I don't want to overnight at Redcliffe, but it's clear the others are exhausted. A week by horseback from Crestwood, every bone sore and jolted. At least it's stopped raining. There is that. Yet the muck from our misadventure is stubborn, crusting in the seams of our clothing and leaving a powdery residue in our supplies. Not to mention the fact that Sera hasn't once quit bitching once about how she's had to replace three of her bowstrings.
My gaze is drawn to the snow-laden peaks, to the fine mist trailing down the ravines, and my heart softly burns because he is there, somewhere in that mountain fastness. Not much further now.
He might be painting, daubing bright pigments to grow the ever-expanding mural. Or he might be poring over texts retrieved from our library, brow furrowed in concentration, lips moving silently as his gaze follows a long finger.
Long fingers that have caressed my face, sought the warm well of my most intimate spaces. Fingers that have spread me, played me like a delicate instrument to bring forth music to make the gods tremble. Despite my weariness, I ache for him, long for the way he fills me, traps me in his embrace and makes me feel that I'm the one who's at his mercy. There is no Inquisitor, no wandering apostate when I'm with him, only the mingling of our breaths, our sweat, our passion. We are at a point of unity for those brief moments of fire.
Or the quiet hours, when he'll tell me of the wonders that he's discovered in the Fade, and on his journeys, while those same long-fingered hands tease snarls out of my hair. The ghosts of his words send tremors down my spine, even here, at least two days' ride from Skyhold.
If I'm subdued downstairs in the common room this night, Sera says not a word. She's busy trying to cheat Varric at a hand of Wicked Grace while Cassandra offers her sage advice to the dwarf on how he should end his next serial. Occasionally they'll cast a glance at me, where I've been revisiting the same lines in a battered copy of Genitivi's little-known sonnets. Trifles, really, but there's something soothing about reading the verses over and over again until different meanings are revealed. A form of meditation, if it were.
I imagine my lover and I ensconced in a bedroom, the curtains drawn and sunlight sending its fingers through the nowhere dust. His sleepy breath, the slow rise and fall of his chest. Nipples hard pebbles beneath my fingertip when I tease them. Then we turn, spooned together, and an arm curls possessively around my waist so a hand can cup a breast. And I feel the hardness of him, his cock pressed against the small of my back and a small trail of moisture cooling when we shift to get more comfortable.
The nights at Skyhold where I've taken such closeness for granted; then when we're travelling, alone in my tent on a hard pallet I've ached and shivered for him. Lying on my back staring into the darkness wondering what he's doing while the rest of the camp settles.
Later, I'm trying (and failing) to sleep. There's a couple in the room next door to mine whose soft murmurings aren't muffled by the walls. Their unrestrained passions filter in through the cracks, accompanied by the thudding of the bed. I'm not sure whether they're the doughty dwarven pair we noted in the common room, or the tow-headed Fereldan couple who came in late, brushing raindrops from their cloaks.
Whoever it is, their sighs and moans remind me all too much of what I'm missing, how I feel with him invading me, filling me, pressing me down on a table so I'm exposed to him, bare. That slap of flesh against flesh, hot breath against skin, the scrape of teeth on my nape. Fingers digging into me, tearing at me with the desperation of a hungry man who cannot get enough. The frantic push and pull, the inevitable rise of our powers mingling – two rivers twining until they combust into a conflagration of fire.
Somehow I manage to sleep, after my fingers have provided paltry relief, and in my dreams I travel through mirror after mirror, hunting him, until I awake the following morning exhausted, with Cassandra thumping on the door that it's time for us to get going.
The rain that so bedevilled us in Crestwood seems to have sought us here on the flanks of the Frostbacks, sending damp fingers through every seam of my oilskin as we ride. Long guard hairs from my hart's coat adhere to my leather leggings, and the grassy scent of the beast overrides the resin of the pines as we rise along the trail. Rivulets turn into small torrents, dragging stones and sticks with them. We cannot hear each other speak over the ever-present drenching, and our last night on the trail before Skyhold is a miserable affair huddled around a smoking fire under a lean-to.
"I should really get this turned into a proper shelter," I mutter into my coffee.
"You say that every time we have to overnight here," Varric says.
"We've been busy."
"No shit. We could have slept over in Haven."
My dreams this night chase themselves nose over tail – frantic, fleeting things that refuse to be trapped and turned over in the garish light of day. I mark the last day in the signs that we pass. Here a crooked pine struck by lightning. There the rock Varric says looks like a troll's cock. Not that any of us claim to have seen one.
Yet when Skyhold grows out of the heights, my heart thrills. The pennants snapping in the chill wind, the particular quality of the air that makes my blood sing. My hart, sensing a warm stable, bellows and needs little urging to close the intervening distance to our mountain fastness.