A.N: In terms of the timeline, this takes place after Hem, and before Trim. However, I would say it stands alone rather nicely.

Interlude

there are things I would do to you

Mithrigil Galtirglin

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Her feet are pressed sole-to-sole, her knees thrust out flat to either side, and she holds her ankles as she tilts forward between them, arching her back and pulsing, one-two, one-two, and the motion is nigh imperceptible. That massive, sun-hilted sword of hers is beside her, bare, its sheath at the foot of a topiary, and shines the same as the sweat on the back of her neck where her hair parts for it, all cast the mild russet of moonlight through a paling desert-winter-thick. Her nightgown is gathered taut underneath her, stained faint by the grass. The image asserts itself for him; exquisite.

From the long shadows of the hall and the mouth of the courtyard he regards her, his cheeks warming with a smile. She faces opposite, if her eyes are open, which he ventures they are not; she exercises no view, no perception what-so-ever, of the world beyond her body in this moment. Here her arms stretch outward and skyward, muscles straining even as the cloth beneath them smoothes; here she lolls her head creakingly side to side, the blades of her shoulders faulting to accommodate; here she leans back on her hands and extends her legs, bare toes curled severely, and gathers herself to stand. And before she is erect, she folds forward to sweep up the sword, and in one hand it is clumsy but soon she holds it as she should, in two, and it is an extension of her, taking both her arms and their fine control for its own.

She is all balance, the sword level and parallel to the earth, and if it wavers at all it is as she wavered in her extensions, beyond his ken. The blade arcs through the air before her, slow as the tide, her elbows levered against its path and the muscles of her bare arms twitching though the sword falters not at all. He considers, with some amusement, that she is drawing her battle lines for a foe he cannot see; when within the reach of my-sword-my-self, quoth the hiss of the blade through the air, thou hast trespass'd, and thou wilt fall.

He smiles, and sighs, and the shoulder of his own nightgown catches on the mortar of the gate. "I find you gone from our bed again," he states, "and it is for that old sword."

As expected, she is unruffled and unsurprised by his presence, and the smile she returns over her shoulder is placid and knowing, her eyes glinting. "Larsa's hunt quickened something in me, you know that."

"I do," he says, and it is so. He thinks on her, near eight months ago, and the pride in her countenance, the flush of her cheeks as she armed and armored herself in the palace of Archades. "And it is a comfort to me, that the petals of Dalmasca's desert bloom no longer enshroud her thorns," he adds, coming toward her into the courtyard. Underfoot, the grass is pliant but the earth firm beneath that, accommodating.

"Do you come to spar with me, then?" she asks as she turns full toward him, letting the greatsword down almost considerately.

He laughs, "She asks, knowing full well that I am no match for her!"

And she as well, "He declines, knowing that he has bested me with his tongue in list upon list, tourney upon tourney."

To hear his words parried so sultrily, and in his own language of entendre and reel, sets his own muscles stirring. He is near to her now, where the sword could reach him should she wish it, but she lets him pass, and her eyes darken for his shadow. "Then, if you will permit me, I will excuse and arm myself, that you may humble me, and assert your valor and your clout."

Her lips soften, but the smile is not gone from them. "'Tis not about that, and you know it."

He takes her by her upper arms, and the bare skin is sun-roughened even on this desert-winter's day, the imperceptible hairs rising gently under his palms. She is pale between his fingers, but not as smooth as the color would once have had him believe, but he knows this skin, these gentle magicked scars twice-healed and thrice-given, the searing of sinew long-neglected only just given heed. And her face, with its lines beginning to tauten and assert themselves, its warrior's jaw and mother's brow and woman's eyes, beckons him, and he leans close, his nose to hers but space between their lips, that he may still speak to her. "Yea. But I do so enjoy how victory makes you feel. Even when, as is too often the case with you, it is so easily taken in hand."

"Fetch a sword, then," she laughs gently against his chin, and his moustache quills for it.

"Ah, but you have already disarmed me with your eyes alone," he whispers as he leans in to take her lips,

But she pulls back leadingly, their nightgowns rustling together and her cheeks rising from lines to dimpled curves. "I am quite serious," she tells him, though her tone belies it.

