Where Does The Nose Go? | part two
contents (nsfw): Ser Duncan The Tall x fem!mer!reader, inspired by HCA’s The Little Mermaid, switching POVs (indicated with dividers), medieval rom-com, love at first sight, mutual pining, yearning, caretaking, wound tending, awkwardness, angst that resolves, fluff, first kiss, lots of kissing actually, love confessions, body dysmorphia, body worship (feet and legs), cunnilingus, mild biting and marking, hair pulling, size difference, size kink, explicit consent, loss of virginity, pain during sex, riding, breast play, nipple play, coming inside, aftercare, protective!Dunk, virgin!Dunk, soft!Dunk, bittersweet ending.
<- part one
synopsis: A mermaid falls in love with a knight praying on her riverbank. A witch gives her legs and three days to make him love her back.
word count: 21,2K (I don't even know guys)
a/n: Banner is by me, dividers by @strangergraphics and @honeyluvsw! Thank you lovely humans for giving it a read before publishing (@lateknightbites, @hextoken and @siliceousooze)!
When you wake the sword rests exactly where it was put in the evening, as if its weight disregards night-time shuffling. You study it from your side of the bedroll, baffled by the patience of it. Perhaps it is only a symbol, one of those man-made rules given shape in iron. Perhaps Duncan would have struck you with it had you rolled too far in your sleep and crossed into whatever danger he believes lives on the other side. The thought has no sense to it. The sword does nothing to quell you. In the night he is warm through cotton and blanket, broad back turned to you. His hair is curled soft at the nape where sleep has dampened it. You fell into slumber looking at that small dark place beneath his skull. You wake to his side empty and sunken into the ground.
So he has kissed before. Says he enjoyed it, or supposes he has. You are thoroughly torn on the matter. On one hand, it is good that at least one of you might know what to do with hands and tongues and teeth. On the other, it ires you greatly that someone you have already marked as your man has rested his mouth on another—and more than one, you presume, from the way he speaks of it—and found pleasure there. You wonder if the women he kissed bore any likeness to you. If he would find it agreeable to kiss you. If all that blushing and hiding of his face comes from the abashment of wanting, or if he is plainly too polite to tell you to stop. If two remaining days are enough to charm him, or if the witch tricked you to get her fill of a soul.
Trying to rise finds you stiff all over. Sleep in water gives the body constant motion. It hones you into fluid, graceful softness, even in dreams. Sleep on land is a meaner thing. The ground holds you in one shape and punishes you for keeping it. Your wretched legs have forgotten everything they learned the day before and returned to being useless logs, long and dumb beneath you. The cut across your foot pulses with a dull little heart of its own.
You push yourself up on your arms. Try to bend one knee. Then the other. Nothing comes kindly. Your joints pull, thighs ache, feet sit at the end of you, inert and limp.
Duncan comes back from the stream with the waterskin filled and dark at the seams. The moment he sees you struggling, he hastens over, nearly sloshing water down his leg.
“Hallo, m’lady,” he says, breath touched with worry. He bends, and his hands hover a moment, large and useless in the air. You make the choice for him, seizing his forearms and grunting angrily as you haul yourself toward him.
“Are you in pain?” he asks.
“No, it is only—” You huff, because the lie is poor and the truth is stupid. “I have gone stiff in the night.”
His grip steadies. “Aye. It happens so to folk unused to sleeping on the ground.” He bows his head a little with plain and honest regret, as though the hardness of the earth were some failing of his hospitality. “Forgive me for not giving you better rest.”
“I enjoy the arrangement,” you say, and mean it more than he can know. “Just my legs seem to disagree.”
He helps you out of the bedroll and onto the grass. At once, your knees show their feeble loyalty. One gives, then the other threatens. Duncan catches each stumble before it can become a fall, swift and careful. His hands close round yours until you are held between him like something being taught to stand by force of kindness.
“Easy,” he says. His eyes are lowered to the ground between you, watching your feet as if they are creatures likely to calm under his gaze. “Hold to me.”
So you hold. He steps back. You step forward, or try. He faces you all the while, walking backwards with a patience that ought to shame the road. His palms stay firm around yours, drawing you neither too fast nor too far. “Put your weight here," he says. Corrects, "No, not so much," when you get that wrong too. "Heel first. Then let the rest follow. Aye, that’s better.”
“It feels worse,” you say.
“Aye, well. Better things often do,” Duncan replies, which sounds to you like another of those human miseries dressed up as wisdom.
After a few steps, his brow furrows. “Were you hurt, then? Is that why it comes so hard?”
You nod quickly, because it is easier than explaining the truth and close enough to keep from being a lie. You hope he will not prod at it, and he does not. He only adjusts his hold and lets you try again.
“I’d wager you are used to softer beds,” he says, likely meaning to ease whatever discomfort has grown between you.
You think of weed-beds and wet sand. Of tree roots stretching their long limbs down into the water, making cradles in the dark. Of sleeping where the current runs over your back and little fish nose curiously at your hair. None of it is soft in the way he means. All of it is gone from you.
“Not exactly,” you say.
Duncan looks at you for half a breath. Then, he mumbles, “Right.” He keeps safeguarding you across the grass, step after strenuous little step. After a while, he clears his throat. “So. Are you seeking to reunite with kin in Riverrun, or—?”
Your brows rise. For a moment you cannot tell what he is asking. Whether he has found some crack in you. Whether he is trying to pry loose the fib you have not quite told. Whether he only wishes to make talk because your hands are in his and silence has begun to notice.
Your folk come to mind with no gentleness at all. There is no coddling among them. No teaching of the young beyond what hunger teaches. You are spat into the world, and if the bodies that made you survive their coupling, they become only two more mouths in the same water. Two more foes over food, territory, warmth, the shadowed places where a creature might sleep without teeth finding her. “I am seeking a fuller life,” you say.
The sadness in your own voice surprises you.
Duncan’s hold changes. Softens at the edges. His thumbs brush over your sleeves, and one finds the bare skin at your wrist by accident. Instead of pulling away, he stays. For a heartbeat, he only stands with you held between his hands, looking down as though some answer might be written in the grass.
You are unaware that it indeed is. When your foot skids back a little, Duncan gasps quietly. “Oh, heavens,” he mutters. His whole frame dips, and he sets your palms on his shoulders so you do not stumble. You cling there, confused, while he lowers himself before you and looks at the grass.
“You’re bleeding,” he says, and there is a soft tsk in it. “M’lady, you’re bleeding still.”
“Oh?” You look down as if the foot belongs to someone else. “I thought—”
“Hold to me.” Then, he takes you by the ankle before you can ask why. Warm fingers, broad enough to meet round the bone. The touch startles more than the pain. He lifts your foot with such care that the rest of you must lean harder into his shoulders, then sets his palm flat to the sole. When he draws it back, red has smeared bright across the heel of it.
Duncan frowns up at you. “Why did you not tell me you were wounded?”
You stare at the blood on his skin. “I thought it would close.”
It should have. Your old body sealed itself quickly. Slashes, bites, the ragged marks left by shell or tooth—by morning they would be shut, tender at the seams perhaps, but no longer asking anything of you. Certainly not for a knight crouched in the grass with your ankle in his hand and alarm in his face. The witch has given you legs and human weakness with them. Flesh that opens and stays open. Flesh that must be begged back together.
“I thought it would just—”
“It needs tending,” Duncan says. His voice gentles, as if he has heard some of what you cannot say. “We’ll see to it. Aye?” He lets go of your ankle and rises with your hands still on his shoulders. “May I carry you?”
You nod and put your arms round his neck, ready for the old manner of being lifted. Instead, his hands come to your waist. The blush returns to him fierce and pink, but he endures it. He simply braces you there, lifts, and carries you back over the grass with your feet held clear of the ground.
His face is close. Too close for the shape of him to stay sensible. He looks you in the eye, searching for protest or hurt, but the looking itself becomes unbearable. You draw a larger breath into your lungs, and your chest expands against his. Duncan closes his eyes for a brief moment. His breath smells of crushed mint.
“There we are,” he mutters when he reaches the bedroll.
He sets you down as if the earth might bruise you further, then reaches for waterskin and turns to his sack. Begins pulling things from it: a strip of cloth and a little packet of something dried and green.
“I’ll clean it first,” he says. “Then bind it. It may smart.”
You give him your foot when he reaches for it. His thumb brushes your toes by accident, and the whole limb twitches under the tickle. There's a tiny squeal, and Duncan's face cracks into a smile that seems impossible to withhold. He looks dear with it.
He wets a clean cloth and wipes away the blood that has started seeping again under the pressure of walking. You watch him in silence. His head is bent, hair falling forward, mouth set in focus. “Thought it would close,” he murmurs once, almost to himself, and huffs through his nose as if the notion offends him.
When he presses harder, you hiss and jerk your leg. His grip holds firm enough that you only thrash a little. “Beg pardon,” he says. “Forgive me. I did not mean to hurt you. I’ll be gentler.”
You bite the inside of your lip. He is so lovely to you that it empties your head. There is no answer fit for it, so you close your eyes and let the touch happen. Cloth over sole. Fingers at ankle. Palm holding your calf when he forgets himself in the work. He handles pain as if it is something that can be negotiated with, made smaller by tender perseverance.
When he binds the foot, he sets your heel against his thigh to check the tightness. “Too hard?”
You shake your head.
He tears the remaining tongue of bandage with his teeth, then secures it with a bow. The bow only makes things worse in your heart. A man knowing how to tie one. That fact that his hands can hold sword and rein and still make this small, neat kindness at the end of your body.
“You’ll be glad,” he says, sitting back. “No shoe for this one.”
“How will I walk?”
“You won’t.” He gives the bandage one last look, then lifts his eyes to yours. “Let it seal. I’ll carry you to Chestnut and off her again, if you’ll let me.”
"I'll allow it," you tell him, and Duncan snorts through his nose.
“That is kind of you,” he says with his mouth pulled shyly at one corner.
He packs the camp with the care of someone used to owning very few things and losing none of them. Oilcloth rolled, wool shaken out, bowls wiped with grass, and fire killed under his boot until smoke gives up in sullen threads. He loads the horses, checks straps, checks them again, then comes back to you as if lifting a girl on and off beasts has become one more road-task his hands are meant to know.
When he sets you on Chestnut, your arms go round his neck and he bears it with the same amount of colour proximity always seems to paint him. “There ye are,” he says, and steps back once you are sat properly.
The day grows warmer than the one before. At first you think the heat is only the sun choosing to dislike you more openly. Then your new body begins casting out its own water. It gathers at your neck, under your arms, between your breasts, slicking you in a thin unpleasant film. Sweat, you remember. Humans leak themselves when the air grows heavy. Understandable why they are so fond of cloth. It gives the body somewhere to be ashamed.
Ahead, Duncan rides with his shoulders set beneath his shirt, and soon the linen darkens down the column of his spine. It clings there, marking the long line of him. His back is broad enough to resemble one of those softer beds he keeps apologising for failing to provide. You think it would be a better one than the ground, and likely kinder.
Chestnut begins blowing through her nose, impatient with the heat. Duncan turns in the saddle. “Aye,” he tells her. “We ought to cool off somewhere.” Then his eyes come to you, expectant now in a way that pleases you. “Any water near?”
You look around. Wait. Listen past the horse-breath and tack-creak and road dust. There. “A little further ahead,” you say, pointing. “There should be a stream.”
Duncan nods this time without that careful pity from yesterday. Soon enough the road bends and forks into a smaller path toward the trees you chose. Beneath the leaves, water susurrates over stone, plain as speech.
He stops in a green hollow where the stream runs slow and bright. First he helps you down from Chestnut, hands steady, then settles you in the shade on a soft bed of grass.
“Would you mind if I tend to the beasts first?” he asks.
It endears you that he calls them what you call them, and you nod with great solemnity. Duncan leads the horses into the water, murmuring to them as they drink.
