Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –

- Emily Dickinson

On the well-worn path to Crow's Cradle, some miles past the crossroads but not yet at Brigand's Rock, Wirt raised his gaze from the rutted path and asked, "How long does this trip take?"

Beatrice, hunkered down in her knitted wool cloak, wiped condensed breath from the tip of her nose and shrugged. "We've made it a dozen times," she said.

"You've made it a dozen –"

"You know how long it takes."

"I know," he insisted. He turned to look up at the swaying bare treetops that arced above the road, and they creaked and hushed, as if in recognition of his attention. "But I don't really know. The days. Do you?"

She couldn't say why she always found this infrequent topic of conversation just slightly disquieting. "It's a dumb question."

"You would think so."

"What does that tone mean?"

"You think everything you don't know about is dumb –" She cut him off by bumping him in the thigh with her hip, and he staggered off-course with a short laugh and a tinkling chime of heavy glass jars from the hand-truck he dragged behind. "Don't damage the merchandise."

"I'll damage you," she threatened without weight, and pulled her hood back over her head. Their conversation was displaced by the sounds of the scraping woods, and the crunch of their feet and the cart wheels on the stony road, and the sigh of the sun as it settled lower in the frost-fogged sky. Then Wirt asked again:

"You really don't know, do you?"

She closed her eyes briefly, as the white glare of afternoon peeked in athwart the swaying branches and lighted upon her face. "No. I don't know."

"Doesn't that feel wrong to you?"

"Why is it so important how I feel?" She craned her neck at him, to emphasize her nonchalance toward the question. "It takes as long as it takes, just like everything else."

"And you don't remember things ever being any other way?"

Beatrice didn't answer that. Instead, she pushed on his shoulder, covered by the heavy brown cloak her mother had gifted him back in the fall. "Do I need to pull the cart for a while? I think exhaustion is making your brain dumber than usual."

"No, I'm fine." He hitched up his hands on the grips slightly. She watched him do it, his long dry fingers relaxing and whitening again on the handles polished by years of use.

"Really," she said again, more seriously this time, and she reached out to try and pry his fingers from the handle. "Your gloves busted out this morning, you've had it all day –"

"I'm really fine."

She didn't believe him at all. Her own hands started to cramp and freeze after one hour, let alone five. "Why are you torturing yourself?"

"It's not torture –"

"Liar."

"It hurts a little bit, but –" A shrug. "I don't really mind."

"You always do this."

"It keeps my mind occupied."

"From what?"

It took him a second to answer that. His brow creased slightly, but his voice was light. "From asking irritating questions, I guess."

Beatrice hip-checked him again, and the cart full of preserves clanked behind him. "Do what you want. But this doesn't mean I'm taking all of tomorrow just because your fingers have fallen off."

He said, "That seems fair," but nonetheless, she removed one of her mittens and placed her warm hand atop his cold one to keep it from freezing.

They didn't talk again for a long time, as they normally didn't while out on the road together.

–

This was their routine:

The season was dry, and all the more terrible for it. Morning always came as cold as the stars sitting on the horizon, and paired its beauty with bitterness for forcing them to crawl out from grimy bedrolls set between the roots of oak or sycamore or wych elm, whichever tree had looked somehow warmest the night before. They were perpetually red-nosed and numb-fingered; they slept in their boots; they watched the sun bruise the firmament and light the treetops crusted in bone-dust from the sky, daily eternities during which creation was not yet warm enough for even time to tread forward. They ate dry breakfasts washed down with water kept liquid by body heat, and they talked, sometimes, though not as much as it seemed maybe they should.

Both of them asked a lot of questions, but neither seemed very inclined to answer any.

They divided their work evenly, at least most of the time, when one or the other of them wasn't trying to be ingratiating or infuriating in their attempts take their companion's stress upon themselves. More than once Wirt had had to physically wrest the delivery cart away from Beatrice while she did her best to run away from him up the road, insisting that he had taken more than his share of hours the day before, or she woke early in an attempt to break camp while he slept, and in between it all, they made their stops, they collected their coin, and each and every night, they found another place to call their beds so that it could all start over again in the morning.

"What's on your mind?" she inquired, occasionally, but not too often, because it only ever seemed to make him go quiet.

"Do you think time can really exist, without change to go with it?" was his own question, among many others equally opaque. Beatrice never knew what she was supposed to think of them and he never explained, so each just told themselves they could be satisfied with the silence, and as always, they walked on.

Now it seemed like most of their days were spent on the move, and Beatrice was fine with that, at least ostensibly; she didn't leave home to earn money during the lean season so that life could plod along at the same slow clip as always, after all. The Unknown had few ways to threaten a body any longer, no more trickful shadows or evil songs; people were coming out of their homes to wander in the wilderness again, and they were not as afraid as they once were. The two travelers were accepted always in the places where they walked, and freely offered food, beds, and knowing promises that warmer days were surely soon to come, no matter how deeply the snow swathed the ground.

