Just a sweet interlude, combining a few ideas that have been percolating for a while. Rated for oblique references to intimacy.
The first night in their finally-refurbished apartments in Caer Dathyl, Eilonwy rose, uncomfortably warm after certain exertions, to open a window to the cool air.
Taran was lying prone when she returned to bed, flopped on his stomach like something washed up on a beach. She took in his total relaxation with a faintly smug sense of accomplishment, satisfied that once again, the burdens he shouldered during the day could be regularly laid aside in the evenings, now that they had their own chambers. Few pleasures had the power to release him from those burdens anymore, save those they enjoyed alone together, and it had been some weeks since they'd had the luxury of privacy. She smiled dreamily, her own cares melted away for the moment, and settled down next to him, draping herself over his back.
He breathed a deep and contented sigh, and she watched his shoulders rise and fall, admiring the smooth interplay of muscle and bone. Her mind dove back to a memory: the time, passing the smithy, she had paused to watch him work, and been frozen to the spot. The sight of his lean back laid bare, of the graceful power of his movement, had spawned an immediate response in her: the first moment in which she had been fully cognizant of her own attraction to him. She had wanted to touch him, to let her hands travel every contour of that bare skin until she knew him by heart. It had frightened her as much as it had intrigued her.
It had been a forbidden thing, then, scandalous in its self-admission, and she had buried it deep. Now here he was, his broad back warm beneath her; she was intimately acquainted with every last bit of him, and neither delight nor desire had abated in the slightest. She reached out to trace the firelight gilding the line of his neck, dripping over his shoulder, flowing up and over the plane of his shoulder blade. And there she paused, her forefinger pressed to a pale white line crossing the golden expanse of skin, her forehead furrowed between her eyebrows.
"You've a scar here," she murmured. "Straight, like a blade cut. Wherever did that come from?"
Taran grunted drowsily. "The day I met Gwydion for the first time." His voice was muffled into the mattress. "One of the Horned King's warriors saw me hiding in the bushes and made a swipe at me. Not much of a wound - he was hampered by the underbrush, but it scared me half to death. It was running away from him that led me to Gwydion."
"That was just before we met, then," she mused. "That's right. I remember now - your shirt was all torn and bloody there." She leaned over thoughtfully, and kissed the white line.
He chuckled. "What was that for?"
Her hair tumbled, a silken cloak across his shoulders, as she bent over him, nuzzling the back of his neck. "Because by traveling with Gwydion, you ended up in Achren's dungeon for me to find, and for that, my love," she whispered, "I would grant that long-ago warrior full pardon, though he meant you only ill."
"That's a dangerous line of reasoning for a queen," he chided her, through a note of breathless amusement. "You could argue away a lot of needful convictions by pleading the good things that came out of…"
"Shhh." She nipped the edge of his ear, and he broke off into a laugh, reaching up to grab her hand and pressing it to his lips. Laying her head into the hollow between his shoulder blades, she waiting, smiling, and when he released her hand it skated up to the pale weal that crossed his forearm, interrupting the pattern of its fine hair. "I remember this one, too," she said, running her thumb along it,"and that I bandaged it for you."
"Yes," he said, "and do you remember saying I clearly didn't know a thing about fighting if I let myself get cut up so badly?"
"Ugh." She winced, crumpling her face into his hair. "Oh, Taran. How did you put up with my being so horrid to you?"
He moved as though he would turn; she lifted herself until he flipped onto his back and pulled her into his arms, and she settled against his chest with a sigh.
"You weren't wrong, for one thing," he said, "and I don't recall exactly what I said, but I don't think I was gracious about it." His hand cupped her shoulder blade and slid down, gliding into the valley at her waist and resting upon the rounded hill below it. "But when you went to tear up your skirts for that bandage, I got quite a lovely peek at your legs, and that may have had some softening effect, too."
He squeezed her mischievously, and she pushed herself up with a gasp of laughter to look him in the face. "Taran of Caer Dallben! You…you didn't really…" she spluttered, simultaneously scandalized and amused with herself for being so. "When we were so young? You weren't thinking of…"
"Oh, no." He grinned at her sheepishly. "There was no thought involved. Just…very pleasant and confusing shock. I had never seen anything like you, you know." He laid his head back, closing his eyes as if savoring the memory. "Of course by the time I even knew what I'd seen, you were on to your next intention. You never gave me time to think about much, back then." His eyes opened again, traveling with open appreciation down her torso, and he threaded a long, shimmering lock of hair through his fingers. "I was ashamed of myself, and tried to forget about it. But the truth is I loved you from that day, I think. It just took me a long time to know it."
