Just as he will never tire of her touch, she will never tire of the way he seems to love her touch – and when he leans in beneath the soft curve of her dark cheek, pressing ever closer until blue and black are as inseparable as a bruise, there is only light in her heart and warmth in her chest. “One day, soon,” she amends with a smile, shifting to draw those dark velvet lips across the strong line of a firm jaw, “probably when she is grown and has a family of her own to worry after her.” A pause and a smile that is so delicately beautiful when it crinkles in the corners of those near-gold eyes, “that seems reasonable, yes?”
His eyes find hers when they settle against his face, drowning in the soft angles and faint hollows that are as beautiful and familiar to her as the constellations strewn across a night sky. When he grins her eyes are drawn there, too, and she can feel her mouth move in mirror, an identical smile etching itself across the soft and black. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.” She tells him with the hint of a laugh, reaching over to leave a kiss in the soft hollow behind the corner of his mouth. But even as she says it, even as the thought soars through her mind, she is reminded of a time when he had not been there, when the world had torn them apart and there had only been cold stone and damp earth to curl against. With a pang in her chest she noses him again, careful to hide the furrowing of her brow beneath that dark curtain of black forelock.
He reaches out to her then, teasing at those corn-silk tangles of dark mane until the smile is back and soft and true beneath the whiskers of her delicate mouth. When he pulls her close, draping his neck across the hollow of her back to draw her in against his chest, she is like clay beneath his touch, willing and easy to fill in the spaces that stretch thinly between them. In a second she is pressed to the curve of his chest, and the only sound she can hear is the thrumming of his heart and the way hers races to keep up. I love you, he says, touching his nose to her shoulder, and she cannot help the way she folds in and against him, softening to that smile and those eyes and the way his lips feel when they dance across her skin.
They stay that way for many long moments, content together while the sun rises and fills their shallow cave with watery gold light. It is only when the wind carries in the scent of near-spring and mud and thaw that Ilka pulls away from him just slightly, twisting to step outside into the light. She always loved the end of winter, the thawing part, when the world yawned and stretched from its frozen slumber, the way the mud smelled when it mixed with snow-melt, how the sun felt strangely warmer and the sky strangely bluer.
Turning back to look over her shoulder, those damp gold eyes soft and eager and still crinkled at the corners with the smile that had not faded from her lips, she says, “Shall we go explore some more?” And it was mostly true that she wanted to get to know this new world, mostly true that she craved the sun on her back and the wind in her face, but it was also true that some small sad part of her wanted to come across the rest of her family. Heartfire and Illum, little Augusta who would always be little Augusta no matter how old she grew, and even Woolf and Bright, the magician twins who had never loved her in the way that children are supposed to love their mother. Not knowing where or how they were felt like a sliver wedged into her chest that she just couldn’t shake loose.
ILKA
makai x oksana