And yet… and yet. Many mornings Beatrice opened her eyes, staring down the stars, and wondered if she hadn't been in this exact place before, once or a thousand times. The cycle of waking and walking and falling asleep became more regular than the turning wheel of the year, and time was not measured in weeks and months, but in the length of the road ahead, where both past and future took the form of quiet journeys on freezing sunlit days. Winter had a glint of eternity off its teeth, but she told herself she should be grateful; the tips were good, the days spent outside were regularly interspersed with warm fires and familiar faces, and for the very first time, she wasn't making the journey alone. That had to be worth something.

Once upon a hazy time, back at the beginning of the hundred-year season when the leaves on the ground were the colors of sun and gloam, Beatrice's clientele had been surprised when her once-solitary endeavor turned suddenly to a joint effort, her cart now often towed by a thin brown-haired boy with big ears and sad eyes. "Where did you find this pilgrim?" they'd asked her, sometimes teasing, often genuinely curious, but Beatrice never really had anything to say about it other than the truth:

"We met on the road."

–

It wasn't until the sun was all but hidden behind the purpled mass of the forest that Beatrice was willing to call it. She drew to a stop in the middle of the westward path and said, "We're not going to make it to the inn tonight."

Wirt, who had been insisting as much since they left Gravestead at noon, was gracious enough not to rub it in, at least explicitly. "It's cutting it kind of close to only be setting up camp now," he said, wrapping his scarf tighter around his neck.

"Yeah, well," she said sourly, and started moving again, hoisting up the barrowful of worsted she pulled behind, "if you'd rather keep walking all night you go right ahead."

He did nothing to indicate that this was the case. The ground was crunchy with rime and the ebbing light cast a dull pink overlay across the gray world. "Look there," he said after a moment, and pointed. Off to the north curved a promisingly wide game trail, and he stepped forward and pushed away the shrubbery concealing it; she didn't want to stray too far from the road, but it was her fault they didn't have the time to be choosy, so she kept the thought to herself.

Wirt entered first, snapping away the foliage as he went so that she could follow with the cart; bands of sun and shadow crossed their faces, flashing as the underbrush grew darker. Beatrice wished she could lift a hand to shield her eyes. After a few hundred yards, the path opened into a shaded glen running parallel to the thoroughfare. It was dusky, but well-hidden, with a handsome icy beck trickling through its center. "Great," Beatrice said with satisfaction, "this'll be fine," and she set her cart against the nearest tree. She started to haul out their bedrolls, and it took her a while to realize she was doing all the work by herself; Wirt stood still by the riverbank, hardly more than a mean angle slanting into a beam of sunlight that penetrated through the trees. His face was lit like a lantern. She sat back on her heels, clumsy-fingered and dry of mouth. After a minute she called, "If you don't come help, I'm gonna take your blankets for myself."

He turned to her with a surprised look, as though it hadn't occurred to him she'd want his assistance, even though she always did. "Sorry," he said, and was at her side again in just a few long strides. "I like this place."

Beatrice grunted, and shoved the food satchel into his arms.

When their camp was set, the two of them carefully jumped from stone to stone across the river and crawled up a steep embankment to the peak of the swale to eat their supper. They seated themselves warmingly close to one another on a fallen log in the light of the setting sun, and portioned out handfuls of the honeyed oats and nuts and dried fruit that they'd bought earlier that morning. "Here," Beatrice said, and handed Wirt their drinking flask with a grin. "You'll like this." He took an absent gulp with his eyes on the horizon and immediately coughed.

"Mmhp – wine?" he choked into his elbow, while Beatrice snickered around a mouthful of cranberries. "Where did –"

"The Shopkeeper's Wife gave us a very nice tip this morning," she said, jangling the coin purse sewn into her coat. "I thought we could treat ourselves." Wirt looked uncertain, but took another drink, longer this time, and handed it back to her so that she could do the same. The alcohol warmed her face and legs, and she settled down inside her jacket with a sigh. "This is the life," she murmured.

"Dying of frostbite on top of a hill?"

Beatrice did not respond to the bait in his tone. "Being alone."

She wasn't looking at him, but his voice sounded a little funny: "You're not alone."

"You don't count."

"Hmm." He sat back on the log with a bemused expression, one hand tucked tightly next to her thigh. "Is that supposed to be a compliment, or…?" She offered neither confirmation nor denial, but did raise the wine flask again, and he accepted it gladly enough.

In the interminable time since she and Wirt first parted ways on that snowy night, long ago, many things had changed between them, and change was not something she suffered terribly often, but for him, she would make an exception. He had been as good a companion to her as she could have asked for, in spite of her expectations that they would quickly grow sick of one another's presence; her customers liked him, and his contribution cut her delivery time into fractions of what it had been in previous years. He'd gotten taller, much taller, at least in her approximation; granted that the last time she'd seen him she'd been a bird, which is bound to change one's sense of scale, but she was sure she wouldn't have fit under his chin before. Sure of it. His demeanor no longer roused her ire the same way it used to, and she couldn't tell if it was because he was different now or because she was. He seemed less prone to cowardice and panic than she remembered, those tendencies replaced by a soft, consuming melancholy that he wore, not on his face, but across his shoulders in place of the blue cloak he'd had long ago and since lost. Unhurriedly, they supped together; Wirt accepted the food she offered, but as usual, seemed less interested in eating than she did. She wondered if he hadn't been growing thinner lately. They drank until their cheeks turned rosy with wine.

