There was nothing to say. In the thrust of battle the course of conversation had been clear: how did they arrive? Where next to go? Who to kill, or how to escape? Then, later, beneath a canopy of white leaves, there was cause to catch up, to strategize, to determine a course of action going forward. They needed to set a plan, and so they did.

Now the plan was set. Now the need was quenched. With need gone, conversation was gone, too. Now there was nothing to say.

Nothing to say, but Eris wanted to say something anyway.

They used to spar wits. Flirt, discuss—anything, really, at camp and on the road. They weren’t close, but then Eris was never close to anyone, ever, at any point in her life. She’d never had a friend before. Not really. Not before…but Rook was different. She wanted what they had again. She wanted more. She wanted company, good company she could talk to and rely on.

She wanted a friend. Or, a partner, with some benefits.

But what was there to say? How to begin a ‘friendship’ anew? She didn’t know. For days they said nothing to each other except the bare necessities of travel. Their lips stayed parted. While they walked through the thawing woods she found herself lost in contemplation, thinking of what to say. Anything at all. Any excuse. Anything to draw near him, to hear his voice. She hated that she needed friendship at all, but the feelings swelled too strongly to resist.

The cold air against her skin was the sole reminder of her body as she walked, her mind someplace else for mile after mile. Yet despite all that thought she still couldn’t find the words. What to articulate? And did Rook feel the same way?

They cleared a bank of snow. A muddy field came into view; far, far beyond, white mountains.

“There,” Astera said, pointing, “Kem-Klaskome. The passage from the west. Many miles yet to go before we enter Rytus.”

She pressed on ahead. Eris sighed, wrapping herself in her cloak. Rook passed her. She watched him, watched for a long way…

Until Robur turned to her. “Are you all right?”

She snapped to him. “I am fine,” she growled, and so they continued onward.

But that moment was when she realized. She realized she didn’t need words to express her thoughts. Neither would Rook. Actions could speak louder. And once they had, she would be freed from her infatuation with him—this time for good. That would be perfect. Her mind was finally to be liberated from whatever hold it was he had on it. Then she could be her own woman, and she would no longer need to devote such excess thinking to him, nor any man at all, nor pointless ponderings on words. And maybe she would have her partner back, but she wouldn’t need him as she felt she needed him now. Of that she felt certain.

In the primordial age, before even the Old Kingdom was forged, the new year was said to begin on the day of the last snowfall. As the domain of the Esenians swelled it became a matter hotly contested as to where it needed to last snow in order for the year to begin, until—so the story went—one year where the temperatures were so low that even in summer blizzards came with enough regularity that no one could say confidently the year was over. This had the awkward effect of extending all offices of annual appointment to twice their normal length, in addition to removing an entire year from the chronicles.

The calendar was amended the following spring to a more standardized twelve-month form, which no doubt should have been done six or seven centuries earlier. Still, the tradition was upheld, and so it came down to the present. The Esenian year began in spring, the first day approximating when snow would last fall in Seneria.

Seneria was significantly farther south than Nanos. Eris had no idea what the date was—few did except scribes—but she suspected the year well underway. Yet she was reminded, as she stood on the hill where they made their camp, looking down on a stretch of farmland where the only spots of white left were under the shade of boulders and trees, that for even Nanos the new year was come.

An anemic snow fell. She felt certain it would be the year’s last.

She devised a plan. She needed to lure Rook away from their camp. If he was anything it was overprotective, doubly so with her powerless, so she would abscond into the darkness and wait until he sought her out. Then her availability would be made known to him. She saw the way he glanced at her, the way his eyes devoured every inch of her frame; if he didn’t leap on her then like a lion on a doe, then he was no man worth having.

The wait was neither so romantic nor thrilling as she imagined. She took her bedroll, leaving her few other things at the camp, and sneaked away into darkness. She found a suitably private place in the silent woods, then undressed, leaving herself covered only by her cloak for warmth—and a small fire that she set and tended at her side.

And she waited. She waited in the cold for more hours than were in a year, let alone a night—that was what it felt like, to sit there alone, in the forest, at the end of winter, on the ground, in the dark, mostly naked. The snow stopped near midnight.

Rook did not come.

She pressed her palms to her eyes. “You idiot girl,” she swore at herself. “Stupid, scheming, useless…”

Et cetera.

