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I could sense the Fool standing behind me. The water was warm against my skin, even where it dripped from my hair onto my shoulders, and I was exhausted. My senses were half hazed over, the tea the Elderlings had served us lifting my mind away from both my cares and my body. I thought perhaps I should go back to the bed in the other room. The Fool would want the pool anyway, and I had better leave him to it.
But abruptly, I found I didn’t care. The sweetsleep was warming me from the inside as the water was from the outside, and I didn’t want to be alone.
“It’s warm. You should come in.” I sighed. “Do you want me to leave?”
A breath; a rustle of Amber’s skirts as the Fool took a few steps. “No. Tell me where the edge is.”
“About five steps towards my voice from you,” I said, glancing over my shoulder and finding enough energy to be surprised. The Fool was pragmatically shedding layers of Amber’s clothes — skirts, petticoats, jerkin, blouse. I looked away hastily. “To your right is a shallow end, with a slope into the water.”
“Thank you,” he said, and then was silent. I decided to just close my eyes and float. I could feel tension leaking from my muscles that had been gathering there since Bee’s capture. Any relief from it had felt like betrayal, and I could still feel the stinking tendrils of guilt the thought left in mind. It was strange, feeling the guilt and yet caring nothing about it.
There was a movement in the water beside me, and then a soft splash followed by the Fool’s deep, relieved gasp, and his familiar voice — not Amber’s. “Oh, it’s so warm.”
I opened my eyes to see him standing where he’d just slipped into the water, wearing Amber’s thin linen shift. His eyes were closed as he shivered in rapture, then dunked his head beneath the water and came up again so it sheeted off the planes of his thin shoulders, plastering his hair to his scalp. We settled side by side with our heads leaning back against the edge of the pool, and just breathed together for a while.
It was so long since we had been like this — just quiet, and content in each other’s company. There were still so many complicated knots of emotion buried in my chest. My guilt over what I’d done to him, my anger over his claims about Bee, the rush of shame at allowing myself to feel any tender emotion for him when Molly was dead and Bee was gone. But for tonight, alone here in this place of impossible wonders, I could only be glad that he was here. And, foolish as it was, glad that it was my Fool, not Amber, that was beside me.
“I missed you,” I whispered, my eyes clenched shut.
His shoulder brushed mine under the water. “So did I, Fitz,” he said. His voice was low and sincere. “Oh, how I have missed you.”
A wave of emotion coursed through me at that, and I found myself reaching toward him blindly, fingers grasping at his shoulders. He shuddered with me, and then wrapped me in his own grasping arms, head tucking into the curve of my neck and shoulder. Under my rough hands his skin was cool, and the heat of the pool was all around us. Cradling him, my face pressing into his hair, was like the breathless exhilaration of coming out of the steams on an icy day.
“Fitz,” he said after a while, “Can I wash your hair?”
“Is it that bad?” I asked.
“No,” he lifted his head and smiled at me from tentative eyes. “I just want to.”
“Oh,” I said, then paused. “All right.” All the reasons to say no seemed irrelevant.
The smile grew a little. “Are there soaps anywhere, can you see?”
I glanced around. “Yes. Let me fetch them.”
He released me for long enough for me to drag the tray of oils and soaps from one corner of the bath over to him. With one hand gloved, even in the water, he picked over the bottles, uncorking and sniffing them each in turn. His hands were so much more nimble now than they had been — joints moving expertly and knuckles only slightly swollen.
“Turn around,” he bid me, when he’d made his selections from the tray, and had me lean back and let him dip my curls into the water, clever fingers brushing through them, soothing trails against my scalp.
My attention drifted and I was halfway to sleep as he tended to me, only maintaining enough awareness to follow his directions. Eventually, I was standing and blinking in front of him as he smoothed a finishing oil through my locks.
“There,” he said. “I wish I could see what it looks like.”
I huffed a humourless laugh. “I assure you, the years have not improved me.”
“As if it would matter to me,” he said, almost matter of factly, but turned away from me again.
“Let me wash yours too,” I blurted.
