(no subject)
Title: On the Borderland
Fandom: Jack and the Magic Beanstalk/Rapunzel
Rating: R
Summary: Filling in a few empty spaces in the Rapunzel story
Notes: This started out as an English assignment. Needless to say, this isn't the version is turned in. No warnings per se, but it's not all sunshine and daisies. Mostly the names are random.
Once upon a time, I had a very happy life. My wife and I dwelt in my father's castle on the edge of faerie-land. He had been a great knight; my upbringing was much more humble. There is magic in the air on the border of that land, though, and still I love the smell of it.
Only one thing galled the days that were otherwise sweet to taste. The father of my lady wife was a great king, and I, in my own right, was the last to carry my family's name. More than anything, the lady of my house wanted a child, and more than anything, I wanted to please her.
There was a witch who lived very near us. She builded high walls all around her garden and her house, though we could look down into them. A witch she was-and will remain, like as not longer than any of us shall be aught-for she used words like psychology and sociology and was forever conducting strange experiments such that all feared to venture near her and her domain.
There was a day, one day, which I can pinpoint as when my life sat itself squarely upon its head and dumped me mercilessly back into the mainstream of magic and intrigue I had so happily drifted out of. It was a warm day, a spring day fallen into summer, where the sun is the browning, ripening sun of August but the world feels fresh and blossoming. I stood on the parapet, watching my lady wife, my Isabella, take in the sun. She did not wilt or blanch as some ladies do in the faerie mountains. As a matter of fact, she was more wont to chase me through the cornfields, shoes in hand and ever-ready to launch.
But this, this morning she looked down into the witch's garden with a countenance I knew very well.
"I wish for some of that rampion, my lord," she told me without once looking up. It was always my lord from her, always my lord and never Jack.
"What now?" I asked, wits scrambled. Scrambling.
"Rampion. Rapunzel. There." She pointed.
I stepped up to peer over her shoulder. "Oh."
Isabella turned her head to hook me by the eye.
"Rampion, my lord."
I kissed her, a quick, comfortable taste.
"By breakfast, love."
***
The head of my guard gave me a strange look when he saw me at the sally port late that night, dressed in black, face all over in soot, and a kitchen maid's sack for the spoils. I flashed him a grin.
"My lady wishes lettuce," I told him, I am afraid, with undeniable giddiness. Sainted man, he merely lifted a rather too-forward eyebrow and walked on.
Climbing, now, climbing is something I know how to do, and the witch's walls were all over in ivy. Of course, I didn't mean to end up hiding in some giant's oven or lumber pile or wardrobe this time.
There were, thankfully, no man-eating giants or fe-fi-fo-fumming. At breakfast the next morning, I unveiled the salad myself (the cook refused to stand by salad at such an hour anyway) with a chivalrous flourish.
That afternoon, Isabella leaned back into my arms and tilted her chin up to look me in the face from the tops of her eyes.
"What is it?" I asked after I had kissed her nose (for it really was a strange angle to be seeing it from).
She grinned mischievously. "More, please."
"Right here?"
Isabella stepped daintily upon my toe, holding an expression of immense dignity on her face by some means I never was able to fathom. I made a face. She made a face back.
"I really don't see how you can eat such things."
"And it eludes me how you can eat a steak that still has blood dripping off it," she returned. "Please?" Great, soulful eyes bore up into my own. "I'll absolutely die if I don't get it."
"Really?"
"Yes! I shall wither and shrivel and blow away in the wind!" she insisted, flinging her arms wide.
I heaved a sigh. "Oh, all right, then."
***
I had actually been hoping that Isabella would be craving something else, which might have been a sign she was with child, while fixation on a single food smacked of enchantment. I was quite prepared to punch in the teeth of anyone who thought to get away with bespelling my wife.
Whether I was preoccupied with this or the witch's suspicions had been raised or she had other reasons to be in her garden at that unholy hour I shall probably never know. The fact remains that she was and that she caught me as I was scaling the wall with my booty.
