He left then, rising to his feet like a prayer just sealed and nothing more. His eyes followed, the exhale of tense muscle at his chest just visible through the low light. And through it, a sly look of appease, at himself or you, you could not tell.

Both.

And then turned on his heel, making no other move toward you, ducking out of the room simply licking the wetness from his lips as he caught his breath. Boots stomped back along the floor and into the hallway, silent and still, your breath catching in your ears as you eased.

He had taken what he wanted, and you had been given the same. Or perhaps it was that he had found you in such a state and offered to help.

Though you didn’t find it in you to care. You were blissed and sated, a blush creeping your cheeks at the knowledge.

—

Something shifted in the house when she was killed. ‘To the wind’ he had told you, carrying her body in from the street just as dusk had settled. You had been upstairs at the time, clearing some of the clutter she had asked you to help her sort. Old pictures in broken frames, trinkets and silver candlestick holders. Nothing special, all dusted and rust covered, but you paused over them, taking your time. She had promised to help you, and you had waited for her, when she would return from her round of groceries.

That’s when you had heard it.

A round of guns, shots ringing down the street in a cascade, firelights cracking into the night. So much, for Halloween. It was said that the veil between life and death was thinnest then, and it must have been true, because whatever gang or bandit had gone after someone, it had taken her in their place.

No others came by, no police or neighbours, just silence, more than before. This time more unsteady. You had not know entirely how to grieve, but you had felt it, an emptiness inside the walls of the house, and in your chest.

And you weren’t the only one.

The tartan crimson coat she had worn, matted fluff at its collar, he had taken it upon himself to wear. He spoke to himself often, louder after that, reminiscing in sonnets and speeches, mentions of sin and revenge, of when he was a boy and the man that was. And it was the only thing other than your footsteps that had echoed the halls of the house.

And though neither of you spoke of it, you grieved together. The rocking from upstairs continued, your duties did as well, and life resumed in the days that followed, the same itch biting at you as it did before.

Desire.

Burning hot and wanting. The itch not yet scratched, not completely, only heightened. His presence followed you, even when he wasn’t there, eyes that peered through the windows late into the night after he had left, the heavy stomping behind you, his frame placed into the small, rickety chair at the table as you prepared what was left of the food on the stove.

He did not eat, and you hardly did yourself. But his gaze sharpened, and your hands trembled.

——

The lamp flickering down the hall broke you from your thoughts, a finger of whiskey from the cupboard left in the crystal glass in your hand. It was late for it to be on. Usually he would be out, or sitting eerily in the dark. You swirled the liquid in the glass before drinking it down, and smacking it to the table, the burn licking at your throat.

You did your best to stay away, not knowing where to turn, what to do, or what to say. And his presence hardly helped giving you the right signal, though one thing was known. A need.

You moved through the corridor, a warmth settling in your chest, and a wanting in your bones. Your fingers traced the bannister, steadying you through every step, the whiskey warming your stomach, and perhaps prickling your courage. Not that you were scared, only curious.

Gentle ticking, clicking to the floor. A tap, tap, tap creaking the wood came from behind the door and you already saw the image, gripping the oak to allow yourself entry. It pushed from your hands as you stepped into the room, a damp smell filling your nostrils.

He was there. A hand swamped over each arm of the rocking chair, staring into the air, only moving by the slightest dip is his knee. He noticed you before he saw you, counting the familiar steps down the hall until you had reached the door. You felt his eyes on you as you entered, glancing around the room taking in more of it as you realised you hadn’t really been in it before.

It was plain, covers till untouched as you had noted beforehand, a smell bedside table and few paintings hung at the walls. His head turned, face like stone, the golden glow illuminating his rugged features.

He looked more handsome in such a way. He was already, striking features of his pointed nose and strong jaw, the light bringing him perfectly into view as you settled before him, watching through the window. The street was quiet, lights at every house turned off and doors closed, blanketing the area into stillness.

“Why did you come here?” You asked him, eyes distant as you kept looking away, though his remained on you.

“A man walks until someone opens a door. He could ask the same.” He replied, a shrug in his voice though his shoulders did not rise. He continued rocking, less focused on the timing, and more on you.

You huffed a laugh, offering a small smile as you faced him, balancing onto your heel, “Not much different. Running from the same things I suppose from fear.”

“You are less afraid, one would notice.” Your eyes met through the thickness in the air, dust particles floating past your face through the shine of the lamp. He wasn’t wrong, and you weren’t afraid of him, far from it, and he knew it. There was a pull between you, one that even as you had gravitated, had been left unspoken.

“Not for a long time..” You countered.