You sit where he has placed you and watch him, only a little. He steps in barefoot, water up to his knees, breeches darkening where they drink the river. When he bends to wash his face the sound he makes is so relieved it nearly has shape. Then, his body shifts as if he might turn, so you lie back quickly and pretend great interest in the sun glittering through the crown of leaves overhead.
For a second, or maybe two, you are interested. Light breaks itself on leaf-edge and comes down green-gold and restless. But in the corner of your eye Duncan pulls the shirt over his head and tosses it onto the bank, inadvertently impoverishing your attention.
It shrinks to his back, shining with sweat and riverlight. Large shoulders become larger bare. The hard-working breadth of him slopes down into a waist that seems almost shy for belonging to such a man. Water skids from the back of his neck and runs between the moving shelves of muscle. His arms gleam where the hair on them catches sun, each strand lit briefly as mosquitoes are lit in evening air. Lower, the ridges at the base of his spine look softer than they ought to, plush little marks above the band of his breeches, a place made by the gods for the pressing of a mouth and then hidden from decent folk by linen.
Duncan forgets himself for one blessed moment. He lowers into the stream with a groan, then lies back where the water is deep enough to take some of his weight. His chest comes into view. No wonder it is so broad if it must hold the sort of heart he has.
His ribs expand slowly and crown the upper swell of his stomach. The whole front of him looks safe. Pliable. Opulent with flesh, with strength, with the dark scatter of hair that begins across him and gathers itself into a neater line below his navel, leading somewhere your thoughts visit, and you don't even care to leash them. The little cup of his belly looks tender enough for a cheek. For a kiss, perhaps. For asking forgiveness of whatever part of him you have offended by wanting so much.
You watch him through leaf-shadow and sun-break, hunger loosening warm in your mouth. It is the looks, yes. You are young enough and living enough for beauty to matter. But the beauty wounds because it is his. His shoulders that carried you. His hands that tied the bandage. His mouth that stammered around kindness. His generous body laid briefly open in the water, while the heart inside it has been nothing but careful with you.
Then you notice the dark brand of mortality spoiling what is dear and fair and supple. A wound at his side, ugly with bruise-bloom and old blood, the flesh round it gone a deep wine-dark colour that makes your teeth meet. That is what has made him wince and grunt whenever he has pretended effort is a stranger to him. Someone put that there. Someone opened your knight and left him to ride on with pain hidden under cloth and courtesy.
Whoever hurt your beloved becomes at once your beloathed.
You want to tend him. Cure him. Put your mouth to the slash and draw the pain from it. Lick it clean. Pack it with moss and bitter green things. Seal him with leaf and mud and charm and the old patience of riverbeds. Hide him somewhere cold and safe where no sword can find him and no lord can send him back out to be struck again. Then you remember that whatever powers lived in your old body have been taken from you with your gills and your tail. All that remains is knowledge. Root, herb, current, and small useful things land and water will still confess if you ask properly.
Heat climbs through you, anger and want together, so fierce the stream begins calling harder. To you, it is communal. Water is company, cleansing, and peace. A place where bodies are honest and the world knows how to hold them. You begin undressing before sense catches up, fingers already at the borrowed linen. Then Duncan’s red ears return to you. His stricken crouch over firewood. The way he begged you to spare him from some bare skin as if you had raised a blade.
Whether that was true misliking or liking too much, you still have no clear answer. Men have a great many words for lying softly.
So the shift stays on. This, you think, is decorum.
You rise with care and make your wobbly way to the bank, each step placed as though the earth may change its mind beneath you. Duncan lies with his ears under the stream, face turned to the sky, and does not stir. The first touch of water over your bandaged foot is bright enough to steal your breath. Cool. Familiar. Wrong only because your body receives it poorly now, through skin instead of gill, through ache instead of ease. Still, it welcomes you better than road and saddle ever did.
You step knee-deep. Then further. The stream dips there into a dark little hollow beneath the willow roots, and the water climbs your thighs, your hips, your waist. Your shift billows round you and then clings. Duncan floats an arm-length away, chest moving slow, the gash ugly at his side like an insult left unanswered.
“You are hurt,” you say.
He jerks so hard his head goes under. For one sharp instant his limbs thrash and water breaks. Then Duncan surges upright, coughing badly, droplets streaming from his hair into his eyes. Water reaches his waist. His mouth opens on a half-strangled oath.
“Seven bloody hells!” he bellows, making the horses lift their heads from drinking. Drags a hand down his face and finds you standing there in your soaked shift. The cloth has gone thin and faithful to every line beneath it. His gaze strikes you once, panics, and bolts upward to the trees. “M-m’lady,” he rasps, still coughing. “Gods. You near frightened the soul out of me.”
“Let me tend to you,” you say, reaching. Your fingers brush his ribs and—oh, gods. He flinches. Flinches as if you have burnt him, near stumbling back on the pebbles.
“N-no,” he stammers. “No, there’s—” Another step back. “There’s no need. I, uh—I’ll let you bathe. Forgive me, I—”
“Ser Duncan?” You only blink at him, stunned. He stays where he is, eyes down. “Ser Duncan, you mustn’t be so foolish," you say. "It is only tending.”
“Please,” he says, and the word comes out almost a whine.
You come closer despite it. Set your fingers to his side again, gentler this time, and find the flesh above the cut warmer than the rest of him. “You’re in pain.”
“It looks worse than it feels,” he says. “Hah—” His breath hitches when your thumb brushes the soft of his belly. “Please,” he says, lower now. “Don’t… don't touch me.”
The hurt of it lands before you can reason with it. Your hand retreats. Your jaw sets tight. “As you wish,” you say, and dip wholly underwater and let the current take you a little way from him.
Duncan starts the day perturbed and only grows more and more mortified during the course of it.
First, sleeping next to you proves shallow and restless, for you keep making soft sounds in the night and moving under the blanket. Your body seems to disregard the steel barrier entirely and every now and then one of your limbs brushes him. Fingers on the hem of his shift. Foot nudging his low on the bedroll. Duncan sleeps terribly.
Then he is shamed for the hurt on you, and rightly. He had been so fixed on keeping his eyes clean and his hands honourable, so addled by the bareness of you, that he had given your bad walking some name out of fear and pity and left the simplest answer underfoot.
A cut. A cruel slash across the sole. Even close, even with your hands in his, it takes the red smear on the grass to make him see it, and the sight puts a shudder of anger through him so sharp he nearly speaks too harshly. After that comes worse: your ankle warm in his hand, your heel on his thigh, the soft give of your calf under his palm while he cleans what he can. You trust him through it. Squeal when it stings, then bite yourself quiet and try to be brave for no reason he deserves. Your skin imperils him by seeming new-made, tender in a way ordinary skin is not, without the leathering of road or work or weather. Dunk binds the foot as gently as he knows how and keeps himself from lifting it to his mouth and kissing it better only because that would mean bringing your leg higher, opening you by accident or design, and he is certain as sunrise that he would not survive the sight.
He contemplates this predicament of knightly challenge while floating on his back, body idle where his mind is restless, and gets startled by your voice. Then haunted by the same fingers that brushed him in the night and the shape of you, plain and vulgar and hallowed all the same under the shift clinging to you. He mumbles his futile excuses, manages to offend you by trying to maintain his honour, and stumbles out of the stream burnt up to his ears and heavy between the legs. Gods have mercy on him, Duncan has a few more nights with you ahead of him and faith in himself near shredded to scraps.
For another hour or so, he is quiet as a dead man. Sets you onto Chestnut with his eyes barely open, and rides in suffocating silence. At camp his heart inevitably melts back to warmness, because you try to feed Sweetfoot an apple you have chewed yourself first, and for it the horse adores you so much that Duncan almost chars the bread he is trying to make less stone-like. You squat too close to the fire and near singe the hem, making him certain you are not road-wise at all, then gut a fish he has caught in tremendous efforts with such unnerving competence Dunk has to revise his whole sense of your shelteredness.
Once he loosens enough to laugh and make talk with you again, the questions return. Seven hells, they never end, and Duncan scowls at each and every one of them. Do 'married things' feel better once people are married? Is it always a man and a woman who do 'married things'? Do folk kiss only on the mouth? Where else can one kiss? At which point Dunk contemplates pouring boiling water from the pot over his palm just so he is spared.
You seem oblivious. Charmingly so, because every inquiry leaves your face adorned with child-like curiosity, and the things you speak of having nothing child-like about them makes you only that much purer and more disarming in his eyes.
“How do I know a man would like to kiss me?” you ask, blinking at him wide-eyed and hopeful.
He is thankful the bite he took has already gone down his throat before that one lands. Duncan considers it gravely, though not without a fresh wave of shame, because while he means to answer you truthfully and as best he can, he need not bare himself doing it.
“It depends on the man,” he says, vague as a coward, and is met with another blink. “He might, uh—” Duncan tries. “Some men would gape at you outright, mayhaps. Some would try to steal looks and turn away when you caught them at it. Some might go nervous round you. Blush some. Look at your mouth and then wish they hadn’t, because—” He exhales hard through his nose. “Gods. I don’t know. Forgive me, m’lady, I've no proper answer for that one.”
You sit across from him with your face set carefully, taking each word in as if it has been given for study. Only then does it dawn on Duncan that he may have given himself away after all.
At nightfall, he prepares the bedroll again and sets the sword down, doubting its use. What he named protection that first evening serves tonight as the restraint he needs so dearly, and there is something wholly unknightly in that.
As if for punishment, he wakes hot and clammy, half-rolled off the wool, his side aching badly. When he opens his eyes, you are perched on one elbow with your hand hovering over his forehead. “Ser Duncan,” you say. “You’re burning up. Let me clean your wound, or you’ll go stiff as a dead fish.”
His mouth is parched. He fights himself a moment, tries to move, and when he finds it painful beyond keeping his face straight, Duncan nods, wincing. “A-aye,” he rasps. “Aye, all right then.”
You get to work at once. Even through the blear in his eyes he sees that you limp less than yesterday. Slow, still, and careful with the foot he bound, but less at war with the earth. You move from the bedroll to the fringe of grass near the stream, bending over plants, touching leaves, bringing them to your nose. Some you take. Some you let fall again with a little dismissive flick of your fingers. Moss from the wet bank. Green things he cannot name. A strip of bark peeled from a low branch after you press your face close to it and seem to listen. You come back with all of it gathered in your skirt, along with clean water from the stream and the bandages pulled from his sack.
Then, you sit on your heels beside him and roll his shirt up. Duncan hisses. “Ah—”
“Ser Duncan, we should not travel today,” you say.
“I’m bound for… for Riverrun soon, ah—” His breath catches when you peel the linen from his side. The cloth gives with a mean little tug. “There is business there.”
“You’ll be more useful to them sound than fevered, Duncan.”
You say it while looking where he cannot see. He looks where he should not. The furrow between your brows, the fall of your hair, and your pretty mouth tightened in focus, and oh—your lips part round a twist of bark and bitter leaves, and thought leaves him in one shameful rush. You chew them all together with grave purpose.
Duncan watches, transfixed enough that the first spill of stream-cool water over his ribs catches him unprepared. His stomach jumps. You take the sound for pain and murmur something under your breath, sweet and wordless, as you pat the wound dry. He is grateful for the mistake. Grateful too that your eyes keep going to his face and the blanket lies over him from the waist down, because your hand is braced low on his stomach and his body has begun turning traitor in ways fever cannot excuse.
“Is this too much?” you ask.
He shakes his head for the lump in his throat makes speech a poor wager.
You pack the wound with moss and the green pulp you have made, careful as any septa laying cloth over the dead. Sphagnum, he knows dimly, from old hedge lessons and worse roads. The rest is beyond him. He must be looking at it strangely, because you pause with your fingers at his side.
“I vow to you, this is safe,” you say. “It is what my people know of healing. I would not harm you.”
“I… I know that,” Duncan says. The answer comes quickly, because it is true before he has time to dress it better. He covers the hand you have set on his stomach. Your skin is cooler than his, cool enough to make him ache toward it.