In what pitiful defence it is possible for me to attempt, I might point out that I'd hardly been getting any sleep, or that when the phrase firstborn child popped into all the talk of social experiments and controlled environment, it wasn't meant literally. I never made any excuses to Isabella. The image of her then still comes clear as seeing if I but close my eyes and look. Her hair was thick and smooth, russet or brown depending on the light. (Mine is blonde enough for the both of us, and winds in hopeless, wonton curls.) The expression in her eyes dragged inevitably after it the drawn lines crawling from them and across her face. We fought horribly in those months before the baby was birthed; gnawed upon and broken. After, Isabella left me and returned to her father's court. I abandoned my castle to my vassals' care and set off into the wilds of the faerie-land, roaming until I settled in this small hut in the friendless wilds. With my hands I built it, and I have found through the long years that if my hands are busy the rest of me quiets.
***
Twice, in the time that has passed, have my solitary illusions been shattered. Once, the witch came along a path that runs through my range and brought with her a young woman whose buttery tresses hung at ragged ends. Some days later, after the witch had gone again by the way she had come, I dared to follow the trail to its end. I did not speak, nor did I show myself. I believed I held no more happy endings.
The second time, it was a man. Noise of his clumsy passage through the snowy brush came to my ears. I rushed towards it, thinking it was perhaps a lost child.
He was handsome, of that there was no doubt, but his face bore the wheals of low branches over its hunger-sunken features. His clothes were ragged and his hair and beard a tangled mess. But his eyes, they stopped me cold.
"Here," I said, my voice rough from disuse. He whipped around, feral and exhausted. A heart-wrenching, confused torrent of pain, anger, and hope flashed across his face.
"Here, now," I said, approaching him, arms feeling the way as though I were the blind man. "I'm a friend."
I reached out to him, laid my hand on his shoulder. For all his meagre frame, he pulled me immediately into a firm embrace.
"Friend," he breathed against my collarbone, as though I proved the reality of the universe. "Yes; I feel I've heard your voice before, though I cannot remember where."
"It's alright." The bones of his shoulders and ribs were clearly sensible to my unsure but comforting arms. "I have a cabin. It's just a little ways from here. There's a fire and warm food-my cooking's not killed anyone yet. You're more like to die of the lack, in any case. What have you been living off? Berries? We'll soon have some meat into you, no worries."
With this gentle, burbling stream of trivialities, I gingerly parted the young man from his death-grip on my torso and, drawing his arm over my shoulders, led him slowly back to my home.
At first, he had little energy but to sleep and eat. He did not talk much and had a tendency to jump at small sounds so that I did not attempt to shave him until he had grown more used to me. His silences I filled with all the talk there had been no ear for in nearly a score of years. It was not until I had scraped the beard off his face (what it had resembled, precisely, I am uncertain but it was most definitely dead and poorly skinned) and was working at his hair with quiet concentration that he spoke.
"My-my name is Carados."
For the briefest of moments, my hands stilled. A smile drew itself across my face, then, and my fingers resumed their work..
"Why are you doing this, Jack?" he asked, and I replied:
"What else should I do? Ah," and here I tugged at an impossible snarl, "how terribly attached to this are you? There's only one way I can think of to roust this one, and the rest look to be worse."
Carados frowned. "Wouldn't it look a trifle silly?"
"Not as silly as burrs poking out of your head," I insisted. "Besides, you've a good face under it all."
His fingers went self-consciously to his freshly bared countenance, lightly tracing the features there. I couldn't see what emotion held his face. Abruptly, Carados stiffened, as if in realisation, and his hand felt awkwardly at the matted locks in question, through which I still had my coarsened fingers threaded.
"Go ahead," he told me, letting his hand fall away. I almost reached out for it, but as I watched I will not say that the young man squared his shoulders, yet still there was less of the crippled, uncaring slump to them and it warmed my heart. Cautiously, I extricated my digits from among the clinging strands.
We had to make do with my belt knife. It was, at least, less awkward than the razor would have been. By the end there was hair everywhere. It floated, glinting in the firelight and dusting the floor. What I considered an excessive amount of it went up my sleeves or found its way into my collar. It itched. A lot; which was nothing in comparison to Carados, down whose back the better part of it had been falling. What can I say? I am no barber.
I ran my hands a last time over his scalp, shaking loose a last cloud of thick hairs and, in the process, trying to smooth down the uneven ends. Carados shivered.
"Cold?" I asked him, touching his shoulder
"No. Warm, actually."
