in sunshine and in shadow
All the reasons he’d given himself not to love her, in the long moonless nights in his chambers or the long starlit nights by the sea, melt away like snowflakes against skin. How foolish those worries seemed now, like haunting ghosts that he himself had invited in. The king sees now that they are nothing, nothing compared to press of her body against his, the brush of her feathers to his side, the warmth of her breath on his cheek and his neck.
He is far from a mountain, but he, too, wants to fall to his knees when she asks for his fealty. “You have it,” he breathes into the curve of her throat, where a curl falls dark behind her ear. “Ask me for anything and you will have it.” There is something in him that turns over, in the deep waters of his soul, uneasy at such promises. But Asterion is tired of listening to his own faceless shadows and he shuts them out now, filling himself instead with the sunlight slanting down on them, the shadows dappling their skin, all the places their bodies meet and glances catch and hold. What could matter but this, what could matter but love? Here where nothing was certain, not life or magic or time, and home was a world away -
She shakes against his side, she begins to pull away, and Asterion steels himself, sure it is too much, too soon -
but he cannot be afraid, in the light of her golden eyes, and when she speaks again his breath sighs out, soft as a whisper of starlight. When she continues it is his lips that curl in a smile, dark and mischievous.
“I would if I could remember any of them,” he says, and his tone is teasing but true, and his heart is as full as the depths of the sea. “Alas, I cannot. We’ll have to just…begin again. From now, if it suits you, Miss Tonnerre.” And the syllables of her name delight him, charm him as they had from the first, but he can’t help what he feels then. That the thing he wants to call her, the thing that feels so close now (as close as a dream, just on the other side of waking), is mine.
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