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He smooths her hair back from the sides of her neck and presses his lips to the skin exposed there. This is just part of the ruse, he thinks, nothing more. She would begin to suspect if he receded from her advances, would she not? What man would not worship her such as this?
“Solas,” she whispers, catching his hand in hers and guiding it around the swell of her hips, mistaking his reticence for fumbling ignorance. As if he were one of the gawky Dalish boys who crept from the fires, hoping to catch a glimpse of her between the pines as she bathed in the stream. No, he has learned her needs from other waking partners, from many such rituals in the Fade—but he set aside such base desires long ago, focused solely upon his purpose.
This is just one night sacrificed to maintain the Inquisitor’s confidence in him, nothing more.
The fact that his hands tremble when he touches her is just a coincidence that lends credence to his disguise, nothing more.
She staggers under the weight of his embrace, catching the edge of the bed with the backs of her knees; she unfolds from him and sprawls back onto the mattress, expelling a breathy laugh as her head hits the sheets. He stands over her, the guttering fire at his back, his shadow splashed across the moonstone flesh of her abdomen like old, black blood. “Vhenan,” she breathes, and she reaches for him, pressing her breasts together into a dark slash down the length of her sternum, but he does not move.
Her smile wilts before his solemn silence. “Is something the matter?” she asks, though she does not try to cover herself.
“You are exceedingly beautiful,” he says, and in this respect, at least, he is honest.
She smiles, appeased, and folds her legs on the bed so that he can just make out the pale crescents of flesh at the tops of her thighs. She stretches her arms over her head, her ribcage curved like the hollow arches of some ancient temple. “What are you waiting for, then?” she asks and presses the flat of her foot against the front of his breeches, finding his body’s betrayal there.
He cannot think with the sudden flush of summer in his veins. “Are you certain we should do this now?” He is ashamed at the way he rasps the excuse, his mouth suddenly tacky and dry. His tongue never abandoned him in such a manner in the Fade.
“What?” She drops her foot and props herself up on her elbow to peer at him, narrowing her eyes at the sadness she finds in his expression. “If not now, when?”
He has no answer, for there is no end to what he must endure but death.
The shadows of her clavicles bow like a crow’s wings as she pushes herself upright. “If you’d rather not,” she says, “I understand,” but her bottom lip curls sullenly as she stares up at him across the darkness.
He cups her jaw in his palm and smooths the pad of his thumb across the line of her mouth. “That is not the issue,” he says.
“Then what is?” Her exhalation mists his fingers, a whisper of the wetness he knows waits for him between her thighs. He presses his thumb past her lips, unable to resist feeling the slick darkness secreted behind her teeth. Her eyes are defiant, as if daring him to draw away, as she closes her mouth around him.
If he turns back now, this guise is lost forever.
“It has been a long time,” he says, “nothing more.”
Her brow tastes of sweat as he bends and touches his lips to it—and finds himself falling forward, following her as she slumps back onto the bed, finding her mouth with his own. She separates them with the pall of his tunic as she rakes it over his head—then, his breeches, her hands slipping beneath the band at his hips to free him. If she notices the spell he casts to assist her, she does not say. She wraps her legs around his waist and drives a heel against the small of his back, urging him toward the black heat pooled between her thighs. When he enters her, the lines of her body, limned in wan firelight, shiver and bend beneath him like the northern lights.
This is but a pale imitation of the magic he has known in ages long past, nothing more.
He draws the shuddering cry from her with a hand trapped between their hips as he thrusts. Foolish child, he thinks, as her mouth widens in surprise. As if he had not practiced this wretched pleasure in his dreams.
He tries to turn her over then, does not want her to witness him succumbing to this final sin, but she resists, clutching his shoulders hard enough to draw blood under her nails. “I want to see you,” she breathes, then: “Just like that, vhenan. Oh, just like that.”
When he comes, he speaks her name, nothing more.
Afterward, he lies alongside her, shivering as this numb warmth bleeds from him, watching the shadows shifting on the canopy over her bed. Soft rains hiss against the windowpanes, promising a gray morning.
With her face tucked against the crook of his neck, he feels the shape of her whispered words more than he hears them. He draws her hand from his chest and presses his lips to the palm, feeling his Mark hum in his lips, in his teeth, in his skull.
“Ar lath ma,” he says, echoing her quiet declaration, and tells himself that it is just another lie—nothing more.