Mark of the Winter King

by DNA

Foreshadowing in the Redemption series--a winter's solstice brings time for introspection: no gift comes without a price.

2. The Veiled One of Winter

The Mark of the Winter King: Part 3

Winter Solstice-183 CE

Fort of Pinnata Castra, Alba (Scotland-Inchtuthill, Tayside)

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Some notes as usual—first off, this part is DEFINITELY FOR THE MATURE AUDIENCES AMONG YOU!!!  AS IN…or you get "swiggy-uncomfortable" with sex scenes, then you should turn back now.  There's nothing excessively grotesque in the descriptors, but yeah—the protagonists in this scene are not just holding hands…let's put it that way.

The verses toward the end of this piece came from Susan Cooper's, The Dark is Rising (my indulgence, and tribute, to a beloved childhood series—this particular book, having been set, appropriately, during the twelve days of Christmas).  It just sort of tied in with the whole moon-wintry-snow-lonely highland-lovey-theme.

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Somehow his voice, deep-tones resonant with a robust masculinity, still caused an unanticipated thrill to shiver through her nerves. Her pulse simply started hammering with one word, forcing her to draw short on breath, a wave of pleasurable warmth—tangible—passing through her veins, leaving her feeling flushed, a bit slack-legged.   When he said her name like that—especially when he said her name like that--"Nem-yn"—she was completely defenseless.  His accent clipped the syllables, silencing the emphasis leading into the -hyn, rumbling with an edge of military gruffness, refined by a shift in tenor conveying a piercing vulnerability and a stirring tenderness.  Her name, the way he had spoken it just then, dreamlike and full of…something—concern, longing—made the utterance seem buoyed in the soft glow of moonlight, encapsulated by this midnight kingdom, an opalescent radiance of snow, icy-shimmering blackness on bare tree-branches, and millions of diamond-specked stars overhead.

She hadn't stepped out from the other side of the granite pillar, thinking how silly it was to be so entranced by one word, the way he had spoken it.  She needed to lean for a moment more, let the icy, gritty feel of the stone beneath her cheek lend her some of its stony impartiality, cool the warmth tingling along her limbs in spite of the frosty chill of winter wind gusting through the courtyard.  She wore only a single, scratchy woolen blanket as a mantle—she ought to have been freezing out of her skin by now. 

She felt, rather, like she'd been working face-in and stooped over the bread ovens all day.

Ridiculous the man should be able to do this to her.  If he ever knew how much she…well, he must have known—it was why, over the year and a half of their contact, they had either been at each other's throats, or standing strong, by each other's sides, throughout Britannia's perilous hours. 

She heard the scuff of his step from the other side of the granite column, coming round about the shadowed interior of the night-bathed corridor, rather than the opposite side, hedging the snowy ground of the unsheltered courtyard.  Her breath left a vaporous wisp in the air, trying to stifle a sudden, whimsical giggle. She ducked, circling further back, retreating from his cautious approach for a moment more. 

The action really was not worthy the dignity of someone—a grown woman—her age, but she indulged it anyway, clutching the blanket about herself tightly to stoop, cupping her hand into an errant snowdrift piled along the pillar's base.  He paused, not quite coming into her full perspective, the outline of his silhouette just illumined by the pellucid glow of moonlight on snowy earth.  There was a watchfulness, a caution about his posture that made her think, unwarranted, of a wild animal testing the air for danger—not exactly a lover searching out his wayward partner on a winter's night.  More like a lover wanting to protect his wayward partner from…what?  Other men?

She let him stand there, alert to something she wasn't aware of out in the courtyard, stepping carefully the rest of the way in back of the pillar, shadow completely absorbed her form, moonbeam and the icy dazzle of the garden blocked from her view temporarily.  Snowball in hand, it chilled her palms and fingers, focusing on the broad shouldered outline of his body, struck anew by the raw power of the man--the wary grace he managed to exude, even when not in full, embattled action. His back and arms were muscled enough, even without armor, to block the convoluted shapes of twisting, snow-cloaked tree limbs, and thickened, blackened trunks, from across the garden's scintillating perimeter. 

The edges of her blanket swished, flapped in the soft, glacial breeze sweeping from the roof-top, whistling down the pillared corridor, disturbing the night's silence with a snapping of cloth.  It was enough to alert him to her approach from in back of the granite column. 

When he turned, she couldn't make out his expression in the darkness, the moon's backlight obscuring any details of his visage.  His tone said enough.

"Nemhyn?  Are you--

SPLAT!  His words promptly cut off by the wet, slushy sound of a snowy-projectile hitting him square in the face and mouth.

Springing back around the colonnade, he sputtered, "What in the name of Jupiter's balls, woman!"

The giggle erupted from her throat, pursuing him closely, emerging full into the moonlight. Tugging the blanket about her, she simply kept on laughing, her gaiety light, welling-up into the night's chilly silence, watching him continue to spit bits of melted snow out of his mouth, and wipe with the sleeve of his tunic over his beard, drying his forehead and cheeks.  His scowl, rather than making him forbidding, took the lines responsibility and grimness had etched about his eyes, and lent him the appearance of a boy who had just been flattened by a blow in his first bout of sword training.  Some shock, not a little irritation, and a smirk he was trying valiantly to suppress, attempting to hold to the dark frown painted across the bold definition of his brow and cheeks.

She tried to have sympathy for his dignity. A little, anyway, by keeping her voice from shaking with repressed mirth.  "You know, it's not Jupiter's balls you should be worried about.  The gods can look after themselves, usually--especially, I would figure, certain prized areas of their bodies.  You, however," she admonished with a glance up and down, frowning at his clothing choice, "might give a little more thought as to what you decide to wear when you wander around deserted hallways of your praetorium on a winter's night."

Gods preserve the man, didn't he feel the least bite of cold in the middle of winter.  An unbleached, untucked linen tunic, loose at the neck, and felt trousers, the sort men wore--from off-duty soldiers to common farm folk--shielded his legs from the full sharpness of the glacial air. And that was all.

The articles of his clothes, like the edges of her blanket, were tugged in the moaning draft breezing across the courtyard and over tree-limbs, whining through the hall, molding his garments to a burly physique, corded muscle formed from long years of wielding sword and shield.  He glanced down at himself with a belittling grunt, as though the cold was hardly worthy of acknowledgment--not existing if he chose not to recognize it. 

Suddenly, looking up, he caught her eyes, fixing her with a simmering, penetrating focus. "If we're comparing propriety, Nemhyn," his gaze scorching over her blanket-obscured body, "your attempt at modesty leaves a lot to be desired."

She knew he saw her hug the folds of the old woolen mantle tighter about herself.  An instinctive motion, like the way she drew herself straighter, looking him levelly in the eye. Archly, she replied, "You just wish you had access to what was underneath." 

He didn't even raise an eyebrow at her tone, merely sniffed into the silence of the winter chill, expelling a curdling vapor of breath, a corner of his mouth twisting up, wry appreciation of her words. 

It was troubling, the oblique hunger in his eyes, the elusive magnetism her body could respond to even if she tried to ignore, for moments longer, the increasingly loud pounding of her heart, blood flushing her cheeks.  The pulling, drawing sensations melting from somewhere deep inside of her lower belly, rolling down her legs and up, through her arms, down to her finger tips--a warm, delicious wave of desire. 

She hadn't realized how ragged her breathing sounded until she saw his nostrils flare, the sound of a long, in-drawn breath, his own attempt at establishing control over insistent, physical sensations.  Even in the icy setting of a winter's courtyard, enshrouded in the blackened shadows of night, moonlight--dazzling over snow, luminescent and bright--could still capture a woman or man, together, in a timeless moment of alluring enthrallment. 

She sought refuge in voice, resistant till the last, against what her body was yearning toward, and her mind wasn't quite ready to give-over just yet.  "I, at least, had the reason of needing to relieve myself in order to explain my…poor choice of winter-wear," the manner of her words huskier than usual.  She cleared her throat, breathing deeply of the chill wind rising in a sudden gust, disturbing ice-coated trees that creaked, weaker limbs, somewhere out in the snow-blanketed garden, snapping with a shattering, frigid sound of glass on rock.  "What was your excuse," meeting him eye-to-eye, unblinking.

The banked intensity of his expression flared, momentary, the gray orbs of his eyes, in the moonlit world they inhabited, darkened to shaded coal-jet, piercing her through with an unseen fire.  A mood, tension, rising as her breath caught, all once broken by his sudden, warm chuckle.  "My personal bed-hearth left, and it started getting cold.  The tunic and breeches were the easiest things to feel out in the dark when I went to go seek her out."

"So you came out here?" she asked, punctuating her words with a sniff. "Where it's even colder?" Derision, culminating, promptly, into a wellspring of her own laughter.