She remembered her birthday then. It had just passed. She was eighteen now. She would have graduated this year from her studies at Pyrthos. How different a life she would be leading there. Yet she still felt like a silly child, with fantasies of playing siren. Of course he hadn’t come for her. She sneaked off from camp often. She always preferred solitude. If Rook would come after her, it wouldn’t be till morning, when she was starved, frozen, and no longer ready to lure him anywhere—

She was so lost in her frustration that she didn’t notice the sound of her name called out through the trees. Not until it drew nearer. Then she looked up: her heart pounded, suddenly self-doubt melting away with the last of the winter’s snow; she saw a torch held high in the air. A man stepped toward her from between two tall trunks, and…

“Eris!” he said. “It’s very late.”

She was halfway to lifting herself to her feet when she realized. The voice, and the asinine comment. ‘He’ was not Rook. He was also not a man, but a boy. His torch was fire directly off a fingertip.

“Robur,” she groaned. She covered herself with her cloak.

“Why are you out here?” he said innocently. He glanced around the area.

“If I intended you to know, do you not think I might have told you ere I left camp?”

He stared at her. “No,” he said.

Eris buzzed in anger. She prepared to snap at him again, but just as her mouth opened, she realized. This was an opportunity.

She smiled.

“Rook and I were supposed to meet, yet it seems he forgot our appointment. Would you send him after me when you return?”

Robur frowned. “Perhaps you should return to camp with me—”

“‘Tis business best conducted in private.”

“It is very dangerous to be here. There are many creatures that may investigate the fires and find you alone. It would be much safer to have your meeting near me and Astera.”

“Your concern truly touches my heart,” she said. “Now go, fetch him. And tell him to come quickly!”

The five minutes that followed were the worst of all. She shivered in sheer anticipation. The whole purpose of this exercise was to free her from the need to say anything, yet as before her brain bubbled with whatever it was women were supposed to tell men as they drew them into bed. She knew it was something. Something seductive, enigmatic, sexual…

She was accustomed to using her looks to get her away. She had less experience with going the extra step. Eris never liked to acknowledge a fault, so she only found herself frustrated by the time a man—a real man—stepped into view.

She sat upright. Her plan had been to let her cloak fall, but she covered herself instinctively in the cold.

“Eris,” Rook said. He strode toward her. Branches cracked beneath his boots. “What’s wrong?”

She took a breath, but the words left her—until she saw that at Rook’s heel in the dark was Pyraz. She folded her arms.

“You brought the dog,” she said.

He glanced down, then to her. “He wanted to come.”

“I do not want him here! Send him away!”

Pyraz whined. Rook took a few more steps forward, so that they were close and she could see his features in the light off the fire. “What’s the matter?”

She decided she had one chance to be seductive—she attempted a subtle start. She folded one of her legs out from beneath her covers for him to see, stretched out along her bedroll. Her pallid skin looked frozen in the light off the dim fire.

It may have been, for the air was chill that night.

“Will you join me?” she said. It was the only thing she could think of.

Rook bit his lip. He stared at her—and her leg—for a long moment, before nodding, and lowering himself to the ground across from her.

Pyraz did not go away. He found a place of warmth and rested there, alert, a watching dog. So be it. She didn’t care.

“Is this the time?” Rook said cautiously, glancing about the dark woods, “or the place?”

“Would there be some time better?” she said.

“Maybe after peril is resolved and we’re living happily ever after.”

“How cute, yet peril is never resolved, and even if it were, there would be much less need then to find distraction. No?”

“I don’t think so at all. When we set up in our—"

“Enough talk!” she cut him off. “The night is freezing. Can we not think of some way more enjoyable to spend the hour?”

She didn’t know that expression on his face. He was the one who always kissed her; what was that look? What was he thinking? It was a sort of dazed, excited, restrained confusion, almost like looking through her instead of at her.

His hands found the bottom of his tunic. They tugged upward—

But he stopped. His words took a long time to form. “Did you change your mind?” he said.

She scoffed. “Change my mind on what?”

“That night, in the tunnel, in Chionos. You told me—quite firmly—you didn’t want a lover.”

Now it was impossible to tell whether she was shaking from excitement or the cold. She had been singularly focused, but she thought back to that night. And what a night it had been. Yet how quaint it seemed, two years later, to be content after mere kissing.

She remembered what she said. She told him not to think of her as his, as an ornament, as a wife—that she acted only out of desire.

“Making love and possessing it for another are very different things. By that remark I referred to the latter. Are you content now?”

