They had outrun their pursuers enough to feel confident letting the horses slow down a bit to get their breath back, but not enough to stop listening for hooves behind them. The company rode in silence, and without the distractions of speech Madmartigan was at liberty to notice Sorsha's weight against his chest, angled back just slightly more than his hold around her warranted. He hadn't seen her in battle, but he knew Kael wouldn't keep company with mere figureheads.
She hadn't escaped.
Had she wanted to?
His arm tensed.
"You're holding me too tight," she complained, but her arms were tight against his.
She scoffed at his excuse that he didn't want her getting away, and he didn't blame her. Apparently his words were finally failing him, though obviously they hadn't the night before.
He wished he could remember what had happened on the mountain. If it were true that she hadn't even tried to escape, what on earth could he possibly have said that would make that true? She didn't seem the type to fall for charm, but then he didn't really know her. At all.
Her hair brushed his face and he turned reflexively into it. It smelled of the outdoors; nothing flowery or even particularly feminine, just wind and sweat and a touch of leather that he assumed came from her helmet, and what was he doing?
He tossed his head. "Get your hair out of my face or I'll chop it off," he said, and unbidden his thoughts went to the braid he had seen Willow stroking gently in the evenings around the campfire. What would it be like, knowing there was somebody who loved you enough to send her beauty with you as a talisman?
He broached the subject of the previous night's conversation as casually as possible, and to his surprise, she didn't rebuff him.
"You said you loved me."
"I don't remember that." He didn't remember anything. That was the problem.
"You lied to me!"
"No, I…" he stopped himself, uneasy at how the sentence had almost finished. "I just wasn't myself last night."
"I suppose my power enchanted you and you were helpless against it."
That was either a supreme (though not unwarranted) amount of self-confidence talking, or she was quoting him. He didn't risk asking.
"Um, sort of."
"Then what?"
Was she actually curious? One way to tell. "It went away."
And then he knew he hadn't been imagining the curve of her spine at rest against him, because Sorsha went as taut as a bowstring.
"'It went away'?" Her voice rose, crackling with indignation. "'I dwell in darkness without you,' and it went away?!"
Smoothly and brutally, she rammed an elbow into his solar plexus and vaulted down from the horse. He leapt off after her, and she was running, and he had time to notice the inefficiency of her stride and the looseness of her arms before he tackled her, bringing her to the ground and pinning her and...and not knowing what to do next.
My sun, my moon, my starlit sky.
I dwell in darkness without you.
He had always been a terrible poet, as more than a few former lovers had informed him. But looking into Sorsha's eyes, he knew those lines he couldn't remember saying had been quoted back to him word for word. And that she had wanted them. Maybe him, too.
In his experience, nobody who had ever wanted him had ever tried to argue herself out of it. He wanted to know why she did. Why she seemed used to believing that expressions of love were nothing more than lies, and yet was so hungry for them that she would take them from an enemy.
He had more arguments against himself than anybody else could possibly muster, and he was no great believer in the heart, either. Somehow, under the influence of that fairy dust, he had made her want to believe. He wondered if he could do it when he was sober. He wondered what it was about this whole quest that had him wanting to believe, too.
He could see himself ending up a willing slave, in the end.
"Hurry, Kael's coming!"
Willow's voice broke the spell of the moment, and Madmartigan dragged Sorsha back up. She kicked and clawed out of his grasp and took off running again, but this time Willow was urging Madmartigan to focus, and the memory of his unceremonious oath of fealty brought the chase to a close.
He mounted his horse and looked back to see Sorsha watching him.
There was no more time for wondering why.