Killian
Iwanted to stay in that blissful moment for an eternity.
For the first time, I held Ilaris all night long while she slept, and a truth I’d never fully understood rose to the surface.
It was the claiming, making her mine that quieted the fire, that made the restraint fade.
My magic understood that it should not burn me, now she was mine, so it would not burn her.
I felt the flares of fire stir again, felt it for the first time since the balloon had crashed.
Something sacred and magical had passed between us last night.
When I opened my eyes, breathing in her warmth, pressing my lips to her neck, I understood what happened here would remain. The ground would remember.
But even as I held her, a tremor moved beneath the surface, and the moment of bliss was gone as reality returned. The Unmaking were escaping. Lady Justice hadn’t reappeared, but no doubt, she would. It was uncanny how she seemed to know exactly where the gifts of the gods were hidden.
I tilted my head back and looked up.
Sure enough, the seeds had done their work overnight.
Three beanstalks had grown to the heavens, twisting together like a thick braid, shooting upward into pale sky, verdant and living rope.
In a few days they would harden into wood, knotted and immovable.
But for now, they were sturdy enough to climb. To reach the Sky Kingdom.
Ilaris shifted against me, her lashes fluttering open. “You’re still here.” Her voice was hushed with sleep and wonder. “How is this possible?”
I drew her closer, feeling the way her soft curves molded to my body. Then I held up one finger between us and snapped it. A flame bloomed on my fingertip, small and golden, steady as a heartbeat. “Do you feel that?”
Her eyes went wide. Slowly she extended her hand toward mine, fingertips grasping my palm. I watched her expression, enjoying the mix of caution and confusion on her face.
“I feel. . .” She paused. “Heat, but it doesn’t hurt. Doesn’t burn. How?”
“My fire never burns me.” I lowered my hand, letting the flame gutter and die. “And now that you’re mine, it will not burn you either. My magic recognizes you now. It knows what it must protect.”
“It was that simple?”
I considered that. The word simple did not fit. Nothing about last night had been simple. Nothing about the long, aching months before it had been either.
“I have been alive a very long time, Ilaris,” I said. “And I’ve heard love spoken of often. Used flippantly, as though it were a coin tossed into a fountain, wishful and weightless. But that is not what it is.”
She watched me, her dark curls loose around her shoulders, the morning light laying copper threads through them. She did not rush me. That was one of the things I loved about her, how she patiently listened, soaking in every word.
“Love is patient,” I said slowly. “Not patient as in tolerant to inconvenience but patient as in willing to wait through seasons, through silence, even though there might not be an end. It is kind, the very action of choosing gentleness when force would be easier. It does not demand its own way.”
I paused. The words came back, not from philosophy this time, but from memory.
Visions from the time we’d spent together flashed before me, one after the other.
“There is a version of myself who would have burned the world down, who would have used the gifts of the gods for power. I would have sealed the hell-gates and called it victory without asking what it cost anyone. That version of me would not have placed a scholar’s wellbeing above my own pride.
Love undid me, has been unraveling me every step of this journey.
And then, I found myself choosing love. Thinking of you before acting.
I never understood love before. I always confused it with lust. But now I know, it is physical and spiritual, it is not one thing but many things, all at once, that require something of me. ”
“Killian.”
She drew my head down with one hand pressed at the back of my neck and kissed me, long and deep and unhurried.
When she opened her eyes, they were dark with wanting, heavy-lidded in the golden morning light.
A stray breeze caught her curls and sent them dancing across her throat.
She turned her head, saw the beanstalks, and sat up so fast she nearly knocked me in the chin.
“The beans!”
“Yes.” I laughed.
Her mouth opened and closed. “I assumed they would grow. I assumed it was our path to the Sky Kingdom.” She shook her head, the disbelief bright on her face. “But not like this. Not so quickly.”
“And we shall climb,” I said. “But first—” I reached for her ankle and drew her back against the grass. “Let me have you. We still have time.”
Ilaris leaned back on her elbows and regarded me with a look I was beginning to know well, equal parts delight and mock-gravity. “Killian, I think I might die today. Either of shock or from pleasure.”
“Do you jest, my lady?”
“I do, you’ve made my heart light and happy. I feel as though anything is possible, that we will succeed now that we are one, unified.”
“It has always been true, but love has given us a confidence we did not have before. Now do you want to talk all morning, or do you want pleasure?”
“You’ll have to kiss me, if you want me to be quiet.”
So I did.
Her mouth, first, the corner of her lips, the soft press of the lower one.
Then her jaw, enjoying the rapid flutter of her pulse against my lips, the warm hollow of her shoulder.
I worked my way down, slowly, patiently, relishing every soft sigh, every heightened moan.
I lingered over the swells of her chest, the smooth plane of her stomach.
I kissed her there, between her thighs, until her hips lifted and her fingers tangled in my hair.
She called my name, broken, breathless, into the open sky.
And it was the sweetest sound I’d ever heard.