“I beg your pardon for my weakness, m’lady.”
“I’ll grant you no pardon for that, ser,” you say. “For it needs none.” Your mouth curves a little, thoughtful rather than cruel. “The foolishness, well. That one I might grant pardon for.”
Despite the pain, something near a laugh moves in his chest.
You reach for the clean bandage and begin to bind his waist. He has to raise himself for it. The doing hurts badly enough to sour his breath, but he does it all the same, one arm locked beneath him while you pass the cloth under his back and round again. Your hands move with surprising certainty. All the awkwardness with laces and shoes gone from you the moment flesh is the thing in need.
When it is done, you tie the bandage firm and check the edge with two fingers. “Too tight?”
“No.”
It is, a little. But he would sooner bite his tongue than make you fuss over him again.
You seem to know that somehow, or else you have learned his face too well already, because you loosen it by the smallest measure before he can protest. Then you lean in, set a wet cloth over his forehead, and smooth it once over his brow. The touch quiets him worse than sleep could.
“Rest, Ser Duncan,” you say. “Riverrun may wait a day.”
It is as though you have put a spell on the world, because Duncan’s eyes grow heavy and everything seems set on peeling the fever off him. The air cools during his sleep and billows with loud howling through the trees, making breath come easier into his lungs. By the time he wakes, the mean bite in his side has dulled to a steady ache, and the heat in him has lessened into something nearer the natural state of a body than the foul blaze of sickness.
For a moment he does nothing but lie there, listening. You are humming beside him. The sound is low and strange and threaded so gently through the wind that he almost thinks he has dreamt it. When he opens his eyes, he finds you curled near the fire in a small, careful shape, arms tucked round yourself as if trying to keep what warmth you have from fleeing. Your hair moves across your cheek. Your face has gone solemn in sleep or thought; he cannot tell which.
He clears his throat and pushes himself up. The movement hurts, but only in the way of a wound that means to remind him it exists, rather than one trying to split him open. “Are you cold, m’lady?” he asks.
You turn your head toward him. Duncan looks round before you can answer and sees at once that a great part of the day has been stolen from him. The shadows have shifted long across the ground. The light has taken on the thinned, slanting look of late afternoon.
“How long was I out?”
“A few hours,” you say. “Do you feel better?”
“Aye.” He presses one hand carefully near the bandage and finds it firm. “Aye, I do. You’ve got my thanks.” He makes himself stand, slower than he likes. “I’ll start the fire proper, so you can warm up.”
You only nod. That troubles him a little.
He works at the kindling with hands that feel almost his own again and urges the fire into steadier life. When it takes, he motions you closer to it. You come, but even with amber light painting your face and the flame catching in your eyes, you keep your arms around yourself. Duncan watches that a moment, then rises and goes to his things. He finds a spare shift that does not shame him too badly for smell, shakes it once, and brings it back to you.
You look up at him. “Do I need more layers for your comfort?” you ask, mild.
“N-no,” he blurts, and then wishes he had managed it better. “No. This is for you. To get warmer.”
You take it after a pause. “Thank you.” Then you pull it over your head.
It unmakes him some, seeing you in something that came from his back. The cloth sits loose on you, too large in the shoulder, the sleeves falling past your wrists, and for some reason that is worse than all your wet linen had been. Worse in a different way. Quieter. It puts a claim in his mind he has no right to make and no courage to name.
He passes you water. Food. What little there is. You take both, but without the bright delight of the nights before. The silence in you discontents him. It sits between the pair of you heavier than his sword does at nights.
You both wait through the sinking of the sun with no moon rising after it. The sky grows dark by degrees and stays that way, blind and deep.
Duncan’s mind, made foolish by fever and wanting, begins to search for crimes. Mayhaps he snored like a pig. Mayhaps he spoke in his sleep. Mayhaps some foulness of the body escaped him while he lay senseless, and you are too gentle or too strange to name it. Then worse thoughts come. Mayhaps you have remembered some home you do not wish to speak of. Mayhaps the road has frightened you. Mayhaps he has touched too much, or withheld too much, or made some fresh error in the long ledger of not knowing how to be with you.
At last he cannot stand it. “Is something wrong?” he asks. “Have I frightened you somehow?”
What he means is, Were you frightened for me? Did my sickness put fear in you? Did you sit here humming me back from fever while I slept like a lump and gave you no thanks worth the doing? He does not ask that, of course.
You look at him across the fire. “Is your fever gone?”
“Aye. I think so.”
Then, you reach out and set your hand to his forehead. Duncan decides to let you. After all his defending himself from your touch, the yielding feels almost humiliating. Your palm is cold. Cool enough that he leans a fraction into it. “It is a wonder, what you did,” he says. “Truly.”
You stay there a moment longer. Then slip, not away, but to the side of his face.
“Are you cold still?” he asks.
You nod.
There is something changed in you now. He cannot say what. You are quieter, but the quiet has gone sharp and watchful. Closed in a way your face has never much managed before. It leaves him with the queer sense that he has done wrong and is only waiting to learn the charge.
“We’ve another blanket,” he says. “You may have it.”
You shake your head. Your hand moves from his cheek to his neck. His breath forgets itself.
“Would you hold me?” you ask and the question leaves him with no ground beneath him.
He wants to. Gods, he wants to. Wants it with such simple force that for one foolish instant his arms open before honour can set a guard over them. To hold you and warm you and give back a little of what you gave him. To fit you against him and learn the shape of your weight with nothing between but cloth and breath. To stop being careful long enough to stop aching.
You come into him as if you had only been waiting for the smallest leave.
Your body moulds tight to his chest. One hand slides behind his neck and into the hair at his nape; the other settles carefully near his side, avoiding the wound with a tenderness that cuts him deeper than a careless touch would have. Your face turns against his throat. Scent comes up with the heat of you—river-cold still, and green, with a foreign worry underneath it that seems made to ruin him.
He sits rigid at first, then lowers his arms around you. He circles your back with great care, as though the wrong pressure might break whatever spell has allowed this. His palm moves once between your shoulders. Then again. A slow, broad pass, the way he soothed you by the bank, only now there is no panic in your breathing. Only the nearness of you. The trust of you. The soft press of your shirt against his chest.
He says nothing. He does not trust his voice. Instead, he closes his eyes.
“Ser Duncan?” you ask.
“Mm?”
“When people kiss—” you start, lancing him with relief so strangely he almost laughs outright. Another question. Another weird, killing little question, but a question all the same. Something with words on it. Something safer than the warm mouth of you near his throat and the hand at the back of his neck making a weak man of him.
“Where does the nose go?”
A huffed chuckle leaves him. He has never once thought on it, which seems impossible now that you have asked. His chin lowers by a little. The dark gives him no help at all. “Wherever it can go,” he answers.
You shift against him, and crane your head back to look at him. “Would you show me?” you ask. Duncan near stops breathing altogether.
If time were a pocket full of stones to be thrown into water, yours would be light now. Between startling him in the stream on the second day and the morning of the third, you are nearly out of pebbles, and nowhere near certainty that what sits so swollen in you has found its likeness in him.
You tend him because pain on Duncan seems an offence against the order of things. Your hands know more than the rest of your borrowed body does, because the old small wisdoms of healing remain when all your better gifts are gone.
Then he sleeps. If you had all the time in the world, it would be a blessed thing. To sit with him through the day and look your fill without having to steal it. To learn his face by light rather than glances: the slope of his nose, the soft fall of his mouth, the worried place between his brows that seems carved by use. But every hour that passes comes down with a weight in it. Doom pressing thumb by thumb upon the tender back of your neck. You have hardly thought of the other choice. You do not know yet if your heart has turned vicious. You do not know what would prove easier in the end: longing or death. You do not even know whom you love more—him, or yourself.
So you hum, for it comes from somewhere old in you. Habit before speech. A small line thrown back to the creature you were so eager to cast off the moment a knight knelt bloodied at your riverbank and broke your life in two by praying. The song is low and almost without shape, but Duncan’s face softens beneath it in unspeakable measure. Sleep takes the worry from him first. Then pain. Then the lines around his mouth ease as if the song has set careful fingers there and smoothed them flat.
When he wakes, your nerves stir again. You have spent hours with him, but he has not spent them with you. He returns from slumber healthier, clearer, less fever-taken, and a bitter thought slips through unbidden: you ought not to have helped so eagerly. A fevered man is easier. Easier to seduce. Easier to kill.
Both notions sadden you in equal measure. If you were willing to win a weak version of him, you may as well have lured him with song the first day and let the river take the rest. As for killing—well. You came hoping for something to begin. Not end.
You cannot decide whether the air has chosen to be ally or enemy. Yesterday, heat helped very little. Duncan took great offence at you bathing near him, though your shift had stayed on like a banner of hard-won virtue, and afterwards he rode ahead in his breeches still dripping, neck blazing red. You still have no clue whether the sun kissed him so passionately there or whether his own blood had run faster from mortification. If the latter, you might almost take comfort. It would mean skin alone does not imperil him, but the shape of what it is stretched over does too.
Now the day has turned cold. All the small ends of you stiffen with it: toes, fingers, nose, the delicate rims of ears you have only just begun to understand. When Duncan gives you his shift, it helps little and wounds much. You eat the food, and it is still good, but doom dulls even salt and fat. You sit by the fire, which burns hot and warms everything except the parts that matter.
The only improvement is his scent. It gathers in the cloth he gives you, in the space around him, in the place where days have drawn the truth of his body closer to the skin. Earth after rain, almost. Warm ground turned by a hand. The deep, honest rot of flesh worked hard and loved too little. It is inviting in the way banks are inviting after too long in flood-water. Safe. Pure in a manner nothing you have known as pure before, because it belongs to a creature who has had every chance to harm you and kept choosing not to.
It makes you want to try harder. So you ask to be held, plainly and bravely, because every subtler method has failed you.
And somehow, blessedly, that works. Duncan opens his arms as if forgetting himself for one breath, and you go into him before he remembers any reason to stop. He is warm. Broad and rigid at first, all restraint and alarm, then his arms lower around you with a care that makes your throat ache. One hand moves over your back. Slow. Heavy and kind. The other stays mindful of his wounded side, and you press yourself where you may without hurting him, cheek near his throat, hand at the back of his neck where his hair curls soft against your fingers.
His scent is stronger here. His breath too. His ribs lift against you once, held too long, and you feel the panic in him before he makes any sound of it.
Emboldened, foolish with nearness, you crane your head up to look at him. “Would you show me?” you ask.
At once, Duncan locks himself in his stringent state of lungs filled with fright. For one breath he only looks at you. Mouth parted, eyes dark and wide and wretched with wanting he seems determined to suffer through rather than obey. His hand moves from your back to your shoulder, then stills there, made smaller and shaking in some deep part of him.
“M’lady,” he says, and the title sounds scraped from him. “You do not know what you ask.”
“I ask for a kiss.”
“Aye,” he says, almost pained. “That is the trouble of it.”
Your fingers tighten in his hair. He swallows. You feel it against your wrist, that small motion of life going down through him, and it draws you closer without thought. Your mouth is near enough now that his breath moves over it. Warm. Uneven. Human.
“Please,” you say, because pride has begun to feel like a thing for creatures with more time.
Duncan shuts his eyes. When they open, there is something terrible in them. Kindness, of all things. “I mustn’t,” he says. “Not like this.” Then he peels you from him.
Gently. Carefully. As if your arms are brambles he means to free himself from without breaking a leaf. That gentleness finishes what the refusal began. His hands leave you with honour in every finger, and you hate the honour so sharply you feel it in your teeth.
“We should rest,” he says, voice low. “You’ve had a hard day. Both of us have.”
You sit back on your heels and look at him. “I will be right there,” you say.
Duncan nods once. He looks as though he wants to say more and knows better than to trust his mouth. Then he lets you go.
