“And… well… we’re different people now,” he said.

“No doubt. We’re all of us changed.” All the things seen since then. The things done. The people gone back to the mud. He’d lost his throne, she’d gained one. But as she came close and took the glass from his hand, he had that same look in his eyes he’d had that night. That look of unguarded desire. And being looked at that way felt just as good. Better’n ever, maybe.

She knocked the wine off in one throw, then had to stand there wincing, one hand pressed to her chest, fighting the urge to puke it back up. That would’ve been quite the mood-killer.

“Need a bucket?” he asked.

“No, I think I’ve got it—” Fighting down an acrid little tickle at the back of her throat with a shudder. “Under control.” And she took her wet hat off and started to slide the pins from her hair, toss them on the table beside her so they bounced and clicked and tumbled twinkling on the floor.

She was a leader. She had responsibilities. Hard choices to make.

But they could wait till tomorrow.

“Sometimes feels like life’s just a long preparation for something,” she said, and she put a finger on his chest and pushed him, so he had no choice but to sit down, hard, wine slopping from his glass. “Hard work getting everything right for a perfect future.” And she scrubbed her damp hair with her nails, scrubbed it back into its usual wild tangle then blew a stray strand out of her face. “But nothing’s ever finished, is it? Nothing’s ever right. Not really.”

“Certainly not in my experience,” he whispered, slightly throaty, as she reached out and perched the hat slanted on his head.

“And if it is, it turns wrong soon enough.” She took two fistfuls of her damp dress and gathered it up. “It rots. It rusts. It dies.” Gathered it up all the way to her thighs, goosefleshed from the cold outside and the warm inside. “Life’s naught but a set of moments.” And she slipped one knee onto the cushions to either side of him, lowered herself gently into his lap. “You’ve got to live each one.”

“I’ve always thought so,” he murmured, eyes fixed on hers.

“All that time spent tending the garden,” she whispered. Seemed fine luck now she hadn’t bothered with all that mass of underwear they trussed themselves up in down here. “You forget to sit back in the garden and enjoy it.” And she pushed her hands into his hair, cool and damp from the rain, and twisted his face up towards hers, and started to kiss him.

Of Your Heart a Stone

When Orso woke in a comfortable bed for the first time in months he wondered, for a blissful moment, whether it might all have been a dream. The rebellion. The Great Change. The Court of the People. The baying crowds and the prison cells. The figures dropping from the Tower of Chains.