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Xena’s been a light sleeper since she was seventeen, the year she took command of her first band of mercenaries and was nearly assassinated four times. In the years that followed she’d learned to sleep on board a ship in a howling gale, in trees, in filthy vermin-infested jail cells and even lashed into Argo’s saddle, if necessary. Sleeping in a barn full of dead Persians is no challenge at all; every muscle in her body is burning with exhaustion, and as the fury of battle fades, the clarity of her mind goes with it. The brief hour of sleep she stole during her nightlong vigil over Gabrielle wasn’t enough. Without rest, she’ll be useless to both of them, and they’ll need to be up and moving soon, before the rest of the Persian cavalry regains their nerve.
The wounds she took during the battle aren’t serious, and they’ve mostly stopped bleeding on their own by the time she lets herself collapse on the pile of hay, sacking and furs serving as a makeshift bed. Thankfully, Gabrielle’s makeshift bed is also just about the only place in the barn still clear of corpses.
Gabrielle’s breathing is still hoarse and ragged, and it’s the most beautiful sound Xena’s ever heard. Just last week Gabrielle was declaiming some fool ballad about the nightingale’s ode to the morning sun, but Xena’s heard a lot of birds in her life and none of the noises they made have ever held a candle to the rattle and wheeze that tells her Gabrielle is alive, still alive, still alive.
She falls asleep to it like a lullaby (still alive, still alive, still alive) —
— and snaps awake, hand already on the chakram at her hip, but the movement that woke her is only Gabrielle, shifting in her sleep. It might be the early afternoon sunlight streaming through the slats in the roof, but Xena thinks she can see some color already coming back to Gabrielle’s face. “Hey,” she whispers, and lets go of her chakram, strokes Gabrielle’s hair instead.
Gabrielle doesn’t open her eyes, just curls further into Xena’s side, heedless of the sharp edges of armband and breastplate. Xena hastily sheds both. Gabrielle blearily gropes at the furs until she gets one arm around Xena’s waist and rests her cheek on Xena’s shoulder, her too-hot forehead pressed against the side of Xena’s neck, her breath tickling the bare skin above Xena’s collarbone. (Still alive, still alive, still alive.)
“Hey,” Xena says again, softly, into Gabrielle’s ear. “You all right?”
“Th’ blue ones,” Gabrielle mumbles. “Ermine trim. Twenty dinars — fifteen — think ‘m an idiot —“
Xena bites back a slow smile. “I’ll get you your damned boots,” she murmurs. “Hush, now.”
“Have t’ be warm. The snow —“ A shudder goes through her, and her grip tightens, her fingers digging into Xena’s back. A sudden, shrill fear is in her voice and in every muscle, the terror of an inescapable nightmare. “Xena, it’s so cold —“
The air is hot and close in the loft, but Xena draws the furs up around Gabrielle’s shoulders anyway. “It’s the poison fever, it’ll break soon. Rest, Gabrielle.”
“I love you,” Gabrielle sighs, and whatever horror had her in its teeth is broken; the tension drains from her and she subsides back into a deeper, healing sleep.
Even knowing that she needs the rest almost as much as Gabrielle does, knowing that in an hour or two she’ll have to get up and start hauling Persian bodies outside to be burned, Xena lies awake for a while, thinking.
I have the gift of prophecy, Gabrielle had said, when she’d been nothing more to Xena or herself than a girl from Potidaea. Xena had hardly thought about it since then, until Gabrielle’s dream this morning, of a man with a double-edged sword who came through the roof. If the stress on her body, or some ingredient of the poison itself, or even something about their time in Illusia had wakened Gabrielle’s gift again after a long while laying dormant —
Well, so what? Through life, into death or beyond it, no matter how bitter or cold the road they traveled, they would be together. And if anything in this life managed to separate them, they would meet again in Tartarus, or the Elysian Fields, or whatever Titans-forsaken place came next, and not even the gods themselves could prevent it.
It’s more than Xena had dared hope for out of this life. Gabrielle’s alive; that’s enough. That will always be enough.
—
The deafening cacophony of two hundred and fifty maddened warhorses can stop a man’s heart from sheer terror at the sound alone, and underneath that, like the screech of Discord herself, are the screams of the dying, steel grating on bone, all building to an unendurable thunder — and just when she thinks she must be shattering apart into a thousand pieces, strong hands grip Gabrielle’s shoulders and shake her roughly awake.
Lightning flickers at the mouth of the cave, cruelly illuminating the matted, mud-caked figure kneeling over her. “Xena,” she gasps, heart in her throat, one hand already clutching her staff. “What happened? Are we under attack?”
“No, there’s no attack.” Xena retreats toward the fire, poking at it irritably with a stick to to wake the banked coals. Gabrielle sits up and takes a better look at her; caked in mud from head to toe, with twigs and brambles sticking out of her matted mane of hair, shallow bloody scrapes along the backs of both hands.
Gabrielle glances at the mouth of the cave and sees a surprising lack of marauding barbarians or armored ne’er-do-wells looming menacingly out of the forest. There’s nothing out there but curtains of rain and the pitch black of a moonless night. “Xena,” she says, “what happened to you?”