The dark receives you with no comfort. No moon has risen. The sky hangs black over the trees, and every small night-sound seems to have sharpened itself for your hearing. The fire cracks behind you. Water calls ahead. You walk toward it with your arms wrapped around yourself, feet wet already from the grass, the bandage gone cold and weighty against your sole.
Stream takes your ankles first. You stand there a while, letting it worry the hurt in your foot, and sing softly because there is nothing else in you large enough to hold the ache. The song comes out thin. Sadder than you mean it to. A thing for deep places and lost skins, for girls foolish enough to think love would explain itself before the third night came hunting.
He has no love for you. That is what the witch’s voice says inside the dark.
He is kind. He is tender. He looks at you as if looking pains him. He has warmed you, carried you, fed you, let you touch his fevered body. He has given you his shirt and his fire and his poor sleeping place. Everything in him leans toward you.
Still, he will not give the proof.
The contradiction scrapes through you until you could scream. He has chosen fear. Virtue. Whatever cold, shining thing men put between their bodies and the bodies that want them. He has chosen the sword.
Something knocks softly against your bad foot, so you look down.
The dagger lies in the shallows, dark blade nosing against the stone as if the river has carried it back in its mouth. Returned from the mud where you left it to rot.
You stare at it first, then bend and take it. The hilt fits your palm with malicious ease.
When you return, the camp is nearly spent. The fire has sunk to a red eye. Duncan sleeps on his back with his face turned toward the dark and the sword laid down between you, steel dull and matted in the thin light. It looks and feels, to you, like an insult.
You kneel beside him with the dagger in your fist and learn again how human bodies rid themselves of water. Your eyes cloud. Your throat swells shut around breath. Tears fall hot down your cheeks and onto his forearm, though he does not wake.
He is very large in sleep. Very warm. His side lies beneath the blanket, bandaged where your hands have worked mercy into him. You know where he is weakest. Where to put the blade. How to turn the hand so it goes under the rib and up. The thought of all that warmth spilling out of him sickens you so badly you nearly retch.
“Forgive me,” you choke, and turn the dagger toward yourself.
Your hand shakes. The blade catches clumsily in the cloth, then slips, and in your blind effort to right it you snag his forearm. Duncan's eyes open.
It must be raining, he thinks at first. Droplets hit his wrist, then his cheek. But when something stings his skin with its sharp tooth, Duncan is alert through knightly instinct, or the instinct that let him survive Flea Bottom as a lame boy, or it is merely the Warrior watching over him. Which one, he does not know.
He knows only enough to move fast when a blade is being turned near where he is weak. His body acts before his mind can give the order. He is battle-trained and large. To seize the perfidious wrist, to roll over a deceitful body and pin it, to bash the weapon from the hand that nursed him away from fever only to break faith with him now—it is all nothing. It is but a blink.
To look into your wet, frightened eyes is everything. Everything that destroys him.
Duncan wants to scream, yet what leaves him is a foolish little thing, near too small to live inside him without getting lost.
“Tell me why,” he breathes over you. The sorrow in it he despises. “Speak, girl!” he says, louder, trying not to sound so heartbroken.
Since now he is sinew and bone first and everything else later, he notices things in scraps. Wretchedly, your spread legs below him. Woefully, your fast-beating heart under his, distraught in the same measure. Lustfully, your mouth, for he is only a man who has yearned for a woman for three days that felt like three lifetimes. Then, dreadfully, the way the mouth cuts itself into a lopsided sickle and begins to wobble. He finds your eyes again, and they are overpouring.
“Why?” he cries. “I’ve nothing for you to rob me of, and I’ve tried to do right by you. To keep my promise, to keep you safe, to—”
His grip tightens as he drags through the miserable list of his own reasons, your wrists caught in both his hands. He feels the small bones under his fingers and catches himself in anger. Loosens. His face cannot decide what shape to take, anguish or ire, so it hangs between them in some ugly misery.
“Why would you betray me?” he whispers.
“It’s—” Your voice breaks before it begins. “It was not meant for you. The w-witch… the witch said a soul, she did not say whose—”
Duncan stares.
“She—she gave me three days,” you sob, words tumbling over themselves, half-choked and damp. “And it has been three days, and I—I would not— I would never, not you—”
Your chest hitches under him. You try to pull one hand free, fail, and only curl your fingers in the air as if reaching for words that keep slipping from you. “It was for me. I was going to—”
He understands naught of it. “Girl, what is this nonsense that you speak of?” he asks, desperate. “What witch? What soul?”
You blink at him through the tears. For a long moment you only gape, and the fear in your face goes strange, as if some part of you had expected him to know the tale already.
“You’ve no love for me,” you say, so quietly he almost misses it. Your fingers flex above the wrists. Duncan lets go.
The instant he does, you take his hands and set them at your throat. Your own close over his, pressing them there, begging with them. He feels how feeble that column is beneath his palms. The hard swallow of it. The frantic life inside. How easily his thumbs could end you. How surely it would end him too.
“You’ve no love for me,” you say, “and it means I cannot go back. I cannot go home, and I cannot take your life, so it has to be mine. Please, please—”
Duncan sees part of it plain, and another part not at all. Your palms squeeze round his, eyes leaking plea after plea. He is certain that if you could reach it, you would hand him the dagger and point its tip to your own neck. How this would ensure his sparing, he does not comprehend. What he recognises is the devotion of putting oneself at the edge of the blade if that means your beloved lives.
“M’lady—” he mouths, stunned by the discovery.
All of the teasing, all of the questions—none of it was malevolent. None of it was oblivious either, or meant to make him stray off his path, use him, seduce him for sport. It was you speaking I want you to him in a language he used to know and misplaced when he found folk scarcely so openly honest.
“Calm yourself. Calm yourself now,” he says, terrified at being the cause of your sorrow. “Oh, girl. Hush now, hush.” He removes his hands from your throat and brings them to your swollen cheeks. “Tell me plain,” he says. “Slowly. Don’t be afraid.”
Your sobbing eases. “I saw you on the bank lancing a man through and praying for him a minute later. You—” Your fingers come up to his cheeks, damp and trembling, and the touch strikes him so softly he can hardly bear it. “You bewitched me.”
Duncan sucks in a breath.
“So I went to a crone and struck a deal. To get legs. So you—” You swallow. “So you could love me.”
“Legs?” Duncan huffs. “Girl—”
His mind begins to move, slow and fearful, through every half-remembered tale old women or some Flea Bottom drunk or hedge septon ever muttered near a fire. Water-wives. River maids. Green-haired things who drowned men by kissing them. Old gods in stones and streams. Stories, he had thought. Ways for folk to dress up queer happenings so the world seemed less wide and hungry than it was.
Yet he thinks of you in the willow-shadow, floating as if the stream had been made to hold you. Of your strange wisdom with water and wound and herb. Of your dread of shoes. Your open face. Your body new to its own legs.
“Where’s your home?” he asks.
You look at him, and he holds his breath without meaning to. Then, you say, “The river.”
The way you looked hugged by water suddenly makes sense. “River-folk,” he mutters. “I was right, then. You’re no human girl.” Your face changes at that, guilt passing plain over it, and the sight only settles the truth harder in him.
“Gods,” he says, hushed. “You’re a river maid. Some old god’s daughter, mayhaps. Holy thing of the water.” It's all muttered half to himself, as if wagering with his own mind whether such a thing can be possible, but awe gets into him anyway. Awe and fear. Awe and the brutal knowledge that he has had a holy thing weeping under him with his hand at her throat.
Your eyes widen. Confused, mayhaps. Hopeful too, in some small wounded way. “What say you to me, knight?”
Duncan shifts. Sets himself firmer on one elbow, then bends one knee and hooks it carefully against your leg to keep you open beneath him. Closer now. More intimate than the pinning had been when his body only knew defence. His hands slide to the back of your head, thumbs settling where your jaw hinges, close beside your ears. He presses there gently.
“What did the witch tell you to do?” he asks.
Wariness moves over your face, but you answer. “She said to bring her a soul if you did not fall for me within three days.” Your eyes drop. “Otherwise I am cast out and trapped in this ugly body.”
The shape of it becomes clearer. Witch-craft with its fangs hidden until the mouth shuts. A sworn sword and a maid from the water. A bargain made to rot between them. How easy to mislead you. How easy to make failure look like virtue and restraint look like scorn.
His body understands some ruinous part of it before his mind is finished. The angle has him feeling you everywhere that matters: your breath hot over his face, the soft give of you under his weight, your fingers brushing shakily beneath his eyes and near his mouth as if you want to touch and are afraid. His groin fills out against sense, against decency, against every terrified plea he has made to the Seven in three days. Reprehensible, mayhaps. True all the same.
For desperate want of proof, he manages to ask, “And how were you to know if I had fallen or no?”
You move a little beneath him. It pains him terribly. “When you want between my legs,” you say. “That is why I needed them in the first place.”
Duncan laughs then. Breathless. Broken by it.
You frown. “What?”
“Wee thing,” he says. “Oh, Gods—” His eyes close.
“Duncan?”
He rubs at the base of your skull. “Hush, sweet thing. Only tell me if I wrong you.” Then he lowers his face slowly to yours.
“There ain’t nowhere for the nose to go,” he says.
First, he fits himself beneath you, clumsy with care. The tip of his nose fills the warm curve above your upper lip, where your mouth rises into that soft little bow. When he speaks, his mouth frames your lower lip so closely that the words seem to move against it. “It just goes here,” he murmurs.
Then he shifts higher, until your mouths face one another and his nose wedges beside yours, dipping into the slope where cheek begins. Nearer now. Close enough that, if your lips were not stunned and motionless beneath his, it would already be a kiss. “Or here.”
He presses in by the smallest measure. “Or flattens some,” he breathes, “when it’s more ardent.”
Duncan wants to kiss you ardently. He also wants to tell you this is not how love works, but he catches himself knowing naught of it. He's been charmed by women, by their voices and breasts and the napes of their necks, thought of them for days upon days, and inevitably, forgotten most of the maids for the sake of his pliant heart remaining whole. You, he's certain, he'd never forget. Despite his body being crude and primal around you, he thinks, innocently, that it is the heart that animates his blood to go where it goes. He presses down on you with ingenuity between the shoulders and lust between the hips, and the lust is pure too, for it comes from affection.
Your leg hitches higher on him and fingers find some valour in their groping. You take a clean hold of his face and trap him there, in the in-between kiss state, and look at him with the sort of plain youthful hope that keeps unearthing him.
"What are you saying?" you ask.
Duncan’s hands come up to answer first. Where you keep him, he cradles you back, careful thumbs, fingers spreading into your hair. There. There is the shape of it. Want met with want, fear met with shaking, your breath touching his and making no wound of it.
“I am saying,” he murmurs, moving the words against your mouth, “that the witch has been proven wrong already. You had my heart before you had legs steady under you.” Your eyes search his so closely he feels near flayed by the looking. “But if you need proof in the flesh,” he says, rougher, shame and hunger dragging at the same rope inside him, “I would be honoured to give it. Gods help me, I would. Only you should know I may be poor at it.” His breath hitches. “You would be my first.”
You consider him calmly. “I don’t need it,” you say, making his whole chest suck in on itself. Then, Duncan breathes again, when you add, “But I want it.”
Finally, the holding concludes. You kiss as if the thing has angered you by staying unknown so long. Your mouth opens wide and catches his lower lip between yours, soft first, then with teeth. Duncan makes a sound into you. He cannot tell whether the bite is artless or bold already, whether you have stumbled into hunger or known the road to it all along. This, at least, he can teach. When the cloth comes off, when bodies are bare and honest and frightening in the dark, both of you will be green as spring branches. But kissing—kissing he knows enough to begin.
So he shows you. Shows you how the nose can fit beneath yours, how it can slide along cheek and breathe there, hot and loud. Shows you how a mouth may press and soften and press again, how teeth need not wound to be felt, how the lips can ask twice before taking. Then his tongue finds the seam of you, and when you open, he slips inside.
He discovers that you must be finding that pleasurable because you moan softly and bend beneath him and fit yourself firmer to his cock, making him ache more. Your fingers climb to his hair and tug, and some helpless part of him near thanks you for it.