"I know what I'm going to do, when we make it to Floodwaters tomorrow," Beatrice said, wiping her mouth as she corked the flask.

"Hmm?"

"I'm going to rent a room, and sleep in a real bed, and I'm going to take a long, long bath." She set her head back lazily into her own shoulders. "If it were springtime, I'd be down in that river right now –" Wirt's ears were red "– but for now, I just have to live with it until we get to town."

"You have to live with it," he muttered, "but I have to smell it –"

She kicked at him, but only weakly, because their legs were so close that she had no space to swing. He pulled his feet up onto the log to escape the assault and elbowed her back, and its surprising force almost bumped her out of her seat. They grappled, and resituated themselves, and then sat in silence for a few minutes before Wirt added, "But spring will be here soon."

"Maybe."

"It has to be," he murmured, and even as surely as Beatrice knew it wasn't true, it was all she could do to stop herself from telling him that it might not come at all.

The flask was getting lighter; she took another swig. "What's on your mind?"

"Nothing, I guess."

"Why bring it up if you don't want to talk about it?"

"I didn't bring up anything, you asked."

"Please," she drawled, slumping her head over at him and giving him the half-lidded look that shredded her younger siblings' sense that they were getting away with anything. "You turn pointed questions into an art form, Wirt."

"I guess I just wonder, sometimes." Beatrice smoothed her napkin in her lap and took off her gloves, so her fingers flushed with chill. She rubbed them together vigorously. "But I've also realized that I don't wonder nearly as often as I used to, anymore. You know?"

"I really don't."

"It's started to feel right that it's still so cold. My head says it should have been spring a long time ago, but my heart…" He trailed off, brows furrowed, eyes blank. "It can't stay winter forever, though," he added. "Can it?"

Beatrice only shrugged at that. "Time takes time," she said, and popped a handful of jerked beef into her mouth. "Wintertime more than others. You don't think it'll ever thaw."

"It didn't always used to be this way. Not back in –" He paused. "I remember. Do you?"

Beatrice chewed and swallowed carefully, eyes on the blistering-pink sunset. "I'm not sure," she said after a moment. "I'm not sure what you're getting at. What are you getting at?"

"…Nothing."

"Liar."

"I don't think I should tell you." She bristled at the words. "Sometimes, it just feels like everything's gone kind of…" He wrapped his hands around one another. "Curled in on itself."

"I don't –"

"Like the world's stopped turning," he said. His face in profile was long and aquiline, the look in his eyes harrowing. "Like it's waiting for us to catch up with it. And it didn't used to be that way but now it's started to feel right and sometimes I can't even remember anymore what it was like back before the –"

He stopped and rested his fingers against his face in a cage, to hide himself from her. From a point of dissociation, Beatrice regarded her own body: still, with an unexpected pit of disquiet in her throat. She did not like this topic of conversation, she never had. Summer turned to fall turned to winter, and each and every season was long enough to encapsulate all of history in its trajectory; the way things were now was as they'd always been, and when they were different, so would be the road that had led to them. If not for Wirt's new presence at her side, she could have wondered if every autumn hadn't only been a dream.

Beatrice watched him for a very long while, ostensibly to see if he would explain himself, even as it turned slowly into a blank-eyed meditation on the shape of him. Wirt's gaze fell to his hands, curled together in his lap, as if to fill a space he wished was held by something else. He looked… weary. She reasoned that it was for the end of another long hard day, but already knew the thought for self-deception. This tiredness was deeper than that of the body; it was the same exhaustion she always saw when he thought she wasn't looking, the same spiritless fatigue of the young man she'd once found on the roadside in the last rushes of a fabled autumn, curled at the base of a tree in cockcrow light for a somber reunion that had even then seemed less coincidence than inevitability.

It was the same terrible, bone-deep sadness he'd expressed when she'd asked him, long ago, "Where's your brother?" and been told only, "I couldn't let him come this time."

Now he asked her, and his voice was as thin as the mist that carried it: "If winter is a time of death, then what's spring like, in a place like this?" She didn't understand the question, as much as she didn't understand the untold history carved into the bone structure of his face. Slowly, she reached out and pressed a hand against his cheek. He looked to her with an expression that was half surprised, half expectant, and entirely lit by the light of the sun.

Beatrice took him by the jaw, opened his mouth, and placed a raisin inside.

"Eat," was what she said, and in surprise, he actually did. When he was finished, she gave him another. "Too much wine, not enough food," she murmured thickly. "You'd have to be the most self-centered fool on Earth to think that the whole world was standing around waiting for you. The world is… it's a bigger place than that. You know?" She tried to sound self-possessed, but inside she was shaking. Wirt was looking at her, really looking at her, or at least that's what the drink wanted her to believe. His hand was rough and cold; she felt the heat of his knee against hers, through her skirts. Closeness was usually inextricable from their work and travel, but in that moment it felt like a weight tied around her neck. They stared into each other's eyes, and she had never before been so sure of her own miscue.

The world was no bigger, after all, than the space that separated their shoulders.