His head kept twitching, though; tiny little shakes. Before I could as if he were all right, I heard a puff of breath and realisation dawned. A crack of disused laughter escaped my open mouth instead as Carados comically endeavoured to blow the insidious snips of hair out of his face. My good humour was contagious, it appears, for I read no sobs in the shaking of his back. (I had seen far more of his tears than I would have wished to of anyone's.) Almost helplessly, he curled forward, raising his hands to his face.
I caught them in my own, taking a moment to regain my breath.
"Don't want to do that, Carados. If you rub at it, you'll only make it worse."
"It itches," he complained, and I had to chuckle at that.
"I know," I told him, sweeping my thumbs soothingly along his wrists. "I should heat water so we can wash it off."
Neither of us moved, though I continued to stroke the skin at the back of his thumb.
"Mm," Carados replied at length, letting his newly shorn head fall back against my chest. I was massaging his open hands now, calluses like a map. Sword, staff, bow and arrow. His fingers were long and graceful but almost as rough as mine, chapped by the season. They flexed, open-close, as I kneaded them.
Gradually, my hands wandered higher, stroking away the tension in Carados' arms. He was making low, pleased baritone rumblings.
We were seated on the floor, the wood of which was smoothed, product of a score of boring winters and too-hot summers, and covered anyway by fur rugs. A pile of soft furs is much more comfortable than a chair, and easier to construct. Except for Carados, there has never been any company to entertain, nor niceties to observe. By then, I had grown used to living as I would. I thought as little of people, and the past, as possible. It was a dull ache only, from time to time, and after I had let my sighs loose themselves as they wished, I would get up and hunt for dinner or new wood for the fire. There had been no question of wanting anything from life; existence was merely a fact.
Carados sank back as though I were a couch. I hated to stop, for the look of peace on his face. Not quite of peace. And so I let my fingers continue to explore the muscled contours of his arms. His soft hair brushed my nose with a movement of his head and I inhaled, smelling dusty snow and magic.
He half-turned, supporting his weight by an elbow on my knee. Reaching up, his hand covered my face with slow, firm touches. My breath stuttered against his palm.
One of my arms was draped over Carados' waist as a result of his turning. There was an acute lack of space between us, across which I could not help the fixation of my eyes upon his visage. His face was most like to the carvings of faerie princes or kings which peeped from nests of frenzied scrollwork on baseboards or doorframes in my father's castle. It was whittled nearer to perfection by forces I did not want to recognise in all their unforgiving familiarity.
I leant down to brush my lips against his, though, for the ease of his expression. A warm rush of gratitude drew me to Carados. I saw myself in him, and that peace was yet within his scope was balm to my weathered and badly-used heart. I kissed him again.
Carados did not move away but remained, recycling my air, for long minutes. His exploratory hand skipped ticklishly to my chest. My laughter caught us both by surprise and Carados was suddenly all light fingers and teasing breath until I surrendered under him, prone on the deeply piled furs. His mouth found mine again in an endless string of wet, warm kisses deepening unhurriedly. Carados clung to me as he had in the woods: as though the world would not exist if not for me, and so I was something precious of which he must not let go.
I touched his sides and chest, caressing skin wherever I could find it. I could feel the racing of Carados' heart as my hands splayed beneath his shirt-my shirt; his clothes had been tatters-pressing him down onto me. My chin hooked over his shoulder, and I stole time to relearn how to breathe with another body against mine.
A fleeting image of Isabella crossed my mind, the radiance of the sun and the passion of storms. It was quiet now, still around our bubble of lulling warmth. A strange taste crept into my mouth, and what were almost tears blurred my vision. Of a sudden it felt like my heart was beating again. Sound and movement were sharp-edged, conveying to my parched senses the thrumming vitality of Carados' body, so close.
I gasped out something and arched up into the unmistakeable hardness against my thigh. Turning his head, Carados bit my neck, alternating teeth and tongue along the muscle.
Squirming a little, I started pushing at Carados' shirt. I missed Isabella's laces with what hazy part of my mind was left for such things. I had never considered them an important component of a tunic, which was clearly a grievous oversight on my part. Carados deeply begrudged the loss of contact while I removed first his shirt and then my own. As much did I; we fell each upon the other, hungrily marking skin with fingers, tongues and teeth. How the trousers were managed remains a blur. I remember being exultantly naked with him, and the instant I owned to loving his every inch. Eyes closed and lips parted, brazen in the light of the fire, he played upon my heartstrings more powerfully even than he did upon my body.