The banter before their kiss had been so playful. Now everything seemed grave. Her toes twitched. She wanted him to shut up.

“We haven’t seen each other in a year,” he said. “I thought you might want something more.”

“So I do,” she said. “You are handsome and virile, and I am beautiful. We may find comfort in each other, and a distraction from the…difficulties…of life on the road. Do not tell me you do not desire me.”

“I do,” he said.

“Then let us waste no time with chatter.”

She could feel his eyes consuming her. It was just what she wanted. Yet his words were much more tempered.

“There’s more between men and women than sex and desire, Eris.”

She groaned. “Need there be?”

“Always.”

“Such as what? Romance? Do you see in me a weight you would wish yourself chained to? That is not what I see in you. You are a companion—a partner, even—and perhaps a font of pleasure…but I make no vows to you of devotion, nor would I expect or want the same from you. Surely—surely—you do not want me to ‘love’ you?”

The word made her wretch.

“Men want lots of things from beautiful women, often including their unending devotion. What if I said yes?”

She was astonished at the admission. “Then we will never have each other, and frigid nights that could be spent in better company will be instead wasted talking to Astera of whetstones. But surely even you are not so stupid to believe that sex must lead to love.”

Long contemplation. A frown. “No,” he said. The words came out like a bad lie, like a statement he had no conviction in, but they were precisely what Eris wanted to hear.

Here she dropped her cloak. That got Rook’s attention. “I wish only to see our mutual desires sated in a way that kissing cannot. And once they are—we will both be more effective, for we will think more clearly, and we will be more independent than ever before.”

Such reasoning made perfect sense to Eris, but of course Rook, that fool, couldn’t follow. But the sight of her now overruled those recalcitrant parts of his brain, and soon he was nodding like an ape to a handler, and he pulled his own shirt off, and finally, according to plan, he tackled her like the lion she knew him to be.

Perhaps it would have been impossible for Rook to live up to two years of fantasies, but Eris was young and inexperienced enough to know no better. She had no notion of how badly she ached for him until those aches were banished. When there was nothing left between their bodies she was left in pure regret not only for leaving him, but for going so long without him in this way, for not doing more to make her desire known those first months they traveled together. To think they might have had this together through all that time—she could do nothing but shiver.

He had seemed hesitant when they spoke, but once the process began, Rook was even more ravenous than Eris. No doubt he had fantasies of his own to play out. She loved to feel every ounce of his focus on her body, to so completely command the desire of such a strong man. It made her feel the same way she did when wielding magic, like a being of power disproportionate to her physical form.

Eris was very loud. She liked to make her pleasure known. They probably heard her in Darom, but she didn’t care. Rook eliminated all thoughts of everything except the present. And even after they were finished, when they were both exhausted, she wanted to do nothing except bury herself in his warmth.

She wrapped her arms around his torso. Her fingers played across his chest. She would never grow tired of feeling the muscles there beneath her palm. And his smell—how was it that a person could smell so perfect, so that she couldn’t stand to pull away?

A thought entered her mind.

“…have there been many other women?” she said cautiously.

He chest was still heaving as he stared through the canopy, past his own frozen breath, up at the stars.

“Worried already? I thought we weren’t chained to each other,” he said.

“Of course we are not chained to each other. I am merely curious where you learned your skills.” She grinned, sitting up somewhat. “Clearly, however vast their number, I am the better for them…”

“Dozens. Hundreds, maybe. I lost count after the Archousa visited me in my chambers.”

“Ha. Such wit. ‘Tis good to see you have maintained some sense of humor after all.”

“My humor is still good,” he said, feigning defensiveness, “but unlike you I appreciate the gravity of the task ahead of us.”

She sighed. Eris could hardly believe how good she felt—how fantastic her mood was. And here laid Rook beneath her, concerned about Arqa. Though he still held her waist, he hardly seemed interested in her anymore, when only a few minutes prior his attention could spare nothing for anything except her body. She didn’t understand what had happened. Were all men so tedious?

She tugged one of his arms. “I take nothing more seriously than the defeat of the Manawyrm. But I also know well that it is pleasure and passion that make life worth living and power worth having.” She giggled.

Their eyes met. Kings, he was handsome. She never wanted to let him leave.

“Astera will be missing us soon,” he said. She felt his baritone reverberate through his chest. “We should return to camp.”

“Let her miss us,” she said playfully. “We are warmer now than we might ever be there.”