He gave me a surprised glance over his shoulder, then it softened. “Thank you.”
I let him direct me again, massaging various things whose purpose I didn’t know through his hair. It felt so good to be close again, to let our bodies share the same space, move against each other. I was so immersed in it that I did not even notice I was growing hard until he moved in my arms, and his hip brushed against me. The proof of my body’s enjoyment of this intimacy was unmistakable. He froze against me, and a startled sound escaped my lips. For a long moment we stalled; I thought we did not even breathe, and then slowly, deliberately, he slid back against me again.
The movement of his thigh and buttock across my groin was like a faint echo of how it always felt for his silvered fingertips to fall onto my wrist. There was a single layer of thinly woven linen between us, and the electricity running from my skin to his took no notice of it.
He gasped, “Fitz,” and lifted his hands to loosen my grip, where my unknowing fingers had been digging tightly into his upper arms.
“Sorry,” I muttered, still quivering. He moved my hands, but otherwise didn’t let our bodies drift apart. Tugging them as he pleased, he wound my arms around his waist, and then carefully nestled himself back against my cock, digging insistently into the cleft of his buttocks. “Sorry, sorry,” I said again, unable to help it.
“There’s no need, Fitz,” he murmured to me. “It’s all right. You can let go.”
I gasped into his shoulder, his wet hair smelling of floral oil and nothing else, the peculiar scentlessness that marked his essence. Was it possible to miss a lack of scent?
My hips twitched against him.
“Mmm,” he said. “Yes. Like that.”
All control was lost. My body moved of its own accord, a separate thing from any thought or conscious action. And yet I felt entirely present in it as I had not since… no, there was no point dwelling on any of it. The twitch and hum of every nerve lit up my skin all over, woke me like the pop of an ember in a nighttime fire, each tiny explosion bursting where my skin touched the Fool. The grind of my hips into him was pure bliss. Cool skin, warm water, the solidity of his presence, the knowledge that at last, he was returned to me.
The time it took for me to reach climax was astonishingly short, but my fevered brain could not really tell, nor care. My Fool spoke to me in encouraging whispers, urged me to let myself go, to rut against him, as mindless as a dog in heat — and I did. I came clutching him to my chest, gasping and choking.
When I shuddered to a stop at last, I realised his ungloved hand was stroking gently back and forth along a forearm that held him in an iron grip. I wanted to apologise for my harsh clasp, but since he did not seem to mind I could not bring myself to.
I pressed my lips to his cool cheek. “Oh, Beloved,” I said, and he gave a convulsive sob in my arms.
There was nothing I could do but turn him gently towards me, and kiss his mouth silent. He clung to me again, and I folded myself around him.
“Let me do something for you,” I said to him when we finally pulled apart. “What — what would you —”
“No,” he said, softly. Then repeated more firmly, “No, Fitz, I would not have you do anything you regret.”
“This tea. I don’t have it in me to regret anything.”
“You would in the morning.”
“I don’t care,” I said desperately. “I will deal with that tomorrow. Please, Fool. I want you to feel good too.”
He twitched under my hands. “My body is… Oh, Beloved, it is not what it used to be. A horrid, burned up thing I am now.”
“You are never anything but beautiful.” That was too honest, but he smiled up at me.
He bit his lip, and his expression flickered with a coy glance that was purely the Fool of my youth, despite all the scars and the deep strangeness of his eyes. “I would like to touch you,” he said. “Would you like that, Fitzy?”
I quivered again. “Anything,” I said. My whole body was worn to the bone, and the pleasure he had already wrung out of me had left me loose-limbed and pliant. I did not want to resist him in the slightest.
He pressed another kiss to my cheek, then stepped away. Fumbling with the oils, he picked up one, and then took my hand to lead me towards the shallow sloping side.
“Lie down for me?” he suggested, and I did so, stretching out on my front against the tiles so I was mostly underwater, but I could fold my arms against the floor and safely rest my head on them.