Nemhyn quieted, seeing the grin that lightened his normally serious countenance fade, replaced by an inscrutable, troubled expression, as he glanced away from her, then back over her blanket-clad form. 

The deep timbre of his voice rumbled into the winter's silence.  "Cailleach Beare," his clipped articulation roughening the softened gutturals of native British speech.

The words, along with the melancholy look he threw her, sent an involuntary shiver--this time not of mounting ardor--down her spine, raising the hairs on her forearms.

"What," she whispered, dread, doubt and cold running deeper through her heart than the already considerable frostiness of the winter night.  The blanket, as old as it might have been, was thick, a tight weave of wool--seemed sufficient until this sudden, inner chill, worked its way up her spine.

Despite the raw, muscled power of his physique, he leaned back against the stone-pillar, exuding the restrained poise of a wild predator, clasping his hands behind himself, propping one heel against the rectangular, concrete foundation of the colonnade.  A wild predator, she thought unbidden, or a man who has spent a lifetime training with sword, lance, shield and horse.   

His gaze, searching and steady as it could sometimes be, held a sudden, sweet tenderness--a vivid expressiveness she often found difficult to hold for the bare vulnerability of his soul it communicated.  "Cailleach Beare," he repeated softly, a whisper of the silent resonance in solstice peace. 

She said nothing as a faint smile, one of memory that didn't touch his eyes this time, played across the bearded lines of a strong jaw.  "The Veiled One of Winter," he explained with that same soft gentility, remembrance lending a low quality to his utterance. 

She knew very well what the phrase meant.  That was why it had caught her so off-guard, a disquieting unease freezing at her inner-sense. 

"I think most northern people's have a similar tale they all relate," he went on, his eyes traveling over her face and form, a probing, impenetrable affection.  "The Germani simply called her the Hyrrokkin's Wicca--the witch--

"--of the Winter Realms," she chimed in, muted and low.  "Yes, I know."

His throat worked, a furrow deepening across his forehead as he combed a hand through mussed, wiry waves that simply refused to lay tame over his ears and neck.  There was a reason why he'd kept it shorn in the years he'd been a legionnaire and a gladiator: it was a very Roman thing to do. Since she and her mother had stolen him out of Rome over a year and half ago, at the summons of Marcus Aurelius' daughter, he hadn't seen fit to sheer the springing, dark-brown locks so short. That orderly trimming of hair, so wonderfully thick--many a woman's envy--hadn't seemed appropriate anymore while assimilating to the quasi, multi-roled position of commander to the entire Sarmatian cavalry--a liaison between Britannia's native chieftains and her legionary garrisons. He staunchly refused to let it get longer than his shoulders, the shorter lairs blending over his temples into the longer tresses at his nape.  The length, as it was, seemed an unspoken pronouncement of his Roman heritage compromising with the authority he held amongst a barbarian peoples from the eastern steppes.  Peoples who judged a man's virility, his strength, upon the length of hair, as they estimated a woman's status in the tribes: long hair meant freeborn, shorn locks meant slave. 

Another draft of wind moaned with mournful longing, whistling through the treetops of the garden's arboreal, ice-leaden kingdom, sprinkling light, loose flakes across the snow-ensconced domain.  Nemhyn turned her face into the brunt of the glacial breeze, feather droplets of winter-lace, cool and tingling across her cheeks, catching in the wind-toyed strands of her hair.

She wondered what he saw just then, for the adoring marvel in his eyes was almost too much to bear, making her want to duck her head, avoid the voiceless yearning she beheld. 

His words cut into her thoughts, just as she was pondering, trivially, how unflattering wind was to hair like hers--snarling it and making it a frazzled nightmare a gorgon wouldn't have wanted. 

"They--the Germani--say she comes down from her mountain stronghold once in a great while. A cruel land of pristine ice, diamond-frozen lakes, frostbitten fir and pine, where spring's thaw never touches her winter-locked heights and towering peaks.  Even her lofty valleys, where flowers might blossom under the nurturance of a warming sun in lower altitudes, remain encased in snow and a frozen drapery of silent mist, sun and moon shining with equal strength throughout the whole of the year."

His steady gaze held her enraptured, hypnotized by the spell of his voice, the near-rhythmic chant of his words. "Upon her fancy, she takes up with a human man for a time--keeping his house, lying with him as his wife, and even bearing his children.  And they are content…sometimes mere months; sometimes years."

His voice dropped to a solemn cadence, a sadness that colored his visage. "There is always an ending though, for she grows bored, begins to dream, first, of her white, snow-kissed dominion where she is queen of the winter wind, and her wolves and ravens, the only creatures daring her ice-bound slopes.  Her ache in the place where a heart would be, if she were a human woman, warmed by flesh and blood, begins to grow until she can no longer ignore the howling of the wolves on a frost-driven winter's night, nor the blizzards that blow, furious and unforgiving, across the barren fields of men's farmlands, untamed forests, stealing the lives of young and old, human and animal, all helpless before the merciless strength of winter storms."

She wanted to speak, to break the thrall of the deep, sonorous richness in his voice.  His eyes held her prisoner though, motionless, as frozen as the leafless, icicle-adorned branches scattered throughout the courtyard.  Clutching her makeshift mantle, she remained spellbound before him, an arms-length away from where he leaned, the granite pillar, a single colonnade in a series of identical columns lining the corridor.  Letting the black and white world of cold moonbeam illuminate the snow-blanketed garden, a star-strewn sky glint against a sable domain with the same pristine, cutting beauty--distant, untouchable beauty--that seemed to embody the winter enchantress he depicted.

That same moonlight capturing, bathing them in a pellucid, hyperborean shadow amongst snowdrift, hoary granite pillars, cold flagstone, and obscuring darkness.

"On a winter-solstice eve," he intoned, something in the odd, desolate pitch of his voice telling her he was drawing his tale to a close. "She will flee to one of the sacred groves of oak, ash and beech trees crowning lowland hillocks of the Continent.  Awaiting the full moon, the right congruence of a winter's wind, she listens for the sudden baying of wolves as they trek across the flat plains skirting the rise of her sanctified copse.  When the wolves of winter hunt, wise men lock their shutters and hide beneath their blankets, sure to keep the fire of their hearths blazing high.  Thus, the state of her mortal husband, until the morning, when, in the watery dawn of a gray-light, he sees his wife's footprints tracking in the snow, disappearing into the hills and trees above their farm.  He goes to look for her, thinking to find her frozen corpse fallen along the track, only to wander up toward the grove of trees on a wind-blustered plateau.  And discovers her foot-prints suddenly end, just disappear before untrammeled snow in the middle of the grove, except where a series of wolf prints can be distinguished, and her shawl--untouched by blood or torn flesh--the only element left of her existence. 

"A garment as pure white as her skin was said to be, like new milk, and made of a material lighter than silk and softer than swan-down--a remnant of the moonshine she fled upon, a wisp of spun snowflakes, the icy water that flows in her veins, and blanches her skin."

She seemed to have lost the capacity for speech, as entranced as he seemed to be, studying her figure--what he could make out of it, covered by the shapeless blanket--his gaze playing over the features of her face. 

For the first time, a hinted embarrassment appeared in his attitude, his eyes skirting from her own, a self-conscious drop of his chin, and a sheepishly boyish grin that made him seen more like a youth of thirteen than a man of three and thirty. "Cailleach Beare," he said, a pondering shake of his head and a small chuckle.  "I thought you might have fled upon the moonshine, seduced by an invernal solstice night to leave behind the world of men. No more than a memory, a rumor of snowdrifts and a tendril of mist and stardust."

She wanted to cross the distance to him; wanted him to take her in his arms and melt the chill of trepidation keeping her, uncharacteristically, from sharing in his easing humor. 

Instead, Nemhyn rested a glance upon him, steady and cool, like the incessant nature of the eternal highland winds shifting gentle through the icy palace of the night-bound courtyard.  "How disappointing it must be, then, for one to discover merely a human woman where one fancied immortal glamour."

"No…no disappointment," the worry in his pitch, his alacrity of response, doing nothing to comfort her disquiet.  His hand reached out as he made to lean forward, seeking to touch her, then paused, inexplicably, retreating back like a spooked bird, to be concealed behind him once more.  "And not merely a human woman, but a gods' be thanked, blessedly mortal woman," an emotion coming through, rasping in his voice, as inexplicable as his reluctant gesture had been.

Shaking his head, scowling, he burst into a rapid tirade,  "I think sometimes, I must be going mad, hearing the voices of gods and shades upon the wind. Then, Cyanus tells me he hears them too, and either we're both deceiving ourselves, or--," he broke off, concealing a shudder from over his deceptively relaxed posture.