He said nothing, the shuffle of his feet planting slightly wider. An invitation, with no enticement, only that.

And in your courage, the stillness of the night descending around you, the quiet tone of his voice beckoning you and the silent understanding. You stepped forward, feet padding the floorboards with every balance.

The chair still rocked as you stepped between his knees, fingers tightening just so as he took in your scent. Whiskey, want, sin.

The first crack.

His eyes didn’t leave you, not once, he didn’t even move a muscle, only the gentle rocking from his heels pressed to the floor slowing.

“You’ve decided something..”

“Maybe.” It didn’t need to be said what it is, his face stayed forward, raised by an inch of that to fully see you. Taking you in. As his gaze dropped, cataloguing. The flex of your fingers, the knock of your knees as you edged them closer, the pupils blown.

“You are taking something.” He stated plainly, etched with a ragged lilt.

“Yes..” You croaked shamelessly, though you should have felt it with him seated before you, saying next to nothing but observing. The weight of it stinging across your face as something paused between you. The rocking stopped, the rounded wooden legs of the chair creaking to a halt, the quiet thickening.

He drew heavy breath that almost deterred you, recalculating your moves, until he spoke.

“Then take it.”

He spoke with a certainty. It wasn’t a beg, or a pleading for you to take him, take what you wanted, but it was an allowance, with him at your disposal. The roughness of his voice edged then with something more, a wanting.

The breath sucking through his nostrils as you came closer, crawling up into his lap. Each of your knees planted either side of him, bone braced against the hardened wood of the chairs sides, biting the sensation that crept between your legs. His arms stayed where they were, encasing you both even as you rover above him, head tilted up against the head of the chair. There was time for contemplation, a lot of it. But you did not take it.

Your lips reached his, unhurried but eager, at first without connection, the soft plush of your lips meeting his chapped and aching. You pressed one after another, kissing at his mouth until his began to shift beneath yours. They curved into one another, tearing and swiping tenderly as your hand cupped the side of his face. You thumbed it slightly, rubbing circles, tangling up into the unwashed threads of his bangs. He shuddered at that, your tongue poking against his as he let you lick into his mouth, his tongue exploring back.

Just like his scent, he tasted of ash and smoke, like the embers stoked from a fire, a warmth pressing in between your lips and your thighs. Heat pooled into your core, slowly grinding onto him from there he sat, the tightness of the chair leaving you near no room to move, building every bit of friction through material. The belt buckle of his kilt graced the inners of your thighs, thick rough fabric rubbing on the underside of your cunt through material. your nose bumped his, grinding down onto him.

“Need this..” You mumbled against his lips, the other hand gripping at his shoulder, the heaviness of the coat that clung to his body already fallen away, leaving him just in the tightness of his shirt, long sleeves scratching your sides as you wriggled.

“Yes..”

He called back, surprisingly. It wasn’t a moan or even of the sort, only an agreement, and one you both took gladly.

His fingers traced delicately, working their way between you, sliding the silk of your thin nightgown up toward your stomach, revealing the skin of your navel. And how you had thanked yourself in that moment, less nonsense to tug with, and he had seemingly thanked you for it too, running a sharp finger along your slit, slick coating through the fabric of your underwear.

Another finger hooked at the other side, dragging up your hips, pimpling along your flesh as the fabric was shoved to the side, cool air hitting your cunt. A moan bubbled up from your chest, burning your lungs as he reached you, fingers pressing between your folds. They were cold, shocking your body as he ran them between your folds, collecting your wetness and spreading you wide.

He watched as he did in, taking in the glistening of your heat in his hand, lips just parted. In awe it would look like. But he listened, the hitch of your throat as his thumb moved to your clit, fingers pushing into your hole. He began to pump them, pulling them in and out of you as you arched into his hand, fingers gripping tighter at the barely covered flesh of his shoulders. Your mouth opened, a silent gasp escaping your lips as your eyes closed, nodding gently at the pleasure he was giving you.

It felt good, unbearably so. His fingers curled tightly inside of you, dragging up into your cunt with a wasteless desire?? He thrusted them slowly, inching you closer, drawing you to him into the palm of his hand, your head falling forward just as your lips connected back to his.

Crooked teeth gnashed against yours, fingers toying with your clit as he drew you to your high, juices spilling out of you and down onto the bend of his wrist. He swallowed your moans, tongue and teeth catching you coming undone.

You didn’t beg, you wouldn’t, and you didn’t need to. You had done your fair share over time, thoughts of your previous marriage blurring into a nothingness that was replaced by the man beneath you, and his initiative.

Just as sin worked its loving tendrils around the vulnerable and shamed, words were not necessary. Instead, it would come naturally as all things did.