The Fool’s hands moved carefully over me, learning my position and my muscles. I heard the pop of the cork from the bottle he held, and then warm oil drizzled against my back. Thorough and firm, he worked it into my muscles, starting at my shoulders and upper arms, then working down my back. By the time he ran gentle hands over my buttocks, I felt I was about to melt into the water.
“Fitz,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Tell me if you want me to stop.”
Then one finger of his ungloved right hand slipped into the crevice of my buttocks, and he trailed it down with careful slowness. I squirmed a little under the unfamiliar sensation, but I didn’t tell him to stop. In fact, I could not imagine telling him to stop ever, no matter what he did. It was my Fool, and every touch of his hands was one of love.
Even below the water the oil clung to his fingers. He reached down and stroked caressing touches over the swell of my sack, against the sensitive place right behind them, and then carefully pressed the tips of fingers against my opening. I gasped, twitched again under him, and made myself hold still again. Still fluid and relaxed in the warmth, I was not yet hard again, but would be soon.
The fingers disappeared for a moment and I heard the soft noise of the oil being picked up and put down again. His touch returned, and he massaged a gentle circle against my rectum. I could feel my face flushing a deep red, and was glad it was buried in my arms where he couldn’t see it. Ever so gently, I felt the tip of his index finger breach the ring of muscle. My mouth made a keening sound.
The Fool’s other hand gripped tight on one of my hips. We were both trembling. “You’re so — so hot inside,” he said. A muffled moan was my only response. He leaned over my back and pressed a kiss to my shoulder blade. “I’ll take care of you, Beloved,” he whispered.
At last, I lifted my head to meet his gaze. “I didn’t know,” I said shakily.
“Know what?” he asked. His eyes were glassy and golden, pupils blown wide despite his sightlessness.
“That it — it could feel so good.”
“Truly?” he said.
In response, I craned my neck up and round to kiss him. He returned it sweetly, warmly, intently. “Ah, my Fitz,” he said. “I didn’t know if you would be able to enjoy it.”
“Perhaps not most of the time,” I admitted. “But I… I can’t care about the rest of the world just now.”
“Good,” he said, fiercely. “Let go, Fitz. That’s what sweetsleep is for. To allow you peace, when your mind otherwise wouldn’t.”
“I want to care,” I said. “Everyone is gone from me. I am so alone. But I don’t want to think about it any more.”
His breath hitched. “Not alone. I’m here. Feel me, Fitz. I’m right here.”
The long stretch of his index finger slid deeper into me and I groaned. “Please,” I begged. “Please, Beloved.”
“I’m here,” he repeated, his finger stroking in and out of me. With his other hand, he pinned my shoulder down, holding me mostly still. It was the firm hold I did not know I needed, and I thought of the other touches in my life that had felt as grounding. There had not been many — the sinking of my hand into the fur at the scruff of Nighteyes’ neck. Molly’s hand in mine on our wedding day. The Fool leaping from Malta into my arms, outside my old cabin near Forge. His finger sank into me, and I into his touch, letting all my concerns fall away for once. What did it matter? Worrying could not change a thing, and right now there was this new bliss waiting for me in his loving hands.
Slow as sand trickling through an hourglass, he slid another finger into me, working me carefully and opening me up until every motion was an easy slide. Before long, I was struggling onto my hands and knees, pushing back against him, shaking and twitching and longing for his touch. His fingers stroked gently at a place inside me that felt indescribable. Overwhelming sensation and need coursed through me at every touch.
“Your knees must be aching,” Beloved said, but I shook my head violently.
“I don’t care,” I gasped.
He laughed, and drew his fingers out of me. I whined in protest. “Oh, my sweet Fitz. Let’s go to the bed. You’ll be much more comfortable.”
I was unsteady on my feet, leaning on my Fool to get myself properly upright. He gave me a frank glance over as the front of my body was revealed, and leered lasciviously at the sight of my bare cock, standing proudly out for him.
“Fool,” I protested weakly, feeling the blush heat my cheeks and my chest.