"Or they are trying to elucidate a truth to you," she queried into an unexpected silence, the whispering wind dying away momentarily.  The words, even as she uttered them, struck her with an apprehensive sense of falsity, setting her further on edge, wondering if those same gods he referred to were listening upon this private exchange. 

In the moonlight, the struggle he fought, internalizing her words, was apparent across his visage.  It was the same as her conundrum.

Neither of them--Nemhyn nor Maximus--were out-rightly impious.  Each was given, however, to the more empirical aspects of sense and intellectual interpretation--what sight, hearing, taste and touch could detect--they consequently construed a belief about the world, how it operated, without jumping to immediate superstition or superfluous explanation.  Usually.

To not believe in gods was profanity, blasphemy almost, but she had doubted every once in a while.  Presuming they played such a direct influence, not only in one's life, but upon one's actions, was like admitting every time one walked out from a sheltered building, one risked hail pummeling your head, even on a cloudless, summer day.  They may not always make their presence known, but They might always be there--at any moment, on a whim, deciding to make life invariably inconvenient.  The stories, the myths, portrayed Immortals as being vain, pompous, inconsistent in whom they blessed, and their reasons for cursing, often brought about because of human arrogance. 

Most of the stories had also been formulated by humans; the rituals they reflected, demanded by priestly-classes, meant to atone or appease the gods, kept the devout in a grip of superstitious fear.   It was the same whether one followed the Roman pantheon, the mystery cults of the East, or the native British deities. When activities of scholarly pursuit, explorations of logic in philosophy and the natural sciences, were prevented based upon humanity's collective appeal to age-old folk beliefs and superstitious fallacies, Nemhyn--following in the path of her mother and father--spoke bitterly, if privately, against the prolific tendency of an uneducated peasant class to be ruled by false notions of magic, and self-limiting sacraments. Her mother had been the first one to teach her that notion.  Her mother, Maeve, who had long walked in the shadow of true Immortal presence, and knew Them to be infinitely nameless, capricious beyond human comprehension, elemental in Their paradigm of the universe, and as subject to the changing tides of fate and chance as any mortal.  Not anything related to what the vast majority of priests, druids, and most other religious affiliates desired their flock of ignorant, blindly following worshippers to believe.

Maximus, for all of his difficulties with her mother, had agreed wholeheartedly.  Nemhyn thought, just perhaps, he was thinking the same thing once more, observing the series of emotions animate his amazingly expressive façade.

The mellowed winter breeze picked up, loosening flakes to scamper across the white-covered courtyard, chasing about the stone-colonnaded hall like the countless pattering of mice-feet.

And she spoke. 

"I heard it earlier this evening, too.  When I was walking through the wind-storm that blew up, trying to get from the infirmary to the baths, I heard Their voices."  He blinked in reaction to her words, glancing up at her, trying to dampen the unaccountable alarm flashing in his eyes.  Alarm and…something else.  "I thought I was simply hearing things, too. I couldn't understand most of what They were saying, but I could make out one phrase quite clearly," she whispered, hesitant, fearful, her lips not wanting to shape the next syllables emerging from her mouth.  "Cailleach Beare."

Something hard and scornful darkened his gaze.  Not directed at her, she didn't think.  "We're being played like pawns in a game of hunt and chase," he bit out, low and resentful.  Dangerous. "If we refuse to bend to Their will, they will somehow force us to carry out Their bidding in the end…usually not until one is looking from across the other side of the Styx."

Not exactly the most pleasant of thoughts to harbor on a winter's solstice reflection, she mused ruefully.

The sentiment was echoed in her remark.  "You would think They would find something better to amuse themselves with than consistently pervading the world of humanity and all of its trials, tribulations, and inconveniences."

She could see his sardonic reception, pondering her reply, the way his mouth turned up at one corner, and a less embittered light in his eyes. It was heartening, noting his façade, his posture, easing somewhat, but in the interim of their exchange, she was beginning to form a picture--a dawning insight--into what all of this might, possibly, be pointing toward. 

It was not a comforting awareness in the least.

Her fingers felt rigid, grasping the blanket's edges about her with submerged apprehension.  "Maximus, you must listen to what I have to say very carefully," her voice sounding reedy, so tightly was she trying to keep it from shaking. 

Even in the dimness of the moonlight's refraction off the snowy world of night, she could see the depth of his worry crease his brow, his eyes calm, though the rising wariness of his stance, leaning against the pillar, was a near palpable thing.  Like the vapor of breath from his quiet respiration.

He still managed an impulsive, facetious grin.  Momentary, but definitely making a heavy mood all the lighter in that one instant.  "If I might suggest something?" She cocked a skeptical eyebrow his direction. "I can assure you, upon my honor, I'll listen even more attentively if you share some of that blanket with me while you divulge your profound insight."

Disbelieving, she hooted like an incensed barn owl. "Incorrigible!" leaving a large cloud of mist hanging between them in the frost-gripped, winter ambiance of the night, "is that what I said before?" In her reactive frustration she almost threw up her hands, characteristic of her irritation. 

Impossible, given she wore close to nothing…in truth, nothing at all, beneath her makeshift mantle.  She settled for hugging the ragged edges of the old woolen cover about herself even closer.  "Reprehensible," she rebuked, a distinctly northern burr on the word, "would have been closer to the truth!" Trying to put vehement sincerity into the slur.   

The way he bent his head back, letting out the full, liberated, rolling delight of his laughter was more than enough evidence he didn't buy her semblance of piqued ire.  

She sniffed loudly, considering, for a moment, bristling further, than abandoned the idea.  He was already too overtly confident when it came to getting under her skin. 

His deep tide of laughter had quieted to a successive chortling, examining her blanket-clad form with an expectant interest. "Well?" Raised brows and a self-satisfied smirk quirking his lips.

A battle of wills, always between them.  He prided himself on knowing just what to say or do when he wanted to catch her off-guard, make her flare into a temper, only realizing, belatedly, she had risen, once again, to a bait he threaded along with teasing, tongue-in-cheek comments.

He had called her intemperate, once--not with any real feeling other than reluctant, amused affection. 

Intemperate and unpredictable, had been his exact words.  She had bridled, of course, some sharp comment or another about to come out of her mouth.  Then, thinking--as she was in this very moment--keenly holding his gaze, shivering in her woolen mantle, amidst a wintry kingdom of snow-glistening trees, ice-glazed branches, and diamond-studded night, one could never be blamed for acting in accordance to their nature. 

She moistened her lips, pressing them together, then, smiling languid and slow as she tilted her head, consideringly, to the side, letting the wind gather and lift the strands of her unbound hair. She saw his eyes follow the straying tresses, like tracking a flock of birds taken to flight.

It was ludicrous, really, attempting an imitation of a seductress, the risibility of her portrayal exemplified by lowering her lashes flirtatiously, coquettish and mischievous. Drifting over with a sway to her hips, a subtle shift of her shoulders--indistinguishable, she was sure, from beneath the shapeless mass of the blanket--she paused just in front of him.

In the dim moonlight, he skewed an eyebrow, looking down at her, something in his gaze flickering briefly.  Dampened arousal?  Embers of banked desire?  She couldn't tell, the glint replaced by his guise of nonchalant expectancy.

He hadn't moved, still leaning against the pillar, his hands clasped behind his body, stoic composure to the last, in spite of what she could feel mounting between them.  That same rush of thrilling current, an intensifying electricity that tingled through her senses, swelling and pulsating within regions of her body, a heady flow that seemed to flower from between her legs, rising with insistent demand, inciting a luscious spark between her breasts, making her feel intoxicated. 

She was mesmerized, the parody suddenly dying away, caught up in her own game, egged on by his gumption for daring her to share a single blanket--her makeshift mantle.

He hadn't moved, his fingers still clasped behind him, except to bend forward slightly, letting her unwrap the two edges of the blanket, gripping a tattered corner in each of her hands.

She licked her lips slowly, temptingly, holding his eyes, pressing herself, melding--lissome and supple--against his casually inclined posture.  The wintry wind was chill, making her catch her breath sharply, brushing across her exposed, naked flesh for the second until she laced her fingers about his neck, holding onto the corners of the woolen blanket, anchoring herself about his wide shoulders, enfolding each of them in the mantle, their intimate nest opposing the frigid aura of the winter night. 

"Is this what you had in mind," she intoned softly, tilting her head up to rest her cheek next to his, feeling to the coarse, tickling sensation of his beard, the rougher stubble, rub along her neck. "As far as sharing the blanket with me." 

For a moment he said nothing. She could feel this close to him, his uneven breathing match the hammering of his heart. The warmth of his breath in her ear caused a small tremor to shiver through her nerves, pimpling her skin. "I might have been hoping for something like this," he murmured cozily.