The inevitable process of washing up was made rather more protracted by the fact that errant snippets of Carados' hair had permeated the astonishingly manifold crevices and creases of our bodies. I must admit a certain gratitude that Carados could not actually watch my awkward and irritated contortions; he laughed quite enough as it was.
***
Carados stayed with me for nearly a month. Winter was just an occasional fleeting breath. As we sat together before the fire, I shifted my gaze from the flames to Carados' clouded eyes. Magic swirled over and through them, like an opaque shell. The knowledge hung heavy in my heart. However common my life and upbringing, my family has lived on the borderland for generations. I knew magic when it was beans in a butcher's hands. And I know an ensorcellment when it's sitting next to me on my bear-skin rug.
He shifted, tilting his head towards me, firelight casting light-lines on his skin.
"I'm a prince, you know," he told me sadly.
I made no move to reply. Carados was like that; he would talk into the stillness and make it hum with his words. And in that light, wrapped in magic and fireglow, I had no difficulty believing him. I had been waiting for this, his story. I would not have blamed him for leaving this memory unvoiced. I did not have the courage to voice mine. So I listened as the words fell from his lips to scatter about my cabin's solitary room, lodging themselves behind wooden carvings and crude crockery, a few lighting softly on the mantle or diving into the hearth.
At last, at last, he was finished, and I was selfishly glad that Carados couldn't see the tears brimming in my eyes.
"I want to stay here," he said. "I-I should like to stay here. I can fill your silences and you, my darkness."
I placed a gentle hand on his shoulder, then tousled his dark hair.
"We must get off early in the morning. I have something to show you. We'd best get some sleep."
***
When the sun broke the following day, I took Carados, son of Llŷr, down the path. It was two days before we reached to end of it. I stopped before the forest opened. I don't know how Carados knew to go on, but he did. I have to believe he understood. That if I was wrong he would have found his way back.
It remains the hardest thing I've ever done and I didn't even have the courage to do it properly. I turned around and walked back up the path. I didn't break into a run until I was a league away.
All it shows, I suppose, is that I'm a weak old fool. But I have to believe that I made it right. I have to believe that I had one more happy ending left to give.
Fandom: Jack and the Magic Beanstalk/Rapunzel
Rating: R
Summary: Filling in a few empty spaces in the Rapunzel story
Notes: This started out as an English assignment. Needless to say, this isn't the version is turned in. No warnings per se, but it's not all sunshine and daisies. Mostly the names are random.
Once upon a time, I had a very happy life. My wife and I dwelt in my father's castle on the edge of faerie-land. He had been a great knight; my upbringing was much more humble. There is magic in the air on the border of that land, though, and still I love the smell of it.
Only one thing galled the days that were otherwise sweet to taste. The father of my lady wife was a great king, and I, in my own right, was the last to carry my family's name. More than anything, the lady of my house wanted a child, and more than anything, I wanted to please her.
There was a witch who lived very near us. She builded high walls all around her garden and her house, though we could look down into them. A witch she was-and will remain, like as not longer than any of us shall be aught-for she used words like psychology and sociology and was forever conducting strange experiments such that all feared to venture near her and her domain.
There was a day, one day, which I can pinpoint as when my life sat itself squarely upon its head and dumped me mercilessly back into the mainstream of magic and intrigue I had so happily drifted out of. It was a warm day, a spring day fallen into summer, where the sun is the browning, ripening sun of August but the world feels fresh and blossoming. I stood on the parapet, watching my lady wife, my Isabella, take in the sun. She did not wilt or blanch as some ladies do in the faerie mountains. As a matter of fact, she was more wont to chase me through the cornfields, shoes in hand and ever-ready to launch.
But this, this morning she looked down into the witch's garden with a countenance I knew very well.
"I wish for some of that rampion, my lord," she told me without once looking up. It was always my lord from her, always my lord and never Jack.
"What now?" I asked, wits scrambled. Scrambling.
"Rampion. Rapunzel. There." She pointed.
I stepped up to peer over her shoulder. "Oh."
Isabella turned her head to hook me by the eye.
"Rampion, my lord."
I kissed her, a quick, comfortable taste.
"By breakfast, love."
***
The head of my guard gave me a strange look when he saw me at the sally port late that night, dressed in black, face all over in soot, and a kitchen maid's sack for the spoils. I flashed him a grin.