The sun's light bloodied the sky, and abruptly, Beatrice let her gaze drop. She could see his frame in her peripheral vision, how it seemed to slope, as if disappointed; she chose not to give it too much thought. "Come on," she said stiffly, and did not let herself look at him. "We have to get back to camp or we'll be trying to wade across a river in the dark." He made no reaction when she packed up the food, and stood up, and took one last drink of wine before pouring the rest out onto the ground. He followed her back down the steep slick hill, and the two of them prepared for bed without saying another word to each another.

Beatrice fell asleep unhappily, counting the stars as they peeked one by one from between the naked branches above.

Then, in the middle of the night, from the midst of a dream about standing in her family's millhouse while the grindstone turned without end, Beatrice's drowse was gradually split by sound, and she squinted her eyes open to the sight of a moonbeam spilling across her body, while on the ground beside her, Wirt muttered familiar words in his sleep:

"Open th' window," he murmured under his breath. "Seatbel'… go. God. Don't wanna. Go." She sat up against the old maple at her back, watching him warily; his lips parted and what might have been a tear glistened in the hollow of his eye. "Tekka deep brea'h. Luh' you."

"Go."

Word order changed, but this story was the same every time she heard it. She sat still for a moment, and then snuck a warm hand out of her covers and reached to touch his shoulder. His eyes opened immediately with a small visible inhalation.

"You were dreaming," she said, hushed, as he sat up with his cloak tight around his shoulders. He scrubbed hurriedly at his eyes without looking at her.

"…I-I'm fine," he said after a minute, unprompted, and squeezed her hand briefly to let her know she had done her job. "I'm fine. I –" He paused and looked to the ground. Even in the moonlight, his eyes seemed red, and his fingers curled with grief that she didn't understand. She swallowed, though her mouth had gone sticky from the painfully cold air; she pushed away her covers and leaned over to wrap her arms around his shoulders, and he bowed toward her body and gave a small, dry sob. "H-he wanted to come with me," he whispered to her, arcane words, the same ones he'd carried on his lips back when she'd first found him again, sitting lost and tearful in the autumn-drifted morning: "I couldn't let him come, Beatrice. I had to let him go."

She didn't ask him to explain, though she badly wanted to. She just held him, consumed by the feeling of his body against hers, warm and solid and very, very close. His arms snuck out to grasp her in return, face pressing against her bodice, breath tightening around her body. She could smell his hair, close to her chin, and without thinking pressed her lips against the crown of his head, squeezing her eyes shut, only halfway aware of what she was doing but fully sure of its necessity.

His breath stopped. He lifted his face slowly with an expression of awe and as he did, her kiss moved of its own volition to his forehead, his cheek, his mouth, his jaw, his mouth again. For a moment the angle was tight and awkward, him leaning up sharply into her embrace, but he pulled away to sit up fully and then brought their kiss exactly back where it had been before he'd interrupted it, meeting it now with equal force. He cupped her cold face in his warm hands. She could feel the dampness on his cheek, the heat of his breath against her mouth and the beat of his body meshed perfectly against hers; a wild part of her wanted him closer, but she dismissed the notion for folly. They were hot, and cold, and as heavy as the light of the moon.

In a break between caresses, she murmured, "What are we doing," as a non-question against his lips, and he had no answer for her, but buried his face into the mass of her hair with deep and heavy breath.

Eternity seemed not so present, right then.

Slowly, slowly, they moved from their two bedrolls to one, huddling together warm and disheveled in a singular, inextricable point of contact, hands hidden behind the corners of one another's bodies. In that moment, it seemed impossible that they could ever have spent their nights any other way.

–

And when they opened their eyes in the morning, spring had arrived.

–

The new day came skimming in on sweet air and birdsong and flowing water. They crawled out into it blinking, perplexed, their faces sticky with hoar and sweat and their cold hands burning in the heat of the sun; frost still threw patchwork across the ground, but it was limp and unimpressive, turning to dew as smoothly as fall had once slickened with mud and frozen over. Beatrice watched a daffodil sway in the light breeze with a lump in her throat, and swallowed harshly to keep it down. How could she have forgotten the color of a living world? It had never really gone away.

Wirt was the first one to crack. He smiled a little, and then crossed his arms tightly to contain a chuckle, and finally threw his head back and laughed, like she couldn't ever remember seeing him do before. He took her hands with abandon and swung her around until they both lost their footing and fell onto the grass, already warming and dry to the touch.

"I-it's here," he stuttered through his mirth, and whisked a finger under his eye. "Just like that. We made it."

She wanted to ask him what he was talking about, but was distracted by the glint of sunlight on the end of his nose, and the movement of his arms as he threw off his cloak and stood in the grass, tall and thin, cutting a wedge out of the sun as it flooded over him. He had a smile on his face, and he was turning it toward her. He took two long steps forward and his shadow rushed out to envelop her in a hug even before his arms could reach her; he was laughing into her ear, squeezing her around the shoulders, lifting her heels ever so slightly from the ground as he straightened his back. She tried for an instant to act irritated, but it was futile to scowl; he couldn't even see it, because his eyes were closed and his lips were pressed firmly against hers.

