Chapter Text
Sometimes, it is such a shock to wake in the royal chambers, in the High King’s bed with Cardan lying fast asleep beside her, that Jude must blink several times before she is convinced it is real.
Sometimes, even then, she must pinch herself.
When she finally sits up, heaving off the heavy blanket of sleep, Jude feels so light it’s as though she’s standing on the edge of a precipice, a giddy breeze whipping about her. She just might float away on it. She doesn’t, of course. Because although Elfhame is magic, and although technically she is magic, gravity is still a thing that exists.
She’s in Cardan’s billowing white shirt from the night before, eyes fixed on her husband’s sleeping form, and Jude thinks that perhaps she could defy that, too. Perhaps she could lift right off this very bed if she tried. She is very good at defiance, after all.
This is what Jude is thinking about when Cardan rouses from his slumber. His eyes flutter open. They are dark pools of molasses spilling sleepily across her face.
“Whatever you’re scheming,” he mumbles, rolling over to his stomach, “Don’t. Or if you must, I beg of you to clue me in on your designs.” Cardan hugs the pillow to his face.
His eyes are closed again, lashes splaying down his cheeks like the open slats of two black hand-fans. Sea-foam sheets cling to his body, delicate—as if the lissom lines of him are rock, or the cresting tides themselves. They lap the shore.
There are pillow-lines on his face where warmth and the last vestiges of sleep now live. Jude wants very badly to sweep back the strand of hair that tumbles over his brow.
“I am not scheming,” she says at last, into the hush of the room. “I’m thinking.”
“About my tail, I hope.” Cardan’s voice is muffled by the pillow. He is ridiculous. He is hers.
She knows he cannot see, but she rolls her eyes anyway and stifles a very stupid grin. “I must give you bad news, I’m afraid,” she tells him. “I was thinking about flying.”
Cardan peeks up at her, squinting his confusion. “Ragwort ponies?”
“No.” She bites the inside of her lip. “With our magic. Can we do it?”
His brows furrow. “I don’t know. I’ve never tried.”
“Oh.” Jude looks at her hands folded in her lap.
Cardan rolls over so he’s on his back again. He opens his eyes in full. They regard her, glinting and inquisitive. “I wonder what made you curious.” He doesn’t phrase it as a question, so she is not obligated to respond.
“Well,” she says, “I was thinking about gravity. And then I was thinking about defying it and then I was truly curious whether or not I could. Whether our magic would allow for that sort of thing.” She wrinkles her nose, feeling a bit silly for such a train of thought, the admission of it. “I’m being foolish, I know. We probably can’t fly.”
He doesn’t tease her as she expects. Slow, gentle hands tug Jude by the waist. He pulls her astride him. “You,” Cardan says, as she makes a home of his bare torso, “Are not a fool. If Alice of Wonderland can believe six impossible things before breakfast, I am certain the High Queen of Elfhame should be afforded at least one more than that.”
At this, Jude allows a sappy smile to play across her lips. She allows it because she rarely does. She knows better than to indulge too often in things so oversweet as this. This spun sugar sunrise feeling, filling her up like a parachute.
Jude laces her fingers in his. Perhaps now is the very best time to imbibe herself on that particular potion. He is a wonder below her, and looking at him feels more like breathing than drawing in breath.
A line appears between Cardan’s brow, then. “Why were you thinking about gravity?” he asks, and Jude knows her cheeks go vermilion.
“Now, that is the silliest thought of them all.”
His gaze flits across her reddened face, her widened eyes. He shrugs. “I often have very silly thoughts. Most of them about this tail.” The soft tuft comes to brush her thigh. “Your lips.” It traces the edges of her pout.
So startled by the sensation is she, that a very un-Jude-like giggle barrels from her chest before she can stop it. She clamps a hand over her mouth.
Cardan looks positively delighted with himself. He renders her a devilish grin. “Would you like to hear them?”
“No,” Jude says, too quickly.
His tail still brushes swirling patterns across her face. She tries to glare at him. She fails magnificently. Cardan’s lips curl up, lopsided at the corners. A plume of sable tickles her nose.
In one swift motion, Jude swipes the deviant tuft from midair, capturing it in her fist. She doesn’t let go. Just sits there, weaving the soft fur between her fingers.
“Liar,” he says, eyes burning a wicked delight. Then, he takes her left hand back up in his and says, more gentle, “Try me.”
Jude knows to what her husband is referring. That remotion of armour, that divestment of masks. Her stomach clenches.
She supposes she could just make something up. But that would be cowardice in earnest since what she has to tell him is hardly a bad thing. Still, admitting her feelings, even heartening ones, is something that might never come easy to Jude. It is a yielding that grates against her very nature, leaving her raw and vulnerable.
She looks down at the tail she still cradles in her grasp, at their hands in her lap. The weft of their fingers like the climbing segments of one spine.
“Fine.” A great sigh puffs out her cheeks. “I was thinking about gravity because when I woke up, I remembered that everything—all of this—is not a dream. That it is reality, and it is mine. And I thought…”
She glances at the ceiling, hoping maybe the packed earth there can save her from embarrassment. Cardan’s thumb trails a line down the centre of her palm, the scar at its centre.
“I thought I might float away from the happiness of it,” she breathes.
Immediately, Jude screws her eyes shut. As if she means to scrub away the memory of her own words from the backs of her lids. As if, by closing them, she herself could cease to exist.
The logs burning low in the hearth hiss their mockery. For a long moment, it is the only sound in the room.
