~oOo~
Waking from a dream, he glimpsed his love at the window, a pretty and unearthly thing who glowed like a wisp of silver flame in the winter moonlight. All about her, enveloping her, the moon appeared to have woven a light netting of shimmering fog. Covered in muslin and mesh this she radiated, his crescent witch.
"My husband," she whispered gently, and slowly he rose, creeping from their warm bed and to Katrina. Before lowering to his knees, he saw beyond his wife buildings and cobbled streets covered with snow. Covered as Katrina was by her aura. Snow fell in a steady torrent, light and dizzying from high clouds.
Ichabod could feel the wintry air reaching through the window, but he was not made to wonder how Katrina could withstand it, for he recognized her as being made of the same; of snow, of ice, of strands of hay, nettles and irises. Sunlit glades, bones, roses, fire. She was of all elements, all things. Of the music that had wafted from the ceiling of the opera house they'd visited, the songs that the same as smoke passed through skin and to their souls
Ichabod slowly began to kiss the tips of her fingers. The back of her hand brushed against his chin, and he felt - he knew - the tendons there; though he tried desperately not to think of them.
Over and over again she murmured the words, "my husband," soft and warm to his neck, and Ichabod kissed her knuckles, her wrists. "Wife," he lovingly returned, and carefully placed her hands to the flesh above his heart, believing it the only location to which Katrina currently remained tethered. That woman, that winter cold, who had moments before been searching the snow covered streets, was more than likely returned home to Sleepy Hollow now to tend to the graves of her mother and father and Jonathan Masbath for the sake of the boy she considered a friend, a son.
Ichabod looked to her pale moon face, placing a finger to her forehead; tenderly caressing her. "What secrets wait for me in here, behind the clouds and before the stars... What secrets will find me in time?"
Her eyes darted over the ceiling before meeting him, and Ichabod felt one of her hands slide into his. Her skin was cold and warm at the same time; warm in palm, cold at arm. She blinked her heavy eyelids, tiredly shaking her head. Waking and emerging from wherever she'd departed, Katrina brought him closer, his head coming to rest at a collarbone. Along with her usual honeysuckle, she was scented as one touched by the night air and faintly of smoke from a recently extinguished candle.
All sense of the forlorn slipped away as her mind registered the countenance of her husband; the rediscovery of something forgotten. Warmth now in her brown eyes, a smile. "My secrets are hardly well kept... You feel them now certainly?"
Beneath the thin cloth of his nightshirt, he could feel her heart, her pulse thrumming through her palms, through her blood and into him.
"My love, in my lifetime I fear I will never know you in full. The depths and unspoken thoughts, your secrets, are like your heart, well kept," he whispered in the dark, the warmth of his breath touching tendrils of her wiry crown.
"You are the sole bearer of the key which unlocks all within me," she said, her free hand settling at her side. Her voice betrayed her.
Ichabod was warm, bathed in her, and tired himself. He was content; heady; he could easily fall asleep or kiss the shadows of her face, areas that glimmered with gentle warmths all their own. Warmths known exclusively in their embrace.
The thought dismayed him, brought over him a wave of chill which rolled through him, fell to the base of his skull and settled; where there it as rosy mist did so escape.
His star, his pearl. She glistened in the light.
~oOo~