“Beloved,” he simpered back to me, and then drew my head down into a tender kiss. “Go and lie down. I will be with you in a moment.”
I went with poor grace, skin on fire with lust and self-consciousness and the knowledge of being looked at. But I had learned him too well to begrudge him his privacy, and indeed when he came to join me he had discarded the wet shift for a soft Elderling robe that billowed around his form.
He climbed up beside me, took me into his arms, and just kissed me for a while. His hands roamed over every inch of my exposed skin, smoothing the planes and curves of my body. I thought he might be memorising it, and a desperate part of me hoped that was so. But he refused to touch me in any of the places I most wanted — my hard length, that deep place inside of me. Instead, he skimmed his fingers over my chest, pinched a nipple, brushed a finger against my buttocks, all until I was panting for him, writhing against the bed and his hands.
“Please,” I said again, shuddering against him.
“Since you ask so beautifully,” he said, and slid a finger inside me again.
I cried out, bucked into the mattress, and then pushed to my hands and knees at once, spreading my legs apart for him as best I could. A hoarse groan sounded from him as he scrambled back for a better angle, a second finger rejoining the first. He’d brought the oil through, and I heard its now-distinctive sounds as he added more.
“Another finger, my love?” he asked tenderly.
I nodded fervently, then remembered to say, “Yes, yes, oh, Beloved.”
Putting the oil back down, he grasped one buttock firmly with his gloved hand, and pressed the third finger in alongside the others. The slow but inexorable pressure as he filled me was like nothing I’d ever felt. His other hand held me open, pinned. My face felt hotter than a forge fire, and my arms shook under me. I lost time for a while as he murmured endearments to me, pressed his fingers in and out of me, turned my breathless body into an instrument of pleasure — made me into a creature with no mind but to beg for him, to call to him.
The idea came to me in a surge of bright desire. His gloved hand was still on me, and a delirious part of me thought I could sense the burning silver coating his skin under the thin fabric.
“Beloved,” I said. “Your other hand. Please.”
He used it to rub a soothing circle into my hip, then slipped it round to take a grasp on my cock. I cried out, clenching my thighs tight to keep from collapsing.
“No, not that.” If I hadn’t come once already, that would have certainly ended things for me. “Take — take off your glove.”
He froze. “Fitz,” he said in a low voice. “Fitz, we shouldn’t. The Skill current is too strong here.”
“You will call me back, if I stray too far. But it’s…” I breathed into the pillow for a moment. “It’s not like the Skill stream, with you. The only place I could get lost in is you.”
Behind me, he shook as he withdrew from me, his unsilvered fingers sliding out of me with an obscene sound. I turned over to see him better and looked up at him with burning eyes.
With trembling hands, he was drawing off his glove. “What if I can’t call us back?” he said, but I could see in his face that he could not resist the offer, not when it was willingly placed in front of him.
“I know you will.” I wasn’t sure this was true, but along with all my other worries the tea had taken with it my fear of our connection. All I could think of now was that tantalising, endless oneness, as close as my Beloved’s fingertips. “I trust you. Please, Beloved.”
His hand was bare now, the new silver on it shining in the dim light of our bedroom. It trembled as he reached for my wrist.
“I want—” I began, and flushed some more. “Not my wrist. Inside me.”
The sound he made was one I’d never heard before, from him or any other lover. The groan was guttural, a short, involuntary noise that he choked off quickly. His mouth hung open, kiss-swollen and red. “We can’t,” he protested. “It’ll be much too sensitive.”
“You can take it away afterwards,” I said. Little as I had liked that experience the first time, there was a small, practical part of me that knew he was right. It was only that my desire for him, in my body and in the Skill, drowned all other considerations. “I need you. I missed you so much, Beloved, and I did not even have the last remnant of our link. Let me feel you again.”
He bent forward and kissed me, filthy and wet, his tongue eager for me. “You’re sure?” he said into my mouth. “Oh, Fitz, this is so unwise.”
“We have never been wise,” I told him.