"I go presently," he says, and kisses her quick and hot, his eyes cracked open that he may watch hers flutter closed. He savors the clutch of her skin and the sweat on her lips, that dangerous martial taste that compels all men, then slides his hands down her arms and turns aside. "I hope not to go through all this and find you again gone," he says with a last look, and her grip on the hilt of her sword has slackened, the blade tilting against the grass as she lifts it, and resumes her forms, and it is all he can do to actually turn from this creature, even if it is to oblige her.

He winds through the halls to their quarters, and it is not far, and all the while muses on these past eight months, and the role of that time in the eight years of their marriage. Where she has ever glowed passively, now she shines; the petals of Dalmasca's desert bloom no longer enshroud her thorns, he had told her, and agrees with himself, with the unvoiced truth that she is in another blossoming, opening to the sun after years of storm. (And it pleases him, to have breathed so casually a metaphor so true.) She has not been young, he realizes as he reaches their rooms alone, not that any of his peers, his generation, has; once grown, now annual, as the flowers upon vines full-wound, beholden only to sun and shear.

Not troubling himself with the door, nor with more than a nod to the guards, he heads for a tall case, of weapons more for emergency than favor, though of late, as evidenced, they have seen use. She carries her sword for ceremony still, this dynast-queen, as some few dissenters call her; he goes about unarmed, and it is years since he has held a blade save to take it from the hands of his son.

He looks upon a sword he used of old, in its sheathe of precious stones and artistry. The thought of taking it up elicits a scoff from his lips and a roll of his eyes, and he reaches instead for the pole behind it—ah, the Whale Whisker, perhaps she will play on that name, he thinks as a smirk years boyish rises on his lips—and pries the thing from its rack. With it rested on his shoulder, and a jaunty yeoman's skip in his step, he closes the breakfront and leaves it, and the room, behind.

This time, he winks at the guards as he passes them. Perhaps, if they are quick of mind, they will be gone when he takes her Majesty to bed.

And so back to the courtyard he goes, and he hears her before he sees her, the rasp of her blade through the air and her tongue-rammed breath echoing almost passively through the halls. Again, he is moved to watch her when the door affords him the opportunity, and though history has quoted her as disparaging the heavens, as simply herself, what she is is hardly simple and thoroughly divine.

The trail of her nightgown curls about her calves as she spins, the wide arc of the blade in her wake and then at her fore, then swept up without so much as a stammer in her gait. She has caught his eye, and slows to a stop, her head nodding as she scans his choice of weapon. "Do you mock me?" she asks, and it is playfully indignant, playfully, if he takes the sparkle in her eyes for truth and not some trick of the night.

"You'll not break it," he drawls low, leaning on its haft into the grass.

Her eyes dart down the length of her curving blade and then back up to his. "You mean, not if I nub the tip."

Outright, he laughs, with the quirk of her brows when she lands that blow in their ever-going war of words, with the new depth of her voice as she knows what she says, at the warmth under his skin that reminds him why he so adores this woman and has forsworn all other wives his fatherland would have allowed him. "It seems you will not yield as readily in the coming tournaments of words either," he says before the laughter leaves his chin, and the point of his goatee presses into his shoulder as he turns aside with it, hand palmed to his forehead where his glasses would be—and he is glad to have left them on the nightstand, for surely they would dampen this gleam of her visage, blacken the moonlight and the whites of her smile.

How he craves that guarded, controlled smile! Near as much, he tells himself, as the one that it hides.

And ah!, how he is rewarded when Ashe leans double over her reposed sword with easy laughter, her bare arms over her midriff and the sound stabbing through the night air, and he is both victorious and slain.

"Perhaps I should ask that you let me win here," he says as he approaches her, to arouse that laughter, that attention, "if the next time we joust in the lists that have heretofore been mine, you will unhorse me."

"But letting you win never satisfies me," she continues to laugh, through a false pout on her lips.

"That makes for two of us," he says, and—

"On your guard," she commands, and he sighs, chuckling, his shoulders slackening as he readies the pole in his arms.