"My lady wishes lettuce," I told him, I am afraid, with undeniable giddiness. Sainted man, he merely lifted a rather too-forward eyebrow and walked on.
Climbing, now, climbing is something I know how to do, and the witch's walls were all over in ivy. Of course, I didn't mean to end up hiding in some giant's oven or lumber pile or wardrobe this time.
There were, thankfully, no man-eating giants or fe-fi-fo-fumming. At breakfast the next morning, I unveiled the salad myself (the cook refused to stand by salad at such an hour anyway) with a chivalrous flourish.
That afternoon, Isabella leaned back into my arms and tilted her chin up to look me in the face from the tops of her eyes.
"What is it?" I asked after I had kissed her nose (for it really was a strange angle to be seeing it from).
She grinned mischievously. "More, please."
"Right here?"
Isabella stepped daintily upon my toe, holding an expression of immense dignity on her face by some means I never was able to fathom. I made a face. She made a face back.
"I really don't see how you can eat such things."
"And it eludes me how you can eat a steak that still has blood dripping off it," she returned. "Please?" Great, soulful eyes bore up into my own. "I'll absolutely die if I don't get it."
"Really?"
"Yes! I shall wither and shrivel and blow away in the wind!" she insisted, flinging her arms wide.
I heaved a sigh. "Oh, all right, then."
***
I had actually been hoping that Isabella would be craving something else, which might have been a sign she was with child, while fixation on a single food smacked of enchantment. I was quite prepared to punch in the teeth of anyone who thought to get away with bespelling my wife.
Whether I was preoccupied with this or the witch's suspicions had been raised or she had other reasons to be in her garden at that unholy hour I shall probably never know. The fact remains that she was and that she caught me as I was scaling the wall with my booty.
In what pitiful defence it is possible for me to attempt, I might point out that I'd hardly been getting any sleep, or that when the phrase firstborn child popped into all the talk of social experiments and controlled environment, it wasn't meant literally. I never made any excuses to Isabella. The image of her then still comes clear as seeing if I but close my eyes and look. Her hair was thick and smooth, russet or brown depending on the light. (Mine is blonde enough for the both of us, and winds in hopeless, wonton curls.) The expression in her eyes dragged inevitably after it the drawn lines crawling from them and across her face. We fought horribly in those months before the baby was birthed; gnawed upon and broken. After, Isabella left me and returned to her father's court. I abandoned my castle to my vassals' care and set off into the wilds of the faerie-land, roaming until I settled in this small hut in the friendless wilds. With my hands I built it, and I have found through the long years that if my hands are busy the rest of me quiets.
***
Twice, in the time that has passed, have my solitary illusions been shattered. Once, the witch came along a path that runs through my range and brought with her a young woman whose buttery tresses hung at ragged ends. Some days later, after the witch had gone again by the way she had come, I dared to follow the trail to its end. I did not speak, nor did I show myself. I believed I held no more happy endings.
The second time, it was a man. Noise of his clumsy passage through the snowy brush came to my ears. I rushed towards it, thinking it was perhaps a lost child.
He was handsome, of that there was no doubt, but his face bore the wheals of low branches over its hunger-sunken features. His clothes were ragged and his hair and beard a tangled mess. But his eyes, they stopped me cold.
"Here," I said, my voice rough from disuse. He whipped around, feral and exhausted. A heart-wrenching, confused torrent of pain, anger, and hope flashed across his face.
"Here, now," I said, approaching him, arms feeling the way as though I were the blind man. "I'm a friend."
I reached out to him, laid my hand on his shoulder. For all his meagre frame, he pulled me immediately into a firm embrace.
"Friend," he breathed against my collarbone, as though I proved the reality of the universe. "Yes; I feel I've heard your voice before, though I cannot remember where."
"It's alright." The bones of his shoulders and ribs were clearly sensible to my unsure but comforting arms. "I have a cabin. It's just a little ways from here. There's a fire and warm food-my cooking's not killed anyone yet. You're more like to die of the lack, in any case. What have you been living off? Berries? We'll soon have some meat into you, no worries."
With this gentle, burbling stream of trivialities, I gingerly parted the young man from his death-grip on my torso and, drawing his arm over my shoulders, led him slowly back to my home.