With only his light linen tunic, the thin felt trousers separating them, the heat shedding off his burly form enveloped the areas where they touched.  Her breasts lightly grazed against his chest, her belly and thighs delicately molded to the outlines of sinewy muscle, and she was acutely aware of the thickened, hardened slabs of pectorals, the rippling flexion of an abdomen many a Greek war-god would have been proud to sport. 

Bracing himself against the pillar, he shifted their combined weight a mere fraction, a tenuous movement of his hips, but she was all at once, attuned to another part of his body that had thickened with a rising heat--stiff between them, resting along his thigh and constrained by the fabric of his trousers.

He had broken their cheek-on-cheek contact to capture her lips in his own, a soft, sensuous play of tongue, nibbling her lower lip, moist and suckling, as she tipped her head back, exposing the graceful line of neck and throat.

Senses swimming, she felt like she was drowning in the luscious exhilaration of his mouth upon hers, the way the angles, plains, of his physique seemed to blend flawlessly to the rounded contours of her own.  His hands, underneath the veil of their shared blanket, were moving to embrace her, draw her even closer than they already were--body to body. 

His hands...gods his hands.  She had yet to feel their callused strength conform to the mold of her quivering body. Inhaling harshly, the arctic air a stream of pristine gelidity, she was aching and taut with desire, every fiber of her nerves, the pores of her skin alive and burning with arousal, feeling his teeth worrying along her neck, his tongue tracing some wondrous design in the hollow of her throat. 

Her mind was trying, vaguely, to recall what thing of dire importance she needed to tell him, lulled by the exquisite fire his lips and tongue were creating, following the graceful elegance of her sternum to nuzzle the valley between her breasts.

The echo of glacial wind through the hall swallowed her soft moan. Gods, why wouldn't he touch her with his hands, yet. She could feel them hovering, underneath the blanket, near the lovely curve of her lower back.

Hovering, but not touching to encircle that area where the small of her back flowed into the swell of her hips.  In the back of her mind, a realization dawned, cutting, about why he'd had his hands clasped behind him for so long, against the granite colonnade.  A cold, granite colonnade.

Her eyes flying open, spurred to abrupt action by her belated comprehension, his progress of quick, light kisses tracking the heavy, proud curve of one of her pale, areola-crowned breasts ceased simultaneously when she inhaled sharply. Anticipating her move, Maximus straightened hastily, clutching her in an iron, ice-cold grip that shocked the sensitized skin of her back as she tried to wiggle away from him, trapped by the imprisoning blanket.

Squealing like a clouted dog, she yelped out, "You bloody bastard!"  

Getting immersed in a winter river couldn't have caused her to shiver more, freezing her to the bone with a chatter of teeth, continuing to curse him with every creative expletive she knew, while he laughed helplessly, gasping through his full-blown mirth, " That was for the snowball!"

"You deserved the snowball!" she bit out, her jaws clicking together audibly. He was merciless in his humor, chuckling unendingly, his frigid grip about her waist, unrelenting, as she tried to knee him, stomp on a foot, anything to break the torturous sensation of his cold fingers upon, what had been, her very warm skin. Her endeavors proved unsuccessful, the range of her motion inhibited, trying to retain what scant trace of her dignity she possessed, refusing to drop her hold on the blanket edges, her fingers and the mantle still entwined about his neck

She resolved to sink her nails into the back of his neck instead, hearing, with vindictive gratification, his laughter drop off, ending in a hiss of stifled pain. 

Not moving his hands, which were at least gradually thawing from icy-cold to merely...cold, he articulated stiffly, "Are you turning a new leaf, Nemhyn?  You usually take the higher ground in this sort of contest--forgiveness rather than feeding fire with fire."

Her dark scowl bore into Maximus' taunting, gray-shadowed gaze.  Between gnashing teeth, and a voice vacillating from laughter to fury, she said, "After all of these years, Spaniard," sinking her nails deeper into the skin of his neck, "and your experience with women, haven't you realized the myth of the gentler sex was just that--a myth?" She hadn't quite drawn blood, watching his suppressed grimace.

In his favor, he did follow his own advice more often than not. It had taken him a while to learn better, drawing his lesson, as he'd once explained to her, from having spent a lifetime breaking in horses.  One didn't pacify a spooked, infuriated mare with the sting of the lash and the punishment of hobbling.  A good trainer, he'd explained in that deep, rumbling tenor, gentles her with food, and slow, gradual caresses.

He was starting to do the same thing, now, among this mystical, timeless moment of wintry chill, glacial wind, and spellbinding night.  "There's no need to be vicious in proving your point," he tried to whisper in her ear, making it an endearment, but she moved her face away from him just enough, glaring into his eyes.  There was a dim glimmer of gentle amusement across his visage, softened by the moonlight, despite her nails digging near permanent scratch marks into his neck.

"About the gentler sex, I mean," he intoned placidly, soothingly.  His voice, something about his voice always snared her when he spoke like this. It sent an entirely different kind of shiver along her spine, prickling the hairs at the back of her neck.

Speaking of caressing, his hands--which she had nearly forgotten about, having warmed sufficiently to almost be the temperature of her own body--began tracing a spiraling pattern from her lower back, moving with a tantalizing slowness, toward the front of her lower abdomen.  Thick fingered, and strong, they moved with the gentle pressure a musician would apply to the strings of his favorite harp.    

Fondling, kneading the soft skin of her belly, his fingers skirted with lazy purpose around the willowy, firm concavity of her navel, carrying on downward with delirious intent. 

Before her mind could reign in the natural response of her body, her breath escaped from between rapturously parted lips in a quiet sigh, her nails having relaxed their gouging pressure unwittingly, tangling in the coarse, thick waves at his nape. Their already intimate vicinity became a fusion of melding extremities, one of his hands, palm flat and most definitely warm, having transported itself to the lush, ripe abundance of her upper thigh, bringing Nemhyn against him, the felt trousers a single barrier between the evidence of his own desire, moving her hips against his, her heel hooking around one of his calves. 

So close to him, it was impossible to hold onto the irritation she'd been feeling, thinking, her lips and teeth catching the roughened skin of his neck, nipping soft, tender, it was unfair that a man, could be so...beautifully captivating.  There was a primal simplicity to his lovemaking, an exemplification of his spirit's essence rendering itself in every aspect of his life, his actions. 

It was not to say he had no complexity of being.  For all the physicality of his presence, his mind and his emotions were those of an artist and thinker. Yet, in spite of the demise and betrayal he'd endured over the years, the prestige he'd won back under a different name, an inadvertent duty to an island and an auxiliary unit of horsemen from the eastern steppes, Maximus'-Artos'-abiding loyalty, the expectation of steadfast trust he endowed upon other persons, never died. 

Perhaps, before his tenure as a slave, he'd hardly been blind to the flaws of men, though not quite conceiving of ambitions which could break oaths of friendship, ties to one emperor over another.  She hadn't known him then, only the bitter essence of the survivor he was after he'd recovered from his violent encounter with Commodus.  What had grown out of that shattered, disillusioned shell of a man was a new persona retaining bits and pieces of the old--shards of glass or gold--enkindled and refined into a harder, sharper, clearer, and more discriminating quality.  He was evolving, growing into a new, as yet, not fully realized power--shared between Batrades, prince of the Royal Iazyges, and key British nobles--sometimes aligned, others times in contention with Roman interests.

Her skin where his hands kneaded, sure and strong, was almost a literal blaze of exquisite stimulation. Pinching softly, caressing, stroking with ardent fervor, he cupped the bountiful glory of her breasts as he would delicate jewels, his lips worshipping with tantalizing, moist warmth and teasing breath, each nipple until she thought she would go mad with wanting.  Her breath would come in a desperate, reluctant gasp, and he would edge off, the bristly feel of his beard tickling her neck as he journeyed with patient intent--tongue, lips, and the light nibble of teeth his eager travelers--taking her lips in his with passionate restraint.  All the while, one hand wandering to tangle in her hair, loosing itself in the unbound mass, combing the curling strands so that a feverish tingle spread from her scalp all the way to her toes, a tremor of pleasure jolting through the sleek, sinuous lines of her arms, belly and thighs.

She heard him whisper, once, in a shuddering, desire-drugged voice, incoherent almost, something about the place she inhabited in his heart.  The comment staggered, got mumbled into another kiss as the callused fingers of his other hand, beneath the blanket still binding them against the pervasive chill of a winter's night, brushed lightly, slowly, up along her thigh--unspoken permission to seek the sanctity of women's holy magic, the warm, most folds of soft fertility, and vessel of her own desire. Her arousal, the feel of his fingers running along a firm, quivering sinew of her inner thigh, transformed her legs to shaking, melting puddles of collapsing support.  He was like a sculptor, softening the clay of her body with the water's of desire so she would--they would--mold into the timeless embrace of intimate carnal harmony.