You learn fast, too—answer his tongue with yours, and they press each other and taste each other, and to Duncan you taste like blessed water and flesh made open. He kisses you deeper for it, ardent at last, enough that his nose flattens against your cheek, and the nonsense of it is so small and heartbreaking the clothes start itching him unbearably.
“I wanted you,” he whispers. “Gods, I wanted you.”
For a moment you stop kissing in favour of laughing sweetly, so he, in his ardour, pulls the shirt off his back, bearing himself to the night and your eyes. You stop laughing then and fix your pupils somewhere below his chin, and Duncan sees a glimpse of what he presumes lesser creatures see before you seize their throats and snap their spines. Lowering lids and lashes gone droopy over them, you breathe out, set your forefinger to the hollow of his throat, collect the dampness there, and bring it back to your mouth.
“And I wanted you,” you say.
Duncan leans in to kiss you some more. The dagger lies abandoned in the grass.
Your knight loves you. He is kissing you, and for a man who only supposes he likes it, he is incredibly fervent about it. Obedient too: he rises when you all but press your fingers to his bicep and lets you climb him a little. He sits on his heels and lowers his head for you to reach. His mouth tastes clean and cold of crushed mint. His hands on you are warm, warming up with every pass. They hold your neck first, then slide down your shoulders, pause briefly at your elbows, and continue lower. You are lost in it, learning how to do this thing called kissing and where the poking parts of the body go during, when desire emboldens him enough to stray beneath your skirt.
You catch his wrist unconsciously, mouth curbing. Before, his touch was medicinal. And rightfully so, since there was nothing else you'd rather have done to your legs than fix them. Heavy, graceless logs beneath you with one foot mangled, the mending of which, despite being mildly titillating for his gentleness, heralded no perfervid development and remained purely sanative. Now, there is intent in it. Now he's looking at your thighs, and regardless of him being a different kind of folk, a kind of folk who likely enjoys thighs, you wish, terribly, for your tail to be back in its rightful place. For the thing of poise and cordiality you could show him. For the thing that makes you beautiful in the water and in sunlight, smooth and shiny and worth seeing, instead of bruised knees and prodding ankles and dirty shins and the sole gone plump with its cut and blood dried round the cut's edges.
When your eyes meet he looks very concerned. His touch stalls. "Have I… have I wronged you?" Duncan asks. He lifts his hands a hairsbreadth off you and murmurs, "Do you want me to stop?"
"N-no, no," you tell him. "No, I don't, just—" Your eyes drop to where he's hovering. You cringe. "Just do not look at me so."
"How did I look?" His fingers curl, then retreat completely to rest on his knees. "Have I looked wrong?" Dunk asks.
"No, I just… don't like them."
Duncan sags a little. When you look up, he's blinking at you, baffled. His mouth moves while he's chewing his own tongue, and finally, he stammers, "Y-your legs?"
You nod. Sit back, pull the skirt over the knees for the lack of a better shield, and hug the whole bundle to hide it from being perceived. "They're ugly," you tell him.
At that, his face breaks open with fondness and ache. Duncan breathes around something that looks like exasperation, though gentler than any you have known. Plainly, he seems to not know what is meant to be said to a girl who tells him she hates a part of herself. So he says nothing at first. Only comes to you, slow on his knees, until he is close enough for the heat of him to reach through the miserable pile you have made of your limbs.
His hand finds your cheek. He turns you toward him by a little, thumb rubbing along your jaw as if coaxing the bone to unclench. “They brought you to me,” he mutters at your ear. The words go through you strangely.
“They bled and still carried you.” His fingers nose, tender and frightened, beneath the edge of your skirt, finding the place where your hip creases under cloth and the guard of your folded arm. He brushes there and goes no farther than you allow. “You’ve had them three days, and they’ve already learned the road so well.”
At that, something in you loosens. Your arms slacken by a measure. Enough for him to slide down to your knee, where the fabric bunches under his broad palm.
“I adore them,” Duncan says, simply enough to make mockery impossible. His eyes lift to yours, serious and shy both. “Would you let me show you?”
You are apprehensive still, but you look at him properly then, and his face is so genuine it gives you no clever place to hide. So trustworthy. So pure in its truth-telling. For a moment you think that perhaps love can be graceless. Perhaps here, with him, it may be youthful and ebullient and still be love. Perhaps the grace you were robbed of has no bearing on your worthiness of it. His hands are clumsy too, trembling and bashful, but eager in the way they touch you, forthright in their care. He seems to pay no mind to his own awkwardness. Only to you. To the careful unpeeling of you in a way that does not leave the parts beneath raw and aching.
“How?” you ask.
Duncan smiles as if something has just been answered for him. “Tell me no at any moment,” he says.
He goes to the lacing at your waistband and pulls at it slowly, eyes fixed on yours. Then his fingers hook between fabric and skin and he begins guiding the skirt down. You prop yourself on his shoulders and lift for him. The cloth passes your hips and drags down your thighs, and you close your eyes briefly so you do not have to see the hated shape of yourself being bared.
Chill kisses your ankles and calves, then deserts them once Duncan’s hands find you. He goes to sit farther away, facing you, and places your feet with their soles to his stomach. Your shift falls loose between your thighs and gathers there, covering you only to the middle of them. You lean back on your elbows and finally open your eyes.
He sits on his heels again, thighs flattened and filling his breeches until the side seams seem fit to complain, so abundant there his knees knock apart naturally. Between his legs he is curiously swollen. You want to touch there. To see him. To learn what it is that makes a man breathe faster and blush the way he does. He is pink up to the temples and sweating round there. Beneath your soles, his stomach ripples now and then. His fingers curl round either of your ankles, eyes fixed on the dorsums of your feet, thumbs brushing where your toes ladder into five thin, twig-like bones.
He unwraps the bandage gently. Checks you for wincing, and when he sees you only staring with your lids nearly disappearing into their sockets, the colour on him deepens.
Then, he lifts your foot to his face, and you learn where else people can be kissed.
He slots his mouth to the hollow where the cut had been. It is barely a brush of lips. A small thing. Soft enough that it should hardly matter. Yet he does it with such care that the warmth of it travels up your throat from the inside, humiliating and near hallowed. Duncan swallows as if bracing himself, then sets his tongue to the sealed line of it and licks across.
The wound has closed. Tender still, and puffed at the edges, but closed. It receives his affection with a strange little pulse that runs the whole length of you and lands low in your belly like kindling catching.
You go very still when he kisses it again. Then the arch, then the heel, then the place below your toes where the skin is softer than you expected it to be. His hand holds the whole weight of your leg as if it weighs nothing at all. You let it rest there, pliant and cradled, and he seems to like the trust of it. Seems to grow gentler and more intent for having it.
When his mouth reaches your toes, he hesitates. His eyes lift to yours. Deadly honest. Pinked still, mouth damp from you, breathing with the rough care of a man at the edge of his own courage.
Then he closes his lips around you, and the sound you make is pulled clean out of you.
He smiles. You feel the shape of it more than see it. The small wickedness of it startles you worse than the mouth does, because he has spent three days shy as a colt and now there is this on him too, some pleased knowledge that he has made you louder. His tongue moves over your toes in a slow pass. His lips draw, soft and firm together. The pressure is nothing like kissing. You cannot answer it except by breathing harder and letting your head tip back, by spreading your fingers on the wool and trying to understand why a useless little toe should have any road at all to where pleasure lives.
The angle opens you by a little, making you learn, once again, how human bodies lose moisture. This one is known to you and strange all the same. You have felt your slit weep at the sight of folk tumbling in the tall grass by your bank, but this is warmer. Thicker. It pearls at the centre of you and pulses there, as if bidding him to come closer.
Duncan releases your foot and turns to the other. “Should I stop?” he asks, voice low.
You shake your head.
He nods as if you have given him some important charge, then bends again. Kisses the second foot with equal devotion. Along the ankle, over the knob of bone, up the calf where his nose stirs the soft hair covering your skin. His breath follows after, hot in places the night had cooled. His lips travel slowly, learning you with more patience than skill, though the patience is its own skill, perhaps. You cannot decide. You only know that each place his mouth has been feels newly awake when he leaves it.
At your knee, he lowers himself. The breadth of his shoulders knocks your legs further apart without hurry and without force. As though both of you were made for this particular placement. He settles on his stomach between them, enormous and careful, and begins again above the knee. Mouth open now. Breath heavier. The kissing grows less neat. At the inner soft of your thigh his eyes cover themselves with the thick row of lashes, and for one moment he seems to forget the mild kind of gentleness in favour of a hungrier one. His jaw opens, then closes with teeth.
Your head lolls back with the force of the moan breaking out of you, and Duncan freezes.
The absence of him is immediate and cruel. You lift your head and find him staring up at you, stricken, his mouth still near the mark he made.
“Did I hurt you?”
“Do it again,” you breathe.
His face does a strange, blissed out thing. He nods, snakes one arm under your leg and sets his palm to your hip. Mouth returns to the same place. Teeth first, as asked. Then lips. Then a slow draw of suction that makes your spine change its mind about what shape it wants. His nose dents the skin beside the bite. Each puff of air from him lays heat there. You watch, fascinated and stunned, because this feels good and the witch never spoke of it. She spoke of being opened. Of men putting themselves where they wished to go. She spoke as though the act were a blade and a body only the place it entered.
She said nothing of this. Nothing of mouths on knees and thighs. Nothing of being marked with blunt, crooked fangs and of brands they leave being so pretty you wish for them to be permanent. Nothing of a large knight lying between your legs with zeal shaking through him and of pleasure arriving before proof.
Your hands move without your leave, rolling the shift up for the cloth to gather over your belly. The apex of your thighs is bared to the night. Duncan groans so loudly it startles you.
“Have I done wrong?” you ask.
He shakes his head at once, almost violently. His hand tightens at your hip, fingers pressing in. “N-no,” he says. “No, sweet thing. Gods, no. Only—”
His free hand comes up slowly. It stops at the curls there, hovers, then dips with two fingers as though he expects you to vanish if touched too boldly. “May I kiss you?” he asks. His voice has gone rough enough to catch. “Here?”
You look down and realise he is nervous. For some reason that steadies you. “Have you kissed there before?”
The colour deepens on him. “No.”
“Is that where folk kiss too?”
“Some,” Duncan says. He swallows. “If they are let.”
His fingers rest in you lightly, barely a touch at all, but your body answers with a soft wetness that reaches him anyway. You see when he feels it. The way his mouth parts. The way his brow draws tight, as if want has put its hand round the back of his neck.
He looks up at you. “Talk to me,” he says. “If I do wrong, tell me. If you want me stopped, tell me. If it is good—” His thumb moves, shy and uncertain, and you draw breath through your teeth. “Tell me that too.”
Then down he goes, and with it something in you drops so low it near shackles you to the ground. It is unimportant at first whether he lands aptly or not, for just the idea of being kissed like this, right there, has already begun to derange you. Another mouth-place, another gate and a room this body contains that can, and deserves to be treated with the same fervour he's given your lips. It makes you forget you own legs whatsoever.
It is but a blunder consecrated by pure intentions. He intends, purely, to show you how pieces of you that you've disregarded and treated as means to an end are also part of the beloved. A little over-eager when his mouth finds you too high and drifts as if listening with tongue instead of ears, but at least honest about his greenness. His nose presses into curls on your mound, and you watch him there, the low-hanging lashes, the blood-filled cheeks, and hair falling loose over his brow and this whole great body brought down to its knees by the smallest knot of nerves you possess. Something absurd lives within it, and something magnificent too, making you want to laugh, or seize him, or ask him if he understands he is doing something to you no one explained. Something outside the cruel little law you've been given, one that doesn't mention being searched by a mouth so loving the searching becomes more devastating than force.
Before he licks you, he hums. The sound buries itself in the flesh of his throat, and then his tongue follows, making the strangest disorder happen. Too much earnestness, broad and hard enough to make white light snap through you with benevolence, so you yelp and drag at his hair.