“I fell.”
“You’re bleeding.” Gabrielle tosses off the bedroll and kneels beside the fire, trying to examine Xena’s hands, but Xena pulls them away with a scowl. “All right, seriously. Did you go out there and roll around in the mud?”
“Not by choice,” Xena says stiffly. “The rain’s loosened the soil. One of the trees was half-rotted through, it fell and undermined the wall of that ravine. I slipped and fell down into it.”
Getting anything out of her is so painful sometimes, Gabrielle thinks, but there’s no good way to describe it — it’s like the information is embedded in Xena’s head, and like it has to be tortuously drawn out, one piece at a time, while Xena fights her the whole way. “All right,” she says, “we’re making progress. Why did you go running out into the rain so fast that you lost your footing?”
“To get my chakram. It stuck in a tree.”
Gabrielle reaches for Xena’s hands again, and this time Xena lets her look them over and rinse the mud out of the shallow scrapes. “Oh, and I suppose your chakram’s been cursed by Ares, and it just leaps off and attacks random inanimate objects by itself now?”
Xena huffs out an irritated breath through her nose. Gabrielle can’t help thinking of a cat that had lurked around her family’s farm back in Potidaea — a lean, prickly, half-wild animal, who’d once fallen into the horses’ water trough while trying to balance on a particularly rickety fencepost, and spent the rest of the day hissing and strutting and conspicuously chasing off the dogs to regain its lost dignity. She just manages to duck her head and bite her lip in time to hide her smile.
“If you must know,” Xena growls, “you shouted something about a cavalry charge, and I woke up, saw something moving out there, and… reacted defensively.”
“I shouted —?” A vague memory returns, and Gabrielle winces. “I was dreaming. About the battle.”
“I figured.”
“Then what did you see out there that was moving?”
Xena’s silent for a while. Finally, as begrudgingly as possible, she says, “I gave a squirrel an extremely close shave.”
Gabrielle claps a hand over her mouth, but it’s too late. Laughter bubbles out of her like an irrepressible spring, and she leans her head on Xena’s shoulder, not caring about the mud. “That poor, innocent creature,” she gasps, and starts laughing again.
Xena’s smiling, Gabrielle can hear it in her voice without needing to see it. “I probably took a year off his life. And you took a year off mine, shouting like that.”
“I’m sorry.” Gabrielle’s still holding Xena’s hands. She laces their fingers together, squeezing Xena’s hands between hers, feeling the sword-calluses as familiar to her, after all this time, as the lines of Xena’s face. “You defended us valiantly, Warrior Princess. I’ll put it in my next scroll. ‘In the dark of night, as thunder crashed, the mighty Xena bravely dashed —‘“
“Gods help us all, you’re rhyming now?”
“‘— to confront her foe! Her chakram whirls, to clear the woods of vicious —‘“
Xena tugs her hands away and flops back onto her bedroll, throwing one arm across her eyes to block out the firelight. “Goodnight, Gabrielle.”
Gabrielle grins and stretches out on her own bedroll. “Goodnight, Xena. Glad you came through that trying battle unscathed.”
Xena snorts. Gabrielle closes her eyes, listening to the roar of the rain and the steady, even rhythm of Xena’s breathing. She’d thought Xena long asleep, and is beginning to drift off herself, when she hears a rustle of furs and feels the feather-light touch of Xena’s fingertips stroking the curve of her shoulder. “No more nightmares, all right?” Xena says softly, and Gabrielle knows that all her grumpy blustering is just a ploy to hide this — the vulnerability at the heart of her, the tenderness of her touch.
“Not tonight,” Gabrielle agrees. It’s a promise she has no trouble keeping.
—
“Gabrielle,” Xena says somewhere on a dusty cattle-track south of Thrace, so casually that Gabrielle would have known right away that she was up to something, if she hadn’t been busy scanning the sides of the trail for wild onions to relieve the monotony of the rabbit stew they’ll be having for dinner for the third night in a row.
“Yeah?”
“Do you think that Phillippa really cheated Sartorius just to steal the last of his father’s fortune, or do think she was jealous of him proposing to Artia?”
“What?” Gabrielle stops short so abruptly that Argo nearly walks right over her. Argo whickers in annoyance, yanks her reins out of Gabrielle’s hand with a toss of her head, and shoulders past the slower, smaller, more oblivious human to get to Xena.
“I mean, it was clear she wanted to woo Artia herself,” Xena continues, “and what better way to punish Sartorius? Since she couldn’t challenge him to a duel and she knew gold was his only true love, she hit him where it hurt.” Xena picks up Argo’s reins and tugs her forward a few steps, then glances back at Gabrielle, who’s still stuck in place, gaping. “Well?”
“Wait, hang on. We’re talking about Three Nights in Actium, right? The play?”
“Of course.” Xena tugs Argo forward another few steps, and this time Gabrielle shakes herself out of her shock and jogs up to keep from getting left behind. “You dragged me to see it,” Xena says, “I thought you’d want to talk about it.”