His hand at your side, the one not carefully pulled from you slipped at the blemished silver buckle at his waist, clinking open in one singular swipe. You held onto him as his knees shoved up, firming you to him as he sunk down into the chair. He looked peaceful, the tension in his back softening just by a touch. Only to be broken with the fervour that he fucked you with.

A hand braced at your hip, not tightly, but enough, snaking its way around your waist. He was hard, the length of him pressed at your entrance as you sunk down onto him, the harsh pull of vein sliding into you. His teeth gritted into a hiss as your mouth parted, eyes squeezed shut at the burning stretch you enveloped him with.

He smoothed into the walls of your cunt, filling you to the brim as you pressed yourself all the way down. Your eyes met finally, chin tilted toward the ceiling as he looked at you, darkened blues finding yours, a glint in them, an unfamiliar one. Like something broken, finding home again. You moved first, moaning at the push of him inside of you, hot and heavy punching deep into you.

The pace you set was rhythmic, chasing and fulfilling with every breath that you took him with. His arm curled tighter at your back, hand pressing just over the curve of your ass, a thumb poking into the dimple, anchoring. Though he did not just observe this time, for once, it was like he was alive, and in this time. His other hands placed over the flesh of your stomach, splaying at the skin where he was inside of you.

Studying.

A heavy hand clasped underneath your thigh, just as he pressed down onto the bulge, a sudden impatience racking his body, hips driving up into you from beneath, pressure from every side pushing onto your heat. He wanted this, even if he didn’t say it, his eyes faltered and fluttered, curses in a language you didn’t recognise falling from lips through your moans. You rocked into eachother, the crack of the chair scraping the floor as you connected, cunt sucking him greedily as the flood at your core pulled at you, eating at your very skin.

“I’m gonna..” You whined, eyes meeting his as your forehead rocked, sliding next to his as your breaths mingled, a heavy rumble vibrating his chest and into yours through silk. “Fuck..” A finger, long and protruding circled over your clit, harsh and fast, the sounds of skin slapping against skin filling the air as the dampened room scented with your sex.

You fell limbless into him, fingers curling at the skin of his neck as you rested, his cock twitching inside of you as he spilled free, neither of you bothering to move.

He did not coddle you, or hold you entirely. The arm circled around you retreating to rest back onto the arm of the chair, but he did not move you. His chest rose and fell against yours, your ear pressed into the wall of him, the steady thrumming, proof he was alive beneath you.

“We are even now.” He recognised. The pair of you taken things both, not that you owed it. There was no debt between either of you, only an understanding. You both took what you wanted.

Your senses fixated through the daze, nodding lowly. You breathed deeply once more, a familiar smell reaching you. Gunpowder, acrid like solvent. He had smelt of it before, the first time you had met him, not long after you had turned up on the same doorstep as he did.

It was a known smell, yes, but this was different. Your senses mixing with a realisation it took you back to. The same stench that had filled your home the night it was revealed your husband had died. Though he had been found in a ditch miles away. Someone had brought that smell into the house The same that was on his skin, clinging to it.

And as you had the closest look of him, chin poking into his collarbone as you looked up, he looked back down at you. It was him.

You didn’t startle, or begin to inch away. There was no fear, in fact the opposite. An understanding as always, and a heat punched into your chest. Leaving you to wonder, just how long he had watched you, followed you, chasing you to the same house you had seeked out for help.

And there in the house of a dead woman, not claimed nor owned, it left the pair of you, running from whatever it was you knew before, the washing away of sins leaving something knew.

A widow weaving her web around the very one sworn to protect it. And he would, as a man should.

You were thoughtful, remembering the past five months and thinking about how you ended up travelling around the States with Ole Munch. He imposed himself in your life to protect you, and you didn't complain, but living under the same roof with the threat of an organised crime group was a nightmare. 

Day after day, every time someone showed up, Ole Much was ready to annihilate them. It was exciting at first, with the idea that someone cared for you enough to fight dangerous criminals, even if it was just a job contract, and even if you had to clean everything up after Ole Munch finished with his tasks.

But when he got stabbed, the burden of guilt took you, and you decided that it was better to move away. You quit your job and abandoned your house, taking with you the bare minimum. 

And that’s where you are now, in the middle of nowhere, travelling with your hitman and with no idea about your future. You didn't feel turmoil, though, despite all of that mess; actually, you felt free. You were doing something out of control, outside your comfort zone, totally outlaw and yet, you felt so light, with no concern.

Still thoughtful, you moved your attention to Ole Munch, who was driving in silence, as usual. He felt your eyes on him, but he didn't move his gaze from the road ahead.

