Leaving Caelin
Author's note: This was written for the fe_contest community on Livejournal (which all you writers should check out – awesome, awesome group). The prompt was the song "Woman King" by Iron & Wine. In case you couldn't tell, it's after Hausen's death.
In the morning, he will leave behind his armor and the raiment stamped with the crest of his home. She, too, will shed the lavish gowns that seemed to drown her, tie her hair up in the simple way she did when first they met, and sling her dust-streaked sword at her side with the confidence he loves so well. They will clasp the hands of their friends – she will weep, he will hold back – and promise letters, perhaps visits, and other things that, in reality, will be far from their thoughts. They will share a mount, and her arms will wrap tight around his waist as he charts the way back to the land where the grass stretches as far as the sea and the sky.
She'll smile at the smell of goldenrod in the wind and dismount before he has a chance to object. She'll dance in the open air as she never danced in the courts and ballrooms. Her voice will carry ancient songs up into the stars that will stretch above them both, and eventually he will join her, though he will not know the words.
She will teach him to hunt – to lie in the grass and silence his heaving breaths, to strike quickly but firmly before the chance is gone – and then to flay his prey and use every scrap with thanks. She will sing him the songs her mother sang her, and he will try to imagine what it sounded like, the voice of that lady he has heard so much about. He will be content to imagine that her mother sounded like his. She will reach out to him in the night, thread her fingers through his own and laugh like a child and a woman all at once, and he will try to return the laughter to her with his own frantic glee.
He will lie awake beneath the emptiness that will stretch beyond his imagining and count the white pinprick stars (each one, she'll say, a spirit smiling down on them both) until he runs out of numbers. He will know, in the silence and stillness that will spread around him, that she is the ruler here, the one who will weave the path that he will follow with quiet joy, even if it means the stars might swallow him up and take him whole.
For tonight, he and the stars are separate, and she far from his touch and view. But in the morning, they will leave Caelin together, and his loyalty will know only the grass and the wind and the sky and her.