A ripple of warmth chased the drowsiness from her limbs; she bent over and seared a kiss to his pliant mouth. He returned it languidly, without urgency, so she sat up again, and traced a gash that crossed his cheek, a fresh scar, less than a year old. "This one you had when I found you again after flooding the Huntsmen out of the valley," she observed. "But it doesn't look like a sword wound - thank goodness; that would have been far too close to your eye for comfort."
His grin turned a little rueful. "No. That was when I got too close, like a fool, to where one of Doli's band of dwarves was chopping trees, and a chunk flew off and hit me in the face. Might as well have been a dagger, but I barely felt it. You'd just saved us, lighting everything up, and all I could think was that you were alive. Someone could have taken a limb off me just then without my noticing."
"I hope not, quite." She watched the silken curls of her hair slide over his chest. The gleaming strands hid and then revealed another rough and pitted place across his left ribs; something she had noticed their first night but always been too distracted to inquire about. "What is this one? I don't remember your ever being wounded here. It doesn't look like a cut."
Taran hesitated, and she felt him stiffen in discomfort. "It isn't," he admitted, after several moments of silence. "That's from the time I fell, trying to help Craddoc. I bashed myself on a lot of sharp rocks. I think I may have broken some ribs."
"Oh." He had told her of this occurrence, of course, in a halting and reluctant narrative: of his failure to save the old shepherd, of his own doubts and self-condemnation, of how her gift had saved him. "You said you were ill after that," she said, "not wounded."
"I was both." His eyes were far away, dark and troubled. "I was wounded and ill…and…heartsick, all at once. The Fair Folk got me out of the crevasse and into the hut, I think, but after that…I don't know. I suppose it was Gurgi who did what he could to care for me, until Fflewddur got there."
She sighed at these lost names, her eyes prickling tightly. "How many days was it?"
He shook his head and shrugged. "I don't know. I was out of my head for most of it…what little I remember is so fuzzy I might as well have been dreaming. Some of it is dreams - at least one, I know, because you were in it."
A wry smile touched her mouth. "I dreamt of you often," she confessed. "Though not so often as I liked, and they were usually more frustrating than anything. Always melting away, like snow in the sunshine, just as they were getting good."
He grinned at this, and at the suggestive move that accompanied it, fanning his fingers tightly across her thighs. "I know what you mean. But this one was different."
"How so?"
"More real, somehow. Usually if I dreamed of you we were home in Caer Dallben, or some…some dream-place, you know, that your mind just…conjures up, and you somehow accept it, though once you're awake you can see that it was all nonsense." His dark brows drew together over shadowed eyes. "But this time it was as though you'd walked in the door of Craddoc's hut, everything exactly how it actually was, and we were both as confused as if you'd just…appeared there out of nowhere."
A sensation like a trickle of ice water down her spine made her shiver, as a memory she would have called hazy suddenly broke the surface of her mind. "I…I actually…" She chewed her lip. "Never mind. Go on."
"You could see I wasn't well, and you were frightened, and kept asking where we were and what had happened. And I was too confused and ill to answer you," he said, "but when you came close enough to touch I reached for you and…and you didn't disappear. That was different." He sighed, and his troubled gaze calmed; he took her hands and pressed his palms to hers, entwining their fingers into the curtain of her hair. "You brought me a drink and laid cold cloths on my face, and lay down beside me and talked until we were both comforted. I think…I think you sang something…"
He stopped abruptly, noticing her trembling. "What is it?"
The icy trickle had become a wash of cold certainty, a flame of understanding; she gasped out, "Taran. That wasn't…that was…when was this? Was it winter? Year before last?"
It had been winter, when she'd dreamed of him, a dream wherein she'd sleep-walked into an unfamiliar, dilapidated hovel and found him sprawled half-dressed on a mat on the floor. He was alone and tossing with fever, his face overgrown with a shocking and disorienting beard, his eyes deliriously bright, his skin unnaturally flushed over a deathly pallor, his few babbled words meaningless. She had hunted frantically through the room, found his saddlebags and their packets of herbs, dosed him with tisane and bound his burning head with compresses frigid from snowmelt.