Nemhyn would have opened to him then, gladly taking him into herself, but for the fact she was still gripping him around the neck, grasping at his hair, holding onto the mantle's corners simultaneously. And so, there was little she could do as far as trying to free him of his own simple garments, the woolen blanket their singular defense against the courtyard' ambient night and winter enshroudment.  Restricted and restrained from letting her own fingers wander with free abandon, her lips incite the same fire, about a body whose muscled thickness, ridges of sinew and flat slabs of honed power were layered over the symmetry of arms, thighs, abdomen, neck.  The essence of masculinity transformed into feral beauty--the roughness of his skin, spread thin over deltoid and bicep, scarred from numerous campaigns, the delightful indentation of the joining where obliques led down to the sculpted confluence of hip, to thigh, and--

Her sigh was one of frustration, echoing into the cold silence about them, as she tried to lift herself, yearning, pressing even closer than their already entwined posture allowed. He'd been teasing at soft bits of her skin along her neck, the sounds of his kisses tender, the trail of moisture his lips left clashing, warm, with the cool gust of air down the corridor, scattering flakes of snow against stone floor and walls. Her own mouth was fast in the disordered, wiry texture of his hair, her knee, wrapped around his leg like ivy around strong oak, rising higher as his fingers stroked, brushing, feather light, further up the inner aspect of her thigh toward the desired goal. 

Hearing her deep breath, he echoed with a heavy, ragged sigh of his own, dragging his lips reluctantly from her neck for a moment, studying her face searchingly--gray irises languid, darkened with arousal and keen attraction.   The strong, rugged line of his jaw, robust plains of his cheekbones and deep-set brow were bathed in the courtyard's pearlescent luminescence.

In the black and white, glistening kingdom of winter's night, moonlight's pallor illumined his skin to a dusky ivory, the dark brown hair, with the contrast of the pillar behind him, taking on the sable tones of the skies above. A dusting of snow blew over them once more, catching in the moonlight, shimmering, a dazzle of frosty crystal and ice-captured moonbeam.  The loose flakes caught in the tousled waves of his hair, his beard, on his lips, beading as they melted from body heat, creating a gloss of dewy iridescence.  He'd likened her to some arcane goddess of winter realms, yet he was the one, who at that instant, entranced her with a boreal beauty--a creature of myth, or timeless legend--a northern deity wandering the world of men at night, leading his host of frost wraiths and dire-wolves across frozen plains--harkening back to a lost age when the world had been locked in an eternal millennia of winter.

Pressing his lips together briefly, he seemed to sample the liquid evidence of frozen particles, smearing a shimmering dampness across his mouth, bading her to reach up, lean the full weight of her body against him, and sample with her own tongue. Taste where the evidence of loose snow, the purity of highland streams, had scattered across his lips, his skin, the short, bristling softness of his beard.

The hand at the curvature of her lower back was pressing her with firmer insistence. The urgent, throbbing heat between his loins, turgid, as his legs buckled, using the column behind him for leverage, lifting her hips, grinding them together so that she clutched at him, a breathless gasp expelling against his neck. 

"Our sleeping quarters," he tried to get out roughly, almost begging, the last half of what he said muffled by the way he buried his face into her hair, his teeth and lips moving along the exposed line of her neck, an intoxia of nibbling and sweet kisses.

Her mind was trying to hold onto what she had intended to impart earlier, before the deliberate weaving of passion, a solstice spell, had caught each of them up in the clamoring head-long rush of dizzying sensuality.  Trying desperately to ignore his fingers, still methodically stroking along her thigh, lightly brushing--tantalizing--never fully exploring the aching hollow of her own need.

"Ye-," she garbled the word, groaning, burying her face in his neck as she clutched harder around him, her breasts crushed against his chest, drowning in the rhythm of his hips moving, slow, subtle, lifting her against him.  She could have cursed him for having the presence of mind to put on trousers before he'd come out to look for her just then.  The textured material of the felt along the sensitized skin of her inner thighs, the one barrier between them from immediate fulfillment, was also the one thing that grounded her mind for a piercing second of clarity.  

"Was that a yes," he whispered desperately into her ear before assaulting her lips with ardent zeal. 

Incoherently, she almost sobbed out, reluctant and regretting, "Not--," gasping.  His fingers had slipped, gentle and delving, into the cleft of her womanhood, exploring slowly, the moist folds of her own arousal.  "Not yet," she said.  He lifted his head from where he'd been licking, biting at her earlobe, puzzled.

"This war," she forced out, pulling in air to steady her utterance. "This war," she repeated, firmer, steadier, though still a breathless rush, "needs to stop."

The only thing that did stop, in that instant, was the exquisite, circling bewitchment his fingers had been creating down between her legs.  Nemhyn smothered a cry of aching disappointment as he withdrew his hand, not un-gently, but, she could tell, with a deliberate motion acknowledging her words.

The familiar crinkle forming between his eyebrows was evidence of a growing perturbation, looking down at her, vexation shadowing his eyes.  "You don't think I know that?"

She could feel that invisible, instinctive wall, a proverbial distance he was retreating to within himself, though he hadn't broken their entwined embrace.  Nemhyn set herself about to seeing he wouldn't flee--figuratively or physically--any further than necessary when he heard the rest of what she had to explain. 

"I think, Maximus...Artos," she murmured, trailing a finger along the curve of his jaw, an inexplicable emotion rising up, almost choking off her undertone,  "you know. I think you do not believe you have the means to make it end."

Tracing up from his chin to cheek, unshaved stubble grainy to her touch, the moist droplets of melted snowflakes trapped by the thicker portions of his clipped beard left a glistening track of water across his skin, where she paused a single finger upon his slightly parted lips.

She refused to let his gaze slide away from her, holding his eyes unwaveringly, deep and incisive, trying to communicate her imperative through more than just words or voice.  "Those Picti prisoners should have been watching their flocks in lowland pastures for winter, making sure their cattle were getting sufficient fodder, repairing the thatching of their homes.  Not...not partaking in an ambush, especially against obviously outmatched, armed and armored soldiers.  They're accustomed to hoes, sickles, rakes and plows; not sword, shield, and lance."

There was nothing accusatory in her tone, keeping her low voice mild. He let her continue, though she felt him prodded to say something. Her finger upon his lips, her words, were his inducement to hearing her out.

"Listen to me carefully...Artos," mindful to use his earned name, an entitlement of honor, status and command. "Early in the spring, maybe two or three cycles of the moon after the battle on the Douglas, a host of twenty-seven men came ashore from Hibernia. They arrived with arms, well-crafted weapons...nobility to be sure, and they offered their services to Beinne Briot--the Caledonian King."

Nemhyn, looking up into the gray-shadowed depths of Maximus' eyes, saw his interest flare, pondering.  He grasped her finger gently, removed it from covering his mouth.  "His son was slain in that last engagement...along with the flower of their trained army," he said. "I don't suppose you can blame him for hiring outside mercenaries until they can replenish the numbers of their military."

"His eldest son," Nemhyn corrected softly.  She saw him register that for a moment, his forehead still furrowed, more in thought than with undue concern.  After a beat of winter-hushed silence and the incessant, whistling draft of chill air down the hall, she said, "His youngest, single surviving son is held, this moment, under guard in the infirmary.  His only son, and heir."

Watching him blink, three rapid successions of lids, his gaze dropped an instant, staring out to the dark world of snow and bare trees of the courtyard around them, before finding her own again.  Drilling her through with a piercing astuteness, orbs suddenly bright in this nighttime world of opalescent splendor and glacial ambiance.

"My key," he said suddenly, definite and assured, "to initiating a truce.  How did you find this all out?"

"He's young," she replied evenly.  "You were right about his pride and his arrogance.  You were also right about his shame.  He wouldn't let any of the army physicians touch him--not even Publius. It took two hours for me to convince him I wasn't going to cut off his leg--what normally would have been done amongst his own people.  The advantage of classical medicine," Nemhyn stated ruefully, "hasn't filtered this far north of the Antonine yet."

"I suppose," she added with a sly glint and a quick grin, "it helps being a woman, too.  I told him what an impressive scar his wound would make when it was sutured up and healed--something to show to the ladies of his father's dun--and a great mark of a warrior amongst the men."

"I wish you'd served in the Adiutrix when I was first a standard-bearer," he complained, mimicking a sullen tone.  "It would have made my time in the hospital so much more entertaining.  You just don't get the same treatment from male surgeons and attendants."

