Her face was the one he had hated for annuals. One of the rebel leaders when he was younger, but not innocent, had gotten a hold of a picture of the Sorceress. Passed it around his men, so that they would know the face of the woman who had destroyed their lives. The one who had ordered their families to be destroyed like precious pieces of tissue paper torn into confetti, their farms burned to deprive them of both food and income. The Sorceress who scorched the very earth of the O.Z., who had raided village after village, all for a pretty green trinket.

Her voice was one every man and woman in his troupe dreaded. To hear her voice meant that you were in the clutches of her Longcoats, on the way to her prison cells or to her torture chamber. If you were lucky she merely used a Viewer to shove her will through your skull and into your thoughts, tainting every memory and image you held dear with the clinging threads of her dark magic. He had heard stories, whispers describing what it sounded like, the screeching high pitched call of a murder of crows, the silky venom of a snake coiled in your blankets, the acidic shot of agony you felt when burning lead met flesh.

The men who protected her with their lives, for power and for pain, were monsters in human form. Slavering beasts pulling at the chains she held around their necks, just clawing at the earth at their feet and already imagining what their prey's terror would taste like. Once loosed they could wrack utter devastation on those they came across, tearing their victims apart with ease and worse, pure enjoyment. She had not created them as sadists, instead she had merely offered the worst of the worst the O.Z. had to offer, offered them the chance to play their talents.

But that was all before the day of the Eclipse, the day his world was turned on its head. The day the Sorceress was revealed to be a Witch who crouched inside the body of the eldest Gale Princess, the day the first victim was allowed free to step into the warm sunlight, out of the oppressive darkness she had lived in longer than anyone else. He had met her face to face late that evening, had needed to see for himself that what he had seen from the bottom of the tower was true, that the Witch was gone. An annual past tonight.

Her face was the one he loved. Her dancing dark eyes, they projected every thought and emotion that went through her with a clarity that made him feel as if he was a Viewer when he watched her. Eyes that seemed to glow when he came near, swirling dark chocolate when she was laughing, dull coffee colored when she was upset, the color of rich stained new mahogany when excitement. Her lips that pursed when he said something he regretted almost immediately, curled when he wormed his way back into her good graces by playing the dramatic fool and apologizing for a laundry list of sins that neither believed he had committed, as he lounged across her lap like a dying man. And gods whenever the pink of blush graced the tops of her cheeks, he was ready to forgive her anything, which was actually a plus as she tended to get embarrassed whenever she had overreacted over something and later tracked him down to apologize.

Her voice was one of the sounds he could not live without. The sound comforted him, pleased him, excited him, no matter the circumstance, hearing her speak, sigh, exclaim, made his day complete. The melodic way she sang slightly off tune, usually some bawdy song he had laughingly taught her before. The rich huskiness that dripped from it like the juices from a perfectly cooked steak, when she whispered naughty things in his ear, trying and succeeding at drawing heat to his cheeks. Even the tremulous way she said his name when he woke her from one of her lingering nightmares, which while now rare, still came for her in the night, as if she needed to reassure herself that he was still lying beside her, and he would wrap his arms tighter around her and promised to never leave her.

The men who protected her with their lives, for loyalty and for the desire to shield her from all ills of the world, were intimidating walls of muscle and sinew. Men of honor who had come to see her as family, a sister, niece or daughter. They snapped and growled at any who dared threaten her safety, but melted like ice in the summer heat the minute she smiled at them. On mornings after one of her nightmares, they lingered around her, telling her stories of their childhoods. Each trying to make her laugh, to chase away any lingering fear from whatever images from her past that haunted her still into the daylight.

He still remembered the thrill of terror he had felt the first time he had been caught leaving her chambers in the early dawn hours, how they had stared him down like a pack of guard dogs just waiting for the command to attack. His rank in the Resistance they had all fought in came to naught when they felt that their princess was in danger. Even from possible heartache.

Soft lips pressing against his cheek drew him from his thoughts, reminded him of the public celebration scheduled for the night in honor of an annual since the Eclipse, the kiss just below his ear reminding him of the private celebration they had planned for the hours after the guests had all drunk too much in the ballroom.

"Where were you just now?" She murmured into his ear, nipping at the lobe of it with her teeth.

He shook his head, "Nowhere important. Here with you now."

A flash of small white teeth as she beamed up at him, the mischievous glint in her eye his only clue to what she was going to do before she did it. Before she goosed him and took off running in the opposite direction, her dark hair floating behind her like a banner, laughter ringing through the garden.

"Az!" He laughed, taking off after her. "Get back here!"

Throwing him a quick grinning look over her shoulder, she did not slow down a bit. "You'll have to catch me first Jebby."

Just wait until he caught up with her…