Work Text:
Cardan is waiting for her when she finally returns to their quarters at the end of the night.
Jude shuts the great oaken door of the royal suite, eyeing him carefully. Flowering vines follow her fingers over the doorknob, twisting together to lock the door behind her.
He is seated on the plush armchair that he favors beside the mantle, and he tracks her with intensity as she makes her way into the sitting area of their bedroom. His eyes are clear, so he isn’t drunk. But Jude immediately notices his tail swishing low against the carpet, betraying his agitation.
“Wife,” Cardan greets her.
“Husband,” she says in reply, shrugging off her jacket as she crosses the threshold. The heavy denim makes an unnatural thunk as it hits the floor. Her knives come off next; she plucks them from each of her boots, then her right thigh, and her left forearm. Nightfell goes last, set reverentially down on her weapons table right by the main door. She pats the pockets of her jeans before turning to face him again.
Cardan wields the silence in the room like his own weapon, sharpening it like a blade against her conscience. She knows that she worried him greatly by venturing to the mortal world without telling him. But he knows her better than to restrict and control her movements, so he doesn’t confront her for it.
But clearly he can damn well sulk about it.
Jude’s propensity towards danger and recklessness is still a bit of a sore point almost a year into their marriage. Cardan wishes that she favor the side of safety now that she has taken her rightful place as the High Queen of Elfhame, but those instincts and tendencies are what has kept her alive for so long. It is one particularly stubborn piece of armor to be rid of, and she is still learning how to compromise.
But seeing Cardan perched on his chair, still dressed in the night’s regalia, and an uneaten plate of dinner ignored beside him, Jude decides that she can afford to let him have this one. She didn’t deceive him by going to the mortal world, but he has made it clear that he wished to be informed of such plans should she make them. She knows she is in the wrong this time.
“I’m not sorry that I went,” she tells him finally, and it is the truth, “but I do regret that I was remiss in telling you I was leaving.”
The fingers of one elegant hand come up to steeple under his chin, insouciant even in his sulking.
“Cardan. I really am sorry I worried you.”
He says nothing.
She raises an eyebrow at him, unimpressed by his posturing.
Cardan sighs, a bit begrudgingly. “I believe you. Even though you make it incredibly difficult, you heedless mortal.”
“Do you accept my apology?”
“Loath though I am to admit it, I do.” The tension in his shoulders is replaced by a slouch, and he extends a plaintive hand toward her. “Will you soothe your troubled husband?”
Jude is powerless to deny him.
She takes his hand, the chill of Maine in October banished by the fire-warmed touch of his skin. Cardan pulls her toward him, and she allows him to settle her easily on his lap. His arms are a cradle of silk and brocade for her to lean against. After checking her over for any possible scratches or bruises and finding none, he buries his face into the quickly heating skin of her neck.
Affection does not come easily to Jude. It is a small and fragile thing she is still growing and nurturing after years of sharpening herself on war games and poison. But she understands the significance of moments like this, understands the undercurrent of tenderness and gentleness that blooms within her, and so she tries, for him.
(And if she’s being completely honest, she tries for herself, too, if only because she has come to crave and collect each of his little touches in turn.)
Jude shifts, and at first Cardan loosens his hold reluctantly, but she is only moving so that she can turn toward him entirely. She is soon straddling him in their armchair by the fire, and has wrapped her arms back around him as tightly as he has done to her. Cardan, so deprived of attention and affection as a child, melts completely into her embrace, tail twining around her ankle.
She doesn’t know how to process the relief softening the limbs of his body. He must have been beside himself with worry. She is still getting used to being worried over by him, and so there is a niggling sense of guilt gnawing at her now. She hugs him tighter in response.
It’s easier said than done though, because he’s still taller and bigger than her. She has to reach around the breadth of his shoulders and wrap her legs across the spread of his thighs, and it’s almost like there is too much of him for her to hold. She feels small in the space of his worry and his relief and his embrace. She grits her teeth against the ache of emotion building in her throat, against the comforting press of his chest, solid against hers.
Many moments later, Cardan surfaces from between her neck and shoulder. “And how is Madoc the exiled faring in the mortal realms?” He knew where she went, then. It’s still a bit odd to have someone know her so well.
“He is resentful,” Jude admits, “but none of the spies I stationed near him have reported suspicious activity.”
“And yet, my queen, suspicion remains heavy in your voice.”
“I needed to confirm some things for myself,” she explains carefully. “My father may have sworn to never put his hand on a weapon again, but that doesn’t mean he can’t command another in his stead.”
Cardan studies her face in earnest. “Keeping the peace is not your burden to bear alone, Jude.”
She touches a lock of hair that has fallen across his forehead. “I know,” she says, softly.
“You promised to warn me the next time you planned something dangerous.”
“I know.”
He waits, the silence his willing pawn.
Jude reaches for the short hairs at the nape of his neck to give her hands something to do. “I just needed to see,” she says, “for myself. How he was doing.”
There is grim understanding in Cardan’s eyes as he listens to her. If there is anyone who knows what it is like to love and resent the person who raised her, it is him.
“Did it help?”
Jude thinks about her reply, wanting to answer him as honestly as she can. “Yes,” she tells him. “I never have to wonder about him again.”
“Does that mean that you will never again check on our old enemies all by yourself?”
She smirks. “I’ll let you come with me to check on the others.”
His eyebrows crease. “You speak of Nore and the Court of Teeth.”