She wondered when exactly that started again, but really, why did it matter?

Her hands driftet to the sides of his face, running disbelievingly along his jaw and neck, until he finally pulled away with a look like a deer caught out in the open, as if he hadn't been the one to initiate the embrace. A heady blush sat high on his cheeks and his shoulders were kept as close to his body as he could manage. She tracked his hands as they tied themselves up in his floppy brown hair. The unclear thought occurred to her that, all season long, it had not grown any longer.

Beatrice swallowed, throat tight, and reached for him again. The sunlight was hot on her arms, as deeply permanent a feeling as summer's golden tan. She pulled his hands from his hair and placed them down by her sides and let them stay there, and then put her own hands on his face and pulled it back toward her own. Their lips grazed one another briefly, and she trailed up toward his ear while he bowed reverently into her neck. A robin twittered from nearby; the river in the center of the glen hushed across the ground; their hands trailed up and down one another's bodies, lingering in daring places. This time Beatrice was the one to eventually pull away, breathing more heavily than she had been when they started, and she turned her head down and let her eyes rest on the shimmering surface of the water, colored like greenstone and sky.

"There's something I want to do," she intimated, "and I… I hope you'll join me." Wirt stared down at her with his lip between his teeth and his hands still resting on her shoulders, but slowly, he nodded.

The riverbed sloped gently into clear chill waters, and Beatrice pulled off her boots and socks and stepped gingerly down the incline, feet slipping in the clay soil until she took a short leap and splashed into the stream. The water bit for the cold, but given a few seconds she could appreciate the burn, cutting at the filth between her toes. In a beam of sunlight, she shrugged off her coat and tossed it back up onto the bank. The warmth caressed her skin, and she hunched her shoulders gratefully as an audacious thought crossed her mind.

Wirt descended behind her. He too stumbled barefoot into the river, and let out an audible shiver. Busily, she hitched her hands up underneath her skirt and untied her drawers with small frustration, and was just stepping out of them one leg at a time as he asked, "Beatrice, what's…?"

"I," she said, and threw her drawers up onto the bank with her coats, "am taking a bath." And she reached deftly behind her back with both hands and began undoing the buttons down the spine of her dress.

She watched him out of the corner of her eye as he crossed his arms and looked away, feet still in the water. As if she hadn't noticed, she continued to unhitch the buttons until the point that she could no longer reach them. She tried to pull the dress open to step out of it, but seemed not to have made enough progress on the back for that to be possible, so she changed tactics and began pulling it over her head instead. It goes alright until her shoulders got stuck, and she struggled to free herself from the confines of her own bodice. She fumed momentarily at the indignity, but then a second set of hands stilled her movement, and took hold of her sleeves to pull them upward. The darkness shifted, and when the dress was gone there was Wirt standing in front of her. His frame blocked the light from touching her skin, but the little half-smile on his face provided much more heat than the sun ever had.

She swallowed, dryly, but bundled up her dress in her hands and tossed it, too, back onto the bank. She stood bare in front of him in the water, arms crossed, determined not to flinch or betray her nerves. He raised his hands ever so slightly and then seemed to realize what he was doing, and dropped them again to his sides. Shamedly, his gaze slid down and away from her body.

Beatrice took back his consideration with another kiss.

She had to stand on her toes to do it, and the rocks of the riverbed tilted dangerously at her unstable weight, but she leaned into him and he stepped backward and somewhere in the midst of it, they found their balance. She flung her arms around his shoulders and he put his hands in the smallest part of her back and kissed her in return. Her fingers eked up his neck, into his hair, and she stretched upward with thrill to reach his lips so fully, while he eagerly pulled her stomach close against his shirt. It took a long time for them to separate, and when they did, the expression on Wirt's face contained enough confused emotion to have coalesced into void, perhaps happy, maybe wistful, maybe even just overwhelmed. She swallowed, unwilling to break eye contact until she thought she's made her point, and slowly, intentionally turned her head, raised her chin, and made her way further into the water, daring him to follow.

A small ways down the riverbank, where the waters were deeper and more still, she knelt down fully. Her feet had acclimated to the cold, but the rest of her was new to it, and she braced herself for the transitionary period again. It wasn't as bad as she'd expected. After a minute, she relaxed and laid down, submerging everything but her head, which rested against a warm dry stone. A shadow fell across her body, and she looked up. Wirt sat down on a rock close to hers, trousers rolled halfway up his calves, the first button of his shirt undone. She took a deep breath.

"Are you scared?" she asked.

It took him a minute to answer. "No."

"Will you join me?"

He looked at her, all of her, where she laid in sunlight scintillated through water, pale as a pearl and dashed by flame. His eyes were soft and needful, and he said, "Yeah."

She, unlike him, did not pretend not to watch as he undressed. She tilted her head curiously at his unbuttoning the front of his shirt; at the narrow shape of his chest and arms when he tossed the garment aside; at the quake in his hands when he started to, finally, undo his trousers. She sat up and he lowered himself into the pool of water behind her, short of breath, shaking, clearly not just for the cold. She took his elbows and pulled them around her shoulders like a cloak. The transfer of moisture from her skin to his was frisson made liquescent.