He stops. Lifts his face, and there he is with his mouth shining and eyes stricken, mumbling, "No?"
"Softer," you tell him, feeling weird for demanding around something that's been gifted.
Duncan only nods, swallowing. Grateful for the doctrine, he gets back to learning you with the same studiousness he's given to the walking lessons, all of it made dangerous by how badly he wishes to do it well.
You bend your knees to make the spread of his shoulders more agreeable, but it only makes you open wider like you're an awkward, frog-like thing with human joints. He takes the leave of it and slides his hands under your thighs as though this is too dear. Makes a cradle of his arms and lifts you into it, saving you from the labour of your own legs. The hated things go light. Your calves rest against his shoulders, heels find his back. The position splits you and steadies you both, and a hot, startled pride moves through you when his breath hitches at the sight.
“Here,” you say, gathering his hair into your fist. You guide him lower by little pressures. “Like you kissed my mouth.”
Obedient still, he tries again. Lets his breath soften you first. Then, a brush. A press and retreat of lips. Underneath it your body is trying to make sense of a feeling that has no mate in memory. It is a kiss, yes, but one that cannot be returned by the same road. You can only suffer the pleasure and be enlarged by it. The passivity maddens you. It makes a queen and a fool of you together. You lie there growing wetter, thinking, wildly, that this must be what land does to rivers when it forces them into beds and banks and makes them learn a new shape by pressure.
“There?” he asks against you. The word itself touches.
“There,” you say. "Please, again."
His tongue returns, gentler, and your mind begins to come apart in layers. First, the ordinary mind that knows cold air and sharp grass, then the clever one counting for proof, and the old water-mind too, with remembrance of lost fins and sealed gills and split tail. Beneath all of them lies this new thing, this land-flesh, this warm, weeping, treacherous little mouth of the body opening under another mouth.
Duncan hums once, and the vibration enters you. Your head falls back. The sky above has no moon, no witness, only a depth of blackness so complete it feels like the world has closed its eyes. You begin to grasp that he is teaching himself by the breaking of breath, the little disloyalties of your spine, and the way your thighs tremble when he loses the right place, and part when he comes near it. Warmth opens there. Thickens. Pearls for him and makes him groan as if the taste of you has struck some hidden bell in his chest. You give more and more of it until there is too much. Until it slicks and drips on your skin, and threatens to waste itself on wool, and Duncan, oh—
He slips his tongue inside. Ladles it cleverly to drink from you, and suddenly your body feels more yours. Alive and awake. "Oh—" you say, and he lifts his eyes without parting you. Tries to fit himself deeper, and in the trying his nose brushes the place that seems to have been waiting for him to discover it. You'd laugh at the sweet lesson of it. At the versatility of destinations bodies hold for noses, if only your muscles wouldn't tense like that, if only teeth weren't busy mauling your lower lip and your eyes weren't rolling back from the euphoria of this little accident.
And Duncan is no master of anything except attention, it would seem. He does it again, slower. Meaner, you'd think, if he were someone else. The arms under your thighs tighten while his tongue slips in with a firmer, deeper thrust. This time his nose finds you on purpose. Rubs you small and blunt, and all of you answers in a vicious little flood. Your hips buck into his face and he groans as though he has been granted something by it.
Again—more, bolder, stronger. Mouth open and breath loud, he makes the double sensation catch you so oddly you cannot tell whether you are being entered or kissed or spoken to. No matter the direction your body chooses, he loves it into splendour by the inch. A living thing throws itself against the inside of your skin, and when you look down you fingers make a mess of his hair and he's there, stubborn and panting, poor sweet creature driven half out of himself by the need to bring you fully past this threshold. You realise then, with a kind of rage, that this body has kept secrets from you.
The witch gave you legs and pain and a wound in the foot. She gave you shame, knees, ankles, the absurdity of toes. She gave you the fear of being split by love or killed by its absence. Yet here is a secret she either did not know or refused to tell: that the body can be opened without being invaded, that a man may go down rather than in, that wanting may have humility in it, that Duncan’s mouth can make a sanctuary of the very place she named as doom.
The thought breaks something, or something he does breaks it. "Yes," you breathe. "Oh, Duncan, yes—"
The pleasure keeps almost arriving. Almost, almost, until the almost becomes its own country and you are trapped there, flooded and furious, hearing yourself make sounds no trout, no eel, no seal-slick thing in the water ever taught you. Human sounds. Girl sounds. The foolish, broken music of having flesh that can beg without words.
He stops at no point, and somehow it works. Or perhaps works is too clean a word for it, for no grace is returned to you in triumph. The body simply takes command with the crude authority of something older than self, and you go with it because there is nowhere else to go. A bright, prickling tug gathers low in your groin, sharp as a hook caught in something living, and then it pulls. You choke on the first sound of it. Bend up so hard your belly creases and your mouth opens wide to the dark, all the while Duncan stays there, caught under you, grunting into the convulsion—pleased, most likely proud, very likely simply surprised that his mouth has become such a mighty tool. Your thighs try to close round his head and cannot, because he is too broad and too fixed and too willing to be crushed there. The bliss grows fangs, pointed and sharp, and when he keeps at it with the same obedience, you pull him off with actual force.
He comes away on the strength of your fist in his hair. For a moment you forget the feeling in yourself because of what has been done to him. He looks changed by it too. Made a man fully, if he had been hovering on the edge of it before, glassy-eyed and glossy-mouthed, lips plumped by labour. His lashes are damp. The skin of his cheeks has risen with blood so deeply it seems lit from underneath. Still large. Still tremendous. Shoulders filling the space between your knees, body hot and weighty against the earth. Yet he lets himself hang from your clenched fist as if he is a head severed clean and kept alive only by the mercy of your grip.
“Too much?” he rasps.
“Enough,” you say, though the word comes out wrecked and fond.
Duncan nods.
His hair slips from between your fingers, and he drops forward as if the cut strings of him have remembered gravity. Down onto your belly, where he turns his face into the soft, creased place below your ribs and lies there breathing hard with arms thrown around you. You listen to him dragging air in and out as if he has been the one carried to some violent height and dropped from it.
Then he asks, muffled, “Did I please you?”
The tenderness of it nearly undoes what the pleasure left standing. “Gods, yes,” you say.
He breathes again, deeper this time, and his cheek shifts against you. You feel the absurd bashfulness returning to him now that his mouth has finished its brave work. His hand moves on your thigh. “Do you still hate them?” he asks.
You look down. There is he, and there are your legs, still strange. Still graceless. Still jointed wrong for a creature born to move as one sleek muscle through water. But his hands have held them. His mouth has blessed them. His shoulders have borne their weight. Shame, you discover, cannot keep its shape where Duncan has put his devotion.
Your fingers slide back into his hair. “I don't think I can hate anything you’ve touched,” you say. His mouth quirks, boyish again.
Duncan thinks, dimly, that he has been allowed too much. He lies on the soft bed of your stomach with his cheeks full of your sweet sap and his scalp scratched by your fingernails, wondering when the gods mean to smite him for a fool like himself daring to touch a holy creature like you.
To think you forsook your home for him. To think you almost passed from the world because he was too much of an imbecile to swallow down the price, the inadequacy, the fear of being too much and too little and simply unworthy.
He looks at your thighs and loves them dearly. One bears the brand of his uneven teeth, a ring like the rings of boulders set into loose soil by men who believed in old gods. It is a place only for him. If anyone else strayed there and saw it, he would have to make them a head lighter.
That is the sort of thought he should turn away from, and quickly. Carnal things have been running him ragged for three days, and now his mind seems determined to drag him through every mire it can find. Nothing about where he is helps. Nothing below him helps. His cock had been hard before his mouth ever reached you, and only turned harder, meaner, more convinced of itself as you softened and opened and shook above him. The ground hides the worst of it well enough, but it pacifies poorly. Each small shift is deadly, especially for a man who has known mostly the mean kind of friction. Solid surfaces and his own hand now and then, when loneliness or some insistent memory of breasts, throats, legs—legs, precisely—made an animal of him in the dark.
And there he is back at the legs.
Yours, with what lies between them still fresh on him, warm and slick and living, a taste so strange and cleanly foul it seems to have made a new chamber in him. He relives the feel of you under his tongue. Of what your body did when he licked properly, when he hummed deep enough, and your fingers turned cruel in his hair. That pulling ought to have hurt more than it did, or shamed him into sense at least. Instead it had near humbled him completely. There seems, to his great peril, to be some direct and wicked road between the roots of his hair and his loins, for when you yanked him up from you with that fistful of him, Duncan had come so close to spending that his whole being narrowed to the crude effort of refusing it. He does not know if that is a thing in him entire, the general affinity for receiving some manhandling, or only another power you have over him. Girlhandling, perhaps, but performed by you.
All of it helps very little. The belly under his cheek and your scent smeared across his face and the hand in his hair, they all help naught. Duncan smacks his lips once, then stirs.
It takes a mean little grunt to rise. His side has drunk some cold from the earth, bandage stiffened where it wraps him, and when he pushes himself up onto his hands the wound pulls as though remembering it has been slighted by all this pleasure around it. Duncan sits back on his heels slowly. Has to set his knees wide as he does, for there is no seemly arrangement left in his breeches. His cock is stranded there, neglected, thick with complaint, as if some part of him expected reward for honest labour and cannot be made to understand that love is no tally of services. He looks at you instead. “Are you well?” he asks, voice rough.
You prop yourself on your elbows, knees knocking together after all that boldness, and nod. You look changed. A little hollowed, though sweetly, in the manner of a body given just enough nourishment to keep wanting and nowhere near enough to be sated by it. Your mouth is damp. Your eyes keep their dark, inward shine. “Yes,” you tell him.
Then, to his utter horror, you scramble up too. Your thighs twitch with the movement, and Duncan has to close one hand on his own knee to stop himself from reaching out and putting you back into decency. His gaze drops, shamelessly, shamefully, to where he has made you glossy. He drags his eyes higher in penance and finds no mercy there either, for you cross your arms, seize the hem of the shift, and pull it upward.
The cloth lifts first over the lower belly he has just lain upon, skin giving way to the shadow below your ribs. Then sternum, then the underside of your breasts, and his cock kicks so hard it seems to have taken a separate oath against him. Your face disappears behind linen for one blind second. All he sees is your torso stretched in the act of undressing, your breasts prickling against the cold, the lifted arms, the night making an open country of you. His mouth goes dry enough for prayer.
By the time the shift drops beside you, words have gone useless in him. Which leaves him wholly defenceless when you take his hands.
You guide them to your chest with solemn purpose, as if returning some misplaced thing to its rightful shrine. His palms meet warmth and weight. He sits petrified while your thighs part again, while you climb him with no more grace than you have had all along and no less power for the lack of it. You settle across him, bare, pressing your cunt to the length of him through wool, and Duncan has great trouble finding the road by which he arrived here. From a girl on the skirts of battle, a crying maid in his cloak to a water-spirit. A sacred thing. Now this same impossible creature sits naked on him, offering him her tits and seeking his mouth as if all of it follows plainly from the first mercy he ever thought to show you.
You kiss him slower this time. Deeper. With the new patience of someone who has discovered there are pleasures that improve by circling.
Duncan lets it happen for a beat because he is weak, because his hands are pleasantly full, because the weight of you has turned his thoughts into warm mud. You draw back by a little, tongue touching your own lip.
“You taste different,” you say.
“Mm.” It is a poor answer. It is the best one he has. Still, your brow furrows. “It’s yourself you taste,” he says then.
You blink at that, and grow delighted in a way so sudden and frank it frightens him. “Do you like it?”
“Mm,” he tries, or means to. Aye, of course. Aye, I like everything. His body answers instead with a hard, hungry throb under you and an involuntary squeeze of both hands round the fullness of your chest.
Your lashes lower. “You do like it.”
“M-m’lady,” Duncan strains.