At first, he had little energy but to sleep and eat. He did not talk much and had a tendency to jump at small sounds so that I did not attempt to shave him until he had grown more used to me. His silences I filled with all the talk there had been no ear for in nearly a score of years. It was not until I had scraped the beard off his face (what it had resembled, precisely, I am uncertain but it was most definitely dead and poorly skinned) and was working at his hair with quiet concentration that he spoke.
"My-my name is Carados."
For the briefest of moments, my hands stilled. A smile drew itself across my face, then, and my fingers resumed their work..
"Why are you doing this, Jack?" he asked, and I replied:
"What else should I do? Ah," and here I tugged at an impossible snarl, "how terribly attached to this are you? There's only one way I can think of to roust this one, and the rest look to be worse."
Carados frowned. "Wouldn't it look a trifle silly?"
"Not as silly as burrs poking out of your head," I insisted. "Besides, you've a good face under it all."
His fingers went self-consciously to his freshly bared countenance, lightly tracing the features there. I couldn't see what emotion held his face. Abruptly, Carados stiffened, as if in realisation, and his hand felt awkwardly at the matted locks in question, through which I still had my coarsened fingers threaded.
"Go ahead," he told me, letting his hand fall away. I almost reached out for it, but as I watched I will not say that the young man squared his shoulders, yet still there was less of the crippled, uncaring slump to them and it warmed my heart. Cautiously, I extricated my digits from among the clinging strands.
We had to make do with my belt knife. It was, at least, less awkward than the razor would have been. By the end there was hair everywhere. It floated, glinting in the firelight and dusting the floor. What I considered an excessive amount of it went up my sleeves or found its way into my collar. It itched. A lot; which was nothing in comparison to Carados, down whose back the better part of it had been falling. What can I say? I am no barber.
I ran my hands a last time over his scalp, shaking loose a last cloud of thick hairs and, in the process, trying to smooth down the uneven ends. Carados shivered.
"Cold?" I asked him, touching his shoulder
"No. Warm, actually."
His head kept twitching, though; tiny little shakes. Before I could as if he were all right, I heard a puff of breath and realisation dawned. A crack of disused laughter escaped my open mouth instead as Carados comically endeavoured to blow the insidious snips of hair out of his face. My good humour was contagious, it appears, for I read no sobs in the shaking of his back. (I had seen far more of his tears than I would have wished to of anyone's.) Almost helplessly, he curled forward, raising his hands to his face.
I caught them in my own, taking a moment to regain my breath.
"Don't want to do that, Carados. If you rub at it, you'll only make it worse."
"It itches," he complained, and I had to chuckle at that.
"I know," I told him, sweeping my thumbs soothingly along his wrists. "I should heat water so we can wash it off."
Neither of us moved, though I continued to stroke the skin at the back of his thumb.
"Mm," Carados replied at length, letting his newly shorn head fall back against my chest. I was massaging his open hands now, calluses like a map. Sword, staff, bow and arrow. His fingers were long and graceful but almost as rough as mine, chapped by the season. They flexed, open-close, as I kneaded them.
Gradually, my hands wandered higher, stroking away the tension in Carados' arms. He was making low, pleased baritone rumblings.
We were seated on the floor, the wood of which was smoothed, product of a score of boring winters and too-hot summers, and covered anyway by fur rugs. A pile of soft furs is much more comfortable than a chair, and easier to construct. Except for Carados, there has never been any company to entertain, nor niceties to observe. By then, I had grown used to living as I would. I thought as little of people, and the past, as possible. It was a dull ache only, from time to time, and after I had let my sighs loose themselves as they wished, I would get up and hunt for dinner or new wood for the fire. There had been no question of wanting anything from life; existence was merely a fact.
Carados sank back as though I were a couch. I hated to stop, for the look of peace on his face. Not quite of peace. And so I let my fingers continue to explore the muscled contours of his arms. His soft hair brushed my nose with a movement of his head and I inhaled, smelling dusty snow and magic.
He half-turned, supporting his weight by an elbow on my knee. Reaching up, his hand covered my face with slow, firm touches. My breath stuttered against his palm.
One of my arms was draped over Carados' waist as a result of his turning. There was an acute lack of space between us, across which I could not help the fixation of my eyes upon his visage. His face was most like to the carvings of faerie princes or kings which peeped from nests of frenzied scrollwork on baseboards or doorframes in my father's castle. It was whittled nearer to perfection by forces I did not want to recognise in all their unforgiving familiarity.