She fastened herself closer to him. He flinched, and they stayed together in silence for a moment longer, but then he shook her loose and rose. Pyraz stood the moment he did—he had watched the whole affair—and barked once in excitement.

Eris sighed again as he redressed. It hurt to part. Only for the end of the pleasure it signified, of course. No other reason.

Still she was too elated to feel much disappointment, and she followed him to the hill where Robur and Astera were no doubt asleep or on watch.

“You did not answer my question,” she said, still smiling, as they walked.

“I gave the answer you wanted,” he replied.

“If that was all I looked to receive, I would do better not to ask and make up some answer for myself.”

“I might pose it back at you.” He walked quickly; she moved faster than normal to keep up. “Do the Magisters have orgies at their academy?”

“Oh yes, up and down the halls. Yet you have seen Robur, hm? I am afraid he is quite usual for a specimen of the Pyrthian man. They did not tempt me overmuch.”

He stopped as their campfire came into view, turning to her with a charming smile. Acting more like his old self, he said, “Then you’ll be happy to know, the truth is much the same about noblewomen.” Then, he leaned in to whisper, “They’re all fat.”

So they were both laughing as they returned to their camp, and they were both somewhat surprised to find their companions not asleep, but staring right their way in horror. Robur sat up in his bedroll, while Astera hung from the branch of a tree.

“What was all that noise?” Robur said honestly. “Are you both all right?”

“You were gone quite some time,” Astera said.

Rook looked to Eris. Eris looked to Rook. Their laughter stopped for a moment, but just as surely broke out again, Eris first, then Rook.

“Nothing but an animated conversation,” Rook managed eventually.

“The matter is quite settled now,” Eris said, still giggling.

“Oh,” Robur said. “That’s good.”

“I hope it is,” Astera cut in. “Not all places will be as safe as this one for absconding late at night.”

“Not all places have night,” Rook said, “so we needn’t worry. Now,” he quenched another gag of laughter, “let’s all try to rest for the night. It’s too late to keep talking.”

“Quite,” Eris said. “I am exhausted after our animated conversation.”

It worked. Kissing had never worked; as an exercise it was like gulping air in place of protein, satisfying only for a brief moment and no longer. But this time, come next morning, Eris felt a different woman. For the first time in two years she was focused. Her mind was unclouded. When she saw Rook she was overcome with no particular urges. All her energy could be focused instead on the path ahead: the vital path toward regaining her powers. The defeat of the Manawyrm. The most important obstacle she had yet faced in her life. She returned to her normal aloof self.

She could hardly believe herself the same girl as from last night. So giddy. So infatuated. So satisfied to be with a man, so desperate to cling to his body. The remembrance made her sick. Whoever that person was, it was not Eris. She looked back on it all like someone else’s memory. A strange, disjointed, impossible, awkward episode—admittedly the source of some pleasure, yes, but nothing more.

Like the passage beneath the Kalmas Mountains from Rytus to Chionos, Nanos and Rytus were connected by an enormous Old Kingdom tunnel cut through the rock of Kem-Klaskome. Unlike the passage beneath the Kalmas Mountains, this tunnel was in good condition and easily traversed, though it took a full day to make it from one end to the next.

Then they found themselves back in Rytus. The sun was out. The forests sprouted green. Flowers bloomed. It was, without any doubt, spring.

A few days passed. In that time Eris and Rook talked more like they used to, not often but keeping each other company sometimes, now diverting their conversation into a licentious realm previously considered off-limits. Yet that was all for fun. There was nothing in it aside a desire to pass the time on cold nights.

…at first. Eris’ clarity, that delicious clarity, lasted only until it didn’t. Then she found herself feeling just the same as she had before, as she had on that night she lured him to her bed—except now it was so much worse, because now she knew how spectacular he could make her feel.

Then there was Rook. That strange coldness that overcame him once they were finished, that urge to break their bodies apart, lingered only until the next morning, whereupon he returned to his old self. So it was no surprise that the next time she suggested he join her away from camp, this time near one of the heated streams that ran down from Thermopos Mountain, he pounced.

Thus they found their cadence. As time permitted they would clear their heads, and for the next little while they would be free of each other’s influence. Then feelings of desire would return, the process would repeat, and they would both find themselves happy.

No different from a stomach's hunger. There was nothing more to the arrangement than that. Nothing more than carnal passion. No room at all for love. And that was beautiful.