Vidar
Her kisses are like honey. They should have been enough to bring me back from the brink of death, but instead, it was that snake I gave her. I’m still laughing about that as I gather her into my arms. She is exactly as soft and warm as I imagined. Exactly as open and generous as she was in our dreams together. Never have I felt such fear as I do when I hold her. She is something I could lose and regret and break over in a way that nothing else I’ve lost has ever broken me.
“And now we fly from this place, generous seer,” I whisper to her.
“And they will put another poor girl into that cage,” she says with sad eyes, but I shake my head and gently turn her chin to look at me.
“I have found a way to free you, wife of mine, and steal you from your fate, and take you as my wife. Do you think I cannot give you this, too? By the time another girl is brought to this place, you and I will have found a way to lay waste to it, to destroy it utterly and there will be no more magic cage. And that is only if it is not already ruined. Look, love of mine.”
And I show her how the magic mayflies who have been with her all this time lie floating around her island.
“They came to me when I could no longer fly and bore me here,” I whisper. “A mayfly cannot lift a man. Not even a thousand of them can – but these ones did. Let me ask you, did you perhaps dream it?”
She nods and her eyes are wide as I smile with her. “I thought that might be so. Never have I known a magic more powerful than what you create behind those delicate eyelids as you dream.”
I kiss her eyelids to emphasize my words and her pretty blush leaves tingles down my spine.
“When they came to me, I bargained with them and set a geas upon them to bring me here, to wake you before your time, to give us this one chance to break the heavy magic that held you in chains.”
“And what did they get in return,” I ask.
“A chance to live one day for something other than the endless cycle of breeding and death. A chance to be a part of the magic.”
She bites her lip and looks affectionately at the mayflies – dead now – who have been her companions this century and longer.
“But where will we go?” she asks me. And then at my hesitation, she looks distressed. “Don’t ask me to leave you.”
“Never,” I promise, kissing the shell of her ear and pulling back her long hair to press a second kiss to the tower of her neck. I’ve never seen so much of her as I do now that the mayflies have left and every bit of what is revealed is a feast for the eyes and the lips. “Your bargain was accepted by one greater than I – someone with the power of creation in his hands. I am no bond breaker. And I would never wish to be when this bond gives to me what I want more than anything.”
I bite my lip and she presses me again. “Have we anywhere safe to go.”
I feel my cheeks heating. Will she reject me now? “My hesitation is not that there is nowhere to go. I’m merely worried that you will discover your husband is over-confident. I made you a refuge years ago, long before you agreed to accept me as yours. I made just as you dreamed it. And it awaits only your judgment.”
She laughs and then draws me close and her eyes warm in a way that stills my beating heart. “And does this perfect house have a warm bed, husband?”
I only thought my cheeks were hot before. Now they are ablaze.
I clear my throat. “All good homes do.”
She smiles mischievously. “I have not slept in a real bed in more than a century.”
I laugh and hitch her into my arms before I spread my wings and kick us into the air. The way her eyes widen makes me want to press her tightly against me and never let her go. Maybe I will. Who is to say that I cannot?
“Then the bed shall be yours and I shall take a pallet next to the roaring fire,” I murmur against her hair as I fly us toward our new home. My home is where she is. Wherever that may be.
She twists in my arms to give me another impish look and I’m stunned by her beauty. Who could have known what mayflies were hiding under their gossamer wings?
“Ah, but our bargain was that you would never leave me – not body or soul. Like it or not, you will sleep in that bed with me tonight.”
Suddenly, it seems my wings cannot flap fast enough. Was I always so slow? And where are the updrafts I was counting on? Everything conspires against a man in love as if thwarting him is the world’s biggest joke. I ought to have made a bargain with the wind to carry me. I ought to have sworn the seasons to me.
But though it is torture to fly so hard and fast when all I want is to get her home, it is the sweetest torture I know.