You kiss him again before he can gather honour into a shield. He manages half a breath against you, then turns his head with some grim effort. “I—I—we needn’t,” he says. “We do not have to. I only wanted—”
You cradle his whole head in your arms and draw him in, mouth close to his ear. “I want to make you feel as you made me feel,” you whisper. “To see you in it too.”
That stills him. For three days he has been thinking in terms of rescue and ruin, sin and restraint, oath and breach. He has been trying to place his body somewhere outside the matter. But your heart is hammering and your hands are in his hair and your cunt is hot for him, and there is no bargain in the looking.
You want. He wants too. At last, even Dunk the Lunk can read a thing so plainly written.
He starts fumbling at the front of his breeches since this is likely what you want, then stops himself halfway through, red to the scalp, and checks anyway. “You wish to see?” he asks. Against his ear there is a breathy yes, so Duncan sets his mouth tight and pulls the waistband away from himself.
His cock comes out, barely half of it, with a weeping eye at the top and blood vessels girdling down the flesh like roots bulging out of the earth. He closes his eyes and seeks asylum in your neck, so the next thing that happens Duncan only feels.
A finger, curious and subtle, teases the meeting of nerves below the crown, then goes up towards the slit. Much like with his throat, you gather and take, and when his eyes open you've got that finger in your mouth and your tongue around it. You seem spellbound. Enchanted, if Duncan believed such thing could be felt about him. "Show me more," you tell him, and he only realises that what you mean is for him to stand and present himself when you slide off him and sit on the bedroll cross-legged. Shameless.
He's battling the opposite. Shame-full, he nods. Even manages to mutter a miserable, "Aye," and stands with one hand braced at his bandaged side, the other just holding the breeches up, uselessly so, for of all things his thighs need no shielding. He lets the linen drop and, with a sombre kind of horror, waits for judgement. Looks down only to not see your face, and that turns against him too.
Between the legs he sways heavy, standing up from himself with more confidence than his mind owns. He has disliked his size before because it made him clumsy, conspicuous and wrong for rooms, so he's made it useful in labour and steel. When he finally harbours the courage to find your eyes, you're wearing the most bizarre expression. All soft-edged and melting with wonder, you are looking as though excess is the blessing.
Your teeth reveal themselves in a sweet, beaming smile, and your hands come out to wrap round his wrists. You pull him back down, and he barely gets his knees under him before you are on him again, kissing, touching, arranging by instinct and no wisdom. So he has to become useful in a new kind of way.
Where friction lived there is now a slide of skin on skin, and Duncan nearly loses the whole of himself to the difference. Your belly moves against him, your breasts flatten to his chest and drag there. Between you, his cock is trapped upright in the soft of both your stomachs, rubbed by every wriggle you make by accident and purpose in turns, and every rub comes barbed. You are kissing him eagerly, messily, trying to find some road forward by moving, by grinding. He can feel how quickly this will become end. You will pant and twist and grow no nearer to what you asked for, while he spends himself like a green fool against your belly and leaves you with his shame cooling on you.
“Sweet thing, please—” he grits, catching your hips. “Slow. Let me be of use to you. I’m… I’m big, and—”
You still for him, though your breath keeps coming hard. Those aspectabund eyes fasten on his face, obvious enough to make hiding useless. “Will you hurt me?” you ask.
“No,” Duncan says, hurt by the very shape of the question. “No, never. I only mean—we go slow. Aye? Slow.”
Your face calms as if he has laid a hand over troubled water, and the trust of it harms him in some deep place. To have someone look at him and believe him so easily. To be taken as a safe thing by a creature who had teeth enough to open throats and the foolish courage to turn a dagger on herself rather than on him. He presses his forehead to yours and breathes there, rough through the nose. “Lift for me?” he asks. “Only a little.”
You brace your hands on his arms and rise. Duncan looks down to guide himself and is bludgeoned by what he finds there. Slick has slipped down your inner thigh in a shining track, catching the dark like some private river. He groans and closes a fist round the base of himself with more force than required and steadies there, feeling the whole of him jump in his hand.
“Do you want me?” he asks into your mouth, legible with the need to hear it. You nod, but that is not enough when his heart has become a greedy thing too. "Tell me," Duncan says. “Please, tell me.”
“Yes,” you say. Your mouth goes wandering over him. “Yes, I do. I want you in me.” Your hips sink once, eager but aimless. “Take me.”
A fierce, impossible belonging spreads through him. He aligns himself and slips twice for the jerking blood in him. You make a small impatient sound and he near smiles despite the terror. Then he gets it right enough for the first touch.
Only the head of him drags through you. A kiss of a different kind. His cock has known linen, callus, mean hurried pressure, and now this unbelievably soft, hot, living mouth of the body. He rubs through it, barely, and his hips lock with the effort of keeping still. Again, slower, collecting what both of you have made, spreading it over himself until the slide turns slick. The intimacy of it is nearly worse than being taken inside would be. This staying at the gate. This being allowed to touch the edge of you and feel you open by a fraction under him. This kiss below kissing, where neither mouth speaks and both bodies answer anyway.
Then it is you who grows greedy. Your weight comes down, and Duncan recognises the change before he can speak to it. He becomes held where he has only been sliding, then feels the first giving inch. Your face breaks into a wince, then a gasp, so he reaches round you hard enough to stop both of you where you are.
"Easy," he says. "Sweetheart, easy."
The tightness has him by the root. All the soft has turned gripping and small on him, shocking his spine so quickly he has to shut his eyes for a moment. Yours are wide and scared in front of him, and the pleasure becomes a rotten thing with guilt in it.
"Why does it hurt?" you ask, voice thin. "You said—"
"I know," Duncan says. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." He presses one hand flat between your shoulders and holds you while his cock throbs like a wound. "Shh. Breathe with me. Breathe—"
You stare at him, doubtful and pained, but try. He draws breath in through his nose, slow enough to make an example of it, then lets it out against your cheek. You follow poorly at first, catching on the inhale, shuddering on the release. He keeps you still with both arms, though the stillness near murders him.
There is some mercy in it too. The worst of the first push hangs there between your bodies, neither taking nor retreating, and Duncan’s mind runs through every filthy scrap of knowledge folk have ever thrown into the air near him. It should ease. It should get good. Use spit. Women like this or that. Noise from those who made knowing sound like conquest and left him with nothing useful but the fear of damaging you.
“We can stop,” he says. “We can stop here, m’lady. I’ll not—”
Before he can make a noble mess of rising you away from himself, your breath changes.
Only a little. The next exhale leaves lower in your chest. Your hips soften by a measure, and the flesh around him gives its small, unwilling quarrel with his size. You notice it too. He sees the fright shift in your eyes and your body listening under the hurt, finding some other report beneath it. You breathe again, this time because you want the breath, and your fingers come to his shoulders.
“There,” he says, relieved. “Good, gods. Just so.”
Your brow stays pinched, but your mouth parts around a sound that has less grievance in it. Duncan does not move. He only holds you, forehead set to yours, the whole of him turned toward patience. Another breath. Another. Under him, inside you, the grip changes by degrees. Less like refusal. More like a fist slowly learning how to open without letting go.
“Oh,” you say, very quietly. It makes him put his teeth together.
“Aye?” he asks, and hates how much hope gets into it.
You nod once. Small. Fierce.
So he keeps holding. He has never been so deep in anything. He is barely in you at all, and already there is that terrible gladness in his sack, akin to one that comes when his cock starts threatening a scrape too raw. He does his best to throttle it, for despite you saying you wish to see him, he's convinced he wishes to see you harder.
You sink on him, stubborn-faced and quiet. Duncan feels each small victory in his muscles, while his mind remains oblivious to the thaumaturgy allowing it. Your brow is set hard at first, then anger at the pain cuts across it because ache has got between you and the thing you want. After, comes the stern listening. You go still around him, eyes lowered, as if this new flesh has answered in some difficult tongue and you mean to learn it properly. He lets you use him as you need, though the need itself is killing work. More of him goes into you. Inch by inch, all of them so alive and close his own breath begins to come wrong.
“Gods,” you say, and then, with a sort of insulted wonder, “You are large.”
Duncan goes hot to the roots of his hair. “I know,” he says, because there is no use pretending otherwise. Worried, he asks, “Does it trouble you?”
You huff through your nose and consider him, sitting there skewered on the question and on him both. “No.” Your hand comes up to his neck, fingers digging briefly as you deepen another little way. “I like that you are an effort.”
A sound gets out of him, small and strangled. He sets one palm to your cheek because he needs somewhere decent to put it and because your face has become dearer to him than life.
“It feels full,” you say. His cock gives a hard throb. “I can feel you—" You take his hand and guide it low to your underbelly.
There he is. Invasive and indeed, large enough to make himself known from the outside. It is foully private. Wonderful. So much so that Duncan whines, “Seven save me,” and hides in your throat.
You are on him, completely, and he stays frozen, stunned stupid by it. Your voice finds him, hushed. "What do I do?"
He near laughs. An odd sense of camaraderie spreads in him because, gods, he knows naught. He never thought getting this far possible at all. "I—" He swallows. Looks at you. "I dunno." Then, helplessly honest, “Whatever feels right.”
Your mouth curves. He knows then that he is in peril.
Flesh squeezes around him fiercely, and as if it is not humbling enough you tease, “This?"
The groan comes out of him as though struck from the gut. “Hah—oh, Seven, this—this feels right, aye.” He pants, staring at you as if you have found a latch in him and pulled it open. “Do that again.”
You do, smaller this time, watching his face as you learn him. Dunk puts his hands to your ribs and awaits another ripple when he remembers he's needed here too. “What… what do I do?” he asks lamely.
The pain has gone from your eyes. For a moment you merely observe him, sat, and he's struck by your beauty in it. Oh gods, he's managed this. Brought you through unease into this quiet wanting. Somehow, by some mercy, he is the man under you.
Then, you tell him: “Whatever you want.”
And for once, Duncan finds some selfish wickedness in himself.
He bows his head to your chest. Breathes out quietly, "This?" and before you can answer, his mouth closes over your nipple.
“Oh—” you moan. Loud. Arch some too, seven fucks. Gods, you arch for him, spine bending as you offer more of your tits. Your arms go behind you, hands brace on his knees. He takes the weight gladly, the shift round his cock graciously, because when your hips roll by accident or discovery the movement carries all the way down and wrings him near inside-out.
Duncan groans into your breast and sets his tongue to work. You grind on him in short, close strokes, hardly lifting, making a mill of your hips and his cock. Whole of him sits inside rubbed alive, worked into small cruel space until his thoughts blunt at the edges. He keeps his mouth on you, because he wants it, and because it gives him a task. In a useful order of things he sucks, breathes, then sucks again. Your nipple hardens under his tongue and he takes it in deeper, hollows his cheeks into a jaw that starts aching sweetly. His hands ride up your back to where spine bends for him. Skin wrinkles there under his fingers and he holds that kink, trying to retain exactly the places where pleasure seems to fold you.
This, he thinks, dazedly, must be being fucked. Men call it fucking. Men call everything fucking when there is ale in them and a chance of dying soon. They talk as if women are tavern benches with cunts, as if the doing is a matter of putting a thing where it goes and rutting till pride spills out. He has heard enough to last a lifetime. Women taking a cock to the root without a sound, as though maids are all built like sheaths and men all swords worth taking. Some girl against a stable door. Some widow with her skirts up in a ditch. Some camp follower who took three men and begged the fourth. A thousand lies told by mouths with grease in the beards.
This bears no kin to those stories. You are whispering his name as if it is helping you take him, and it rolls lovely off your tongue. You are trying to make yourself come on him, and Duncan has his mouth full of your tit, working at it with fixed devotion of someone given one good thing to do and determined to do it well. That, to him, seems closer to the truth. This awkward holy labour. This sweating. This being used sweetly and trusted through it. This is lovemaking, right here, with wanting you vivid under his hands more than he wants his own ending.