She attacks, with a side-borne swing, slower than he expects or she would have. He can tell, and it shames him a touch, that she is pulling her swings, a perceived concession to his lack of skill. Here she thrusts, and here he blocks, and a rhythm becomes them, his backpedaling to her advance, relentless and calculated (and he is forever and always on the defensive, but can he be any other way against her?), and were it not for his having a sense of where her blows would land he would be as the grass underfoot. He is ungraceful, his hands and the pole between them as one shield to her, flung into the path of that sun-hilted blade rendered brass by moonlight and speed. Parried aside once, twice, and aha, she has ceased to coddle me! as the curve of the blade hooks around his pole, and how he wishes he could spare a glance at her face, at the breach of her lips and the hot air hissing past her teeth to punctuate the snap of metal, through air, to metal again. Were he not so apt at dodging, were all his intent not on her and her art, were she less mindful of him and her own prowess, oh, sure he would be bleeding at her feet!

(And this is as ruffled as he allows himself with any, man or woman, even in illness, even debauched, and even now he laughs through the lock of mind he requires to evade her.)

"You could attack me," she calls, on the edge of a grunt as her swipe comes mallet-mien from above.

He cannot parry, and darts aside, sinking nearly to his knee as the earth fails him. "You leave few openings," he laughs—or nearly, her blade summons him again and he blocks another low, dangerous swing with the haft, "and less time for me to take them!"

"Now you know—" from the right, for his flank, and he dodges, "—how I feel—" and she pivots, bearing down on him from above and following through, "—up against your army of words!" and a thrust that could have shorn the hair from his chest and reddened his nightclothes had he not nearly fallen out of its way.

"If that is the case, I should be glad to engage you," he pants, and through the words his power returns to him, and he sinks to one knee in the grass as he yields.

The words or the gesture stay her—she has always been moved by the sight of him on his knees. "What, you…"

Al-Cid leans down the pole, hands curled to fists around it as a shepherd with his prop, and still needs must catch his breath, heavily and more ragged than his pride would ordinarily allow. She stands above him, sword still level, and he regards her upturned and clear-eyed, as a vassal to his liege. "Are there ways I have not yet exhausted, to speak of the joy I feel to see your smile?"

She favors him with a smirk. "The weapon in your hands fails you and you resort to another?"

"Had I come here sword-in-hand, I would be forced to cow before your superior skill with it; here, I can blame the thing itself, by its very nature your lesser." And he too is smirking, though sweat drips through his garment and beads on his beard and moustache and clings to the corners of his wearied smile.

Exquisite, again; the heave of her chest, the curve of her arms, the reflection of his conquering tongue in her eyes.

"Now who is pulling his swings for whom?" she asks, where any other woman would have melted to a whisper or a stammer, and he sees it in the raised veins of her neck, and only because the years have taught him where to look.

"My love," he says as he rises from that kneel and comes to her, carefully snaking around the sword, and he embraces her fully, the pole at staunch rest against the small of her back. "Allow my fragile claims to dignity."

And then, that smile! but the moment is quickly gone, for it is pressed against his own.

As ever, the heat of her lips is a draught he would drink 'til it parched him, her tongue as rough as the sand. He gathers her up in his arms, letting fall the pole before she does her sword and he does not hear them topple. The seams of her nightgown ruck against his palms as he smoothes his hands down her sides, and he abandons them for the plain-laced path up her chest toward her neck and chin, and her skin shudders under the cloth and her lips from the kiss, the laugh beginning even as her tongue is twined with his.

To be sure, she can feel through their hips, what he desires. "Now, do I ask you to come to bed, or do we try the patience of the night watch?"

She answers low, the words barely leaving her throat. "The realm would be comforted, to know the revels of its rulers."

"Yea, and I suspect it shall arouse more than suspicion in the guards," he drawls lower still, cupping her breast through the shift, "but there are things I would to do to you that require some…leverage," he emphasizes, one dart of his eyes away from hers at this courtyard with its trees too tall and boughs too frail.