“The wife speaks.”

“We’ve been travelling for a while, but you have never told me anything about the jobs you take.”

“No need to. The less you know, the better.”

It was always like that. He decided where to go, what to do, and when to do it, without involving you. When he had to work, he disappeared, sometimes for days, and you had to wait for him somewhere, usually in motels. He never let you miss a bed to sleep in or food to eat. Not that you couldn't do it alone, but he felt that his protection service had to include the essentials for survival.

You weren't sure why you were accepting all of that crazy situation. You weren't a prisoner, not a victim, and you weren't as much broke and desperate to live like a parasite, and yet, being at his side made you feel good.

“Can you at least tell me where we’re going this time?”

Ole Munch didn't reply immediately; he bent his head over to check on a Motel sign on the side of the road, and he entered the parking lot right after.

“Here.”

The Motel was the usual passing motel, not bad, but it could be better. The general atmosphere was outdated; it needed some renovation, but it didn't seem overly dirty. Ole Munch didn't greet the man at the reception, nor did the man. He looked carefully at both of you, making some inner assumptions, but not asking for personal info. He turned around on the chair to take a key and placed it on the counter.

“Sixty bucks a day, cleaning woman comes at 9:00, twenty bucks more and you'll have breakfast included.”

Ole Munch put exactly two hundred and forty dollars on the counter, renting the room for four days, no breakfast included. He took the key and moved down the hallway, looking for the same room number he had on the key chain. You followed him without question; you knew it would be useless anyway.

Room 006

Of course, it was a double bedroom, who knows why it was never a room with two single beds. It wasn't a problem, though. Ole Munch always gave you the bed and used the couch, the armchair, or whatever seat furniture a place had to offer. On second thought, you were the one who usually fell asleep first, and when you woke up, he had already disappeared. You weren’t afraid to be abandoned in the middle of nowhere, though. He always came back. 

Ole Munch didn't put his bag on the floor. He checked for suspicious nonsense around the room and in the bathroom before coming back to you.

“I'll be back soon.”

His tone was assertive, and his expression severe, but he wasn't angry. It was some concern or anxiety, or maybe it was something he couldn't explain even to himself. His attachment to you was growing strong with time, and he even forgot when his protection service ended, because he was just happy to have you at his side. Happiness. A far too strong word for him, but he felt something similar for sure.

“Already? Don’t you need some rest?”

“No.”

Every time he had to leave, he lingered a bit, staring at you. He needed to record your facial details before a job, in case he died. Nothing would have been sweeter than your face in his mind in his very last moment on Earth. 

You lowered your gaze. You usually had more time to elaborate on the moment he had to leave, but he seemed in a rush.

“Be careful, okay?”

He just nodded and left without further ado.

For the first three days, you were pretty calm about Ole Munch's safety. In the past five months, he had always taken small jobs that could be done quickly. However, when you had to add more dollars to keep the room for another five days, you started to worry for real.

It was dead of night when he came back. Despite his massive figure, you didn't hear him right away enter the room and reach the bathroom. You woke up when you heard the shower.

You slowly moved to the bathroom, the door was half open, and you peeked inside, recognising his clothes on the floor, stained with blood. Ole Munch's familiar frame was hidden behind the shower curtain.

“Are you injured?”

Your question came out hesitant, fully aware you weren’t supposed to be there while he was taking a wash. No response came.

“I’ll wait outside. Just let me know if you need me.”

You didn’t know why you didn’t leave immediately, lingering in the bathroom while he stopped the water and left the shower, and you didn’t even know why you didn’t leave after. Your eyes wandered around his massive body, appreciating every scar you could see and deliberately staring at what he had to offer between his legs.

He stood motionless, dripping water on the bath mat under him and unashamed even though he was naked in front of you. He observed you while you collected his clothes in a corner, but not a word escaped from his mouth.

And then you did something unexpected even for you. You raised a hand with the intent to touch his cheek. His first instinctive reaction was to move his head away, and he frowned in confusion, but you tried again, approaching slowly and resting your hand on the side of his face. This time, Ole Munch allowed you to do it, even if his whole body tensed up under your delicate touch. 

“Hundreds of years have passed since the last time a woman touched me.” He said slowly, making pauses to remarking some words. 

You thought he was joking about his almost absent sexual life, but you weren't there to mock him. Curiosity and a bit of affection led you to do that act, and you couldn't ignore the warm sensation you felt inside when he didn't reject you.

“Is it that bad?” 

He slightly shook his head, maintaining his severe expression, even when you offered him a sweet smile. He looked everywhere but you, not sure what to do or what to say, but he stood still, not wanting to lose your touch on his face.