When he would not settle, she had stretched herself beside him and wrapped him in her arms and stroked his hair, heedless of modesty or propriety or anything but a desperation to comfort him somehow. She had spoken, in a low, hypnotic murmur, of their shared life and their quiet happiness at Caer Dallben, of her favorite memories of him - even, in the reckless urgency of potential loss, of her longing for him, her hopes for their future. And she had sung to him, a lullaby she'd learned on Mona - a song of Llyr, they had told her, the words a fulfillment of a tune she had known, without memory of its origins, all her life.
He had quieted, gradually, sinking into the shallow mat, ceasing to toss, and finally, after endless hours, soaked into a drenching sweat as his fever broke. At last he had sighed and turned his face toward her and seemed to truly see her for the first time, and she had wept with relief when he spoke her name, gripping his hand and folding her lips into his work-rough palm. He had cupped her cheek and pulled her weakly toward him…and she had awakened, alone in her tower chamber in Dinas Rhydnant, mind churning in a battle between dread and relief.
She had told herself it was a dream, again and again, but the unease of it had plagued her for many days, fading only after being drowned by activity and her own stubborn will to push it away, to forget the terror of beholding him in such a state.
Taran looked at her now in puzzlement. "It…yes, it was winter. Why?"
She stared at him without answering, her heart pounding wildly, reeling with the dizzy realization of the impossible reality. But…nothing is impossible, she thought, and…and my ancestors were enchantresses, every one.
The ring on her left hand shimmered in the firelight.
She bit back a sob, and shifted herself over to lie next to him, curling her arm behind his head. He settled into her embrace, mystified but uncomplaining. Taking a shaky breath, she sang, low, into the silence.
He froze at the first words, his hand gripping her arm, and she felt the tight heave of his ribs as he took a breath, a long silence, and then another, faster; his entire figure seemed to strain to listen, although she was right there, her voice inches from his ear. "How?" he whispered, after her voice wavered through the last refrain. "How did you…?"
"I don't know," she said. "I dreamed it. All this time I thought I dreamed it."
"No," he said incredulously. "It was no dream. You were there. You were there." Spoken aloud, it sounded no less like madness.
"I was…" She choked, and pressed her closed lips against his head, hard, as though to dam back a flood, quivering between amazement and an incongruous, simmering anger. Why had she not known? No one had ever told her that was possible. Could she have visited him again - at least until she was sure he was fully healed and whole? or gone to him, some night when they could have actually enjoyed one another's company in health and happiness? Perhaps every night of that interminable two years? Or…was it some chance, a mystery unanticipated by any of her mentors? What magical confluence of stars and stone and soul had worked to merge their places in space and time for this one single instance? And now, by her own choice, likely never could again…a thread broken, frayed at the end.
"I don't…I don't think we should talk about it too much," she muttered finally. "I always thought Fflewddur was a little silly, being so squirrelly about magic. But this…Taran, I don't think even Dallben could have explained it. I've never heard of any such thing happening, and it frightens me to question it." Her voice broke. "I was glad to believe it was just a nightmare. I didn't know you were that poorly. When you first told me, you made it sound like you just needed a few days' rest."
His arms tightened about her. "I suppose I wasn't completely honest, but I didn't want to upset you. It wasn't as if you could do anything about it, so long after the fact."
"Except apparently I already had," she gasped out, a little hysterical.
He burst into a surprised laugh, a sound that pushed through her misted fear like the fresh breeze from the open casement, tearing it into rags. "Only just think, you may very well have saved my life that night." He pulled back to look at her, his eyes full of wonder. "How many times does that make now?"
She sniffed, blinking back tears. "I've lost count."
"It shouldn't be difficult," he pointed out, "as I seem to have a scar for every one of them."
She sighed, and laid her palm over the rough patch at his ribcage. "They're like landmarks on a map…marks of your worth, not mine." They were, really, she thought; every one a reminder of some good thing he'd done, even in his ignorant youth; each blemish a monument to his courage, to his compassion. She could not regret them, for that reason alone, and if she had to keep saving his life again and again, well…she was good at that, by now. "But you're an injury-prone creature, Taran King of Prydain, and troublesome. I suppose it's useless to forbid you to acquire any more of them."
"I'll do my best." He traced her collarbone with a rueful smile. "Funny that you don't have any, after all you've been through."
"I have them," she returned, wincing a little; her greatest wounds had never been of body but of spirit, and those had been healing since she had met him, before she'd even known it. "You just…can't see them."
His eyes flickered down toward her toes and then back up, glinting. "Do I need to search more diligently?"
She laughed in spite of herself. "That is not what I meant. But," she added, breathlessly, as he bent his head, fastening his lips to her throat, "by all means, be as thorough as you like."