And by the grace of the gods her hands tug at the laces of his nightgown as she backs away, and they thump against his chest. She turns from him and bends to sweep up the sword and its sheathe when she finds it, and oh! were he seated he would sit back and sigh for the deliberate sway of her posture, cloth tightening thin as she looks over her shoulder while still part-supined. "To that," she breathes, "I yield."

"Ah, the honeyed taste of victory," he muses, his eyes still at the punctuated curves of her under her nightgown as he stoops forward himself and grabs the fallen pole with more grace than he actually used it. In two strides he is caught up to her, and with the weapon tucked 'neath his arm, his other hand is free to caress that thinly-clothed buttocks of hers—before, alas, settling his hand on her hip where cursory propriety demands it.

The tiled castle floor is cold and wet beneath his feet, after the paling-dewed grass, and they make the most enticing little sounds in uneven counterpoint, and he cannot help but lean against her with the thoughts those presses evoke. Astride them, the guardsmen smile, some daring to catch his eye as they pass, and pride coils around the desires already full in his blood. He holds the Queen to his side, and the cloth of her nightgown rises twixt his fingers as they turn a corner.

"Thank you," she says against his neck, no whisper but doubtless meant for him alone, in a tone of voice he has not heard her use outside their chambers.

"Oh?" he prods.

"For inviting me on that hunt," she clarifies, and covers the faint hairs on the back of his hand with the callused rough of hers.

He splays his fingers through hers from under and arches them, sliding their knuckles together, one-two, one-two. "It is a part of who you are," he says, and perhaps she does not know his double-speak, or—to himself alone, he laughs—treble-speak, of truth undeniable, of innuendo, of speculation. "Why should it lie neglected?"

She smiles, and he perceives the motion behind it, that perhaps all three of his meanings have dilated. "How is it that your tongue stays so keen?" she asks, and it is her defense, to praise his weapon even as it tears through her.

"Regular sparring," he answers, as they arrive.

The door is opened by his hand—and he must commend those guards, for they have departed!—but even as he bows gently to bid her pass she takes his nightdress by the collar and pulls him in. The knob of the door is out of his slick hand before it clatters shut, and he is grinning like a youth, to see her already drawing her nightgown over her head, hair fanning over the bones of her neck and her bare back, pale from sequestering and scarring both, the sword abandoned at their bedside. He must touch her, and strides toward her and does, tiptoeing his fingertips up her spine and his lips to her arching shoulder, across the breach muscle and bone allow it, the march from west-to-east against the map of her back. "You are too good to me," he tells her, and it is so, as her shoulder-blades flatten achingly against his chest.

She reaches back for him, her nails pricking his thighs and pulls him closer along her back, and he hums considerately into her skin, lowering his kisses down her spine. His hands follow lower as he kneels, down her bare sides, her thighs (ah, but she did not expect this tonight, for she has not shaved the hair from her upper legs!) and all the way down to her ankles. And it elicits the most luscious tremors under her skin and from her throat, and he can feel the snapping tautness in every sound through his lips against her spine, her heels stuttering to his knees, the unbidden twitches of her thighs as his hands slide higher between them. How he loves this clatter of her legs, the clicks of air escaping her bones! "So strong," he tells her, "my warrior-queen, my conqueror," and the words are near lost under the hitch in her breath, stifled there above him but nay, it is too late, for he feels it before it sounds, and her hands are like a bird's talons on his shoulders, his cheeks, and he darts out his tongue to one adventurous fingertip.

That gasp of hers will be the first of many, he is certain as she pulls away and hauls him to his feet. He knows this well, this battle with herself, and as she turns to him and takes control of his lips and chin he can speak no more, save in the wordless satisfactions low in his throat. To her breasts he lets his hands rise, the broken skin soft as the surface of warming ice (or the petals of the bloom, he considers, smirking thrice at his own witticism) until it roughens and wrinkles at the peaks. These he can never fully sate himself on, nor on the halting rests in her breath and shudders of her tongue against his as he skates his thumbs over them, waking firm (even as he does) under his touch. One blissful-harsh twist and her lips wrench from his, biting back a sound he knows he educed of her, and he laughs as he lowers his head to suckle at that same nipple, flicking his thumb over the crease before countering it with his tongue.

