Chapter Text
Jude wakes at the brush of Cardan’s tail against the back of her knee.
It tickles more than anything, and it’s this that shoves her into wakefulness. Growing up as a human in Faerie has not afforded Jude the luxury of graceful sleep. She comes into consciousness like a soldier, eyes open wide and trying to make sense of her surroundings.
Cardan watches her from the far side of the bed.
Jude furrows her brows. The sun is low in the sky, and it casts their room into burnished amber. It lines the angles of Cardan’s face with gold and shadow, and with the length of his body reposed before her, he is unearthly. Untouchable. She thinks she could still be dreaming right now.
Until she notices the distant look in his eyes.
She peers past the drowsy haze of sunset, taking in the way his tail lashes low and distracted across his body. He probably hadn’t meant to wake her from the looks of it. His tail often moves with a mind of its own.
She stretches out a hand across the space between them, the sheets of their bed cool and empty against the backs of her fingers. “Cardan?”
They had gone to sleep as they usually did, curled together and limbs tangled. It was the common way things were after they began sharing their marriage bed in earnest months ago.
This is new.
“Jude,” he says in reply, and in his voice, she hears something she doesn’t understand.
It strikes in her an unfamiliar urge to soothe. It’s a human thing, one that she hasn’t had reason to attend to while being raised in a redcap’s stronghold. She’s not quite sure what caused it, what it was in the way he whispered her name. All she knows is that it makes her want to shift closer.
Cardan has an unnerving ability to bring out the human in her, despite her best efforts, despite her being High Queen of Elfhame.
She reaches out a hand, and he – unearthly, untouchable – lets her brush a knuckle across his cheek. She waits.
He says nothing.
Undeterred, she tries to brush a curl of ink black hair away from his eyes. They burn.
She pauses.
He is holding himself preternaturally quiet, and still. So still, the way only fae can. An animal sort of stillness, she thinks.
Within the next heartbeat, Jude understands that gentle is not what Cardan needs right now.
Alright. This she knows how to do.
Her fingers, previously resting at his temple, move to tangle in his hair. She pulls hard enough to make him hiss. “What is it?” She tightens her hold. “What happened?”
His black gem eyes go clear with pain – and something else. Something darker. “A nightmare,” he breathes, finally.
She narrows her eyes, thinking about the tense line of his shoulders.
When he doesn’t elaborate, she slips a little bit closer. For better leverage. He tracks her movement across the bed.
From this distance, her nails rake a path down his temple and the side of his face. She digs her fingers in when she reaches his jawline, feels the way he clenches it in response. “Tell me.”
Something cruel pulls the corner of his mouth upward. “You shall like very little of it.”
He smiles when he’s nervous, Jude reminds herself.
She leans in close enough to see how the skin of his jaw is going white against the half-moons of her nails. “Tell me anyway.”
His eyes close. She thinks she sees a little of defeat in the way he leans into the rough grip of her fingers. “I dreamt,” he whispers into the waiting air, “of the Undersea.” And even in the warmth of the bed they share together, something cold slithers up Jude’s spine.
“Why?” she demands, before she can think better of it.
They haven’t talked much about her kidnapping. He’d almost forsaken his kingdom in exchange for her, and that was more than her heart, then so unsure and betrayed by her exile, could understand.
But now, there is space to wonder.
(“When you were gone—truly gone beneath the waves—I hated myself as I never have before.”)
Cardan’s eyes flash open. “Why?” he repeats, and Jude feels the power shift between them. “Don’t you remember, wife?” he croons. “It was the Undersea that stole you away from me.”
And Jude has only enough time to think, danger, before he –
– lunges at her –
Jude’s back hits the bed with a thud, and Cardan leans on his elbows over her, the unforgiving weight of him pressing her into the mattress. This time, it is his hand that grips her chin, the raw emotion in his dark eyes at odds with the careful way he tilts her face up to his. “They hid you away for weeks.”
“I clawed my way out of there,” she says, a little breathlessly. “I didn’t let them keep me.”
The slant of his mouth grows crueller. “Darling, I had to forge a treaty for you.”
Indignation sparks in her, at the reminder of her weakness. “I didn’t ask you to – ”
Cardan swoops in, and Jude holds her breath as his lips come perilously close to hers. “Do not mishear me, Jude Duarte Greenbriar,” he says softly, so softly. “I would have done anything to get you back.”
Jude sucks in another breath, because Cardan has suddenly dropped his mouth to the tender skin of her neck.
“Anything,” he says, and his lips ghost the words behind her ear as he speaks. “Everything.”
It’s instinct that has her spreading her legs, letting the weight of him make a home in the cradle of her thighs. He settles against her body like he belongs there.
“Do you understand that, Jude?” he asks. “Can you?”
He presses a hot, open-mouthed kiss at the base of her throat, and Jude wonders at how something so small can be felt all the way down to her toes.
Still, his words have dredged up memories she thought were long past. They are vivid in her mind now: the dampness of the dark cell, the ache of her exhausted body, the cold brush of Balekin’s lips –
“They did all that they could,” she says, because suddenly it’s like she has something to prove, “but I did not let them break me.”
Cardan tenses, his forehead resting on the softness of her cheek.
“Don’t you remember?” she asks him now. “I came for you the very same night they released me.”
Something passes over the length of his body, and pressed against him so closely like this, Jude can recognize it for what it is: a shudder.
“Oh, Jude,” he breathes into the line of her jaw. “I dreamt that you didn’t.”
What had he said? A nightmare.
“There was nothing left of you to ransom for,” he continues, face hidden in the crook of her neck. “Nothing but salt and seafoam.” And there, in their ridiculously large bed with the cobweb canopy billowing in a sunset breeze, the High King of Elfhame begins to tremble.