Wirt pressed his face into the crook of her neck, and his breath echoed in the hollow. His bare chest was warm against her back and his head was heavy on her shoulders; his legs extended out next to her on either side, toes eddying the creek. The air between them smelled like skin, like water drying in the sun. She hunched up with a small "Mmn," and felt his fingers spider their way down her sides, to her hips, whorling the water they displaced. His hands made out to be bold, but he had turned his face away, as if he could hide himself from her in doing so.

A hopeless case, indeed.

She reached behind and craned her neck, pulled his chin in and met his mouth with her own, leaning backward into the meagre crescent of his body while they braced themselves against the stream. Her heart beat to jolt her limbs, but she pressed herself into his chest and rolled over slowly, taking his face in her hands and reveling in the ebb of the water, which in its cold retreat and return offered a repeated shock to impress the beautiful reality of this moment. He fell against the steep grassy bank behind and wrapped his arms around her back, fingered the nape of her neck, let out a small sound when she pulled away briefly with his lower lip between her teeth and then went back in with caresses meant for his temples, his cheekbones, the hollow behind his ear. He ran his wet fingers through her hair and encountered resistance from the ribbon that held it up, so the bastard made a bold move and began to take the ties out.

Beatrice would have normally thought it an act to get his hand slapped, but she couldn't repudiate his fingers against her scalp.

Red curls fell in cataract down her shoulders, onto his chest in the shallows, and he tied the ribbon around his wrist and then took that same hand and brushed it against her jaw. She, face still half-buried in the crooks of him, murmured and pushed against his touch as it trailed down her shoulder and arm and side, and slid inward along the ledge of her hip. His hand lingered just momentarily below her belly button before slipping (his pulse quickened; she could feel it) into the space between her legs.

She closed her eyes.

The measure of Wirt's fingers, past her nervousness at their placement, was a revelation. In each small motion, each cautious come hither, were born jolts, jarring, titillating, fearsome, flaring in the way of fire as it's fed. His other hand was in the small of her back, playing there like on a woodwind, and it raised its own arrangement of goosebumps in her flesh. His chest didn't move; he was holding his breath. "Mmn," she moaned into his ear, curling her toes, and he exhaled relievedly for hearing it.

Without thinking, Beatrice captured his mouth in another kiss, rolling against his touches, feeling his growing interest against her stomach. She thought that she ought to express something about just how he was making her feel, but those same feelings had rendered her muddy-headed; weakly she dug her fingers into his chest, but could only unconsciously begin to line up their bodies, hitching her leg outside of his while she groaned against his lips. She felt a thrill in her stomach that was half his ministrations, half her own anticipation, and was about to lower herself toward him when he suddenly pulled his hand away and placed it on her breast, whether intentionally or not, to offer her pause.

"Mm. What's wrong?" she murmured, and raised her head. Water flowed down her skin from beneath his palm.

Wirt's eyes were wide and consumingly brown. His throat bobbed as he swallowed and his mouth worked dumbly for a second before croaking, "There – there's something I'd like to d-do."

She rasped, "What's that?" but in lieu of an answer he kissed her again, and put his hands around the smallest part of her waist and began to roll her over beneath him. Her heart stuttered when he moved her up on the bank, so that all of her but her feet was removed from the water. Her wet skin felt clammy in the brisk air, and she shivered and once again asked, "What –"

And then Wirt placed his shaking hands on her knees and dipped his face downward into the place where her legs met. For an instant she was shocked, chagrined, ready to press her thighs together and come to her senses about just what they'd gotten themselves into, but his expression was mesmerized; she couldn't bring herself to move when he paused and glanced up at her face, and then back down, and nervously, tentatively pressed his mouth to a place she could not see. It was like a chip of ice had speared her lower body, and her legs jerked involuntarily. She couldn't help, not exactly gasping, but certainly exhaling much smaller and faster than she could control.

"Hnn," she vocalized involuntarily, and Wirt raised his head again, looking worried.

He started to ask, "Are you –"

"I-I don't – yeah," she stuttered. She pasted back her hair with a damp hand. "What was – I can't…" There must have been something more telling in her expression than in her words, because he bent down and did it timidly again, eliciting another small nonverbal sound from her lips. His movements were inconsistent, frequently broken, prodding at some small, temperamental kernel hiding at the radius of her body. Her first thought was that it almost tickled, and she wanted to laugh, but given a few deep breaths and a second or two, decided that it really felt much as his fingers had, if distinctly softer, pliable, more accommodating to the shape of her. When his jaw shifted, it sent sudden thunder rumbling down her legs and up into her stomach, hot and rapid.

"Mmn," she moaned, and writhed slightly on the riverbank. He seemed to take it as a good sign, and gently, his eyes closed in such visible beatitude that she found she was reflecting it in spite of herself. His hands still shook, but less so. They slid lightly up and down the inside of her thighs, a sparkling touch to feed the static which was filling Beatrice's brain and body as he became, gradually, bolder. He increased his pace.