Ah, yes, it is the first of many, and her nails claw through his nightgown into his collar, and he moans, sagging against her and supporting them both. He parts his mouth horse-toothed and the warmth of her streaks through his bones, and knows he what she feels, the raggedness of hair and fullness of lips, the wet of tongue and rock-slickness of teeth, and she cannot deny him all of her groaning and whimpering, or the jerks and shivers of her flesh. By the grace of the gods, this woman in his arms, and how she regales him with her slipping self-restraint, and he tells her so, rejoices against her wavering skin of the things he does to her, the twists and slaps of her legs against each other and his, the taste of her sweat, the muffled shrieks and jumps as he closes his teeth around her with the words, and she has told him time and again that she would have him speak when they lie together, and who is he to deny her something so free as his voice?

(And for that matter, the things he says to her! Upon a time, he asked if she would allow a scribe into the bedroom. At the least, she was amused. Perhaps next time, she will allow him to join.)

She has staggered from him, toward the bed, and follows, stalking her breasts in an outright prowl, snapping and plunging his tongue after her. Her laughter rattles through the gasps, and she is the first to reach the bed. Her leg is caught between his and pins his vagrant hand between them, his fingers feinting at her sprawl of darker hair and between them to the wetness, and how he would love to tip her back and minister to her, and might, this time—

It is not to be. Her hands twine through his hair sword-sudden and strong arms thrust him to his knees. And he remarks on it, against her, a distant jibe at her manhandling as she spreads before him, her knees about his shoulders in an embrace like a warrior's, heels crossed delightfully high on his spine.

So rough, as if almost she trusts him not! as if she cannot abide his teasing teeth, his whispers into the juncture of her thighs, her hair tangled through his moustache as he reminds those lower lips of hers that they lack a tongue. Gods, but she is heady and thick, ridged skin throbbing with the beats beneath it of blood he is quickening through her, and her taste excites him as much as the fist in his hair. He laughs as she drives him closer and he chides her haste, breathing in hot bursts against her shallows, his kiss a baiting retreat, tongue near but not at the place he knows she craves it and ah! the pleasure unrivaled of driving her mad in his arms. By the ankles he has her, spreading her further astride him, and she is goosefleshed and sleep-needled in his mouth, now the racing succulence of further in, now the stubborn cold as he withdraws, and ever the moans she cannot fully stifle, ever the nails and stern fingertips that force his head into her and how it stirs him, that she cannot abide his patience.

Desert air on his back and hips, and his nightgown is at the mercy of her foot, and—oh! there is more of him at the mercy of her foot!—and alas, his lips falter for the growl that must pass them, into her, and she is victorious. And with each stroke of her foot up that which a man calls himself he abandons his subtlety for her, and thrusts his tongue deep, and above him she can muffle her voice no longer.

Her hands tighten in his hair, a pain he can endure, and then they hang slack. There is sweat running down his neck and along his cheeks, some of it hers, and her fingernail nestles jagged under his ear, stammering against his skin, the harsh companion to the folds about him shuddering still, and he savors it long, lingering in the chastest of kisses to a place not-so-chaste. Ha, he thinks, and says aloud as he rises (and as the holes from the carpet terries sting on his kneecaps, but oh, so very worth it), and thus opens his eyes to her, to her gleaming body and head thrown back toward the canopies, the sconces of the room shoving any wrinkle or shadow from her skin. Her palms thud to the covers and her heels to the floor when he is standing, and so gently, so teasingly still he nestles his shoulders to hers and kisses her neck (she is not one for her own taste, but all that requires is that he kiss her all the more, and all the elsewhere, before taking her proper lips again, and he disparages that not at all!), and perhaps this will be the night that she allows him to work his magick to counter her mettle.

Perhaps it shall, for the shuck of his nightgown over his head, by her hands, as he still stretches atop her; perhaps it shall, for the sound the hair of his chest and stomach and lower still wrapped in their mutual sweat; perhaps it shall, for the sounds she still makes, now that she can choke them and hide them from his ears, though not from his lips at her throat, not from his chest atop hers—

Alas, even now, it is not to be, and she does not yield; to her side, first, and he to his, facing her, and then she is atop him, astride him, and though his feet still brace on the carpet she has impaled herself on him, always above, where she believes she has control.