One more kiss, sweet and almost chaste, placed just atop my lips, and he sat up from me. He ran his unsilvered hand down my side, around my hip and cupped my buttock. With care, he arranged my legs to be spread how he wanted them, and gazed with unseeing eyes down at his work. “You are so beautiful,” he said wretchedly
“Only in your mind’s eye.”
He shook his head. “I don’t have to see to know,” he said, and slid his Skilled fingers inside me.
Our joining in the Skill had always been something barely short of sexual pleasure, and yet far beyond it as well. This moment, this communion, was both of them in equal measure. We fell into each other like two rivers merging, all our currents and eddies winding around each other, until our waters were so mingled it was impossible to find the lines between us. It was the roar of a dragon, the heat shock of stepping outside in a southern summer, the percussive force of a storm-driven wave hitting the rocks and exploding into spray. His soul was mine, and mine was his, and in my frail, human body his fingers were reaching deep inside me and finding new sensations.
Oh, Beloved! he cried out to me.
My body jerked under him, my soul spiralled and danced with his, and the pure joy of our connection burst through us both. It was a physical rapture, a spiritual ecstasy, a bright clash of our very essences. His fingers twisted inside me, pressed into me, and we were coming together like a bolt of lightning running through us both to the ground, in a moment of white heat that stretched, stretched, and broke like shattering glass.
I do not know how he found the strength to pull his fingers away from me again. With deep certainty, I know I would not have. But somehow, as both our minds and our bodies gasped and shivered, he withdrew from me and collapsed across my sweating chest. I clutched him to me, unable to let go of him. He panted against me for a while, and then stirred. “Fitz, I have to —”
Reluctant, I let him move, and felt the horrible jolt of sorrow and solitude as he reached his fingers down and drew the marks of his silvered fingers out of me again. A sob wrenched itself out of my throat, pulling guttural pain with it. Only the Fool’s body collapsing back onto me stopped me from drowning completely in the agony that wrenched through me. With his hand held carefully out of the way, he folded himself back around me. I buried my face in his hair, twisting my fingers in his robe and holding on to him with all my strength. Thankfully, he seemed glad to do the same, letting us both sink back into the horrible smallness of our individual bodies while we could at least take comfort in our closeness. For a long time, we shook in each other’s arms — or perhaps it was sobs. I could not tell then, and do not know now.
Once we calmed, I would have fallen asleep right then, despite the mess that I had splattered my chest with and the Fool’s unprotected silver hand. All thought and all emotion had been drained out of me, leaving only the husk of a man. He was ever fastidious, though, my beloved, and when he had decided we had enough breath back, I was pushed with irresistible gentleness back into the bathing pool.
More than halfway asleep on my feet, I was clumsy in my washing, and waited, with my back turned, as my Fool performed whatever cleaning he was in need of. When he was done, he took my arm in his ever-beautiful fingers, and we stumbled out of the bath together. He dried me, too, stroking the towel through the hair on my chest, between my legs, in every intimate place I’d never thought about. There had been a soft Elderling robe laid out for me as well, but I refused it. I wanted to hold him as close to my skin as I could just now.
“There,” he said, running exploratory fingers over my shoulders as though to hunt out any recalcitrant drops of moisture. “How do you feel?”
I shivered. “Strange. Empty. Exhausted.”
“Sleep will fix much of that.”
I cupped his face in my hands, and pressed our foreheads together. “I am glad to have you here.”
He huffed a mirthless laugh. “I only hope you will feel the same in the morning.”
For a moment, I remained silent. “It does not seem right to promise you what I can’t be sure of myself,” I told him. “But I — I do not know how I could regret you, Beloved.”
I felt the hot tracks of tears on his cheeks under my fingers, and I smoothed them away. We stood a long while by the pool, until he sighed, and drew back. “Bed,” he said firmly.
We curled up together, as we had so many times before. The strange stone cushioning of the Elderling bed allowed me to slip an arm under his body without it being crushed, and we nestled into each other. I was warm and sated and blissfully empty.
“Sleep, Beloved,” he told me. I heard no more, falling into his embrace, and into sleep’s.