“Well,” Cardan murmurs and Jude opens one eye. His are large, moonlike things. Unbearable to look at if she should like to keep any shred of dignity. She swallows his gaze down whole, unblinking. “That is an awful lot of thinking for such an early hour.”
“Yes,” Jude agrees. She releases his hand, his tail. “I think I’ll go test that theory of gravity, now.” She makes to climb off Cardan, off their bed, but he sits up, trapping her in a cage of his arms so she can’t flee from scarlet humiliation.
“Where are you going?” Cardan says poutingly.
Now, she’s in his lap. They sit practically nose to nose. He smells of juniper and sage. Green, Jude thinks. Like home. She wants to guttle it down.
“The nearest window,” she replies.
“I can’t allow that.”
“No?” She shifts so that her legs wrap around him, caging him in, too.
“No.” Cardan shakes his head, then disarms her with a grin. “Especially now that I know how unfathomably happy I make you.”
Jude gives him a flat look. “I’m never telling you anything ever again.”
He tucks a lock of her hair behind her ear. “Liar,” he says, which is true enough. A thoughtful expression spins across his face. “I am unsure whether or not we can fly with our magic. Would that be something you would want?”
“It would be a pleasing addition, to be sure,” she says, thinking of Peter Pan and Wendy, flying across the sleeping London skyline.
“If you could have any kind of magic,” he asks, “What would it be?”
She narrows her eyes. “Now who’s scheming?”
“I’m not scheming,” Cardan says, “I am curious about my wife and even her most dizzying of daydreams.”
A ribbon of heat rakes through her. If there is one thing Jude is certain, it is that her most dizzying flights of fancy do not involve a single bit of magic. Or flying.
“Time travel,” she humours him, mainly to distract herself from her own unspooling. “I should like to be able to travel back in time.”
His brows knit together. “Would you do anything differently?”
“No,” she says, kissing the crease on his forehead. “No, I would not.”
“What would you do, then?”
Jude thinks for a moment. It is no small question, what he’s asking. She feels the weight of it in his gaze, immobile and fixed on her. Winding her arms around his neck, Jude fiddles with the downy curls at his nape.
“I would see my mom,” she murmurs. Cardan gives her a small nod. Then, she adds, “I think I might also give your mother a visit.”
“Oh?” His brows rise high at that. “How come?”
“To keep her from burning those letters you sent me.” A small smile coils her lips. Her husband had told her the elementaries of what they’d contained. But Jude’s mind was hardly ever sated by mere elementaries. “I’m sad I never got to read them.”
“I had no idea you had any desire to,” Cardan says.
She shoots him a look. “The love of my life writes me a myriad of anguished letters, all expressing a visceral pining for my return from exile, and you think I have no desire to read them?” She grins. “I think you underestimate my shameless need to know things.”
Jude hasn’t a second more to think before Cardan flips her onto the bed, pinning her against the mattress. His gaze is heady as he hovers over her lips, skimming them with his own. She captures him with her teeth, drawing him in.
He devours her. Jude can hardly think past the fervour of it—the feel of Cardan’s mouth hungry against hers, the hot swipe of his tongue. His hands drift under the fabric of her shirt, wandering the sweep of her hips, raising gooseflesh there. Her fingers card his hair.
Their mouths slide together, languorous and rich. Redolent. Wanting. Jude’s head spins a reel. She is white-heat living, her dizzying reality.
Just when she’s sure she might never need air again, Cardan breaks away, roving down her jawline. His tongue teases her. Lapping at her skin, tasting her in a slow trail down her neck, teeth grazing as he goes. Everything dissipates but the mingled pounding of their hearts, their shared breath, the fever of their bodies pressed flush against each other.
“Love of your life, am I?” Cardan hums against her racing pulse. His hand moves higher on her thigh. Higher still, and that sweet ache, that saccharine undoing, rips through her.
“Yes,” Jude gasps, tugging at his hair, “You are.” She is featherbrained and fuddled.
Abruptly, he is gone.
The absence of him makes Jude’s eyes fly wide open. Her husband is already off the bed and heading for their wardrobe. She hates him. She’s totally besotted by him, of course, but right now she also hates him.
Jude sits up on the bed, gaping at Cardan as he walks away. She makes a sound of protest. “Where are you going?”
Cardan lifts a thin satin robe hanging on a hook inside one of the wardrobe doors, which are forever pitched open and spewing a rainbow of frothy fabrics.
“To write you a letter,” he says, shrugging the robe onto his shoulders. He doesn’t bother with the tie. In fact, he probably would not bother with a robe at all if certain bits of him were not larger now than usual.
Jude swallows, trying desperately to avert her eyes. “Why?”
“You said you were sad,” Cardan says, sitting down at the desk and unrolling a piece of parchment. “I would wish to see you happy again, wife.”
The simplicity of that makes her bite her lip. “You know that’s not really what I meant, don’t you?” she asks. “I mean, I’m not actually sad. Just a little disappointed that I didn’t get to read them.”
“And I will disappoint you no longer.” Cardan licks the tip of a pen before dipping it into an open inkpot.
“I’d argue you just did,” she grumbles, but he waves her off.
As her husband leans over the paper, Jude can’t help the reluctant grin that contorts her face. It’s reluctant because she knows it must look absolutely ridiculous. But if there is anyone Jude can afford to be stupid for, it is him. He’s writing her a love letter even though she’s right there, and she's grinning like an idiot, and they are both fools in love.
Jude blinks several times. Pinches herself lightly on the arm.
Life winks back, incandescent—and very, very real.
☽☽☽☽☽