The build was slow, painfully slow, but continual; over and over his tongue moved against her, and each of those movements was a warm blush centered around her hips. Beatrice felt loose, limp, and yet still stretched painfully taut; she couldn't control her movements. She couldn't control her breath. Her stomach convulsed with each lingering circle and broad flat caress, and when he went faster, her shuddering turned nearly to vibration.

"Oh," she heard, fuzzily, and recognized only on an intellectual level that it was her own voice. "Ohh, don't ssstop."

She threw her head back with throat hitched, so that her gaze fell on the golden treetops above, budding lightly for spring's approach. Viscerally, she felt their momentum in her own body as they swayed. She was dizzy, halting, roiling with the sensation of being fast filled with so much thermal energy that it might start spilling from her eyes and fingertips and ears if she wasn't careful. He sucked gently, and her desperate breathing turned from shallow to shaky to very nearly tearful; she couldn't speak, she could only cry out. She felt. He was making her feel everything, without filter or pretense, and she wasn't truthfully sure how much longer her frame could contain it for. She toyed deliriously with the mad idea that she might simply die.

Then, as Wirt hit upon a steady, direct pressure and began to push his knobby hands up along her wet stomach, catching on her skin, pulling her apart, the life-ending enjoyment, too, surged by another step. It washed over her mind, flooded her mouth and throat. The air in her lungs turned liquid, and it was fine and pleasing that she might drown in it; encompassing pulsation grew blissfully full as her body flushed with cruel and wonderful heat.

She would have screamed, if she'd had a voice, but all she could do was grasp blindly, hands in his hair, rocking and jerking against his mouth while her heart did her the favor of going still so that there was no movement left in her that was not of, by, and for him. She was as warm and intangible as a sunspot, and the clouds cut her to beautiful pieces. Waves of heat, waves of water, his fingers between hers. She was deaf and blind.

The minute was all things and no words.

Still, slowly, slowly, like the last rock settling atop a landslide, the world before her open eyes began to fall back into place. Wirt eventually pulled away and stopped as she became aware again of the sounds of water and air, of the feel of her breath and the burden of her trembling body. Her heart was pounding, not in its usual place in her chest, but down where his mouth had been, a migration that she can neither explain nor deny. She felt numb. Water lapped up against her back as, slowly, Wirt pulled himself up toward her. He was visibly shaking again and looked frightened half to death, panting like he'd just run a mile. "Are you –" he began to ask, but there was no reason to let him finish when the answer was yes, of course, a thousand times yes, you fool, you monster, you beautiful wonderful mistake. She held herself up on one arm and used the other to take him around the head and pull his weakened lips to hers, intoxicated by the clean and musty smell of his breath, intent on his chest and his arms and the lean muscles of his back. His cock was hard against her thigh and she took it in hand as she pushed her body into his, dragging them again into the full flow of the river, settling him against a slanted stone and embracing him both above and below. Water flowed across her skin, cold as anything in its reintroduction, but Beatrice was a source of heat unto herself. She was untouchable.

Wirt put his hands against her jaw, her neck, her breasts, while she felt his member within her grasp, hot and alive and perfect. His ears were wet and she leaned in to take the water from them with her tongue. He wrapped his long arms around her back and moaned in response, fingers digging into her ribs. The world seemed misty as a dream, and still so very clear.

This time, he made no objections when she pulled her legs fully over his lap and slowly, gently, had him enter her.

It hurt Beatrice no more than would briefly spreading her hand too wide, and faded as quickly. Wirt tensed and then relaxed, unsteadying the cadence of his breathing, his touch playing across her scapulae and spine. She clung to his neck as he bucked slightly; it gave a thrill to rival those of fingers or lips, but deeper, darker, closer to her heart where it nestled still at the bottom of her belly. She squeaked a little, and felt far too good to even be embarrassed by it. Wirt raised his lap and she slipped forward so that her knees rested against the smooth stones of the riverbed, bumping and shifting under her legs as she dug in between them with her shins to find purchase.

For a second, Wirt caught her chin in his fingers and led her to look at him. His face was long, his nose too big, eyes a little swollen, ears red with chill. He looked baffled and overwhelmed and on edge and in love. He was just about everything she'd ever wanted.

She kissed him again, to ensure that the declaration on her tongue could not be spoken.

At first, they struggled to find their measure. They tried simultaneously to go down, and up, and when this proved ineffective had to pause and deliberately gauge a rhythm before falling into it, but when they did it was like remembering the beat of an old, old song. They kissed, they clutched, they whined – once, when Wirt accidentally kicked a small rock right out of the stream, they laughed – and they felt the current around their waists, swelling, searching, filling the cracks between them so that they knew where it was possible to push closer to one another still, while pleasure built on the crests of the waves that broke against their bodies. This was not the persistent, building pressure Beatrice had felt before, but shorter, choppier, little salvos in the center of her that grew sharper with each consecutive thrust. She dug her teeth into her bottom lip and held Wirt close to her breast, panting, washed by the warm, the cold, the feel of his breath, the edge of his pelvis and his sharp thin wrists. She could feel him, wanting her, wanting him; her body hummed with thoughts of every new shape that the combination of them could make, but she knew that they were all, eventually, circles.