I leant down to brush my lips against his, though, for the ease of his expression. A warm rush of gratitude drew me to Carados. I saw myself in him, and that peace was yet within his scope was balm to my weathered and badly-used heart. I kissed him again.
Carados did not move away but remained, recycling my air, for long minutes. His exploratory hand skipped ticklishly to my chest. My laughter caught us both by surprise and Carados was suddenly all light fingers and teasing breath until I surrendered under him, prone on the deeply piled furs. His mouth found mine again in an endless string of wet, warm kisses deepening unhurriedly. Carados clung to me as he had in the woods: as though the world would not exist if not for me, and so I was something precious of which he must not let go.
I touched his sides and chest, caressing skin wherever I could find it. I could feel the racing of Carados' heart as my hands splayed beneath his shirt-my shirt; his clothes had been tatters-pressing him down onto me. My chin hooked over his shoulder, and I stole time to relearn how to breathe with another body against mine.
A fleeting image of Isabella crossed my mind, the radiance of the sun and the passion of storms. It was quiet now, still around our bubble of lulling warmth. A strange taste crept into my mouth, and what were almost tears blurred my vision. Of a sudden it felt like my heart was beating again. Sound and movement were sharp-edged, conveying to my parched senses the thrumming vitality of Carados' body, so close.
I gasped out something and arched up into the unmistakeable hardness against my thigh. Turning his head, Carados bit my neck, alternating teeth and tongue along the muscle.
Squirming a little, I started pushing at Carados' shirt. I missed Isabella's laces with what hazy part of my mind was left for such things. I had never considered them an important component of a tunic, which was clearly a grievous oversight on my part. Carados deeply begrudged the loss of contact while I removed first his shirt and then my own. As much did I; we fell each upon the other, hungrily marking skin with fingers, tongues and teeth. How the trousers were managed remains a blur. I remember being exultantly naked with him, and the instant I owned to loving his every inch. Eyes closed and lips parted, brazen in the light of the fire, he played upon my heartstrings more powerfully even than he did upon my body.
The inevitable process of washing up was made rather more protracted by the fact that errant snippets of Carados' hair had permeated the astonishingly manifold crevices and creases of our bodies. I must admit a certain gratitude that Carados could not actually watch my awkward and irritated contortions; he laughed quite enough as it was.
***
Carados stayed with me for nearly a month. Winter was just an occasional fleeting breath. As we sat together before the fire, I shifted my gaze from the flames to Carados' clouded eyes. Magic swirled over and through them, like an opaque shell. The knowledge hung heavy in my heart. However common my life and upbringing, my family has lived on the borderland for generations. I knew magic when it was beans in a butcher's hands. And I know an ensorcellment when it's sitting next to me on my bear-skin rug.
He shifted, tilting his head towards me, firelight casting light-lines on his skin.
"I'm a prince, you know," he told me sadly.
I made no move to reply. Carados was like that; he would talk into the stillness and make it hum with his words. And in that light, wrapped in magic and fireglow, I had no difficulty believing him. I had been waiting for this, his story. I would not have blamed him for leaving this memory unvoiced. I did not have the courage to voice mine. So I listened as the words fell from his lips to scatter about my cabin's solitary room, lodging themselves behind wooden carvings and crude crockery, a few lighting softly on the mantle or diving into the hearth.
At last, at last, he was finished, and I was selfishly glad that Carados couldn't see the tears brimming in my eyes.
"I want to stay here," he said. "I-I should like to stay here. I can fill your silences and you, my darkness."
I placed a gentle hand on his shoulder, then tousled his dark hair.
"We must get off early in the morning. I have something to show you. We'd best get some sleep."
***
When the sun broke the following day, I took Carados, son of Llŷr, down the path. It was two days before we reached to end of it. I stopped before the forest opened. I don't know how Carados knew to go on, but he did. I have to believe he understood. That if I was wrong he would have found his way back.
It remains the hardest thing I've ever done and I didn't even have the courage to do it properly. I turned around and walked back up the path. I didn't break into a run until I was a league away.
All it shows, I suppose, is that I'm a weak old fool. But I have to believe that I made it right. I have to believe that I had one more happy ending left to give.