She laughed, sincere and exuberant, but quickly fading, as she explained, soberly, the rest of how Beinne Briot's youngest son allowed her to finally repair his wound, bearing through the pain with stalwart fortitude.  Explained how the young man--coming of age into his fifteenth year--suddenly broke down and wept, for shame at the loss of old men and boys--all of humble origin collected from villagers serving his father's lands.  Others had been fellow sons of Caledonian nobility--too young to fight earlier that year along the banks of the River Douglas.  The young prince had been goaded into exacting vengeance, despite obviously inferior weapons, armor, and skill.  One of the men of the Hibernian company relentlessly insinuated, for months, how cowardly and thin the blood of the Picti peoples had become.  Weak hearted, weak warriors, their shame would carry over to future generations unless justice was sought.

Hence, Beinne Briot's youngest son, with the fervor of youthful pride and insult done to his native heritage, sought to correct the mistaken Hibernian--leading a rabble of old men and gangly adolescents into a doomed attempt against powerful horsemen of the eastern steppe, and hardened, disciplined legionnaires.

"None of that will matter to the eyes of a prisoner-tribunal," Maximus intoned, gruff, his habitual martial alertness fading the vestiges of sweet tenderness and sensual allurement. "The legionary commanders are going to want him executed as a barbarian insurgent."  There was no small amount of contempt to his voice. 

"Hold him as a hostage. There are plenty of chieftains south of the Wall who would take him for the seven year period to ensure a truce," she said, the sobriety of their converse over-riding the intimacy of their embraced posture, wrapped in each other's arms.  His hands were chastely upon her shoulders now, her own, still clasping the corners of the woolen blanket, once more about his neck.  "And insist," she added, "that the Hibernian party go back to their own shores."

That brought a full-fledged frown to his brow, skeptical and glowering, his gut reaction protesting her advisement.  "Beinne Briot might listen to our proposal...we have his son." She caught the thickness in his voice--momentary, but noticeable.  Almost hearing his words unspoken--and a father will do anything to defend the life of his son.  He cleared his throat harshly before adding, "What makes you think the Hibernians will listen to an offer from a British legionnaire or a Sarmatian auxiliary as far as a truce?"

"They will if it comes from you," she asserted.  The words carried into the stillness, the moaning wind fading to a mere shift of frosty current, seething with the wisps of snow, undulating like trails of mist, across the open space of the garden.

His hands dropped from her shoulders, not pushing her away, but a wary light falling over the plains of his facade.  When he began to shake his head in denial, she adamantly continued, "You carry the blood of Cuchulain, Maximus--a hero of their people.  They will see that and they will listen to you in a way they will listen to no other emissary.  It is more than they would do for any British noble or Roman officer."

His agitation was growing with every word she spoke, his eyes falling away from her face as he looked up into the star-strewn darkness of night, swallowing hard, and focusing on the snow covered awning glistening in the moonlight above.   

"Listen to me," she insisted, urgent and soft, but clear into the frosty air, her hands leaving his neck to encompass his face, peer into his eyes, draw his attention back.  "Don't...do not turn away from what is your gods' given right--Artos."  Conviction made her voice resonate down the corridor of the colonnaded hall.

A flickering lucidity sparked in his expression when she said that name.  "You suffered once for not accepting the duty and leadership vested in you by an Emperor until it was too late. Do not repeat the same mistake."  He winced, but she held his face between firm hands, not letting him escape so easily, despite the fact he could have overpowered her with simple brute strength. Not without a struggle, of course--she was strong for a woman, and hardly a delicate slip of frail femininity.

It was a measure of his respect--and his love--that he humored her, however, allowing her to lean closer to him, tilting her chin up slightly to still hold his gaze.  His denial of her words was sorely obvious in his eyes, though, and rather than looking away from whatever truth he saw reflected upon her visage, he finally settled for simply shutting them.  As though he could shut out the exigency of what she said.

"Oh, my heart," she murmured softly, tenderness imbued upon her voice, her sincerity--a guileless appeal, reaching out to him in a way no other woman ever could before her. "Listen to me, please," she entreated, a susurration but a hair's breadth from his lips. 

He made no move, his hands gone slack at his sides.  He did not he push her away, though, as he once might have done--a year and a half ago.  She could hear his quiet, even breaths.  "Maximus…Artorius," she whispered into the winter's silent night.  "Those men--the Hibernians-- will listen to you for the same reason the Sarmati have grown to follow you so devotedly; for the same reason Roman legionnaires do not question your command as a prefect of twenty-five hundred horsemen, in spite of what they see as your obscure origins.  For the same reason," she pursued in her low undertone, "the British nobility south of the Wall vests you with an authority and respect they have traditionally reserved only for their own chieftains."

He'd opened his eyes, at long last, to study her with that endearing look of keen vulnerability. That expression of yearning unvoiced, not seeking reassurance, or guidance--simply an affirmation of a truth he had never been fully able to accept in his own character when looking into the mirror of self-reflection.

This was a solstice though--not a time to hide from truths, nor escape from the inevitable duty of power.  And he had never shirked duty.  That simple fact was why he'd almost died in the Arena nearly two years ago.

"To the Sarmati, you are their god incarnate--the wielder of the Chalybee blade, leading the Dragon standard Batrades bears, to victory and glory, so long as the cause you serve is a just one, and done in the name of peace."

She was not sure, as she elaborated, when that disconcerting Otherness began to absorb her sense.  It was a strange thing, something she had felt a time or two before, a perception of dislocation within and outside of her mind and body. A gradual hyperawareness of her surroundings coinciding with the internal rhythms of her pulse, the exchange of ice-tinged air in her lungs, the muffled fall of individual crystalline flakes settling upon cold granite, disturbed from the high branches of the trees, floating down to catch and melt in her hair, or upon Maximus' skin.  The scintillating sharpness of winter starlight, high above in the blackened heavens, shining across distances too vast for her mind to fathom.  The way the starlight caught the man's eyes before her, perceived in some organic space of his brain, simultaneously interpreted by his more evolved senses with an awed awareness of cold, icy, coruscating beauty. 

"To the Romans," she whispered, trying to focus through the schism of her perception, "you are the intermediary between the legions and wild horsemen from the steppe, Picti barbarian, and British chieftain."

He was studying her with an intent gaze, somehow picking up on the stirring in her eyes, her voice, perhaps discerning the same thrumming swelling from the imperceptible shifting of layered earth beneath the foundations of the flagstones and snow-veiled soil.  Earth, frost soaked, nourishing, even in the midst of a winter-locked land, burrows of ancient root systems, embedded in the interminable, dark fecundity of dirt, springing up to reach with age-weathered trunks and a jointed latticework of limbs, to claw at the infinite, star-clad sky overhead like the talons of some monstrous beast from a lost myth. 

With the sudden siege expanding her awareness beyond simple human perception, she could feel the kinship animals--people--shared with those trees. Humans were very like these noble vestiges of wooded growth, hibernating in their winter sleep, a bridge between the infinite, the arcane, and the mundane temporality of life. 

"To the tribes south of the Wall," she uttered solemnly, her voice permeated with the essence of the northern wind wailing softly through the polar heights of deserted mountain passes and blizzard-encased, highland vales. "You are the Defender of Britannia. They have all chosen you, acknowledged you as the victor, the commander, a wolf among lions, the lord of the wild hunt."

Somewhere, in the blurry perception of Nemhyn's separate awareness vying with this glamour of Other pervading her sense, the woman could feel his eyes smolder, blazing with steely suspicion, recognizing the Thing taking over her being--the comforting flesh and blood matter of his lover.

Nemhyn, separate and herself, surfaced from that hazy, Immortal possession momentarily, saying, "And they will listen to you, all of them--Roman, Sarmati, Picti, and Hibernian--because you are the Winter King," her voice entirely human, entirely her own for one moment more.  Swaying under the strength of the solstice-enchantment, she bit out before succumbing to the overwhelming flood of Immortal vitality running through every pore of her body, "Don't fight it."  

The energy that surrounded, encompassing, connecting herself to Maximus, flowed between humans to winter-stripped trees, pulsated with the same thrumming essence of sap through the limbs of the mighty oak and fragile, sapling elm. She heard him dimly argue with stubborn defiance, "I have no claim to royal authority," before losing her self to the fleeting rip-tide invading her mind and soul.

A whirlpool diffusing through the world, that puissant synergy united the universe, the great seas connecting disparate pieces of land, breaking inroad with the force of tide, wave, and river inlet. Unseen currents swirling beneath murky ocean depths, warmed vast land masses, and swept over mountains, plains, forests, field and desert, rising to the heavens and soaking the limitless boundaries of earth with rain, sleet, snow and sunlight. An ephemeral web spanning, spinning the threads of all living things, elemental power of glacial, ice-clad night was the cyclic turning of the seasons--to become the sun-warmed exposure of verdant meadows and flourishing crops in summer.

This intrinsic spirit of death and life fed the wind-hushed sonority of Nemhyn's voice. "You, Artos, Great Bear--the king of the winter country beyond the gales of the polar kingdom--have proven yourself worthy and more than worthy of royal authority.  Cailleach Beare you named this woman, in whose blood runs the sovereignty of my island. Brigantia. 