Jude is frozen underneath him. “Cardan,” she whispers, because there is nothing else she can say. No one that she can remember has ever cared for her like this before.
Another shudder passes through him at the sound of his name. And suddenly, he is moving closer, something like desperation igniting the insistent press of his body over hers as he tries to burrow his face deeper into her collarbone.
“I dove into the water,” he says, and she feels every word dance on the sensitive skin of her neck, “and it was cold and it was dark, but I swam and I searched, and I couldn’t find you.” His hands fist into the gossamer skirts of her nightgown.
Jude grits her teeth. She is powerless in the wake of his heartache. She doesn’t know what to do. This is an enemy she has never faced before.
“I would have done everything,” he repeats, lost. She gets the feeling that he isn’t speaking entirely just to her anymore.
In this liminal space between waking and dreaming, Cardan duels with the imaginary horrors of his nightmare, and Jude holds on as tight as she can.
The rocking starts with the intention to soothe. Jude thinks of Oriana, calming a restless Oak in the cradle of her arms. She thinks of her mother, wrapping her in an embrace that swept her back and forth. She thinks of Cardan’s mother, Lady Asha, and how she most likely never held her son the way mothers do.
So Jude begins to sway, as best as she can with the weight of him all along the front of her body. There is so much of him to hold, almost too much because he is so much bigger than her, but she will hold him. She will hold all of him until he no longer needs her.
A different kind of tremor passes through Cardan’s body when he feels her moving under him. She runs a hand through the hair at the base of his neck, gently scraping with the tips of her nails. Cardan seems to melt into her more, a long, faint breath easing out of him.
Soon, he starts to sway with her. Just a simple accompaniment of his body with hers. Against hers. Beat and tempo are but second language to the king of Faerie and his many revels.
He continues to murmur in her ear, as if the words are a refrain he cannot get out of his head. “Everything,” he is saying. “My everything, Jude.” The words are both vow and reassurance all at once. She feels them seep into her bones.
Cardan moves over her, trembling no longer. The mattress dips under their combined weight.
There’s a certain whiplash to all of this. She’s supposed to be the one comforting him, and yet now it is he who is whispering sweetly into the quickly heating skin of her neck. It is he who guides their bodies into an altogether different kind of rhythm.
Jude’s fingers clench into his bare shoulders. His habit of wearing nothing to bed has carried over into their marriage. She feels the overwhelming warmth of him all over her, the wisps of her nightgown a paltry barrier.
Their hips press flush, and Jude knows it wasn’t intentional, but he’s right there between her thighs, and the way he’s rolling against her is now wickedly familiar.
Or maybe he had meant it. Maybe this is how she can give him the comfort he needs –
There is no mistaking the rocking of their bodies now.
They are similar in this regard, in this need for something to fight with, to move against. She will be the sentinel at his back as he wrestles with the phantom of his dreams.
Cardan surfaces from the crook of her neck like he is surfacing from cold water. She brings him down to her, until they are nose to nose, until she can see the last dregs of his nightmare swirling in the depths of his eyes.
The words spill from him like a confession. “In the darkest shadows of my heart,” he tells her, hushed against the backdrop of the dying sun, “I wondered if I should ever see you again.”
And Jude thinks of the many, long months of her exile. Of how he had fought to keep her when Madoc stole her back as Taryn. She remembers the way he had clutched her to him after she beheaded the cursed snake. This isn’t just about the Undersea.
“I came for you,” she reminds him. “I came back for you.” And then she rolls her hips up to meet his.
Cardan groans.
All traces of innocence evaporate.
He descends upon her with a new vigor. She rises up under him with purpose simmering in her blood. Their bodies collide, and collide again, and he grasps her by the waist to hike her up higher. She wraps her legs around his hips, feels the length of him through the insubstantial fabric of her underwear.
He dances, she fights, and in this, they move together.
But first, she needs him to understand something.
Jude pulls on his hair again, now a mess of black curls from her fingers. She wants the pain to remind him just who exactly he has pinned beneath him. His Queen, his wife, his equal. “I’m not going anywhere,” she promises harshly, and then takes her teeth to the base of his throat.
His assent is a broken moan against her forehead. He spreads her knees wider, and grinds down in retaliation. He hits that spot between her legs, and Jude chokes back a whimper.
“I want you with me for always.” His breathing is ragged. His pace is ceaseless. “Do you believe me?”
Her body is hot all over, and he feels so good right there, she rocks her hips up because she wants him to do it again, more –
She can feel his cock now, hard and hot against the quickly dampening fabric between her thighs. It’s blessed friction, but it’s not enough.
“Do you believe me?” he says again. When she doesn’t answer right away, he digs into her again, running his length up and down the seam of her underwear. The tip of it rubs against her clit, not quite hard enough, with every pass.
Something like a whine escapes her lips. She can almost feel the beginnings of an orgasm curling low in her body, if only he would just –
“Say yes, Jude.” It’s almost a plea, sealed with a strategic roll of his hips that has her arching up from the bed. And there, in his need for her confirmation, for her validation, Jude feels another piece of armor fall away between them. “Say yes.”
He’s crushing her, with the sheer weight of him all down the length of her hypersensitive body, with the magnitude of the meaning behind his words.
She is surrounded by him, his chest pressed against hers. He is all she sees when she opens her eyes, not realizing that she had closed them in the first place. His eyes scorch as he looks down at her, dark with desire – and the need for her to believe.
A small wildness charges the air between them. He knows her body so well now, knows exactly how to angle the next flex of his hips –
“Yes,” Jude gasps.
Cardan grins, slow and full of wicked intent.
He bends down low again, ready to whisper another naughty pledge, ready to press a kiss to her wanting lips, ready to finally take that sinful mouth and those clever fingers and finish what he started –
Three knocks, rapid like gunfire, ricochet through the room.