“Ole.” 

You have never called him by his name, there has never been the occasion to do it, and you tried to pronounce it correctly. Hearing it from you was unexpectedly pleasant for him.

“Can I kiss you?”

He frowned, lowering his gaze before slightly nodding. No woman ever showed that kind of interest in him of their own free will. It was new and pleasant. You stretched out to reach his face, resting your hands on his chest to keep the balance. Your sweet scent was so strong at that distance, and a strange turmoil crawled inside him. The feel of your lips on his was delicate, while you left some soft kisses, your eyes were closed, but not his. He blinked a couple of times, not knowing exactly what to do as he slightly opened his mouth. When he felt your tongue caressing his entrance, he did the same, following your steps.

It was awkward at first, but the more you teased him, the more he got confident and thrilled to make that experience. His hands rested on your hips, and he bent over you, closing his eyes and increasing that kiss with more passion. Your arms surrounded his ample shoulders, dragging him with you against the bathroom cabinet. Your bodies pressed together inevitably, causing a rush of pleasure in both of you. The thin fabric of your pyjamas let him feel your warmth and the softness of your bra-free breasts.

“A man feels strange.”

He said it with a low voice, breathing heavily against your mouth, and showing a sort of fear. Ole Munch was scared, in fact, that feeling was not totally unknown to him, but there was more, something he couldn’t explain, something he felt in his guts. 

“Is it good, or bad?” 

“I can’t say, but a man wants more.”

You made a reassuring smile and nodded, caressing his cheek and kissing him again before taking off your t-shirt.

“It’s good if you want more.”

Ole Munch stared at your bare breasts with a shameful, desperate desire and his usual frown. He raised his hands as if he wanted to touch them, but stopped, unsure of how to act. His erection was noticeable. 

“You can touch, if you want.”

He looked up at you as you gently took his hands and rested them on your breasts. His huge hands cupped them perfectly, and his touch was delicate when he started fondling them.

“Let me taste your flesh.” He begged.

You nodded, and your breath faltered slightly as he licked your nipple. He kept touching with more vehemence now, and he sucked and bit with more intensity. Your breath turned into some moans, and a shiver of pleasure reached your guts. He moved to kiss you again, this time with confidence, and he showed all his desire toward you. He grabbed his hardness and roughly started to jerk off.

“Wait…”

You replaced his hand with yours, stroking him as he moved his hands on the cabinet surface, trapping you between him and the furniture. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead on your shoulder as you kept giving him pleasure. His guttural noises in that helpless moment woke up something wild in you. The unyielding Ole Munch was defeated by you.

When you felt your hand wet with his precum, you stopped, gently pushing him away to be able to take your pyjama pants off.

“I want more. And you?”

Ole Munch slowly nodded while he looked at your body like a piece of art. His expression was so soft now, desperate for you. No man on earth ever looked at you like that.

You sat on the cabinet and took his hand to bring him closer, moving your legs around his waist. He couldn’t resist; his fingers gently traced your wet fold, causing a jolt of raw pleasure through your body. He observed your reaction and kept torturing your intimacy with careful attention.

You could have spent the night with his amazing hands between your legs, but you wanted more; you wanted him. Moving his hand away, you guided his hardness at your entrance, giving him the hit to proceed.

“I want to be yours.”

He swallowed hard and nodded as he penetrated you with agonising slowness. Fear was unfamiliar to him, but the idea that he could hurt you made him feel that way. He wanted to make you feel equally good, if not more.

“The wife’s womb is a temple.”

It was a compliment because he never felt so good inside a woman in his entire existence. Warm and tight walls embraced his member, slowly milking him perfectly. He took his time to enjoy your body, with closed eyes and lips pressed against your shoulder. Your thighs pressed against his hips, sinking your hand into his hair and clinging onto him. 

It didn’t take long for him to increase the thrusts inside you. His pelvis had a spasm of raw lust, and he adjusted the rhythm according to your whining moans. You felt so good, filled with him and so wanted. Ole Munch was a man of few words, but the way he complimented you verbally and physically was on another level entirely.

When you felt the familiar blooming in your core, you moaned his name like a song, and it was something irresistible for his ears. As your body stiffened, your mind blanked, and your inner walls tightened around him, he came wildly without a warning, filling your womb with pure pleasure. 

Your eyes met once again, in the most intimate moment of your journey, and he could see the happiness rise in you. He couldn’t believe someone like him could do something so beautiful for someone to whom he cared so much. He caressed your face, staring with his usual frown.

“A man belongs to the wife now.”

✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: :･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ✧✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: :･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ✧✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ:

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