"I, the veiled one of winter, invoke you, Great Bear, to take your place at her side--Defender, Consort, and King."

Somewhere, in a distant corner or her mind, Nemhyn retained a faint hold on her dim faculty, the spark of her own measly awareness before the multi-layered perception of divinity.  Her hands guided his face down, slightly, so she might brush her lips softly against his forehead.

"For the knowledge that resides in the seat of men's reasoning," she murmured, kissing him lightly, the motion a blessing of initiation, an incipient budding of inner-radiance taking root within the soul of both their minds, lending the nature of a seedling thrusting with interminable persistence through the barrier of dirt to the bright sunlight of creation and inspiration. "That you may guide with the wisdom of the antlered Ancient One, who is both Lord and Victim of Winter's wild hunt."

Her hands moved from encircling his cheeks, still grasping the folds of the blanket, sliding down the front of his powerful chest. Moving down to the edge of his linen tunic, she lifted the loose, untucked edge covering the top of his trousers, her fingertips tracing lightly up the a contracting ripple of abdomen when the icy bewitchment of winter's cold zephyr basked the bare skin of his exposed torso. 

As she had done to his brow, she proceeded--mortal Nemhyn possessed of immortal awareness--partially bowing her neck, to grace the area where his heart strove strongly to beat, with the petal-softness of her lips. "For the intuitive sentiment said to exist in the realm of men's feeling," she whispered clear and low, straightening to look into his eyes, not letting his shirt fall just yet, her palms resting warm against the surface of his skin, the thud of his heart palpable to her touch. "That you, as the giver of thy flesh in the season of sacrifice, gain insight into the hearts of men and women, alike.  Teaching as you learn, yourself, that love, in all of its incarnations, is neither a gift earned nor a favor gained, but a giving and receiving, freely flowing like the spontaneity of a child's conception in the womb of mother's sustenance."

"I've known love," he asserted, his breath harsh and uneven, responding to her touch, his night-shadowed gaze flickering with a rising intensity.

"You have," she agreed with a sigh.  "You do." She could almost see, sense with her mind's vision, the radiant fountain of energy, what had started as a gradual sensation of warmth behind his eyes, brimming from her kiss like the well-spring of creation's cauldron, overflowing to pour with sparkling electricity, jolting from the gate of his mind, tracking down to where her palms rested on the firm, corded tautness of his bared chest.

Her hands seemed alive with that continuous, tickling current, sliding over his skin, spread even across the curving, inward symmetry of a strong rib-cage, the gradual indent where muscle overlay bone beneath the grainy-smooth texture of a man's flesh, keen to her dancing fingers.  The hammering of his heart echoed a throbbing rhythm that seemed to drum through the ground in pulsing waves, climbing from underneath her feet. Running up her legs with a resplendent shudder of power, the radiant fountainhead of warmth unfurled in her lower belly with an efflorescence mirroring that stream of inner-light blazing through Maximus' sense.

Of their own accord, her grazing hands slid slowly across the light, curling down of hair on his chest, flattening over pectorals, treading through the trail of short wisps that thinned toward the depression of his navel.   

Her fingers traced the rim of his umbilicus.  And lower. 

She followed the direction of her hands, lowering herself graceful, supple, the contours of her body shifting upon his, embers blazing to full-blown fire, fanned by the wind of immortal imperative driving human instinct. Where she touched upon his skin, the stream of inner-radiance flared beneath his flesh, flowing in her mind's other-vision, downward, coursing upward, from earth, through her, in a flux of inciting, enervated thrill. She felt the involuntary tremor of his skin contracting responsively, the rise and fall of his chest growing more pronounced, his breath catching when the edge of his tunic fell back over his torso in a hushed flutter of linen, where she knelt--suppliant to king--delicately untying the drawstrings of his trousers with practiced fingers.

His seizing inhalation was carried away by the moan of chill wind through the blackened, snow-glimmered courtyard. A gasp when she gripped the length of his manhood, his hands--which had been motionless before then, tangling in the unbound mass of her hair, spilling through his fingers, steering her face up to meet his eyes.  "You don't need to--," stumbling, choking on the words, silenced by the magic of other-light glimmering with tangible presence in the clouded, enigmatic wells of her gaze. 

There was nothing of Nemhyn in the esoteric smile she granted him, flitting across her visage before following upon the impulse driving her, to bestow obeisance with silken lips, soft tongue.  "The Spear of Lugh," she whispered between the entrapment her gentle, fondling kisses, the stroking of wicked hands and fingers along his swollen member.  "For his lightening springs from the most powerful source of all--that of procreation.  Like the strong oak, drawer of lightening down to earth, that drops its leaves before the barren spell of winter, so the Defender is also the Defeated.  Yet, the promise of returning warmth upon the rays of his blessed sun are evoked by the power of She who is both lady of life-in-death, the Crystal Queen of ice-riven pine and glacial mountain heights, who dances with the Lord of the Slain--the Winter King--upon the arctic currents of the diamond-studded heavens."

She heard him, distantly, cry out, something muffled and harsh, a sound in the back of his throat, leaning his head back against the granite pillar, inhaling immensely.  She knew she still wasn't quite herself. The freezing concrete of the flagstones, the snow surrounding where she knelt upon the unyielding surface, playing out her ministration of worship to the intimate source of his masculinity, ought to have been plying her with physical discomfort in the form of aching knee joints and winter-chilled skin.

She scarcely felt either sensation, lost in the ebb and flow of that inner-radiance of brilliant, pulsating energy, welling up from undetected currents of the ground, spilling from the trees, cast upon the bathing light of moonglow, and frosty sparkling air. Her body, and his, were conduits for the founting reservoir, driving down from the source of his conscious thought, burning along a path lured by the seduction of her hands and lips upon his phallus. Alighting her vision, behind closed eyes, with a silver shimmer of warm prismatic colors, flooding through their veins, until the impossible brilliance of being, this hyperawareness, became too much for mortal flesh. 

A pressure was building, and suddenly, she felt his fingers, no longer moving with unconscious caresses through her hair, grasp, dig into her scalp.  His hips jerked, uncontrolled motion, a harsh expulsion of air torn from his lungs, "No!" 

Gently, but with firm insistence, he dragged her up as gracefully as he could, trying to keep the blanket about her shoulders, and simultaneously clutch at the waist line of his loose, felt trousers.  It was not gentle enough, his gesture causing her to stagger against him, eliciting a confused protest on her part.  "I'm sorry...did--," she tried to get out in a broken, shaking breath. "Did I hurt--," she muttered, reeling, unsteady, from the shattered enchantment of synergistic entrapment she'd woven about each of them unwitting, and nearly unaware. 

His eyes were dark, clouded by unresolved desire in the shadowed moonglow reflecting off the pillar.  "No," he answered, an odd heaviness in his voice, finishing securing the ties holding up his breeches. He touched her hair tentatively, a hesitant gesture, giving up when she moved away from him, only to pitch forward, so that he caught her, a scowl of worry darkening his features. Her legs were unusually numb, inexplicably weak as a newborn foal's.

She was still shaking. She couldn't seem to stop, her hands tremoring like an old woman's.  Enfolded in his powerful embrace, she tried to hug the blanket around her, colder than she had been before, concentrating on not touching him too closely.  It was difficult after the unifying completion they had nearly experienced, feeling bereft and disoriented, the aches and discomforts she'd hadn't been aware prior to his unforeseen objection to immortal entrapment, attacking her ten-fold about her knees and lower back. 

She found herself avoiding his eyes, a trace of embarrassment beginning to flush along the paths where ardency had touched not so long ago.  Gods, her head felt foggy--wondering with a shrinking abasement, where some of those phrases she had uttered came from.  Wanting to shrink even further into herself when she remembered some of them explicitly. 

Taking a steadying breath, regaining some of her composure, she tried again, to break their embrace, clutching the folds of the woolen blanket like armor about her form when she backed away from him carefully.  She wasn't sure why, all at once, she was so discomfited.  It wasn't as though she were a virgin, nor that they hadn't made love before.  Something about this time...well, almost this time—the aftermath, was different.  The fabric of reality, the cold bite of winter air, the chill sky above, black with colorless, crystalline stars, the vaporous cloud of breath Maximus blew out randomly, observing her with a considering, unfathomable look, all seemed bent and out of place. 

She swallowed, hemming awkwardly. "I'm...I'm going to head back to the bedroom," she quivered out between reluctant vocal chords.    

