I sent him off in the morning, as I'd promised, handing him a leather filing folder with my ziploc-ed pajama pants inside. They were probably still warm; I'd worn them for one more night for him, so that the smell of my skin would last one day longer. No doubt it would be faint or gone by the time he returned, turned to old-laundry smell, but at least he'd have something comforting to curl up with for one more day than he would have otherwise.

If he returned.

As the days passed, I did my best not to think about what might be happening to him. My best was pretty awful; I spent hours contemplating maps and tracing out horseback-plausible routes between the Antlered Palace and the border territory that was ruled over and defended by Lady Rynsandoral, and sometimes I rode out into the woods on horseback just so I could feel like, somehow, we were riding together even though we were separated by hundreds of miles.

I read and re-read his letter until I had sections of it memorized. For someone who claimed his prose was mediocre, it was a pretty damn poetic letter, and the raw emotion of it matched the man I'd found hiding in the conservatory. I wished, more than once, that I could thank Alluin somehow for having told me what was happening. Whether he'd done it for me or for Dain, he'd given us both an incredible gift, and I thought that he'd made Dain's task a thousand times easier. Dain got to carry away the knowledge that I didn't despise him, and that in no way did it disgust me that he was thinking of me every waking hour.

It made me a little breathless to think about, to be honest. Having someone move heaven and earth to fix himself for you because you want him to be a better man is a standby in romance for a reason. Whether it's going to therapy to unlearn bad behaviors, struggling through trials with your handkerchief tucked under their breastplate, or riding towards a foreign king to end a war, there's something intoxicating about knowing that the reason for undergoing the trial is you. We dream about wounded men who love us passionately enough to do the hard work of healing. Dain was actually doing it. He'd sworn he would the first day we'd seen each other in Faery without me asking for it, and he was following through, more than I had ever expected.