She shrugs. “Unlike Madoc, there may be others who have not accepted their judgement so easily.”
“Do you doubt Suren’s ability to control the traitors?”
“No,” she admits, a little uneasily. “Not that.” There was something in Suren’s untethered, sharp-toothed grin that unnerved her, but as long as that remains directed towards the peace of Elfhame, then she is willing to leave it untouched.
Jude sits up straighter on his thighs. “A year has passed since I laid judgement on Madoc and his coup,” she explains.
“Yes,” Cardan breathes. “And what a fearsome thing you were to behold.” He says this the same way he had once spoken about her hospitality of knives. Jude feels the glint of a grin tug at the corner of her mouth.
“A lot can happen in a year. I think it would be utterly feckless of us to let that much time go by without reminding Elfhame what happens to those who threaten the crown.” You and me, she thinks. Us.
At this, Cardan doesn’t bother to hide the beginnings of his own wicked grin. “Ah. Is that what you are scheming, Jude? Reminding our kingdom of what a formidable queen you make?”
His eyes burn as he looks up at her, the firelight setting the angles of his face aglow, his clothes and hair in disarray from her embrace. He is unbearably beautiful. He is her husband. “Perhaps.” She is unable to stop herself from leaning down and whispering it against his lips. “If my great king should deign to join me.”
Cardan’s fingers clench against her hips in anticipation, but Jude is already pulling away. She has one more thing to confess before she can let herself fall into him completely. “Checking on Madoc wasn’t all I did in the mortal world.”
He frowns, though whether it’s because she denied him a proper kiss or because there is more to her scheming, she can’t be exactly sure. “Your words bode ill, dear wife.”
Jude pokes at the wrinkles on his forehead. “Nothing for you to anguish over. Quite the opposite in fact.”
His eyes gleam. “Oh?”
“Cardan. Not like that, either.”
“Oh.”
He pouts, and she bites her lip to keep from smiling. But then she thinks about what she has for him in her pocket and she is biting her lip for another reason. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now that she is looking down at Cardan, who watches her with an inhuman stillness, the otherworldly lines of his ears and his cheekbones and his jawline illuminated against the dying night sky, she is suddenly less sure.
Jude thumbs at the ruby ring on her fourth finger, the one missing its tip. Cardan had known the significance of that mortal convention to her. Would he be willing to accept it for himself?
“Jude?” he asks, after she has been silent for too long.
She takes a deep breath. “There’s a tradition among married human couples,” she begins. “When a couple is wed, they exchange rings to wear as a symbol of their vows to each other.”
“Yes,” he says, taking her left hand. “That much I understand.” And then he takes his teeth to the sensitive skin of her fourth knuckle. Jude swallows as she tries her best not to think about the marks those same teeth had left on the insides of her thighs.
Cardan looks at the red imprints he made above her red ring, and then up at her face. He grins, roguishly pleased at what he finds there. “I like seeing this on your finger. I like it even more knowing what it means.”
“Yeah, well,” she says, struggling not to squirm, “I realized that you gave me a ring the night that we wed, but I never gave you one back.” She reaches into the pocket of her mortal jeans. “So I was wondering if – if maybe you would take this one.”
His eyes widen. In her palm, flashing in the light, is a yellow gold band paved all over with a single row of tiny, blood-red rubies.
“Jude,” Cardan breathes.
“It was my mom’s,” she blurts out. “Or at least the gold was. I knew that Madoc kept the ring she was wearing the night he –” Her words fail her, and he waits in stunned silence for her to continue. “That was part of the reason I visited him today. To ask for it. Taryn and Vivi said it was ok for me to have it, but I wasn’t sure if he would actually give it up. He did, though, so I had the gold melted down and the rubies added because I wanted us to –” She realizes she’s babbling, and the words die off into a whisper. “I wanted us to match.”
“Jude,” he says again, and this time, she recognizes the awe in his tone.
“Do you… do you like it?”
“Yes.” His reply is immediate. His voice is hushed. “Yes, Jude, I like it very much.”
Jude watches as Cardan solemnly removes the rings on his left hand. All of them, every single one. His eyes never leave her face as she slowly, deliberately slides the new ruby ring onto his finger. Only when she whispers, “There,” does he look down at his new piece of jewelry.
Cardan takes her left hand in his, palms down, and moves them by the fire so that their rings sparkle in the light.
“A perfect pair,” he says, and then he is kissing her.
Cardan is not entirely kind with this kiss. He drags her closer by the roots of her hair and takes her bottom lip in between his teeth. She bites back and digs her fingers into his hair and shoulders in kind, using her position over him to her advantage. But he is needy and demanding, as if he has been unmade just a little by receiving her ring, and so she lets him sweep her away. There is a fire at her back, and there is the heat of his body as he pulls her in flush against him, and Jude feels like bursting.
“There is something I must ask,” he pants against her pulse point several long, fevered moments later.
Jude can barely think straight. All she can see is the dark desire in Cardan’s glittering eyes, and the color red. The red of their shared rubies, and the red of their bedsheets, singing their siren song just a few feet away.
“My cruel conqueror,” Cardan croons into her ear. "Who did you ask to make my ring?"
“What?” She steadies herself against his chest, the buttons of his shirt almost completely gone down the front. “Oh. I had a mortal jeweler do the ring while I was down in Portland.”
The relief is painfully palpable in Cardan’s voice. “Thank the stars.”
Jude laughs.