“I did! I do! But — I have to admit, I’m surprised that you remember anything about it. Or care. Didn’t you fall asleep while Sartorius and Cassarius were dueling to the death?”
“Shoddy swordwork always puts me to sleep.” Xena wrinkles her nose in disgust at the memory. “Anyway, I think Phillippa was jealous. The real problem was that no one would let her duel Sartorius. If she could’ve just defeated him in fair and honest combat, there wouldn’t have been any need for all that sneaking around and poisoning business. I think it’s always better to get your feelings out in the open. It’s not healthy to bottle everything down like that.”
“Of course not, but that’s the whole point! Don’t you see? If Phillippa had been allowed to express any of her feelings openly, the entire tragedy could have been avoided! People think that Sartorius is the villain, but really it’s the small-mindedness, the tyranny of Phillippa’s father —“
“Then what’s your excuse?”
Xena glances back to watch as Gabrielle’s eyes widen in shock, then narrow in suspicion. “My excuse for what?”
“Bottling up all your jealousy and hurt feelings. That stuff is poisonous, you know. Better to let it out.”
“Jealous? Why would I be jealous? You’re not making any sense.”
Xena smiles, a lazy indolent smile that makes Gabrielle want to shove her and kiss her, simultaneously and intensely. “So you’re saying you weren’t jealous last night when that bold, handsome, honorable guard captain offered me the world on a silver shield, put his drunken paws all over me, and walked away without even a bruise?”
Gabrielle bristles with remembered rage and immediately tries to hide it. “Jealousy is a petty, base emotion, the thief of contentment and joy —“
Xena stops and taps her chin, peering thoughtfully up at the clouds as though searching for the answer to an intriguing riddle. “No, that’s not the way to do it. What’s the line? ‘Thou who hast dared to touch what he is unfit to worship, and to plunder what he has not earned, feel my wrath’?”
“That’s Phillippa’s line to Sartorius, just when she poisons him, but it’s… not… oh, no.” Gabrielle turns her face into Argo’s flank in a futile effort to hide her blush. “I dreamed about that scene last night. I said that line out loud, didn’t I?”
Xena’s smile widens. “Among others.”
“So you didn’t pay attention at all when I took you to see Three Nights in Actium?”
“I couldn’t have told you the plot yesterday if you’d paid me a hundred dinars,” Xena says matter-of-factly. “But the things you were saying seemed familiar, so while you were off buying new blankets this morning I paid that bard in the town square to give me a refresher.”
“Great,” Gabrielle mumbles into the saddlebags.
Xena’s hands slide over her shoulders, and when Gabrielle doesn’t immediately pull away Xena digs her thumbs into the tense muscles at the base of Gabrielle’s neck, working out the knots in the way that she knows Gabrielle has never been able to resist. “Come on, look at me,” she says, and Gabrielle turns around, scowling up into Xena’s tender, teasing smile. “You have nothing and no one to be jealous of, in this world or any other,” Xena says. “After all we’ve been through, I can’t believe you’d need reminding of that. But if you ever do need a reminder, all you have to do is ask.”
Her hands start to drift, one sliding around the back of Gabrielle’s neck and the other brushing under her chin, tilting her head back to bare her throat. The sun, the trees, the road all disappear behind the dark, shining curtain of Xena’s hair as she bends forward to brush her lips to the pulse in Gabrielle’s neck, then the sensitive spot below her ear, then the corner of her jaw. By the time Xena’s lips meet hers Gabrielle is on fire, shivery and weak at the knees, melting in Xena’s sure, expert hands, just like she always does. Just like she always will — her, and no one else, no matter how handsome or bold or honorable —
By the time she can speak again Xena has her pressed up against a tree, which is just as well because she’d probably have fallen without it. “Couldn’t you do this in a tavern once in a while?” she pleads, burying her face in the curve of Xena’s neck. “Those men, when they look at you, all they see is this — prize that they can win. Another trophy, another conquest. Like if they just kill the right warlord or humiliate the right rival, you’ll belong to them.” More quietly, she adds, “They don’t see me as a rival. It’s like I’m not even there.”
“The men who proposition me in taverns are swine, Gabrielle — they’re so blind, they wouldn’t see the Golden Fleece if you pulled it over their eyes. Of course you’re not a rival to men like that,” Xena says, and Gabrielle is surprised at the depths of pain in her voice. “You’re too far beyond them. They think they can race each other to my heart, but you’ve already won.”
This time it’s Gabrielle who reaches up and draws Xena’s lips down to hers. As they break apart, flushed and breathless, she murmurs, “Careful, Xena, or I just might make a poet of you yet.”
Xena laughs, and Gabrielle feels the vibration of it in her hands and her chest and her belly. “Oh, I’d love to see you try.”
“Xena,” Gabrielle groans, half pleading, half demanding, a call that Xena couldn’t possibly fail to answer, and Xena gladly sets aside moral philosophy and literary criticism in favor of a much more entertaining way to spend the afternoon.