(Where she believes, indeed, he says inwardly as he bids her, aloud, to at least let him on to the bed before she tries to take him anywhere else.)

Her laugh is all stomach, all muscle and no sound, and he feels it clenching about him even as she rises part off him, and he slides through the cage of her arms to the pillows—such strange things these flat Dalmascan beds are, but he has had time to acclimate—and though she crawls over him catlike there is much of her he can reach, and does, her wrists, her breasts as they hang, those devilish dexterous feet with his own this time. He settles himself for her, and she takes his shoulders as she lowers herself to him again, and slow and careful like this it is best, and if only she knew.

Not that her way, her warfare of hips and heat, is worthy of any consternation.

He could never tire of this, this calculated chaos of her riding, the searching sounds that reach his ears from the drumming of the mattress, her knees, his heels. She surges against him, relentless as wind in his hair, and he can no longer look at her for the haze that seeps through his vision. Ah, swordplay! her lunges, her thrusts, coarse hands in the hair of his chest; but even here, with him inside her, she is not the Queen, though she is bent on empire.

And he tells her so, though he doubts she hears, and he doubts he says, what with his tongue's thousand other occupations, the scars of her breasts, each wrinkle, each hair, each muscle-wound bone he can reach from where she pins him. He strains for her further and soon his own pleasure overwhelms him, though it shames him to admit, and he can no longer touch her for the waves, the instinct. He must be deeper, and arches off the bed, grabbing the headboard for, ah yes, the leverage he promised, and it is so good to claim her, to hear the clashing of their flesh. And again, one-two, one-two, as he pulls himself up and into her, and she shallows, and they compromise.

Exquisite, to feel the quake of her flesh surrounding him, her weight bearing down, the boiling heat and the sound, this moan that he has raised from her and fills them both. And even after that, there is to be more for him, the bliss as she collapses against his thighs, and strokes his chest, and "Let this be the night," he pants up at her, bringing his hand from the bedpost to her cheek, let this be the night you yield to yourself, and for a moment he could swear she will, will let him prove that she need not take her own pleasure, that it is at no expense to him to see her through. And he gathers her close, and shifts inside her, and will if one laugh or one smile allows.

Her breath rattles, and her palms scrape, and it is not to be.

But she reaches between them and takes him in hand, and for—no, she has not removed his prominence from her, and will not, and if anything her knees tighten and her hips roll sharp. And he is both within and without her, and the clever woman, she knows a trick that I do not overtakes him, and as her nails clench around his sac he spills up and into her, and what more words are there?

She stays, and though sleep will take him soon he regards her thought its veil. He sinks, and she leans her cheek into his outstretched hand, and her smile is pleased, is sated, is as ever, exquisite. "And you," he tells her when the words return, "are the single most controlling woman I have had the pleasure of intimate acquaintance with." And it is true, and so is what he adds as he sits up to kiss her: "And I would have no other."

He curses those words as soon as says them, for the smile is wiped from her face by horror's stain—but no, perhaps he is nearer to sleep than he would like, and if there had been any darkness on her face it is gone. But so is her smile, and the cast of placidity, of position, has lined her cheeks and the corners of her eyes.

Slow and careful, she rises from him, and asks, quick, as if to evade, to hide, "How long has it been since we did something like this?"

"My dearest one, allow me first to recalibrate my tongue before I answer you," he says, and—yea, that smile, though small, though guarded.

And he can sleep assured, and so parts the blankets and sheets, baring her side of the bed as well, that she may join him. But as his head meets the pillow and sleep draws ever nearer, he hears her at the window, wrapped in the curtains that she may stare over her city, or past it, south toward the winter moon.

The cloth of the curtains splays between her fingers and clings to her skin, as the hair to the curve of her neck, as her toes to the carpet's twisting tongues.

"Your fallen foe is here in bed, desert bloom," he mutters, on the hinge of a yawn. "Come and gloat."

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