Your rhythm finds itself crookedly. Then loses itself. Then finds another way. Duncan follows what he can. Pants though his nose. Groans when you bear down. Grows bold enough once to nip you with his teeth, and you seem to adore it down to your tightening cunt. So he does it again, softer, and your body grows snugger, wetter, meaner around his cock. When he licks over it, you exhale the strangest little oh.
“Gods,” he mutters into you. “Gods, girl.”
The change starts plain. It's less orderly. Your body has its mind elsewhere now, and that mind has no use for manners. The strokes go crooked, breath starts jumping. The hands on his knees dig in until he feels the half-moons of your nails and hopes they stay. Pain would be proof come morning. A mark of where he was when you needed somewhere to put your strength.
Then you push off his legs and catch his head between your arms.
Duncan leaves your breast with a wet sound and lifts as far as you allow. Your forearms yoke him close. His nose fits beside yours almost by habit now. Your eyes are dark and open and half-wild.
“Tell me,” you whisper. “Tell me you love me. Tell me you love me—”
“I love you,” Duncan bursts, with no search needed for the answer. “Gods, I love you. I love you. I love you—”
Your mouth trembles near his. “I love you,” you say. “You’re mine and I love you. I was right about you, oh gods, I was right—”
In all your mumbling, you ride him hard enough that he feels the signal in it. More. Deeper. More room, more of him given up to you. His hands go to your arse and grip there, sudden and rude enough to make his ears burn, but you give a sharp glad sound and bear down again. That decides him. He braces, lifts you with him a little, and unfolds his knees from under himself. The shift wrenches both of you. He falls back flat with a grunt, side burning, cock dragged deeper by your weight.
The sky opens above him, black and moonless. And you.
That is all there is for a breath. You astride him, hair loose, thighs going badly and beautifully, hands on his chest as if he is ground and beast and lover together. Duncan catches your hips, then lets them go because you seem to know more when he does less. You lean down to kiss him and your face breaks in the middle of it. He feels it seize you.
Your hands find his cheeks. Nose knocks beside him. Your muscles grip him so hard his vision blanches, and then you are coming with his name caught in your teeth and love spilling out in pieces. I love you Duncan, I love you, and he just grips your shoulders and holds on, holds on and on, because if he moves wrong he will lose everything at once. The luck of being the thing inside you when it happens is unbearable.
“My girl,” he gets out. “My girl, my—”
Then, he's ripped in half. It starts low and pulls everything with it: thighs, sack, belly, chest, throat. It frightens him how good it is. How deep it seems to go from him. He has spilled before with his face hot from shame and hand slick round himself, but this is nothing like those past miseries. He's being drawn out and kept. He fills you in hard pulses and lets his body believe it has come home, foolish as that is, dangerous as that is, true as anything he has ever known. Lucky, he thinks, with what little mind remains. Lucky, lucky, lucky. To be wanted. To be held there. To spend in a creature who loves him and says so.
He keeps saying, "My girl, gods, my girl," because there is nothing else in him.
You take each spill with a gasp, and then a smile begins to sprout on your face. You're smiling while he's being torn asunder.
After, the world grows smaller. Deafer, as if great hands have closed over its ears. Duncan hears himself muttering things into the little space between you, broken stammers and poor scraps of prayer and slur. Gods, and Seven, and yes, still, still, as if he is trying to tell you you have done well and make certain he has done well too. You sag on him. Your arms wedge themselves beneath his neck, baring his throat, and your mouth comes there. It is hardly a kiss. More the arrival of a mouth too tired and too fond to do more than rest.
He turns to the side with you wrapped round him. You squeal some, as though you have forgotten his strength, or forgotten that he has been pliant beneath you because you asked him to be.
Something enormous has been done to him. Duncan comes out the other side of it a full man, and thinks, dimly, that full men do not brag about this sort of thing.
Then he notices you are trembling differently. When his cock shifts inside you, bathed in himself, he feels the scrape of soreness against it. It sobers him at once.
“Easy,” he murmurs. “Let me—”
He holds you close and draws back with as much care as he has left. Your body resists round him, tight and displeased, then gives him up with a low, unhappy sound that makes his stomach pull. “Did I hurt you?” he asks.
He looks down and sees the oddest medley of the body’s humours. Milk tainted red, gone pink where it oozes out of you. His cock smeared along the length with blood and spent. It all sobers him tenderly.
“Let me see,” Duncan says, and dips between your legs as if there is something his hands may yet fix.
He knows it is virgin blood. Something old and primal flickers in him, a brief possessive pride at being the proof of your first, and then it dies under the weight of your hands finding his cheeks. You guide him back up to your face, and he goes.
On the way, he thinks how unjust it is that women must bleed so boys can grow into men.
Then he sees your worry. At first he's certain it is pain troubling you, but your eyes move from his face to his groin and back again. “Have I damaged you?” you ask, with honest dread.
It hits him then that you understand as little as he does. Mayhaps less. You have done some violent inland magic with a body you barely know and come away afraid you have broken him by it.
“No, m’lady,” he breathes. “I ain’t so easily damaged.” Then he winces, because his side pulls when his arms try to hold you, and he ruins his case entirely.
You laugh, damp and small, and begin to fuss over him. “Oh, my sweet,” you murmur, touching his face, his shoulder, the binding. “Oh, my love.”
Duncan fusses back, trying to look you over while you try to look him over, until it becomes a strange little quarrel of hands and fret, each of you meaning to tend the other first.
When it's over, when wet cloth has been found and put to swollen parts, when hair has been brushed off slick foreheads and knuckles have been kissed, Duncan pulls you to him, cages you in him, and breathes so deep it feels like a first honest breath of his life. "I love you," he says to your temple. "Thank you. Thank you, my love."
You say it back. I love you into his throat. I love you against his jaw, and then I love you put to his cheek and preserved there. He keeps kissing you until his mouth goes tired and then his eyes grow heavy and then Duncan falls asleep with his beloved safe next to his heart and blades thrown away to lie useless in the grass.
Cold moves down your skin correctly. Your lungs feel heavy and full and familiar. When you open your eyes, the vision comes warped and magnified, and at once you understand you're floating in water.
It is hard at first to assess anything. You remember him under you. You remember his mouth, his hands, his flesh, warm and abundant, splitting you and filling you until body has torn itself to pleasure and blood.
But when you look at yourself, there are no legs he's ventured between. You're made whole again, with your old grace returned which feels like theft, somehow. Your tail glimmers in morning sunlight. Hands, panicked, come to your sides to find skin sliced back into gills and the palms themselves are scaled and fingers connected with thin, translucent webbing.
She tricked you. She gave you a quest and a man and told you all about what would happen if you failed, and naught of what comes of success. Now, you've regained yourself right after making peace with feeble knees, so it feels more like a loss. When you break the surface another loss lies still where you've left him, large and sleeping and oblivious.
Duncan looks peaceful. He's on his side on the bedroll, breathing calmly and his arms are thrown around a space where a body is missing. It seems that some lessons of humanity remain, for tears push themselves violent and hot into your eyes. They add to the river, salt into sweet water, and you're crying audibly, sobbing and hiccuping, because it all comes down on you, unkind and sad and miserable. He's right there and you cannot touch him. He's right there and you cannot hold him, because once again you've been made to belong somewhere where he doesn't.
"Duncan!" you call. It comes less as a call for him than a wail after something already lost.
He wakes badly. Jerks in the bedroll, one hand to the empty place under his arm. He looks there first, sleep-stupid and stricken, at the flattened hollow where your body ought to be.
Only then does his head turn. You see the first thing his face does: smile.
That wounds worse than anything. He cannot see you properly yet. He is still thick with slumber, hair mussed and mouth soft, looking at you as if this is only another of your oddities. Bathing at dawn. Calling for him from water. Waiting for him to come.
He rises slowly, muttering something you cannot hear. Finds his breeches. Pulls them on with one hand braced to his side, half awake and half fond, and comes barefoot over the bank with grass stuck to his soles.
The waiting lacerates. You are submerged to the waist, though waist is no honest word for you now. Beneath the surface the tail hangs in one long weight, scales catching and throwing the sun in broken pieces. You keep as still as you can, as if stillness might delay his seeing. It does not, of course.
His steps slow. Then stop. The colour drains from his face.
“M’lady—” he says, and the word fails. A breath goes into him sharply. He comes down to crouch at the bank, staring as if the world has put a second world inside it while he slept. “What has happened?”
“She tricked me,” you say, and once you begin the words come in scraps. “Wicked thing, wicked old thing, may she choke on peat and fishbones, may her teeth fall out, may the bog take her house and all her foul eggs—she tricked me, Duncan, she tricked me—”
You curse until the anger frays and leaves fear showing through, all the while he is staring.
It dawns on you then. He must be frightened. Repulsed. Cheated. A night ago he had a girl with legs, a girl who could sit astride him and bleed and laugh and walk badly into his hands. Now there is this creature before him, river-made and scaled, and made of different cloth from him.
You break into sobbing. Hide your face in your hands. “Forgive me,” you say. “Forgive me, I did not know. I did not know— I would never have, if I—”
“Gods be good,” Duncan breathes. His voice makes you freeze.
You lower your hands by a little. His eyes are wet. His mouth is parted. There is no disgust in him that you can find, only shock, and awe so plain it seems almost childish.
“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve seen,” he says.
A sob gets trapped in your throat. Mistrustful. “You said the same of the other body.”
“Aye,” he says.
“You needn’t make mercy of it.”
Realisation moves over his face. That you think this is the loss of him. That you think your shape has become a problem to solve or pardon. He softens entirely. “My sweet girl,” he says. “It is all true.”
Your tail twitches. His eyes go to it and you hate yourself for that too, for still wanting him to see and still wanting to hide from the seeing.
“Wilful girl,” he says under his breath. “Oh, sweetheart. Believe me. Please, believe me.”
Then, he steps into the water without bargaining or careful testing of whether the magic might stain him. Only comes, with his legs wide for balance, slipping once on the shallow stones, hissing when the cold gets him, and still coming. Water darkens his breeches and climbs his thighs. The bandage at his side drinks at once and is ruined, but he pays it no mind. His eyes stay fixed on you. Awed, devoted, and so full of purpose there is no spare room in his face for doubt.
His arms come for you. At first the holding is awkward. Your body is heavy in a different way now, long and slick with no knees to bend around him. His hand finds where your waist remains and the other comes to your cheek. He adjusts when you move toward him. Learns the weight of you without complaint, frowning only with the effort of keeping you close.
“It matters naught,” he tells you. “It matters not at all, my sweetheart.”
“How will we be?” you ask, disbelieving.
Duncan looks at you as if the question is large but the answer is simple. “I’m a hedge knight,” he says. “It is no great hardship to sleep under the stars. Rivers, then. Streams and lakes and ditches, if I must. I’ll find you.”
“Will you?”
“Aye,” he says. “Always.”
It strikes you that he offers no solution because he needs none. He does not speak of witches or bargains, of throttling the crone into giving the legs back, of fixing what has been returned to you. You cannot tell if he is so kind or simply stupid. Mayhaps both.
“I have no legs,” you insist.
Duncan laughs softly. “Aye, I see that.” You glare at him through tears, so his face comes close to yours. “You’ve a heart I adore, though,” he says. Softer, with the shyest wickedness tucked beneath it, “And you still have a mouth.”
He kisses you once. Small and careful. Then murmurs against you, “No matter the rest, this is where the nose goes. Always.”
And he shows you: his nose finds the side of yours. His mouth follows. The kiss is shy first, then surer when you clutch at him and kiss back. Around you, the river carries morning light over the lovers.
It is an old tale. A girl loves a boy, and a boy loves a girl. Big things, ancient things come between them, but youth pays no mind to the impossibility of worlds colliding. It regards naught the steel of propriety or the dull blades of daggers hungry for souls. With fear dressed as arrogance, youth traverses bridges invisible to the faithless, and so the mermaid falls for a hedge knight, and the hedge knight falls for her back.