Quick, unforeseen, he grabbed at her as she was about to turn to the gloom of shadowed corridors, colonnaded hallways at right angles to one another, surrounding the insular garden.  Catching her roughly at the elbows, then shoulders, he pivoted, backing her up against the grooved surface of the pillar this time, never giving her a chance to speak, pressing the full weight of his body upon hers, kissing her with a bridled tenderness, at odds with his churlish motion, the urgent need still obvious between his thighs. The assault he laid on her mouth, her lips, with teeth, exploring with tongue, firm, then soft and pliant, drinking from their impassioned embrace like a thirsty man seeking water, bristles of his beard, stubble texture, scraped across her skin as he drew out the play of ardent attack.

Grinding his hips against hers, forcing her legs apart just slightly, the trousers, as before, did little to hide evidence of, what must have been, by now, a killing pressure from his arousal.  He finally released her from the extended onslaught of his lips and mouth, leaving her sagging against him, breathless, and feeling thoroughly bruised.  Strangely, she was devoid of words, a characteristic witty comment, some clever remark to lighten things between them.

He seemed to read her odd melancholy, not pursuing his advantage having her up against the stone column, but gathering her in his arms as though she were as delicate as a girl's glass doll.  Enfolding her, stroking back straggling locks of her stubborn curls, rumbling out with sweet candor, "By the Fates, Nemhyn.  If you're going to call me a king, then, tonight at least, let me serve you as one. In the great paradox of the world, being a warrior--even a leader of men--isn't so very hard compared to loving a woman.  Especially loving one like you."

That shattered the pall of pensive despondency clouding her feeling, snapping her chin up, directing the full brunt of her glare at him. "Whatever that's supposed to mean," she bit out reprovingly. Then breaking into a small chuckle, "I'm fine with you...serving me.  Just don't ask me to walk all the way back to the sleeping quarters. My legs don't seem to be working properly at the moment."  Hearing his deep, rolling laugh begin to rise up, responding to her wry comment, she warmed in her heart, gladdened by the way his jocular grin lightened his features, brightening his eyes with an easy light. 

"Ah, the things you ask of me," he expressed with an attitude of long-suffering forbearance, swinging her up, one arm around her shoulders, the other under her knees.  He evoked a laughing shriek from her when he stumbled, emulating exaggerated strain with a groan, lumbering a couple of steps down the hall. 

"By the three mothers, I'm not that heavy," she huffed out, indignant.  "You sound like you're hefting an overfed brood mare."

"Mmmm, maybe not a brood mare," he mused consideringly, successively striding along, effortlessly now, balancing her weight in burly arms. Just before turning down the juncture to their sleeping quarters, he paused in the engulfing darkness, bouncing her up and down in his arms a few times, like testing the mass of a flour sack.  "Closer to an overfed ewe, I think," he stated, definate, making her exclaim something vicious in protest, her words echoing into the darkness. 

Words swallowed by the kiss he placed upon her mouth, shouldering the door open, entering the chilly domain of their quarters.  Laughter swelled between them, shared caresses, and the re-awakened delight of rapturous ecstasy, the tattered woolen blanket falling to a heap on the floor, joined in short order by his tunic and trousers.

She was rendered nearly speechless with uproarious mirth when he threw her onto their bed, his growling parody of enflamed desire, as he succumbed to his own up-welling of guffaws, cursing the cold in a vapor of breath and a shiver, trying to get the brazier lit with a flint.  The warm, fiery glow spread throughout the room with an orange-gold coziness, allowing her to view his naked form in the dim incandescence, her admiration reflected in the whetted hunger glinting in his eyes, scorching across her body when she stretched, arms coming above her head, reclining languorously. 

"Well?  Are you waiting for a special acknowledgment?" she asked pertly.  Amidst the blankets, furs, and pillows, her hair was spread like a fall of autumn leaves, russet curls adorning pale-flecked skin, the drawn scar tissue of a dagger wound, running the length of her right thigh. 

Suddenly, with a motion as quick as an eye-blink, he dove next to her on the bed, making the frame jolt with a hideously creaking gripe, laughing deeply as she stifled a startled screech, trying to skitter away from his exploring fingers seeking out the ticklish areas of her ribs and lower back.

They grappled like children, Nemhyn giving as good as she got--he had a spot just behind one knee that never failed to send him into rails of mirth, another in that ripple of muscle just between his lowest rib, and his hip bone. They were both breathless with glee, falling against one another, limbs entwined, their playful groping becoming the slower, sliding feel of flesh upon flesh, lips following suit, fingers tangling in hair, trailing down the length of body to seek out more intimate sources of stimulation. 

And that was how they spent the out-tide hours of early morning until the gray pallor of dawn. Tender caresses, whispered utterances of endearment, the arch of her back when he finally sought surcease, joining her in the fulfillment of woman to man, the cyclic rhythm of nature and the oldest dance in the world.  In the white-hot urgency of his climax, he gasped something in her ear, the words drowning in the melting, lush, throb erupting somewhere deep inside of her, engulfing her to the point of impossible pleasure, crying out with joyous bliss as she moved, taking him further into herself.

His exultation was breathless, shaking when he finally fell atop her, slick with perspiration, their hearts hammering to a shared beat. He rolled so that suddenly she was astride him, the pale curve of her hips, the swell of thigh, rich fullness of her breasts, ripe in the repletion of womanhood, all lit like glowing alabaster in the orange-gold shelter of the room.  The simple sweetness in his gaze, the disheveled array of his hair caused her to sweep a finger across his forehead, bending to kiss him softly, shifting along his muscled length, cradled in the crevasse of his shoulder and chest. 

Winter King, veiled goddess of snowy places far from the world of men, raiding Hibernians, vengeful Picti, legions, medicine, could all fade away--look after themselves for the moment. None of that mattered, in the silent, frosty peace of a winter morn, the first rose-pink blush of an invernal sun breaking through the wooden slots of the shutters in shafts of washed out light.  Cuddled in the warm embrace of his arms, feeling his lips brush the top of her head softly, she looked up at him from beneath their shared blankets, realizing, as he started to speak--hushed and solemn, the deep rumbling of his muted voice a treasured sound to her soul--the only thing that did seem to matter, in that winter dawn, was this.  What they had, what they had found in each other, a precious thing, delicate as a new flower rising forth in the icy thaw of early spring, a rare and uncommon gift. 

A blessing to be savored, draw delight from, and as the years rolled by, give thanks to those forces, or fates, that granted such a gift upon the whim of life's twisting circumstance.  What was bestowed never came without a price, though, a sacrifice to an island at the edge of the Western Empire--Britannia.  A leader of men, defender of sovereignty, king-consort to the hidden queen of mist-veiled moors, towering highland peaks, purples and gray, heather-strewn fields.

None of that mattered, however, before the impossible, mortal sweetness his words invoked, filtering upon the imminent dawn-light. The only outlet for her rising of emotion, the expression of tears she angrily tried to stifle.  Not able to suppress the salty drops trailing slowly down her cheeks, as he went on, reciting in his gentle, clipped resonance:

"White in the moon, the long road lies,

The moon stands blank above;

White in the moon the long road lies,

That leads me from my love."

She rose to sitting on her knees by his side, her hair rippling down her back, disheveled curls hanging over shoulders, attentive to keeping the pile of furs and woolen, fleeced hides about them to maintain warmth. 

He was lying back on a down-stuffed pillow, one elbow bent behind his head, his other arm resting, loose and relaxed upon his stomach. Gray irises clear with that lucid appeal, affection and love blatant as rain in an overcast sky, holding her watery gaze. Nemhyn felt her throat constrict, the simplicity of the verses redolent of a child's lullaby, as he continued in a hushed undertone.

"Still hangs the edge without a gust,

Still, still the shadows stay;

My feet upon the moonlit dust

Pursue the ceaseless way." 

A single tear spilled over from the corner of her eye, rolling, a dewdrop against the pale, even skin of her freckled cheek. When it came to bead at her lips, he reached a finger up, wiping the tear away with a gentle caress, his hand curving to the shape of her cheek, holding it there.

"The world is round, so travelers tell,

And straight through reach the track,

Trudge on, trudge on, 'twill all be well;

The way will guide one back."

A single, strangled sob escaped from her raw throat then, so that he sat up by her side, facing her from beneath their shared shroud of bed-linens, the light of washed out dawn beyond the shutters, crisp with the air of winter, dimmed feature, distinguishable detail to shadowed angles cast by the emanating glow of the brazier. He folded her to his chest, strong arms wrapped around the straight, proud curve of her shoulders, breasts bare against the warm, firm-rough feel of his skin. Clutching him around the neck, she wept into groove of his collarbone, giving full vent to the inexplicable sadness welling up, even when she ought to have been laughing in disbelieving happiness. 

"But ere the circle homeward hies," he whispered into the veil of her unbound hair.

"Far, far must it remove;

White in the moon the long road lies

That leads me from my love."