Sweat was beading on Wirt's nose, despite the air's chill; she kissed it away, and it stung her chapped lips. He looked up at her and his brow creased, relaxed, creased again, his mouth open, his eyes fluttering and visibly pained by desire. It was the most wonderful thing she'd ever seen, and Beatrice let that thought carry her further up into the branches of ardor. They were rocking, pushing, rolling with one another; she was flint and he steel, and their friction deep in her belly bore sparks that were swiftly catching. She arched her back away from him in an expression of abandon and he ran his hands down her exposed sides.

He croaked, between tremor and breath: "You are so beautiful."

And in perfect time, he pushed himself inside of her that extra depth so that the darkness behind her eyelids went white, and she couldn't help crying out in a voice carried by the rush of the river. The one thrust by itself did not do it, but it was followed by another, and another further, impacts at her deepest point aided by his hands bearing down on her hips.

One by one they built up to where the atmosphere was thin and breathless, before swaying dangerously in the wind and abruptly, terrifyingly, taking wing.

She was bliss given body. She scrabbled at his chest but found no purchase, so she made some with her nails and gasped her inarticulation. Her spine was a lightning rod to connect the sky and the earth. He was choking her name, wrapping himself around her ribcage, moving madly those last few times and then crying out into her skin. Beatrice could feel him come into her, or imagined she could; she had gone transparent, aware of every swish and spasm of both their bodies.

The barrier of their skin was no match for the river. They were living water, liquid inside and out.

But once again, inevitably, the real world unrolled back in over their enduring moment, and Beatrice thumped down inside her own head in enough time to control her collapse onto his chest, where he held her steady. Their heartbeats were in opposition to one another, pressing inward simultaneously, as their hips had been only seconds before. She stared blankly into the dark hollow of his collarbone for what might be a very long time, empty-headed, sure of nothing but the weight of his arms on her back, and just how much of her voice was leaching into her breath.

Slowly, she sat up, as unbalanced as if her head were light as paper and her body made of lead. Wirt released her from his embrace as she settled back in his lap. She tucked her hair behind her ear only for it to fall straight back out, and they stared at one another wordlessly. When a stiff breeze skipped across the water, she wrapped her arms around her shoulders and shivered aloud.

Wirt laughed at that a little, and took her hand and stuttered, "Are y-you cold too?"

"Mm-hmm," she stressed, nodding wildly, and both of their faces slowly cracked with grins and then opened into full laughter, jittery from chill. She slid away from him, but he snatched her back and put his lips in the tickly place at the base of her neck; when she flailed and tried to get away he held her tighter, until she slipped from his grasp like a fish and went splashing toward the bank with a small, delighted scream. He chased her up the embankment and caught her around the waist so that they both fell to the ground, and the prairie clover laid low to make them a bed of purple and green. For a minute longer they wrestled, but numbness and exhaustion kept their perseverance to a minimum, and eventually they grew still and were left just lying in a patch of morning sunlight, staring up at the thin riparian canopy. Bits of grass and soil stuck to Beatrice's back and thighs, and the air was fresh and full of the smell of a world delighting in its rebirth. Unconsciously, her hand drifted to her stomach and came to rest just below her navel. Her insides felt stolid, carved from driftwood and warped by flow; there was a slick texture between her legs. For the first time, something resembling anxiety bit at her forehead.

"Why do people do this to themselves?" she murmured.

The enquiry could have meant a lot of things, but Wirt knew which question she was asking. He rolled over onto his side and put his hand on top of hers. His smile faded. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah." She turned inward and curled on her side in the grass, putting her nose just inches from his chest. "I… am." The copula came slowly, so that she had time to be certain it was wholly true. He rested his chin on the crown of her head and pulled her in closer. She closed her eyes, and asked him, as she had the night before, "What are we doing?"

He swallowed against her hair, and his fingers curled into her back. He didn't respond, and said nothing for so long that she'd started to grow drowsy in the shadows between their bodies before he finally answered, "Acting like we're alive."

Thin clouds veiled the sky as lightly as gauze while a whippoorwill on the ground sang admiration for the long bright day. The air wanted to nip, but the two of them were held safely in the sun's arms. "That's a good reason," Beatrice murmured. Her lashes grazed his skin when she blinked; his eyes were on the grass that bowed to the wind, but focused on something miles away from them. "Are you okay?"

Wirt turned down to look at her. For a brief second the sadness in his face struck like a blade, but when his eyes lit on her the expression turned soft so quickly that she thought she might have imagined it. With half his mouth, he smiled, and said, "I will never be so good again," and it never once occurred to her to question his words at a moment when existence seemed so magnificently self-evident.

They kissed once more, and she rolled halfway on top of him, but it wasn't with purpose; they pulled apart and she laid her head atop his chest so that they made a mound above the earth, hands together, legs long and kissed by young springtime sun. She listened to his heartbeat and the sounds his bones made in the places where they joined, and wondered if he was doing the same.

It took a long time for them to rise again to dress and return to the westward path, but all was well.

The turning world had stopped to wait for them while they were in the water.

Here, have a song to make you sad! I certainly did:

Murder By Death - Lost River

I'd give you a link, but a certain website won't let me.